"Meteoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... A meteoric stone may seem to differ from a planet only in size, but the difference in size involves also many other differences, notably the fact that the larger body can attract and hold to itself an atmosphere—a circumstance of the utmost importance to the existence of ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... baffle our telescopic 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 ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... boats are sometimes towed 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 electric changes affecting the clashing mass of meteoric bodies which constituted the head of the comet, we found it impossible to escape from ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... payments on the sale of the Field land, and when Eugene and his brother-in-law-to-be reached Naples their soulful appeals for more currency with which to continue their golden girdle of the earth were met with the chilling notice "No funds available." Happily, in their meteoric transit across Europe, they had invested in many articles of vertu and convertible souvenirs of the places they had visited. By the sale, or sometimes by the pledge, of these accumulated impedimenta of travel, Eugene ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... infusion of fresh blood to Odo were Alfieri's meteoric returns to Turin. Life moved languidly in the strait-laced city, even to a young gentleman a-tiptoe for adventure and framed to elicit it as the hazel-wand draws water. Not that vulgar distractions were lacking. The town, as Cantapresto had ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... 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. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... at his word—had made but a meteoric appearance in her future sister-in-law's cottage—a hasty greeting, a brief peck on Ilona's two cheeks, and one on Aladar's bristly face, then the inevitable homily; and as soon as Ilona paused ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... effective had been the blow. The whole Northern campaign had been upset by the meteoric appearance of Jackson and the speed with which he marched and fought. McDowell's army of 40,000 men and a hundred guns had been scattered, and it would take him much time to get it all together again. McClellan, advancing on Richmond, was without the support on his right which McDowell was ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... twenty years has presided over the weekly 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 ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... call the meteor, "Wakan-denda" (sacred fire) and Wakan-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-no-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 ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... and, during the latter part of November, and the first half of December, Captain Parry's journal presents little more than observations on it; and oh the meteoric appearances and fantastic illusions of light and colour, with which the voyagers were often amused. At one time, the moon appeared to be curiously deformed by refraction; the lower edges of it seeming to be indented ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... that the other story of a gigantic bird 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
... which, though they are 'the fruit of the Spirit,' are yet not produced in us without our own co- operation. We have to forge and sharpen these weapons, though the fire in which they are forged is from above, and the metal of which they are made is given from heaven, like meteoric iron. These are 'kindness, long-suffering, love unfeigned.' We have to dismiss from our minds the ordinary characteristics of warfare in thinking of that which Christians are to wage. Like the old Knights Templars, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... than poetical, we may still gladly 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 ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... 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, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... with the difficulties attached to the effort and the display, rather than with any intellectual sense of power and skill genially unfolded under natural excitements. It would be idle to cite Madame de Stael's remark on one of these meteoric exhibitions, viz., that Mr. Coleridge possessed the art of monologue in perfection, but not that of the dialogue; yet it comes near to hitting the truth from her point of view. The habit of monologue which Coleridge favoured lies open to three fatal objections: 1. It ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... noisiest great man of the last, about whom we listen with pleasure to each new voice, perhaps critically and doubtingly, yet for our own part colored by that absorbing, painful interest, which induced us when a boy to close the book which first told us of his doings, after having traced his meteoric flight to the 'monster meeting' at Moscow, unable to proceed to the catastrophe; and it was months before we could bring ourselves to read on, of the heroism which charmed, or the glitter which dazzled us, to its final chaos and night. On ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... innumerable bodies, comparatively small, but of various dimensions, is sweeping around the solar focus in an orbit, which periodically cuts the orbit of the earth, thus explaining the actual cause of shooting stars, aerolites, and meteoric showers." ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... As a 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 ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Exceedingly so! Don't laugh children, the philosophers have been doing quite splendid work lately, in their own way especially, the transformation of force into light is a great piece of systematized discovery and this notion about the sun being supplied with his flame by ceaseless meteoric hail is grand, and looks very likely to be true. Of course, it is only the old gunlock,—flint and steel,—on a large scale but the order and majesty of it are sublime. Still, we sculptors and painters care little about it. "It is very fine," we say, "and ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... 