"Primal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... regularity of the grain of the wood of which the belly was fashioned: the neatness, or, wanting that, the original style of the purfling—the exquisite mottling of the back, which is wrought, he tells you, 'by the cunning hand of nature in the primal growth of the tree'—twang. Then he will break out in placid exclamations of delight upon the gracefulness of the swell—twang—and the noble rise in the centre—twang—and make you pass your hand over it to convince ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... was made with labor: Strong fusing air and fire Strove before the years of birth, With awful deed and dire, And wrought from primal chaos Amidst the ancient night. The seas and shores which are the earth, And shapes of ...
— Selected Poems • William Francis Barnard
... of Hindu philosophy is the philosophy of Kapila, generally known as the Sankhya system. This teaching opposes the Atomic Theory of the Vaisheshika system, and holds that the atoms are not indestructible nor eternal, but may be resolved back into a primal substance called Prakriti. Prakriti is held to be an universal, eternal energy or ethereal substance, something similar to certain Western scientific conceptions of an Universal Ether. From this eternal, universal energy, Kapila ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... investigate the history of its genesis, we alike find, as we might have antecedently expected, that it is dependent on our more ultimate idea of mind as mind; the conception of causality is not, as a matter of fact, original or primal, but derivative or secondary. Therefore, if this conception necessarily involves the postulation of a first cause, there can be no doubt that such a cause can only be conceived as of the nature of mind. From ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... a peg into the ground with my axe or mallet, is the life in my arm any more strictly the source (the secondary source) of the energy expended than is the nut in this case? Of course, the sun is the primal source of the energy in both cases, and in all cases, but does not life exert the force, use it, bring it to bear, which it receives from ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... known him was an education in primal manhood. To sit at his hospitable board, with him at the head of the table, was an inspiration in the genius of life and the art of living. One of his familiars started the joke that when Wake drew the second white bean "he got a peep." He took it kindly; though in my intimacy ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... had rushed out only in time to see the longshoreman, in a moment of sober strength, ejecting with some violence a newcomer of appearance more needy than himself. It was suggested to Jamie by this that a similar but mutual exclusion might be effected, at least against the weaker couple of the primal four; but there was an honorable sense of property among these beggars, and they refused to fail in respect for each other's vested rights. But Jamie was most impatient of them, and would sometimes attempt to hold the ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... secluded districts in England and Scotland even after the coming of Tennyson and Browning. This spirit is manifested both in the preservation of the English ballad and in the creation of local songs. Illiterate people, and people cut off from newspapers and books, isolated and lonely,—thrown back on primal resources for entertainment and for the expression of emotion,—utter themselves through somewhat the same character of songs as did their forefathers of perhaps a thousand years ago. In some such way have been made and preserved ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... defend himself, which had brought him to a standing position, would be interpreted as only the natural action of a gentleman addressed by a feminine acquaintance, he was confident that he had not betrayed his primal consternation. He bowed, smiled, and with eyes in which astonishment swiftly gave place to gratification and complete comprehension, appraised ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... as the dead. They spake not, neither did they hunt, nor eat, nor did they die. Then the Great Spirit, whose name is not known, placed upon earth a man, in his arms the strength to kill, in his heart the primal urge of love. And in that flowerless arctic Eden, out of its bounteous compassion, the Great Spirit placed also a maiden, her face beautiful with the young virginity of the world, in her bosom implanted ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... a form or an image. The word signified in early philosophical use the archetype or primal image which the Platonic philosophy supposed to be the model or pattern that existing objects imperfectly embody. This high sense has nearly disappeared from the word idea, and has been largely appropriated by ideal, tho something of the original meaning still appears ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... gladness of the May! What though the radiance which was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind, In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be, In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering, In the faith that looks through death, In years ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... blanket, I could see a great raft of wild duck, taking their midday rest in safety. All the world seemed a million miles away. Care did not exist. And—so intimate and swiftly comprehensive is the human soul, especially the more primal soul of woman—already and without words, this young woman seemed to feel the less need of conversation, to recognize the slackening rein of custom. So that a rug and a wrapper—granted always also an aunt—seemed to her not amiss as full equipment for reception ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... guided as I read, "In the beginning was the Sense," Take heed. The import of this primal sentence weigh, Lest thy too hasty pen be led astray. Is force creative then of sense the dower? "In the beginning was the Power." Thus should it stand; yet, while the line I trace, A something warns me once more to efface. The spirit aids, from anxious ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... said further, "were created after this." Whether entity springs from non-entity or vice versa is discussed in another hymn of the same book.[31] The most celebrated of the pantheistic hymns is that in which the universe is regarded as portions of the deity conceived as the primal Person: "Purusha (the Male Person) is this all, what has been and will be ... all created things are a fourth of him; that which is immortal in the sky is three-fourths of him." The hymn is too well known to be quoted entire. All the castes, all gods, all animals, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... his fault by becoming a refuge from its consequences? Before this strange extension of her love all the old limitations seemed to fall. Something had cleft the surface of self, and there welled up the mysterious primal influences, the sacrificial instinct of her sex, a passion of spiritual motherhood that made her long to fling herself between the unborn child and ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... with smiling, happy faces, by far the greater percentage would be found to be dancers. "For the good are always the merry," the lighthearted, free from care and worry, who sing, or dance, or play because of their superabundance of vital energy, and because in so doing they are in harmony with the primal ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... the joy of life, if you are born in a land of the sun, and in a land of cold you dance for the joy which springs from warmth. It is a primal expression of feeling, and the Scottish Highlanders have always had beautiful dances, and danced them well; dances with the music of sex in them, though they might not admit it, or did not know it. Religion and dancing have often been the only things in their ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... the simplest to the most complex. He so presents pathology that you are able to trace backward from any given end-result, such as sclerosis of an organ (cirrhosis of the liver, for example), through all the various acute lesions that may terminate in that particular end-result to the primal cause of the lesion. ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... in part responsible. Haverly Lodge lay in acres not only smooth, but elaborately beautified, yet the margins of the estate met and merged with nature's ragged fringe. Metaled roads ran out in lumber trails where the Adirondacks reared turrets of granite and primal forests. In summer, ease-loving guests took their pleasure here, but when winter held the hills, wild deer came down and gingerly picked their way close to the sundials and marble basins of the sunken gardens. Foxes, too, stole on cushioned ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... which was once so bright, Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of glory in the grass, of splendour in the flow'r; I do not grieve, but rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy, Which having been, must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In years ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... this moment to despair is the idea of perfection in your mistress, the idea that has been shattered. But when you understand that the primal idea itself was human, small and restricted, you will see that it is little more than a rung in the rotten ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... glamour of youth Vanished too soon—and, piercing to the truth, I found some evil each fair show to mar. No thing I saw so high and free from blame But worms were at its heart; each noble deed Revealed self-seeking as its primal seed. Love, honor, virtue—each was but a name! Naught marked us off, vile creatures of the dust, From ravening brutes, save on the smiling face A honeyed falseness—in the heart so base A craven weakness and a fiercer ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... so primal, those dances! And all those primal things are dangerous, don't you think? ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... proofs of the gradual levelling of the mountains, in the huge blocks of rock piled up in the most grotesque shapes. Many of these are colossal pillars, surmounted by boulders weighing many tons. The softer rock and gravel have washed down the ravines, leaving these as monuments of the primal ages. The ravines penetrate the mountain on every side, and little by little wear the monster away. The beavers choose the prettiest nooks in them for their villages, and the miner, finding the water cut off, often learns that in a single night these busy architects have built a tight and closely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... suppose I seem to them as a partridge squatting among dry grass and leaves, so like the grass and leaves as to be invisible. We all come to be marked upon by nature and dismissed—how carelessly!—as genera or species. And is it not the primal struggle of man to escape ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... with defiant eyes. Sanchia's hands clenched and the resultant impression given forth by her whole demeanour was that upon occasion the little widow might be swept into such passionate rage that she was prone to resort to primal, physical violence. Helen, though her own cheeks burned, smiled loftily and ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... with genuine chauffeurs and passengers, raced uproariously across the stage. That is realism in its nakedness. That is realism reduced to its first principles. Realistic "effects," however speciously beautiful they may be, invariably tend to realism of that primal type, which satisfies the predilections of the groundling, and reduces drama to the ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... with one voice! In your welfare we rejoice, Sons and brothers that have sent, From isle and cape and continent, Produce of your field and flood, Mount and mine and primal wood; Works of subtle brain and hand, And splendors of the morning land, Gifts from every British zone; Britons, hold ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... imagination, many signs of unwonted crassness. It was not that he had ceased to think his wife stupid: she was stupid, limited, inflexible; but there was a pathos in the struggles of her swaddled mind, in its blind reachings toward the primal emotions. He had always thought she would have been happier with a child; but he had thought it mechanically, because it had so often been thought before, because it was in the nature of things to think it of every woman, because his wife was so eminently one of a species that ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... said Uncle Blair emphatically. "You're back in the youth of the race—back in the beguilement of the young world. Everything is in this hour—the beauty of classic myths, the primal charm of the silent and the open, the lure of mystery. Why, it's a time and place when and where everything might come true—when the men in green might creep out to join hands and dance around the fire, or dryads steal from their trees to warm their white limbs, ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... have arisen lately if the cosmos Sprang as I stated; an egregious don Has published pamphlets asking if it was moss, Or something else, that formed the primal On. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... oritur, qualecumque est, causam a natura habet, whatever comes into being, of whatever sort it is, has its primal cause ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... Antipathist of Light! Fate's only essence! primal scorpion rod— The one permitted ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... of its adherents endeavoured to solve the problem of the origin of evil, [431:2] and to trace the connexion between the finite and the infinite, was not without ingenuity. They maintained that a series of Aeons, or divine beings, emanated from the Primal Essence; but, as sound issuing from a given point gradually becomes fainter until it is finally lost in silence, each generation of Aeons, as it receded from the great Fountain of Spiritual Existence, lost somewhat of the vigour ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... staring at him, inarticulate with fury; Don Mike faced his enemy with a bantering, prescient little smile. Then, with a great sigh that was in reality a sob, Loustalot abandoned his primal impulse to hurl himself upon Farrel and attempt to throttle; instead, he ran back to the customers' desk and started scribbling another check. Thereupon, the impish Farrel removed the ink, and when Loustalot moved to another ink-well, Farrel's hand closed over that. Helpless and desperate, ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... to the guilty pair Without the walls of Eden came, Transforming sinless ease to care And rugged toil, no more shall bear The burden of old crime, or mark of primal shame. ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... far faint ray from Sirius rising, When through space first was hurled The primal gloom of ancient voids surprising, This ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... hands well towards the bottom of his pockets, smiles sheepishly, yet knowingly, in listening to this "discourse." Courtship is one thing and marriage is another in his code. Mary's primal mistake is in assuming—(upon John's authority, I regret as his advocate to say), that the two states are one and the same. Moonlight vows and noonday action should, according to her theory, be in exact harmony. John ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... lessons of history; they do not tell us to what extent the State itself has contributed towards the existing order by creating proletarians and delivering them up to exploiters. They forget to prove us that it is possible to put an end to exploitation while the primal causes—private capital and poverty, two-thirds of which are artificially created ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... silly, sickening rhapsody of the old libertine, the author begs to state that he introduced it, (as well as other speeches of a like character,) for the purpose of painting, in strong colors, the disgusting lechery of a man, whose primal passions had degraded him to the level of a brute. He would also assure the reader that the character of old Tickels is drawn from a living original, whose real name sounds very much like the curious cognomen that has been assigned him. It will readily be observed that during the entire ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... be theologically more en regle. How as mere detached unaccompanied infants we enjoyed such impunity of range and confidence of welcome is beyond comprehension save by the light of the old manners and conditions, the old local bonhomie, the comparatively primal innocence, the absence of complications; with the several notes of which last beatitude my reminiscence surely shines. It was the theory of the time and place that the young, were they but young enough, could take publicly no harm; to which adds itself moreover, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... even know of its existence. So is it with the man who prays, unknowing of the creative force of his thought, of the living creature he has sent out to do his bidding. He acts as unconsciously as the child, and like the child grasps what he wants. In both cases God is equally the primal Agent, all power being from Him; in both cases the actual work is done by the apparatus provided by ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... a perilous ride down that red slope, not so much from the hissing bullets as from the washes and gullies which Silvermane sailed over in magnificent leaps. Hare thrilled with savage delight in the wonderful prowess of his desert king, in the primal instinct of joy at escaping with ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... to live for if the great primal instinct which strives to make whole the half life of lonely manhood is defeated, suppressed, crushed out of existence? Why not as well die in the attempt to break up a wretched servitude to a perverted nervous movement as in any other way? I am alone in the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of revelation. Hence, from the imperfections of reason, or from disregard of other established truths, deductions may be pushed to absurdity even when logical, and may be made to conflict with the obvious meaning of primal truths from which these deductions are made, or at least with those intuitions which are hard to be distinguished from consciousness itself. There may be no flaw in the argument, but the argument may land one in absurdity and contradiction. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... back to it, is most desirable. And he can propose, and she accept, much better when alone, and they have all their faculties under full control, than verbally, perhaps, when excited. Those same primal reasons for reducing all other contracts to writing obtain doubly in reference ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... he held her, as the primal man takes and holds his woman, tightly against his beating heart as though he would defy the world, lost in a sea of strange new emotions that rolled in golden ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... weight with overloading. To Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth and that crowd I yield the bays for ground and lofty oding. Mine but the task to trace a country's growth, As evidenced by each inauguration From Washington's to Wilson's primal oath— In these U. S., ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... go any farther, then, than these simple truths, to lay our finger on the primal fact which underlies all financial embarrassments and panics? The mass of the transactions in commerce rests upon credit; the solvent of that credit is gold; and gold has not only a sliding scale of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... of this volume is that the necessary ideas and laws of the reason, and the native instincts of the human heart, originally implanted by God, are the primal and germinal forces of history; and that these have been developed under conditions which were first ordained, and have been continually supervised by the providence of God. God is the Father of humanity, and he is also the Guide ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... go there." He turned irresolutely, and they walked together down the plank pathway, Kitty with an oppressive sense of having fallen into the clutch of one of the Primal Forces, who was about to settle her destiny for her; in which she stumbled almost on the truth. Miss Muller was quite aware of the fact of her brother's visits at the book-shop, and their motive. She glanced at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... protecting trees. One felt that at any time an indiscreet hoot of the steamer might send them scuttering back to the forest depths. There were no signs of life in these submerged villages, where the fight between the forester's axe and primal vegetation seemed still undecided. Life was there; but it was hidden under the luxuriance of the overgrowth, hidden to casual passers-by like the life of insects. Only by the seaside, where the houses were clustered together above a seawall of cyclopean stones, and ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon't, A brother's murder!—Pray can I not, Though inclination be as sharp as will; My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent; And, like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both neglect. What if this cursed hand Were thicker than itself ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... before the child is eight years old, and in many cases it can be done much earlier, at least so far as inculcating the most essential truths is concerned. Many details will slip away in time, but if the work is thoroughly done the great primal truths of living things will stay, and as the child's life unfolds, they will illuminate it in ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... river winds in foaming centuries Its changing, swift, irrevocable course To far off and incalculable seas; She is twin-born with primal mysteries, And drinks of life at ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... man and the first woman were gardeners, and there is something wrong in any descendant of theirs who does not love a garden. He is lacking in a primal instinct. But Aunt Jane was in this respect a true daughter of Eve, a faithful co-worker with the sunshine, the winds, the rain, and all other forces ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... the greatest movements of conquest have been due to drought in Arabia, causing the nomads of that country to migrate into regions already inhabited. The last of these four movements was the rise of Islam. In these four cases, the primal need of food and drink was enough to set events in motion; but as this need could only be satisfied by conquest, the four secondary passions must have very soon come into play. In the conquests of modern industrialism, the secondary passions have been almost wholly dominant, since ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... goblet of the fiery liquid upon him, Peter of Colfax regained his lost nerve enough so that he could raise his sword arm and defend himself and, as the fumes circulated through him, and the primal instinct of self-preservation asserted itself, he put up a more and more creditable fight, until those who watched thought that he might indeed have a chance to vanquish the Outlaw of Torn. But they did not know that Norman of Torn was but playing with his victim, that he might make ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... it would appear to have been new- formed for the purpose. But did this flesh then either so appear to human eyes that the body was deemed human which was not really human, because it was not subject to any primal penalty, or was some new true human flesh formed as a makeshift, not subject to the penalty for original sin? If it was not a truly human body, the Godhead is plainly convicted of falsehood for displaying to men ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... seasons, at thy call, renewed the spell That thrilled our better years, The primal wonder o'er our spirits fell, And ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... their time. Their government, while they had one, being merely a loose and mutable expression of the desires and caprices of the majority—that is to say, of the ignorant, restless and reckless—gave the freest rein and play to all the primal instincts and elemental passions of the race. In so far and for so long as it had any restraining force, it was only the restraint of the present over the power of the past—that of a new habit over an old and insistent tendency ever seeking expression in large liberties and indulgences ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... here than any aristocratic institution has in Europe; and politics is but the common pulse-beat, of which revolution is the fever-spasm. Yet we have seen European aristocracy survive storms which seemed to reach down to the primal strata of European life. Shall we, then, trust to mere politics, where even revolution has failed? How shall the stream rise above its fountain? Where shall our church organizations or parties get strength to attack their great parent and moulder, the slave power? Shall the thing ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... before the promise of some decisive word which I was without the power to utter. For we were only half-warm, the two of us, toying with the ghosts of the dead past and childishly afraid of the future. We were Laodiceans, neither hot nor cold, without the primal hunger to reach out and possess what we too timidly desired. We were more neutral even than Ferdinand and the Lady of the Bust, for we no longer cared sufficiently to let the other know we cared, but waited and waited in that twilight ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... place to the steam-liners that began and closed their brief career at Sebastopol and Bomarsund; and the prize-belt is now borne, among the bruisers of the main, by the mob of iron-clads, infinitely diverse of aspect and some of them shapeless, like the geologic monsters that weltered in the primal deep. Which of these is to triumph ultimately and devour its misshapen kindred, or whether they are not all to go down before the torpedo, that carries no gun and fires no shot, is a "survival-of-the-fittest" question to be solved by Darwins yet to come. But ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... manhood, virility, energy, simple strength, directness, all that this poor neurotic world is yearning for, the primal force, uncomplex, untroubled, just the exultation ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... the hope of discovering why Mr. Handy irritated Temperance. He was a man of sixty, with a round head, and a large, tender wart on one cheek; the two tusks under his upper lip suggested a walrus. Though he was no beauty, he looked thoroughly respectable, in garments whose primal colors had disappeared, and blue woolen stockings gartered to a miracle ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... day was young. Very young. Under the early sun the grass was afire with dew diamonds. The flowers, dripping and fragrant, held up their cups to the light. The town still lay asleep. Over the suburb brooded the Hush of the primal Wilderness, creeping back furtively and momentarily to its ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... it, and, as he grows up, remains a total abstainer, there is no question that his abstinence will prove a great safeguard; though I cannot go as far as some of my abstaining friends, who seem to regard the use of alcohol as the root of what must, in the nature of things, be one of the strongest primal passions of human nature, and therefore liable to abuse, whether men are total abstainers or not. Anyhow, though a lad can be trained to strict moderation, abstinence in both alcohol and tobacco must after a time come of the lad's own free ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... themselves, slowly developing, have peopled this planet from that immeasurable past to the present hour. Love between man and woman must be forever young, even as Eros, Cupid, Krishna, are forever youthful gods. But mother-love is of necessity mature, majestic, ancient from the stamp of primal experience which is ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... as though the most ancient furies of antagonistic races, enchained and suspended for centuries by the magic of Rome, had been unloosed; as though the indigenous populations of Italy, tamed by antique culture, were reverting to their primal instincts, with all the discords and divisions introduced by the military system of the Lombards, the feudalism of the Franks, the alien institutions of the Germans, superadded to exasperate the passions of a nation blindly struggling against obstacles that block the channel of continuous ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... It is humiliating again to think that golf is an artificial substitute for man's need to hunt and plough, but it is undoubtedly true; and thus to break with the monotony of civilisation, and to delude the mind into believing that it is occupied with primal needs is often a great refreshment. Anyone who fishes and shoots knows that the joy of securing a fish or a partridge is entirely out of proportion to any advantages resulting. A lawyer could make money enough in a single week to buy the whole contents of a fishmonger's shop, but this does not give ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... morning dawned cloudless. Nature, radiant in her bountiful splendor, seemed to give herself to man, who, in response, thrilled with something of the primal impulse which stirred his pulses in the golden days before he had separated himself from the beneficent currents of the Earth Mother's vitality to shut himself up within brick walls with artificial heat, artificial light, and ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... vigorous sports in which women now excel—were boldly athletic, and yet you could not feel quite that they were tomboyish. Was it because the bent of Miss Shirley was so academic that she was periling upon tomboyishness without knowing it in this primal inspiration of hers? Inwardly he resented the word academic, although outwardly he had assented to it when Miss Macroyd proposed it. To be academic would be even more fatal to Miss Shirley's ambition than to be tomboyish, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... swiftly through the air, its head showing like a silver crescent against the gray twilight of the trees. It did not reach its tall objective, but fell among the undergrowth, shaking up a flying litter of birds. But in the poet's memory, full of primal things, something seemed to say that he had seen the birds of some pagan augury, the ax of some ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... her primal woman's instinct of revolt from the thoughts which his quiet interrogation sent at her, like an arrow. But she struggled to keep down the little shudder which woke and stirred within her. He had done nothing more than respond to her tacit challenge. ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... the primal icy years Scraped slowly o'er the Puritans' hopes and fears, Like as great glaciers built of frozen tears, The Voice from far within the secret sky Said, 'Blood of Faith ye have? So; let us try.' And presently ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... spiral is a primal law, simple yet complex, which we who understand life's manifold ascensions grow to symbolize in our thought, language, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... of philosophy, traced to its primal sources, reveals the truths concerning universal knowledge, often perceived by the great teachers, but dimly stated by minds enshrouded by the ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... condition of the upper valley of a particular river at the time of a given inundation in the ancient or the mediaeval period.] I say the sources of the rivers, because the floods of great rivers are occasioned by heavy rains and snows which fall in the more elevated regions around the primal springs, and not by precipitation in the main valleys or on the plains ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... is never old-fashioned; because it expresses in final form some truth about human nature, and human nature never changes—in comparison with its primal elements, the mountains are ephemeral. A drama dealing with the impalpable human soul is more likely to stay true than a treatise on geology. This is the notable advantage that works of art have over works of science, the advantage of being and remaining true. No matter ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... puss upon the tiles and the melodious love-songs of the nightingale." "War, the father of all things," goes back to the same origin as language. The serenade is matched by the battle-cry. The fight between two cock-pheasants for the love of a hen-pheasant is war in its last analysis, in its primal manifestation. Selfish hatred is at the bottom of it. It is the hell-fire to which we owe the heat that is necessary to some of the noblest as to some of the vilest manifestations of human nature. Righteous indignation, sense of injustice, ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... the primal fount of life and peace, Who shedd'st Thy breathing quiet all around, In me command that pain and conflict cease, And turn to music ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... difficult of reduction with our imperfect mountain machinery. The proprietors have combined the capital and labor hinted at in my exordium. They are toiling and probing. Their tunnel has reached the length of one hundred feet. From primal assays alone, coupled with the development of the mine and public confidence in the continuance of effort, the stock had reared itself to eight hundred dollars market value. I do not know that one ton of the ore has been converted into current metal. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the wall. Had it ever yet befallen any young woman in the world to wish with secret intensity that she might have been, for her convenience, a shade less inordinately pretty? She had come to that, to this view of the bane, the primal curse, of their lavish physical outfit, which had included everything and as to which she lumped herself resentfully with her mother. The only thing was that her mother was, thank goodness, still so much prettier, still so assertively, so publicly, ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... to an exalted height, considering his age and circumstances. Some of them remind us of some of the best Proverbs of Solomon. In general, we should say that to his mind filial piety and fraternal submission were the foundation of all virtuous practices, and absolute obedience to rulers the primal principle of government. He was eminently a peace man, discouraging wars and violence. He was liberal and tolerant in his views. He said that the "superior man is catholic and no partisan." Duke Gae asked, "What should be done to secure the submission of the people?" ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... as in the Old World, people who wish to attain competence or wealth must toil hard for it. In Canada, with all its capabilities and advantages, there is no royal road to riches—no Midas touch to turn everything into gold. The primal curse still holds good, "though softened into mercy;" and those who emigrate, expecting to work less hard for 5s. a day than at home for 1s. 6d., will be miserably disappointed, for, where high wages are given, hard work is required; those must also be disappointed who expect to ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... my art was to me, the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world, the great passion of my life, the love to which all other loves were as marsh water to red wine, or the glow worm of the marsh ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That is what I was at 19 and 20; and that is what the average Southerner is at 60 today. Northerners, too, of a certain grade. It is of children like this that voters are made. And such is the primal source of our government! A man hardly knows whether to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... about the revelation of the fact on both sides, and the arrangements it would be desirable to make beforehand. I suppose we should all have felt as Deronda did, without sinking into snobbishness or the notion that the primal duties of life demand a morning and an evening suit, that it was an admissible desire to free Mirah's first meeting with her brother from all jarring outward conditions. His own sense of deliverance from the dreaded relationship of the other Cohens, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Shelley which Mr. Wyndham pronounces the most important contribution to English letters during the last twenty years—"with many the religion of beauty must always be a passion and a power, and it is only evil when divorced from the worship of the Primal Beauty." In this confession we are brought back to the point where we began. The gods of Greece were ideals of earthly beauty, and by them, while their worship remained spiritual, men were exalted far above paganism. And now, as we are drawing to a close, it is fitting that ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... 'wood,' those of my coat in the substance 'wool,' and so forth. Chalk, wood and wool, show again, in spite of their differences, common properties, and in so far forth they are themselves counted as modes of a still more primal substance, matter, the attributes of which are space occupancy and impenetrability. Similarly our thoughts and feelings are affections or properties of our several souls, which are substances, but again not wholly in their own right, for they are modes of the ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower. We will grieve not—rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been, must ever be. In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering! In the faith that looks through death— In years, that bring the philosophic ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... senses allows them internal resources whereon to retreat. 'There is a world without, and a world within,' which may be called complementary worlds. But nature is ever liberal, and her chords are generally harmonies, or exquisite modifications of concord. The chord of the tonic, in music, is the primal type of this harmony in sound; it is perfectly satisfactory to the tympanum; and the ear, knowing no further elements (for the tonic chord combines them all), can ask for ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... hostility can be measured. But to understand is more than to forgive, it is to adopt; and the passion that thought merely to withdraw into a sullen and maimed self-indulgence can feel itself expanded by sympathies which in its primal vehemence it would have excluded altogether. Experience, in bringing humility, brings intelligence also. Personal interests begin to seem relative, factors only in a general voluminous welfare expressed in many common institutions and arts, moulds for whatever is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... hearts to bring; The Word of God, the telling of His thought; The Light of God, the making-visible; The far-transcending glory brought In human form with man to dwell; The dazzling gone; the power not less To show, irradiate, and bless; The gathering of the primal rays divine, Informing chaos, to ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... Every other primal gift of man rises to a new height at the bidding of the electrician. All the deftness and skill that have followed from the upright attitude, in its creation of the human hand, have been brought to a new edge and a broader range through electric ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... black man or Moor by a white or European woman is black, and vice versa; and especially in that the soul is in the seed, for impregnation is by the seed, and the seed is what is clothed with a body by the mother. The seed is the primal form of the love in which the father is—the form of his ruling love with its nearest derivatives or the inmost affections ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... action at Chicago goes deeper than this primal need of his party for votes. It reaches down to the springs of fundamental social and political changes at the South in relation to its race question, and sets in motion the healing waters of its pool of Bethesda, which ...
— The Ballotless Victim of One-Party Governments - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 16 • Archibald H. Grimke
... choice, or even to the conscience, of the individual an option as to which of its commands shall be obeyed, and which not. To do so would be to loose the bands of society, to bring to an end the reign of law, and to plunge the community once again into that primal chaos of anarchy from which in the beginning it painfully emerged. The State demands, and must necessarily demand, implicit obedience. From the loyal it receives it. Those from whom it does not receive it are rebels, no matter how conscientious they may be, how lofty their ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... strategy, the only strategy—and for a time it went well. Within the hour Kurho's forces were scattered, as attack and counter-attack surged and slashed in wild eruption of the long-shafts. Just as eruptive were the neuro-emotives, as each in his primal way must have known that this was the long awaitment, this was the grim finality in Kurho's boast and Otah's ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... as he said it and the change that came over her lighted a strange fire in his blood. The black eyes kindled it, and the red lips, half parted, blew it into a blaze. His face flushed and he broke the eye-hold and looked down. In their primal state, when Nature mothered the race, the man was less daring than ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... thee, Olympus' king, That suffering mortals at thy doom should know By omens dire the massacre to come? Or did the primal parent of the world When first the flames gave way and yielding left Matter unformed to his subduing hand, And realms unbalanced, fix by stern decree' Unalterable laws to bind the whole (Himself, too, bound by law), so that for aye All Nature moves within its ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... man was a fighter. It was fight or fall, for the trail would brook no weaklings. Good or bad, a man must be a man in the primal sense, dominant, savage and enduring. The trail was implacable. From the start it cried for strong men; it weeded out its weaklings. I had seen these fellows on the ship feed their vanity with foolish fancies; kindled to ardours of hope, I had seen debauch ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... standing by him, her restraining hand still on his arm, the sun glinting in the gloss of her dark hair, her dark eyes fixed on him in denial, in a softness of pity that Morgan knew was not for his victims alone. And so in that revel of base surrender to his primal passions she had come to him, she whom his heart sought among the faces of women; in that manner she had found him, and found him, as Morgan knew in his abased heart, at ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... land of austerut simplicity, decomposes the mind into corresponding states of primal contentment and resilience. There arises before our phantasy a new perspective of human affairs; a suggestion of well-being wherein the futile complexities and disharmonies of our age shall have no place. To discard these wrappings, to claim kinship with ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... in hand, shoulder to shoulder, with her stronger but not more resolute companion, enters on that career which looks to the formation of communities and states. It is the household which constitutes the primal atom, the aggregation whereof makes the village, town, or city; the state itself rests upon the household finally, and the household is what the faithful ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... case of plants like the tomato, which are propagated by seed, from what they do with plants like the apple and strawberry, which are propagated by division. In the latter case all the plants of the variety are but parts of the primal origination, and so are alike. A description is simply a more or less complete and accurate definition of what a certain immutable thing really is, but in the case of plants propagated by seed the variety is made up of all the ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... existence of truth in general is self-evident but the existence of a Primal Truth is not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... how the Creator of the earth has got him in a rat trap—put him here "willy nilly" (you know the Omar verse); and then I want to show what he does about it. There is always the eternal question from the Primal Source—"What are you going ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... visited it and sat beneath its roof with Jim, and already its few ruins had taken upon themselves the look of years of abandonment and decay. The wild land seemed to have thrown off its yoke of cultivation in a night, and nature rioted again with all its primal forces over the freed soil. Wild oats and mustard were springing already in the broken furrows, and lank vines were slimily spreading over a few scattered but still unseasoned and sappy shingles. Some battered tin cans and fragments ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... same condition. The rank and file of the city, ignorant of the tricks which were constantly being employed in politics to effect one end or another, were greatly cheered by this so-called "public uprising." They little knew the pawns they were in the game, or how little sincerity constituted the primal impulse. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... is to write as an outsider: for that thirteenth, by a mystical process which has given to each of its series in its day the same primal quality, is, of course, not only the last, but the first. And, indeed, with little casuistry, that thirteenth may be truly held to be the first, for it is a fact determined not so much by the chosen maid as by ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... daily papers columns of virtuous verbiage. The following week I ran down to Brighton for a chat, as Mr. Pinhorn called it, with Mrs. Bounder, who gave me, on the subject of her divorce, many curious particulars that had not been articulated in court. If ever an article flowed from the primal fount it was that article on Mrs. Bounder. By this time, however, I became aware that Neil Paraday's new book was on the point of appearing and that its approach had been the ground of my original appeal to Mr. Pinhorn, who was now annoyed with me for having lost so ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... this is the original form of all snowflakes, but that, when I observe these crystal stars falling around me, they are only just generated in the low mist next the earth. I am nearer to the source of the snow, its primal auroral, and golden hour of infancy; commonly the flakes reach us travel-worn and agglomerated, comparatively, without order or beauty, far down in their fall, like men in their advanced age. As for the circumstances under which this occurs, it is quite cold, ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... and how love granted, that ye knew Your yet uncertain wishes?" She replied: "No greater grief than to remember days Of joy, when mis'ry is at hand! That kens Thy learn'd instructor. Yet so eagerly If thou art bent to know the primal root, From whence our love gat being, I will do, As one, who weeps and tells his tale. One day For our delight we read of Lancelot, How him love thrall'd. Alone we were, and no Suspicion near us. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... treasure, mountain, grim and gray, Playing with wind and wave, child-lough And lazy bay—Archaic group Are they, whose quiet naught details Of primal epochs; yet, as face Of man with furrowed wrinkles marked And seared, suggests his past life's course, Their presence in itself reveals The trace of annals which their calm Conceals. So Mystery's ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... each other, and eagles and vultures devour other birds, it is all right for powerful nations to absorb the weak ones, as the Romans did. Might does not make right by the eternal decrees of God Almighty, written in the Bible and on the consciences of mankind. Politicians, whose primal law is expediency, may justify such acts as public robbery, for they are political Jesuits,—always were, always will be; and even calm statesmen, looking on the overruling of events, may palliate; but to enlightened Christians there is ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... is one Who hears no Voice in wind or sun, Believer in some primal curse, Deaf in ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... afternoon we had listened to a new tale of disaster. Till now, although most of us had lost stock, and many had lost land as well, we had regarded health, the rude health of man living the primal life, as an inalienable possession. Our cattle and horses were dying, but we lived. We learned that ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Criminal Courts Building and, through the favour of The Organisation that breeds such pests, escaped scot-free under the convenient fiction of "suspended sentence"; and knowing well the nature and the power of the man, the primal concerted thought had been to flee the place before bullets began to fly. In blind panic like that of sheep, they rose as one in uproar and surged toward the outer doors. November himself, struggling up from beneath the table, was caught and swept on ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... your Maker's smile that hour, As when He paused and owned you good; His blessing on earth's primal bower, Ye felt it all renewed. What care ye now, if winter's storm Sweep ruthless o'er each silken form? Christ's blessing at your heart is warm, Ye fear ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... The sisters are both of that gentle class of semi-invalids whose presence in our civilization enables us to support the rudeness of the general health. They employ aesthetically the beautiful alleviations with which science has rescued domestic drudgery from so much of the primal curse; it is a pleasure to see them work; it is made so graceful, so charming, that you can hardly ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... for themselves independently of further parental aid. The qualities developed during pre-adolescence are, in the evolutionary history of the race, far older than hereditary traits of body and mind which develop later and which may be compared to a new and higher story built upon our primal nature. Heredity is so far both more stable and more secure. The elements of personality are few, but are well organised on a simple, effective plan. The momentum of these traits inherited from our indefinitely remote ancestors is great, and they are often ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... cylinders of the two weapons on the desk was that death which Warden, Singleton, Slade, and the others deserved at his hands. He took up the pistols, nestling their sinister shapes in his palms, while his blood rioted with the terrible lust that now seized him—the old urge to do violence, the primal instinct to slay, to which he had yielded when Shorty told him of the things ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... mere nature, and the humility and penitence in which alone mere nature receive it; yet I think that our movement from one to the other is more naturally described by us in the language of growth than in the language of convulsion. The primal object of religion is to disclose to us this perdurable basis of life, and foster our growth into communion with it. And whatever its special, language and personal colour be—for all our news of God comes to us through the consciousness ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... switched round. The accomplishments came first; I became fascinated by a voice and a mind. But when I saw her face.... Oh, well! Mrs. Sandford warned me against her; the woman herself has warned me; the primal instinct of self-preservation has warned me; yet, here I am! I had not ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... again I ask—who are those that, after seven months' watching of the revolt, appeared, by any plausible construction of events, to have been the primal movers in this hideous convulsion? Individual opinions on this question, and such as could plead a weight of authority in regard to experience, to local advantages for conjecture, and to official opportunities for overlooking intercepted ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... will continue to exist to all eternity; that though he was not born in sin, he is held by the secondary law of retribution accountable for offences committed in his person, and these he must expiate through subsequent transmigrations, until, by sublimation, he is absorbed again into the primal source of his being; and that mutability is an essential and ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... idiosyncrasies, which have left him, as he is found to-day, without a government and without a God. Far more probable is it, in seeking for analogies to his mythology and cosmogony, to resort to the era of that primal reconstruction of the theory of a Deity, when the human philosophy in the oriental world ascribed the godship of the universe to the subtile, ineffable, and indestructible essences of fire and light, as revealed ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... and what pride, And what hunger fierce and wide, Thou dost break beyond it all, Seeking for the spirit unconfined In the clear abyss of mind A shelter and a peace majestical. For what is life to thee, Turning toward the primal light, With that stern and silent face, If thou canst not be Something radiant and august as night, ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... was projected, some one asked, "What is there to say about Browning's heroines beyond what he said himself?"—and the question, though it could not stay me, did chill momentarily my primal ardour. Soon, however, the restorative answer presented itself. "If there were nothing to say about Browning's heroines beyond what he said himself, it would be a bad mark against him." For to suggest—to ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... ultimate view ever aspired to, if but partially attained, by the poet's own soul. Not what man sees, but what God sees—the 'Ideas' of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand—it is toward these that he struggles. Not with the combination of humanity in action, but with the primal elements of humanity he has to do; and he digs where he stands,—preferring to seek them in his own soul as the nearest reflex of that absolute Mind, according to the intuitions of which he desires to perceive ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... faculties are also apt to be very active, although the higher intellect may be dormant. If we therefore presume India to have been the cradle of our race, they might at first exemplify a sort of golden age; but it could not be of long continuance. The very first movements from the primal seat would be attended with degradation, nor could there be any tendency to true civilization till groups had settled and thickened in particular ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... of primal personality have not yet undergone the abrasion of the glacial drift nor of the frost and the heat, the wind and the rain of long years. They are angular, bold, defiant, and unsuited to the pastoral and agricultural scenes of middle life. The grind of life with its ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... sense of freshness is nothing short of inspiring. To share the same lofty outlook, to breathe the same high air with those who first sensed a whole era of creative thoughts, is the next thing to being the gods' chosen medium for those primal expressions. ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... (indeed he was better employed), yet I am nearly, if not wholly of his mind respecting the works of the Fathers. Those which appear to me of any great value are valuable chiefly for those articles of Christian Faith which are, as it were, 'ante Christum' JESUM, namely, the Trinity, and the primal Incarnation spoken of by John i, 10. But in the main I should perhaps go even farther than Luther; for I cannot conceive any thing more likely than that a young man of strong and active intellect, who has no fears, or suffers no fears of worldly prudence to cry, Halt! ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... slap over Wetterhorn and strikes the Rhone Valley at a place called Ulrichen. That is how a bird would do it, if some High Pope of Birds lived in Rome and needed visiting, as, for instance, the Great Auk; or if some old primal relic sacred to birds was connected therewith, as, for instance, the bones of the Dodo.... But I digress. The point is that the straight line takes one over the Brienzer Grat, over the lake, and then over the Wetterhorn. That was manifestly impossible. But whatever ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... challenged to repeat the experiments he was unable to do so and committed suicide. In the course of the 19th century the idea that the different elements are constituted by different groupings or condensations of one primal matter—a speculation which, if proved to be well grounded, would imply the possibility of changing one element into another—found favour with more than one responsible chemist; but experimental research failed to yield any evidence that was generally regarded ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... ignorance and darkness of the outer world, his first craving is for light—not that physical light which springs from the great orb of day as its fountain, but that moral and intellectual light which emanates from the primal Source of all things—from the Grand Architect of the Universe—the Creator of the sun and of all that it illuminates. Hence the great, the primary object of the first degree is to symbolize the birth of intellectual light in the mind; and the ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... and the other a happy effort of imaginative humor,—one of those strokes of genius that recreate the world and clothe it with the unfading hues of romance; the theme was an old-world echo, transformed by genius into a primal story that will endure as long as the Hudson flows through its mountains to the sea. A great artist can paint a great picture on ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... divinity, and he first speaks: "How sorely mortals blame the Gods!" It is indeed an alienated discordant time like the primal fall in Eden. But why this blame? "For they say that evils come from us, the Gods; whereas they, through their own follies, have sorrows beyond what is ordained." The first words of the highest God concern the highest problem ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... April, and the shapes Lurking 'twixt lid and eye-ball in the dark. Mocked I thee not in every guise of life, Hid in girls' eyes, a naiad in her well, Wooed through their laughter, and like echo fled, Luring thee down the primal silences Where the heart hushes and the flesh is dumb? Nay, was not I the tide that drew thee out Relentlessly from the detaining shore, Forth from the home-lights and the hailing voices, Forth from the last faint headland's failing line, Till I enveloped thee from ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... thought naught of it. His lips did not move; had he spoken, at the sound of his own voice the charm had cracked, the little lyric had shrunk away before tragedy that was yet as fierce as it was profound, that had as yet few other notes than those of primal pain. ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... hesitations, those rebellions against law and discipline, which marked more than one of her descendants; but he might even then have felt some vague instinctive suspicion that he was to inherit from her the seeds of the primal sin, the fall from grace, the curse of Abel, that he was not of pure New England stock, but half exotic. As a child of Quincy he was not a true Bostonian, but even as a child of Quincy he inherited a quarter taint of Maryland blood. Charles Francis, half ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... hour—God help keep the President! To him all Lincoln's tenderness be lent, The grave, sweet nature of the man that saw Most power in peace and let no claptrap awe His high-poised duty from its primal plan Of rule supreme for the whole ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... realize that the desert was a teacher. He did not realize all that he had learned, but he was a different man. And when he decided upon that, he was not thinking of the slow, sure call to the primal instincts of man; he was thinking that the desert, as much as he had experienced and no more, would absolutely overturn the whole scale of a man's values, break old habits, form new ones, remake him. More of ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... appearances, of causes, or of elements, only lead us down to fresh appearances—we cannot see a law, let the power of our lens be ever so immense. The true causes remain just as impalpable, as unfathomable as ever, eluding equally our microscope and our induction—ever tending towards some great primal law, as Mr. Grove has well shown lately in his most valuable pamphlet—some great primal law, I say, manifesting itself, according to circumstances, in countless diverse and unexpected forms—till all that the philosopher as well as the divine can say, is—the Spirit of Life, impalpable, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... In the Ever-living yesterday, today, and tomorrow are words of no meaning. I know I fell into what we call the past and the things I counted as dead for ever were the things I had yet to endure. Out of the old age of earth I stepped into its childhood, and received once more the primal blessing of youth, ecstasy, and beauty. But these things are too vast and vague to speak of, the words we use today cannot tell their story. Nearer to our time ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... Netherlands was a compact, a treaty, an agreement between sovereign states. There was no pretence that it was an incorporation, that the people had laid down a constitution, an organic law. The people were never consulted, did not exist, had not for political purposes been invented. It was the great primal defect of their institutions, but the Netherlanders would have been centuries before their age had they been able to remedy that defect. Yet the Netherlanders would have been much behind even that age of bigotry had they admitted the possibility in a free commonwealth, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... uncomplimentary to the colored man's interest in the professional and business ventures of his race-variety can be of weight, there are several antecedent facts of primal value to be considered. If devotion to either class is lacking, it must be remembered, that shortcoming is traceable to causes which, however marked may be their effects in the Negro's case, are equally marked and striking in others of similar condition. Given centuries ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Such creatures may have grown down as well as up. They may have grown into, or something like, human beings. Lady Arabella March is of snake nature. She has committed crimes to our knowledge. She retains something of the vast strength of her primal being—can see in the dark—has the eyes of a snake. She used the nigger, and then dragged him through the snake's hole down to the swamp; she is intent on evil, and hates some one we love. Result . . ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... condescend to speak the language of legend; the belief of the times is part of the record of the times; and, though there may occur what may baffle its more calm and searching philosophy, it must not disdain that which was the primal, almost universal, motive of human life."—Latin. Christ., vol. i. p. 388. Dr. Milman's decision justifies me in putting this down ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... Lord Byron, whose letters to Mr. Bowles on the subject, though composed in his lordship's most ruffianly vein, still make good reading—of a sort. But the battle is over, at all events for the present. It is not now our humour to inquire too curiously about first causes or primal elements. As we are not prepared with a definition of poetry, we feel how impossible it would be for us to deny the rank of a poet to one whose lines not infrequently scan and almost always rhyme. For my part, I should as soon think of asking whether a centipede has legs or a wasp a sting ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... this little essay, it will be sufficient to consider the Kami as the spirits of the dead,—without making any attempt to distinguish such Kami from those primal deities believed to have created the land. With this general interpretation of the term Kami, we return, then, to the great Shinto idea that all the dead still dwell in the world and rule it; influencing not only the thoughts and the acts ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... it has ripened to fruit. But it is the labour of a life time to make one's true self known and honoured. Therefore I have come to thy door, thou world-vanquishing Love, and thou, Vasanta, youthful Lord of the Seasons, take from my young body this primal injustice, an unattractive plainness. For a single day make me superbly beautiful, even as beautiful as was the sudden blooming of love in my heart. Give me but one brief day of perfect beauty, and I will answer for ...
— Chitra - A Play in One Act • Rabindranath Tagore
... other boats on the adjacent river, some have bathing-sheds, and others padi plantations. These kampongs have much of the poetry as well as inanity of tropical life about them. They are beautiful and appropriate, and food is above them and around them. "The primal curse" can hardly be known. A very little labor provides all that the Malay desires, and if the tenure of the land be secure (and the lack of security is one of the great evils), and he be not over-taxed, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... are true. Indeed they are inevitable. They abide, and form a glowing background for all subsequent pictures, toned more austerely, and painted in more lasting hues of truth upon the brain. Those have never felt Venice at all who have not known this primal rapture, or who perhaps expected more of colour, more of melodrama, from a scene which nature and the art of man have made the richest in these qualities. Yet the mood engendered by this first experience is not destined to be permanent. It contains an element of unrest ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... glows. It makes room for more happiness. Loving, too, is a positive word. It is related to happiness as an impulse to action. The love that does not work itself out in helping acts as mere torture of the mind. The primal impulse of vice and sin is a short cut to happiness. It promises pleasure without earning it. And this pleasure is always an illusion. Its final legacy is weakness and pain. Pain is not a punishment, but a warning of harm done to the body. The unearned pleasures provoke ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... I do not dread change. Why should we? Is not change the primal condition on which all life is permitted to exist? Change is the very essence of all things pure, the sign and token of the divinity that is within us, and conservatism per se is infidelity against the ordination of God. When, therefore, we see such change in all things that ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... him lay his task. There under his eyes was the Enemy. Face to face with him was the titanic primal strength of a chaotic world, the stupendous still force of a merciless nature, waiting calmly, waiting silently to close upon and crush him. For a long time he stood watching. Then the great brutal jaw grew more salient ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... concentrated flash of Giorgione discordant abruptness. The bland, central light of a globe, imperceptibly gliding through lucid demi-tints into rich reflected shades, composes the spell of Correggio, and affects us with the soft emotions of a delicious dream." Here terminates the great, the primal era. Such were the patriarchs of modern art. Here, it may be said, terminated the great discoverers. Mr Fuseli pauses here to observe, that we should consider the characteristic of each of these painters, not their occasional deviations; for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... as well to choir as to congregational singing. Let us suppose now that the mere primal foundation—the mechanical execution—be respectably good; that the congregation or choir have been taught to sing in tune; that all be harmonious and properly balanced; in short, that the auditory nerves be spared any very severe shock—and what then will we ordinarily ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the man who was to win her, not in stuffy rooms, not dressed in stiff, ungainly clothes, not saying unmeaning things to fill the time. This tale of laborious days bounded by the fires of sunrise and sunset, this struggle with the primal forces of storm and flood, this passage across a panorama unrolling in ever wilder majesty, was the setting for her love idyl. The joy of her mounting spirit broke out in an answering cry that flew across the river to David ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... births, too! But mine I know, and thine thou knowest not, O Slayer of thy Foes! Albeit I be Unborn, undying, indestructible, The Lord of all things living; not the less— By Maya, by my magic which I stamp On floating Nature-forms, the primal vast— I come, and go, and come. When Righteousness Declines, O Bharata! when Wickedness Is strong, I rise, from age to age, and take Visible shape, and move a man with men, Succouring the good, thrusting the evil back, And setting Virtue on her ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold |
