"Primitive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breakwater of seaweed. The inhabitants, consisting of about forty men, women, and children, gathered on the beach to welcome them in front of their little stone-boxes of dwellings which were scattered about here and there. They appeared to be a primitive race, the descendants of two old men-of-war's men, who, having been discharged from the service at the end of the last century, had lived there ever since with wives whom they had brought from the Cape, their respective children and grandchildren ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... taught, so as not to be helpless without mother or sister,—and with the help of a needle and some thread the friendly girl gave him, he soon made of the packing-sheet a pair of trousers for Tommy, of a primitive but not unserviceable cut, and a shirt for himself, of fashion more primitive still. He managed it this way: he cut a hole in the middle of a piece of the stuff, through which to put his head, and another hole on ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... opportunities; the poetry independent of the creed; Milton's choice of subject; King Arthur; Paradise Lost; attractions of the theme: primitive religion, natural beauty, dramatic interest; difficulties of the theme, and forbidden topics; how Milton overcomes these difficulties by his episodes, his similes, and the tradition that he adopts concerning the fallen angels; the cosmography of Paradise Lost; its chronology; some difficulties ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... bodies would go to join the absent beloved, while the other remained at home. (In my "Exotics and Retrospectives," under the title "A Question in the Zen Texts," the reader will find a typical Chinese story on the subject,—the story of the girl Ts'ing.) Some form of the primitive belief in doubles and wraiths probably exists in every part of the world; but this Far Eastern variety is of peculiar interest because the double is supposed to be caused by love, and the subjects of the affliction to belong to the gentler sex.... ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... week it had been raining at Temple Camp, and the ground was soggy from the continuous downpour. The thatched roofs of the more primitive type of cabins looked bedrabbled, like the hair of a bather emerging from the lake, and the more substantial shelters were crowded with the overflow from these and from tents deserted by troops and patrols that had been ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... thought of all for Philippe. Deep hollows appeared in his cheeks. The minutes seemed to age him like long years of sickness. The sight of him suggested the faces of the dying martyrs in certain primitive pictures. Nothing short of physical pain can thus convulse the features of a man's countenance. And he really suffered as much as if he were being stretched on the rack and burnt with red-hot pincers. Nevertheless, he felt that his mind remained lucid, as must ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... a month. Robert took it in a 'fine phrenzy,' on which I rebelled, and made him give it up on a sacrifice of ten francs, which was the only cheap thing in the place, as far as I observed anything. Also, the bay is so restricted that whoever takes a step is 'commanded' by all the windows of the primitive hotel and the few villas, and as people have nothing whatever to do but to look at you, you may imagine the perfection of the analysis. I should have been a fly in a microscope, feeling my legs and arms counted on all sides, and receiving no comfort from ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... half-savage woman, unregulated, unsubdued, leaped high within her bosom, fled to her face, gave color to her cheek and brightness to her eye. Her breath shortened after feline fashion. Deep was calling unto deep, ancient unto ancient, primitive unto primitive. Without the gate of London prison there was one abject prisoner. Within its gates there were two prisoners, and one of ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... "The primitive jus civile derived from the jus quiritium. Point out the principal social element on which, and through which, the jus privatum, connected with the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... Princes and Ambassadors, but holden in no other esteem than vessels made of earth. The Germans however adjoining to our frontiers value gold and silver for the purposes of commerce, and are wont to distinguish and prefer certain of our coins. They who live more remote are more primitive and simple in their dealings, and exchange one commodity for another. The money which they like is the old and long known, that indented [with milled edges], or that impressed with a chariot and two horses. Silver too is what they seek more than ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... which mankind might unlearn the violin or forget how to ride horses; and the art of domesticity seems to me as special and as valuable as all the ancient arts of our race. Nor do I propose to enter at all into those formless and floundering speculations about how woman was or is regarded in the primitive times that we cannot remember, or in the savage countries which we cannot understand. Even if these people segregated their women for low or barbaric reasons it would not make our reasons barbaric; and I am haunted with a tenacious suspicion that ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... or vestment. We do not ask what fetish or totem the sleepers in the grassy barrows believed in; we may ask if they lived their lives truly and faithfully, doing that which was good according to the light of their primitive consciences. ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... explanations of the origin of Philippine rice terraces. First, that they (and those of other islands peopled by primitive and modern Malayans, and those of Japan and China) are indigenous — the product of the mountain lands of each isolated area; second, that most of them are due to cultural influences from one center, or possibly more ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... itself the chief part of the business of law-making. Statute laws became more and more numerous and important; they were the principal—the customs were only subsidiary, laws de Jure, enacted before they are obeyed by the People. Still new customs continued to flow from the primitive source of legislation, the People, and of course took new forms to suit the conditions of ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... cliff-dwellers' nomadic period. "There must be some very cogent reason for the employment of this shape," he says, "for the construction of a cylindrical chamber within a block of rectangular rooms involves no small amount of labor. We know how obstinately primitive nations cling to everything connected with their religious ideas. Then what is more natural than the retention, for the room where religious ceremonies were performed, of the round shape characteristic of the original dwelling ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... seems to have been consumed by even very primitive people as far back as history goes. The Bible records an early case of intoxication from wine, and beer was brewed by the ancient Egyptians. So much has been consumed that some people have a subconscious craving for it. There are cases on record where ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... hampered by the proprieties. One can be more "free," you know! You may take a little walk into "Old" Cairo, and turning a corner you may catch glimpses of what Mark Twain calls "Oriental simplicity," namely, picturesquely-composed groups of "dear delightful" Arabs whose clothing is no more than primitive custom makes strictly necessary. These kind of "tableaux vivants" or "art studies" give quite a thrill of novelty to Cairene-English Society,—a touch of savagery,—a soupcon of