What is "vicissitude"

Usage examples of "vicissitude".

These ancient Martians had been a highly cultivated and literary race, but during the vicissitudes of those trying centuries of readjustment to new conditions, not only did their advancement and production cease entirely, but practically all their archives, records, and literature were lost.

The indiscretion of his predecessor, instead of reconciling, had artfully fomented the religious war: and the balance which he affected to preserve between the hostile factions, served only to perpetuate the contest, by the vicissitudes of hope and fear, by the rival claims of ancient possession and actual favor.

But when I reflect upon after events of my life I am not astonished that The Leads proved ineffectual, for the numberless vicissitudes which I have gone through since have not cured me--my disorder, indeed, being of the incurable kind.

If he had behaved well he might have become a rich man, but he got involved in some conspiracy and had to fly, and afterwards experienced many vicissitudes of fortune.

I made friends with Baron Lefort at supper, and he afterwards told me of the vicissitudes he had experienced.

Parent-Parent in that they proceed without the benefit of reality data and are the same kind of judgemental exchange these ladies, as children, overheard between their mummies and aunties over the vicissitudes of riding streetcars.

It was now for more than the middle span of our allotted years that he had passed through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary ascendancy and self a man of rare forecast, he had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude of sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn and all find tolerable and but tolerable.

And if at times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery.

Of course, his own basically realistic mind insisted, who was to say thatwith all of the vicissitudes of the intervening times, the plagues, the wars, the copyings and recopyings that had taken place over the past timesome records had not been lost, others mistranscribed or deliberately altered for diverse reasons that no one now living would ever know or understand.

Because we live on the seam between formula and mystery, because I can recognize in the harmonic vicissitudes the hummable tune is put through some similar, metaphorical bend, music marks out the way all messages go.

He preserves, in all his mental vicissitudes, a loftiness of tone and a unity of intention, difficult to connect, even in fancy, with the real man, in whom the inherited superstitions and the prognostics of true science must often have clashed with each other.

Like Spring, the STURM UND DRANG period of the propagandist brings forth growth, frail and delicate, to be matured or killed according to its powers of resistance against a thousand vicissitudes.

Italian sun infected with disease those tramontane bodies which had already suffered the vicissitudes of intemperance and famine.

It seemed unlikely that an abandoned house would have been left with all shades down, or, if it had, that all of them would still be rigidly fastened, unflapped and untorn by winds over the years, undamaged by whatever stones or other vicissitudes of time had breached most of their glass.

I made friends with Baron Lefort at supper, and he afterwards told me of the vicissitudes he had experienced.