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Perilously   /pˈɛrələsli/   Listen
Perilously

adverb
1.
In a dangerous manner.  Synonyms: dangerously, hazardously.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Perilously" Quotes from Famous Books



... stood there drinking in the scene before him. Then he took a step forward which brought him perilously near the edge of the steep rock. His lips moved though no sound could be heard for the tumult of the falls which was rending the air. What connection had such a man with his surroundings? No boor or clown ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody

... little lace edged wavelets, undulating flounces of them. A blur of faces rose above deck-rails, faces that, looking back, receded finally. The last flag and the last kerchief became vapor. Against the pier-edge, frantically, even perilously forward, her small flag thrust desperately beyond the rail, Mrs. Ross, who had lost a saving sense of time and place, leaned after that ship receding in majesty, long after it had ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst

... we reach the term of our Laureate calendar. Long ages and much perilously dry research must he traverse who shall enlarge these outlines to the worthier proportions of history. Yet will the labor not be wholly barren. It will bring him in contact with all the famous of letters and poetry; he will fight over again numberless quarrels of authors; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... unfailing insurance eye, pointed out that the stove-pipe wire had sagged, bringing the pipe perilously near the woodwork, and then gossiped about the robberies his company had suffered. A game of rhymes was proposed. In this one person gives a word and the next to him must at once match it with an appropriate rhyme. ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton

... quite unable to conceal his jealousy. He seemed to think that he had a proprietary right to Mrs. Monte Irvin's society, and during the week preceding Sir Lucien's departure Gray came perilously near to making himself ridiculous ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... companions. Was there some reason? Wasn't she happy? He felt vaguely troubled for her. She aroused his sympathy, as well as his curiosity. He couldn't forget that look he had surprised. It stayed in his memory, perilously. At night in his room, when he should have been studying, that astonishing glance came before him on his book, and cast a luminous spell ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... himself quickly and perilously into the cleft, and found the creature with its leg broken and bleeding. It was not a sheep but a young goat. He had no cloak to wrap it in, but he took off his turban and unrolled it, and bound it around the trembling animal. Then he ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke

... dawned, and with the coming of the sun there woke in unison the chorus of joyous animal life. Then Ichabod, his long legs dangling over the dashboard, lifted up a voice untrained as the note of a loon, and sang lustily, until his companion on the wagon ahead,—boy-faced, man-bodied,—grinned perilously. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... and loaded like a furniture van with luggage. There was a day's delay in the start. Even the setting out was awkwardly managed; the queen leaving the palace on foot, losing her way, and keeping her companions perilously waiting. The detachments of troops on the road were sure to attract attention. Careful precautions for the defeat of the enterprise seemed to ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris

... never be able to get up this place," murmured Laura, looking up at the sheer wall down which she had come so perilously. ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison

... to the vital postulates of any of the Great Powers. It was only on the subject of the lesser states and the equality of nations that the debates were intense, protracted, and for a long while fruitless. At times words flamed perilously high. For months the solutions of the Adriatic, the Austrian, Turkish, and Thracian problems hung in poignant suspense, the public looking on with diminishing interest and waxing dissatisfaction. The usual optimistic assurances that all would soon run smoothly and swiftly fell upon deaf ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... to be about" had been made. It would have been some solace to him to intimate to Miss Alicia by his bearing and the manner of his services that she had been discovered, so to speak, in the character of a sort of accomplice; that her position was a perilously uncertain one, which would probably end in utter downfall, leaving her in her old and proper place as an elderly, insignificant, and unattractive poor relation, without a feature to recommend her. But being, as before remarked, a timid man, and recalling the interview between ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... Domineering and ever dominant, he had been accustomed throughout his life to impose his will upon others. Shrewd and capable in his chosen business, successful in the limited area of his activities, he had come perilously close to believing himself omnipotent, not only in all that pertained to his own destiny, but in the destinies of those about him. Never until the last few weeks had either men or events dared to march contrary to his wish, whereas now they appeared to have entered deliberately ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... make herself conspicuous, to be held up to ridicule or blame. She does not care for marriage; her position is infinitely more delightful in its variety. She can make a world of her own without being accountable to any one, but she has come perilously near to loving Floyd Grandon, when she considered love no longer a temptation, had dismissed it as a puerile ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... William, my dear lord, hear me," he said in a gasping voice, still hanging perilously between earth and heaven. "If I have indeed been a faithful servant, I beseech you come with me—for the sake of the house of Douglas and of your mother, a widow ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... way—suddenly broke through the circle and disappeared, much to our astonishment, until it was explained that his opponent in the debate had charged him with having recently poisoned six persons; as this was perilously near the truth, the criminal simply ran away. The accuser was a fine-looking man, splendidly dressed, of a haughty countenance, displaying the greatest contempt for all the arguments addressed to him, his impatience being marked ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... eyes were so perilously kind that Priscilla had to struggle to keep back her tears. A sense of security and peace flooded her heart, but the past ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... adventure from what he had hoped it might be! He had thought that the two of them might simply enter the termitary, mingle—perilously, but with at least a margin of safety—with the blind race it housed, and walk out again whenever they pleased. But from the moment of entering they'd had no chance. They had been hopelessly in the clutch of the insects; played with, indulged, and finally trapped, to be led at ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst

... acclamation rent the sky again; And from that hour a new tradition gave Their sanctuary the name of "Neuha's Cave." A hundred fires, far flickering from the height,[fw] Blazed o'er the general revel of the night, The feast in honour of the guest, returned To Peace and Pleasure, perilously earned; A night succeeded by such happy days As only the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... sideways, towards him, on the inner horse—named 'Wildfire'. But of course John Thomas was not going to sit discreetly on 'Black Bess', holding the brass bar. Round they spun and heaved, in the light. And round he swung on his wooden steed, flinging one leg across her mount, and perilously tipping up and down, across the space, half lying back, laughing at her. He was perfectly happy; she was afraid her hat was on one side, but she ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence

... after the founding of the town, has long been destroyed; and the second, begun in 1610, to the honour of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, held episcopal rank until the See was disestablished by the great Concordat. Although this Cathedral was built in the XVII century, a date perilously near that of decadence in French ecclesiastical architecture, it was situated in so obscure a corner of Provence that its plan was unaffected by innovating ideas; it is of the old native type, a building of stout walls and heavy buttresses, a single tower, square and straight, and a ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose

... paused at the open door, where he met his nephew. "Come to get those scalp-locks trimmed, John? They are perilously long. If you were to get into a fight and a fellow got hold of them, you would have a bad time." Then as his uncle went away laughing, John knew that the Squire must have heard of his battle from Mark Rivers. He did not like it. Why he did not know ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... force the strongly defended passes, they would only find a maze of other mountains beyond. When, in the summer of 1916, the Archduke Frederick launched his great offensive from the Trentino, supported by a shattering artillery, he came perilously near—much nearer, indeed, than the world was permitted to know—to cutting the main east-and-west line of communications, which would have resulted in isolating the Italian ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell

... of her mother's full white petticoats and turned to wring it dry with her red and blistered hands, a look that was perilously near disgust was on her face—for though she had done her duty heroically and meant to do it until the end, there were brief moments when it sickened her to desperation. She was the kind of woman whose hands perform the more thoroughly because the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... George her hand he came perilously near telling her that he would follow her to Yaque; but he reflected that if he were to tell her at all, he would better do so on the way to the submarine. So he went blindly down the hall and rang the elevator ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale

... fetched home more 'n a couple o' minnies, 't would seem worth while," Mrs. Todd concluded, putting a last dab of the mysterious compound so perilously near her brother's mouth that William flushed ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett

... himself to a drink, after a quizzical look at his guest, decanter in hand; the usurer snatched it from him and splashed out half a tumbler. Certainly he was beginning to know his Raffles perilously well. ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung

... heaven!" exclaimed the Hon. Bovine, "and I am getting perilously near to forty. We'll change the subject. I'm very sleepy. Don't expect to find me up when you come in, Arthur; to-morrow night, remember, we may be sleeping on the cold ground, I shall get all the rest I can to-night." Clarges and the other man took ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison

... stood trying to orient himself to this unexpected and amazing minifying of Hooker's Bend. He had left a metropolis; he was coming back to a tumble-down village. Yet nothing was changed. Even the two scraggly locust-trees that clung perilously to the brink of the river bank still held their toe-hold ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... There is a certain charm in good faith and honesty, even when on the side of wrong and vice; and it is his perfect frankness, self-complacency, nay, self-praise, in a sensuality which in plain prose would seem by turns vapid and disgusting, that makes Horace even perilously fascinating, so that the guardians of the public morals may well be thankful that for the young the approach to him is warded off by the formidable ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody

... is known to every French-speaking child, and with many variants the old "ronde" is sung and danced from the remotest plains of Canada to the valleys of the Swiss Alps. The good folk of Avignon, however, protest that their "rondes" were not danced perilously on the narrow Pont St. Benezet, but under its arches on the green meadows of the Isle de la Barthelasse, and that "Sur" in lieu of "Sous" is due to northern misunderstanding of their sweet ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... the present condition of English Christianity; or in a still narrower, nobody can look round upon this congregation; or in the narrowest view, none of us can look into our own hearts—without feeling that this saying comes perilously near being true of us. And I beg you, dear Christian friends, while I try to dwell on this point, to ask yourselves this question—Lord, is it I? and not to be thinking of other people whom you may suppose the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... was a prank, and I cannot say I think it was an admirable performance. But young folks will be young folks, and I trust I'm not so old and grouty as to frown on innocent fun. To my mind, this came perilously near NOT being entirely innocent, but I'm not going to split hairs about it. I don't care for such jokes myself, but I must admit, Cameron, you played it pretty cleverly. And you certainly did your share toward lessening ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells

... of the princes followed the chariots, the Egyptian cavalry, twenty thousand in number, each drawn by two horses and holding three men. They advanced ten in a line, the axletrees perilously near together, but never coming in contact with each other, so great was ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various

... a joke, and he contrived to present it to his audience in that light. From the deck of the steamboat he addressed the town, and then, to the relief of the passengers, he decided to go ashore. When the boat drew away on her voyage we left him swaying perilously near the edge of the wharf, good-naturedly resenting the grasp of his coat-tail by a friend, addressing us upon the topics of the day, and wishing us prosperity and the Fourth of July. His was the only effort in the nature of a public lecture that we heard in the Provinces, and we could not judge ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... while it somehow eased his mind to see the smashed-up brine fly half the height of her drenched mainsail. There was also satisfaction in feeling the strain on the tiller when, swayed down by a fiercer gust, she plunged through the combers with the froth swirling, perilously close to the coaming, along her half-submerged deck. In all their moods, men of his kind find pleasure in such things; the turmoil, the rush, the need for quick, resolute action stirs the ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... who tries to have the best of both worlds, matters not a straw. The medium of expression changes, but the theme is constant: the conception is whole. That is more than can be said of The Lady from the Sea, where the symbolism comes perilously near padding; or of When We Dead Awaken, where it often expresses nothing relevant, merely standing picturesquely for commonplaces, and ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell

... on his first ascent, but all that he actually did notice was that it was hard to tell at what instant they left the ground; that when they were up, the wind threatened to crush his ribs and burst his nostrils; that there must be something perilously wrong, because the machine climbed so swiftly; and, when they were down, that it had been worth waiting a ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... sounded so perilously sweet to her, said thus in Ralph's low voice, that once again her eyes met his in that full, steady gaze which tells heart secrets and brings either life-long joys or unending regrets. Nor—as we ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... house; the sun was shining brightly; a cool breeze seemed to have sprung up as they ran. She could see a quantity of rubbish lying on the roof from which a dozen yards of zinc gutter were perilously hanging; the broken shafts of the further cluster of chimneys, a pile of bricks scattered upon the ground and among the battered down beams of the end of the veranda—but that was all. She lifted her now whitened face to the man, and with the apologetic ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte

... perilously near to the Jewel Office, which was scorching hot—yet Mr. Swifte, the keeper of the jewels, saved the whole of the Regalia, down to the minutest article, and was earnestly begged to retire and leave the last thing, a huge silver wine fountain, to its fate, but ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton

... dancing on his own hot place and blowing on his hands which were in agony from contact with the metal wheel. The three leaped; and the launch's stern dipped perilously under the tremendous influx of weight; the flaming oil alongside licked ravenously at ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle

... turning this way and that the curious, and in some cases apparently conflicting details of the Tocsin's letter, paid little attention to his surroundings, save to note approvingly from time to time that a request to Benson to hurry was equivalent to something perilously near to a contempt of speed laws. It still seemed incredible that Clarie Archman was a thief, a safe-tapper, even if but an amateur one. The boy must have travelled a pace of late that was fast and furious. How ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... Abstinence here is as obligatory as considerate care for our unfortunate fellow-men late in bonds, and, if observed, would equally prove to be wise forecast. The great qualities of the South, those attested in the War, we can perilously alienate, or we may make ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville

... the suit-case, followed it, and gave his hand to Mother, who creakingly crawled out with her bundle. It was an early November evening, chilly, a mist in the air. After their day in the enervating furnace heat the breeze seemed biting, and the garage roof was perilously slippery. Mother slid and balanced and slid on the roof, irritably observing, "I declare to goodness I never thought that at my time of life I'd have to sneak out of a window on to a nasty slippery shed-roof, like a thief in the night, when ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis

... of arduous and even fatal encounters with the hunted leopard. The following is one of these adventures, which occurred in a frontier district in 1822, as described by one of the two individuals so perilously engaged in it. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various

... devotees. Through Broadway the dingily glittering tide spreads itself over the sands of 'amusement.' Theatres and 'movies' are aglare. Cars shriek down the street; the Elevated train clangs and curves perilously overhead; newsboys wail the baseball news; wits cry their obscure challenges to one another, 'I should worry!' or 'She's some Daisy!' or 'Good-night, Nurse!' In houses off the streets around children are being born, lovers are kissing, people are dying. Above, in the ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... a little nearer, took her hand and raised it to his lips. Her face was perilously near to his. She drew a little back—and ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... muslin gown." Two spots of color tinted her cheeks. He had never seen such beauty in human guise, and he came very near saying so. Something in the aromatic mountain air was tempting her to recklessness. Amazed, exhilarated by the temptation, she sat there looking down at him; and her smile was perilously innocent and sweet. ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers

... years, must be reinstated in something resembling its old position; for Korea has always been the keystone of the Far Eastern arch, and it is the destruction of that arch more than anything else which has brought the collapse of China so perilously near. ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... Maupassant says he learnt from Flaubert (in whose own hands it was always subordinated to an effort at larger completeness) does lead to the composition of a series or flock of isolated vignettes or scenes rather than to that of a great picture or drama. For it comes perilously close—though perhaps in Maupassant's own case it never actually reached—the barest and boldest (or baldest) individualising of impressions, and leaving them as they are, without an attempt at architectonic. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... cover his name with infamy. I do not commit myself to the statement that he ever said this; but whether he did or not, he is credited with acting upon what is a very general impression of how truth may be used. With vast masses of people it has become perilously like a conviction that strict integrity, while good and desirable as an ideal, is yet too much of a risk for the purpose of what is popularly known as practical life. The advice said to have been given by a Yorkshireman to his son who was entering ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd

... days,—and was glad to make a reconnaissance before the enemy arrived upon the field of battle. He had made—at least he had thought so—considerable progress with Alice during the three weeks since her return from Washington, and once or twice Alice had been perilously near the tender stage. This visit had disturbed the situation and threatened to ruin his chances; but he did not mean to give up ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... his horse near the gate and stood looking between the massive iron bars toward Haddon Hall, whose turrets could be seen through the leafless boughs of the trees. The sun was sinking perilously low, thought John, and with each moment his heart also sank, while his good resolutions showed the flimsy fibre of their fabric and were rent asunder by the fear that she might not come. As the moments dragged on and she did not come, a hundred alarms tormented him. First among these ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major

... were directed toward him, but they glanced harmlessly from his polished armor. Society was to him what business was to his brother,—an arena in which he easily manifested his power. At the same time he was a manly fellow, and had no taste for corner flirtations or the excitement of drawing perilously near to a committal with those who would have responded to marked attentions. The atmosphere he loved was that of general and social gayety. The girls that he singled out for his especial regard were noted for their vivacity and ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe

... narrow that the slightest current might have caused a nip and obliged them to take hurried refuge on the floes, while, at other times, when compelled to pass rather close to the small bergs, lumps dropped into the water perilously near to them ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne

... those horrid improper-looking gods and goddesses in clouds and chariots on the ceilings at Belforest," observed that lady, in a half-puzzled, half-offended tone of voice, that most perilously tickled the fancy of Mother Carey and her brood! and she could hardly command her voice to make answer, "Never fear, Ellen; we are not going to attempt allegorical monstrosities, only to make a bower of green leaves and flowers such as we see round us; though after what ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... would laugh at the idea of an active lad being lost in the mountains. To them it seems, as they travel comfortably along by rail or coach, impossible that any one could go perilously astray ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn

... arose a not unnatural distrust of the journalistic monopoly created by the consolidation of the three former dailies into a single newspaper, carrying an unfamiliar hyphenated headline. Touching its policy of sectional conciliation it picked its way perilously through the cross currents of public opinion. There was scarcely a sinister purpose that was not alleged against it by its enemies; scarcely a hostile device that was not undertaken to put it down ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... her hoarsely to keep away. He even tried to thrust her hands off the woodwork. But she withstood him fiercely, with a strength that agonised and overcame. In a second she was on the step, where she swayed perilously, then fell forward on her hands and ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell

... a witness. It would be derogatory to his royal character to put himself in a position where comments could be made, either by the opposing barrister or by the public outside, on his evidence. And, on the other hand, it would be perilously unfair to one litigant for his adversary to be able to produce a witness who was not subject to cross-examination, nor to remarks ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... who analyze the workings of the human mind as they would the entrails of an eight-day clock, explain the phenomenon I am about to relate, or decline to believe it, as they choose—she became suddenly aware that she was getting perilously near ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... met hers, took in her face.... And suddenly his heart gave a jump. Then it stopped dead still, tingling, for a second. Then it flew off, racing perilously.—Oh, for reasons—for the best reasons in the world: but ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... that one man is as good as another; but the Fire Department says he is better. This is a too generous theory, but the law will not tallow itself to be construed otherwise. All of which comes perilously near to being a paradox, and commends itself to the attention of the S. P. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... back turned, paid no attention to the warning—probably did not even hear him. The coping, poised on the wall's edge, swayed perilously. If it fell, there would be one less of the indigent and helpless for the relief committees to support. With a half angry exclamation ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... Do you remember when Rohscheimer offered me five hundred pounds if I could induce the Marquess to come to dinner? Gad! He came perilously near to a just retribution that day! I think if I had been in uniform I should ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer

... perilously towards her. She affected not to notice, not to notice the hand which seemed for a moment as though it would snatch the door handle from her grasp. She passed out pleasantly and without haste. The last sound ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... unconsciously. There was nothing he could do. The train had gone; there was no telegraph to Patesville, and no letter could leave Clarence for twenty-four hours. The best laid schemes go wrong at times—the stanchest ships are sometimes wrecked, or skirt the breakers perilously. Life is a sea, full of strange currents and uncharted reefs—whoever leaves the traveled path must run the danger of destruction. Warwick was a lawyer, however, and accustomed ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... there is nothing more to be done with objective epic. But Hugo's method, of a connected sequence of separate poems, instead of one continuous poem, may come in here. The determination to keep up a continuous form brought both Lucretius and Wordsworth at times perilously near to the odious state of didactic poetry; it was at least responsible for some tedium. Epic poetry will certainly never be didactic. What we may imagine—who knows how vainly imagine?—is, then, a sequence of odes expressing, in the image of some fortunate and lofty mind, as much of the spiritual ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie

... him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously drew over his swaying .. flukes, and the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady jets from the new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the natural spout-hole in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... the Hall are full of surprises even to those familiar with Crabbe's earlier poems. He can still allow couplets to stand which are perilously near to doggerel; and, on the other hand, when his deepest interest in the fortunes of his characters is aroused, he rises at times to real eloquence, if never to poetry's supremest heights. Moreover, the poems contain passages of description which, for ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger

... the stokers, with hooks, pull out the glowing logs on to the iron deck in front of the furnace door, and throw water over them, and the Move sends a cloud of oil-laden steam against the bank, coming perilously near scalding some of her black admirers assembled there. I dare say she felt vicious because they had been admiring ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... fought, for the man behind it never shirked a conflict. His was a vigorous and irascible temperament, compounded of old-fashioned, slow-burning black powder and nitroglycerine—a combination of incalculable destructive power. It was a perilously unstable mixture, tool, at times nothing less than a flame served to ignite it; on other occasions the office force pussy-footed past Carter's door on felt soles, and even then the slightest jar often caused the untoward thing to let go. In either event there was a deafening roar, much ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach

... help. Her father's need of it was sore, and made the aid of her old friend invaluable. Death stood at his pillow. A shade, already, of what he had been, shattered in mind, and perilously sick in body, he laid his weary head down on the bed his daughter's hands prepared for him, and had never ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... spellbound, as the agile form ascended, using every physical device and disregarding every danger. More than once Tom almost shuddered at the chances which his young companion took upon some perilously slender limb. Once, the impulse seized him to call a warning, but he refrained from a kind of inspired confidence in that young dare-devil who by now seemed a mere speck of brown moving in and out of the darkened green above him. Once he was on ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... goes to the theatre with a man about whom she knows nothing except that he has the price of the tickets is running a serious risk. She is violating one of the most rigid principles of etiquette and she is skating perilously out beyond the line marked off by common sense. Nearly every man can, and does, if he is the right sort, present credentials before asking a girl if he may call or if he may escort her to a place of amusement. There are instances in romantic stories and in real ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney

... experiment nearly two thousand years ago, while Goethe had immediately anticipated him in his charming 'Der Junggesett und der Muehlbach'. There was certainly no novelty in such an attempt. The poem is in parts charmingly written, but the oak is certainly "garrulously given," and comes perilously ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson

... that in this great and generous effort to secure the freedom of the human soul men in some measure lost their way. They demanded and in a measure they succeeded in asserting the freedom of the religious organization, as against the temporal organization, but in doing this they went perilously near to denying the freedom of the individual spiritual experience. They went perilously near to denying it, but they never wholly forgot it. The Church claimed and exercised an immense authority in religion, so immense an authority that it might easily seem as though ...
— Progress and History • Various

... Most of them had on clean shirts and paper collars, and wore their Sunday coats (thick woolen garments) over rough trousers. All of them crossed their legs at once, and most of them sought the wall and leaned back perilouslyupon the hind legs of their chairs, eyeing ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland

... and even that is gone from the oaken wall; That picture that never was painted for gold or fame, So vowed the artist friend who went with me to the hall; But the pain on your white brow sits regally I ween, The smile on your perfect lips is perilously sweet, My slavish glances crown you my love, my fate, my queen, As you pass in peerless beauty adown ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley

... was skating perilously close to the brink—once I revealed to a Normal that I had the Stigma, my days as an attorney were done. "This organization—I'll call it the Lodge, if I may—has to have an attorney to represent it in Court. And you know as well as I do they ...
— Modus Vivendi • Gordon Randall Garrett

... to Pollyanna then. What to her was perilously near a second deluge—but according to Mrs. Carew was merely "the usual fall rains"—brought a series of damp, foggy, cold, cheerless days, filled with either a dreary drizzle of rain, or, worse yet, a steady ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter

... astern, more or less, to avoid a shoal or what not; and to do this the sail mentioned is braced either to shake, neutralizing it, or to bring it also aback, as the occasion demands. This rather long preamble is perilously like explaining a joke, but it is necessary. Balch had seen a good deal of this work in China, and he told us that the Chinese pilot's expression, if he wanted the sail shaken, was "Makee sick the mizzen topsail;" but if aback, he added, "Kill him dead." I wonder does that give us an ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan

... minute she was eagerly kissing Benjamin (who, together with Fido, had run out at the sound of her footsteps), and shedding tears of joy at the news that Reuben was no worse, that there were now no symptoms of the plague about him, but that he was perilously weak, and needed above all things that his mind should be ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green

... Von Barwig's sense of humour, and he burst Into laughter, a laughter perilously near to tears. It never occurred to him to ask Poons what he knew or what he had heard. The fact that what was preying on his mind, his carefully guarded secret, was common property did not strike him at that ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein

... of the captain did acrobatic feats like a strange demon upon his chin. His eyes stood perilously from his head. The suspender wheezed and tugged like the tackle ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane

... to imagine laws which a very considerable number of perfectly wellmeaning people would be glad to have enacted, but which if enacted it would be not only the right, but the duty, of sound citizens to ignore. I do not say that the Eighteenth Amendment falls into this category. But it comes perilously near to doing so, and thousands of the best American citizens think that it actually does do so. It has degraded the Constitution of the United States. It has created a division among the people of the United States comparable only to that ...
— What Prohibition Has Done to America • Fabian Franklin

... as clean swept as the smallest village on the road. Everything had been carried off or destroyed. Moscow lies far to the north and the days began to grow perilously short. Napoleon sought to make terms with the Russians, but met with nothing but delays. The Russians were waiting for the approach of ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler

... them, and then to march past the very gates without coming in, refuse invitations on trumpery excuses, and attend a church at the opposite end of the parish—such behaviour as this was worse than inconsistent in Peggy's eyes, it approached perilously near hypocrisy! ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey

... kind. The first and second headlands were directly in line with the south-west wind; but once around the second,—and we went perilously near,—we picked up the third headland, still in line with the wind and with the other two. But the cove that intervened! It penetrated deep into the land, and the tide, setting in, drifted us under the shelter of the point. Here the sea was calm, ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London

... beg of you not to ask. Leave me! or let me leave you. I refuse to answer further." The latter half of this sentence was uttered doggedly and sounded sullen and ill-humored, although, of course, it was not so intended. He had been so perilously near speaking words which would probably have lighted, to their destruction—to his, certainly—the smoldering flames within their breast that it frightened him, and the manner in which he spoke was but a tone giving utterance to the pain in ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major

... she drew a chair underneath the chandelier, and armed with a handful of matches proceeded to the unheard-of extravagance of lighting it, not here and there, but throughout as high as she could reach, standing perilously on ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... boorish tree burnt flush with the ground. Twelve months and a fortnight after the firing of the shot which did not echo round the world, but was merely a local defiant and emphatic promulgation of authority, a fire was set to the base of the tree, for our tents had been pitched perilously close. Space was wanted, and moreover its bony, imprecating arms, long since bereft of beckoning fingers, menaced our safety. I said it must fall to the north-east, for the ponderous inclination is in that direction, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... the broad trail left by the lion and his pursuers. I passed perilously near the brink of precipices, but fear of them was not in me that day. I passed out of the Bay into the mouth of Left Canyon, and began to climb. The baying of the hounds directed me. In the box of yellow walls the chorus seemed to ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey

... business is his business, and this is my opportunity. Seth, they tell me, is very good at figures. Somebody said that Seth could figure to live comfortably on nothing if he found he had to. Now most churches are perilously near the place where they have to live on nothing and so, if any one can steer our finances in an exact and careful manner, Seth can. And it is the only, absolutely the only way in ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds

... divided between stern conviction and a wish to deride it, suffered a mental trepidation that grew daily more unbearable, for what had been serious enough when Rosanne was younger began to be something perilously sinister now that she was turning into a woman and her deeper passions and emotions began to be aroused. In fact, the thing had come home to Mrs. Ozanne with renewed significance lately, and she was still trembling with apprehension over several ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... been difficult for him to believe that it was really I who followed them, he could not very well doubt the witness of his own eyes; and so he trained their stern gun upon me with his own hands, and an instant later an explosive radium projectile whizzed perilously ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... was taking in contravening the will of his imperious master. If the large sum of money was long withheld from the blackmailer, Douglas Sanderson ran the risk of Number Three opening up communication direct with his master. Investigation would show that the old servant had come perilously near laying himself open to a charge of breach of trust, and even of defalcation with regard to the money, and all this danger he was heroically incurring for the unselfish purpose of serving the interests ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr

... the twelve-mile circuit, allowing for their difference in starting time. But as the Mercury turned into the straight stretch of back road, on the second time around, there sounded a sharp report, the car staggered perilously, and a tire tore itself loose from a rear wheel to hurtle, a vicious projectile of rubber and steel, far across the stubble fields. Reeling, but held to its course by the driver's trained hand, the Mercury slackened its flight and was brought to a stop. Rupert was already ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram

... the matter of the rooms a thought." Whitney moved restlessly; he hated to see a woman cry, and his wife looked perilously upon the point of tears. In spite of his assertion that he did not miss the loss of sleep, his nerves were not under full control. Ordinarily not a drinking man, he had stopped on his way from his bedroom to help himself to the small amount of Scotch ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... distance or else her nearsighted baby eyes failed to take account of the four-foot drop to the gravel drive below. Too late, she tried to check her awkward rush. And, for a moment, her fat little body swayed perilously on the brink. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune

... in the numerous uprooted trees which lay all round us within the light of our rekindled camp-fire. From most of these we had been protected by the great pine, under which we had taken shelter, though one or two had fallen perilously near to us—in one case falling on and slightly damaging ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne

... farther off, a creak of oars upon the other. It was clear we had been sighted yesterday in the morning; here were the cruiser's boats to cut us out; here were we defenceless in their very midst. Sure, never were poor souls more perilously placed; and as we lay there on our oars, praying God the mist might hold, the sweat poured from my brow. Presently we heard one of the boats where we might have thrown a biscuit in her. "Softly, men," we heard an officer whisper; and I marvelled ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson

... it that his stock of money was running perilously low, nor that he had ceased to work. Ceased to work? He had not ceased to work. They knew very little about it who supposed that Oleron had ceased to work! He was in truth only now beginning to work. He was preparing such a work ... such a work ... such a Mistress ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions

... turned upon bigamy, but Mr. Brown snored through it all, though Mr. Legge's remark that the revelations of that afternoon had thrown a light upon many little things in his behaviour which had hitherto baffled him came perilously ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs

... set down the bowl of water poised perilously on one arm, and stammered, "I—I beg your pardon, Dr. Shumway. You are rather late this morning, or am I ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown

... bows was small, and, in spite of his praiseworthy efforts to imitate his great exemplar, the arrow only turned a feeble sort of somersault, and descended perilously near Bab's uplifted nose. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... decks, its low bulwarks, its guarded mechanism, its heavy armament, and its impenetrable revolving turret, to that near battle with the "Merrimac," on which, as it seemed to us at the time, the destiny of the nation was perilously poised. The material of which the ship was wrought was largely that which is built in beauty into this luxurious lofty fabric. But no contrast could be greater among the works of human genius than between the compact and rigid ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley

... and on, sweeping over growing swells. Once, a black, towering shape dropped down upon us. Far above, lights blazed, bells rang, vague cries pierced the fog. The launch pitched and rolled perilously, but weathered the wash of the liner which so nearly had concluded this episode. It was such a journey as I had taken once before, early in our pursuit of the genius of the Yellow Peril; but this was infinitely more terrible; for now we were ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... trees and hiding-places the paddles and the pretty triangular sails are fetched and fastened on the canoes; then the boats are pushed off and the whole crowd jumps in. The babies sit in their mothers' laps or hang on their backs, perilously close to the water, into which they stare with big, dark eyes. By twos and threes the canoes push off, driven by vigorous paddling along the shore, against the current. Sometimes a young man wades after a canoe and joins some fair friends, sitting in front of them, as etiquette ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... them now, those energetic years seem all compacted to a year or so; from the days of our first hazardous beginning in Farringdon Street with barely a thousand pounds' worth of stuff or credit all told—and that got by something perilously like snatching—to the days when my uncle went to the public on behalf of himself and me (one-tenth share) and our silent partners, the drug wholesalers and the printing people and the owner of that group of magazines and newspapers, to ask with ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... fear—a fearful enemy, 75 Which in the human heart opposes me, By its coward fear alone made fearful to me. Not that, which full of life, instinct with power, Makes known its present being, that is not The true, the perilously formidable. 80 O no! it is the common, the quite common, The thing of an eternal yesterday, What ever was, and evermore returns, Sterling to-morrow, for to-day 'twas sterling! For of the wholly common is man made, 85 And custom is his nurse! Woe then to them, Who ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... to make Tucker Creek he would have to double out of the Morgan Hills and brush back perilously close to Rickett, but Billy was convinced that this was the outlaw's plan; for though the Caswell City fords would be his safest route it would take him a day's ride, on an ordinary horse, out of his way. Besides, the sheriff had always said: "Barry ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand

... Spurriergate, built at the same period as the Guildhall, is curiously similar in its interior, having only a nave and aisles. The stone pillars are so slight that they are scarcely of much greater diameter than the wooden ones in the civic structure, and some of them are perilously out of plumb. There is much old glass in ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home

... wager. But I didn't know—then. And so I learned; and by no virtue nor prowess, but simply through good fortune and constitution. Again my constitution had triumphed over John Barleycorn. I had escaped from another death-pit, dragged myself through another morass, and perilously acquired the discretion that would enable me to drink wisely for many ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... shrill voice that rang clear above the hammering tumult of the rifles, screamed "Veev la France! A baa la Bosh!" The rifles by this time were pelting a storm of lead at him, and now that the haste and flurry of the urgent call had passed and the shooters had steadied to their task, the storm was perilously close. 'Enery stayed a moment even then to spread his hands and raise his shoulders ear-high in a magnificent stage shrug; but a bullet snatched the cap from his head, and 'Enery ducked hastily, turned, and ran his hardest, with the bullets snapping ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)

... disappeared, and he could see nothing but the occasional wet stem of an olive, which their lamp illumined as they passed it. They travelled quickly, for this driver did not care how fast he went to the station, and would dash down each incline and scuttle perilously round the curves. ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster

... which there lies between the bright water and the forest, then turned into the jungle, and waded through a stream which was up to my knees as we went, and up to my waist as we returned. Then a tremendous shower came on, and we were asked to climb into a large Malay house, of which the floor was a perilously open gridiron. At least three families were in it, and there were some very big men, but the women hid themselves behind a screen of matting. It looked forlorn. A young baboon was chained to the floor, and walked ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... rations were becoming perilously low, McKinlay was anxious to get to the mouth of the Albert, it having been understood that Captain Norman, with the steam-ship Victoria was there to form a depot for the use of the Queensland search parties. His attempts to reach it however, ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc

... showed no hesitation about pouring down the wine as fast as it was mixed and served, nor did either of them appear to notice that we drank less than they; they seemed able to hold any amount and stay sober and keep on drinking. As dusk deepened and the waiter-boys lit the inn lamps, I found myself perilously near sliding off my chair to the floor and very doubtful whether, if I did, I should be able to get up again or to resist my tendency to go to sleep then ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... had never met a man who was quite fit to breathe the same air with Donald McKaye; already she had magnified his virtues until, to her, he was rapidly assuming the aspect of an archangel—a feeling which bordered perilously on adoration. ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... of founding a monastery; instead, he had fallen in love (the word shocked him), and he asked himself if he had ever thought of her more as a wife than as a sister; if he could have been her husband? He feared that he had adventured perilously near to a life of which he could nowise sustain or fulfil, to a life for which he knew he was nowise suited, and which might ...
— Celibates • George Moore

... NEGRO PROBLEM.—The Negro problem was never of more pressing importance than it is to-day. Illiteracy is still perilously high, Negro crime is becoming more serious, and the cityward tendency of the Negro is increasing his susceptibility to disease and vice. In spite of prohibitive laws, racial intermixture is continuing, ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson

... was not conspicuously an occupant of the front room. No day passed that he did not contrive at least one look at his wonderful shell, but he craftily did not linger there, nor did he ever utter words about the thing, though these often crowded perilously ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson

... nullification. New England, finding its shipping interests crippled in the European conflict and then penalized by embargoes, opposed the declaration of war on Great Britain, which meant the completion of the ruin already begun. In the course of the struggle, the Federalist leaders came perilously near to treason in their efforts to hamper the government of the United States; and in their desperation they fell back upon the doctrine of nullification so recently condemned by them when it came ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... as playful as it seemed to her lover, for something in the glow of his eyes and something vibrant in the tones of his voice had disturbed her profoundly. The fear of something which he seemed perilously near saying filled her with unrest, bringing up questions which had thus far been kept in the background of her scheme ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... we had two banks, four hotels, a chemist, saddler, besides other branches of industry, we felt that we were being drawn perilously within the influences of ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield



Words linked to "Perilously" :   perilous, hazardously



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