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. . . . Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I have more than a suspicion that, in the minds of the two lords, the early public-house at the corner has superseded the sun. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... 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, ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • 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 to dream of ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... is, in general, characterised by marshy swamps poisoning the whole atmosphere with their miasmatic exhalations. The meteoric influences are decidedly cold and variable; and the 'extremes of temperature increase in proportion as we approach the valleys at the foot of the Central Alps, especially those most distant from the Adriatic coast.' This climate, our author tells us, cannot afford more benefit ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... the naked eye to distinguish the individual points from the smaller stars; and shortly after this the nearest began to present discs of appreciable size but somewhat irregular shape. I had now no doubt that I was about to pass through one of those meteoric rings which our most advanced astronomers believe to exist in immense numbers throughout space, and to the Earth's contact with or approach to which they ascribe the showers of falling, stars visible ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... 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 ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... mountaintops, 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 in the heart of it. Surely ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... for practical effects. In some nations, the manifestations of power are coincident with its growth; in others, from vicious institutions, a vast crystallization goes on for ages blindly and in silence, which the lamp of some meteoric mind is required to light up into brilliant display. Thus it had been in Russia; and hence, to the abused judgment of all Christendom, she had seemed to leap like Pallas from the brain of Jupiter—gorgeously endowed, and in panoply of civil array, for all purposes of national grandeur, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... receiving with Miss Alice Hooker, a niece of Henry Ward Beecher, at the home of a Mrs. Berry; he decided to go there first. With young Langdon he arrived at eleven o'clock in the morning, and they did not leave until midnight. If his first impression upon Olivia Langdon had been meteoric, it would seem that he must now have become to her as a streaming comet that swept from zenith to horizon. One thing is certain: she had become to him the single, unvarying beacon of his future years. He visited Henry Ward Beecher on that trip and dined with him by invitation. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the slim 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 springy young legs in their absurdly ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... created, in rapid succession, Viscount and Marquis, and finally Duke of Buckingham; he won for bride an Earl's daughter, the richest heiress in the land; and for some years dazzled the world by his splendours and wealth as he alienated it by his arrogance. And just when his meteoric career had reached its zenith, his life was closed in tragedy ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... before the war used to call "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 incontinently died, leaving his family his reputation, ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... summoned to the Council of the Patenta. All are anxious to see you. At present it is hoped you will not push further the matter of the telegraphy with the Earth. The disturbances in Pike increase daily—flashing stars seem to emerge from nothing, meteoric showers, like a rain of sparks rush across the fields of the telescopes, gaseous disengagements from what seem like shining nuclei, shoot upward for thousands of miles from their surfaces; all is chaos, and these disturbances have been noticed in other regions of the heavens. Again spirits ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... 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 ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... in May 1844, in which he shewed that the dust, so far from being inorganic, contained numerous specimens of a species of flint-shelled animalcules, or infusoria, known as polygastrica, and minute portions of terrestrial plants. The investigation led him to certain conclusions: '1. That meteoric dust-rain is of terrestrial origin. 2. That the same is not a rain of volcanic ashes. 3. That it is necessarily a dust carried up to a great height by a strong current of air or whirlwind from a dried-up swamp-region. 4. That the dust neither demonstrably ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... some one (if we are to believe the Chippeway legends, on the shores of Lake Superior) found fragments of the pure copper of that region, beat them into shape, and the art of metallurgy was begun; iron was first worked in the same way by shaping meteoric iron ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... ground up into bits of 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 we call ...
— Uncle Robert's Geography (Uncle Robert's Visit, V.3) • Francis W. Parker and Nellie Lathrop Helm
... collapse, gradually and at this point and that it crept 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
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... burden. He has skimmed rivers in his headlong rush, dashed through forests, plunged into the hearts of mountains, and glanced from the city to the desert-place, and again to a far-off city, with a meteoric progress, seen and out of sight, while his reverberating roar still fills the ear. The travellers swarm forth from the cars. All are full of the momentum which they have caught from their mode of conveyance. It seems as if the whole world, both morally and physically, were detached from its ...
— The Old Apple Dealer (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... very striking 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 surrounding plain, two small rivers, the Rio ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the course 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. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... resumed tranquillity of Lucille's life the brilliant apparition of St. Amand appeared as something dreamed of, not seen. The star of Napoleon had risen above the horizon; the romance of his early career had commenced; and the campaign of Egypt had been the herald of those brilliant and meteoric successes which flashed forth from the gloom of the Revolution ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... unquenched, unextinguished[obs3], 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; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... condition, and with footing capable to carry his affairs and him. When he died, in 1786, the enormous Phenomenon since called FRENCH REVOLUTION was already growling audibly in the depths of the world; meteoric-electric coruscations heralding it, all round the horizon. Strange enough to note, one of Friedrich's last visitors was Gabriel Honore Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau. These two saw one another; twice, for half an hour each ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... respect to his own work he was scrupulous; indeed, a stern critic. He abhorred claptrap and specious effects, and aimed at high standards of artistic expression. This gave him position among his brother architects, but was incompatible with meteoric progress. His design for the church at Benham represented much thought and hope, and he felt ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... crown, from this report of the birth of a king. Having first consulted the priests and scribes respecting the birthplace of Christ, he procured a private interview with the Magians, for the purpose of ascertaining the time of the meteoric appearance; and, with all the policy of all experienced statesman, requested them to go and find out the extraordinary Child, then return to bring him word, that he might come and worship him. This was a contrivance, by which he expected to accomplish, with ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... I found that he had cut out the war, in so far as his military experiences were concerned. In khaki he showed himself to be as English and John Bull as you please; and how the deuce his meteoric promotion occurred and what various splendid services compelled the exhibition on his breast of a rainbow row of ribbons, are matters known only to the War Office, Andrew Lackaday and his Maker. Well—that is perhaps an exaggeration of secrecy. The newspapers ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... the desert sky; now a 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 vessel in emerald green, incrusted from long ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... 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 confirm a usurping family in its ill-gotten possessions. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... time that falls of meteoric matter into the sun would account for the sun's heat. This position is hardly tenable now. The mere bulk of the meteoric matter required by the hypothesis, apart from other reasons, is against it. There is undoubtedly an enormous amount of meteoric matter moving about within the bounds ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... 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 ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... crimson Damask Wastcoat, and Breeches, a red Feather in his Hat, and a Gold Chain Ten Times round his Neck, a Sword in his Hand, and two pair of Pistols hanging at the End of a Silk Sling, which was flung over his Shoulders, according to the Fashion of the Pyrates" (p. 213). His meteoric career of piracy lasted ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... Haldgren's words; his slim, sensitive hand was reaching for the ball-control to build up still more the tremendous blast of a forward exhaust that was checking their speed and making them as heavy as if their bodies were of meteoric iron. ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... stood, while, on the other side of the river, a murmur ran through the crowd like a breeze, caused doubtless by the fear that the bey had arrived unexpectedly from another direction. A second gesture from the manager and the great orchestra subsided, more gradually, with rallentando passages and meteoric showers of notes scattered among the foliage; but nothing better could be expected from a company ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... jaw-bones, of what looked to be wolves, still containing the teeth, and fossils of many kinds. Some looked like vegetables, some were hexagonal, and some looked as though made of floor tiling. We found many water and moss agates of various sizes. The ground was covered with some meteoric ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen
... directed to proceed to London, for the purpose of entering into negotiations for a treaty of commerce with Great Britain. Before leaving the continent, Mr. Adams visited Paris, where he witnessed the return of Napoleon from Elbe, and his meteoric career during the Hundred Days. Here he was joined in March, 1815, by his family, after a long and perilous ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... seeing. For anything we know, this may be a great day in the earth's earlier history; she may have put forth her original rose on this day, or tried her hand at a primitive specimen of wheat; or she may, in fact, have survived some gunpowder plot about this time; so that the meteoric appearance may be a kind congratulating feu-de-joye, on the anniversary of the happy event. What it is that the 'cosmogony man' in the 'Vicar of Wakefield' would have thought of such novelties, whether he would have favored us with his usual opinion upon such topics, viz., ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... Eternal Sovereign arranges a solar or an astral system by dispositions imparted primordially to matter; He causes, by the same majestic means, vast oceans to form and continents to rise, and all the grand meteoric agencies to proceed in ceaseless alternation, so as to fit the earth for a residence of organic beings. But when, in the course of these operations, fuci and corals are to be for the first time placed in those oceans, a particular interference of the Divine power is required; and this ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... the people. Speaking almost daily in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois, she had little time to think of the work in the East; the glamor of Victoria Woodhull faded, and she realized that her own hard monotonous spade work would in the long run do more for the cause than the meteoric rise of a vivid personality who gave only part of ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... John Herschel described them as almost spiritual in texture, and small stars have been seen shining through their densest parts without any perceptible diminution of their light. The nucleus is believed to be composed of a congeries of meteoric fragments, and these, when exposed to the Sun's heat, throw off luminous nebulous particles that are swept by some repulsive force into space and form the appendage known as the tail. Comets may be regarded ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... silence and overshadowing of that night whose fitful meteoric fires only herald the descent of a superficial fame into lasting oblivion, the imbecile and unavailing resistance which is made against the doom must often excite our pity for the pampered child of market-gilded popularity;" and as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the settlement of meteoric dust is not easy to obtain in such a place as England, where the dust which accumulates is seldom of a celestial character; but on the snow-fields of Greenland or the Himalayas dust can be found; and by a Committee of ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... 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's superstitious man, pouring their drink-offerings on the smooth stones ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... extinction and renewal; the sun only going out more gradually than the human eye; the system meanwhile, of which it is the centre, in ceaseless movement nowhither. Our terrestrial planet is in constant increase by meteoric dust, moving to it through endless time out of infinite space. The Alps drift down the rivers into the plains, as still loftier mountains found their level there ages ago. The granite kernel of the earth, it is said, is ever changing in its very substance, its molecular ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... crowding to the walls of Viana, watched that last reckless ride of his with amazed, uncomprehending eyes. The peeping sun caught his glittering armour as he sped, so that of a sudden he must have seemed to them a thing of fire—meteoric, as had been his whole life's trajectory which was now swiftly dipping ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... the old "college chorus"—it had been a "chorus" almost from the foundation—into a glee club, and he had organized the first guitar and banjo club. The pleasant glow he left behind him still hung over the campus when Fred entered four years later. Charles's meteoric social career had dimmed the fact (save to a few sober professors) that he had got through by the skin of his teeth. Fred's plodding ways, relieved only by his prowess at football, had left a very different impression. Fred worked hard at his studies because ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... replied the unknown, "the astronomers Louville and Halley took for lunar phenomena phenomena purely terrestrial, such as meteoric or other bodies which are generated in our own atmosphere. That was the scientific aspect of these facts, and ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... that Tennyson spent the quiet years of meditation and study before he achieved his full renown. This was no such sensational event as Byron's meteoric appearance in 1812; but one year, 1850, is a clear landmark in his career. This was the date of the publication of In Memoriam and of his appointment, on the death of Wordsworth, to the office of Poet Laureate. This year saw the end of his struggle with ill-fortune ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... 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. ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... paper, to which Olga Lermontof, who came daily to Lilac Lodge to practise with Diana, drew the latter's attention. The paragraph recalled the fact that it was just a year since Miss Quentin had made her debut, and then went on to comment lightly upon the brief and meteoric character of ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... produce more than contusions," said the operator, bending his gaze in every direction in vain, in quest of the hand from which the missile had been hurled. "It must be meteoric; there is no living being in sight, ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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
... than bronze 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 to that time. The most ancient sepulchres of Malabar contain ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... Eagle, alias the New York Revenge's Revenge. Tried, condemned, and hanged in 1718 at Charleston. His was a brilliant career while it lasted, but was cut short after a brief and meteoric spell. ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... as well be understood, but there is nothing in them to dwell upon. The far side of the moon is probably but little worth seeing. Its features are likely to be more blurred with accumulations of meteoric dust than are those of our side, but otherwise they are likely to be of the ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... stock still wondering at her. There never was such a young lady. What was there in life that he would not have done for her—were it to the shedding of blood? And to think he was no more to serve and follow her; no longer to jog contentedly through the pine-scented Forest—watching the meteoric course of that graceful figure in front of him, the lively young horse curbed by the light and dexterous hand, the ruddy brown hair glittering in the sunlight, the flexible form moving in unison with every motion of the horse that carried ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... 