"Vicissitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them. But just as nature gave the instinct, fortune supplied the breeding and the occasion. The heir, pupil, find victim of a second family of Atreus and Thyestes, the child was trained into demoralization, vicissitude, and daring. Believed himself to have been the favorite lover of the most lovely of his sisters, he describes her as the "Atrocious memoir-writer," a "Messalina, boasting of the purity of her morals, and an absconding wife, bragging of her love for her husband." ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... characters of change and diversity thus attach themselves to doing while knowing is as permanent as its object. To know, to grasp a thing intellectually or theoretically, is to be out of the region of vicissitude, chance, and diversity. Truth has no lack; it is untouched by the perturbations of the world of sense. It deals with the eternal and the universal. And the world of experience can be brought under control, can be steadied and ordered, only through ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... precincts of a hospital, I wandered in a sympathetic mood; Where face to face with wormwood and with gall, With wrecks of pain and stern vicissitude, The eye unused to human misery Might ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... worship, which, he says, "is the most ancient form of religious worship there!" "Why should Congregational worship be excluded to make room for others?" asks the Rev. Mr. Fish. "Where will be the end of vicissitude on the adoption of such a principle, and how is it possible, amid the action of rival factions, for pure religion to be promoted." [Pages 7, 8, 9, of Mr. Fish's memorial. Senate, No. 17.] Is this language for ...
— Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts - Relative to the Marshpee Tribe: or, The Pretended Riot Explained • William Apes
... turned toward him. A few hours' sail might again bring me beneath his roof, and once more should I find myself at home. The thought was calming to all my excitement; I forgot every danger I had passed through; I lost all memory of every vicissitude I had escaped, and had only the little low parlor in the "Black Pits" before my mind's eye; the wild, unweeded garden, and the sandy, sunny beach before the door. It was as though all that nigh a year had compassed had never occurred, and that my life at Crown ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... has been a life of trouble and turmoil of change and vicissitude; of anger and exultation; of sorrow and of vengeance. My sorrows have all been for a slighted gospel, and my vengeance has been wreaked on its adversaries. Therefore, in the might of Heaven, I will sit down and write: I will let the wicked of this world know what I have done ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... too soon if all evil and vicissitude were ended. Checks upon our prosperity must fall, and changes tax and interrupt our gains; and he is not most of a man who meets least evil, and loses least of the reward of toil; but he who endures with the manliest courage, the mightiest will to overcome, and most dexterous hand to manage for decided ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... after sundown he went home and, sending for Bowers, the two sat talking earnestly. For Bowers it had been a day of vicissitude which he was only partially competent to face. Rooted out of a small practice in a small village, and caught up in the sweep of irresistible progress, he had never had to fight for his point. The weight and momentum Clark put before him were too great ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... I be so unlike my present self that pitying friends can only wonder and whisper, How changed! and enemies shall glory in my fall. No. It is vain to strive after certainty in this world of change and vicissitude, since none of us can tell what himself shall be on the morrow. Do what I will, moreover, my child can only inherit a sinful nature." In the midst of gloomy thoughts like these, we turn to the story of Samson's mother, and hear Jehovah directing her to ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... the lives of artists were adventurous; political relations gave scope to incident; and Michel Angelo, Salvator Rosa, and Benvenuto Cellini furnish almost as many anecdotes as memorials of genius. In modern times, however, vicissitude has chiefly diversified the uniform and tranquil existence of the artist; his struggles with fortune, and not his relations to public events, have given external interest to his biography. It is the mental ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... small proficiency. I was too young and too unpracticed in the world to make my skill subordinate to my chief's, and beat him at every game with as little compunction as though he were only my equal, till, at last, vexed at his want of success, and tired of a contest that offered no vicissitude of fortune, he would frequently cease playing, to chat over the events of the time, and the chances ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... him shoreward out of wind and wet, Into his sanctum, where choice fare was spread, And cosy comfort ready to receive Young Ninety-Two, and give him a "send-off" Such as should strengthen and encourage him To make fair start, and face those many moons Of multiform vicissitude with pluck, Good hope and patient pertinacity. And when men sought the Modern MERLIN's ear And asked him what these matters might portend, The shining angel, and the naked Child Descending in the glory of the seas, He laughed, as is his wont, and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... first, at least in some of the subsequent rounds; for it is not to be supposed, that in the progress of the race the antagonists always continued in the same order in which they started. They often changed places in a short interval of time, and in that variety and vicissitude consisted all ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... under the same parallels with Greece, Italy, and Spain; but the climates are found to be different; and while the shores, not only of the Mediterranean, but even those of the Atlantic, are favoured with a moderate change and vicissitude of seasons, the eastern parts of Europe, and the northern continent of Asia, are afflicted with all their extremes. In one season, we are told, that the plagues of an ardent summer reach almost to the frozen sea; and that the inhabitant is obliged ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... at her with renewed interest. He admitted to himself that she was one of the most fascinating women he had ever met, and wondered what vicissitude could have brought such a woman, who used classical illustrations, fluent, cultivated speech, and who was strong grace exemplified, to such a position. She seemed master of her surroundings, and yet not of them, looking down with a hard ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... showed, that if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were soon swayed up to their cranes —the two parts of the wrecked boat having been previously secured by her —and ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... class whom the world is accustomed to designate as nobody's enemies but their own. Bred to a profession for which he never qualified himself, and reared in the expectation of a fortune he has never inherited, he has undergone every vicissitude of which such an existence is capable. He and his younger brother, both orphans from their childhood, were educated by a wealthy relative, who taught them to expect an equal division of his property; but too indolent to court, and too honest ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... the mind of man as a mirror or glass, capable of the image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof, as the eye joyeth to receive light; and not only delighted in beholding the variety of things and vicissitude of times, but raised also to find out and discern the ordinances and decrees which throughout all those changes are infallibly observed. And although he doth insinuate that the supreme or summary law of Nature (which he calleth "the work which God worketh from the ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... vicissitude. Mrs. Meadows would not hear of being thrust on any one, and was certain that Maria had extorted an invitation; she would never be a burden upon any one; young people liked company and amusement, and she was an old woman in every one's way; ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... months in the year; and for the other four is worth the trouble of following. I do not mean to say that the quantity of four gallons can be made at an average, in every distillery, with every sort of grain, and water, or during every vicissitude of weather, and by every distiller, but this far I will venture to say, that a still house that is kept in complete order, with good water, grain well chopped, good malt, hops, and above all good yeast; together with an apt, careful and industrious distiller, cannot fail to produce ...
— The Practical Distiller • Samuel McHarry
... cost verified the advertisement Solon had before times given him; which was, that no man, what cheerefull and blandishing countenance soever fortune shewed them, may rightly deeme himselfe happie, till such time as he have passed the last day of his life, by reason of the uncertaintie and vicissitude of humane things, which by a very light motive, and slight occasion, are often changed from one to another cleane contrary state and degree. And therefore Agesilaus answered one that counted the King of Persia happy, because being very young, he had gotten the garland of so mightie and great a ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... But vicissitude reaches young and old alike. Youthful Rough-and-Ready and the Saints had climbed to their meridian together, and it seemed fit that they should together decline. The first shadow fell with the immigration to Rough-and-Ready of a second aged pair. The landlady of the Independence Hotel had not ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... of blood, the very abstract of all the greatest houses in Christendom: and remarkable it is, considering that violent desertion of the Royal House of the Britons by the intrusion of the Saxons, and afterwards by the conquest of the Normans, that, through vicissitude of times, and after a discontinuance almost of a thousand years, the sceptre should fall again and be brought back into the old regal line and true current of the British blood, in the person of her renowned grandfather, King Henry VII., together with whatsoever the German, Norman, Burgundian, ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... and knee through mire, heart pierced with the bramble of experience, up over the jagged pathways to that still place where skies are clear at last. Thompson is the last among the great ones to have known the dire vicissitude, direst, if legends are true, that can befall a human being. We have the silence of his saviour friends, the Meynells, saying so much more than their few public words, tender but so careful. What they knew, and what the walls of the monastery of Storrington ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... remarked, "Recollect that, though Shelley has scruples about duelling, I have none, and shall be at all times ready to take his place." Polidori had ultimately to be dismissed, and, after some years of vicissitude, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... barbarians, who despised life when it was separated from freedom; and though, on the first attack, they seemed to yield to the weight of the Roman power, they soon, by a signal act of despair, regained their independence, and reminded Augustus of the vicissitude of fortune. [3] On the death of that emperor, his testament was publicly read in the senate. He bequeathed, as a valuable legacy to his successors, the advice of confining the empire within those limits which nature seemed to have placed as its permanent bulwarks and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... its chief power to enthusiasm or fanaticism. Plain, sober, practical men and women as they were, there was no hard detail of every-day life that they were not equal to, no patient and cheerless sacrifice they could not endure, no vicissitude of adverse or prosperous fortune which they could not meet with unchecked serenity. If it be enthusiasm that in them the fear of God had cast out the fear of man, or fanaticism that they placed "things that are spiritually discerned" above the vain shows of the ...
— Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase - Delivered by William M. Evarts before the Alumni of - Dartmouth College, at Hanover • William M. Evarts
... a set of characters varied and so attractive as the more prominent figures in this romance, and a book so full of life, vicissitude, and peril, should be welcomed by every discreet ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... before Thee may be set free from the fear of vicissitude and the fear of death, may finish what remains before us of our course without dishonour to ourselves or hurt to others, and, when the day comes, may die in peace. Deliver us from fear and favour: from ...
— A Lowden Sabbath Morn • Robert Louis Stevenson
... law. How long their arbitrary edicts will be continued in spite of the demonstrations that not even a pretext for them has been given by the United States, and of the fair and liberal attempt to induce a revocation of them, can not be anticipated. Assuring myself that under every vicissitude the determined spirit and united councils of the nation will be safeguards to its honor and its essential interests, I repair to the post assigned me with no other discouragement than what springs from my own inadequacy to its ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... in the last struggles of Revolutionary France under Napoleon; and his exclamations, "Oh for a Republic!—'Brutus, thou sleepest!'" show the lengths to which, in theory at least, his political zeal extended. Since then, he had but rarely turned his thoughts to politics; the tame, ordinary vicissitude of public affairs having but little in it to stimulate a mind like his, whose sympathies nothing short of a crisis seemed worthy to interest. This the present state of Italy gave every promise of affording him; and, in ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... impressed themselves upon her consciousness, and to the history of whose pleasures and brilliant and fantastic dissipation she had recently been listening with a lively and diverted ear, it seemed that, by some rapid and magical vicissitude, her little Plantagenet, the faithful and affectionate companion of her childhood, whose sorrows she had so often soothed, and who in her pure and devoted love had always found consolation and happiness, had become 'the observed of all observers;' the most remarkable where ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... judges of good and evil actions, ye know that not without just cause, but constrained by necessity, we have been forced to revenge ourselves on the city of our unrighteous and wicked enemies. But if, the the vicissitude of things, there by any calamity due, to counter-balance this great felicity, I beg that it may be diverted from the city and army of the Romans, and fall, with as little hurt as may be, upon my own head." Having said these words, and just turning ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... have degraded them. Ricci, the general of the order, would not permit them to land in Italy, to which country they were sent by the king of Spain. Six thousand priests, in misery and poverty, were sent adrift upon the Mediterranean, and after six months of vicissitude, suffering, and despair, they found a miserable refuge on the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... associations, straggling away across three thousand years to when Perugia was one of the thirty cities of Etruria, and kept her independence through every vicissitude until Augustus starved her out in 40 B.C.! Portions of the wall, huge smooth blocks of travertine stone, are the work of the vanished Etruscans, and fragments of several gateways, with Roman alterations. One is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... guild, church, or the feudal system; now the covers were opened, and the new opportunity bred daring, initiative, and ambition. The exploits of the Elizabethan sea rovers still stir us with the thrill of adventure; but adventure and vicissitude were hardly less the share of merchant, priest, poet, or politician. The individual has had no such opportunity for fame in England before or since. The nineteenth century, which saw the industrial revolution, the triumphs of steam and electricity, and the discoveries of natural ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... by joy—impatient as the wind I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find? Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind— 5 But how could I forget thee? Through what power, Even for the least division of an hour, Have I been so beguiled as to be blind To my most grievous loss?—That thought's return Was the worst ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Glory the Reward of the Righteous; being Meditations on the Vicissitude and Uncertainty of all Sublunary Enjoyments. To which is added, a Manual of Devotions for Times of Trouble and Affliction: also Meditations and Prayers before, at, and after receiving the Holy Communion; with some General Rules for our Daily Practice. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... summoned to G.H.Q., where I had half an hour's talk with the greatest British commander. I can see yet his patient, kindly face and that steady eye which no vicissitude of fortune could perturb. He took the biggest view, for he was statesman as well as soldier, and knew that the whole world was one battle-field and every man and woman among the combatant nations was in the battle-line. So contradictory is human nature, that ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... conveys a true Idea of his Gratitude and Honour XXXV He repairs to Bristol Spring, where he reigns paramount during the whole Season XXXVI He is smitten with the Charms of a Female Adventurer, whose Allurements subject him to a new Vicissitude of Fortune XXXVII Fresh Cause for exerting his Equanimity and Fortitude XXXVIII ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... and his wife now joined in dissuading him from further experiments. Were not four years of such vicissitude enough? Who had ever touched India-rubber without loss? Could he hope to succeed, when so many able and enterprising men had failed? Had he a right to keep his family in a condition so humiliating and painful? He had succeeded ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... Lindsay. I feel an interest in you, and must take the friend and the old man's privilege of giving you an advice. The sailor, of all men, stands most in need of religion. His life is one of continued vicissitude—of unexpected success, or unlooked-for misfortune; he is ever passing from danger to safety, and from safety to danger; his dependence is on the ever-varying winds, his abode on the unstable waters. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... sent, as before, to purchase, by begging in the day, the reiteration of the torture in the night. Days of menace, insult, and extortion, nights of bolts, fetters, and flagellation, succeeded to each other in the same round, and for a long time made up all the vicissitude of life to these ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... gather up and comprehend The volume of vicissitude, and take Account of loving, for each other's sake, And ask how love began and how will end (If there be any end of love, O friend Of my worst hours and best desires!)—and stake Our all upon the sweetness and the ache ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... progress toward that larger and grander state imaged to them with mysterious sublimity in the idea of Death or Eternity. In accordance with this belief, they expressed in their dwellings the sentiment of transitoriness and vicissitude, and in their tombs the immortality of calm repose. And so their houses have crumbled into dust ages ago, but their tombs are eternal. In all the relations of Life the sentiment of Death was present in some form ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... no more, 'twas only a Gallantry mistaken; but I'll accelerate your Felicity, and to morrow shall conclude the great dispute, since there is such Volubility and Vicissitude in ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising out of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer,—apples that are bitter sweet with the moral of Time's vicissitude. ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... kinsman or his wife, Could tears recall him into wretched life? Their sorrow hurts themselves; on him is lost; And worse than both, offends his happy ghost. 1110 What then remains, but, after past annoy, To take the good vicissitude of joy? To thank the gracious gods for what they give, Possess our souls, and while we live, to live? Ordain we then two sorrows to combine, And in one point the extremes of grief to join; That thence ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... rude the sound; She feels no biting pang the while she sings, Nor, as she turns the giddy wheel around, Revolves the sad vicissitude of things." ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... in two successive years it was found necessary to resort to loans to meet the engagements of the nation. The returning tides of the succeeding years replenished the public coffers until they have again begun to feel the vicissitude of a decline. To produce these alternations of fullness and exhaustion the relative operation of abundant or unfruitful seasons, the regulations of foreign governments, political revolutions, the prosperous or decaying ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Quincy Adams • John Quincy Adams
... strength of those fraternal and domestic ties which constitute the only guaranty to the success and permanency of our happy Union, and which, formed in the hour of peril, have hitherto been honorably sustained through every vicissitude in our national affairs. These blessings, which evince the care and beneficence of Providence, call for our ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Martin van Buren • Martin van Buren
... sharp bargains struck without the help of a common language. I am in the belief, which may be erroneous, that nobody is wronged in these trades. The taciturn storekeeper, who regards his customers with a stare of solemn amusement as Critturs born by some extraordinary vicissitude of nature to the use of a language that practically amounts to deafness and dumbness, never suffers his philosophical interest in them to affect his commercial efficiency; he drops them now and then a curt English phrase, or expressive Yankee idiom; he knows very well when they mean to buy and ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... grandson of the illustrious Ahmed Shah, reigned in Afghanistan from 1803 till 1809. His youth had been full of trouble and vicissitude. He had been a wanderer, on the verge of starvation, a pedlar and a bandit, who raised money by plundering caravans. His courage was lightly reputed, and it was as a mere creature of circumstance that he reached the throne. His reign was perturbed, ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... habits of all our Northern Indians. The necessity of changing their camps often to procure game or fish, the want of domestic animals, the general dependence on wild rice, and the custom of journeying in canoes has produced a general uniformity of life, and it is emphatically a life of want and vicissitude. There is a perpetual change between action and inanity in the mind which is a striking peculiarity of the savage state, and there is such a general want of forecast that most of their misfortunes and hardships, in ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... Worms, when the then dawning heresy had become broad day; when Luther had gone to his rest—and there had gathered about his name the hate which mean men feel for an enemy who has proved too strong for them—a passing vicissitude in the struggle brought the emperor at the head of ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... There is wisdom in the saying of Feltham, that the whole creation is kept in order by discord, and that vicissitude maintains the world. Many evils bring many blessings. Manna drops in the wilderness—corn ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... she should see the yawning mystery in the middle of the floor, or hear some awful sound from its unknown depths. The very shadows on the walls thrown up wildly by the expiring firelight were objects of grotesque terror. Never—never—in her whole youth of strange vicissitude, had the nerves of this brave girl been so tremendously shaken ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... and great nobles, whose mutability of faith had so happily corresponded with every ecclesiastical vicissitude of the last three reigns, political and personal considerations may well be supposed to have held the first place; and though the old religion might still be endeared to them by many cherished associations and by early prejudice, there were few among them who did not regard the liberation of the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... in itself a positive virtue that money lacks. It "gives life to them that have it," animates, preserves in life, modifies, at least in measure, the evils from which it cannot altogether guard its possessor; and, by giving equanimity to a life of change and vicissitude, proves, in some sort, its own life-giving energy. How infinitely true this is with regard to Him who is absolute infinite Wisdom, and who is our Life, it is our health ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... end was near. She rallied, and he returned to Onteora. But on the 27th of October came the close of that long, active life, and the woman who two generations before had followed John Clemens into the wilderness, and along the path of vicissitude, was borne by her children to Hannibal and laid to rest at his side. She was in her ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and bowled away merrily toward Boston without so much as a parting glance at that fountain of dreamlike vicissitude. He knew not that a phantom of Wealth had thrown a golden hue upon its waters, nor that one of Love had sighed softly to their murmur, nor that one of Death had threatened to crimson them with his blood, all in the brief hour since he lay ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... pebble into the lake, and watched the ripples roll away and disappear, and ruminated on a life full of color and vicissitude. He remembered the Arizona days, the endless burning sand, the dull routine of a cavalry trooper, the lithe brown bodies of the Apaches, the first skirmish and the last. From a soldier he had turned journalist, tramped the streets of ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... sovereign, reigned till 1797. He took part in the first coalition against revolutionary France, and in the second and third partitions of Poland. Frederick William III. reigned from 1797 to 1840, during which time Prussia experienced every vicissitude of fortune. The first war with imperial France, in 1806-7, led to the reduction of her territory and population one half; and what was left of country and people was most mercilessly treated by Napoleon I., who should either have restored her altogether, or have annihilated her. But ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... The principle which comes forward for the first time, however strong it may appear, has yet to secure its future: it must struggle with the other elements of the world around it. It will be pressed back, perhaps beaten down: but in the vicissitude of the strife it will develop its inborn strength and establish itself ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... was my interest at this time sufficient to make another to be knight of the shire; yet when my condition fell, my interest fell with it, and I was looked upon as a stranger among them. Such is the course and vicissitude of worldly things; therefore ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... lot of man when considered in his relations to creatures and to the world. It is a lot full of uncertainty, of instability, of vicissitude; but this should not make us skeptical or cynical; it affords no justification for pessimism. It is a condition arising, on the one hand, from the very nature of limited beings, and on the other, ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... Through Heaven's wide champain held his way; till Morn, Waked by the circling Hours, with rosy hand Unbarred the gates of light. There is a cave Within the mount of God, fast by his throne, Where light and darkness in perpetual round Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heaven Grateful vicissitude, like day and night; Light issues forth, and at the other door Obsequious darkness enters, till her hour To veil the Heaven, though darkness there might well Seem twilight here: And now went forth the Morn ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... intellectual engine of the time. The serious thinking of the Puritans was given almost exclusively to religion; the other world was all their art. The daily secular events of life, the aspects of nature, the vicissitude of the seasons, were important enough to find record in print only in so far as they manifested God's dealings with his people. So much was the sermon depended upon to furnish literary food that it was the general ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... "zounds," imagines that he is speaking of such awful and inconceivable things as "God's wounds," though literally he is doing so? Or what honest farmer, who ejaculates "Please the pigs" (such extraordinary things do reform and vicissitude bring together!) supposes that his Protestant soul is propitiating the Pyx, or Holy Sacrament box, of the Roman Catholic Church? Yet time was, when the innocent word "zounds" was written with the same culpatory dashes and hyphens as the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... so. While men chide they will admire him, And frowning, praise. I could nigh prophesy That the unwonted crosses he has borne In his career of sharp vicissitude Will tinct his story with a tender charm, And grant the memory of his strenuous feats As long a lease within the minds of men As conquerors hold there.—Does the sheet give news Of how ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... communities—the most significant token of a universal brotherhood, to which all the families of mankind were severally and irresistibly drawn, and by which their common descent was emphatically expressed, or by means of which each and all preserved, amid every vicissitude of fortune, a knowledge of the primeval happiness and dignity of their species. Where authentic history is silent on the subject, the material relics of past and long since forgotten races are not wanting to confirm and strengthen this supposition. Diversified ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... blaze of the world. Happy is it, when these kindly workings of a sublimer providence, cause the graces of his spirit to shoot forth like "the tender grass springing up out of the earth by clear shining after rain;" and when the experience acquired in seasons of vicissitude, is treasured up in the heart for future use. Mrs. Lyth had her April weather preparatory to the summer of her usefulness, as will appear by ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... in dire vicissitude invade; The rustling brake alarms, and quiv'ring shade: Nor light nor darkness brings his pain relief; One shows the plunder, and one ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... assembly, was natural and reasonable. The nation, however, overlooked all these considerations. Those who had most loved and honored the Great Commoner were loudest in invective against the new-made lord. London had hitherto been true to him through every vicissitude. When the citizens learned that he had been sent for from Somersetshire, that he had been closeted with the King at Richmond, and that he was to be first minister, they had been in transports of joy. Preparations were made for a grand entertainment and for a general ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... accumulated at the bottom of declivities, rises again to the surface forming springs and wells. As wells take their origin at some depth from the surface, and below the influence of the external atmosphere, their temperature is in general pretty uniform during every vicissitude of season, and always several degrees lower than the atmosphere. They differ from one another according to the nature of the strata through which they issue; for though the ingredients usually existing in them are in such minute quantities ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... of debasement, existing in an intolerable atmosphere of derogation and disrepute, the humble and humiliated American Negro sought the exaltation of international honor. Denied and disavowed at home, through vicissitude of international war, he hoped for affirmation of a new world dictum in acknowledgment of his human qualities and worth. He did not, like Toussaint, long for the high honors of the continental emperor. He sought democratic equality, and he would as lief think of bringing the Kaiser to his level ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... filled the imagination. I was unwilling to believe that in no region of the world, or at no period could these ideas be realized. It was plain that the nations of Europe were tending to greater depravity, and would be the prey of perpetual vicissitude. All individual attempts at their reformation would be fruitless. He therefore who desired the diffusion of right principles, to make a just system be adopted by a whole community, must pursue ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... at the Globe Tavern was destined to end at the White House, after years of vicissitude and serious national trouble. Children were born unto them, and all but the eldest died. Great responsibilities were laid upon Lincoln and even though he met them bravely it was inevitable that ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... slumb'ring in her rosy bowers. With lordly eye, that reach'd the world's extreme, Methought he look'd, when, gliding on his beam, That winged power approach'd that wheels his car In its wide annual range from star to star, Measuring vicissitude; till, now more near, Methought these thrilling accents met my ear:— "New laws must be observed if mortals claim, Spite of the lapse of time, eternal fame. Those laws have lost their force that Heaven decreed, And I my circle run with fruitless ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... those that stood out in the limelight of '98 can tell the tale to-day? Ladue is dead, leaving little behind. Big Alec MacDonald, after lavishing a dozen fortunes on his friends, dies at last, almost friendless and alone. Nigger Jim and Stillwater Willie—in what back slough of vicissitude do they languish to-day? Dick Low lies in a drunkard's grave. Skookum Jim would fain qualify for one. Dawson Charlie, reeling home from a debauch, drowns in the river. In impecunious despair, Harry Waugh hangs himself. Charlie Anderson, after ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... one of vicissitude, but generally and ultimately successful, for he made the whole of the comfortable competence of which he died possessed, after he was sixty years of age. While in the beginning of his business career, as an iron merchant in this city, a wealthy rival house attempted ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... of the Ages, native to American soil, may fittingly stand as the symbol of the great Western Republic which, after so many thousand years of spiritual vicissitude and political experiment, rises heavenward out of the wilderness of time, and reveals its golden promise to those who have lost their way in the dark forest of error and oppression. It was long withheld, but it came at last, and about it center the best hopes of mankind. These United ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... all love, all tenderness, all goodness; and may the grace of her Almighty Father keep her from the wail and woe which too often accompany the path of beauty in this life of vicissitude and trial." ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... of Portland at their head; and the rest had, after many vain struggles, quitted the field in despair. Fox had retired to the shades of St Anne's Hill, and had there found, in the society of friends whom no vicissitude could estrange from him, of a woman whom he tenderly loved, and of the illustrious dead of Athens, of Rome, and of Florence, ample compensation for all the misfortunes of his public life. Session followed session with scarcely a single division. In the eventful year 1799, the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cottage, and his slumbers sound, Though confiscation's vultures hover round[d]. The needy traveller, serene and gay, Walks the wild heath, and sings his toil away. Does envy seize thee? crush th' upbraiding joy; Increase his riches, and his peace destroy; [e]Now fears, in dire vicissitude, invade, The rustling brake alarms, and quiv'ring shade; Nor light nor darkness bring his pain relief, One shows the plunder, and one hides the thief. [f] Yet still one gen'ral cry[g] the skies assails, And gain and grandeur load the tainted ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... cheque, which had been sent to me nearly a month before, and it had been by some accident dropped into the area where it had lain unregarded all this time. There was a feast that night, but the truth is that life was one constant vicissitude, an unfailing series of ups and downs, of jolly happy-go-lucky rejoicings with comrades who were equally careless with myself, and of alternating spells of hardship. "Literature," said Sir Walter, "is an excellent ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... and of how she would have felt had she been able to follow the scenes in some magical mirror through every single vicissitude of my drive. And once more I saw with the eye of recent memory the horses in that long, endless plunge through the corner of the marsh. Once more I felt my muscles a-quiver with the strain of that last wild struggle over that last, inhuman drift. And slowly I made ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... are usually confined to the inner life of imaginative men, but Mr. Poe's biography displays a vicissitude and peculiarity of interest such as is rarely met with. The offspring of a romantic marriage, and left an orphan at an early age, he was adopted by Mr. Allan, a wealthy Virginian, whose barren marriage-bed seemed the warranty of a large estate to the young ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... ever told his story with more spirit, ever sketched his characters with more living truth, or led our curiosity onward through the labyrinth of political intrigue, parliamentary struggle, and national vicissitude, with so light, and yet so leading a hand? A part of this charm arises from the interest which he himself took in his performance. He evidently delighted in the revival of those scenes in which he had once figured, and the powerful portraiture ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... to tilth, and woodlands brown and sear, The falling leaf and crispy pool proclaim the waning year; And sounds of sylvan pastime ring through our valley wide, Vicissitude itself is ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... that Mercury is a habitable globe we must depend entirely upon the imagination for pictures of creatures able to endure its extremes of heat and cold, of light and darkness, of instability, swift vicissitude, ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... the humanists were a perilous temptation; it seemed to him that he too 'through inborn pride could no longer regard the low and common things of life.' He was thus led to plunge into a life of excitement and vicissitude, in which exhausting studies, tutorships, secretaryships, professorships, offices in princely households, mortal enmities and perils, luxury and beggary, boundless admiration and boundless contempt, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... N. changeableness &c adj.; mutability, inconstancy; versatility, mobility; instability, unstable equilibrium; vacillation &c (irresolution) 605; fluctuation, vicissitude; alternation &c (oscillation) 314. restlessness &c adj.. fidgets, disquiet; disquietude, inquietude; unrest; agitation &c 315. moon, Proteus, chameleon, quicksilver, shifting sands, weathercock, harlequin, Cynthia of the minute, April showers^; wheel of Fortune; transientness &c 111 [Obs.]. V. fluctuate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... and caused by an accidental over-dose of prussic-acid, which she was in the habit of taking for spasms. She was found alone, and nearly dead, behind the door of her apartment. Alas, poor L.E.L.! It was certainly a strange and wild vicissitude of fate that made it the duty of this respectable African merchant, in company with men of similar fitness for the task, to "sit" upon the body—say, rather, on the heart—of a creature so delicate, impassioned, ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... than the town of Santa Cruz. It stands in the centre of a spacious bay, on a gentle acclivity surrounded with retiring hills, and the noble promontory of the Peek rising majestically behind it, dignifies the scene beyond description, being continually diversified with every vicissitude of the surrounding atmosphere, emerging and retiring thro' the fleecy clouds, from the bottom of the ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... the character of the range, exposed to every vicissitude of temperature and climate. White billows of fog beat upon the mountain tops like a silent sea, and blot out the landscape with an impenetrable veil. Thunder echoes through the rocky caves with incessant ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... reach of the Asiatic continent, can place half a million of men in the field at any moment. The second steady-point is China's financial condition. She is the debtor of several Western nations, and they may be trusted to avert from her any vicissitude that would impair her credit as a borrower. Prominent among such vicissitudes is the dismemberment ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... thoughts may suggest to him the vicissitude of day and night, the change of seasons, with all that variety of scenes which diversify the face of nature, and fill the mind with a perpetual succession of beautiful and ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... Selection, to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety; the voices of its fathers call it forth. Already in our society as it exists, the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living; he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out of reach of any vicissitude but one of health; and there he yawns. If the people in the next villa took pot-shots at him, he might be killed indeed, but so long as he escaped he would find his blood oxygenated and his views of the world brighter. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from Maryland and Delaware, then recently married. This was the son of Augustine Herrman, "first founder and seater of Bohemia Manor." Augustine Herrman was a Bohemian adventurer, born in Prague, who, after a career of much vicissitude, made his way to New Netherland. He became a force at New Amsterdam, and was an original member of the council of nine men instituted by Governor Stuyvesant in 1647. His connection with Maryland matters dates from his appointment by Governor Stuyvesant as a special commissioner, along ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... be denied that in this process of thought, the results of experience have had to contend with many disadvantages; we must not, therefore, be surprised if, in the perpetual vicissitude of theoretical views, as is ingeniously expressed by the author of 'Giordano Bruno', "most men see nothing in philosophy but a succession of passing meteors, while even the grander forms in which she has revealed herself share the fate of comets, bodies that do not rank in popular opinion ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... revolutions than that of this unknown monarch? How can we attribute to an immutable God, powerful enough to give solidity to His works, the government of a world where everything is in a continual vicissitude? If I think to see a God unchanging in all the effects advantageous to my kind, what God can I discover in the continual misfortunes by which my kind is oppressed? You tell me that it is our sins that force Him to punish us. I will ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... Where hemlock boughs in silence nod, And there with mutual vow and pledge, In presence of their living God, They join the hand, the heart, the life, While harvest-moon a witness stood, That he the husband, she the wife, Should share in life's vicissitude. That sacred pledge was heard on high And written by an angel hand, Nor priest, nor king, nor majesty, Could marriage ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... spirit in which they are done, that fidelity to instant duty, which, according to Herbert, makes an action fine, then his length of years should be very precious to us for its lesson. Talleyrand, whose life may be compared with his for the strange vicissitude which it witnessed, carried with him out of the world the respect of no man, least of all his own; and how many of our own public men have we seen whose old age but accumulated a disregard which they would gladly have exchanged for oblivion! In Quincy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various |
