Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Gradual   /grˈædʒuəl/   Listen
Gradual

adjective
1.
Proceeding in small stages.
2.
(of a topographical gradient) not steep or abrupt.



Related searches:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Gradual" Quotes from Famous Books



... associations of laborers, and thus many of the advantages associated with the system of peasant proprietorship may be secured, while at the same time the disadvantages of small farming may be avoided. The progress toward co-operative agriculture will no doubt be slow and gradual." ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... being that, after all, was Berlioz has come to appreciation. For behind the fiery, the volcanic Berlioz, behind the Byronic and fantastical composer, there was always another, greater man. The history of the art of Berlioz is the history of the gradual incarnation of that calm and majestic being, the gradual triumph of that grander personality over the other, up to the final unclosing and real presence in "Romeo" and the "Mass for the Dead." ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... corners of the eyes and mouth, and the disappearance of the cartilage of the nose; and a few, in whom the disease had terminated in a sort of gangrene, were frightful objects, with their features scarcely distinguishable; but in the majority of cases the leprosy had caused a gradual disappearance of the ends of the fingers and toes, and even of the whole hands and feet. The limbs thus mutilated looked as though the parts which were wanting had been amputated, and the wound had quite healed over, but it is caused by a gradual absorption without wound and without ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... with a mixed capitalist economy and a per capita GDP two-thirds that of the four leading economies of Western Europe, has shared with these countries the recession of the early 1990s, the gradual upturn of 1994-95, and the ongoing controversies over the timing and terms of European economic union. Reduction of the budget deficit - at 5.9% of GDP in 1995 - to meet the Maastricht monetary convergence criterion of 3% by 1997 remains the primary goal of Spanish economic policy, ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... the promise by Great Britain of self-government in gradual stages and "as soon as circumstances will permit"; the exemption of burghers from civil or criminal proceedings in connection with the war (with certain specified exceptions); the recognition of English as the official language, and the promise that Dutch should be taught in the schools ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins

... just such a person as Lady Coke had described to the children when she told them the story of Dick. Little bluntings of conscience had begun his downward career—temptation not at once resisted—then the gradual yielding as the bribe became more dazzling. And this was ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... of the tapers. The young priest could no longer distinctly see the crutches on the roof, the votive offerings hanging from the sides, the altar of engraved silver, and the harmonium in its wrapper, for a slow intoxication seemed to be stealing over him, a gradual prostration of his whole being. And he particularly experienced the divine sensation of having left the living world, of having attained to the far realms of the marvellous and the superhuman, as though that simple iron railing yonder had become the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... by boiling, a grayish scum appears on the surface just before the boiling point is reached. This scum is caused by the gradual extraction of a part of the soluble albumin that is present in the hollow fibers of the muscle tissue. After its extraction, it is coagulated by the heat in the water. As it coagulates and rises, it carries ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 3 - Volume 3: Soup; Meat; Poultry and Game; Fish and Shell Fish • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences

... sometimes by light fences of reed or cane. Nearing the mountain, to a low spur of which we intended to ascend, we easily scaled a wall about four feet high, and found ourselves upon pasture-land, which led, sometimes by gradual ascents, and sometimes by bits of rough climbing, to the spot we wished to reach. We were afraid we were a little late, and therefore hurried on, running up the grassy hills, and bounding briskly over the rough and rocky places. I carried a knapsack strapped firmly to my shoulders, ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... 1871, two brothers and a sister—Sepia, an artist, Levell, an engineer, and Scribe, who is the narrator—left Chicago by the North-western Railroad, bound for Denver in Colorado, about eleven hundred miles west. The first day we were climbing the gradual ascent from the Lakes to the Mississippi, which we crossed at 4.30 P.M., at Clinton. The thirty years which had elapsed since I first traversed this region had changed it from wild, unbroken prairie to a well-cultivated country, full of corn-fields, cattle and flourishing towns. Then I traveled ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... shines the light upon the heavenly shore! O blindness, dearer far than others' sight! O sweeter grief than earth's most sweet delight! For ye have led the erring soul By gradual steps to this fair goal, And through the darkness into ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... last row; this is a bold but very effective method of expressing gradation. A variation upon this is shown in fig. 42; the bands of different colour are here necessarily worked in a chevron pattern which makes the shading rather more gradual. An example of the same thing can be seen in fig. 44 in the leaf upon which the squirrel sits. Apart from gradation of colour, the surface to be covered by satin stitch has often to be partitioned up in some way in order to make the satin stitches ...
— Embroidery and Tapestry Weaving • Grace Christie

... station, Octavia and I were put into a two horse fly because it was very windy and cold. It always is, we are told, and the motors for hire were all open. So we started to go to Fairmount, the big hotel right up on the hill. At first it was a sort of gradual slope past such sad desolation of levelled houses, with hardly the foundations left. The results of the earthquake and the fire are so incredible that you would think I was recounting travellers' tales if I described them, so I won't. Presently the coachman turned his two strong fat horses to ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn

... that other victuals than Stevey Todd's seem unfriendly strangers, likely to be hostile. I claim that, as a cook, Stevey's a bold and skilful one, and enterprising. But outside the galley he's a backward man and caution's his motto, and in argument he's, as you might say, a gradual man. His nature, as differing there from Flannagan's, might be seen in this way. For when Bill was dead, Flannagan and Stevey Todd each wanted to marry Madame Bill, and their notions of it were as different as sharks are different from mud-turtles, Flannagan's notion ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton

... describe the Life of Reason; that is, to note what facts and purposes seem to be primary, to show how the conception of nature and life gathers around them, and to point to the ideals of thought and action which are approached by this gradual mastering of experience by reason. A great task, which it would be beyond the powers of a writer in this age either to execute or to conceive, had not the Greeks drawn for us the outlines of an ideal culture at a time when life was simpler than at present ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... for the delight and instruction of future generations. Pompeii therefore preserves the marks of more than half a thousand years of civilization, so that those who will take the necessary trouble can trace within its area the gradual progress of its social and political life from the far-off days of Greeks and Oscans to the reign of the Emperor Titus. The case of a ruined Exeter or Shrewsbury could not be widely different. The students of ensuing ages ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... the blame for the historic existence of slavery lay deep within human nature itself. Yet gradually all of these associations reached the point of view of the abolitionist and before the war was over even the most lukewarm unionist saw no other solution of the nation's difficulty. Some such gradual conversion to the point of view of abolition is the experience of every society or group of people who seriously face the difficulties and complications of the social evil. Certainly all the national organizations—the National Vigilance Committee, the American Purity Federation, ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams

... continuous change cannot be explained by a discontinuous variation, i.e. a mutation. The abnormalities above mentioned on the other hand, although they doubtless arise from the same kind of symmetrical larva as the normal Flat-fish, and develop by a gradual and continuous process, do not presumably pass through the condition of the normal adult Flat-fish and then change gradually into the condition we find in them. As compared with the normal Flat-fish ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... social scale with a clear-sighted equity. His philanthropy is what the word literally signifies,—the love of man as man, and because he is a man. Without being an impracticable fanatic, advocating impossible theories, or theories that can grow into realities only with the gradual progress of the race,—without indulging in fanciful visions of unapproached Utopias,—without imagining that all, wherever born and however nurtured, can reach the same level of wealth and station,—he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... a spot to which there is a gradual and imperceptible ascent on all sides, and was approached by two avenues of two hundred stones each. Its general form was that of a snake, in by gone ages, the symbol of eternity and omniscience. "To ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various

... in the comparatively brief space of fourteen years. The Lectures of Dr. Brown passed through exactly seven editions in twelve years, and this at a time when, according to Jeffrey, that science of mind of which they treated was in a state of gradual decay. The critic was, however, in the right. The genius of Brown had imparted to his brilliant posthumous work an interest which could scarce be regarded as attaching to the subject of it; and in a few years after—from ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... boarding-houses are the necessary defence of humanity against dirt and over-eating, so is the most ungainly Bloomer that ever drifted on bare poles across the continent a providential protest against the fashion-plates. It is probable, that, on the whole, there is a gradual amelioration in female costume. These hooded water-proof cloaks, equalizing all womankind,—these thick soles and heavy heels, proclaiming themselves with such masculine emphasis on the pavement,—these priceless india-rubber boots, emancipating all juvenile femineity from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... sorts of wild radical notions, and settle down in middle age into moderate Liberals, if not into contented Conservatives. The world is good enough in its way and at any rate if it is to get better it will be by gradual progress and not by individual effort. There is much that is very true in Miss Brander's views that things might be better than they are, it is only with her idea that she has a mission to set them right that I quarrel. ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty

... asleep, careless of the direction in which they might be travelling. And two days later, having in the meanwhile been lucky enough to obtain some food and water at a siding into which the trucks were shunted, they heard the brakes grind, and felt the train come to a gradual standstill. ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton

... only half filled lungs loses half its authority and is very apt to be false in pitch. To take a full breath properly, the chest must be raised at the same moment the abdomen sinks in. Then with the gradual expulsion of the breath a contrary movement takes place. The diaphragm and elastic tissue surrounding and containing the stomach and vital organs and the muscles surrounding, by practice acquire great strength and assist considerably in this process ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini

... points invest his hair; Celestial odours breathe through purpled air; And wings, whose colours glitter'd on the day, Wide at his back, their gradual plumes display. The form ethereal bursts upon his sight, And moves in all the majesty ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett

... philosophy had always contemplated it at a distance, toward which easy and gradual approaches might be made: but here it was, now, at a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... Presbyterian principles to which he had been so readily loyal in the day of his distress. Episcopacy was restored as the form of Church government for Scotland, and bishops were consecrated; but it was left to time and the gradual power of imitation to secure the introduction of a ritual into the worship of the Church. Charles the Second and his minion, Sharp, did not deem it wise to undertake a work in which Charles the First ...
— Presbyterian Worship - Its Spirit, Method and History • Robert Johnston

... silent witness of scenes like these, who laid them up deeply in her heart. Mrs Williams was not unobservant of the gradual but steady falling off in Eric's character, and the first thing she noticed was the blunting of his home affections. When they first came to Roslyn, the boy used constantly to join his father and mother in ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar

... rapidly increased in force and permanence. It has not been owing as far as I can myself discern, to the operation of any external cause whatever; nor of internal ones to any others than those which work their effects in the most gradual and imperceptible manner. Day after day it has grown upon and into my habit of feeling and desire. It has been gradually strengthened by those small accessions of power, each of which singly it would be utterly impossible to trace, but which collectively have not only produced a desire ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... given a little at a time to those perishing with hunger. If the patient were brought into a warm room, heat would be applied very rapidly, were not something interposed to prevent this, and allow its gradual admission. Snow or iced water is exactly what is wanted; it is not cold to the part; it is very possibly warm, on the contrary, for these terms are relative, and if it does not melt and let the heat in, or is not taken away, the part will remain frozen up until doomsday. ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... manu scriptum a se alienum putabat. In spite of the large amount of rubbish among his 30,000 odd volumes, I can never hear without a bitter pang the tale that the University of Oxford many years ago shied at his offer of them, accompanied as it was by some tiresome conditions; their fate has been gradual dispersion to every part of Europe and ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James

... not at first a quick adventurous pace; Six miles its top points gradual from its base; Up the high rise with panting haste I past, And gained the long laborious steep at last; More prudent thou—when once you pass the deep, With cautious steps and ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... contains the account of the Garden of Eden and the eating of the apple, they say: "As out of this allegory grow the doctrines of original sin, the fall of man and of woman the author of all our woes, and the curses on the serpent, the woman and the man, the Darwinian theory of the gradual growth of the race from a lower to a higher type of animal life is ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... true, had been gradual; it had not struck the servants, but it was none the less positive and real, and it betrayed itself in ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau

... this transition on the part of the pupil to a larger view seems to be found in the history of the western nations of Europe. It is the gradual change in the conception of the world held during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the enlarged conception of the world as a sphere which the remarkable discoveries and explorations of the fifteenth and ...
— Discoverers and Explorers • Edward R. Shaw

... Jomala, and destroyed his countrymen by treachery on their way home. Where two expeditions are recorded they may well stand for twenty unknown and uneventful ones, and the same must be equally granted as to the gradual advance of knowledge through the unceasing attacks of the Norse kings and pirates on the lands to the south of the Baltic, where ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... the operation without danger. I rode along, hoping to find a more practicable path; I had, however, to ascend some distance, and then continue along the side of the hill, before the slope was sufficiently gradual to permit me again to descend. I was aware that I had spent much precious time in searching for a way down, and that, should I be delayed much longer, my enemies would be upon me. I felt like a person in a dreadful dream. I had got ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston

... that plane. That this may be understood it is essential to remember that the power of magnification by means of which these experiments are conducted is quite apart from the faculty of functioning upon one or other of the planes. The latter is the result of a slow and gradual unfoldment of the Self, while the former is merely a special development of one of the many powers latent in man. All the planes are round us here, just as much as any other point in space, and if a man sharpens his sight until he can see their tiniest atoms he can make a study of them, ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater

... every prospect of these north-western tribes remaining in their present primitive state, indeed of their gradual improvement, for nothing can induce them to touch spirits. They know that the eastern Indians have been debased and conquered by the use of them, and consider an offer of a dram from an American trader as an indirect attempt upon their life ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat

... injecting minute quantities of fuel at the proper instant. Although the Diesel engine suffers upon comparison with the Otto cycle engine in flexibility there seems to be a definite field for employment of Diesels and a gradual extension of their ...
— The First Airplane Diesel Engine: Packard Model DR-980 of 1928 • Robert B. Meyer

... never falls into the commonplaces of poetic phraseology. His poems exhibit the exact opposite of the Petrarchistic or the Marinistic mannerism. Each sonnet seems to have been wrenched alive and palpitating from the poet's heart. There is no smoothness, no gradual unfolding of a theme, no rhetorical exposition, no fanciful embroidery, no sweetness of melodic cadence, in his masculine art of poetry. Brusque, rough, violent in transition, leaping from the sublime to the ridiculous—his poems owe their elevation to the intensity of ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella

... the coiled spring is too limited to be employed upon a larger scale. The use of the steam-engine is accompanied with a gradual consumption of the resources of the Balloon in ballast, and consequently in gas, the one being exactly answerable to the other, and is therefore not calculated for voyages of long duration. Human strength appears to be too feeble ...
— A Project for Flying - In Earnest at Last! • Robert Hardley

... visible horizon and its dip at sea, the gradual appearance and disappearance of ships in the offing, cannot fail to incline intelligent sailors to a belief in the globular figure of the earth. The writings of the Mohammedan astronomers and philosophers had given currency ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... best historical fiction of the latter part of this century. The gradual maddening of the people by agitators, the rising of those who have revenges to feed, the burnings and the outrages are described in a masterly way. The attack on the castle of St. Alais, the hideous death of the steward, the ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman

... water or air or other material symbol, or even of the indefinite or characterless as the original of all,—the danger, namely, that one should lose sight of the idea of law, of rationality, of eternal self-centred force, and so be carried away by some vision of a gradual process of evolution from mere emptiness to fulness of being. Such a position would be not dissimilar to that of many would-be metaphysicians among evolutionists, who, not content with the doctrine of evolution ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... all these different kinds had been suddenly created either through natural law or by the immediate will of God. We now know that from the beginning of organic life in the remote past to the present day one kind of animal or plant has been in a natural and essentially gradual way converted into the species which was to be its successor, so that all the vast and complicated assemblage of kinds which now exists has been derived by a process of change from the forms which in earlier ages dwelt upon this planet. The exact manner in which these alterations were produced ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... exactly to the north, but diverges from the meridian by an angle which is different in different places and is not even constant at the same place. For instance, at Greenwich the needle at present points in a direction 17 deg. West of North, but this amount is subject to very slow and gradual changes, as well as to very small daily oscillations. It was found about fifty years ago by Lamont (a Bavarian astronomer, but a native of Scotland) that the extent of this daily oscillation increases and decreases ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... was so gradual that, although I did not leave Antwerp until the bombardment was over, I caught up with the army of refugees before Roosendaal, just ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green

... hope that it is surely if not rapidly approaching its abolishment? Why is the preponderating good, which has, as you say, proved sufficient to uphold the institution hitherto, to become (in spite of the spread of civilisation and national progress, and the gradual improvement of the slaves themselves) inadequate to its perpetuation henceforward? Or why, if good really has prevailed in it, do you rejoice that it is speedily to pass away? You say the emancipation of the slaves is inevitable, and that through progressive ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble

... difficult problem to face, and it is not surprising that he has been less eager to welcome the Company and its railway than those who considered him the white man's friend had expected. The coming of the whites means not only the coming of liquor, but the gradual occupation of the large open tracts where the natives have hunted and pastured their cattle, with a consequent change in their mode of life, which, inevitable as it may be, a patriotic chief must ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce

... keep clearly marked the most reposeful features of the old Europe of peasants and townsmen. Among them he had found a few good friends, grave, serious, and faithful, who hold isolated and immured in them regrets for the past; they were looking on at the gradual disappearance of the old Switzerland with a sort of religious fatalism and Calvinistic pessimism; great gray souls. Christophe seldom saw them. His old wounds were apparently healed: but they had been too deep wholly to be cured. He was fearful of forming new ties with men. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... the perfect stop in all the paces. The perfect stop in the walk, is a cessation of all action in the animal, produced instantaneously by the rider, without any previous intimation being given by her to the horse. The slovenly stop is gradual and uncertain. The incorrect stop is a momentary and violent check on the action in the middle, instead of the conclusion, of the cadence, while the fore legs are coming to the ground. The proper movements should be performed, by the rider, so that the stop may conclude correctly ...
— The Young Lady's Equestrian Manual • Anonymous

... or against a country (including new loans, current interest, and repayments) must thus eventually be settled in money. This cannot fail to affect the general level of prices in both countries, tho this is brought about often only in indirect and gradual ways. The flow of money out of a country causes the loan market of a country to tighten (interest and discount rates to rise) in proportion as the reserves of the banks are reduced. Then "general prices" begin to fall.[10] When prices fall, imports decline, as the country is not ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... fortified places these passages had existed from the middle ages. In Klosterheim they had possibly as early an origin: but by this period it is very probable that the gradual accumulation of rubbish, through a course of centuries, would have unfitted them for use, had not the Peasants' War, in the time of Luther's reformation, little more than one hundred years before, given occasion for their use and repair. At that time ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... by week, slowly, a little joy came to her, as she saw the gradual return of power to the paralysed body and clearness to the flooded brain. She wondered, when he would begin to remember, whether her face would recall to him their last interview, her ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... evident from the gradual change of course the Uncas was obliged to make that the vessel she was following was headed in a ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair

... inexperienced, but enthusiastic dreamers of a reign of goodwill which should regenerate Russia. With the utmost confidence, reforms of the most radical nature were proposed and discussed. There was to be a gradual emancipation of the serfs, and misery of all sorts to be lifted from the land by a new and benign system of government which should be representative and constitutional. Many changes were at once instituted. ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... future meet. All things move onwards. But the movement sometimes takes the form of a cataract, at others of an even and almost imperceptible current. This is really another way of saying that the usually slow and gradual course of change is, at certain stages, interrupted by a more or less prolonged period of revolution. The process of growth, from being gradual and ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... the bud growing amid the points, dwelling in savage places, and of little aid to man, none in the way of food. (They are called 'pines,' we may explain, vernacularly.) Mr. Ruskin then goes on to the 'Bud,' and is at some pains to explain its gradual development and the scheme of its growth. 'Leaves' he explains to be 'broadly divisible into mainsails and studding-sails.' Many diagrams are given explanatory of the leaf system, its form and manner and charm, and ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... their neighbours. At the end of the century in which the Republic secured its independence there were under 900,000 slaves in the whole of the United States; but the total was nearly 4,000,000 in the year of emancipation. The Northern States had already liberated their slaves in a gradual way about a quarter of a century before that crisis. For generations slavery had been denounced as a wrong, amounting to a great evil, by a number of chief men among the Republican leaders, such as Franklin and Washington, Madison and Jefferson, ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike

... fuller, and her exertions, with the increasing warmth of the season, often flushed her face with a charming color. The old sad and troubled expression was passing away from her blue eyes. Every day it seemed easier for her to laugh, and her step grew more elastic. It was all so gradual that he never questioned it, but his eyes followed her with increasing pleasure and he listened, when she spoke, with deepening interest. Sundays had been long and rather dreary days, but now he positively welcomed their coming and looked forward to the hours when, instead ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe

... hundred human derelicts cast away on the theatrical strand. An advance agent of the old school, he found himself at the age of fifty outdistanced by younger and more active men. In the three decades of his life, which he had devoted to the service of the stage, he had seen the gradual evolution of the theatrical business. The old-time circus and minstrel men had been pushed aside and younger men, more up-to-date in their methods, had taken their place. Jim realized that he was a back number, but he hung on just the same. He was too old now to begin learning a new trade. He ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow

... of those who first resorted to them, they had now become mere hives of disorder, where the resources of the State were lavished in accumulating a force for its own overthrow. It was necessary, at whatever risk, to extinguish the evil. Plans for the gradual dispersion of the army of workmen were drawn up by Committees and discussed by the Assembly. If put in force with no more than the necessary delay, these plans might perhaps have rendered a peaceful solution of the difficulty possible. But the Government hesitated, and finally, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... were laid out during the summer, Spangenberg assisting with the survey. By the close of the year twenty-six acres had been cleared,—on the uplands this meant the felling of trees, and gradual removal of stumps as time permitted, but on the rice lands it meant far more. The great reeds, ten to twelve feet high, grew so thick that a man could scarcely set foot between them, and in cutting them down it was necessary to go "knee-deep" below the surface of the ground, and then the ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries

... shores, the steep cliffs, the quiet bays, the creeks and caverns - are all the work of the "sculptor" water; and he works best where the rocks are hardest, for there they offer him a good stout wall to batter, whereas in places where the ground is soft it washes down into a gradual gentle slope, and so the waves come flowing smoothly in and have no power to ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley

... inconsistencies and contradictions he indeed pointed out in other matters; but, on the whole, the answer was miserably deficient in every thing but invective, of which there was far too much; and either from a gradual perception of the badness of his cause or the weakness of his performance, or perhaps for other reasons with which we are unacquainted, he abandoned his design; and the fragment never saw the light till the publication ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... post, and was trying to make up for lost time. I believe it was this horse who actually killed somebody on the course. The race over, back into the street thronged the crowd, filling it from wall to wall; then there was a gradual thinning away, as the people went home for supper; and finally came the night and the moccoli, with the biggest crowd of all. I was there with my twist of moccolo and a box of matches; except the moccoli, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... year shall have been provided for, the revenues which will accrue from that or a nearly approximate rate of duty will be sufficient to defray the expenses of the Government and leave a surplus to be annually applied to the gradual payment of the national debt, leaving the proceeds of the public lands to be disposed of as Congress shall ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... who was Thursday is not its incomprehensibility, but its author's gradual decline of interest in the book as it lengthened out. It begins excellently. There is real humour and a good deal of it in the earlier stages of Syme. And there are passages like this one on ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West

... influence from the fact that it is difficult to account for the result from purely normal causes. With Rembrandt, the greatest master of concentrated pictorial effect, the transitions from the fully illumined passages to the surrounding transparent darks are so gradual and so subtle that one scarcely notices that the effect has been arranged—the concentration is an integral part of the imaginative apprehension of the subject. It is otherwise with Raeburn, in his earlier work at least. Later he attained much ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw

... natural life to the artificial life of civilization has been very gradual in most cases, until the last fifty years, when the changes have been more rapid. Those who were first affected were the so-called "Five Civilized Nations" of the South, and the "Six Nations" of New York State, together with some of the now extinct bands in New England, who came in ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman

... in our time, but it serves to give an idea of the splendour of other days and the enormous size of the apartments. It also tends to explain why most of the noble mansions still extant from the time of which we speak, instead of a staircase, have a gradual ascent of bricks, generally leading to a hall of large dimensions. And frequently we see evident tokens that flights of steps have been substituted ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 445 - Volume 18, New Series, July 10, 1852 • Various

... brink, which rises, with steep sides on the west, to 4000 feet in height, and is about seven miles in length. It is wooded up to the very top, and very beautiful. The southern end, seen from a distance, has a fine gradual slope, and looks as if it might be of easy ascent; but the side which faces the Shire is steep and rocky, especially in the upper half. A small village peeps out about halfway up the mountain; it has a pure and bracing atmosphere; and is perched above mosquito range. The people on ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... passed, the little Doctor was hard put to it to keep his hands off the great political issue of the year, bound up as it was in the tenets of his own politics, which he held only less uncompromisingly than those of the Shorter Catechism. It was, unfortunately for him, a gradual and peaceful progress of opinion, marked by no dramatic incidents; and analogy was hard to find in either Testament for a change of fiscal policy based on imperial advantage. Dr Drummond liked a pretty definite parallel; ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... these rude spectacles to more regular dramatic efforts, was very slow and gradual. In 1414, an allegorical comedy, composed by the celebrated Henry, marquis of Villena, was performed at Saragossa, in the presence of the court. [33] In 1469, a dramatic eclogue by an anonymous author was exhibited ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... the rush of a great volume of water, Sol. It's the Falls of the Ohio, that not many white men have yet seen, a gradual sort of fall, one that boats can go over without trouble most of the time, but which, owing to the state of the river, are just now at ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... more importance than to be right. 'Change,' says Hooker, 'is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.' There is in constancy and stability a general and lasting advantage, which will always overbalance the slow improvements of gradual correction. Much less ought our written language to comply with the corruptions of oral utterance, or copy that which every variation of time or place makes different from itself, and imitate those changes, which will ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... interesting to note the gradual development of this doctrine, which was first fully expressed by Him who brought life and immortality to light. We have the statement of the writer to the Hebrews that the faith of Old Testament saints had ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds

... the Governors effected an exchange. Huntwait was given up for Tarn Brow and the rent rose five pounds. In spite of this gradual increase in value, the Governors only allotted the five pounds to the Exhibition Fund, the rest went to the poor of Giggleswick, to be distributed on the day of the Purification of the Virgin Mary. The five pounds was as a rule paid as an extra ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell

... holiness led him to notice what are the disadvantages of those who are not daily stirred up by the fellowship of more advanced believers. "I have found, by some experience, that in the country here my watch does not go so well as it used to do in town. By small and gradual changes I find it either gains or loses, and I am surprised to find myself different in time from all the world, and, what is worse, from the sun. The simple explanation is, that in town I met with a steeple ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar

... is not disarmed in the passage, and what sufferings must be undergone by those who live by their labour during the dismal intervals between the sudden destruction of one form of society and the gradual settlement of another. Such a man, however, has no type in a Victor de Mauleon. The circumstances of his life had placed this strong nature at war with society, and corrupted into misanthropy affections that had once been ardent. That misanthropy made his ambition more intense, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... wheels go round, but he never tells you why the wheels go round. He knows little of psychology—that curious, unseen thing that stands behind every act. He knows not the highest love, therefore he never depicts the highest joy. Nowhere does he show the gradual awakening in man of Godlike passion—nowhere does he show the evolution of a soul; very, very seldom does ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... spirit of art has two sides. The development is, in the first place, a spiritual and universal one, in so far as a gradual series of definite conceptions of the universe—of nature, man, and God—finds artistic representation. In the second place, this universal development of art, embodying itself in sensuous form, determines definite modes of artistic expression and a totality of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... was the old, and probably for a long time the only haven; but long before the middle of the sixteenth century the action of the tide, which washes in great quantities of sand, combining with the gradual deposit of alluvium made by the neighboring springs, had converted this inlet into a marsh—"les Marais Salans"—intersected by ditches and used only in the manufacture of salt. The marsh itself has since been entirely reclaimed. ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... exquisite, and it is a pity that better specimens are not seen in England. The process of lacquer-making, too, is very interesting. We had, however, to go from house to house to witness it, as only one portion of the process is carried on at each—from the gradual coating of the roughest wood with three coatings of varnish, until it is finally ornamented with delicate designs, and polished ready for sale. In appearance, price, and length of wear there is ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... kind exists, no doubt deposited in the natural reservoirs by percolation from the higher ground. The whole formation of the district, these capacious caverns, and the numerous and extensive tea-tree swamps along the coast, plainly demonstrate that they are supplied by gradual filtration, or find their way through the interstices, or cells of the lava to the ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt

... wholesome Emulation and Quarrelsomeness respectively. Then by means of the Myth of Pandora the poet shows how evil and the need for work first arose, and goes on to describe the Five Ages of the World, tracing the gradual increase in evil, and emphasizing the present miserable condition of the world, a condition in which struggle is inevitable. Next, after the Fable of the Hawk and Nightingale, which serves as a condemnation of violence and injustice, the poet passes ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... compass was preserved from generation to generation among a few families of seamen unknown to the rest of the civilised world. The ceremonies, especially, were kept up, though in a succession of ages they have undergone gradual alterations. ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... sun, but which now are rapidly disintegrating and mingling again with the soil from which the wood of their structures sprung. Every harbor on the New England coast, from New Bedford around to the Canadian line, bears these dumb memorials to the gradual decadence of what was once our foremost national industry. For the fisheries which once nursed for us a school of the hardiest seamen, which aroused the jealousy of England and France, which built up our seaport towns, and carried our flag to the furthest corners of the globe, and which ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... fruit of a plant which was introduced into Borneo certainly within the last fifty or sixty years. The plant is PLUKENETIA CORNICULATA, one of the Euphorbiaceae, and it is cultivated as a vegetable; its Kayan name is JALAUT. We have here a good example of the gradual degradation of a design leading to a loss of its original significance and even of its name, another name, which originated probably from some fancied resemblance between pattern and object, being applied at a subsequent date. IPA OLIM, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... deep interest in what learned Germans call the Volkerwanderung—that is to say, the migrations of peoples during the gradual dissolution of the Roman Empire, and it had often occurred to me that the most approved authorities, who had expended an infinite amount of learning on the subject, had not always taken the trouble to investigate the nature of the process. It is not enough to know that a race or tribe ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... act with advantage for themselves. Their best instruction from abroad, is the example of other nations; their only proper teachers at home, are their own enlightened patriots; and the wisest process, the gradual diffusion of light among them. That a movement may be premature and end only in abortion and misery, the former example of France has instructed them. That it may be mature, and the deliverance easy, quick and safe, she has ...
— Celebration in Baltimore of the Triumph of Liberty in France • William Wirt

... creatures, but that we are thus suddenly called upon and stirred up to look after a newness of nature. The renewal of our first birth and state is something entirely distinct from our first sudden conversion and call to repentance. That is not a thing done in an instant, but is a certain process, a gradual release from our captivity and disorder, consisting of several stages and degrees, both of life and death, which the soul must go through before it can have thoroughly put off the old man. It is well worth observing ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte

... "They do come very gradual to fulness o' body an' reason," admitted Billy; "and 't is gude it should be so; 't is well all men an' women 's got to be childer fust, for they brings brightness an' joy 'pon the earth as babies, though 't is mostly changed ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... a good excuse for a failure in character; but God knows how wickedly provocative thereof it can be. The elders of the Aiken Club did not notice that Larkin was slipping from grace, because his slipping was gradual; but they noticed all of a sudden, with pity, chagrin (for they liked him), and kindly contempt, that he had fallen. Forthwith a wave of reform swept over the Aiken Club, or it amounted to that. Rich men who did not care a hang about what they won or lost refused to play for high ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... take occasion here to say, that this position of the seventeen was mainly satisfactory to me. I would, indeed, have had the South go farther. I would have had it take in hand the business of putting an end to slavery, by laws [118] providing for its gradual abolition, and by preparing the slaves for it; but I did not believe then, and do not now, [FN: The date of this passage must be in or about 1868.-M. E. D.] that immediate emancipation was theoretically the best plan. It was forced upon us by the exigencies of the ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... feet, the wind hit us with exceeding force, and soon had us with freezing hands and faces. All about us were bold black and gray peaks, with patches of snow, and above them clouds of white and drab, showing blue sky between. It developed that this grassy summit ascended in a long gradual sweep, from the apex of which stretched a grand expanse, like a plain of gold, down and down, endlessly almost, and then up and up to end under a gray butte, highest of the points around. The ride across here seemed to have no limit, but it was beautiful, though severe ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... of sennachie and bard. A short way beyond Llansaintfraed is the handsome gate and beautiful park of Clytha; the gate surmounted by a magnificent and highly ornamented Gothic arch, and the mansion-house pure Grecian—an allegory, perhaps, of the gradual civilization of mankind, or the process by which chivalrous knights are turned into Christian gentlemen. The house is modern, and even the arch without much pretension to antiquity; but the family ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... are known to us only by their fossil and mostly fragmentary skeletons, but it may be said that at least in the ungulate line, the successive geological periods show steady structural progression in certain directions. Of great importance are a decrease in the number of functional digits; a gradual elevation of the heel, so that their modern descendants walk on the tips of their toes, instead of on the whole sole; a constant tendency to the development of deeply grooved and interlocked joints in place of shallow bearing ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various

... The descent was a gradual one, down into a beautiful valley. For a mile or two the road was perfectly straight and the rider, shading his eyes, glanced along it. In the distance a moving object attracted his attention, and as he gazed at it, long ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... Animal Food in American Diet. Extracts from Medical Writers on this Point. Articles most easily digested. The most Unhealthful Articles result from bad cooking. Caution as to Mode of Eating. Reason why Mental and Bodily Exertions are injurious after a full Meal. Changes in Diet should be gradual; and why. Drink most needed at Breakfast; and why. Dinner should be the heartiest Meal; and why. Little Drink to be taken while eating; and why. Extremes of Heat or Cold; why injurious in Food. Fluids ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... remember who we were. For many years it was my fate to see her looking at me thus, at first stony and estranged, like a dweller in another star, then half-recalling with extended hand, then forgetting again with hand to mouth, then the gradual dawn of memory and love, and final full recognition. "It's Fred, my Fred!" I never got used to it; it always moved me to tears.... It was not to be thought that we had no quarrels. I still had fits of bad temper, and sometimes they came into collision with A.'s temper. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... followed, and it lasted three days—from April 19th to 21 st—being attended by all the horrible and gradual torturings reserved for regicides. Yet possibly he did not suffer more than his victim, whose agony had lasted for thirteen days, and who perished miserably in the consciousness that he deserved his fate, whilst Ankarstrom was uplifted and ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... illuminated surface is turned towards the Earth, it is utterly extinguished to our eyes by the immediate vicinity of the Sun, as was soon the case with the terrestrial crescent in question. I watched long and with intense interest the gradual change, but I was called away from it by a consideration of no little practical moment. I must now be moving at a rate of nearly, if not quite, 40,000 miles an hour, or about a million miles per diem. It was not my intention, for reasons I shall presently ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... first faint and gradual break of the summer dawn; and two men stood in a balcony overhanging a garden fragrant with the scents of the awakening flowers. The stars had not left the sky, the birds were yet silent on the boughs; ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... past the incessant report in the papers, "all quiet upon the Potomac," had been getting upon the nerves of the North. The gradual conversion of their pride in an imposing army into puzzled rage at its inactivity has left a deeper impression on Northern memories than the shock of disappointment at Bull Run. Public men of weight had ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... proved the Ptolemaic astronomy to be wrong. The evolutionary theory, bitterly attacked in its day, replaced Cuvier's doctrine of the forms of life upon earth coming about through a series of successive catastrophes. Lyell, in the face of the whole scientific world of his day, insisted on the gradual and uniform development of the earth's surface. Half the scientific doctrines now accepted as axiomatic were bitterly denounced when they were first suggested by ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... I must have begun to love your daughter from the first hour in which I saw her; but I think the growth of the interest was so gradual that I was not conscious of it ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... loved good children. It seemed such a poor sort of love, that. Yet that is precisely how we men and women do love; taking only what gives us pleasure, repaying the rest with anger. There would have arisen the unkind words that can never be recalled; the ugly silences; the gradual withdrawing from one another. I ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome

... with the flesh and blood of the slave, and for the 2,130,000 negroes supplied to Jamaica between 1680 and 1786. Like a veteran devotee Great Britain began atoning for the coquetries of her hot youth. While Spain and Portugal have passed sensible laws for gradual emancipation, England, with a sublime folly, set free by a stroke of the pen, at the expense of twenty millions sterling the born and bred slaves of Jamaica. The result was an orgy for a week, a systematic refusal to work, and for many years the ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

... poisoning is the result of a gradual intoxication by the absorption of the active principle of tobacco, the alkaloid nicotine. Excessive smoking conduces to nicotism, more common in Europe than in the tropics, because the natives of Europe smoke the pipe and being confined in closed dwellings, ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera

... Divine Word, "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." The thoughts and affections appear to dwell for a time where they have been already fixed during life, but changes here, including the gradual reunion on the other side, of all those who are loved with those who love them, the advancing dissociation of the mind with things here, and, no doubt, the evolution of a different life under different conditions, seem gradually ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various

... bridges, quays, interminable streets; of wine-shops, water-carriers, great crowds of people, soldiers, coaches, military drums, arcades. Of the monotony of bells and wheels and horses' feet being at length lost in the universal din and uproar. Of the gradual subsidence of that noise as he passed out in another carriage by a different barrier from that by which he had entered. Of the restoration, as he travelled on towards the seacoast, of the monotony of bells and wheels, and horses' ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... Variety in India's Religious Systems—The Early Monotheistic Nature Worship and its Gradual Lapse Into Polytheism—The Influence of Environment on the Development of Systems—The Distinction between Aryanism and Brahmanism, and the Abuses of the Latter in its Doctrines of Sacrifice and Caste—The Causes which Led to the Overthrow of this System of Sacerdotalism—The ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... is the same. Relatively considered, a large ocean steam mail service is indispensable to a people who are largely commercial, because the most noted commercial rivals of the world employ it, and thus either force them to its use, or the loss of their commerce, and the gradual transference of their shipping and trade into the hands of their rivals. Considered in its natural bearings, in its direct influences and effects per se, it becomes even more evidently necessary, ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey

... still a goodly distance, and he tried to imagine, if it appeared so huge from where he stood, what it would be when he got there. He climbed the terrace and then faced a long, gradual ascent of weathered rock and dust, which made climbing too difficult for attention to anything else. At length he entered a zone of shade, and looked up. He stood just within the hollow of a cavern so immense that he had no ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey

... certain facts, which may be observed by any one who will take the necessary trouble. These facts are those which are classed by biologists under the heads of Embryology and of Palaeontology. Embryology proves that every higher form of individual life becomes what it is by a process of gradual differentiation from an extremely low form; palaeontology proves, in some cases, and renders probable in all, that the oldest types of a group are the lowest; and that they have been followed by a gradual succession of more and more differentiated ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... The structure of the Roman Empire was apparently sound before it buckled and disintegrated. The French aristocracy was never surer of itself than in the gala days that preceded 1789. The old order may undergo a process of gradual transformation. In that case the change is slow, as it was when Feudalism gave place to Capitalism in England. Again, the old order may be exterminated as it was when Feudalism gave place to Capitalism in France. In one case ...
— Bars and Shadows • Ralph Chaplin

... the bluejackets were manning two 12-pounders that showed no sign of damage, and both of them were making excellent practice. At the third round it planted a shell in the enemy's battery, and the fifth put "Long Tom" out of action for a time by disabling some of its gunners. Sir George White's gradual withdrawal of his forces to positions prepared for defence was therefore not harassed by shell fire from beyond the range of our own ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse

... splendid clamor of the organ above her, growing in sonorous force, filled Rosamund with exultation. She longed to open her mouth and sing; the blood came to her cheeks; her eyes shone; she mounted on the waves of sound; she was wound up with the great fugue, and felt herself part of it. The gradual working up thrilled her whole being; she was physically and spiritually seized hold of and carried along towards a great and satisfying end. At last came the trumpet with its sound of triumphant flame, and the roar of ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... how merrily, from distant tower, Ring round the village bells! now on the gale They rise with gradual swell, distinct and loud; Anon they die upon the pensive ear, Melting in faintest music. They bespeak A day of jubilee, and oft they bear, Commix'd along the unfrequented shore, The sound of village dance and tabor loud, Startling the ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White

... sitting-room; faint odors of a fragrant pipe from the shed kitchen; no stir of boisterous fun, except when some bronzed, solemn joker, with his wife, came in for a formal call, and solemnity gave way, by a gradual descent, to merriment. Joe had given no new departure, only an impulse. "James used to behave himself quite well," Mrs. Parsons would say, archly raising her eyebrows, "before Joe's time; but now there 's two boys of 'em together, and the one as bad ...
— By The Sea - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin

... resembles the Star-Fish closely, and they called it Asterias; but even Aristotle was ignorant of its true structural relations, and alludes only to its motion and general appearance. Some account of the gradual steps by which naturalists have deciphered the true nature of these lowest Echinoderms and their history in past times may not be without interest, and is very instructive as showing bow such problems ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... as many others have done, that "little can be expected" from a modern grammarian, or (as he chose to express it) "from a new compilation, besides a careful selection of the most useful matter, and some degree of improvement in the mode of adapting it to the understanding, and the gradual progress of learners."—Introd. to L. Murray's Gram.; 8vo, p. 5; 12mo, p. 3. As if, to be master of his own art—to think and write well himself, were no part of a grammarian's business! And again, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... certain stars, as connected with their concomitant seasons of spring (or seed-time) and harvest, seemed to the ancients, who had not yet discovered that gradual change, resulting from the apparent movement of the stars in longitude, which has been termed the precession of the equinoxes, to be eternal and immutable; and those periodical returns were to the initiated, even more than to the vulgar, celestial oracles, announcing the approach ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... possibilities of a husband, that she had awakened almost with surprise one morning to the knowledge that she was miserable. It was not so much that her romance had met with open disaster as that it had simply faded away. This gradual fading away of sentiment, which she had accepted at the time as only one of the inevitable stages in the slow process of emotional adjustment, would perhaps have made but a passing impression on a soul to whom every other outlet into the world had ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... with secret pleasure the figure and bearing of this young captain of the Huguenots. She loved physical grace and prowess with a full heart. The day had almost passed when she would measure all men against Leicester in his favour; and he, knowing this clearly now, saw with haughty anxiety the gradual passing of his power, and clutched futilely at the vanishing substance. Thus it was that he now spent his strength in getting his way with the Queen in little things. She had been so long used to take his counsel—in some part wise and skilful—that when she at length did without ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... on six horses instead of four. Of course there were now three postilions. But although the country was mountainous, the ascent was not steep, for the road was carried up by means of long windings and zigzags, in such a manner that the rise was very regular and gradual all the way. The consequence was, that the six horses took the diligence on almost as fast up the mountains as the four had done on the ...
— Rollo in Rome • Jacob Abbott

... scenery at every mile becoming more and more monotonous, and less marked by bold outline, cliff, or mountain: as far as the bay, of which Snow-blind Point formed one extreme, a long range of hills, soft and rounded in contour, faced the sea, and sloped to it with a gradual inclination, some three miles in length; ravines became more and more scarce; and after passing the bay, in 100 deg. long. W., none of any size were to be seen. Drearily monotonous as all Arctic scenery must naturally be, when one universal mantle of snow makes earth and ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn

... months saw the gradual development of a situation that caused Dr. Butterton's retirement. The Rev. John Howson also showed signs of so serious an illness that he expressed his readiness to retire, should some suitable arrangement be made. The Governors ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell

... always to be identical with the scales of divine justice. The splendid empire of Charles the Fifth was erected upon the grave of liberty. It is a consolation to those who have hope in humanity to watch, under the reign of his successor, the gradual but triumphant resurrection of the spirit over which the sepulchre had so long been sealed. From the handbreadth of territory called the province of Holland rises a power which wages eighty years' ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... His passions do not stand at the same height, from first to last, as is the case with so many tragic poets, who, in the language of Lessing, are thorough masters of the legal style of love. He paints, with inimitable veracity, the gradual advance from the first origin; "he gives," as Lessing says, "a living picture of all the slight and secret artifices by which a feeling steals into our souls, of all the imperceptible advantages which it there gains, of all the stratagems by which it makes every other ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... a short time since bore himself so proudly there, with the people in raptures with him, and with the world on his side, was now so humble and abject as to disgust even himself, not to say his hearers. Crassus enjoyed the scene, but no one else. Pompey had fallen down out of the stars—not by a gradual descent, but in a single plunge; and as Apelles if he had seen his Venus, or Protogenes his Ialysus, all daubed with mud, would have been vexed and annoyed, so was I grieved to the very heart to see one whom I had painted out in the choicest colors of art thus suddenly defaced.[5] Pompey is sick ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... rule, British civilians and British soldiers have, almost always, worked together harmoniously. It was this union of force which gave us Bengal in the time of which I have been writing, and to the same source of power we owe the gradual building up of the great Empire which now ...
— Three Frenchmen in Bengal - The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757 • S.C. Hill

... material man, goodness seems in em- bryo. By suffering for sin, and the gradual fading out of the mortal and material sense of man, thought is de- veloped into an infant Christianity; and, feeding at first on the milk of the Word, it drinks ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... vividly and hated so ardently. Meanwhile he dwelt in a peace that was strange to him. The little voice had gone out of his life. The cry of the child was hushed. Often, in the past, Maurice had contemplated the coming of this exquisite silence, but he had always imagined it as a gradual approach. He had fancied that if the lamentation of the child ever died out of his haunted life it would fade away as the sound of the sea fades on a long strand when the whispering tide goes down. Day by day, night by night, her ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... range was sharply outlined to Fairchild, from the ragged hump of Pikes Peak far to the south, on up to where the gradual lowering of the mighty upheaval slid away into Wyoming. Eighty miles, yet they were clear with the clearness that only altitudinous country can bring; alluring, fascinating, beckoning to him until his being rebelled against the comparative slowness of the train, and the minutes ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... expression could stand without loss of power. At this point, as has already been explained, a school is at the height of its development. The work after this usually shows an increased concern with naturalistic truth, which is always very popular, to the gradual exclusion of the backbone of abstract line and form significance that dominated the earlier work. And when these primitive conditions are lost touch with, a decadence sets in. At least, this is roughly the theory to which a study of the ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... the Illinois where it flows by the village of Utica, and stand on the meadow that borders it on the north. In front glides the river, a musket-shot in width; and from the farther bank rises, with gradual slope, a range of wooded hills that hide from sight the vast prairie behind them. A mile or more on your left these gentle acclivities end abruptly in the lofty front of the great cliff, called by the French the Rock of St. Louis, looking boldly out from the forests that environ it; and, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman

... it wasn't in his nature to give in, and he dashed forward as determinedly as ever. To his unutterable chagrin, however, it was not long before he realized that the footsteps of his enemy were gradually becoming more distant. His rage grew with his adversary's gradual escape, and he would have pursued had he been certain of rushing into destruction itself. All at once he made a second fall, and, instead of recovering, went headlong down into a gully, fully ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis

... Director Cornet's basest interests. His one aim was to create a sensation, which he thought should be of great service to me also; and not only did he put me off with a smaller fee, but even suggested that it should be paid by gradual instalments. The dignity of scenic decoration, of which he had not the smallest idea, was completely sacrificed to the most ridiculous and tawdry showiness. He imagined that pageantry was all that was really needed ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... my earliest visions seemed The paradise of our first parents, filled With countless angels whose celestial light Thrilled the sweet foliage like a gush of song. Look how the long and level landscape gleams, And with a gradual pace goes mellowing up Into the blue. The very ground we tread Seems flooded with the tender hue of heaven; An azure lawn is all about our feet, And sprinkled with a thousand gleaming flowers, Like lovely lilies ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... your match, and touch him off again and again with the same joke. Or rather, you must magnetize him many times to get him en rapport with a jest. This once accomplished, you have him, and one bit of fun will last the whole voyage. He prefers those of one syllable, the a-b abs of humor. The gradual fattening of the steward, a benevolent mulatto with whiskers and ear-rings, who looks as if he had been meant for a woman, and had become a man by accident, as in some of those stories by the elder physiologists, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various

... even childish, and now gracious and commanding beyond any other she had ever known, which he had worn at Nemi. His face, upturned beside her, as she and her horse climbed the steep path; the extraordinary significance, fulness, warmth of the nature behind it; the gradual unveiling of the man's personality, most human, faulty, self-willed, yet perpetually interesting and challenging, whether to the love or hate of the bystander:—these feelings or judgments about her host pulsed through the girl's mind with an energy that she was powerless to arrest. They ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... peak some ten miles away, and shot to it in a line which was impeccably straight. Then he repeated the flight, this time in a slight even curve, flowing and smooth as the rise, swell, and gradual fall of a musical chord. The next time, he flew to the peak in a zipping parabola that was as the course ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper

... strength holding a cigar in your mouth when it requires no effort at all to smoke a cigarette? Why, I got it all figured out scientifically. With the same amount of energy you expend in smokin' one cigar you could smoke between thirty and forty cigarettes, and being sort of gradual, you wouldn't begin to feel half as ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon

... let her stay in Geneva, but I have not told you that she begged of me to tell him all, while I unhesitatingly refused. I knew expulsion from College would surely be the result, and I was far too ambitious to submit to this degradation when it could be avoided. You know of the gradual change in our feelings for each other, know what followed her coming home, and you can perhaps understand how I grew so morbidly sensitive to anything concerning her, and so desirous to conceal my marriage from every one. This, of ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes

... in silence and darkness, the Persians watched at the two points where the Euphrates entered and left the walls. Anxiously they noted the gradual sinking of the water in the river-bed; still more anxiously they watched to see if those within the walls would observe the suspicious circumstance and sound an alarm through the town. Should such an alarm be given, all their labors would be lost. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson

... choose to ask, concerning its material, or its aspect, its loftiness and luminousness,—how of its limitation? What hews it into a heap, or spins it into a web? Cold is usually shapeless, I suppose, extending over large spaces equally, or with gradual diminution. You cannot have in the open air, angles, and wedges, and coils, and cliffs, of cold. Yet the vapor stops suddenly, sharp and steep as a rock, or thrusts itself across the gates of heaven in likeness of a brazen bar; or braids ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin

... structures, perhaps from their very rudeness, have survived the vicissitudes of time, whilst there scarce remains a vestige of the temples erected in this island by the Romans; yet it is from Roman edifices that we derive, and can trace by a gradual transition, the progress of that peculiar kind of architecture called GOTHIC, which presents in its later stages the most striking contrast that can be imagined ...
— The Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture, Elucidated by Question and Answer, 4th ed. • Matthew Holbeche Bloxam

... of the slaves in New York has been gradual. When public opinion became strong in their favor, then grew up a custom of buying the services of a slave, for six or eight years, with a condition to liberate him at the end of the period. Then the law provided that all born after a certain day should ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... gradual. The first Hewishes, no doubt, kept in touch with their English cousins. London was their metropolis, and to London, in the fashions of their remote province, they would return with amusing tales of Irish savagery that made them good company in an eighteenth century coffee-house. Little by little ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young



Words linked to "Gradual" :   antiphon, stepwise, step-by-step, Roman Church, gradualness, grade, sudden, Roman Catholic Church, bit-by-bit, in small stages, piecemeal, gradatory, sloping, gradational, antiphony, graduated, slow, inclined, graduality, gentle, easy, Western Church, Roman Catholic, steep, Church of Rome



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com