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 ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... point, Professor Olmsted's views are particularly interesting, as, out of one mysterious phenomenon, he endeavours to explain another, and inquires: 'Whether or not the zodiacal light is the origin of the meteoric showers of November and August, and especially those of November?' Many readers know that for some years past great numbers of falling-stars, or showers of meteors, have been observed periodically in November: the fall ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... fine, the perfect artist. Even in the first flare of youth, even at the time when he was the meteoric, dazzling figure flaunting over all the baldpates of the universe the standard of the musical future, it was apparent that there were serious flaws in his spirit. Despite the audacity with which he realized his amazing and poignant and ironic visions, despite his youthful fire ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... phase of life at the Pier. Nor was Mr. Port's lot made happier as he listened to the brisk discussion that ensued in regard to the organization of the yachting party, and found that its two remaining members were to be drawn, as was only natural, from the eminently meteoric set ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... 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
... four or five fell out of the stage, followed by another, who lit unerringly on top of the prostrate one. In the meteoric moment of the fall, Harlan had seen that the two must have discovered America at about the same time, for they were exactly alike, making due allowance for the slight difference made by ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... sentence. Why should you or I speak of variation as having been ordained and guided, more than does an astronomer, in discussing the fall of a meteoric stone? He would simply say that it was drawn to our earth by the attraction of gravity, having been displaced in its course by the action of some quite unknown laws. Would you have him say that its fall at some particular place and ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... 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 length. These huge solid masses of ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... grant that," the prince cried; "but you are a sensible, clever woman, and you know my heart is easily excited. It is only the meteoric light of the ignis fatuus, soon extinguished. Let it dance and flicker, but remember that the only warmth which cheers and brightens my heart is your love and friendship. You are my first and only love, and you will be my last—that I swear to you, and upon it you ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... says old Glegg, shakin' his grizzly head; 'she's shore the most meteoric married lady of which hist'ry says a word. My girl Abby's ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... 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 that was now ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... deepest interest in these two children. At the 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 ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... breathes deeper devotion than that of Wellesley. Was it not because he at last saw the pettiness of his own pride and petulance when contrasted with the self-abnegation of him who was truly the Great Commoner? And did not even his meteoric career in the East pale before the full-orbed splendour of the quarter of a century of achievement which made up the public ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... or the thrash of her screw, the 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 Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... lagging fingers finally pointed to five. The sky seemed brass, the atmosphere a blast from Tophet; and the sun, still standing at some distance above the horizon, glared mercilessly down over the panting parched: earth, as if a recent and unusually copious shower of "meteoric cosmical matter" had fallen into the solar furnace, and prompted it by increased incandescence to hotly deny the truth of Helmholtz's assertion: "The inexorable laws of mechanics show that the store of heat in the sun must be finally ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... gravity, and tossed into a most deep and silent lake. Nothing affected its loveliness 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. Mr. Waples knew the power it obeyed to be that prostrate, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... charity—that his life has probably been shortened by his scrupulous regard for justice. His career was one splendid refutation of the popular fallacy, that genius has of necessity vices—that its light must be meteoric—and its courses wayward and uncontrolled. He has left mankind two great lessons,—we scarcely know which is the most valuable. He has taught us how much delight one human being can confer upon the world; he has taught us also that the imagination may aspire to the wildest ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... "The Story of a Meteorite." [For the preceding lectures, see 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 to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... Feldspar Group which is called Anorthite has been shown by Rammelsberg to occur in a meteoric stone, and his analysis proves it to be almost identical in its chemical proportions to the same mineral in the lavas of modern volcanoes. So also Bronzite (Enstatite) and Olivine have been met with in meteorites shown by analysis to come remarkably ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... could 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 of that day denounced him as a utilitarian ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... complained that he bounded with amazing rapidity from one subject to another, without leaving a trace of his track: now among the stars—then on a steam engine chasing infidelity—or pelting atheism with meteoric stones.[148] ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... 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 ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... 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 ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... that moment of discovery. He had drifted along toward it quite unconsciously, as a river might idle toward the sea. Patty! The light of this knowledge was blinding for a space. So Warrington came into his own romance. It was not the grand passion, which is always meteoric; it was rather like a ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath |
