|
|
|
More "Precursor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to have the two thus meet together. To be lifted up in hilarity is the precursor of being cast down in dejection. A sudden rise of the thermometer is generally followed by as sudden a fall. "I am not sorry," said Sir Walter Scott, after the breaking up of a merry group of guests at Abbotsford, "being one ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... prior to the opening of the Christian era, made a wooden pigeon that actually flew by means of a mechanism of balancing weights and the breath of a mysterious spirit hidden within it. There may yet arise one credulous enough to state that the mysterious spirit was precursor of the internal combustion engine, but, however that may be, the pigeon of Archytas almost certainly existed, and perhaps it actually glided or flew for short distances—or else Aulus Gellius was an utter liar, ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... miles per hour, burn about 35 lb. of coal per mile, when taking trains weighing about 230 tons gross. A variation from this type has been adopted on the Northern and Welsh sections, known as the "Precursor" class. These engines have 5 ft. 6 in. coupled wheels, and weigh 31 tons 8 cwt. in working order, but in other respects are very similar to the standard engines just described; with the Scotch express, averaging in total weight 187 tons, between ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... the insufferable militarism of Germany may very probably be the precursor of a much wider alliance against any aggression whatever in the future. Only through some such arrangement is there any reasonable hope of a control and cessation of that constant international bickering and pressure, that rivalry in finance, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... them by the water's edge difficult. The tan-work lads used to come now and then for a swim, but you would not find a tan-work lad bathing on a chill April night. Yet there was no question where our precursor had gone. He was making for the shore. Tam unshuttered his lantern, and the steps went clearly down the corkscrew path. 'Maybe he is after our cave. We'd ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... misty, drizzly day the precursor of a long spell of dark and gloomy weather, that Claudia at length grew to fear would never come ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... quotes the same text as authority for sending heretics to the stake.[2] According to this peculiar exegesis, the law and custom of the day merely sanctioned the law of Christ. To regard our Saviour as the precursor or rather the author of the criminal code of the Inquisition evidences, one must admit, a ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... explained the hygienist's view of why people get sick. The sequence of causation goes: enervation, toxemia, alternative elimination, disease. However, there is one more link in this chain, a precursor to enervation that, for good and understandable reasons, seemed unknown to the earlier hygienists. That precursor is long term sub-clinical malnutrition. Lack of nutrition effects virtually everybody today. Almost all of us are ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... of comb in melted beeswax, and sticking it to the top. Bees should never be allowed to send off more than two colonies in one season. To restrict them to one is still better. Excessive swarming is a precursor of destruction, rather than an evidence (as usually regarded) of prosperity. A given number of bees will make far less honey in two hives than in one, unless they are so numerous as greatly to crowd the hive. When a late swarm comes out, take away the queen, and they will immediately return. Any ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... movement here passing under review. He has made known the time when it should appear, the character it would bear, and the work it is to do. He has also connected this with the great event of all-overshadowing importance to this world, of which it is a startling sign and sure precursor; namely, the second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We ask the special attention of the reader to ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... neglecting their duties. We may sneer, if we will, at the weaknesses—the aristocratic pride, the spiritual vanity—which we fancy that we discover. We may lament—and in that we shall not be wrong—the influence which such men as Jerome obtained over them— the example and precursor of so much which has since then been ruinous to family and social life: but we must confess that the fault lay not with the themselves, but with their fathers, husbands, and brothers; we must confess that in these women the spirit of the old Roman matrons, which seemed to have been so long dead, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... that pride is The precursor of a fall. Those beneath you to deride is Not expedient at all. Howsoever meek and humble Your inferiors may be, They perchance may make you tumble, So ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... distant countries, to tell them harrowing tales, let them know it is intended to take them for a view behind the dike,—that they may understand the source of the trickling stream of brothel slaves that, almost unobserved, flows steadily into our fair land, and know that the stream is the precursor of a flood. No mere wall of immigration restrictions will ever get control of the flow so long as men are permitted to hold slaves after they have once been landed. And for the further reason, that so soon as China and Japan have drilled a little longer with the fire-arms furnished ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... a hideous invention of modern times. They date from the seventeenth century. Before that time there were only guard-houses where the soldiers played cards and told tales. Louis XIV was a precursor of Bonaparte. But the evil has attained its plenitude since the monstrous institution of the obligatory enlistment. The shame of emperors and of republics is to have made it an obligation for men to kill. In the ages called barbarous, cities and princes entrusted their defence to mercenaries, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... westward, and the vessel was standing under reefed mainsail, whole foresail, and topsail, and jib. Towards nine, the wind shifted to the southward, and a small dark cloud was observed hovering over the land. This ominous appearance, as is well known, is often the precursor of a coming squall, and seems as if sent as a ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... Sainte Helene d'une maniere inconnue', London. Murray; Bruxelles, De Mat, 20 Avril 1817. This work merits a note. Metternich (vol, i. pp. 312-13) says, "At the time when it appeared the manuscript of St. Helena made a great impression upon Europe. This pamphlet was generally regarded as a precursor of the memoirs which Napoleon was thought to be writing in his place of exile. The report soon spread that the work was conceived and executed by Madame de Stael. Madame de Stael, for her part, attributed ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... best men—the most learned, the most graceful, the most eloquent, the most successful—has come at some one time or other the dreadful agony of bashfulness. Indeed, it is the higher order of man being that it most surely attacks; it is the precursor of many excellences, and, like the knight's vigil, if patiently and bravely borne, the knight is twice the hero. It is this recollection, which can alone assuage the sufferer, that he should always carry with him. He should remember that the compound ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... urged in his presence the preference of hope to possession; and as I remember produced an Italian sonnet on the subject. "Let us not," cries Johnson, "amuse ourselves with subtleties and sonnets, when speaking about hope, which is the follower of faith and the precursor of eternity; but if you only mean those air-built hopes which to-day excite and to-morrow will destroy, let us talk away, and remember that we only talk of the pleasures of hope; we feel those of possession, and ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... of consequence," he said aggravatingly. "I was just thinking of the way folks are talking." Then he laughed right out; and if Joan had only understood the man she would have known that his merriment was but the precursor of something ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... with everything, from the station (Pettybaw Sands, two miles away) to Jane Grieve's name, which she thought as perfect, in its way, as Susanna Crum's. She had purchased a "tirling-pin," that old-time precursor of knockers and bells, at an antique shop in Oban, and we fastened it on the front door at once, taking turns at risping it until our own nerves were shattered, and the draper's wife ran down the loaning to see if we were in ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... come to hold a portfolio under the first Consul. He did not fear death, and he envied with consuming envy those to whom nature had given the qualities of initiative. But his nerves always played him false. The consciousness of having to resolve to take a decided step alone, was the precursor of a fit of trembling. His heart did not fail, but he could not control the parched voice, nor the twitching features, not the ghastly palsy of inner misgiving. In this respect Robespierre recalls a more illustrious man; we think of Cicero tremblingly calling upon ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... especial notice as having been the first extravagant story written under the form of a circumstantial narration of travels. It was the precursor of "The Voyage to the Moon," Baron Muenchausen, and various Utopias. We must therefore allow it the merit of originality, and it evinces talent, for mere exaggeration would not be entertaining. The intention was to ridicule the marvellous travellers' stories then current. Much of this history is ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... the revival of the Gospel of Christ and the regeneration of the world appeared in the north and south. The Italian monk and fanatic, Joachim of Floris (about A.D. 1200), preached that this regeneration was predestined to happen. A precursor of Hegel, he taught three eras: the dominion of the Father, or the first era, characterised by fear and the severity of the law; the dominion of the Son, or the era of faith and compassion; and the dominion of the Holy Ghost, or the era of love. This last era ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... of this touching story, are we not called on to pause, and read the uncertainty of earth's best joys and purest happiness; that the brightest sunshine is often the precursor of a dark cloud. When the gourd is all flourishing, a worm may unseen be preying at its root! When the vessel is gliding joyously on the calm sea, the treacherous rock may be at hand, and, in one brief hour, it has become ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... day. Fortunately I escaped along with my old man out of the house before it fell in with a crash behind us. There was no business doing; everybody on the Rialto seemed stunned, and everything lifeless. But this dreadful event was only the precursor of another approaching monster, which soon breathed out its poisonous breath over the town and the surrounding country. It was known that the pestilence, which had first made its way from the Levant into Sicily, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... though the one which most attracted its alarmed attention. The considerable numbers in which this assemblage was suddenly occurring; the fact that the son of the Liberator had already taken its command, and only as the precursor of his formidable sire; the accredited rumor that Ghirelli at the head of a purely Roman legion was daily expected to join the frontier force; that Nicotera was stirring in the old Neapolitan kingdom, while the Liberator himself at Florence ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... When we remember all the strange literary effort gathered round about that year in the West—Symbolism, the Yellow Book, Art for Art's sake—and the limbo into which it has been thrust by now, we may realise how great a precursor and, in his own despite, a leader, Anton Tchehov was. When Western literature was plunging with enthusiasm into one cul de sac after another, incapable of diagnosing its own disease, Tchehov in Russia, unknown to the West, ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... was to be a panegyric of Braithwaite, treating him as the Precursor of a movement ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... descanted on the several contingents from Antigone as they strode by; then of those from God's houses at Halki, the pearl of the Marmora; amongst them the monastery of John the Precursor, and the Convents of St. George, Hagia Trias, and lastly the Very Holy House of the All Holy Mother of God, founded by John VIII. Palaeologus. After them, in turn, the consecrated from Prinkipo, especially those from the Kamares ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... precursor of this Company was a Joint Stock Association, established at Dorchester under the auspices of the Rev. Mr. White, "patriarch of Dorchester," and called the "Dorchester Adventurers," with a view to fishing, farming, and hunting; but the undertaking was not successful, and ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... one man, should it carry so alarming a sound? Is the whole bench of bishops bound and compromised by the audacity of any one amongst its members? Certainly not. But yet such an act, though it should be that of a rash precursor, marks the universal change of position; there is ever some sympathy between the van and the rear of the same body at the same time; and the boldest could not have dared to go ahead so rashly, if the rearmost was not known to be pressing forward to his support, far more closely ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... will act as did the Federals, and employ his reserves elsewhere. A vigorous attack is, almost invariably, the only means of keeping him to his ground. But an attack which is certain to be repulsed, and to be repulsed in quick time, is even less effective than a demonstration. It may be the precursor ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... the wiser of his contemporaries saw, Erasmus was, at heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent Christian"; and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have discerned, he was the precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth century "enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church Voltaire, who held by his "Independent Christianity" as stoutly as ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... presentiment herself, and had made some exertions which proved much increased activity of brain. Alas! though their coming had thus been rendered very happy, the brightening had been but the symptom and precursor of a sudden attack of paralysis, whence there was no symptom of recovery, and which in a ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nation afresh, and evoked the first great popular demonstration of loyalty that had been witnessed since the early days of the reign. I was present in the Cathedral at that solemn and stately service on the 27th February, 1872, the precursor of the still more stately service held at Westminster on the 21st June, 1887. Except on the occasion of the Jubilee of the last-mentioned year, and of that of 1897, London has never witnessed a more remarkable outburst of loyal enthusiasm. At night the whole ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... the precursor of railway travelling then coming into vogue, for Lord George foresaw that the railways would revolutionize racing and enormously increase the ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... Dialogo entre el amor y un viejo has real charm, and has saved his name from the oblivion to which most of his fellows have justly been consigned. The bishop Ambrosio Montesino (Cancionero, 1508) was a fervent religious poet and the precursor of the ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... Germany be what she was in the heroic age of the Reformation,—the instructor of the ignorant, the friend of the helpless, the dread of Romanism, and the mother of giants. The evil days are nearly numbered. "Good Friday is the precursor ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... and in constant correspondence with him. Even as I write, in Dunfermline old men who knew Grandfather Morrison speak of him as one of the finest orators and ablest men they have known. He was publisher of "The Precursor," a small edition it might be said of Cobbett's "Register," and thought to have been the first radical paper in Scotland. I have read some of his writings, and in view of the importance now given to technical education, I think the most remarkable of them is ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... defiant words. Prayer tells God what it knows that He knows already, for it relieves the burdened heart to tell Him. It asks Him to see and hear what it knows that He does see and hear. But the prayer is not for mere observance followed by no divine act, but for taking knowledge as the precursor of the appropriate help. Of such seeing and hearing by God, believing prayer is the appointed condition. 'Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him'; but that is not a reason for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... progress. It was in vain he repeated his assurance that he came to reconcile them to the protectorate and not to deliver them from it. But the popular instinct insisted upon regarding him as at least the precursor of their union with the Kingdom of Greece. The legislative assembly met January 27, 1859, and proposed annexation to Greece. Finding that this was their firm wish and determination, Mr. Gladstone despatched ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... plane, and the stars were observed by bringing the sights on the movable diameter to bear upon them. Their altitude was then read off on the circle. Ultimately, the circle of the astrolabe, mounted with one of its diameters parallel to the earth's axis, became the armillary sphere, the precursor of our modern equatorial telescope. Great stone quadrants fixed in the meridian were also employed from very early times. Out of such furnishings, little modified by the lapse of centuries, was provided the ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... studied the wise maxims of Pythagoras, and being a disciple of the Brahma school, abominators of flesh and strong liquors, he hoped to be excused, by drinking the ladies in aqua pura.—" Water is a monstrous drink for Christians!" said the alderman, "the sure precursor of coughs, colds, consumptions, agues, dropsies, pleurisies, and spleen. I never knew a water-drinker in my life that was ever a fellow of any spirit, mere morbid anatomies, starvelings and hypochondriacs: your water-drinkers never die ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... unprofessional eye saw the danger the boy was in; and the boy himself, lying awake during most of the weary hours of the night, had confided to his friend some thoughts which it seemed to Hinton could only come to such a child as the precursor of death. He now loved the boy for his own sake, and he was determined, even more determined than during the height of the fever, to do something to ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... became surly. I recognised the precursor of its becoming dangerous. One day on a walk in the hills I came on Thrackles and Pulz lying on their stomachs gazing down fixedly at Dr. Schermerhorn's camp. This was nothing extraordinary, but they started guiltily ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... take long to think about it, Watson. Again I saw that grim face look over the cliff, and I knew that it was the precursor of another stone. I scrambled down on to the path. I don't think I could have done it in cold blood. It was a hundred times more difficult than getting up. But I had no time to think of the danger, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to herself that the horrible forebodings she had in reference to the island, were but the precursor of what might be expected. The grandeur and sublimity of its scenery, its isolated position, being surrounded by the waters of the Atlantic—the unnatural music and noises, all conspired to fill the mind of this young girl with the idea that something was about to ...
— Blackbeard - Or, The Pirate of Roanoke. • B. Barker
... violence, at one decisive rent, From the best youth in England their dear pride, Their joy, in England; this, too, at a time In which worst losses easily might wean The best of names, when patriotic love 305 Did of itself in modesty give way, Like the Precursor when the Deity Is come Whose harbinger he was; a time In which apostasy from ancient faith Seemed but conversion to a higher creed; 310 Withal a season dangerous and wild, A time when sage Experience would have snatched Flowers out of ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... numbers of that species, and the species would become rarer: we feel not the least surprise at one species of a genus being rare and another abundant; why then should we be surprised at its extinction, when we have good reason to believe that this very rarity is its regular precursor ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... the moment the head seeks power or aggrandizement for itself, the hands work for their good alone, or the feet strive to bear the body alone the paths they only wish to tread. Disease follows, if the evil is not remedied; disease, the sure precursor of dissolution. How disturbed and unhappy each member of such an aggregated man must be, you ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... Church and most intelligent laymen have already discerned the only emphatic answer to this question. The Church is undoubtedly passing quietly through a revolution in its conception and attitude toward the Bible, more fundamental and far-reaching than that represented by its precursor the Protestant Reformation; but its real significance is daily becoming more apparent. Not a grain of truth which the Bible contains has been destroyed or permanently obscured. Instead, the debris of time-honored traditions and dogmas have been cleared ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... centre of a vast system of commerce, the emporium, in fact, where will take place the exchange of the products of the Indian Archipelago for those of the vast plains of Australia. It may require some effort of the imagination, certainly, to discover the precursor of such a state of things in the miserable traffic now carried on by the Macassar proas; but still, I think, we possess some data on which to found such an opinion, and I am persuaded that Port Essington will ultimately hold ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... At the time of his father's death, in 1841, seven volumes of the "Prodromus" had appeared: Alphonse completed the seventeenth volume in 1873. In 1855 appeared his "Geographie botanique raisonnee," "which was the most important work of his life," and if not a precursor, "yet one of the inevitable foundation-stones" of modern evolutionary principles. He also wrote "Histoire des Savants," 1873, and "Phytographie," 1880. He was lavish of assistance to workers in Botany, and was distinguished by a dignified and ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Christ our Lord," and are called to follow "the example of their steadfastness in the faith and obedience to God's holy commandments." There are days dedicated to the memory of the Blessed Virgin; the Apostles; the Baptist as the precursor, and St. Stephen as the {118} protomartyr; to St. Mark and St. Luke as Evangelists; to St. Paul and St. Barnabas on account of their extraordinary call; to the Holy Innocents as the earliest who suffered for Christ's sake; to St. Michael ...
— The Worship of the Church - and The Beauty of Holiness • Jacob A. Regester
... by numbers and bloodshed, regard the second more extensive battle near the falls of Niagara, on the 25th of the same month, between the same parties with British reinforcements, known as the battle of Bridgewater, as more important than its precursor.... The victory of Chippewa was the resurrection or birth of American arms, after their prostration by so long disuse, and when at length taken up again, by such continual and deplorable failures, that ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... iron heated to a low red-heat. I had never before beheld such a weird, awe-inspiring spectacle, but as I gazed upon it the memory came to me that I had somewhere read of something similar, and I also remembered that it had been described as the precursor of a hurricane, or some ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... Malachi, whose opinion in this matter was soon brought to bear,[1] had announced with much energy a precursor of the Messiah, who was to prepare men for the final renovation, a messenger who should come to make straight the paths before the elected one of God. This messenger was no other than the prophet Elias, who, according to a widely spread belief, ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... are worse than some of those of coal-miners. Why stop here? Who ever said we would stop here? I welcome and support this measure, not only for its own sake, but much more because it is, I believe, simply the precursor of the general movement which is in progress all over the world, and in other industries besides this, towards reconciling the conditions of labour with the well-ascertained laws of science and health. If we are told that because we support this measure ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... called to explain. To the use of fine phrases was now added a facility in employing violence at a pinch which likewise remained characteristic of Buonaparte's career down to the end. Nasica, who alone records the tale, sees in this event the precursor of the long series of state-strokes which culminated on the eighteenth Brumaire. There is a story that in one of the scuffles incident to this brawl a member of Pozzo di Borgo's family was thrown down and trampled on. Be that as it may, Buonaparte ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... consideration on which the patent is to issue bears no just proportion to that of the ordinary preemptor, and that this bill is but the precursor of a system of land distribution to a privileged class, unequal, unjust, and which ought not to receive the sanction of the General Government. Many thousand pioneers have turned their steps to the Western ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... have required no large exertion of editorial self-denial to have abstained from marring the pages with puns of which Punch would be ashamed, and with the vulgar affectation of patronage with which the sea captain of the nineteenth century condescends to criticize and approve of his half-barbarous precursor; but it must have been a defect in his heart, rather than in his understanding, which betrayed him into such an offence as this which follows. The war of freedom of the Araucan Indians is the most gallant ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... the night stood a great colossal form, not of a naked savage, but a form clad perhaps, in the panoply of the Macedonian phalanx, the representative of the Europe that then was and was yet to be, the precursor, it may be, to the classically informed mind of the missionary to the Gentiles, of that long procession of great world conquerors. It was the Man of Macedon who stood there in the might of his strength ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... Elizabeth that there was no treason in Hayward's Henry IV, but 'very much felony', because Hayward 'had stolen many of his sentences and conceits out of Cornelius Tacitus' (Apophthegms, 58). Hayward and Bacon had a precursor in the author of The History of King Richard the Thirde, generally attributed to Sir Thomas More, and printed in the collection of his works published in 1557. It was known to the chroniclers, but it did not affect the writing of history. ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... character of Robespierre, show sufficiently that Lamartine, though he may not as yet have taken a positive direction in politics, has at least, from his vague poetical conceptions, returned to a sound state of political criticism, the inevitable precursor of sound theories. His views on the execution of the royal family are ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... valley of the Conon from that of the Peffer. The day was mild and pleasant, and the atmosphere clear; but the higher hills again exhibited their ominous belts of vapor, and there had been a slight frost during the night,—at this autumnal season the almost certain precursor of rain. ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... of malaise increased in the night, and was, in fact, the precursor of a short but sharp attack of a form of typhoid which was running through the hotel at the time. Being in bed next afternoon about four o'clock, I was dismayed to hear that Miss Maynard had arrived to see me, and, moreover, had arrived ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... list of projects for a universal language[1] and their dates will strengthen the conviction from an historical point of view that the fulness of time is accomplished, while the history of the rise and fall of Volapk and of the extraordinary rise of Esperanto, in spite of its precursor's failure, are ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... having been a very cold night last night I had got some cold, and so in pain by wind, and a sure precursor of pain is sudden letting off farts, and when that stops, then my passages stop and my pain begins. Up and did several businesses, and so with my wife by water to White Hall, she to her father's, I to the Duke, where we did our usual business. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... paroxysms of the volcano, above referred to, had by that time taken place, but the third, and worst—that which occurred about 10 A.M.—was yet in store for them, though they knew it not, and a lull in the roar, accompanied by thicker darkness than ever, was its precursor. There was not, however, any lull in the violence ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... Eve!" cried David, holding his wife closely to him.—"At Saintes, not very far from here, in the sixteenth century, there lived one of the very greatest of Frenchmen, for he was not merely the inventor of glaze, he was the glorious precursor of Buffon and Cuvier besides; he was the first geologist, good, simple soul that he was. Bernard Palissy endured the martyrdom appointed for all seekers into secrets but his wife and children and all his neighbors were against him. His wife used to sell his tools; nobody understood ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... growing so bright and beautiful beneath the autumnal frosts. Anna had been very sick since that morning in September when she sat on the piazza at the Ocean House and read Lucy Harcourt's letter. The faint was a precursor of fever, the physician said, when summoned to her aid, and in a tremor of fear and distress Mrs. Meredith had had her at once removed to New York, and that ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... churches of the land. But it is not for us to despise the poor. Has not God chosen the poor of this world, rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom? That little group in front of that poor old school-house may become historic as the precursor of a great movement of blessing to millions among the poorest of the poor ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 50, No. 05, May, 1896 • Various
... Italian physician, Sanctorius, who was in so many ways the precursor of our modern methods of physiological research by the means of instruments of precision, was the first, so far as I am aware, to suggest a monthly cycle of the organism in men. He had carefully studied the weight of the body with reference to the amount of excretions, and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... she who, with her accustomed grace and address, determined him to make common cause with his younger against their eldest brother. Divers incidents retarded for a whole year the outburst of this family plot, and of the war of which it was the precursor. The position of the young King Charles appeared for some time a very bad one; but "certain chieftains," says the historian Nithard, "faithful to his mother and to him, and having nothing more to lose than life or limb, chose rather to die gloriously than to betray their ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... performance dominated by a deliberation as great and brilliant as the dawn), I argued that this good cheer was out of proportion; that Emerson should keep back a smile so striking and circumstantial for rare occasions, such as enormous surprise; or, he should make it the precursor to a tremendous roar of laughter. I have yet to learn that any one heard him laugh aloud,—which pastime he has called, with certainly a familiar precision that indicates personal experience, a "pleasant spasm," ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... saw," replied the priest; "and certainly, as far as my senses would enable me to judge, the appearance was most unusual—I may say supernatural; but I had heard of this Phantom Ship before, and moreover that its appearance was the precursor of disaster. So did it prove in our case, although, indeed, we had one on board, now no more, whose weight of guilt was more than sufficient to sink any vessel; one, the swallowing up of whom, with all that wealth from which he anticipated such enjoyment in his ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... visited by a terrific thunderstorm, when the tower was struck by lightning. The damage, however, was not great, as, fortunately, the excessive rains which followed quenched the fire that had been kindled. This incident, however, was the precursor of one of the stormiest periods in the history of the city and its cathedral church. Roger de Skerning occupied the episcopal chair, and the prior was one William de Brunham, a man of fierce and truculent disposition. An outbreak of ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Norwich - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • C. H. B. Quennell
... towers upwards like a mountain, the luminous radiation resembling a mere 'spur' at its base. From the very brightness of the light of some of the fixed stars we may infer the intensity of that dark radiation, which is the precursor and inseparable associate ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... sober, and, together with his quiet wife, kept out of the way, letting father and mother reap their due of honour and thanks. But the next day he took hold strongly, and the old folks felt a shadow—precursor of the grave—fall upon them finally. The world is ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... brilliant circle than this in any of our cities. There was none where so much freedom of thought was united to so much scholarship. The "Anthology" was the literary precursor of the "North American Review," and the theological herald of the "Christian Examiner." Like all first beginnings it showed many marks of immaturity. It mingled extracts and original contributions, theology and medicine, with all manner of literary chips and shavings. ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Pinkney arrived, the matter of the colonial trade had already been settled indirectly by the Order of May 16, and it was soon to disappear from prominence, merged in the extreme measures of which that blockade was the precursor; but impressment remained an unhealed sore ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... by certain naturalists that the song of the house-mouse is the result of a disease in its throat, and is therefore a precursor of death. The mouse that came to my study ceased her visits soon after the week had passed and was never seen again; and I was unable to determine how her end was hastened. Brighteye could not, at any rate, have suffered seriously, else he would have succumbed, either to some enemy ever ready to ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... year, but it is pleasing to note that the others have shown at least some slight improvement—crude naphtha and benzol having during the year risen nearly one hundred per cent. in value. Let us hope that this is the precursor of a general rise in value from which we shall all profit. For the purpose of bringing about this much desired end, I understand that some of the gentlemen present to-day have been burning their tar in the retort furnaces, and as it will be interesting to know what success they have attained, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... they might safely put out to sea; but found the waves still extremely high and boisterous. There my uncle, having drunk a draught or two of cold water, flung himself down upon a cloth which was spread for him, when immediately the flames and their precursor, a strong stench of sulphur, dispersed the rest of the company, and compelled him to rise. He raised himself with the assistance of two of the servants, but instantly fell down dead; suffocated, I imagine by some gross and noxious vapor. As soon as it was light again, which was not until the third ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... however, as in many preceding years, no stone was left unturned by opposition whereby there was the remotest chance of bringing ministers into public contempt. They were assailed at every point wherein they were considered vulnerable; and one attack was but the precursor of another. Mr. Brinsley Sheridan, who had made his first speech during last November, and had won golden opinions by his oratory on that occasion, moved three propositions: the first declaring that the military force could not justifiably be applied in dispersing tumultuous assemblies, without ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and went counter to their previous course, thereby acknowledging it to be bad, and supported in the Republican party the men and principles they had so fiercely condemned. The Liberty party was not in any sense the precursor of the Republican party, which was based as much on expediency as on abstract right, and was, therefore, able to accomplish good instead of harm. To say that extreme Abolitionists triumphed in Republican success and were causes of it, is as absurd as to call ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... direction. Now, as ever, the impulse was given by the middle classes, and they were in no mood to imperil their own cause by revolutionary claims. They could not always succeed, however, in checking the fury of the populace, which had been taught to clamour for reform as the precursor of a good time coming for the suffering and toiling masses of mankind. The streets of London were illuminated, and the windows of those who omitted to illuminate or were otherwise obnoxious were tumultuously ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... Chicawgun to-night. Get a move on you!" will bring you sullen service, and probably breed kicks on the grub supply, which is the immediate precursor of mutiny. ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... British Institution was the establishment of the ordinary aforesaid. The prospectus of the Institution bore this notice: "There is a public ordinary every day at four o'clock, price three shillings. Each person to drink port, claret, or whatever liquor he shall choose." A disastrous precursor of the free lunch this would seem. And so it proved. But not immediately. Attracted by the novelty of having a famous actor for host, the ordinary went swimmingly for a time. Macklin presided in person. As soon as the door of the ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... act of Charles III. as being but revenge for the tumult of Aranjuez under the ministry of Esquilace,*1* arguing that the Jesuits were in fact the authors of it, and that it was but the precursor of a plot to dethrone the King and place his brother Don Luis upon the throne, as being not so liberal in his ideas. Others, again, have stated*2* that the Jesuits set about a calumny that Charles III. was not the Queen's son by ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... had just become a sorrow. So perhaps my downfall as a lover was a precursor of better results as ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... tribe, for the purchase of their land in the State of Indiana. He has succeeded in procuring from them a cession of two hundred thousand acres, on terms advantageous to themselves and the United States. It may be considered the precursor to a total cession of their remaining land in that State, and their consequent emigration to the western territory; a result desirable in many respects, especially connected with advantages to a portion of our citizens, and doubly gratifying from its being compatible with the best interests ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... side by side with the preaching of atheism in religion and morals, a growth had become apparent in the preaching of extreme democracy or Socialist Radicalism in politics, a preaching of which Bright was in this country the precursor, and which first came to a head between the years 1880 and 1900, in the writings of Henry George and the English followers of Marx. What I looked on as the fallacies of these new political gospels seemed to me no less dangerous, and also no less absurd, than those which I had previously ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... glow was already appearing in the eastern sky, precursor of the sun, Paddy and I at once set off. As we drew near he shouted, "Pullingo, Pullingo." Directly afterwards we saw the black crawl out of his hut. "Our friend doesn't take much time to dress in the morning," observed Paddy, "seeing he ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... Constitution of the 3rd of May, was sweeping over Poland. Equality of civic rights, freedom of the peasant, a liberal form of government, political and social reforms of all descriptions, were the questions of the hour. The first Commission of Education to be established in Europe, the precursor of our modern Ministry of Education, that had been opened two years before Kosciuszko left Poland, and on which sat Ignacy Potocki and Hugo Kollontaj, both afterwards to be closely associated with Kosciuszko in his war for national independence, was, founding ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... critical moment a trivial incident arose that pierced Robespierre's armour in its weakest joint, and that crystallized the fear of the Convention into ridicule,—ridicule that proved the precursor of revolt. Catherine Theot, a female spiritualist, or medium, as we {214} should call her at the present day, highly elated at the triumph of the Supreme Being over the unemotional Goddess of Reason, had ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... opposition, and yoke nations to their car. Of fear he evidently had no comprehension whatever. The rustling of the autumn breeze in his gown alarmed him as much, as did the clang of those horses' hoofs upon the pavements, though he so well knew it was the precursor of suffering ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... God and to eternity, and which has all its being and welfare wrapped up in those sublime verities, is made to strive and sigh for them in vain, to stretch out its hands to—nothing? This day rises upon us fair and beautiful,—the precursor, [285] I believe, of endless days. If not, I would say with Job, "Let it be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it; for darkness and the shadow of death stain it." But what a different staining was upon it this morning! As ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... could almost have endorsed the sentiment just then. Perhaps Andy's low spirits were intensified by the uncomfortable motion of the ship, which was beginning to strike landsmen with that rolling headache, the sure precursor of a worse visitation. Suffice it to say, that the mass of groaning misery in the steerage and cabins, on the subsequent night, would melt the heart of any but the most hardened 'old salt.' Did not Robert and Arthur regret their emigration bitterly, when shaken by the fangs of the fell ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... of opposing vibrations. But the vocal cords are wedded in phonation, and by their attrition the node is formed. Very often strands of tough mucus appear spanning the chink or slit between the cords when they are drawn up in tone-production. The presence of these bands of mucus is an assured precursor of the node. Often they indicate the existence of a node which is hardly perceptible through the laryngeal mirror. The mucus is nature's effort to relieve the attrition, and so to ease the inflammation at the point of difficulty. The obstinacy with which the nodes caused by ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... imaginations which answered readily to the summons of their poets, the Welsh chiefs and leaders united in acclamations of applause; and the song of the bard went farther to render popular the intended alliance of the Prince, than had all the graver arguments of his priestly precursor in the same topic. ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... and always to those of other trades. Your toleration of them appears to me one of the worst symptoms of your political state of health. It shows among your public men an ignorance or a cowardice, or a desire of ill-earned popularity, which is generally a precursor of a democratic revolution.' ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... and richly embroidered in silver. He was hanged with a silken rope, and instead of being swung into eternity from a common cart, a scaffold was erected under the gallows, which we think may be regarded as the precursor of the drop. Mr. T. Broadbent Trowsdale contributed to "Bygone Leicestershire" an informing paper on "Laurence Ferrers: the Murderer-Earl."[3] We reproduce an illustration of the execution from a print of ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... upon the principles of science, from granites and syenites to melaphyres and basalts. After thirty years of study and progress, other savants, without differing from him, progressed further in the intimate knowledge of rocks; but the historian of science will not forget that Delesse was the precursor of this order of research. His studies of metamorphism will long do him honor. The mineralogical modifications which the eruptive rocks have undergone in the mass are the permanent witnesses which attracted all his attention. The chemical comparison of the metamorphic with the normal rock ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... early predilections seemed to be gaining strength, instead of becoming weaker; and, as in nature, the calm is known to succeed the tempest, the blind attachment of the colony to the parent country, was but a precursor of the alienation and violent disunion that were ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of illicit intercourse between a woman and a dog, a creature resembling in its upper extremities its mother, while its lower extremities were the exact counterpart of its canine father. This particular case was believed by Bateman and others to be a precursor to the murders and wickedness that followed in the time of Pope Alexander I. Volateranus, Cardani, and many others cite instances of this kind. Lycosthenes says that in the year 1110, in the bourg of Liege, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... true precursor of our present-day Matissists and Futurists. He, as they, has the courage to strip his imagination of all mechanical restrictions and let it go free to mould the world at ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... cause of the French was championed. Finding the French yoke as heavy as the Spanish yoke, Toussaint struck for absolute liberty.[418] He was not, in a real sense, the liberator of the Haitians, as commonly supposed, but he was the precursor of their liberty.[419] His deportation aroused them to struggle with new vigor. Under Dessalines, one of the generals in the army of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the rebellion grew more successful, and on January 1, 1804, the army swore ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... prolongation of the signals due to induction, each signal was made by two opposite currents in succession—a positive followed by a negative, or a negative followed by a positive, as the case might be. The after-current had the effect of curbing its precursor. This self-acting cable key was brought out in 1876, and tried on the lines of the Eastern ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... cruelly swept away by it. Voltaire and Diderot, Rousseau and Helvetius, had vanished, but Condorcet both assisted at the Encyclopaedia and sat in the Convention; the one eminent man of those who had tended the tree, who also came in due season to partake of its fruit; at once a precursor, and a sharer in the fulfilment. In neither character has he attracted the goodwill of any of those considerable sections and schools into which criticism of the Revolution has been mainly divided. As a thinker he is roughly classed as an Economist, and as a practical ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... spoke timidly, as he always did when talking of money matters. The countess was accustomed to this tone as a precursor of news of something detrimental to the children's interests, such as the building of a new gallery or conservatory, the inauguration of a private theater or an orchestra. She was accustomed always to oppose anything announced in that timid tone and considered ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... dimensions, that the ordinary press of passengers made it like a theatrical squeeze on a Jenny Lind night; only with this lamentable difference—that the theatrical squeeze was a prelude to all that could charm the senses, whereas the ticket squeeze was, I knew but too well, the precursor of a day of ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... Italian Renaissance than the emergence not only from the same society, but also from the bosom of the same Church, of two men so diverse as the Pope Alexander VI. and the Prophet Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola has been claimed as a precursor of the Lutheran Reformers, and as an inspired exponent of the spirit of the fifteenth century. In reality he neither shared the revolutionary genius of Luther, which gave a new vitality to the faiths of Christendom, nor did he sympathize with that free movement ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... time that the pair had sufficiently refreshed themselves the gloom of the departing day was deepening into the darkness of a moonless, starless night; and as they entered their hut the first shimmer of sheet lightning which was the precursor of the coming storm flickered above the tree-tops of ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... house woke, so to speak, with one eye, and took on the aspect of a house in which someone is astir. First came the fox-terrier, inevitable precursor of his little master, and then, stepping around Toucle as though she were a tree or a rock, came his little partner Paul, his freckled face shining with soap and the earliness of the hour. Mr. Welles was apt to swallow hard again, when he felt the child's rough, strong fingers ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like planets, and, once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the music, they never quite subside to their old stony state. But what is the Imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the Reason. And books that treat the old pedantries of the world, our times, places, professions, customs, opinions, histories, with a certain freedom, and distribute things, not after the usages of America and Europe, but after the laws of right ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... reflection, - that is, if you choose to reflect (for instance) upon the wondrous legend of the seven sleepers (you may see where they lie in a row), who lived together - they were brothers and cousins - in primitive piety, in the sanctuary constructed by the blessed Saint Martin (emulous of his precursor, Saint Gatianus), in the face of the hillside that overhung the Loire, and who, twenty-five years after his death, yielded up their seven souls at the same moment, and enjoyed the curious privilege of retaining in their faces, in spite of this process, the rosy tints ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the birth of Christianity was one of fermenting opinion and decaying faith. Then, as now, men's minds were seething and unsettled, and that unrest which is the precursor of great changes in intellectual and spiritual habitudes affected the civilised world. Such a period is ever one of predisposition to superstition. The one true bond which unites God and man being obscured, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... development to which society tends. The scheme was visionary: but, as a protest against unjust monopolies which existed in that age, it woke up a response in society (cfr. Mill on Liberty, p. 47-50); and in its tendency it made Rousseau the precursor of the French revolution; but in typifying that movement it represented only its transient aspect of subversive energy, not its work of ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... honorable measures by which this result can be accomplished." Although closely related to the present American Federation of Labor in point of time and personnel of leadership, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada was in reality the precursor of the present state federations of labor, which as specialized parts of the national federation now look ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... radiating from the S.E., a precursor of blizzard, we feared, and sure enough we got it next day, when it burst upon us whilst we were putting on our footgear after breakfast. There was nothing for it but to get back into our sleeping-bags, wherein we spent ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... none; but from Spanish fiction and from Spanish history Lesage borrowed what suited his purpose, without in any way compromising his originality. To the picaresque tales (and among these may be noted a distant precursor of Gil Blas in the Francion of Charles Sorel) he added his own humanity, and in place of a series of vulgar adventures we are given a broad picture of social life; the comedy of manners and intrigue grows, as the author proceeds, into a comedy of character, and to this something ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, haughty, and disobedient to parents. We cannot escape these scandals; and God has said that He has sent us like sheep in the midst of wolves. It is necessary for us then to combine the innocence of the dove with the prudence of the serpent. Now, when the precursor of Antichrist erects himself against the Church, he must find us innocent and prudent; these dispositions constitute wisdom. We must hate no one, but bear with the madmen who would violate the law of God. Remember ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... (so he signed his name), "the precursor and pilot of Daniel Boone to Kentucky," but little is known and less has been published. Apparently he was a native of the north of Ireland. In early life he emigrated to the neighborhood of Carlisle, Cumberland county, Pa., a district almost wholly ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... paint certain characteristic peculiarities, (for instance, the awkward carriage of the Bacchus-stricken Pentheus in his female attire, the gluttony of Hercules, and his boisterous demands on the hospitality of Admetus,) Euripides was a precursor of the new comedy, to which he had an evident inclination, as he frequently paints, under the names of the heroic ages, the men and manners of his own times. Hence Menander expressed a most marked admiration for him, and proclaimed himself ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... in the state have appointed "city foresters." This is a step in the right direction, if it is a precursor to the establishment of municipal forests for these men to manage; otherwise it is a misnomer and can only be misleading to the people. The city governments, in an endeavor to create a complete park organization, have ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... have reduced his sleeping hours to five. He was thus able to devote four to study, beside two for conversation. He loved research; and his name is in a list of members of the Society of Antiquaries formed by Archbishop Parker, which, though subsequently dissolved, was the precursor of the present learned body bearing the name. In the Tower he could read without stint. He possessed a fair library. From the company of his books, writes Sir John Harington, he drew more true comfort than ever from his courtly companions in ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... authority. The scholastic age,—that is, the age of dialectics, when theology invoked the aid of philosophy to establish the truths of Christianity,—had not yet begun; but Anselm may be regarded as a pioneer, the precursor of Thomas Aquinas, since he was led into important theological controversies to establish the creed of Saint Augustine. It was not till several centuries after his death, however, that his remarkable originality of genius was fully appreciated. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... we have arrived in this narrative. Since that moment of unutterable anguish her spirits completely abandoned her. Naturally healthy she had ever been, but now she began to feel what the want of it meant; a feeling which to her, as the gradual precursor of death, and its consequent release from sorrow, brought something like hope and consolation. Yet this was not much; for we know that to the young heart entering upon the world of life and enjoyment, the prospect of early dissolution, no matter by what hopes or by what resignation ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... an apartment on the north-east side of the quadrangular building, where the sunshine never entered. Even daylight never came, but only a feeble, sickening twilight, precursor of the grave itself. It was not merely the gloom that intensified the horrors of the situation, or the ghastly traditions of the place, or the impending fate of our callous client; but there was a tier of shelves occupying the side ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... the ordinary man in dealing with ghosts is supremely unscientific, but it is less objectionable than that of the pseudo-scientist. The Inquisitor who forbade free inquiry into matters of religion because of human depravity, was the natural precursor of the Scientist who forbids the exercise of the reason on the subject of ghosts, on account of inherited tendencies to attribute such phenomena to causes outside the established order of nature. What difference ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... still smiling with anticipated triumph, kept bending eagerly over his crucible, stirring the mixture with his rod, and muttering to himself all the time. "Now," I heard him say, "it changes. There—there's the scum. And now the green and bronze shades flit across it. Oh, the beautiful green! the precursor of the golden-red hue that tells of the end attained! Ah! now the golden-red is coming—slowly—slowly! It deepens, it shines, it is dazzling! Ah, I have it!" So saying, he caught up his crucible in ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... evening that followed the exposure; the precursor of many and many miserable evenings in days to come. Mr. and Mrs. Channing, Hamish, Constance, and Arthur sat in the usual sitting-room when the rest had retired—sat in ominous silence. Even Hamish, with his naturally sunny ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... occasionally shifting a point or two. The sky had become covered over with one black mass of clouds, which hung down so low that they appeared almost to rest on the water; and there was that peculiar fitful moaning which is ever the precursor of a violent gale of wind. At nightfall we reefed our lug-sails; and, while one sat at the helm, the rest of us lounged against the gunnel, buttoned up in our pilot jackets; some shutting their eyes, as if to invite sleep, others watching ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... one of the most powerful lawyers in heaven. In his Novena (Manila, 1913), he is called the precursor of Christ, altho in reality he came to the world twelve centuries after Christ (p. 5). "In the chastity, color, and figure of his body, and in the eloquence of his spirit, he was the one most like Christ" (p. 7). ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... The discovery was soon made that any one was at liberty to reprint the book, and the initiative was thus given to a new era in cheap literature, founded on American reprints. A shilling edition followed the one-and-sixpence, and this in turn became the precursor of one 'complete for sixpence.' From April to December, 1852, twelve different editions (not reissues) were published, and within the twelve months of its first appearance eighteen different London publishing houses were engaged in supplying the great demand that ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... tone and complexion to things in this country. We have not yet had time to develop a truly national literature or art. We have produced but one poet of the highest order. Whitman is autochthonous. He had no precursor. He is a new type of man ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... operations on the Magwa River, and seventy miles up the river a large crew was shipping and excavating at the iron mine. These things and many others being on foot, Clark had experienced that intellectual restlessness which in him was the precursor of further effort. ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... nature is the effect of some previous change and the cause of some change to follow; just as the movement of each carriage near the middle of a long train is a result of the movement of the one in front and a precursor of the movement of the one behind. Facts or effects are to be seen everywhere, but causes have usually to be sought for. It is the function of science or organized knowledge to observe all effects, or phenomena, and to seek for ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the cause of the French was championed. Finding the French yoke as heavy as the Spanish yoke, Toussaint struck for absolute liberty.[418] He was not, in a real sense, the liberator of the Haitians, as commonly supposed, but he was the precursor of their liberty.[419] His deportation aroused them to struggle with new vigor. Under Dessalines, one of the generals in the army of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the rebellion grew more successful, and on January 1, 1804, the army swore to abjure their allegiance to ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... of ignorance and cruelty. A thousand men knew the fact touching the steam that issues from the tea-kettle, but not until Watts discovered the significance of the fact did the tea-kettle become the precursor of the steam-engine that has transformed civilization. It required the imagination of Newton to interpret the falling of the apple and to cause this simple, common fact to lead on to the discovery of the great truth of gravitation. Had Galileo lacked imagination, the chandelier ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... amused themselves by projecting the Scriblerus Club, a body which never had, it would seem, any definite organization, but was held to exist for the prosecution of a design never fully executed. Martinus Scriblerus was the name of an imaginary pedant—a precursor and relative of Dr. Dryasdust—whose memoirs and works were to form a satire upon stupidity in the guise of learning. The various members of the club were to share in the compilation; and if such joint-stock undertakings were practicable in literature, it would be difficult to collect ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... it. Voltaire and Diderot, Rousseau and Helvetius, had vanished, but Condorcet both assisted at the Encyclopaedia and sat in the Convention; the one eminent man of those who had tended the tree, who also came in due season to partake of its fruit; at once a precursor, and a sharer in the fulfilment. In neither character has he attracted the goodwill of any of those considerable sections and schools into which criticism of the Revolution has been mainly divided. As a thinker he is roughly classed as an Economist, and as a practical politician he figured first ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... partner in his brother's cigar stand, had moved out to Fifty-fourth Street, so that there was nobody who could have contradicted her. But lying awake planning how he might piece out life for his mother with comforts, and hearing in every knock the precursor of what might have happened to her, his heart was exercised as it is good for the heart to be even with pain and anxiety. And beyond the heart stretching there was always the House. He could seldom get away to it ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... contemporaries) and Messrs. M'LACHLIN AND SNOW, the resident editors of the 'Jonathan,' discharged their functions to due public acceptance; but a name so invariably connected with unsuccessful publications that it has come to be justly regarded as the sure precursor and inevitable cause of failure, was at the head of the journal as 'principal editor;' and 'down east' editorial-ings, transmitted by the yard, and endless unreadable tales, claiming a kindred paternity, gradually ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... The visitor was the convalescent sheriff, Jim Dunn, who had publicly commemorated his recovery by making his first call upon the father of his inamorata. The Reverend Mr. Wynn had been expatiating upon the unremitting heat as a possible precursor of forest fires, and exhibiting some catholic knowledge of the designs of a Deity in that regard, and what should be the policy of the Legislature, when Mr. Brace concluded to enter. Mr. Wynn and the wounded man, who occupied an arm-chair by the ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... under it."[134] When Pinkney arrived, the matter of the colonial trade had already been settled indirectly by the Order of May 16, and it was soon to disappear from prominence, merged in the extreme measures of which that blockade was the precursor; but impressment remained an ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... Platiere, in the enjoyment of all that this world can give of peace and happiness, when the first portentous mutterings of that terrible moral tempest, the French Revolution, fell upon her ears. She eagerly caught the sounds, and, believing them the precursor of the most signal political and social blessings, rejoiced in the assurance that the hour was approaching when long-oppressed humanity would reassert its rights and achieve its triumph. Little did she dream ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... slow and painful. The oppressive afternoon was half spent when a breeze started up, the precursor of a thunder-gust. The breeze, strengthening to a brisk gale, made Arlington hold fast to his hat, and caused the long streamers of Spanish moss to wave like gray banners from the limbs of the cypress-trees. The air grew murky, clouds were flying in dark blotches. A hurricane was sweeping across ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... the Pliocene as "a period of great unrest." "Many migrations occurred the world over, new competitions arose, and the weaker stocks began to show the effects of the strenuous life. One momentous event seems to have occurred in the Pliocene, and that was the transformation of the precursor of humanity into man—the culmination of the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... stark headland of the Red Neb made the road to them by the water's edge difficult. The tan-work lads used to come now and then for a swim, but you would not find a tan-work lad bathing on a chill April night. Yet there was no question where our precursor had gone. He was making for the shore. Tam unshuttered his lantern, and the steps went clearly down the corkscrew path. 'Maybe he is after our cave. ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... review. He has made known the time when it should appear, the character it would bear, and the work it is to do. He has also connected this with the great event of all-overshadowing importance to this world, of which it is a startling sign and sure precursor; namely, the second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. We ask the special attention of the reader to this ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... society tends. The scheme was visionary: but, as a protest against unjust monopolies which existed in that age, it woke up a response in society (cfr. Mill on Liberty, p. 47-50); and in its tendency it made Rousseau the precursor of the French revolution; but in typifying that movement it represented only its transient aspect of subversive energy, not its work ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... the general attitude, and the hopes and fears of both fighting men and civilians. Not only is this voluminous book a brilliantly written commentary on the opening months of the war, it is also infused with an inner sadness that could well be considered a precursor to the post-war "lost generation" myth, which is yet another indicator at how well Gibbs could gage the feel of the times and assess its impact on ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... 'shepherd' and 'pastor'; 'feeling' and 'sentiment'; 'handbook' and 'manual'; 'ship' and 'nave'; 'anger' and 'ire'; 'grief' and 'sorrow'; 'kingdom,' 'reign,' and 'realm'; 'love' and 'charity'; 'feather' and 'plume'; 'forerunner' and 'precursor'; 'foresight' and 'providence'; 'freedom' and 'liberty'; 'bitterness' and 'acerbity'; 'murder' and 'homicide'; 'moons' and 'lunes.' Sometimes, in theology and science especially, we have gone both to the Latin and to the Greek, and drawn the ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... Mediaeval days. It portrays the sufferings of Christ, and was performed at church festivals, the congregation taking part in the singing of the chorales, which were mostly familiar religious folk-songs. It was a revival of the sacred drama in musical form, and the immediate precursor of the modern oratorio. Bach wrote five passions,—the "St. John," probably written in 1723, and first performed in the following year; another, which has been lost, in 1725; the "St. Matthew," in 1729; the "St. Mark," in 1731; and the "St. ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... conception of an airship is to be found in General Meusnier's design in 1784 for an egg-shaped balloon driven by three screw propellers, worked, of course, by hand. The chief interest in his design, though it never materialized, lies in the fact that it provided for a double envelope and was the precursor of the ballonet. The first man-carrying airship was built by Henri Giffard in 1852. It had a capacity of 87,000 cu. feet, a length of 144 feet, a 3 horse-power engine, and a speed of 6 miles an hour. A gas engine was first used twenty years later in an Austrian dirigible, ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes
... Egypt were worshipped side by side with those of old Rome, where all sorts of exotic art, philosophy, literature and politics took root and flourished. That is usually regarded as a period of decadence, and it was certainly a precursor of the empire's fall. When we consider that it was contemporaneous with great material prosperity and with the spread of luxury and a certain loosening of the moral fiber, such as we are experiencing in America today, ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... is to arise with sympathies large and wide, to show us, in verse most musical, in words full meaning, with that grace of humour which is a fresh light upon life, how men and women lived: and to be the great precursor of a greater than he. Geoffrey Chaucer is to come to ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... of the Carlow mountains. At Killcomney Hill, however, they were forced into action under most unfavourable circumstances, and utterly routed. One, Father Murphy, fell in the engagement, the other, the precursor of the insurrection, was captured three days afterward, and conveyed a prisoner to General Duff's headquarters at Tullow. Here he was put on his trial before a Military Commission composed of Sir James Duff, Lord Roden, Colonels Eden and Foster, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... opinion that all branches of the human race are related and have sprung from the same ancestors. There have been differences of opinion regarding this view, some holding that there are several centres of development in which the precursor of man assumed a human form (polygenesis), and others holding that according to the law of differentiation and zoological development there must have been at some time one origin of the species (monogenesis). So far as the scientific investigation ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... set down Copernicus, Galileo, etc. among the paradoxers, merely because everybody knows them; if my list were quite complete, they would have been in it. But the reader will find Gilbert, the great precursor of sound magnetical theory; and several others on whom no censure can be cast, though some of their paradoxes are inadmissible, {7} some unprovoked, and some capital jokes, true or false: the author of Vestiges of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... of the stronger inductions have been expressed with greater universality than their evidence warrants, the weaker one must give way. The opinion so long prevalent that a comet, or any other unusual appearance in the heavenly regions, was the precursor of calamities to mankind, or to those at least who witnessed it; the belief in the veracity of the oracles of Delphi or Dodona; the reliance on astrology, or on the weather prophecies in almanacs, were doubtless inductions supposed to be grounded ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... with your riches,' said I, 'when you have obtained them? Will you sit down and muse upon them, or will you deposit them in a cellar, and go down once a day to stare at them? I have heard say that the fulfilment of one's wishes is invariably the precursor of extreme misery, and forsooth I can scarcely conceive a more horrible state of existence than to be ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... poor fisherman than to meddle with the governing of men,' would have found itself there. It is true that in Byron we miss the firmness of noble and generous hope. This makes him a more veritable embodiment of the Revolution than such a precursor as Rousseau, in whom were all the unclouded anticipations of a dawn, that opened to an obscured noon and a tempestuous night. Yet one knows not, in truth, how much of that violence of will and restless activity and resolute force was due less to confidence, than to the ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... and I shall turn in future to it, and see that all transliterations in the book accord with it. I must ask for it therefore by return. You understand what we want. "A transliteration alphabet, for explaining the signs employed," would be a good precursor to yours and Lepsius' scientific work. We shall do well to employ in the text as ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... liable to occur in double flowers; indeed, Dr. Hill, who published a treatise on this subject, setting forth the method of artificially producing prolified flowers, deemed the doubling to be an almost necessary precursor of prolification;[128] but, though frequently so, it is not invariably the case that the flower so affected is double—e.g. Geum. If double, the doubling may arise from actual multiplication of the petals, or from the substitution of petals for stamens and pistils, according ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... form an acquaintance with Prince Louis-Ferdinand, the same whose warlike ardor so transported him, that his death was almost the precursor of the first reverses of his country. He was a man full of ardor and enthusiasm, but who, for want of glory, cultivated too much the emotions which agitate life. What particularly irritated him against Bonaparte ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... toleration of them appears to me one of the worst symptoms of your political state of health. It shows among your public men an ignorance or a cowardice, or a desire of ill-earned popularity, which is generally a precursor of a democratic revolution.' ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... successive winters, and were in reality a vindication of woman's right to think. In calling forth the opinions of her sex upon Life, Literature, Mythology, Art, Culture, and Religion, Miss Fuller was the precursor of the Woman's Rights agitation of the last thirty-three years. Her work, "The Great Lawsuit; or, Man vs. Woman, Woman vs. Man," was declared by Horace Greeley to be the loftiest and most commanding assertion made ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of the Talmud-School, who dressed in white on Sabbath, and wore a fourfold garment to signify the four letters of the Ineffable Name, and who by permutating these, could draw down spirits from Heaven, passed as the Messiah of the Race of Joseph, precursor of the true Messiah of the Race of David. The times were ripe. "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," cried the Cabalists with one voice. The Jews had suffered so much and so long. Decimated for not dying of the Black Death, pillaged and murdered by the Crusaders, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the blood tends to develop low inflammation, dropsical effusion, tubercular deposits, Bright's disease, derangements of the liver, diarrhea, leucorrhea, and is a precursor of low, protracted fevers. This condition of the blood predisposes to the development of other affections, providing they are in existence, and often it is found associated with Bright's disease, cancer, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... brings the passenger into Waterford County. The road above Whiting Bay leads to the fishing village of Ardmore. It was perhaps, the first place in Ireland where the light of Christianity shone, as St. Declan is generally agreed to have been a precursor of the National apostle. In the country districts surrounding, as in the fishing village itself, the language most in use is Gaelic. The round tower, said to be of later date than any other in Ireland, is unique in many respects. The Cathedral, ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... next morning I had the glow of satisfaction with my own doings which is a safe precursor of misfortunes. I had settled my business with the Free Companions, and need look for no more trouble on that score. But what tickled my vanity was my talk with Ringan and Lawrence at the Monacan lodge and the ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... Ragusian literature. Junius Palmota wrote tragedies; selecting his subjects principally from Slavic history. But his most esteemed production is a Slavic version of a great Latin epic on Christ, by M.H. Vita, which may be considered as a kind of precursor to Klopstock's Messiah. John Gondola, a dramatic writer before him, translated Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered; and ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... in the ninth century, Saint Marc of Venice was finished in 1071, and the beautiful dome of Pisa in 1063. In fact, the intellectual movement which has been described as the Twelfth Century Renaissance(23) and the Twelfth Century Rationalism—the precursor of the Reform(24) date from that period, when most cities were still simple agglomerations of small village communities enclosed ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... part was to be a panegyric of Braithwaite, treating him as the Precursor of a movement that even now ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... the frequent misapprehension of Mr. Browning's religious views which has been based on the literal evidence of 'Christmas Eve', were it not that its companion poem has failed to do so; though the tendency of 'Easter Day' is as different from that of its precursor as their common Christianity admits. The balance of argument in 'Christmas Eve' is in favour of direct revelation of religious truth and prosaic certainty regarding it; while the 'Easter Day' vision makes a tentative ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... of the sky," by clearing away the mists of pre-existing error, first completely explained the varying positions of the Shepherd's star, irradiating the first or last watch of night, according to her alternate function as the follower or precursor of the sun. As she travels on a path nearer to him by more than twenty-five and a half million miles than that of the earth, she is seen by us on each side of him in turn after passing behind or in front of him. The points at which her orbit ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... the lovers was uncomfortable, Jaspar's was painful. They had the consolation of loving and being loved; but he was now writhing under the weight of an additional torture. The appearance of Hatchie was the knell of all his hopes, the precursor of ruin. To him it was a mystery, and all his endeavors to ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... wall, they passed through Smithfield and Holborn, and turned away from Saint Giles into the Reading road, the precursor of Piccadilly. The roads were good for the time of year, and they reached Kingston before dark. The next morning Robin returned home, with strict charges to fetch Isoult in a week, and sooner should either of the children ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... commanding a fine view. But to one unused to many stairs, and weakened by continuous illness in a long sea-voyage, the exhaustion of that first ascent was something to be remembered. It was, however, but the precursor of hundreds of similar feats, which our residence involved, as nearly all families live up several flights of stairs. Only once did we see an elevator in Germany. In the elegant hotel known as the Kaiserhof, the sojourning-place of princes, diplomatists, ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... the reefing, and the great main-sail had been successfully reduced to its smallest area and hoisted home again before the trees on the western shore began to bow and churn in the precursor blasts of the ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... perspective and omission, and, however true, is sure to act as a shower-bath to courage, if it is unaccompanied with a word of cheer. To begin a perilous enterprise without fairly facing its risks and difficulties is folly. To look at them only is no less folly, and is the sure precursor of defeat. But when on the one side is God's command, and on the other such doleful discouragements, they are more than folly, they ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... thus to revert to the early emigration of that 'Barbaric' race of which the Anglo-Saxon was a scion, making the shadow of Odin pass in succession over the background of the several pictures presented (the Heroic being thus the unconscious precursor of the Spiritual), and to show how the religion which bore his name was fitted at once to predispose its nobler votaries to Christianity and to infuriate against it those who but valued their faith for what it contained of degenerate. It seemed also expedient to select for ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... proverb says, and so the poet sings," returned Ellis, thoughtfully. "This seems to be my darkest hour. God grant it be only the precursor ...
— The Two Wives - or, Lost and Won • T. S. Arthur
... the tone and complexion to things in this country. We have not yet had time to develop a truly national literature or art. We have produced but one poet of the highest order. Whitman is autochthonous. He had no precursor. He is a new type of ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... civic rights, freedom of the peasant, a liberal form of government, political and social reforms of all descriptions, were the questions of the hour. The first Commission of Education to be established in Europe, the precursor of our modern Ministry of Education, that had been opened two years before Kosciuszko left Poland, and on which sat Ignacy Potocki and Hugo Kollontaj, both afterwards to be closely associated with Kosciuszko in his war ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... common opinion is, that during the continuance of the wind from the north, called the Precursor, and of the Etesian gales, which last forty-five days without interruption, they drive back the stream and check its speed, so that it becomes swollen with its waves thus dammed back; then, when the wind changes, the force of the breeze drives the waters ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... him when he enters port," said he, chuckling. "It may give him a sleepless night. He will find it as sure a precursor of his fate as ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... the river at the cost of wet boots, ascended the slope, and crouched down behind a bush a few yards from the top. He had gained on Paul, and arrived at his hiding-place in time to hear the exclamation wrung from his precursor by the sudden sight of the barricade: from the valley below the erection had been so hidden by bushes ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... a very cold night last night I had got some cold, and so in pain by wind, and a sure precursor of pain is sudden letting off farts, and when that stops, then my passages stop and my pain begins. Up and did several businesses, and so with my wife by water to White Hall, she to her father's, I to the Duke, where we did our usual business. And among other discourse of ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... p. 230.), on the cuckoo, as the Welsh Ambassador, I would suggest that it was in allusion to the annual arrival of Welshmen in search of summer and other employment. As those wanderers may have entered England about the time of the cuckoo's appearance, the idea that the bird was the precursor of the Welsh might thus become prevalent. Also, on the quotation given by "PETIT ANDRE" (No. 18. p. 283.) of Welsh parsley, or hempen halters, it may have derived its origin from the severity practised ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 26. Saturday, April 27, 1850 • Various
... the surroundings would add impressiveness to the preacher's words; in Hyde Park at midnight, in darkness which might be felt, when men's hearts were panic-stricken at the prospect of the approaching earthquake, which was to be the precursor of the end of the world; on Hampton Common, surrounded by twelve thousand people, collected to see a man hung in chains—the scenery would all lend effect to the great preacher's utterances. Outdoor preaching was what he loved best. He felt 'cribbed, cabined, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... was the miraculous image of our Saviour, was thrown down, and the image that had annually poured forth its precious blood for the healing of the spiritual and temporal maladies of all pious believers was buried under the ruins. But this calamity was only a precursor of a greater miracle; for, on removing the rubbish, the sacred image was found intact, and as ready as ever to bleed again to order for ready pay. The spiritual interpretation of this astounding phenomenon was, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... diameter to bear upon them. Their altitude was then read off on the circle. Ultimately, the circle of the astrolabe, mounted with one of its diameters parallel to the earth's axis, became the armillary sphere, the precursor of our modern equatorial telescope. Great stone quadrants fixed in the meridian were also employed from very early times. Out of such furnishings, little modified by the lapse of centuries, was provided the elaborate instrumental equipment of Uranibourg, ...
— The New Heavens • George Ellery Hale
... on, even when the great wheel is paralysed or broken. Maltravers was, if I may so express it, in a kind of mental trance. His emotions had left him thoroughly exhausted. He felt that torpor which succeeds and is again the precursor of great woe. At length he was alone, and the solitude half unconsciously restored him to the sense of his heavy misery. For it may be observed, that when misfortune has stricken us home, the presence of any one seems to interfere between the memory and ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... abundant in the inner skeleton, which is consequently in their case cartilaginous, with occasional "calcification" and no distinct bones at all. Unlike the majority of fish, they possess no swimming bladder— the precursor of the lungs; but in many other respects, notably in the uro-genital organs, they have, in common with the higher vertebrata, preserved features which may have been disguised or lost in the perfecting of such modern and specialized fish as, for ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... foresail, and topsail, and jib. Towards nine, the wind shifted to the southward, and a small dark cloud was observed hovering over the land. This ominous appearance, as is well known, is often the precursor of a coming squall, and seems as if sent as a ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... exultingly told him of the aptness of her pupil, of her intention to persevere in teaching me, and of the duty which she felt it to teach me, at least to read the bible. Here arose the first cloud over my Baltimore prospects, the precursor of drenching rains and ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... garments of rock, thistles, and thorns, on the opposite shore of the Cedron. The six brutal Pharisees walked as close to our Lord as they could, struck him constantly with thick pointed sticks, and seeing that his bare and bleeding feet were torn by the stones and briars, exclaimed scornfully: 'His precursor, John the Baptist, has certainly not prepared a good path for him here;' or, 'The words of Malachy, "Behold, I send my angel before thy face, to prepare the way before thee," do not exactly apply ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... it appears a just conclusion that written language generally follows the spoken language through its various revolutions, but still at a certain distance,—not dropping so far behind as to lose sight of its precursor, nor following so close as to be led ...
— Elements of Gaelic Grammar • Alexander Stewart
... low descending sun was shedding the mellow light of his parting beams over the joyful face of reanimating nature. The invalid, during all the fore part of the day, had suffered greatly from pain—that general and undefinable distress which is so frequently found to be the precursor of approaching dissolution. To this had succeeded a sort of lethargic sleep, from which it was not easy to arouse her, so that she could be made to take any notice of what was passing around her. But now she awoke, clear and collected; and, glancing ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... been supposed by certain naturalists that the song of the house-mouse is the result of a disease in its throat, and is therefore a precursor of death. The mouse that came to my study ceased her visits soon after the week had passed and was never seen again; and I was unable to determine how her end was hastened. Brighteye could not, at any rate, have suffered seriously, else he would have succumbed, either to some enemy ever ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... William Cobbett, a contributor to his "Register," and in constant correspondence with him. Even as I write, in Dunfermline old men who knew Grandfather Morrison speak of him as one of the finest orators and ablest men they have known. He was publisher of "The Precursor," a small edition it might be said of Cobbett's "Register," and thought to have been the first radical paper in Scotland. I have read some of his writings, and in view of the importance now given to technical education, I think the most remarkable of them ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... the last letter he had sent her, with the announcement of her death and the hope that "his persecutions" would now cease. A wild idea had sometimes come to him out of the very insufficiency of his knowledge of this climax, but he had always put it aside as a precursor of that madness which might end his ceaseless thought. And now it was returning to him, here, thousands of miles away from where she was peacefully sleeping, and even filling him with ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... is located the most wonderful garden in Japan. Ujima is a place of twelve thousand inhabitants, and the taking on of cargo consumed an hour. Soon after, we came to an island which had been transformed into a magazine; the side presented to us was a solid wall of rock. This was the precursor to our arrival at Kore, the most important naval station in Japan. The steamer touched anchor, which gave us an opportunity to note the many war-vessels in the harbor, three of which had been captured ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... the ordinary press of passengers made it like a theatrical squeeze on a Jenny Lind night; only with this lamentable difference—that the theatrical squeeze was a prelude to all that could charm the senses, whereas the ticket squeeze was, I knew but too well, the precursor of a day of most ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... have come to hold a portfolio under the first Consul. He did not fear death, and he envied with consuming envy those to whom nature had given the qualities of initiative. But his nerves always played him false. The consciousness of having to resolve to take a decided step alone, was the precursor of a fit of trembling. His heart did not fail, but he could not control the parched voice, nor the twitching features, not the ghastly palsy of inner misgiving. In this respect Robespierre recalls a more illustrious man; we think of Cicero tremblingly calling upon the Senate to decide ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... may think our plea of ignorance may excuse us now. But just think of that awful hour, that gathering storm that is now clothing the moral world with darkness that may be felt. The sure and certain precursor of that tremendous "rush" when God roars out of Zion, and utters his voice from Jerusalem, preparatory to the sign of the Son of man in heaven and the trump of the archangel and a great sound, with so much power that earth and sea will ...
— The Seventh Day Sabbath, a Perpetual Sign - 1847 edition • Joseph Bates
... by Mr Ross and those who had lived in that land. It was a dreadful thunderbolt, the precursor of the fierce cyclone, the sudden storm that is coming upon them at the rate of something near a hundred miles an hour. Worst of all, four young people are out in it, in a couple of frail canoes, and who can tell what may happen to them ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... as she thus gives vent to her troubled feelings. Twice, already, has her husband been seized with the drunkard's madness; and, in the nervous prostration consequent upon even a brief withdrawal of his usual strong stimulants, she sees the fearful precursor of another attack of this dreadful and dangerous malady. In the hope of supplying the needed tone she has given him strong coffee; and this for the time, produces the effect desired. The restlessness is allayed, ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... to Lady Nottingham's room to talk to her. She herself was feeling very tired, not with the sound and wholesome tiredness that is the precursor of long sleep and refreshed awakening, but with the restless fatigue of frayed nerves and disquiet mind that leads to intolerable tossings and turnings, and long vigils through the varying greys of dawn and ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... Precursor to what black despairs Was that child's face which once was theirs! And O to what a world of guile Was herald ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... republic a happier futurity. The friar Savonarola, who had exercised such influence in the council, evinced at the same time an ardent love of mankind, deep respect for the rights of all, great sensibility, and an elevated mind. Though a zealous reformer of the Church, and in this respect a precursor of Luther, who was destined to begin his mission twenty years later, he did not quit the pale of orthodoxy; he did not assume the right of examining doctrine; he limited his efforts to the restoration of discipline, the reformation of the morals of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... London. Murray; Bruxelles, De Mat, 20 Avril 1817. This work merits a note. Metternich (vol, i. pp. 312-13) says, "At the time when it appeared the manuscript of St. Helena made a great impression upon Europe. This pamphlet was generally regarded as a precursor of the memoirs which Napoleon was thought to be writing in his place of exile. The report soon spread that the work was conceived and executed by Madame de Stael. Madame de Stael, for her part, attributed it to Benjamin ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... a form of monasticism—it is a getting away from the world. Monasticism does not necessarily imply celibacy, but as unrequited or misplaced love is usually the precursor of the monastic impulse, celibacy or some strange idea on the sex problem usually is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... triumphant in his ferocious activity of purpose, when his fancied bondman and his fancied victim were most helpless at his command—now, when his strained faculties were strung to their highest pitch, the long-deferred paroxysm had seized him, which was the precursor of his repose, of the only repose granted by his awful fate—a change (the mournful change already described) in the form of his insanity. For at those rare periods when he slept, his sleep was not unconsciousness, not rest: it was a trance of hideous dreams—his tongue spoke, his limbs ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... was celebrated throughout the United States as a victory, and considered as the precursor of the total ruin of the invading army. The utmost exultation was displayed, and the militia were stimulated to fly to arms, and complete the work ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like planets, and, once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the music, they never quite subside to their old stony state. But what is the Imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the Reason. And books that treat the old pedantries of the world, our times, places, professions, customs, opinions, histories, with a certain freedom, and distribute things, not after the usages of America and Europe, but after the laws of right ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... parching, enervating, sure precursor, if she had thought to remember, if she had been less engrossed in the bitterness of ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... great love that is so rare in the heart of an artist, who is incapable of abandoning herself unreservedly to a sentiment, or was it simply a dream of an honest, bourgeois life, well protected against ennui, that vile ennui, the precursor of storms, which she had so much reason to dread? In any event, she suffered herself to be deceived and had been living for several days in a state of delicious unrest, for love is so strong, so beautiful, that its semblance, its mirage, takes us captive and may move us ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... formed an overflow valley from a lake held up by ice in the neighbourhood of Fen Bogs and Eller Beck. This great gorge is tenanted at the present time by Pickering Beck, an exceedingly small stream, which now carries off all the surface drainage and must therefore be only remotely related to its great precursor that carved this enormous trench out of the limestone tableland. Compared to the torrential rushes of water carrying along huge quantities of gravel and boulders that must have flowed from the lake at the upper end, Newton Dale can almost ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... arms, having on the right the Virgin in her usual place, and on the left, also in his accustomed place, St. John the Baptist; both seated, and nearly on a level with Christ. The Baptist is here in his character of the Precursor "sent to bear witness to the light, that through him all men might believe." (John i. 7.) The Virgin is exhibited, not merely as the Mother, the Sposa, the Church, but as HEAVENLY WISDOM, for in this character the Catholic Church has applied ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... Napoleon, the most entirely known as well as the ablest of historic men. In another sphere, it is the vision of a higher world to be intimate with the character of Fenelon, the cherished model of politicians, ecclesiastics, and men of letters, the witness against one century and precursor of another, the advocate of the poor against oppression, of liberty in an age of arbitrary power, of tolerance in an age of persecution, of the humane virtues among men accustomed to sacrifice them to authority, the man of whom ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... indignation soon became the prevailing sentiment; crowds assembled, and the tumult increased. Those who had not prevented the flight were accused of favouring it. Neither Bailly nor Lafayette escaped the general mistrust. This event was considered the precursor of the invasion of France, the triumph of the emigrants; the return of the ancient regime, and a long civil war. But the conduct of the assembly soon restored the public mind to calmness and security. It took every measure which so difficult a conjuncture ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... came into Jane's face, a look that her friends would have recognised as the precursor of a resolute and determined attempt to achieve the thing in hand. She seized the horn of the saddle, put her foot into the stirrup and ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... ink, and as he drank, he pondered on why water should not be an antidote for the poisons that lurk in whiskey flasks. Then he wondered why such foolish conceits at such times persist in shouldering death itself out of a man's thoughts. And meanwhile, there stood the precursor of his end, in the emblematic person of a very brown John the Baptist. The fellow's gorgeous red jacket was unbuttoned, revealing a sordid dirty shirt. He was officer of the guard, and had a curiosity as to how a Gringo about to be shot would act. He waited clumsily, lantern in hand. But ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... anything, to do with their political condition? Or can it be believed they will be fit for, much less achieve, political emancipation, while priests and priests alone, are their instructors? We may rely upon it that intellectual freedom is the natural and necessary precursor of political freedom. Education, said Lord Brougham, makes men easy to lead but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave. The Irish peasantry clamoured for 'Repeal,' never considering that did they get it, no essential change would be made in their ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... Ceylon, Java, Sumatra, New Holland—having first laid together, as it were, many of the Cyclopean blocks, out of which the British realm, at a late: period, has been constructed—must always be looked upon with interest by Englishmen, as in a great measure the precursor in their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the book is interesting as one of the predecessors of the modern novel. But we need to keep in mind that it is really a precursor of the novel and not the thing itself. We have no right, therefore, to demand a well-constructed plot or skill in characterization, because these did not appear in English fiction till a much later time. It was two centuries before the novel, in the time ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... from the station (Pettybaw Sands, two miles away) to Jane Grieve's name, which she thought as perfect, in its way, as Susanna Crum's. She had purchased a "tirling-pin," that old-time precursor of knockers and bells, at an antique shop in Oban, and we fastened it on the front door at once, taking turns at risping it until our own nerves were shattered, and the draper's wife ran down the loaning to see if we were in need of anything. The twisted bar of iron ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... her to wed me then, and I would never cease striving after the excellence she wished me to attain. But on that score she was obdurate. Her hand must be the reward of my entire reformation, not the precursor of it. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... know that this occasional "touch of the piles" over a period of many years, and all that it involves, is a precursor and an invitation to the development of that deadly enemy, Cancer—a worse disaster than financial ruin? It is my duty to utter a warning here. Only one making a specialty of the diseases of the alimentary canal ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... religious meetings, etc. Want of sleep is decidedly the most frequent and immediate cause of insanity, and one the most important to guard against. 'So rarely (says the superintendent) do you see a recent case of insanity that is not preceded by want of sleep, that we regard it as almost the sure precursor of mental derangement.' As evidences of the difficulty of arranging the insane in classes, founded on symptoms, Dr. BRIGHAM gives us the following synopsis of individual peculiarities noticed among certain of the ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... he looked across to the shores of Europe, and there in the night stood a great colossal form, not of a naked savage, but a form clad perhaps, in the panoply of the Macedonian phalanx, the representative of the Europe that then was and was yet to be, the precursor, it may be, to the classically informed mind of the missionary to the Gentiles, of that long procession of great world conquerors. It was the Man of Macedon who stood there in the might of his strength and cried, like the crying ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... Socrates was animated by the truest spirit of positive science, and formed an indispensable precursor to its attainment. And we may form some estimate of his worth and genius if we recollect, that while the systems and speculations of other ancient philosophers serve only as curiosities to make us wonder, or as beacons to warn us into what absurdities the ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... an effort to alter her position, but failed: her face changed; she seemed to experience some inward sensation—the precursor, perhaps, of ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... districts; but a competent authority[J] has estimated, that, on the average, land which has been drained produces a quarter more grain per acre than that which is undrained. But this by no means exhausts the benefits derived from it, draining being merely the precursor of further improvement. It is only after it has been carried out that the farmer derives the full benefit of the manures which he applies. He gains also by the increased facility of working the soil, and by the rapidity with which it dries after continued rain, thus ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... Meanwhile, side by side with the preaching of atheism in religion and morals, a growth had become apparent in the preaching of extreme democracy or Socialist Radicalism in politics, a preaching of which Bright was in this country the precursor, and which first came to a head between the years 1880 and 1900, in the writings of Henry George and the English followers of Marx. What I looked on as the fallacies of these new political gospels seemed to me no less dangerous, and also no less absurd, than those which I had previously attacked ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... admitted to a share in the management of the college. The following letter from a prominent Trustee of Dartmouth to the president, written just at this period, shows that the animated contest in Connecticut was only the natural and logical precursor of one more animated and much more important, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... Territory the French and Indian intermarried, and syphilis did not begin to tell on the Indian until the Americans settled the country. From these observations it is very evident that in the Polynesian Archipelago syphilis must have been the precursor of the phthisis and scrofula, as we know it to have been that which induced those diseases among the Indians of the Mississippi or Missouri Valleys, or of the Colorado and Mojave Deserts, or in the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... that this injunction was the precursor of a terrible vengeance: the whole town echoed with cries and groans, the mosques were filled with people praying for deliverance. The appointed time arrived, they embraced each other as if parting for ever, and then the men, unarmed, in number six hundred ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... gentleman rose; moreover, part of his sermon next Sunday inveighed against inhumanity; and Robinson, who had no conception the sermon was several years old, looked on it as aimed at Hawes and his myrmidons and as the precursor of other and effective remonstrances. Not long after this, to his delight, the chaplain visited him alone. He seized this opportunity of securing the good man's interference in his favor. He told ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... circulate among all classes, but especially among readers of comparatively small means, a cheap, well-edited, and beautifully illustrated edition of the works of our great poet. The text of the present edition is not printed, {351} like of its precursor, in double columns, but in a distinct and handsome type extending across the page; and as there is no doubt the notes will be revised so as to incorporate the amendments and elucidations of the text, which have appeared from our Colliers, Hunters, &c., since the Pictorial Shakspeare was first ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... significance—vigorously showed that the problem of prostitution is in reality the problem of marriage, and that we can only reform away prostitution by reforming marriage, regarded as a compulsory institution resting on an antiquated economic basis. Gross-Hoffinger was a pioneering precursor of Ellen Key. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a sharpening of his perceptive faculties, awakening him to the fact that he stood in danger of being taken for an idiot or a madman if he did not frame some answer to the questions which the doctors asked him. This new acuteness was perhaps the precursor to a return of his memory; but as yet the Past was like a dead wall, an abyss of darkness surrounding him. Now and then flashes of light seemed to dart across that darkness: he seemed on the point of recalling something—he knew not what; ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... and a half directly toward East Point, so as to cover roads going eastward toward Rough-and-Ready Station on the Macon road. We were hardly in position before our skirmishers were briskly engaged with an advancing force of the enemy's cavalry, and we felt sure that it was the precursor of an attack by Hood in force. It proved to be nothing but a reconnoissance, and showed that Hood was strangely misconceiving the situation. Its chief interest to me at the moment was in the experiment it enabled me to make of the speed with which my men could cover themselves ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... robin (Turdus migratorius) appeared; this bird is hailed by the natives as the infallible precursor of warm weather. Ducks and geese were also seen in numbers and the reindeer advanced to the northward. The merganser (Mergus serrator) which preys upon small fish, was the first of the duck tribe that appeared; next came the teal (Anas ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... distinctively Bernesque Capitoli. Two years later (see Letter to Murray, February 21, 1820, Letters, 1900, iv. 407; and "Advertisement" to Morgante Maggiore) he had discovered that "Pulci was the parent of Whistlecraft, and the precursor and model of Berni," but, in 1817, he was only at the commencement of his studies. A time came long before the "year or two" of his promise (March 25, 1818) when he had learned to simulate the vera imago of the Italian Muse, and was able not only to surpass his "immediate model," but to rival ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... upon him as a precursor who cleared away his doubts. What was strange about his marrying a Chueta, a woman like others in her customs, beliefs, and education, since the most famous of the Febrers in an epoch of intolerance had lived beyond the pale of the law with infidel women? ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... possession; and as I remember produced an Italian sonnet on the subject. "Let us not," cries Johnson, "amuse ourselves with subtleties and sonnets, when speaking about hope, which is the follower of faith and the precursor of eternity; but if you only mean those air-built hopes which to-day excite and to-morrow will destroy, let us talk away, and remember that we only talk of the pleasures of hope; we feel those of possession, ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... reached the corner. There he stopped. His color had heightened. The smile was still on his lips; it had altered, taken on a quality of gameness. He did not shake his fist at the embodied spirit of metropolitanism before him, as had a famous Gallic precursor of his, also a determined seeker for Success in a lesser sphere; but he paraphrased Rastignac's threat in his ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... fitness and the urgent desirability of women of later ages even as Members of Parliament. It may be added that, on this very point, there is a ridiculous argument against woman suffrage—that it is the precursor of a demand to enter Parliament, which would mean (it is assumed), women being numerically in the majority, that the House would be filled with girls of twenty-two and three. Men of a sort would be likelier than women, it could be argued, to vote for such girls; but the wise of both ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... had now set in—a sure precursor of the starting whistle. Before it was quite completed, the inevitable late passenger appeared in the distance. This time it was a lady, middle-aged and stout, and short of wind, but with an iron will, as was ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... crowd they are! As a garden is beautified by flowers, so is heaven made more beautiful by the radiant crimson-clad army of martyrs. Here is St. John the Baptist, the fearless precursor of Jesus. Here is the glorious St. Stephen, the first who laid down his life after the ascension of Jesus. Here are the holy Apostles, those intrepid soldiers of Christ, who went forth from the council, rejoicing that ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... some hours been gradually stealing over it; while around the horizon lay piled long, motionless banks of leaden clouds, thick and heavy enough evidently to be dark, but yet of that light, dead, glazed, uncertain hue, which the close observer may have often noted as the precursor of winter-storms. After a long and attentive survey of every visible part of the heavens, the hunter, with an ominous shake of the head, dropped his eyes to the ground, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... his soul seemed inspired with a warlike ardour that caused him for a while to forget the presence of the Senator. It was only after some minutes spent in this wild enthusiasm that he remembered an important fact—that in all projects such as he was engaged in, intrigue should be the precursor of open action; and as this was to be the peculiar role which the Senator was expected to play, he again turned to address ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... difficult to know what to do, especially as the Kafirs have, very naturally, an intense horror and dislike to going out in a thunderstorm. This storm was not really overhead at all, and scarcely deserves mention except as the precursor of a severe one of which our valley got the full benefit. It was quite curious to see the numbers of dead butterflies on the garden-paths after that second storm. Their beautiful plumage was not dimmed or smirched ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... healthful and vigorous constitution had thus far resisted the infection, but after returning from the sad duty of laying little Bertha's remains by those of her father, he felt the peculiar languor which is so often the precursor of the chill and subsequent fever. Although he had scarcely hoped to escape an attack, he had never before realized how disastrous it would be to the very ones he had come to serve. Who was there to take care of him? Mrs. Poland ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... the colour of iron heated to a low red-heat. I had never before beheld such a weird, awe-inspiring spectacle, but as I gazed upon it the memory came to me that I had somewhere read of something similar, and I also remembered that it had been described as the precursor of a hurricane, or ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... Choate, who was present, writes of his appearance: "When he spoke he was transformed, his eye kindled, his voice rang, his face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly. For an hour and a half he held his audience in the hollow of his hand." This address may be regarded as a precursor, and a worthy precursor, of the First Inaugural, and by many competent critics it has been given the first place among the discussions of the political situation just before the war. After such a performance there could be no ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... begun to get the place into something like order when a shell was sent into the colony, which created almost as much dismay as if it had been the precursor of another Kafir invasion. ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... of [g] and [d] is an infallible precursor of rain, and if the Bee Hive is not visible in a clear sky, it is a presage of ...
— A Field Book of the Stars • William Tyler Olcott
... I am inclined to believe that a symmetrical perforation of both vessels is the most common precursor of either condition; that the pure varix is the rarer and less likely result, and that its formation is dependent mainly on certain anatomical conditions. The most important of these conditions are ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... arguments apply elsewhere?" and we are told of people whose conditions of life are worse than some of those of coal-miners. Why stop here? Who ever said we would stop here? I welcome and support this measure, not only for its own sake, but much more because it is, I believe, simply the precursor of the general movement which is in progress all over the world, and in other industries besides this, towards reconciling the conditions of labour with the well-ascertained laws of science and health. If we are told that because we support ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... quarrel between England and France, but it was only the precursor of a far more serious conflict which was to arise. From time to time, however, these differences were adjusted temporarily by treaties, only to lead to further complications. The principal difficulty arose regarding the boundaries of New France, ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... it is the precursor of reform. But no repentance can merit pardon, nor atone for wrong. If, having done wrong, I repent, and afterwards do right, that is good. But to be sorry and not to reform ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... said De Luynes, as he stood beside his royal master—"to this insult, which is but the precursor of many others, you have been subjected by ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... in Newgate was the precursor of similar work undertaken in other prisons, not in London only, but all over the country. With prisons now so much better managed, and with multitudes of workers, single or associated, striving for the welfare of prisoners, the record of Mrs. Fry's early labours may have lost ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... for senility and denounced as disregarding the obligations of the Constitution. But the wrath of the pro-slavery extremists was specially aroused against the Society of Friends, and was unrestrained by any considerations of either decency or truth. In this respect the debate was the precursor of every contest in Congress upon the subject that was to follow for the coming seventy years. The Quakers were the representative abolitionists of that day, and the measure of bitter and angry denunciation that was meted out to them was the same measure which, heaped up ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... of imaginations which answered readily to the summons of their poets, the Welsh chiefs and leaders united in acclamations of applause; and the song of the bard went farther to render popular the intended alliance of the Prince, than had all the graver arguments of his priestly precursor in ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... wife to be cheerful, with the pleasant thoughts and evident anticipations she had in her mind, but a little more difficult for him to put off his doleful looks while his own child lay in a state of suffering and illness which might be the precursor of a still worse malady. But he was always a man for immediate action as soon as he had resolved on the course to be taken; and he knew that 'some must watch, while some must sleep; so runs ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... ago, by a gentleman from Scotland, to whom, we fear, Americans have never tendered the grateful acknowledgments he deserved for his disinterested efforts to teach them to eat eggs properly, and to give due time to the mastication of their food. This benevolently instructive work was the precursor of a host of others on the same topics, and others of a kindred character. America has been the standard subject for the trial essays of European tyros in philosophy, political economy, and book-making ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... tells God what it knows that He knows already, for it relieves the burdened heart to tell Him. It asks Him to see and hear what it knows that He does see and hear. But the prayer is not for mere observance followed by no divine act, but for taking knowledge as the precursor of the appropriate help. Of such seeing and hearing by God, believing prayer is the appointed condition. 'Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him'; but that is not a reason for silence, but ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... voyage; and there was much anxiety until it could be ascertained that his literary stock-in-trade had been rescued from the hands of the sailors. It was not till the end of the century that Chrysoloras renewed the knowledge of the classics: but we may regard the austere Leontio as the chief precursor of the crowd of later immigrants, each with a gem, or bronze, or 'a brown Greek manuscript' for sale, and all eager to play their parts ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... 1892. When we remember all the strange literary effort gathered round about that year in the West—Symbolism, the Yellow Book, Art for Art's sake—and the limbo into which it has been thrust by now, we may realise how great a precursor and, in his own despite, a leader, Anton Tchehov was. When Western literature was plunging with enthusiasm into one cul de sac after another, incapable of diagnosing its own disease, Tchehov in Russia, unknown to the ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... no such reference here, for Jesus not only said, "Behold the fig tree," but also, "all the trees." His meaning is perfectly plain. He did not refer to nations under the figure of trees, but he declared that as the foliage is a sure precursor of summer, so the signs of which he spoke are a certain indication of his imminent return. "Even so ye also, when ye see these things coming to pass, know ye that the kingdom of God is nigh," the Kingdom which is to be established in glory at the ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... huge creature, its body the size of a rhinoceros, covered with a coat of armour, a convex oval shield, formed of hexagonal plates wonderfully fitted to each other! It is an armadillo, the precursor of a race still abounding in the land, though of diminutive form compared to its mighty predecessor. See how, with powerful jaws, it crunches up a fallen tree, perforated through and through by ants,—grinding ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... succeeded one another more rapidly, the thunder began to growl, and the wind, the precursor of a hurricane, whistled in the plumes and the hair of ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... moreover by the unpleasant fact that it grew late. Soon the dusk would fall, its coming hastened by the mist, now settling into a steady drizzle of rain precursor of a dark and early night. To hunt any longer would be useless. She must give it up. Yet her maidenly pride, her sense of what is seemly and becoming, revolted from exposing herself to Timothy Proud's coarse ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the sparkle of flame to all her motions. Beauvouloir shuddered when he noticed this phenomenon, which we may call in these days the phosphorescence of thought; the old physician of that period regarded it as the precursor ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... affairs the people now first obtained a place in Parliament. Their victory was not permanent then, but it was the precursor of the establishment of a permanent House of Commons which was to come in ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... broken them, and gone to sleep." Another wonderfully comic minor character was introduced later on in the eminently ridiculous person of old Mrs. Fielding—in regard to in-door gloves, a foreshadowing of Mrs. Wilfer—in the matter of her imaginary losses through the indigo trade, a spectral precursor, or dim prototype, as one might say, of Mrs. Pipchin and the Peruvian mines. Throughout the chief part of the dreamy, dramatic little story, the various characters, it will be remembered, are involved in a mazy entanglement of cross purposes. Mystery sometimes, pathos ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... innocuous angels if there were not evil in the world for us to be ground upon and master. We are held and refined between the two attractions—one of the earth and the other a spiritual uplift. We believe that the sense of Unity is the first deep breath of the soul, the precursor of illumination; that the great Brotherhood conception must come from this sense. Next to this realisation, we believe that man's idea of time is an illusion, that immortality is here and now; that nothing can happen to us that is not the right good thing; that the farther and faster we go, the ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... in writings that have perished, for instance, in those of Antimachus of Colophon, but the "Argonautica" is perhaps the first poem still extant in which the expression of this spirit is developed with elaboration. The Medea of Apollonius is the direct precursor of the Dido of Virgil, and it is the pathos and passion of the fourth book of the "Aeneid" that keep alive ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... however, lies beyond our present purpose. We are here looking at the work chiefly as a document for the writer's history; and in this point of view, it certainly seems, as contrasted with its more popular precursor, to deserve our best attention: for the problem which had been stated in /Werter/, with despair of its solution, is here solved. The lofty enthusiasm, which, wandering wildly over the universe, found no resting-place, has here reached its appointed ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... become well civilized and after those of America were also sufficiently civilized to assimilate new ideas, a stray ship or two was blown by the trade-winds across the Atlantic. That hypothetical voyage was the precursor of the great journey of Columbus. Without the tradewinds this historic discoverer never could have found the West Indies. Suppose that a strong west wind had blown him backward on his course when his men were mutinous. ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... they were in no mood to imperil their own cause by revolutionary claims. They could not always succeed, however, in checking the fury of the populace, which had been taught to clamour for reform as the precursor of a good time coming for the suffering and toiling masses of mankind. The streets of London were illuminated, and the windows of those who omitted to illuminate or were otherwise obnoxious were tumultuously demolished by the mob, which did not even spare Apsley House, the town residence ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... was down, the sky a cold, opaque grey, overcast with a light drift of cloud. The park seemed very dark, very dreary; a searching breeze was sweeping inland from the Sound, soughing sadly in the tree-tops; a chill humidity permeated the air, precursor of rain. The young man shivered, both with chill and reaction from the tension ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
