"Devastating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great Cathedrals of both North and South. These were the years when religion was the dominant idea of the western world,—when everything, even warfare, was pressed into its service. Instead of devastating their own and their neighbour's country, Christian armies were devastating the Holy Land; doing to the Infidel in the name of their religion what he, in the name of his, had formerly done to them. The capture of Jerusalem had triumphantly ended the First Crusade; the Church was everywhere victorious, ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... father of the American smutty story—the only original art-form that America has yet contributed to literature. Huxley, had he not been the greatest intellectual duellist of his age, might have been its greatest satirist. Bismarck, pursuing the gruesome trade of politics, concealed the devastating wit of a Moliere; his surviving epigrams are truly stupendous. And Beethoven, after soaring to the heights of tragedy in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, turned to the sardonic bull-fiddling of ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... the sky like portents. Little heavy drops of rain fell with a sudden urgency as though they were emphasising some secret; figures were swept through the streets and the roar of the wind was so vehement that the traffic seemed to make no sound. And yet nothing happened—no great storm of rain, no devastating flood. It was a day ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... of a peculiar density spurted from the tube toward Mapes. There was a flash of blinding flame as the light beam met the gangster's body; then Mapes' figure seemed to literally explode, as though blasted by dynamite from within. So devastating was the force of that explosion that nothing remained of Mapes' body beyond a few scattered fragments of shoes ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... fact; and I should say that in these the reality of Zola, unreal or ideal in his larger form, his epicality, vitally resided. His people live in the memory as entirely as any people who have ever lived; and, however devastating one's experience of them may be, it leaves no doubt of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... if the fire from heaven had descended in one terrific crash, burying beneath its devastating flames his ideals, his happiness, and his divinity. She was no longer there. His madonna had ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... first lull came in that devastating storm, Columbus found himself south of Cuba among the little "Garden" group. It was the third time he had had a chance to sail along the Cuban coast and discover whether it really was an island, as the natives said, or whether it was the mainland, as he had forced his sailors to ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... Pillaging, burning, devastating wherever they could, in what was to them a holy war of resistance to the infidel and the invader, the predatory tribes had broken out into a revolt which the rout of Zaraila, heavy blow though it had been to them, had by no means ended. They were still in arms, infesting ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... a sidelong glance at Mason, who stood as if carved out of marble. The effects of the ray blast were devastating, having paralyzed his entire nervous system. While the victim was still able to breathe and his heartbeat remained normal, he was unable to move so much as an eyelid. The gun was developed after all ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... too weak to effect its relief, too wise to jeopardise his army for the sake of Spanish praise, lay motionless while this great fortress fell into the hands of the invader. In September, the French, 70,000 strong, entered Portugal. Wellington retreated down the valley of the Mondego, devastating the country. At length he halted at Busaco and gave battle (September 27). The French were defeated; the victory gave the Portuguese full confidence in the English leader; but other roads were open to the invader, and Wellington continued his retreat. Massena followed, and heard for the first ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... witnessed the spectacle for which the unhappy captain had prayed long and devoutly. The Philadelphia was in flames—red, devouring flames, pouring out of her hold, climbing the rigging, licking her topmasts, forming fantastic columns—devastating, unconquerable flames—the frigate was doomed, doomed! And every now and then one of her guns would explode as though booming out her requiem. ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... had so recently been, making their inglorious campaign in France had been excluded from that country at the close of 1587, and furious were the denunciations of the pulpits and the populace of Paris that the foreign brigands who had been devastating the soil of France, and attempting to oppose the decrees of the Holy Father of Rome, should; have made their escape so easily. Rabid Lincestre and other priests and monks foamed with rage, as they execrated and anathematized the devil-worshipper Henry of Valois, in all ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... The falling gang raced to keep ahead of the buckers and swampers, and they in turn raced to keep ahead of the hook tender, rigging slinger, and donkey, which last trio moved the logs from woods to water, once they were down and trimmed. Terrible, devastating forces of destruction they seemed to Stella Benton, wholly unused as she was to any woodland save the well-kept parks and little areas of groomed forest in her native State. All about in the ravaged woods lay the big logs, scores ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... time for verbal argument. I collected him, a kicking handful, bore him to the ladder, and pushed him through the opening. He uttered one of his devastating squeals. The sound seemed to encourage the workers outside like a trumpet-blast. The blows on the ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... nation was of such a nature that they could not represent the church for long, for at heart they were idolaters; they therefore relapsed gradually from representative worship, perverting all things of the church, even to devastating it finally. This was represented by the profanations of the temple by the kings and by the people's idolatries; the full devastation of the church was represented by the destruction of the temple, the carrying off of Israel, and ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Mandulies (metallic cells) are worn to great advantage in India on diseased parts of the body. The curative properties of these cells I have seen verified in authentic instances. When, years ago (I believe about 1852), cholera was devastating some parts of Europe, it was remarked at Munich (Bavaria) that among the thousands of its victims there was not a single coppersmith. Hence, it was recommended by the medical authorities of that town to wear disks of thin ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... box, with numerous wires, wheels, levers and projecting tubes. These latter contained lenses and shutters, but the Germans must have imagined devastating fire could spout from them. And so they ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... them, had they ever met in mortal combat. Between this part of the Prince's forces and the Irish auxiliaries there was a deadly animosity. Alas, there always is such in camps! The sons of Albion had not forgotten the day when the children of Erin had been subject to their devastating sway. ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Russia are at their Eastern gates and will very soon be devastating their country and overthrowing ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... vast seething furnace from whose throat the fire burst now southward and upward with a roar. The wind was bringing its element of peril to add to the conflagration's own; it caught the white heat from the blazing mass of buildings and started it sweeping southward in a devastating ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... and I don't want to fail, and you don't want me to fail." He agreed rapturously. Of course she did fail, nevertheless. But being obstinate she said she would go in again, and they continued to make a secret of the engagement. They found the secret delicious. Then followed the devastating episode of Vaillac. Shortly afterwards Olive One and Vaillac were married, and then Olive Two was alone in the nice house. The examination was forgotten, and she hated the house. She wanted to be married; Coe also. But nothing had been ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... known many devastating floods, but none like to this in either destructive force or extent. On March 26th three distinct flood districts prevailed—the eastern part of the state including the valley of the White Water River and the Fort ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... 715, shattered any optimistic hopes that Micah held for a continuation of improvement in the condition of the common people, in which he had been instrumental up to this time. The costs of war always fell heaviest on the poor, and the devastating results of war upon the ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... it all: The materialization of the fleets; the swift, devastating blow, then the instantaneous retreat into the fastnesses of the past. Terrific destruction, but not a ship ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... Maritime northwest where I now live, and a catastrophe develops. During the first year these soil animals are present but cause no problem. But after the first mild winter with no population setback, they become a plague. Slugs (and in California, snails) will be found everywhere, devastating seedlings. Earwigs and sow bugs, that previously only were seen eating only decaying mulch, begin to attack plants. It soon becomes impossible to get a stand of seedlings established. The situation can be rapidly cured by raking up all the mulch, carting it away from the garden, and composting it. ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... raging none are angered about it, because they know it will quickly pass away, and when the storms of contention are devastating the world, the wise man, looking with the eye of Truth and pity, knows that it will pass away, and that out of the wreckage of broken hearts which it leaves behind the immortal Temple of Wisdom ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... triumph, excitement, congratulations, a sort of sunburst of gladness, after a long night of gloom and anxiety; then two or three days of calming down, by degrees —a receding of tides, a quieting of the storm-wash to a murmurous surf-beat, a diminishing of devastating winds to a refrain that bore the spirit of a truce-days given to solitude, rest, self-communion, and the reasoning of herself into a realization of the fact that she was actually done with bolts and bars, prison, horrors and impending, death; then came a day whose hours filed slowly by her, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... struck their dens, they attempted clumsily to take wing, but a interlacing network of devastating disintegrating rays from the ray-guns shattered their bodies to dust, which was borne away by ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... all the dwellers of the forest has descended a devastating visitation in the shape of the ivory raiders of civilisation. The race that wrote the Arabian Nights, built Bagdad and Granada, and invented Algebra, sends forth men with the hunger for gold in their hearts, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... which he was invested during the six days of the creation, and as he will shine at the end of days, to make whole the halt and the blind among the Jews and to consume the heathen. This same healing and devastating property he had on that day, too, for Jacob was cured, while Esau and his princes were all but burnt up by his ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... great intermediate region, the fierce Cachalot inclines toward the south, devastating the warm waters. On the contrary, the Free Whale fears the warm waters,—we should rather say, that they did, formerly, fear them,—they have become so scarce. They are never found in the warm southern current; it is that fact that led to the current being noticed, and thence ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... that devastating and altogether horrible prospect, and because the London feather dealers "need the money," the bill was at first defeated—to the great joy of the Chamber of Commerce and Mr. Downham; but the cause of birds will win in the end, because it ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... struggled on still with despotism in obstinate and dubious contest; sanguinary battles were fought; a brilliant array of heroes succeeded each other on the field of glory, and Flanders and Brabant were the schools which educated generals for the coming century. A long, devastating war laid waste the open country; victor and vanquished alike waded through blood; while the rising republic of the waters gave a welcome to fugitive industry, and out of the ruins of despotism erected the noble edifice of its own greatness. For forty years lasted the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... with a hopeless vein of sheer worldly philistinism in his book, Thackeray is yet able, by a certain unconquerable insight into the motives and impulses of mediocre people, and by a certain weight and mass of creative force, to give a convincing reality to his pictures of life, which is almost devastating in its sneering ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... of Chaldaea must always have been familiar with inundations; probably no generation failed to witness an inundation which rose unusually high, or was rendered serious by coincident atmospheric or other disturbances. And the memory of the general features of any exceptionally severe and devastating flood, would be preserved by popular tradition for long ages. What, then, could be more natural than that a Chaldaean poet should seek for the incidents of a great catastrophe among such phenomena? In what other ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, clergymen, Montenegrins, and the Editor of John Bull, at the government's expense—and I am bound to say he deserved them all, being a man of infinite tact, many languages, and a devastating sense of humor. There was always a Charlie Chaplin film between moving pictures of the battles of the Somme. He brought the actualities of war to the visitors' chateau by sentry-boxes outside the door, a toy "tank" in the front garden, and a collection of war trophies in the hall. He spoke to ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... And who can tell How men and women will interact On each other, or what children will result? There were Benjamin Pantier and his wife, Good in themselves, but evil toward each other; He oxygen, she hydrogen, Their son, a devastating fire. I Trainor, the druggist, a miser of chemicals, Killed while making ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... way, although his position as heir-presumptive to the Crown secured him from any demonstration of resistance. Langres and Dijon closed their gates against him, the magistrates excusing themselves upon the plea that they held those cities for the King; and on his arrival in the Bourbonnais, after devastating all the villages upon his route, the imprudent Prince was met by a request from M. de Montmorency that he would march his troops through some other province, as no sufficient preparations had yet been completed ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... substantially to American Samoa's economic well-being. Attempts by the government to develop a larger and broader economy are restrained by Samoa's remote location, its limited transportation, and its devastating hurricanes. Tourism, a developing sector, may be held back by the current financial difficulties ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... have restored the kingdom of Poland, and stamped perpetual renown on his diadem, by an act of imperial justice. But he preferred sacrificing it to the alliance of Austria—for the purpose of devastating Russia. He might have exercised his boundless influence over Spain, to bring the faculties of that noble country to the light, and add the contributions of twelve millions of a half-forgotten race of mankind, to the general happiness of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... spreadings and recessions of populations, as aimless and mechanical as the trickling of spilt water, which was the substance of history for endless years, giving rise here to congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and everywhere to a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only picturesque, is at an end. Men spread now, with the whole power of the race to aid them, into every available region of the earth. ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... their resistless course, till they were arrested by the Atlantic on the one side, and the Indian ocean on the other—of the stern crusaders, who, nursed amid the cloistered shades and castellated realms of Europe, struggled with that devastating horde "when 'twas strongest, and ruled it when 'twas wildest"—of the long agony, silent decay, and ultimate resurrection of the Eternal City—are so many immortal pictures, which, to the end of the world, will fascinate every ardent and imaginative mind. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... these people are well. In spite of their healthy forest lives they are far less sound than an average white community. They have their own troubles, with the white man's maladies thrown in. I saw numberless other cases of dreadful, hopeless, devastating diseases, mostly of the white man's importation. It is heart-rending to see so much human misery and be able to do nothing at all for it, not even bring a gleam of hope. It made me feel like a murderer to tell one after another, ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... calcified by study," a colossal pride, an unhinged conscience, a pompous, gloomy imagination haunted with the bloody recollections of Rome and Sparta, an intelligence so warped and twisted as to be comfortable only among excessive paradoxes, shameless sophistry, and devastating lies.[3418] All these dangerous ingredients which, mingled in the crucible of suppressed, concentrated ambition, long and silently boiling within him, have led to a constant defiance, a determined callousness, an automatic rigidity, and to the summary politics of the Utopian dictator ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... unfortunate people as she has hitherto done. Not only has she forced Stan islaus Augustus upon them, but she has also compelled them to alter their constitution, and, in the face of all justice, her armies occupy Poland, devastating the country, and ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... The church, till now gloomy, seemed to Rosalie to be illuminated. The girl was fascinated by his slow and solemn demeanor, as of a man who bears a world on his shoulders and whose deep gaze, whose very gestures, combine to express a devastating or absorbing thought. Rosalie now understood the Vicar-General's words in their fullest extent. Yes, those eyes of tawny brown, shot with golden lights, covered ardor which revealed itself in sudden flashes. ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... From over the table, set with the glass and silver that George Alston had bought when he came down from Virginia City, the high, hard light of the chandelier fell on the three females who made up the family. It was devastating to Aunt Ellen Tisdale's gnarled old visage—she was over seventy and for several years now had given up all tiresome thought processes—but the girls were so smoothly skinned and firmly modeled that it only served to bring out the rounded freshness ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... plunged into dissipation, into corroding vice, I desired and possessed everything, for fasting had made me light-headed like the tempted Saint Anthony. Slumber, happily, would put an end at last to these devastating trances; and on the morrow science would beckon me, smiling, and I was faithful to her. I imagine that women reputed virtuous, must often fall a prey to these insane tempests of desire and passion, which rise in us in spite of ourselves. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... losses suffered by their comrades of the Hussars and Dragoons, almost entirely exterminated the eight Russian battalions, All were either killed or captured! The battlefield was a scene of horror. Never has a cavalry charge had such a devastating result. The Emperor demonstrated his satisfaction with the Cuirassiers by embracing their general before the whole division. General D'Hautpoul exclaimed, "To show myself worthy of this honour, I shall dedicate my life to your majesty." He kept his word, for the ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... their approach and palsied resistance. At almost the same date Bremen on the Baltic and Constance on the lake, felt their power. They swarmed over the Alps. They menaced Southern France, and peered from the Pyrenees at Spain. Italy felt their heaviest hand, and Rome saw their devastating flames almost under its walls. For fifty years Christendom quaked and fell before them, and halted them for the first time in A. D. 936 by the hands of Henry the Fowler. Gradually they were restrained to the limits of ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... terrific explosive shells. Clouds of sand, and yellow smoke mingled marked the scene of destruction, as battery after battery was spotted and promptly put out of action. Across the dunes could be seen swarms of ant-like figures—German troops flying for shelter from the devastating ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... there lurks disease" (So dreamt this lively dreamer), "Or devastating caries In humerus or femur, If you can pay a handsome fee, Oh, then you may remember me— With joy elate I'll amputate Your humerus ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... is that they had overstrained their intellects in the study of metaphysical theology, "because when the mind soars up to see God it is no wonder that, it falls down sometimes blind and confused." Heresy he elsewhere pictures as a devastating monster. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... counsel, worthy of his knowledge and experience. Miss Maggimore had actually asked him if the papers were good for anything; and he had actually informed her that they were very valuable, thus saving them from a devastating conflagration in the cooking-stove. Miss Maggimore had actually been paid five hundred dollars for opening that chest, and taking therefrom the package of papers; while he, who had furnished the intelligence, supplied the brains, and ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... dump of useless ore. Serviss, familiar with the rise and fall of the silver-miner, looked over the lovely valley with a certain sense of satisfaction, for he was able to reconstruct its beauty before that flood of devastating humankind swept up from the eastern plain. "Nature is reasserting her dominion," he said, aloud. "Mining is ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... "Those are devastating clothes," he remarked. "D'you know, until now I always had an idea that furs weren't becoming to women. Make most of 'em look stuffy. ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... that the motion of winds can be transmitted to other matter, as we have numerous examples from our observation and experience, in the case of windmills driven by the motive power of the winds, and also balloons urged along by the same cause; apart from the devastating effect produced in towns and country by a hurricane ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... crosses the Rhine and plunders and burns the towns of the Allemanni, repairs the fortress of Trajan, and grants the barbarians a truce for ten months.—II. He hems in six hundred Franks who are devastating the second Germania, and starves them into surrender.—III. He endeavours to relieve the Gauls from some of the tribute which weighs them down.—IV. By order of the Emperor Constantius an obelisk is erected at Rome in the Circus Maximus;—some observations ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... for Tom Vanrevel was, in a measure, that of the vine for the oak. He was full of levities at Tom's expense, which the other bore with a grin of sympathetic comprehension, or, at long intervals, returned upon Crailey with devastating effect. Vanrevel was the one steadying thing in his life, and, at the same time, the only one of the young men upon whom he did not have an almost mesmeric influence. In good truth, Crailey was the ringleader in all the devilries of the town. Many a youth swore to avoid the roisterer's company ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... instant Tou Tou is scrawling and scrambling like a great spider up the steep bank: in an instant more she is tugging, tearing, devastating; while the faint petals that no mightiest king can restore, but that any infant with a touch can destroy, are showering in scented ruin around her. It gives me a pain to see it, as if I saw some sentient thing in agony. I think I feel, with Walter ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... economy and most populous nation, Germany remains a key member of the continent's economic, political, and defense organizations. European power struggles immersed the country in two devastating World Wars in the first half of the 20th century and left the country occupied by the victorious Allied powers of the US, UK, France, and the Soviet Union in 1945. With the advent of the Cold War, two German states were formed in 1949: the western Federal Republic of Germany ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... was not there. A terrible storm came over her, as if she were drowning. She was possessed by a devastating hopelessness. And she approached mechanically to the altar. Never had she known such a pang of utter and final hopelessness. It was beyond ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... The devastating effects of these storm-waves is still further illustrated by the total destruction of Coringa, on the Coromandel Coast, in 1789. During a hurricane, in December of that year, at the moment when a high tide was at its highest point, and the north-west wind was blowing with fury, accumulating the ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... measures might be taken to secure my safety, but to spare me any sudden agitation. Alas! none was spared to himself! More clearly than any one he anticipated the impending tempest, and foreboded its devastating effects. He spoke aloud and strenuously, with prophetic energy, to all with whom he was then officially associated but the greater part either despaired of resisting the torrent, or disbelieved its approach. What deeply interesting scenes crowd upon my remembrance, of his noble, his daring, but ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... more peremptory, than that? How then, upon what conditions, in what sense, can a principle which is its own denial enter into science? How can it become an organic law of society? If competition is necessary; if, as the school says, it is a postulate of production,—how does it become so devastating in its effects? And if its most certain effect is to ruin those whom it incites, how does it become useful? For the INCONVENIENCES which follow in its train, like the good which it procures, are not accidents ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Wall, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,—which one prominent librarian considers the best ghost story ever written,—is original in the method of its horrific manifestation. Isn't it more devastating to one's sanity to see the shadow of a revenge ghost cast on the wall,—to know that a vindictive spirit is beside one but invisible—than to see the specter himself? Under such circumstances, the sight of a skeleton or a sheeted phantom would be ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... you. It is in the volume which covers his mission to Spain; not one of the best, little more in fact than a journal, but at least it is a journal wonderfully well written, which fairly distinguishes it from the devastating journalism that we feel bound to read in these days, morning, noon ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... conclusion that I need not wonder. All with the exception perhaps of two, a painter and a Jew looked such good citizens. I became gradually sure that they were not troubled with the lap and wash of speculation; unclogged by any devastating sense of unity; pure of doubt, and undefiled ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... told the time when Charles the First was beheaded, and recorded the death-devouring progress of the Great Plague and the Fire of London. There is no doubt that the sun often shone even in these devastating occasions, so that we may picture Sir Thomas Blank telling the time here ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... the Huns 166 were driven out of Pannonia by the Romans and Goths, almost fifty years after they had taken possession of it. Then Valia found that the Vandals had come forth with bold audacity from the interior of Galicia, whither Athavulf had long ago driven them, and were devastating and plundering everywhere in his own territories, namely in the land of Spain. So he made no delay but moved his army against them at once, at about the time when Hierius and Ardabures had ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes
... the most terrific bombardment the war had witnessed burst with devastating fury upon the German lines. Nothing had been heard like it, and men smiled grimly, knowing that their turn ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... enemy retired on Petra Bona, and that too was taken. Then the Austrians rushed toward the bridge of the Bormida; but Carra-Saint-Cyr was there before them. The flying multitudes sought the fords, or plunged into the Bormida under a devastating fire, which did not slacken ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... amount of capital invested disproportionate to the product when measured by the achievement in other branches of industry. More important than this is the result of the isolation upon the worker herself. There is nothing more devastating to the inventive faculty, nor fatal to a flow of mind and spirit, than the constant feeling of loneliness and the absence of that fellowship which makes our public opinion. If an angry foreman reprimands a girl for breaking a machine, twenty other girls hear him, and ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... merely speculative questions about "the church," or about "religion," and the stream which, had it been directed into a right channel, and to a right point, would have been made a power for immense good, soon rushes over the land a wide-spread, muddy, devastating flood, oozes out into stagnant marshes, full of miasma and fever, or evaporates ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... troops over the river, no one venturing to oppose him, and even the Suevi, the most valiant of the Germans, retired with their property into deep woody valleys. After devastating with fire the enemy's country and encouraging all those who favoured the Romans, he returned into Gaul after spending eighteen days in Germany. His expedition against the Britanni[498] was notorious for its daring: for he was the first who ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... overtaking it, I found the dark clouds accumulated on his brow, and learned with indescribable pain that he was on his way home from Florence, where he had just lost his second and only remaining son, from an attack corresponding in its suddenness and its devastating rapidity with that which had struck down his eldest born son ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... heavier personal affliction in perpetual imputations of awkwardness. Then, again, it is no easy matter to put on a smiling and indifferent countenance, whenever a friend, accustomed to some latitude of motion, runs, as is often the case, his devastating chair against a high-priced work of art, or overturns a table laden with an "infinite thing" in costly bijouterie. I have long made it a rule to exclude from my visiting-list, or at least not to let up stairs, ladies ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... with the Law," cries Paul. He could not have uttered anything more devastating to the prestige of the Law. He declares that he does not care for the Law, that he does not intend ever to be justified ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... Mrs. Gubling, as one devastating tableful rose lingeringly from the repast, and another flock began to gather in hungry expectancy at the door,—"I do declare, I'm near beat out. Is this a starvin' community? At this rate they'll eat up all there is in the house, and ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... A devastating epidemic of measles, much aggravated by the improper treatment given to patients by the natives, now broke out. Even Vailima did not escape its ravages, and Mrs. Strong writes ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... snow. By 8 P.M. we had reached within a mile or so of the slope ascending to the gap which Shackleton called the Gateway.22 I had hoped to be through the Gateway with the ponies still in hand at a very much earlier date and, but for the devastating storm, we should have been. It has been a most serious blow to us, but things are not yet desperate, if only the storm has not hopelessly spoilt the surface. The man-haulers are not up yet, in spite of their light load. I think they have stopped for tea, or something, but under ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... at Florence, the great plague that carried off Petrarch's Laura, and those other thousands of whom the world knew nothing then and knows nothing now. Some, too, have heard that the plague swept over Europe—desolating, devastating—the spectre with the swinging scythe mowing down broad swathes of men. Some, when they hear of it, picture to themselves Pope Clement VI. at Avignon, sitting in that vast palace that overlooks the Rhone, the stench of corpses mastered for him by the fragrant smoke of aromatic logs ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... September sixteenth, Massena crossed the Portuguese frontier, and Wellington, who lay near by but had not ventured to assume the offensive, began a slow and cautious retreat down the valley of the Mondego, devastating the country as he went. At last he made a stand on the heights near Busaco, over against a gorge where the river breaks through the hills into the plains below. Massena attacked on September twenty-seventh and was repulsed ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... subjects. Persons who not only band against the sovereign, but invoke foreign aid and seek a foreign alliance, are, however noble their motives, rebels. There is no other word for them. But that they were not rebels Knox urged in a sermon at Edinburgh, which the Reformers, after devastating Stirling, reached by June 28-29 (?), and the Second Book of his "History" labours mainly to prove this point; no change of "authority" ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... crazy, enthusiastic Americans, engineers, health officers, executives, school teachers, Constabulary, labored on in the glory of service: eradicated cholera, built roads and bridges, brought six hundred thousand children into school that two score tribes might find a common tongue, fought the devastating cattle plagues, wiped out brigandage and piracy, brought order and first semblance of prosperity to eight ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... solemnly our disbelief that he is actuated by any but the highest motives in lending his name to persecutions that recall the spirit of the Star Chamber. But in these days when the rapid and relentless march of Scientific Knowledge is devastating the plain of Theological Speculation we owe it to our readers to observe that the appointment of Dr. Aylmer Oliphant to the Bishopric of Silchester must be regarded as an act of intellectual cowardice. Not merely is Dr. Oliphant a notorious extremist ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... final effort in the late afternoon to advance against our positions in a line of small sections, which was met with the usual devastating fire, the enemy gave it up and occupied the remaining hours of daylight with fierce shelling. Our heavy artillery had at last returned and got to work and their shelling began to have effect, for it was noticeable that the Boche shells were now arriving from a ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... to the sword? To it was due the birth of our own nation, not least among the benefits of which was the stern experience that has made Great Britain no longer the mistress, but the mother, of her dependencies. The control, to good from evil, of the devastating fire of the French Revolution and of Napoleon was due to the sword. The long line of illustrious names and deeds, of those who bore it not in vain, has in our times culminated—if indeed the end is even yet nearly reached—in ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... business, followed by the closing of factories and penury among laborers. To others it means three dollars a day for unskilled labor, fire, clothes, and something to eat. Again, if one wished to present the horrors of devastating disease, in the South he would mention yellow fever, in the North smallpox; but to a lady who saw six little brothers and sisters dead from it in one week, three carried to the graveyard on the hillside one chill November morning, all the terrors of contagious disease are ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... village of Hendon, on the north-western side of London, and to trust to inquiries for the rest of the way. Between Hendon and Willesden, there are pastoral solitudes within an hour's drive of Oxford Street—wooded lanes and wild-flowers, farms and cornfields, still unprofaned by the devastating brickwork of the builder of modern times. Following winding ways, under shadowing trees, the coachman made his last inquiry at a roadside public-house. Hearing that Benjulia's place of abode was now within ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... with the thundering noise of a devastating avalanche, the herd came as though nothing had happened. The late moon that had been touching the peaks of the far mountains now lifted a rim over them, flooding the world with a soft radiance. Sanderson had reached the center of the trail, ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the Forest lived and breathed in safety, secure from mutilation. No terror of the axe could haunt the peace of its vast subconscious life, no terror of devastating Man afflict it with the dread of premature death. It knew itself supreme; it spread and preened itself without concealment. It set no spires to carry warnings, for no wind brought messages of alarm as it bulged outwards ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... gold-regions of California was, indeed, clouded to a fearful extent with the soul-destroying vapours of worldliness, selfishness, and ungodliness, which the terrors of Lynch law alone restrained from breaking forth in all their devastating strength. ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... freedom from the bondage in which so many men move wearily. It was as if his passions had been dammed up by the original influence of Valentine. Through the years, behind the height of the dam, the waters had been rising, accumulating, pressing. Suddenly the dam was removed, and a devastating flood swept forth, uncontrollable, headlong, and furious. Julian needed rescue, but the only way to rescue seemed to lie through Valentine, within whose circle of influence he was so closely bound. The mystery of Valentine ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... mortal mind are not always destroyed [20] by the first uprooting; they reappear, like devastating witch-grass, to choke the coming clover. O stupid gar- dener! watch their reappearing, and tear them away from their native soil, until no seedling be left to ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... England, France, and Russia, under the chief command of Sir Edward Codrington. The Greeks had readily accepted an armistice under the treaty; but Ibrahim Pasha not only refused its terms, but aggravated the miseries of war by devastating the country of Greece. The inhabitants were massacred; villages, vineyards and olive-trees, in which the principal riches of the nation consisted, destroyed. Irritated by such barbarity the allied admirals determined to enforce the armistice ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Curiosity rushed like a devastating tornado across Miss Mapp's mind, rooting up all other growths, buffeting her with the necessity of knowing what the two whom she had been forced to leave in the garden were doing now, and snatching up her opera-glasses she glided upstairs, and let herself out through ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... cheered myself with vain hope, for the papers next morning blazoned the news to all the world. That they printed it under great staring head-lines was not surprising to me, for to me this fact transcended all others in importance. Beside it the rumblings of war in the Balkans, the devastating flood in China, or the earthquake which wrecked a southern city were trifles. So to my distorted view the papers were filled with the announcement of my overwhelming misfortune. Only by the greatest effort could I drag myself from reading and rereading to my humdrum task. Before me in black and white ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... operations in naval warfare, have been somewhat overrated. Visions of air-ships hovering over a doomed city and devastating it with missiles dropped from above are mere fairy tales. Indeed the whole subject of aeronautics as an element in future human progress has excited far more attention than its intrinsic ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... produced an actual threat of war from France, and made the Pope and Philip gnash their teeth with rage. The Roman Catholic allied powers had no sufficient navy, and Philip's credit was at its lowest ebb after Drake's devastating raid. The English were exultant, east and west; for the True Report of a Worthie Fight performed in the voiage from Turkie by Five Shippes of London against 11 gallies and two frigats of the King of Spain at Pantalarea, within the Straits [of Gibraltar] Anno 1586 ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... because of the victories gained over them by their rivals—the Pish de-danaans—a sect of Yoni worshippers; in other words, the sect which recognized the female element as the superior agency in reproduction, and who, therefore, worshipped it as divine. In the devastating wars which swept over Persia and the other countries of antiquity prior to the age of the later Zoroaster, the Pish-de danaans were victorious, and, driving from the country the Tuath-de danaans, or male worshippers, succeeded in re-establishing, and ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... for the matter of that, short-range—bombardments of the Flanders littoral by warships I placed no trust. Mr. Churchill's "we could give you 100 or 200 guns from the sea in absolutely devastating support" of the 22nd of November to Sir J. French would not have excited me in the very least. In his book, the Field-Marshal ascribes the final decision of our Government to refuse sanction to a plan of operations which they had approved of at the first ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... excused in a matter so devastating to republican institutions as this if I quote further from the disclosures of Thomas Beet: "There is another phase," he says, "of the private detective evil which has worked untold damage in America. This is the private constabulary system by which armed forces are employed ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... rigor and destructive power. In the torrid zone it took the form of excessive rain and humidity, excessive heat, or excessive dryness and aridity. In the temperate and frigid zones, life was a seasonal battle with bitter cold, torrents of cold rain in early winter or spring, devastating sleet, and deep snow and ice that left no room ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... When a man was hit some one gave him first aid, directed the stretcher-bearers where to find him, and coolly resumed digging. In two hours our position had become untenable. We had been subjected to a merciless and devastating shelling, and our first experience of war had cost us sixty-five men. In a new and safer position ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... reports two hundred and forty-three thousand cases of venereal disease treated in one year, as compared with forty-one thousand five hundred and eighty-five cases of all other communicable diseases. This horrible sapping of the physical energies of the nation, with the devastating results in the family, with the poisoning of the germs for the next generation, and with the disastrous diseases of brain and spinal cord, is surely the gravest material danger which exists. How small compared with that the thousands of deaths from crime ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... and in Virginia, and Brazil, and down the St. Lawrence valley, it shone intermittently through a driving reek of thunder-clouds, flickering violet lightning, and hail unprecedented. In Manitoba was a thaw and devastating floods. And upon all the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt that night, and all the rivers coming out of high country flowed thick and turbid, and soon—in their upper reaches—with swirling trees and the bodies ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... facts with attention, I am astonished every day that society subsists at all, that the burning lava of unruly passions does not oftener make large fissures in the social soil, and overflow in devastating torrents, bearing away at once palace and cottage, field and workshop. This standing danger is drawing anxious attention, and we hear the old adage repeated: "There must be a religion for the people." There are men who wish to give the people a ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... those who surrounded him, and from those he admired as his masters, took hold of him. He was afraid of his own otherness, as all men are afraid when the first knowledge of their own essential loneliness begins to trouble their depths. The pathos of his struggle to kill the seed of this devastating knowledge is apparent in his declared desire to become 'a polished gentleman.' In the note which he added to his memoir for M. Dupin in 1749 he confesses to this ideal. If only he could become 'one of them,' indistinguishable ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... untrained to the work required of them. "Wordy chatterers, swearers of enormous oaths, despisers of others," as they seemed to the race of Nesta's descendants, the new rulers of the country proved mere plunderers, who went about burning, slaying, and devastating, while the old soldiery of the first conquest were despised and cast aside. Divisions of race which in England had quite died out were revived in Ireland in their full intensity; and added to the two ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... for some hesitation," said he. "St. Riok was only two years old when he overcame the dragon. Who says that nine or ten years later he could have done as much? Remember, father, that the dragon who is devastating our island has devoured little Elo and four or five other young boys. Brother Samuel is not go presumptuous as to believe that at nineteen years of age he is more innocent than they were at ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... abnormal, a terrible devastating agony of madness, inherited, incurable probably; part of mind and body and soul. Inherited, and integrally of him as were the colour of his eyes, his intelligence, his physique.... Heredity ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... not long after this that Jack received news that the James Boys had escaped from prison, reorganized the old gang and were devastating ...
— Jack Wright and His Electric Stage; - or, Leagued Against the James Boys • "Noname"
... trap and chain or otherwise overcome him. So my child, there are ways wherein man, assisted by his own knowledge, and by the instruction of departed spirits; aye, by the immortal Gods themselves, can evade even the malefic planets in their devastating course. ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... the only vital necessity in a nation's life. But the one vital necessity in a man's spiritual life he had missed. If he had had this, he told himself, life's bludgeons, however searching, however devastating, he could have laughed at. A man must have the thought of some good woman's love to sustain him. But for Enoch, the thought of any woman's love, Luigi had tainted at its source. He had neither mother nor mate, and until he had evolved some philosophy which would reconcile ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... purposes of living, on the things a man really and deep within himself sets first in his life; he will follow those things no matter what other professions he may make. Business as a servant deserves our allegiance and devotion; business as a master is the most evil and soul devastating thing in this universe. ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... selected him as admiral of his fleet: also he had in his mind those others who spoke slightingly of him as "the African pirate"; they should know as well as their master of what this pirate was capable. Northward the devastating host of Barbarossa took its way; the fair shores of Italy smoked to heaven as the torches of the corsairs fired the villages. Blood and agony, torture and despair, followed ever on the heels of the Sea-wolves ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... whatever the expectations were, they were doomed to disappointment, for, while she was last in starting, she did not reach any decisive result at all. Australia, New Zealand—and even South Africa, so lately the scene of a devastating war—each gave money, while Canada gave none. New Zealand, with only one-seventh of Canada's population, gave a Dreadnought, while Canada gave none. Australia had a battle-worthy squadron of her own—but Canada had ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... against them should they once reach the open valleys of the Alf and the Moselle. His Lordship would also have you know that this campaign is as much in your own interest as in his, for the Hungarians, in their devastating march, spare neither ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... SIR:—In your article in No. 51, on the forest fires and drought following a very wet season, and remarking that we should have such extremes, is it not due—our irregularity of climate—to our careless devastating of whole portions of the country of trees? Many claim so. We are in sore need of national or state ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 53, November 11, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... its historian Thucydides. In that fratricidal conflict Greece tore herself to pieces. It was a struggle between the two leaders of the then civilized world, and it has a terrible likeness to the struggle that is going on now. From its devastating influence Greece never recovered. Historians still dispute, and always will, as to the exact proportion of praise and blame between the two. But Thucydides himself, a true-hearted Athenian, brings out the tyrannical side in the Athenian temper. Not indeed towards her ...
— Progress and History • Various
... masters by right of might, of the city and the lives and fortunes of its inhabitants. The people in their darkened dwellings fell a prey to the helpless bewilderment which comes over men before the floods, the devastating upheavals of the earth, against which all wisdom and all force are unavailing. The same phenomenon occurs each time that the established order of things is overthrown, when public security is at an end, and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... he liked with it!" said a mild, piping falsetto; "And so far, he has made it beau-ti-ful!—beau-ti-ful!" carved with traceries of natural fruit and foliage, which were scarcely injured by the devastating mark of time. But rough and sacrilegious hands had been at work to spoil and deface the classic remains of the time-worn edifice, and some of the lancet windows had been actually hewn out and widened to admit of the insertion of modern timber ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... The devastating rush of the gray-clad hordes of Huns into the peace-loving lands of Belgium and France has demonstrated conclusively that to win this or any other war the one thing necessary is superiority in artillery. Without this, an ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... or overcoat he dropped into a chair before the library fire. A devastating weariness possessed him, but he knew he could not hide there in his home. To-day he might, to-morrow even, but the time would come when he must go out and face the world, must listen to the endless speculation concerning ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... quarrels, and their arms could not even preserve the Hellenic heritage against external foes. The Oriental rallied and expelled Hellenism again from the Asiatic hinterland, while the new cloud of Rome was gathering in the west. In four generations[2] of the most devastating warfare the world had seen, Rome conquered all the coasts of the Mediterranean. Greek city and Greek dynast went down before her, and the political sceptre passed irrevocably from ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... extremes of heat and cold, removed alike from the sultry, protracted summers of the more southern states, and the longer winters and devastating storm and cyclones of the North and Northwest. Its limits north and south correspond ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... control of life may have accomplished, it has not saved mankind from the old and devastating problems of trouble and sin. So far as individual experience of these is concerned, there is little discernable difference between two thousand years before Christ and two thousand years afterward. Still disasters fall upon our lives, sometimes as swift ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Leipzig clocks imperturbably strike nine, and the battle which is to decide the fate of Europe, and perhaps the world, begins with three booms from the line of the allies. They are the signal for a general cannonade of devastating intensity. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... by the memory of events and of landmarks. Out of the soil of diseased imagination has sprung up a growth as terrible as the drunkard's phantasies. The earthquake, flood, tidal wave, famine, withering or devastating wind and poisonous gases, the geological monsters and ravening bird, beast and fish, have their representatives or supposed ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... refrain, even as religion, "Sacrifice! Abnegate! Submit!" The spirit of Anarchism has lifted man from his prostrate position. He now stands erect, with his face toward the light. He has learned to see the insatiable, devouring, devastating nature of property, and he is preparing ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... however, to explain to ourselves why we love them. We love them because, as surely as the writings of Shakespeare and Lamb, they are an expression of that sort of heroic gentleness which can endure the fires of the most devastating tragedy. Shakespeare finally revealed the strong sweetness of his nature in The Tempest. Many people are inclined to over-estimate The Tempest as poetry simply because it gives them so precious a clue to the character of his genius, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... formed with the Egyptian king, Nekht-nebf, or Nectanebo II., who sent a body of 4,000 Greek mercenaries, under Mentor the Rhodian, to the aid of Tennes.[14335] Hostilities commenced by the Phoenicians expelling or massacring the Persian garrisons, devastating the royal park or paradise, and burning the stores of forage collected for the use of the Persian cavalry.[14336] An attempt made by two satraps—Belesys of Syria and Mazaeus of Cilicia—to crush the revolt was completely defeated by Tennes, with the aid of ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... chill at my northern home, was veiled in a soft and tender mist, which brought into yet lower tones the pale greens and grays of the southern forest which came close to the bayou's edge. The forest about us not yet fallen before the devastating northern lumbermen—men such as my father had been, who cared nothing for a tree or a country save as it might come to cash—was in part cypress, in part cottonwood, but on the ridge were many oaks, and over all hung the soft gray Spanish moss. The bayou itself, once the river, but now released ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... the Alban hills. Then one day Jose's uncle appeared at the monastery door with a written order from His Holiness, effecting the priest's conditional release. Together they journeyed at once to Seville, the uncle alert and energetic as ever, showing but slight trace of time's devastating hand; Jose, the shadow of his former self physically, and his mind clouded with the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... finished, a devastating fire of stones enfiladed the company, and one by one they fell, save for the commander himself, who bowed his grizzled wrought-steel head and sobbed, "The brave ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... eminently worth living to-night. Her head did not ache, her throat was not sore, her shoe did not hurt, her dress had been mended so successfully by Aunt Hannah, and with such comforting celerity, that long before night one would never have suspected the filmy thing had known the devastating tread of any man's foot. Better yet, the soprano had sung exactly to key, the alto had shrieked "Beware!" to thrilling purpose, Arkwright had shown all his old charm and vim, and the chorus had been prodigies of joyousness and marvels of lightness. Even the ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... Park. These men related their own experiences and impressions. Their auditors were able to appreciate the stupendous task of the landing parties and the heroism with which they had held on to the ground gained under devastating enemy fire and the ravages of disease. Of the relative positions of the opposing forces little of a definite nature was known, nor could anything be ascertained as to the plans for the future. The fact that ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... gave them a sense of direction. Many times they fell, skinning their shins and their foreheads against trees, but they picked themselves up again, entirely unconscious of bruises, and ran on as fast as they could go with the hot devastating wind behind them. Suddenly the whole mountainside was illuminated by a flash of lightning, like a jagged stream of fire stretching from heaven to earth. A deafening roar of thunder followed. Then all the forest seemed to be perfectly quiet. Such a stillness settled over the ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... three hundred miles below. From that time the height of the Nile increases rapidly day by day. The river, constantly reinforced by floods following one upon another from the Great Lakes and from Abyssinia, rises in furious bounds, and would become a devastating torrent were its rage not checked by the Nubian cataracts. Here six basins, one above another, in which the water collects, check its course, and permit it to flow thence only as a partially filtered and moderated stream. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... and carried off more than one-fourth of its inhabitants; in 1733, according to Collinson, it almost depopulated Greenland. The Samoyeds, Ostiaks, and other natives of Eastern Siberia, have frequently suffered from devastating epidemics. In Kamchatka the disease was introduced in 1767, and many villages were completely depopulated. According to Moore, at the beginning of the eighteenth century nearly one-fourteenth of the population died from small-pox ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... trouble: that is how we get those feuds between parent and child which recur to our memory so ironically when we hear people sentimentalizing about natural affection. We even get tragedies; for there is nothing so tragic to contemplate or so devastating to suffer as the oppression of will without conscience; and the whole tendency of our family and school system is to set the will of the parent and the school despot above conscience as something that must be deferred to abjectly and ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... the gifts, as Du Chesne tells us. But on the subsequent division of the empire among the undutiful sons of Louis, the pirates did not fail to take advantage of the general confusion; braving the sea almost every summer in their light coracles, sailing up the Seine, the Somme, or the Loire, and devastating the best parts of France, almost without resistance. In 845, they went up to Paris, pillaged it, and were on the point of attacking the royal camp at St. Dennis; but receiving a large sum of money from Charles the Bald, they retreated from thence, and with the new means thus ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... which made it an easy prey. The Mongols, moving as one man, took one principality at a time, its nobles and citizens alone bearing arms, the peasants, by far the greater part, being utterly defenseless. After wrecking and devastating that, they passed on to the next, which, however desperately defended, met the same fate. The Grand Principality was a ruin; its fourteen towns were burned, and when, in the absence of its Grand ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... occupied a wing of great price, and Cheyne, in a veranda-room, between a secretary and a typewriter, who was also a telegraphist, toiled along wearily from day to day. There was a war of rates among four Western railroads in which he was supposed to be interested; a devastating strike had developed in his lumber camps in Oregon, and the legislature of the State of California, which has no love for its makers, was preparing open ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... extraordinary cases, in which man, as an instrument in the hands of Providence, sometimes punishes great crimes, eradicates great evils, and accomplishes great national reforms by acts as sudden as the devastating career of the tempest in sweeping away pestilential vapors. Such may be the case with the revolted States, if they should persist in this wicked rebellion beyond the close of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... proceeding French had been distracting the enemy by a demonstration to the south-east of Colesburg. Consequently the shells from nowhere began to pour into their laager during breakfast (January 12) with devastating results. The laager was instantly abandoned, and a second, two thousand yards farther off, suffered the same fate. When Butcher had finally been able to get a second 15-pounder up the hill, the Boers were compelled to shift every camp they ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... was freshly made, and its meaning, had it possessed any, might have been repeated pat. But it was evident that the boy was putting a devastating strain upon an unexuberant and tardy wit when he endeavoured to ascribe to it a literary rendering. His hesitancy and contradictions ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... royal banners, of pennons on the breeze; the smiling of beautiful Court Ladies and great, silken Nobles; the swaying of howdahs on camel and elephant, and the awesome shaking of the earth beneath the elephant's feet, and the gleam of his small but devastating eye (every one declared he looked the alarmed Mr. Snoddy full in the face as he passed, and Mr. Snoddy felt not at all reassured when Tom Martin severely hinted that it was with the threatening glance of a rival); then the badinage of the clown, creaking ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... held as an almost sacred spot. Children are never allowed to meddle with its smallest twig. The ax of the woodman has never resounded there. Even war and riot have passed it reverently, pausing for a moment in their devastating way. Philip of Spain, while he ordered Dutchmen to be mowed down by hundreds, issued a mandate that not a bough of the beautiful Wood should be touched. And once, when in a time of great necessity the State was about to sacrifice it to assist in filling a nearly exhausted treasury, ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... father, though I can tell no one else. Harold has ordered us to bring out our housecarls, and with them he means to deal a blow against the Welsh, who have been devastating our western counties. The expedition is to be secret and sudden, although against what point and in what manner the blow is to be struck Harold has ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... automatic and wholesale progress in human affairs. Our part, the human part, was simply to enjoy the usufruct. Evolution inherited all the goods of divine Providence and had the advantage of being in fashion. Even a great and devastating war is not too great a price to pay for an awakening from such an infantile and selfish dream. Progress is not automatic; it depends upon human intent and aim and upon acceptance of responsibility for its production. It is not a wholesale matter, but a retail ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park |
