"Portent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was no portent in the sky, No cry, like Pan's, along the seas, Nor hovered round his baby mouth The swarm of ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... war and transports, wearing the Union flag,—"Old Glory," as I hear it called in these days. A little withdrawn from our national fleet lay two French frigates, and, in another direction, an English sloop, under that banner which always makes itself visible, like a red portent in the air, wherever there is strife. In pursuance of our official duty, (which had no ascertainable limits,) we went on board the flag-ship, and were shown over every part of her, and down into her depths, inspecting her gallant crew, her powerful armament, her mighty engines, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Was this a portent of the fate about to overtake the latest comers? Jenks, of course, stood up. He always, stood square on his feet when the volcano within ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... rise and rapid growth of the Life and Liberty movement within the Established Church is something like a portent and one that Nonconformists cannot but regard with the deepest interest and sympathy. They may perhaps be forgiven if they see in it an attempt to win from within the Church just those privileges and liberties for ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... opened and closed very softly. Then he heard a low, quick gasp. Some one had entered. Suddenly the room seemed strange, full, charged with terrible portent. And he turned as if a giant hand had ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... Congress in 1859-60, and aimed especially at John Sherman, of Ohio, the Republican candidate for speaker, who had signed a qualified recommendation of the book. After a long contest the Republicans dropped Sherman for Pennington, of New Jersey, whom they elected. The Impending Crisis was a portent and an ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... churchyard and overlooked it; and between them and the churchyard wall there ran a narrow cobbled lane known as Pease Alley (i.e., pis aller, the Vicar was wont to explain humorously). Through this he might hope to reach the Lower Town and discover some interpretation of the portent. ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... revealed to him a tenth part of that which may be made sound and real knowledge to our boys and girls, he would not only have been what he was, the greatest physiologist of his age, but he would have loomed upon the seventeenth century as a sort of intellectual portent. Our "little knowledge" would have been to him a great, astounding, unlooked-for vision ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... it be?—Brydon breathed his wonder till the very impunity of his attitude and the very insistence of his eyes produced, as he felt, a sudden stir which showed the next instant as a deeper portent, while the head raised itself, the betrayal of a braver purpose. The hands, as he looked, began to move, to open; then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and left it uncovered and presented. Horror, with the sight, had leaped into Brydon's throat, ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... over in his mind this prophetic remark, which seemed to him full of sinister portent. For the first time in his life the prince of travellers did not dine jovially. The whole town of Vouvray was put in a ferment about the "affair" between Monsieur Vernier and the apostle of Saint-Simonism. Never before had the tragic event of a duel been so much as heard of in that ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... refined a fibre to enjoy the Carnival; but, planted there with his face pale with fasting and his knees stiff with praying, he seemed so stern a satire on it and on the crazy thousands who were preferring it to his way, that I half expected to see some heavenly portent out of a monastic legend come down and confirm his choice. Yet I confess that though I wasn't enamoured of the Carnival myself, his seemed a grim preference and this forswearing of the world a terrible game—a ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... this important day at Friars Carse, I have watched the elements and skies, in the full persuasion that they would announce it to the astonished world by some phenomena of terrific portent. Yesternight until a very late hour, did I wait with anxious horror for the appearance of some comet firing half the sky, or aerial armies of sanguinary Scandinavians, darting athwart the startled heavens, rapid as the ragged ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... d'abondantes paillettes de fer oligiste, qui couvrent non seulement une vaste etendue de pays pres des cotes, mais encore le premier plan des Montagnes-Bleues; et 3. Le lignite stratiforme qu'on exploite au Mont-Yorck, a 1000 pieds au-dessus du niveau de la mer, et dont la presence ajoute aux motifs qui portent a penser que les gres ferrugineux de ces contrees appartiennent au ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... evil portent to see a snake on the trail. The traveler must return and wait till next day, or if that can not be done, recourse must be had to other omens, such as the egg omen, or the suspension omen, in order to determine beyond a doubt what ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... we glance over the latter part of the book of prodigies, compiled by the otherwise unknown writer Julius Obsequens from the records of the pontifices quoted in Livy's history, we can get a fair idea of the kind of portent that was troubling the popular mind. They are much the same as they always had been in Roman history,—earthquakes, monstrous births, temples struck by lightning, statues overthrown, wolves entering the city, and so on; they are ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... material they contain. All these humorous stories and sallies find appreciation because there is, alas! a certain amount of truth at the heart of them. Then there is also that demand for shorter sermons in which some see so ominous a portent. We demur to the assumption that this demand invariably grows out of dislike for the subjects upon which the preacher dilates. It is objected that no one grumbles greatly concerning the length of a Shakespearian representation, nor when a prominent and eloquent ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... the legal interest. But what I wanted to say was this: here, in a House of educated men dealing with education, nobody troubled to correct the grammar of the thing. That to my mind stands out as a moral portent of the first magnitude. The Bishops quite rightly sent it back again, but for the wrong reason. Their reason was pure blind obscurantism; if they had returned it because of its split infinitives and its slovenly drafting, and requested that it should be put into decent ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... England. To-day Americans of German birth are called upon to rise, together with their fellow-citizens of all races, to free not only this country but the whole world from the oppression of the rulers of Germany, an oppression far less capable of being endured and of far graver portent. ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... reddish-haired youngster, freckled almost as profusely as Billy. Three times had they met in noble battle, and three times had Billy been the conqueror, but somehow the spirit of young McMasters did not seem particularly broken, nor did he become a serf. Billy felt that the air was full of portent, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... the mother, sitting suddenly up. A direful cracking resounded under the bed-clothes as she did so, but in the excitement of the moment its possible evil portent went unnoticed. ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... incalculably greater. She ate as much as she could swallow and pushed the rest away. Leaving the camp-fire, she began walking again, here and there, aimlessly, scarcely seeing what she looked at. There was a shadow over her, an impending portent of catastrophe, a moment standing dark and sharp out of the age-long hour. She leaned against the balsam and then she rested in the stone seat, and then she had to walk again. It might have been long, that time; she never knew how long or short. There came a strange flagging, sinking ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... Antiquities, ed. 1849, iii. 132, where Brand cites Melton's Astrologaster, or the Figure-Caster, 1620, to show that to dream of the devil and of gold was deemed an equally lucky portent. To dream of gold is also pronounced a happy omen in the ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... the one girl in all the world who unconsciously had inspired and stirred him to action. Was she really to be his guiding star? Anyway, the sight of her standing before him seemed to be a favorable portent of the future. ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... the human spirit? Are we in the period of a new incubation? Or is the new age born? Is it a new slope that we are on, or are we merely part of a surprisingly vigorous premonitory flutter? These are queries to ponder. Is Cezanne the beginning of a slope, a portent, or merely the crest of a movement? The oracles are dumb. This alone seems to me sure: since the Byzantine primitives set their mosaics at Ravenna no artist in Europe has created forms of greater significance unless ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... true portent; for the wind freshened during the first watch, causing us to take in all of our stu'n'sails before midnight. Then followed the royals and topgallants in quick succession, the main-sail and inner and outer jibs being next furled and the foresail reefed, ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... admonition of the aruspices, and the vessel containing the entrails being watched with increased attention, it is reported that the snakes came a second, and a third time, and, after tasting the liver, went away untouched. Though the aruspices forewarned him that the portent had reference to the general, and that he ought to be on his guard against secret enemies and machinations, yet no foresight could avert the destiny which awaited him. There was a Lucanian, named Flavius, ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... the stately decay of the place was unrelieved by a particle of furniture. Pemberton's spirits were low, and it came over him that the fortune of the Moreens was now even lower. A blast of desolation, a portent of disgrace and disaster, seemed to draw through the comfortless hall. Mr. Moreen and Ulick were in the Piazza, looking out for something, strolling drearily, in mackintoshes, under the arcades; but still, in spite of mackintoshes, unmistakeable men of the world. Paula and Amy were in bed—it ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... vestu de brouderie, De soleil luyant, cler et beau. Il n'y a beste, ne oyseau, Qu'en son jargon ne chant ou crie; Le temps a laissie son manteau De vent de froidure et de pluye. Riviere, fontaine et ruisseau Portent, en livree jolie, Gouttes d'argent d'orfavrerie, Chascun s'abille de nouveau. Le temps a ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... elsewhere shown that the howling dog, or wish-hound of Hermes, whose appearance under the windows of a sick person is such an alarming portent, is merely the tempest personified. Throughout all Aryan mythology the souls of the dead are supposed to ride on the night-wind, with their howling dogs, gathering into their throng the souls of those just dying as they pass by their houses. [73] Sometimes the whole ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... there grew up a bamboo of extraordinary size and a bush with sweet and beautiful flowers: many people tried to cut down the big bamboo and to pluck the beautiful flowers but every arm that was raised to do so was restrained by some unseen power. Eventually the news of this portent reached the ears of the Raja who went to see what was happening. When the Raja tried to pluck a flower he succeeded at the first attempt. The Raja then cut down the bamboo and out of it stepped the mongoose ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... with one arm extended along the back of the sofa, the white gleam of the big eyeballs setting off the black, fathomless stare of the enlarged pupils, impressed Razumov more than anything he had seen since his hasty and secret departure from St. Petersburg. A witch in Parisian clothes, he thought. A portent! He actually hesitated in his advance, and did not even comprehend, at first, what the ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... alvum excernunt, quin aquam secum portent qua partes obscaenas lavent. Busbequius ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... as if at the hearing of some portent, the professor stood rooted to the spot for a moment, and then was about to leap to the door, when the simulacrums before him sprang to their feet and with a tremendous stamping, smote their wooden legs upon the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... were now but singing their third welcome to the earliest dawn, when Alcmena called forth Tiresias, the seer that cannot lie, and told him of the new portent, and bade him declare what things should come ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... the garden behind the administration building where our Headquarters were, waking us from sleep with a sudden start. It did no harm, but on the next day we were informed that we were all to move back to our old quarters in Barlin. I always said that I regarded a bomb dropped on Headquarters as a portent sent from heaven, telling us we were going to move. Accordingly on September 6th we all made our way to Barlin, where I was given a billet in an upper room in an estaminet. The propriety of housing (p. 207) a Senior Chaplain in an estaminet might be questioned, ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... polite to women, and they are kind to animals and to those of their inferiors who show them proper deference and salute them briskly. It is not always easy to judge them fairly. And that night one did not try. They jarred intolerably. They seemed a portent, though in truth they were something less. They found themselves left alone to their private griefs, ruminating regretfully over the golden age that had suddenly ended, gazing into the blackness ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... order not to miss him at breakfast; but as she entered the dining-room the parlour-maid told her that Mr. Peyton had overslept himself, and had rung to have his breakfast sent upstairs. Was it a pretext to avoid her? She was vexed at her own readiness to see a portent in the simplest incident; but while she blushed at her doubts she let them govern her. She left the dining-room door open, determined not to miss him if he came downstairs while she was at breakfast; then she went back to the drawing-room and sat down at her writing-table, trying to busy herself ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... my sister right, Freeman, and I'll come and try if I can have a peep from your ladder." Then Blair saw a thing which always seems more impressive than anything else that can be witnessed at sea—except, perhaps, a snowstorm. A mysterious portent came rolling onward; afar off it looked like a pale grey wall of inconceivable height, but as it drew nearer, the wall resolved itself into a wild array of columns, and eddies, and whirlpools, and great full-bosomed clouds, that rolled and swam and rose and fell with maddening ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... deliberately sworn that they would tell and were telling it. The State loyalty as being a mental reservation evermore to abrogate the oath of National loyalty:—what is it but a modern reproduction of the old Jesuit portent? ...
— Thirteen Months in the Rebel Army • William G. Stevenson
... profound Etruscan read off to the believer his future fortunes in detail from the lightning and from the entrails of animals offered in sacrifice; and the more singular the language of the gods, the more startling the portent or prodigy, the more confidently did he declare what they foretold and the means by which it was possible to avert the mischief. Thus arose the lore of lightning, the art of inspecting entrails, the interpretation ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Pleiades, and the long trail of the Milky Way. As a little child hanging in the trees, or sprawled beside a tepee, she had made friends with them all, even as she learned and loved all the signs of the earth beneath—the twist of a blade of grass, the portent in the cry of a river-hen, the colour of a star, the smell of a wind. She had known Nature then, now she knew men. And knowing them, and having suffered, and sick at heart as she was, standing by this window in the dead of night, the cry that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... fallen. And they went pattering softly over the plain, and their eyes shone in the dark, and crossed and recrossed one another in their courses. Suddenly there became manifest in the midst of the plain that fearful portent of the presence of Man—a little flickering fire. And the children of Earth who prowl abroad by night looked sideways at it and snarled and edged away; all but the wolves, who came a little nearer, for it was winter and the wolves were hungry, and they had come in thousands from the mountains, ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... this smallness of spirit, was only temporary, he assured himself; it would soon pass, and then he would find the strength to go to her with his customary smile, his mask in place. Now, however, he was empty, cheerless, frightened by the portent of this new thing. It could have but one significance—it meant that he would lose his "sister," that she would have no ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... mother's heart when the child instructed her as to what might be looked for at his bedside; she used all her emphasis in assuring him that no man with two heads would ever trouble those innocent eyes, for there was no such portent anywhere on earth. There is no such heart-oppressing task as the making of these assurances to a child, for whom who knows what portents are actually in wait! She found him, however, cowering with laughter, not with dread, lest the man with two heads should see or overhear. ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... clouds are breaking from the crystal ball, Breaking and clearing: and I look to fall. When the cold winds and airs of portent sweep, My spirit ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... mine image came the maiden's face, And when he saw her, straight the warrior said Turning about unto an earthly maid, 'O, lady Venus, thou art kind to me After so much of wandering on the sea To show thy very body to me here,' But when this impious saying I did hear, I sent them a great portent, for straightway I quenched the fire, and no priest on that day Could light it any more for all his prayer. "So must she fall, so must her golden hair Flash no more through the city, or her feet Be seen like lilies moving down the street; ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... visits hither and thither in a very rapid flying manner. Thus I find he had made one flying visit to the Cumberland Lake-region in 1828, and got sight of Wordsworth; and in the same year another flying one to Paris, and seen with no undue enthusiasm the Saint-Simonian Portent just beginning to preach for itself, and France in general simmering under a scum of impieties, levities, Saint-Simonisms, and frothy fantasticalities of all kinds, towards the boiling-over which soon made the Three Days of July famous. But by far the most important ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... is the first application of the celestial portent to this particular comparison. Yet Milton's "imperial ensign" waves defiant behind his impregnable lines, and even Campbell flaunts his "meteor flag" in Waller's face. Gray's bard might be sent to the lock-up, but even ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... of the encinal I felt a breeze spring up, that started the windmill. Casting my eyes upward, I noticed that the wind had veered to a quarter directly opposite to that of the customary coast breeze. Not being able to read aright the portent of the change in the wind, I had to learn from that native-born son of the soil: "Tomas," he cried, riding up excitedly, "in three days it will rain! Listen to me: Pasquale Arispe says that in three days the arroyos on the hacienda of Don Lancelot will run like a mill-race. See, ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... just, inevitable scorn, Strong child of righteous judgment, whom with grief The rent heart bears, and wins not yet relief, Seeing of its pain so dire a portent born, Must thou not spare one sheaf of all the corn, One doit of all the treasure? not one sheaf, Not one poor doit of all? not one dead leaf Of all that fell and left behind a thorn? Is man so strong that ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... anchors, Pauthier's text has just the opposite of the G.T. which we have preferred: "Les nefs du Manzi portent si grans ancres de fust, que il seuffrent moult de grans fortunes aus plajes" De Mailla says the Chinese consider their ironwood anchors to be much better than those of iron, because the latter are subject to strain. (Lett. Edif. XIV. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... distance from their homes. At last, to their horror, they discovered that the recumbent figure was a livid corpse, swathed in a blood-stained winding-sheet. {5a} Many thought that this apparition was a portent of the deaths connected with the ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... settlement for the child, waiting for her with mixed emotions,—a trembling merge of love and fear, with something, indeed, of awe for this woman-child of her mother, who had come to him so deviously and with a secret significance so mighty of portent to his own soul. When they brought her in at last, he had to brace ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... Day, Day of Festival and Frolic,—once. Now Day of Portent, of Threats and the Evil Eye. Such is the miracle worked by Steam Engine, Mechanics, Quick ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... despaired of, I would by the same act bestow a benefit on all men and return one to him; seeing that for such characters death is the only remedy, and that he who never will return to himself, had best leave himself. However, such wickedness as this is uncommon, and is always regarded as a portent, as when the earth opens, or when fires break forth from caves under the sea; so let us leave it, and speak of those vices which we can hate without shuddering at them. As for the ordinary bad man, whom I can find in the marketplace of any town, who is feared ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... folly, said, "Your importunity, wife, has prevailed, listen to a dreadful and portentous matter. It has been told us by the priests that a lark has been seen flying in the air with a golden helmet and spear: it is this portent that we are considering and discussing with the augurs, as to whether it be a good or bad omen. But say nothing about it." Having said these words he went into the Forum. But his wife seized on the very first of her maids that entered the room, and smote her breast, and tore her ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... or their portent, the effect was startling. Steele's bulky assailant paused, remained stock-still, his purpose arrested, all his anger ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... end of the High Street, he had proposed that they should walk in the Gardens. The broad walk was full of the colour of Spring and its perfume, the thick grass was like a carpet beneath their feet; they had lingered by a pond, and she had watched the little yachts, carrying each a portent of her own success or failure. The Albert Hall curved over the tops of the trees, and sheep strayed through the deep May grass in Arcadian peacefulness; but the most vivid impression was when they had come upon ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... blacker, the superstitious fears of Lafaele increased, and every day some new portent was reported. "On May 16," says the diary, "Lafaele and Araki reported that while walking on the road they met Louis riding on my horse Musu. What was their surprise and terror when they reached home to find that he had ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... clouds gathered thickly and grew threatening. They were unmistakable in their portent. War was meant, and we heard the martial thunder rumbling ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... its mistress, Pallas Athene. If he finds a serpent in his house, he sets up an altar to it. If he pass at a four-cross-way an anointed stone, he pours oil on it, kneels down, and adores it. If a rat has nibbled one of his sacks he takes it for a fearful portent—a superstition which Cicero also mentions. He dare not sit on a tomb, because it would be assisting at his own funeral. He purifies endlessly his house, saying that Hecate—that is, the moon—has exercised ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... all the inmates of the convent paused in their sorrow to rejoice in the happy portent of the death and burial of one whom they loyally believed to be no less entitled to beatification than Catherine herself. Her miracles may not have been of the irreducible protoplastic order, but they had been miracles to the practical Californian mind, ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... were the tongue, lungs, heart, liver, gall bladder, spleen, kidneys, and caul. If the head of the right lobe of the liver was absent, it was considered a very bad omen. If certain fissures existed, or were absent, it was a portent of the first importance. But the Romans were a very practical people, and not easily deterred from their purpose. So if one sacrifice failed they would try another and another, until the portents were favorable. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... unattainableness in the very spell that made her beautiful. At her side, and familiarly attentive to her, sat a gentleman of whom I remember only a hard outline of the nose and forehead, and such a monstrous portent of a beard that you could discover no symptom of a mouth, except, when he opened it to speak, or to put in a morsel of food. Then, indeed, you suddenly became aware of a cave hidden behind the impervious and darksome shrubbery. There could be no doubt ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Sonnet is a moment's monument,— Memorial from the Soul's eternity To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be, Whether for lustral rite or dire portent, Of its own arduous fulness reverent: Carve it in ivory or in ebony, As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see Its flowering crest impearled and orient. A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals The soul,—its converse, to what Power 'tis due:— Whether for tribute ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs handle him without gloves, henceforward," remarked the old sexton, grimly smiling. "But did your reverence hear of the portent that was seen last night?—a great red letter in the sky,—the letter A, which we interpret to stand for Angel. For, as our good Governor Winthrop was made an angel this past night, it was doubtless held fit that there should be ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... preceded him along a passage and then, taking a door on the left, found herself surprisingly in the shop, behind a counter. The shop was lighted only by a few diamond-shaped holes in the central shutters, and it had a troubling aspect of portent, with its merchandise mysteriously enveloped in pale sheets, and its chairs wrong side up, and its deep-shadowed corners. Destiny might have been lurking in one of those baffling corners. From above, through the ceiling, came the vibration of some machine at work, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... observed her act, although he yielded automatically to his gentler instincts and withheld the knife-hack. To him, human life had dwarfed to microscopic proportions before this colossal portent of higher life from within the distances of the sidereal universe. As had she been a dog, he kicked the ugly little bushwoman to her feet and compelled her to start with him on an encirclement of the base. Part way around, he encountered horrors. ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... seemed to ring a bell for silence; seemed to carry with it some hidden portent that stopped idle conversation as a striking clock that marks the ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... a burning city Sets now the red sun's dome. See, mystic firebrands sparkle There on each store and home. See how the golden gateway Burns with the day to be— Torch-bearing fiends of portent Loom o'er ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... to give? Thine is the splendour of all things that live, And this thy pain the price of life to thee— The sacrament that binds to the beloved, The chain that holds though mountains be removed, The portent of thine immortality. ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... if black bats were flying about his brain, each charged with a different portent of disaster. Once more the unreality of the whole affair overwhelmed him. How could he have been so fatuous as to believe that he had really won such a woman? He remembered his first impression: that she was on a plane above, apart. They hadn't an interest in common, not even ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... died before the visible fulfilment of the great promise of salvation. To them, to be sure, or rather to many of them, not to all, merciful helps were granted. The unseen and the hoped-for was sometimes, not always, made more tangible to them by the grant of some sign and token, some portent or miracle, by the way. But the careful Bible-reader knows how very little such things are represented in the holy histories as being the "daily bread" of the life of the old believers. Even in the lives where they occur most often they come at long and difficult intervals, ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... environment: no wish was left in it for the assertion of its freedom. To this day, the south-east, save where leavened and permeated by Celtic influences, hugs its chains and loves them. It produces the strange portent of the Conservative working-man, who yearns to be led ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... should not have been written found that it was necessary to say it loudly and to say it at great length. Their very violence showed their sense of Chesterton as a peril even when they abused anyone who felt him to be a portent. It was not the kind of contempt that is really bestowed on ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... and beg without the delay of a moment as soon as they see your unwonted figure. Let it be taken for granted that you give all you can; some form of refusal becomes necessary at last, and the gentlest—it is worth while to remember—is the most effectual. An indignant tourist, one who to the portent of a puggaree which, perhaps, he wears on a grey day, adds that of ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is made to understand him; and the beggars beg dismayed but unalarmed, uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture. They beg by rote, thinking of something ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... of timber, and came upon a small party of men whose attitudes even in the dimming light conveyed a subtle suggestion of portent. Some sat their horses, with one leg thrown across the pommel. Others stood in the road, and a bottle of white liquor was passing in and out among them. At the distance they recognized the gray mule, though even the fact that ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... of such mighty events, so deeply affecting the destiny of the nation which worshipped them in a thousand temples; and an earthquake, which had recently occurred at Delos, the sacred island of Apollo, where such a visitation had never been known before, was interpreted as a portent ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... through certain waste lands near Sardis, met with an infinite number of serpents, which the horses devoured with great appetite, and which Herodotus says was a prodigy of ominous portent ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... for she had paid little attention to the trail, beyond giving the horse direction, trusting to the animal's wisdom, accepting the risks as a matter-of-course. It was the imminence of violence that had aroused her, the portent of a lawless deed that might result in tragedy. She had told Mrs. Levins that she was doing this thing for her sake, but she knew better. She did consider the woman, but she realized that her dominating ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... thought of George, but not as an actor in last night's scenes; her memory swung back, as his had often done, to the autumn night when they sat together in the heather, and his figure and hers became huge with portent. She had thought he was the tinker, and so, indeed, he was, and he no doubt had mistaken her for Miriam, as latterly he had mistaken his own needs. No, she was not altogether responsible. And why had Rupert told her that tale? And why, if she must have a tinker, could ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... night on the roof! What a revel there was of brave scout doings, of gentlemanly conduct!—all witnessed by a large, fat moon. He wigwagged messages of great portent to phantom scouts who were in dire need. He helped blind men across streets that ran down the whole length of the roof. He held back pressing crowds while the police were rendered speechless with admiration. ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... peaceful gentlemen, let nothing you dismay, But—leave your sports a little while—the dead are borne this way! Armies dead and Cities dead, past all count or care. God rest you, merry gentlemen, what portent see you there? Singing.—Break ground for a wearied host That have no ground to keep. Give them the rest that they covet most, And who shall next to sleep, good sirs, In such ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... of a section of our fortifications, the segment of a circle, with the triangle penetrating through from the north. These shapes were distinctly defined. Could the operations beneath have produced this phenomenon? was it accidental? or a portent of ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... the wood. It seemed as if he was so thoroughly convinced of a divine manifestation against him, that he despised any exceptional scepticism as utterly beneath his notice or attention—thoroughly engrossed, as he appeared to be, with the terrible sanction of a portent of some coming retribution. His silence in some degree distressed me, as I thought he resented my levity in commenting upon his convictions; so it was with some relief that Dr. Rogers came in and sat down at the table, apparently to wait for a call ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... on, sah. Dey had 'portent business, an' wouldn't likely wait 'roun' here jest ter help a nigger. Ain't ennybody ben here ter see me, no-how, an' I 'spects I'se eradicated from dey mem'ry—I ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... "Read the portent thus," she answered: "they shall be united, but not here. Yon is a Spirit bridge, and, see: the waters of Death foam ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... I choose for the theme of my lay Is a portent "conspicuous even to-day," For, though she was freely condemned and abhorred, She was never suppressed and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... could not finish her sentence; she clasped her hands and hid her face on the back of her armchair, quite overcome by this dreadful portent. ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... am answered! When a king asks twice, and has A question as an answer to his question, It is a portent. What! they ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... of the Merrimac was to follow close upon her birth; she was the portent of a few weeks only. For, during a short time past, there had been also rapidly building in a Connecticut yard the Northern marvel, the famous Monitor. When the ingenious Swede, John Ericsson, proposed his scheme for an impregnable ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... masses of moss, winding with the faint light in our hands through the awful ways and avenues of the catacombs. The scene grew real to me, as I mused. Alone, what should I fear? These silent hosts encamped around would but have cheered their child. But with her, every murmur becomes a portent of danger, every current of air gives me fresh tremors; as we pass casual openings into the sky, the vault of air, the glint of stars, shall seem a malignant face; I fancy to hear impossible footsteps behind us, some ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... What portent from the mid oracular place Hath smitten thee so like a curse that flies Wingless, to waste men with ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... island, distant a full day's sailing, which was barren of all forms of living things, and contained only a single gigantic rock of divine origin and majestic appearance. Many persons, the villagers asserted, had sailed to the island in the hope of learning the portent of the rock, but none ever returned, and they themselves avoided coming even within sight of it; for the sacred stone, they declared, exercised an evil influence over their ships, and would, if permitted, draw them out of their course and towards itself. For this reason ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... too well do I understand the dream's portent and monition: my DOCTRINE is in danger; tares ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... prosperous fishing season a herring-barrel appears in the midst of a storm-cloud; and at a place called Columkille's Strand, a place of marsh and mire, an ancient boat, with St. Columba himself, comes floating in from sea on a moonlight night: a portent of a brave harvesting. They have their dread portents too. Some few seasons ago a fisherman saw, far on the horizon, renowned Hy Brazel, where he who touches shall find no more labour or care, nor cynic ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... marvel of man's skill, That stood within a vale of hollow ground, And bulk'd scarce smaller than the bitter-hill,— The common barrow that the dead men fill Who died in the long leaguer,—not of earth, Was this new portent, but of tree, and still The Trojans stood, and marvell'd 'mid ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... told that the lightning had been driven for leagues underground, and had dragged at its destroying tail loads of laughing human beings, and if they had then been told that the people alluded to this pulverising portent chirpily as "The Twopenny Tube," they would have called down the fire of Heaven on us as a race of half-witted atheists. Probably they would have been ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... of his distant and repellent attitude, Mlle. Blaye de Tartas made him her sole heir, to the violent wrath of a questionable old party known to infamy as the Sar Torrevieja, the "King of the Sorcerers." This malevolent old portent, whose gray and crafty face was often seen in the Rue M. le Prince during the life of Mlle. de Tartas had, it seems, fully expected to enjoy her small wealth after her death; and when it appeared that she had left him only the contents of the gloomy old ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... terror, rage, and despair. He passed an hour or two of agony in his own room, and came down, looking pale and exhausted. But, indeed, the little Dumas, though he does not pass for a moralist, says truly and well, "Les amours ille'gitimes portent toujours des fruits amers;" and Ned Severne's turn was come to suffer a few of the pangs he had inflicted gayly on more than one woman ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... Lakely and of the possibilities the night might hold; for more than once before, the weight of the 'St. George's Gazette', with Lakely at its back, had turned the political scales. To be marked by him as a coming man was at any time a favorable portent; to be singled out by him at the present juncture was momentous. A thrill of expectancy, almost of excitement, passed through him as he surveyed his appearance preparatory to ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... and smooth purple legs on the box before them, Madam Weatherstone and Mrs. Weatherstone rolled home silently, a silence of thunderous portent. Another purple person opened the door for them, and when Madam Weatherstone said, "We will have tea on the terrace," it was ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... order, and to Christ. Prudence I learned, And sageness in the government of men, By me sore needed soon. O stately man, In all things great, in action and in thought, And plain as great! To Britain called, the Saint Trod down that great Pelagian Blasphemy, Chief portent of the age. But better far He loved his cell. There sat he vigil-worn, In cowl and dusky tunic hued like earth Whence issued man and unto which returns; I marvelled at his wrinkled brows, and hands Still tracing, enter or depart who would, From morn to ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... they talked, Paul noticed that Peter's eyes often rested with a troubled look upon his sister. In fact, it seemed to Paul that a black shadow of direful portent hung over ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... the book of fate, Hands may not unbind it; Eyes may search for truth till late, But will never find it—! Rising on the brow of night Like a portent of dismay, As the worlds in wild affright Track it on its direful way; Resting like a rainbow bar Where the curve and level meet, As the children chase it far O'er the sands with blistered feet; Sadly through the mist of ages Gazing on this life of fear, Doubtful shining on its ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... Conversation languished during the trip; a disturbed conscience on the part of the father, and on the part of Kay and her mother an intuition, peculiar to their sex and aroused by the doctor's comments, that events of more than ordinary portent had occurred that ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... on him as a portent and a terror; but he had no fear of Time. Indeed he was the foster-brother of Time, and so disdainful of the bitter god that he did not even disdain him; he leaped over the scythe, he dodged under it, and the sole occasions on which Time laughs is when he chances on ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... constitues doivent necessairement s'exprimer autrement que les hommes ordinaires. Il est impossible qu'avec des ames si differemment modifies ils ne portent pas dans l'expression de leurs sentiments et de leurs idees l'empreinte de ces modifications. Si cette empreinte echappe a ceux qui n'ont aucune notion de cette maniere d'etre, elle ne peut echapper a ceux qui la ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... light. A huge, furry, reeking mass rising right in the wolverine's path from behind a tree, towering over him, almost mountainous to his eyes, like the very shape of doom! Himself hurling sideways, and rolling over and over, snarling, to prevent the crowning disaster of collision with this terrible portent! A blow, two blows, with enormous paws whose claws gleamed like skewers, whistling half-an-inch above his ducked head! Jaws, monstrous and wet, grabbing at him in enraged confusion, and rumblings deep down in the inside of the thing that ran cold lightning-sparks all up his spine. ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... will be a deuce of a bill to pay," says Clive, with a groan whereof J. J. knew the portent; for the young men had the confidence of youth one in another. Clive was accustomed to pour out his full heart to any crony who was near him; and indeed had he spoken never a word, his growing attachment ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... starvation? Patty and I were afraid we would lose mother, too. But starvation was menacing the whole party, and she was roused to new strength in a desire to protect her children from that fate. And even more ominous in their portent of disaster, before us rose the snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains, which we must cross before the heavy snows fell, and the question was, could we do it? We left our wagon behind, which was too heavy ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... connoitre la cause physique du premier individu de chaque espece, que d'assigner aussi physiquement la cause de l'existence de la matiere ou de l'univers entier. C'est au moins ce que le resultat de mes connaissances et de mes reflexions me portent a penser. S'il existe beaucoup de varietes produites par l'effet des circonstances, ces varietes ne denaturent point les especes; mais on se trompe, sans doute souvent, en indiquant comme espece, ce qui n'est ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... pitiless night—a night the superstitious might well associate with the portent of the downfall of the house around which the storm seemed to rage. The rain beat upon the windows, and the wind with its invisible arms clasped the old farmstead as if to wrench it from its foundations and scatter broadcast its gray stones over the wild moor on the fringe of which it ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... in Aulis, freighted with trouble for Priam and the Trojans; and we round about a spring were offering on the holy altars unblemished hecatombs to the immortals, beneath a fair plane-tree whence flowed bright water, when there was seen a great portent: a snake blood-red on the back, terrible, whom the god of Olympus himself had sent forth to the light of day, sprang from beneath the altar and darted to the plane-tree. Now there were there the brood of a sparrow, tender ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... for the first time by the excited Andy—never later recalled without a thrill as he realized from that experience its terrific portent. ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... strange return of Ugh-lomi, a wonderful animal seen galloping far across the river, that suddenly changed into two animals, a horse and a man. Following this portent, the vision of Ugh-lomi on the farther bank of the river.... Yes, it was all plain to her. Uya was punishing them, because they had not ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... popularity of such writers as Meredith and Hardy, Ibsen and Nietzsche, Maeterlinck and Walt Whitman, constitutes a writing on the wall the significance of which cannot be gainsaid. The vogue alone of Mr. Bernard Shaw, apostle to the Philistines, is a portent sufficiently conclusive. To regard Mr. Shaw either as a great dramatist or an original philosopher is, of course, absurd. He, of all men, must surely be the last to imagine such a vain thing about himself; but even should he be ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... if he were lying beneath the earth, enveloped in his shroud, still unconscious of bitter toils. Would that the dark wave, when the maiden Helle perished, had overwhelmed Phrixus too with the ram; but the dire portent even sent forth a human voice, that it might cause to Alcimede sorrows and ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... out, &c.] Tunica Coccinia solebat pridie quam dimicandum esset, supra praetorium poni, quasi admonito, & indicium futurae pugnae. [The praetors wore scarlet tunics on the day before the battle, for a warning, and a portent of the future. ] ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... returning with the Sanitatsmachine, turns it on from behind, and its pinkish shower, goldened by a ray of sunlight, falls around the LITTLE MAN's head, transfiguring it as he stands with eyes upraised to see whence the portent comes.] ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... looked like a crucified malefactor, polluted the air with hideous profanities. He cursed everything in nature and beyond it, and no amount of clouts on the head would stem the torrent. Sometimes he would fall to howling like a wolf, and folk ran to their cottage doors to see the portent. Groups of children followed us from every wayside clachan, so that we gave great entertainment to the dwellers in Lothian that day. The thing infuriated the dragoons, for it made them a laughing-stock, and the ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... and debauched. Every gift of the gods is sometimes abused; but wit and fine talents by a natural law gravitate towards virtue; accidents may drive them out of their proper direction; but such accidents are a sort of prodigies, and, like other prodigies, it is an alarming omen, and of dire portent to the times. For if virtue cannot keep to her allegiance those men, who in their hearts confess her divine right, and know the value of her laws, on whose fidelity and obedience can she depend? May ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... nature with a bland disposition, gradually brings himself to inflict misery on his fellow-creatures with indifference, with satisfaction, and at length with a hideous rapture, deserves to be regarded as a portent of wickedness; and such a man was Barere. The history of his downward progress is full of instruction. Weakness, cowardice, and fickleness were born with him; the best quality which he received from nature was a good temper. These, it is true, are not very promising ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thought was an antelope moved swiftly through the waves of rippling grass. When she turned east she saw a plume of black smoke roll across the sky and the tops of three elevators above the edge of the plain. It was a portent, a warning of momentous change, in which she and her husband must play their part. What that part would be she could not tell, but the curtain was going up, and on the whole she approved the stage ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... his first novel, and though he is still on the sunny side of thirty, this arresting story is a promising portent of what we may expect from the powerful pen of this blind man ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... was the doom meted out to the bush-handlers, the medicine-men, the rain-compellers, erewhile so inscrutably potent for working out the bliss or the bale of friend or enemy. "Lo, from no mountain-top, from no ceiba-hollow in the forest recesses, has issued any interposing sign, any avenging portent, to vindicate the Spirit of Darkness so foully outraged in the hitherto inviolate person of his chosen minister! Verily, even the powers of the midnight are impotent against these invaders from beyond the mighty salt-water! Here, huddled together ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... they reflected. As the lion, the king of beasts, when he enters among the herd of beasts, drives from their minds all thoughts of common things, as now they watch the true form of their kind, so those Rishi masters assembled there, suddenly perceiving the miraculous portent, were struck with awe and fearful gladness, as they gazed with earnest eyes and hands conjoined. The men and women, engaged in various occupations, beholding him, with unchanged attitudes, gazed as the gods look on King ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... succeeded in a short time in raising a formidable opposition amongst the workmen in the surrounding districts. When the local school-mistress, a girl of seventeen, found a temporary grave in this sort of Black Hole of Calcutta the wells of Kushva and Taighill became a dreadful portent to the ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... bent down on one knee, and as he did so his magnificently jewelled tulwar fell forward naturally enough from the point of the scabbard touching the carpet right between us, and he started as if the sword between us had come as a strange portent to show that we were enemies, always to be kept apart by the ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... family. Perhaps this form of infanticide is a policy derived from ancestors who found it necessary. In the kingdom of Apollonia (Guinea) the tenth child was always buried alive; never a Decimus was allowed to stand in the way of the nine seniors. The birth of twins is an evil portent to the Mpongwes, as it is in many parts of Central Africa, and even in the New World; it also involves the idea of moral turpitude, as if the woman were one of the lower animals, capable of superfetation. There is no greater insult to a man, ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... blind to-day to the menace of the revolution as it was blind in the past to its own God-given opportunity. It cannot see how precarious is its position, cannot comprehend the power and the portent of the revolution. It goes on its placid way, prattling sweet ideals and dear moralities, and scrambling sordidly for ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... I began to write. Within two days I had written about fifteen thousand words—for the most part on the subject of reforms and how to effect them. One of the documents prepared at that time contained grandiloquent passages that were a portent of coming events—though I was ignorant of the fact. In writing about my project I said, "Whether I am a tool of God or a toy of the devil, time alone will tell; but there will be no misunderstanding Time's answer if I succeed in doing one-tenth of the good things ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... see-sawed from one team to the other. It was not a pitchers' battle, though both men worked to the limit of skill and endurance. They were hit hard. Dazzling plays kept the score down and the innings short. Over the fields hung the portent of something to come, every player, every spectator felt the subtle baseball chance; each inning seemed to lead closer and more thrillingly up to the climax. But at the end of the seventh, with the score tied six and six, with daring steals, hard hits and splendid plays, enough to have made ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... lashes hung above her dreamy eyes, Like twin clouds of stormy portent balanced over limpid deeps; Like the wings of birds of passage seen against the hazy skies; Like the petal o'er the pollen of the flow'ret when ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... see what different definitions have been given of miracles, and that the definition is not so easy a thing as one might at first suppose. All depends on the point of view which we take. If we look only at the outward fact, a miracle is a wonderful event, a portent, something out of the common course of nature, and unparalleled in common human experience. But if we look at it as regards the character of him who works the miracle, it then becomes a supernatural work, or a preternatural work, having a divine ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... stillness thrilled. It was the hush of portent, the hush of watchfulness, the hush of a ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... till dark. A negro fisherman, living in a lonely hut in a little bay near by, had seen the start and was on the lookout for some sign. He called to his wife just as the sun was about to set. They had watched the strange portent ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Australian verse unacquainted with Mr. J. Le Gay Brereton's work has a real pleasure in store. The poems in this collection are unique, and as the Bulletin says, "Such careful work, so delicately done, is a rare portent in our ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... from the battery was connected with a firework bomb, which, when Tuxall pressed the switch, exploded, releasing a flaming 'dropper.' About the time the 'dropper' reached the earth Tuxall lighted up his well-oiled barn. All Harwick, having had its attention attracted by the explosion, and seen the portent with its own eyes, believed that a huge meteor had fired the building. So Tuxall and Company had a well attested wonder from the heavens. That's the little plan which Bailey's presence threatened to wreck. Is it your opinion that the ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of the tabby cat's appearance with six kittens may have been a portent either of good or of evil. As you know, I am not a superstitious person. I smile at those whimsical fancies which figure so conspicuously in many people's lives, such as the howling of dogs, the flickering of a candle, the arrangement of the grounds in a cup, the cracking of a mirror, ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... flow—the every-day people, I am sure, will not take in the blackness of this transaction at this stage of my story, but before it is ended I will lay this and many more of an equally hellish nature before them in such A B C simplicity that all can read the portent as clearly as the Prophet Daniel read the writing on the wall in the banquet-hall ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... of those mystical explorers, of peculiarly modern temper, who are perhaps most essentially represented in the plays and poetry and philosophies of Mr. Yeats and M. Maeterlinck: those who dwell—it has before been said—"upon the confines of a crepuscular world whose every phase is full of subtle portent, and who are convinced (in the phrase of M. Maeterlinck himself) 'that there are in man many regions more fertile, more profound, and more interesting than those of his reason or his intelligence.'" It is an order of temperament for which the things of the marginal world of the ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... skin tingles to an insult no one dreamt of paying. I make no doubt a great many of your Gaelic beliefs are sheer paganism or Popery or relics of the same, but the charm of seven has a Scriptural warrant that as minister of the Gospel I have some respect for, even when twisted into a portent for a band of broken men in the ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... had always supported the Bourbon system of Government, it was hardly strange if the royalists were hurt at receiving neither assistance nor even sympathy from the Austrian squadron which witnessed their destruction. The remark was acute; even Austria was, in fact, tired of the Bourbons of Naples; a portent of their not distant doom. But it was not likely that the royalists should appreciate the phlegmatic attitude ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... lunched, finished their business, and Washington went away. When this perfectly insignificant fact was published in the papers the next morning, the South burst into a storm of indignation and abuse. Some of the Southern journals saw, in what was a mere routine incident, a terrible portent, foreboding that Roosevelt planned to put the negroes back to control the Southern whites. Others alleged the milder motive that he was fishing for negro votes. The common type of fire-eaters saw in it one of Roosevelt's unpleasant ways of having fun by insulting the South. And Southern cartoonists ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... a portent. There was nothing in him. Just about that time the word Thrift was to the fore. You know the power of words. We pass through periods dominated by this or that word—it may be development, or it may be competition, ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... one egg miraculously hatched within ten hours. The little lonely yellow ball of down went cheeping along behind, following its mother as best it could. What, then, had happened to the established period of incubation? For an instant the thing was like a portent, and I was near joining Em'ly in her horrid surprise, when I saw how it all was. The Virginian had taken an egg from a hen which had already been sitting for ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... him, for, in truth, I only asked with a half hope that he might have some other interpretation of this portent than that of violent death, which seemed the plain meaning of it—that is, if he saw aught, and I had no reason to disbelieve him. I tried to think that his glance had met the sun for a moment before he looked on the king; but I could not think it, for in the hall was ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... Amidst his fellows: "From whose evil act Is this the fruit? Hath worship not been paid To mighty Manibhadra? Gave we not The reverence due to Vaishravan, that King Of all the Yakshas? Was not offering made At outset to the spirits which impede? Is this the evil portent of the birds? Were the stars adverse? or what else hath fall'n?" And others said, wailing for friends and goods:— "Who was that woman, with mad eyes, that came Into our camp, ill-favored, hardly cast In mortal ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... in the conflict with the Harpies, one of those half-human birds had threatened the Trojans with dire sufferings. In particular she predicted that before their wanderings ceased they should be pressed by hunger to devour their tables. This portent now came true; for as they took their scanty meal, seated on the grass, the men placed their hard biscuit on their laps, and put thereon whatever their gleanings in the woods supplied. Having dispatched the latter they finished by eating the crusts. Seeing which, ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... clothing, if they might but procure the works of Burns." This first edition only brought the author L20 direct return, but it introduced him to the literati of Edinburgh, whither he was invited, and where he was welcomed, feasted, admired and patronized. He appeared as a portent among the scholars of the northern capital and its university, and manifested, according to Mr Lockhart, "in the whole strain of his bearing, his belief that in the society of the most eminent men of his nation he was where he was entitled ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Sun that brief December day Rose cheerless over hills of gray, And, darkly circled, gave at noon A sadder light than waning moon. Slow tracing down the thickening sky Its mute and ominous prophecy, A portent seeming less than threat, It sank from sight before it set. A chill no coat, however stout, Of homespun stuff could quite shut out. A hard, dull bitterness of cold, That checked, mid-vein, the circling ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... by a vision. Thus doubtfully, amidst rumour and portent, cloud and spiritual light, comes Arthur: "from the great deep" he comes, and in as strange fashion, at the end, "to the great deep he goes"—a king to be accepted in faith or rejected by doubt. Arthur and his ideal are objects of ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... from the inmost heart outwardly, and at last manifesting Heaven's dreadful judgment by the visible presence of the letter. The reader may choose among these theories. We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office, erase its deep print out of our own brain, where long meditation has fixt it in very ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... with a quarter of a line in the Dunciad. But it attracted some notice on account of the situation of the writer. For, a hundred and twenty years ago, an eclogue or a lampoon written by a Highland chief was a literary portent, [372] ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... together with the fact that these two officers were only doing their duty. He invited them to eat and drink. They accepted the favour, our good spirits revived, and we informally discussed the new situation and its portent. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... shock of his life when he met the gaze of those contrasting eyes. Yet he did not believe that his strange feeling came from sight of different-colored eyes. There was an instinct or portent in that meeting. ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... mortal men with fears to fill, Whene'er the moody sire, to wreak his hate On realms or towns deserving of their fate, Hurls down diseases, death and deadly care, And terrifies the guilty world with war. One sister plague if these from heav'n he sent, To fright Juturna with a dire portent. The pest comes whirling down: by far more slow Springs the swift arrow from the Parthian bow, Or Cydon yew, when, traversing the skies, And drench'd in pois'nous juice, the sure destruction flies. With such a sudden ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... had put out to sea from thence, Delos was moved, not having been shaken (as the Delians reported to me) either before that time or since that down to my own time; and this no doubt the god 8601 manifested as a portent to men of the evils that were about to be; for in the time of Dareios the son of Hystaspes and Xerxes the son of Dareios and Artoxerxes the son of Xerxes, three generations following upon one another, there happened more ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... fatal prey, In airy circles wings his painful way, Floats on the winds, and rends the heav'ns with cries. Amid the host the fallen serpent lies. They, pale with terror, mark its spires unroll'd, And Jove's portent with beating hearts behold." ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... luck, Bodo, quaking at the knees, might even behold a portent new to his experience, the emperor's elephant. Haroun El Raschid, the great Sultan of the 'Arabian Nights' had sent it to Charles, and it accompanied him on all his progresses. Its name was 'Abu-Lubabah', which is an Arabic word and means 'the ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... a tire son nom de la meme origine. Elle est nommee dans les vieux Ecrivains, Auga, Augam, et Aucum; et dans les auteurs Anglois Ou, d'ou est forme le nom d'Eu. De cette meme origine vient le nom d'Au, qu'on a depuis ecrit et prononce O, et que portent plusieurs Seigneuries de Normandie et d'ailleurs, et qui est le meme que celui d'Ou. Ou est une Comte qui a appartenue a ce Robert, que Robert du Mont qualifie Comte d'Ou. Ces mots d'Eu, d'Au, et d'Ou, se trouvent encore dans la composition de plusieurs noms de terres et de Seigneuries. ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman |
