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Narrowing   /nˈɛroʊɪŋ/   Listen
Narrowing

adjective
1.
Becoming gradually narrower.  Synonyms: tapered, tapering.  "Trousers with tapered legs"
2.
(of circumstances) tending to constrict freedom.  Synonyms: constricting, constrictive.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Narrowing" Quotes from Famous Books



... separates this island from those that lie to the north of it, and whose position before the harbour shelters it from the winds that blow from that quarter. It runs in S. by W., about four miles, and is about a mile broad at the entrance, narrowing toward the head, where its breadth is not above a quarter of a mile, and where ships can lie land-locked, in seven, six, and four fathoms water. Great plenty of good water may be easily got, but not a single stick ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr

... from side to side. As she peered ahead she could see a yellow flood of water rushing down the road before them so that it did not look like a road at all but like an angry, muddy stream upon which they were floating. Once Claybrook leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. He had been as silent ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... and years; and Time With the ceaseless stroke of his wings Brush'd off the bloom from their soul. Clouded and dim grew their eye, Languid their heart—for youth Quicken'd its pulses no more. Slowly, within the walls Of an ever-narrowing world, They droop'd, they grew blind, they grew old. Thee and their youth in thee, Nature! ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... might, by accident, vote the Republican ticket," Mr. Pardriff retorted, narrowing his eyes ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... had now wherewith to live; and if it seem to my reader that the horizon of hope was narrowing around them, it does not follow that it must have seemed so to them. For what is the extent of our merely rational horizon at any time? But for faith and imagination it would be a narrow one indeed! Even what we call experience is but a stupid kind of faith. It is a ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... less. As has been said, he loved better to disfurnish the outside of other people's heads than to furnish the inside of his own. What he felt, and keenly, was that the newcomers treated him as an inferior, were day by day narrowing his range, and slowly but surely reducing his condition to that of a subject people. Dull as he was, he saw that one of three fates confronted him: to perish, to migrate, or to lay aside his savage character and mode of life. Such thoughts ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... turbulent republics were concentrated upon art and letters. The leisure and the security which the specialist demands were bought by renouncing the Utopian visions of the past. But the growth of technical dexterity was a poor compensation for the narrowing of interests; the individual was sacrificed to make the artist; and art, too, suffered by the divorce from practical affairs. If we are moved to impatience by the waste of life and energy involved in the turmoils of medieval Italy, we must remember ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis

... plants being broader than high; the sides split up into about twenty ridges, which are again divided into knotty tubercles or waves. The spines are remarkable for their size and strength, those on large plants being 4 in. long by 1/2 in. broad at the base, gradually narrowing to a stiff point; there are four central spines of this size, the others, of which there are about a dozen, being shorter and thinner, and arranged stellately. The flowers, which are rarely produced, are poor in comparison with the majority of the flowers of this genus. ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson

... the next day Ragon was in misery, but nightfall came and he had heard nothing of Sandy, though several craft had come into port. If another day got over he would feel safe; but he told himself that he was in a gradually narrowing circle, and that the sooner he leaped outside of ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... touched their iron hue with blood-red splashes. Pollard willows indicated the edge of one field, gaunt poplars marked the boundary of another, alike leafless and unbeautiful, standing darkly out against the dim grey sky. Night was hastening towards the travellers, narrowing and blotting out that level landscape, field, dyke, and ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... tapering from about the middle towards the top, finely acuminate, and also narrowing towards the base into the stout midrib, margins with fine long hairs at the base, 6 to 18 inches by 1/10 to 1/3 inch, scabrous above ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar

... day is glad with music, But through it sounds a sadder strain; The worthiest of our narrowing circle Sings Loring's dirges ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... bear my weight: even if I wound it round her body, I feared my mere mass might drag her over. I peered about at the surroundings. No tree grew near; no rock had a pinnacle sufficiently safe to depend upon. But I found a plan soon. In the crag behind me was a cleft, narrowing wedge-shape as it descended. I tied the end of the rope round a stone, a good big water-worn stone, rudely girdled with a groove near the middle, which prevented it from slipping; then I dropped it down the fissure till it jammed; after ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne

... stretched endlessly and monotonously round about him, says, 'I will look at the things that I cannot see, and lift up my eyes above these lownesses about me, to the loftinesses that sense cannot behold, but which I know to be lying serene and solid beyond the narrowing horizon before me.' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... would have none of it, and moved and milled uneasily until, in order to save the lambs that were being crushed in the narrowing circle, Sims gave the order ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan

... this narrowing of the area over which a definite public opinion may be said to exist that at once creates the possibility and defines the limits of arbitrary control, so far as it is created or determined by the existence of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... the State step by step further down the road to ruin. For the end for which they struggled was not the good of Italy, much less of the world, but the supremacy of Rome in Italy, and of themselves in Rome. Wealth and office were shared by an ever narrowing circle. Ten years after the passing of the Baebian law, it was said that among all the citizens there were only 2,000 wealthy families. And between the years 123 and 109 B.C. four sons and probably two nephews of Quintus Metellus gained the consulship, five ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley

... morai, merits description. It is formed by walls of great thickness, like that at Tahiti. It is an irregular parallelogram, two hundred and twenty-four feet long, and a hundred wide. The walls on three sides are twenty feet high and twelve feet thick, but narrowing towards the top. The wall nearest the sea is only eight feet high. The only entrance is by a narrow passage between two high walls leading up to an inner court, where stands the grim god of war, with numerous other idols on either side of him. In front rises a lofty ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston

... neurasthenics shall not marry? Even the health certificate at the wedding may give only an illusion of safety, as the health of too many marriages is destroyed by the escapades of the husband, and it may, on the other hand, lead to a narrowing down under the pressure of arbitrary theories, producing a true race suicide. The question whether the healthy man is the only desirable element of the community is one which allows different answers. Much of the greatest work for the world's progress has ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... or differentiation of interests, the later situation by an emulation constantly increasing in relative absence of antagonism or differentiation of interests, the later situation by an emulation constantly increasing in intensity and narrowing in scope. The traits which characterize the predatory and subsequent stages of culture, and which indicate the types of man best fitted to survive under the regime of status, are (in their primary expression) ferocity, self-seeking, clannishness, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... The order, narrowing the column, allowed the squire and Janice to ride on and cross the bridge. On the other side of the stream a by-road joined the turnpike, and as Janice glanced along it, she gave a cry of surprise. "Look, dadda," she prompted, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... than the space between them, because they fill with ink, which afterwards dries and produces a thicker layer of black sediment than those elsewhere. The variations of pressure upon the pen can be easily noticed by the alternate widening and narrowing of the band between these two furrows. The tracing appears knotty and uneven when made by an untrained hand, while it appears uniformly thin, and generally tremulous or in zigzags when made by a weak ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay

... by sudden narrowing of the smaller air tubes in the lungs. This narrowing is produced by swelling of the mucous membrane lining them, or is due to contraction of the tubes through reflex nervous influences. It may accompany bronchitis, or may be uncomplicated. It may ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various

... in their common schools all began their work with the year 1776, when the American colonies formed themselves into an independent confederacy. The teaching assumed that the creation of the universe occurred about that date. What could be more absurd, more narrow and narrowing, more mischievously misleading as to the whole purport and significance of history? As if the laws, the representative institutions, the religious uses, the scientific methods, the moral ideas, which give to an American citizen his character and mental habits and social surroundings, had not all ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley

... he whispered as we came up. We looked down from the top of the bank and saw below us a broad forest glade, canopied by the thick branches of the ancient trees that met overhead, and leading up a slope, narrowing as it went, to a path that lost itself among the shadows that were falling fast upon ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams

... the cherry brandy, and presently off we went. The covert we were going to shoot, into which we had been driving pheasants all the morning, must have been nearly a mile long. At the top end it was broad, narrowing at the bottom to a width of about two hundred yards. Here it ran into a horse-shoe shaped piece of water that was about fifty yards in breadth. Four of the guns were placed round the bow of this water, but on its farther side, in such a position that the pheasants should stream ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard

... deepening and narrowing, became a gorge, the beginning of that long series of fissures in the metamorphic and secondary rocks which, crossing an extensive tract of Languedoc and Guyenne, leads the traveller up to the Cevennes Mountains, through scenery as wild and beautiful ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... gravest political resolutions into outbursts of sentimental feeling appeared in his "Vow of the Swan," when rising at the royal board he swore on the dish before him to avenge on Scotland the murder of Comyn. Chivalry exerted on him a yet more fatal influence in its narrowing of his sympathy to the noble class and in its exclusion of the peasant and the craftsman from all claim to pity. "Knight without reproach" as he was, he looked calmly on at the massacre of the burghers of Berwick, and saw in William Wallace ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... and let them pass on either hand, down the beautiful avenue narrowing with an admirably even sky-line in the perspective. They were not in a hurry. The mare jounced easily along, and they talked of the different houses on either side of the way. They had a crude taste ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... the house of Ariosto, which stands at the end of a long, long street, not far from the railway station. There was not a Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat nor a dog to be seen in all that long street, at high noon, as we looked down its narrowing perspective, and if the poet and his friends have ever a mind for a posthumous meeting in his little reddish brick house, there is nothing to prevent their assembly, in broad daylight, from any part of the neighborhood. There was no presence, however, more ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... mind she saw Tierra del Fuego as it looked on the map at the end of the narrowing continent, and then she remembered a picture of Cape Horn that had been in her geography when she was a child—a bold, rocky promontory jutting into a restless sea, in which three whales were blowing fountains from the tops of their heads. She reflected that it was very ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... the houses, with their faded blue shutters and verandas, the gay striped awnings of the little fleet of rowing boats, the gray of the stone parapet, and the dull green of the mountainous opposite shore, were mirrored steeply in the bight of narrowing, sunlit lake. The wide, dusty esplanade was almost empty, except at the corners, where voluble market women gossiped over their fruit-baskets, heaped with purple-brown figs, little mountain-born strawberries, sweet, watery grapes, green almonds, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... which I stood inconvenient. The triangular space, narrowing acutely towards the bottom, hindered me from standing fairly on my feet; but I soon remedied this defect, by filling the angle with some pieces of cloth and velvet that were near at hand. I then proceeded ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid

... part, which the bandages may not hold quite firmly, becomes overwhelming, and results in rupture. Dr. Grosvenor also thinks that many cases of weak lungs, and even of consumption in later life, are due to the tight bands of the skirts pressing upon the soft ribs of the young child, and narrowing the lung space. ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne

... companion sank as he suddenly noted the keen, intuitive power of comprehension expressed in the face of the old Indian. Here was craft too, but of a different quality, masked, potent, impossible to divine, to measure, to thwart. The sage Oo-koo-koo stood motionless, his eyes narrowing, his long, flat, cruel mouth compressed as with a keen scrutiny he marked all the characteristics of the strangers,—first of one, then deliberately of the other. A war captain (his flighty name ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... morning, I had a pleasant walk over an even road leading to a narrowing gorge, through which a heart-breaking road led to the valley beyond. Two and a half hours it took me, in my foreign boots, to cover the twenty li. I fell five times over the smooth stones. The country was bare, desolate, lonely—four people only were met over the entire ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... pardon; they merely happen. And even when the sun so condescends as to face them at the level of their own horizon (say from the western end of the Bayswater Road), when he searches out the eyes that have neglected him all day, finds a way between their narrowing lids, looks straight into their unwelcoming pupils, explores the careful wrinkles, singles and numbers the dull hairs, even, I say, to sudden sunset in our dim climate, the Londoner makes no reply; he would rather ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell

... we are losing this—all this! And yet we have won it! Mon Dieu, have we not won it? Yet for whom, alas? Maximilian?—Faw, an ungrateful puppet such as that, to have, to take from us, such as—this! Now suppose," her lips formed the unuttered words, while her gray eyes closed to a narrowing cunning, "just suppose that we—that someone—reminds His Majesty how ingratitude falls short of ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... the corner at which stood the shop. Hilda peered within the narrowing, unshuttered slit, but she could see ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... below the poverty line. Ongoing challenges include increasing the government revenues, negotiating further assistance from international donors, upgrading both government and private financial operations, and narrowing the trade deficit. A free trade agreement between the US and Central American countries promises greater access to US ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... moment remained tensely, watchfully still. She felt his eyes on her; she could not see them in the shadow of his hat, but had an unpleasant sensation of a pair of sinister eyes narrowing in their keen regard of her. She shivered ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory

... to save its victim? We have heard them refusing him admission or cutting him off, but we have not heard of any considerable aid which they have given to public or private morality. And, further, do we not find them narrowing the circle of obligation, substituting attachment and duty to an order for love and obligations to mankind? Membership in a lodge, not character, is held to make one "worthy," opening the way to favor and society. But can all this be done without sensibly weakening the ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher

... time the rescue expedition was mustering at Wady Haifa, a point which the narrowing gorge of the Nile marks out as one of the natural defences of its lower valley. There the British and Egyptian Governments were collecting a force that soon amounted to 2570 British troops and some Egyptians, who were to be used solely for transport ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... with that editor and his deafness, it matters not a straw whether he belong to a northern or a southern journal. Here is one evil of journal writing—viz., its overmastering precipitation. A second is, its effect at times in narrowing your publicity. Every journal, or pretty nearly so, is understood to hold (perhaps in its very title it makes proclamation of holding) certain fixed principles in politics, or possibly religion. These ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... peace already, and at all events. Poverty is most seriously an evil to sons and daughters, who see their parents stripped of comfort, at an age when comfort is almost one with life itself: and to parents who watch the narrowing of the capacities of their children by the pressure of poverty,—the impairing of their promise, the blotting out of their prospects. To such mourning children there is little comfort, but in contemplating the easier life which lies behind, and (it may be hoped) ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau

... said. "Well, you look it." He shook a finger at her. "Agatha has been writing to me rather often, lately," he added. There followed no answer and J. C. went on, narrowing his eyes at the girl. "She tells me that this fellow who calls himself 'Brand' Trevison has proven himself a—shall we say, persistent?—escort on your trips of inspection ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer

... possibly be drawn is the sufficiently absurd one that dwellers in the chilly spiritual clime of Unitarianism can be cured of their faith in that icy creed by being subjected to the horrors of a polar winter. Far more clearly does the novel show the falling-off in his artistic conceptions and the narrowing process his opinions were undergoing. At the rate this latter was taking place it seems probable that had he lived to write another novel on a theme similar to this, his hero would have been compelled to abandon his belief in Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, Methodism, or some other ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... deformans necessarily vary with the type of the disease and the joint affected; in the joints of the fingers there is a narrowing of the spaces between the articular ends of the bones as a result of absorption of the articular cartilage, and rarefaction of the cancellous tissue in the vicinity of the joints; in the larger joints there is "lipping" of the articular margins, ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... Mersey. On the last evening of the voyage he and Edith stood on the upper deck. It was a zone of danger. From each side of the narrowing river flashlights skimmed the surface of the water, playing round but never on the darkened ship. Red and green lights blinked signals. Their progress was a devious one through the mine-strewn channel. ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Narrowing the field down to Texas, J. Mason Brewer's "Juneteenth," in Tone the Bell Easy, Publication X of the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1932, is outstanding as a collection of tales. In volume after volume the Texas Folklore Society has published collections ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... girl: it introduces her to the world; it gives her wings. In America, it is clipping her wings, chaining her down, shutting her up,—no more gayety, no more admiration; nothing but cradles and cribs, and bibs and tuckers, little narrowing, wearing, domestic cares, hard, vulgar domestic slaveries: and so our women lose their bloom and health and freshness, and are moped ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... 4, cast on 3, knit 3, and continue as usual. This forms the buttonhole. Make five buttonholes at equal distances apart, and begin the narrowing for collar in the 11th row, ...
— Handbook of Wool Knitting and Crochet • Anonymous

... opposite hemisphere contains more land than water; and when it is in its turn placed above the horizon, the Atlantic will be seen lying almost wholly on the western side of the meridian, and forming, with the Arctic ocean, a species of channel, narrowing from the latitude of the Cape of Good Hope towards the northern pole, and communicating with the great ocean which lies principally in the opposite hemisphere by Behring's straits. On this hemisphere are also seen parts of the Pacific and Indian ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... of the least conventional kind.[229] The Seri of Tiburon Island have not the knife habit. They draw a knife towards the body instead of pushing it away.[230] Hence we see that the lack of a habit, or lack of opportunity to see a dexterity practiced, constitutes a narrowing of ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... consciousness of itself it found inexhaustible interest and strength. Thus it created Philosophy, its last and greatest gift to humanity. In so doing it freed itself from the trammels even of Science, which thus became its servant and not its master—at the same time finally liberating itself from the narrowing and blinding influences of passion and imagination and all the shackles of merely practical needs and disabilities. Here too it fixed the idea or the ideal. 'Life without reflection upon life, without self-examination and self-study and self-knowledge, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... red, 2 to 5 inches broad, fleshy, bell-shaped or almost conical, then convex, dry, smooth, marked with reddish specks, darker toward the centre, flesh white, turning red and narrowing toward the margin. Stem 3 to 6 inches long, 1/2 inch thick, solid, firm, slightly tapering toward the apex, very bulbous at base, same color as cap, stuffed with brown pith inside. There are two or three reddish oblique zones encircling ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin

... of wheels special attention should be given to the concentration and increase of the velocity of the current by wing dams or by the narrowing of shallow streams; always bearing in mind that any increase in the velocity of the current is economy in increased power, as well as in the size and cost of a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various

... came. Either I had unconsciously turned and was rapidly nearing the Rebel shore,—a suspicion which a glance at the stars corrected,—or else it was the tide itself which had turned, and which was sweeping me down the river with all its force, and was also sucking away at every moment the narrowing water from that treacherous expanse of mud out of whose horrible miry embrace I had lately helped ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... whirr of many wheels, the thudding of weights, and the buzz and babel of human toil. Beyond, the dwellings of the workingmen, smoke-stained and unlovely, radiated away in a lessening perspective of narrowing road and ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle

... they had been looking for some one smaller, more childish than this tall girl who stood before them. She was not at all pretty. Her brown hair was too straight and lank and light, and her grey eyes had a trick of narrowing themselves to a line; but her expression was frank and open, and she wore her simple grey suit with an air which spoke volumes for her past training. Across her arm hung a bright golf cape with a tag end of grey fur sticking ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray

... On went the company, grimly silent now save for the snort of a horse, the champing of curbing bits and the thud of slow trampling hoofs upon the tender grass, as the west flamed to sunset. Thus in a while they came to a place where the road, narrowing, ran 'twixt high banks clothed in gorse and underbrush; a shadowy road, the which, winding downwards, was lost in a sharp curve. Here the array was halted, and abode very still and silent, with helm and lance-point winking in the last red ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol

... has a mind—a mind that must be kept informed and alert, that must know itself, that understands the hopes and the needs of its neighbors—all the other nations that live within the narrowing ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... snatched up his club, wrenched the broken spear from his dead rival's neck, thrust it into the girl's hands, and darted for the narrowing space of open between the two ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... which make a twilight between the fantastic stories of the earlier paganism and the clear records of the Christian epoch after the re-Latinisation of England. An outpost beyond these three is the institution of St Frideswides at Oxford. Beyond that point the upper river, gradually narrowing, losing its importance for commerce and as a highway, supported no great monastery, and felt but tardily the economic change wrought by the foundations ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc

... does not know it, nor do they know it, but everyone of his servants has been vigorously and zealously watched without avail. The circle has been drawn closer and closer, Mr. Ducaine. Down in Braster you may be able to help me in narrowing it down till only one person is within ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... peninsula between the York and the James, is only eight miles wide. In this broad and bold river, a ship of the line may ride in safety. Its southern banks are high, and, on the opposite shore, is Gloucester Point, a piece of land projecting deep into the river, and narrowing it, at that place, to the space of one mile. Both these posts were occupied by Lord Cornwallis. The communication between them was commanded by his batteries, and by some ships of war which lay ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall

... shapes of foul disease, Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various

... grasshoppers: Chrysantheme in love with Yves; Yves with Chrysantheme; Oyouki with me; I with no one. We might even find here, ready to hand, the elements of a fratricidal drama, were we in any other country than Japan; but we are in Japan, and under the narrowing and dwarfing influence of the surroundings, which turn everything into ridicule, nothing will ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti

... sheet around us boiled up and foamed like the surface of a cauldron, and then, with scarcely a moment of slack water, the whole went whirling by in the opposite direction. In a few moments the low rollers had passed the islands and united again in a single bank of water, which swept up the narrowing channel with ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... not long after this that Lowell began to feel that his work as a writer for the abolitionist cause was narrowing in its effect. For "red-hot" reform he had no liking. It seemed to him that the hope of his cause lay not so much in treating others harshly as in living according to the high principles that the reformers professed. "The ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester

... Persian triremes drew up in three lines on each side of the island of Psyttaleia and advanced into the straits. But the narrowing waters of the channel made it necessary to reduce the front and bear to the left. Consequently all formation was lost, and the Persian triremes poured into the narrows "in a stream,"—to quote the phrase of the tragedian AEschylus, who fought on an Athenian trireme ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... space was coming in. The edge of the cloud was barely six inches from her hand. Our witch's mind overflowed with the thought of invasions and the coming in of tides. It seemed that all her life she had been living on a narrowing shore. She remembered all her dawns as precarious footholds of peace on a threatened rock, and all her evenings as golden sands sloping down into encroaching sleep. She realised Everything as a little hopeless garrison against ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson

... rabbit hutches, once inhabited by the skipper and his mate. Here there were great findings in the way of rubbish. Old clothes, old boots, an old top-hat of that extraordinary pattern you may see in the streets of Pernambuco, immensely tall, and narrowing towards the brim. A telescope without a lens, a volume of Hoyt, a nautical almanac, a great bolt of striped flannel shirting, a box of fish hooks. And in one corner—glorious find!—a coil of what seemed to be ten yards or ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... The narrowing path carried us up until one of those gaps I had noticed came in view. Chapman stopped, and then hearing my approaching steps, ran forward and jumped. His calculation and strength were yet secure and ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... whole length of the long, narrow cubicle lay to her left, with a slight recess at its further end, so that from the threshold of the doorway she could not see into the distant corner. Swift as a lightning flash the remembrance came back to her of proud Marie Antoinette narrowing her life to that dark corner where the insolent eyes of the rabble soldiery could not spy ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy

... left his army, but has been carried about on a "machela" to prevent the half-resistance that leads to surrender. And now we hear he has had blackwater, and, recovering, has resumed his elusive journeys from one discouraged company to another all over the narrowing area of operations that alone is left to the Hun of his favourite colonial possessions. For to the fat shipping clerk of Tanga, whose soul lives only for beer and the leave that comes to reward two years of effort, the temptation ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... no time to lose. The huge mass of ice was closing rapidly into the mouth of the creek, and narrowing the only passage through which the canoe could escape into the open water of the river beyond. Stanley might, indeed, drag his canoe up the bank, if so disposed, and reach home by a circuitous walk through the woods; but by doing so he would lose much time, and be under ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne

... then," he muttered, his eyes narrowing as they took note of the black rage distorting the big Canadian's face. "If George does not kill him it is a miracle ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory

... thicket. So quickly did it pass that he scarcely saw it; nevertheless, a burning desire to capture and possess the beautiful strange creature filled his breast. He instantly ordered his attendants to form a ring round the thicket, and so encircle the hind; then, gradually narrowing the circle, he pressed forward till he could distinctly see the white hind panting in the midst. Nearer and nearer he advanced, till just as he thought to lay hold of the beautiful strange creature, it gave one mighty bound, leaped clean over the King's head, and fled toward ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various

... a thousand attempts to one successful issue,—these are the ways in which the colossal achievements of mankind have been built up. Work, as has well been said, is an ascending stairway. On its broad base are ranged all the multitudes of the earth. Those who can climb mount the higher and ever-narrowing stair. ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... looked behind him, as if he expected to see some one there. But there was nothing but the straight, long street, in narrowing perspective. ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh

... my opinion that Philip and I were equally gifted. Phil was of a graceful, slender figure; within an inch of six feet, I should say; with a longish face, narrowing from the forehead downward, very distinctly outlined, the nose a little curved, the mouth still as delicate as a boy's. Indeed he always retained something boyish in his look, for all his studiousness and thoughtfulness, and all that came ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... a curious hush that had suddenly fallen over his mind. '"Fades inside? silts?"—I'm awfully stupid, but what on earth do you mean?' The room had slowly emptied itself of daylight; its own darkness, it seemed, had met that of the narrowing night, and Herbert deliberately lit a cigarette before replying. His clear pale face, with its smooth outline and thin mouth and rather long dark eyes, turned with a kind of serene ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare

... There was little to fear from depredatory man or beast—desperadoes of the mountain trail never stooped to ignoble burglary, bear or panther seldom approached a cabin—but there was the chance of sudden illness, fire, the accidents that beset childhood, to say nothing of the narrowing moral and mental effect of their isolation at that tender age. It was scandalous in Johnson to ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... and curl. Her eyes held the light gloriously; they were of a luminous, tawny brown, wide apart, and slightly round, with a sudden fineness at the corners. The lids had thick black lashes, so short that when they drooped they had the effect of narrowing her eyes without darkening them. Her nose, small and straight, was a shade too broadly rounded at the tip, but that defect gave a sort of softness to her splendor. Of her mouth Thesiger could not judge; he hadn't ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... been strange to covenanted lips. Often, too, he asked himself what manner of man he must be who nursed and reared this narrow sect of the hills—a sect setting judgment before mercy, and law before love—a sect narrowing salvation to units, and drawing the limit line of grace around a fragment ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather

... heartily carried on against him by Leicester and Hohenlo, with plenty of troops and money at command, would have brought the heroic champion of Catholicism to the ground. He was hemmed in upon all sides; he was cut off from the sea; he stood as it were in a narrowing circle, surrounded by increasing dangers. His own veterans, maddened by misery, stung by their King's ingratitude, naked, starving, ferocious, were turning against him. Mucio, like his evil genius, was spiriting away ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... the canteen. Five minutes' rest, and they were on the road again. The big mesa reached on and on toward the south, seemingly limitless, without sign of fence or civilization save for the narrow road that swung over each slight, rounded rise and ran away into the distance, narrowing to a gray line that disappeared ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... deacon, who of old Dwelt, poor but blameless, where his narrowing Cape Stretches its shrunk arm out to all the winds And the relentless smiting of the waves, Awoke one morning from a pleasant dream Of a good angel dropping in his hand A fair, broad gold-piece, in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... and several of the beaten and despondent Saxons had joined the royal exiles. Their voyage, however, was an unprosperous one, and after much beating about by winds and storms they were at last driven up the Firth of Forth, where their ship found shelter in the little bay at the narrowing of the Firth, which has since borne the name ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... in the chair started, her eyes narrowing. The flush deepened in her cheeks. It had been faint before and steady, but now ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon

... opening with something of his old speed. As he went through, yellow loops flashed in the sun, circling, narrowing, and he seemed to run straight into them. One loop whipped close round his glossy neck; the other caught his head. Dave's mustang staggered under the violent shock, went to his knees, struggled up and held firmly. Bill's mount slid on his haunches and spilled his ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey

... you to converse with common strangers and shake hands with them?" continued Mrs. Randolph, with narrowing lips. ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte

... and to substitute in its place a declaration which, in some instances, might or might not be taken, according to the will of the sovereign. The form of declaration was also strongly objected to in the committee; and several amendments were carried to meet the views of the objectors, though not narrowing the principles of the bill; and it finally passed by a large majority. The amendments made simply consisted in this, that the man assuming a public office in a Christian community should declare that he was a Christian, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... Borgia. The supposed or real criminal was shut up in a room, supplied with every convenience and luxury; and at first mourned little over his imprisonment. But day by day he became aware that the space between the walls of his apartment was narrowing, and then he understood the end. Those painted walls would come into hideous nearness, and at last crush ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... did get the gold! Eh, sir?" said Bridger, his eyes narrowing. "The tip the gal give ye was ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough

... all. We are weak in our divided strength. The criticism of both clergy and laity in this matter is widespread and very often justifiable. We could willingly endorse what Cardinal Newman wrote to a friend: "Instead of aiming at being a world-wide power, we are shrinking into ourselves, narrowing the lines of communion, trembling at freedom of thought, and using the language of dismay and despair at the prospect before us, instead of the high spirit of the warrior going out conquering and to conquer."—(Life, by ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... continued, looking round, "the thing's narrowing. Let Mr. Wing there help by getting some news of Chuh Fen, if possible; as for me, I'm going to follow up the Netherfield line. I think we shall track these fellows yet—you never know how unexpectedly a clue may ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher

... Dreamland, Knowledge and Experience do not enter. They stay without, together with the dull, dead clay of which they form a part; while the freed brain, released from their narrowing tutelage, steals softly past the ebon gate, to wanton at its own sweet will among the mazy paths that wind through ...
— Dreams - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome

... State, and at the moment of his advance his forces covered a semicircular front of about forty miles, the right under Ian Hamilton near Thabanchu, and the left at Karee. This was the broad net which was to be swept from south to north across the Free State, gradually narrowing as it went. The conception was admirable, and appears to have been an adoption of the Boers' own strategy, which had in turn been borrowed from the Zulus. The solid centre could hold any force which faced it, while the mobile flanks, Hutton upon the left and Hamilton upon the right, could ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... was obtained which, from the thickness of its walls, was cool enough for the purpose during the hottest weather. Preparations were now made for breaking in the cows to be milked. A sort of lane was made of two strong fences of iron wire. This lane was of the shape of a funnel, narrowing at one end to little more than the width of a cow. At the end of this was a gate, and attached to the gate a light trough filled ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty

... line we notice the Hovenweep Creek joining the McElmo from the north. The mesa, narrowing to a point where the two canyons meet, is covered with ruins much like what we have described already. The Hovenweep is appropriately named, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... Avon, he could see the smoke and the church towers of the town of Bristol, and beyond it, the slime of the water of the Bristol Channel; and nearer, on one side, the spire of Elmwood Church looked up, and, on the other, the woods round Elmwood House, and these ran out as it were, lengthening and narrowing into a wooded cleft or gulley, Hermit's Gulley, which broke the side of the hill just below where Steadfast stood, and had a little clear stream running along ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of the Palace, with a park on either hand, and its main entrance fronting the Mall, has green gardens of its own, velvet turf, shady trees, shining water—now expanding into a great round pond, like that in Kensington Gardens, only larger—now narrowing till it is crossed by a rustic bridge. These cheat the eye and the fancy into the belief that the dwellers in the Palace have got rid of the town, and furnish pleasant paths and pretty effects of landscape gardening within a ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler

... the valley of the Indus and its tributaries, at first a broad tract, 350 miles from west to east, but narrowing as it descends, and in places not exceeding sixty or seventy miles, across. The length of the valley is not less than 800 miles. Its area is probably about a hundred thousand square miles. We may best regard it as composed of two very distinct tracts—one ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson

... name of the North River. Near their confluence is Governor's Island, half a mile below the town, centrally situated to command the entrances to both. Between the East and North rivers, with their general directions from north and east-north-east, is embraced a long strip of land gradually narrowing to the southward. The end of this peninsula, as it would otherwise be, is converted into an island, of a mean length of about eight miles, by the Harlem River,—a narrow and partially navigable stream connecting the East and North rivers. To the southern ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan

... Cornwallis that he was wheedled by Joseph Bonaparte into conceding more than the British Government had empowered him to do; and, though the "secret and most confidential" despatch of March 22nd cautioned him against narrowing too much the ground of a rupture, if a rupture should still occur, yet three days later, and after the receipt of this despatch, he signed the terms of peace with Joseph Bonaparte, and two days later with the other signatory Powers.[196] It may well be doubted whether peace ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... of being constantly ready to do what he professed as, in the abstract, the right thing to be done; impetuous, bold, uncompromising, lavishly generous, and inspired by a general love of humankind, and a coequal detestation of all the narrowing influences of custom and prescription. Pity, which included self-pity, was one of his dominant emotions. If we consider what are the uses, and what the abuses, of a character of this type, we shall have some notion of the excellences ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... appropriated the name, which thus became a party title. In the course of its sessions, it rejected doctrines, notably that of Justification by Faith, which had been strongly favoured even by such men as Pole and Contarini, so narrowing the bounds of orthodoxy. But while cutting off all possibility of reconciliation with the Protestants, it marked a strong tendency to reformation not of dogma but of practice; while an increased intolerance of what was stigmatised as error, an intensification of the spirit which ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes

... my story," said Don Antonio, after a pause, and from narrowing eyes looked at the beauty who had heard ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... But at the narrowing something in his eyes she sidestepped him, stooping down at the door of her bathhouse for a last ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... needin' a title any more," said Harlan, narrowing his eyes at the other. "He needs plantin'. Soon as we get set some of you boys can go over an' take care of him. You'll find him in the harness shop. He busted down the door of Miss Barbara's room last night, an' she made a ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer

... these our very kith and kin, You should likewise, when they ask you, pardon for their single sin. O by nature best and wisest, O relax your jealous ire, Let us all the world as kinsfolk and as citizens acquire, All who on our ships will battle well and bravely by our side If we cocker up our city, narrowing her with senseless pride Now when she is rocked and reeling in the cradles of the sea, Here again will after ages deem we ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes

... little old idea!" asked the girl coldly, her eyes narrowing as she studied the other girl in detail and attempted to classify her into the known and unknown quantities of her world. Her face was absolutely expressionless as far as any sign of interest or sympathy was concerned. It was like a house with the door ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill

... shelter of a wooded, half submerged island, out of which rose, on piles, a little light-house. Under this lee we crept along in safety. The sail was furled, never to be used in storm again. The wind went down with the sinking sun, and a delightful calm favored us for our row up the narrowing river, eight miles ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop

... rigging the sea had left. She looked to be made of shells and moss; her shrouds and masts were incrusted as thickly as her hull. She was a mere tub of a ship in shape, being scarce twice as long as she was broad, with great fat buttocks, a very tall stern narrowing atop, and low bows with a prodigious curve to the stem-head. I am not well versed in the shipping of olden times, but I would have willingly staked all I was worth in the world that the fabric before me belonged to a period ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various

... rock-cover to pine-clad hillside he was driven in his attempts to break the narrowing circle of grim hunters that hemmed him. And with each failure, with every passing hour, the terror in him mounted. He would have welcomed life imprisonment, would have sold the last vestige of manhood to save the worthless life that would soon be snuffed out unless he could ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine

... more than an instrument of sound, a wind instrument like a trumpet, or a clanging instrument like a cymbal." That is the apostolic warning to the successful professional man,—the warning against the narrowing, self-contented result which sometimes taints even great attainments and professional distinction. Covet the best. Be satisfied with nothing less than the highest professional work of doctor, politician, or teacher. But beware of the imprisoning effect which sometimes comes of ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody

... some, the weaker bidders, from getting any of the desired goods, or limits them to their most urgently desired units. What may be called "the theoretically correct price"[3] with two-sided competition is the one that permits the maximum number of trades with a margin of gain to each trader. In narrowing the possibility of substitution of goods by trade, the sum of values of goods for most men is diminished. All citizens thus that are the victims of an artificially created scarcity look upon monopoly as "bad," just as they do upon the ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... whom those who screamed had heard something unpleasant—oh, yes, yellow!—lanced down the narrowing aisle between radiator and fenders. He struck Felicity like a vicious tackler yet did not go down, but leaped again. As the cars crunched together they slithered through the crowd, across the walk, against ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans

... do? Presumably, they would maneuver so as to seek to shut the "Terror" within the narrowing end of the lake where the ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne

... were lured on and on so far by the dog that they were where the ditch began to bend round more sharply and the pipe was narrowing. This was the time ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn

... growing less frequent. The fields open to injustice (which originally from pure ignorance are so vast) continually (through deeper and more expansive surveys by man's intellect—searching—reflecting—comparing) are narrowing themselves; narrowing themselves in this sense, that all nations under a common centre of religious civilization, as Christendom suppose, or Islamism, would not fight—no, and would not (by the ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... how one day she met Him on a bridge, and blushed, and hurried by. Nor how the following week he stood to let Her pass, the pavement narrowing suddenly. How once he took her basket, and once he Pulled back a rearing horse who might have struck Her with his hoofs. ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell

... country, affected to gaze at it with the unconcern of a proprietor, merely reminding his master that he had always said, that his was a very fine country. For miles below the padi fields stretched away narrowing in the distance, and here and there amidst this expanse of emerald green were dotted little clumps of green of a darker shade, these being the trees surrounding the clusters of houses inhabited by the fortunate owners of the ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser

... was a very beautiful one—a sloping hillside gradually narrowing into a strip six or seven hundred yards wide and running between two of the most picturesque lakes the boys ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various



Words linked to "Narrowing" :   constriction, decrement, widening, decrease, constricting, tapered, constrictive, coarctation, tapering, contour, conformation, narrow, taper, change of shape, bottleneck, form, shape, chokepoint, configuration



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