"Historic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vitiated by the association. From a public recreation the thing has got to be a public scandal. Every year witnesses a holocaust of great names sacrificed to the insatiable demon of horse-racing—ancient families ruined, old historic memories defiled at the shrine of this vulgarest and most vicious ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... the name Erceldoune was arbitrarily inserted by the English translator; though Mr. McNeill, the latest editor, thinks there is a "reasonable probability" in favor of Scott's opinion that the author was the historic Thomas, who flourished in the thirteenth century. It is important, however, that Scott's scholarship in the matter passed muster at that time with such men as Ellis, who wrote the review in the Edinburgh, in which he said, "Upon the whole we are much ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... of the province, or in Lord Baltimore's commission for the new seal. It was hoped and desired that in this paper no occasion would arise to make accusations against any of Ingle's opponents, but historic truth now requires it to be done. It must be remembered that Baltimore was in constant danger of losing his charter, in a great measure, on account of Ingle's activity against him. Upon his authority alone is based ...
— Captain Richard Ingle - The Maryland • Edward Ingle
... was more like an amateur museum, with its big Fifteenth Century fireplace, and its brasses and tapestries on the walls, and if the huge Mirliton hanging from the ceiling was not remarkable as a work of art, it should now, as historic symbol of the Nineties, have a place at the Carnavalet by the side of the sign of the Chat Noir. When we had time to look round, we saw that the severe ordeal through which we had passed had admitted us into the company of a few youths ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... I have decided to sell, and it shall be yours, Signor Merreek, at a price far less than is represented by its historic worth. I am sure you will ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... probable incidents that they give it a basis of proper names, choosing for the purpose any names that may occur to them, instead of writing like the old iambic poets about particular persons. In Tragedy, however, they still adhere to the historic names; and for this reason: what convinces is the possible; now whereas we are not yet sure as to the possibility of that which has not happened, that which has happened is manifestly possible, else it would not have come to pass. Nevertheless even in Tragedy there are some plays with but one ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... Cannes in her own villa that she made her main impression upon people of the greater world. Though of good parts, she was not in any sense intellectual. I never heard her attempt to say brilliant things or epigrammatic things, or to talk about books or historic people. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... would do if he were rich; and as he was of a constructive disposition, his fancies in this direction turned chiefly on the enlarging and beautifying of the castle—but always with the impossibility understood of destroying a feature of its ancient dignity and historic worth. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... St. Dunstan, as they are related in the tale, have the authority of history; although it is needless to say that the agents are in part fictitious characters. The writer's object has been to subordinate fiction to history, and never to contradict historic fact; if he has failed in this intention, it has been his misfortune rather than his fault; for he has had recourse to all such authorities as lay in his reach.[i] Especially, he is glad to find that the character he had conceived as Edwy's perfectly coincides ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... organisation, and to the jackal in habits. See also Boyd Dawkins, 'Cave Hunting' 1874 page 131 etc. and his other publications. Jeitteles has discussed in great detail the character of the breeds of pre-historic dogs: 'Die vorgeschichtlichen Alterthumer der Stadt Olmutz' II. Theil, 1872 page 44 to end.) does not throw much light on the question, owing, on the one hand, to the close similarity of the skulls of extinct as well as living wolves and jackals, and owing, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... wasting the energies of imagination to account for the destinations of millions upon millions of human beings, the countless host that has occupied the surfaces of this earth through all the historic and prehistoric ages, we can, upon this assumption, reduce the number of individuals immensely, allowing that spirits are constantly arriving, constantly departing, and that the sum total in the solar system remains perhaps ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... landscapes, and where each has some legend or story of the English, the League, of the Black Prince, or the Lion-hearted, of Henry IV, still adored, or of Simon de Montfort, still execrated, where the towns are truly historic ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... be captured, but rather should find it possible to escape from the country. It is in other ways well known that he had already made up his mind not to conclude the war with a series of hangings after the historic European fashion of dealing with traitors. He preferred, however, to evade rather than to encounter the problem of disposing of such embarrassing captives, and a road for them out of the country would be also a road for him out of a difficulty. What else was said ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... to an incident that has become historic. Wagner had been obliged, because of his participation in the revolution, to flee from Dresden. He sought refuge with Liszt in Weimar, but, learning that the Saxon authorities were seeking to apprehend him, decided to continue ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... opportunity to study some of these historic scrolls, and was so much impressed by them that I caused a suggestion to be conveyed to the warden. Instead of sending all the menus to Washington, and to admiring friends in the Atlanta neighborhood, let one or two of them ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... speaking of the intermediate play, Bothwell, may be said of them all: 'I will add that I took as much care and pains as though I had been writing or compiling a history of the period to do loyal justice to all the historic figures which came within the scope of my dramatic or poetic design.' Of Bothwell, the longest of the three plays—indeed, the longest play in existence, Swinburne says: 'That ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... representatives of the bar of Central New York filling the courtroom, for Judge Hunt, without precedent to sustain him, declaring it a case of law and not of fact, refused to give the case to the jury, reserving to himself final decision. Was it not an historic scene which was enacted there in that little courthouse in Canandaigua? All the inconsistencies were embodied in that Judge, punctilious in manner, scrupulous in attire, conscientious in trivialities, and obtuse on great principles, fitly described by Charles O'Conor—"A very ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... visit in Europe a few friends, under the inspiration of one Mrs. Henry Richardson, raised money, purchased Mr. Douglass, and placed his freedom papers in his hands. The documents are of quaint historic value. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... the exact stroke of midday the Volunteers in Sackville Street were suddenly seen to stop short opposite the Post Office. "I was outside the building at the time," said an eye-witness of that now historic event, Mr. E. A. Stoker, the well-known Grafton Street jeweller, "and noticed a mixed crowd of, I should say, roughly, about one hundred men and boys, all armed, and half the number carrying old portmanteaux ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... expected to find that brilliant band playing a most prominent part in his last great struggle, no longer for mere victory, but for very existence. In recording how the Guard came up the fatal hill at Waterloo for their last combat, it would seem but natural to have to give a long roll of the old historic names as leading or at least accompanying them; and the reader is apt to ask, where were the men whose very titles recalled such glorious battle-fields, such achievements, and such rewards showered down by the man who, almost alone at the end of the day, rode forward to ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... to that moment I had never experienced such a thrill as passed through me when I realized that I was navigating these historic waters. The lifelong dreams that I never had dared hope to see fulfilled were at last a reality—but under what ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... however, that during several centuries corporations were either dissolved or hidden from public notice, for they almost entirely disappeared from the historic records during the partial return to barbarism, when the production of objects of daily necessity and the preparation of food were entrusted to slaves under the eye of their master. Not till the twelfth century did ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... early Christianity is new—on the other hand, it seems to me to be implicitly and explicitly contained in the early prophetic Judaism and the later Hellenised Judaism; and though it is quite true that the new vitality of the old ideal manifested in early Christianity demands "an adequate historic cause," I would suggest that the word "cause" may mislead if it ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... cannibal in that country once supported his claim to a piece of land on the ground that the title passed to him when he ate the former owner. I accepted this story as a bit of humour, but it accurately describes an historic form of title. Even among the highly civilized nations governments convey to their subjects or citizens land secured by conquest, the lands being taken from the conquered by the conquerors. A tramp, so the story goes, ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... he adds, speaking of his hearty desire for union with the Dissenters, "we cannot surrender for any immediate advantages the threefold Ministry which we have inherited from Apostolic times, and which is the historic backbone of the Church" ("Ep. to the Philippians," p. 276, ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... leaving all these and going forth to encounter untried conditions, an unknown Nature, a moral and social order equally unknown? Looking at the peaceful, ethereally lovely landscape, set in such close proximity and notable contrast to the unrest of that historic highway of the nations, the Channel sea, he felt small and lonely, childishly diffident and weak. All the established safety and comfort of home, all the thoughtless irresponsible delights of vanished boyhood, pulled at his heart-strings. He wanted, wanted wildly, desperately, not to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... as she was before marriage, came of a race of soldiers, governors, and tried servants of the State, and she married into a race which has long stood in the front rank of the historic servants of the Crown and of the people. But neither the house of Elliot nor that of Russell in so many generations ever bred man or woman with a keener sense of public duty, a more generous nature, and a more magnanimous soul. In the annals ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... inexact was in reality a profounder truth than had come under your observation. Nor would a discussion of Shakespeare's truthfulness be rounded out should his value as historian be omitted. He is profoundest of philosophical historians, compelling the motives in historic personages to disclose themselves, while, in the main, his historical data are correct as understood in his day. He has not juggled with facts, though in instances where he has taken liberty with events he has, by such change in historic setting, made the main issues more apparent. ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... fashion; and in the treatment of both mind and body, the decorative element has continued to predominate in an even greater degree among women than among men. The births, deaths, and marriages of kings, and other like historic trivialities are committed to memory, not because of any direct benefit that can possibly result from knowing them, but because society considers them parts of a good education—because the absence of such knowledge may bring the contempt of others. Not what knowledge is of the most ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... think it would be very difficult for those who lived thousands of years afterward to be sure in which country a specific bead was made, the art as practiced by one country being a kind of copy of the art as practiced in the other country. With the historic record that the Phoenicians were the great traders of the Ancient World our writers attributed the carrying of the beads into Africa, among the natives, to the Phoenicians. Without questioning these time-honored conclusions, ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... master-key, he went on thinking, love is the master-key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, the gate of fear. How terrible is the one fact of beauty!—not only the historic wonder of beauty, that "burnt the topless towers of Ilium" for the smile of Helen, and fired the palaces of Babylon by the hand of Thais, but the beauty which springs up in all times and places, and ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... ready to embark, but I was anxious to witness the first clash between two fair-sized armies of the opposing races of Pellucidar. I realized that this was to mark the historic beginning of a mighty struggle for possession of a world, and as the first emperor of Pellucidar I felt that it was not alone my duty, but my right, to be in the thick ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... is historic," he told them as they rode back into the city. "There is a story about every ruin along the Appian Way. I have told you the legends of the kings, but there are also tales to tell of the days of the republic and of the ...
— Rafael in Italy - A Geographical Reader • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... founders and pioneers of the earliest Tideshead farms, there was not a boy nor girl who did not have a sense of pride in belonging to so valiant an old town. They could plan a dozen expeditions to places of historic interest. There had been even witches in Tideshead, and soldiers and scholars to find out about and remember. There was no better way of learning American history (as Miss Leicester said) than to study thoroughly the history of a single New England village. As for newer ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... in which, if real pirates had not left their treasure, at least real tramps had slept and left a real smell. And on top of the cave there was a stone which was supposed to retain the footprint of a pre-historic Indian. From what I remember of that footprint I am inclined to think that it must have been made by the foot of a derrick, and not by ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... is traditionally called conversion. It is usually associated with an appropriation of the teaching of Jesus Christ, and inevitably follows an appreciation of His words and His work. But all the revelations of the Christ have not been through the historic Jesus. In every land, and in every age, souls have come to this new consciousness. It was said of Isaiah that he saw the Lord; and of Melchizedek that he was the priest of the most high God. The former ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... never agree wholly, when they have the temerity to reason on matters that are enveloped in the obscurity of imaginative fiction, and which cannot be subject to the usual evidence accompanying matters of report, or historic relation. ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... Farmers were of low origin and had risen to fortune by their own abilities. Others belonged to families which had long made a mark in the financial world. Their luxurious style of life was admired by the vulgar and derided by the envious. The offices of the Farm occupied several historic houses in Paris. In the chief of these the French Academy had once held its sittings under the presidency of Seguier, and the walls and ceilings shone with pictures from the brushes of Lebrun and Mignard. The warehouses and offices for the monopoly of tobacco ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... the sun is a ball of fire, for computation showed that, at the present rate of heat-giving, if the sun were a solid mass of coal, he would be totally consumed in about five thousand years. As no such decrease in size as this implies had taken place within historic times, it was clear that some other ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... vice, the sweets of making love and dangling after women. From the camp and the council-chamber, where they had formerly been bred, the nobles passed into petty courts and moldered in a multitude of little capitals. Men bearing historic names, insensible of their own degradation, bowed the neck gladly, groveled in beatitude. Deprived of power, they consoled themselves with privileges, patented favors, impertinences vented on the common people. The princes amused themselves by debasing the old aristocracy to the mire, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Liberals and Conservatives were restored to their proper and historic places, and the way was cleared for new issues. These issues arose out of the ill-advised attempt to join Upper and Lower Canada in a legislative union. A large part of the history of this period is the history of an attempt to escape the consequences of that blunder. This was ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... Hellas from legendary times to its (p. 75) becoming a Roman province. Many well-known mythical and historic tales are included. There ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... they could look out across the blue harbor, and see sailing vessels and rowboats coming and going. In the distance were the three forts whose historic names were known to every child in Charleston. Grace never failed to point them out to the little northern girl, and ...
— Yankee Girl at Fort Sumter • Alice Turner Curtis
... again. He rides in his historic yesterday. You will no more see him gallop out of the unchanging silence than you will see Columbus on the unchanging sea come sailing from ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... profligate—when we see him lingering on his last march, on the very verge of the death-struggle, in the teeth of Galba's legions, to decorate Popaea's grave. More in pity than in scorn, be sure, did Tacitus, the historic epigrammatist, write "Ne tum quidem veterum ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... and a religion which claims the right, on superhuman authority, to impose limits on the field or manner of their exercise. It is the chief of the movements of free thought which it is my purpose to describe, in their historic succession, and their connection with intellectual causes. We must ascertain the facts, discover the causes, and ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... of his friends. The Prince was given twenty-four hours in which to surrender his person to the new governor of the city. With the expiration of the time limit mentioned, the Castle would be shelled from the fortress, greatly as the dictator might regret the destruction of the historic and well-beloved structure. No one would be spared if it became necessary to bombard; the rejection of his offer of mercy would be taken as a sign that the defenders were ready to die for a lost cause. He would cheerfully see to it that they ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... inconspicuousness of any given feature, and the mellow tone and homely sincerity of all; now dwelling fondly upon the groups of neatly modeled stacks, then upon the field occupations, the gathering of turnips and cabbages, or the digging of potatoes,—how I longed to turn up the historic soil, into which had passed the sweat and virtue of so many generations, with my own spade,—then upon the quaint, old, thatched houses, or the cluster of tiled roofs, then catching at a church spire across a meadow (and it is all meadow), or ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... unparalleled heirlooms to which I have alluded, and many more besides, hospitably asked me if there was anything else that I would care to see, he meant the pieces of plate that they had in the cupboards, the curiously graven swords of other princes, historic jewels, legendary seals, but I who had had a glimpse of their marvelous staircase, whose balustrade I believed to be solid gold and wondering why in such a stately house they chose to dine in the basement, mentioned the word "upstairs." A profound hush came down on the whole assembly, the hush that ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... theory of a purely subjective character; it is as little the historical or legal view as it is the theological view. We have not yet lost our right in the nineteenth century to think of the Church of England as a continuous, historic, religious society, bound by ties which, however strained, are still unbroken with that vast Christendom from which as a matter of fact it sprung, and still, in spite of all differences, external and internal, and by force of its traditions and institutions, as truly one ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... to recite MY epic. How all is changed since Blauvelt kindled your eyes and flushed your cheeks with the narration of heroic deeds! Then we heard of armies whose tread shook the continent, and whose guns have echoed around the world. Men, already historic for all time, were the leaders, and your soldier friends were clad in a uniform which distinguished them as the nation's defenders. My humble hero had merely an ill-fitting policeman's coat buttoned over his soiled, ragged blouse. Truly it is fit that I should recite his deeds in a kitchen and not ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... sands, on the coasts of Normandy and the salt plains of Brittany, among Druses and Arabs and Syrians, in brand-new Boston and amidst the ruins of Thebes. But this infinite variety has little in it of mere historic or social curiosity. I do not think Browning has ever set himself the task of recording the legend of the ages, though to some extent he has done it. The instinct of the poet seizes on a type of character, the eye of the painter perceives the shades and shapes of line and colour and form required ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... a long time looking upon it, musing upon its historic associations. Around him he heard the grinding wheels, the click of the horses' hoofs upon the asphalt pavement, and heard the shouts of drivers. Somewhere near him water was falling with a musical sound in a subterranean sluiceway. At last he came to himself with ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... blaze of glory ended the historic siege of Mafeking, for Eloff's attack was the last, though by no means the worst of the trials which the garrison had to face. Six killed and ten wounded were the British losses in this admirably managed affair. On May 17th, five days after the fight, ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... this subject to-day not to recall these historic fables, but to show what cruel wrong we may do to the innocent by accepting rumours about our neighbours without examining the facts. Was there ever a more pitiful story than that told at the inquest on an elderly woman at Henham in Suffolk? Her ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... of Brie became part of the French kingdom on the occasion of the marriage of Jeanne of Navarre with Philip-le-Bel in 1361, and is as prosperous as it is picturesque. It also possesses historic interest. Within a stone's throw of our garden wall once stood a famous convent of Bernardines, called Pont-aux-Dames. Here Madame du Barry, the favourite of Louis XV., was exiled after his death; on the outbreak ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... supernatural action. And yet they strike an exotic note distinct in itself. The seventy-three stories here presented after original sources, embracing "Nursery Fairy Tales," "Legends of the Gods," "Tales of Saints and Magicians," "Nature and Animal Tales," "Ghost Stories," "Historic Fairy Tales," and "Literary Fairy Tales," probably represent the most comprehensive and varied collection of oriental fairy tales ever made available for American readers. There is no child who will not enjoy their novel color, their fantastic ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... hills. How many an emotion stirred within Edward's breast, as the melting music fell upon his ear! In the midst of matchless beauties he heard the matchless strains of his native land, and the echoes of her old hills responding to the triumphs of her old bards. The air, too, bore with it historic associations;—it told a tale of wrong and of suffering. The wrong has ceased, the suffering is past, but the air ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... manly and masterly state-paper which I have two or three times referred to,[33] and may still more frequently hereafter. The diplomatic collection never was more enriched than with this piece. The historic facts justify every stroke of the master. "Thus painters write their names ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and reform of the Breviary was in the mind of every Pope, and nearly every one of them took some step to perfect the historic book. In the eighteenth century Benedict XIV. (1740-1758) contemplated Breviary reform in some details, particularly in improving the composition of some legends and of replacing some homilies of the Fathers. He entrusted ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... of determining the date of the individual psalms and of the different collections is exceedingly difficult, both because the superscriptions were clearly added by later editors who thought thereby to connect the psalm with an earlier writer or historic incident, and because the psalms themselves contain few historical allusions. A great majority of them reflect the teachings of the pre-exilic prophets or, like the book of Proverbs, come from the lips of the sages and deal with universal human problems. ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... whom she patronizes. A very great majority of the memorials are to naval and military men, slain in Bonaparte's wars; men in whom one feels little or no interest (except Picton, Abercrombie, Moore, Nelson, of course, and a few others really historic), they having done nothing remarkable, save having been shot, nor shown any more brains than the cannonballs that killed them. All the statues have the dust of years upon then, strewn thickly in the folds of their marble garments, and on any limb stretched ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the reason," said the abbe, rightly believing that a pause with Blondet was equivalent to a question: "twelve centuries have done nothing for a caste whom the historic spectacle of civilization has never yet diverted from its one predominating thought,—a caste which still wears proudly the broad-brimmed hat of its masters, ever since an abandoned fashion placed it upon their ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... Kingston upon Hull, Leicester, City of London, Nottingham, Peterborough, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Southampton, Stoke-on-Trent, York royal boroughs: Kensington and Chelsea, Kingston upon Thames, Windsor and Maidenhead Northern Ireland: 24 districts, 2 cities, 6 counties (historic) districts: Antrim, Ards, Armagh, Ballymena, Ballymoney, Banbridge, Carrickfergus, Castlereagh, Coleraine, Cookstown, Craigavon, Down, Dungannon, Fermanagh, Larne, Limavady, Lisburn, Magherafelt, Moyle, Newry and Mourne, Newtownabbey, ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... all such explanations, after we have allowed for them in every possible way, there remains a conviction that behind these fascinating stories there is a certain irreducible remainder of actual fact. Individual historic figures, seen through the mists of time, walk before our eyes in the dawn. Long before history was written men lived and did striking deeds. Heroic memories and traditions of such distinguished men passed in the form of fireside tales from ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... independence. The narration of events takes the form of a story—a slight thread of romance being employed, rather than didactic narrative, to more vividly picture the scenes and the parts performed by the actors in the great historic drama. It will not be difficult for the reader to discern between the facts of history and the imaginative ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... developed into one lone step, heavy, stately, and funereal. Doing her best to emulate the historic example held up to her, Letty lengthened her neck and stiffened it. A haughty spirit seemed to rise in her by the mere process of the elongation. She was so nervous that the paper shook in her hand, but she knew that if the Celestial City was to be won, she could shrink from no tests which ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... writing, is itself a comparatively recent art. In no country do we find any records carrying us further back than a few thousand years before the Christian era. We have every reason to believe that the historical part of man's life on the globe is but an insignificant part of the whole. This historic period is not the same in all countries. It varies from a few centuries in our own country to a few thousands of years in Oriental lands. In no country is there a hard and fast line separating the historic ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... Yellow Journals is appropriate to their matter. The headlines live on and by the historic present; the text is as bald as a paper of statistics. It is the big type that does the execution. The "story" itself, to use the slang of the newspaper, is seldom either humorous or picturesque. Bare facts and vulgar incidents are enough for the public, which cares as little for wit as for sane ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... Niemann's behavior when he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera House. Here was the greatest living dramatic tenor, an artist identified with the cause and the triumphs of Wagner, appearing on a new continent, in the same role that he had created at the historic Bayreuth festival of 1876. The house, of course, was packed, and included many old admirers who had heard him abroad, and who, of course, received him with a volley of applause when he staggered into Hunding's hut. But Niemann did not acknowledge this applause with ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... you never dreamt of the existence of such a profession or calling, and yet from the earliest historic times there have been men who followed it. There were plant-collectors in the days of Pliny, who furnished the gardens of Herculaneum and Pompeii; there were plant-collectors employed by the wealthy mandarins of China, by the royal ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... lifeless material, devoid of spirit, which it appears to a man who gives himself up exclusively to the influence of the Luciferian being. To this being man owes his personal independence and sense of freedom; but it should work within him in harmony with the opposite spiritual being. With the pre-historic Persians it was a question of keeping alive the sense of this last-named spiritual-being. Through their inclination toward the physical sense world they ran the risk of complete amalgamation with the Luciferian beings. Now Zarathustra, ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... British ships Cyane and Levant. In 1830, when it was proposed to break her up, Holmes wrote this poem by way of protest. The result was that the ship was preserved. She now lies at the Boston Navy Yard, an object of great historic and patriotic interest. The poem is a kind of ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... opinion. If we take the word 'Celt' as describing any branch of the many divergent races which came under the influence of one particular type of culture, the true originators of which were absorbed among the folk they governed and instructed before the historic era, then the Bretons are 'Celts' indeed, speaking the tongue known as 'Celtic' for want of a more specific name, exhibiting marked signs of the possession of 'Celtic' customs, and having those racial characteristics which the science of anthropology ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... Fifth our historic materials become more abundant. We have the "Gesta Henrici Quinti" by Titus Livius, a chaplain in the royal army; a life by Elmham, prior of Lenton, simpler in style but identical in arrangement ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... involving the use of 230 wagons and 350 men. It was this great wagon trail which first brought us into touch with the Spanish civilization of the Southwest. Its commercial totals do not bulk large today, but the old trail itself was a thing titanic in its historic value. ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... find here a tale of love passionate and pure; the student of character, the subtle analysis and deft portrayal he loves; the historian will approve its conscientious historic accuracy; the lover of adventure will find his blood stir and pulses ...
— Man Overboard! • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... it—my sensitive child! But on the material side, Mr. Archer, if one may stoop to consider such things; do you know what she is giving up? Those roses there on the sofa—acres like them, under glass and in the open, in his matchless terraced gardens at Nice! Jewels—historic pearls: the Sobieski emeralds—sables,—but she cares nothing for all these! Art and beauty, those she does care for, she lives for, as I always have; and those also surrounded her. Pictures, priceless furniture, music, brilliant conversation—ah, that, my ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... historic appreciation of the discovery of ether was presented here by Professor Welch, and last year an address on medical research was given by President Eliot. I, therefore, will not attempt a general address, but will invite your attention to an experimental and clinical study. ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... indeed in the months which followed this historic gathering at Dordrecht was not encouraging to those who had thus dared somewhat prematurely to brave the wrath of Philip and the vengeance of Alva. Lewis of Nassau had for some time been engaged in raising a Huguenot force for the invasion of the southern Netherlands. The news of ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... that it was impossible to produce an assent to the historic credibility of the facts related in the Gospel? Did he say that it was impossible to become a Socinian by the weighing of outward evidences? No! but Dr. Hawker says,—and I say,—that this is not, cannot be, what Christ means by faith, which, ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... recorded in ancient books, can be verified by calculations, and lost dates can be recovered by them; and we can foresee, by the laws which they follow, when there will be eclipses again. Will a time ever be when the lost secret of the foundation of Rome can be recovered by historic laws? If not, where is our science? It may be said that this is a particular fact, that we can deal satisfactorily with general phenomena affecting eras and cycles. Well, then, let us take some general phenomenon; Mahometanism, for instance, or Buddhism. Those are large ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... faces are not Christian. Is it the stamp of a longer, more complex heredity? Is it the brand of suffering? Certainly a stern Congress, the speeches little lightened by humor, the atmosphere of historic tragedy too overbrooding for intellectual dalliance. Even the presence of the gayer sex—for there are a few ladies among the delegates, and more peep down from the crowded spectators' gallery that runs ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to one form of life are equally applicable to any other plant, insect, or animal, and there is no greater or less mystery in the life of a blade of grass than in the cedar of Lebanon figuring so conspicuously in the historic page. ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... now a very rich man, and because Daisy fancied it would please her brother they have taken for the summer this historic English manor house, famed all the world over to those interested in mediaeval architecture, as ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... be doubted that the solidarity of society demands that the homogeneity of economic interests should be recognised by the magistrate." The other said: "The first need is rather that the historic continuity of society should be affirmed by the momentary depositaries ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... means a revolutionary; he possessed too many ideals and too little passion, he was essentially a passionless man—except of course the one historic occasion during his campaign against prohibition when he completely lost control, and flying low in a government aeroplane broke a bottle of green chartreuse over the head ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... the sloping banks of some meadow spring. On the shelves are scanty votive offerings, piteous to see. Piteous, not on the score of the superstition which prompts them—that is a matter to be dealt with in a spirit of broad sympathy, on its historic and social merits—but because of the dire poverty they reveal. Even its of broken crockery are held worthy of a place at these little shrines; so bereft are the peasantry of the simplest accompaniments of ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... and went onward with their devil-may-care test, devised in a historic keel-boat man's brain, as inflamed then by alcohol as their ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... may seem to carry one away from Wimbledon, but I should mention that many of the points enunciated were touched upon by M. Zola for the first time, while we postponed further house-hunting to drive over Wimbledon Common. The historic mill and Caesar's Camp, and the picturesque meres were all viewed before the horses' heads were turned ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... without reading it. But it is under the influence of Paris, not London, that this book has been written by one who, though an Englishman, feels himself a European also, and, because of too vivid recent experience, cannot disinterest himself from the further unfolding of the great historic drama of these days which will destroy great institutions, but may also create ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... how much evil and distress might be averted if the imagination were utilized in its higher capacities through the historic paths. An English moralist has lately asserted that "much of the evil of the time may be traced to outraged imagination. It is the strongest quality of the brain and it is starved. Children, from their earliest years, are hedged ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... hours. During the season of low water the current of the Ohio is so slow, as flatboat-men have informed me, that their boats are carried by the flow of the stream only ten miles in a day. The most shallow portion of the river is between Troy and Evansville. Troy is twelve miles below the historic Blennerhasset's Island, which lies between the states of Ohio and Virginia. Here the water sometimes shoals to a depth of ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... nevertheless, Schiller was wont to look back upon the three years at Lorch as the happiest part of his childhood. The village is charmingly situated in the valley of the Rems, a tributary of the Neckar, and the region round about is historic ground. A short walk southward brings one to the Hohenstaufen, on whose summit once stood the ancestral seat of the famous Suabian dynasty, and close by Lorch is the Benedictine monastery in which a number of the Hohenstaufen monarchs are buried. Here was the romance ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... school, whose function is solely the preparation of teachers for the rural schools—sixty-one of them found only in Michigan and Wisconsin, sending into the rural schools of those states about 800 fairly well equipt teachers each year; (2) the old state normal school of historic fame, whose function is the preparation of teachers for the elementary grades of our city and village schools—195 there were two years ago—and they sent out into the schools approximately 10,000 teachers, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... the picturesque scenery of the Octoraro hills, that she wrote the poem entitled "Sketch of a Landscape," which no doubt was inspired by the beauty of the surrounding scenery and the fine view of the "Modest Octoraro," which may be had from the porch of the old historic mansion in which ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... twelve dramatic scenes, the most appropriate to mention in this volume of personalia, are the two which detail certain perilous matters affecting the lives of two ancient ancestors, the one on my mother's side, the other on my father's. The latter records the historic incident whereby John Tupper saved the Channel Islands for William and Mary (receiving from them a gold collar and medal, now in our heraldry) and enabling Admiral Russell to win his naval victory at La Hogue. The former shows ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... our security against foreigners is not based upon physical force at all. I suppose during the last century some hundreds of thousands of British and American tourists have traveled through the historic cities of Germany, their children have gone to the German educational institutions, their invalids have been attended by German doctors and cut up by German surgeons in German sanatoria and health resorts, and I am quite sure that it never occurred to any one of these hundreds of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... slowed down in front of a gate, on one side of which was a big board. On this board was painted a statement to the effect that the historic estate of Doryford House was to be let or sold, furnished or unfurnished, "Apply to the principal ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... peremptory summons from him saying I must come and see him next day, and I went up in the morning. One could not foresee that that breakfast in Draycott Place to which I had been bidden was to take rank as a historic meal. Mr. Maxse has told the story of it in the pages of the National Review, and of how the movement was there started by which the Unionist leaders were got together from various quarters to bring pressure on ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... Not a bit of it. I thought it was, perhaps, but that was only one of my many youthful errors. No, I liked you because your father was an old English baronet, and mine was a merchant who trafficked mainly in things Teutonic. And that's why I like you still. 'Pon my soul it is. You gratify my historic sense—like an old building. You are picturesque. You stand to me for all the good old ideals, including the pride which we are beginning to see is deuced unchristian. Mind you, it's a curious kind of pride ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... "anyway." That indeed—he did her perfect justice—was of the very essence of the newness and freshness and beautiful, brave, social irresponsibility by which she had originally dazzled him: just exactly that circumstance of her having no instinct for any old quality or quantity or identity, a single historic or social value, as he might say, of the New York of his already almost legendary past; and that additional one of his, on his side, having, so far as this went, cultivated blankness, cultivated positive prudence, as to her own personal background—the vagueness, at the best, with which ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... uninhabitable ruin. A score of slaves and peasants looked after what remained of the dwelling and cultivated the land attached to it, garden, oliveyard, vineyard, partly on the island, partly beyond the river in the direction of Arpinum, which historic city, now but sparsely peopled, showed on the hillside a few miles away. Excepting his house in Rome, this was all the property that Marcian possessed. It was dear to him because of the memories of his childhood, and for another reason which sprang out of the depths ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... concerts given by virtuosi, both singers and instrumentalists, accompanied by an orchestra, and for chamber music. Finally, the hall where France was introduced to the masterpieces of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, whose influence has been so profound, is a historic place. ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... had seen her supply dwindle. For this last of the herd, she had a feeling far in excess of his value, such as a collector might have for a rare coin of a certain minting, or a bit of pottery of a pre-historic period. ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... a lesson. Verdun must be taken before he ordered his armies upon the French capital; and so it was that, upon February twenty-third, 1916, the German Crown Prince began a determined assault upon the historic French fortress. ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... route that for three-fourths of the time he would be treading upon volcanic materials and could pitch his camp upon them every night. The oldest eruptions do not go back of Tertiary time, while some are so recent as probably to come within the historic period—within three or ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... of discovery; losing herself often in Boston's impossible streets, only to find her way back home with the instinct for direction of one bred amid forests, trackless, save for infrequent blind and tortuous paths. And soon the historic, homey city cast its strange spell over her heart, and ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... theories of free competition, and Fourier's dream of a perfected communism. But who would have known of Moses, save for Christ? The Old Testament would have been merely the sacred book of the Hebrews, and save as a literary and historic work, of very uncertain historic value, would have been unread, as the Koran and other books of a similar nature ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... the great historic controversies in philosophy is the controversy between the two schools called respectively 'empiricists' and 'rationalists'. The empiricists—who are best represented by the British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—maintained ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... large sums of money; to maintain such an institution by charity through a third of a century is no small undertaking, requiring faith and consecration. But it has repaid more than a hundred-fold all that has ever been expended. Here in this historic city, surrounded by lowlands of rice and cotton, the negro was found in overwhelming numbers, and after emancipation, in utter ignorance of book lore or a pure gospel. To this people the American Missionary Association, ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 2, April, 1900 • Various
... Captain Cook, belongs the honour of the discovery of the island. The names that he bestowed—judicious and expressive—are among the most precious historic possessions of Australia. They remind us that Cook formed the official bond between Britain and this great Southern land, and bear witness to the splendid feats of quiet heroism that he performed, the privations that he and his ship's company endured, and ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... fire, sending their ranging shots so truly that the announcement from the fire-control stations of "Range correct" seemed superfluous. Fire had been opened with the guns laid to eight thousand yards, and all four heavy, armour-piercing shells had found their billets. The historic battle of the ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... is desirable to develop the historic sense by working outward from the industrial activities ...
— A Guide to Methods and Observation in History - Studies in High School Observation • Calvin Olin Davis
... every kind kept clear of the giant "Majestic" as she plowed down the Narrows. Historic but worthless old forts are on either side, and far down into the lower bay the pilot guides the wonderful steamer. Sandy Hook lighthouse, the low shores, and purple mountains of New Jersey are left behind, as the "Majestic" is set on her course ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... hitherto been their rare distinction, and which furnished the motivation for Synge's masterpiece. Whether or not Synge finds a successor, it is none the less true that in English dramatic literature "Riders to the Sea" has an historic value which it would be difficult to over-estimate in its accomplishment and its possibilities. A writer in The Manchester Guardian shortly after Synge's death phrased it rightly when he wrote that it is "the tragic masterpiece of ...
— Riders to the Sea • J. M. Synge
... even been suggested that there may possibly be a historic or ancestral reason for this weakness to attack, and one dating clear back to the days of the mud-fish. It is pointed out that the lung is the last of our great organs to develop, inasmuch as over half of our family ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... their ancient communications.* (* The geological constitution of the soil seems to indicate that, notwithstanding the actual difference of level in their waters, the Black Sea, the Caspian, and lake Aral, communicated with each other in an era anterior to historic times. The overflowing of the Aral into the Caspian Sea seems even to be partly of a more recent date, and independent of the bifurcation of the Gihon (Oxus), on which one of the most learned geographers of our day, M. Ritter, has ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... same remark without suffocating a single h, these two people are manifestly talking two different languages. But if the signs are to be trusted, even your educated classes used to drop the 'h.' They say humble, now, and heroic, and historic etc., but I judge that they used to drop those h's because your writers still keep up the fashion of patting an before those words instead of a. This is what Mr. Darwin might call a 'rudimentary' sign that as an was justifiable once, and useful when ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ago this country was peopled by two races—male and female. The male race were rulers in public and domestic life. Their supremacy had come down from pre-historic time, when strength of muscle was the only master. Woman was a beast of burden. She was regarded as inferior to man, mentally as well as physically. This idea prevailed through centuries of the earlier civilization, even after enlightenment had brought to her a chivalrous regard from men. But this ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... beginning to become so accustomed to the spiced dishes of Continental Problem drama,—reaction against which has set in there long ago,—that fears may well be entertained that the rude simple fare of the Historic Drama will be rejected with scorn. This would indeed be regrettable, as tending to show that we are still far from a sober catholicity of taste, and still in the leading-strings of the Old World, not yet having obtained that independence and maturity ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... of Ebenezer Skinner for four years. He oscillated between the dinginess and dulness of the capital as he knew it, and the well-accustomed rurality of his home. For him the historic associations of Edinburgh were as good as naught. He and Sandy Kerr (Bench Seventeen) heard the bugles blaring at ten o'clock from the Castle on windy Saturday nights, as they walked up the Bridges, and never stirred a pulse! They never went into Holyrood, because ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... as in the idyllic dawn when Theocritus sang its pafatoral charms, was that sunny Sicilian land where, one May morning, Leo Gordon wandered with a gay party in quest of historic sites, which the slow silting of the stream of time had not obliterated. Viewed from the heights of Achradina, whence all the vestiges of magnificence and luxury have vanished, and only the hideous monument of "man's inhumanity ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... specific pattern, but in the form of a greater or smaller number of variants. Some variation of the ethnic types has resulted under the protracted selective process to which the several types and their hybrids have been subjected during the prehistoric and historic growth of culture. ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... had occasion to refer to the historic evolution of male opinion regarding women in previous volumes, as, e.g., Man and Woman, chapter i, and the appendix on "The Influence of Menstruation on the Position of Women" in the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... who detached all the carvings that could be removed without difficulty, and sold them in Paris. The noble staircase and all its delicate sculpture remain, but these only add to the regret that one feels for what is no longer there. Had the Commission of Historic Monuments placed the Chateau de Montal upon its list, it would probably have escaped spoliation, although, in the case of private property, the State has no power to prevent destruction, however grievous the ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... Princess outlived her uncle she would succeed him on the Throne. The Duchess of Kent's Parliamentary Grant was increased, and she took advantage of her improved resources to familiarise the Princess with the social life of the nation. They paid visits to historic houses and important towns, and received addresses. This was a wise and prudent course, but the King spoke with ill-humour of his niece's "royal progresses." The chief cause of offence was that the Princess was not allowed by the Duchess of Kent to make ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... inhabitants at most, while at Cosne there are now more than six thousand. Within half a century the part played by these two towns standing opposite each other has been reversed. The advantage of situation, however, remains with the historic town, whence the view on every side is perfectly enchanting, where the air is deliciously pure, the vegetation splendid, and the residents, in harmony with nature, are friendly souls, good fellows, and devoid of Puritanism, though two-thirds ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... boat from the Barge Office, New York,—a pier near Castle Garden, the historic immigration station,—carried Hamilton to the famous Ellis Island. Preferring his request, the lad speedily found himself in the presence of the Commissioner. He stated his ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... historic night session of the Second All-Russian Congress of the Soviets the decree on peace was adopted. (The full text is printed in the Appendix.) At that moment the Soviet government was only becoming established in the important ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... adorned with a mass of white, wavy hair. His face and massive forehead bore the stamp of deep intellectuality. He was noted as a writer of no mean order, having produced several works dealing with church questions, full of valuable historic research. His every movement bespoke a man of great activity and devotion in his high office. His eyes were keen and searching, while his voice was sharp and piercing. "Sharp as a razor," said several of his careless ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... years upon a modern library! Where will the archaeologist of the year 12,896 turn for the history of our time—where search for those "few immortal names that were not born to die"? Oral transmission of historic data, such as prevails among savages, such as prevailed among the Hellenes in the age of Homer, has been supplanted by the press. Long before Macaulay's New Zealander stands on a broken arch of London bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's, every book now extant will have perished. Will they be ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann |
