"Precursor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said, with a certain emotion, whose meaning he could not analyse. "Was there ever yet a man of genius who was not either the relic of some great dead age, or the precursor of some noble future one, in which he ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... splendid Court thus suddenly evolved among the northern mists got abroad, and brought merchants with their wares up the Firth, and quickened, if it did not altogether originate, the first feeble current of trade which was the precursor and origin of all our after wealth ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... but from Spanish fiction and from Spanish history Lesage borrowed what suited his purpose, without in any way compromising his originality. To the picaresque tales (and among these may be noted a distant precursor of Gil Blas in the Francion of Charles Sorel) he added his own humanity, and in place of a series of vulgar adventures we are given a broad picture of social life; the comedy of manners and intrigue grows, as the author proceeds, into a comedy of ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... hideous invention of modern times. They date from the seventeenth century. Before that time there were only guard-houses where the soldiers played cards and told tales. Louis XIV was a precursor of Bonaparte. But the evil has attained its plenitude since the monstrous institution of the obligatory enlistment. The shame of emperors and of republics is to have made it an obligation for men to kill. In the ages called barbarous, cities and princes entrusted ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... mentioned that, as the result of observations and researches carried out at the South Orkneys—a group of sub-Antarctic islands at the entrance to the Weddell Sea—it has been found that a cold winter in that sea is a sure precursor of a drought over the maize and cereal bearing area of Argentina three and a half years later. To the farmers, the value of this knowledge so far in advance is enormous, and since England has some three hundred million pounds sterling invested in Argentine interests, Antarctic Expeditions ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... per cent., and it is daily increasing. But the sale of expensive works, and of library editions of standard authors in costly bindings, is yet more noticeable. Ten years ago such a display of magnificent works as is to be found at the Appletons' would have been a precursor of bankruptcy. There was no demand for them. A few dozen, in one little show-case, was the prudent whole. Now, one whole side of an immense store is not only filled with admirably bound library books, but from some inexhaustible source ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... twenty workmen of various trades, thirty women, some doctors, and even some musicians. The admiral obtained the concession besides, that all the punishments in use in Spain should be changed into transportation to the islands. He was thus the precursor of the English in the intelligent idea of peopling new colonies with convicts, whom labour was ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... Precursor to what black despairs Was that child's face which once was theirs! And O to what a world of guile Was herald ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... position of the lovers was uncomfortable, Jaspar's was painful. They had the consolation of loving and being loved; but he was now writhing under the weight of an additional torture. The appearance of Hatchie was the knell of all his hopes, the precursor of ruin. To him it was a mystery, and all his endeavors ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... eyes, dressed in the garb of a Roman Catholic priest, albeit slightly tinged with frontier innovations. He came on board at Detroit, and as soon as we were under way he exchanged his hat for a cloth cap embroidered with Indian bead-work; and when the cold air, precursor of the gale, struck us on Huron, he wrapped himself in a large capote made of ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... The precursor of Saint-Simon, the model of Lord Chesterfield, this ornament of his age, belonged, as well as Saint-Simon, to that state of society in France which was characterised—as Lord John Russell, in his 'Memoirs of the Duchess of Orleans,' tells us—by an idolatry of power ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... recognize Arcturus and Orion and Perseus and the glittering jewels of the Southern Crown, and the Pleiades shedding sweet influences; but the Evening Star, the soft and serene light that glowed in their van, the precursor of them all, has sunk below the horizon. The spheres, meanwhile, perform their appointed courses; the same motion which lifted them up to the mid-sky bears them onward to their setting; and they, too, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... to give up; and, exhausted through pain and excitement, a film gathered over my eyes, which I thought was the precursor of dissolution. From this hopeless state I was aroused by a wounded Mexican, calling out to me, 'Bueno Americano,' and turning my eyes toward the spot, I saw that he was holding a certificate and calling to me. The tide of action now rolled away from me and hope again ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... the party was set for Thursday night, as Wain was to leave Patesville on Friday morning, taking with him the new teacher. The party would serve the double purpose of a compliment to the guest and a farewell to Rena, and it might prove the precursor, the mother secretly hoped, of other festivities to follow at some ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... piece of comb in melted beeswax, and sticking it to the top. Bees should never be allowed to send off more than two colonies in one season. To restrict them to one is still better. Excessive swarming is a precursor of destruction, rather than an evidence (as usually regarded) of prosperity. A given number of bees will make far less honey in two hives than in one, unless they are so numerous as greatly to crowd the hive. When a late swarm comes out, take away the queen, and they will immediately ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... the ship first became apparent; and looking about us for the cause, we became aware of the fact that a cross swell had begun to gather, and was slowly creeping down to us from the north-west—the sure precursor, Forbes affirmed, of a stiff blow from that quarter. In this opinion I fully agreed; still there was at that moment nothing of a menacing character in the aspect of the sky, beyond an increasing thickness of the atmosphere; ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... lasted only two days. Precursor Tolpatcheries (and, in fact, Prince Karl's Vanguard, if we knew it) come storming about, rifer and rifer; attempting the Bridge of Kolin (road to our Magazines); attempting this and that; meaning to get between us and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... death, in 1841, seven volumes of the "Prodromus" had appeared: Alphonse completed the seventeenth volume in 1873. In 1855 appeared his "Geographie botanique raisonnee," "which was the most important work of his life," and if not a precursor, "yet one of the inevitable foundation-stones" of modern evolutionary principles. He also wrote "Histoire des Savants," 1873, and "Phytographie," 1880. He was lavish of assistance to workers in Botany, and was distinguished by a dignified and charming personality. (See ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... of his death, and although he occasionally spoke with the eloquence and vehemence he had so often exhibited, his mind was evidently giving way. The reported appearance of a comet was taken as a token of his death. He was excited, and exclaimed with emotion, "A comet! that was the precursor ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... quarrel, give a new and additional interest to this former act of desperate perfidy. But let it be remembered with what tremendous vengeance that perfidy was punished—that the American alliance was the precursor of the French republic; and that the long train of hideous calamities which broke down the French throne, banished the nobility, and decimated the population, dates its origin from the day when that fatal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... of open water was not to be seen along the face of the Barrier meant that the ice in Ross Sea had a southerly drift. This in itself was unusual, and was caused by a northerly wind with snow, the precursor here of a storm from the south-west. The sky looked black and threatening, the barometer began to fall, and before long down came snowflakes on the ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... a most successful attempt to circulate among all classes, but especially among readers of comparatively small means, a cheap, well-edited, and beautifully illustrated edition of the works of our great poet. The text of the present edition is not printed, {351} like of its precursor, in double columns, but in a distinct and handsome type extending across the page; and as there is no doubt the notes will be revised so as to incorporate the amendments and elucidations of the text, which have appeared from our Colliers, Hunters, &c., since the Pictorial Shakspeare ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... self-governing people. The masses, and not a privileged few, give the tone and complexion to things in this country. We have not yet had time to develop a truly national literature or art. We have produced but one poet of the highest order. Whitman is autochthonous. He had no precursor. He is a new type of man ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... he always did when talking of money matters. The countess was accustomed to this tone as a precursor of news of something detrimental to the children's interests, such as the building of a new gallery or conservatory, the inauguration of a private theater or an orchestra. She was accustomed always to oppose anything announced in that ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... miles west of that on which we left him—two hundred miles nearer his goal. This galleon, called the Griffin because it carried on its prow the carving of a griffin, "in honor of the armorial bearings of Count Frontenac," was the precursor of those mighty fleets that now stir those waters with ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... fasting mystic would resemble, and his conception happens to coincide with the outcome of similar conditions actually put into practice elsewhere. The Berlin bronze is St. John as Baptist, the others show him with the scroll as Precursor. He always wears the camel's-hair tunic, which ends just below the knee; at Siena it is thick, like some woolly fleece; it conceals and broadens the frame, thus suggesting a stoutness which is not warranted by the size of ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... gazing, like myself, between the bars of the huge windows; for the ball is conducted upon exclusive principles, and is accessible only with tickets of admission. Two 'policias,' armed with revolvers and short Roman Swords, are stationed at the entrance-door, and this looks very much like the precursor of a row. Mulatto balls generally do end in some unlooked-for 'compromisa,' and it would not surprise me if this particular ball were to terminate ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... cursory an observation," returned the other, in a dry, reticent, ultra-professional manner. "But I will go so far as to say that I do not think it is a case of shell-shock. If it is what I suspect, that first attack was the precursor of another, possibly a worse attack. Ha! it is commencing. Look at his thumb—that ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... opened a negotiation recently with the chiefs of that tribe, for the purchase of their land in the State of Indiana. He has succeeded in procuring from them a cession of two hundred thousand acres, on terms advantageous to themselves and the United States. It may be considered the precursor to a total cession of their remaining land in that State, and their consequent emigration to the western territory; a result desirable in many respects, especially connected with advantages to a portion of our citizens, and doubly gratifying from its being compatible ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... still intensely cold. The light of the midday sun had decreased still more, and on reaching the plateau again she saw that a dark cloud, not unlike the precursor of a thunder-storm, was brooding over the snowy peaks beyond. In spite of the cold this singular suggestion of summer phenomena was still borne out by the distant smiling valley, and even in the soft grasses at her feet. It seemed to her the crowning inconsistency of the climate, and with a ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... feet, well bound to an iron rod and holding an iron cross also firmly infixed, stood a living representative of Saint John the Baptist, with arms and legs bare, a garment of tiger-skins about his body, and a golden nimbus fastened on his head—as the Precursor was wont to appear in the cloisters and churches, not having yet revealed himself to painters as the brown and sturdy boy who made one of the Holy Family. For where could the image of the patron saint ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Foreland beyond. In fact, the Wantsum was an early Spithead: it stood to Rutupiae as the Solent stands to Portsmouth and Southampton. But Thanet Isle hardly shared at all in this increased civilisation; on the contrary, Rutupiae (the precursor of Sandwich Haven) seems to have diverted all its early commerce. For Rutupiae became clearly the naval capital of our island, the seat of that vir spectabilis, the Count of Saxon Shore, and the rendezvous of the fleets of those British 'usurpers' Maximus and Carausius. It was also ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... middle classes, and they were in no mood to imperil their own cause by revolutionary claims. They could not always succeed, however, in checking the fury of the populace, which had been taught to clamour for reform as the precursor of a good time coming for the suffering and toiling masses of mankind. The streets of London were illuminated, and the windows of those who omitted to illuminate or were otherwise obnoxious were tumultuously demolished ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... THE MORAL is that pride is The precursor of a fall. Those beneath you to deride is Not expedient at all. Howsoever meek and humble Your inferiors may be, They perchance may make you tumble, So respect them. ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... entreated her to wed me then, and I would never cease striving after the excellence she wished me to attain. But on that score she was obdurate. Her hand must be the reward of my entire reformation, not the precursor of it. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... as he said this; he breathed quickly; and there was a curious working of the mouth and nostrils, which Mr. Claypole thought must be the immediate precursor of a violent fit of crying. Under this impression ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... was strong and lasting. They amused themselves by projecting the Scriblerus Club, a body which never had, it would seem, any definite organization, but was held to exist for the prosecution of a design never fully executed. Martinus Scriblerus was the name of an imaginary pedant—a precursor and relative of Dr. Dryasdust—whose memoirs and works were to form a satire upon stupidity in the guise of learning. The various members of the club were to share in the compilation; and if such joint-stock undertakings were practicable in literature, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... is in dramatic art, and very primitive as is the development of plot in it, it presents one aspect, as a literary work, which is notable. That it should exist at all is curious, since, surprising as it seems, it had no precursor. Although, during the thirty-five years of Norwegian independence, various classes of literature had been cultivated with extreme diligence, the drama had hitherto been totally neglected. With the exception of a graceful opera by Bjerregaard, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... of this country under it."[134] When Pinkney arrived, the matter of the colonial trade had already been settled indirectly by the Order of May 16, and it was soon to disappear from prominence, merged in the extreme measures of which that blockade was the precursor; but impressment remained an unhealed ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... commentary carried equal weight with Henry of Susa's throughout the Middle Ages, quotes the same text as authority for sending heretics to the stake.[2] According to this peculiar exegesis, the law and custom of the day merely sanctioned the law of Christ. To regard our Saviour as the precursor or rather the author of the criminal code of the Inquisition evidences, one must admit, a very peculiar ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... or the laws of hospitality, the wish became but the precursor to the actual carrying-out of the evil thought. Thanks to my heedlessness, and the careless way in which I had guarded the earrings, she obtained them with little trouble; and after an amount of duplicity and deceit, terrible and shameful to ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... and a Saxon word offer themselves to our choice, we shall generally do best to employ the Saxon, to speak of 'happiness' rather than 'felicity', 'almighty' rather than 'omnipotent', a 'forerunner' rather than a 'precursor', still these latter must be regarded as much denizens in the language as the former, no alien interlopers, but possessing the rights of citizenship as fully as the most Saxon word of them all. One part of the language is not to be favoured at the expense of the other; the Saxon ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... rent, From the best youth in England their dear pride, Their joy, in England; this, too, at a time In which worst losses easily might wean The best of names, when patriotic love 305 Did of itself in modesty give way, Like the Precursor when the Deity Is come Whose harbinger he was; a time In which apostasy from ancient faith Seemed but conversion to a higher creed; 310 Withal a season dangerous and wild, A time when sage Experience would have snatched Flowers out of any hedge-row ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... opportunity of pondering over his love just then, for Bob Sawyer's return was the immediate precursor of the arrival of a meat-pie from the baker's, of which that gentleman insisted on his staying to partake. The cloth was laid by an occasional charwoman, who officiated in the capacity of Mr. Bob Sawyer's housekeeper; and a third knife and fork ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... for them from the deadly bullets of the restless veteran. The appalling white horse would suddenly and unexpectedly dash out from a brake, or from behind a rock, and the whizzing of his bullet was the precursor of death. He followed the enemy to their very boats; and then, turning his horse's head, returned ...
— The Yankee Tea-party - Or, Boston in 1773 • Henry C. Watson
... of consequence," he said aggravatingly. "I was just thinking of the way folks are talking." Then he laughed right out; and if Joan had only understood the man she would have known that his merriment was but the precursor of ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... active illicit crop eradication program; used as transshipment point for Asian opiates, cannabis, and Latin American cocaine bound for growing domestic markets, to a lesser extent Western and Central Europe, and occasionally to the US; major source of heroin precursor chemicals; corruption and organized crime are key concerns; heroin ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Precursor of our woes, historic spade, What dismal records burn upon thy blade! On thee I see the maculating stains Of passengers' commingled blood and brains. In this red rust a widow's curse appears, And here an orphan tarnished thee with tears. Upon thy handle sanguinary bands Reveal the clutching ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... Palestine to-day may remind us. Whether the literal fulfilment is to be anticipated or no seems less important than to note that the experience of forgiveness (and of the consequent blessings described above) is the precursor of this fair picture. Therefore, the Church's condition of growth and prosperity is its realisation in the persons of its individual members, of pardon, the renewal of the inner man by the indwelling Spirit, faithful obedience, communion with God, and lowly remembrance of past ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... than she had ever thought of any man before. Was this love at last, the great love that is so rare in the heart of an artist, who is incapable of abandoning herself unreservedly to a sentiment, or was it simply a dream of an honest, bourgeois life, well protected against ennui, that vile ennui, the precursor of storms, which she had so much reason to dread? In any event, she suffered herself to be deceived and had been living for several days in a state of delicious unrest, for love is so strong, so beautiful, that its semblance, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... or of a cause acting without producing its full effect. Every change in nature is the effect of some previous change and the cause of some change to follow; just as the movement of each carriage near the middle of a long train is a result of the movement of the one in front and a precursor of the movement of the one behind. Facts or effects are to be seen everywhere, but causes have usually to be sought for. It is the function of science or organized knowledge to observe all effects, or phenomena, and to seek for ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... undoubting hopes of the physical students in Italy and England in his own time, Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, Gilbert, Galileo, or the founders of the Italian prototype of "Solomon's House" in the New Atlantis, the precursor of our Royal Societies, the Academy of the Lincei at Rome. Among these meditations was his inner life. But however he may have originally planned his course, and though at times under the influence of disappointment he threatened to retire to Cambridge or to travel ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... that the pair had sufficiently refreshed themselves the gloom of the departing day was deepening into the darkness of a moonless, starless night; and as they entered their hut the first shimmer of sheet lightning which was the precursor of the coming storm flickered above the tree-tops ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... were destined to wage mortal war. And for Moses this was a most important connection, for Moses after his exile never permitted his relations with his own people in Egypt to lapse. The possibility of a Jewish revolt, of which his own banishment was a precursor, was constantly in his mind. To Moses a Jewish exodus from Egypt was always imminent. For centuries it had been a dream of the Jews. Indeed it was an article of faith with them. Joseph, as he sank in death, had called his descendants about him and made them solemnly swear ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... unturned by opposition whereby there was the remotest chance of bringing ministers into public contempt. They were assailed at every point wherein they were considered vulnerable; and one attack was but the precursor of another. Mr. Brinsley Sheridan, who had made his first speech during last November, and had won golden opinions by his oratory on that occasion, moved three propositions: the first declaring that the military force could not justifiably be applied ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... that fall on the prisms are decomposed at angles of sixty and ninety degrees. Halos cannot, therefore, exist in a calm atmosphere. The doctor thought this theory very probable. Sailors accustomed to the boreal seas generally consider this phenomenon as the precursor of abundant snow. If their observation was just, the position of the Forward became very difficult. Hatteras, therefore, resolved to go on fast; during the remainder of the day and following night he did not take a minute's rest, ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... received instructions to make reprisals on the Spanish for their depredations on the southern borders of the Georgia Province. He rightly judged this to be the precursor of open hostilities, and hastened his preparations to put Carolina and Georgia in a state of defense. In October the British Government declared war on Spain, and November witnessed the beginning of fighting ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... little less common. There are also numerous forms of the genera Phragmoceras, Ascoceras, Gyroteras, Lituites, and Nautilus. Here, also, are the first-known species of the genus Goniatites—a group which attains considerable importance in later deposits, and which is to be regarded as the precursor of the Ammonites of ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... Indian war-whoop, the precursor of blood and flame and torture, which even the boldest heart could seldom hear without terror, burst as it were simultaneously from a hundred warrior lips. The wary savages had provided themselves with sharpened sticks. Rending the skies with ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... limbs; and this was the last unpleasant sensation remembered by Roswell, when he fell into another short and disturbed slumber. The propensity to sleep was very general now, though many struggled against it, knowing it was the usual precursor of death ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... he exemplifies the principle (like Micah, chapter vi.) chiefly from the early history of Jacob and Moses: as for the really historical period he belongs to it too much himself to survey it from so high a point of view. In this also he is a precursor of later writers, that he regards the human monarchy as one of the great evils of Israel: he certainly had very great occasion for this in the circumstances of the ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... this odd earliest allegory of music and theology, this earliest precursor of the organ-playing of Abt Vogler, one of those choirs, clusters of singing childish heads—clusters, you might almost say, of sweet treble notes, tied like nosegays by the score held scrollwise across them, which are among the sweetest inventions of Italian ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... of events afterwards, I conclude that I must have been insensible for about two hours. What roused me to consciousness once more was that sharp metallic click which had been the precursor of my terrible experience. It was the shooting back of the spring lock. Then, before my senses were clear enough to entirely apprehend what they saw, I was aware of the round, benevolent face of my cousin peering in through the ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... textiles, glass, petroleum, coal Agriculture: accounts for 2.3% of GDP; emphasis on livestock production - beef, veal, pork, milk; major crops are sugar beets, fresh vegetables, fruits, grain, tobacco; net importer of farm products Illicit drugs: source of precursor chemicals for South American cocaine processors; increasingly important gateway country for cocaine ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... from place to place observing curiously the habits and customs of other tribes; the common Willamette tongue, precursor of the more modern Chinook jargon, furnishing a means of intercourse. Everywhere Cecil found talk, barter, diversion. It was a rude caricature of civilization, the picture of society in its infancy, the rough dramatization of that phase through ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... Renaissance than the emergence not only from the same society, but also from the bosom of the same Church, of two men so diverse as the Pope Alexander VI. and the Prophet Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola has been claimed as a precursor of the Lutheran Reformers, and as an inspired exponent of the spirit of the fifteenth century. In reality he neither shared the revolutionary genius of Luther, which gave a new vitality to the faiths of Christendom, nor did he sympathize with that free movement of the modern ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... precursor of the Calicurgi (The Calicurgus, or Pompilus, is a Hunting Wasp, feeding her larvae on Spiders. Cf. "The Life and Love of the Insect": chapter 12.—Translator's Note.) dwelling in the prehistoric coal-forests. Her prey was some hideous ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... grown animals which have red or black hair; it is scarcely found at all in the lamb, sucking pig, chicken, and the white meat of the largest fowls. For this reason true connoisseurs always prefer the second joint; instinct with them was the precursor of science. ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... burdened heart to tell Him. It asks Him to see and hear what it knows that He does see and hear. But the prayer is not for mere observance followed by no divine act, but for taking knowledge as the precursor of the appropriate help. Of such seeing and hearing by God, believing prayer is the appointed condition. 'Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him'; but that is not a reason ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... flashes succeeded one another more rapidly, the thunder began to growl, and the wind, the precursor of a hurricane, whistled in the plumes and the hair of ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... intercourse between a woman and a dog, a creature resembling in its upper extremities its mother, while its lower extremities were the exact counterpart of its canine father. This particular case was believed by Bateman and others to be a precursor to the murders and wickedness that followed in the time of Pope Alexander I. Volateranus, Cardani, and many others cite instances of this kind. Lycosthenes says that in the year 1110, in the bourg ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... at best innocuous angels if there were not evil in the world for us to be ground upon and master. We are held and refined between the two attractions—one of the earth and the other a spiritual uplift. We believe that the sense of Unity is the first deep breath of the soul, the precursor of illumination; that the great Brotherhood conception must come from this sense. Next to this realisation, we believe that man's idea of time is an illusion, that immortality is here and now; that ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... excellence has never been attained, unless where nature and education, native endowment and circumstances, have concurred. This wonderful man received his commission for his achievements and his peculiar walk from the sign manual of nature. He was formed to be a woodsman, and the adventurous precursor in the first settlement of Kentucky. His home was in the woods, where others were bewildered and lost. It is a mysterious spectacle to see a man possessed of such an astonishing power of being perfectly familiar with his route and his resources in the depths of the untrodden wilderness, ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... forgotten; she had just become a sorrow. So perhaps my downfall as a lover was a precursor of better results ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... sudden falls, that the influences of the Holy Ghost are undervalued and unsought? Pray for the outpouring of this blessed Agent for the world's renovation, and thine own. "I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh," is the precursor of millennial bliss. Jesus! draw near, in thy mercy, to this torpid heart, as thou didst of old to thy mourning disciples, and breathe upon it, and say, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost." It is the mightiest of all boons; but, like the sun in the heavens, it is the freest of ...
— The Faithful Promiser • John Ross Macduff
... diplomacy, having for some time been placed in charge of the Government in the island of Guernsey. His appointment to the more onerous and responsible post of Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada was heralded as the precursor of better times. It was announced that he had come over charged with instructions to reverse the fatuous policy of his predecessor, and to conduct the administration in accordance with the well understood wishes of the ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... unprofessional eye saw the danger the boy was in; and the boy himself, lying awake during most of the weary hours of the night, had confided to his friend some thoughts which it seemed to Hinton could only come to such a child as the precursor of death. He now loved the boy for his own sake, and he was determined, even more determined than during the height of the fever, to do something to again ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... increase of all organic beings, each area is already fully stocked with inhabitants, it follows that as each selected and favoured form increases in number, so will the less favoured forms decrease and become rare. Rarity, as geology tells us, is the precursor to extinction. We can, also, see that any form represented by few individuals will, during fluctuations in the seasons or in the number of its enemies, run a good chance of utter extinction. But we may go further than this; for as new forms are continually and slowly being produced, ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... area. The posterior gland represents an outgrowth of the oldest part of the nervous system. When it is traced back along the tree of the vertebrate species, it is found to be present in all of them. An ancient invention, its precursor has been identified in worms and molluscs and even among the starfish. "The pituitary is practically the same, from myxine to man." A trusted veteran, therefore, among the internal secretory organs, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... and blanched face and asked herself if that look of pain and mortal trouble was the precursor of happiness and peace. As she bathed the forehead of the wounded man, it suddenly came to her that here was the only tragedy connected with Stafford's going: his work was cut short, his usefulness ended, his hand was fallen from ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... His present volume on the Origin of Species is the result of many years of observation, thought, and speculation; and is manifestly regarded by him as the "opus" upon which his future fame is to rest. It is true that he announces it modestly enough as the mere precursor of a mightier volume. But that volume is only intended to supply the facts which are to support the completed argument of the present essay. In this we have a specimen-collection of the vast accumulation; and, working from these as the high analytical mathematician may work from the admitted ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... general attitude, and the hopes and fears of both fighting men and civilians. Not only is this voluminous book a brilliantly written commentary on the opening months of the war, it is also infused with an inner sadness that could well be considered a precursor to the post-war "lost generation" myth, which is yet another indicator at how well Gibbs could gage the feel of the times and assess its impact on future developments ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... animals and of all that had been in contact with them. Severe as were the losses in flocks and herds from these imported diseases, they were eclipsed by the ravages of the mysterious potato blight, which, first appearing in 1845, pervaded the whole of Europe, and in Ireland especially proved the precursor ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... down before them all opposition, and yoke nations to their car. Of fear he evidently had no comprehension whatever. The rustling of the autumn breeze in his gown alarmed him as much, as did the clang of those horses' hoofs upon the pavements, though he so well knew it was the precursor of suffering and death. ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... cleansing away of the carnal film from the mind's eye. Hence the primitive Church called baptism [Greek: phos], light, and the Eucharist [Greek: zoae], life. Baptism, therefore, was properly the sign, the 'precursor', or rather the first act, the 'initium', of that regeneration of which the whole spiritual life of a Christian is the complete process; the Eucharist indicating the means, namely, the continued assimilation of and to the Divine Humanity. Hence ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... them,—those manuscripts just as he has celebrated them, written on the fine white paper, tied with ribbon. Yellow and faded age has made them, yet at their touch I seemed to feel the fire of youth, immortally glowing, more and more expansive, with which his soul has pervaded this century. He was the precursor of all we most prize. True, his blood was mixed with madness, and the course of his actual life made some detours through villanous places; but his spirit was intimate with the fundamental truths of human nature, and fraught ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... had undermined the old beliefs. At that time John Baptist Porta was conducting his investigations, and, despite a considerable mixture of pseudo-science, they were fruitful. His was not "black magic," claiming the aid of Satan, but "white magic," bringing into service the laws of nature—the precursor of applied science. His book on meteorology was the first in which sound ideas were broached on this subject; his researches in optics gave the world the camera obscura, and possibly the telescope; in chemistry he seems to have been the first to show how to reduce ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... through an open field toward the rampart of blood and death, the Federal batteries began to open and mow down and gather into the garner of death, as brave, and good, and pure spirits as the world ever saw. The twilight of evening had begun to gather as a precursor of the coming blackness of midnight darkness that was to envelop a scene so sickening and horrible that it is impossible for me to describe it. "Forward, men," is repeated all along the line. A sheet of fire was poured into our very faces, and for a moment we halted as if in despair, as ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... still an undergraduate, occupied about six or seven years. Meanwhile, side by side with the preaching of atheism in religion and morals, a growth had become apparent in the preaching of extreme democracy or Socialist Radicalism in politics, a preaching of which Bright was in this country the precursor, and which first came to a head between the years 1880 and 1900, in the writings of Henry George and the English followers of Marx. What I looked on as the fallacies of these new political gospels seemed ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... apply elsewhere?" and we are told of people whose conditions of life are worse than some of those of coal-miners. Why stop here? Who ever said we would stop here? I welcome and support this measure, not only for its own sake, but much more because it is, I believe, simply the precursor of the general movement which is in progress all over the world, and in other industries besides this, towards reconciling the conditions of labour with the well-ascertained laws of science and health. If we ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... As the precursor of a summer that yielded such a mellow harvest, the spring of Mr. Blackmore's fiction was slow and intermittent. The plot of his stories is never probable, but in his first novel, 'Clara Vaughan,' published ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... wise to have the two thus meet together. To be lifted up in hilarity is the precursor of being cast down in dejection. A sudden rise of the thermometer is generally followed by as sudden a fall. "I am not sorry," said Sir Walter Scott, after the breaking up of a merry group of guests at Abbotsford, "being one of those whom too much mirth ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... that she had to be this sorrowful offspring of a poisoned world in order to clear the wells of feeling for others, and to win from emancipated generations of free souls the gratitude which is due to a precursor. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... action as his executioners; sublimity is reached, strange to say, only in the bust of Tiberius, which crowns the rude archway through which the figures have issued into the open space. Titian is here the precursor of the Naturalisti—of Caravaggio and his school. Yet, all the same, how immeasurable is the distance between ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... and, looking closer, I detected the face of Mr. Fobbs peering out from behind the curtain. The sight assured me I was not wrong in my estimate of Mr. Gryce; and, struck with pity for the desolate girl left to meet the exigencies of a fate to which this watch upon her movements was but the evident precursor, I stepped back and sent her a note, in which, as Mr. Veeley's representative, I proffered my services in case of any sudden emergency, saying I was always to be found in my rooms between the hours of six and eight. This done, I proceeded to the house in Thirty-seventh Street where ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like planets, and, once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the music, they never quite subside to their old stony state. But what is the Imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the Reason. And books that treat the old pedantries of the world, our times, places, professions, customs, opinions, histories, with a certain freedom, and distribute things, not after the usages of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Dialogo entre el amor y un viejo has real charm, and has saved his name from the oblivion to which most of his fellows have justly been consigned. The bishop Ambrosio Montesino (Cancionero, 1508) was a fervent religious poet and the precursor of the mystics of ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... believed they will be fit for, much less achieve political emancipation, while priests, and priests alone, are their instructors? We may rely upon it, that intellectual freedom is the natural and necessary precursor of political freedom. Education, said Lord Brougham, makes men easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave. The Irish peasantry clamour for 'Repeal,' never considering that did they get it, no essential change would be made in their social, moral, ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... churches of the land. But it is not for us to despise the poor. Has not God chosen the poor of this world, rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom? That little group in front of that poor old school-house may become historic as the precursor of a great movement of blessing to millions among the poorest of the poor ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 50, No. 05, May, 1896 • Various
... The precursor of this Company was a Joint Stock Association, established at Dorchester under the auspices of the Rev. Mr. White, "patriarch of Dorchester," and called the "Dorchester Adventurers," with a view to fishing, farming, and hunting; but the undertaking ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... position, who had abandoned the world to become an ancress, following the life prescribed in that gem of early English devotional literature, the Ancren Riwle.14 It is clearly only a fragment of her complete book (whatever that may have been); but it is enough to show that she was a worthy precursor of that other great woman mystic of East Anglia: Juliana of Norwich. For Margery, as for Juliana, Love is the interpretation of revelation, and the key to ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... bear the light which the inevitable progress of humanistic criticism would throw upon them? As the wiser of his contemporaries saw, Erasmus was, at heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent Christian"; and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have discerned, he was the precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth century "enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church Voltaire, who held by his "Independent Christianity" as stoutly as Voltaire by ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Imperial library at Vienna, and died in the year 1800, at the age of 71. His Supplement to Maittaire's Typographical Annals, in two parts or volumes, 1789, 4to., is a work of solid merit, and indispensable to the possessor of its precursor. The bibliographical references are very few; but the descriptions of the volumes are minutely accurate. The indexes also are excellent. In the year 1793, Denis published the first volume (in three thick parts in folio) ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... all its imaginative flights of thought beyond the death of the body, was the cause of the mythological creativeness of the barbaric mind. And thus the elaboration of the imagery of ghosts and a ghostly realm was not the precursor, but the result of a belief in another life. The belief sprang directly out of the feeling of a continuous being unconquerably connected with human self consciousness, and is independent of the imagery in which it has been clothed, may clothe itself in endless ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... foolish behaviour on his part I had not noticed anything particular about him. I was surprised, however, that he should have selected my address as his lodging in Venice. He told me that he was merely the precursor of a certain Princess Galitzin, for whom he had to arrange winter quarters in Venice; that he knew nobody there, but having heard in Vienna that I was staying here, it was very natural he should apply first at my hotel. I argued with him that this was not an hotel, and announced ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... the gods of Greece, Syria and Egypt were worshipped side by side with those of old Rome, where all sorts of exotic art, philosophy, literature and politics took root and flourished. That is usually regarded as a period of decadence, and it was certainly a precursor of the empire's fall. When we consider that it was contemporaneous with great material prosperity and with the spread of luxury and a certain loosening of the moral fiber, such as we are experiencing in America today, we can not help feeling a little perturbed. Yet there is another way ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... may—you will have nothing to do but to die! The grave will be irradiated with His presence and smile. He will be standing there as He did by His own tomb of old, pointing to yours, tenanted with angel forms, nay, Himself as the "Precursor," showing you "the path of life!" There can be no true peace till the fear of death be conquered by the sense of sin forgiven, through "the blood of the Cross." "Not till then," as one has it, "will you be able to be a quiet spectator of the open grave at ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... man on record who received with perfect equanimity the verses of an aspiring young poet, wrote him the cheerfullest of letters, and actually invited him to breakfast. The letter is still extant; but the verses were so little the precursor of fame that the youth's subsequent history is to this day unknown. It was with truth that Byron said of himself: "I am really a civil and polite person, and do hate pain when it ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... old trees. Near by is a river picturesquely winding and darkly shaded. Here I saw a number of eclopes fishing as calmly as if the roar of the guns that came down the wind from Verdun were but the precursor ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... me show Phillips as the precursor of many of the publishers of one-volume books of reference so plentiful in our day. A Million of Facts is one of them, and A Chronology of Public Events Within the Last Fifty Years from 1771 to 1821 is another, while one of the earliest and most refreshing ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... of iron heated to a low red-heat. I had never before beheld such a weird, awe-inspiring spectacle, but as I gazed upon it the memory came to me that I had somewhere read of something similar, and I also remembered that it had been described as the precursor of a hurricane, ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... famous reflecting telescope which bears the name of Newton. The little reflector which he constructed, represented in the adjoining figure, is still preserved as one of the treasures of the Royal Society. The telescope tube had the very modest dimension of one inch in diameter. It was, however, the precursor of a whole series of magnificent instruments, each outstripping the other in magnitude, until at last the culminating point was attained in 1845, by the construction of Lord Rosse's mammoth reflector ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... and many writers have sought to deny it. But the lines I have quoted verbatim from the conclusion of the sixth chapter of the "Descent of Man" (1871) leave no doubt that he was as firmly convinced of it as was his great precursor Jean Lamarck in 1809. Moreover, Darwin adds, with particular explicitness, in the "general summary and conclusion" (chapter XXI.) of that standard work ("Descent of ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... in possession of no facts which go to support such a conclusion, unless indeed it be the fact, that it in an eminent degree brings on that cold perspiration of which we have spoken, and which is, in many instances, the immediate precursor of death. ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... studied the wise maxims of Pythagoras, and being a disciple of the Brahma school, abominators of flesh and strong liquors, he hoped to be excused, by drinking the ladies in aqua pura.—" Water is a monstrous drink for Christians!" said the alderman, "the sure precursor of coughs, colds, consumptions, agues, dropsies, pleurisies, and spleen. I never knew a water-drinker in my life that was ever a fellow of any spirit, mere morbid anatomies, starvelings and hypochondriacs: your water-drinkers never die of old age, but melancholy."—"Right, right, alderman," ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... from their parent slope At slender interval, the level calm Is ridg'd with restless and increasing spheres Which break upon each other, each th' effect Of separate impulse, but more fleet and strong Than its precursor, till the eye in vain Amid the wild unrest of swimming shade Dappled with hollow and alternate rise Of interpenetrated arc, ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson |
