Legacy to Lessing

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

legacy, n. (2)

    Con 1.300 27 ...the solid columnar stem, which lifts that bank of foliage into the air...is the gift and legacy of dead and buried years.
    CbW 6.271 7 The success which will content [men] is a bargain...a legacy and the like.

legal, adj. (17)

    Pol1 3.210 3 The philosopher, the poet, or the religious man, will of course wish to cast his vote with the democrat...for the abolition of legal cruelties in the penal code...
    ShP 4.200 17 The nervous language of the Common Law...and the precision and substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws govern.
    ET5 5.90 9 The high civil and legal offices [in England] are not beds of ease...
    ET5 5.97 9 [English] social classes are made by statute. Their ratios of power and representation are historical and legal.
    F 6.46 22 ...year after year, we find two men, two women, without legal or carnal tie, spend a great part of their best time within a few feet of each other.
    Elo1 7.80 7 A barrister in England is reputed to have made thirty or forty thousand pounds per annum in representing the claims of railroad companies before committees of the House of Commons. His clients pay not so much for legal as for manly accomplishments...
    Elo1 7.89 27 By applying the habits of a higher style of thought to the common affairs of this world, [the orator] introduces beauty and magnificence wherever he goes. Such a power was Burke's, and of this genius we have had some brilliant examples in our own political and legal men.
    Chr2 10.112 15 ...in America, where are no legal ties to churches, the looseness appears dangerous.
    SovE 10.204 2 There was in the last century a serious habitual reference to the spiritual world, running through diaries, letters and conversation-yes, and into wills and legal instruments also...
    SlHr 10.437 23 At the time when [Samuel Hoar] went to South Carolina... pending his correspondence with the governor and the legal officers, he was repeatedly warned that it was not safe for him to appear in public...
    SlHr 10.438 19 ...when the mob of Charleston was assembled in the streets before his hotel...[Samuel Hoar] considered his duty discharged to the last point of possibility. The force was apparent and irresistible; the legal officer's part was up;...
    SlHr 10.439 11 [Samuel Hoar] was...a man...of a strong understanding, precise and methodical, which gave him great eminence in the legal profession.
    EWI 11.105 26 [Granville] Sharpe protected the [West Indian] slave. In consulting with the lawyers, they told Sharpe the laws were against him. Sharpe would not believe it; no prescription on earth could ever render such iniquities legal.
    EWI 11.136 12 Granville Sharpe filled the ear of the judges with the sound principles that had from time to time been affirmed by the legal authorities...
    FSLC 11.197 15 Great is the mischief of a legal crime.
    AKan 11.257 19 ...I submit that, in a case like this, where citizens of Massachusetts, legal voters here, have emigrated to national territory...I submit that the governor and legislature should neither slumber nor sleep till they have found out how to send effectual aid and comfort to these poor farmers [in Kansas]...
    EurB 12.367 19 Early in life...[Wordsworth] made his election between assuming and defending some legal rights, with the chances of wealth and a position in the world, and the inward promptings of his heavenly genius;...

legate, n. (1)

    Mrs1 3.135 17 Cardinal Caprara, the Pope's legate at Paris, defended himself from the glances of Napoleon by an immense pair of green spectacles.

legend, n. (25)

    SwM 4.145 14 I think of [Swedenborg] as of some transmigrating votary of Indian legend...
    ShP 4.194 10 ...the poet owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple.
    ShP 4.212 10 [Shakespeare] clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments as if they were people who had lived under his roof;...
    ET4 5.49 27 ...we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure races...
    ET4 5.67 19 This union of qualities is fabled in [the Englishmen's] national legend of Beauty and the Beast...
    ET4 5.67 20 This union of qualities [in the English] is fabled...long before, in the Greek legend of Hermaphrodite.
    ET16 5.282 10 Hercules, in the legend, drew his bow at the sun, and the sun-god gave him a golden cup, with which he sailed over the ocean.
    Ctr 6.137 27 In the Norse legend, All-fadir did not get a drink of Mimir's spring (the fountain of wisdom) until he left his eye in pledge.
    Bhr 6.194 12 The legend says [the monk Basle's] sentence was remitted...
    Wsp 6.239 16 [Immortality] is a doctrine too great to rest on any legend...
    Civ 7.22 11 Another step in civility is the change from war, hunting and pasturage, to agriculture. Our Scandinavian forefathers have left us a significant legend to convey their sense of the importance of this step.
    WD 7.175 26 In the Norse legend of our ancestors, Odin dwells in a fisher' s hut...
    WD 7.176 3 In the Greek legend, Apollo lodges with the shepherds of Admetus...
    WD 7.184 21 It is a fine fable for the advantage of character over talent, the Greek legend of the strife of Jove and Phoebus.
    PI 8.32 12 Of course, we know what you say, that legends are found in all tribes,--but this legend is different.
    PI 8.74 10 One man sees a spark or shimmer of the truth and reports it, and his saying becomes a legend or golden proverb for ages...
    QO 8.182 1 ...what we daily observe in regard to the bon-mots that circulate in society...the same growth befalls mythology: the legend is tossed from believer to poet, from poet to believer...
    PC 8.230 8 It is an old legend of just men, Noblesse oblige;...
    Imtl 8.339 19 ...a higher poetic use must be made of the legend [of the Wandering Jew].
    Imtl 8.343 25 [The belief in immortality] cannot rest on a legend;...
    Chr2 10.113 2 The creed, the legend, forms of worship, swiftly decay.
    SovE 10.208 19 The life of those once omnipotent traditions was really not in the legend...
    Scot 11.465 27 [Scott] saw...in his own reading and research such store of legend and renown as won his imagination to their cause.
    ChiE 11.471 7 All share the surprise and pleasure when the venerable Oriental dynasty,-hitherto a romantic legend to most of us-suddenly steps into the fellowship of nations.
    EurB 12.372 4 Godiva is a noble poem that will tell the legend a thousand years.

legendary, adj. (3)

    ET11 5.179 4 The names [of English towns and districts] are excellent,--an atmosphere of legendary melody spread over the land.
    ET14 5.236 6 The ardor and endurance of [English] study...and, generally, the easy exertion of power,--astonish, like the legendary feats of Guy of Warwick.
    MLit 12.333 18 What is Austria? What is England? What is our graduated and petrified social scale of ranks and employments? Shall not a poet redeem us from these idolatries, and pale their legendary lustre before the fires of the Divine Wisdom which burn in his heart?

legends, n. (21)

    UGM 4.3 7 In the legends of the Gautama, the first men ate the earth and found it deliciously sweet.
    ET7 5.123 23 [The English] are very liable in their politics to extraordinary delusions; thus to believe...that the movement of 10 April, 1848, was urged or assisted by foreigners: which, to be sure, is paralleled...by the French popular legends on the subject of perfidious Albion.
    ET13 5.225 13 The chatter of French politics...and the noise of embarking emigrants had quite put most of the old legends out of mind;...
    Elo1 7.71 4 These legends [of story-tellers] are only exaggerations of real occurrences...
    WD 7.176 1 In the Hindoo legends, Hari dwells a peasant among peasants.
    WD 7.176 13 ...it was the rule of our poets, in the legends of fairy lore, that the fairies largest in power were the least in size.
    Boks 7.206 21 [The scholar] can look back for the legends and mythology to the Younger Edda and the Heimskringla of Snorro Sturleson...
    Clbs 7.237 12 In the Norse legends, The gods of Valhalla when they meet the Jotuns, converse on the perilous terms that he who cannot answer the other's questions forfeits his own life.
    OA 7.317 12 ...in our old British legends of Arthur and the Round Table, his friend and counsellor, Merlin the Wise, is a babe found exposed in a basket by the river-side...
    PI 8.32 11 Of course, we know what you say, that legends are found in all tribes,--but this legend is different.
    PPo 8.240 9 The Persian poetry rests on a mythology whose few legends are connected with the Jewish history and the anterior traditions of the Pentateuch.
    PPo 8.242 21 These legends [of Persian kings], with Chiser, the fountain of life, Tuba, the tree of life;...make the staple imagery of Persian odes.
    Insp 8.275 14 The legends of Arabia, Persia and India are of the same complexion as the Christian.
    Imtl 8.349 9 The human mind takes no account of geography, language or legends...
    Dem1 10.13 12 For Spiritism, it shows that no man, almost, is fit to give evidence. Then I say to the amiable and sincere among them, these matters are quite too important than that I can rest them on any legends.
    Chr2 10.114 4 The Church...clings to the miraculous...which has even an immoral tendency, as one sees in Greek, Indian and Catholic legends...
    SovE 10.208 21 The life of those once omnipotent traditions was really not in the legend, but in the moral sentiment and the metaphysical fact which the legends enclosed...
    SovE 10.212 7 We buttress [the moral sentiment] up...with legends, traditions and forms...
    MoL 10.256 3 I distrust all the legends of great accomplishments or performance of unprincipled men.
    Plu 10.296 21 M. Octave Greard, in a critical work on [Plutarch's] Morals, has carefully corrected the popular legends...
    Plu 10.318 6 ...wherever the Cid is relished, the legends of Arthur, Saxon Alfred...there will Plutarch...sit as...laureate of the ancient world.

legged, adj. (1)

    Ctr 6.146 11 ...if...nature has aimed to make a legged and winged creature, framed for locomotion, we must follow her hint...

leggins, n. (1)

    HDC 11.33 13 Some of [the pilgrims], having no leggins, have had the blood trickle down at every step.

leggy, adj. (1)

    ACri 12.302 16 [Channing] complains of Nature,-too many leaves, too windy and grassy, and I suppose the birds are too feathery and the horses too leggy.

legible, adj. (2)

    DSA 1.144 7 When a man comes, all books are legible...
    F 6.9 9 The gross lines are legible to the dull;...

legibly, adv. (1)

    LT 1.284 12 I question if care and doubt ever wrote their names so legibly on the faces of any population.

legion, n. (1)

    PPh 4.53 17 The Roman legion, Byzantine legislation...may all be seen in perspective;...

Legion of Honor, n. (2)

    NMW 4.245 6 ...the crosses of [Napoleon's] Legion of Honor were given to personal valor, and not to family connexion.
    Aris 10.59 16 ...I hear the complaint of the aspirant...that there is no...stern exclusive Legion of Honor...

legions, n. (3)

    Exp 3.66 16 You who see the artist, the orator, the poet, too near...conclude very reasonably that these arts are not for man, but are disease. Yet nature will not bear you out. Irresistible nature made men such, and makes legions more of such, every day.
    NR 3.232 13 The world is full...of secret and public legions of honor;...
    ET5 5.74 20 [The Roman] disembarked his legions [in England], erected his camps and towers...

legislate, v. (3)

    YA 1.374 9 We legislate against forestalling and monopoly;...
    Wth 6.105 23 The basis of political economy is noninterference. The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply. Do not legislate.
    Bty 6.293 23 ...the circumstances may be easily imagined in which woman may speak, vote, argue causes, legislate and drive a coach...if only it come by degrees.

legislated, v. (1)

    FSLC 11.190 21 ...no reasonable person needs a quotation from Blackstone to convince him that white cannot be legislated to be black...

legislates, v. (1)

    Con 1.319 4 ...[the radical] legislates for man as he ought to be;...

legislating, v. (3)

    YA 1.370 23 To men legislating for the area betwixt the two oceans... somewhat of the gravity of nature will infuse itself into the code.
    Wsp 6.225 20 In every variety of human employment...in navigation, in farming, in legislating...there are the working men, on whom the burden of the business falls;...
    FRep 11.531 11 I wish to see America...legislating for all nationalities.

legislation, n. (25)

    Con 1.319 11 The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and...his total legislation is for the present distress...
    YA 1.371 7 ...it cannot be doubted that the legislation of this country should become more catholic and cosmopolitan than that of any other.
    YA 1.374 14 ...the law of self-preservation is surer policy than any legislation can be.
    Pol1 3.200 7 ...foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting;...
    NER 3.280 5 It only needs that a just man should walk in our streets to make it appear how pitiful and inartificial a contrivance is our legislation.
    PPh 4.53 18 The Roman legion, Byzantine legislation...may all be seen in perspective;...
    ET1 5.13 21 ...[Coleridge] compared one island [Malta] with the other [Sicily]...Sicily was an excellent school of political economy; for, in any town there, it only needed to ask what the government enacted, and reverse that, to know what ought to be done; it was the most felicitously opposite legislation to anything good and wise.
    ET10 5.169 14 What befalls from the violence of financial crises, befalls daily in the violence of artificial legislation.
    F 6.11 5 ...all the legislation of the world cannot meddle or help to make a poet or a prince of [a man].
    Wth 6.106 9 ...artifice or legislation punishes itself by reactions, gluts and bankruptcies.
    SovE 10.187 2 'T is a long scale...from the gorilla...to the sanctities of religion, the refinements of legislation...
    HDC 11.65 2 The charges of education and of legislation, at this period, seem to have afflicted the town [Concord];...
    EWI 11.127 7 The House of Commons would...interfere in English politics in the [West Indian] island legislation...
    EWI 11.132 12 Let the senators and representatives of the State [of Massachusetts]...go in a body before the Congress and say that they have a demand to make on them, so imperative that all functions of government must stop until it is satisfied. If ordinary legislation cannot reach it, then extraordinary must be applied.
    FSLC 11.179 23 There are men who are as sure indexes of the equity of legislation...as the barometer is of the weight of the air...
    FSLC 11.195 15 By law of Congress September, 1850, it is a high crime and misdemeanor, punishable with fine and imprisonment, to resist the reenslaving a man on the coast of America. Off soundings, it is piracy and murder to enslave him. On soundings, it is fine and prison not to reenslave. What kind of legislation is this?
    FSLC 11.197 8 Philadelphia...in this auction of the rights of mankind, rescinded all its legislation against slavery.
    FSLC 11.201 22 [Webster] must learn...that the obscure and private who have no voice and care for none, so long as things go well, but who feel the disgrace of the new legislation creeping like miasma into their homes... disown him...
    AKan 11.259 12 I do not know any story so gloomy as the politics of this country for the last twenty years, centralizing ever more manifestly round one spring, and that a vast crime...illustrating the fatal effects of a false position to demoralize legislation...
    ACiv 11.309 17 The end of all political struggle is to establish morality as the basis of all legislation.
    EPro 11.315 7 These [poetic acts] are the jets of thought into affairs, when...the political leaders of the day break the else insurmountable routine of class and local legislation...
    FRep 11.523 1 [Americans] are carless of politics, because they do not entertain the possibility of being seriously caught in meshes of legislation.
    FRep 11.540 25 The end of all political struggle is to establish morality as the basis of all legislation.
    Bost 12.189 13 The [Massachusetts Bay] territory-conferred on the patentees...with...the sole power of legislation...extended from the 40th to the 48th degree of north latitude...
    EurB 12.369 22 The influence [of Wordsworth]...was wafted up and down into lone and into populous places...and soon came to be felt in poetry, in criticism, in plans of life, and at last in legislation.

legislative, adj. (4)

    YA 1.388 8 I find no expression in our state papers or legislative debate...of a high national feeling...
    Aris 10.49 25 ...the town-meeting, the Congress, will not fail to find out legislative talent.
    EWI 11.128 26 There are causes in the composition of the British legislature...which exclude much that is pitiful and injurious in other legislative assemblies.
    TPar 11.288 15 ...[it will be] in the plain lessons of Theodore Parker...in legislative committee rooms, that the true temper and the authentic record of these days will be read.

legislator, n. (1)

    ET13 5.226 4 The wise legislator will spend on temples, schools, libraries, colleges...

legislators, n. (5)

    Pow 6.63 2 ...let these rough riders--legislators in shirt-sleeves...drive as they may, and the disposition of territories and public lands...will bestow promptness, address and reason, at last, on our buffalo-hunter, and authority and majesty of manners.
    Pow 6.65 20 [The Hoosiers and the Suckers] see...how much crime the people will bear;...they have calculated but too justly upon their Excellencies the New England governors, and upon their Honors the New England legislators.
    HDC 11.84 2 I find [in Concord annals]...no eavesdropping legislators...
    EWI 11.136 1 The lives of the advocates [of emancipation in the West Indies] are pages of greatness, and the connection of the eminent senators with this question constitutes the immortalizing moments of those men's lives. The bare enunciation of the theses at which the lawyers and legislators arrived, gives a glow to the heart of the reader.
    EWI 11.139 9 [The steam of human affairs...is very little affected by the activity of legislators.

Legislature, Act of the, n. (1)

    CPL 11.495 11 That town is attractive to its native citizens and to immigrants...if it avail itself of the Act of the Legislature authorizing towns to tax themselves for the establishment of a public library.

legislature, n. (17)

    Art1 2.368 5 Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature...
    ShP 4.198 22 The learned member of the legislature...speaks and votes for thousands.
    Elo1 7.96 24 This man [the sturdy countryman]...is his own...legislature and executive.
    Elo2 8.111 13 ...[an anecdote of eloquence] has a beautiful and prodigious surprise in it. For all can see and understand the means by which a battle is gained...they see...the character and advantages of the ground, so that the result is often predicted by the observer with great certainty before the charge is sounded. Not so in a court of law, or in a legislature.
    EWI 11.112 6 The scheme of the Minister, with such modification as it received in the legislature, proposed gradual emancipation [in the West Indies];...
    EWI 11.114 13 It was feared that the interest of the master and servant [in the West Indies] would now produce perpetual discord between them. In the island of Antigua...these objections had such weight that the legislature rejected the apprenticeship system...
    EWI 11.117 24 The governors [of Jamaica]...were at constant quarrel with the angry and bilious island legislature.
    EWI 11.121 22 The legislature [of Jamaica], in their reply, echo the governor's statement...
    EWI 11.128 16 ...England has the advantage of trying the question [of slavery] at a wide distance from the spot where the nuisance exists; the planters are not, excepting in rare examples, members of the legislature.
    EWI 11.128 23 There are causes in the composition of the British legislature...which exclude much that is pitiful and injurious in other legislative assemblies.
    AKan 11.257 15 We must have aid [for Kansas] from individuals,-we must also have aid from the state. I know that the last legislature refused that aid.
    AKan 11.257 17 I know that lawyers hesitate on technical grounds, and wonder what method of relief [for Kansas] the legislature will apply.
    AKan 11.258 1 ...the governor and legislature should neither slumber nor sleep till they have found out how to send effectual aid and comfort to these poor farmers [in Kansas]...
    ALin 11.330 16 [Lincoln] was thoroughly American...a flatboatman, a captain in the Black Hawk War, a country lawyer, a representative in the rural legislature of Illinois;...
    FRep 11.527 18 The legislature, to which every good farmer goes once on trial, is a superior academy.
    PLT 12.49 20 The difference is obvious enough in Talent between the speed of one man's action above another's. In debate, in legislature, not less in action;...
    ACri 12.302 27 ...this is the ball that is tossed in every court of law, in every legislature and in literature...by sovereignty of thought to make facts and men obey our present humor or belief.

Legislature, n. (3)

    SlHr 10.443 16 ...in his own town, if some important end was to be gained... all parties combined to send Mr. Hoar to the Legislature...
    HDC 11.81 20 It was put to the town of Concord, in October, 1776, by the Legislature, whether the existing house of representatives should enact a constitution for the State?
    CInt 12.115 3 ...either science and literature is a hypocrisy, or it is not. If it be, then resign your charter to the Legislature, turn your college into barracks and warehouses...

legislatures, n. (9)

    Pow 6.65 21 The messages of the governors and the resolutions of the legislatures are a proverb for expressing a sham virtuous indignation, which, in the course of events, is sure to be belied.
    DL 7.110 7 Do not ask [the scholar] to help with his savings...eager agents to lobby in legislatures...
    PC 8.230 27 Around that immovable persistency of yours, statesmen, legislatures, must revolve...
    PerF 10.87 26 ...legislatures listen with appetite to declamations against [the moral sentiment], and vote it down.
    EWI 11.113 27 The colonial legislatures [in the West Indies] received the act of Parliament with various degrees of displeasure...
    FSLN 11.237 11 ...a man cannot steal without incurring the penalties of the thief, though all the legislatures vote that it is virtuous...
    Wom 11.421 4 The objection to [women's] voting is the same as is urged, in the lobbies of legislatures, against clergymen who take an active part in politics;...
    FRep 11.518 10 ...liberal congresses and legislatures ordain...equivocal, interested and vicious measures.
    AgMs 12.363 27 [Edmund Hosmer]...was incorrigible in his skepticism concerning the benefits conferred by legislatures on the agriculture of Massachusetts.

legitimate, adj. (24)

    MR 1.229 9 Let ideas establish their legitimate sway again in society...and the scholars will gladly be lovers...
    Comp 2.95 1 The legitimate inference the disciple would draw was,--We are to have such a good time as the sinners have now;...
    Prd1 2.222 14 [Prudence] is legitimate when it is the Natural History of the soul incarnate...
    Mrs1 3.129 1 In the year 1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile.
    UGM 4.7 18 ...each legitimate idea makes its own channels...
    PNR 4.88 5 ...a very well-marked class of souls, namely those who delight in giving a spiritual, that is, an ethico-intellectual expression to every truth, by exhibiting an ulterior end which is yet legitimate to it,--are said to Platonize.
    Wth 6.95 23 Is not then the demand to be rich legitimate?
    Bty 6.302 15 ...if a man...can take such advantages of nature that all her powers serve him;...this is still the legitimate dominion of beauty.
    Boks 7.209 12 The annals of bibliography afford many examples of the delirious extent to which book-fancying can go, when the legitimate delight in a book is transferred to a rare edition or to a manuscript.
    Elo2 8.117 16 The special ingredients of this force [of eloquence] are... logic; imagination...and then a grand will, which, when legitimate and abiding, we call character...
    Comc 8.163 16 Plutarch happily expresses the value of the jest as a legitimate weapon of the philosopher.
    Grts 8.307 16 ...it is only as [a man] feels and obeys [his bias] that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world.
    Aris 10.47 22 Whoever wants more power than is the legitimate attraction of his faculty, is a politician...
    Aris 10.61 25 Effectual service in his own legitimate fashion distinguishes the true man.
    Aris 10.62 23 ...the genius of the House of Commons, its legitimate expression, is a sneer.
    SovE 10.205 23 If I miss the inspiration of the saints of Calvinism, or of Platonism, or Buddhism, our times are not up to theirs, or, more truly, have not yet their own legitimate force.
    Schr 10.267 8 Action is legitimate and good;...
    FSLN 11.220 9 I saw plainly that the great show their legitimate power in nothing more than in their power to misguide us.
    EdAd 11.387 7 ...the right patriotism consists in the delight which springs from contributing our peculiar and legitimate advantages to the benefit of humanity.
    PLT 12.10 12 ...there is a certain beatitude...to which all men are entitled... and to which their entrance must be in every way forwarded. Practical men...cannot arrive at this. Something very different has to be done,-the resisting this conspiracy of men and material things against the sanitary and legitimate inspirations of the intellectual nature.
    II 12.71 27 The poet works to an end above his will, and by means, too, which are out of his will. Every part of the poem is therefore a true surprise to the reader, like the parts of the plant, and legitimate as they.
    CInt 12.119 27 ...I value [talent] more when it is legitimate...
    EurB 12.371 12 [Tennyson] is...a tasteful bachelor who collects quaint staircases and groined ceilings. We have no right to such superfineness. We must not make our bread of pure sugar. These delicacies and splendors are then legitimate when they are the excess of substantial and necessary expenditure.
    EurB 12.374 19 ...Zanoni pains us and the author loses our respect... because the power with which his hero is armed is a toy, inasmuch as the power does not flow from its legitimate fountains in the mind...

legitimately, adv. (1)

    Int 2.332 14 The immortality of man is as legitimately preached from the intellections as from the moral volitions.

legitimates, n. (1)

    NMW 4.242 4 The people [of Napoleon's France] felt that no longer the throne was occupied and the land sucked of its nourishment, by a small class of legitimates...

legitimation, n. (1)

    Pt1 3.25 16 ...herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's faith that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature with which they ought to be made to tally.

LeGrand, M., n. (1)

    QO 8.181 18 M. Le Grand showed that in the old Fabliaux were the originals of the tales of Moliere, La Fontaine, Boccaccio, and of Voltaire.

legs, n. (27)

    Nat 1.51 12 Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture...
    Exp 3.43 15 The lords of life, the lords of life,--/ I saw them pass,/ In their own guise,/ .../ Little man, least of all,/ Among the legs of his guardians tall,/ Walked about with puzzled look:--/...
    NER 3.257 16 We cannot use our hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms.
    UGM 4.23 7 I like a master standing firm on legs of iron...
    SwM 4.108 5 Manifestly, at the end of the spine, Nature puts out smaller spines, as arms; at the end of the arms, new spines, as hands; at the other end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet.
    ET9 5.147 27 If one of [the English] have...bow legs...he has persuaded himself that there is something modish and becoming in it...
    F 6.33 11 Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses...
    Pow 6.66 19 It is an esoteric doctrine of society that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands and legs;...
    Pow 6.72 10 The men whom in peaceful communities we hold if we can with iron at their legs...this man [Napoleon] dealt with hand to hand...
    Wth 6.86 9 One man has stronger arms or longer legs; another sees by the course of streams and the growth of markets where land will be wanted, makes a clearing to the river, goes to sleep and wakes up rich.
    Wth 6.93 12 Power is what [men of sense] want...power to give legs and feet...to their thought;...
    Ctr 6.131 16 If [nature] wants a thumb, she makes one at the cost of arms and legs...
    Bty 6.298 19 ...short legs which constrain us to short, mincing steps are a kind of personal insult and contumely to the owner;...
    Bty 6.301 10 If a man...can enlarge knowledge,--'t is no matter...whether his legs are straight...
    Bty 6.301 11 If a man...can enlarge knowledge,--'t is no matter...whether his legs are straight, or whether his legs are amputated...
    DL 7.104 21 Mistrusting the cunning of his small legs, [the young American] wishes to ride on the necks and shoulders of all flesh.
    WD 7.183 1 [The savant's] performance is a memoir to the Academy on fish-worms, tadpoles, or spiders' legs;...
    SA 8.82 14 Give me a thought, and my hands and legs and voice and face will all go right.
    SA 8.91 20 ...presidents of the United States are afflicted by rude Western and Southern gossips...until the gossip's immeasurable legs are tired of sitting;...
    LLNE 10.327 26 Demonology is on its last legs.
    Thor 10.462 4 [Thoreau] said he wanted every stride his legs made.
    Thor 10.470 1 ...[Thoreau's] strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor.
    Thor 10.472 5 Snakes coiled round [Thoreau's] legs;...
    HDC 11.33 11 ...[the pilgrims] meet a scorching plain, yet not so plain but that the ragged bushes scratch their legs foully...
    War 11.161 17 ...war is on its last legs;...
    ACiv 11.303 25 The one power that has legs long enough and strong enough to wade across the Potomac offers itself at this hour;...
    Milt1 12.266 2 [Milton] said, he had learned the prudence of the Roman soldier, not to stand breaking of legs, when the breath was quite out of the body.

Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm (6)

    SwM 4.105 3 ...the largest application of principles, had been exhibited by Leibnitz and Christian Wolff, in cosmology;...
    Bhr 6.190 4 Neither Aristotle, nor Leibnitz, nor Junius, nor Champollion has set down the grammar-rules of this dialect [of behavior]...
    WD 7.158 18 ...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...
    Clbs 7.238 20 The same thing took place when Leibnitz came to visit Newton; when Schiller came to Goethe;...
    Edc1 10.133 19 I have hope, said the great Leibnitz, that society may be reformed, when I see how much education may be reformed.
    MLit 12.316 27 Of the perception now fast becoming a conscious fact...that Moses and Confucius, Montaigne and Leibnitz, are not so much individuals as they are parts of man and parts of me, and my intelligence proves them my own,-literature is far the best expression.

Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm (2)

    Nat 1.34 16 [The relation between mind and matter] is the standing problem which has exercised the wonder and the study of every fine genius since the world began; from the era of the Egyptians...to that...of Leibnitz...
    LE 1.161 2 ...do not teach me out of Leibnitz or Schelling...

Leicester, England, adj. (1)

    ET10 5.167 6 The robust rural Saxon degenerates in the mills to the Leicester stockinger...

Leicester, England, n. (2)

    ET11 5.179 10 Cambridge is the bridge of the Cam;...Leicester the castra, or camp, of the Lear, or Leir (now Soar);....
    ET17 5.294 1 The like frank hospitality...I found among the great and the humble, wherever I went [in England];...in Leicester, in Nottingham...

Leicesters, n. (1)

    ShP 4.202 11 There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age mischooses the object on which...all eyes are turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching...the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs and Buckinghams;...

Leicestershire, England, n. (1)

    ET11 5.178 11 Sir Henry Wotton says of the first Duke of Buckingham, He was born at Brookeby in Leicestershire...

Leighton, Robert, n. (2)

    Bost 12.194 1 In our own age we are learning to look, as on chivalry, at the sweetness of that ancient piety which makes the genius of...Jeremy Taylor, Herbert and Leighton.
    Bost 12.195 1 How needful is David, Paul, Leighton, Fenelon, to our devotion.

Leightons, n. (1)

    ET13 5.220 14 ...the age...of the Taylors, Leightons, Herberts;...is gone.

Leila, n. (1)

    PPo 8.242 23 These legends [of Persian kings], with...the romances of the loves of Leila and Medschnun...make the staple imagery of Persian odes.

Leipsic Fair Catalogue, n. (1)

    Humb 11.458 18 One of [Germany's] writers warns his countrymen that it is not the Battle of Leipsic, but the Leipsic Fair Catalogue, which raises them above the French.

Leipsic, Germany, Battle of (1)

    Humb 11.458 17 One of [Germany's] writers warns his countrymen that it is not the Battle of Leipsic, but the Leipsic Fair Catalogue, which raises them above the French.

Leipsig [Leipsic], Germany, (1)

    SwM 4.100 10 [Swedenborg]...devoted himself to the writing and publication of his voluminous theological works, which were printed...at Dresden, Leipsic, London, or Amsterdam.

Leipzig, Germany, adj. (1)

    MoL 10.256 21 ...this big-mouthed talker, among his dictionaries and Leipzig editions of Lysias, had lost his knowledge.

Leir River, England, n. (1)

    ET11 5.179 11 Cambridge is the bridge of the Cam;...Leicester the castra, or camp, of the Lear, or Leir (now Soar);....

leisure, n. (32)

    LT 1.291 3 Have you leisure, power, property, friends?
    Con 1.312 7 ...to thy industry and thrift and small condescension to the established usage,-scores of servants are swarming...to thy command; scores...for thy wardrobe, thy table, thy chamber, thy library, thy leisure;...
    Pt1 3.15 17 Is it only poets, and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with [nature]?
    Mrs1 3.147 27 If the individuals who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe...should pass in review, in such manner as that we could at leisure and critically inspect their behavior, we might find no gentleman and no lady;...
    ShP 4.194 8 [Popular tradition]...in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves [the poet] at leisure and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.
    ShP 4.214 5 Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine, and then proceeds at leisure to etch a million.
    NMW 4.252 1 In intervals of leisure...Napoleon appears as a man of genius...
    GoW 4.288 12 I suppose the worldly tone of [Goethe's] tales grew out of the calculations of self-culture. It was the infirmity of an admirable scholar...who knew where libraries, galleries, architecture, laboratories, savans and leisure were to be had...
    ET1 5.20 9 ...I [Wordsworth] fear [the Americans] lack a class of men of leisure...
    ET2 5.26 3 ...the invitation [to lecture in England] was repeated and pressed at a moment of more leisure...
    ET2 5.32 1 The busiest talk with leisure and convenience at sea...
    ET8 5.142 21 [The English] are ready for leisure...
    Bhr 6.184 14 The theatre in which this science of manners has a formal importance is not with us a court, but dress-circles, wherein, after the close of the day's business, men and women meet at leisure...
    Clbs 7.228 11 I prize the mechanics of conversation. 'T is pulley and lever and screw. To fairly disengage the mass, and send it jingling down, a good boulder,--a block of quartz and gold, to be worked up at leisure in the useful arts of life,--is a wonderful relief.
    Clbs 7.248 1 ...to a club met for conversation a supper is a good basis, as it...puts pedantry and business to the door. All are in good humor and at leisure...
    OA 7.330 23 We remember our old Greek Professor at Cambridge...with nothing to break his leisure after the three hours of his daily classes...
    OA 7.331 25 America is...too full of work hitherto for leisure and tranquillity;...
    PI 8.28 11 ...as soon as this [inspired] soul...at leisure plays with the resemblances and types, for amusement, and not for its moral end, we call its action Fancy.
    SA 8.81 25 ...trying experiments, and at perfect leisure with these posture-masters and flatterers all day, [the babe] throws himself into all the attitudes that correspond to theirs.
    PPo 8.239 12 The Persians and the Arabs, with great leisure and few books, are exquisitely sensible to the pleasures of poetry.
    Insp 8.288 22 In the hotel...I command an astronomic leisure.
    LLNE 10.356 27 [Thoreau]...brought every day a new proposition, as revolutionary as that of yesterday, but different: the only man of leisure in his town;...
    Thor 10.453 12 ...[Thoreau] was very competent to live in any part of the world. It would cost him less time to supply his wants than another. He was therefore secure of his leisure.
    Thor 10.463 4 ...[Thoreau] seemed the only man of leisure in town...
    Carl 10.489 11 If you would know precisely how [Carlyle] talks, just suppose Hugh Whelan (the gardener) had found leisure enough in addition to all his daily work to read Plato and Shakspeare...
    HDC 11.49 16 ...in the clock on the church, [the people of Concord] read their own power, and consider, at leisure, the wisdom and error of their judgments.
    HDC 11.79 26 The great expense of the [Revolutionary] war was borne with cheerfulness [by Concord], whilst the war lasted; but years passed, after the peace, before the debt was paid. As soon as danger and injury ceased, the people were left at leisure to consider their poverty and their debts.
    CPL 11.507 7 ...the book is a sure friend, always ready at your first leisure...
    PLT 12.38 12 The point of interest is here, that these gates [spiritual facts], once opened, never swing back. The observers may come at their leisure...
    CL 12.140 25 We are very sensible of this [power of the air]...when, after much confinement to the house, we go abroad into the landscape, with any leisure to attend to its soothing and expanding influences.
    WSL 12.342 6 From the moment of entering a library and opening a desired book, we cease to be...men of care and fear. What boundless leisure!...
    Trag 12.405 8 I do not know but the prevalent hue of things to the eye of leisure is melancholy.

leisurely, adj. (1)

    PPh 4.73 21 [Socrates is] A pitiless disputant...whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive;...

leisures, n. (4)

    ET14 5.248 9 It is because [Bacon] had...the leisures of the spirit...that he is impressive...
    Bhr 6.187 22 Here comes to me Roland, with a delicacy of sentiment leading and enwrapping him like a divine cloud or holy ghost. 'T is a great destitution to both that this should not be entertained with large leisures...
    WD 7.170 4 The scholar must look long for the right hour for Plato's Timaeus. At last the elect morning arrives, the early dawn...and in its wide leisures we dare open that book.
    Aris 10.55 15 ...the thought has...large leisures and an inviting future.

Leman, Lake, Switzerland, n (1)

    SA 8.94 8 When they showed [Madame de Stael] the beautiful Lake Leman, she exclaimed, O for the gutter of the Rue de Bac!...

lemmings, n. (1)

    CL 12.135 22 ...Nature has impressed on savage men periodical or secular impulses to emigrate, as upon lemmings, rats and birds.

lemon, adj. (1)

    F 6.32 26 The plague in the sea-service from scurvy is healed by lemon juice...

lemon, n. (1)

    PLT 12.32 2 ...each tree can secrete from the soil the elements that form a peach, a lemon, or a cocoa-nut, according to its kind...

lemons, n. (1)

    ET14 5.247 22 [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.

lemures [Lemurs], n. (1)

    ET1 5.15 18 [Carlyle's] talk playfully exalting the familiar objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs...

Lemurs [lemures], n. (2)

    ET1 5.15 18 [Carlyle's] talk playfully exalting the familiar objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs...
    Dem1 10.2 4 In the chamber, on the stairs,/ Lurking dumb,/ Go and come/ Lemurs and Lars./

Lena River, Russia, n. (1)

    Art1 2.369 2 The boat at St. Petersburg, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime.

lend, v. (19)

    DSA 1.139 1 ...there is a commanding attraction in the moral sentiment, that can lend a faint tint of light to dulness...coming in its name...
    LT 1.278 15 To the youth...the temptation is always great to lend himself to public movements...
    SL 2.136 14 We [country folk] have not dollars, merchants have; let them give them. Farmers will give corn;...laborers will lend a hand;...
    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.
    ET5 5.97 26 Solvency is maintained [in England] by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?
    Clbs 7.232 15 Some men love only to talk where they are masters. They like to go...into the shops where the sauntering people gladly lend an ear to any one.
    PI 8.48 9 A little onward lend thy guiding hand,/ To these dark steps a little farther on./ Samson.
    QO 8.189 15 The capitalist of either kind [mental or pecuniary] is as hungry to lend as the consumer to borrow;...
    PC 8.227 18 In our daily intercourse, we...lend ourselves to low fears and hopes...
    PPo 8.250 23 A saint might lend an ear to the riotous fun of Falstaff;...
    Insp 8.268 2 If with light head erect I sing,/ Though all the Muses lend their force,/ From my poor love of anything,/ The verse is weak and shallow as its source./
    Insp 8.289 26 ...the machine with which we are dealing is of such an inconceivable delicacy that whims also must be respected. Fire must lend its aid.
    Edc1 10.146 27 Always genius...desires nothing so much as...to find those who can lend it aid to perfect itself.
    Edc1 10.159 5 Work straight on in absolute duty, and you lend an arm and an encouragement to all the youth of the universe.
    Plu 10.316 8 It would be generous to lend our eyes and ears, nay, if possible, our reason and fortitude to others, whilst we are idle or asleep.
    Thor 10.458 21 On one occasion [Thoreau] went to the University Library to procure some books. The librarian refused to lend them.
    FSLC 11.193 4 There is not a manly Whig, or a manly Democrat, of whom if a slave were hidden in one of our houses from the hounds, we should not ask with confidence to lend his wagon in aid of his escape, and he would lend it.
    FSLC 11.193 5 There is not a manly Whig, or a manly Democrat, of whom if a slave were hidden in one of our houses from the hounds, we should not ask with confidence to lend his wagon in aid of his escape, and he would lend it.
    Wom 11.412 12 ...[women] could not be such excellent artists in this element of fancy if they did not lend and give themselves to it.

lending, v. (3)

    ET11 5.185 25 You cannot wield great agencies without lending yourself to them...
    SlHr 10.440 10 Though rich, [Samuel Hoar was] of a plainness and almost poverty of personal expenditure, yet liberal of his money to any worthy use, readily lending it to young men...
    EPro 11.316 17 [Movement toward liberty]...is as when an orator... suddenly, lending himself to some happy inspiration, announces with vibrating voice the grand human principles involved;...

lendings, n. (1)

    LE 1.178 1 ...out of earnings, and borrowings, and lendings, and losses;... comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

lends, v. (13)

    Nat 1.41 3 ...Nature...lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment.
    Nat 1.66 11 ...the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth, will see that there remains much to learn of his relation to the world...
    Prd1 2.223 16 The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings of a base prudence...a prudence...which never subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends...
    Nat2 3.196 2 ...the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being... and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul.
    GoW 4.273 9 The immense horizon which journeys with us lends its majesty to trifles...
    ET10 5.162 22 Scandinavian Thor...in England...lends Miollnir to Birmingham for a steam-hammer.
    WD 7.173 14 This element of illusion lends all its force to hide the values of present time.
    OA 7.316 11 Nature lends herself to these illusions [of time]...
    PI 8.11 19 ...the facility with which Nature lends itself to the thoughts of man...is as if the world were only a disguised man...
    Aris 10.35 5 ...[the young adventurer] lends himself to each malignant party that assails what is eminent.
    HDC 11.64 11 The public charity seems to have been bestowed in a manner now obsolete [in Concord]. The town lends its commons as pastures, to poor men;...
    SMC 11.348 12 These things are dear to every man that lives,/ And life prized more for what it lends than gives./
    Pray 12.354 10 And next in value, which thy kindness lends,/ That I may greatly disappoint my friends,/ Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,/ They may not dream how thou'st distinguished me./

length, n. (41)

    MN 1.201 7 ...intention might be signified by a straight line of definite length.
    MN 1.203 2 When we are dizzied with the arithmetic of the savant toiling to compute the length of [Nature's] line...we are steadied by the perception that a great deal is doing;...
    SR 2.83 1 ...if the American artist will study...the precise thing to be done by him, considering...the length of the day...he will create a house in which [beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought] will find themselves fitted...
    SL 2.142 2 Somewhere, not only every orator but every man should let out all the length of all the reins;...
    Hsm1 2.258 15 The pictures which fill the imagination in reading the actions of Pericles...Hampden, teach us...that we, by the depth of our living, should...act on principles that should interest man and nature in the length of our days.
    Cir 2.311 21 The length of the discourse indicates the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer.
    Pt1 3.39 23 ...the poet knows well that [what he says] not his; that it is as strange and beautiful to him as to you; he would fain hear the like eloquence at length.
    PPh 4.74 3 ...Meno has discoursed a thousand times, at length, on virtue...
    ShP 4.189 10 ...seeing what men want and sharing their desire, [the hero] adds the needful length of sight and of arm...
    ShP 4.196 5 ...the play [Henry VIII] contains through all its length unmistakable traits of Shakspeare's hand...
    ET2 5.28 4 The mainmast [of our ship]...measured 115 feet; the length of the deck from stem to stern, 155.
    ET3 5.41 16 It is not down in the books...that fortunate day when a wave of the German Ocean burst the old isthmus which joined Kent and Cornwall to France...cutting off an island of eight hundred miles in length...
    ET4 5.70 11 [The English] think...with the Arabs, that the days spent in the chase are not counted in the length of life.
    ET10 5.157 19 Six hundred years ago, Roger Bacon...measured the length of the year;...
    ET16 5.286 1 I know not why in real architecture the hunger of the eye for length of line is so rarely gratified.
    ET16 5.289 20 The length of line [of Winchester Cathedral] exceeds that of any other English church;...
    ET18 5.303 12 In the island [England], they never let out all the length of all the reins...
    Wth 6.87 27 Wealth begins...in giving on all sides by tools and auxiliaries the greatest possible extension to our powers; as if it added...length to the day...
    Ctr 6.162 19 [The finished man of the world] must hold his hatreds...at arm' s length...
    Bty 6.281 5 ...how far off and at arm's length [our science] is from its objects!
    WD 7.179 4 I am of the opinion of Pliny that whilst we are musing on these things, we are adding to the length of our lives.
    OA 7.315 9 [Josiah Quincy]...entered at some length into an Apology for Old Age...
    OA 7.331 21 It must be believed that there is a proportion between the designs of a man and the length of his life...
    PI 8.46 16 ...the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the inhalation and exhalation of the lungs.
    Elo2 8.119 21 Those whom we admire--the great orators--have some habit of heat, and moreover...an art of husbanding it,--as if their hand was on the organ-stop, and could now use it temperately, and now let out all the length and breadth of the power.
    PPo 8.240 27 When Solomon travelled, his throne was placed on a carpet of green silk, of a length and breadth sufficient for all his army to stand upon...
    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...
    Imtl 8.347 16 Future state is an illusion for the ever-present state. It is not length of life, but depth of life.
    PerF 10.82 22 The imagination enriches [the man], as if there were no other; the memory opens all her cabinets and archives; Science her length and breadth;...
    Thor 10.462 4 The length of [Thoreau's] walk uniformly made the length of his writing.
    Thor 10.462 5 The length of [Thoreau's] walk uniformly made the length of his writing.
    Thor 10.482 16 The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon...and, at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.
    LS 11.10 17 The reason why St. John does not repeat [Jesus's] words on this occasion [the Last Supper] seems to be that he had reported a similar discourse of Jesus to the people of Capernaum more at length already...
    War 11.168 21 A man does not come the length of the spirit of martyrdom without some active purpose...
    SMC 11.348 24 ...manhood is the one immortal thing/ Beneath Time's changeful sky,/ And, where it lightened once, from age to age,/ Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage,/ That length of days is knowing when to die./ Lowell, Concord Ode.
    SMC 11.371 26 Every day, for the last eight days, there has been a terrible battle the whole length of the line.
    PLT 12.44 4 ...the true scholar is one who has the power...to hold off his thoughts at arm's length...
    Bost 12.189 16 The [Massachusetts Bay] territory...extended...in length from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
    Milt1 12.278 25 We have offered no apology for expanding to such length our commentary on the character of John Milton;...
    EurB 12.376 27 ...a perception of beauty was the equally indispensable element of the association [society in Wilhelm Meister], by which each was dignified and all were dignified; then each was to obey his genius to the length of abandonment.
    Trag 12.410 6 Come bad chance,/ And we add it to our strength,/ And we teach it art and length,/ Itself o'er us to advance./

lengthen, v. (1)

    F 6.34 4 ...time [steam] shall lengthen...

lengthened, adj. (2)

    SR 2.61 15 An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man;...
    Suc 7.283 10 Our eyes run approvingly along the lengthened lines of railroad and telegraph.

lengthening, adj. (1)

    Imtl 8.321 4 Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know/ What rainbows teach, and sunsets show?/ Verdict which accumulates/ From lengthening scroll of human fates/...

lengthening, v. (1)

    Mem 12.108 24 The acceleration of mental process is equivalent to the lengthening of life.

lens, n. (3)

    Wth 6.116 20 Sir David Brewster gives exact instructions for microscopic observation: Lie down on your back, and hold the single lens and object over your eye, etc., etc.
    QO 8.197 22 ...James Hogg...is but a third-rate author, owing his fame to his effigy colossalized through the lens of John Wilson...
    Supl 10.166 12 Think how much pains astronomers and opticians have taken to procure an achromatic lens.

lenses, n. (4)

    Exp 3.50 6 Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue...
    Exp 3.75 25 ...we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are...
    UGM 4.5 20 Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.
    PPo 8.237 17 Many qualities go to make a good telescope,-as the... achromatic purity of lenses...

lent, v. (7)

    YA 1.391 9 Every great and memorable community has consisted of formidable individuals, who, like the Roman or the Spartan, lent his own spirit to the State and made it great.
    Hist 2.40 26 Broader and deeper we must write our annals...instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes.
    NMW 4.252 10 He delighted to fascinate Josephine and her ladies...by the terrors of a fiction to which his voice and dramatic power lent every addition.
    Wth 6.119 1 The farm yielded no money, and the farmer got on without it. If he fell sick, his neighbors came in to his aid; each gave a day's work...or lent his yoke of oxen, or his horse...
    CInt 12.114 12 When the war came to his own city, [Michaelangelo] lent his genius...
    MAng1 12.220 15 Granacci, a painter's apprentice, having lent [Michelangelo], when a boy, a print of Saint Antony beaten by devils, together with some colors and pencils, he went to the fish-market to observe the form and color of fins and of the eyes of fish.
    Milt1 12.269 8 Questions that involve all social and personal rights...were searched by eyes to which the love of freedom, civil and religious, lent new illumination.

Leo, n. (1)

    Civ 7.30 19 Let us not lie and steal. No god will help. We shall find all their teams going the other way...Orion, Leo, Hercules: every god will leave us.

Leo Tenths, n. (1)

    Wth 6.96 8 Ages derive a culture from the wealth of...Leo Tenths...or whatever great proprietors.

Leon and Castile, Alphonso (1)

    NR 3.238 11 ...Nature has her maligners, as if she were Circe; and Alphonso of Castile fancied he could have given useful advice.

Leonidas, n. (3)

    Nat 1.20 18 ...when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying...are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene to the beauty of the deed?
    Cour 7.255 15 There is a Hercules...or a Cid in the mythology of every nation; and in authentic history, a Leonidas, a Scipio...
    Plu 10.318 11 ...wherever the Cid is relished, the legends of...Bonaparte, and Walter Scott's Chronicles in prose or verse,-there will Plutarch, who told the story of Leonidas, of Agesilaus...sit as...laureate of the ancient world.

leontopodium, Gnaphalium, n. (1)

    Thor 10.484 18 There is a flower known to botanists...which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains... It is called by botanists the Gnaphalium leontopodium, but by the Swiss Edelweisse...

leopard, adj. (2)

    MN 1.205 19 The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things...was but the representative of thee, O rich and various Man!...
    PLT 12.36 9 [Pan] wears a coat of leopard spots or stars.

leopard, n. (2)

    ET4 5.61 8 ...decent and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves [the Normans], who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits, by assuming for their types the...leopard, wolf and snake...
    PI 8.12 24 ...my young scholar does not wish to know what the leopard, the wolf, or Lucia, signify in Dante's Inferno...

leopards, n. (2)

    Pt1 3.16 22 Some stars, lilies, leopards...on an old rag of bunting...shall make the blood tingle...
    Cour 7.256 24 Men are so charmed with valor that they have pleased themselves with being called...leopards...

leper, n. (2)

    Aris 10.42 25 The Cid has a prevailing health that will let him nurse the leper...
    JBS 11.281 2 All gentlemen, of course, are on [John Brown's] side. I do not mean by gentlemen, people of scented hair and perfumed handkerchiefs, but men...who, like the Cid, give the outcast leper a share of their bed;...

lepers, n. (2)

    Con 1.319 20 ...leprosy has grown cunning, has got into the ballot-box; the lepers outvote the clean;...
    SwM 4.135 20 The excess of [Hebraic] influence shows itself [in Swedenborg] in the incongruous importation of a foreign rhetoric. What have I to do, asks the impatient reader, with...beryl and chalcedony;...what with lepers and emerods;...

leprosy, n. (2)

    Con 1.319 19 ...leprosy has grown cunning, has got into the ballot-box;...
    Bhr 6.196 20 ...if you have headache...or leprosy...I beseech you...to hold your peace...

Lepsius, Karl Richard, n. (1)

    Wth 6.95 5 The reader of Humboldt's Cosmos follows the marches of a man whose eyes, ears and mind are armed by all the science, arts, and implements which mankind have anywhere accumulated, and who is using these to add to the stock. So it is with...Lepsius...

Leroux, Paul, n. (1)

    Wsp 6.209 19 When Paul Leroux offered his article Dieu to the conductor of a leading French journal, he replied, La question de Dieu manque d' actualite.

lese-majesty, n. (1)

    MN 1.208 19 Why then goest thou as some Boswell or listening worshipper to this saint or to that? That is the only lese-majesty.

Leslie, Charles Robert, n. (1)

    Scot 11.467 24 Scott] found himself in his youth and manhood and age in the society of...Leslie, Sir William Hamilton, Wilson...

less, adj. (183)

    Nat 1.11 17 The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
    Nat 1.17 19 Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon, was the charm...of a January sunset.
    Nat 1.39 11 Man is greater that he can see [that the beauty of nature shines in his own breast], and the universe less...
    Nat 1.67 12 ...it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.
    AmS 1.106 20 All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude being, - ripened; yes, and are content to be less...
    DSA 1.124 19 In so far as [a man] roves from these [good] ends...he becomes less and less...
    DSA 1.124 20 In so far as [a man] roves from these [good] ends...he becomes less and less...
    LE 1.159 22 If any person have less love of liberty...shall he therefore dictate to you and me?
    LE 1.159 23 If any person have...less jealousy to guard his integrity, shall he therefore dictate to you and me?
    LE 1.161 10 ...see how much you would impoverish the world if you could take clean out of history the lives of Milton, Shakspeare, and Plato...and cause them not to be. See you not how much less the power of man would be?
    MN 1.198 12 In treating a subject so large...I know it is not easy to speak with the precision attainable on topics of less scope.
    LT 1.284 27 Is there less oxygen in the atmosphere?
    LT 1.287 17 ...we think the Genius of this Age more philosophical than any other has been...with less fear, less fable, less mixture of any sort.
    LT 1.287 18 ...we think the Genius of this Age more philosophical than any other has been...with less fear, less fable, less mixture of any sort.
    Con 1.309 2 All your aggregate existences are less to me a fact than is my own;...
    Con 1.316 14 ...[riches] take somewhat for everything they give. I look bigger, but I am less;...
    Con 1.316 16 ...[riches] take somewhat for everything they give. I look bigger, but I am less; I have...more armor, but less courage;...
    Con 1.316 16 ...[riches] take somewhat for everything they give. I look bigger, but I am less; I have...more books, but less wit.
    Tran 1.342 27 ...if any one will take pains to talk with [these separators], he will find that this part is chosen...with some unwillingness...and as a choice of the less of two evils;...
    Hist 2.3 14 Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history.
    SR 2.67 12 Before a leaf-bud has burst, [the rose's] whole life acts;...in the leafless root there is no less.
    SR 2.73 1 ...henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law.
    SR 2.77 16 Prayer that craves...anything less than all good, is vicious.
    Comp 2.109 21 Thou shalt be paid exactly for what thou hast done, no more, no less.
    Comp 2.122 16 Our instinct uses more and less in application to man, of the presence of the soul, and not of its absence;...
    Comp 2.122 19 ...the true, the benevolent, the wise, is more a man and not less, than the fool and knave.
    Comp 2.123 22 Look at those who have less faculty, and one feels sad...
    SL 2.134 7 There is less intention in history than we ascribe to it.
    SL 2.134 20 ...there was less in [men of extraordinary success] on which they could reflect than in another;...
    SL 2.145 26 M. de Narbonne in less than a fortnight penetrated all the secrets of the imperial cabinet.
    Lov1 2.170 12 ...this passion of which we speak [love]...makes the aged participators of it not less than the tender maiden...
    Fdsp 2.195 26 [Our friend's] goodness seems better than our goodness...his temptations less.
    Fdsp 2.210 22 ...wish [your friend] not less by a thought...
    Prd1 2.232 7 [The man of talent's] art is less for every deduction from his holiness...
    Prd1 2.232 8 [The man of talent's] art is...less for every defect of common sense.
    Int 2.334 21 ...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.
    Int 2.342 25 ...if I speak, I define, I confine and am less.
    Art1 2.356 6 A dog, drawn by a master...is a reality not less than the frescoes of Angelo.
    Art1 2.363 19 Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is [art's] end.
    Exp 3.62 2 I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe and is disappointed when anything is less than the best...
    Exp 3.69 17 ...I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal.
    Exp 3.79 16 Sin, seen from the thought, is a diminution, or less;...
    Mrs1 3.139 2 The same discrimination of fit and fair runs out, if with less rigor, into all parts of life.
    Mrs1 3.143 27 There is not only the right of conquest, which genius pretends...but less claims will pass for the time;...
    Gts 3.162 15 Nothing less will content us.
    Pol1 3.204 17 If it be not easy to settle the equity of this question [of property], the peril is less when we take note of our natural defenses.
    Pol1 3.215 20 ...the less government we have the better...
    Pol1 3.215 21 ...the less government we have the better,--the fewer laws, and the less confided power.
    NR 3.238 17 The recluse thinks of men as having his manner, or as not having his manner; and as having degrees of it, more and less.
    NR 3.241 15 The statesman looks at many, and compares the few habitually with others, and these look less.
    NER 3.265 8 ...the men of less faith could not thus believe, and to such, concert appears the sole specific of strength.
    UGM 4.22 16 We live in a market, where is only so much wheat, or wool, or land; and if I have so much more, every other must have so much less.
    UGM 4.33 27 The genius of humanity is the right point of view of history. The qualities abide; the men who exhibit them have now more, now less, and pass away;...
    PPh 4.40 17 How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of night, to be [Plato's] men,--Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, not less;...
    PPh 4.77 7 [Plato's Platonism] shall be the world passed through the mind of Plato,--nothing less.
    SwM 4.107 16 The whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without end, the more or less of heat, light, moisture and food determining the form it shall assume.
    SwM 4.146 7 ...if [Swedenborg] staggered under the trance of delight, the more excellent is the spectacle he saw, the realities of being which beam and blaze through him, and which no infirmities of the prophet are suffered to obscure; and he renders a second passive service to men, not less than the first, perhaps, in the great circle of being...
    MoS 4.175 1 [The levity of intellect] is hobgoblin the first; and though it has been the subject of much elegy in our nineteenth century, from Byron, Goethe and other poets of less fame...I confess it is not very affecting to my imagination;...
    MoS 4.181 6 Others there are to whom the heaven is brass, and it shuts down to the surface of the earth. It is a question of temperament, or of more or less immersion in nature.
    MoS 4.182 15 Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man...[the spiritualist' s] neighbors can not put the statement so that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more faith, and not less.
    ShP 4.193 8 Here [in the Elizabethan drama] is...a shelf full of English history...and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales and Spanish voyages, which all the London 'prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or less skill, by every playwright...
    ShP 4.210 17 Had [Shakespeare] been less, we should have had to consider how well he filled his place...
    ShP 4.218 8 ...when the question is, to life and its materials and its auxiliaries, how does [Shakespeare] profit me? What does it signify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer-Night's Dream, or Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another picture more or less?
    ShP 4.218 14 Had [Shakespeare] been less...we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate...
    NMW 4.235 5 ...in less than no time we buried some thousands of Russians and Austrians under the waters of the lake.
    NMW 4.247 5 We can not...sufficiently congratulate ourselves on this strong and ready actor [Napoleon], who...showed us how much may be accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all men possess in less degrees;...
    ET4 5.53 18 In Ireland are the same climate and soil as in England, but less food...
    ET12 5.211 8 No doubt much of the power and brilliancy of the reading-men [at Oxford] is merely constitutional or hygienic. With a hardier habit and resolute gymnastics, with five miles more walking, or five ounces less eating...the American would arrives at as robust exegesis...
    ET14 5.236 9 The union of Saxon precision and Oriental soaring, of which Shakspeare is the perfect example, is shared in less degree by the writers of two centuries.
    ET14 5.244 24 Burke was addicted to generalizing, but his was a shorter line [than Milton's]; as his thoughts have less depth, they have less compass.
    ET14 5.248 18 Sir David Brewster sees the high place of Bacon, without finding Newton indebted to him, and thinks it a mistake. Bacon occupies it... not by any tutoring more or less of Newton...
    ET16 5.274 23 For the science, [Carlyle] had if possible even less tolerance [than for art]...
    ET16 5.287 14 ...I opened the dogma of no-government and non-resistance... and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, it is true that I have never seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand for this truth, and yet it is plain to me that no less valor than this can command my respect.
    ET18 5.306 22 ...the feudal system can be seen with less pain on large historical grounds.
    F 6.33 2 ...every other pest is not less in the chain of cause and effect...
    F 6.37 26 These are coarse adjustments, but the invisible are not less.
    Pow 6.63 15 Men expect from good whigs put into office by the respectability of the country, much less skill to deal with Mexico...than from some strong transgressor, like Jefferson or Jackson...
    Wth 6.88 7 ...by making his wants less or his gains more, [a man] must draw himself out of that state of pain and insult in which [nature] forces the beggar to lie.
    Wth 6.106 17 ...for all that is consumed so much less remains in the basket and pot...
    Bhr 6.191 14 Jacobi said that when a man has fully expressed his thought, he has somewhat less possession of it.
    Wsp 6.227 7 As men get on in life, they acquire...somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or amused.
    CbW 6.243 11 Who has little, to him who has less, can spare/...
    CbW 6.254 11 Rough, selfish despots serve men immensely...as the infatuations no less than the wisdom of Cromwell;...
    CbW 6.256 22 What is the benefit done by a good King Alfred...or Florence Nightingale, or any lover, less or larger, compared with the involuntary blessing wrought on nations by the selfish capitalists who built the Illinois...roads;...
    CbW 6.264 22 'T is a Dutch proverb that paint costs nothing, such are its preserving qualities in damp climates. Well, sunshine costs less, yet is finer pigment.
    Bty 6.297 3 Not less in England in the last century was the fame of the Gunnings...
    SS 7.12 15 A cold sluggish blood thinks it has not facts enough to the purpose, and must decline its turn in the conversation. But they who speak have no more,--have less.
    Elo1 7.61 13 One man is brought to the boiling-point by the excitement of conversation in the parlor. ... ...and a fifth [needs] nothing less than the grandeur of absolute ideas...
    Elo1 7.74 18 There is a petty lawyer's fluency, which is sufficiently impressive...though it be...nothing more than a facility of expressing with accuracy and speed what everybody thinks and says more slowly; without new information, or precision of thought, but the same thing, neither less nor more.
    DL 7.122 11 ...[Lord Falkland's] house was a university in a less volume...
    Farm 7.142 3 We commonly say that the rich man...can afford independence of opinion and action;--and that is the theory of nobility. But it is the rich man in a true sense, that is to say...solely the man whose outlay is less than his income and is steadily kept so.
    Farm 7.151 6 There has been a nightmare bred in England of indigestion and spleen among the landlords and loom-lords, namely, the dogma that... the land is ever yielding less returns to enlarging hosts of eaters.
    WD 7.161 3 The chain of Western railroads from Chicago to the Pacific has planted cities and civilization in less time than it costs to bring an orchard into bearing.
    WD 7.170 21 'T is pitiful the things by which we are rich or poor...a little more or less stone, or wood, or paint...
    WD 7.173 17 Who is he that does not always find himself doing something less than his best task?
    Boks 7.198 15 You find in [Plato] that which you have already found in Homer...yet with no less security of bold and perfect song, when he cares to use it...
    Boks 7.201 22 ...we must read the Clouds of Aristophanes, and what more of that master we gain appetite for...to know the tyranny of Aristophanes, requiring more genius and sometimes not less cruelty than belonged to the official commanders.
    Boks 7.215 26 A person of less courage...will answer [the question of a vicious marriage] as the heroine [of Jane Eyre] does,--giving way to fate...
    Boks 7.215 27 A person of less courage, that is of less constitution, will answer [the question of a vicious marriage] as the heroine [of Jane Eyre] does,--giving way to fate...
    Clbs 7.229 25 If men are less when together than they are alone, they are also in some respects enlarged.
    Clbs 7.235 14 However courteously we conceal it, it is social rank and spiritual power that are compared; whether in the parlor...or the chamber of science,--which are only less or larger theatres for this competition.
    Cour 7.255 2 ...here is one who, seeing the wishes of men, knows how to come at their end;...looks at all men as wax for his hands; takes command of them as...the man that knows more does of the man that knows less...
    Suc 7.287 5 I don't know but we and our race elsewhere set a higher value on wealth, victory and coarse superiority of all kinds, than other men,--have less tranquillity of mind...
    Suc 7.299 27 ...what is the ocean but cubic miles of water? a little more or less signifies nothing.
    Suc 7.310 27 ...this witty malefactor [the cynic] makes [the most sanguine' s] little hope less with satire and skepticism...
    OA 7.325 13 I count it another capital advantage of age, this, that a success more or less signifies nothing.
    PI 8.5 14 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 grub and fly...
    PI 8.59 17 The Norsemen have no less faith in poetry and its power...
    PI 8.69 17 Shakspeare could no doubt have been disagreeable, had he less genius...
    PI 8.69 25 It is not style or rhymes, or a new image more or less that imports, but sanity;...
    PI 8.72 22 A little more or less skill in whistling is of no account.
    SA 8.79 24 'T is an inestimable hint that I owe to a few persons of fine manners, that they make behavior the very first sign of force,--behavior, and not performance...or much less, wealth.
    SA 8.83 6 'T is a great point in a gallery, how you hang pictures; and not less in society, how you seat your party.
    SA 8.84 22 Less credit will there be? You are mistaken.
    Res 8.149 26 Whether larger or less, these strokes and all exploits rest at last on the wonderful structure of the mind.
    Comc 8.165 27 Our brethren of New England use/ Choice malefactors to excuse,/ And hang the guiltless in their stead,/ Of whom the churches have less need;/...
    QO 8.193 14 We admire that poetry which no man wrote,-no poet less than the genius of humanity itself...
    QO 8.196 5 It is a familiar expedient of brilliant writers, and not the less of witty talkers, the device of ascribing their own sentence to an imaginary person...
    QO 8.197 18 Dumont was exalted by being used by Mirabeau, by Bentham and by Sir Philip Francis, who, again, was less than his own Junius;...
    PC 8.229 2 It happens sometimes that poets do not believe their own poetry; they are so much the less poets.
    PPo 8.238 19 ...life [in the East] hangs on the contingency of a skin of water more or less.
    Grts 8.301 18 Our aim is no less than greatness;...
    Grts 8.307 18 [A man's bias] is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path, with more or less variation from any other man's.
    Grts 8.316 20 We must have some charity for the sense of the people, which admires natural power, and will elect it over virtuous men who have less.
    Imtl 8.324 9 ...I read in the second book of Herodotus this memorable sentence: The Egyptians are the first of mankind who have affirmed the immortality of the soul. Nor do I read it with less interest that the historian connects it presently with the doctrine of metempsychosis;...
    Imtl 8.337 18 All the comfort I have found teaches me to confide that I shall not have less in times and places that I do not yet know.
    PerF 10.71 26 When the heat is less here it is not lost, but more heat is there.
    PerF 10.72 4 When life is less here, it spawns there.
    PerF 10.78 14 ...not less [than Memory, Fancy, Imagination, Eloquence], method, patience, self-trust, perseverance, love, desire of knowledge, the passion for truth. These are the angels that take us by the hand...
    Chr2 10.96 24 Though Love repine, and Reason chafe,/ There came a voice without reply,/ 'T is man's perdition to be safe,/ When for the truth he ought to die./ Such is the difference of the action of the heart within and of the senses without. One is enthusiasm, and the other more or less amounts of horse-power.
    Chr2 10.107 14 ...it by no means follows, because those [earlier religious] offices are much disused, that the men and women are irreligious; certainly not that they have less integrity or sentiment...
    Chr2 10.108 21 ...all the dogmas rest on morals, and...it is only a question of youth or maturity, of more or less fancy in the recipient;...
    Chr2 10.121 3 The more reason, the less government.
    Supl 10.173 21 ...the luminous object...is luminous because it is burning up; and if the powers are disposed for display, there is all the less left for use and creation.
    SovE 10.184 8 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 10.184 19 I see the unity of thought and of morals running through all animated Nature; there is no difference of quality, but only of more and less.
    Prch 10.224 23 ...it is as if [a man] were ten or twenty less men than himself, acting at discord with one another...
    Schr 10.272 14 Union Pacific stock is not quite private property, but the quality and essence of the universe is in that also. Have we less interest in ships or in shops...
    Plu 10.297 12 Whatever is eminent in fact or in fiction...came to [Plutarch' s] pen with more or less fulness of record.
    Plu 10.310 24 [Plutarch] quotes Thucydides's saying that not the desire of honor only never grows old, but much less also the inclination to society and affection to the State...
    Plu 10.313 6 When you are persuaded in your mind that you cannot either offer or perform anything more agreeable to the gods than the entertaining a right notion of them, you will then avoid superstition as a no less evil than atheism.
    MMEm 10.403 4 [Mary Moody Emerson] had a deep sympathy with genius. When it was unhallowed, as in Byron, she had none the less...
    MMEm 10.421 21 In a religious contemplative public [our civilization] would have less outward variety, but simpler and grander means;...
    MMEm 10.423 13 War devastates the conscience of men, yet corrupt peace does not less.
    Thor 10.453 10 ...[Thoreau] was very competent to live in any part of the world. It would cost him less time to supply his wants than another.
    Thor 10.478 21 Himself of a perfect probity, [Thoreau] required not less of others.
    LS 11.13 1 ...[the disciples] were bound together by the memory of Christ, and nothing could be more natural than...that what was done with peculiar propriety by them, his personal friends, with less propriety should come to be extended to their companions also.
    EWI 11.139 21 The tendency of things runs steadily to this point, namely... to give [every man] so much power as he naturally exerts,-no more, no less.
    FSLC 11.180 23 ...we must transfer our vaunt to the country, and say, with a little less confidence, no fugitive man can be arrested here;...
    FSLC 11.183 21 I question the value of our civilization, when I see that the public mind had never less hold of the strongest of all truths.
    FSLC 11.199 21 ...Mr. Webster can judge whether this sort of solar microscope brought to bear on his law is likely to make opposition less.
    FSLN 11.221 19 I remember [Webster's] appearance at Bunker's Hill. There was the Monument, and here was Webster. He knew well that a little more or less of rhetoric signified nothing...
    AKan 11.257 6 I think we are to give largely, lavishly, to these [Kansas] men. And we must prepare to do it. We must learn to do with less...
    AKan 11.261 22 ...I borrow the language of an eminent man, used long since, with far less occasion: If that be law, let the ploughshare be run under the foundations of the Capitol;...
    TPar 11.287 15 [Theodore Parker] came at a time when, to the irresistible march of opinion, the forms still retained by the most advanced sects showed loose and lifeless, and he, with something less of affectionate attachment to the old, or with more vigorous logic, rejected them.
    ALin 11.333 17 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...
    SMC 11.359 4 The older among us can well remember [George Prescott]... not a trace of fierceness, much less of recklessness...
    Koss 11.398 14 We [people of Concord] please ourselves that in you [Kossuth] we meet...a man so truly in love with the greatest future, that he cannot be diverted to any less.
    Wom 11.406 24 Plato said, Women are the same as men in faculty, only less in degree.
    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...
    FRO1 11.478 14 ...[the church] cannot inspire the enthusiasm...which makes the romance of history. For that enthusiasm you must have something greater than yourselves, and not less.
    FRO1 11.478 20 ...in churches, every healthy and thoughtful mind finds itself in something less;...
    CPL 11.507 16 ...it is a disadvantage not to have read the book your mates have read...so that...you shall understand their allusions to it, and not give it more or less emphasis than they do.
    FRep 11.519 13 The spirit of our political action, for the most part, considers nothing less than the sacredness of man.
    FRep 11.530 24 The spread eagle must fold his foolish wings and be less of a peacock;...
    FRep 11.541 17 The genius of the country has marked out our true policy,-opportunity. Opportunity...of personal power, and not less of wealth;...
    PLT 12.10 2 ...there is a certain beatitude,-I can call it nothing less,-to which all men are entitled...
    PLT 12.26 14 Scholars say that if they return to the study of a new language after some intermission, the intelligence of it is more and not less.
    PLT 12.33 19 Newton did not exercise more ingenuity but less than another to see the world.
    PLT 12.59 3 ...becoming somewhat else is the perpetual game of Nature, and death the penalty of standing still. 'T is not less in thought.
    II 12.65 15 [Instinct] is that which never pretends: nothing seems less, nothing is more.
    II 12.72 5 The poetic state given, a little more or a good deal more or less performance seems indifferent.
    II 12.82 3 A man of more comprehensive view can always see with good humor the seeming opposition of a powerful talent which has less comprehension.
    CInt 12.117 21 I presently know whether my companion has more candor or less...
    CInt 12.117 22 I presently know whether my companion has...more hope for men or less...
    CInt 12.130 5 My friend, stretch a few threads over a common Aeolian harp, and put it in your window, and listen to what it says of times and the heart of Nature. I do not think that you will believe that the miracle of Nature is less...
    CL 12.148 8 Some English reformers thought...that, if there were no cows to pasture, less land would suffice.
    CL 12.166 7 We know already what matter is, and more or less of it does not signify.
    Bost 12.186 9 What Vasari said...of the republican city of Florence might be said of Boston; that the desire for glory and honor is powerfully generates by the air of that place...whereby...all labor by every means to be foremost. We find no less stimulus in our native air;...
    Bost 12.186 10 What Vasari said...of the republican city of Florence might be said of Boston;...all labor by every means to be foremost. We find...not less ambition in our blood...
    MAng1 12.230 4 Several statues [by Michelangelo] of less fame, and bas-reliefs, are in Rome and Florence and Paris.
    Milt1 12.247 8 ...the new-found book having in itself less attraction than any other work of Milton, the curiosity of the public as quickly subsided...
    Milt1 12.264 18 [Milton] states these things, he says, to show that...a certain reservedness of natural disposition and moral discipline...was enough to keep him in disdain of far less incontinences that these that had been charged on him.

less, adv. (251)

    Nat 1.11 17 The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
    Nat 1.17 19 Not less excellent...was the charm...of a January sunset.
    Nat 1.31 3 A man conversing in earnest...will find that a material image more or less luminous arises in his mind...
    Nat 1.55 5 ...the philosopher, not less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of things to the empire of thought.
    AmS 1.112 11 Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote.
    DSA 1.133 10 The injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching is not less flagrant to Jesus than to the souls which it profanes.
    LE 1.155 9 ...I am not less glad or sanguine at the meeting of scholars, than when, a boy, I first saw the graduates of my own College assembled at their anniversary.
    LE 1.170 1 ...not less is there a relation of beauty between my soul and the dim crags of Agiochook up there in the clouds.
    LE 1.172 7 The book of philosophy is...no more inspiring fact than another, and no less;...
    LE 1.183 24 Not the less let [the scholar] be cold and true...
    MR 1.230 24 The employments of commerce are not intrinsically unfit for a man, or less genial to his faculties;...
    MR 1.231 4 Has [the young man] genius and virtue? the less does he find [the employments of commerce] fit for him to grow in...
    MR 1.232 18 ...the general system of our trade...is not measured by the exact law of reciprocity, much less by the sentiments of love and heroism...
    LT 1.276 9 The impulse [of Reform] is good, and the theory; the practice is less beautiful.
    LT 1.284 10 I think men never loved life less.
    YA 1.369 22 ...he who merely uses it as a support...to his manufactory, values [the land] less.
    Hist 2.6 2 ...all [laws] express more or less distinctly some command of this supreme, illimitable essence [the universal nature].
    Hist 2.22 21 The antagonism of the two tendencies [Nomadism and Agriculture] is not less active in individuals...
    Hist 2.31 9 The Prometheus Vinctus is the romance of skepticism. Not less true to all time are the details of that stately apologue.
    Hist 2.35 25 ...along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another history goes daily forward,--that of the external world,--in which he is not less strictly implicated.
    Hist 2.37 12 One may say a gravitating solar system is already prophesied in the nature of Newton's mind. Not less does the brain of Davy or of Gay-Lussac... anticipate the laws of organization.
    SR 2.48 13 So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm...
    Comp 2.101 21 The microscope cannot find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little.
    Comp 2.115 12 ...the doctrine...that it is impossible to get anything without its price,--is not less sublime in the columns of a leger than in the budgets of states...
    SL 2.133 22 The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues the better we like him.
    SL 2.134 5 Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over will in all practical life.
    SL 2.144 13 Those facts, words, persons, which dwell in [a man's] memory without his being able to say why, remain because they have a relation to him not less real for being as yet unapprehended.
    SL 2.148 13 As in dreams, so in the scarcely less fluid events of the world every man sees himself in colossal...
    SL 2.157 21 Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so.
    SL 2.163 7 Shall I...imagine my being here impertinent? less pertinent than Epaminondas or Homer being there?...
    Fdsp 2.196 21 Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are. Their essence is not less beautiful than their appearance...
    Fdsp 2.213 2 The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood.
    Fdsp 2.216 4 [My friends] shall give me that which properly they cannot give, but which emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by any relations less subtile and pure.
    Prd1 2.227 1 ...let [a man] accept and hive every fact of chemistry, natural history and economics; the more he has, the less is he willing to spare any one.
    Prd1 2.227 10 The application of means to ends insures victory and the songs of victory not less in a farm or a shop than in the tactics of party or of war.
    OS 2.273 13 Is the teaching of Christ less effective now than it was when first his mouth was opened?
    OS 2.278 1 ...the best minds, who love truth for its own sake, think much less of property in truth.
    OS 2.282 10 What was in the case of these remarkable persons a ravishment, has, in innumerable instances in common life, been exhibited in less striking manner.
    OS 2.288 19 [Genius] is...more like and not less like other men.
    OS 2.289 8 The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, and then we think less of his compositions.
    OS 2.297 4 ...man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders;...
    Cir 2.318 2 I own I am gladdened...not less by beholding in morals that unrestrained inundation of the principle of good...
    Int 2.341 18 A self-denial no less austere than the saint's is demanded of the scholar.
    Int 2.343 6 ...a true and natural man contains and is the same truth which an eloquent man articulates; but in the eloquent man, because he can articulate it, it seems something the less to reside...
    Int 2.345 2 ...whosoever propounds to you a philosophy of the mind, is only a more or less awkward translator of things in your consciousness...
    Art1 2.356 1 A squirrel leaping from bough to bough...fills the eye not less than a lion...
    Pt1 3.3 22 We were put into our bodies...but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former.
    Pt1 3.19 6 ...the poet sees [the factory-village and the railway] fall within the great Order not less than the beehive or the spider's geometrical web.
    Pt1 3.25 20 A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a seashell...
    Exp 3.50 17 There are...only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament.
    Mrs1 3.127 3 ...the youth finds himself in a more transparent atmosphere, wherein life is a less troublesome game...
    Mrs1 3.137 23 Not less I dislike a low sympathy of each with his neighbor' s needs.
    Nat2 3.186 12 [Nature]...has secured the symmetrical growth of the [the child's] bodily frame by all these attitudes and exertions,--an end of the first importance, which could not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own.
    Nat2 3.187 19 Not less remarkable is the overfaith of each man in the importance of what he has to do or say.
    Nat2 3.189 13 ...perhaps the discovery...that though we should hold our peace the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our zeal.
    Nat2 3.195 24 In these checks and impossibilities...we find our advantage, not less than in the impulses.
    Pol1 3.221 18 Not the less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of this enthusiasm...
    NR 3.223 7 Not less are summer mornings dear/ To every child they wake/...
    NR 3.230 17 We conceive distinctly enough the French, the Spanish, the German genius, and it is not the less real that perhaps we should not meet in either of those nations a single individual who corresponded with the type.
    NER 3.265 26 ...concert is...neither more nor less potent, than individual force.
    UGM 4.30 8 Presently a dot appears on the animal [the monad], which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes two perfect animals. The ever-proceeding detachment appears not less in all thought and in society.
    UGM 4.32 12 Ask the great man if there be none greater. His companions are; and not the less great but the more that society cannot see them.
    PPh 4.66 13 Those of you who were the worthy ones in the state of ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon as you embrace it. Plato was not less firm.
    PPh 4.73 14 ...[Socrates] is...a man who was willingly confuted if he did not speak the truth, and who willingly confuted others asserting what was false; and not less pleased when confuted than when confuting;...
    PNR 4.85 4 [Plato] saw...that the world was throughout mathematical;... there is just so much water and slate and magnesia; not less are the proportions constant of the moral elements.
    PNR 4.86 14 ...the connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication must be not less magnificent.
    SwM 4.135 3 Palestine is ever the more valuable as a chapter in universal history, and ever the less an available element in education.
    SwM 4.135 27 The more coherent and elaborate the system, the less I like it.
    SwM 4.137 13 [Swedenborg] is...like Montaigne's parish priest, who, if a hail-storm passes over the village, thinks the day of doom is come, and the cannibals already have got the pip. Swedenborg confounds us not less with the pains of Melancthon and Luther and Wolfius...
    SwM 4.142 4 Shall the archangels be less majestic and sweet than the figures that have actually walked the earth?
    SwM 4.146 9 ...if [Swedenborg] staggered under the trance of delight, the more excellent is the spectacle he saw, the realities of being which beam and blaze through him...and he renders a second passive service to men... and, in the retributions of spiritual nature, not less glorious or less beautiful to himself.
    MoS 4.152 15 After dinner, a man believes less, denies more...
    MoS 4.168 10 I know not anywhere the book that seems less written [than Montaigne's Essays].
    MoS 4.178 10 ...through all the offices, learned, civil and social, can detect the child. We are not the less necessitated to dedicate life to them.
    ShP 4.192 9 [The Elizabethan theatre] had become, by all causes, a national interest...not a whit less considerable because it was cheap and of no account...
    ShP 4.216 8 Not less sovereign and cheerful,--much more sovereign and cheerful, is the tone of Shakspeare.
    GoW 4.261 17 Not a foot steps into the snow...but prints, in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march.
    GoW 4.262 22 The gardener saves every slip and seed and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair.
    GoW 4.274 1 [Goethe]...showed that the dulness and prose we ascribe to the age was only another of [Proteus's] masks...that he...was not a whit less vivacious or rich in Liverpool or the Hague than once in Rome or Antioch.
    GoW 4.281 22 If [the writer] can not rightly express himself to-day, the same things subsist and will open themselves to-morrow. There lies the burden on his mind,--the burden of truth to be declared,--more or less understood;...
    GoW 4.284 11 [Goethe] has no aims less large than the conquest of universal nature...
    ET3 5.36 1 ...[England] has, in the last centuries...stamped the knowledge, activity and power of mankind with its impress. Those who resist it do not feel it or obey it less.
    ET3 5.36 12 The American is only the continuation of the English genius into new conditions, more or less propitious.
    ET3 5.37 10 ...the English interest us a little less within a few years;...
    ET4 5.48 24 Trades and professions carve their own lines on face and form. Certain circumstances of English life are not less effective;...
    ET4 5.54 21 I found plenty of well-marked English types...a Norman type, with the complacency that belongs to that constitution. Others who might be Americans, for any thing that appeared in their complexion or form; and their speech was much less marked and their thought much less bound.
    ET4 5.54 22 I found plenty of well-marked English types...a Norman type, with the complacency that belongs to that constitution. Others who might be Americans, for any thing that appeared in their complexion or form; and their speech was much less marked and their thought much less bound.
    ET6 5.108 21 The sentiment of Imogen in Cymbeline is copied from English nature; and not less the Portia of Brutus...
    ET7 5.120 8 If war do not bring in its sequel new trade, better agriculture and manufactures...no prosperity could support it; much less a nation decimated for conscripts and out of pocket, like France.
    ET7 5.123 26 A slow temperament makes [the English] less rapid and ready than other countrymen...
    ET8 5.131 4 [The English] are headstrong believers and defenders of their opinion, and not less resolute in maintaining their whim and perversity.
    ET8 5.140 6 King Harold gave [Haldor] this testimony, that he, among all his men, cared least about doubtful circumstances...for whatever turned up, he...never slept less nor more on account of them...
    ET8 5.141 17 Does the early history of each tribe show the permanent bias, which, though not less potent, is masked as the tribe spreads its activity into colonies, commerce, codes, arts, letters?
    ET11 5.176 23 I have met somewhere with a historiette, which, whether more or less true in its particulars, carries a general truth.
    ET11 5.191 1 Of course there is another side to this gorgeous show [of English aristocracy]. Every victory was the defeat of a party only less worthy.
    ET13 5.224 11 [The English] put up no Socratic prayer, much less any saintly prayer for the Queen's mind;...
    ET14 5.234 10 [The hard English mentality] is not less seen in poetry.
    ET14 5.256 24 ...the grave old [English] poets...heeded their designs, and less considered the finish.
    ET15 5.269 9 [The London Times] makes rude work with the Board of Admiralty. The Bench of Bishops is still less safe.
    ET17 5.293 6 A finer hospitality made many private houses [in London] not less known and dear.
    F 6.4 6 If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty...
    F 6.8 23 ...these shocks and ruins are less destructive to us than the stealthy power of other laws which act on us daily.
    F 6.13 4 To say it less sublimely,-in the history of the individual is always an account of his condition...
    F 6.19 1 ...not less work the laws of repression...
    F 6.24 15 [A man] shall have not less the flow, the expansion, and the resistance of [the river, the oak, the mountain].
    Pow 6.64 10 The same elements are always present, only sometimes these conspicuous, and sometimes those; what was yesterday foreground, being to-day background;--what was surface, playing now a not less effective part as basis.
    Pow 6.81 24 The world-mill is more complex than the calico-mill, and the architect stooped less.
    Wth 6.86 7 ...the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving...
    Wth 6.88 13 ...[nature]...takes away warmth, laughter, sleep, friends and daylight, until [a man] has fought his way to his own loaf. Then, less peremptorily but still with sting enough, she urges him to the acquisition of such things as belong to him.
    Wth 6.104 5 If you take out of State Street the ten honestest merchants and put in ten roguish persons controlling the same amount of capital...the highways will be less secure;...
    Wth 6.104 7 If you take out of State Street the ten honestest merchants and put in ten roguish persons controlling the same amount of capital...the judge will sit less firmly on the bench...
    Wth 6.104 8 If you take out of State Street the ten honestest merchants and put in ten roguish persons controlling the same amount of capital...the judge will sit less firmly on the bench, and his decisions be less upright;...
    Wth 6.123 23 Not less within doors a system settles itself paramount and tyrannical over master and mistress...
    Ctr 6.143 2 Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod, horse and boat, are all educators, liberalizers; and so are dancing, dress and the street talk; and provided only the boy...is of a noble and ingenuous strain, these will not serve him less than the books.
    Ctr 6.156 26 ...if [solitude] can be shared between two or more than two, it is happier and not less noble.
    Bhr 6.169 2 The soul which animates nature is not less significantly published in the figure...of animated bodies, than in its last vehicle of articulate speech.
    Wsp 6.203 5 Men as naturally make a state, or a church, as caterpillars a web. If they were more refined, it would be less formal...
    Wsp 6.204 7 Nature has...certain proportions in which oxygen and azote combine, and not less a harmony in faculties...
    Wsp 6.214 21 I do not think [skepticism] can be cured or stayed by any modification of theologic creeds, much less by theologic discipline.
    Wsp 6.219 11 ...if in sidereal ages gravity and projection keep their craft...a secreter gravitation, a secreter projection rule not less tyrannically in human history...
    CbW 6.262 16 In our life and culture everything is worked up and comes in use,--passion, war, revolt, bankruptcy, and not less, folly and blunders...
    CbW 6.266 15 My countrymen are not less infatuated with the rococo toy of Italy.
    Bty 6.286 25 ...not less does nature furnish us with every sign of grace and goodness.
    Ill 6.310 15 ...on looking upwards [in the Mammoth Cave], I saw or seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars glimmering more or less brightly over our heads...
    Ill 6.315 19 Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance...
    SS 7.1 7 ...nor loved [Seyd] less/ Stately lords in palaces/...
    Civ 7.33 20 Not the less the popular measures of progress will ever be the arts and the laws.
    Civ 7.34 20 Montesquieu says: Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free; and the remark holds not less but more true of the culture of men than of the tillage of land.
    Art2 7.51 1 The mind that made the world is not one mind, but the mind. And every work of art is a more or less pure manifestation of the same.
    DL 7.112 16 If the children...are...schooled and at home fostered by the parents,--then does the hospitality of the house suffer; friends are less carefully bestowed...
    DL 7.112 16 If the children...are...schooled and at home fostered by the parents,--then does the hospitality of the house suffer;...the daily table [is] less catered.
    DL 7.117 17 [A house] stands there under the sun and moon to ends analogous, and not less noble than theirs.
    DL 7.124 17 ...we soon catch the trick of each man's conversation, and knowing his two or three main facts, anticipate what he thinks of each new topic that rises. It is scarcely less perceivable in educated men, so called, than in the uneducated.
    Farm 7.147 24 The roots that shot deepest, and the stems of happiest exposure, drew the nourishment from the rest, until the less thrifty perished and manured the soil for the stronger...
    Boks 7.189 23 ...it is not less true that there are books which are of that importance in a man's private experience as to verify for him the fables of Cornelius Agrippa...
    Boks 7.200 2 ...Plutarch's Morals is less known...
    Boks 7.201 5 ...Plato's [delineation of Athenian manners] has merits of every kind,--being...a picture of a feast of wits, not less descriptive than Aristophanes;...
    Clbs 7.229 14 [The student] seeks intelligent persons, whether more wise or less wise than he, who will give him provocation...
    Clbs 7.249 27 One likes in a companion a phlegm which it is a triumph to disturb, and, not less, to make in an old acquaintance discoveries of scope and power through the advantage of an inspiring subject.
    Cour 7.265 5 ...men with little imagination are less fearful;...
    Suc 7.287 6 I don't know but we and our race elsewhere set a higher value on wealth, victory and coarse superiority of all kinds, than other men...are less easily contented.
    PI 8.40 20 These successes are not less admirable and astonishing to the poet than they are to his audience.
    PI 8.49 8 ...the elemental forces have their...their own grand strains of harmony not less exact...
    PI 8.72 15 The problem of the poet is...to give the pleasure of color, and be not less the most powerful of sculptors.
    SA 8.81 1 ...he who has not this fine garment of behavior is studious of dress, and then not less of house and furniture and pictures and gardens...
    SA 8.88 5 There are always slovens in State Street or Wall Street, who are not less considered.
    SA 8.101 17 ...the heroic father did not surely have heroic sons, and still less surely heroic grandsons;...
    Elo2 8.122 23 If indignation makes verses, as Horace says, it is not less true that a good indignation makes an excellent speech.
    Comc 8.167 13 Women [Camper says], the prettiest in society, and those whom I find less comely, they are all either narwhales or porpoises to my eyes.
    QO 8.178 9 We expect a great man to be a good reader; or in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power. And though such are a more difficult and exacting class, they are not less eager.
    QO 8.192 22 The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports the question of authorship.
    PC 8.209 20 ...[the coxcomb] has found...that good sense is now in power, and that resting...on perceptions less and less dim of laws the most sublime.
    PC 8.224 22 Whilst [Nature's] power is offered to [man's] hand, its laws to his science, not less its beauty speaks to his taste, imagination and sentiment.
    PC 8.231 1 Around that immovable persistency of yours, statesmen, legislatures, must revolve, denying you, but not less forced to obey.
    PPo 8.239 19 When the bard improvised an amatory ditty, the young [Bedouin] chief's excitement was almost beyond control. The other Bedouins were scarcely less moved by these rude measures...
    PPo 8.249 18 We do not wish to...try to make mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much less out of the erotic and bacchanalian songs of Hafiz.
    PPo 8.252 7 The [Persian] law of the ghaselle, or shorter ode, requires that the poet insert his name in the last stanza. Almost every one of several hundreds of poems of Hafiz contains his name thus interwoven more or less closely with the subject of the piece.
    PPo 8.254 7 O Hafiz! speak not of thy need;/ Are not these verses thine?/ Then all the poets are agreed,/ No man can less repine./
    PPo 8.261 13 Is Allah's face on thee/ Bending with love benign,/ And thou not less on Allah's eye/ O fairest! turnest thine./
    PPo 8.262 25 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!/
    Insp 8.275 7 There are thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; we are not the less drawn to them.
    Grts 8.318 21 A great style of hero draws equally...all the extremes of society, till we say the very dogs believe in him. We have had such examples in this country, in Daniel Webster...in France, although it is less intelligible to us, Voltaire.
    Dem1 10.17 13 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.
    Dem1 10.22 26 Every fact in which the moral elements intermingle is not the less under the dominion of fatal law.
    Aris 10.50 21 ...[the public] forgot to ask the fourth question, not less important than either of the others...
    Chr2 10.104 24 ...sometimes also [the moral sentiment] is the source, in natures less pure, of sneers and flippant jokes of common people, who feel that the forms and dogmas are not true for them...
    Chr2 10.107 25 ...the distinctions of the true clergyman are not less decisive.
    Edc1 10.136 3 ...if [the moral nature] monopolize the man...he does not yet know his wealth. He is in danger of becoming...wearisome through the monotony of his thought. It is not less necessary that the intellectual and the active faculties should be nourished and matured.
    Edc1 10.148 6 ...this function of opening and feeding the human mind...is not to be trusted to any skill less large than Nature itself.
    Edc1 10.149 2 Not less delightful is the mutual pleasure of teaching and learning the secret of algebra...
    Edc1 10.157 22 Set this law up, whatever becomes of the rules of the school: [the pupils] must not whisper, much less talk;...
    Supl 10.166 14 Think how much pains astronomers and opticians have taken to procure an achromatic lens. Discovery in the heavens has waited for it; discovery on the face of the earth not less.
    Supl 10.174 16 All rests at last on the simplicity of nature, or real being. Nothing is for the most part less esteemed.
    SovE 10.184 3 Asthis unity exists...from lower type of man to the highest yet attained, so it does not less declare itself in the spirit or intelligence of the brute.
    SovE 10.195 16 We do not believe the less in astronomy and vegetation, because we are writhing and roaring in our beds with rheumatism.
    SovE 10.198 13 ...spontaneous graces and forces elevate [life] in every domestic circle, which are overlooked while we are reading something less excellent in old authors.
    Prch 10.227 9 [The theologian] is to claim for his own whatever eloquence of St. Chrysostom or St. Jerome or St. Bernard he has felt. So not less of Bishop Taylor or George Herbert or Henry Scougal.
    Prch 10.237 2 The forms [of the creeds] are flexible, but the uses not less real.
    Schr 10.283 13 [Whosoever looks with heed into his thoughts] will find there is somebody within him that knows more than he does...makes no progress, but was wise in youth as in age. More or less clouded it yet resides the same in all...
    Plu 10.303 27 ...in reading [Plutarch], I embrace the particulars, and carry a faint memory of the argument or general design of the chapter; but he is not less welcome...
    Plu 10.311 17 Plutarch is genial; with an endless interest in all human and divine things; Seneca...is less interesting, because less humane;...
    Plu 10.319 12 If Plutarch...held the balance between the severe Stoic and the indulgent Epicurean, his humanity shines not less in his intercourse with his personal friends.
    LLNE 10.332 10 [Everett's learning] was so coldly and weightily communicated...that, though nothing could be conceived beforehand less attractive or indeed less fit for green boys from Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts...this learning instantly took the highest place to our imagination...
    LLNE 10.335 2 ...[works of talent] are more or less matured in every degree of completeness according to the time bestowed on them...
    LLNE 10.343 18 From that time meetings were held for conversation...of people...watchful of all the intellectual light from whatever quarter it flowed. Nothing could be less formal...
    LLNE 10.360 4 There were many employments more or less lucrative found for, or brought hither by these members [of Brook Farm]...
    LLNE 10.363 25 An English baronet, Sir John Caldwell, was a frequent visitor [at Brook Farm], and more or less directly interested in the leaders and the success.
    LLNE 10.369 25 ...I am not less aware of that excellent and increasing circle of masters in arts and in song and in science, who cheer the intellect of our cities and this country to-day...
    EzRy 10.383 26 I am sure all who remember both will associate [Ezra Ripley's] form with whatever was grave and droll in the old...meeting-house... with long prayers...and not less with the report like musketry from the movable seats.
    EzRy 10.385 7 [Joseph Emerson wrote] Have I done well to get me a shay? ... Should I not be more in my study and less fond of diversion?
    MMEm 10.404 25 ...wonderfully as [Mary Moody Emerson] varies and poetically repeats that image [of the angel of Death] in every page and day, yet not less fondly and sublimely she returns to the other,-the grandeur of humility and privation...
    MMEm 10.426 14 Usefulness, if it requires action, seems less like existence than the desire of being absorbed in God, retaining consciousness.
    MMEm 10.432 27 Is it the less desirable to have the lofty abstractions because the abstractionist is nervous and irritable?
    SlHr 10.443 23 [Samuel Hoar] retained to the last the erectness of his tall but slender form, and not less the full strength of his mind.
    SlHr 10.445 4 [Samuel Hoar] saw what was essential, and refused whatever was not, so that no man embarrassed himself less with a needless array of books and evidences of contingent value.
    SlHr 10.446 6 ...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...not less perfect in their angles and structure, and only less beautiful, than the transparent topazes and diamonds.
    SlHr 10.446 7 ...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...not less perfect in their angles and structure, and only less beautiful, than the transparent topazes and diamonds.
    Thor 10.463 1 If [Thoreau] brought you yesterday a new proposition, he would bring you to-day another not less revolutionary.
    Thor 10.484 23 The scale on which [Thoreau's] studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance.
    HDC 11.47 21 In these assemblies [New England town-meetings]...every local feeling, every private grudge, every suggestion of petulance and ignorance, were not less faithfully produced.
    HDC 11.86 11 The merit of those who fill a space in the world's history... sheds a perfume less sweet than do the sacrifices of private virtue.
    EWI 11.123 22 It was, or it seemed the dictate of trade, to keep the negro down. We had found a race who were less warlike, and less energetic shopkeepers than we;...
    EWI 11.123 23 It was, or it seemed the dictate of trade, to keep the negro down. We had found a race who were less warlike, and less energetic shopkeepers than we;...
    EWI 11.126 5 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...
    EWI 11.134 12 ...the reader of Congressional debates, in New England, is perplexed to see with what admirable sweetness and patience the majority of the free States are schooled and ridden by the minority of slave-holders. What if we should send thither representatives who were a particle less amiable and less innocent?
    War 11.157 12 ...it is no less true that [all history] is the record of the mitigation and decline of war.
    War 11.157 26 ...the art of war...has made...battles less frequent and less murderous.
    War 11.157 27 ...the art of war...has made...battles less frequent and less murderous.
    War 11.167 16 Since the peace question has been before the public mind, those who affirm its right and expediency have naturally been met with objections more or less weighty.
    FSLC 11.203 5 ...as the activity and growth of slavery began to be offensively felt by [Webster's] constituents, the senator became less sensitive to these evils.
    FSLN 11.218 2 ...every man speaks mainly to a class whom he works with and more or less fully represents.
    FSLN 11.233 3 [Official papers] are all declaratory of the will of the moment, and are passed with more levity and on grounds far less honorable than ordinary business transactions of the street.
    TPar 11.289 10 It was [Theodore Parker's] merit, like...to speak tart truth, when that was peremptory and when there were few to say it. But his sympathy for goodness was not less energetic.
    ACiv 11.298 21 ...boys and girls find their education, this year, less liberal and complete.
    ACiv 11.301 19 ...there is no one owner of the state, but a good many small owners. ... It is clearly a vast inconvenience to each of these to make any change...and those less interested are inert...
    EPro 11.325 20 The malignant cry of the Secession press within the free states, and the recent action of the Confederate Congress, are decisive as to [the Emancipation Proclamation's] efficiency and correctness of aim. Not less so is the silent joy which has greeted it in all generous hearts...
    EdAd 11.387 20 ...though it may not be easy to define [America's] influence, the men feel already its emancipating quality...even in the reckless and sinister politics, not less than in purer expressions.
    EdAd 11.389 12 ...the retributions of armed states are not less sure and signal than those which come to private felons.
    Wom 11.404 7 Lo, when the Lord made North and South,/ And sun and moon ordained he,/ Forth bringing each by word of mouth/ In order of its dignity,/ Did man from the crude clay express/ By sequence, and, all else decreed,/ He formed the woman; nor might less/ Than Sabbath such a work succeed./ Coventry Patmore.
    Scot 11.463 9 ...to the rare tribute of a centennial anniversary of his birthday...[Scott] is not less entitled...
    Scot 11.466 2 Not less [Scott's] eminent humanity delighted in the sense and virtue and wit of the common people.
    CPL 11.499 11 [Mary Moody Emerson] was much addicted to journeying, and not less to reading...
    CPL 11.499 23 [Mary Moody Emerson writes] Is the melancholy bird of night...less gratified than the gay lark...
    FRep 11.514 1 ...if this is true in all the useful and in the fine arts, that the direction must be drawn from a superior source or there will be no good work, does it hold less in our social and civil life?
    FRep 11.514 23 Prince Metternich said, Revolutions begin in the best heads and run steadily down to the populace. It is a very old observation; not truer because Metternich said it, and not less true.
    FRep 11.543 6 Pennsylvania coal-mines and New York shipping and free labor, though not idealists, gravitate in the ideal direction. Nothing less large than justice can keep them in good temper.
    PLT 12.24 23 Under every leaf is the bud of a new leaf, and not less under every thought is a newer thought.
    PLT 12.26 4 ...not less in human history aboriginal races are incapable of improvement;...
    PLT 12.49 20 The difference is obvious enough in Talent between the speed of one man's action above another's. In debate, in legislature, not less in action;...
    II 12.67 26 Objection and loud denial not less prove the reality and conquests of an idea than the friends and advocates it finds.
    II 12.79 9 It is not less the rule of this kingdom [of thought] that you shall not speak of the mount except on the mount;...
    II 12.80 26 Plant the pitch-pine in a sand-bank, where is no food, and it thrives, and presently makes a grove, and covers the sand with a soil by shedding its leaves. Not less are the arts and institutions of men created out of thought.
    Mem 12.91 2 The builder of the mind found it not less needful that it should have retroaction...
    CInt 12.117 23 I presently know...whether [my companion's] sense of duty is more or less severe...than mine;...
    CL 12.135 4 [Earth-hunger] is not less visible in that branch of the family which inhabits America.
    CL 12.146 8 It seems to me much that I have brought a skilful chemist into my ground...for an art he has, out of all kinds of refuse rubbish to manufacture Virgaliens, Bergamots, and Seckels...and his method of working is no less beautiful than the result.
    CL 12.152 20 We know the healing effect on the sick of change of air,- the action of new scenery on the mind is not less fruitful.
    CL 12.156 13 Of the finer influences [of nature], I shall say that they are not less positive, if they are indescribable.
    CL 12.159 26 ...the speculators who rush for investment...are all more or less mad...
    CW 12.171 21 Still less did I know [when I bought my farm] what good and true neighbors I was buying...
    MAng1 12.218 3 All particular beauties scattered up and down in Nature are only so far beautiful as they suggest more or less in themselves this entire circuit of harmonious proportions.
    MAng1 12.218 21 ...all men have an organization corresponding more or less to the entire system of Nature...
    Milt1 12.250 24 ...as an historical argument, [Milton's Defence of the English People] cannot be valued with similar disquisitions of Robertson and Hallam, and even less celebrated scholars.
    Milt1 12.268 23 Thus chosen...for the clear perception of all that is graceful and all that is great in man, Milton was not less happy in his times.
    ACri 12.299 20 ...the secret interior wits and hearts of men take note of [Carlyle's History of Frederick II], not the less surely.
    ACri 12.299 23 ...the secret interior wits and hearts of men take note of [Carlyle's History of Frederick II], not the less surely. They have said nothing lately in praise of the air, or of fire, or of the blessing of love, and yet, I suppose, they are sensible of these, and not less of this Book, which is like these.
    MLit 12.315 17 The great lead us...in our age to metaphysical Nature...to moral abstractions, which are not less Nature than is a river...
    WSL 12.339 12 A less pardonable eccentricity [in Landor] is the cold and gratuitous obtrusion of licentious images...
    WSL 12.347 2 ...it is not from the highest Alps or Andes but from less elevated summits that the most attractive landscape is commanded...
    EurB 12.373 8 We have heard it alleged with some evidence that the prominence given to intellectual power in Bulwer's romances has proved a main stimulus to mental culture in thousands of young men in England and America. The effect on manners cannot be less sensible...
    Trag 12.406 16 ...whether we and those who are next to us are more or less vulnerable, no theory of life can have any right which leaves out of account the values of vice...fear and death.

less, n. (11)

    Nat 1.44 5 The granite is differenced in its laws only by the more or less of heat from the river that wears it away.
    Comp 2.91 7 Gauge of more and less through space/ Electric star and pencil plays./
    Comp 2.102 17 The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value, not more nor less, still returns to you.
    SwM 4.138 1 The less we have to do with our sins the better.
    ShP 4.214 1 ...[Shakespeare] is the chief example to prove that more or less of production...is a thing indifferent.
    Pow 6.58 6 ...if [the plus man] have the accidental advantage of personal ascendency,--which implies neither more or less of talent...then quite easily...all his coadjutors and feeders will admit his right to absorb them.
    Elo2 8.127 8 Something which any boy would tell with color and vivacity [some men] can only...say it in the very words they heard, and no other. This fault is very incident to men of study,--as if the more they had read the less they knew.
    Aris 10.46 7 ...I am not going to argue the merits of gradation in the universe; the existing order of more or less.
    FRep 11.525 20 ...the history of Nature from first to last is incessant advance from less to more.
    PLT 12.21 19 ...having accepted this law of identity pervading the universe, we next perceive that whilst every creature represents and obeys it, there is diversity, there is more or less of power;...
    PLT 12.21 23 ...there is development from less to more...

Less, n. (2)

    Comp 2.123 20 The radical tragedy of nature seems to be the distinction of More and Less.
    Comp 2.123 20 How can Less not feel the pain; how not feel indignation or malevolence towards More?

less-civilized, adj. (1)

    ACiv 11.299 12 ...Why cannot the best civilization be extended over the whole country, since the disorder of the less-civilized portion menaces the existence of the country?

lessen, v. (2)

    YA 1.394 25 ...the system [of English aristocracy] is an invasion of the sentiment of justice and the native rights of men, which, however decorated, must lessen the value of English citizenship.
    Civ 7.24 25 The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and compend of a nation's arts... No use can lessen the wonder of this control by so weak a creature of forces so prodigious.

lessening, v. (2)

    MMEm 10.417 25 My [Mary Moody Emerson's] uncle has been the means of lessening my property.
    MAng1 12.240 3 There is yet one more trait in Michael Angelo's history, which humanizes his character without lessening its loftiness; this is his platonic love.

lessens, v. (2)

    Pow 6.81 27 In the gingham-mill, a broken thread or a shred...is traced back to the girl that wove it, and lessens her wages.
    LVB 11.94 13 One circumstance lessens the reluctance with which I intrude at this time on your [Van Buren's] attention my conviction that the government ought to be admonished of a new historical fact...

lesser, adj. (5)

    YA 1.372 14 The sphere is flattened at the poles and swelled at the equator;...the form...required to prevent the protuberances...even of lesser mountains...from continually deranging the axis of the earth.
    Mrs1 3.133 13 There will always be in society certain persons...whose glance will at any time determine for the curious their standing in the world. These are the chamberlains of the lesser gods.
    ET14 5.239 10 ...wherever the mind takes a step, it is to put itself at one with a larger class, discerned beyond the lesser class with which it has been conversant.
    Dem1 10.23 19 ...the main ambition and genius being bestowed in one direction, the lesser spirit and involuntary aids within [a man's] sphere will follow.
    CL 12.167 2 Matter, how immensely soever enlarged by the telescope, remains the lesser half.

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, (1)

    ShP 4.204 7 ...it was with the introduction of Shakspeare into German, by Lessing...that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately connected.

Content (Text): Copyright © 2005 by Charlotte York Irey
Coding (HTML): Copyright © 2005 by Bradley P. Dean
All Rights Reserved

Back to Emerson Concordance home
Special Collections home
Library home