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More "Primal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sex, Meredith found her little more than a child; the result of her narrow upbringing by which she had been reared in ignorance of the primal facts of life and all that was common knowledge to the flapper of the day. But to his fastidious nature her unsophisticated innocence was the most captivating of any of the qualities he had met with in girls, ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... 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 billows ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... Following the inherent tendency of the enlightened intellect to seek unity in diversity, the One in the Many, he reached the conclusion to which so many thinkers in all ages and of all races have been driven, that underlying all phenomena is one primal and adequate Cause, the Essence of all Existence. This conclusion he expressed in a philosophic apothegm which was preserved by ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... thinking actor. Coming from the 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; ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... shared even then the ideas of the editors of the Gazetta del Popolo, and felt that to lay the foundations of constitutional liberty, they needs must raze those of Rome. This is a truth; and not only so,—it is the primal truth in the science of European liberty. This truth only now begins to be understood on the Continent. It is the main lesson which the re-action of 1849 has been overruled to teach. All former insurrections ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... the beginning, the pioneer encountered the savagery of border life, grappled with it, and reacted to it without guidance from other mentor than his own instincts. His need was still the primal threefold need family, sustenance, and safe sleep when the day's work was done. We who look back with thoughtful eyes upon the frontiersman—all links of contact with his racial past severed, at grips with destruction in the contenting of his needs—see ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... respect of their marriages or the baptism of their children, and knowing no way of getting out of the kingdom and setting their conscience free, abandoned themselves to despair, and attacked certain priests, because they regarded them as the primal and principal cause of the vexations done to them. Once more, I blame those people; but I thought it my duty to explain to you the cause of their despair. If it be thought that my ministry is necessary to calm the ruffled spirits, I shall comply with pleasure. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... length so accustomed to their hurtless menaces that I fell to beguiling the way with the invention of monstrosities, never suspecting that I owed each moment of life to the staring moon. Though hers was no primal radiance, it so hampered the evil things, that I walked in safety. For light is yet light, if but the last of a countless series of reflections! How swiftly would not my feet have carried me over the restless soil, had I known that, if still within ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... is it? Doubtless—and other things, perhaps, which chemistry cannot detect. Nevertheless, give its parts what names you will, its whole is yet the wind of the living God to the bodies of men, his spirit to their spirits, his breath to their hearts. When I learn that there is no primal intent—only chance—in the unspeakable joy that it gives, I shall cease to believe in poetry, in music, in woman, in God. Nay, I must have already ceased to believe in God ere I could believe that the wind that bloweth where it listeth is free because God hath forgotten ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... of the poet Ossian. Its success was astonishing, and Macpherson followed it up with Temora (1763), another epic in the same strain. In both these works Macpherson succeeds in giving an air of primal grandeur to his heroes; the characters are big and shadowy; the imagery is at times magnificent; the language is a kind of ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... boots like the miners, and to crown all, a white sombrero such as the vaqueros wore. Handsome and headstrong he was; and Bill shook his head over the combination which made for trouble in that land where the primal instincts lay all on the surface; where men looked askance at the one who drew oftenest the glances of the women and who walked erect and unafraid in the midst of the lawlessness. Jack Allen was fast making enemies, and no one knew ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... were to arouse the terrible race about them to frenzies that were based, not on any reasoned thought processes, or which in any case they were of themselves incapable, but on the more grim and fanatic foundations of unreasoned, primal, outraged instinct. ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... a battle! On the one side devotion, simple-minded loyalty and a fighting heart in a body of such mechanical perfection as Mars had never seen before or since. On the other side a primal beast, just ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... upon one than a masterpiece of sculpture, literature or music, and infinitely surpasses man's most worthy efforts. Why cross the ocean or spend an over-amount of time in the art galleries of our own country, when we dwell so near Art's primal source? Out here the Divine Artist, with all rare colors, has painted scenes of panoramic splendor and every day new and grander views are displayed, for He sketches no two alike. Then, what harmonious blending of light and shadow; what glowing veils ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... a crank. He knew that so far from being a mere animal, the Indian is of a subtlety more ancient than the Sphinx. In his primal brain—nearer nature than our own—the directness of a child mingles with the profoundest cunning. He believes easily in powers of light and darkness, yet is a sceptic all the while. Stirling knew this; but he could not know just when, if ever, the young charlatan ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... Our blind and dizzied vision sees too late The cool broad shadows trailing at the base. And then our wasted arms let slip the flowers, And our pained bosoms wrinkle from the fair And smooth proportions of our primal years, And so our sun goes down, and wistful death Withdraws love's last delusion from our hearts, And mates us with ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... but of its very contrary. That the cosmic drama should have followed this particular course; that from the cooling down of fiery nebulas there should have come forth the orderly system we behold in nature; that life should have climbed up from the speck of protoplasm "through primal ooze and slime," making its way step by step through all the lower creation until it "blossomed into man"—this, to the unbiassed mind, does not wear the aspect of mere incalculable accident, but of all-embracing wisdom and directivity. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... extension of slavery and the creation of additional slave States was a necessary step in the scheme, and became the well-defined single issue in the presidential election, though not necessarily the primal cause of the impending civil war. For the first time in the history of the republic the ambition of the South met overwhelming defeat. In legal form and by constitutional majorities Abraham Lincoln was chosen to the presidency, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... experience of the race from the dawn of creation, man as he is, and the times and seasons of the heavenly bodies, are part and parcel of one system. The first great division of time, the day-night (nychthemerum), for which we have no precise synonym in our language, with its primal alternation of waking and sleeping, of labor and rest, is a vital condition of the existence of such a creature as man. The revolution of the year, with its various incidents of summer and winter, and seed-time and harvest, is not less involved in our social, material, and moral progress. It ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... one, whatever was called, Must be called back to the primal Centre. Let no soul tremble or be appalled, For the heart of the Maker is where we enter - Is where we enter to gain new force Before we are ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... crimson, which contrasted beautifully with her luxuriant dark tresses, had that voluptuous development and grace which only maturity and maternity can impart to the female form. In short, never had Mercedes, in the days of her primal bloom, presented a person so fascinating as now. She was a woman to sigh for, perchance to die for, and one whom a man would willingly wish to live for, if he might but hope she would live for him, or, peradventure, he ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... the shield or wield the sword of Mars! A broken harp, suspended at his side, A faded garland, wreathed about his brow, Tell what he was, and still employ his care. With thin white hand, that trembles at its task, In vain he strives to bind the broken chords, And to their primal melody attune them;— In vain,—for to his efforts still replies A boding strain of harsh, discordant sound. And then, with hot tears coursing down his cheeks, He lifts his faded wreath from his pale brow, And gazing on its withered leaves, exclaims,— "For ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... glad view to moderating my disposition, I sat with Captain Leezur and the little girl on the log, and ate soiled nervine lozenges, tinctured originally with such primal medicaments as catnip and thoroughwort; and whether from that source or not, yet peace did descend upon ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... Giants begotten by flesh and spirits will be called evil spirits on earth, and on the earth will be their dwelling-place. Evil spirits proceed from their bodies, because they are created from above, and from the holy watchers is their beginning and primal origin; they will be evil spirits on earth, and evil spirits they will be named. And the spirits of heaven have their dwelling in heaven, but the spirits of the earth, which were born upon the earth, have their dwelling on the earth. And the spirits of the giants ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... all. 'Tis right That all should know what they obey, Lest erring conscience damp delight, And folly laugh our joys away. Thou Primal Love, who grantest wings And voices to the woodland birds, Grant me the power of saying things Too simple ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... when the stability of the human race was, more or less, assured and permanent. Our primal ancestors existed in a state as nearly resembling chaos as well might be. They had not yet aggregated into communities, but vast hordes of families—a father, an uncertain number of mothers, and an astounding complexity of children—wandered ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... last letter makes me much happier. I put great faith in the healing power of the great winds and the sun. "Nature," as Walt Whitman says, "and her primal sanities." Mrs. S . . . , also, is a primal sanity. It is not, I believe, considered complimentary, in a common way, to approach an attractive lady and say pleasantly, "You are thousands of years old." Or, "You seem ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... conceiving the first initial impulse which started our Universe on its endless way. All matter being but an expression of energy, all energy being (in all probability) but the varying modes or forms of expression of one underlying primal energy, the difficulty has been in accounting for the origin of this primal energy—the initial "push," so to say, which sent the Universe ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... determination of the harmonic relations of the distances of the planets, which it was given him to solve more than twenty years afterwards. The hypothesis which he adopted proved utterly fallacious; but his primal intuition, that numerical and geometric relations connect the velocities, periods, and distances of the planets, was none ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... your pardon! The uncouthness Of that primal age is gone, And the skin of dazzling smoothness Screens not now a heart of stone. Love has flush'd those cruel faces; And those slacken'd arms forgo The delight of death-embraces, And yon ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... 