peculiarity which is entirely ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... by which the Ottawa and Chippewa nations of Indians were governed in their primitive state, were almost the same as the ten commandments which the God Almighty himself delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai on tables of stone. Very few of these divine precepts are not found among the precepts of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, except with regard to the ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... tremulous resentment, as if gathering herself together for a long-premediated attempt at self-defense. "You're not only as green as grass, but you perceive nothing,—any European, even the stupidest, would perceive what you—but you are as primitive as a Sioux Indian, you have the silly morals of a ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... quarter of a century, the unknown and unsung heroes grappled with the frost, and groped for the gold they were sure lay somewhere among the shadows of the Pole. In the struggle with the terrifying and pitiless natural forces, they returned to the primitive, garmenting themselves in the skins of wild beasts, and covering their feet with the walrus mucluc and the moosehide moccasin. They forgot the world and its ways, as the world had forgotten them; killed their meat as they found it; feasted in plenty and starved in ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... of greatest beauty the primitive mind seeks to portray for the benefit of other primitive minds the omnipotence of the ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... become the object of the keenest hate, and as soon as—shortly before we entered Keilhau—hunting was freely permitted, the peasants gave full vent to their rage, set off for the woods with the old muskets they had kept hidden in the garrets, or other still more primitive weapons, and shot or struck down all the game they encountered. Roast venison was cheap for weeks on Rudolstadt tables, and the pupils had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hall, with its stone pavement rather below than above the level of the soil, hung with armour rude and rusty enough to dispel the suspicion of its having passed through a collector's hands; the low ceilings; the dark oak wainscot, carved after primitive designs, that covered every inch of wall in bedroom and corridor; the general air which the whole interior presented of having been put to rights at the date of the Armada and left alone ever since;—all this antiquity contrasted quaintly, but prettily enough, with the youth and gaiety that ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... nearly all the leading members of the British party in that part of the Grants lying east of the mountains, having been thus summarily disposed of, the people, now taking the government into their own hands, and acting in primitive assembly, proceeded to reorganize the county, by the appointment of new judges, and all the usual subordinate officers, of their own principles, to adopt measures to reduce to submission or drive away the remaining loyalists of the county, and, finally, to ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... her until they had passed from the street, through the cottonwoods and into the splendid living-room of the Engle home, that her escort was not dressed as she had imagined all civilized mankind dressed for a call. Walking through the primitive town his boots and soft shirt and travel-soiled hat had been in too perfect keeping with the environment for her to be more than ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... spoke of it she lowered her voice. I felt that no matter how much education she had, there lurked back in her brain some of the primitive impulses, as well as beliefs. Either the curse of Mansiche on the treasure was as real to her as if its mere touch were poisonous, or else she was going out of her way to ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... shall like it. It's an adventure for rich men when they have to be poor. That's why a lot of fellows have gone into it. They are tired of being the last word in civilization. They want to get down to primitive things." ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... hope you will not judge my earnestness to be impatience: and for my simplicity, if by that you mean a harmlessness, or that simplicity which was usually found in the primitive Christians, who were, as most Anglers are, quiet men, and followers of peace; men that were so simply wise, as not to sell their consciences to buy riches, and with them vexation and a fear to die; if you mean ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... woke the echoes. He tried to jump out, but as both Bee and I had our arms around him, more in anxiety than affection, however, he realized that we desired his society, and forbore to escape. Jack is a good deal of a gentleman, you see, albeit primitive in his methods ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... for that purpose oxygenated water. He had ascertained its power of converting the black sulphide of lead into the white sulphate, and, by touching the spots with a brush dipped in the fluid, soon succeeded in restoring the drawing to its primitive state. Here, again, the use of the agent might doubtless be extended to other colours, to ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... and restore peace among their four-footed friends, who, in the balmy softness of the air, had set to biting and kicking one another, uprooting their pickets and neighing and snorting furiously. Then there was the delicious coffee, their greatest, indeed their only, luxury, which they ground by the primitive appliances of a carbine-butt and a porringer, and afterward strained through a red woolen sash. But their life was not one of unalloyed enjoyment; there were dark days, also, when they were far from the abodes of civilized man with the enemy before them. No more fires, then; no singing, no good ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... front of the shed and admire the world. I thought about the primitive mind, and how the civilised was given to playing it low on the primitive. I seemed to get around part of their point of view after a while and see it was reasonable. For the Mituans had got it fixed before we came that the keeper was somehow mixed up in the earthquakes. And ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... The primitive population around Greencombe had never seen the duke, or any of his family, who preferred to reside at Hereward Hold, in Devonshire, or their town-house in Piccadilly, leaving their small Sussex place in charge of a land-steward and ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... him an historical personage, in some sense distinct from both the world and man, which are his works and yet stand in an external relationship to him. It expresses the spirit of ethical and monotheistic religion, and is therefore the natural belief of the Christian. Pantheism appears in primitive religion as an animistic or polytheistic sense of the presence of a divine principle diffused throughout nature. But it figures most notably in the history of religions, in the highly reflective Brahmanism of India. In sharp opposition to Christianity, this religion ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... and his children. A medal of the Emperor Constantius is said to be still extant in which the mysterious symbol is accompanied with the memorable words, "By this sign shalt thou conquer." The austere simplicity of the Primitive Christians yielded at length to this innovation of sacred splendor. Before the end of the sixth century the use and even the worship of images, or pictorial representations of sacred persons and subjects, was firmly established ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... years in Paris. But he came back to fight. Nothing could keep Julien from the army, but he brought his violin with him. We Latins, or at least we who are called Latins, steep our souls in music. It's not merely intellectual with us. It's passion, fire, abandonment, triumph and all the great primitive ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... buildings of the Kensington Public Baths. Between the Lancaster and Walmer Roads we come again to the very poor district extending from the Potteries. In Fowell Street there is a square, yellow brick Primitive Methodist chapel, with a stone stating that it was founded "Aug. 2nd, 1864, by J. Fowell, who gave the land." Fowell Street leads into Bomore Road, at the corner of which stands Notting Dale Chapel; this is a plain brick building founded in 1851. ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... night on their way to some other part of the front, jostled among British soldiers, and their packs were a wonder to see. They were like traveling tinkers, with pots and pans and boots slung about their faded blue coats, and packs bulging with all the primitive needs of life in the desert of the battlefields beyond civilization. They were unshaven, and wore their steel casques low over their foreheads, without gaiety, without the means of buying a little false hilarity, but grim and sullen—looking and ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... Sussex auctioneer's list that lies before me—a catalogue of live and dead farming stock to be sold at a homestead under the South Downs—is full of them. So blunt and sturdy they are, these ancient primitive terms of the soil: "Lot 1. Pitch prong, two half-pitch prongs, two 4-speen spuds, and a road hoe. Lot 5. Five short prongs, flint spud, dung drag, two turnip pecks, and two shovels. Lot 9. Six hay rakes, two scythes and sneaths, cross-cut saw, and a sheep hook. Lot 39. Corn chest, ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... as his burial-place. It was consecrated by Pope Leo III., assisted by three hundred and sixty-five archbishops and bishops. It was partially destroyed by barbarians, but was rebuilt by the Emperor Otho III., and much of the primitive structure still remains. Under the centre of the dome is a marble slab in the floor on which are the words CAROLO MAGNO, indicating the spot where the tomb of Charlemagne was located. It was probably a little chapel above ground. It was opened in 1165, and the body was found sitting ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... than one admiring allusion to Mr. W. E. Henley. That clever and unhappy man lived in admiration of a vague violence, and was always going back to rude old tales and rude old ballads, to strong and primitive literatures, to find the praise of strength and the justification of tyranny. But he could not find it. It is not there. The primitive literature is shown in the tale of Jack the Giant-Killer. The strong old literature is all in praise of the weak. The rude old tales are as ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... dreading their storms. Indeed, Saba is one of those quiet secluded nooks, which are sometimes unexpectedly discovered in different parts of the world, where the people, generation after generation, live in a sort of primitive simplicity, and pride themselves upon their peculiarities and seclusion from mankind. The traveller in quest of novelties would do well to ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... Rome conquered every other free State, and finished the murder of Liberty in the ancient world, by destroying herself. What but the sword, in modern times, annihilated the Republics of Italy, the Hanseatic Towns, and the primitive independence of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland? What but the sword partitioned Poland, assassinated the rising liberty of Spain, banished the Huguenots from France, and made Cromwell the master, not ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... as the plant received in early Abyssinia and Arabia was crude and primitive at best. Throughout the intervening centuries, there has been little improvement in Yemen; but modern cultural methods obtain in the Harar ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... world's poorest nations, Laos has had a Communist centrally planned economy with government ownership and control of productive enterprises of any size. Recently, however, the government has been decentralizing control and encouraging private enterprise. Laos is a landlocked country with a primitive infrastructure, that is, it has no railroads, a rudimentary road system, limited external and internal telecommunications, and electricity available in only a limited area. Subsistence agriculture is the main occupation, accounting ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... discovery, is in no wise the natural consequence of a new invention, of processes or methods hitherto unknown. It owes nothing to the latest acquirements of our knowledge. It springs from the humblest idea which the most primitive man might have conceived in the first days of the earth's existence. It is simply a matter of having a little more patience, confidence and respect for all that which shares our lot in a world whereof we know none of the purposes. It is simply a matter of having a ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... above—do indeed make, in some of the chansons, a fuller appearance than the flashlight view of lost tragedy which we have in Roland. But until the reflex influence of the Arthurian romance begins to work, they are, though not always disagreeable or ungraceful, of a very simple and primitive kind, as indeed are ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... an habitual expression of kind feeling. It had been a German face some two or three generations before, but an American climate,—political, I mean,—had tamed down the rude lines produced by ages of European despotism, and had almost restored it to its primitive nobility of feature. Afterwards, when better acquainted with American types, I should have known it as a Pennsylvanian face, and such in reality it was. I saw before me a graduate of one of the great medical schools of Philadelphia, ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... Like the navigators of old when approaching an unknown land, we examined and watched for the most trivial sign of a change. The drifted trunk of a tree, or a boulder of primitive rock, was hailed with joy, as if we had seen a forest growing on the flanks of the Cordillera. The top, however, of a heavy bank of clouds, which remained almost constantly in one position, was the most promising sign, and eventually ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... conceive the state of mind of primitive man the first thing that occurs to us is the bewilderment and terror he must have felt in the presence of the powers of nature. Naked, houseless, weaponless, he is at the mercy, every hour, of this immense and incalculable Something so alien and so hostile to himself. As fire it burns, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... first point to be remembered in the history of the English language, is that it was not the primitive and original tongue of any of the British Islands, nor yet of any portion of them. Indeed, of the whole of Great Britain it is not the language at the present moment. Welsh is spoken in Wales, Manks in the Isle of Man, and Scotch Gaelic in the Highlands ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... and have the culture of travel, but can not describe or locate the various organs or functions upon which their lives depend! "The time will come," says Frances Willard, "when it will be told as a relic of our primitive barbarism that children were taught the list of prepositions and the names of the rivers of Thibet, but were not taught the wonderful laws on which their own bodily happiness is based, and the humanities ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... strikingly different conditions. We have found a refuge in a boarding-house which has been highly recommended to me, and where the arrangements partake of that barbarous magnificence which in this country is the only alternative from primitive rudeness. The terms, per week, are as magnificent as all the rest. The landlady wears diamond ear- rings; and the drawing-rooms are decorated with marble statues. I should indeed be sorry to let you know how I ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... comparatively short staple, and the unevenness of the fibers, as well as the difficulty of detaching it from the seed, was decidedly inferior to some other accessible species. The Southern planters who grew it, moreover, found it next to impossible to gin it properly, the primitive roller gin of the time being unsuited to the task, and the work of pulling off the fibers by hand being both tedious and expensive. In 1792, the amount exported from the United States was ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... with less comfort than before in a rickety buggy of most primitive construction, designed to meet the needs of rough mountain roads, and as innocent of springs as Guy himself of the murder of Montague Nevitt. It was a wretched drive. The drought had now broken; the wet season had begun; rain fell heavily. A piercing cold wind blew down from the nearer ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... complexions, lively deep-set eyes, scanty beards—dressed in blue nankeen trimmed with black plush, sword-belts of leather with silver buckles, coats gayly braided, and silk caps edged with fur and three ribbons fluttering behind. Brown-skinned Afghans, too, might have been seen. Arabs, having the primitive type of the beautiful Semitic races; and Turcomans, with eyes which looked as if they had lost the pupil,—all enrolled under the Emir's flag, the flag of ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... ill-constructed, others which produce a jarring effect in poetry, or indeed in any lofty literature. Thirdly, he sins from time to time by being obscure, fragmentary, and agglomerative—giving long strings of successive and detached items, not, however, devoid of a certain primitive effectiveness. Fourthly, his self- assertion is boundless; yet not always to be understood as strictly or merely personal to himself, but sometimes as vicarious, the poet speaking on behalf of all men, and every man and woman. These and any ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... of Casabianda outlasted the sun. He had the virtues of his primitive race, and that appreciation of a guest which urges the entertainer to give not only the best that he has, but the best that he ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... primitive in character, but comprehensive and easily understood, yet adequate to bring speedy relief, is what is now most needed. Such laws could be passed by a provisional legislative body. Light taxes for a few ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... erection of this modest but comfortable building the court used to be held out in the open air under the shade of some large trees—a more picturesque method of doing business, certainly, but subject to inconveniences on account of the weather. It is altogether the most primitive and patriarchal style of business one ever saw, but all the more delightful ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... be respected, men to be admired, men to be beloved, men of learning, goodness, genius, and charm. But could they resist the truth that lucidity would have been fatal to it? The movers of all those questions about apostolical succession, church patristic authority, primitive usage, postures, vestments—questions so passionately debated, and on which he would not seek to cast ridicule—did not they all begin by taking for granted something no longer possible or receivable, build on this basis as if it were indubitably solid, and fail to see that their basis not being ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... bodies trapped in it were not well organized some weeks after the bombings. As the British Mission has stated, "the impression which both cities make is of having sunk, in an instant and without a struggle, to the most primitive level." ...
— The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United States
... later those to whom time or comfort meant more than money could make the through journey in one-third the time, though for the leaner-pursed the more primitive facilities still lingered. For the summer trip from Quebec to Montreal the steamer had outstripped the stage-coach. Even with {22} frequent stops to load the fifty or sixty cords of pine burned on each trip—how many Canadian business men secured their start ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... Chap-books of all sorts made in Moscow about 1830, long before the Censorship had in great measure stopped the growth of popular literature. It is not necessary to dilate upon the peculiarities of Chap-books and their methods: in the conditions of their existence many of the finest qualities of the primitive stories are eliminated, but on the other hand certain essentials are enforced. The story must be direct, the interest sustained, and the language however ...
— The Russian Garland - being Russian Falk Tales • Various
... pass to Eutyches who, wandering from the path of primitive doctrine, has rushed into the opposite error[70] and asserts that so far from our having to believe in a twofold Person in Christ, we must not even confess a double Nature; humanity, he maintains, was so assumed that the union ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... and the judges of the King's Court claiming from the starving survivors the "murder-fine" ordained by law to be paid for every dead body found when the murderer was not produced. The system of cultivation was ignorant and primitive. Rendered timid by the repeated failure of crops, the poor people would set aside a part of their land to sow together oats, barley, and wheat, in the hope that whatever were the season something would come up which might serve for the rough black bread which was their main ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... Word of God such texts were incorporated in their creeds, but so deep has been their plunge into the whirlpool of worldliness that they are rejected from both Bible and creed. Many tell us that this was for the women in the primitive days of Christianity when it was the custom to plait the hair with gold and silver strands. This is only a ready sophistry to allure the soul. We will admit it was for women in the early days of Christianity, but we deny it is any less for women and men also in any other day. ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... under their chins; but no matter how bizarre they made themselves, nobody on the streets of blase San Francisco paid the slightest attention to them. The Mission, which they, together with the crowd, frequented, was a primitive Coney Island. Bear pits, cockfights, theatrical attractions, side-shows, innumerable hotels and small restaurants, saloons, races, hammer-striking, throwing balls at negroes' heads, and a hundred other attractions kept the crowds busy and generally good-natured. If a fight ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... of anything like the next few days—the filth, the degradation, the cruelty. Nicholas was glad, when half-naked Moslem boys called them names from a safe distance, that the others could not understand. The insults of an Oriental are primitive and plain—and very old. Nicholas had a trick of absorbing languages, and already knew half a score of ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... land, and a communal system was adopted under which Francia disposed at will of the country and its people. He fixed a system for the cultivation of the fields, and when hands were needed for the harvest he enlisted them forcibly. Yet agriculture made little progress under the primitive methods employed, a broad board serving for a plough, while the wheat was ground in mortars, and a piece of wood moved by oxen formed the sugar-mill. The cotton, as soon as picked from the pods, was spun on the spinning-wheel, and then woven ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... the catastrophe was undoubtedly inflicted by the mortal who had married the Fairy lady. Why iron should have been tabooed by the Fairy and her father, must remain an open question. But if we could, with reason, suppose, that that metal had brought about their subjugation, then in an age of primitive and imperfect knowledge, and consequent deep superstition, we might not be wrong in supposing that the subjugated race would look upon iron with superstitious dread, and ascribe to it supernatural power inimical to them as a race. They would under such feelings ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... no other hand can rival, to make the reasons of his failure and isolation clear both to himself and others. "To love, to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand—all these are possible to me if only I may be dispensed from willing—I have a sort of primitive horror of ambition, of struggle, of hatred, of all which dissipates the soul and makes it dependent on external things and aims. The joy of becoming once more conscious of myself, of listening to the passage of time and the flow of the universal life, is sometimes enough to make me ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of it, on a small island at the southern entrance of this strait. This islet looked truly inviting, being clothed with long rich grass, which to our cost we found concealed boulders of granite; this was the first time we met with this primitive rock, and from the colour of the surrounding heights it was evident we were in an old red sandstone region. Strange to say the attraction on this island rendered our compasses quite useless; we noticed on its North-West side a portion of the wreck of a small vessel. There was ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... all social organizations, at their inception, must have been to provide shelter against inclement weather. In primitive times society was composed of shepherds, or agriculturists, or hunters, and it is presumable that each of these groups adopted a shelter suited to its nomadic or sedentary tastes. For this reason to shepherds is attributed the invention of the tent, a portable habitation which they could ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... rational conception of the Person of the Incarnate Son, as the Church had received it by divine inspiration. Some Christian historians may seem for a moment to yield a half {20} assent to the shallow opinions of those who would refuse to go beyond what is sometimes strangely called the "primitive simplicity of the Gospel." But it is impossible in this obscurantist fashion to check the free inquiry of the human intellect. The truths of the Gospel must be studied and pondered over, and set in their proper ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... In a primitive state of society, then, he is poor who has not enough of the things useful to him, and he who has them in abundance is rich, ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... curious how, in spite of domestication and training, Nature in her great moments returns to the primitive and instinctive! My brown cow, never having had anything but the kindest treatment, is as gentle an animal as could be imagined, but she had followed the nameless, ages-old law of her breed: she had escaped in her great moment to the most secret place she knew. It did ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... they came into the world in the primitive way in which Mr. Owen wishes us all to come—too naturally for the present state of society, and Mr. Owen's parallelogram was not ready for them. By the way, one of them disappeared at Paris;-you never ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... noticed the first Tarahumare plough, the share of which was made of a section of oak. In its general appearance it is an imitation of the ordinary Mexican plough, in other words, is simply a tree stem with a branch as a handle. But, however primitive in design and construction, the civilised man's implement always has an iron share. Of course, such among the Tarahumares as can afford iron shares, never fail to get them; but in several parts of their country ploughs made entirely of wood, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... a 'prentice, my boy, in the primitive stage, And you itch, like a boy, to confess: When you know a bit more of the arts of the age You will probably talk ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... taken the matter philosophically. He has not annoyed me, except by being alive on earth. He showed a certain primitive decency in not recognizing me when he might have done it in a very disagreeable fashion. I think he was absolutely astonished to see me there; but he never winked an eyelash. I give ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... assembled, could not fail to tax severely the resources of a port like Cadiz, and distress would tend to drive them out soon. Thirty thousand able-bodied men are a heavy additional load on the markets of a small city, blockaded by sea, and with primitive communications by land. Upon this rested Nelson's principal hope of obliging them to come forth, if Napoleon himself did not compel them. Their position, he wrote the Secretary for War soon after he joined the fleet, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... seen the true Mecca breed, with which the Moslems conquered Spain. He would have also perceived how much the advantages of a beautiful clime and perpetual pasture has improved these noble animals, making them superior to the primitive stock, both in size, speed, and bottom. With one of them I made a journey of five thousand miles, and on arriving in Missouri, I sold him for eight hundred dollars. He was an entire horse, as white as snow, and standing seventeen and a half hands ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... heathen soil:—a church, in which by no means all should be preachers, but all should be willing to do for all whatever occasion required. Such a church had I read of among the Moravians in Greenland and in South Africa. I imagined a little colony, so animated by primitive faith, love, and disinterestedness, that the collective moral influence of all might interpret and enforce the words of the few who preached. Only in this way did it appear to me that preaching to the heathen could ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... relation of Homer to Christianity. "The standard of humanity of the Greek poet is different, yet many of his ideas almost carry us back to the early morning of our race; the hours of its greater simplicity and purity, and more free intercourse with God.... How is it possible to overvalue this primitive representation of the human race in a form complete, distinct and separate, with its own religion, stories, policy, history, arts, manners, fresh and true to the standard of its nature, like the form of an infant from the hand of the Creator, yet ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... rude pictorial representation shows him seated and giving audience, in horrible state, with the upper part of his person enveloped by these writhing and entangled reptiles. [Footnote: This picture and some other equally grotesque illustrations, produced in a primitive style of wood engraving, are prefixed to David Cusick's History of the Six Nations. The artist to whom we owe them was probably the historian himself. My accomplished friend, Mrs. E. A. Smith, whose studies have thrown much light upon the mythology and language of the Iroquois ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... wanted to be primitive and do it all ourselves; I knew Morris would be grand help, but I was not ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... bazar, but to a bazar at which crowds of peasants from different provinces congregate once a week for the sale of silver and turquoise jewelry, which is mostly exhibited on their persons, supplemented by a small bundle which is carried; but the transactions are very primitive and unlike those at any other bazar. Then there are the quaint things they wear,—artistic chatelaines with articles generally suspended and thrown over the shoulder, instead of worn around the waist, immense earrings, ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... place in a tragedy, and the one kind of strength which is systematically denied to him is the strength to succeed. That the power of a man's spirit might possibly go to the length of turning a tragedy into a comedy is not admitted; nevertheless, almost all the primitive legends of the world are comedies, not only in the sense that they have a happy ending, but in the sense that they are based upon a certain optimistic assumption that the hero is destined to be the destroyer of the monster. Singularly enough, this modern idea of the essential disastrous ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... a G. A. R. veteran was dying. He had come from the Civil War straight to a farm which, though it was officially within the city-limits of Zenith, was primitive as the backwoods. He had never ridden in a motor car, never seen a bath-tub, never read any book save the Bible, McGuffey's readers, and religious tracts; and he believed that the earth is flat, that the English are the Lost Ten Tribes of ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... electro-magnet, with the heavy glass across its perforated poles, and P the second Nicol.) Exciting the magnet, one half of the image becomes suddenly red, the other half green. Interrupting the current, the two colours fade away, and the primitive puce ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... of the pioneers of the great Restoration Movement of the nineteenth century, who forsook the religious associations of a lifetime and cheerfully endured poverty, persecution and every hardship in their endeavor to restore Christian union on the primitive gospel, and who held forth a beacon-light that helped me to find the truth in its simplicity as it is ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... form than Melas-gerd is Manas-gert, the city of Manas, where Manas would represent Menuas: one of the inscriptions of Aghtamar speaks of a certain Menuakhinas, city of Menuas, which may be a primitive version ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... with them for an hour. There was a mingled sweetness and dignity in his manner which had in it something of the primitive character we poetically ascribe to the pastors of the Church. Lady Vargrave seemed to vie with Evelyn which should love him the most. When he retired to his home, which was not many yards distant from the cottage, Evelyn, pleading a headache, sought her chamber, and Lumley, to soothe his mortification, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lift. The tilted lamp straightened and its light rested on Adam's wasted form. His silk pyjamas rather emphasized than hid his gauntness; he looked strangely worn and weak, but Kit could picture the strong passion of his love-making. There was something fierce and primitive about the old Buccaneer, and it was not hard to see how he had, so to speak, swept the romantic girl off her feet by the fiery spirit that had burned him out. Yet he had never talked about other women, and though he ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... centuries China's population had been constant. Her territory had been saturated with population; that is to say, her territory, with the primitive method of production, had supported the maximum limit of population. But when she awoke and inaugurated the machine-civilization, her productive power had been enormously increased. Thus, on the same territory, she was able to support a far larger ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... humility, and patience under affliction, were admirably taught at Cowan Bridge. And if the carnal nature of the Clergy Daughters resisted the militant efforts of Mr. Carus Wilson, it was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitive drainage working together in an unwholesome valley. Mr. Carus Wilson, indeed, was inspired by a sublime antagonism to the claims of the perishable body; but he seems to have pushed his campaign against the flesh a ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... of our actions—and it must suffice! Ask no questions; we do not wish to be disturbed by the blind gropings of your primitive mind!" ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... opinion, the most important thing which can be done to promote the nut growing industry is to make clear to men and women everywhere the necessity for returning to natural and biologic living. Since he left his primitive state, in his wanderings up and down the face of the earth to escape destruction by terrific terrestrial convulsions and cataclysmic changes in climate and temperatures, chilled during long glacial periods, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... the Japanese is still involved in obscurity, and the date of the settlement of the islands is unknown. The boldest theory is, that a tribe proceeded thither directly from the land of Shinar, at the division of the races. In support of this, the purity of the Japanese language, which, in its primitive form, bears very slight affinity to any other tongue, and the evident dissimilarity of the people to those of any other Asiatic country, are adduced. The more general belief is, that the Japanese are an offshoot of the Mongol family, and that their emigration to these islands ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... us that primitive man had certain affinities to the beast of prey. By superior strength or ingenuity he slew or snared the means of subsistence. Civilized man leaves the coarsest forms of slaughter to a professional class, and, if he kills at all, elevates his pastime to the rank of sport by the ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... pear-trees, and before me, among the hills northward, lay broad, cultivated slopes, dotted here and there with cabins and tall, solitary trees. On the nearer slope, perhaps a sixteenth of a mile away, a negro was ploughing, with a single ox harnessed in some primitive manner,—with pieces of wood, for the most part, as well as I could make out through an opera-glass. The soil offered the least possible hindrance, and both he and the ox seemed to be having a literal "walk-over." Beyond him—a full half-mile away, perhaps—another ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... to live as thei list, that thei be compelled eyther to desist from ecclesiastical administratioun, or to discharge thare dewities as becumeth trew ministeris; So that the grave and godlie face of the primitive Churche reduced, ignorance may be expelled, trew doctrine and good maneris may ones agane appeare in the Churche of this Realme. These thingis we, as most obedient subjectis, requyre of your Grace, in the name of the Eternall ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... plain, Helchitsky points to the primitive organization of Christian society—the organization which, he says, is now regarded in the Roman Church as an abominable heresy. This Primitive Church was his special ideal of social organization, founded on equality, liberty, and fraternity. Christianity, in Helchitsky's ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... primitive pine-torch to the paraffin candle, how wide an interval! between them how vast a contrast! The means adopted by man to illuminate his home at night, stamp at once his position in the scale of civilisation. The fluid bitumen of the far East, blazing in rude vessels of baked ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... has caused in them any physical or moral deterioration which interferes with their fighting capacity. The soldiers of these civilized peoples are just as ready for hand-to-hand encounters with cold steel as any barbarians or savages have ever been. The primitive combative instincts remain in full force and can be brought into play by all the belligerents with facility. The progress of the war should have removed any delusions on this subject which Germany, Austria-Hungary, or any one of the Allies may have entertained. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Francais, and to some of the people connected with it, for ten years, for nothing! One gets a kind of insight from long habit which, I think, one may trust. Oh, you blind Eustace, how could you forget that for a creature so full of primitive energy, so rich in the stuff of life, nothing is irreparable! Education has passed her by. Well, she will go to find her education. She will make a teacher out of every friend, out of every sensation. Incident and feeling, praise and dispraise, will ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... incident of the kind to show not merely the tenderness of his heart, but the extraordinary reputation Gordon had acquired by his high-minded action among these primitive and down-trodden races. Here are some others that have been selected almost at random out of his daily acts of gentleness and ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... the history of the Eastern Indians agree in assigning the highest place to the Iroquois. Parkman asserts that they afford perhaps an example of the highest elevation which man can reach without emerging from the primitive condition of the hunter. Morgan declares that in the width of their sway they had reared the most powerful empire that ever existed in America north of the Aztec monarchy. The home country of the Iroquois included nearly the whole of the present State of ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... the author of the original offence.), even more strange than his first story, and he thoroughly stirred her enthusiasm by his descriptions of the strange wild beauty of the country, the peculiarities of its inhabitants, and their primitive hospitality and customs. Finally, he offered her a pretty little stiletto, less remarkable for its shape and copper mounting than for its origin. A famous bandit had given it to Captain Ellis, and had assured him it had been buried in four human bodies. Miss Lydia thrust ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... Here introduce a comparison between the social group known to the student, a retarded group (such as MacClintock's or Vincent's study of the Kentucky Mountaineers[35]) or a frontier community, and a contemporary primitive tribe (say, the Hupa or Seri Indians, Negritos, Bontoc Igorot, Bangala, Kafirs, Yakuts, Eskimo, or Andaman Islanders). Require a detailed comparison arranged in parallel columns on such points as size, variety of occupation, food supply, security of life, institutions, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... as possible from raids. But the Cape Colony is considerably larger in area than France and the United Kingdom put together; it has "an immense length of frontier that can be crossed anywhere," and "exceedingly primitive means of communication." The exclusion of mobile guerilla bands from across the frontier is, therefore, "something of an impossibility." There is one method, and one only, by which "the game of the invaders can be frustrated." It is to provide each district with ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... De Thou, i. 539; Crespin, ubi supra, fols. 100, 101.—Historians have noticed the remarkable points of similarity this report presents to that made by the younger Pliny to the Emperor Trajan regarding the primitive Christians. Plinii Epistolae, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... "lacks form a little," and his indifference to "accurate statistics"—which he declares to be "somewhat tedious"—is now and then felt to be an embarrassment. One would like to know, for instance, while reading about the primitive theatrical times, when actors sailed the western rivers in flatboats, and shot beasts and birds on the bank, precisely the extent and limits of that period. Nor is this the only queer aspect of the dramatic past ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... charge. My instances are gathered from half a dozen pages of the tale called Deerslayer. He uses "verbal," for "oral"; "precision," for "facility"; "phenomena," for "marvels"; "necessary," for "predetermined"; "unsophisticated," for "primitive"; "preparation," for "expectancy"; "rebuked," for "subdued"; "dependent on," for "resulting from"; "fact," for "condition"; "fact," for "conjecture"; "precaution," for "caution"; "explain," for "determine"; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... wall and the embryos are probably discharged into the lymph spaces, thence into the venous system, and by the blood stream to the muscles, which constitutes their seat of election. After a preliminary migration in the inter-muscular connective tissue, they penetrate the primitive muscle- fibres and in about two weeks develop into the full grown muscle form. In this process interstitial inflammation of the muscle is excited, and gradually an ovoid capsule develops about the parasite. Two, and occasionally three or four, worms may be seen within ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... not find that such enterprises have usually been successful. I see, rather, how commonly they have failed. And if it was so in the Middle Ages when the arts of war were primitive, how much less likely are the conspiracies of secret societies, the partial and superficial risings of refugees, to be serious now in the days of ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... of the world," said Xanthes, "primitive man was contented to imitate the language of the animals." But as we study the evolution of human nature, we find that man was not long content to imitate the sounds of the animals in the forests. He found ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... concerned, therefore, the translation is sufficiently accurate. But as regards style the problem is much more difficult. To convey not only the meaning but exactly the Hawaiian way of seeing things, in such form as to get the spirit of the original, is hardly possible to our language. The brevity of primitive speech must be sacrificed, thus accentuating the tedious repetition of detail—a trait sufficiently characteristic of Hawaiian story-telling. Then, too, common words for which we have but one form, in the original employ a variety of synonyms. "Say" and "see" are conspicuous examples. ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... watched the rain. It was beginning to get on his nerves. It was not like our soft English rain that drops gently on the earth; it was unmerciful and somehow terrible; you felt in it the malignancy of the primitive powers of nature. It did not pour, it flowed. It was like a deluge from heaven, and it rattled on the roof of corrugated iron with a steady persistence that was maddening. It seemed to have a fury ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... north side of the volcanoes north of Lake Kivu (see MEUMBIRO.) On reaching the level plain 15 m. from the lake its waters become brackish, and the Vegetation on its banks is scanty. The reedy marshes near its mouth form a retreat for a primitive race of fishermen. Lake Dweru, the shores of which are generally high, is fed by the streams from the eastern slopes of the Ruwenzori range. One of these, the Mpango, is a larger river than the Ruchuru. The outlet of the Nyanza, the Semliki, and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... is certainly later than the title Ab-u, probably the oldest epithet of this deity, see Tammuz and Ishtar, p. 8. Dumu-zi I take to have been originally the name of a prehistoric ruler of Erech, identified with the primitive ...
— The Epic of Gilgamish - A Fragment of the Gilgamish Legend in Old-Babylonian Cuneiform • Stephen Langdon
... grandfather's time it had been a plain farmhouse, of the kind that had satisfied the simpler manners of former days—the days when Consuls and Dictators were content, their time of office ended, to plow their own fields and reap their own harvests. Cicero was born within its walls, for the primitive fashion of family life still prevailed, and the married son continued to live in his father's house. After the old man's death, when the old-fashioned frugality gave way to a more sumptuous manner of life, the house was greatly enlarged, ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... the artists in the region farther back from the river than that monopolized by the boating-people. We were back among the sunny slopes and smiling meadows, the red-tiled farm-houses and dusky lanes, of the still primitive natives of the region, while the navy covered the shining river by day and overran ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... representations. Chinese acting is much admired and praised by travellers who are competent to follow the dialogue. The stage is generally a temporary erection improvised in a market-place, and the stage arrangements are of the most primitive character; no scenery is employed, and the actors introduce themselves in a sort of prologue, in which they state the name and character they represent in the drama. They also indicate the place where they are in the story, or the house which they have entered. ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... carriage and look at the alarm bell without pulling it. I have watched him seated in the smoking-room of the club we both attended, in which the star-light in the centre of the ceiling was shaded by a rather primitive screen of stretched tissue paper, gazing at it for half-an-hour at a time, and eventually taking all the coins out of his pocket to throw them one after another at the immediate object of his irritation. He frequently succeeded in penetrating ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... door always kept open winter and summer. A huge fire-place is in one end of the room. If you would have a view of humanity in its simplicity, visit one of these mountain homes. You will find everything of the most primitive kind. The hum of the spinning-wheel and the heavy thud of the loom will greet your ears. In one room you will very often see several beds, while the rest of the furniture will consist of a few wooden chairs, a table and perhaps a cupboard, and into this one room will be gathered the ...
— American Missionary, Volume 50, No. 8, August, 1896 • Various
... of or simultaneously with animatism as a primitive explanation of many different phenomena; if animatism was originally applied to non-human or inanimate objects, animism may from the outset have been in vogue as a theory of the nature of man. Lists of phenomena from the contemplation of which the savage was led to believe ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... lamp, was staggered by the splendour and luxury of my life, I, as I looked at him, by the wildness and uncouthness of his appearance. He was as a savage from the centre of Africa, thick ragged hair and beard, a powerful body in rags, and his whole attitude to the world primeval and utterly primitive. His mouth was cruel; his eyes, as almost always with the Russian peasant, mild and kindly. I do not intend to take up much space here with an account of him, but he did, after this first meeting, in some sort attach himself to me. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... minister. 'We need all hands to make use of the sunshine to-day. "Whatsoever thine hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might." It will be a healthy change of work for thee, lad; and I find best rest in change of work.' So off I went, a willing labourer, following Phillis's lead; it was the primitive distinction of rank; the boy who frightened the sparrows off the fruit was the last in our rear. We did not leave off till the red sun was gone down behind the fir-trees bordering the common. Then we went home to supper—prayers—to ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... branches, the history of error. The senses are the single source of our ideas, and furnish its models to the imagination. Hence that nearly incorrigible disposition to judge what we are ignorant of by what we know; hence those deceptive analogies to which the primitive rudeness of men surrenders itself. 'As they watched nature, as their eyes wandered to the surface of a profound ocean, instead of the far-off bed hidden under the waters, they saw nothing but their own likeness. Every object in nature had its god, and this ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... France—from sin if not from invaders. Pierre wondered what force could have produced her—her and her work. How was it that the visionary faculty had become developed in that lowly girl, so distracting believing souls as to bring about a renewal of the miracles of primitive times, as to found almost a new religion in the midst of a Holy City, built at an outlay of millions, and ever invaded by crowds of worshippers more numerous and more exalted in mind than had ever been known since the days of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... famous battlefield, of which we shall hear more in his later correspondence. 'This place is solitary enough,' he writes to John Allen, 'but I am well off in a nice farm-house. I wish you could come and see the primitive inhabitants, and the fine field of Naseby. There are grand views on every side: and all is interesting. . . . Do you know, Allen, that this is a very curious place with odd fossils: and mixed with bones and bullets of the fight at Naseby; and the identical spot where ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... primitive man from the German forests, whose language was scarcely intelligible, lived entirely to himself and constructed his shelter of brush and leaves—as would a bear preparing to hibernate. In his ignorance of the use of an axe I saw him, in felling a tree, "throw" it so that ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore
... nation, childish, irritating, endlessly amusing; of the daily toil of Northern men in managing farms and of Northern women in managing households under Southern and war-time conditions; of the universal preoccupation with negro needs; of the friendly interchange of primitive hospitality; of the underlying sense in the writers' minds of romantic contrast between their own to-day and the yesterday of the planters,—or a possible to-morrow of the planters. It is not with matters military or political that these letters ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... as soon as she was inside the door, "how fast would a Primitive Woman go up and how ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... when the lumbering vehicle neared its final destination and drew up to the little post-offices along the way. However late it might be, the village postmaster had to be on hand to receive and open the mailbags; after which he distributed the newspapers and letters in a primitive set of pine pigeon-holes on the wall, turned out the loafers, "banked up" the fire, and went home ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the time, he had an opportunity to examine his surroundings. He found himself in a small hut built of the straw of wild oats, interwoven with long, slender sticks, while the roof was treated in the same way. Only a few rather primitive utensils of cooking and living were to be seen, and he was wondering what sort of a hermit he had fallen in ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... The profusion and vigor are as wonderful as the variety. At a flower show in Santa Barbara were exhibited 160 varieties of roses all cut from one garden the same morning. The open garden rivals the Eastern conservatory. The country is new and many of the conditions of life may be primitive and rude, but it is impossible that any region shall not be beautiful, clothed with such a ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... was finished in 1887, five hundred and more years after the abandonment of Arnolfo's original design and three hundred and more years after the destruction of the second one, begun in 1357 and demolished in 1587. Of Arnolfo's facade the primitive seated statue of Boniface VIII (or John XXII) just inside the cathedral is, with a bishop in one of the sacristies, the only remnant; while of the second facade, for which Donatello and other early Renaissance sculptors worked, the giant S. John the ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... set out for Deer Creek. As has been already explained, it was the name of a mining settlement. Now, by the way, it is a prosperous town, though the name has been changed. Then, however, everything was rude and primitive. ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... said Constance, with great equanimity, "Mr. Sweet gets them for me, and I only save him the trouble of spoiling them. My taste leads me to prefer the simplicity of primitive ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell |
