Bet to Birminghamized

A Concordance to the Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Compiled by Eugene F. Irey

bet, n. (1)

    Boks 7.210 4 Now [the bidders for the Valdarfer Boccaccio] talked apart, now ate a biscuit, now made a bet...

betake, v. (2)

    MN 1.220 19 Shall we not...betake ourselves to some desert cliff of Mount Katahdin...
    Tran 1.341 2 ...many intelligent and religious persons...betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living...

betakes, v. (3)

    SwM 4.113 3 ...as often as [nature] betakes herself upward from visible phenomena...she instantly as it were disappears, while no one knows what has become of her...
    Dem1 10.20 7 There is one world common to all who are awake, but each sleeper betakes himself to one of his own.
    Wom 11.426 11 Woman should find in man her guardian. Silently she looks for that, and when she finds that he is not, as she instantly does, she betakes her to her own defences...

Bethany, Palestine, n. (1)

    LT 1.274 8 [The wealthy man] entertains [the divine]...lodges him; his religion comes home at night, prays, is...sumptuously laid to sleep; rises...is better breakfasted than he whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem...

Bethel, n. (1)

    Elo2 8.114 9 ...you may find [the orator] in some lowly Bethel...

bethink, v. (2)

    Int 2.329 4 [Ideas]...so fully engage us that we...gaze like children, without an effort to make them our own. By and by we fall out of that rapture, bethink us where we have been, what we have seen...
    Prch 10.236 20 We want some intercalated days, to bethink us and to derive order to our life from the heart.

bethinks, v. (1)

    MoS 4.149 13 A man is flushed with success, and bethinks himself what this good luck signifies.

Bethlehem Star, n. (1)

    Chr2 10.90 3 For what need I of book or priest/ Or Sibyl from the mummied East/ When every star is Bethlehem Star,-/...

bethought, v. (5)

    ET16 5.286 26 My friends asked, whether there were any Americans?...any theory of the right future of that country? Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither of caucuses nor congress...
    F 6.33 21 ...the Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and Fulton bethought themselves that where was power was not devil...
    Civ 7.27 21 The farmer had much ill temper, laziness and shirking to endure from his hand-sawyers, until one day he bethought him to put his saw-mill on the edge of a waterfall;...
    Boks 7.210 8 Earl Spencer bethought him like a prudent general of useless bloodshed and waste of powder...
    Thor 10.457 14 ...a young girl...sharply asked [Thoreau], Whether his lecture would be a nice, interesting story...or whether it was one of those old philosophical things that she did not care about. Henry turned to her, and bethought himself...

betoken, v. (2)

    ET4 5.66 25 When it is considered...what resources of mental and moral power the traits of the blonde race betoken, its accession to empire marks a new and finer epoch...
    DL 7.116 17 ...many things betoken a revolution of opinion and practice in regard to manual labor...

betokened, v. (1)

    ET8 5.140 3 King Harold gave [Haldor] this testimony, that he, among all his men, cared least about doubtful circumstances, whether they betokened danger or pleasure;...

betokens, v. (1)

    SwM 4.144 12 The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind [as Swedenborg's] betokens the disease...

betray, v. (24)

    AmS 1.101 6 ...[the scholar] must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts...
    Hist 2.19 20 The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and subterranean houses of their forefathers.
    Lov1 2.172 14 Perhaps we never saw [the lovers] before and never shall meet them again. But we see them...betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers.
    Chr1 3.110 22 The coldest precisian cannot go abroad without encountering inexplicable influences. One man fastens an eye on him and... the secrets that make him wretched either to keep or to betray must be yielded;...
    Mrs1 3.143 15 ...the respect which these mysteries [of fashion] inspire in the most rude and sylvan characters, and the curiosity with which the details of high life are read, betray the universality of the love of cultivated manners.
    Nat2 3.186 26 All things betray the same calculated profusion.
    Nat2 3.187 27 Jacob Behmen and George Fox betray their egotism in the pertinacity of their controversial tracts...
    NER 3.270 7 When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange that society should be disheartened...
    ET14 5.254 17 ...parochial and shop-till politics, and idolatry of usage, betray the ebb of life and spirit [in English students].
    F 6.9 14 ...mats of hair, the pigment of the epidermis betray character.
    Wth 6.92 5 The brave workman, who might betray his feeling of it in his manners...must replace the grace or elegance forfeited, by the merit of the work done.
    Wth 6.104 10 If you take out of State Street the ten honestest merchants and put in ten roguish persons controlling the same amount of capital...the pulpit will betray it...
    Bhr 6.182 4 What refinement and what limitations the teeth betray!
    Bhr 6.197 20 ...'t is a thousand to one that [the young girl's] air and manner will at once betray that she is not primary...
    Bty 6.299 14 A beautiful person among the Greeks was thought to betray by this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods;...
    Ill 6.317 14 ...[men who make themselves felt in the world] never deeply interest us unless they...betray, never so slightly, their penetration of what is behind [the curtain].
    PI 8.63 12 [The high poets] have touched this heaven and retain afterwards some sparkle of it: they betray their belief that such discourse is possible.
    Comc 8.157 4 The rocks, the plants, the beasts, the birds, neither do anything ridiculous, nor betray a perception of anything absurd done in their presence.
    QO 8.186 18 There are many fables which, as they...betray no sign of being borrowed, are said to be agreeable to the human mind.
    Aris 10.43 19 ...the manners betray the like puny constitution.
    HDC 11.51 25 The questions which the Indians put [to John Eliot] betray their reason and their ignorance.
    MLit 12.318 6 [The educated and susceptible] betray this impatience [with the poverty of our dogmas of religion and philosophy] by fleeing for resource to a conversation with Nature...
    Let 12.397 21 As long as [a man] sleeps in the shade of the present error, the after-nature does not betray its resources.
    Trag 12.412 24 There is a fire in some men which demands an outlet in some rude action; they betray their impatience of quiet by an irregular Catilinarian gait;...

betrayed, v. (19)

    Con 1.305 12 ...you [reformers] are betrayed by your own nature.
    MoS 4.155 19 Neither will [the skeptic] be betrayed to a book and wrapped in a gown.
    ET6 5.105 19 [The Englishman] is never betrayed into any curiosity or unbecoming emotion.
    ET17 5.297 1 A gentleman in the neighborhood told the story of Walter Scott's staying once for a week with Wordsworth, and slipping out every day...to the Swan Inn for a cold cut and porter; and one day passing with Wordsworth the inn, he was betrayed by the landlord's asking him if he had come for his porter.
    ET18 5.301 11 ...[the foreign policy of England] betrayed Genoa, Sicily, Parma, Greece, Turkey, Rome and Hungary.
    F 6.29 13 ...'T is written on the gate of Heaven, Woe unto him who suffers himself to be betrayed by Fate!
    Ctr 6.153 16 ...in cities [the gods] have betrayed you to a cloud of insignificant annoyances...
    Wsp 6.234 13 I recall some traits of a remarkable person whose life and discourse betrayed many inspirations of this [moral] sentiment.
    Elo1 7.86 5 ...the court and the county have really come together to arrive at these three or four memorable expressions which betrayed the mind and meaning of somebody.
    DL 7.114 13 ...we desire to play the benefactor and the prince...with the man or woman of worth who alights at our door. How can we do this, if the wants of each day...constrain us to a continual vigilance lest we be betrayed into expense?
    Cour 7.270 12 ...each is betrayed when he seeks in himself the courage of others.
    Prch 10.227 13 Be not betrayed into undervaluing the churches which annoy you by their bigoted claims.
    Prch 10.229 4 ...anything but losing hold of the moral intuitions, as betrayed in the clinging to a form of devotion or a theological dogma;...
    EzRy 10.389 24 ...[Ezra Ripley] repeated to me at table some of the particulars of that gentleman's [Jack Downing's] intimacy with General Jackson, in a manner which betrayed to me at once that he took the whole for fact.
    SlHr 10.438 27 ...when the votes of the Free States...had...betrayed the cause of freedom, [Samuel Hoar] considered the question of justice and liberty, for his age, lost...
    Wom 11.423 25 ...when I read the list of men of intellect, of refined pursuits...and see what they have voted for and suffered to be voted for, I think no community was ever so politely and elegantly betrayed.
    MAng1 12.222 2 There needs no better proof of our instinctive feeling of the immense expression of which the human figure is capable than the uniform tendency which the religion of every country has betrayed towards Anthropomorphism...
    Milt1 12.259 1 ...[Milton] writes: Many have been celebrated for their compositions, whose common conversation and intercourse have betrayed no marks of sublimity or genius.
    MLit 12.318 3 All over the modern world the educated and susceptible have betrayed their discontent with the limits of our municipal life...

betrayers, n. (1)

    SA 8.83 26 Manners are...the betrayers of any disproportion or want of symmetry in mind and character.

betraying, adj. (1)

    Dem1 10.11 10 All life, all creation, is telltale and betraying.

betraying, v. (3)

    SR 2.47 17 Great men have always...confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart...
    Lov1 2.172 11 ...what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties?
    MMEm 10.427 7 I sometimes fancy I detect in [Mary Moody Emerson's] writings a certain...polite and courtly homage to the name and dignity of Jesus...really veiling and betraying her organic dislike to any interference, any mediation between her and the Author of her being...

betrays, v. (32)

    Nat 1.44 17 So intimate is this Unity, that...it...betrays its source in Universal Spirit.
    Tran 1.335 6 I-this thought which is called I-is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould.
    Hist 2.9 4 ...the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history.
    SL 2.141 20 The pretence that [a man] has another call, a summons by name and personal election...betrays obtuseness to perceive that there is one mind in all the individuals...
    Fdsp 2.198 5 The soul invirons itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations.
    Fdsp 2.213 16 Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances...
    OS 2.282 11 Everywhere the history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm.
    Cir 2.307 6 The continual effort...to work a pitch above his last height, betrays itself in a man's relations.
    Art1 2.353 8 ...[a man] cannot wipe out from his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew. The very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids.
    Art1 2.363 6 The real value of the Iliad or the Transfiguration is as signs of power;...tokens of the everlasting effort to produce, which even in its worst estate the soul betrays.
    Exp 3.78 7 Every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity.
    Nat2 3.175 21 The muse herself betrays her son [the poor young poet]...
    Nat2 3.181 5 Compound it how [nature] will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties.
    Nat2 3.195 12 Our servitude to particulars betrays us into a hundred foolish expectations.
    ET4 5.50 20 The English composite character betrays a mixed origin.
    ET6 5.104 13 [The Englishman's] vivacity betrays itself at all points...
    F 6.22 14 [Man] betrays his relation to what is below him...
    CbW 6.264 19 He who desponds betrays that he has not seen [the law which distributes things].
    WD 7.185 16 ...this is the progress of every earnest mind;...from local skills and the economy which reckons the amount of production per hour to the finer economy which respects the quality of what is done, and...the fidelity with which it flows from ourselves; then to the depth of thought it betrays...
    PI 8.12 18 Genius thus [through figurative speech]...betrays the rhymes and echoes that pole makes with pole.
    PI 8.17 9 [Poetry's] essential mark is that it betrays in every word instant activity of mind...
    PI 8.33 8 Style betrays you...
    SA 8.87 5 Sometimes, when in almost all expressions the Choctaw and the slave have been worked out of [a man], a coarse nature still betrays itself in his contemptible squeals of joy.
    Elo2 8.120 15 The voice...betrays the nature and disposition...
    QO 8.192 15 [Quotation] betrays the consciousness that truth is the property of no individual...
    QO 8.193 9 ...it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others, as it is to invent. Always...some sudden alteration...of point of view, betrays the foreign interpolation.
    Dem1 10.27 19 ...I think the numberless forms in which this superstition [demonology] has reappeared...betrays [man's] conviction that behind all your explanations is a vast and potent and living Nature...
    Schr 10.264 27 The poet with poets betrays no amiable weakness.
    MLit 12.334 13 He who doubts whether this age or this country can yield any contribution to the literature of the world only betrays his own blindness to the necessities of the human soul.
    WSL 12.337 4 We sometimes meet in a stage-coach in New England an erect, muscular man...whose nervous speech instantly betrays the English traveller;...
    WSL 12.343 26 [Landor's] love of beauty...betrays itself in all petulant and contemptuous expressions.
    EurB 12.374 15 ...Zanoni pains us and the author loses our respect, because he speedily betrays that he does not see the true limitations of the charm;...

betrothal, n. (1)

    ET13 5.218 12 It was strange to hear the pretty pastoral of the betrothal of Rebecca and Isaac, in the morning of the world, read with circumstantiality in York minster, on the 13th January, 1848...

betrothed, adj. (3)

    Nat2 3.193 11 The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him.
    Wth 6.113 10 ...the betrothed maiden by one secure affection is relieved from a system of slaveries...
    DL 7.115 21 You are to bring with you that spirit which is understanding, health and self-help. To offer [man] money in lieu of these is to do him the same wrong as when the bridegroom offers his betrothed virgin a sum of money to release him from his engagements.

betrothed, v. (1)

    Boks 7.217 1 Money, and killing, and the Wandering Jew, and persuading the lover that his mistress is betrothed to another, these are the main-springs [of the novel];...

better, adj. (428)

    Nat 1.11 1 [The waving of the boughs'] effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me...
    Nat 1.16 11 For better consideration, we may distribute the aspects of beauty in a threefold manner.
    Nat 1.37 13 ...good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed!
    Nat 1.72 25 ...in the thick darkness, there are not wanting gleams of a better light...
    AmS 1.81 19 Perhaps the time is already come...when the sluggard intellect of this continent will...fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill.
    AmS 1.98 17 ...the final value of action, like that of books, and better than books, is that it is a resource.
    AmS 1.103 26 ...the deeper [the orator] dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most...universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music;...
    AmS 1.108 12 ...we crave a better and more abundant food.
    DSA 1.137 11 ...we can make...a far better, holier, sweeter [Sabbath], for ourselves.
    DSA 1.139 8 When [the good hearer] listens to these vain words, he comforts himself by their relation to his remembrance of better hours...
    DSA 1.141 12 ...the exceptions are not so much to be found in a few eminent preachers, as in the better hours...of all...
    LE 1.160 27 There is a better way than this indolent learning of another.
    LE 1.181 1 Let the scholar appreciate this combination of gifts, which, applied to better purpose, make true wisdom.
    LE 1.187 4 ...Ask not...Who is the better for the philosopher who conceals his accomplishments...
    MN 1.192 26 Let there be worse cotton and better men.
    MN 1.199 2 How can I hope for better hap in my attempts to enunciate spiritual facts?
    MN 1.203 17 Why should not then these messieurs of Versailles strut and plot for tabourets and ribbons, for a season, without prejudice to their faculty to run on better errands by and by?
    MN 1.209 6 A man's wisdom is to know...that the best end must be superseded by a better.
    MR 1.242 12 Better that the book should not be quite so good, and the book-maker abler and better...
    MR 1.242 14 Better that the book should not be quite so good, and the book-maker abler and better...
    MR 1.245 17 It is better to go without [the conveniences of life], than to have them at too great a cost.
    MR 1.253 23 It is better to work on institutions by the sun than by the wind.
    MR 1.254 8 I am to see to it that the world is the better for me...
    MR 1.256 1 It is better that joy should be spread over all the day in the form of strength...
    LT 1.268 2 Let us not see the foundations...of a new and better order of things laid, with...an attention preoccupied with trifles.
    LT 1.268 11 Here is the innumerable multitude of those who accept the state and the church from the last generation, and stand on no argument but possession. They have reason also, and, as I think, better reason than is commonly stated.
    LT 1.276 17 The love which lifted men to the sight of these better ends was the true and best distinction of this time...
    Con 1.297 27 ...[conservatism] will not open its eyes to see a better fact.
    Con 1.303 22 [The existing world] will stand until a better cast of the dice is made.
    Con 1.304 4 We hold to this [existing world], until you can demonstrate something better.
    Con 1.304 27 You who...are willing to...risk the indisputable good that exists, for the chance of better, live, move, and have your being in this [society]...
    Con 1.313 15 Thank the rude foster-mother [Necessity], though she has taught you a better wisdom than her own...
    Con 1.320 9 [Conservatism's] social and political action has no better aim;...
    Tran 1.333 11 Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors.
    Tran 1.346 1 Will it be better with the new generation?
    Tran 1.347 10 [Transcendentalists] say to themselves, It is better to be alone than in bad company.
    YA 1.370 4 How much better when the whole land is a garden...
    YA 1.372 23 Remark the unceasing effort throughout nature at somewhat better than the actual creatures...
    YA 1.373 3 The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but...the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God.
    YA 1.379 23 ...Trade is also but for a time, and must give way to somewhat broader and better...
    YA 1.391 6 ...the wise and just man will always feel...that if all went down, he and such as he would quite easily combine in a new and better constitution.
    Hist 2.6 19 Universal history, the poets, the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures...anywhere make us feel...that this is for better men;...
    Hist 2.10 14 Ferguson discovered many things in astronomy which had long been known. The better for him.
    Hist 2.33 7 ...if the man is true to his better instincts or sentiments...then the facts fall aptly and supple into their places;...
    SR 2.50 1 Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.
    SR 2.52 1 I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last...
    SR 2.66 17 Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion?
    SR 2.66 18 Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being?
    SR 2.67 6 These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones;...
    SR 2.89 6 Is not a man better than a town?
    Comp 2.95 24 ...men are better than their theology.
    Comp 2.119 10 The longer the payment is withholden, the better for you;...
    SL 2.133 4 The regular course of studies...have not yielded me better facts than some idle books under the bench at the Latin School.
    SL 2.133 18 ...the question is everywhere vexed when a noble nature is commended, whether the man is not better who strives with temptation.
    SL 2.134 3 When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful and pleasant as roses, we must...not...say, Crump is a better man with his grunting resistance to all his native devils.
    SL 2.147 19 People are not the better for the sun and moon, the horizon and the trees;...
    SL 2.158 6 A stranger comes from a distant school, with better dress...
    SL 2.160 4 ...the hero fears not that if he withhold the avowal of a just and brave act it will go unwitnessed and unloved. One knows it,--himself,--and is pledged by it...to nobleness of aim which will prove in the end a better proclamation of it than the relating of the incident.
    SL 2.161 17 The epochs of our life are...in a thought which...says,--Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus.
    Fdsp 2.195 25 [Our friend's] goodness seems better than our goodness...
    Prd1 2.233 23 Is it not better that a man should accept the first pains and mortifications of this sort...as hints that he must expect no other good than the just fruit of his own labor and self-denial?
    Prd1 2.234 12 There is nothing [a man] will not be the better for knowing...
    Prd1 2.239 19 The natural motions of the soul are so much better than the voluntary ones that you will never do yourself justice in dispute.
    Prd1 2.240 4 We refuse sympathy and intimacy with people, as if we waited for some better sympathy and intimacy to come.
    Hsm1 2.246 19 ...[To die] is to end/ An old, stale, weary work and to commence/ A newer and a better..../
    Hsm1 2.253 10 ...the soul of a better quality thrusts back the unreasonable economy into the vaults of life...
    Hsm1 2.254 15 ...[the great soul's] own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks and fair water than belong to city feasts.
    Hsm1 2.255 3 Better still is the temperance of King David...
    Hsm1 2.259 6 ...a better valor and a purer truth shall one day organize [many extraordinary young men's] belief.
    Hsm1 2.262 6 The circumstances of man, we say, are historically somewhat better in this country and at this hour than perhaps ever before.
    Hsm1 2.262 17 It is but the other day that the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob...and died when it was better not to live.
    OS 2.269 20 ...by falling back on our better thoughts...we can know what [the soul] saith.
    OS 2.275 16 The soul...requires beneficence, but is somewhat better;...
    OS 2.292 18 ...for ever and ever the influx of this better and universal self is new and unsearchable.
    Cir 2.303 2 ...that which builds is better than that which is built.
    Cir 2.303 3 Better than the hand and nimbler was the invisible thought which wrought through it;...
    Cir 2.307 15 For every friend whom he loses for truth, [a man] gains a better.
    Cir 2.311 21 Good as is discourse, silence is better...
    Cir 2.314 25 The same law of eternal procession...extinguishes each [virtue] in the light of a better.
    Cir 2.315 23 Blessed be nothing and The worse things are, the better they are are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.
    Cir 2.321 3 The difference between talents and character is adroitness to keep the old and trodden round, and power and courage to make a new road to new and better goals.
    Int 2.327 12 ...any record of our fancies or reflections, disentangled from the web of our unconsciousness, becomes an object impersonal and immortal. ... A better art than that of Egypt has taken fear and corruption out of it.
    Int 2.339 20 Is it any better if the student...aims to make a mechanical whole of history...by a numerical addition of all the facts that fall within his vision.
    Art1 2.366 15 Men are not well pleased with the figure they make in their own imaginations, and...convey their better sense in an oratorio, a statue, or a picture.
    Art1 2.367 19 Would it not be better to begin higher up,--to serve the ideal before [men] eat and drink;...
    Pt1 3.12 13 This day shall be better than my birthday...
    Pt1 3.13 13 Being used as a type, a second wonderful value appears in the object, far better than its old value;...
    Pt1 3.20 22 ...through that better perception [the poet] stands one step nearer to things...
    Exp 3.49 4 If to-morrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,--neither better nor worse.
    Exp 3.65 22 Thou art sick, but shalt not be worse, and the universe, which holds thee dear, shall be the better.
    Exp 3.75 5 ...[a man's] good is tidings of a better.
    Chr1 3.101 21 No institution will be better than the institutor.
    Chr1 3.108 25 Every trait which the artist recorded in stone he had seen in life, and better than his copy.
    Mrs1 3.123 21 In politics and in trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks.
    Mrs1 3.141 26 Parliamentary history has few better passages than the debate in which Burke and Fox separated in the House of Commons;...
    Mrs1 3.149 3 A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face;...
    Mrs1 3.149 4 ...a beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form...
    Gts 3.160 27 In our condition of universal dependence it seems heroic to let the petitioner be the judge of his necessity, and to give all that is asked, though at great inconvenience. If it be a fantastic desire, it is better to leave to others the office of punishing him.
    Nat2 3.177 9 The fop of fields is no better than his brother of Broadway.
    Pol1 3.199 9 ...we ought to remember...that [the State's institutions] all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good, we may make better.
    Pol1 3.204 18 We are kept by better guards than the vigilance of such magistrates as we commonly elect.
    Pol1 3.207 16 [Our political institutions] are not better, but only fitter for us.
    Pol1 3.207 21 Democracy is better for us, because the religious sentiment of the present time accords better with it.
    Pol1 3.208 14 Parties...have better guides to their own humble aims than the sagacity of their leaders.
    Pol1 3.215 20 ...the less government we have the better...
    Pol1 3.220 5 Are our methods now so excellent that all competition is hopeless? could not a nation of friends even devise better ways?
    NR 3.239 3 ...[the recluse] goes into a mob...into a camp, and in each new place he is no better than an idiot;...
    NR 3.245 11 ...Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech;...
    NR 3.245 12 ...Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech;...
    NER 3.258 8 ...the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.
    NER 3.261 21 It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment...than to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration.
    NER 3.261 27 ...there is no part of society or of life better than any other part.
    NER 3.265 25 ...concert is neither better nor worse...than individual force.
    NER 3.273 15 Men in all ways are better than they seem.
    UGM 4.13 24 If you affect to give me bread and fire...at last it leaves me as it found me, neither better nor worse...
    PPh 4.63 18 Nature is good, but the intellect is better...
    PPh 4.64 9 ...[said Plato] the persuasion that we must search that which we do not know, will render us, beyond comparison, better, braver and more industrious than if we thought it impossible to discover what we do not know, and useless to search for it.
    PPh 4.71 25 [Socrates]...thought every thing in Athens a little better than anything in any other place.
    PPh 4.79 3 ...when we praise the style, or the common sense, or arithmetic [of Plato], we speak as boys, and much of our impatient criticism of the dialectic, I suspect, is no better.
    PNR 4.84 2 Plato affirms...that it is better to suffer injustice than to do it;...
    PNR 4.88 8 Shakspeare is a Platonist when he writes,--Nature is made better by no mean,/ But nature makes that mean/...
    SwM 4.120 7 [Swedenborg] had borrowed from Plato the fine fable of a most ancient people, men better than we and dwelling nigher to the gods;...
    SwM 4.138 2 The less we have to do with our sins the better.
    MoS 4.153 1 Spence relates that Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey Kneller one day, when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came in. Nephew, said Sir Godfrey, you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men in the world. I don't know how great men you may be, said the Guinea man, but I don't like your looks. I have often bought a man much better than both of you, all muscles and bones, for ten guineas.
    MoS 4.160 9 [Skepticism] is a position taken up for better defence...
    MoS 4.166 14 [Montaigne]...is so nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks the more barbarous man is, the better he is.
    MoS 4.172 26 [The wise skeptic] is a reformer; yet he is no better member of the philanthropic association.
    MoS 4.179 2 ...we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours. But what are these cares and works the better?
    ShP 4.196 11 Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any invention can.
    ShP 4.203 4 [Jonson] no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to [Shakespeare] generous, and esteemed himself...the better poet of the two.
    GoW 4.274 26 Eyes are better on the whole than telescopes or microscopes.
    GoW 4.283 18 However excellent [Goethe's] sentence is, he has somewhat better in view.
    ET1 5.21 24 [Wordsworth] had never gone farther than the first part [of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister]; so disgusted was he that he threw the book across the room. I deprecated this wrath, and said what I could for the better parts of the book...
    ET1 5.23 19 I said Tinturn Abbey appeared to be the favorite poem with the public, but more contemplative readers preferred the first books of the Excursion, and the Sonnets. He said, Yes, they are better.
    ET1 5.24 11 [Wordsworth] then said he would show me a better way towards the inn;...
    ET2 5.30 26 Jack [Tar] has a life of risks, incessant abuse and the worst pay. It is a little better with the mate, and not very much better with the captain.
    ET4 5.51 11 Neither do this people [the English] appear to be of one stem, but collectively a better race than any from which they are derived.
    ET4 5.60 2 History rarely yields us better passages than the conversation between King Sigurd the Crusader and King Eystein his brother...
    ET4 5.71 24 Their young boiling clerks and lusty collegians [in England] like the company of horses better than the company of professors. I suppose the horses are better company for them.
    ET5 5.80 10 [The English]...cannot conceal their contempt for sallies of thought...whose steps they cannot count by their wonted rule. Neither do they reckon better a syllogism that ends in syllogism.
    ET5 5.86 26 ...conscious that no race of better men exists, [the English] rely most on the simplest means...
    ET5 5.93 18 ...it is [Englishmen's] commercial advantage that whatever light appears in better method or happy invention, breaks out in their race.
    ET6 5.108 5 ...the poorest [Englishmen] have some spoon or saucepan... saved out of better times.
    ET6 5.110 22 As soon as [the English] have rid themselves of some grievance and settled the better practice, they make haste to fix it as a finality...
    ET7 5.120 6 If war do not bring in its sequel new trade, better agriculture and manufactures...no prosperity could support it;...
    ET8 5.131 19 Of absolute stoutness no nation has more or better examples [than England].
    ET9 5.152 17 ...this precious knave [George of Cappadocia] became, in good time, Saint George of England...the pride of the best blood of the modern world. Strange, that the solid truth-speaking Briton should derive from an impostor. Strange, that the New World should have no better luck...
    ET10 5.156 14 If [the English] cannot pay, they do not buy; for they have no presumption of better fortunes next year...
    ET10 5.160 20 ...a better measure than these sounding figures is the estimate that there is wealth enough in England to support the entire population in idleness for one year.
    ET10 5.166 3 I much prefer the condition of an English gentleman of the better class to that of any potentate in Europe...
    ET11 5.174 27 The things these English have done were not done...without wisdom and conduct; and the first hands...were often challenged to show their right to their honors, or yield them to better men.
    ET12 5.209 10 ...so eminent are the members that a glance at the calendars will show that in all the world one cannot be in better company than on the books of one of the larger Oxford or Cambridge colleges.
    ET12 5.212 3 ...the rich libraries collected at every one of many thousands of houses [in England], give an advantage not to be attained by a youth in this country, when one thinks how much more and better may be learned by a scholar who, immediately on hearing of a book, can consult it...
    ET13 5.215 10 In seeing old castles and cathedrals, I sometimes say...This was built by another and a better race than any that now look on it.
    ET14 5.247 15 [Macaulay] thinks it the distinctive merit of the Baconian philosophy in its triumph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the intellect from theories of the all-Fair and all-Good, and pinning it down to the making of a better sick chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid;...
    ET14 5.247 16 [Macaulay] thinks it the distinctive merit of the Baconian philosophy in its triumph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the intellect from theories of the all-Fair and all-Good, and pinning it down to the making of a better sick chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid;...
    ET14 5.247 20 [Macaulay] thinks...that, solid advantage, as he calls it, meaning always sensual benefit, is the only good. The eminent benefit of astronomy is the better navigation it creates to enable the fruit-ships to bring home their lemons and wine to the London grocer.
    ET14 5.257 27 [Tennyson] contents himself with describing the Englishman as he is, and proposes no better.
    ET15 5.271 21 The [London] Times, like every important institution, shows the way to a better.
    ET17 5.295 9 [Wordsworth] had thought an elder brother of Tennyson at first the better poet...
    ET18 5.307 16 ...the American people do not yield better or more able men...than the English.
    ET18 5.307 18 Congress is not wiser or better than Parliament.
    ET19 5.309 10 In looking over recently a newspaper-report of my remarks [at the Manchester Atheneaum Banquet], I incline to reprint it, as fitly expressing the feeling with which I entered England, and which agrees well enough with the more deliberate results of better acquaintance recorded in the foregoing pages.
    F 6.14 15 ...if, after five hundred years you get a better observer or a better glass, he finds, within the last [egg] observed, another [vesicle].
    F 6.26 12 [The mind] dates from itself; not from...better men...
    Pow 6.60 2 The second man is as good as the first,--perhaps better;...
    Pow 6.65 12 These Hoosiers and Suckers are really better than the snivelling opposition.
    Pow 6.76 10 ...in our flowing affairs a decision must be made,--the best, if you can, but any is better than none.
    Pow 6.77 9 The hack is a better roadster than the Arab barb.
    Pow 6.77 12 ...the galvanic stream, slow but continuous, is equal in power to the electric spark, and is, in our arts, a better agent.
    Wth 6.85 21 ...a better order is equivalent to vast amounts of brute labor.
    Wth 6.86 7 ...the art of getting rich consists not in industry...but in a better order...
    Wth 6.86 14 Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago; but is put to better use.
    Wth 6.109 6 A youth coming into the city from his native New Hampshire farm...boards at a first-class hotel, and believes he must somehow have outwitted Dr. Franklin and Malthus, for luxuries are cheap. But he pays for the one convenience of a better dinner, by the loss of some of the richest social and educational advantages.
    Ctr 6.139 16 ...the old English poet Gascoigne says, A boy is better unborn than untaught.
    Ctr 6.151 10 How the imagination is piqued by anecdotes...of Goethe, who preferred...worse rather than better clothes...
    Ctr 6.162 2 Ben Jonson specifies in his address to the Muse:--...Make him lose all his friends, and what is worse,/ Almost all ways to any better course;/ With me thou leav'st a better Muse than thee,/ And which thou brought'st me, blessed Poverty./
    Ctr 6.162 3 Ben Jonson specifies in his address to the Muse:--...Make him lose all his friends, and what is worse,/ Almost all ways to any better course;/ With me thou leav'st a better Muse than thee,/ And which thou brought'st me, blessed Poverty./
    Bhr 6.185 21 Nothing can be more excellent in kind than the Corinthian grace of Gertrude's manners, and yet Blanche, who has no manners, has better manners than she;...
    Bhr 6.189 12 A little integrity is better than any career.
    Bhr 6.193 12 ...[simple and noble persons]...meet on a better ground than the talents and skills they may chance to possess...
    Bhr 6.194 4 The angel that was sent to find a place of torment for [the monk Basle] attempted to remove him to a worse pit, but with no better success;...
    Bhr 6.195 23 I have seen manners that make a similar impression with personal beauty;...and in memorable experiences they are suddenly better than beauty...
    Bhr 6.196 8 It is good to give a stranger...a night's lodging. It is better to be hospitable to his good meaning and thought...
    Wsp 6.212 5 ...they who pay this homage [to the public sinner] have said to themselves, On the whole, we don't know about this that you call honesty; a bird in the hand is better.
    Wsp 6.215 26 What a day dawns when we have taken to heart the doctrine of faith! to prefer, as a better investment, being to doing;...
    Wsp 6.224 21 Each must be armed--not necessarily with musket and pike. Happy, if seeing these, he can feel that he has better muskets and pikes in his energy and constancy.
    Wsp 6.232 12 It is strange that superior persons should not feel that they have some better resistance against cholera than avoiding green peas and salads.
    CbW 6.247 22 Is all we have to do to draw the breath in and blow it out again? Porphyry's definition is better; Life is that which holds matter together.
    CbW 6.253 15 Good is a good doctor but Bad is sometimes a better.
    CbW 6.258 7 Better, certainly, if we could secure the strength and fire which rude, passionate men bring into society, quite clear of their vices.
    CbW 6.259 21 ...there is...no plant that is not fed from manures. We only insist...that the plant grow upward and convert the base into the better nature.
    CbW 6.259 27 ...all great men come out of the middle classes. 'T is better for the head; 't is better for the heart.
    CbW 6.260 21 ...what we ask daily, is to be conventional. ... But the wise gods say, No, we have better things for thee.
    CbW 6.265 11 ...I find the gayest castles in the air that were ever piled, far better for comfort and for use than the dungeons in the air that are daily dug and caverned out by grumbling, discontented people.
    CbW 6.272 7 Our conversation once and again has apprised us that we belong to better circles than we have yet beheld;...
    CbW 6.273 5 ...few writers have said anything better to this point [of friendship] than Hafiz...
    Bty 6.290 3 ...the forms and colors of nature have a new charm for us in our perception that...each is a sign of some better health or more excellent action.
    Bty 6.296 20 Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm, which seems to say, Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a little better kind of man than any I yet behold.
    Ill 6.312 10 [The boy] has no better friend or influence than Scott, Shakspeare, Plutarch and Homer.
    SS 7.12 6 A backwoodsman...told me that when he heard the best-bred young men at the law-school talk together, he reckoned himself a boor; but whenever he...had one to himself alone, then they were the boors and he the better man.
    Civ 7.23 6 ...the multiplication of the arts of peace, which is nothing but a large allowance to each man...to live by his better hand,--fills the State with useful and happy laborers;...
    Civ 7.32 24 ...I see what cubic values America has, and in these a better certificate of civilization than great cities or enormous wealth.
    Art2 7.44 16 Just as much better as is the polished statue of dazzling marble than the clay model, or as much more impressive as is the granite cathedral or pyramid than the ground-plan or profile of them on paper, so much more beauty owe they to Nature than to Art.
    Elo1 7.61 24 The plight of these phlegmatic brains is better than that of those who prematurely boil...
    Elo1 7.74 22 ...whoever can say off currently, sentence by sentence, matter neither better nor worse than what is there [in the country newspaper] printed, will be very impressive to our easily pleased population.
    Elo1 7.76 10 Leaving behind us these pretensions, better or worse, to come a little nearer to the verity,--eloquence is attractive as an example of the magic of personal ascendency...
    DL 7.107 19 Fact is better than fiction...
    DL 7.108 12 ...we are always hovering round this better divination.
    DL 7.116 13 ...this voice of communities and ages, Give us wealth and the good household shall exist, is vicious, and leaves the whole difficulty untouched. It is better, certainly, in this form, Give us your labor, and the household begins.
    DL 7.125 25 ...we hold fast, all our lives long, a faith in a better life...
    DL 7.125 26 ...we hold fast, all our lives long, a faith...in better men...
    DL 7.126 6 ...Certainly this was not the intention of Nature, to produce...so cheap and humble a result. The aspirations in the heart after the good and true teach us better,--nay, the men themselves suggest a better life.
    DL 7.133 11 These are the consolations,--these are the ends to which the household is instituted and the roof-tree stands. If these are sought and in any good degree attained...can the labor of many for one, yield anything better, or half as good"
    Farm 7.140 10 ...for sleep, [the farmer] has cheaper and better and more of it than citizens.
    Farm 7.148 8 In September, when the pears hang heaviest...comes usually a gusty day which...throws down the heaviest fruit in bruised heaps. The planter took the hint of the Sequoias, built a high wall, or--better-- surrounded the orchard with a nursery of birches and evergreens.
    Farm 7.150 10 By drainage we went down to a subsoil we did not know, and have found...that Massachusetts has a basement story...that promises to pay a better rent than all the superstructure.
    Farm 7.150 14 These [drainage] tiles are political economists, confuters of Malthus and Ricardo; they are so many Young Americans announcing a better era,--more bread.
    Farm 7.150 19 [The farmer's tiles] drain the land, make it sweet and friable; have made English Chat Moss a garden, and will now do as much for the Dismal Swamp. But beyond this benefit they are the text of better opinions and better auguries for mankind.
    Farm 7.151 14 The first planter, the savage...takes poor land. The better lands are loaded with timber, which he cannot clear;...
    Farm 7.152 1 Later [the first planter] learns that his planting is better than hunting;...
    WD 7.158 22 ...Leibnitz said of Newton, that if he reckoned all that had been done by mathematicians from the beginning of the world down to Newton, and what had been done by him, his would be the better half...
    WD 7.160 26 ...there is no argument of theism better than the grandeur of ends brought about by paltry means.
    WD 7.164 9 Tantalus begins to think...galvanism no better than it should be.
    WD 7.166 7 What have these arts done for the character, for the worth of mankind? Are men better?
    Boks 7.189 12 In Plato's Gorgias, Socrates says: The shipmaster walks in a modest garb near the sea, after bringing his passengers from Aegina or from Pontus;...certainly knowing that his passengers are the same and in no respect better than when he took them on board.
    Boks 7.189 16 The bookseller might certainly know that his customers are in no respect better for the purchase and consumption of his wares.
    Clbs 7.233 6 It does not help that you find as good or a better man than yourself, if he is not timed and fitted to you.
    Clbs 7.248 14 Plutarch, Xenophon and Plato, who have celebrated each a banquet of their set, have given us next to no data of the viands; and it is to be believed that an indifferent tavern dinner in such society was more relished by the convives than a much better one in worse company.
    Cour 7.254 11 Men admire...the power of better combination and foresight...
    Cour 7.263 9 Use makes a better soldier than the most urgent considerations of duty...
    Cour 7.273 1 The statue, the architecture, were the later and inferior creation of the same [Greek] genius. In view of this moment of history, we recognize a certain prophetic instinct, better than wisdom.
    Suc 7.288 14 The inventor knows there is much more and better where this came from.
    Suc 7.295 9 ...it is sanity to know that, over my talent or knack, and a million times better than any talent, is the central intelligence...
    Suc 7.297 12 ...has [the scholar or writer] never found that there is a better poetry hinted in a boy's whistle of a tune...than in all his literary results?
    OA 7.322 15 We still feel the force...of Archimedes, holding Syracuse against the Romans by his wit, and himself better than all their nation;...
    OA 7.335 7 [John Adams]...is better the next day after having visitors in his chamber from morning to night.
    PI 8.20 21 Better than images is seen through them.
    PI 8.21 27 Poetry must first be good sense, though it is something better.
    PI 8.27 19 William Blake...writes thus: He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.
    PI 8.27 20 William Blake...writes thus: He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.
    PI 8.33 18 Great design belongs to a poem, and is better than any skill of execution...
    PI 8.37 1 [The poet's] wreath and robe is...escape from the gossip and routine of society, and the allowed right and practice of making better.
    PI 8.42 3 Better men saw heavens and earths;...
    PI 8.43 13 Better examples [of poetry] are Shakspeare's Ariel, his Caliban...
    PI 8.48 13 So in our songs and ballads the refrain skilfully used, and deriving some novelty or better sense in each of many verses...
    PI 8.50 10 Thomas Taylor...is really a better man of imagination, a better poet...than any man between Milton and Wordsworth.
    PI 8.50 11 Thomas Taylor...is really...a better poet...than any man between Milton and Wordsworth.
    PI 8.50 12 Thomas Taylor...is really...a better poet, or perhaps I should say a better feeder to a poet, than any man between Milton and Wordsworth.
    PI 8.56 13 Gray avows that he thinks even a bad verse as good a thing or better than the best observation that was ever made on it.
    PI 8.68 13 Better not to be easily pleased.
    SA 8.91 27 It may happen that each hears from the other a better wisdom than any one else will ever hear from either.
    SA 8.93 4 If every one recalled his experiences, he might find the best in the speech of superior women;--which was better than song...
    SA 8.106 26 ...those people, and no others, interest us...who are absorbed, if you please to say so, in their own dream. They only can give the key and leading to better society...
    Elo2 8.111 4 I do not know any kind of history, except the event of a battle, to which people listen with more interest than to any anecdote of eloquence; and the wise think it better than a battle.
    Elo2 8.116 23 ...[the orator] taking no counsel of past things but only of the inspiration of his to-day's feeling, surprises [the people]...with his better knowledge...
    Res 8.137 17 I am benefited by every observation of a victory of man over Nature; by seeing that wisdom is better than strength;...
    Res 8.138 10 A Schopenhauer...inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than sleep,--all the talent in the world cannot save him from being odious.
    Res 8.146 27 ...one man whose eye commands the end in view and the means by which it can be attained, is not only better than ten men or a hundred men, but victor over all mankind who do not see the issue and the means.
    Res 8.150 22 There are better games than billiards and whist.
    Res 8.153 11 ...I think [the mighty law of vegetation] more grateful and health-giving than any news I am likely to find of man in the journals, and better than Washington politics.
    Comc 8.168 18 The pedantry of literature belongs to the same category [as that of religion and science]. In both cases there is a lie, when the mind... learning languages and reading books to the end of a better acquaintance with man, stops in the languages and books;...
    QO 8.182 8 ...the psalms and liturgies of churches, are...of this slow growth,-a fagot of selections gathered through ages, leaving the worse and saving the better...
    QO 8.190 14 Whatever we think and say is wonderfully better for our spirits and trust, in another mouth.
    QO 8.197 2 In hours of high mental activity we sometimes do the book too much honor, reading out of it better things than the author wrote...
    QO 8.199 19 ...does it not look...as if we stood...in a circle of intelligences that reached...back to the first negro, who, with more health or better perception, gave a shriller sound or name for the thing he saw and dealt with?
    PC 8.209 19 ...[the coxcomb] has found...that good sense is now in power, and that resting on a vast constituency of intelligent labor, and, better yet, on perceptions less and less dim of laws the most sublime.
    PC 8.213 16 ...we have not on the instant better men to show than Plutarch' s heroes.
    PC 8.215 23 If [your public] are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better.
    PC 8.234 15 I read the promise of better times and of greater men.
    PPo 8.237 21 ...the essential value [in books] is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts...
    Insp 8.272 10 Rarey can tame a wild horse; but if he could give speed to a dull horse, were not that better?
    Insp 8.277 11 ...all poets have signalized their consciousness of rare moments...when a light, a freedom, a power came to them which lifted them to performances far better than they could reach at other times;...
    Insp 8.279 20 ...when you can use the lightning it is better than cannon.
    Insp 8.296 1 Books of natural science...all the better if written without literary aim or ambition.
    Grts 8.304 18 I am to infer that you keep good company by your better information and manners...
    Grts 8.313 8 Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the haughtiness of humility.
    Imtl 8.329 21 I think all sound minds rest on a certain preliminary conviction, namely, that if it be best that conscious personal life shall continue, it will continue; if not best, then it will not; and we, if we saw the whole, should of course see that it was better so.
    Imtl 8.332 15 ...the impulse which drew these minds to this inquiry [concerning immortality] through so many years was a better affirmative evidence than their failure to find a confirmation was negative.
    Imtl 8.346 1 I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious souls are better believers in the immortality, than we can give grounds for.
    Imtl 8.346 2 I mean that I am a better believer, and all serious souls are better believers in the immortality, than we can give grounds for.
    Dem1 10.14 23 ...this man [Masollam] inquired the reason of [the multitude's] halting. The augur showed him a bird, and told him, If that bird remained where he was, it would be better for them all to remain;...
    Dem1 10.21 20 The best are never demoniacal or magnetic; leave this limbo to the Prince of the power of the air. The lowest angel is better.
    Aris 10.48 2 Every Frenchman would have a career. We English are not any better with our love of making a figure.
    Aris 10.49 19 I think that the community...will be the best measure and the justest judge of the citizen...better than any royal patronage;...
    Aris 10.49 20 I think that the community...will be the best measure and the justest judge of the citizen...better than any premium on race;...
    Aris 10.49 20 I think that the community...will be the best measure and the justest judge of the citizen...better than any statute elevating families to hereditary distinction...
    PerF 10.70 2 ...I find it wholesome and invigorating to enumerate the resources we can command, to look a little into this arsenal, and see...how many arms better than Springfield muskets, we can bring to bear.
    PerF 10.86 22 The divine knowledge has ebbed out of us and we do not know enough to be free. I hope better of the State.
    Chr2 10.115 16 Every exaggeration of [person and text]...inclines the manly reader to lay down the New Testament, to take up the Pagan philosophers. It is not that the Upanishads or the Maxims of Antoninus are better, but that they do not invade his freedom;...
    Edc1 10.127 5 Certain nations, with a better brain...have made such progress as to compare with these [savages] as these compare with the bear and the wolf.
    Edc1 10.147 10 It is better to teach the child arithmetic and Latin grammar than rhetoric or moral philosophy...
    Supl 10.178 7 Universally, the better gold, the worse man.
    SovE 10.184 7 In ignorant ages it was common to vaunt the human superiority by underrating the instinct of other animals; but a better discernment finds that the difference is only of less and more.
    SovE 10.185 21 The finer the sense of justice, the better poet.
    SovE 10.188 19 When we trace from the beginning, that ferocity has uses; only so are the conditions of the then world met, and these monsters are the...diggers, pioneers and fertilizers...making better life possible.
    SovE 10.200 20 Jesus was better than others, because he refused to listen to others and listened at home.
    Prch 10.217 6 In the history of opinion, the pinch of falsehood shows itself first...in insincerity, indifference and abandonment of...the scientific or political or economic institution for other better or worse forms.
    Prch 10.221 18 Unlovely, nay, frightful, is the solitude of the soul which is without God in the world. To wander all day in the sunlight among the tribes of animals, unrelated to anything better;...
    MoL 10.253 5 Does any one doubt that a good general is better than a park of artillery?
    Schr 10.267 20 The action of these [busy] men I cannot respect, for they do not respect it themselves. They were better and more respectable abed and asleep.
    Schr 10.280 27 The objection of men of the world to what they call the morbid intellectual tendency in our young men at present, is...that the idealistic views unfit their children for business in their sense, and do not qualify them for any complete life of a better kind.
    Plu 10.300 3 ...though Plutarch is as plain-spoken [as Montaigne], his moral sentiment is always pure. What better praise has any writer received than he whom Montaigne finds frank in giving things, not words...
    Plu 10.301 20 I find [Plutarch] a better teacher of rhetoric than any modern.
    Plu 10.314 6 [Plutarch] believes that the souls of infants pass immediately into a better and more divine state.
    LLNE 10.347 10 [Robert Owen] was the better Christian in his controversy with Christians...
    LLNE 10.353 11 ...it would be better to say, Let us be lovers and servants of that which is just...
    LLNE 10.360 16 [Brook Farm] was a noble and generous movement in the projectors, to try an experiment of better living.
    CSC 10.376 7 These men and women [at the Chardon Street Convention] were in search of something better and more satisfying than a vote or a definition...
    EzRy 10.391 23 [Ezra Ripley] showed even in his fireside discourse traits of that pertinency and judgment...which, under a better discipline, might have ripened into a Bentley or a Porson.
    MMEm 10.414 23 ...as I [Mary Moody Emerson] walked out this afternoon, so sad was wearied Nature that I felt her whisper to me, Even these leaves you use to think my better emblem have lost their charm on me too...
    MMEm 10.420 6 Better anything than dishonest dependence...
    MMEm 10.420 23 The difficulty of getting places of low board for a lady, is obvious. And, at moments, I [Mary Moody Emerson] am tired out. Yet how independent, how better than to hang on friends!
    MMEm 10.422 22 To her nephew Charles [Mary Moody Emerson writes]: War; what do I think of it? Why in your ear I think it so much better than oppression that if it were ravaging the whole geography of despotism it would be an omen of high and glorious import.
    MMEm 10.423 2 Channing paints [war's] miseries, but does he know those of a worse war...the cruel oppression of the poor by the rich, which corrupts old worlds? How much better, more honest, are storming and conflagration of towns!
    MMEm 10.426 9 Sadness is better than walking talking acting somnambulism.
    MMEm 10.430 1 If one could choose, and without crime be gibbeted,- were it not altogether better than the long drooping away by age without mentality or devotion?
    Thor 10.451 18 [Thoreau's] father was a manufacturer of lead-pencils, and Henry applied himself for a time to this craft, believing he could make a better pencil than was then in use.
    Thor 10.457 7 I said [to Thoreau]...who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment, which delights everybody? Henry objected, of course, and vaunted the better lectures which reached only a few persons.
    Thor 10.473 8 The farmers who employed [Thoreau] as a surveyor soon discovered...his knowledge of their lands...which enabled him to tell every farmer more than he knew before of his own farm; so that he began to feel a little as if Mr. Thoreau had better rights in his land than he.
    Thor 10.475 23 ...[Thoreau] have not the poetic temperament, he never lacks the causal thought, showing that his genius was better than his talent.
    Thor 10.476 26 [Thoreau's] classic poem on Smoke suggests Simonides, but is better than any poem of Simonides.
    Carl 10.494 10 A natural defender of anything...[Carlyle] respects; and the nobler this object, of course, the better.
    LS 11.10 23 ...when the Jews on that occasion [at Capernaum] complained that they did not comprehend what [Jesus] meant, he added for their better understanding...that we might not think his body was to be actually eaten, that he only meant we should live by his commandment.
    LS 11.16 19 But it is said: Admit that the rite [the Lord's Supper] was not designed to be perpetual. What harm doth it? Here it stands...the undoubted occasion of much good; is it not better it should remain?
    HDC 11.35 27 ...the pilgrims had the preparation of an armed mind, better than any hardihood of body.
    HDC 11.55 19 New plantations and better land had been opened, far and near;...
    HDC 11.56 15 We have among us [says Peter Bulkeley] excess and...pride in apparel, daintiness in diet, and that in those who, in times past, would have been satisfied with bread. This is the sin of the lowest of the people. Better evidence could not be desired of the rapid growth of the settlement [Concord].
    HDC 11.67 18 In 1764, [George] Whitfield preached again at Concord, on Sunday afternoon; Mr. [Daniel] Bliss preached in the morning, and the Concord people thought their minister gave them the better sermon of the two.
    HDC 11.77 3 To you [veterans of the battle of Concord] belongs a better badge than stars and ribbons.
    EWI 11.99 5 We are met to exchange congratulations on the anniversary of an event singular in the history of civilization; a day of reason;...of that which makes us better than a flock of birds and beasts;...
    EWI 11.136 15 It is better to suffer every evil, than to consent to any.
    War 11.160 19 The sublime question has startled one and another happy soul in different quarters of the globe,-Cannot love be, as well as hate? Would not love answer the same end, or even a better?
    War 11.174 4 I regard no longer those names that so tingled in my ear. [The man of principle] is a baron of a better nobility and a stouter stomach.
    War 11.174 10 If peace is sought to be defended or preserved for the safety of the luxurious and the timid, it is a sham, and the peace will be base. War is better...
    FSLN 11.223 20 ...it was the misfortune of his country that with this large understanding [Webster] had not what is better than intellect...
    FSLN 11.226 17 ...a ghastly result of all those years of experience in affairs, this, that there was nothing better for the foremost American man [Webster] to tell his countrymen than that Slavery was now at that strength that they must beat down their conscience and become kidnappers for it.
    FSLN 11.241 23 It is a potent support and ally to a brave man standing single, or with a few, for the right...to know that better men in other parts of the country appreciate the service...
    AsSu 11.248 17 If...Massachusetts could send to the Senate a better man than Mr. Sumner, his death would be only so much the more quick and certain.
    JBB 11.268 22 [John Brown] believes in two articles,-two instruments, shall I say?-the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence; and he used this expression in conversation here concerning them, Better that a whole generation of men, women and children should pass away by a violent death than that one word of either should be violated in this country.
    JBS 11.278 10 ...in Pennsylvania...[John Brown] fell in with a boy...whom he looked upon as his superior. This boy was a slave;...he saw that this boy had nothing better to look forward to in life...
    TPar 11.291 11 I can readily forgive [silence], only not the other, the false tongue which makes the worse appear the better cause.
    ACiv 11.298 17 In every house...the children ask the serious father,-What is the news of the war to-day, and when will there be better times?
    ACiv 11.299 21 There are periods, said Niebuhr, when something much better than happiness and security of life is attainable.
    ACiv 11.303 3 Better the war should more dangerously threaten us...and so...exasperate our nationality.
    ACiv 11.310 7 ...ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.
    ACiv 11.311 4 More and better than the President has spoken shall, perhaps, the effect of this message [proposal for gradual abolition] be...
    ACiv 11.311 6 More and better than the President has spoken shall, perhaps, the effect of this message [proposal for gradual abolition] be,- but...not more or better than he hoped in his heart...
    EPro 11.316 10 These measures [for liberty]...are received into a sympathy so deep as to apprise us that mankind are greater and better than we know.
    EPro 11.318 15 Better is virtue in the sovereign than plenty in the season, say the Chinese.
    SMC 11.363 5 I [George Prescott] told [the West Point officer] I had a good many young men in my company whose mothers asked me to look after them, and I should do so, and not allow them to hear such language, especially from an officer, whose duty it was to set them a better example.
    SMC 11.363 13 [George Prescott's] next point is to keep [his men] cheerful. 'T is better than medicine.
    EdAd 11.392 2 We have a better opinion of the economy of Nature than to fear that those varying phases which humanity presents ever leave out any of the grand springs of human action.
    Wom 11.408 18 ...[women's] fine organization, their taste and love of details, makes the knowledge they give better in their hands.
    Wom 11.408 19 ...there is an art which is better than painting, poetry, music, or architecture...namely, Conversation.
    Wom 11.408 20 ...there is an art...better than botany, geology, or any science; namely, Conversation.
    Wom 11.426 3 The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings. The melioration of manners brought their melioration of course. It could not be otherwise, and hence the new desire of better laws.
    RBur 11.439 22 ...We are here to hold our parliament [the Burns Festival] with love and poesy, as men were wont to do in the Middle Ages. Those famous parliaments might or might not have had more stateliness and better singers than we...but they could not have better reason.
    RBur 11.439 24 ...We are here to hold our parliament [the Burns Festival] with love and poesy, as men were wont to do in the Middle Ages. Those famous parliaments might or might not have had more stateliness and better singers than we...but they could not have better reason.
    RBur 11.442 20 ...[Burns] had that secret of genius to draw from the bottom of society the strength of its speech, and astonish the ears of the polite with these artless words, better than art...
    Scot 11.467 12 What an ornament and safeguard is humor! Far better than wit for a poet and writer.
    FRO2 11.486 10 ...there is a force always at work to make the best better and the worst good.
    FRO2 11.489 8 It is the praise of our New Testament...that no better lesson has been taught or incarnated.
    CPL 11.503 14 ...what omniscience has music! so absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow reached. Yet to a scholar the book is as good or better.
    FRep 11.511 10 The sailors sail by chronometers that do not lose two or three seconds in a year, ever since Newton explained to Parliament that the way to improve navigation was to get good watches, and to offer public premiums for a better time-keeper than any then in use.
    FRep 11.512 14 The wine-merchant has his analyst and taster, the more exquisite the better.
    FRep 11.513 18 Our sleepy civilization, ever since Roger Bacon and Monk Schwartz invented gunpowder, has built its whole art of war...on that one compound...and reckons Greeks and Romans and Middle Ages little better than Indians and bow-and-arrow times.
    FRep 11.515 18 When the cannon is aimed by ideas...when men die for what they live for...then gods join in the combat; then poets are born, and the better code of laws at last records the victory.
    FRep 11.516 22 The mind is always better the more it is used...
    FRep 11.527 6 ...here that same great body [of the people] has arrived at a sloven plenty...the man...disposed to give his children a better education than he received.
    FRep 11.533 13 We buy much of Europe that does not make us better men;...
    FRep 11.543 2 Happily we are under better guidance than of statesmen.
    FRep 11.543 22 Our helm is given up to a better guidance than our own;...
    PLT 12.6 18 My belief in the use of a course of philosophy is...that [the student] shall see in [the mind] the source of all traditions, and shall see each one of them as better or worse statement of its revelations;...
    PLT 12.8 18 Was it better when we came to the philosophers, who found everybody wrong;...
    PLT 12.14 14 There is something surgical in metaphysics as we treat it. Were not an ode a better form?
    PLT 12.15 26 What but thought...makes us better than cow or cat?
    PLT 12.48 5 Somewhat is to come to the light, and one [talent] was created to fetch it,-a vessel of honor or of dishonor. 'T is of instant use in the economy of the Cosmos, and the more armed and biassed for the work the better.
    PLT 12.54 1 The more the peculiarities are pressed, the better the result.
    PLT 12.59 9 We are passing into new heavens...in thought by our better knowledge.
    PLT 12.62 16 ...Aristotle declares that the origin of reason is not reason, but something better.
    PLT 12.63 14 ...[Socrates] utilized his humanity chiefly as a better eye-glass to penetrate the vapors that baffled the vision of other men.
    II 12.75 20 ...your nature and genius will certainly give your vigilance the slip...and will educate the children by the inevitable infusions of its quality. You will do as you can. Why then cumber yourself about it, and make believe be better than you are?
    Mem 12.91 23 The Past has a new value every moment to the active mind, through the incessant purification and better method of its memory.
    Mem 12.98 7 [The orator] has an old story, an odd circumstance, that illustrates the point he is now proving, and is better than an argument.
    Mem 12.99 23 The mind has a better secret in generalization than merely adding units to its list of facts.
    CInt 12.115 25 [The college] is essentially the most radiating and public of agencies, like, but better than, the light-house...
    CInt 12.116 8 If the colleges were better...we should all rush to their gates;...
    CInt 12.121 25 ...in the class called intellectual the men are no better than the uninstructed.
    CInt 12.125 20 What right have you to be better than your neighbor?
    CInt 12.130 13 ...know that, next to being [intellect's] minister, like Aristotle, and perhaps better than that, is the profound reception and sympathy, without ambition, which secularizes and trades it.
    CL 12.139 9 ...if...we would, manlike, see what grows, or might grow, in Massachusetts...and...ponder the moral secrets which, in her solitudes, Nature has to whisper to us, we were better patriots and happier men.
    CL 12.142 17 Good observers have the manners of trees and animals...and if they add words, 't is only when words are better than silence.
    CW 12.170 12 The gentle deities/ Showed me the love of color and of sounds,/ The innumerable tenements of beauty,/ the miracle of generative force,/ Far-reaching concords of astronomy/ Felt in the plants and in the punctual birds;/ Better, the linked purpose of the whole./
    CW 12.176 15 ...it is much better to learn the elements of geology, of botany...by word of mouth from a companion than dully from a book.
    Bost 12.191 2 In our beautiful [Boston] bay...a good boatman can...wonder that Governor Carver had not better eyes than to stop on the Plymouth Sands.
    Bost 12.198 1 I do not look to find in England better manners than the best manners here [in New England].
    MAng1 12.219 26 ...to the artist it belongs by a better knowledge of anatomy, and, within anatomy, of life and thought, to acquire the power of true drawing.
    MAng1 12.221 26 There needs no better proof of our instinctive feeling of the immense expression of which the human figure is capable than the uniform tendency which the religion of every country has betrayed towards Anthropomorphism...
    MAng1 12.238 2 Vasari observed that [Michelangelo] did not use wax candles, but a better sort made of the tallow of goats.
    Milt1 12.259 20 ...probably no traveller ever entered that country of history [Italy] with better right to its hospitality [than Milton]...
    Milt1 12.272 6 [Milton] maintained the doctrine of domestic liberty, or the liberty of divorce, on the ground that unfit disposition of mind was a better reason for the act of divorce than infirmity of body...
    Milt1 12.278 5 ...according to Lord Bacon's definition of poetry...Poetry... seeks...to create an ideal world better than the world of experience.
    Milt1 12.279 3 ...are we not the better; are not all men fortified by the remembrance of the bravery...of this man [Milton]...
    ACri 12.284 15 ...the learned depart from established forms of speech, in hope of finding or making better;...
    ACri 12.286 21 Look at this forlorn caravan of travellers who wander over Europe dumb...condemned to the company of a courier and of the padrone when they cannot take refuge in the society of countrymen. A well-chosen series of stereoscopic views would have served a better purpose...
    ACri 12.288 3 The short Saxon words with which the people help themselves are better than Latin.
    ACri 12.288 14 ...some men swear with genius. I knew a poet in whose talent Nature carried this freak so far that his only graceful verses were pretty blasphemies. The better the worse, you will say;...
    ACri 12.290 10 The next virtue of rhetoric is compression, the science of omitting, which makes good the old verse of Hesiod, Fools, they did not know that half was better than the whole.
    ACri 12.291 16 Never say, I beg not to be misunderstood. It is only graceful in the case when you are afraid that what is called a better meaning will be taken, and you wish to insist on a worse;...
    ACri 12.291 19 ...a man has a right to pass...for a worse man than he is, but not for a better.
    PD 12.307 3 The tongue is prone to lose the way;/ Not so the pen, for in a letter/ We have not better things to say,/ But surely say them better./
    MLit 12.309 5 In our fidelity to the higher truth we need not disown our debt, in our actual state of culture, in the twilights of experience, to these rude helpers. They keep alive the memory and the hope of a better day.
    MLit 12.311 4 ...[the library of the Present Age] vents...books...which leave no man where they found him, but make him better or worse;...
    WSL 12.338 5 Add to this proud blindness [of John Bull] the better quality of great downrightness in speaking the truth...
    WSL 12.339 3 ...[Landor] delights to throw a clod of dirt on the table, and cry, Gentlemen, there is a better man than all of you.
    WSL 12.343 12 Do not brag of your actions, as if they were better than Homer's verses or Raphael's pictures.
    WSL 12.343 20 Whoever writes for the love of truth and beauty...belongs to this sacred class; and among these, few men of the present age have a better claim to be numbered than Mr. Landor.
    AgMs 12.360 10 The First Report, [Edmund Hosmer] said, is better than the last...
    AgMs 12.361 11 ...our [New England] people...will remove from town to town as...a better farm is to be had...
    EurB 12.370 17 Otto-of-roses is good, but wild air is better.
    PPr 12.382 16 A man's diet should be what is simplest and readiest to be had, because it is so private a good. His house should be better, because that is for the use of hundreds, perhaps of thousands...
    PPr 12.382 24 [A man's] manners,-let them be hospitable and civilizing, so that no Phidias or Raphael shall have taught anything better in canvas or stone;...
    Let 12.394 9 Excellent reasons [the correspondents] have shown why something better should be tried.
    Let 12.396 8 It is not for nothing, we assure ourselves, that our people are busied with these projects of a better social state...
    Let 12.401 24 ...where the divine nature and the artist is crushed...every other planet is better than the earth.
    Let 12.402 24 It may easily happen...that the times must be worse before they are better.
    Trag 12.408 15 After reason and faith have introduced a better public and private tradition, the tragic element is somewhat circumscribed.