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 illustrations are ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... under the brim next the dark streaks of her coarse hair. The face of the bride was simple and rude in contour and line, the face of a peasant from a long line of peasants, and it was complex with the simple complexity of the simplest and most primal emotions, with love and joy and wonder, the half-fearful triumph of swift inertia, attained at last in the full element of life. The others were different; they were dimpling and laughing and jesting in their unintelligible guttural. Their ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... western slope. (Afterward, he discovered that the gloves she wore that day were gray, and that her hat was for the most part white.) The charm of fabric and tint belonging to what she wore was no shame to her, not being of primal importance beyond herself; it was but the expression of her daintiness and the adjunct of it. She was tall, but if Joe could have spoken or thought of her as "slender," he would have been capable of calling her lips "red," in which case ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... with all its multiplicity, and so stands on "the horizon" between undivided and divided being. In the famous encyclopaedia of the "Brothers of Purity," written in the East about A.D. 1000, and representing Muslim thought at its best, the hierarchy takes this form: God, Intelligence, Soul, Primal Matter, Secondary Matter, World, Nature, the Elements, Material Things. (See Dieterici, 'Die Philosophic der Araber im X. Jahrhundert n. Chr.,' 2 vols., Leipzig, 1876-79.) In the hands of Ibn Gabirol, this is transformed thus: God, Will, Primal ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... of the Tehuantepec Isthmus, a primal woman, round-armed, deep-breasted, shapely as the dream on which Canova modeled Venus. Her skin was of the rich gold hue that marks the blood unmuddied by Spanish strain; to see her, poised on a rich hip by the river's brink, wringing her tresses after ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... Saba's weakling sons their frankincense, Iron from the naked Chalybs, castor rank From Pontus, from Epirus the prize-palms O' the mares of Elis. Such the eternal bond And such the laws by Nature's hand imposed On clime and clime, e'er since the primal dawn When old Deucalion on the unpeopled earth Cast stones, whence men, a flinty race, were reared. Up then! if fat the soil, let sturdy bulls Upturn it from the year's first opening months, And let the clods lie bare till baked to dust By the ripe suns of summer; ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... 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 ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... were populous: men swarmed In public places—chattered, laughed and wept; And savages their shining bodies warmed At fires in primal woods. The wild beast leapt Upon its prey and slew it as it slept. Armies went forth to battle on the plain So far, far down in that unfathomed deep The living seemed as silent as the slain, Nor even the widows could be heard to weep. One might have thought their shaking was but ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... 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, sympathy with the oppressed, ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... 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 ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... nor 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. ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... the years are fleeting, With their burden of toil and pain, We know that the page Of that primal age Will ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... word meaning prayer and devotion, becomes in the laws of Manu the primal God, first-born of the creation, from the self-existent being, in the form of a golden egg. He became the creator of all things by the power of prayer. In the struggle for ascendancy, which took place between the priests and the ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... billiard ball that the hunger-desperate men found the habitat of the sea-beaver to be the kelp beds of the Aleutian Islands and northwestern America. But what use were priceless pelts where neither money nor merchant was, and men mad with hunger were thrown back on the primal necessities ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... Primal Cause and Self-created! when is done his purpose high, NARAYANA leads Immortals to their dwelling in ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... had ended by merely perpetuating the hollow structure of the old regime. Now, however, the Bolsheviki, in one night, had dissipated it, as one blows away smoke. Old Russia was no more; human society flowed molten in primal heat, and from the tossing sea of flame was emerging the class struggle, stark and pitiless-and the fragile, slowly-cooling crust of ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... agricultural, but in the cities the pursuit of knowledge still continues. There is, however, on Mars a much lessened intellectual activity than on the earth. It is a sphere of simplified needs and primal feelings exalted by acutely developed love of Music. Mars is the music planet. There are not on Mars newspapers, journals, magazines, books. The tireless production of these things on the earth has but one analogy ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... with unruffled philosophy, and divided her smiles between two or three faithful suppliants. Ila had a very high colour, and her primal fascination was less reserved than usual. Rose admired Helena too extravagantly for jealousy, and what Caro felt ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... offence 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 ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... "A world primal again,—vistas of glory incessant and branching, A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, New politics—new literature and ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... loved and guarded the earth, although its children had departed from their early obedience. In evidence of His care, He sent, from time to time, gifted spirits among men to aid them in developing and elevating the souls so fallen from their primal innocence. These spirits He clad in sensuous bodies, that they might be prepared to enter the far country of Human Life. Earth was rapidly falling under the merciless rule of a hopeless and crushing materialism, when He determined upon sending among men, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... all that we saw of the wedding at Kafr Kenna—just a vivid, mysterious flash of human figures, drawn together by the primal impulse and longing of our common nature, garbed and ordered by the social customs which make different lands and ages seem strange to each other, and moving across the narrow stage of Time into the dimness of that Arab village, where ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... 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 ...
— Selected Poems • William Francis Barnard
... primal fount of life and peace, Who shedd'st Thy breathing quiet all around, In me command that pain and conflict cease, And turn ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... Poesy with fiery call Into my carcass, by the way methought Whence bread goes forth-there was none else at all. ' 'Now to return unto my primal thought: Who wills to know what weal awaits him, must First learn the ill that God for ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... the other or on both, proved not lovable. There has been a failure in the fundamental art of love. If we are to counterbalance facility of divorce our only sound course is to increase the stability of marriage, and that is only possible by cultivating the art of love, the primal foundation of marriage. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... philosophizing and the primal will to philosophize are both of them penetrated through and through, with this ultimate duality of love and malice. Love and malice in alternate impulse are found latent and potent in every philosophic effort. Behind ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... 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
... inspired. "We can't. It's born in 'em; it's a primal instinct, like the love of a mother for her young, and it can't be eradicated! Them chickens is constructed by a divine providence for the express purpose of chasin' grasshoppers, jest as the beaver is made ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... evidently untiring. It was in its own element; obstacles meant nothing to it. It oozed over the jagged ridges that took the humans precious moments to scramble past, and the speed of its weird progress seemed to increase as theirs faltered. It was a heartless mass driven inexorably by primal instinct towards the food that lay ahead. The dim phosphorescent illumination tinged its flabby tissues a ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... Of our primal meeting, And the fateful greeting Of the How and Why! Ah, the Thingness flying From the Hereness, sighing For a love undying That ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... produce of his sudden gains. If, in the darkness, wife was separated from husband, or parent from child, vain was the hope of reunion. Each hurried blindly and confusedly on. Nothing in all the various and complicated machinery of social life was left save the primal law of self-preservation! ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... book that ever man Looked into since the world began Is Woman! As I turn those pages, As fresh as in the primal ages, As day by day I scan, perplext, The ever subtly changing text, I feel that I am slowly growing To think no other work worth knowing. And in my copy—there is none So perfect as the one I own— I find no thing set down but such As teaches ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... be very sure that the passage is corrupt before we set about amending it. First and last, we must remember that primal elder law, that of two readings the more difficult is to be preferred. Durior lectio preferenda 'st should be a frontlet between our brows. The weaker reading or the plainer meaning is more likely to be a printer's interpretation of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... I 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 ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... is the EARTH-BORN, both in language and myths.—Illustrations from the legends of the Caribs, Apalachians, Iroquois, Quichuas, Aztecs, and others.—The under-world.—Man the product of one of the primal creative powers, the Spirit, or the Water, in the myths of the Athapascas, Eskimos, Moxos, and others—Never literally derived from ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... appeared on the surface it had not been easy to establish and every day brought its frictions and obstacles. The French temperament is perhaps the most difficult in the world to deal with, even by the French themselves. Our boasted individuality is merely in the primal stage compared with the finished production in France. Even the children are far more complex and intractable than ours. They have definite opinions on the subject of life, character, and the disposition of themselves ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... be careful, Katy," said Linda. "That car was not bought for its beauty. Its primal object in this world was to arrive. Gee, how we shot curves, and coasted down the canyons, and gassed up on the level when some poor soul went batty from nerve strain! The truth is, Katy, that you can't drive very slowly. You have got to go the speed for which it was built. ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... for the Presidency, the slaves on our far-off plantation, miles from any railroad or large city or daily newspaper, knew what the issues involved were. When war was begun between the North and the South, every slave on our plantation felt and knew that, though other issues were discussed, the primal one was that of slavery. Even the most ignorant members of my race on the remote plantations felt in their hearts, with a certainty that admitted of no doubt, that the freedom of the slaves would be the one great ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... goes to his own matriarchal stock, and at his death his bones are deposited in the cromlech of his mother's kin. In Jowai he neither lives nor eats in his wife's house, but visits it only after dark (p. 76). In the veneration of ancestors, which is the foundation of the tribal piety, the primal ancestress (Ka Iawbei) and her brother are the only persons regarded. The flat memorial stones set up to perpetuate the memory of the dead are called after the woman who represents the clan (maw kynthei p. 150), and the standing stones ranged behind them are dedicated to the male kinsmen ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... drenching a 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, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... serve up the gospel scheme in a compact form. It states the plan and work well, and usually correctly. It refuses to concede primal immortality to Adam, and adopts the pre-millennial view. It is ...
— That Gospel Sermon on the Blessed Hope • Dwight Lyman Moody
... way into the sorrowful city; into eternal dole among the lost people. Justice incited my sublime Creator. Divine Omnipotence, the highest wisdom, and the Primal Love created me. Before me, there were no created things. Only eternal, and I eternal, last. Abandon hope, all ye ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... intelligence, of individual character, absolutely open and broad minded; and show 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
... friend and supporter infinite satisfaction. Bill even felt he had miscalculated the primal instincts which governed this man. He knew he was exercising a powerful restraint. And it pleased as ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... hand to furnish it with the necessary material, thus increasing its power and devastation; this is one explanation. Another theory, which is probably the correct one, could safely be advanced upon plausible grounds. Supposing electricity to be the primal cause of the cloud itself, in passing across deep and irregular valleys with rugged surface, more electricity would be developed, and greater power would be infused into the revolving cone as it moved forward. When passing over a smooth, level plateau, it would excite less of the electrical ...
— A Full Description of the Great Tornado in Chester County, Pa. • Richard Darlington
... fact caused him no regrets at all. Catie, as he still called her on occasion, should, of course, have been the one to comprehend him; but, like the cicada, he merely iterated "Catie didn't." And comprehension is the primal need of every man. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of being and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no escape. What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of truth. Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true might at this rate be treated as godlike, and a man's religion might thus be identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, toward what he felt to ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... 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 ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... good Reader, the poker which he would thrust down his windpipe to broaden it a little. With asthmatic fits and tuberous infiltrations, one is permitted to commune with any of Allah's ministers of grace or spirits of Juhannam. And that divine spark of primal, paradisical love, which is rapidly devouring all others—let us not forget that. Ay, we mean his cousin Najma. Of course, he speaks, too, of his nation, his people, awaking, lisping, beginning to speak, waiting for ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... annual deficit, and the finances were utterly disordered. Successive ministers had exhausted all ordinary resources and the most ingenious forms of taxation. They made promises, and resorted to every kind of expediency, which had only a temporary effect. The primal evils remained. The national treasury was empty. Calonne and Necker pursued each a different policy, and with the same results. The extravagance of the one and the economy of the other were alike fatal. Nobody would make sacrifices in a great national exigency. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... according to all evidence by me attainable, entirely true, tradition has been all but lost, among the ruins of fair old Florence, by the industry of modern mason-critics—who, without exception, labouring under the primal (and necessarily unconscious) disadvantage of not knowing good work from bad, and never, therefore, knowing a man by his hand or his thoughts, would be in any case sorrowfully at the mercy of mistakes in a document; but are tenfold more deceived by their own vanity, and delight in overthrowing ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... had not chanced to read the pages where her press-matter had celebrated her. He defended himself from the jealousy of Miss Clampett very lamely; for the luscious beauty of his Anita, her graphic art, and her sway over the audience rekindled his primal emotions to a ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... good and evil Return we. Eve dishevel Your hair for the bliss-drenched revel On our primal loam. ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... world-wide accessibility of an island environment; yet underlying Japan's present receptivity of new ideas and her outwardly indiscriminate adoption of western civilization is to be detected the deep primal stamp of the Japanese character, and an instinctive determination to preserve the core ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... 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 to the magic mirror ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... a quality that appeals to the unversed admirer almost as strongly as the handsome flowers, which occur in large, loose panicles at the terminals of the branches. Boldly exposed, the white flowers as they lose primal freshness change to cream, but last for several weeks. The omitted compliment from formal records is the singular fragrance of the flowers—strong, sweet, and enticing, though with a drug-like savour, as if rather an artificial ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... already seen that the primal gods of this people are identical with the gods of the Greek mythology, and were originally kings of Atlantis. But it seems that these ancient divinities are grouped together as "the Aditya;" and in this name "Ad-itya" ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Being primal in his instincts, as every great man is, Mr. Bayard, at this hostile declaration, could not avoid a quick side-glance at Richard's door-wide shoulders, Pict arms, and panther build. ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... or Universal Life, whence all forms proceed: Literally, "the Way," in the sense of the First Cause. Lao-tseu uses the term in other ways; but that primal and most important philosophical sense which he gave to it is well explained in the celebrated Chapter XXV. of the Tao-te-king.... The difference between the great Chinese thinker's conception of the First Cause—the Unknowable,—and the theories ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... wars, Tumults of primal love and hate, Through crags of song reverberate. Held by the Singer of High State, Battalions of the ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... Inconceivable ruminates, The unthinkable "To be or not to be?" Then, as Existence flickers into sight, A marsh-flame in the night of Nothingness— The great, soft, restful, dreamless, fathomless night— We know the Affirmative the primal curse, And loathe, with all its imbecile strain and stress, This ostentatious, ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... constitution, decreased. Every avenue, in fact, was blocked by corruption. juries, courts, legislatures, congresses, they were as if they were not. The people were walled in by impassable barriers. Nothing was left them but the primal, brute instincts of the animal man, and upon these they fell back, and the Brotherhood of Destruction arose. But no words can tell the sufferings that have been endured by the good men, here and there, who, during the past century, tried to save mankind. Some were simply ostracised from ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... (unvisited by many), rising picturesquely before us, and yet forbidden. We thought of Tantalus, and his fate, of Prometheus and the rock—of—of Adam and his expulsion, and must own that in our first feelings of disappointment, we made but a partial excuse for our primal progenitor, and great great grandmother, as we repeated those expressive lines of the poet, so early ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... held in his hand was worth more than many years' purchase of an archiepiscopal see; that it would build cathedrals more stately than Ely or Cologne; that he who possessed it was set free for ever from the primal curse, and might follow his own inclinations without concern or hurry, without let or hindrance. And as he suddenly turned it, the rays leaped forth again with renewed brilliancy, and seemed to pierce his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... their flame Sheer down the primal wall, But up and up each linking troop In stretching festoons crawl— Nor fire a shot. Such men appall The foe, though brave. He, from the brink, Looks far along the breadth of slope, And sees two miles of dark dots creep, And knows they mean ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... spite of his passion of anxiety during her illness, in spite of the pity and affection of his daily attitude, Kitty occupied, in truth, much less of his mind than she had ever yet occupied?—that a certain magic—primal, incommunicable—had ceased to clothe her image in ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the faithfulness of the seasons than of human tragedy or strenuous overthrow. Even so early she felt great delight in natural things; and when her heart turned to Jethro Moore, she had no doubt whatever of the straightness of its path. She trusted all the primal instincts without knowing she trusted them. She was thirsty; here was water, and she drank. Jethro was a little older than she, the son of a minister in a neighboring town. His father had marked out his plan of ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... the moon, with a silent majesty that shamed human speech, slid her bright silver plate up behind the fret of trees on the far hills. Across the river a shimmering path of light grew, broadening; and the world beamed in holy beauty, as on the primal night. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... flickering light by the side of this full flame of personal affection. It has gone out to Mark Twain not only for what he has written, for the clean, irresistible extravagance of his humour and his unfailing command of the primal feelings, for his tenderness, his jollity and his power to read the heart of boy and man and woman; not only for the tragedies and afflictions of his life so unconquerably borne; not only for his brave and fiery dashes against tyranny, humbug, and corruption at home and ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... be done in it. I am quite satisfied he saw chances for improvement on every hand. God had placed there the material for the first gardener to work with, but He had wisely left it for the other to do with it what he thought best, when actuated by the primal instinct which makes gardeners of so many, if not the most, of us when the opportunity to ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... 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
... pretended to be in advance of himself. Institutions that his wholesome nature and habit fully accepted he had to sneer at as old-fashioned, out of a servile and snobbish fear of the future. Out of the primal forests, through all the real progress of history, man had picked his way obeying his human instinct, or (in the excellent phrase) following his nose. But now he was trying, by violent athletic exertions, to get in front ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... notwithstanding the fact that the nerve-cell is not differentiated in these primal forms, nerve-elements are, nevertheless, present in them, and serve ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... sad fate Even to tears my grief and pity moves. But tell me, in the time of your sweet sighs, By what and how Love granted that ye knew Your yet uncertain wishes.' She replied: 'No greater grief than to remember days Of joy, when misery is at hand. 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. Oft times by that reading Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue Fled from our alter'd ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... a small settlement of labourers, belonging to a tribe of aborigines called Dangurs. These originally, I believe, came from Chota Nagpoor, which seems to have been their primal home. They are a cheerful industrious race, have a distinct language of their own, and only intermarry with each other. Long ago, when there were no post carriages to the hills, and but few roads, the Dangurs were largely employed as dale runners, or postmen. Some few of them settled with ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... still there. And, in time, his reason brought forth material to fortify this impulse, too: it came out in brief, grim sentences which burned themselves into his mind. Surface was his father. To deny the primal blood-tie was not honorable. The sins of the fathers descended to the children. To suppress ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... himself had harnessed To the yoke of Fate unbending, With a blast of strange new feeling Sweeping o'er his heart and spirit, Aweless, godless and unholy, He his thoughts and purpose altered To full measure of all daring, (Still base counsel's fatal frenzy, Wretched primal source of evils, Gives to mortal hearts strange boldness,) And at last his heart be hardened His own child to slay as victim, Help in war that they were waging To avenge a woman's frailty, Victim for the good ship's ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... degree of purity, of their connexion one with the other and of the most widely-spread roots common to the majority of the Bantu languages. The present writer, relying on linguistic evidence, fixed the approximate date at which the Bantu negroes left their primal home in the very heart of Africa at not much more than 2000 years ago; and the reason adduced was worth some consideration. It lay in the root common to a large proportion of the Bantu languages expressing the domestic fowl—kuku (nkuku, ngoko, nsusu, nguku, nku). ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... advance of modern life and its complicated tangle of interests and creature comforts. A highly developed civilisation, with its attendant specialisation of culture, tends ever to lose sight of those elemental forces, those primal emotions, naked to wind and sky, which are the stuff from which great drama is wrought by the artist, but which, as it would seem, are rapidly departing from us. It is only in the far places, where solitary communion may be had with the elements, that this dynamic life is still ...
— Riders to the Sea • J. M. Synge
... 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 ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... This was the way she should see 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 like the call ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... All through the western part of our country have been found clay relics of various early tribes of Indians; and in some places are giant mounds in which have been buried all sorts of crude clay jugs and bowls. Since these primal peoples used for materials the natural clays and earths they succeeded in producing some ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... life but every own mother or substitute-mother should have a decent place to live in so that all needed drill may be conducted in dignified privacy and in an atmosphere required for right results. The housing problem reaches back to the primal need to have a suitable living-place into which to put ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... author's nature; 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 a ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... iron. On their hardy shrubs the pale pink clusters of mountain laurel were beaten into shapeless colour-masses by the wind-blown rains. Sometimes, up above, where the fiery points of redbud trees shot skyward, a thrush sang or a blue jay scolded—and the bird-notes were laden, like the air, with the primal ripeness of spring. ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... the destructive forces of nature which threatens with so much terror as fire. The senses disband in panic before it, reason flees, the voice appeals in its distress with a note that vibrates horror. In the threat of death by fire, man descends to his primal levels; his tongue speaks again the universal language, its note lending its horrified thrill to the lowest thing that moves by the divine ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... 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 ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... water was the primal element from which all had been derived; Anaximenes guessed air; Heraclitus fire; Pythagoras held that number was the essence of all things; Empedocles thought that fire and heat, accompanied by "indestructible forces," formed the basis; Xenophanes had guessed ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... mountains may be a trifle lower than in the morning of creation. The theory of gradual development was unknown to our fathers; the idea of evolution did not occur to them. Our fathers looked upon the then arrangement of things as the primal arrangement. The earth appeared to them fresh from the hands of a deity. They knew nothing of the slow evolutions of countless years, but supposed that the almost infinite variety of vegetable and animal forms had ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... spans the stream; the storm so long threatened begins now to let loose its rage against all unsheltered mortals. Here De Quincey consents to bid you good-bye,—to you his last good-bye; and as here you leave him, so is he forever enshrined in your thoughts, together with the primal mysteries of night and of storm, of human tragedies and of the most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... ordinary expressions, arranged in certain sequences and mutual relations, which none but the initiate would observe. That few living Brahmans possess this key but proves that, as in other archaic religious and philosophical systems, the soul of Hinduism has fled (to its primal imparters—the initiates), and only the decrepit body remains with a spiritually ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... men come in clusters." That is true, but it is equally true that once in a great while, we are vouchsafed a royal guest, a man who mingles freely with the ordinary throng, yet stands far above them; a man who can wrest the primal secrets from nature's closed hand, who makes astounding discoveries, only to gladly disclose ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... wheat known to hungry man. And on these clear and opaline mornings when I see the prairie-floor waving with its harvest to be, and hear the clack and stutter of the tractor breaking sod on the outer quarter and leaving behind it the serried furrows of umber, I feel there is something primal and poetic in the picture, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... its counterpart in Beethoven and Cherubini. The production of "Lodoiska" was the point of departure from which the great French school of serious opera, which has given us "Robert le Diable," "Les Huguenots," and "Faust," got its primal value and significance. Two men of genius, Gluck and Gretry, had formed the taste of the public in being faithful to the accents of nature. The idea of reconciling this taste, founded on strict truth, with the seductive charm ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... 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 that bring the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... a primal necessity, and insists upon the use of the roller for rendering the surface of wheatlands compact, and so retaining the moisture; nor does he attempt to reconcile this declaration with the Tull theory of constant trituration. A great many excellent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... come in clusters." That is true, but it is equally true that once in a great while, we are vouchsafed a royal guest, a man who mingles freely with the ordinary throng, yet stands far above them; a man who can wrest the primal secrets from nature's closed hand, who makes astounding discoveries, only to gladly disclose ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... of the monastic spirit, from the fourth century, had brought marriage into disrepute; by many of the ascetic writers of the West it was considered almost in the light of a necessary evil. This idea, that the primal and most sacred ordinance of God and nature was incompatible with the sanctity and purity acceptable to God, was the origin of the singular legends of the Marriage of the Virgin. One sees very clearly that, if possible, it ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... rests in fullness Himself. He who is in the body is ever athirst, for he pursues that which is in part: But ever there wells forth deeper and deeper the sound "He is this—this is He"; fusing love and renunciation into one. Kabr says: "O brother! that is the Primal Word." ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... become a living and thinking actor. Coming from the 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 Entered Apprentice is the type of the unregenerate man, ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh
... occasional hint of a broader intention,—it was only in esoteric language that the great principles of this philosophy could begin to be set forth in their true comprehension. The very trunk of it, the primal science itself, must needs be mystified and hidden in a shower of metaphysical dust, and piled and heaped about with the old dead branches of scholasticism, lest men should see for themselves how broad and comprehensive must be the ultimate sweep of its determinations; lest men should ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... 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 ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Such primal force, capable of evoking a whole world of passionate living figures, comes only once or twice in the history of a race. There will be thousands of cleverer psychologists, thousands of more felicitous stylists, thousands of more exact ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... step, Thro' many voices crying right and left, Have I climb'd back into the primal church, And stand within the porch, and Christ with me: My flight were such a scandal to the faith, The downfall of so many simple souls, I ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... chiefly from Eastern sources, is novel and attractive. That addressed to Narayena is in a strain of singular magnificence. The description, in the fourth stanza, of the creative power or intelligence, issuing from the primal germ of being, and questioning itself as to its own faculties, has something in it that fills the ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... head; I heard the flap of wings—and they were gone; The pheasant whizzed from bushes at my feet Unseen until its sudden whir of wings Startled and broke my wandering reverie; And then I whistled and relapsed to dreams, Wandering I cared not whither—wheresoe'er My silent gun still bore its primal charge. So gameless, but with cheeks and forehead tinged By breeze and sunshine, I returned to books. But still a phantom haunted all my dreams— Awake or sleeping, for awake I dreamed— A spectre that I could not chase away— The phantom-form ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... foremost, leading, chief, premier; primary, primal, primordial, primitive, primeval, pristine, original, aboriginal, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... time, from the moment when Gayomaritan, the type of humanity, began to find himself struggling against the hostility of the Evil Spirit up to the death of Yima. This is the system adopted by the Bundehesh. The history of the sin which made Yima lose his primal happiness, and subjected him to the power of the adversary, still remains connected with the name of that hero. But this transgression is no longer the original sin; and in order to be able to attribute it to ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... 