"Meteor" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be in these stars, which appear not to those who inhabit the northern regions?" said Amine, as she cast her eyes above, and watched them in their brightness; "and what does that falling meteor portend? what causes its ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... will shew us what we were; For, like a blazing meteor hence he shot, And drew a sweeping fiery train along.— O Paris, Paris, once my seat of triumph, But now the scene of all thy king's misfortunes; Ungrateful, perjured, and disloyal town, Which by my royal presence I have ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... refreshes himse'f, 'it's needless to go over that hunt in detail. We hustles the flyin' demon full eighteen miles, our faithful dogs crowdin' close an' breathless at his coward heels. Still, they don't catch up with him; he streaks it like some saffron meteor. ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... value of his writings. The caprice of fashion, the accident of high rank or distinguished social position, the zeal of a literary faction or a political party, may invest some "Cynthia of the minute" with a brief notoriety, which resembles true fame only as the meteor resembles the star. But popularity of this kind is of too flimsy and delicate a texture to bear transportation. It is only merit of a solid and durable fabric which can survive a voyage across the Atlantic. It has been said, with as much truth as point, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... tell of the depth of the atmosphere by the angle the meteor makes in falling, but perhaps you can not understand that now. So you see, children, we live on the bottom of a great ocean of air, and that air, or atmosphere, is a part of our ...
— Uncle Robert's Geography (Uncle Robert's Visit, V.3) • Francis W. Parker and Nellie Lathrop Helm
... path. You may get a very faint real illumination from him, lighting perhaps the space of your fingernail as he crawls along. He, too, merely serves to make the darkness visible. The firefly of the tropics is more spectacular. He blazes forth like a meteor, setting all the thicket aglow for a moment. The lights of our fireflies are more like a frosting of the darkness, as when the moon shines in winter and the light glints from ice crystals hung on the frozen grass. I ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... deep interest, compounded of admiration and aversion, according to the relative proportions of sensibility and judgment in the various minds which contemplated the subject. In Germany, the enthusiasm which the Robbers excited was extreme. The young author had burst upon the world like a meteor; and surprise, for a time, suspended the power of cool and rational criticism. In the ferment produced by the universal discussion of this single topic, the poet was magnified above his natural dimensions, great as they were: and though the general sentence was loudly in his favour, yet he found ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... standing, and the blue mirror of the Mediterranean just below, with a few vessels moored near the shore, made up the foreground; just in front lay the queenly city, stretching out to the eastern point of the bay, like a great meteor—-this point, crowned with the towers and dome of a cathedral representing the nucleus, while the tail gradually widened out and was lost among the numberless villas that reached to the top of the mountains ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... hast thou food that brings satiety, Not satisfaction; gold that reftlessly, Like quicksilver, melts down within The hands; a game in which men never win; A maid that, hanging on my breast, Ogles a neighbor with her wanton glances; Of fame the glorious godlike zest, That like a short-lived meteor dances— Show me the fruit that, ere it's plucked, will rot, And trees from which new green is ...
— Faust • Goethe
... or to make respectable, national crime; every day your felicities will become baits for the iniquity of others; your heroisms, wreckers' beacons, betraying them to destruction; and before your own deceived eyes and wandering hearts every false meteor of knowledge will flash, and every perishing pleasure glow, to lure you into the gulf ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... day forth Antar was named Abool-fawaris, that is to say, the father of horsemen. His sword, Dhami—the trenchant—was forged from a meteor that fell from the sky; it was two cubits long and two spans wide. If it were presented to Nushirvan, King of Persia, he would exalt the giver with favors; or if it were presented to the Emperor of Europe, one would be enriched with treasures of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... ship. The Spaniards strove furiously to close their line, the twenty-one huge ships bearing down from the windward, the smaller squadron clawing desperately up from the leeward. But the British fleet—a long line of gliding pyramids of sails, leaning over to the pressure of the wind, with "the meteor flag" flying from the peak of each vessel, and the curving lines of guns awaiting grim and silent beneath—was too swift. As it swept through the gap, the Spanish vice-admiral, in the Principe de Asturias, a great three-decker of 112 guns, tried the daring feat ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... over the whole land. The result was that a somewhat superstitious generation was followed by an excessively overwise one; for it is astonishing how the grandchild feels when he knows that a nocturnal fiery meteor is composed merely of inflammable gases, while his grandfather sees in it the devil trying to enter some chimney or other with his shining ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... the above I shall add TWO MEMORABLE RELATIONS. FIRST. On a certain time I saw not far from me a meteor—a cloud divided into smaller clouds, some of which were of an azure color, some opaque, and as it were in collision together. They were streaked with translucent irradiations of light, which at one time appeared sharp ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... I am, to love is dangerous. For such as I am, nor fire nor meteor hurls a mightier bolt than Aphrodite's shaft, or marks its passage by more direful ruin. But you do not know Euripides?—a fidgety-footed liar, Messire the Comte, who occasionally blunders into the clumsiest truths. Yes, he is perfectly right; all things this goddess laughingly demolishes ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... the festival of Pentecost, about the third hour of the day, had appeared over the Mount of Olives, to the edification of the devout pilgrims, and the people of the holy city. [89] The size of the meteor was gradually magnified; and the Arian historian has ventured to affirm, that it was conspicuous to the two armies in the plains of Pannonia; and that the tyrant, who is purposely represented as an idolater, fled before the auspicious ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... a terrific yell was uttered by our frantic washerwoman, as she sprang to her feet and rushed for the door, upsetting the bucket of dirty water in her meteor-like progress. Out of the station, across the tracks, and away out on to the open prairie she fled, never pausing till she reached the village, where she turned into an Indian's house and was lost from view. The next morning her son came to get the few articles belonging ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... The brilliant meteor which had flashed across the sky of the little town that night had a decisive influence on Jean-Christophe's mind. All his childhood Hassler was the model on which his eyes were fixed, and to follow his ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... more than the expertness of the rider. A number of cavaliers having assembled, one of them taking a small flag, or crimson scarf; or pistol cover embroidered by the fair hands of the belle of the aoul, starts off on the gallop, his prize streaming in the wind like a meteor. The others, after having given him the advantage in the start, pursue for the purpose of overtaking him; for whoever succeeds in coming up with the flag-bearer takes his place, and so to the end of the race. With grace and impetuosity they dash down the valley, over the hills, ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... the mariners were awestruck by beholding a meteor of great brilliancy—a common phenomenon in those latitudes. With a favourable breeze, day after day, the squadron was wafted on, so that it was unnecessary to shift a ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... and at that moment a meteor shot across the heaven, plunging as though from the galaxy into the darkness, and after the white and dazzling lustre of the trail had disappeared, seeming to leave behind the glory of it a deeper gloom. It gave too true a type of many ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the Homeric question from these much neglected pieces. We must not study obscurum per obscurius. The genius of the Epic soars high above such myths as those about Pytho, Typhaon, and the Apollo who is alternately a dolphin and a meteor: soars high above pedantry and bad etymology. In the Epics we breathe ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... at night, we saw a meteor of uncommon brightness in the N.N.W. It directed its course to the S.W., with a very great light in the southern sky, such as is known to the northward by the name of Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. We saw ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... be possible for a man to catch hold of the meager tail of a meteor and let it snatch ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... arch, and took the plunge. About half-way down, the descent became suddenly steeper, and the lead-dog swerved to one side, bringing the sledge around like the lash of a whip, overturning it, and shooting me like a huge living meteor through the air into a deep soft drift of snow at the bottom. I must have fallen at least eighteen feet, for I buried myself entirely, with the exception of my lower extremities, which, projecting above ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... hour. The Lord, Who was the Future, died full long ago. Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go, Poor child, and be not to thyself abhorred. Around thine earth sun-winged winds do blow And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword; The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord And the long strips of river-silver flow: Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours. Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight About their fragile hairs' aerial gold. Thou art divine, thou livest, — as of old Apollo springing ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... pride of mere human greatness! How are the mighty fallen! Of all that was great in Napoleon, what remains? Despoiled of his usurped power, he sinks to insignificance. There was no moral greatness in the man. The meteor dazzled, scorched, is put out,—utterly, and for ever. But the power which rests in those who have delivered the nations from bondage, is a power that is delegated to them from heaven; and the manner in which they have used it is a guarantee ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... but a shudder through him creepeth, As the mighty monster sweepeth like a torrent through the dell; His mane, so softly flowing, is now a meteor blowing, And his burning eyes are glowing with the light of an inward hell; And the red breath of his nostrils, like steam where the lightning fell; And his ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... capital circumstance a joint interest with Greece, or specially authorized, by visible right and power, to interfere as her protector. The semi-Asiatic power of Russia, from the era of the Czar Peter the Great, had arisen above the horizon with the sudden sweep and splendor of a meteor. The arch described by her ascent was as vast in compass as it was rapid; and, in all history, no political growth, not that of our own Indian empire, had travelled by accelerations of speed so terrifically marked. Not that even ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the gentry or lairds, and the preachers on one side; and the great Catholic families of Huntly, Morton (the title being now held by a Maxwell), Errol, and Crawford on the other. Bothwell (a sister's son of Mary's Bothwell) flitted meteor-like, more Catholic than anything else, but always plotting to seize James's person; and in this he was backed by the widow of Gowrie and the preachers, and encouraged by Elizabeth. In her fear that James would join the Catholic nobles, whom the preachers eternally urged him to persecute, ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... withholds no touch that can go to make him the hero of a dime novel; and there is not a more picturesque and dashing character in literature outside of the adventures of Claude Duval. Everywhere we behold him waving his steel (as he calls his sword); he wheels before our dazzled eyes like a meteor; he charges, and the foe fly like sheep before him. And no sooner is he come into town from killing a score or two of Yankees, than the ladies—who are all good Union women and have just taken the oath of allegiance—crowd to kiss and caress him; or, as he puts it in his own vivid language, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... its outlying point. There was a pass here beyond which the reefs began once more and stretched on, a barrier to the shoal inside waters. When the skiff had drawn about the sand spit, the reflecting waters around the Marie had vanished, and the fire appeared as a fallen meteor burning on the flat, black ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... close the narrative of this extraordinary man's life by an account of the cause why he was denominated Black Beard. He derived this name from his long black beard, which, like a frightful meteor, covered his whole face, and terrified all America more than any comet that had ever appeared. He was accustomed to twist it with ribbon in small quantities, and turn them about his ears. In time of action he wore a sling over his shoulders with three brace of pistols. He stuck lighted ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... the B. Race signal, the old red swallow-tail— There was young Ben Bolt, and the Portland colt, and Aston Villa, and Yale; And W. G., and Steinitz, Leander, and The Saint, And the German Emperor's Meteor, a-looking as ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... pennies, they all go To the grocer, and so do the dimes, But, O, for the little crepe meteor dress I ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... Down among them there at Montpellier, like a brilliant meteor, flashed this wonderful Rabelais, in the year 1530. He had fled, some say, for his life. Like Erasmus, he had no mind to be a martyr, and he had been terrified at the execution of poor Louis de Berquin, his friend, and the friend of ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... as the very model and type of respectable composure. As the plan was gradually unfolded, however, the old soldier began to puff harder at his cigar until a continuous thick grey cloud rose up from him, through which the lurid tip of the havannah shone like a murky meteor. From time to time he passed his hand down his puffy cheeks, as was his custom when excited. Then he moved uneasily in his chair, cleared his throat huskily, and showed other signs of restlessness, all of which were hailed by Ezra Girdlestone as unmistakable proofs of the correctness ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... on the horizon, and with the rapidity peculiar to these low latitudes, was about to set vertically, like an enormous meteor. ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a swift-flitting meteor, a fast-flying cloud, The flash of the lightning, a break of the wave, He passes from life to his rest in ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... meteoric shower. The meteors now cross our track at the point occupied by the earth on November 13th, but this point is gradually altering. The only influence known to us which could account for the continuous change in the plane of the meteor's orbit arises from the attraction of the various planets. The problem to be solved may therefore be attacked in this manner. A specified amount of change in the plane of the orbit of the meteors is known to arise, and the changes which ought to result from ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... when so summoned that it was my fortune to see the shower of falling stars in November, 1833. From the time I arose until after daylight there was no part of the heavens that was not illuminated—not with one meteor merely—but with many hundreds. Many of them left a long train, extending through twenty, thirty, or even forty degrees. I called at Bard's window and told him that the stars were falling, but he refused to get up, thinking it a joke. The ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... intelligent direction of social processes. Many men in many ages have had ideals and aspirations, coupled, in some cases, with a limited knowledge of social practice, but social changes have come upon mankind for the most part, as a meteor comes upon the earth's atmosphere—unexpected and unheralded, startling those who have seen it by the suddenness of its appearance. Nor has there been any attempt on the part of the ruling powers to instill a different point of view with regard ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... would continue to grow brighter and brighter, until eclipsed by the advent of some younger Dr. Esculapius Liverwort Tar Cant-ye-get-your-leg-away Opodeldoc, who in after years would shoot up like a meteor and reproduce his father's greatness; and ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... whence came each glowing hue, That tints yon flag of 'meteor' light,[4]— The streaming red, the deeper blue, Crossed with the ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... Here then he is by his destiny conducted. Here, Friedland! and no further! From Bohemia Thy meteor rose, traversed the sky awhile, And here upon the borders of Bohemia Must sink. Thou hast forsworn the ancient colors, Blind man! yet trustest to thy ancient fortunes. Profaner of the altar and the hearth, Against thy emperor and fellow-citizens ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... life was! Swung out of his peaceful orbit, by the legerdemain of death; no longer a humble steady star but a meteor; bumping as yet darkly against the planets; and then this monumental folly which had returned him to the old orbit but still in meteoric form, without peace or means of livelihood! An ass, indeed, if ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... were the points where the chief difficulties met them. There the cab and van drivers turned into or crossed the great thoroughfare, all ignorant of the thunderbolt that was rushing on like a fiery meteor, with its lamps casting a glare of light before, and the helmets of its stern charioteers flashing back the rays of street-lamps and windows; for, late though the hour was, all the gin-palaces, and tobacconists' shops, and many of the restaurants ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... therefore a meteor, which blazes a while and disappears for ever; and, if we except a few transcendent and invincible names, which no revolutions of opinion or length of time is able to suppress; all those that engage ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... his foes, came like a "blast from the mountain. He came in his terror and shook his dusky spear. His eyes were flames, and his voice like distant thunder. 'Son of night,' said Fingal, 'retire. Do I fear thy gloomy form, spirit of dismal Loda? Weak is thy shield of cloud, feeble thy meteor sword.'"[TN-4] Then cleft he the gloomy shadow with his sword. It fell like a column of smoke. It shrieked. Then rolling itself up, the wounded spirit rose on the wind, and the island shook ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... lowland vales, to drown Men's voices and to choke their breath And make a silence like to death. But this was hot and dry; it came And smote them, like the gush of flame Fanned in a smithy, that outpours And floods with fire the open doors. Downward their course was, swift as flight Of meteor flaring through the night, Steady and dreadful, with no sound Of wheels or hoofs upon the ground, Nor jolt, nor jar; for once past through Earth's portals, steeds and chariot flew On wings invisible and strong ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... to her room and looked down the drive. He was running toward the bridge, and the sunlight on his red hair and his flying legs made him look like a revengeful meteor. Jane was weak in the knees. She knelt on the cold radiator and watched him out of sight, and then got trembly all over and fell to snivelling. This was of course because, if anything happened to him, she would be left entirely alone. And anyhow the D.T. case was singing again and had ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of Russia. Yet, when two or three of these expectant gentlemen stood in some window-niche, and believed themselves beyond the reach of indiscreet ears, they dared to ask each other, in a low and anxious tone, whether all this splendor would not soon vanish as a meteor—whether one might not see the aurora of a new day dawning- -whether the battles into which Napoleon was about to plunge so recklessly would not result in the downfall of him whom they publicly extolled, but secretly cursed. But, to these whispered questions the brilliant anterooms, the marshals ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... this falling meteor awoke Keekie Joe and he sat up, holding the two sides of his head, startled and dizzy from hunger. And shining through the doorway of the shack he saw a light. It was not the moonlight, but another light, and he crept, light-headed and fearful, toward ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... conjoined, nor other cement asked Than water interfused to make them one. Lamps gracefully disposed, and of all hues, Illumined every side. A watery light Gleamed through the clear transparency, that seemed Another moon new-risen, or meteor fallen From heaven to earth, of lambent flame serene. So stood the brittle prodigy, though smooth And slippery the materials, yet frost-bound Firm as a rock. Nor wanted aught within That royal residence might well befit, For grandeur or for use. Long wavy ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... rumors increased, and the gathering together of the soldiery betokened the certainty of an event which would fall as a burning meteor in the midst of the ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... enormous water-spout was gradually forming in the south— a cone of thick mists, but with the point at the bottom, and base at the top, linking together the turbulent water and the angry clouds. This meteor soon began to move forward, turning over and over on itself with dizzy rapidity, and sweeping up into its center a column of water from the lake, while its gyratory motions made all the surrounding currents of air ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... head at once and said, "No, the plans were changed. We had to fit in some kind of new meteor-repelling gear for operating in the ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... a moment in Coleridge's history, and think of him at this period! Butler! Keate! Bethell! and Coleridge!! How different the career of each in future life! O Coleridge; through what strange paths did the meteor of genius lead thee! Pause a moment, ye distinguished men! and deem it not the least bright spot in your happier career, that you and Coleridge were once rivals, and for a moment running abreast in the pursuit of honour. I believe that his disappointment at this crisis damped his ardour. Unfortunately, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... rattles along; the trumpet-tongued whistle—or rather horn—booms far away in the breeze, and finds no echo; the giant monarchs of the forest line the road on either side, like a guard of Titans, their nodding heads inquiring, as it were curiously, why their ranks were thinned, and what strange meteor is that which, with clatter and roar, rushes past, disturbing their peaceful solitude. Patience my noble friends; patience, I say. A few short years more, and many of you, like your deceased brethren, will bend ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... Powell Williams has been a sort of "surprise packet." Poets, we are told, are born, and not made, but Mr. Powell Williams seems to have been made, and not born. At least, no one seems to know anything much about his early career. He appeared to burst upon the municipal horizon all at once, like a meteor emerging from outer space, but when he came in contact with the Corporation atmosphere he soon became ignited and fired by municipal enthusiasm, and, encouraged by those who perceived his capacity, he rapidly began to be a conspicuous luminary ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... experiments was made upon the superior vessels Venus, Swiftsure, Dasher, Arrow, Spitfire, Fury, Albion, Queen, Dart, Hawk, Margaret, and Hero-all vessels having flat floors and round bilges, where the coefficient became 1160. The third set of experiments was made upon the vessels Lightning, Meteor, James Watt, Cinderella, Navy Meteor, Crocodile, Watersprite, Thetis, Dolphin, Wizard, Escape, and Dragon-all vessels with rising floors and round bilges, and the coefficient of performance was found ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... and had all about the voyage and the tunnies, the flight of the birds, the alarm of the crew when the meteor appeared, their disappointment when the fancied land vanished in the morning, their wonder at the distant moving light, their impatience and their turbulence. All this he did, still sitting on his seat and gesticulating. When he came to the mutiny ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... tell me, 'tis my birth-day, and I'll keep it With double pomp of sadness. 'Tis what the day deserves, which gave me breath. Why was I raised the meteor of the world, Hung in the skies, and blazing as I travelled, Till all my fires were spent; and then cast downward, To be ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... hour before sunrise, a bright meteor was seen in the south-west. It was first taken for the signal lanterns of a large ship; then the officer of the watch thought it was a blue light, and we made no doubt of its being Sir T. Hardy in the Creole. It remained a long time stationary; then it was lost ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... from the ground did the grim monster lift The loud-screaming maid, like a blast; And he sped through the air, like a meteor swift, While the clouds, wand'ring by him, did fearfully drift To the right and the left ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... away, against the nearly one-quarter million miles which separate us from our moon. The nearer moon of Mars makes a complete revolution around the planet in a little over seven and one-half hours, so that she may be seen hurtling through the sky like some huge meteor two or three times each night, revealing all her phases during each ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sky-born glories burn; And as his springing steps advance, Catch war and vengeance from the glance. And when the cannon-mouthings loud Heave in wild wreaths the battle shroud, And gory sabres rise and fall Like shoots of flame on midnight's pall; Then shall thy meteor glances glow, And cowering foes shall shrink beneath Each gallant arm that strikes below That lovely messenger ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... With airy bow of lightning sheen, Hunts the shadowy deer-herd fleet In their dim-embowered retreat. He is free to roam at will O'er sea and sky, o'er heath and hill, When our fathers' spirits rush On the blast and crimson gush Of the cloud-fire, through the storms, Like the meteor's brilliant forms, He shall come to the heroes' shout In the battle's gory rout; He shall stand by the stone of death, When the captive yields his breath; And in halls of revelry His dim ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... skies over England there rushed the bright stranger—a meteor, a comet, a fiery star! "such as no man before ever saw;" it appeared on the 8th, before the kalends of May; seven nights did it shine [235], and the faces of sleepless men were ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... peep into Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets' showed me mine own fine subject as the work of some long-forgotten bard! This moral earthquake demolished in a moment my goodly aerial fabric; the fair plot burst like a meteor; and an after-recollection of a certain French tragedy-queen, Agrippina, showed me that the ground was still further preoccupied. But it is high time to tell the destined name of my abortive play; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... daylight, I know it, I: It is some meteor that the sun exhales To be to thee this night a torch-bearer And light thee on the way to Mantua: Therefore stay yet, thou need'st not ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... to the disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter,—the letter A,—marked out in lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil of cloud; but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave it; or, at least, with so little definiteness, that another's guilt might have seen another ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I met Swears, returning from breakfast with our mutual friend, Professor Heat Ray Lankester—they had had Lee-Metford sardines and Cairns marmalade, he told me,—and we sought the meteor together. ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... furnace-ovens sweat giant pores. And other things perturb each crypt, Each vulture's brood and figent owls: A belching mountain in the South Hurls boulders thro' the fearful night: A demon-quire rants from script, Led by staccato raspings, howls; A meteor vaults a Cauldron's mouth; A sombre maid doth long for light. Bleak wintry winds engulf us all— Hosannah! cry the fretful mobs; White-heated storms assail all heads— Triumphal paeons shake the air! Unnumbered gawks roam thro' each hall— Where Typhon ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... now examine another phenomenon. The Aurora Borealis has been generally considered to be in some way connected with the magnetism of the earth, and with the position of the magnetic pole. It is certain that the appearance of this meteor does affect the needle in a way not to be mistaken, and (although not invariably) the vertex of the luminous arch will usually conform to the magnetic meridian. Yet (and this is worthy of attention), ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... Mountains to Idaho, thrilling, melting, and amusing, in turn, the crowds that came out to hear the wild-looking man whose coming was so sudden, and whose going as so rapid, that they were lost in wonder, as if gazing at a meteor that flashed across ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... have contributed to popularize the Indian creed. The people at large adhered to their traditional cult and were easily swayed by superstitions. The first half of the seventh century was marked by abnormal occurrences well calculated to disturb men's minds. There were comets (twice); there was a meteor of large dimensions; there were eclipses of the sun and moon; there were occultations of Venus; there was snow in July and hail "as large as peaches" in May, and there was a famine (621) when old people ate roots of herbs and died ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... young miss, emerged from the cloisters of a convent, where she had, perhaps, been sequestered, in order that her bloom might not eclipse the declining charms of her mother, and who appeared timid, bashful, and diffident, was no sooner married to a man in a certain rank in life, than she shone as a meteor of extravagance and dissipation. Such a wife thought of nothing but the gratification of her own desires; because she considered it as a matter of course that all the cares of the family ought to devolve by right on the husband. Provided she could procure the ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... Raoul Nathan was a very fine meteor. Fashion accepted his ways and his appearance. His borrowed republicanism gave him, for the time being, that Jansenist harshness assumed by the defenders of the popular cause, while they inwardly scoff at it,—a quality not without charm in the eyes of women. Women like to perform prodigies, break ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... Clysthementhe 'neath thy broad arched dome, Predict the fortunes with the crimes of Rome? Shall time yet partial in his cycling course, Bring thee no Fox, no Pitt, no Wilberforce? Still must thou live and corybantic die, A traceless meteor in a clouding sky; Thy name a cheat; thyself, a world-wide lie? No; there will come, prophetic hearts may trust, Some embryo angel of superior dust, With brow of cloud and tongue of livid flame— Another Moses, but in time and name— Whose Heaven-appealing voice shall bid thee pass— On ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... The late self-slaughter'd Man, in earth yet green And festering, burst from his incumbent mound, Roams!—and the Slave of Terror thinks he hears A mutter'd groan!—sees the sunk eye, that glares As shoots the Meteor.—But no more forlorn He strays;—the Spectre sinks into his tomb! For now the jocund Herald of the Morn Claps his bold wings, and ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... of the comet kept pace with the growing misery of the town. Every one connected it with the intense heat of the season, with the delay in the inundation, and the appearance of the sickness; and the leech and his friend often argued about these matters, for Philippus would not admit that the meteor had any influence on human affairs, while Horapollo believed that it had, and supported his view by a long series ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... ride: Perhaps, (for who can guess th' effects of chance?) Here Hunt[a] may box, or Mahomet may dance. Hard is his lot that, here by fortune plac'd, Must watch the wild vicissitudes of taste; With ev'ry meteor of caprice must play, And chase the new-blown bubbles of the day. Ah! let not censure term our fate our choice, The stage but echoes back the publick voice; The drama's laws the drama's patrons give, For we that live to please, must please ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... information with words of such sweet import, with so much tenderness and gentleness, as will never be erased from my mind. Ah foolish girl, wilt thou for ever delude thyself, wilt thou be for ever extracting comfort from despair? No! Long enough hast thou been misguided by the meteor of hope. Long enough hast thou been cheated by the visions of youthful fancy. There is now no remedy left. Let ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... with his wild, strange ways, With his idle hours or his busy days, With his queer remarks and his odd replies, Sometimes foolish and sometimes wise, Often brilliant for one of his size, As a meteor hurled From ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... gray waves of ocean,—then, the heaving green of the churchyard, billows of death, over which the wind blew damp and chill. I had left the lamp unextinguished, where its light reflected the rosy red of the curtains, and that became a fiery meteor shooting through crimson clouds, and leaving a lurid track ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... and am consumed with hopeless Love; those Beams in whose soft temperate warmth I wanton'd heretofore, now flash destruction to my Soul, my Treacherous greedy Eyes have suck'd the glaring Light, they have united all its Rays, and, like a burning-Glass, convey'd the pointed Meteor to my Heart—Ah! Aurelian, how quickly hast thou Conquer'd, and how quickly must thou Forsake. Oh Happy (to me unfortunately Happy) Juliana! I am to be the subject of thy Triumph—To thee Aurelian comes laden with the Tribute of my Heart and Glories in the Oblation of his broken Vows.—What then, ...
— Incognita - or, Love & Duty Reconcil'd. A Novel • William Congreve
... oak staircase, watching it ceaselessly, with vulture-like intentness. Then after the passage of minutes, there came the sound of feet that literally scampered along the corridor above, and in a moment, with meteor-like ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... meteor flag of England Shall yet terrific burn; Till danger's troubled night depart, And the star of peace return. Then, then, ye ocean warriors! Our song and feast shall flow To the fame of your name, When the storm has ceased to blow: When the fiery fight is heard no ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... emerging upon the high road that led from Great Mallowes to Perrythorpe. The hoot of a motor-horn caused Rupert to prick his ears, and his master reined him back as two great, shining head-lights appeared round a curve. They drew swiftly near, flashed past, and were gone meteor-like into the gloom. ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... earth and patch up the hole, but I fear to do so," answered the inventor. "The Monarch is not under control, and if I attempt to make a landing I may smash her all to pieces. She may settle down until within a few hundred feet of the earth and then plunge like a meteor. We ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... names Byron as the constellation which ruled the heavens during the period from the Napoleonic wars to the "Voelkerfruehling," 1848, as the meteor upon which at that time the eyes of all Europe were fixed. Certainly the English poet could not have wished for a more auspicious introduction and endorsation in Germany, if he had needed such, than that which was given him by Goethe himself, whose subsequent tribute in his Euphorion in the ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... little like astrogation, in which he had had the required preliminary instruction. When you worked out a ship's course, you had to keep altering it to allow for course deflection, effects of planetary magnetic fields, meteor swarms, and such obstacles—and you had to be one jump ahead of the obstacles all ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... meteor, called by various names, such as Will with the Wisp, Jack with the Lantern, etc. It hovers in the air over marshy and fenny places. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... early manhood, from the youth I have seen grow up about me, make a host whose usefulness has been lost to the world. Well may the poet sing in melancholy verse that genius is a fatal gift. It dazzles as a meteor with its superhuman light, and as soon fades into darkness, lighting its path with a blaze of glory, astonishing and delighting the world, but consuming ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Marlow thought less of me when I confessed that I am here only for the lark, and really do not care a meteor whether the planet is ever elevated or not. But he is a charming old fellow all the same, and the only one of the lot who has not grown the least ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high, And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky; Beneath it rung the battle shout, And burst the cannon's roar:— The meteor of the ocean air Shall sweep the clouds ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... th' equal grace Both of his wisdom and his face; In cut and dye so like a tile, A sadden view it would beguile: The upper part whereof was whey, The nether orange mixt with grey. This hairy meteor did denounce The fall of sceptres and of crowns; With grisly type did represent Declining age of government, And tell, with hieroglyphic spade, Its own grave and the state's ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... is going too far," replied Fouquet, smiling; "allow me, my friend, not to be so easily frightened; M. Colbert a meteor! Corbleu, we confront the meteor. Let us see acts, and not ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... night long the storm roared on: The morning broke without a sun; In tiny spherule traced with lines Of nature's geometric signs, In starry flake and pellicle, 5 All day the hoary meteor fell; And when the second morning shone, We looked upon a world unknown, On nothing we could call our own. Around the glistening wonder bent 10 The blue walls of the firmament, No cloud above, no earth below— A universe of ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... can scarcely see. A fixed thing it seems to be; But, while we speak, see how it glides Away, and now observe it hides Half of its perfect arch—now we Scarce any part of it can see. What is colour? If I were A natural philosopher, I would tell you what does make This meteor every colour take: But an unlearned eye may view Nature's rare sights, and love them too. Whenever I a Rainbow see, Each precious tint is dear to me; For every colour find I there, Which flowers, which fields, which ladies wear; ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... stood there a star swept like a glorious meteor across the wide expanse of the night sky, filling his soul with awe, for it seemed to him as though he had thus been given a sign from heaven that his course met with approval there among the ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... Lady Mary was coming to Florence came to the ears of Horace Walpole, who was staying there. If he had not yet made her acquaintance, he certainly knew much about her. "On Wednesday we expect a third she-meteor," he wrote to Richard West, July 31, 1740. "Those learned luminaries the Ladies Pomfret and Walpole[9] are to be joined by the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. You have not been witness to the rhapsody ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... University and apprentice in his father's law office, Scott took his own way to become a "virtuoso"; a rather queer way it must sometimes have seemed to his good preceptors. He refused point-blank to learn Greek, and cared little for Latin. His scholarship was so erratic that he glanced meteor-like from the head to the foot of his classes and back again, according as luck gave or withheld the question to which his highly selective memory had retained the answer. But outside of school hours he was intensely at work to "know everything," so far as "everything" ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... not know that beautiful occurrence which we call a shooting star, or which, in its more splendid forms, is sometimes called a meteor or fireball? It is to objects of this class that we are now to direct ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... concealed in one corner of her heart ever since their first meeting. If he had known that her only desire was to be chosen and loved by this handsome Maurice, who had gone through their house and among poor Papa Gerard's bric-a-brac like a meteor! Why not, after all? Did she not possess that great power, beauty? Her father, her mother, and even her sister, the wise Louise, had often said so to her. Yes! from the very first she had been charmed by this ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of astronomy, said he was certain that the object was not a meteor or other natural phenomenon. . . . Switchboards Swamped Switchboards at the Pima county sheriff's office and Tucson police station were jammed with inquiries. Hundreds saw the object. Tom Bailey, 1411 E. 10th Street, thought it was a large airplane on fire. ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... was different. This thing of light and air, this dancing sunbeam, this creature of the morning, exquisite in every detail, perfectly poised, swifter than thought, yet arresting at every turn, vivid as a meteor, yet beyond all scrutiny, all ocular power of comprehension, she set every nerve in him a-quiver. She seized upon his fancy and flung it to and fro, catching a million colours in her radiant flights. She made the hot blood throb in his temples. She beat upon the door ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... of the twinkering rain; I have burnished the meteor's mail; I have bridled the wind When he whinnied and whined With a bunch of stars tied to his tail; But my sky-rocket hopes, hanging over the past, Must fuzzle and fazzle and fizzle ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... confidences. The stroll soon resolved itself into a tranquil session on a bench overhung with laurel and Banksian roses, from which they caught a dazzle of blue sea between marble balusters, and the fiery shafts of cactus-blossoms shooting meteor-like from the rock. The soft shade of their niche, and the adjacent glitter of the air, were conducive to an easy lounging mood, and to the smoking of many cigarettes; and Selden, yielding to these influences, suffered Mrs. Fisher to unfold ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... place in the future gallery of ages is somewhat uncertain. For all he has hitherto done, or for all the impression he has made upon the world, his course may be marked as that of a brilliant but timid meteor, shooting athwart the midnight, watched but by few eyes, but accompanied by the keenest interest and admiration of those who did watch it. Passages of his writings may be preserved in collections; and, among ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... by a picnic, and were now hastening home, drenched, bedraggled, and in a sorry plight. They had scarcely reached the convent yard, however, where Sherasmin fancied all would be quite safe from further enchantment, when Oberon suddenly appeared in their midst like a brilliant meteor. ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... arrests the wings of Time in his flight to the gulf of oblivion. Philosophy, the queen of arts, and the daughter of Heaven, is daily extending her intellectual empire. Fancy sports on airy wing like a meteor on the bosom of a summer cloud; and even Metaphysics spins her cobwebs, and catches ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... falcon 's tow'ring o'er him with an eye of fire and pride, Her pinions strong, with one short pull, are gather'd to her side, When like a stone from off the sling, or bolt from out the bow, In meteor flight, with sudden dart, she stoops upon ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... opal talisman, flashed outward from her joyful eyes the Spark,—the Crown, the Curse! So a forked tongue of lightning speeds from its rain-fringed cloud, and cleaves the oak to its centre; so the blaze of a meteor rushes through mid-heaven, and—is gone! The Spark lit, quivered, sunk, and flashed again; but the wood lay unlighted beneath it. Maya gasped for breath, and with the long respiration the Spark returned, lit upon her lips, seared them like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... no such command. Like a white meteor he sped across the field and dashed into the woods. She called him, but he did not turn. Again and again the shrill command of her little nickel-plated whistle echoed in fields and woods. At last, in the direction he had taken, she started running swiftly. Behind her ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... what voice is that? Who rides on that meteor of fire! Green are his airy limbs. It is he! it is the ghost of Malcolm!—Rest, lovely soul, rest on the rock; and let me hear thy voice!—He is gone, like a dream of the night. I see him through the trees. Daughter of Reynold! he is gone. Thy spouse shall return no ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson
... institutions, and the renown of our country. That name was a power to rally a nation in the hour of thick-thronging public disasters and calamities; that name shone amid the storm of war, a beacon light to cheer and guide the country's friends; its flame, too, like a meteor, to repel her foes. That name in the days of peace was a loadstone, attracting to itself a whole people's confidence, a whole people's love, and the whole world's respect; that name, descending with ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... it obvious quite; To do your will, I'll cordially essay; Only reflect! The hill is magic-mad to-night; And if to show the path you choose a meteor's light, You must not ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... for the most part to the concentration camps, the majority of Kaffir kraals served the same purpose. It was this means of information which made the Boer resistance possible: it was to this system of espionage that De Wet owed the success of his meteor-like career. ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... might, that he made no secret whatever of his dreadful resolution, but, compounding all the materials of fun, sarcasm, irony, and invective, into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of Richmond Hill; and whilst the authors were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst and poured down the whole of its contents on the garrets of Grub Street. Then issued a scene of (ludicrous) woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... from the ruins in the lands of Hun Doptchin Djamtso there is a small lake which sometimes burns with a red flame, terrifying the Mongols and herds of horses. Naturally this lake is rich with legends. Here a meteor formerly fell and sank far into the earth. In the hole this lake appeared. Now, it seems, the inhabitants of the subterranean passages, semi-man and semi-demon, are laboring to extract this "stone of the sky" from its deep bed and it is setting ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... on evening cloud impress'd, Bent in vast curve, the watery meteor shines Delightfully, to th' levell'd sun opposed: Lovely refraction ! while the vivid brede In listed colours glows, th' unconscious swain, With vacant eye, gazes on the divine Phenomenon, gleaming ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... Norfolk, Pensacola, Mare Island, and Port Royal, while two others held Chicago and St. Louis, the great railway centres for the west and south, at their mercy, and the Ithuriel, with a broad red flag flying from her stern, swept like a meteor along the eastern coast ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... got the report at ATIC, our first reaction was that the master sergeants had seen a large meteor. From the evidence I had written off, as meteors, all previous similar UFO ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... ought to take place, so that there should be first, the form whereby it is a being; secondly, we consider in it its effective power, whereby it is perfect in being, for a thing is perfect when it can reproduce its like, as the Philosopher says (Meteor. iv); thirdly, there follows the formality of goodness which is the basic ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... the gallery except faint up-and-down glimmers from the glass of the cases, and here and there the little spark of an eye. Outside there was a whole world of light, the milky way of the street with the meteor roar of the Elevated going by, processions of small moons marching below them across the park, and blazing constellations in the high windows opposite. Tucked into one of the window benches between the cases, the children seemed to swing into another world where almost anything might happen. And ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... a meteor," said a hearty voice in slightly foreign accents. "Well, my good friend, well my guardian angel, how are you both? We meet under more auspicious ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... words of the conversation; but Ethel, leaning from her window to listen to the plash of the waves, suspected that the slowly moving meteor she beheld, denoted that a cigar was soothing the emotions excited by their dialogue. She mused long over that revelation of the motives of the life that had always been noble and generous in the midst of much that was eccentric and wayward, and constantly the beat of the ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 devastation; and even the meteor flash, that glares for a moment and then disappears forever, is awakened into action by the density of the atmosphere, and regulated by the ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... mysteries of the Rosy Cross, mixed strange ingredients into a possible Elixir of Life, ran far afield in search for the Philosopher's Stone, gathered herbs for the confection of simples during auspicious phases of the moon, and beheld in comet and meteor awful forewarnings of public calamity or of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... had been caused by Guy Ranger. Five years before, when Sylvia had been only eighteen, he had flashed like a meteor through her sky, and no other star had ever shone for her again. Though seven years older than herself, he was little more than a boy, full of gaiety and life, possessing an extraordinary fascination, ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... inner cloud-chambers. Rude winds would break the spell and mar the process. The clouds are smoother, and slower in their movements, with less definite outlines than those which bring rain. In fact, everything is prophetic of the gentle and noiseless meteor that is approaching, and of the stillness that is to succeed it, when "all the batteries of sound are spiked," as Lowell says, and "we see the movements of life as a deaf man sees it,—a mere wraith of the clamorous existence that inflicts itself on our ears ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... jest; PATRIGE is dead! nay more, he died Ere he could prove the good Squire lied! Strange, an Astrologer should die Without one wonder in the sky Not one of all his crony stars To pay their duty at his hearse! No meteor, no eclipse appeared, No comet with a flaming beard! The sun has rose and gone to bed Just as if PATRIGE were not dead; Nor hid himself behind the moon To make a dreadful night at noon. He at fit periods walks through Aries, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... strip of paper twisted about one of the stalks which she did not at first perceive. When she did, she unfolded it, wondering. Four words met her eyes, written in minute characters, and it was as if a meteor had flamed suddenly across her sky. They were words that, curiously, had never ceased to ring in her brain since the moment she had first read them: "With love ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... a mountaineer. You find him from the plains to the timber-line, sometimes even in the deepest canyons and on the most precipitous mountain sides, always the same busy, noisy, cheery body. One day I saw a robin dart like a meteor from the top of a high ridge over the cliffs to the valley below, where he alighted on a cultivated field almost as lightly as a flake of snow. He—probably she (what a trouble these pronouns are, anyway!)—gathered a mouthful of worms for his nestlings, ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... and queenly presence of her Majesty would have rendered her conspicuous above the rest, even if her tiny golden crown and sceptre, tipped with a diamond that blazed like a meteor, had not indicated that she was a monarch; and the acclamations that rose on all sides attested the attachment her subjects felt ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... Minerva was already eager to do, so down she darted from the topmost summits of Olympus. She shot through the sky as some brilliant meteor which the son of scheming Saturn has sent as a sign to mariners or to some great army, and a fiery train of light follows in its wake. The Trojans and Achaeans were struck with awe as they beheld, and one would turn ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... life, nor gave him freedom only, but a purse of gold and this sword, which she averred had been captured from the Persian people hundreds of years before, and was a true Damascus blade forged from meteor iron, and of the curious tempering now forgotten. And she said, moreover, that there was a charm upon it that made him who carried it invincible and scathless, and she, poor maid, had robbed her father's ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... a handsome man. Years before, a rare, fast-moving meteor had punched its way through his helmet and taken part of his face with it. He had managed to get back to his ship and pump air in before he lost consciousness. He had had to stay conscious, because the ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... mixer remaining inside the cylinder during the roasting process, but designed to be withdrawn at the end, discharging the contents with a jerk into a circular cooler. These improvements are featured in Van Gulpen & Co.'s latest Meteor machine. They make also the Typhoon and Comet machines, and a ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... of Conrad is undoubtedly finely imagined; as the painters would say, it is in the highest style of art, and brought out with sublime effect; but still it is only another phase of the same portentous meteor, that was nebulous in Childe Harold, and fiery in The Giaour. To the safe and shop-resorting inhabitants of Christendom, The Corsair seems to present many improbabilities; nevertheless, it is true ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... sparkles on the brow of wisdom. It flashes in the eye of love. It breathes in the spirit of piety. It is the Beauty of the heaven of heavens—the Beauty of God and his Son—the Beauty of "eternal life," "incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away." It is not a meteor flashing to deceive; not a glow-worm, shining to fade; not a glitter, leading to bewilder; not a charm, working to tempt. No. It is positive, real, lovely, delightful, glorious, and eternal. It is the life of ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... and marvellous the things of fear Earth's breast doth bear; And the sea's lap with many monsters teems, And windy levin-bolts and meteor gleams Breed many deadly things— Unknown and flying forms, with fear upon their wings, And in their tread is death; And rushing whirlwinds, of whose blasting breath Man's tongue can tell. But who can tell aright the fiercer thing, ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... village lay under the grey haze of a chill September night. Once or twice a meteor flashed across the vault of heaven; and the sharp, clear stars lighted with magic fires the pure crystals of the first frost. The hoot of an owl rang out mournfully in answer to the plaintive whine of the ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... destruction. All the virtue consistent with so false a principle was, perhaps, brought forth by chivalry; but in the long run, the false principle overruled the force of the generous spirit, and chivalry sank like a meteor that owed its splendour to surrounding darkness. Its spirit gave an impulse to opinion and sentiment, but its errors and ignorance disabled it from supplying any corrective to the bad institutions and mistaken policy which fostered barbarism. It was not every mind that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... lakes of dew, Fairy cliffs of crystal sheen Passed we; and the forest's blue Sea of branches tossed between: Once we saw a gryphon make One soft iris as it passed Like the curving meteor's wake O'er ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... majesty of Heaven, most true! There was indeed a false note—jarring, not so much the voice as the music of life itself. There is stuff in all of us that will weave, as we desire it, into a web of stately or simple harmony; but let the meteor-like brilliancy of a woman's smile—a woman's touch—a woman's LIE—intermingle itself with the strain, and lo! the false note is struck, discord declares itself, and God Himself, the great Composer, can do nothing in this life to restore the old calm tune of peaceful, unspoiled ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... never knew his surname, or maybe it was his given name, for Gregory could function as well in one respect as the other. He would boast continually of what he would do to wine, women, and song once we returned to Earth. Poor Gregory. The meteor that hulled our ship struck squarely through the engine room where he was on duty. Probably he never knew that he had died. At least his fate had the mercy of being brief. Certainly it is not like mine. ...
— The Issahar Artifacts • Jesse Franklin Bone
... flagstaff fell dissevered on the crushed and broken car, As from azure sky of midnight falls the meteor's ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... and the decades drifted by, and the spectacle of the marvelous child's meteor flight across the war firmament of France and its extinction in the smoke-clouds of the stake receded deeper and deeper into the past and grew ever more strange, and wonderful, and divine, and pathetic, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... apparently it had several guns at trail. Early had not yet come up from Union Mills; was it Early? Could it be—could it be from Manassas? Could it be the missing brigade? Beauregard, flashing across the plateau like a meteor, lifted himself in his stirrups, raised with a shaking hand his field-glasses to his eyes. Stonewall Jackson held higher his wounded hand, wrapped in a handkerchief no longer white. "It ain't for the pain,—he's ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... tells us here, my lord, That a new head being set upon your statue, A rope is since found wreath'd about it! and, But now a fiery meteor in the form Of a great ball was seen to roll along The troubled air, where yet it hangs unperfect, The amazing wonder of ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... superior of the friars is a bishop, and a fine old fellow, with the beard of a meteor. Father Paschal is also a learned and pious soul. He ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... same age as the artist, did his work and lapsed into imbecility, surviving him sixteen years; Richardson became the happy father of the English Novel; Sterne took his Sentimental Journey; Chatterton, the meteor, flashed across the literary sky; Gray mused in the churchyard and laid his head upon the lap of earth; Burns was promoted from the Excise to be the idol of all Scotland. The year that Gainsborough died, Napoleon, a slim slip ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... untold thy deeds too long! But when the tragic actor's part is done, When clamor ceases, and the fights are won, When heroes realize what Fate decreed, When chieftains mark no more which thousands bleed; When they have shone, as clouded or as bright, As fitful meteor in the heaven at night, And when the sycophant no more proclaims To gaping crowds the glory of their names,— 'Tis then the mem'ries of warriors die, And fall—alas!—into obscurity, Until the poet, in whose verse alone Exists a world—can make their ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... that at the warlike sound Of Trumpets loud and Clarions be upreard His mighty Standard; that proud honour claim'd Azazel as his right, a Cherube tall: Who forthwith from the glittering Staff unfurld Th' Imperial Ensign, which full high advanc't Shon like a Meteor streaming to the Wind With Gemms and Golden lustre rich imblaz'd, Seraphic arms and Trophies: all the while Sonorous mettal blowing Martial sounds: 540 At which the universal Host upsent A shout that tore Hells Concave, and ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... twinkle to the stedfast eye; And seen, and vanishing, and seen again, Like dying tapers smoth'ring in their sockets, Appear at last shut from the face of heav'n; Whilst every lesser flame which shone by night, The flashy meteor from the op'ning cloud, That shoots full oft' across the dusky sky; Or wand'ring fire which looks across the marsh, Beaming like candle in a lonely cot, To cheer the hopes of the benighted trav'ller, Till swifter than the very change ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... however, I recollect gazing at the anchorage from the open window of the Admiralty House, near which we stood. The flag-ship then lay just off Osnaburg Point, with her ensign, or, as it used to be called in old books, her Ancient, the "meteor flag of England," dropped, in the calm, so perpendicularly from the gaff-end, that it looked like a rope more than a flag; while its reflection, as well as that of the ship herself, with every mast, yard, and line of the rigging, seemed, as it were, engraved on the surface of the ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... deep, to bear the probing of word or argument; He speaks, therefore, in the touching pathos of her own silent grief. Her melting emotion has its response in His own. In one word, Martha was one of those meteor spirits rushing to and fro amid the ceaseless activities of life, softened and saddened, but not prostrated and crushed by the sudden inroads of sorrow. Mary, again, we think of as one of those angel forms which now and then seem to walk the earth from the spirit-land; ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... politicks was introduced. JOHNSON. 'Pulteney was as paltry a fellow as could be. He was a Whig, who pretended to be honest; and you know it is ridiculous for a Whig to pretend to be honest. He cannot hold it out.' He called Mr Pitt a meteor; Sir Robert Walpole a fixed star. He said, 'It is wonderful to think that all the force of government was required to prevent Wilkes from being chosen the chief magistrate of London, though the liverymen knew he would rob their shops, knew he would ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... not speak a word, but preserve as profound a silence as possible. Jack, of course, was too much taken up with watching the Royal visitor, to think of talking, save, perhaps, the desire of whispering to his messmate a comment or so on the meteor passing before him. All was still. Her Majesty tasted the cocoa, and approved of it—yet all was still. Her Majesty then inquired whether there was no stronger beverage allowed the men, and forthwith a tumbler of 'three-water grog' was handed her. She raised it to her lips—when ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton |
