"Comet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cast by the sun. But he was as one born out of due time. We are all familiar with the use made by students of unfulfilled prophecy of every extraordinary occurrence in nature, such as the sudden appearance of a comet, an earthquake, an eclipse, etc. We know how mysteriously they interpret those simple passages in the Bible about the sun being darkened and the moon being turned into blood. If they were not wilfully blind, such facts as are established by the following quotations would ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... my own deceit: was I so utterly unversed in the heavenly politics as not to know that this person described herself fully as having been born four years previous to the date I had given him, in the year of the eclipse, which was moreover a comet-year and one in which Uranus usurped the throne of reigning planets, and breaking all bounds, shadowed that fateful season? That Aquarius, drawn by him, had imposed himself, too, and affected the very Moon in her courses? Indeed she would be an unbelievable ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... but before she could get to the door, something flashed like a scarlet comet from across the street. It was the little girl whom Maida had seen twice before—the one who ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... you have done yours, and successfully, this time at least, and at night. All rescued. How gladly the last must have looked on that brave "Comet Light," As you put from the wave-battered wreck. Cold, surf-buffeted, weary, and drenched, Your pluck, like the glare from that beacon, flamed on through ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 13, 1892 • Various
... The great majority of cometary orbits are classed as parabolic; and it is ordinarily inferred that they are visitors from remote space, and will never return. But are they rightly classed as parabolic? Observations on a comet moving in an extremely eccentric ellipse, which are possible only when it is comparatively near perihelion, must fail to distinguish its orbit from a parabola. Evidently, then, it is not safe to class ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... reports of the richness of the land than the eminent persons who have been sent to examine the auriferous lodes of our Acadian neighbors. If gold does not really exist there, and in very remunerative quantities, it will be hard for us henceforth to believe in the calculations of even a spring-tide, a comet, or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... Pestilence. [6] It is certain this imaginary Person might have been described in all her purple Spots. The Fever might have marched before her, Pain might have stood at her right Hand, Phrenzy on her Left, and Death in her Rear. She might have been introduced as gliding down from the Tail of a Comet, or darted upon the Earth in a Flash of Lightning: She might have tainted the Atmosphere with her Breath; the very glaring of her Eyes might have scattered Infection. But I believe every Reader will think, that in such sublime ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... to esteem these fantastic tales above all his other work. Story-writing, indeed, was his first love, and his Opus 1 a bad imitation of Poe, by name "The Comet," was done in Philadelphia so long ago as July 4, 1876. (Temperature, 105 degrees Fahrenheit.) One rather marvels that he has never attempted a novel. It would have been as bad, perhaps, as "Love Among the Artists," but certainly no bore. He might ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... a little old driver, so lively and quick, I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick. More rapid than eagles his coursers they came, And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name: "Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!— To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall, Now, dash away, dash away, dash away all!" As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky, So, up to the ...
— Required Poems for Reading and Memorizing - Third and Fourth Grades, Prescribed by State Courses of Study • Anonymous
... noise awakens him. Jack starts up and sees something monstrous—a howling, snorting beast, with two fiery eyes that send forth a shower of sparks. The creature dashed past, leaving behind him a train like a comet's tail. A grove of trees, quite unsuspected by Jack, suddenly flashed out clearly; each leaf could have been counted. Not until this apparition was far away, and nothing of it was visible save a small green light, did Jack know that ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... gorgeous fire, and we were still helpless before all that glory, the colours faded away to the most delicate combinations of half-tones; soon the stars came out glittering on the deep sky, first of all the Southern Cross. Halley's comet was ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... the said Johne aboad in Scotland, appeired a comet, the course whairof was from the south and south-west, to the north and north-east. It was sein the monethis of November, December, and Januare. It was called "The fyrie boosome."[663] Sune after dyed ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... Head had H——, and considered him well indicated. One bronco was called "Bronchitis." The top horse of the string was Bill Shea's Dynamite, according to Bill Shea. There were Dusty, Shorty, Sally Goodwin, Buffalo Tom, Chalk-Eye, Comet, and Swapping Tater—Swapping Tater being a pacer who, when he hit the ground, swapped feet. Bob ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... have sent in word by the canals that rockets in clusters covering hundreds of square miles are arising from Scandor. The cause is unknown, cannot even be surmised, and last night Herschell and Gauss, at the big telescopes, detected a comet charging towards us with an incredible velocity. The Council believe I should at once start for Scandor to bring the month's report, and these new excitements, to the paper Dia, while they urge that you should recount to the governors at ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... if a certain comet, whose path intersected the ecliptic, had met the earth in some (I forgot what) sign, it would have whirled us along with it, in its eccentric course, into God knows what regions of heat and cold. Had the portentous comet of the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... I swear, by the light of the Comet-King's tail!" And he tower'd with pride as he spoke, "If again with these magical colours I fail, The crater of Etna shall hence be my jail, And my food shall ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... but in a cloud Still lodged, where all thy unseen arrows shroud; I will on thee as on a comet look, A comet, the sad world's ill-boding book; Thy light as luctual and stained with woes I'll judge, where penal flames sit mixed and close. For though some think thou shin'st but to restrain Bold storms, and simply dost attend on rain; ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... on, he grew blind, deaf and dumb, Tho' his sport, 'twere hard to keep from it, Quite tired of life, bid adieu to his wife, And blazed like the tail of a comet, brave boys. ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... them that the Prophet had stationed a "lamp" in the sky, to watch them for him—and sure enough, a comet flamed in the horizon. To a Creek chief in ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... once these starres are come so nigh As to seem one, the Comet must appear In biggest show, because more loose they lie Somewhat spread out, but as they draw more near The compasse of his head away must wear, Till he be brought to his least magnitude; And then they passing crosse, he doth repair Himself, and still ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... The scales of Justice tilt Something askew. The curse of high-placed guilt Is on you, if the warning tocsin's knell, Clanging forth fiercely, hath not force to tell The hearer that Fate's hourglass fast runs out. That spectral Comet flames, beset about With miasmatic mist, and lurid fume, Conquering Corruption threatens hideous doom. Yet, yet the Bow of Promise gleams above, Herald of Hope to her whom all men mark ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... 1843.—I saw the letter of your new friend, and liked it much; only, at this distance, one could not be sure whether it was the nucleus or the train of a comet, that lightened afar. The daemons are not busy enough at the births of most men. They do not give them individuality deep enough for truth to take root in. Such shallow natures cannot resist a strong head; ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... ''Tis the Comet Margaux,' said Dr. Forbery, topping anything Rockney might have had to say, and anything would have served. The latter clasped the decanter, poured ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... had no answer. I at the same time got a person in the India House to write a much fuller enquiry to a relative of his who was saved, one Yates a midshipman. Both these officers (and indeed pretty nearly all that are left) have got appointed to other ships and have joined them. Gilpin is in the Comet, India man, now lying at Gravesend. Neither Yates nor Gilpin have yet answered, but I am in daily expectation. I have sent your letter of this morning also to Gilpin. The waiting for these answers has been my reason ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... eloquent writer, founded on a mere accident, or rather the error of a comet which produced the beautiful system of this world, M. de Luc, in his Theory of the earth, has given us the history of a disaster which befell this well contrived world;—a disaster which caused the general deluge, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... pole to the ground and shot upward like a rocket. Kalora saw him give an upward twist and wriggle, fling himself free from the pole and disappear on the other side of the wall, the camera following like the tail of a comet. As he did so, number two, coming to a sitting posture, began to shriek for reinforcements. Number one was up on his elbow, regarding the affairs of this world with a ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... Herschel, by the king's command, came to exhibit to his majesty and the royal family the new comet lately discovered by his sister, Miss Herschel; and while I was playing at piquet with Mrs. Schwellenberg, the Princess Augusta came into the room, and asked her if she chose to go into the garden and look at it. She declined ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... Indian, and a very sensible fellow. He sometimes filled minor offices in the government of the place. He used to come very frequently to my house to chat, and was always striving to acquire solid information about things. When Donati's comet appeared, he took a great interest in it. We saw it at its best from the 3rd to the 10th of October (1858), between which dates it was visible near the western horizon just after sunset, the tail extending ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... it would be a paradise congenial to you too. Don't you see us, hand in hand, or rather, my arm about your lovely waist, making our remarks on Sirius, the nearest of the fixed stars; or surveying a comet, flaming innoxious by us, as we just now would mark the passing pomp of a travelling monarch; or in a shady bower of Mercury or Venus, dedicating the hour to love, in mutual converse, relying honour, and revelling endearment, whilst ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the baleful comet die, The brood of blazing Sirius fly: God's orb shall quench their sultry heats And drive them ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... upon my spirit how greatly I had wandered away, and how that I stood afar in the lonesomeness of that Land of Night; as it had been that a man of this Age did wander amid the stars, and perceive a great comet to go by him very close; for then he should know in his heart how that he was far off in the Void. And this I do say to you, that you may know somewhat of the emotions of ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... and many a grand good time did they have all together. The road over which she ran her red machine had many an unexpected turning,—now it led her into peculiar danger; now into contact with strange travelers; and again into experiences by fire and water. But, best of all, "The Comet" never failed its brave ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... expanding before me, which I could easily prevail with myself to enter; in which we behold the child plucking a wing and a leg off a fly, to try how the poor insect can perform with half his limbs; or running a pin through the posteriors of a locust, to observe it spinning through the air, like a comet, drawing a tail of thread. If we allow, man has a right to destroy noxious animals, we cannot allow he has a right to protract their pain by a lingering death. By fine gradations the modes of cruelty improve with years, in pinching the tail of a cat for the music ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... minutes past twelve a Gomez-Dep roadster appeared down the road, stopped at the garage. To Milt it was as exciting as the appearance of a comet to a ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... of emancipation do as we are now situated? Shall I issue a document that the whole world will see must be of no more effect that the Pope's bull against the comet? Will my words free the slaves when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States? Is there a single court or magistrate, or individual that will be influenced by it there? I approved the law of Congress which offers protection ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... confused jumble of house-fronts and clustering trees—green like the trees in stage scenery—could be vaguely discerned. To and fro, across the Pont des Invalides, gleaming lights flashed without ceasing; far below, across a band of denser gloom, appeared a marvellous train of comet-like coruscations, from whose lustrous tails fell a rain of gold. These were the reflections in the Seine's black waters of the lamps on the bridge. From this point, however, the unknown began. The long curve ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... advanced alone in all her inconceivable beauty, producing an effect like that of a brilliant meteor shooting through the sky on a calm clear night, or of a sunbeam darting at the first dawn of day through a mountain gorge. A comet she seemed, portending a fiery doom to the hearts of many in that presence hall. Full of meekness and courtesy, she advanced to the foot of the throne, knelt before the queen, and said to her in English, "May it please your Majesty to extend your ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... From his speech it was gathered that he represented a district which has been immortalized by the genius of the author of Tom Thumb; and in the present unfortunate aspect of human affairs, when a comet is brandishing its tail in the heavens, and O'Connell seems to have been deprived of his upon earth—when poverty, distress, rebellion, and wooden pavements, are threatening the very existence of Great Britain, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... to last through the ages! And when this earth shall have withered, when the sun shall have touched it with his fiery finger, when it shall roll through space as silent and bare as the desert, when the comet shall have smitten it and hurled it into dust, when the systems to which it belongs—the sun into which it melted—shall be no more known to time—where then will be thy books and thy songs? Where then will be these things for which thou didst crouch and tremble, didst plot and plan? For ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... Washington, not in Napoleon Bonaparte; in the Whigs of the Revolutionary day, not in the Tories; the Chatham, Burke, and Sam Adams, not in Dr. Johnson or Lord North. I believe that the North Star, abiding in its place, is a greater influence in the Universe than any comet or meteor. I believe that the United States when President McKinley was inaugurated was a greater world power than Rome in the height of her glory or even England with her 400,000,000 vassals. I believe, finally, whatever clouds may darken the horizon, that the world is growing better, that ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... of hair, lies furled The fire and splendour of the ancient world; The dire gold of the comet's wind-blown hair; The songs that turned to gold the evening air When all the stars of heaven sang for joy. The flames that burnt the cloud-high city Troy. The maenad fire of spring on the cold earth; The myrrh-lit flame that gave both death and birth To the soul ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... until the reappearance of the comet of 1812; it will pass this way again in about a year. . ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... I cannot tell you who it is.' The most precise description came from Monsieur Blaise, receiver of taxes, who said that he had employed Putois to cut wood in his yard, from the 19th to the 28d of October, the year of the comet. One morning, Madame Cornouiller, out of breath, dropped into my father's office. 'I have seen Putois. Ah! I have seen him.'—'You believe it?'—'I am sure. He was passing close by Monsieur Tenchant's wall. Then he turned into the Rue des Abbesses, ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France
... aid of the heliometer or a double-refracting prism,* determines the diameter of planetary bodies; who measures patiently year after year, the meridian altitude and the relative distances of stars, or who seeks a telescopic comet in a group of nebulae, does not feel his imagination more excited — and this is the very guarantee of the precision of his labors — than the botanist who counts the divisions of the calyx, or the number of stamens in a flower, or examines the connected or the separate ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... sold the invention to some greenhorn for anything he could get; or else some one else had been so deeply interested in the affair as to risk a great deal of money in it. Mrs. Rushmore's gleam of intelligence was a comet; but her comet had two tails, which ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... of foreign affairs will sign your brevet and a hundred others, without knowing what he is signing; then you cable me, and the Star of the Crescent will burst upon the United States in a way that will make Halley's comet look like a ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... piece of shagreen which hung on the wall behind his chair. It was only about the size of a fox's skin, but it seemed to fill the deep shadows of the place with such brilliant rays that it looked like a small comet, an appearance at first sight inexplicable. The young sceptic went up to this so-called talisman, which was to rescue him from all points of view, and he soon found out the cause of its singular brilliancy. The dark grain of the leather had been so ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... private secretary do about it? Perhaps, in his good nature, Milnes thought that Swinburne might find a friend in Stirling or Oliphant, but he could hardly have fancied Henry Adams rousing in him even an interest. Adams could no more interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Encke's comet. To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The quality of genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched there the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only receive; one had nothing to give — nothing even ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... let her dream, even as beauty should! Let the while plumes athwart her slumbers away! Why should I steep their swaling snows in blood, Or bid her think of battle's grim array? Truth will too soon her blinding star display, And like a fearful comet meet her eyes. And yet how peaceful they pass on their way! How grand the sight as up the hill they rise! I will not think of cities reddening ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... the Bible are very rarely brought forward by truly scientific men. It is a phenomenon, like the advent of a great comet, to find a man profoundly versed in science attack the Bible. Your third or fourth rate men of learning attain distinction in this field. An anti-Bible writer or lecturer has generally been promoted to that high eminence from the school-room, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... of September 1736. Originally intended for the profession of a painter, he preferred writing tragedies until attracted to science by the influence of Nicolas de Lacaille. He calculated an orbit for the comet of 1759 (Halley's), reduced Lacaille's observations of 515 zodiacal stars, and was, in 1763, elected a member of the Academy of Sciences. His Essai sur la theorie des satellites de Jupiter (1766), an expansion of a memoir presented to the Academy in 1763, showed much original ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... garments of isolation, robed with questioning. Her genius is in this sense essentially local, as much the voice of the spirit of New England as it is possible for one to hold. If ever wanderer hitched vehicle to the comet's tail, it was the poetic, sprite woman, no one ever rode the sky and the earth as she did in this radiant ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... A comet, beyond it infinite things, only dreamed of as yet, a world floating in an ocean and in night, beneath are two hands clasped ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... to. From cities reeking with putrefying filth it was thought that the plague might be stayed by the prayers of the priests, by them rain and dry weather might be secured, and deliverance obtained from the baleful influences of eclipses and comets. But when Halley's comet came, in 1456, so tremendous was its apparition that it was necessary for the pope himself to interfere. He exorcised and expelled it from the skies. It slunk away into the abysses of space, terror-stricken ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... weakness, the inconsistency of his understanding; and a still more laborious task for him to conquer his passions, and learn to seek content, instead of happiness. Good dispositions, and virtuous propensities, without the light of the Gospel, produce eccentric characters: comet-like, they are always in extremes; while revelation resembles the laws of attraction, and produces uniformity; but too often is the attraction feeble; and the light so obscured by passion, as to ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... to be dreaded, it's a blessing! Yes, a blessing! Everything's dreadful to you. If the Northern Lights shine in the heavens—you ought to admire and marvel at "the dawn breaking in the land of midnight!" But you are in terror, and imagine it means war or flood. If a comet comes—I can't take my eyes from it! a thing so beautiful! the stars we have looked upon to our hearts' content, they are always with us, but that is something new; well, one must gaze and admire! But you're afraid even to look at the sky, and all in a tremble! You make a bogey ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... blood is cymbal-clashed and the anklets of the dancers tinkle there.... Harp and psaltery, harp and psaltery make drunk my spirit.... I am of the terrible people, I am of the strange Hebrews.... Amongst the swarms fixed like the rooted stars, my folk is a streaming Comet, Comet of the Asian tiger-darkness, The Wanderer of Eternity, the eternal ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... been used since 1878, and then only at intervals for several years previous; the mural circle had not been used since 1877; the prime vertical had not been used since 1867. These instruments had been shamefully neglected and much injured thereby. . . . The small equatorial and comet seeker were in the same disgraceful condition, and were ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... quoted, "heaven and earth had given us only too many prognostics of what was to happen to him: it was in the year 1608 that a great eclipse nearly covered the whole body of the sun; in the preceding year 1607 that the terrible comet appeared; after which some three months or thereabout we had two earthquakes; then several monsters born in divers provinces of France; bloody rains that fell at Orleans and at Troyes; the great plague that afflicted ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... the greatest uncertainty in the minds of astronomers. The greatest variety of opinions regarding them prevailed; they were thought on the one hand to be divine messengers, and on the other to be merely igneous phenomena of the earth's atmosphere. Tycho Brahe declared that a comet which he observed in the year 1577 had no parallax, proving its extreme distance. The observed course of the comet intersected the planetary orbits, which fact gave a quietus to the long-mooted question as to whether the Ptolemaic spheres were transparent solids or merely imaginary; since ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... to The Blazing Comet; or the Beauties of the Poets (1732), Johnson of Cheshire noted that "the same thought that makes the Fool laugh, may make the wise Man sigh" (ix). Given such an equivocal approach to the ways in which the ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... butler was despatched betimes to Jawleyford Court with the dog-cart freighted with clothes, driven by a groom to attend to the horses, while his lordship mounted his galloping grey hack towards noon, and dashed through the country like a comet. The people, who were only accustomed to see him in his short, country-cut hunting-coats, baggy breeches, and shapeless boots, could hardly recognize the frock-coated, fancy-vested, military-trousered ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... personality. Poor fellow, though I pitied him, I did admire his spunk in holding back. It seems that as an editor he took to telling falsehoods on his own account so often that the Syndicate is packing him off as Special Correspondent to a tailless comet. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... the Captain called my attention to a comet which was showing to the north, and according to traditions said to be a harbinger of war, but when we went to look for it with our glasses it had gone down. We saw it on the evening of the 7th ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... whatsoeuer some doe or maie imagine to the contrarie, specially some Astrologers knowing of the Eclipse of the Sunne which wee saw the same yeere before in our voyage thytherward, which vnto them appeared very terrible. And also of a Comet which beganne to appeare but a few daies before the beginning of the said sicknesse. But to exclude them from being the speciall an accident, there are farther reasons then I thinke fit at this present to ...
— A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land Of Virginia • Thomas Hariot
... symptoms, and was requested to repeat his visit the next day. Napoleon was now within a month 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 of ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... existence that his eye cannot reach them. And when they do condescend to pay us a visit, they traverse so wide a circuit that the curve they describe is too slight to furnish a basis for reliable mathematical calculations. Hence the orbit of a comet is a mystery, and the return not unfrequently a surprise. If this be true of what seem to be the unfinished or exploded worlds, that swing like airy nothings in the heavens and fringe the imperial realm of physical being, then what may not be predicated of the profounder mysteries that ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... this fatal Tuesday all the elements seemed to unite in adding horror to the scene of carnage. Shortly before this a great comet had made men fear and wonder; and now, on this morning the sky was overcast with such dense clouds that the land was in darkness; so black were the heavens that nothing like it had been known within ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... But we know next to nothing of Borrow in East Dereham, from which indeed he departed in his eighth year. There are, however, interesting references to his memories of the place in Lavengro. The first is where he recalls to his author friend, who had offered him comet wine of 1811, his recollection of gazing at the comet from the market-place of 'pretty D——' in 1811.[23] The second reference is when he goes to church with the gypsies and dreams of ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... noise of his breath was like the rushing of the tempest-blast. The earth groaned beneath his iron feet. The storm rustled in his hair, which waved round his head like the tail from the threatening comet. Faustus lay before him like a worm; for the horrible sight had deprived him of his senses and his strength. The Devil uttered a contemptuous laugh, which hissed over the surface of the earth; and seizing the trembling being, he tore him to pieces, as a capricious ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... those figures when they broke. First they teetered hesitantly a moment, glancing wildly around and up at the vision of death that was coming like a silver comet from the skies, and then they melted apart. Three scrambled towards the rim of jungle foliage close at hand, while their fellows leaped in the other direction, trying to make an open port in their craft. Harkness saw them tumble headlong through it and slam it shut. Then ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... folly our attempting to ascend; but a second glance would prove that our Indians had not acted rashly. In the centre of the impetuous current a large rock rose above the surface, and from its lower end a long eddy ran like the tail of a comet for about twenty yards down the river. It was just opposite this rock that we entered the rapid, and paddled for it with all our might. The current, however, as I said before, swept us down; and when we got to the middle of the stream, ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... they say seven years must elapse between its visitations, which the superstitious old cronies are wont to associate with woful stories of pestilence — just such tales as are resurrected from the depths of morbid memories here when a comet reappears or the seven-year ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... have ruled the world until the end of time, SOSIOSCH, the promised Redeemer, will come and annihilate the power of the DEVS (or Evil Spirits), awaken the dead, and sit in final judgment upon spirits and men. After that the comet Gurzsher will be thrown down, and a general conflagration take place, which will consume the whole world. The remains of the earth will then sink down into Duzakh, and become for three periods a place of punishment for the wicked. Then, by degrees all will be pardoned, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... ever did worked out with him on top, somehow. Paul was different. Smart enough, plenty of the old gazoo, but he never had Dan's drive. Bad breaks, right down the line. Kinda tough on a guy, with a comet like Dan ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... of the kind they ever seed, and proper scared they were to see a vessel, without sails or oars, goin' right straight ahead, nine knots an hour, in the very wind's eye, and a great streak of smoke arter her as long as the tail of a comet. I believe they thought it was Old Nick alive, a-treatin' himself to a swim. You could see the niggers a-clippin' it away from the shore, for dear life, and the soldiers a-movin' about as if they thought that ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Catholic treatise, entitled "The Church of England truly represented," begins by informing us that "the ignis fatuus of reformation, which had grown to a comet by many acts of spoil and rapine, had been ushered into England, purified of the filth which it had contracted among the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... after-thought, or a mistake in taking up the designs to work in their proper order. Harold is crowned, but with an ill omen (from the Norman point of view), as represented in the tapestry by an evil star—a comet of extravagant size, upon which the people gaze with most comical ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... a brief Chronology of all the famous Comets and their events, that have happened from the birth of Christ to this very day. Together with a modest enquiry into this present comet, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... respected citizens. His library was large. His name constantly appears on the lists of subscribers to new books. After his death his astronomical instruments became the property of Harvard College, and as late as 1843 his comet-finder was used there. ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... do, especially as we are now situated?" asked Mr. Lincoln by way of reply. "I do not want to issue a document that the whole world would see must necessarily be inoperative, like the Pope's bull against the comet. Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... river, Leaped into the light of morning, O'er the precipice plunging downward Gleamed like Ishkoodah, the comet. And the Spirit, stooping earthward, With his finger on the meadow Traced a winding pathway for it, Saying to it, "Run ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... them. Some time after he got a letter {46} from Pons, who informed him with great satisfaction that he was quite right, that very large spots had appeared on the sun, and that he had found a fine comet shortly after. I do not vouch for the first story, but I have the second in Zach's handwriting. It would mend the joke exceedingly if some day a real relation should be established between comets and solar spots: of late years good reason ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... Spontini was so painful to her that she discarded it at once. She preferred to think that an unforeseen event would prevent their meeting again—the end of the world, for example. M. Lagrange, member of the Academie des Sciences, had told her the day before of a comet which some day might meet the earth, envelop it with its flaming hair, imbue animals and plants with unknown poisons, and make all men die in a frenzy of laughter. She expected that this, or something else, would happen next month. It was not inexplicable that she wished ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... shake the Hebrides from shore to shore. * * * * * "Bless'd be thy labors, most adventurous Bozzy, Bold rival of Sir John and Dame Piozzi; Heavens! with what laurels shall thy head be crown'd! A grove, a forest, shall thy ears surround! Yes! whilst the Rambler shall a comet blaze, And gild a world of darkness with his rays, Thee, too, that world with wonderment shall hail, A lively, bouncing ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... vibration of a pendulum," but a conduct, wise, manly, judicious, and heroic. Who does not know, that the twinkling stars are of a more excellent nature, than those which shine upon us with unremitted lustre? Who does not know that the comet, which appears for a short time, and vanishes again for revolving years, is more gazed upon than either? But I am afraid the comet is too sublime an idea for your lordship's comprehension. I would therefore recommend to you, to make ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... public that in connection with Mr. Barnum I have leased the comet for a term, of years; and I desire also to solicit the public patronage in favor of a beneficial enterprise which we have ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... make me justly proud of you. This means that you must be a good speaker there; I use the word must, because I know you may if you will. The vulgar, who are always mistaken, look upon a speaker and a comet with the same astonishment and admiration, taking them both for preternatural phenomena. This error discourages many young men from attempting that character; and good speakers are willing to have their talent considered as something very extraordinary, if not a peculiar gift of ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... he never did an unkind act in his life proves him to have been Cardinal Newman's definition of a gentleman: "One who never inflicts pain." And only now is the real significance of the man as a composer beginning to be revealed. Like a comet he swept the heavens of his early youth. He was a marvelous virtuoso who mistook the piano for an orchestra and often confounded the orchestra with the piano. As a pianist pure and simple I prefer Sigismund Thalberg; ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... house was crowded with hundreds more than it could hold—with thousands of admiring spectators who went away without obtaining a sight. This extraordinary phenomenon of tragic excellence! this star of Melpomene! this comet of the stage! this sun in the firmament of the muses! this moon of blank verse! this queen and princess of tears! this Donellan of the poisoned bowl! this empress of the pistol and dagger! this chaos of Shakspeare! this world of weeping clouds! this Terpsichore of the curtains and scenes! this ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... Chemistry, in Astronomy, in Natural History, besides acquiring groups of facts, the student has a glimpse of the method by which they were discovered, of the type of inference to which the discovery conforms, so that the discovery of a new comet, the detection of a new species, the invention of a new chemical compound, each becomes a lesson of the most beautiful and impressive kind in the art of reasoning. And it would be superfluous and impertinent for me here to point out how valuable such lessons are in the way of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... at the portentous glare of a comet, and hear a crow with equal tranquillity from the right or left, will yet talk of times and situations proper for intellectual performances,' &c. The Idler, No. xi. See ante, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... Pauline, sir—or Miss Pauline and meself, for the ladies comes first anyhow—we got tired of the hobstroppylous scrimmaging among the ould servants, that didn't know a joke when they seen one: and we went out to look at the comet—that's the rorybory-alehouse, they calls him in this country—and we walked upon the lawn—and divil of any alehouse there was there at all; and Miss Pauline said it was bekase of the shrubbery maybe, and why wouldn't we see it better beyonst ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... time, be absorbed, or swallowed up; that the face of the sun, will, by degrees, be encrusted with its own effluvia, and give no more light to the world; that the earth very narrowly escaped a brush from the tail of the last comet, which would have infallibly reduced it to ashes; and that the next, which they have calculated for one-and-thirty years hence, will probably destroy us. For if, in its perihelion, it should approach within a certain degree of the sun (as by their calculations ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... heroes were accustomed to city life, and the embarrassment of the situation soon evaporated. They bundled themselves into a nocturnal automobile which was no sooner loaded than it "hit" the streets of Vancouver like Halley's comet. It went up and down, out and in, hither and thither. It tried to leap from under the invaders, but they kept up with it. It went north forty chains, east forty chains, south forty chains, and thence west forty chains ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... Dr. Halley is of opinion that the comet seen in 1680 is the same which appeared in Julius Caesar's time. This shows more than any other that comets are hard, opaque bodies; for it descended so near to the sun, as to come within a sixth ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... man, as if some morning something dropped out of the sky that had had no place upon our earth before, as if there came the summons to man to be something entirely different from what the conditions of his nature prophesied and intended that he should be. The other idea is that religion comet by the utterance of God from the heavens, but comes up out of the human life of man; that man is essentially and intrinsically religious; that he does not become something else than man when he becomes ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... morning, from ridge to ridge, from peak to peak; now on the mountain, now crossing the valley, now playing about a large slope of uplying pasture fields. At times the fox has a pretty well- defined orbit, and the hunter knows where to intercept him. Again, he leads off like a comet, quite beyond the system of hills and ridges upon which he was started, and his return is entirely a matter of conjecture; but if the day be not more than half spent, the chances are that the fox will be back before night, though the sportsman's ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... land without owning a lord, and who goeth against the fealty and homage due from him and his predecessors?" The answer was, that the lord ought in that case to take back the fief as his own property. "As my name is Louis," said the king, "the Comet of La Marche doth claim to hold land in such wise, land which hath been a fief of France since the days of the valiant King Clovis, who won all Aquitaine from King Alaric, a pagan without faith or creed, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... had been dead about thirty years I begun to get a little anxious. Mind you, had been whizzing through space all that time, like a comet. LIKE a comet! Why, Peters, I laid over the lot of them! Of course there warn't any of them going my way, as a steady thing, you know, because they travel in a long circle like the loop of a lasso, whereas I was pointed as straight as a dart for the Hereafter; but I happened ...
— Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Mark Twain
... having everything against him, nothing for him, without provisions, ammunition, guns, shoes, almost without an army, with a handful of men against masses, dashed at allied Europe, and absurdly gained impossible victories? Who was this new comet of war who possest the effrontery ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... phenomena show the observed irregularity, but it is symmetrical as regards density. 3. The most interesting discrepancy of the theory of the solar atmosphere is the fact that while it is supposed to extend for millions of miles from the sun, the recent comet passed within two hundred thousand miles of the sun, and yet its orbit was not affected in the least, as it would have been if it had plowed its way through a material substance. In taking photographs of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... thirty-fourth century that the dark star began its famous conquest, unparalleled in stellar annals. Phobar the astronomer discovered it. He was sweeping the heavens with one of the newly invented multi-powered Sussendorf comet-hunters when something caught his eye—a new star of great brilliance in the foreground of ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... consciousness of guilt would have swelled within me to such a bulk as to have burst me into fragments, which would now be travelling around aimlessly in space, like the lost Pleiad, or like the dismembered and stray tail of a comet. So I called my next neighbor, Rush, out behind his barn, and, under oath of secrecy, revealed the good news to him, and then I did likewise by neighbor Tiltman, and so on, in seemly progression, by all the other ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... of the plan; and the key is capable of so many variations, that every pair of correspondents in Christendom may have their own cipher practically different from all others. In the November and December numbers, a popular account of Donati's Comet was given by Geo. P. Bond, then assistant, now chief director of the Observatory at Cambridge. This paper has been issued separately, very finely illustrated by twenty-one cuts, and by two beautiful engravings. No papers, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... sky, throwing her silver mantle overnight's sable form, performs her varied evolutions without "variableness or shadow of turning." Every planet and every star has its fixed place assigned it, and even the fiery comet has its appointed orbit, and the man of science can tell the exact time of its appearance, and the course it will run, and now it is accounted for by the laws of nature, rather than regarded as a fearful herald of war or ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... pedigree is known, which it is in some instances to the sixteenth generation, she is not one-sixteenth only but nearly nine-sixteenths of pure Favorite blood. This arises from 'Favorite' having been used repeatedly on cows descended from himself. In the pedigree of 'Charmer' we repeatedly meet with 'Comet'—'Comet' was by 'Favorite' and his dam 'Young Phoenix' was also by 'Favorite;' with 'George'—'George' was by 'Favorite' and his dam 'Lady Grace' was also by 'Favorite;' with 'Chilton'—'Chilton' was by 'Favorite' and his dam was also by 'Favorite;' with 'Minor'—'Minor' ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... ourselves. The first, and perhaps the most startling to the Old World watcher of the political skies, upon whose field of vision the flaming sword of our western heavens grew from a misty speck to its full comet-like proportions, perplexing them with fear of change, has been the amazing strength and no less amazing steadiness of democratic institutions. An army twice larger than England, with the help of bounties, drafts, and the purchase of foreign vagabonds, ever set in the field ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... sepulchre there came up shaft and terrace and amphitheatre. Healthful curiosity has enlarged the telescopic vision of the astronomer until worlds hidden in the distant heavens have trooped forth and have joined the choir praising the Lord. Planet weighed against planet and wildest comet lassoed ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... times there was a great wonder and mystery in life. Man walked in fear and solemnity, with Heaven very close above his head, and Hell below his very feet. God's visible hand was everywhere, in the rainbow and the comet, in the thunder and the wind. The Devil too raged openly upon the earth; he skulked behind the hedge-rows in the gloaming; he laughed loudly in the night-time; he clawed the dying sinner, pounced on the ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of 1863 freeing the slaves in the seceded States, as an illegal concession to the Anti-Slavery feeling of the North and of Europe, and that he spoke of it with undisguised contempt, as a 'Pope's bull against the comet.' Like Mr. Lincoln, Andrew Johnson was devoted to the Union, but he was a Constitutional Democrat in his political opinions, and the Civil War having ended in the defeat of the Confederacy, he gradually settled down ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... have the purity of an abstract idea. In great sleepy continents, in land-locked harvest towns, in the little islands of the sea, for four days men watched that name as they might stand out at night to watch a comet, or to see a ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... directness, in a way in which it is done nowhere else; that we gaze into the characteristic medley of rough forces and wild impulses which as a rule are the original ingredients of such a man, and that we accompany him from the lowest stage up to the zenith, where the unrestrained roving comet, that in its disorderliness was exposed to the danger of self-destruction, is transformed into a clear self-dependent fixed star. Do we need any other proof that the work is capable of producing a most unprecedented effect? Even though it gave us nothing but the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... the cabin I found a tiny chink and applied my eye. My first thought was that a comet was streaming down into my face. The long war-arrow, weighted with a blazing mass of pitch-smeared moss, stuck in a log a few inches below my peephole. From the ridge ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... dwellings the country road becomes the village street. An avenue is a long, broad, and imposing or principal street. Track is a word of wide signification; we speak of a goat-track on a mountain-side, a railroad-track, a race-track, the track of a comet; on a traveled road the line worn by regular passing of hoofs and wheels in either direction is called the track. A passage is between any two objects or lines of enclosure, a pass commonly between mountains. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... reconsideration it should appear that some of the stronger inductions have been expressed with greater universality than their evidence warrants, the weaker one must give way. The opinion so long prevalent that a comet, or any other unusual appearance in the heavenly regions, was the precursor of calamities to mankind, or to those at least who witnessed it; the belief in the veracity of the oracles of Delphi or Dodona; the reliance on astrology, or on the weather-prophecies in almanacs, were doubtless inductions ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... as a comet, with a very long tail. The superstitious thought my appearance to be significant of some coming misfortune. Some draughtsmen took my figure, as far as they could descry it, so that when I landed I found ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... own real views of his mistake, and of his unfitness for the post, there never was any doubt, and they found expression when, in the midst of a family gathering, he exclaimed: "Up to this I have been an independent comet, now I ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... indignant, raise Red on the hills his beacon's comet blaze; Bid from on high his lonely cannon sound, And on ten thousand hearths his shout rebound; His larum-bell from village-tower to tower Swing on the astounded ear its dull undying ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... better kept there in those times than in Christian Europe; and the Chinese astronomers write of a star appearing April 2, 1066, which was seen first in the early morning sky, then after a time disappeared to reappear in the evening sky, with a flaming tail, most agreeably sensational. It was Halley's comet, the same that we watched in 1910 with no superstitious fear at all for princes nor for powers. But it is interesting to know that our modern comet was recorded in China in the Eleventh Century, and has its portrait on the Bayeux tapestry, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... to and fro, And wild-eyed sages hunted them for truth. The Italian, Frangipani, thought the star The lost Electra, that had left her throne Among the Pleiads, and plunged into the night Like a veiled mourner, when Troy town was burned. The German painter, Busch, of Erfurt, wrote, "It was a comet, made of mortal sins; A poisonous mist, touched by the wrath of God To fire; from which there would descend on earth All manner of evil—plagues and sudden death, Frenchmen and famine." Preachers thumped and raved. Theodore Beza in Calvin's pulpit tore His grim black gown, and ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... for the reaping; and the very day that the sickle was put in, there was Annie to see and share in the joy. How mysterious she thought those long colonnades of slender pillars, each supporting its own waving comet-head of barley! Or when the sun was high, she would lie down on the ground, and look far into the little forest of yellow polished oat-stems, stretching away and away into the unseen—alas, so soon to fall, ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... Tycho Brahe in the constellation Cassiopeia, never changed its position, or presented the slightest perceptible parallax. It could not therefore have been a meteor, nor a planet regularly revolving round the sun, nor a comet blazing with fiery nebulous light, nor a satellite of one of the planets, but a fixed star, far beyond our solar system. Such a phenomenon created an immense sensation, and has never since been satisfactorily explained by philosophers. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... AEneas raised 70 To godlike honors in all Trojan hearts, And Polybus, with whom Antenor's sons Agenor, and young Acamas advanced. Hector the splendid orb of his broad shield Bore in the van, and as a comet now 75 Glares through the clouds portentous, and again, Obscured by gloomy vapors, disappears, So Hector, marshalling his host, in front Now shone, now vanish'd in the distant rear. All-cased he flamed in brass, and on the sight 80 Flash'd as the lightnings of Jove AEgis-arm'd. As reapers, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... over Jerusalem blazed a great comet, in appearance like a sword of fire. It was true that they had seen it before at Tyre, but never before had it shown so bright. Moreover, there it had not the appearance of a sword. This they thought to be an ill omen, all of them ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... sword of God before them blaz'd Fierce as a comet: which with torrid heat And vapours, as the Libyan air adust, Begun to parch that temperate clime; whereat In either hand the hast'ning angel caught Our ling'ring parents, and to the eastern gate Led them direct, and down the cliff as fast To the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... for Addison had always prided himself on being free from all superstition. But I saw that he was startled; and he admitted afterwards that he, too, had remembered about that rainbow in the morning, and had also thought of the comet that had appeared a few years before and that many people believed to presage the ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... since so lovely an autumn as that of 1874 has been seen in Europe: people say not since the last great comet year, and they credit the erratic visitor of last summer with the exceptional beauty of the weather. As in the case of other marked comet years, the vintages of which still bring extraordinary prices, Italy has had exceptionally fine harvests of all kinds this year. The grain has been abundant, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... instantaneously ejected towards the object of the feeling. Fig. 10 depicts just such a thought-form after it has left the astral body of its author, and is on its way towards its goal. It will be observed that the almost circular form has changed into one somewhat resembling a projectile or the head of a comet; and it will be easily understood that this alteration is caused by its rapid forward motion. The clearness of the colour assures us of the purity of the emotion which gave birth to this thought-form, while ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... with his eyes. At first he thought that it was a comet moving across the sky and reflected in the water; but, on glancing above, he saw his mistake. It looked, at first, like a great ball of fire rolling along the bottom of the lake with a stream ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... heavenly bodies. The evolution of man on our planet in this broad conception of space and time is most infinitesimal. It has been just a few hours ago in this widened conception of time that Halley's comet was excommunicated from the skies by Pope Calixitus III, who looked upon this comet as one of unheard-of magnitude and from the tail of which was flung down upon the ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... and a young woman; there must always be "something in it": either a mitten for him, or a disappointment for her, or wedding-cake for all—generally and preferably, of course, the wedding-cake;—and belonging to such friendship as lawfully as a tail belongs to a comet, was a great, wide-spreading area of gossip. It was only in the case of Phebe Lane that this universal and common-sense rule had its one particular and unreasonable exception; and it was acting upon a speedily acquired ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... Comet for thy shield is bright and strong, Maryland! Come! for thy dalliance does thee wrong, Maryland! Come! to thins own heroic throng, That stalks with Liberty along, And give a new Key to thy ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... a comet. A Minister said, "This broom-star sweeps away the old, and brings in the new. The doings of God are constantly attended by ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... enchantments. At night the lights of the city zigzag in patterns of distracting loveliness, and Market street reaches from the foot of the mountain to the Embarcadero like the tail of some flaming comet ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... Tony Briotti and Howard Shannon, but that was probably just the slowness of mail. Barby urged them to hurry back and hoped they were finding life dull enough so they would. She and Jan needed instruction in sailing, because they had just bought a new Comet-class sailboat. ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... obedience; and I'll keep my word, even if there should be a comet. I'll go and buy the horse, and then I shall be ready to take the ring-fence as ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... habits, the ethics, the psychology of our globe. One would be inclined to say that the insect comes from another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insane, more atrocious, more infernal than our own. One would think that it was born of some comet that had lost its course and died ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... lasting than the kingdoms of the world! Blind and unhappy Zabastes! ... he is ignorant as a stone, and for him the mysteries of Nature are forever veiled. The triumphal hero-march of the stars,—the brief, bright rhyme of the flashing comet,—the canticle of the rose as she bears her crimson heart to the smile of the sun,—the chorus of green leaves chanting orisons to the wind—the never completed epic of heaven's lofty solitudes where the white moon ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... have heard my father tell how in the heat of that year a great red comet burned in the sky, even as that we now see, my friend. God forbid that this portends blood. But in the coming spring the French conscripts filled our sacred land like a swarm of locusts, devouring as they went. And at their head, with the pomp of Darius, rode that destroyer ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... movement has its crowd of camp followers, who straggle and scatter. We are like a comet, bright at the head but tailing away into mere gas behind. However, every man may speak for himself, and I do not feel that your charge comes home to me. I am only bigoted against bigotry, and that I hold to ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... and fled as one man. They descended the pass as they had never before descended it; they coursed over the plains like grey-hounds; they passed through their own villages like a whirlwind; drew most of the inhabitants after them like the living tail of a mad comet, and only stopped when they fell exhausted on the damp ground in the remotest depths ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... solemnity, the thrilling fascination of the old unetherized operation upon the human sufferer. Their recorded phenomena, stored away by the physiological inquisitor on dusty shelves, are mostly of as little present value to man as the knowledge of a new comet or of a tungstate of zirconium, perhaps to be confuted the next year, perhaps to remain a fixed truth of immediate value,— ... CONTEMPTIBLY SMALL COMPARED WITH THE PRICE PAID FOR IT IN AGONY ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... regarded him by the light of the candle. There was something in his look which agonized her, in the rush of his thoughts, accelerating their speed from minute to minute. He seemed to be passing through the universe of ideas like a comet—erratic, inapprehensible, untraceable. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... liking when she was young. Yet she is plodding through the Life religiously—only skipping the verses. I have come across two little specimens of "Death and the child" in it. His son, Lionel, was carried out in a blanket one night in the great comet year, and waking up under the stars asked, "Am I dead?" Number two is of a little girl at Wellington's funeral who saw his charger carrying his boots, and asked, "Shall I be like that ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... a mathematician and astronomer as Galileo. In 1607 at Ilfracombe and in South Wales, he had taken by hand and Jacob's staff, the old patriarchal method, valuable observations of the comet of that year, and compared notes with his astronomical pupil William Lower, and afterwards with Kepler. This comet, now known as Halley's, ought perhaps to have been named Hariot's, for it confirmed his notions that the ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... printed at his own expense several small books in 1681 and 1682, amongst others one piece addressed to Mahomet IV., De Conversione Turcarum. The following passage occurs in this fantastic production: "You saw, some months ago, O great Eastern Leader, a comet of unusual magnitude, a true prognostic of the Kingdom of the Jesuelites, that is, of the restoration of all people to the one-three God. O well is thee, that thou hast turned thy mind before God, and by proclaiming a general fast throughout ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield |
