"Vicissitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... under his standard, with his old competitor the Duke of Portland at their head; and the rest had, after many vain struggles, quitted the field in despair. Fox had retired to the shades of St Anne's Hill, and had there found, in the society of friends whom no vicissitude could estrange from him, of a woman whom he tenderly loved, and of the illustrious dead of Athens, of Rome, and of Florence, ample compensation for all the misfortunes of his public life. Session followed session with ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising out of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer,—apples that are bitter sweet with the moral of Time's vicissitude. ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... obscurely that God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass, capable of the image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof, as the eye joyeth to receive light; and not only delighted in beholding the variety of things and vicissitude of times, but raised also to find out and discern the ordinances and decrees which throughout all those changes are infallibly observed. And although he doth insinuate that the supreme or summary law of Nature (which he calleth "the work which God worketh from the beginning to the ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... a weak sovereign, reigned till 1797. He took part in the first coalition against revolutionary France, and in the second and third partitions of Poland. Frederick William III. reigned from 1797 to 1840, during which time Prussia experienced every vicissitude of fortune. The first war with imperial France, in 1806-7, led to the reduction of her territory and population one half; and what was left of country and people was most mercilessly treated by Napoleon I., who should either have restored her altogether, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... obscurity; philosophers have endeavoured to reconcile us to that condition which they cannot teach us to mend, by persuading us that most of our evils are made afflictive only by ignorance or perverseness, and that nature has annexed to every vicissitude of external circumstances some advantage sufficient to over-balance all ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... Great Britain could prevent the kingdom of Naples from passing from one vicissitude into another. The French took possession of it in January 1799, and established what they called the Parthenopean Republic. Nelson helped to retake it in June of the same year, and put the itinerant King on ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... contrast is there between the lives of human beings! Considering the beginning and the end of all mortal careers are the same, how wonderfully is the interval varied! Some, the weeds of the world, dashed from shore to shore,—all vicissitude, enterprise, strife, disquiet; others, the world's lichen, rooted to some peaceful rock, growing, flourishing, withering on the same spot,—scarce a feeling expressed, scarce a sentiment called forth, scarce a tithe of the properties of their very ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... About eighty years ago, and just before their marriage day, my father and mother stood up in the old meeting-house at Somerville, New Jersey, and took upon them the vows of the Christian. Through a long life of vicissitude she lived harmlessly and usefully, and came to her end in peace. No child of want ever came to her door and was turned empty away. No one in sorrow came to her but was comforted. No one asked her the way to be saved but ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... may be deplored, From a foul prison to free air restored. Ought he to thank his kinsman or his wife, Could tears recall him into wretched life? Their sorrow hurts themselves; on him is lost, And worse than both, offends his happy ghost. What then remains, but after past annoy To take the good vicissitude of joy; To thank the gracious gods for what they give, Possess our souls, and, while we live, to live? Ordain we then two sorrows to combine, And in one point the extremes of grief to join; That thence resulting ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... Hours, with rosie hand Unbarr'd the gates of Light. There is a Cave Within the Mount of God, fast by his Throne, Where light and darkness in perpetual round Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heav'n Grateful vicissitude, like Day and Night; Light issues forth, and at the other dore Obsequious darkness enters, till her houre 10 To veile the Heav'n, though darkness there might well Seem twilight here; and now went forth ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... from our hemisphere, The world's enlightener vanishes, and day On all sides wasteth, suddenly the sky, Erewhile irradiate only with his beam, Is yet again unfolded, putting forth Innumerable lights wherein one shines. Of such vicissitude in heaven I thought, As the great sign, that marshaleth the world And the world's leaders, in the blessed beak Was silent; for that all those living lights, Waxing in splendour, burst forth into songs, Such as from memory ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... was Superintendent of Indian Affairs in this country before the Revolution, was distinguished in Colonial history, and active in the French and Indian war. His life was one of romantic interest and vicissitude. The work is highly spoken of by the literati who have seen the advance sheets. Jared Sparks, George Bancroft, F. Parkman, G.W. Curtis, Lewis Cass, &c., testify to its interest and historical accuracy. From the well-known ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... restored. Ought he to thank his kinsman or his wife, Could tears recall him into wretched life? Their sorrow hurts themselves; on him is lost; And worse than both, offends his happy ghost. 1110 What then remains, but, after past annoy, To take the good vicissitude of joy? To thank the gracious gods for what they give, Possess our souls, and while we live, to live? Ordain we then two sorrows to combine, And in one point the extremes of grief to join; That thence resulting joy may be renew'd, As jarring notes ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... life of trouble and turmoil of change and vicissitude; of anger and exultation; of sorrow and of vengeance. My sorrows have all been for a slighted gospel, and my vengeance has been wreaked on its adversaries. Therefore, in the might of Heaven, I will sit down and write: I will let the wicked ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... out into this prayer: "O most mighty Jupiter, and ye gods that are judges of good and evil actions, ye know that not without just cause, but constrained by necessity, we have been forced to revenge ourselves on the city of our unrighteous and wicked enemies. But if, the the vicissitude of things, there by any calamity due, to counter-balance this great felicity, I beg that it may be diverted from the city and army of the Romans, and fall, with as little hurt as may be, upon my own head." Having said these words, and ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... was at last able to purchase—his own body and soul; this, however, was not effected, until he had endured much oppression and insult. He was several times shipwrecked, and finally, after thirty years of vicissitude and suffering, he settled in London and published his Memoirs. The book is said to be written with all the simplicity, and something of the roughness, of uneducated nature. He gives a naive description of his terror at an earthquake, his surprise when he first saw snow, a picture, ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... them. But just as nature gave the instinct, fortune supplied the breeding and the occasion. The heir, pupil, find victim of a second family of Atreus and Thyestes, the child was trained into demoralization, vicissitude, and daring. Believed himself to have been the favorite lover of the most lovely of his sisters, he describes her as the "Atrocious memoir-writer," a "Messalina, boasting of the purity of her morals, and an absconding ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... heaven too soon if all evil and vicissitude were ended. Checks upon our prosperity must fall, and changes tax and interrupt our gains; and he is not most of a man who meets least evil, and loses least of the reward of toil; but he who endures with the manliest courage, the mightiest will to overcome, and most dexterous hand ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... Acre; and he labored, night and day, for the relief of his brethren and the annoyance of the Franks. Nine battles, not unworthy of the name, were fought in the neighborhood of Mount Carmel, with such vicissitude of fortune, that in one attack, the sultan forced his way into the city; that in one sally, the Christians penetrated to the royal tent. By the means of divers and pigeons, a regular correspondence was maintained with the besieged; and, as often as the sea was left ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... absent until the time of which I am now going to tell you, would have noted some changes which had imperceptibly come over all; but he, too, would have thought, that the life which had brought so little of turmoil and vicissitude must have been calm and tranquil, and in accordance with the bygone activity of the town in which their existence ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... national plays and poems, or have been celebrated in those all-pervading ballads which are as the life-breath of the people, and thus have continued to exercise an influence on the national character which centuries of vicissitude and decline have not been able to destroy; so that, with all their faults, and they are many, the Spaniards, even at the present day, are on many points the most high-minded and proud-spirited people of ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... of the illustrious Ahmed Shah, reigned in Afghanistan from 1803 till 1809. His youth had been full of trouble and vicissitude. He had been a wanderer, on the verge of starvation, a pedlar and a bandit, who raised money by plundering caravans. His courage was lightly reputed, and it was as a mere creature of circumstance that he reached the throne. His reign was perturbed, and in 1809 he was a ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... Asiatic continent, can place half a million of men in the field at any moment. The second steady-point is China's financial condition. She is the debtor of several Western nations, and they may be trusted to avert from her any vicissitude that would impair her credit as a borrower. Prominent among such vicissitudes is the dismemberment of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... two great republics, which for more than five centuries had been slowly extending their limits and maturing their powers upon the opposite shores of the Mediterranean, were now about to begin one of the most memorable struggles of all antiquity—a duel that was to last, with every vicissitude of fortune, for ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... many sharp bargains struck without the help of a common language. I am in the belief, which may be erroneous, that nobody is wronged in these trades. The taciturn storekeeper, who regards his customers with a stare of solemn amusement as Critturs born by some extraordinary vicissitude of nature to the use of a language that practically amounts to deafness and dumbness, never suffers his philosophical interest in them to affect his commercial efficiency; he drops them now and then a curt English phrase, or expressive Yankee idiom; he knows very well when they mean ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... England worth listening to. He has immured his intellect in the catacombs of the Romish Church, but he has not been able to quench it, and even there it radiates a splendor through the gloom. His saintly character is as indubitable as the subtlety of his mind, and no vicissitude has impaired the charm of his style, which is pure and perfect as an exquisite and flawless diamond; serene and chaste in its usual mood, but scintillating gloriously in the light of ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... send a wire to Fox to say that you accept," he said, rising. He seated himself at his desk in the appropriate attitude. He had an appropriate attitude for every vicissitude of his life. These he had struck before so many people that even in the small hours of the morning he was ready for the kodak wielder. Beside him he had every form of labour-saver; every kind of literary knick-knack. There were book-holders that ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... the last heard of him was to this effect: He had strayed out to St. Louis, and, after a few months of vicissitude, had secured the position of bartender in a low liquor saloon. He has very little chance of rising higher. The young tyrant of Smith Institute has not done very well for himself, but he has himself to ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... succeeded the overworked Fawkner, was, somewhat later, bought up by the "Argus", under Wilson and Johnston, in succession to Kerr. The Herald, when quitted after an excellent and timely sale by its founder early in the gold times, was soon after shipwrecked in the storm of vicissitude that characterized some of the first ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... under the terrible bereavement. For weeks he was a maniac; and, though Providence spared him again to us, and his mind, thanks to God, is again whole, he is the victim of a profound melancholy, that seems to defy alike medical skill and worldly vicissitude.' ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... the intelligence Heaven hath bestowed upon us for our greatest good, to our ruin, repugning nature's design and the universal order and vicissitude of things, which implieth that every man should use his instrument and ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... character and the working of the human will, were eminently characteristic of the religious life of the American church. In the times when that life was stirred to its most strenuous activity, it was marked by the vicissitude of prolonged passions of painful sensibility at the consciousness of sin, and ecstasies of delight in the contemplation of the infinity of God and the glory of the Saviour and his salvation. Every one who is conversant with the religious biography of the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... by which the great masses of men rise from penury to comfort, and it is the nations in which these qualities are most diffused that in the long run are the most prosperous. Chance and circumstance may do much. A happy climate, a fortunate annexation, a favourable vicissitude in the course of commerce, may vastly influence the prosperity of nations; anarchy, agitation, unjust laws, and fraudulent enterprise may offer many opportunities of individual or even of class gains; but ultimately it will be found that the nations in which the solid ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Well, never mind that just now; there's a time for every thing. Please observe that ruined house: the ancient family to whom it belongs are a remarkable example of the vicissitude of human affairs." He then told him the curious ups and downs of that family, which, at two distant periods, had held vast possessions in the county; but were now represented by the shell of one manor house, and its dovecote, the size of a modern villa. Next he showed him an obscure ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... should interchangeably execute the office of supreme magistrate, and each in succession, with the ensigns of royalty, should offer the solemn sacrifices and dispatch public business for the space of six hours by day and six by night; which vicissitude and equal distribution of power would preclude all rivalry amongst the senators and envy from the people, when they should behold one, elevated to the degree of a king, leveled within the space of a day to the condition ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... on the reader many other Pisan statistics, but they would be at second-hand. After long vicissitude, the city is again almost as prosperous as she was in the heyday of her national greatness, when she had commerce with every Levantine and Oriental port. We ourselves saw a silk factory pouring forth a tide of pretty girls from their work at the end of the day; there was no ruin or disrepair ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... circling Hours, with rosy hand Unbarred the gates of light. There is a cave Within the mount of God, fast by his throne, Where light and darkness in perpetual round Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heaven Grateful vicissitude, like day and night; Light issues forth, and at the other door Obsequious darkness enters, till her hour To veil the Heaven, though darkness there might well Seem twilight here: And now went forth the Morn Such as in highest Heaven arrayed in gold Empyreal; from before ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... this? [Reading the inscription by a torch.] "To Rose, from Walter!" Madam, I understand you now. I was deceived. Permit me to be the means of restoring this valued token from a dear friend. Would it not be a strange vicissitude if the finding of the trinket should be the means of losing the friend? ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce
... worked by some secret and unseen hand to bring terrible events to a terrible issue. But puppets themselves have passions. They will bring a new plot into what they are presenting, and twist the ordered issue of vicissitude to suit some whim or appetite of their own. To be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realise at every moment; and this, I often think, is the only explanation possible of your nature, if indeed for the profound and terrible ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... temporary incident, an unimportant phase of their progress toward that larger and grander state imaged to them with mysterious sublimity in the idea of Death or Eternity. In accordance with this belief, they expressed in their dwellings the sentiment of transitoriness and vicissitude, and in their tombs the immortality of calm repose. And so their houses have crumbled into dust ages ago, but their tombs are eternal. In all the relations of Life the sentiment of Death was present in some form or other. The hallowed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... other cycles. Canopus is afar off, Memnon resoundeth not to the sun, and Nilus heareth strange voices. Her monuments are but hieroglyphically sempiternal. Osiris and Anubis, her averruncous deities, have departed, while Orus yet remains dimly shadowing the principle of vicissitude and the effluxion of things, but ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... same; and if there be any difference, I venture to say it is in favour of us. Your country, before this declaration, was not a self-consisting independent State. Hungary was. Through the lapse of a thousand years, through every vicissitude of this long period, while nations vanished and empires fell, the self-consisting independence of Hungary was never disputed, but was recognized by all powers of the earth, sanctioned by treaties made ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... us sound judgment, we should not only consider those things which have happened, but those also which may occur. Even if you should forget all others, I am myself a sufficient instance of every vicissitude of fortune. For me, whom a little while ago you saw advancing my standards to the walls of Rome, after pitching my camp between the Anio and your city, you now behold here, bereft of my two brothers, men of consummate bravery, and most ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... Three years of strange vicissitude rolled over the career of our heroines. Some thousands of pounds gilded the path they passed over. With all the recklessness of youth, they squandered their ill-gotten money. Many a poor ruined family eked out a miserable ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... all tenderness, all goodness; and may the grace of her Almighty Father keep her from the wail and woe which too often accompany the path of beauty in this life of vicissitude and trial." ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Jung, "has already ascended the spiritual regions, and is no more a mortal being in this dusty world exposed to vicissitude like you and I. Although a mean prince like me has been the recipient of the favour of the Emperor, and has undeservedly been called to the princely inheritance, how could I presume to go before the spiritual ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... rest on this or that point of the thorax or abdomen; but it does not stop at any of these, nor is the sting unsheathed, as can readily be ascertained. Indeed, once the contest is opened, the Philanthus becomes so entirely absorbed in her operation that I can remove the cover and follow every vicissitude of the tragedy with ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... and reserving all her favor and protection for genius and patriotism, and honor and virtue. Surrounded at a later period by unexampled dangers and calamities, she showed herself equal to every vicissitude of fortune, and superior to its worst frowns. If her judgment occasionally erred, it was in cases where alternatives of evil were alone offered to her choice, and in which it is even now scarcely possible to decide what course would have been wiser or safer than ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... desire of rule and reference, from the humble quiet of his native fireside; and if, in after life, he did not bitterly repent of the folly, it was because of that light-hearted and sanguine temperament which never deserted him quite, and supported him in all events and through every vicissitude. He had wandered much after leaving his parental home, and was now engaged in an occupation and pursuit which our future pages must develop. Having narrated, in his desultory way to his companion, the facts which we have condensed, he conceived ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... fine and the expense of his discharge. Gratitude and fidelity are inseparable from an honest man; and it was this benevolent act that prompted De Foe to support Harley, with his able and ingenious pen, when Anne lay lifeless, and his benefactor in the vicissitude of party was persecuted by faction, and overpowered, though not ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... the character of the range, exposed to every vicissitude of temperature and climate. White billows of fog beat upon the mountain tops like a silent sea, and blot out the landscape with an impenetrable veil. Thunder echoes through the rocky caves with incessant reverberations, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... advice. Do not think I say so in flattery. No! No! It is from my heart. He will be like his uncle, equally wise and good. . . . He will be of the greatest use to you, and will keep well at your side if a time of vicissitude should come, such as I hope may never be—but, after all, no one ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... wisdom of nations does not improvise itself, nor reveal itself all at once in its fulness, as Minerva of old sprang from the head of Jupiter, clad in complete armour, but that it develops itself during their historic progress amidst vicissitude, and by turning to profit the lessons of trial and experience. It is this that gives us the hope that in future our nation, enlightened by the painful events of which we are now reaping the sad fruits, will become ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... toward him. A few hours' sail might again bring me beneath his roof, and once more should I find myself at home. The thought was calming to all my excitement; I forgot every danger I had passed through; I lost all memory of every vicissitude I had escaped, and had only the little low parlor in the "Black Pits" before my mind's eye; the wild, unweeded garden, and the sandy, sunny beach before the door. It was as though all that nigh a year had compassed had never occurred, and that my ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... is filled with similar details, and would be a melancholy narration were it not that it exhibits him under every vicissitude, suspected and watched by the French government, misrepresented by the representatives of his own country, treated with almost universal coldness and neglect, cut off from all communication with America, without money, without occupation, and without any reasonable ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... this England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution; but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it: the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrow-fields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... patience in the tedium of safety; the voices of its fathers call it forth. Already in our society as it exists, the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living; he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out of reach of any vicissitude but one of health; and there he yawns. If the people in the next villa took pot-shots at him, he might be killed indeed, but so long as he escaped he would find his blood oxygenated and his views of the ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... engaged. It was now that he entered the University at Leipzig to study law. The wife of Professor Carus charmed him by her singing and inspired various songs. At her house he met the noted piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, and thus began an acquaintance of strange vicissitude and strange power for ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... transition, mutation, transposition, conversion, metamorphosis, innovation, transfiguration, permutation, transference, reversion, reaction, transmutation; substitution, commutation; variety, novelty, vicissitude. Associated word: mutanda. Antonyms: continuation, stability, conservatism, permanence, inertia, monotony, perpetuation, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Gratitude and Honour XXXV He repairs to Bristol Spring, where he reigns paramount during the whole Season XXXVI He is smitten with the Charms of a Female Adventurer, whose Allurements subject him to a new Vicissitude of Fortune XXXVII Fresh Cause for exerting his Equanimity and Fortitude XXXVIII The ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... has generally enabled the plants, (if duly sheltered from the spring frosts, a circumstance to which a planter should always be attentive in selecting his plant patch,) to shoot forward in sufficient strength to bear the vicissitude of transplantation. ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... settlers of Lincoln county (formerly Tryon) was Jacob Forney, Sr. He was the son of a Huguenot, and born about the year 1721. His life was checkered with a vicissitude of fortunes bordering on romance. At the revocation of the edict of Nantes, in 1685, his father fled from France, preferring self-expatriation to the renunciation of his religious belief, and settled in Alsace, on the ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... a pebble into the lake, and watched the ripples roll away and disappear, and ruminated on a life full of color and vicissitude. He remembered the Arizona days, the endless burning sand, the dull routine of a cavalry trooper, the lithe brown bodies of the Apaches, the first skirmish and the last. From a soldier he had turned journalist, tramped the streets ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... and great nobles, whose mutability of faith had so happily corresponded with every ecclesiastical vicissitude of the last three reigns, political and personal considerations may well be supposed to have held the first place; and though the old religion might still be endeared to them by many cherished associations and by early ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... are usually confined to the inner life of imaginative men, but Mr. Poe's biography displays a vicissitude and peculiarity of interest such as is rarely met with. The offspring of a romantic marriage, and left an orphan at an early age, he was adopted by Mr. Allan, a wealthy Virginian, whose barren marriage-bed seemed the warranty ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... recognition; here and there a house she could remember had altogether disappeared; a new one had replaced it that before long might be replaced by a newer still. To Olivia the consoling thought was precisely in this state of transition, to which rapid vicissitude, for better or for worse, was something like a law. It made the downfall of her own family less exceptional, less bitter, when viewed as part of a huge impermanency, shifting from phase to phase, with no rule to govern it but the necessities of ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... or maligned him. Six and twenty years after this scene at Worms, when the then dawning heresy had become broad day; when Luther had gone to his rest—and there had gathered about his name the hate which mean men feel for an enemy who has proved too strong for them—a passing vicissitude in the struggle brought the emperor at the head ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... was true of Dickens; and what kind or quality of nature such intercourse expressed in him, of what strength, tenderness, and delicacy susceptible, of what steady level warmth, of what daily unresting activity of intellect, of what unbroken continuity of kindly impulse through the change and vicissitude of three-and-thirty years, the letters to myself given in these volumes could alone express. Gathered from various and differing sources, their interest could not have been as the interest of these; in which everything comprised in the successive stages of a most ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... and the brilliant position of the humanists were a perilous temptation; it seemed to him that he too 'through inborn pride could no longer regard the low and common things of life.' He was thus led to plunge into a life of excitement and vicissitude, in which exhausting studies, tutorships, secretaryships, professorships, offices in princely households, mortal enmities and perils, luxury and beggary, boundless admiration and boundless contempt, followed confusedly one upon the other, and in which ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... will be continued in spite of the demonstrations that not even a pretext for them has been given by the United States, and of the fair and liberal attempt to induce a revocation of them, can not be anticipated. Assuring myself that under every vicissitude the determined spirit and united councils of the nation will be safeguards to its honor and its essential interests, I repair to the post assigned me with no other discouragement than what springs from my own inadequacy ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... bitter months, surveying my attenuated body, I exclaim with the melancholy prophet, "My leanness, my leanness! woe is me!" and though, adverting to the state of my mind, I behold it "all in a robe of darkest grain," yet when April and May reign in sweet vicissitude, I give, like Horace, care to the winds, and perceive the whole system excited by the potent stimulus of sunshine.... I have myself in winter felt hostile to those whom I could smile upon in May, and clasp to ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... childhood of a poet is the mirror wherein the image of his future is seen, and because there is something peculiarly touching in this season of innocence and unconsciousness of self in the history of men whose after lives have been torn to pieces by the storms of vicissitude and passion. So far, he had not begun to rhyme—an unusual case, as boys who can make two lines jingle, whether they be poets or not, generally scribble plentifully before leaving school. At the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... proof to establish that system of navigation, and a commercial route, which remained in use for nearly 1300 years, must have been based on the internal sources of Egypt, and been regarded as absolutely necessary, under every vicissitude of foreign trade, to the prosperity of the country. The great object of the canal was to afford a high-road for the exportation of the produce of Egypt; and its connexion with the Indian trade was merely a secondary and unimportant consideration. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... traveller, serene and gay, Walks the wild heath, and sings his toil away. Does envy seize thee? Crush the upbraiding joy, Increase his riches, and his peace destroy— 40 Now fears in dire vicissitude invade, The rustling brake alarms, and quivering shade; Nor light nor darkness brings his pain relief, One shows the plunder, and one hides the thief. Yet still one general cry the sky assails, And gain and grandeur load the tainted gales; Few know the toiling statesman's ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... smouldering senses in death's sick delay Or seizure of malign vicissitude Can rob this body of honour, or denude This soul of wedding-raiment worn to-day? For lo! even now my lady's lips did play With these my lips such consonant interlude As laurelled Orpheus longed for when he wooed The half-drawn hungering face with ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... influences wholly unexpected may gain the ascendancy, and I be so unlike my present self that pitying friends can only wonder and whisper, How changed! and enemies shall glory in my fall. No. It is vain to strive after certainty in this world of change and vicissitude, since none of us can tell what himself shall be on the morrow. Do what I will, moreover, my child can only inherit a sinful nature." In the midst of gloomy thoughts like these, we turn to the story of Samson's mother, and hear Jehovah directing her to walk before Him in the spirit of consecration, ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... well-known soul: new notes, but with the added charm of likeness to already loved ones, deeper, more resonant, or perhaps of unsuspected high unearthly purity, in the dear voice. Absence may do it, or change of occupation; or sudden vicissitude of fortune; or merely the reading of a certain book (how many friends may not Tolstoi's "Resurrection" have thus revealed to one another!), or the passing of some public crisis like the Dreyfus business. What! after these years of familiarity, we did not know each other fully? ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... among the others" and he explains this by saying that these disturbances "are due to the diffusion of the attention towards obsessions or preoccupations;" and he gives as an example the reply of a patient "I think of my illness or such vicissitude by which it was brought about." Indeed, in one place, Professor Dejerine goes so far as to permit himself to say that the hypochondriac preoccupation itself constitutes originally a purely intellectual conception, a propos ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... There is one thing that they should not do: they should pass no judgment on man's destiny, for it is a thing with which they are unacquainted. Their own life is an excrescence of the moment, doomed, in the vicissitude of history, to pass and disappear. The eternal life of man, spent under sun and rain and in rude physical effort, lies upon one side, scarce ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... however rude the sound. All at her work the village maiden sings; Nor, while she turns the giddy wheel around Revolves the sad vicissitude of things."' ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... consisted of Nine Kingdoms, all which had their several Kings; but now by the vicissitude of Times and Things, they are all reduced under one King, who is an absolute Tyrant, and Rules the most arbitrarily of any King in the World. We will first speak of him as to his Personal Capacity, and next ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... lies under the same parallels with Greece, Italy, and Spain; but the climates are found to be different; and while the shores, not only of the Mediterranean, but even those of the Atlantic, are favoured with a moderate change and vicissitude of seasons, the eastern parts of Europe, and the northern continent of Asia, are afflicted with all their extremes. In one season, we are told, that the plagues of an ardent summer reach almost to the frozen sea; and that the inhabitant is obliged to ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... instability in this world, which you claim as His empire? Is any state subject to more frequent and cruel revolutions than that of this unknown monarch? How can we attribute to an immutable God, powerful enough to give solidity to His works, the government of a world where everything is in a continual vicissitude? If I think to see a God unchanging in all the effects advantageous to my kind, what God can I discover in the continual misfortunes by which my kind is oppressed? You tell me that it is our sins that force Him to punish us. I will answer that God, according to yourselves, is not immutable, ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... camp at Avignon; Villot, a Paris student; Caillette had received the spirited education of a soldier in the household of his benefactor, Diane's father. And as for the others—how varied had been their careers!—lives of hazard and vicissitude; scapegraces and adventurers—existing literally ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... so vividly impressed themselves upon her consciousness, and to the history of whose pleasures and brilliant and fantastic dissipation she had recently been listening with a lively and diverted ear, it seemed that, by some rapid and magical vicissitude, her little Plantagenet, the faithful and affectionate companion of her childhood, whose sorrows she had so often soothed, and who in her pure and devoted love had always found consolation and happiness, had become 'the observed of all observers;' the most ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... Happy is it, when these kindly workings of a sublimer providence, cause the graces of his spirit to shoot forth like "the tender grass springing up out of the earth by clear shining after rain;" and when the experience acquired in seasons of vicissitude, is treasured up in the heart for future use. Mrs. Lyth had her April weather preparatory to the summer of her usefulness, as will appear by further extracts ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... at the Globe Tavern was destined to end at the White House, after years of vicissitude and serious national trouble. Children were born unto them, and all but the eldest died. Great responsibilities were laid upon Lincoln and even though he met them bravely it was inevitable that ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... tell (for Memory can) How thy first years in even current ran; How every pleasure, every good, combined To feast with countless sweets thy tranquil mind: Each passing joy a kindred joy pursued, Nor ask'd the aid of sad vicissitude. Swift flew thy boat, thro' isles with verdure crown'd, Heaven's smile above, and prosperous seas around: O'er the smooth waves Hope's cheering zephyr pass'd, And every wave ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... iii. 6. "The counsel of the Lord standeth for ever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations," Psal. xxxiii. 11. Men change their mind oftener than their garments. Poor vain man, even in his best estate, is changeableness, and vicissitude itself, altogether vanity! And this ariseth partly from the imperfection of his understanding, and his ignorance because he does not understand what may fall out. There are many things secret and hidden, which if he discovered, he would not be of that judgment, and many things may fall out which ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... duty, and will, therefore, always want a monitor to recall them; and a new book often seizes the attention of the publick, without any other claim than that it is new. There is likewise in composition, as in other things, a perpetual vicissitude of fashion; and truth is recommended at one time to regard, by appearances which at another would expose it to neglect; the author, therefore, who has judgment to discern the taste of his contemporaries, and skill to gratify it, will have always an opportunity to deserve ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... overlooked all these considerations. Those who had most loved and honored the Great Commoner were loudest in invective against the new-made lord. London had hitherto been true to him through every vicissitude. When the citizens learned that he had been sent for from Somersetshire, that he had been closeted with the King at Richmond, and that he was to be first minister, they had been in transports of joy. Preparations were ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... had been wise enough to twine our new vigor round about her ancient strength, her power would have been too firmly established ever to yield, in its due season, to the otherwise immutable law of imperial vicissitude. The earth might then have beheld the intolerable spectacle of a sovereignty and institutions, imperfect, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the last struggles of Revolutionary France under Napoleon; and his exclamations, "Oh for a Republic!—'Brutus, thou sleepest!'" show the lengths to which, in theory at least, his political zeal extended. Since then, he had but rarely turned his thoughts to politics; the tame, ordinary vicissitude of public affairs having but little in it to stimulate a mind like his, whose sympathies nothing short of a crisis seemed worthy to interest. This the present state of Italy gave every promise of affording him; and, in addition ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... irresistible, unless aided by the magic of smiles; she knew the power of contrast even in charms; she believed the poets, who certainly understand these things, and who assure us that the very existence of love depends on this blest vicissitude. Convinced, or seemingly convinced, of the folly of that fond melancholy in which she persisted for a week, she next appeared all radiant with joy; and she had reason to be delighted by the effect which this produced. ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... globe, a power for interchanging sea and land. If this shall be admitted as a just view of the system of this globe, we may next examine, how far there are to be found any marks of certain parts of our earth having more than once undergone that change of posture, or vicissitude of things, and of having had reiterated operations of the mineral kingdom changing their substance, as well as altering their positions in relation to the ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... eloquence. The pulpit ruled New England, and the sermon was the great intellectual engine of the time. The serious thinking of the Puritans was given almost exclusively to religion; the other world was all their art. The daily secular events of life, the aspects of nature, the vicissitude of the seasons, were important enough to find record in print only in so far as they manifested God's dealings with his people. So much was the sermon depended upon to furnish literary food that it was the general ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... Heaven had planned him for a peaceful world. Unfortunately Heaven had not planned a peaceful world for him. He lived in a world of obstinate and incessant change, and in parts where its operations were unsparingly conspicuous. Vicissitude was in the very soil he tilled; even his garden was upon a yearly tenancy, and overshadowed by a huge board that proclaimed it not so much a garden as an eligible building site. He was horticulture under notice to quit, the last patch ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... wind and wet, Into his sanctum, where choice fare was spread, And cosy comfort ready to receive Young Ninety-Two, and give him a "send-off" Such as should strengthen and encourage him To make fair start, and face those many moons Of multiform vicissitude with pluck, Good hope and patient pertinacity. And when men sought the Modern MERLIN's ear And asked him what these matters might portend, The shining angel, and the naked Child Descending in the glory of the seas, He laughed, as is his wont, and answered them In riddling ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... geniuses must creep hand and knee through mire, heart pierced with the bramble of experience, up over the jagged pathways to that still place where skies are clear at last. Thompson is the last among the great ones to have known the dire vicissitude, direst, if legends are true, that can befall a human being. We have the silence of his saviour friends, the Meynells, saying so much more than their few public words, tender but so careful. What they ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... killed by a ball; then Kirchener by another, which, ricochetting from a tree, mortally wounded Duroc, the commander's faithful aid, his second self. Such a blow was stupefying indeed, for it was the loss of his closest confidant, of one who through every vicissitude had been a near, true friend, almost the only companion of a man reduced to solitude by his great elevation. Napoleon was stricken to the heart, and, halting, gave way until nightfall to his despair. ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were soon swayed up to their ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... some of the most stupendous problems which have ever engaged the restless intellect of humanity. The origin and primaeval constitution of the terrestrial globe, the laws of geologic action through long ages of vicissitude and development, the origin of life, the nature and source of the myriad complexities of living beings, the advent of man, possibly even the future history of the earth, are amongst the questions with which the geologist has to grapple in ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... had been his comrade in many a vicissitude And he knew that Najib's fondness for him was as sincere as can be that of any Oriental for a foreigner, an affection based not wholly on self-interest. Kirby enjoyed his evening powwows with superintendent beside the campfire; and the little man's amazing faculty ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... thrown from his shoulders. His penetration of character was so remarkable that all stood in fear of him; yet fear gave place to admiration. Never had a monarch more devoted servants and followers than David in his palmy days; he was the nation's idol and pride for thirty years. In every successive vicissitude he was great; and were it not for his cruelty in war and severity to his enemies, and his one great lapse into criminal self-indulgence, his reign would have been faultless. Contrast David with the other conquerors of the world; compare him with ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... ardour does not explain the whole position, which we have to face with firmness. Epochs come to an end, and before they have their place finally awarded to them in history they are bound to endure much vicissitude of fortune. No amount of sarcasm or of indignant protest will avail to conceal the fact that we stand to-day at the porch, that much more probably we have already penetrated far into the vestibule, of a new age. What its character will be, or what its principal products, it ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... floor, or hear some awful sound from its unknown depths. The very shadows on the walls thrown up wildly by the expiring firelight were objects of grotesque terror. Never—never—in her whole youth of strange vicissitude, had the nerves of this brave girl been so tremendously ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... in the face of a very superior enemy, is unavoidably exposed to excessive fatigue, and extreme hardship. The effect of these hardships was much increased by the privations under which the American troops suffered. While in almost continual motion, wading deep rivers, and encountering every vicissitude of the seasons, they were without tents, nearly without shoes, or winter clothes, and often ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... season of November, and proceeded to Malines, 14 miles distant, formerly one of the greatest cities of Belgium, but now like too many other once celebrated places in that country, affording a melancholy contrast to its former splendour, and proving that in the vicissitude of all sublunary affairs, cities, as well as their inhabitants, are ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... the very Gordon that of old Was wont to preach to me, now once more preaching; 75 I know well, that all sublunary things Are still the vassals of vicissitude. The unpropitious gods demand their tribute. This long ago the ancient Pagans knew: And therefore of their own accord they offered 80 To themselves injuries, so to atone The jealousy of their divinities: And human sacrifices bled ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... tailor, Mr. William Filby, of a suit of "Tyrian bloom, satin grain, and garter blue silk breeches, L8 2s. 7d." Thus magnificently attired, he attended the theater and watched the reception of the play and the effect of each individual scene, with that vicissitude of feeling ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... narrative, they met in New York one Ephraim Herrman, a young trader from Maryland and Delaware, then recently married. This was the son of Augustine Herrman, "first founder and seater of Bohemia Manor." Augustine Herrman was a Bohemian adventurer, born in Prague, who, after a career of much vicissitude, made his way to New Netherland. He became a force at New Amsterdam, and was an original member of the council of nine men instituted by Governor Stuyvesant in 1647. His connection with Maryland matters dates from his appointment ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... and consequently the spirit of mutual jealousy, seized upon all the coalesced powers. Some sought an accession of territory at the expense of France, some at the expense of each other, some at the expense of third parties; and when the vicissitude of disaster took its turn, they found common distress a treacherous bond ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... is furnished by this brief summary! How little was he aware of the vast advantages he was acquiring in this school of bitter experience! "In the hand of heaven he stood," to be shaped and trained for its great purpose; and every trial and vicissitude of his early life, but fitted him to cope with one or other of the varied and multifarious duties of ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... The Cow.[FN352]" Q "Which is the most magnificent verse?" "That of the Throne; it hath fifty words, bearing in each fifty blessings." Q "What sign or verse hath in it nine signs or wonders?" "That in which quoth Allah Almighty, 'Verily, in the creation of the Heaven and the Earth: and in the vicissitude of night, and day; and in the ship which saileth through the sea laden with what is profitable for mankind; and in the rain-water which God sendeth down from Heaven, quickening thereby the dead ground and replenishing the same with all sorts ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... true cause of the final success of the paper was the indomitable character of its founder, his audacity, his persistence, his power of continuous labor, and the inexhaustible vivacity of his mind. After a year of vicissitude and doubt, he doubled the price of his paper, and from that time his prosperity was uninterrupted. He turned everything to account. Six times he was assaulted by persons whom he had satirized in ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... and for ever accompanied by the infamy of the father, languishing in continued indigence, and finding their punishment in living, and their relief in dying?' If the widowed mother should carry the orphan heir of her unfortunate husband to the gate of any man who himself touched with the sad vicissitude of human affairs, might feel a compassionate reverence for the noble blood that flowed in his veins, nobler than the royalty that first ennobled it, that, like a rich stream, rose till it ran and hid its fountain—if, remembering the many noble qualities of his unfortunate father, his heart ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... York, and in that journal, at the date of this writing, he continues to wield his trenchant pen on behalf of the Irish cause. To that cause, through all the lapse of time, and change of scene, and vicissitude of fortune which he has known, his heart has remained for ever true. He has suffered much for it; that he may live to see it triumphant is a prayer which finds an echo in the ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... kind, remarked, "Recollect that, though Shelley has scruples about duelling, I have none, and shall be at all times ready to take his place." Polidori had ultimately to be dismissed, and, after some years of vicissitude, committed suicide. ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... were in the air. Another Frenchman, the classical scholar, Louis Le Roy, translator of Plato and Aristotle, put forward similar views in a work of less celebrity, On the Vicissitude or Variety of the Things in the Universe. [Footnote: De la vicissitude ou variete des choses en l'univers, 1577, 2nd ed. (which I have used), 1584.] It contains a survey of great periods in which particular peoples attained an exceptional state of ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... is like a history of the Roman Catholic Church, and the relics of bishops and saints meet us at every turn. As early as the third century there are records of its conversion to Christianity; it has passed through every vicissitude of war, pillage, and revolution, until in these latter days it has earned the guide-book appellation of 'a semi-clerical, semi-manufacturing, quiet, clean, agreeable town.' There are about 9000 inhabitants, including a ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... This vicissitude is so observable, that it would be unnecessary to dwell upon it were it, sic not of such ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... model the character of one, who, last Wednesday, we put away for the resurrection. About sixty years ago, just before the day of their marriage, my father and mother stood up in the old meeting-house, at Somerville, to take the vows of a Christian. Through a long life of vicissitude she lived blamelessly and usefully, and came to her end in peace. No child of want ever came to her door, and was turned away. No stricken soul ever appealed to her and was not comforted. No sinner ever asked her the way to be saved, and was not ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... conduct which would violate the affections of the heart, or the dictates of the conscience, however it may lead to immediate success, is a fatal error. Conscious that he was perhaps verging on some painful vicissitude of his life, he devoted himself to a love that seemed hopeless, and to a fame ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... to the surface forming springs and wells. As wells take their origin at some depth from the surface, and below the influence of the external atmosphere, their temperature is in general pretty uniform during every vicissitude of season, and always several degrees lower than the atmosphere. They differ from one another according to the nature of the strata through which they issue; for though the ingredients usually existing ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... grasped me by the hand. "I am happy," he said, "that we should have met, Mr. Lindsay. I feel an interest in you, and must take the friend and the old man's privilege of giving you an advice. The sailor, of all men, stands most in need of religion. His life is one of continued vicissitude—of unexpected success, or unlooked-for misfortune; he is ever passing from danger to safety, and from safety to danger; his dependence is on the ever-varying winds, his abode on the unstable waters. And the mind takes a peculiar tone from what is peculiar in the circumstances. With nothing ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... Minervas, issuing amid flame and splendour from Jove's head; a rich, idiomatic diction, picturesque allusions, fiery poetic emphasis, or quaint tricksy turns; all the graces and terrors of a wild Imagination, wedded to the clearest Intellect, alternate in beautiful vicissitude. Were it not that sheer sleeping and soporific passages; circumlocutions, repetitions, touches even of pure doting jargon, so often intervene! On the whole, Professor Teufelsdroeckh is not a cultivated writer. Of his sentences perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the lot of man when considered in his relations to creatures and to the world. It is a lot full of uncertainty, of instability, of vicissitude; but this should not make us skeptical or cynical; it affords no justification for pessimism. It is a condition arising, on the one hand, from the very nature of limited beings, and on the other, from the vast potentialities of our souls, which, while they are limited ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... Jeremiah, we have on record that variety and vicissitude of feelings, which this transition from hope to disappointment produces, at least in a sensitive mind. His trials were very great, even in Josiah's reign; but when that pious king's countenance was withdrawn on his early ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... Stanley, in 1867. Clarendon's mother had been buried there in 1661; and afterwards his third son, in 1664. It is at the foot of the steps to Henry VII.'s Chapel.] We have endeavoured, from the varied episodes of his life of strange vicissitude, and from the records of his strenuous action, of his undaunted courage, and of his well-tried loyalty, to draw the portrait of Lord Clarendon, to describe his character as we conceive it, and to vindicate his place in history. We have not sought to conceal his ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... fails, and friends drop off, and time Has shadows waiting in predestined ways— When shame that grows from want of money comes, And sets its brand upon a husband's brow, And makes him walk an alien in the streets: One faithful face, on which a light divine Becomes a glory when vicissitude Is in its darkest mood—one face, I say, Marks not the fallings-off that others see, Seeks not to know the thoughts that others think, Cares not to hear the words that others say: But, through her deep and self-sufficing love, She ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... was so. While men chide they will admire him, And frowning, praise. I could nigh prophesy That the unwonted crosses he has borne In his career of sharp vicissitude Will tinct his story with a tender charm, And grant the memory of his strenuous feats As long a lease within the minds of men As conquerors hold there.—Does the sheet give news Of how the troops ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... the history or beauties of the Alcazar. Asking a question now and then of our guide, we wandered from patio to patio, from room to room of that wonderful royal dwelling once called "the house of Caesar." Many a rude shock and vicissitude had it sustained when Goths fought for it with Romans, when Moors seized it from Christians, when Christians won it back, and conducted themselves within its jewelled walls in ways unworthy of their faith and boasted chivalry, ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... gather up and comprehend The volume of vicissitude, and take Account of loving, for each other's sake, And ask how love began and how will end (If there be any end of love, O friend Of my worst hours and best desires!)—and stake Our all upon the sweetness and the ache Of what men's stories ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... toil, however rude the sound. All at her work the village maiden sings; Nor while she turns the giddy wheel around, Revolves the sad vicissitude of things[368].' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... become the hero of the ancient drama of immortality.[58] Whether or not this fact can be verified from history, such is the form in which the tradition has come down to us, surviving through long ages and triumphing over all vicissitude.[59] Secret orders have few records and their story is hard to tell, but this account is perfectly in accord with the spirit and setting of the situation, and there is neither fact nor reason against it. While this does not establish it as true historically, it surely gives ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... of the rise and progress of British power in India—of that strange and rapid vicissitude, by which the ancient Empire of the Moguls was transferred into the hands of a Company of Merchants in Leadenhall Street—furnishes matter perhaps more than any other that could be mentioned, for those strong contrasts and startling associations, to which eloquence and wit often owe their ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... received, before I left the chamber, a note for the secretary at war, recommending me, in the strongest terms, for a commission in the Guards.—The world was now before me, and the world in the most vivid, various, and dazzling shape; in the boldest development of grandeur, terror, and wild vicissitude, which it exhibited for a thousand ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... the last chapter, lost him for two or three years. During this time Antony himself was involved in a great variety of difficulties and dangers, and passed through many eventful scenes, which, however, can not here be described in detail. His life, during this period, was full of vicissitude and excitement, and was spent probably in alternations of remorse for the past and anxiety for the future. On landing at Tyre, he was at first extremely perplexed whether to go to Asia Minor or to Rome. His presence was imperiously demanded in both places. ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... still another vicissitude. Mrs. Meadows would not hear of being thrust on any one, and was certain that Maria had extorted an invitation; she would never be a burden upon any one; young people liked company and amusement, and she was an old woman in every ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... suffered, and what my Brother Mad-man has done to undo himself, and every body who was so unlucky to have the least Concern with him, I could not but be movingly touch'd at so extraordinary a Vicissitude of Fortune, to see a great Man fallen from that shining Light, in which I beheld him in the House of Lords, to such a Degree of Obscurity, that I have observ'd the meanest Commoner here decline, and the Few he would sometimes fasten ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... am recollecting, many, I question not, are experiencing the same tragical vicissitude. The eyes of the Sublime Being, who sits upon the circle of the earth, and views all its inhabitants with one incomprehensive glance, even now behold as many tents in affliction as overwhelmed the Egyptians in that fatal night when the destroying angel sheathed his arrows ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to India; of a Shipwreck on board the Lady Castlereagh; and a Description of New South Wales • W. B. Cramp
... always seemed to me a sort of end of the world; and I remembered particularly feeling this, the only time when I had previously visited Chelsea, which was at that period of life.... I know not whether the corner I speak of remains as quiet as it was. I am afraid not; for steamboats have carried vicissitude into Chelsea, and Belgravia threatens it with her mighty advent. But to complete my sense of repose and distance, the house was of that old-fashioned sort which I have always loved best, familiar to ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... as cold, wet, and sodden as it had been a month before. The backward season, of which the whole country was now complaining, culminated on the following morning, which ushered in a day of remarkable vicissitude. By rapid transition the rain passed into sleet, then snow, which flurried down so rapidly that the land grew white and wintry, making it almost impossible to imagine that two months of spring had ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... before, to purchase, by begging in the day, the reiteration of the torture in the night. Days of menace, insult, and extortion, nights of bolts, fetters, and flagellation, succeeded to each other in the same round, and for a long time made up all the vicissitude of life to these ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... In every work, one part must be for the sake of others; a palace must have passages; a poem must have transitions. It is no more to be required that wit should always be blazing, than that the sun should always stand at noon. In a great work there is a vicissitude of luminous and opaque parts, as there is in the world a succession of day and night. Milton, when he has expatiated in the sky, may be allowed, sometimes, to revisit earth; for what other author ever soared so high, or ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... time, just as fresh and beautiful seem to us the brick walls and the busy streets where our lot is cast, and our interests run. There is no condition in life of which we can say exclusively "It is good for us to be here." Our course is appointed through vicissitude,—our discipline is in alternations; and we can build no abiding tabernacles ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... Bentinck; flies to follow the poor deserted fugitive Stuart, with all his sins upon his head. Kings have no rights divine, except when deposed and fallen; they are then invested with the awe that belongs to each solemn image of mortal vicissitude,—vicissitude that startles the Epicurean, "insanientis sapientiae consultus," and strikes from his careless lyre the notes that attest a god! Some proud shadow chases another from the throne of Cyrus, and Horace hears in the thunder the rush of Diespiter, and identifies Providence ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... age of Mrs Blair had been more free from trial than is the common lot; but the last few years had been years of great vicissitude. She was now a widow and childless; for though it might be that her youngest son was still alive, she did not know that he was; and his life had been the cause of more sorrow than the death of all her ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... uncertain character—part masculine, part feminine. Was there ever a truly great man, or one with a generous disposition, with a thin beard and a weazen face? On the other hand, show me a man with "royal locks," and I will trust his natural impulses in almost every vicissitude. When we see a genuine man, upon whom Nature has declined to set this seal of her approval, we cannot help an involuntary emotion of admiration for the virtuous and persevering energy with which he must ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various |
