Word: rarer
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Dates: during 1890-1899
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...hundred years woman had been falling lower and lower in social estimation. Even the attitude of the church towards her was extremely unfavorable, so much so that St. Jerome commended as "golden" the work in which Theocrastus stated that a good woman was rarer than a white blackbird, and complained that a man had nevertheless to marry without such a trial as would be expected if he bought even a beast of burden. The question whether woman was a human being was also soberly discussed at church council. It was finally decided that she was; but with so much favor...
They deserve help and they need it. Not only are the rarer books of reference valuable, but also the common textbooks. The more of these available, the more men of restricted means will be relieved from the necessity of purchases...
...science in its application to commerce and the arts of life, it is still only the achievements of the imagination that stir the deeper enthusiasm of mankind. Watt and Stephenson are entitled to our highest respect, but Plato holds his own, and we feel that something greater and rarer went to the making of Hamlet than to the invention of the steamengine, or the turning of it into a draught horse. Men have always been willing to pay the highest prices for things that were of no practical use whatever, and though a Frenchman has said that cookery...
...Dryden, but that he habitually dwelt in a diviner air, and alone of modern poets renewed and justifled the earlier faith that made poet and prophet interchangeable terms. Surely he was not an artist in the strictest sense of the word; neither was Isaiah; but he had a rarer gift, the capability of being greatly inspired. Popular, let us admit, he can never be; but as in Catholic countries men go for a time into retreat from the importunate dissonances of life to collect their better selves again by communion with things that are heavenly, and therefore eternal, so this...
...majority of books are of that exemplary kind which no gentleman's library can be without, but there is another and rarer kind without which no man's education is complete. These are the representative books in which epochs culminated like Homer, Dante, Shakespeare,- or which mark the transitions of the human mind like Cervantes and Gothe. But here Nature deals kindly and mercifully with us, and it is seldom that she gives more than one great speaker or singer to one race. There is a New England proverb which says of a fastidious person-"the best is not good...