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 ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... I, for my wife, the sun uphold, Or, dozing, strike the seasons cold. She, on her side, in fairy-wise Deals in diviner mysteries, By spells to make the fuel burn And keep the parlour warm, to turn Water to wine, and stones to bread, By her unconquered hero-head. A naked Adam, naked Eve, Alone the primal bower we weave; Sequestered in the seas of life, A Crusoe couple, man and wife, With all our good, with all our will, Our unfrequented isle we fill; And victor in day's petty wars, Each for the other lights the stars. Come then, my Eve, and to and fro Let us about our garden go; And, grateful-hearted, ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... bleak Pindus, Acherusia's lake, And left the primal city of the land, And onwards did his farther journey take To greet Albania's chief, whose dread command Is lawless law; for with a bloody hand He sways a nation, turbulent and bold: Yet here and there ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... hat to the Ridiculous. Send a cartridge clashing into the breech and speculate about the Absolute. Keep one eye on your sights and the other on Cosmos. Blow the reek of burned powder from before you so you may look over the edge of the abyss of the Great Primal Cause. Duck to the whistle of a bullet and commune with Schopenhauer. Perhaps I am a little mad. Perhaps I am supremely intelligent. But in either case I am not understandable to myself. How, then, be understandable to others? ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... 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 will; ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It's a blasted heath.—It's a Hyperborean winter scene.—It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... even then the ideas of the editors of the Gazetta del Popolo, and felt that to lay the foundations of constitutional liberty, they needs must raze those of Rome. This is a truth; and not only so,—it is the primal truth in the science of European liberty. This truth only now begins to be understood on the Continent. It is the main lesson which the re-action of 1849 has been overruled to teach. All former insurrections have been against kings and aristocrats: even in 1848 the ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... gladly to the dawn of chivalry, when, every hour and year, men were becoming more gentle and more wise; while, even through their worst cruelty and error, native qualities of noblest cast may be seen asserting themselves for primal motive, and submitting ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... not a crank. He knew that so far from being a mere animal, the Indian is of a subtlety more ancient than the Sphinx. In his primal brain—nearer nature than our own—the directness of a child mingles with the profoundest cunning. He believes easily in powers of light and darkness, yet is a sceptic all the while. Stirling knew this; but he could not know just when, if ever, the young charlatan Cheschapah would succeed in cheating ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... subconscious understanding? Perhaps it was a little of all three. He did not stop to inquire. In crises such as that through which he was passing, the mind and body act without reason, rather by the primal instinct, the certain call of the things that were before ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... simplicity. The mountains and lakes of the West have become settings for the reading of the "Centaur" of Maurice de Guerin. You see the reason for the titles chosen because you feel that the poetry of line and the harmonic accompaniment of color is the primal essential. They are not so dynamic as suggestive in their quality of finality. The way is left open, in other words, for you yourself to wander, if you will, and possess the ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... will have in common with other seaside places is a parade. At first Stella wouldn't hear of having one; but Norty told her there's "a deep-seated primal instinct in human nature for sitting on benches and watching one's fellow-creatures walk up and down, and it would not be wise to thwart this instinct." He's an enormously clever boy, and, when it was put to her like that, Stella gave ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... merchandise, he went back to his solitary vigil, which finally became so unbearable that he sought to escape his thoughts, or at least to drown them for a while, amid the lights and life and laughter of Stark's saloon. Being but a child by nature, his means of distraction were primal and elementary, and he began to gamble, as usual with hard luck, for the cards had ever been unkind to him. He did not think of winnings or losings, however—he merely craved the occupation; and it was this that induced him to sit at a game in ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... young attorney sensed a poorly concealed effort to evade this primal responsibility toward him and the society of which he was an inseparable part. Men who walked with their heads in the clouds were certain to step on one's feet. Dreamers were scoundrels or lunatics who sought to justify their unfitness for society by ridiculing it as unworthy ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... begotten by flesh and spirits will be called evil spirits on earth, and on the earth will be their dwelling-place. Evil spirits proceed from their bodies, because they are created from above, and from the holy watchers is their beginning and primal origin; they will be evil spirits on earth, and evil spirits they will be named. And the spirits of heaven have their dwelling in heaven, but the spirits of the earth, which were born upon the earth, have their dwelling on the earth. And ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... appropriate dispositions and acts. The powers which have been employed in its culture are thus set free for the acquisition of yet other virtues, and the formation of other good habits. Herein lies the secret of progressive goodness, of an ever nearer approach to a perfect standard of character. The primal virtues are first made habits of the unceasing consciousness and of the daily life, and the moral power no longer needed for these is then employed in the cultivation of the finer traits of superior excellence,—the ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... that ever man Looked into since the world began Is Woman! As I turn those pages, As fresh as in the primal ages, As day by day I scan, perplext, The ever subtly changing text, I feel that I am slowly growing To think no other work worth knowing. And in my copy—there is none So perfect as the one I own— I find no thing set down but such As teaches ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... on her in a gaze so concentrated, so full of intense longing, that she felt as if he were trying to hypnotise her into loving him. She knew that if he were, it must be unconscious hypnotism on his part. There were no subtleties of that kind in Colin McKeith. No, it was the primal element in him that appealed to her, dominated her. For she was startled by a sudden realization of that dominant quality in him as applied to herself. In their courtship it had ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... prejudices to the best advantage? Slavery has deeper root 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 ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... ran, And, on our faces, blessed the wondrous man: Say, was I then deceived, or from the skies Burst on my ear seraphic harmonies? "Glory to God!" unnumbered voices sung: "Glory to God!" the vales and mountains rang. Voices that hailed Creation's primal morn, And to the shepherds sung a Saviour born. Slowly, bare-headed, through the surf we bore The sacred cross, and, kneeling, kissed the shore. 'But what a scene was there? Nymphs of romance, Youths graceful as the Fawn, with eager glance, Spring from the glades, and down the alleys ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... yet contain an elemental truth. Yet, before I make this clearer, let me tell you a thought that has often been made. It may be that physical birth is but a secondary process; and that prior to the possibility, the Mother Spirit searches for, until it finds, the small Element—the primal Ego or child's soul. It may be that a certain waywardness would cause such to strive to evade capture by the Mother Spirit. It may have been such a thing as this, that I saw. I have always tried to think so; but it is impossible to ignore the sense of repulsion that ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... of Aleardi was Le Prime Storie (Primal Histories), in which he traces the course of the human race through the Scriptural story of its creation, its fall, and its destruction by the deluge, through the Greek and Latin days, through ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... a genuine expression of the author's nature; 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 ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... But let me ask you why you consider the tiger more bloodthirsty than yourself? He springs upon his food— you buy yours from the butcher. He cannot live without animal food: it is a primal necessity, and he obeys the ordained instinct. You can live on vegetables; yet you slaughter beasts of the field and birds of the air (or buy them when slaughtered), and consider yourself a model of virtue. The tiger only kills his food or his enemies; you not only kill both, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Unquestionably, the first period was most important in influencing her genius. It was in the home days at Griff, the school days at Nuneaton nearby, that those deepest, most permanent impressions were absorbed which are given out in the finest of her fictions. Hence came the primal inspiration which produced her best. And it is because she drew most generously upon her younger life in her earlier works that it is they which are most likely to survive ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... penetrates and permeates the life of the universe as it does the hearts of men, though called by different names in different lands, is the same to every race, wherever it may dwell, whatever its language or its beliefs. You Christians call him the Heavenly Father, we give him the name of the Primal One. To you, too, your God speaks in the surging seas, the waving corn, the pure light of day; you, too, regard music which enchants your heart, and love which draws man to man, as his gifts; and we go only a step further, giving a special name to each phenomenon of nature, and each lofty ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... worked not gently, bound first Danglar and then Skeeny to their respective chairs. Skeeny for the most part kept his eyes on the floor, casting only furtive glances at Rhoda Gray's revolver muzzle. But Danglar was smiling now. He had very white teeth. There was something of primal, insensate fury in the hard-drawn, parted lips. Somehow he seemed to remind Rhoda Gray of a beast, stung to madness, but impotent behind the bars of its cage, ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... the construction of this dish there is to be recognised a breath of the same afflatus which gave us the Florentine campanile, and the Medici tombs, and the portrait of Monna Lisa. When we stand before any one of these masterpieces, we realise at a glance how keen must have been the primal insight, and how strenuous the effort necessary for the evolution of so consummate an achievement; and, with the savour of the Tenerumi di Vitello still fresh, I feel that it deserves to be added to the list of Italian capo lavori. Now, ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... acid, is it? Doubtless—and other things, perhaps, which chemistry cannot detect. Nevertheless, give its parts what names you will, its whole is yet the wind of the living God to the bodies of men, his spirit to their spirits, his breath to their hearts. When I learn that there is no primal intent—only chance—in the unspeakable joy that it gives, I shall cease to believe in poetry, in music, in woman, in God. Nay, I must have already ceased to believe in God ere I could believe that ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... churchyard; so that not an individual of the thousands who pass along this public way can help trampling over him or her. The scene, nevertheless, was very cheerful in the morning sun: people going about their business in the day's primal freshness, which was just as fresh here as in younger villages; children with milk-pails, loitering over the burial-stones; school-boys playing leap-frog with the altar-tombs; the simple old town preparing itself for the day, which would be like myriads ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... must again confess, although as an editor I may bitterly regret the confession, that the passion for reviewing is almost inexplicable. Reviewing has the primal curse of hard labor upon it. You must do two kinds of work at once, and be adequately rewarded for neither. First you must digest another man's conception, assimilate his ideas, absorb his imagination. ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... an Indian cakewalk. Others tossed their hats in the air and shot holes through them as they fell to the ground. And all were laughing, crying, shouting, waving arms and head gear in a sort of wild, feverish, primal jubilation. ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... cause for it. Perhaps the emotion was the beginning of a new soul-life for her; certainly here was a moment of reversion to a condition of unplumbed progenital influences; the scorching anger arising from such a primitive situation was in itself primal. Hence the emotion no less that the experience itself was novel; ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... 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 ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... 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 ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... into the sorrowful city; into eternal dole among the lost people. Justice incited my sublime Creator. Divine Omnipotence, the highest wisdom, and the Primal Love created me. Before me, there were no created things. Only eternal, and I eternal, last. Abandon hope, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... must be very sure that the passage is corrupt before we set about amending it. First and last, we must remember that primal elder law, that of two readings the more difficult is to be preferred. Durior lectio preferenda 'st should be a frontlet between our brows. The weaker reading or the plainer meaning is more likely to be a printer's interpretation of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... 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 seeds were sown. Even the simple Indian folk,— Naive indigene of primitive ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... eternal decrees and volitions of God, we must perforce conclude that our knowledge of God, and of God's will increases in proportion to our knowledge and clear understanding of nature, as we see how she depends on her primal cause, and how she works according to eternal law. (35) Wherefore so far as our understanding goes, those phenomena which we clearly and distinctly understand have much better right to be called works of God, and to be referred to the will of God than those ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... are curiously wrought in splendid purple; on the tables is massy silver and deeds of ancestral valour graven in gold, all the long course of history drawn through many a heroic name from the nation's primal antiquity. ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... Chicago Convention, the exact and extreme opposite of such a theme created one of the most interesting of the debates. The platform had been read and received with tremendous cheers, when Mr. Giddings, of Ohio, who was everywhere eager to insist upon what he designated as the "primal truths" of the Declaration of Independence, moved to amend the first resolution by incorporating in it the phrase which announces the right of all men to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The convention was ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... which was also called the Lair of the White Worm. 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
... years of experience, to the common level—man weak and credulous in his dealings with woman. He hoped that his disgust with himself would lead on to disgust, or, rather, distaste for her. It is the primal instinct of vanity to dislike and to shun those who ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... requires three things: a fruitful germ; a quickening impulse; a nourishing medium. Science plainly shows us that this primal nucleus is given, in the human species, by the union of the contents of a sperm cell with those of a germ cell; that this dynamic start is imparted from the life force of the parents; and that this ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... he had made. Such was the view Arthur took of the case, however false a light his pride may have cast upon it; and he buried his face, with the glow of shame upon it, deep in the pillow, while, with bitter resentment, his young heart traced it all back to the primal cause—the contemptuous repulse he had met ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... exit. There was the usual crush, but he could see the tall figure passing up the steps to the depot. He tried to force his way and was called a brute by a crowded woman. He ran down the platform to the gates he had entered with the truck. They were automatic and had locked. Then he became a primal creature being cheated of a lawful mate and climbed the high iron fence and ran for ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... supremely true of the sexual part of life. If mere lust is the vilest thing on earth, pure love is the most beautiful. And when pure love dominates a life all the sexual activities of the body may be transmuted and redeemed until a complete life is attained in which all the primal forces of our beings find a happy exercise under the control of a passion that is at once physical, mental, and spiritual. But the body is not in this process denied. It is accepted, understood, and made to play its true part. If passion be truly handled it provides the ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... 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
... alone and make it sweet and satisfying? Not I, oh God, not I! I'm no exceptional creature. I'm just a plain woman. And if life doesn't give me wifehood and motherhood, it gives me nothing. I wonder if all women feel this way. This pretty little Lena,—is she bursting with primal need of giving and taking? At any rate she has put something in Dick's face that was never there before—that I'd give my soul to see in a man's face when he looks ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... 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
... the wind in her, and a balance, rhythm, and give in all that she does which marries her to the sea—whether it be a fore and aft rig and one sees only great lines of the white, or a square rig and one sees what is commonly and well called a leaning tower of canvas, or that primal rig, the triangular sail, that cuts through the airs of the world and clove a way for the first adventures, whatever its rig, a ship so approaching an awaiting boat from which we watch her is one of ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... David is as deeply colored with the primal passions of humanity as are the songs of Homer. There is the picture of the shepherd-boy, to which must be added the exquisite psalm which later traditions put in his mouth; the victory over the giant; the most pathetic story of the moody and wayward ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... falling of the flesh, So that there is no thing in earth or heaven But to the unhoused spirit native is— The mantle falls and leaves the Prophet angel! Body, then, is the prison-house of soul, And freedom is its highest happiness, Its heaven, its primal being full of joy. This power that holdeth thus the keys of life, Can then at will give moments of release, Which to the soul are as the water-brooks That scantly rise amid a sun-scorch'd waste: These, oft repeated, must at length destroy The ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... priest took up with her this primal oath of fidelity, body and soul. All at once the full personal import of the words pierced her, and her low voice swelled unconsciously with her affirmation. She was to be for always as she was now. They two had not been one before: the words ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... the pioneer encountered the savagery of border life, grappled with it, and reacted to it without guidance from other mentor than his own instincts. His need was still the primal threefold need family, sustenance, and safe sleep when the day's work was done. We who look back with thoughtful eyes upon the frontiersman—all links of contact with his racial past severed, at grips with destruction in the contenting ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... folding, the heat of radioactivity has been a determining factor. We recognise in the movements of the sediments not only an influence localising and accelerating crustal movements, but one which, in subservience to the primal distribution of land and water, has determined some of the greatest geographical features of ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... destined, with the illusion from which it springs, to pass away. When man arrives at the final consciousness in which the idea of such a self, superior or inferior or in any way antagonistic to others, ceases to operate, then he will return to his first and primal condition, and will cease to need ANY special religion or gods, knowing himself and all his fellows to be divine and the origin and ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... when it was destitute of brightness and light, and enveloped all around in total darkness, there came into being, as the primal cause of creation, a mighty egg, the one inexhaustible seed of all created beings. It is called Mahadivya, and was formed at the beginning of the Yuga, in which we are told, was the true light Brahma, the eternal one, the wonderful ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... about him in the lonely hours. It exalted his passion, lulled the pains of desire, held the flesh subservient to spirit. What is love, says the physiologist, but ravening sex? If so, in Piers Otway's breast the primal instinct had undergone strange transformation. How wrought?—he asked himself. To what destiny did it correspond, this winged love soaring into the infinite? This rapture of devotion, this utter humbling ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... shape chased shape. I saw a neat-garbed nurse, Wan with excessive work; and, bowed with toil, A shop-girl sickly, of the primal curse Each looked ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 2, 1890. • 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 ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... sighs, By what and how Love granted that ye knew Your yet uncertain wishes.' She replied: 'No greater grief than to remember days Of joy, when misery is at hand. 