"Immemorial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... According to the immemorial fashion of love, they understood and misunderstood each other alternately playing high and low at every other moment upon the wide gamut of feeling, touching faint sweet notes that would ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... becoming blue and white gown Jane had given her the previous year. Since that first eventful freshman dance, when Jane had played fairy godmother to her, she had worn the exquisite frock only once. Now it looked as fresh and dainty as it had on that immemorial night. Trimmed as it was with clusters of velvet forget-me-nots, Norma wore no ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... ON immemorial altitudes august Grief holds her high dominion. Bold the feet That climb unblenching to that stern retreat Whence, looking down, man knows himself but dust. There lie the mightiest passions, earthward thrust Beneath her regnant footstool, and there meet Pale ghosts of buried ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... 340.; Vol. vii., p. 316.).—May I be allowed to inform MR. PINKERTON that the sharks' teeth (fossils), now so frequently found imbedded in this tufa rock, and cheaply sold, are not known as "the tongues of vipers," but, on the contrary, from time immemorial, as the "tongues of St. Paul." In proof of this, I would refer MR. PINKERTON to the following extract, which I have taken from an Italian letter now in the Maltese Library; which was published on August 28, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... irredeemable, so fast asleep intellectually that they cannot be awakened; designed by nature, therefore, to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. This cruel and wicked thing was said of Slavs; it is the same thing which has been said from time immemorial by the slave owners of their slaves. First they degrade human beings by denying them the opportunity to develop their better nature: no schools, no teaching, no freedom, no outlook; and then, as if in mockery, ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... America the opportunity, internationally recognized as legitimate, to seize any of the enemy's possessions; hence the acquisition of the Philippines by conquest. Up to this point there is nothing to criticize, in face of the universal tacit recognition, from time immemorial, of the right ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... crowded round her, and besought her eagerly to explain herself. She gravely replied that for time immemorial the Statue had been famous for performing miracles: From this She inferred that the Saint was concerned at the conflagration of a Convent which She protected, and expressed her grief by audible lamentations. Not having equal faith in the miraculous ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... the procession had gone off by different routes to ride the boundaries of lordships and perform other annual ceremonies: part had dispersed: and another part had accompanied Sir Morgan to the town hall of Machynleth—where a Welsh court-of-grace was held, according to immemorial precedent, for receiving petitions, granting extraordinary favors or dispensations, and redressing any complaints against the agents of Sir Morgan (as lord of Walladmor and many other manors) in their various feudal ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... the alley, braced himself in the angle of a brick pier and waited. He neither stamped his feet nor flailed his arms about to drive off the cold. He just stood still with the patience of his immemorial ancestor, waiting. Unconscious of the lapse of time, unconscious of the figures that presently began straggling out of the narrow door, that were ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... is dotted pleasantly with hawthorn bushes and the pretty pieces of sandwich-paper that are always the harbingers of London's Spring. Beyond these things, and far away to the front, you may detect on clear days a white church-tower nestling like Swiss milk amongst immemorial trees. And this view is mine—mine, like the old home. If we linger for a moment in the road we shall probably see the scornful face of the proud usurper at one of the windows calmly enjoying this view of mine, all unconscious that I, the rightful owner, am standing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... base-ball one point is scored only when the runner has made every base in succession and returned to the one from which he started. In rounders every player on the side must be put out before the other side can come in, while in base-ball from time immemorial the rule has been "three out, all out." The distinctive feature of rounders, and the one which gives it its name, is that when all of a side except two have been retired, one of the two remaining may call for "the rounder;" that is, he is allowed three hits at the ball, and ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... German have from time immemorial looked upon themselves as the guardians and protectors of ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... end. She had never trusted Jane—no, not a minute; she had never really trusted her mother. Something had told her that Jane had never meant in her heart to leave Charley, that she was only making a scene, after the immemorial habit of women, before going back to him. And yet, though she had suspected this all along, she was as indignant as if she had been deceived by a conspiracy of the three of them. Her sense of decency was outraged. She despised Jane because she had no strength of character; but even while this ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Punch was brought to Italy in the fifteenth century.[2081] Polichinelle, as developed in France, is distinctly French. The model is Henri IV. The hump is an immemorial sign of the French badin-es-farces. "Polichinelle seems to me to be a purely national (French) type, and one of the most spontaneous and vivacious creations of French fantasy."[2082] The puppet play of Punch and Judy has enjoyed immense popularity in western Europe. The Faust legend has been developed ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... wonderful canvas where the foreshore of Valencia, usually so vivacious with running figures and the brightest of sunlight on dancing sails, had been made the wine-dark sea of the pagan questioner with the weight of immemorial human woe to shadow it. Josie had been asking me about marriage and children, for even she was knowing her more solemn moments in the midst of all that feverishly organized merriment. But I was surprised, when she slipped a hand through my arm, to see ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... (the Greeks), in spite even of the feuds of tribes and the jealousies of states, the deep feeling of that ideal unity which constitutes a people? It was their primitive religion; it was a dim recollection of the common allegiance they owed from time immemorial to the great father of gods and men; it was their belief in the old Zeus of Dodona in the Pan-Hellenic Zeus."[155] "There is, in truth, but one," says Sophocles, "one only God, who made both heaven and long-extended earth and bright-faced swell of seas and force of winds." ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... left by deceased citizens. There are depots established to dispense medicines among the poor, and others whence clothing is distributed free of cost. It must be remembered that these societies and organizations are not copied from Western models. They have existed here from time immemorial. ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... are now justly famous in the county, the natural result has happened and women have come here in considerable numbers. Women preponderate in spinning places, because the work of spinning yarn has always been in their hands from time immemorial. And they tend our modern machinery as deftly as of old they twirled the distaff and worked the spinning-wheel; and as steadily as they used to trudge the rope walks and spin, like spiders, from the masses of flax or hemp ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... time immemorial been under the special supervision of the proprietors of Riverton Park, the whole hamlet being a portion of the property. The parish to which it belonged was extensive, and the parish church some five miles distant, Bridgepath being ...
— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson
... corpses; how these elements are then synthetically combined into food tablets for those of us who are yet alive—thus completing an endless chain from the dead to the living. Naturally then, agriculture and stock-raising ceased, since the food problem, with which man had coped from time immemorial, was solved. The two direct results were, first—that land lost the inflated values it had possessed when it was necessary for tillage, and second—that men were at last given enough leisure to enter the fields ...
— John Jones's Dollar • Harry Stephen Keeler
... bird, Resting your head half out of your wimple In the slow dignity of your eternal pause. Alone, with no sense of being alone, And hence six times more solitary; Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through immemorial ages Your little round house in ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... address of welcome was made by the principal chief of the inviting nation. The topics of this address comprised a singular mixture of congratulation and condolence, and seem to have been prescribed forms, which had come down from immemorial antiquity, ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... their expressions of contrition and their promises of amendment. In one matter, too, which, if not exactly political, was at all events of public interest, she acted in a manner of which none of her predecessors had set an example. By a custom of immemorial antiquity, at the accession of a new sovereign, a tax had been levied on the whole kingdom as an offering to the king, known as "the gift of the happy accession;[11]" when there was a queen, a similar tax was imposed upon the Parisians, to provide what was called "the girdle of the queen.[12]" ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... house, mounted it cautiously, and began to wash windows with housewifely thoroughness. Her stout figure was swathed in a gray sweater and on her head was a battered felt hat—the sort of window—washing costume that has been worn by women from time immemorial. We noticed that she used plenty of hot water and clean rags, and that she rubbed the glass until it sparkled, leaning perilously sideways on the ladder to detect elusive streaks. Our keenest housekeeping eye could find no fault with the way Blanche ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... for making unbaked bricks (TobSpan. Adobe) with chaff and bruised or charred straw. The use of this article in rainless lands dates from ages immemorial, and formed the outer ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... graveyard brings to mind the universal worship of ancestors, which has been from time immemorial such a marked feature of Chinese religious life. At death, the spirit of a man or woman is believed to remain watching over the material interests of the family to which the deceased had belonged. Offerings of various kinds, ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... holy living are good and virtuous. All creatures follow the principles of conduct which are innate in their nature. The sinful being who has no control over self acquire lust, anger and other vices. It is the immemorial rule that virtuous actions are those that are founded on justice, and it is also ordained by holy men that all iniquitous conduct is sin. Those who are not swayed by anger, pride, haughtiness and envy, and those who are quiet and straight-forward, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... valleys?"[558] The words suggest a belief in divine beings filling heaven, earth, sea, air, hills, glens, lochs, and rivers, and following human customs. A naive faith, full of beauty and poetry, even if it had its dark and grim aspects! These powers or personalities had been invoked from time immemorial, but the invocations were soon stereotyped into definite formulas. Such a formula is put into the mouth of Amairgen, the poet of the Milesians, when they were about to invade Erin, and it may have been a magical invocation of the powers of nature at the beginning of ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... the most inattentive traveller as soon as he steps into this Lower Egypt, where from time immemorial the Nile has been accumulating its mud in thin layers, is the close intimacy of the fellah and the earth. Autochthone is the name that best fits him; he springs from the clay which he treads, he is ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... student had to verify every fact afresh for himself. The business of the teacher was explanation of the methods of verification, insistence on the accomplishment of verification. It was a training in the immemorial attitude of the scientific mind, codified by Huxley and made an ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... chemical proof of this thesis as here set forth. Men have from time immemorial put things "in their bellies to steal their brains away." The chemical substance known as ethyl alcohol has been an artificial basis of good fellowship the world over, as well as furnishing a very fair share of the tragedy, the misery and the humor of the world. This is because, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... years' retirement Milton began to feel the want of a little society, of the kind that is 'quiet, wise, and good,' and he meditated taking chambers in one of the Inns of Court, where he could have a pleasant and shady walk under 'immemorial elms,' and also enjoy the advantages of a few choice associates at home and an elegant society abroad. The death of his mother in 1637 gave his thoughts another direction, and he obtained his father's permission ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... explored at Tello, Nippur, and elsewhere, belong to city walls, houses, and temples. The most peculiar and conspicuous feature of the temple was a lofty rectangular tower of several stages, each stage smaller than the one below it. The arch was known and used in Babylonia from time immemorial. As for the ornamental details of buildings, we know very little about them except that large use was made ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... gain is not often considered by mankind as very criminal, and those who would willingly subject it to its adequate punishment of fine and confiscation, will hesitate to become the means of inflicting death on the offender, or of depriving him of his liberty. The Poets have, from time immemorial, claimed a kind of exclusive jurisdiction over the sin of avarice: but, unfortunately, minds once steeled by this vice are not often sensible to the attacks of ridicule; and I have never heard that any poet, from Plautus to Moliere, has reformed a single miser. I am not, therefore, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... That same peculiar dignity, which no impertinence can scathe, that same abiding peace, the handiwork of labouring centuries, that immemorial youth, which drains the cups of Time and pays no reckoning—three wonders of the world, rose ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... by disease it is difficult to come to any {23} definite conclusion. In some cases mutilations have been practised for a vast number of generations without any inherited result. Godron has remarked[60] that different races of man have from time immemorial knocked out their upper incisors, cut off joints of their fingers, made holes of immense size through the lobes of their ears or through their nostrils, made deep gashes in various parts of their bodies, and there is no reason ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... thinker's nerves. He suddenly remembered that in his house there was a cupboard in a wall, with two shelves devoted to storage of heirlooms; on the upper shelf lay the torah of immemorial usage in his family; the second contained cups of horn and metal, old phylacteries, amulets, and things of vertu in general, and of such addition and multiplication through the ages that he himself could not have made a list ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... green door of his domain was in a garden-wall on which the discoloured stucco made patches, and in the small detached villa behind it everything was old, the furniture, the servants, the books, the prints, the immemorial habits and the new improvements. The Mallows, at Carrara Lodge, were within ten minutes, and the studio there was on their little land, to which they had added, in their happy faith, for building it. This was the good fortune, if it was not the ill, of her having brought him ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... claiming? Do you know, too,—but you can scarcely know it,—that it has been surmised by some that there is an insecurity in the title to the estate, and has always been; so that the possessors have lived in some apprehension, from time immemorial, that another heir would appear and take from them the fair inheritance? It is ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Its roofs were tiled with antique stones covered over deep with moss, each little window looked with a myriad strange cut panes on the gardens shaped with quaint devices and overrun with weeds. On rusted hinges the doors sung to and fro and were fashioned of planks of immemorial oak with black knots gaping from their sockets. Against it all there beat the thistle-down, about it clambered the ivy or swayed the weeds; tall and straight out of the twisted chimneys arose blue columns ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... his iron-works at Wuchang, in the province of Hupeh, he ordered the substitution of a drawbridge over a creek for the old bridge which had stood there from time immemorial, the object being to let steamers pass freely up and down. Unfortunately, the old bridge was destroyed before the new one was ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... 'l-lanz." These unguents have been used in the East from time immemorial whilst the last generation in England knew nothing of anointing with oil for incipient consumption. A late friend of mine, Dr. Stocks of the Bombay Establishment, and I proposed it as long back as 1845; but in those days it was a far cry from ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... show that this woman, according to the judgment of the Indians, was a witch. That she had been regularly tried, and condemned by their laws; and her death was in conformity with usages, that had been in existence among them, from time immemorial. ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... not be obtained in this way. After much parleying with Hebrews and chaffing with country people, I heard that Mayor Bragg kept some fair animals, and when I stated my purpose at his house, he commenced the business after a fashion immemorial at the ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... the naked surface of the rock, but the Tusayan builders would hardly resort to so laborious a device to gain this small advantage. The explanation of this apparent waste of labor lies in the fact that kivas had been built of masonry from time immemorial, and that the changed conditions of the present Tusayan environment have not exerted their influence for a sufficient length of time to overcome the traditional practice. As will be seen later, the building of a kiva is accompanied by certain rites and ceremonies ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... The immemorial custom of planting trees on graves in China is supposed by De Groot (p. 277) to be due to "the desire to strengthen the soul of the buried person, thus to save his body from corruption, for which reason trees such as pines and cypresses, deemed to be bearers of great vitality for being possessed ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... and is of ancient Macedonian descent. His ancestors from time immemorial have held the office he now fills, and he even supposes himself to be related to the extinct royal dynasty through the mistress of some one of the Lagides. Keraunus sits in the town council and never stirs out in the streets without ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... probably the larva of some insect or crustacean, very common in the pools and sluggish streams of the country inhabited by these Indians. Now, it is possible that this figure has been used with the same meaning from time immemorial, but I find, as pointed out to me by Prof. Cyrus Thomas, that almost exactly the same figure is on a vessel pictured on Plate VII of the manuscript Troano, where a religious ceremony of some kind is evidently represented. The same figure is also found in Landa's character for the ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... which the ensuing Novel mainly turns, are derived from the ancient Metrical Chronicle of "The Brace," by Archdeacon Barbour, and from the "History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus," by David Hume of Godscroft; and are sustained by the immemorial tradition of the western parts of Scotland. They are so much in consonance with the spirit and manners of the troubled age to which they are referred, that I can see no reason for doubting their being founded in fact; the names, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... and grandfather before him had for many a decade done the weaving work, both in linen and wool, required by "them at the castle." He had been on the land, in the person of his ancestors, from time almost immemorial, though he had only a small cottage, and a little bit of land, barely enough to feed the translunar cow. But poor little place as Jeames's was, if the laird would have sold it the price would have gone a good way towards clearing the ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... of the sky the vast triangle formed by the Pole Star, golden Arcturus (not now visible), and ice-blue Vega. But these are not names for me. Better are those homely sounds that link the pageant of night with the immemorial life of the fields. Arcturus is Alpha of the Herdsman. Shall it ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... that Papua whispers to you of her immemorial ancientness and of her power. And, as every white man must, I fought against her spell. While I struggled I saw a tall figure striding down the pier; a Kapa-Kapa boy followed swinging a new valise. There was something familiar about ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... writ large. Anyhow the Dyers were not so distinguished in mind and manners as they were wealthy. Old conservative folks sighed at the idea of Redcross Manor-house, which had belonged to the Cliftons from time immemorial, till the last Clifton fell into the hands of the Jews before he was twenty, and was driven to break the entail by the time he was forty, passing to a family of Dyers. The best that could be said of them was, that the old people were comparatively inoffensive and the ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... on her left, the place of honour going by custom immemorial to monsieur le cure of Nant. For all that, Duchemin declined to feel slighted. Was he not on the right ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... conference illustrates a general characteristic of reformers. Almost without debate, certainly without adequate consideration, the conference adopted a recommendation that astronomers and navigators should change their system of reckoning time. Both these classes have, from time immemorial, begun the day at noon, because this system was most natural and convenient, when the question was not that of a measure of time for daily life, but simply to indicate with mathematical precision the moment of an event. Navigators had begun the day at noon, ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... Birotteau fell to examining attentively the broad green lines painted on the oilcloth which, from custom immemorial, Mademoiselle Gamard left on the table at breakfast-time, without regard to the ragged edges or the various scars displayed on its surface. The priests sat opposite to each other in cane-seated arm-chairs on either side of the square table, the head of which ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... guess'd right; Yet, entre-nous, thought her not very polite: But that was a trifle; he now had a clew To assist his research; and more satisfied grew: Since the OWL'S well-known wisdom, and vast penetration, From time immemorial had ...
— The Peacock and Parrot, on their Tour to Discover the Author of "The Peacock At Home" • Unknown
... mountains now came plainly in view, late moon, melancholy and significant, as the waning moon always is. By its dim illumination Creed saw Judith Barrier standing at the door of his own house, smiling at him tremulously, with the immemorial challenge in her dark eyes. To that challenge the native man in him—the lover—so long usurped by the zealot, the would-be philanthropist, rose thrilling, yet still bewildered and uncertain, to respond. Something heady ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... settled, and John feels supremely happy, just as all sincere and successful wooers have done from time immemorial. ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... the labyrinths of the bazaar and stir with foolish finger the dust which lies thick upon immemorial custom, what should ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... inquiring, I was told that it is indispensably necessary a young man should procure a skull before he gets married. When I urged on them that the custom would be more honored in the breach than the observance, they replied that it was established from time immemorial, and could not be dispensed with. Subsequently, however, Sejugah allowed that heads were very difficult to obtain now, and a young man might sometimes get married by giving presents to his lady-love's parents. At all ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... from the cane of Charles I. at his trial, or the same king's striking a medal, bearing an oak tress, (prefiguring the oak of Boscobel,) with this prophetic inscription, "Seris nepotibus umbram." At the very moment when (according to immemorial usage) the birth of a child was in the act of annunciation to the great officers of state assembled in the queen's bed chamber, and when a private signal from a lady had made known the glad tidings that ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... literature, a sentence that should save the world the trouble of some of its futile, violent, and weak experiments: "Law, the rectitude of humanity," says Mr Coventry Patmore, "should be the poet's only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has been the subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse's will and knew it not. As all the music of verse arises, not from infraction but from inflection of the law of the set metre; so the greatest poets ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... contains all the gradations of architecture from early English to late perpendicular," you will certainly not expect me to describe it in one letter. It has been the residence of the archbishops of Canterbury from time immemorial, both in the days before the reformation ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was at Peterborough, and strolled into the Close under a fine, dark, mouldering archway, to find myself in a romantic world, full of solemn dignity and immemorial peace. There in its niche stood that exquisite crumbled statue that Flaxman said summed up the grace of mediaeval art. The quiet canonical houses gave me the sense of stately and pious repose; of secluded lives, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... immemorial airlessness of the staircase as if they were breathing the free air of the forests depicted on its dirty-brown wall-paper. It was the new atmosphere of self-respect that they were really absorbing. Each had at last explained herself and her brown wig to the other. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... Fredda's cloister-wall I pause to feel the mountain breeze, And watch the shadows eastward fall From immemorial cypress trees. ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... converted and scattered thick enough to cover every square foot of the valley—I happened upon this record, surprised as if a bit of the transmontane sea spray had touched my own face on the Mississippi: "That delightful country" (Kentucky), it ran, "from time immemorial had been the resort of wild beasts and of men only less savage, when in the year 1767 it was visited by John Finley and a few wandering white men from the British colony of North Carolina, allured by the love ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... Here, in these immemorial recesses, the natives had long been wont to bury, as we learned, their oldest objects of interest and value. There, when we pushed our way within the swinging portal, lay around us, in vast and solemn pyramids of portable property, the silent and touching monuments of human existence. ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... shillings a year is paid by a tenant of Sir John Bridges, at Chislett, Kent, as a charge on lands called Dog-whipper's Marsh, to a person for keeping order in the church during service[78], and from time immemorial an acre of land at Peterchurch, Herefordshire, was appropriated to the use of a person for keeping dogs out of church, such person being appointed by ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... the year 1763, very considerable riots took place in Drury-Lane, in consequence of an effort on the part of Garrick to abolish a shabby practice that had prevailed in London from time immemorial. This was, to admit persons into the theatre after the third act, at half price. Great devastation was committed on every thing that could be destroyed in the theatre. A wicked villain took a light, and was deliberately setting fire to the scenes, which might have caused ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... valuable purpose, by removing a source of national disputes; but it is to be regretted that the claims of humanity and justice were overlooked. The Mosquito settlers, who amounted to many hundred families, and who had from time immemorial occupied their lands, under British protection, were ordered to evacuate the country in eighteen months; nothing further being stipulated in their favour, than that the king of Spain should "order his governors to grant ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed. Even Englishmen, tho not bred in any knowledge of such institutions, can not but shudder at the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges or the Euphrates. It contributes much to these feelings, that southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life; the great officina gentium. Man is a weed ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... a tenth part of the booty in virtue of an immemorial custom. Do not reproach him, but rather be thankful to him for having wished to save us, when his convent was interested in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... these enormous mountains, presents not less notably than inanimate Nature a singular compound of change and solidity, of the catastrophic and the secular. The little state of Kashmir, overrun from time immemorial, in peace or war, by hordes of many races and tongues, preserves a language and a physiognomy of its own. About forty per cent. of the words in Kashmiri are Persian, twenty-five Sanscrit, fifteen Hindusthani, ten Arabic and fifteen Mongol. Its letters resemble ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... things," he said, "which find their way into our thoughts and consciousness, but of which it would be considered flagrantly bad taste to speak. And there are things in the world which exist, which have existed from time immemorial, the evil legacy of countless generations, of which it seems to me to be equally bad taste to write. Art has a limitless choice of subjects. I would not have you sully your fine gifts by writing of ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... from Cornwall's guary miracles,— From immemorial custom there They raise a turfy theatre! When from a passage underground, By frequent crowds encompassed round, Out leaps some little Mephistopheles, Who e'en of all the mob ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... New York and west of Lake Champlain. Ever since the white man came, hostile forces had been going north or south along well-defined passes in these regions, and, doubtless, bands of Indians had been traveling the same course from time immemorial; so it was not hard for them to come upon the traces of French and Indians going to Quebec to make the great stand against Wolfe and ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... every man has a religious belief peculiar to himself? Smith is always a Smithite. He takes in exactly Smith's-worth of knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity. And Brown has from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to excommunicate him, to anonymous-article him, because he did not take in Brown's-worth of knowledge, truth, beauty, divinity. He cannot do it, any more than a pint-pot can hold ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Ulster accent is generally regarded as a hard one, I never thought it was so with my friend. Perhaps this is owing to my partiality as a County Down man, which, though born in Antrim, I always consider myself, Down being the native place of my people from time immemorial. I have always thought that the people born and reared, as Bernard was, among the Mourne Mountains and their surroundings have anything but an ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... Loangwa; but after Undi's death it fell to pieces, and a large portion of it on the Zambesi was absorbed by their powerful southern neighbours the Banyai. This has been the inevitable fate of every African empire from time immemorial. A chief of more than ordinary ability arises and, subduing all his less powerful neighbours, founds a kingdom, which he governs more or less wisely till he dies. His successor not having the talents of the ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... most natural, which they could possibly have taken up, we must put ourselves in their places; and look at nature as they had learnt to look at it, not from Scripture and Christianity, so much as from the immemorial traditions of their ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... wise remarkable in itself; but I regarded it with reverence, for it had been the asylum of a persecuted author. Hither poor Steele had retreated and lain perdue when persecuted by creditors and bailiffs; those immemorial plagues of authors and free-spirited gentlemen; and here he had written many numbers of the Spectator. It was from hence, too, that he had despatched those little notes to his lady, so full of affection and whimsicality; in which the fond ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... of belief and worship still lingered, all the more touching to Fancy, perhaps, that they were homeless and attainted: the light of skeptic day was baffled by depths of forest where superstitious shapes still cowered, creatures of immemorial wonder, the raw material of Imagination. The invention of printing, without yet vulgarizing letters, had made the thought and history of the entire past contemporaneous; while a crowd of translators put every man who could read in inspiring contact with the select souls ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Encantadas," the Enchanted Islands. These islands, usually volcanic, have no vegetation but cactuses or wiry bushes with strange names; no inhabitants but insects and reptiles—lizards, spiders, snakes,—with vast tortoises which seem of immemorial age, and are coated with seaweed and the slime of the ocean. If there are any birds, it is the strange and heavy penguin, the passing albatross, or the Mother Cary's chicken, which has been called the humming bird of ocean, ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... independent life, and to rely wholly on man to preserve it from extinction. Now this is precisely the condition of the maize, tobacco, cotton, quinoa, and mandioca plants, and of that species of palm called by botanists the Gulielma speciosa; all have been cultivated from immemorial time by the aborigines of America, and, except cotton, by no other race; all no longer are to be identified with any known wild species; several are sure to perish unless fostered by human care.[37-1] What numberless ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... the same rank and position in the eyes of his subjects which the great monarch of Western Asia, whoever he might be, had always occupied from time immemorial. He was their lord and master, absolute disposer of their lives, liberties, and property; the sole fountain of law and right, incapable himself of doing wrong, irresponsible irresistable—a sort of God upon earth; one whose favor was ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... you start! No, it's not a lion roaring, though it's a pretty good imitation; it's only a camel cursing and snarling with all his might while his owner piles a few bushels' weight on his back. He doesn't really mind it, but it is the immemorial custom of camels to protest with hideousness and confused noise, and if he didn't do it his trade union would be ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... 20th of April the Forward was in sight of an iceberg a hundred and fifty feet high, stranded there from time immemorial; the thaws had taken no effect on it, and had respected its strange forms. Snow saw it; James Ross took an exact sketch of it in 1829; and in 1851 the French lieutenant Bellot saw it from the deck of the Prince Albert. Of course the doctor wished ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... Mr Lange, that the chiefs who had successively presided over the five principalities of this island, had lived for time immemorial in the strictest alliance and most cordial friendship with each other; yet he said the people were of a warlike disposition, and had always courageously defended themselves against foreign invaders. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... I still call it, has become a symbolic thing to me; and the sight of it now stands for my supreme or best-loved impression, not alone in the world of ferns, but also in each department of nature. Among forests it symbolizes the immemorial incense cedars and redwoods of the Yosemite; among shores, those of Capri and Monterey; among mountains, the glowing one called Isis as seen at dawn from the ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... alluded to by sacred writers as well as profane—a typical rite entailed from Paganism on the greater proportion of existing Christendom. Nor was any oblation duly prepared until it was mingled with salt—that homely and immemorial offering, ordained not only by the priests of the heathen idols, but also prescribed by Moses to the covenant of the Hebrew ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, to the frames of sky-scrapers," there to pay "their blood-tax—in the immemorial human warfare against nature." All of which means, among other things, that those men and women today who are already mining coal, and washing dishes, and making tunnels, and stoking furnaces, and building sky-scrapers, are already heroes, ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... those laws, which are not enacted all of a sudden—and such are rarely the best laws—but grow upon the people with gradual growth unmarked, like a habit by the repetition of acts, in the way of immemorial custom. I have said that a law is for a community, that it requires amplitude and large area. A law is not laid down for an individual, except so far as his action is of importance to the community. The private ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... architectural traditions to indicate a nomadic ancestry for the race. Always and everywhere there is a total absence of what we would call solidity; and the characteristics of impermanence seem to mark almost everything in the exterior life of the people, except, indeed, the immemorial costume of the peasant and the shape of the implements of his toil. Not to dwell upon the fact that even during the comparatively brief period of her written history Japan has had more than sixty capitals, of which ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... His own jackal—From time immemorial the tiger has been supposed to be accompanied by a jackal who shows him his game and gets the leavings as his wages. Hence the Sanskrit title of vyâghra-nâyaka or tiger-leader ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... October; St. Jerome, three years before our era, on December 25th; Eusebius, two years before our era, on January 6th; and Ideler, seven years before our era, in December." Milton, following the immemorial tradition of the ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... of a little novelty, to pay a fifty-times repeated visit (where our individual faces should be as well known to the warden as those of his own charges) to the Lions in the Tower—to whose levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... hard, a dull roaring under the hood that threatened trouble. He drew up beside the road and took off the water-cap. Then he whistled. Why, of course! Had it not been done from time immemorial, this steaming of letters? He examined it. It bore ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... castle battlements, for miles and miles, until the rich green champaign was lost in the blue haze of distance. And it was green and gay over the whole of that vast expanse, here with the dense and unpruned foliage of immemorial forests, well stocked with every species of game, from the gaunt wolf and the tusky boar, to the fleet roebuck and the timid hare; here with the trim and smiling verdure of rich orchards, in which nestled around their old, gray shrines the humble ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... answered the ingenious speculation, by the little coppery hand put forth to grasp the debated toy, and champ it in the baby mouth, after the fashion of our own immemorial coral-and-bells. This was the beginning of Linda's acquaintance with, and interest for, the poor Indians. She afterwards saw much of them in their wigwams and at their work. A little kindness goes far towards winning the Indian heart. They soon learned to regard ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... lay between the Rio Grande del Norte on the east, the Rio Colorado on the west, the Rio San Juan on the north, and the Rio Colorado Chiquito on the south, but from time immemorial they had roamed a considerable distance beyond ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... vague, unverifiable conclusions with which the classics of the healing art were overloaded. The history of practical medicine had been like the story of the Danaides. "Experience" had been, from time immemorial, pouring its flowing treasures into buckets full of holes. At the existing rate of supply and leakage they would never be filled; nothing would ever be settled in medicine. But cases thoroughly recorded and mathematically ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and so could have no children to whom they might transmit their property. Consequently, when a landholding churchman died, some one had to be chosen in his place who should enjoy his property and perform his duties. The rule of the Church had been, from time immemorial, that the clergy of the diocese should choose the bishop, their choice being ratified by the people. As the church law expresses it, "A bishop is therefore rightly appointed in the church of God when the people ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... pulpit The stranger stood staring vacantly at the crowd until the elder motioned him to a chair, when he obeyed with the hesitating, blind obedience of a dog. Then the elder made a brief prayer, and after a few remarks flavoured with puns, sacred and immemorial as the pulpit itself, started a brief programme of entertainment. A broad smile marked the beginning of his lighter mood. His manner seemed to say: 'Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you will give good heed, you shall see I can be ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... acquainted with Latin and the history of ancient times, particularly the history of such holy people as have lived and died in the service of God—the saints and martyrs of old days. He also taught his little boys to write; and they could sing sweetly many of the old hymns and psalms which from time immemorial had been ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... to tradition, by Ferrari, and without doubt representative of his manner. The harmony between its colours, so mellow in their ruin, its graceful arcades and quiet roofing, and the glowing tones of those granite mountains, with their wealth of vineyards, and their forests of immemorial chestnut trees, is ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... sitteth at the northwest gates, With restless violent hands and casual tongue Moulding her mighty fates, The Lakes shall robe them in ethereal sheen; And like a larger sea, the vital green Of springing wheat shall vastly be outflung Over Dakota and the prairie states. By desert people immemorial On Arizonan mesas shall be done Dim rites unto the thunder and the sun; Nor shall the primal gods lack sacrifice More splendid, when the white Sierras call Unto the Rockies straightway to arise And dance before the unveiled ark of the year, Sounding their windy cedars as for shawms, Unrolling rivers ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... with their shining plates, only caught the oak of his box-door; and the tete-a-tete in the sultry, oppressive night went on as the speakers moved to a prudent distance; one of them thoughtfully chewing a bit of straw, after the immemorial habit of grooms, who ever seem as if they had been born into this world with a cornstalk ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... possible, to secure them. At the same time, the selfishness of most men is not confined to their own persons, but extends also to their posterity. Hence it is that bed and board, eonnubium and commercium, have, from time immemorial, been considered correlative ideas; and, to all the more logical socialists, a community of wives (or celibacy)(512) is as dear as a community of goods.(513) ( 245.) And in practice, the greater number of nations of hunters, who, according to our conceptions, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... marls, the relics of infinite animal life, into which has sunk the lizard or the dragon of antiquity—the gigantic Hadrosaurus, who cranes his snaky throat at us in the museum, swelling with the tale of immemorial times when he weltered here in the sunny ooze. The country is a mighty steppe, but not deprived of trees: the ilex clothes it with its set, dark foliage, and the endless woods of pine, sand-planted, strew over that boundless beach a murmur like the sea. The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... you be without it? I do not wonder that the poor, when they have to choose between fuel and food, choose fuel. Food nourishes the body; but fuel, warming the body, warms the soul too. I do not wonder that the hearth has been regarded from time immemorial as the centre, and used as the symbol, of the home. I like the social tradition that we must not poke a fire in a friend's drawing-room unless our friendship dates back full seven years. It rests evidently, this tradition, on the sentiment that a fire is a ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... we met in our road, had decorated their hats. The goats of the peak, which are of a deep brown colour, are reckoned delicious food; they browse on the spartium, and have run wild in the deserts from time immemorial. They have been transported to Madeira, where they are preferred to the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... being by the advice of the count dressed in good cloaths, was by him introduced into the best company. They constantly frequented the assemblies, auctions, gaming-tables, and play-houses; at which last they saw two acts every night, and then retired without paying—this being, it seems, an immemorial privilege which the beaus of the town prescribe for themselves. This, however, did not suit Wild's temper, who called it a cheat, and objected against it as requiring no dexterity, but what every blockhead might put in execution. He said it was a custom very much savouring ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... gods are revered and worshipped by name. The Sun, Indra, and all the divinities embalmed in ritual, are placated and 'satiated' with offerings, just as they had been satiated from time immemorial. But no hint is given that this is a form; or that the Vedic gods are of less account than they had been. Moreover, it is not in the inherited formulae of the ritual alone that this view is upheld. To be ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... with living confidence the hand Which heaven hath sent for my deliverance. 'Tis he, he comes with his embattled hosts, To set me free, and to avenge my shame! Hark to his drums, his martial trumpets' clang! Ye nations come—come from the east and south. Forth from your steppes, your immemorial woods Of every tongue, of every raiment come! Bridle the steed, the reindeer, and the camel! Sweep hither, countless as the ocean waves, And throng around the banners of your king! Oh, wherefore am I mewed and fettered ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... roar of the sea; but it had a different tone. Waste and trackless solitudes and death are in the roar of the sea; remoteness, untroubled centuries of silence, the strange alien memories of woodland life, are in the roar of the pines. The forgotten ages of an immemorial past seem to have become audible in it, and to speak of things which had ceased to exist before human speech was born; things which lie at the roots of instinct rather than within the recollection of thought. The pines only murmur, but the secret which they guard so well is mine as well as ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... immemorial, senile, ancient, elderly, olden, time-honored, antiquated, gray, patriarchal, time-worn, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... immemorial, the birch canoe has been considered a part of the craft of the Indian. Centuries of its use has enabled him so to perfect it, that although attempts have been made by the white man to improve it, they have not ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... Joan's knee made her look down. Binks—tired of his abortive blasts at an unresponsive hole—desired refreshment, and from time immemorial tea had been the one meal at which he was allowed to beg. He condescended to eat two slices of saffron cake, and then Vane presented ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... events, it is the charge made against us from time immemorial,' I replied, trying to speak in ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... out—thanks to Perry—with absurd and anachronous persistence against the inevitable consolidation. Mr. Tallant's newspaper had published many complaints of the age and scarcity of the cars, etc.; and alarmed holders of securities, in whose vaults they had lain since time immemorial, began to sell.... I saw little of Perry in those days, as I have explained, but one day I met him in the Hambleton Building, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and there. Here and there was a burning bush or tree. Beyond was a fringe of excitement, and farther than that fringe the inflammation had not crept as yet. In the rest of the world the stream of life still flowed as it had flowed for immemorial years. The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve and destroy brain, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... state in which a man has at the same time more than one wife. It has existed from time immemorial, especially among the nations of the East. The custom was tolerated by the laws of Moses, and, in fact, no positive injunction against it is found in the whole of the Old Testament. It is questionable whether more than one was recognized as the bona fide wife, ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... vowel-colors and the frequent use of alliteration and of phonetic syzygy,*1* by which last is meant a combination or succession of identical or similar consonants, whether initially, medially, or finally, as for instance the succession of M's in Tennyson's "The moan of doves in immemorial elms And murmuring of innumerable bees." All of these phenomena are illustrated in Lanier's 'Song of the Chattahoochee', which has often been compared to Tennyson's 'The Brook', and which alone proves the author a master in versification. To be sure, Lanier occasionally ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier |
