"Prescience" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Forsythe in charge of the bridge, he came down the stairs and aft on the run. Not a word was spoken by either; but, with the prescience that men feel at the coming of a fight, the two cooks left their dishes and the engineers their engines to crowd their heads into the hatches. Riley showed his disfigured face over the heads of the other two; and on the ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... forth: By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune— Now my dear lady—hath mine enemies Brought to this shore; and by my prescience I find my zenith[379-52] doth depend upon A most auspicious star, whose influence If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes Will ever after droop.[379-53] Here cease more questions: Thou art inclined to sleep; 'tis a good dulness, And give it way: I know thou canst not ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... a sort of semi-diplomatic position, when the Assembly of Notables was convened. His keen prescience and profound sagacity induced him to return to his distracted country, where he knew his services would soon be required. Though debauched, extravagant, and unscrupulous, he was not unpatriotic. He had an intense hatred ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... there was a new stir in the atmosphere of old Detroit. For General Wayne with the prescience of an able and far-sighted patriot had said, "To make good citizens they must learn the English language and there must be schools. Education will be the corner stone of this ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... that gets a wound, And prescience hath of death, will drag itself Back to its cavern sullenly to die, And would not have heaven's airs for witnesses, So Wyndham, shrinking from the very stars And tell-tale places where the moonlight fell, Crept through the huddled shadows back to hall, And in a lonely room ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the times demanded the latter. It is from such demands that our chief institutions arise. By precept we may be taught their propriety; by example we may see their advantages. But until the necessity is personally felt they are sure to be neglected; and men wonder at their want of prescience and upbraid their shortsightedness when, with a sudden and sometimes startling success, the proposal they have slighted arises ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... subjects with foul insurrection Have batter'd down her consecrated wall, And by their mortal fault brought in subjection Her immortality, and made her thrall To living death and pain perpetual: Which in her prescience she controlled still, But her foresight could ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... one, and it belonged to little Francette, the pretty maid who had run by the factor's side that day of the meeting of Bois DesCaut by the river. With the drop of that head from the sill there passed over Maren a strange feeling, a prescience of evil, a thrill of fear in a heart that had ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... with the prescience of success. With Nobili in the house, what might not the chapter of accidents produce? All this had occurred, too, without taking into account what the marchesa herself might have planned, when she ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... work rather than by my poor knowledge; and therefore in the year 1300, when I returned from Rome, I began to compile this book, to the reverence of God and Saint John and the praise of this our city Florence.' The key-note is struck in these passages. Admiration for the past mingles with prescience of the future. The artist and the patriot awake together in Villani at the sight of Rome and the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... rose again before their mind's eye, that night of anxious vigil, the agonized suspense, the prescience of the disaster at Froeschwiller hanging in the sultry heavy air, while the Alsatian told his prophetic fears; Germany in readiness, with the best of arms and the best of leaders, rising to a man in a grand outburst of patriotism; France dazed, a century behind ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... received the medal from the Chevalier, with whom afterwards I had half-an-hour's talk, chiefly about German history, in which by good fortune I was fairly posted, perhaps with a prescience that the ambassador might ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... unexpectedly he found he was afraid—filled with a kind of nameless dread—a horrible prescience of some villainy about to happen. There was a motive in this programme of changing scents, a deeper significance than the mere will to annoy. He knew without even asking himself how he knew that the smell of pineapple would be next. But why he ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... shall never be of the opinion they can forsee future contingencies, which I suppose the divell himselfe can neither forknow nor fortell; these being things which the Almightie hath keepd hidden in the bosome of his divine prescience. And whither the great God hath preordained or predestinated these things, which to us are contingent, to fall out by ane uncontrollable and unavoidable necessitie, is a question not yet decided." [SIR JAMES TURNER'S MEMOIRS, ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... that she will return again. Now I understood why she had quailed and even seemed to shrivel when, in my last interview with her, stung beyond endurance by her witcheries and sarcasms, I had suggested that even for her with all her powers, Fate might reserve one of its shrewdest blows. Some prescience had told her that if the words seemed random, Truth spoke through my lips, although, and this was the worst of it, she did not know what weapon would deal the stroke or when and where ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... omniscience and prescience of God do not deprive men of free will. Maimonides explains this in the last chapter of the Shemonah Perakim (ed. Gorfinkle, p. ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... and masterful child of his first marriage. It was into his ear that the dying man had poured the wretched tale of his repentance for the life he had lived and the state in which he was leaving his affairs with such scant provision for his sons. For Oliver he had no fear. It was as if with the prescience that comes to men in his pass he had perceived that Oliver was of those who must prevail, a man born to make the world his oyster. His anxieties were all for Lionel, whom he also judged with that ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... seeing many pictures through his wide-open eyes, Quebec, the lost Stadacona of the Mohawks, the St. Lawrence, Tandakora, the huge Ojibway who had hunted him so fiercely, St. Luc, De Courcelles, and all the others who had passed out of his life for a while, though he felt now, with the prescience of old King Hendrik, that they were coming back again. His path would lie for a long time away from cities and the gay and varied life that appealed to him so much, and would lead once more through ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... His prescience, however, in this respect was demonstrated when a year later the Czar saluted a French squadron in the harbour of Cronstadt to the strains of the "Marseillaise" and signed a secret agreement that was alluded ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... obliged to notice that for once he could not hold his audience. The primer class especially had begun to flag in attention, but one or two faces among the elder scholars fairly shone with vital sympathy and a lovely prescience of their future. Their eyes met his as if they struck a flash of light. There was a sturdy boy who half rose in his place unconsciously, the color coming and going in his cheeks; something in Mr. Laneway's words lit the altar ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the stone flags behind her. She looked up quickly; Helen stood beside her. Helen, in all the sheen of her gay Paris garments, with the evening light upon her uncovered head, and the glow of a passion, fiercer than madness, in her glittering eyes. Some prescience of evil—she knew not of what—made Vera ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... with sudden keen prescience, took alarm. Noticing the two maids standing wide-mouthed in the hallway, she summoned her most commandatory tone, stepped into the hall, half closing the door behind her, and cowed the two handmaidens under ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... were the first among the rich inhabitants of the Spanish colonies who visited Spain, France and Italy; and at the Havannah the people were always well informed of the politics of Europe. This knowledge of events, this prescience of future chances, have powerfully aided the inhabitants of Cuba to free themselves from some of the burthens which check the development of colonial prosperity. In the interval between the peace ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... prescience of such a state of thought, I wonder (for it certainly did not exist in their time), that caused good men of old to extol old age; as though anything could reconcile the mind of man to the time when the very sun is darkened to ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... were written at a period before the great problems which have since controlled our history were recognized or appreciated among the people at large, they will be found to indicate a moral tone and a political prescience quite remarkable in a young man of ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... from the shackles that bound him to the effeminate serfdom of idleness; but the magic that could unrivet those fetters had not yet been revealed. Still he was sometimes stirred by a mysterious prescience that they would be loosened, and through ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... and neither knew the silent heartaches when she was alone and began to take an inventory of her innermost self. She had loved Dru from the moment she first saw him at her home in Philadelphia, but with that her prescience in such matters as only women have, she knew that nothing more than his friendship would ever be hers. She sometimes felt the bitterness of woman's position in such situations. If Dru had loved her, he would have been free to pay her court, and to do those things ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... as was Hojo Tokimasa, his son Yoshitoki excelled him in both of those attributes as well as in prescience. It was to the mansion of Yoshitoki that Sanetomo was carried for safety when his life was menaced by the wiles of Tokimasa. Yet in thus espousing the cause of his sister, Masa, and his nephew, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... think The inner prescience never stirred or spoke: Veiled though it be from consciousness so strangely, And its fine voice unheard amid the din Of outward things, the quest of earthly passion, There is an under-sense, a faculty All independent ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... whole volume is but their masterful development. They prove that together with audacious sincerity in the coordination of facts and an infallible judgment, Ardant du Picq possessed prescience in the highest degree. His prophetic eye distinguished sixty years ago the constituent principles of a good army. These are the principles which lead to victory. They are radically opposed to those which enchant our parliamentarians ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... her to see how acute her prescience had been when Dr Barnes made his furious reply to the bishop. For Dr Barnes was one of Privy Seal's most noted men: an insolent fool whom he had taken out of the gutter to send ambassador to the Schmalkaldners. And it was on the day when Gardiner made his complaint to the King about Dr ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... grief worked in his heart and a wistful tenderness moistened his eyes as he thought upon that injured brother, living out his wrecked life somewhere in the heart of those great woods about him. Perhaps there was a bit of prescience in the warmth with which he dwelt on the subject, for Fate had written that Joshua Ward was to play an important part in the ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... sound. His air indicated deep reflection. In previous encounters with him, the Count had been pleased; now his sensations were of repugnance mixed with doubt and suspicion. He had not time to account for the change. It may have had origin in the higher prescience sometimes an endowment of the spirit by which we stand advised of a friend or an enemy; most likely, however, it was a consequence of the curious tales abroad in Constantinople; for at the recognition up sprang the history of the Prince's connection with Lael, and ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... was gifted with prescience beyond the common run; but for this case, which would have been the first thought for most men, his foresight had failed. During the long six-hour nooning Boland suffered with intermittent cramps in his legs, wakeful while the others slept. He made no complaint; but, though he kept his trouble from ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... with an odd note of prescience in her voice. It was so pronounced that the sense of foreboding ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... fear save that others should encounter death before them on Italy's behalf. Had the profoundest statesmanship, the keenest political genius, governed the counsels of Piedmont in 1849, it would, with full prescience of the ruin of Novara, have bidden the sovereign and the army strike in self-sacrifice their last unaided blow. From this time there was but one possible head for Italy. The faults of the Government of Turin ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... of events is an intricate process, and to its successful exploitation a certain degree of sagacious prescience is a prerequisite, as well as a thorough mastery of the lessons of experience. For a day or so all went well in the inner consciousness of Nehemiah Yerby. The letter had satisfied his restless craving for some action toward the ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... instinctive appreciation of the meaning and bearing of facts, his capacity to recognize the precise time until which action should be postponed and then to know that action must be taken, suggesting the idea of prescience, his long-suffering and tolerance towards impolitic, obstructive, or over-rash individuals, his marvelous gift of keeping in touch with the people, form a group of qualities which, united in the President of the United States at that mortal juncture, are as strong evidence ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... Russian-Jewish colony on the west side of Chicago were thrown into a state of intense excitement as soon as the nationality of the young man became known. They were filled with dark forebodings from a swift prescience of what it would mean to them were the oduim of anarchy rightly or wrongly attached to one of their members. It seemed to the residents of Hull-House most important that every effort should be made to ascertain just what did happen, that every means of ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... between a man's moments of prescience and a woman's, is that the man puts them out of his consciousness as quickly as he can, while a woman clings to them fearfully and goes her way a little more carefully for the momentary flash of foresight. David ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... of Mr. Landale's weighted brow she propped up her own long sallow face, upon its aching side, with a trembling hand, and, full of agonised prescience, ventured to ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... is the cause of death; and sin's alone The cause of God's predestination: And from God's prescience of man's sin doth flow ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... in the darkness of the night startled him. The idea that he had cast a shuttle of crime into the great loom upon which the fabric of his life was being woven, took complete possession of his mind. With unerring prescience, he saw that it began to be entangled in the mysterious meshes. A consciousness that he was no longer the master but the victim of his destiny seized him and he shuddered. Pepeeta perceived the shudder through the arm which ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... have gone by since the Great War broke out. It needed no prescience, no remarkable statesmanship or gift of forecasting the future, to see that, when such mighty forces were unloosed, and when it had been shown that all treaties and other methods hitherto relied upon for national protection and for mitigating the horror ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... ornamented the interior of the roof beneath which the Magician knelt; before he could remove, the sharp and heavy mass descended on his forehead, and whilst it confirmed the infallibility of his prescience, in an instant deprived him of life. Michael, however, according to the account of Benvenuto da Imola, had strength enough to lift up the stone, and ascertain its weight, after which he declared it was of the exact size he expected; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... herself that comfort. Lavretsky was particularly struck by this talent when, immediately after the wedding, he and his wife set off for Lavriki, travelling in a convenient carriage which she had chosen herself. How carefully all their surroundings had been meditated over by Varvara Pavlovna! what prescience she had shown in providing them! What charming travelling contrivances made their appearance in the various convenient corners! what delicious toilet boxes! what excellent coffee machines! and how gracefully did Varvara Pavlovna herself make the coffee in the morning! But it must be confessed that ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... may have been prescience, it may have been merely the deplorable state of his nerves, but, as he continued to look out upon that unfamiliar landscape, the beauty of it, in growing on him, became almost intolerable. It affected him with an indescribable uneasiness, a yearning, a foreboding, a terror. He gave a deep sigh ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... conquest of the industrial and commercial worlds by the power of associated capital. To-day the new feudalism has more than half entangled society in its meshes, and its complete establishment stares us in the face. What perspicuity to have foreseen so clearly what is now being realized! If prescience is a test of science—if the foretelling of future events is a test of the laws that govern them and from which they are deducible, then Fourier must have discovered at least some of the laws which govern ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... bay as our boat went sailing Under the skies of Augustine, Wan on the waters the mist lay veiling Under the skies of Augustine.— Was it the joy that begot the sorrow?— Joy that was filled with the dreams that borrow Prescience sad of a far To-morrow,— There in the Now that was all too keen, That shadowed the fate that might intervene? As over the bay our boat went sailing ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... hard, since there were many hands to lighten it; he was brought into contact with a magnificence of which he had never dreamed. As always, he kept his eyes and ears open; with his strange, sure prescience that all he could see and hear and know would be useful to him, somehow, somewhen, he set out to learn all he could of the life of the great mansion and of ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... blank beach Whereto the boldest thought may reach That voyages from the vaguest past— (Dim realm and ultimate of space)— Is vexed and troubled, stirs and shakes, In prescience of a god that wakes, Born of man's ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... because in the one hundred and forty-eighth Psalm they are mentioned AFTER the heavenly bodies and the "heaven of heavens," but BEFORE the terrestrial elements. As to their purpose, he hesitates between those who held that they were stored up there by the prescience of God for the destruction of the world at the Flood, as the words of Scripture that "the windows of heaven were opened" seemed to indicate, and those who held that they were kept there to moderate the heat ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... was not Manuel, not the wan prisoner of Foray,—but her heart needed none to tell her it was the hero who had loved the lady of this chateau in the splendor of his manhood. She saw it, and saw nothing more,—the prescience of her soul was satisfied. As he was, she beheld him now;—was it safe for her to sit there ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... actions, criminal in the eyes of the masses, are the outcome of a vast and intelligent thought. There is in these terrible souls some mysterious blending of the force of fate and that of destiny, some prescience which suddenly elevates them above their fellows; the masses seek them for a time in their own ranks, then they raise their eyes and see ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... a position of independent command, his mind appears to have taken a higher stand: he recognised higher responsibilities: and one may almost detect, in the confirmed self-reliance of his judgment even in this comparatively limited sphere, a prescience ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... harmonious allotment of the most varied gifts to different beings; definite recognition of time and space, as in the life of individuals, of species, in the stages of growth, in the geographical limitation of types; prescience and omniscience, as shown in the prophetic types of earlier geological ages; omnipresence, by the adjustment of the whole series of animal organisms to the various parts of the planet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... for delay. This fact he pointed out to his companions curtly, with a philosophic commentary on the folly of "throwing up their hand before the game was played out." But they were furnished with liquor, which in this emergency stood them in place of food, fuel, rest, and prescience. In spite of his remonstrances, it was not long before they were more or less under its influence. Uncle Billy passed rapidly from a bellicose state into one of stupor, the Duchess became maudlin, and Mother Shipton snored. Mr. Oakhurst alone remained erect, leaning ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... and he declared that Spain was the place for it, and that then England would intervene 85. General Wellesley, fresh from India, was present. Ten years later, when he had accomplished that which Pitt had seen in the lucid prescience of his last days, he related at Paris what I scarcely hesitate to call the most astounding and profound prediction in all political history, where such things have ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... independence to all at the price of labor. With this resource no man needed to call another master. This may be considered the idyllic period of the republic, the time when De Tocqueville saw and admired it, though not without prescience of the doom that awaited it. The seed of death was in the state in the principle of private capitalism, and was sure in time to grow and ripen, but as yet the conditions were not favorable to its development. All seemed to go well, and it is not strange that the American people indulged in the hope ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... with these places, the sea also seemed to lie uneasily; a sound of it, like a long sigh, mounted to me where I stood; and, quiet as it was, the Roost itself appeared to be revolving mischief. For I ought to say that all we dwellers in these parts attributed, if not prescience, at least a quality of warning, to that strange and dangerous creature ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... written the book, nor is it thick: but I have printed you a book, and it is thin. And I take the occasion to note that old Geoffry Chaucer, our father poet, must have had you in his mind's eye, by prescience or precognition, or he could hardly else have written two poems, one on the daisy and one on the rose. They are poems too long for modern days, nor are we equal in patience to our fore-fathers, who read 'The Faerie Queen,' 'Gondibert,' and the 'Polyolbion,' annually, ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... not wish to lay claim to any special prescience or wisdom, for, in spite of lucid intervals of foresight, we were all deceived by Germany. Nearly fifty years of peace had blinded us to fifty years of relentless preparation for war. But if we were deceived by the treachery of Germany's false professions, we had no monopoly ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... he saw her again. His instinct, intuition, prescience, what you will, had told him that he would meet her here—and to his weary eyes, when first he caught sight of her across the crowded room, she had never seemed more exquisite, nor more desirable. She was ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... Washington's prescience is remarkable. Recognizing, in October, 1789, that France had "gone triumphantly through the first paroxysm," he felt that she must encounter others, that more blood must be shed, that she might run from one extreme to another, and ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... Germans of Tacitus, etc. Woman, at that time, takes in the family and in public life a position such as she has never since taken. Along these lines, says Tacitus in his "Germania": "They (the Germans) even suppose somewhat of sanctity and prescience to be inherent in the female sex; and, therefore, neither despise their counsels, nor disregard their responses;" and Diodorus, who lived at the time of Caesar, feels highly indignant over the position of women in Egypt, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... heavens played a soft light, and now and then a star shot. The man who marked its trail across the studded skies thought of himself as of one as far withdrawn as it from the world of lower lights in the forest at his feet. Already he felt a prescience of the loneliness of the morrow, and the morrow, and the morrow, of the slow drift of the days in the waning forest, the hopeless nights, the terror of that great solitude—and felt, too, a feverish desire to ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... the approaching "Eastern Question," when in the cartoon of "The Turkey in Danger," the Sick Bird is shown in the powerful hug of the Russian Bear; and "The Emperor's Cup for 1853" illustrates still further the prescience of Punch. Nevertheless, as has been said, he could not appreciate a suaviter policy, and in a cartoon entitled "Not a Nice Business" (p. 271, Vol. XXVI.) Lord Aberdeen, the Premier, is shown engaged in cleaning ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... of my letter, that it was his own fault that he had it not before. But, governed by the same pragmatical motives which induced me to correspond with him at first, I was again afraid, truly, with my foolish and busy prescience; and the disappointment would have thrown him into the way of receiving fresh insults from the same persons; which might have made him guilty of some violence to them. And so to save him an apprehended ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... aggrandizement, Monseigneur,' said I, 'in truth I do not see much material for it just at present; as for your welfare, we must be allowed to see your intentions a little more clearly first, and take the liberty of repeating to you that my prescience does not extend so far. I do him the justice to believe that he really feels the greater part of all that he expresses for your Majesty; but that horrid habit of indecision and putting off till to-morrow what he might do to-day is not eradicated, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... his reins to a soldier, followed Greene into Nassau Hall, and was quickly running over the bundles of papers which the British, with more prudence than prescience, had for safety left behind. Presently he came upon a great package of signed oaths of allegiance, which he was shoving to one side as of no immediate importance, when the name signed at the bottom of the uppermost one caught ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... restraint, as of a hushed yet mighty wind, it breathed a power of valiant endurance, and promised before nightfall the respite of a twilight hour. For stoicism has qualities which seem foreordained for the bracing of shy souls, as if the men who framed its austere laws had prescience of our frailty and consciously legislated to its intention. It is the philosophy of the individual standing by himself, as the shy must always stand, over against a world which he likes not but may not altogether ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... the silent woman slept, and in silence the watcher gazed. And as he looked a great fear, a prescience of evil that should come, entered into Geoffrey and took possession of him. A cloud without crossed the ray of sunlight and turned it. It wavered, for a second it rested on his breast, flashed back to hers, then went out; and as it flashed and died, he seemed to know that henceforth, ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... of a public lamp, in the vicinity of the Assembly Room. As the heavy rains of the last few days have unfortunately obliterated this interesting impression, the society is to be congratulated on the prescience of the member who was energetic enough to measure ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... a wine. It is a beverage, lighter indeed than brandy and soda, but, like cologne, fit only for demi-reps." But he seems untrue to himself in an essay condemning the use of perfumes. His own books are heavily scented. With the rare prescience and clairvoyance of an artist he includes the German Kaiser in a chapter on hyenas (in 1906!); therein stalk the blood-stained shadows of Caligula, Caracalla, Atilla, Tamerlane, Cesare Borgia, Philip II, and Ivan the Terrible. The paragraph ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... of the skylight—the surface of the deck offered nothing secure. But on the farther or starboard side, rather abaft the beam, there was a small boat in davits, swung outboard, to which common sense, and perhaps a vague prescience of its after utility, pointed irresistibly. In any case, discrimination was out of place, so I mounted the bulwark and gently entered my refuge. The tackles creaked a trifle, oars and seats impeded me; but well before the thirsty truants had returned I was settled ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... wished that some prescience of danger had made him throttle her then and there, so she could not have raised her shrill, alarming voice! But he had no warning. All he saw was a woman in a washed-out blue calico dress and a fresh white apron, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... he must necessarily pass, that would with any likelihood investigate the forma informans of Vegetables: for as I think that he shall find it a very difficult task, who undertakes to discover the form of Saline crystallizations, without the consideration and prescience of the nature and reason of a Globular form, and as difficult to explicate this configuration of Mushroms, without the previous consideration of the form of Salts; so will the enquiry into the forms of Vegetables be no less, if not much more difficult, without the ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... Mr. Asquith's Governments nor that of his successor need fear comparison with those of our Allies or our enemies on that account; and it is merely a modest foible of the people, which has hardly lost a war for nearly four hundred years, to ascribe its escape to fortune, and to envy the prescience and the science which have lightened the path of its ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... from far and near to buy it, in the hopes of selling it later on, and were struck purblind as a punishment for the sin of those who sent them. Before long a second iconoclastic fury would infallibly have followed, but for the prescience of a statesman who succeeded in passing an Act to the effect that no statue of any public man or woman should be allowed to remain unbroken for more than fifty years, unless at the end of that time a jury ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... things before the foundation of the world," opens a vista of contemplation and poetical framework, with which none other in the whole cycle of human thought can compare. Not election and reprobation as set out in the petty chicanery of Calvin's Institutes, but the prescience of absolute wisdom revolving all the possibilities of time, space, and matter. Poetry has been defined as "the suggestion by the image of noble grounds for noble emotions," and, in this respect, none of the world-epics—there are at most five or six such in existence—can compete with Paradise ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... not suffer man to have the knowledge of things to come; for if he had prescience of his prosperity, he would be careless; and, understanding of his adversity, ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... dispirited and demoralized the people, while it only harassed and weakened the army. Both looked to the great shock to come; forces for which were gathering, perhaps unseen and unheard, yet felt by that morbid prescience which comes in ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... to the purely literary movement. I have tried to show that neither in philosophy, theology, nor political and social strata, was there any belief in the necessity of radical changes, or prescience of a coming alteration of the intellectual atmosphere. Speculation, like politics, could advance quietly along the old paths without fearing that they might lead to a precipice; and society, in spite of very vigorous and active controversy upon the questions ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... Beauty, gain their power over the soul of man by reminding him of the Divine Attributes. His thirst for the beautiful belongs to his immortality, for it never rests in the appreciation of mere finite beauty, but struggles wildly to obtain the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of time, to attain a portion of that loveliness whose elements pertain to Eternity alone; and thus, when by poetry or music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... was not ashamed to doubt, And, lacking prescience, went without: Often appeared to halt, And was, ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... childhood and boyhood he had known, but chiefly because in after life it was borne in on him that he had been deprived of something infinitely precious which others have—the enduring and sustaining memory of a love which is unlike any other love known to mortals, and is almost a sense and prescience of immortality. ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... bailiffs, as if moved by some strange prescience, had fallen back and allowed her to enter alone. The buzz of subdued chatter ceased, and a great silence came over all as they looked. Some swore, in awed whispers, when the dramatic day had ended, and judge and jury and ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the fingers there came to him a swift, unreasoning prescience of impending tragedy. To what dark ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... proving what he can do. And it is on this score, because they see in his public course the irrefragable evidences of patriotism, integrity, and courage, and because they recognize in him the noble gift of natural authority, and have a prescience of the stately endowment of administrative genius, that his fellow-citizens are about to summon Franklin Pierce to the presidency. To those who know him well, the event comes, not like accident, but as a consummation which might have been anticipated, ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... religious knowledge in the reason, and the abandonment of him, on the other, to the juggling of cunning priests and despots. Thus the deists had no sense either for the peculiarities of an inward religious feeling, which, in happy prescience, rises above the earthly circle of moral duties to the world beyond, or for the involuntary, historically necessary origin and growth of the particular forms of religion. Here, again, we find that turning away from will and feeling to thought, from history to nature, from the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... from him? Nothing, from him; much from his grub. This grub, so poor in sensory organs, gives us no little food for reflection with its prescience. It knows that the coming Beetle will not be able to cut himself a road through the oak and it bethinks itself of opening one for him at its own risk and peril. It knows that the Cerambyx, in his stiff armour, will never be able to ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... and all the time I am as far off my object as ever. I cannot work, I cannot think. I have said fine things in my books about the discipline of reluctant suffering; and now my feeling is that I could bear any other kind of trial better. It seems to be given to me with an almost demoniacal prescience of what ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... strict supralapsarian. At the colloquy of Moempelgard (Montbeliard), 1586, in disputing with Andreae, he defended the proposition "that Adam had indeed of his own accord fallen into these calamities, yet, nevertheless, not only according to the prescience, but also according to the ordination and decree of God—sponte quidem, sed tamen non modo praesciente, sed etiam iuste ordinante et decernente Deo." (186.) "There never has been, nor is, nor will be a time," said he, "when ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... to me of Heaven and Hell, he was wont to treat of Nature as being master; but now, as he pronounced these last words, big with prescience, he seemed to soar more boldly than ever above the landscape, and his forehead seemed ready to burst with the afflatus of genius. His powers—mental powers we must call them till some new term is found—seemed to flash from the organs intended ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... and the western breeze that tasted of ocean, heightened his natural cheeriness. Dr. Madden fell into a familiar strain of prescience. ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... pensive, and thoughtful. You see in it that he has often been amused, and that he may easily be amused again. Spenser's is of sharper and keener feature, disdainful, and breathing that severity which appertains to so many of the Elizabethan men. A fourteenth-century child, with delicate prescience, would have asked Chaucer to assist her in a strait, and would not have been disappointed. A sixteenth-century child in like circumstances would have shrunk from drawing on herself the regards of the sterner-looking man. We can trace the descent ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... fearful mystery, was the case so suddenly submitted to my guidance; and the few faint gleams of light derived from the attorney's research, prescience, and sagacity, served but to render dimly visible a still profounder and blacker abyss of crime than that disclosed by the evidence for the crown. Young as I then was in the profession, no marvel that I felt oppressed by the weight of the responsibility cast upon me; or that, when ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... army and the quartermasters ought to have inquired at the head-quarters of the defenses of Washington, if the roads are safe. But of course it was not done, as the big men here possess all the prescience, and need no valuable information. All of them appear to me as ostriches, who hide their heads and eyes, ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... be denied that the enemy can select the point of attack out of the whole extent of coast, where is the prescience that can indicate the spot? And if it cannot be foretold, how is that ubiquity to be imparted that shall always place our fleet in the path of the advancing foe? Suppose we attempt to cover the coast by cruising in front of it, ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... years ago. Now that Edmonton has arrived, it seems the most natural thing in the world that there should have sprung up on the Saskatchewan this rich metropolis, anticipating for itself a future expansion second to no city in commercial Canada. But some one had to have faith and prescience before Edmonton got her start, and the god-from-the-machine was the Canadian Northern, in other words, William Mackenzie and D.D. Mann. Individuals and nations as they reap a harvest are apt to forget the hands that sowed the seed in faith, nothing doubting. When this railroad went into Edmonton, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the Fall the heretic Marcion wrote: "The Deity must either be deficient in goodness if he willed, in prescience if he did not foresee, or in power if ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... depths of infamy. The long warnings of recorded time teach me, that perjured man triumphs, disdains, and abandons. Too well, alas! I know these fatal truths; too well I feel my approaching doom. Yet, infatuated as I am, prescience avails not; the voice of prudence warns, the hand of Heaven beckons ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... forgotten, nothing neglected. Even the watches of the leading officers had been regulated, that there might not be the smallest error with regard to time. It is a painful reflection that this carefulness of preparation, and prescience with respect to probabilities, was not shown by the English general and his associates in arranging the mode of attack. When the orders were promulgated, on the 7th, many officers shook their heads doubtingly, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... the guilty. The courage of the despiser will fail: the last poor comfort of the blasphemer, to hurl against the judgment seat the last despairing, defiant word, will be taken away. The history of the fact written by divine prescience before the time, makes no mention of what the condemned will say. The record simply runs, "These shall go away ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... most sensitive of all things, began to show nervousness and a tendency to go into hiding. The bulk of the world was still asleep to the real meaning of events, but it had begun to stir in its dreams, as if some prescience, some premonition had begun to reach it even ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... They attest, to the latest moment of his life, with what a sacred intensity and unflinching sincerity he clung to his original sentiments touching the French Revolution. Nor let the present writer shrink from adding, they constitute but one of the many specimens of that instinctive prescience, whereby this profoundest of philosophical statesmen was enabled to herald from afar the final triumphs of courage, patriotism, and truth. The passage occurs towards the conclusion of his "Letters on a Regicide Peace," and is as follows:—"Never succumb. It is a ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... by contrast ordinary persons seem to be without character; such men are therefore called, distinctively, 'characters'; and it is a matter of common experience that, whether through the unconscious prescience of parents or through that felicitous sense of propriety which often guides the hazards of destiny, they usually bear names to match their qualities. Meshach Myatt! Meshach Myatt! What piquant curious syllables to roll glibly off the tongue, and to repeat for the ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... Cavour, Victor Emmanuel's minister, that, by acting with the allies against Russia, Sardinia would increase her prestige with the European Powers, and thereby promote the movement for independence. The success of the allies in the Crimean War confirmed the prescience of Cavour. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... Government to be "to offer us terms which they know we cannot accept, and then throw on us the odium of having obstructed a settlement." Mr. Walter Long had the same apprehension in March 1914 as to the purpose of Mr. Asquith's unknown proposals. Both these leaders herein showed insight and prescience, for not only Mr. Asquith's Government, but also that which succeeded it, had resort on many subsequent occasions to the manoeuvre suspected by ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... to Thomas the Rhymer, with an account of whose legend I concluded last letter, it would seem that the example which it afforded of obtaining the gift of prescience, and other supernatural powers, by means of the fairy people, became the common apology of those who attempted to cure diseases, to tell fortunes, to revenge injuries, or to engage in traffic with the invisible world, for the purpose of satisfying their ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... the wall near which she had seated herself. The young man bent forward, taking both her hands quietly in his own now, and gazing steadily into her eyes. There was no triumph in his gaze. Perhaps John Law had prescience of the future. ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... first had a prescience of disagreeable things. There was malice in Dredlinton's pallid face, the ugly twist of his lips and the light in his bloodshot eyes. He paused opposite to them, and leaning his hands on the back of the nearest chair, spoke ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the eastern sky, was spread the first faint hint of a wondering dawn. Far out over the harbor a lightening could be seen, a prescience of day, and a ghostly half light, like that in a dim cathedral, replaced the flame-lit darkness. There were mists above the water, and the light gained progress slowly; still, it gained, and presently the salt sea odors came rolling in from the ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... a wise prescience of the jealousies and bickerings always arising between Regulars and Volunteers, provides that Regulars shall be tried by Regular, and Volunteers by Volunteer Officers. In practice, the spirit of the law is evaded by the subterfuge, that a Regular Officer, temporarily in command of Volunteers, ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... bit, bridle, and drive Mr. Webster, were determined to rule or ruin, through his political disfranchisement, from the great party he was virtually the father of. All this, too, by false pretence; for a cool review of Mr. Webster's course has satisfied the country that the great depth of motive, prescience of danger to the Union and in fact, purpose of that speech, was, in the highest sense, proper and patriotic, and in no way at variance with the interpretation of either the old or new Constitution as now understood. The occasion was seized upon, having failed in their first ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... good and hard, and several of the others look sick, especially Lennie. Lennie has his eyes fixed on the colonel; it is not prescience, but a slight sideways movement of the colonel's eye causes him to blurt out, "What ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... one most intimately connected therewith. Thus, in the case of the stag-beetle, the purpose consists in the leaving space for the growth of the horns; the means, in the digging the hole of a sufficient size; and the unconscious knowledge, in prescience concerning the future development of ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... eight or ten paintings of the early Tuscan School—notably two admirable specimens of Filippo Lippi and one of the frequent circular pictures of the great Botticelli—a Madonna, chilled with tragic prescience, laying a pale cheek against that of a blighted Infant. Such a melancholy mother as this of Botticelli would have strangled her baby in its cradle to rescue it from the future. But of Botticelli there is much to say. One of the Filippo Lippis is perhaps his masterpiece—a Madonna ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... last (1879) a woman, known as the Queen of Hearts, who had attained the age of one hundred years, and who had been known for three quarters of a century as a fortune-teller, died in Vienna. Apparently gifted with the faculty of prescience, intimately acquainted with the shuffling of cards, deeply learned in the lore of the prophetic lines traced by the graver of Fate upon human hands and feet, this lady devoted her days to the unravelling of the tangled secrets of the future, charging ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... privileges, and high in place in His church, it would avail nothing. The Kingdom of Christ is a Kingdom into which faith, and faith only, admits a man. Therefore from the furthest corners of the world Christ's sad prescience saw the Gentiles flocking, and the Jews who ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... careers under him. He followed them with good wishes always, he spoke strong words for them when, where, and to whom they little suspected, and he rightly regarded their success as a vindication of his own prescience in having set them on their way, and also as a gratification not merely to his confidence in his own opinion concerning them, but to the wishes of his unselfish heart in desiring that they should take the pinnacles of achievement in whatsoever field of newspaper ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... thus I made reply: 'O goddess I on thy aid my hopes rely; Dictate propitious to my duteous ear, What arts can captivate the changeful seer; For perilous the assay, unheard the toil, To elude the prescience ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... win, success during his lifetime. As Professor Huxley said, in lecturing on "The Coming of Age of 'The Origin of Species,'" "the foremost men of science in every country are either avowed champions of its leading doctrines, or at any rate abstain from opposing them." His prescience has in less than a generation been justified by the discovery of intermediate fossil forms of animals too numerous to be here recounted. The break between vertebrate and invertebrate animals, between ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... carefully these letters, the writing of which had seemed changed to her. And noticing the unsteady characters, the breaks in the words, she felt a chill at her heart. He was ill, very ill—she had become certain of this now, by a divination in which there was less of reasoning than of subtle prescience. And the rest of the journey seemed terribly long, for her anguish increased in proportion as she approached its termination. And worse than all, arriving at Marseilles at half-past twelve, there was no train for Plassans until twenty minutes past three. Three long hours of waiting! ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... condescended to honour me with his correspondence and an invitation to join the true believers, i.e., the Mahdists. I have no doubt he meant well, but the land and the dervishes were alike abhorrent to me. Osman had quietly come to the wise conclusion that Mahdism was near its end. With his usual prescience he made his own arrangements without consulting the Khalifa. Early in the year he had all his women and children and such wealth as he could smuggle out of the country sent over to Jeddah. There his ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... down the grand corridor. The bulldog tugged at his chain. Animals are gifted with prescience. He knew that his master had passed forever out of his life. Presently he heard the voice of the princess calling; and the glamour of royalty encompassed him,—something a human finds hard to resist, and he was ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... It was a very ugly oath, sworn by every god who had an altar in Rome, with the divinities of the Jews and the Christians thrown in, that in a day to come he would avenge Domitian's rods with daggers. Had the prince been able to do so, there might have risen in his mind some prescience of a certain scene, in which he must play a part on a far-off but destined night. He might have beheld a vision of himself, bald, corpulent and thin-legged, but wearing the imperial robes of Caesar, ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... great love into a greater hate: round it hang the black elf-locks, disheveled, that have never been braided since the gripe of Telamonian Ajax ruffled them so rudely. In her great, troubled eyes you read terrible memories, and a prescience of coming death—death, most grateful to the dishonored princess, but before which the frail womanhood can not but shudder and quail. No wonder that the reverend men glance at her uneasily, scarcely mustering ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... Rivers might have been one of the robbers,—perhaps the one who accompanied Mrs. Barker to San Jose. But it was plain that the young girl had no complicity with the actions of the gang, whatever might have been her companion's confederation. In the prescience of a true lover, he knew that she must have been deceived and kept in utter ignorance of it. There was no look of it in her lovely, guileless eyes; her very impulsiveness and ingenuousness would have long since betrayed the secret. Was it left for him, at this very outset of ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... is free-will reconcileable, either with the influence of motive upon will? or with the order of the universe, prescribed by the Deity? or, with his prescience? For that, which his infinite mind prescribes or foresees, must ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... fashions are haphazard, and are dictated and guided by no fixed principles of action, and represent no great currents in politics or movements of the human mind. Women, who are exceedingly subtle in all their operations, feel that it is otherwise. They have a prescience of changes in the drift of public affairs, and a delicate sensitiveness that causes them to adjust their raiment to express these changes. Men have written a great deal in their bungling way about the philosophy of clothes. Women exhibit it, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... light, heady draughts she and Neale had drunk together in their youth, nor in the quieter satisfying draughts they knew now. What was the meaning of that odor of decay about what seemed so living, so hotly more living than what she had? Why should she have this unmistakable prescience of something stale and tainting which she had never felt? Was she too old for passion? But she was in the height of her physical flowering, and physically she cried out for it. Could it be that, having spent the heritage of youth, she could not have it again? Could it be that one could not go ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... sun, and earth, but to God only; for in respect to them which seek only to amplify themselves, we are born and live by chance; but in respect to God, whose instruments we are, we are formed by prescience and design, and for a high end. Therefore we are bound to no father but God, and receive all things from Him. They hold as beyond question the immortality of souls, and that these associate with good angels after death, ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... folded, her dress blowing about her: she'll often do the same in her white wrapper now, at dead of dark in any stormy night: she could not find sufficient air to breathe, and something set her heart on fire, some influence oppressed her with unrest and longing, some instinct, some unconscious prescience, made her all astir. I passed her and went down, and I hid myself in the arbor, quite overgrown with wild, rank vines of late summer, and listened to a little night-bird ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... prescience of coming trouble between them which caused a noticeable pause after the introduction—a pause which Dermott ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... eleventh and twelfth centuries many monasteries were founded and grew in importance, and what might have happened in Japan but for the somewhat unscrupulous prescience of Japanese statesmen actually did happen in Tibet. Among the numerous contending chiefs none was pre-eminent: the people were pugnacious but superstitious. They were ready to build and respect when built ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... heart hath followed thee with praise As 'good and faithful;' in thy words and ways Pure-minded, just, and simple, and sincere: And as, with early half prophetic ken I hailed thy greatness in my college days, The coming man to guide and govern men, How gladly that instinctive prescience then Now do I see fulfill'd—because, thou art Our England's eloquent tongue, her wise free hand To pour, wherever is her world-wide mart, The horn of plenty over every land; Because, by all the powers of mind and lip Thou art the ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the symphony. But in his sonatas he is always rather hampered, and never attains the flow of his slow melodies for the violin. Mozart, also, while a beautiful player upon the pianoforte of his day, did not possess the prescience of Beethoven, who was able to see over the pianoforte of his time and write as if he felt the assurance of the nobler and yet nobler instruments of these later times. Here he stands with Bach, who in his great Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue requires and confidently ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... after them, and as she looked a great, nameless dread took possession of her, and she experienced exactly the same peculiar sensation she had felt in the train coming down, a feeling of prescience and foreboding, of brooding evil. It gripped her heart with cold hands and she changed her intention of going to Nyoda's room and asking what was the matter with Veronica. Suddenly she felt that Nyoda ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... lore, erudition, culture, enlightenment, attainments, information; cognizance, apprehension, cognition, understanding, ken; omniscience (universal knowledge); prescience (foreknowledge); polymathy. Antonyms: sciolism, ignorance, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the present situation of England? Is not this the great and fatal crush of their funding system, which, like death, has been foreseen by all, but its hour, like that of death, hidden from mortal prescience? It appears to me that all the circumstances now exist which render recovery desperate. The interest of the national debt is now equal to such a portion of the profits of all the land and the labor of the island, as not to leave enough for the subsistence ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... his level. Even to an ordinary observer that sudden revelation of her eyes seemed to transform her face with subtle witchery. They were large, brown, and soft, yet filled with an extraordinary penetration and prescience. They were the eyes of an experienced woman of thirty fixed in the face of a child. What else the Colonel saw there Heaven only knows! He felt his inmost secrets plucked from him—his whole soul laid bare—his vanity, belligerency, gallantry—even his mediaeval chivalry, ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... Doubtless to your all-consuming prescience, it will at once become plain that I have abandoned the place of residence from which I directed my former badly-written and offensively-constructed letter, the house of the sympathetic and resourceful Maidens Blank, where in ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... are here and the sad mornings, The air is filled with portents and with warnings, Clouds that vastly loom and winds that cry, A mournful prescience Of bright things going hence; Red leaves are blown about the widowed sky, And late disconsolate blooms Dankly bestrew The garden walks, as in deserted rooms The parted guest, in haste to bid adieu, Trinklets and shreds forgotten ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... generations of the Worths. Then it had died. In one smiting stroke of tragedy the life had gone out of it. Now it stood staring bleakly out from its corner with filmed eyes, across the busy square. Passing its closed gates daily, I was always sensible of a qualm of the spirit, a daunting prescience that the stilled mansion still harbored the ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... South and West, for the profit of a lucky financial group in the Eastern States. He knew also that such financial groups are never national: he knew that the Bank had foreign backers, and he showed an almost startling prescience as to the evils that were to follow in the train of cosmopolitan finance, "more formidable and more dangerous than the naval and military power of an enemy." But above all he knew that the Bank was odious to the people, and he was true to his political creed, whereby he, as the elect of ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... provided alike for all—whether they reside in their own comparatively small localities, nor ever wish to leave them—or at stated seasons instinctively fly away over thousands of miles, to drop down and settle for a while on some spot adapted to their necessities, of which they had prescience afar off, though seemingly wafted thither like leaves upon the wind! Verily, as great a mystery is that Natural Religion by the theist studied in woods and on mountains and by sea-shores, as that Revelation which philosophers will not believe because they do not understand—"the blinded ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... prescience of coming events, and his decisions rightly made as to his own whereabouts in crises, enabled him to concentrate without wasting his powers. He then gave himself to his work with all ardor, and without sparing brain or muscle, risking limb and life at Bull Run, on the Mississippi, at Fort Donelson, ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... insight, prudence, depth, judgment, reason, discernment, judiciousness, reasonableness, discretion, knowledge, sagacity, enlightenment, learning, sense, erudition, prescience, skill, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... a clairvoyant? How could he know that Vicky had done this very thing? But I realized at once, that he knew it, not from cognizance of facts, but from his prescience of what would necessarily follow ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... life in mine some prescience, or dream, or desire (How shall I name it aright?) comes for a moment and goes— Rapture of life ineffable, perfect—as if in the brier, Leafless there by my door, trembled a sense ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... and held hard to the table edge. Reason, cold, remorseless reason surged back into his brain, accompanied by a paralyzing fear. Some prescience told him that the man in the doorway was Kane Lawler. And though he was convinced of it, he was a long time lifting his head and in turning it the merest trifle toward the door. And when he saw that the dread apparition was indeed ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... certain jealousy for his friend's dignity. It seemed to him too, every now and then, that she—the girl—was teased by all this absorption, this deference. He was conscious of watching for something in her that did not appear; and a first prescience of things anxious or untoward stirred in his ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sufficiently familiar to all students of the subject, are combined with others of a more doubtful character. Edwards has no hesitation about dealing with the absolute and the infinite. He dwells, for example, with great ingenuity upon the difficulty of reconciling the Divine prescience with the contingency of human actions, and has no scruple in inferring the possibility of reconciling virtue with necessity from the fact that God is at once the type of all perfection, and is under a necessity to be perfect. If such arguments would be rejected as transcending the limits ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... agreeable strangers. Yet I returned once more to America with my desire, which was turning into a duty, unfulfilled; and when once more I sailed for Europe in 1911 it was more with foreboding of another failure than a prescience of fruition in my inveterate longing. Even after that boldly decisive week of the professor in London I had my doubts and my self-doubts. There were delays at London, delays at Paris, delays at Tours; and when at last we crossed the Pyrenees and I found myself in ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... happiness, all—all told her. He was too inexorably gay and loving. Not for her—to whom every word and every kiss had uncannily the desperate value of a last word and kiss—not for her to deprive herself of these by any sign or gesture which might betray her prescience. Poor soul—she took all, and would have taken more, a hundredfold. She did not want to drink the wine he kept tilting into her glass, but, with the acceptance learned by women who have lived her life, she did not refuse. She had never refused him anything. So much had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy |
