"Primeval" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... through him where he lay and rested, as one walks through the dun mist in a little hollow on a still, damp morning; and turning round to look (at the proper distance) there was the unmistakable shape again, just thick enough to blot out the lines of the dim primeval landscape beyond, and make a hole in the blank sky. A dread silhouette, thrilling our hearts with awe—blurred and indistinct like a composite photograph—merely the type, as it had been seen ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... [Shows a primeval forest, with great trees, thickets in background, and moss and ferns underfoot. A set in the foreground. To the left is a tent, about ten feet square, with a fly. The front and sides are rolled up, showing a rubber blanket spread, ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... charring the wood in the embers and then rubbing it between two rough stones. With her head bent low over her work, the heavy, tangled masses of her hair fell upon it and got in her way, and from time to time she shook them aside impatiently. It was a picture of primeval peace. ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... away to the north and east lies the snug little Island of St. Jean; a beautiful land in summer, with its red cliffs of red sandstone and ruddy clay, surmounted by green fields, which stretch away inland to small areas of the primeval forest, which once extended unbroken from the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the waters of the ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... second cosmogonic poem the account is more similar to that of the second chapter of Genesis, and its present form originated in or near Babylon. Here we have nothing of the primeval deep, but are told how the gods made a beautiful land, with rivers and trees; how Babylon was built and Marduk created man, and the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the beasts and cities and temples. This also must be looked ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... fun in coaling, even when a craft as funny as the Pinta is snuggling up under your quarter, looking more like the Pinafore than ever, with her skylarking sailors, midshipmite and all; so Captain Carroll secured a jaunty little steam-launch, and away we went on a picnic in the forest primeval. The launch was laden to the brim; three of our biggest boats were in tow; an abundant collation, in charge of a corps of cabin-boys, gave assurance of success in ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... inside, there is often no chimney, and the habitation is smoky and dark, with only a hole in the roof for ventilation. En passant, it may be said that some of the methods of the poorer Mexican peones are not much in advance of those of our common ancestor—primeval man! ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... shrill manner, stole all our blankets and whisky, and fled to the primeval forest ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 5 • Charles Farrar Browne
... all marks of his struggle and walked into dinner shamefacedly, all muscle gone out of his bulk of fat. His sudden return to primeval savagery grew monstrous in the cheerful kitchen, with its noise of hearty children, sizzling meat, and the clatter ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... soft place of the earth! down-pillowed couch, Made ready for the weary! Everywhere, O Earth, thou hast one gift for thy poor children— Room to lie down, leave to cease standing up, Leave to return to thee, and in thy bosom Lie in the luxury of primeval peace, Fearless of any morn; as a new babe Lies nestling in his mother's arms in bed: That home of blessedness is all there is; He never feels the silent rushing tide, Strong setting for the sea, which bears ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... architects with whose work he was familiar and books about whom or illustrated by whom he knew, is too long to be given here. His chief interest, in so far as I could make out, in these opening days, was Egyptology and the study of things natural and primeval—all the wonders of ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... creating all beings in proper and exact order. This story which I have narrated to thee and the hearing of which destroyeth all sin, is celebrated as the Legend of the Fish. And the man who listeneth every day to this primeval history of Manu, attaineth happiness and all other objects of desire ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... for a moment stood still, Stan felt that he was about to see something he had never beheld before. It was something that can not be described. It is a horrible thing to have a dragon come. It seemed as if the monster was hurling huge rocks at the trees, and thus forcing a way through primeval forests. Even Stan felt that he should be wise to take the quickest way off, and enter into no quarrel with a dragon. Ah! but his ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... finds, perchance, a shell. It is so small a thing that it can be held in the hollow of the hand; so frail that a slight pressure of the finger will crush it to atoms, yet, held to the ear, it brings the surge and sweep of that vast, primeval ocean which, in the inconceivably remote past, covered the peak. And so, to the eye of the mind, the small brown book, with its hundred printed pages, brings back the whole story of ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... no possible flight in human idealism, produces in those who hold it truly a freshness of heart very hard to be understood by the dispassionate critic who weighs character by the newest laws of his favourite degenerate, but never by the primeval tests of God. Robert, therefore, was thinking of his bride's face, the pure curves of her mouth, her sapphirine eyes, her pretty hands, her golden hair, the nose which others found fault with, which he, nevertheless, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... express both awe and love, the infinite and the finite, they can do but what their old fathers did when gazing up to the eternal sky, and feeling the presence of a Being as far as far, and as near as near can be; they can but combine the self-same words and utter once more the primeval Aryan prayer, Heaven-Father, in that form which will endure for ever, 'Our Father, ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... the sense of striking down through, of having the lid of one's smaller consciousness lifted off. In the long run his inspiration can be had or not as he wills. He knows that it is the supreme reasonableness in him, the primeval, underlying naturalness in him, rising to its rights. What he feels when he is inspired is that the larger laws, the laws above the other laws, have taken hold of him. He knows that the one law of inspiration is ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... pure panic terror of the land itself,—not of the Indians or of our hardships, both of which he faced bravely enough, but of the strange trees and the high and long roofs of vine, of the black sliding earth and the white mist, of the fireflies and the whippoorwills,—a sick fear of primeval Nature and her ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... preceding chapter we have seen some little of the peculiar habits of the American Indian, civilized and otherwise, and it will be interesting now to see to what extent the white man's teaching has driven away primeval habits of living, hunting and fighting. Within the last few weeks, evidence of a most valuable character on this question has been furnished by the report submitted to the Secretary of the Interior by the Commission sent to investigate matters concerning the five civilized tribes of ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... each other, two crouching, snarling animals, the raw, primeval passions of their hearts released, each seeing through a mist of red; a mist that had risen up to roll across a mighty land and plunge its noblest sons into a bloody ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... evolution of humanity has been an unbroken progress toward perfection; you may maintain that there has been no progress at all, and that man remains the same poor creature that he ever was; or, lastly, you may say, with the author of the "Contract Social," that men were purest and best in primeval simplicity,— ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... Night so cling to thee? Thou vast, profound, primeval hiding-place Of ancient secrets,—gray and ghostly gulf Cleft in the green of this high forest land, And crowded in the dark with giant forms! Art thou a grave, a prison, ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... of country through which they have flowed. The dark indicate vegetable decay, while the others point to clayey soil. Twice we came across rapids, and in each case made a portage of half a mile or so to avoid them. The woods on either side were primeval, which are more easily penetrated than woods of the second growth, and we had no great difficulty in carrying our canoes through them. How shall I ever forget the solemn mystery of it? The height of the trees and the thickness of the boles ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the Falls of Niagara, before the hallowed waters of the mist fell, on the pale-faced warrior or the sound of the axe had even broken the great stillness of their undisputed soil, the dark shadows of the primeval forest fell only ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah
... September 15, 1789, in Burlington, New Jersey, but while still very young he was taken to Cooperstown, on the shores of Otsego Lake, in central New York. His father owned many thousand acres of primeval forest about this village, and so through the years of a free boyhood the young Cooper came to love the wilderness and to know the characters of border life. When the village school was no longer adequate, he went to study privately in Albany and later ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... to this viewpoint, that we begin to understand the mistake of ordinary opinion in identifying the hero with the soldier. Especially in this age of waxing militarism, it is well for us to note the fallacy which is involved in this primeval superstition. Heroism, at its truest and best, is spiritual. It is "an obedience," says Emerson, "to a secret impulse of an individual's character." It needs no other stimulus, hides in no gorgeous trappings, craves no companionship in suffering, accepts ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... stood before him, superb and still, shrined in a crescent of tall beech stems, column by column, with the light descending on the fine gold of her hair. Nothing in Anne even remotely suggested a sylvan and primeval creature; but, as she stood there in her temperate and alien beauty, she seemed to him to have yielded to a brief enchantment. She threw back her head, as if her white throat drank the sweet air like ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... Eden's love; And seraph-taught seemed the enchanting lay The Nightingale poured forth at close of day; For yet nor sin nor sorrow had its birth, To touch, as now, the sweetest sounds of earth. Yes! as upon his inner sense was borne The melody of that primeval morn, And all his soul was music,—O, to him The voice of Nature was an angel's hymn! But was there, then, one human voice that brought Unto his outward ear his own rapt thought, In tones, interpreting in worthy guise The varied notes of Eden's melodies?— O, happier ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... definition has been adopted by Leibnitz, by Collins, by Gravezende, by Edwards, by Bonnet, and by all later necessitarians." The truth is, as we have seen, that instead of adopting, Leibnitz has very clearly refuted, the definition of Hobbes. Mr. Harris, in his work entitled "The Primeval Man," has also fallen into the error of ascribing this definition of liberty to Leibnitz. Surely, these very learned authors must have forgotten, that Leibnitz wrote a reply to Hobbes, in which he expressly combats ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... ought to acquire. The other interior objects will require a proportional degree of information with regard to them. It is true that all these difficulties will, by degrees, be very much diminished. The most laborious task will be the proper inauguration of the government and the primeval formation of a federal code. Improvements on the first draughts will every year become both easier and fewer. Past transactions of the government will be a ready and accurate source of information to new members. The affairs of the Union will become more and more objects of ...
— The Federalist Papers
... blood, sprung from worthy and venerable houses in that green island which with fondness they still called home, and many had made for themselves name and fortune, hewing their way to honor through a primeval forest of adversities. Lesser personages were not lacking, but crowded the gallery and invaded the pit. Old fighters of Indians were present, and masters of ships trading from the Spanish islands or from the ports of home. Rude lumbermen from Norfolk or the borders of the Dismal Swamp stared ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... us was a boys' school—"Maison d'Education, Dirigee par M. Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maitre es Lettres et es Sciences," and author of a treatise on geology, with such hauntingly terrific pictures of antediluvian reptiles battling in the primeval slime that I have never been able to forget them. My father, who was fond of science, made me a present of it on my sixth birthday. It ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... accommodate ninety pupils and teachers, giving one room to every two pupils, and all being so arranged, as to admit of thorough ventilation. This building is surrounded by extensive grounds, enclosed with handsome fences, where remains of the primeval forest still offer ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... being divided throughout its whole length, into small compartments, by a row of shallow buttresses, which rise from the ground to the eaves of the roof, without any partition into splays. Those on the south side, (see plate forty-two) are all, except the most eastern, still in their primeval state; but a buttress of a subsequent, though not very recent, date, has been built up against almost every one of the original buttresses on the north side, by way of support to the edifice. Each division contains a single narrow circular-headed ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... stand in the way of true progress. But you will work this out, for the Divine Spark that pulses through us of the Larger Universe, pulses also through you. That spark, once lighted, can never be extinguished, can never be swallowed up again in the primeval slime. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... Priceless (valuable) senpreza, netaksebla. Price lists prezaro. Prick piki. Prick pikilo. Prickly pika. Pride malhumileco, fiereco. Priest pastro. Priesthood pastreco. Prim afekta, preciza. Primary elementa, unua. Primeval primitiva. Primitive primitiva, originala. Primrose primolo. Prince regxido, princo. Principal estro, cxefo. Principal precipa. Principality princlando. Principle principo. Print presi. Print (picture) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Lost contains many more lines of poetic beauty than Homer's Iliad; and there is nothing in the latter poem of equal length, which will bear any comparison with the exquisite picture of the primeval innocence of our First Parents in his fourth book. Nevertheless, the Iliad is a more interesting poem than the Paradise Lost; and has produced and will produce a much more extensive impression on mankind. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... Surely with mankind the appreciation of flowers must have been coeval with the poetry of love. Where better than in a flower, sweet in its unconsciousness, fragrant because of its silence, can we image the unfolding of a virgin soul? The primeval man in offering the first garland to his maiden thereby transcended the brute. He became human in thus rising above the crude necessities of nature. He entered the realm of art when he perceived the ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... proper effect on close inspection through a want of finish, confirms my opinion. Still there is no doubt that he must have been pleased, as all true lovers of art are with the picturesque effect—an effect as of things half seen in dreams or emergent from primeval substances—which the imperfection of the craftsman's labour leaves ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... the days, if the night, with its dews and darkness, did not come to restore the drooping world! As the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the natural ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... extent of country, many hundred miles broad and many hundred miles long, covered with dense forests, expanded lakes, broad rivers, wide prairies, swamps, and mighty mountains: and all in a state of primeval simplicity—undefaced by the axe of civilised man, and untenanted by aught save a few roving hordes of Red Indians and myriads of wild animals. Imagine amid this wilderness a number of small squares, each enclosing half a dozen wooden houses and about a dozen men, and between ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... Ever the slave of every proud desire; Come now a little down where sports thy sire; Choose thy small better from thy abounding worse; Prove thou thy lordship who hadst dust for nurse, And for thy swaddling the primeval mire!" ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... of his great mission burst thus from the lips of the Gothic king, the spirit of his lofty ambition seemed to diffuse itself over his outward form. His noble stature, his fine proportions, his commanding features, became invested with a simple, primeval grandeur. Contrasted as he now was with the shrunken figure of the spirit-broken ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... day is repeated the merry dance of many skaters—about the only kind of dance I thoroughly believe in. If I stand on the porch upon which one of my library windows opens, and look to the east, I see the mountain clad with its primeval forest, crowding down to the water's edge. It looks as though one might naturally expect to come upon a camp of Indian wigwams there. Two years ago a wild-cat was shot in those same woods and stuffed by the hunters, and ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... which were the most characteristic creatures of the American fauna. The prehistoric inhabitants of North America were familiar with the mastodon, those of South America with the glyptodon, the shell of which on occasion served as a roof to the dwelling of primeval reran, which dwelling was often but a den hollowed out of the ground. As in Europe, the early inhabitants of America had to contend with powerful mammals and fierce carnivora; and in the West as in the East man made up in intelligence for his lack of brute force, and however ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... a time when these primeval forests gave way to cultivated fields, and wealthy cities sprang up on all sides. Mighty kingdoms were established, which had communications with all the great powers of the world. But even in the heyday of its material prosperity the heart of India ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... the great record of the religious education of the human race. It shows us man primeval in the unconscious innocence of nature; then the patriarchal era with its simple, uniform manners along with its untamed passion; and then again the most active intercourse of nations, the most savage wars, the hierarchical state and the elective and hereditary ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... surrounding territory and his own conclusion as to its possible future. Then the rapids became woven into his speech, the nucleus of power which made so many things possible. From this he moved into the wilderness and before his listeners there began to unroll the north country in its primeval silence, broken only by the occasional tap of a prospector's pick or the heavy crash of a moose through a cluster of saplings. And with the story of the wilderness came that of pulp wood and great areas now tributary to St. Marys. And after the pulp ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... fifty years of age; her complection, though faded, kept the traces of its former loveliness, her eyes, though they had lost their youthful fire, retained a lustre that evinced their primeval brilliancy, and the fine symmetry of her features, still uninjured by the siege of time, not only indicated the perfection of her juvenile beauty, but still laid claim to admiration in every beholder. Her carriage was lofty and commanding; but the dignity to which high birth and conscious superiority ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... picturesque as the United States of America. All times, races, and languages have brought their contribution. Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky. Chelsea, with its London associations of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King's Road, is own suburb to stately and primeval Memphis; there they have their seat, translated names of cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and Arkansas; and both, while I was crossing the continent, lay, watched by armed men, in the horror and isolation of a plague. Old, ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... believe that on the "Playground Peninsula" of eastern United States an unsurveyed primeval wilderness of perhaps three thousand square miles had remained absolutely detached from inquisitive civilization, I was soon to learn that Gates had not in any way exaggerated. It was there; it is there today in the same ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... The forest primeval was shown on the American side by green twigs of trees set very close together. On pulling apart the leaves and peering into the depths of this forest, one found it inhabited by bears and other wild beasts, also cut ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs
... evoluted from this universal root-principle, Mula-prakriti or undifferentiated primeval cosmic matter, which evolves out of itself consciousness and mind, and is generally called "Prakriti" and amulam mulam, "the rootless root," and Aryakta, the "unevolved evolver," &c.? This primordial tattwa ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... translate literally the first verse of the Bible, it would read in this way: In the beginning the Strong Ones created the heavens and the earth. "The word that we have translated God is in the plural; and I have already given you its meaning. This is only a survival, a trace, of that primeval belief which the Jews shared with all ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... the higher altitudes gave place to oaks, these to ash, beech and maple. To these succeeded the tamarack and such trees as affect a moist and marshy habitat; and finally, when for four months I had been steadily descending, I found myself in a primeval flora consisting mainly of giant ferns, some of them as much as twenty surindas in diameter. They grew upon the margins of vast stagnant lakes which I was compelled to navigate by means of rude rafts made from their trunks lashed ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... when thus she broke upon our sight; a lovely apparition, sent to be Jim Hartman's blandishment. At least so it seemed, for he stood there and stared like a noble savage. As when the lightning descends on the giant oak in its primeval solitude—but I must stop this; she is too near, though she pretends not to see us yet. So I whispered in low and ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... society."—Wilson's Essay on Gram., p. 1. I know not how so many professed Christians, and some of them teachers of religion too, with the Bible in their hands, can reason upon this subject as they do. We find them, in their speculations, conspiring to represent primeval man, to use their own words, as a "savage, whose 'howl at the appearance of danger, and whose exclamations of joy at the sight of his prey, reiterated, or varied with the change of objects, were probably the origin of language.'—Booth's Analytical ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... gown at the bottom of the picture, not quite in the middle of the picture, a little on the right, is also ultramarine, and here the colour is used nearly in its first intensity. And the colossal woman who wears the blue gown leans against some grey forest tree trunk, and a great white primeval animal is what her forms and attitude suggest. There are some women about her, and they lie and sit in disconnected groups like fragments fallen from a pediment. Nor is any attempt made to relate, by the aid of vague look or gesture, this group in the foreground to the ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... assessed upon them by the imperial government is, however, a feature which—even more than their imperfect system of property and their low grade of mental culture—separates them by a world-wide interval from the New England township, to the primeval embryonic stage of which ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... ill-favored pair, these miners upon whose hospitality fate had thrown them. Foreigners of some sort they were, Cornishmen, Moya guessed. But whatever their nationality they were primeval savages untouched by the fourteen centuries of civilizing influences since their forbears ravaged England. To the super-nervous minds of these exhausted young women there was a suggestion of apes in the huge musclebound ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... structure, and to the segregating genius of their great Law-giver, Sidonia ascribed the fact that they had not been long ago absorbed among those mixed races, who presume to persecute them, but who periodically wear away and disappear, while their victims still flourish in all the primeval vigour of ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... for the very crumbs swept from the tables of the rich. And the worst of it all was the degradation of the human being; this was no case of the free naked savage, hunting and devouring his prey in the primeval forests; here civilised man was found, sunk into brutishness, with all the stigmas of his fall, debased, disfigured, and enfeebled, amidst the luxury and refinement of that city of Paris which is one of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... ninth; First, of Poysons, their primeval Origine from Minerals, and their accidental Generation in Vegetable and Animal Bodies, together with their differences; where 'tis discoursed, not only how Poysons may be bred in Men, but also, how the Poyfons of some Animals do infect ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... and the poets, after crediting him with fabulous wealth, tried also to make out that he was a conqueror. The kingdom expanded in all directions, and soon included the upper valley of the Masander, with its primeval sanctuaries, Kydrara, Colossae, and Kylsenae, founded wherever exhalations of steam and boiling springs betrayed the presence of some supernatural power. The southern shores of the Hellespont, which formed part of the Troad, and was the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... country's minstrel! in whose crystal verse With tranquil joy we trace Her native glories, and the tale rehearse Of her primeval race,— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... on the Run itself, and the West went wild. All of a sudden the mountain-sides bristled with armed men and their burros. Camps sprang up in a night and shafts were sunk in a day. Yampah County, from primeval wilderness, leaped to renown, with a population of ten thousand. Gold and silver came "packed" down the trails to the First National. Then, faster than the precious metal came down, costly machinery, and prices, went up. Fortunes were declared ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... The weird and impenetrable crows, most talkative of birds and most uncommunicative, their very food at this season a mystery, are almost as numerous now as in summer. They always seem like some race of banished goblins, doing penance for some primeval and inscrutable transgression, and if any bird have a history, it is they. In the Spanish version of the tradition of King Arthur it is said that he fled from the weeping queens and the island valley of Avilion in the form of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... I think an American folk dance might be like these young beech trees. I know that sounds absurd. What I mean is, the dance should show youth and freshness and grace, beautiful things like a primeval American forest. Oh, I don't suppose you understand me. I am sure I don't ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... people's hearts and homes and lives is one of the primeval instincts. In that curiosity all the sciences are rooted; and it is a scientific impulse that makes us hanker to get back of faces into brains, to push through words into thoughts, and to ferret out of silences the emotions ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... York are adequately traceable by the successive pictures of her main thoroughfare,—beginning with the Indian village and the primeval forest which Henry Hudson found on the island of Manhattan in 1609, and advancing to the stockade fort of New Amsterdam, built where the Battery now is, by Wouter Van Twiller, the second Dutch governor, and thence to the era when the fur trade, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... had arrived during the night, and, not 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 ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... was different from any other ever made since man and man first began battling together in the dim twilights of the primeval. Not with shout and cheer did it rush forward, nor yet with venomous gases that gave the alarm, that choked, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... like to be a tree for a while. The great lust of roots. Root-lust. And no mind at all. He towers, and I sit and feel safe. I like to feel him towering round me. I used to be afraid. I used to fear their lust, their rushing black lust. But now I like it, I worship it. I always felt them huge primeval enemies. But now they are my only shelter and strength. I lose myself among the trees. I am so glad to be with them in their silent, intent passion, and their great lust. They feed my soul. But I can understand that Jesus ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... in the primeval woods no underbrush, save along streams or where the windfall had crashed earthward, made travelling in ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... "The Visionary," the hero of which is essentially the Finnish half of himself, "all natural phenomena are intense, and appear in colossal contrasts. There is an endless, stony-gray desert as in primeval times, before men dwelt there; but in the midst of this are also endless natural riches. There is sun and glory of summer, the day of which is not only twelve hours, but lasts continuously, day and night, for three months—a warm, bright, fragrance-laden ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... and potatoes, and then to nothing at all, everything changing, dying, stopping—and the ever-increasing yet degenerating people leaving the city ruins, which they could not rebuild—taking to the fields, the forests, the mountains—going down, down, back toward the primeval state, down through ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... to produce the full narcotic effects of the favorite weed. They would rather seem to confirm the indications derived from the other sources, of an essential difference between the ancient smoking usages of Central America and of the mound-builders, and those which are still maintained in their primeval integrity among the Indians of the ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... god," says M. Barth, "is the sense of the divine majesty and of the absolute dependence of the creature expressed with the same force. We must go to the Psalms to find similar accents of adoration and supplication." He was the prototype of the Greek Uranus, the primeval father of gods ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... breve pace (in two beats), with dazzling maze of lesser rhythms. Throughout the work a song of primeval strain prevails. Here and there a tinge of foreshadowing pain appears, as the song sounds on high, espressivo dolente. But the fervor and fury of movement is undiminished. The brief touch of pathos soon merges in the general heroic mood. Later, the whole ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... the heathen counted for divine the legislative wisdom of the man,—manly strength, manly truth, manly justice, manly courage, Hercules with his club, Jupiter with his thunderbolt, so Baal, representing the primeval power of nature, became the object of idolatrous worship. After Christ, partly because of the new spirit which pervaded the world, and largely because the carnal heart, ruled by Satan, is glad of any pretext to neglect Christ, Mary, the mother, became preferable ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... 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. ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... phys. Mo. Races of Man, Religions of the World, Great Educators and Their Methods, Primeval Man, ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... the deep impression made upon travelers when they sight suddenly the well-attended fields of the natives on emerging from the primeval forests. "In the more thickly populated parts of Africa these fields often stretch for many a mile, and the assiduous care of the Negro women shines in all the brighter light when we consider the insecurity of life, the constant feuds and pillages, in ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... the natural scenery of the whole surrounding country, it is putting altogether too fine a point on it. The picturesque people will inform you of an Indian encampment. You go to see it, thinking of the forest primeval, and expecting to be transported back to tomahawks, scalps, and forefathers but you return without them, and that is all. I never heard of anybody's going anywhere. In fact there did not seem to be anywhere to go. Any suggestion of mine to strike out into the champaign was ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... and out upon a bench that bordered the lofty red wall of rock. From there we went down into heavy forest again, dim and gray, with its dank, penetrating odor, and oppressive stillness. The forest primeval! When we rode out of that into open slopes the afternoon was far advanced, and long shadows lay across the distant ranges. When we reached camp, supper and a fire to warm cold wet feet were exceedingly welcome. I ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... have the freedom of action necessary to accumulate new and valuable knowledge about man's nature and possibilities which may ultimately be applied to reforming our ways, it must loose itself from the bonds that now confine it. The primeval curse still holds: "Of every tree in the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Few people confess ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... of possession of the forest was a true old Germanic idea. Such a line of argument, however, could also bring us to the further conclusion that this community of possession has only once been fully realized—namely, by and in the primeval forest. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... there, the same forms of superstition meet us in the ancient popular poetry of the Servians and modern Greeks, which were familiar to the Teutonic and Cambrian races of early centuries,—must we not believe in a primeval intimate connection between distant nations? are we not compelled to acknowledge that there must have existed, in those remote times, means of communication unknown ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... one of the Preadamite worlds. Its fossil remains might now and then excite curiosity. But it was as impossible to put life into the old institutions as to animate the skeletons which are imbedded in the depths of primeval strata. It was as absurd to think that France could again be placed under the feudal system, as that our globe could be overrun by Mammoths. The revolution in the laws and in the form of government was but an outward sign of that mightier revolution ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... republic, I grant, there was a virtue in the people which we see not now. But that grew not out of the purer administration of religion, but was the product of the times in part—times, in comparison with these, of a primeval simplicity. To live well, was easier then. Where no temptation is, virtue is easy, is necessary. But then it ceases to be virtue. It is a quality, not an acquisition—a gift of the gods, an accident, rather than man's ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... alive and unquenched, in himself. He wondered about the heritage to come. There was a further belief that it followed exclusively the male line. The Pennys, like many another comparatively obscure name, went far back into the primeval soil of civilization. If he had no issue the endlessness might be confounded; a fatality in his long, dangerous excursions would have vanquished the ineradicable Welsh blood. He might have no children; yesterday he would have made such a decision; but now he was less sure of himself, of his power ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... not all come back to me with equal clearness, the earlier lives being, as one might expect, the more difficult to recover and the comparatively recent ones the easiest. Also they seem to range over a vast stretch of time, back indeed to the days of primeval, prehistoric man. In short, I think the subconscious in some ways resembles the conscious and natural memory; that which is very far off to it grows dim and blurred, that which is comparatively close remains clear and sharp, although ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... is chiefly concerned with the private lot of a few men and women; but there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had to wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she milked was one of a herd which had made the pastures bare. Even in that conservatory existence where the fair Camelia is sighed for by the noble young Pineapple, neither of them needing to ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... sturdy Pilgrim Fathers cut their perilous way through the dense and dangerous depths of the Forest Primeval for the setting up of their hearthstones, so the courageous pioneers of the desolate and treeless West were forced to fight the fury of ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... and brushwood, a second growth that had sprung up where the original forest had been cut for maize plantations; but after passing a brook bordered by numerous plants of the pita, from which a fine fibre is obtained, and which gives its name to Pital, we entered the primeval forest. On each side of the road great trees towered up, carrying their crowns out of sight amongst a canopy of foliage; lianas wound round every trunk and hung from every bough, passing from tree to tree, and entangling the giants in a ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... a divine and sacred thing—the symbol of a mystery. In his own pity for this emaciated arrested youth he read the pledge of a divine sympathy, the secret voice of a God suffering for and with man, which, in its myriad forms, is the primeval faith of the race. Where a thinker of another type would have seen mere aimless waste and mutilation, this evangelical optimist bared the head and bent the knee. The spot whereon he stood was holy ground, and above this ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... implanted along through the ages germs of another growth in human thinking, some of them even as early as the Babylonian period. In the Assyrian inscriptions we find recorded the Chaldeo-Babylonian idea of AN EVOLUTION of the universe out of the primeval flood or "great deep," and of the animal creation out of the earth and sea. This idea, recast, partially at least, into monotheistic form, passed naturally into the sacred books of the neighbours and pupils of the Chaldeans—the Hebrews; but its growth in Christendom ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... defines God as "the Eternal Reason"—the Supreme Mind. "He is the immovable cause of all movement in the universe, the all-perfect principle. This principle or essence pervades all things. It eternally possesses perfect happiness, and its happiness consists in energy. This primeval mover is immaterial, for its essence is energy—it is pure thought, thought thinking itself—the thought of thought."[885] Polytheism is thus swept away from the higher regions of the intelligence. "For several to command," says he, "is not good, there should be but one ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... should note, 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 ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... with a garden and apple orchard, and with rows of butternut-trees planted beside it; and perhaps she had sought this retirement with the hope of its being consonant with her own solitude. The country round about was wilderness, most of it primeval woods. The little settlement, only a mill and a country store and a few scattered houses, lay on a broad headland making out into Sebago Lake, better known as the Great Pond, a sheet of water eight miles across and fourteen miles long, and connected with other lakes in a chain of navigable ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... appearance, by a necessary law, whereby the outer and superficial conformeth itself, to the inner and hidden, become deformed and hideous. Hence is man now but a shadow, a skeleton of original beauty. The primeval perfection and present degeneracy of man, are ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... seriousness. Those of us who can remember it should do so, for it will not return. It has given place to the age of melodrama, when nothing is too strange to happen, and no one is ever surprised. That, too, may pass, but probably will not, for it is primeval. The other was artificial, a mere product of ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... her beloved, and laying her hand softly upon his shoulder, she said: "Love is like God—eternal, primeval, and ever present! But you must believe in it to feel its presence; you must trust it to ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... cannot descend. Doomed to an end that is evil, That is the limit—the end! Pride of the forest primeval. ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... scenes that were occurring in the town. Tents and cabins were scattered throughout the length of the valley, lumber was sawed for sluice-boxes, and the virginal breezes that had sucked through this seam in the mountains since days primeval came to smell of spruce fires and echo with the ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... I'm 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 or delightful summer resorts, and go in ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... eighth Aeneid[473] makes Evander show his guest this altar and the celebration of its festival, and tell him the tale of Cacus and the oxen and the cave on the Aventine hard by; the poet, like every one else until the last few years, believed the cult to be primeval and Roman. But one of the many gains for the history of Roman religion which have recently been secured—even since the publication of my Roman Festivals—is the certainty that the Italian Hercules is really the Greek Heracles acclimatised in the sister peninsula, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... broad valley of the St. Charles, covered with green fields and ripening harvests, and dotted with quaint old homesteads, redolent with memories of Normandy and Brittany, rose a long mountain ridge covered with primeval woods, on the slope of which rose the glittering spire of Charlebourg, once a dangerous outpost of civilization. The pastoral Lairet was seen mingling its waters with the St. Charles in a little bay that preserves the name of Jacques ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... In the article on "Primeval Man," the author states that the Cave-men "probably had lower foreheads, with high bosses like the Neanderthal skull, and big canine teeth ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... from his labor to watch us pass. But the few farmhouses became fewer, and these last were deserted. Finally no more houses appeared, and stump-lots changed to tangled clearings, and these into second growth, and these at last into the primeval forests, darkly magnificent, through which our road, now but a lumber road, ran moist and dark, springy and deep with the ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... range of hills I have called "Stanley's Barrier Range," and that all the mountain chains to the eastward and westward of it, were once so many islands I have not the slightest doubt, and that during the primeval period, a sea covered the deserts over which I wandered; but it is impossible for a writer, whatever powers of description he may have, to transfer to the minds of his readers the same vivid impressions his own may have received, on a view of ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... what had three centuries done to this gateway of American 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, ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... 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; they ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... us the difference between the stone of this building and that of Boylston Hall? We know that they are both granite, but they do not look alike." Agassiz was delighted, and entertained them with a brief lecture on primeval rocks and the crust of the earth's surface. He told them that Boylston Hall was made of syenite; that most of the stone called granite in New England was syenite, and if they wanted to see genuine granite they should go to the tops of the White Mountains. Then looking at his watch ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... religious notions yet fearful worship of evil powers, its homage to magic, and desperate belief in spells, incantations and the fetish. The configuration of the country, so far as it can be conjectured, assists this primeval barbarism. Divided by natural barriers of hill, chasm, or river, into isolated states, they act under a general impulse of hostility and disunion. If they make peace, it is only for purposes of plunder; and, if they plunder, it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... of drowned giants which the pool wanted to throw up on the land. Arms and legs writhed about one another, the long fingers dug deep into the very cliff to get a hold, the mighty ribs formed arches, which held up primeval trees. It had happened, however, that the iron arms, the steel-like fingers with which the pines held themselves fast, had given way, and a pine had been borne by a mighty north wind from the top of the cliff down into the pool. It had ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... imitation. Save in the bustling business segment, abutting the four corners, where the old United States road bore off westward to Bucephalo and the lakes, the few score houses were set far back from the highway in a wilderness of shrubbery, secluded by hedges and shaded by an almost primeval growth of elms or maples. The whole hamlet might be mistaken for a lordly park or an old-fashioned German Spa. Family marketing was mostly done in Warchester; hence the village shops were like Arabian bazaars, few but all-supplying. The most pregnant evidence of the approach of ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... by a man who has passed many years of his life in the Adirondack woods, strikes a note not often sounded—the power of the primeval over the ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... had been half-starved dogs hunting in a pack, having gone back to the primeval habits of their wolfish ancestors; and now it looked as though they were about to suffer from ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... edge of his appetite. Then again he has to just wait his turn to be served, and mustn't forget his table manners if he knows what's good for him. But say, up in the woods he can just revert back to the habits of primeval man from whose loins he sprang, and his appetite compares to that of the wolf. Oh! things do taste altogether different, somehow or other; and meals seem an ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... big crack or cleft in the side of the mountain for about one hundred feet, when we emerged into a large dome-shaped passage, the abode during certain seasons of the year of innumerable bats, and at all times of primeval darkness. There were various other crannies and pit-holes opening into it, some of which we explored. The voice of running water was everywhere heard, betraying the proximity of the little stream by whose ceaseless corroding the cave and its entrance had been worn. This streamlet ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... for canoeing, but duststorms and wind make the Elbow the most trying stretch of water in the whole length of the river. Beyond this great bend, still called the Elbow, the Saskatchewan takes a swing north-east through the true wilderness primeval. The rough waters below the Elbow are the first of twenty-two rapids round the same number of sharp turns in the river. Some are a mere rippling of the current, more noisy than dangerous; others run swift and strong for sixteen miles. First are the Squaw ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... process of being tastefully adorned by Art, a few years only have been numbered with the past since not only this spot, but all the surrounding country, as well as almost the entire territory of our young, but noble and now highly prosperous State, was an unbroken wilderness, covered with the primeval forest, the entangled woods giving shelter and concealment to wild and ferocious beasts, as well as to the wandering and savage red man. What a change has thus been wrought in a few short years! the result of the toil and privation of the adventurous pioneers, of whom many have already become ...
— Address delivered by Hon. Henry H. Crapo, Governor of Michigan, before the Central Michigan Agricultural Society, at their Sheep-shearing Exhibition held at the Agricultural College Farm, on Thursday, • Henry Howland Crapo
... boughs with their windings and knots formed, as it were, valleys and hills, clothed with velvety green, and covered with flowers. Everything was like a wide, blooming meadow, or like the most charming garden. Here the birds from all quarters of the world assembled together—birds from the primeval forests of America, the rose gardens of Damascus, from the deserts of Africa, in which the elephant and the lion boast of being the only rulers. The Polar birds came flying hither, and of course the stork and ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... halves: he answers what he can: they think it were right to send this strategic National Commandant to the Abbaye Prison, and let a Court of Law decide on him. Alas, a Court of Law, not Book-Law but primeval Club-Law, crowds and jostles out of doors; all fretted to the hysterical pitch; cruel as Fear, blind as the Night: such Court of Law, and no other, clutches poor Mandat from his constables; beats him down, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... on the higher points, canyons disclosed themselves far away, gigantic grooves in the landscape, deep blue in the distance, opening one into another, ocean-deep, silent, huge, and suggestive of colossal primeval forces held in reserve. At their bottoms they were solid, massive; on their crests they broke delicately into fine serrated edges where the pines and redwoods outlined their million of tops against the high white horizon. Here and there the mountains lifted themselves out ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... When the oppressed looks round in vain for justice, When his sore burden may no more be borne, With fearless heart he makes appeal to Heaven, And thence brings down his everlasting rights, Which there abide, inalienably his, And indestructible as are the stars. Nature's primeval state returns again, Where man stands hostile to his fellow-man; And if all other means shall fail his need, One last resource remains—his own good sword. Our dearest treasures call to us for aid Against the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the dawn of Being, God the Father enunciated The Word, and The Holy Spirit moved upon the sea of homogeneous Virgin Matter, primeval Darkness was turned to Light. That is therefore the prime manifestation of Deity, and a study of the principles of Light will reveal to the mystic intuition a wonderful source of spiritual inspiration. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... antelopes started in terror, while from the great cage of tropical birds, where the sun shone most fully, came warblings and flutterings of wings, discordant screams, and an enraged chatter, all the tumult, in short, on a small scale, of a primeval forest ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... strength sturdily to the task, had pressed up the massive slope from the deep cleft of the gorge. As the road curved about the outer verge of the mountain, the valley far beneath came into view, with intersecting valleys and transverse ranges, dense with the growths of primeval wildernesses, and rugged with the tilted strata of great upheavals, and with chasms cut in the solid rock by centuries of erosion, traces of some remote cataclysmal period, registering thus its throes and turmoils. The ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the pleasantness of our trip for the first twenty-four hours. There were some officers, old friends, among the passengers. We had plenty of books. The gentlemen read aloud occasionally, admired the solitary magnificence of the scenery around us, the primeval woods, or the vast expanse of water unenlivened by a single sail, and then betook themselves to their cigar, or their game of euchre, to ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie |
