"Primeval" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with 1200 men, and made their way through the wilderness of Maine, up the valley of the Kennebec and down that of the Chaudiere, coming out upon the St. Lawrence opposite Quebec on the 13th of November. This long march through the primeval forest and over rugged and trackless mountains was one of the most remarkable exploits of the war. It cost the lives of 200 men, but besides this the rear-guard gave out and went back to Cambridge, so that when ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... tiny, secret ways of entrance. The thought was so penetrating, true, and simple. Even old Mother Plume would wake to the recovery of some hitherto forgotten fragrance in her daily life... just as those Northern forests would wake to find new wild-flowers. For all fairytales issue first from the primeval forest, thence undergoing their protean transformation; and in similar fashion this story, so slight but so tremendous, issued from the forest of one man's underthinking—one deep, pure mind, wumbled badly as far as external things were concerned, ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... A few giant elms of the primeval forest are yet to be found on the bank of the St. John. The author not long since examined the stump of a large elm that grew a few miles below the town of Woodstock. It was four feet in diameter and the number of concentric ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... turned fury. It was one of those instants that are so unexpected, so entirely unnatural and out of harmony with the rest of life, that they obliterate the boundaries of character which separate the life of the individual from the ancient root of the race. Not Virginia, but the primeval woman in her blood, shrieked out in protest as she saw her hold on her mate threatened. The destruction of the universe, as long as it left her house standing in its bit of ground, would ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... GARDEN OF EDEN.—The Garden of Eden was no harem. Primeval nature knew no community of love; there was only the union of two souls, and the twain were made one flesh. If God had intended man to be a polygamist he would have created for him two or more wives; but he only created one wife for the first man. He also directed Noah to ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... wonderful tales. Its handle of leather was buff. Though shorn of its glory, e'en now it exhales An odor of hymn-books and snuff. Its primeval grace, if you like, you can trace: 'Twas limned for the future to scan, Just under a smiling gold-spectacled face, My ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... ascribed geological phenomena to one agency, acting during one primeval epoch, there came a greatly-improved conception, which ascribed them to two agencies, acting alternately during successive epochs. Hutton, perceiving that sedimentary deposits were still being formed at the bottom of the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... him like a haloed saint. Something like worship shone in his eyes, but he kept the mask down, and looked at her with the eyes of a stranger while he talked, and smiled a stiff conventional smile. But a look of anguish grew in his young face, like the sorrow of something primeval, such as a great rock ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... the valleys are exalted and the hills laid low. Not because we object to hills and valleys—quite the contrary; but we must show our strength and daring. Nobody wants the North Pole, but we are furious to have a breach made in the wall that surrounds it. If we discover a mighty primeval forest we straightway grind our axes to cut it down; an open prairie we plant with trees. When we find ourselves in an unclean, malarious bog, instead of taking the short cut out, shaking the mud from our feet and keeping clear of it forever after, we plunge in deeper still and swear by ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... region, he expressed the utmost awe, united with the bitterest condemnation of the Europeans, for desecrating by their roads and other works a place so obviously the abode of deutas and spirits. He said, that when they had begun to carry the up-hill road through these primeval forests, they were warned of their impiety by the voices of the gods themselves, in bursts of unearthly music, blasts of the trumpet, and the clash of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... night the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locks the sunshine in its bearded sheaf. In the same field the clover steals the fragrance of the wind, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains. There are mountains stored with exhaustless treasures; forests—vast and primeval; and rivers that, tumbling or loitering, run wanton to the sea. Of the three essential items of all industries—cotton, iron and wood—that region has easy control. In cotton, a fixed monopoly—in iron, proven supremacy—in timber, the reserve supply of the Republic. From ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... passing trouble, a mere quick outburst of passionate feeling. Amiel indeed has neither the continuous romantic beauty nor the rich descriptive wealth of Senancour. The Dent du Midi, with its untrodden solitude, its primeval silences and its hovering eagles, the Swiss landscape described in the "Fragment on the Ranz des Vaches," the summer moonlight on the Lake of Neufchatel—these various pictures are the work of one of the most finished artists in words that literature has produced. But how true George Sand's criticism ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that forms the summit of Vaea, a place no wider than a room, and flat as a table. On either side the land descends precipitously; in front lies the vast ocean and the surf-swept reefs; to the right and left green mountains rise, densely covered with the primeval forest. Two hundred years ago the eyes of another man turned towards that same peak of Vaea as the spot that should ultimately receive his war-worn body: ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Establishment thus divided and threatened, thus ignorant of its true strength, I compared that fresh vigorous power of which I was reading in the first centuries. In her triumphant zeal on behalf of that Primeval Mystery, to which I had had so great a devotion from my youth, I recognised the movement of my Spiritual Mother. "Incessu patuit Dea." The self-conquest of her ascetics, the patience of her martyrs, the irresistible determination of ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... of logical identity, my mind is carried forward a hundred thousand years to that centre of to-day's highest civilization—Detroit, and to its very palladium, the Ford Motor Works. For in that far-famed institution is to be found a very striking similarity to the primeval monopoly of initiative which arose with the first control of fire. Mr. Henry Ford has been magnanimously ready to share profits with his men, but, so far as I can learn, no ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode." ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... in vain—the all-composing Hour Resistless falls; the Muse obeys the Power— She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold Of night primeval and of chaos old! Before her Fancy's gilded clouds decay, And all its varying rainbows die away. Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, The meteor drops, and in a flash expires, As one by one, at dread Medea's strain, The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain; As Argus' eyes ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... The primeval world,—the Fore-World, as the Germans say,—I can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with researching fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... other things MacLeod had mentioned for his benefit Thompson, in his dimly realized need of some mental stimulus, could not think of a white man and a scholar being aught but a special blessing in that primeval solitude. Thompson had run across that phrase in books—primeval solitude. He was just beginning to understand what ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... their dark faces lighted at intervals by brooklets tumbling in cascades from the heights above. A loon laughed weirdly in the distance, and from the hills above a wolf sounded a dismal howl. It was a scene of rugged, primeval grandeur, and Shad, taken completely by surprise, ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... over the rear of Pine Mountain, down the steep sides of the Gulch, up that terrible jungle which even the red man avoids, over the great boulders and falls of the South Fork, and up the long miles through the primeval wilderness to where he knew the white tents of Camp ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... which men accept the opinions of those in authority as binding on their judgment. I shall endeavour to prove that the slavish aptitudes in man are a direct consequence of his gregarious nature, which itself is a result of the conditions both of his primeval barbarism and of the forms of his subsequent civilisation. My argument will be, that gregarious brute animals possess a want of self-reliance in a marked degree; that the conditions of the lives of these animals have made a want ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... carried out with them no more than a pittance; but they carried out the English heart, and head, and arm; and the English heart and head and arm turned the wilderness into cornfield and orchard, and the huge trees of the primeval forest into cities and fleets. Man, man is the great instrument that produces wealth. The natural difference between Campania and Spitzbergen is trifling, when compared with the difference between a country inhabited by men full of bodily and mental vigour, and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of which is a mere dot of print over a large I of vacancy. There are seldom more than ten lines on a page, and it would be better if most of those lines were not there at all. Either Mr. Crane is insulting the public or insulting himself, or he has developed a case of atavism and is chattering the primeval nonsense of the apes. His "Black Riders," uneven as it was, was a casket of polished masterpieces when compared with "War Is Kind." And it is not kind at all, Mr. Crane; when it provokes such verses as these, it is all that ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... civilization? Surely not very much. Keeping one's eyes in the right direction it was easy to blot out three hundred years, and to feel that we were looking upon about the same scene that those first colonists beheld—just the primeval waste of rolling waters, lonely marsh, and ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... sublime setting of primeval forest and pouring canyon was worthy of the lines; I am sure the dewless, crystalline air never vibrated to strains of more solemn music. Certainly, our poet can never be numbered among the great writers of all time. He has told no story; he has never unpacked his heart ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... lurid life on a Californian ranch, and might almost have been modelled on one of Mr. Punch's cinema burlesques. There are the familiar scenes of a plot to hang the girl's lover, swiftly alternating with scenes of her progress on horseback through the primeval forest, and concluding with her arrival just in time to shoot the villain and untie the noose that encircles ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... thousands of trees before they could put out a crop of any size. Beyond the Mississippi, however, there were all ready for the breaking plow great reaches of almost treeless prairie, where every stick of timber was precious. In the other parts, often rough and mountainous, where stood primeval forests of the finest woods, the railroads made good use of the timber. They consumed acres of forests themselves in making ties, bridge timbers, and telegraph poles, and they laid a heavy tribute upon ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... applications came to be in some instances very different, and that, for example, the corn intended to be ground, as well as the mill for grinding it (Gothic -quairinus-, Lithuanian -girnos-,(4)) received their names from the Sanscrit -kurnu-. We may accordingly assume it as probable, that the primeval Indo-Germanic people were not yet acquainted with agriculture, and as certain, that, if they were so, it played but a very subordinate part in their economy; for had it at that time held the place which it afterwards ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... egotistically said to be faultless by such critics as Alfieri, who thought they resembled him, partakes, as every body's style does, of the faults as well as good qualities of the man. It is nervous, concise, full almost as it can hold, picturesque, mighty, primeval; but it is often obscure, often harsh, and forced in its constructions, defective in melody, and wilful and superfluous in the rhyme. Sometimes, also, the writer is inconsistent in circumstance (probably from not having corrected ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... this?—snarling and strange forms, small and dim and menacing, are between the pack and its prey. It is another pack of road-kids, and in the hostile pause we learn that it is their meat, that they have been trailing it a dozen blocks and more and that we are butting in. But it is the world primeval. These wolves are baby wolves. (As a matter of fact, I don't think one of them was over twelve or thirteen years of age. I met some of them afterward, and learned that they had just arrived that day over the hill, ...
— The Road • Jack London
... went on, his voice softening, "that your attitude has aroused the savage, the primeval man in me—that, had I met you here fifty or a hundred years ago, I would have picked you up and quietly carried you away? I know I've been a brute by driving you into the open like this, but that's ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... of limb.[91] Those who reared these works are supposed to have been in possession of some knowledge of the pulley, the lever, and the incline; but, after all, giant strength must have been the main fulcrum for such operations. Had there been ornament, sculpture, or inscriptions on these primeval monuments, our thoughts might have been carried forward to a later age, when colonisation from the East brought in its train the arts which there first ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... the thieves, the curs—the rich ones! Against the vampire Tsar! Beat them, kill them—the cursed evil-doers! Glow, dawn of better life!" The simple ideology, the easy catch phrases in which the language of this ideology is couched, the primeval character of the passion aroused, contribute to the success which the party enjoys among working people and homeless paupers. Therein lies the power of the Bolsheviki. But reaction is bound to come and here again the peasants will play the chief role. All ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... position as the official residence of the Governor-General, and the Dutch horticulturists, than whom there are probably none better, deserve to be congratulated upon the garden city they have created out of the primeval jungle. ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... manner, the baffled driver muttered and swore, while he applied the whip to his horse's flanks, and pursued the route indicated by May until they came to the very verge of the city limits, where grand old oaks still waved their broad limbs in primeval vigor over sloping hills and picturesque declivities. Near a rustic bridge, which spanned a frozen stream, stood a few scattered huts, or cottages, towards the poorest of which she directed her footsteps. Standing on one of the broken flags, which ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... inches in diameter. There are many villages dotted over the slopes which we climbed; one had been destroyed, and revealed the hard clay walls and square forms of Manyuema houses. Our path lay partly along a ridge, with a deep valley on each side: one on the left had a valley filled with primeval forests, into which elephants when wounded escape completely. The forest was a dense mass, without a bit of ground to be seen except a patch on the S.W., the bottom of this great valley was 2000 feet ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... the time before the IVth Dynasty. Of a prehistoric Egypt nothing was known, beyond a few flint flakes gathered here and there upon the desert plateaus, which might or might not tell of an age when the ancestors of the Pyramid-builders knew only the stone tools and weapons of the primeval savage. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... solitary blade of grass in the distant waste. He destroys thoroughly and unceasingly. Everywhere we may see how he crushes to dust plants and beasts, men and their works. Even the Egyptian pyramids, that would seem to defy him, are trophies of his power,—monuments of decay, graves of primeval ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... activities were in movement, as if marshalling vast forces. The stars had vanished. A gentle but equivocal wind on the cheek presaged rain, and seemed to be bearing downwards into the homeliness of the earth some strange vibration out of infinite space. The primeval elements of the summer night encouraged and intensified Hilda's mood, half joyous, half apprehensive. She thought: "A few days ago, I was in Hornsey, with the prospect of the visit to Turnhill before me. Now the ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... relationship. If man was originally in a higher and more perfect state of being than he is now, it is probable that his communion with God was singularly, if not totally, unlike what it has been since he fell from primeval blessedness. If after his fall, two temporary states have been appointed to him by his God, then the miracles of each epoch will bear their own special corresponding characteristics. And lastly, if by a new exercise of regenerating and restoring power it has pleased the Invisible One to rescue His ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... measured out in long, narrow strips, a mile and a quarter long, and a quarter of a mile wide, the back parts of the lots, which are reserved for firewood, are only visible at a distance. This narrow belt of the primeval forest, which runs along the rear of all the lots in the first line of settlements, or concession as it is here called, necessarily conceals the houses and clearings of the next concession, unless the land beyond rises into hills. This arrangement, however convenient, tends greatly ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... acolytes Of lifted granite round with reachless snows. Stand for Eternity while pilgrim rows Of all the nations envy thy repose. Ensheath thy swart sublimities, unscaled. Be that alone on earth which has not failed. Be that which never yet has yearned or ailed, But since primeval Power upreared thy heights Has stood above all deaths and ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... within the shadowy cupboard of his eye. Of course we got no further. Additional opposition but further enraged him. He recapitulated what he would no doubt call his arguments,—they sounded more like threats,—and as he spoke I saw dragons fighting for their dams in the primeval ooze, and heard savage trumpetings of masculine ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... Lives of Dr. Chalmers, Southey, Chantrey, Mahomet, Tasso, Ochlenschlaeger, Plumer Ward, and Dr. A. Combe. The Report of the Commissioners on the British Museum and the present state of the Library Catalogue. On Prisons and Prison Discipline. On the Copyright of Foreigners and Translators. On the Primeval Antiquities of Denmark; with illustrations. On the Discovery of a singular Roman Temple at the source of the Seine. History of Pottery; with engravings. Villa and Tomb of a Female Gallo-Roman Artist. Full Reviews of Lord Campbell's Chief Justices; Boutell's Christian Monuments in England, with ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various
... the reeds, and fancy himself in Arcadia. If in midsummer the heat is oppressive and life seems burthensome, forthwith another canvas is outspread, and the glories of the Alps appear, or a stretch of blue sea, or a corner of a primeval forest. ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... his day. It is therefore not surprising to find that his account of the Babylonian beliefs about the origin of things corresponds very closely with that given in the cuneiform texts, and that it is of the greatest use in explaining and partly in expanding these texts. His account of the primeval abyss, out of which everything came, ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... in the primeval forest, and the rows of vast and stately trees were as easy to thread as the pillared aisles of a cathedral. When he came to one of the innumerable streamlets that caught the land in a net of silver, he removed his coarse ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... wishing to disturb the sleeping household, had lain them down in the front garden to sleep with a quiet conscience beneath the stars. The action was so startlingly characteristic, so suggestive of the primeval, simple man whom Oscard represented as one born out of time, that Jocelyn ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... to discuss here, a large part of her claim was allowed. This concession was attacked by many as connoting a departure from principle, but the deviation was more apparent than real, for under all the wrappings of idealistic catchwords lay the primeval doctrine of force. The only substantial difference between the old system and the new was to be found in the wielders of the force and the ends to which they intended to apply it. Force remains the granite foundation of the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... miles from any other human being. Never in all his life had he been so much alone. He was not afraid, but there was something awesome in a world so empty of his kind. Sometimes he sang, and the sound of his voice at first startled him. It was like living in a world primeval, this traverse of a land so void of all the mechanism that man has ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... were sharp as knives, and hurt my hands cruelly. I tried to get up cautiously, so as not to cut myself on the sharp grass. I put down a tentative foot, much as my kitten treads for the first time the primeval forest in the backyard. All at once I felt the stealthy patter of something creeping, creeping, creeping purposefully toward me. I do not know how at that time the idea was in my mind; I had no words for intention or purpose. Yet it was precisely the ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... ambassador extraordinary from the United States of America to the Court of London. 9. A considerable portion of the United States yet remains to be surveyed, but no portion remains unexplored. There are doubtless large tracts of forest and mountain land which are in primeval wildness, but the general topography is known. In Alaska, however, there are thousands of square miles which have never been visited by a white man, mainly in the interior; in fact, with the exception of a strip of sea-coast and the lands bordering on the ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... practice resignation. Who, pray, is unoppressed! Who could not say every day: 'Really a very questionable affair.' You know, I have also a small burden to bear, not the same as yours, but not much lighter. That talk about creeping around in the primeval forest or spending the night in an ant hill is folly. Whoever cares to, may, but it is not the thing for us. The best thing is to stand in the gap and hold out till one falls, but, until then, to ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... to the earliest era in art for the origin of the style, if, indeed, the grotesque does not so intimately connect itself with the primeval art of all countries as to be almost inseparable. Indeed, it requires a considerable amount of classical education to see seriously the meaning, that ancient artists desired in all gravity to express, in works which now excite a smile by their inherent comicality. ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... curb chains, the baying of hounds, and the enlivening notes of the bugle, the cavalcade and the train of footmen swept out of the court yard, and descending the winding path, plunged into the heart of the primeval forest. The dogs and the beaters darted into the thick copsewood, and soon the shouts of the huntsmen and the fierce bay of the dogs announced that a wild boar had been found and started. On dashed ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... people should repeat Their visit to his calm retreat, Away from Chitrakuta's hill Fared Rama ever onward till Beneath the shady trees he stood Of Dandaka's primeval wood, Viradha, giant fiend, he slew, And then Agastya's friendship knew. Counselled by him he gained the sword And bow of Indra, heavenly lord: A pair of quivers too, that bore Of arrows an exhaustless store. While there he dwelt in greenwood shade The ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... English and even Hawaiian. The true Chukchi language, of which Nordenskjoeld collected a thousand words, is distinct from Eskimo and akin to Koryak, and Nordenskjoeld sums the problem up with the remark—"this race settled on the primeval route between the Old and New World bears an unmistakable stamp of the Mongols of Asia and the Eskimo ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... until last Wednesday that I began to get my fill, temporarily, of the outward satisfaction of the Road—the primeval takings of the senses—the mere joys of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching. But on that day I began to wake up; I began to have a desire to know something of all the strange and interesting people who ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... Vine, Heredity, Rooted in Voids primeval, The world climbs ever to some great To-Be ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... blaze to smoke, talk, and sing American songs until supper time. The scene to civilised eyes was strangely wild and picturesque. The dark, lonely river gurgling mournfully around sunken trees in its channel; the dense primeval forest whispering softly to the passing wind its amazement at this invasion of its solitude; the huge flaming camp-fire throwing a red lurid glare over the still water, and lighting up weirdly the encircling woods; ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... over bars, exchanging that brainless but well-willed talk by which men of his sort come to know men. He sat beside roped rings to witness the best muscle of the world—and not the worst brain—revive in ten thousand men the primeval brute. He frolicked with trifling painters, bookless poets, apprentice journalists, and the girls who accrued to all these, through wild studio parties in Latin quarter attics. He sat before the lace, mahogany, crimson lights ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... caught my idea. How write upon the board: 'This is the forest primeval,' and a dozen lines or so following, from this slip. Scan that for me; parse it; show me the relations of words and clauses, and ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... Egyptian city. Thor (thor). The Norse god of thunder. Thrace (tras). A region in Southeastern Europe, with varying boundaries. In early times it was regarded as the entire region north of Greece. Titans (ti' tanz). Primeval giants, children of heaven and earth. Tithonus (ti tho' nus). The husband of Aurora; changed into a grasshopper. tortoise (tor' tis). A kind of turtle. trident (tri' dent). A spear with three prongs—the common ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... to be feared only in the winter or spring, never in the summer or autumn. And nearly a hundred years ago, when the river's shores were bound throughout their great length by primeval forests, there was less reason to fear at any season. So that on a day of October in the year eighteen hundred and eleven, the mighty stream lay safely within its deep bounds flowing quietly on its way to ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... part of the world do you come from?" asked my host, "that we should appear so strange to you and you to us? I have seen individual specimens of nearly all the races differing from our own, except the primeval savages who dwell in the most desolate and remote recesses of uncultivated nature, unacquainted with other light than that they obtain from volcanic fires, and contented to grope their way in the dark, as do many creeping, crawling and flying things. But certainly you cannot ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... flying glance at the cliff, knew that he was being forced nearer the gulf by sheer strength of muscle. Irwin, his jaw shattered and his shoulder torn, was not fighting to win, but to kill. He cared not whether he himself also went to death. He was obsessed by the old primeval lust to crush the life out of this lusty antagonist, and his whole gigantic force was concentrated to that end. He scarce knew that he was wounded, and he cared not at all. Backward and forward though the battle went, on the whole it moved jerkily ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... errors that science has yet committed, or rather that scientific men have stumbled upon, is the theory that all living forms have appeared but once in time and place, and that they have thence diffused themselves, in pairs, throughout the globe, as from specific centres of origin. In the primeval oceans, whenever and wherever the environing conditions of matter were the same or identical, the like living forms made their appearance and flourished for hundreds and thousands of years, and finally disappeared, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... scarcely less important than the coal gas itself. The ammonia water furnishes large quantities of salts to be used, among other applications, as food for plants. We thus restore to-day to our vegetation the nitrogen which existed in plants of primeval times. The tar, black and noisome though it be, is a marvelous product, by the reason of scores of beautiful substances which are concealed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... I emerged from it. A narrow glade opened out before me, leading in the direction I wished to take; it was formed either by deer or buffalo, who, from constantly following the same tracks, are the chief road-makers of the primeval forests. I dashed along it; fortunately neither fallen trunks nor stumps impeding my progress. As may be supposed, I looked out eagerly for Dio, and I thought it very possible that I might fall in with him, but no ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... constancy to his original inclination were blotted out as if by magic. His primeval affection was uprooted, turned over, and then jolted unceremoniously out of existence. One divided glimpse had restored vigour to his waning passion and it flamed with all the fury of coals that have smouldered long and lazily. The one distressing condition attached ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... Jewish, or half-Jewish, origin of Selma Gordon. Thus, she assumed that she would see a frankly Jewish face. Instead, the face looking at her from beneath the wealth of thick black hair, carelessly parted near the centre, was Russian—was Cossack—strange and primeval, intense, dark, as superbly alive as one of those exuberant tropical flowers that seem to cry out the mad joy of life. Only, those flowers suggest the evanescent, the flame burning so fiercely that it must soon burn out, ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... Though they all descend at times to the ground, their awkward motion on the surface shows them to be out of their element, while they move with ease and rapidity in the trees. The organization of man renders it questionable if his primeval ancestor was arboreal to any similar extent. The indications would seem to be that it made the ground its habitual place of residence at an early period in its history, and that the result of this new habit and of its erect attitude was ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... he had before Eve, and who bore him, in that wedlock, the whole progeny of aerial, aquatic, and terrestrial Devils,'—very needlessly, we think. On this portion of the Work, with its profound glances into the Adam-Kadmon, or Primeval Element, here strangely brought into relation with the Nifl and Muspel (Darkness and Light) of the antique North, it may be enough to say, that its correctness of deduction, and depth of Talmudic and Rabbinical lore have filled perhaps not the worst Hebraist ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... rear of the town stood the primeval forests, where Red Men and wild beasts roamed at their pleasure. It is claimed that an Indian or pioneer might have traveled, at that time, through unbroken forests from Boston to the Pacific coast, a distance of ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... however, that I am here speaking of that Primeval Substance, which necessarily has no light in itself, because there is as yet no vibration in it, for there can be no light without vibration. We must not make the mistake of supposing that Matter is evil in itself: it is our misconception of it that makes ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... show himself. When they saw him they rushed for him. It was their instinct. He was the Wild—the unknown, the terrible, the ever-menacing, the thing that prowled in the darkness around the fires of the primeval world when they, cowering close to the fires, were reshaping their instincts, learning to fear the Wild out of which they had come, and which they had deserted and betrayed. Generation by generation, down all the generations, had this fear of the Wild been stamped into their natures. ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... making numerous necks or minor peninsulas of land. Up these rivers and creeks the tide ebbs and flows for many miles. In 1607, before the English arrived, the whole of this tide-water region, except here and there where the Indians had a cornfield, was covered with primeval forests, so free from undergrowth that a coach with four horses could be driven through ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... in for the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock, bearded with moss and green in the something or other —I forget the rest. I want to quit lying on paper, and lie on my back instead, on the sward or in a hammock. I'm going to avoid all boarding houses ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... if one next became a bat, like the colony in our eaves, that dart and drop and skim and skurry, all the length of moonless nights, in such ecstasies of dusky joy." Was this weird creature, the bat, in very truth a bird, in some far primeval time? and does he fancy, in unquiet dreams at nightfall, that he is one still? I wonder whether he can enjoy the winged brotherhood into which he has thrust himself,—victim, perhaps, of some rash quadruped-ambition,—an Icarus ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... one book, the Bible; the unwearied curiosity and care with which those farmers and fishermen and woodsmen read the signs of the sky; their awe of the dark wilderness and their familiar traffic with the great deep; the silences of lonely places; the opulence of primeval meadows by the clear streams; the English flowers that were made to bloom again in farmhouse windows and along garden walks; the inner visions, more lovely still, of duty and of moral law; the spirit of sacrifice; the daily walk with God, whether by green pastures ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... of the cabin opened with a sharp thrust and Sheila stepped out. She walked quickly through the firs and stood on the edge of the open range-land, beyond and below which began the dark ridge of the primeval woods. She stood perfectly still and lifted her face to the sky. For all the blaze of the moon the greater stars danced in radiance. Their constellations sloped nobly across her dazzled vision. She had come very close to madness, and ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Red River Settlement, they are not considered available for every case of emergency that may chance to occur in the hundreds of little outposts, scattered far and wide over the whole continent of North America, with miles and miles of primeval wilderness between each. We do not think, therefore, that when we say there are no doctors in the country, we use a culpable amount ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... mortal man; here the retainers who had grown up with him from his childhood, who had followed him to his first fields of war, who had lived under the shelter of his many castles, and fed, in that rude equality of a more primeval age which he loved still to maintain, at his lavish board. And now Lord Warwick's coal-black steed halted, motionless in the van. His squire behind bore his helmet, overshadowed by the eagle of Monthermer, the outstretched wings of which ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... see now how Kant bases his whole system upon the indestructible fact of ethical law, the primeval intuition of the awakened spirit of man into the eternal distinction between good and evil. Standing on that foundation, he is able to descry the world of transcendental realities—"the land which is very far off"—which the pure and critical reason could never behold. But though the eyes of ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... saw-mill, with the modern-looking villa of the employer, and clustered round it the cottages of the work-people. No sooner does the road curl again than we are once more in a solitude as complete as if we were in some primeval forest of the new world. We come suddenly upon the Valle d'Hrival, but the deep close gorge we gaze upon is only the beginning of the valley within valley we have come to see. Our road makes a loop round ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... shores of the lake that we were worshipping Him Who is always the same. At times delightful and suggestive were our environments. With Winnipeg's sunlit waves before us, the blue sky above us, the dark, deep, primeval forest as our background, and the massive granite rocks beneath us, we often felt a nearness of access to Him, the Sovereign of the universe, Who "dwelleth not in temples made with hands,"—but "Who covereth Himself with light as with a garment; ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... were camped in the forest or by the river, and the fur-trade could be prosecuted to the best advantage, we see the coureurs de bois, not the least picturesque figures of these grand woods, then in the primeval sublimity of their solitude and vastness. Despite the vices and weaknesses of a large proportion of this class, not a few were most useful in the work of exploration and exercised a great influence among the Indians of the West. But for these ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... time by the arbitrary stirrings of a similar artistic impulse; so close to us indeed that some of his habits still survive among us. Some of us at least have made a recreation of his necessity, and still go hunting wild or hypothetically wild animals for food. But when this primeval hunter emerged from his lair in the forest or his valley-cave, he was prepared to attack at sight any man he happened to meet: and he thought himself a fine fellow if he succeeded in cracking the skull ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... III had been most carefully chosen by the Master Scientist and Carse as best suiting their needs. It lay at least a thousand miles—a thousand miles of ugly, primeval jungle—from the nearest unfriendly isuan ranch, and was diametrically opposite Port o' Porno. Thus it allowed Leithgow and Carse to come and go with but faint chance of being observed, and the steady watch kept through the laboratory's telescopic instruments lessened ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... reverberating momentum. Such is your sedative and stimulating character. My client is only a man of domestic eccentricity and matrimonial configuration, not permitted, as you are, gentlemen, to walk in the primeval and lowest vales of society, but he has to endure the red-hot sun of the universe, on the heights of nobility and feudal eminence. He has a beautiful wife of horticultural propensities, that hen-pecks the remainder of his days with soothing ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... modern, welcome sound, breaking in distractingly on the primeval silence. Kurt hastened to the road and saw the encouraging prelude of dust. The passing tourist gave him the requisite supply of gasoline and ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... sluggish river, reed-fringed, crocodile-haunted; and night after night they would build their camp-fire, resting secure in the red circle of its cheery flame—while the howling of ravening beasts kept up dismal chorus in the outer darkness beyond. It was a primeval idyll, the wandering of these two—the man, the product of the highest fin-de-siecle civilization; the woman, the daughter of a savage race. Yet in such wandering, savage and civilized were curiously near akin. They were free as air—untrammelled ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... people, with energetic German eyes and hearts, though so ill-lodged. These Hamlets, needing shelter and spring-water, stand generally in some slight hollow, if well up the Height, as Rorschach is; sometimes, if near the bottom, they are nestled in a sudden dell or gash,—work of the primeval rains, accumulating from above, and ploughing out their way. The rains, we can see, have been busy; but there is seldom the least stream visible, bottom being too sandy and porous. On the western slope, there is in our time a kind of coal, or ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... influence on this occasion we would leave learned theologians to decide. It is of importance here to add only that in Abyssinia, a country entirely separated from Europe, where Christianity has maintained itself in its primeval simplicity against Mahometanism, John is to this day worshipped as protecting saint of those who are attacked with the dancing malady. In these fragments of the dominion of mysticism and superstition, historical connection is ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... with his unsocial retreat. I felt, with renewed force, that a note was lacking to the full harmony of my life, and I threw myself upon a bank. I tried not to see the artificial roads of the forest, alive with city carriages. I believed myself lost in a primeval wood, and I examined the state of my heart. I perceived with concern that that organ was still lacerated. The languid, musical pageant of my youth streamed toward me again through the leafy aisles, and I remembered my high aspirings, my ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... reminder of your first meeting and a suggestion that you might possibly desire to continue the acquaintanceship. Quotations from poetry of the better sort are always appropriate; thus, on this occasion, it might be nice to write on the card accompanying the flowers—"'This is the forest primeval'—H. W. Longfellow," or "'Take, oh take, those lips away'—W. Shakespeare." You will find there are hundreds of lines equally appropriate for this and other occasions, and in this connection it might be well to display a little ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... (1) To cut the bark of a tree round the trunk so as to kill it. The word is common in the same sense in English forestry and horticulture, and only seems Australasian from its more frequent use, owing to the widespread practice of clearing the primeval forests and generally destroying trees. "Ringed" is the correct past participle, but "rung" is ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... restless, hungry type, whom she had hoped by the perfecting of herself to help. Other scholars at the school were not like him. They were, with a single exception, of the valley and foothills, but this one came from primeval grandeur. He alone possessed the absorbing craze to learn which had dominated her own life, and so she felt ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... sat for many a weary evening, when her brother and Mr. Muller came up together, and, sitting down on either side of her, began to talk of the rising city of Massissauga—admirably situated—excellent water privilege, communicating with Lake Michigan—glorious primeval forest—healthy situation—fertile land—where a colossal fortune might be realized in maize, eighties, sections, speculations. It was all addressed to her, and it was a hard task to give attention, so ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by primeval forest is but seldom seen in the interior here, though the country cannot be described otherwise than as generally covered with interminable forests. Insects kill or dwarf some trees, and men maim others for the sake ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... is said to have been the fairest of all plains, and very fertile. Near the plain again, and also in the centre of the island, at a distance of about fifty stadia, there was a mountain, not very high on any side. In this mountain there dwelt one of the earth-born primeval men of that country, whose name was Evenor, and he had a wife named Leucippe, and they had an only daughter, who was named Cleito. The maiden was growing up to womanhood when her father and mother died; Poseidon fell in ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... although a million times more numerous than its relative of the Sierra—is too good to live long. Such is its value for lumber and its accessibility, that, judging the future by the past, it is not likely, in its primeval growth, to ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... and flowers also increased in size, again resembling somewhat the large species they had seen near the equator. "This would be the place to live," said Bearwarden, looking at iron mountains, silver, copper, and lead formations, primeval forests, rich prairies, and regions evidently underlaid with coal and petroleum, not to mention huge beds of aluminum clay, and other natural resources, that made his materialistic mouth water. "It would be joy and delight to develop ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... Virgin is a close red tunic, with long sleeves;[1] and over this a blue robe or mantle. In the early pictures, the colours are pale and delicate. Her head ought to be veiled. The fathers of the primeval Church, particularly Tertullian, attach great importance to the decent veil worn by Christian maidens; and in all the early pictures the Virgin is veiled. The enthroned Virgin, unveiled, with long ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... characteristics as the man who resides on the plains; or that he whose home is in the interior of a continent will have the same habits as the man whose home is on the islands of the sea. The denizen of the primeval forest will most naturally become a huntsman. The dweller on the extended plain, or fertile mountain slope, will lead a pastoral, or an agricultural life. Those who live on the margin of great rivers, or the borders ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... who found, in the forests of this new and attractive country, ample scope for the exercise of their religious enthusiasm. It was at Quebec that these Christian heroes landed, from hence they started for the forest primeval, the bearers of the olive branch of Christianity, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... by steamer to Hamilton, the fare being about a dollar for each passenger. The next stage was to Guelph; then on to Durham, and finally they came to the end of their journeying near Walkerton in Bruce County in the primeval forest, from which they cut out a home for ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... Pomp could not get it open in the morning. And there I was, too much excited by the ideas of the trip to get to sleep. For as I lay there I could picture the little river winding in and out among the great trees of the primeval forest, and see it here black as night flowing sluggishly beneath the drooping moss-hung trees, there dancing in the sunshine that rained down from above, and then on and on in amongst the mysterious shades where in all probability the foot of ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... the jewellery, the writing at desks of the town. The writings of a thousand clerks, the busy factory work, the trimmings and feathers, and counter attendance do not touch the real. They are all artificial. For food you must still go to the earth and to the sea, as in primeval days. Where would your thousand clerks, your trimmers, and counter-salesmen be without a loaf of bread, without meat, without fish? The old brown sails and the nets, the anchors and tarry ropes, go straight to nature. ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... travelled through the great primeval forest in the heart of Africa have likewise described its suffocating hot-house air, the peaceful silence, only broken by the cries of monkeys and parrots, its deep, depressing gloom. If the journey is of long duration men get wearied, experiencing a feeling ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... distress, a sigh from thousands who have been blind enough to think it God's will that they should suffer the tyranny of one man—who have thought it their duty not even to hope for liberation. (Olof takes the volume and begins to read.) You shall hear complaints all the way from the primeval forests of Norrland down to the Sound. Out of the wreckage from the churches the King is building new castles for the nobility and new prisons for the people. You shall read how the King is bartering away law and justice by letting murderers escape their punishment if they seek ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... has left behind, small as the quantity of that work is. I believe that Canada will, in future times, cherish her memory more and more, for of all Canadian poets she was the most distinctly a daughter of the soil, inasmuch as she inherited the blood of the great primeval race now so rapidly vanishing, and of the greater race that has ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... general considerations, that nitric acid must be one of the sources from which plants derive their nitrogen. It has been already stated, that the humus contained in the soil consists of the remains of decayed plants, and there is every reason to suppose that the primeval soil contained no organic matters, and that the first generation of plants must have derived the whole of their nitrogen from, the atmosphere. If, therefore, it be assumed that ammonia is the only ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... orgie of the Ego as that led by Fichte and Hegel. The doctrines of transmission and inheritance have attacked the independence of the individual. Science finds no ego, self or will that can maintain itself against the past. Heredity rules our lives like that supreme primeval necessity that stood above the Olympian gods. "It is the last of the fates," says Wilde, "and the most terrible. It is the only one of the gods whose real name we know." It is the "divinity that shapes our ends" and hurls down ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... whatever is found of the manner in which human beings come into existence: they make their appearance upon the scene as though they were a primeval part of it. Izanagi, whose return to the upper world takes place in southwestern Japan,* now cleanses himself from the pollution he has incurred by contact with the dead, and thus inaugurates the rite of purification practised to this day in Japan. The Records ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... convicted miscreant had no connection with his recent interview with his police-officer friend—no hint of appeal to Law and Order. The anger that burnt in his heart and sent the blood to his head was as unsullied, as pure, as any that ever Primeval Man sharpened flints to satisfy before ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... in his ingenious treatise on this art, has very justly observed, that both singing and dancing must have existed from the primeval times; that is to say, from the first of the ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... numerous that he sometimes sends as far as to Wicklow for men to capture and sell them for him. He was once fortunate enough to trap a pair of the snow geese of the Arctic region, but Belmullet, in other respects a primeval paradise, is cursed with the small boy of civilisation; and one of these pests of society slew the goose with a stone. The widowed gander consoled himself by contracting family ties with the common domestic goose of the parish, ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... constantly succeed them, not less lovely and picturesque than they, with every curve of the many-curving lake. We advance over charming expanses of water lying between lofty hills; and as the lake is narrow, the voyage is like that of a winding river,—like that of the Ohio, but for the primeval wildness of the acclivities that guard our Western stream, and the tawniness of its current. Wherever the hills do not descend sheer into Como, a pretty town nestles on the brink, or, if not a town, then a villa, or else a cottage, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... Gram., p. 133. Wells has something similar: "A verb in the imperative is sometimes used absolutely, having no direct reference to any particular subject expressed or implied; as, 'And God said, Let there be light.'"—School Gram., p. 141. But, when this command was uttered to the dark waves of primeval chaos, it must have meant, "Do ye let light be there." What else could it mean? There may frequently be difficulty in determining what or who is addressed by the imperative let, but there seems to be more in affirming that it has no subject. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... idea of special creation or any altogether exceptional mode of production is absolutely extinct! Yet more: this is held also to apply to many higher groups as well as to the species of a genus, and not even Mr. Darwin's severest critics venture to suggest that the primeval bird, reptile, or fish must have been "specially created." And this vast, this totally unprecedented change in public opinion has been the result of the work of one man, and was brought about in the short space of twenty years! This is the answer to those who continue to maintain that the "origin ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... of hardship, privation, and exposure occupied from two to three months. The obstacles encountered may readily be imagined in a country where the primeval forest covered the earth, and where the only path was the river or the lake. The parents and family of the writer of this history were from the middle of May to the middle of July making the journey in an open boat. Generally two or more families ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... suffrage has so generally been restricted to men is perhaps to be sought in the conditions under which voting originated. In primeval times voting was probably adopted as a substitute for fighting. The smaller and presumably weaker party yielded to the larger without an actual trial of physical strength; heads were counted instead of being broken. Accordingly it was only the warriors who became voters. The ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... I gave you some time ago," said the enthusiastic Alf, "about Professor Heer of Zurich, who came to the conclusion that primeval forests once existed in these now treeless Arctic regions, from the fossils of oak, elm, pine, and maple leaves discovered there. Well, I found a fossil of a plane leaf the other day,—not a very good one, to be sure—and now, here is a splendid ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... fell with the lilt of music. The tinkling breeze was cool and fresh and invigorating. Fear vanished from her. She felt herself a part of the elements, a part of the night, the lone representative of life and consciousness, and God amid the waste of primeval desolation. ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... as great as its height. It fills me with amazement now to think that I should have dared to follow such a horror into the bowels of the earth, but when one's blood is up, and when one's quarry seems to be flying, the old primeval hunting-spirit awakes and prudence is cast to the wind. Rifle in hand, I ran at the top of my speed upon ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... has approached him; and Don Quixote and Sancho, like the men and women of Shakspeare, are the contemporaries of every generation, because they are not products of an artificial and transitory society, but because they are animated by the primeval and unchanging forces of that humanity which underlies and survives the forever-fickle creeds and ceremonials of the parochial corners which we who dwell in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... proudly from the remote shores, there are many noble islands in its expanse, and forest-covered peninsulas, bordered with beaches of glittering white pebbles. But over all this wide landscape there broods a spirit of primeval solitude; not a sail broke the loneliness of the lake until we had advanced far upon our day's journey. For strange as it may seem, the Golden Arm is a very useless piece of water in this part of the world; highly favored as it is by nature, land-locked, deep ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... the third decade of the nineteenth century, the settlers in the valley of Leatherwood Creek had opened the primeval forest to their fields of corn and tobacco on the fertile slopes and rich bottom-lands. The stream had its name from the bush growing on its banks, which with its tough and pliable bark served many uses of leather among the pioneers; ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... prayers devout and pious, Like a psalm, such as we gnomes sing Often in the earth's vast bowels; Then like curses unto heaven. Much I could not understand. But it woke the recollections Of the days of time primeval, When the wild ferocious Titans Rocks and mountains tore up o'er us From their firm and deep foundations, And we fled to greater depths. For the man I felt great pity, And I took him to my cavern; And he liked it, when I showed him ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... as vast as life and time. Like the day which was ended, in which the mountain-girl had found a taste of Eden, it seemed too sacred for mortal strife. Now and again there came the note of a night-bird, the croak of a frog from the shore; but the serene stillness and beauty of the primeval ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... breathing hard. Then from the shadow he hurled himself into that zone of glowing firelight where she stood. A white flame passed over his face and lighted his eyes with that burning, incandescent glow that only those cold, blue eyes can show. Primeval, all preliminary bowing and scraping in the minuet of wooing ignored, he saw his heart's desire and seized it, lifting the Pearl in his arms, crushing her against his breast, until she, dazed for the moment, lay captured ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... the impenetrable forest-foliage which shrouds the abysses below, leaving the impression of an ocean depth—at the broad lawns and magnificent savannahs glowing in verdure and sunlight—at the princely estates and palace mansions—at the luxuriant cultivation, and the sublime solitude of primeval forests, where trees of every name, the mahogany, the boxwood, the rosewood, the cedar, the palm, the fern, the bamboo, the cocoa, the breadfruit, the mango, the almond, all grow in wild confusion, interwoven with a ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... level with him, then stooped swiftly and caught his ankle. The bricklayer went sprawling, and in an instant the Push closed in on the fallen man as footballers form a scrum, kicking the struggling body with silent ferocity, drunk with the primeval instinct to destroy. ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... had not been given sufficient time to plant crops for themselves. Dissatisfaction spread throughout the ranks of the Palatinates, and when the Governor refused to heed their appeal for relief, fifty families left the settlement and hewed their way through the primeval forest to the Mohawk Valley, where they obtained fertile lands from the Indians and founded the Schoharie congregation in the winter of 1712/13. The governor declared the fugitives rebels; but still more followed in March, making their way through ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... to his double heritage of the soldier spirit. From age to age the primeval link between poet and warrior is reaffirmed in time of war: and the Rajput in him recognised only one way of fighting worthy the name—the triune conjunction of man and horse and sword. Disillusion, strange and terrible, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... comprehend, Rise to her heights, and to her depths descend; The Father's sacred counsels thou canst tell, Who in his bosom didst for ever dwell; Thou on the deep's dark face, immortal Dove! Thou with Almighty energy didst move On the wild waves, incumbent didst display Thy genial wings, and hatch primeval day. Order from thee, from thee distinction came, And all the beauties of the wondrous frame. Hence stamped on nature we perfection find, Fair as the idea in the Eternal Mind. See, through this vast extended theatre Of skill divine, what shining marks ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... be at least a month with my friends, and to gain peace and balance, and a less troubled heart, and a sweeter mood. I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... Neither does it seem to me that a certain university president expresses things with any more wisdom or effectiveness, when he says that it "impressed him with its infinite laziness." Lazy? When once, in the far-distant past, after rising from the primeval sea, it sank back again and deposited twelve thousand feet of strata, then lifted them out into the sunshine, carved eleven thousand feet of them away, and sent them dashing down the river to fill up the Gulf of California and make the Mohave and Colorado Deserts? Lazy? When, after that was done, ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... herself to run quickly from him. As she ran, she strove to hide from herself that, in her inmost heart, she was longing for him to overtake her, seize her about the body, and carry her off, as might some primeval man, to some lair of his own, where he would defend her with his life against any who might seek to ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... house is a wild, rocky shore covered with the primeval woods. Here in one place there rises a barren rock, perfectly bare of verdure, which is called Mount Misery. I chose his place as the spot where I ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... as the Great American Desert. "This region," he writes, "resembles one of the immeasurable steppes of Asia, and spreads forth into undulating and treeless plains and desolate sandy wastes, which are supposed by geologists to have formed the ancient floor of the ocean countless ages ago, when its primeval waves beat against the granite bases of the Rocky Mountains. It is a land where no man permanently abides, for in certain seasons of the year there is no food either for the hunter or his steed. The herbage is parched and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... sometimes inland, through portions of wood, part of that great impenetrable primeval forest that at one time completely covered the whole of Sitka, sometimes quite on the edge of the water. Here there were rocks and boulders, and little coves of white sand and stretches of miniature beaches, with the lip of the bay resting ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... war of the Revolution and all of them in the border wars with the Indians. Though brave, hospitable and generous, they were more at ease beneath the forest bivouac than in the "living-room" of the log-cabin, and to swing a woodman's axe among the lofty trees of the primeval forest was a pursuit far more congenial to their rough nature and active temperament than to mingle with society in settled communities. Their habits and manners were plain, simple, and unostentatious. Their clothing was generally made of the dressed skins of the deer, wolf, or fox, ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... sun was high in the heavens when they reached the end of this tortuous path and found themselves at a point where their road led downward into the valley below. A venerable beech-tree, perhaps centuries old, marked this spot. It was the sole survivor of the primeval forest that had once crowned the height on which it stood. Held firm by its great, wide-reaching roots, which fastened themselves in the crannies of the rock, it had thus far defied the elements. Its trunk half hid a cavernous opening in the mountainside, before which lay a large stone basin partly ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... process, but the mechanical environment. Life is essentially an assertion, not against life, but against death. Interests that expend their energies in destroying or crippling one another, slip back toward that primeval lifelessness from which they emerged. Restraint for the sake of organization is therefore only a ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... which we have spoken,—those other cases where some original element of our nature is capable of being regarded as an inlet of mystic truth. For in each of these complex aspects of religion we see, perhaps, the modification of a primeval instinct. There is a point of view from which Revelation seems to be but transfigured Sorcery, and Love transfigured Appetite, and Philosophy man's ordered Wonder, and Prayer his softening Fear. And similarly in the natural religion of Wordsworth we may discern the modified outcome of other human ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Soul the savage beast which in primeval forests strayed, What shape had it, what dwelling-place, what part ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... an insight into the essentially intelligent Self, and whose minds are cleared by devotion—the means of apprehending the Holy one as the universal Self—, they view this entire world with all its manifold bodies—the effects of primeval matter—as thy body—a body the Self of which is constituted by knowledge abiding apart from its world-body; this is the meaning of the following sloka: 'But those who possess knowledge,' &c.—If the different slokas were not interpreted in this ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... have men been at a loss how to inflict mental and bodily anguish upon their fellow-creatures. This aptitude came to them in the growing complexity of their passions and the early refinement of their ingenuity. But it may safely be said that primeval man did not go to the trouble of inventing tortures. He was indolent and pure of heart. He brained his neighbour ferociously with a stone axe from necessity and without malice. The stupidest mind may invent a rankling phrase or brand the innocent with ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... had made all his money by a certain chemical compound which had been adopted by the world at large as a panacea for every ill. But the heiress of the Purlings hated any reference to the Primeval Pills, although she owed ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... quivering level of the grain. The thicket rising gradually in height, but with a regular slope whose gradient had been determined by centuries of western trade winds, presently becomes a fair wood of live-oak, and a few hundred yards further at last assumes the aspect of a primeval forest. A delicious coolness fills the air; the long, shadowy aisles greet the aching eye with a soothing twilight; the murmur of unseen brooks is heard, and, by a strange irony, the enormous, widely-spaced stacks of wild oats are replaced ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... to see the divine in all things fair and lovely; to take them as evidences that the love that once pronounced this world good in its primeval glory still is working, still is seeking to enrich our lives and lead them out in fullness of joy. Why should not we, like the poets and preachers of ancient Israel, taste again of ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... and it was a lonely musing place, and so on one of the stillest, clearest days of 'St. Luke's little summer,' the last afternoon of her visit at the Holt, there stood Honora, leaning against a tree stem, deep, very deep in a vision of the primeval woodlands of the West, their red inhabitants, and the white man who should carry the true, glad tidings westward, westward, ever from east to west. Did she know how completely her whole spirit and soul were surrendered to the worship of that devotion? Worship? Yes, the word is advisedly used; ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge |
