"Meteoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... It was not even known in Scandinavia before the Christian era. In Germany, Pannonia, and Noricum its use dates from the sixth or seventh century B.C. Beneath the mounds of Central America we find but a few fragments of meteoric iron, the rarity of which made them extremely valuable; on the other hand iron was known to the Hellenes as long ago as the fourteenth century B.C., and it had been employed in Egypt for many centuries prior to that time. The ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... rescues Fathom, and there is a good deal of the satirical Smollett fun in the description of Fathom's ups and downs, first as the petted beau, and then as the fashionable doctor. In chronicling the latter meteoric career, Smollett had already observed the peculiarity of his countrymen which Thackeray was fond of harping on in the next century—"the maxim which universally prevails among the English people . . . to overlook, . . . on their return to the metropolis, all the connexions ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... to so adjust the electric charge upon the ships that they would be repelled from the cometic mass, but, owing apparently to eccentric changes continually going on in the electric charge affecting the clashing mass of meteoric bodies which constituted the head of the comet, we found it impossible to escape from ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... to collect all the information I possibly could, and forwarded it to him on the 18th of the same month." Among the particulars thus communicated, was the local superstition, that on the anniversary of the night when Bruce landed at Turnberry from Arran, the same meteoric gleam which had attended his voyage reappeared, unfailingly, in the same quarter of the heavens. With this circumstance Scott was much struck. "Your information," he writes on the 22d November, "was particularly interesting and acceptable, especially that which {p.006} relates to the supposed preternatural ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... advances. In other words, if we could take up a position in open space in advance of the sun, we should see him rushing toward us at the rate of some 450,000 miles a day, chased by his whole family of shining worlds and the vast swarms of meteoric bodies ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... land, and when Eugene and his brother-in-law-to-be reached Naples their soulful appeals for more currency with which to continue their golden girdle of the earth were met with the chilling notice "No funds available." Happily, in their meteoric transit across Europe, they had invested in many articles of vertu and convertible souvenirs of the places they had visited. By the sale, or sometimes by the pledge, of these accumulated impedimenta of travel, Eugene made good his retreat to America, where he landed with empty pockets ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... we allude particularly to minor planets, to telescopic comets, and to meteoric streams, which severally form a very numerous group of bodies of which the known members are accumulating to a great extent. As complications arise, some remedies must be applied to their solution, and one probable effect will be that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... printed page, apparently exerted a profound influence upon his contemporaries. 'Never within the memory of teacher or student,' wrote his college friend Aubert de Gaspe, 'had a voice so eloquent filled the halls of the seminary of Quebec.' In the Assembly his rise to prominence was meteoric; only three years after his entrance he was elected speaker on the resignation of the veteran {22} J. A. Panet, who had held the office at different times since 1792. Papineau retained the speakership, with but one brief period of intermission, until the outbreak of rebellion twenty-two years ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... (but not, as was subsequently averred, with his eyes shut) he smote the red, and his ball travelled rapidly up and down the table. On the down journey it glanced off the white, after which, still going at a tremendous pace, it made a complete tour of the table and concluded its meteoric career in the bottom right-hand pocket. Meanwhile the red and the white had both departed on voyages of their own, the terminus in each case being the self-same pocket. (See diagram.) After the balls had been taken out, examined and counted, and James's person had been searched ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... views are particularly interesting, as, out of one mysterious phenomenon, he endeavours to explain another, and inquires: 'Whether or not the zodiacal light is the origin of the meteoric showers of November and August, and especially those of November?' Many readers know that for some years past great numbers of falling-stars, or showers of meteors, have been observed periodically in November: the fall seen in the United States in 1834—when, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... examined the object. A glance told him that this god of the Amasuka was a meteoric stone of unusual size. Most of such stones are mere shapeless lumps, but this one bore a peculiar resemblance to a seated human being holding up one arm towards the sky. So strange was this likeness that, other reasons apart, it seemed not wonderful that savages should regard the thing with awe and ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... of Emerson's is irradiated by a single precept that is worthy to stand by the side of that which Juvenal says came from heaven. How could the man in whose thought such a meteoric expression suddenly announced itself fail to recognize it as divine? It is not strange that he repeats it on the page next the one where we first see it. Not having any golden letters to print it in, I will underscore it for italics, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... darkness decreased, but the morning was cloudy, and there was little appearance of daybreak before nine o'clock. In the early twilight we were startled by the appearance of a ball of meteoric fire, nearly as large as the moon, and of a soft white lustre, which moved in a horizontal line from east to west, and disappeared without a sound. I was charmed by the forest scenery through which we passed. The pine, spruce, and fir trees, of the greatest variety ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... life was! Swung out of his peaceful orbit, by the legerdemain of death; no longer a humble steady star but a meteor; bumping as yet darkly against the planets; and then this monumental folly which had returned him to the old orbit but still in meteoric form, without peace or means of livelihood! An ass, indeed, if ever ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... meteoric poet," and the same title seems very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few readers had heard his name—I only knew it as that of the author of a strange mediaeval tale in prose—when he published "Atalanta in Calydon" in 1865. I remember taking up the quarto in white cloth, at the Oxford ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... independently attained both of these results. Subsequently Weiss, of Vienna, identified the meteor shower of April 20th (Lyrids) with comet 1861. Finally, that indefatigable worker on meteors, A. S. Herschel, added to the number, and in 1878 gave a list of seventy-six coincidences between cometary and meteoric orbits. ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... troopers, and to see a lanky southerner pursuing a victim was good entertainment. Captured at length and shrieking in abject terror, they would go flying skyward from the tautened blanket. But, alas, the blankets were of Government manufacture, and occasionally, upon the victim's meteoric return, would split in two. Thus many blankets were rent in twain, and thus did many dusky ones learn that the belongings of ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... in the London world was under peculiar conditions, which, while they would enhance the greatness of success, would be almost certainly fatal to anything short of the highest order of ability. The meteoric luster of Mali-bran's dazzling career was still fresh in the eyes of the public. The Italian stage was filled by Mme. Grisi, who, in personal beauty and voice, was held nearly matchless, and had an established hold on the public favor. Another great singer, Mme. Persiani, reigned ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... analogy that a Republican State would not offer any powerful resistance if it were to come into collision with a nation possessing a more settled form of government. A shower of meteoric stones, like passing fireworks, might take place; but beyond that nothing would occur to excite the fear, or arouse the energies of the more favoured nation. As an example of the weakness of a Republican State I may mention France. There we see an industrious ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... lot about you in the papers," said the judge, and the Pope waved wearily to a pile of dailies. There were columns about him in those papers—about his meteoric rise: how he started a poor boy in the mountains, studied by candle-light, taught school in the hills: how a vision of their future came to him even that early and how he clung to that vision all his life, turning, twisting ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... centuries. Its beginnings were unimpressively local. At the height of its wealth, power and cultural influence it bestrode the Eurasian-African triangle. Its decline and disappearance were no less spectacular than its meteoric rise ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... then and there to have had a had that hadn't had any chance to go out hadding on account of this foolish discrimination which lets one Had go hadding in any kind of indefinite grammatical weather but restricts the other one to definite and datable meteoric convulsions, and keeps it pining around and watching the barometer all the time, and liable to get sick through confinement and lack of exercise, and all that sort of thing, why—why, the inhumanity of it is enough, let alone the wanton superfluity ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... smallest in the solar system, and the loneliest, Thad Allen was thinking, as he straightened wearily in the huge, bulging, inflated fabric of his Osprey space armor. Walking awkwardly in the magnetic boots that held him to the black mass of meteoric iron, he mounted a projection and stood motionless, staring moodily away through the vision panels of his bulky helmet into the dark mystery ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... not listening to Haldgren's words; his slim, sensitive hand was reaching for the ball-control to build up still more the tremendous blast of a forward exhaust that was checking their speed and making them as heavy as if their bodies were of meteoric iron. ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... weigh many tons. In some of the old fables about wonderful heroes, the stories sometimes declare that the swords with which they accomplished their deeds of prowess fell straight from the heavens, which probably means that they were made of meteoric iron. Fortunately for the people and their homes, meteorites are not common, but every large museum ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan
... raise MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS to her somewhat insecure pinnacle of devotion; by the alchemy of a machine centuries have been shortened to days and nights in the meteoric career of Miss PICKFORD. Yet merit has joined fortune in high cabal. Handicapped by a somewhat uneuphonious patronymic, MARY PICKFORD has established her rule without recourse to any of the disputable methods adopted by her predecessor. At home in all the "palaces" of both hemispheres, she ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... corpse, the startled realization of death stamped for ever in the wide, staring eyes, was indeed a subject for meditation. There, in the midst of all the evidences of Hartley Parrish's meteoric rise to affluence and power, Greve pondered for an instant on the strange pranks which ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... smiled contentedly in the dark and did not know that he was not awake until at some later time he was half aroused by the meteoric glow and whiz of another automobile. It had gone before he was quite awake, and he sank back ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... be a practical difficulty in ascertaining affinities; SECOND, of another impulse connected with the vital forces, tending, in the course of generations, to modify organic structures in accordance with external circumstances, as food, the nature of the habitat, and the meteoric agencies, these being the 'adaptations' of the natural theologian." The author apparently believes that organisation progresses by sudden leaps, but that the effects produced by the conditions of life are gradual. He argues with much force on general grounds that species are not immutable ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... a view of Nature totally new in that age; healthy, human, cheerful, loving, trustful, and yet reverent—identical with that which happily is beginning to prevail in our own day. They defied those very volcanic and meteoric phenomena of their land, to which their countrymen were slaying their own children in the clefts of the rocks, and, like Theophrastus's superstitious man, pouring their drink-offerings on the smooth stones of the valley; and declared that, for their part, they would not fear, ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... At the time of the birth of Louis Napoleon he was at Bayonne, arranging with the Spanish princes for the transfer of the crown of Spain to Joseph Bonaparte. Josephine was at Bordeaux. From this interview he passed, in his meteoric flight, to the Congress of Kings at Erfurt, but a few miles from the battle-field of Jena. It was here that the celebrated historian Mueller met the Emperor and gave the following testimony as to the impression which his presence produced upon ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Mohammedans we have a curious example of the same tendency toward a kindly interpretation of stars and meteors, in the belief of certain Mohammedan teachers that meteoric showers are caused by good angels hurling missiles to drive evil angels out ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... yet ferociously slaying everybody who came in his way, until at some convenient point, definable at the option of the actor, he was suddenly smitten with a sufficient remorse to account for his trepidation before and during the tent-scene; and thereafter he was launched into combat like a meteoric butcher, all frenzy and all gore, and killed, amid general acclamation, when he had fenced himself ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... of marine organisms; while intermingled with these are found various volcanic products which have been either carried through the air or floated on the surface, and a small but perfectly recognisable quantity of meteoric matter. Ice-borne rocks are also found abundantly scattered over the ocean bottom within a definite distance of the arctic and antarctic circles, clearly marking out the limit of floating icebergs in recent ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... meteoric rebel against the degrading servility of what we have come to call the "Nonconformist Conscience" Byron must always have his place in the tragically slow emancipation of the human spirit. The reluctance of an ordinary sensitive modern person, genuinely devoted to poetry, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... lectures, see SUPPLEMENTS 529 and 580.] He said that cosmic dust is found on Arctic snows and upon the bottom of the ocean; all over the world, in fact, at some time or other, there has been a large deposit of this meteoric dust, containing little round nodules found also in meteorites. In Greenland some time ago numbers of what were supposed to be meteoric stones were found; they contained iron, and this iron, on being analyzed at Copenhagen, was found to be rich in nickel. The Esquimaux once made knives ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... president, entering upon office on July 6, 1878. Guillermo immediately started a revolution with General Ulises Heureaux and compelled Gonzalez to abdicate on September 2, 1878. It was the end of Gonzalez' meteoric presidential flights, but after a period of retirement he ventured into public life again, and for many years was Dominican ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... beautifully in the early evenings of spring and the early mornings of autumn; there are the startling comets, whose use is all unknown; there are the brightening and flickering variable stars, whose cause is all unknown; and the meteoric showers—and for all of these the reasons are as clear as for the succession of day and night; they lie just beyond the daily mist of our minds, but our eyes have not yet pierced ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... examples 'prove a little too much; they vouch not only for human apparitions, but for such phantoms as demon dogs, and for still more fanciful symbolic omens.' This is perfectly true. I have found no cases of demon dogs; but wandering lights, probably of meteoric or miasmatic origin, are certainly regarded as tokens of death. This is obviously a superstitious hypothesis, the lights being real phenomena misconstrued. Again, funerals are not uncommonly seen where no funeral ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... he listened to the brisk discussion that ensued in regard to the organization of the yachting party, and found that its two remaining members were to be drawn, as was only natural, from the eminently meteoric set to which Mrs. ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... opinions, with the oldest, blindest, and most inveterate of human superstitions. If extravagant, yet to the multitude it did not seem extravagant. So natural a craze, therefore, however baseless, would never have carried Lord Monboddo's name into that meteoric notoriety and atmosphere of astonishment which soon invested it in England. And, in that case, my childhood would have escaped the deadliest blight of mortification and despondency that could have been incident to ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... enthusiasm kept him buoyant. In respect to his own work he was scrupulous; indeed, a stern critic. He abhorred claptrap and specious effects, and aimed at high standards of artistic expression. This gave him position among his brother architects, but was incompatible with meteoric progress. His design for the church at Benham represented much thought and hope, and he felt happy ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... have been doing quite splendid work lately, in their own way especially, the transformation of force into light is a great piece of systematized discovery and this notion about the sun being supplied with his flame by ceaseless meteoric hail is grand, and looks very likely to be true. Of course, it is only the old gunlock,—flint and steel,—on a large scale but the order and majesty of it are sublime. Still, we sculptors and painters care little about ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... wonderful anticipation of the results of the modern spectroscope. Nor can it be said that this hypothesis of Anaxagoras was a purely visionary guess. It was in all probability a scientific deduction from the observed character of meteoric stones. Reference has already been made to the alleged prediction of the fall of the famous meteor at aegespotomi by Anaxagoras. The assertion that he actually predicted this fall in any proper sense of the word would ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... him an air of deference to everybody else which was sometimes painfully misunderstood. The stars, it must be said regretfully, in connection with so laudable an ambition, nearly always betrayed him, coming down with an unmistakably meteoric descent, stony-broke in the uttermost ends of the earth, with a strong inclination to bring the cause of that misfortune before the Consular Courts. They seldom succeeded in this design, since Llewellyn was usually able to prove to them in advance that it would be fruitless and expensive, ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Illyria, created in 1809, joined for the first time Slovenes and Croats in one political unit, and the excellent administration and the schools left an undying memory of what might be if the Habsburgs cared. Vodnik, the Slovene poet, sang of Illyria and her creator, but it was the meteoric Croat, Ljudevit Gaj, in the thirties, who so eloquently idealized it as he poured heated rhetoric into the camp of the Magyars, who after the Diet of 1825 began their unfortunate policy of Magyarization. Illyria, though short-lived, became the germ of ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... mean street, emptily echoing to my footsteps—no soul awake and audible but me. Then my halt at the placard. And amidst that sleeping stillness, smeared hastily upon the board, a little askew and crumpled, but quite distinct beneath that cool meteoric glare, preposterous and appalling, the measureless evil ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... fire. 8. Duration, 9. Their velocity. Under these different heads meteors have been investigated by the scrutinizing of philosophy, and many superstitious notions, long entertained concerning them, entirely exploded. Meteoric phenomena, it has been demonstrated, all proceed from one common cause—irregularity in the density of the atmosphere. When the atmospheric fluid is homogenous and of equal density, the rays of light pass without obstruction ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... his Hat, and a Gold Chain Ten Times round his Neck, a Sword in his Hand, and two pair of Pistols hanging at the End of a Silk Sling, which was flung over his Shoulders, according to the Fashion of the Pyrates" (p. 213). His meteoric career of piracy lasted but ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... carried her predecessors to glory, had less fortunate results. There has always been a strong strain of extravagance in the governing families of England; from time to time they throw off some peculiarly ill-balanced member, who performs a strange meteoric course. A century earlier, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an illustrious example of this tendency: that splendid comet, after filling half the heavens, vanished suddenly into desolation and darkness. Lady Hester ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... frontier of China, stood forty pillars. On each side of the temple at Pæstum were fourteen, recording the Egyptian cycle of the dark and light sides of the moon, as described by Plutarch; the whole thirty-eight that surrounded them recording the two meteoric cycles so often found ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... and deserts, and through systems and webs, and into shops and cabinets of costliest china, will come at it, will not be refused, let the distances and the breakages be what they may. He went like the meteoric man with the mechanical legs in the song, too quick for a cry of protestation, and reached results amazing to his instincts, his tastes, and his training, not less rapidly and naturally than tremendous Ergo is shot forth from the clash ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... London critics, who complained that he bounded with amazing rapidity from one subject to another, without leaving a trace of his track: now among the stars—then on a steam engine chasing infidelity—or pelting atheism with meteoric stones.[148] ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... while, on the other side of the river, a murmur ran through the crowd like a breeze, caused doubtless by the fear that the bey had arrived unexpectedly from another direction. A second gesture from the manager and the great orchestra subsided, more gradually, with rallentando passages and meteoric showers of notes scattered among the foliage; but nothing better could be expected from a company ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the visual angle of each reporter: and whenever any attempt was made to focus his hard sharp personality some guardian divinity seemed to throw a veil of mystery over him. His detractors, however, were the first to own that there was "something about him"; it was felt that he had passed beyond the meteoric stage, and the business world was unanimous in recognizing that he had "come to stay." A dawning sense of his stability was even beginning to make itself felt in Fifth Avenue. It was said that he had bought a house in Seventy-second Street, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... origin, the same. The boulders which were sometimes used for boundary-stones may have been the representations of these meteorites in later times, and it is noteworthy that the Sumerian group for "iron," /an-bar/, implies that the early Babylonians only knew of that metal from meteoric ironstone. The name of the god Nirig or Enu-restu (Ninip) is generally written with the same group, implying some kind of connection between the two—the god and the iron. In a well-known hymn to that deity certain stones are mentioned, one of them being described as the "poison-tooth"[1] ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... of fresh blood to Odo were Alfieri's meteoric returns to Turin. Life moved languidly in the strait-laced city, even to a young gentleman a-tiptoe for adventure and framed to elicit it as the hazel-wand draws water. Not that vulgar distractions were lacking. The town, as Cantapresto ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... been meteoric. She literally had leaped from the chorus into the role of principal comedienne—one of those pranks of fortune that cannot be explained or denied. She was one of the "Jack-in-the-Box" girls in a big New York production. On the opening night, ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... and Henry Clay, was directed to proceed to London, for the purpose of entering into negotiations for a treaty of commerce with Great Britain. Before leaving the continent, Mr. Adams visited Paris, where he witnessed the return of Napoleon from Elbe, and his meteoric career during the Hundred Days. Here he was joined in March, 1815, by his family, after a long and perilous journey ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... (Cr) occurs in the metallic state only in a very small quantity in meteoric iron, but is frequently found in union with oxygen, as oxide in chrome iron ore, and as chromic ...
— A System of Instruction in the Practical Use of the Blowpipe • Anonymous
... later the slim young figure, in its English-fitting black and white, sat opposite Emma McChesney at the breakfast table and between excited gulps of coffee outlined a meteoric career in his chosen field. And the more he talked and the rosier his figures of speech became, the more silent and thoughtful fell his mother. She wondered if five o'clock would find a droop to the set of those young shoulders; if the springy young legs in their absurdly ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... nearly a hundred years. Should all the planets thus come to rest in the sun, it would cover his emission for a period of forty-five thousand five hundred and eighty-nine years. It has been maintained that the solar heat is actually produced in this way by the constant collision upon his surface of meteoric bodies, but for the particulars of this hypothesis we must refer ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... other hand, if a meteoric stone fell from the sky in the sight of a savage, and he picked it up hot, he would most probably lay it aside in some, to him, sacred place, and believe the stone itself to be a kind of god, and offer prayer ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... group—group after group. To the Pleiades He adds Orion. It seems that God likes light so well that He keeps making it. Only one being in the universe knows the statistics of solar, lunar, stellar, meteoric creations, and that is the—Creator Himself. And they have all been lovingly christened, each one a name as distinct as the names of your children. "He telleth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names." The seven Pleiades had names given ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... sources for Sterne in English letters, that is, for the strange combination of whimsicality, genuine sentiment and knavish smiles, which is the real Sterne. He is individual, exotic, not demonstrable from preceding literary conditions, and his meteoric, or rather rocket-like career in Britain is in its decline a proof of the insensibility of the English people to a large portion of his gospel. The creature of fancy which, by a process of elimination, the Germans made out of Yorick is more easily ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... putting himself on common ground with his reader Simplicity Slovenly literature, unrebuked and uncorrected Suggestion rather than by commandment Unenlightened popular preference for a book Waste precious time in chasing meteoric appearances ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... is not unknown. In 1914 there was a meteoric fall in Siberia which knocked down every tree for fifty miles around. A few thousand years earlier, eight or ten, Canon Diablo crater was formed in Colorado by a missile from the heavens which wiped out all life within a thousand-mile radius. Earlier still ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... which released the planter from the necessity of toil, all tended to aggravate the peculiarities of mind and body which the settlers inherited from their ancestors; and the result has been a race which, while it presents here and there an example of brilliant, meteoric genius, is, in the main, both intellectually and physically inferior to the hardy denizens of the North and West. The same influences have fostered the aristocratic notions of the early settlers of the Southern States. With every element of a monarchy in their midst, the Gulf States have long been ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... how terribly effective had been the blow. The whole Northern campaign had been upset by the meteoric appearance of Jackson and the speed with which he marched and fought. McDowell's army of 40,000 men and a hundred guns had been scattered, and it would take him much time to get it all together again. McClellan, advancing on Richmond, was without the ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... meteoric glare, It will come! With Destruction in the air. It will come! With a meteoric glare, With Destruction in the air, With the vengeance of Despair, It will come! ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... and a doctor, while his creditors mounted guard over the old masters, and his guests explained to each other that they had dined with him only because they wanted to see the pictures. Mr. Rosedale meant to have a less meteoric career. He knew he should have to go slowly, and the instincts of his race fitted him to suffer rebuffs and put up with delays. But he was prompt to perceive that the general dulness of the season afforded him an unusual opportunity to shine, and ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... night, the festivities continued. The Palace of the Tuileries was ever thronged with a crowd, eager to catch a glimpse of the preserver of France. All the public bodies waited upon him with congratulations. Bells rung, cannon thundered, bonfires and illuminations blazed, rockets and fire-works, in meteoric splendor filled the air, bands of music poured forth their exuberant strains, and united Paris, thronging the garden of the Tuileries and flooding back into the Elysian Fields, rent the heavens with deafening shouts of exultation. As Napoleon stood at the window of his palace, witnessing ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... neighbourhood called "the Heights." Ogilvy, who was some ten years older than I, and who belonged to one of our old families, had embarked on a career then becoming common, but which at first was regarded as somewhat meteoric: gradually abandoning the practice of law, and perceiving the possibilities of the city of his birth, he had "gambled" in real estate and other enterprises, such as our local water company, until he had quadrupled his inheritance. He had built a mansion on Grant Avenue, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... bankrupt, we may say; fallen into bottomless abysses of destruction; he still in a paying condition, and with footing capable to carry his affairs and him. When he died, in 1786, the enormous Phenomenon since called FRENCH REVOLUTION was already growling audibly in the depths of the world; meteoric-electric coruscations heralding it, all round the horizon. Strange enough to note, one of Friedrich's last visitors was Gabriel Honore Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau. These two saw one another; twice, for half an hour each time. The last of the old Gods and the first of the modern ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... sorcerized by vivid flashes of captivating contrast, forked, as lightning, and left, as embers smouldering to glow in the crucible of memory's recesses. Specious instances of irony playing the manliest part: flashes of meteoric, mesmeric eloquence, fitfully flecking the embossed page, as one tier or set of ideas, in rhetoric orchestration, symphonizes with or eclipses another. Connection, an element of robust mesmeric cohesion with this prized author being the adamantine hyphen, the articulating ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... very striking proof of the origin of hot springs by the sinking of cold meteoric water into the earth, and by its contact with a volcanic focus, is afforded by the volcano of Jorullo. When, in September, 1759, Jorullo was suddenly elevated into a mountain eleven hundred and eighty-three feet above the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to the pavilion, and mutely watched the cow-ponies rush and buck around the course. She beheld Valentino Cortes, a meteoric vision in white cotton trousers, girdled in crimson, flash by to victory amid the wild "Vivas!" of his compatriots. She saw the burros trot past in their little dog-trot of ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... natures and distributions of these harmonize with the hypothesis of an exploded planet, and I think with no other hypothesis. The theory of volcanic origin, joined with the remark that the Sun emits jets which might propel them with adequate velocities, seems quite untenable. Such meteoric bodies as have descended to us, forbid absolutely the supposition of solar origin. Nor can they rationally be ascribed to planetary volcanoes. Even were their mineral characters appropriate, which ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... a triclinium. One man sounds a double pipe, another carries food to the guests, one of whom is singing an obscene song, which disgusts the women, who make the sign of displeasure at him. In a relief of the time of Heliogabalus a meteoric stone is seen carried in procession, preceded by duumvirs, lictors, &c.—an evidence of an Oriental cult practised in Aquileia. Five great medallions from the same building show busts in very high relief of Jupiter, Mercury, Vulcan, Venus, and Minerva. A stone ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... heat, pass muster easily with children and sailor folk for the genuine thunderbolts. But the grand upholder of the belief, the one true undeniable reality which has kept alive the thunderbolt even in a wicked and sceptical age, is, beyond all question, the occasional falling of meteoric stones. Your meteor is an incontrovertible fact; there is no getting over him; in the British Museum itself you will find him duly classified and labelled and catalogued. Here, surely, we have the ultimate substratum of the thunderbolt myth. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... departure, sought to accompany him but was detained by an angel. To the Hebrews it was sacred as the rock on which Abraham was ready to offer Isaac; and also as a stone which kept down within the earth the receded waters of the Flood.) Meteoric stones have a sanctity as having fallen from heaven: for example, the lingam of Jagannath at Puri, and the famous black stone at Mecca. Wells also, for obvious reasons, tend ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... is totally unaccountable upon any reasonable theory," said the doctor, "and I do not know what to believe, unless we are to conceive that the tooth and the ball were really meteoric stones that have assumed these remarkable shapes and been shot down upon the earth with such force as to penetrate Mr. Dingus' leg, and this is so very improbable that we can hardly accept it unless ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... need any advice from me (which, indeed, he would utterly disdain) as to the lethal weapons which should form his battery; but if the wayfarer be a humble performer who has never slain anything more formidable than a wary old stag, or more nerve-shattering than a meteoric cock pheasant rising clamorously from behind a turnip, he may not be too proud to learn that he will find an ordinary "fowling piece" the most useful weapon which he can take with him. If his gun is not choked, he should be provided with a dozen or ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... of thieves, or else resigned in disgust. Worse still, because this taint was at the very source, the royal government in France was already beset with that entanglement of weakness and corruption which lasted throughout the whole century between the decline of Louis XIV and the meteoric ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... insignificant to warrant such pretensions. Many days passed, and still you pressed me on the subject, because your partiality made you think me deserving of the honour; but I resisted, really through modesty, not that I did not covet the distinction, until something was said of my paper on the meteoric mass of iron of Brazil, which was published some years ago in the Transactions of the Royal Society; when you insisted on proposing me, and I assented gratefully, because I was and am desirous of being a Fellow of the Royal Society, if I can be supposed worthy of having ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... meteor, "Wakan-denda" (sacred fire) and Wakan-wohlpa (sacred gift). Meteors are messages from the Land of Spirits warning of impending danger. It is a curious fact that the "sacred stone" of the Mohammedans, in the Kaaba at Mecca, is a meteoric stone, and obtains its sacred character from the fact ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... the meteoric appearance of a young speculator in Duluth, and after Chicago had seen the tentative opening of a grain and commission company labeled Frank A. Cowperwood & Co., which ostensibly dealt in the great wheat crops of ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... evolutions and not depart thitherward, feeling ashamed and grieved to think that he had ever lived to be a horse. And Sundown, despite his length of limb, seemed unbreakable. "He's the most durable rider on the range," remarked Hi Wingle, incident to one of his late assistant's meteoric departures from ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... one with her?" he inquired, with the memory of a meteoric vision of another rider fleeing back along the road on a ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... a superb shower of falling stars, far exceeding, both in number and in brilliancy, the phenomena which are commonly distinguished as the August and November meteors; in fact, Gallia was passing through that meteoric ring which is known to lie exterior to the earth's orbit, but almost concentric with it. The rocky coast, its metallic surface reflecting the glow of the dazzling luminaries, appeared literally stippled with light, whilst the sea, as though spattered ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... Trevor, gravely, "it is reassuring to learn that, no matter where I am, I am liable to have a huge incandescent mass of meteoric stone hurtling at me out of space at any moment—for that is what your statement really amounts to, you know—isn't it? And now I will bid you good night and retire to my cabin, with the fixed resolution not to dream ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... situation. Only stout lashings prevented these men from being swept from the deck, while those upon the roof below were constantly compelled to cling to rails and stanchions to save themselves from being carried away by each new burst of meteoric fury. Upon the prow of the Vanator was painted the device of Gathol, but no pennants were displayed in the upper works since the storm had carried away several in rapid succession, just as it seemed to the watching men that it must carry away the ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sensitive or irritable. Who has not lived at one time or other in his life in daily contact with people of this sort,—persons whose outbreaks of temper, or of wounded feeling still worse than temper, were as incalculable as meteoric showers? The suppressed atmosphere, the chronic state of alarm and misgiving, in which the victims of this species of tyranny live are withering and exhausting to the stoutest hearts. They are also hardening; perpetually having to wonder and ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... glare, It will come! With Destruction in the air. It will come! With a meteoric glare, With Destruction in the air, With the vengeance of Despair, It ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... succession in the crust of the earth in other quarters of the globe, the interior of South Africa is unquestionably a grand type of a region which has preserved its ancient terrestrial conditions during a very long period, unaffected by any changes except those which are dependent on atmospheric and meteoric influences. ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... Moab, is an object of admiration to all save patients suffering from the strange disease "Holy Land on the Brain."[FN390] But I found no traces of craters in the neighbourhood, no signs of vulcanism, no remains of "meteoric stones": the asphalt which named the water is a mineralised vegetable washed out of the limestones, and the sulphur and salt are brought down by the Jordan into a lake without issue. I must therefore look upon the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... with shame I write the following pages. Would I could blot them out of my life. To this day there must be many who remember my meteoric career in the firmament of fast life. It did not last long, but in less than a week I managed ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... unless they need them to explain something, and they don't need this assumption for anything. Well, it would come in handy to make some of these reports of freak phenomena, like mysterious appearances and disappearances, or flying-object sightings, or reported falls of non-meteoric matter, theoretically respectable. Reports like that usually get the ignore-and-forget ...
— Crossroads of Destiny • Henry Beam Piper
... the sudden intrusion and the swift spread of an absolutely harmless organism—one that has been, perhaps, dormant for centuries in the soil, or has evolved to its present form in the deep waters of the Elan watershed by a process whose nature we can only dimly guess at. Some have suggested a meteoric origin, and it is true that some meteoric stones fell over Wales recently. But that is far-fetched to my mind, for how could a white-hot stone harbour living matter? Whatever its origin, it is, I am sure, a harmless thing, and though strange, and at first sight alarming, we ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... vicinity, witnessed by Dr. Goodspeed, which fell in a slough and so heated the water as to kill the catfish that inhabited it. It lies in the pond, and looks as if a hundred feet wide. A much more marvellous story has been published of an engraved meteoric stone falling in an obscure portion of Georgia near Clayton Court-house, which is a hoax, and has been so pronounced ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... Friends downwards, have something in them of a homespun, humdrum, plain, flat—not unprofitable, perhaps, but unattractive character. They may be good and useful, but they have no dignity or splendour, and are quite destitute of the strange meteoric power and grandeur which have accompanied the career of Clubs. Societies there are, indeed, which identify themselves through their very nomenclature with misfortune and misery, seeming proudly to proclaim themselves victims to all the saddest ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... stature, not more than five feet seven inches in height, and weighing not more than one hundred and forty pounds. His eyes and hair were black, his complexion dark, giving the impression that he did not belong to the Caucasian race. His career was a meteoric display in political oratory, such as the world does not often witness. His integrity cannot be questioned, and for more than a third of a century he submitted to a life of exile rather than accept a home under a ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... that the sun is surrounded by a mass of nebulous matter, of which this light is but a manifestation. Some philosophers have an idea that the matter has solid particles in it, which, when they pass through the earth's atmosphere, produce shooting stars, or are drawn towards it in the shape of meteoric stones. It is seen always, it must be remembered, nearly in the elliptic, or sun's path. Now, too, my eyes gazed for the first time on the magnificent constellation of the Southern Cross, which rose night after night higher in the heavens. Greater, also, ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... especially important in developing the theme of romantic love with real fineness of feeling and thus helping to prepare the way for Shakspere in a very important particular. In marked contrast to these men is Thomas Kyd, who about the year 1590 attained a meteoric reputation with crude 'tragedies of blood,' specialized descendants of Senecan tragedy, one of which may have been the early play on Hamlet which Shakspere used as the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... intensely severe; and, during the latter part of November, and the first half of December, Captain Parry's journal presents little more than observations on it; and oh the meteoric appearances and fantastic illusions of light and colour, with which the voyagers were often amused. At one time, the moon appeared to be curiously deformed by refraction; the lower edges of it seeming to be indented with deep notches, and afterwards to be cut off ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... the Feldspar Group which is called Anorthite has been shown by Rammelsberg to occur in a meteoric stone, and his analysis proves it to be almost identical in its chemical proportions to the same mineral in the lavas of modern volcanoes. So also Bronzite (Enstatite) and Olivine have been met with in ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... the purpose of the present work. It proposes to lay down in a series of apposite chapters the story of the past century, beginning, in fact, rather more than a century ago with the meteoric career of Napoleon and seeking to show to what it led, and what effects it had upon the political evolution of mankind. The French Revolution stood midway between two spheres of history, the sphere of medieval barbarism and that of modern enlightenment. It exploded like a bomb in the ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... some one (if we are to believe the Chippeway legends, on the shores of Lake Superior) found fragments of the pure copper of that region, beat them into shape, and the art of metallurgy was begun; iron was first worked in the same way by shaping meteoric ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... sufficient to reveal their situation, or to organize them for practical effects. In some nations, the manifestations of power are coincident with its growth; in others, from vicious institutions, a vast crystallization goes on for ages blindly and in silence, which the lamp of some meteoric mind is required to light up into brilliant display. Thus it had been in Russia; and hence, to the abused judgment of all Christendom, she had seemed to leap like Pallas from the brain of Jupiter—gorgeously endowed, and in ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... fashion, was suffered to fall in long elf-locks about his ears. Notwithstanding all these disadvantages, his eyes were so superlatively beautiful that they almost persuaded you into the belief that he was handsome. From their lustrous depths there streamed a meteoric splendor, which, more than words, revealed the genius, the enthusiasm, and the noble soul to which Nature had ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... course and color, take the place of stars. Over the wild-surging chaos, in the leaden air, are only sudden glares of revolutionary lightning; then mere darkness, with philanthropistic phosphorescences, empty meteoric lights; here and there an ecclesiastical luminary still hovering, hanging on to its old quaking fixtures, pretending still to be a Moon or Sun,—though visibly it is but a Chinese lantern made of paper mainly, with candle-end foully dying in the heart of it. Surely as ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... fragmentary. It is to his formal publications and the common tradition of what he did, that we must turn for our biographical and historical estimate of the man. In this respect he is in analogy with Patrick Henry who appears only fitfully in history, but with meteoric brilliancy; or with Abraham Lincoln the narrative of whose life for the first forty-five years can be adequately written ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... "After your meteoric career during the past few hours I am inclined to agree with that last remark," and Clancy's tone became so serious that Devar laughed outright. "Don't misunderstand me, Mr. Curtis. I am lost in admiration of your nerve, but you have ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... its rows of lamps, and the throngs of carriages, each bearing now its lighted lantern, moving along that far-extending slope, looked like a new Milky Way, fenced with lustrous stars, and swarming with meteoric fire-flies. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of them, indeed, do strike the ground, and very large ones bury themselves deep in the earth. When we go to the Field Columbian Museum, in Chicago, we shall see these visitors from other worlds. They are called meteoric stones, or meteorites. When they are in the ...
— Uncle Robert's Geography (Uncle Robert's Visit, V.3) • Francis W. Parker and Nellie Lathrop Helm
... and the wonder and the paragon and the criterion of his friend Billy Fairfax, who had trailed his meteoric course through college and who, when the Brian Boru went down, was accompanying him on his most recent adventure—a globe-trotting trip in the interests of a moving-picture company. Socially they made an excellent team. For Billy contributed ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... childlike wonder—as others had done—his meteoric progress in wealth and power. He was a man, disliked by some, feared by many, and obeyed by all; a land-owner; a cattle breeder; a grain dealer; a giant in body as well as will; ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... war chief of the Shawnees, was born at the ancient town of Piqua on Mad River, not far from the present city of Springfield, in Clark County. His name means Shooting Star, and he was indeed the meteoric light of his people while he lived. He was of a high Indian, family of the Turtle Tribe, and his father had come with his clan to Ohio from their home in Florida, about the middle of the last century. Tecumseh was born, as nearly as can be reckoned, ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... the unknown, "the astronomers Louville and Halley took for lunar phenomena phenomena purely terrestrial, such as meteoric or other bodies which are generated in our own atmosphere. That was the scientific aspect of these facts, ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... every particle of soil and everything movable, including people, animals and vegetation, have been lifted by terrific cyclones and scattered afar, falling in other lands and at sea in the form of what was called meteoric dust! I find that these terrible phenomena began to occur about the year 1860, and lasted, with increasing frequency and power, through a century, culminating about the middle of that glacial period which saw the extinction of the Galoots and their neighboring ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... hands of the clock, whose lagging fingers finally pointed to five. The sky seemed brass, the atmosphere a blast from Tophet; and the sun, still standing at some distance above the horizon, glared mercilessly down over the panting parched: earth, as if a recent and unusually copious shower of "meteoric cosmical matter" had fallen into the solar furnace, and prompted it by increased incandescence to hotly deny the truth of Helmholtz's assertion: "The inexorable laws of mechanics show that the store of heat in the sun must be finally exhausted." Certainly ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... unruly; headstrong, ungovernable, unappeasable, immitigable, unmitigable^; uncontrollable, incontrollable^; insuppressible, irrepressible; orgastic, orgasmatic, orgasmic. spasmodic, convulsive, explosive; detonating &c v.; volcanic, meteoric; stormy &c (wind) 349. Adv. violently &c adj.; amain^; by storm, by force, by main force; with might and main; tooth and nail, vi et armis [Lat.], at the point of the sword, at the point of the bayonet; at ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the MS. I found that he had cut out the war, in so far as his military experiences were concerned. In khaki he showed himself to be as English and John Bull as you please; and how the deuce his meteoric promotion occurred and what various splendid services compelled the exhibition on his breast of a rainbow row of ribbons, are matters known only to the War Office, Andrew Lackaday and his Maker. Well—that is perhaps an exaggeration of secrecy. The newspapers have published ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... primitive period, are a certain number of engraved cylinders, some of which are very curious. [PLATE XIV., Fig. 1] It is clearly established that the cylinders in question, which are generally of serpentine, meteoric stone, jasper, chalcedony, or other similar substance, were the seals or signets of their possessors, who impressed them upon the moist clay which formed the ordinary material for writing. They are round, or nearly so, and measure from half an inch to three inches in length; ordinarily they are ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... that Tennyson spent the quiet years of meditation and study before he achieved his full renown. This was no such sensational event as Byron's meteoric appearance in 1812; but one year, 1850, is a clear landmark in his career. This was the date of the publication of In Memoriam and of his appointment, on the death of Wordsworth, to the office of Poet Laureate. This year saw the end of his struggle with ill-fortune and the end of his long ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... source of finely divided matter is to be found in volcanic dust which, as in the case of Krakatoa, may remain for years in the atmosphere, but which must ultimately fall upon the surface of the earth and ocean. This can be traced in all the deep-sea oozes. Finally there is meteoric dust, which is continually falling to the surface of the earth, but in such minute quantities and in such a finely-divided state that it can be detected only in the oozes of the deepest oceans, where both inorganic and organic debris ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Meteoric displays, swarms of shooting stars, have been observed at various times all through the ages; but this phenomenon, coming in the order given by the prophecy, that is, following the darkening of the sun, constituted the sublime display answering to the pen-picture of the Apocalypse,—as if ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... his word—had made but a meteoric appearance in her future sister-in-law's cottage—a hasty greeting, a brief peck on Ilona's two cheeks, and one on Aladar's bristly face, then the inevitable homily; and as soon as Ilona paused in the latter, in order to draw breath, ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... brief and brilliant career was like its beginning: meteoric. On the 20th of April, a whisper against him whirled through the salons. On the 30th it had become a murmur. From May 5th to May 19th, Petersburg had stood, with open mouth, craning its neck to catch a glimpse of this monster of vice and crime. On May 21st, as Ivan walked from the court-room, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... about seven o'clock, a wonderful appearance was witnessed in the sky. A succession of meteoric balls of fire flew through the air, apparently from west to east; attended by reports in rapid succession very much resembling those of heavy pieces of artillery and quite as loud. Some think this may ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... by the apparition of Yoshitsune and Yukiiye on the Yamato plain and that of the Emperor Antoku at Inamura promontory. Just twenty years had elapsed since he raised the Minamoto standard in Sagami. His career was short but meteoric, and he ranks among the three greatest statesmen Japan has ever produced, his ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... be possible at any given epoch, my difficulty is this: how long could the outer parts of this nebula exist, exposed to the zero temperature of surrounding space, without losing the gaseous state and aggregating into minute solid particles—into meteoric dust, in fact? ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... the Operatic and Dramatic Company of this particular ship had known many vicissitudes. Under the guidance of a musically inclined Ship's Steward, it had faced audiences across impromptu footlights as "The Pale Pink Pierrots," and, as such, had achieved a meteoric distinction. But unhappily the Ship's Steward was partial to oysters, and bought a barrelful at an auction sale ashore. On the face of things, it appeared a bargain; but the Ship's Steward neglected to inquire too closely ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... vigilant watch on northern skies, had never come across the name of Knut Hamsun. He was unknown; whatever slight attention his earlier struggles for recognition may have attracted was long ago forgotten. And now he blazed forth overnight, with meteoric suddenness, with a strange, fantastic, intense brilliance which could only emanate from a star of ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... ice, which in exchange was sharpened into a wonderful effulgence by the hues above and around it. Again and again, along the whole range, far as the sight could explore, the spray rose in stately clouds of silver, which were scattered by the wind in meteoric scintillations of surpassing beauty, flashing through the fires of the sun like millions of little blazing stars. There were twenty different dyes of light in the collection of spires, fanes, and pillars near the schooner, whose masts, yards, and gear mingled their own particular ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... he had used made him think suddenly of Gideon Vetch. Was that the secret of the Governor's irresistible magnetism, of his meteoric rise into power? He embodied the modern fetish—success; he was, in the lively idiom of the younger set,—personified "pep." After all, if the old order crumbled, was it not because of its own weakness? Was not ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... poetical, we may still gladly acknowledge the swinging rhythm, the martial dash and vigor of his best verse. Also, remembering the Revolution, we may understand the dazzling impression which he made upon the poets of his day. When the news came from Greece that his meteoric career was ended, the young Tennyson wept passionately and went out to carve on a stone, "Byron is dead," as if poetry had perished with him. Even the coldly critical Matthew Arnold ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... dark shadow was a large meteoric stone. Many have fallen on our earth at various times, some being tons in weight. Usually, however, they are so small that on entering our atmosphere they become fused by the friction and changed to dust. Larger ones are partially fused, and often split into fragments in the upper air. ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... there are which have had similar meteoric rises in value. The first edition of Walton and Cotton's 'Compleat Angler' was published in 1653 at one and sixpence. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the average price for a fine copy seems to have been between three and four pounds. In 1850 so much as ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... simple matters may as well be understood, but there is nothing in them to dwell upon. The far side of the moon is probably but little worth seeing. Its features are likely to be more blurred with accumulations of meteoric dust than are those of our side, but otherwise they are likely to be of ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... this brownish black crust, which gives these rocks, when they have a globular form, the appearance of meteoric stones? What idea can we form of the action of the water, which produces a deposit, or a change of colour, so extraordinary? We must observe, in the first place, that this phenomenon does not belong to the cataracts of the Orinoco alone, but ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... ledge, dropping into the Crimson Sea, sending up geysers of ruby spray, dashing on the bridge, crushing the frog-men, fell a shower of stone, mingled with distorted shapes and fragments whose scales still flashed meteoric as they hurled ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... strike every reflecting mind. The Eternal Sovereign arranges a solar or an astral system, by dispositions imparted primordially to matter; he causes, by the same means, vast oceans to join and continents to rise, and all the grand meteoric agencies to proceed in ceaseless alternation, so as to fit the earth for a residence of organic beings. But when, in the course of these operations, fuci and corals are to be, for the first time, placed in these oceans, a change in his plan of administration ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... course of his report he stated: "Its specific gravity is 3.456 at 68 deg. Fahr., barom. 29.9. Its structure is imperfectly granular, but not crystallized, and there are small black specks of the size of a pin's head, and smaller, of malleable meteoric iron, which are readily removed from the crushed stone by the magnet. The color of the mass is ash gray. A portion of the surface is black and is scarified by fusion. Its hardness is not superior to that of olivine or massive chrysolite. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... she could run no longer. But this rapid rush carried them out of immediate peril, and brought them into the flying throng pressing their way northward and westward. Wedged into the multitude they could only move on with it in the desperate struggle forward. But fire was falling about them like a meteoric shower. ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... "mares' tails,"—small cloud-forms here and there against a heavy background, that look like the stroke of a brush, or the streaming tail of a charger. Sometimes a few under-clouds will be combed and groomed by the winds or other meteoric agencies at work, as if for a race. I have seen coming storms develop well-defined vertebrae,—a long backbone of cloud, with the articulations and processes clearly marked. Any of these forms, changing, growing, denote rain, because they show unusual agencies at work. The storm ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... years the astronomer's fame has steadily increased. In 1868, in the great meteoric shower, she and her pupils recorded the paths of four thousand meteors, and gave valuable data of their height above the earth. In the summer of 1869 she joined the astronomers who went to Burlington, ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... are plenty in Vanity Fair, at least there are two; Becky dominates one, Amelia smiles and weeps in the other. They join hands occasionally, but really they have very little to exchange. Becky and her Crawleys, Becky and her meteoric career in Curzon Street, would have been all as they are if Amelia had never been heard of; and Bloomsbury, too, of the Osbornes and the Sedleys, might have had the whole book to itself, for all that Becky ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... grouping of avenues and edifices may be, the attraction does not belong to the outside alone: inside the great doors of the majestic halls you will find that time has wings while you pass in review the trophies of all the zones, and of the meteoric heavens too, preserved in the Smithsonian, or the archives of the country in the Patent Office. This latter is indeed a place of enchantment. The Pompeiian hall has something of the air of a hall dressed for legerdemain, and if you pause to think ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... gravity, rotating like our sun or moving at moderate speed as in spiral nebulae. Gravitational condensation would at first produce rise of temperature, followed later by cooling, ultimately freezing, giving solid bodies, collision between which would produce meteoric stones such ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... between them. But when, met by Craven and Johnnie Big Duncan, they passed across to Dan, Hughie again checked so fiercely that Johnnie Big Duncan secured the ball, passed back to the master, who with another meteoric flash along the edge of the field broke through the Front's defense, ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor
... fellow-fright along with him. Which wish of his is the gist of my epistle. Can he bring him? He wants to know before he broaches the proposition. I'm to be skinned alive if Jack ever learns that such a plea was made, so I beg you whatever other rash acts you see fit to commit during your meteoric flight across my plane of existence, don't ever give me away. Firstly, because if I ever get a chance to do so, I'm positive that I should want to cling to you as the mistletoe does to the oak, and could not bear to be given away; and secondly, because I'm so attached ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... found on the earth's surface. This supply is of course extremely limited, yet some Siberian tribes are said to make knives from iron obtained in this manner. Moreover the evidence of language, as used by the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, would imply the meteoric origin of the first known form of the metal. But though such accidental finds might prove the existence of another metal, they would furnish no hint how to extract it from its ores, or indeed, that it existed ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... ethereal medium I have spoken of before, and which is only denser in proportion to its solar vicinity? The lenticular-shaped phenomenon, also called the zodiacal light, was a matter worthy of attention. This radiance, so apparent in the tropics, and which cannot be mistaken for any meteoric lustre, extends from the horizon obliquely upward, and follows generally the direction of the sun's equator. It appeared to me evidently in the nature of a rare atmosphere extending from the sun outward, beyond the orbit of Venus at least, and I believed indefinitely farther.(*2) ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a passing property in the air, which may have left something to eat behind it. They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and fragments of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric discharge, for fowls to peck at. Peg-tops and hoops they account, I think, as a sort of hail; shuttlecocks, as rain, or dew. Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I have more than a suspicion that, in the minds of the two lords, the early public-house ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Persian satraps was slender in the extreme, he used it with the most flagrant dishonesty as a bait first to Sparta, then to the Athenian oligarchs, and finally to the democracy. Superficial and opportunist to the last, he owed the successes of his meteoric career purely to personal magnetism and an almost incredible capacity ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... wending homeward from their visit to the amphitheatre. As he turned, his eye was arrested by a strange and sudden apparition. From the summit of Vesuvius, darkly visible at the distance, there shot a pale, meteoric, livid light—it trembled an instant and was gone. And at the same moment that his eye caught it, the voice of one of the youngest of the women broke out hilariously ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton |
