|
|
|
More "Agonizing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are habitually practiced elsewhere, and by other classes? And they must be practiced, unless greater evils would be encountered. On the one side, all the evils of vice, with the miseries to which it leads—on the other, a marriage cursed and made hateful by want—the sufferings of children, and agonizing apprehensions concerning their future fate. Is it a small good that the slave is free from all this? He knows that his own subsistance is secure, and that his children will be in as good a condition as himself. To a refined and intellectual nature, it may not be difficult to ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... inflicting some severe tortures on Williamson, and forcing him to carry a heavy weight of the plunder, which they had taken from him, they went to a neighboring house, occupied by Jacob Snyder, his wife, five children and a servant. The piercing cries, and [77] agonizing shrieks of these poor creatures, made no impression on the savages. The father, mother, and children were tomahawked and scalped, and their bodies consumed by fire together with the house. The servant was spared that he might aid in carrying their plunder; but manifesting ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... full of thoughts that he could not apprehend. Behind the benignant evasiveness of the doctors he seemed to discern a fact, like a thunderbolt withheld. He recoiled from his conjectures, to cower amid these shadows which he felt might be less agonizing ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... finally obtained a respectable audience without once raising his voice. He has written surprisingly little love poetry; the notes of passion, as we are accustomed to hear them, seldom sound from his lute; nor do we hear the agonizing cries of doubt, remorse, or despair. There is nothing turbulent and nothing truculent; he has made no contribution to the literature of revolt. Yet many of his poems make an irresistible appeal to our more reflective moods; and ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... it; and seizing her by the hand he fell upon his knees and with the voice of one born to be obeyed commanded silence and began his prayer. The dance was immediately suspended, and a solemnity and horror, as if the presage of approaching doom, fell upon the startled assemblage. Above the agonizing sobs of the lately impenitent revellers was heard, as was that of the ancient prophet above the din of the worshippers of Baal, the voice of the man of God in earnest appeals to the throne of grace for mercy ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... in which we now repose, in the triumph in which we are now indulging, it is difficult to carry back our minds to the state of agonizing suspense in which we were at the critical time at which this conspiracy took place. At that time the empire of him for whom Europe itself appeared too small, was not confined within the narrow limits of the Isle of Elba; he had been driven back, it is true, from the extremity of Europe into ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... table-fork, which was stuck into the kidneys, and which was the occasion of his speedy and dreadful death. A few days after this, my best greyhound was stuck in the loins, in the like barbarous manner, which brought on the same kind of speedy and agonizing death; and this was the catastrophe of these two noted dogs, which had been much talked of, and were famous amongst sportsmen, as being most perfect in their kind. Some time after this, their game-keeper, in ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... sense, he now admitted, but still one which bound him in fetters of steel. His life had been one of grossest inconsistency. He was utterly out of tune with the universe. His incessant clash with the world of people and events had sounded nothing but agonizing discord. And his confusion of thought had become such that, were he asked why he was in Simiti, he could scarcely have told. At length he ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... was agonizing. She burst into a flood of tears: nor could every effort she made keep down the deep sobs that for some minutes impeded speech. I used every endeavour to appease and calm her mind: she seemed sensibly touched by that ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... in comparison with Johannesburg. There the work is agonizing. Between wounds and enteric, the place is crammed, and we can't get the nurses we absolutely need. My mother thought I was growing too tired, and she sent Syb up here to take care of me. Instead, I have pressed her into the service and trained her until she is one of the best nurses I have ever ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... laboratory the doors were kept barred, the telephones disconnected. Within, there was a bustle of feverish—if odorous—activity. For the three researchers, the olfactory acuity had reached agonizing proportions. Even the small gas masks Phillip had devised could no longer shield them from the constant ...
— The Coffin Cure • Alan Edward Nourse
... the holy King of earth, in goodness lowly, From thy ruins by the Tiber, Look with tearless aspect mild, Till each agonizing fibre ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... longer, and running swiftly, he reached the street where Dorfling lived, waited in agonizing suspense for the door to be opened, flew up the stairs, and through the open door to his friend's bedroom. There he found Schrotter; Mayboom was also there sobbing, and a tearful old servant. In an arm chair near the bed was Dorfling, still in his dress coat and tie, his head sunk on his ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... epidemic has a material cause; the Christian healer says it has a mental cause. Before there is an object to fear there must be the sentiment of fear. Let scarlet fever appear in a community, and every parent will immediately send out the most agonizing thoughts of fear. Where will they go? Everywhere, because thoughts can not be restrained. Their influence goes out in every direction. To the tender children especially, because particularly directed to them. All who ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... for endless, agonizing minutes. Presently Alice, white-faced, was kneeling on the step below her, and ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... with a sense of despair in his heart. Added to the anxiety caused by this hasty departure, jealousy entered his soul, and in this agonizing moment of disappointment the most distressing explanations crowded ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... had their moments of rapturous love—passionate attempts at self-surrender. They had long hours of cool discussion, as impersonal as if they had been talking about the characters out of a hook instead of about themselves. They had stormy nerve-tearing hours of blind agonizing, around and around in circles, lacerating each other, lashing out at each other, getting nowhere. They had moments ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... But even among the real guttersnipes of the neighbourhood he was an outcast. He did not know how to play with other children. He was ignorant alike of their ways and their games, and, stiff with an agonizing shyness, he bore himself before them arrogantly. It was natural that they in turn hated him. Like young wolves they flaired a member of a strange and alien pack—a creature who broke their unwritten laws—and at first they had hunted him pitilessly, throwing mud and stones at him, pushing him from ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... gain relief from the sight of it and the demand it so fearfully embodied, pressing her dry lips together lest any word should escape them. For the whole matter, as she understood it was secret, sacred too as it was agonizing. No one must guess what lay at the root of her present suffering—not even comfortable devoted Mary, nor that invaluable lifebelt, Dr. McCabe. She held the honour of both those conflicting interchangeable personalities in her hands; and, whether she were strong enough to adjust their differences ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... think that the true friend of Pompeii should make it a matter of conscience, on entering the enchanted city, to cast out of his knowledge all the rubbish that has fallen into it from novels and travels, and to keep merely the facts of the town's luxurious life and agonizing death, with such incidents of the eruption as he can remember from the description of Pliny. These are the spells to which the sorcery yields, and with these in your thought you can rehabilitate the city until Ventisei seems ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... at Fort Hays on the Smoky Hill, beyond whose protecting guns the wilderness ruled. A wilderness checkered by faint trails of lawless feet, a wilderness set with bloody claws and poison stings and cruel fangs, and slow, agonizing death. And with all a wilderness of weird, fascinating distances and danger, charm and beauty. The thrill of the explorer of new lands possessed us as we looked far into the heart of it. Here in these August days the Cheyenne and ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... so intent on escape that he had gone some distance down stream before realizing he was no longer pursued. Suddenly an agonizing cry was borne on the ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... all but lost. And while the strife hung in the balance, you might hear in the Athenian army at once lamentation, shouting, cries of victory or defeat, and all the various sounds which are wrung from a great host in extremity of danger. Not less agonizing were the feelings of those ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... severe that pursuer and pursued were brought to a sheer scramble. The toil was terrific, but Effie's pony, bred of the tough prairie fibre, clawed up with indomitable courage and endurance. The deer kept its lead by desperate, agonizing effort, and the woman knew that the summit would have exhausted ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... treaty existing between the United States and Canada." The biographer quotes also as follows from an English contemporary: "These judges, proof against unpopularity and unswayed by their own bitter hatred of slavery, as well as unsoftened by their own feelings for a fellow man, in agonizing peril, upheld the law made to their hands and which they are sworn faithfully to administer. Fiat justitia. Give them their due. Such men are the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... mean while, kept up the most agonizing cry, at times fluttering furiously about their pursuer, and actually laying hold of his tail with their beaks and claws. On being thus attacked, the snake would suddenly double upon himself and follow his own body back, thus executing a strategic movement that at first ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... considerable time, filled up with this feeling of agonizing uncertainty, he began at length, more composedly, to recollect the little chance there was that the Princess would, even for her own sake, resentful as she was in the highest degree of her husband's ill behaviour, join ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... filled up by a paviour, who, to every stroke of his rammer, adds a loud, distinct, and echoing, Haugh! The pedestrian cutler is grinding a butcher's cleaver with such earnestness and force, that it elicits sparks of fire. This, added to the agonizing howls of his unfortunate dog, must afford a perfect specimen of the ancient chromatic. The poor animal, between a man and a monkey, piping harsh discords upon a hautboy, the girl whirling her crepitaculum, or rattle, and the boy beating his drum, conclude the catalogue ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... torment, which the cessation of the use of morphia brings about, are interesting. Agonizing pains show that the nerves, long muffled, have become more acutely sensitive than they were before the fatal drug was first employed. A host of lesser troubles—insomnia, pain, and indigestion—attend ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... you," returned Thaddeus, drawing an agonizing sigh at the dreadful picture which the last sentence recalled. "I believe you; though at the time of which I speak, I thought otherwise, for both my last letters were re-enclosed to me in a blank cover, directed as if by your hand, and brought by a servant, with ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... agonizing scene, she did not sleep; the feverish activity of her mind rendered that impossible, and unerring instinct told her that David was awake also—that they two, amid the silence of a sleeping city, wrestled in the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... distant than Browne had supposed, was only reached after two hours of agonizing effort, and at the foot Goodman sank speechless and exhausted, his eyes closed, his parted lips white and drawn. Browne looked at him despairingly, and calling the dogs made one crouch at either side close to the heart and lungs ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... matter of fact, she had brought the bottle back to England without really knowing that she had done so; and that she had never given it a thought till it had been found, as described, after her husband's death, by the doctor who had been called in to attend Colonel Crofton in his agonizing seizure. ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... steal away undiscovered. Divers emotions fought for the possession of him. He was in the meeting of many waters, each capable of whirling him where it chose, but two only imperious: the one the fierce joy of being loved; the other an agonizing remorse. He would fain have stolen away to think this tremendous thing over, but it tossed him forward. "Grizel," he said in a husky ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... to Sairey and the little uns." And Mr. Bouncer "went the complete unicorn," for the last time in that term, by extemporising a farewell solo to Verdant, which was of such an agonizing character of execution, that Huz, and Buz his brother, lifted up their noses and ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... the scene to a place which is but seldom resorted to by a living man. Once inside of his terrible retreat he became a prey to feelings of the most varied and harrowing character, in the midst of which there was a suspense, twofold, agonizing, and intolerable. First of all, his suspense was for Ethel, and then for himself. In that narrow and restricted retreat his senses soon became sharpened to an unusual degree of acuteness. Every touch against it communicated itself to his frame, as though the wood of his inclosure ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... be most effectually given, how they were even to be preserved from receiving injuries instead of benefits at our hands,—whence were we to learn this but from their language and from our own hearts? They had spoken of unrelenting and inhuman wrongs; of patience wearied out; of the agonizing yoke cast off; of the blessed service of freedom chosen; of heroic aspirations; of constancy, and fortitude, and perseverance; of resolution even to the death; of gladness in the embrace of death; of weeping over the graves of the slain, by those ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... join her in an impassioned epistle of farewell, which once more left none of the nothings unsaid that they had many times reiterated. She would not let him put the stamp on, for fear it would not stick, and she had an agonizing moment of doubt whether it ought not to be a German stamp; she was not pacified till the steward in charge of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a wagon like this, the platform well filled up with women and children, and a pack of dogs following along behind, slowly rolling over the country, and this is the way they traveled when they went visiting friends who lived a few miles in the country. Sometimes the wheels gave perfectly agonizing shrieks as they revolved, and when they made so much noise that their strong Spanish nerves could stand it no longer, if there was any green grass to be found the drivers would crowd in a quantity around the axle, and there was generally room for a good lot of ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... your visions had been in other fields. He might make you a seed-sower, like lonely Morrison in China, when you wanted to be a harvester like Moody. Here is the real battlefield. The fighting and agonizing are here. Not with God but with yourself, that the old self in you may be crucified and ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... An agonizing shriek came buzzing to Alonzo's ear, like the sharp buzzing of a hurt gnat; it lost power in traveling five thousand miles. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to frig himself, and Madame G—— was also pushing furiously backwards and forwards on the dildo, as Frank now fucked the girl with deep and agonizing insertions of his prick. ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... beaded curtain, raised it, and stepped into the flood of warm sunlight. The voluptuous, agonizing music came in a wave over him. Tragedy, poignant misery, rang through every note, swelled in a stream which drowned the senses. This man-devil could play, Stafford remarked, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... innocent. Leonora, to be consistent in goodness, or to complete her triumph in the face of the world, invited me to accompany her to the country.—I have now been some weeks at this superb castle. Heaven is my witness that I came with a heart overflowing with affection; but the painful, the agonizing sense of humiliation mixed with my tenderest sentiments, and all became bitterness insufferable. Oh, Gabrielle! you, and perhaps you alone upon earth, can understand my feelings. Adieu!—pity me—I must not ask you a single question ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... it, driven by the secret agonies within, and all the time conscious that he could not escape from them. Then that befell which put a term to these agonizing imaginings. As he walked he came suddenly on the ashes of a camp fire. For a moment he stared at it uncomprehendingly. Then his interest quickened, as the state of the ashes showed some one had camped at this place quite recently. He began ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... till the sun had slightly warmed the air, and then attempted to prepare breakfast by the fire; but no one could eat anything, and the native from Waimea complained of severe headache, which shortly became agonizing, and he lay on the ground moaning, and completely prostrated by mountain sickness. I felt extreme lassitude, and exhaustion followed the slightest effort; but the use of snow to the head produced great relief. The water ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... said he, with a forced smile. "I am no hero; I shall not fall upon the battlefield. I know this; I feel it. I feel also that if this was to be my fate, I should be spared many sorrowful and agonizing hours; how much better a quick, glorious death, than this slow torture, this daily death of wretchedness! Oh, Laura, I have presentiments, in which my whole future is covered with clouds and thick darkness, through ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... ground, arose a truly monstrous tumult. Every one of the creatures below raised its voice in a horrible, bleating cry. The volume of sound was numbing—was agonizing in sheer impact. There were stirrings and clickings as of horns clashing ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... cause, that which, after rendering the slaves less miserable, has contributed at length entirely to enfranchise them from their sufferings and their chains,—Christianity. It would be easy to accumulate the most frightful, the most agonizing details, of the manner in which the Romans treated their slaves; whole works have been devoted to the description. I content myself with referring to them. Some reflections of Robertson, taken from the discourse already quoted, will make us feel that Gibbon, in tracing the mitigation of the condition ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... gaze, sleepless and frantic. When from deadly exhaustion he would half faint into stupor the hollow, sinister sound of the drum stunned his ears, while rich, churchly voices of men would intone "Pater noster, qui es in coelis!" and always in the agonizing key of B. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... how they could go on living without having solved the problems that so absorbed him. He had been engrossed by the same thoughts ever since the day he returned from Sokolniki after the duel and had spent that first agonizing, sleepless night. But now, in the solitude of the journey, they seized him with special force. No matter what he thought about, he always returned to these same questions which he could not solve and yet could not cease to ask ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... through which they must wend their way were assuming the staggering attitude characteristic of them as the sap dried and they died of their wounds. Sometimes, one side of a bush would shrivel first, causing it to double up like a creature agonizing. Some crouched like strange beasts watching to spring. Others thrust themselves ominously forward with projected arms, as if ready to grapple. Some brandished their flat leaves as the painter Wiertz, in his famous picture of Napoleon in Hell, made wives and mothers brandish their menacing fists ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... "what a little beast I am, to make you feel like that, when you're journalizing and agonizing day and night, and when it's your own savings that you flung. It was, dear," ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... want to express to you my appreciation of the high character of citizenship displayed by the people of Centralia in their agonizing calamity. We are all shocked by the manifestation of barbarity on the part of the outlaws, and are depressed by the loss of lives of brave men, but at the same time are proud of the calm control and loyalty to American ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... two his heart was full of pity for her. Who could be a spectator of a woman's struggles for life in the midst of that turbulent sea of passion which was overwhelming her, and refrain from feeling pity? That letter which lay before him represented the agonizing cry of a drowning creature; one whom the long struggle has made delirious; one who looks forward to going down with the delight born ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... of," the other commented; "just imagine those agonizing journeys in the teeth of an Arctic wind, traveling over hundreds of miles of trackless wilderness to get less than one-tenth as many people as a city enumerator ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... even the straitest sect of the grown-ups could call it so. If writing down your dreams, with agonizing care as to composition and spelling—for who knew that the eyes of generations unborn might not read the record?—were not a harmless amusement, could anything be called so? ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... language, of the same creed, intent on mutual destruction, rejoicing with fiendish pleasure at their address in perpetrating murder by wholesale, shouting for joy as disasters propagated by the chances of war hurled death and agonizing wounds into the ranks of their opponents! And yet the very same men, when chance gave them the opportunity, would readily exchange, in their own peculiar way, all the amenities of social life, extending ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... through an open grove, filled with sharp-shooters, who were speedily dislodged; when being up with the front of the attack, and emerging into open space, at the foot of a rocky acclivity, that gallant leader was struck down by an agonizing wound. The immediate command devolved on Brigadier-General Cadwallader, in the absence of the senior brigadier (Pierce) of the same division, an invalid since the events of August 19. On a previous call of Pillow, Worth had just sent him a ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... "The idea was agonizing, and I made up my mind to do all I could to save him; that is why I appealed to you to get me all the intimate details. Then he was arrested; the body had been examined by the coroner, but no word was said of my jewels. It was then that a ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... happiness of all created intelligences, whether pure or sinful. As, the fear and love of the Creator, who preserves and bountifully blesses his creatures; and flowing from this is love to all his creation. He who wantonly destroys life in order that he may glut a demoniac propensity with the agonizing death struggle, is a practical atheist. The Christian will cherish and promote the happiness of all; he dares only to take away ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... seemed to me as if my heart ceased beating; I listened and strained my ears in agonizing suspense, but the voice did not come again, and the moon dropping suddenly behind the fig trees, cast the whole place ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... wasted, his mouth parched with intense thirst, and his hands tremulous from weakness. Amid these torments he spent his nights and days; and he endured them all out of the greatness of the love which he bore in his heart to the Divine and Eternal Wisdom, our Lord Jesus Christ, whose agonizing sufferings he sought to imitate. After a time he gave up this penitential exercise of the door, and instead of it he took up his abode in a very small cell, and used the bench, which was so narrow and short that he could not stretch himself upon it, as his bed. In this hole, or upon ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the reaction to disappointment was a violent, agonizing wrench. She lost all control of her muscles for a moment, and had to lean against the ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... with a hard, fixed look. "I—you see, Lawrence was my lover—I spent two or three hours in agonizing suspense. I knew what I should feel when I stopped, but couldn't go on with the others, because I might have kept them back. It was freezing hard and now and then a little snow fell, but I scarcely noticed this; I was listening, ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... was almost full now. It would sink before she saw it! That hole must be stopped until he had drifted near enough to give vent to an agonizing cry for help. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... beautiful. She had long, black, glossy hair, straight, regular features, a rich olive complexion, and large, dark lustrous eyes, which, as she sat opposite the open door, were fixed on the thick, gloomy woods with an earnest, almost agonizing gaze, as if they were reading in its tangled depths the dark, uncertain future that lay before her. Never shall I forget the expression of her face. Never have I seen its look of keen, intense agony, and its ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... instant, are ominously still. Sometimes, as in the Eighth Sonata, Scriabine is like a gorgeous tropical bird preening himself in the quivering river light. Sometimes he is a seraphic creature outspreading his mighty pinions to greet some tremendous spirit sunrise. And in those last, bleeding, agonizing preludes, there is still the breath of flight. But this time it is another motion. Is it "the wind of death's imperishable wing"? Is it the blind hovering of the spirit that has quit its earthly habitation in the moment of dissolution? One ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... knowledge that no case could be like theirs, they beseeched God with bitter weeping for their lovers' lives, because, forsooth, they could not bear it if hurt came to them. The answers to many thousands of these agonizing appeals of maid and wife and mother were already ...
— An Echo Of Antietam - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... doth the cold and careless world Requite the toil divine of genius-souls, Their wasting cares and agonizing throes! I had a friend, a sweet and precious friend, One passing rich in all the strange and rare, And fearful gifts of song. On one great work, A poem in twelve cantos, she had toiled From early girlhood, e'en till she became An olden maid. Worn with intensest thought, She sunk at last, just ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... Nikita was leaning, and it shifted away and hit him in the back with one of its runners, he awoke and had to change his position whether he liked it or not. Straightening his legs with difficulty and shaking the snow off them he got up, and an agonizing cold immediately penetrated his whole body. On making out what was happening he called to Vasili Andreevich to leave him the drugget which the horse no longer needed, so that he ...
— Master and Man • Leo Tolstoy
... the priest, and faint and low, Like the sighing of an evening breeze, Comes through these painted lattices The ceaseless sound of human woe, Here, while her bosom aches and throbs With deep and agonizing sobs, That half are passion, half contrition, The luckless daughter of perdition Slowly confesses her secret shame! The time, the place, the lover's name! Here the grim murderer, with a groan, From his bruised conscience ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... against us." If we use this prayer without forgiving those who injure us, then, in so using it, we are really asking God not to forgive us. And Jesus practised what he preached. As he hung bleeding and agonizing on the cross, while his enemies were cruelly mocking his misery, he looked up to heaven, and uttered that wonderful prayer—"Father forgive them; for they know not what they do." Here we have the best illustration of forgiveness that the world has ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton
... heart of the multitudes around, and in a strong and clear voice, broke forth the unanimous and decisive answer: Amen—such truths we do indeed hold to be self-evident. And animated and sustained by a declaration, so inspiring and sublime, they rushed to arms, and as the result of agonizing efforts and dreadful sufferings, achieved under God the independence of their country. The great truth, whence they derived light and strength to assert and defend their rights, they made the foundation of their republic. And in the midst of this republic, must we prove, that He, who ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... to his grave, they pursued him after death with redoubled fury, and recounted with infinite gusto and satisfaction the supposed horrors of his death-bed: gloried in the fact that he was forlorn and friendless, and gloated like fiends over what they supposed to be the agonizing remorse of his ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... arrangement was yet more difficult. It required the exercise of authority to sever the ties that bound the son to the father. But it was done—Victor resigned his task to a little dog that was procured by the merchant, and after an agonizing farewell was whirled ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... read just now. He had known it must happen; but there seemed to him all the difference in the world between an event and its mere certainty.... The thing was done—out to every bitter detail of the loathsome, agonizing death—and it had been two of the men whom he had seen say mass after himself—the ruddy-faced, breezy countryman, yet anointed with the sealing oil, and the gentle, studious, smiling man who had been no less vigorous than ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... woe—a widow's cap. What signal of sorrow that grief holds out, ever moves so much as this? Their eyes were red with weeping, as could be seen when, for a moment, their deep bordered handkerchiefs were allowed to fall from their faces. Their eyes were red with weeping, and the agonizing grief of domestic bereavement sat chiselled on every feature. If you stood near enough, your heart would melt at ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... sovereign who formerly wielded unlimited power. To be present at—an actual witness, too—of this bitterness of death; to float, indecisively, in an incomprehensible mystery, between resemblance and reality; to hear everything, to see everything, without interfering in a single detail of agonizing suffering, was—so the king thought within himself—a torture far more terrible, since it might last forever. "Is this what is termed eternity—hell?" he murmured, at the moment the door was closed upon him, which we remember Baisemeaux had shut with his own ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of truth on one side, as the foundation of the subject,—"the humble truth," as he termed it at the beginning of "Une Vie,"—and of the agonizing of beauty on the other side, in composition, determines the whole use that Maupassant made of his literary gifts. It helped to make more intense and more systematic that dainty yet dangerous pessimism which in him was innate. The ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... Mary of fire-and-fagot memory; and Philip gladly would have placed Mary's sister Elizabeth in his half-vacant bed. The marriage of Philip and Mary was barren, and poor Mary's belief that a "blessed baby" was coming has been matter for laughter for more than three hundred years. Had her agonizing prayers for offspring been heard, what a change would have been wrought in human destinies, even had the child lived to be no older than Edward VI.! The second son of Philip the Fair and Juana ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... elbow. The Very Young Man crooked his arm through the little square orifice window that he found at his side, and, with a signal to his companions, all three in unison heaved upwards with all their strength. There came one agonizing instant of resistance; then with a wrenching of wood, the clatter of falling stones and a sudden crash, they burst through and straightened upright into ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... and its surroundings. It was written manifestly in the first instance to meet special and pressing current trials; it bears the impress of a time of severe sifting, a time when foundations were challenged, and individual faith put to even agonizing proofs, and the community threatened with an almost dissolution. Such a writing must have a voice articulate and sympathetic for a ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... consult her about some new songs. She sang them over to him several times, and then, as it was getting dark, she went out of the room for a few minutes to order lights. When she returned he was lying on the sofa, shivering with cold, and in agonizing pain. Leeches were applied, and he partially recovered; but another attack followed, and this was ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... to himself, it was some time before he could collect his scattered faculties; and when the agonizing consciousness of his terrible situation forced itself upon his mind, he had nigh relapsed into oblivion. He arose. He rushed towards the door; he knocked against it with his knuckles till the blood streamed from them; he scratched ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... But these precautions only half reassured him, for he knew that he could not see properly and that certain stains had very likely escaped him. He stood irresolute in the middle of the room, a prey to a somber, agonizing thought, the thought that he was going mad, that at that moment he was not in a fit state to come to a determination and to watch over his security, that his way of going to work was probably not the one the circumstances demanded. "Good heavens! ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... ship gripped them with the strange, clawing lassitude and discomfort. Bart, gasping under it, heard the girl moan, saw her slump lax in her chair, half fainting. Her face was so deathly white that he began seriously to be afraid she would die of her fear. Fighting his own agonizing weakness, he pulled himself upright. He reached the girl, dug ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... Unwashen there he crouched With famine-haggard cheeks, with sunken eyes Glaring his misery 'neath cavernous brows. Never his groaning ceased, for evermore The ulcerous black wound, eating to the bone, Festered with thrills of agonizing pain. As when a beetling cliff, by seething seas Aye buffeted, is carved and underscooped, For all its stubborn strength, by tireless waves, Till, scourged by winds and lashed by tempest-flails, The sea into deep caves hath gnawed its base; So greater 'neath his foot grew evermore The festering ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... gaze. There, upon the bed, lay the poor, unhappy girl swollen to an enormous size, her body moving about the bed as if Beelzebub himself were in her, while between her gasps for breath she exclaimed in agonizing sobs: "Oh, my God, I wish I were dead! I wish ...
— The Haunted House - A True Ghost Story • Walter Hubbell
... metal which had many desirable qualities, was too soft. Thomas B. Doolittle solved this problem by inventing a hard-drawn copper wire. A young man of twenty-two, John J. Carty, suggested a simple device for exorcising the hundreds of "mysterious noises" that had made the use of the telephone so agonizing. It was caused, Carty pointed out, by the circumstance that the telephone, like the telegraph, used a ground circuit for the return wire; the resultant scrapings and moanings and howlings were merely ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... She rarely saw Stephen except for a few moments late in the evening. He had ventured into Mrs. Carr's room once or twice; but his presence seemed to disturb her, the only presence that had done so. She looked distressed, made agonizing efforts to speak, and with the hand she could lift made a gesture to repel him when he drew near the bed. In Mercy's overwrought state, this seemed to her like an omen. She shuddered, and drew ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... madness in the day's exultant festivities; the bells may ring, the cannon may roar, the incense of our harmless saltpetre fill the air, and the children who are to inherit the fruit of these toiling, agonizing years, go about unblamed, making day and night vocal with their ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of the head, With the hand, as it were, of a master, This agonizing old gentleman said: "'Twas a truly ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... until all the boxes and parcels must have arrived in the Condamine, that an agonizing thought struck Hugh. What if Evie should be offended with him for buying her things to wear? What if she should imagine him capable of thinking that the things she already had were not good enough when she was ...
— Rosemary - A Christmas story • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... singlestick, and Sam as patiently learning, until the boy came to be so marvellously active on his legs, and to show such rapidity of eye and hand, that the Major, on one occasion, having received a more than usually agonizing cut on the forearm, remarked that he thought he was not quite so active on his pins as formerly, and that he must hand the boy ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... encountered their adversary with entire success. For no sooner had the arrow penetrated his skin, than he presently began to grow sick, exhibiting signs of the deepest distress. He threw himself into every imaginable shape, and with wonderful contortions and agonizing pains, rolled his ponderous body down along the declivity of the mountain, uttering horrid noises as he went, prostrating trees in his course, and falling ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... within me pounding, pulsing, beginning to answer in spite of myself. I tasted once more the warm, salty fluid on my lips. Eve's body was liquid in my arms; warm, heady, narcotizing. Once again I felt the agonizing, dagger sharp pain ...
— Each Man Kills • Victoria Glad
... swallowed all my teens, which is greedily devouring my youth, which will sap my prime, and in which my old age, if I am cursed with any, will be worn away! As my life creeps on for ever through the long toil-laden days with its agonizing monotony, narrowness, and absolute uncongeniality, how my spirit frets and champs its ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... excruciating pain, a spasm so agonizing that she thought, "I am going to die! I am dying!" And her soul was filled with a furious hatred; she felt she must curse this man who was the cause of all her agony, and this child which was killing her. She strained every muscle in a supreme effort to rid herself of ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... year to secure it a fair patrimony, a finished education, and an honorable position in life. How unremittingly these parents watch over the sick-bed of their children and of each other; and oh, what burning tears gush forth as the utterance of their agonizing hearts, when death threatens to blight a single bud, or lay his cold ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... figures on the box were sporting with each other disgracefully. Lucy had a spasm of envy. Granted that they wished to misbehave, it was pleasant for them to be able to do so. They were probably the only people enjoying the expedition. The carriage swept with agonizing jolts up through the Piazza of Fiesole and ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... she had allowed it, the train started with a puff and a wheeze, and ambled on toward its destination, with frequent brief pauses to get its breath or to accommodate the connections that were "all out of whack," and a final long and agonizing wait in the yards. That was the last straw—to be so near the goal and yet helplessly stranded just out of reach. Wishing to verify her own calculations, Betty leaned forward and asked a friendly-looking, gray-haired woman in the seat ahead ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... delicate irony no answer was possible, and Kate could only bite her lips, and pretend not to understand. But it was difficult not to turn pale and tremble sometimes, so agonizing were the anecdotes that the active brain of Dolly conjured up concerning the atrocities that pursuing husbands had perpetrated with knife and pistol on the betrayers of their happiness. And when these scarecrows failed, there were always ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... being ever tells the whole truth about himself. We seem to be born liars in that particular, all of us, and I am no different. I'm starting out now to tell the bitter, agonizing truth about myself, but before I am through I shall probably be lying at the rate of a mile a minute and cracking myself up something awful! A man can tell only so much truth; then he ...
— Goat-Feathers • Ellis Parker Butler
... sought the King everywhere, to entreat him to return, they could not ascertain where he had gone. Marie in great alarm caused all around her to join in the search, while she remained at one of the windows in a state of agonizing anxiety. At length the retreat of the fugitive was found, and M. de Souvre ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... Elizabeth hid her little son behind the altar and ran to the door hoping, it is supposed, to divert the attention of the furious priest from her son to herself. She shrieked, and the soldiers in the field above heard her agonizing cry, 'God help me, ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... the Campo di Fiora. Yet the only eye-witness who records the event, is Gaspar Schoppe, or Scioppius, who wrote a letter on the subject to his friend Rittershausen. Kepler, eight years afterwards, informed his correspondent Breugger that Bruno had been really burned: 'he bore his agonizing death with fortitude, abiding by the asseveration that all religions are vain, and that God identifies himself with the world, circumference and center.' Kepler, it may be observed, conceived a high opinion of Bruno's speculations, and pointed him out to Galileo as the man who ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... leave of us, and to make us the partners of his council. But the task imposed on Perdita was not the less painful. He had extorted from her a vow of secrecy; and her part of the drama, since it was to be performed alone, was the most agonizing that could be devised. But to return ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... but a few steps, when the three occupants of the room were startled by a series of sudden and agonizing cries. From the rear of the apartment came a succession of screams so piercing in their intensity, so filled with horror, that they found themselves for a moment unable to stir. Then Mrs. Morton gave a cry of anguish, ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... indifference to the girls. The girls were cleverer at it, and actually achieved the impression that they were indifferent. We kept an eye on them, uneasily, while we talked. To be in Nancy's presence and not alone with Nancy was agonizing, and I wondered at a sang-froid beyond my power to achieve, accused her of coldness, my sufferings being the greater because she seemed more beautiful, daintier, more irreproachable than I had ever seen her. Even at that early age she gave evidence of the social gift, and it was due to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... anger tortured him until midnight. Then he had a high fever and a distracting headache, and, the physical torment being the most insistent and distressing, he gave way before it. With such agonizing tears as spring from despairing wounded love he threw himself upon his bed, and his craving, suffering heart at length found rest in sleep from the terrible egotism ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... replied the unhappy girl, raising her right hand to her throbbing brow. "It may be so; perhaps it has all been a dream—a wild and fearful dream!—and I am awakened from it now; and yet—yet how can it be; how came my arm thus if it had not been reality—horrible, agonizing reality!" And as she spoke she removed the covering from her left arm. Painfully Isabella started: the beautiful limb hung powerless from wrist to shoulder, a dry and ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... down the pier to the very end, where the little roofed shelter lay out in the ocean, bathed in moonlight, fairylike, unreal. The ocean was a thing of molten silver. The sound of the wailing voices in song came to her on the breeze, agonizing in its beauty. There, beyond, lay Pearl Harbour. From the other side, faintly, you heard the music and laughter from the ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... pause: then midst a wail Of agonizing woe, His answer falls upon the ear, 'Yes, sister, you ...
— The Anti-Slavery Harp • Various
... dinginess, neglect, about the black velvet rugs and hangings. Her mother, she found, had pneumonia; there was practically no chance of her recovering. Linda sat for a short while by the elder's bed, intent upon a totally strange woman, darkly flushed and ravished in an agonizing difficulty of breathing. Linda had a remembered vision of her gold-haired and gay in floating chiffons, and suddenly life seemed shockingly brief. A serious-visaged clergyman entered the room as she left and she heard the rich soothing ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... an agonizing shriek rang through the forest. The same runners who had sped to Marie Torode's cottage and had learnt there that the wise woman had in truth passed away, had brought back with them Suzanne's mother, who threw herself on her child's body endeavouring to ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... agility of a boy. He ran up the hill, no one pursuing, and, as he neared the edge of the forest, turned and looked back. From the high ground where he stood, he could see the butchery, the fury of the conquerors, and the agonizing gestures of the victims. He turned again in horror, and plunged into the woods. As he tore his way through the briers and thickets, he met several fugitives escaped like himself. Others presently ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... screams; upon which the assassin, fearful of detection, ran away, and escaped from the house. The cauzee's wife awaking in a fright, alarmed her unhappy hosts, who, striking a light, came to her assistance; but how can we describe their agonizing affliction when they beheld their beloved child expiring, and their unfortunate guest, who had swooned away, bathed in the infant's blood. From such a scene we turn away, as the pen is incapable of description. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... and Aunt Matilda rigidly confronted them, having stolen upon them unseen, unheard, unthought of, and they stood now in grim horror, merciless and implacable. They advanced in a swooping body, after one moment of agonizing suspense, and snatched Adnah into their midst, glaring three kinds of loathing scorn upon ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... of her aunt's observations; she lay in a stupifying agony, insensible to all that passed. When supper was ready, her aunt endeavoured to arouse her. She started up, stared around her with a wild agonizing countenance, but spoke not a word. Her aunt became alarmed. She applied stimulants to her temples and forehead, and persuaded her to take some cordials. She remained seemingly insensible through the night: ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... years. He thought of his own boyhood when church was so distasteful. He thought of those ten busy years in Boston when he had worked among all classes of humanity, with churches on all sides, yet few reaching down into the lives of the people in any vital way. He knew of the silent, agonizing cry for help, for comfort, for light, that went up without ceasing day and night from humanity in sorrow, in suffering, in affliction, went up as it were to skies of brass, yet he knew a loving Savior stood ready to pour forth his healing love, a Divine Spirit waited only the means, to lay a healing ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... disappointment, that it was because he had lost. At the farther end of the course he turned his horse, and then his heart gave a leap and a bound as though it would burst, the blood leaped to his cheeks tingling, and his bosom thrilled with an almost agonizing pang of ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... lavished upon her every attention. Josephine was grateful, but sad, for her heart still yearned for William. Soon William, hearing of her arrival, and not knowing of her engagement, anxiously repaired to Fontainebleau. The interview was agonizing. William still loved her with the utmost devotion. They both found that they had been the victims of a conspiracy, though one of which De Beauharnais had ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... upon the trestle. Her steps are not regulated by the ties, and almost instantly she falls between them. Her hands grasp the rails on either side; but she has not sufficient strength to support herself. With an agonizing cry she drops twenty feet upon the jagged rocks below. Her head strikes a ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... was an eventful day; nor was its conclusion the least so. But little was said during the drive home. Each felt what bad been done by the other. Edith remembered how Dudleigh had risked the most terrible, the most agonizing of deaths to save her. Dudleigh, on his part, remembered that movement of hers, by which she was about to take the poison from his wound unto herself. The appalling event which had occurred had broken down all reserve. All was known. Each knew that the other was dearer than all the world. ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... on shore, while victory hung in the balance, were a prey to the most agonizing and conflicting emotions; the natives thirsting for more glory than they had already won, while the invaders feared to find themselves in even worse plight than before. The all of the Athenians being set upon their fleet, their fear for the event was like nothing ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... He was seized with violent sickness, such sickness as he had never yet known, and would have believed impossible. The sounds of his bodily anguish reached her from the room above. They stirred her emotion to a passion of helpless, agonizing pity. If she could only go up to him and put her hand on his forehead, and do things for him! But she couldn't; and she felt poignantly that if she did Ranny somehow wouldn't like it. So, as ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... opinions to mine. If there is one person I do despise more than another, it is the man who does not think exactly the same on all topics as I do—foolish people, I say, then, who have never experienced much of either, will tell you that mental distress is far more agonizing than bodily. Romantic and touching theory! so comforting to the love-sick young sprig who looks down patronizingly at some poor devil with a white starved face and thinks to himself, "Ah, how happy you are compared with me!"—so soothing ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... to recall her. The agonizing agitation passed from her and a great quiet fell upon her soul. The struggle was done. She had made the ancient sacrifice demanded of women since ever the first man went forth to war. It remained only to complete with fitting ritual this ancient sacrifice. She ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... side of the brougham, it flew, and Margaret tottered backward with an exclamation. The next moment she sent forth a scream, the grip of Frankl on her wrist agonizing ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... keen-edged and ruthless, was cutting its way through his soul, lacerating him, agonizing him. "And they loved each other. That made all the difference." Ah, God, the ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... never be informed—that our hopeless portion is that of the really dead—these considerations, I say, carry into the heart, which still palpitates, a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil. We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth—we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell. And thus all narratives upon this topic have an interest profound; an interest, nevertheless, which, through the sacred ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... years that woman watched over and took care of that idiotic child; and Mr. Moody says how much better would it have been if she had allowed God to have had his own way. Think of a God who would punish a mother for speaking to Him from an agonizing heart and saying, "I cannot give up my babe," and making the child an idiot. What would the devil have done under the same circumstances? That is the God we are expected to worship. I range myself with the opposition. The next day I read another sermon preached by the Rev. De Witt Talmage, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Oh, heavens! do not even mention the appalling word; there is something more terrible than death in the very idea. No, no," she continued, with vivid earnestness; "I do not; I cannot; I will not doubt of your affection. If ever such agonizing——" ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... strength of the juloh, Pottinger writes that, so searching is its nature, it has been known to kill camels and other hardy animals, and its effects on the human frame are said by eye-witnesses to be the most agonizing and repulsive imaginable. Shortly after contact with the wind the muscles of the sufferer become rigid and contracted, the skin shrivels, a terrible sensation as if the skin were on fire pervades the whole ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... astonished me:-the name of the parties concerned seemed to strike her with horror:-but when I said, We fought, and he fell; -"My son," cried she, "you have then murdered your father!" and she sunk breathless at my feet. Comments, Madam, upon such a scene as this, would to you be superfluous, and to me agonizing: I cannot, for both our sakes, be too concise. When she recovered, she confessed all the particulars of a tale which she had hoped never to have revealed.-Alas! the loss she had sustained of my father was not ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... ourselves; yet at this instant what horrors are being enacted in every part of the world! Men are perishing by every conceivable form of cruelty and natural anguish. Sailors are gurgling out their life in sea-storms; soldiers are agonizing on battle-fields; men, women, and children are being burnt, boiled, hacked, squashed, rent, exploded to death in every town and almost every village of the globe. Here in Paris, and over there in London, there is no end ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... revolving, a shriek rent the air and froze my young blood. Some mother parting from a son who was on board our vessel, no longer able to restrain her emotion, was borne away, frantically raving in the delirium of grief. I have never forgotten that agonizing scene, or the despairing wail that was enough to pierce the hardest heart. I imagined my heart was about to break; and when we put out to sea in a damp and dreary drizzle, and the shore-line dissolved away, while on board there was overcrowding, and confusion ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... out into the world without one morsel of food, one cent of money, one foot of land. Naked and unarmed he was pushed forward into a dark cavern and told to beard the lion in his den. In childlike simplicity he undertook the task. Soon the air was filled with his agonizing cries; for the claws and teeth of the lion were ripping open every vein and crushing every bone. In this hour of dire distress the negro lifted up his voice in loud, long piteous wails calling upon those ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... sprinkling the deck with hot vinegar, to remove the stains and odor of blood. The dead numbered forty-three, and sixty-one were wounded. An eye-witness of the terrible spectacle writes of it: "Fragments of the dead were distributed in every direction, the decks covered with blood,—one continued, agonizing yell of the unhappy wounded. A scene so horrible of my fellow-creatures, I assure you, deprived me very much of the pleasure of victory." Yet, with all this terrific destruction and loss of life on the "Macedonian," the "United States" was but little injured; and ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... it reached the seat of my trousers. There it pinched, presumably to ascertain whether or no I were malingering, a most agonizing pinch like to that of a pair of blacksmith's tongs. So sharp was it that, although I did not stir, who was aware that the slightest movement meant death, it tore a piece out of the stout cloth of my breeches, to say nothing of a portion of the skin beneath. This ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... Madame de la Tour saw me coming, she eagerly cried,—"Where is my daughter—my dear daughter—my child?" My silence and my tears apprised her of her misfortune. She was instantly seized with a convulsive stopping of the breath and agonizing pains, and her voice was only heard in sighs and groans. Margaret cried, "Where is my son? I do not see my son!" and fainted. We ran to her assistance. In a short time she recovered, and being assured that Paul was ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... he rushed toward the spot from whence the sound proceeded, but could see no one. Calling the name of his bride, he dashed forward through the thicket, but could see or hear nothing of her. He called loudly again, but received no response. The silence was agonizing, and he listened for several moments, when he heard the crackling of some branches in the distance. He rushed frantically to the spot, but his career was quickly stopped by an object on the ground. It was the torn and now ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... chills the Champion's heart, His brain whirls round with agonizing smart; O'er his wan cheek no gushing sorrows flow, Senseless he sinks beneath the weight of woe; Relieved at length, with frenzied look, he cries: "Prove thou art mine, confirm my doubting eyes! For I am Rustem!" Piercing was the groan, Which burst from his torn heart—as wild and lone, ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... brought out, a dozen of the bravest fell upon him at once; and, with their ungainly blunt swords, hacked away at his hands and feet with all the delight an Abyssinian has for spilling blood. Whilst submitting to this agonizing torture, Lij Barie never lost his courage or presence of mind, and it is very remarkable that whilst they were so unmercifully murdering him, he prophesied, almost to a letter, the fate that before long ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... his soul in prayer. Marcellus felt as though his own soul was being lifted up to the courts of heaven, to the presence of the Saviour, by the power of that, fervent and agonizing prayer. The words seemed to find an echo in his own soul. In his deep abasement he rested his wants upon his companion so that he might present them in a more ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... sees men approach in dazzling cloaks, of which the hoods cover their eyes and face, like those worn by the monks of Cologne; but he finds that they are crushing weights of gilded lead—splendid semblance and agonizing, destroying reality. Again, when the two poets, Dante and Virgil, came to the Abyss of Evil-pits (Malebolge), down which the crimson stream of Phlegethon leaps in "a Niagara of blood," he is on the edge of the Circle ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... brain-fever demon starts on a low but steadily rising key, and is a spiral twist which augments in intensity and severity with each added spiral, growing sharper and sharper, and more and more painful, more and more agonizing, more and more maddening, intolerable, unendurable, as it bores deeper and deeper and deeper into the listener's brain, until at last the brain fever comes as a relief and the man dies. I am bringing some of these birds home to America. They will be a great curiosity there, and it ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... with many the suffering is too great for self-deception, and they come home to look back upon those long halls, filled with the masterpieces of ancient and modern art, as mere torture-chambers, whence nothing is brought away but backache, headache, weary feet and an agonizing confusion of ideas. Some of them avenge themselves by making fun of the whole matter: they tell you that there is a great deal of humbug about your great pictures and statues; that Raphael is nearly as much overrated as Shakespeare; that it is all nonsense ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... the Peasant from that little cot, Where PEACE and LOVE have blest his humble life? In vain his agonizing wife With tears bedews her husband's face, And clasps him in a long and last embrace; In vain his children round his bosom creep, And weep to see their mother weep, Fettering their father with their little arms; What are to him the wars ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... they were all but saved or all but lost. And while the strife hung in the balance, you might hear in the Athenian army at once lamentation, shouting, cries of victory or defeat, and all the various sounds which are wrung from a great host in extremity of danger. Not less agonizing were the feelings of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... human hearts endure, That part which kings or laws[11] can cause or cure. Still to ourselves in every place consign'd, Our own felicity we make or find[12]; With secret course, which no loud storms annoy, Glides the smooth current of domestick joy: The lifted axe, the agonizing wheel, Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel, To men remote from power, but rarely known, Leave reason, faith, and conscience, all ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... on that lonely, patient, wistful little creature making the best shift she could with those pitiable playthings, something came up from that man's breast into his throat. He had not supposed he had any of it left in his soul—it was tender, agonizing, heartrending pity. ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... detective, and alms-house reports; city missionaries' explorations, and the testimony of the abandoned and sin-blasted, who, about to take the final plunge, have staggered back just for a moment, to utter the wild shriek of their warning, and the agonizing wail of ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... heavens! do not even mention the appalling word; there is something more terrible than death in the very idea. No, no," she continued, with vivid earnestness; "I do not; I cannot; I will not doubt of your affection. If ever such agonizing——" ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... animal and sensual pleasure in the look of blood, and in the inspection of mortal agonies. I can see no other explanation of the phenomena which meet my eye in Africa. In almost all the towns on the Oil Rivers, you see dead or dying animals in some agonizing position." [189] ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... live—what regrets, what hopes, what fears! The sky was darkening, earth fading; wealth, power, fame, the prizes most esteemed of men, were as nothing. His only hope lay in the Saviour of whom his mother had taught him. I doubt not his earnest, agonizing prayer was heard. Nay, to doubt would be to question ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... climbed the stairs to bed, it was understood that the hour of retribution had arrived. Dorothy wept softly while undressing, and uttered agonizing shrieks as she underwent her chastisement. Down-stairs the girls looked at one another aghast, and Hobo whined uneasily, as if asking permission to interfere. Then the uproar ended abruptly, and Dorothy climbing upon Peggy's knee, pledged herself solemnly ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... that was yet more painful, when my Sigurd they ingloriously slew in his bed; though of all most cruel, when of Gunnar the glistening serpents to the vitals crawled; but the most agonizing, which to my heart flew, when the brave king's heart ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... the rescue, when the dog with a sudden, desperate jerk freed himself. Mad with rage and pain, he tried to seize the raccoon's throat. But his enemy managed to elude the strangling grip, and getting on his feet, again caught Tiger, this time by the cheek, causing another agonizing yelp. ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... night appeared now to Andras as an almost fantastic dream. Since then he had erected a mausoleum of marble on the very spot where Prince Sandor fell; and of all the moments of that romantic, picturesque war, the agonizing moment, the wild scene of the burial of his father, was most vivid in his memory—the picture of the warrior stretched in the snow, his hand on the handle of his sword, remained before his eyes, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... 65th swept on, yet it felt the cold air from the cavern. It had, of course, seen accidents, men injured in various ways, but never had it viewed so many, nor so much blood, and never before had it rushed past the helpless and the agonizing. There were surgeons and ambulances—there seemed to be a table of planks on which the worst cases were laid—the sufferers had help, of course, a little help. A Creole from Bayou Teche lay writhing, shot through the stomach, beneath a pine. He was raving. "Melanie, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... to human anguish so inured That thou hast neither sentiment of grief Nor sense of pity for terrestrial ills? Can agonizing and heart-rending scenes Relax thy obdurate and placid face To semblance of emotion? Can man's woes Excite thy tranquil immobility To the pathetic look of tenderness, Or touch thy bosom's calm indifference ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... brow darkened already with the shades of death; then, with a convulsive groan, with a half start, he lifted his eyes above. They rested not on the face of the editor nor on the pitying brows of his relenting judges. He saw them not; they were as if the vast space was desolate and bare; one pale agonizing face alone was all he recognized—one cry of a broken heart was all that, amidst the murmurs and the shouts of the populace, reached his ear. The ferocity vanished from his brow; a soft, a tender expression ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... he was wicked in not staying in the library and continuing his duties to the party. He had to crowd into a minute all his agonizing and be ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... and the distressed orphan, in all his brilliant array, shot backwards into some shrubs of a prickly nature, whose sharp thorns added to his agonizing sensations. ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... They had their moments of rapturous love—passionate attempts at self-surrender. They had long hours of cool discussion, as impersonal as if they had been talking about the characters out of a hook instead of about themselves. They had stormy nerve-tearing hours of blind agonizing, around and around in circles, lacerating each other, lashing out at each other, getting nowhere. They ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... winding-sheet of Edward's race. Give ample room, and verge enough The characters of hell to trace. Mark the year, and mark the night, When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death, thro' Berkley's roofs that ring, Shrieks of an agonizing King! She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate, From thee be born, who o'er thy country hangs The scourge of Heav'n. What terrors round him wait! Amazement ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... commonplace, humdrum spot, as you think, when your visions had been in other fields. He might make you a seed-sower, like lonely Morrison in China, when you wanted to be a harvester like Moody. Here is the real battlefield. The fighting and agonizing are here. Not with God but with yourself, that the old self in you may be crucified and Jesus ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... into the sea, and had a glorious swim. You cannot sink. You make very little way in the water, and tire yourself if you try to swim fast. If a drop of the water happens to get into your eye, nose, or mouth, it is agonizing; it is so salt, hard, and bitter. Next day I felt very ill from the effects of my bath. In the first place, I was too hot to have plunged into the cold water at once; and, in the second place, I stopped in too long, because, being the only woman, and the place of disrobing being somewhat ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... him.] No, I live that I may still your agonizing cry,— Live that I may lean my bosom on your breast ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... credited with possessing either fear or a heart, but now he showed that he was a moral as well as a physical coward, and was racked by most agonizing fears. ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... hour from the sound of the first warning bugle the head of the column began to move, just as daylight was breaking. Comparatively few of the officers of Ralph's regiment were married men, and there were therefore fewer of those agonizing partings that wrung the hearts of many belonging to regiments that had been quartered for some time at home; but Ralph saw enough to convince him that the soldier should remain a single man at any rate ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... The agonizing suspense in which Helen had been living for the last few days had laid a heavy hand upon her. Her cheeks were thin, and had been woefully pale until the sudden excitement of this visit had called up a faint hectic flush which had no kindred with the color of health. ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... plan is quite as 'practical' as the other. Interest has to be paid on a mortgage, and if it can't be paid, why it's foreclosed, both in real life and Irish melodramas where the lovely heroine has the most agonizing alternatives offered her. Suppose, anyhow, we just let Mr. Storm tell us—since he's an expert—what he means by the 'right way' of turning Kidd's Pines into a hotel. Maybe he means something ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... give my love to Sairey and the little uns." And Mr. Bouncer "went the complete unicorn," for the last time in that term, by extemporising a farewell solo to Verdant, which was of such an agonizing character of execution, that Huz, and Buz his brother, lifted up ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... Anderson was silent all this time. She was sighing and groaning in a spasmodic devotion. She was "seeking strength from above to do her whole duty," she would have told you. She was "agonizing" in prayer for her daughter, and she contrived that her stage-whisper praying should now and then reach the ears of its devoted object. Humphreys remained seated, pretending to read the copy of "Josephus," but watching the coming storm with the interest ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... father! she's my child! she's my child!" I reached the door, which was guarded by the sheriff, in a condition of mental exaltation (or concentration), which to this day reflects itself at the recollection of that agonizing cry of the beautiful young mother, set upon by the myrmidons of the law whose base inhumanity shames the brute! "Who is it?" "What is it?" "What does it all mean?" were the anxious queries put up on all ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... through the bosom steal, Like one who stands upon a precipice, And sees below a mangled sacrifice, Feeling that he himself must ere long fall, With none to save him, none to hear his call, Or wrest him from the agonizing thrall? ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... bigness, of nobility, he of all men, when, after his outburst in the little drawing-room that night, he had stood back to wait until Joan had grown up. He had waited for six weeks, going through tortures of Joan-sickness that were agonizing. He had asked her to do what she could for him in the way of a little kindness, but had not received one single line. He was prepared to continue to wait because he knew his love to be so great that it must eventually catch hold of her ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... always been a source of great amusement to citizens, but what a horror to plebes. Those torturous twistings and twirlings, stretching every nerve, straining every sinew, almost twisting the joints out of place and making life one long agonizing effort. Was there ever a "plebe," or recruit, who did not hate, did not shudder at the mere mention of squad drill? I did. Others did. I remember distinctly my first experience of it. I formed ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... ended as an offensive victory for the French. And so this terrible drama is an epitome of the whole great war: a brief term of success for the Germans at the start, due to a tremendous preparation which took careless adversaries by surprise—terrible and agonizing first moments, soon offset by energy, heroism, and the spirit of sacrifice; and finally, victory for the Soldiers ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... horrified by the sight which met his gaze. There, upon the bed, lay the poor, unhappy girl swollen to an enormous size, her body moving about the bed as if Beelzebub himself were in her, while between her gasps for breath she exclaimed in agonizing sobs: "Oh, my God, I wish I were dead! I ...
— The Haunted House - A True Ghost Story • Walter Hubbell
... times they seem to run into each other. Maggie erred in not closing the gate of her heart inexorably, and in not resisting the sway of a purely "physiological law." The vivid description of this sort of love, with its "strange agitations" and agonizing ecstasies, would have been denounced as immoral fifty years ago. The denouement is an improbable catastrophe on a tidal river, in the rising floods of which Maggie and her brother are drowned,—a favorite way with the author in disposing of her heroes ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... great richness of the soil. The luxuriance of the vegetation on the slopes of Etna attracts the attention of every traveler; and Mr. Gladstone remarked upon this point: "It seems as though the finest of all soils were produced from the most agonizing throes of nature, as the hardiest characters are often reared amidst the severest circumstances. The aspect of this side of Sicily is infinitely more active and the country is cultivated as well as most ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... if his brain were on fire, each nerve-centre agonizing separately in the intolerable, all-enveloping flames. And through the dreadful stillness he heard the beat, beat, beat, of his heart, like the feet of a runaway along ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... in the tent till the sun had slightly warmed the air, and then attempted to prepare breakfast by the fire; but no one could eat anything, and the native from Waimea complained of severe headache, which shortly became agonizing, and he lay on the ground moaning, and completely prostrated by mountain sickness. I felt extreme lassitude, and exhaustion followed the slightest effort; but the use of snow to the head produced great relief. The water in our canteens was hard frozen, and the keenness of the cold aggravated ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... loving, trusting little ones. The wretched children of our time,—alone in wretchedness,—alone in the universe of nature,—who found, where nature promised them a mother's love, the knife, or the more cruel agonizing drug of death. Was there any cause in nature for it? Yes. They did it for the 'burial fee,' perhaps, or for some other cause as good. They had a reason for it. Let our naturalists throw their learning 'to the dogs,' and come ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... interpret His prophecy that He would build again His temple, nor understand the spirituality of His kingdom. These facts seem to me utterly to demolish the theory of a vision called up by eager, yea, agonizing, expectation. The idea of the Resurrection justifies His prophecies as to Himself and the fact accounts, better than any theory which denies the fact, for the faith and founding of the early Church as well as for the course of subsequent history and ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... fearing even to receive it then lest it announce the death of the loved ones. No telegraph, no railroad, no postal service, no newspaper might offer relief, only the letter brought by some friend, or the bit of news told by some passing traveller. It was a time of agonizing anxiety. There were months when the wife heard nothing; we have seen from the letters of Mrs. Adams that three months sometimes intervened between the letters from her husband. In 1774, when John Adams was at Philadelphia, such a short distance from Boston, according to ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... was slight and graceful, and her face very beautiful. She had long, black, glossy hair, straight, regular features, a rich olive complexion, and large, dark lustrous eyes, which, as she sat opposite the open door, were fixed on the thick, gloomy woods with an earnest, almost agonizing gaze, as if they were reading in its tangled depths the dark, uncertain future that lay before her. Never shall I forget the expression of her face. Never have I seen its look of keen, intense agony, and its full, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... uttered loud screams; upon which the assassin, fearful of detection, ran away, and escaped from the house. The cauzee's wife awaking in a fright, alarmed her unhappy hosts, who, striking a light, came to her assistance; but how can we describe their agonizing affliction when they beheld their beloved child expiring, and their unfortunate guest, who had swooned away, bathed in the infant's blood. From such a scene we turn away, as the pen is incapable of description. The unhappy lady at length revived, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... spake, he threw to him across the table jewelled orders and diamond crosses, saying: 'Wear these in memory of me!' The Herald then drew near, and read to him from the Black Book the form of abjuration. The agonizing and swooning man mechanically repeated the words one by one after him, not even hearing the sound of his own voice. His head had fallen on the bosom of his bride, his lips still moved, but his eyes were glaring in the whiteness of death—and so he uttered all the prescribed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... huts, they raised no voice of appeal to us for alms as we went among them.... Men, women, and children stand silent, famishing with hunger. Their only appeal comes from their sad eyes, through which one looks as through an open window into their agonizing souls. ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... to be ever admitted on the English stage; but it furnishes occasion for the display of consummate art in the imitation of the most terrible and overpowering emotions; and it is difficult to conceive a more powerful representation than they exhibited of the gloomy forebodings of suspicion, of the agonizing suspence of unsatisfied doubt, and the "sickening pang of hope deferred"—heightened, rather than diminished, by the consciousness of innocent intention, and the feeling of undeserved affliction, and giving way only to the certainty of ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... talked over the poor king's situation, and Sir Lucas was very open and comforting. How many sad meetings have I had with him heretofore ; first in the alarming attacks of poor Mr. Thrale, and next in the agonizing fluctuations ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... no hint of the tumult in his breast, though some malign spirit seemed to whisper the agonizing question: "Will you permit her to fall into the hands of the ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... how eagerly everybody watched it! The poor toll-gatherer, if he had had the courage, would have run after the children, and snatched them back from their doom. Every looker-on was anxious; yet all the anxiety of the multitude could not equal the agonizing suspense in that one father's heart. He thought he knew the strength of the piers; he thought he could tell how long they would stand against the ice; but what if he ...
— Little Grandmother • Sophie May
... stout Whigs doubtless bled at the thought of what Fenwick must have suffered, the agonizing struggle, in a mind not of the firmest temper, between the fear of shame and the fear of death, the parting from a tender wife, and all the gloomy solemnity of the last morning. But whose heart was to bleed at the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... itself pretty well known at that day, and whose fate, pathetic at all times, out-tragedies almost any other in the history of letters. She was seized with hydrophobia from the bite of her dog, on a railroad train; and made a long journey home in the paroxysms of that agonizing disease, which ended in her death after she reached New York. But this was after her reign had ended, and no such black shadow was cast forward upon Pfaff's, whose name often figured in the verse ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... now admitted, but still one which bound him in fetters of steel. His life had been one of grossest inconsistency. He was utterly out of tune with the universe. His incessant clash with the world of people and events had sounded nothing but agonizing discord. And his confusion of thought had become such that, were he asked why he was in Simiti, he could scarcely have told. At length he ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... my mind could make no headway against its monstrous assemblage of horror. There was something in that jagged black hill against the moonshine and the gigantic basin of darkness out of which it rose that seemed to gather all these gaunt and grisly effects into one appalling heap of agonizing futility. That rock rose up and crouched like something that broods ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... highly-susceptible temperament of Merton. From that moment peace fled his mind. He went instantly home; but instead of devoting himself, as before, to those studies in which he delighted, and in which he was wont so highly to excel, he immured himself in his chamber, giving way to gloomy abstraction, and agonizing his spirit with painful and most distressing fancies. The great power of his imagination caused him, in a peculiar manner, to suffer from the remembrance of what he had witnessed; and, accordingly, his waking as well as his sleeping hours were haunted with visions of noses,—noses of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... rarest fruit, And birds, enamoured, ne'er were mute. Bowed down with terror and distress, Watched by each cruel giantess,— Like a poor solitary deer When ravening tigresses are near,— The hapless lady lay distraught Like some wild thing but newly caught, And found no solace, no relief From agonizing fear and grief; Not for one moment could forget Each terrifying word and threat, Or the fierce eyes upon her set By those who watched around. She thought of Rama far away, She mourned for Lakshman as she lay In grief and terror and dismay Half ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... the dark is more real than God in his heaven as "protector." We must remember that not what we feel is of value, but what the child feels is of value is what will appeal to his interest and attention. And no exertion or agonizing on our part will create interest in the child in matters for which his own understanding and experience have not fitted him. For example, probably no child is ever interested in learning the church catechism or Bible verses which ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... which has swallowed all my teens, which is greedily devouring my youth, which will sap my prime, and in which my old age, if I am cursed with any, will be worn away! As my life creeps on for ever through the long toil-laden days with its agonizing monotony, narrowness, and absolute uncongeniality, how my spirit frets and champs ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... untarnished gold. Yet he could not and would not speak, and she came on till she stood opposite him, the dead woman lying there between them. Then for the first time she lowered her eyes and he awoke with a start of agonizing pain. ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... where I might, from that hour to this, I have never been free from agonizing remorse, nor have I been able for one moment to banish from my memory the sight of that face,—the face of my brother, killed by my own hand, and a discovery which I made within the first few hours of my flight made ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... and winter, with ghosts of memory, with figures in literature, and has finally obtained a respectable audience without once raising his voice. He has written surprisingly little love poetry; the notes of passion, as we are accustomed to hear them, seldom sound from his lute; nor do we hear the agonizing cries of doubt, remorse, or despair. There is nothing turbulent and nothing truculent; he has made no contribution to the literature of revolt. Yet many of his poems make an irresistible appeal ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... sounds had once more commenced to well up from the dark depths, and in a most agonizing fashion too. Even Rod felt a thrill, although he could give a pretty good guess concerning the nature of the poor unfortunate who was the contributing cause ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow
... suffice it to say that he passed from celluloid to a blue flannel shirt and from blue to grey. The sight of a red cotton handkerchief in his wash at length warned me that his disappointed love had unhinged his mind, and I feared the worst. Then came an agonizing interval of three weeks during which he sent me nothing, and after that came the last parcel that I ever received from him an enormous bundle that seemed to contain all his effects. In this, to my horror, I discovered one shirt the breast of which was stained a deep crimson with his ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... the passage. She advanced, and listened. When she came to the second, she heard a voice, apparently in complaint, within, to which she continued to listen, afraid to open the door, and unwilling to leave it. Convulsive sobs followed, and then the piercing accents of an agonizing spirit burst forth. Emily stood appalled, and looked through the gloom, that surrounded her, in fearful expectation. The lamentations continued. Pity now began to subdue terror; it was possible she might administer comfort to the sufferer, at least, by expressing sympathy, and she laid ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... began to see him I could not say. Every impulse and vital force of nature centered in my eyes, and they fastened themselves upon that one irregular shadow in the opposing corner which slowly—oh! with such agonizing slowness—assumed the outlines of a man. My fascinated gaze wandered not nor wearied. When in the moist light of the morning I clearly saw Broussard, haggard, pale and sunken-eyed, watching me thirty feet away, it seemed that I had ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... reason for Jean's high head and burning cheeks, and in spite of his sense of agonizing humiliation, he was glad to ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... sunlight is brightest a strange darkness came over all the scene, the sun's light being obscured or failing wholly. And for three hours this strange, weird spectacle continues. Then the hushed silence is broken by an agonizing cry from the lips of Jesus, "My God—My God—why—didst—Thou—forsake—Me?" One of the bewildered bystanders thinks He is calling for Elijah, and another wonders if something startling ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... back to you in after years, when his grave is green in the quiet valley, and the worn and weary hands that have toiled for you are forever at rest, how patiently he submitted while his daughter pinned the clean, stiff, agonizing white collar about his neck, and brushed the velvet collar of his best coat; how he toiled up the long, dark, lonesome stairs, not with the egotism of a half century ago, but with the light of anticipated ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... no friend—a young girl at the mercy of soldiers, who could not be expected to regard her with any sympathy beyond that which is accompanied with repulsive leers and hints. Day after day her loneliness and helplessness became more agonizing. Farnsworth, it is true, did all he could to relieve the strain of her situation; but Hamilton had an eye upon what passed and soon interfered. He administered a bitter reprimand, under which his subordinate writhed in ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... have moved if I wanted to. I could scarcely breathe. Then I felt the blood within me pounding, pulsing, beginning to answer in spite of myself. I tasted once more the warm, salty fluid on my lips. Eve's body was liquid in my arms; warm, heady, narcotizing. Once again I felt the agonizing, dagger sharp ...
— Each Man Kills • Victoria Glad
... Sancho continued with the lashing, which he administered to a perfectly innocent tree with such brutality and ferocity that the bark flew in all directions. All the while he gave vent to his pain by fierce shrieks, and then there came one long agonizing cry, which nearly rent Don Quixote's heart, and Sancho exclaimed piteously: "Here dies Sancho, and all with him!" Don Quixote hastened to his squire's side, and insisted for the sake of his unsupported wife and children that he go no further, but ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... when Dr. Stirling came back, but it was barely eleven o'clock, and people were only just returning from Hanbridge Theatre and Hanbridge Music Hall. The use of the electrical apparatus was a dead spectacle. Sophia's inertness under it was agonizing. They waited, as it were, breathless for the result. And there was no result. Both injections and electricity had entirely failed to influence the paralysis of Sophia's mouth and throat. Everything ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the mean of truth on one side, as the foundation of the subject,—"the humble truth," as he termed it at the beginning of "Une Vie,"—and of the agonizing of beauty on the other side, in composition, determines the whole use that Maupassant made of his literary gifts. It helped to make more intense and more systematic that dainty yet dangerous pessimism which in him was innate. The middle-class ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... become damp with perspiration. Moreover, as our long marches and short sleeps had brought us round to the calendar day, we were facing the sun, and this, with the southwest wind, burned my face so badly that it was little short of agonizing. But I consoled myself with the reflection that we were now less than a hundred miles from land. I tried to forget my stinging flesh in looking at the land clouds which we could see from this camp. There is no mistaking these clouds, which are permanent and formed of the condensation of ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... horror of that agonizing thrill! (I can feel the place in frosty weather still). For a week from ten to four I was fastened to the floor, While a mercenary wopped ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... sights I have ever seen in China. Seven dogs were dragging a corpse from a coffin, barely covered with earth, which formed one of the grave mounds which skirt the road. No one was disturbed by the scene; it was not uncommon. But the foreigner suffered an agonizing sickness, for which his companions would have been at a loss to find any possible reason, and was ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... until she came down. In this state did J. find me on his return from England. His family was up in Aaleih, and he used to ride over occasionally to see P. and prescribe some new medicine for him, but his skill was baffled with this terrifying disease, and poor P. remained in this agonizing state of suffering for five whole months without leaving his bed. He was carried down on a litter to Beirut, where he has been since. He took a little room by himself, and gives lessons in English until something more prosperous turns up for him. Twenty years' experience ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... short her weeping and make an end of this agonizing state of affairs, I ought to have gone up to my wife and comforted her, caressed her, or apologized; but how could I do it so that she would believe me? How could I persuade the wild duck, living in captivity ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... his own side), and hurried up the steps. Passing through another door bolted like the first within side, he issued upon the roof. He was now on the highest part of the cathedral, and farther from his hopes than ever; and so agonizing were his feelings, that he almost felt tempted to fling himself headlong downwards. Beneath him lay the body of the mighty fabric, its vast roof, its crocketed pinnacles, its buttresses and battlements scarcely discernible through the gloom, but looking ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... boilers continued for a long time before public opinion quelled the boyish love of victory which tempted not only the steamboatmen but their passengers too. These joined with the captain in forcing the boat to the top of its speed, at the risk of a swift or agonizing death to all on board; and it was no doubt with their full approval that the master of the beautiful new steamer Moselle took the chance that resulted in the loss of more than two hundred lives on the 26th of April, 1838. She had just left her moorings at Cincinnati for her ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... Major, faint with the terror of his helplessness and the crushing weight of the quivering masses of muscle about him, would have fallen but for their dread support. His consciousness fast deserting him, fascinated, he watched the monstrous leer as the head drew farther back, poised. He felt the agonizing pressure as the great muscles steeled for the blow, and in the moment before his senses departed, heard two crashing shots that sounded from behind him. With the smashing reports the poised head thudded ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... awful thing to be turned adrift in a world of sin and suffering with this agonizing sense. He could look, whether he would or not, beneath the smiling and rubicund countenance of the hail-fellow-well-met to that corrosive spot within where the trust of the widow and fatherless had been betrayed; or see beyond the stolid and heavy ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... could get no sleep; she could not swallow food half the time or retain it. She was beset by horrible visions. She was racked by an inexpressible longing. But she held on. Those who knew her and watched her agonizing battle with astonishment and sympathy told her that she was killing herself. "It may be," she would answer, "but I shall die true to my oath." "But," they would urge, "a habit like yours, which has obtained for years, should be broken gradually." "I will master ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... witnesses, vainly endeavouring to tell the truth, forced by the ingenuity of lawyers into falsehood and perjury! What awful denunciations and what light wit, almost in the same breath! Of what laughter hardly suppressed by judicial authority would it tell—what agonizing sobs altogether unsuppressable would it describe—how many a clever, smiling, self-sufficient barrister would it, from long knowledge, have learnt to laugh to scorn—of how many a sharp attorney would it declare the hidden ways! But yards ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... endless months had gone to the preparation of a deed that had taken one second! That transformed him! His life on earth, his spirit in the beyond, could never be now what they might have been. And he sobbed through grinding teeth as he felt the disintegrating, agonizing, irremediable forces at work on ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... love and their little knowledge that no case could be like theirs, they beseeched God with bitter weeping for their lovers' lives, because, forsooth, they could not bear it if hurt came to them. The answers to many thousands of these agonizing appeals of maid and wife and mother were already in the ...
— An Echo Of Antietam - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... great dryness and constriction of skin, loss of appetite, difficult breathing, tendency to syncope, and utter indifference. Baron Mueller, in his ascent of Orizava (17,800 feet), found great difficulty in breathing, and experienced the sensation of a red-hot iron searing his lungs, and agonizing pains in the chest, followed by fainting-fits and torrents of blood from his mouth; Humboldt, in scaling Chimborazo, suffered from nausea akin to sea-sickness, and a flow of blood from the nose and lips; while Herndon, on the slope of Puy-puy (15,700 feet), said he thought ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... each other disgracefully. Lucy had a spasm of envy. Granted that they wished to misbehave, it was pleasant for them to be able to do so. They were probably the only people enjoying the expedition. The carriage swept with agonizing jolts up through the Piazza of Fiesole and into the ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... the worthy lady who contrived this somewhat original device, understand fully my opinion upon the matter—good morning"; and with these words he left me again in doubt, and involved in all horrors of the most agonizing suspense. I had reason to think that Lord Glenfallen wreaked his vengeance upon the author of the strange story which I had heard, with a violence which was not satisfied with mere words, for old Martha, with whom I was a great favourite, while attending me in ...
— Two Ghostly Mysteries - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family; and The Murdered Cousin • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... heavens to avenge his cause, "for they are old like him", there is nothing extravagant or impious in this sublime identification of his age with theirs; for there is no other image which could do justice to the agonizing sense of ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... fruit remained. If, in the palmy days of Athenian greatness, any field of human inquiry had been successfully explored; if human reason had achieved any conquests; if any thing true and good had been obtained, that must endure as an heir-loom for all coming time; and if those centuries of agonizing wrestlings with nature, and of ceaseless questioning of the human heart, had yielded no results, then, at least, the lesson of their failure and defeat remained for the instruction of future generations. Either the problems they sought to solve were proved to be insoluble, or ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... exciting, crept in upon my spirit, or that my thoughts fell back aghast upon the wild tales and thrilling theories of the entombed Morella? I snatched from the scrutiny of the world a being whom destiny compelled me to adore, and in the rigorous seclusion of my home, watched with an agonizing anxiety over all ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... that we are hereby more conformed to the example of our blessed Master: though we must ever recollect one important difference, that the sufferings of Christ were voluntarily borne for our benefit, and were probably far more exquisitely agonizing than any which we are called upon to undergo. Besides, it must be a solid support to us amidst all our troubles to know, that they do not happen to us by chance; that they are not even merely the punishment of sin; but ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... Rushville, and—O, curse of curses!—gave way to my appetite. The moment the whisky began to affect me, I forgot that I had crutches, and set my lame leg down with my whole weight upon it. The sudden and agonizing pain caused me to give a scream, and yet I repeated the step a number of times. But the insufferable pain caused me to ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... and he himself was slain. Yet was the token preserved to us, and yet again the sign from heaven will come. And then—thou knowest—" But here a shiver of pain went through him, and his speech gave place to agonizing moans. When he spoke again his words were but a whisper. "Lay me—in front of—the altar," he said. "Now ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... his rightful reign When from the woods he comes again. The Brahmans on the prince's head King-making drops shall quickly shed, And Sita, Earth, and Fortune share The glories which await the heir. For him, when forth his chariot swept, The crowd that thronged Ayodhya wept, With agonizing woe distressed. With him in hermit's mantle dressed In guise of Sita Lakshmi went, And none his glory may prevent. Yea, naught to him is high or hard, Before whose steps, to be his guard, Lakshman, the best who draws the bow, With spear, shaft, sword rejoiced to go. His wanderings in the ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... refusing to acknowledge Thee, Vain man denies his own reality; But tho' the boon of life he may receive From God, and still affect to disbelieve, What are his views at death's resounding knell? Just Heaven! Sure, man ne'er died an infidel. Stretched on the agonizing couch of pain, All human aid inefficacious, vain, Where shall his tortured spirit rest? Ah, where? The past, all gloom! the future, all despair! 'Tis then, O Lord, the skeptic turns to Thee, Then the proud scoffer humbly bends the knee; Feels in this darksome hour there's much ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... the agonizing strivings, he was too late. It was a rough quarter-mile down to the shadowy group of buildings whence the humming of the dynamo and the quick exhausts of the high-speeded steam-engine rose on the still ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... of the really dead—these considerations, I say, carry into the heart, which still palpitates, a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil. We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth—we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell. And thus all narratives upon this topic have an interest profound; an interest, nevertheless, which, through the sacred awe ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of God's servants, has been that of an overwhelming sorrow, which has taken away all taste for the pleasures and comforts of life. And this was the thought by which John was penetrated. On the one hand, there was his deep and agonizing conviction of the sin of Israel; and on the other, the belief that the Messiah must be nigh, even at the doors. Thus the pressure of the burden increased on him till he was forced to give utterance to the cry it extorted from his soul: ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... venture with my old frame to travel hither a-foot in search of the fairy Sybella, she had a glass, which if she showed him, he would be cured of this dreadful melancholy, and I have borne the labour and fatigue of coming this long tiresome way, that I may not breathe my last with the agonizing reflection, that all the labours of my life have been thrown away. But what shall I say to engage you to go with me? Can riches tempt, ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... he suffered from the strange and terrible delusion that he was the centre of the universe and that it was his task to keep the whole world in equilibrium. The myriad forces of all creation were united in him and he felt with agonizing constancy, how the suns and the planets were circling about him, and how everything was rushing and whirling through space. If a chain of skaters revolves around one man who is in the middle, that man will feel the extraordinary force with which ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... For an agonizing moment they faced each other angrily, both of them lost in the labyrinth of their own situation. At the slightest plea for help on her part, Quin would have broken through his own difficulties and rushed ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... return, my Laura," said he, with a forced smile. "I am no hero; I shall not fall upon the battlefield. I know this; I feel it. I feel also that if this was to be my fate, I should be spared many sorrowful and agonizing hours; how much better a quick, glorious death, than this slow torture, this daily death of wretchedness! Oh, Laura, I have presentiments, in which my whole future is covered with clouds and thick darkness, through which even your lovely form ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the teeth of an almost unceasing north-east wind which was freezingly cold. Night after night they were obliged to dig deep holes in the snow for their sleeping places. La Verendrye nearly died of agonizing pain and fatigue during this journey, and was a long time recovering from ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... two armies on shore, while victory hung in the balance, were a prey to the most agonizing and conflicting emotions; the natives thirsting for more glory than they had already won, while the invaders feared to find themselves in even worse plight than before. The all of the Athenians being set upon their fleet, their fear for the event was like nothing ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... and the terrible excitements of watching the decorators at work, her scheme developing beneath their hands, and the awful knowledge that now it was being done it was done for good or bad—no altering it now!—and the agonizing excitements of putting down the carpets—how can you tell exactly how a carpet is going to look until you see it actually down upon its floor and between its walls?—and the increasing excitement all the time of the knowledge that everything was ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... gone out. Not, however, till the loss of blood had so relieved the agonizing pressure on the brain, that reason had evidently returned—for she opened her eyes, with a sweet, sad smile, looked at us all—saw every thing—knew every thing that had passed. She raised her hand to her neck, and then pointed upward, and breathing more and more softly, like the dead child ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... was a trouble to his father,—but not an agonizing trouble, as are some sons. His faults were not of a nature to rob his father's cup of all its sweetness and to bring his grey hairs with sorrow to the grave. Old Wharton had never had to ask himself whether he should now, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... Tell un, there's a lovey!" said Mrs. Lake. "Who did daddy put in the hopper?" But still Jan gazed at nothing in particular with a sly twinkle in his black eyes, and continued to squeeze poor Sandy to a degree that can have been little less agonizing than the millstone torture; and obdurate he would probably have remained, but that Abel, bending over him, said, "Do 'ee tell ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... them with the aid of a damp rag. But these precautions only half reassured him, for he knew that he could not see properly and that certain stains had very likely escaped him. He stood irresolute in the middle of the room, a prey to a somber, agonizing thought, the thought that he was going mad, that at that moment he was not in a fit state to come to a determination and to watch over his security, that his way of going to work was probably not the one the circumstances demanded. "Good heavens! I ought to go, to go away at once!" murmured ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... the apprehension on the faces of the occupants of the canoe was agonizing to watch. Once Frank saw the old man arise as if to cast himself into the water rather than face what lay ahead, but Lathrop ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... horse slowly down the upper, steeper portion of the track toward Zeitoon, swearing to myself, and dreading the smoother going where I should feel compelled to gallop whether my ankle hurt or not. As a matter of fact I began to suspect a broken bone or ligament, for the agonizing pain increased and made me sit awkwardly on the horse, thus causing him to change his pace at odd intervals and give me more pain yet. However, gallop I had to, and I reached the bridge going at ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... "a message sent without wires; it came by one of those underground currents that convulse an unconscious world, sometimes agonizing mountains, at others perplexing a simple maid like yourself. You see, Joan, all things conspire to draw ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... the west side, lay through an open grove, filled with sharp-shooters, who were speedily dislodged; when being up with the front of the attack, and emerging into open space, at the foot of a rocky acclivity, that gallant leader was struck down by an agonizing wound. The immediate command devolved on Brigadier-General Cadwallader, in the absence of the senior brigadier (Pierce) of the same division, an invalid since the events of August 19. On a previous call of Pillow, Worth had just ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... deep heart. You may never know it; but should you, you will remember that I told you there was but one Alice. In all her feelings she is intense; her love is a flame—her hate a thorn; the fragrance of the one is an incense—the piercing of the other is deep and agonizing. Shan't we go in, sir; I see the damp of the dew is on your boot-toe, and you have been ill. The absence of the sun is the hour for pestilence to ride the breeze in our climate, and you cannot ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... nearly friendless, and with enemies so many and so great... A boy "up aginst" so huge and difficult circumstances always, that (you would say) there was no time, no possibility, for him to look ahead: in every moment the next agonizing perilous step that must be taken vast enough to fill the whole horizon of his mind, of any human mind perhaps;—ay, so vast and compelling that every day with wrenches and torsion that horizon must be pushed back and back ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... faint and low, Like the sighing of an evening breeze, Comes through these painted lattices The ceaseless sound of human woe, Here, while her bosom aches and throbs With deep and agonizing sobs, That half are passion, half contrition, The luckless daughter of perdition Slowly confesses her secret shame! The time, the place, the lover's name! Here the grim murderer, with a groan, From his bruised conscience rolls the stone, Thinking that thus he can atone For ravages ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... paled lips, and they cover their heads weeping. At times when the obligate goat's laugh bleated in among the melodious pangs, I caught a glimpse in the background of a crowd of small women-figures who nodded their odious heads with wicked wantonness. Then a rush of agonizing sounds came from the violin, and a fearful groan and a sob, such as was never heard upon earth before, nor will be perhaps heard upon earth again, unless in the valley of Jehoshaphat, when the colossal trumpets of doom shall ring out, and the naked corpses ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... Mr. Samuel Wright's embarrassment became more agonizing, nor was it lessened by the very old man's quite obvious interest in it; his head, in its brown wig, was inclined a little to one side, like a canary's, and his black eyes helped out the likeness—except that there was a carefully restrained gleam of humor in ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... knowing it, driven by the secret agonies within, and all the time conscious that he could not escape from them. Then that befell which put a term to these agonizing imaginings. As he walked he came suddenly on the ashes of a camp fire. For a moment he stared at it uncomprehendingly. Then his interest quickened, as the state of the ashes showed some one had camped at this place quite recently. He began to ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... the near-sighted one replied. "Every time I look at him I see a bleedin' bullet-hole in his abominable regions, about here." He laid a finger upon his stomach, and Glass felt a darting pain at precisely the same spot. It was as agonizing as if Willie's spectacles were huge burning-glasses focussing the rays of a tropic sun upon his bare flesh. He folded protecting hands over the threatened region and backed toward the prayer-rug, mumbling "Allah! ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... brother!] His tide of wrongs he could not stem, His brothers filch'd his diadem. There sleeps the king who aim'd to spurn The daring Scots, at Bannockburn, But turn'd him back, with humbled fame, And Berkley's "shrieks"[B] declare his name. [Footnote B: "Shrieks of an agonizing king."] ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... Damrosch's effort, or, perhaps, because of it, there is a deal of monotony in the music of the first act. There is a fine ingenuity of orchestration throughout, however, and an amount of daring in harmonization which sometimes oversteps the limits of discretion. In an agonizing scene between Chillingworth and Hester at the close of the first act the orchestra and the two chief personages are wholly engrossed with an exposition of the dramatic feeling of the moment, while the chorus (supposed to be worshiping in the neighboring meeting-house) sing the "Old ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... in Necia's eyes, and her cheeks were blanched with the pallor of a great resolution. She did not stop to reason why or how she had been led to this disposal of her future, but clutched desperately at Stark's plan of rescue from her agonizing predicament. ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... tells the whole truth about himself. We seem to be born liars in that particular, all of us, and I am no different. I'm starting out now to tell the bitter, agonizing truth about myself, but before I am through I shall probably be lying at the rate of a mile a minute and cracking myself up something awful! A man can tell only so much truth; then he begins ...
— Goat-Feathers • Ellis Parker Butler
... by an excruciating pain, a spasm so agonizing that she thought, "I am going to die! I am dying!" And her soul was filled with a furious hatred; she felt she must curse this man who was the cause of all her agony, and this child which was killing her. She strained every muscle in a supreme effort ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... and forth and from side to side and little by little, inch by inch, she could feel something giving way; she was not sure, yet, whether it was the tub, the paint or herself; but something was giving way. And at last, with one agonizing jerk, she broke away and arose to her feet. And then she turned and looked down into the tub to see what had happened; and what she saw there brought a sigh of relief to her lips; for she discovered that she ...
— Continuous Vaudeville • Will M. Cressy
... or less ethereal and slightly morbid love it is characterized by remarkable power. Its heroine, Madame Mortsauf, tied to a nearly insane husband and pursued by a sentimental lover, undergoes tortures of conscience through an agonizing sense of half-failure in her duty. Balzac himself used to cite her when he was charged with not being able to draw a pure woman; but he has created nobler types. The other stories of the group are also decidedly more interesting. The distress of the abbe Birotteau over his landlady's treatment, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... With an agonizing jerk of his neck the Senior Surgeon rooted his mud-gagged mouth a half inch further towards free and spontaneous speech. Very laboriously, very painstakingly, he spat out one by one two stones and a wisp of ground pine and a brackish, prickly tickle ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... bed, and looked about him vacantly. In the earnest and watchful countenance that bent above his pillow, he slowly recognized his friend, companion, and servant, Valdemar Svensen, and though returning consciousness brought with it throbs of agonizing pain, he strove to smile, and feebly stretched out his hand. Valdemar grasped it—kissed it—and in spite of his efforts to restrain his emotion, a sigh, that was almost a groan, escaped him. The bonde smiled again,—then lay quiet for ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... character; but it lacks pathos, tenderness, and humanity; its power is out of all proportion to its geniality; the characters, while they stand definitely out to the eye, are seen through no visionary medium of sentiment and fancy; and the reader feels the force of Leantio's own agonizing complaint, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
