"Agonising" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rose; she found that other tomb; she knelt; And o'er it went her wandering palms, as though Some stone-blind mother o'er an infant's face Should spread an agonising hand, intent To choose betwixt her own and counterfeit; She found that cross deep-grav'n, and further sign Close by, to her well known. One piercing shriek - Another moment, and her body lay Along that grave with kisses, and wild hands As when some forest beast ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... opened, and between a double file of soldiers advanced seventeen non-commissioned officers, each one assisted by two monks of the order of Misericordia. Mournful silence prevailed, interrupted every now and then by the doleful beating of the drums, and the prayers of the agonising, chanted by the monks. The procession moved slowly on, and after some time reached the palace; the seventeen non-commissioned officers were ordered to kneel, their faces turned towards the wall. After a lengthened beating of the ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... stout pole pointed at one end, and the criminal being thrown upon his belly is held firm whilst the end is passed up his fundament. His legs and body are then lashed to it and it is raised by degrees and planted in a hole already dug, an agonising part of the process. If the operation be performed by an expert who avoids injuring any mortal part, the wretch may live for three days suffering the pangs of thirst; but a drink of water causes hemorrhage and instant death. This was ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Was she for whom these lines were intended still alive to read them? "God is good; God is merciful; He orders all things for the best; His will be done," he said calmly. Then he wrote on: he told of his deep anxiety, his agonising fears; but he spoke also of his hopes, of his trust in One all-powerful to save, of his eager desire ere long to reach Virginia. Lettice likewise wrote to her, giving many messages to Roger, to whom she would ...
— The Settlers - A Tale of Virginia • William H. G. Kingston
... mighty tree before a tempest. Cameron and Ross both spring to him. On the hillsides men stand rigid, pale, shaking; women shriek and faint. One ghastly moment of suspense, and then a horrid sickening thud; one more agonising second of silence, and then from a score of throats rises ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... desperation. A conviction that the Mountain and the cakes were delicious, an amiable desire that the palate of her spoiled child should be gratified, some reasonable maternal anxiety that after so long and fatiguing a drive he in fact needed some refreshment, and the agonising consciousness that all her own physical pleasure at the moment was destroyed by the mental sufferings she endured at having quarrelled with her son, and that he was depriving himself of what was so agreeable only to pique ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... seemed to be a moving form. His gaze remaining fixed and fascinated on this object, distinguished at last a dark face with two gleaming eyes surmounted by horns. All Peter Rorke's vaunted courage deserted him; conscience-stricken and smitten by sudden agonising fears, he uttered a shrill quavering scream and began to totter down the hill with all the ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... him. Now there must be an end of all this, now he would go home. He had not had the slightest prickings of conscience, the slightest longings, until now; all at once they were uncontrollable. SHE stood upon the hilltop, pure and noble. It became agonising. He must go at once, or it would drive him mad. This anxiety was made less acute by the sight of his mother's sincere pleasure. She came up to him when she heard that he had shut himself into his room. They had a really ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... of these poor beasts pierced me to the heart. Jacques questioned me with his eyes; he would have liked to try and deliver them. Their agonising moans soon became lamentable, and a great cracking sound was heard. The oxen had just broken down the stable doors. We saw them pass before us, borne away by the flood, rolled over and over in the current. And they disappeared amid ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... ball for some time in agonising indecision before he finally drove off. A cloud of sand rose; the ball was nowhere to be seen, and, taught by experience, he ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... able to see a day into the future, we might have spared ourselves this agonising, for all our doubts and fears were suddenly dispersed in an entirely unexpected manner. Happily these interior problems are not infrequently resolved by ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... fiend had driven her back against her will? The thought maddened her, but she could not move. The passionate love in her heart anchored those weary feet. She flung up her arms towards a window through which a light shone dimly—the window of his room, and an agonising cry of farewell broke from her. It was his name that fled from her lips like a burning arrow, and reached her husband in the gloomy stillness ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... calumnies of fools. I shall instantly let the worthy lady who contrived this somewhat original device, understand fully my opinion upon the matter. Good morning;' and with these words he left me again in doubt, and involved in all horrors of the most agonising suspense. ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... of Egyptian Mummies are past, how dare Mrs. Prodgit require, for the use of my son, an amount of flannel and linen that would carpet my humble roof? Do I wonder that she requires it? No! This morning, within an hour, I beheld this agonising sight. I beheld my son - Augustus George - in Mrs. Prodgit's hands, and on Mrs. Prodgit's knee, being dressed. He was at the moment, comparatively speaking, in a state of nature; having nothing on, but an extremely short shirt, remarkably ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... us out at the end of his work just as wise as we were at the beginning. It was doubtless some philosophical wild-goose chase of the kind that made the old poet Macrobius rail in such a passion at curiosity, which he anathematises most heartily as "an irksome, agonising care, a superstitious industry about unprofitable things, an itching humor to see what is not to be seen, and to be doing what signifies nothing when it is ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... shall never regret having kept my promise! Indeed, I never felt tempted to break it, except one day, when, in the old church, I met your father face to face. Never shall I forget the agonising longing I felt to throw myself at his feet and tell him all, and mingle ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... side, and with her face upturned and her hands clasped together, she now implored him to stop. She uttered no dissent, she made no protestations; but she beseeched him, by their long and tender love, by all the common ties which bound them together, to cease to speak on a subject which was so agonising. ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... had thought he would get hold of something, and—nothing! Not a trace, not a sign of anybody. He had raised his weapon as the door flew open, but now his arm fell. "Fire! Defend yourself," the girl outside cried in an agonising voice. She, being in the dark and with her arm thrust in to the shoulder through the small hole, couldn't see what was going on, and she dared not withdraw the torch now to run round. "There's nobody here!" yelled Jim contemptuously, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... indecent haste, returned a verdict of Guilty. The crowd of people in court were evidently surprised at the result, although I was not, and they gave vent to groans and hisses. The tumult was indescribable. Suddenly there rang out from the gallery overhead the agonising cry of my young wife, whom I had implored not to come, and whose presence there I never suspected. She had crept in and listened all day to my trial, never leaving her seat for fear of losing it; and now, overwearied and faint for want of food, she reeled under the ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... found the pious clergyman reading prayers with great fervency, while Don Diego stood with his right hand upon his breast, looking steadfastly upon the agonising Fathom, and the young woman kneeled, with her streaming eyes lifted up to heaven, in an ecstasy of grief and devotion. The physician had run to an apothecary's shop in the neighbourhood, from whence he soon returned with an assistant, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... treaty—"whereby the Germans have to tell us all the secrets of their manufacture of explosives, all their methods of making toxic gases— in fact, all the military secrets that made them so terrible. This clause was a very just one. It is not fair that when we have gone through this agonising struggle, and when we are still suffering from the consequences of all the wealth of knowledge and ingenuity which they employed for their infamous purposes— it is not fair, I say, to allow them to keep ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... remained to watch over the linen; but at five o'clock on the Sunday morning, Aunt Anna, Fleeming, and his mother were rowed in a pour of rain on board an English merchantman, to suffer "nine mortal hours of agonising suspense." With the end of that time peace was restored. On Tuesday morning officers with white flags appeared on the bastions; then, regiment by regiment, the troops marched in, two hundred men sleeping on the ground ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he had entertained, the visions of gay things which he had suffered the enchanter Imagination to call forth from the former obscurity of his fate, were all dispelled by the words that he had just heard spoken; and everything dark, and painful and agonising, was spread out around him in its stead. He was as one who, having fallen asleep in a desert, has dreamt sweet dreams, and then suddenly wakes with the rising sun, to find nothing ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... and deliberately spat in his face, filling both eyes with poison. That is the invariable defence of the "Spitting Snake" (Rinkholz in Dutch, and Mbamba Twan or child catcher in Zulu). The pain is agonising. The eye turns red and appears to run with blood, but after a day or two the poison passes off and sight returns. The snake is not otherwise poisonous, but apparently can count on success in its shots at men, ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... middle of them fled the woman, terror lending her an incredible speed which agonising physical pain augmented. She dived under horses, she squeezed through vehicles, she twisted and turned, caring naught for the native drivers, who, indifferent to the daily sufferings of their wretched little horses, lashed at her with their whips, with shouts of "Shima-lak!" ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... "your adoring slave," and all that speech of Hyacinth's which the child had repeated, haunted Angela with an agonising iteration. She had not an instant's doubt as to the scene being faithfully reported. She knew how preternaturally acute Henriette's intellect had become in the rarified atmosphere of her mother's drawing-room, how accurate her memory, how ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... for aye distilling, Every nerve with torment filling; Thus shall he in horror languish. By him, still unwearied kneeling, Sigyn at his tortured side,— Faithful wife! with beaker stealing Drops of venom as they fall,— Agonising poison all! Sleepless, changeless, ever dealing Comfort, will she still abide; Only when the cup's o'erflowing Must fresh pain and smarting cause, Swift, to void the beaker going, Shall she in her watching pause. Then doth Loki Loudly cry; Shrieks of terror, Groans of horror, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... Public ridicule would have ended my scientific career in such an event. I know of no better way to end Professor Bottomly's scientific career and capability for mischief than to start her out after something which doesn't exist, inform the newspapers, and let her suffer the agonising consequences." ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... fairer face to look upon,—fairer, perhaps, than her mother's had ever been; but it was less expressive, and in it there was infinitely less capability for anger, and perhaps less capability for the agonising extremes of tenderness. But Kate was taller than her mother, and seemed by her mother's side to be slender. Nevertheless she was strong and healthy; and though she did not willingly join in those longer ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... the isolated labour of a couple of years. How short is the time devoted to the manipulation of a plot can be known only to those who have written plays and novels; I may say also, how very little time the brain is able to devote to such wearing work. There are usually some hours of agonising doubt, almost of despair,—so at least it has been with me,—or perhaps some days. And then, with nothing settled in my brain as to the final development of events, with no capability of settling anything, but with a most distinct conception of some character or characters, I have ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... to kill my son?" In another case a woman rushed into the street, alternately objurgating and pleading with the spirits, who, she said, were vexing her child which had convulsions. "Observe," said the Doctor in his impressive way, "these were distinctly prayers, appeals for mercy, agonising protests, but there was no praise, no love, no thanks, no confession of sin." I said, considering the underlying idea, I did not see how that could be, thinking of the thing as they did, and the Doctor and I had one of ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... to her and told her not to be a fool; such an opportunity would not come again, and after so long she could not still believe that Red would ever return. The girl's resistance only increased Neilson's desire, and what had been a very pure love now became an agonising passion. He was determined that nothing should stand in his way. He gave Sally no peace. At last, worn out by his persistence and the persuasions, by turns pleading and angry, of everyone around her, she consented. But the day after when, exultant, he went to see her he found ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... the world and his own life looked to Joseph when he woke! Hesitations and agonising doubts of his betrothed's purity had vanished with the night, and, instead of the dread that her child would be the offspring of shame, had come a divinely given certainty that it was 'a holy thing.' In the rush ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Edward's race: Give ample room and verge enough The characters of Hell to trace. Mark the year and mark the night When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death through Berkley's roofs that ring, Shrieks of an agonising king![5] She-wolf of France,[6] with unrelenting fangs That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate, From thee[7] be born who o'er thy country hangs The scourge of Heaven. What terrors round him wait! Amazement in his van, with Flight combined, And Sorrow's ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... and alter, or completely throw aside those traditions. Within the individuality itself of such persons, goes on, in an intensified form, that very struggle, conflict, and disco-ordination which is going on in society at large between its different members and sections; and agonising moments must arise, when the individual, seeing the necessity for adopting new courses of action, or for accepting new truths, or conforming to new conditions, will yet be tortured by the hold of traditional convictions; and the man or woman who attempts to adapt their life to the new material ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... making Mr. Stafford turn, as Griff said, 'white in the gills,' though he talked of the wind on the stillest of frosty nights. Then came the sobbing and wailing, which certainly overawed them all; Henderson called them 'agonising,' but Griff was in a manner inured to this, and felt as if master of the ceremonies. Let them say what they would by daylight about owls, cats, and rats, they owned the human element then, and were far from comfortable, though they would not compromise their good sense by owning what ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... may I certainly know what God wants of me?" is sure to become the earnest and, oftentimes, the agonising cry of every humble and devoutly zealous young Christian. "How may I know the guidance of the Holy Spirit?" is asked ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... was in his arms, and his voice was sobbing, "Ethel! Mary! home! Where's papa?" One moment's almost agonising joy in the certainty of his identity! but ere she could look or think, he was ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... wish or plan of his is to be touched or changed, or I am to be MADE TO DO anything." She ended her letter in grief and affection. She was, she said, his "ever wretched but devoted child, Victoria R." And then she looked at the date: it was the 24th of December. An agonising pang assailed her, and she dashed down a postcript—"What a Xmas! I won't ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... his own emotion the puniest name I could find for it; I have no nobler name for his intellect. But other men had thoughts, other men had passions; political, sexual, natural, noble, vile, ideal, gross, rebellious, agonising, imperial, republican, cruel, compassionate; and with these he fed his verses. Upon these and their life he sustained, he fattened, he enriched his poetry. Mazzini in Italy, Gautier and Baudelaire in France, Shelley in England, made for him a base of passionate and intellectual supplies. With ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... Twenty-four hours of agonising suspense, and then the revolving figures reach the base of the mountain, and commence simultaneously to roll ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... Nickleby, flying off at another angle, 'if I had but those unfortunate amethysts of mine—you recollect them, Kate, my love—how they used to sparkle, you know—but your papa, your poor dear papa—ah! there never was anything so cruelly sacrificed as those jewels were, never!' Overpowered by this agonising thought, Mrs Nickleby shook her head, in a melancholy manner, and applied her handkerchief ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... not come to her rescue. The ministers of her religion were scattered to the four corners of besieged, agonising France. She had no one to help her, no one to comfort her. That very peaceful, contemplative life she had led in the convent, only served to enhance her feeling of the solemnity of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... day—that her mother had come back again to consciousness. She opened her eyes wearily, coming back, as Marjorie had herself that morning, from that strange realm of heavy and deathly sleep, to the pale phantom world called "life"; and agonising pain about the heart stabbed ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... running,—there they were! All gay, all occupied, all happy:—unconscious of the alternate miseries and luxuries of the Bibliomania!—unknowing in the nice distinctions of type from the presses of George Laver, Schurener de Bopardia, and Adam Rot: uninitiated in the agonising mysteries of rough edges, large margins, and ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and License, mingling in unblessed union, engendered that mighty Revolution in which the lineaments of both parents were strangely blended. The long gestation was accomplished; and Europe saw, with mixed hope and terror, that agonising travail ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... contained the Queen. And I stopped for a while, for my heart was beating so furiously that I was afraid it would break. And I said to myself, with a sigh of ineffable relief: Ah! now, then, I am actually here, once more. And O now, very soon, comes the agonising rapture of seeing her again. And I wonder where she is, and how I shall find her to-night. And now I must begin to hunt for a very sweet quarry. And suddenly I started almost running, paying absolutely no attention to the trees at all, with eyes that were blind for ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... wind. Blackness engulfed the world; blackness, stabbed across from every side by intricate and blinding lightning. Almost in the same second, at one world-swallowing stride, the heart of the tornado reached the clearing. I heard an agonising crash, and the light of my reason ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... again. "Calm yourself. That's enough. What are you afraid of? Surely you know me?" said Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, trying to soothe her; but it was long before he could succeed. She gazed at him dumbly with the same look of agonising perplexity, with a painful idea in her poor brain, and she still seemed to be trying to reach some conclusion. At one moment she dropped her eyes, then suddenly scrutinised him in a rapid comprehensive glance. At last, though ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to all the final resolutions taken by him in the matter; they had one strange characteristic: the more final they were, the more hideous and the more absurd they at once became in his eyes. In spite of all his agonising inward struggle, he never for a single instant all that time could believe in the carrying out of ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... there are other moments when she seems to carry repression too far. Her pathos, as in the final scene, and at the end of the scene of the reception, where she repeats the one word "Armando" over and over again, in an amazed and agonising reproachfulness, is of the finest order of pathos. She appeals to us by a kind of goodness, much deeper than the sentimental goodness intended by Dumas. It is love itself that she gives us, love utterly unconscious of anything ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... The Irish Daily Mass Crusade; Total Abstinence; devotion to the Passion; devotion to the agonising ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... attempts, it is found impossible to sell the minister and his family in one lot. Hence, by the force of necessity, his agonising beseechings pouring forth, he is put up like other single bales of merchandise, and sold to Mr. M'Fadden, of A—district. The minister brought eleven hundred dollars, ready money down! The purchaser is a well-known planter; ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... 'perhapses' than a man can make garments out of a spider's web. Religion consists of the things of which we are sure, and not of the things which are probable. 'Peradventure' is not the word on which a man can rest the weight of a crushed, or an agonising, or a sinking soul; he must have 'Verily! verily!' and then he ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... its way through the bushes. The birds flew up from the thicket, terrified and screaming—the horse neighed wildly—the dogs sent forth their impatient yelps, and our children shrieked in affright! Again rose, the deep and sonorous roar, filling the valley with its agonising tones. The cane rattled as it yielded to the crushing hoof. We saw the leaves of the thick underwood shaking at a distance—then nearer—then up to the edge of the glade—and the next moment a bright red object appeared through the leaves, and dashed out ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... applauded; people danced and Rachel amongst them; young gentlemen were introduced to me, and I told them "I don't dance" with my cold lips. There was an agonising pressure on my senses, of sound, light, perfume. I thought it was these things that gave the pain, while from my heart, which seemed perfectly still, came forth at intervals the repetition "I will get over it, I will get over it." John found me out, and said, quite ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... was particularly agonising. It has been mentioned that Mrs. Dawson, one of the passengers, had declared before the vessel started, that, if she could, she would leave it, and would not sail. But her husband did not come in time, and she had therefore gone with the ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... of his gown. The executioner adjusted his wig elegantly, took up and minutely examined his crowbar, and casting first a coxcomb look at the breathless spectators, brought the bar into the air with a flourish, and down with a crash on the right thigh of the poor prisoner. The agonising cry of the helpless man was drowned in a tremendous outburst of applause from the crowd. When he had been disposed of in each of his four limbs, Bec was treated in the same manner. Then the assistants, seizing Hugues, threw him on the cross, bound him, and the executioner ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... strength and vigour, fond of boating and a good lawn-tennis player. In China he is always ill, anaemic, wasted, and dyspeptic, constantly subject to low forms of fever, and destitute of appetite. But more agonising than his bad health is the horrible reality of the unavailing sacrifice he is making—no converts but "outcasts subsidised to forsake their family altars;" no reward but the ultimate one which his noble self-devotion is laying up for ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... cried. "If you are going home now, take my arm," he said, and they walked together along the path leading across the meadow. "You have been fighting a hard and despairing battle, Vera. So much you do not conceal. Are you going to conquer this agonising ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... by the agonising stimulus into precocious though transitory power: and Resolve, equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression—as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Edward's race: Give ample room and verge enough The characters of hell to trace. Mark the year and mark the night When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death thro' Berkley's roof that ring, Shrieks of an agonising king! She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate, From thee be born, who o'er thy country hangs The scourge of Heaven! What terrors round him wait! Amazement in his van, with Flight combined, And Sorrow's ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... victim, that perfect sin- offering, who this day offered up Himself upon the altar of the cross, in the fire of His own boundless zeal for the kingdom of God, His Father, and of His boundless love for us, His sinful brothers! "Oh, thou blessed Jesus! Saviour, agonising for us! God Almighty, who did make Thyself weak for the love of us! oh, write that love upon our hearts so deeply that neither pleasure nor sorrow, life nor death, may wipe it away! Thou hast sacrificed Thyself for us, oh, give ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... grasping the old man fiercely by the wrist; "I will have life for life, and here is ONE. MY child died, before his father's eyes, a far more agonising and painful death than that young slanderer of his sister's worth is meeting while I speak. You laughed—laughed in your daughter's face, where death had already set his hand—at our sufferings, then. What think you of them now! See ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... young or old have not read of the scene exhibited on the field of battle after the action, when visited by the surgeon. The cries of the wounded and dying for help, have been described by many graphic pens. The agonising entreaty for "Water! water! help, help!" has been conveyed to our minds with painful distinctness. I can liken the scene we witnessed in the low lane of famine and pestilence, to nothing of greater family resemblance, than that of the battle field, when the hostile armies have ...
— A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen, and its Neighbourhood • Elihu Burritt
... the kindness and providence of God, are they not exemplified in the case of the old apple-woman and her son. These are beings in many points bad, but with warm affections, who, after an agonising separation, are restored to each other, but not until the hearts of both are changed and purified by the influence of affliction. Are they not exemplified in the case of the rich gentleman, who touches objects in order to avert the evil chance? This being has ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... we ran, it was far from being a pleasant period of existence to me. I was called upon to witness a scene of constant suffering, daily—ay, hourly—my heart was wrung with pain, for there was not an hour in which some agonising spectacle did not transpire among the wretched denizens ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... the distance. It was found necessary that three Ariadnes, similarly costumed, and identical in appearance, should lend their aid to accomplish this thrilling termination. Mrs. Mowatt, as Ariadne the first, paced the shore, and received the agonising intelligence of the desertion of Theseus. A ballet-girl, as Ariadne the second, climbed the rocks of the Island of Naxos, reaching the highest peak to catch the last glimpse of the vanishing vessel. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... incoherent, I fear, but I have been waking two nights witnessing such agonising suffering as I would not wish my worst enemy to endure; and I have now lost the guide and director of all the happy days connected with my childhood. I have suffered much sorrow since I ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... involuntarily caused him to accept one thing and to reject another; his intuitive sense regarding good or bad; that all this was merely as a faint mist, in which his personality alone was shrouded. By the world in its huge, vast entirety all his profoundest and most agonising experiences were as utterly and completely ignored as the death-agony of this little frog. In imagining that his sufferings and his emotions were of interest to others, he had expressly and senselessly woven a complicated net between himself and the universe. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... spread; beginning at the factories, the wharves, the shipyards, and the sawmills, they mingle with wagon rumblings and human voices; the air is rent by steam-whistles whose agonising wails rise skyward, meeting and blending above the large squares in a booming diapason, a deep-throated, throbbing roar that enwraps the entire city. Telegraph messengers dart hither and yon, scattering ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... louder; they became an agonising wail; the painful shrieking of a lover before the mutilated corpse of his affections. With unsteady hands he touched the limbs lying in confusion around him; the head, the torso, the arms that had snapped in twain; above aught else the bosom, now caved in. That bosom, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... from his uniform was agonising, and he berated the fate that pried him loose from tunic and puttees. So disgusted was he that, although the Government allowed three months longer before discarding uniforms, he shed his in disgust ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... services at a Mission which then happened to be proceeding which, instead of inspiring him with hope, convinced him that his case was past recovery. For some weeks he tasted, day by day, the dreary bitterness of the cup of dark and causeless depression, and laboured under an agonising dejection of spirit. This intensity of suffering seemed to shake his whole life to its foundation. It made havoc of his work, of his friendships, of the easy philosophy of his life. He began to learn ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... think not," said the captain. And, indeed, no sooner did he begin to unroll her than cries broke out, very sufficient answer as to the child's being alive, and as her mother vehemently clasped her they grew more agonising. ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Another few seconds of agonising suspense went by. The fair Leah had ceased to move. Undoubtedly she was engaged in disentangling the wool from the leg of the chair. That was my opportunity. More stealthy than any cat, I tiptoed toward the chair—and, ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... difficult than this for a gentleman to answer. Circumstances do not often admit of its being asked by a lady with that courageous simplicity which had come upon Miss French in this moment of her agonising struggle; but nevertheless it is one which, in a more complicated form, is often put, and to which some reply, more or less complicated, is expected. "If I, a woman, can dare, for your sake, to encounter the public tongue, will you, a man, be afraid?" ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... longer swallow, and the affection of the brain was fast blocking up the senses, so that blindness and deafness came on, and passed into that insensibility in which the last struggles of life are, as they tell us, rather agonising to the beholder than to the sufferer. It was at sundown at last that the mightiest and gentlest spirit I ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hurry seems destined to be vain, self-baffled, and where the dreadful knell of too late is already sounding in the ears by anticipation—even that anguish is liable to a hideous exasperation in one particular case, namely, where the agonising appeal is made not exclusively to the instinct of self-preservation, but to the conscience, on behalf of another life besides your own, accidentally cast upon your protection. To fail, to collapse in a service merely your own, might seem comparatively ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... scene from what it had lately been! Now from point to point, and through every sheltered nook and bay resounded the roar of cannon, the rattle of musketry, the shouts of the combatants, the shrieks and groans and agonising cries of the wounded, while above all hung a dark, funereal pall of smoke, ascending from the scene of strife, shutting it out as it were from the bright blue glorious firmament above, and, if it could be, from the all-searching eye of the Creator of men ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... Wha meekly gie your hurdies to the smiters; And (what would now be strange), ye godly Writers; A' ye douce folk I've borne aboon the broo, Were ye but here, what would ye say or do? How would your spirits groan in deep vexation, To see each melancholy alteration; And, agonising, curse the time and place When ye begat the base degen'rate race! Nae langer rev'rend men, their country's glory, In plain braid Scots hold forth a plain braid story; Nae langer thrifty citizens, an' douce, Meet owre a pint, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Laubardemont; "but the mode of your death is in our hands: it rests with us to make it slow or quick, painless or agonising; so ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... happened, and I realised, at last, that if I was to escape an agonising cramp in the leg, I must get down. I put my feet on the ladder, and then paused for a last look about the grounds. My eye was caught by a flutter of white among the trees. Someone was walking along one of the paths; in a moment, straining forward, I saw it was ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... responses to a paid choir. "Lor, bless yer," as Betsy Jane Ward would say, a choir will sing, anything put before them if it is set to music; and they think no more of getting through all that sad business about personal sinfulness, agonising repentance, and a general craving for forgiveness, than the odd woman did when she used to kiss her cow and say it was delicious. There was once a period when all Parish Church goers made open confession ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... the scene of horror which the sudden conflagration produced in these two ships. The collision in which the fore-top-mast of the Hermenegildo fell on board of the Real Carlos, added to the general dismay; and the agonising screams of the unhappy crews, deserted by their countrymen and allies in that dreadful hour, could not fail to pierce the hearts of the brave conquerors; but to render them any assistance while the hostile flag was flying was impossible. ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... conduct. She acknowledged to herself that, to remain still single, a prey to Sir Edmund's importunities and the continual temptations of her own heart, was, for the sake of present indulgence, submitting to a fiery ordeal, from which she could not escape unblamable without the most repeated and agonising conflicts. ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... the two young men remained a mystery to their dear ones for many months of agonising suspense, and they pass out of these pages for a time while we turn our attention to the relation of events ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... robbers, and at the teeth of animals, is said to be an inglorious one.[1555] Those men that are righteous never incur such or similar deaths even if they be afflicted with mental and physical diseases of the most agonising kind. The lives of the righteous, O king, piercing through the Sun, ascend into the regions of Brahma. The lives of those that are both righteous and sinful rove in the middle regions. The lives of those that are sinful sink into the lowest ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... I write the air is balmy and the skies are blue, it is agonising to feel that our own spring rhubarb is growing crimson only to be toyed with by alien lips, and that the thrush on our pear-tree bough——But no, I am wrong; the pear-tree bough is in the garden of No. 9; it is only the trunk that stands in the garden of No. 10. That, by the way, is an accident ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... Now the youthful lady and the gentleman ate little supper, but retired early to rest. Let us leave them there, since no words, except those of paradise unknown to us, would describe their delightful agonies, and agonising delights. Meanwhile, the husband, so well cuckolded that all memory of marriage had been swept away by love,—the said Avenelles found himself in a great fix. To the council of the Huguenots came the Prince of Conde, accompanied by all the chiefs and bigwigs, and there it was resolved ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... chief of what Bart himself saw. That unquenchable instinct in a man's heart that if he had only tried a little harder he would certainly have attained to righteousness gave the lie to his sense of agonising struggle, with its desperate, rallies of courage and sinkings of discouragement, gleams of self-confidence, and foul suspicion of self, suspicion even as to the reality of his own effort. All this was in the region of unseen spirit, almost as ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... told me since what a dreadful walk that was. He can remember it vividly across all the intervening years, and he declares that no criminal on his way to the gallows could have suffered from more agonising apprehensions. He pictured his reception in a thousand dismal forms. He saw himself knocking at the door; the moment's suspense; the servant facing him. What ought he to say? "Is Lady Charlton at home?" But that was ridiculous, since ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... train; there were already at least fifty corpses laid on the platform, and the tale of dead increased every minute. Others, stricken with the fell disease, were lying on the platform, still alive, but in a state of collapse, or in the agonising cramps of this swift-slaying scourge. There happened to be two white doctors in the train, who did all that was possible for the sufferers, but, beyond the administration of opium, medical science is powerless in cholera cases. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... need something—is it that, then? Is it a real thing? Do people fight for it like that? For this imperious Voice is agonising for something and the drum is the ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... was thrown into dull inaction by an agonising doubt. How could he think of approaching Hannah Gropphusen—he, a marked man, a condemned man? He set it before himself a thousand times, and dinned it into his own ears: he desired nothing, he wanted nothing but to be allowed to live in ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... him when the interview between him and his mother took place, and I assure you that it was almost too much for my nerves—his joy and gratitude were so great at once more beholding his parent, while the grief and distraction of the poor woman, on seeing him in a dying state, was agonising; and she gave vent to her feelings in uttering the most hearty curses against the country, and the persons who by their unkindness had been the cause of his sickness. The young man seemed shocked at the unfeminine conduct of his mother, and begged me to excuse the rude ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Another agonising week passed and still there was no sure word of hope from the Front. In Canada one strong, heartening note had been sounded. The Canadian Parliament had met and with splendid unhesitating unanimity ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... were, poor children! used enough to illness to attend to their brother with a collectedness that amazed their cousin; and without calling for help, Edgar came shuddering and trembling to himself, and then burst into silent but agonising sobs, very painful to witness. He was always—boy as he was—the most easily and entirely overthrown by anything that affected him strongly; and Mr. Thomas Underwood was so much struck and touched by his exceeding ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... And thus we lay agonising until the moon rose and then, by common consent, we stumbled on, seeking our great desire. And now as I went, my mouth parched, my tongue thickening to the roof of my mouth, I must needs think of plashing brooks, of bubbling rills, of sweet and pellucid streams, ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... on at breathless speed, sometimes crept on slow, unwilling feet, sometimes stood motionless to stare blindly about me, raged at and torn by conflicting thoughts ... agonising ... irresolute. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... mooncalf nozzle and howls.) Verfluchte Goim! He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig God! He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchia, a Libyan eunuch, the pope's bastard. (He leans out on tortured forepaws, elbows bent rigid, his eye agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mute world) A son ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... his case in the newspapers, and employ a lawyer to proceed against all the parties concerned in his detention. Day after day he waited for an answer to his letter; none came. Then he began to be sore perplexed, and torn with agonising doubts. What if her mind was poisoned too! What if she thought him mad! What if some misfortune had befallen her! What if she had believed him dead, and her heart had broken! Hitherto he had seen his own trouble chiefly; but now he ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... a deep agonising interest; he was so frail and broken, so bent in his figure, so slow and feeble in his movements. He made an attempt to raise the amice but could not, and turned slightly; and the man from behind stepped up ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... its assumption that he is sharp enough to be dismayed by what stares him in the face. Charles Dickens had lucid intervals in which he was vaguely conscious of the abuses around him; but his spasmodic efforts to expose these brought him into contact with realities so agonising to his highstrung literary nerves that he invariably sank back into debauches of unsocial optimism. Even the Swan of Avon had his glimpses of the havoc of displacement wrought by Elizabethan romanticism in the social machine which had been working ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... of course suddenly, came the final warning of all: the occurrence, without notice, of an almost agonising home-sickness. The party travelled by land, as speedily as they could, to the Channel, a last attack of apoplectic paralysis taking place at Nimeguen; and after crossing it and reaching London, Sir Walter was taken by sea to the Forth, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... admiration for Sir ISAAC NEWTON, merely shaking her finger. But self-control among women must be on the increase, for in a hotel the other day I overheard a coffee-room conversation in which two cases were instanced of supreme heroism under agonising conditions—one being when a butler (an old and honoured butler too, who had never misconducted himself before) fainted while carrying round the after-dinner coffee and poured most of it over the ample shoulders of a dowager. This lady ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... conveniently unsheathed without detaching the scabbard from the belt from which it depends. The consul in turn exhibits a mighty scroll of parchment, which takes as long to unroll as the officer's sabre takes to unsheath. Meanwhile I watch the combatants in agonising suspense, till the chamber becomes suddenly dark. But, after a painful pause, daylight appears, and to my unspeakable relief I find that my formidable visitors have vanished, and that ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... profound and tranquil sleep, her unfortunate lover was a prey to the most agonising doubts and fears. "Surely, surely, she cannot think me guilty," thought the devoted Anthony, as he tossed from side to side upon his restless bed. "She is too generous to condemn me without further evidence. Yet, why do I cling to a forlorn hope? Stronger ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... time when he had not known her and talked with her, and yet with this was also a consciousness of all the joys that he had missed because he had not known her before. As he thought of it the hard irretrievable fact of those earlier empty years struck him physically with a sharp agonising pain—toothache, and no possible way of healing it. The irony of her proximity, of her desire for him as he, all unwittingly, had in reality desired her, hit him like a blow. The picture of her waiting, told that he did not wish to come, looking so sadly and lonely in that white room, whilst ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... motto—"In hoc signo vinces!" This ring came from the Roman sepulchre of an early Christian, and the hand for which it was originally fashioned may have aided in the conquering war of the first Christian emperor; or may have been convulsed in an agonising death, "thrown to the beasts" of the circus, but reposing after death with the first martyrs to ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... nearer and nearer, and then he felt her hand on his arm. She had crept closer, involuntarily, he could believe, but drawn by the instinct to be saved. He felt his own heart beating thickly, with sorrow for her, an agonising ruth that she should have to sue to him. But he spoke sharply, not looking at her, his eyes ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... applauding shouts of rapturous friends he hears! The big drops from his manly forehead roll, And deep emotions thrill his generous soul. But struggling nature now reluctant yields; Down drops the arm the infant's face that shields, To bear the precious burthen all too weak; When, hark!—the mother's agonising shriek! Once more he's roused,—his eye no longer swims, And tenfold strength reanimates his limbs; He nerves his faltering frame for one last bound,— "Your child!" he cries, and ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... mischiefs! Unluckily we have none such; unluckily the Heavens themselves, in their rich pharmacopoeia, contain none such. There will no 'thing' be done that will cure you. There will a radical universal alteration of your regimen and way of life take place; there will a most agonising divorce between you and your chimeras, luxuries and falsities, take place; a most toilsome, all-but 'impossible' return to Nature, and her veracities and her integrities, take place: that so the inner fountains ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... my health when on May the 21st, 1895, after an agonising night, Sir John Williams and Henry came into my bedroom between five and six in the morning and I was told that I should have to lie on my back till August, as I was suffering from phlebitis; but I was too unhappy and disappointed to mind. It was then that my doctor, Sir ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... public shame; she saw the odium, disgrace, and folly of her story flaunt through Europe. She recalled the scandal she had so royally braved; and alas! she had now no courage to confront it with. To be thought the mistress of that man: perhaps for that. . . . She closed her eyes on agonising vistas. Swift as thought she had snatched a bright dagger from the weapons that shone along the wall. Ay, she would escape. From that world-wide theatre of nodding heads and buzzing whisperers, in which she now beheld herself unpitiably martyred, one door stood open. At any ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... evening of the second Mr. Falkland arrived, accompanied by Doctor Wilson, the physician by whom she had previously been attended. The scene he was called upon to witness was such as to be most exquisitely agonising to a man of his acute sensibility. The news of the arrest had given him an inexpressible shock; he was transported out of himself at the unexampled malignity of its author. But, when he saw the figure of Miss Melville, haggard, and a warrant of death written in her countenance, a victim to the diabolical ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... and picked confessions into an act of accusation against others, who have no chance of vindicating themselves; and most of all by that reverence for the higher efforts of our common nature, which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonising struggles with temptation, in unbroken silence. But the incompleteness which comes of self-ignorance may be compensated by self-betrayal. A man who is affected to tears in dwelling on the generosity of his own sentiments makes me aware of several things not included under those ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... that the butler, whom I feared even more than Lord Rantremly himself, got some inkling of what was going forward. But, be that as it may, he and his lordship entered the chapel just as the ceremony was finished, and there followed an agonising scene. His lordship flung the ancient chaplain from his place, and when Reginald attempted to interfere, the maddened nobleman struck his son full in the face with his clenched fist, and my husband lay as one dead on the stone floor of the chapel. By this time the butler ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... sun rose bright and joyous over this scene of anxiety and pain. On came the vessel flying before the gale, while the seas chased her as if they would fain overwhelm her. It was fearful to see her scud—agonising to know that she was rushing ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... the notes, folded very small, and written in pencil. There was a strange faintness at my heart, and my fingers trembled as I opened them. Fear, fear was clutching me, compressing me in an agonising grip. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... the darkness was intense, his form and features were as clear and as defined as if it were noon-day. Fear would have inclined me to recoil from,—his loved presence to fly towards him. I remained on the spot where I was, choked with agonising sensations. When he had entered the room, the windows and shutters closed of themselves, and the candle was relighted—then I thought it was his apparition, and I fainted ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... pay the tent a flying visit and return to listen to a pleader's lengthy oration with all the attention he could muster under the troublous circumstances. Visions of his wife's flushed face lying still on the pillow with closed eyes would haunt him with agonising fidelity to detail—especially in relation to the attentive doctor hovering near, adjusting the bag or removing it to be refilled, and administering the necessary doses of medicine. He took special notice of Dalton in his new character of nurse, and had no fault to find with his ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... age. On the floor were scattered several pence, and in a vase above the holy-water vessel stood some withered hyacinths. As my sight became accustomed to the gloom, I could see from the darkness of the picture a pale Christ nailed to the cross with agonising upward eyes and ashy aureole above the bleeding thorns. Thus I stepped suddenly away from the outward pomp and bravery of nature to the inward aspirations, agonies, and martyrdoms of man—from Greek legends of the past to the real Christian present—and I remembered that an illimitable ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Seer, to you This Song Wreath of our Race is due, Since high o'er hatred and division, You have scaled the Peak and seen the Vision Of Freedom, breaking into birth From out an agonising Earth. ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... only hard and ungenial, but one that shall absorb and fetter all her energies, restrain all her faculties, impair and frustrate all her higher and broader aims, make impossible all that better and purer fulness of life for which she yearns. Then follows the long and painful struggle,—a struggle so agonising to such a nature, that only one nearly akin to her own can adequately conceive or picture it. For it is a struggle not primarily to forego any certain or fancied mere personal good. On one side is ranged tenderest ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... the end! With agonising shriek He turned and fled, the spectral perspiration Dewing his brow and coursing down his cheek; Fled, and was lost to man's investigation (For full discussion of his little tricks See Psychical Research Reports, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... am wrong," said Murray, warmly; "but have some pity for me too. Doctor Barnes, you cannot be blind to what I think and feel. All this is agonising to me. Look here, sir; do you think I have not brains enough to see that this man reads me and my sentiments toward your daughter. The scoundrel—the insolent barbarian! he is actually jealous, and under his smiling civility, ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... them," whispered the housekeeper, "that when he was agonising in prayer it came into his mind to wait until August this year. He hasn't any assurance what it may have meant; but that may come later, and p'r'aps the days may be told him; and he's awaiting, and we're awaiting ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... shells and shrapnel were bursting over and around them the wounded man dictated a letter to his wife in Holland. Blood flowed copiously from the wound and stained the grass upon which he lay. He was pale as the clouds above him, and the pain was agonising, but the dying man's letter was filled with nothing but expressions of ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... much for poor, half-petrified pink-face with the twisted tail. Seeing that its comrades were gone in earnest, it became desperate, flung itself frantically into the air with an agonising squeak, missed its mark, went crashing through the slender branches and fell ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... been left to man, as a doubtful gift of the gods. By order of Zeus, Prometheus was chained to a rock on the Caucasus, on account of his relation to man. An eagle perpetually gnaws his liver, which is as often renewed. He has to pass his life in agonising loneliness till one of the gods voluntarily sacrifices himself, i.e., devotes himself to death. The tormented Prometheus bears his sufferings steadfastly. It had been told him that Zeus would be dethroned by the son of ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... those old ecclesiastical or military ones, by which human hardness, or human justice, adds the last touch of unkindness to the execution of its sentences, in the scene where Richard "deposes" himself, as in some long, agonising ceremony, reflectively drawn out, with an extraordinary refinement of intelligence and variety of piteous appeal, but also with a felicity of poetic invention, which puts these pages into a very select class, with the finest "vermeil and ivory" ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... is woven through the whole of this scene. In a hard masterful voice he speaks at length: "Bruennhilde! A suitor is come whom your fire does not alarm! I seek you for my wife; follow me unresistingly." It is all so strange, so like the agonising impossibilities of a dream,—Bruennhilde falls to trembling. "Who are you, dreadful one? Are you a mortal? Do you come from Hella's army of the night?" Still watching her, motionless on his point of vantage, he replies: "A Gibichung am I, and Gunther ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall |
