"Prophetical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... held by many for a mere Tragedy-dream—by many who have never given themselves the trouble to ask themselves from what grounds dreams pleased in Tragedy, and wherefore they have become so common. I believe, however, that in the present case, the whole is here psychologically true and accurate. Prophetical dreams are things of nature, and explicable by that law of the mind in which where dim ideas are connected with vivid feelings, Perception and Imagination insinuate themselves and mix with the forms of Recollection, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... sacerdotal, the Magi claimed to exercise the prophetical office. From a very early date they had made themselves conspicuous as omen-readers and dream-expounders; but, not content with such occasional exhibitions of prophetic power, they ultimately reduced divination to a system, and, by the help of the barsom ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... whoever heard it; or more agreeably by a display of voluble young countrywomen, standing tiptoe on their carriage seats, eager to see the first fall, and permitting the young men who swaggered by to scare them into the prettiest attitudes of dismay, by a prophetical announcement of the bones that would be broken before the race was won. Some little buzz there is about unfairness and jockeyship, when we catch, from the mouth of our Anglo-Roman livery-stable-man, who chanced to be near, that "the osses is a-saddling." It took long to saddle; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... resolution to be passed by the assembly in 1637, which stated, according to Winthrop: "That though women might meet (some few together) to pray and edify one another; yet such a set assembly, (as was then in practice at Boston), where sixty or more did meet every week, and one woman (in a prophetical way, by resolving questions of doctrine, and expounding scripture) took upon her the whole exercise, was agreed to be disorderly, and ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... into four classes: i. Those of the early period from the twelfth to the ninth century, including Samuel, Elijah, Eliska, etc, who have left no prophetical writings. 2. The prophets of the Assyrian age (800-700 B.C.), where belong Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, and Nahum. 3. The prophets of the Babylonian age, Zephaniah, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Ezekiel. Here some scholars would place a part of Isaiah. 4. The post-exilian prophets, Haggai, Zachariah, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... frozen loins to sweep in deluge away the civilization of the South—figure here. Here is Attila with his Huns. Here is the Mussulman. Here is Rome of the dark ages. Great Britain appears last—the dulness which has blessed, which blesses, and which shall bless her. We extract the prophetical part. The visioned progress of Dulness has reached the theatres; and some sixteen verses which contain—says Warton, well and truly—"some of the most lively and forcible descriptions any where to be found, and are perfect pattern of a clear picturesque style," call up ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... north of the line and permitting it south of the line. This territory had been paid for equally by the treasure and blood of all the states. Blood for land! Then slavery on the land to raise cotton! And was not Jefferson prophetic when he wrote that the extension of this divisional line in 1820 alarmed him like a fire bell at midnight? It betokened sectional strife: the North against the South. And about trade! For as the Southern States grew richer they would ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... that this was the age when the vast modern movement of inquiry and investigation was beginning. Bacon was laying in England the foundations of philosophy, casting with his prophetic intelligence the horoscope of unborn sciences. Descartes was opening new vistas of thought to the world. But in Spain, while the greatest names of her literature occur at this time, they aimed at no higher object than to amuse their betters. Cervantes wrote Quixote, but he died in a monk's ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... without reason that our adventurer afflicted himself; his fears were but too prophetic. When he alighted at the inn, which he had left so abruptly the preceding evening, he ran directly to the apartment where he had been so happy in Aurelia's company; but her he saw not—all was solitary. ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... To attach objective value to that which was external in the Old Testament sacrifices, or even to the outward accompaniments of the Supreme Sacrifice, the Death of Jesus Christ upon the Cross, is to be guilty of a relapse from the Christian, or even the prophetic spirit, into the late and debased pagan idea of sacrifice, from which the ancient mysteries of the Eastern and Greek world were a reaction. Certainly, the outward sufferings of our Lord should sometimes form the ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... his own eloquence, and the madness of the mob reacted upon him. Like the dyer's hand, he became subdued to that in which he worked. Suspicion and rebellion filled his soul. Wealth to him was an offense—he had not the prophetic vision to see the rise of capitalism and all the splendid industrial evolution which the world is today working out. Society to him was all founded on wrong premises, and he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... Josephines prophetic heart had not deceived her. Bonaparte lived! But his was a life of danger, of constantly renewed battles and hardships—a life in which he had constantly to guard against not only enemies, but also ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... its enfranchisement from time, in its double end, the realization of the species and of the individuality, in its proud dominion over all hostile circumstances, in its prophetic certainty of the future, in its immortal youth, such is their theme. Through them we are enabled to enter into a life of monumental interest, wholly original and beyond the influence of anything exterior, an astonishing example of the autonomy of the ego, an imposing type of character, Zeno ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... came accidentally to Ancyra. Julian determined to examine Basil himself, when that holy man being brought before him, the emperor did every thing in his power to dissuade him from persevering in the faith. Basil not only continued as firm as ever, but, with a prophetic spirit foretold the death of the emperor, and that he should be tormented in the other life. Enraged at what he heard, Julian commanded that the body of Basil should be torn every day in seven different parts, till ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... (1897), they were interrupted by the outbreak of his malady, and he had only time to write four, of which he suppressed one. Their associations are pathetic when one remembers the tragic time at which they were composed; and, by a sort of prophetic instinct, they exhale heaviness of spirit and mournful pride. The second melody is perhaps more beautiful than anything else Wolf wrote; it ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... quem praesagus et electus symmista Dei ad terram venturum praevidens longe ante praenotavit, sicque praedixit. (This is He whose coming to earth the prophetic and chosen initiate into the mysteries of God foresaw and pointed out ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... A Prophetic Account of a Grand National Epic Poem, to be entitled "The Wellingtoniad," and to be Published ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... began to think that in my old association of her with the stained-glass window in the church, a prophetic foreshadowing of what she would be to me, in the calamity that was to happen in the fullness of time, had found a way into my mind. In all that sorrow, from the moment, never to be forgotten, when she stood before me with her upraised hand, she was like a sacred ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... the character of Radiant Energy. We have actually touched here the borderland where Matter and Force seem to merge into one another, the shadowy realm between Known and Unknown, which for me has always had peculiar temptations.' And in boldly prophetic words, which time has partly justified, he added, 'I venture to think that the greatest scientific problems of the future will find their solution in this Borderland, and even beyond; here, it seems to me, lie Ultimate Realities, subtle, ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... he realized that his old friend's prophetic words were approaching fulfilment: "The child will grow to be a lovely woman. Already she is fond of you; she will love you ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... was almost prophetic. In less than half an hour after that moment they met with the first really serious accident of the entire journey, and one which easily might have resulted disastrously to life ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Trail • Emerson Hough
... the ethereal drapery of qualities in which the prophetic imagination has clothed her, and central to them all I find a new phenomenon—the latest of the ages—TRUE WOMANHOOD. From this proceeds the veiled glory hitherto seen but by poet's eye—not far ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Metaphysical and Ethical Science to the Evidence of Religion. Boston, 1849.) This is merely saying that when we will a thing we have an idea of it. But to have an idea of what we wish to happen, does not imply a prophetic knowledge that it will happen. Perhaps it will be said that the first time we exerted our will, when we had of course no experience of any of the powers residing in us, we nevertheless must already have known that we possessed them, since we can not will that which ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... City throve finely, and so did Utah. One of the last things which Brigham Young had done before leaving Iowa, was to appear in the pulpit dressed to personate the worshipped and lamented prophet Smith, and confer the prophetic succession, with all its dignities, emoluments and authorities, upon "President Brigham Young!" The people accepted the pious fraud with the maddest enthusiasm, and Brigham's power was sealed and secured for all time. Within five years afterward he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... single feature of a fairy-tale, where everything else is told with the most majestic simplicity. But this word, which so ignorantly he presumes to be an ordinary human day, bears that meaning only in common historical transactions between man and man; but never once in the great prophetic writings, where God comes forward as himself the principal agent. It then means always a vast and mysterious duration—undetermined, even to this hour, in Daniel. The heptameron is not a week, but a shadowy adumbration of a week.] Meantime, if a man sets ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... imparts itself to me, and my heart quickens with hope that what you say may be prophetic. But, to return to the immediate work in hand, let us simplify our habits and customs to as great a degree as is possible under existing circumstances. One of the causes for the mad rush for money is the desire to excel our friends and neighbors in our ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... of a horde of nomadic invaders settling in a land of farmers, he had his images, ranging in elaboration from an uncut mazzebah or asherah, to a golden bull. He was plural by place and tribe and function. What did the prophetic movement do with his sacred powers? It identified his ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... caress her broad and exuberant breasts, overflowing with milk for her hundred million children." And the foreigner saw only dreary deserts, tenanted by sparse, ague-stricken pioneers and savages. The cities were log huts and gambling dens. But the frontiersman's dream was prophetic. In spite of his rude, gross nature, this early Western man was an idealist withal. He dreamed dreams and beheld visions. He had faith in man, hope for democracy, belief in America's destiny, unbounded confidence in his ability to make his dreams ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... of old to the still astonishing vivacity of the eyes. The carriage of the head, too, was prouder and more assured. Fenwick, indeed, as far as years went, was, as Watson knew, in the very prime of life. Nevertheless, there was in his aspect, as he sat there, a prophetic note of discouragement, of ebbing vitality which ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his address, his prophetic spirit was exhausted, as might perhaps have been anticipated, for the speech was of portentous length, and the skeleton clattered down again into the tomb, which closed by another miracle while a ball ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... dark old tomes, she met with chapters full of romance and poetry. They were the works of the philosophers of the middle ages, such as Albertus, Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar who created the prophetic Brazen Head. All these antique naturalists stood in advance of their centuries, yet were imbued with some of their credulity, and therefore were believed, and perhaps imagined themselves, to have acquired from the investigation of nature a power ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... conduct, than the laws of each country; that Plato, whose sublime doctrine was so near an anticipation of Christianity that celebrated theologians wished his works to be forbidden, lest men should be content with them, and indifferent to any higher dogma—to whom was granted that prophetic vision of the Just Man, accused, condemned and scourged, and dying on a Cross—nevertheless employed the most splendid intellect ever bestowed on man to advocate the abolition of the family and the exposure of infants; that Aristotle, the ablest moralist of antiquity, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... sank. Too late by a few minutes; but somehow she could not turn back. She walked as fast as she could after the gay cavalcade, a prey to one of those female anxieties we have all laughed at as extravagant, proved unreasonable, and sometimes found prophetic. ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... early century, who consequently became a Christian and a pessimistic, clear-sighted Tory. This tale of the deja vu, therefore, leads up to the marvellous narratives of dreams simultaneous with, or prophetic of, events not capable of being guessed or inferred, or of events lost in the historical past, but, ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... repeated. Though she disclaimed the prophetic vision she was at this instant the nearest approach he had ever met to the priestess of the oracle. The light was in her eyes. "You ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... Maryllia, heartily, and then she began to laugh. "Then it would be a case of 'Oh my prophetic soul! mine uncle!' And I should be able to say: 'My aunt is a Duchess.' Imagine the pride ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... fair to explain that modern men as well as modern women come under his censure. All the tendencies and all the habits of modern life afflict him, and he lashes out at them without discrimination, and with such an entire lack of prophetic insight that I have found him consoling. For this book was published sixteen years before the Franco-Prussian War, when Germany, the world must admit, proved that it was not decadent. Yet every page of it is a Jeremiad, an exhortation ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... distance held the burden in its hand, It seemed, that, like a vessel on the stock, 'Twould easy, when the holding blocks were moved, Slip gently down into the sea of states; But now that nearness stares me in the face, Wearing prophetic grin, methinks, I see Deep obstacles which bar the slippery ways, On which the ship must glide to waters deep. A ship to safely sail in troubled seas, Must boast a captain skilled in wat'ry lore. But ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... months I had seen an Empire crash to the ground; already in the prophetic and visionary eyes of our ragged soldiery, a mightier empire was beginning to crumble under the blasts from the blackened muzzles of our muskets. Soon kings would live only in the tales of yesterday, and the unending thunder of artillery would die away, and the clouds ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... this connexion reference should be made also to Cowley's Ode to the Royal Society, and to Dr John Wallis's remarks in Hearne's Preface to P. Langtoft's Chronicle (appendix, num. xi.). Joseph Glanvill, in his Scepsis Scientifica (dedication) says, "Solomon's house in the New Atlantis was a prophetic scheme of the Royal Society"; and Henry Oldenburg (c. 1615-1677), one of the first secretaries of the society, speaks of the new eagerness to obtain scientific data as "a work begun by the single care and conduct of the excellent Lord Verulam." Boyle, in whose works there are frequent ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... belonging to my own age, as there have been to all ages, that are intellectually in advance of it. They live in a mental and prophetic world of their own, and leave behind them discoveries, inventions and teachings that benefit and ennoble the generations to come. Could such a mind have chanced upon Mizora, as I chanced upon it, it might have consorted with its intellect, and brought from the companionship ideas that ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... the enemy should come and take the city [of] Jerusalem; but because he came once, and went back without doing it, how stout and hardened were the hearts of that people against all the rest of his prophetic sayings, as to such a thing (Jer 37). Now the error lay not in these prophets, but in the people's mistaking the times: and if mistakes do so much harden the heart of the wicked, what will they do to such of them who make it their business to blind and harden ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Snob, sir,' pursued Mr Chuckster with a prophetic look, 'you'll find he'll turn out bad. In our profession we know something of human nature, and take my word for it, that the feller that came back to work out that shilling, will show himself one of these days in his true colours. He's a low ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... year, save a few twisted leaves of oak and beech, a few empty seed-vessels of the tardy witch-hazel, and a few gnawed nutshells dropped coquettishly by the squirrels into the crevices of the bark. All else is bare, but prophetic: buds everywhere, the whole splendor of the coming summer concentrated in those hard little knobs on every bough; and clinging here and there among them, a brown, papery chrysalis, from which shall yet wave the superb wings of the Luna moth. An occasional shower patters on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... unsatisfactory as those on miracles. They often handled the prophecies unfairly if not deceitfully. They treated as absolute prophecies, prophecies which were expressly conditional. And they lost sight of the fact, so plainly stated in Jeremiah xviii, that all prophetic promises and threatenings are conditional. Then they took one bit of a prophecy and left another: kept out of sight predictions which had not been fulfilled, and dwelt exclusively on phrases ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... stay so long! I started just as soon as I could pack. Did you get my despatch? I telegraphed from Springfield. But it don't matter, now. Here I am. And I don't think I need have hurried on Pen's account," she added, with an accent prophetic of the sort of old maid she would become, if she ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... most people would have done the same; but most would also have been struck, as I was, by these prophetic words. But, conscript though I was, I felt that I could trust my thoughts to no one, and that it was my duty to seem always calm ...
— How The Redoubt Was Taken - 1896 • Prosper Merimee
... evidences, devoutness of life to the rites of the church, characterized him as a great religious leader, and developed for the Catholic Christians a new type of Christianity. Whatever Channing's limitations as a thinker and a reformer, he was a man of prophetic insight and lofty spiritual vision. In other ages he would have been canonized as a saint or called the beatific doctor; but in Boston he was a heretic and a reformer, who sought to lead men into a faith ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... swept into the mind in sleep are as disconnected and as unmeaning as the pieces of paper which the street cleaners sweep into a bin from the city gutters at night. We should not think of taking all these papers, piecing them together, and making a marvelous book of them, prophetic of the future and pregnant with the past. We should not do so, although every rag of printed paper swept from the gutter would have some connection with the past day's event. But its significance, the significance of the words printed upon it is so small, that we relegate it into ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... like others, know how to rise above sordid reality into a more ideal sphere, and for this reason, even if we had found in the dramas of India a portrayal of true love, it would not prove that it existed outside of a poet's glowing and prophetic fancy. There is a Hindoo saying, "Do not strike a woman, even with a flower;" but we have seen that these Hindoos often do physically abuse their wives most cruelly, besides subjecting them to indescribable mental anguish, and mental anguish is much more ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... through her streets. The burghers and the land-owners, alarmed at first lest the price of everything should increase, recognized later that this increase in the style of living had a contrary effect upon their revenues. The prophetic remark of du Ronceret, "Du Bousquier is a very strong man," was adopted ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... Man pointed a lean, prophetic forefinger to the rolling south. "There's Wheatwood," he said. "Come on." And so, shouldering our coats, with the hot sunlight on our right cheeks and the day before us, we ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... the bed as if the announcement was too much for her, but was up again in an instant to declare with prophetic solemnity,— ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... Achaians brazen-mail'd Indignant, will supply a champion soon To combat with the noble Chief of Troy. So spake Apollo, and his counsel pleased Minerva; which when Helenus the seer, 50 Priam's own son, in his prophetic soul Perceived, approaching Hector, thus he spake. Jove's peer in wisdom, Hector, Priam's son! I am thy brother. Wilt thou list to me? Bid cease the battle. Bid both armies sit. 55 Call first, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... philosophy was poorly able to dispel or lead to anything else than this hopeless gloom. His great picture of the plafond of the Salon d'Apollon, in the Louvre, seems like a great ode to light, in the singing of which he felt the gloom break and saw the tones of healthy life lighten in his day for a prophetic moment; but dispelled the gloom never was. What he might have been, bred in the cheerful, unquestioning, and healthy, if unprogressive faith of Venice, we can only conjecture, seeing how great he grew in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... would court and flatter him while his name was new, and who, when they had contributed to distract his attention and impair his health, would cast him off unceremoniously to seek some other novelty.' These words of true advice proved almost prophetic in ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... himself, in that bitter moment, heir to Leary's part. And in Mullan, Knappe saw more even than the successor of Leary,—he saw in him the representative of Klein. Klein had hailed the praam from the rifle-pits; he had there uttered ill-chosen words, unhappily prophetic; it is even likely that he was present at the time of the first fire. To accuse him of the design and conduct of the whole attack was but a step forward; his own vapouring served to corroborate the accusation; and it was not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stumbling block to industrial protective legislation has been removed, we may hope to see a change in legal decisions handed down in our courts. The educational process is not yet complete. Not every judge possesses the prophetic mind of the late Justice Brewer, who wrote the decision in the Oregon Case. Not every court has learned that healthy men and women are infinitely more valuable to a nation than mere property. But ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... evening in the woods, with the slow setting of the sun in the Golden West; a scene by which Nature often creates the sense of the mysterious more impressively and truly than any man-made attempts can equal. This view of declining day, the gradual shutting off of light and life, was strangely prophetic when MacDowell wrote it, for his own end came by a similar process in the form of an ever deepening gloom fatalling ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... publisher. In short, my tradesmen's bills for "The Watchman", including what paper I have bought since the seventh number, the printing, etc., amount exactly to L5 more than the whole of my receipts. "O Watchman, thou hast watched in vain!"—said the Prophet Ezekiel, when, I suppose, he was taking a prophetic glimpse ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... definitions. Indeed, so often and so glibly has the quotation been made that it is well-nigh axiomatic and altogether trite. But we still await any clear explanation of what is meant by complete living. On this point we are still groping, with no prophetic voice to tell us the way. By implication we have had hints, and much has been said on the negative side, but the positive side still lies fallow. When asked for an explanation, those who give the quotation resort to circumlocution and, at length, ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... wildfire, and caused more or less uneasiness in three hundred stout hearts; so near is every seaman to death, and so strong the persuasion in their superstitious minds, that a shark does not follow a ship pertinaciously without a prophetic instinct ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... than to spend and be spent in the service of Christ, for the salvation of the North American Indians. Not my will, however, but His be done, who alone can direct and control all Missions successfully, to the fulfilment of His prophetic word, when "The wilderness shall become a fruitful field," and "the desert shall rejoice and ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... of the Tree of Life. And God would help him: John Banks was quite sure of that. But as he stepped out into the summer night, it seemed almost as if he could see a vision—as if the outward circumstances in which he had beheld the trio were prophetic—Alice in the glory of the great light, Roger with his way shown clearly by the little lamp of God's Word, and Edward in that black shadow, made lurid and more awful by the faint unearthly light. The moon came out brightly ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... thoughts which, like the fires that flare In storm-encompassed isles, we cherish yet 3155 In this dark ruin—such were mine even there; As in its sleep some odorous violet, While yet its leaves with nightly dews are wet, Breathes in prophetic dreams of day's uprise, Or as, ere Scythian frost in fear has met 3160 Spring's messengers descending from the skies, The buds foreknow their life—this hope ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... winter-evening entertainment: nevertheless, for inferior Intelligences, like men, such Philosophies have always seemed to me uninstructive enough. Nay, what is your Montesquieu himself but a clever infant spelling Letters from a hieroglyphical prophetic Book, the lexicon of which lies in Eternity, in Heaven?—Let any Cause-and-Effect Philosopher explain, not why I wear such and such a Garment, obey such and such a Law; but even why I am here, to wear and obey anything!—Much, therefore, if not the whole, of that same Spirit of Clothes I shall ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... back to civilization and all its miseries," thought Graydon. "I was among scenes that know not Wildmeres or Arnaults. 'Oh, my prophetic soul!' I felt that there was something wrong, in spite of her superb acting. Sweet Madge, dear sister Madge, as you ever will be to me, the more I think of it the more clearly I see that you are the ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... their helpless victim into insensibility. In the very next issue of the ICONOCLAST, Brann, its outraged but incomparably fearless editor, in speaking of his cowardly assailants, used the following defiant and sadly prophetic words: "Truth to tell there's not one of the whole cowardly tribe who's worth a charge of buckshot who deserve so much honor as being sent to hell by a white man's hand! If Socrates was poisoned, and Christ was crucified, ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... maintaining the principle of Nationalism, the New England Puritans did not decline the implications and corollaries of that principle. It was only to a prophetic genius like the Separatist Roger Williams that it was revealed that civil government had no concern to enforce "the laws of the first table." But the historical student might be puzzled to name any other church establishment ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... consuls and praetors at Rome till the fifth of the calends of May; on which day, having completed the solemnities on the mount, they proceeded to their respective provinces. Afterwards a new difficulty respecting religious matters arose out of the prophetic verses of Marcius, who had been a distinguished soothsayer; and on a search being made the year before, for books of this description, agreeably to a decree of the senate, these verses had fallen into the hands of Marcus Atilius, the city praetor, who had the management ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... Doyle). This officer was killed in the battle, and the owl was afterwards seen on Capt. Duncan's tent. His brother-officers quizzed him on the subject, by telling him that he was the next on the list; a joke which Capt. D. did not much relish, and it was prophetic, as he soon afterwards fell ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... father. The King was sent to Westminster, and thence on the following day to the Tower, and, as he went along, was greeted with curses and the appellation of "the bastard," a word of ominous import, and prophetic of his approaching degradation. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... play-bill? Mistakes of a Night! If the title's prophetic, I pity his plight! She Stoops. Let us hope she won't fall at full length, For the piece—so 'tis whispered—is wanting in strength. And the humour is "low!"—you are doubtless aware There's a character, ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... the firm chin and throat, the shapely hands, all denoted harmony and completeness of development, and promised a reserve of strength, ready to encounter and overcome if danger were to be met. Years afterwards, the remembrance of Katherine as he just then saw her would return upon Julius, as prophetic of much. Quailing in spirit, still reluctant, in his asceticism, to comprehend and reckon with her personality in the fulness of its present manifestation, he answered her at random, and with none of the pause and playful evasiveness usual ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... sound and irrefragable argument has not been enforced by the Church divines in their controversies with the modern Unitarians, as Capp, Belsham and others, who refer all the prophetic texts of the Old Testament to historical personages of their time, exclusively of ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... but Jerusalem. In heart and mind I am there to-day, and have been there ever since the eternally memorable day on which our army entered it. What I am writing will see the light on the Feast of the Holy Innocents;[*] and my thoughts have been running on a prophetic verse which unites the place and the festival in ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... truth was that as he exerted himself to recall the recognisances of military chieftains, their war-cries, emblems, and other types by which they distinguished themselves in battle, and might undoubtedly be indicated in prophetic rhymes, he began to experience the pleasure which most men entertain when they find themselves unexpectedly possessed of a faculty which the moment calls upon them to employ, and renders them important in the possession ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... historical probability, as Dr. Berdoe believes. In any case it was the direct product of Mr. Browning's mind, and expressed what was to be his permanent conviction. It might then have been an echo of German pantheistic philosophies. From the point of view of science—of modern science at least—it was prophetic; although the prophecy of one for whom evolution could never mean less or more than a divine creation operating on this ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... impressed by his wife's half-prophetic words, roused himself, and rode away to the Thing; here he found shelter with a great chieftain, Steinthor of Ere, who was kind to the old man, and gave Howard a place in his booth. Steinthor praised Olaf's courage and manful ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... from the manifold testimonies of the Sacred Books of the New Testament, and the unanimous agreement of the Fathers, as well as from the admission of the writers of the Jewish people, several prophetic and Messianic psalms are to be recognised, as prophesying concerning the coming kingdom, priesthood, passion, death and resurrection of the future Redeemer; and that therefore the opinion is to be absolutely rejected of those who, perverting the prophetic and Messianic character of the Psalms, ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... First Wacumic ruled The band, from all the hosts of field And feathery flock of heaven, thou wert Elected Totem. Favored One! Their fate forever linked to thine; Thy image crested on their shields; Thy every flight prophetic held! ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... within the hour we emigrants from the steerage had become first-class passengers. The translation brought such obvious and real relief to my father that my own spirits rose instantly; I began to take great interest in our surroundings, and, from that moment, entirely forgot those prophetic internal twinges, those stomachic forebodings which, in the 'other place,' as politicians say, had begun to turn my thoughts toward the harrowing tales I had ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... morning's dawn, Nor one lone ray from day's meridian light. And men pass by and say "within is night!" Not so; for Memory's lamp, with steady blaze, Shines on the hallowed scenes of other days, While Fancy's torch, prophetic, flashing through The vistas of the future, brings to view Scenes passing strange, but scenes that yet shall be, Which I can see, but which he can not see Whose dazzled orbs find nothing hid away Beyond ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... again grew down-hearted at this intelligence, and it was as much as Burgher Jans could do, with all his plausibility, to make her hopeful; while Lorischen, her old superstitious fears and belief in Mouser's prophetic miaow-wowing again revived, did all her best to negative the fat little man's praiseworthy efforts at cheering. Ever since the Burgher had been elected a confidant of Madaleine's original communication, he had made a point of calling every day in the Gulden Strasse, with his, to ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... indeed, prophetic of the salutary effects of a lesson, which these and a thousand more voices from the tomb will proclaim to future ages; if, indeed, future ages will believe, that a[8] dastardly stroller was allowed to ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... enslaved in his infancy, with his mother, somewhere in the "Hinterland" of Guinea. While still a child, his mother escaped with him into Liberia, a where he had remained till her death, She was, according to him, an Obeah woman of great power, venerated exceedingly by her own people for her prophetic abilities. Before her death, she had told him that he would die suddenly, violently, in a struggle with a white man in a far-off country, but that the white man would die too by his hand. She had also told him that ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... correct. He thought that no man has the right to speak until what he has to say is so ripe with meaning, and the season for his saying it is so compelling, that what he says will result in a deed—a thing accomplished now or afterwhile. In the prophetic old Scotchman's iron philosophy there was no room for ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... claimed to exercise the prophetical office. From a very early date they had made themselves conspicuous as omen-readers and dream-expounders; but, not content with such occasional exhibitions of prophetic power, they ultimately reduced divination to a system, and, by the help of the barsom or bundle of divining rods, undertook to return a true answer on all points connected with the future, upon which they might be consulted. Credulity is never wanting among Orientals; and ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... the men who were to be induced to take this stock was made out with wonderful and prophetic sagacity. It contained some of the ablest and most influential men in the two Houses of Congress, representing different parts of the country. It included men as conspicuous for integrity as ability. Each of them occupied already a great place in the respect of his countrymen, and nearly every ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... which he rendered classic; among them were Thackeray, Forster, Maclise, and Dickens. The times were stirring: social agitation, and "Carol philosophy" in Dickens, with growls from Carlyle, marked the period. There was also a kind of optimism in the air, a prophetic optimism, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... of much relentless debate. By some it is held that this stanza is prophetic in its nature, foreseeing the transcendent miracle of the poet's death; by others it is as stoutly maintained that the poet in the above lines decreed that his work should be preserved and handed down to posterity in a wrapping of tobacco. The Editor ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... as if some prophetic vision had been called up by the word and the tone, in which ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... more than touching; in its minute, absurd way it was symbolical and prophetic, it was the miniature ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Mrs. Micawber's worldly wisdom, and Mr. Micawber's ostentatious impecuniosity. A word, that last, it always seems to us—describing poverty, as it does, with such an air of pomp—especially provided beforehand for Mr. Micawber (out of a prophetic anticipation or foreknowledge of ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... Jenkins' Ear Question], and would take no denial of it, as if they had surmised and seen. For the instincts of simple, guileless persons (liable to be counted stupid by the unwary) are sometimes of prophetic nature, and spring from the deep places of this universe!'[16] If the writer of this had only thought it out to the end, and applied the conclusions thereof to history and politics, what a difference it ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... brother was Robert, the third son of Charles II. He had been kept as a hostage in Catalonia from 1288 to 1295, and when he became King of Naples in 1309 he introduced into his service many Catalonian officials. The words of Charles Martel are prophetic of the evils wrought ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... surface, suggestive of some hidden influence at work, were not wanting, as the time passed on. The one thing missing was the prophetic faculty that could read those signs aright ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... all made by order of the then Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, who aroused a storm of protest in the East against his "misguided attention to the desolate West." But few statesmen and fewer of the outside public in that day possessed the prophetic vision to perceive the future greatness of what were termed the "arid wastes" of Arizona and California. This was shown by the perfect hail of protest that swept to the White House when the terms of the Gadsden Treaty, drawn up by a man who as minister to a great minor republic had had ample ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... The idea was prophetic, although the means of giving effect to it were mistaken. It became practicable, however, when Oersted discovered that a magnetic needle could be swung to one side or the other by an electric current passing ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... short life—how he had wronged her, and of her violent death, he could hardly find words severe enough for his own conduct; and from this point of view, the curse that Bridget had laid upon him and his was regarded by him as a prophetic doom, to the utterance of which she was moved by a Higher Power, working for the fulfilment of a deeper vengeance than for the death of the poor dog. But then, again, when he came to speak of his daughter, the repugnance which the conduct of the demoniac creature had produced ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... elevation of eyebrow, and droop of mouth gave her the expression of martyred resignation, which St. Lawrence might have worn, when invited to make himself comfortable on the gridiron—so had Mrs. Worthington's words impressed her with the force of their prophetic meaning. ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... alas! had never been especially his study); it was enough for him if he could see, stretching to his mind's eye beyond the walls of that dull room, the long vistas into fairer fortune. At sixteen, what sorrow can freeze the Hope, or what prophetic fear whisper, "Fool!" to the Ambition? He would bear back into ease and prosperity, if not into affluence and station, the dear ones left at home. From the eminence of five shillings a week, he looked over ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... adversaries, in reference to the Navy, and that he thinks they do begin to flag; but then, beginning to talk in general of the excellency of old constitutions, he did bring out of his cabinet, and made me read it, an extract out of a book of my late Lord of Northumberland's, so prophetic of the business of Chatham, as is almost miraculous. I did desire, and he did give it me to copy out, which pleased me mightily, and so, it being late, I away and to my wife, and by hackney; home, and there, my eyes being weary with reading so much: but yet ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... to perceive, that the immediate danger of the country was not war but a divided people. While he was engaging in framing the first Lusitania note he discussed the situation with one of his callers at the White House in words that have since proved prophetic: ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... twelve gates in the visioned heaven of St. John,—and each gate was composed of one pearl! Truly do the scoffers say that never did any planetary sea provide such pearls as these! No,—for they were but prophetic emblems of the then undiscovered Sciences. Ah, Monsignor!—and what of the psychic senses and forces?—forces which we are just beginning to discover and to use,—forces which enable me to read your mind at this present moment and to see how willingly you ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... our United States senator from 1813 till 1839. He was one of the earliest American statesman to own the right of the slave and to defend it. In his last speech he startled the Senate with the prophetic words in which he recognized the danger hanging over the Union, and he said, "That all may be safe, I conclude that the negro ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... prosperous one, no storms without, and a heavenly calm within. His last work in his office was a discourse which he delivered in our village church on the 1st of August, on the emancipation of the slaves in the British West Indies. I shall send it to you, and pray mark the prophetic invocation with which it concludes. You should have seen the inspired expression of his intellectual brow, and the earnest, spiritual look that seemed to penetrate the clouds that hang over the eternal world and to reflect its light. On the Sundays of his sojourn with us he had domestic ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... made to a lady, possibly a Roman matron of high quality, in Sepphoris. Rabbi Jose was evidently an adept in meeting the puzzling questions of women, for as many as sixteen interviews between him and "matrons" are recorded in Agadic literature. Whether because prophetic of its subsequent popularity, or for some other reason, this particular dialogue in which Rabbi Jose bore so conspicuous a part is repeated in the Midrash Rabba alone not less than four times, besides appearing in other Midrashim. It will be as well, then, ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... all Its desolation and its terrors—lo! 'T is but a phantom world. So long ago That God and all the angels since have died That poet lived—yourself long dead—his mind Filled with the light of a prophetic fire, And standing by the Western sea, above The youngest, fairest city in the world, Named in another tongue than his for one Ensainted, saw its populous domain Plague-smitten with a nameless shame. For there Red-handed murder rioted; and there The people gathered gold, nor cared to loose ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... a sufficiently alarming retrospect, in all conscience, to which we had just listened, and the prophetic utterance wherewith it had been wound up, while powerfully suggestive of a highly novel and picturesque experience in store for us, was certainly not attractive enough to cause us to look forward to its fulfilment with undisturbed serenity; ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... there is no "grave and perfect man," but only a great boy to be softened and restrained by the influence of girls. Poets—the elder brothers of their race—have usually seen further; but what can you expect of every-day men, if Schiller was not more prophetic as to what women must be? Even with Richter, one foremost thought about a wife was that she would "cook him something good." But as this is a delicate subject, and we are in constant danger of being accused of slighting what are called "the functions," let ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... revile Him and not revile again, willing to let men tread on Him and not retaliate or defend Himself. Above all, we see Him broken as He meekly goes to Calvary to become men's scapegoat by bearing their sins in His own body on the Tree. In a pathetic passage in a prophetic Psalm, He says, "I am a worm and no man."[footnote2:Psalm 22: 6.] Those who have been in tropical lands tell us that there is a big difference between a snake and a worm, when you attempt to strike at them. The snake rears itself up and hisses and tries to strike back—a true picture ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... prophetic texts, and to append, in brackets, the apotropaic initials D.V. after every statement in his letters implying futurity, led him also to envisage his ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... of the masonry, contrary to the usual Gothic manner, and as if in reminiscence of those old Druidic piles amid which the Virgin of Chartres had been adored, long before the birth of Christ, by a mystic race, possessed of some prophetic sense of the grace in store for her. Through repeated dangers good-fortune has saved that unrivalled treasure of stained glass; and then, as now, the word "awful," so often applied to Gothic aisles, was for once really applicable. You enter, looking perhaps for ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... her aunt's words spoken in the vehemence of her prophetic passion. It was the one thing, she had warned her, that could ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... ah! there were hearts cherish'd far other feelings— Illumed by the light of prophetic revealings— And drank from the scenery of beauty but sorrow, For they knew that their blood would ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent,—others merely sensible, as the phrase is,—others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... socks. In his attitude there was something suggestive of the patience and determination of a mule. At Cecilia's approach he raised his eyes. It was at once apparent why, in so full a room, he was standing alone. Those blue eyes looked as if he were about to utter a prophetic statement. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was part of Dunmore's (imaginary) treacherous conduct, as he wished to discredit Cresap, because he knew—apparently by divination—that the latter was going to be a whig. Even granting the Earl corrupt motives and a prophetic soul, it remains to be explained why he should wish to injure an obscure borderer, whom nobody has ever heard of except in connection with Logan; it would have served the purpose quite as well to have used ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... unchanged, for it has always appeared to me to be one of the most eloquent and touching parts of this book. But it has ceased to be prophetic; the destruction of the Indian race in the United States is already consummated. In 1870 there remained but 25,731 Indians in the whole territory of the Union, and of these by far the largest part ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... a politic act, young man, to pass by Catulus, the best of men, and choose Lepidus, the worst! It will be well for you to be vigilant, now that you have strengthened your opponent against yourself." Sylla spoke this, it may seem, by a prophetic instinct, for, not long after, Lepidus grew insolent, and broke into open hostility to Pompey ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough |
