"Vicissitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The world's enlightener vanishes, and day On all sides wasteth, suddenly the sky, Erewhile irradiate only with his beam, Is yet again unfolded, putting forth Innumerable lights wherein one shines. Of such vicissitude in heaven I thought, As the great sign, that marshaleth the world And the world's leaders, in the blessed beak Was silent; for that all those living lights, Waxing in splendour, burst forth into songs, Such ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... then dawning heresy had become broad day; when Luther had gone to his rest—and there had gathered about his name the hate which mean men feel for an enemy who has proved too strong for them—a passing vicissitude in the struggle brought the emperor at the head ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... place to reverie, and the whole rapt being abandoned itself like an Orphic worshipper to the guidance of an unseen mysteriarch. This acquiescence in the swift succession of calm to fury and stress, resembled the quiet which may be conceived to follow sudden death; the heightened sense of vicissitude in things summoned up and sustained a solemn mood. All the while that we lay charmed and half oppressed in this atmosphere as of an under-world, the clouds were drawing forward on their course; and as their last fringe ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... as a whole bears other testimony which is worth considering here. Through every vicissitude of women's education there have always been the few who were exceptional in mental and moral strength, and they have held on their way, and achieved a great deal, and left behind them names deserving of honour. Such were Maria Gaetana Agnesi, who was invited by the Pope and the university ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... may please;' and if it does, we will use our 'selectest influence' to induce him to write out for us a series of papers containing his complete autobiography, which we have good reason to believe would overflow with romance and strange vicissitude: 'I was raised,' he writes, 'as we western folks term it, in a small village some fifteen miles from Boston, and when about sixteen years of age I paid a visit to the metropolis for the first time in my life. When I first arrived there I spent some hours ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... the sound. All at her work the village maiden sings; Nor, while she turns the giddy wheel around Revolves the sad vicissitude of things."' ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... and at length burst out into passionate exclamations: 'What,' says he, 'and where am I? Am I, indeed, HAMET; that son of Solyman who divided the dominion of Persia with his brother, and who possessed the love of ALMEIDA alone? Dreadful vicissitude! I am now an outcast, friendless and forlorn; without an associate, and without a dwelling: for me the cup of adversity overflows, and the last dregs of sorrow have been wrung out for my portion: the powers not only of the earth, but of the air, ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... however rude the sound; She feels no biting pang the while she sings, Nor, as she turns the giddy wheel around, Revolves the sad vicissitude of things." ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... which still bears the name of Ensenada de Cortes, west of Batabano and opposite to the island of Pinos. From thence, believing he should better escape the snares laid for him by the governor, Velasquez, he passed almost clandestinely to the coast of Mexico. Strange vicissitude of events! the empire of Montezuma was shaken by a handful of men who, from the western extremity of the island of Cuba, landed on the coast of Yucatan; and in our days, three centuries later, Yucatan, now a part of the new confederation of the free states of Mexico, has nearly ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... worked, and was alike inaccessible to artifice and love; a versatile, formidable, indefatigable mind, soft, and ductile enough to be instantaneously moulded into all forms; guarded enough to lose itself in none; and strong enough to endure every vicissitude of fortune. A greater master in reading and in winning men's hearts never existed than William. Not that, after the fashion of courts, his lips avowed a servility to which his proud heart gave the lie; but because he was neither too sparing nor too ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... I was unwilling to believe that in no region of the world, or at no period could these ideas be realized. It was plain that the nations of Europe were tending to greater depravity, and would be the prey of perpetual vicissitude. All individual attempts at their reformation would be fruitless. He therefore who desired the diffusion of right principles, to make a just system be adopted by a whole community, must ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... hospital, I wandered in a sympathetic mood; Where face to face with wormwood and with gall, With wrecks of pain and stern vicissitude, The eye unused to human misery Might view ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... over-fondly set On throwing off incumbrances, to seek In man, and in the frame of social life, 35 Whate'er there is desirable and good Of kindred permanence, unchanged in form And function, or, through strict vicissitude Of life and death, revolving. Above all Were re-established now those watchful thoughts 40 Which, seeing little worthy or sublime In what the Historian's pen so much delights To blazon—power and energy detached From moral purpose—early tutored me To look with feelings ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... interchangeably execute the office of supreme magistrate, and each in succession, with the ensigns of royalty, should offer the solemn sacrifices and dispatch public business for the space of six hours by day and six by night; which vicissitude and equal distribution of power would preclude all rivalry amongst the senators and envy from the people, when they should behold one, elevated to the degree of a king, leveled within the space of a day to the condition ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... transacted, and how many sharp bargains struck without the help of a common language. I am in the belief, which may be erroneous, that nobody is wronged in these trades. The taciturn storekeeper, who regards his customers with a stare of solemn amusement as Critturs born by some extraordinary vicissitude of nature to the use of a language that practically amounts to deafness and dumbness, never suffers his philosophical interest in them to affect his commercial efficiency; he drops them now and then a curt English phrase, or expressive Yankee idiom; he knows very well ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... Cawn- pore, the relief of Arrah, the death of poor Spottis-woode, and Sir Hugh Rose's hotspur, midland campaign. He was intent to hear; his brown face, strongly marked with small-pox, kindled and changed with each vicissitude. His eyes glowed with the reflected light of battle; his questions were many and intelligent, and it was chiefly these that sent us so often to the map. But it is of our parting that I keep the strongest sense. We were to sail on the ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sovereign, reigned till 1797. He took part in the first coalition against revolutionary France, and in the second and third partitions of Poland. Frederick William III. reigned from 1797 to 1840, during which time Prussia experienced every vicissitude of fortune. The first war with imperial France, in 1806-7, led to the reduction of her territory and population one half; and what was left of country and people was most mercilessly treated by Napoleon I., who should ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... all things, and Edward's laugh was not always seasonable; but it was his nature, and he could not help it. He was joyous as the May morning; and thus he continued for years, laughing at everything—pleased with everybody—almost universally liked—and his bold, free, and happy spirit unchecked by vicissitude or hardship. ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... and caused by an accidental over-dose of prussic-acid, which she was in the habit of taking for spasms. She was found alone, and nearly dead, behind the door of her apartment. Alas, poor L.E.L.! It was certainly a strange and wild vicissitude of fate that made it the duty of this respectable African merchant, in company with men of similar fitness for the task, to "sit" upon the body—say, rather, on the heart—of a creature ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... the subtile and elusive facts concerning the human constitution and character and the working of the human will, were eminently characteristic of the religious life of the American church. In the times when that life was stirred to its most strenuous activity, it was marked by the vicissitude of prolonged passions of painful sensibility at the consciousness of sin, and ecstasies of delight in the contemplation of the infinity of God and the glory of the Saviour and his salvation. Every one who ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... ascribe its chief power to enthusiasm or fanaticism. Plain, sober, practical men and women as they were, there was no hard detail of every-day life that they were not equal to, no patient and cheerless sacrifice they could not endure, no vicissitude of adverse or prosperous fortune which they could not meet with unchecked serenity. If it be enthusiasm that in them the fear of God had cast out the fear of man, or fanaticism that they placed ...
— Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase - Delivered by William M. Evarts before the Alumni of - Dartmouth College, at Hanover • William M. Evarts
... a strange and wayward wight, Fond of each gentle, and each dreadful scene. In darkness, and in storm, he found delight: Nor less, than when on ocean-wave serene The southern sun diffused his dazzling shene. Even sad vicissitude amused his soul: And if a sigh would sometimes intervene, And down his cheek a tear of pity roll, A sigh, a tear, so sweet, ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... that utters the word "zounds," imagines that he is speaking of such awful and inconceivable things as "God's wounds," though literally he is doing so? Or what honest farmer, who ejaculates "Please the pigs" (such extraordinary things do reform and vicissitude bring together!) supposes that his Protestant soul is propitiating the Pyx, or Holy Sacrament box, of the Roman Catholic Church? Yet time was, when the innocent word "zounds" was written with the same culpatory dashes and hyphens as the "damns ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... prayer: "O most mighty Jupiter, and ye gods that are judges of good and evil actions, ye know that not without just cause, but constrained by necessity, we have been forced to revenge ourselves on the city of our unrighteous and wicked enemies. But if, the the vicissitude of things, there by any calamity due, to counter-balance this great felicity, I beg that it may be diverted from the city and army of the Romans, and fall, with as little hurt as may be, upon my own head." Having said ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... sweetens toil, however rude the sound. All at her work the village maiden sings; Nor while she turns the giddy wheel around, Revolves the sad vicissitude of things[368].' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... it was his father's custom to send him into the fields, and employ him in agriculture, and such kind of rural occupations, which he continued, through all his life, to love and practise; and, by this vicissitude of study and exercise, preserved himself, in a great measure, from those distempers and depressions, which are frequently the consequences of indiscreet diligence and uninterrupted application; and from which students, not well acquainted ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... was a strange and wayward youth. Fond of each gentle and each dreadful scene. In darkness and in storm he found delight; Not less than when on ocean-wave serene The Southern sun diffus'd his dazzling sheen; Even sad vicissitude ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... can be injured by frost, are stored in cellars; and milk, and wine, and cider, and a thousand "vessels of honor," like tubs and buckets, churns and washing-machines, that are liable to injury from heat or cold, or other vicissitude of climate, find a safe retreat in the cellar. Excepting the garret, which is, as Ariosto represents the moon to be, the receptacle of all things useless on earth, the cellar is the greatest ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... lot of man when considered in his relations to creatures and to the world. It is a lot full of uncertainty, of instability, of vicissitude; but this should not make us skeptical or cynical; it affords no justification for pessimism. It is a condition arising, on the one hand, from the very nature of limited beings, and on the other, from ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... when she heard it, or hidden away up in her own bedroom, her sole refuge from the orgies that took place below, where the sound of music, exquisite music, went up like the cry of an angel imprisoned in a den of brutes, the girl had imagined it all. And through every vicissitude, hidden closer for its utter contrast to all the associations and experience of her daily life, Christian Oakley had kept in her heart its innocent, ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... admiration, gratitude,—the affection of the head, not that of the feelings,—had been the links that bound him to the enthusiastic correspondent revealed in the gifted beauty; and the gloomy circumstances connected with her early fate had left deep furrows in his memory. Time and vicissitude had effaced the wounds, and the Light of the Beautiful dawned once more in the face of Evelyn. Valerie de Ventadour had been but the fancy of a roving breast. Alice, the sweet Alice!—her, indeed, in the first flower of youth, he had loved with a boy's romance. He had loved her ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... those of Eliza still more slender? Could I rely upon the permanence of her equanimity and her docility to my instructions? What qualities might not time unfold, and how little was I qualified to estimate the character of one whom no vicissitude or hardship had approached before the death of her father,—whose ignorance was, indeed, great, when it could justly be said ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... so much vicissitude, alternate defeat and victory, and stained by horrid atrocities, was at its height when Henry IV. was a boy, and had no thought of ever being King of France. His father, Antoine de Bourbon, although King of Navarre and a prince of the blood, being a lineal descendant from Saint Louis, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... Age Of Beauty Of Deformity Of Building Of Gardens Of Negotiating Of Followers and Friends Of Suitors Of Studies Of Faction Of Ceremonies and Respects Of Praise Of Vain-glory Of Honor and Reputation Of Judicature Of Anger Of Vicissitude of ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... duty, and will, therefore, always want a monitor to recall them; and a new book often seizes the attention of the publick, without any other claim than that it is new. There is likewise in composition, as in other things, a perpetual vicissitude of fashion; and truth is recommended at one time to regard, by appearances which at another would expose it to neglect; the author, therefore, who has judgment to discern the taste of his contemporaries, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... shook off his stupor, and began the experiment of keeping house and maintaining his dairy with hired help. For a long year he had struggled on through all kinds of domestic vicissitude, conscious all the time that things were going from bad to worse. His house was isolated, the region sparsely settled, and good help difficult to be obtained under favoring auspices. The few respectable ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... latter part of the year 1867, turning to the press again, he started the Irish Citizen at New York, and in that journal, at the date of this writing, he continues to wield his trenchant pen on behalf of the Irish cause. To that cause, through all the lapse of time, and change of scene, and vicissitude of fortune which he has known, his heart has remained for ever true. He has suffered much for it; that he may live to see it triumphant is a prayer which finds an echo in the hearts of all ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... all save those which touch upon the round Of the day's palpable doings, the vain man, And oftener still the volatile woman vain, Is busiest at heart with restless cares, Poor pains and paltry joys, that make within Petty yet turbulent vicissitude." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... strange vicissitude rolled over the career of our heroines. Some thousands of pounds gilded the path they passed over. With all the recklessness of youth, they squandered their ill-gotten money. Many a poor ruined family eked out a miserable existence, whilst ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... hours' sail might again bring me beneath his roof, and once more should I find myself at home. The thought was calming to all my excitement; I forgot every danger I had passed through; I lost all memory of every vicissitude I had escaped, and had only the little low parlor in the "Black Pits" before my mind's eye; the wild, unweeded garden, and the sandy, sunny beach before the door. It was as though all that nigh a year had compassed had ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... air, and with in the circumjacent clouds. These last, tending uniformly to the centre, compressed each other at a certain distance from it, and, like the stones in an arch of masonry, prevented each other's nearer approach. That island, however, does not experience the vicissitude of land and sea breezes, being too small, and too lofty, and situated in a latitude where the trade or perpetual winds prevail in their utmost force. In sandy countries, the effect of the sun's rays penetrating deeply, a more permanent ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... all love, all tenderness, all goodness; and may the grace of her Almighty Father keep her from the wail and woe which too often accompany the path of beauty in this life of vicissitude and trial." ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising out of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer,—apples that are bitter sweet with the moral of Time's vicissitude. ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... my life was strange and did not think how well I spoke. Yesterday evening I was briefed to defend a political prisoner before the Deputy Commissioner. What do you think of that for a vicissitude? ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at the other end of the world, in China, had a thousand years ago. Did we but see as much of the world as we do not see, we should perceive, we may well believe, a perpetual multiplication and vicissitude of forms. There is nothing single and rare in respect of nature, but in respect of our knowledge, which is a wretched foundation whereon to ground our rules, and that represents to us a very false image of things. As we nowadays vainly conclude the declension and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... myself to be, and could then, like me, have seen Mr. Hastings make his entrance into this court, and looked at him when he was brought to that bar; not even you, Mr. Windham, could then have reflected on such a vicissitude for him, on all ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... intellectual engine of the time. The serious thinking of the Puritans was given almost exclusively to religion; the other world was all their art. The daily secular events of life, the aspects of nature, the vicissitude of the seasons, were important enough to find record in print only in so far as they manifested God's dealings with his people. So much was the sermon depended upon to furnish literary food that it was the general custom of serious minded laymen to take down the words of the discourse ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of state were periodically captured by privateers, has hastened our downward progress in the evil way. By making the administration prominent at the cost of the government, and by its constant lesson of scramble and vicissitude, almost obliterating the idea of orderly permanence, it has tended in no small measure to make disruption possible, for Mr. Lincoln's election threw the weight of every office-holder in the South into the scale of Secession. The ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... away for the resurrection. About sixty years ago, just before the day of their marriage, my father and mother stood up in the old meeting-house, at Somerville, to take the vows of a Christian. Through a long life of vicissitude she lived blamelessly and usefully, and came to her end in peace. No child of want ever came to her door, and was turned away. No stricken soul ever appealed to her and was not comforted. No sinner ever asked her the way to be saved, and ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... was so. While men chide they will admire him, And frowning, praise. I could nigh prophesy That the unwonted crosses he has borne In his career of sharp vicissitude Will tinct his story with a tender charm, And grant the memory of his strenuous feats As long a lease within the minds of men As conquerors hold there.—Does the sheet give news Of how the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... according to the rules of astrology, he made no scruple of turning against her, and affirming that he should henceforth hold her for a cruel and perfidious Jezebel. After a life of storms and perpetual vicissitude, he died in 1534, aged ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... Is any state subject to more frequent and cruel revolutions than that of this unknown monarch? How can we attribute to an immutable God, powerful enough to give solidity to His works, the government of a world where everything is in a continual vicissitude? If I think to see a God unchanging in all the effects advantageous to my kind, what God can I discover in the continual misfortunes by which my kind is oppressed? You tell me that it is our sins that force Him to punish us. I will answer that God, according to yourselves, is not immutable, ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... time of strange and infinite vicissitude, yet apparently the mob steadily attained vaster and more terrible proportions, and everywhere lawlessness was on the increase, especially in the upper ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... intelligence Heaven hath bestowed upon us for our greatest good, to our ruin, repugning nature's design and the universal order and vicissitude of things, which implieth that every man should use his instrument and ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... mire, heart pierced with the bramble of experience, up over the jagged pathways to that still place where skies are clear at last. Thompson is the last among the great ones to have known the dire vicissitude, direst, if legends are true, that can befall a human being. We have the silence of his saviour friends, the Meynells, saying so much more than their few public words, tender but so careful. What they knew, and what the walls of the monastery of Storrington must have heard in that ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... along the whole summit. As we ascended the zigzag road, we looked behind, at every opening in the forest, and beheld a wide landscape of mountain-swells and valleys intermixed, and old Graylock and the whole of Saddleback. Over the wide scene there was a general gloom; but there was a continual vicissitude of bright sunshine flitting over it, now resting for a brief space on portions of the heights, now flooding the valleys with green brightness, now making out distinctly each dwelling, and the hotels, and then two small brick churches of the distant village, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Glory the Reward of the Righteous; being Meditations on the Vicissitude and Uncertainty of all Sublunary Enjoyments. To which is added, a Manual of Devotions for Times of Trouble and Affliction: also Meditations and Prayers before, at, and after receiving the Holy Communion; with some General Rules for our Daily Practice. Composed for the use of a Noble Family, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... from principles of gratitude, veracity, and justice, a grateful sense of the confidence you have ever placed in me), a recollection of the cheerful assistance and prompt obedience I have experienced from you under every vicissitude of fortune, and the sincere affection I feel for an army I have so long had the honor to command, will oblige me to declare, in this public and solemn manner, that in the attainment of complete justice for all your toils and dangers, and in the gratification of every wish, so far as may be done consistently ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... occurrences, that after lengthened cycles of time, and the returns and conjunctions of planets, conflagrations, and floods are wont to happen, and because after the last flood, which took place in the time of Deucalion, the lapse of time, agreeably to the vicissitude of all things, requires a conflagration; and this made them give utterance to the erroneous opinion that God will descend, bringing ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... from those great floods which had at various times desolated Greece, and destroyed the memory of remote events by the destruction of the people and their records; and Bacon had evidently this passage in view when he poetically remarked, in his magnificent essay on the "Vicissitude of Things," that "the great winding sheets that bury all things in oblivion are two,—deluges and earthquakes; from which two destructions is to be noted," he adds, "that the remnant of people that happen to be preserved are commonly ignorant and ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... The clouds return again After the falling of the latter rain; But to the aged blind shall ne'er return Grateful vicissitude: She still must mourn The sun, and moon, and every starry light, Eclipsed to her, and lost in ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... for the first time, however strong it may appear, has yet to secure its future: it must struggle with the other elements of the world around it. It will be pressed back, perhaps beaten down: but in the vicissitude of the strife it will develop its inborn strength and establish itself ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... Christendom: and remarkable it is, considering that violent desertion of the Royal House of the Britons by the intrusion of the Saxons, and afterwards by the conquest of the Normans, that, through vicissitude of times, and after a discontinuance almost of a thousand years, the sceptre should fall again and be brought back into the old regal line and true current of the British blood, in the person of her renowned grandfather, King Henry VII., together with whatsoever the German, Norman, ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... vicissitude of time and politics, though fashion deserted the Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie, and actors migrated, and fresh generations of wits and philosophers succeeded each other, the Cafe Procope still held its ground and maintained its ancient ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... success, the spirit of aggrandisement, and consequently the spirit of mutual jealousy, seized upon all the coalesced powers. Some sought an accession of territory at the expense of France, some at the expense of each other, some at the expense of third parties; and when the vicissitude of disaster took its turn, they found common distress a treacherous bond of ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... summoned to G.H.Q., where I had half an hour's talk with the greatest British commander. I can see yet his patient, kindly face and that steady eye which no vicissitude of fortune could perturb. He took the biggest view, for he was statesman as well as soldier, and knew that the whole world was one battle-field and every man and woman among the combatant nations was ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... varies the character of the range, exposed to every vicissitude of temperature and climate. White billows of fog beat upon the mountain tops like a silent sea, and blot out the landscape with an impenetrable veil. Thunder echoes through the rocky caves with incessant reverberations, and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... chiefly in the abundant additions made to his experience of life, which ripened his nature, and developed new powers. The meditative life of the sheepfold is followed by the crowded court and camp. Strenuous work, familiarity with men, constant vicissitude, take the place of placid thought, of calm seclusion, of tranquil days that knew no changes but the alternation of sun and stars, storm and brightness, green pastures and dusty paths. He learned the real world, with its hate and effort, ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... been a hanger-on of the camp at Avignon; Villot, a Paris student; Caillette had received the spirited education of a soldier in the household of his benefactor, Diane's father. And as for the others—how varied had been their careers!—lives of hazard and vicissitude; scapegraces and adventurers—existing literally ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... Mekebleh, sometimes inhabited, but more frequently a pile of broken-down houses, with some remains of antique sculpture lying on the surface of its hill; and the same occasionally, though not so frequent in vicissitude, with Iksal. ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... whom the world is accustomed to designate as nobody's enemies but their own. Bred to a profession for which he never qualified himself, and reared in the expectation of a fortune he has never inherited, he has undergone every vicissitude of which such an existence is capable. He and his younger brother, both orphans from their childhood, were educated by a wealthy relative, who taught them to expect an equal division of his property; but too indolent to court, and too honest to flatter, the elder gradually lost ground in the ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... it was found necessary to resort to loans to meet the engagements of the nation. The returning tides of the succeeding years replenished the public coffers until they have again begun to feel the vicissitude of a decline. To produce these alternations of fullness and exhaustion the relative operation of abundant or unfruitful seasons, the regulations of foreign governments, political revolutions, the prosperous or decaying condition of manufactures, commercial speculations, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... a wire to Fox to say that you accept," he said, rising. He seated himself at his desk in the appropriate attitude. He had an appropriate attitude for every vicissitude of his life. These he had struck before so many people that even in the small hours of the morning he was ready for the kodak wielder. Beside him he had every form of labour-saver; every kind of ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... inhabitants to their political situation. They talk of the day appointed for a revolt a fortnight before, as though it were a fete, and the most timid begin to be inured to a state of agitation and apprehension, and to consider it as a natural vicissitude that their lives should be ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... Mr. Grandcourt, the happy lover?" said Mrs. Meyrick, who, in her way, was as much interested as Mab in the hints she had been hearing of vicissitude in in the life ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... again to the surface forming springs and wells. As wells take their origin at some depth from the surface, and below the influence of the external atmosphere, their temperature is in general pretty uniform during every vicissitude of season, and always several degrees lower than the atmosphere. They differ from one another according to the nature of the strata through which they issue; for though the ingredients usually existing in them are in such minute quantities as ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... a maniac; and, though Providence spared him again to us, and his mind, thanks to God, is again whole, he is the victim of a profound melancholy, that seems to defy alike medical skill and worldly vicissitude.' ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... the kingdom as well as that of London, parliament—the Long Parliament, which during its actual or nominal existence for nearly twenty years had experienced every vicissitude of fortune—was at length dissolved (16 March) by its own act, and writs were issued for a fresh parliament to meet on the 25th April.(1162) The new parliament was known as the Convention Parliament on account of its ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... to the inner life of imaginative men, but Mr. Poe's biography displays a vicissitude and peculiarity of interest such as is rarely met with. The offspring of a romantic marriage, and left an orphan at an early age, he was adopted by Mr. Allan, a wealthy Virginian, whose barren marriage-bed seemed the warranty of a large estate ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... marched under his standard, with his old competitor the Duke of Portland at their head; and the rest had, after many vain struggles, quitted the field in despair. Fox had retired to the shades of St Anne's Hill, and had there found, in the society of friends whom no vicissitude could estrange from him, of a woman whom he tenderly loved, and of the illustrious dead of Athens, of Rome, and of Florence, ample compensation for all the misfortunes of his public life. Session followed session ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... humble quiet of his native fireside; and if, in after life, he did not bitterly repent of the folly, it was because of that light-hearted and sanguine temperament which never deserted him quite, and supported him in all events and through every vicissitude. He had wandered much after leaving his parental home, and was now engaged in an occupation and pursuit which our future pages must develop. Having narrated, in his desultory way to his companion, the facts which we have condensed, he conceived himself entitled to some ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... destruction of all genuine commercial enterprise, just that we were taught with every luxury of stage effect. Our simulacrum of a market was ruled by the real markets outside, so that we might experience the course and vicissitude of prices. We must keep books, and our ledgers were overhauled at the month's end by the principal or his assistants. To add a spice of verisimilitude, "college paper" (like poker chips) had an actual marketable value. It was bought for each pupil by anxious ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Asiatic continent, can place half a million of men in the field at any moment. The second steady-point is China's financial condition. She is the debtor of several Western nations, and they may be trusted to avert from her any vicissitude that would impair her credit as a borrower. Prominent among such vicissitudes is ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... reiteration of the torture in the night. Days of menace, insult, and extortion, nights of bolts, fetters, and flagellation, succeeded to each other in the same round, and for a long time made up all the vicissitude of life ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... took in the last struggles of Revolutionary France under Napoleon; and his exclamations, "Oh for a Republic!—'Brutus, thou sleepest!'" show the lengths to which, in theory at least, his political zeal extended. Since then, he had but rarely turned his thoughts to politics; the tame, ordinary vicissitude of public affairs having but little in it to stimulate a mind like his, whose sympathies nothing short of a crisis seemed worthy to interest. This the present state of Italy gave every promise of affording him; and, in addition ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... war, and my constancy to the sentiments of Tilsit and Erfurt. In any case your Majesty will allow me to assure you, that if fate renders this war inevitable between us, it will make no change in the sentiments with which your Majesty has inspired me, and which are safe from all vicissitude or alteration." ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... this work in prison; that after his serious studies it served him for amusement and even consolation, for he was of Timocles's opinion, that Tragedies might serve to alleviate the idea of our misfortunes by carrying our reflexions to the vicissitude of human affairs; and begs some indulgence to a work done partly in prison and partly during illness. The translation is in Latin verse such as the ancient tragic writers used. In the preface Grotius enters into an examination of Euripides's tragedy. ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... you wish that I should tell you Mr President? Since the age of seven years I have been found only on the streets of Paris. I have never met anyone who was interested in me. When a child, I was abandoned to every vicissitude—and I am lost. I have always been unfortunate. My life has been passed in prisons and gaols. That is all. It is my fate. I have reached—you know where. I will not say that I have committed the crime ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... ministered to him night and day in his own rooms with the tender devotion of a mother to a child. Two children were born to them, a son and a daughter, the latter of whom, after a life of strange romance and vicissitude, ended her days in a loathsome dungeon of the fortress of Saints Peter and Paul, the victim of Catherine II.'s vengeance—miserably drowned, so one story goes, by an inundation ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... as strong as it now is weak, passive self-defence, whether in trade or war, would be but a poor policy, so long as this world continues to be one of struggle and vicissitude. All around us now is strife; "the struggle of life," "the race of life," are phrases so familiar that we do not feel their significance till we stop to think about them. Everywhere nation is arrayed against nation; our own no less than others. What is our protective ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... bidding send forth shoots, bear fruit and ripen it; at His bidding let it fall and shed their leaves, and folded up upon themselves lie in quietness and rest? How else, as the Moon waxes and wanes, as the Sun approaches and recedes, can it be that such vicissitude and alternation is seen in ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... a profound conviction which never again deserted him, that the conduct which would violate the affections of the heart, or the dictates of the conscience, however it may lead to immediate success, is a fatal error. Conscious that he was perhaps verging on some painful vicissitude of his life, he devoted himself to a love that seemed hopeless, and to a fame that was perhaps ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... many others who experience this disconcerting vicissitude—for whom the deductions of science as a moral message are ludicrous, but for whom its homicidal negations prove in the end ineluctable. If this is their permanent, if this is their final condition, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... incident, an unimportant phase of their progress toward that larger and grander state imaged to them with mysterious sublimity in the idea of Death or Eternity. In accordance with this belief, they expressed in their dwellings the sentiment of transitoriness and vicissitude, and in their tombs the immortality of calm repose. And so their houses have crumbled into dust ages ago, but their tombs are eternal. In all the relations of Life the sentiment of Death was present in some form or other. The hallowed mummies of their ancestors were the most sacred mortgages ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... circling Hours, with rosy hand Unbarred the gates of light. There is a cave Within the mount of God, fast by his throne, Where light and darkness in perpetual round Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heaven Grateful vicissitude, like day and night; Light issues forth, and at the other door Obsequious darkness enters, till her hour To veil the Heaven, though darkness there might well Seem twilight here: And now went forth the Morn Such as in highest Heaven ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... of the bitterest trials. For an ambitious youth, the fame and the brilliant position of the humanists were a perilous temptation; it seemed to him that he too 'through inborn pride could no longer regard the low and common things of life.' He was thus led to plunge into a life of excitement and vicissitude, in which exhausting studies, tutorships, secretaryships, professorships, offices in princely households, mortal enmities and perils, luxury and beggary, boundless admiration and boundless contempt, followed confusedly one upon the other, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... we would still believe that Mercury is a habitable globe we must depend entirely upon the imagination for pictures of creatures able to endure its extremes of heat and cold, of light and darkness, of instability, swift vicissitude, ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... together. There is wisdom in the saying of Feltham, that the whole creation is kept in order by discord, and that vicissitude maintains the world. Many evils bring many blessings. Manna drops in the wilderness—corn grows ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... thoughts may suggest to him the vicissitude of day and night, the change of seasons, with all that variety of scenes which diversify the face of nature, and fill the mind with a perpetual succession of ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... went home and, sending for Bowers, the two sat talking earnestly. For Bowers it had been a day of vicissitude which he was only partially competent to face. Rooted out of a small practice in a small village, and caught up in the sweep of irresistible progress, he had never had to fight for his point. The weight ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... his mother's bedside, for it was believed that her end was near. She rallied, and he returned to Onteora. But on the 27th of October came the close of that long, active life, and the woman who two generations before had followed John Clemens into the wilderness, and along the path of vicissitude, was borne by her children to Hannibal and laid to rest at his side. She was in ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... twenty years ago, we put away for the resurrection. About eighty years ago, and just before their marriage day, my father and mother stood up in the old meeting-house at Somerville, New Jersey, and took upon them the vows of the Christian. Through a long life of vicissitude she lived harmlessly and usefully, and came to her end in peace. No child of want ever came to her door and was turned empty away. No one in sorrow came to her but was comforted. No one asked her the way to be saved but she pointed him to the cross. When the angel of life came to a ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... others" and he explains this by saying that these disturbances "are due to the diffusion of the attention towards obsessions or preoccupations;" and he gives as an example the reply of a patient "I think of my illness or such vicissitude by which it was brought about." Indeed, in one place, Professor Dejerine goes so far as to permit himself to say that the hypochondriac preoccupation itself constitutes originally a purely intellectual conception, a propos of which, but secondarily to it the patient really ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... this? [Reading the inscription by a torch.] "To Rose, from Walter!" Madam, I understand you now. I was deceived. Permit me to be the means of restoring this valued token from a dear friend. Would it not be a strange vicissitude if the finding of the trinket should be the means of losing the friend? Conduct ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce |
