"Ancestral" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and attractive of the ancestral homes still standing, in this vicinity, is the Greenough mansion, finely situated on the curve of Centre and South streets. It has an air of dignity and spaciousness which many a more portentous modern countryseat fail to match. Although it has been home to five generations of the Greenough family, ...
— Annals and Reminiscences of Jamaica Plain • Harriet Manning Whitcomb
... Pteridophyta lies even more in the region of speculation, on slender grounds without much hope of decisive evidence. In a general sense we may regard the Bryophyta as derived from an algal ancestry, without being able to suggest the nature of the ancestral forms or the geological period at which they arose. Recent researches on those Algae such as Coleochaete which appeared to afford a close comparison in their alternation of generations with Riccia, have shown that the body resulting from the segmentation of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... birth, Thou, to whom thy Windsor gave Nativity and name and grave Heavily upon his head Ancestral crimes were visited. Meek in heart and undefiled, Patiently his soul resigned, Blessing, while he kissed the rod, His Redeemer and ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... undertake. At this moment, in fact, having just succeeded to his patrimonial estates through the death of his father, La Rochefoucauld recognised no obstacle in his path, but bravely went forward in the cause he had espoused and generously sacrificed his property in Angoumois and Saintonge. His ancestral chateau of Verteuil was even razed to the ground by Mazarin's orders, and when the tidings of it reached him, he received them with such great firmness", says Lenet, "that he seemed as though he were delighted, through a feeling that it would inspire confidence in the ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... race unique among all peoples of our cosmopolitan population. Other peoples have lost, under the disintegrating influence of the American environment, much of their cultural heritage. None have been so utterly cut off and estranged from their ancestral land, traditions and people. It is just because of this that the history of the Negro offers exceptional materials for determining the relative influence of temperamental and historical conditions upon the process by which cultural materials from one racial group are transmitted ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... amazingly like her pater. She will, I know, be a nice girl when she grows up, without very much of that irresponsibility which seems to have been the bugbear of her maternal parent. I'm even beginning to believe there's something in the old tradition about ancestral traits so often skipping a generation. At any rate, that crazy-hearted old Irish grandmother of mine passed on to me a muckle o' her wildness, the mad County Clare girl who swore at the vicar and rode to hounds and could take a seven-barred gate without turning a hair and was apt to be always ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... this belief of the ancients in the divine interpenetration of the whole of Nature is universal and constant, and that it is, as Aristotle calls it, an ancestral dogma (patrios doxa) (Metaphysica, lib. vii., cap. vii.); this would prove only that there is a motive impelling peoples and individuals—that is to say, all or almost all or a majority of them—to believe in a God. But may it ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... escaped, but was always lured by food to return. He never seemed disposed to depart to the blue empyrean, his ancestral home. ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... the all-producing earth Feeding those dire Chimaeras breathing flame From hideous jaws—Of which 'tis simple fact That none have been begot; because we see All are from fixed seed and fixed dam Engendered and so function as to keep Throughout their growth their own ancestral type. This happens surely by a fixed law: For from all food-stuff, when once eaten down, Go sundered atoms, suited to each creature, Throughout their bodies, and, conjoining there, Produce the proper motions; but we see How, contrariwise, ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... pious and not less heroic race, which, under the name of Huguenots, battled, not for rapine and conquest, but for the rights of conscience and for a large public liberty, and which, though defeated and driven from their ancestral land, the beautiful land of the fig, the olive, and the vine, to the chalky shores of old England, were more than triumphant in the virtue of their cause. The music familiar to the ears of Tazewell's ancestors was the wind from the boisterous North ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... stood at her window, looking out on the lawn where her life had been passed. The breakfast-bell summoned her away, and, a half-hour after, she saw the lofty columns of the old house fade from view, and knew that many months, perhaps years, must elapse before the ancestral trees of the long avenue would wave again over the head of their young mistress. Her father sat beside her, moody and silent, and, when the brick wall and arched iron gate vanished from her sight, she sank back in one corner, and, covering ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... fact that they would probably let another repairman in, under the same conditions, if the beacon conked out again. At least I had done nothing, like butchering a few of them, that would make them antagonistic toward future ancestral messengers. ...
— The Repairman • Harry Harrison
... a beautiful woman, the following inscription: "Marie Felicite Diane de Chateaudun, Duchesse de Montignan," and turning quickly towards me, with a face deadly pale, he exclaimed: "Louise?" "No, not Louise, but Irene!" I replied; and my voice rang with ancestral pride when I thus appeared before him ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... the prairie Is our ancestral hall. Agate is the dome, Cornelian the wall. Ghouls are in the cellar, But fays upon the stairs. And here lived old King Silver Dreams, Always ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... were occupying an old palace, the property of a noble family whose decayed fortunes compelled the renting of their ancestral home. In the afternoon of the day of their visit to the picture-gallery Mr. Dinsmore and his daughter were seated in its spacious saloon, she beside a window overlooking the street, he at a little distance from her, and near to a table covered with books, magazines, and newspapers. That ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... most interesting place we visited was the Temple of the Five Hundred Genii, with large brass gods seated on opposite sides of a long hall,—the Temple of the Five Genii, and the ancestral temple of a certain royal family of China. We first entered a large enclosure, then a goodly-sized audience room, and next the temple proper. The three walls of this room (as I remember them) were fitted up like an immense cabinet, ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... conscience—the accumulated sediment of ancestral faintheartedness in countless generations, with vague religious fears and superstitions to leaven and mellow it. What! a conscience? Yes, dear friends, a conscience. That conscience may be imperfect, inept, unintelligent, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... long and justly claimed them for her own. And when it is no longer possible to refuse the Reverend Mad Tom or Mrs. Crazy Jane some new raiment, then consanguineous munificence does not go to Pool or Elise, but oftener to paternal or maternal wardrobes, and even to the ancestral chest, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... partly on account of their novelty and of their exceptional and extraordinary character. Easily first among these trouble-breeding remnants is that famous, or rather notorious, scrap of intestine, the appendix vermiformis, an obvious survival from that peaceful, ancestral period when we were more largely herbivorous in our diet and required a longer and more complicated food-tube, with larger side pouches in the course of it, to dissolve and absorb our food. Its present utility is just about that of a grain ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... pages, we come to one name which immediately if whimsically suggests poetry. The man was, like Touchstone's Audrey, not poetical and yet a great poet has been pleased to address him, very much as Pindar might have addressed the Ancestral Hero ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... detection, for he had recovered his old swaggering audacity, but from a quick distaste he had taken to his resemblance to the portrait. He was too genuine a Westerner, and too vain a man, to feel flattered at his resemblance to an aristocratic bully, as he believed the ancestral De Fontonelles to be. Even his momentary sensation as he faced the Cure in the picture-gallery was more from a vague sense that liberties had been taken with his, Dick's, personality, than that he had borrowed anything from ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... de Montaigne, one of the greatest masters of the essay in all literature, was born at his family's ancestral chateau near Bordeaux, in France, Feb. 28, 1533, and died on September 13, 1592. His life was one of much suffering from hereditary disease, which, however, he endured so philosophically that little trace of his trials is apparent in his writings. His father, who is said to have been of English ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... War is the result of the action of the herd instinct in man upon the old instinct of aggression. At least aggressive war is. Men in all their social relations show the play of these instincts; in war it is the old aggressive instinct, the old passion of the pack, that dominates them; and it is the ancestral herd-fears that overcome them in their panics. It is the herd instinct that makes men in groups so highly sensitive to the leader, whose relations to the herd or pack are always dependent upon their recognizing him as one of the group; that ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... and for several hundred years persons have gone there to take the waters against the more fashionable ailments. Its chief fame was in the days when rich folk, to ward off for the season a touch of ancestral gout, travelled down from London in their coaches. We may fancy Lord Thingumdo crossing his sleek legs inside or putting his head to the window on the change of horses. He has outriders and a horn to sound his coming. His Lordship has a liver that must be mended, but also he has a weakness for the ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... divine prophecy concerning the Saviour of the world. According to the imperial decree, Joseph left Nazareth and with Mary, to whom according to Matthew he was not only "betrothed" but married, journeyed to Bethlehem, five miles south of Jerusalem, to be enrolled in his ancestral city. There is born their promised Son. Their exclusion from the inn was not due to any lack of hospitality; much less did it express hostility to Jesus; it was due simply to the crowded condition of the town. However, it is suggestive of the obscurity and discomfort ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... that of so many young men who owed their religious training exclusively to Cambridge and other public institutions, he says: "How much happier was my star which rained on me influence of ancestral religion. The depth of the religious sentiment which I knew in my Aunt Mary, imbuing all her genius and derived to her from such hoarded family traditions, from so many godly lives and godly deeds of sainted kindred of Concord, Maiden, York, was ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... race I cling unto my country, Whatever dubious reason may protesting cry; The shame alone of all her blood bought glory, Her haughty self-assurance, conscious pride, And the ancestral faith's traditions dark, With woe have ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... mine, and in the same block. I am just over her head, and the same secret staircase serves for both. My father's rooms are in the block opposite, but are larger by the whole of the space occupied by the grand staircase on our side of the building. These ancestral mansions are so spacious, that my father and mother continue to occupy the ground-floor rooms, in spite of the social duties which have once more devolved on them with the return of the Bourbons, and are even ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... taught to them, nor teachable to any others; but, in them, innate; and the seal and reward of persistence in great national life;—the obedience and the peace of ages having extended gradually the glory of the revered ancestors also to the ancestral land; until the Motherhood of the dust, the mystery of the Demeter from whose bosom we came, and to whose bosom we return, surrounds and inspires, everywhere, the local awe of field and fountain; the sacredness of landmark that none may remove, and of wave that none may pollute; while records of ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... general right or expediency which is the germ of law as a science. The Greek, sceptical and speculative as he was, appears never to have quite got rid of the notion that there was something sacred in ancestral custom, and that to alter it by legislation was a sort of impiety. We in England still conceive that there is something in the breast of the judge, and the belief is a lingering shadow of the tribal custom, the source of the common law. Now what conditions would be most favourable to this critical ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... with a heavy black mustache. I am very like him. He was a man who had read a great deal, and his ideas were not like those of most of his class. His great-grandmother had been a friend of J. J. Rousseau's, and one might have said that he had inherited something of this ancestral connection. He knew the Contrat Social, and the Nouvelle Heloise by heart, and all those philosophical books which prepared in advance the overthrow of our old usages, prejudices, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... under Stephenson, faster and faster, to a transitory empire over the earth. It was a steam locomotive—but for all that it was primarily a steam engine for pumping adapted to a new end; it was a steam engine whose ancestral stage had developed under conditions that were by no means exacting in the matter of weight. And from that fact followed a consequence that has hampered railway travel and transport very greatly, and that is tolerated nowadays only through a belief in its practical necessity. The steam locomotive ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... with mouse-skin; when he wished to divine he beat his drum till a black bird appeared and perched on his hut; then the shaman swooned, the bird vanished, and the divination could begin. Similarly the Greenland angekok is said to summon his torngak (which may be an ancestral ghost or an animal) by drumming; he is heard by the bystanders to carry on a conversation and obtain advice as to how to treat diseases, the prospects of good weather and other matters of importance. The familiar, who is sometimes replaced by the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... Hampden Scarborough as he ended a brief recital of the ancestral murders which Pauline had drawn from him—they were out for ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... have sorrow," the Boy resumed, "for ridding the world of a sordid worm;* of a man whose very soul was dross, and who never had a feeling for the Truthful and the Beautiful? When I stood before my uncle in the moonlight, in the gardens of the ancestral halls of the De Barnwells, I felt that it was the Nemesis come to overthrow him. 'Dog,' I said to the trembling slave, 'tell me where thy Gold is. THOU hast no use for it. I can spend it in relieving the Poverty on which thou ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... proprieties, his love for all the minor graces of life. Why should she alone of the three be crushed beneath the trip-hammer of the immensities? But she ended always as she had begun, by reverting to that ancestral spirit of religious strenuousness in which she had been bred and cradled, and by planting herself once more upon the eleventh of Hebrews and the renowned victories of faith that had been the glory of the Church in every age. To leave this ground seemed to her ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... the iron cross is standing On yon rude and crumbling wall, Dwelt a chieftain's orphan daughter, In her broad ancestral hall. ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... going to publish Sebastian Bach's works is something which does good to my heart, which beats in love of the great and lofty art of this ancestral father of harmony; I want to ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... the ancestral acres, his anticipated seat in parliament, his chance of ousting Frank from the heritage of Hazeldean, were all as strings that pulled him to and fro, like a puppet in the sleek, filbert-nailed fingers of the smiling showman, who could exhibit him to the admiration of a crowd, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... charges his posterity to remain faithful.(241) In the archives of the Buddhist temple Zojoji at Shiba in Tokyo was preserved an account written by the head priest of the time, how Ieyasu, in 1590, visited the temple and took it under his patronage, saying,(242) "For a general to be without an ancestral temple of his own is as though he were forgetful of the fact that he must die.... I have now come to beg of you to let me make this my ancestral temple here." So that from the time of Ieyasu the ...
— Japan • David Murray
... see that the triumph of Christianity meant his destruction, also the abandonment of all their ancient customs. He harangued the tribe in secret, asking them if they wished to bring upon themselves the vengeance of their ancestral and other spirits and to go through their days as the possessors of only one miserable wife, questions to which they answered that emphatically they did not. So the tribe was rent in two, and by far the ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... germ on this view must contain not only seeds from the immediate parents but from many, perhaps all, of the older generations of the family, otherwise how are we to account for the appearance of ancestral peculiarities which the father and mother do not show? Moreover, since very minute things, like the inner angle of the eyebrow, may independently vary, there must be an enormous number of seeds apart altogether from the considerations alluded to in the last paragraph. And many authorities who ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... I were its owner, I should find it hard to give up these ancestral acres and trees, or to cease to take care of them. I am glad I ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... exclaimed Mrs. Basil, much miffed, "is a man of hereditary ijees, Colonel Reybold. He is now in pursuit of the—ahem!—the Kinvas-back on his ancestral waters. If he should hear that you suggested a pacific life and the grovelling associations of the capital for him, he might ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... and was received as Adalantado, was feasted, and then fell asleep. When he came to himself again he was on board a homeward-bound vessel, having been picked up senseless from a drifting wreck. He reached Lisbon, but no one knew him. His ancestral mansion was occupied by others: none of his name had dwelt in it for many a year. He hurried to his betrothed, only to fling himself, not, as he thought, at her feet, but at the feet of her great-granddaughter. ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... to which they belonged pursued some definite branch of productive work. Moreover, there were corporations instituted for purposes quite independent of industry; namely, to perpetuate the memory of an Imperial or princely personage who had died without issue or without attaining ancestral rank. Such tomobe were collectively known as nashiro (namesakes) or koshiro (child substitutes). For example, when Prince Itoshi, son of the Emperor Suinin, died without leaving a son to perpetuate his name, the Itoshibe was established ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... days they went together out of the castle and enchanted wood, both of which immediately vanished, and were nevermore beheld by mortal eyes. The Princess was restored to her ancestral kingdom, and after a few years the Prince and she became King and Queen, and ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... (that is, Beaw of the Anglo-Saxon genealogists, not our Beowulf, who was a Geat, not a Dane), 'the son of Scyld in Scedeland.' This is our ancestral myth,—the story of the first culture-hero of the North; 'the patriarch,' as Rydberg calls him, 'of the royal families of Sweden, Denmark, Angeln, Saxland, and England.'"—Br., p. 78. ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... blend of Christianity and indigenous ancestral worship) 40%, Roman Catholic 20%, Muslim 10%, Anglican, Bahai, Methodist, Mormon, Jewish ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... universal is the nest-making instinct that one might safely say the M. bovariensis had once possessed it, and that in the cases I have mentioned it was a recurrence, too weak to be efficient, to the ancestral habit." Mr. Hudson suggests that this bird lost the nest-making instinct by acquiring the semi-parasitical habit, common to many South American birds, of breeding in the large covered nests of the Dendrocolaptidae, although, owing to increased severity in the struggle for the ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... Swadeshi is that spirit in us which restricts us to the use and service of our immediate surroundings to the exclusion of the more remote. Thus, as for religion, in order to satisfy the requirements of the definition, I must restrict myself to my ancestral religion. That is the use of my immediate religious surrounding. If I find it defective, I should serve it by purging it of its defects. In the domain of politics I should make use of the indigenous institutions and serve them by curing them of their ...
— Third class in Indian railways • Mahatma Gandhi
... between us, for The New Elizabethans (LANE) must certainly be read, if only to understand clearly that there is no fault in the heroes, at any rate. Mr. E.B. OSBORN describes them as "these golden lads ... who first conquered their easier selves and secondly led the ancestral generations into a joyous captivity" (whatever that may mean), and maintains, against the father of one of them apparently, that he is apt in the title he has given to them and to their countless peers. I agree with the father ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... rather, as a place of estates, too aristocratic to be fashionable, of historic houses, and of charming walks and drives and views. Many of the old families who have given the town its prestige still live in their ancestral manors, and many of the families who have moved there in recent years are of such sort as will heighten the fame of the famous town. As the stranger passes through Milton he is captivated by glimpses of ancient ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... Yes, Little Buttercup, I'm sad and sorry— My daughter, Josephine, the fairest flower That ever blossomed on ancestral timber, Is sought in marriage by Sir Joseph Porter, Our Admiralty's First Lord, but for some reason She does not seem ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... be corrected in this phase of our being, or it may be carried over into the next. Carried over into the next the individual, according to our ancestral teaching, comes under the sentence in which our fathers delighted as "damnation." Not only did damnation involve the most fiendish torture the Almighty could invent, but the torture was inflicted, without an instant of relief, ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... of the exceeding mutability of all things, common to most very old houses, was stronger than ordinary in this house, whose owners did not even hold it by ancestral right, so as to find and leave behind some few ancestral ties and memories, but came and went, with all that belonged to them; the only trace of their occupancy and themselves being a name on the college books, or a solitary portrait ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... the hereditary predilection of his family. His tastes were in perfect harmony with this dwelling, for he had quickly become the perfect type of a country gentleman, scorning the court and rarely leaving his ancestral acres. He was too kind-hearted to exact that his wife should share his country tastes and retired life. The unlimited confidence which he had in her, a loyalty which never allowed him to suppose evil or suspect her, a nature very little inclined to jealousy, made him allow Clemence ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... in the library, she called to him. "Hugh! come with me and see the Treasure Chamber of the Montforts. Don't you want to see the ancestral silver?" ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... heaven in His mother's arms. What a caricature of Christianity! Paul said: "If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." "Make Jesus a perpetual child, and Mariolatry becomes lower than Chinese ancestral worship." If He, as a child, was translated to heaven, then He never died and rose again. Mary is, to them, the Saviour. The child Jesus happened to be her son, and, as she was the great divine one, He, through her, partook of divinity. ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... of our nervous system to be a priori, in regard to the excitements which are propagated in it. A nerve cell is formed, with its protoplasm, its nucleus and its nucleoli before being irritated; its properties precede its functions. If it be possible to admit that as a consequence of ancestral experiences the function has created the organ, the latter is now formed, and this it is which in its turn becomes anterior to the function. The notion of a priori has therefore nothing in it which ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... of the seats, while to me, the visitor, was assigned the "lang-settle" on the other side of the fireplace. It was a coign of vantage which I shared with the ancestral copper warming-pan, and from it I could see the whole group. Grannie, bent half-double with rheumatism, was propped up in her bed, with the children grouped around her. She wore, as usual, her white mutch cap and grey shawl. Mittens covered her wrists, and her fingers, painfully swollen with ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... called it, and looked upon it as a terrible and deadly sin. At the same time, he had knocked about the world enough to have won a larger toleration for all sorts and conditions of men than he would have done had he remained master of the ancestral estates at home; and after a momentary thrill of dismay and repulsion, he decided to take no notice of what he ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... looked, and one could see it was intentional," laughed Vaura; "no more dinners at the ancestral home of Lord Lisleville; no more shooting for the culprit," ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... associated with the several categories. Be it observed that these judgments are spontaneous, instinctive, and unnoticed. They are made so by immemorial education in the art of contact which man has inherited from the life of the ancestral beasts and men; they have most likely been in some measure affirmed by selection, for these determinations as to the nature of the neighbor were in the lower stages of existence in brute and man of critical importance, the creatures lived or died according as they determined well or ill, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... black veil, he stood before the chief magistrate, the council, and the representatives, and wrought so deep an impression, that the legislative measures of that year were characterized by all the gloom and piety of our earliest ancestral sway. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... destructiveness. It was his, my Santayana's; he procured it from Toledo, from the master sword-maker of the universe. The blade is so fine, the eye refuses to tell where it melts into the air; a touch, and the hardest substance is divided exactly in two pieces. The handle, gold, set with an ancestral emerald, which for centuries has brought victory in the field to the arm of the hero who wore it; the sheath—I forget myself; this weapon has no sheath. When a Santillo de Santayana rides into battle, he has no thought to sheathe his sword. ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... from it, the large yellow mansion was the home of Commodore Cassin, built by him, I think, in the early 1800's. In 1893 Mr. and Mrs. Beverley Randolph Mason, of Virginia, opened here their school, Gunston Hall, named, of course, for Mr. Mason's ancestral home, which continued in Washington as a flourishing boarding school for girls for fifty years. After that, this building housed the Epiphany School, an ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... been to the province of Poltava. We went to the Smagins', and to Sorotchintsi. We drove with a four-in-hand, in an ancestral, very comfortable carriage. We had no end of laughter, adventures, misunderstandings, halts, and meetings on the way.... If you had only seen the places where we stayed the night and the villages stretching eight or ten versts through which we drove! ... What weddings we met on the road, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... passed since the Pennsylvania farm wagon, the ancestral form of the Conestoga wagon, first won attention through military service in the French and Indian War. These early wagons, while not generally so well known, were the forerunners of the more popular Conestoga freighter of the post-Revolutionary period and also of the swaying, ...
— Conestoga Wagons in Braddock's Campaign, 1755 • Don H. Berkebile
... for it was my fault remaining so long listening to Mrs Massey's dreadful accounts of the O'Harrall family. I was much interested, and I have taken it into my head that Mr Massey may be able to regain his ancestral property. You know I am somewhat romantic, and I should be so delighted to see you mistress of ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... attempt at suicide. He rescued her, and when she was restored asked for the reason. She acknowledged that she had a good home and a kind and generous husband, but there was no shrine in the house, no ancestral tablet, no Joss, and she was convinced that some great evil must be impending from spirits thus neglected and provoked. She preferred to sacrifice her present comfort rather than incur the woes approaching,—all the more dreadful in her apprehension because utterly ...
— The American Missionary - Vol. 44, No. 3, March, 1890 • Various
... VOYTECH), (c. 950-997), known as the apostle of the Prussians, the son of a Bohemian prince, was born at Libice (Lobnik, Lubik), the ancestral seat near the junction of the Cidlina and the Elbe. He was educated at the monastery of Magdeburg; and in 983 was chosen bishop of Prague. The extreme severity of his rule repelled the Bohemians, whom he vainly strove to wean from ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... more than three hundred years on their ancestral estates, which, it is true, were now considerably diminished, and he was connected by ties of blood or marriage with all the nobility in the county of Pesth. Up to the year 1848 the whole village ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... form a noble army of martyrs, of whom Madagascar is justly proud. The causes that led to the persecution are not far to seek. On the one hand, they were intensely conservative, clinging to ancestral customs; and on the other hand, a suspicious and jealous fear of foreign influence. The zealous work of the missionaries was believed by many of the Queen's advisers to be only a cloak to conceal political designs. The ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... of the cemetery, shone the white ancestral monuments of the Frisbies. Death, the leveller, had not, somehow, levelled them,—proud and pretentious even in their tombs. You felt, as you read the sculptured record of their names and virtues, that even their ashes were better than the ashes of common ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... and raised his dreadful foot, Armed at all points with the ancestral boot. Harvardiana, Vol. ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... other. When he perceived from my Spanish that we were not English, he rejoiced that we were Americans of the north, and as joyfully proclaimed that they were Americans of the south. We were at once sensible of a community of spirit in our difference from our different ancestral races. They were Spanish, but with a New World blitheness which we nowhere afterward found in the native Spaniards; and we were English, with a willingness to laugh and to joke which they had not perhaps noted in our ancestral contemporaries. Again and again we met them in the different cities ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... speaking of wealth, luxury, splendor, power, influence, and all that men hope for, or struggle for, or fight for; from all of which he and his had been cast out; and the one who had done this was even now occupying the old ancestral ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... inhabit their hills, much as the Jews did their Palestine. Each man lives on his ancestral acres; and his farm or vineyard is not too large to be cultivated by himself and his family. There are amongst them no titles of honour, and scarce any distinctions of rank and circumstances. They are a nation of vine-dressers, husbandmen, and shepherds. In their habits they are frugal ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... produced a magical effect upon the old lady, exonerating George Douglas at once from all blame. But towards Henry Warner she was not thus lenient; for, coward-like, Theo charged him with having suggested everything, even to the cutting up of the ancestral red coat ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... endlessly and painfully coughing; and yet she had waited upwards of a hundred hours before coming to seek help, and had the week been twice as long, she would have waited still. There was a canonical day for consultation; such was the ancestral habit, to which a respectable lady must study ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the possibility of a fatal termination to his wound, and in obedience to a grim frontier tradition, he had also refused to have his boots removed in order that he might "die with them on," as became his ancestral custom. Johnny was therefore speedily made comfortable in the McKinstry bed, while Dr. Duchesne gave his whole attention to his more serious patient. The master glanced hurriedly around for Mrs. McKinstry. She was not only absent from the room, but ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... primeval home, the original ancestral seat of mankind, Hawaiian traditions speak in highest praise. "It had a number of names of various meanings, though the most generally occurring, and said to be the oldest, was Kalana-i-hau-ola (Kalana with the life-giving dew). It was situated ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... easy slope of the Caelian mount, with the Minervium, in which Arvina stood, leading directly downward to its centre. Beyond this sparkling line, rose the twin summits Oppius and Cispius, of the Esquiline hill, still decked with the dark foliage of the ancestral groves of oak and sweet-chesnut, said to derive their origin from Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome, and green with the long grass and towering cypresses of the plebeian cemetery, across which the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... home as fast as my old legs would carry me. That self-same evening, as soon as it was dark, Mme. la Marquise, carrying M. le Vicomte in her arms and I carrying a pack with a few necessaries on my back, left the ancestral home of the Mortaines never to return to it again: for within an hour of our flight a detachment of the revolutionary army made a descent upon the chateau; they ransacked it from attic to cellar, and finding nothing there to satisfy their ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... No ancestral fox-terrier of his race could possibly, I fancy, have 'gone aloft' like the original head of our house; for, though he liked being at sea well enough in fine weather, he got in the dumps when it came on to blow, his apology for a tail becoming so limp that what there was of it drooped and lost ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... attention, were the many little towns within the town, the fortresses within the fortress; viz., the walled monastic enclosures, and several other precincts, remaining from earlier times, and more or less like castles,—as the Nuremberg Court, the Compostella, the Braunfels, the ancestral house of the family of Stallburg, and several strongholds, in later days transformed into dwellings and warehouses. No architecture of an elevating kind was then to be seen in Frankfort; and every thing pointed to a period long past and ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... woke up the next morning in the chamber where her girlhood had passed. The birds of spring were singing under her windows in the old ancestral gardens. As she recognized these friendly voices, so familiar to her infancy, her heart melted; but several hours' sleep had restored to her her natural courage. She banished the thoughts which had weakened her, rose, and went to surprise her mother at her first ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... slay Sisupala in the sacrifice of king Yudhishthira, the son of Dharma, which sacrifice all the kings of the world will bring tribute. In some of these feats, only Arjuna, the son of Vasava, will become my assistant. I shall establish Yudhishthira with all his brothers in his ancestral kingdom. People will call me and Arjuna as Narayana and Nara, when, endued with puissance, we two, exerting our strength, shall consume a large number of Kshatriyas, for doing good to the world. Having lightened the burthen of the Earth according ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... a very splendid old boy who was cooking for me and greasing my boots and going off with me after moose; putting his keen ancestral instincts of three thousand years at my service for three dollars a day. With my chances would not Rafael have been a bigger man than I? At least never could I achieve that grand air, that austere repose of manner which he had got with no trouble at all from a line ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... goose-marrow or ear's lowmost lobe, Or Age's languid yard and cobweb'd part, Same Thallus greedier than the gale thou art, When the Kite-goddess shows thee Gulls agape, 5 Return my muffler thou hast dared to rape, Saetaban napkins, tablets of Thynos, all Which (Fool!) ancestral heirlooms thou didst call. These now unglue-ing from thy claws restore, Lest thy soft hands, and floss-like flanklets score 10 The burning scourges, basely signed and lined, And thou unwonted toss like wee barque tyned 'Mid vasty ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... at last he procured, on the accession of Edward III., of the independence of Scotland in 1329, himself dying the same year, his work done and his glory for ever secured,—not to speak of the beautiful legends which have clustered round his history like ivy round an ancestral tower—of the spider on the wall, teaching him the lesson of perseverance, as he lay in the barn sad and desponding in heart—of the strange signal-light upon the shore near his maternal castle of Turnberry, which led him ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... what the young man had been doing was thinking it over beneath his ancestral oaks and beeches. His countenance showed this,—showed it more than Miss Bernardstone could have liked. He looked like a man who was crossed, not like a man who was happy, in love. I was no more disposed than before to help him out with his plot, but at the end of ten minutes we were articulately ...
— The Path Of Duty • Henry James
... Epirus by the conqueror of Pydna, or as many of them as were transported out of their own country—and these were probably the vast majority,—were thereby deprived for the rest of their lives of all social and family life, of their ancestral worship, in fact of everything that could act as a moral tie, as a restraining influence upon vicious instincts. With the lamentable effect of this on the regions thus depopulated we are not here concerned, but it was beyond doubt most ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... had settled on his eldest son,' says Dr. Rogers (Boswelliana, p. 129), 'the ancestral estate, with an unencumbered rental of Ll,600 a year.' That the rental, whatever it was, was not unencumbered is shewn by the passage from Johnson's letter, post, p. 155, note 4. Boswell wrote to Malone in 1791 (Croker's Boswell, p. 828):—'The clear money on which I can reckon out ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... up before Mr. Jenney's ancestral trees, and through the deepening shadows beneath these the windows of the farm-house glowed with welcoming light. At Victoria's bidding Mr. Rangely knocked to ask for Austen Vane, and Austen himself answered the summons. He held a book in his hand, and as Rangely spoke she ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... barouche, Nor bandit cavalcade, Tore from the trembling father's arms His all-accomplished maid. For her how happy had it been! And Heaven had spared to me To see one sad, ungathered rose On my ancestral tree. ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... the coach up with hay, put the collar off the lame shaft-horse under the seat, in case we might want to fit it on to the horse to be bought at Tula.... Filofey, who had managed to run home and come back in a long, white, loose, ancestral overcoat, a high sugar-loaf cap, and tarred boots, clambered triumphantly up on to the box. I took my seat, looking at my watch: it was a quarter past ten. Yermolai did not even say good-bye to me—he was engaged in beating his Valetka—Filofey tugged at ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... cut the air. A sickening thud, a gurgling howl, and the assailant fell, his head half severed from his body. An instant later the big Englishman was in his saddle. A second slash and an Indian at his side went down beneath the ancestral blade! ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... solitudes—not where the sun shone and the water ran, but where the light was dim and the wind low in the pine woods. There, where the sombre green vaults were upheld by a hundred slender columns, and the far-receding aisles seemed to lead to the ancestral home of shadows, there, his own soul a shadow of grief and fear among the shades of the gloomy temple, he bowed his heart before the Eternal, gathered together all the might of his being, and groaned forth in deepest effort of a will that struggled to be: "Thy will be done, ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... a conservative man and a firm believer in his own ancestral gods, had paid little attention to this strange, new religion. Upon arrival at Tanagor, to be sure, he had sometimes placed small offerings in the votive bowl, but more often, he had merely strode past the Slave of Kondaro, and gone upon ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... Africa, Australia, India, China; from every point to which Irish regiments have followed the roll of the British drums, news of the prospective shedding of Irish blood has been brought home, and the slaughter preceded by a Banshee wail outside the ancestral windows. But it is due to the reader to state, that this silent Banshee theory is by no means well or generally received, the burden of evidence going to show that there are only two kinds of Banshees, and that, in a supernatural way, they know the immediate future of those in whom ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... attention and show themselves to be still unread riddles when men have time to think. The beneficent demon, doubt, whose name is Legion and who dwells amongst the tombs of old faiths, enters into mankind and thenceforth refuses to be cast out. Sacred customs, venerable dooms of ancestral wisdom, hallowed by tradition and professing to hold good for all time, are put to the question. Cultured reflection asks for their credentials; judges them by its own standards; finally, gathers those of which it approves into ethical systems, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... who hails from an ancestral hall in the East Riding of York. His hair, also curling, is dark brown; his complexion in correspondence. Moustaches already well grown. An acquiline nose and broad jaw-blades denote resolution—a character borne out by the glance of ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... riches too great to count; could boast Of a high ancestral name, But I also dreamt, which pleased me most, That you loved ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... career in which no one should be ashamed to embark. Always remember the fable of the sun, the storm, and the traveller's cloak. Forget wholly and for ever all small pruderies, and remember that you cannot change ancestral feelings of right and wrong without what is practically soul-murder. Barbarous as the customs may seem, always hear them with patience, always judge them with gentleness, always find in them some seed of good; see that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... established by means of comparative researches. The tumuli in the old mother country of the Saxons have been examined, and their affinity with our Saxon graves has been determined beyond question; while a parallel comparison has also been instituted between the Frankish graves in France, and the ancestral Frankish graves in old Franconia over the Rhine. Thus it is well known ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... exhausted into his hands, and would place France in the power of the Holy League and at the feet of Philip. Another Ivry would shatter the confederacy, and carry the king in triumph to his capital and his ancestral throne. On the approach of the combined armies under Parma and Mayenne, the king had found himself most reluctantly compelled to suspend the siege of Paris. His army, which consisted of sixteen thousand foot and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... down but the one who was to speak; and, laden by them with the responsibility of speaking, he commenced. He was not contented with a mere word of salutation, such as, "Gentlemen," but he must, with great minuteness, go over the names and titles, and a host of ancestral references, of which they were proud. Another half-hour was spent with this. Up to this time conversation went on freely all round the meeting; but whenever he came to the point of his address, viz., the object of the meeting and an opinion on it, all was attention. After ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... capital. They are images of incense rising in autumn from the ancient altar on the home-stead, of the feast of the Terminalia with its slain lamb, of libations of ruddy wine and offerings of bright flowers on the clear waters of some ancestral spring, of the simple hearth of the farmhouse, of the family table resplendent with the silver salinum, heirloom of generations, from which the grave paterfamilias makes the pious offering of crackling salt and meal ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... like Demas of old, forsook them and "went after this present world;" having no objection, of course, to the restoration of Popery: but preferring some more comfortable method than an invasion which would inevitably rob them of their ancestral lands and would seat needy and greedy Castilians in their old country houses, to treat their tenants as they had treated the Indians of Hispaniola, and them as they had ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... don't mind living on bread and cheese for a year or two. The farms of my ancestral home make a pretty good rent-roll, but if my tenants become the untrammelled communists my steward predicts, we may have to camp out on burnt stubble for some time to come. It is in the hope of inducing them to leave ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... put on their summer habit of heavy leafage, and made his newly-laid lawn look as well established as an old manorial meadow. The house had been so adroitly placed between six tall elms which were growing on the site beforehand, that they seemed like real ancestral trees; and the rooks, young and old, cawed melodiously ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... one fence. The soft, velvety greensward is half-shaded by the wide-spreading branches of evergreen oaks that singly and in small groups are scattered at irregular intervals from one end of the pasture to the other, giving it the appearance of one of the old ancestral parks of England. As I bowl pleasantly along I involuntarily look about me, half expecting to see some grand, stately old mansion peeping from among some one of the splendid oak-groves; and when a jack-rabbit hops out and halts at twenty paces from my road, I half hesitate ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... summers the ancestral home of the Wickletts had been turned into a boarding-house, but apparently it ignored the change with the same high-born ease of manner that characterised its gentle old mistress. The hospitality it extended to its paying guests was the same with which ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... have filled our slums and tenement houses, our hospitals, asylums, alms-houses, and jails to overflowing. They cannot escape the results of their physical organization, which, in its turn, is an inherited result of ancestral degeneration. For them we may 'hope the best, but hold the present, fatal daughter of the past.' Their death rates are from two to three times as great as those of the better class of population; one-fourth ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... benefit his fellow-men, he would have within the radius of his own estate a hundred cabins to call in play his invention or humanity; and with one's conscience at rest, he said, could there be a purer joy than to wander with her of one's choice under the ancestral elms of old England, ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... furniture in which they were hidden is not an ancestral possession. I bought it at second hand—you see it's old—the other day in the King's Road. Obviously the man who sold it to me sold me more than he meant; he had no idea (from his own point of view it was stupid of him), that there was a hidden chamber or that mysterious ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... the kind may best be despatched in a note here. Their want of merit contrasts strangely with the admirable quality of the 'Old Play' fragments scattered about the novels. Halidon Hill (1822), in the subject of which Scott had an ancestral interest from his Swinton blood, reminds one much more of Joanna Baillie than of its author. Macduff's Cross (1823), a very brief thing, is still more like Joanna, was dedicated to her, and appeared in a miscellany which ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... which had been long thrown into a disturbed and unsetted state, by the rebellion and violent death of its three last rulers, was at length restored to peace and security by the Flavian family, whose descent was indeed obscure, and which boasted no ancestral honours; but the public had no cause to regret its elevation; though it is acknowledged that Domitian met with the just reward of his avarice and cruelty. Titus Flavius Petro, a townsman of Reate [721], whether a centurion ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... reverence for Latin, and more reverence for Greek. If they did not all share in the services of the temple, all, at least, shared in the superstition. But, now-a-days, the readers come chiefly from a class of busy people who care very little for ancestral crazes. Latin they have heard of, and some of them know it as a good sort of industrious language, that even, in modern times, has turned out many useful books, astronomical, medical, philosophical, and (as Mrs. Malaprop observes) diabolical; but, as to Greek, they think of it as of an ancient mummy: ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... must!"—agreed Cicely—"If genius wants to etand on its head, it must be allowed to make that exhibition of itself lest it should explode. If genius asks the lame, halt, blind and idiotic into the ancestral halls of Abbot's Manor, then the lame, halt, blind and idiotic are bound to come. If genius summons the god Pan to pipe a roundelay, pipings there shall be! Shall ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... intimate acquaintance with Italy and Italians gives her the necessary knowledge to write on this subject. Her zealous Italian studies came to her aid, and her love of nature give life and vitality to the scene. Valperga, the ancestral castle home of Euthanasia, a Florentine lady of the Guelph faction, is most picturesquely described, on its ledge of projecting rock, overlooking the plain of Lucca; the dependent peasants around happy under the protection of their good Signora. That this ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... (a blend of Christianity and indigenous ancestral worship), Roman Catholic 20%, Muslim 10%, other (includes Anglican, Bahai, Methodist, Mormon, ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 1897, Max Halbe shows himself at his best both in spirit and in manner. The hero of that play is estranged from his paternal hearth, with its ancestral traditions and from the simple rural life and the innocent tender love of his youth. For he has gone to Berlin, has drifted into the circles of the intellectuals, married the brilliant and advanced daughter of a professor and become actively ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... extends northwards to the Wayma family of the Dankali; southwards to the Gudabirsi, and midway between Zayla and Berberah; eastwards it is bounded by the sea, and westwards by the Gallas around Harar. It derives itself from Dirr and Aydur, without, however, knowing aught beyond the ancestral names, and is twitted with paganism by its enemies. This tribe, said to number 100,000 shields, is divided into numerous clans [47]: these again split up into minor septs [48] which plunder, and sometimes murder, one another in time ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... because you were prevented by illness from crossing to Cilicia, but that you will now do everything in your power to settle it, I may tell you that the fact of the matter is that, if he can annex this property, my brother thinks that he will owe to you the consolidation of this ancestral estate. I should like you to write about all your affairs, and about the studies and training of your son Lentulus (whom I regard as mine also) as confidentially and as frequently as possible, and to believe that there never has been anyone either dearer or more congenial to another ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Netherton having lost their ancestral property, had to begin the world again. They had to begin at the beginning. But they had plenty of pluck and energy. I go back to my great-great-grandfather, Michael Naesmyth, who was born in 1652. He occupied a house in the Grassmarket, Edinburgh, which was afterwards rebuilt, in ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth |
