"Grovelling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... texture, it is so helpless that if it is placed on the sand it is extremely doubtful whether of its own volition it could regain its natural position. The surge of the sea might roll it over, and it might then be able to regain the grovelling attitude essential to life. Otherwise, I am inclined to think fatal results would follow the mere placing of the creature sideways on the sand. It seems to possess but the feeblest spark of life, and yet it has its sentiments and love for its kind, for often three or four are huddled together. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... our fault, not that of the great, that they should fancy themselves so far above us. If you WILL fling yourself under the wheels, Juggernaut will go over you, depend upon it; and if you and I, my dear friend, had Kotow performed before us every day,—found people whenever we appeared grovelling in slavish adoration, we should drop into the airs of superiority quite naturally, and accept the greatness with which the ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with the death of her mother, which had immediately followed it. At other times she congratulated herself for having repulsed far from her two wretched creatures, who, she said, had both dishonoured their family by their grovelling inclinations. Sometimes, at the sight of the many miserable objects with which Paris abounds, she would fly into a rage, and exclaim,—"Why are not these idle people sent off to the colonies?" As for the notions of humanity, virtue and religion, adopted by all nations, she ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... was their ancient hunting-ground. That the Boers did not abandon their old schemes merely because they had agreed by treaty to do so is shown by a letter which was found at Lo Bengula's kraal by Mr. F. Thompson when he went up to negotiate for Mr. Rhodes. The stealthy grovelling of the Commandant-General before a savage native chief, the unctuous phraseology, the hypocritical assurances of an undying friendship between Boer and Matabele so long as there are living one of each race, throw a lurid light upon the conduct of Boer diplomacy with native ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... inundate your hungry senses, and prepare them, by the delicate visitation of atoms, for the keen gusto of ampler contact! Especially if you have confidence in the dinner-giving capacity of your host—if you know that he is not a man who entertains grovelling views of eating and drinking as a mere satisfaction of hunger and thirst, and, dead to all the finer influences of the palate, expects his guest to be brilliant on ill-flavoured gravies and the cheapest Marsala. Mr. Ely was particularly worthy ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... despair stands the stern St. Just; the palsied Couthon crawls, grovelling, beneath table; a shot,—an explosion! Robespierre would destroy himself! The trembling hand has mangled, and failed to kill! The clock of the Hotel de Ville strikes the third hour. Through the battered door, along the gloomy passages, into the Death-hall, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... natural Defect in his Subject. Accordingly he leaves the Adversary of Mankind, in the last View which he gives us of him, under the lowest State of Mortification and Disappointment. We see him chewing Ashes, grovelling in the Dust, and loaden with supernumerary Pains and Torments. On the contrary, our two first Parents are comforted by Dreams and Visions, cheared with Promises of Salvation, and, in a manner, raised to a greater Happiness than that which they had forfeited: ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... do mean it, you grovelling coward. And if you take my advice you'll submit, for it has ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... strong for me. I don't believe in the people as you do. It's beautiful when you say it. I like to hear you. And I would not wish you to feel as I do. I'd hate it if you did. It would be stooping, grovelling for you to make distinctions among ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... Italian and every other language of which he was master, but obtained no reply. The man remained stupidly, idiotically dumb, only grovelling lower ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... follows:—"'Nothing has surprised me more than the grovelling propensities of the English on the subject of names. Thus this very inn, which in America would be styled the 'Eagle Tavern,' or the 'Oriental or Occidental Hotel,' or the 'Anglo-Saxon Democratical Coffee-house,' ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... now saw that there was nothing to be done but to kiss the rod. Accordingly, he made a humble and a grovelling submission, on which the Archbishop gave a dispensation under his great seal, a dispensation which is registered in the archives of Lambeth Palace, absolving all concerned from the penalties they had incurred, and, as if to complete the joke, alleging, as an excuse, ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... testifying approbation of its learning and the purity of its morality. That there is some salt in England, minds not swayed by mere externals, he is fully convinced; if he were not, he would spare himself the trouble of writing; but to the fact that the generality of his countrymen are basely grovelling before the shrine of what they are pleased to call gentility, he cannot ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... and Herr Frays, who had started by refusing to let her appear, was now full of grovelling apologies. He offered her a contract. But Lola, having other ideas as to how her time should be employed in Munich, would ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... So, and so only, will this electorate of ours rid itself, under a misapprehension, of a real peril, to which, if able to see the thing in its true form and dimensions, it would in all likelihood yield itself grovelling." ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... grace they sold, first to the living, then to the kinsmen and friends of the dead.[63] Now it was surely more worthy of a belief in the natural depravity than in the natural perfectibility of the sons of Adam, thus to assume without parley or proviso a base mercenariness on the one hand, and grovelling terror on the other, as the origin of a doctrine which was obviously susceptible of a kinder explanation. Would it not have been more consistent with belief in human goodness to refer the doctrine to a merciful and affectionate and truly humanising anxiety to assuage the horrors of what ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... Wang was grovelling in the dirt at Lin's feet, but Lin answered him only with a loud laugh which finally burst into a roar. "Duck feathers! ha! ha! ha! and all over your body? Why, that's too good a story to believe! You'll be wanting to live in the water ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... heard Richard crying for her upstairs. She dragged herself up at once, but remembered and fell grovelling on the floor and wept. But Richard continued to call for her, and she struggled to her feet and made her way up the stairs, clinging to the banisters. She looked over her shoulder at the loathed room and was amazed to see that this mawkish early ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... merchant, on appearing in the presence of the king, first fell on his knees, and then throwing off his shirt, extended himself naked and flat on the ground, whilst his attendants almost buried him beneath dust and mud; after grovelling like a beast for some time in this position, he suddenly started up, shook off the mud from him, in which operation he was assisted by two of his wives, who then assisted him in equipping himself in ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Seb. Base grovelling soul, who know'st not honour's worth, But weigh'st it out in mercenary scales! The secret pleasure of a generous act Is the great ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... nor earthly pleasures make The sum and substance of my song; Such themes let grovelling rhymsters take, Who write to ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... Arise—the naked clothe, the hungry feed, The sick and wounded tend,—soothe the distressed. If thy weak arm cannot protect, yet plead With bold rebuke the cause of the oppressed, Kindling hot shame in Mammon's votaries, Abashed, at least, in lucre's grovelling quest; And, in the toil-worn serf, a glad surprise Awakening—when, from brute despondency, Taught to look up to heaven with dazzled eyes.— Thus mayst thou do God service,—thus apply Thyself, within thy limit, to abate What wickedness thou seest, or misery: ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... legs with a snarl, and though not half grown, opened formidable jaws and long claws. Gerard, in a fury of excitement and agitation, flung himself on it, and delivered a tremendous blow on its nose with his axe, and the creature staggered; another, and it lay grovelling, with ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... a rage upon the receipt of this rebuff, and openly avowed his intention to make her suffer. His infatuation became a mania, and, up to the very day on which the Countess told the story, he persisted in his appeals to the Princess. In person he had gone to her to plead his suit, on his knees, grovelling at her feet. He went so far as to exclaim madly in the presence of the alarmed but relentless object of his love that he would win her or turn the whole ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... almost preternatural misery, or our indignation more deeply aroused by the cruelty with which the sublimest principles of human nature may be made to serve the purposes of selfish ambition and grovelling ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... perfectly well what would happen after I had put forth the programme of my financial operations. I said at the time to my friend GUS BRUMMAGEM, "Mark my words," I said, "I shall have all the Crowned Heads of the world grovelling at my feet and imploring, actually imploring me to allow them to hand over their money and their ancestral regalia to me for investment. They're bound to do it. I know the beggars well, and a more grasping ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 101, November 21, 1891 • Various
... love to hear that thou wilt not pardon me except because Christ has loved me; but I give thee thanks that nowhere in the record of thy gospel, does one of thy servants say any such word. In spite of all our fears and grovelling, our weakness, and our wrongs, thou wilt be to us what thou art—such a perfect Father as no most loving child-heart on earth could invent the thought of! Thou wilt take our sins on thyself, giving ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... Through hedges, ditches, and through all that's ill. 110 'Twere crime in any man but him alone, To use a body so, though 'tis one's own: Yet this false comfort never gives him o'er, That whilst he creeps his vigorous thoughts can soar; Alas! that soaring to those few that know, Is but a busy grovelling here below. So men in rapture think they mount the sky, Whilst on the ground the entranced wretches lie: So modern fops have fancied they could fly. As the new earl,[59] with parts deserving praise, 120 And wit enough to laugh at his own ways, Yet loses all soft days and sensual nights, Kind ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... "Though it was never any good to try to fight me! If you like to have it in black and white, I've been all the brains of the business here—single-handed! It was I got the secret of the wolf bait from the mother of your lame friend here," he pointed with his unoccupied hand to my grovelling boy, "when first I followed Paulette out from New York and laid up in Skunk's Misery to wait till I had a clear way to get to La Chance. That old ass Thompson gave me that, when I scooped him up on the road. After I'd used him, two of my men drowned ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling thing that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... day thou hast Trampled the Emperor's lands beneath thy feet. Oh, I am but a woman! Were I man, I'd find some better thing to do, than here Lie grovelling in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... had imagined himself a great writer, a man with a compelling message to his fellows. It seemed only necessary to reach out his hand in order to grasp a chaplet—a crown. With her the world seemed his debtor. Now he was a thing cast off, a broken boy grovelling at the foot of ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... I conform to the maxims of worldly wisdom? can I listen to the cold dictates of worldly prudence and bid my tumultuous passions cease to vex me, be still, find content in grovelling pursuits, and the admiration of the misjudging crowd, when it is only one I wish to please—one who could be all the world to me. Argue not with me, I am bound by human ties; but did my spirit ever promise to love, or could I consider when forced to bind myself—to ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... clear. "El hijo—Agua para mi Pedrillo—No le hace pari mi—oh la noche pasado, la noche pasado!" He was told to compose himself, and that his boy would be taken care of. "Dexa me verlo entonces, oh Dios, dexa me verlo"——and he crawled, grovelling on his chest, like a crushed worm, across the deck, until he got his head over the port sill, and looked down into the boat. He there beheld the pale face of his dead son; it was the last object he ever saw, "Ay de mi!" he groaned ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... carpet-ground. He goes with more impetuosity than Horace, but as securely; and the swiftness adds a more lively agitation to the spirits. The low style of Horace is according to his subject—that is, generally grovelling. I question not but he could have raised it, for the first epistle of the second book, which he writes to Augustus (a most instructive satire concerning poetry), is of so much dignity in the words, and ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... grovelling yet in the mire with popular fiction, but it is standing still, and whatever is standing still is going backward, or at least other things are passing it. To hold its own, the vaudeville must grab something more than its own. It must venture into regions yet unexplored. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... one of the hands with both of his, twisted outward as he grasped two fingers in each hand. Robert's face went putty-grey as the bones snapped. Muldoon no longer cared about fair play. His knee came up where it could do most damage, and Robert sank grovelling to the floor. ...
— Lease to Doomsday • Lee Archer
... told himself with a groan, "it wouldn't amuse me in the least to convulse money markets. Do I want to see the smartest people in London grovelling for anything they think they're likely to get out of me? As I should be perfectly well aware that their homage was not paid to any personal merit of mine, I could hardly consider it flattering. And why should I make ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... of which was his crown of empire. At twenty-six, the man who, but a little earlier, was an out-of-work captain, eating his heart out in a Marseilles slum, was General-in-Chief of the armies of France, with the disarmed rebels of Paris grovelling at his feet. ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... lantern not yet douted [Transcriber's note: doused?] cast its fitful light, a man lay grovelling on the deck. He was praying aloud in an agony of fear, but no sound could be heard from his moving lips. Suddenly there came a crash as of a falling body, the light went out, and I saw the man no more. How long the night lasted I cannot tell; to ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... who have to navigate the ship, but we are above such grovelling notions," answered Mildmay; "you have nothing ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... curtly that they must go to the Public Prosecutor for the order. Anna went out without a word. Manske bowed and apologised profusely for having disturbed the Herr Untersuchungsrichter at his repast; he felt the necessity of grovelling before these persons whose power was so almighty. The Examining Judge made no reply whatever to these piteous amiabilities, but turned on his heel, leaving them to find the door as best ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... "He lay not grovelling now, but as a knight That ever had to heavenly things desire, So toward heaven the prince lay bolt upright, Like him that upward still sought to aspire, His right hand closed held his weapon bright, Ready to strike and execute his ire, His left upon his breast ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... The wretches fell upon their knees and howled for mercy. While Deppingham was holding his wife's limp form in his arms, calling out to her in the agony of fear, utterly oblivious to all else that was happening about him, his two friends were swiftly disarming the grovelling natives. Selim's knife severed the cords that bound Bobby Browne's hands; he was staring blankly, dizzily before him, and many minutes passed before he was able to comprehend ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... that strange old long-ago, Crowding my opened memory, presents Tumultuous, as in dreams, some dreadful state Wherein I knew not falsehood from the truth; Where hope ascending struck the star of Love, Then fell down headlong grovelling in despair; But rose at length and walked the beaten way. So dim and far these things; so worn and changed, I scarcely feel that I am he who sought And won her love. And is it true indeed, That I absorbed in tenderest ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... and whirling his sword about his head, to throw himself prone before and beneath the vermilion hoofs that never paused or swerved in their gallop. Not a movement, not a glance of the rider gave sign of acknowledgment or recognition; not a look was cast upon the grovelling form, safe or hurt or maimed—only the soldier's comrades howled their plaudits, mingled with laughter and rude jeers whenever the devotee lay still or writhed or rose staggering from some ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... he exclaimed loftily. "But there, what can you expect from a low, grovelling beetle? Away, sir, pass on! Your very presence is distasteful to me. The idea of placing ME upon the same level—in the same family, as a low-born, mean, insignificant, utterly valueless——" Here the Diamond fairly choked ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... ye grovelling down there for, ye drunken beast?" shouted the angry waiter, as he came down with a thud. "Why don't you walk on your two feet like ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... soldierly manner; and the Catholic, by the very pomp with which he chants his Te Deum, somewhat conceals the meaning of his act, and, keeping God a little out of sight, makes his mass express the natural feeling of a human triumph. But the sleek Puritan, at once grovelling and presumptuous, mingles with his sanguinary mood all the morbid sickly conceit, all the crawling affected humility of the conventicle. All his bloodsheds are "mercies," and they are granted in answer to his long and miserable prayers—prayers which, to a man ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... Philip, testily; "don't crouch grovelling on the floor there. Get up and let us know the meaning of this. Good heavens! the lad may be ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... In a few minutes the icy flood had robbed me of all sensation in my limbs, and showed how impossible was the plan, so I gave the signal to haul me in; which they did, nearly cutting my body in two with the rope. And if ever there was a grovelling fire-worshipper, it was my frozen self when ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... maintained, indeed, that the withdrawal from the Indian of the Government's protecting arm, and the recognition of his position, as no longer that of a needy, grovelling annuitant, but as one of equal footing with the white before the law, would—far from bringing blessings in their train—promote, with other evils, a pernicious development, with calamitous reaction upon him, of the aggrandizing instinct of the white, who would lure and entrap him into ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... that school not only did the assistant masters not have the power of the cane, but Pasquale, being in the sixth form at the time I joined, was exempt from corporal punishment—when they both rose flushed from their grovelling beneath the table, and some merry remark from Pasquale put the question out ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... wagged here and there at the will of waves, and to have no spring nor mind of its own; or else that it has at least no springy intention and elasticity of purpose, but only a knobby, knotty, prickly, malignant stubbornness, and incoherent opiniativeness; crawling about, and coggling, and grovelling, and aggregating {161} anyhow, like the minds of so many ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... motives, which at once denoted both his baseness and his meanness, and marked him for a traitor and a trickster. Nay, in his style and writing there was the same mixture of vicious contrarieties;— the most grovelling ideas were conveyed in the most inflated language, giving mock consequence to low cavils, and uttering quibbles in heroics; so that his compositions disgusted the mind's taste, as much as his actions excited the soul's abhorrence. Indeed this mixture of character seemed, by some unaccountable ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... misunderstood, and, for myself, I wish to claim no exemption from the rule. My one aim is to benefit my readers, and to advance truth. For this I would sacrifice the smiles of Courts, and incur the shallow sneers of the grovelling, chowder-headed horde of flunkeys who sit in high places. My work bears witness to my merit. Need I ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... stalls of your cathedrals: no! let the venerable orders of the hierarchy exist with all their advantages." And shall I tell them, "I reject your just and reasonable petition, not because it shakes the Church, but because there are others, while you lie grovelling upon the earth, that will kick and bite you"? Judge which of these descriptions of men comes with a fair request: that which says, "Sir, I desire liberty for my own, because I trespass on no man's conscience,"—or ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... been a time when certain of his private occupations—interviews with personages of wealth or influence, cryptic conversations, resulting always, however defiant the beginning, in the same grovelling pleas and promises—had amused and interested the cynic most mightily: been the cream of his labors, indeed. But latterly even these scenes had palled; and it came to him with a faint shock of surprise that he was beginning to remember with ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... capital punishment,—taking lives, when there is no life to take. Memento mori! We don't understand that sublime sentence which some worthy got sculptured on his gravestone once. We've interpreted it in a grovelling and snivelling sense; we've wholly forgotten how ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... what is the amount? I long for a little peace and independence! Every obligation we receive from our fellow-creatures is a new shackle, takes from our native freedom, and debases the mind, makes us mere earthworms—I am not fond of grovelling! ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... opening, though still far away. He thought that he had out-distanced Radicofani and stumbled on, exultation giving him new strength when a sudden eclipse of this star of hope made him crouch motionless, grovelling close to the earth. A man's head and shoulders were silhouetted blackly against the brightness. The man peered cautiously into the tunnel, and listened; but neither hearing nor seeing ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... and a dish of beef-steak on the same day; in consequence of which, the heart, which ought properly to be soaring in the clouds, or, at all events, in a castle half way up, is more generally to be found grovelling about a hen-roost, in the vain hope, that, if it cannot get hold of the hen herself, it may at least hit upon an egg; and such, I remember, was the state of my feelings on this occasion, in consequence ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... general value of the world Next pride, he believes ambition to be the only generous and heroical virtue in the world that mankind is capable of; for, as Nature gave man an erect figure to raise him above the grovelling condition of his fellow-creatures the beasts, so he that endeavours to improve that and raise himself higher seems best to comply with the design and intention of Nature. Though the stature of man is confined ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... have climbed to the top thereof, where they heard the groans more plainly than they could below. One among the rest being a-top, spoke to the tree; but presently came down much astonished, and lay grovelling on the earth speechless for three hours, and then reviving said, Brampton, Brampton, thou art much bound to pray.' The author of this news is one Mr. Vaughan, a minister who was there present and heard and saw ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... common merchantmen look very small indeed. But even she, haughty lady, was put in the shade, when her young but gargantuan sister, the Aquitania, floating leisurely between the booms, claimed the attention of the harbour, and reduced us all to a state of grovelling homage. And then the Olympic, not to be outdone by these overrated Cunarders, would join the company with ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... over those days now, Ned; but they were really happy while they lasted. We were the salt of the earth; we were lifted above those grovelling instincts which we saw manifested in the lives of others. Each contributed his share of gas to inflate the painted balloon to which we all clung, in the expectation that it would presently soar with us to the stars. But ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... the others. When the vessel was dashed against the stones bespattering the aged drunkard with its contents, he fell upon the grass wringing his hands and bemoaning his hard fate. The others met his grief with muttered curses, and one of them spurned the grovelling creature with his foot, showering ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... service of mankind to be A guardian god below; still to employ The mind's brave ardor in heroic aims, Such as may raise us o'er the grovelling herd, And make us shine for ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... quite out of my exultation. I stood raging at myself in a defiant scorn, struck dumb at the folly that will let a man who loves one woman go sweethearting with another. Her eyes stabbed me, the while I stood there dogged yet grovelling, no word coming to my dry lips. What was there to be said? The tie that bound me to Aileen was indefinable, tenuous, not to be phrased; yet none the less it existed. I stood convicted, for I had tacitly ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... but herself, to wander among a few mouldy ruins, that are only imperfect indexes to lost volumes of glory, and meet at every step the more melancholy ruins of human nature—a degenerate race of stupid and shrivelled slaves, grovelling in the lowest depths of ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... of man in vain. Here the yellow grains will be harvested, which buy the smiles of beauty, blunt the sword of justice, and tempt the wavering conscience of young and old. It will bring the human herd to one grovelling level—human swine rooting after the concrete token of power. Here, in later years, the wicked arm of power will be given golden hammers to beat down all before it. Here will that generation arise wherein the golden helmet can dignify the ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... to sobbing and grovelling about my feet, and still imploring. Imploring what? The man's death? I could not quite get the bearings of the thing. But Hugo ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Poverty is necessarily selfish, contracted, grovelling, anxious. Now and then a poor man's heart, when certain beams and dews visit it, may smell like the budding vegetation in yonder garden on this spring day, may feel ripe to evolve in foliage, perhaps blossom; but he must not encourage ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... elucidate the case of the Gitanos, their brethren by blood and language. Spain for many centuries has been the country of error; she has mistaken stern and savage tyranny for rational government; base, low, and grovelling superstition for clear, bright, and soul-ennobling religion; sordid cheating she has considered as the path to riches; vexatious persecution as the path to power; and the consequence has been, that she is now poor and powerless, a pagan amongst the pagans, with a dozen kings, and ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... won the most sceptical. The sound of his voice soothed me then, as far as it was possible for anything to soothe me, and I shifted slightly to one side and looked up at him furtively and crossly, my poor face all blubbered with tears and smeared with mire where I had lain grovelling. ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Arnott into the darkness. 'We aren't beginning again!' We descended by the stairs, to find ourselves knee-deep in a grovelling crowd, some crying that they were blind, others beseeching us not to make any more noises, but the greater part writhing face downward, their hands or their caps before ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... through. When the young knight saw his shield cloven asunder he was a little ashamed of that stroke and of her language, and then he gave the other such a buffet upon the helm that he fell on his knees, and Fair-hands quickly pulled him upon the ground grovelling. Then the Green Knight cried for mercy, and yielded himself unto Sir Fair-hands, and prayed ...
— Stories of King Arthur and His Knights - Retold from Malory's "Morte dArthur" • U. Waldo Cutler
... thousand times more than could be rendered by the art of any painter. For the age that Carlyle spits at and the great and good John Ruskin scorns is gross, Mr. Aylwin; the age is grovelling and gross. No wonder, then, that Art in our time has nothing but technical excellence; that it despises conscience, despises aspiration, despises soul, despises even ideas—that ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... in a more composed tone, 'that it is not deficiency of spirit, but the grovelling habits of a confined education, among the poor-spirited class you were condemned to herd with, that keeps you silent. You scarce yet believe yourself a Redgauntlet; your pulse has not yet learned the genuine ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... there are in every builded house, that seem to be just the places for some little oddities of contrivance or other. But there is one appendage in particular which is quite apt to possess the mind of the greenhorn. He is early disgusted with the dirty, grovelling life of your easy-going, shiftless, contented old campaigner, and inwardly resolves to adopt a genteeler regimen. So he builds him a cellar for the cool deposit of wines, butter, milk, eggs, and whatever other delicacy his dainty stomach may require. In the tent flooring he cuts a trap ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... to his. He cannot directly get any praise, therefore he would indirectly find excuse by shrouding his unworthiness under the blame of others. Hence detraction is a sign of a weak, ignoble spirit; it is an impotent and grovelling serpent, that lurks in the hedge, waiting opportunity to bite the heel of any nobler creature ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... from the heaving mass upon his left, slew it with the knife, and tossed its body on the ground. At length, it seemed, it reached the turn of the high- priestess. She set down the basket on the steps, moved into the centre of the ring, grovelled in the dust before the reptiles, and still grovelling lifted up her voice, between speech and singing, and with so great, with so insane a fervour of excitement, as struck a sort of ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... constitution and their political rights should be trampled under foot by foreigners, introduced through a breach in the Constitution." The Federal opposition to the proposed War of 1812 has been described. It was a result of the "low, grovelling parsimony of the counting-room," as ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... as I could collect my scattered senses, I found myself nearly suffocated, and grovelling in utter darkness among a quantity of loose earth, which was also falling upon me heavily in every direction, threatening to bury me entirely. Horribly alarmed at this idea, I struggled to gain my feet, and at last succeeded. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... cow, like to imagine themselves advanced people, 'destroyers,' and to push themselves into the 'new movement,' and this quite sincerely. Meanwhile the really new people are very often unobserved by them, or even despised as reactionaries of grovelling tendencies. But I don't think there is any considerable danger here, and you really need not be uneasy for they never go very far. Of course, they might have a thrashing sometimes for letting their fancy run away ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... said he, "been accused of ambition in presenting this measure. Ambition! inordinate ambition! Low, grovelling souls who are utterly incapable of elevating themselves to the higher and nobler duties of pure patriotism—beings who, forever keeping their own selfish aims in view, decide all public measures by their presumed influence on their own aggrandizement—judge me by ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... drank,— When, smiting each with her enchanting wand, She shut them in her sties. In head, in voice, In body, and in bristles they became All swine, yet intellected as before, And at her hand were dieted alone With acorns, chestnuts, and the cornel-fruit, Food grateful ever to the grovelling swine. 300 Back flew Eurylochus toward the ship, To tell the woeful tale; struggling to speak, Yet speechless, there he stood, his heart transfixt With anguish, and his eyes deluged with tears. Me boding terrours ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... useful information, and was also accustomed to defer to her teachers as high authority on matters of daily discipline. She was not in "our set." She was poor, and studious, and obedient, yet a friendship had sprung up between her and me, and I was moved to forgive her the, in many respects, grovelling tendencies of her nature. I even ascended occasionally to her room on the fourth floor to shock her with my sentiments, when there was nothing ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... sank and then violently rebelled against the contrast of this hideous place with the light and colour she had left. She was a rebel. The contrast was too great. How could she live in a room like this? How could anybody live? It was not life at all, but a mere grovelling. And Sally had tasted something that thrilled her. She had come into contact with a life resembling the life led by those who travelled in the motor broughams she so much admired. She was ravenous for such a life. Her natural arrogance was roused and inflamed by the comparison she so instinctively ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... his tears with an effort. Beaubocage—Cotenoir. Ah, me! what empty sounds those two once magic names seemed to him now that his son's life had been sacrificed to so paltry an ambition, so sordid a passion, so vile and grovelling a desire! He took the boy on his knee, and kissed him tenderly. His thoughts bridged over a chasm of five-and-twenty years as his lips pressed that fair young brow; and it was his own son—the son whom he had disowned—whose soft hair was mingling itself now with the grey bristles ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... name he held out his hand again and flicked his fingers. The dog rose from his grovelling posture and came eagerly forward, wagging his lank tail. He rubbed his nose against the man's hand and slowly licked the ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... durst not dismiss him, and might, perhaps, have been doomed for ever to the grossness of pedlary, and the jargon of usury, had not a fraud been discovered in the settlement, which set me free from the persecution of grovelling pride, and pecuniary impudence. I was afterwards six months without any particular notice but at last became the idol of the glittering Flosculus, who prescribed the mode of embroidery to all the fops of his time, and varied at pleasure the cock of every hat, and the sleeve of every ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... knows not Circe, The daughter of the sun, whose charmed cup Whoever tasted lost his upright shape, And downward fell into a grovelling swine? Milton, Comus (1634). ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... lends to it grace and dignity, we may look for it among the vulgar and the ignorant, taking only a grosser and meaner form, in accordance with their habits of thought. The rude materials, of which the highest and noblest feelings of educated minds are formed, will be found amongst the most grovelling and base; and so this vulgar curiosity, which, combined with other feelings, prompted an ignorant and illiterate mob to exhume Miles, the once fat butcher, in a different form tempted the philosophic Hamlet to moralise upon the ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... began to happen to me at night. Do you know when she lay there asleep beside me (he laughs shrilly) I would hear him, pushing open the door, crawling into the room, coming to me on his hands and knees, grovelling, whining, begging me (he is almost shouting) for her, for her, imagine it! And I, I had to get up and give my place to him. (He covers his eyes with his hands in a. convulsive moment.) Phew! ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... wrongs—The miserable Highland drover, bankrupt, barefooted,—stripped of all, dishonoured and hunted down, because the avarice of others grasped at more than that poor all could pay, shall burst on them in an awful change. They that scoffed at the grovelling worm, and trode upon him, may cry and howl when they see the stoop of the flying and fiery-mouthed dragon.—But why do I speak of all this?" he said, sitting down again, and in a calmer tone—"Only ye may opine ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... herself erect, and paused at two yards' distance from him. There was an unconquerable repulsion for her in that monkish aspect; it seemed to her the brand of the dastardly undutifulness which had left her father desolate—of the grovelling superstition which could give such undutifulness the name of piety. Her father, whose proud sincerity and simplicity of life had made him one of the few frank pagans of his time, had brought her up with a silent ignoring of any claims ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... five or six pages." Yet, he attached the most importance to "Locke's Essay," for he acknowledged that it turned his attention to metaphysics, and, he said, "It awakened me from my stupor, and induced me to form a resolution to abandon the grovelling views which I had ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... fell back again to the ground, grovelling and speechless. The tyrannic Thascius, regarding him with a scowl of drunken wrath, seized an empty vase, and poising it in his unsteady hand, prepared to hurl it at the hunchback's prostrate form, when again a single ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... demoralised as she had never been, Mrs. Wix suffered her wound to bleed and her resentment to gush. Her great bitterness was that Ida had called her false, denounced her hypocrisy and duplicity, reviled her spying and tattling, her lying and grovelling to Sir Claude. "Me, ME!" the poor woman wailed, "who've seen what I've seen and gone through everything only to cover her up and ease her off and smooth her down? If I've been an 'ipocrite it's the other ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... said Sophia, whose noble and proud heart felt humbled by this pious grovelling of her husband; "not so, we will be more than dust and food for worms. The dust of common mortals will be scattered in every direction by the hand of Time, and over their graves will History walk with ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... once more was not alluring. In the meantime there was his more immediate duty to be performed, the apology to Thomson. But that reminded him. The apology must only be of a certain kind. It must not be grovelling. And this for a very excellent reason. After the apology must come an official lecture on the subject of betting. He had rather lost sight of that offence in the excitement of the greater crime of which Thomson had been accused, and very nearly convicted. Now the full heinousness of ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... among the general multitude, have been a Brahminical caste, dissociated by an imagined essential distinction of nature. While they were exulting in this elevation and free excursiveness of mental existence, the prostrate crowd were grovelling through a life on a level with the soil where they were at last to find their graves. But this crowd it was that constituted the substance of the nation; to which, nation, in the mass, the historian applies the superb epithets, ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... each warrior be, Nor lack meat in the morning, For who can rule The eve's returning, And base to fall before fate grovelling." ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... world that lifts them up to high degree, And treads us down in grovelling misery! England affords these glorious vagabonds, That carried erst their fardels on their backs, Coursers to ride on through the gazing streets, Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits, And pages ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... The youth grovelling before him wondered to see him calm, and plucking up spirit stood upright. "You must go back to her, and ask her to get it for you," Blondel said firmly. "You can be back within the ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... this form of torture. A forefinger extended with a threatening waggle was sufficient to rob her of every vestige of self-control, while the play of her brother's fingers over her ribs reduced her instantly to grovelling submission. To do Graham justice, he was quite unable to appreciate the fact that this pastime cost Ruth real suffering. He would have put his hand into the fire before he would have struck his sister, yet ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... famous of the Dutch masters, and he rises into glory; coarseness and vulgarity in them had no point out of which could come instruction. If they picture the issues of their own minds, they must have been gross and sensual; they ransacked the muck of life, and the grovelling in character, for themes that one should see only by compulsion. But Hogarth's subjects were never without a lesson, and, inasmuch as he resorted for them to the open volume of humanity, like those of the most immortal of our writers, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... sight of this, Dyke dropped down flat, and lay panting and motionless for a few minutes. Then he began to crawl straight for the horse, grovelling along upon his breast. But this soon proved to be far too painful and laborious a mode of progression, and he rose to his hands and knees, feeling that it must be that way or nohow, though fast growing desperate enough to rise to ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... of a week ago turned flatterers and flunkeys, bowing, grovelling, fawning, contemptible in their self-abasement, but quite ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... to Owain Glyndwyr to bid the latter send the promised implements to Caer Idion. Richard, returning to the hut the same evening, found Alundyne there, alone, and grovelling at the threshold. Her forehead was bloodied when she raised it and through tearless sobs told of what had happened. A half-hour earlier, while she and Branwen were intent upon their milking, Gwyllem had ridden up, somewhat the worse for liquor. Branwen ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... sleep, as if it felt some sensible torment. Many have climbed to the top of it, who heard the groans more easily than they could below. But one among the rest, being on the top thereof, spake to the tree; but presently came down much aghast, and lay grovelling on the earth, three hours speechless. In the end reviving, he said: "Brampton, Brampton, thou art much bound to pray!"' The Earl of Lincoln caused one of the arms of the ash to be lopped off and a hole bored through the body, and then was the ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... may be set on a very improper and base object, it will not fail to seek a good motive for its justification, few men being so hardened in any grovelling passion, that they will not endeavor to deceive themselves, as well as ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... other, grovelling in the darkness under the table. "This is it." He reappeared with ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie |
