"Climax" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... transmission of the idea of the authority which the Empire once exerted to the Church which grew up upon its ruins. The tremendous drama of Roman history displayed itself to the imagination from scene to scene, from act to act, with completeness of poetic progress and climax,—first the growth, the extension, the absoluteness of material supremacy, the heathen being made the instruments of Divine power for preparing the world for the revelation of the true God; then the tragedy of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... a certain air of new courage and determination, though she was still pallid and anxious. It was as if she had passed a climax and had gained strength. Monsieur, the father, was alternately nervous and dejected, or in feverishly high spirits. Occasionally he sat for some time without speak ing, merely gazing into the fire with a hand upon each knee; and it was one evening, after a more than usually ...
— Esmeralda • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... reaction against Pericles, which had begun with the first invasion of Attica, reached a climax, and on all sides he was loudly decried by the Athenians, as the author of all their miseries. Envoys were sent with overtures of peace to Sparta, and when these returned with no favourable answer, the storm of popular fury grew more violent ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... 30 Strand," was stigmatized as a man who had no respect for the ancient patriarchs, and it was hinted that he would probably not hesitate to sell his blacking on the sarcophagus of Pharaoh, "or any other"—mummy, if he could only make money by it. In fact, to cap the climax, Warren was denounced as a "humbug." These indignant articles were copied into all the Provincial journals, and very soon, in this manner, the columns of every newspaper in Great Britain were teeming with this advice: "Try Warren's Blacking, 30 Strand, London." The ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... to do?" asked a chorus of voices. Hadria's was not among them, for she knew what was coming. The debate of last night, and this morning's discussion, had evidently brought to a climax a project that Algitha had long had in her mind, but had hesitated to carry out, on account of the distress that it would cause to her mother. Algitha's eyes glittered, ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... stand aside and sacrifice himself for the country. The one was selfishness incarnate; the other was a noble example of a man who never hesitated to subordinate his own welfare to the general good, and whose career came to its climax in his martyrdom. Whether the presidency was or was not, Lincoln's destiny, it was certainly his destination. Had anything occurred to thrust him one side in this career, it would have prevented his complete development, ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... 1742 and 1749, that is to say, at the very climax of the personal activity of Holberg, several poets were born, who were destined to enrich the language with its first group of lyrical blossoms. Of these the two eldest, Wessel and Ewald, were men of extraordinary ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... a schoolboy one moment, playful even in the bitterness of the next, and now no longer giving way to the feeling which had spoilt the climax of his tale, Raffles needed knowing as I alone knew him for a right appreciation of those last words. That they were no mere words I know full well. That, but for the tragedy of his Italian life, that life would have sufficed him for years, if not for ever, ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... successive arrival of the Colonists was the cue for fresh demonstrations and for the display of flags and banners bearing mottoes, "For Queen and Empire," "Welcome, Brother Colonists," and the like; and by the time the Canadians had landed patriotic feeling had reached its climax. Then public enthusiasm literally seemed to burst all bounds. The streets, windows, verandahs, roofs, were packed with an excited, surging, shouting, cheering throng, and the air was thick with hats, and flags, and handkerchiefs, waving ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... figures of speech, his tropes, his witticisms, take rank with the law of gravity and the precession of the equinoxes. Philosophical exaltation of the individual cannot go beyond this point. It is the climax. ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... worry your family, and turn the house upside down for a parcel of girls who don't care a sixpence for you? I thought you had too much pride and sense to truckle to any mortal woman just because she wears French boots and rides in a coupe," said Jo, who, being called from the tragic climax of her novel, was not in the best ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... climax of the hardship of her case. She had no concern whatever with this act of publication. It was one of poor Campbell's disastrous pranks. He could not conceive how he could have done such a thing, and was desperately sorry; but there was little good in that. The mischief was done ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... principle held good. And thus it was that men and women regarded the supreme emotion of love from such different points of view, and failed so often to comprehend the way in which the opposite sex regarded it; to women it was but the natural climax, the raising and heightening of their habitual mood into one great momentous passion; it was the flower of life slowly matured into bloom; to men it was more a surprising and tremendous experience, an amazing episode, cutting across life and interrupting its habitual ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... appear a waste of effort, notwithstanding time enough would be spent in reading the newspapers, conversation, or sitting idly about, to do all this three or four times over. When confusion reached its climax, then he would go to work most vigorously, and in a few hours reduce all to order. But usually some important paper was lost or mislaid, and could not be found at the time when most needed. It generally happened that this great effort was not made until he had been going to ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... The climax was reached at tea-time, when an anonymous hand was thrust beneath the skylight, and a full-bodied tract fluttered wildly down ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... with a smoke, a confluent sea, Heaved in a combing pyramid full, Spent at its climax, in collapse Down headlong thundering stuns the hull: The trophy drops; but, reared again, Shows Mars' ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... mailed fist reached, the pretext being reprisal for the Non-Intercourse Act. More than two hundred American vessels were lost to their owners, a ten-million-dollar robbery for which France paid an indemnity of five millions after twenty years. It was the grand climax of the exploitation which American commerce had been compelled to endure through two centuries of tumult and bloodshed afloat. There lingers today in many a coastwise town an inherited dislike for France. It is a legacy of that far-off catastrophe which beggared many a household and filled the ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... bit of description for a nickul librury, and having got it out of his system Mr. Wheeler wasted no more valuable space on the scenery. From this point on he gave you action—action with reason behind it and logic to it and the guaranty of a proper climax and a satisfactory conclusion to follow. Deadwood Dick marched many a flower-strewn mile through my young life, but to the best of my recollection he never shut off anybody's sublunary prospects. If a party deserved killing Deadwood just naturally up and killed him, and the historian told about ...
— A Plea for Old Cap Collier • Irvin S. Cobb
... conscientiously felt was my foremost duty. I never went near a recruiting meeting, so that I should not be carried away by enthusiasm to the recruiting office. I must decide when my thoughts were cool and collected. The second week in November brought the climax. I knew my duty was ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... superiority. Again that thrill of terror of the unknown passed through the stallion; could this apparently weaponless enemy cling to him in spite of his best efforts? He would see, and that very shortly. Without going through the intermediate stages by which the usual educated bronco rises to a climax of his efforts, Alcatraz began at once that most dreaded of all forms of bucking—sun-fishing. The wooded hills were close now and the ground beneath him was firm underfoot assuring him full use of all his agility and strength. His motion was ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... The climax in the too free use of the rifle came on the 23d, when Major H. C. Tilden, a prominent member of the General Relief Committee, was shot and killed in his automobile by members of the citizens' patrol. Two others in the car were struck by bullets. The automobile had been ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... champagne—and was naturally inclined to be argumentative. Any one of the ship's company who happened to be near him with a little time to spare would get up a discussion on any matter that came to his mind, work things gently to a climax, and then contradict Cranze flatly. Upon which, out would come the revolver, and down would go the humorist on his knees, pitifully begging for pardon and life, to the vast ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... a forced or willing accomplice of the events of last night was part of a question that had become more and more repugnant to him as he was leaving the scene of it forever. It had come upon him, desecrating the dream he had dreamt that last night and turning its hopeful climax to bitterness. Small wonder that Barker, walking by his side, had his quick sympathies aroused, and as he saw that shadow, which they were all familiar with, but had never sought to penetrate, fall upon his companion's handsome ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... those few moments they had been gradually building to a climax. It was prodigiously heightened now by the silence of the boy. The throat of Vance ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... crowning touch, a climax long imagined, plotted and hilariously enjoyed in prospect, he next produced, before the bewildered eyes of Snorky Green, what in school-day parlance is known as a Trophy of Trophies; an incredible, amazing, inexplicable thing, a tasseled, beribboned, pink and white ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... nature, you will understand how much of the effect of any composition upon the human mind depends upon the printing, upon the placing of the points, even upon the position of the sentences on the page. A grand, high-flown, and sentimental climax ought always to conclude at the bottom of a page. It will look ridiculous, if it ends four or five lines down from the top of the next page. Somehow there is a feeling as of the difference between the night before and the next morning. It is as though the crushed ball-dress and the dishevelled ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... However, when the climax came, I had but one course to pursue; this I resolutely followed. A man will defend himself and his family to the last, for life is ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... us replace this vain description by the useful formula: Impossible to describe him. But you must not forget that Antinous Lebeau was ugly, that the fact impressed everybody as soon as they saw him, and that nobody remembered ever having seen an uglier person; and let us add, that as the climax of his misfortune, he thought ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Her heart and mind were in a tumult of conflicting emotion. She was thinking of the girl who had come so unexpectedly into her life and home. The silence and restraint of long years had at last reached their climax. A mother's passionate love possessed her soul, and an intense affection for the child of her womb swept like an overmastering current through her very being. The girl was hers, she must keep her, and she was determined that no power ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... chimney-corners were more attractive than ledgers. Ralph and the girls brought their young friends there. What was strangest of all, the nervous headaches almost entirely disappeared; even the high notes of a song, or the jingling of piano-keys, failed to bring them back. The crowning climax of the whole was this: there was positively no scolding in that house. The evil spirit had been exorcised, and that mother was given the victory day by day. Peace was in her heart ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... had been his movement, so unwonted his energy, that the marchesa was checked in the very climax of ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... a sacrilege to the two spectators of the unexpected climax of this intimate personal drama to remain, so instinctively they both withdrew silently to the drawing-room, leaving Eleanor closely enfolded in her husband's arms. For the first time since Covington had disclosed himself, Alice was alone ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... me in this affair," she said, with no apparent resentment, "you're clever enough to become famous some day. I'm going to take your advice about the letter and if that climax you're predicting arrives on schedule time I'll not be sorry to quit this dreary, dragging case and pick up a more ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... to a reputation already wide, and anew demonstrates his power of pictorial portrayal and of strong dramatic situation and climax."—Philadelphia Bulletin. ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... The miraculous cures of the Messiah were, according to Moslems, mostly performed by aspiration. They hold that in the days of Isa, physic had reached its highest development, and thus his miracles were mostly miracles of medicine; whereas, in Mohammed's time, eloquence had attained its climax and accordingly his miracles were those of eloquence, as shown in the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... rage and brutality: Vandalism obtained the possession of the beautiful country of France. The fine tone of society was superseded by the rudest manners; and even the better sort affected them that they might not be suspected of favouring aristocracy. As a climax to their folly and madness, the republicans even assailed religion. First, the republican calendar was substituted for the Christian calendar; then, the celebration of the Christian festivals was restricted; and, finally, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... The climax was reached at the next hole, when, with several strokes in hand, he topped his approach shot into a bunker. For my sake he tried to look as though he had meant to run it up along the ground, having forgotten about the intervening hazard. It was a brave effort to hide ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... back prepared for the approaching climax. In such matters he was a human barometer. The affairs of the family in whose interests he had become so suddenly involved were rapidly reaching an acute stage. Something must happen soon, and that something would probably have tremendous ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... persons should believe in witchcraft in the nineteenth century: as if educated persons did not believe in grosser follies: such as this same spirit-rapping, unknown tongues, clairvoyance, table-turning, and all sorts of fanatical impositions, having for the present their climax in Mormonism. Herein all times are alike. There is nothing too monstrous for human credulity. I like the notion of the Aristophanic comedy. But it would require a numerous company, especially as the chorus is indispensable. The tenson may be carried ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... the announcement that John Bunyan was to preach gathered a large and attentive auditory, hanging on his lips and drinking from them the word of life. His fame grew the more he was known and reached its climax when his work was nearest its end. His biographer Charles Doe tells us that just before his death, "when Mr. Bunyan preached in London, if there were but one day's notice given, there would be more people come together than the meeting-house could hold. I have seen, by my ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... a climax, slipping a glance warily, once or twice, out of the tail of his eye through ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... the climax of error in this matter, some mothers allow their infants to lie on their arm, as a pillow. This practice not only exposes them to all or nearly all the evils which have been mentioned, but to one more; viz. the danger of ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... a silence. The two stood there, looking straight into one another's eyes, their mutual opposition at its climax. The seconds began to pass. The conflict between the man's aggression and the woman's resistance reached its turning point. Before another word should be spoken, before the minute should pass, one of the ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... a striking truth; but I think it confusedly wrought out, and all but certain to fail in expressing itself. Eleanor, I regard as forced and overstrained. The natural result is, that she carries a train of anti-climax after her. I particularly notice this at the point when she thinks she is ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... 'Under Way,' and, 'Finishing Touches.' My poor White Knight, are five years of training wasted on you? Sometimes you make me fear it. Here is Plattville panting for our story of the hanging of the sign, and you throw away the climax like that!" He began to write rapidly, bending low over the pad in the half darkness. His narrative was an amplification of the interesting information (already possessed by every inhabitant) that Herve Miller had put up a ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... down all their enemies, independent of the immense power they had obtained from their quantity of fire-arms and almost inexhaustible ammunition. All the other nations were jealous of their strength and resources, and this jealousy being now worked up to its climax, they determined to unite and strike a great blow, not only to destroy the ascendancy which the Shoshones had attained, but also to possess themselves of the immense wealth which they foolishly supposed the Europeans had brought ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... it was then quite possible to get equal, sometimes better, quality in quite new instruments which were being sent forth every day by the resident makers. With the onward march of time this has been changed; the art of the Italian liutaro having reached its climax some century and a half back, the masterpieces executed during that time are gradually diminishing in number and cannot be replaced by instruments having a sufficiently high degree of excellence; naturally ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... Mayence; if, indeed, one may give the name of army to a few masses of men destitute, dispirited, and exhausted by fatigue and privation. On the arrival of the troops at Mayence no preparation had been made for receiving them: there were no provisions, or supplies of any kind; and, as the climax of misfortune, infectious epidemics broke out amongst the men. All the accounts I received concurred in assuring me that their ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... to a climax. One evening, two weeks before the close of the season, Ivy put on her hat and announced that she was going downtown to ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... the damster kept order. Joseph disturbed the banquet only by entering with new triumphs of Art. Last came a climax-pie, —contents unknown. And when that dish, fit to set before a king, was opened, the poem of our supper was complete. J. B. sailed to the Parnassus where Ude and Vattel feast, forever cooking ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... date, 1837, marks a certain climax or culmination in the political {3} development of Canada. The constitution of the country now works with so little friction that those who have not read history assume that it must always have worked so. There is a real danger in forgetting that, not so very long ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... prospecting for water. (3) Of great importance too was the practicability of placing the eggs and the young, perhaps in a nest, in some place inaccessible to most enemies. When one thinks of it, the rooks' nests swaying on the tree-tops express the climax of a brilliant experiment. (4) The crowning advantage was the possibility of migrating, of conquering time (by circumventing the arid summer and the severe winter) and of conquering space (by passing quickly ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... a little quiet and fresh air to get over this climax of my troubles—out of one living, and not into another; and that with a wife, six children, and three servants, with very little to live on. Here was a state of things! I had plenty to occupy my thoughts and prayers. I feared and mourned, above ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... in crises or catastrophes resulting from character. It has been quite unjustly preferred to the German play, "The Weavers." Yet that is in another category. That is the classic tragedy of the masses. It contains all that can be demanded of a drama: climax, necessary impulsion, catastrophe. It would not be easy to surpass this truly modern tragedy, even if it is less adroitly philosophical than "The Doss-house." Moreover "The Weavers" indicates a revolution in dramatic literature. "The Doss-house" is at ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... deemed a fortunate circumstance in the contingencies of this species of trade, since it enables the dealer to offer his uncalled-for wares in the least suspicious and most natural manner. It was fortunate, also, that I lay at the bottom of the little pile—a climax being quite as essential in sustaining an extortionate price, as in terminating with due effect, a poem, a ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... still unbroken—people said it never was to be broken again, and that wars and rumors of wars had come to an end. So much for human foreknowledge. By the autumn of 1854, the horrors of the Crimean war had reached their climax. The Times was full, day by day, of the most thrilling and appalling descriptions of the hideous sufferings of our brave men—sufferings caused quite as much by the utter breakdown of the sanitary administration as by even the deadly battles and trenchwork; ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... of nauseous cynicism had not been reached at a bound; the doctor had been working up to it all the evening, and this was the climax of his cold-blooded consolation as the schoolboy mechanically undressed himself for bed. His host had accompanied him up two pairs of stairs, carrying candles, and his meerschaum pipe in aromatic blast. Pocket felt a new chill through his ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... how this state of things gradually became transformed into the considerably different position of parents and child we have known, which doubtless attained its climax nearly a century ago. Feudal conditions, with the large households so well adapted to act as seminaries for youth, began to decay, and as education in such seminaries must have led to frequent mischances both for youths and maidens who enjoyed the ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... And then the climax arrived, with anticlimax following so swiftly upon it that the two were almost simultaneous. I saw the worker on the roof cautiously poise himself in the opening, hunched up like some strange ape. The ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... point that I would make here before I go on, and that is, that it is well to notice that the climax of Christian character, according to Jesus Christ Himself, is found in our relations to men, and not in our relation to God. Worship of heart and spirit, devout emotions of the sacredest, sweetest, most hallowed and hallowing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... her arms to Tom, who falling down on his knees, embraced her, and thus they remained with their faces buried in each other's shoulders. The whole scene was now at its climax; it was too oppressive, and I felt faint, when I was aroused by the voice of the Dominie, who, lifting up both his arms, and extending them forth, solemnly prayed, "O Lord, look down upon these Thy ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... down upon them with her much-maligned nose in the air. As she maneuvered to pass, the ship, which had reached the climax of its normal roll to port, paused, and then decided to go a couple of degrees farther; in consequence of which the young lady fled with a stifled cry of fury straight into the Tyro's waiting arms. Alderson, true to his promise, extracted ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... will allow me to sing you a song." I had a fairly strong voice, and could go up a good height; so I gave them "Tom Bowling." Directly I started you could have heard a pin drop. They gave, me a fair hearing all through; and when, as a final climax, I finished up with a prolonged B flat—a very loud and long note, which sounded to me something between a "view holloa" and the whistle of a penny steamboat, but which came in nicely as a sort of piece de resistance, ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... the efforts of men. A few years of growth and aspiration—then the fiery bourgeoning to a climax, and, after that, incorporation in the soil of a forgetfulness that seems indifferent alike to their exertions and their ambitions. But the end is not here. Somewhere, and most certainly in some other form, the effort achieves immortality and reasserts itself, indestructible ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... class-meetings, he awaited the usual "call" to preach the gospel. Accordingly, having received the "call," he became a Methodist preacher, belonging to the Old Connexion, the New Connexion, and then advancing to Unitarianism, ultimately arriving at the climax of Freethought, in which cause he is now so distinguished an advocate. While a Methodist preacher, he was induced by a neighbor, an Atheist, to read Carlile's "Republican." We can readily understand why Christians are taught not ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... Mrs. Gaskell's nurse is kindly and protective; that of Dickens' nurse severe, admonitory and emphatic. She, who told the grim legend of Captain Murderer, meant, clearly, to scare as well as to entertain her hearer. She leads up to the climax of her story, the deadly revenge of the dark twin's poisoned pie, with admirable art. The nurse's name was Mercy, but, as Dickens remarks, she showed none to him. Though Dickens shrank timorously in childhood ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... signal faults that he saw succeed each other unceasingly; the gradual extinction of all emulation; the luxury, the emptiness, the ignorance, the confusion of ranks; the inquisition in the place of the police: he saw all the signs of destruction, and he used to say it was only a climax of dangerous disorder that could ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Andrew Malden assumed; how he overlooked all the gruffness of his guest and treated him like a prince. Job fairly stared in wonder. It capped the climax when one night—just as, tucked up snug in his bed, Job was dreaming of his last walk home from school with Jane—to feel a rude shake and to see Andrew Malden with excited face standing ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... This climax of the series had been reached to-night on the aforesaid moor, and for the first time in the season its irregularities were forms without features; suggestive of anything, proclaiming nothing, and without more character than that of being the limit of something ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... visits in 1889 to Oxford and Cambridge to receive Honorary Degrees, the offer of a baronetcy in 1883, and the conferring on him in 1885 of the Prussian 'Ordre pour le merite'.[49] But a chronicle of such external matters is wearisome in itself; and before the climax was reached, the current of opinion was, by a strange turn of fortune, already setting in ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... in the bear's arms along with the blanket, the lover rams his knife into the bear, and saves—whom, the blanket? No—nothing of the sort. You get yourself all worked up and excited about that blanket, and then all of a sudden, just when a happy climax seems imminent you are let down flat—nothing saved but the girl. Whereas, one is not interested in the girl; she is not the prominent feature of the legend. Nevertheless, there you are left, and there ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the climax! Averil just held her tongue; but she rushed to her own room, and wept bitterly and angrily. Sick of her after all her devotion! Leonard, the being she loved best ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in a tragic climax. One night she made more violent resistance than ever to the attempts of the police to arrest her, and when she was at last captured, she was torn and bleeding. They put her into a cell by herself; she could be heard pacing up and down with ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... The toils now closed around Ionia, and her cities began to be attacked one by one; whereupon the incapable Aristagoras, deserting the falling cause, betook himself to Europe, where a just Nemesis pursued him: he died by a Thracian sword. After this the climax soon arrived. Persia concentrated her strength upon Miletus, the cradle of the revolt, and the acknowledged chief of the cities; and though her sister states came gallantly to her aid, and a fleet was collected which made it for a while doubtful which way victory might incline, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... three together,—were on the point of adding another incident to the annals of the house, with a bolder relief of wrong and sorrow, which would cause it to stand out from all the rest. Thus it is that the grief of the passing moment takes upon itself an individuality, and a character of climax, which it is destined to lose after a while, and to fade into the dark gray tissue common to the grave or glad events of many years ago. It is but for a moment, comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling,—a truth ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... man raised a glass of water to his mouth to take a drink; some one passing struck his elbow, and—! Now an interesting thing has happened: each one of you fellows got a picture, complete in all details, to a climax. Yet there was no real picture; it was all in your imagination, spurred by twenty-one simple words. And it was a moving picture, too, and it went away past the word-spurs, because you painted the balance of it yourselves like a flash. You ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... steadily fixed upon the man leaning back against the hideous picture on the wall and the gaudy siren curved almost into an arch before him. The musicians blew their hautboys and beat their tomtoms more violently, and all things, Domini thought, were filled with a sense of climax. She felt as if the room, all the inanimate objects, and all the animate figures in it, were instruments of an orchestra, and as if each individual instrument was contributing to a slow and great, and irresistible ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... intense indignation. And so when he found that most of the people in Hillcrest were turned against Parson Dan's lad, simply because he was a waif, he naturally took an interest in the boy, which increased the more people talked. The climax to his interest was reached the day he took Rod's part ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... under whose orders he works, I changed my opinion of the man. For evil communications corrupt good manners, and a man is known by the company he keeps. The whole session has been a degradation of the British Parliament. Things have been going from bad to worse until we have reached the climax. If Mr. Gladstone remains in power we must change the qualifications of our members, and send the best fighting men and the hardest hitters. We must heckle candidates as to their 'science,' and ascertain if ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... my friend! Sister Theresa was considered a possible match for my grandfather in my youth. She and I are hardly contemporaries. And the other lady with the fascinating algebraic climax to her name,—she, too, is impossible; it seems that I can’t get the money by marrying her. I’d better let her take it. She’s as poor as the devil, ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... themselves and fall in behind the advancing line. These knew without being told what this noiseless band of stern-eyed riders portended, and ever since the coming of Moran into Crawling Water Valley, they had been waiting for just this climax. ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... bring punishment on the accusers, which could not be done since there was no evidence of deliberate insincerity and malice on the part of the circulators of the scandal. The blame of the disastrous gossip fell on two of the Whig Ladies of the Bed-chamber; and just before the sad climax, the other event, which angry Tory eyes magnified to the dignity of a conspiracy, drew double attention to ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... "The grand climax is coming," he thinks, as he takes note of these things. "Blunt is getting ready to sweep the board. ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... had been too strong for him, but I was none the less bitter against him, and my wrath reached its climax soon after, when he ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... author's work in the simple style, the least indebted to super-added ornament or to mere variety. The dangerous expedient of a recit, of which the eighteenth-century novelists were so fond, has never been employed with more successful effect than in the confession of Benassis, at once the climax and the centre of the story. And one thing which strikes us immediately about this confession is the universality of its humanity and its strange freedom from merely national limitations. To very few French novelists—to few even of those who are generally credited with a much ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... after the departure of the English, the contests between the Portuguese and Dutch grew more bitter and violent, and the arrogance of the Portuguese more unbearable, until at length, in 1637, the climax of their offences was reached, and the affections of the Japanese rulers, which, but for their own follies, would always have been with them, were turned into the most unrelenting hatred. The Portuguese, not content with the great privileges they already enjoyed, formed a conspiracy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... released her, and in words of at once triumphant and humble adoration, had made her an offer of marriage, she had felt it an absurd anti-climax to a very delicious and, even in her well-stored ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... The climax was reached in about seventy years more. When these had passed into history, so had also the Persian Empire, and the East, as the Greeks had conceived it thus far and we have understood it, was subject to the European race which a century and a half before it had tried to subdue ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... "pimpled Hazlitt." It so happened that Hazlitt's complexion was unusually clear, but the epithet clung to him with a cruel tenacity. When an ill-natured reviewer could find nothing else to say, he had recourse to "pimpled essays" or "pimpled criticism."[27] The climax of abuse was reached in an article entitled "Hazlitt Cross-Questioned," which a sense of decency makes it impossible to reproduce, and which resulted in the payment of damages to the victim. Even the publisher Blackwood speaks of it, with what sincerity it is not safe to say, as disgusting in ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the last vestige of the wastrel fires of the emigrant encampment. An instant and every human being in the train, most of them ill defended by their clothing, was drenched by the icy flood. One moment and the battering of hail made climax of it all. The groaning animals plunged and fell at their picket ropes, or broke and fled into the open. The remaining cattle caught terror, and since there was no corral, most of the cows and oxen stampeded down ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... Addison, unlike the fashion of some other amiable authors, heard her objections with approval, and soon Mr. Pope was again called into consultation. There was more hobnobbing, a change of diction, and the rehearsals continued. Then, to cap the climax of poetic condescension, little Alexander honoured "Cato" with a flowing prologue wherein he ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... the loftier sound, or more pompous allusion in the sense, which latter is sometimes carried to an extraordinary pitch of bombast, as in the instance of Pengunchang bumi, or Shaker of the World, the title of a pangeran of Manna. But a climax is not always ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... (1558-1594) was far from the equal of Marlowe, he was a playwright of real ability and one whose tragedies were unusually popular. Influenced greatly by Seneca, he brought to its climax the 'tragedy of blood'—a type of drama in which ungovernable passions of lust and revenge lead to atrocious crimes and end in gruesome and appalling murders. His famous Spanish Tragedy was the forerunner of many ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... acknowledges this deathly Christ as supreme Lord. The mountain peasant seems grounded upon fear, the fear of death, of physical death. Beyond this he knows nothing. His supreme sensation is in physical pain, and in its culmination. His great climax, his consummation, is death. Therefore he worships it, bows down before it, and is fascinated by it all the while. It is his fulfilment, death, and his approach to fulfilment ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... And noting that the place was an exceedingly good country, he built for himself a palace and dwelt there. And he married a wife who was the daughter of a deity of the place, who bore him three sons whom he named Prince Fire-Shine, Prince Fire-Climax, and Prince Fire-Subside. ...
— Japan • David Murray
... with that lady to grow warm and more tender, by degrees. Keeping a copy of his last, he always knew where he was. Cupid's barometer rose by rule; and so he arrived by just gradations at an artful climax, and made her in terms of chivalrous affection, an offer of a house, etc., three hundred a year, etc., not forgetting his heart, etc. He knew that the ladies of the stage have an ear for flattery and an eye to the ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... eagerness and avidity, a keen, fiendish expression of impatience for more, from which scene, a memory too tenacious upon this subject will not allow me to escape; the kidneys and heart were in like manner immediately consumed, and as a climax to these revolting orgies, when the whole viscera were removed, a quantity of blood and serum which had collected in the cavity of the chest, was eagerly collected in handsful, and drunk by the old man who had dissected the body; ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... political history chiefly by reason of the prolonged struggle for the establishment of parliamentary government which took place within it—a struggle which had its beginning, indeed, in the deadlock by which the dissolution of 1906 was occasioned, which reached its climax in the fiscal debates of 1908-1909, and which during the years that followed gradually subsided, leaving both the status of parties and the constitutional order of the Empire essentially as they were at the beginning. Even before the dissolution of 1906 the Conservative-Centre bloc was effectually ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... shows, my husband's chief care was to make his sister's visit bright and enjoyable—no easy task in the lonely back-blocks where our station was, and where the dreary loneliness and deadly monotony of the West Australian bush reaches its climax. Miles upon miles of uninteresting plains, covered with the usual gums and undergrowth, surrounded us on all sides; beautiful, indeed, in early spring, when the wealth of West Australian wild flowers—unsurpassed for loveliness by those of any other country—enriched ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... little luck. Once more she was interrupted by an explosion, a much louder one, directly above them. Our witch hardly heard the noise; she seemed suddenly to have found the climax of her life, and the climax was pain. There was pain and a feeling of terrible change all over her, smothering her, and a super-pain in her shoulder. After a second or two as long as death, she realised dimly that she was all tensely strung to an attitude, like a marionette. ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... (toccare) the touch, then bursting out into sustained and full harmony, and at last settling down to a fugue. But before Bach no one seemed able to keep the fugue in motion long enough to make a convincing climax. Very soon it collapsed and the process of quasi-extemporization began again, to culminate in a new fugue which often gave the whole work a happy but deceptive suggestion of organic unity by being founded on an ingenious variation of the subject of the first fugue. But in Bach's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... like flame and wind. It was irrational and wonderful and conclusive. But after all, it might not have come to quite so swift a climax if Marna, following Kate's advice, had not confided the whole thing to ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... the force that there had been in his arm there had been the accumulated hatred of years, hatred that dated from that first term at school thirteen years ago when he had known Carfax for the dirty hypocrite that he was. He could not stay now to think of the many things that had led to this climax. He only knew that as he raised himself again from the body there was with him no feeling of repentance, no suggestion of fear, only a grim satisfaction that he had struck so hard, and, above all, that lightning certainty that he ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... caught the glance, too, and continued. "I got a good lab, general, smart boys willing to pull extra duty. They've already told me that Clarens reached—after he killed the guy in the park—an emotional climax." ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire
... instance," said Peters, who up to the present, secure in his climax, had waited with a professional smile until the big guns had been silenced. "In fact, the most extraordinary instance of this sort I ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... of the Cordeliers that this miracle occurred. The crowd rushed there. It was much that the Virgin should weep; but a rumor spread at the same time that brought the excitement to a climax. A large coffer, tightly sealed, had been carried through the city; this chest had excited the curiosity of all Avignon. What did it contain? Two hours later it was no longer a coffer; but eighteen trunks ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... way of soliloquy, gradually rising higher and higher on tiptoe, in her impatience to hear the news, and making a corkscrew of her apron, and a bottle of her mouth. At last, arriving at a climax of suspense, and seeing the Doctor still engaged in the perusal of the letter, she came down flat upon the soles of her feet again, and cast her apron, as a veil, over her head, in a mute despair, and inability to ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... suddenness of a sky-rocket's rush, and was accompanied in its flight by a great volume of sizzling, sputtering, glittering, adjectival sparks that—filling the air to no purpose whatever—winked out as they were born; the climax of the pyrotechnical display being reached in the explosive pop of another "oh" which released a brilliant shower of variegated sighs and moans and ecstatic looks and inarticulate exclamations—ending, ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... in the days which followed, that friend of Mr. Crawley's, whose name, by the by, is yet to be mentioned, received quick and great promotion. Mr. Arabin by name he was then; Dr. Arabin afterwards, when that quick and great promotion reached its climax. He had been simply a Fellow of Lazarus in those former years. Then he became vicar of St. Ewold's, in East Barsetshire, and had not yet got himself settled there when he married the Widow Bold, a widow with belongings in land and funded money, and with ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... cusser"—and something of his old proficiency had returned to him. Perhaps public sympathy for his troubles strengthened his hold upon the regard of the community. For it was in the second year of Evelina's marriage, in the splendid midsummer, when all the gifts of nature climax to a gorgeous perfection, and candidates become incumbents, that he unexpectedly attained the great ambition of his life. He was said to have made the race for justice of the peace from sheer force of habit, but by some unexplained freak of popularity the oft-defeated ...
— His "Day In Court" - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... of the class mystifies you with metaphysics, half conned and unmastered by himself—more anxious still to make his points than to please his party; and, of the two, would rather sink his country than his climax. He is a rhetorician, a dealer in set phraseology, an ingenious gatherer and polisher of "other men's stuff." Of the faiseurs, may be repeated what Marshal Marmont, in his Voyage en Hongrie, en Transylvanie, &c., ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... watching all round for danger, as well as beyond the bounding black in the full expectation of catching sight at any moment of the plumed heads of a party of his companions rising above the ridge, when, as if in a final effort or an attempt at a climax to the weirdly absurd performance, the black warrior proceeded to finish off with the slaying of about a dozen invisible enemies around him. Bang went his stabbing assagai against his shield, and then ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... Hartford papers. What a magnificent meeting you had! Splendid climax of the campaign—the two ablest and most eloquent women on one platform and the Governor of the State by your side. I was with you in spirit that evening; the chairman of the Committee had both telegraphed and written me all about ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... into tears the parson was a little astonished as well as distressed. Men are apt to be so, not perhaps because women cry on such very small accounts, as because the full reason does not always transpire. Tears are often the climax of nervous exhaustion and this is commonly the result of more causes than one. Ostensibly Miss Kitty was "upset" by the loss of the diamond, but she also wept away a good deal of the vexation of her unequal conflict with the sarcastic ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... language into a condition of sympathy with the fears of the fictitious personage. But the moment that the scene of horror is past, that the hidden danger is revealed, that, it turns out to be no ghost but only a Count Morano, all Mrs. Radcliffe's power is required to prevent an anti-climax. This weakness is very different from that of Walpole or Reeve. They failed to excite the feeling of superstitious fear. Mrs. Radcliffe excited it, but she destroyed its effect by revealing the inadequacy of its cause. The works of Walpole, Clara ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... of that factory system which has culminated in the gigantic trusts of to-day. Nor can we pause to deal with the manifold circumstances and methods involved in that expansion. The full tale of the rise and climax of industrial establishments; how they subverted the functions of government to their own ends; stole inventions right and left and drove inventors to poverty and to the grave; defrauded the community of incredible amounts ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... were reinforced by brand-new clothes from top to toe; black dress coat instead of the usual frock; black cloth or satin vest, black pantaloons, and a glossy hat evidently just out of the box. To cap the climax of novelty, he carried a huge ebony cane, with a gold head the size of an egg. In these, to him, strange habiliments, he looked so miserably uncomfortable that I could not help pitying him. Reaching ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... mentioned the approaching climax of the chase. Even hardened veterans of the Psychodeviant Police don't look forward to the possibility of having their minds taken over, controlled by ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... end of the world." This partial and somewhat conventional foreign conception of American humour is admirably descriptive of the cumulative and "sky-breaking" humour of the early Mark Twain. Then no exaggeration was too absurd for him, no phantasm too unreal, no climax too extreme. ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... book of Acts to get fully within the grip of this truth. For it, with the epistles fitting into it, is peculiarly the Holy Spirit book, even as the Old Testament is the Jehovah book and the gospels with Revelation the Jesus book. The climax of the gospels is in the Acts. What is promised in the gospels is ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... To cap the climax, Edna was elected an honorary member, "for," said the girls, "if it hadn't been for you we should never have had a club at all. And when you come to your grandfather's, you will always know that you must attend ...
— A Dear Little Girl's Thanksgiving Holidays • Amy E. Blanchard
... order while, on the one hand, it presents substitutes for war in so far as war is a source of virtues, on the other hand, renders war a much more dangerous performance both to the individual and to the community, becoming indeed, progressively more dangerous to both, until it reaches such a climax of world-wide injury as we witness to-day. The claim made in primitive societies that warfare is necessary to the maintenance of virility and courage, a claim so fully admitted that only the youth furnished with trophies of heads or scalps can hope to become an accepted ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... shrubbery etc., are in the foreground, then come the hills and if there be a mountain range it is in the background. If the mountain range were in the foreground it would obscure everything else. So in making a song. If it tells a story and reaches a climax the climax should come near the end of the song. When the singer has carried his audience with him up to a great emotional height then all it needs is to be brought back safely and quickly to ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... guns—Allah preserve us!" said many more who had talked revolution for a while. This, truly, was a bloodless climax to the schemes of Germany, ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... a part upon the court-room stage than old "Bill" Howe. His every move and gesture was considered with reference to its effect upon the jury, and the climax of his summing-up was always accompanied by some dramatic exhibition calculated to arouse sympathy for his client. Himself an adept at shedding tears at will, he seemed able to induce them when needed in the lachrymal ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... candles must be lighted; some were fixed in sconces round the walls, and there were others on the table, where also lay the charter, with its engrossed text, and its broad seal. The assemblymen, as the debate seemed to approach its climax, left their seats and crowded round the table, where stood on one side the royal governor, in his scarlet coat laced with gold, his heavy but sharp-featured countenance flushed with irritation, one hand on the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... as if she might, in another instant, cap the suggestion by a satirical climax, and Ellen Bayliss rested her sewing hand on her knee and glanced thoughtfully about as if to ask, in her still, earnest way, what her own part could be in such an enterprise. But a step came hurrying down the stairs, the step of a heavy body lightly carried, and Caddie ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... was fast drawing to its climax when I was born. Already war clouds seemed to cast a shadow. While freedom was not had in Georgia until 1865, I was hardly old enough to remember very much about the early customs of slavery in pre-war days. We had comfortable ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... remember it was on August 20th that the climax came. Liege had fallen. The English Expedition had landed, and was marching on Belgium. A victorious German army had goose-stepped into defenseless Brussels, and was sweeping out toward the French frontier. The French advance into Alsace had ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... overwhelm her with shame and confusion: "Because you love him with all the strength and fervor of a heart that has never frittered away its force in senseless flirtations or passing fancies." This was the climax of misfortune. To know that the one of all others she most looked up to must, in spite of his kind forbearance, despise her as a cheat. Surely it was a sufficient punishment for a delicately proud woman to know that she had given her love ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... super-Simba. The dispute might in the ordinary course of events have come to shooting; but only after hours of excited wrangling, and as a climax worked up to in a crescendo of emotion. This expeditious nipping in the bud was ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... his raid to a climax by an actual attack upon the stately Frenchman opposite, whose slight sarcastic look pricked him intolerably. All other conversation at the ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ceased to be. Patty was carried helplessly on, a part of that frenzied flood of flesh, muscles rigid, brain tense—waiting for the inevitable moment—the horrible moment that was to mark the climax of this ride of horrors. She wondered if it would hurt, or would merciful unconsciousness come with the ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... true that a critical condition of stress between two gigantic and contending forces may be touched off, as it were, by any feeble force originating at a distance. Thus a distant volcanic eruption or earthquake shock may determine the climax of stress in a given portion of the earth, which will produce an earthquake. Observations show that more earthquakes occur near the full and the new moon than at other times. This is probably due to the fact that at these times the gravitation of the sun and moon are combined, ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... telling Steptoe that he had come to the wrong place, while Steptoe was saying no. From time to time the lady would send a glance toward Letty, not in disdain, but in perplexity. It was perplexity which reached its climax when Steptoe drew from an inside pocket an impressive ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... torture of teachers; at least, so Lancelot thought, but then he had never had any other pupils, and was not patient. It must be admitted, though, that Rosie giggled perpetually, apparently finding endless humour in her own mistakes. But the climax of the horror was the attendance of Mrs. Leadbatter at the lessons, for, to Lancelot's consternation, she took it for granted that her presence was part of the contract. She marched into the room in her best cap, and sat, smiling, in the easy chair, wheezing ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... had been. She felt as if she had reached the last page of her book of life, and the ennui of middle age came over her. She had not reached the last page; she was, of course, mistaken; but she had reached a paragraph so tremendous that it seemed to her the climax, as if there could be nothing beyond it. She was married—that is, she had been pronounced a wife! There was, there could be, nothing further. She was both afraid of, and disliked, the boy who had married her. There was nothing ahead that she ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... had thought loved her too well to play this trick upon her. She could have cried aloud at her mother's unkind way of dying. It struck her that there had always been a vein of selfishness and inconsiderateness running through her mother's character, which had come to a climax when she indulged in this preposterous death just when the stage was set for their complete happiness. She had almost succeeded in fleeing from her grief into an aggrieved feeling, when those poor loose wrinkled lids lifted again, and the fluttering knowledge in those great glazed ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... was short, for she was obliged to return at three in the morning, and it struck one as we sat down to table. As the climax of ill luck a storm came on whilst we were at supper. Our hair stood on end; our only hope was founded in the nature of these squalls, which seldom last more than an hour. We were in hopes, also, that it would not leave behind it too strong a wind, as is sometimes the case, for ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... other possibilities. Let me do her that justice; her effort at magnanimity must have been immense. There couldn't fail of course to be ways in which poor Mrs. Brash paid for it. How much she had to pay we were in fact soon enough to see; and it's my intimate conviction that, as a climax, her life at last was the price. But while she lived at least—and it was with an intensity, for those wondrous weeks, of which she had never dreamed—Lady Beldonald herself faced the music. This ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... cleared channel, then the swift current gripped her, swung her broadside in the entrance against the matted grasses, and there she lay, heeling over slowly, burning away merrily above water, but safe to stay there in the opposing elements of fire and water whose contest must come to a climax when fire ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... speeches prove him to have been a man of parts, but are somewhat disfigured by what he doubtless considered as Ciceronian graces, interjections which show more art than passion, and elaborate amplifications, in which epithet rises above epithet in wearisome climax. He had now, for the first time, been found scrupulous. He was, therefore, in spite of all his claims on the gratitude of the government, deprived of his office. He retired into the country, and soon after went up to London for the purpose of clearing ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... morning, matters reached a climax, when the family sat down to their one o'clock dejeuner. The baroness was late; the first course was finished, and still ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... Mr Root fell into the greatest of all possible rages, and, as we like a figure of speech called a climax, we must say, that Mrs Root fell into a much greater. They would turn the hussey out of the house that instant; they would do that, they would do this, and they would do the other. At length, the lady, with calm severity, requested them to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Praetor should not have extinguished it. Everybody conversant with the philosophy of opinion is aware that a sentiment by no means dies out, of necessity, with the passing away of the circumstances which produced it. It may long survive them; nay, it may afterwards attain to a pitch and climax of intensity which it never ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... manifold wonders of the Sherman, Herman, and Verman collection. With the air of a proprietor he escorted Sam into the alley for a good look at Queenie (who seemed not to care for her increasing celebrity) and proceeded to a dramatic climax—the recital of the episode of the pitchfork ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... arena where the vital question of labor, as modified by involuntary servitude, and free activity, found its most practical solution—was, and is, legitimately, appropriately, and naturally, the scene of the fiercest strife for national existence—where the claims and the climax of freedom and faith culminated in all the desolation of civil war. A more difficult country for military operations can scarcely be imagined. Early in the struggle it ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... at this climax of their perilous trip?—Harkness told himself that this was so. But he swung back to the helm of the ship. He glanced at instruments that again were registering; he saw the air-pressure indicator that told of oxygen ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... rake in my modest share of War profits. But recently Clibbers, of the International Fiction Syndicate, approached me and said, "Old man, do me some War stuff. Anything you like, but it must have a novel climax." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... behind him, sheltering her with his body, and swaying from side to side in his sword-play with a demoniac swiftness and suppleness, his thick dark brows knitted over eyes that flamed with a fiercer fire than flashed from steel meeting steel. A shriek of horror from Angela marked the climax, as Denzil fell with Fareham's sword between his ribs. There had been little of dilettante science, or graceful play of wrist in this encounter. The men had rushed at each other savagely, like beasts in a circus, and whatever of science had guided Fareham's more practised ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... this anti-climax, Ardan's companions could hardly consider his utterings either as ridiculous or over enthusiastic. They could easily excuse his excitement on the subject. And so could we, if we only remember that Tycho, though nearly a quarter ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... amplifications of the Scripture narrative are often conceived with high poetic insight, and this "Dream of the World's Tragedy" is, despite some trifling incongruities, a lofty and not inadequate paraphrase of the supreme climax of the inspired ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... sudden turn of his head nodded at Thaddeus and bestowed on him a stern glance; it was evident that he had now reached the climax of his speech. ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... better organisation. As matters grow worse, this passion for wholesale change becomes more fervidly manifested. The jacqueries of the middle ages are renewed. Various districts of country, in which poverty has reached its climax, break into universal insurrection. It is a war levied by those who have nothing against those who have something. To have coin in the pocket, is to be the enemy. The cry is: Down with the rich; take all they have got, and divide the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... devoured would be the climax of misfortune. I wished to know what animals would be likely to stop my wayfaring in this ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker |