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. Oft times by that reading Our eyes ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... boy, whence comes that brooding smile, Whose secret lifts his cheeks, and overflows His sight with tender dew? What through his frame Melts languor sweeter than approaching sleep To one made weary by a hard day's toil? It is the memory of primal love, Whose visionary splendour steeped his life In hues of heaven; and which grown open day, Revealing perilous falls, his steps confined Within the pathways to the noblest end. Now following this dimmed glory, tired, ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct, which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind, (though different in degree,) amongst all living creatures; this instinct therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of "the poor beetle ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... employed. It is, indeed, a strange art to take these blocks, rudely conceived for the purpose of the market or the bar, and by tact of application touch them to the finest meanings and distinctions, restore to them their primal energy, wittily shift them to another issue, or make of them a drum to rouse the passions. But though this form of merit is without doubt the most sensible and seizing, it is far from being equally present in all writers. The effect of words in Shakespeare, their singular justice, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... know why I think of vaudeville as I think of a collection of good drawings. Unless it is because the sense of form is the same in all of the arts. The acrobat certainly has line and mass to think of, even if that isn't his primal concern. He knows how he decorates the space on which he operates. To make another comparison, then, Grock is the Forain of vaudeville. He achieves great plastic beauty with distinguished economy of means. He ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... o'er yonder main Thy bark, that bids the world adieu for aye To seek a better strand, The western winds their ready wings expand; Which, through the dangers of that dusky way, Where all deplore the first infringed command, Will guide her safe, from primal bondage free, Reckless to stop or stay, To that true East, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... trail every 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; ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... at a glance; none can read it wholly unmoved. For here is pure humanity, which none can escape, the primal instinct without which man that is born of woman would not be. Before this weak, bowed, and homely figure Knowledge is silent, Pride and Passion are rebuked. Strength is shamed. Motherhood and ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... time of your sweet sighs, By what, 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. Ofttimes by that reading Our eyes were drawn together, and the hue Fled ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... cried Cedric, starting up, 'Speak swiftly, ere too late, where dwelleth he?' 'Ah, that I know not,' spake the little voice, 'Yet keep thy courage, seek thou out the stork, The ancient stork that saw from earliest days, Sitting in primal contemplation lost, Sphinx-like, seraphic, and oracular, Watching the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... had we heard this reference to becoming Galus. Ahm had spoken of it many times. Lys and I decided that it was a sort of original religious conviction, as much a part of them as their instinct for self-preservation—a primal acceptance of a hereafter and a holier state. It was a brilliant theory, but it was all wrong. I know it now, and how far we were from guessing the wonderful, the miraculous, the gigantic truth which even yet I may only guess at—the ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... oozed over the jagged ridges that took the humans precious moments to scramble past, and the speed of its weird progress seemed to increase as theirs faltered. It was a heartless mass driven inexorably by primal instinct towards the food that lay ahead. The dim phosphorescent illumination tinged its flabby ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... eloquence. He is an adroit magician, able to assume almost any form at will, and impervious to any amount of ridicule and insult. Here we have, it appears, the elements of the story in Genesis; the primal Eden, the tempter in animal form, and the bringing of sorrow and death upon earth through the elemental ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... prostituted to earthly uses. It is a God-made arrangement for human development and happiness, and woe be to him who defiles it with sensuous abuses. It is before the Church, before any of the solemn ordinances of God's house, the primal decree of the Father for his human children. To degrade or abuse the Marriage covenant is blasphemy, irreverence, sacrilegious wickedness. If one would enter the portals of the church bowed in reverence ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... some nations make for pensions. A large and unestimated sum may also be added to the account from loss of military conscription, again not counting the losses to society through those forms of poverty which have their primal cause in war. For in the words of Bastiat, "War is an ogre that devours as much when he sleeps as when he is awake." It was Gambetta who foretold that the final end of armament rivalry must be "a beggar crouching by a ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... see the advisability of returning to the policy of the church prevalent before the Council of Trent, and will allow a wiser freedom to his spiritual subjects in this matter of divorce. Hearts were created before creeds, and the primal laws of God still possess, and exert in emergencies, their ancient ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... grain came upon this moving platform these men seized it, bound it into sheaves, and threw it upon the field. Simple as this procedure seemed it really worked a revolution in agriculture; for the first time since the pronouncement of the primal curse, the farmer abandoned his hunchback attitude and did his work standing erect. Yet this device also had its disqualifications, the chief one being that it converted the human sheaf-binder into a sweat-shop ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... place, the range of his voyages and migrations, the distribution of animals and plants on which he must depend. These conditions he has shared with all forms of life from the amoeba to the civilized nation. The earth's superficial area is the primal and immutable condition of earth-born, earth-bound man; it is the common soil whence is sprung our common humanity. Nations belong to countries and races to continents, but humanity belongs to the whole world. Naught but the united forces of the whole earth could have produced ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... mightiest impulse genius owes to pride. From conquer'd science graced with glorious spoils, He still dares on, demands sublimer toils; And, had not Nature check'd his vent'rous wing, His eye had pierced her at her primal spring. ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... 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 ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... a creative act; the second as much as, if not more than, the first. According to the first theory the creative power has been distributed over a series of acts, according to the second theory it has been concentrated in one primal creation. The second is the theory of the mutability of species, or, in general, of evolution, but ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... all the flowers, Whose faintest sigh is like a spell, Was born in Eden's sinless bowers Long ere our primal parents fell. ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... 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 First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... his ears, yet he heard around him still the mellow murmuring of bees, and saw the butterflies whirling deliriously together. All the forces which had held him under restraint stretched suddenly, while he met her eyes, like bands that were breaking. Before the solitary primal fact of his love for her, the fog of tradition with which civilization has enveloped the simple relation of man and woman, evaporated in the sunlight. The harsh outlines of the future were veiled, and he saw only the present, ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... Thought is a product of mind. Thought is real, and, when sufficiently concentrated, becomes tangible and visible to those who can be brought into sympathy with its vibrations. There is but one primal substance, which is mind. Mind creates all things out of itself; therefore, to change the world we look at, it is only necessary to change ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... our brave militia from extinguishing in Vienna and Olmutz the decrepit absolutism of the Hapsburgs? What hindered me from afterwards crushing it? The intervention of Russian despotism,—always the primal ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... a something in thy form and face, Thy looks and ways, of primal harmony; A certain soothing charm, a vital grace That breathes of the eternal womanly, And makes me feel the warmth of Nature's breast, When in her arms, and thine, I sink ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... 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 open magic casements—surely ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... 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 ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... her. And the heart of her asked but a single boon - That love should seek her, and find her, and win her. She grasped the scope of the First Intent That made her kingdom FOR HER, no other, And joyfully into her place she went - The primal ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... must have, or we faint by the roadside of the intelligible. The only altruism is that which can defy the cold brutality of things as they are, and convince us with things as they are not. Thus alone can the contemplation of art bring us back to primal infelicity, and restore in our souls the perfect vacuity of infants and cows. Thus only can we achieve the suffusion of vision ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... From the primal source of their wrongs,—that is, the undue importance attached to the sexual character,—Mary next explains that minor causes have arisen to prevent women from realizing this ideal. The narrowness of mind engendered by their vicious education hinders ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... intention on the part of the Creator it is said that each of these elements was made tripartite; and this tripartite constitution of all things is apprehended by Perception as well. The red colour in burning fire comes from (primal elementary) fire, the white colour from water, the black colour from earth—in this way Scripture explains the threefold nature of burning fire. In the same way all things are composed of elements of all things. The Vishnu Purana, in its ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... seems now—we two white men, gentlemen of quality, completely oblivious to blood, birth, tradition, breeding—our primal allegiance, our very individualities sunk in the mystical freemasonry of a savage tie which bound us to the two nations we assumed to speak for, Oneida and Delaware—two nations of the great Confederacy of the Iroquois that ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... not of chance but of its very contrary. That the cosmic drama should have followed this particular course; that from the cooling down of fiery nebulas there should have come forth the orderly system we behold in nature; that life should have climbed up from the speck of protoplasm "through primal ooze and slime," making its way step by step through all the lower creation until it "blossomed into man"—this, to the unbiassed mind, does not wear the aspect of mere incalculable accident, but of all-embracing wisdom and directivity. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... nobly imaginative faculty, is the worship of the Letter, instead of the Spirit, in what we chiefly accept as the ordinance and teaching of Deity; and the apprehension of a healing sacredness in the act of reading the Book whose primal commands we ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... no stain, ineffable in Thy generation and inconceivable in Thy manifestation. Hear us, then, O Father Incorruptible, Father Immortal, God of Hidden Beings, sole Light and Life, Alone beyond Vision, only Unspeakable, only Unstainable, only [Foundation] stone of Adamant (40), sole Primal Being, for before Thee nothing was. Hearken unto this prayer which we make unto Him who is concealed in every place. Hear us, send unto us incorporeal spirits that they may dwell with us and teach us that which Thou hast promised unto us; that they may dwell in us and that we may become bodies ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... Hasteth to meet her lord, the westward-going man! Even as he saw the citadel of Heaven, He beheld an earthly state divinely fair and just. Mystic and statesman, maker of homes, Strengthened by the primal law of toil, And schooled by monarch-made injustices, He carried the covenant of liberty with fire and sword, And laid a rich state on frugality! Many republics have sprung into being, Full-grown, equipped with theories forged in reason; All, all have fallen in a single night; But ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... 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, of that most sacred ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... a sigh the primitive savage within him had struggled with the gentleman,—and the gentleman had won. This very conflict with himself, however, had increased though it had chastened his desire. The more personal concern he now felt for her recovery was but another expression of the primal ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... stamping feet round and round the big room. The cries became shorter, menacing, abrupt, imperative. The high lamps cast strange shadows on their lost faces. The voices grew hoarse, dropped to low growls, their faces changed from ferocity to a mournful solemnity until they looked even more like primal men than before; but they continued their marching and stamping until Gora, who, with the other women, had begun to fear that the rhythm would bring down the house, had the inspiration to insert a Caruso disk into the victrola; ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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 by the State—continue ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... threatens with so much terror as fire. The senses disband in panic before it, reason flees, the voice appeals in its distress with a note that vibrates horror. In the threat of death by fire, man descends to his primal levels; his tongue speaks again the universal language, its note lending its horrified thrill to the lowest thing that moves by the ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... awoke to find its heart unchanged and war with aggressive animalism still the underlying and primal force in man. ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... point Dr. Ingleby says, succinctly and decidedly, "The primal evidence of the forgery lies in the ink writing, and in that alone";[S] but he expressly bases this dictum upon the decisions of the professed palaeographers of the British Museum and the Record Office. He goes on, however, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... after the philosophic school in the Masonic Temple had come to an end, he invited him to Concord and cared for him like a brother. Mr. Alcott deserved this, for though he was not more a philosopher than Thoreau was a naturalist, and equally with Thoreau he was a character. The primal tenet in his creed was like the ancient mariner's, to harm neither man nor bird nor beast; and he exemplified this doctrine with incredible consistency for full fifty years. He lived a blameless life. Many laughed at him for his ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... a keen jealousy of which he was ashamed. The boy was crude and untrained; his work was not to be compared with Kittrell's, master of line that he was, but Kittrell saw that it had the thing his work now lacked, the vital, primal thing—sincerity, belief, love. The spark was there, and Kittrell knew how Hardy would nurse that spark and fan it, and keep it alive and burning until it should eventually blaze up in a fine white flame. And Kittrell realized, as the days went by, that Banks' ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... part of her flesh and blood, a part of her spirit—something vital to her and dependent upon him. He was ready to guard it with every instinct of caution and every ounce of courage there was in him. And to protect it meant to fight. That was the first law of his breed, the primal warning which came to him through the red blood of many generations of wilderness forefathers. So he listened, and he watched, and his blood pounded hot in his veins as he followed the footprints in the trail. A bit of brush, swinging suddenly free from ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... and enthusiastic admirers,—the proportion of those who yield to his genius a cold and reluctant homage is probably greater in Scotland than in any other country in Christendom. "The rest of mankind recognize the essential truth of his delineations, and his loyalty to all the primal instincts and sympathies of humanity"; but the Scotch cannot forget that he opposed the Reform Bill, painted the Covenanters with an Episcopalian pencil, and made a graceful and heroic image of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... birth to a sort of forecast of the new order, had ended by merely perpetuating the hollow structure of the old regime. Now, however, the Bolsheviki, in one night, had dissipated it, as one blows away smoke. Old Russia was no more; human society flowed molten in primal heat, and from the tossing sea of flame was emerging the class struggle, stark and pitiless-and the fragile, slowly-cooling crust of ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... his passion of anxiety during her illness, in spite of the pity and affection of his daily attitude, Kitty occupied, in truth, much less of his mind than she had ever yet occupied?—that a certain magic—primal, incommunicable—had ceased to clothe her image ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... human face at last!" she boomed. "Here I've been a month in this dinky hole," which I thought strange, since we were surrounded by league upon league of the primal wilderness. "Cooped up like a hen in a barrel," she added in tones that must have carried well out over ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... mind, confesses his disappointment and disgust. Corn, wine and oil, houses, lands and station are all the objects of loathing as well as of pursuit, to those who, having won them, have found out their real quality. It is a primal instinct of the race that "the life is more than meat and ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... exalted form of mud pies; they work away on already passable specimens with such a will. But who does quite outgrow his childish delights? And to make of the play of childhood the work of middle life, must be to foil the primal curse to the very letter. What more enchanting pastime than to wade all day in viscous mud, hearing your feet plash when you put them in, and suck as you draw them out; while the higher part of you is busied building a parapet of ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... because society is what it is; that, again, the character of society depends upon the economic system by which it feeds, clothes and houses itself, and that finally all such systems owe their existence to the machinery in use for the production of the basic necessities of life, the primal machine being the human hand to which all other machines ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... Court-Planets, and did his revolutions; striving to forget that there ever was a Hirsch, or a soot-explosion of that nature. In words nobody reminded him of it, the King least of all: and by degrees matters were again tolerably glorious, and all might have gone well enough; though the primal perfect splendor, such fuliginous reminiscence being ineffaceable, never could be quite re-attained. The diamond Cross of Merit, the Chamberlain gold Key, hung bright upon the man; a man the admired ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... tension, then the quivering expulsion of force. It was 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 ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... Shows that heaven and earth then were, Shows that sea and land existed:— The beginning then must be Something more remote and distant: He who has expressly said 'The beginning,' must have hinted At the primal cause of all things, At the first and great beginning, All things growing out of HIM, He himself the pre-existent:— Yes, but then a new beginning Must we seek for this beginner, And so on ad infinitum; Since if I, on soaring pinion Seek from facts ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... 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 ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... rapid increase of children and the need of more pasturage for the cattle, many of the leading men and women drifted away from the original confines of Plymouth towards Duxbury, Marshfield, Scituate, Bridgewater and Eastham. Agriculture became their primal concern, with the allied pursuits of fishing, hunting and trading with the Indians and white settlements that were made on Cape Cod ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble
... was discovered by the Chevalier La Salle nearly two hundred years ago, there was still much uncertainty as to its true source. Within the last century several distinguished explorers have attempted to find the primal reservoir of the Great River. Beltrami, Nicollett, and Schoolcraft have each in turn claimed the goal of their explorations. Numerous lakes, ponds, and rivers have from time to time enjoyed the honor of standing at the head of the ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... and much broader conception of the world. It was a big place. It was filled with many things, of which Kazan and Gray Wolf were not the most important. The monsters he had seen on the moonlit plot of sand had roused in him a new kind of caution, and the one greatest instinct of beasts—the primal understanding that it is the strong that prey upon the weak—was wakening swiftly in him. As yet he quite naturally measured brute force and the menace of things by size alone. Thus the bear was more terrible than ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... long under his immediate care. I was soon sent to school—that preparatory world, where the great primal principles of human nature, in the aggression of the strong and the meanness of the weak, constitute the earliest lesson of importance that we are taught; and where the forced primitiae of that less universal knowledge which is useless ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
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