better, adv. (145)

    Nat 1.60 26 [The soul]...is a doer, only that it may the better watch.
    AmS 1.82 22 It is one of those fables which out of an unknown antiquity convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods...divided Man into men...just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.
    AmS 1.89 27 I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit...
    AmS 1.99 18 Those...who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of [the great soul's] constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be measured by any public and designed display.
    MR 1.235 20 ...I should not be pained at a change which threatened a loss of some of the luxuries or conveniences of society, if it proceeded from a preference of the agricultural life out of the belief that our primary duties as men could be better discharged in that calling.
    MR 1.241 22 ...where there is a fine organization, apt for poetry and philosophy, that individual...is better taught by a moderate and dainty exercise...than by the downright drudgery of the farmer and the smith.
    LT 1.274 6 [The wealthy man] entertains [the divine]...lodges him; his religion comes home at night, prays, is...sumptuously laid to sleep; rises...is better breakfasted than he whose morning appetite would have gladly fed on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem...
    LT 1.277 23 I think the work of the reformer as innocent as other work that is done around him; but when I have seen it near, I do not like it better.
    Con 1.309 10 I cannot then spare you the whole world. I love you better.
    Tran 1.348 15 ...genius is the power to labor better and more availably.
    Tran 1.353 10 That is to be done which [the Transcendentalist] has not skill to do, or to be said which others can say better...
    Tran 1.353 15 Much of our reading, much of our labor, seems mere waiting; it was not that we were born for. Any other could do it as well or better.
    YA 1.379 7 We design it thus and thus; it turns out otherwise and far better.
    Hist 2.29 4 The fact teaches [the child]...how the Pyramids were built, better than the discovery by Champollion of the names of all the workmen and the cost of every tile.
    SR 2.53 26 ...you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.
    SR 2.71 20 I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
    Comp 2.113 2 [The borrower] may soon come to see that he had better have broken his own bones than to have ridden in his neighbor's coach...
    SL 2.133 23 The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues the better we like him.
    SL 2.135 20 [Nature] does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars.
    SL 2.140 1 If we would not be mar-plots with our miserable interferences, the work...of men would go on far better than now...
    SL 2.157 22 If a man know that he can do any thing,--that he can do it better than any one else,--he has a pledge of the acknowledgement of that fact by all persons.
    Fdsp 2.192 22 We talk better [with the commended stranger] than we are wont.
    Fdsp 2.208 23 Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.
    OS 2.278 16 We know better than we do.
    Cir 2.315 3 ...it behooves each to see, when he sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be prudent still;...
    Art1 2.356 25 When [dancing] has educated the frame...to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten;...
    Exp 3.83 4 I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture.
    Mrs1 3.138 24 I could better eat with one who did not respect the truth or the laws than with a sloven and unpresentable person.
    Mrs1 3.150 12 Certainly let [woman] be as much better placed in the laws and in social forms as the most zealous reformer can ask...
    Pol1 3.202 24 ...if question arise whether additional officers or watch-towers should be provided, must not Laban and Isaac, and those who must sell part of their herds to buy protection for the rest, judge better of this, and with more right, than Jacob, who...eats their bread and not his own?
    Pol1 3.207 23 Democracy is better for us, because the religious sentiment of the present time accords better with it.
    NR 3.237 20 [Nature] loves better a wheelwright who dreams all night of wheels...
    UGM 4.13 10 We must not be sacks and stomachs. To ascend one step,-- we are better served through our sympathy.
    UGM 4.15 1 There is a power in love to divine another's destiny better than that other can...
    PPh 4.65 23 ...in the Republic [Plato says],--By each of these disciplines a certain organ of the soul is both purified and reanimated...an organ better worth saving than ten thousand eyes...
    ShP 4.212 4 For executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can imagine it better.
    NMW 4.247 26 ...it is at all times the belief of society that the world is used up. But Bonaparte knew better than society;...
    NMW 4.247 27 ...Bonaparte knew better than society; and moreover knew that he knew better.
    NMW 4.247 27 I think all men know better than they do;...
    NMW 4.251 3 Believe me, [Bonaparte] said...we had better leave off all these remedies...
    ET1 5.16 13 ...[Carlyle] liked Nero's death, Qualis artifex pereo! better than most history.
    ET4 5.71 22 Their young boiling clerks and lusty collegians [in England] like the company of horses better than the company of professors.
    ET4 5.72 27 ...[the English] boast that they understand horses better than any other people in the world...
    ET4 5.73 4 William the Conqueror being, says Camden, better affected to beasts than to men, imposed heavy fines and punishments on those that should meddle with his game.
    ET5 5.97 17 The pauper [in England] lives better than the free laborer, the thief better than the pauper...
    ET5 5.97 18 The pauper [in England] lives better than the free laborer...and the transported felon better than the one under imprisonment.
    ET8 5.136 7 [The English] like the sayers of No, better than the sayers of Yes.
    ET10 5.155 3 ...Mr. Wortley said, though, in the higher ranks, to cultivate family affections was a good thing, it was not so among the lower orders. Better take [the children] away from those who might deprave them.
    ET11 5.189 13 Against the cry of the old tenantry and the sympathetic cry of the English press, the [English nobility] have rooted out and planted anew, and now six millions of people live, and live better, on the same land that fed three millions.
    ET12 5.211 14 I should readily concede these [physical] advantages...if I did not find also that [Oxford men] read better than we, and write better.
    ET12 5.211 15 I should readily concede these [physical] advantages...if I did not find also that [Oxford men] read better than we, and write better.
    ET13 5.215 1 [Prudent men say] Better find some niche or crevice in this mountain of stone which religious ages have quarried and carved...than attempt anything ridiculously and dangerously above your strength, like removing it.
    ET14 5.246 2 ...[Hallam] lifts himself to own better than almost any the greatness of Shakspeare...
    ET14 5.246 4 ...better than Johnson [Hallam] appreciates Milton.
    ET15 5.270 10 [The London Times's] editors know better than to defend Russia, or Austria...on abstract grounds.
    ET17 5.291 14 ...what is nowhere better found than in England, a cultivated person fitly surrounded by a happy home, with Honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,/ is of all institutions the best.
    ET19 5.310 20 ...these things are not for me to say; these compliments, though true, would better come from one who felt and understood these merits more.
    ET19 5.313 15 I see [England]...with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day...
    F 6.42 5 ...a man likes better to be complimented on his position...than on his merits.
    Pow 6.63 22 The senators who dissented from Mr. Polk's Mexican war were not those who knew better...
    Pow 6.78 1 John Kemble said that the worst provincial company of actors would go through a play better than the best amateur company.
    Pow 6.78 26 Cannot one converse better on a topic on which he has experience, than on one which is new?
    CbW 6.265 23 A man should make life and nature happier to us, or he had better never been born.
    CbW 6.270 21 How to live with unfit companions?--for with such, life is for the most part spent; and experience teaches little better than our earliest instinct of self-defence...
    Ill 6.312 23 [the dreariest alderman] wishes the bow and compliment of some leader in the state or in society; weighs what he says; perhaps he never comes nearer to him for that, but dies at last better contented for this amusement of his eyes and his fancy.
    SS 7.3 17 ...[my new friend's] evident earnestness engaged my attention, and in the weeks that followed we became better acquainted.
    Civ 7.25 11 The skill that pervades complex details;...the very prison compelled to maintain itself...and better still, made a reform school...these are examples of that tendency to combine antagonisms...which is the index of high civilization.
    Elo1 7.77 19 The newspapers, every week, report the adventures of some impudent swindler, who, by steadiness of carriage, duped those who should have known better.
    DL 7.126 5 ...Certainly this was not the intention of Nature, to produce...so cheap and humble a result. The aspirations in the heart after the good and true teach us better...
    Farm 7.149 4 The smaller [the farmer's] garden, the better he can feed it...
    WD 7.163 4 ...we have a pretty artillery of tools now in our social arrangements: we...travel, grind, weave, forge, plant, till and excavate better [than our fathers did].
    Clbs 7.239 18 Hyde, Earl of Rochester, asked Lord-Keeper Guilford, Do you not think I could understand any business in England in a month? Yes, my lord, replied the other, but I think you would understand it better in two months.
    Clbs 7.248 26 ...it was when things went prosperously, and the company was full of honor, at the banquet of the Cid, that the guests all...agreed in one thing,--that they had not eaten better for three years.
    Cour 7.267 2 In every school there are certain fighting boys;...in every town, bravoes and bullies, better or worse dressed...
    Cour 7.274 23 Sacred courage indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world;...
    Suc 7.290 3 ...Nature utilizes misers, fanatics, show-men, egotists, to accomplish her ends; but we must not think better of the foible for that.
    Suc 7.298 26 The owner of the wood-lot finds only a number of discolored trees, and says...they are n't growing any better;...
    Suc 7.305 6 ...if [Sylvina] says [Odoacer] was defeated, why he had better a great deal have been defeated than give her a moment's annoy.
    PI 8.35 26 On the stage, the farce is commonly far better given than the tragedy...
    PI 8.36 12 ...there is entertainment and room for talent in the artist's selection of ancient or remote subjects; as when the poet goes to India, or to Rome, or to Persia, for his fable. But I believe nobody knows better than he that herein he consults his ease rather than his strength or his desire.
    PI 8.46 5 The universality of this taste [for rhyme] is proved by our habit of casting our facts into rhyme to remember them better...
    PI 8.46 13 Sailors can work better for their yo-heave-o.
    PI 8.46 14 Soldiers can march better and fight better for the drum and trumpet.
    PI 8.46 15 Soldiers can march better and fight better for the drum and trumpet.
    PI 8.68 17 The poet should rejoice...if he has so moved us as...to open the eye of the intellect to see farther and better.
    SA 8.85 8 Wait till your affairs go better...
    Elo2 8.125 6 You say, If [the man in the street] could only express himself; but he does already, better than any one can for him...
    QO 8.184 12 ...[the Earl of Strafford] drew all that ran in the author more strictly, and might better judge of his own wants to supply them.
    QO 8.189 6 In literature, quotation is good only when the writer whom I follow goes my way, being better mounted than I, gives me a cast, as we say;...
    QO 8.189 8 In literature, quotation is good only when the writer whom I follow goes my way, being better mounted than I, gives me a cast, as we say; but if I like the gay equipage so well as to go out of my road, I had better have gone afoot.
    QO 8.196 15 ...many men can write better under a mask than for themselves;...
    QO 8.197 23 ...James Hogg...is but a third-rate author, owing his fame to his effigy colossalized through the lens of John Wilson,-who, again, writes better under the domino of Christopher North than in his proper clothes.
    PC 8.217 19 If a man know the laws of Nature better than other men, his nation cannot spare him;...
    PC 8.217 24 If [a man] can converse better than any other, he rules the minds of men...
    PPo 8.251 10 In general what is more tedious than dedications or panegyrics addressed to grandees? Yet in the Divan you would not skip them, since [Hafiz's] muse seldom supports him better...
    Insp 8.293 12 Homer said, When two come together, one apprehends before the other; but it is because one thought well that the other thinks better...
    Grts 8.319 4 These may serve as local examples [of real heroes] to indicate a magnetism which is probably known better and finer to each scholar in the little Olympus of his own favorites...
    Imtl 8.340 10 Salt is a good preserver; cold is: but a truth cures the taint of mortality better...
    Aris 10.51 4 ...if [Will] is not in you, you had better not put yourself in places where not to have it is to be a public enemy.
    Aris 10.57 13 It was objected to Gustavus that he did not better distinguish between the duties of a carabine and a general...
    PerF 10.87 8 If I have not my own respect, I...had better creep into my grave.
    PerF 10.87 11 I admire the sentiment of Thoreau, who said, Nothing is so much to be feared as fear; God himself likes atheism better.
    Chr2 10.100 2 Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.
    Edc1 10.143 7 Let [the youth]...read Tom Brown at Oxford,-better yet, read Hodson's Life...
    LLNE 10.333 14 [Everett] abounded...even in a sort of defying experiment of his own wit and skill in giving an oracular weight to Hebrew or Rabbinical words;-feats which no man could better accomplish...
    EzRy 10.384 8 Perhaps I cannot better illustrate this tendency [to believe in a particular providence] than by citing a record from the diary of the father of [Ezra Ripley's] predecessor...
    MMEm 10.425 23 ...the bare bones of this poor embryo earth may give the idea of the Infinite far, far better than when dignified with arts and industry...
    SlHr 10.445 1 [Samuel Hoar's] ability lay in the clear apprehension and the powerful statement of the material points of his case. He soon possessed it, and he never possessed it better...
    Thor 10.455 23 In his travels, [Thoreau] used the railroad only to get over so much country as was unimportant to the present purpose, walking hundreds of miles...buying a lodging in farmers' and fishermen's houses... because there he could better find the men and the information he wanted.
    Thor 10.461 20 [Thoreau] could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes.
    Thor 10.463 12 ...Thoreau thought all diets a very small matter, saying that the man who shoots the buffalo lives better than the man who boards at the Graham House.
    Thor 10.471 18 ...none knew better than [Thoreau] that it is not the fact that imports...
    Thor 10.478 14 [Thoreau] thought that without religion or devotion of some kind nothing great was ever accomplished: and he thought that the bigoted sectarian had better bear this in mind.
    EWI 11.100 20 ...[the opponent of slavery] feels that none but a stupid or a malignant person can hesitate on a view of the facts. Under such an impulse...I had almost said, Creep into your grave, the universe has no need of you! But I have thought better: let him not go.
    EWI 11.103 16 Very sad was the negro tradition, that the Great Spirit, in the beginning offered the black man, whom he loved better than the buckra, or white, his choice of two boxes...
    EWI 11.135 2 ...government exists to defend the weak and the poor and the injured party; the rich and the strong can better take care of themselves.
    JBB 11.272 11 If judges cannot find law enough to maintain the sovereignty of the state...it is idle to compliment them as learned and venerable. What avails their learning or veneration? At a pinch, they are no more use than idiots. After the mischance they wring their hands, but they had better never have been born.
    JBB 11.273 4 ...I am detaining the meeting on matters which others understand better.
    JBS 11.277 6 ...the best orators who have added their praise to his fame... have one rival who comes off a little better, and that is JOHN BROWN.
    TPar 11.289 14 One fault [Theodore Parker] had, he...sometimes vexed [his friends] with the importunity of his good opinion, whilst they knew better the ebb which follows unfounded praise.
    Wom 11.410 23 ...man invents and adorns all he does with delays and degrees, paints it all over with forms, to please himself better;...
    Wom 11.411 4 ...how should we better measure the gulf between the best intercourse of men in old Athens, in London, or in our American capitals,- between this and the hedgehog existence of diggers of worms, and the eaters of clay and offal,-than by signalizing just this department of taste or comeliness?
    Wom 11.412 6 The worm its golden woof presents./ Whatever runs, flies, dives or delves/ All doff for [woman] their ornaments,/ Which suit her better than themselves./
    CPL 11.500 12 Henry Thoreau we all remember as a man...known to our farmers as...better acquainted with their forests and meadows and trees than themselves...
    PLT 12.34 6 Each man has a feeling that what is done anywhere is done by the same wit as his. All men are his representatives, and he is glad to see that his wit can work at this or that problem as it ought to be done, and better than he could do it.
    PLT 12.51 12 The horse goes better with blinders...
    II 12.74 11 When a young man asked old Goethe about Faust, he replied, What can I know of this? I ought rather to ask you, who are young, and can enter much better into that feeling.
    Mem 12.91 20 ...a piece of news I hear, has a value at this moment exactly proportioned to my skill to deal with it. To-morrow, when I know more, I recall that piece of knowledge, and use it better.
    Mem 12.92 1 Some fact that had a childish significance to your childhood and was a type in the nursery, when riper intelligence recalls it means more and serves you better as an illustration;...
    Mem 12.98 10 The more [the orator] is heated, the wider he sees; he seems to remember all he ever knew; thus certifying us that he is in the habit of seeing better than other people;...
    Mem 12.101 20 Shall we not on higher stages of being remember and understand our early history better?
    CInt 12.122 19 [A man] looks at all men as his representatives, and is glad to see that his wit can work at that problem as it ought to be done, and better than he could do it;...
    CL 12.166 18 ...the imagination...does not impart its secret to inquisitive persons. Sometimes a parlor in which fine persons are found...answers our purpose still better.
    Bost 12.209 25 As long as [Boston] cleaves to her liberty, her education and to her spiritual faith as the foundation of [material accumulations], she will teach the teachers and rule the rulers of America. Her mechanics, her farmers will toil better;...
    MAng1 12.239 19 ...it is said that when [Michelangelo] left Florence to go to Rome...he turned his horse's head on the last hill from which the noble dome of the cathedral (built by Brunelleschi) was visible, and said, Like you, I will not build; better than you I cannot.
    Milt1 12.254 15 Better than any other [Milton] has discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of posterity...
    ACri 12.294 22 Shakespeare's] loom is better toothed, cranked and pedalled than other people's...
    PD 12.307 4 The tongue is prone to lose the way;/ Not so the pen, for in a letter/ We have not better things to say,/ But surely say them better./
    MLit 12.326 4 The fair hearers [says Wieland] were enthusiastic at the nature in this piece [Goethe's journal]; I liked the sly art in the composition...still better.
    MLit 12.332 14 [Goethe] has written better than other poets only as his talent was subtler...
    MLit 12.332 23 ...they have served [humanity] better, who assured it out of the innocent hope in their hearts that a Physician will come, than this majestic Artist [Goethe]...
    AgMs 12.360 21 [Farmers] could not afford to follow such advice as is given here [in the Agricultural Survey]; they have sterner teachers; their own business teaches them better.
    AgMs 12.361 26 ...necessity finds out when to go to Brighton, and when to feed in the stall, better than Mr. [Henry] Colman can tell us.
    Let 12.395 14 Another objection [to Communities] seems to have occurred to a subtle but ardent advocate. Is it, he writes, a too great wilfulness and intermeddling with life,-which is better accepted than calculated?
    Let 12.396 5 The more discontent, the better we like it.

