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More "Devastating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was very mad in his primer works, not so mad in his dotages. There was always a good deal of furor prosaicus smouldering in Zola, and it broke out with an opposite result on these occasions, the flames, alas! being rather devastating, but affording spectacles at least grandiose. He kept sane and sordid to his loss earlier, and went mad later—partially at least ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... a man must guard his own, or lose it. But perhaps it was the indifference to the ruin of the women belonging to him that Harry Heathcote felt the strongest. The stranger cared nothing for the utter desolation which one unscrupulous ruffian might produce, felt no horror at the idea of a vast devastating fire, but could be indignant in his mock philanthropy because it was proposed to watch the ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... over the estate, entered the forest, in order to visit his relatives there. His fellow monkeys, who knew of his marriage with the princess, believed him to be of some importance, and begged him to save them from the famine which was devastating the forest. This Amo-Mongo, with much boasting of his wealth, promised to do, declaring that at the time of harvest he would give them ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... The latter, seized with a panic, gave way, the imperialists pursuing them, cutting to pieces with their sharp swords, or running through with their pikes, all they overtook. Moretz and his grandson watched the fugitives and their pursuers. The latter, like a devastating conflagration or a fierce torrent, swept all before them, till they ...
— The Woodcutter of Gutech • W.H.G. Kingston
... individual and concerted action, that is our next duty. Truth spreads, not like the devastating torrent, but like the tide. From individual to individual as from pebble to pebble it slowly creeps in and spreads the silent power of its rising waters. "No one ever talks freely about anything without contributing ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... wild-ox revelled in dense herbage that often concealed his whole body; gray, black, and yellow elephants of the most gigantic size burst headlong, like a living hurricane, through the forests, breaking, rending, tearing down, devastating every thing in their path; upon the woody slopes of the hills trickled cascades and springs flowing northward; there, too, the hippopotami bathed their huge forms, splashing and snorting as they frolicked in the water, and lamantines, ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... The materialization of the fleets; the swift, devastating blow, then the instantaneous retreat into the fastnesses of the past. Terrific destruction, but not a ship lost nor ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... our posterity, for ages to come. But let us be warned in time. Even now the insidious movement of dissension is hailed with satisfaction and delight in the council meetings at Richmond, and no effort will be spared to aid its devastating progress. False rumors will be raised on the slightest and most insignificant grounds. Trivial mistakes and blunders in the cabinet and the field will be magnified; facts distorted, and the flame be blown by corrupting influences abroad and at home, in the hopes—let them be vain hopes—that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... second Northmen, or now Norman, outbreak. The marauders had grown polished, but not peaceful, in their French home. They had become more numerous and more restless, until we find them again taking to their ships and seeking newer lands to master. Only they go now as a civilizing as well as a devastating influence. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... regiments, I don't know, but their 7th Grenadier Guards were there, and their 47th, 58th, 59th, 80th, and 87th regiments of the line, not counting a Jaeger battalion and no end of artillery. They carried the Three Poplars—a hill—and they began devastating everything. We couldn't face their fire—I don't know why, Jack; it breaks my heart when I say it, but we couldn't hold them. Then they began howling for cannon, and, of course, that settled the Chateau. The town was ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... lurks disease" (So dreamt this lively dreamer), "Or devastating caries In humerus or femur, If you can pay a handsome fee, Oh, then you may remember me— With joy elate I'll amputate Your humerus ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... nothing but a mutual accommodation imposed by a common lot—common subjection to the forces of gravitation and the extinction of friction by the reaction of short grass on leather—had been to her companion a phase of stimulus to the storm that was devastating the region of his soul; a new and prolonged peal of thunder swift on the heels of a blinding lightning-flash, and a deluge to follow such as a real storm makes us run to shelter from. On Dr. Conrad's side of the analogy, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... state of anarchy which prevailed during that period, had looted to their hearts' content, levying blackmail on the richer inhabitants and pursuing their evil course without let or hindrance. Still, that which had escaped the plundering and devastating hands of the sepoys was most effectually ruined by our men. Not a single house or building remained intact, and the damage done must have amounted to thousands ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... scene of strife raged wildly there, 'Mid cries for help and struggles of despair; All human efforts powerless to assuage, The greedy fire-fiend's devastating rage. ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... to see that by aiding them he could attack his enemy at the most vulnerable point; consequently, when the chiefs offered the Crown of Ireland to his brother Edward if he would come and help them, he gladly accepted the invitation. For three years a devastating war raged over a large part of Ireland; the Scotch went from the North of Ulster almost to Limerick, burning, slaying, plundering, sacking towns, castles and churches; and a terrible famine ensued. But the Irish ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... solutions to Africa's problems. We have supported initiatives by the Organization of African Unity to solve the protracted conflict in the western Sahara, Chad, and the Horn. In Chad, the world is watching with dismay as a country torn by a devastating civil war has become a fertile field for Libya's exploitation, thus demonstrating that threats to peace can come from forces within ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Jimmy Carter • Jimmy Carter
... received their discharge. It is the aim of Mr. Mosher's book to keep this Landwehr in fighting trim and aid in recruiting its ranks, possibly against the next war. Until every nation on earth has subjected its public speakers to a devastating operation on the larynx no true disarmament can be said to have ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... intention of ever marrying him. She will fool the mature man who is desperately in earnest, while she is angling after some one wealthier or more amusing. If she does elect to wed one of her victims, it is, in all probability, only to carry out her devastating tactics on a ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... into principalities, which made it an easy prey. The Mongols, moving as one man, took one principality at a time, its nobles and citizens alone bearing arms, the peasants, by far the greater part, being utterly defenseless. After wrecking and devastating that, they passed on to the next, which, however desperately defended, met the same fate. The Grand Principality was a ruin; its fourteen towns were burned, and when, in the absence of its Grand Prince, Vladimir the capital city fell, the Princesses and all the families of the nobles ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... nearly everything else, is easier to tear down than to build up, and one of the most devastating instruments of destruction is discourtesy. A contact which has taken years to build can be broken off by one snippy letter, one pert answer, or one discourteous response over the telephone. Even collection letters, no matter how long overdue the accounts are, bring in more returns when ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... pass whereat the boldest blench, The "aching time" will quickly turn to bliss, When, having borne the devastating wrench, I hear you murmur, "Rinse your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 26, 1920 • Various
... already tottering, crumbled to pieces under the shock, and were broken up into their primitive elements. The barbarians, unable to carry the towns by assault, and too impatient to resort to a lengthened siege, spread over the valley of the Orontes, burning and devastating the country everywhere. Having reached the frontiers of the empire, in the country of the Amorites, they came to a halt, and constructing an entrenched camp, installed within it their women and the booty they had acquired. Some of their predatory ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... been brought away from his family and his friends, half-way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing—it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn't stand it, and wouldn't she please shut him up. The tears ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... beans in their stack-yards. After walking about seven miles we arrived at the dismal-looking village of Buchlyvie, where we saw many houses in ruins, standing in all their gloominess as evidences of the devastating effects of war. Some of the inhabitants were trying to eke out their livelihood by hand-loom weaving, but there was a poverty-stricken appearance about the place which had, we found, altered but little since Sir Walter Scott wrote of it in the following rhyme which he ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... had made up my mind that, as I had spoilt many good conversations by talking too much myself, I would hold my tongue and let the Master for once make the first move. I had not had much experience of his classical and devastating silences and had often defended him from the charge; but it was time to see what happened if I ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... canned tuna the primary export. Transfers from the US Government add substantially to American Samoa's economic well being. Attempts by the government to develop a larger and broader economy are restrained by Samoa's remote location, its limited transportation, and its devastating hurricanes. Tourism is a ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... profitable pursuit, and of spreading it far and wide over the land—especially as it is peculiarly adapted to districts in which the bees do not readily and regularly swarm. His eminent success in re-establishing his stock after suffering so heavily from the devastating pestilence—in short the recuperative power of the system demonstrates conclusively, that it furnishes the best, perhaps the only means of reinstating bee-culture lo a profitable branch of ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... You must give him time. The people in the towns wouldn't at first believe that he had come back. General Massena, who is in command at Marseilles, thought fit to spread the news that a band of Corsican pirates had landed on the littoral and were marching inland—devastating villages as they marched. The peasants from the mountains were the first to believe that the Emperor had really come, and they wandered down in their hundreds to see him first and to spread the news of his arrival ahead of him. By the time we reached Castellane the ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... cruel injustice, coupled with the previous outrage, caused the smouldering spark of discontent and disaffection to blaze forth at once into a devastating insurrectionary flame. ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... cannibal burnings of human beings—our Lynch courts—our lawless scourgings and capital executions, not only of slaves, but of freemen—our demoniac mobs raging through the streets of our cities and large towns at midday as well as at midnight, shedding innocent blood, devastating property, and applying the incendiaries' torch to edifices erected and dedicated to FREE DISCUSSION—the known friends of order, of law, of liberty, of the Constitution—citizens, distinguished for their worth at home, and reflecting honor on their country abroad, shut out from more than half our ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... orders, compelling him to risk what he considered a very precious life in a successful effort to drag her back to safety. As a matter of fact, he did not drag her back to safety. That feat was accomplished by two sailors who managed to reach both of them before another devastating wave came up to tear his grip loose from the broken rail to which he clung with one bandaged hand while he kept her from sliding into the ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... coherent and indurate ledges the most valuble ores exist, but coal and fossils are searched for in vain. Many a change during the geological periods have these granite mountains looked upon. They have seen fire and water successively sweep over the surface of our globe. Devastating epochs passed, continents sunk and rose, and mountains were piled on mountains in the dread chaos, but these stood firm and undaunted, though scarred and seamed by glaciers, and washed by the billows of a primeval sea, presenting nearly the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... intensity, a sense of burden overcame Isabel, a weariness, a terrible ennui, in that silent house approached between a colonnade of tall-shafted pines. Then she felt she would go mad, for she could not bear it. And sometimes he had devastating fits of depression, which seemed to lay waste his whole being. It was worse than depression—a black misery, when his own life was a torture to him, and when his presence was unbearable to his wife. The dread went down to the roots of her soul as these ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... death. They destroyed themselves and each other by their violence. Scarcely did one become eminent before it was torn to pieces by its comrades, or perished of its own rage. They were like barbarous hordes, exterminating one another or falling into dissolution, while devastating everything ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... customs which they brought from their native deserts. 15. After having expelled the Goths from the banks of the Danube, they fell upon the eastern empire, and compelled the court of Constantinople to pay them tribute. They then, under the guidance of Attila, invaded Italy, and after devastating the peninsula, captured and plundered Rome. After the death of Attila, the Huns were broken up into a number of petty states, which maintained their independence until the close of the eighth century, when ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... start after the magnificent escape from the morass of the moribund father-in-law and the moribund school and the moribund Devonshire town proved to be but a stagger down into morass heavier and more devastating of ambition. He always jumped blindly and wildly into things. Blindly and wildly into the Church, blindly and wildly into marriage, blindly and wildly into the school, blindly and wildly, one might say, into fatherhood on a lavish scale. Blindly and ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... powerful machine, spurning the solid earth like some huge, infuriated brute, leapt sideways, two tyres thrashing empty air, and went howling through an arch of verdure, between hedges which seemed to shrink to right and left from its devastating course. ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... home swiftly through the early night, his brain seething with tumultuous thoughts. The revelations of the day were staggering; the whole universe seemed to have turned topsy-turvy since that devastating hour at Burton's Inn. Somehow he was not able to confine his thoughts to Hetty Castleton alone. She seemed to sink into the background, despite the absolution he had been so ready, so eager to grant her on hearing the story from Sara's lips. Not that ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... inordinate preparation that has been the scourge and the bane of many old-world countries for so many years, and that quite as much as anything has been provocative of the horrible conflict that has literally been devastating ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... army was concentrated at the Southern extremity of Russia, for it was here that the fleets of the allied powers would be encountered. Like devastating swarms of locusts the semi-barbarous warriors descended upon the fertile fields, destroying all that lay in their path. Great was the misery of the peasantry in that section of the Empire; greater still the hardships endured by the Jews, who were despoiled of their possessions ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... guard the place, and then sell the things by auction; but it is difficult to get things done by system in such a case, so some officers are left who are to fill two or three carts with treasures which are to be sold.... Plundering and devastating a place like this is bad enough, but what is much worse is the waste and breakage. Out of 1,000,000 l. worth of property, I daresay 50,000 l. will not be realised. French soldiers were destroying in every way the most beautiful silks, breaking the jade ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... Forest lived and breathed in safety, secure from mutilation. No terror of the axe could haunt the peace of its vast subconscious life, no terror of devastating Man afflict it with the dread of premature death. It knew itself supreme; it spread and preened itself without concealment. It set no spires to carry warnings, for no wind brought messages of alarm as it bulged outwards ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... and upper rocks, and no doubt they did not wish to expose themselves. But the plateau of Prospect Heights was open to them, and not covered by the fire of Granite House. They gave themselves up, therefore, to their instinct of destruction,—plundering, burning, devastating everything,—and only retiring half an hour before the arrival of the colonists, whom they believed still ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... degrees and kinds of rigor and destructive power. In the torrid zone it took the form of excessive rain and humidity, excessive heat, or excessive dryness and aridity. In the temperate and frigid zones, life was a seasonal battle with bitter cold, torrents of cold rain in early winter or spring, devastating sleet, and deep snow and ice that left ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... those parts. Forgetting is the most wearisome of all pains to which we humans are subject; and for some of us there is so much to forget. For some of us there is Beatrice to forget, and Dora, and Christina, and the devastating loveliness of Isabel. For another thing, its atmosphere is so depressingly Slavonic. It is as dismal and as overdone as Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C sharp minor. How shall I give you the sharp flavour of it, or catch the temper of ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... surrounded him, and from those he admired as his masters, took hold of him. He was afraid of his own otherness, as all men are afraid when the first knowledge of their own essential loneliness begins to trouble their depths. The pathos of his struggle to kill the seed of this devastating knowledge is apparent in his declared desire to become 'a polished gentleman.' In the note which he added to his memoir for M. Dupin in 1749 he confesses to this ideal. If only he could become 'one of them,' indistinguishable without ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... so many men move wearily. It was as if his passions had been dammed up by the original influence of Valentine. Through the years, behind the height of the dam, the waters had been rising, accumulating, pressing. Suddenly the dam was removed, and a devastating flood swept forth, uncontrollable, headlong, and furious. Julian needed rescue, but the only way to rescue seemed to lie through Valentine, within whose circle of influence he was so closely bound. The mystery of Valentine must ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... puzzling at first, which Miss F.E. MILLS YOUNG has given to her latest story, The Almonds of Life (HODDER AND STOUGHTON), turns out to be based upon a Chinese proverb to the effect that "almonds came to those who have no teeth." This rather devastating sample of philosophy (which I have put by for use against the next person who attempts to work off upon me the adage about those who wait) forms the text of a well-told tale of misplaced affections. As you may expect, if you know Miss ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... Presque Isle, on Lake Erie; and the chains of forts thence to the head of the Ohio were still in their hands. They had expelled the English from their ancient fort at Oswego, had driven them from Lake George, and compelled the Six Nations to a treaty of neutrality. A devastating Indian war was raging along the whole north-western frontier of the British colonies, and Indian scalping parties penetrated into the very centre of Massachusetts, approached within a short distance of Philadelphia, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... enemy retired on Petra Bona, and that too was taken. Then the Austrians rushed toward the bridge of the Bormida; but Carra-Saint-Cyr was there before them. The flying multitudes sought the fords, or plunged into the Bormida under a devastating fire, which did not slacken before ten ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... one all-embracing material substance, or of one all-embracing spiritual substance. In either case that living plurality of real separate "souls" which correspond to our own soul vanishes away, and a dreary and devastating oneness, whether spiritual or chemical, fills the whole field. The world which is the emanation of this atrophied and distorted vision is a world of crushing dreariness; but it is an unreal world because the only vivid and unfathomable reality we know is the reality ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... to be—lying across the main road. Seeing it, he realized at the same instant that Patricia was neither throttling the motor nor applying the brakes. After that he had barely time to snap the switch and to throw the heavy wind-shield down before the devastating crash came. ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make, and every Russian grenadier has learnt to handle in Manchuria, lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... of an invasion of New York to-day, other than by some devastating fleet, we can at once see that the whole outline of defence as proposed by Washington, until he ordered the retreat, was characteristic of his wisdom and his settled purpose to resist a landing, fight at every ridge, ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... depths. There is his novel, Mr. Pim. Old Mr. Pim, in his gentle way, shuffled into the Mardens' charming household. Mr. Pim said a few words and went absentmindedly away,—leaving Mr. Marden with the devastating knowledge that his wife was no wife, that her first husband, instead of lying quietly in his grave in Australia, had just landed in England. In short, the Mardens had been living in sin for five years! Then ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... is the cause of poverty, disease, and war: and consequently, unless the growth of population is artificially restrained, all attempts to remedy social evils are futile. Malthusians claim that "if only the devastating torrent of children could be arrested for a few years, it would bring untold relief." They hold that overpopulation is the root of all social evil, and the truth or falsehood of that proposition is therefore the basis of all their teaching. Now, ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... word. Remember it," warned the Bonnie Lassie. "She's a devastating whirlwind, that child, and she comes down here partly to get away from the wreckage. Now, if you play ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... land and enter England from the South or East, and that in the latter case the inhabitants of Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire would, in the event of a flank movement through the Eastern Counties for London, be among the first to bear the brunt of the devastating march! The horror of the expected invasion was intensified a thousandfold by the Englishman's attachment to his home and family, and deliberations of the village councils often showed less regard for ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... he liked with it!" said a mild, piping falsetto; "And so far, he has made it beau-ti-ful!—beau-ti-ful!" carved with traceries of natural fruit and foliage, which were scarcely injured by the devastating mark of time. But rough and sacrilegious hands had been at work to spoil and deface the classic remains of the time-worn edifice, and some of the lancet windows had been actually hewn out and widened to ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... a devastating hunger assailed Fido, which was not strange, for it was long past the hour when the old man usually took a bulky parcel out of his desk, spread a newspaper upon the floor, and bade Fido eat of cold potatoes, meat, and bread. There was, nearly always, ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... had indeed been a worthy one when he had selected him as admiral of his fleet: also he had in his mind those others who spoke slightingly of him as "the African pirate"; they should know as well as their master of what this pirate was capable. Northward the devastating host of Barbarossa took its way; the fair shores of Italy smoked to heaven as the torches of the corsairs fired the villages. Blood and agony, torture and despair, followed ever on the heels of the Sea-wolves of the Mediterranean. And now ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... veranda-room, between a secretary and a typewriter, who was also a telegraphist, toiled along wearily from day to day. There was a war of rates among four Western railroads in which he was supposed to be interested; a devastating strike had developed in his lumber camps in Oregon, and the legislature of the State of California, which has no love for its makers, was preparing open ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... England. Subsequent failure to embrace the mercantile and industrial revolutions caused the country to fall behind Britain, France, and Germany in economic and political power. Spain remained neutral in World Wars I and II, but suffered through a devastating Civil War (1936-39). In the second half of the 20th century, it has played a catch-up role in the western international community. Continuing concerns are large-scale unemployment ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... which they were now engaged. The journey was not altogether devoid of adventure, by any means; for upon one occasion they killed no less than five of their oxen through overwork during a hurried flight from the neighbourhood of a devastating grass fire; they lost three more at one fell swoop while crossing a flooded river; six succumbed to snake bites; four fell a prey to lions; and seven died of sickness believed to have been induced by the eating of some ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... Europe with him, giving expression to the voices within, which, to him, had been unutterable,—then we saw that the emotions which would have been safe, had they been suffered to well up gently from the first, could come forth now only as a fierce and perhaps devastating torrent. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... from metric patterns. Nobody claims that the hierarchy of modern impassioned prose writers, from Bunyan to Ruskin, should be placed below the writers of pretty lyrics, from Herrick to Mr. Austin Dobson. Only in dramatic literature do we find the devastating tradition of blank verse still lingering, giving factitious prestige to the platitudes of dullards, and robbing the dramatic style of the genuine poet of its full natural endowment of variety, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... first speeches lead us already to form the most unfavourable anticipations of his future conduct. He lowers obliquely like a dark thundercloud on the horizon, which gradually approaches nearer and nearer, and first pours out the devastating elements with which it is charged when it hangs over the heads of mortals. Two of Richard's most significant soliloquies which enable us to draw the most important conclusions with regard to his mental temperament, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... their successes at Northampton and Rochester, the royalists marched through Kent and Sussex, plundering and devastating the lands of their enemies. Though masters of the open country, they had to encounter the resistance of the Clare castles, and the solid opposition of the Cinque Ports. Their presence on the south coast was specially necessary, for Queen Eleanor, who had gone abroad, was waiting, with an ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... specially enlivening in that. Briefly, young Simon Honeyball in his parents' home threatened to weary me. But later, when he had migrated with his money and his extraordinary collection of proteges to Silverside, E., and there set up his preposterous household, and become a Guardian (with what devastating municipal results you may guess!) I found myself the grateful admirer of both Simon and his creator. Mr. LYONS' sympathetic drawing of certain odd London characters is a thing that I have often admired; he has no better portraits in his gallery than these of the quaint ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... With commendable forethought, the first settlers had built their houses and stores some little distance back from the stream along the summit of a wooded ridge perhaps forty feet above the river at its midsummer low-water level. The tremendous, devastating floods that came annually with the breaking up of winter failed to reach the houses,—although in 1883,—according to the records,—the water came up to within a foot of Joe Roush's blacksmith shop, situated at that ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... than he, should advance after his so-called victories in the same manner as Benningsen is retreating now, he would restore to us no state, only a desert. The king ought to believe us that they are utterly unwilling to render us assistance, and that they only intend devastating our country in order to protect themselves. Whatever the noble and generous Emperor Alexander may order, it is certain that nothing will be done. Even though we should protest and clamor against it in the most heart-rending manner, we should ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... the recent devastating fire which swept from the earth with a breath, as it were, millions of accumulated wealth in the city of Boston, there has been no overshadowing calamity within the year to record. It is gratifying to note how, like their fellow-citizens of the city of Chicago ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... raged along the British coasts that autumn was the wildest that had been known for years. It swelled quite suddenly out of the last breezes of a superb summer, and by the middle of September it had become a monster of destruction, devastating the shore. The crumbling cliffs of Brethaven testified to its violence. Beating rain and colossal, shattering waves united to accomplish ruin and destruction. And the little fishing-village ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... you might call a third-and-fourth- generation story—one of those books, so rightly devastating to the skipper, in which the accidental turning of two pages together is quite liable to involve you with the great-grandchildren of the couple whose courtship you have been perusing. Observe that I was careful to say the "accidental" turning, though I can picture a type of reader ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... behind the closed shutters eyes peered furtively at the conquerors, masters by right of might, of the city and the lives and fortunes of its inhabitants. The people in their darkened dwellings fell a prey to the helpless bewilderment which comes over men before the floods, the devastating upheavals of the earth, against which all wisdom and all force are unavailing. The same phenomenon occurs each time that the established order of things is overthrown, when public security is at an end, and when all that the laws of man or of nature protect is at the mercy of some blind ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... 21st, treaties were there signed with France, with Holland, and with Denmark. Peace was based upon the maintenance of the status quo; no cession of territory was to take place. The rights of commerce and of navigation were to be as provided by the treaty of 1662. Never was a costly and devastating war entered upon more recklessly, conducted, on our side at least, with more helpless inefficiency, and closed with a smaller result in any change which it effected. The people of England accepted peace as a relief; they found in it neither ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... moved on to the Temple of Jimjambo, and there a devastating experience befell him—he tumbled head over heels and agonizingly in love. There was a chambermaid in the institution, a radiant creature from the Emerald Isles with hair like sunrise and cheeks like apples, and a laugh that shook the dish-pans ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... frozen; there could not be one open spot as big as a soup-plate on which the storm could begin its work. But it was a wonderful sight, to see the sea lying dead and motionless as a rocky desert in the midst of this devastating storm. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... the things that sadden a man as he grows older and reviews his life is the reflection that his most devastating deeds were generally the ones which he did with the best motives. The thought is disheartening. I can honestly say that, when George Mackintosh came to me and told me his troubles, my sole desire was to ameliorate his lot. That I might be starting on the downward path a man whom I liked and respected ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... were the numbers of the Indians—perhaps not more than 500 warriors in all Acadia—they were capable of devastating remote settlements and of creating ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... and the two vessels of Olaf the Saint, which carried sometimes 200 men. The Sea-kings, as they often called these adventurers, lived on the ocean, never settling on shore, passing from the pillage of a castle to the burning of an abbey, devastating the coasts of France, ascending rivers, especially the Seine, as far as Paris, sailing over the Mediterranean as far as Constantinople, establishing themselves later in Sicily, and leaving traces of their incursions or their sojourn in all the regions ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... the fire from heaven had descended in one terrific crash, burying beneath its devastating flames his ideals, his happiness, and his divinity. She was no longer there. His madonna had ceased ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... in his own plans lay in the Dominicans, without whose aid his efforts were foredoomed to failure. He spoke to the Bishop and the members of the Council, reading them the letter and addressing earnest appeals to them to stop the iniquities which were devastating the entire coast. He urged, with all the arguments of which he was master, that the one hundred leagues asked for should be conceded. The Bishop of Burgos was unmoved, both by the Prior's harrowing description of the outrages committed ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... of the fort. They sprang to the window and witnessed the spectacle for which the unhappy captain had prayed long and devoutly. The Philadelphia was in flames—red, devouring flames, pouring out of her hold, climbing the rigging, licking her topmasts, forming fantastic columns—devastating, unconquerable flames—the frigate was doomed, doomed! And every now and then one of her guns would explode as though booming out her requiem. ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... Collier had to drop to the heavy grub again. I noticed about that time that I was seized by a most uncommon and devastating appetite. I ate until Mame must have hated to see me darken the door. Afterward I found out that I had been made the victim of the first dark and irreligious trick played on me by Ed Collier. Him and me had been taking drinks together ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... this opportunity to enter Italy, which now lay open to their attack, they entered the country of the Helvetii, where they were joined by the tribes of that people, the Ambrones, the Tigurines, and the Teutones; descending now upon Gaul like a devastating torrent, they wasted it as far as the Belgian frontier; here, however, the resistance of the inhabitants prevented them from advancing further. Turning now upon the Roman province of Transalpine Gaul, they defeated three Roman armies under Silanus, Cassius, and Scaurus; and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... sort of whirlwind, accompanied by rain, thunder and lightning, sometimes by earthquake shocks, and always by the most terrible and devastating circumstances that can possibly combine to ruin a country in a few hours. A clear, serene day is followed by the darkest night; the delightful view offered by woods and prairies is diverted into the deary waste of ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... than the fatal plague itself. The once flourishing and magnificent plains of Eske-Seher have been deserts since the Sultan Amurath traversed them, at the head of 300,000 men, to lay siege to Bagdad. His passage was marked by all the devastating effects of the hurricane. When a body of those horsemen called Delhis, who are attached to the suite of every Pasha, enters a village, the consternation is general, and followed by a system of exaction ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... Thanksgiving Day. The political storm increased tenfold in velocity and destructiveness by race hatred that had swept through the old city of Wilmington, devastating homes, leaving orphans, widows and ruined fortunes in its wake, was slowly abating. A city in a state of siege could not have presented a more distressing appearance. Soldiers and armed white men and boys stood in groups on every street ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... over the country as an authority on fraternities and their influence, and a power for making that influence constantly better and finer. In business, farmer, and school circles in the Middle West Mr. Clark is famous for his whimsical, inspiring speeches. His quick, shaft-like humor, his keen, devastating sarcasm, and his rare, resilient sympathy have made him a personality beloved particularly ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... was conscious of a sense of urgency. Suppose that what Sssuri suggested was the truth, that Those Others were attempting to recover the skills which had brought on the devastating war that had turned this whole eastern continent into a wilderness? Equipped with even the crumbs of such discoveries, they would be enemies against which the Terran colonists could not hope to stand. The few weapons their outlaw ancestors had brought with ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... you, now,' she said to the Duke in the most seemingly simple-minded manner possible, 'I'd just quote those passages I've marked in pencil in the House to-night on the Small Urban Holdings Bill, and point out how the wave of Continental Socialism is at last invading England with its devastating flood.' And the Duke, who was a complacent, thick-headed, obstinate old gentleman, congenitally incapable of looking at any question from any other point of view whatsoever except that of his own order, fell headlong passively into Lady Hilda's cruel ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... from some God-forsaken hole in Montana, that it's all rot about Armitage being that fake Baron von Kissel. The newspaper accounts of the expose at my supper party had just reached him, and he says Armitage was on his (Armitage's) ranch all that summer the noble baron was devastating our northern sea-coast. Where, may I ask, does this leave me? And what cad gave that story to the papers? And where and who is John Armitage? Keep this mum for the present—even from the governor. If Sanderson is right, Armitage will undoubtedly turn up again—he has a weakness ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... destroyed the kingdom of Bactria, a far-eastern relic of the empire of Alexander the Great. Several centuries later they may have combined with their old foes to form the Huns, who flung themselves in a devastating torrent upon Europe, and eventually became the founders of the modern kingdom ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... 'That about which thou hath first enquired is Arjuna's bow, of world-wide fame, called Gandiva, capable of devastating hostile hosts. Embellished with gold, this Gandiva, the highest and largest of all weapons belonged to Arjuna. Alone equal unto a hundred thousand weapons, and always capable of extending the confines of kingdoms, it is with this that Partha ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... gravels affords the protection which we have noted. Throughout this region the rainfall is heavy, and the larger part of it is apt to come after the ground has become deeply snow-covered. The result is a succession of devastating floods which already are very damaging to the works of man, and promise to become more destructive as time goes on. More than in any other country, we need the protection which forests can give us against these disastrous ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... of these people are well. In spite of their healthy forest lives they are far less sound than an average white community. They have their own troubles, with the white man's maladies thrown in. I saw numberless other cases of dreadful, hopeless, devastating diseases, mostly of the white man's importation. It is heart-rending to see so much human misery and be able to do nothing at all for it, not even bring a gleam of hope. It made me feel like a murderer to tell one after another, who came to me covered with cankerous bone-eating sores, "I can do ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... cyclone, resembling a solid wall of water, which at Diamond Harbour rose to the height of 34 feet; when it reached Calcutta it was 27 to 28 feet, rushing up the Hooghly from the sea at the rate of 20 miles an hour, destroying and overwhelming everything it encountered in its wild and devastating career. It was, of course, a matter of extreme difficulty to arrive at any very reliable estimate of the number who perished, owing to the vast area of country over which the storm raged. Happily the death rate in Calcutta itself was, comparatively speaking, not so very great, ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... A devastating curiosity seized upon us boys concerning that Latin grammar, for we had discovered the nature of the book. Strong wanted to steal it one night, but concluded not to. "In the first place," reflected Strong, "I haven't the heart to do it, and in the next place ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... conscientious; he had given good, wholesome counsel, worthy of his knowledge and experience. Miss Maggimore had actually asked him if the papers were good for anything; and he had actually informed her that they were very valuable, thus saving them from a devastating conflagration in the cooking-stove. Miss Maggimore had actually been paid five hundred dollars for opening that chest, and taking therefrom the package of papers; while he, who had furnished the intelligence, supplied the brains, and even ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... as in France, taking cities, devastating the country, doing more damage each year than could be repaired in a decade. Aix-la-Chapelle, the imperial city of the mighty Charlemagne, fell into their hands, and the palace of the great Charles, in little more than half a century after his death, was converted ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... Lady Ingleton sickened now when she thought of the lovely hands sensitively touching, feeling, the thin china. There really was something appalling in the delicate mentality, in the subtle taste, of a woman in whom raged such devastating ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... the 20th century was marked by: (a) two devastating world wars; (b) the Great Depression of the 1930s; (c) the end of vast colonial empires; (d) rapid advances in science and technology, from the first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (US) to the landing on the moon; (e) the Cold War between the Western ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Nationalism" was supplanting the thesis "Judaism as Religion" and the antithesis "Judaism as Nationalism." The religionists, that is, the believers in the purely religious character of Judaism, began to realize the devastating effect of their doctrine on Jewish life and development, while the nationalists, without sacrificing their convictions—for religion, least of all sentiments, can be forced on modern men—began to appreciate ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... him to pieces, yet man, by forethought, can evade or trap and chain or otherwise overcome him. So my child, there are ways wherein man, assisted by his own knowledge, and by the instruction of departed spirits; aye, by the immortal Gods themselves, can evade even the malefic planets in their devastating course. ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... Indians gathered for conspiracy. They were too deeply stirred for anything like the usual brusque manner of the Police to be effective. A slight indiscretion, indeed, might kindle such a conflagration as would sweep the whole country with the devastating horror of an Indian war. He recalled the very grave manner of Inspector Dickson and resolved upon an entirely new plan of action. At all costs he must allay suspicion that the Police were at all anxious about the situation in the North. Further, he must break the influence of the Sioux Chief ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... and your stiff Covenanter makes his covenant with Death, and your Old Mortality deciphers only the senseless legends of the eternal gravestone,—you get your weed, earth-grown, in bitter verity, and earth-devastating, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... the Wood has for ages been held as an almost sacred spot. Children are never allowed to meddle with its smallest twig. The ax of the woodman has never resounded there. Even war and riot have passed it reverently, pausing for a moment in their devastating way. Philip of Spain, while he ordered Dutchmen to be mowed down by hundreds, issued a mandate that not a bough of the beautiful Wood should be touched. And once, when in a time of great necessity the State was about to sacrifice it to assist in filling a nearly exhausted treasury, the people ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... him as one who should have soared And seen for us the devastating light Whereof there is not either day or night, And shared with us the glamour of the Word That fell once upon Amos to record For men at ease in Zion, when the sight Of ills obscured aggrieved him and the might Of Hamath was a warning ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... in camp on the San Miguel water-hole a solitary horseman on the regulation fiery steed dashed in among them. The newcomer was of a portentous and devastating aspect. A beak-like nose with a predatory curve projected above a mass of bristling, blue-black whiskers. His eye was cavernous and fierce. He was spurred, sombreroed, booted, garnished with revolvers, abundantly drunk, and very much unafraid. Few people in the country drained by the Rio ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... it. It is the carefully cleaned and cherished window of Mr. Brumley's mind, square and tidy and as it were "frosted" against an excess of light, and in that also we have now to record the most jagged all and devastating fractures. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... British came out of the city of New-York, on the west side of the Hudson river, about 2000 strong, for the purpose of plundering and devastating the adjacent country, and capturing the public stores. Colonel Burr was with his regiment, distant about thirty miles, when he heard of the enemy, and yet he was in their camp, and captured or ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Joel admirably illustrates the intimate connection which subsisted for the prophetic mind between the sorrows and disasters of the present and the coming day of Jehovah: the one is the immediate harbinger of the other. In an unusually devastating plague of locusts, which, like an army of the Lord,[1] has stripped the land bare and brought misery alike upon city and country, man and beast—"for the beasts of the field look up sighing unto Thee," i. 20—the prophet ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... were finishing dinner. From over the table, set with the glass and silver that George Alston had bought when he came down from Virginia City, the high, hard light of the chandelier fell on the three females who made up the family. It was devastating to Aunt Ellen Tisdale's gnarled old visage—she was over seventy and for several years now had given up all tiresome thought processes—but the girls were so smoothly skinned and firmly modeled that it only served to bring out the rounded ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... do no such thing!" returned that young lady, dealing a flash from between her curled eyelashes that put the naval officer temporarily out of action, so devastating was its effect. ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... anything but an advantage to the latter. The extent to which the Roman naval power had declined about the year 400 is shown by the plundering of the Latin coasts by a Greek, presumably a Sicilian, war fleet in 405, while at the same time Celtic hordes were traversing and devastating the Latin land.(7) In the following year (406), and beyond doubt under the immediate impression produced by these serious events, the Roman community and the Phoenicians of Carthage, acting respectively for themselves and for their dependent allies, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... war had been increased by the deadly bubonic plague which appeared in Europe early in 1348. In April it had reached Florence; by August it was devastating France and Germany; it then spread over England from the southwest northward, attacking every part of the country during the year 1349. This disease, like other terrible epidemics, such as smallpox and cholera, came from Asia. Those who were stricken ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... painful to relate that in process of being captured one of these youthful fugitives delivered a devastating blow upon the long nose of the constable thereby unconsciously doing a good turn like a true scout and repaying him in kind for his treatment of Pee-wee Thus it will be seen that fate is just for, as Pee-wee explained ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Fanaticism, envy, depreciation of others, aggression, morbid and excessive ambition were all fruits from the same stem. The gloom which many have found in German life, and the pessimism in German philosophy, we may explain in part by the experiences of Germany as the scene of so many devastating wars. Upon the background of fear, in our interpretation of aggressive motives, is erected German autocracy, German ambition and the conception of the absolute State, which may be interpreted as almost a specific fear reaction. It comes in time to have other meanings, and like many instinctive ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... almost interminable extent, there is a most superb view of the surrounding country; nothing can be more varied, grand, and sublime; every spot spared by the all-devastating lavas, is highly cultivated; the vines and other productive fruit-trees are seen laden with the most delicious fruits; the groves of olives, the towns and villages, in almost endless aerial perspective, all terminated by the distant and deep-blue sea, form a scene ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20. No. 568 - 29 Sept 1832 • Various
... it; he shuddered and drew back. But it was of no avail. In vain did Keble and Pusey wring their hands and stretch forth their pleading arms to their now vanishing brother. The fatal moment was fast approaching. Ward at last published a devastating book in which he proved conclusively, by a series of syllogisms, that the only proper course for the Church of England was to repent in sackcloth and ashes her separation from the Communion of Rome. The reckless author was deprived of his degree by an outraged University, ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... fully comprehend the devastating effect of this apparently successful attack upon the allied morale. British statesmen and British soldiers made no attempt to conceal from official Americans the desperate state of affairs. It was the expectation that the Germans might reach Calais and thence invade England. The War Office discussed ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... epoch an imperialist might have been justified in taking a gloomy view of the situation. In Spain Numantia was inflicting more injury on Roman prestige than on Roman power, while the long and harassing slave-war was devastating Sicily. But these perils were ultimately overcome, and meanwhile circumstances had led to the first extension of provincial rule ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... than articles, two hundred was the highest figure it had yet attained. And supposing the poems came and the articles didn't? For in these things he was in the hands of the god. Therefore he had long been a prey to devastating anxiety. But he hoped great things from the transformation of The Museion. It certainly promised him a larger and more certain revenue in the future, almost justifying his marriage in the autumn. ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... also is preserved and cared for? Of course, we can obtain all the bark necessary at present and for some time to come, but the time will come when we shall certainly regret not having taken these steps, if the lumbermen and bark peelers go on devastating magnificent forests. Below will be found a table of weight results. Sole leather tanned with these materials gives for every 100 lb. green hide the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... Quebec, and on several occasions captured and carried off priests and their assistants. But during these years no large body of Iroquois invaded Huronia. The insatiable warriors of the Five Nations were busy devastating the St Lawrence and the Ottawa, pressing the tribes back and ever back, until scarcely a wigwam could be seen between Ville Marie and Lake Nipissing. The Algonquins who had not fallen had left their villages and had sought safety on the bleak shores and islands of ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... carried on their trades as briskly as ever, and were just as eager in their endeavours to tempt the Sahib log to spend their money as if trade had never been interrupted; so quickly do Orientals recover from the effects of a devastating war. ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... time previous to this devastating eruption, Louis IX. fell sick in Paris, and dreamed in the delirium of his fever that he saw the Christian and Moslem host fighting before Jerusalem, and the Christians defeated with great slaughter. The dream made a great impression ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... of Pushkin's that Alexandre Benois has most marvellously illustrated, which has for its theme the rising of the river Neva in November 1824. On that occasion the splendid animal devoured the town, and in Pushkin's poem you feel the devastating power of the beast, and in Benois' pictures you can see it licking its lips as it swallowed down pillars and bridges and streets and squares with poor little fragments of humanity clutching and crying and ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... time for verbal argument. I collected him, a kicking handful, bore him to the ladder, and pushed him through the opening. He uttered one of his devastating squeals. The sound seemed to encourage the workers outside like a trumpet-blast. The ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... A much more devastating criticism was published in Le Journal des Debats by Jules Janin. He went out of his way, indeed, to be positively offensive. Nor did Theophile Gautier, who in his famous waistcoat of crimson velvet was present on this eventful evening, think very much of the would-be ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... barricades. But on the 1st the Chinese, elated at their success in capturing the eastern half of the French Legation, pushed their barricades nearer and nearer, and only one hundred yards behind their advanced lines they brought two guns into action, firing segment and shrapnel alternately. Under this devastating bombardment, almost a bout portant, as the French say, the last line of French trenches and their main-gate blockhouse became untenable. Pieces of shell tore through everything; men were wounded more and ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... be excused in a matter so devastating to republican institutions as this if I quote further from the disclosures of Thomas Beet: "There is another phase," he says, "of the private detective evil which has worked untold damage in America. This is the private constabulary system by which armed forces are employed ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... fuss. I trust you will bear up under it for my sake. I think it will be well for her to learn of my marriage sufficiently long before our return to insure resignation, at least, upon our arrival. After the storm the calm, and although, with my dear Aunt, the calm is almost the more devastating, I trust you will ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... imaginable. The theme is the influence of heredity, as shown in the working out of a strain of Spanish blood in a Sussex peasant stock, the victims of this inconvenient blend being Ruth and the young cousin whom half-unwillingly she marries; with devastating results. Ruth, as I say, was attracted to Westmacott with only part of her being; the better (or at least less Spanish) elements in her were employed in making soft eyes at two other men, one of whom, Malory, is supposed to relate portions of the affair to the quite superfluous ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... thing has become a Decalogue of forbidding commandments, as devastating as those Ten. It is the new avatar of the "moral sense" carrying categorical insolence into the sphere of ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... whole side of life, and it was the side for which she had lived ever since she was a girl of sixteen. The renunciation was tremendous, devastating almost. She thought of a landslide carrying away villages, whole populations. How true had been the instinct which had told her that she was drawing near to a climax in her life! Had ever a woman before her been brought in a flash to such a cruel insight? ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... tailed men, Tdug,[6] overran the Agsan Valley as far south as Verula. They were tailed men from all accounts, the tail of the men being like a dagger, and that of the women like an adze of the kind used by Manbos. For 14 years they continued their depredations, devastating the whole valley till all the Manbos had fled or been killed, except one woman on the Argwan River or, as some ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... Curiosity rushed like a devastating tornado across Miss Mapp's mind, rooting up all other growths, buffeting her with the necessity of knowing what the two whom she had been forced to leave in the garden were doing now, and snatching up her opera-glasses she ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... crumbling. arrullar lull. arrullo m. lullaby. as m. ace. asaz adv. enough, sufficiently, very. ascender ascend, rise. as adv. so, thus. Asia f. Asia. asiento m. seat. asilo m. refuge, protection, shelter, haven, asylum. asolador, -a destroying, devastating. asomar appear. asombro m. amazement, wonder. aspecto m. aspect, appearance, sight. spero, -a rough, rugged. aspirar breathe, inhale, aspire. asqueroso, -a loathsome, filthy. astro m. heavenly body, orb, star. astuto, -a cunning, crafty. ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... have been familiar with inundations; probably no generation failed to witness an inundation which rose unusually high, or was rendered serious by coincident atmospheric or other disturbances. And the memory of the general features of any exceptionally severe and devastating flood, would be preserved by popular tradition for long ages. What, then, could be more natural than that a Chaldaean poet should seek for the incidents of a great catastrophe among such phenomena? In what other way than by such an appeal to their experience could he so surely awaken ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... this land has been but lightly touched by the devastating hand of man. A log road cuts the forest here and there and sometimes we saw a train of ox-carts winding through the trees; but the primitive beauty of the mountains remains unmarred, save where a hillside has been ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... for the rest of the way. Between Hendon and Willesden, there are pastoral solitudes within an hour's drive of Oxford Street—wooded lanes and wild-flowers, farms and cornfields, still unprofaned by the devastating brickwork of the builder of modern times. Following winding ways, under shadowing trees, the coachman made his last inquiry at a roadside public-house. Hearing that Benjulia's place of abode was now within half a mile of him, Ovid set forth on foot; leaving the driver and the horses to ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... to take possession, and our newspapers would merely remark that there was always a strain of insanity in the Spanish branch of the Bourbons. Two hundred years ago such a will would have produced a prolonged and devastating war. Something is gained. We have eliminated royal dynasties from the motives ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... exhausted by their own devouring passions, or compelled by the stern hand of necessity, they have permitted suffering humanity to take breath; they have allowed the miseries concomitant on war, to cease for an instant their devastating havoc; they have made peace in the name of that God, whose decrees, as attested by themselves, they have been so wantonly outraging,—still ready, however, to violate their most solemn pledges, when the smallest interest could offer ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... I had read, about two years before, the passage in Southey's "Colloquies," in which Sir Thomas More is made to remark that modern Englishmen have no guarantee whatever, in these latter times, that their shores shall not be visited, as of old, by devastating plagues. "As touching the pestilence," says Sir Thomas (or rather the poet in his name), "you fancy yourselves secure because the plague has not appeared among you for the last hundred and fifty years—a portion of time which, long as it may seem, compared with the brief ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... landowners along the Hudson to grant freehold title. Most of the Germans, seeking homes in the best advertised and most German of all the colonies, landed at the port of Philadelphia. Germantown had been founded by Francis Daniel Pastorius in 1683, but it was not until forty years later, after the devastating wars of the Spanish Succession, that his countrymen occupied in force the neighboring counties of Lancaster, Montgomery, and Bucks, pushed up into Lehigh and Northampton, and across the Susquehanna into Cumberland and Adams. Much to their surprise, doubtless, for it was scarcely the business of ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... suddenly rage off the capes of Virginia, round to the Gulf of Mexico, and drive off the sea from America, affecting the Bahama Banks, but not reaching to Jamaica or Cuba. The rollers set in terrifically in the Gulf of California, causing vessels to founder or strike in 7 fathoms, and devastating the coast-line. H.M.S. Lily foundered off Tristan d'Acunha in similar weather. In all the latter cases no satisfactory cause is yet ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... rock pinnacle and stood looking somberly down at the devastation that was being wrought, with no greater beginning, probably, than a dropped match or cigarette stub. He was thinking hazily that so his old life had been swept away in the devastating effect of a passing whim, a foolish bit of play. The girl irritated him with her chatter—yet three months ago he himself would have considered it brilliant conversation, and would have exerted himself to keep pace ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... not be. The Lord surely will not suffer it. Twice is quite enough. Five centuries ago, the avenging hand of the Almighty drove me hither from the depths of Asia. A solitary wanderer, I left in my track more mourning, despair, disaster, and death, than the innumerable armies of a hundred devastating conquerors could have produced. I then entered this city, and it was decimated. Two centuries ago that inexorable hand which led me through the world again conducted me here; and on that occasion, as on the previous one, that scourge, which at intervals the Almighty binds to my footsteps, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... her. He had not been unkind nor patronising nor contemptuous—he had simply not yet thought about her. The circumstances of his recent return, however, had forced him to consider every one in the house. He had his secret preoccupation that seemed so absorbing and devastating to him that he could not believe that every one around him would not guess it. He soon discovered that his father was too cock-sure and his sister too innocent to guess anything. Now he was not himself a perceptive man; he had, after all, seen as yet very little of ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... sea commerce; and herein, if history may be trusted, they greatly failed. At no time has war against commerce been conducted on a larger scale and with greater results than during this period; and its operations were widest and most devastating at the very time that the great French fleets were disappearing, in the years immediately after La Hougue, apparently contradicting the assertion that such a warfare must be based on powerful fleets or neighboring seaports. A somewhat full discussion is due, ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... power. In the torrid zone it took the form of excessive rain and humidity, excessive heat, or excessive dryness and aridity. In the temperate and frigid zones, life was a seasonal battle with bitter cold, torrents of cold rain in early winter or spring, devastating sleet, and deep snow and ice that ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... successes. I was an utterly devastating debutante and you were a prosperous musician ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... from investment, consequent stagnation in business, followed by the closing of factories and penury among laborers. To others it means three dollars a day for unskilled labor, fire, clothes, and something to eat. Again, if one wished to present the horrors of devastating disease, in the South he would mention yellow fever, in the North smallpox; but to a lady who saw six little brothers and sisters dead from it in one week, three carried to the graveyard on the hillside one chill November morning, all the terrors of contagious ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... condemned Mexico to fifty years of turbulence and alternating despotism and license. Ambitious soldiers strove with each other for the place of highest honour and profit. Texas, resenting the instability of Creole government, separated from the Mexican States after a devastating war. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... commiseration. His clear-sighted intelligence is often pleased to toy very plausibly with a certain species of revolutionary socialism. But, I suppose few socialists derive much satisfaction from that devastating piece of irony, the Isle of the Penguins; where everything moves in circles and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... wholesale progress in human affairs. Our part, the human part, was simply to enjoy the usufruct. Evolution inherited all the goods of divine Providence and had the advantage of being in fashion. Even a great and devastating war is not too great a price to pay for an awakening from such an infantile and selfish dream. Progress is not automatic; it depends upon human intent and aim and upon acceptance of responsibility for its production. It is not a wholesale matter, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... old feud was renewed, the old score opened, and the waters of malice, revenge and hate which had been accumulating for months broke forth afresh with devastating effect. Soon the news was heard in all the surrounding hills and valleys. It stirred the dull and untrained minds in many a mountain cabin; it was discussed between drinks in rough taverns. Somehow the story sounded through the green Kentucky woods until its echoes appeared in the daily ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... Park's tragical end. The natives were extremely reserved upon the subject, but what they told, bore out in every particular Amadi Fatouma's account. They said that the attack was caused by the English having been mistaken for an advanced guard of Fellatahs, who were then devastating Soudan. The King of Boussa received Clapperton and Lander with great kindness. Here they found boats lying ready for them, with a message from the Sultan of Youri, requesting a visit, and promising, ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... melancholy pine. And many a denuded avenue Of varying and considerable width, Cut through the growth of balsam, spruce and pine, Which stands erect and proud on either hand, Attests the swift and desolating force Of fearful, devastating avalanche. ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... boat, and enjoys outwitting fish and turtle and dugong. However unstable his craft and surly the sea, he keeps calm; but with a tempestuous horse, who was wont to play about on the flat, pawing the air like a tragic actor, and kicking it with devastating viciousness, well—"Look out!" As was the horse, so was the yard designed—big and strong. Some of the posts are one foot in diameter, and four and a half feet in the ground. As neither of us had built a yard before, there ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the wind. Needless to struggle; to fling helm a-lee, and make 'bout ship! A bewildered Convention sails not in the teeth of the wind; but is rapidly blown round again. So strong is the wind, we say; and so changed; blowing fresher and fresher, as from the sweet South-West; your devastating North-Easters, and wild tornado-gusts of Terror, blown utterly out! All Sansculottic things are passing away; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... purchased, by the very large sums that have been expended, and the valuable lives that have been lost in its exploration; the arid and waterless wastes of the interior, which have now been proved equally subject to terrific droughts and devastating floods, make it improbable that the Settlements of the North Coast and the Southern Colonies can be connected by a continuous line of occupation for many years to come; the rich pastoral tracts of Arnheim's Land, the Victoria River, the ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... however. Our troops had, apparently, gained their objectives along the entire line to the right. On the left the next Brigade had been hung up by devastating machine-gun fire. As McKnutt and Talbot waited around for news and fresh orders, one of their men ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... So devastating had been the character of the late wars in Tahiti, that we found it impossible to obtain supplies, and we therefore sailed for Ulitea, the largest of the Georgian group, where we were informed that we should probably be more ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... nobleman and his niece, who lives with him. The man I allude to as Lord Bilberry, but is now Earl of Cockletown. He was raised to this rank for some services he rendered the government against the tories, who had been devastating the country, and also against some turbulent papists who were supposed to have privately encouraged them in their outrages against Protestant life and property. He was a daring and intrepid man when in his prime of life, and appeared to seek danger for its ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... blue skies. There is one gray peak ahead, tinged with green. The trail is all washed away and our horses stumble and slide, slip and almost fall over the barren and rough rocks, and the scattered bowlders, a devastating cloud-burst could ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... helpless cry, and the little fellow instinctively flew through the open doorway, where, blinded and choking with the devastating element around him, he staggered feebly beyond its influence. Yet again a flurry of thick smoke lighted up the forked and vivid flames, and chased ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... will not be. The Lord surely will not suffer it. Twice is quite enough. Five centuries ago, the avenging hand of the Almighty drove me hither from the depths of Asia. A solitary wanderer, I left in my track more mourning, despair, disaster, and death, than the innumerable armies of a hundred devastating conquerors could have produced. I then entered this city, and it was decimated. Two centuries ago that inexorable hand which led me through the world again conducted me here; and on that occasion, as on the previous one, that scourge, which at intervals the Almighty binds to my footsteps, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the old homestead. More than four years, however, had passed since any tidings had been received of them by Franconia; and it was strongly surmised that they had fallen victims to the savage incursions of marauding parties, who were at that time devastating the country, and scattering its defenceless inhabitants homeless over the western shores of central America. So strong had this impression found place in Franconia's mind that she had given up all hopes ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... Wall, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,—which one prominent librarian considers the best ghost story ever written,—is original in the method of its horrific manifestation. Isn't it more devastating to one's sanity to see the shadow of a revenge ghost cast on the wall,—to know that a vindictive spirit is beside one but invisible—than to see the specter himself? Under such circumstances, the sight of a skeleton or a sheeted ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... internal upheaval, so that the game today is a refined product of the game of twenty years ago. Refined but not vitalized. The World War alone placed its blight on the English game, and changed the even tenor of its way. Naturally the War had only a devastating effect. No good sprang from it. It is to the everlasting credit of the French and English that during those horrible four years of privation, suffering, and death the ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... All. In each of them, desire for the void mounts into a gigantic, monstrous flower, into the shimmering thing that enchants King Mark's garden and the rippling stream and the distant horns while Isolde waits for Tristan, or into the devastating fever that chains the sick Tristan to his bed ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... far-fetched they may appear to the unimaginative, are certainly not lacking in originality of device, or cleverness of construction.... This is a specimen incident—those which succeed it derive their special interest from the action of Rontgen rays, subterranean torrents, and devastating inundations. The book is very readable throughout, and ends happily. What more can the average novel reader ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... midnight," replied the Nome King, "we shall arrive at the Emerald City by daybreak. Then, while all the Oz people are sleeping, we will capture them and make them our slaves. After that we will destroy the city itself and march through the Land of Oz, burning and devastating ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... would. But the boots seem to have a devastating effect. The minute she gets them on—even in imagination, for we haven't had a dress rehearsal yet—her voice grows softer and her manner more lady-like. It's the funniest thing I ever knew, to hear ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... hoisted his shoulders in a mighty shrug. "It is devastating, Madame. See now! Here is this city—a beastly place, it is true, but with much money, and very busy exterminating Jews. Which will you, Madame—its money or its Jews? You see the choice! But I will weary you no longer; the ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... the Sixth; nay, even his first speeches lead us already to form the most unfavourable anticipations of his future conduct. He lowers obliquely like a dark thundercloud on the horizon, which gradually approaches nearer and nearer, and first pours out the devastating elements with which it is charged when it hangs over the heads of mortals. Two of Richard's most significant soliloquies which enable us to draw the most important conclusions with regard to his mental temperament, are to be found in The Last Part of Henry ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... industry. Transfers from the US Government add substantially to American Samoa's economic well-being. According to one observer, attempts by the government to develop a larger and broader economy are restrained by Samoa's remote location, its limited transportation, and its devastating hurricanes. ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... sentinelle the peasants call it, because its lofty crest, rising to every wind, sends down the street first warning of any coming change. They see it bend or hear the rattle of its leaves. The coup de Joran, most sudden and devastating of mountain winds, is on the way from the precipice of the Creux du Van. It comes howling like artillery down the deep Gorges de l'Areuse. They run to fasten windows, collect the washing from roof and garden, drive the cattle into shelter, and close the big doors of the barns. The children ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... had been made to signal across estuaries and deltas. Number Five was forbidden to wake the engine within earshot of the school. But a deep, devastating drone filled the passages as McTurk and Beetle scientifically rubbed its top. Anon it changed to the blare of trumpets—of savage pursuing trumpets. Then, as McTurk slapped one side, smooth with the blood of ancient sacrifice, the roar broke into short coughing howls ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... through a district is a pest more dreaded than the fatal plague itself. The once flourishing and magnificent plains of Eske-Seher have been deserts since the Sultan Amurath traversed them, at the head of 300,000 men, to lay siege to Bagdad. His passage was marked by all the devastating effects of the hurricane. When a body of those horsemen called Delhis, who are attached to the suite of every Pasha, enters a village, the consternation is general, and followed by a system of exaction that to the unfortunate villager is equivalent to ruin. ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... desolating fury. It seemed as if at one and the same instant the four Union batteries opened, and a terrible concentrating storm of flame and projectiles leaped from the muzzles of twenty-four pieces of artillery and burst upon their centre with devastating effect. In an instant after, the infantry sprung to their feet, and a sheet of fire burst from right to left, one deadly and irresistible shower of lead sweeping through the rebel ranks that had so little ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... time excluded us even from trade with the West Indies, while we were at peace with all nations. In our recent civil war the rebels and their piratical and blockade-breaking allies found facilities in the same ports for the work, which they too successfully accomplished, of injuring and devastating the commerce which we are now engaged in rebuilding. We labored especially under this disadvantage, that European steam vessels employed by our enemies found friendly shelter, protection, and supplies in West Indian ports, while our naval operations were necessarily carried on from our own ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... name "McCallum"—two rocks upon which she had builded the edifice of her confidence—were found of a sudden to be but shifting sands, hard-packed enough on the surface, but subjected to the most insidious and devastating undertow. Many a weaker spirit would have thrown up his arms and dived with desperation overboard in search of solid footing. But not so Mary Louise. She had a momentary whirl at negation and then a firm and ever-increasing determination to ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... part of the island, in the consequence of successive eruptions extending over many years. The most ancient eruption of Mount Aetna on record is that mentioned by Pindar and Schylus, as occurring under Hiero, in the second year of the 75th Olympiad. It is probable that Hesiod was aware of the devastating eruptions of Aetna before the period of Greek immigration. There is, however, some doubt regarding the work [Greek word] in the text of Hesiod, a subject into whci I have entered at some length in another place. (Humboldt, 'Examen Crit. de le Geogr.', ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... written with that fellow-feeling which on such occasions royalty is bound to express. "I know what it is like myself," wrote one who had had six attempts made on him; "but I have never had it done to me from behind. How very devastating to the nerves that must be!" The Prince of Schnapps-Wasser wired that he could find no language to express himself, but hoped in a few weeks' time to come and show all that he felt. Max after a brief wire had flown back ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... Leipzig clocks imperturbably strike nine, and the battle which is to decide the fate of Europe, and perhaps the world, begins with three booms from the line of the allies. They are the signal for a general cannonade of devastating intensity. ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... the risk of a heavy pecuniary loss by breakage, and a heavier personal affliction in perpetual imputations of awkwardness. Then, again, it is no easy matter to put on a smiling and indifferent countenance, whenever a friend, accustomed to some latitude of motion, runs, as is often the case, his devastating chair against a high-priced work of art, or overturns a table laden with an "infinite thing" in costly bijouterie. I have long made it a rule to exclude from my visiting-list, or at least not to let up stairs, ladies who pay their morning calls with a retinue of children: but the thing is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... He was poised to spring, his fangs bared and his fierce eyes hot with fire, but he was not hunting. Whatever moved in the darkness without, the wolf had no desire to go forth and attack. Perhaps he would fight to the death to protect the occupants of the cave; but surely an ancient and devastating fear had hold of him. Evidently he recognized the intruder as an ancestral enemy that ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... conditions. We hold the key to the solution of a great problem, which for the past quarter of a century, has puzzled the brightest minds and best thinkers among our statesmen. The problem of how best to control the devastating floods, which each year, with increasing power and violence, continue to destroy hundreds of lives and millions of dollars worth of property, on the farms and in the towns and cities throughout the river valleys of ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... allies with heavy loss, and brought in a convoy; and Ameer Khan, who had only joined the Rajah of Bhurtpoor in the hope of plunder, had deserted his ally and ridden off, with his following and a large body of Pindarees, with the intention of devastating and plundering the district of Rohilcund. Three regiments of British cavalry, under General Smith; and as many of native horse, with artillery, followed on his track and, after a pursuit of three weeks, at last came up with him, annihilated ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... of heralds, marched four trumpet-faced creatures making a devastating bray; and then came squat, resolute-moving ushers before and behind, and on either hand a galaxy of learned heads, a sort of animated encyclopedia, who were, Phi-oo explained, to stand about the Grand Lunar for purposes of reference. (Not a thing in lunar science, ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... possibility of any such catastrophe as the deluge within the historic period. According to Sir Charles Lyell, no devastating flood could have passed over the forest zone of AEtna during the last twelve thousand years; and the volcanic cones of Auvergne, which enclose in their ashes the remains of extinct animals, and present an outline as perfect as that of AEtna, are deemed older still. Kalisch forcibly ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... where strength was stronger or beauty beautifuller than right here in Hoskins' Corners. He prayed with all his heart, though it was almost too much to hope, that the cholera, which was raging in Kentucky, would pass this Eden by; that the yellow fever, which was devastating Tennessee, would halt abashed before this stronghold of health, though he felt bound to add that it was a peculiarly malignant and persistent disease; that the smallpox, which was creeping southward from Canada, would smite the ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... drought that lay over the land; with the fiery sun, that streamed from cloudless skies, beneath which the very earth shrunk from itself in gaping fissures; with the wild night wind, that shrieked and skirled with devastating breath over the wilderness beneath the cold ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... left reached Madras in safety, but of those who remained in the town, all are dead, or prisoners beyond the hills. Hyder descended through the pass of Changama on the 20th of July, and his horsemen spread out like a cloud over the country, burning, devastating, and slaughtering. Hyder moved with the main army slowly, occupying town after town, ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... as the swift wave of sympathy that surged over the earth. A famine in India, a devastating earthquake in Mexico, a bid for freedom on the part of an oppressed population, a deed of heroism at sea—each was felt within practically a few moments, emotionally, in an English, French or German village. Our hearts were throbbing continuously ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... almost incessant death. They destroyed themselves and each other by their violence. Scarcely did one become eminent before it was torn to pieces by its comrades, or perished of its own rage. They were like barbarous hordes, exterminating one another or falling into dissolution, while devastating everything in ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... submarine operations in naval warfare, have been somewhat overrated. Visions of air-ships hovering over a doomed city and devastating it with missiles dropped from above are mere fairy tales. Indeed the whole subject of aeronautics as an element in future human progress has excited far more attention than its intrinsic ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... vitality neglected, unexplored; and I do not think the end of that wasteful system can be lamented by anyone who believes in the English. Rather it should reconcile us to the disillusionments of this present time of transition. They are devastating, I admit; for me, they have spoilt a great deal of that pleasure which the English country used to give me, when I still fancied it to be the scene of a joyful and comely art of living. I know now that the ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... who dwell in the chestnut-trees,—too intimate, for almost every day in the summer he would bring in one, until he nearly discouraged them. He was, indeed, a superb hunter, and would have been a devastating one, if his bump of destructiveness had not been offset by a bump of moderation. There was very little of the brutality of the lower animals about him; I don't think he enjoyed rats for themselves, but he knew his business, and for the first few months ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... like a devastating tornado across Miss Mapp's mind, rooting up all other growths, buffeting her with the necessity of knowing what the two whom she had been forced to leave in the garden were doing now, and snatching up her opera-glasses she glided upstairs, and let herself out through the trap-door on to the roof. ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... founded unproductive dynasties. For the Semitic race, the interval between God and man, and consequently between God and civilization, was and is infinite, impassable. The Arabs possessed nothing but the devastating force of proselytism to fertilize their minds and social relations; and, with the exception of architecture, geography, and cognate sciences, they were for the most part only the transmitters of the science of others. We, on the ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... were divided with rigorous precision, and sent in different directions to maintain the equilibrium of the enormous liquid mass,—for the smallest deviation might cause the submersion of whole provinces. In this manner all of the rivers, which originally wandered unrestrained, swamping and devastating the whole country, have been reduced to streams and have become the ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... tropical; hot, humid; little seasonal temperature variation Guadeloupe and Martinique: subtropical tempered by trade winds; moderately high humidity; rainy season (June to October); vulnerable to devastating cyclones (hurricanes) every eight years on average Reunion: tropical, but temperature moderates with elevation; cool and dry (May to November), hot and ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... eyes were quite expressionless, but his thick lips parted, and his strong yellow teeth showed in his thick brake of beard. With the caution of one who knows that a single glowing match-end dropped among dry vegetation may cause a devastating conflagration, he blew out the lingering flame, and rolled the little charred stick between his tough-skinned fingers before he threw it down. Then he raised himself up, and stepped over the dying creature, and went upon ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... and there by an angry red, and torn by vivid streams of lightning. Not a breath of wind shook the leaves or stirred the high, rank grass by the water-side; a portentous and awful stillness filled the air,—the stillness felt by nature before a devastating storm. Quiet, with the like awful and portentous calm, the black regiment, headed by its young, fair-haired, knightly colonel, marched to its destined ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... on this account), and so far as the Lutheran Princes were concerned (by whom the progress of the Turks is reckoned matter of joy),—this frantic and man-destroying Fury, I say, by this time would be depopulating and devastating all Europe, overturning altars and signs of the cross as zealously as Calvin himself. Ours therefore they are, our proper foes, seeing that by the industry of our champions it was that their fangs were unfastened ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... and forgave her father all. In the midst of his devastating fury he had stopped short, restrained by paternal feeling and the gratitude he owed to his daughter! This proof of tenderness, coming to her at a moment when despair had reached its climax, brought about in Marguerite's ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... at her with curiosity. I tried to see what there was in her to have excited in Lawson such a devastating passion. But who can explain these things? It was true that she was lovely; she reminded one of the red hibiscus, the common flower of the hedgerow in Samoa, with its grace and its languor and its passion; but what surprised me most, taking into ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... Valley as far south as Verula. They were tailed men from all accounts, the tail of the men being like a dagger, and that of the women like an adze of the kind used by Manbos. For 14 years they continued their depredations, devastating the whole valley till all the Manbos had fled or been killed, except one woman on the Argwan River or, as ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... storm! storm! storm! and still storm! storm! storm! and forever storm! storm! storm! hunt the enemy to his hole, then turn her French hurricanes loose and carry him by storm! And that is my sort! Jargeau? What of Jargeau, with its battlements and towers, its devastating artillery, its seven thousand picked veterans? Joan of Arc is to the fore, and by the splendor of God ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... is a thought less romantic than in certain novels that drew sighs from my adolescent breast, this is a change inherent in the theme. For the matter of the present work is a study in conjugal tedium. Parthenope (name of ill-omen) was one of those unhappy and devastating beings who go through life fated to bore their nearest and dearest to the verge of lunacy. So that her marriage to poor well-meaning Willy Steele had not endured for more than a matter of weeks before the wretched man fled from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... itself. The Picts of Caledonia and the Scots of Ireland were their natural foes, but conflict with these enemies served only to stimulate the national life. But actual disaster threatened them when in the fifth and sixth centuries the heathen Angles and Saxons bore down in devastating hordes upon the land. It is at this critical period in the national history that Arthur must have lived. How long or how valiant the resistance was we cannot know. That it was vain is certain. A large body of Britons fled from annihilation across the channel, ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... by the guns of the fort. They sprang to the window and witnessed the spectacle for which the unhappy captain had prayed long and devoutly. The Philadelphia was in flames—red, devouring flames, pouring out of her hold, climbing the rigging, licking her topmasts, forming fantastic columns—devastating, unconquerable flames—the frigate was doomed, doomed! And every now and then one of her guns would explode as though booming out her requiem. Bainbridge ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... in a matter so devastating to republican institutions as this if I quote further from the disclosures of Thomas Beet: "There is another phase," he says, "of the private detective evil which has worked untold damage in America. ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... the continuity of its venerable life, was a house of mourning; not for loss in the inevitable and not unkindly way of human destiny as understood and accepted with long disciplined resignation—but for loss sudden, awful, devastating; for the gallant lad who had left it but a few weeks before, with a smile on his lips, and a new and dancing light of manhood in his eyes, now with those eyes unclosed and glazed staring at the pitiless Flanders ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... who abandoned the country to fire, sword, and rapine. Old men and women, pale with fear, came crowding into camp with thrilling tales of the brutality of the Bohemians and their associates. The war had begun; and Henry was devastating the region bordering on the Danube and the Rhine, from ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... faintly hinted at a dwarfish human shape in outline. A rather unusually small and heavy catassin, the Security chief pointed out, would present such an outline. That something quite material was finally undergoing devastating structural disorganization on the gravity mine was unpleasantly obvious, but it produced no further information. The sequence ended with the short blaze of heat which had ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... soldier. Everything had been done to save him. Money had been spent freely—my uncle did not stop at his unmarried daughter's portion, when everything else was gone. My cousin had also submitted to some secret treatment,—some devastating drug administered for months before the examination,—but the effects were not pronounced enough, and he was passed. For the first few weeks his company was stationed in Polotzk. I saw my cousin drill on the square, ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... not an English wherry would stir to take possession, and our newspapers would merely remark that there was always a strain of insanity in the Spanish branch of the Bourbons. Two hundred years ago such a will would have produced a prolonged and devastating war. Something is gained. We have eliminated royal dynasties from the motives ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... the horizon, and vanished, to bring back for the hundredth time darkness more shattering than their instantly renewed light over all Illinois. Then the tune and lights ceased together, and we heard one single devastating wail that shook all the horizon as a rubbed wet finger shakes the rim ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... appears in vineyards in vast swarms toward the middle of June in northern states and about two weeks earlier in southern states east of the Rocky Mountains. Often they overrun gardens, orchards, vineyards and nurseries, and usually, after having done a vast amount of damage in the month of their devastating presence, the beetles disappear as suddenly as they came. Vineyards on or near sandy soils are most often infested, the larvae of the beetle seeming to live in considerable numbers only in these light soils. The chief damage ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... she had both hurt and puzzled Don Carlos, and she gloried in the thought, flattering herself that she was really taking her revenge. She was completely mistress of herself again, sure of her own powers, and during supper she laid herself out to be "nice," with almost devastating effect, playing on the emotions of the Spaniard like a skilled musician on a sensitive instrument. Deliberately she encouraged him, only to rebuff him when she had inflamed his ardour, deliberately she set herself ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... could not keep her heart from going out to him in pity; she was filled with compunctions to see him lying there, drunk and contented, and ever suspecting. Never suspecting—trusting her with a perfect and pathetic trust, and she holding over him by a thread a possible calamity of so devastating a— ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the years when he wrote more articles than poems. Whereas, if he wrote more poems than articles, two hundred was the highest figure it had yet attained. And supposing the poems came and the articles didn't? For in these things he was in the hands of the god. Therefore he had long been a prey to devastating anxiety. But he hoped great things from the transformation of The Museion. It certainly promised him a larger and more certain revenue in the future, almost justifying his marriage in the autumn. It had been expressly understood that his promise to Flossie ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... of Wollin, and now I am ready to give you up the annuity which I then received, if it will help your necessities, and that you promise thereupon to release the land from the interdict, that all this fearful villainy and lawlessness which is devastating the country may have ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... own, or lose it. But perhaps it was the indifference to the ruin of the women belonging to him that Harry Heathcote felt the strongest. The stranger cared nothing for the utter desolation which one unscrupulous ruffian might produce, felt no horror at the idea of a vast devastating fire, but could be indignant in his mock philanthropy because it was proposed to watch the ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... this resembles the first start of the Atacama nitrate fields, where there was a financing house, a gentleman of the name of Edwards, and—a Government; or, rather, two Governments—two South American Governments. And you know what came of it. War came of it; devastating and prolonged war came of it, Mr. Gould. However, here we possess the advantage of having only one South American Government hanging around for plunder out of the deal. It is an advantage; but then there are degrees of badness, and that ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... fortunate isle was uninhabited. Flat, offering nothing but a tiny bay for the convenience of embarkation, and under the protection of the governor, who went shares with them, smugglers made use of it as a provisional entrepot, at the expense of not killing the game or devastating the garden. With this compromise, the governor was in a situation to be satisfied with a garrison of eight men to guard his fortress, in which twelve cannons accumulated coats of moldy green. The governor was a sort of happy farmer, harvesting wines, figs, oil, ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Rientes, near Lorca, in Murcia, where a dam 150 ft. high, the construction of which for irrigation purposes was commenced in 1755 and completed in 1789, was filled for the first time in February, 1802, and two months later gave way, destroying part of the town of Lorca and devastating a large tract of the most fertile country, and causing the death of 600 people. The immediate cause of failure in this case the author has been unable to ascertain. In Algeria the Sig and Tlelat dams were destroyed in 1865; and in the United States of America, at Williamsburg, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... pouring With a wild eternal roar; Like a sea, that's burst its barriers Resounding evermore: Like an ocean lash'd to fury, And toiling to o'erwhelm With its devastating billows The earth's ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... and went through Europe with him, giving expression to the voices within, which, to him, had been unutterable,—then we saw that the emotions which would have been safe, had they been suffered to well up gently from the first, could come forth now only as a fierce and perhaps devastating torrent. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of thus securing an easy passage for their armies into China. An offer of peace was now made by the Chinese Emperor, for reasons shortly to be stated; but the Manchu terms were too severe, and hostilities were resumed, the Manchus chiefly occupying themselves in devastating the country round Peking, their numbers being constantly swelled by a stream of deserters from the Chinese ranks. In 1643, Abkhai died; he was succeeded by his ninth son, a boy of five, and was later on canonised as T'ai Tsung, the Great Forefather. By 1635, he had already begun ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... against them. A devastating blizzard enveloped them, and they lay huddled together behind a rock, chilled to the bone by the driving particles of ice ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... wandering with their herds, some dwelling in villages and tilling their fields, but all warlike and all barbarians. And over this plain at intervals swept conquering hordes from Asia, the terrible Huns, the devastating Avars, and others of varied names. But as yet the Russia we know did not exist, and its very name had ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... chimney two recessed seats looked out over the college gardens; long red curtains were drawn to shut out the winter draughts. It was the true English January— driving squalls of rain, dampness, and devastating chill. The east wind brought the booming toll from Magdalen tower very distinctly to the ear, closely followed by the tinny chime in Fellows' Quad. ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... years, but I reckon I've got a crop now." The cotton looked tall and rich, and we praised it. He curtsied low, and then bowed almost to the ground, with an imperturbable gravity that seemed almost suspicious. Then he continued, "My mule died last week,"—a calamity in this land equal to a devastating fire in town,—"but a white man loaned me another." Then he added, eyeing us, "Oh, I gets along with white folks." We turned the conversation. "Bears? deer?" he answered, "well, I should say there were," and he let fly a string of brave oaths, as he told hunting-tales ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... dividing the party opposed to it. William crossed to Normandy in 1073, leading a considerable army composed in part of English. The campaign was a short one. Revolt was punished, as William sometimes punished it, by barbarously devastating the country. Le Mans did not venture to stand a siege, but surrendered on William's sworn promise to respect its ancient liberty. By a later treaty with Fulk of Anjou, Robert was recognized as Count of Maine, but as a vassal of Anjou and ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... time were of a sudden flung open. In the space of a few years something like five centuries poured over the land. Nikola stood on the rocks with his sons hoping to escape the devastating torrent. But there was no way of escape. They must swim with the ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... the landing the exploring party stood on the summit of the hill, where the black flag waved over a scene of utter desolation. The vegetation was withered to pallid rags: even the tiniest weedling in the rock crevices had been poisoned by the devastating blast. ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... gold-regions of California was, indeed, clouded to a fearful extent with the soul-destroying vapours of worldliness, selfishness, and ungodliness, which the terrors of Lynch law alone restrained from breaking forth in all their devastating strength. ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... which the Roman naval power had declined about the year 400 is shown by the plundering of the Latin coasts by a Greek, presumably a Sicilian, war fleet in 405, while at the same time Celtic hordes were traversing and devastating the Latin land.(7) In the following year (406), and beyond doubt under the immediate impression produced by these serious events, the Roman community and the Phoenicians of Carthage, acting respectively for themselves and for their dependent allies, concluded a treaty of commerce and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... science is not a mere coincidence. Before this advance men placed the golden age in remote antiquity. Now they face the future with a firm belief that intelligence properly used can do away with evils once thought inevitable. To subjugate devastating disease is no longer a dream; the hope of abolishing poverty ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... move. And then they understood that the whole sea was frozen; there could not be one open spot as big as a soup-plate on which the storm could begin its work. But it was a wonderful sight, to see the sea lying dead and motionless as a rocky desert in the midst of this devastating storm. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... of growth, from the giant pine to the creeping wintergreen and shaded mosses, mingled in beautiful confusion. Here it became a desert. For the terrible forest fires, the woodsman's tragic enemy, had swept over it not long before, devastating an area of many square miles. Millions of dollars worth of valuable timber had been reduced to rotting embers. Storm-defying pines had crashed to the earth, and were overridden by the flames in their wild rush ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... Islands, the Yankees being assisted every now and then by one or more of their gunboats. The General explained to us that these light-draft armed vessels—river-gropers, as he called them—were indefatigable at pushing up the numerous creeks, burning and devastating everything. He said that when he became acquainted with the habits of one of these "critturs," he arranged an ambuscade for her, and with the assistance of "his fancy Irishman" (Captain Mitchell), he captured her. This was the case ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... (played by Miss GLADYS GORDON with a nice sense of fun). Mr. HENRY CAINE, as "The Daisy," presented very effectively the rough-and-ready humour and the frank brutality of his type; but he perhaps failed to convey the devastating attractions which he was alleged to have for the frail sex; and his sudden spasms of tragic emotion seemed a little out of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... slavery. Mr. H. M. Hyndman, an English writer of repute, declares that in India men and women cannot get food, because they cannot save money to buy it, so terrible are the burdens laid by Christian England on that unhappy people. Just as Ireland exported food to England during her most devastating "famines," so does India send food to the "Mother Country" in the discharge of governmental burdens, while her own people are starving by millions. Henry George, who has never been suspected of anti-English tendencies, says: "The millions of India have bowed their necks beneath the yokes of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of spring, but April was one of the coldest and dreariest in the memory of living man. The old earth in sympathy with the great struggle that was devastating and searing her, seemed to be withholding leaf and flower, and forbidding the sun ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... heard; the very winds, Danger's grim playmates, on that precipice Slept, clasped in his embrace.—O, storm of death! Whose sightless speed divides this sullen night: 610 And thou, colossal Skeleton, that, still Guiding its irresistible career In thy devastating omnipotence, Art king of this frail world, from the red field Of slaughter, from the reeking hospital, 615 The patriot's sacred couch, the snowy bed Of innocence, the scaffold and the throne, A mighty voice invokes thee. Ruin calls His brother ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the contents of his cellar. Still further; all these people went away with the conviction that M. de Beaufort only acted in this manner to prepare for a new fortune concealed beneath the Arab tents. They repeated to each other, while devastating his hotel, that he was sent to Gigelli by the king, to reconstruct his lost fortunes; that the treasures of Africa would be equally divided between the admiral and the king of France; that these treasures consisted ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... forests, level the mountains, and shut out the sea, if you want to equalize society in a closet-civilization where all will have the same polish and all be of the same color. We have seen that entire flourishing lands which have been robbed of the protecting forests have fallen prey to the devastating floods of the mountain streams and the scorching breath of the storms. A large part of Italy, the paradise of Europe, is a land which has, ceased to live, because its soil no longer bears any forests under the protection of which it might become rejuvenated. And not only is the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... of religion, the war of 1569, in which the Huguenots were defeated in the historic battles of Jarnac and Moncontour, had been so devastating that the government lost the disposition to go on fighting, and counsels of moderation prevailed. Coligny, summoned to advise, was listened to with attention, and a marriage was decided on between the king's sister, Margaret of Valois, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... so recently been, making their inglorious campaign in France had been excluded from that country at the close of 1587, and furious were the denunciations of the pulpits and the populace of Paris that the foreign brigands who had been devastating the soil of France, and attempting to oppose the decrees of the Holy Father of Rome, should; have made their escape so easily. Rabid Lincestre and other priests and monks foamed with rage, as they execrated and anathematized the devil-worshipper Henry of Valois, in all the churches ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... their arms could not even preserve the Hellenic heritage against external foes. The Oriental rallied and expelled Hellenism again from the Asiatic hinterland, while the new cloud of Rome was gathering in the west. In four generations[2] of the most devastating warfare the world had seen, Rome conquered all the coasts of the Mediterranean. Greek city and Greek dynast went down before her, and the political sceptre passed ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... The devastating track of the pony's feet was the last misdeed that cut him off from all sympathy of Humanity. He turned into the road, leaned forward, and rode as fast as the pony could put foot to the ground in ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... dating from the devastating wars of the Middle Ages there are practically no farms in Germany, but inhabitants of the agricultural districts are collected in villages and the few farms have, characteristically, a military name. They are called "vorwerk" ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... Dyaks were always head-hunters, and used to pull the oars in the Malay prahus for the sake of the heads of the slain, which they alone cared for. But, in course of time, the Dyaks became expert seamen. They built boats which they called bangkongs, and went out with the Malays, devastating the coast and killing Malays, Chinese, Dyaks, whoever they met with. The Dyak bangkong draws very little water, and is both lighter and faster than the Malay prahu; it is a hundred feet long, and nine or ten broad. Sixty or eighty men with paddles ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... as one who should have soared And seen for us the devastating light Whereof there is not either day or night, And shared with us the glamour of the Word That fell once upon Amos to record For men at ease in Zion, when the sight Of ills obscured aggrieved him and the might Of Hamath was a warning ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... the lava, over which they were walking, which was like a sea of glass; frequently sinking in different places in consequence of the intense heat below. It will probably yet find its way to the surface somewhere, and, laying prostrate every thing that opposes it, pursue its devastating course to the sea. Truly we live in a world of wonders!' . . . BY the by, speaking of volcanos: it will be remembered that in 1831 an island was thrown up by volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean sea, ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... dictated "Paradise Lost" to his daughter, who acted as his secretary. One can not help contrasting the unsurpassed majesty and dignity of the great poem with the humble and even rude surroundings of the cottage. Milton came here in 1665 to escape the plague which was then devastating London. His eldest daughter was at that time about seventeen years of age, and there is reason to believe that she was with him during his stay in St. Giles. We were delighted with the place, for we had seen little else more typical of old-time ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... One! whose presence bright All space doth occupy, all motion guide, Unchanged through time's all-devastating blight! Thou only God, there is no god beside! Being above all things, mighty One, Whom none can comprehend and none explore; Who fill'st existence with thyself alone,— Embracing all, supporting, ruling o'er,— Being whom we call God, and know ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... brutal, British public's bestial thirst for blood. They have no arenas now, but they must have special correspondents. You're a fat gladiator who comes up through a trap-door and talks of what he's seen. You stand on precisely the same level as an energetic bishop, an affable actress, a devastating cyclone, or—mine own sweet self. And you presume to lecture me about my work! Nilghai, if it were worth while I'd caricature you in ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... She was, clearly, evading that question. She went on quickly. "The psychological shock of awakening would have been devastating, if you were not prepared. So, while you were still under sedation, I used the hypnopedic method on you. Your unconscious was aware of the main facts of the situation before you awoke, and that ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton
... everything complete it barely weighs one man's load—I called up the men, and for hours held it so by strength of arm. Even the hippopotami, to judge by the frequency of their snorts and grunts, as they indulged in their devastating excursions amongst the crops, seemed angry at this unusual severity of the weather. Never from the 15th of November, when the rainy season commenced, had we experienced such a ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... to the Temple of Jimjambo, and there a devastating experience befell him—he tumbled head over heels and agonizingly in love. There was a chambermaid in the institution, a radiant creature from the Emerald Isles with hair like sunrise and cheeks like apples, and a laugh that shook the dish-pans on ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... self-respect. Liberty struggled on still with despotism in the obstinate and dubious contest; sanguinary battles were fought; a brilliant array of heroes succeeded each other on the field of glory; and Flanders and Brabant were the schools which educated generals for the coming century. A long, devastating war laid waste the open country; victor and vanquished alike were bathed in blood; while the rising republic of the waters gave a welcome to fugitive industry, and out of the ruins erected the noble edifice ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... its narrow channel under the city was making such a noise that it was impossible to hear even a loud voice above its hideous rattle. There are few noises more devastating to conversation than the awful roar of a London tube-railway. But Love speaks with an eloquence which no noise can drown; its sympathy and passion carry it far above the din and noise of battle. Margaret and Michael knew it well. If Love depended upon ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... On certain slopes—where the devastating miners have not yet played their relentless game—dark forests rise to the high, bold summits of the chiefest mountains, and it is to guard these timbered tracts, growing each year more valuable, that the government has established ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... death. There are germs which disintegrate effete forms of matter merely to allow the forces of life to rebuild them again—and these may propagate in the human system if it so happens that the human system is prepared to receive them. Their devastating process is called disease, but they never begin their work till the being they attack has either wasted a vital opportunity or neglected a vital necessity. Far more numerous are the beneficial germs of revivifying and creative power—and if these find place, they ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... Bromstead, which is now a borough, was ruled by a strange body called a Local Board—it was the Age of Boards—and I still remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the breakfast-table over the liberation of London from the corrupt and devastating control of a Metropolitan Board of Works. Then there were also School Boards; I was already practically in politics before the London School Board was absorbed by the spreading tentacles of the London ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... anger be more plain if it were printed in fire upon the sky? Israel was the evil one for whose sin they suffered this devastating plague. The Lord was rebuking them for sparing him, even as He had rebuked Saul for sparing the king and cattle of the Amalekites. Seventeen years and more he had been among them without being of them, never entering a synagogue, never observing ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... all over, then? Was he really leaving? Fear, and a prophetic breath of the devastating loneliness he should yet know, came upon him, paralyzed his mind, made him weak and aghast. He was going out into the night of death, launching on his frail raft into the barren boundless ocean of darkness, leaving the last landmarks, drifting out in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... We have supported initiatives by the Organization of African Unity to solve the protracted conflict in the western Sahara, Chad, and the Horn. In Chad, the world is watching with dismay as a country torn by a devastating civil war has become a fertile field for Libya's exploitation, thus demonstrating that threats to peace can come from forces within as well ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Jimmy Carter • Jimmy Carter
... North Devon, who had taken little impress, probably, of the alien Roman civilization, except Christianity, for many of the churches round still carry the name of a Celtic saint, showing that the Saxons did not come devastating villages and destroying the little churches (in which case, of course, the churches would carry the name of a Saxon saint of their later Christianity), but settled with the inhabitants, intermarried, and probably adopted their worship. There is the ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... wont to allow his most elemental passions to sway his actions. But though he did not altogether understand, Armand St. Just could fully appreciate. All that was noble and loyal in him rose triumphant from beneath the devastating ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... material activity of the race. The spontaneous, disorderly spreadings and recessions of populations, as aimless and mechanical as the trickling of spilt water, which was the substance of history for endless years, giving rise here to congestions, here to chronic devastating wars, and everywhere to a discomfort and disorderliness that was at its best only picturesque, is at an end. Men spread now, with the whole power of the race to aid them, into every available region of the earth. Their cities are no longer tethered to running water and ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... last upon the reader's consciousness, let another and a kindred spectacle replace it. It is the carefully cleaned and cherished window of Mr. Brumley's mind, square and tidy and as it were "frosted" against an excess of light, and in that also we have now to record the most jagged all and devastating fractures. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... services of the one, has been graciously pleased to appoint him to—a case of blue and collapsed cholera, in India; and also, for the bravery and gallant conduct of the other, in his late affair with the 'How-dow-dallah Indians,' has promoted him to the—yellow fever now devastating and desolating Jamaica." How far my zeal for the service might have carried me on this point, I know not; for I was speedily aroused from my musings by the loud tramp of feet upon the stairs, and the sound of many well-known voices ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... voice well enough. He had always had a lurking fear that he would hear it say something devastating to him, from the great chair where its owner sat and dispensed what justice a jury would permit him to do. That devastating something would be agony to one who loved liberty and freedom—had not that ever been his watchword, liberty and freedom to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... incident—more than a passing adventure to the beast, and more than an irritating happening to the man. It was, for the time, the elemental raison d'etre of their lives. Baree hung to the trap line. He haunted it like a devastating specter, and each time that he sniffed afresh the scent of the factor from Lac Bain he was impressed still more strongly with the instinct that he was avenging himself upon a deadly enemy. Again and again he outwitted ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... rational point of view some of her feelings and emotions were very devastating for her own existence and her own serenity. And her deep attachment to the family was also a source of pain and suffering because of its acuteness. There was not much family left but for those who remained, ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... stricken the same day and followed his employer within a few hours, and the Indian and Spanish laborers on the estate went like sheep. There is a rumor that misfortunes did not cease here, but that the plague was followed by an earthquake of a most devastating nature, and thus the population of that especial district was almost ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... of Yucatan increased the previous worlds by one, making the present the fourth. Two cycles had terminated by devastating plagues. They were called "the sudden deaths," for it was said so swift and mortal was the pest, that the buzzards and other foul birds dwelt in the houses of the cities, and ate the bodies of their former owners. The third closed either by a hurricane, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... of the religious restraints with which their morality was bound up. Yet the Lancastrian party, or rather the party of Margaret of Anjou and her favourites, was the more reactionary, and it had the centre of its strength in the North, whence Margaret drew the plundering and devastating host which gained for her the second battle of St. Albans and paid the penalty of its ravages in the merciless slaughter of Towton. The North had been kept back in the race of progress by agricultural inferiority, by the absence ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... are quick, Mr. Pim. Well, if you take my advice, when you've finished your business with George, you will hang about a bit and see if you can't see Olivia. (Rising and moving C.) She's simply—(feeling for the word)—devastating. I don't wonder George fell in ...
— Mr. Pim Passes By • Alan Alexander Milne
... Tom Vanrevel was, in a measure, that of the vine for the oak. He was full of levities at Tom's expense, which the other bore with a grin of sympathetic comprehension, or, at long intervals, returned upon Crailey with devastating effect. Vanrevel was the one steadying thing in his life, and, at the same time, the only one of the young men upon whom he did not have an almost mesmeric influence. In good truth, Crailey was the ringleader in all the devilries of the town. Many a youth swore to ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... all the belligerents when this war is over. It is quite true that ill-bred and swinish nations can be roused to a serious consideration of their position and their destiny only by earthquakes, pestilences, famines, comets' tails, Titanic shipwrecks, and devastating wars, just as it is true that African chiefs cannot make themselves respected unless they bury virgins alive beneath the doorposts of their hut-palaces, and Tartar Khans find that the exhibition of a pyramid of ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... rivers they sailed, as in France, taking cities, devastating the country, doing more damage each year than could be repaired in a decade. Aix-la-Chapelle, the imperial city of the mighty Charlemagne, fell into their hands, and the palace of the great Charles, in little more ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... Christian marriage. It has at least given us the Christian home, and pure family life. And sometimes it fills me with despair to see enlightened nations, like America and Australia, whittling away and slowly undermining this great bulwark against the devastating sea of human passion. If only I could feel that any poor words of mine could in any faint measure rouse American women to set themselves against what must in the end affect the depth and steadfastness of those family affections on which the beauty and solidity of the national character mainly ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... point, a prospect of an opening bearing N, then down the hill to a run and over a rich neck lying between it and the Tiadaughton."[26] Incidentally, the editor of this extract from Bartram's journal makes the quite devastating point that Meginness did not know of Bartram's journal, which was published in London in 1751 but which did not appear in America ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
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