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Primeval   Listen
adjective
Primeval  adj.  Belonging to the first ages; pristine; original; primitive; primary; as, the primeval innocence of man. "This is the forest primeval." "From chaos, and primeval darkness, came Light."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Primeval" Quotes from Famous Books



... that still haunt our remaining solitudes, the ruffed grouse—the pa'tridge of our younger days—is perhaps the wildest, the most alert, the most suggestive of the primeval wilderness that we have lost. You enter the woods from the hillside pasture, lounging a moment on the old gray fence to note the play of light and shadow on the birch bolls. Your eye lingers restfully ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long

... that mood. But Conrad, he's given to brooding. And his habit at night when he stands staring up at the stars is to see (or conjure up rather) a dumb buffoon Fate, primeval, unfriendly and stupid, whom Man must defy. And Conrad defies it, but wearily, for he feels sick at heart,—because of his surety that Fate is ignoble, ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.

... life-like reproduction of themselves and their boats, their bits of cottages, and their bare-footed bairns—in the painted glimpses of the broad-billowed ocean; and the desolate old hills, with such forlorn lights on their scarps, as the gloom of primeval tempests might ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr

... unison with old pursuits, and by the associations thus raised in his mind, always recalling the pleasures of the chase, the stilly whispering hum of the pines, the fragrance of wild flowers, and the deep solitude of the primeval forest. ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley

... wear out to-morrow, and all the to-morrows which make up life, among the same dull scenes and in the same wretched toil that had darkened the sunshine of to-day. But there were some, full of the primeval instinct, who preserved the freshness of youth to their latest years by the continual excitement of new objects, new pursuits, and new associates; and cared little, though their birthplace might have been here in New ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... formation, the first in which organic remains are found. It is probably from the Trenton epoch of that age. If geologists can be trusted, at the time the little animals, whose remains are thus preserved, were living, the only part of this continent which had appeared above the primeval ocean was a strip of land along the present St. Lawrence River and the northern shores of the great lakes, with a promontory reaching out toward the Adirondacks, and a few islands along what is now the Atlantic coast ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various

... Vaea, a place no wider than a room, and flat as a table. On either side the land descends precipitously; in front lies the vast ocean and the surf-swept reefs; to the right and left green mountains rise, densely covered with the primeval forest. Two hundred years ago the eyes of another man turned towards that same peak of Vaea as the spot that should ultimately receive his war-worn body: Soalu, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Schuyler with a force against Canada by way of Lake Champlain. Schuyler penetrated almost to Montreal, gained some indecisive success, and caused much suffering to the unhappy Canadian settlers. Frontenac made his last great stroke in duly, 1696, when he led more than two thousand men through the primeval forest to destroy the villages of the Onondaga and the Oneida tribes of the Iroquois. On the journey from the south shore of Lake Ontario, the old man of seventy-five was unable to walk over the rough portages and fifty Indians shouting ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong

... loneliness about the spot that was terrible. Over it hung the "thought and deadly feel of solitude." The only break for miles in the primeval forest was that made for the narrow road. House or cabin there was none in all the gloomy reaches of rocks and gnarled trees. It was too inhospitable a region to ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy

... of animal epics.] "The root of this saga lies in the harmless natural simplicity of a primeval people. We see described the delight which the rude child of nature takes in all animals,—in their slim forms, their gleaming eyes, their fierceness, their nimbleness and cunning. Such sagas would naturally have ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber

... Chalmers, Southey, Chantrey, Mahomet, Tasso, Ochlenschlaeger, Plumer Ward, and Dr. A. Combe. The Report of the Commissioners on the British Museum and the present state of the Library Catalogue. On Prisons and Prison Discipline. On the Copyright of Foreigners and Translators. On the Primeval Antiquities of Denmark; with illustrations. On the Discovery of a singular Roman Temple at the source of the Seine. History of Pottery; with engravings. Villa and Tomb of a Female Gallo-Roman Artist. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various

... case in the legs of the donkey, and I have collected some most curious cases of stripes appearing in various crossed equine animals. I have also a large mass of parallel facts in the breeds of pigeons about the wing bars. I SUSPECT it will throw light on the colour of the primeval horse. So do help me if occasion turns up...My health has been lately very bad from overwork, and on Tuesday I go for a fortnight's hydropathy. My work is ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... the memory of a beloved parent; and it was right that the generation which was reaping the fruits of his toils and dangers should desire to have in their midst and decorate with the tokens of their love, the sepulchre of this Primeval Patriarch whose stout heart watched by the cradle of this now ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott

... described his life. Born in a cabin of Kentucky, of parents who could hardly read; born a new Moses in the solitude of the desert, where are forged all great and obstinate thoughts, monotonous like the desert, and growing up among those primeval forests, which, with their fragrance, send a cloud of incense, and, with their murmurs, a cloud of prayers to heaven; a boatman at eight years in the impetuous current of the Ohio, and at seventeen in the ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... Spaniards, seem to find their music in a hurdy-gurdy swell of sound. The other day we met a little girl, walking and spinning, and singing all the while, whose song was just another version of this chant. It has a discontented plaintive wail, as if it came from some vast age, and were a cousin of primeval winds. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... through dense forests of redwoods and pine, only the soft footfalls of the unshod mustang or the sudden cry of the wild-cat breaking the primeval silence. It was night when Dona Brigida abruptly dismounted, dragging Pilar with her. They were halfway up a rocky height, surrounded by towering peaks black with rigid trees. Just in front of them was an opening in the ascending wall. ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... Clair, and thence through Lake Huron to Point Iroquois. They were the first navigators of the Great Lakes, and that they were not peace-loving boatmen, is certain from the fact that they traveled all these miles of primeval waterway for the express purpose of battle. History records that they had no difficulty in bringing on a combat with the Illinois tribes, and in an attempt to displace the latter from Point Iroquois, the invaders were destroyed after ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... dear friend, a real work of nature. So beautiful! Parrots and monkeys flitting about overhead, the primeval forest stretching its bosky arms above us in all directions—so bosky! What one might call a real work of nature; so very, ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen

... and He has breathed into their nostrils the breath of life. They who hold that sonship is obtained on the condition which these passages seem to assert, do also rejoice to believe and to preach that the Father's love broods over every human heart as the dovelike Spirit over the primeval chaos. They rejoice to proclaim that Christ has come that all, that each, may receive the adoption of sons. They do not feel that their message to, nor their hope for, the world is less blessed, less wide, because while they call on all to come and take the things that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... then, to dedicate this book to you, not because of your eminence as a lawyer, nor yet on account of your distinguished position as a citizen, but as a keen, intelligent sportsman, one who loves nature in her primeval wildness, and who is at home, with a rifle and ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond

... the primeval ages, was the common parent of traffick; for the opulence of mankind then consisted in cattle, and the product of tillage, which are now very essential for the promotion of trade in general, but more particularly so to such nations as ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... to plant crops for themselves. Dissatisfaction spread throughout the ranks of the Palatinates, and when the Governor refused to heed their appeal for relief, fifty families left the settlement and hewed their way through the primeval forest to the Mohawk Valley, where they obtained fertile lands from the Indians and founded the Schoharie congregation in the winter of 1712/13. The governor declared the fugitives rebels; but still more followed in March, making ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente

... for roots. That I suspect was among the first occupations of primeval man, and requires no great exertion of the mind," answered the doctor. "Here ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston

... so cling to thee? Thou vast, profound, primeval hiding-place Of ancient secrets,—gray and ghostly gulf Cleft in the green of this high forest land, And crowded in the dark with giant forms! Art thou a grave, a prison, or ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke

... between the pack and its prey. It is another pack of road-kids, and in the hostile pause we learn that it is their meat, that they have been trailing it a dozen blocks and more and that we are butting in. But it is the world primeval. These wolves are baby wolves. (As a matter of fact, I don't think one of them was over twelve or thirteen years of age. I met some of them afterward, and learned that they had just arrived that day ...
— The Road • Jack London

... not more than fifty years of age; her complection, though faded, kept the traces of its former loveliness, her eyes, though they had lost their youthful fire, retained a lustre that evinced their primeval brilliancy, and the fine symmetry of her features, still uninjured by the siege of time, not only indicated the perfection of her juvenile beauty, but still laid claim to admiration in every beholder. Her carriage was lofty and commanding; ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney

... no keener when I saw Old England the next year than when I saw New England now. I had imagined the landscape bare of trees, and I was astonished to find it almost as full of them as at home, though they all looked very little, as they well might to eyes used to the primeval forests of Ohio. The road ran through them from time to time, and took their coolness on its smooth hard reaches, and then issued again in the glisten ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... in a primeval forest, it seemed, would the modest Puritan bare his body to the mirror of limpid water and the caress ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.

... or profession, Without trust of public money, And without bribeworthy service, He acquired, or more properly created, A Ministerial Estate: He was the only person of his time Who could cheat without the mask of honesty, Retain his primeval meanness When possessed of ten thousand a year: And having daily deserved the gibbet for what he did, Was at last condemned for what he could not do. Oh! indignant reader! Think not his life useless to mankind! Providence connived at his execrable designs, To give to ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... it seem to me that a certain university president expresses things with any more wisdom or effectiveness, when he says that it "impressed him with its infinite laziness." Lazy? When once, in the far-distant past, after rising from the primeval sea, it sank back again and deposited twelve thousand feet of strata, then lifted them out into the sunshine, carved eleven thousand feet of them away, and sent them dashing down the river to fill up the Gulf of California and make the Mohave and Colorado ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... was different from any other ever made since man and man first began battling together in the dim twilights of the primeval. Not with shout and cheer did it rush forward, nor yet with venomous gases that gave the alarm, that choked, that strangled, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... to see his words fulfilled—fulfilled in such marvellous sort, that bald bare statistics read like the wildest romance. At the time he spoke, twenty-two years ago from this present year 1858, the Yarra rolled its clear waters to the sea through the unbroken solitude of a primeval forest, as yet unseen by the eye of a white man. Now there stands there a noble city, with crowded wharves, containing with its suburbs not less than 120,000 inhabitants. A thousand vessels have lain at one time side by side, off ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... (thor). The Norse god of thunder. Thrace (tras). A region in Southeastern Europe, with varying boundaries. In early times it was regarded as the entire region north of Greece. Titans (ti' tanz). Primeval giants, children of heaven and earth. Tithonus (ti tho' nus). The husband of Aurora; changed into a grasshopper. tortoise (tor' tis). A kind of turtle. trident (tri' dent). A spear with three prongs—the common attribute of Neptune. ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd

... the two Frankfort lads had claimed for it. It was two feet deep, clear, cold and swift, shadowed by great primeval trees. Men and horses drank eagerly, and at last Colonel Winchester, feeling that there was neither danger nor the need of hurry, permitted them to undress and take a quick bath, which was a heavenly relief and stimulant, allowing them to get clear ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler

... present day. What was to bring about this consummation was the soul of the universe becoming too big for its body, which it would eventually swallow up altogether. In the efflagration, when everything went back to the primeval aether, the universe would be pure soul and alive equally through and through. In this subtle and attenuated state, it would require more room than before and so expand into the void, contracting again when another period of cosmic generation ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock

... sturdily to the task, had pressed up the massive slope from the deep cleft of the gorge. As the road curved about the outer verge of the mountain, the valley far beneath came into view, with intersecting valleys and transverse ranges, dense with the growths of primeval wildernesses, and rugged with the tilted strata of great upheavals, and with chasms cut in the solid rock by centuries of erosion, traces of some remote cataclysmal period, registering thus its throes and turmoils. The blue sky, seen beyond a gaunt profile of one of the farther ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... do. The slope of the ground alone guided them. So dense was the stand of timber that the huge trunks shut off the view in all directions. It was almost as though they were encircled by palisades. And so thick was the shade that rarely did a sunbeam reach the earth. They were in the forest primeval, a land of perpetual gloom. There was no underbrush and they could travel rapidly. In a very short time they came to the ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss

... the explanation I gave you some time ago," said the enthusiastic Alf, "about Professor Heer of Zurich, who came to the conclusion that primeval forests once existed in these now treeless Arctic regions, from the fossils of oak, elm, pine, and maple leaves discovered there. Well, I found a fossil of a plane leaf the other day,—not a very good one, to be sure—and now, here is a splendid specimen of a petrified ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne

... The reason this kind of speech was the first is, that the face was formed to effigy forth whatever a man thinks and wills; in consequence of which the face is also called the effigy and index of the mind (animus). Another reason is, that in the Most Ancient or primeval times sincerity prevailed, and no one cherished or wanted to cherish a thought which he was not willing should shine forth out of his face. In this way, also, the affections of the mind (animus), and the thoughts from them, could ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg

... centuries done to this gateway of American civilization? Surely not very much. Keeping one's eyes in the right direction it was easy to blot out three hundred years, and to feel that we were looking upon about the same scene that those first colonists beheld—just the primeval waste of rolling waters, lonely ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins

... industry. Neither vice nor ignorance, shall stop their active career; they will know our calamities only from the records of history. The prolonged duration of their life will enable them to plan and accomplish the most laudable undertakings. The tranquil, the innocent gratifications of that primeval age will be restored, wherein man laboured without toil, lived without sorrow, and expired without a groan! Mothers will no longer be subject to pain and danger during their pregnancy and child-birth: their progeny ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... country on either side of the high road is for the most part highly cultivated, and would give a stranger an over-favourable idea of it, for but a short distance off on either side of it, especially as it advances north, dense jungles and forests are to be found in a primeval state, full of wild beasts of every description. The island is about 270 miles long and 145 wide. It is divided into five provinces—Central, Southern, Eastern, ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... they really terrifying?' said Gudrun. 'Don't they look saurian? They are just like great lizards. Did you ever see anything like Sir Joshua? But really, Ursula, he belongs to the primeval world, when ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... appreciation of flowers must have been coeval with the poetry of love. Where better than in a flower, sweet in its unconsciousness, fragrant because of its silence, can we image the unfolding of a virgin soul? The primeval man in offering the first garland to his maiden thereby transcended the brute. He became human in thus rising above the crude necessities of nature. He entered the realm of art when he perceived the subtle use of ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura

... when the column is of great thickness in proportion to its height, and the sufficient firmness, either of the ground or prepared floor, is evident, it is the best of all, having a strange dignity in its excessive simplicity. It is, or ought to be, connected in our minds with the deep meaning of primeval memorial. "And Jacob took the stone that he had put for his pillow, and set it up for a pillar." I do not fancy that he put a base for it first. If you try to put a base to the rock-piers of Stonehenge, you will hardly ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... Victorianism lay buried. And sitting there, high up on its most individual spot, Soames—like a figure of Investment—refused their restless sounds. Instinctively he would not fight them—there was in him too much primeval wisdom, of Man the possessive animal. They would quiet down when they had fulfilled their tidal fever of dispossessing and destroying; when the creations and the properties of others were sufficiently broken and defected—they ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... his great mission burst thus from the lips of the Gothic king, the spirit of his lofty ambition seemed to diffuse itself over his outward form. His noble stature, his fine proportions, his commanding features, became invested with a simple, primeval grandeur. Contrasted as he now was with the shrunken figure of the spirit-broken stranger, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... through which they have flowed. The dark indicate vegetable decay, while the others point to clayey soil. Twice we came across rapids, and in each case made a portage of half a mile or so to avoid them. The woods on either side were primeval, which are more easily penetrated than woods of the second growth, and we had no great difficulty in carrying our canoes through them. How shall I ever forget the solemn mystery of it? The height of the trees and the thickness of the boles ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... their childish affection took the inevitable turn. Veritable offsprings of Nature, knowing naught of social conventions and restraints, they loved one another in all innocence and guilelessness. They mated even as the birds of the air mate, even as youth and maid mated in primeval times, because such is Nature's law. At sixteen Cadine was a dusky town gipsy, greedy and sensual, whilst Marjolin, now eighteen, was a tall, strapping fellow, as handsome a youth as could be met, but still with his mental faculties ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... not, the flames still shine and awe the superstitious, and so great is the fame of the place that many pilgrims come yearly from distant India to pray, and to have prayers said for them, here in the visible presence of the primeval light. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... was hers when the carriage entered the long avenue, bordered with velvety grass and primeval elms, and at the end Savigny awaiting her with its ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet

... this, no mention whatever is found of the manner in which human beings come into existence: they make their appearance upon the scene as though they were a primeval part of it. Izanagi, whose return to the upper world takes place in southwestern Japan,* now cleanses himself from the pollution he has incurred by contact with the dead, and thus inaugurates the rite of purification practised to this day in Japan. The ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... the recommendation—now don't be crying—touching the recommendation of another husband, by all the classics that ever were mistranslated, I meant nothing but the purest of consolation. If I did, may I be reduced to primeval and aboriginal ignorance! But you know yourself, that they never prospered who prevented a rara avis like me from entering the church—from laboring in the vineyard, and cultivating the grape. Don't be hathenish; but act with a philosophy suitable to so dignified an occasion—Farewell! ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... whatever it was it obliged this young Irishman to make long journeys into the interior of the country, which was almost a terra incognita. Sparsely settled, where settled at all, it was still clothed in primeval verdure—here in the endless reach of savannas, there in the depth of pathless woods, and far away to the North and the West in those monotonous ocean-like levels of land for which the speech of England has no name—the Prairies. Its population was nomadic, not to say barbaric, ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid

... was past a wide stretching extent of primeval forest that clothed the mountain-side with green. Here were wonderful specimens of trees, some of which would rival the oaks of England—aye, even those in Windsor great park! There was the sandbox, whose seeds are ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... Night's primeval bars, I dared the old abysmal curse, And flashed through ranks of frightened stars ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke

... shed a sad and ghostly beam. They might have been the hooded torches of cave dwellers sheltering from enemies and the storm in those perpendicular fastnesses. Far down, a red sphere glowed dimly, exalting the illusion. He almost fancied he could see the out-posts of primeval forests bending over the canyon and wondered why the "Poet of Manhattan" had never immortalized a scene at once so sinister and ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... and preserved and the Synagogue that selected and canonized so marvellous a literature, than dismayed because occasionally amid the organ-music of its Miltons and Wordsworths there is heard the primeval saga-note of heroic savagery. ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill

... ascribed geological phenomena to one agency, acting during one primeval epoch, there came a greatly-improved conception, which ascribed them to two agencies, acting alternately during successive epochs. Hutton, perceiving that sedimentary deposits were still being formed at the bottom of the sea from the detritus carried down by ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... then, to be oftentimes abroad in the early twilight of the morning. It is primeval-instinct with possibilities of thought and action. Then, if at all, he will get a glimpse into his soul that may hap to startle him. Judgment and the face of God justly angry seem more likely and ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... be called the American house, the Western house, the Ohio house. Hardly any other house was built for a hundred years by the men who were clearing the land for the stately mansions of our day. As long as the primeval forests stood, the log cabin remained the woodsman's home; and not fifty years ago, I saw log cabins newly built in one of the richest and most prosperous regions of Ohio. They were, to be sure, log cabins of a finer pattern than the first settler reared. They were of logs handsomely ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... of the shrubs, some of which were aromatic and fragrant, relieved the dark, depressing spirit which seemed to brood upon it. This little colony, notwithstanding the wretchedness of its appearance, was not, however, shut out from a share of human happiness. The manners of its inhabitants were primeval and simple, and if their enjoyments were few and limited, so also were their desires. God gave them the summer breeze to purify their blood, the sun of heaven to irradiate the bleakness of their ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... thinn'd and let in floods of daylight now, Then dark and dern as when the Druids lived. Narrow'd is now the red-deer's forest reign; The royal race of eagles is extinct. But other changes than on moor and cliff Have tamed the aspect of the wilderness; The simple system of primeval life, Simple but stately, hath been broken down; The clans are scatter'd, and the chieftain's power Is dead, or dying—but a name—though yet It sometimes stirs the desert; to the winds The tall plumes wave no more—the ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... those enjoying a considerable authority) are chargeable with the very procedure of which they accuse the philosopher—introducing a priori inventions of their own into the records of the past. It is, for example, a widely current fiction that there was an original primeval people, taught directly by God, endowed with perfect insight and wisdom, possessing a thorough knowledge of all natural laws and spiritual truth; that there have been such or such sacerdotal peoples; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... stretched the forest primeval,—the home of noisy comedy and silent tragedy. Here the struggle for survival continued to wage with all its ancient brutality. Briton and Russian were still to overlap in the Land of the Rainbow's End—and this was the very heart of it—nor had Yankee gold yet purchased its vast domain. ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London

... about eighty houses and log-cabins,[45] strung at intervals along the north side of the rough track, known as the King's Road, which ran parallel to the sea. Behind the houses were rude, half-cleared pastures, and behind these again, the primeval forest. The cultivated land was on the south side of the road; in front of the houses, and beyond it, spread great salt-marshes, bordering the sea and ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman

... Warden, "is well worth the notice of such an enthusiastic lover of old things; though I suppose aged trees may be the one antiquity that you do not value, having them by myriads in your primeval forests. But then the interest of this tree consists greatly in what your trees have not,—in its long connection with men and the goings of men. Some of its companions were made into bows for Harold's archers. This ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... than is the case in civilized nations. Physical strength is the same, with the advantage at times on the side of the woman, as in certain African tribes to-day, over which tribes this fact has given them the mastery. Primeval woman, all attainable evidence goes to show, started more nearly equal in the race, but became the inferior of man, when periods of child-bearing rendered her helpless and forced her to look to him for ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... been burned here. Just below Duncan's tilt is a spruce-covered island, but the mainland has a stunted new growth of spruce, with a few white birch, covering the wreck of the primeval forest that was flame swept thirty odd years ago. Over some considerable areas no new growth to speak of has appeared, and the charred remains of the dead trees stand stark and gray, or lie about in confusion upon the ground, giving the country a ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace

... old man had but one idea, and nothing could ever change it. Solitude fixes our hearts immovably on things—call it madness, what you will. In busy life we have no real or lasting dreams, no ideals. We have to go to the primeval hills and the wild plains for them. When we leave the hills and the plains, we lose them again. Shon was, however, for the valley of gold. He was a poor man, and it would be a joyful thing for him if one day he could empty ample gold into his wife's lap. Lawless was not greedy, but he ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... were the devil! All except his mother. They were the clumsiest of biological devices, and as they handed on life they spoiled it. They stood at the edge of the primeval swamps and called the men down from the highlands of civilisation and certain cells determined upon immortality betrayed their victims to them. They served the seed of life, but to all the divine accretions that had gathered round it, the courage that adventures, the intellect that ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... shared these primeval scenes of old England by the side of his British parent, (which festivities are still honorably preserved by some of its most ancient and noblest families,) they brought back to his heart those similar assemblages at Villanow and in Cracovia, where his revered grandfather, the palatine, had ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... primeval forest, with great trees, thickets in background, and moss and ferns underfoot. A set in the foreground. To the left is a tent, about ten feet square, with a fly. The front and sides are rolled up, showing a rubber blanket ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair

... globe; for the arbitrary rites and opinions of every pagan nation bear so close a resemblance to each other, that such a coincidence can only have been produced by their having had a common origin. Barbarism itself has not been able to efface the strong primeval impression. Vestiges of the ancient general system may be traced in the recently discovered islands in the Pacific Ocean; and, when the American world was first opened to the hardy adventurers of Europe, its inhabitants from north to ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble

... seemed more the inclination of spirit than matter, but still she accepted his support and walked along easily at his side. So far from her resenting his summary taking of her hand, she was grateful, with the humble gratitude of the primeval woman for the kindness of a master whom she ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... dreamer—became electrically alive to his double heritage of the soldier spirit. From age to age the primeval link between poet and warrior is reaffirmed in time of war: and the Rajput in him recognised only one way of fighting worthy the name—the triune conjunction of man and horse and sword. Disillusion, strange and terrible, awaited him on that score: and ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... wild wrath, Revolt against the deed? I should not marvel, Though to the lake these rocks should bow their heads, Though yonder pinnacles, yon towers of ice, That, since creation's dawn, have known no thaw, Should, from their lofty summits, melt away,— Though yonder mountains, yon primeval cliffs, Should topple down, and a new deluge whelm Beneath its ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

... without fallacy. This is the reason why we here undertake to describe that love in its essence; and as it was in this essence when, together with life from God, it was infused into man, we undertake to describe it such as it was in its primeval state; and as in this state it was truly conjugial, therefore we have entitled this section, ON LOVE TRULY CONJUGIAL. The description of it shall be given in the following order: I. There exists a love truly ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... almost wholly "a waste, howling wilderness." At Marquette, Portage Lake, Copper Harbor, Eagle River, Eagle Harbor, and Ontonagon, and the mines adjacent, are the only places where the primeval forests have given place to the enterprise of man, and these in comparison with the whole extent of territory embraced in this region, are but mere insignificant patches. What this country may become years hence, it would defy all speculations now ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland

... her most agreeable mood. The children themselves were quite unaccustomed to carriage exercise. It was a wonderful luxury to lean back on the softly cushioned seats and dash swiftly under the noble beech-trees and the giant oaks of the primeval forest. By-and-by they drove up to some white gates. Verena was desired to get out and open them. The carriage passed through. She remounted into her seat, and a few minutes later they all found themselves in a great cobble-stoned ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade

... haloed saint. Something like worship shone in his eyes, but he kept the mask down, and looked at her with the eyes of a stranger while he talked, and smiled a stiff conventional smile. But a look of anguish grew in his young face, like the sorrow of something primeval, such as a great rock ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill

... on September 15, 1789, in Burlington, New Jersey, but while still very young he was taken to Cooperstown, on the shores of Otsego Lake, in central New York. His father owned many thousand acres of primeval forest about this village, and so through the years of a free boyhood the young Cooper came to love the wilderness and to know the characters of border life. When the village school was no longer adequate, he went to study ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... after the two wayfarers had crossed from the peninsula to the mainland, was no other than a footpath. It straggled onward into the mystery of the primeval forest. This hemmed it in so narrowly, and stood so black and dense on either side, and disclosed such imperfect glimpses of the sky above, that, to Hester's mind, it imaged not amiss the moral wilderness in which ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... creatures had made it centuries ago, on their way from the hills to the river. The silent moccasins of Indians had widened it; later, pioneers, Kildares and their hardy kindred, flintlock on shoulder, ear alert for the crackling of a twig in the primeval forest, seeking a place of safety for their women and children in the new world they had come to conquer. Now it was become a thoroughfare for prosperous loaded wains, for world-famed horses, for their supplanter, the automobile, which in ever-increasing numbers has come to enjoy ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly

... between the dances; Without, somewhere, a tinkling fountain played. The dusky path was lit by ardent glances As forth they fared, a lover and a maid. He chose a nook, from curious eyes well hidden - All redolent with sweet midsummer charm, And by the great primeval instinct bidden, He drew her in the shelter of his arm. The words that long deep in his heart had trembled Found sudden utterance; she at first dissembled, Refused her lips, and half withdrew her hand, Then murmured "Yes," and yielded, ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... ne'er drew the Spanish prow Through the primeval hush of Indian seas, Nor wrinkled the lean brow Of age, to rob the lover's heart of ease; 'Tis the Spring's largess, which she scatters now To rich and poor alike, with lavish hand, Though most hearts never understand To take it at God's value, but pass by The ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various

... appetite. Then again he has to just wait his turn to be served, and mustn't forget his table manners if he knows what's good for him. But say, up in the woods he can just revert back to the habits of primeval man from whose loins he sprang, and his appetite compares to that of the wolf. Oh! things do taste altogether different, somehow or other; and meals seem ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton

... Owen Saxham who has gone down of his own choice to the muddiest depths of moral and physical decadence, and come up of the strength of his own will from among the hideous things that hang suspended and drifting in the primeval sludge, than he ever was of the man before his fall. His is a combative nature, and the great blow he has sustained this day in the wreck and ruin of his raft of hope has left him quivering to the centre of his being with ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... men are equal as to earthly rights and human privileges; but that each has individual capacity and capabilities; that in the primeval world there were spirits noble and great, as there were others of lesser power and inferior purpose. There is no chance in the number or nature of spirits that are born to earth; all who are entitled to the privileges of ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage

... soul alone animate now the Louisiana colonel. Hope has fled. Over his devoted head the sentinel stars swing, with neither haste nor rest, toward the occident. They will shine on Lagunitas, smiling, fringed with its primeval pines. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... Primeval life and love were all around them. Meadow larks flung their brief jets of song into the sunlight; the copses rustled with wings; wood-doves cooed from the warm sunny hollows, and the soft booming of their throaty call was like a beating in the air,—the pulse of spring. ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote

... unity has made us one. We thus make it manifest unto the world. In the woman I have chosen as my comrade, behold the living soul of serene-browed Grecian goddess and German seeress of old, whose untamed eyes of primeval womanhood, the equal and the mate of man, proclaim the end of slave-marriage and the ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... Hamlets, needing shelter and spring-water, stand generally in some slight hollow, if well up the Height, as Rorschach is; sometimes, if near the bottom, they are nestled in a sudden dell or gash,—work of the primeval rains, accumulating from above, and ploughing out their way. The rains, we can see, have been busy; but there is seldom the least stream visible, bottom being too sandy and porous. On the western slope, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... moisture in the air. The plants and flowers also increased in size, again resembling somewhat the large species they had seen near the equator. "This would be the place to live," said Bearwarden, looking at iron mountains, silver, copper, and lead formations, primeval forests, rich prairies, and regions evidently underlaid with coal and petroleum, not to mention huge beds of aluminum clay, and other natural resources, that made his materialistic mouth water. "It would be joy and delight to develop industries here, with no snow avalanches to clog your railroads, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... Shamanic belief, which was the primeval religion of all mankind, every physical ailment is caused by a little devil which enters the body and can be expelled therefrom only by ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... frost-relaxing showers soften the flinty ground. There were fierce spiritual conflicts, wild questionings, doubts, fears, and forebodings, and sometimes despair, as in this gusty month nature often seems resolving itself back to primeval chaos. But too often his mood was that of cold hard scepticism, the frost of midwinter. The impetus of his evil life would evidently ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... assimilation of Cybele and Anahita justifies to a certain extent the unwarranted practice of calling Cybele the Persian Artemis. See Radet, Revue des etudes anciennes, X, 1908, p. 157. The pagan theologians often considered Attis as the primeval man whose death brought about the creation, and so they likened him to the Mazdean Gayomart, see Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, 1907, ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... he is the great Creator, and he is the highest state of blessedness. Learned persons versed in the scriptures attain to great happiness by knowing him. In that spot are the celestial Rishis, the Siddhas, and, indeed, all the Rishis,—where dwelleth the slayer of Madhu, that primeval Deity and mighty Yogin! Let no doubt enter thy heart that that spot is the foremost of all holy spots. These, O lord of earth, are the tirthas and sacred spots on earth, that I have recited, O best of men! These all are visited by the Vasus, the Sadhyas, ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... primordial skull. These Selachians, the Rays and Sharks, are on the whole the creatures which throw the clearest light on the history of the lineage of the vertebrata and on the organisation of our primeval fish-natured ancestors. It is one of the particular merits of Gegenbaur that he clearly and firmly established the place in nature of the Selachians as the common ancestors of all vertebrate animals from fish up ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... a few patches of corn and potatoes, and then to nothing at all, everything changing, dying, stopping—and the ever-increasing yet degenerating people leaving the city ruins, which they could not rebuild—taking to the fields, the forests, the mountains—going down, down, back toward the primeval state, down ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... savage solitudes, I also am grown savage. The old primeval passions of love and hate stir within me, and they are fierce and cruel and strong, beyond what you men of the later ages could understand. The culture of the centuries has fallen from me as a flimsy garment whirled away by the mountain wind; the old ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome



Words linked to "Primeval" :   aboriginal, primordial, primal, early



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