better, n. (7)

    SR 2.46 14 There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction...that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion;...
    Cir 2.318 27 ...that which is made instructs how to make a better.
    ET13 5.222 5 Wellington esteems a saint only as far as he can be an army chaplain: Mr. Briscoll, by his admirable conduct and good sense, got the better of Methodism, which had appeared among the soldiers and once among the officers.
    F 6.11 18 The more of these drones perish, the better for the hive.
    War 11.160 12 The eternal germination of the better has unfolded new powers...
    War 11.167 21 ...chiefly it is said,-Either accept this principle [of peace] for better, for worse, carry it out to the end, and meet its absurd consequences; or else...give up the principle...
    CL 12.143 18 ...De Quincey prefixes to this description of Wordsworth a little piece of advice which I wonder has not attracted more attention. ...if young ladies were aware of the magical transformations which can be wrought in the depth and sweetness of the eye by a few weeks' exercise, I fancy we should see their habits in this point altered greatly for the better.

Better, n. (5)

    LT 1.270 24 ...each of these aspirations and attempts of the people for the Better is magnified by the natural exaggeration of its advocates...
    F 6.35 25 ...before [every individual] opens liberty,-the Better, the Best.
    Ctr 6.166 14 ...if one shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of nature to mount and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not overcome and convert...
    Imtl 8.339 13 Every really able man...considers his work...as far short of what it should be. What is this Better, this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of his Creator?
    FSLN 11.232 1 In vulgar politics the Whig goes...for the old necessities,- the Musts. The reformer goes for the Better, for the ideal good...

better, v. (3)

    Bhr 6.170 9 Genius invents fine manners, which the baron and the baroness copy very fast, and by the advantage of a palace, better the instruction.
    Plu 10.298 12 Plutarch was...a self-respecting, amiable man, who knew how to better a good education by travels...
    AgMs 12.361 10 ...our [New England] people are...always alert to better themselves....

better-directed, adj. (1)

    Civ 7.32 14 ...when I...see...man acting on man by weight of opinion, of longer or better-directed industry;...I see what cubic values America has...

better-garnished, adj. (1)

    Nat2 3.175 14 That [the rich] have some high-fenced grove which they call a park; that they live in larger and better-garnished saloons than he has visited...these make the groundwork from which [the poor young poet] has delineated estates of romance...

betters, v. (1)

    ShP 4.190 18 [A great man] finds a war raging: it educates him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction.

Betterton, Thomas, n. (1)

    ShP 4.206 17 Betterton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean and Macready dedicate their lives to this genius [Shakespeare];...

Bettine [Bettina von Arnim] (1)

    Ctr 6.163 17 Bettine replies to Goethe's mother, who chides her disregard of dress,--If I cannot do as I have a mind in our poor Frankfort, I shall not carry things far.

Bettine [Elizabeth von Arni [Bettine,] (2)

    Exp 3.55 21 Once I took such delight in Montaigne that I thought I should not need any other book; before that, in Shakspeare;...afterwards in Goethe; even in Bettine;...
    PC 8.218 19 Some...Erasmus, Beranger, Bettine von Arnim...is always allowed.

Beverley Minster, England, (1)

    ET13 5.215 25 The power of the religious sentiment [in England]...created the religious architecture...Fountains Abbey, Ripon, Beverley and Dundee...

bewail, v. (4)

    LE 1.173 6 Thus is justice done to each generation and individual,- wisdom teaching man...that he shall not bewail himself...
    MN 1.220 21 Shall we not...betake ourselves to...some unvisited recess in Moosehead Lake, to bewail our innocency and to recover it...
    Ctr 6.154 4 What is odious but...people who scream and bewail?...
    Suc 7.309 12 Don't bewail and bemoan.

bewailed, v. (1)

    AmS 1.109 14 Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion.

bewailing, v. (1)

    CbW 6.265 27 When the political economist reckons up the unproductive classes, he should put at the head this class of...cravers of sympathy, bewailing imaginary disasters.

bewails, v. (1)

    Let 12.404 9 ...every man knows in his heart the cure for the disease he so ostentatiously bewails.

beware, v. (16)

    AmS 1.84 18 ...All things have two handles: beware of the wrong one.
    MN 1.212 2 Is it [man's] work in the world to study nature, or the laws of the world? Let him beware of proposing to himself any end.
    Comp 2.113 25 Beware of too much good staying in your hand.
    Cir 2.308 19 Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
    F 6.47 3 ...hence the high caution, that since we are sure of having what we wish, we beware to ask only for high things.
    Wth 6.89 17 Beware of me, [the sea] says, but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.
    Ctr 6.133 17 Beware of the man who says, I am on the eve of a revelation.
    Bhr 6.182 4 Beware you don't laugh, said the wise mother, for then you show all your faults.
    CbW 6.243 12 ...thou, Cyndyllan's son! beware/ Ponderous gold and stuffs to bear/...
    SA 8.97 25 ...beware of jokes;...
    SA 8.98 18 ...even if you could trust yourself on that perilous topic [sickness], beware of unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will soon give you your fill of it.
    PPo 8.246 7 There resides in the grieving/ A poison to kill;/ Beware to go near them/ 'T is pestilent still./
    PPo 8.262 26 In thee, friend, that Tyrian chamber is found;/ Thine the star-pointing- roof, and the base on the ground:/ Is one half depicted with colors less bright?/ Beware that the counterpart blazes with light!/
    Thor 10.470 25 Presently [Thoreau] heard a note which he called that of the night-warbler, a bird he had never identified...the only bird which sings indifferently by night and by day. I told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show him.
    FSLN 11.236 16 The Persian Saadi said, Beware of hurting the orphan. When the orphan sets a-crying, the throne of the Almighty is rocked from side to side.
    AKan 11.254 4 ...Help them who cannot help again:/ Beware from right to swerve./

Beware-of-this, n. (1)

    CL 12.146 26 Here [on Estabrook Farm] are varieties of apple not found in Downing or Loudon. The Tartaric variety, and Cow-apple...and Beware-of-this.

bewildered, v. (2)

    Dem1 10.24 11 Read demonology or Colquhoun's Report, and we are bewildered...
    PLT 12.42 2 I am bewildered by the immense variety of attractions and cannot take a step;...

bewildering, v. (1)

    PC 8.224 6 Here stretches...out of conception even, this vast Nature, daunting, bewildering, but all penetrable...

bewitched, v. (1)

    PPh 4.74 7 ...Meno has discoursed a thousand times, at length, on virtue... and very well, as it appeared to him; but at this moment he cannot even tell what it is,--this cramp-fish of a Socrates has so bewitched him.

bewitching, v. (1)

    DL 7.103 23 ...[the child's] little sins [are] more bewitching than any virtue.

Beza, Theodore, n. (1)

    ShP 4.203 11 ...I find, among [Wotton's] correspondents and acquaintances...Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon...

Bhagavad-Geeta, n. (2)

    PPh 4.49 12 The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds its highest expression...chiefly...in the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu Purana.
    MoS 4.172 23 [The wise skeptic's] politics are those...of Krishna, in the Bhagavat...

Bhagavad-Gita, n. (1)

    Boks 7.218 18 After the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures...[the sacred books] are...the Upanishads, the Vishnu Purana, the Bhagvat Geeta, of the Hindoos;...

Bhavagad-Gita, n. (1)

    ET14 5.259 2 I am not surprised...to find an Englishman like Warren Hastings...deprecating the prejudices of his countrymen while offering them a translation of the Bhagvat.

Biagioli, Giambattista, n,. (1)

    MAng1 12.241 12 An eloquent vindication of [Michelangelo's poems'] philosophy may be found in a paper...by the Italian scholar, in the Discourse of Benedetto Varchi upon one sonnet of Michael Angelo, contained in the volume of his poems published by Biagioli...

bias, n. (40)

    MR 1.242 19 ...if a man find in himself any strong bias to poetry...that man...ought to ransom himself from the duties of economy by a certain rigor and privation in his habits.
    Tran 1.338 5 ...all who by strong bias of nature have leaned to the spiritual side in doctrine, have stopped short of their goal.
    Mrs1 3.152 3 ...the bias of [Lilla's] nature was not to thought, but to sympathy...
    SwM 4.97 18 All religious history contains traces of the trance of saints... The trances of Socrates...Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes to mind is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes...with shocks to the mind of the receiver. It...gives a certain violent bias which taints his judgment.
    SwM 4.121 21 [Swedenborg's] theological bias thus fatally narrowed his interpretation of nature...
    ShP 4.202 19 There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age...registers every trifle touching Queen Elizabeth...and lets pass without a single valuable note...the man...on whose thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias.
    ET4 5.45 16 [The English] give the bias to the current age;...
    ET5 5.83 11 The bias of the nation [England] is a passion for utility.
    ET8 5.137 26 [The English] are testy and headstrong through an excess of will and bias;...
    ET8 5.141 17 Does the early history of each tribe show the permanent bias, which...is masked as the tribe spreads its activity into colonies, commerce, codes, arts, letters?
    ET10 5.157 4 The headlong bias to utility [in England] will let no talent lie in a napkin...
    ET14 5.251 19 The bias of Englishmen to practical skill has reacted on the national mind.
    ET18 5.299 14 England is not so public in its bias;...
    ET18 5.301 9 [The foreign policy of England] has a principal regard to the interest of trade, checked however by the aristocratic bias of the ambassador...
    F 6.12 16 People are born with the moral or with the material bias;...
    Ctr 6.131 22 ...nature usually in the instances where a marked man is sent into the world, overloads him with bias...
    Ctr 6.136 23 ...our talents are as mischievous as if each had been seized upon by some bird of prey...some zeal, some bias...
    Wsp 6.202 15 The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a skeptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power...
    Wsp 6.217 23 The bias of errors of principle carries away men into perilous courses as soon as their will does not control their passion or talent.
    CbW 6.267 7 ...the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness...
    PI 8.71 23 ...for obvious municipal or parietal uses God has given us a bias or a rest on to-day's forms.
    Elo2 8.112 2 ...[in a debate] much power is to be exhibited which is not yet called into existence, but is to be suggested on the spot...by the exhibition of an unlooked-for bias in the judges or in the audience.
    Res 8.138 18 ...if you tell me...that every man is provided, in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to Nature...I am invigorated...
    Grts 8.307 5 ...there is a teaching for [every man] from within...and, the more it is trusted, separates and signalizes him, while it makes him more important and necessary to society. We call this specialty the bias of each individual.
    Grts 8.307 13 ...every individual man has a bias which he must obey...
    Grts 8.310 21 ...if the first rule is to obey your native bias...the second rule is concentration...
    Grts 8.312 3 With this respect to the bias of the individual mind add...the most catholic receptivity for the genius of others.
    PerF 10.73 13 ...in man that bias or direction of his constitution is often as tyrannical as gravity.
    Edc1 10.142 6 There is no want of example of great men, great benefactors, who have been monks and hermits in habit. The bias of mind is sometimes irresistible in that direction.
    Edc1 10.145 13 Happy this child with a bias...
    SovE 10.208 25 ...a new crop of geniuses like those of the Elizabethan age, may be born in this age, and, with happy heart and a bias for theism, bring asceticism, duty and magnanimity into vogue again.
    MoL 10.247 22 ...no decay has crept over the spiritual force which gives bias and period to boundless Nature.
    Schr 10.264 20 The men committed by profession as well as by bias to study...talk hard and worldly...
    LLNE 10.363 13 [Charles Newcomb] was the Abbe or spiritual father [of Brook Farm], from his religious bias.
    Scot 11.465 20 By nature, by his reading and taste an aristocrat, in a time and country which easily gave him that bias, [Scott] had the virtues and graces of that class...
    CPL 11.498 18 The religious bias of our founders had its usual effect to secure an education to read their Bible and hymn-book...
    II 12.82 11 Every man comes into Nature impressed with his own polarity or bias...
    CL 12.135 9 The land, the care of land, seems to be the calling of the people of this new country, of those, at least, who have not some decided bias...
    ACri 12.294 8 ...the only check on the detail of each of [Shakespeare's] portraits is his own universality, which made bias or fixed ideas impossible...
    MLit 12.329 15 [We can fancy Goethe saying to himself] I have given my characters [in Wilhelm Meister] a bias to error. Men have the same.

bias, v. (1)

    Exp 3.52 18 ...the individual texture holds its dominion, if not to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure of activity and of enjoyment.

biases, n. (3)

    ET14 5.250 23 If [James Wilkinson's] mind does not rest in immovable biases, perhaps the orbit is larger and the return is not yet...
    Chr2 10.93 12 Certain biases, talents, executive skills, are special to each individual;...
    Wom 11.422 14 ...one [man] wishes schools, another armies, one gunboats, another public gardens. Bring all these biases together and something is done in favor of them all.

biassed, v. (1)

    PLT 12.48 4 Somewhat is to come to the light, and one [talent] was created to fetch it,-a vessel of honor or of dishonor. 'T is of instant use in the economy of the Cosmos, and the more armed and biassed for the work the better.

bib, n. (1)

    Con 1.319 13 The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and...his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe...with bib and pap-spoon...

Bible, adj. (1)

    Ill 6.315 6 ...I have known gentlemen of great stake in the community...who held themselves bound to...act with Bible societies and missions and peace-makers...

Bible Conventions, n. (1)

    NER 3.251 14 [The observer of New England's] attention must be commanded by the signs that the Church, or religious party...is appearing... in very significant assemblies called Sabbath and Bible Conventions;...

bible, n. (2)

    Pow 6.53 2 There is not yet any inventory of a man's faculties, any more than a bible of his opinions.
    Plu 10.318 4 [Plutarch's] delight in magnanimity and self-sacrifice has made his books...a bible for heroes;...

Bible, n. (30)

    DSA 1.144 13 The stationariness of religion; the assumption...that the Bible is closed;...indicate...the falsehood of our theology.
    LT 1.279 22 If every island and every house had a Bible...would the wounds of the world heal...
    Exp 3.63 13 I think I will never read any but the commonest books,--The Bible, Homer, Dante, Shakspeare and Milton.
    UGM 4.20 25 With each new mind, a new secret of nature transpires; nor can the Bible be closed until the last great man is born.
    PPh 4.39 15 The Bible of the learned for twenty-two hundred years, every brisk young man who says in succession fine things to each reluctant generation...is some reader of Plato...
    PPh 4.44 19 ...our Jewish Bible has implanted itself in the table-talk and household life of every man and woman in the European and American nations...
    ShP 4.199 26 Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language.
    ET5 5.100 14 ...[the English people's] language seems drawn from the Bible, the Common Law and the works of Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, Pope, Young, Cowper, Burns and Scott.
    ET12 5.203 12 In the Bodleian Library, Dr. Bandinel showed me...the first Bible printed at Mentz...
    ET12 5.203 21 On proceeding afterwards to examine his purchase, [Dr. Bandinel] found the twenty deficient pages of his Mentz Bible, in perfect order;...
    ET13 5.216 1 The power of the religious sentiment [in England]...inspired the English Bible...
    ET13 5.218 5 The carved and pictured chapel...made the parish-church [in England] a sort of book and Bible to the people's eye.
    ET14 5.256 13 ...if I should count the poets who have contributed to the Bible of existing England sentences of guidance and consolation which are still glowing and effective,--how few!
    Wth 6.101 17 Political Economy is as good a book wherein to read...the ascendency of laws over all private and hostile influences, as any Bible which has come down to us.
    Boks 7.194 12 ...the Bible has been the literature as well as the religion of large portions of Europe;...
    Boks 7.204 4 ...in our Bible...it seems easy and inevitable to render the rhythm and music of the original into phrases of equal melody.
    Boks 7.220 9 ...it takes millenniums to make a Bible.
    PI 8.8 24 Natural objects...are really parts of a symmetrical universe, like words of a sentence; and if their true order is found, the poet can read their divine significance orderly as in a Bible.
    Elo2 8.122 15 I have heard that no man could read the Bible with such powerful effect [as John Quincy Adams].
    QO 8.182 10 The Bible itself is like an old Cremona [violin];...
    MMEm 10.402 14 [Mary Moody Emerson's] early reading was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan Edwards, and always the Bible.
    MMEm 10.408 8 [Mary Moody Emerson] is...a Bible, miscellaneous in its parts...
    FSLC 11.190 9 I had often heard that the Bible constituted a part of every technical law library...
    FSLN 11.234 10 Of course [slave-owners] will not dare to read the Bible?
    FSLN 11.234 11 Of course [slave-owners] will not dare to read the Bible? Won't they? They quote the Bible, quote Paul, quote Christ, to justify slavery.
    SMC 11.361 15 If Marshal Montluc's Memoirs are the Bible of soldiers, as Henry IV. of France said, Colonel Prescott might furnish the Book of Epistles.
    CPL 11.498 20 The religious bias of our founders had its usual effect to secure an education to read their Bible and hymn-book...
    II 12.87 1 There is a probity of the Intellect, which demands, if possible, virtues more costly than any Bible has consecrated.
    ACri 12.295 9 ...the English and Germans, who read Shakspeare and the Bible, have a great onward march.
    ACri 12.296 11 Herrick is a remarkable example of the low style. He is, therefore, a good example of the modernness of an old English writer. So Latimer, so Chaucer, so the Bible.

bibles, n. (2)

    FSLN 11.234 7 I fear there is no reliance to be put on any kind or form of covenant, no, not on sacred forms, none on churches, none on bibles.
    FSLN 11.234 18 These things show that no forms, neither constitutions... nor churches, nor bibles, are of any use in themselves.

Bibles, n. (8)

    GoW 4.269 9 There have been times when [the writer] was a sacred person: he wrote Bibles...
    GoW 4.290 16 We too must write Bibles...
    Bhr 6.192 15 The novels are as useful as Bibles if they teach you the secret that the best of life is conversation...
    Boks 7.218 10 ...I might as well not have begun as to leave out a class of books which are the best: I mean the Bibles...
    Suc 7.296 1 'T is the fulness of man that...makes his Bibles and Shakspeares and Homers so great.
    PI 8.38 11 Socrates, the Indian teachers of the Maia, the Bibles...these all deal with Nature and history as means and symbols...
    QO 8.180 19 ...if we find in India or Arabia a book out of our horizon of thought and tradition, we are soon taught by new researches in its native country to discover...its latent, but real connection with our own Bibles.
    Prch 10.224 8 ...all that saints and churches and Bibles...have aimed at, is to suppress this impertinent surface-action...

Bible-society, n. (1)

    SR 2.54 9 If you...contribute to a dead Bible-society...I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are...

biblical, adj. (3)

    MoS 4.165 6 ...though a biblical plainness coupled with a most uncanonical levity may shut [Montaigne's] pages to many sensitive readers, yet the offence is superficial.
    ET14 5.233 24 A taste for plain strong speech, what is called a biblical style, marks the English.
    Elo1 7.93 26 ...first and last, [eloquence] must still be at bottom a biblical statement of fact.

bibliography, n. (2)

    ET12 5.203 24 On proceeding afterwards to examine his purchase, [Bulkeley Bandinel] found the twenty deficient pages of his Mentz Bible, in perfect order; brought them to Oxford with the rest of his purchase, and placed them in the volume; but has too much awe for the Providence that appears in bibliography also, to suffer the reunited parts to be re-bound.
    Boks 7.209 10 The annals of bibliography afford many examples of the delirious extent to which book-fancying can go...

bibliomaniacs, n. (1)

    AmS 1.89 23 Hence the restorers of readings...the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.

bibulous, adj. (1)

    OS 2.290 26 ...the soul that ascends to worship the great God...dwells...in the earnest experience of the common day,--by reason of the present moment and the mere trifle having become...bibulous of the sea of light.

bid, n. (1)

    Boks 7.209 27 The bid [for the Valdarfer Boccaccio] stood at five hundred guineas.

bid, v. (8)

    SR 2.71 9 Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet...
    Fdsp 2.214 13 Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell...
    Hsm1 2.246 3 Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell.
    ET1 5.17 26 [Carlyle] still returned to English pauperism...the selfish abdication by public men of all that public persons should perform. Government should direct poor men what to do. Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors. ... But here are thousands of acres which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor Irish go to the moor and till it.
    Wth 6.84 13 ...The storm-wind wove, the torrent span,/ Where they were bid the rivers ran;/...
    Bhr 6.177 27 A cow can bid her calf...to run away...
    MMEm 10.410 25 [Mary Moody Emerson] exclaimed, God has given you a voice that you might use it in the service of your fellow creatures. Go instantly and call Elizabeth till you find [Elizabeth Hoar and her niece]. The man...did as he was bid...
    HDC 11.52 10 Tahattawan, our Concord sachem, called his Indians together, and bid them not oppose the courses which the English were taking for their good;...

bidders, n. (1)

    Boks 7.210 3 The bid [for the Valdarfer Boccaccio] stood at five hundred guineas. A thousand guineas, said Earl Spencer. And ten, added the Marquis [of Blandford]. You might hear a pin drop. All eyes were bent on the bidders.

bidding, n. (3)

    Pol1 3.208 23 Our quarrel with [political parties] begins when they quit this deep natural ground at the bidding of some leader...
    Schr 10.286 4 Genius delights only in statements which are themselves true...which society cannot dispose of or forget, but which...will not down at anybody's bidding...
    CPL 11.506 27 You say, [reading] is a languid pleasure. Yes, but its tractableness, coming and going like a dog at our bidding, compensates the quietness...

bide, v. (4)

    AmS 1.103 2 ...let [the scholar]...bide his own time...
    Mrs1 3.138 10 The flower of courtesy does not very well bide handling...
    CbW 6.244 4 ...Fool and foe may harmless roam,/ Loved and lovers bide at home./
    GSt 10.504 16 Plainly [George Stearns] was...a soldier to bide the brunt;...

bides, v. (1)

    Suc 7.281 6 Who bides at home, nor looks abroad,/ Carries the eagles and masters the sword./

biding, v. (2)

    MN 1.208 15 ...many more men than one [God] harbors in his bosom, biding their time and the needs and the beauty of all.
    Carl 10.490 2 [Carlyle] talks like a very unhappy man...biding his time, meditating how to undermine and explode the whole world of nonsense which torments him.

Bidpai [Pilpay], n. (2)

    ShP 4.201 2 Vedas, Aesop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men.
    ALin 11.333 19 I am sure if this man [Lincoln] had ruled in a period of less facility of printing, he would have become mythological in a very few years, like Aesop or Pilpay...

bids, v. (3)

    Elo1 7.65 20 Bring [the master orator] to his audience...and they shall carry and execute that which he bids them.
    LS 11.10 12 [Jesus] permitted himself to be anointed, declaring that it was for his interment. He washed the feet of his disciples. These are admitted to be symbolical actions and expressions. Here [at the Last Supper], in like manner, he calls the bread his body, and bids the disciples eat.
    War 11.171 9 ...[peace] is to hear the voice of God, which bids the devils that have rended and torn [the man] come out of him...

bien, adv. (2)

    ET11 5.186 3 ...beneficent power, le talent de bien faire, gives a majesty which cannot be concealed or resisted.
    Chr2 10.104 9 Si Dieu a fait l'homme a son image, l'homme l' a bien rendu.

bier, n. (2)

    Elo1 7.65 27 [Eloquence] is that despotism which poets have celebrated in the Pied Piper of Hamelin...or that of the minstrel of Meudon, who made the pall-bearers dance around the bier.
    MMEm 10.423 16 ...if you tell me [Mary Moody Emerson] of the miseries of the battle-field...what of a vulture being the bier, tomb and parson of a hero, compared to the long years of sticking on a bed and wished away?

bifold, adj. (2)

    Con 1.301 13 ...this bifold fact [Conservatism and Reform] lies thus united in real nature...
    Prd1 2.233 3 The scholar shames us by his bifold life.

big, adj. (9)

    ShP 4.207 9 That imagination which dilates the closet [Shakespeare] writes in to the world's dimension...as quickly reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon.
    Ill 6.316 14 We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
    Ill 6.320 21 The cloud is now as big as your hand, and now it covers a county.
    SlHr 10.446 5 ...so entirely was [Samuel Hoar's] respect to the ground-plan and substructure of society a natural ability...that it was...like one of those opaque crystals, big beryls weighing tons...not less perfect in their angles and structure, and only less beautiful, than the transparent topazes and diamonds.
    EWI 11.103 17 Very sad was the negro tradition, that the Great Spirit, in the beginning offered the black man, whom he loved better than the buckra, or white, his choice of two boxes, a big and a little one.
    ACiv 11.300 18 Neither was anything concealed of the theory or practice of slavery. To what purpose make more big books of these statistics?
    HCom 11.344 4 When her blood is up, [Massachusetts] has a fist big enough to knock down an empire.
    CL 12.144 14 Twenty years ago in Northern Wisconsin the pinery was composed of trees so big, and so many of them, that it was impossible to walk in the country...
    Bost 12.188 10 Linnaeus, like a naturalist, esteeming the globe a big egg, called London the punctum saliens in the yolk of the world.

bigger, adj. (8)

    Con 1.316 14 ...[riches] take somewhat for everything they give. I look bigger, but I am less;...
    ET3 5.42 25 ...there is such an artificial completeness in this nation of artificers [England] as if there were a design from the beginning to elaborate a bigger Birmingham.
    ET4 5.65 8 [The English] are bigger men than the Americans.
    F 6.30 23 ...when the boy grows to man...he pulls down that wall and builds a new and bigger.
    Wth 6.117 2 Saving and unexpensiveness will not keep the most pathetic family from ruin, nor will bigger incomes make free spending safe.
    Wth 6.118 6 It is a general rule in that country [England] that bigger incomes do not help anybody.
    Cour 7.258 13 The Norse Sagas relate that when Bishop Magne reproved King Sigurd for his wicked divorce, the priest who attended the bishop, expecting every moment when the savage king would burst with rage and slay his superior, said that he saw the sky no bigger than a calf-skin.
    HCom 11.344 3 ...when I see how irresistible the convictions of Massachusetts are in these swarming populations,-I think the little state bigger than I knew.

biggest, adj. (1)

    ET16 5.277 22 We [Emerson and Carlyle] counted and measured by paces the biggest stones [at Stonehenge]...

Bigio, Nanni di Bacio, n. (2)

    MAng1 12.226 7 ...this work [rebuilding the Pons Palatinus] was taken from [Michelangelo]...and intrusted to Nanni di Bacio Bigio...
    MAng1 12.226 8 Nanni sold the travertine, and filled up the piers [of the Pons Palatinus] with gravel at small expense.

big-mouthed, adj. (1)

    MoL 10.256 20 ...this big-mouthed talker, among his dictionaries and Leipzig editions of Lysias, had lost his knowledge.

bigness, n. (1)

    HDC 11.34 25 ...the Lord is pleased to provide for [the pilgrims] great store of fish in the spring-time, and especially, alewives, about the bigness of a herring.

Bigot, Emeric, n. (1)

    Milt1 12.258 24 In a letter to one of his foreign correspondents, Emeric Bigot...[Milton] writes: Many have been celebrated for their compositions, whose common conversation and intercourse have betrayed no marks of sublimity or genius.

bigot, n. (5)

    MN 1.193 20 The bigot must cease to be a bigot to-day.
    MN 1.193 21 The bigot must cease to be a bigot to-day.
    SR 2.51 10 If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition... why should I not say to him, Go love thy infant;...
    Nat2 3.185 10 ...without this violence of direction which men and women have, without a spice of bigot and fanatic, no excitement, no efficiency.
    Boks 7.191 15 Whenever any skeptic or bigot claims to be heard on the questions of intellect and morals, we ask if he is familiar with the books of Plato, where all his pert objections have once for all been disposed of.

bigoted, adj. (3)

    MoS 4.164 21 Gibbon reckons, in these bigoted times, but two men of liberality in France,--Henry IV. and Montaigne.
    Prch 10.227 14 Be not betrayed into undervaluing the churches which annoy you by their bigoted claims.
    Thor 10.478 14 [Thoreau] thought that without religion or devotion of some kind nothing great was ever accomplished: and he thought that the bigoted sectarian had better bear this in mind.

bigotry, n. (2)

    LT 1.269 15 The leaders of the crusades against War, Negro slavery...are the right successors of Luther...and Whitefield. They have...the same noble impulse, and the same bigotry.
    ET15 5.269 11 One bishop fares badly [in the London Times] for his rapacity, and another for his bigotry...

bigots, n. (4)

    Cir 2.313 24 ...the instinct of man...gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of bigots...
    MoS 4.171 25 Every superior mind...will know how to avail himself of the checks and balances in nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and formalism of bigots and blockheads.
    SovE 10.187 25 Montaigne kills off bigots as cowhage kills worms;...
    PLT 12.54 4 ...without the violence of direction that men have, without bigots, without men of fixed idea, no excitement, no efficiency.

bilge, n. (1)

    ET2 5.29 7 Nobody likes to be treated ignominiously, upset...suffocated with bilge...

bilge-water, n. (1)

    AKan 11.259 27 Manifest Destiny, Democracy, Freedom, fine names for an ugly thing. They call it otto of rose and lavender,-I call it bilge-water.

biliary, adj. (1)

    Exp 3.51 16 I knew a witty physician who found the creed in the biliary duct...

bilious, adj. (4)

    ET5 5.78 5 The people [of England] have that nervous bilious temperament which is known by medical men to resist every means employed to make its possessor subservient to the will of others.
    ET8 5.129 19 Commerce sends abroad multitudes of different classes [of Englishmen]. The choleric Welshman, the fervid Scot, the bilious resident in the East or West Indies, are wide of the perfect behavior of the educated and dignified man of family [in England].
    F 6.45 20 A strong, astringent, bilious nature has more truculent enemies than the slugs and moths that fret my leaves.
    EWI 11.117 24 The governors [of Jamaica]...were at constant quarrel with the angry and bilious island legislature.

Bill, Copyright, n. (1)

    EurB 12.366 18 In the debates on the Copyright Bill, in the English Parliament, Mr. Sergeant Wakley, the coroner, quoted Wordsworth's poetry in derision...

Bill, Fugitive Slave, n. (3)

    FSLC 11.184 20 Who could have believed it, if foretold that a hundred guns would be fired in Boston on the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill?
    FSLN 11.224 15 Four years ago to-night...Mr. Webster...caused by his personal and official authority the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill.
    TPar 11.290 14 [Theodore Parker's] ministry fell...on the years when Southern slavery...wrung from the weakness or treachery of Northern people fatal concessions in the Fugitive Slave Bill...

Bill, Homestead, n. (1)

    EPro 11.316 2 Such moments of expansion [of liberty] in modern history were the Confession of Augsburg...the passage of the Homestead Bill in the last Congress...

bill, n. (32)

    SR 2.58 21 The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also.
    SR 2.84 21 What a contrast between the...American, with a...bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander...
    Pol1 3.201 10 What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints to-day...shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war...
    ET8 5.133 24 The common Englishman is prone to forget a cardinal article in the bill of social rights, that every man has a right to his own ears.
    ET10 5.154 24 When Sir S. Romilly proposed his bill forbidding parish officers to bind children apprentices at a greater distance than forty miles from their home, Peel opposed...
    ET13 5.224 23 The bill for the naturalization of the Jews [in England] (in 1753) was resisted by petitions from all parts of the kingdom...
    ET13 5.224 26 The bill for the naturalization of the Jews [in England] (in 1753) was resisted...by petition from the city of London, reprobating this bill...
    ET14 5.233 12 [The Englishman]...prefers his hot chop, with perfect security and convenience in the eating of it, to the chances of the amplest and Frenchiest bill of fare...
    F 6.9 1 ...the bill of the bird...determines tyrannically its limits.
    CbW 6.262 26 You buy much that is not rendered in the bill.
    Bty 6.283 25 ...we prize very humble utilities, a prudent husband, a good son...and perhaps reckon only his money value...as a sort of bill of exchange easily convertible into fine chambers...
    Elo2 8.129 4 Lord Ashley, in 1696, while the bill for regulating trials in cases of high treason was pending, attempting to utter a premeditated speech in Parliament...fell into such a disorder that he was not able to proceed;...
    Elo2 8.129 7 Lord Ashley...attempting to utter a premeditated speech in Parliament in favor of that clause of the bill which allowed the prisoner the benefit of counsel, fell into such a disorder that he was not able to proceed;...
    Elo2 8.129 21 ...said [Lord Ashley], if I, who had no personal concern in the question, was so overpowered with my own apprehensions that I could not find words to express myself, what must be the case of one whose life depended on his own abilities to defend it? This happy turn did great service in promoting that excellent bill [regulating trials in cases of high treason].
    EWI 11.103 21 The buckra box was full up with pen, paper and whip, and the negro box with hoe and bill; and hoe and bill for the negro to this day.
    EWI 11.108 6 John Woolman of New Jersey...was uneasy in his mind when he was set to write a bill of sale of a negro, for his master.
    EWI 11.109 6 In 1791, a bill to abolish the [slave] trade was brought in by Wilberforce...
    EWI 11.109 26 ...in 1807, on the 25th March, the bill passed, and the slave-trade was abolished.
    EWI 11.112 3 ...in 1833, on the 14th May, Lord Stanley, Minister of the Colonies, introduced into the House of Commons his bill for the Emancipation.
    EWI 11.112 20 With these provisions and conditions, the bill [for emancipation in the West Indies] proceeds...in the following terms...
    EWI 11.113 22 After much debate, the bill [for emancipation in the West Indies] passed by large majorities.
    EWI 11.114 2 ...every provision of the bill [for emancipation in the West Indies] was criticised with severity.
    EWI 11.114 5 ...the bill [for emancipation in the West Indies] required the appointment of magistrates who should hear every complaint of the apprentice and see that justice was done him.
    EWI 11.127 8 ...[British merchants] hastened to make the best of their position, and accepted the bill [for emancipation in the West Indies].
    EWI 11.128 6 For months and years the bill [on emanicipation in the West Indies] was debated...
    FSLC 11.202 13 ...we must use the introducer and substantial author of the [Fugitive Slave] bill as an illustration of the history.
    ChiE 11.473 16 I am sure that gentlemen around me bear in mind the bill which the Hon. Mr. Jenckes of Rhode Island has twice attempted to carry through Congress, requiring that candidates for public offices shall first pass examinations on their literary qualifications for the same.
    FRep 11.517 17 One hundred years ago the American people attempted to carry out the bill of political rights to an almost ideal perfection.
    FRep 11.517 22 [The American people] are now proceeding...to carry out, not the bill of rights, but the bill of human duties.
    FRep 11.540 18 [The Constitution and the law in America] should be mankind's bill of rights...
    CW 12.171 4 When I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, bobolinks and thrushes, which were not charged in the bill;...
    Trag 12.415 23 The market-man never damned the lady because she had not paid her bill...

Bill, n. (2)

    FSLN 11.219 8 I say Mr. Webster, for though the [Fugitive Slave] Bill was not his, it is yet notorious that he was the life and soul of it...
    FSLN 11.228 25 There was an old fugitive law, but it had become, or was fast becoming...by the genius and laws of Massachusetts, inoperative. The new [Fugitive Slave] Bill made it operative...

Bill, Nebraska, n. (1)

    FSLN 11.244 16 ...the Fugitive Law did much to unglue the eyes of men, and now the Nebraska Bill leaves us staring.

Bill of Rights, Massachuset (1)

    Bost 12.201 17 There is a little formula, couched in pure Saxon...I 'm as good as you be, which contains the essence of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights and of the American Declaration of Independence.

Bill of Rights, n. (1)

    SMC 11.352 10 ...after the quarrel [American Revolution] began, the Americans took higher ground, and stood for political independence. But in the necessities of the hour, they...winked at a practical exception to the Bill of Rights they had drawn up.

Bill, Reform, n. (4)

    ET1 5.21 2 [Wordsworth] said he talked on political aspects, for he wished to impress on me and all good Americans...never to call into action the physical strength of the people, as had just now been done in England in the Reform Bill...
    PC 8.232 6 In England, it was the game-laws which exasperated the farmers to carry the Reform Bill.
    MoL 10.251 22 'T is some thirty years since the days of the Reform Bill in England...
    EPro 11.315 22 Such moments of expansion [of liberty] in modern history were the Confession of Augsburg...the passage of the Reform Bill...

billets-doux, n. (1)

    Nat2 3.182 23 The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace...is directly related, there amid essences and billets-doux, to Himmaleh mountain-chains and the axis of the globe.

billiard-room, n. (1)

    SL 2.150 3 ...Gertrude has Guy; but what now avails...how Roman his mien and manners, if his heart and aims are...in the billiard-room...

billiards, n. (4)

    Ctr 6.144 23 Balls, riding, wine-parties and billiards pass to a poor boy for something fine and romantic...
    Clbs 7.235 8 What is a match at...billiards...to a match of mother-wit...
    Res 8.150 22 There are better games than billiards and whist.
    PLT 12.9 8 Here [in society] they play the game of conversation, as they play billiards, for pastime and credit.

billions, n. (1)

    Pt1 3.23 2 ...[nature] shakes down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, and one of which, being preserved, transmits new billions of spores to-morrow or next day.

billows, n. (3)

    Art1 2.363 3 The real value of the Iliad or the Transfiguration is as signs of power; billows or ripples they are of the stream of tendency;...
    MoS 4.160 21 We want a ship in these billows we inhabit.
    Aris 10.33 16 The terrible aristocracy that is in Nature. Real people dwelling with the real...then, far down, people of taste, people dwelling in a relation...and, far below these, gross and thoughtless, the animal man, billows of chaos...

bills, n. (7)

    NMW 4.240 5 When the expenses...of his palaces, had accumulated great debts, Napoleon examined the bills of the creditors himself...
    ET10 5.161 11 [The Bank of England] votes an issue of bills, population is stimulated and cities rise;...
    Wth 6.105 6 If the Rothschilds at Paris do not accept bills, the people at Manchester...are forced into the highway...
    WD 7.159 22 Lord Chancellor Thurlow thought [steam] might be made to draw bills and answers in chancery.
    SMC 11.360 26 Some of these [Civil War] letters are written on the back of old bills...
    PPr 12.380 27 ...Mr. Carlyle very fairly finds the calamity of the times, not in bad bills of Parliament...but the vice in false and superficial aims of the people...
    PPr 12.381 1 ...Mr. Carlyle very fairly finds the calamity of the times, not in bad bills of Parliament, nor the remedy in good bills, but the vice in false and superficial aims of the people...

binal, adj. (1)

    Edc1 10.131 22 Yonder magnificent astronomy [man] is at last to import, fetching away...solstice, period, comet and binal star, by comprehending their relation and law.

bind, v. (20)

    Con 1.307 14 [The youth says] Nature has sufficiently provided me with rewards and sharp penalties, to bind me not to transgress.
    YA 1.364 3 ...the locomotive and the steamboat...shoot every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and employment, and bind them fast in one web...
    Cir 2.304 16 ...if the soul is quick and strong it...expands another orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, with attempt again to stop and to bind.
    Nat2 3.183 22 A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws which bind the farthest regions of nature...
    Pol1 3.215 11 This is the history of governments,--one man does something which is to bind another.
    ET1 5.18 12 ...[Carlyle] was...cognizant of the subtile links that bind ages together...
    ET10 5.154 25 When Sir S. Romilly proposed his bill forbidding parish officers to bind children apprentices at a greater distance than forty miles from their home, Peel opposed...
    F 6.20 19 ...the gods in the Norse heaven were unable to bind the Fenris Wolf...
    Wth 6.84 22 ...Still, through [Matter's] motes and masses, draw/ Electric thrills and ties of Law,/ Which bind the strengths of Nature wild/ To the conscience of a child./
    WD 7.172 22 The Hindoos represent Maia, the illusory energy of Vishnu, as one of his principal attributes. As if, in this gale of warring elements which life is, it was necessary to bind souls to human life as mariners in a tempest lash themselves to the mast and bulwarks of a ship...
    Boks 7.207 20 ...the works of Ben Jonson are a sort of hoop to bind all these fine [Elizabethan] persons together...
    PI 8.65 17 Literature warps away from life, though at first it seems to bind it.
    PC 8.230 9 ...superior advantages bind you to larger generosity.
    Dem1 10.17 25 I believed that I discovered in nature...somewhat which manifested itself only in contradiction, and therefore could not be grasped by a conception, much less by a word. ... This, which seemed to insert itself between all other things, to sever them, to bind them, I named the Demoniacal...
    Edc1 10.128 16 Here [in the household] is the sincere thing, the wondrous composition for which day and night go round. In that routine are the sacred relations, the passions that bind and sever.
    FSLC 11.183 3 [The crisis over the Fugitive Slave Law]...showed...that the resolutions of public bodies, or the pledges never so often given and put on record of public men, will not bind them.
    FSLC 11.191 20 Even the Canon Law says (in malis promissis non expedit servare fidem), Neither allegiance nor oath can bind to obey that which is wrong.
    FRO1 11.481 3 The interests that grow out of a meeting like this [of the Free Religious Association] should bind us with new strength to the old eternal duties.
    FRep 11.539 4 Here is the post where the patriot should plant himself; here the altar where virtuous young men...should bind each other to loyalty;...
    MLit 12.336 1 Religion will bind again these that were sometime frivolous, customary, enemies...

binder, n. (1)

    PPo 8.242 2 Firdusi...has written in the Shah Nameh the annals...of Jamschid, the binder of demons...

binding, adj. (2)

    Chr2 10.92 21 He is moral...whose aim or motive may become a universal rule, binding on all intelligent beings;...
    FSLC 11.206 11 If [the North and the South] continue to have a binding interest, they will be pretty sure to find it out...

binding, v. (3)

    ET10 5.155 5 ...Mr. Wortley said, though, in the higher ranks, to cultivate family affections was a good thing, it was not so among the lower orders. Better take [the children] away from those who might deprave them. And it was highly injurious to trade to stop binding to manufacturers...
    ET13 5.218 19 It was strange to hear the pretty pastoral of the betrothal of Rebecca and Isaac, in the morning of the world, read with circumstantiality in York minster, on the 13th January, 1848, to the decorous English audience...listening with all the devotion of national pride. That was binding old and new to some purpose.
    PLT 12.39 27 ...the mind discovers some essential copula binding this [new] fact or change to a class of facts or changes...

binds, v. (4)

    Nat 1.49 21 The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it...
    Con 1.302 11 What insurmountable fact binds [the conservative] to that side?
    LS 11.21 12 ...it is not usage, it is not what I do not understand, that binds me to [Christianity]...
    Mem 12.97 5 ...this mysterious power [memory] that binds our life together has its own vagaries and interruptions.

binomial, adj. (1)

    Edc1 10.140 12 ...Jove and Achilles...opera and binomial theorem...dance through [the boy's] narrative in merry confusion, yet the logic is good.

biographer, n. (4)

    Nat 1.21 17 ...[William Russell's] biographer says, the multitude imagined they saw liberty and virtue sitting by his side.
    ShP 4.208 5 Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare;...
    ShP 4.208 21 ...with Shakspeare for biographer...we have really the information [about Shakespeare] which is material;...
    MAng1 12.223 4 Seeing these works [of art], we appreciate the taste which led Michael Angelo...to cover the walls of churches with unclothed figures, improper, says his biographer, for the place, but proper for the exhibition of all the pomp of his profound knowledge.

biographers, n. (2)

    NMW 4.240 18 I like an incident mentioned by one of [Napoleon's] biographers at St. Helena.
    Milt1 12.256 26 Perfections of body and of mind are attributed to [Milton] by his biographers...

biographical, adj. (2)

    Hsm1 2.248 3 Thomas Carlyle...has suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his biographical and historical pictures.
    PLT 12.62 23 ...when a man says I hope, I find, I think, he might properly say, The human race, thinks or finds or hopes. And meantime he shall be able continually to keep sight of his biographical Ego,-I have a desk, I have an office...

biographies, n. (6)

    Nat 1.3 2 [Our age] writes biographies, histories, and criticism.
    AmS 1.102 2 [The scholar] is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating...noble biographies...
    PPh 4.43 11 Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
    Bhr 6.184 26 ...here [in dress circles] are the secret biographies written and read.
    Plu 10.293 7 Strange that the writer of so many illustrious biographies [as Plutarch] should wait so long for his own.
    II 12.88 15 Our books are full of generous biographies of Saints, who knew not that they were such;...

biography, n. (40)

    AmS 1.82 14 Year by year we come up hither to read one more chapter of [the American Scholar's] biography.
    DSA 1.138 22 ...of the bad preacher, it could not be told from his sermon... whether he was a citizen or a countryman; or any other fact of his biography.
    LE 1.160 15 The whole value...of biography, is to increase my self-trust...
    LE 1.161 4 Still more do we owe to biography the fortification of our hope.
    LE 1.163 24 ...the more quaintly you inspect...its astounding whole,-so much the more you master the biography of this hero...
    MN 1.202 20 ...we feel not much otherwise if, instead of beholding foolish nations, we take...the eminent souls, and narrowly inspect their biography.
    Hist 2.10 3 ...there is properly no history, only biography.
    Hist 2.30 3 [The advancing man's] own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born.
    SR 2.61 21 ...all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.
    Comp 2.125 11 ...such should be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead circumstances day by day...
    Prd1 2.232 25 Tasso's is no unfrequent case in modern biography.
    OS 2.295 21 Before the immense possibilities of man...all past biography... shrinks away.
    Cir 2.313 13 ...steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which the field offers us, we may chance to cast a right glance back upon biography.
    Int 2.332 24 Every trivial fact in [the writer's] private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle...
    Int 2.334 20 ...we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.
    Mrs1 3.144 26 Another mode [of winning a place in fashion] is to pass through all the degrees...being...perfumed, and dined, and introduced, and properly grounded in all the biography and politics and anecdotes of the boudoirs.
    Gts 3.161 18 ...it restores society in so far to the primary basis, when a man' s biography is conveyed in his gift...
    NER 3.271 10 It would be easy to show, by a narrow scanning of any man' s biography, that we are not so wedded to our paltry performances of every kind but that every man has at intervals the grace to scorn his performances, in comparing them with his belief of what he should do;...
    UGM 4.14 21 I cannot even hear of...great power of performance, without fresh resolution. ... This is the moral of biography;...
    UGM 4.32 21 The genius of humanity is the real subject whose biography is written in our annals.
    PPh 4.43 17 Plato especially has no external biography.
    PPh 4.44 14 ...the biography of Plato is interior.
    PPh 4.70 20 ...[Plato] constantly affirms...that the greatest goods...are assigned to us by a divine gift. This leads me to that central figure...whose biography he has likewise so labored that the historic facts are lost in the light of Plato's mind.
    ShP 4.207 11 Can any biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream admits me?
    ET3 5.36 14 Every book we read, every biography, play, romance, in whatever form, is still English history and manners.
    ET10 5.154 8 ...one of [England's] recent writers speaks...of the grave moral deterioration which follows an empty exchequer. You shall find this sentiment...deeply implied...in biography and in the votes of public assemblies...
    ET18 5.302 14 We cannot go deep enough into the biography of the spirit who never throws himself entire into one hero...
    Bty 6.282 14 However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in [astrology], the hint was true and divine...that climate, century, remote natures as well as near, are part of [the soul's] biography.
    Boks 7.217 20 Every good fable...every biography from a religious age... when they proceed from an intellectual integrity...have the imaginative element.
    Insp 8.296 24 I value literary biography for the hints it furnishes from so many scholars...of what hygiene, what ascetic...their experience suggested and approved.
    Edc1 10.149 6 Not less delightful is the mutual pleasure of teaching and learning the secret...of chosen facts in history or in biography.
    Plu 10.296 23 M. Octave Greard...has...constructed from the works of Plutarch himself his true biography.
    Thor 10.476 27 [Thoreau's] biography is in his verses.
    TPar 11.285 4 I have the feeling that every man's biography is at his own expense.
    TPar 11.285 6 ...all biography is autobiography.
    Shak1 11.449 21 ...we pause expectant before the genius of Shakspeare- as if his biography were not yet written;...
    PLT 12.13 10 Metaphysics...must be biography...
    MAng1 12.215 16 Every line in [Michelangelo's] biography might be read to the human race with wholesome effect.
    ACri 12.298 25 ...[Carlyle's History of Frederick II is] a book...with new heroes, things unvoiced before-the German Plutarch, now that we have exhausted the Greek and Roman and British biography...
    MLit 12.328 23 The spirit of [Goethe's] biography, of his poems, of his tales, is identical...

Biography, n. (1)

    Hist 2.21 12 ...all public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime.

Biorn, n. (2)

    Pow 6.55 21 If Eric is in robust health...at his departure from Greenland he will steer west, and his ships will reach Newfoundland. But take out Eric and put in a stronger and bolder man,--Biorn, or Thorfin,--and the ships will...sail six hundred...miles further...
    Bost 12.192 5 In the journey of Rev. Peter Bulkeley and his company through the forest from Boston to Concord they fainted from the powerful odor of the stweefern in the sun;-like what befell, still earlier, Biorn and Thorfinn, Northmen, in their expedition to the same coast;...

biped, n. (3)

    F 6.22 18 [Man] betrays his relation to what is below him...quadruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into biped...
    Edc1 10.156 2 ...as [the naturalist] is still immovable, [the creatures of nature]...volunteer some degree of advances towards fellowship and good understanding with a biped who behaves so civilly and well.
    CL 12.133 4 The air is wise, the wind thinks well,/ And all through which it blows;/ If plant or brain, if egg or shell,/ Or bird or biped knows./

bipolar, adj. (2)

    Chr1 3.97 3 Everything in nature is bipolar...
    Dem1 10.8 7 ...every act, every thought, every cause, is bipolar...

birch, n. (1)

    CL 12.149 19 ...what countless uses [of the forest] that we know not! How an Indian helps himself...making his bow of hickory, birch, or even a fir-bough, at a pinch;...

birches, n. (2)

    Farm 7.148 9 In September, when the pears hang heaviest...comes usually a gusty day which...throws down the heaviest fruit in bruised heaps. The planter took the hint of the Sequoias...surrounded the orchard with a nursery of birches and evergreens.
    Mem 12.103 20 ...confined now in populous streets you behold again the green fields, the shadows of the gray birches;...

birch-tree, n. (1)

    CL 12.149 22 [The Indian] goes to a white birch-tree, and can fit his leg with a seamless boot, or a hat for his head.

Bird Conversations [Ferided (1)

    PPo 8.263 15 Ferideddin Attar wrote the Bird Conversations, a mystical tale...

bird, n. (72)

    Nat 1.33 17 ...A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush;...
    Nat 1.34 22 ...beast and bird...preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God...
    DSA 1.137 7 The faith should blend...with...the singing bird...
    LE 1.167 26 Further inquiry will discover...that [these chanting poets] contented themselves with the passing chirp of a bird...
    MN 1.199 11 The bird hastens to lay her egg: the egg hastens to be a bird.
    MN 1.199 12 The bird hastens to lay her egg: the egg hastens to be a bird.
    Comp 2.101 8 ...the naturalist...regards...a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man.
    Comp 2.112 3 Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered over government and property. That obscene bird is not there for nothing.
    Lov1 2.176 17 Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to [the lover' s] heart and soul.
    Int 2.340 25 We talk with accomplished persons who appear to be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, the turf, the bird, are not theirs...
    Exp 3.58 3 Like a bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power which abides in no man and in no woman, but for a moment speaks from this one, and for another moment from that one.
    Exp 3.63 20 We fancy that we are strangers, and not so intimately domesticated in the planet as the wild man and the wild beast and bird.
    Exp 3.68 18 The most attractive class of people are those who are powerful obliquely...one gets the cheer of their light without paying too great a tax. Theirs is the beauty of the bird...and not of art.
    Nat2 3.181 13 ...by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers [nature] gives him a petty omnipresence.
    Nat2 3.185 17 ...when now and then comes along some sad, sharp-eyed man, who sees how paltry a game is played, and refuses to play but blabs the secret;--how then? Is the bird flown?
    SwM 4.125 15 [To Swedenborg] Bird and beast is not bird and beast, but emanation and effluvia of the minds and wills of men there present.
    SwM 4.131 12 ...a bird does not more readily weave its nest...than this seer of the souls [Swedenborg] substructs a new hell and pit...round every new crew of offenders.
    SwM 4.144 10 No bird ever sang in all [Swedenborg's] gardens of the dead.
    ET14 5.251 26 The voice of [Englishmen's] modern muse has a slight hint of the steam-whistle, and the poem is created...by no means as the bird of a new morning...
    F 6.9 2 ...the bill of the bird...determines tyrannically its limits.
    F 6.14 25 Lodged in the parent animal...[the vesicle] unlocks itself to fish, bird, or quadruped...
    Ctr 6.136 20 ...our talents are as mischievous as if each had been seized upon by some bird of prey...
    Wsp 6.212 5 ...they who pay this homage [to the public sinner] have said to themselves, On the whole, we don't know about this that you call honesty; a bird in the hand is better.
    Bty 6.281 20 The want of sympathy makes [the ornithologist's] record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird.
    Bty 6.281 20 The bird is not in its ounces and inches...
    Bty 6.284 5 The motive of science was the extension of man...till his hands should touch the stars...his ears understand the language of beast and bird...
    Bty 6.290 5 Elegance of form in bird or beast, or in the human figure, marks some excellence of structure...
    Bty 6.294 12 ...the bone or the quill of the bird gives the most alar strength with the least weight.
    Civ 7.25 20 In bird and beast the organs are released and begin to play.
    Art2 7.39 7 Relatively to themselves, the bee, the bird, the beaver, have no art;...
    Art2 7.53 1 The plumage of the bird...has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal.
    Farm 7.135 4 [Farmers] harness beast, bird, insect, to their work;/...
    WD 7.170 12 Yesterday not a bird peeped;...
    WD 7.182 4 Shakspeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest.
    Clbs 7.226 7 ...the staple of conversation is widely unlike in its circles. Sometimes it is facts...sometimes a singing, as if the heart poured out all like a bird;...
    Cour 7.278 9 And when the bird or deer/ Fell by the hunter's skill,/ The boy was always near/ To help with right good will./
    OA 7.314 1 As the bird trims her to the gale,/ I trim myself to the storm of time,/ I man the rudder, reef the sail,/ Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime/...
    PI 8.5 15 I believe this conviction makes the charm of chemistry,--that we have the same avoirdupois matter in an alembic, without a vestige of the old form; and in animal transformation not less, as...in egg and bird...
    PI 8.11 21 ...the aptness with which a river, a flower, a bird, fire, day or night, can express [man's] fortunes, is as if the world were only a disguised man...
    PI 8.15 11 As the bird alights on the bough, then plunges into the air again, so the thoughts of God pause but for a moment in any form.
    PI 8.72 4 One would say of the force in the works of Nature, all depends on the battery. If it give one shock, we shall get to the fish form, and stop; if two shocks, to the bird;...
    Res 8.148 23 See the dexterity of the good aunt in keeping the young people all the weary holiday busy and diverted without knowing it...the rabbits, the mino bird...
    PPo 8.255 14 Round and round this heap of ashes/ Now flies the bird [the phoenix] amain,/ But in that odorous niche of heaven/ Nestles the bird again./
    PPo 8.255 16 Round and round this heap of ashes/ Now flies the bird [the phoenix] amain,/ But in that odorous niche of heaven/ Nestles the bird again./
    PPo 8.256 28 The loving nightingale mourns;-cause enow for mourning;-/ Why envies the bird the streaming verses of Hafiz?/ Know that a god bestowed on him eloquent speech./
    PPo 8.260 14 ...what a nest has [Hafiz] found for his bonny bird to take up her abode in!
    Imtl 8.329 11 A man of affairs is afraid to die...because he...is the victim of those who have moulded the religious doctrines into some neat and plausible system...for household use. It is the fear of the young bird to trust its wings.
    Dem1 10.14 22 ...this man [Masollam] inquired the reason of [the multitude's] halting. The augur showed him a bird, and told him, If that bird remained where he was, it would be better for them all to remain;...
    Dem1 10.14 26 The augur showed [Masollam] a bird, and told him, If that bird remained where he was, it would be better for them all to remain; if he flew on, they might proceed; but if he flew back, they must return. The Jew said nothing, but bent his bow and shot the bird to the ground.
    Dem1 10.15 3 The Jew [Masollam]...bent his bow and shot the bird to the ground. This act offended the augur and some others, and they began to utter imprecations against the Jew. But he replied, Wherefore? Why are you so foolish as to take care of this unfortunate bird?
    PerF 10.88 19 ...as the bird on the air...so do nations of men and their institutions rest on thoughts.
    Edc1 10.152 7 Alas for the cripple Practice when it seeks to come up with the bird Theory, which flies before it.
    Edc1 10.155 17 These creatures [in nature] have no value for their time, and [the naturalist] must put as low a rate on his. By dint of obstinate sitting still...bird and beast...begin to return.
    SovE 10.184 1 ...this unity exists in the organization of insect, beast and bird, still ascending to man...
    SovE 10.184 9 Experiment shows that the bird and the dog reason as the hunter does...
    Prch 10.221 19 Unlovely, nay, frightful, is the solitude of the soul which is without God in the world. To...behold the horse, cow and bird, and to foresee an equal and speedy end to him and them;...
    Prch 10.221 21 Unlovely, nay, frightful, is the solitude of the soul which is without God in the world. To...behold the horse, cow and bird, and to foresee an equal and speedy end to him and them;-no, the bird...would disclaim his sympathy...
    Thor 10.467 10 ...the turtle, frog, hyla and cricket, which make the banks [of the Concord River] vocal,-were all known to [Thoreau], and, as it were, townsmen and fellow creatures; so that he felt an absurdity or violence in any narrative of one of these by itself apart, and still more of... in...the specimen of a squirrel or a bird in brandy.
    Thor 10.469 10 [Thoreau] knew how to sit immovable...until the bird, the reptile, the fish, which had retired from him, should come back and resume its habits...
    Thor 10.469 15 [Thoreau] knew the country like a fox or a bird...
    Thor 10.470 20 Presently [Thoreau] heard a note which he called that of the night-warbler, a bird he had never identified...
    Thor 10.470 24 Presently [Thoreau] heard a note which he called that of the night-warbler...the only bird which sings indifferently by night and by day.
    Thor 10.471 5 [Thoreau's] interest in the flower or the bird lay very deep in his mind...
    EWI 11.143 20 [Nature] appoints...no fort or city for the bird but his wings;...
    EdAd 11.382 9 Our eyes/ Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars,/ And strangers to the mystic beast and bird,/ And strangers to the plant and to the mine./
    CPL 11.499 21 [Mary Moody Emerson writes] Is the melancholy bird of night...less gratified than the gay lark...
    PLT 12.17 1 Leaving aside the question which was prior, egg or bird, I believe the mind is the creator of the world...
    CL 12.133 4 The air is wise, the wind thinks well,/ And all through which it blows;/ If plant or brain, if egg or shell,/ Or bird or biped knows./
    Bost 12.193 5 The common eye cannot tell what the bird will be, from the egg...
    Milt1 12.264 26 In like spirit, [Milton] replies to the suspicious calumny respecting his morning haunts. Those morning haunts are where they should be, at home;...up and stirring...in summer, as oft with the bird that first rouses, or not much tardier...
    PPr 12.390 24 How like an air-balloon or bird of Jove does [Carlyle] seem to float over the continent...

bird-fancier, n. (1)

    ShP 4.212 27 ...no veins, no curiosities; no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is [Shakespeare]...

bird-hunting, v. (1)

    LLNE 10.362 27 ...[Charles Newcomb was] a student and philosopher, who found his daily enjoyment not with the elders or his exact contemporaries so much as with the fine boys who were skating and playing ball or bird-hunting;...

birds, n. (72)

    Nat 1.16 7 ...almost all the individual forms [in nature] are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them, as...the wings and forms of most birds...
    Nat 1.18 25 The tribes of birds and insects...follow each other...
    Nat 1.52 25 ...the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers [Shakspeare] finds to be the shadow of his beloved;...
    Nat 1.65 10 We do not understand the notes of birds.
    DSA 1.119 5 The air is full of birds...
    LE 1.167 16 By Latin and English poetry we were born and bred in an oratorio of praises of nature,-flowers, birds, mountains, sun, and moon;...
    MR 1.253 21 To use an Egyptian metaphor, it is not [the people's] will for any long time, to raise the nails of wild beasts and to depress the heads of the sacred birds.
    Hist 2.34 19 Magic and all that is ascribed to it is a deep presentiment of the powers of science. The shoes of swiftness...the power...of understanding the voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction.
    Comp 2.109 12 ...this law of laws [Compensation]...is hourly preached in all markets and workshops by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omnipresent as that of birds and flies.
    Lov1 2.179 2 [The lover's] friends find in [his mistress] a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except...to rainbows and the song of birds.
    Pt1 3.25 23 The pairing of the birds is an idyl...
    Pt1 3.31 23 ...Aesop reports the whole catalogue of common daily relations through the masquerade of birds and beasts;...
    Pt1 3.42 17 Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly...there is Beauty...shed for thee [O poet]...
    Mrs1 3.120 1 In the deserts of Borgoo the rock-Tibboos still dwell in caves, like cliff-swallows, and the language of these negroes is compared by their neighbors to the shrieking of bats and to the whistling of birds.
    PPh 4.57 17 ...the birds of highest flight have the strongest alar bones.
    ET10 5.158 3 Finally, [Roger Bacon announced] it would not be impossible to make machines which by means of a suit of wings, should fly in the air in the manner of birds.
    ET11 5.197 16 The lawyers, said Burke, are only birds of passage in this House of Commons...
    ET12 5.213 12 ...when you have settled it that the universities are moribund, out comes a poetic influence from the heart of Oxford, to mould the opinions of cities, to build their houses as simply as birds their nests...
    F 6.1 3 Birds with auguries on their wings/ Chanted undeceiving things,/ [The bard] to beckon, him to warn;/...
    Wth 6.98 11 Every man may have occasion to consult books which he does not care to possess...pictures also of birds, beasts, fishes, shells, trees, flowers, whose names he desires to know.
    Ctr 6.138 22 To wade in marshes and sea-margins is the destiny of certain birds...
    Bhr 6.177 25 In some respects the animals excel us. The birds have a longer sight...
    CbW 6.267 25 ...'t is strange how tenaciously we cling to that bell-astronomy of a protecting domestic horizon. I find the same illusion in the search after happiness which I observe every summer recommenced in this neighborhood, soon after the pairing of the birds.
    Bty 6.281 17 We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling if he could teach us what the social birds say when they sit in the autumn council...
    Bty 6.292 21 The interruption of equilibrium stimulates the eye to desire the restoration of symmetry, and to watch the steps through which it is attained. This is the charm of...the flight of birds...
    WD 7.164 27 I saw a brave man...constructing his cabinet of drawers for shells, eggs, minerals, and mounted birds.
    Boks 7.219 19 [The communications of the sacred books]...are living characters translatable into every tongue and form of life. I read them on lichens and bark;...they fly in birds, they creep in worms;...
    PI 8.41 2 Now at this rare elevation above his usual sphere...[the poet] is permitted to dip his brush into the old paint-pot with which birds, flowers, the human cheek, the living rock, the broad landscape, the ocean and the eternal sky were painted.
    Res 8.151 19 The first care of a man settling in the country should be to open the face of the earth to himself by a little knowledge of Nature, or a great deal, if he can; of birds, plants, rocks, astronomy;...
    Comc 8.157 3 The rocks, the plants, the beasts, the birds, neither do anything ridiculous, nor betray a perception of anything absurd done in their presence.
    Comc 8.158 4 With the trifling exception of the stratagems of a few beasts and birds, there is no seeming, no halfness in Nature, until the appearance of man.
    PC 8.215 7 ...[Roger Bacon] announced...machines to fly into the air like birds.
    PPo 8.240 19 [Solomon's] counsellor was Simorg, king of birds...
    PPo 8.240 24 By [Simorg] Solomon was taught the language of birds...
    PPo 8.241 6 ...the east wind, at [Solomon's] command, took up the carpet and transported with all that were upon it, whither he pleased,-the army of birds at the same time flying overhead and forming a canopy to shade them from the sun.
    PPo 8.249 27 Hafiz praises...birds, mornings and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and sympathy with every form of beauty and joy;...
    PPo 8.257 1 The cedar, the cypress, the palm, the olive and fig-tree, the birds that inhabit them...are never wanting in these musky verses [of Hafiz]...
    PPo 8.261 20 While roses bloomed along the plain,/ The nightingale to the falcon said/ Why, of all birds, must thou be dumb?/ With closed mouth thou utterest,/ Though dying, no last word to man./
    PPo 8.263 16 Ferideddin Attar wrote the Bird Conversations, a mystical tale, in which the birds, coming together to choose their king, resolve on a pilgrimage to Mount Kaf...
    PPo 8.263 23 In the fable [Ferideddin Attar's Bird Conversations], the birds were soon weary of the length and difficulties of the way...
    PPo 8.265 16 You as three birds are amazed,/ Impatient, heartless, confused:/ Far over you am I raised,/ Since I am in act Simorg./
    Insp 8.274 2 In June the morning is noisy with birds;...
    Edc1 10.155 8 Do you know how the naturalist learns all the secrets...of birds...
    Edc1 10.155 10 When [the naturalist] goes into the woods the birds fly before him...
    Edc1 10.158 12 If a child [in the school] happens to show that he knows any fact about...birds...that interests him and you, hush all the classes and encourage him to tell it so that all may hear.
    Supl 10.165 27 ...there is an inverted superlative...which...hates birds and flowers.
    SovE 10.188 9 Nature is a tropical swamp in sunshine, on whose purlieus we hear the song of summer birds...
    Plu 10.314 4 The soul, incapable of death, suffers in the same manner in the body, as birds that are kept in a cage.
    LLNE 10.356 5 Since the foxes and the birds have the right of it, with a warm hole to keep out the weather, and no more,-a pent-house to fend the sun and rain is the house which lays no tax on the owner's time and thoughts...
    LLNE 10.356 24 [Thoreau] lived extempore from hour to hour, like the birds and the angels;...
    SlHr 10.440 3 [Samuel Hoar] was...fond of birds...
    Thor 10.466 26 ...the birds which frequent the stream [the Concord River], heron, duck, sheldrake, loon, osprey;...were all known to [Thoreau]...
    Thor 10.469 23 Under his arm [Thoreau] carried an old music-book to press plants; in his pocket...a spy-glass for birds...
    Thor 10.473 4 The farmers who employed [Thoreau] as a surveyor soon discovered...his knowledge...of trees, of birds, of Indian remains and the like...
    EWI 11.99 6 We are met to exchange congratulations on the anniversary of an event singular in the history of civilization; a day of reason;...of that which makes us better than a flock of birds and beasts;...
    EWI 11.143 7 We do not wish a world of bugs or of birds;...
    SHC 11.435 22 Our use [of Sleepy Hollow] will not displace the old tenants. The well-beloved birds will not sing one song the less...
    RBur 11.438 8 Praise to the bard! his words are driven,/ Like flower-seeds by the far winds sown,/ Where'er, beneath the sky of heaven,/ The birds of fame have flown./ Halleck.
    RBur 11.442 1 What a love of Nature [in Burns], and, shall I say it? of middle-class Nature. Not like...Moore, in the luxurious East, but in the homely landscape which the poor see around them...birds, hares, field-mice, thistles and heather...
    RBur 11.443 14 ...the birds whistle [Burns's songs]...
    CL 12.135 22 ...Nature has impressed on savage men periodical or secular impulses to emigrate, as upon lemmings, rats and birds.
    CL 12.136 26 ...[Linnaeus] summoned his class to go with him on excursions on foot into the country, to collect plants and insects, birds and eggs.
    CL 12.138 26 [Linnaeus]...examined fishes, insects, birds, quadrupeds;...
    CL 12.151 4 The next day the Hylas were piping in every pool, and a new activity among the hardy birds...
    CL 12.151 17 Man...pumps the sap of all this forest through his arteries; the loquacity of all birds in the morning;...
    CL 12.151 21 In August, when the corn is grown to be a resort and protection to woodcocks and small birds...we observe already that the leaf is sere...
    CW 12.170 11 The gentle deities/ Showed me the love of color and of sounds,/ The innumerable tenements of beauty,/ the miracle of generative force,/ Far-reaching concords of astronomy/ Felt in the plants and in the punctual birds;/...
    CW 12.174 4 [A man in his wood-lot] can fancy that the birds know him and trust him...
    ACri 12.302 15 [Channing] complains of Nature,-too many leaves, too windy and grassy, and I suppose the birds are too feathery and the horses too leggy.
    ACri 12.305 5 Once in the fields with the lowing cattle, the birds, trees and waters...and I cannot tell whether this is Thessaly and Enna, or whether Concord and Acton.
    MLit 12.312 25 ...[the poet] now revolves...what are the birds to me?...
    Let 12.393 26 The sea and the iron road are safer toys for such ungrown people; we are not yet ripe to be birds.

bird's, n. (1)

    WD 7.180 24 You must hear the bird's song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs.

bird-soul, n. (1)

    PPo 8.264 1 The bird-soul was ashamed;/ [The birds'] body was quite annihilated;/ They had cleaned themselves from the dust,/ And were by the light ensouled./ What was, and was not,-the Past,-/ Was wiped out from their breast./

Birmingham, England, adj. (2)

    ET5 5.98 18 Man [in England] is made as a Birmingham button.
    ET14 5.256 2 What did Walter Scott write without stint? a rhymed traveller' s guide to Scotland. And the libraries of verses [the English] print have this Birmingham character.

Birmingham, England, n. (7)

    ET3 5.42 25 ...there is such an artificial completeness in this nation of artificers [England] as if there were a design from the beginning to elaborate a bigger Birmingham.
    ET5 5.97 11 The last Reform-bill [in England] took away political power from a mound, a ruin and a stone wall, whilst Birmingham and Manchester...had no representative.
    ET10 5.162 22 Scandinavian Thor...in England...lends Miollnir to Birmingham for a steam-hammer.
    ET17 5.293 27 The like frank hospitality...I found among the great and the humble, wherever I went [in England]; in Birmingham, in Oxford...
    Wth 6.105 7 If the Rothschilds at Paris do not accept bills, the people at Manchester...at Birmingham, are forced into the highway...
    EWI 11.126 6 It was very easy for manufacturers less shrewd than those of Birmingham and Manchester to see that if the state of things in the islands [of the West Indies] was altered, if the slaves had wages, the slaves would be clothed, would build houses...
    ALin 11.334 6 [The Gettyburg Address] and one other American speech, that of John Brown to the court that tried him, and a part of Kossuth's speech at Birmingham, can only be compared with each other...

Birminghamized, v. (1)

    ET5 5.98 9 The manners and customs of [English] society are artificial;-- made-up men with made-up manners;--and thus the whole is Birminghamized...

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