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Immemorial   /ˌɪməmˈɔriəl/   Listen
Immemorial

adjective
1.
Long past; beyond the limits of memory or tradition or recorded history.



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"Immemorial" Quotes from Famous Books



... borough-mote to which every burgher was summoned by the town-bell swinging out of the town-tower, had descended by traditional usage from the customs of the first English settlers in Britain. The close association of the burghers in the sworn brotherhood of the guild was a Teutonic custom of immemorial antiquity. Gathered at the guild supper round the common fire, sharing the common meal, and draining the guild cup, the burghers added to the tie of mere neighbourhood that of loyal association, of mutual ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... efforts made for raising Africa from her immemorial degradation, we are bound to confess our obligations to the Mahometans for what they have done. If they have extirpated Christianity from the soil of North Africa, and planted, instead of this tree of fair and pure ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... ON immemorial altitudes august Grief holds her high dominion. Bold the feet That climb unblenching to that stern retreat Whence, looking down, man knows himself but dust. There lie the mightiest passions, earthward thrust Beneath her regnant footstool, and there ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton

... of the earth descended from Noah," therefore, the Hawaiians "must once have known the great Jehova and the principles of true religion." But the historian says on the next page that the Hawaiians were heathen from time immemorial, for, "Go back to the very first reputed progenitor of the Hawaiian race, and you find that the ingredients of their character are lust, anger, strife, malice, sensuality, revenge and the worship of idols." This is the elevation upon which Mr. Dibble places himself to fire upon the memory of the ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... us on first getting sight of Segeste! Paestum we had seen, and thought that it exhausted all that was possible to a temple, or the site of a temple. Awe-stricken had we surveyed those monuments of "immemorial antiquity" in that baleful region of wild-eyed buffaloes and birds of prey—temples to death in the midst of his undisputed domains! We had fully adopted Forsyth's sentiment, and held Paestum to be probably the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various

... moreover, to underline the fact that his action was dictated always by a consistent desire for peace: "We wish to serve no selfish ends. We seek merely to stand true alike in thought and in action to the immemorial principles of our people.... These are the bases of peace, not war. God grant we may not be challenged to defend them by acts of willful injustice on the part of the Government ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour

... recline At ease beneath This immemorial pine, Small sphere! (By dusky fingers brought this morning here And shown with boastful smiles), I turn thy cloven sheath, Through which the soft white fibres peer, That, with their gossamer bands, Unite, ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod

... this "law"—for, interpreting it in its straitest sense they understood it to be mandatory—employers and employees alike regulated by its iron authority all their dealings with one another, throwing off the immemorial relations of mutual dependence and mutual esteem as tending to interfere with beneficent operation. The employer came to believe conscientiously that it was not only profitable and expedient, but under all circumstances his duty, to obtain ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce

... the ninety and nine that go not astray, never feel the caressing touch which the yearning Shepherd lays on the obstinate wanderer, who would not pasture in peace; and from the immemorial dawn of inchoate civilization, prodigals have possessed the open sesame to parental hearts that seemed barred against the more dutiful. By what perverted organon of ethics has it come to pass in sociology, that the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... question, in which I found nothing worthy of wonder. In regard to the other agosos and those newly produced, I proved that there are both old and new trees, for they are produced without any cultivation, and are conserved from time immemorial, and their very great age is recognized ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various

... from being brought to bear upon the peninsula by land. No trace is to be found of any resort in early times to the difficult route by land between Italy and Greece. There were in all probability from time immemorial tracks for purposes of traffic, leading from Italy to the lands beyond the Alps; the oldest route of the amber trade from the Baltic joined the Mediterranean at the mouth of the Po—on which account the delta of the Po appears in Greek ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... How far, far she was from Uncle Ben, and that shingled house in Vermont! It was near midsummer, and all the English and Americans had fled from this Southern Italy. Italy was at home, and at ease in her own house, living her own rich immemorial life, knowing and thinking nothing of the foreigner. Nor indeed on those uplands and in those woods had she ever thought of him; though below in the valley ran the old coach road from Florence to Rome, on which Goethe and Winckelmann had journeyed to the Eternal City. Lucy felt as though, but yesterday ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... things which from immemorial custom are regarded as being wrong, and appropriate punishments for which are generally recognised, especially stealing, wounding, killing and adultery; but the punishment for these is administered by the injured parties and their friends, favoured and supported by public opinion, ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson

... the deacon had been in a profound meditation concerning the ways and means of putting a stop to a quarrel that had been his torment from time immemorial, and just at this moment a plan had struck his mind which our story will ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... be once and again understood WHAT has actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... nearer than those of the house. The shape and altitude of the lighted windows, the whisper of the laurels on either hand, the very feel of the gravel underfoot, were at once familiar to my senses as the sweet, relaxing, immemorial air that one drank deeper at every breath. Our stealthy advance was to me like stealing back into one's childhood; and yet I could conduct it without compunction. I was too excited to feel immediate remorse, albeit not too lost in excitement to know that remorse for every ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung

... be particularly observed, that it has been from time immemorial the invariable course, in criminal cases, as soon as the verdict has been delivered, however special its form, for the proper officer to write on the indictment, in the presence of the court and jury, the word "Guilty," ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various

... that slavery has existed in the world from time immemorial. There was slavery, in the earliest periods of history, among the Oriental nations. There was slavery among the Jews; the theocratic government of that people issued no injunction against it. There was slavery among the Greeks; and the ingenious philosophy of the Greeks found, or sought to ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... Roads, renowned in our day for the sea-fight of the Titans; Sewell's Point; the Rip Raps; Newport News,—all household words in the ears of this generation. Now, far on their right, buried in the damp shade of immemorial verdure, lay, untrodden and voiceless, the fields where stretched the leaguering lines of Washington where the lilies of France floated beside the banners of the new-born republic, and where in later years embattled treason confronted the manhood of an outraged nation. And now before ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... ran a stream following the line of the present Dock Street. Its mouth had been a natural landing place for the first explorers and for the Indians from time immemorial. Here stood a neat tavern, the Blue Anchor, with its dovecotes in old English style, looking out for many a year over the river with its fleet of small boats. Along the wharves lay the very solid, broad, somber, Quaker-like brick warehouses, some of which have survived into modern times. Everywhere ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher

... the strange and sometimes retrograde nature of civilization in America. On one side, the coast of Paria, the islands of Cubagua and Marguerita; on the other, the Gulf of Uraba and Darien, received the first Spanish colonists. Gold and pearls, which were there found in abundance, because from time immemorial they had been accumulated in the hands of the natives, gave those countries a popular celebrity from the beginning of the sixteenth century. At Seville, Toledo, Pisa, Genoa and Antwerp those countries ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt

... the Peace there is a house, on the left hand also, into the door of which one could not only drive a coach and four, but eke a load of straw. Moreover, the driver could go to sleep and leave it to the horses, for there is plenty of space. This is the Casa Lloseta, the town residence since time immemorial of the family of that name. There are servants at the door, there are servants on the broad marble staircase, there are servants everywhere! for the Spaniard is unapproachable in the gentle art of leaving things to others. In the patio, or marble ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman

... prominence of the celestial bodies in the history of creation is not to be wondered at, for the greater number of the religious beliefs of the Babylonians are grouped round them. Moreover, the science of astronomy had gone hand in hand with the superstition of astrology in Mesopotamia from time immemorial; and at a very early period the oldest gods of Babylonia were associated with the heavenly bodies. Thus the Annunaki and the Igigi, who are bodies of deified spirits, were identified with the stars of the northern and ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum

... mirthfulness which one associates with the name certainly ran riot in the boy, but it was a twisted wayward sort of mirth of which Francesca herself could seldom see the humorous side. In her brother Henry, who sat eating small cress sandwiches as solemnly as though they had been ordained in some immemorial Book of Observances, fate had been undisguisedly kind to her. He might so easily have married some pretty helpless little woman, and lived at Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... Howitt's evidence on the moral element in the mysteries was not published. Waitz scouts the idea that the higher Australian beliefs are of European origin. 'Wir schen vielmehr uralte Truemmer aehnlicher Mythologenie in ihnen,' (vi. 798) flotsam from ideas of immemorial antiquity.] ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang

... with the universal,—God,—who must be a reality, not a symbol; but it is forced to limit the process of God's realizations somewhere, or the priest soon becomes a worshipper of God in sticks and stones. Theologists had commonly chosen, from time immemorial, to stop at the Trinity; within the triangle they were wholly realist; but they could not admit that God went on to realize Himself in the square and circle, or that the third member of the Trinity contained multiplicity, because ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... changed in accordance with certain general principles outlined above, viz: I. That inasmuch as Adam was formed before Eve and as women are the weaker vessels, they should confine themselves to those duties only which society has, from time immemorial, assigned them as their peculiar sphere. II. They should be meek, and not oppose father or husband; and to these they should go for advice on all matters. III. All license, such as the Roman woman's ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker

... that for ends of trade And virtue and God's better worshipping, We henceforth should exalt the name of Peace And leave those rusty wars that eat the soul,— Besides their clippings at our golden fleece. I, too, have loved peace, and from bole to bole Of immemorial undeciduous trees Would write, as lovers use upon a scroll, The holy name of Peace and set it high Where none could pluck it down. On trees, I say,— Not upon gibbets!—With the greenery Of dewy branches and the flowery ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... Jonathan—had long been noted as a droll. A grin was as much a part of his stock apparel as tow breeches or a palm-leaf hat. The negro, too, had from time immemorial been portrayed upon the stage and in fiction as an irrepressible and inimitably farcical fellow. But the "Southern gentleman" was a man of different kidney from either of these. A sardonic dignity hedged him about with peculiar sacredness. ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... classes were commonly assumed to be static, one supporting and one protecting the other, as though they resembled two geological strata. In slightly different language, society was presented to us in the form of two immemorial orders—the men, women, and children who touched their hats and curtsied, and the men, women, and children to whom ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... well stamped by stereotype blocks of wood. Some of the blocks accompanied the drawings; they are sharply and neatly cut in a kind of Sanscrit character, and are objects of great curiosity, as, by the accounts of the natives, this mode of printing has been in use for time immemorial." ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... conscription of our young men "to coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, to the frames of sky-scrapers," there to pay "their blood-tax—in the immemorial human warfare against nature." All of which means, among other things, that those men and women today who are already mining coal, and washing dishes, and making tunnels, and stoking furnaces, and building sky-scrapers, are already heroes, trained like the soldier to "the ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes

... report was read; but the meeting exclaimed against so extensive a proposal, imputing mere motives of self-interest to the surveyor. "Popular clamour," says Telford, "overcame my report. 'These fractures,' exclaimed the vestrymen, 'have been there from time immemorial;' and there were some otherwise sensible persons, who remarked that professional men always wanted to carve out employment for themselves, and that the whole of the necessary repairs could be done at a comparatively small expense."*[7] The vestry then called in another ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... 1879, when, on repairing the flooring in the chapel of the "stone bishop" in the cathedral, the slab indicating the grave of the Adelantado Rodrigo de Bastidas, the explorer, was found concealed under a stone, and it was discovered that the epitaph of Bastidas on a board which from time immemorial had hung on the wall of the chapel was an incorrect copy of the original graven on the burial slab. From the words of the archbishop it appears possible that the sepulchre of Columbus was marked in some way in 1655, although even then there may have been ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... and intimately identified with many schemes for the strengthening of the monarchy. For Mr. Morris, while a most ardent republican in his own country, was a royalist in France, convinced that a people, used from time immemorial to an almost despotic government, extremely licentious, and by nature volatile, were utterly unfitted for a republic. In many of the drawing-rooms where indiscriminate and dangerous republicanism was so freely advocated, he was ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe

... limit of the fun. From time immemorial Christmas Eve has been licensed for the performance of all sorts of tricks, and demure little faces are flitting about convulsed by the effort to conceal the merry sense of mischief. The stockings are duly hung for Saint Nicholas, and the holly, with its glossy leaves and scarlet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various

... of immemorial antiquity. The origin of the name has elicited much learned conjecture, and Hertford is one of several places held to be the Durocobrivis mentioned by Antonine. It is the Herudsford (i.e. red ford) of the Venerable Bede. That it was a town of some importance on the river Lea even in the ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins

... twenty-four years old, and the immemorial custom of that village gave her a scant remaining year in which to make up her mind. All girls who ran true to pattern were either snugly married or serenely teaching by the time they were twenty-five, ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... comedy was about to be enacted, there reclined under the celebrated oak, known as Herne's Oak, in a small clear space between some ferns, two of those beings called fairies who had for time immemorial taken up their quarters in that delightful retreat. Whether they were man and wife is not established, but certainly they were male and female; and as they appeared to be on the very best understanding, it is to be presumed that ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat

... life. To do away with it is to do away with the greatest influence for good in China to-day. What will become of the filial piety that has been the backbone of our country? This family life has always been, from time immemorial, the foundation-stone of our Empire, and filial piety is the foundation-stone ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper

... much. He wore a high hat, a well-preserved black coat, with a cutaway waistcoat, showing a quantity of glazed shirtfront and a massive watch chain. They were his Sabbath clothes, and, like the Sabbath they honored, were of immemorial antiquity. The shirt served him for seven Sabbaths, or a week of Sabbaths, being carefully folded after each. His boots had the Sabbath polish. The hat was the one he bought when he first set up as a Baal ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... of peace also are among the greatest which England has conferred upon India. "Pax Britanica" is equally known and loved today in India and in the British Isles. From time immemorial India had been torn asunder, not only by internecine wars, but also by numerous attacks from the peoples of other countries. India has always been a prey both to the decimating wars of her own unjust and ambitious tyrants, and mutually antagonistic ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones

... formality, and an address of welcome was made by the principal chief of the inviting nation. The topics of this address comprised a singular mixture of congratulation and condolence, and seem to have been prescribed forms, which had come down from immemorial antiquity, as appropriate ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale

... the room. He found his carriage at the door, and doing his utmost to restrain his anger he went at once to find Beauchamp, who was in his office. It was a gloomy, dusty-looking apartment, such as journalists' offices have always been from time immemorial. The servant announced M. Albert de Morcerf. Beauchamp repeated the name to himself, as though he could scarcely believe that he had heard aright, and then gave orders for him to be admitted. Albert entered. Beauchamp uttered an exclamation ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... expression and the fact. As a consequence of inundations and falling in of banks and such like, many big trees had, from time immemorial, been carried down the American rivers. Many of these trees had ended by catching in the river beds by their roots. Stripped of their branches, and sharpened to a point by the action of the water, and bent sloping by the current, they formed, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... wailing with the suddenness with which he had begun, and finally was tucked into his cradle and fell soundly asleep, one tiny hand flung palm upwards upon the pillow by his head after the manner of babies from time immemorial. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... and where was the upset and confusion which had been expected, where the signs of recent arrival, where the smallest, most trifling evidence of confusion? The stately hall looked as if it had been undisturbed from immemorial ages, and the butler stared at the two girls and their basket ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... name Of that half mythic ancestor of mine Who trod its slopes two hundred years ago, Down the long valley of the Merrimac, Midway between me and the river's mouth, I see thy home, set like an eagle's nest Among Deer Island's immemorial pines, Crowning the crag on which the sunset breaks Its last red arrow. Many a tale and song, Which thou bast told or sung, I call to mind, Softening with silvery mist the woods and hills, The out-thrust ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... SEA-NETTLE. An immemorial name of several zoophytes and marine creatures of the class Acalephae, which have the power of stinging, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... little fellow," said Herbert. "The most truculent little Radical to hear him talk, and yet staunch in his votes, for he can't go against those whose hair he has cut off from time immemorial." ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... a coming eruption after unnumbered centuries of quiet was given by a series of earthquakes which did an immense amount of damage at Herculaneum and Pompeii; yet in a district which had from time immemorial been subject to similar convulsions of nature, the shocks, though unusually distressing and destructive to life and property, were evidently unconnected in the popular mind with their true cause: the reawakening to life of the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... heart even in the languor of imprisonment to start up and meet the sun, with all the springs of new life which at that verdant season come with every new day—the apparition of the beautiful one suddenly appearing in the old immemorial garden with all its flowers, herself the sweetest and the fairest of flowers, all are set before us, with a harmony and music not to be excelled. The young Prince chafing at his imprisonment, dreaming of all the fantastic wonderful things he ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... to-day is almost identical with that assigned them in Roman times. They were constantly at war with the Romans, who at last subsidized them. In the middle ages they were known as Beja (q.v.), and convoyed pilgrims from the Nile valley to Aidhab, the port of embarkation for Jedda. From time immemorial they have acted as guides to caravans through the Nubian desert and up the Nile valley as far as Sennar. To-day many of them are employed in the telegraph service across the Arabian desert. They intermarried with the Nuba, and settled in small Colonies at Shendi and elsewhere long before ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Beer Hoffman, the poet, wrote to Herzl saying "At last there comes again a man, who does not carry his Judaism with resignation as if it were a burden or a misfortune, but is proud to be the legal heir of an immemorial culture." ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl

... organization, and rules to which the governments of the nations will agree. Civilized nations have always had their official means of dealing with one another through their governments, such as the diplomatic and consular services. Alliances have, from time immemorial, been made between nations, treaties have been solemnly agreed to, and a body of international law has gradually grown up. But treaties and international law have frequently been violated, and no international government has existed with sufficient ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn

... arrived from a jeweler's and one from a department store. They were a pie knife and a table crumber in the form of a miniature carpet sweeper. The usual futilities with which such occasions can be cluttered and which have shaped the destinies of immemorial women into a tyranny of ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... mightily to hold its own against Wilton and had found its opponent so redoubtable that the tie score seemed to be fully as much as it deserved—and perhaps a little more—Jefferson, the big rival of Ridgley from time immemorial, had been winning the laurels. Jefferson had trampled mercilessly upon Goodrich Academy and with seeming ease had scored touchdown after touchdown. The final score was 34-0 and herein lay the menace for Ridgley: only ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst

... detail, with green uplands, and wild-rose tangled hedgerows, and much running water, and abundance of summer flowers. At a point above Fossombrone, the Barano joins the Metauro, and here one has a glimpse of faraway Urbino, high upon its mountain eyrie. It is so rare, in spite of immemorial belief, to find in Italy a wilderness of wild flowers, that I feel inclined to make a list of those I saw from our carriage windows as we rolled down lazily along the road to Fossombrone. Broom, and cytisus, and hawthorn mingled with roses, gladiolus, and sainfoin. There ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... What can you know of laws: what know of plans Which bound these varied interests of ours, Through crossing currents, fixed for certain ends, To frame this state we call society, The full outcome of immemorial time? Know, here on earth wealth must not be despised, For we are as we are. While men subsist By interchanging goods and service, gold Will be the grease that smooths the whole machine. I grant a few, the greatest, live content To give forth what has ripened in their minds; ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner

... From time immemorial, the Verbascum thapsus, or great mullein, has been a trusted popular remedy, in Ireland, for the treatment of the above formidable malady. It is a wild plant—most persons would call it a weed—found in many parts of the United Kingdom; and, according to Sowerby's ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various

... now 'tis done: more durable than brass My monument shall be, and raise its head O'er royal pyramids: it shall not dread Corroding rain or angry Boreas, Nor the long lapse of immemorial time. I shall not wholly die: large residue Shall 'scape the queen of funerals. Ever new My after fame shall grow, while pontiffs climb With silent maids the Capitolian height. "Born," men will say, "where Aufidus is loud, Where Daunus, scant of ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace

... coping,—the utter lack of vegetation, save where the heath and the furze rustle far above,—all combine to form assemblages of dreary ruins, amid which, in the solitude of night, one almost expects to see spirits walk. These excavations have been designated, from time immemorial, by the neighboring town's-people, as "the Danes;" but whether the name be, as is most probable, merely a corruption of an appropriate enough Saxon word, "the dens," or derived, as a vague tradition is said to testify, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... approached only by unfrequented ancient ways paved with cobble stones. It is a place of garden greenness, of seclusion and of leisure. It breathes a provincial quietness, a measured, hallowed breath as of a cathedral close. Its inhabitants pride themselves on this immemorial calm. The older families rely on it for the sustenance of their patrician state. They sit by their firesides in dignified attitudes, impressively, luxuriously inert. Their whole being is a religious protest against the spirit ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... large for that use. They are not unlike the beads Belzoni found in the mummy pits in Egypt, and they closely resemble some of the many kinds of beads with which the Bramins have counted their muntras time immemorial. The Oriental custom of dropping a bead for every prayer having been adopted by the Christians of the west, and still continuing in Roman Catholic countries, appears, on that account, too common to deserve the notice of a philosophical traveller; and therefore the Guanche shepherds, or goatherd ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham

... saw a barrel-chested red-haired giant holding up a drink in the immemorial bar toast. He raised his own glass gingerly, but his trembling hand caused the layers to mix and he stared ruefully at the ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow

... three had been added a fourth, the spirit of Trehayne, and that he anxiously waited there yonder in the shadows for the deliverance of our judgment. Had he, an English public school boy, played the game according to the immemorial ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone

... aristocracy, a monarchy, and a despotism. PUBLIUS. 1 A writer in a Pennsylvania paper, under the signature of TAMONY, has asserted that the king of Great Britain owes his prerogative as commander-in-chief to an annual mutiny bill. The truth is, on the contrary, that his prerogative, in this respect, is immemorial, and was only disputed, "contrary to all reason and precedent,'' as Blackstone vol. i., page 262, expresses it, by the Long Parliament of Charles I. but by the statute the 13th of Charles II., ...
— The Federalist Papers

... he was now going out of the court room free. Could it happen that the law protected only against the blundering rogue? They had heard always of the boasted completeness of the law which magistrates from time immemorial had labored to perfect, and now when the skillful villain sought to evade it, they saw how weak a ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... seen by Didron was one belonging to a monk of Sphigmenou named Joasaph, who was himself a painter. It was "loaded with notes added by himself and his master, which in course of time would be incorporated, according to immemorial custom, in the text." In this way, indeed, the Manual has grown to what it is at present. A transcript of it may probably be found in every monastery belonging to the Greek Church. Another monk named Macarios, also a ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley

... persons calling themselves such; and I am admitted where they cannot appear. You cannot but know that on the day on which you shall make your public entry, I am called to the ceremony by etiquette; and by an immemorial custom, to follow you in a dress of ceremony, and afterwards to dine with you at the palace of St. Mark; and I know not why a man who has a right and is to eat in public with the doge and the senate of Venice should not eat in private with the Duke of Modena." Though this argument was unanswerable, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... in the middle of this square contains two or three elms of immemorial age, besides many thrifty trees of a later planting. The wooden barrier by which it is enclosed was once adorned with a coat of white paint, now nearly worn off. The topmost rails and post-heads of this fence have been so notched and gnawed by the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... the economic, ethnic and historical development of England, Japan, Melanesian Fiji, Polynesian New Zealand, and pre-historic Crete. The great belt of deserts and steppes extending across the Old World gives us a vast territory of rare historical uniformity. From time immemorial they have borne and bred tribes of wandering herdsmen; they have sent out the invading hordes who, in successive waves of conquest, have overwhelmed the neighboring river lowlands of Eurasia and Africa. They have given birth in ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... Waterloo, by immemorial habit, had flung itself on the shops, bent on plunder. For an hour past a stream of people had flowed from the back streets into Botany Road, where the shops stood in shining rows, ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone

... love-song of this land has praised the skill of the woman deftly plying the hand loom. But if one expects to see the glory of ancient Greece, in its perfection of form and design, transmitted in any degree to the industry of modern rug-weaving he will be disappointed. From time immemorial rugs have constituted a most important part of the dowry of a young girl from the provinces. Even now the courting of a bride in Crete is often prefaced with the question whether the girl is skilled in the handling ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt

... leaves were very much used instead of tea in consumptions, coughs, and all kinds of pectoral diseases. This they have learned from the Indians, who have made use of it for these purposes from time immemorial. This American maiden-hair is reckoned preferable in surgery to that which we have in Europe, and therefore they send a great quantity of it to France every year. Commonly the price at Quebec is between ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton

... immemorial customs of their people, because of the established pre-eminence of his prowess, Ootah should now find favor in the eyes of Annadoah. Scarce seventeen summers had passed over Annadoah's head and of wooers she had a score. The young ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre

... read them consecutively; when he had done, so he did not differ from his wife. In one case, Agatha had written to her dear Mrs. March that she and Burnamy had just that evening become engaged; Mrs. Adding, on her part owned a farther step, and announced her marriage to Mr. Kenby. Following immemorial usage in such matters Kenby had added a postscript affirming his happiness in unsparing terms, and in Agatha's letter there was an avowal of like effect from Burnamy. Agatha hinted her belief that her father would soon come to regard Burnamy as she ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... know that every man has a religious belief peculiar to himself? Smith is always a Smithite. He takes in exactly Smith's-worth of knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity. And Brown has from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to excommunicate him, to anonymous-article him, because he did not take in Brown's-worth of knowledge, truth, beauty, divinity. He cannot do it, any more than a pint-pot can hold a quart, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... At the same time, the selfishness of most men is not confined to their own persons, but extends also to their posterity. Hence it is that bed and board, eonnubium and commercium, have, from time immemorial, been considered correlative ideas; and, to all the more logical socialists, a community of wives (or celibacy)(512) is as dear as a community of goods.(513) ( 245.) And in practice, the greater number of nations ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... back in imagination to that upper room, where Jesus and a handful of Galileans were sitting, and remember the sanctity which immemorial usage had cast round that centre and apex of the Jewish ritual, established at the Exodus by a solemn divine appointment, intended to commemorate the birth of the nation, venerable by antiquity and association with the most vehement pulsations of national feeling, the centre point of Jewish ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... West. Punch was brought to Italy in the fifteenth century.[2081] Polichinelle, as developed in France, is distinctly French. The model is Henri IV. The hump is an immemorial sign of the French badin-es-farces. "Polichinelle seems to me to be a purely national (French) type, and one of the most spontaneous and vivacious creations of French fantasy."[2082] The puppet play of Punch and Judy has enjoyed immense popularity in western Europe. The Faust legend ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... mutilated by injuries or altered by disease it is difficult to come to any {23} definite conclusion. In some cases mutilations have been practised for a vast number of generations without any inherited result. Godron has remarked[60] that different races of man have from time immemorial knocked out their upper incisors, cut off joints of their fingers, made holes of immense size through the lobes of their ears or through their nostrils, made deep gashes in various parts of their bodies, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that these ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... of fresh, sweet China matting for the floor. How quickly the general foulness was purified, the general raggedness repaired, the general shabbiness made "good as new"! The floors, that had been buried under immemorial dust, arose again under the excavating labors of the sweepers; and the walls, that had been gory with expectorations of betel, hid their "damned spots" under innocent ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... it is proper to mention that the kirk-bell, which had to this time, from time immemorial, hung on an ash-tree, was one stormy night cast down by the breaking of the branch, which was the cause of the heritors agreeing to build the steeple. The clock was a mortification to the parish from the Lady Breadland, when she died ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt

... and urgent necessity for some immediate and provisional arrangements." He further states that in framing these regulations he has, while giving due weight to local considerations, "adhered as closely as possible to those principles which from immemorial usage have ever been considered the most essential and sacred ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold

... human race has from time immemorial been afflicted with so-called revelations, all claiming inspiration, all conflicting, and all being equally "mysterious and obscure." The wars arising among these sectarians have retarded civilization, and deluged the earth in blood. The revelations of science, founded upon ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham

... structures consisted of sometimes only a single empty room, on the floor of which the traveler might spread his carpet for sleep; the larger ones, always built in a hollow square, enclosing a court for the beasts, with water in it for them and their masters. From immemorial antiquity it has been a favorite mode of benevolence to raise such places of shelter, as we see so far back as the times of David, when Chimham built a great khan near Bethlehem, on the caravan road ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... blossom of many colours and sweetest perfume. Here the voice of the Burong boya (crocodile-bird) may be heard, singing like an English thrush. He shakes his wings as he sings, and the Malays say that from time immemorial he has owed a large sum of money to the crocodile, who comes every year to ask payment; then the bird, perched on a high bough out of reach of the monster, sings, "How can I pay? I have nothing but my feathers, ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall

... exquisite in their perfect state, but liable to accident from the nature of their delicate composition. Remote antiquity chronicles their existence, and immemorial potentates eagerly sought for them to adorn their persons. Pearl-fisheries in the Persian Gulf are older than the reign of Alexander; and the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the Coast of Coromandel yielded their white wonders ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... From time immemorial it has been known that the Yellow River is neither more nor less than a prolongation of the Milky Way, soiled by earthly contact and contamination, and that the homes of the Spinning Maiden and the Cow-herd are ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland

... day, when they were approaching the side of the moon which from time immemorial has been hidden from view of the inhabitants of the earth, that Jack, who was with Mark in the engine room, while the two professors were in the pilot-house, remarked to his chum: "Mark, doesn't it strike you that the water pump and the air apparatus aren't ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood

... as prefatory, a curious occurrence in the Country of Zips, contiguous to the Hungarian Frontier. Zips, a pretty enough District, of no great extent, had from time immemorial belonged to Hungary; till, above 300 years ago, it was—by Sigismund SUPER GRAMMATICAM, a man always in want of money (whom we last saw, in flaming color, investing Friedrich's Ancestor with Brandenburg instead of payment for a debt of money)—pledged to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... than perhaps limiting that production. But we know that while the quality is valuable in respect of power it has no other precise value. We remember that Giorgione perished likewise with an uncertain product to his credit, as to numbers, but he did leave his immemorial impression. So it is with John H. Twachtman. He leaves his indelible influence among Americans as a fine artist, and he may be said to be among the few artists who, having taken up the impressionistic ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... home we would to-day celebrate, as usual, the birthday of our land. But with heavy hearts we see that this would now seem like a hollow mockery of something solemn and immemorial. It were more in keeping with reality that we burnt incense upon the altars of the ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman

... pertinently be asked why China has become a Republic, since from time immemorial she has had a monarchial form of government. The answer is that the conditions and circumstances in China are peculiar, and are different from those prevailing in Japan and other countries. In Japan it is claimed that the Empire was founded ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang

... gone by; bygone days; old times, ancient times, former times; fore time; the good old days, the olden time, good old time; auld lang syne[obs3]; eld|. antiquity, antiqueness[obs3], status quo; time immemorial; distance of time; remote age, remote time; remote past; rust of antiquity [study of the past] paleontology, paleography, paleology[obs3]; paleozoology; palaetiology|[obs3], archaeology; paleogeography; paleoecology; paleobotany; paleoclimatoogy; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... a rapid survey of the varieties which indicate to us the alterations that each species has undergone, there arises a broader and more important question, how far, namely, species themselves can change—how far there has been an older degeneration, immemorial from all antiquity, which has taken place in every family, or, if the term is preferred, in all the genera under which those species are comprehended which neighbour one another without presenting points of any very profound dissimilarity? We have only a few isolated ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... their requirements, and is content with the formal recognition of the spiritual supremacy of the church. This is most remarkably shown in their acknowledgment of the day on which offerings had been made from time immemorial by the pagan Lepchas to the genius of Kinchinjunga, by holding it as a festival of the church throughout Sikkim.* [On that occasion an invocation to the mountain is chanted by priests and people in chorus. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... branches of this Anti-Suicide Crusade. Thus, it is at work in almost all our big cities, and also in America, in Australia, and in Japan. The Japanese Bureau was opened last year with very good results. This is the more remarkable in a country where ancient tradition and immemorial custom hallow the system of hara-kiri in any ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard

... things in the spirit of man. I have no doubt whatever that Browning thought of the idea after doing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring at a piece of inked blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and in that insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, nameless from the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... the habit of lions from time immemorial, and groups of people have fallen victims ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson

... therefore likely to make talk. A departure from custom—that settled it; it was a nation capable of committing any crime but that. The servants said they would follow the fashion, a fashion grown sacred through immemorial observance; they would scatter fresh rushes in all the rooms and halls, and then the evidence of the aristocratic visitation would be no longer visible. It was a kind of satire on Nature: it was the scientific method, the geologic method; it deposited the history of the family in a stratified ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... opinion, supporting this supposition is the following: The cow-pox has been known among our dairies time immemorial. If pustules, then, like the variolous, were to follow the communication of it from the cow to the milker, would not such a fact have been known and recorded at our farms? Yet neither our farmers nor the medical people of the neighbourhood ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... to drink. That gave the owner all the title he needed. His right to the increase he could prove by another phenomenon of nature, just as inevitable and invariable as that of thirst. The maternal instinct of a cow and the dependence of the calf upon its mother gave the old rancher of immemorial times sufficient proof of ownership in the increase of his herd. The calf would run with its own mother and with no other cow through its first season. So that if an old Mexican ranchero saw a certain number of cows at his watering-places, and with them calves, he knew that all before him were ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough

... British Parliaments, that they could make a new law. What they supposed they did, and what they were understood by the people to do, was merely to declare the law, as it was then and as it had been from time immemorial; the notion always being—and the farther back you go and the more simple the people are, the more they have that notion—that their free laws and customs were something which came from the beginning of the world, which they ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... nestled among the trees, and hear the sound of the postman's reluctant feet tapping over the cobblestones—the postman that comes with the relentlessness of Fate—and at every house the horror of the black envelope. "Somewhere in France" the great immemorial cathedrals and the dotted, cool, moss-covered churches are filled with supplicating women and the black-framed, golden locks of children lifting their eyes before the Great Consoler as the sun breaks through the paling ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... at various times claimed, and are at this moment claiming? Do you know, too,—but you can scarcely know it,—that it has been surmised by some that there is an insecurity in the title to the estate, and has always been; so that the possessors have lived in some apprehension, from time immemorial, that another heir would appear and take from them the fair inheritance? It ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... flood of white immigration which, having surmounted the towering Alleghenies, was spreading itself over the hunting grounds of Kentucky, and along the banks of the Scioto, the Miami and the Wabash, whose waters, from time immemorial, had reflected the smoke of the rude but populous villages of his ancestors. As a statesman, he studied the subject, and, having satisfied himself that justice was on the side of his countrymen, he tasked the powers of his expansive mind, to find a remedy for ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake

... new-born lambs beside them, studded the green pastures of the valley; and sounds of water came from the fell-sides. Everywhere lines of broad and flowing harmony, moulded by some subtle union of rock and climate and immemorial age into a mountain beauty which is the peculiar possession of Westmoreland and Cumberland. Neither awful, nor yet trivial; neither too soft for dignity, nor too rugged for delight. The Westmoreland hills are the remains of an infinitely older world—giants decayed, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... letters that deserved preservation, prose poems composed with infinite pains and copied with meticulous care. If the potpourri was at times redolent of the dried flowers of other men's loves, Eleanor was blissfully unaware of it. When he wrote of the lonesome October of his most immemorial year, or spoke of her pilgrim soul coming to him at midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, she thrilled ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... the Indians are almost the actual, although not the nominal, masters of the country. In short, they commit excesses whenever it suits them, paying no regard to treaties. This has been their habit from time immemorial, and it is found to be a difficult task to break them from it. Their minor crimes are allowed to accumulate, and when, at last, they are actuated by increasing success and consequent boldness, to commit some great and overt act, it is noticed ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... Resting your head half out of your wimple In the slow dignity of your eternal pause. Alone, with no sense of being alone, And hence six times more solitary; Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through immemorial ages Your little round house in the midst ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence

... the Latin element of our language had come in with the Roman conquest. Of the Four Ages he wrote a fragment. Of Yardley Oak he wrote the opening; it was apparently to have been a survey of the countries in connexion with an immemorial oak which stood in a neighbouring chace. But he was forced to say that the mind of man was not a fountain but a cistern, and his was a broken one. He had expended his stock of materials for a long ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... out of repair; there was a rich abundance of mud. All this was familiar and satisfying; but the ancient armies of drays, and struggling throngs of men, and mountains of freight, were gone; and Sabbath reigned in their stead. The immemorial mile of cheap foul doggeries remained, but business was dull with them; the multitudes of poison-swilling Irishmen had departed, and in their places were a few scattering handfuls of ragged negroes, some drinking, some drunk, some nodding, others asleep. St. Louis is a great and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... full five minutes of intense silence I knew that my bold appeal was being balanced in the scales by one of a people to whom tradition is a religion. One scale was weighted with the immemorial customs and usages of a great and proud people; the other with a white man's subtle and flattering recognition of these customs, conveyed in metaphor, which all Indians adore, and appealing to imagination—an appeal to which no Huron, no Iroquois, ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... also several native species (Fig. 107, F). These are types of the flax family (Linaceae). Linen is the product of the tough, fibrous inner bark of L. usitatissimum, which has been cultivated for its fibre from time immemorial. The last family is the balsam family (Balsamineae). The jewel-weed or touch-me-not (Impatiens), so called from the sensitive pods which spring open on being touched, is very common in moist ground everywhere (Fig. 107, L-P). ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell

... Apostolic Chair. This is against all human and divine law, and brings these said Jews into a worse condition than that of their forefathers under the Pharaohs of Egypt, and forces them, in their misery, to leave the places where their fathers had been settled from time immemorial. In their fear of being exterminated entirely, they have sought the protection of the Apostolic Chair, and we hereby forbid every unjust oppression of the said Jews, whose conversion we trust to the ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore

... sat erect, with her hands resting on the balustrade, and under that mysteriously white moon her pearl-pale face looked as hopelessly cold and rigid as any Persepolitan sphinx, that nightly fronts the immemorial stars which watch the ruined tombs ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... hunt this cover with all his hounds, for the game is thin and small: and if you were but alert and wary, if you lodged ever in the deepest thickets, you too might live on into later generations and astonish men by your stalwart age and the trophies of an immemorial success. ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... wonder that thirsty travellers in African deserts have, from time immemorial, rushed towards these phantom waters of the well-known mirage, to meet with bitter disappointment! The resemblance is so perfect that any one might be deceived if unacquainted with ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne

... presents not less notably than inanimate Nature a singular compound of change and solidity, of the catastrophic and the secular. The little state of Kashmir, overrun from time immemorial, in peace or war, by hordes of many races and tongues, preserves a language and a physiognomy of its own. About forty per cent. of the words in Kashmiri are Persian, twenty-five Sanscrit, fifteen Hindusthani, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... century no Italian merchant could have told you anything of the "isles where the spices grow," or of the countries which produced the rich fabrics in which he trafficked: he knew only that they came to Alexandria or Damascus from Far Eastern lands. For from time immemorial the Orient had been the enemy's country, little known beyond the bounds of Syria, a half-mythical land of alien races, of curious customs and infidel faiths, a land of interminable distances, rich and populous, doubtless, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... this shred with incredible avidity. An old document, enclosed an immemorial time within the folds of this old book, had for him ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... and his equal mate, Not his competitor in toil and trade. While coarser man, with greater strength was made To fight her battles and her rights protect. Ay! to protect the rights of earth's elect (The virgin maiden and the spotless wife) From immemorial time has man laid down ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... of decorum was very much shocked. Mrs Latrobe had not spoken a word of her late mother, and had hinted at changes in matters which had existed at White-Ladies from time immemorial. ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt

... "conditions of physical life fulfilled" and "liberty acquired" is now universally and intuitively recognized. Thus the infant is treated like a young plant. Children to-day enjoy the rights which from time immemorial have been accorded to the vegetables of a well-kept garden. Good food, oxygen, suitable temperature, the careful elimination of parasites that produce disease; yes, henceforth we may say that the son of a prince will be tended with as much care as the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... those very methods by which we are now enthusiastically curing indigestion and cold in the head. The articulate repetition of such phrases increases their suggestive power; for the unconscious is most easily reached by way of the ear. This fact throws light on the immemorial insistence of all great religions on the peculiar value of vocal prayer, whether this be the mantra of the Hindu or the dikr of the Moslem; and explains the instinct which causes the Catholic Church to require from her priests the verbal repetition, not merely the silent reading of their ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... poor man's duel. "So true is this," he said, "that no assassination takes place till a formal challenge has been delivered. 'Be on your guard yourself, I am on mine!' are the sacramental words exchanged, from time immemorial, between two enemies, before they begin to lie in wait for each other. There are more assassinations among us," he added, "than anywhere else. But you will never discover an ignoble cause for any of these crimes. We have many murderers, ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee

... of Punns in this University has been an immemorial Privilege of the Johnians; and we can't help resenting the late Invasion of our ancient Right as to that Particular, by a little Pretender to Clenching in a neighbouring College, who in an Application to you by way of Letter, a while ago, styled himself Philobrune. Dear Sir, as you ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... a shirt. Over that they place rich patolas, which are pieces of cloth of gold, or of silk alone, worked very beautifully, and of great value, pious generosity endeavoring to give him the best and to clothe him in the finest and most precious garments. It is a law, established by immemorial custom, that the children and near relatives each clothe the deceased in a piece of gauze or of sinampuli (another fabric of equal estimation) arranging it with such loops and knots that they find space for it all. In regard to the dress, this custom is in force even to this ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin

... mad or not, Christmas will come round again. Now, Jack, from time immemorial, thinks that he has a right undeniable to get drunk on that auspicious day. In harbour, that right is not discussed by his officers, but is usually exercised sub silentio under their eyes, with everything but silence on ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... of the Balkan range which stretches the whole length of it; for this reason, and also on account of its geographical position, any invaders coming from the north or north-east, especially if aiming at Constantinople or Salonika, were bound to sweep over it. The great immemorial highway from the north-west to the Balkan peninsula crosses the Danube at Belgrade and follows the valley of the Morava to Nish; thence it branches off eastwards, going through Sofia and again crossing all Bulgaria to reach Constantinople, ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... 23, 1803, the English cutter "Vincejo," commanded by Captain Wright, had landed the conspirators at the foot of the cliffs of Biville, a steep wall of rocks and clay three hundred and twenty feet high. From time immemorial, in the place called the hollow of Parfonval there had existed an "estamperche," a long cord fixed to some piles, which was used by the country people for descending to the beach. It was necessary to pull oneself up this long rope by the arms, ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre

... importance to the second point, which is that since the murder has been committed the nightly conversation at the inn tap-room has centred around a local ghost, known as the White Lady of the Shrieking Pit, who is supposed from time immemorial to have haunted the pit where the body was thrown, and to bring death to anybody who encounters her at night. This spectre, which is profoundly believed in by the villagers, had not been seen for at least two ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... East, then, came our ancestors, in days of immemorial antiquity, in that gray dawn of time of which all early songs and lays can tell, but of which it is as impossible as it is useless to attempt to fix the date. Impossible, because no means exist for ascertaining it; useless, because it is in reality a matter ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... rabbinical seminaries in Zhitomir (1848), this former centre of Hasidism became the nursery of Haskalah. The movement was especially strong in Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," as Napoleon is said to have called it. From time immemorial, long before the Gaon's day, it had been famous for its Talmudic scholars. "Its yeshibot," says Jacob Emden in the middle of the eighteenth century, "were closed neither by day nor by night; many scholars came home from the bet ha-midrash but once ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... amusement, and it does amuse me very much, viz., making a collection of all the plants, which grow in a field, which has been allowed to run waste for fifteen years, but which before was cultivated from time immemorial; and we are also collecting all the plants in an adjoining and SIMILAR but cultivated field; just for the fun of seeing what plants have survived or died out. Hereafter we shall want a bit of help in naming puzzlers. How dreadfully difficult it ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... the limits imposed by immemorial tradition there surely must be somebody in the United Kingdom who could make a better book. It was pathetic that so capable a cast—Miss LILY LONG in particular—should have such second-rate stuff to say and sing. Seldom ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various

... that of the father, who was cheerful and contented, and ate his meals with far more relish than he had before done. As the fatal day approached I attempted to remonstrate with the young chief on so unnatural a proceeding; but he sternly rebuked me, and told me not to interfere with the immemorial customs of the people. His father had been chief long enough—he was worn-out and weary of life—and he himself wished to be chief. When he should become old, his son would probably wish to finish him in the same honourable way, and that he should be content to submit ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston



Words linked to "Immemorial" :   old, time immemorial



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