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More "Abject" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... career. These pretty little creatures took the leading parts in "Bombastes Furioso," the first night my boy ever saw a play, and he instantly fell impartially in love with both of them, and tacitly remained their abject slave for a great while after. When the smaller of them came out with a large pair of stage boots in one hand and a drawn sword in the other, ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... embryo among these men; he had admired Nathan's book, he had reverenced the author as an immortal; Nathan's abject attitude before this critic, whose name and importance were both unknown to him, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... strange presence, and caught at a post for support. His self-possession was gone; he trembled like the most abject coward. Only for a moment—and then, when he looked ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... the Roman cities under the popular rule of their Bishops is illustrated by Milan, second only to Rome in the last days of the Empire. Milan had been reduced to the condition of abject misery by the Kings, who spared no pains to exalt Pavia at the expense of her elder sister. After the dissolution of the kingdom, she started into a new life, and in 1037 her archbishop, Heribert, was ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... ago, my dear," protested Barbara, calmly. "When he spoke to me—he told me it would be impossible for him to marry within a year. And don't you see that a year may make him an abject beggar?" ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... speech of Mr. Goschen. But Mr. Storey, clear, resonant, resolute, speaks to a House that listens with the stillness of great situations. Every word tells. The issue is understood and knit; and now let us troop into the lobbies, and proclaim to the world either our abject unfitness to govern an empire and pass a real statute, or let us stand by our great mission and ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... Helen—look up, my love! I am prouder of you this day than any king could be of his crown, but if religion is going to make you abject and tame, and mistrustful, I will have none of it," said the worldly man, ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... neither less irregular nor conducted with more wisdom and regard for the public interest. King Robert had not succeeded in keeping his first wife, Bertha of Burgundy; and his second, Constance of Aquitaine, with her imperious, malevolent, avaricious, meddlesome disposition, reduced him to so abject a state that he never gave a gratuity to any of his servants without saying, "Take care that Constance know nought of it." After Robert's death, Constance, having become regent for her eldest son, Henry I., forthwith conspired to dethrone him, and to put in his place ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... was the last commission entrusted to him. On his return to the capital Peter, in order to see what progress his son had made in mechanics and mathematics, asked him to draw something of a technical nature for his inspection. Alexius, in order to escape such an ordeal, resorted to the abject expedient of disabling his right hand by a pistol-shot. In no other way could the tsarevich have offended his father so deeply. He had behaved like a cowardly recruit who mutilates himself to escape military service. After this, Peter seemed for a time to take ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... from Menander. EVIL BOOKS CORRUPT AT ONCE BOTH OUR MANNERS AND OUR TASTE." Four days after this learned 'lucubration' the voice of the warm-hearted magistrate speaks in a reminder of the prevailing abject misery of the London poor who "in the most miserable lingering Manner do daily perish for Want in this Metropolis." And in almost the next number his Honour gives his readers letters from the fair Cordelia, from Sarah Scandal, and from other correspondents, of ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... made of his being a volcano. The two men had been standing dumb before him, Donal pained for the man on whom this phial of devilish wrath had been emptied, he white and trembling with dismay—an abject creature, crushed by a cruel parent. When his father ceased, he still stood, still said nothing: power was gone from him. He grew ghastly, uttered a groan, and wavered. Donal supported him to a chair; he dropped into it, and leaned back, with streaming face. It was miserable to ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... a hunchback, especially in the morning, might bring accident, ruin, and perhaps sudden death before sunset. He shook all over, and the blue eyes never winked, and seemed to grow more and more angry till they positively blazed with wrath, and, at last, the fellow uttered a cry of abject fright and turned and ran up the dirty street at the top of his speed. But Cucurullo went quietly on his way, smiling with a little satisfaction; for, after all, it was something to command kindness and hospitality, or inspire mortal terror, by the deformity ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... command each of us, and we are bound to bow ourselves, unreluctant, unmurmuring, unhesitating, with complete submission at His feet. His authority, and our submission, go far, far deeper than the most despotic sway of the most tyrannous master, or than the most abject submission of the most downtrodden slave. For no man can coerce another man's will, and no man can require more, or can ever get more, than that outward obedience which may be rendered with the most sullen and fixed rebellion of a hating heart ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... Empire' was not much more than a shadow.... As for the mass of the people, their spirit was broken; for a time they gave up even the longing for the rights which they had lost, and taught their children abject obedience in order that they ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... none like him to trumpet about the streets the brave nature, the wise conduct, and great glory of the king Diabolus. He would range and rove throughout all the streets of Mansoul to cry up his illustrious lord, and would make himself even as an abject, among the base and rascal crew, to cry up his valiant prince. And I say, when and wheresoever he found these vassals, he would even make himself as one of them. In all ill courses he would act without bidding, and ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... Reduced to abject slavery is not enough, the very thought of which should awaken every sensibility of our common nature; but those of their descendants who are freemen even in the non-slaveholding States, occupy the very ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... wretched, squalid, and uncivilised: but on the other hand nothing can be more unlike this report than the most valuable and unintentional evidence furnished by King James's own poems, with their tale of village merry-makings and frays which convey no impression of abject poverty, nor even of that rudest level of life where material wants are so pressing as to exclude all lighter thoughts. "On Mayday," says King James, "when everybody is bound to Peblis to ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... have asked why they do not this or that, the reply has invariably been, that they dare not. In fact, to keep their station in society, they must be slaves—not merely slaves, for we are all so far slaves, that if we do that which is not right, we must be expelled from it; but abject and cowardly slaves, who dare not do that which is innocent, lest they should be misrepresented. This is the cause by there is such an attention to the outward forms of religion in the United States, and which has induced some travellers ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Iron Chancellor. One particularly arrested my attention. It was the familiar picture of the negotiations for peace between Bismarck and Jules Favre in the terrible winter of 1871. The French statesman has sunk into a chair in abject despair, struck speechless by the demands of the conqueror. Bismarck stands triumphant and his proud bearing and arrogant manner fail to suggest any such magnanimous courtesy as that with which Grant accepted the sword of Lee at Appomattox. ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... mosquito, and "Heena," a stream, and it is aptly named, for from here on to White Horse City we were assailed by myriads of these pests. Indeed the spot where the town now stands was once a mosquito swamp in which I can recall passing a night of abject misery. It was past midnight before the White Horse was safely moored alongside her wharf, but electric light blazed everywhere, and here, for the first time since leaving Irkutsk, more than seven months before, clanking buffers and the shriek of a locomotive struck pleasantly ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... these miseries, which, if they do not positively reach, are so frequently near to reaching the normal poor, are, no doubt, the severest of the trials to which humanity is subjected. They threaten life,—or, if not life, then liberty,—reducing the abject one to a choice between captivity and starvation. By hook or crook, the poor gentleman or poor lady,—let the one or the other be ever so poor,—does not often come to the last extremity of the workhouse. There are such cases, but they are exceptional. Mrs Crawley, through ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... took at the same time the appurtenances of it. Officials multiplied. Subjects lost their rights. Abject fear paralyzed the people and those that ruled were intoxicated with insolence and cruelty.... The worst government is that which is most worshipped as divine. . . . The emperor possessed in the army an overwhelming force over which citizens ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... be low, to avoid being abject, and despicable, you must borrow some light from the Expression; not such as is dazling, but pure, and lambent, such as may shine thro the whole matter, but never flash, and blind. {58} The words of such a Stile we are usually taught in our Nurses armes, ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... the human soul, and set up in its place little ugly idols which it compels us to worship with more than Japanese devotion. It has contradicted Nature in the most obvious things, and been listened to with abject submission. Its empire has been no less extensive than deep-seated. The serf to custom points his finger at the slave to fashion—as if it signified whether it is an old or a new thing which is irrationally conformed to. The man of letters despises both the slaves of fashion and of custom, but ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... called picked men, i.e., those only who had been actually engaged in the war, and were known as strong disunionists. The negroes in the sections of country these men controlled were kept in the most abject slavery, and treated in every way contrary to the requirements of General Orders No. 129, from the War Department." (Accompanying document No. 25.) As late as September 29, Captain J.H. Weber, agent of the Freedmen's Bureau, reported to Colonel Thomas, assistant commissioner of the ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... superiors two extremes are to be avoided; namely, an abject and base servility, and an impudent and encroaching freedom. When the well-bred Hyperdulus approaches a nobleman in any public place, you would be persuaded he was one of the meanest of his domestics; his cringes fall little short of prostration; and his whole behaviour ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... at him, at the lean figure sunk in the armchair, at the dragged, infirm face, the blurred, owlish eyes, the expression of abject self-pity, ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... with them, but they were in such abject fear of the Indians that they paid little heed to their master's words, but went and huddled themselves together upon the straw in the sitting-room, remaining there without movement until all was over. Terence was now recalled from the gate, ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... Wait till she has been fed a little and freed from fear. That fair type recovers itself very quickly. You won't know her in a week or two, when that abject fear has died out of her eyes. She'll be too happy ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... Is this house ruined and abject as I have seen it in the daylight, or royal and the house of Gods as we see it now? Which ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... vigour. Then he bent down, put his lips to the damp brow, and feeling him move, said very gravely and respectfully, as one speaks to the head of the family, "Good-night, my brother." Perhaps the captive soul had heard it from the depths of its dark and abject limbo. For the lips moved and a long moan answered him, a far-away wail, a despairing cry, which filled with helpless tears the glance exchanged between Francoise and her son, and tore from them both the same cry in which their sorrow met, "Pecaire," the local word which expressed ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... a lemon, and the dengue cracking at his bones. I began to think of going to him after all, of jerking him out of his rut by force, if necessary, making him respect the traditions of his race. But just then came that Nichols affair, and flaring, his other bad side—his abject cowardice—reappeared to me. You remember the Nichols thing—boloed in the dark between my town and Himamaylan. His muchacho had jumped into the ditch. Afterward he got out and ran back the whole way, fifteen miles, to my place. I started down there. My idea was to pick up Miller as I passed, ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... had written Miss Angelina an abject apology, most witty and poetic, taking all the blame to himself and more than exonerating his high-principled friend ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... every department; above all, a philosopher of his own school, he judged by the law of Procrustes, and permitted no appeals; opinionated and arbitrary as the Czar, he was sauced by his negroes, respected and loved by his neighbors, led by the nose by his wife and daughters, and the abject ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... stagnant,—that, although great thoughts and great acts were towering in the West, there were in Russia, after all his galvanizing, no great authors, or scholars, or builders, or inventors, but only those two main products of Russian civilization,—dissolute lords and abject serfs. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... began to talk of his death, and as he spoke the terror of it grew on him. This man, known to have killed more than one American soldier and to be absolutely fearless in battle, quaked with abject fright. He would contend gladly in a contest against hopeless odds; but at the thought of his end creeping on him thus, slowly, inexorably his soul writhed in terror. He leaned forward and pressed his face ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... forgotten all about that damned money! Oh, you ass!—you abject ass! Why, she's one of the richest women in America, and you're only a fifth-rate painter with a paltry thousand or so a year! You marry her!—why, I dare say she's refused a hundred better men than you! She'd think ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... remedy the evil: his idea is imprisonment. 'In that way,' said he, 'I shall protect the rich from the importunity of beggars, and shall relieve them of the disgusting sight of abject poverty.'" ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... matter to him, he could not know what it meant to her. In her bedroom she dismissed her maid and went to an open window. She was very tired, but restless, and disinclined for bed. Dropping down on the low seat she stared out over the moonlit landscape. The repentant Mouston, abject at her continued neglect, crawled from his basket and crept tentatively to her, and as absently her hand went out to him gained courage and climbed up beside her. Inch by inch he sidled nearer, and unrepulsed grew bolder until he finally subsided with his head across ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... stout, and resolute widow, with a heavy hand and a shrewish temper. With a huge bunch of keys at her side, and an eye quick to detect the smallest waste and the slightest irregularity, she kept the household in terror, and her master (poor little man!) in almost abject vassalage. A specimen of one of their daily breakfast dialogues may be worthy ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... Dunbar and behind its gates allowed themselves to breathe more freely, and to congratulate themselves upon the dangers they had escaped. Such is the story of the famous, or infamous, "Cantor of Coltbrigg," one of the most disgraceful records of the abject collapse of regular troops before the terror of an almost unseen foe that are to found in history. Well might loyal Edinburgh despair if such were its best defenders. The town was all tumult, the Loyalists were in utter gloom, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... manage to catch his eye for an instant you will observe that its pupil is contracted to an almost invisible point. It is no exaggeration to say that he would barter his very soul for that which indulgence has made him too poor to purchase, and where artifice fails he will grovel in abject agony of supplication for a few grains. At the same time he resorts to all kinds of miserable and transparent shifts, to conceal his degradation. He never buys for himself, but always for some fictitious person, and often resorts to purchasing from ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... hazards. She gave her husband to understand, that she had resolved to seek a home in Canada. Fortunately, he was free, but slavery had many ways of putting the yoke on the colored man, even though he might be free; it was bound to keep him in ignorance, and at the same time miserably abject, so that he would scarcely dare to look up in the presence ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... Storri to Dorothy since that awful New Year's night. However, so worn to abject thinness was now his spirit on the constant wheel of fear that he carried Storri's latest word to her without apology. Richard must not visit Senator Hanway in his study. Mr. Harley could not go to Senator Hanway, he could not go to Richard; he ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the snow was falling in heavy flakes, and Huntsman's manufactory threw its red glare of light over the neighborhood, a person of the most abject appearance presented himself at the entrance, praying for permission to share the warmth and shelter which it afforded. The humane workmen found the appeal irresistible, and the apparent beggar was permitted to take up his quarters in a warm ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... the junta of Oporto endeavoured to rob him; attacking the house where he and his escort had taken up their quarters with a newly-raised levy of two thousand five hundred unarmed peasants. By a ruse he got their leaders into his hands, and these showed such abject cowardice that the peasants refused further to follow them, and asked Terence to take the command of ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... from?" he asked blandly, as one speaks to a harmless imbecile. "I leave you here in an abject state of despair, ready almost to decide upon marrying old Bessie, and I return in an hour and you inform me everything is settled, and you are the fiance of another lady! You know, you surprise me, Michael—'Pon my word, ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... of life; for, deceive not yourself, the harem, what we are accustomed to think of as a Mahometan institution, existed more or less perfectly in Greece by seventeen centuries at least antecedently to Mahometanism. Already before Homer, before Troy, before the Argonauts, woman was an abject, dependent chattel in Greece, and living in nun-like seclusion. There is so much of intellectual resemblance between Greece and Rome, shown in the two literatures, the two religions, and the structure of the two languages, that we are apt to overlook ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... in the Western Hemisphere, with 80% of the population living under the poverty line and 54% in abject poverty. Two-thirds of all Haitians depend on the agricultural sector, mainly small-scale subsistence farming, and remain vulnerable to damage from frequent natural disasters, exacerbated by the country's widespread deforestation. ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... pure red and white, or violet and white. The new officers were in black velvet dresses, with broad white collars. They took the oaths of office, and then actually kissed his foot. I had supposed this was never really done, but only a very low obeisance made; the act seemed to me disgustingly abject. A Heavenly Father does not want his children at his feet, but in his arms, on a level ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... them much better dressed, he was certain of that. But he was equally assured that not one of them would have forborne to laugh at his plight, as he sat abject and ridiculous in the very largest puddle in ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... martinet of a West Pointer," as he referred to the judge advocate at an early stage in the proceedings, had laid proof after proof before the court, and left the case of the defense at the last without a leg to stand on. And then Nevins dropped the debonair and donned the abject, for the one friend or adviser left to him in the crowded camp, an officer who said he always took the side of the under dog in a fight, had told him that in its present temper that court, with old Turnbull as one of its leaders, would surely sentence him to a term of years at Alcatraz ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... proofs and protestations. The Duke's suspicions vanish in face of the news that the woman he loves is to become the mother of his child, and in a moment he is at her knees imploring her pardon, and uttering abject apologies. He is now more deeply than ever in her toils, ready to defy the world in defence of the Princess he adores and can no ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... outclassed and outmanned and like to be even dispossessed by a most powerful and determined enemy. He asked their deliberations as to help for the king in his difficulties. Oxford was the king's birthplace and was also in Lincoln diocese.{9} The Court party, who advocated abject submission to the king's becks, at once proposed that the barons of England, among whom were the bishops, should furnish three hundred knights to the king, which knights should serve for a year without ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... by horses, vehicles, and smoking cooker-chimneys, were passing one another, some coming, others going back. Those coming made a left-handed turn at Savy, hugged the line of single railway as far as a crucifix at a cross-roads, and were then lost to distinct view amid the abject ruins of Holnon. Those going were the 32nd Division, whose march carried them out of the cathedral's eye or observation ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... hope Gordon won't have to go," the other said. "He is an awfully good fellow, though he has made an abject ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty
... name, O Princess mine, be light * On me, for Love hath robbed me of my reason's sight' 'Slaved me this longing and enthralled me love of you; * And clad in sickness garb, a poor and abject wight. I wont ere this to think small things of Love and hold, * O Princess mine, 'twas silly thing and over-slight. But when it showed me swelling surges of its sea, * To Allah's hest I bowed and pitied lover's plight. An will you, pity show and deign a meeting grant, * An will you ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... Notwithstanding this abject poverty, a bullying tax-gatherer, with half a dozen louting soldiers, have been up here prowling about, and wresting with violence the means of supporting life from these miserable beings. The scenes which I witness are heart-rending, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... with the hardest of all their work; and are frequently very severely beaten by their hard and ruthless taskmasters. Degraded as are these aborigines generally, those in the immediate vicinity of Sydney are a more abject race than their more fortunate brethren who inhabit the distant parts of the Colony. This may be partly, if not wholly accounted for, by the facility with which at Sydney they can obtain ardent spirits, to procure which they will do almost any thing. I have never seen human beings elsewhere ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... little support or encouragement at the hands of Elizabeth; in fact, she had suffered him to languish in the most abject poverty; for there is a letter extant from a person about him to lord Burleigh[99], entreating that he would move her majesty either to advance don Antonio two hundred thousand crowns out of her share of the rich Portuguese carrack captured by sir Francis Drake, to enable ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... inclined to refuse him; then, perhaps moved to compassion by his abject attitude, she relented and agreed. "Very well," she said, and retaining the picture moved swiftly before him into the shadowed garden. He lagged after her, inventing a hundred impracticable yarns. She found her chair and sat down ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... mentioned. But simply because she is a lady, and because she had her duties as hostess to attend to, she is unfit to carry out the actual work of investigating the phenomena in question. Some of her assistants sat up all night, with loaded guns, in a condition of abject fright; others, there is reason to suspect, manufactured phenomena for themselves; and nearly all seem to have begun by assuming supernatural interference, instead of leaving it for the final explanation of whatever might be clearly proved ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... again at once in the organ charged to repair this error. Turn where we may, it towers high over our heads. It is the circular ocean, the tideless water, whereon our boldest and most independent thoughts will never be more than mere abject bubbles. We call it Nature to-day; to-morrow, perhaps, we shall give it another name, softer or more alarming. In the meanwhile it holds simultaneous, impartial sway over life and death; furnishing the two irreconcilable sisters with the magnificent and familiar ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the pipe thoughtfully) is our surest register of advance or retrogression; and, with few exceptions indeed, the prevailing and conspicuous element in all publications of more than a century ago is a tacit acceptance of irresponsible lordship and abject inferiority as Divine ordinances. Brutal indifference, utter contempt, or more insulting condescension, toward the rank and file, was an article of the fine old English gentleman's religion— "a point of our faith," as the pious Sir Thomas ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... carved upon the stones were "Um mani panee," and meant, as far as I could make out, "the Supreme Being." As the old gentleman repeated the mystic syllables, he bobbed and scraped towards a strange-looking monument close by, in an abject, deprecatory way, as if in extreme ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... once set off with Mr Tidey. We first made our way to the canoe, where we found our prisoner groaning with pain, for, by endeavouring to release himself, he had only tightened the cords with which his arms and legs were lashed. We took him out of the canoe, and from the expression of abject terror exhibited in his countenance, I suspected that the fellow believed he was then and there to undergo the penalty of 'Lynch law,' for he looked up at the bough of a tree above his head, as if he expected immediately ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... of her; he was proud that she had "taken" so well among his friend, proud that she bore herself so complacently in the drawing-rooms of the wives of pompous Government officials, but doubly proud of her almost abject devotion to him. If ever human being was worshipped that being was Charlie McDonald; it could scarcely have been otherwise, for the almost godlike strength of his passion for that little wife of his would have mastered and melted a far more invincible citadel ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... meditated truancy from the ranch and his parting instructions to "sit tight." I also know that the Happy Family was not at all likely to volunteer information of their lapse. And as for Applehead, the money burned his soul deep with remorse; so deep that he went around with an abject eagerness to serve Luck that touched that young man as a rare example of a bone-deep loyalty that knows no deceit. Which proves once more how fortunate it is that we cannot always see too deeply into the thoughts ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... the rope," wailed the unhappy Vivian, now utterly crestfallen and abject. "I meant your brother no harm; I only intended to frighten him. The pistols are ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... tell him that the girl for whose sake he has brought this load of ruin on himself will not so much as lift it with her little finger! You fair, foul devil, how I hate you!" She drew herself up to her full height, and regarded the wretched girl with such contemptuous scorn that even in her abject ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... the Prime Minister, asked Mr. Slide, have remembered the past events of his own rather peculiar life? Had not he, too, been poor, and driven in his poverty to rather questionable straits? Had not he been abject in his petition for office,—and in what degree were such petitions less disgraceful than a request for money which had been hopelessly expended on an impossible object, attempted at the instance of the great Croesus who, when asked to pay it, had at once acknowledged the necessity ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... Porter's condition had to be given his wife, though the full gravity was masked. This was done by Allis, and Mrs. Porter immediately became a prey to abject despair. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... on our side, not on theirs. We, born servitors and underlings, it was thought, had forgotten our proper places,—nay, had presumed to strike back, when our masters chastised us. Of course, we should soon be whipped to our knees again. And when we were again submissive and abject, Europe must so have demeaned itself as still to be on good terms with the conquerors. As for us, our final opinion of their demeanor, so they deemed, mattered very little. The ill opinion of the servants can be borne; but one must needs ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... Iberians. Sauromaces, who reigned in that country by the permission of the emperors, was expelled by a superior force; and, as an insult on the majesty of Rome, the king of kings placed a diadem on the head of his abject vassal Aspacuras. The city of Artogerassa [134] was the only place of Armenia [134a] which presumed to resist the efforts of his arms. The treasure deposited in that strong fortress tempted the avarice of Sapor; but the danger of Olympias, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... hero, who is to brave danger in his stead. His own bride this latter will bring for him to the Rhine, but to me he will bring—the Ring! You frank good fellows, light-hearted companions, sail cheerfully on! Abject though he may seem to you, you are yet his servants—the servants of the Nibelung's son!" The ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... vie in adulation? In the Tribunate, on April 23rd, an obscure member named Curee proposed the adoption of the hereditary principle. One man alone dared openly to combat the proposal, the great Carnot; and the opposition of Curee to Carnot might have recalled to the minds of those abject champions of popular liberty the verse that glitters amidst the literary rubbish of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... "Abject! abject!" repeated Lambourne; "that shall be answered with cold steel whenever a bowl of sack has washed out memory of the morning's draught that we had together. In the meanwhile, do you see, shog—tramp—begone—we ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... them [Footnote: 25] not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude; liberty looks, amongst them, like something that is more noble and liberal. I do not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in it; but I cannot alter the ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... fascinating, sympathising, giving. It was the first time she had seen poverty; she had barely heard of its existence; it had never occurred to her that great romanticists condescended to borrow from life. It was not abject poverty that she witnessed, by any means. There were no hollow cheeks here, no pallid faces, no shrunken limbs. It was, save for the passing distress, to which they were not unaccustomed, a very jolly, hearty, contented poverty. Their belongings ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... receive their monthly wages. Amongst the many charitable institutions of Mexico, there appears to me (in spite of the many prejudices existing against such institutions) none more useful than this. These otherwise unfortunate children, the offspring of abject poverty or guilt, are left at the gate of the establishment, where they are received without any questions being asked; and from that moment, they are protected and cared for, by the best and noblest families in the country. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... window. "If your High Excellency will listen for a moment to the shouts of the exasperated populace—" ("of the exasperated populace!" the Sub-Warden repeated in a louder tone, as the Lord Chancellor, being in a state of abject terror, had dropped almost into a whisper) "—you will understand what it is ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... herculean strength has nonetheless been terrorized into abject helplessness before the onslaught of a royal Bengal. Thus the tiger has converted the man, in his own mind, to a state as nerveless as the pussycat's. It is possible for a man, owning a fairly strong body and an immensely strong determination, ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... with any anxiety of your child. From ages past poverty as well as success have both had a fixed destiny; and is it likely that separation and reunion are not subject to predestination? Though we may now be far apart in two different places, we must each of us try and preserve good cheer. Your abject child has, it is true, gone from home, but abstain from ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... John as the head and front of the offence which he had received, "Whatever," he said, "have been the follies and vices of our race, a Saxon would have been held 'nidering'," [21] (the most emphatic term for abject worthlessness,) "who should in his own hall, and while his own wine-cup passed, have treated, or suffered to be treated, an unoffending guest as your highness has this day beheld me used; and whatever was the misfortune of our fathers on the field ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... called for a rope to hang him; he thought himself lost, and through his tears he begged for mercy, pleaded for compassion, and promised atonement. General Bonham riding up at this juncture of the soldiers' sport, and seeing the abject fear of the old Northern Abolitionist, took pity and showed his sympathy by telling the men to turn him loose, and not to interfere with non-combatants. He was told to run now, and if he kept the gait he started with through the woods, not many hours elapsed before ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... this was not occasioned so much by fear of the adversary, as by disease, by sorrow, and by fatal prognostications, which often weighed most potently on the brave, and quelled the manly heart to abject subjection. ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... a weather-beaten, sad, abject little town that one might readily experience surprise that the trains even condescend to stop there. It squats in the sand a few miles south of Tehachapi pass, hemmed in by mountain ranges ocher-tinted where near by, mellowed by distance ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... Between proud wealth and abject poverty there can be no friendly feeling. Stolid, brutish ignorance can alone render the bonds of the slave endurable. As his eyes are slowly opened by increasing knowledge, and he can compare his condition with that of the freeman, his fetters gall ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... looked so innocent, so pretty, so unconscious, so sympathetic with everybody and everything, so very young, yet so wondrously wise and womanly, that he felt an irresistible desire to prostrate himself at her feet in abject slavery. ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... three centuries, were cultivated to noble fruitfulness by the monks of the East. For their humility, obedience, and reverence for their superiors it is not wise to praise them just now; for those are qualities which are not at present considered virtues, but rather (save by the soldier) somewhat abject vices; and indeed they often carried them, as they did their abstinence, to an extravagant pitch. But it must be remembered, in fairness, that if they obeyed their supposed superiors, they had first chosen their superiors themselves; that as the becoming a monk at all was an assertion of self-will ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... look of approbation, and told him that it should be applied to the repairs of the schoolroom. The rest of the boys waited in silence for the doctor's sentence against them, but not with those looks of abject fear with which boys usually expect the sentence of ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... may be converted to Christianity. You violently object to this amelioration of the lot of the negro savage; but you shut your eyes to the fact that thousands of your own countrymen and women are actually slaves of the most abject type, made so by your own insatiable and contemptible craving for cheap clothing, cheap food, cheap every thing, to satisfy which, and to, at the same time, gratify his own perfectly legitimate desire to make a living, the employer of labour has to grind his employes down in the matter of wage ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... so, Is not submission my duty? A contest had in fact been going on in my mind for a long time, between the clear consciousness of right and the plausible make-shifts of theology and superstition. The one held me an abject slave—a prisoner for life, punished for some transgression in which I had no lot nor part; and the other counseled me to manly endeavor to secure my freedom. This contest was now ended; my chains were broken, and the ...
— Collected Articles of Frederick Douglass • Frederick Douglass
... to her majesty. He specially denounced the use of the sign of the cross. Suddenly a harsh voice was heard in the royal closet. It was Elizabeth's. She chidingly bade Mr. Dean return from his ungodly digression and revert to his text. The next day the frightened dean wrote a most abject apology to the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... he thought he had scaled her side as noiseless as a mouse; and he was amazed to see the pirates cowering from him, with Hook in their midst as abject as if he ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... of old men have sons whose interests they regard as an essential part of their own. This is a law of human nature.'[96] There would, he observes, be no danger that men above forty would try to reduce the 'rest of the community to the state of abject slaves.' Mill, as his son tells us,[97] disowned any intention of positively advocating these exclusions. He only meant to say that they were not condemned by his general principle. The doctrine, however, about women, even as thus understood, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... his glasses. Thousands of men were running like frightened rabbits down the Cimatario slope, and spreading as a fan over the grassy plain. Mountain pieces boomed farewell behind them, until in abject panic they cast away carbines and scrambled the faster. But other troops were pushing up the slope opposite the town, and these were ordered ranks of infantry. Up and up they climbed, to trench after trench, and the howitzers ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... all the conveniences and luxuries they possessed, all the pleasures associated with the idea of home; for parting with all the animate and inanimate objects to which they had long and early habits of affection and attachment. This family had never been proud in prosperity, nor were they abject in adversity: they submitted with fortitude to their fate; yet they could not, without regret, leave the place where they had spent ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... And concerning that abject and ignoble saying, "If there were not a God it would be necessary to invent Him," we shall say nothing. It is the expression of the unclean scepticism of those conservatives who look upon religion merely as a means of ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... many years the recluse headquarters of the Jesuits, so of all enslaved Spanish-Americans probably the Guaranis are the worst. During Lent they will inflict stripes on their bodies, or almost starve themselves to death; and their abject humility to the Pa is sad to witness. On special church celebrations large processions will walk the streets, headed by the priests, chanting in Latin. The people sometimes fall over one another in their eager endeavors to kiss the priest's garments, They ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... Pushkin, and he never lost his admiration for the founder of Russian literature. He read the great classics of antiquity and of modern Europe with wild excitement, and wrote burning eulogies in letters to his friends. The flame of his literary ambition was not quenched by the most abject poverty, nor by the death of those whom he loved most intensely. After his first wife died, he suffered agonies of grief, accentuated by wretched health, public neglect, and total lack of financial resources. But chill penury could not repress his noble rage. He was ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... daughter, to whom he was engaged, the old merchant disinherited him. Captain George fell on the field of Waterloo, but the heart of old Osborne would not relent, and he allowed the widow to starve in abject poverty. He adopted, however, the widow's son George, and brought him up in absurd luxury and indulgence. A more detestable cad than old Sedley ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... he was from England, and a traveller; and now, bolder grown as a geologist, he talked of his specimens, and his hopes of finding a mine in the neighbouring mountains; then adopting, as well as he could, the servile tone and abject manner, in which he found Mr. Dennis was to be addressed, "he hoped he might get encouragement from the gentlemen at the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... once," he said; "you might know I shouldn't change. I've got one or two little jobs to see to about Bouncing's funeral. That woman's half a little cat and half an abject fool. Still, you can't help feeling a bit sorry for her. I dare say I can get things done by lunch-time; then I'll drive over the Fluella. I'll put up at the Kulm; but don't bother to write till you've got something settled. I'm not going to mess about saying ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... other saddle-blanket over him. He lay on his side, his face to the fire, one moment saying over the words of the psalm, but the next listening in abject terror to something ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... Native a difficult and risky undertaking and, furthermore, there is to be considered the spirit of traditional submissiveness which at all times and in all places marks the attitude of the slave or serf towards his master. One has only to remember the many accounts of abject resignation by the peasants of France and the moujiks of Russia before the revolutions that changed the order of the past in those countries. No such considerations affect the Native where his anger and hatred are directed against one or more of his own ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... of a strange riddle, good Folces. They helped to puzzle me—and Heaven knows that I was puzzled enough ere I saw those miserable wretches. Mayhap some day I'll understand the riddle which their abject persons did represent. But now tell ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Lateran had decided that bishops must not be invested by kings with the ring and staff of their office, because by such investiture they were the king's vassals, Henry decided to invite Anselm to receive the archbishopric afresh from the King's hands by a new act of investiture. To Anselm the abject submission of the bishops to the Red King had been a painful spectacle; and now Henry was making a demand that would emphasise the royal supremacy, and the demand was intolerable and impossible. Again Anselm ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... the monstrous injustice of the present time which makes a mother dependent upon the economic accidents of her man, which plunges the best of wives and the most admirable of children into abject poverty if he happens to die, which visits his sins of waste and carelessness upon them far more than upon himself, will disappear. So too the still more monstrous absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function, bearing and rearing children in ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... man of abject soul in vain Shall walk the Marathonian plain; Or thrill the shadowy gloom, That still invests the guardian Pass, Where stood, sublime, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... resisted, Sir Francis," rejoined the other; "and if you had followed my counsel, you would not have condescended to play the abject wooer, but have adopted the manlier course, and demanded ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... French which she had been accustomed to hear in the schoolroom at Bally William. The agonising presentiment that her ignorance was about to be discovered before her schoolmates reduced Pixie at one blow to a condition of abject despair. She hung her head over her plate, and strove to avoid attention by ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... round him. He saw himself ruined in everything that he had held dear. He would be the laughing-stock of Rome; he, the hero of a score of amorous escapades, the darling of as many patrician maidens, jilted by the one woman to whom he had become the abject slave. Courage ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... experienced by the arms of Ava, to demand homage from the English envoys. The firmness of these gentlemen, and the fear of renewed hostilities, caused the sovereign to waive his claims to forms and ceremonies of abject submission, and the issue was peaceful. Cordial relations with the Birmese dominions were not however established, either at that juncture or subsequently: but the salutary fear of British power, caused by the war of 1851-2-3, prevented any violent ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... writing, articles for the press, etc.; for, said he, teaching is a narrowing profession. I wonder if any schoolmaster has ever imagined how narrowing it is for the boys? Have they never seen the look of abject boredom creep over the faces of even clever lads as the "lesson" drones on: "At this period the Gothic style of architecture arose, and was much used in Northern Europe for ecclesiastical buildings." And so on, including dates. Whose spirit would not fail? Why not, oh, my masters, why not use ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... that about the only thing he could afford to keep was a diary. Here he wrote down alternate accounts of his abject poverty and of his abnormal hopes. In Villon's time, the wolves used to come into the streets of Paris at night. They were not all dead by 1840, it would seem, for one of them made his home on Wagner's door-step. He wrote in his diary that he had ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... books and theatres, and sufficient food and clothing. Isn't it strange that when we might have been so happy we preferred to be so wretched? For even if we had all we wanted ourselves, we could not escape the sights and sounds that told of abject misery." ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... nightcap. Every one who knows Keene's work can imagine how the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against the mother-in-law; ill-dressed men with whisky—ill- dressed women with tempers; everything that is underbred and decivilised; abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom with shambling ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... what bitter and satirical things he said of Germans and Germany is not recorded. They stood in abject silence while he replenished his store ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... conflict in human conduct, producing ever increasing misery, pain and injustice. In crystallizing and codifying this contradiction, the Church not only solidified its own power over men but reduced women to the most abject and prostrate slavery. It was essentially a morality that would not "work." The sex instinct in the human race is too strong to be bound by the dictates of any church. The church's failure, its century after century of failure, is now evident on every ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Hence, like a person haunted by spectres, he loses the free enjoyment even of a safe and prosperous state, and on the first shock of adversity he desponds. Instead of exerting himself to lay hold on the resources that remain, he gives up all for lost, and resigns himself to abject and broken spirits. On the other hand, firmness of mind is the parent of tranquillity. It enables one to enjoy the present without disturbance, and to look calmly on dangers that approach or evils that threaten in future. Look into the heart of this man, and you will find composure, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... that. Scythia was a Mexican Indian. It is well known to travelers that the Mexican Indians possess the secret of a drug which, when administered to a man, will not kill him, or do him any physical harm, but will reduce him to a state of abject imbecility, so that his free will is destroyed, and he may be led by any one who may wish to lead him. This drug administered to Rothsay, by the woman, must have so deprived him of his reason as to induce him to follow any one ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... leisure to recollect, nor perhaps penetration to perceive, the effect that this little sally might have upon his interests. Despotic and boorish as was the genius of Mr. Hartley, it cowred under that of Sophia with the most abject servility. And that lady now vowed eternal ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... felt shame, but shame was something that could be walked off. Faster ... with an amorous mumble soothing him and the hurt. After all, was it so important? Yes ... no. Forgive himself, but not too quickly. He walked.... Words made circles in his head—abject and sorrowful circles about the dream of ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Oberst Lieutenant,' said she, laughing; 'so come forward now and clap your heels together, and let us hear how you utter your few syllables in true abject fashion. I'll sit here, and receive you.' As she spoke, she threw herself into an arm-chair, and assuming a look of intense hauteur and defiance, affected to stroke an imaginary moustache with one hand, while with the other she ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... the Speaker's eldest son, was hung at York, for murder; and his half-brother, Sir Richard, endured a fate only less miserable. The splendid estate he inherited he wasted by the most wanton extravagance, and at length reduced himself to abject want. 'His excesses,' says Mr. Hunter, in his 'History of Doncaster,' 'are still, at the expiration of two centuries, the subject of village tradition; and his attachment to gaming is commemorated in an old painting, long preserved in the neighboring mansion of Badsworth, ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... lieutenant to do, when some of the greatest in the land were in the field? Esmond never so much as thought of asking permission to hope so far above his reach as he knew this prize was—and passed his foolish, useless life in mere abject sighs and impotent longing. What nights of rage, what days of torment, of passionate unfulfilled desire, of sickening jealousy, can he recall! Beatrix thought no more of him than of the lackey that ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... innocence, a violet's shyness, a passion of fostering gentleness, mirth that ripples like the surface of the crystal pools, and—could it be dawning—love? Everett had been in a state of uncertainty and misery so abject that it hid itself under an unusually casual manner that had for weeks kept Rose Mary from suspecting to the least degree the condition of his mind. There is a place along the way in the pilgrimage to the altar of Love, when the god takes on an ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... her into the house, frisking joyously. From the kitchen she procured a small basket, and into this she packed some old cloths and pieces of biscuit. Then she picked up the terrier, cuffed it on both sides of the head, popped it into the basket, tucked its humbly-agitated tail under its abject ribs, closed the basket, and fastened it with a skewer. She next addressed a label to her cousin's home, tied it to the basket, and despatched a servant with it to the railway-station, instructing her that it should ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... arms, the soldiers dragged me down the ladder, as though I had been a truss of hay, into the room beneath, which was also crowded with troopers. In one corner was the wretched scrivener, a picture of abject terror, with chattering teeth and trembling knees, only prevented from falling upon the floor by the grasp of a stalwart corporal. In front of him stood two officers, one a little hard brown man with dark twinkling eyes and an alert manner, the other tall and slender, with a long ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... assured me that, under the circumstances, Mr. Seabrook would not make any opposition, fearing we might prove the whole, if he did so; but would let the case go by default. This was just what he did; and oh, you should have witnessed his abject humility when I at last had the acknowledged right to put him out ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... as they please over the land, assuming any disguise they may need, and for ever preying upon the people. When they are not engaged in acts of crime, they are beggars, assuming various religious forms, or affecting the most abject poverty. The women and children have the true whine of the professional mendicant, as they frequent thronged bazaars, receiving charity and stealing what they can. They sell mock baubles in some instances, but only as a cloak to other enterprises, and as a pretence ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... The count, the young wife, the suspected priest, the lawyers, the Pope who presides at the trial,—each tells the story, and each unconsciously reveals the depths of his own nature in the recital. The most interesting of the characters are Guido, the husband, who changes from bold defiance to abject fear; Caponsacchi, the young priest, who aids the wife in her flight from her brutal husband, and is unjustly accused of false motives; Pompilia, the young wife, one of the noblest characters in literature, fit in all respects to rank with Shakespeare's great heroines; and the Pope, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... the superiority of others, and her own abject and disgustful state, she cried, "Let me herd with those who won't despise me; let me only see faces whereon I can look without confusion and terror; let me associate with wretches like myself, rather than force my shame before those who are so good ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... every description increased many fold the effectiveness of the effort of each individual. All parts of the country participated in the material progress. The South, issuing quickly from the almost abject state of prostration in which it was left by the ravages of a disastrous war, became more prosperous and flourishing than ever; the Northern States east of the Mississippi constantly increased their ...
— Outline of the development of the internal commerce of the United States - 1789-1900 • T.W. van Mettre
... dried salmon, and other fish, for winter: with these, they were ready to traffic with the travellers for any objects of utility in Indian life; giving a large quantity in exchange for an awl, a knife, or a fish-hook. Others were in the most abject state of want and starvation; and would even gather up the fish-bones which the travellers threw away after a repast, warm them over again at the fire, and pick them with the ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... over it grievously in the beginning, but at length sullenly delivered myself into his hands, murmuring an abject prayer for the salvation of my soul. That, at least, was not to be remodeled by all their fashionable garniture. These heated discussions concerning what I was to wear were not for me to put a voice in. Verily, I knew nothing and cared naught for the cut of a shoe my Lord ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... itself, and to find beauty wheresoever in life it chooses to turn the light of its gaze. So, also, in "Andrea del Sarto," the easy cleverness of the unaspiring craftsman is not embodied apart from the abject relationship which made his very soul a bond-slave to the gross mandates of "the Cousin's whistle." Yet in all three poems the biographic and historic conditions contributing toward the individualizing of each artist are so unobtrusively ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... yet consider! My wealth dates back ten years; till then I had known hunger, and every kind of sorrow and despair. I had stretched out longing arms to the world, but not a heart opened to me. And suddenly, when the taste of men's cruelty was bitter in my mouth, capricious fortune snatched me from abject poverty and gave me delirious wealth. I was ploughing a barren field, and flung up a nugget. From that moment gold dogged my footsteps. I enriched the few friends I had—they turned howlingly from me because I ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... deemed himself only safe from compulsory exile by a voluntary exit to America. This event took place about two years after Montgomery's first connexion with Sheffield, and he had now reverted to his former condition of abject dependence unless for a fortunate occurrence. This was no less than his being appointed joint-proprietor and editor of the newspaper by a wealthy individual, who, noticing the abilities of the young shopman, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and overturned the post to which Cox was being bound. He could not tell very much about the execution done by the balls, for at first he believed it was some new form of torture which the savages had invented; but when the painted crew fled across the river in abject fear, leaving him comparatively at liberty, he began to understand that the comrades whom he had wickedly wronged were doing what they could ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... feet, and manacles to his hands; an iron collar was round his neck, and a chain from the collar had its last link in an iron staple deep fixed in the stone floor. His head was sunk on his bosom, and he sat abject and despairing. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... Seeing him so abject, so incoherent, so wild with apprehension, the directors began to whisper gravely among themselves, while one got quietly up and called the porter to guard ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... of this remorseless combination without any prospect of repaying them. But all resistance was useless, she was convinced; she had to submit or she would be expunged from life. She who had fancied herself so powerful was but the lowly, abject subaltern at the beck of a preponderating power of which she understood no more the details than the ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... illness, true, that destroyed his courage, but not the less was he a man of fear, not the less he felt himself a coward. Again he got into a damp brake and lay down, in a minute or two again got up and went on, his fear growing until, mainly through consciousness of itself, it ripened into abject terror. Loneliness seemed to have taken the shape of a watching omnipresent enemy, out of whose diffusion death might at any moment break ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... herself deceived," exclaims the more candid separatist or sceptic, taking up the argument declined by his scoffing brother. Catholics, it is supposed, are under the dominion of so abject a superstition, that the moment the subject of their religion is introduced, they cease to exert their ordinary common sense and powers of criticism, and believe any thing and every thing that seems to be marvellous. Granting them to be sincere, the charitable Protestant is of opinion ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... means less ill-famed Suburra. Into this they struck instantly, walking in single file, and keeping as nearly as possible in the middle of the causeway. The lane, which was composed of dwellings of the lowest order, tenanted by the most abject profligates, was dark as midnight; for the tall dingy buildings absolutely intercepted every ray of light that proceeded from the murky sky, and there was not a spark in any of the sordid casements, nor any votive lamp in that foul alley. The only glimpse of casual illumination, and that too barely ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... fairy-like creature, plucky as a "Dandie Dinmont" terrier, and with a heart as big as Massanutten, she was seated in a nondescript trap, drawn by two mules, driven by a negro. One look from the great, tearful eyes made of me an abject coward, and I basely shuffled the refusal to let her pass on to Jackson. The Parthian glance of contempt that reached me through her tears showed that the lady understood and despised my paltering. Nicholls was speedily exchanged, ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... still flowed sluggishly. But in spite of his weakness and the pain he evidently suffered, Jock could hardly wait to lead his masters back to the flock. Hurrying on with him they crossed a little rise of ground and came upon the sheep which were crowded close to one another, panting in abject terror. ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... spread dissension through the plain On matters that concern'd the state, The council met in grand debate. A colt whose eyeballs flamed with ire, Elate with strength and youthful fire, In haste stept forth before the rest, And thus the listening throng address'd. 'Goodness, how abject is our race, Condemn'd to slavery and disgrace! Shall we our servitude retain, Because our sires have borne the chain? Consider, friends! your strength and might; 'Tis conquest to assert your right. How cumbrous is the gilded ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... infirmities are so many stairs tending downwards; to others they represent steps that lead us on high. The wise man perchance may do things that are done by the unwise man also; but the latter is forced by his passions to become the abject slave of his instincts, whereas the sage's passions will end by illumining much that was vague in his consciousness. To love madly, perhaps, is not wise; still, should he love madly, more wisdom will doubtless come to him than if he ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... my abject despair. I was so completely knocked over that I offered no opposition when the Colonel impudently took the telegram out of my ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... poor dear, was abject! A girl had things all her own way. Secretly and sweetly Marie smiled ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... indifferent to the astonishment his presence occasioned, he crept in, shut the door, kissed his greasy glove as servilely as if it were the dust, and made a most abject bow. ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... grounded upon scenes of contract surgery upon the fields of battle. The ministry he set aside. From commerce, as he had always seen it in his native town, twelve hours a day of haggling and smirking, he shrank with all the impulses of his soul. The abject country newspaper gave him no inkling of that fourth estate which was later to spring up in the land. Arms he loved, but there was now no field for arms. There were no family resources to tide him over the season of experiment, and, indeed, but for ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... passed an enormous globe of bluish color, on which were marked the seas and continents with outlines like those he had seen on maps. It was the Earth! He, an imperceptible molecule in the immensity of space, an abject spectator of the stupendous representation of Nature, beheld the blue globe with ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... shades of midnight darkness Abject sits the Pagan world; There the banner of salvation Ne'er hath been by time unfurled; Nor their idols ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... life had been a failure; total, miserable, abject. It had come to nothing; its harvest was a harvest of ashes. If it had been a useful life, he could have accepted its unhappiness; if it had been a happy life, he could have forgiven its uselessness; but it had been both useless ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... the abject slave of Madam Silverkoop, had been victorious over Mrs. Cat? The first blow is, I believe, the decisive one in these cases, and the Countess had stricken it a week after their marriage;—establishing a supremacy which the Count never ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... conditions; and the attempt ends as usual in the repetition—in the circumstances the inevitable repetition—of the old disaster. Not that at times we do not obtain glimpses of the true state of the case. After seasons of much discouragement, with the sore sense upon us of our abject feebleness, we do confer with ourselves, insisting for the thousandth time, "My soul, wait thou only upon God." But the lesson is soon forgotten. The strength supplied we speedily credit to our own achievement; and even the temporary success is mistaken for a symptom of improved ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... looked upon its distorted and overhanging position with a sensation of pain and dread; where the very rats had deserted their loathsome cells from the insecurity of their tenure, and the ragged mothers of the abject neighbourhood forbade their brawling children to wander under the threatening walls, lest they should keep the promise of their mouldering aspect, and, falling, bare to the obstructed and sickly day the secrets of their prison-house. Girt with the foul and ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... its fall. All these catastrophes, so crushing, so unexpected, filled him with a kind of primeval terror. Mr. Parker was neither a devout believer nor the reverse. He was a fool and liable, as such, under the stress of bodily or mental disturbance, to spasmodic fits of abject fright which he mistook for religion. An attack of indigestion, the failure of some pecuniary speculation, the demise of a beloved stepsister—these various happenings, so dissimilar to one another, had yet this feature in common, that they put the fear of God ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Grove and opened fire with machine guns upon a sleeping village of miners. They have beaten, clubbed, and stabbed men and women in the effort either to infuriate them into open war, or to reduce them to abject slavery. Unfortunately, at this time the complete report of the Senate investigation has not been issued, and it seems better to confine these pages to those facts only that careful inquiry has proved unquestionable. We are fortunate in having the reports of public ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... ourselves, as soon as the tackles were hooked into the jollyboat's ringbolts I ordered the four savages in the canoe to leave her and come on deck to help to hoist in the boat; and this they did in a state of the most abject fear and trembling. Then I sent them for'ard to the windlass to assist in breaking out the anchor; and it was not until the schooner was actually adrift that I permitted them to begin the transfer of their wounded from the Martha's deck to the canoe. They ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... his ear, distinct, though softened by distance. "I am an appointed minister. It seems as if I were the one of whom I myself have spoken as likely to arise—not, as Laveaux says, after Raynal, to avenge, but to repair the wrongs of my colour. Low, indeed, are we sunk, deep is our ignorance, abject are our wills, if such a one as I am to be the leader of thousands—I, whose will is yet unexercised—I, who shrink ashamed before the knowledge of the meanest white—I, so lately a slave—so long dependent that I am an oppression to myself—am at ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... Rosario!" he began, plucking her by the sleeve and uplifting a pale, boyish face—he was not yet twenty-two—to hers with a look of abject misery. "I want to speak to you. I simply must speak to you. I've been waiting for the chance, and now that it's come—Look here! You're not going back on ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... colleagues to take up some literary hobby—essay writing, articles for the press, etc.; for, said he, teaching is a narrowing profession. I wonder if any schoolmaster has ever imagined how narrowing it is for the boys? Have they never seen the look of abject boredom creep over the faces of even clever lads as the "lesson" drones on: "At this period the Gothic style of architecture arose, and was much used in Northern Europe for ecclesiastical buildings." And so on, including dates. Whose spirit would not fail? Why not, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... makes them collapse into utter farce. Disgusted by their intrusion on his privacy, the Priapus adopts a simple but exceedingly vulgar expedient to alarm these appalling hags. In an instant they fall into the most abject terror, suspend their incantations, and, tucking up their skirts, make off for the more comfortable quarters of the city as fast as their trembling limbs can carry them—Canidia, the great enchantress, dropping her false teeth, and her attendant Sagana parting company with her ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... part in it duly acknowledged—the devil, I say, finding the house abandoned to him, rushed at once into brain and heart and limbs, and possessed. When Raymount saw the creature who had turned his hitherto happy life into a shame and a misery lying at his feet thus abject, he became instantly conscious of the whip in his hand, and without a moment's pause, a moment's thought, heaved his arm aloft, and brought it down with a fierce lash on the quivering flesh of his son. He richly deserved the punishment, but God would not have struck him that way. There ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... Lounsbury, addressed affectionately as Uncle by his nephew's fiancee, was in ill humor as he devoured his lunch. In the first place he hadn't been getting the attention that he had expected. He was used to being treated with a certain deference, an abject humility was as fitting to a man of wealth and position. These northern people, however, didn't seem to know how to fawn. They were courteous enough, gave good service, but were inclined to speak to him as man to man,—an inference ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... has been driven out of the vocabulary of good men. Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain it. How can we to whom so much has been given dare to think otherwise? How can you look at the bowed back and bent legs and abject face of that poor ploughman, who winter and summer has to drag his rheumatic limbs to his work, while you go a-hunting or sit in pride of place among the foremost few of your country, and say that it all is as it ought to be? You are a Liberal because you know ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... reigned paramount there under every costume; whilst theocracy made its last efforts there. Never had the sacerdotal system more completely swayed a nation, and never had a nation been reduced to a more abject state of degradation. The Inquisition was its government,—the auto-da-fes its triumphs,—bull-fights and processions its only diversions. Had the inquisitorial reign lasted a few years more, this people would have been no longer reckoned amongst ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... and nodding crest, They bore him to his dreamless rest, A cold and abject thing; Before the whisper of whose name Strong hearts had quailed in fear and shame, While nations knelt to fling The victor's laurel at his feet; Now gorgeous pall and winding-sheet, Were all that royalty could bring To mark ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... father's letter, she sent for Manar al-Sana and they set before her the prisoner drowned in her blood and pinioned with her hair, shackled with heavy iron shackles and clad in hair-cloth; and they made her stand in the presence abject and abashed. When she saw herself in this condition of passing humiliation and exceeding abjection, she called to mind her former high estate and wept with sore weeping ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... It was the calm of abject slavery. At command of that minute despot I began to toil frenziedly. At her word I read over and over, and over once again, the Rhymes of Mother Goose and the Tales of Peter Wabbitt. The Tin ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... to see a great, huddled, furry mass that crouched and cowered in a corner of the cage. A huge ape, Thorpe concluded, and it moaned and whimpered absurdly like a human in abject fear. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... never could have got through the difficulties he had to face, and his selfishness is the defect of his quality; but it is pitiable to find writers—Glasenapp, Ashton Ellis, Chamberlain and Wolzogen—sunk so low in abject flunkeyism as to glorify the defect as ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... was one resource: if I "didn't like it," meaning the state of things in Gombroon, I might "abdicate." Yes, I knew that. I might abdicate; and, once having cut the connection between myself and the poor abject islanders, I might seem to have no further interest in the degradation that affected them. After such a disruption between us, what was it to me if they had even three tails apiece? Ah, that was fine talking; but this connection with my ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the trial, Delano had maintained his confidence and composure; but at length the evidence of his own people, and the master and crew of the Helen, became so overwhelming that he lost all hope, and, overcome by the most abject fear, sunk down, and would have fallen, had he not been supported. Recovering himself a little, he broke forth into earnest petitions that his life might be spared. He made the most trivial and weak excuses for his conduct, utterly unlikely to avail him anything. He declared ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... witness; for it prevented that free intercourse with the people, by which a true insight to their manners can alone be acquired. Their laws seem very simple; he who kills is killed—shooting being the mode of execution. He who robs must make good; and, as few of the people are in abject poverty, this is usually done. Should they fail, a summary flogging is inflicted. At Cettigna is a small prison; I believe there is no other. When any one is there confined, he trusts entirely to his friends for subsistence. They are good-humoured, obliging, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... high Coliseum, Clear by the garlanded line cut of the Flavian ring. Beautiful can I not call thee, and yet thou hast power to o'ermaster, Power of mere beauty; in dreams, Alba, thou hauntest me still. Is it religion? I ask me; or is it a vain superstition? Slavery abject and gross? service, too feeble, of truth? Is it an idol I bow to, or is it a god that I worship? Do I sink back on the old, or do I soar from the mean? So through the city I wander and question, unsatisfied ever, Reverent so I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... the land.'[4] Bunyan alludes to this very pointedly in the preface to A Few Sighs from Hell:—'I am thine, if thou be not ashamed to own me, because of my low and contemptible descent in the world.'[5] His poor and abject parentage was so notorious, that his pastor, John Burton, apologized for it in his recommendation to The Gospel Truths Opened:—'Be not offended because Christ holds forth the glorious treasure of the gospel to thee in a poor earthen ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... upon by Captain Mathews, who in the name of Conway demanded an abject apology. This, of course, was refused, and a formal challenge was delivered. Calhoun at once accepted it, and referred Mathews to his friend ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... installed in large factories, which none but considerable capitalists could build, but once in operation the product of these factories undersold domestic labor, and ruined and evicted the population of whole regions like Halifax. These unfortunate laborers were thrust in abject destitution into filthy and dark alleys in cities, where they herded in masses, in misery and crime. In consequence grain rose in value, so much so that in 1766 prayers were offered touching its price. Thenceforward England imported largely from ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... them, they gave him a negative before debate. This, indeed, was abolished upon the accession of King William III., with many other oppressive and despotical powers, which had rendered our nobles abject slaves to the Crown, while they were allowed to be tyrants over the people. But if King James or his son had been restored, the government he had exercised would have been re-established, and nothing but the union of the two kingdoms could have effectually ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... that only the administration of Numidia belongs to him, but that the legal title and supremacy belong to Rome—the language of abject servility, by which he wishes to recommend himself to the protection of the senate. [79] Affines are those connected with one another by marriage, whereas cognati are relations by blood. [80] Sustinere is here the same as ferre. ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... is to protect this beautiful lady. So long as I love her you must guard this place. It is a life sentence. You are always on watch. You never sleep. You are her slave. She says you have a friendly smile. She wrongs you. It is a beseeching, abject, worshipping smile. I am sure when I look at her mine is equally idiotic. In fact, we are in many ways alike. I also am her slave. I also am devoted only to her service. And I never sleep, at least not ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... something exceptional and peculiar, that humanity must not be measured by the stature of Christ, let us remember that it was precisely thus that he wished it to be measured, delighting to call himself the Son of Man, delighting to call the meanest of mankind his brothers. If some human beings are abject and contemptible, if it be incredible to us that they can have any high dignity or destiny, do we regard them from so great a height as Christ? Are we likely to be more pained by their faults and deficiencies ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... him, unusually gracious, Gurley extended his hand to Claud; ushered him into the house; formally introduced him to his wife, an ordinary, abject-looking woman; and then to his daughter, the fair, dark-eyed, tall, shapely, and every way magnificent Avis Gurley, the girl who had so long, but unwittingly, been the object of ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... if recovering somewhat from his abject dread, the black knelt and shuffled about as if longing to ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... improvidence stared him in the face; and poor Jack, a thoughtless, but kind creature, and a most affectionate father, looked at his three motherless children with the acute misery of a parent who has brought those whom he loves best in the world to abject destitution. He found help, where he probably least expected it, in the sense and spirit of his young daughter, a girl ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... broken, wretched staircase was immediately before him, but no person appeared; he knocked again, vainly—and then, impatient of further delay, he ascended the dark, creaking stairs. His main wish, more particularly now that he witnessed the abject dwelling of the artist, was to relieve one, possessed of talent, but depressed by want. He pictured to himself a youth, whose eyes sparkled with genius, whose person was attenuated by famine. He ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... what is unthinkable is that we could love such a One—a God who had predestined all human sin and woe, who had fore-ordered things in such a manner that unnumbered hapless souls were doomed evermore to stumble and to suffer. Such a God might inspire a shuddering, wondering, abject awe, but never affection. Only a good God, aiming at the evolution of goodness, the making of character, could have endowed us with freedom, for only through such an endowment can such an ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... philosophy! by whose pure light We first distinguish, then pursue the right, Thy power the breast from every error frees And weeds out every error by degrees:— Illumined by thy beam, revenge we find The abject pleasure of an abject mind, And hence so dear to poor, weak womankind. But why are those, Calvinus, thought to 'scape Unpunished, whom in every fearful shape Guilt still alarms, and conscience ne'er asleep Wounds with ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... gone yawning to bed, he returned and sat at the window for a little, smoking hard and puzzling out the knots which confronted him. He had a dismal anticipation of failure. Not defeat—that was a little matter; but an abject show of incompetence. His feelings pulled him hither and thither. He could not utter moral platitudes to checkmate his opponent's rhetoric, for, after all, he was honest; nor could he fill the part of the cold critic of hazy sentiment; gladly though ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... suite, at Meaux, were almost entirely unprotected, the six thousand Swiss being still at Chateau-Thierry, thirty miles higher up the Marne. Instant orders were sent to bring them forward as quickly as possible, and the night of the twenty-eighth of September witnessed a scene of abject fear on the part of the ladies and not a few of the gentlemen that accompanied Charles and his mother. At three o'clock in the morning, under escort of the Swiss, who had at last arrived, the court started for Paris, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... one, two, or more of the districts, to be considered stronger and of more importance than the rest, were frequent causes of war in Samoa. Hostilities were often prevented by such acts as giving up the culprit, paying a heavy fine, or by bowing down in abject submission, carrying firewood and small stones used in baking a pig, or, perhaps, a few bamboos. The firewood, stones, and leaves, were equivalent to their saying, "Here we are, your pigs, to be cooked if you please; ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... the bulk of the people was to deepen "the strong delusion," as to Anti-christ, under which they laboured, so that they fed upon "The Lie," and became abject slaves in their wills and worship of the "Man ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... from the strange presence, and caught at a post for support. His self-possession was gone; he trembled like the most abject coward. Only for a moment—and then, when he looked again, ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... to become of me?" inquired Mrs. Winstanley in abject lamentation. "It is too hard that my own daughter should be a source of misery in my married life, that she should harden her heart against the best of stepfathers, and try, yes, actually try, to bring discord between me and the husband ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... have been discovering that vast numbers of our farming population live in a poverty more abject than that of many of the farmers of Europe whom we are wont to call peasants; that the prices of our products of agriculture are too often dependent on speculation by non-farming groups; and that foreign nations, eager ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt • Franklin D. Roosevelt
... get off. To stay seemed sure death. Dumb with fright, for a moment he stood in speechless terror. Then there rang across the wild, black river and through the quiet streets of the village, such a yell of abject fear as only a lusty lad of that age can give. It was a cry that chilled the heart of every one ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... in abject terror, unable to move. Her fear stricken eyes were wild and staring as the mountain ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... principal performance, the Divine Legation. During the following years he was the most conspicuous theologian of the day, dreaded and hated by his opponents, whom he unsparingly bullied, and dominating a small clique of abject admirers. He is said to have condemned the Essay on Man when it first appeared. He called it a collection of the worst passages of the worst authors, and declared that it taught rank atheism. The appearance ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... nowhere. They admitted that his brother's ranch was their next stopping-place, and Leander went through perfect contortions of apology and self-effacement before he could bring himself to ask them to do him a favor. It would have taken a very stern order of womankind to refuse anything so abject, and they blindly committed ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... time, Blassemare met his abject and agonized entreaties with a stoical scorn; at last, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... in the dining-room window, so that he knew his father had come home. At that all his sorrow and sense of a grievous wrong done to him was swallowed up in abject physical terror. Even later in life, when things had shrunk into reasonable proportions, it was difficult for him to see his father as others had seen him, as an unhappy not unlovable man, gifted ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... own it, but I was frightened, downright frightened. I quailed and I quaked. The sight of Sir Charles stepping out of the study window filled me with abject rapture. Metaphorically speaking, my craven soul squirmed at his heels. He was to me as a strong tower and house of defence.—But look here, Damaris, joking apart, tell me weren't you disturbed, didn't you hear ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... said over my shoulder. "If it had been Miss Cicester, you would have crawled about the room, muttering abject apologies and asking her to kick you. But as ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... not know of a man that is in greater danger of being ultimately lost than that man who never cares for religion except when he is scared. Because the truth of the matter is that a man of that kind does not care for goodness or for God at all. Not even in his moments of most abject terror does he want to be truly saved. He simply wants to escape the results of his sin. He does not want to pay the penalty for wrong doing. He wants to defeat the ends of justice. He is not interested in being good and pure and true. ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... He felt a cowardly satisfaction that with her was gone the secret of his treason. Then he began to doubt. I had MEANS to penetrate all his thoughts, as well as to know his acts. Then he became a slave to a horrible fear. He fled in abject terror to a convent. They still existed in Paris; and behind the walls of Jacobins the wretch thought himself secure. Poor fool! I had but to set one of my somnambulists to sleep. Her spirit went forth and ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... adjusted her lorgnette to see if by any chance her grandniece could be one of those rowdy children. When she discovered that it was not only Hinpoha, but her mother as well, frolicking so indecorously, she was speechless. Mrs. Bradford started to make an abject apology, but the sight of Aunt Phoebe sitting in the snowdrift with her lorgnette was too much for her and she went off into a peal of laughter, in which Hinpoha joined gleefully. It was weeks before Aunt Phoebe could be ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... seen Mr. Carvel angry once, and his soul had quivered. Terror, abject terror, seized him now, so that his knees smote together. As well stare into the sun as into the Colonel's face. In one stride he had a hand in the collar of Eliphalet's new coat, the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of abject terror upon her face as her eyes fell upon the man lying dead upon the carpet ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... the Hesperides, while Trebius gnaws such musty things as are tossed to a performing monkey on the town wall. But the distance is immeasurable between Juvenal's scorching truculence and Diderot's half-ironical, half-serious sufferance. Juvenal knows that Trebius is a base and abject being; he tells him what he is; and in the process blasts him. Diderot knows that Rameau too is base and abject, but he is so little willing to rest in the fat and easy paradise of conventions, that he seems to be ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... The utter helplessness of the man; his abject and complete surrender to the demon which possessed him—all this appalled him. He had seen many drunken men in his time—roysterers and brawlers, most of them—but never one like Poe. The poet seemed to have lost his identity—nothing of the man of ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... would be to get hold of all those on deck, and to lash their hands behind them, and then to summon a few at a time of those below to be treated in the same way. We soon had all those above deck secured. It seemed extraordinary that men should submit in so abject a manner to a party of men and boys. They appeared, indeed, entirely to have lost their wits. It shows what boldness and audacity will accomplish. However, it might have been the other way, and we might all have ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... you yourself, Which none else durst have done? but had I been That name, which I disdain to speak again, I needed not have sought your abject fortunes, Come to partake your fate, to die with you. What hindered me to have led my conquering eagles To fill Octavius' bands? I could have been A traitor then, a glorious, happy traitor, And ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... Their very attitudes were abject, and the expression of their countenances distrustful, surprised, and startled. After we had presented them with some scarlet cloth, which they immediately tied round their necks, they became good friends. This was shown by the old man patting our breasts, and making a chuckling ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... crafty enough to imitate the prosaic drawl of the printed broadside ballad, or the feeble interpolations with which the "gangrel scrape-gut," or bankelsanger, supplied gaps in his memory. The modern complete ballad-faker WOULD introduce such abject verses, but Scott and Hogg desired to decorate, not to debase, ballads with which they intermeddled, and we track them by their modern romantic touch when they interpolate. I take it, for this reason, that Hogg did not write ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... catch what he said. He was a tall man, but stooped at the shoulders, threw his head forward like a long-necked bird, and nodded as he walked. Beside my Dominican monolith he looked, what he was far from being, abject and poor-witted. I thought that he bent his head, as if it weighed down to the earth under the pitiless blows rained upon it by the inquisitor, as without gesture or modulation of the voice, this monstrous man ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... countenance change as Leah's did that moment: her ordinary sallow complexion became a sort of dead-white; from insolence, her manner grew cringing, almost abject; the shock deprived her of all power of speech; only directly I began she caught hold of my gown with both hands, as though to implore me to stop; but Mr. Hamilton shook off her touch angrily, and asked her if it looked as ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... not named Storri to Dorothy since that awful New Year's night. However, so worn to abject thinness was now his spirit on the constant wheel of fear that he carried Storri's latest word to her without apology. Richard must not visit Senator Hanway in his study. Mr. Harley could not go to Senator Hanway, he could not go to Richard; he ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... a common idea, both Quest and the Professor hurried out of the room and down the broad stairs. Their inspiration was a true one. The gamekeeper welcomed them with a smile of triumph. By his side, the picture of abject misery, his clothes ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he said; "you might know I shouldn't change. I've got one or two little jobs to see to about Bouncing's funeral. That woman's half a little cat and half an abject fool. Still, you can't help feeling a bit sorry for her. I dare say I can get things done by lunch-time; then I'll drive over the Fluella. I'll put up at the Kulm; but don't bother to write till you've got something settled. I'm not going to mess about saying good-by to people. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... and they were in fact seized, but afterwards liberated by a counter-order of Louvois. Heaven, however, took care of their punishment for the crime which they had committed upon my poor brother; for Langhans died in the most abject wretchedness, and Winkler went mad and beat his own ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and reproving him for his impertinence, declared if he ever again looked up at her balcony she would contrive his death. The tailor, perfectly cured of love for his superior in life, made the most abject submission, thanked her for his deliverance, hurried home, prayed heartily for his escape, and the very next day took care to move ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... was complete, and no resistance was attempted. For twenty-four hours the Creoles were in abject terror. Then Clark summoned their chief men together and explained that he came as their ally, and not as their foe, and that if they would join with him they should be citizens of the American republic, and treated in all respects on an equality ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... usage. It is perhaps the strongest instance of his externality. His wife may do what she pleases, and though he may groan, it will never occur to him to blame her; he has no weapon left but tears and the most abject submission. We should perhaps have respected him more had he not given way so utterly - above all, had he refused to write, under his wife's dictation, an insulting letter to his unhappy fellow-culprit, Miss Willet; but ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... worst of all. They began to spend all their time in dressing themselves up to the Nines. And the Nines would become their hopeless and abject slaves. But their cutting remarks about one another were ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... to this, at first with that look of abject pain on his face. Then as the substance of the man's confession dawned upon his mind he began to exhibit fresh interest that caused another expression, that of wild hope, to swiftly take the place of despair on ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... soon. Having been unable to do any work for months, and incurred, moreover, great expenses for medical assistance and other items connected therewith, Clare found himself now deeper than ever in debt, and with scarcely any prospects of raising himself from his abject state of poverty. Nevertheless, he struggled on bravely, once more trusting to his pen and poetical inspiration. That book-hawking would not open the road to success, but, if anything, lead him into an opposite direction, had become clear to him by this time, and ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... good result as she had expected. She had probably not thought that Linda would be quite so fierce as she had shown herself; but she had expected tears, and more of despair, and a clearer protestation of abject misery in the proposed marriage. Linda's mind would now be filled with the idea, and probably she might by degrees reconcile herself to it, and learn to think that Peter was not so very old a man. At any rate it would now be for Peter himself ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... with a becoming respect, but he never gave the smallest encouragement to aristocratical arrogance'; and his son Robert was not less manly and independent. He was too sound in judgment; too conscious of his own worth, to sink into mean and abject servility. But this factor, perhaps more than anyone else, did much to pervert, if he could not kill, the poet's ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... that in his art the realist is not amusing himself as much as ever is the teller of a fairy-tale, though he does not deliberately start out to do so; he is amusing, too, a large part of mankind. For, admitted that the abject, and the test of Art, is always the awakening of vibration, of impersonal emotion, it is still usually forgotten that men fall, roughly speaking, into two flocks: Those whose intelligence is uninquiring in the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... face in her hands again—a picture of total and abject misery. Her frame shook with sobs that she was ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... overview: About 80% of the population lives in abject poverty. Nearly 70% of all Haitians depend on the agriculture sector, which consists mainly of small-scale subsistence farming and employs about two-thirds of the economically active work force. The country has experienced little job creation since President PREVAL took office ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... plainly to be mistaken. Now there is a curious thing about cowards of this sort. When they are once found out they lose the little appearance of courage that they have taken such pains to maintain, and become at once the most abject and shameless dastards imaginable. That was what happened to Jake Elliott. When Sam conquered him so effectually on the occasion of the boot stealing, he lost all the pride he had and all his meanness seemed to come to the surface. If he had had a spark of manliness in him, he would ...
— Captain Sam - The Boy Scouts of 1814 • George Cary Eggleston
... and the accused man gave a strange, guttural sound, expressive of abject fear, and as the tall figure drew nearer, he rose to flee ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... scamp"—and by this time we were beside the fellow, whose face bore every mark of the most abject terror—"has been in league with the bushrangers for years; that he just entered into a contract with Jim Gulpin, to set his gang free, and that he picked the pocket of Maurice to get the key of ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... was getting beyond her. She had not intended to make him propose for at least a week and then he would have been abject and she majestic. She sprang to her feet with a swift sidewise movement that made her limp young body melt into a series of curves; and, standing at bay as it were, looked at him with a ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... light in which she was seeing everything on to her relations with him, which she had hitherto avoided thinking about. "What was it he sought in me? Not love so much as the satisfaction of vanity." She remembered his words, the expression of his face, that recalled an abject setter-dog, in the early days of their connection. And everything now confirmed this. "Yes, there was the triumph of success in him. Of course there was love too, but the chief element was the pride of success. He boasted of me. Now that's over. There's nothing to be proud of. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... for me by thy lamented predecessor, whose mistress I was in youth, and whose coadjutor I have been in age. I am now ready to minister to thee in the latter capacity. Be ruled by me; exchange thy abject superstition for common sense; thy childish simplicity for discreet policy; thy unbecoming spareness for a majestic portliness; thy present ridiculous and uncomfortable situation for the repute of sanctity, and the veneration ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... slow and weary shroud them in their spheres, While Titon's wife embosom'd by him lies, And world doth languish in a dreary guise: As looks a garden of its beauty spoil'd, As woods in winter by rough Boreas foil'd, As portraits razed of colours used to be: So look'd these abject bounds deprived of thee. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... disarmed the man without our receiving more than a small scratch apiece; and subsequently brought him to the humbleness of a fawning spaniel, by a mien and tone of half-threatening superiority which never fail of reducing such high-talking sparks to abject meekness. 'Twas a trick of pretended bullying, which we long-suffering Americans were driven to adopt in self-defence against certain derisive, contemptuous praters that came to our shores from Europe. But 'tis more to my purpose, as the biographer of Philip Winwood, to continue ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... as we have observed, we cannot admit it as a question whether any person through a whole life has always been wholly insensible,—we will not say (though well we might) to the good and true,—but to beauty; at least, to some one kind, or degree, of the beautiful. The most abject wretch, however animalized by vice, may still be able to recall the time when a morning or evening sky, a bird, a flower, or the sight of some other object in nature, has given him a pleasure, which he felt to be distinct from that of his animal appetites, and to which he could attach ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... hours a sailor handed him a note from Captain Fitz-Roy, full of abject apology for having so forgotten himself. Darwin was then but twenty-two years old, but the poise and patience of the young man won the respect and then the admiration and finally the affection of every man on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... by the Duchess only to be broken. She had already received money and the permission to make levies, and was fast assuming a tone very different from the abject demeanor which had characterized her in August. Count Horn had been used even as Egmont, Orange and Hoogstraaten had been employed, in order that their personal influence with the Reformers might be turned to account. The tools and the work accomplished ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... scarcely addressed a word to him, or he to them. True, he knew the elephants, but was he not possessed of evil spirits? He was always without rupees, too, a creature of the wild that could not seem to understand the gathering of money. As a man, according to the standards of men, he was an abject failure. ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... man stood his ground immovably against whatever might happen, only taking care not to throw himself away in an abject manner, and grieving from his heart that innocence had no safe foundation on which to stand. And the more sad also for this consideration, that before these events took place many of his friends had gone over to other more powerful persons, as in cases ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... never felt till now My abject fortune, withered fame so low: Seyd is mine enemy; had swept my band From earth with ruthless but with open hand, And therefore came I, in my bark of war, 1530 To smite the smiter with the scimitar; Such is my weapon—not the secret knife; Who spares a Woman's seeks not Slumber's ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... side with truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude make virtue of ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... abject poverty to a man who, having always had an exceptionally large allowance, had naturally never thought about money, and though Frank believed himself not to be extravagant because he had never made large debts, his ideas of the ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... long as we kept the thing a secret," Fred replied, with a feeling of mingled pity and contempt because of the abject terror displayed. "We must take you with us; but needn't tell ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... distracted confusion; a heaving, surging herd of humanity, smitten with a very frenzy of fright and despair, every sense of manly pride, of honor, and duty, completely paralyzed, and dead to every feeling save the most abject, pitiful terror. A number of officers could be distinguished amid the tumult, performing, with violent gesticulations, the pantomimic accompaniments of shouting incoherent commands, mingled with threats and entreaties. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... however, before Carley sank into abject and open wretchedness. She managed to keep pace with Glenn until exercise warmed her blood. At every little ascent in the trail she found herself laboring to get her breath. There was assuredly evidence of abundance of air in this canyon, but somehow she could not ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... when proposed by others. How much soever he looked forward with anxious expectation to the period when the negroes might with safety be liberated, he knew too well the effect which the long continuance of abject slavery produced upon the human mind to think of their immediate emancipation, a measure which at the present moment would be injurious both to them and to the colonies. He and those who acted with him were satisfied with having gained ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... myself under the bed-covers, in the most abject terror lest she might come back the same way; and, true enough, she did, with a most piercing cry. I never had much rest after that occurrence, as we had no ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... noise, panic-stricken as the danger from the shells threatened the cottage more and more nearly, Grace threw her arms round the nurse, and clung, in the abject familiarity of terror, to the woman whose hand she had shrunk from touching not five minutes since. "Where is it safest?" she cried. "Where can ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... transports of gratitude, but he turned hastily away and strode up the mountain, his cheek glowing as he remembered, too late, that his defiance would be scoffed at, as a boy's vaunt. By and by he arrived at the hamlet, where he found a prisoner, a scowling, abject fellow, already well beaten, and now ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... roaring, fighting pirates came alongside in dirty row-boats, and to our utter consternation we found these bloodthirsty brigands were to row us to land. Not one word could we understand in all that fearful uproar. We were watching them in a terror too abject to describe, when, to our joy, an English voice said, "I am the guide for the two American ladies, and here is the kavass which the American minister sent down to meet you. The consul at ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... arose and going inside the cabin closed the door. After that the dog lay in abject misery so deep that two big tears squeezed from his eyes and rolled down his face. To be shut out was worse than the blow. He did not take the trouble to arise from the wet leaves covering the cold earth, but closing his eyes went ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... up, Mohammed—I give her up. Who am I to dispute with the Mandarin Fo-Hi;' and performing an abject obeisance he ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... dominating power over others, and are found rather inclined to be too dogmatic in their opinions, and also often too unyielding and tyrannical. They are considered stiff-necked and obstinate, but the strange thing is that when they love they become the most abject slaves of all to the object of their devotion, and they will consider no sacrifice too great for that one being who holds or ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... sheen of Byzantine brocades and the quaint paraphernalia of bygone days inspired his apocalyptic words. His language in those telegrams and letters was highfaluting and bombastic. And I read other communications of his—mostly abject appeals for help—devoid of dignity and manliness, when the gloom of dissipated illusions was made unbearable by fear of dethronement and death. And the figure cut by the Tsarlet, who addressed those humble prayers—mostly to ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... infinity of guard-houses, at a multitude of town gates, and on every drawbridge, angle, and rampart, of a complete system of fortifications. Fifty times a day, I got down to harangue an infuriated soldiery about the Bottle. Through the filthy degradation of the abject and vile Roman States, I had as much difficulty in working my way with the Bottle, as if it had bottled up a complete system of heretical theology. In the Neapolitan country, where everybody was a spy, a soldier, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... change in the ministry. I hope you have received mine regularly since, that you may know all the consequent steps. I like the Pasquinades you sent me, and think the Emperor's(509) letter as mean as you do. I hope his state will grow more abject every day. It is amazing, the progress and success of the Queen of Hungary's arms! It is said to-day, that she has defeated a great body of the Prussians in Moravia. We are going to extend a helping hand to her ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... that all send about wagons. The Chinese carry every thing by hand; they seem altogether too meek and timid to have horses; but, as they adapt themselves to every thing, they have looked about, and met the difficulty, in part, by securing quite a number of poor, abject animals, with which they are beginning to appear in the streets. There is no change they are not willing to make; and their patience and perseverance are unconquerable, about staying and going on with their work. ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... for the tragic stage. Racine, according to his own confession, made a hazardous attempt with the Turks; it was successful, and since that time the necessary tragical dignity has been allowed to this barbarous people, among whom the customs and habits of the rudest despotism and the most abject slavery are often united in the same person, and nothing is known of love, but the most luxurious sensuality; while, on the other hand, it has been refused to the Europeans, notwithstanding that their religion, their sense of honour, and their respect for the female sex, plead so powerfully ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... were no two alike, and in the lead was a mastiff as large as any wolf that ever followed in the wake of a wounded stag, a tawny colored animal, with wide-open jaws that must have filled the watching girls with a sense of abject horror, even though they were apparently safe from attack up among the ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... tortures inflicted upon those who help the State—the absolute black silence of convict excommunication, the blows and kicks inflicted without opportunity for retaliation or complaint, the hostility of guards and keepers, the suffering of abject poverty, keener in a prison house than on any other foot ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... there was the fiendish-looking dog close on my heels. I could run no longer. For one moment I felt as if I should sink to the earth for sheer terror. The next moment a wholesome rage sent the blood to my brain. From abject cowardice to wild attack—I cannot call it courage—was the change of an instant. I rushed towards the little wretch. I did not know how to fight him, but in desperation I threw myself upon him, and dug my nails into him. They had fortunately found their way to his ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... is the unvarying statement of these missionaries, deduced from the experience of a hundred years of patient service and laborious exertions among the rudest and most abject tribes of human beings; that the moral nature of man must be in the first instance quickened, the conscience awakened, and the better feelings of the heart aroused, by the motives which Christianity brings with it, before any improvement can be hoped for in the outward ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... renewal of it from the widow, or even an account of the state of her brother's affairs. Her letters for three years past had remained unanswered, and she would have been exposed to the horrors of the most abject want, but for a pittance quarterly doled out to her by her ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... them," he said complacently, and went out to smoke a cigar and revel in himself. Through his mind went the proud reflection that people who came in contact with his granite will usually ended in quick and abject submission. ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... situated an extensive government agency for the sale of land in Michigan; whither, at the time, vast numbers of new settlers were daily proceeding in search of homes and happiness. I saw many of these on their way, and as they toiled to their new homes, they looked haggard, forlorn, and abject; and I thought I could distinguish in almost all, especially the women, an aspect of grief that indicated they were exiles, who had left behind all that tended to make life joyous and happy, to seek a precarious existence in an unknown wilderness. ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... his hand into the ashes, he poured a fistful with inarticulate low cries over his gray hairs; and the agitation of that obese little body on its knees had a lamentable and grotesque inconsequence, as inexplicable in itself as the sorrow of a madman. Full of wonder before his abject ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... of ridding herself of your pretensions forever? And if she had not felt an inexhaustible affection for you, would she have taken so much trouble, and imposed so many sacrifices upon herself to raise you from the abject condition in which she found you, and make you worthy of her? Well, you are always dreaming of the mighty deeds of the knight-errants of old: cannot you see that you are a noble knight condemned by your lady to rude ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... white, equal in political rights—as they were always equal in the sight of God—Mrs. Mott has made it her business to visit every colored church in Philadelphia. This we may regard as the formal closing of fifty years of work in behalf of a race which she has seen raised from a position of abject servitude, to one higher than that of a monarch's throne. But though she may have ended this Anti-slavery work, which is but the foundation of the destiny of the colored race in America, her influence is not ended—that cannot die; it must live and ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... must have loved him much, who, after seeing that look of hers, would have married him. But a moment after she was listening with abject ear to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... to "sit tight." I also know that the Happy Family was not at all likely to volunteer information of their lapse. And as for Applehead, the money burned his soul deep with remorse; so deep that he went around with an abject eagerness to serve Luck that touched that young man as a rare example of a bone-deep loyalty that knows no deceit. Which proves once more how fortunate it is that we cannot always see too deeply into the thoughts and motives of ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... from the touch and set his teeth. Ward tied his hands before him and told him to get up and go out to his horse. Buck obeyed with abject submissiveness, and Ward's lip curled again as he walked behind him to the door. He had not the slightest twinge of pity for the man. He was gloatingly glad that he could make him suffer, and he inwardly cursed his own humanity for being ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... wrung his hands. "I am desperate. Take these papyri, read, pay, then let me never see your face again." He flung the two rolls in the Prince's lap and sat in abject misery. ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... quotation his. After the form was locked up, Wan Lee took advantage of Webster's absence to remove the quotation, and substitute a thin piece of lead, of the same size as the type, engraved with Chinese characters, making a sentence, which, I had reason to believe, was an utter and abject confession of the incapacity and offensiveness of the Webster family generally, and exceedingly eulogistic of Wan Lee ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... an eminent Japanese moralist, is the name of a treatise on woman's duties which sums up the ideas common in Japan upon this subject. For two hundred years or more it has been used as a text-book in the training of girls. It enjoins such abject submission of the wife to her husband, to her parents-in-law, and to her other kindred by marriage, as no self-respecting woman of Western lands could for a moment endure. Let me prove ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... he had committed the grossest description of sacrilege, the sin from which the sovereign pontiff alone could absolve. In a short time the barbarous Clotaire passed from a state of rabid fury to one of the most abject despair, so that he required little persuasion from the clergy ere he sent a messenger to Rome, bearing rich presents, to beg for absolution from the pope. The messenger arrived at Rome just as Agapet was at the point of death; yet the business being urgent, and the presents valuable, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... do we perceive between the Spaniard of those times and the abject and degraded vassal of the princes of the Austrian dynasty! Religious sentiment was not less energetic, it was not less profound, in the second epoch than in the first; but it was a sentiment perverted by superstition, envenomed by fanaticism, and ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... Reeder had fled, disguised as a common laborer; and others were in hiding; and perforce the management of affairs had to be given into the hands of new men. A Committee of Public Safety was chosen, and this committee determined on a policy of abject submission and non-resistance. A committee of volunteers from Topeka offered their assistance, but were told: "We do not want you." Pusillanimous as Gov. Shannon was, he found he had a man to deal with more pusillanimous than himself, ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... on the lounge when Owen returned. She was pale, and a haunting fear, cringing, abject, was ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Charles himself ran a shrewd risk in assuming the crown, lest, should his relations with Norway become difficult, he might be forced to resign, and find himself—having abandoned his naval career for the throne—in a state of abject poverty. ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... to him by degrees. He shifted himself uneasily, as though he would have been glad to smother himself beneath the bedclothes, was it not for lack of resolution. A whipped hound never presented a more abject appearance. ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... Johnny's abject tone—he who had been so high-chested in the past—may have had its effect upon the boss. When Sudden spoke again his voice was almost kind, which is unusual, surely, for a man who ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... on in the world; but who would not hurt a worm. Indeed, his chambers were converted into a perfect dog-kennel, by his habit of bringing home stray and benighted curs, who were attracted by his looks in the street, and followed him with abject fondness. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... night, while the snow was falling in heavy flakes, and Huntsman's manufactory threw its red glare of light over the neighborhood, a person of the most abject appearance presented himself at the entrance, praying for permission to share the warmth and shelter which it afforded. The humane workmen found the appeal irresistible, and the apparent beggar was permitted to take up his quarters in a warm ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Oxford scholar, is of course a worshipper of Charles, and a hater of Puritans. We do not wish to raise a prejudice against so young a man by quoting any of the ridiculous, and often somewhat abject, rant with which he addresses their majesties on their return from Scotland, on the queen's delivery, on the birth of the Duke of York, and so forth; for in that he did but copy the tone of grave divines and pious prelates; but he, unfortunately for his fame, is given (as young geniuses are sometimes) ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... notaries, who was peculiarly qualified, by his dexterity in business, as well as by his former intimacy with the Gothic prince. When they were introduced into his presence, they declared, perhaps in a more lofty style than became their abject condition, that the Romans were resolved to maintain their dignity, either in peace or war; and that, if Alaric refused them a fair and honorable capitulation, he might sound his trumpets, and prepare to give battle ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... a curious fact that those of my clients who made great sums from time to time in ways similar to these rarely had any money; most of them died in abject poverty. Sooner or later all ran foul of the law and had to give up to the lawyers all they had ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... direction of autocracy. He consulted neither boyard nor priest. He deposed the Metropolitan and banished him to a monastery. Prince Kholmski, who was married to one of Vassili's sisters, was thrown into prison for failing to show abject respect. When one of the boyards complained that "The grand duke decided all the questions, shut up with two others in the bedchamber," the noble was promptly arrested, condemned to death, and executed. He interrupted the objection ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... the stranger had turned his head and was looking at us—never shall I forget the infinite pathos of his expression at that moment. There was something in the face which betrayed misery and dejection so abject that for days afterwards the look haunted me. Again I saw the lips ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... been. For to the eyes of all the Utopians, except very few, which had been in other countries for some reasonable cause, all that gorgeousness of apparel seemed shameful and reproachful; in so much that they most reverently saluted the vilest and most abject of them for lords; passing over the Ambassadors themselves without any honour; judging them by their wearing of golden chains to ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... upon me after the length of my age, and the vicissitudes of days and circumstances, I am the son of Sheddad, who held dominion over mankind and each tract of the whole earth. All the stubborn troops became abject unto me, and Esh-Sham from Misr unto Adnan. In glory I reigned, abasing their kings, the people of the earth fearing my dominion; And I beheld the tribes and armies in my power, and saw the countries and their inhabitants dread me. When I mounted, I beheld my army comprising a ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... "all a woman has to do in this world is contained within the duties of a daughter, a sister, a wife, and a mother." She has sustained at least one of these relations to even the poorest of us; but I wonder if there is a man here to-night so miserably abject and forlorn and God-forsaken as not, some time in his life, to have been able to regard her in the delightful relation of sweetheart? I hope not. I would rather he had had a dozen, than no sweetheart at all. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... of what The Westminster Gazette termed "the abject surrender to the Army" of the Government over the Curragh incident, when officers were declared to have refused to serve against Ulster, not much in the way of stern measures was to be expected now. The Government on the occasion of the Curragh incident ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... not he dined with old Mr. Bowdoin in their college club once a month for forty years? But a low-browed fellow who was sitting behind the counsel at the table was heard to mutter "Treason." Beside him in the prisoner's dock sat the slave; not cowed nor abject, though in chains and handcuffs, but looking straight before him at the low-browed man who was his master, as a bird ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... assassins fear that they might be compelled to disgorge. So they suddenly charged the son with having killed his father. The most frightful circumstance about the case is not the piteous injustice suffered by the son, but the abject way in which Cicero speaks of Sulla, comparing him to Jupiter who, despite his universal beneficence, sometimes permits destruction, not on purpose but because his sway is so world-wide, and scouting the idea of its being possible for him to share personally in such ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... ensued I am powerless to describe. My pen is unequal to it. The doctor arose, not so much angry as astonished, white and incredulous. "What did you do that for, any way?" he asked, glaring fiercely at my brother-in-law. Charles was all abject apology. He began by profusely expressing his regret, and offering to make any suitable reparation, monetary or otherwise. Then he revealed his whole hand. He admitted that he was Sir Charles Vandrift, the famous millionaire, and that he had suffered egregiously from the endless machinations ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... as a proof that the French are, as well as the English and Americans, a speculative nation: one solitary instance of a portion of the French having, about sixty or seventy years ago, been induced to embark their capital, is brought forward, while the abject supineness of the French population of Lower Canada, in juxta-position with the energy and enterprise of the Americans, has for half a century stared us ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... opened and closed again, and he swayed weakly backward and forward, and choked as if his throat were dry and burning. Even to such a hardened connoisseur in crime as Gallegher, who stood closely by, drinking it in, there was something so abject in the man's terror that he regarded him with what was almost ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... Theron. He laid down his knife and fork, and gazed at his wife in frank surprise. She had so accustomed him, of late, to a demeanor almost abject in its depressed docility that he had quite forgotten the Alice of the old days, when she had spirit and courage enough for two, and a notable tongue of her own. The flash in her eyes and the lines of resolution ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... ecstatic to be true. Oh! Should she ever think of me! Were it only possible she ever should be mine!—The pleasure is too exquisite! It is insupportable!—Let me gaze and wonder at humble distance, in silence and in awe!—Do not call me abject—Yet, if I am so, do; tell me all that ought to be told. It is not before her rank that I bend and sink. Being for being I am her equal: but who is her equal in virtue?—Heavens! What a smile did she bestow on me, when I took the money I mentioned to thee! It has sunken ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... a boy, thrust by mischance into a man's body,—a boy who could complacently pluck a butterfly, wing from wing, or cower in abject terror before a lean, nervy fellow, not half his size. He was a selfish cry-baby, hidden behind a man's mustache and stature, and glossed over with a skin-deep veneer of culture and conventionality. ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... reported, discussed, and voted on or not, as the case might be, in vain. And in the meantime, in New York, in Philadelphia, and elsewhere in the North, the timidity of Capital showed itself in great Conciliation meetings, where speeches were applauded and resolutions adopted of the most abject character, in behalf of "Peace, at any price," regardless of the sacrifice of honor and principles and even decency. In fact the Commercial North, with supplicating hands and beseeching face, sank on its knees in a vain attempt ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... spoke; his upraised hand had sunk at his side, at the first address of Matilda to her enemy, and the dagger had fallen from his hand upon the sward, where it might he seen glittering in the rays of the pale moon. His head was bent upon his chest in abject shame, and he seemed as one who had suddenly been ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... considered to be truth. Virtue is thus perverted; mark thou its subtle ways. O best of virtuous men, man's actions are either good or bad, and he undoubtedly reaps their fruits. The ignorant man having attained to an abject state, grossly abuses the gods, not knowing that it is the consequence of his own evil karma. The foolish, the designing and the fickle, O good Brahmana, always attain the very reverse of happiness or misery. Neither learning ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and quite indifferent to the astonishment his presence occasioned, he crept in, shut the door, kissed his greasy glove as servilely as if it were the dust, and made a most abject bow. ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... you shall see such an army enter Rome as never before invaded it. I assert that within three miles of this place, at the gates of this capital of Christendom, human beings are living lives more abject than that of ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... destroyed his courage, but not the less was he a man of fear, not the less he felt himself a coward. Again he got into a damp brake and lay down, in a minute or two again got up and went on, his fear growing until, mainly through consciousness of itself, it ripened into abject terror. Loneliness seemed to have taken the shape of a watching omnipresent enemy, out of whose diffusion death might at any moment ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... neighbourhood—had been never near him; that the old friends and associates of his boyhood, who had been amongst these fancied visitors, were for the greater number dead and passed away long before this time; that he had been, in every dream and every fancy of that weary interval, the abject slave of his own hallucinations. Little by little his strength came back to him by very slow degrees—so slowly, indeed, that the process of recovery might have sorely tried the patience of any man less patient than Gilbert. There came a day ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... by a detested rival; and, in the first transports of her indignation, devoted them as sacrifices to her vengeance. Nor was her surprise so much the effect of his dissimulation, as of his want of taste and discernment. She inveighed against him, not as the most treacherous lover, but as the most abject wretch, in courting the smiles of such an awkward dowdy, while he enjoyed the favours of a woman who had numbered princes in the train of her admirers. For the brilliancy of her attractions, such as they at present shone, she appealed to the decision of her minister, who ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... and indignation his uncle's abject submission to the Spaniards, and endeavoured to form a league with the other chiefs to rescue him out of their hands. But they, from jealousy, declined to join him, declaring themselves unwilling to do ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... going-on of day by day, without either of us guessing at it, wore that down till it had no more meaning for you or me than any other faded remembrance in this interminable footling with truth that we call life. And this one—the whole abject meaning of it lies simply in the fact that it has pierced down and shown us up. I had no courage. I couldn't see how feeble a hold I had on life—just one's friends' opinions. It was all at second hand. What I want to know ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... The abject one found a glove of Grizel's, that she did not know she had lost, and put it in his pocket. There it lay, unknown to her. He knew that he must not even ask them to bury it with him in his grave. This was a little thing to ask, but too ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... bestowed gifts, and he laughed and sported with anybody and everybody. He was constantly going to the theatre and kept getting up banquets: in fine, he left nothing undone to win our favor. However, he was not trusted; his servility was so abject that it made him an object of suspicion. Everything out of the common, even if it seems to be a kindness to somebody, is regarded by men of ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... is not dead, the ideal love, but indwells, a redeeming power, wherever there are desolate hearts and minds to be updrawn and united by its ministry; a power so lustral in its nature, that no abject and despairing thought creeps into its presence but is purified and exalted by its regard. This love brings hope and cheerful constancy; with a shining falchion it affrights into their natal darkness the monstrous forms of despair, and lends ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... her that all that was past should be as a dream, a sad and ugly dream, but one to which no reality was attached, never occurred to him. He must still be the master, and, in order that his masterdom might be assured, full and abject confession must be made. Yet he had such an idea of his wife, that he felt that no such confession would be forthcoming, and therefore to him it appeared ever more and more impossible that they ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... was a trifle more abject than usual, and steps more halting, meekly followed the procession of actors around the ring, led by Dimple, the Snake Charmer. Nickey's entree created a most profound sensation, and was greeted with tumultuous applause—a tribute both to his equestrian feat and ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... 'loose wild beast,' her horror was as great as her thankfulness for the supposed escape. In curious contrast to the natural tameness of the Kinkajou was the natural untameness of a beautiful little Night-Monkey, belonging to the purser. Its great owl's eyes were instinct with nothing but abject terror of everybody and everything; and it was a miracle that ere the voyage was over it did not die of mere fright. How is it, en passant, that some animals are naturally fearless and tamable, others not; and that even in the same family? ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... mirror of our fickle state, Since man on earth, unparalleled! The rarer thy example stands, By how much from the top of wondrous glory, Strongest of mortal men, To lowest pitch of abject fortune ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... sign language began to fail her. Kalliope continued to be greatly pleased with herself and proud of her performance. After a long struggle the Queen made her understand that she had behaved not well, but very badly. Kalliope grovelled in abject apology. The impression finally left on her mind was that she was to blame for anticipating her mistress' action. The Queen, so she thought, would have liked to fell the German sailor herself, would indeed have ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... them. What was I? Suddenly, one of them, a young boy surely not more than twenty-one or twenty-two, caught sight of us, and he fixed his eyes upon us in a curious, concentrated way as if to assure himself we were real. And then, all at once, abject terror leapt into his eyes. His mouth opened and the cords of his neck stood out. He threw both arms before his face as if to ward off somebody or something. He began to scream out quick, unintelligible words in a high-pitched, ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... death so cruelly intolerable that often they were driven to entreat and implore the spectators or the executioners, for dear pity's sake, to put an end to anguish too awful for man to bear—conscious to the last, and often, with tears of abject misery, beseeching from their enemies the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... angry with them, but they were in such abject fear of the Indians that they paid little heed to their master's words, but went and huddled themselves together upon the straw in the sitting-room, remaining there without movement until all was over. Terence was now recalled from the gate, which ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... had terrified him into abject submission. He spoke the truth; he would have been willing to say or do anything just then. Lecoq profited by this disposition; and then clearly and concisely gave the lad his instructions. "And now," added he, "I must see and hear you. Where can ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... me, for I examined and found that he had already been stealing and selling his ammunition: this is all preparatory to returning to the coast with some slave-trader. Nothing can exceed the ease and grace with which sepoys can glide from a swagger into the most abject begging of food from the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... admiring posture at the door of his cave. It was Flavius, the honest steward, whom love and zealous affection to his master had led to seek him out at his wretched dwelling and to offer his services; and the first sight of his master, the once noble Timon, in that abject condition, naked as he was born, living in the manner of a beast among beasts, looking like his own sad ruins and a monument of decay, so affected this good servant that he stood speechless, wrapped up in horror and confounded. And when he found utterance ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... among these men; he had admired Nathan's book, he had reverenced the author as an immortal; Nathan's abject attitude before this critic, whose name and importance were both ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... watched him eat, plying him with food and then with question after question about the trip, about Barbara Redding and about Molly's going to school. Mormon made abject apology for talking too much and Sandy told how close a shave ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... to have been distantly removed from her, to have reacquired at a bound the dizzy importance he had possessed for her before she became his stenographer. She found it impossible to realize that this was the Ditmar who had pursued and desired her; at times supplicating, apologetic, abject; and again revealed by the light in his eyes and the trembling of his hand as the sinister and ruthless predatory male from whom—since the revelation in her sister Lise she had determined to flee, and whom she had ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... one than that offered to him by the old barrister's reception of this news. Mr. Elphick's face not only fell, but changed; his expression of almost sneering contempt was transformed to one clearly resembling abject terror; he dropped his pipe, fell back in his chair, recovered himself, gripped the chair's arms, and stared at Spargo as if the young man had suddenly announced to him that in another minute he must be led to instant execution. ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... full upon it, clearly revealing its strange, unearthly whiteness, and the bright flashing eyes, gazing dreamily past the terror-stricken man looking down on her, with white, livid lips and blanched, horror-stricken face. His eyes almost leaped from their sockets in abject terror, as Lester Stanwick gazed on the upturned face by ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... reached the bridge across the Ramsey River she saw a girl standing as if waiting for her. The girl was all powdered with snow and she had on a thick veil, but Maria immediately knew that she was Lily Merrill. Lily came up to her as she reached her with almost an abject motion. She had her veiled face lowered before the storm, and she carried herself as if her spirit also was lowered before some wind of fate. She pressed timidly close to ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... both have reference to the writer's progress in going over the tribes of Germany, those tribes growing less and less free as he advances eastward: already under more subjection than the foregoing tribes, but not yet in such abject slavery, as some we shall soon reach, sc. in the next chapter, where ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... expected that angels would come hurrying and scurrying after one in a spectacle like this. "What has a man," says Blank in his Angels of the Nineteenth Century,—"What has a man who consents to be a knee-bumping, elbow-jamming, foothold-struggling strap-hanger—an abject commuter all his days (for no better reason than that he is not well enough to keep still and that there is not enough of him to be alone)—to do with angels—or to do with anything, except to get done with it as ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... dreadful for Joan to see, because she felt sorry for him, and divined that behind them would rise the darker, grimmer force of the man. And she was right, for suddenly he changed. That which had seemed almost to make him abject gave way to a pale and bitter dignity. He took up Dandy Dale's belt, which Joan had left on the bed, and, drawing the gun from its sheath, he opened the cylinder to see if it was loaded, and then threw the ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... what a time we had. The elephants got down off that pyramid so quick it would make your head swim, and old Bolivar trumpeted in abject fear, and tried to break away, but pa came along with a tent stake and hit Bolivar over the head, and told the trainer to put the elephants back into the pyramid and hold them there till the bell rung for them to cease their stunt. The trainer couldn't do anything with them, ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... but afterwards liberated by a counter-order of Louvois. Heaven, however, took care of their punishment for the crime which they had committed upon my poor brother; for Langhans died in the most abject wretchedness, and Winkler went mad and ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... he makes one desperate and final effort to escape, but ceases all struggling as you come up, and behaves in a manner that stamps him a very timid warrior,—cowering to the earth with a mingled look of shame, guilt, and abject fear. A young farmer told me of tracing one with his trap to the border of a wood, where he discovered the cunning rogue trying to hide by embracing a small tree. Most animals, when taken in a trap, show fight; but Reynard ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... poor creature of a mortal)—Ver. 591. "Homuncio." He uses this word the better to contrast his abject nature as a poor mortal with the majesty of Jupiter. St. Augustin refers to this passage. The preceding line is said by Donatus to be a parody on ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... evident that our prisoner did not expect much mercy; for we could see that his face was absolutely livid when, pistol in hand, either of us approached to examine his bonds; and once, in his abject dread, he shrieked aloud to Lilla to come and save ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... the plebeians, whose position, as M. Fustel de Coulanges himself points out, corresponded very closely to that of the Sudras. The plebeians had no religion and no ancestors; they did not belong to a family or a gens. [192] They were a despised and abject class, who lived like beasts outside the proper boundary of the city. The touch of the plebeian was impure. [193] "When tribunes were created a special law was necessary to protect their life and liberty, and it ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... resistance, still clutching frantically, as though for safety, at that white-satin gew-gaw, unable to crawl even from its deadly neighbourhood, able only to scream and scream and scream. In her brain she was dimly conscious of balancing, or striving to balance, the abject shame which had him now in thrall against the one compelling act of courage which had flung him grandly and madly on to the point of danger. It was only for the fraction of a minute that she stood watching the two entangled figures, the infant with ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... the deepest sorrow. But apart from the sorrows of ill-starred love, she caught glimpses of something else—a terrible something which she did not understand. Dark forms would now and then appear to her, gliding through the paradise of love, disgraced and abject. The sacred name of love was linked with the direst shame and the deepest misery. Among people whom she knew, things happened from time to time which she dared not think about; and when, in stern but guarded words, her father chanced to speak of moral ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... exhibits were ample, and many of them strikingly unique. Few, even at the South, believed that the Southern States could set forth such displays. The fact that this was possible so soon after a devastating war, which had left the section in abject poverty, was a speaking compliment to the land and to the energy ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... ventured to bring you a manuscript," began Katherine, smiling with all her might, with an abject desire to propitiate the arbiter of her ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... curious fact that those of my clients who made great sums from time to time in ways similar to these rarely had any money; most of them died in abject poverty. Sooner or later all ran foul of the law and had to give up to the lawyers all they had managed to ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... Mrs. Sims, a tall, stout, and resolute widow, with a heavy hand and a shrewish temper. With a huge bunch of keys at her side, and an eye quick to detect the smallest waste and the slightest irregularity, she kept the household in terror, and her master (poor little man!) in almost abject vassalage. A specimen of one of their daily breakfast dialogues may be worthy ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... rich, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful is man! How passing wonder He who made him such, Who centred in our make such strange extremes! From different natures marvellously mixed, Connection exquisite of distant worlds! Distinguished link in being's endless chain! Midway from nothing ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... over the whole abject effect, but I descended the stairs and passed through the great hall of the hotel with a miserable feeling of running the blockade. Suppose I met anyone! Suppose anyone knew me! Suppose—I flushed miserably at the thought—Charmion herself ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... he had no energy, and no idea of business. If no one came to buy his wares of him, they simply stayed on hand and were spoiled, and so he lost the value of them. So he died of want at last. He had ill-treated his wife till she was almost idiotic, and she lived in a state of abject wretchedness. It was so painful to see this laziness and incurable stupidity, and I so much disliked the sight of the tile-works, that I never came this way if I could help it. Luckily, both the man and his wife were old people. One fine day the tile-maker had a paralytic ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... I rescued him From abject wretchedness. Let that go by; I never reckon'd yet on gratitude. And wherein doth he wrong in going from me? He follows still the god whom all his life He has worship'd at the gaming-table. With My fortune, and my seeming destiny, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... unless they comprehend it, unless their morals be fixed on the same immutable principles as those of man, no authority can make them discharge it in a virtuous manner. They may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent. ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... my private or public life that you don't meddle with—as it pleases you? Half a dozen times a day when I'm with you, you make me feel myself a fool or a brute. And then I go home and write you abject letters—and apologize—and explain. Do you think I'd do it for any other woman in the world? Do you dare to say you don't know ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... saw in any other dog the sudden transition from discretion, not to say abject cowardice, to blazing and permanent valor. From his earliest years he showed a general meanness of blood, inherited from many generations of starved, bekicked, and down-trodden forefathers and mothers, resulting in a condition of intense abjectness ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... heedless hands! How few see aught to live for, but the outward sunshine of prosperity, which is an idle sunshine, compared with the ever-strengthening light that may grow in the spirit! How strong, how great, how beautiful may life be, when smiled upon by our Creator! how weak, how abject, how trampled upon, when turned ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... and to their slumbers peace! —But of the poor man ask, the abject poor, Go and demand of him, if there be here, In this cold abstinence from evil deeds, And these inevitable charities, Wherewith to satisfy the human soul. No—man is dear to man: the poorest poor Long for some moments in a weary life ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... 's looks Matter against me, and his eye revil'd Me as his abject object. At this instant He bores me with some trick. He's gone to the King; I'll follow, ...
— The Life of Henry VIII • William Shakespeare [Dunlap edition]
... the lady just mentioned. But simply because she is a lady, and because she had her duties as hostess to attend to, she is unfit to carry out the actual work of investigating the phenomena in question. Some of her assistants sat up all night, with loaded guns, in a condition of abject fright; others, there is reason to suspect, manufactured phenomena for themselves; and nearly all seem to have begun by assuming supernatural interference, instead of leaving it for the final explanation of whatever might be clearly proved to be ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... frightened as anybody. He stood six feet one in his stockings, and was a match for any two in the country side, and yet, I am happy to think, he was as bad as any one. As for me, to say that my heart became like water and my knees like soft wax, is to express in mild words my state of abject terror. There was no need to inquire what the maids thought, for smothered shrieks, louder and louder as each peal of knocks vibrated through the little house, proclaimed sufficiently their sentiments ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... Science, not only natural science—physics and chemistry—but also the scientific organisation of the State as an instrument of war, has so developed the means of destruction as either to blot out humanity or to leave the greater part of mankind in abject and bitter slavery to the powers that can wield most effectively the instruments of death and of torture, if war between the leading nations breaks out again after an interval of seeming peace. How warfare has changed within living memory! Five-and-twenty years ago ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... be a successful knave. He had told more lies in his time, and undergone more baseness of stratagem in order to stave off a small debt, or to swindle a poor creditor, than would have suffered to make a fortune for a braver rogue. He was abject and a shuffler in the very height of his prosperity. Had he been a crown prince, he could not have been more weak, useless, dissolute or ungrateful. He could not move through life except leaning on the arm of ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... every mother's son of you, like the eels at Melun; and now, begone! out of my sight, quick, you vile canaille!" The discomfited ruffians turned and fled, thankful to make their escape, and forgetful for the moment of their painful wounds and bruises; such abject terror did the young duke's anger inspire in the breasts of those hardened villains. When the poor devils had disappeared, Vallombreuse threw himself down on a heap of cushions, piled up on a low, broad divan ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... sentry at the edge of an orchard of plum-trees, between the road and the river. The night was black as ink, and as soon as his comrades left him and he found himself alone in the deep silence of the sleeping fields he was conscious of a sensation of fear creeping over him, a feeling of abject terror such as he had never known before and which he trembled with rage and shame at his inability to conquer. He turned his head to cheer himself by a sight of the camp-fires, but they were hidden from him by a wood; ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Interpreters of the Laws; both Laws and States were now only mere Phantoms, which he could raise or annihilate at his Pleasure. It is true, that this has made the King of the Kofirans the most powerful Monarch in the Universe; but perhaps, it also makes the People the most miserable; tho' an abject Veneration for their Kings will not permit them to own their Slavery, or lament ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... church, and the brown of the monk's robes, and evolve a thrilling mental picture therefrom. The tag game and her noisy little companions vanished. She was peopling the place with stealthy Indians. Stealthy, cunning, yet savagely brave. They bore no relation to the abject, contemptible, and rather smelly Oneidas who came to the back door on summer mornings, in calico, and ragged overalls, with baskets of huckleberries on their arm, their pride gone, a broken and conquered people. She saw them wild, free, sovereign, ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... will not the most miserable of men be still more miserable in a public station? Master of others when he is not master of himself; like a sick man who is compelled to be an athlete; the meanest of slaves and the most abject of flatterers; wanting all things, and never able to satisfy his desires; always in fear and distraction, like the State of which he is the representative. His jealous, hateful, faithless temper grows worse with ...
— The Republic • Plato
... in the twinkling of an eye; the telling it takes double, treble the time of the happening. Before Alessandro was fairly aware what had befallen, Ramona and Margarita were disappearing from view under the garden trellis,—Ramona walking in advance, stately, silent, and Margarita following, sulky, abject in her gait, but with a raging whirlwind in ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... some. Whether they come to all mankind I know not; whether the squalid Andaman or the hideous Fuegian ever feel them I know not; nay, I know not whether they ever come, whether they ever can come, to the wretched outcasts of earth's abject poverty and fathomless degradation; whether they ever come, whether they ever can come, to the cruel and the proud, to the malicious and the mean, to the cynical and discontented; yet, if they come not to these, God help them! for they are the surest ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... rising scholar, the elegant essayist, was an unparalleled decoration; of his kind, of course. Personally, we laugh at him; you had better not, unless you are fain to show that the higher world of polite literature is unknown to you. Sir Willoughby could create an abject silence at a county dinner-table by an allusion to Vernon "at work at home upon his Etruscans or his Dorians"; and he paused a moment to let the allusion sink, laughed audibly to himself over his eccentric cousin, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... o'erlabour'd wight, So abject, mean, and vile, Who begs a brother of the earth To give him leave to toil; And see his lordly fellow-worm The poor petition spurn, Unmindful, though a weeping wife And ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... have demanded the most abject and degrading obedience. In order to please them, man must lay his very face in the dust. Of course, they have always been partial to the people who created them, and they have generally shown their ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... to them he tried to speak. But it was useless. For now he was not Richard any more. He was not even Witherington, the crippled fighting-man of the Chevy Chase ballad. He was—he was the winged sea-gull, with wild, pale eyes, hiding—abject yet fierce—among the vegetable beds in the Brockhurst kitchen-gardens, and picking up loathsome provender of snails and slugs. Roger Ormiston, calm, able, kindly, yet just a trifle insolent, cigar in mouth, sauntered ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... composing the second and more numerous class of the Arabs; then the great mass of the inhabitants, who had sunk into the state of absolute helots. These last were hired peasants or fellahs who cultivated the land, and lived in abject poverty. There was also a class of Arabs, namely, the Bedouins or rovers, who would never attach themselves to the soil, but were the children of the desert. These wandering Arabs, divided into tribes on both sides of the valley, numbered nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... have not to learn that, though a stanch republican in America, he was the most abject courtier in France; and though a violent defender of liberty and equality on the other side of the Atlantic, no man bowed lower to usurpation, or revered despotism more, in Europe. Without talents, and almost ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... to misconduct herself in this garden with a police sergeant, and then to sit on his lap and weep. Yet this last I do not wholly believe, for the sergeant in question is a veteran scarcely able to put one foot before the other. Also, Jonah, though a brute, lives in abject fear of his stepmother." ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... princes; no subjects—only slaves. But no sooner are calamities approaching than they grow discouraged, and in their cowardice they degrade themselves before their people so far as to flatter them in the most fulsome and abject manner, making promises to them which they are neither able nor willing to fulfil. I have been told that these loquacious Germans, in their impotent wrath, have called me the 'Scourge of God!' Well, then, they shall be right. To these petty princes who are playing the part of great sovereigns, ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... assistance, and that was Lois. He had thought of her before, and wondered if she had heard the news of David's disappearance. He felt that it was unlikely as no one would think of carrying the news there. As he stood for a few minutes looking upon Betty who was sitting before him the very embodiment of abject misery, he believed that Lois was the only one who could comfort her, and perhaps induce her to reveal the cause of her unusual state of agitation. Telling the girl to be brave, and to keep up hope for David's safe return, he left the Haven and hastened down the road ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... twisting the wrong way, or threatening to snap in sunder, or refusing to allow his fingers to slip the knot, or doing something that was dreadfully uncomfortable, and productive of perspiration; and two or three times he was reduced to the abject necessity of asking his friends to ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... like him to trumpet about the streets the brave nature, the wise conduct, and great glory of the King Diabolus. He would range and rove throughout all the streets of Mansoul to cry up his illustrious Lord, and would make himself even as an abject, among the base and rascal crew, to cry up his valiant prince. And I say, when and wheresoever he found these vassals, he would even make himself as one of them. In all ill courses he would act without bidding, and do ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... room, of small size and destitute of all furniture save a truckle bed, a heap of clean straw in a corner, on which lay a black shawl, a deal chair, and a small table. Abject poverty was stamped on the whole place. On the bed lay the dead man, covered with a sheet. Beside it kneeled, or rather lay, the figure of a woman. Her dress was a soiled and rusty black. Her hair, fallen from its fastenings, ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Mediterranean is a mere bit of a sea, when you look at it on the map—a pocket sea, to be regarded with mingled contempt and affection; but you learn to respect it when you find that it takes four clear days and nights of abject misery merely to run across its eastern basin from Brindisi to Alexandria. I respected the Mediterranean immensely while we lay off the Peloponnesus in the trough of the waves with a north wind blowing; I only began to temper ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... in early bondage unless you give them your best service now—down to our own Phillips and Gough,—Wendell Phillips against the traffic in human blood, John B. Gough against a slavery among his fellow-men more hard and galling and abject than the one just spoken of; for by it the body merely is in bondage, the mind and soul are free, while in this, body, soul, and mind are enslaved. So you can easily discover the great purpose, the great cause for service, behind each ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... one of the highest misfortunes which can befall any man whatsoever; for it not only leaves him little better than the beasts which perish, exposed to a thousand inconveniences against which there is no guard but that of a clear and unbiased reason, but it renders him also base and abject when under misfortunes, the sport and contempt of that wicked and debauched part of the human species who are apt to scoff at despairing misery, and to add by their insults to the miseries of those who ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... the triumph of him that begot, And the travail of her that bore, Behold they are evermore As warp and weft in our lot. We are children of splendour and flame, Of shuddering, also, and tears. Magnificent out of the dust we came, And abject from the Spheres. ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... some one else see what was so perfectly clear to himself, he said, 'Well, what I say to you, Hapgood, is just precisely what I said to my wife. I felt that the girl had a claim on us. In the first place, she'd turned to us in her abject misery for help and that alone established a claim, even if it had come from an utter stranger. It established a claim because here was a human creature absolutely down and out come to us, picking us out from everybody, ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... be confounded with mean-spiritedness, or that abject state of feeling which permits a man to surrender the rights of his character to any one who chooses to infringe upon them. While it thinks little of personal considerations, it thinks the more of character and principle. It is really a powerful aid to progress. When ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... was going to say. I am an abject idiot, which, all things considered, is not remarkable.—Ever your affectionate and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Wellington, and Gough, and Hardinge, and Napier, and Bentinck, and Ellenborough, and Dalhousie, and all the John Company that has come of them; from the tremendous and overwhelming SAHIB, to that most profoundly abject of human objects, the Hindoo PARIAH, (who approaches thee, O Awful Being! O Benign Protector of the Poor! O Writer in the Salt-and-Opium Office! on his hands and knees, and with a wisp of grass in his mouth, to denote ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... clear conscience, as it was only a question of priority and did not involve any support of the system, which he deemed far inferior to that of Copernicus. The following year saw friction between the two astronomers, and we learn from Kepler's abject letter of apology that he was entirely in the wrong. It was about money matters, which in one way or another embittered the rest of Kepler's life, and it arose during his absence from Prague. On his return in September, 1601, Tycho ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... of quitclaim for personal service. But the manifestation and expression of sympathy may make the gift of immeasurably more worth and efficacy. Considerate courtesy, delicacy, and gentleness are essential parts of beneficence. There are very few so abject that they do not feel insulted and degraded by what is coldly, grudgingly, superciliously, or chidingly bestowed; while the thoughtful tenderness which never forgets the sensibilities of those whom it relieves, inspires comfort, hope, and courage, ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... treated from the first hour of his captivity. Not a rough word was said to him; and his own unbridled outbursts were received with as much indifference as the abject prayers and supplications which were their regular reaction. The ebbing life was ordered on that principle of high humanity which might be the last refinement of calculated cruelty. The prisoner was so tethered ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... from him. He had never so unreservedly qualified her as while confronted in thought with such a possibility; in spite of which there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his long riddle the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his situation would be an abject anticlimax. It would represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of which his existence could only become the most grotesques of failures. He had been far from holding it a failure—long as he had waited for the appearance ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... Rene de Ronville essayed to break out of his embarrassment and resume equal footing with the girl so suddenly become his commanding superior; but the effort disclosed to him as well as to her that he had fallen to rise no more. In his abject defeat he accepted the terms dictated by Alice and was glad when she adroitly changed her manner and tone in going on to discuss ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... I could see, being close by, having been attracted by the row as most of us were, had altered their expression, now flashing with a peculiar glare as the Chinaman, with a more abject bow than before to the ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... myself of a very nervous turn!" he says, presently, with a smile. "Nancy, you will laugh at me, but I assure you upon my honor that all the way home I have been in the most abject and deadly fright: at every puff of wind I thought we were infallibly going to the bottom: whenever the carriage rocked in the least to-day on the way down, I made up my mind we were going to smash! ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... criminal. Franz, on the other hand, represents the scheming intellect sundered from conscience and natural feeling. He is a monster of cool, calculating, hypocritical villainy. At the end he cowers in abject terror before the phantom conscience that he has reasoned out of existence in the first act. The portrait of the two brothers, as thus conceived, is crudely simple. There are no delicacies of shading, no subtleties of psychological analysis. ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with 80% of the population living under the poverty line and 54% in abject poverty. Two-thirds of all Haitians depend on the agriculture sector, mainly small-scale subsistence farming, and remain vulnerable to damage from frequent natural disasters, exacerbated by the country's widespread deforestation. A macroeconomic ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... "'If mind and body spotless to this day, If I have kept my bed still undefiled, Not for myself a sinful wretch I pray, That in thy presence am an abject vilde, Preserve this babe, whose mother must denay To nourish it, preserve this harmless child, Oh let it live, and chaste like me it make, But for good fortune elsewhere ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... into his own hands and work out, in spite of opposition and misfortune, a satisfactory career tasks strength and resolution to the utmost.—It is so much more easy to give over the determination of our fate to some outside power that the abject surrender to fortune is a serious temptation. Air-castles and day-dreams, and idle waiting for something to turn up, are the feeble forms of this temptation. The impulse to run away from danger, and the impulse to plunge recklessly into risks, are the two forms of temptation which ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... denounced the use of the sign of the cross. Suddenly a harsh voice was heard in the royal closet. It was Elizabeth's. She chidingly bade Mr. Dean return from his ungodly digression and revert to his text. The next day the frightened dean wrote a most abject apology ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... can understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science and religion from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying grotesquely in the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and most abject terrors. Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet the pretences of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud like hats in a gust of wind. But when ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... gone, and was on its way to St. Petersburg, a mental condition of such abject misery settled down upon her that the thought of the endless days and nights of idle monotony which would be her lot if she returned home, and the awful void of her mother's absence, became intolerable. ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... the storms of the Arctic regions of North Greenland and Grant Land, the only word I can use to describe them is "terrible," in the fullest meaning it conveys. The effect of such storms of wind and snow, or rain, is abject physical terror, due to the realization of perfect helplessness. I have seen rocks a hundred and a hundred and fifty pounds in weight picked up by the storm and blown for distances of ninety or a hundred feet to the edge ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson
... wise beyond her years, he thought, but one even far less knowing could hardly have been in two minds about his present abject condition. The pushed-up collar of his coat did not entirely hide the once-white collar beneath it, the beard had reached its perhaps most distressing stage of development, and the suit was rumpled out of all the nattiness for which it had been advertised. Even the plush ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... liberal like a bigot; the champion of truth has foolishly and vainly lied; the steadfast friend has betrayed his neighbor, the just person has oppressed him. This is the fruitful moment, apparently so sterile, in which character may spring and flower anew; but the mood of abject humility in which the theorist of his own character is plunged and struggles for his lost self- respect is full of deceit for others. It cannot last: it may end in disowning and retrieving the error, or it may end in justifying it, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... imagine nothing more shameful than the life of a man who continues his administrations after he has ceased to believe in them, especially a Catholic priest, so precise and explicit are the Roman Sacraments. A very abject life it is to murmur Absolve te over the heads of parishioners, and to place wafers on their tongues, when we have ceased to believe that we have power to forgive sins and to turn biscuits into God. A layman may have doubts, ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... its accumulation the summit of his ambition; its reckless sacrifice in his daughter's honor appeared the only adequate expression of his love. The intervals of his devotion were passed in idle boasting, and to me he detailed every incident. There was something really touching in the abject way in which he mentioned each trifle concerning her. Little circumstances connected with her daily life were described as one would describe the traits of some rare animal. His career of degradation seemed to have blunted every ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... away; and in that moment of humiliation and abject fear, drank all the bitterness of ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... the Disagreeable Girl shine—everywhere else she is an abject failure. The much-vaunted Gibson Girl is a kind of de luxe edition of Shaw's Disagreeable Girl. The Gibson Girl lolls, loafs, pouts, weeps, talks back, lies in wait, dreams, eats, drinks, sleeps ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... for the abject way in which he had been fooled. The man Victor had given Jeekes his orders in Dutch and had purposely picked a soft spot on the roadside and slowed down the car in order that the unwelcome intruder might be ejected as safely ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... impossible to regard with surprise or with condemnatory feelings, the riots of the misguided "Luddites" who went about destroying machinery in their blind desperation. Ned Lud, after whom the Luddites were named, was an idiot, but wiser men, finding themselves reduced to abject poverty through the introduction of the giant machines, could see no further than he. It was not to be expected that the masses should understand that it was not the machines, but the institution of their private ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... In that instant of abject terror, two things struck Puffin. One was that the Major looked at the open door behind him as if meditating retreat, the second that he carried a Gladstone bag. Simultaneously Major Flint spoke, if indeed that reverberating thunder of scornful indignation ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... of the bound man. His eyes were dilated with terror, his weak lower jaw had dropped, and his mouth was wide open. So overcome was he, that he had no strength left to stand, so his entire weight rested upon his bonds. Never was there a more pitiable object of abject terror and cowardice. But the Indians did not seem in the least affected by their captive's misery. With stern, impassive faces they went on with their chanting, which steadily increased in ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... second sight; he speaks Spanish to Consuelo and calls her by her name when he first sees her, though he has not the faintest sane idea who she is or whence she comes; and he reduces his family to abject misery by ensconcing himself for days in a grotto which can be isolated by means of a torrent turned on and off at pleasure by a dwarf gipsy called Zdenko, who is almost a greater nuisance than Albert himself. Consuelo discovers his retreat at the risk of being drowned; and various ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... (Prayers, abject prayers for themselves. None for him. Not one word. They were cowards, afraid for themselves, afraid of death; their funk had made them forget him. It was as if they didn't believe that he was there. And, after all, it ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... our deaths in the darkness. Moreover, I guessed that the path was narrow and bordered by some gulf, for as we went I heard stones fall, apparently to a considerable depth, while the poor horse lifted its feet gingerly and snorted in abject fear. At length we saw daylight, and never was I more glad of its advent, although it showed us that there was a gulf on our right, and that the path we travelled could not measure more ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... unhappiness of unhappiness, that it ceases to be interesting. The five books of the Tristia, written during the earlier years of his banishment, still retain, through the monotony of their subject, and the abject humility of their attitude to Augustus, much of the old dexterity. In the four books of Epistles from Pontus, which continue the lamentation over his calamities, the failure of power is evident. He went on writing profusely, because there was ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... and was about to skip up the bank, when, with forbidding arm, she cried: "Don't you approach me!"—and he stood checked and abject, one foot planted on the bank, looking up, ready to dart for her in her Oriental dress, flimsy, baggy at the girdle, her arms bare, her fingers clasped before her, making convex the two tassels of the girdle, from her ears depending circles of gold large enough to hoop with, a saffron ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... of the population lives in abject poverty. Nearly 70% of all Haitians depend on the agriculture sector, which consists mainly of small-scale subsistence farming and employs about two-thirds of the economically active work force. The country has experienced only moderate job creation ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... in a state of abject subjection, Berry, whose heart was hard that day, but whose diplomacy was impeccable, discovered a thing of moment. There was to be a procession of strikers from two factories in Manitou, who would throw down their tools or leave their machines at a certain moment. Falling into line these strikers ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... had alone prevented his formal proposals; but now that he was informed (he could scarcely believe his senses or command his passions) that her relations wished to force her into a BARBAROUS marriage with a foreigner of MOST FORBIDDING APPEARANCE, and most abject circumstances, he lost not a moment in laying at her feet his own hand and fortune. And he did this the more confidently, inasmuch as he could not but be aware of Miss Jemima's SECRET feelings towards him, while he was proud and happy to say, that his dear and distinguished cousin, Mr. Sharpe Currie, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... O Munificent; forget them,' said Ah Moy, deeply contrite. 'Carried away by excitement, your abject slave considered but lightly what he then so foolishly said, and now so fervently regrets—and—and—let's drop this powwow, Quong Lee. I have no time for it! I tell you, man, I ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... was alone, and might easily have been killed by stones or arrows. Why then did a crowd of savages manifest such abject terror? Why did they take to flight? Why did they appear incapable of defending themselves ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... of the Emperor's progress, strength, and weakness. The six hundred thousand armed Frenchmen were used up, and the whole fabric falls; the six hundred thousand are reduced to sixty thousand, and straightway all the rest of the fine imperial scheme vanishes: the miserable senate, so crawling and abject but now, becomes of a sudden endowed with a wondrous independence; the miserable sham nobles, sham empress, sham kings, dukes, princes, chamberlains, pack up their plumes and embroideries, pounce upon what money and plate they ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the plantation to the slaves' quarters which crouched blistering in the sun. Cowed as they were, as only ramshackle buildings can be cowed, they presented their gray boards, each eaten with four or five knot-holes, to the elements in abject submission. The door of one hung loose by a rust-encased hinge, of which only one screw remained on duty, and that by sheer willpower of two or three threads. Legree could not quite make out how many threads there were on the screw, but he guessed, and Simon Legree's guess was nearly ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... other, 'was haunted, and had been uninhabited for years: each intending occupant had been at once driven out of it in abject terror by a most grim and formidable apparition. Finally it had fallen into a ruinous state, the roof was giving way, and in short no one would have thought of entering it. Well, when I heard about this, I got my books ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... same people there were another set of traditions, illustrated sufficiently for our purpose by the story of Prometheus. According to this the first age of humanity was its worst and poorest and lowest age. The people lived in abject poverty and misery. They were even neglected on the part of the gods, who did not seem to care for them, but treated them with contempt. Prometheus is represented as pitying their evil estate, caring more for them than the gods did; and so he steals the celestial fire, and comes down to ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... with the terrified expression of a mediaeval wrongdoer, writhing under an ecclesiastical curse. He made abject apology. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... thoughts at all beyond their own busy contrivances how to live and to indulge their craving passions,—all these, by the mesmerism of the heart, and by means of that great witness, conscience, which God, in mercy, leaves as a light from heaven in the most abject dwelling on earth, can, to some extent, read the living epistle of a renewed soul, written in the divine characters of the Holy Spirit. They can see and feel, as they never did anything else in this world, the love which calmly ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... It was a tedious business, but progress became more rapid when de Courtois realized that he was in the hands of those who meant well by him. It was noticeable, too, as his senses returned and the panic glare left his eyes, that his expression changed from one of abject fear to a lowering look of suspicious uncertainty. He peered at Steingall and the hotel clerk many times, but gave Curtis and Devar only a perfunctory glance. Oddly enough, the fact that the two latter were in evening dress seemed to reassure him, and it became ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... gradually became too numerous, there being only one apartment for ourselves, and such of our servants as were not imprisoned elsewhere. Some of them were frightened out of their senses, and the state of abject fear and trembling in which one Limboo arrived, and continued for nearly a week, was quite distressing* [It amounted to a complete prostration of bodily and mental powers: the man trembled and started when ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... be induced to pay largely for mercy. His spirit sank under the terrors of death. When brought to the bar of the Old Bailey he not only pleaded guilty, but disgraced the illustrious name which he bore by abject submissions and entreaties. He protested that he had not been privy to the design of assassination; but he owned that he had meditated rebellion, professed deep repentance for his offence, implored the intercession ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... elapsed since that August evening when, terrified by his brother's sudden and violent death, Edward Duke of York had dictated his will in terms of such abject penitence. The effect of that terror was wearing away. The unseen world, which had come very near, receded into the far distance; and the visible world returned to its usual prominence. And York's ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... so abject a reliance upon the spoken word that it brought a laugh from Christopher's lips. "How ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... she became quiet. They sat there a long time in silence. At last he ran up the white flag of abject surrender ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... more, in heartrending accents, and—with his eyes half-shut and mouth wide open, his arms and hands helplessly pendent, his legs astraddle, and his whole aspect what is expressively styled in the Norse tongue begrutten—howled in abject despair! ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... matter, did my old Italian's acolytes; for I had made up my mind that he must be Italian, and an Italian he was. There was something great, something too of the despot about this old Homer bearing within him an Odyssey doomed to oblivion. The greatness was so real that it triumphed over his abject position; the despotism so much a part of him, that it ...
— Facino Cane • Honore de Balzac
... in the light of the moon he saw that he was surrounded by vast hordes of men. No one spoke to him, however; but he saw by the many glances that were cast at him, that he was an abject of great interest. ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... pick her up, and set her on his knee, and whittle wonderful wooden dogs and dolls and boats and boxes for her with his jack-knife, as Walley Johnson and the others did. With Walley she would hardly condescend to coquet, so sure she was of his abject slavery to her whims; and, moreover, as must be confessed with regret, so unforgiving was she in her heart toward his blank eye. She merely consented to make him useful, much as she might a convenient ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... from her with every breath, the wretched woman allowed herself to be helped to the chair, into which she sank with an air of abject despair. ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... of 1848 lay banked along the Vermilion in utter and abject confusion. Organization there now was none. But for Banion's work with the back fires the entire train would have been wiped out. The effects of the storm were not so capable of evasion. Sodden, wretched, miserable, chilled, ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... Burrard's command was a short one, for on the following morning Sir Hew Dalrymple superseded him. Thus in twenty-four hours a battle had been fought and the command of the army had been three times changed, a striking proof of the abject folly and incapacity of the ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... separation, certainly for years, perhaps for ever, from all that happiness: the hopelessness of his condition as a prisoner of war at a time when war seemed chronic in Europe, without prospect of cessation. And in the abject misery of his soul—misery all the more intense because of his peculiar sensitiveness of nature—he thus bewailed in secret and with ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... weaknesses and their meannesses, as elsewhere in their glory and beauty. And not so much their meanness and weakness, as that of those who have distorted these innocent servants of truth to become tools of falsehood and the abject instruments of the extinction of all ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was the most abject-looking specimen of humanity imaginable. My camera in its case was securely fastened on my shoulders as a knapsack, and so, with the exception of a slight derangement, which I soon readjusted, no damage was done. But the motor-cycle suffered ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... had gone yawning to bed, he returned and sat at the window for a little, smoking hard and puzzling out the knots which confronted him. He had a dismal anticipation of failure. Not defeat—that was a little matter; but an abject show of incompetence. His feelings pulled him hither and thither. He could not utter moral platitudes to checkmate his opponent's rhetoric, for, after all, he was honest; nor could he fill the part of the cold critic ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... home, and there found Dr. Rush and Dr. Glentworth, who was later to be the physician of Mr. Washington. My aunt, preceding me, had taken possession. Mr. Warder was reduced to a condition of abject obedience, and for a month and more my aunt hardly left her girl-boy's pillow. Indeed, it was long before I was let to see him, and then he was but a spectre of himself, with not enough blood to blush with. Our officers very promptly left for New York the day ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... tale to relate all their follies, surrounded as they were by a bountiful nature and a kindly people, and yet soon reduced to abject want. In the party there were brawling soldiers and piratical sailors, with only a few quiet, decent artisans and shop-keepers, but with a swarm of reckless young nobles, who had nothing to recommend them but a long name, and who expected to prove themselves Pizarros in fighting and treasure-getting. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... Stavrogin will come later. But I will note now as a curious fact that of all the impressions made on him by his stay in our town, the one most sharply imprinted on his memory was the unsightly and almost abject figure of the little provincial official, the coarse and jealous family despot, the miserly money-lender who picked up the candle-ends and scraps left from dinner, and was at the same time a passionate believer in some visionary future "social harmony," who at ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... On his return to the capital Peter, in order to see what progress his son had made in mechanics and mathematics, asked him to draw something of a technical nature for his inspection. Alexius, in order to escape such an ordeal, resorted to the abject expedient of disabling his right hand by a pistol-shot. In no other way could the tsarevich have offended his father so deeply. He had behaved like a cowardly recruit who mutilates himself to escape military service. After this, Peter seemed for a time to take no ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sailor handed him a note from Captain Fitz-Roy, full of abject apology for having so forgotten himself. Darwin was then but twenty-two years old, but the poise and patience of the young man won the respect and then the admiration and finally the affection of every man on board ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... an interpreter, came to say that I must go to Newgate. This is a prison where the most wretched and abject criminals are kept. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... be acknowledged this unduly dependent spirit has been often shown. A greater wrong could not be done to orphans, when grown to maturity, than to treat them as children, unable to make their own way in the world. This would be to destroy all strength of character, and turn them into abject, and at the same time discontented, paupers. Few have been so destitute of common sense as to have supposed that in this way they were to be supported, but there has been a tendency to expect the missionaries to set them out on a career of self-support, and remove ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... for him, also, there is no respect of King or Pope; he has placed himself above law, and substituted his own will for justice. With his pen, as Cellini with his dagger, he assassinates; his cynicism serves him for a coat of armour. And so abject is society, so natural has tyranny become, that he extorts blackmail from monarchs, makes princes tremble, and receives smooth answers to his insults from Buonarroti. These three men, Machiavelli, Cellini, and Aretino, each in his own line, and with the proper differences ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... of the most pitiful objects in nature is a man or an animal in a condition of abject fear; and an examination of Plate XIV. in Man Visible and Invisible shows that under such circumstances the astral body presents no better appearance than the physical. When a man's astral body is thus in a state of frenzied palpitation, its natural tendency ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... perhaps the strongest instance of his externality. His wife may do what she pleases, and though he may groan, it will never occur to him to blame her; he has no weapon left but tears and the most abject submission. We should perhaps have respected him more had he not given way so utterly - above all, had he refused to write, under his wife's dictation, an insulting letter to his unhappy fellow-culprit, Miss Willet; but somehow I believe ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and shuddered, twisted to his side, and at last sat up weakly. In his eyes there was now a great terror, while in place of his drunkenness was only fear and faintness—abject fear of the great bulk that sat and smoked and stared at him so fishily. He felt uncertainly of his throat, ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... compensation for her loss. Poland was surrounded by Austria, Russia and Prussia. The population consisted of two classes—the nobles who possessed all the power, and the people who were in a state of the most abject feudal vassalage. By the laws of Poland every person was a noble who was not engaged in any industrial occupation and who owned any land, or who had descended from those who ever had held any land. The ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... principally in answering objections on the present occasion) that the three first cases are not strictly analogous to that of our West Indian slaves, whose emancipation we are seeking. It will be contended, that the slaves in our West Indian colonies have been constantly in an abject and degraded state. Their faculties are benumbed. They have contracted all the vices of slavery. They are become habitually thieves and liars. Their bosoms burn with revenge against the whites. How then can persons in such a state be fit to receive their freedom? The slaves, on the other ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... without resorting to malodorous measures—stamping his little feet in rage, jumping up, spluttering and hissing and flourishing his brush like a warlike banner above his head—then hardly could I restrain my dog from turning tail and flying home in abject terror. My cruel persistence was rewarded at last. Continued shouts, cheers, and hand-clappings began to stir the brute to a kind of frenzy. Torn by conflicting emotions, he began to revolve about the skunk at a lumbering gallop, barking, howling, and bristling up his hair; and at ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... with an impossible desire, I saw Xerxes and his army, tossed and glittering, rank upon rank, multitude upon multitude, out of sight, but ever regularly advancing, and with confused roar of ceaseless music, prostrating themselves in abject homage. Or, as with arms outstretched and hair streaming on the wind, he chanted full lines of the resounding Iliad, I saw Homer pacing the Aegean sands of the ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... convincing her; that in fact she could not comprehend the drift of his arguments. Philip, it is manifest, must already have made use of very harsh language towards the queen respecting her conduct in this affair, for she deprecates his further displeasure in very abject terms; but yet persists in her resolution with laudable firmness. Her husband was so far, however, from yielding with a good grace a point on which he had certainly no right to dictate either to Mary or to her sister, that soon afterwards he sent ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... all the attempts made on this plantation to improve the moral nature of these men and women, Governor Aiken, during a yellow-fever season in Savannah after the war, while visiting the poor sufferers, intent upon charitable works, found in the lowest quarter of the city, sunk in the most abject depths of vice, men and women who had once been ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... been most mutinous and turbulent during the voyage were now most devoted and enthusiastic. Some begged favors of him, as if he had already wealth and honors in his gift. Many abject spirits, who had outraged him by their insolence, now crouched at his feet, begging pardon for all the trouble they had caused him and promising the blindest obedience for ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... affect us? where then is the remedy but in the philosophy I have mentioned, which, when once by a long course of meditation it is reduced to a habit, teaches us to set a just value on everything, and cures at once all eager wishes and abject fears, all violent joy and grief concerning objects which cannot endure long, and ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... Demosthenes to make his fellow citizens accept this proposition.[35] In 1779 Laurens said: "I would advance those who are unjustly deprived of the rights of mankind to a state which would be a proper gradation between abject slavery and perfect liberty, and besides I am persuaded that if I could obtain authority for the purpose, I would have a corps of such men trained, uniformly clad, equipped and ready in every respect to act at the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... plan it is to praise servants too highly for doing well what they are expressly paid to do, I intimated my satisfaction to my landlord by a mere careless nod and smile of approval. He, who waited on my every gesture with abject humility, received this sign of condescension with as much delight as though it had come from the king himself, and I could easily see that the very fact of my showing no enthusiasm at the result of his labors, made him consider me a greater man than ever. I now went to my own ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... never existed. And now, my dear boy, I must request that you call for your discharge, and come home as soon as possible. I cannot exist without you, and I require your assistance in the grand work I have in contemplation. The time is at hand, the cause of equality will soon triumph; the abject slaves now hold up their heads; I have electrified them with my speeches, but I am getting old and feeble; I require my son to leave my mantle to, as one prophet did to another, and then I will, like him, ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... Soul, by casting me away from you to Antonio!—Ha! (cry'd he, starting) what said you, Madam? What did Ardelia say? That I had bless'd your Soul with Hopes! That I would cast you away to Antonio!—Can they who safely arrive in their wish'd-for Port, be said to be shipwreck'd? Or, can an abject indigent Wretch make a King?—These are more than Riddles, Madam; and I must not think to expound 'em. No, (said she) let it alone, Don Henrique; I'll ease you of that Trouble, and tell you plainly that I love you. Ah! (cry'd he) now all my Fears ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... were obstinate, but unable to restrain his ambition: his ambition was still less dangerous than the tyranny and violence of his temper. An implacable enemy, but a lukewarm friend; insolent to his inferiors, but abject to his superiors; though in his whole character and deportment he was almost diametrically opposite to the king, he had the fortune, beyond any other minister, to maintain, during the greater part of his reign, an ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... the stuff they gave him, loathed it, paid and staggered on. When he reached his hotel he crept upstairs, dreading to meet any of the harsh-faced people who frowned as he passed them. He had done abject things these last three days to conciliate them—tipped the waiter, ordered food, not that he might eat it but that he might pay for it, bowed to the landlady—all to save the shrinking of his sore and quivering nerves. In vain! It seemed to him ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hesitation &c. (irresolution) 605. nervousness, restlessness &c. adj.; inquietude, disquietude, worry, concern; batophobia[obs3]; heartquake[obs3]; flutter, trepidation, fear and trembling, perturbation, tremor, quivering, shaking, trembling, throbbing heart, palpitation, ague fit, cold sweat; abject fear &c. (cowardice) 862; mortal funk, heartsinking[obs3], despondency; despair &c. 859. fright; affright, affrightment[obs3]; boof alarm[obs3][U.S.], dread, awe, terror, horror, dismay, consternation, panic, scare, stampede [of horses]. intimidation, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... but yesterday I rescued him From abject wretchedness. Let that go by; I never reckon'd yet on gratitude. And wherein doth he wrong in going from me? He follows still the god whom all his life He has worship'd at the gaming-table. With My fortune, and my seeming destiny, He made the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... elapsed before their arrival, the court was in a state of abject alarm, but at one o'clock the Swiss arrived; and two hours later the court set out, under their protection, for Paris. The Prince of Conde, who had with him but some four hundred gentlemen, for the most part armed only with swords, met ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... explained Dallas. 'That sort of thing has been going on the whole term. If the head of a House is an abject lunatic, there's bound to be ructions. Fags simply live for the sake of kicking up rows. It's meat and ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... years have passed; and where The Gallic bugles stirred the air, And, through breached batteries, side by side, To victory stormed the hosts allied, And brave foes grounded, pale with pain, The arms they might not lift again, As abject as in that old day The slave still ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... however abject its inhabitants may appear, where the most daring and ambitious can venture to usurp the supreme power without first obtaining a hold on public opinion; we cannot have a stronger proof of this fact, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... hope that Gabriella will never marry," replied Mrs. Carr with the uncompromising bitterness of abject despair; "the Carrs all seem to marry ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... interrupting him, "his blood is noble; nor is he that abject thing, my Lord, you speak him. He is my lawful son, and Sicily can boast of few houses more ancient than that of Falconara. But alas! my Lord, what is blood! what is nobility! We are all reptiles, miserable, sinful creatures. ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole
... to the streaming, shivering wretch he made a noose in the rope he held, manipulating it as if he were really going to hang the abject creature, in whom the fire of rage had quite become extinct. Then the sailors took hold of him, and he uttered a despairing shriek; but he cooled down as he found that he was only to be made a prisoner, and was thrust below, with ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... error be possible—thereupon rising again at once in the organ charged to repair this error. Turn where we may, it towers high over our heads. It is the circular ocean, the tideless water, whereon our boldest and most independent thoughts will never be more than mere abject bubbles. We call it Nature to-day; to-morrow, perhaps, we shall give it another name, softer or more alarming. In the meanwhile it holds simultaneous, impartial sway over life and death; furnishing the two irreconcilable sisters with the magnificent and familiar weapons that adorn ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... one word," she answered, with an air of abject confession. "It don't interest me a mite! I give because it's my bounden duty, but I'll be whipped if I want to knit warm mittens all my life, an' fill poor barrels. Sometimes I wisht I could git a chance to provide ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... followed her into the room, carrying her impedimenta, wore the bored expression of the R.A. who is expected to admire the work of an outsider. He was the abject slave of his good-natured wife—she was good-natured, in spite of her love of scandal—and his only fault from her point of view, and his greatest one in the eyes of people in general, lay in an unfortunate habit of thinking aloud, a dangerous characteristic, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... Kaiser and Crown Prince had fled for safety to Holland, a nation they had asserted existed only by the long sufferance of Germany. Before the fatal day (November 11, 1918) of the armistice—like the falling of a house of cards—had occurred a succession of abject surrenders, as one by one of the nations composing the Teutonic Alliance had fallen before the crushing blows of the ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... fortify his body against infection, half to fortify his heart against conscience. Tom had never reproached him for his share in the public folly. Indeed, Tom had never reproached a single soul. Poor wretches who had insulted him had sent for him, with abject shrieks. "Oh, doctor, doctor, save me! Oh, forgive me! oh, if I'd minded what you said! Oh, don't think of what I said!" And Tom had answered cheerfully, "Tut-tut; never mind what might have been; let's feel ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... lowpower magnifying glass: 2 erotic photocards showing a) buccal coition between nude senorita (rere presentation, superior position) and nude torero (fore presentation, inferior position) b) anal violation by male religious (fully clothed, eyes abject) of female religious (partly clothed, eyes direct), purchased by post from Box 32, P. O., Charing Cross, London, W. C.: a press cutting of recipe for renovation of old tan boots: a Id adhesive stamp, lavender, of the reign of Queen Victoria: a chart of the measurements of Leopold Bloom compiled ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... evil, I have learnt that he cannot keep the good out of him. When the boy found himself in my clutches, he turned on me a look of such terror that it disarmed me at once, and, confounded and distressed to see a human being in such abject fear, a state which in my own experience I knew to be horrible, ashamed also that it should be before such a one as myself, I would have let him go instantly, but that I could not without first having comforted him. But not a word of mine could ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... a long time over dinner. Eve was between a cousin of mine—who was a member of Parliament, a master of foxhounds, and in his way quite a distinguished person—and the old Earl of Enterdean, my godfather; and they were both of them obviously her abject slaves. No one seemed in the least inclined to move and it was nearly eleven o'clock before we passed into the private room I had engaged, where coffee and some bridge tables awaited us. We broke up there into little ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Ajib and smote him with his mace a smashing blow and a swashing, that went nigh to beat in his ribs, and seizing him by the mail gorges tore him from the saddle and cast him to the ground; whereupon the two Marids pounced upon him and binding him fast, dragged him off dejected and abject; whilst Gharib rejoiced in the capture of his enemy and repeated these ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... work in a half-hearted way. He was still a sick man, and I more than once observed him creeping painfully aloft to a topsail, or drooping wearily as he stood at the wheel. But, still worse, it seemed that his spirit was broken. He was abject before Wolf Larsen and almost grovelled to Johansen. Not so was the conduct of Leach. He went about the deck like a tiger cub, glaring his hatred openly at Wolf Larsen ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... such hours at any rate for some. Whether they come to all mankind I know not; whether the squalid Andaman or the hideous Fuegian ever feel them I know not; nay, I know not whether they ever come, whether they ever can come, to the wretched outcasts of earth's abject poverty and fathomless degradation; whether they ever come, whether they ever can come, to the cruel and the proud, to the malicious and the mean, to the cynical and discontented; yet, if they come not to these, God ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... slightly under the strain of the control she was forcing upon herself, and the pupils of her eyes were strangely dilated, looking like bits of night sky set in a moon circle; but she spoke and moved quickly as the man, having brought the foot-gear and unwound the cut hair from the abject dog, leant down and picked up ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... of hostility to abject admiration and worship was embarrassing. His mind was all in a whirl, and when the others knelt before him and kissed his paw he could find no words to say. He simply smiled as graciously as he could, and accepted the homage ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh
... lady whose humanity overstepped the bounds of discretion: for though she knew Miss La Rue had eloped from a convent with a young officer, and, on coming to England, had lived with several different men in open defiance of all moral and religious duties; yet, finding her reduced to the most abject want, and believing the penitence which she professed to be sincere, she took her into her own family, and from thence recommended her to Madame Du Pont, as thinking the situation more suitable for a woman of her abilities. But Mademoiselle possessed too much of the spirit ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... a vigor of her own. It was not in spiritual deference only that she differed from the country of her birth. Whatever she had caught of its corruptions, she had caught nothing of its effeminacy. The mass of her people lived in a rude poverty,—not abject, like the peasant of old France, nor ground down by the tax-gatherer; while those of the higher ranks—all more or less engaged in pursuits of war or adventure, and inured to rough journeyings and forest exposures—were rugged as their climate. Even the French regular troops, sent ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... bad faith came from so deeply wounded a spirit as he would have them believe, he was not likely to tell; but he claimed the prisoner as his own, and declined to say what he meant to do. When, however, they saw the abject terror of the Faith Healer as he begged not to be left alone with Tim—for they had not meant death, and Ingles thought he read death in Tim's ferocious eyes—they laughed cynically, and left it to Tim to uphold the honor of Jansen and ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... compensation for the expenditures he made for the relief of the early settlers of California. His death occurred at Washington, D. C., on the eighteenth day of June, 1880, and his remains were laid at rest in Litiz, Pennsylvania. The termination of this grand, heroic life, under circumstances of abject poverty and destitution, forms as strange and mournful a story as can be found in the ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... ceased to hum and flutter, left to await the coming of this awful creature. The stammering step came round the bend of the lane, and I saw for the first time a person whom I grew to respect and pity later on, but who struck me then with such an abject sense of terror as I have sometimes since ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... his private character is very amiable and respectable, but how any man possessed of common feelings, can suffer such humiliations from those around him, I cannot conceive. When any person approaches the general to speak to him, his behaviour and address must be the most abject imaginable, and the respect and profound submission which every servant of the company, and every inhabitant must necessarily assume on these occasions, are little short of the adoration paid to the Divinity: this homage is carried to so great a height, that when the general enters the church, although ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... know by experience, that those who labor sleep more sweetly and soundly than those who are labored for, and could fail to see by comparing the Persians' manner of living with their own, that it was the most abject and slavish condition to be voluptuous, but the most noble arid royal to undergo pain and labor. He argued with them further, how it was possible for anyone who pretended to be a soldier, either to look well after ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... indicate the extent to which judgment may be influenced by familiarity with perversions of the taxing power. And when we seek to reinstate the self-confidence and business enterprise of our citizens by discrediting an abject dependence upon governmental favor, we strive to stimulate those elements of American character which support the hope of ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... Isabelle, "it is to be hoped she is! I have the most abject horror of fevers and that is enough to make me catch it. Fancy having one's head shorn like a convict! The very idea ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... the dog listened. Whether these two dependents understood that they were being reproached for living at his expense, I don't know, but their stomachs looked more pinched than ever, and their whole figures shrivelled up, grew gloomier and more abject than before. . . . Their submissive air exasperated Zotov ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... my father and mother. I felt ashamed to admit that I was a foundling,—a child picked up in the streets! I knew how the children from the Foundlings' Hospital had been scorned. It seemed to me that it was the most abject thing in the world to be a foundling. I did not want Mrs. Milligan and Arthur to know. Would they not have turned from me ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... application. But although the question of slavery seems to be incidental and subordinate to the former, virtually the question of slavery is twin to the former. Slavery serves as a basis, as a nurse, for the most infamous and abject aristocracy or oligarchy that was ever built up in history, and any, even the best, the mildest, and the most honest oligarchy or aristocracy kills and destroys man ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... lowest courts? [6:3]Know you not that we shall judge angels? Much more then things pertaining to this life? [6:4]If then you have courts for the business of this life, do you constitute them of the most abject in the church? [6:5]I speak to your shame. Is there not now a wise man among you? not one who can judge between his brothers? [6:6]But brother goes to law with brother, and that before unbelievers. [6:7]Now therefore there is a great fault among you, ...
— The New Testament • Various
... sat perched upon the broad back. Forgotten were all parish cares as the venerable man gave himself up to the little waif. He had become a child again, and had entered that kingdom where children are the uncrowned monarchs, and the strong and the aged are willing subjects, yea, even most abject slaves. ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... man was wiser than his fellow. He had been given several minutes grace in which to meditate upon the unwisdom of defiance; and he had seen the bug-killer change abruptly from sullenness to terror, and afterward to abject obedience. He did not know what they had said to him, or what they had done; but he knew the bug-killer was a hard man to stampede. And he was one man, and they were many; also he judged that, being human, and this being the third offense of the Dot sheep under his care, it ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... one thing," continued the suspected man, "that the record will not tell you; that, disgusted with this abject life, I was tempted to suicide. It will not tell you anything of my desperate attempts, my repentance, my relapses. At last, I was able in part to reform. I got work; and after being in four situations, engaged myself here. I found myself well off. ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... I do not know. It must have been several minutes. Blood of Christ, how vividly I remember the vision! The sunny radiance of the girl's hair was darkened and dead. Her bending attitude was one of abject grief. Her hands covered her face, and she was the image of woe. Suddenly she lifted her head with the quick impulsive movement so familiar in her, and with a cry eloquent as a child's wail for its mother called, "John," and held out her arms imploringly ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... King of Waters! Such delightful three days in hospitable New Orleans! Might it not be possible to tarry even here? "No," cried the inexorable George. "We have put our hand to the plough. Who will turn back?" Two days of abject wretchedness on the Gulf of Mexico. "Why were we born? Why did we not die before we left solid land?" And then the light-house ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... that he would cast the emperor's head at the feet of his neighbours. When, however, the plot was discovered, he did not exhibit any firmness of mind. A confession was wrung from him without much difficulty; and, humbling himself to the most abject entreaties, he even named his innocent mother as one of the conspirators [980]; hoping that his want of natural affection would give him favour in the eyes of a parricidal prince. Having obtained permission to choose his mode of death [981], ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for. I say nothing about the social mistake, which would have been abject, which, of course, I would not have allowed, but I assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... her thus miserably abject and humbled, I grew abashed also and fain would have loosed me from her clasp but she held me only the faster; and thus, my hand coming upon her head, she caught that hand and kissed it passionately, wetting it with ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... went to Florence, to Rome, to Naples; thence I passed to Toulon, and at length reached what had long been the bourne of my wishes, Paris. There was wild work in Paris then. The poor king, Charles the Sixth, now sane, now mad, now a monarch, now an abject slave, was the very mockery of humanity. The queen, the dauphin, the Duke of Burgundy, alternately friends and foes—now meeting in prodigal feasts, now shedding blood in rivalry—were blind to the miserable state of their country, and the dangers that impended over it, and gave themselves wholly ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... the time and take Eleanor's attention from herself for the moment. He gave a short account of the people in question; a people of fine physical and even fine mental development, for savages; inhabiting a country of great beauty and rich natural resources; but at the same time sunk in the most abject depths of moral debasement. A country where the "works of the devil" had reached their utmost vigour; where men lived but for vile ends, and took the lives of their fellow-men and each other with the utmost ruthlessness ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... deepest in the divine heart, the desire which God has most for every one of us. And when the Old Testament tells us that the great motive of the divine action is for 'My own Name's sake,' that expression might be so regarded as to disclose an ugly despot, who only wants to be reverenced by abject and submissive subjects. But what it really means is this, that the divine love which hovers over its poor, prodigal children because it is love, and, therefore, lovingly delights in a loving recognition and response, desires most ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... in this dependent state, was the very reverse of what it should have been. In place of directing his studies to some useful acquisition, so as to support himself and family, he spent his time in the most abject trifling, and drew many heavy expences upon his father, who had no other means of supporting himself than what his congregation afforded, and a small estate of fourscore pounds a ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... of affluence to that of penury. An illustration of this proposition was afforded in the family of Mr. Wheelwright. It appeared that after the change recorded in the last chapter, from a condition of the most abject misery, to that of comparative comfort, the Doctor's lady, elated by her prosperity, began to take airs upon herself, and her carriage was such as to excite the jealousy of her neighbors up stairs. The consequences were a speedy and open rupture, so that occasional ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... lay the forms of the woman and the children; I could see their dull eyes, unblinking, looking up at me in abject terror. Still the patter of footsteps sounded from without, with now and then an interval ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... listened for the noise of a fall or a cry or the crash of a piece of the handrail of the upper landing; but none of these things came. She was spared. Apparently her rival suffered her to crawl abject and beaten away. Oleron heard the passing of her steps under his window; ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... and to kill a viper and foster its young, would not be the acts of rational beings. Though the clouds pour down the water of vegetation, thou canst never gather fruit from a willow twig. Exalt not the fortune of the abject, for thou canst never extract sugar from a mat or ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... advance or retrogression; and, with few exceptions indeed, the prevailing and conspicuous element in all publications of more than a century ago is a tacit acceptance of irresponsible lordship and abject inferiority as Divine ordinances. Brutal indifference, utter contempt, or more insulting condescension, toward the rank and file, was an article of the fine old English gentleman's religion— "a point of our faith," as the pious Sir Thomas Browne seriously puts it— ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... am always looking for. To me all of them told the full story of what went before and necessitated the great French revolution—the long precedent crushing of the masses of a heroic people into the earth, in abject poverty, hunger—every right denied, humanity attempted to be put back for generations—yet Nature's force, titanic here, the stronger and hardier for that repression—waiting terribly to break forth, revengeful—the pressure on the dykes, and the bursting ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... say unnatural—way. In the early days of the siege, you see, some poor wretch who lived near our hospital possessed, as is almost always the case with a Frenchman removed a quarter of a degree, say, above abject poverty, a favorite dog. One day his beast and house were made glad by the appearance of two pups. They were tawny, bright-eyed little fellows, and the Frenchman loved them with a love that the Anglo-Saxon knows not of, especially in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... France, upon the brother of her favourite Leonora,[52] an unhappy being who was not only deformed in person, but so wholly deficient in intellect that every effort even to teach him to read had proved ineffectual. So abject was he, indeed, that Concini had been careful never to allow him to come into contact with Henri IV lest he should be banished from the Court; and this ill-advised donation consequently excited great disapprobation, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... before him. The body of Sir Rowland was then laid on the large table. Opposite to it was placed the Jew. Seeing from the threatening looks of his captors, that they were about to wreak their vengeance upon him, the miserable wretch besought mercy in abject terms, and charged his master with the most atrocious crimes. His relation of the murder of Sir Rowland petrified even his ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... steward, whom love and zealous affection to his master had led to seek him out at his wretched dwelling and to offer his services; and the first sight of his master, the once noble Timon, in that abject condition, naked as he was born, living in the manner of a beast among beasts, looking like his own sad ruins and a monument of decay, so affected this good servant that he stood speechless, wrapped up in horror and confounded. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... have a warning! Slowly I have developed a new sense that needs not eyes, nor ears, nor sense of touch—no antennae even, such as I once possessed—but unites and transcends all these! And I beg of you in my most abject humility, do not venture to remove even one formic-acid wall, either from above or from its depth into the ground. Rather build more! Perceptively I shudder in the awful remembrance of their occasion, and the day may come when they ...
— Walls of Acid • Henry Hasse
... superseded by some more mastering passion or emotion. This passion or emotion, according to those who deny her attachment to Bothwell, was simply terror—the blind and irrational prostration of an abject spirit before the cruel force of circumstances and the crafty wickedness of men. Hitherto, according to all evidence, she had shown herself on all occasions, as on all subsequent occasions she indisputably showed herself, the most fearless, the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... betrayed my abject despair. I was so completely knocked over that I offered no opposition when the Colonel impudently took the telegram out of my ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... given no sign of life, and I, at least, had supposed him to be still lying in a faint; but he replied at once, and in such tones as I have never heard elsewhere, save from a delirious patient, adjured and besought us not to desert him. It was the most hideous and abject performance that my imagination ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ought to receive him," said her sister, and accordingly Jimmy was conducted to the drawing-room, where he at once began to make an almost abject apology. ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... shoulders, or he would have fallen. The man's eyes opened and closed again, and he swayed weakly backward and forward, and choked as if his throat were dry and burning. Even to such a hardened connoisseur in crime as Gallegher, who stood closely by, drinking it in, there was something so abject in the man's terror that he regarded him with what was ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... pranced, kicked, savaged the air—not an item of all his pentup wickedness being undemonstrated. Then George dismounted suddenly, and calling in soothing tones, Christmas realised that the appalling creature was but a temporary compound of his playmate and the abject Jonah. Cautiously advancing in a series of contours dislocated with staccato stops and starts and frothy exclamations, he seemed to recognise the whole episode as a practical joke, of which he had been the victim, and to promise retaliation upon ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... nation, and was clearly only an instrument by which the Council of the Army might exercise its power. "The name of the Protector was no longer heard but in derision." [Footnote: Richard Cromwell submitted himself, with abject and craven weakness, to the will of this so-called Parliament. Nor did his younger brother, Henry, the Lieutenant of Ireland, prove to have any larger share of his father's courage.] But nothing was established to take the place of the ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... with his glasses. Thousands of men were running like frightened rabbits down the Cimatario slope, and spreading as a fan over the grassy plain. Mountain pieces boomed farewell behind them, until in abject panic they cast away carbines and scrambled the faster. But other troops were pushing up the slope opposite the town, and these were ordered ranks of infantry. Up and up they climbed, to trench after trench, and the howitzers one by one stopped ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... baron!" burst out Kranitski. "Lili and superhumanity, the ideal! Why, she is a little beast that sings abject ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... be at all morbid. Certainly it is morbid when a man allows himself to be insulted, bound and flogged, but it is fairly normal when his passionate admiration is roused by an imperious woman, who passes him by like a queen without even noticing his abject adoration; when he longs to kneel down before her and kiss her feet, which in reward would spurn him. Quite normal, too, is the boyish happiness in serving an admired and adored woman (Kraft-Ebbing calls this pageism) described so beautifully in Dostoievsky's ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... varied and numerous, and easy of proof. He had received bribes; he had given false judgments for money; he had perverted justice to secure the smiles of Buckingham, the favorite; and when a commission was appointed to examine these charges he was convicted. With abject humility, he acknowledged his guilt, and implored the pity of his judges. The annals of biography present no sorrier picture than this. "Upon advised consideration of the charges," he wrote, "descending into my own conscience, and calling my memory to account ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... it is clear to me, clearer perhaps than it ever was to her, that she, with her resentment at being in any sense property, her self-reliant thought, her independence of standard, was the very prototype of that sister-lover who must replace the seductive and abject womanhood, owned, mastered and deceiving, who waste the world to-day. And she was owned, she was mastered, she was forced into concealment. What alternative was there for her? What alternative is there for any woman? She might perhaps have kept her freedom by ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... could I continue to administer Sacraments that I ceased to believe in. I can imagine nothing more shameful than the life of a man who continues his administrations after he has ceased to believe in them, especially a Catholic priest, so precise and explicit are the Roman Sacraments. A very abject life it is to murmur Absolve te over the heads of parishioners, and to place wafers on their tongues, when we have ceased to believe that we have power to forgive sins and to turn biscuits into God. A layman may have doubts, and continue to live his life as before, without troubling to take the ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... as strictly defined as a word could have, being the proper legal designation for those persons who were the subjects of the less onerous forms of feudal bondage. The scorn of the semi-barbarous military aristocracy for these their abject dependants, rendered the act of likening any person to this class of people a mark of the greatest contumely; the same scorn led them to ascribe to the same people all manner of hateful qualities, which doubtless also, in the degrading situation in which they were held, were often not unjustly ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... finally. "I give it up. I haven't succeeded in getting within ten yards of a nigger woman to-day. If I went in at the front door, every occupant in a house would bolt out at the back one, and run for dear life. They will listen to no overtures of friendship. Our very faces fill them with abject terror. We had just as well throw up the insurance business and quit, as far as Wilmington is concerned. God's curse on the men who are responsible for this blight upon the good name of this city. One woman ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... of the Roman cities under the popular rule of their Bishops is illustrated by Milan, second only to Rome in the last days of the Empire. Milan had been reduced to the condition of abject misery by the Kings, who spared no pains to exalt Pavia at the expense of her elder sister. After the dissolution of the kingdom, she started into a new life, and in 1037 her archbishop, Heribert, was singled out by Conrad II. as the protagonist of the episcopal ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... it meant to her. In her bedroom she dismissed her maid and went to an open window. She was very tired, but restless, and disinclined for bed. Dropping down on the low seat she stared out over the moonlit landscape. The repentant Mouston, abject at her continued neglect, crawled from his basket and crept tentatively to her, and as absently her hand went out to him gained courage and climbed up beside her. Inch by inch he sidled nearer, and unrepulsed grew bolder until he finally ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... take the word of its administrative head, especially since he desires the same freedom. This was actually the case in Sacramento, Cal., where the commission plan was tried for fifteen years and given up as an abject failure. Says the Hon. Clinton White of that city: "In almost every instance, the board soon came to the understanding that each man was to be let alone in the management of the department assigned to him. This resulted in there being in fact ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... occupied by Union troops; abject terror of inhabitants; guarded by General Cox; measures taken to prevent outbreak on ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Osborne—about himself. He was just as cordial and friendly as ever with her. If Cynthia had not been there all would have gone on as she had anticipated; but of all the victims to Cynthia's charms he fell most prone and abject. Molly saw it all, as she was sitting next to Miss Phoebe at the tea-table, acting right- hand, and passing cake, cream, sugar, with such busy assiduity that every one besides herself thought that her mind, as well as her hands, was fully occupied. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... was a miserable dancer on the public squares in the presence of these high-born maidens? They seemed to take no heed of her presence, and talked of her aloud, to her face, as of something unclean, abject, and yet, at the same time, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... first words Winter started as if a pike had been thrust into his side. On his face was written blank astonishment, which expression, as she proceeded, gave way to one of abject fear. It would have been difficult to say which of the two was the more agitated. He dashed a hand to his brow as if to drive away the fumes of liquor which had mounted to his brain; looked at the kneeling figure; gazed on the tapers burning upon the table; and tried to form some ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... method of correspondence with the universe is not to be identified with "mere feeling" in its lowest and least orderly forms. Contemplation does not mean abject surrender to every "mystical" impression that comes in. It is no sentimental aestheticism or emotional piety to which you are being invited: nor shall the transcending of reason ever be achieved by way of spiritual ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... population, upon whose daily and yearly labor the great establishments they so much admired were sustained and supported. They failed to perceive that the scantily fed and half-clad operatives were not only in abject poverty, but were bound in chains of oppressive servitude for the benefit of favored classes, who were the exclusive objects of the care of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... House, anxious only to do his duty to his QUEEN and Country. Whereas it is clear he is a martinet of the severest type, a ruthless tyrant, a man who rules with a rod of iron, and keeps his followers in a condition of abject personal terror." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 6, 1891 • Various
... she padded off after Eleseus up through the forest, shrunken with age, grey and abject, and for ever nosing after things, imperishable. Going to old Sivert now, to let him know how she, Oline, had managed ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
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