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Vitals

noun
1.
A bodily organ that is essential for life.  Synonym: vital organ.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Vitals" Quotes from Famous Books



... the midst of these evils, (with many more that might be noticed) when our pleasant things are laid waste, than to see such a scene of strife and division carried on, and maintained among Christ's professing witnesses in these lands, whereby true love and sympathy is eradicated, the very vitals of religion pulled out, and the ways of God and godliness lampooned and ridiculed, giving Jacob to the curse, and Israel to the reproaches.—And it is most lamentable, that while malignants (now as well as formerly) ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie

... these commingled now and then with oaths and scraps of discordant song bellowed out above the hubbub. His wounded head beat with tremendous and straining painfulness, as though it would burst asunder, and he was possessed by a burning thirst that seemed to consume his very vitals. He called aloud, and in reply a fat, one-eyed woman came, fetching him something to drink in a cup. This he swallowed with avidity, and thereupon (the liquor perhaps having been drugged) he dropped ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle

... cousin had scorned him; the tenants had refused to accept him when there certainly had been no cause for their rejection. Mr Apjohn from the first had looked at him with accusing eyes; his servants were spies upon his actions; this newspaper was rending his very vitals; and now this one last friend had deserted him. He thought that if only he could summon courage for the deed, it would be best for him to ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope

... your slave, Sway'd by your pleasure—when I forget it, May this keen dagger, which I mean to hide Deep in his bosom, pierce my vitals thro'. [Aside. ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey

... happen if England bows before the worst and the stupidest bigotry the modern world can show? Not only will you strike a blow at Ireland and a blow at Irish-American sympathy, but a blow at the vitals of religion. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... Mississippi, ten thousand cavalry; Canby, from Mobile Bay, with about eighteen thousand mixed troops—these three latter pushing for Tuscaloosa, Selma and Montgomery; and Sherman with a large army eating out the vitals of South Carolina—is all that will be wanted to leave nothing for the rebellion to stand upon. I would advise you to overcome great obstacles to accomplish this. Charleston was evacuated on ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... little eyes? I am sure 'tis the grief of my soul to think you are out of order." They had been keeping his birthday; Swift wished he had been with them, rather than in London, where he had no manner of pleasure: "I say Amen with all my heart and vitals, that we may never be asunder again ten days together while poor Presto lives." A few days later he says, "I wish I were at Laracor, with dear charming MD," and again, "Farewell, dearest beloved MD, and love ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... seepin' and sabbin' doon the glen, an' yon unhaly footstep that cam' plodding' doun the stairs inside the manse. He kenned the foot ower-weel, for it was Janet's; and at ilka step that cam' a wee thing nearer, the cauld got deeper in his vitals. He commended his soul to Him that made an' keepit him; "and, O Lord," said he, "give me strength this night to war ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various

... heaven's high call! And then—in one day—he had sinned and lost it all, and there he lay, a white upturned face. That was himself, lying there with face illumined by the fire, and men would call him dead! But he would not be dead! He would be living on with that inward fire, gnawing at his vitals, telling him continually what he might have been, and showing him what high heaven was that he had had, and lost. He saw it now. He had deliberately thrown away that heaven that had been his. He saw that hell was hell because he made it so, ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill

... ** These vitals airs and sub-airs are forces which harmonize the interior man with his surroundings, by adjusting the relations of the body to external objects. They are the five allotropic modifications of ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... beholding everything with the eyes of his spies, he should take care to conceal his own emotions before the spies of his enemies. Like a fisherman who becometh prosperous by catching and killing fish, a king can never grow prosperous without tearing the vitals of his enemy and without doing some violent deeds. The might of thy foe, as represented by his armed force, should ever be completely destroyed, by ploughing it up (like weeds) and mowing it down and otherwise afflicting it by disease, starvation, and want of drink. A person ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... many villages in rural England at which the more thoughtful stood aghast, for under the sacred name of charity, laziness and immorality, unblushing and impudent, were found to be feeding the stream of pauperism and eating out the vitals of our ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston

... not be his fault. The isolation of my position is too great; all my social intercourse has died away; I was fated to survive and cast from me everything. I stand in a desert, and feed on my own vitals; I must perish. Some people will be sorry for this one day, perhaps ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... Roman society persisted in a state of peaceful security, it already contained within itself the seeds of dissolution. The long peace and uniform government of the Romans introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated. The citizens received laws and covenants from the will of their sovereign, and trusted for their defence to a mercenary army. Of their ancient ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... days when he was an actor there was some reason for that custom; actors, being obliged to dine early and very sparingly, have a terrible gnawing at their vitals when they leave the theatre, and usually eat when they go home. Delobelle had not acted for a long time; but having, as he said, no right to abandon the stage, he kept his mania alive by clinging to a number of the strolling ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet

... luminous green. The wind may still be cold, but there is a briskness in the air that stirs good blood. People do not all look equally sour and downcast. They fall into two divisions: one, the knight of the blue face and hollow paunch, whom Winter has gotten by the vitals; the other well lined with New-year's fare, conscious of the touch of cold on his periphery, but stepping through it by the glow of his internal fires. Such an one I remember, triply cased in grease, whom no extremity of temperature ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... by necessity it could not be full-orbed. Religion could not enter into it as a plastic element, but was fixed, a veiled, external figure, radiating indeed color and fragrance, but not making one of the struggling, independent vitals of the heart. Literature could play about this figure, but could not grasp it, and take it in among the materials to be fashioned. The Church, through its clergy, held jealous command of divine knowledge, beneath divine guidance, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... you, Henry, I am resolved. I have nothing but evil to choose. There is but one calamity greater than my mother's anger. I cannot mangle my own vitals. I cannot put an impious and violent end to my own life. Will it be mercy to make her witness my death? and can I live without you? If I must be an ingrate, be her and not you the victim. If I must requite ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown

... petrified blood of victims which stained a ledge of porphyry when it ran down the mountain side in torrents, an awful sacrifice to the ancient idols of lust and ignorance. A kindly warning to you, fellow-prospectors and miners, who delve in the vitals of Mother Earth! Beware Thumb Butte, beware the district of the Sphinx! Have a care, for you know not what you may encounter in this mystic neighborhood! Shun strange gods and set up no idols in your hearts, as you value the salvation of your souls. But if your ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann

... may be certain in that hour of my distress the argument was not forgotten. There was never a ship more ardently perquested; no stone was left unturned, and no expedient untried; day after day of growing despair, we punched and dug in the brig's vitals, exciting the men with promises and presents; evening after evening Nares and I sat face to face in the narrow cabin, racking our minds for some neglected possibility of search. I could stake my salvation on the certainty of the result: ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... skinning him and making an examination of the wounds, it was discovered that none of the balls from the small pistols had, after passing through his thick and tough hide, penetrated deeper than about an inch into the flesh, but that the two balls from the large pistol had gone into the vitals and killed him. This test was to my mind a decisive one as to the relative efficiency of the two arms for frontier service, and I resolved thenceforth ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy

... my son to put his hand to the lips of my cash box whenever he had a mind, he would plunge it deep into the vitals, he would take all I have!" cried old Sechard. "That is the way with children; they eat up their parents' purse. What did I do myself, eh? I never cost my parents a farthing. Your printing office is standing idle. The rats and the mice do all the printing that is done in it. . . . You ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... Gyrtius, who to battle led The warlike Mysians; next Antilochus From Mermerus and Phalces stripp'd their arms; Meriones Hippotion gave to death, And Morys; Teucer Periphetes slew, And Prothoon; Menelaus, through the flank Smote Hyperenor; as the grinding spear Drain'd all his vitals, through the gaping wound His spirit escap'd, and darkness clos'd his eyes. But chiefest slaughter of the Trojans wrought Oileus' active son; of all the Greeks No foot so swift as his, when Jove had fill'd Their souls with fear, ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... has happened since 1848 has exasperated, not calmed, the electric tension of the European atmosphere; that a rottenness, rapidly growing intolerable alike 'to God and the enemies of God,' has eaten into the vitals of Continental life; that their rulers know neither where they are nor whither they are going, and only pray that things may last out their time: all notes which one would interpret as proving the Continent to be already ripe for subjection ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley

... form of Varicocele lies in the fact that thousands of young men are going about to-day not knowing that they have the disease; not knowing that a persistent evil is nestling in this little canal, gnawing at their vitals, and slowly but surely undermining and destroying their ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown

... people; by giving to the Bourbons the title of legitimate King, which was declaring the French people and the armies rebels, proclaiming those emigrants, who for five and twenty years have been wounding the vitals of their country, the only good Frenchmen, and violating all the rights of the people, by sanctioning the principle, that the nation is made for the throne, not the throne for ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon

... which a plain battle between factions cannot boast, but which, notwithstanding, are very suitable to the fierce and gloomy silence of that premeditated vengeance which burns with such intensity in the heart, and scorches up the vitals into such a thirst for blood. Not but that they come by different means to the same conclusion; because it is the feeling, and not altogether the manner of operation, that ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... without stores of thought, without leisure, with nothing often to eat, and nothing to put on but tatters and rags, and, withal, with the whole Anglo-Saxon race treading on his toes and burning out his vitals with ardent spirits. Such ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... this furious fire, which lit the blackness of that warm Egyptian night with devils' tongues of flame. The cannonade went on. But even the thunder of two thousand guns could not drown the roar of that seething fire, now eating into the very vitals of the ship, nearer and nearer to the magazine. Every near-by ship that could move now hauled clear as far as possible; while the rest closed portholes and hatchways, took their powder below, sent all ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood

... men's hearts and mystify their moral sense. Here let them pause in the investigation of the past. They have discovered the mainspring, the life, the very essence of the system that had wrought itself into the vitals of mankind, and choked their original nature in its deadly gripe. Yet how powerless over these young inheritors of earth's hoarded wealth! And here, too, are huge, packages of back-notes, those talismanic ...
— The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... shapeless drift, Thinking o'er all the bitterness of death, Mix'd with the tender anguish nature shoots Through the wrung bosom of the dying man. His wife, his children, and his friends unseen. On every nerve The deadly winter seizes; shuts up sense; And o'er his inmost vitals creeping cold Lays him along the snows, a stiffened corse, Stretched out, and bleaching in ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde

... He was young, in spite of his fifty-five years, and this tussle against odds, reminding him of other tussles during his first seasons in business, aroused his energies and, as he expressed it, "stirred up his vitals and made him hop round like a ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln

... coward. And Archias, drawing near, desired him to rise up, and repeating the same kind things he had spoken before, he once more promised him to make his peace with Antipater. But Demosthenes, perceiving that now the poison had pierced and seized his vitals, uncovered his head, and fixing his eyes upon Archias, "Now," said he, "as soon as you please you may commence the part of Creon in the tragedy, and cast out this body of mine unburied. But, O gracious Neptune, I, for my ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... stratum which the Negro occupies, the race is an easy prey to disease that affects the health of the whole nation. The germs of disease have no race prejudice. They do not even draw the line at social equality, but gnaw with equal avidity at the vitals of white and black alike, and pass with the greatest freedom of intercourse from the one to the other. One touch of disease makes the whole world kin, and also kind. The Negro physician comes into immediate contact ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... breathed in solemn awe. "Look at it!—presenting his solar plexus to you, his vitals an' his life, all defense down, as much as sayin': 'Here I am. Stamp on me. Kick the life outa me.' I love you, I am your slave, but I just can't help defendin' my bone. My instinct's stronger'n me. Kill me, but I can't ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... drown in the Dvina than a drop of the baptismal water should touch my forehead. To be forced to kneel before the hideous images, to kiss the cross,—sooner would I rush out to the mob that was passing, and let them tear my vitals out. To forswear the One God, to bow before idols,—rather would I be seized with the plague, and be eaten up by vermin. I was only a little girl, and not very brave; little pains made me ill, and ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... death, when at length it came, approached like sleep, and gently closed the eyes. Prometheus (who represents the human race) effected some great change in the condition of his nature, and applied fire to culinary purposes. From this moment his vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease. It consumed his being in every shape of its loathsome and infinite variety, inducing the soul-quelling sinkings of premature and violent death. All vice arose from the ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... were considered the only logical refutation of a philosophical heresy. The anomaly of our laws interfered again. Collins was rich, and so must escape the fangs of the law. Thomas Woolston was poor, so his vitals were pierced by laws which Collins escaped—yet both committed the same offence. In later times Gibbon traced the rise of Christianity, and about the same time Paine accomplished another portion of the same risk—and the Government which prosecuted the plebeian, flattered the patrician. ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts

... be at his declaration, and earnestly entreated her to consider how precious the moments were, and for once sacrifice superfluous ceremony to the happiness of one who adored her with such a flame as could not fail to consume his vitals, if she would not deign to ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... and at once the ware, All lands are mortgag'd, and all persons bound, And in the use the principal is drown'd. Thus debt's a feaver, and like that disease, Bred in our bowels, by unfelt degrees Will through our thirsty vitals ev'ry member seize Wild tumults now to arms for succour call, (For what may dare and never fear a fall.) Wasted by riot, wealth's a putrid sore, That only wounds can its lost strength restore. What rules of reason, or soft gentle ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter

... have a jolt of whiskey in yer vitals," suggested one. "Slivers is a regular expert with a stockin' ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various

... the battle—sometimes devouring, as he flies, the entrails of one of Assyria's enemies. Occasionally he appears upon the battle-field, perched upon the bodies of the slain, and pecking at their eyes or their vitals. [PLATE XXVIII., Fig. 4.] The ostrich, which we know from Xenophon to have been a former inhabitant of the country on the left bank of the Euphrates, but which has now retreated into the wilds of Arabia, occurs frequently upon cylinders, dresses, and utensils; ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson

... belt a long bowie knife, and darting after the animal, hurled it at him with all his force. The blade of the weapon, which was six or seven inches long, entered and stuck fast in the abdomen of the agonized creature, which, for about twenty yards, ran on furiously, with the murderous knife in its vitals. It then fell-with a deep groan, while the fiend who had perpetrated this wanton act of barbarity and his companions watched its fall, and loudly exulted in it. I noticed that there was a deep scowl of hatred ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell

... this all, nor the worst. There is another article, and far more damaging, in the indictment. Through Protection, and because of it, Paternalism has crept in; and, like a huge cancerous growth, is eating steadily into the vitals of the political system. Instead of supporting a government economically administered by money contributed by the People, a majority of the People to-day are looking to the government for support, ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams

... to each. Dove-coloured was that stony beach, And white birds hungering hovered over The shining waves; And men had kindled there A great fierce heap of golden flame— Spoiled grasses with dead buttercups and pale clover. The agonising flame Yearned in its vitals towards the quiet air And died in a little smoke. And on the coloured beach the black warm ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman

... distance and knew it was a signal fire, which the folks on Ellen's Isle had built to guide them. Hinpoha held her little bug light down while the Captain searched for the trouble in the launch engine and he was not long in discovering that it was nothing serious. A few pokes in her vitals and the launch ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey

... naturally good constitution triumphed over the disease, and his sick soreness of mind lost somewhat of its sharpness. So long as he brooded in silence over his pain and his wrongs, there was little chance of the sting becoming much lighter; it was like the vulture preying upon its own vitals; but that season of silence was past. When once a deep grief can be spoken of, its great agony is gone. I think there is an old saying, or a proverb—"Griefs lose themselves in telling," and a greater truism was never ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood

... individual. Later pundits have called in question the academic accuracy of Borrow's researches in the Romany language: but such frettings are beside the mark; Borrow is the only genuine expounder of Gipsyness that ever lived. He laid hold of their vitals, and they of his; his act of brotherhood with Mr. Jasper Petulengro is but a symbol of his mystical alliance with the race. This is not to say that he fathomed the heart of their mystery; the gipsies themselves ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... Indeed, unsuspected though it remained by any of his friends, it was really this fact of Prince Michael's witness of his misfortune—his second disgrace—which, through all these months, had been eating, like some poisonous acid, into the very vitals of Ivan's manhood, Ivan's courage. It was evident to him that his father, having somewhere beheld a programme of the concert, finding his son's name in famous company, had determined to give him one more chance of favor. He had come to hear the symphony: ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... empire, the Donatists still maintained in some provinces, particularly in Numidia, their superior numbers; and four hundred bishops acknowledged the jurisdiction of their primate. But the invincible spirit of the sect sometimes preyed on its own vitals: and the bosom of their schismatical church was torn by intestine divisions. A fourth part of the Donatist bishops followed the independent standard of the Maximianists. The narrow and solitary path which ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... His idea of ventilation was to leave a hole in the wall about the size of a lima bean and let the thing go at that. If our friend does not arrive shortly, I shall pull down the roof. Why, gadzooks! Not to mention stap my vitals! Isn't that a trap-door up there? ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... secretly nursed the worm of grief that preyed upon his vitals, the alteration in his countenance and conduct did not escape the eyes of that discerning young lady. She was alarmed at the change, yet afraid to inquire into the source of it; for, being ignorant of his distress, she could impute it to no cause in ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... aunt!" he whispered. "It was she who took the vial out of the box; who put it to her own lips; who shrieked when she felt her vitals gripped. Had you stayed you would have known this. Can't you say so? Don't you think so? Why do you look at me ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green

... allies, led by Marlborough and Prince Eugene, we find Valenciennes again playing a leading part. And during the last blind, desperate effort of France to shake off the domination of the scoundrels who had fastened themselves upon her vitals at Paris after the collapse of the monarchy, Valenciennes became the theatre of the tolerably well-conceived, but intolerably ill-executed, attempt of Dumouriez to make himself a French Duke of Albemarle. It was quite as unprincipled as his political operations were at Paris ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... cuticle emits a nauseous steam! The black blood oozing from her nostrils proclaims how terrible the inward struggle. The whole frame bends and shrinks, and warps like a fragment of leather thrown into a furnace—the flame has reached her vitals—at last, by God's mercy, ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood

... familiar instance of the Spartan youth who having stolen a fox and hidden it inside his robe calmly stood up and let the animal gnaw his vitals rather than be caught with it in his possession. But, why? I ask you, why? What was the good of it all? What object was served? To begin with, the boy had absconded with somebody else's fox, or with somebody's ...
— A Plea for Old Cap Collier • Irvin S. Cobb

... and besides, she was the only person in Wellingsford whom I did not shrink from boring with the song of my own ailments. Rather than worry the Fenimores or Betty or Mrs. Holmes with my aches and pains I would have hung on, like the idiot boy of Sparta with the fox, until my vitals were gnawed out—parenthetically, it has always worried me to conjecture why a boy should steal a fox, why it should have been so valuable to the owner, and to what use he put it. In the case of all my other friends I regarded myself as too much of an obvious nuisance, as it was, for ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... of a mad dog, your most strenuous efforts will not bring desired results, and fatal disease may be clutching at your vitals. If a mad dog succeeds in biting you, it is a sign that you or some loved one is on the verge of insanity, and ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller

... of a ship between two ice floes is not sudden, like her destruction by a submarine mine, for instance. It is a slow and gradually increasing pressure from both sides, sometimes till the ice meets in the vitals of the ship. A vessel might stay thus, suspended between two floes, for twenty-four hours—or until the movement of the tides relaxed the pressure, when she would sink. The ice might open at first just sufficiently to let the hull go down, and the ends of the yards might ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... to him naught save a flitting breath * And an eye whose babe ever wandereth. There remains not a joint in his limbs, but what * Disease firm fixt ever tortureth. His tears are flowing, his vitals burning; * Yet for all his tongue still he silenceth. All foemen in pity beweep his woes; * Ah for freke ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... fallen to his lot to witness since that day in the jungle four years since that his eyes had first fallen upon a human being other than himself—the sleek, black Kulonga, whose swift spear had that day found the vitals of Kala, the great she-ape, and robbed the youth, Tarzan, of the only mother he ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... wild bamboo grow, and a few stunted trees fill some of the less deep clefts, wherever the sunshine can penetrate. Splendid as is the scenery, its gloom, its stillness, its naked crags and peaks, its dark depths that seem to cleave to the very vitals of the earth, become so oppressive that, after a few days spent among them, the traveller is filled with repulsion and almost horror. Few living things have their home there. You might meet an occasional "klipspringer" (an antelope, in habits and appearance somewhat ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various

... lines about his mouth showing that he was fighting back the pain which had never quite left him from the day he had twisted his knee out of joint five years ago, in a wrestling match, and which, in his weary moments, gnawed into his vitals. He hated to lose his grip of himself, for then he knew he should have to grow stern and terrifying, and rule these young imps in the forms in front of him by what he called afterwards, in his moments ...
— Glengarry Schooldays • Ralph Connor

... and turn their eyes from its contemplation, and give the right hand of fellowship to the buyers and sellers of human flesh, is there not cause for lamentation and alarm? The pulpit is false to its trust, and a moral paralysis has seized the vitals of the church. The sanctity of religion is thrown, like a mantle, over the horrid system. Under its auspices, robbery and oppression have become popular and flourishing. The press, too, by its profound silence, or selfish neutrality, ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison

... though he was assiduously [Footnote: Assiduously: diligently, laboriously.] gnawing at the near foreleg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breast-plate was apparently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... when we had none? For two years our crops have failed, and hunger has eaten our vitals until there is not a man in the village who has the strength to raise ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... wonder what's with me the Matter, For I look like Death, and am as weak as Water, For several Days I loath the sight of Meat, And every Night I chew the upper Sheet; [*?]e such Obstructions, that I'm almost moap'd, And breath as if my Vitals all were stop'd. I told a Friend how strange with me it was, She, an experienc'd Bawd, soon grop'd the Cause, Saying, for this Disease, take what you can, You'll ne'er be well, till you have taken Man. Therefore, before with Maiden-heads I'll ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses From Women • Various

... fallen into the habit of remembering and fitting together with others, and of having her theories and interpretations of, kept up before her their long procession and rotation. What twisted the knife in her vitals was the way the profligate rich scattered about them, in extravagant chatter over their extravagant pleasures and sins, an amount of money that would have held the stricken household of her frightened childhood, ...
— In the Cage • Henry James

... suffering; a dull, hopeless misery in their sunken eyes, a pathetic patience fit to touch a heart of stone; while others still have grown frantic with that terrible pain, the hunger gnawing at their very vitals, and go staggering about, wildly ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley

... the confidence of sturdy health courts the sternest activities of life and rejoices in the hardihood of constant labor may still have lurking near his vitals the unheeded disease that dooms him ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland

... water line, and the flat part to be 3-1/8 in. thick. Beyond the machinery and magazine spaces, the deck was to be gradually reduced to 3 in. thick at the ends. This deck is intended to protect the vitals of the ship, such as boilers, engines, powder magazines, steering gear, etc., from the effects of shot and shell, but the floating and stability maintaining power of the ship was to be dependent upon a similar structure raised ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various

... determines its real greatness and grandeur, or its self-complacent but essential vacuity. It is possible for a nation, through subtle delusions, to get such an attack of the big head that it bends over backwards, and it is liable, in this exposed position, to get a thrust in its vitals. ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... his gastric juice triumphed. Something or other in the music-box gave way all at once, the springs were unrolled with alarming force, and Henry Chubb, as he felt the fragments of the instruments hurled right and left among his vitals, tumbled over ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various

... personally, I may say that the thing which most nearly concerned me for the moment was this: I had just been invited to take a trip aloft in this wabbly great wienerwurst, with its painted silk cuticle and its gaseous vitals—and had, on ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... injuring myself or family. To all which I do most solemnly and sincerely promise and swear, without the least hesitation, mental reservation, or self-evasion of mind in me whatever; binding myself under no less penalty than to have my left breast torn open, and my heart and vitals taken from thence and thrown over my left shoulder, and carried into the valley of Jehosaphat, there to become a prey to the wild beasts of the fields, and vultures of the air, if ever I should prove wilfully guilty of violating ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan

... blinding tears had fallen, I saw That column, and those corpses, and the moon, And felt the poisonous tooth of hunger gnaw My vitals, I rejoiced, as if the boon Of senseless death would be accorded soon;— 1355 When from that stony gloom a voice arose, Solemn and sweet as when low winds attune The midnight pines; the grate did then ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... arrowy shower. Beholding this, Salwa rained on my son other weapons of blazing splendour. Then, O foremost of monarchs, pierced by the shafts of Salwa, the son of Rukmini discharged without loss of time an arrow that was capable of entering the vitals of a foe in fight. And that winged shaft shot by my son, piercing Salwa's mail, entered his heart—whereupon he fell down, in a swoon. And beholding the heroic king Salwa fallen down deprived of sense, the foremost ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... practice by new superstitions; and the establishment of the inquisition, the mendicant orders of monks and friars, the last abuse of indulgences, and the final progress of idolatry, flowed from the baleful fountain of the holy war. The active spirit of the Latins preyed on the vitals of their reason and religion; and if the ninth and tenth centuries were the times of darkness, the thirteenth and fourteenth were the age of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... we could not help knowing in our hearts that no normal girl could help preferring that celestial peacock to our grey hen, and that Miss Destrey's wish to be kind must have outstripped her obligation to be truthful. This knowledge was turning a screw round in our vitals, when His Highness himself appeared to give it a still ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... little, as those shiver who have just swallowed good liquor, while it is permeating their vitals. Yet he seemed to be in a pleasant state of feeling, and, as was frequently the case with this simple soul, in a devout frame of mind. He read a chapter in the Bible, and said his prayers for Pansie and himself, before he went to bed, and had much better sleep than usually comes ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... was not more than ten. On they came, their fierce eyes almost starting out of their heads, and I felt, with a cold thrill of fear, that in another three seconds those broad "bangwans" might be buried in my vitals. On such occasions we act, I suppose, more from instinct than from anything else—there is no time for thought. At any rate, I dropped the reins and, raising my gun, fired point blank at the left-hand man. The bullet struck him in the ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard

... of these divine tragedies, known as Prometheus Bound, and composed by the Greek poet AEschylus, was played at Athens 500 years before the beginning of the Christian era. To show that this sin-atoning saviour was not chained to a rock, while vultures preyed upon his vitals, as popularly taught, but was nailed to a tree; we quote front Potter's translation of the play, that passage which, readily recognized as the original of a Christian song, reads ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill

... experience of flying downhill behind a muscular black man with feathers in his hair and bangles on his feet. Before she reached the station her veil and hair were in streamers, and her scalp was almost torn from her head, but the serpent jaune which had gnawed her vitals all night had ceased from troubling, and joy of living glowed in her once more. She could not help it; there was something in the air and the wind and the blaze of Africa that made for life, and ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... consequent engrossing of estates in the hands of the rich—the ruin of its mighty dominion. But it is not generally known how wide-spread had been the desolation thus produced; how deep and incurable the wounds inflicted on the vitals of the state—by the simple consequences of its extension, which enabled the grain growers of the distant provinces of the empire to supplant the cultivators of its heart by the unrestricted admission of foreign corn, before the invasion ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various

... came the ringing report of a rifle! It might have been a mile or two miles away, but distance did not lessen the fear it brought to the dying king of the North. That day he had heard the same sound, and it had brought mysterious and weakening pain in his vitals. With a supreme effort he brought himself to his feet, once more sniffed into the north, the east, and the west, then turned and buried himself in the black and frozen ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... like a whirlwind, or like a cloud which is suddenly manifested in the firmament. They began with the Canton insurrection; then Peking was alarmed by Wu Yueeh's bomb (1905). A year later Hsue Hsi-lin fired his bullet into the vitals of the Manchu robber-chief, En Ming, Governor of Anhui. Hsiung Cheng-chi raised the standard of liberty on the Yang-tsze's banks; rising followed rising all over the empire, until the secret plot against the Regent was discovered, and the abortive ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles

... cold night passed wearily, and the howling of the wolves caused me to grip my revolver, yet at daybreak we arose refreshed, and notwithstanding the terrible pangs of hunger now gnawing at our vitals, we were prepared to renew our desperate ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux

... why we should falter now? 'New occasions teach new duties.' Let us not be satisfied with a supetficial view. While fresh loam is being scattered on the surface, commercial interests and the suburban greed to get home quick are striking at the vitals of the Common. Citizens of ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers

... a hand of fiery iron grasped my vitals. Terrible moment: full of struggle, blackness, burning! Not a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was loved; and him who thus loved me I absolutely worshipped: and I must renounce love and idol. One drear word comprised ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... themselves than any other children of men. They are for ever judging their betters; how shall they escape from judgment of each other? Judge not, says the Book; but if you pry for vice, what can you be yourself but a prying-ground? So Purcell agonised, and felt her very vitals under the hooks. The case was past praying for. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... their sport, and at last blew out his brains; Then Old Brown, Osawatomie Brown, Raised his right hand up to Heaven, calling Heaven's vengeance down. And he swore a fearful oath, by the name of the Almighty, He would hunt this ravening evil that had scathed and torn him so; He would seize it by the vitals; he would crush it day and night; he Would so pursue its footsteps, so return it blow for blow, That Old Brown, Osawatomie Brown, Should be a name to swear by, in backwoods or ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)

... than civil on Emathian (1) plains, And crime let loose we sing; how Rome's high race Plunged in her vitals her victorious sword; Armies akin embattled, with the force Of all the shaken earth bent on the fray; And burst asunder, to the common guilt, A kingdom's compact; eagle with eagle met, Standard to standard, spear ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... brought out a particular sound with a tap on the collarbone, in the attitude of a pointer who has just come on the scent or sight of a woodcock. You remember the Spartan boy, who, with unmoved countenance, hid the fox that was tearing his vitals beneath his mantle. What he could do in his own suffering you must learn to do for others on whose vital organs disease has fastened its devouring teeth. It is a terrible thing to take away hope, even earthly hope, from a fellow-creature. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... it was all you could do to poke a sharp needle into the skin. Poor Otto ended up a basket case, just in time to have the damned stuff start all over again at the stumps of his arms and legs. He died when hardening reached his vitals. ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith

... in the day when he awoke again and hunger was gnawing his vitals; but the slow stupor was gone, he was himself again and the cramps had gone out of his limbs. He rose up luxuriously and cut a can of tomatoes, drinking the juice and eating the fruit, and then he lit a fire and boiled some strong coffee and cooked ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge

... and life in the body of her father. The next day the doctor came again: M. d'Aubray was worse; the nausea had ceased, but the pains in the stomach were now more acute; a strange fire seemed to burn his vitals; and a treatment was ordered which necessitated his return to Paris. He was soon so weak that he thought it might be best to go only so far as Compiegne, but the marquise was so insistent as to the necessity for further and better advice than ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... splendid museum of natural history, the life work of one Captain Bell of the Old Company. It gives us a sorry feeling to look at these specimens, now dropping their glass eyes and exposing their cotton-batting vitals to the careless on-looker, while the skeleton ribs of that canoe with which Dr. Richardson made history so long ago add their share to the general desolation. In a journal of the vintage of 1842 we read an appeal for natural history exhibits sent to Fort Simpson by an ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... abbot have closed his ears, and, hoping to stifle the remorseful pangs that seized upon his very vitals with the sharpness of serpents' teeth, he strove to dwell upon the frequent and severe acts of penance he had performed. But he now found that his penitence had never been sincere and efficacious. This one damning sin obscured all ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... steamship offices appeared rejoiced to see Jimmy once more. With a sunny smile he snatched a pencil from his ear and plunged it into the vitals of the Atlantic. ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... a bull that sees red, the nations had rushed madly at each other, thirsting to gore each other's vitals with their horns. Men of peaceful vocations were at that very moment slaughtering their brother-men. It was ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... book of business "horse sense," containing 130 pages of boiled-down, successful, practical experience. It treats of the vitals of business—from the inside; of expense; fixed charges; overhead; buying; selling; advertising; credit; debt; employer and employee. It is suggestive, simple in language and systematic in arrangement. It embodies little theory but much tried-out truth. It ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter

... policy toward us. This grave question settled, the vast army of Negro leaders absorbed in the momentous work of adjusting this external problem, will be free to turn undivided attention to the curing of those ills that are gnawing at the vitals of the race. ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... by a fable of the past? I hear his mighty cry reverberating through the world, "I am white!" Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough for two colors, for many little shinings of the sun? Why, then, devour your own vitals if I answer even as proudly, "I ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... national interest is confined to no party. Neither is it confined to party leaders; but it controls the people on whom the leaders rely for support. Here is the seat of the disease which is gnawing at the vitals of the republic. The man who now refuses to cater to the depraved tastes of the masses, can not, as a rule, be promoted to office. How many men can sit in the halls of legislation, or even on our benches of justice, who persistently refuse ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen

... believing that a great stretch of mere water rendered the country immune from taking its honest part in its own war. "Oh, my God," he had said in his heart, as all clear-sighted Americans had been saying, "has commercialism eaten into our very vitals? Has the good red blood of the early pioneers turned to water? Are we without the nerve any longer to read the writing on the wall?" And the only times that his national pride had been able to raise its head beneath the weight of shame and foreboding were those when ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... he woke again, terror jarring through his vitals. This was no time to be idle; he must be up and doing, he must think. Once at the end of this ridiculous cruise, once at the Lodge door, there would be nothing for it but to turn the cab and trundle back again. Why, then, go so far? why add another feature of suspicion to ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the unerring physician of the soul, sees that each one of us requires. Does the refiner hesitate to put the crude ore into the crucible? Does the sculptor shrink from chiselling the shapeless block into beauty? Does not the surgeon, with nerves of steel and pulse unquickened, cut near the very vitals of his agonized patient? He sees that it is necessary, in order to save from greater evil, and therefore he is as remorseless as fate. If to cure some transient, physical infirmity, man is justified in inflicting—nay, more, ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... back to his room, a ripping, tearing, grinding sound came to his startled ears. It was followed by a sudden swishing noise. Grant knew what that meant. A meteor had ripped into the vitals of the space-flier, and the precious air was rushing through the fissure into outer space. He whirled without an instant's hesitation and sprang down the long corridor toward the captain's quarters. If caught in time, the ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner

... matter of course, and up went the stern. Norrak hastily disengaged himself, so as to be ready to spring clear of the sinking wreck, and was on the point of jumping out when his brother's kayak shot past him, and Ermigit sent a spear deep into the vitals of the seal—so deep, indeed, that it turned over ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne

... of the demon we hunt. Its footsteps are marked with blood. We glory in our liberties, and every fourth of July our bells ring a merry peal, as if we were the happiest people on earth. But O, our country, our country! She has a worm at her vitals, making fast a wreck of her physical energies, her intellect, and her moral principle; augmenting her pauperism and her crime; nullifying her elections—for a drunkard is not fit for an elector—and preparing her for subjection to the most merciless tyranny that ever scourged any ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... fond. On these commingled, fresh-drawn gore she pour'd, And warm'd them bubbling in a brazen vase; Stirr'd by a sprouting hemlock. Trembling, they Shudder, while in their breasts the poison fierce She pours: both bosoms feel it deep instill'd;— Their inmost vitals feel it. Then her torch, Whirl'd flaming round and round, in triumph glares, Fires from the circling gathering. Powerful thus; Victorious in her aims, and deeds desir'd, To mighty Pluto's shadowy realm she speeds; And from her loins untwists the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... With hunger at his vitals the unfortunate skipper, hardly able to believe his ears, heard the cook come down and clear away. The smell of dinner gave way to that of tobacco, and the mate, having half finished his pipe, ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs

... which has perhaps affected the very vitals of mathematical teaching in America still more is the founding of the American Mathematical Society in 1888, called the New York Mathematical Society until 1894. Through its Bulletin and Transactions, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... quick, yet wary: Yet for all this, so full of certain passions, That if once stirred and baffled, as he has been Upon the tenderest points, there is no Fury 170 In Grecian story like to that which wrings His vitals with her burning hands, till he Grows capable of all things for revenge; And add too, that his mind is liberal, He sees and feels the people are oppressed, And shares their sufferings. Take him all in all, We have need of such, and such ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... said that it was due to her wonderful sensitiveness and highly strungness, and that it was just one more proof to him of the loftiness of her soul and her shrinking horror of any form of deceit. In fact, he gave me the impression that, though the affair was rending his vitals, he took a mournful pleasure in contemplating ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... literary men, that I found it almost impossible to avoid altogether without cutting very valuable connections, gave me a dreadful dyspepsia. I became livingly sensible of the agonies of Prometheus with the daily vulture gnawing at his vitals. At once I started with all my family for a year's sojourn in Germany, which, in fact, proved three years. But the fiend had left me the very first day. The moment I quitted the British shore, the tormentor quitted me. I suppose ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade

... terrible oath, and snatching the musket from the hands of the soldier boy, he rushed upon the soulless miscreant, and transfixed him upon the bayonet. Uttering fierce curses all the time, he plunged the bayonet again and again into the vitals of the ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic

... come like this," he went on. "You see that the old enemy has a grip on me. He pinches, he pinches. He'll get at my vitals one of these days, no doubt. And I've not even the satisfaction of having got my gout in an honourable way. If it had come to me from a fine old three-bottle ancestor! But I, who never had a grandfather, ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing

... said, 'it is not upon my head that I do not wed this wench. You be my witness that I would wed; it gores my heart to see her look so pale. It tears my vitals to see any woman look pale. As Lucretius says, "Better ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford

... [joyfully]. I praise Heaven for you, Little Mother. Come. [He leads the way out.] It was the temptation of the devil that led your young man to bruise my vitals and deprive me of breath. We must be ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw

... servant who is the dutiful tool of a court-favourite, and employed either as the pimp of his pleasure, or sometimes, perhaps, made a dirty channel to assist in the conveyance of that corruption which is clogging up and destroying the very vitals ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... neither move leg nor wing, suspends it, as if for a spectacle to be exulted over: then stalking to the door of his cell, turns about, glotes over it at a distance; and, sometimes advancing, sometimes retiring, preys at leisure upon its vitals. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... must be laid to Ringfield, who had lifted neither voice nor hand to hinder; for while pursuing an evil course the latter seemed powerless to cast out the emotions of blinding hate and jealousy that tore at his vitals and rendered him a changed and miserable creature. The next morning he visited Crabbe again and found him, as he had hoped, absolutely sodden and useless; his elasticity and nerve, his good looks, his air of authority, having all disappeared, and a wretched physical sickness begun. He ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... l'Internationale, Vive Henri IV, and Dieu Protege la France!,—(You see, something like this.)—I would make you a soup so hot that it would burn your mouth! It would be unpleasant,—(no worse in any case than what you are doing now):—but I vow it would warm your vitals, and that you would have to set out ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... heavy tense silence of the hall, ghastly in its timbre, like nothing any of us had ever heard before. And in it was conveyed agony as though Brayley had not merely pinched that flabby arm, but had thrust a red-hot knife into its vitals. ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings

... above and below the water line only, except amidships, where it was carried up to the upper deck, forming a "citadel," inside which her ten 18-ton and 12-ton guns were well protected. In this way her guns, waterline, and engines—or "vitals," as these are known for short—were fully protected at the expense of less vital parts of the ship. Though smaller and less expensive than the Minotaur she was a far more efficient ship. Her broadside was 1818 pounds. The Sultan, another ship of much the same type, ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... she hit the outer fringes of the ionosphere—that upper layer of rarified protons, the rapidly moving current of high velocity ions known as the plasmasphere—she bucked like a kicked horse. From deep within her vitals, the throb began, a strumming, thrumming sound with a somewhat higher note imposed upon it, making a sound like that of a bass viol being plucked ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett

... red-eyed, gasping mob rushed and staggered to the edge of the water, and, plunging their heads into it with hoarse grunts and cries, drank and drank and drank. Indeed, several lost their lives there, for some filled themselves so full that their vitals were ruptured, and some were thrust into the river by the cattle or those pressing behind them, to be carried ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard

... roaster of the sucking-pigs, we choose, and praise at table most, the favourite of its mother. Fifty times have I seen this, and smiled, and praised our people's taste, and offered them more of the vitals. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... fortunes Of the hapless Stuart line! Phantom-like, as in a mirror, Rise the griesly scenes of death— There before me, in its wildness, Stretches bare Culloden's heath: There the broken clans are scattered, Gaunt as wolves, and famine-eyed, Hunger gnawing at their vitals, Hope abandoned, all but pride— Pride, and that supreme devotion Which the Southron never knew, And the hatred, deeply rankling, 'Gainst the Hanoverian crew. Oh, my God! are these the remnants, These the wrecks of the array That around the royal standard ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun

... Mahmoud was to operate. In the destruction of the Strelitzes and the Janissaries, Peter and Mahmoud may be compared to two physicians: one practises on a healthy savage, while the other attempts to cut out a malignant cancer reaching the vitals, from the pampered sensualist. In annihilating these troops, as in his other reforms, Mahmoud began where he should have ended his labors; he mistook the end for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... help from him. He is one of those soft, gentle creatures, that come into the world with what your canting fools call a mission; and his mission is to take care of number one. Not dishonestly, mind you, nor violently, nor rudely, but doucely and calmly. The care a brute like me takes of his vitals, that care Lusignan takes of his outer cuticle. His number one is a sensitive plant. No scenes, no noise; nothing painful—by-the-by, the little creature that writes in the papers, and calls calamities PAINFUL, is of Lusignan's breed. Out to-day! ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade

... know, among us is a strange thing for a girl to do. Then she thrust me from her with a laugh, and added: 'As for the waiting, you must ask my father of that. Am I not his heifer, to be sold, and can I disobey my father?' And she was gone, leaving me empty, for it seemed as though she took my vitals with her. Nor will she talk thus any more, the white ant who has gone ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard

... potential internal grief! Whenever anything had happened to his Ford auty-mo-bile between Pinnacle and Lund, Casey never failed to trace the direct cause, which had always been external rather than internal, save that time when he had walked in and bought a new car without out probing into the vitals of the other. ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... constantly; a mention of it is felt to be a poetic ornament. Now it is its multitudinous descent upon the milk that he celebrates; now he is in want of an illustration for Athene as she wards off a spear from the vitals of Menelaus; so he makes her a mother caring for her sleeping child, and in comes the fly again. Moreover he gives them that pretty epithet, 'thick- clust'ring'; and 'nations' is his dignified word for a swarm ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... impeachments of the judges. So will it fare with your institutions. The principle openly advocated is that none shall be obliged to contribute for the support of religious institutions. This once established destroys the vitals of the system, and the residue of its existence will be misery and wretchedness. Shall a party avowing this sentiment and seeking by every artifice to give it effect, receive the support of a people who have derived such substantial benefits from these institutions? Shall we look in ...
— Count The Cost • Jonathan Steadfast

... ear; all was silent without, but within and close by he seemed to catch a faint sighing, a faint sobbing rustle, a little stealthy creak—as though many persons were at his side, holding themselves quite still, and governing even their respiration with the extreme of slyness. The idea went to his vitals with a shock, and he faced about suddenly as if to defend his life. Then, for the first time, he became aware of a light about the level of his eyes and at some distance in the interior of the house—a vertical thread ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... it to be an evil. Because such an acknowledgment is not enough on our part. It is doing no more than the slave-master and the slave-trader. "We have found," says James Monroe, in his speech on the subject before the Virginia Convention, "that this evil has preyed upon the very vitals of the Union; and has been prejudicial to all the states in which it has existed." All the states in their several Constitutions and declarations of rights have made a similar statement. And what has been the consequence of this general ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... the world in spiritual as well as material regeneration, and this is the only real and dispassionate America, with no foreign pull on its vitals. You must wake up; the cry has been heard to 'Come over and help.' Why ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... because time flies fast, And the pen answers ill my good intent, Full many a thing long written in my mind I here omit; and only mention such Whereat who hears them now will marvel much. Death so his hand around my vitals twined, Not silence from its grasp my heart could save, Or succour to its outraged virtue bring: As speech to me was a forbidden thing, To paper and to ink my griefs I gave— Life, not my own, is lost through you who dig ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... the edge of the grass impinging directly on the salt was sullenly retreating. The central bulk remained, a vast, obstinate mass, but most people thought it would somehow end by consuming itself, if indeed this doom were not anticipated by fresh scatterings of salt striking at its vitals as soon as ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... published; laboured articles have been inserted in widely-spread reviews; statistical accounts have been watched over with the most careful surveillance. If the misrepresentations of the press could have altered the matter of fact, famine would not have been gnawing the vitals of Sutherland in every year just a little less abundant than its fellows, nor would the dejected and oppressed people be feeding their discontent, amid present misery, with the recollections of a happier past. If a singularly ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... amounted to recognition by the Federal Government, had already been exploded. The Government of the United States, having made the necessary preparations, was not disposed to abandon a line of invasion which led right to the vitals of the Confederacy, and promised a successful reduction of the rebellion in at least three of the seceded States, because of the partially ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke

... strength. The shields that hang about their necks are not worth two coats of bark: the leather tears, and they split the wood, and they shatter the meshes of the hauberks. Both are pierced to the vitals by the lances, and the horses fall to earth. Now, both the warriors were doughty. Grievously, but not mortally, wounded, they quickly got upon their feet and grasped afresh their lances, which were not broken nor the worse for wear. But they cast them away on the ground, and drawing ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes

... not close upon him, nor do him the least harm in the world. Thus, though the struggle was a tremendous one, and though the dragon shattered the tuft of trees into small splinters by the lashing of his tail, yet, as Cadmus was all the while slashing and stabbing at his very vitals, it was not long before the scaly wretch bethought himself of slipping away. He had not gone his length, however, when the brave Cadmus gave him a sword thrust that finished the battle; and creeping out of the gateway of ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... through. On that day the consternation at Harrington was so great that Mrs. Spooner would not go to the meet. She came over from Spoon Hall, and spent a considerable part of the day in the sick man's room. "It's sure to come right if it's above the vitals," she said, expressing an opinion which had come from much experience. "That is," she added, "unless the neck's broke. When poor old Jack Stubbs drove his head into his cap and dislocated his wertebury, of course it was all up with him." The patient ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope

... rushed in and, fastening their teeth in the belly of the serpent, caused it to writhe and twist in its anguish. Instantly Gozon was upon his feet again, and, watching his opportunity, plunged his sword into the exposed vitals of his enemy. Mortally wounded, the serpent flung itself high in the air with a convulsive effort, and falling backwards pinned the knight to the ground beneath its enormous bulk. The servants, who had been ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey

... Gwendolen is joining in, rather claiming it as a triumph for her own dramatic power. She demurs to removal, but goes in the end on condition that all present shall come and see dolly galvanised at an early date. Jane agrees to replace dolly's vitals and sew her up to qualify her for this experience. And ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... to weave the carpet for the support of the chrysalis, an appearance of emaciation at last points to the evil that is at their vitals. They spin nevertheless. They are stoics who do not forget their duty in the hour of death. At last they expire, quite softly, not of any wounds, but of anaemia, even as a lamp goes out when the oil comes to ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... in natural sequence. In short, Australia was languishing for a few patriotic sons with strong, clear, business heads to apply the science of statecraft, as distinguished from the self-seeking artifices of the mere job politician at present sapping her vitals, and all the elements for ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin



Words linked to "Vitals" :   organ



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