"Dark Ages" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ignorance, ignorance crasse [Fr.]; unfamiliarity, unacquaintance^; unconsciousness &c adj.; darkness, blindness; incomprehension, inexperience, simplicity. unknown quantities, x, y, z. sealed book, terra incognita, virgin soil, unexplored ground; dark ages. [Imperfect knowledge] smattering, sciolism^, glimmering, dilettantism; bewilderment &c (uncertainty) 475; incapacity. [Affectation of knowledge] pedantry; charlatanry, charlatism^; Philister^, Philistine. V. be ignorant &c adj.; not know &c 490; know not, know not what, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to distance and lack of communications, villages were isolated and self-sufficing, this village economy became stereotyped, and the village trades hereditary. But in western Europe, as order was slowly evolved after the chaos of the Dark Ages, communications and trade-routes were opened up; and whole villages began to specialize in certain industries, leaving other commodities to be produced by other communities. For the exchange of these commodities markets and ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... autocracy, and it is less capable of remedy. The "divine right of the odd man" "to govern wrong" is too often assumed as an article of political faith. A new generation may think that to quote from an early Victorian writer is to appeal to the "dark ages"; but is there not a warning for all time in Hallam's words, "the absolute Government of the majority is in general the most tyrannical of any"? It is possible to decapitate a king who sets himself above the law, or to deport or destroy a reactionary and tyrannous ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... libretto, which is a remarkable specimen of Wagner's alliterative verse, only helps the more to rivet attention and compel admiration. I have given you an idea of the brief overture, and the opera itself opens with a somber recitative, descriptive or symbolic of the Dark Ages of ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... watch through long dark ages. When sunrise reddens them, their shadows stretch westward in bars of darkness over the burnished grass. From morning to midday the shadows shrink, ever hiding from the sun; an army of wraiths, sprite-like able to grow gigantic or draw together ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... unheeding ears. Snettishane was still in the dark ages. As she paused for breath, he said threateningly, "To-night I shall call ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... sunset, ships and harvests, the winds and the rain, and the bargains in the market-place. The reading of Clio's blood-stained scroll would be unbearable, were it not for the reflection that all the important things have been left out—the myriads of sunny mornings that dawned on the "Dark Ages," and filled creation with the joy of life; the hopes and loves throbbing in the great obscure mass of humanity; the individual virtues and victories that co-existed with the decadence of great empires; the vast ocean of consciousness of which History just skims the surface. And now all that ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... she followed him. There clandestinely did he favor her graciously by adding a bar sinister to our knightly escutcheon and a strain of the blood royal to our family. This happened long, long ago in the dark ages or some other dark place—it may have been the Schwarzwald—and it was the curse of the ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... He awoke in the Dark Ages and smelt dawn in the dark, and knew he was not wholly a slave. It was as if, in some tale of Hans Andersen, a stick or a stool had been left in the garden all night and had grown alive and struck root like a tree. For this is the truth behind the old legal fiction ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... and gambled to-day in the factories, the shops, the railroads, as they fought in the dark ages, for the same ends—for sensual pleasures, gross love of power, barbaric show. They would fight on, glorifying their petty deeds of personal gain; but not always. The mystery of human defeat in the midst ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... they love no other, and set themselves to make His spirit tell, first in their lives and after that in the world about them, does it greatly matter whether they speak of His divinity or His uniqueness, whether they accept definitions concerning Him (framed by men in the dark ages) or go about to do His will with no definitions in their mind at all beyond the intellectual conviction that here is One who spoke as no other man has spoken since the ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... world—whichever side you view! Without them, Ocean ne'er would bear a sail To catch the breeze, or fly before the gale; Without them, where could we obtain the Press— That mightiest engine in the universe? Take it away, and we should back be thrown Into dark ages, which would Science drown. While all the household comforts that we boast Would disappear, and be forever lost! Such thoughts as these would ramble through the brain Of our apprentice, while he did maintain A due respect for those above him placed, And kept ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... be wise enough and sufficiently well organized and equipped to demolish and construct at the same time. As yet no such stage has been reached. During the intervals of chaos which separate two periods of forward movement (the dark ages of the world, as they are sometimes called) the masses agonize and suffer, groping blindly and crying out for guidance. Such is the period in which the world ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... getting to be of ponderous size. History's remedy for this malady has always been to knock the whole structure to pieces every now and then and begin again. Perhaps we shall have to have another period of the Dark Ages and another Renaissance to set ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... changed his tone. Suppose this child did have some strange sort of power—mystic perhaps, but definitely abnormal. He may belong in the School of the Future, Smithy thought. Or perhaps in the School of the Past—the Dark Ages Department. But not here! ...
— When I Grow Up • Richard E. Lowe
... of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and institutions of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, outlived the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory, and blended themselves in a new fabric of manners and opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress of despotism and superstition. Men, from ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... which are not unjustly called the Dark Ages, in which were laid the foundations of all the happiness that has been since enjoyed, and of all the greatness that has been achieved, by men. The good seed, from which a new Christian civilisation sprang, was ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... from some of which no person could ever have escaped without an interposition of Providence. Thus it has appeared to me in my calm and unbiassed judgment. Yet I confess I should want faith to make the trial. May it not be, that by such means in dark ages, and among blind nations, the purpose is effected of preserving conscience and the belief of our immortality, without which the life of our life would be extinct? And with regard to the conjurers of the African and American savages, would it be unreasonable to suppose that, ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... "Modern," in some connections and particularly in the study of history the Modern is not usually understood to begin where the Ancient ended but to stand only for the comparatively Recent. For example, in History, the ill-defined period called the Middle and Dark Ages makes a considerable hiatus before, in the process of retrospection, we get back to a civilization which (in Europe at least) we ordinarily regard as Ancient. Again, in History, we distinguish commonly two provinces within the undoubted ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... danger near Vixen managed to avoid it; she made a sweeping curve, skirted the treacherous-looking lawn, and disappeared in another cart-track, between silvery trunks of veteran beeches, self-sown in the dark ages, with here and there a gnarled old oak, rugged and lichen-mantled, with feathery tufts of fern nestling in the hollow places between his ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... the material for the inscription,—they must, then, have been used for a more literary purpose; and verse was the first form of literature. I grant that prior, and indeed long subsequent to the time of Homer, the art of writing (as with us in the dark ages) would be very partially known— that in many parts of Greece, especially European Greece, it might scarcely ever be used but for brief inscriptions. But that is nothing to the purpose;—if known at all—to any Ionian trader—even to any neighbouring ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said, glancing up at her escort. "But even if I were, Mr. Pounce, I am in London, not in the dark ages, and as sure of respect here, at the doors of a theatre, as I am in my own drawing-room. I believe, by the way," she added lightly, not liking to hurt him by too blunt a snub, "I believe this is the only big city in Europe of which so much can be said; and English women may thank themselves for ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... a brilliant period known now as the Renaissance—a French word meaning re-birth—which marks the beginning of modern history. It followed a long, painful period known to us as the Dark Ages, or Middle Ages, namely, the period between ancient and modern times. In the Middle Ages humanity was very ignorant, hampered by all sorts of evil superstitions; while the daily life of the people was miserable and without comforts, lacking many things which ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... in the dark ages, and who, like Merlin, lived in confidence with successive kings, was St. Dunstan. He was born and died in the tenth century. It is not a little instructive to employ our attention upon the recorded adventures, and incidents occurring in the lives, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... imitation of classical models. The classical drama had expired at the break-up of the Roman Empire; its death was due largely, indeed, to the hostility of Christianity, but also to the rude indifference of the barbarian invaders. Whatever secular dramatic impulses remained in the Dark Ages showed themselves not in public and organized performances, but obscurely in the songs and mimicry of minstrels and in traditional folk-customs. Both of these classes of practices were strongly opposed by the Church, because of their connection with heathenism and the ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... period known as the "Dark Ages," Faith reigned, with scarcely rebellious subject. Her temples were "carpeted with knees," and the wealth of nations adorned her countless shrines. The great painters prostituted their genius to immortalize ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... skip eight centuries, to introduce the man that linked the ancient and the modern world, and was almost the sole luminary in the west during the dark ages, namely, Boethius, minister of the Gothic Emperor Theodoric. As much of Aristotle as was known between the 6th and the 11th centuries was handed down by him. During that time, only the logical treatises existed among the Latins; and ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... gardens, with spaliered lemons, suddenly displayed above the illustrated hoardings of a street to be. In the midst of it, in a filthy, half modern, crowded street, a rugged Lombard church porch, dark ages all over: the object of my search, St. Praxed's church; but it was walled up, and I entered by a door in a side lane. Entered to remain on threshold, a Mass at a side altar. Eight small boys blocking the way, with a crowd of sluttish, tawdry worshippers, with the usual ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... century, he informs us, the dark ages of Europe could scarcely have been darker. Weak and wicked kings, the dregs of the worn-out blood of Charlemagne, misruled France, while along the northern coast the Normans robbed and plundered at their will. Even the church had her share of crimes and scandals. In this dark time, ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... Taxing of Personal Incomes, and for the Levying of a Withholding Tax.' Fellow citizens, words fail me to express my horror of this diabolic proposition, this proposed instrument of tyrannical extortion, borrowed from the Dark Ages of the Twentieth Century! Why, if this young nobleman had not taken his blade in hand, I'd have ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... may fall asleep again (ecstatic sensation!) five minutes after he has knocked at the door, and may get up two hours later, to pursue your journey, with perfect impunity and satisfaction. For, to you, what is a time-table but waste-paper?—and a "booked place" but a relic of the dark ages? You dread, perhaps, blisters on your feet—sponge your feet with cold vinegar and water, change your socks every ten miles, and show me blisters after that, if you can! You strap on your knapsack for the first time, and five minutes afterwards feel an aching pain in the muscles at the back ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... was made even more interesting to me, by the fact of my thoughts being brought back from the dark ages by observing a christening going on in one of the dimly lighted aisles; after which a number of little Sunday school children went through an examination of ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... as time progressed, I began to realize that there was very little chance for any radical improvement of our race until the false doctrines which have come down to us from the dark ages were put away; and knowing that in the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg we have a new revelation from the Lord, even the truths of his Second Coming in the clouds of heaven, which are destined to make all things new by leading men back to a life of obedience to the Divine commandments; and, ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... sensation stories, for in those dark ages, even all-perfect America read rubbish. She told no one, but concocted a 'thrilling tale', and boldly carried it herself to Mr. Dashwood, editor of the Weekly Volcano. She had never read Sartor Resartus, but she ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... early Dark Ages there was some prejudice against these rich embroideries. In the sixth century the Bishop St. Cesaire of Arles forbade his nuns to embroider robes with precious stones or painting and flowers. King Withaf of Mercia willed to the Abbey of Croyland "my purple mantle which ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... well said that scepticism is "the necessary antecedent of all progress." Without it we should still be groping in the night of the Dark Ages. The very foundations of modern science and philosophy were laid on ground which was wrested from the Church, and every stone was cemented with the blood of martyrs. As the edifice arose the sharpshooters of faith attacked the builders at every point, and they still continue their old practice, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... Soloman, tipping his glass very politely, "I never-that is, when I hear our people who get themselves laced into narrow-stringed Calvinism, and long-founded foreign missions, talk-think much could have come of the dark ages. I speak after the manner of an attorney, when I say this. We hear a deal of the dark ages, the crimes of the dark ages, the dark idolatry of darker Africa. My word for it, and it's something, if they ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... practicing any of the rites and ceremonies of the old religion. Thus the onslaught of Christian savagery obliterated the civilization of Greece and Rome, and inaugurated that long reign of intellectual night known as the Dark Ages, which, materially aiding in effecting the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, made it possible to erect upon its ruins that Italian Oligarchy, which, since then, has ruled the greater ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... done better, is it not rather an older and higher civilisation and freer political institutions that have held us back from all the cruelties, excesses and immoralities which have taken the world back to the dark ages? It will not do to say that they have occurred in spite of Christianity, and that Christianity is, therefore, not to blame. It is true that Christ's teaching is not to blame, for it is often spoiled in the transmission. But Christianity has taken over control of the morals ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... middle ages, the monasteries of Europe and Asia kept alive the tiny flame of Greek and Roman culture throughout the foggy ignorance of the Dark Ages, so did the priests of Baal, of Ashtoreth, of Marduk and of Ormuzd pass on the torch of their day to their successors who were Greeks and Romans. The Eleusinian mysteries, which at a later time were associated with a considerable amount of sensual, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... far more suggestive of mediaevalism. The hooded faces of the penitents, the quaint wooden figures representing Biblical characters, the coarse dresses, the tawdry colours, the strangely weird arrangement of the whole business, take us back into the monkish superstitions of the Dark Ages, with their mystery plays. It is best seen from one of the windows of the Spanish House, or from the balcony of the Hotel de Ville, on a sultry day, when the sky is heavy with black clouds, and thunder growls over the plain of Flanders, and hot raindrops fall now ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... truth of our proposition. When the mists of ignorance and superstition which had for centuries enveloped the world, had begun to clear away, and when Europe first attempted to throw off the errors of the Dark Ages, the arts were dead, and the only music known was that cultivated by the monks and clergy, as necessary to their profession, and the songs of the Troubadours. "The fame of the Troubadours," remarks ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... said softly, "do have licenses against book agents. One of the relics of the dark ages, but abolished wherever the light o' culture is loved and esteemed. What so helpful as the book? What so comforting? What so uplifting? And who but the book agent carries help and comfort and uplift, and leaves it scattered around, one dollar down and one dollar ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... Luther. They would crowd around a person who was able to read, and would listen for hours. At St. Paul's in London public reading of the Bible became a regular custom. But between the early days of Christianity and the beginning of the Reformation lies a period which. is known as the Dark Ages. No amount of oratory will turn that age into a Bright Age. "From the seventh to the eleventh century books were so scarce that often not one could be found in an entire city, and even rich monasteries possessed only a single text-book." ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... plainly an idle monkish Tale, the other a simple Narrative of an Event. One is a Fact supported by numerous authorities, the other evidently is one of those prodigies, pretended miracles, and priestly Inventions, which are to be found in most Authors who wrote during the dark ages ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams
... Mephistopheles be types; for they are artistic expressions of essential and historical realities. But though the beck of curiosity lead us through the labyrinthine plot of a novel, long as Gibbon's way through the Dark Ages, yet, when we have finished it, the bubble collapses, the little heavens which had been framed about us roll away, and most rarely does a character remain ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... need its prisons, but as we become more enlightened we insist on treating our criminals more from the physiological and psychological standpoints than in the cruel, brutal, barbarous manner of the dark ages. In other words the sociologist insists that the law-breaker has greater need of the physician than ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... force which shows little sign of being overcome—the profound superstition of the people. A striking episode of street life reminded me how near akin were the southern Italians of to-day to their predecessors in what are called the dark ages; nay, to those more illustrious ancestors who were so ready to believe that an ox had uttered an oracle, or that a stone had shed blood. Somewhere near the swing-bridge, where undeniable steamships ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... the magic light, only to be borne by him who has earned the power through toil of reason and of induction, he has been able to see in the spirit and describe the processes of creation. His knowledge has pierced the dark ages, when through countless aeons the earth was being prepared for man; he has shown how forests—vast as those we see to-day, but with vanished forms of vegetation and of life, grew, decayed, and were preserved in altered condition to give us in ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... formidable foes. I'll wager there's been some terrible fighting in these narrow ways—and there may be some more, too, before we're through with it. God, what a place! Makes me think of the machicoulis and pasterns at old Carcassonne. So far as this is concerned, we're back again in the Dark Ages—dark, dark as Erebus!" ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... his head and a wine-cup in his hand." Antigonus was, in fact, not so much what we should call a philosopher as a man of action with literary tastes, standing thus in marked contrast to Pyrrhus, who "cared as little for knowledge or culture as did any baron of the Dark Ages." When he was engaged in a difficult negotiation with Ptolemy Philadelphus he allowed himself to be mollified by a quotation from Homer, who, as Plato said, was "the educator of Hellas." Although not himself an original ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... is not merely to pass over a few degrees of latitude,—it is to take a step from the nineteenth century back into the dark ages. In the clime of sunshine and endless summer, we are in the land of starless political darkness. Lying under the lee of a land where every man is a sovereign is a realm where the lives, liberties, and fortunes of all are held at the will of a single ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... note that is in harmony with its colour and surroundings: the emblem of some wild survival from dark ages when that spot had been one of the most uncivilised in the whole of Britain—a land of wild, uncouth people, living in a state of perpetual watch and guard, fearing the sea, fearing the land, cringingly ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... light-red coat could not possibly have been mistaken for anything but a sportsman, if he had not borne an equal resemblance to a general postman. Last of all came Mr. Pickwick, whom the boys applauded as loud as anybody, probably under the impression that his tights and gaiters were some remnants of the dark ages; and then the two vehicles proceeded towards Mrs. Leo Hunter's; Mr. Weller (who was to assist in waiting) being stationed on the box of that in which ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... to the philanthropist is this extravagance than the miserable frugality of want, and the barbarous virtues of ignorance, which at that time oppressed nearly the whole of Europe! The Burgundian era shines pleasingly forth from those dark ages, like a lovely spring day amid the showers of February. But this flourishing condition tempted the Flemish towns at last to their ruin; Ghent and Bruges, giddy with liberty and success, declared war against Philip the Good, the ruler of eleven ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Latin and Greek to keep the ignorant in their places; but now, that cheap education has endowed the tradesman with Latin and Greek, there is a tendency to feel toward intellectual culture much as the barons did away back in the Dark Ages, and to outdazzle by mere show of costly pleasure the class they can no longer excel in learned polish. After all, the great question in recommending culture is the question of its effect on morals: if the effect of poetry and art is weakening to the moral sense, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... and sword, stately with a pride that had won its just and inalienable majesty from elastic centuries of progress and culture, History, the muse to whom fewest songs were sung, yet whose march was music's sublimest voice, trembled upon the brink of the Dark Ages, and leaped, in her armor, into the abyss of ignorance before her. A poetry the purest, an art the noblest, a religion deeply symbolical, a freedom bold and magnificent, had given to the world-histories ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... It is the Way trodden by Patriarchs, Prophets, and ancient servants of God. It is the Way of the Apostles, and Martyrs, and Confessors of the early Church—the Way that became obscured and almost hidden during the dark ages. It is the Way for the bringing to light and re-opening of which God raised up ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... nations, and blessed it with equal laws and equal protection to all? What shall we say of the constitution that ordained slavery as the corner stone of a new confederacy, to teach mankind the folly of Christian civilization, and bring back the 'statelier Eden' of the dark ages? To which party in this terrible strife of brothers does 'liberty' look for protection to-day? Which of the two armies of brothers now arrayed against each other on the plains of Virginia and Georgia, is fighting for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution—learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance which was the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... likewise. Greek philosophy, the germs of physical science, and all that we owe to the ancients, would have perished; and we should have truly had an invasion of the barbarians, followed by truly dark ages, in which Europe would have had to begin all anew, without the help of the generations ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... the order described as these six days, God planted in chaos the various beginnings of things. These in the fullness of time sprang up into the world as we know it now. The problem was not a question about which the church cared to trouble itself, and with the oncoming of the Dark Ages the whole matter dropped nearly out of the thoughts ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... woman; (2) the establishment of the home and the enthronement of the home relation; (3) the advancement of the idea of humanity; (4) the development of morality; (5) the conservation of spiritual power; (6) the conservation of knowledge during the Dark Ages; (7) the development of faith; (8) the introduction of a new social order founded on brotherhood, which manifested itself in many ways in the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... attended High Mass in the cathedral, built in the eleventh century. Being entirely new to us it was a most entertaining spectacular performance. With our American ideas of religious devotion, it seemed to us that the people, as well as the building, belonged to the Dark Ages. About fifty priests, in mantles, gowns, and capes, some black, some yellow,—with tinseled fringes and ornamentation,—with all manner of gestures, genuflections, salutations, kneelings, and burning ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... "The dark ages are not back, please; they're all 'round, and you know very well that my critical bookstore has never been tried yet. But tell me one thing: should you wish to live with a picture, even for a few hours, which had been painted by an old lady of seventy who had never ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... the existence of such an organization cannot be tolerated today! This survival of the dark ages must be stamped out. However just a cause may be, secret murder is not permissible, as you, a man of culture, a Believer, and"—I glanced at his unusual turban—"a descendant of the ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... readiness with which the whole country yielded when the Roman forces were defeated. But hence also arose the weakness of the Persians, and their speedy loss of this conquest when the Arabs rebelled. Their rule, however, in Egypt was not quite unmarked in the history of these dark ages. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... hand, looked curiously at this heathen Prince of Darkness, arrived out of the dark ages to sit to her for ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... grew older, Di picked up certain stray bits of information, but she never tried to piece them together. She felt that she would a little rather not know any more. A quarrel there had certainly been, some time in the dark ages before she was born, and the old man had proved himself obstinate and implacable. Friendly overtures had been made from time to time, but he had set his face against all such advances, and now, for many, ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... rumoured that tradesmen's weekly books are to be abolished. We have long felt that the absurd practice of paying the fellows is a relic of the dark ages. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... admire a man for being able to write them, as for being able to write his name. But in the days of William the Third such versification was rare; and a rhymer who had any skill in it passed for a great poet, just as in the dark ages a person who could write his name passed for a great clerk. Accordingly, Duke, Stepney, Granville, Walsh, and others whose only title to fame was that they said in tolerable metre what might have been as well said in prose, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the credit of having kept alive the study of the stars during the dark ages of European history. They erected some fine observatories, notably in Spain and in the neighbourhood of Bagdad. Following them, some of the Oriental peoples embraced the science in earnest; Ulugh Beigh, grandson of the famous ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... analyzed, one of the most important written contributions to practical medicine, to the treatment of internal disease, of this century, if not since the days of Sydenham. The lancet was the magician's wand of the dark ages of medicine. The old physicians not only believed in its general efficacy as a wonder-worker in disease, but they believed that each malady could be successfully attacked from some special part of the body,—the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... dark ages the mystical virtues of the lodestone drew more attention than those of the more precious amber, and interesting experiments were made with it. The Romans knew that it could attract iron at some distance ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... in the still starlight of the mountains; for all the rest are asleep by this time] It was just so with her, sir. Her intellect reached forward into the twentieth century: her social prejudices and family affections reached back into the dark ages. Ah, sir, how the words of Shakespear seem to fit every ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... Christian religion to which Britain owes its present greatness. Yet subsequently, on account of the inaccessible nature of the country, the inhabitants, separated from their more enlightened fellow-subjects, remained for a long period almost as ignorant as their ancestors in the dark ages; and, till of late years, retained many of the grosser superstitions and customs ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... more right had he to her past than she had to his. The world had changed since that had been the code of life. That code was a relic of the dark ages when the Tree of Knowledge grew only in the Garden of Eden. Now the Tree of Knowledge grew in every man's garden and ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... this matter was reprinted in the Preface to his "History of the Reformation," and it contains also the bishop's rejoinder against Wharton's method of criticism in the "Specimen": "He had examined the dark ages before the Reformation with much diligence, and so knew many things relating to those times beyond any man of the age; he pretended that he had many more errors in reserve, and that this specimen was only a hasty collection of a few, out of many other ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... indicate the indigenous Italic populations molded by Roman rule into homogeneity. The resurgence of this population and its reattainment of intellectual consciousness by the recovery of past traditions and the rejection of foreign influence constitutes the history of Italy upon the close of the Dark Ages. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Channel and the Severn Sea, and the Bristol Avon receives the stream that rises but a mile from its namesake of Christchurch Bay. High in one of the combes at this end of the valley is the small village of All Cannings, said to have been of much importance in the dark ages as a Saxon centre. All it has to show the visitor now is a cruciform church with Norman and Early English fragments and ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... the word "war" as a standard when it is not courage and strength that count, but explosive bombs and the length of range of the guns and the speed with which women and children turn out shells? We used to speak with horror of the tyrants of dark ages, who threw helpless men and women to the lions and tigers; but now is there one of us who would not mention them with respect in comparison with the rulers who are at present directing the struggle between men and ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... colleges, I desire to say in this paper everything I have to say on the subject, and therefore take this opportunity to refer to the practice of "hazing," although it is but remotely connected with Class-Day. If we should find it among hinds, a remnant of the barbarisms of the Dark Ages, blindly handed down by such slow-growing people as go to mill with their meal on side of the saddle and a stone on the other to balance, as their fathers did, because it never occurred to them to divide the meal into two parcels and make it balance itself, we should ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Griffin nonchalantly, as she started up the stair again, dragging the board after her. "The March Hare originated it back in the dark ages, and we've been doing it off and on—when the authorities don't get on ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... parents. I saw the bent skull of the Flathead Indian child, the crippled feet of the Chinese girl child, the age-long, hideous life and death of the child-wife and the child-widow of Hindoostan. I saw The Child in Sparta, and The Child in Rome, The Child in the Dark Ages, The Child scourged, imprisoned, starved, its mind filled with all manner of black falsehoods, its body misunderstood, and maltreated; and my heart ached, and I cried out, "Were there no Mothers for ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... supposed that this contemptible practice was first introduced into Europe by the Gipsies: but such persons are greatly mistaken. In the dark ages of superstition, in which this wandering people came to our part of the world, prognostication and fortune-telling were carried on to an infinite extent; and so enraged were the deceivers of those days against the Gipsies, that they proclaimed they knew nothing of the art; that they ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... reverence than Europeans for the privacy of others, but also less resentment for the violation of their own privacy. The new democracy has resigned itself to the custom of living in glass houses and regards the desire to shroud one's personal life in mystery as one of the survivals of the dark ages. The newspaper personalities are largely "the result of the desperate desire of the new classes, to whom democratic institutions have given their first chance, to discover the way to live, in the wide ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Wigwam had gradually been undergoing improvements, ever since that period, which, in the way of the arts, if not in the way of chronology, might be termed the dark ages of Otsego. The great hall had long before lost its characteristic decoration of the severed arm of Wolf, a Gothic paper that was better adapted to the really respectable architecture of the room being ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... he nodded, smiled and was positively radiant with the latitudinarianism of the old Italian painter. It was interesting for it was a fresh proof that even the early Church united had a period of thought and tolerance before the dark ages closed around it. There is one thing that I must tell you more of when we meet, the tower of Giotto. It was built in a square of Florence, near the Cathedral, by a self-made young painter and architect who had kept sheep as a boy on the Tuscan hills. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... am sure, would not read them for general use and pleasure, and are a very different kind of author. I shall like, I dare to say, any thing you do write, but I am not overjoyed at your wading into the history of dark ages' unless you use it as a canvass to be embroidered with your opinions, and episodes, and comparisons with more recent times. That is a most entertaining kind of writing. In general, I have seldom wasted time on the origin of nations, unless for ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... of the road do not concern me. I give way to no one—certainly not to your companion, who appears to be disloyal. I had forgotten, for a moment, the character of this country. The dark ages ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... as to the lowly born. Nature's laws are inflexible and swerve not for any human wish. They outraged them by the admixture of kindred blood, and degeneracy was often the result. A people should always have for their chief ruler the highest and noblest intellect among them, but in those dark ages they were too often compelled to submit to the lowest, simply because it had been born to the position. But," she added, with a sweet smile, "that time lies many centuries behind us, and I sometimes think we had better forget ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... thinks worth rescuing from the darkness of the dark ages, one is the Irish metaphysician, John Erigena. In a recent communication to the "Association" we had Bavarians acknowledging the Irish St. Killian as the apostle ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... residuum still available now, 300 years later), it may yet be said that the Revival of Letters did do a good deal to divest celestial phenomena of those alarming and panic-causing attributes which undoubtedly attached to them during the earlier ages of the world and during the "Dark Ages" in Western Europe quite as much as during any other period of the world's history. No one can examine the writings of the ancient Greek and Roman historians, and the chronicles kept in the monasteries of Western Europe by their monkish occupiers, without being ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... nonsense. My father replies that, in the good old times, not only the priests but even the bishops themselves rode about the country on horseback, putting infidels to the sword. I rejoin that this might happen in the dark ages, but that in our days the ministers of the Most High should know how to wield no other weapons than those of persuasion. "And what if persuasion be not enough?" rejoins my father. "Do you think it would be amiss ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... Then came the Dark Ages of history, and in a degraded world dancing was saved and taken under the protection of the Christian church, where it remained for the greater part of a thousand years. The vehicle that carried the ballet through this period was known as the "spectacle." These sacred spectacles, ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... all the arrangements, while to the younger folk it was "all very well," but quite of the old times. Little did they know of "old times" beyond the quarter century of their birth! Poor old Arnscombe might feebly represent them, but even that had struggled out of the modern "dark ages." Magdalen had decided on talking to Agatha and seeing how far she understood the situation, and she came to her room to put her in possession now that Mrs. Best had ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... his denunciation of the cowardice which had given her over to her enemies. Later Bishop Bradford, expressing his sympathy in a speech to the Dorcas' Society, referred to the walling up of escaped nuns during the dark ages. A little tide of paragraphs flowed from the papers, plaintively murmuring the one sad strain: the dear sister could not be far distant; she might be in the city, deep in a convent dungeon; she had belonged to the community of the Good Shepherd, whose convent stood ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... threatening from another quarter. Creeping up from the darkness of the dark ages, a hideous monster is intently watching to seize the throat of liberty in our land. It thrusts itself up into the noonday of the ninteenth century, not that it may be benefited by its light and freedom, but that it may suppress and obscure them. The ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... here warn everyone concerned that the most formidable opposition to the break-up of these unnatural alliances between east and west, between Democracy and Autocracy, between the twentieth century and the Dark Ages, will not come from the Balancers of Power. They are not really Balance of Power alliances: in fact, they are tending to an enormous overbalance of power in favor of the east as against the west and in favor of Militarist Autocracy as against Democracy. They are at root absolutely unpatriotic, ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... second prevails. From hence it happens that the most civilised nations are often guilty of injustice and cruelty which the least civilised would abhor, and that many of the most absurd opinions and doctrines which have been imposed in the Dark Ages of ignorance continue to be the opinions and doctrines of ages enlightened by philosophy and learning. "If I was a philosopher," says Montaigne, "I would naturalise art instead of artilising Nature." The expression is odd, but the sense is good, ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... Government interference. Our play-writers and play-actors could do a great deal to raise the standard of stage-literature and of acting, if they would but try. But they do not try. I went the other evening to see that relic of the Dark Ages, a sterling English comedy. If any one thinks I go too far in saying that there is no attempt on our stage to imitate Nature, and that the writing and acting of English plays are like the landscape-painting of the Chinese,—a wonderfully ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... unknown; a life free from temptations and intellectual snares, from political ambition and social unrest, from recognized injustice and stinging inequalities. The historian with his theory of development might call this revolution the change from national youth to manhood, the emerging from the dark ages of Hebrew history to a period of national aggrandizement and growth in civilization,—one of the necessary changes which must take place if a nation would become strong, powerful, and cultivated. To the eye of the contemplative, conservative, and God-fearing ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... des Volkes) is the proudest designation of the German Kaiser. "Little Father" is alike the literal meaning of Attila, the name of the far-famed leader of the "Huns," in the dark ages of Europe, and of batyushka, the affectionate term by which the peasant of Russia ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... earliest beginnings to the dawn of atomic power. Barrent skimmed through them. As he read, some memories of prior reading returned to him. He was able to jump quickly from Periclean Greece to Imperial Rome, to Charlemagne and the Dark Ages, from the Norman Conquest to the Thirty Years' War, and then to a rapid survey of the Napoleonic Era. He read with more care about the World Wars. The book ended with the explosion of the first atom bombs. The other books on the shelf were ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... early, after poetry, but with architecture, and before painting and polyphonic music. It reached the greatest perfection of which it is capable in the age of Pericles, and from that time progress was impossible to it, and for a thousand years its movement was one of decline. After the dark ages sculpture was one of the first arts to revive; and again it develops rapidly—though not so rapidly as before, conditions of custom and climate being less favorable to it—until it reaches, in the first ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox |
