"Meteoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one with her?" he inquired, with the memory of a meteoric vision of another rider fleeing back along the road on ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... nurse and a doctor, while his creditors mounted guard over the old masters, and his guests explained to each other that they had dined with him only because they wanted to see the pictures. Mr. Rosedale meant to have a less meteoric career. He knew he should have to go slowly, and the instincts of his race fitted him to suffer rebuffs and put up with delays. But he was prompt to perceive that the general dulness of the season afforded him an unusual ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... the great meteoric shower, in Nov. 1833. I was at Remley's tavern, 12 miles west of Lewisburg, Greenbrier Co., Virginia. A drove of 50 or 60 negroes stopped at the same place that night. They usually 'camp out,' but as it was excessively muddy, they were permitted to come into the house. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... opposite, but a little to the left, in a melancholy piece of waste ground with frowzy grass, which looks like a small piece of country that has taken to drinking, and has quite lost itself. Standing anyhow and all wrong, upon this open space, like something meteoric that has fallen down from the moon, is an odd, lop-sided, one-eyed kind of wooden building, that looks like a church, with a flag- staff as long as itself sticking out of a steeple something larger than a tea-chest. Under the window is a small stand of coaches, whose slave-drivers are sunning ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... Tartary, on the frontier of China, stood forty pillars. On each side of the temple at Pæstum were fourteen, recording the Egyptian cycle of the dark and light sides of the moon, as described by Plutarch; the whole thirty-eight that surrounded them recording the two meteoric cycles so often found ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... pursuits, will be thrilled by what he sees around him. The life of the farmer, planted in the midst of so much that is beautiful, having to do with nature's marvellous miracles of germination and growth, moving under the open heaven with its glory of sky and meteoric change, and accompanied by the songs of birds and all characteristic rural sights and sounds, will seem to him the sweetest and the most enviable that falls to human lot. But the hard-working farmer sees nothing of this. What cares he for birds, unless they pull ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... are which have had similar meteoric rises in value. The first edition of Walton and Cotton's 'Compleat Angler' was published in 1653 at one and sixpence. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the average price for a fine copy seems to have been between three and four pounds. In 1850 so much as fifteen pounds ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... astronomer's fame has steadily increased. In 1868, in the great meteoric shower, she and her pupils recorded the paths of four thousand meteors, and gave valuable data of their height above the earth. In the summer of 1869 she joined the astronomers who went to Burlington, Iowa, to observe the total eclipse of the sun, ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... course is, but they seem so far and alien from my wonted place that it is as if I had slid down a steepy slant from the home-planet to a group of asteroids nebulous somewhere in middle space, and were resting there, still vibrant from the rush of the meteoric fall. There were, of course, facts and incidents contrary to such a theory: a steamer starting from New York in the raw March morning, and lurching and twisting through two days of diagonal seas, with people aboard dining and undining, and talking and smoking and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... certain, we should always find an example of nobility, of generosity, of charity and kindness and self-forgetfulness. Indeed, we find these qualities, as a rule, in the biographies of the great sympathetic poets and men of genius of the pen—I do not say in the lives of rebels of genius, "meteoric poets" like Byron. The same basis, the same foundations of rectitude, of honour, of goodness, of melancholy, and of mirth, underlie the art of Moliere, of Scott, of Fielding, and as his correspondence ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... artistic character, that can be distinctly assigned to the primitive period, are a certain number of engraved cylinders, some of which are very curious. [PLATE XIV., Fig. 1] It is clearly established that the cylinders in question, which are generally of serpentine, meteoric stone, jasper, chalcedony, or other similar substance, were the seals or signets of their possessors, who impressed them upon the moist clay which formed the ordinary material for writing. They ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... occurs in the metallic state only in a very small quantity in meteoric iron, but is frequently found in union with oxygen, as oxide in chrome iron ore, and as chromic ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... victim of a tragic fate, amongst those present at the dinner party with which Mrs Stanhope began the season of 1807. Another man, then in the heyday of popularity and fame, was doomed to a yet sadder close to his meteoric career. ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from under the horses, perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a passing property in the air, which may have left something to eat behind it. They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and fragments of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric discharge, for fowls to peck at. Peg-tops and hoops they account, I think, as a sort of hail; shuttlecocks, as rain, or dew. Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I have more than a suspicion ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... prevented these men from being swept from the deck, while those upon the roof below were constantly compelled to cling to rails and stanchions to save themselves from being carried away by each new burst of meteoric fury. Upon the prow of the Vanator was painted the device of Gathol, but no pennants were displayed in the upper works since the storm had carried away several in rapid succession, just as it seemed ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... way back up town, the street seemed full of Madeira. Even when some few of the satellites broke away from him and scattered into other parts of the town, at the livery stable, the drug store, the Grange, talking a little dubiously, the impression was definite that they were only meteoric scraps, cast-off clinkers that could not stand the fire and the fizz and the whirl ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... a book until it is from one to five years old Quietly putting himself on common ground with his reader Simplicity Slovenly literature, unrebuked and uncorrected Suggestion rather than by commandment Unenlightened popular preference for a book Waste precious time in chasing meteoric appearances ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... these most remarkable cosmic phenomena can be explained in either of two ways: they may have resulted from an explosive or volcanic discharge from the surface of the earth, or from the oblique impact of a meteoric stream moving at a very high velocity. It seems unlikely that sufficient energy to bring about the observed changes could have been developed by a volcanic disturbance of the ordinary type; but if radioactive forces are allowed to come into play the ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... metamorphism of rocks by the infiltration of rain and other meteoric waters, M. De Koninck, of the Belgian Academy of Sciences, assigns the cause of many hitherto ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... Meteoric displays, swarms of shooting stars, have been observed at various times all through the ages; but this phenomenon, coming in the order given by the prophecy, that is, following the darkening of the sun, constituted the sublime ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... Dead Sea, whose tranquil loveliness, backed by the grand plateau of Moab, is an object of admiration to all save patients suffering from the strange disease "Holy Land on the Brain."[FN390] But I found no traces of craters in the neighbourhood, no signs of vulcanism, no remains of "meteoric stones": the asphalt which named the water is a mineralised vegetable washed out of the limestones, and the sulphur and salt are brought down by the Jordan into a lake without issue. I must therefore look upon the history as ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Mohammedans we have a curious example of the same tendency toward a kindly interpretation of stars and meteors, in the belief of certain Mohammedan teachers that meteoric showers are caused by good angels hurling missiles to drive evil ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... reading, outlining chronologically. Ingersoll's election to state senate, then to United States Senate. His rise to national prominence as economist for the post-war Administrator of President Drayton in 1966. His meteoric rise as a peacemaker in a nation tired from endless dreary years of fighting in China and India. His tremendous popularity as he tried to stall the re-intensifying cold-war with Russia. The first Nobel Peace Prize, in 1969, for ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... later, following the meteoric appearance of a young speculator in Duluth, and after Chicago had seen the tentative opening of a grain and commission company labeled Frank A. Cowperwood & Co., which ostensibly dealt in the great wheat crops of the West, a quiet divorce was ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... stood on the corner of Baker and Clinton streets, near that fashionable neighbourhood called "the Heights." Ogilvy, who was some ten years older than I, and who belonged to one of our old families, had embarked on a career then becoming common, but which at first was regarded as somewhat meteoric: gradually abandoning the practice of law, and perceiving the possibilities of the city of his birth, he had "gambled" in real estate and other enterprises, such as our local water company, until he had quadrupled his inheritance. He ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... snow had been dug which was being ground above. The wind felt black, the sky was black, and the lamps were blowing about as if they wanted to escape for the darkness was after them. It was the Sunday following the induction of Fergus, and this was the meteoric condition through which Donal and Gibbie passed on their way to the North church, to hear him preach in the pulpit ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... literature and the Pagan,—Addison had read and esteemed. There was also in the very constitution of Milton's mind, in the majestic regularity and planetary solemnity of its epic movements, something which he could understand and appreciate. As to the meteoric and incalculable eccentricities of the dramatic mind, as it displayed itself in the heroic age of our drama, amongst the Titans of 1590-1630, they confounded and ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... shook the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century subsided ere they reached this lonely rock near the coast of Andalusia. If the name of the great Emperor echoed fitfully upon its shores, it may be doubted whether the fantastic march of his glory or the flaming majesty of his meteoric life ever reached the comprehension of those saintly women kneeling in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... presently. I want to—wow!" he finished, and lost no time in his descent, which was meteoric. "That feller'll kill somebody if he ain't careful!" he complained as Pete tied ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... are, besides, true Smollett strokes in the scenes in the prison from which Melvil rescues Fathom, and there is a good deal of the satirical Smollett fun in the description of Fathom's ups and downs, first as the petted beau, and then as the fashionable doctor. In chronicling the latter meteoric career, Smollett had already observed the peculiarity of his countrymen which Thackeray was fond of harping on in the next century—"the maxim which universally prevails among the English people . . . to overlook, . ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... or crystals!" declared Mark, who had made a study of gems. "I should say they were diamonds, probably meteoric diamonds, very rare and valuable. Why, there is the ransom of a thousand kings spread out ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... cubes of distances and squares of times of revolution: the almost infinite compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion: the sidereal origin of meteoric stones: the Libyan floods on Mars about the period of the birth of the younger astroscopist: the annual recurrence of meteoric showers about the period of the feast of S. Lawrence (martyr, lo August): the monthly recurrence known as the new moon with the old moon in her arms: the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... firmness, conscientiousness, self-esteem, indicating a stern will, unswerving integrity, and marvellous self-possession. He walked rapidly with a firm and elastic tread. He was somewhat like John Baptist, taciturn in habits, usually wrapped in meditation. He was rather meteoric in his movements, appearing suddenly and unexpectedly at this place, and then disappearing in the same ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... to that day according to a certain ordinance. They took a view of Nature totally new in that age; healthy, human, cheerful, loving, trustful, and yet reverent—identical with that which happily is beginning to prevail in our own day. They defied those very volcanic and meteoric phenomena of their land, to which their countrymen were slaying their own children in the clefts of the rocks, and, like Theophrastus' superstitious man, pouring their drink-offerings on the smooth stones of the valley; and declared that, for their part, they would not fear, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... time of the birth of Louis Napoleon he was at Bayonne, arranging with the Spanish princes for the transfer of the crown of Spain to Joseph Bonaparte. Josephine was at Bordeaux. From this interview he passed, in his meteoric flight, to the Congress of Kings at Erfurt, but a few miles from the battle-field of Jena. It was here that the celebrated historian Mueller met the Emperor and gave the following testimony as to the impression which his presence produced upon ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... duty quite as dangerous as the bearing of arms. Fresh recruits for this service are divided into those capable of receiving instruction only in field duty and those for "full service," which includes, with military signaling and telegraphy, the taking of meteoric observations, the collating and publication of such observations, and the deduction from them of correct results. Passing two examinations successfully in the latter course, the signal-service soldier is detailed for duty at a post as assistant, and after six months' satisfactory service is returned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... on their own ground. I am aghast at his temerity, as he, too, will be when he has heard our side of the subject. We girls never have allowed ourselves the luxury of vindicating ourselves, or refuting this charge. It is the clever girl who suffers most of all—not the brilliant, meteoric girl—but just the ordinarily clever girl, as other girls know her. It is this sort of a girl who drags upon my sympathies, because she occupies an ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... to a more gradual and less precipitous descent, he fixes his eye on some distant point in the earth beneath him, and thither bends his course. He is still almost meteoric in his speed and boldness. You see his path down the heavens, straight as a line; if near, you hear the rush of his wings; his shadow hurtles across the fields, and in an instant you see him quietly perched upon some low tree or decayed stub in a swamp or meadow, with reminiscences of ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... weighed with an equal and dispassionate mind whether it was better to spare a man or to cut his throat. As he did not attempt more than he could perform, his rapid success awakened aspirations for a possible future. He was odious to Venice, but a Venetian, who watched his meteoric course, wonders, in his secret diary, whether this unerring schemer was to be the appointed deliverer. He was a terror to Florence, yet the Florentine secretary, to whom he confided his thoughts in certain critical hours, wrote of him as men have written of Napoleon, and erected ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... carbonic acid,—the quickness of respiration,—the beats of the pulse,—together with accurate notes of the duration of bodily exercise in the open air, the loss of weight of the whole body, the general feelings, and the circumstances, thermometric, barometric, and meteoric, under which the observations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... acknowledge the swinging rhythm, the martial dash and vigor of his best verse. Also, remembering the Revolution, we may understand the dazzling impression which he made upon the poets of his day. When the news came from Greece that his meteoric career was ended, the young Tennyson wept passionately and went out to carve on a stone, "Byron is dead," as if poetry had perished with him. Even the coldly critical Matthew Arnold was deeply ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... SUPPLEMENTS 529 and 580.] He said that cosmic dust is found on Arctic snows and upon the bottom of the ocean; all over the world, in fact, at some time or other, there has been a large deposit of this meteoric dust, containing little round nodules found also in meteorites. In Greenland some time ago numbers of what were supposed to be meteoric stones were found; they contained iron, and this iron, on being analyzed at Copenhagen, was found ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... own country the chief object of Meccan worship was a black meteoric stone, kept in the Caaba, with three hundred and sixty subordinate idols, representing the days of the year, as the year ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... none of us knows who this yere Cleopatra the Doc refers to is, onless it's Colonel Sterett, who edits the Daily Coyote. Still, the compar'son is plenty convincin'. Accordin' to the Doc himself, this Cleopatra's a meteoric female party, as lively as she is lovely, who sets a passel of ancient sports to walkin' in a cirkle back some'ers in the mists of time. Also, it's bloo chips to white, an' bet 'em higher than a cat's back, the Doc knows. The Doc is ondoubted ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... that son require but few words of illustration. Hardly a chapter of European history or romance is more familiar to the world than the one which records the meteoric course of Charles the Bold. The propriety of his title was never doubtful. No prince was ever bolder, but it is certain that no quality could be less desirable, at that particular moment in the history of his house. It was not the quality to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... unrepressed, unbridled, unruly; headstrong, ungovernable, unappeasable, immitigable, unmitigable[obs3]; uncontrollable, incontrollable[obs3]; insuppressible, irrepressible; orgastic, orgasmatic, orgasmic. spasmodic, convulsive, explosive; detonating &c. v.; volcanic, meteoric; stormy &c. (wind) 349. Adv. violently &c. adj.; amain[obs3]; by storm, by force, by main force; with might and main; tooth and nail, vi et armis[Lat], at the point of the sword, at the point of the bayonet; at one fell swoop; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... famous war chief of the Shawnees, was born at the ancient town of Piqua on Mad River, not far from the present city of Springfield, in Clark County. His name means Shooting Star, and he was indeed the meteoric light of his people while he lived. He was of a high Indian, family of the Turtle Tribe, and his father had come with his clan to Ohio from their home in Florida, about the middle of the last century. Tecumseh was born, as nearly as can be reckoned, in the year 1768, and from his earliest ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... comes from near Manyema and that the whalebone that was passed off at Zanzibar as the wing of a bird, came, they said, from Tanganyika. As to rocks falling in East Africa, I think their idea might easily arise from the fall of meteoric stones."] ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... eddy of passion on the high road of society, while all around is the week-day goings on of wind and weather; a Lear, therefore, without its soul-searching flashes, its ear-cleaving thunder-claps, its meteoric splendours,—without the contagion and the fearful sympathies of nature, the fates, the furies, the frenzied elements, dancing in and out, now breaking through and scattering,—now hand in hand with,—the fierce or fantastic group of human passions, crimes, and anguishes, reeling on the unsteady ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... particular ship had known many vicissitudes. Under the guidance of a musically inclined Ship's Steward, it had faced audiences across impromptu footlights as "The Pale Pink Pierrots," and, as such, had achieved a meteoric distinction. But unhappily the Ship's Steward was partial to oysters, and bought a barrelful at an auction sale ashore. On the face of things, it appeared a bargain; but the Ship's Steward neglected to inquire too closely into the antecedents of ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... mean street, emptily echoing to my footsteps—no soul awake and audible but me. Then my halt at the placard. And amidst that sleeping stillness, smeared hastily upon the board, a little askew and crumpled, but quite distinct beneath that cool meteoric glare, preposterous and appalling, the measureless evil of ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... blotted out all stars: will-o'-wisps, of various course and color, take the place of stars. Over the wild-surging chaos, in the leaden air, are only sudden glares of revolutionary lightning; then mere darkness, with philanthropistic phosphorescences, empty meteoric lights; here and there an ecclesiastical luminary still hovering, hanging on to its old quaking fixtures, pretending still to be a Moon or Sun,—though visibly it is but a Chinese lantern made of paper mainly, with candle-end foully dying ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... (One of the most spectacular meteoric showers on record, visible all over North America, ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... will come! With Destruction in the air. It will come! With a meteoric glare, With Destruction in the air, With the vengeance of Despair, It will come! It ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... introduced for the first time comparison, classification, and serial order into the peculiar kind of fact which he collected. He was a genius at perceiving analogies; he was fertile in hypotheses; and as far as conditions allowed it in this meteoric region, he relied on verification. Such advantages are of no avail, however, if one has struck into a false road from the outset. But should it turn out that Frederic Myers has really hit the right road by his divining instinct, it is certain that, like the names of others who have been wise, his ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... temperature often undergoes a sudden change of many degrees at the time the storm sets in, the perspiration is checked, and the system receives an instantaneous shock, against which it requires great vital energy to bear up. Men and animals are not, in this mild climate, prepared for these capricious meteoric revolutions, and they not unfrequently perish ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... He expressed his deep regret at leaving my service and his confidence that I would give him a good character. Bingley wept after the way of women. There was also a shadowy housemaidy young person in a cap who used to make meteoric appearances and whom I left to the diplomacy of Bingley. These dismal rites performed, I put my chambers into the hands of a house agent and interviewed a firm of auctioneers with reference to the sale. It was all exceedingly unpleasant. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... isolated grains the mineral is a characteristic constituent of ultrabasic igneous rocks, namely the peridotites and the serpentines which have resulted from their alteration. It is also found under similar conditions in meteoric stones and irons. Often these rocks enclose large segregated masses of granular chromite. The earliest worked deposits were those in the serpentine of the Bare Hills near Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.; it was also formerly extensively ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... accumulation, and the decomposition of water by atmospheric and ordinary electricity; the new Indigo; the spontaneous inflammation of charcoal; the nitrous atmosphere of Tirhoot, one of the principal districts in India for the manufacture of salt-petre; Discovery of a mass of meteoric iron in Bohemia; the chemical composition of cheese; Berzelius on the power of metallic rods to decompose water after their connexion with the galvanic pile is broken; an alkaline principle in Box-wood; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... and whenever any attempt was made to focus his hard sharp personality some guardian divinity seemed to throw a veil of mystery over him. His detractors, however, were the first to own that there was "something about him"; it was felt that he had passed beyond the meteoric stage, and the business world was unanimous in recognizing that he had "come to stay." A dawning sense of his stability was even beginning to make itself felt in Fifth Avenue. It was said that he had bought a house in Seventy-second ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... to use the forward atomic beam to brake our meteoric entrance into the heavy atmosphere. We had, of course, turned on the neutralizing frigi-rectifiers that formed a network on the outer shell of our sphere. At last we were through. Dipping lower as we circled, we discerned majestic ...
— Walls of Acid • Henry Hasse
... success of the new member for Vanebury had been as great as his most reasonable friends anticipated for him, if not quite as meteoric as one or two flatterers had predicted. Meteoric success in the House of Commons is not, indeed, so rare as it was twenty years ago, for the studied rhetoric which served our great-grandfathers in their ambitious pursuit of notoriety has given ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... steamer even of that day was far more dependable than the sailing vessel. The Lightning clipper might run a hundred miles farther in twenty-four hours than ever a steamer had done, but she could not maintain this meteoric burst of speed. Upon the heaving surface of the Western Ocean there was enacted over again the fable of the hare ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... startled realization of death stamped for ever in the wide, staring eyes, was indeed a subject for meditation. There, in the midst of all the evidences of Hartley Parrish's meteoric rise to affluence and power, Greve pondered for an instant on the strange pranks which ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... Persian bowl of hues that changed with a turn of the head or a quiver of the lids; now a Spanish plaque gleaming with metallic, opalescent colors, too indefinable to name, too fugitive for the eye to transmit to memory. Later he picked up strange examples which, like meteoric stones from another sphere, had found their mysterious way from Chinese palaces to his grimy haunts in London, Amsterdam, or Florence, as the case might be—a blue-and-white jar of Chia-ching, or a Han ceremonial ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... so-called Sacred Mosque, or area, which is entirely enclosed by a covered structure of colonnades having minarets and cupolas. Within the centre of this enclosed space is a cube-shaped building called the Kaaba, which contains the famous sacred Black Stone. This stone, probably of meteoric origin, gives to the building its sanctity, and is an object of the greatest veneration to every pious Moslem, who kisses it repeatedly. There is also within the enclosure a building containing the holy well, Zemzem, ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... Saracen, "if all thou lackest were some such distant meteoric glimpse of happiness as thou hadst formerly, thy beacon-light might be rekindled, thy hope fished up from the ocean in which it has sunk, and thou thyself, good knight, restored to the exercise and amusement of nourishing thy fantastic fashion upon a diet as unsubstantial ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... young figure, in its English-fitting black and white, sat opposite Emma McChesney at the breakfast table and between excited gulps of coffee outlined a meteoric career in his chosen field. And the more he talked and the rosier his figures of speech became, the more silent and thoughtful fell his mother. She wondered if five o'clock would find a droop to the set of those young shoulders; if the ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... as the solar corona is the "zodiacal light," which any one can see rising from the western horizon just after the end of twilight on a clear winter or spring evening. The most plausible explanation is that it is due to a cloud of small meteoric bodies revolving round the sun. We should hardly doubt this explanation were it not that this light has a yet more mysterious appendage, commonly called the Gegenschein, or counter-glow. This is a patch of light in the sky in a direction exactly opposite that of the sun. It is so faint ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... the social scale of the town was meteoric, chiefly owing to the goodwill of Madame Coquereau, the widowed mother of the Mayor. She was a hard-featured old lady, with a face that might have been made of corrugated iron painted yellow and with the eyes of an old hawk. She dressed always ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... leadership than is presented in the political history of the Empire State. Rarely more than two controlling spirits appear at a time, and as these pass into apogee younger men of approved capacity are ready to take their places. None had a meteoric rise, but in his day each became an absolute party boss; for the Constitution of 1777, by creating the Council of Appointment, opened wide the door to bossism. The abolition of the Council in 1821 doubtless made individual ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... is—' says old Glegg, shakin' his grizzly head; 'she's shore the most meteoric married lady of which hist'ry says a word. My girl ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... delightfully to her outrageous ideal of arrangement. Dick had denuded several smart florist shops to furnish her with field flowers enough to develop her decorative scheme, which included strangely the stringing of half a dozen huge Chinese lanterns that even in the daylight took on a meteoric light ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... should examine the cases in the order in which they are arranged, beginning with the cases marked 1 and 1A. These two cases contain specimens of native Iron. Native iron has nearly always proved to be of meteoric origin; and the specimens are here arranged in the order in which they have been found. They have fallen from the heavens at different places, and at different periods. The largest known aerolite is that which fell in Brazil, and was no less than eight feet in ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... meteoric glare, It will come! With Destruction in the air. It will come! With a meteoric glare, With Destruction in the air, With the vengeance of Despair, It will ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... unknown, "the astronomers Louville and Halley mistook for lunar phenomena some which were purely terrestrial, such as meteoric or other bodies which are generated in our own atmosphere. This was the scientific explanation at the time of the facts; and that ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... merriment, the marriage service was concluded, Mr. Meech heroically foregoing his meteoric finale. ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... has power to startle, as if the crime were a new thing, not as old (so all religions tell us) as the first brothers. As a meteoric stone falls on our planet, strange and unexplained, a waif of the universe, from a nameless system, so the horror of murder descends on us, when we meet it, with an alien dread, as of an intrusion from some lost star, some ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... of Emerson's is irradiated by a single precept that is worthy to stand by the side of that which Juvenal says came from heaven. How could the man in whose thought such a meteoric expression suddenly announced itself fail to recognize it as divine? It is not strange that he repeats it on the page next the one where we first see it. Not having any golden letters to print it in, I will underscore it for italics, and doubly underscore it in the ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... off by a wounded whale. Every effort had been made to so adjust the electric charge upon the ships that they would be repelled from the cometic mass, but, owing apparently to eccentric changes continually going on in the electric charge affecting the clashing mass of meteoric bodies which constituted the head of the comet, we found it impossible ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... in the greater part of Europe. It was not even known in Scandinavia before the Christian era. In Germany, Pannonia, and Noricum its use dates from the sixth or seventh century B.C. Beneath the mounds of Central America we find but a few fragments of meteoric iron, the rarity of which made them extremely valuable; on the other hand iron was known to the Hellenes as long ago as the fourteenth century B.C., and it had been employed in Egypt for many centuries prior ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... seems to have been a sort of meteoric shower of chipmunk magazines, following in the luminous pathway of the "Spectator" and the "Tatler." Burke was passing through his poetic period, and supplied various stanzas of alleged poetry to these magazines for a modest consideration. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... need this assumption for anything. Well, it would come in handy to make some of these reports of freak phenomena, like mysterious appearances and disappearances, or flying-object sightings, or reported falls of non-meteoric matter, theoretically respectable. Reports like that usually get the ...
— Crossroads of Destiny • Henry Beam Piper
... spears. It is roofed with shields, and the ornaments on its benches are coats of mail. The Valkyrs are Odin's battle maids, choosers of heroes for his banquet rooms. With helmets on their heads, in bloody harness, mounted on shadowy steeds, surrounded by meteoric lightnings, and wielding flaming swords, they hover over the conflict and point the way to Valhalla to the warriors who fall. The valiant souls thus received to Odin's presence are called Einheriar, or the elect. The Valkyrs, as white clad virgins with flowing ringlets, wait on them in the capacity ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... lightning lighted up the spot with a lurid light, and she saw a little white cross, with white daisies growing around it, and upon the cross, in that one meteoric flash, she read the words, "Sacred to the memory of ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... "the inferior aristocracy"—with an inflection of voice caught no doubt from the great families themselves. Yet their father had been an Earl, the second of his name, and was himself the son of a meteoric personage of mid-Victorian days—parliamentary lawyer, peer, and Governor of an Indian Presidency, who had earned his final step in the peerage by the skilful management of a little war, and had then ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... world in space, This is just the evidence which in recent years has been claimed as derived from a study of the surface of Mars. To that planet our hope of such evidence is restricted. Our survey in all other directions is barred by insurmountable difficulties. Unless some meteoric record reached our Earth, revelationary of intelligence on a perished world, our only hope of obtaining such evidence rests on the observation of Mars' surface features. To this subject we confine our ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... call the meteor, "Wakn-denda" (sacred fire) and Wakn-wohlpa (sacred gift.) Meteors are messengers from the Land of Spirits, warning of impending danger. It is a curious fact that the "sacred stone" of the Mohammedans, in the Kaaba at Mecca, is a meteoric stone, and obtains its sacred character from the fact that it fell from heaven. 31 Kah-n-te-dahn—The little, mysterious dweller in the woods. This spirit lives in the forest in hollow trees. Mrs. Eastman's Dacotah, Pre. Rem. xxxi. "The Dakota god of the woods—an unknown animal ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... happened, and we have survived it pretty well. The Democratic Almanacs predicted a torrent, a whirlwind, and we know not what meteoric phenomena,—but the next day Nature gave no sign, the dome of the State-House was in its place, the Monument was as plumb as ever, no chimney mourned a ravished brick, and the Republican Party took its morning tea and toast in peace and safety. On the whole, it must ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... consider the powers which the ancient poets might have discovered in the air, in the clouds, and, more particularly, in those meteoric conflicts which by thunder, lightning, darkness, storms, and showers of rain must have taught man that very important lesson that he was not alone in this world. Many philosophers, as you know, believe that all religion arose from fear ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... general. There was plenty of room to replace so much that had disappeared during the Revolution, and a vast quantity of decorative furniture was made during the few years which elapsed before the disaster of Waterloo caused the disappearance of a power which had been almost meteoric in its career. ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... called "meteorites," some of which weigh many tons. In some of the old fables about wonderful heroes, the stories sometimes declare that the swords with which they accomplished their deeds of prowess fell straight from the heavens, which probably means that they were made of meteoric iron. Fortunately for the people and their homes, meteorites are not common, but every large museum has specimens ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan
... muster easily with children and sailor folk for the genuine thunderbolts. But the grand upholder of the belief, the one true undeniable reality which has kept alive the thunderbolt even in a wicked and sceptical age, is, beyond all question, the occasional falling of meteoric stones. Your meteor is an incontrovertible fact; there is no getting over him; in the British Museum itself you will find him duly classified and labelled and catalogued. Here, surely, we have the ultimate substratum of the thunderbolt myth. To be sure, meteors have ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... but an oppressive shadow that came from above, and seemed to sink every floating object in the scarcely buoyant waves. No shores were visible, but distant mountains on one side; nothing lived in the waters but meteoric lights and objects that ran as if on errands for the spirit above. Broad, submissive, unevaporating, but sinking down; the great inland lonely pool was everywhere the creature of an invisible footprint. ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... elapsed since Mauleverer's meteoric visit to Warlock House, when the squire received from his brother the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by analogy that a Republican State would not offer any powerful resistance if it were to come into collision with a nation possessing a more settled form of government. A shower of meteoric stones, like passing fireworks, might take place; but beyond that nothing would occur to excite the fear, or arouse the energies of the more favoured nation. As an example of the weakness of a Republican State I may mention France. There we see an industrious race of people, endowed ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... Baldwin, I found that he had become acquainted with Reginald Blake in college, that he came of no particular family and seemed to have no great means, although he was very popular in the best circles. In fact he had had, thanks to his friend, a rather meteoric rise in society, though it was reported that he was somewhat involved ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... on steadily, "is it not possible that Mr. Wynne has stumbled upon a huge deposit of diamonds in some meteoric substance some place in this country? A meteor may have fallen anywhere, of course, and it may have been only two months ago, or it may have been two thousand years ago. It may even ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... son of the eminent James Mill, historian and philosopher, also Head Examiner of the East India House. Mr. and Mrs. Taylor had made out the list of people between them, choosing those whom they thought had sufficient phosphorus so they would enjoy meeting a great theological meteoric personality from Essex. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... smiled contentedly in the dark and did not know that he was not awake until at some later time he was half aroused by the meteoric glow and whiz of another automobile. It had gone before he was quite awake, and he sank ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... although we may justly doubt the virtue of his motives. William Walker, perhaps the foremost of them all, invaded Lower California in 1854, attempted to found a republic, was defeated, and later conquered Nicaragua and became its president, only to shift about in his meteoric career of destiny and sail against Honduras, where he was captured, court-martialled, and shot ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... of his is the gist of my epistle. Can he bring him? He wants to know before he broaches the proposition. I'm to be skinned alive if Jack ever learns that such a plea was made, so I beg you whatever other rash acts you see fit to commit during your meteoric flight across my plane of existence, don't ever give me away. Firstly, because if I ever get a chance to do so, I'm positive that I should want to cling to you as the mistletoe does to the oak, and could not bear to be given ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... hauling baggage up a smooth board. Three hundred people were sorting their goods without checks. Porters were shouldering immense loads, four or five heavy trunks at once, corded together, and stalking off Atlantean. Hat-boxes, bandboxes, and valises burst like a meteoric shower out of a crater. 'A moi, moi!' was the cry, from old men, young women, soldiers, shopkeepers, and frres, scuffling ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... meteoric prosperity came to a sudden halt, for there was war on the high seas as well. The whole mercantile marine was refitted and turned out to win what it might in other channels. Privateering was held right ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Santiago: "There will be honor enough for us all" can well be said of the aviators of all nations now at war. For in spite of all enmity the aviators have followed the knightly code of old which respects a good opponent and honors him. Captain Boelcke's death, after his meteoric career, was mourned alike by friend and foe. Great as is the damage done by this war, horrible as is its devastation, it has acted as a tonic on aviation. Before the war, of course, there had been some achievements of note. Since the day when the Wright ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke
... important source of finely divided matter is to be found in volcanic dust which, as in the case of Krakatoa, may remain for years in the atmosphere, but which must ultimately fall upon the surface of the earth and ocean. This can be traced in all the deep-sea oozes. Finally there is meteoric dust, which is continually falling to the surface of the earth, but in such minute quantities and in such a finely-divided state that it can be detected only in the oozes of the deepest oceans, where both inorganic and ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the debris of marine organisms; while intermingled with these are found various volcanic products which have been either carried through the air or floated on the surface, and a small but perfectly recognisable quantity of meteoric matter. Ice-borne rocks are also found abundantly scattered over the ocean bottom within a definite distance of the arctic and antarctic circles, clearly marking out the limit of floating icebergs ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the perturbations caused by the mutual attractions of the sun, nine planets, twenty moons, one hundred and ninety-two asteroids, millions [Page 14] of comets, and innumerable meteoric bodies swarming in space, and when we add to all these, that belong to one solar system, the attractions of all the systems of the other suns that sparkle on a brilliant winter night, we are compelled to say, "As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... outer planets were formed last, a theory which had difficulties of its own. Professor George Darwin had recently shown, from an investigation of the mechanical conditions of a swarm of meteorites, that on certain assumptions a meteoric swarm might behave as a coarse gas, and in this way bring back the fluid pressure exercised by one part of the system on the other, which was required by Laplace's theory. One chief assumption consisted in supposing that such inelastic bodies as meteoric stones might attain the effective ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... rates, and that they should be pleased where they innocently may. We are, therefore, by no means among those spectators who view the occasional ascent of a poetic luminary upon the horizon of literature, as a meteoric flash which has no relation to ourselves; but we feel instantly an eager desire to find its altitude, to take its bearings, to trace its course, and to calculate its influence upon surrounding bodies. When especially it ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... proof of the origin of hot springs by the sinking of cold meteoric water into the earth, and by its contact with a volcanic focus, is afforded by the volcano of Jorullo. When, in September, 1759, Jorullo was suddenly elevated into a mountain eleven hundred and eighty-three feet above ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... unruly; headstrong, ungovernable, unappeasable, immitigable, unmitigable^; uncontrollable, incontrollable^; insuppressible, irrepressible; orgastic, orgasmatic, orgasmic. spasmodic, convulsive, explosive; detonating &c v.; volcanic, meteoric; stormy &c (wind) 349. Adv. violently &c adj.; amain^; by storm, by force, by main force; with might and main; tooth and nail, vi et armis [Lat.], at the point of the sword, at the point of the bayonet; at one fell swoop; with a high hand, through thick and thin; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... or ordinary life;—a local eddy of passion on the high road of society, while all around is the week-day goings on of wind and weather; a Lear, therefore, without its soul-searching flashes, its ear-cleaving thunderclaps, its meteoric splendors,—without the contagion and the fearful sympathies of nature, the fates, the furies, the frenzied elements, dancing in and out, now breaking through, and scattering,—now hand in hand with,—the fierce or fantastic group of human passions, crimes, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... Her colts, sold at well-advertised auctions, were sought after, were competed for, brought fancy prices, won many races, came to have a reputation that spread beyond the city, over all Italy, even into the provinces. Her career as a stock farmer was brilliant, meteoric, phenomenal. ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... to the surface. One may indeed see our destruction—for indeed politically we could not be more extinct if we had been shot dead—in the form of a catastrophe as disconnected and conclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven upon two friends and crushing them both. But I do not think that is true to our situation or ourselves. We were not taken by surprise. The thing was in us and not from without, it was akin to our way of thinking ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... meteoric career during the past few hours I am inclined to agree with that last remark," and Clancy's tone became so serious that Devar laughed outright. "Don't misunderstand me, Mr. Curtis. I am lost in admiration of your nerve, ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... of the work of what nitrifying bacteria may be present also, with great loss. The combined nitrogen of dead organisms, broken down to ammonia by putrefactive bacteria, the ammonia of urea and the results of the fixation of free nitrogen, together with traces of nitrogen salts due to meteoric activity, are thus seen to undergo various vicissitudes in the soil, rivers and surface of the globe generally. The ammonia may be oxidized to nitrites and nitrates, and then pass into the higher plants and be worked up into proteids, and so be handed on to animals, eventually to be broken down ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... demonology, which had for its basis the natural history and habitation of demons. His first class consisted of fiery devils, that wandered in the regions near the moon, but were prevented from entering that luminary. They displayed their power in blazing stars, in counterfeit suns, moons, and meteoric lights, and prevented foul weather. These demons, we are informed, occasionally resided in the furnaces of Hecla, Etna, or Vesuvius. His second class was made up of aerial devils, that inhabited the atmosphere, caused tempests, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... dinner where the good things are suggested, and the weekly sheet whereon they are inscribed; who has seen comrades fall out of the ranks in the march of life, and perish by the wayside. And such comrades! Gone the brilliant, meteoric A'Beckett; fiery, impulsive, scathing Jerrold; playfully cynical Thackeray; and now—John Leech! There stood Shirley Brooks, who since Jerrold's death has been Punch's literary mainstay; Tom Taylor, working now in other channels, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... dust before they reach the ground. Some of them, indeed, do strike the ground, and very large ones bury themselves deep in the earth. When we go to the Field Columbian Museum, in Chicago, we shall see these visitors from other worlds. They are called meteoric stones, or meteorites. When they are in the air ...
— Uncle Robert's Geography (Uncle Robert's Visit, V.3) • Francis W. Parker and Nellie Lathrop Helm
... observations in different parts of the globe, and by a singular coincidence some magnetic storms such as had already visited Europe, were on this very day observed in these latitudes. The instrument registered the same phenomena as at Toronto, Canada, proving the vast extent of these meteoric disturbances, and the incredible rapidity with which ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... group of females were wending homeward from their visit to the amphitheatre. As he turned, his eye was arrested by a strange and sudden apparition. From the summit of Vesuvius, darkly visible at the distance, there shot a pale, meteoric, livid light—it trembled an instant and was gone. And at the same moment that his eye caught it, the voice of one of the youngest of the women broke ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... surprised Heaven, ere I fairly hollaed 'Furl the sail!'— She had at fingers' end both cloud and star Some thought that perched there, tame and tuneable, Fitted with wings, and still, as off it flew, 'So sang Euripides,' she said, 'so sang The meteoric poet of air and sea, Planets and the pale populace of heaven, The mind of man, and all that's made to soar!' And so, although she has some other name, We only call her Wild-pomegranate-flower, Balaustion; since, where'er the red bloom burns ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... have first of all the atmospheric nitrogen. Of this let us first consider that present as combined nitrogen. This, as we have already seen, consists chiefly of nitrates, nitrites, and ammonia, and reaches the soil dissolved in rain or in other meteoric forms of water, such as ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... thrilling, agonizing delight in the thought—it filled the eyes with misty tears, it tore the heart with tumultuous heavings; frailer than the "snow fall in the river," were we each and all—but we strove to give life and individuality to the meteoric course of our several existences, and to feel that no moment escaped us unenjoyed. Thus tottering on the dizzy brink, we were happy. Yes! as we sat beneath the toppling rocks, beside ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... called "the meteoric poet," and the same title seems very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few readers had heard his name—I only knew it as that of the author of a strange mediaeval tale in prose—when he published "Atalanta in Calydon" in 1865. ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... to resign to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel his commission as missionary. Just as he was landing, the ship was setting sail which bore to his deserted field his old Oxford friend and associate in "the Methodist Club," George Whitefield, then just beginning the career of meteoric splendor which for thirty-two years dazzled the observers of both hemispheres. He landed in Savannah in May, 1738. This was the first of Whitefield's work in America. But it was not the beginning of the Great Awakening. For many years there had been waiting and longing as of them that watch for ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Its beginnings were unimpressively local. At the height of its wealth, power and cultural influence it bestrode the Eurasian-African triangle. Its decline and disappearance were no less spectacular than its meteoric rise ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... present!" or, "That boy's grown an inch round the chest since you set him sparring!" Uncles never get stale. They don't come every day like parents and plain pudding; they're a sort of holiday relative with a plummy, Christmas flavor about them. Everybody hasn't got them; they are not so rare as the meteoric showers, but as occasional as a particularly fine day, and whenever they come to a house they're in the nature of a ...
— A Brace Of Boys - 1867, From "Little Brother" • Fitz Hugh Ludlow
... only make use of such metals as he found free in nature, that is, such as had not been attacked and corroded by the ubiquitous oxygen. These were primarily gold or copper, though possibly some original genius may have happened upon a bit of meteoric iron and pounded it out into a sword. But when man found that the red ocher he had hitherto used only as a cosmetic could be made to yield iron by melting it with charcoal he opened a new era in civilization, though doubtless the ocher artists ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... elf-locks about his ears. Notwithstanding all these disadvantages, his eyes were so superlatively beautiful that they almost persuaded you into the belief that he was handsome. From their lustrous depths there streamed a meteoric splendor, which, more than words, revealed the genius, the enthusiasm, and the noble soul to which Nature ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... but very meteoric while it lasted, and full of anti-British mischief-making. His agents were everywhere; and his successor, Adet, carried on the underground agitation with equal zeal and more astuteness. Vermont offered an excellent base of operations. Finding that its British proclivities had not produced the ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... being of a vaporous, a cloudy, or a fluid nature. Nothing remains but to consider them as separate and independent sheets, flakes, or scales, having some sort of solidity. And these flakes, be they what they may, and whatever may be said about the dashing of meteoric stones into the sun's atmosphere, &c., are evidently THE IMMEDIATE SOURCES OF THE SOLAR LIGHT AND HEAT, by whatever mechanism or whatever processes they may be enabled to develope and, as it were, elaborate these elements from ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... of his report he stated: "Its specific gravity is 3.456 at 68 deg. Fahr., barom. 29.9. Its structure is imperfectly granular, but not crystallized, and there are small black specks of the size of a pin's head, and smaller, of malleable meteoric iron, which are readily removed from the crushed stone by the magnet. The color of the mass is ash gray. A portion of the surface is black and is scarified by fusion. Its hardness is not superior to that of olivine or massive chrysolite. Chemical analysis shows that its composition is that of a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... Nellie's career had been meteoric. She literally had leaped from the chorus into the role of principal comedienne—one of those pranks of fortune that cannot be explained or denied. She was one of the "Jack-in-the-Box" girls in a big New York production. On the opening night, when the lid of her box flew open and she was ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... which created and sustained this passionate ideal, itself inhibited the realization by emphasizing the redemption as miraculous, as a consummation to come in its own time without man's effort, and indeed in spite of man's will. And so, except for the sporadic and meteoric fiascos of mock-Messiahs, the Jews—this most practical of people—continued in hope and prayer to watch the centuries creep by. Frequently the hope flowered into the songs of a Judah Halevi or Ibn Gabirol, songs as sweet as have blossomed in the medieval garden; and the prayer ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... blindest, and most inveterate of human superstitions. If extravagant, yet to the multitude it did not seem extravagant. So natural a craze, therefore, however baseless, would never have carried Lord Monboddo's name into that meteoric notoriety and atmosphere of astonishment which soon invested it in England. And, in that case, my childhood would have escaped the deadliest blight of mortification and despondency that could have been incident to a most morbid temperament concurring with ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... meteoric rebel against the degrading servility of what we have come to call the "Nonconformist Conscience" Byron must always have his place in the tragically slow emancipation of the human spirit. The reluctance of an ordinary sensitive modern ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... exaggerated way, boasting that he was the first to explain the phases of the moon, the nature of solar and lunar eclipses, that he had the power of foretelling future events, and had even predicted the fall of a meteoric stone. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... velocity of lightning. Hundreds, thousands of them were all about me. My chance of not being hit was not one in a million, and yet I escaped. The sweat of terror was upon me, but I did not lose my head. "A comet has met me," I said. "These missiles are the meteoric stones of which it is composed." And now I noticed that as they rushed along collisions took place, and flashes of electricity darted from one to another. A pale luminosity dimmed the stars. I did not doubt that, as seen from the earth, the comet was already ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... tore at her and whipped her face; the car rocked and reeled as in some mad frenzy. There was not much traffic, but such as there was it cleared away from before her as if by magic, as, seeking shelter from the wild meteoric thing running amuck, the few vehicles, motor or horse, that she encountered hugged; the edge of the road, and the wind whisked to her ears fragments of shouts and execrations. Again and again she looked back two fiery balls of light blazed behind her ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... require a detailed account of the Indian campaign to trace adequately the gradual rise of this officer in the service. For his was not a meteoric or spectacular rise. It was by gradual steps—but each step found him fully prepared. This, perhaps, is as near the secret of the great soldier's success as we can get. He was never a self-advertiser. He never talked much. ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS to her somewhat insecure pinnacle of devotion; by the alchemy of a machine centuries have been shortened to days and nights in the meteoric career of Miss PICKFORD. Yet merit has joined fortune in high cabal. Handicapped by a somewhat uneuphonious patronymic, MARY PICKFORD has established her rule without recourse to any of the disputable methods adopted by her predecessor. At home in all the "palaces" of both hemispheres, she owes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... the Arabs believe that meteoric stones are thrown at Satan for his wickedness. They believe that cannon were taken up Kilimanjaro by the first Arabs who came into the country, and there they lie. They deny that Van der Decken did more than go round a portion ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... apparition of Yoshitsune and Yukiiye on the Yamato plain and that of the Emperor Antoku at Inamura promontory. Just twenty years had elapsed since he raised the Minamoto standard in Sagami. His career was short but meteoric, and he ranks among the three greatest statesmen Japan has ever produced, his compeers ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... population of Babylonia.' Mr. Isaac Taylor, again, explains Cronus as the sky which swallows and reproduces the stars. The story of the sickle may be derived from the crescent moon, the 'silver sickle,' or from a crescent-shaped piece of meteoric iron—for, in this theory, the fetich- stone of Delphi is a ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... to the pavilion, and mutely watched the cow-ponies rush and buck around the course. She beheld Valentino Cortes, a meteoric vision in white cotton trousers, girdled in crimson, flash by to victory amid the wild "Vivas!" of his compatriots. She saw the burros trot past in their little dog-trot ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... hostile Indians as though it were merely a street-car trip up the thoroughfares of one of Arizona's progressive cities. He talks of desperate rides through a wild and dangerous country, of little scraps, as he terms them, with bands of murderous Apaches, of meteoric rises from hired hand to ranch foreman, of adventurous expeditions into the realm of trade when everything was a risk in a land of uncertainty, of journeys through a foreign and wild country "dead broke"—of these and many similar ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... appeared in business. The rapid increase in new trades and new industrial systems afforded possibilities of immediate rise to affluence. The outside public engaged in speculation to a degree not before known. Exaggerated gains, violent fluctuations in prices, meteoric rises and collapses—these gave rein to a gambling spirit perennial in man. The word "Projects" enters into literature as a recurrent motif, strangely familiar to our present generation, which needs only to turn Defoe's Essay on Projects into contemporary ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... investigations. A suggestion in the case is furnished, however, by the fact that the columns of the Sun are not lighted up with advertisements from any of the establishments against which it has been discharging its meteoric sneezes. And this may account for the dearth of the milk of journalistic courtesy in the cocoa-nut of the DAN PHOEBUS who "runs ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... gravely, "it is reassuring to learn that, no matter where I am, I am liable to have a huge incandescent mass of meteoric stone hurtling at me out of space at any moment—for that is what your statement really amounts to, you know—isn't it? And now I will bid you good night and retire to my cabin, with the fixed resolution not ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... anticipation of the results of the modern spectroscope. Nor can it be said that this hypothesis of Anaxagoras was a purely visionary guess. It was in all probability a scientific deduction from the observed character of meteoric stones. Reference has already been made to the alleged prediction of the fall of the famous meteor at aegespotomi by Anaxagoras. The assertion that he actually predicted this fall in any proper sense of the word would be obviously ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... shooting stars. The natures and distributions of these harmonize with the hypothesis of an exploded planet, and I think with no other hypothesis. The theory of volcanic origin, joined with the remark that the Sun emits jets which might propel them with adequate velocities, seems quite untenable. Such meteoric bodies as have descended to us, forbid absolutely the supposition of solar origin. Nor can they rationally be ascribed to planetary volcanoes. Even were their mineral characters appropriate, which many of them are not (for volcanoes do not eject iron), no planetary volcanoes could propel them ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... It is to his formal publications and the common tradition of what he did, that we must turn for our biographical and historical estimate of the man. In this respect he is in analogy with Patrick Henry who appears only fitfully in history, but with meteoric brilliancy; or with Abraham Lincoln the narrative of whose life for the first forty-five years can be adequately written in ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath |
