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Primeval   Listen
adjective
Primeval  adj.  Belonging to the first ages; pristine; original; primitive; primary; as, the primeval innocence of man. "This is the forest primeval." "From chaos, and primeval darkness, came Light."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Primeval" Quotes from Famous Books



... becomes for him a sacred term. "Conform thyself to Nature"—with what sincerity, what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he enounces the precept to others, to himself! Recovering, as he fancies, a certain primeval sense of Deity broadcast on things, in which Pythagoras and other inspired theorists of early Greece had abounded, in his hands philosophy becomes a poem, a sacred poem, as it had been with them. That Bruno himself, ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater

... must observe, as regards the plants of the lower alpine region, that it is the actual presence of a forest vegetation, rather than the theoretical tree-limit, which affects their vertical distribution; so that, e.g. they overflow into the extensive clearings made by man in the primeval mountain forests. Indeed, an analysis of the composition of the alpine flora as a whole leads to the conclusion that the chief bond of union between its members consists in the treeless ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... in these days, Cap'n Sproul. Gold-mines—why, you can't see through 'em, nor the ones that run 'em. And mark what has been done to you when you invested in the forest primeval! I knowed I was comin' here at just the right time. I've got a wonderful power for knowin' them things. So I came. I'm here. You need a good investment to square yourself for a poor one. Here it is!" He pulled off his dented derby ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day

... ill-usage, half of unnecessary, self-willed, self-conceited martyrdom, instead of being (as God intended) half of the human universe, a helpmeet for man, and the one bright spot which makes this world endurable. Towards making her that, and so realising the primeval mission by every cottage hearth, each of you can do something; for each of you have some talent, power, knowledge, attraction between soul and soul, which the cottager's wife has not, and by which you may draw her to you with (as the prophet says) human bonds and the cords of love: but she must ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... some knowledge of the pulley, the lever, and the incline; but, after all, giant strength must have been the main fulcrum for such operations. Had there been ornament, sculpture, or inscriptions on these primeval monuments, our thoughts might have been carried forward to a later age, when colonisation from the East brought in its train the arts which ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... us that anyone can quickly habituate himself to the luxuries and commodities of modern life finds a check when applied to primeval people like the Sakais. They may observe, enquire, and seek to understand—as far as their intelligence permits—everything they see around them; they remember well all they have heard and seen, and will mimic ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti

... the Indian tribes were camped in the forest or by the river, and the fur-trade could be prosecuted to the best advantage, we see the coureurs de bois, not the least picturesque figures of these grand woods, then in the primeval sublimity of their solitude and vastness. Despite the vices and weaknesses of a large proportion of this class, not a few were most useful in the work of exploration and exercised a great influence among the Indians of the ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot

... her from unkindness, even in his cups. His hand had never unmanned itself by striking her, and rarely indeed did it injure any one else. He wrestled not against flesh and blood, or powers, or principalities, or wicked spirits in high places. He struggled with clods and stones, and primeval chaos. His hands were horny with the fight, and his nature had perhaps caught some of the dull ruggedness of the things wherewith he battled. Hard and with a will had he worked through the years ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins

... water from the mine. At the bottom of the excavation a piece of white cedar timber was found on which were the marks of an axe. Cedar shovels, mauls, copper gads or wedges, charcoal, and ashes were discovered, over which "primeval" forest trees had grown ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin

... wearing which he enjoyed much subtle subterranean merriment; while underneath the real man lived, fresh as morning, vigorous as a young sycamore, wild-hearted as an eagle, ever ready to flash out the 'password primeval' to such as alone could understand. How else had he at once taken the stranger lad to his heart with such a sunlight of welcome? As the maid every boy must have sighed for but so rarely found, who makes not as ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... of dewy Spanish moss into long-drawn chains of sparkling silver. From swamp and foliage the voices of the night fill the balmy air with quavering wailings, punctured by the occasional screams of wild-cats and hootings of the melancholy owls. Here in this forest primeval, mid the murmuring pines and star-eyed magnolias, nature rules supreme, uncontaminated by the trammels ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

... boundless expanse and freedom. Much more had they that beauty eight hundred years ago, when they were still, for the most part, as God had made them, or rather was making them even then. The low rolling uplands were clothed in primeval forest: oak and ash, beech and elm, with here and there, perhaps, a group of ancient pines, ragged and decayed, and fast dying out in England even then; though lingering still in the ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... altered. The pines of the higher altitudes gave place to oaks, these to ash, beech and maple. To these succeeded the tamarack and such trees as affect a moist and marshy habitat; and finally, when for four months I had been steadily descending, I found myself in a primeval flora consisting mainly of giant ferns, some of them as much as twenty surindas in diameter. They grew upon the margins of vast stagnant lakes which I was compelled to navigate by means of rude rafts made from their ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce

... Kain-tuck-ee, where the red man made his most desperate stand, and none ever knew when or whence danger would come. Moreover, he was lost, and the forest told him nothing; he was not like his friend, Henry Ware, born to the forest, the heir to all the primeval instincts, alive to every sight and sound, and able to read the slightest warning the wilderness might give. Paul Cotter was a student, a lover of books, and a coming statesman. Fate, it seemed, ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler

... our house, on our Mount Clear, is an old oak, the apostle of the primeval forest. Once, when this place was all wildwood, the man who was seeking a spot for the location of the buildings of Phillips Academy climbed this oak, using it as a sort of green watchtower, from whence he might gain a view of the surrounding country. ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... primeval seat of what may be called material civilization, and many arts and inventions were known there when the rest of the world was still in ignorance and barbarism. More than four thousand years ago the Egyptians had chariots of war and most ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord

... the former gulfs that kept us apart, we are in the main alike. Under the same uncouth outlines we conceal and reveal the same ways and habits, the same simple nature of men who have reverted to the state primeval. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... Choosing mainly the cool of the evening, he travelled the town from the primeval forests of the Farther Bronx to the sandy beaches of Ultimate Staten Island, which is in the city, and yet not of it. He roamed through queer streets and around quaint by-corners, and he learned much strange geography of his city and ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... crust to disruptions, distortions, fissures, and chasms. The passage through which we were moving was such a fissure, through which at one time granite poured out in a molten state. Its thousands of windings formed an inextricable labyrinth through the primeval mass. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... some then living would see these mighty falls turn the machinery of the greatest mills in the world, and a great and beautiful city arise on the adjacent shores, would have been called a visionary and impossible dream by those early visitors who saw this amazing water power in its primeval glory. ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve

... to see his fruits decaying on the ground, after he had watched them through the sunny days of the world's first summer. However, insects, at the worst, will hold a festival upon them, so that they will not be thrown away, in the great scheme of Nature. Moreover, I have one advantage over the primeval Adam, inasmuch as there is a chance of disposing of my superfluous fruits among people who inhabit no Paradise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... A.D., with a seemingly primeval forest around us, Tina, Larry and I held an anxious consultation. We had anticipated that Tugh would stop in his own Time-world. That might have been around 3,000 or 4,000; but we hardly thought, as we viewed the scene in passing, that he had come originally from ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various

... not be afraid.; there is no man whom I love better than Porthos, because he is so simple-minded and good-natured. Porthos is so straightforward in everything. Since I have become a bishop, I have looked for these primeval natures, which make me love truth and ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... said to have been the fairest of all plains, and very fertile. Near the plain again, and also in the centre of the island, at a distance of about fifty stadia, there was a mountain, not very high on any side. In this mountain there dwelt one of the earth-born primeval men of that country, whose name was Evenor, and he had a wife named Leucippe, and they had an only daughter, who was named Cleito. The maiden was growing up to womanhood when her father and mother died; Poseidon fell in love with her, and had intercourse ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... heard: a modern, welcome sound, breaking in distractingly on the primeval silence. Kurt hastened to the road and saw the encouraging prelude of dust. The passing tourist gave him the requisite supply of gasoline and continued on ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates

... expression of the successive ages of the world's growth." He suggests four stages: the nebulous world, symbolized by the central fountain, in which Robert Aitken of San Francisco has worked out a stupendous study of primeval passions. Out of chaos, come the elemental forces, Water, Land and Light. The braziers and cauldrons symbolize Fire. The two sentinel columns, flanking the tower on either side, are Earth and Air. The eight paintings, by Frank Brangwyn ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt

... the settlement stood was one of those magnificent stretches of primeval forest which used to be the hunting-grounds of the red man, and from which he had not at that time been thrust by the "paleface," for, here and there, his wigwam might still be seen sending its wreath of blue ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne

... lest the people should repeat Their visit to his calm retreat, Away from Chitrakuta's hill Fared Rama ever onward till Beneath the shady trees he stood Of Dandaka's primeval wood, Viradha, giant fiend, he slew, And then Agastya's friendship knew. Counselled by him he gained the sword And bow of Indra, heavenly lord: A pair of quivers too, that bore Of arrows an exhaustless store. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... a primeval chaos, constituted of four indestructible elements of which fire was the leading one, the Oriental astrologers began to indulge in speculations relative to the agencies which were engaged in its organization. Having no knowledge of the ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill

... believed. And studying these new aspects of history, we are saddened, thinking that the sunrise comes to us from shining over desert sands or the mounds of empty cities, where the lion and the jackal "reassert their primeval possession," or where the European and the Tartar, from the West and from the East, dispute their rights to suzerainty. We are dazzled and confused when we look back to those great days when the over-peopled kingdoms sent forth whole tribes, eastward to the confines ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... the forest primeval, Peer of the glorious pine, Doomed to an end that is evil, Fearful the ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor

... fire and a little earth; fickle as the wind that blew her in a wavering line across the surface of things." "Modern, and of stuff so fine that it chafed under the very breath of disapproval; and yet with a little malleable heart in it compounded of the most primeval of affections." She turned over the pages; everywhere she came upon the same thing. Now the phrases were spun out fine, they were subtle, they seemed to cling round her and stifle her; now they were short and keen, and they cut like knives. "Women may be divided into three ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... that a man under the new covenant, or one who is really a christian, is a renovated man. As long as Adam preserved his primeval innocence, or continued in the image of his Maker, his spiritual vision was clear. When he lost this image, it became dim, short, and confused. This is the case, the Quakers believe, with every apostate or wicked man. He sees through ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... with each other, all forest clad, and many a mighty and moss-grown trunk in that great wilderness told of the forest primeval which in the early days had covered all this part of South Germany. Elsewhere in the land, railways had been built, until there was scarcely a hamlet whose slumbers were undisturbed by the shrill scream ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner

... of Humboldt, that, if any tract of wooded country deserves to be considered a part of the great "primeval forest", it is "that boundless district which, in the torrid zone of South America, connects the river-basins of the Amazon and the Orinoco." This tract, unequalled in extent by any other forest in the world, occupies an area of more than a thousand miles square. In this vast chaos of teeming ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... rambles I have taken Northward from my retirement, along the awful perspectives of Wimpole-street, Harley- street, and similar frowning regions. Their effect would be scarcely distinguishable from that of the primeval forests, but for the Klem stragglers; these may be dimly observed, when the heavy shadows fall, flitting to and fro, putting up the door-chain, taking in the pint of beer, lowering like phantoms at the dark parlour windows, or secretly ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... months ago, since which the union hath snapt, but M. Burney borrowd it for him and after reiterated messages I only got it on Friday. His remarks had some vigor in them, particularly something about an old ruin being too modern for your Primeval Nature, and about a lichen, but I forget the Passage, but the whole wore a slovenly air of dispatch and disrespect. That objection which M. Burney had imbibed from him about Voltaire, I explaind to M. B. (or tried) exactly on your principle ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... [v]opulence and poverty. As they had almost all the conveniences of life within themselves, they seldom visited towns or cities in search of [v]superfluity. Remote from the polite, they still retained the [v]primeval simplicity of manners; and, frugal by habit, they scarce knew that temperance was a virtue. They wrought with cheerfulness on days of labor, but observed festivals as intervals of idleness and pleasure. They kept up the Christmas carol, sent love-knots on Valentine morning, ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various

... or not, the flames still shine and awe the superstitious, and so great is the fame of the place that many pilgrims come yearly from distant India to pray, and to have prayers said for them, here in the visible presence of the primeval light. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... in that low grange, crouching under the five melancholy poplars? An hour later father and son would go forth in that treacherous quaking boat, lying amid the sedge, and cast their net into one of those black pools. But these pictures of primeval simplicities which the landscape evoked were not in accord with a journey toward love and pleasure. Evelyn and Owen did not dare to contrast their lives with those of the Picardy peasants, and that they should see not roses and sunshine, ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... about the spot that was terrible. Over it hung the "thought and deadly feel of solitude." The only break for miles in the primeval forest was that made for the narrow road. House or cabin there was none in all the gloomy reaches of rocks and gnarled trees. It was too inhospitable a region to tempt even ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy

... steeps and rock-bound fastnesses, one finds, perchance, a shell. It is so small a thing that it can be held in the hollow of the hand; so frail that a slight pressure of the finger will crush it to atoms, yet, held to the ear, it brings the surge and sweep of that vast, primeval ocean which, in the inconceivably remote past, covered the peak. And so, to the eye of the mind, the small brown book, with its hundred printed pages, brings back the ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed

... hole, and the second pair was busy trying to carry nesting material into a Flicker's nest from which the young birds had not yet departed. Here then were Martins preparing to carry on their domestic duties just as they did back in the old primeval days. ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson

... whale. That's a way of acting which calls for respect, but it's not romantic. She slapped the bamboo raft, and there was no such thing. She swallowed the harbour and spit it out. She whooped and danced and teetered. She let out all her primeval feelings. She put on no airs, and she made no pretences. She turned everything she could find into scrambled eggs, and played the "Marseillaise" on her blow-hole. She did herself up into knots to break whalebone, and untied them like a pop of a cork. She was no more female than she ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton

... understand by primeval forest is but seldom seen in the interior here, though the country cannot be described otherwise than as generally covered with interminable forests. Insects kill or dwarf some trees, and men maim others ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone

... is spoken, and the earth bursts forth from the darkness, with its great mountains and forests and animals and birds, as they might to a voyager approaching the shore. An episode occurs, describing a deluge, but still bearing in it the traces of the double tradition,—the one referring to some primeval catastrophe, and the other to a local inundation, which had perhaps surprised the first legislators in the midst of their efforts. The Mexican tradition (Codex Chimalpopoca) shows more distinctly the united action of the Mediator (Quetzalcohuatl) ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various

... left the window open, but he could not see outdoors. Only his memory told him where the window was. Never a star pinked the heavens to distinguish it. He could not tell casement from sky, nor window from wall, nor wall from ceiling or floor. He was as one hung in primeval chaos before light ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes

... lesson from our friend Jack Penny, there," he said, smiling in my face as he stroked his broad beard. "I must confess, Joe, to feeling a curious sensation of awe as we sit out here in this primeval forest, surrounded by teeming savage life; but Jack Penny coolly sleeps through it all, and, as I say, we must take a lesson from him, and get used ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn

... appearance, by a necessary law, whereby the outer and superficial conformeth itself, to the inner and hidden, become deformed and hideous. Hence is man now but a shadow, a skeleton of original beauty. The primeval perfection and present degeneracy of man, are the tradition ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... chubby cherubs at her feet. The main court, dedicated to the achievements of man, had groups representing the Human Intellect and Emotions. The sculptures about the Electric Tower naturally related to the Falls. There were primeval Niagara and the Niagara of today, as well as figures symbolic of the Lakes ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews

... conversationalists." Now there are very deep reasons for talking about the weather, reasons that are delicate as well as deep; they lie in layer upon layer of stratified sagacity. First of all it is a gesture of primeval worship. The sky must be invoked; and to begin everything with the weather is a sort of pagan way of beginning everything with prayer. Jones and Brown talk about the weather: but so do Milton and Shelley. Then it is an expression of that elementary idea in politeness—equality. ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... very pleasant to feel the solid ground under our feet after 94 days at sea, and we sat awhile with the whale men before resuming our boat. Then we proceeded quietly down the Bay, which was very beautiful, the dense and variegated primeval forests clothing the lower portions of the hills and fringing the ravines and gullies to the shore, the pretty caves and bays lying in sheltered nooks, with a mountain stream or cascade to complete the picture, ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth

... vain—the all-composing hour Resistless falls; the Muse obeys the pow'r. She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold Of Night primeval, and of Chaos old! Before her fancy's gilded clouds decay, And all its varying rainbows die away. Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, The meteor drops, and in a flash expires. As one by one, at dread Medea's strain, The sick'ning stars fade off ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various

... elderly, senescent, decrepit, venerable, patriarchal, superannuated, senile; former, pre-existing, preceding, ancient, archaic, antique, antiquated, olden, time-honored, traditional, immemorial, primitive, primordial, primeval, pristine, fossil; dilapidated, decayed, effete; practiced, veteran, experienced; sensible, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... is a woman's business. It is the primeval instinct at the bottom of every woman's heart. The average American and English home is a clean, sweet, sanitary and well-governed institution,—made and kept so by some woman. God made women to be wives, mothers and home-makers; and if our modern ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow

... out into the square, she would look with tender eyes upon the young men and women on horseback going to the Bois de Boulogne, the luxurious automobiles, the morning radiant in the sunshine, all the primeval freshness of the early hours—realizing what a beautiful thing ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... movements, of which the mind enveloped in ignorance can form no conception. He can trace back the stream of time to its commencement, and, gliding along its downward course, can survey the most memorable events which have happened in every part of its progress, from the primeval ages to the present day; the rise of empires, the fall of kings, the revolutions of nations, the battles of warriors, and the important events which have followed in their train; the progress of civilization, ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... descend at times to the ground, their awkward motion on the surface shows them to be out of their element, while they move with ease and rapidity in the trees. The organization of man renders it questionable if his primeval ancestor was arboreal to any similar extent. The indications would seem to be that it made the ground its habitual place of residence at an early period in its history, and that the result of this new habit and of its erect attitude ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... dedicate this book to you, not because of your eminence as a lawyer, nor yet on account of your distinguished position as a citizen, but as a keen, intelligent sportsman, one who loves nature in her primeval wildness, and who is at home, with a rifle and rod, in ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond

... understand, towards the coast and the wild west, then we get into tongas and creep down and under jungle day after day, an immensity of trees towering above till the wholesome light of the sky is shut out and you breathe in the damp depths of the primeval jungle, and see huge mosquitoes and diminutive aboriginal men with bows and arrows hiding from you like the beasts in the field that perish. So you travel day in day out, spending nights in Dak bungalows with nothing to eat but tins. I said, "It seems a damned long, dark, boggy, dangerous ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... the stand of timber that the huge trunks shut off the view in all directions. It was almost as though they were encircled by palisades. And so thick was the shade that rarely did a sunbeam reach the earth. They were in the forest primeval, a land of perpetual gloom. There was no underbrush and they could travel rapidly. In a very short time they came to the top ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss

... yards, and they were obliged to ride so close that their shoulders touched. It was the full of the moon, but in the forest there was only an occasional splash of silver. They might have fancied themselves alone in primeval solitude had it not been for the gay voices behind them. And never had Delfina been so enchanting. She even talked a little, but her accomplished coquetry needed few words. She could express more by a bend of the head or an inflection of the voice than other women could accomplish with ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton

... the vivid light received her. Majendie hung back to look at her. She turned and stood before him, superb and still, shrined in a crescent of tall beech stems, column by column, with the light descending on the fine gold of her hair. Nothing in Anne even remotely suggested a sylvan and primeval creature; but, as she stood there in her temperate and alien beauty, she seemed to him to have yielded to a brief enchantment. She threw back her head, as if her white throat drank the sweet air like wine. She held out her white hands, ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... duty. Tangles impeded, doubts beset them, although the axe by which the desired route had been blazed out aforetime by the petitioners had been zealous and active; but the part of a pioneer in a primeval wilderness is indeed the threading of a clueless labyrinth, and both sun and compass were consulted often before the continued direction of the road could be determined ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... remain unswept. The filthy habits of the people, now restrained only by strong remonstrance, will be too apparent. The old monks, Neophitos and Woomonos, (who are dear old people when clean) will cease to wash, and the place and people will certainly relapse into the primeval state of dirt and holiness in which ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... such as thine ne'er drew the Spanish prow 10 Through the primeval hush of Indian seas, Nor wrinkled the lean brow Of age, to rob the lover's heart of ease; 'T is the Spring's largess, which she scatters now To rich and poor alike, with lavish hand, 15 Though most hearts never understand ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... hand he offered up the camels in sacrifice. He considered that primeval institution to be equally sacred as prayer, and that no reason can be alleged in support of the one which is not equally strong in ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... me, and I turned around to watch his face. I recognized the air—the opening passage from Haydn's Creation. I was soon spellbound, as were all the rest. Mrs. Flaxman laid down her fan; there were no melting passages to bring tears in this symphony, descriptive of primeval darkness, and confusion of the elements, the evil spirits hurrying away from the glad, new light into their native regions of eternal night—the thunder and storm and elemental terrors. Presently I turned to Mr. Winthrop. He was sitting ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter

... much pleasure in wandering through the woods in this region, where the stems of the primeval forest still stand—straight trunks of the beech, the maple, the ash, and the linden, towering to a vast height. The hollows are traversed by clear, rapid brooks. The mowing fields at that time were full of strawberries of large size and admirable flavor, which you could scarce ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant

... privation, and exposure occupied from two to three months. The obstacles encountered may readily be imagined in a country where the primeval forest covered the earth, and where the only path was the river or the lake. The parents and family of the writer of this history were from the middle of May to the middle of July making the journey in an open boat. Generally two or more families ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various

... nothing less kindly than the sun shining its benediction; for their eyes only the changing beauties of day and night; for their ears no sound harsher than the dripping of dew or a bird-song; for them youth, health, beauty, love. And it was primeval love, the love of the first woman for the first man. She knew no convention, no prudery, no doubt. Her life was impulse, and her impulse was love. She was the teacher now, and he the taught; and he ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.

... good and righteous provisions made for the restraint of the licentiousness and brutishness of man in the primeval days of our commonwealth; and wherein it has since sunk away from these original organic laws the people have only weakened and degraded themselves, and hindered that virtuous and happy prosperity which would otherwise in far larger degree than ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss

... when the carriage entered the long avenue, bordered with velvety grass and primeval elms, and at the end Savigny awaiting her with its great gate ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet

... safely go back to the earliest era in art for the origin of the style, if, indeed, the grotesque does not so intimately connect itself with the primeval art of all countries as to be almost inseparable. Indeed, it requires a considerable amount of classical education to see seriously the meaning, that ancient artists desired in all gravity to express, in works which ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt

... he said, "that it is my turn to talk. You have come to me like a hysterical schoolboy, you seem ignorant of the primeval elements of justice. After all it is not wonderful. As yet you have only looked in upon life. You look in, but you do not understand. You have called me a coward. It is only a year or so since His Majesty pinned a little cross ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... sufficient time to plant crops for themselves. Dissatisfaction spread throughout the ranks of the Palatinates, and when the Governor refused to heed their appeal for relief, fifty families left the settlement and hewed their way through the primeval forest to the Mohawk Valley, where they obtained fertile lands from the Indians and founded the Schoharie congregation in the winter of 1712/13. The governor declared the fugitives rebels; but still ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente

... docthrines about th' future life, an' wrote his cillybrated book on wild animiles iv th' West fr'm a Brooklyn car window. It took on'y a moment f'r him to inflict a mortal wound on Seton-Thompson's kodak. An' Tiddy Rosenfelt stood alone in th' primeval forest. Suddenly there was a sound in th' bushes. He loaded his pen, an' thin give a gasp iv relief, f'r down th' glade come his thrusted ally, John Burroughs, leadin' captive th' pair iv wild white mice that had so long preyed on ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne

... up supinely. Both had the dauntless fighting spirit that must be conquered, that will never give up, not only while hope remains, but while disaster, be it ever so certain, has not actually come to pass. They were in a sort of thicket, almost as thick as a primeval jungle. At the same moment the thought seemed to come to each of them that the one chance for momentary safety lay in keeping perfectly still. They were side by side, wedged in a little opening they had made for themselves, and ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine

... earliest; foremost, leading, chief, premier; primary, primal, primordial, primitive, primeval, pristine, original, aboriginal, primogenial; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... yesterday—this morning as it were—beginning with the super-surface on top and going right down through the different layers and stratas—through the vanished ages—right down and back to the pre-historical—to the very primeval or fundamental geological formations!" And Steelman studied the face of the cutting as if he could read it like a book, with every layer or stratum a chapter, and every streak a note of explanation. The boss seemed to be getting interested, and ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... very different affair; somewhat similar in character indeed, but far grander. Not a mere spinney of trees along the bank of a small stream; but a region extending beyond the reach of vision,—a vast tract of primeval woods,—the tall trees submerged to their very tops, not for days, nor weeks, but for months,—ay, some of them forever! Picture to your mind an inundation of this kind, and you will have some idea of ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... and indeed he spent much of his time, when not at the store, there. He resumed his seat in the well-worn easy-chair beside his hearth, upon which smouldered a fire, and waited. He still felt dazed. He had that doubt of his own identity which comes to us at times, and which is primeval under stress of a great surprise. The old nursery rhyme of the old woman who had her petticoats clipped and was not sure of herself, has a truth in it which dates from the beginning of things. Anderson, sitting precisely ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... mere farm, level as a floor, part of a larger clearing in the primeval woods, where only fire or age had preyed since man was come; and, although there seemed more land than belonged to this property, no other house could Levin see over all the prospect except the bold and tarnished form of Johnson's castle, sliding its long ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... with a bitter smile; "I will go to America. I will find a refuge with the savages. Perhaps they will appoint me as their chieftain, and adorn my head with a crown of feathers instead of the crown of gold. Yes, I will go to America, In the primeval forests, with the children of nature, there will be a home for the exile, the homeless one. Madame, I thank you for your sympathy and your goodness, and my thanks shall consist in this, that I subject myself wholly to your will. You loved Queen Marie Antoinette. ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach

... artificial light and of the means of producing it constitutes one of the most interesting chapters in the history of our race. Primeval man knew fire. He learned in some way how to kindle fire. The lowest barbarian may be defined as a fire-producing animal. The cave men of ancient Europe kindled fires in their dark caverns. The lake dwellers had fires, both on shore and ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various

... the St. Charles, covered with green fields and ripening harvests, and dotted with quaint old homesteads, redolent with memories of Normandy and Brittany, rose a long mountain ridge covered with primeval woods, on the slope of which rose the glittering spire of Charlebourg, once a dangerous outpost of civilization. The pastoral Lairet was seen mingling its waters with the St. Charles in a little bay that preserves the name of Jacques Cartier, who with his hardy companions spent ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... allusions to the planetary orbits and the fixed stars and the primeval spaces of land and sea; what a power they have of spreading wide before us the huge horizons of the world's edge! Who can forget "the fleecy star that bears Andromeda far off Atlantic seas"? Or that phrase about the sailors "stemming mightly to the pole"? Or the sudden terror of that guarded Paradisic ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... and mosses separated its grove of trees from the moorland and the rocky country round about it. For me, brought up in the city, the old and solitary garden, where even the fruit trees were dying from old age, had all the mystery and charm of a primeval forest. I crossed a border of box, and I was in the midst of a large uncultivated tract filled with climbing asparagus and great weeds. Then I cowered down, as is the fashion of little children, that I might be more ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti

... their right lay in long curves of sand, like the dunes which might have fringed some forgotten primeval sea. Topping them they could see the black, craggy summits of the curious volcanic hills which rise upon the Libyan side. On the crest of the low sand-hills they would catch a glimpse every now and then of a tall, sky-blue soldier, walking swiftly, his rifle at the trail. ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... Shawnee, Cherokee, and Chickasaw to fight and hunt. To the Indian the Blue Ridge was a favorite hunting ground with its forests and rolling plains, while the fertile valleys with thick canebrakes offered bread in abundance. Sometimes these primeval trails which they followed took their names from the purpose they served. For instance, the Athiamiowee trail was, in the Miami dialect, the Path of the Armed Ones or the Armed Path and became known as the Warrior's Path. It was the most direct line of communication between ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... released from their forest burdens, are now devoted to the pursuits of husbandry and yield liberally to feed the multitudes dwelling in the neighboring large cities. Here and there patches of virgin growth in primeval splendor may still be seen, but usually, excepting in the Hood Canal region, the forests have been forced back to the foot hills, leaving in their wake the so-called logged-off areas which are in turn rapidly giving away to meadows and orchards. Further ...
— The Beauties of the State of Washington - A Book for Tourists • Harry F. Giles

... not so? We are one long street, rambling from sun to sun, inheriting traits of the parent country roads which we unite. And we are cross streets, members of the same family, properly imitative, proving our ancestorship in a primeval genius for trees, or bursting out in inexplicable weaknesses of Court-House, Engine-House, Town Hall, and Telephone Office. Ultimately our stock dwindles out in a slaughter-yard and a few detached houses of milkmen. The cemetery is delicately ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale

... instructive operations of Nature: for generations the country has been depleted to swell the bloated population of the towns; and now the wastage of the cities is being sent back to the country to get a renewal of vigour at the primeval fountain of health. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... affection took the inevitable turn. Veritable offsprings of Nature, knowing naught of social conventions and restraints, they loved one another in all innocence and guilelessness. They mated even as the birds of the air mate, even as youth and maid mated in primeval times, because such is Nature's law. At sixteen Cadine was a dusky town gipsy, greedy and sensual, whilst Marjolin, now eighteen, was a tall, strapping fellow, as handsome a youth as could be met, but still with his mental faculties quite undeveloped. He had lived, indeed, a mere ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... assertions of some historians that the Phrygians were the oldest of races, since their birthplace was in Armenia, which in turn is credited with having the Garden of Eden within its boundaries. The Chinese also can advance very substantial claims that primeval man was born with eyes aslant. They at least have a fixed date for the invention of the loom. This was in 2640 B. C. by Lady of Si-Ling, the wife ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster

... Learnt of the primeval earth, Surely was with magic fraught That upon my pulses wrought: I too felt the air of June Humming with a merry tune, I too reckoned, like a boy, Less of Time and more of Joy: Till, as homeward I was wending, I perceived my back unbending, And before the ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt

... lightly, came into a little glade. He was white, but he brought with him no alien air. He was in full harmony with the primeval woods, a part of them, one in whose ears the soft song of the leaves was a familiar and loved tune. He was lean, but tall, and he walked with a wonderful swinging gait that betokened a frame wrought to the strength of steel by exercise, wind, weather, and life always in the open. Though ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler

... unhappy Africans, the Jesuits were realizing the ideal paradise of More—a Utopia, where no murders or robberies were committed, and where the blessed flowers of peace and harmony bloomed in a garden of almost primeval loveliness. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... its greatest extent. In that respect, he may use the wisdom of the serpent, though guided by the innocence of the dove. If, therefore, he sees the reign of prejudice and corruption, so firmly established, that men would be offended with the genuine simplicity of the Gospel, and the purity of its primeval doctrines, he may so far moderate their rigour as to prevent them from entirely disgusting weak and luxurious minds. If we cannot effect the greatest possible perfection, it is still a material point to preserve from the grossest vices. A ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day

... prow and side of the boat. It was all so solemn, and strange, and awe-inspiring that, in spite of a feeling of dread which he could not master, he was glad to be there, wakeful, trying to picture the different creatures prowling about in the darkness of the primeval forest. He had listened time after time on the voyage up, but then the schooner was close at hand, and they passed towns and villages on the east bank; but here they were farther away in the heart of the wild country, and on the very edge of a forest ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn

... water, are nowadays scarcely less important than the coal gas itself. The ammonia water furnishes large quantities of salts to be used, among other applications, as food for plants. We thus restore to-day to our vegetation the nitrogen which existed in plants of primeval times. The tar, black and noisome though it be, is a marvelous product, by the reason of scores of beautiful substances which are ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various

... smiling, "seems to come from the top of a primeval pine tree—with a hawk in sight! Little bird, will you please come down into the lower regions of air?—where ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner

... hung over to boil, and we all gathered around the cheerful blaze to smoke, talk, and sing American songs until supper time. The scene to civilised eyes was strangely wild and picturesque. The dark, lonely river gurgling mournfully around sunken trees in its channel; the dense primeval forest whispering softly to the passing wind its amazement at this invasion of its solitude; the huge flaming camp-fire throwing a red lurid glare over the still water, and lighting up weirdly the encircling woods; and the groups of strangely dressed men lounging carelessly about the blaze upon ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... forces of ever-fresh nature to an intelligent human will. All that makes man strong, healthy, worthy, is given in portion to the agriculturist: his life is a ceaseless battle and a ceaseless victory. The pure air of heaven steels the muscles of his body, and the primeval order of nature forces his thoughts too into a regular orbit. Other species of industry may become obsolete; his is enduring as the earth: other tastes may prison men in narrow walls, in the depths of the earth, or between the planks of a ship; his glance has only ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag

... Mecca, or the absence of these things, simply denotes the foregone determinations of God in regard to the given individuals, in practice and feeling the contrasted beliefs and courses of conduct are held to obtain heaven and hell. And we find, accordingly, that Mohammed spoke as if God's primeval ordination had fixed all things forever, whenever he wished to awaken in his followers reckless valor and implicit submission. "Whole armies cannot slay him who is fated to die in his bed." On the contrary, when he ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... as thine ne'er drew the Spanish prow Through the primeval hush of Indian seas, Nor wrinkled the lean brow Of age, to rob the lover's heart of ease; 'Tis the Spring's largess, which she scatters now To rich and poor alike, with lavish hand, Though most ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various

... came swinging along through the silent aisles of the vast primeval forest, his gun in the hollow of his arm, a heavy bag of venison meat hanging ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... a little, and it is needless for me to attempt to describe what our feelings were, when we got a strip of the primeval forest cleared away. Our clearing now extended across the two lots, being half a mile east and west. It was about eighty rods wide on the west side, running this width to the east a little over half way, and it was ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin

... not a little. He talked precipitately, and I did not try to stop him. I had my shoulders against the wreck of my steamer, hauled up on the slope like a carcass of some big river animal. The smell of mud, of primeval mud, by Jove! was in my nostrils, the high stillness of primeval forest was before my eyes; there were shiny patches on the black creek. The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver—over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... this unity has made us one. We thus make it manifest unto the world. In the woman I have chosen as my comrade, behold the living soul of serene-browed Grecian goddess and German seeress of old, whose untamed eyes of primeval womanhood, the equal and the mate of man, proclaim the end of slave-marriage and the ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... rude races the size and weight of the brain differ far less according to sex than is the case in civilized nations. Physical strength is the same, with the advantage at times on the side of the woman, as in certain African tribes to-day, over which tribes this fact has given them the mastery. Primeval woman, all attainable evidence goes to show, started more nearly equal in the race, but became the inferior of man, when periods of child-bearing rendered her helpless and forced her to look to him ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... didst put to flight Primeval silence, when the morning stars, Exulting, shouted o'er the rising ball; O Thou! whose word from solid darkness struck That spark the sun, strike wisdom from my soul; My soul which flies to Thee, her trust, ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern

... new world for me out of primeval chaos, and for aeons of centuries I dizzied myself gazing ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... ought to acquire. The other interior objects will require a proportional degree of information with regard to them. It is true that all these difficulties will, by degrees, be very much diminished. The most laborious task will be the proper inauguration of the government and the primeval formation of a federal code. Improvements on the first draughts will every year become both easier and fewer. Past transactions of the government will be a ready and accurate source of information to new members. The affairs of the Union will become more and more objects of curiosity and ...
— The Federalist Papers

... we departed from the pretty little oasis of Wynbring, leaving its isolated and water-giving rock, in the silence and solitude of its enveloping scrubs, abandoning it once again, to the occupation of primeval man, a fertile little gem in a desolate waste, where the footsteps of the white man had never been seen until I came, where the wild emu, and the wilder black man, continually return to its life-sustaining rock, where the aboriginal inhabitants ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... magnified him in the boy's eyes, until he was the largest beast in the world. Monstrous and sinister he stood there, unmoving, gazing at the strange creatures in the little camp. He seemed to Will a symbol of this vast and primeval new world into which he had come. Remembering his glasses he took them and brought the great grizzly ...
— The Great Sioux Trail - A Story of Mountain and Plain • Joseph Altsheler

... creatures. He is eternal, he is the great Creator, and he is the highest state of blessedness. Learned persons versed in the scriptures attain to great happiness by knowing him. In that spot are the celestial Rishis, the Siddhas, and, indeed, all the Rishis,—where dwelleth the slayer of Madhu, that primeval Deity and mighty Yogin! Let no doubt enter thy heart that that spot is the foremost of all holy spots. These, O lord of earth, are the tirthas and sacred spots on earth, that I have recited, O best of men! These ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... for it was there my Princess lived. John Asibeli Tungi was king. He was full-blooded native, descended out of the oldest and highest chief-stock that traced back to Manua which was the primeval sea home of the race. Also was he known as John the Apostate. He lived a long life and apostasized frequently. First converted by the Catholics, he threw down the idols, broke the tabus, cleaned out the native priests, executed ...
— The Red One • Jack London

... at the natural history museum in Hospital Philadelphia. Like all creatures with oxygen-and-water based metabolisms, the Moruans could trace their evolutionary line to minute one-celled salt-water creatures; but with the bitter cold of the planet, the first land-creatures to emerge from the primeval swamp of Morua VIII had developed the heavy furs and the hibernation characteristics of bear-like mammals. They towered over Dal, and even Tiger seemed dwarfed by their immense ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse

... long way up the narrow, secluded valley, but had met not a soul. All was delightful and picturesque, the profusion of wild flowers, the huge grey moss-grown boulders, the overhanging ilexes and olives, and the music of the tumbling current through a crooked course worn deep by the waters of primeval ages. ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux

... Kant bases his whole system upon the indestructible fact of ethical law, the primeval intuition of the awakened spirit of man into the eternal distinction between good and evil. Standing on that foundation, he is able to descry the world of transcendental realities—"the land which is very far off"—which the pure and critical reason could never behold. But though the eyes ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... elements of power in its treatment of plot and personality. The men are all well-marked types. The women are all possible and pleasant beings. The story gives dramatically the inner life of a mining camp. The atmosphere of wild nature and primeval human passion is well sustained. The exuberance of detail and suggestion, the easy drawing of character, the fine massing of effects, all show a strength and fire in the author which ought to give us a line of good books from his pen in the ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower

... hark back to the primeval man that there was a tendency to lionize the prodigal in Ripton, which proves the finished civilization of the East not to be so far removed from that land of outlaws, Pepper County. Mr. Paul Pardriff, who had a guilty conscience about the clipping, and vividly ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... Lights o'er darkness, Gleamed his thought with light and guidance. When with filial fond remembrance Tenderly he sought and questioned, Searching for his people's pathways— Names and graves and rusty weapons, Stones and tools their answer gave him. Through primeval Asian forests, Over steppes and sands of deserts, 'Neath a thousand years that moldered, Saw he caravan-made footsteps Seek a new home in the Northland. And as they the rivers followed, Followed them his thought abundant, ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... master of a school at Seehausen. This was the most wearisome period of his life. Notwithstanding a success in dealing with children, which seems to testify to something simple and primeval in his nature, he found the work of teaching very depressing. Engaged in this work, he writes that he still has within him a longing desire to attain to the knowledge of beauty— sehnlich wunschte zur Kenntniss des Schonen zu gelangen. He ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... Primeval Fear created Gods on earth when from the sky The lightning-flashes rent with flame the ramparts of the world, And smitten Athos blazed! Then, Phoebus, sinking to the earth, His course complete, and waning Luna, offerings received. The changing seasons ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... would be impossible to represent either the Welsh or the Egyptian legend as a copy of the other. Obviously the conclusion is forced upon us that the stories, like the words, are related collaterally, having descended from a common ancestral legend, or having been suggested by one and the same primeval idea. ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... of her world had been altogether different, and the few frontier specimens she had met at the Briggs' dinner table had not impressed her with anything except their shyness and manifest awkwardness in her presence. The West itself appealed to her, its bigness, its nearness to the absolutely primeval, but not the people she had so far met. They were not wrapped in a glamor of romance; she was altogether too keen to idealize them. They were not her kind, and while she granted their worth, they were more picturesque ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... Great Britain towards her colonies; her agents and the colonial magistrates manifested all the insolence of authority; and individuals who had suffered from their aggressions bethought themselves of a country beyond the mountains, in the midst of primeval forests, where no laws existed save the law of Nature—no magistrate except those selected by themselves; where full liberty of conscience, of speech, and of action prevailed. Yet, almost in the first year of their settlement, they formed a written code ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various

... tinkling breeze was cool and fresh and invigorating. Fear vanished from her. She felt herself a part of the elements, a part of the night, the lone representative of life and consciousness, and God amid the waste of primeval desolation. ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry

... nothing remaining but a rhythmical far-away echo of steps. The spot was indeed a perfect desert, there were neither promenaders nor passers-by, nor was there even the shadow of a prowler in the pillared forest of the colonnade, which was as empty as the wild primeval forests of the world's infancy. And what a solemn desert it was, full of the silence of haughty desolation. Never had so vast and black a presentment of slumber, so instinct with the sovereign nobility ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... firs were pines, and it was a lonely musing place, and so on one of the stillest, clearest days of 'St. Luke's little summer,' the last afternoon of her visit at the Holt, there stood Honora, leaning against a tree stem, deep, very deep in a vision of the primeval woodlands of the West, their red inhabitants, and the white man who should carry the true, glad tidings westward, westward, ever from east to west. Did she know how completely her whole spirit and soul were surrendered ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... contemptible baseness, so that the necessity of association is degrading, and the tie, which at such moments is always extremely close, drags like a halter round the neck. William's exacting demands and his jealousy had pulled her down into some horrible swamp of her nature where the primeval struggle between ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... moonlight fluttered about her and now and then flowed against her companion. The simple tale of stress and effort borne and made was one that went well with the snorting of the big locomotives toiling up the climbing track and the rhythmic roar of wheels flung back by primeval forest or towering wall of rock. The girl had ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... with a garden and apple orchard, and with rows of butternut-trees planted beside it; and perhaps she had sought this retirement with the hope of its being consonant with her own solitude. The country round about was wilderness, most of it primeval woods. The little settlement, only a mill and a country store and a few scattered houses, lay on a broad headland making out into Sebago Lake, better known as the Great Pond, a sheet of water eight miles ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry

... the grand assemblage of tufa cones, covered with an ancient vegetation, backed by high mountains of volcanic origin, on whose ragged crests the red ash was blazing vermilion against the blue sky, with a foreground of bright waters flashing through a primeval forest. The banks of these streams were deeply excavated by the heavy rains, and sometimes we had to jump three and even four feet out of the forest into the river, and as much up again, fording the Shiraoi river only more than twenty times, and often making a pathway of its treacherous bed ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... wildness and excitement, without enduring any of its hardships. No wonder, then, that a high-spirited and active-minded youth of Henrich's age, should often forget that his wanderings were compulsory; and should feel cheerful, and even exhilarated, as he roamed through the boundless primeval forests, or crossed the summits of the ranges of lofty hills that occasionally lifted their barren crags above the otherwise ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb

... ingenious treatise on this art, has very justly observed, that both singing and dancing must have existed from the primeval times; that is to say, from the first of the existence ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini

... ravishing emotions, of an abandonment to excessive sensibility. The soul was to be, no longer the "little bark attendant" that "pursues the triumph and partakes the gale" in Pope's complacent Fourth Epistle, but an aeolian harp hung in some cave of a primeval forest for the winds to rave across ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... had made all his money by a certain chemical compound which had been adopted by the world at large as a panacea for every ill. But the heiress of the Purlings hated any reference to the Primeval Pills, although she owed to ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths

... last Wednesday that I began to get my fill, temporarily, of the outward satisfaction of the Road—the primeval takings of the senses—the mere joys of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching. But on that day I began to wake up; I began to have a desire to know something of all the strange and interesting people who are working ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker

... Swastika, if not an evolution from it, was the Cross, made forever holy by the highest heroism of Love. When man climbed up out of the primeval night, with his face to heaven upturned, he had a cross in his hand. Where he got it, why he held it, and what he meant by it, no one can conjecture much less affirm.[13] Itself a paradox, its arms pointing to the four quarters of the earth, it is found in almost every ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... volume. After quitting the capital of Peru, Dr. Tschudi went over ground previously untrodden by any European traveller. He visited the Western Sierra, the mighty chain of the Cordilleras, the boundless level heights, the deep mountain valleys on the eastern declivity of the Andes, and the vast primeval forests. Whilst recounting his wanderings in these distant regions, he describes not only the country and the people, but every object of novelty and interest in the animal, ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... likeness to the lovely statue of Praxiteles, his happy animal temperament, and the dim legend of his pedigree are combined with wonderful art to reconcile us to the notion of a Greek myth embodied in an Italian of the nineteenth century; and when at length a soul is created in this primeval pagan, this child of earth, this creature of mere instinct, awakened through sin to a conception of the necessity of atonement, we feel, that, while we looked to be entertained with the airiest of fictions, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... made him hesitate, and he felt that invisible forces barred his way. Unseen hands seemed to draw him back. No one would go near now to gather the cocoa-nuts, and they lay rotting on the ground. Everywhere was desolation. The bush was encroaching, and it looked as though very soon the primeval forest would regain possession of that strip of land which had been snatched from it at the cost of so much labour. He had the sensation that here was the abode of pain. As he approached the house he was struck by the unearthly silence, and at first he thought it was deserted. Then he saw ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham

... hand, good-humoured enthusiasts, Teutomaniacs by upbringing and freethinkers by reflexion, seek for our history of freedom beyond our history in the Teutonic primeval woods. But in what respect is our freedom history distinguished from the freedom history of the boar, if it is only to be found in the woods? Moreover, as one shouts into the wood, so one's voice comes back in answer ("As ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx

... and woman watched, one vanished. Then another winked out, and did not reappear. No more than fifteen seemed to reach the Jersey shore, there to creep vaguely, slowly away and vanish in the dense primeval woods. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... little doubt that the primeval ocean was in the condition of a fresh-water lake. It can be shown that a primitive and more rapid solution of the original crust of the Earth by the slowly cooling ocean would have given rise to relatively small ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... picked up our host, Giovanni Bianca, on the way, and he took us round and showed us the garden, which was full of flowers and fruit trees and vines; he showed us also the lava of 1669 which destroyed part of Catania. He gave me a piece of primeval lava from the bottom of the well which his father had dug, about 150 feet down. I inquired how old that lava would be. He was not sure, but it would be older than the Romans, older than the Greeks, older than the Sikels ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones

... you may smile and look astonished;" went on the Professor good-humoredly, "but science does not destroy the primeval instincts entirely. Lucy, my dear," he took her hand and patted it, "while in London and in lodgings, it was borne in upon me forcibly how lonely I was and how lonely I would be when you married our young friend yonder. I had intended to come down to-morrow, but to-night, such ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume

... this primeval stand of pine, sunshine glimmered, warning of a clearing. And here Trooper Lannis pulled in his horse at the edge of what seemed to be a broad, ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers

... further. Additional opposition but further enraged him. He recapitulated what he would no doubt call his arguments,—they sounded more like threats,—and as he spoke I saw dragons fighting for their dams in the primeval ooze, and heard savage trumpetings of masculine ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne

... nitric acid must be one of the sources from which plants derive their nitrogen. It has been already stated, that the humus contained in the soil consists of the remains of decayed plants, and there is every reason to suppose that the primeval soil contained no organic matters, and that the first generation of plants must have derived the whole of their nitrogen from, the atmosphere. If, therefore, it be assumed that ammonia is the only source of the nitrogen of plants, it would follow, that as that substance cannot be produced ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson

... vastness in Whitman, and, despairing of conveying an adequate notion of him by any process of literary analysis, resorts to the use of a succession of metaphors,—the symbolic use of objects that convey the idea of size and power. Thus, "he is Behemoth, wallowing in primeval jungles;" "he is a gigantic elk or buffalo, trampling the grass of the wilderness;" "he is an immense tree, a kind of Ygdrasil, striking its roots deep down into the bowels of the world;" "he is the circumambient air in which float shadowy shapes, rise mirage-towers and palm-groves;" ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... New Hampshire woman and her husband went out into the forest primeval; he cut down a few trees, made a little clearing termed a cut-down wherein a tiny patch of sky and cloud and scant sunlight could be seen overhead, but no sunrise or sunset, and built a log house of a single room—a home. With ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle

... tradition. Suppose Jeanne d'Arc had stayed with her mother and stuck to her knitting. Charles VII would have been dispossessed and the war would have come to an end. The Plantagenets would have reigned over England and France, which, in primeval times before the Channel existed, formed one territory occupied by one race, as you know. Thus there would have been a single united and powerful kingdom of the North, reaching as far as the province of Languedoc and embracing peoples whose tastes, instincts, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... Rocca, and their loves that ended always in cruelty and horror, and Filippo had all the instincts of his decadent race. In love he was pitiless; no impulses of tenderness or of chivalry restrained him, and his methods were primeval and violent. Probably the Rape of the Sabines was his ideal of courtship, but the subsequent domesticity, the settling down of the Romans with their stolen wives, would have ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton

... the extreme top of the elevation, however, this noise suddenly died away, and the calmness of the primeval wilderness lay on the scene as he paused on the summit ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood

... absorption of a vast series of undigested facts. The facility with which the world swallows up the ordinary college graduate who thought he was going to dazzle mankind should bid you pause and reflect. But just as certainly as man was created not to crawl on all fours in the depths of primeval forests, but to develop his mental and moral faculties, just so certainly he needs education, and only by means of it will he become what he ought to become,—man, in the highest sense of the word. Ignorance is not simply the negation of knowledge, it is the misdirection of the mind. "One step ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... ground, make their way round, and be ready to meet me as I emerged from it. A narrow glade opened out before me, leading in the direction I wished to take; it was formed either by deer or buffalo, who, from constantly following the same tracks, are the chief road-makers of the primeval forests. I dashed along it; fortunately neither fallen trunks nor stumps impeding my progress. As may be supposed, I looked out eagerly for Dio, and I thought it very possible that I might fall in with him, but no signs could I discover of his having passed that way, as the snow lay unbroken ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston

... utmost rigors or felicities of condition, and to establish themselves with great indifferency under all varieties of circumstances. Under all governments the influence of character remains the same,—in Turkey and in New England about alike. Under the primeval despots of Egypt, history honestly confesses that man must have been as free as culture ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Beaudry took stock of this dusky nymph with surprise. In her attitude was something wild and free and proud. It was as if she challenged his presence even though she had summoned him. Across his mind flashed the thought that this was woman primeval before the conventions of civilization had ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine

... the blackest in the annals of humanity, would ring the death-knell of modern civilization, of national prosperity, social morality, and domestic happiness! and would consign the race to a night of degradation and horror infinitely more appalling than a return to primeval barbarism." ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... rich volume of sound fluted the piercing thin sopranos of the women, piping higher, higher, until the ancient hymn resolved itself into something that was neither human nor animal, but so elemental, so primeval, that it was like a voice imprisoned in the soil—a dumb and inarticulate music, rooted deep, and without consciousness, in the passionate earth. Over the mass of dark faces, as they rocked back and forth, I saw light shadows tremble, as ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow

... habit of celebrating the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this. He insists on celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never been conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... pertains to the event of birth; natural denotes that which rests upon inherent qualities of character or being. We speak of one's native country, or of his natal day; of natural ability, native genius. Compare INHERENT; PRIMEVAL; RADICAL. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... observing the ragged neglect of soil and shrubbery into which the place had lapsed. It was idle, however, to imagine that an airy guest from Monument Mountain, Bald Summit, and old Graylock, shaggy with primeval forests, could see anything to admire in my poor little hillside, with its growth of frail and insect-eaten locust trees. Eustace very frankly called the view from my hill top tame; and so, no doubt, it was, after rough, broken, rugged, headlong Berkshire, ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... past a wide stretching extent of primeval forest that clothed the mountain-side with green. Here were wonderful specimens of trees, some of which would rival the oaks of England—aye, even those in Windsor great park! There was the sandbox, whose seeds are contained in an oval pod about the size of a penny roll; which when ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson



Words linked to "Primeval" :   early, primordial



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