"Meteoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the astronomer's fame has steadily increased. In 1868, in the great meteoric shower, she and her pupils recorded the paths of four thousand meteors, and gave valuable data of their height above the earth. In the summer of 1869 she joined the astronomers who went to Burlington, Iowa, to observe the total eclipse of the ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... five years old Quietly putting himself on common ground with his reader Simplicity Slovenly literature, unrebuked and uncorrected Suggestion rather than by commandment Unenlightened popular preference for a book Waste precious time in chasing meteoric appearances ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the Shawnees, was born at the ancient town of Piqua on Mad River, not far from the present city of Springfield, in Clark County. His name means Shooting Star, and he was indeed the meteoric light of his people while he lived. He was of a high Indian, family of the Turtle Tribe, and his father had come with his clan to Ohio from their home in Florida, about the middle of the last century. Tecumseh was born, as nearly as can be reckoned, in the year ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... covering the entire ocean floor, are various oozes formed wholly from the debris of marine organisms; while intermingled with these are found various volcanic products which have been either carried through the air or floated on the surface, and a small but perfectly recognisable quantity of meteoric matter. Ice-borne rocks are also found abundantly scattered over the ocean bottom within a definite distance of the arctic and antarctic circles, clearly marking out the limit of floating icebergs in ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... meteor, "Wakan-denda" (sacred fire) and Wakan-wohlpa (sacred gift.) Meteors are messengers from the Land of Spirits, warning of impending danger. It is a curious fact that the "sacred stone" of the Mohammedans, in the Kaaba at Mecca, is a meteoric stone, and obtains its sacred character from the fact that it fell from heaven. 31 Kah-no-te-dahn—The little, mysterious dweller in the woods. This spirit lives in the forest in hollow trees. Mrs. Eastman's Dacotah, Pre. Rem. xxxi. "The Dakota god of the woods—an ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... "After your meteoric career during the past few hours I am inclined to agree with that last remark," and Clancy's tone became so serious that Devar laughed outright. "Don't misunderstand me, Mr. Curtis. I am lost in admiration of your nerve, but you have told me just ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... investigations. A suggestion in the case is furnished, however, by the fact that the columns of the Sun are not lighted up with advertisements from any of the establishments against which it has been discharging its meteoric sneezes. And this may account for the dearth of the milk of journalistic courtesy in the cocoa-nut of the DAN ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... been paid to the dust which is found on roofs and ledges at great heights. This meteoric dust, as it is called, consists of minute particles of iron, which are thought to fall from the highest part of the atmosphere, or possibly to be attracted to the earth from space. Lightning usually ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... one time that falls of meteoric matter into the sun would account for the sun's heat. This position is hardly tenable now. The mere bulk of the meteoric matter required by the hypothesis, apart from other reasons, is against it. There is undoubtedly an enormous amount of meteoric ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... which do not beset the path of those who fit into the routine of life as they find it. Certainly it is advisable for the artist to temper his ways with discretion, for genius is altogether too apt to make a meteoric blaze and end up ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... a bolide—a slow-moving, large meteoric object—had been observed by radar to be descending to earth. It had been tracked throughout its descent. It had landed in Boulder Lake. Air photos taken since its landing showed that an enormous disturbance of the water of the lake had ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... attraction, circle about him as he advances. In other words, if we could take up a position in open space in advance of the sun, we should see him rushing toward us at the rate of some 450,000 miles a day, chased by his whole family of shining worlds and the vast swarms of meteoric ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... in the dry bed of a stream near it, a curious white substance like thick felt, formed of felspathic silt (no doubt the product of glacial streams) and the siliceous cells of infusoriae. It much resembles the fossil or meteoric paper of Germany, which is also formed of the lowest tribes of fresh-water plants, though considered by Ehrenberg as of animal origin. A vein of granite in the bottom of the valley had completely altered the character of the gneiss, which contained veins ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... forgotten limbo. In due time the separation rule, its chief protagonist discredited and gone none knew where, would be repealed, either under legal compulsion or without. When that day came, the Guardian would be back in the position it had always enjoyed until Mr. O'Connor played—and lost—his meteoric game. ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... glance of ardent admiration toward Grace, and she whisked out. In a moment she returned and said, "Now, Colonel, I must be honest, especially as I think of your vow in the dark woods. I am very, very happy;" and then in a meteoric brilliancy of smiles, tears, and excitement, ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... my pocket, and frequently told the story of the dramatic way in which I had become possessed of it. I also kept my resolution of showing it to Professor Shroeder, who was much interested both by the anecdote and the specimen. He pronounced it to be a piece of meteoric stone, and drew my attention to the fact that its resemblance to an ear was not accidental, but that it was most carefully worked into that shape. A dozen little anatomical points showed that the worker had been as accurate as he was skilful. "I should not wonder," said the Professor, ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... land, and when Eugene and his brother-in-law-to-be reached Naples their soulful appeals for more currency with which to continue their golden girdle of the earth were met with the chilling notice "No funds available." Happily, in their meteoric transit across Europe, they had invested in many articles of vertu and convertible souvenirs of the places they had visited. By the sale, or sometimes by the pledge, of these accumulated impedimenta of travel, Eugene made good his retreat to America, where he landed with empty pockets and an inexhaustible ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... than bronze in the greater part of Europe. It was not even known in Scandinavia before the Christian era. In Germany, Pannonia, and Noricum its use dates from the sixth or seventh century B.C. Beneath the mounds of Central America we find but a few fragments of meteoric iron, the rarity of which made them extremely valuable; on the other hand iron was known to the Hellenes as long ago as the fourteenth century B.C., and it had been employed in Egypt for many centuries prior to that time. The most ancient sepulchres of ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... we know, this may be a great day in the earth's earlier history; she may have put forth her original rose on this day, or tried her hand at a primitive specimen of wheat; or she may, in fact, have survived some gunpowder plot about this time; so that the meteoric appearance may be a kind congratulating feu-de-joye, on the anniversary of the happy event. What it is that the 'cosmogony man' in the 'Vicar of Wakefield' would have thought of such novelties, whether he would have favored us with his usual ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... sharpened into a wonderful effulgence by the hues above and around it. Again and again, along the whole range, far as the sight could explore, the spray rose in stately clouds of silver, which were scattered by the wind in meteoric scintillations of surpassing beauty, flashing through the fires of the sun like millions of little blazing stars. There were twenty different dyes of light in the collection of spires, fanes, and ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... satellites broke away from him and scattered into other parts of the town, at the livery stable, the drug store, the Grange, talking a little dubiously, the impression was definite that they were only meteoric scraps, cast-off clinkers that could not stand the fire and the fizz and the whirl ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... of the river, a murmur ran through the crowd like a breeze, caused doubtless by the fear that the bey had arrived unexpectedly from another direction. A second gesture from the manager and the great orchestra subsided, more gradually, with rallentando passages and meteoric showers of notes scattered among the foliage; but nothing better could be expected from a ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... further piece of information, namely, the periodic time, will be necessary to complete our knowledge of the movements of the system. Professor H. Newton, of Yale, had shown that the choice of possible orbits for the meteoric swarm is limited to five. There is, first, the great ellipse in which we now know the meteors revolve once every thirty three and one quarter years. There is next an orbit of a nearly circular kind in which the periodic time would be a little more than a year. There ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... contact with the atmosphere, streaked the darkness with their luminous trails, overspreading it occasionally with sheets of electric flame. The Earth was just then in her perihelion, and we all know that the months of November and December are so highly favorable to the appearance of these meteoric showers that at the famous display of November, 1866, astronomers counted as many as 8,000 between midnight ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... the martial dash and vigor of his best verse. Also, remembering the Revolution, we may understand the dazzling impression which he made upon the poets of his day. When the news came from Greece that his meteoric career was ended, the young Tennyson wept passionately and went out to carve on a stone, "Byron is dead," as if poetry had perished with him. Even the coldly critical Matthew Arnold ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... enough to see a town again after what appeared to us such a long acquaintance with deep, still, almost lifeless and houseless solitude! We tumbled out into the busy street feeling like meteoric people crumbled off the corner of some other world, and wakened up suddenly in this. For an hour we took as much interest in Overland City as if we had never seen a town before. The reason we had an hour to spare was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... which have had similar meteoric rises in value. The first edition of Walton and Cotton's 'Compleat Angler' was published in 1653 at one and sixpence. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the average price for a fine copy seems ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... St. Amand appeared as something dreamed of, not seen. The star of Napoleon had risen above the horizon; the romance of his early career had commenced; and the campaign of Egypt had been the herald of those brilliant and meteoric successes which flashed forth from the gloom of the Revolution ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mustn't either; but I can see you won't. Your eyes are telling me things already. I don't get on with stiff people somehow. Lady Bassett calls me effusive. And I think myself there must have been something meteoric about my birth star. Doubtless that is why I agree so well with Nick. He's meteoric, too." She slipped cosily down upon a stool by Muriel's side. "He's a nice boy, isn't he?" she said sympathetically. "And is that his ring? Ah, let me look at it! I think I have seen ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... him at his word—had made but a meteoric appearance in her future sister-in-law's cottage—a hasty greeting, a brief peck on Ilona's two cheeks, and one on Aladar's bristly face, then the inevitable homily; and as soon as Ilona paused in the latter, in order to draw breath, Elsa gave her another ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Union a more interesting or picturesque leadership than is presented in the political history of the Empire State. Rarely more than two controlling spirits appear at a time, and as these pass into apogee younger men of approved capacity are ready to take their places. None had a meteoric rise, but in his day each became an absolute party boss; for the Constitution of 1777, by creating the Council of Appointment, opened wide the door to bossism. The abolition of the Council in 1821 doubtless made individual control ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... while, but that eventually her cause would triumph. "We do not care for your disbelief," cried one, "for in this very hall your predecessors denied the circulation of the blood!" - "Yes," cried another, "and they denied the falling of meteoric stones!" while a third exclaimed "Grande est veritas et praevalebit!" Some degree of order being at last restored, the question whether the report should be received and published was decided in the negative. It was afterwards agreed ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... (Cr) occurs in the metallic state only in a very small quantity in meteoric iron, but is frequently found in union with oxygen, as oxide in chrome iron ore, and as chromic acid in ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... Nellie's career had been meteoric. She literally had leaped from the chorus into the role of principal comedienne—one of those pranks of fortune that cannot be explained or denied. She was one of the "Jack-in-the-Box" girls in a big New York production. On the opening night, when the lid of her box flew open and she was projected ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... Messrs. Albert Gallatin and Henry Clay, was directed to proceed to London, for the purpose of entering into negotiations for a treaty of commerce with Great Britain. Before leaving the continent, Mr. Adams visited Paris, where he witnessed the return of Napoleon from Elbe, and his meteoric career during the Hundred Days. Here he was joined in March, 1815, by his family, after a long and perilous journey from ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... Olmsted's views are particularly interesting, as, out of one mysterious phenomenon, he endeavours to explain another, and inquires: 'Whether or not the zodiacal light is the origin of the meteoric showers of November and August, and especially those of November?' Many readers know that for some years past great numbers of falling-stars, or showers of meteors, have been observed periodically in November: the fall seen in the United States in 1834—when, as is estimated, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... commission as missionary. Just as he was landing, the ship was setting sail which bore to his deserted field his old Oxford friend and associate in "the Methodist Club," George Whitefield, then just beginning the career of meteoric splendor which for thirty-two years dazzled the observers of both hemispheres. He landed in Savannah in May, 1738. This was the first of Whitefield's work in America. But it was not the beginning of the Great Awakening. For many years there had been waiting and longing as of them that watch for ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... picturesque scenery, a painting of the Shah taken in his apartments, jewels, gold ornaments inlaid with precious stones, a beautiful malachite set consisting of clock, inkstand, vases, and a pair of candlesticks; meteoric stones and fossil shells—all were displayed in the utmost ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... the chivalrous bravery of the Emden's Captain, which has been many times in evidence throughout her meteoric career, was again shown. If the French boats were coming out, every moment was of priceless value to him. Nevertheless, utterly disregarding this, he stopped, lowered boats, and picked up the survivors from the Mosquet before steaming ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... absolutely harmless organism—one that has been, perhaps, dormant for centuries in the soil, or has evolved to its present form in the deep waters of the Elan watershed by a process whose nature we can only dimly guess at. Some have suggested a meteoric origin, and it is true that some meteoric stones fell over Wales recently. But that is far-fetched to my mind, for how could a white-hot stone harbour living matter? Whatever its origin, it is, I am sure, a harmless thing, and though strange, and at first sight alarming, we need none of ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... Persian satraps was slender in the extreme, he used it with the most flagrant dishonesty as a bait first to Sparta, then to the Athenian oligarchs, and finally to the democracy. Superficial and opportunist to the last, he owed the successes of his meteoric career purely to personal magnetism and an almost incredible capacity for ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... soul of a Milton with a "gift divine;" inspired a Homer with the "fire and frenzy" which crowned an Iliad and an Odyssey, the master pieces of Epic verse; gave to the antique and traditional literature of the Celtic race its meteoric brilliancy, and produced the weird, wondrous sublimity of ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... streets, near that fashionable neighbourhood called "the Heights." Ogilvy, who was some ten years older than I, and who belonged to one of our old families, had embarked on a career then becoming common, but which at first was regarded as somewhat meteoric: gradually abandoning the practice of law, and perceiving the possibilities of the city of his birth, he had "gambled" in real estate and other enterprises, such as our local water company, until he had quadrupled his inheritance. He had built a mansion on Grant Avenue, the wide thoroughfare ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the larger Bulan raised it high above his head, and then hurled it down amongst the upclimbing warriors. In an instant pandemonium reigned, for the heavy boulder had mowed down a score of the pursuers, breaking arms and legs in its meteoric descent. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... connection we allude particularly to minor planets, to telescopic comets, and to meteoric streams, which severally form a very numerous group of bodies of which the known members are accumulating to a great extent. As complications arise, some remedies must be applied to their solution, and one probable effect will be that astronomers will be induced each one ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... to practise with Diana, drew the latter's attention. The paragraph recalled the fact that it was just a year since Miss Quentin had made her debut, and then went on to comment lightly upon the brief and meteoric character ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... his horse in a swoon caused by the apparition of Yoshitsune and Yukiiye on the Yamato plain and that of the Emperor Antoku at Inamura promontory. Just twenty years had elapsed since he raised the Minamoto standard in Sagami. His career was short but meteoric, and he ranks among the three greatest statesmen Japan has ever produced, his ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... energy of motion into that of light and heat suggests itself at once. But what were the circumstances of the collision? Did an extinguished sun, flying blindly through space, plunge into a vast cloud of meteoric particles, and, under the lashing impact of so many myriads of missiles, break into superficial incandescence, while the cosmical wrack through which it had driven remained glowing with nebulous luminosity? Such an explanation has been offered by Seeliger. Or was Vogel right ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... than a rock or a tree. And Azuma-zi was practically a savage still; the veneer of civilisation lay no deeper than his slop suit, his bruises, and the coal grime on his face and hands. His father before him had worshipped a meteoric stone, kindred blood it may be had splashed the ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... this, another phenomenon not less wonderful occurred, which I had the satisfaction of seeing; and although forty-five years have elapsed, the terrifying scene is as firmly fixed in my memory as though it had happened but an hour ago. I refer to the meteoric shower of the 13th of November, 1833. My father had been from home, and on his return, about midnight, his attention was arrested by the frequent fall of meteors, or stars, to use the common phrase. The number rapidly increased; ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... intellectual pursuits, will be thrilled by what he sees around him. The life of the farmer, planted in the midst of so much that is beautiful, having to do with nature's marvellous miracles of germination and growth, moving under the open heaven with its glory of sky and meteoric change, and accompanied by the songs of birds and all characteristic rural sights and sounds, will seem to him the sweetest and the most enviable that falls to human lot. But the hard-working farmer sees nothing of this. What cares he for birds, unless ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... later, following the meteoric appearance of a young speculator in Duluth, and after Chicago had seen the tentative opening of a grain and commission company labeled Frank A. Cowperwood & Co., which ostensibly dealt in the great wheat crops of the West, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... stars. The natures and distributions of these harmonize with the hypothesis of an exploded planet, and I think with no other hypothesis. The theory of volcanic origin, joined with the remark that the Sun emits jets which might propel them with adequate velocities, seems quite untenable. Such meteoric bodies as have descended to us, forbid absolutely the supposition of solar origin. Nor can they rationally be ascribed to planetary volcanoes. Even were their mineral characters appropriate, which many of them are not (for volcanoes do not eject iron), no planetary volcanoes could propel ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the unknown, "the astronomers Louville and Halley took for lunar phenomena phenomena purely terrestrial, such as meteoric or other bodies which are generated in our own atmosphere. That was the scientific aspect of these facts, ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... drama; a Lear of domestic or ordinary life;—a local eddy of passion on the high road of society, while all around is the week-day goings on of wind and weather; a Lear, therefore, without its soul-searching flashes, its ear-cleaving thunderclaps, its meteoric splendors,—without the contagion and the fearful sympathies of nature, the fates, the furies, the frenzied elements, dancing in and out, now breaking through, and scattering,—now hand in hand with,—the fierce or fantastic group of human passions, crimes, and ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... Feldspar Group which is called Anorthite has been shown by Rammelsberg to occur in a meteoric stone, and his analysis proves it to be almost identical in its chemical proportions to the same mineral in the lavas of modern volcanoes. So also Bronzite (Enstatite) and Olivine have been met with in meteorites shown by ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... anything of an artistic character, that can be distinctly assigned to the primitive period, are a certain number of engraved cylinders, some of which are very curious. [PLATE XIV., Fig. 1] It is clearly established that the cylinders in question, which are generally of serpentine, meteoric stone, jasper, chalcedony, or other similar substance, were the seals or signets of their possessors, who impressed them upon the moist clay which formed the ordinary material for writing. They are round, or nearly ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... these two children. At the time of the birth of Louis Napoleon he was at Bayonne, arranging with the Spanish princes for the transfer of the crown of Spain to Joseph Bonaparte. Josephine was at Bordeaux. From this interview he passed, in his meteoric flight, to the Congress of Kings at Erfurt, but a few miles from the battle-field of Jena. It was here that the celebrated historian Mueller met the Emperor and gave the following testimony as to the impression which his ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... only make use of such metals as he found free in nature, that is, such as had not been attacked and corroded by the ubiquitous oxygen. These were primarily gold or copper, though possibly some original genius may have happened upon a bit of meteoric iron and pounded it out into a sword. But when man found that the red ocher he had hitherto used only as a cosmetic could be made to yield iron by melting it with charcoal he opened a new era in civilization, though doubtless the ocher artists of that day denounced ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... Some of them, indeed, do strike the ground, and very large ones bury themselves deep in the earth. When we go to the Field Columbian Museum, in Chicago, we shall see these visitors from other worlds. They are called meteoric stones, or meteorites. When they are in the ...
— Uncle Robert's Geography (Uncle Robert's Visit, V.3) • Francis W. Parker and Nellie Lathrop Helm
... naturally apprehended fatal consequences to his crown, from this report of the birth of a king. Having first consulted the priests and scribes respecting the birthplace of Christ, he procured a private interview with the Magians, for the purpose of ascertaining the time of the meteoric appearance; and, with all the policy of all experienced statesman, requested them to go and find out the extraordinary Child, then return to bring him word, that he might come and worship him. This was a contrivance, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... source of finely divided matter is to be found in volcanic dust which, as in the case of Krakatoa, may remain for years in the atmosphere, but which must ultimately fall upon the surface of the earth and ocean. This can be traced in all the deep-sea oozes. Finally there is meteoric dust, which is continually falling to the surface of the earth, but in such minute quantities and in such a finely-divided state that it can be detected only in the oozes of the deepest oceans, where both inorganic and organic ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... and, during the latter part of November, and the first half of December, Captain Parry's journal presents little more than observations on it; and oh the meteoric appearances and fantastic illusions of light and colour, with which the voyagers were often amused. At one time, the moon appeared to be curiously deformed by refraction; the lower edges of it seeming to be indented ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... well-known frequenter of great houses and great families before the war used to call "the inferior aristocracy"—with an inflection of voice caught no doubt from the great families themselves. Yet their father had been an Earl, the second of his name, and was himself the son of a meteoric personage of mid-Victorian days—parliamentary lawyer, peer, and Governor of an Indian Presidency, who had earned his final step in the peerage by the skilful management of a little war, and had then incontinently died, leaving his family his reputation, ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his modest savings nor to work for me for no wages. He expressed his deep regret at leaving my service and his confidence that I would give him a good character. Bingley wept after the way of women. There was also a shadowy housemaidy young person in a cap who used to make meteoric appearances and whom I left to the diplomacy of Bingley. These dismal rites performed, I put my chambers into the hands of a house agent and interviewed a firm of auctioneers with reference to the sale. It was all exceedingly unpleasant. The agent was so anxious to let my chambers, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... and that the whalebone that was passed off at Zanzibar as the wing of a bird, came, they said, from Tanganyika. As to rocks falling in East Africa, I think their idea might easily arise from the fall of meteoric stones."] ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... old Glegg, shakin' his grizzly head; 'she's shore the most meteoric married lady of which hist'ry says a word. ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... in a slough and so heated the water as to kill the catfish that inhabited it. It lies in the pond, and looks as if a hundred feet wide. A much more marvellous story has been published of an engraved meteoric stone falling in an obscure portion of Georgia near Clayton Court-house, which is a hoax, and has been so pronounced by the postmaster ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... particular ship had known many vicissitudes. Under the guidance of a musically inclined Ship's Steward, it had faced audiences across impromptu footlights as "The Pale Pink Pierrots," and, as such, had achieved a meteoric distinction. But unhappily the Ship's Steward was partial to oysters, and bought a barrelful at an auction sale ashore. On the face of things, it appeared a bargain; but the Ship's Steward neglected to inquire too closely into the antecedents of its contents, and was duly ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... say; fallen into bottomless abysses of destruction; he still in a paying condition, and with footing capable to carry his affairs and him. When he died, in 1786, the enormous Phenomenon since called FRENCH REVOLUTION was already growling audibly in the depths of the world; meteoric-electric coruscations heralding it, all round the horizon. Strange enough to note, one of Friedrich's last visitors was Gabriel Honore Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau. These two saw one another; twice, for half an hour each time. The last of the old ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... stature, not more than five feet seven inches in height, and weighing not more than one hundred and forty pounds. His eyes and hair were black, his complexion dark, giving the impression that he did not belong to the Caucasian race. His career was a meteoric display in political oratory, such as the world does not often witness. His integrity cannot be questioned, and for more than a third of a century he submitted to a life of exile rather than accept a home under a government which he thought was a usurpation. He gave ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... still reports of victories came in. Yet news was very scarce, and had we known it, the period was only just beginning, of that long, irregular warfare, by which the two provinces had to be conquered, when the brilliancy of Roberts's meteoric march to Pretoria was past. We were to take our small share in work as necessary and arduous as any in these latter ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... feeling tolerably sure of meeting Logotheti at the dinner. If there were any other women they would be of the meteoric sort, the fragments of former social planets that go on revolving in the old orbit, more or less divorced, bankrupt, or otherwise unsound, though still smart, the kind of women who are asked to fill a table on such occasions 'because they ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... several years before he made his meteoric appearance before the public as a platform talker, and while yet a law student, that Phillips met the lady in question. The interview, as described by one of the parties, certainly had its comical aspect. "I talked Abolitionism to him all the time ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... the chest since you set him sparring!" Uncles never get stale. They don't come every day like parents and plain pudding; they're a sort of holiday relative with a plummy, Christmas flavor about them. Everybody hasn't got them; they are not so rare as the meteoric showers, but as occasional as a particularly fine day, and whenever they come to a house they're in the nature of ...
— A Brace Of Boys - 1867, From "Little Brother" • Fitz Hugh Ludlow
... attempt was made to focus his hard sharp personality some guardian divinity seemed to throw a veil of mystery over him. His detractors, however, were the first to own that there was "something about him"; it was felt that he had passed beyond the meteoric stage, and the business world was unanimous in recognizing that he had "come to stay." A dawning sense of his stability was even beginning to make itself felt in Fifth Avenue. It was said that he had bought a house in Seventy-second ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... step of the altar, and fell sound asleep, and the torch sunk in her hand, and went out, and all was dark. Then Ulysses put the phial in his wallet, and crept very cautiously to the altar, in the dark, and stole the Luck of Troy. It was only a small black mass of what is now called meteoric iron, which sometimes comes down with meteorites from the sky, but it was shaped like a shield, and the people thought it an image of the warlike shielded Goddess, fallen from Heaven. Such sacred shields, made of glass and ivory, are found deep in the earth in the ruined cities of Ulysses' ...
— Tales of Troy: Ulysses the Sacker of Cities • Andrew Lang
... of many double and triple stars, amenable only to superior instrumental power, in the immense labor already performed in preparing star catalogues, and in numerous accurate observations of standard stars; in the diligent and successful observation of the meteoric showers; in an extensive series of magnetic observations; in the discovery of an asteroid and ten or twelve telescopic comets; in the resolution of nebulae which had defied every thing in Europe but Lord Rosse's great reflector; in the ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... glare, It will come! With Destruction in the air. It will come! With a meteoric glare, With Destruction in the air, With the vengeance of Despair, It will ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... several. We have first of all the atmospheric nitrogen. Of this let us first consider that present as combined nitrogen. This, as we have already seen, consists chiefly of nitrates, nitrites, and ammonia, and reaches the soil dissolved in rain or in other meteoric forms of water, such as snow, hail, ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... all things continued to that day according to a certain ordinance. They took a view of Nature totally new in that age; healthy, human, cheerful, loving, trustful, and yet reverent—identical with that which happily is beginning to prevail in our own day. They defied those very volcanic and meteoric phenomena of their land, to which their countrymen were slaying their own children in the clefts of the rocks, and, like Theophrastus's superstitious man, pouring their drink-offerings on the smooth stones of the valley; and declared that, for their part, they would not fear, though the ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... first be expected; for soil in this case accumulates only in a few protected hollows, and being blown in one direction, it is always travelling towards the sea in the form of the finest dust, leaving the surface of the rocks bare, and exposed to the full effects of renewed meteoric action. ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... therefore infer by analogy that a Republican State would not offer any powerful resistance if it were to come into collision with a nation possessing a more settled form of government. A shower of meteoric stones, like passing fireworks, might take place; but beyond that nothing would occur to excite the fear, or arouse the energies of the more favoured nation. As an example of the weakness of a Republican State I may mention France. There we see an industrious race of people, endowed with ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... called "the meteoric poet," and the same title seems very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few readers had heard his name—I only knew it as that of the author of a strange mediaeval tale in prose—when he published "Atalanta in Calydon" ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... As a meteoric rebel against the degrading servility of what we have come to call the "Nonconformist Conscience" Byron must always have his place in the tragically slow emancipation of the human spirit. The reluctance of an ordinary ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... as well be understood, but there is nothing in them to dwell upon. The far side of the moon is probably but little worth seeing. Its features are likely to be more blurred with accumulations of meteoric dust than are those of our side, but otherwise they are likely to be of ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... metamorphism of rocks by the infiltration of rain and other meteoric waters, M. De Koninck, of the Belgian Academy of Sciences, assigns the cause of many hitherto ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... meteoric rise as a peacemaker in a nation tired by the long years of war made the ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... by intense heat, pass muster easily with children and sailor folk for the genuine thunderbolts. But the grand upholder of the belief, the one true undeniable reality which has kept alive the thunderbolt even in a wicked and sceptical age, is, beyond all question, the occasional falling of meteoric stones. Your meteor is an incontrovertible fact; there is no getting over him; in the British Museum itself you will find him duly classified and labelled and catalogued. Here, surely, we have the ultimate substratum of ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... to be possible at any given epoch, my difficulty is this: how long could the outer parts of this nebula exist, exposed to the zero temperature of surrounding space, without losing the gaseous state and aggregating into minute solid particles—into meteoric ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... not to reject what they assert, merely because it does not correspond with our own ideas on the subject. The most remarkable instance of unbelief was relative to the aerolites or meteoric stones formed during a thunder-storm in the air, and falling to the earth. Of course you have heard that ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... totally unaccountable upon any reasonable theory," said the doctor, "and I do not know what to believe, unless we are to conceive that the tooth and the ball were really meteoric stones that have assumed these remarkable shapes and been shot down upon the earth with such force as to penetrate Mr. Dingus' leg, and this is so very improbable that we can hardly accept it unless it is impossible to find any other. Hallo! What's the matter ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... upon the ledge, dropping into the Crimson Sea, sending up geysers of ruby spray, dashing on the bridge, crushing the frog-men, fell a shower of stone, mingled with distorted shapes and fragments whose scales still flashed meteoric ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... A meteoric stone may seem to differ from a planet only in size, but the difference in size involves also many other differences, notably the fact that the larger body can attract and hold to itself an atmosphere—a circumstance ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... silence and overshadowing of that night whose fitful meteoric fires only herald the descent of a superficial fame into lasting oblivion, the imbecile and unavailing resistance which is made against the doom must often excite our pity for the pampered child of market-gilded popularity;" and as "it is not with such feelings that we behold ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... be seen at the Smithsonian Institute at Washington. In Anderson township, Ohio, native gold has been found for the first time. Several small ornaments of copper have been found covered with thin sheets of gold. Earrings also, made of meteoric iron, have been found, and a serpent cut out of mica. Some terra-cotta figures also, which give us an idea of the way the hair was dressed in the days of the Mound-builders. I cannot here name all the implements and ornaments that have been discovered. ...
— Mound-Builders • William J. Smyth
... to have been a sort of meteoric shower of chipmunk magazines, following in the luminous pathway of the "Spectator" and the "Tatler." Burke was passing through his poetic period, and supplied various stanzas of alleged poetry to these magazines for a modest consideration. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... in a part of Asia far removed from the region in which the wise men of old lived and studied, and the might of that nation is even now checking the progress of huge and haughty Russia. But brilliant as has been the meteoric career of Japan, there is another race in Asia, which, though now moving more sluggishly, has possibilities of development that may in time make it a dominant factor in the future of the world. Great forces are now operating on that race and it is the purpose of this book to give some account ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... the world should be instructed at all rates, and that they should be pleased where they innocently may. We are, therefore, by no means among those spectators who view the occasional ascent of a poetic luminary upon the horizon of literature, as a meteoric flash which has no relation to ourselves; but we feel instantly an eager desire to find its altitude, to take its bearings, to trace its course, and to calculate its influence upon surrounding bodies. When ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... blindest, and most inveterate of human superstitions. If extravagant, yet to the multitude it did not seem extravagant. So natural a craze, therefore, however baseless, would never have carried Lord Monboddo's name into that meteoric notoriety and atmosphere of astonishment which soon invested it in England. And, in that case, my childhood would have escaped the deadliest blight of mortification and despondency that could have been incident to a most morbid temperament concurring with a situation of visionary (yes! if you ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... oceans and deserts, and through systems and webs, and into shops and cabinets of costliest china, will come at it, will not be refused, let the distances and the breakages be what they may. He went like the meteoric man with the mechanical legs in the song, too quick for a cry of protestation, and reached results amazing to his instincts, his tastes, and his training, not less rapidly and naturally than tremendous Ergo is shot forth from the clash of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... extreme tenuity, and especially so in the coma and tail. Sir John Herschel described them as almost spiritual in texture, and small stars have been seen shining through their densest parts without any perceptible diminution of their light. The nucleus is believed to be composed of a congeries of meteoric fragments, and these, when exposed to the Sun's heat, throw off luminous nebulous particles that are swept by some repulsive force into space and form the appendage known as the tail. Comets may be regarded ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... supply is of course extremely limited, yet some Siberian tribes are said to make knives from iron obtained in this manner. Moreover the evidence of language, as used by the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, would imply the meteoric origin of the first known form of the metal. But though such accidental finds might prove the existence of another metal, they would furnish no hint how to extract it from its ores, or indeed, that it existed ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... honour upon his memory in their customary exaggerated way, boasting that he was the first to explain the phases of the moon, the nature of solar and lunar eclipses, that he had the power of foretelling future events, and had even predicted the fall of a meteoric stone. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... wonder—as others had done—his meteoric progress in wealth and power. He was a man, disliked by some, feared by many, and obeyed by all; a land-owner; a cattle breeder; a grain dealer; a giant in body as well as will; and—the new Mayor ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... they are 'the fruit of the Spirit,' are yet not produced in us without our own co- operation. We have to forge and sharpen these weapons, though the fire in which they are forged is from above, and the metal of which they are made is given from heaven, like meteoric iron. These are 'kindness, long-suffering, love unfeigned.' We have to dismiss from our minds the ordinary characteristics of warfare in thinking of that which Christians are to wage. Like the old Knights Templars, we must carry a sword which has a cross for its hilt, and must be clad in gentleness, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... meteors, known as the Leonids, which at regular periods of thirty-three years had in the past encountered the earth's atmosphere, was due, and over-due. The cause of this, and of their finally eluding observation, need only be very briefly touched on here. The actual meteoric train is known to travel in an elongated ellipse, the far end of which lies near the confines of the solar system, while at a point near the hither end the earth's orbit runs slantingly athwart it, forming, as it were, a level crossing common to the two orbits, ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... This evening, about seven o'clock, a wonderful appearance was witnessed in the sky. A succession of meteoric balls of fire flew through the air, apparently from west to east; attended by reports in rapid succession very much resembling those of heavy pieces of artillery and quite as loud. Some think this may be a providential mockery of the pageantry ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... scenes were enacted around the long table at which the councilors sat at their weekly sessions, for every Monday through the greater portion of the year the Council convened at seven o'clock in the morning and usually sat until noon or later. But these were only meteoric flashes. Historians have given them undue prominence because such episodes make racy reading. By far the greater portion of the council's meetings were devoted to the serious and patient consideration of routine ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... since Mauleverer's meteoric visit to Warlock House, when the squire received from his brother the ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... accumulation, and the decomposition of water by atmospheric and ordinary electricity; the new Indigo; the spontaneous inflammation of charcoal; the nitrous atmosphere of Tirhoot, one of the principal districts in India for the manufacture of salt-petre; Discovery of a mass of meteoric iron in Bohemia; the chemical composition of cheese; Berzelius on the power of metallic rods to decompose water after their connexion with the galvanic pile is broken; an alkaline principle in Box-wood; Professor Davy on a new method of detecting metallic ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... and the common tradition of what he did, that we must turn for our biographical and historical estimate of the man. In this respect he is in analogy with Patrick Henry who appears only fitfully in history, but with meteoric brilliancy; or with Abraham Lincoln the narrative of whose life for the first forty-five years can be ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... trace sources for Sterne in English letters, that is, for the strange combination of whimsicality, genuine sentiment and knavish smiles, which is the real Sterne. He is individual, exotic, not demonstrable from preceding literary conditions, and his meteoric, or rather rocket-like career in Britain is in its decline a proof of the insensibility of the English people to a large portion of his gospel. The creature of fancy which, by a process of elimination, the Germans made out of Yorick is more easily explicable from existing and ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... The Platform could make much more precise measurements of the solar constant than could be obtained below. The flickering radar was gathering information for studies of the frequency and size of meteoric particles outside the atmosphere. There was the extremely important project for securing and sealing in really good vacua in various electronic devices brought up by Joe and his crew ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... sciences, with what ability and success, his published writings and his well-earned reputation at home and abroad may eloquently testify. Among the subjects upon which he wrote are, amber of Cape Sable, Maryland; the minerals of Missouri; five reports on the geology of Tennessee; meteoric iron from Tennessee and Alabama; a shower of red matter in ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... derogatory to the wisdom and power of the Most High. His words are remarkable: "The Eternal Sovereign arranges a solar or an astral system by dispositions imparted primordially to matter; He causes, by the same majestic means, vast oceans to form and continents to rise, and all the grand meteoric agencies to proceed in ceaseless alternation, so as to fit the earth for a residence of organic beings. But when, in the course of these operations, fuci and corals are to be for the first time placed in those oceans, a ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... meteoric glare, It will come! With Destruction in the air. It will come! With a meteoric glare, With Destruction in the air, With the vengeance of Despair, It ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... life was! Swung out of his peaceful orbit, by the legerdemain of death; no longer a humble steady star but a meteor; bumping as yet darkly against the planets; and then this monumental folly which had returned him to the old orbit but still in meteoric form, without peace or means of livelihood! An ass, indeed, if ever there ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... northward—if a cloud surprised Heaven, ere I fairly hollaed 'Furl the sail!'— She had at fingers' end both cloud and star Some thought that perched there, tame and tuneable, Fitted with wings, and still, as off it flew, 'So sang Euripides,' she said, 'so sang The meteoric poet of air and sea, Planets and the pale populace of heaven, The mind of man, and all that's made to soar!' And so, although she has some other name, We only call her Wild-pomegranate-flower, Balaustion; since, where'er the red bloom burns I' the dull ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... through the MS. I found that he had cut out the war, in so far as his military experiences were concerned. In khaki he showed himself to be as English and John Bull as you please; and how the deuce his meteoric promotion occurred and what various splendid services compelled the exhibition on his breast of a rainbow row of ribbons, are matters known only to the War Office, Andrew Lackaday and his Maker. Well—that is perhaps an exaggeration of secrecy. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... which were sometimes used for boundary-stones may have been the representations of these meteorites in later times, and it is noteworthy that the Sumerian group for "iron," /an-bar/, implies that the early Babylonians only knew of that metal from meteoric ironstone. The name of the god Nirig or Enu-restu (Ninip) is generally written with the same group, implying some kind of connection between the two—the god and the iron. In a well-known hymn to that deity certain ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... February night, there shone a full moon of fabulous size and unheard of splendour. In that immense radiance, the surrounding objects seemed to exist only as in a dream, impalpable, meteoric, and visible at a great distance by virtue of some fantastic irradiation of their own. The snow covered the railings of the gateway, concealing the iron and transforming it into a piece of open-work, more frail and ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... implements which are alluded to in the above mentioned articles also in Science, [Footnote: Science, vol. 3, 1884, pp. 308-310] as found in a North Carolina mound, and which analysis shows were not meteoric, furnish conclusive evidence that the tumulus was built after the Europeans had reached America; and as it is shown in the same article that the Cherokees must have occupied the region from the time of its discovery up to its settlement by the whites it is more than probable they ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... terribly effective had been the blow. The whole Northern campaign had been upset by the meteoric appearance of Jackson and the speed with which he marched and fought. McDowell's army of 40,000 men and a hundred guns had been scattered, and it would take him much time to get it all together again. ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... will be when he has heard our side of the subject. We girls never have allowed ourselves the luxury of vindicating ourselves, or refuting this charge. It is the clever girl who suffers most of all—not the brilliant, meteoric girl—but just the ordinarily clever girl, as other girls know her. It is this sort of a girl who drags upon my sympathies, because ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... in the social scale of the town was meteoric, chiefly owing to the goodwill of Madame Coquereau, the widowed mother of the Mayor. She was a hard-featured old lady, with a face that might have been made of corrugated iron painted yellow and with the eyes of an old hawk. She dressed always in black, ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... the Challenger expedition announced that meteoric dust is found in the sea ooze, a result that follows as a matter of course from the discovery that this cosmic dust is falling all ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... Museum of Natural History, and many other objects of interest. You must, however, take a peep at the Mineral Cabinet, or Geological Museum. It has been collected and arranged, with great industry and taste, by Professor Silliman. Look at this meteoric iron-stone. It fell a few years ago in Texas, and ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... seven; and having finished that group of worlds, makes another group—group after group. To the Pleiades He adds Orion. It seems that God likes light so well that He keeps making it. Only one being in the universe knows the statistics of solar, lunar, stellar, meteoric creations, and that is the—Creator Himself. And they have all been lovingly christened, each one a name as distinct as the names of your children. "He telleth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names." The seven Pleiades had names given to them, ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... find an example of nobility, of generosity, of charity and kindness and self-forgetfulness. Indeed, we find these qualities, as a rule, in the biographies of the great sympathetic poets and men of genius of the pen—I do not say in the lives of rebels of genius, "meteoric poets" like Byron. The same basis, the same foundations of rectitude, of honour, of goodness, of melancholy, and of mirth, underlie the art of Moliere, of Scott, of Fielding, and as his ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... own country the chief object of Meccan worship was a black meteoric stone, kept in the Caaba, with three hundred and sixty subordinate idols, representing the days of the year, as the year was ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... a band of Blackfeet, superior in numbers to the Crows, most unmercifully whipped them. On their return to their village one night in August, shortly after the fight, there was a grand display of meteoric showers, and although the Crow warriors were ready to face death in any form, the wonderful celestial display appalled them. They regarded it as the wrath of the Great Spirit showered visibly upon them. ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... uncomfortable bed, and lay down in one another's arms. For the last few hours mountainous piles of clouds had been rising dark and stormy in the sea-mouth: they had flared portentously in the setting sun, and had worn, with the decline of evening, almost every meteoric tint of anger, from fiery red to a sombre thundrous brown, and from sombre brown to doleful black. And we could now at least hear what they portended, though we could no longer see. The rising wind began to howl mournfully amid the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... Pagan,—Addison had read and esteemed. There was also in the very constitution of Milton's mind, in the majestic regularity and planetary solemnity of its epic movements, something which he could understand and appreciate. As to the meteoric and incalculable eccentricities of the dramatic mind, as it displayed itself in the heroic age of our drama, amongst the Titans of 1590-1630, they confounded and ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... favour. King James himself gave orders for the disposition of the sufferer, found lodgings for him, sent his own surgeon, and was constant in his visits to the convalescent. Thereafter the rise of Robert Carr was meteoric. Knighted, he became Viscount Rochester, a member of the Privy Council, then Earl of Somerset, Knight of the Garter, all in a very few years. It was in 1607 that he fell from his horse, under the King's nose. In ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... critics, who complained that he bounded with amazing rapidity from one subject to another, without leaving a trace of his track: now among the stars—then on a steam engine chasing infidelity—or pelting atheism with meteoric stones.[148] ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... there in life that he would not have done for her—were it to the shedding of blood? And to think he was no more to serve and follow her; no longer to jog contentedly through the pine-scented Forest—watching the meteoric course of that graceful figure in front of him, the lively young horse curbed by the light and dexterous hand, the ruddy brown hair glittering in the sunlight, the flexible form moving in unison with every motion of the horse that carried it! There could be no deeper ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... much; they vouch not only for human apparitions, but for such phantoms as demon dogs, and for still more fanciful symbolic omens.' This is perfectly true. I have found no cases of demon dogs; but wandering lights, probably of meteoric or miasmatic origin, are certainly regarded as tokens of death. This is obviously a superstitious hypothesis, the lights being real phenomena misconstrued. Again, funerals are not uncommonly seen where no funeral is taking place; it is then alleged that a ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... quarters which shook the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century subsided ere they reached this lonely rock near the coast of Andalusia. If the name of the great Emperor echoed fitfully upon its shores, it may be doubted whether the fantastic march of his glory or the flaming majesty of his meteoric life ever reached the comprehension of those saintly women kneeling in their ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... which they are accompanied. 7. Their fire. 8. Duration, 9. Their velocity. Under these different heads meteors have been investigated by the scrutinizing of philosophy, and many superstitious notions, long entertained concerning them, entirely exploded. Meteoric phenomena, it has been demonstrated, all proceed from one common cause—irregularity in the density of the atmosphere. When the atmospheric fluid is homogenous and of equal density, the rays of light pass ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... of the present work. It proposes to lay down in a series of apposite chapters the story of the past century, beginning, in fact, rather more than a century ago with the meteoric career of Napoleon and seeking to show to what it led, and what effects it had upon the political evolution of mankind. The French Revolution stood midway between two spheres of history, the sphere of medieval barbarism and that of ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... fainted away. Of all the estimates of Pitt none breathes deeper devotion than that of Wellesley. Was it not because he at last saw the pettiness of his own pride and petulance when contrasted with the self-abnegation of him who was truly the Great Commoner? And did not even his meteoric career in the East pale before the full-orbed splendour of the quarter of a century of achievement which made up the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... room to replace so much that had disappeared during the Revolution, and a vast quantity of decorative furniture was made during the few years which elapsed before the disaster of Waterloo caused the disappearance of a power which had been almost meteoric in ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... ahead to the beat of her paddles or the thrash of her screw, the steamer even of that day was far more dependable than the sailing vessel. The Lightning clipper might run a hundred miles farther in twenty-four hours than ever a steamer had done, but she could not maintain this meteoric burst of speed. Upon the heaving surface of the Western Ocean there was enacted over again the fable of the hare ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... ungovernable, unappeasable, immitigable, unmitigable[obs3]; uncontrollable, incontrollable[obs3]; insuppressible, irrepressible; orgastic, orgasmatic, orgasmic. spasmodic, convulsive, explosive; detonating &c. v.; volcanic, meteoric; stormy &c. (wind) 349. Adv. violently &c. adj.; amain[obs3]; by storm, by force, by main force; with might and main; tooth and nail, vi et armis[Lat], at the point of the sword, at the point of the bayonet; at one fell swoop; with a high hand, through thick ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... street, emptily echoing to my footsteps—no soul awake and audible but me. Then my halt at the placard. And amidst that sleeping stillness, smeared hastily upon the board, a little askew and crumpled, but quite distinct beneath that cool meteoric glare, preposterous and appalling, the measureless evil of ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... long time for human beings to accept that our little piece of meteoric rubble wasn't the exact and absolute center of the Universe. It does appear that way, doesn't it? It may not take so long for ...
— Egocentric Orbit • John Cory
... moment that gaze continued, then the lids fell, the face grew utterly white. He rose, flung the book, crushed and torn, upon the floor, went out, speaking no word to me, nor greeting Louise in the next room. Could he have seen her? No. I, only, had that. For, as I drew from his arm, a meteoric crimson, shooting across the pale face bent over work there, flashed upon me, and then a few great tears, like sudden thunder-drops, falling slowly and wetting the heavy fingers. The long mirror opposite her reflected ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... their misrepresentations. Finding argument thus unavailing, I produced visible and tangible proofs of the truth of my narrative. I showed them a specimen of moonstone. They asserted that it was of the same character as those meteoric stones which had been found in every part of the world, and that I had merely procured a piece of one of these for the purpose of deception. I then exhibited some of what I considered my most curious Lunar plants: but this made the matter worse; for it ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker |
