"Ancestral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a convention. Men and women are attached to it as they are attached to material things, as a king is attached to his crown or an old family to its ancestral home. We have all been led to believe that love is splendid and wonderful, and the greatest thing in the world, and it pains us to part with it. Faith, we will not part with it. The man who would bid us put it by is a knave and a fool, a vile, degraded wretch, who will receive pardon ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... fantastic glee is so strangely blended with an indescribable master-note of sadness. The dance itself is nothing; it might as well be called a Rigadoon or a Sailor's Hornpipe, so far as the steps go. The tune is everything; it is amongst the immortals. Who composed it? Did it come from Normandy, the ancestral home of so many French Canadians and of French Canadian song? Or did some lonely but inspired voyageur, on the banks of Red River, sighing for Detroit or Trois Rivieres—for the joys and sorrows of home—give birth to its mingled chords in ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... at least the family, worshipped in the form of Confucius; his precepts and admonitions, the sacred hiao or filial submission, the tablets and ancestral piety, were a part of her blood; as was the infinitely fainter infusion of Buddhism; yet in her intellectual brooding it was to the Tao-teh-king that she returned. She paused to recall that, the brace at last removed, she was practically completely recovered; but ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... volume, the Ten Broeck Genealogical Record, are reproductions of some of the landscape views by Albertina Ten Broeck at the same date. They show the house and farm surroundings of the old Ten Broeck "Bouwerie," the ancestral home in New York, and give a wonderfully good idea of it. These are not in dead silhouette, for an appearance of shading is afforded by finely cut lines and intervening spaces. The highest form of cut-paper reproduction and decoration ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... been surmised from what has gone before, that when Henry said to himself that he would go and see Aunt Tipping, he did not propose to himself a visit to the country seat of some quaint old lady of quality. Baronial towers and stately avenues of ancestral elm did not make a picturesque background for his thoughts as he ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... as an hypothesis, the transformation of one organic stage into the stage immediately superior." But it is not clear that he considered the development of the amphibian to be a repetition of its ancestral history. ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... slight differences in structure which gives to each watch certain individual characteristics, but the type as an instrument constructed for recording time remains. In the fusion of the chromosomes of the male and female sexual cells, to which the hereditary transmission of the ancestral qualities to the new offspring is due, there are differences in the qualities of each, for the individuality of the parents is expressed in the germ cells, and the varying way in which these may fuse gives to the new cell qualities of its own ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... forgotten. 'Lion! (cried that young Columbian) where is he? Who is he? What is he? Show him to me. Let me have him here. Here!' said the young Columbian, in a wrestling attitude, 'upon this sacred altar. Here!' cried the young Columbian, idealising the dining-table, 'upon ancestral ashes, cemented with the glorious blood poured out like water on our native plains of Chickabiddy Lick! Bring forth that Lion!' said the young Columbian. 'Alone, I dare him! I taunt that Lion. I tell that Lion, that Freedom's hand once twisted in his mane, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... They drop away from the standard which highly civilized nations have reached. As with harsh and dangerous labor they bring the new land up towards the level of the old, they themselves partly revert to their ancestral conditions; they sink back towards the state of their ages-dead barbarian forefathers. Few observers can see beyond this temporary retrogression into the future for which it is a preparation. There is small cause for wonder in the fact that so many of the leaders of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... communities, in this respect, present a striking contrast to agricultural. By their aid speculative philosophy was rapidly disseminated everywhere, as was subsequently Christianity. But the agriculturists steadfastly adhered with marvellous stolidity to their ancestral traditions and polytheistic absurdities, until the very designation—paganism—under which their system passes was given as a ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... driver {246} and footman in livery wearing the armorial design of his own Ledyard ancestors rolled past in the street. He ran to the coachman, asked the address, and presented himself at the door of the ancestral Ledyards, hope beating high. The relationship was to be the key to open all doors. And the door of the ancestral Ledyards was shut in his face. The father was out. The son put no stock in the story of the ragged stranger. He did not even know that Ledyards existed in ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... had his head to the east, made his court robes be spread over him, and drew his girdle across them. 4. When the prince's order called him, without waiting for his carriage to be yoked, he went at once. CHAP. XIV. When he entered the ancestral temple of the State, he asked about everything. CHAP. XV. 1. When any of his friends died, if he had no relations who could be depended on for the necessary offices, he would say, 'I will bury him.' ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... accounts for much in her miscellaneous writings. As I was saying, she handles her "ancestral shadows," as she calls them, just as I do mine. It is remarkable. When she runs across "a relative of my Grandfather Baker, General Henry Knox, of Revolutionary fame," she sets him down; when she finds another good one, "the late Sir John Macneill, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ethnography, one may be strongly inclined to believe, in common with many savants, that a close relationship exists between the leading families of the English aristocracy and the oldest families of Scandinavia. Numerous proofs of this fact, indeed, are to be found in the ancestral names which are identical in both countries. There is no aristocracy in Norway, however; still, though the democracy everywhere rules, that does not prevent it from being aristocratic to the highest degree. All are equals upon an exalted plane instead of ...
— Ticket No. "9672" • Jules Verne
... far Than that accumulated store of wealth And orient gems, which, for a day of need, The sultan hides in his ancestral tombs, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... swoop of hand, sharp vibrating police decrees, an unsleeping paternal government darts down the fabric of our hopes, sends off the nearly captured prey, loud neighing and with heels kicked high in air, but safe, to his ancestral Lombard pastures, and whirls away the too ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... agriculture, more especially the lack in agricultural labourers, induced the Servian peasants not to leave the parental house but to remain together on the family's property. In the same yard, within the same fence, one could see around the ancestral house a number of wooden huts which contained one or two rooms, and were used as sleeping places for the sons, nephews and grandsons and their wives. Men and women of three generations could be often seen living in that way together, and working together the land which was ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Landale's ancestral home stood, in its placid and double pride of ancient and settled wealth, only some few miles away as the bee flies, in the midst of its noble park, slightly retired from the coast-line; and from ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... blood. Ewe's milk you'd bleed If your nose were tapped. Who'd ever guess my dugs Had suckled you? Even your dad's no more Than three-parts mutton, with a strain of reynard— A fox's heart, for all his weak sheep's head. Lad, look well round on your ancestral halls: You'll likely not clap eyes on them again. I'm eager to be off: we don't seem welcome. Your venerable grandsire is asleep, Or else he's a deaf mute; though, likely enough, That's how folk look, awake, ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... very little to those who have the good fortune to be invited to Lady Ann Newcome's parties whether her beautiful daughters can trace their pedigrees no higher than to the alderman their grandfather; or whether, through the mythic ancestral barber-surgeon, they hang on to the chin of ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... for them, that is), engravings, pianos, paintings, books, cosmetics, marbles, building lots (their titles), laces, porcelain, glass, alabaster, bales of cotton, big bank checks, hair flowers, barouches, bonds, shawls, carvings, shell-work boxes, jewellery, silks, ancestral relics, curios from half round the world, wax fruits, tapestries, and loose sapphires, diamonds, rubies, and pearls. The Callenders and Valcours could see, in fancy, all the first chaos of it and all the fair creation that was to ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... general sense of condemnation strong enough to create an adequate desire for salvation, all sorts and conditions of people, theology has not only charged us up with our own sins which are always a sad enough account, but it has charged us up with ancestral and imputed sins. ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... of shame and woe! For not by these who go, Scythe-men and club-men, foot and hunger-worn, These levies raw and rude, Can England be subdued, Or that ancestral throne from ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... on to Grosvenor Square, if you will, then," she begged, "and deposit me at the ancestral mansion. I am really rather annoyed about Margaret," she went on, rearranging her veil. "I had begun to have hopes that you might have revived my taste for ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Elysees would be pleasant and not too far; I like to see the swards and the poplars and the villas, the tall iron railings, and the flower vases hidden in bouquets of trees. These things are Paris; the mind of the country, that mind which comes out of a long past, and which may be defined as a sort of ancestral beauty and energy is manifested everywhere in Paris; and a more beautiful day for seeing the tall, white houses and the villas and the trees and the swards can hardly be imagined. I should be interested ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... been as well aware of the neglected state of his ancestral halls as of his tangled and overgrown woods; but he had also, it seemed, been unable to make up his mind to take any steps towards amending the condition of either—or to part with his ever-increasing ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... was a statelier one than Walter's. His father, Sir Lawrence Power, was a baronet, the owner of broad acres, whose large and beautiful mansion stood on one of the undulations in a park shadowed by ancestral trees, under whose boughs the deer fed with their graceful fawns around them. Through the park flowed a famous river, of which the windings were haunted by herons and kingfishers, and the pleasant waters ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... Hills rises on the horizon to the left, terminating in the grand rugged peak of Monte Gennaro, whose every cliff and scar are distinctly visible, and concealing in its bosom the romantic waterfalls of Tivoli and the lone ancestral farm of Horace. On the right the crested Alban heights form the boundary, crowned on the summit with the white convent of Monte Cavo—the ancient temple of Jupiter Latialis, up to which the Roman consuls came to triumph when ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... merit of the family. No stronger influence could be exerted upon an erring member of such a family than to be brought by his father or elder brother before the family shrine and there reprimanded in the presence of the ancestral spirits. The head of this house is at present a schoolboy of twelve and the government of the family is in the hands of a "regent," the lad's uncle. I saw the boy and his younger sister trot off in the morning with ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... sinks within Let us not wait on earth behind, But follow where it flies, and win The glow again, and we may find Beyond the Gateways of the Day Dominion and ancestral sway. ...
— By Still Waters - Lyrical Poems Old and New • George William Russell
... Fill me a goblet of May-drink, As aromatic as the May From which it steals the breath away, And which he loved so well of yore; It is of him that I would think You shall attend me, when I call, In the ancestral banquet hall. Unseen companions, guests of air, You cannot wait on, will be there; They taste not food, they drink not wine, But their soft eyes look into mine, And their lips speak to me, and all The vast and shadowy banquet-hall Is full of looks ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... clientelas a large household, a large number of dependents; clientelas clientes. 16. intentum (in tendo) on the stretch. Cf. opposite remissus. 19-21. metuebant ... disciplina his slaves feared him, his children stood in awe of him, yet all held him dear; in him ancestral spirit and principles ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... something to show you," he said, leading me through the vaulted hall, hung round with ancestral pictures, into the gravelled space that looked like a filled-up moat, where stood the big blasted oak, with its twisted, pointing branches. I followed him on to the lawn, or rather the piece of park-land that ran up to the house. We walked quickly, he in ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... of heroes! Heirs of the fame as the hills of your fathers; Say, shall the Southern—the Sassenach fear us When to the war-peal each plaided clan gathers? Too long on the trophied walls Of your ancestral halls, Red rust hath blunted the armour of Albin; Seize then, ye mountain Macs, Buckler and battle-axe, Lads of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... fighting against fearful odds, too. There are giants and dragons in this nineteenth century, and the golden casket that they guard is not so easy to win as it appears in the story-books. There, Algernon takes one long, last look at the ancestral hall, dashes the tear-drop from his eye, and goes off—to return in three years' time, rolling in riches. The authors do not tell us "how it's done," which is a pity, for it would surely ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... what you are to know, for yourselves, by the inevitable operation of your anterior affinities and inner consciences:—whereas the old idea of education was that the baby material of you, however accidentally or inevitably born, was at least to be by external force, and ancestral knowledge, bred; and treated by its Fathers and Tutors as a plastic vase, to be shaped or mannered as they chose, not as it chose, and filled, when its form was well finished and baked, with sweetness of sound doctrine, as with Hybla ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin
... received communion and been anointed with the holy oil. Early in the evening he began to be in such agony that the people in the house took him for dead, and, after laying out the body, put him on his ancestral bier. After they had watched the whole night about his body, when dawn returned he returned also, stammered something, and about noon uttered his words articulately. Then he said first that he seemed to have been dead three years, because of the cruel torments ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... of a discontented and migratory turn of mind, and we frequently encountered two or three of them on the cross-roads several miles from their ancestral mud. Unspeakable was our delight whenever we discovered one soberly walking off with Harry Blake's initials! I've no doubt there are, at this moment, fat ancient turtles wandering about that gummy woodland with H.B. neatly cut ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... words: "Et praecepit rex quod nullus reciperetur ad sacramentum armorum nisi liber homo."[8] A summons was a right quite as much as a duty. The English were a brave and martial race, proud of their ancestral liberty. Not to be called to defend it when it was endangered, not to be allowed to carry arms to maintain the integrity of the fatherland, was a degradation which branded a man ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... me and the Manton to spend a month with him in England when we go abroad. He said I'd probably be pleased to hear that he had made a lovely garage out of his ancestral Norman chapel. But I suppose that was just his English humor, you know. Anyway, we are the best of friends, and if I ever see him again I'll give him a double toot on ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... has a strange power to forecast life for the youth. Each boy comes from our ancestral past not "in entire forgetfulness," and quite as he unconsciously uses ancient war-cries in his street play, so he longs to reproduce and to see set before him the valors and vengeances of a society embodying a much more primitive state of morality than that in which he finds himself. ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... None. No not one. There is a malaria in the atmosphere of those regions, which the new comer shuns, as being deleterious to his views and habits. See the wide-spreading ruin which the avarice of our ancestral government has produced in the South, as witnessed in a sparse population of freemen, deserted habitations, fields without culture, and, strange to tell, even the wolf, which, driven back long since by the approach of man, now returns, after the lapse of an hundred years, to howl o'er ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... induced her good man, Thomas Fleet, to publish, in 1719, "The Mother Goose Melodies," many of which rhymes dated back to a similar publication printed in London two hundred years before. Is it strange that, with this ancestral nursery training, the cry against the use of pastry goes unheeded, when as children, we, too, have sung to us, over and over, the ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... protected him; their skies have smiled upon his crops. With grateful memories, therefore, is clothed for us the sound of such river names as Thames, Danube, Hudson, Mississippi. Through the centuries their kindly waters have borne down ancestral argosies of profit without number, establishing thus the wealth and happiness of the people. Well have rivers been termed the "Arteries of Commerce"; well, also, may they be considered the binding ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... is among the children of kings. That is what O'Grady did for me and for others who were my contemporaries, and I welcome these reprints of his tales in the hope that he will go on magically recreating for generations yet unborn the ancestral life of their race in Ireland. For many centuries the youth of Ireland as it grew up was made aware of the life of bygone ages, and there were always some who remade themselves in the heroic mould before they passed on. The sentiment ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... had settled on his eldest son,' says Dr. Rogers (Boswelliana, p. 129), 'the ancestral estate, with an unencumbered rental of Ll,600 a year.' That the rental, whatever it was, was not unencumbered is shewn by the passage from Johnson's letter, post, p. 155, note 4. Boswell wrote to Malone in 1791 (Croker's Boswell, p. 828):—'The clear money on which ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... you shall drink [at my house] ignoble Sabine wine in sober cups, which I myself sealed up in the Grecian cask, stored at the time, when so loud an applause was given to you in the amphitheatre, that the banks of your ancestral river, together with the cheerful echo of the Vatican mountain, returned your praises. You [when you are at home] will drink the Caecuban, and the grape which is squeezed in the Calenian press; but neither the Falernian vines, nor the ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... languid yard and cobweb'd part, Same Thallus greedier than the gale thou art, When the Kite-goddess shows thee Gulls agape, 5 Return my muffler thou hast dared to rape, Saetaban napkins, tablets of Thynos, all Which (Fool!) ancestral heirlooms thou didst call. These now unglue-ing from thy claws restore, Lest thy soft hands, and floss-like flanklets score 10 The burning scourges, basely signed and lined, And thou unwonted toss like wee barque tyned 'Mid vasty Ocean vexed ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... in the midst, the primate's carriage fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose-reined in pursuit, Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the first. No scene of history has ever written itself so deeply on my mind; not because Balfour, that questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of my own; not because of the pleadings of the victim and his daughter; not even because of the live bum-bee that flew out of Sharpe's 'bacco-box, thus clearly indicating his complicity with Satan; nor merely because, as it was after all a crime of a fine ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... under Odovacar. On the overthrow of that chieftain, he, like Liberius, transferred his services to Theodoric, who employed him as governor first of Sicily, then of Calabria, and finally, about the year 500, conferred upon him the highest dignity of all, that of Praetorian Prefect. The ancestral possessions of the Cassiodori were situated m that southernmost province, sometimes likened to the toe of Italy, which was then called Bruttii, and is now called Calabria. It was a land rich in cattle, ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... without shame. That is not enough! Write to him—you, with your own hand—and tell him how his son fell!" And the hero fulfilled the prayer; and that letter is dearer to Roland than all the long roll of the ancestral dead! Nature has reclaimed her rights, and the forefathers recede ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Charleston-either of which would be a stain upon the name of civilization-standing as emblems of the time-established notions of a people, and their cherished love for the ancestral relics of a gone-by age. Nothing could point with more unerring aim than these sombre monuments do, to the distance behind the age that marks the thoughts and actions of the Charlestonians. They are the poor-house, hospital, ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... states (hypnosis, hysteria, divided consciousness, etc.) it is just the reverse. Here is the bold part of the hypothesis: Its authors suppose that the supremacy of the subliminal consciousness is a reversion, a return to the ancestral. In the higher animals and in primitive man, according to them, all trophic actions entered consciousness and were regulated by it. In the course of evolution this became organized; the higher consciousness has delegated to the subliminal consciousness the care of silently governing ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... of this wealthy Englishman was appropriately dubbed "Up to Snuff." Alas, this ancestral and aristocratic luxury of snuff departed many years ago, but succeeding generations have been "up to snuff" in many other ways. The gold snuff-box frequently studded with gems which I remember so well in days gone by and ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... directed to study our remote ancestors.... Such considerations as these have diverse effects according to our temperaments. They quite uniformly produce, however, disillusionment and sophistication.... This exaltation of the past, as the ancestral home of all that we are, may make us regret our loss of illusions and our disconcerting enlightenment.... We may break with the past, scorn an inheritance so redolent of blood and lust and superstition, revel ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... limit the horizon of the soul to the bounds of ancestral tradition has ever been the deadliest foe of human hope. Doubt is the vestibule of knowledge. They who doubt, rebel and disobey have ever led the shining way of progress ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... the chevalier and the First Consul. I longed to think that a part of the gladness was in seeing me once more so unexpectedly; but I knew this was only my foolish vanity, and I steadied my brain by saying over to myself, "She is a princess of Conde in her ancestral home; you are only the son of a plain American gentleman." So I made her such a speech as I would have made to ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... implications of long ancestral lines, it reminded him that he had none. Over his own past, over the lineage of nearly every negro in the South, hung a curtain. Even the names of the colored folk meant nothing, and gave no hint of their kin and clan. At ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... such a foe, all well mounted on tough and nimble horses, well provisioned and provided with the best weapons extant, guided by very competent chiefs and European advisers—withal self-reliant and conscious of a superior aggressive and defensive capability for repeating their splendid ancestral records of prowess. Add to this inbred patriotism stimulated to an enthusiasm approaching fanaticism by a mind fashioned to the belief that their war is against an unjust usurper destined to be overthrown; it all sums up a long way towards balancing numerical inferiority and inexperience in the ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... return to America, he betook himself to his native town of Deerfield, to assume for a time the care of the ancestral farm, which the death of his father had placed in his hands. He had returned from Europe full of inspired ideas, and was apparently ready to go on at once in new paths of labor; but the voice of duty seemed to him to call him away from his chosen life, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... nor barouche, Nor bandit cavalcade, Tore from the trembling father's arms His all-accomplished maid. For her how happy had it been! And Heaven had spared to me To see one sad, ungathered rose On my ancestral tree. ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... the friendly dark he halted to strip the sweet but insipid fruit of an Indian pear, which for a little assuaged his appetite. Then he rushed on,—perhaps aimlessly, as far as conscious purpose was concerned, but, in reality, by a sure instinct, making toward his ancestral ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... now fully understood the haughty unconcern of the Cardinal, who suffered time to complete its work of destruction in that ancestral mansion, to which he was powerless to restore the glorious life of former times! Built for that shining life, for the sovereign display of a sixteenth-century prince, it was now deserted and empty, crumbling about the head of its ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... become large enough to form Stakes, and in a few years the country around Salt Lake City was dotted with settlements, many of them on lands to which the "Lamanites," who held so deep a place in Joseph Smith's heart, asserted in vain their ancestral titles. ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... you are going to publish Sebastian Bach's works is something which does good to my heart, which beats in love of the great and lofty art of this ancestral father of harmony; I want to ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... from the desire to become notorious and to be the centre of observation. The spirit of vanity, very strong in the low type, is appealed to and aroused. Or perhaps, the example of another's crime affords a suggestion for the method of accomplishing a certain desired end. On the other hand, the ancestral example, after having broken down the moral barrier depends entirely upon its power to fascinate. Those of weak will or guilty conscience, alone succumb to its influence. If we consider the cases of thieves, vagabonds and paupers we find their crimes and vices likewise ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... something in it, although not all they claim, but my business man, a clever chap up in your place,—perhaps you may have heard of him, Sir James MacFen,—wrote to me that what they really wanted were some ancestral lands with the right to use the family name and privileges. The oddest part of the affair was that the claimant was an impossible sort of lunatic, and the whole thing was run by a syndicate of shrewd Western men. As I don't care for the property, which has ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... assume, we possess only the fragments of a great cycle of knowledge in whose centre stood the primeval man in friendly relation with the powers of the universe, and build our hovels out of the ruins of our ancestral palace; or whether, according to the development theory of others, we are rising gradually, and have come up out of an atom instead of descending from an Adam, so that the proudest pedigree might run up to a barnacle or ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... been suggested that the name Foch (which, by the way, is pronounced as if it rhymed with "hush") is derived from Foix—a town some sixty miles east of St. Gaudens, near which was the ancestral home of the ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... Anglo-American army—was coming, and he would have no part in it. The losses of Braddock's defeat and the taking of Fort William Henry by Montcalm would be repaired, once more the flag of his native land and of his ancestral land, would be triumphant, but he would be merely a spectator, even if he were as much as that. It was a bitter reflection, and again he thought of escape. But no plan seemed possible. He was held as firmly in the center of an army, as if he were in ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... honest indignation he would reply, "Away with it!" But suppose I mounted higher in the social scale. Suppose I drew my arm through the arm of my respected friend upon my left, and, walking with him through the ancestral woods of his family, and under the spreading beeches of Snigsworthy Park, approached the noble hall, crossed the courtyard, entered by the door, went up the staircase, and, passing from room to ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... precepts, to confine ourselves to the lines of their policy. Let us then either justify the British ministries of Pitt and his successors, in their obstinate adherence to the traditions they had received, or let us admit that even ancestral piety may be carried too far, and that venerable maxims must be brought to the ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... of a considerable family. Indeed, one of my friends in Valenciennes was quite severe in his comments upon the indifference of the head of this family, still a man of large property, to this conversion of the ancestral mansion into an inn. With its fine gateway, its porter's lodge on either hand, its large courtyard shaded with well-grown old trees, and its well-proportioned apartments, it is certainly a specimen worth preserving of such a house as King Louis need not have disdained to enter, when he made Valenciennes ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... struck oil at last—yes. We would make a plunge at the Four Hundred, and pull in some ancient lineage, venerable, holy, ineffable, mellow with the antiquity of a hundred and fifty years, disinfected of the ancestral odors of salt-cod and pelts all of a century ago, and unsmirched by a day's work since, and then! why, then the marriages, of course. But no, along comes a pair a real aristocrats from Europe, and straightway ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... married Angelique Talon du Boulay, a member of a military family, and grand-daughter of Denis Talon; a kinsman of Jean Talon, the best intendant who ever served New France. For the next twenty years, from 1736 to 1756, he spent in his ancestral castle of Candiac as much of his time as he could spare from the army. There he had been born, and there he always hoped he could live and die among his own people after his wars were over. How often he was to sigh ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... to the succession, and much admiring him and his brother Nedford, he had become an ardent supporter of the English claim. He had married an English lady, and had received the grant if the castle of Leurre in Normandy by way of compensation for his ancestral one of Ribaumont in Picardy, which had been declared to be forfeited by his treason, ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Camors woke up the next morning in the chamber where her girlhood had passed. The birds of spring were singing under her windows in the old ancestral gardens. As she recognized these friendly voices, so familiar to her infancy, her heart melted; but several hours' sleep had restored to her her natural courage. She banished the thoughts which had weakened her, rose, and went to surprise her mother at her first waking. Soon after, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... arrive by the middle of April; with us, their appearance is a week or two later. Our April, at its best, is a bright, laughing face under a hood of snow, like the English March, but presenting sharper contrasts, a greater mixture of smiles and tears and icy looks than are known to our ancestral climate. Indeed, Winter sometimes retraces his steps in this month, and unburdens himself of the snows that the previous cold has kept back; but we are always sure of a number of radiant, equable days,—days that go before the bud, when ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... this interpretation of Gothic design other than a result of its descent from the Egyptian ancestral motive, where the temple columns represented the single stem of the lotus with one large blossom for its capital, or else a bundle of stems of the lotus, palm, and convolvulus flowering together into a beautiful cluster. ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... smoke, Sit now unworshipped, the rude monument Of faiths forgot and races undivined; Sit now disconsolate, remembering well The priest, the victim, and the songful crowd, The blaze of the blue noon, and that huge voice Incessant, of the breakers on the shore. As far as these from their ancestral shrine, So far, so foreign, your divided friends Wander, estranged ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Elizabeth, and in which few modern alterations had been made. It was historically a very unique and interesting structure. Additions had been made to it by succeeding generations, each being another house with its own methods of ingress and egress. Lord Randolph said: "I welcome you to my ancestral home, which I ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... that I loved the Warren, my ancestral home. The neighbours called it the Warren, but I can't think why. The Post Office said it was No. 4, Catley Mews, Kentish Town, and dear papa—who always had the mot juste—sometimes said ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... oh, how bourgeois they were! That salon; the flagrantly modern clock, brass work, eight hundred francs on the Boulevard St Germain, the cabinets, brass work, the rich brown carpet, and the furniture set all round the room geometrically, the great gilt mirror, the ancestral portrait, the arms and crest everywhere, and the stuffy bourgeois sense of comfort; a little grotesque no doubt;—the mechanical admiration for all that is about her, for the general atmosphere; the Figaro, that is to say Albert Wolf, l'homme le plus ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... I have sorrow," the Boy resumed, "for ridding the world of a sordid worm;* of a man whose very soul was dross, and who never had a feeling for the Truthful and the Beautiful? When I stood before my uncle in the moonlight, in the gardens of the ancestral halls of the De Barnwells, I felt that it was the Nemesis come to overthrow him. 'Dog,' I said to the trembling slave, 'tell me where thy Gold is. THOU hast no use for it. I can spend it in relieving the Poverty on which thou tramplest; in aiding Science, which thou knowest not; in uplifting ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Marquis de Vaudreuil entrusted to St. Castin the command of Acadia. After the treaty of Utrecht he retired to his ancestral residence on the banks of the Penobscot, where he lived on amicable terms with the English and kept the Penobscot Indians from making encroachments on their neighbors. His sister, Ursule de St. Castin, married his wife's brother, a son of Louis d'Amours, a circumstance of interest not only ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... nor would serve under a man with an ancestry inferior to his own. Feodor asked that the Books of Pedigrees be sent to him for examination, and then had them every one thrown into the fire and burned. This must have been his last act, for his death and this holocaust of ancestral claims both occurred ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... of kinship was felt by the Hebrews with the dwellers of the more distant south, and it is characteristic of the genealogies that the mothers (Sarah, Hagar and Keturah) are in the descending scale as regards purity of blood. This great ancestral figure came, it was said, from Ur in Babylonia and Haran and thence to Canaan. Late tradition supposed that the migration was to escape Babylonian idolatry (Judith v., Jubilees xii.; cf. Josh. xxiv. 2), and knew of Abraham's miraculous escape from death (an obscure reference to some act of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... pages, we come to one name which immediately if whimsically suggests poetry. The man was, like Touchstone's Audrey, not poetical and yet a great poet has been pleased to address him, very much as Pindar might have addressed the Ancestral Hero ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... "His Excellency has to be home soon to get there in time for the mating season. This occurs once in a lifetime, I'm told, and this is his only chance to continue the ancestral rule—" ...
— No Moving Parts • Murray F. Yaco
... by, her imperial writ runs. They have never subscribed to the vow of Ruth, 'Thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.' They dwell under the Pax Romana, not merely protected by it but as citizens. Theirs are the ancestral deities portrayed on that unfading pavement in the very centre of the villa—Apollo and Daphne, ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... have been told, especially those old ladies who held a little court, like Mrs. Bethune Balliol, or made their bold criticism of all things both new and old, like those who flourish in Lord Cockburn's lively pages—continued to live in the ancestral houses which still kept their old-fashioned perfection within, though they had to be approached through all the squalor and misery which had already found refuge outside in the desecrated Canongate; but society in the Scotch metropolis ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... though an independent sovereign, was still heir-apparent to the throne of Portugal, and the ultra-royalists hoped that, in spite of the provisions of the Brazilian constitution, his succession to his ancestral crown would restore the unity of the Portuguese dominions. The death of King John VI. on March 10, 1826, brought the matter to a crisis. Four days before his death he had appointed a council of regency which was to be presided over by his daughter, Isabella Maria, but from which the queen ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... proportions, long since gone to the dogs. All things pass away. Generations wax old as does a garment: but eternally God says:—'Come again, ye children of men.' Wildernesses of fruit, and worlds of flowers, are annually gathered in solitary South America to ancestral graves: yet still the Pomona of Earth, yet still the Flora of Earth, does not become superannuated, but blossoms in everlasting youth. Not otherwise by secular periods, known to us geologically as facts, though obscure as durations, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... difficulty in doing that. People live in Russell Square again now, and try to make one believe that it is a fashionable quarter. Your father stayed on there because the carpets fitted the rooms, and on account of other ancestral conveniences. He did not live there—he knew nothing of his immediate ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... clay, and here the stone paths merge into well-beaten trails that on reasonably level soil afford excellent wheeling. The hillsides are crowded with graves, which, instead of the sugar-loaf "ant hillocks" of the paddy-fields, assume the traditional horseshoe shape of the Chinese ancestral grave. On the barren, gravelly hills, unfit for cultivation, the thrifty and economical Celestial inters the remains of his departed friends. Although in making this choice he is supposed to be chiefly interested in securing ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... oracle at Kastalia whether it be worth the quest, and the oracle chargeth me straightway to send a ship on the sacred mission. This deed do thou offer me to do, and I swear to give thee up the sway and kingly rule. Let Zeus the ancestral god of thee and me be witness of my oath and stablish it ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... degeneracy. There is consolation, however, in the hope, based on substantial physiological data, that our great-grand-daughters may recapture their ancestors' bloom and force. "Three generations of wholesome life," says Mr. Greg, "might suffice to eliminate the ancestral poison, for the vis medicatrix naturae has wonderful efficacy when allowed free play; and perhaps the time may come when the worst cases shall deem it a plain duty to curse no future generations with the damnosa hereditas, which has caused such bitter wretchedness ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... ground floor, exactly corresponding to mine, and in the same block. I am just over her head, and the same secret staircase serves for both. My father's rooms are in the block opposite, but are larger by the whole of the space occupied by the grand staircase on our side of the building. These ancestral mansions are so spacious, that my father and mother continue to occupy the ground-floor rooms, in spite of the social duties which have once more devolved on them with the return of the Bourbons, and are even ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... in Spanish, which is my native tongue—although not my ancestral one. And as I crouched to pass the archway I found time to speculate on his business in this cavern. For clearly he had not come hither to drink, and as clearly he had nothing to do with either army. At first glance I took him for a priest; but his bands, ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... irregularity and careless construction of most of the Tusayan ruins. Its distance from the center of the province, too, suggests outside relationship; but still the Tusayan traditions undoubtedly connect the place with some of the ancestral gentes, as seen ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... an instant to lose. Old Rex was gaining, and Carver was growing tired. It was too hot up there for a red sweater. With the bull a scant thirty feet away Donald pulled in MacDuff, and yelled to Carver to jump, which he did, aided by the stirrup, Donald's arm, and the last bit of ancestral nerve he possessed. When Old Rex, baffled and defeated, saw his foe being championed by one whom he full well knew, it took but a yell from Donald and a mighty crack of his quirt to send him back among ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... with all the virtues rolled up within him, has not a fragment of one chance in ten thousand billions of equalling the achievements of a tenth-rate white man whose ancestral start was ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... He could see only one side of it. He was born so, educated so, his veins were full of ancestral blood that was rotten with this sort of unconscious brutality, brought down by inheritance from a long procession of hearts that had each done its share toward poisoning the stream. To imprison these men without proof, and starve their kindred, was no harm, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the large yellow mansion was the home of Commodore Cassin, built by him, I think, in the early 1800's. In 1893 Mr. and Mrs. Beverley Randolph Mason, of Virginia, opened here their school, Gunston Hall, named, of course, for Mr. Mason's ancestral home, which continued in Washington as a flourishing boarding school for girls for fifty years. After that, this building housed the Epiphany School, ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... in connection with this incident that Confucius drew the attention of his disciples to the metal statue of a man with a triple clasp upon his mouth, which stood in the ancestral temple at Lo. On the back of the statue were inscribed these words: "The ancients were guarded in their speech, and like them we should avoid loquacity. Many words invite many defeats. Avoid also engaging in many businesses, for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... possible that a woman could exist for two thousand years, this might be possible also—anything might be possible. I myself might, for aught I knew, be a reincarnation of some other forgotten self, or perhaps the last of a long line of ancestral selves. Well, vive la guerre! why not? Only, unfortunately, I had no recollection of these previous conditions. The idea was so absurd to me that I burst out laughing, and, addressing the sculptured picture of a grim-looking warrior on the cave wall, called out to him aloud, "Who knows, old ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... dream of old silk, denotes that she will have much pride in her ancestors, and will be wooed by a wealthy, but elderly person. If the silk is soiled or torn, she will drag her ancestral pride in ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... tolled funeral knells in the ears of the first Bourbon, and called him out as a martyr hurrying to meet his own sacrifice—could we suppose this gloomy representative of his family destinies to have met him in some solitary apartment of the Tuileries or Versailles, some twilight gallery of ancestral portraits, he could have met him with the purpose of raising the curtain from before the long series of his household woes—from him the king would have learned that no personal ransom could be accepted for misgovernment ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... and was presented with a packet of papers, which he left unopened at a lawyer's. The young man made a fortune in India, returned to Scotland, and took a shooting in Dumfriesshire, near bormont, his ancestral home. He lodged at a small inn hard by, and the landlady, struck by his name, began to gossip with him about his family history. He knew nothing of the facts which the landlady disclosed, but, impressed by her ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... head might be chopped off as a sacrifice to assuage the rage of our pious monarch Philip, settled on the island, and did not return home till towards the end of a long life. His son, who accompanied him, having recovered his ancestral estates, remained in Spain; but he, when advanced in years, in consequence of being implicated in some political plot, fled the country, and naturally took refuge in that of his mother, where he was cordially welcomed. He was afterwards joined by his son, who, curiously enough, married ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... likewise resemble both sexes of the species in several allied genera found in various parts of the world. Hence we may infer that these nine species, and probably all the others of the genus, are descended from an ancestral form which was coloured in nearly the same manner. In the tenth species the female still retains the same general colouring, but the male resembles her, so that he is coloured in a much less gaudy and contrasted manner than the males of the previous species. In the eleventh ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... the light of reason along with the Boy-Bishop and the Lord of Misrule, I am not sure that Dickens (though he was one of the readiest and most rapid masters of reply in history) would have found it very easy upon his own principles to answer. It was by a great ancestral instinct that he defended Christmas; by that sacred sub-consciousness which is called tradition, which some have called a dead thing, but which is really a thing far more living than the intellect. There is a dark kinship and brotherhood of all mankind which is much too ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... days out of my busy life, and visited the old family homestead of General Laurance. The owner was in Europe, the house closed; but, standing unnoticed under the venerable oaks that formed the avenue of approach to the ancestral halls of my husband, I looked at the stately pile and the broad fields that surrounded it, and called upon Heaven to spare me long enough to see my child the regnant heiress of all that proud domain. There I vowed that cost what it might, I would accomplish my revenge, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... o'er the world, had they not put An end to Magnus' life? That I am chief Of all these mingled peoples and of Rome Disproves an angry heaven. See here combined All means of victory. Noble men have sought Unasked the risks of war. Our soldiers boast Ancestral statues. If to us were given A Curius, if Camillus were returned, Or patriot Decius to devote his life, Here would they take their stand. From furthest east All nations gathered, cities as the sand Unnumbered, give their ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... walk with us by the way, and make our chill hearts glow. He will sit with us at the table—however humble the meal, and He will not leave us when we discern Him. Strangers we are indeed here—but not solitary, for we are 'strangers with Thee.' As in some ancestral home in which a family has lived for centuries—son after father has rested in its great chambers, and been safe behind its strong walls—so, age after age, they who love Him abide in God.—'Thou hast been our ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... having lost their ancestral property, had to begin the world again. They had to begin at the beginning. But they had plenty of pluck and energy. I go back to my great-great-grandfather, Michael Naesmyth, who was born in 1652. He occupied a house in the Grassmarket, Edinburgh, which was afterwards rebuilt, ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... the seats, while to me, the visitor, was assigned the "lang-settle" on the other side of the fireplace. It was a coign of vantage which I shared with the ancestral copper warming-pan, and from it I could see the whole group. Grannie, bent half-double with rheumatism, was propped up in her bed, with the children grouped around her. She wore, as usual, her white mutch cap and grey shawl. Mittens covered her wrists, ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... Carrol Key, a name hinting that in his veins, however thinly diluted by generations of degeneration, ran blood of some potentiality. But one could stare endlessly at the long, chinless face, the dull, watery eyes, and high cheek-bones, without finding suggestion of either ancestral ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald |
