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Throes

noun
1.
Violent pangs of suffering.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Throes" Quotes from Famous Books



... facing a slip of bright moon. Poetical impressions, emotions, any stirrings of his mind by the sensational stamp on it, were new to him, and while he swam in them, both lulled and pricked by his novel accessibility to nature's lyrical touch, he asked himself whether, if he were near the throes of death, the thought of having Diana Warwick to sit beside his vacant semblance for an hour at night would be comforting. And why had his uncle specified an hour of the night? It was a sentiment, like the request: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... their might, she withdrew within her pride. Nan was no meek and humble spirit. But the scales had dropped from her eyes as to affairs about her. San Francisco suddenly became something besides a crude collection of buildings. For the first time she saw it as a living entity, strong in the throes of growth. She devoured eagerly all the newspapers, collected avidly all the rumours. Whenever possible, she discussed the state of affairs; but this was difficult, for nearly every one was strongly partisan for one side ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... the Orellanna, also, tell of horrible noises heard occasionally in the Paraguaxo, which they consider the throes and groans of the mountains, endeavoring to cast forth the precious stones hidden within its entrails. Others have endeavored to account for these discharges of "mountain artillery" on humbler principles; attributing them to the loud reports made by the disruption and fall of ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving

... whirl back into the darkness; yellow solfataras rise in foaming jets, with the fierce hiss of unseen serpents, and bellowing thunders shake the earth. The superb spectacle of nature's power in her armoury of terror is unique among the volcanos of Java, for unless the Bromo blazes in the throes of a violent eruption, when the ascent to the crater becomes impossible, no danger exists in gazing down into the mysterious abyss. At every gust which rages round this laboratory of Nature, the vast clouds—black, yellow, and blue—floating away into space, assume grotesque ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... that he was wounded, leaped down from his horse, drew near the prostrate man, never suspecting anything, and, as he stooped over the stranger, he received in the middle of the stomach the long curved blade of the saber. He sank down without any death throes, merely quivering with a ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... how it enraged the heart of a tender mother, Exod. iv. 26. It is the excision or cutting off a member, and these the most dear and precious, be it the right hand or right foot, which is a living death, as it were, even to kill a man while he is alive. It is a new birth, and the pains and throes of the birth are known. Regeneration certainly hath a travailing pain within it, insomuch that Paul travailed in pain till it were accomplished in these, Gal. iv. 19. Though men conceive sin in pleasure, yet they cannot be rid of that deadly burden without throes and pains, and to half this ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... take what accommodation he could get on the first available boat. Two days later he had lain unconscious, strapped to the captain's table, whilst the ship's doctor, a young man, himself in the horrible throes of seasickness, had performed a radical operation for acute mastoiditis. There had been no facilities. The whole thing had been in the last degree makeshift. The half-trained stewardess had held his instruments ready for him, and the sea-sickness, comic in retrospect, had weighed heavily ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie

... R. D. Pryce, presiding, in the absence of the Marquess, concluded the proceedings on a happy note of assurance that directors and shareholders were "of one mind," and full of sanguine expectations as to the future of their undertaking. The throes of consolidation are sometimes not less severe than those of birth itself, but they can be ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine

... sitting at the table apparently in the throes of literary composition, raised his head. "No," he replied, "I wouldn't; I'm writing a letter. 'Sides I've heard that record at least seven ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... do; you must come no farther. Not that I fear what is to follow for myself,' he said proudly: 'Nature has her tortures as well as art; and how happy should we think the man who escapes from the throes of a mortal and painful disorder, in the space of a short half hour? And this matter, spin it out as they will, cannot last longer, But what a dying man can suffer firmly, may kill a living friend to look upon.—This same law of high treason,' he continued, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... deck, bleeding, yelling, struggling. There were two lying near us with blood spurting out of their necks. One rose upon a knee, choking horribly, shaken with the last throes of his flooded heart, and reeled over. The Scorpion of our fleet had got her guns in action; the little Ariel was also firing. D'ri leaned over, shouting ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller

... problems which crowd the attention of the woman in her social laboratory should ever be considered unworthy of first-class brains and training is but proof of the difficulty the human mind has in distinguishing values when in the throes of social change. We rightly believe to-day that the world is not nearly so well run as it would be if we could—or would—apply unselfishly what we already know. Each of us advocates his own pet theory of betterment, often to the ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... bobs in alcoholic glee in a bottle on the top shelf of the laboratory of a more alert professional brother. Your civil engineer constructs imaginary bridges which slump and fall as quickly as they are completed. Your stage favorite, in the throes of a post-lobster nightmare, has a horrid vision of herself "resting" in January. But when he who sells goods on the road groans and tosses in the clutches of a dreadful dream, it is, strangely enough, never of canceled orders, maniacal train schedules, lumpy ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber

... the two men now was to turn their gold-dust into food. The current price for flour and beans was a dollar and a half a pound, but the difficulty was to find a seller. Dawson was in the throes of famine. Hundreds of men, with money but no food, had been compelled to leave the country. Many had gone down the river on the last water, and many more, with barely enough food to last, had walked the six hundred miles over the ice ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... flame enliven, so that light I saw Shine at my blandishments; and, as it grew More fair to look on, so with voice more sweet, Yet not in this our modern phrase, forthwith It answer'd: "From the day, when it was said ' Hail Virgin!' to the throes, by which my mother, Who now is sainted, lighten'd her of me Whom she was heavy with, this fire had come, Five hundred fifty times and thrice, its beams To reilumine underneath the foot Of its own lion. They, of whom I sprang, And I, had there our birth-place, where the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... towards the rugged features before her, and her gaze was of an intensity such as Ralph could not support in silence. Words blundered unbidden to his lips, uncontrolled, and he spoke as a man who scarce knows what he is saying. His mind was in the throes of a fever, and his speech partook of the irrelevance ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum

... transferred from a territorial aristocracy to the middle and trading classes. Laws were made at once more equal and more humane. During all the tumult of the great war which for so many years bathed Europe in fire, through all the throes and agitations in which peace brought forth the new time, Wordsworth for half a century (1799-1850) dwelt sequestered in unbroken composure and steadfastness in his chosen home amid the mountains and lakes of his ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... have seen the lips of daring men, now and then, giving spasmodic twitchings; eyes swimming in tears, and a silence and solemnity that bespoke the truest kind of grief. Among that party, such a one would have been sure to have marked out the countenance of Kit Carson; for, engraven on it were the throes which were troubling his kind heart on being thus obliged to separate from old friends. Not a man left that grave, but who resolved, secretly and silently, to make these dastardly Indians suffer for the lives they had thus wantonly taken. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... conditions of digestion, with the wasting bodies the clearest evidence that food is neither digested nor assimilated. I wonder with only increasing impatience that the stomach is not understood as a machine that Nature wills shall not be run to tax her resources when life is in the throes of disease. ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey

... constitute an unusual harmony. Her boudoir on the night of the dinner presented a veritable riot of silks, satins, laces, lingerie, hair ornaments, perfumes, jewels—anything and everything which might contribute to the feminine art of being beautiful. Once in the throes of a toilet composition, Aileen invariably became restless and energetic, almost fidgety, and her maid, Fadette, was compelled to move quickly. Fresh from her bath, a smooth, ivory Venus, she worked quickly through silken lingerie, stockings and shoes, to ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... at such a sight. Before us lay the bodies of the buffaloes. They were all dead, or quivering in the last throes. Each bad a wound above the brisket, and from this the red stream gurled out, and trickled down their still panting sides. Blood welled from their mouths and out of their nostrils. Pools of it were filtering through the prairie turf; and clotted gouts, flung out by the struggling ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid

... a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... was not repeated. But the cry, like that of a woman in her death-throes, pierced the silence again. It left a quivering ring that softly died away. Then the stillness clamped down once more and the darkness seemed to thicken. The men waited, and when they had begun to relax the cry burst out appallingly close, ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey

... with superiors to elevate them in popular opinion above the other outcasts. They are now manufacturers of bamboo cages and baskets. They are said to be descendants of the family and retainers of Taira-no-Masakado-Heishino, the only man in Japan who ever seriously conspired to seize the imperial throes by armed force, and who was killed by the famous ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... face in her hands and stood silent a moment, in the throes of a struggle, still trembling violently. At the touch of Renwick's fingers upon her arm, she straightened, lowered her hands, her ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs

... wife, missed her lord, and she was nigh out of her wit, and also as great with child as she was, she took a gentlewoman with her, and ran into the forest to seek her lord. And when she was far in the forest she might no farther, for she began to travail fast of her child. And she had many grimly throes; her gentlewoman helped her all that she might, and so by miracle of Our Lady of Heaven she was delivered with great pains. But she had taken such cold for the default of help that deep draughts of death took her, that needs she must die and depart out of this world; there was ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory

... attached to her bed. The finger on the abdomen or vulva elicited symptoms of great sensitiveness. He told her she was not pregnant, and the next day she was sitting up, though the discharge continued, but the simulated throes of labor, which she had so graphically ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... the hounds on Englebourn Common, were the most exciting events which in an ordinary way stirred the surface of Englebourn life; only faintest and most distant murmurs of the din and strife of the great outer world, of wars, and rumors of wars, the fall of governments, and the throes of nations, reached that primitive, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... In perfect symmetry of self-control, Seems not so great at first, but greater grows Still as we look, and by experience learn How grand this quiet is, how nobly stern The discipline that wrought through life-long throes ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... The Papal Bull appointing Roman Catholic bishops throughout England was issued on September 24, 1850, and England was now in the throes of the ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... rally," said Kent, when they had passed far enough beyond the zone of brass-throated clamorings to make the reply audible. "I told you that the Gaston wolf-pack had gone into politics. We are in the throes of a State election, and there is to be a political speech-making at the Opera House to-night, with Bucks in the title role. And there is a fair measure of the deadness of the town! When you see people flock together like that to hear a brass band play, it means one of two things: ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde

... Wimper's desk, George regarded P. Sybarite with an indulgent and compassionate smile and wagged a doggish head at him. From these symptoms inferring that his fellow-employee was in the throes of a witticism, P. Sybarite cocked an apprehensive eye and tightened ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance

... soil when his awakening perceptions sensed the people's oppression under the tyranny of ecclesiastical politicians. Nor did he fail to scent the approach of a tremendous conflict, in which the country would pass through violent throes in the struggle to shake off the galling yoke of Rome. Maintaining an attitude of strict neutrality, he had striven quietly to gauge the anticlerical movement, and had been appalled to find it so widespread and menacing. Only ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... lover played such a prominent part; ours to enjoy her charming manner and sparkling wit, and to respect with deep admiring a brave girl of the Massachusetts colony who watched a great nation in its birth-throes, and whose name is written in history not alone as Madam Hancock, but as Dorothy Quincy, the girl who saw the first gun ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... and melancholy too; The bridegroom widowed, ere he pleasure knew; His hopes of bliss had soared unduly high, And little dreamt he there was danger nigh; But see! the throes of death his bride arrest, The barbed arrow strikes her beating breast: His hands have touched the cup, but ere he sips, The wine is hurried ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth

... curiosity, step by step, the progress of mental anguish, but when that point is passed, analysis loses its interest; the vocabulary of pain has exhausted itself, the phenomena already noted do but repeat themselves with more rapidity, with more intensity—detail is lost in the mere sense of throes. Perchance the mind is capable of suffering worse than the fiercest pangs of hopeless love combined with jealousy; one would not pretend to put a limit to the possibilities of human woe; but for Mallard, ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing

... was forgot. On the wings of vagabond fancy she was in Rome, demanding vengeance of Tiberius, wresting it from him by the sheer force of entreaty, and with it exulting in the death-throes of the procurator. Oh, to see his nails pulled out, his outer skin removed, his tongue severed, his eyes seared with irons, his wrists slowly twisted till they snapped! to hear him cry for mercy! to promise it and not fulfil!—dear God, ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus

... more tangible than a streak of gray, silent and terrible, shot through the dawn-gloom. It was Kazan. He came without a snarl, without a cry, and in a moment he and the husky were in the throes of terrific battle. ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood

... just a quiver of Madeline's eyelid; it said nothing of the natural rapacity behind. This man's testimony was coming out in throes, and yet—it must ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... to give of him at work should be prefaced by a word or two that may throw light on the design he was working at. It was a large theme for so small an instrument; and the disproportion was not more characteristic of the man, than the throes of suffering and passion to be presently undergone by him for results that many men would smile at. He was bent, as he says, on striking a blow for the poor. They had always been his clients, they had never been forgotten in any of his books, but here nothing else was to be remembered. He had ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... prayer on the wind, which seemed to offer it for him, listened and was gravely touched. But he himself was far from the throes of supplication. He was looking for the forces of his soul; and by the time he reached Dr Drummond's door we may suppose ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... name. Even eleven States were insufficiently represented. Delaware had only one Senator and no Representative at hand. South Carolina had but one Senator present. The influential State of New York, the home of Hamilton and Jay, the place of meeting of the new Congress, was in the throes of ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks

... indeed hardly got so far even as that stage, but had been a mere "bodiless childful of life in the gloom"—for more than two thousand years before Waverley. Of its earlier attempts to get into full existence we cannot say much here:[18] something on the more recent but rather abortive birth-throes has been promised, and is now due. It is not improbable that considerable assistance was rendered to the kind by the heroic romance of the seventeenth century in prose and verse, which often attempted historic, and ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... the country was kept in the throes of partisan turmoil—and for what? Simply to depose a President who had disappointed the partisan and personal expectations and schemes of a rule or ruin faction which was able, under the peculiar conditions of the time, to subordinate to its purposes a large proportion ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross

... oratory the appearance of the man is always changed. Men grow by throes and throbs, by leaps and bounds. The idea of "Cosmic Consciousness"—being born again—is not without its foundation in fact: the soul is in process of gestation, and when the time is ripe the new birth occurs, and will occur again ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... down-town Cynthia stopped to see G. G.'s mother and found the whole household in the throes occasioned by its ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... spared what was I born to have, I am a woman, and this very flesh Demands its natural pangs, its rightful throes, And I implore with vehemence these pains. I know that children wound us, and surprise Even to utter death, till we at last Turn from a face to flowers; but this my heart Was ready for these pangs, and ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge

... which filters through emerald panes in the high nave of a great cathedral, lay upon the earth. The forms of the mourning women were strangely magnified in the curious semi-luminance and, as their bodies moved to and fro in the throes of their grief, they might have been, for all they seemed, shadowy ghosts bemoaning their sins in some weird purgatory ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre

... native clime. Sure of her constancy, elate he came, The lovely partner of his soul to claim; Light was his heart, as up the well known way He bent his steps—and all his thoughts were gay. Oh! who can paint his agonizing throes, When on his ear the fatal news arose! Chill'd with amazement,—senseless with the blow, He stood a marble monument of woe; Till call'd to all the horrors of despair, He smote his brow, and tore his horrent hair; Then rush'd impetuous from the dreadful ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White

... convulsive throes denied my breath The faintest utterance to my fading thought, To thee—to thee—e'en in the gasp of death My spirit turned, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron

... moved his workshop to a room in the University building in Washington Square. "There," says his biographer*, "he wrought through the year 1836, probably the darkest and longest year of his life, giving lessons to pupils in the art of painting while his mind was in the throes of the great invention." In that year he took into his confidence one of his colleagues in the University, Leonard D. Gale, who assisted him greatly, in improving the apparatus, while the inventor himself formulated the rudiments of ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson

... sweet— Even though with garments rent, and bleeding feet, To wander over the deserted places Where once thy princely palaces arose, And 'mid the weeds and wild-flowers mark the traces, Where the ground, yawning in its earthquake throes, The ark of covenant and the cherubim Received, lest stranger hands, that reek'd the while With blood of thine own children, should defile Its heaven-resplendent glory, and bedim: And my dishevell'd locks, in my despair, All madly should I tear; ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... through his brain on this Indian-summer night, they all merged into the one obsession that he could no longer stay. The irresistible logic of the brain stretched to an abnormal tenuity, and an intolerable brightness was with him. He was in the throes of that intense visualization which comes with insomnia, when one is awake yet apart from the waking world, where nothing is really real and nothing normal. He had a call to go hence, and he must go. Minute after ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... above them stood an interne and several nurses. No sooner had the American regained his scattered wits than he leaped to the floor. The interne and the nurses tried to force him back upon the cot, thinking that he was in the throes of a delirium, and it required his best efforts to convince them that he ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... people hearkened for the voice of the King; but in the intervals a louder moan would strike their ears, and they whispered among themselves, "Tis that of the fakir, El Zoop!' and the moaning and howling prevailed again. And again they heard another moan, a deep one, as of the earth in its throes, and said among themselves, ''Tis that of Bootlbac, the drumbeater!' and this led off to the howl of Areep, the dervish; and this was followed by the shriek of Zeel, the garlic-seller; and the waul of Krooz el Krazawik, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... been brought into contact with the social life of the past. I now propose to give the impressions which they conveyed to me of the moral, material, and political condition of England just at the moment when the old order was yielding place to new, and modern Society was emerging from the birth-throes of the French Revolution. All testimony seems to me to point to the fact that towards the close of the eighteenth century Religion was almost extinct in the highest and lowest classes of English society. The poor were sunk in ignorance and barbarism, and the aristocracy was honeycombed ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... was my practice to cut off a steak for consumption. There were two cats, fortunately, and a slice was often thrown to them. One morning I first gave them their portion, then cut my own. In a few minutes the unfortunate animals were in the throes of strychnine poisoning and died in short order. It was a shock to me and ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson

... a choking rattle at my feet; half the head of a dwarf raised out of vacancy; beat twice upon the floor in death throes; fell back. Lakla shivered; gave a command. The frog-men moved about; peering here and there; lifting unseen folds revealing in stark rigidity torn form after form of ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... known, that cannot be again, And pleasures too that never can be more: For loss of pleasure I was never sore, But worse, far worse is to feel no pain. The throes and agonies of a heart explain Its very depth of want at inmost core; Prove that it does believe, and would adore, And doth with ill for ever strive and strain. I not lament for happy childish years, For loves departed, that have had their day, Or hopes that faded when ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... of Islam fades to-day and grows pale, but there are yet fierce Believers, alust for the blood of the infidel. In such as these a faith dies the death of an adder, and is more venomous in its death-throes than in the full pulse of life. The ghastly indiscretion of Professor Deeping, in rifling a Moslem Sacristy, had led to the mutilation of many who, unwittingly, had touched the looted relic, had brought about his own end, had established a league ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer

... ten years, Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs, In hunger and in thirsts, fevers and colds, In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes, and cramps, ... Patient on this tall pillar I have borne. Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... till the rending asunder of our affections forces us to become conscious of a need. St. Paul in his Roman cell; John Huss led to the stake at Constance; Tyndale dying in his prison at Amsterdam; Milton, amid the incipient earthquake throes of revolution, teaching two little boys in Aldgate Street; David Livingstone, worn to a shadow, dying in a negro hut in Central Africa, alone—what failures they might all have seemed to themselves to be, yet what mighty purposes was God working ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... the fatal area. Detection was now but a question of instants. Then Skippy in the throes of despair saw the plump little hand of Miss Jennie Tupper reach out and casually close over the offending pearl stud. He was saved, saved by the miracle of compassion and forgiveness that lifts women to those sublime heights ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... he could not keep it up. He was by nature powerful of thought and sensibility, and the creative spirit was restive and urgent. He was swiftly mastered by the concept or sensation in him that struggled in birth-throes to receive expression and form, and then he forgot himself and where he was, and the old words—the tools ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... poet's plinth The amorous colocynth Yearns for the aloe, faint with rapturous thrills, How can he hymn their throes Knowing, as well he knows, That they are ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

... set out on foot for the country. Delighted as he was with his sale of the business, he was not quite easy in his mind as to the payment. To the throes of the vendor, the agony of uncertainty as to the completion of the purchase inevitably succeeds. Passion of every sort is essentially Jesuitical. Here was a man who thought that education was useless, forcing ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac

... around Whose lofty summit veiling clouds arise Of the earth's immemorial sacrifice To Brahma in whose breath all lives and dies; O Hierarch enrobed in timeless snows, First-born of Asia whose maternal throes Seem changed now to a million human woes, Holy thou art and still! Be so, nor sound One sigh of all the mystery ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice

... the agonizing cries of the wounded. Men whose parting breath was an ascription of praise to the god of battles, whose last earthly joy was the knowledge of victory, and others who, shattered and torn and in throes of agony, yet repressed their moans that they might listen for the music of the fount which "springs eternal," whose bright waters (to them) mirrored the cause ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers

... impetuous velocity whose cause is not explained in the narrative of Arthur Pym. In the midst of this frightful darkness a flock of gigantic birds, of livid white plumage, swept by, uttering their eternal tekeli-li, and then the savage, in the supreme throes of ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne

... tea and dry bread. It was hard but wholesome, and there was plenty of it. His new comrades exercised their yarning propensities for him, around him, at him. He listened to their chaff, boisterous, uncultured; their savage throes of passion and easy comradeships. They seemed to have never a care in the world but the annoyances of the moment. Even their hatred for the foreman and their employer seemed to lift from them, and vanish with the sound ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum

... "Idleness as a Fine Art." Before writing a particularly funny or spirited article upon Politics, the Fine Arts, or the Drama, H.G., it is said, may be seen for several hours at the Astor Library, poring over BURTON'S Anatomy of Melancholy. While in the throes of literary labor upon The Great Conflict, he had numerous dogmatic discussions with Mr. KIT BURNS, participated in several flights of the "fancy" to the bird-battling haunts of New Jersey, and even pursued the ministers of muscle to the scene of their bucolic pastimes in the P.R. It ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 1, Saturday, April 2, 1870 • Various

... than that in the hush of the curate: he felt as if he had left the physician of souls behind him at the bedside; that a human being lay on the rack of the truth, but at his head stood one who watched his throes with the throbs of such a human heart as never beat in any bosom but his own, and the executioners were angels of light. No wonder if with such a feeling in his breast Wingfold walked softly, and his face glistened! He was not aware ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... I have attempted to describe, the waters of the Strokhr again subsided into sobs and convulsive throes. Some half an hour now elapsed before any thing more took place. Then there was another series of growls, and a terrible swashing about down in the churn, as if all the demons under earth were trying to drown one another, and up shot the murky flood for the third ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... of life For faint echoes of lost melody. The moonlight gather'd itself back from me And slanted its pale pinions to the dust. The drowsy gust, bedded in luscious blooms, Startled, as 'twere at the death-throes of peace, Down through the darkness moaningly fled off. O mournful Past! how thou dost cling and cling— Like a forsaken maiden to false hope— To the tired bosom of the living hour, Which, from thy weak embrace, the future time Jocundly ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various

... six days before her father's death, and when the kingdom which was her heritage seemed to be almost in its death-throes. James V. of Scotland, half Stuart and half Tudor, was no ordinary monarch. As a mere boy he had burst the bonds with which a regency had bound him, and he had ruled the wild Scotland of the sixteenth century. He was brave and crafty, keen in statesmanship, and ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... ruined son, to avenge myself for all the harm that he has done me: I had no other dream, no other object in life. That is what I wanted: to see that man crushed, reduced to poverty, to tears—as though he still knew how to cry!—sobbing in the throes ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc

... the Commune is in its death throes. Like the dragon of fairy lore, it dies, vomiting flames. La Villette is on fire, houses are burning at Belleville and on the Buttes-Chaumont. The resistance is concentrated on one side at Pere la Chaise, and on the other at the Mont-Parnasse cemetery. The insurrection was mistress of the whole ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... the day, Pledge began to work, and Templeton put down the Bishop's scholarship to him, without further parley. Only two men were against him—Cartwright, who, fine fellow as he was, could not desert the cricket field and gymnasium even in the throes of an examination, and Freckleton, the hermit, whom half of Templeton didn't know by sight, and the other half put down as a harmless lunatic, who divided his time between theological exercises and plodding, but not always ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed

... that. All must needs be told. For, after the first throes of the overwhelming calamity, in which her thoughts alone dwelt on the slain son, they turned towards him suspected as the slayer. In her case with something stronger than suspicion—indeed almost belief, based on her foreknowledge ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid

... England, Italy, Spain, Holland, Arabia and India all stand elbow to elbow, and the European visitor knows not whether to laugh or to make a hasty visit to his nerve-specialist. It seems all right to us, and it is all right from the standpoint of a nation that is yet in the throes of eclecticism. And our other art—painting, sculpture, music—it is all similarly mixed. Good of its kind, often; but we have not yet settled down to the kind that we like best—the kind in which we are best fitted to do something that will ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... be, and the extinction of the love of beauty and imagination would prove to be the extinction of civilisation. But that sickness the world will one day throw off, yet will, I believe, pass through many pains in so doing, some of which will look very like the death-throes of Art, and some, perhaps, will be grievous enough to the poor people of the world; since hard necessity, I doubt, works many of the world's changes, rather than the purblind striving to see, which we call the ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris

... giv'n, with charge to keep These Gates for ever shut, which none can pass Without my op'ning. Pensive here I sat Alone, but long I sat not, till my womb Pregnant by thee, and now excessive grown Prodigious motion felt and rueful throes. 780 At last this odious offspring whom thou seest Thine own begotten, breaking violent way Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew Transform'd: but he my inbred enemie Forth issu'd, brandishing his fatal Dart Made to destroy: I fled, and ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... a thousandth part Of the horrors and crimes and sins and woes That arise, when with palpitating throes The graveyard in the human heart Gives up its dead, at the voice of the priest, As if he were an archangel, at least. It makes a peculiar atmosphere, This odor of earthly passions and crimes, Such as I like to breathe, at times, And such as often brings ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... of degree. Soothe yourself ever so little with alcohol, and you don't get QUITE the full sensation of gambling. You do lose just a little something of the proper tremors before a coup, the proper throes during a coup, the proper thrill of joy or anguish after a coup. You're bound to, you know," he added, purposely making this bathos when he saw me smiling at the heights to which ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm

... immigrant strain begin to merge in the land of the future—the promised land that the protagonists are destined never to enter, even as Moses himself, upon Mount Nebo in the land of Moab, beheld Canaan and died in the throes of ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

... charming widow of twenty-seven, who had successfully gambled on her late husband's probable lease of life, and was now in the throes of a wild attachment to George Copplestone, to which he had shown himself by no means averse. She was somewhat languid from an excess of luxury, unable to brook opposition even to a whim, and as yet undefeated in the attainment of her desires, which were ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming

... her gaze, he looked at her hungrily; his eyes feasted on the coils of dark hair, her long, black lashes, the curve of her cheek and her delicate color, the full, ruby lips, and the small, quivering chin. She was in the throes ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts

... off!" It was an eery, strangled shriek from one of the male prisoners in the throes of a nightmare. With a startled curse the guard thudded to his feet, peered tensely into the darkness, his weapon sending twin milky beams of the powerful ionizing ray toward the ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl

... that will be found, like the web of the spider, to possess a power of resistance far exceeding its gossamer appearance—one strong enough to hold all that it was ever intended to inclose. The slave interest is now making its final effort for supremacy, and men are deceived by the throes of a departing power. The institution of domestic slavery cannot last. It is opposed to the spirit of the age; and the figments of Mr. Calhoun, in affirming that the Territories belong to the States, instead of the Government of the United States; and the celebrated doctrine ...
— New York • James Fenimore Cooper

... of all these throes and agonies, at which all the passengers, who have their own woes (you yourself—for how can you help THEM?—you are on your back on a bench, and if you move all is up with you,) are looking on indifferent—one man there ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Sassenach, And, having dined off mountain sheep, Betakes him moodily to sleep. And "Ah!" he cries, "would I micht be A clansman kilted to the knee, Wi' sporran, plaid and buckled shoe, And Caledonian whuskers too! Would I could wake the pibroch's throes And live on parritch and peas brose And spurn the ling wi' knotty knees, The dourest Scot fra Esk tae Tees! For only such, I'll answer for 't, Are rightly built for Hielan' sport, Can stalk Ben Ledi's antlered stag Frae scaur to scaur and crag tae crag, Cra'ing like serrpents through the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 8, 1920 • Various

... and grasping close the rock, Up towers the mountain pine. The Winter blast May like an ocean surge be on it cast; Proud doth it stand, and stern defy the shock, Unchanged in verdure and unbroke in crest, Although wild throes may agitate its breast, And clinging closer when the storm is gone, Tired, but unbent upon its granite throne, Not always doth it wrestle with the storm! Skies smile; spring flowers make soft its iron roots; Its sturdy boughs are kissed by breezes warm; And birds gleam in and out with joyous flutes. ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... constant companion of my thoughts. How wretched is the condition of one who is haunted with conscious guilt, and trembling under the idea of dreaded vengeance! and what a placid calm, what a charming secret enjoyment it gives, to bosom the kind feelings of friendship and the fond throes of love! Out upon the tempest of anger, the acrimonious gall of fretful impatience, the sullen frost of louring resentment, or the corroding poison of withered envy! They eat up the immortal part of man! If they spent their fury only on ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... throes And we wonder for why! But the blind planet knows When her ruler is nigh; And, attuned since Creation, To perfect accord, She thrills in her station And yearns to ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling

... solid little figure sitting at the foot of the table and a gleam of amusement chased the seriousness from her eyes. Miss Craven was in the throes of a heated discussion with Peters which involved elaborate diagrams traced on the smooth cloth with a salt spoon, and as Gillian watched she completed her design with a fine flourish and leant back triumphant in her chair, rumpling her ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull

... in the terrible throes of the Reformation, and Albrecht Duerer, who has left us the portraits of several of the great Reformers, is believed to have been no uninterested spectator of the struggle, and to have held, like his fellow-painter, Lucas Cranach—though in Albrecht Duerer's ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler

... thunder and the tossing spray warned us from sunken reefs, we heard the harsh challenges of gulls; where the pallid surf twisted in yellow coils of spume above the bar, the singing sands murmured of treachery and secrets of lost souls agasp in the throes of ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers

... there was nothing of the kind. Fardorougha's heart, in the first instance, was against the expense, and besides, its present broodings resembled the throes of pain which break out from the stupor that presses so heavily upon the exhausted functions of life in the crisis of a severe fever. He could not, in fact, rest nor remain for any length of time in the same spot. With a slow but troubled step he ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... who subsided before him, as, with grey hair fluttering in the wind, he came beneath the extending boughs, like some denouncing Druid amidst the sacred oaks, his countenance inflamed, his whole frame seeming to shake as if in throes to eject some foul possession; or, rather, as if he were himself a fierce, incarnate, and unfriendly spirit; and, at length, addressing his son, who was now leaning against a tree, both for support and concealment, he burst forth: "Miscreant!"—and the word was echoed from the side of ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege

... the Eighth, and who was the first Englishman, perhaps, who ever set foot on the soil of the New World. There he sits, like an old Druid Tor of primeval granite amid the tall wheat and rich clover crops of a modern farm. He has seen the death of old Europe and the birth-throes of the new. Go to him, and question him; for his senses are quick as ever; and just now the old man seems uneasy. He is peering with rheumy eyes through the groups, and seems listening for ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... speeches were in due accordance. Dr. (now Sir Charles) Nicholson, the Sydney Speaker, happened to pay us a visit during these early legislative throes of baby Victoria; and as I sat by him in the privileged place near the Speaker's chair, he remarked that, prepared as he was to find a crude spectacle, he had never imagined an assemblage of such helpless incompetency. But, in defence, ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth

... the door of the Pagoda. A bedlam of noise surged out at him—a tin-pan piano and a mandolin were going furiously from a little raised platform at the rear; in the centre of the room a dozen couples were in the throes of the tango and the bunny-hug; around the sides, at little tables, men and women laughed and applauded and thumped time on the tabletops with their beer mugs; while waiters, with beer-stained aprons and ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... his typewriter he said to the old man: "I see Jimmy is in the throes of a literary composition. He seems all het up. But he can probably go with you right away. The plane is still ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew

... compatriots who were slain in the Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions. Here comes to light the profound difference dividing the Celtic from the Teutonic race. The Teutons only received Christianity tardily and in spite of themselves, by scheming or by force, after a sanguinary resistance, and with terrible throes, Christianity was in fact on several sides repugnant to their nature; and one understands the regrets of pure Teutonists who, to this day, reproach the new faith with having corrupted their ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... all quivering wan, As smitten with the throes of birth, Upheaving, vanished, to reveal ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... of light, as from the jaws of the defeated dragon in his throes, made known to him the country he traversed. Crimsoned above the water glimmered the monster-haunted rock itself, and mid-channel beyond, flat and black to the stream, stretched the Nuns' Isle in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... few years events moved fast. In 1678 the ecclesiastical power was so shattered that the Baptists felt strong enough to build a church; but the old despotic spirit lived even in the throes of death, and the legislature passed an act forbidding the erection of unlicensed meeting-houses under penalty of confiscation. Nevertheless it was finished, but on the Sunday on which it was to have been opened the marshal nailed the doors fast and posted notices ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams

... showing how fearfully and savagely they flung and battered about the poor maimed fabric, it became absolutely terrifying, as was to be seen by the blanched faces and quailing, cowering figures of the crowd on the poop who, stood watching the craft in her death throes. Hitherto the violence of the sea had been productive in them of nothing worse than a condition of more or less discomfort; but now that they had before their eyes an exemplification of what old ocean could do with man and man's ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood

... past,—it would seem sacrilege for me to mention to another. Believe me, I am perfectly aware of your inquisitive nature, and I know that this omission may nettle you. Charge it all up, then, to the perversity of a bachelor in the throes of his first, last, and only love experience. You must see that such things cannot be conveyed to another with anything like their real significance. Were I to say I was carried beyond myself by her protestations of gratitude until, in a delirium of joy, I seized her in my arms ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy

... and his temper so inflammable, that he was an unfailing source of merriment, especially to the Neil boys and their friends. There was not a kinder or tenderer heart in all the Ontario Highlands than poor Catchach's, but he was always in the throes of a feud with someone, for he loved a fight and might be said never to be at peace except when ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith

... France, and France alone, from the moment of her revolution. On that happy change, all our dread of that nation as a power was to cease. She became in an instant dear to our affections, and one with our interests. All other nations we ought to have commanded not to trouble her sacred throes, whilst in labour to bring into a happy birth her abundant ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... she replied, "but I am caught up in the throes of a great reaction. I have been studying events, which it is quite true may change the destinies of the world, so intently that I have almost forgotten that, after all, the greatest thing in the world, my world, is the happiness or ill-content ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Calais, and put up at an inn recommended by one of the officers as being decent and reasonable. Calais was already in the throes of the war, for the streets were crowded with marching soldiers; and artillery trains could be seen moving this way and that, as they were being loaded on flat cars to be ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow

... under its present form,—that we are apt to forget how recent is this movement in American universities. To glance through the average college or university history one would imagine these associations sprang full-armed, with no preliminary throes of organization. Suddenly we find the alumni asserting their desires in some important matter and thenceforth their voice has a recognized place in university councils. It is quite obvious that the significance of this movement among college graduates was not recognized for a long time. ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw

... Tump Pack detached himself from the group and gave a pantomime of thrusting. He was clearly reproducing the action which had won for him his military medal. Then suddenly he fell down in the dust and writhed. He was mimicking with a ghastly realism the death-throes of his four victims. His audience howled with mirth at this dumb show of the bayonet-fight and of killing four men. Tump himself got up out of the dust with tears of laughter in his eyes. Peter caught the end of his sentence, "Sho put it to 'em, ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... before the appearance of this book the subject must have been one of daily and pressing importance, various dialects of Italy had long been the object of study and dispute, and that the birth of the one ideal was not accomplished without many throes. ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... word from one who rows Low at the oars beneath, what time we rule, We of the upper tier? Thou'lt know anon, 'Tis bitter to be taught again in age, By one so young, submission at the word. But iron of the chain and hunger's throes Can minister unto an o'erswoln pride Marvellous well, ay, even in the old. Hast eyes, and seest not this? Peace—kick not thus Against the pricks, unto ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus

... such moneyed men as the late Sir Josiah Mason, Isaac Horton, and others of somewhat similar calibre. Going away from the immediate centre of the town architectural improvements will be noted on all hands, Snow Hill, for one place, being evidently in the regenerative throes of a new birth, with its Gothic Arcade opposite the railway station, and the new circus at the foot of the hill, where for so many long years there has been nothing but a wreck and a ruin. In close neighbourhood, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... about her waist, her face upturned to his, her floating golden hair across his shoulder as they danced,—while, I say, such fancies held a firm clutch over my brain and senses, devouring me with the throes of an insane jealousy, my mother came in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... artist's fondness for attitude. He seems to have regarded posture-making as a peculiar attribute of genius. His figures are always in a constrained and over-studied pose: twisting about in the throes of giving birth to a great idea: filled with the divine afflatus, even to the bursting of their buttonholes and the snapping of their braces. His Handel is in a state of exceeding perturbation: his clothes in staring ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... with his knuckles, to stimulate the action of the organs within, or else striding up and down the room, in a brown study, over sundry half-written and discarded sheets of paper, scattered on the floor. L'Isle's servant wished to speak to him, but was too wise to disturb him in the midst of those throes of mental labor. But, when pausing suddenly in his walk, he pressed his forefinger on his temple, and exclaimed, "I had it last night, and now I have lost it!" his confidential man thought it time to speak. "What is it, sir, ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen

... reception of my house, repaying thee the careful nurture of my youth?" Of such words have remembrance, but thou hast forgotten them, and fain wouldst slay me. Do not, [I beseech you] by Pelops and by thy father Atreus, and this my mother, who having before brought me forth with throes, now suffers this second throe. What have I to do with the marriage of Paris and Helen? Whence came he, father, for my destruction? Look upon me; give me one look, one kiss, that this memorial of thee at least I, dying, may possess, if thou wilt not be persuaded ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides

... forlorn, Forsaking her false kingdom in the West, Quitting a world too sunk in crime To heed that glorious light sublime— No longer shall she hide her burning crest— No more her children's cries In vain appeal shall rise, While ruthless War's fierce earthquake shocks With throes convulsive thy dominion's rock, And tyrants, in their proud halls, celebrate The anguish of a nation tottering to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... heart-throbs of a sentient frame: Each night the whistles in the bay, the same Whirl of incessant wheels and clanging cars: For smoke that half obscured, the circling stars Burnt like his youth with but a sickly flame. Up to his attic came the city cries — The throes with which her iron sinews heave — And yet forever behind prison doors Welled in his heart and trembled in his eyes The light that hangs on desert hills at eve And tints the sea on solitary shores. . ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger

... is heard, that tells of the peace-blood's ebb, Till the long, low roar grows more and more, from the ships of the "Yank" and "Reb." Till over the deep the tempests sweep, of fire and bursting shell, And the very air is a mad Despair, in the throes of a living Hell: Then, down, deep down, in the mighty ship, unseen by the mid-day suns, You'll find the chaps who are giving the ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston

... in his father's; so limp that it seemed only a case of leading, now. Yet there was always the uncertain in the boy; the uncertain hovering under that face of ashes that the father was so keenly watching; a face so clearly revealing the throes of a struggle that sent cold little shivers into his father's warm grasp. Jack's eyes were looking into the distance through a mist. He dropped the lids as if he wanted darkness in which to think. When he raised them it was to look in his ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... guide; if once, why not again, And in this desert? If never—then the whole Of what he says, and looks, and does, and is, Makes up one damning falsehood. Leave him here To cold and hunger!—Pain is of the heart, And what are a few throes of bodily suffering If they can waken one pang of remorse? [Goes up to HERBERT.] Old Man! my wrath is as a flame burnt out, It cannot be rekindled. Thou art here Led by my hand to save thee from perdition: Thou wilt have time ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight

... in spite of his long association with the British aristocracy, the bosom of the valiant Russell heaved with strange emotions, and his heart quaked with unusual throes, at the prospect of this interview. As his host claimed to be "King," he would naturally expect to be treated as such. But how would that be? Of the etiquette of courts Russell had no knowledge whatever. From French ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille

... Russia. In Western Europe the modern scientific spirit, being the natural offspring of numerous concomitant historical causes, was born in the natural way, and Society had, consequently, before giving birth to it, to endure the pains of pregnancy and the throes of prolonged labour. In Russia, on the contrary, this spirit appeared suddenly as an adult foreigner, adopted by a despotic paterfamilias. Thus Russia made the transition from mediaeval to modern times without any violent struggle between ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... many men of more distinguished talent the two best orators in the judicial courts of the desolated Forum; the consular Lucius Domitius, and above all the venerable -pontifex maximus- Quintus Scaevola, who had escaped the dagger of Fimbria only to bleed to death during these last throes of the revolution in the vestibule of the temple of Vesta entrusted to his guardianship. With speechlesshorror the multitude saw the corpses of these last victims of the reign of terror dragged through the streets, and thrown into ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... breath of spaceless night, each twinkle from the firmament, though but the phantom of a ray quenched ages before, everything, he teases into anxious commentary on his own puny end. There could not be more ado if the Universe were in the throes, writhing against a reconquering Chaos. Harassed creature, what ails him is only the pathetic fallacy, which is a soothing melody and stimulating to mortal pride. But the lapses into healthier realization are very, very hard ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... tell you what I went through in that interval. But even in its utmost agony—even in those terrible throes that love must suffer before it can be disembodied of selfish desire—my love for you sufficed to withhold me from suicide, without the aid of any other motive. In the midst of my egoism, I yet could not bear to ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... faint streak of the dawn of June 7 the mines at Hill 60 and St. Yves were exploded. The sight was awe-inspiring, and the ground trembled as if in the throes of an agonizing palsy. On the tick of the appointed time our 'boys' went 'over the top.' It was for this experience that they had worked and waited. They advanced immediately behind the barrage so consistently sustained by the artillery, ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss

... frequently talked with Laney. He is still strong in the Mormon faith, and believes that Dame had the right to have him killed. Punishment by death is the penalty for refusing to obey the orders of the Priesthood. About this time the Church was in the throes of a "reformation." ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee

... arm'd, And now with missile force of massy stones, 325 While yet his warm blood sallied from the wound. But when the wound grew dry, and the blood ceased, Anguish intolerable undermined Then all the might of Atreus' royal son. As when a laboring woman's arrowy throes 330 Seize her intense, by Juno's daughters dread The birth-presiding Ilithyae deep Infixt, dispensers of those pangs severe; So, anguish insupportable subdued Then all the might of Atreus' royal son. 335 Up-springing to his seat, instant he bade His charioteer ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... was granted; the sweet voice that had thrilled the hearts of many of the rich and noble of earth, freely poured forth its richest strains to soothe the dying throes of agony ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley

... themes, unsung, Compassionate the maiden's tender woes, Revive the faint who are with fears unstrung, And solace them who writhe in suffering's throes. Awake! awake! there's need enough of thee, Nor let again such sloth enchain thy tongue, And may thy constant effort henceforth be, To plant the right, and to ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley

... whale-ship COMBOY with the intention of remaining three months on the island. At the end of that time a war vessel was to call and convey him back to Chili. But in less than two months the Republic was in the throes of a deadly struggle with Peru—here the commander of the O'HIGGINS bowed to the American captain, and, pointing to a huge scar that traversed his bronzed face from temple to chin, said, "in which I had the honour to receive this, and promotion"—and nearly two years had elapsed ere ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke

... searched out the axe. With it he first smashed in the whiskey jugs. Then he wrecked the cutter, chopping it savagely until it was reduced to splinters and twisted iron. By the time this was done, his antagonists were in the throes of returning consciousness. He stood over them, ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White

... passing thence to battle, felt Travail, and throes and agonies of the life, Desiring to be join'd with Guinevere; And thinking as he rode, "Her father said That there between the man and beast they die. Shall I not lift her from this land of beasts Up to my throne, and side by side with me? What happiness to reign a lonely king, Vext—O ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various

... there was a chorus of laughter when the young wretch exhibited my battered pencil, bought in Princes Street yesterday, its gay Gordon tints sadly disfigured by the destroying tooth, not of Time, but of a bard in the throes of composition. ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... unison, a distance of scarce twenty yards intervening between the marksmen and their prey. Peter's mark, the largest and most beautiful of the two, fell dead, with its head transfixed with the arrow, which waved feebly above the crimsoned surface, as the huge body trembled with the throes of dissolution. La Salle's aim was less sure, and the novel missile tore through the neck, just below the ear. A fountain of blood sprang ten feet into the air as the dying animal fell back, spurning the bloody pool with tail and flippers; but the mighty heart sent forth its wasted ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall

... he descended with a thud to observe that it was quarter of two o'clock, and the dining-room was cold with the dying down of the Latrobe, and the excellent reading-lamp in the death-throes of going out. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... wrongs of time one succourer arose: When Pleiads and the Fishes show in sky the rise I watch, * As worshipper within whose breast a pious burning glows: For Star o' Morn I speer until at last when it is seen, * I'm madded with my passion and my fancy's woes and throes: I swear by you that never from your love have I been loosed; * Naught am I save a watcher who of slumber nothing knows! Though hard appear my hope to win, though languor aye increase, * And after thee my patience fails and ne'er ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... Arnold's sons never recovered the strain of those awful hours on the bridge of the Sorrento in her death-throes, and, to use his father's words: 'He never was a man no more.' But Jarvist himself did many a subsequent good deed of rescue, and stuck to his arduous post as long as, and even beyond, what health and strength ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor

... that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson

... in celebration of the new Goodloets, down in the Settlement like rejoicings were being held at the dance hall of the Last Chance. In fact, the whole small city was in the throes of a great rejoicing. Why shouldn't all Goodloets revel when it was enjoying a prosperity beyond anybody's dreams of two years before? Everybody had been generous to the old town with the money that had come so ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... web, she hastens up and covers the captive with corded meshes and silk ribbons by the armful, making all resistance impossible. When the prey is solidly bound, a prick is carefully administered with the poison-fangs; then the Spider retires, waiting for the death-throes to calm down, after which the huntress comes back to the game. In these conditions, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre

... throes and struggles which proclaimed a painful return of life, Harrington lifted Mabel to a sitting posture and supported her there. His heart was wrung by every spasm of anguish that swept over her; yet at each one, he sent ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens

... principle of good was content to remain shut up inactive in his barren glory, the principle of evil slumbered unconscious in a darkness that knew no beginning; but when at last "the spirit who giveth increase"—Spento-mainyus—determined to manifest himself, the first throes of his vivifying activity roused from inertia the spirit of destruction and of pain, Angro-mainyus. The heaven was not yet in existence, nor the waters, nor the earth, nor ox, nor fire, nor man, nor demons, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... strains of the old home songs—Irish, Scotch and English—were wafted to my ears. Except for the incessant shelling, the flash of guns, and the distant glare from the star-shells, it was almost impossible to believe we were in the terrible throes of war. I arrived ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins



Words linked to "Throes" :   hurt, suffering



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