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More "Verge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... light stole down the slopes, and we saw that we were at the bottom, or rather, nearly at the bottom, of the vast pit in front of the entrance to the cave. Now we could make out the dim forms of the three Colossi who sat upon its verge. Doubtless those awful passages, along which we had wandered the livelong night, had been originally in some way connected with the great diamond mine. As for the subterranean river in the bowels of the mountain, Heaven only knows what it is, or ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... Hermann," she said, "for better for worse, for richer for poorer, I don't care. But I don't want a family quarrel, a runaway match, all that horrid newspaper talk." Here she was evidently a little excited and on the verge ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... eventually wash the city walls of Florence. A few steps farther, travelling south, we pass into the valley of the Tiber, and, after traversing a barren upland region for a couple of hours, reach the verge of the descent upon Caprese. Here the landscape assumes a softer character. Far away stretch blue Apennines, ridge melting into ridge above Perugia in the distance. Gigantic oaks begin to clothe the stony hillsides, and little by little a fertile mountain ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... with his own sword. Doth Satan tell thee thou prayest but faintly and with cold devotions? Answer him, I am glad you told me, I will trust the more to Christ's prayers, and groan, sigh, and cry more earnestly at the Throne of Grace." To such readers as have been driven to the verge of despair by a fear of having committed the unpardonable sin, here is strong consolation, and a very explicit scriptural definition of that awful crime. Want of space prevents me adding more than my earnest desire that the reading of this treatise may be productive of solid ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... drawn to this, for it is a correction one will find one's self compelled often to make in his thinking. It is so difficult to keep out of mind the idea of substance in connection with the Natural Laws, the idea that they are the movers, the essences, the energies, that one is constantly on the verge of falling into false conclusions. Thus a hasty glance at the present argument on the part of any one ill-furnished enough to confound Law with substance or with cause would probably lead to its immediate rejection. For, to continue the same line of illustration, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... no one better, of all the obstacles that have been placed in the way, so cunningly that no man could put a finger on the motive. It has been his persistent resolve to let everything run down, to bring the business to the very verge of bankruptcy. He did not count on Floyd Grandon being so ready to part with his money to save it, or of ever having any personal interest in it, and he did count on his being disgusted with his brother's selfishness, ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... men, for they are terribly cruel, and when they get a victim he is tortured with all the horrible rites of the true savage. They know that the moment they are caught that is the end for them, so that they are reckless to the verge of insanity. ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... The tide was rising. In a few minutes she was afloat and under way again, safely passing through the barrier of broken stakes and spars. But her brave commander was no more. A shot from one of the batteries had struck and killed him, when on the very verge of gaining the highest honor that man could attain,—that of saving his native town from the horrors of starvation ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Ducrot to seek the protection of the wood of la Garenne, and were pushing up the right bank, likewise in full march upon the plateau of Illy. Their task was almost done; one effort more, and up there at the north, among those barren fields, on the very verge of the dark forests of the Ardennes, the Crown Prince of Prussia would join hands with the Crown Prince of Saxony. To the south of Sedan the village of Bazeilles was lost to sight in the dense smoke of its burning houses, in the clouds of dun vapor that rose above ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... the paper slightly, as if to prolong the scene before him. If my uncle had been on the verge of ruin, he could not have ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... this abrupt manner of proceeding, Louis followed Casson to the verge of the lane, and waited ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... its countenance or ill favor, as such banks severally observed or disregarded the ordinary rules of financial prudence. The immediate effect of the refusal of Congress to recharter the Bank of the United States was to bring the Treasury to the verge of bankruptcy. The interference of Parish, Girard, and Astor alone saved the credit of the government, and this interference was no doubt prompted by self-interest. That Mr. Astor was hostile to the bank is certain. Gallatin wrote ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... on the old sofa," he said. "There is much to say to you. We are now on the verge of a ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... of fugitives increased, and now they saw swarms of men who stood here and there, not running, but huddled and irresolute. Never did Fortune, who brought this, her favorite, from the depths, bring him again in her play so near to the verge of destruction. When he came upon the field, the battle seemed wholly lost, and the whole world would have cried that he ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... from Portland: this inlet opens at about two miles west, and grows very broad, and makes a kind of lake within the land of a mile and a half broad, and near three miles in length, the breadth unequal. At the farthest end west of this water is a large duck-coy, and the verge of the water well grown with wood, and proper groves of trees for cover for the fowl: in the open lake, or broad part, is a continual assembly of swans: here they live, feed, and breed, and the number of them is such that, I believe, I did not see so few ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... testified that he was once on the verge of doing what would have brought him undying disgrace when, as if she had been drawn out of the air, his mother stood before him, looking reproachfully at him. Thus the fascination of temptation was broken by what he always believed to have ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... the left of our road. Here the mountains receded, so that above us rose a mighty, dazzling slope of snow and below us lay that same pitiless, unclimbable gulf. As the light began to fade we perceived, half a mile or more in front a bare-topped hillock of rock, which stood on the verge of the precipice, and hurried to it, thinking that from its crest we might be able to discover a way ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... cavern after all, otherwise that poor ape would not have dashed out of it so precipitately, and in such a ghastly state of terror. But what could it be? It must be something even more formidable than a jaguar or a puma, to have terrified that unhappy monkey to the verge of madness; yet, so far as Phil knew, the jaguar was the most dreaded beast to be found in the South American forest. There was but one way of determining the point satisfactorily. So, completely forgetful now ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Especially on an evening when at the highest moment of her justifiable wrath Mr. Freddie would appear and nonchalantly suggest a "few eats for some chaps who'd dropped in" as casually as though Janet were not already on the verge of explosion. Of course she would prepare the lunch, stabbing the bread-saw viciously into the defenseless loaf and muttering dark things as she assembled something she called "old doves" on a big Sheffield platter. Janet couldn't cook at all but she could arrange things as beautifully as ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... tribe of Timurees. Of course, the Governor sends his salaams, and invites me to come round to the government konak and favor him with an exhibition. Since our refusal to entertain any more of the "Shah's relations," we find that the worthy and long-suffering Abbas Khan has been worried almost to the verge of despair by requests from all over the city begging the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... Blue Pike pain and mental suffering had driven her to the verge of despair. But the day which began so sorrowfully was followed by an evening of delight—she owed to it her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... twitching, his whole frame a-quake. His eyes were snapping wildly. He was like a man who could hardly speak or stand, and fairly on the verge of a fit. ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... And visibly grindeth with its heel in mire The lictors' glorious rods and axes dire, Having them in derision! Again, when earth From end to end is rocking under foot, And shaken cities ruin down, or threaten Upon the verge, what wonder is it then That mortal generations abase themselves, And unto gods in all affairs of earth Assign as last resort almighty powers And wondrous ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... succession. First of all his father bought him a season ticket at the public baths in the North River and made him join a class of small boys for instruction in the manly art of swimming. The world was opening up, Keith felt, and his father was lured to the verge of openly expressed satisfaction at finding that the boy's timidity did not extend ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... he finds himself placed on a pinnacle from which he is called upon to take a perspective survey of the range of science, and to tell us what he can see from his vantage ground; if at such a moment after straining his gaze to the very verge of the horizon, and after describing the most distant of well-defined objects, he should give utterance also to some of the subjective impressions which he is conscious of receiving from regions beyond; if he should depict possibilities which seem opening to his view; if he should ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... horses; scarcely any cattle left in the fields; commerce paralysed by the stoppage of railway and other communications; industry at a complete standstill, with 500,000 men thrown out of work and nearly half of the population which remained in Belgium (3,500,000) on the verge of starvation and entirely dependent for their subsistance on the work ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... whole quiver on me, I have a soul that, like an ample shield, Can take in all, and verge ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... had spoken of. Having given up his previous intention of crossing the stream, there seemed nothing better for him to do than to follow the truant's advice and take the road back to Green Springs. Yet he was loath to leave the wood, halting on its verge, and turning to look back into its charmed recesses. Once or twice—perhaps because he recalled the words of the poem—that yellowish sea of ferns had seemed instinct with hidden life, and he had even fancied, here and ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... said. When we returned to the Guardian-Mother I told Captain Ringgold all about it, in the presence of Flix. The commander immediately directed us to say not a word about it to any person. Even Captain Scott was kept in the dark till he and I were on the verge of ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... notice one or two facts connected with glass, which show that the ancients were on the verge of making one or two very important discoveries in physical science. They were acquainted with the power of transparent spherical bodies to produce heat by the transmission of light, though not with the manner in which that heat was generated by the concentration ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... and, did not even see her, Marjorie's state of mind (not unmingled with emotion!) became dangerous. In fact, a trained nurse, chancing to observe her at this juncture, would probably have advised that she be taken home and put to bed. Marjorie was on the verge of hysterics. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... be her last opportunity. So Mary told herself as she got out of the carriage at Mr Hall's front door. It was made manifest to her by such a speech that he did not expect that she should do so, but looked upon her doing so as within the verge of possibility. She could still do it, and yet not encounter his disgust or his horror. How terrible was the importance to herself, and, as she believed, to the other man also. Was she not justified in so thinking? Mr Gordon had come home, travelling ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... its revelation of the biographer as for its portrayal of the subject. Burton's wife was the loving-est slave that ever wedded with an idol. The story of the courtship is ridiculous almost to the verge of tragic. As a girl, a gypsy woman named Burton, told Isabel Arundell that she would marry one of the palmist's name, would travel ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... done upon a stronger and more systematic principle of contrast than any other of Shakspeare's plays. It moves upon the verge of an abyss, and is a constant struggle between life and death. The action is desperate and the reaction is dreadful. It is a huddling together of fierce extremes, a war of opposite natures which of them shall destroy the other. There is nothing but what has a violent end or violent beginnings. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... his life he always revolved in a distinguished circle, frequenting the English Clubs[B] of both capitals, and being generally considered a man of ability and a pleasant companion, though not a person to be confidently depended upon. In spite of all his ability, he was almost always just on the verge of ruin, and he ultimately left but a small and embarrassed property to his only son. About that son's education, however, he had, after his own ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... or its neighborhood; the number, I think, is limited to twelve. When they muster in force, the sleeping accommodation must necessarily be limited, as Mr. Russell describes it; but there is room and verge enough in the quaint old homestead of the proprietor for any ordinary party. The burly host himself is quite in keeping with the place, and bears his part right jovially in the rough-and-ready revels that contrast ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... our great cities, as did Dickens and Victor Hugo. He confines himself more rigorously than any other novelist of equal power to the ways and manners and entanglements of people who are "in society," or who could be in society if they wanted to, or are on the verge and edge of society. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... and politicians at one and the same time, in a high social position and in the flower of their age, could not reconcile themselves to the Constable de Montmorency's system, defensive solely and prudential to the verge of inertness; they thought that, in order to repair the reverses of France and for the sake of their own fame, there was something else to be done, and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... peaks, which happens to extend entirely across this point of the Upper Alps, thus forming a passage several thousand feet lower than would otherwise be obtained. The convent stands within a few yards of the northern verge of the precipice, and precisely at the spot where the lowest cavity is formed, the rocks beginning to rise, in its front and in its rear, at very short distances from the buildings. A little south of it, the mountains recede sufficiently ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... At the southern verge of the mighty forest called the Andredsweald, or Anderida Sylva, Gilbert d'Aquila, last of that name, founded the Priory of Michelham for the good of ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... would come floating in over the combings of the cabin bulkhead, tumbling him over and washing him aft amidst the debris, almost drowning the man before he could fish himself up again and set to his task anew. His toil, like that of Sisyphus, was ever being renewed when on the verge of completion. ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... public contempt, and in the month of August he was deprived of the best supporter of his administration, by the death of Lord Egremont. The loss of this nobleman brought his cabinet, indeed, to the verge of dissolution, and a coalition of parties was hence deemed desirable. To this end Bute waited, at his majesty's commands, on his stern rival, Pitt, to whom he stated the king's wish of employing political talent and integrity without respect of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Auburn marks the western verge of the mineral zone, but in the fifties there were, rich placer diggings in the immediate vicinity. There are some remarkably solid buildings of that period, in the old portion of the town, which, as customary, is situated in the bottom of the winding valley or ravine. ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... those extreme sectaries whose religion runs perilously near to madness. The hums and groans which rose from the crowd proved, however, that his fiery words were well suited to his hearers, so we halted on the verge of the multitude and hearkened to his address. A red-bearded, fierce-faced man he was, with tangled shaggy hair tumbling over his gleaming eyes, and a hoarse voice which ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... changed; let them see what it is to have God in covenant with them to be the God of their seed; and, withal, let us correct, or modify, the intense anti-papal jealousy of the Christian rites, which makes us all, unconsciously, verge to the opposite extreme, thus missing the divinely-appointed intention and use which there is in our two simple ordinances; and then, with the revival of such spiritual views and feelings, and, as a consequence, with greater ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... awake at night and fret and fume, to think Of bank officials on a spree with what he's toiled to get. He is not driven by his woe quite to the verge of drink By wondering if his balance in the bank ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... at Wrayton, she was on the verge of tears. And again that unreasonable conscience of mine smote me. I longed to—Well, to prove myself the ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... grew redder and more perturbed; just as Beatrice meant that it should; she seemed to derive a keen pleasure from goading this big, good-looking Englishman to the verge of apoplexy. ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... stood on the verge of the great upheaval and knew it not. We were thinking of holidays; of cricket and golf and bathing, and then were suddenly plunged in the deep waters of the greatest of all Wars. It has been a month of rude awakening, of revelation, of discovery—of many moods varying from confidence to deep ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... short, on the very verge of saying that she was sure that those frowns cleared from her husband's face before the sweets, for he would never take afternoon tea, in order to have a better appetite for dinner, and consequently was wont to begin that meal in a tetchy humour. ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... authorities were always promising to send him more help, but it never arrived. One of the assistants, a Monsieur Dubos, a little man with a remarkably big beard, was a chemist, who, at the outbreak of the war, had been on the verge, as he made sure, of an important discovery in connection with colour photography. Almost the first question he asked Joan was could she speak German. Finding that she could, he had hurried her across the yard into a small hut where patients who had borne their operation ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... of 65, called Dr. Druid, an antiquary, wholly ignorant of his real duties as a guide of youth. The young man runs wantonly wild, squanders his money, and gives loose to his passions almost to the verge of ruin, but he is arrested and reclaimed by his honest Scotch bailiff or financier, and the vigilance of his father's executor, Mr. Mortimer. This "fashionable lover" promises marriage to a vulgar, malicious city minx named Lucinda Bridgemore, but is saved from this pitfall also.—Cumberland, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... who had been inclined to blame the President for allowing a discussion that could serve no scientific purpose now forgave him from the bottom of my heart. Unfortunately the Bishop, hurried along on the current of his own eloquence, so far forgot himself as to push his attempted advantage to the verge of personality in a telling passage in which he turned round and addressed Huxley: I forgot the precise words, and quote from Lyell. 'The Bishop asked whether Huxley was related by his grandfather's or grandmother's side to an ape.' (Lyell's ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... mill (for such things were in New England) in the orchard was the remotest verge in one direction; to sit near it, and watch the horse go slowly round and round, and chat with Chauncey, the youngest son of the house, who was superintending it, was a great pleasure; but most of ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... the very verge of humanity, for the man who sleeps is something more than a mere social being: the law protects, ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... stationary inaction,' says one of our greatest living writers, 'is one of the great secrets which science has yet to penetrate.' I am sure I do not pretend that I can completely penetrate it; but it undoubtedly seems to me that the problem is on the verge of solution, and that scientific successes in kindred fields by analogy suggest some principles—which wholly remove many of its difficulties, and indicate the sort of way in which those which remain ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... in love with her, and narrowly escaped the loss of reason as well as of his heart. Since that day the figure of Britannia has appeared on millions of coins and medals to perpetuate through the centuries the faultless form of the woman who drove artist as well as King to the verge of despair by her beauty and ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... yards ahead lay a deep and narrow gully, hid by bushes that grew rankly along its verge. Straight toward this the Princess Emma von der Tann rode. Behind her came her pursuers—two quite close and the others trailing farther in the rear. The girl reined in a trifle, letting the troopers that were closest to her gain until they were ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... officers call 'compass meant us,' which I understand to signify that she means always to go in the right direction, but sometimes does not know how. 'Compass'for the p'int, and 'meant us' for the intention. No, poor Hetty is what I call on the verge of ignorance, and sometimes she stumbles on one side of the line, and sometimes ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... absorbing spell of the pursuit, as to acknowledge no satisfaction at the sight of human faces, in the remote and solitary region whither they had ascended. A vast extent of wilderness lay between them and the nearest settlement, while scant a mile above their heads was that black verge where the hills throw off their shaggy mantle of forest trees, and either robe themselves in clouds or tower naked into the sky. The roar of the Amonoosuck would have been too awful for endurance if only a solitary man had listened, while the mountain stream ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... mist veiled the world before me, In opening buds a marvel woke, As I the thousand blossoms broke, Which every valley richly bore me! I nothing had, and yet enough for youth— Joy in Illusion, ardent thirst for Truth. Give, unrestrained, the old emotion, The bliss that touched the verge of pain, The strength of Hate, Love's deep devotion,— O, give me ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... after the sale; and while they were doing their writings, the Christian portion of the slaves asked permission to kneel in prayer on the ground before they separated, which was granted. And while bathing each other with tears of sorrow on the verge of their final separation, their eloquent appeals in prayer to the Most High seemed to cause an unpleasant sensation upon the ears of their tyrants, who ordered them to rise and make ready their limbs ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... not all. If hundreds collapsed, thousands approached the verge of collapse. They survived and were discharged from the armies as normal. They reappear in civil life as cases of "nerves." Ordinarily that would mean that they would be classed as failures. But such ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... I, of course, knew nothing of the edict at the time—for bushmen do not advertise their chivalry—and wandered round the straggling Settlement vaguely surprised at its sobriety, and turning up in such unexpected places that the little bushman was constantly on the verge of apoplexy. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... Swart-bearded king, with iron crown'd, In iron mailed, his chariot bound About with iron, holding back Amain two steeds of glistering black And eyeballs white-rimmed fearfully, And nostrils red, and crests flying free; Who held them pawing at the verge, Tossing their spume up, as the surge Flung high against some seaward bluff. Nothing he spake, or smooth or gruff, But drave his errand, gazing down Upon the Maid, whose blown back gown Revealed her maiden. Still ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... room, and verge enough, The characters of hell to trace; How through each circling year, on many a night, Have Severn's waves re-echoed with affright The shrieks of (maids) through ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... swollen and inflamed that every step was torture. Ulcers, which opened and left gaping wounds, next made their appearance. It was said that in earlier years he had taken the place of an unfortunate man who had been condemned to the galleys and who was in consequence on the verge of despair, and that the malady from which he suffered had been caused by the heavy fetters with which his legs had been chained to the rowers' bench. It was several months, ran the tale, before his heroic action had been discovered and he was ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... toilet, went on with it calmly, when everyone else spoke of flight, rivalling Mazarin himself in courage and coolness. On finding themselves once more together under the roof of royalty after so many long and sorrowful separations, after seeing each other so often on the very verge of ruin, they might well be proud of their mutual constancy, which had deserved and brought about the halo of prosperity surrounding that auspicious day, and together look forward for the rest of their lives with the solid hope ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... neither Prince Michael nor his wife was in tune for a family conclave. Monseigneur was ruffled, distinctly so, and Madame was on the verge of tears. ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... pushed on. As soon as they reached Anadyrsk they were sent to the Myan, and by the middle of March the two parties together had cut and distributed along the banks of that river about 3000 poles. In April, however, their provisions began again to run short, they were gradually reduced to the verge of starvation, and Bush started a second time for Gizhiga with a few miserable half-starved and exhausted dog-teams, to get more provisions. During his absence the unfortunate parties on the Myan were left to take care of themselves, and ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... wily Dutch, who, like fallen angels, fear'd This new Messiah's coming, there did wait, And round the verge their braving vessels steer'd, To tempt his courage with ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... usually approach near enough to shoot his prey with a rifle, or strike it with a seal spear or oo-nar. Often, however, just as he is about to shoot or spear his game, it slips suddenly into the sea through its hole, upon the very verge of which it rests, seldom venturing further than a foot or two from its safe retreat. If they could only rest contented with a fair shot, the Inuits would probably secure more game than they now do, for the ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... not only troubled, he was seriously embarrassed. The hint thrown out by his little brother about the Koshare had struck him; for it led to the inference that the child had knowledge of secret arts and occult practices of which even he, Okoya, although on the verge of manhood, had never received any intimation. Far more yet than this knowledge, which Shyuote might have obtained through mere accident, the hint at unpleasant relations between Okoya and ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... something else that was not wholly itself—a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked. So these figures seemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable, against an ultimate horizon, visions from the verge. The ends of the earth were ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... What do you mean?" Pentfield demanded, a sudden fear at his heart, for he felt himself on the verge of a ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... the distance and was crouching beside a protruding rock to get her breath. "It's rather foolish to tear up a perfectly good pair of riding boots just at the psychological moment when leather is villainously high and I'm on the verge of marrying a poor man. I guess I'll ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... new company took an honest view of its obligations—but only for a time. Within a year or so, Quebec was again on the verge of starvation; and in the spring of 1629 the famished inhabitants were eagerly awaiting the Company's ships from France. By July their patience was almost worn out, when at last the watchers at Cap Tourmente brought the news that a fleet of six vessels had reached Tadousac. ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... the verge of war with another race, the Jarmuthians, descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel, when Nelson is transported to Heliopolis, the Atlantean Capital, for trial. All strangers must prove their value to the State or be condemned ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... various Courts of Europe, but always without success. Things were becoming awkward. The firm had borrowed heavily to pay for the stones, and anxiety seems to have driven Bohmer to the verge of desperation. Again he offered the necklace to the King, announcing himself ready to make terms, and to accept payment in instalments; but again ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... sensibility was at the mercy of such trivial accidents. ... Yes; that, and the cold and fatigue, the absence of hope and the haunting sense of starved aptitudes, all these had brought him to the perilous verge over which, once or twice before, his ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... which contrasted strikingly enough with the stern dry aspect and manners of her husband, a right descendant of the moss-troopers of Harden, who never seemed at his ease but on horseback, and continued to be the boldest fox-hunter of the district, even to the verge of eighty. The poet's aunt spoke her native language pure and undiluted, but without the slightest tincture of that vulgarity which now seems almost unavoidable in the oral use of a dialect so long banished from courts, and which has not been avoided by any modern writer who ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... rest of us by a small table; but he barely tasted it, and after a bit he lay down in his corner, with his arm for a pillow, and almost instantly was asleep, breathing heavily, like a man on the verge of exhaustion. A few minutes later we heard, from Sergeant Rosenthal, that the prisoner's brother-in-law had been killed the day before, and that he—the little officer—had seen ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... he, that avoiding all such remote excursions, keeps close within the verge of his own affairs, minds his shop or warehouse, and confining himself to what belongs to him there, goes on in the road of his business without launching into unknown oceans; and content with the gain of his own trade, is neither led by ambition or avarice, ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... Southwest. They were so placed that with common management they could be more effective than with rivalry. The owners of the Great Northern and the Burlington, James J. Hill and J. Pierpont Morgan, were on the verge of a general consolidation when Harriman tried to buy a control of the Northern Pacific. They struggled to retain it and succeeded, but their competition raised its stock to one thousand per share, causing a stock exchange panic ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... the Canal towards the Northern verge of the Regent's Park; and nearly opposite to it is a road leading to Primrose Hill, as celebrated in the annals of Cockayne as was the Palatino among the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... and glittering gems; to fly with the shepherd lad to the deep cool forests of the far east and dream her life away in some black tent or vine-embowered cot—to take his hand in hers and wander on to the world's extreme verge, listening to the music of his voice. The great house, once her pride, has become a grewsome prison, the jailer a grizzly gorgon who conjured her with the baleful gleam of gold to cast her beauty on Mammon's brutish ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... years, my Lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms and was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect, for I ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... case like this; and besides, as before remarked, Steelman knew his men. The only way to escape from him was to move—but then, as likely as not, he'd help pack up and come along with his portmanteau right on top of the last load of furniture, and drive you and your wife to the verge of madness by the calm style in which he proceeded to superintend ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... contest, involving several issues, in which a Secretary of War was finally removed from office with the consent of his own personal and political friends, a President was impeached and escaped removal from office by only one vote, and the country was brought to the verge of another civil war. As I had helped Evarts, Seward, and some others whose names I never knew, to "pour oil on the troubled waters" in the time of Grant and Stanton, and to get everybody into the humor to respond heartily to that great aspiration, "Let us have peace," I thought perhaps I might ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... have never REALLY known any one who did not show some spot in the sunlight, I mean some side where the artist verged on the Philistine. Perhaps you have not that spot; you ought to paint yourself. As for me I have it. I love classifications, I verge on the pedagogue. I love to sew and to care for children, I verge on the servant. I am easily distracted and verge on the idiot. And then I should not like perfection; I feel it but I shouldn't know how to ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... brief historical summaries prefixed to many of Mr. Brown's papers are models of judicial conscientiousness. And Mr. Darwin's evident delight at discovering that some one else has "said his good things before him," or has been on the verge of uttering them, seemingly equals that of making the discovery himself. It reminds one of Goethe's insisting that his views in morphology must have been held before him and must be somewhere on record, so obvious did they appear ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... snow. Concerning this part of the journey Fremont says: "We had reached and run over the position where, according to the best maps in my possession, we should have found Mary's lake or river. We were evidently on the verge of the desert, and the country was so forbidding that we were afraid ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... the duke were overthrown by simple statements of fact. Thus, his instance of the Eskimo as pushed to the verge of habitable America, and therefore living in the lowest depths of savagery, which, even if it were true, by no means proved a general rule, was deprived of its force by the simple fact that the Eskimos are by no means the lowest race on ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... West of the Red River Colony, told me of a narrow escape he once had, with his servant boy, in meeting a grizzly bear. They were riding slowly along, near the close of the day, when they espied the animal coming from the verge of a wood in the direction towards them. They immediately quickened the pace of their horses, but being jaded with the day's journey, the bear was soon seen to gain upon them. In this emergency, he hit upon an expedient, which was probably the means of saving their lives. ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... indulged in acrimonious controversies, especially when the time came for walking the boundaries. The dispute between broad and narrow gauges is indeed merely a modern form of a long-standing quarrel. A market-town and a seaport would naturally desire to have ample verge and room enough on their highways for the transport of grain, hides, and timber from the interior, and for carriage of cloth and manufactured or imported goods to the inland. On the other hand isolated parishes would contend that driftways were all-sufficient for their demands, and that ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... easy enough, but higher up became very steep, and somewhat appalling, being cut out of the side of the hill which shelves precipitously down towards the valley of the Dee. Near the top of the mountain were three lofty beech-trees growing on the very verge of the precipice. Here the road for about twenty yards is fenced on its dangerous side by a wall, parts of which are built between the stems of the trees. Just beyond the wall a truly noble prospect presented itself to our ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... time of Osorkon II., the Sheshonk dynasty rapidly declined in power. A system of constituting appanages for the princes of the reigning house grew up, and in a short time conducted the country to the verge of dissolution. "For the purpose of avoiding usurpations analogous to that of the High-Priests of Ammon," says M. Maspero, "Sheshonk and his descendants made a rule to entrust all positions of importance, whether civil ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... Greaves. It is undoubtedly evidence of the greatness of Don Quixote that there should have been so many direct imitations of it by persons of genius and talent: but this particular instance is unfortunate to the verge of the preposterous, if not over it. The eighteenth century was indeed almost the capital time of English eccentricity: and it was also a time of licence which sometimes looked very like lawlessness. But its eccentricities were not at this special ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... she called back; and came running down-stairs. "Oh, Blair dear," she said, "I want to see you so much!" By that time she was on the verge of tears, and the flush of worry in her cheeks made her so pretty that her brother looked at ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... now—splendid, dry, hard stuff, made of oat meal and water, baked on a gridiron—it would leave too long a fast afterwards. Denis Donohoe had been brought up to practise caution in these matters, to subject his stomach to a rigorous discipline, for life on the verge of a bog is an exacting business. Instead of obeying the impulse to eat Denis Donohoe blew warm breaths into his purple hands, beat his arms about his body to deaden the bitter cold, whistled, took some steps of an odd dance along the road, and went on ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... French people, it was received with more derision than alarm by the men who were cognisant of the affairs of Europe. All the politicians of the National Assembly knew that Prussia and Austria had lately been on the verge of war with one another upon the Eastern question; they even underrated the effect of the French revolution in appeasing the existing enmities of the great Powers. No important party in France regarded the Declaration ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... boyhood into the bloom of youth, having reached that season in which the young man, now standing upon the verge of independence, shows plainly whether he will enter upon the path of virtue or of vice, he went forth into a quiet place, and sat debating with himself which of those two paths he should pursue; and as he there ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... narrowest verge of the craggy path! A very young knight with dark hair and a proud carriage and gray eyes with ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... my dearest and loveliest!" said the Earl, scarce tearing himself from her embrace, yet again returning to fold her again and again in his arms, and again bidding farewell, and again returning to kiss and bid adieu once more. "The sun is on the verge of the blue horizon—I dare not stay. Ere this I should have been ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... cottage lay dark and silent, but there were lights in Hynds House although the night was upon the verge of morning. A gray light, upon which was stealing a primrose tinge, was already in the sky. It was, in fact, four o'clock. I was so mortally tired that for a moment I sat ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... the sweet little creature, but the red-haired boy saw that she was on the verge of tears, and he caught her hand and sobbed out loud in sympathy. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... know—but I got no satisfaction at all. He hadn't been there for several days. That was all they knew. Yes, there had been talk of giving the case to a detective agency, but they weren't sure it had been done. And here is his poor mother up in New Rochelle, almost on the verge of nervous prostration. There is his fiancee, too; little Betty Parsons, who is crying her eyes out. Nice girl, Betty. And it's a shame that something isn't being done. Anyway, I shall ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... Divide, the view was glorious. In one direction, an ocean of dark pines rolled westward in enormous billows. The silver surfaces of several lakes gleamed here and there like whitecaps on the rolling waves. Far off upon the verge of the horizon, fifty miles away, three snow-capped, sharply pointed mountains looked like a group of icebergs drifting from the Polar Sea. They did not move, however, nor will they move while this old earth shall last. They antedate ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... tone is in accordance with the multitude of articles upon the same subject which occurred about the same time, and, like them all, or most of them, is rather farfetched. It is too broad. Its denunciations cover too much ground. They verge upon untruth. ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... and neared the post, its blare and hubbub burst on him, and its torch-light and many twinkling candles. He proceeded beside the triple row of Indian lodges which occupied the entire water-front. At intervals, on the very verge, evening fires were built, throwing streamers of crimson flicker on the lake. Naked pappooses gathered around these at play. But on an open flat betwixt encampment and village rose a lighted tabernacle of blankets stretched ...
— The Cobbler In The Devil's Kitchen - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... from exposure To the slight of the detractor or aspersion of the defamer: And we ask thy forgiveness Should our frailties betray us into ambiguities, As we ask thy forgiveness Should our steps advance to the verge of improprieties: And we beg thee freely to bestow Propitious succor to lead us aright, And a heart turning in unison with truth, And a language adorned with veracity, And style supported by conclusiveness, And ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... books of travel, may well, even if only from the allurement of its title, have shared the general enthusiasm for the traveler's narrative. Most important, however, is the direct appeal of the book itself, irresistible to the German mind and heart. Germany had been for a decade hesitating on the verge of tears, and grasped with eagerness a book which seemed to give her British sanction for indulgence in ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... perfumed with old romance. In New York he would certainly have been in danger of a Barnum's museum, beside Washington's nurse and the woolly horse. It is a triumph of art that a being whose nature trembles on the very verge of the grotesque should walk through Hawthorne's pages with such undeviating grace. In the Roman dreamland he is in little danger of such prying curiosity, though even there he can only be kept out of harm's way by the admirable skill of his creator. Perhaps it may be thought by ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... in June, Beatrix's baby was born, and for days afterward, the mother's life, so long in danger, now hung by a thread. Then the good old fibre of the Danes reasserted itself, and Beatrix came slowly upward from the verge of the River of Death. Bobby's face cleared itself of its shadows, Thayer signed his contracts and, the next week, he and ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... we sent eighty pieces to Chicago, to one house, yesterday, and fifty patterns to Omaha this morning; one hundred and ten we last week shipped to the South; the whole lot will perhaps be sold by to-morrow," etc.—that poor Mary felt like a speculator on the verge of a great chance. So she decided on a light-green brocade, and could not gainsay the smooth-tongued clerk as he assured her, while tying the bundle, that she had secured a very handsome and elegant ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... now evident that the assault must fail unless some accident intervened, for the tide was rising, the reserves all engaged, and no greater effort could be expected from men whose courage had been already pushed to the verge of madness. In this crisis, fortune interfered. A number of powder-barrels, live shells, and combustible materials which the French had accumulated behind the traverses for their defence, caught fire, a bright, consuming flame wrapped the whole of the high curtain, ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... very wet child," said Nan, laughing, yet on the verge of tears herself. "You might have been drowned, you WOULD have been had it not been ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... open fires in the hall, waiting for dinner. Before this hour came, however, and while the rest of the young folks were getting acquainted with the possibilities of Snow Camp, Ruth had a serious talk with Mr. Cameron regarding the mysterious boy who had disappeared on the verge of the Snow ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... of damask revisiting cheek. Resolved to mention name of D. C. Introduced same, cautiously, in course of airing. D. immediately overcome. "Oh, dear, dear Julia! Oh, I have been a naughty and undutiful child!" Soothed and caressed. Drew ideal picture of D. C. on verge of tomb. D. again overcome. "Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do? Oh, take me somewhere!" Much alarmed. Fainting of D. and glass of water from public-house. (Poetical affinity. Chequered sign on door-post; chequered human ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... side of him that he lets you see," replied the man. "His gaiety is all forced. If you could see him after you leave you would realize that he is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Your father is not an old man in years, but he has placed a constant surtax on his nervous system for the last twenty-five years without a let-up, and it doesn't make any difference how good a machine may be it is going ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... tent was in an uproar, for the chevalier's wife had come hurrying in, the chevalier's daughter was on the verge of hysterics, and the chevalier's prospective son-in-law, was alternately hugging the great beast-tamer and then shaking his hand and generally deporting himself like a respectable young man ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... verge of the graveyard. Its fine old ruin stood there as usual, but not altogether without the symptoms of change. Some persons had, for the purposes of building, thrown down one of its most picturesque walls. Still its ruins clothed ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... eventually found their way into the Black Sea. Stress of weather compelled them to put into the little port of Yalta, on the north coast, where they went on shore. The Colonel, on the Lucretian principle of "Suave mari magno," &c., proceeded the next morning to the verge of the precipice to observe the magnificent prospect of a sea running mountains high. As it was raining at the time, he put up a huge gingham Umbrella he happened to find in the hotel. Suddenly, however, a furious blast of wind drove ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... fact, he "hated the very name of slaveholder." The limit of the box not admitting of straightening himself out he was taken with the cramp on the road, suffered indescribable misery, and had his faith taxed to the utmost,—indeed was brought to the very verge of "screaming aloud" ere relief came. However, he controlled himself, though only for a short season, for before a great while an excessive faintness came over him. Here nature became quite exhausted. He thought he must "die;" but his time had not yet come. After a severe struggle he revived, but ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... of my old California friend," Browning said to himself. "Can he have heard of the money intrusted to me? I don't think it possible, for I left Walton on the verge of death. That money has made my fortune. I invested it in land which has more than quadrupled in value. Old women say that honesty pays," he added, with a sneer; "but it is nonsense. In this case dishonesty has paid me richly. If the boy has heard anything, ...
— Luke Walton • Horatio Alger
... man. And you have so much faith yourself, and mean to fling yourself into it so earnestly, that I shouldn't be wholly surprised if you were somehow to pull it through. If you do, Lady Hilda—if you manage to save these two poor young people from the verge of starvation—you'll have done a very great good work in your day, and you'll have made me personally ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... by no means subsided, and presently he found himself on the verge of tears—a pitiable, despicable object. The Vicomte—soothing and benevolent—went on to explain more fully the position of his own affairs. He told us that on information received from a sure source he had months earlier concluded that the Emperor's illness was of a more serious ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... pale, flaxen haired, blue eyed, round shouldered, and given to stammering when nervous. Perhaps because of his very weakness Rebecca's decision of character had a fascination for him, and although she snubbed him to the verge of madness, he could never keep his eyes away from her. The force with which she tied her shoe when the lacing came undone, the flirt over shoulder she gave her black braid when she was excited or warm, her manner of studying,—book on desk, arms folded, eyes fixed on the ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... we said just now, these phenomena formerly had the power of terrifying ignorant mortals, either when the orb of light and life seemed on the verge of extinction, or when the beautiful Phoebus was covered with a veil of crape and woe, or took ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... unable to replace your sick and wounded men." But, if he knows I can't take the offensive, why trouble to cable me that the Dardanelles Committee expect me to adopt "only a purely defensive attitude"? I realize where we stand; K., Braithwaite and I,—on the verge. We are getting on for two months now since the August fighting—all that time we have been allowed to do nothing—literally, allowed to do nothing, seeing we have been given no shell. What a fiasco! The Dardanelles is not ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... black circle, bound 740 His glaring disk around, Proclaims Earth's last of summer days hath shone! The clouds return into the hues of night, Save where their brazen-coloured edges streak The verge where brighter ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... I murmured, "no enchantments for me but thine! Thine are the spells by which creation is beautified, and, in that beauty, hallowed. What though we can see not into the measureless future from the verge of the moment; what though sorrow may smite us while we are dreaming of bliss, let the future not rob me of thee, and a balm will be found for each wound! Love me ever as now, oh, my Lilian; troth to troth, side ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... face of special difficulties, to put the equipment of any exclusively male profession to shame. If the work of the average man required half the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average prostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... hard life is that of the poor Icelanders! When our ship arrived, they were on the verge of starvation, their supplies being all exhausted. Glad indeed they must have been to welcome the Camoens, and know that flour and other staple articles of food were once again within their reach. Outside every house we noticed rows of dried fish hung up, and ready for the winter's consumption. ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... a way young birds have," Mr. Bronson remarked, turning to Joe with a serious smile; "and I dare say you are on the verge of a somewhat similar predicament, my boy," he went on. "I am afraid things have reached a crisis, Joe. I have watched it coming on for a year now—your poor scholarship, your carelessness and inattention, your constant desire to be out of the house and away in search ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... part of the host, after the guest has refused a second helping, is overdoing the bounds of hospitality, and perilously borders on the verge of incivility. ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... and transient misfortune arising out of the advantage given to the magician by the unpardonable stupidity of Aladdin in regard to the lamp. But, whilst my sister and I agreed in despising Aladdin so much as almost to be on the verge of despising the queen of all the bluestockings for so ill-directed a preference, one solitary section there was of that tale which was fixed and fascinated my gaze, in a degree that I never afterwards forgot, and did not at that time ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... of an innocent girl's way of making out for herself only the sweetness of the world, the majesty of the heavens . . . and just when all seemed on the verge of growing clear, and out of the "soft fifty changes" of the moon, "no unfamiliar face" could look, the sweet ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... by inch, they fought their way along the edge of the foaming rocks, until Kit feared he had made a mistake. And then, when on the verge of himself turning back, they came abreast of a narrow opening, not twenty feet wide, which led into a land-locked enclosure where the fiercest gusts scarcely flawed the surface. It was the haven gained by the boats of previous days. They landed on a shelving beach, and ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... love. And I have also finished at last with that terrible correspondence for the Union. Seventy-six pages of minute writing have I sent to Berlin yesterday and to-day, and I breathe again. In my yesterday's letter I broke Helene to you. It is extraordinarily fortunate that on the verge of forty I should be able to find a wife so beautiful, so sympathetic, who loves me so much, and who, as you and I agreed was indispensable, is entirely absorbed in my personality. In your last letter you throw cold water on my proposed journey to Hamburg; and perhaps you are right in thinking the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... It is more amazing to see how close to the brute a man may remain than it is to see how far he may leave the brute behind. How it began I cannot recall; but this youth, a lad of seventeen, whether moved by dislike or the mere fascination of injury, was in the habit of teasing me beyond the verge of endurance as often as he had the chance. I did not like to complain to my father, though that would have been better than to hate him as I did. I was ashamed of my own impotence for self-defence; but therein I was little ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... for a grand naval engagement which shall eclipse anything ever seen before. There are many who would like the engagement to occur, who do not much relish the prospect of its occurring very near the city. They think deeper water and scope and verge enough for such an encounter may be found farther up the river. All, however, are rejoiced to learn that Memphis will not fall till conclusions are first tried on water, ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... anything there worth printing. His book showed me that the humblest spot in nature becomes extraordinary the moment extraordinary observation is applied to it. I must mimic Gilbert White directly. I pestered my poor parents to spend a month or two in the depths of the country, on the verge of a forest. They yielded, with groans; I kissed them, and we rusticated. I pried into every living thing, not forgetting my old friends, the insect tribe. Here I found ants with grander ideas than they have to home, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... you will weigh carefully every word I utter." Bennington took his father's letter from his pocket and unfolded it. "You are about to take a step such as you all will live to regret. My father never threatened; he acted. I shall follow his example. You are on the verge of striking. I shall recognize the strike only at the moment you decide to leave the shops. You will strike without cause, without justice, simply because you are commanded to do ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... plunging down like a maddened bull, when suddenly, within 12 ft. of the rock, there was a thrilling cry from Kenneth Moore, and up we shot, almost clearing the projecting summit. Almost—not quite—sufficiently to escape death; but the car, tripping against the very verge, hurled Phillip and myself, clasped in each other's arms, far ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... impulsive and often irresistible longings for food delicacies which are apt to overcome children, and in girls often persist or revive through adolescence and even beyond. Such sudden fits of greediness belong to those kind of normal psychic manifestations which are on the verge of the abnormal into which they occasionally pass. They may occur, however, in healthy, well-bred, and well-behaved children who, under the stress of the sudden craving, will, without compunction and apparently without reflection, steal the food they ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... foreigners hold to be made by the whipping of the wind. As the souls gathered at their goal, nature's sounds were hushed. The roar of the waterfall, the sea's dashing, the sigh of the wind in the trees, all were silenced. At the Spirits' Leap on the verge of a tall cliff grew a lonely tree, with brown, spreading branches, dark leaves and red flowers. The name of the tree was Spray-Sprinkled.[1] One of its roots hung down over the cliff's face to the mouth of a cavern fringed by much sea-weed, floating or dripping on the ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... unheard-of purpose, for which human powers and motives by themselves are insufficient. In the murder of Clytemnestra, and her heart-rending appeals, the poet, without disguising her guilt, has gone to the very verge of what was allowable in awakening our sympathy with her sufferings. The crime which is to be punished is kept in view from the very first by the grave, and, at the conclusion, it is brought still nearer to our minds by the unfolding ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... party's wonder grew. Most of them dragged themselves forward with stumbling footsteps. Their faces were haggard, their hands moving restlessly and their features twitching. They looked like men who had been for days undergoing severe mental and physical strain and were on the verge of collapse. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... the back of the head, we see ourselves on the verge of the outlook. Only he who has accomplished the notable feat of turning about knows himself the central figure in ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... mesters." To have been weak of will, or vacillating of purpose, would have been death to every vestige of the authority vested in him; but he was as strong mentally as physically—strong-willed to the verge of stubbornness. But if they could not frighten or subdue him, they could still oppose and irritate him, and the contention was obstinate. This feeling even influenced the girls and women at the "mouth." They, too, organized in ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... given in their college hall. And how many polkas these young ladies danced, and how many waltzes they waltzed, and how many ices they consumed, and how many too susceptible partners they drove to the verge of desperation, it would be improper, if ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... real revelation. I will confess to you that this is the rock upon which my powers and my mission seem sometimes most likely to split. But I console myself by thinking that all of us, great as well as small, must be on the verge of it sometimes. Let me draw you a parallel. Perhaps you know something of the old alchemists. They had laid hold on the edge of chemistry. But because that truth came confused, because they all had things by the wrong handle, a thousand of them confused truth with error until, in ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... state, on the verge of exhaustion, for his vigil had been long and faithful; it was a nightmare period of suspense for him. Occasionally he dozed, but only to start into wakefulness and to experience apprehensions keener than before. The man was beside himself, and his anxiety had its effect upon Tom and Jerry. ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... feel so ill!" faintly exclaimed Miss Tag-rag, turning deadly pale. Titmouse was on the verge of dropping on his knees and confessing the trick, greatly agitated at the effect unexpectedly produced on Miss Tag-rag; when Tag-rag's heavy hand was suddenly placed on his shoulder, and he whispered in a fierce undertone—"You're an impostor, sir!" which ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... astonished the Doctor very much. He was not a man, however, to show all he felt. He saw that Nurse was on the verge of hysterics, and he knew that if he did not take this startling and unpleasant piece of information in the most matter-of-fact way, he would get ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... I climb'd my vessel's lofty side; My train obey'd me, and the ship untied. In order seated on their banks, they sweep Neptune's smooth face, and cleave the yielding deep. When to the nearest verge of land we drew, Fast by the sea a lonely cave we view, High, and with darkening laurels covered o'er; Were sheep and goats lay slumbering round the shore Near this, a fence of marble from the rock, Brown with o'eraching pine and spreading oak. A giant shepherd here ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... steps of a church—San Pietro was its name, a very old church. For a while we were silent; Virginia, it was to be seen, was now timid—timid to the verge of defiance; I was ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... precious quarter of an hour, when the veil that has divided two faithful friends is suddenly dashed aside, and they rush one to the other, calling themselves every imaginable bad name in the dictionary, insisting to the verge of quarrelling that it was all their fault, and no fault at all of the other, far too rapturous to talk ordinary common sense, and far too forgetful of everything to remember that they are saying the same thing over and over again ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... now for the countries of Europe; we have watched Jonathan Edwards in his solitary ecstasies in the Northampton and the Stockbridge woods; we have seen Franklin preaching his gospel of personal thrift and of getting on in the world. Down to the very verge of the Revolution the American pioneer spirit was forever urging the individual to fight for his own hand. Each boy on the old farms had his own chores to do; each head of a family had to plan for himself. The most tragic failure of the individual ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... Canada, at the same time, matters had come to the verge of rebellion. Sir John Colborne had, just before retiring as Lieutenant Governor in 1836, added fuel to the flames by creating and endowing some forty-four rectories, thus strengthening the grip of the Anglican Church on the province. His ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... efforts now to take care not only of Violet Winslow but Warrington himself, who was on the verge of collapse after his heroic ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... minutes spent in this way they got under cover of a little clump near the water's edge, and near enough to the gigantic game. Upon their hands and knees they now approached the verge of the underwood; and having parted the leaves, looked through. The mighty quadruped was right under their eyes, ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... government is that which governs least, and allows the utmost scope to untrammelled individual enterprise. But if there is a tendency on the part of some to return to the individualistic principle, the 'paternal' idea as espoused by others is being carried to the verge of socialism. The function of the State is stretched almost to breaking point when it is conceived as the 'guardian angel' who accompanies and guards with perpetual oversight the whole life of the individual from the cradle to the grave. ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... impart some outline or foreshadow of this Doctrine. Readers of any intelligence are once more invited to favour us with their most concentrated attention: let these, after intense consideration, and not till then, pronounce, Whether on the utmost verge of our actual horizon there is not a looming as of Land; a promise of new Fortunate Islands, perhaps whole undiscovered Americas, for such as have canvas to sail thither?—As exordium to the whole, stand here the following ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... sad exile's weary search was at last rewarded; the long parted lovers were reunited, though but for a moment on the verge of the grave; ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... exercise is to write verse without rhyme or very much reason, whose only virtue shall be lines of exact length with meter regular to the verge of singsongness. As an exercise, too, it is helpful to take a dozen lines or more of good verse and break them up into feet. The greatest poets are not necessarily the best for this purpose, owing to the irregularity of much of their work. It is better ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... like the poplar and willow, fringing the shore. "It is the sign which Circe gave me," whispered Odysseus to his awestruck comrades; "we are at the very gates of Hades." Landing in silence, they carried the victims for sacrifice to the verge of the grove, and Odysseus with his sword dug a trench, a cubit in length and breadth, and poured about it a libation of mead and water and wine. Then the sheep were slaughtered, and the trench was filled to the brim with their blood. When the ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... advantages of this situation, rendered it a place of consequence, and its possession had already been severely contested. As a military post, on the verge of the English colonies, its retention was important to the French interest in Acadia; and the extensive commerce it opened with the natives in the interior, through the navigable streams, which emptied into the bay, was a source of private emolument, that D'Aulney was anxious ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... the waste, and began to make our toilsome and devious travel towards the eastern verge. There were the tops of mountains all round (you are to remember) from whence we might be spied at any moment; so it behoved us to keep in the hollow parts of the moor, and when these turned aside from our direction to move upon its naked face with infinite care. ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my noble cousin, must have been written in a most desponding mood, as all the great reforms of the day seem to you on the verge of failure. What are the experiences of days and months and years in the lifetime of a mighty nation? Can one man in his brief hour hope to see the beginning and end of any reform? When you compare the public sentiment and social customs of our day with what ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... five Hendricks came in, to report. He was a young man, stockily built, with eyes that were always on the verge of laughter and lips that sloped inward as if biting down on the threatened mirth. The shape of his lips was symbolical of his habit of discourse; he was ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... of the Prophet Moses. Moses and manna—the connection is obvious and the secret was soon in his possession. He manufactured the stuff in his own laboratory and lived on it himself—at least to the verge of physical extinction. Then he went gunning for subjects, and you know the rest. The rubbish fills you up without nourishing you, and what you lived on was really ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... It seemed only reasonable to expect that he would proceed to make that fact clear to her now that he had found the mine, but she was a little puzzled about his smile. It indicated rather too much self-possession for a man on the verge of a proposal, and she did not know that since he entered the house he had been endeavoring to impose ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... has been declared, the skies haven't fallen and oysters taste just the same. I never would have dreamed that so big a step would be accepted with so much equanimity. It is due to two causes, I think. First, because we have trembled on the verge so long and sort of dabbled our toes in the water, that our minds have grown gradually accustomed to what under other circumstances would be a violent shock. Second, because the individual units of the Navy are so well prepared that there is little to do. We made a few minor changes in the routine ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... on the very verge of a revelation of the truth. He was on the point of telling Hermione that he was sure that the padrone had been murdered, and that he meant to avenge the murder. Hermione believed that for the moment he was mad, and ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Gildas, who flourished in the latter part of the sixth century. British antiquaries of the present day will doubtless forgive me, if I leave in their original obscurity the prophecies of Merlin, and the exploits of King Arthur, with all the Knights of the Round Table, as scarcely coming within the verge of history. Notwithstanding, also, the authority of Bale, and of the writers whom he follows, I cannot persuade myself to rank Joseph of Arimathea, Arviragus, and Bonduca, or even the Emperor Constantine himself, among the illustrious writers of Great ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... disposition, which thou hast so often censured as the inheritance of a tender-hearted Mother. To mould me into thine own likeness thou hast sent me hither. Thou dost compel me to behold this man on the verge of the yawning grave, in the grasp of an arbitrary doom, that I may experience the profoundest anguish; that thus, rendered callous to every fate, I may henceforth meet every event with a ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... it a rule for yourself always to go to an older friend, when you want to talk about anything that might be not quite nice, or that might verge on silliness. If conscience or prudence give any pricks in the matter, go to an elder. You do not know how much such a rule would save you from, and if you say, "but that is impossible, she would not understand!" ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... I have felt for some time that when France was on the verge of a precipice it was not the time for her nobles to be marrying. Noblesse oblige. If we were two peasants we might marry and be happy. As it is we must wait, even though we know that waiting may never come to an end. I have a conviction, Victor, that ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... of wind and large pattering drops. It was a dreary moment. The dogs were fast drawing on their victim, and nothing but despair and death stared him in the face. The ground now began to get irregular and varied, and a hope arose in his heart that he was getting on the verge of the moors. Still he was entirely ignorant as to the direction. The clouds then burst with a violence which their threatening aspect had long foretold, and in an instant Smyth was drenched to the skin; the ground became slippery, and the footing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... before all the wheels of government move smoothly, and Mgr. de Laval, obliged to face ever renewed conflicts of authority, had necessarily either to abandon what he considered it his duty to support, or create malcontents. If sometimes he carried persistence to the verge of obstinacy, he must be judged in relation to the period in which he lived: governors like Frontenac were only too anxious to imitate their absolute master, whose guiding maxim was, "I am the state!" Moreover, where are the men of true worth who have not found upon their path the ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... who spoke last night at the Hotel Astor, at a dinner of the Economic Club, which was held for the purpose of hearing his story of conditions in Europe, whence he has recently returned, said that England was on the verge of a revolution, which was narrowly averted in February, when he was there, and the conditions on the Continent of Europe are appalling beyond anything dreamed of in ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... was generosity, carried to the verge of rashness. Even in his last years, when living on a very limited income, he was only too ready to empty his pockets at the call of any charity, whether public or private. Impulse, however, prompted him to give most heartily when he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... the street, is used as the excuse for a human interest story. Sometimes the purpose is pathos and sometimes it is humor, but, whatever it may be, if it is clever and interesting it gets its place in the paper, a place entirely out of proportion to its true news value. The results sometimes verge very close upon nature faking, but after all they are only the result of the "up-lift" idea of looking at all life in a more sympathetic way. Several of the beginnings quoted earlier in this chapter belong to animal stories and the following is a ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... replied Wibisma in a calmer tone. "You will push those tottering on the verge of the abyss completely over the precipice, and go to destruction ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that was still full of water, although the river itself had gone dry. Here I stood looking at the spoor and consulting with Saduko as to whether the beast could have swum the pool, for the tracks that went to its very verge had become confused and uncertain. Suddenly our doubts were ended, since out of a patch of dense bush which we had passed—for it had played the common trick of doubling back on its own spoor—appeared the buffalo, a huge bull, that halted on three legs, my bullet having broken ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... in a man who up till then had exhibited such fortitude, demanded the reason of his conduct. "Son of Cyrus," he replied, "the misfortunes of my house are too unparalleled to weep over, but not the affliction of my friend. When a man, on the verge of old age, falls from luxury and abundance into extreme poverty, one may well lament his fate." When the speech was reported to Cambyses, he fully recognised the truth of it. Croesus, who was also present, shed tears, and the Persians round him were moved with ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... on the banks among the trees, or towering on the heights, owned by the wealthy and titled people that own the land round the lakes. A cottage built for Her Majesty was pointed out to us, and we heard of a royal deer hunt held here. We heard rapturous accounts of stags hunted to the verge of death, and saved alive to repeat the ennobling sport. And we censure without measure the Spanish bull fight where the animals are killed once! How many deaths do these timid deer suffer? I am afraid we are not as noble and merciful a people as we ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... their lives each a series of great successes and great disasters, mighty acquisitions and tremendous losses of power, sudden overthrows, followed by unexpected recoveries, but they died, also, Demetrius in actual captivity to his enemies, and Antony on the verge of it. ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... which is always on the verge of being broken, which depends largely on uninterrupted hours, on confidential, velvet-shod servants, on a brooding dove in a cedar, on the absence of the inharmonious or jarring elements ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... exercise in benefiting the nervous system is well known, and the effect of a gentle walk in making the ideas flow through the brain is a matter of common observation. At the same time, it must be borne in mind that exercise, when carried to the verge of fatigue, compels inactivity of the brain for a time, since Nature must have repose. But when carried out in moderation with a view of improving the condition of the body, it conduces to the salubrity of the brain as well, for the latter organ shares ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... their head. But their journey was destined to come to an abrupt and unexpected close. A couple of hours' gallop brought them to the edge of one of those open plains which sometimes break up the woodland near the verge of the great prairies. It stretched out like a green lake towards the horizon, on which, just as the band of horsemen reached it, the sun was descending in a ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... projecting cape And perilous reef along the ocean's verge, Starts into life a dim, gigantic shape, Holding its lantern o'er ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... under-world, the clouds were drawing forward on their course; and as their last fringe trailed slowly by and the moon was revealed once more, the spell was broken in an instant by human voices calling us to re-embark. Again we glided to the verge of tumultuous falls, again we were flung through foaming narrows and labyrinthine passages of torn rocks, until, the last promontory turned with arrowy swiftness, we shot through a postern of the granite ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... pursuit was being followed up in brave style, when some of the rebels suddenly faced around and took steady aim at those who were charging them. Roberts was of the party and had gone to the rescue of a man who was on the verge of being run through by a bayonet, when he saw two sepoys running off with the Union Jack. He spurred his horse in pursuit, and, leaning over, wrenched the standard out of the hands of one of the men, at the same time sabering ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... seize upon the imagination, and inspire it with new worship of Nature, we have great lack. In private grounds we cannot of course command the opportunity which the long tenure under British privilege gives; but the conservators of public parks have scope and verge; let them look to it, that their resources be not wasted in the niceties of mere gardening, or in elaborate architectural devices. Banks of blossoming shrubs and tangled wild vines and labyrinthine walks will count for nothing in park-effect, when, fifty years hence, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... the holidays; he also suggested that their affair—"their" affair!—be kept quiet for the present. Yet he had all too facile a vision of beatific meditations that were like enough to give the situation away to all the household; and he was nervously aware of Amy Leffingwell as continually on the verge of bubbling confidences. ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... hundred yards I went, and then wheeled to the right past the post office, and so on for a quarter of a mile, till I reached the descent from the higher ground, on which the town was built, to the river. There, on my left, on the verge of the slope, stood the Sheriff's house in a lot by itself, with the long, low jail attached to it. Down the hill I went, and across the bridge and out into the open country. I drove rapidly for about five miles—more than halfway to Osawotamie—and then I pulled up, in order ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... minuteness a strange headache which had attacked Mrs. Cox, together with a long list of the remedies prescribed and the effects of each, and wound up in an out-of-the-way corner, in a vein of cheery optimism which reduced both readers to the verge of madness. ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... may be disease in the presence of a question as well as in the lack of an answer. We do not wonder so strangely at an ingenious and well-set-up effect, for we feel such in ourselves; but a cause, reaching out beyond the verge [of fact] and dangling its legs in nonentity, with the hope of a rational foothold, should realize a strenuous life. Pluralism believes in truth and reason, but only as mystically realized, as lived in experience. Up from the breast of a man, up to his tongue and brain, comes ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... apparent cause; not necessarily from a charitable desire to give him another chance. Also, the pleasing Indian characteristic of regard for family relationship, which is so strong, leads to an anxiety to belittle the wrongdoings of anyone who can claim kinship, and this may be carried even to the verge of distortion, or suppression of the truth. Anyhow, the conclusions of the Christian Panchayat are, not unfrequently, singularly at variance with what would appear to ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... the same absolute surrender to an awful Master she gave so easily herself, was enough to chill the wayward Rose, and fill her with a kind of restless despair. And at home, as the vicar said, the two sisters were always on the verge of conflict. Rose had enough of her father in her to suffer in resisting, but resist she must by the law of ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his second year when the family moved to a respectable house and farm on the verge of the pretty little village of Lissoy, in West Meath. Here the schoolmistress who first put a book into Oliver Goldsmith's hands confessed, "Never was so dull a boy; he ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Sinclair protested, "while that sort of philanthropy is very delightful when one can afford the luxury, it is scarcely practical when one is teetering on the verge of financial ruin. After all, Bryce, self-preservation is the first law of human nature, and the sale of those farms would go a long way toward helping the Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company out of the hole it is in ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... opportunities to do so. Louis XVI, in his weakness, called the States-General for counsel and advice. It was the first time the people had been called in council for more than 200 years; monarchy had said it could run the government without the people, and now, on the verge of destruction, called upon the people to save it from the {405} wreck. The well-intended king invoked a storm; his predecessors had sown the wind, he reaped ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... repeated, but their very accumulation heightens the impression of a great unheard-of purpose, for which human powers and motives by themselves are insufficient. In the murder of Clytemnestra, and her heart-rending appeals, the poet, without disguising her guilt, has gone to the very verge of what was allowable in awakening our sympathy with her sufferings. The crime which is to be punished is kept in view from the very first by the grave, and, at the conclusion, it is brought still nearer to our minds by the unfolding the fatal garment: ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... previous intention of crossing the stream, there seemed nothing better for him to do than to follow the truant's advice and take the road back to Green Springs. Yet he was loath to leave the wood, halting on its verge, and turning to look back into its charmed recesses. Once or twice—perhaps because he recalled the words of the poem—that yellowish sea of ferns had seemed instinct with hidden life, and he had ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... 1873-74," says McNeill, was one of extreme suffering. Midwinter found tens of thousands of people on the verge of starvation, suffering for food, for the need of proper clothing, and for medical attendance. Meetings of the unemployed were held in many places, and public attention called to the needs of the poor. The men ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... season in the year for Europeans. Want of rain in Fezzan and Sockna is compensated for by the abundance of springs. These rains in The Mountains will establish the rule of the Turks. It is only a question of provisions. The want of rain for several years has brought Tripoli to the verge of ruin, and the Sultan is tired of supporting this Regency. If a few good harvests come, Tripoli will support itself. Wrote to Mr. Gagliuffi by this caravan, to tell him where I was on the 30th of March! He expects me ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... also, referring to his Little Father, the Czar; the Teuton would have poured forth oceans of turgid sentiment about the Fatherland; the dignified Spaniard would have recognised himself as a warrior upon the verge of a Homeric struggle, and said so candidly; the hysterical American would have sung "Hail, Columbia!" and waved pocket-handkerchief-sized replicas of the Star-Spangled Banner until too exhausted to agitate or vocalise. But to these men indulgence in sentiment ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... condemnation or justification, would be thought of the old Murray Davenport. It wouldn't matter to the new man. During that last talk with you, Davenport had such an impulse of communicativeness—such a desire for a moment's relief from his long-maintained secrecy—that he was on the verge of confiding his project to you, under bond of silence. But he mastered the impulse; and you had no sooner gone than ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... was seldom seen by Frenchmen in the eighteenth century. This confusion of thought was a cause of many of the troubles of the French Revolution. We shall see that Rousseau, who had been carried by the love of liberty beyond the verge of the ridiculous in his Discourses, was brought back, in his "Social Compact," by his love of equality, so far as to become the advocate of an intolerable tyranny, yet was quite unaware that he was inconsistent. He composed, in fact, a description of liberty ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... men of his years, in daylight, at dawn, or silvered with moonlight. He thought he had exhausted the possibilities for terror. But he found himself grudgingly admitting that he was at the least a little nervous—at the most, on the verge of alarm. But he put his whistle in his mouth, drew his revolver again and ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... forced a war that could end only in disaster. When one of his councillors advised against the folly, he caned him and sent him into exile. Yet out of the fiery trial this king came a hero; his queen, whose pride and wasteful vanity[1] had done its full share in bringing the country to the verge of ruin, became the idol of the nation. In the hour of its peril she grew to the stature of a great woman who shared danger and hardship with her people and by her example put hope and courage into ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... established at Dojima, in Osaka, for the purpose of imparting some measure of stability to the price of the cereal. Just at this time (1732), the central and western provinces were visited by a famine which caused seventeen thousand deaths and reduced multitudes to the verge of starvation. The Bakufu rendered aid on a munificent scale, but the price of rice naturally appreciated, and although this brought relief to the military class, it was misconstrued by the lower orders as a result of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... almost to the ground; but, having taken careful note of his prices, I felt secure in commending him, even to the verge of extravagance; and, besides, does not the artistic nature demand the stimulus of praise to enable it to put forth ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... we have reached the verge of the romance of the life of William Phips. He had before him a difficult task, but he possessed the qualities which enable men to meet and overcome difficulty. The silver-ship was said to have been sunk somewhere near the Bahamas; the exact spot it was not easy to learn, for half ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... reached the top of the hill overlooking the glen, she noticed fresh furrows in the field on her left. Clambering through the fence, she waited until the heads of a pair of horses made their appearance, rising over the verge of the hill. As she conjectured, Gilbert Potter was behind them, guiding the plough-handle. He was heartily glad to see her, and halted his team at ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... the European kind, but they had not arrived as yet. The first class, although by far the dullest and most bovine, was still the most powerful because they were the richest, money as yet providing the highest standard. The functions which these people provided were stupid to the verge of distraction; really they were only the week-day receptions and Sunday-afternoon calls of Squeedunk and Hohokus raised to the Nth power. The purpose of the whole matter was to see and be seen. Novelty in either thought or action was decidedly ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... paced the floor with nervous, uneven strides. He plunged his hand into his coat pocket and drew out the letter again. He re-read it, with hot eyes and straining thought. Every word seemed to sear itself upon his poor brain, and drive him to the verge of distraction. Why? Why? And he raised his bloodshot eyes to the roof of his hut, and crushed the ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... wider stared her eyes, but no sound escaped her lips. She gazed and gazed, but the specter would not vanish. Poor Miss Arthur was terror-stricken almost to the verge of catalepsy. ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... wild pear; the second, all dead, bleached and impenetrable, of what had once been hawthorn, but now one jagged, fixed mass of awkward arms and cruel thorns; the third, a beautiful, spacious pine-wood, climbing over cliffs to the far verge of the cape where the lighthouse flashes. These were like woods in a fairy tale, and may well have had each their own particular elves and spirits. Each had a separate character: the first as of the earth, homely, full of gentle russet colours from the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... dragged themselves forward with stumbling footsteps. Their faces were haggard, their hands moving restlessly and their features twitching. They looked like men who had been for days undergoing severe mental and physical strain and were on the verge of collapse. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... necessaries of life. The distinction between the citizen class on the one hand and the productive class on the other was thus as clearly and sharply drawn as possible. It was even exaggerated; for the citizens were a band of conquerors, the productive class a subject race, perpetually on the verge of insurrection and only kept in restraint by such measures as secret assassination. The result was to draw together the small band of Spartiatae into a discipline so rigorous and close that under it everything ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Nucingen, love-sick for Esther Gobseck; and Mme. de Serizy ill on account of the suicide of Lucien de Rubempre. [Scenes from a Courtesan's Life.] He and his assistant, Bianchon, waited on Mme. de Bauvan, who was on the verge of death at the close of 1830 and beginning of 1831. [Honorine.] Desplein had an only daughter whose marriage in 1829 was arranged with the Prince ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... sir, the error was not mine," was the instant rejoinder, so quick, sharp and positive as to carry it at a bound to the verge of disrespect, and the keen, blue eyes of the young soldier gazed, frank and fearless, into the heavily ambushed grays of the veteran in the chair. It made the latter wince and ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... the brink of a precipice, be calm? Can a man be calm on the verge of the grave? I love you, Agatha, with a true and holy love; but still with a love fierce and untameable. You reviled me when I said I worshipped you, but I adore the ground you tread on, and the air you breathe. I would shed my last drop of blood to bring you ease; but ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... courageous of the party followed Tom, and, the way being thus made, the whole party began pushing up the rock,—the hindermost pushing the front ones faster than they would have gone of themselves. On they came, and in a moment the burly form of Tom appeared in sight, almost at the verge ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... arose, and traced certain mystical characters upon the greensward. Straightway the glade in which they sat was filled with knights, ladies, maidens, and esquires, who danced and disported themselves right joyously. A stately castle rose on the verge of the forest, and in the garden the spirits whom Merlin the enchanter had raised up in the semblance of knights and ladies held carnival. Vivien, delighted, asked of Merlin in what manner he had achieved this feat of faery, and he told her that he would in time instruct her as to the ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... first; he didn't mind that much, he was so sure of his uncle's inheritance repairing his lost fortunes, but suddenly this difficulty of identification springs up, and he is literally on the verge of ruin." ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... in a very different way! he heard me attentively, and I left him perfectly satisfied of the truth of my system." I have had much reason to think that many discoverers, of all classes, believe they have convinced every one who is not peremptory to the verge of incivility. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... insistence. Between these two hills runs a rapid stream from the Downs to the southward, that below the town opens out suddenly into a small estuary or creek. Where the Watling Street forded the Darent there grew up the town of Dartford, on the verge of the marshes within reach of the tide, but also within reach of an inexhaustible river of fresh water. The ford was presently replaced by a ferry, and later still, in the latter years of Henry VI., by a great bridge, as we see, but the ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... upwards. Night lay like a sack around and below us: but right aloft, at the zenith, day was trembling. Slowly established, it spread and descended upon us until it touched a distant verge of hills, and there, cut by the rim of the rising sun, flowed suddenly with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not the case with free men. You cannot oppress and murder freemen as you would slaves: you cannot so insult them with the question, "What are you going to do about it?" When you ask free men that question you appeal to men who, though sunk to the verge of despair, yet are capable of uprising and ripping hip and thigh those who deemed them incapable of so rising above their condition. The history of mankind is fruitful of such uprisings of races and classes reduced to a condition of absolute ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... Let my old eyes fix on thee till thou goest Beneath the farthest verge. Good Megacles, And you brave gentlemen, be faithful all To me and to ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... ample reason why he should take this tone with me if he felt like it. I looked like a derelict and was acting like one. Moreover, I was tormented to the verge of madness by the fear that the conductor might come along on a ticket-punching tour, and that by this means Barton would learn my ultimate destination—which would be equivalent, I fancied, to publishing it in the Glendale ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... one; the latter is enlivening; the former lovely. Thirdly, with regard to the union of the eye with the neighbouring parts, it is to hold the same rule that is given of other beautiful ones; it is not to make a strong deviation from the line of the neighbouring parts; nor to verge into any exact geometrical figure. Besides all this, the eye affects, as it is expressive of some qualities of the mind, and its principal power generally arises from this; so that what we have just said of the ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... A.M., we are passing Grand Bassam, seven or eight miles from land. Our track just touches the outer edge of the semicircular line of dirty foam, indicating the distance to which the influence of the river extends. Within the verge, the water is discolored by recent contact with the earth; beyond it, ripples the uncontaminated, pure, blue ocean. One is the emblem of human life, muddied with base influences; the other, of eternity, which is only not transparent ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... additions may be made to their diet in the shape of paunches, carefully cleaned and cooked, and Spratt's Puppy Rodnim. A plentiful supply of fresh milk is still essential. Gradually the number of their meals may be decreased, first to four a day, and later on to three, until at six months old they verge on adolescence; and may be placed upon the rations of the adult dog, two meals ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... The midnight Witches breathe the songs of hell; Delighted Ariel wings his fiery way To whirl the storm, the wheeling Orbs to stay; Then bathes in honey-dews, and sleeps in flowers; Meanwhile, young Oberon, girt with shadowy powers, Pursues o'er Ocean's verge the pale cold Moon, Or hymns her, riding in ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... eternally over the wooded valley; till, roaming across them all, the eye rested at last on the rearing scarp of Chanctonbury Ring, faintly pencilled on the furthest skyline. Shadowy phantoms of dim heights framed the verge to east and west. Alan Merrick drank it in with profound satisfaction. After those sharp and clear-cut Italian outlines, hard as lapis lazuli, the mysterious vagueness, the pregnant suggestiveness, of our English scenery strikes the imagination; ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... and Indians concealed by the prairie grass and timber, and from this situation, in almost perfect security, they fired down upon Braddock's men. The only exposure of the French and Indians, resulted from the circumstance of their having to raise their heads to peep over the verge of the cliff, in order to shoot with more deadly precision. In consequence, all of them who were killed in the early part of the action, were ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... gifts withheld by Fate From morrow unto morrow, till her great Dread eyes 'gan tell of other gifts than those, And her advancing wings gloomed like a pall; Her speech foretelling joy became a dirge As piteous as pitiless; and all My company had passed beyond the verge And lost me ere Fate raised her blinding wings.... Hark! through the dusk a bird ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... seemed on the verge of being anticipated. The experiment, which in Kirchhoff's hands proved decisive, of passing sunlight through glowing vapours and examining the superposed spectra, was performed by Professor W. A. Miller of King's College in 1845.[395] Nay, more, it was ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... on the hills, melancholy on the verge of pools, exalted when the sun is crowned in an ocean of blood-red shadows, and when it casts on the rivers its red reflection. And at night, under the moon, as it passes across the vault of heaven, you think of things, singular things, which would never have occurred ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... evidence of a painful episode in Mrs. Carteret's family, which the doctor's presence would inevitably recall. Once before, Mrs. Carteret's life had been endangered by encountering, at a time of great nervous strain, this ill-born sister and her child. She was even now upon the verge of collapse at the prospect of her child's suffering, and should be protected from the intrusion of any idea which might ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... sky, Haltingly, the lines go by. Ah, would steps were blithe and gay, As when first they marched away, Smile on lip and curl on brow,— Only white-faced gray-beards now, Standing on life's outer verge, E'en the ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... that not a motion of the arm, not an inch of the foot, pass the verge of the ring; and if the fluid be thus unhappily stinted, reserve all that is left for the protecting circle and the twelve outer lamps! See how the Grand Work advances, how the hues in the caldron are glowing blood-red through the film ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... considerable notice. In later days his brilliancy had been less conspicuously displayed. During a debate in the House of Lords on affairs in Morocco, at a moment when that country, for the fifth time in seven years, had brought half Europe to the verge of war, he had interpolated the remark "a little Moor and how much it is," but in spite of the encouraging reception accorded to this one political utterance he was never tempted to a further display in that direction. It began to be generally understood that he did ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... expedition acted the part of peacemaker among the Indians. The officers patched up peace agreements between the tribes that were on the verge of warfare, and made treaties with the Yankton branch of the Sioux and the Ricaras. All these natives were familiar with white men, having known both French traders and the employees of the British Fur Company. The Indians showed a friendly disposition toward the ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... favorite with us, and with all the officers of the regiment. He talked less than any man I ever knew, but there was nothing sinister or sullen in his reticence. It was sunshine,—warmth and brightness, but no voice. Unassuming and modest to the verge of shyness, he impressed every one as a man of singular pluck ...
— Quite So • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... pitchforks and spades, while the women remained outside the church with the cure, they sought a suitable ambuscade. Approaching a mill on a rising ground adjacent to the verge of the forest, they saw the light of the burning farm flaming against the stars. There they waited under enormous oaks, before a ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... I think the putting off these material points, when so many accidents every day happen, and life is so precarious, is one of the most inexcusable things in the world. And there are many important points to be thought of, when life is drawing to its utmost verge; and the mind may be so agitated and unfit, that it is a most sad thing to put off, to that time, any of those concerns, which more especially require a considerate and composed frame of temper, and perfect health ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... awaking, surrounded by a revengeful and infuriated people—they at length reached the shore to find no junk or vessel of sufficient size to convey them across the narrow sea to their own country. Driven to face their enemies on the very verge of the ocean, they eventually succeeded in retreating to some small boats—in which, wounded and bleeding, but all alive, they confided themselves to the sea, as being more merciful than their relentless and cruel foe. All ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... riverward alleys the young fellow came upon his ambuscade, and was struck motionless with amazement at the form it took. Silhouetted against the shining water beyond was a young girl. She knelt at the very verge of the low, crumbling cliff above the water; her left hand, outspread, was on the ground, her right rested against the rough trunk of a palm-tree, and counter-balanced the weight of her body, which leaned far forward over the brink. Her face was turned ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... I knew what is the matter with me. I feel always just on the verge of becoming an absurd old hypochondriac, and as if it only wanted a touch ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... of Osorkon II., the Sheshonk dynasty rapidly declined in power. A system of constituting appanages for the princes of the reigning house grew up, and in a short time conducted the country to the verge of dissolution. "For the purpose of avoiding usurpations analogous to that of the High-Priests of Ammon," says M. Maspero, "Sheshonk and his descendants made a rule to entrust all positions of importance, whether civil or military, to the princes of the blood royal. A son of the reigning Pharaoh, ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... collision with the great soldier—that tried and trusty friend of my heart. The army had saluted him on a hundred fields. His name had become the synonym of unfaltering courage. He was here, on the verge of surrender now, looking as calm and resolute as on ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... day by day strengthening its cords, enlarging its borders, and with firm tread advancing steadily to recognized place among the nations. They would have beheld the savage foe—giving way before the inexorable advance of the hated 'pale face'—sadly retreating toward the ever-receding western verge of civilization. It would have been theirs to witness the symbols of French and Spanish authority disappear forever from mainland and island of the New World. Following the sun a thousand miles toward his ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... blue-eyed waif. In its blue-checked apron, the remains of fish and ham around its mouth, its large blue eyes wandering from face to face in search of the pale mother who had for a time left her, Letty stood for a moment motionless and on the verge of tears. ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... Lloyd's yet," he answered, easily. "My uncle is far from his dotage. Then, too, you know that I was never intended for a business man, but a lawyer, like my father, if there had not been so little for my father's second wife and the children—" He stopped himself abruptly on the verge of a confidence. "I think I saw you on your way to the photographer to-day," he said, and Ellen blushed, remembering her aunt Eva's violent nudge, and wondering if he had noticed. She gave ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... acknowledging the irregular marriage. This he deposited with Mr. Aitken of Ayr, who, as Burns heard, deleted the names, thus rendering the marriage null and void. This was the circumstance, what he regarded as Jean's desertion, which brought Burns, as he has said, to the verge of insanity. ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... been often asked concerning supposed cases, in which I was said to have been placed on the verge of discovery; but, as I maintained my point with the composure of a lawyer of thirty years' standing, I never recollect being in pain or confusion on the subject. In Captain Medwyn's Conversations of Lord Byron the reporter states himself to have asked my noble and highly gifted ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the lighthouse in a hurry, intending to call on a shipping agent, naturally he wouldn't stay in port long," said Blake. "Besides——" He stopped suddenly, being on the verge of saying something that would give Joe a hint of ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton
... why Otho's banish'd? Know, the cause Comes not within the verge of vulgar laws. Against all rules of fashionable life, The rogue had dared to sleep with his ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... the girl Varina Pemberton was telling him. "It has plates of metal that may be turned to use. Perhaps—" She seemed to be on the verge of saying ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... Requisition which swept the bulk of French workmen into the army. The old pressman was the only hand left in the printing-house; and when the master (otherwise the "gaffer") died, leaving a widow, but no children, the business seemed to be on the verge of extinction; for the solitary "bear" was quite incapable of the feat of transformation into a "monkey," and in his quality of pressman had never learned to read or write. Just then, however, a Representative ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... the pump and the currant bushes, then down the path to the chicken-houses, and so on, by way of the woodpile, to the south gate. After that, you went west toward the clover meadows, past the house where the Crazy Lady lived—here, if you were alone, you ran—and then, reaching the verge of the woods, you took your choice of climbing a seven-rail fence or of walking a quarter of a mile till you came to the bars. The latter was much better for the lace ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... door jambs, Carpy effectually barred the exit. Knowing his stubborn patient well, he humored him, to the verge of letting him have his own way, but with much raillery denied him the drug store trip. A compromise was effected. Laramie consented to go to Belle's to get something to eat. In this way, refusing help, the obdurate patient was got ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... it come like this— A vivid glory burning at the gate Over the sudden verge of golden waves? The tall white columns stand like seraphim With high arms locked for song. The city lies Pearled like the courts of heaven, waiting the tread Of souls made wise with joy. Why should we fear? ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... even unintelligible; yet it is logically and intently thought out from its emotional premises. It can take permanent possession of a deep mind here and there, and under certain conditions it can become epidemic. Imagine, for instance, a small nation with an intense vitality, but on the verge of ruin, ecstatic and distressful, having a strict and minute code of laws, that paints life in sharp and violent chiaroscuro, all pure righteousness and black abominations, and exaggerating the consequences of both perhaps to infinity. Such a people were the Jews after the exile, and again ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... sensitiveness. She would go to the root of this matter, if she had intelligence enough. Crippled, ruined in health, wrecked and broken by an inexplicable war, soul-blighted by the heartless, callous neglect of government and public, on the verge of madness at the insupportable facts, he had yet been wonderful enough, true enough to himself and God, to fight for life with the instinct of a man, to fight for his mind with a noble and unquenchable faith. Alone indeed he had been alone! And by some miracle beyond ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... the girl, who seemed on the verge of fainting, in his left arm, and approached his mouth to hers. But, just as their lips were about to touch, an owl's cry was heard, so close to the window that Amelie started and Charles raised his head. The cry was repeated a second ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... urged the teaching of the elements of religion common to all of the Christian sects. He took a firm stand against the idea of a purely secular education, and on one occasion said he was in favor of religious instruction 'to the extremest verge to which it can be carried without invading those rights of conscience which are established by the laws of God, and guaranteed to us by the Constitution of the State.' At another time he said that he regarded hostility to religion in the schools as the greatest crime he could commit. Lest his ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... equilibrium after that change. Though actual rebellion was nipped in the bud wherever it appeared, as in the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536 and in the Rising of the North of 1569, yet between those years, and long after the second rising, religious passions were embittered to the very verge of outbreak. In the early period of the Reformation changes were rapid and violent, and during more than a century and a half after Protestantism was established hostile legislation imposed heavy burdens upon all those who differed from the dominant ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... and never succeeds in compassing the (intended) ends of his measures. That king of infirm soul, who, yielding to the influence of wrath and malice, does not love and honour those amongst his kinsmen that are possessed of good qualities, is said to live on the very verge of destruction. That king, who attaches to himself accomplished persons by doing good to them even though he may not like them at heart, succeeds in enjoying fame for ever. Thou shouldst never impose taxes unseasonably. Thou shouldst not be grieved at the occurrence of anything ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... unfit to allot its proper place to the most insignificant fact; all her heart stunned by a cataclysm she had no wits to give a name to. She had come with a rare courage and endurance to be at close quarters with this mystery, whatever it was, at once. On the very verge of full knowledge of it, this terror had come upon her, and she stood trembling, sick with dread undefined, glad she need not speak or call out. It would pass, and then she would call to Ruth, whose voice ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... with a swift crimson and she set her lips together. She was on the verge of extreme anger just then, but after a little the flush died down again and the dark fire went out of her eyes. She made an odd gesture with her two hands. It seemed to express fatigue as ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... recover my beloved child. After having been many years deprived of both bodily and mental vigour by his paralysis, my husband died. I was free; but wherefore should I live!... I had lost my faith in everything which makes life dear, and I stood alone, on the verge of old age, surrounded by darkness and bitter memories. Thus did I still feel but a few days ago, when I received a writing from the present Commandant of K——. Within lay an unsealed letter, which he said had been found in a drawer into which my husband ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... we thought we saw. At first she slightly drew back, with brows knitted, on the verge of an exclamation; then her brows unbent, and the pleasure of finding herself admired, confusion at being taken unawares, the desire of appearing at ease, all appeared at once on her rosy cheeks and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... an appearance of calmness, there was something in his voice that made Dick catch his breath. It was not that the younger lad was exactly afraid, but he was on the verge of ...
— The Boy Ranchers - or Solving the Mystery at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... was within an ace of driving his fist into the face of his boorish visitor, but held himself awkwardly in check. Everybody rose. Lake lost his head and caught himself on the verge of saying, 'Must you go?' Then began the farrago of leave-taking. 'So nice of you—' 'I am awfully sorry' 'By Jove! how things ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... circumstances fall within the latitude of the command: so in religious covenants, not only those things which are of the substance and integrals of religion, but even the collaterals and subserviences that tend either to the establishing or advancing of religion, may justly be admitted within the verge and pale of the covenant. The cities of refuge had their suburbs appointed by God, as well as their habitations, and even they also were counted holy. The rights and privileges of the parliaments, and the liberties of the kingdom, mentioned in the third article; they are ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... the point and neared the post, its blare and hubbub burst on him, and its torch-light and many twinkling candles. He proceeded beside the triple row of Indian lodges which occupied the entire water-front. At intervals, on the very verge, evening fires were built, throwing streamers of crimson flicker on the lake. Naked pappooses gathered around these at play. But on an open flat betwixt encampment and village rose a lighted tabernacle of blankets stretched on poles and uprights; and within this the adult ...
— The Cobbler In The Devil's Kitchen - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... word, of Christ's nature and work. And now, as I believe, to a very large extent, the foremost and best thinking of the Christian Church is being occupied with that last problem, the nature and work of that Divine Spirit. I believe that we stand on the verge of a far clearer perception of, and of a far more fervent and realising faith in, the Spirit of God, than ever the Churches have seen before. And I pray you to remember that however much your Christian thought and Christian faith may be centred upon, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... stumbled eagerly after him. In a few moments they were at the camp. Trent roused his companions, packages were hastily undone and a meal prepared. Scarcely a word was said or a question asked. One or two of the Kru boys seemed on the verge of insanity—Francis himself was hysterical and faint. Trent boiled a kettle and made some beef-tea himself. The first mouthful Francis was unable to swallow. His throat had swollen and his eyes were hideously bloodshot. Trent, who had seen men before in dire ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... will happen now?" she said, her voice faltering, her eyes filling, and seemingly on the very verge of hysterics. "What if Blackadder should find that I am ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... because he had bequeathed her nothing but memories full of fragrance, yet full of torment. And there she was, sitting in her lonely room amongst the faded mementoes of a youth that had passed unprofitably and friendlessly; there she was, on the verge of the time when there would be no more hopes and no more desires—life had slipped through her fingers, and she was thirty ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the underworld, Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love below the verge; So sad, so fresh, the ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Anselmo would keep his word and free him; but gradually this hope vanished, and as the column marched into Toulon on the 28th of January, Benedetto was on the verge of despair. ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... his accustomed sense of critical values has to our notion definitely summed up the question: "His classicism is absolutely unacademic, his romanticism unreal beyond the verge of mysticism and so preoccupied with visions that he may almost be called a man for whom the actual world does not exist—in the converse of Gautier's phrase. His distinction is wholly personal. He lives evidently ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... and later, when the promise of his youth had begun to blossom, he sent him to Paris, although the expenditure just at that time demanded a sacrifice which might have been the ruin of Maurice's own career. Francis's promise had never come to entire fulfilment. He was always trembling on the verge of a great success without quite plunging into it. Despite the joy which his presence gave his brother and sister-in-law, most of his time was spent abroad, where he could find just the atmosphere that suited ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... last; Then, trembling, back unto the bed she crept, And lay down by his side, and no more wept, Nay scarce could think of death for very love That in her faithful heart for ever strove 'Gainst fear and grief: but now the incense-cloud The old familiar chamber did enshroud, And on the very verge of death drawn close Wrapt both their weary souls in strange repose, That through sweet sleep sent kindly images Of simple things; and in the midst of these, Whether it were but parcel of their dream, Or that they woke to it as some might ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... a later day; and at the period of his accession to the Throne was, without and beyond question, the best liked Prince in Europe—the most universally popular man in the United Kingdom and its external Empire. Upon the verge of His Majesty's Coronation there occurred that sudden and dramatic illness which proved so well the bravery and patience of the man, and increased so greatly the popularity ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... bravo, you are always true to yourself, Kosinski. I have always known you as a confirmed misogynist, and I see you still resist all temptations to reform. You carry boorishness to the verge ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... is unable to take any active part in life. The attempt to eat is attended with such severe pain that he avoids taking food. In some cases the suffering is so great that the patient only obtains sleep by the use of hypnotics, and he is often on the verge of suicide. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... very probably be broken down, perhaps even on the verge of hysteria. Such an experience would upset any woman, I don't care how robust she may have been. She'll need rest and care. You must bring her to ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... commanded them on their lives to hold. So soon as a glance from one to the other had ascertained to him whom he had to deal with, he demanded, "Whether the devils of Woodstock, whom folk talked about, had got possession of them both, that they were tilting at each other within the verge of the royal liberties? Let me tell both of you," he said, "that while old Henry Lee is at Woodstock, the immunities of the Park shall be maintained as much as if the King were still on the throne. None shall fight duellos here, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... of course, missed the ball, while the umpire dispassionately cried, "Strike two." The batter grieved loudly and bitterly. He accused the umpire of having eyes like a codfish, and of being stampeded by "some guy in the stand." He declared him to be incompetent to the verge of insanity, and wondered, in a voice that could be heard all over the field, how he had kept out of the asylum so long. His team mates supported him loyally, and incidentally demanded of the Toronto team's manager that William, whom they had discovered as the source of the heavy ...
— William Adolphus Turnpike • William Banks
... from the quality of humour, one is much struck by the evidence that in Holland during the present day there is a genial literature, of which we have known nothing at all. The pictures, just on the verge of caricature mostly, are ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... consider themselves civilized should be thus acting: so contrary to the natural laws and instincts of humanity that often in order for a bayonet charge men must be primed with liquor to the verge of intoxication . ...
— NEVER AGAIN • Edward Carpenter
... they jobbed and traded in Republicanism, and either parted with it, or at the present day are eager to part with it for a consideration. In order to get the Whigs into power, and themselves places, they brought the country by their inflammatory language to the verge of a revolution, and were the cause that many perished on the scaffold; by their incendiary harangues and newspaper articles they caused the Bristol conflagration, for which six poor creatures were executed; they encouraged the mob to pillage, pull down and burn, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... his window he was recalling the separate events of the day. The court room had been crowded to the verge of suffocation; when he entered it a sudden hush and a mighty craning of necks had been his welcome, and he had felt his cheeks redden and pale with a sense of shame at his hapless plight. Those many pairs of eyes that were fixed on him seemed to lay bare ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... town that spends many tens of thousands of taels each year upon these guardians of the people's peace. It seems to me that this should tell the world that the force of China is not a physical force, but the force of the law-abiding instinct of a happy common people, who, although living on the verge of misery and great hunger, live upright lives and do not try to break ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... their shovels bore down into the precious pocket. The earth flew. They worked like madmen, with nervous energy and power of will; and when the chest finally came into sight, rotten with age and the soak of earth, they fell back against a tree, on the verge of collapse. The hair was damp on their foreheads, their breath ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... vast crowd. Everybody repeated them, some with a growing delight, others with a sense of impending disaster to the wild hopes they had been so ardently cherishing; all according to the viewpoint they held. Scranton's register was rising, while Allandale visitors began to feel something was on the verge of happening to crush the budding paean of victory that was ready to ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... of a tie in nature betwixt those who are born for worthy actions, and those who can transmit them to posterity; and though ours be much the inferior part, it comes at least within the verge of alliance; nor are we unprofitable members of the commonwealth, when we animate others to those virtues, which we copy and describe ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... strife of modern nations, the deeds of statesmen, and the affairs of the financial world. And yet in the sale of this farm in an obscure country place the secret springs of life, even though on a small scale, were laid bare. The pathos of a happy home on the verge of destruction, with a loving mother and an invalid child in danger of being cast out upon the cold world, and to see this tragedy so narrowly averted through one staunch champion successfully beating back pride and greed as represented in the person of ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... himself in his own way. It was his hand that saved the man on the very verge of disgrace. I see you know that you, Nina, are the woman, and you, Prosper, the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... really was a little wooden hut, being what was left of an old-fashioned farmhouse, built before the stone age. It lay on the verge of the marshes in an isolated position and was placed in the middle of a square garden, protected from the winter floods by a low stone wall solidly built, but of no great height. The road to the Fort ran past the front part ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... The dizzy whirl of events that had snatched her from the beaten path and deposited her somewhere out upon the rim of the world had come upon her so suddenly and with such stupendous import that it beggared any attempt to forecast its outcome. With a shudder she recalled the moment upon the verge of the bench when in a flash she had realized the true character of Purdy and her own utter helplessness. With a great surge of gratitude—and—was it only gratitude—this admiration and pride in the achievement of the man who had rushed to ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... But I must not conceal the fact that, in many cases, great cowardice was exhibited; as, when the report got current and the cry was rife that "the French were coming"—a cry that used to frighten naughty children to the verge of terror—numbers of the inhabitants became panic-struck, and actually packed up their furniture and valuables, and commenced a hasty exodus believing that they would be safer inland than by the ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... lesson the next morning. Equally inadequate is it to relate in full how he became so confused among the wax-works that he pinched the solemnest showman's legs to see if he was real, and perplexed the beautiful Circassian to the verge of idiocy by telling her he had read all about the way they sold girls like her ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... inflamed that every step was torture. Ulcers, which opened and left gaping wounds, next made their appearance. It was said that in earlier years he had taken the place of an unfortunate man who had been condemned to the galleys and who was in consequence on the verge of despair, and that the malady from which he suffered had been caused by the heavy fetters with which his legs had been chained to the rowers' bench. It was several months, ran the tale, before his ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... competent judges had examined it in all its bearings, pronounced it the work of the Holy Spirit, and decided that she ought to carry it out without delay. Her vocation received its final confirmation in a dangerous illness which brought her to the very verge of the tomb. When the last hope had vanished, and her soul seemed on the very point of hearing the great summons to eternity, she felt inspired to vow that if her life were spared, she would build a church in Canada in honour ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... men. The only way to escape from him was to move—but then, as likely as not, he'd help pack up and come along with his portmanteau right on top of the last load of furniture, and drive you and your wife to the verge of madness by the calm style in which he proceeded to superintend the hanging ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... so busy running after work, and working for the benefit of others, that they had overlooked the fact that they were only earning a bare living for themselves and now, after forty years' hard labour, the old man was clothed in rags and on the verge of destitution. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... surround it on every side. It is, above all, rich in public walks and promenades, one of these, the Promenade Chamart—a corruption of Champ de Mars—possessing some of the finest plane trees in Europe—a gigantic bit of forest on the verge of this city—of wonderful beauty and stateliness. These veteran trees vary in height from thirty to thirty-five yards. The Promenade Micaud, so called after its originator, Mayor of Besancon, in 1842, winds along ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... into his mind. Why had she come to the very verge of death, with the rope around her neck rather than reveal her identity, knowing, as she must know, that in the mountain desert men feel some touch of ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... 1663, he travelled over Persia, the Mogul Empire, the Indies as far as the frontier of China, and the Islands of Sunda. Dazzled by the immense fortune which his traffic had obtained for him, Tavernier would play the lord, and soon saw himself on the verge of ruin, which he hoped to avert by sending one of his nephews to the east with a considerable venture, but instead, his ruin was consummated by this young man, who, judging it best to appropriate the goods which had ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... brave the scorn and contempt, the daily jeers, and the cut direct from his schoolfellows? All was soon made plain. This boy's parents were old and very poor—so poor, helpless, and friendless that they were often brought to the verge of starvation. In those days, remember, there was not the same attention paid to the poor of all classes, nor loving provision made for their wants, as there is now. So the noble son—for truly noble he was—submitted cheerfully to every trouble and shame that could fall upon himself, in ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... latter part of the year 1860, the air was full of threatenings. The country was clearly on the verge of civil war, and the feeling almost as intense as it was in the following April, after the flash of Edmund Ruffin's gun had ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... quite given him up," said Miss Giddings; "he says he passed long since the verge of healthy thought and speculation. I used to think that possibly some new and powerful stimulus, such as might spring from some ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... were surprised to observe that a grave was dug close by the foot of the rock with great neatness and regularity, the green turf being laid down upon the one side, and the earth thrown out in a heap upon the other. A mattock and shovel lay by the verge of the grave. ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... had said, all New Jersey was roused to action. Harassed and harried as no other state had been, with the exception of South Carolina, at this time it seemed on the verge of extinction, and its condition was in truth deplorable. In the earlier years of the war it had been swept like a plague by the horde of hireling Hessians and the British army. In addition, the main ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... Sheffield, the scenery became softer, gentler, yet more picturesque. At one point we saw what I believe to be the utmost northern verge of Sherwood Forest,—not consisting, however, of thousand-year oaks, extant from Robin Hood's days, but of young and thriving plantations, which will require a century or two of slow English growth to give them much breadth of shade. Earl Fitzwilliam's property lies in ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to banish Chloe from the room, lest the noisy manifestation of her joy should injure her nursling, yet trembling upon the very verge of the grave; and as he did so, he cautioned her to refrain from yet communicating the glad tidings to any one, lest some sound of their rejoicing might reach the sick-chamber, and disturb the ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... had been sorely tried. Dropping his pick, he gripped the tempter by the shoulder with fingers that held him like a vice. He pressed Melhuish backward until they stood within a foot of the verge of the black rift. Melhuish's face was gray in the candle-light as he heard the dislodged pebbles splash sullenly into the water, fathoms beneath. He had heard stories of the vagaries of the Thurstons of Crosbie, and it was most unpleasant to stand ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... As a natural result, when all minds were directed to one channel, as they were by prayer, the superstitious feeling which possessed them passed away, and the household, which a few moments ago was on the verge of hysteria, became more calm, and when all rose from their knees, Mrs. Parris asked her visitor to spend ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... not a motion of the arm, not an inch of the foot, pass the verge of the ring; and if the fluid be thus unhappily stinted, reserve all that is left for the protecting circle and the twelve outer lamps! See how the Grand Work advances, how the hues in the caldron are glowing blood-red through ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... am very glad, on my father's account. He is so aggressive in his opinions that whenever there is any excitement of this kind I am anxious about him until the trouble is over." She hesitated a moment, her lips trembling on the verge of further speech, and he waited for her to go on. "Mr. Wellesly," she said, a note of uncertainty sounding in her voice, "you are not prejudiced by the political feeling which colors people's opinions here. I wish ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... Peru and Bolivia as allies on the other. In Peru unstable and corrupt governments had contracted foreign loans under conditions that made their repayment almost impossible and had spent the proceeds in so reckless and extravagant a fashion as to bring the country to the verge of bankruptcy. Bolivia, similarly governed, was still the scene of the orgies and carnivals which had for some time characterized its unfortunate history. One of its buffoon "presidents," moreover, had entered into boundary agreements with ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... of the country were in a state of the utmost disorder. A profuse and corrupt monarch, whose profuseness and corruption were imitated by almost every functionary, from the highest to the lowest grade, had brought France to the verge of ruin. The national debt amounted to 3000 millions of livres, the revenue to 145 millions, and the expenses of government to 142 millions per annum; leaving only three millions to pay the interest ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... putting the transportation in good working order, giving each regiment its proper quota of wagons, and turning the surplus into the general supply trains of the army. In accomplishing this I was several times on the verge of personal conflict with irate regimental commanders, but Colonel G. M. Dodge so greatly sustained me with General Curtis by strong moral support, and by such efficient details from his regiment—the Fourth Iowa Volunteer Infantry—that I still bear him and ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan
... the neck of the domestic bull, the same character in even more pronounced form in the case of the bull buffalo and the musk-ox, and in varying degrees in other animals conspicuous for their vitality and energy-all this seemed to indicate that I was on the verge of a remarkable discovery. When you think of a fiery steed, in every instance you bring to mind the arched appearance of the neck. The tight reins that are sometimes used to give a horse a pleasing appearance, are based upon the same ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... a Dream, which was not all a Dream. (By Somnus and old Nox I fear 'twas not!) Common-sense was extinguished, and Good Taste Did wonder darkling on the verge of doom. I saw a Monster, a malign, marine, Mysterious, many-whorled, mug-lumbering Bogey, Stretched (like Miltonian angels on the marl) In league-long loops upon the billowy brine. Beshrew thee, old familiar ocean Bogey, Thou spectral spook of many Silly Seasons, Beshrew thee, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... might safely be shown, for he would use them not speculatively but practically. "Nothing almost sees miracles but misery," perhaps because to misery alone, save it be to the great unselfish joy, is it safe to show miracles. Those who must see ere they will believe, may have to be brought to the verge of the infinite grave that a condition fit for seeing may be effected in them. "Blessed are they who have not seen and ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... exceedingly diminutive Eels, rather less, to the best of my recollection, than three-quarters of an inch long, and almost transparent, but exhibiting in every respect the true form of the mature Eel. They had evidently followed the water to its extreme verge, where it could not have been more than an inch deep, and that they must have been very numerous was clear from the large numbers which were left behind and had perished—for that they did perish I found on the following day, when ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... pavilion of Chantebled, on the verge of the woods, where they had now been installed for nearly a month, Mathieu was making all haste in order that he might catch the seven-o'clock train which every day conveyed him from Janville to Paris. It was already half-past six, and there were fully two thousand paces from the pavilion to ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... said Governor Manco; he gave orders, and immediately a gibbet was reared on the verge of the great beetling bastion that overlooked the Plaza. "Now," said he, in a message to the captain-general, "hang my soldier when you please; but at the same time that he is swung off in the square, look up to see your Escribano dangling against ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... interest now was in her sons' possible marriages, and it was a little painful to her that Henrietta should be so much excited about what had never after all been more than a potential love affair. To tell the truth, she thought it a trifle petty and not worthy the dignity of one on the verge of old age. She wanted to be sympathetic, and she was too kind to say anything that would wound, but Henrietta could see that Evelyn did ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... fertile meadow-land before flowing back into the narrow gorge past Intombi Spruit Camp. How the Boers got there one can only imagine, for neither the Imperial Light Horse pickets on Waggon Hill, nor the Manchesters holding the very verge of that cliff which we call Caesar's Camp and the Kaffirs Intombi, nor the mixed force of volunteers and police watching the scrub lower down, saw any form or heard a movement during the night. It was intensely dark for two or three hours, but in that still air a steenbok's light ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... surely it is one of the most appalling lapses of genius which could be indicated. Even the beautiful song in the third scene of the first act, "There's a woman like a dew-drop, she's so purer than the purest," is, in the circumstances, nearly over the verge which divides the sublime from the ridiculous. No wonder that, on the night the play was first acted, Mertoun's song, as he clambered to his mistress's window, caused a sceptical laugh to ripple lightly among the tolerant auditory. It is with diffidence I take so radically ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... near approached the verge of life, Some kind relation (for I'd have no wife) Should take upon him all my worldly care, Whilst I did ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... clouds of wool gathered about her face. She was fighting for her life, and for years it seemed to be; though indeed it was only seconds before her will reasserted itself, and light broke again upon her way. Even on the verge of the last ambushed passage her senses came back; but they came with a stark realization of the peril ahead: it looked out of her eyes as a face shows itself at the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to seize him. His lips shut and his figure stiffened with determination. "But it has to be—it has to be," he declared abruptly. His air was forceful to the verge of aggressiveness as he turned to ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... A distant verge morosely gray Appears, while clots of flying foam Break from its muddy monochrome, And a light blinks up far away. I sigh: "My eyes now as all day Behold her ebon loops of hair!" Like bursting bonds the wind responds, "Nay, wait for tresses ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... were standing in Lily's eyes and her mouth quivered a little. George could not see, for the life of him, why she should be on the verge of tears. He felt a little impatient, but at the same time she became more interesting to him. He had never seen Lily weeping since the time when she was a child at school, and used to conceal her weeping little face in a ring of her right arm, as was the fashion ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the States on the verge of bankruptcy, extensive recourse was had to sales taxes and, as an offset to these in favor of the local economy, "use" taxes on competing products coming from sister States. The basic decision sustaining the use tax, in this novel employment of it, was Henneford ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... have been struck by his openness in some respects and the absolute mystery with which he surrounded himself in others. Where he lived, what he was doing, what his life was like—all these facts were hidden from his companion, till he revealed himself at last, on the verge of his hoped-for triumph. But, on the other hand, the sentiments and impressions of which M. de Petigny read afterwards in Balzac's books seemed to him only a pale, distant echo of the rich and vivid expressions which fell from his ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... of the indigent Ibycus, at length put an end to your wickedness, and your infamous practices. Cease to sport among the damsels, and to diffuse a cloud among bright constellations, now on the verge of a timely death. If any thing will become Pholoe, it does not you Chloris, likewise. Your daughter with more propriety attacks the young men's apartments, like a Bacchanalian roused up by the rattling timbrel. The love of Nothus makes her frisk about like a wanton ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... white man knows this river as I do, and I do not recommend it. Look at me—on the verge of jaundice—look at this wound on my arm; it began with a scratch and has never healed. All that comes from a month up this cursed river. Take ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... one thing, however, which, if it did not throw the laird into a passion—nothing, as I have said, did that—brought him nearer to the outer verge of displeasure than any other, and that was, anything whatever to which he could affix the name of superstition. The indignation of better men than the laird with even a confessedly harmless superstition, is sometimes very amusing; and it was a point of Mr. Galbraith's poverty-stricken ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... pronunciation of the name of the city which the old Arabic writers call Saburkan and Shaburkan, now called Shibrgan, lying some 90 miles west of Balkh; containing now some 12,000 inhabitants, and situated in a plain still richly cultivated, though on the verge of the desert.[1] But I have seen no satisfactory solution of the difficulties as to the time assigned. This in the G. T. and in Ramusio is clearly six days. The point of departure is indeed uncertain, but even if we were to place that at ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... hoping and fearing that Pepeeta would be asleep. He had a vague presentiment that he was on the verge of some great event. The guilty secret so long hidden in the depths of his soul seemed to have festered its way dangerously near to the surface, and he felt that if anything more should happen to irritate him he might do ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... of medieval torture. The prisoners denied their guilt with indignation, and, when confronted with Terentyeva, denounced her vehemently as a liar. The excruciating cross-examinations brought some of the prisoners to the verge of madness. But as far as Strakhov was concerned, the hysterical fits of the women, the angry speeches of the men, the remarks of some of the accused, such as: "I shall tell everything, but only to the Tzar," served in his eyes as evidence of the Jews' ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... for two distinct bodies, and named it differently according to the time of its appearance. The evening star they called Hesperus, and from its place on the western horizon, fabled an earthly hero of that name, the son of Atlas, who from the slopes of that mountain on the verge of the known world used to observe the stars until eventually carried off by a mighty wind, and so translated to the skies. These divine honors were earned by his piety, wisdom, and justice as a ruler of men, and his name long shed a shimmering glory over those Hesperidean ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... this evil. By famine funds and relief works it strives, as it did the last famine, to reduce the mortality and suffering arising from these seasons of drought. But the constant penury of the people, and the fact of their always living upon the verge of hunger and want, make it almost impossible to save many from the terrible result of such visitations. Perhaps there is no other thing, at present, which occupies more of the time and thought of the Imperial Government than this; but, to drive entirely away this hideous demon from a land ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... Verge, placed for the time under the orders of General Douay, entered the gate at half-past three in the afternoon, and took possession of Point du Jour, after having taken several barricades; at one of these, Ducatel was sent with ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... ordinary days it provoked wild excitement, which forced him to take special measures; and what would now happen, as it wended its way through this dense multitude of thirty thousand persons, consumed by such a fever of faith, already on the verge of divine frenzy? Accordingly, in a sensible way, he took advantage of this opportunity to give Abbe Judaine ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Its church is a spacious structure, with a nave, north and south aisles, and a chancel, and a tower at the west end. In the floor is a stone with a Latin inscription, in black letter, round the verge, to the memory of one Gilbert West, who died in 1404. The church is dedicated to St. Helen. In the village the Wesleyan Methodists also have a place of worship. According to the parliamentary returns ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... she entered the shop and introduced herself. The introduction was needless. Mr Blurt recognised her at once, dropped his paper, extended both hands, gave her a welcome that brought even Jiggs back to the verge of sanity, and had her into the back shop, whence he expelled Mrs Murridge to some other and little-known region of ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... whether he slept or woke, for the events of the past days, coupled with the disappointment of not being set ashore as he had hoped, had brought even his determined courage to a low ebb. He was on the verge of a fever, and Bob's prescription of rest and sleep was what he most needed. Made snug at the back side of the berth, where little or no light came, he fell into a fitful slumber. Bob took a last look to see that his friend was comfortable and went ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... that Ned's letter had been inspired by his admiration of her, and that this seemed to her selfish. She wondered how a father could consider his wife before the child, but when she said this she did not feel she was speaking quite sincerely, and this troubled her; she was on the verge of tears, and the nurse came in and said she had spoken enough that afternoon, and the priest bade her good-by. The doctor came in soon after; there was some whispering, and Ellen knew that the woman ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... utmost verge of a high bank, By craggy rocks environ'd round, we came, Where woes beneath more cruel yet were stow'd: And here to shun the horrible excess Of fetid exhalation, upward cast From the profound abyss, behind the lid Of a great ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... should expect to find stars presenting every stage of development—some in an embryo state and others more advanced; stars in full vigour and activity, stars that have passed the meridian of life, and stars in a condition of decay and on the verge of extinction. The observations of astronomers have led them to conclude that this condition of 'youth and age' exists among the stellar multitude; but the characteristics by which it is distinguished are ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... Still uncertainty—even on the verge of eternity—strange, doubtless, and reprehensible to Right Reverend persons, who never 'cast away' anything; to whom a religious profession has been a highway to pleasure and preferment, who live in the comfortable assurance that ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... the barge with oar and sail Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan That, fluting a wild carol ere her death, Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere Revolving many memories, till the hull Looked one black dot against the verge of dawn, And on the mere ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... Osorkon II., the Sheshonk dynasty rapidly declined in power. A system of constituting appanages for the princes of the reigning house grew up, and in a short time conducted the country to the verge of dissolution. "For the purpose of avoiding usurpations analogous to that of the High-Priests of Ammon," says M. Maspero, "Sheshonk and his descendants made a rule to entrust all positions of importance, ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... ethereal blue—the "love-color" of Egypt, as the Egyptians often call it—still adhered to the stone. This hall, dignified, grand, but happy, was open on all sides to the sun and air. From it I could see tamarisk- and acacia-trees, and far-off shadowy mountains beyond the eastern verge of the Nile. And the trees were still as carven things in an atmosphere that was a miracle of clearness and of purity. Behind me, and near, the hard Libyan mountains gleamed in the sun. Somewhere a boy was singing; and suddenly ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... remembering always that your ears should serve you much more often than your eyes. And in woodland hunting that which you thus see and hear is likely to be your amusement for the day. There is "ample room and verge enough" to run a fox down without any visit to the open country, and by degrees, as a true love of hunting comes upon you in place of a love of riding, you will learn to think that a day among the woodlands is a day not badly spent. At first, when after an hour and ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope
... the appeal of Christ's love hardens where it does not soften. That gentle voice drove the traitor nearer the verge over which he fell into a gulf of despair. It should have drawn him closer to the Lord, but he recoiled from it, and was thereby brought nearer destruction. Every pleading of Christ's grace, whether by providences, or by ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... voice of the sufferer—though uttered loudly in that paroxysm of an emotion which, in another, would almost have touched the verge of despair—was yet rendered more uncertain and indistinct from the condition of exhaustion in which he hung; and so, amid the darkness, and confused noise, and dull footsteps of the moving multitude, there were some who did ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... leatherne coat Almost to bursting, and the big round teares Cours'd one another downe his innocent nose In pitteous chase: and thus the hairie foole, Much marked of the melancholie Iaques, Stood on th' extremest verge of the swift brooke, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... school!" cried Miss Wadsworth, on the verge of tears. "Of course they don't mean ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... not wish to force myself upon you," I said icily as I left. The poor man appeared to be on the verge of having ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... which the predictions of these prophets were circulated and viewed as a Gospel, though at the same time they lost their effect by being so treated. The confessors at Lyons openly expressed their full sympathy with the movement in Asia. The bishop of Rome was on the verge of acknowledging the Montanists to be in full communion with the Church. But among themselves there was no longer, as at the beginning, any question of a new organisation in the strict sense of the word, and of a radical ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... the Assistant Scout-Master, "I don't want to raise any false hopes in you, but I think we're on the verge of finding out something about you—about who you really are, ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters - or Jack Danby's Bravest Deed • Robert Maitland
... let us consider the curious fact that a moth always lays its eggs on that particular plant upon which the caterpillars, when they hatch out of these eggs, must feed. The study of the Life History of Insects has always been of great interest to me, as I firmly believe that we are on the verge of a great discovery, and that the first indications are being revealed to us through the investigation of the Biology of Insects. Some of you may, perhaps, have watched this progress of ovipositing, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... sauciest—so saucy, indeed, that the doctor did not repeat it, but flushed and kept silent. And now the coast knew of the open war; and great tales came to us of Jagger's laughter and loose-mouthed boasting—of his hate and ridicule and defiant cursing: so that the doctor wisely conceived him to be upon the verge of some cowardly panic. But the doctor went about his usual work, healing the sick, quietly keeping the helm of our business, as though nothing had occurred: and grimly waited ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... so charming and considerate, uncle Rutherford had the most exasperating way of exciting one's curiosity and interest to the verge of distraction, ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... its source is not in the matter through which it is manifested, though inseparable from it. The material substance of life, like the rain-drops, is in perpetual flux and change; it hangs always on the verge of dissolution and vanishes when the material conditions fail, to be renewed again when they return. We know, do we not? that life is as literally dependent upon the sun as is the rainbow, and equally dependent upon the material elements; but ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... to these measures was their bearing on the general politics of Christendom. The adhesion of England to the Protestant cause came at a moment when Protestantism seemed on the verge of ruin. The confidence of the Lutheran princes in their ability to resist the Emperor had been seen in their refusal of succour from Henry the Eighth. But in the winter of Henry's death the secession of Duke Maurice of Saxony with many of his colleagues from the League of Schmalkald so weakened ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... who had once run the yard engine was building bridges in France. Hutchinson had heard the call, and was learning to fly in Florida, The service flag over his office door showed hundreds of stars, and more were being added constantly. Joey dead. Graham wounded, his family life on the verge of disruption, and Audrey— ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... form of renewed orders from his principals. Many of the faces that fringed the inner circle of that crowd were frightful to look upon, some white as though just lifted from hospital pillows, others red to the verge of apoplexy—all strained as though awaiting the coming of the jury with a life or death verdict. They all knew that Bob had sold more than a hundred thousand shares of Sugar upon which the profits must be more than four million dollars. Would he ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... of one-sixth of their payments to their unemployed members; but these measures—and others—were inadequate to maintain the unions in a sound financial condition, and many unions trembled on the verge of bankruptcy.[1] Such a condition of affairs was viewed with apprehension not only by the trade union movement, but by the State, with the result that at the beginning of October the Government subsidy of one-sixth was under certain conditions increased.[2] ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... from the southeast coast of Florida. Being so close, it was but natural that our people should take an interest in the struggle at hand. Everybody sympathized with the Cubans, and some made offers of assistance. Then, when many Cubans were on the verge of starvation, we voted to send them relief in the way ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... as well as their condition materially benefited by the necessary expenditure that must be laid out locally in labour and materials, giving work to the needy, and so helping to cure Erin's chief disease,—poverty to the verge of famine. As to actual life-peril,—every due precaution being taken,—the happy result of such a humanising experiment might fairly be left to the generous native loyalty of a kindly treated people, and to the gracious guardianship of God's good providence. ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... night's sport to hold me as chief mourner; and, indeed, poor wretch, I had much to mourn for. The great plumed hat they had put upon me flapped and swaled over my eyes so as almost to blind me. My foot was for ever catching in my great mourning cloak, and I on the verge of tripping myself up; and there was a hot smoke sweltering from the tapers, and a dreadful smell of new black cloth and sawdust and beeswax, that was like to have suffocated me. Infinite was the relief when ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... through the jungle. An elephant always puts his foot into the hole which another elephant's foot has made, so that a frequented track is nothing but a series of pits filled with mud and water. Trying to get along one of these I was altogether baffled, for it had no verge. The jungle presented an impassable wall of dense vegetation on either side, the undergrowth and trees being matted together by the stout, interminable strands of the rattan and other tenacious creepers, including a thorn-bearing one, known ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... hearing little more, understanding only that a feud had ceased, that two enemies on the verge of the long parting had held each other's hands, slapped each other's backs with crude, embarrassed emotion, for the sake of the memories that lived in the shadow of a name. And something like a lump rose again in Dink's throat. He no longer thought of his loneliness. He felt in him the ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... their more advanced civilization, finally carried sun-worship to a very high point of perfection. The hymns to Ra, the sun-god, reached the verge of monotheism and are ethically high, yet traces of the physical side of the sun appear throughout.[1220] The same thing is true of the old Semitic sun-cult. The Babylonian and Assyrian Shamash is in certain respects an independent deity with universal attributes, but retains ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... neither hardship nor prosperity had touched his character. Years ago his emigrant team had broken down in this wild but wooded defile of the Sierras, and he had been forced to a winter encampment, with only a rude log-cabin for shelter, on the very verge of the promised land. Unable to enter it himself, he was nevertheless able to assist the better-equipped teams that followed him with wood and water and a coarse forage gathered from a sheltered slope of wild ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... human interest story. Sometimes the purpose is pathos and sometimes it is humor, but, whatever it may be, if it is clever and interesting it gets its place in the paper, a place entirely out of proportion to its true news value. The results sometimes verge very close upon nature faking, but after all they are only the result of the "up-lift" idea of looking at all life in a more sympathetic way. Several of the beginnings quoted earlier in this chapter belong to animal stories and the following is a ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... written, of her message. The words almost passed her lips, but again she refrained, she obeyed her super-senses. She was convinced that Michael, when his blood was up, ran terrible risks, that he was reckless to the verge of folly. She had heard a letter read in the hospital which had been written to a mother about her son. His Colonel had said, "There are some men who will storm hell, there are others who will follow, and there are some who will lag behind. Your son belongs to the first of the three. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... future this must be the burning question of politics and statesmanship, as it is at present in Great Britain. The agitations in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have long been on the verge of bloody conflict, and a Land League has been formed in Germany at Berlin, of which Dr. A. Theodor Stamm is president, having for its object the transfer of land ownership from individuals to the State. A newspaper at Berlin is devoted to ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... the chaos of greed, Canim eagerly intent, Li Wan weak and listless. She knew she had been on the verge of disclosure, and she felt that she was still on the verge of disclosure, but the nervous strain she had undergone had tired her, and she passively waited for the thing, she knew not what, to happen. ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... never spoken to her. I was just on the point of saying to her that she was to give me some small coins, when she bent swiftly down to my hand, and tried to kiss it, evidently imaging that I had given her the ruble. I muttered something, and quitted the kitchen. I was ashamed, ashamed to the verge of torture, as I had not been for a long time. I shrank together; I was conscious that I was making grimaces, and I groaned with shame as I fled from the kitchen. This utterly unexpected, and, as it seemed to me, utterly ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... Peter which Pope Julius had wished upon his innocent successors, although only half begun, was already in need of repair. Alexander VI had spent every penny of the Papal treasury. Leo X, who succeeded Julius in the year 1513, was on the verge of bankruptcy. He reverted to an old method of raising ready cash. He began to sell "indulgences." An indulgence was a piece of parchment which in return for a certain sum of money, promised a sinner a decrease of the time which he would have to spend ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... others. In non-commercial architecture Chicago may point with some pride to its City Hall, its University, its libraries, the admirable Chicago Club (the old Art Institute), and the new Art Institute on the verge of Lake Michigan. Of its churches the less said the better; their architecture, regarded as a studied insult to religion, would go far to justify the highly uncomplimentary epithet Mr. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... making sure that her husband was no more than slightly dazed, had been forced to turn her attention to Barby and Jan. The two girls were on the verge of sheer hysteria with fear for their fathers. Scotty had joined Mrs. Brant, in an effort to soothe the girls' frayed nerves. Now, as Rick opened the library door, he could see that the two pretty young ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... alone, the enterprise for which he had risked all on the verge of failure. By a master-stroke his ranks were repleted, his position recovered, his authority secured ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... approach near enough to shoot his prey with a rifle, or strike it with a seal spear or oo-nar. Often, however, just as he is about to shoot or spear his game, it slips suddenly into the sea through its hole, upon the very verge of which it rests, seldom venturing further than a foot or two from its safe retreat. If they could only rest contented with a fair shot, the Inuits would probably secure more game than they now do, for the most of those I have seen them lose in this way went down after the hunter ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... such pursuit I too must think of adopting," replied Fitzroy, "else I shall sink into the gulph of ennuit to the verge of which I am fast approaching. Independent of the frequent ruinous consequences of the gaming-table, I have taken a dislike to its associates, and therefore abandoned their society; nor will you be surprised ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... his sensibility was at the mercy of such trifles.... Yes; that, and the cold and fatigue, the absence of hope and the haunting sense of starved aptitudes, all these had brought him to the perilous verge over which, once or twice before, his terrified brain ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... this, putting off the reading of it until the latest possible moment, only a girl like Dorothy Broughton could have told. And even when she broke the seal it was with apparently reluctant fingers. It was so delightful not to know, yet to be upon the verge of knowing! But as soon as the first words met her eyes there was no longer any delay. She read rapidly, her glance drinking in ...
— The Brown Study • Grace S. Richmond
... during the hours of a solitary life; in this case, however, to supplant them, when she left his parish, by those others of a more aching nature which accompany an over-full one. In short, he had been on the verge of feeling towards her that passion to which his dignified self-respect would not give its true name, even in the privacy ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... a grandmother!" roared the King, upon the verge of madness, as the Crown Prince, at the head of six Army Corps surrounded the building and captured ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... he crept back from Monte Carlo with his poor tail between his poor legs. As far as I can make out she cut short his first mumblings and his first attempts at affectionate speech with words something like: "We're on the verge of ruin. Do you intend to let me pull things together? If not I shall retire to Hendon on my jointure." (Hendon represented a convent to which she occasionally went for what is called a "retreat" in Catholic circles.) And poor dear Edward knew nothing—absolutely nothing. He did not know how much ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... her in a curious kind of way, like a broadside of stoniness, but Caroline did not seem to mind it at all. Then the boarder changed her tactics like a general on the verge of defeat. She sidled up to Mr. Spear, the chief engineer, who was giving orders to drag home the engine, and said in an unexpectedly sweet voice, like a trickle of honey off the face of a rock: "My good man, am I to understand ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... with a sudden emotion. His eye lit up, and he thrust one hand into the breast of his coat while he raised the other in a sweeping gesture. For an instant he appeared on the verge of a flood of eloquence. And then, as if he had been made sharply aware of what it was that he intended to do, he suddenly sagged. The gleam died out of his eyes. He ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... [1] that excellent architect, caused the latter to get work taken from him which he had previously procured for him from Messer Agnolo da Cesi; and after this San Gallo used his influence so strenuously against him that he must have been brought to the verge of starvation, had not I pitied his condition and lent him some scores of crowns to live upon. So then, not having been repaid, and knowing that he held employment under the King, I went, as I have said, to look him up. I did ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... city of Prague seemed on the verge of a bloody conflict. As in former ages, God's servant was accused as "he that troubleth Israel."(132) The city was again placed under interdict, and Huss withdrew to his native village. The testimony so faithfully ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... was on the verge of banishing it from his thoughts, a solution of the name's persistence flashed upon him. It had been used by Dennison that day at the Polo Club. He had called it after Ashton-Kirk ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... pretended to love a person and then run away and left them to—to suffer," said little Margery, on the verge of sobs again. ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... troubles, rather than to make money out of them. Many a puzzled farmer he had saved from losing in an unjust bargain when the opposite course would have meant money for himself. Many a family on the verge of disintegration over a will had been brought together and made happy, because their lawyer was more bent on their welfare than his own. Roderick intended fully to keep up the fine old standards of the firm as far as possible. But he was determined to be much more than the legal adviser of ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... service of our Master." What greater aid could be given to a lone far off Indian mission, than "a man of faith and prayer." When an observer in the vast panorama of the West and North has seen a poor missionary and his family, living five-hundred miles from the nearest verge of civilization, solitary and desolate, surrounded with heathen red men, and worse than heathen white men, with none out of his little circle to honor God or appreciate his word, it is presumable to him that any reinforcement of help must be hailed as cold water to a parched tongue. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... Whether it was wise to give so much at so short a notice may be doubted. What is beyond dispute is that it was unwise to expect so great and so unexpected a gift to be used at once to full advantage. A man who had grown accustomed to semi-darkness would be dazzled to the verge of blindness if he were suddenly taken out into broad daylight. This is what was done in 1895 to the teachers of England, and it is not to be wondered at that many of them have been purblind ever since. For thirty-three years they had been treated as machines, and they were suddenly asked ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... to tremble. She grew deadly pale: she might have been on the verge of a fainting fit. She had realised the incredulity of the man to whom, in her chaste innocence, she had given her heart. In the pure soul of this loving girl an immense void made itself felt. It was as though a flashlight had revealed to her the lamentable ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... overtopping its tallest trees! We might have fancied that we were threading our way through some extended nursery. The trail led directly across its central part; and ere we had reached its furthest verge, the moon's rays were mingling with the purple ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... open-mouthed. A shivering thrill passed through him, such as shakes a man on the verge of a great discovery. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... making a bolder request than you think, Mr. Vanstone. I never do things by halves. When I am acting with my customary candor, I am frank (as you know already) to the utmost verge of imprudence. When exceptional circumstances compel me to take an opposite course, there isn't a slyer fox alive than I am. If, at your express request, I take off my honest English coat here and put ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... nosegays, and came near losing my character by them, as nobody would believe I was so gallant to myself out of my own pocket. My room is always full of them here, and in spite of recollecting (which I always do in the very act of sticking flowers in my hair) that I am upon the verge of thirty, they are still my ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... and therefore thought the poetry was good. She let the visitor go on to pour out his heart; until at last came a climax that Thyrsis had been expecting all along. The man explained that he was a bookkeeper, out of work, and with a wife and three children on the verge of starvation; and then he tried to borrow some ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything they could carry; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits by assuming ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... when no one answered he grunted and tied up the hole. There was a silence, and the crowd began to filter away—all but Lynch, who stood staring like an Indian. Then he too turned away, his haggard eyes blinking fast, like a woman on the verge ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... patient would slip through her hands into the next world before she had time to even attempt to save her. And Cyrillon Vergmaud, unhappy and restless, wandered up and down outside the house, where this life, so secretly dear to him, was poised as it were on the verge of death, not daring to enter, or even enquire for news, lest ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... squaw, brilliant in her scarlet dress and silver tassels, the pappoose piously quiet in his perpendicular cradle on her back, slipped with gingerly caution to the verge of the precipice ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Pompeii possessed many local advantages. Upon the verge of the sea, at the mouth of the Sarno, with a fertile plain behind, like many an ancient Italian town, it united the conveniences of commerce with the security of a military station. According to Strabo, Pompeii was first occupied by the Oscans, subsequently ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... the very circumstance which has been the foundation of the importance of Timbuctoo to the traders of Barbary, and consequently of a great portion of its fame amongst us, its frontier situation on the verge of the desert, at the extreme northern limits of the negro population, will of necessity have a contrary operation now, since a shorter and securer channel for European enterprise into the central regions of Africa has been opened by the intrepidity and perseverance ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... relatively active brains and mental fertility. Certainly, most of the Seminole I met cannot justly be called either stupid or intellectually sluggish, and I observed that, when invited to think of matters with which they are not familiar or which are beyond the verge of the domain which their intellectual faculties have mastered, they nevertheless bravely endeavored to satisfy me before they were willing to acknowledge themselves powerless. They would not at once answer a misunderstood or unintelligible question, but would return inquiry upon inquiry, before ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... it in various Courts of Europe, but always without success. Things were becoming awkward. The firm had borrowed heavily to pay for the stones, and anxiety seems to have driven Bohmer to the verge of desperation. Again he offered the necklace to the King, announcing himself ready to make terms, and to accept payment in instalments; but again it ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... ascertain in what direction they were leading him, but he soon gave this up as useless. He was on the verge of despair, when suddenly out of the gloom came a startlingly familiar call—-the call of ...
— The Boy Scouts on Picket Duty • Robert Shaler
... she was would be the ruin of her aunt; for who would lodge in the same house with her? She must go at once! and her longing to go, with the impossibility of even thinking where she could go, brought her to the very verge of despair, and it was only the thought of her child that still gave her strength enough to live on. And to add immeasurably to her misery, she was now suddenly possessed by the idea, which for a long time remained immovably fixed, that, agonizing as had ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... wisdom to bestow. The voyage out is like a holiday excursion, for it is only the laying that is arduous, and even that is lightened by excitement. Glimpses are got of hide-away spots, where the cable is landed, perhaps. on the verge of the primeval forest or near the port of a modern city, or by the site of some ruined monument of the past. The very magic of the craft and its benefit to the world are a source of pleasure to ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... down like a maddened bull, when suddenly, within 12 ft. of the rock, there was a thrilling cry from Kenneth Moore, and up we shot, almost clearing the projecting summit. Almost—not quite—sufficiently to escape death; but the car, tripping against the very verge, hurled Phillip and myself, clasped in each other's arms, far over ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... was quiet and pleasantly modulated, and he spoke English with the faintest slur—perceptible, perhaps, only to the keenest ear—of a French accent. To ears less keen it would merely seem that he articulated with a precision so singular as to verge on pedantry. ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... time to review our foreign relations during this period. Twice since 1890 they had brought us apparently to the verge of war. ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... limpid water, and there deep the lotus grows; Its little leaves are round as coins, and only yet half blown; Going to the jutting verge, near a clear and shallow spot, I try my present looks, mark how of ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... workingmen have been trained for centuries as slaves. They exhibit, therefore, all the advantages and defects of such training; they are willing and good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, or careful. If now the economic development of the South is to be pushed to the verge of exploitation, as seems probable, then we have a mass of workingmen thrown into relentless competition with the workingmen of the world, but handicapped by a training the very opposite to that of the modern self-reliant democratic ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... questioned by his chief, dared not tell his thought. He recognized Goupil. Goupil, he fully believed, was the only man capable of carrying a persecution to the very verge of the penal code without infringing a ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... battles from the Rapidan to this night, I had everywhere found myself thrown in collision with the great soldier—that tried and trusty friend of my heart. The army had saluted him on a hundred fields. His name had become the synonym of unfaltering courage. He was here, on the verge of surrender now, looking as calm and resolute as ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... single instance slept out of my clothes, weakened me exceedingly, and a fever came on not long before my master's death, which hung upon me for fifteen days, and ultimately brought me to the very verge of the grave. Finding myself unequal to pay that attention to my master's wants which his situation so particularly required, I solicited and obtained his consent to have old Pascoe once more to assist me. On entering the hut, he fell on his knees, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... eyes searched the rigid lines of his face in astonishment. In their struggle to establish the impossible she had been so far ahead, so greatly the more confident and daring, had tempted him to such heights, scorning every dizzy verge, that now, when she turned quite back from their adventure, humbly confessing it too hard, she could not understand how he should continue to set himself doggedly toward it. Perhaps, too, she trusted ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... chirped the little gathering gayly. They had good voices, and the harmony was simple and pleasing. Allison and Leslie joined their beautiful voices in with the rest, and liked it, felt almost as if they were on the verge of doing something toward helping on ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... life before the cash left them by their father was exhausted; and, their rents not sufficing to defray their expenditure, they began to sell and pledge their property, and disposing of it by degrees, one item to-day and another to-morrow, they hardly perceived that they were approaching the verge of ruin, until poverty opened the eyes which wealth had fast sealed. So one day Lamberto called his brothers to him, reminded them of the position of wealth and dignity which had been theirs and their father's before them, and shewed them ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... of grief or regret, and when his son mourned the death of his wife the philosopher reproved him. In all things he reasoned upward toward the throne; his grand aim was to build up an ideal state. He therefore magnified reverence for parents and all ancestors even to the verge of idolatry, but he utterly failed in that symmetry in which Paul makes the duties of parents and children mutual. Under his system a father might exercise his caprice almost to the power of life or death, and a Chinese mother-in-law is proverbially a tyrant. The ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... the terrible tidings I had overheard—overwhelmed with the sight of the ships, now glistening like bright specks on the verge of the horizon, I forgot my own position—my safety—every thing but the insult thus cast upon my ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... chemise. Even this, and the word drawers, which was also once a most refined expression, are falling into disuse, and people talk vaguely of "underlinen" in speaking of these garments. The shops which are always refined to the verge of vulgarity only allow themselves to use the ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... Heads of Families in the Verge of our Monthly Meeting held on the Oblong and in the Nine-Partners Circularly taken in the 3 mo. 1760. (This date should be 1761. The Monthly Meeting directed the list to be made 4, ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... in it the touching tribute which it was to abstract womanliness—to the "wimmen nater," of which Jim was so frank an admirer. The gulf which was between them had never yet been crossed, even in imagination, though it is presumable; that, unknown to himself, Jim was trembling on the verge of it at this moment, dragged thither by the excitement of prospective wealth and the possibilities involved in it, and by the recollection of the pleasant words and smiles of this, to ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... where this road passes near the verge of a precipice, which, like that at Maury, falls sheer to the road along the River Creuse from Clochonne to Narjec. But, unlike that at Maury, this declivity is ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... her own starboard," answered the Regent's mellow bell to the bell of the Votaress. Her whistle whitened and trumpeted in salute, and on jack-staff and verge-staff her rippling flags ran up and dipped, twice, thrice, to the answering flags of the Courteney boat. Well forward on her hurricane-deck her captain, whom many on the Votaress pointed out by name, stood alone. Amid-ships her cabin-boys lined her cook-house ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... to star, from system to system, until we reach yon lonely star that appears to be performing the Guardian's task, upon the verge of unmeasured and immeasurable space. We may descry and describe the form and outlines of those heavenly bodies, detect their movements and approximately determine their distances and dimensions. But what more? Little that is satisfying. When they had a beginning, ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... have upon the very sensible personality it indicated. "She'll think it is all nonsense, that it doesn't matter at all!" thought Charmian. And more than ever she wanted to tell Miss Fleet. In self-restraint she became violently excited. Often she felt on the verge of tears. And at last, very suddenly ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... sprang. And down the road We henchmen followed, hard beside the rein, Each hand, to speed him, toward the Argive plain And Epidaurus. So we made our way Up toward the desert region, where the bay Curls to a promontory near the verge Of our Trozen, facing the southward surge Of Saron's gulf. Just there an angry sound, Slow-swelling, like God's thunder underground Broke on us, and we trembled. And the steeds Pricked their ears skyward, and threw back ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... strength. These occupations are not conducive to the morality of either sex. If the well be far from the village, the girls usually form parties to go thither, and amuse themselves on the road by singing sentimental or love songs, which not unfrequently verge upon the obscene, and indulge in conversation of a similar description; while, during their halt at the well for an hour or so, they engage in romps of all kinds, in which parties of the other sex frequently join. This early ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... for anything serious." She had never been in love in her life, except with herself, and to that one affection she was most constant. She accepted all, but gave none. Once or twice her flirtations had been on the verge, but Lady Amelie was one of those who can look very steadily over the brink ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... summoned me and my mother to the terrace of the palace; these were hours of recreation for me, as I never saw anything in the dismal cavern but the gloomy countenances of the slaves and Selim's fiery lance. My father was endeavoring to pierce with his eager looks the remotest verge of the horizon, examining attentively every black speck which appeared on the lake, while my mother, reclining by his side, rested her head on his shoulder, and I played at his feet, admiring everything I saw with that unsophisticated innocence of childhood which throws a charm round objects insignificant ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... would enable man to rise above the abject state into which he has fallen, and to return to his original perfection." To the evil offices of these demons, he attributed his late disaster. He had been on the very verge of the glorious discovery; never were the indications more completely auspicious; all was going on prosperously, when, at the critical moment which should have crowned his labours with success, and have placed him at the very summit of human power and felicity, the bursting of a retort had reduced ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... with his countenance. "You know what it is to have to do exclusively with fools and brutes, to rave under the vile restraints of Philistine surroundings? Then you can form some notion of the state I was in when I took the step of writing that advertisement; I was, I firmly believe, on the verge of lunacy! For two or three days I had come back home from the school only to pace up and down the room in an indescribable condition. I get often like that, but this time things seemed reaching a head. Why, I positively cried with misery, absurd as it may sound. My blood seemed too ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... $20,000, put in ten times that amount, and Field much more. The first cable across the Gulf of St. Lawrence was a failure. The second one held; and at last there rolled two thousand miles of tempestuous ocean, with a bottom that was a mystery, between the verge of the American soil and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... sitting room the women stood looking at one another. Mis' Bates was frowning and all Mis' Moran's expressions were on the verge of dissolving; but in Mis' Winslow's face it was as though she had found some new way ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... every hour, and see and hear it all, and live it o'er and o'er, as it sweeter grows with memory's ripening touch. Some moments there are, that send their glad ripple down through life's stream to the verge of the grave, and truly blest is one who can smile upon and kiss these memory waves, and draw from thence a bliss that never fails. But thou knowest full well my heart, and I need not ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... Time ran gadding by And left me with Eternity alone; I hear beyond the range of sound, I see beyond the verge of sight,— ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... delicate and sensitive in the extreme; that of smelling, as I have before remarked, particularly: he can scent his prey at an immense distance,—blood which is fresh and flowing will attract him at least a league from the spot. When he leaves the forest, he never forgets to stop on its verge; there turning round, he snuffs the breeze, plunges his nostrils deep into the passing wind, and receives through his wonderful instinct a knowledge of what is going on amongst the animals, dead or alive, ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... had given his body a backward nimble fling that carried him sprawling through a gap between the ornamental bushes fringing the park sward. Instantly he was up and, with never a backward glance, was running across the lower, narrower verge of Indian Field, making for the trees which edged it thickly upon the east. He could run fast, too. Nor were there men in front to hinder him, since because of the rain, coming down in a thin drizzle, the wide, sloped stretch of turf was for this once ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... He would never have known her but for that. And the more he thought of that handkerchief, the more amazing his luck seemed. Fleur! It certainly rhymed with her! Rhythm thronged his head; words jostled to be joined together; he was on the verge of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... pass by that carry the pilgrims of the earth, for their freight is chiefly human. It is here 'the first ray glitters on the sail that brings our friends up from the under world, and the last falls on that which sinks with all we love below the verge.' Even at night there is no cessation to this coming and going; only, a red light or a white, and the distant strokes of a paddle-wheel in the hush of the moonless void are then the sole signs of all this motion. What hopes and fears contend in unseen hearts under those moving stars! ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... that the assault must fail unless some accident intervened, for the tide was rising, the reserves all engaged, and no greater effort could be expected from men whose courage had been already pushed to the verge of madness. In this crisis, fortune interfered. A number of powder-barrels, live shells, and combustible materials which the French had accumulated behind the traverses for their defence, caught fire, a bright, consuming flame wrapped ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... and then, a staggering blow filled his enemies with a wholesome fear of him. His sallies were as swift and unexpected as the rush of a panther with the way of retreat always open. Meanwhile a cry of affliction and alarm had arisen in England. Its manufacturers were on the verge of bankruptcy, ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... shoots of tender growth were reaching out for conquest on right and left in all manner of graceful curves and spirals. Through an opening in this shadowy foliage came a glimpse of the hill-side slope across the valley upon whose verge my studio is perched, and as my eye penetrated this pretty vista it was intercepted by what appeared to be a shadowed portion of a rose branch crossing the opening and mingling with the bittersweet stems. In my idle mood I had for some moments ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... pinnacle from which he is called upon to take a perspective survey of the range of science, and to tell us what he can see from his vantage ground; if at such a moment after straining his gaze to the very verge of the horizon, and after describing the most distant of well-defined objects, he should give utterance also to some of the subjective impressions which he is conscious of receiving from regions ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... yonder streak Meets the horizon's verge; That is the land, to seek If we tire or ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... centuries of their recorded history, they were in a sense a dependency of America, and now the whirligig of time has restored them in their political relations to the Western Hemisphere. As a dependency of New Spain they constituted the extreme western verge of the Spanish dominions and were commonly known as the Western Islands [2] (Las Islas del Poniente). Their discovery and conquest rounded out an empire which in geographical extent far surpassed anything the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... his party in 1875, Bright was chairman of the party meeting which chose Lord Hartington as his successor. He took a less prominent part in political discussion till the Eastern Question brought Great Britain to the verge of war with Russia, and his old energy flamed up afresh. In the debate on the vote of credit in February 1878, he made one of his impressive speeches, urging the government not to increase the difficulties manufacturers had in finding employment for their workpeople by any single word or act ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... himself on the verge of a proposal—with an effort he choked back the impulse. "You're just the romantic age," she continued—"fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly-wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... thicken and roll, 'Neath the heavens arching their heaven; o'er-hazing the eye of the soul. Then the vision is pure no longer; refracted above us arise The phantasmal figures of passion; earth's mirage exhaled to the skies. And they go as the castled clouds o'er the verge when the tempest is laid, Towering Ambition, and Glory, and Self as Duty array'd:— Idols no less than that idol whom lustful Ammon of yore With the death-scream of children, a furnace of blood, was fain to adore! So these, ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... Egypt, as the Egyptians often call it—still adhered to the stone. This hall, dignified, grand, but happy, was open on all sides to the sun and air. From it I could see tamarisk- and acacia-trees, and far-off shadowy mountains beyond the eastern verge of the Nile. And the trees were still as carven things in an atmosphere that was a miracle of clearness and of purity. Behind me, and near, the hard Libyan mountains gleamed in the sun. Somewhere a boy was singing; and ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... things like that," said Lady Frensham with the utmost gusto, "when the country's on the very verge of civil war.... You people who try to pretend there isn't a grave crisis when there is one, will be more accountable than any one—when the civil war does come. It won't spare you. Mark ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... the Hole in the Wall where the steward of the Waldo had seated himself, after the wreck, Leopold placed his precious burden. He sat down by her side, utterly exhausted, and unable to speak. He breathed very hardly, groaning heavily at each respiration, for he had exerted himself to the verge of human endurance. ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic
... flowery squares, Beneath a broad and equal-flowing wind, Smelt of the coming summer, as one large cloud Drew downward; but all else of heaven was pure Up to the sun, and May from verge to verge, And May with me from ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... chanced that Medenham had to exercise his wits very quickly to trip his tongue when on the verge of some indiscretion that would betray him. Perhaps he was unduly cautious. Perhaps his listener's heart had mastered her brain for the time. Perhaps she would not have woke up in a maze from a dream that was ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... streams and pools reflecting the darkly mournful sunset." He described visits to his country neighbours and long drives in gay company, during which, he says, "we ate every half hour, and laughed to the verge ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... Miss Goold's ideals—and she had ideals, as he knew—were somehow vulgarized in their contact with the actual. He had seen something of the joy she found in her conflict with O'Rourke, and it did not seem to him to be pure or ennobling. At one time he was on the verge of deciding to do what the priest wished. Walking day by day along the shore or through the fields, he came to think that life might very well be spent without ambitious or extended hopes in quiet toil and ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... stretched her head over the edge of the precipice, and for an instant fixes on him her astonished glance. Then, as if re-assured, defying his powerlessness, with a disdainful lip she quietly crops some tufts of grass growing on the verge of the tunnel. ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... for a luncheon party, wasn't it? That man's on the verge of a breakdown. Don't like it at all. That wife of his is overdoing it. Shall look him up again next week. His mind's not right. He forgot to pay for the lunch. I suggested that I should do it, and he let me. Something seriously wrong ...
— If Winter Don't - A B C D E F Notsomuchinson • Barry Pain
... forgotten that the author who wishes to be understood is obliged to push all his ideas to their utmost theoretical consequences, and often to the verge of what is false or impracticable; for if it be necessary sometimes to quit the rules of logic in active life, such is not the case in discourse, and a man finds that almost as many difficulties ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... don't meet with so much as one low or coarse jest. The language is everywhere that of men of honour, but their actions are those of knaves—a proof that he was perfectly well acquainted with human nature, and frequented what we call polite company. He was infirm and come to the verge of life when I knew him. Mr. Congreve had one defect, which was his entertaining too mean an idea of his first profession (that of a writer), though it was to this he owed his fame and fortune. He spoke of his works as of trifles that were beneath him; and hinted to me, in our ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... side. And therefore, though I be beaten, it is not necessary I should yield, not knowing what forces there are in reserve behind. This is a refuge against conviction so open and so wide, that it is hard to determine when a man is quite out of the verge of it. ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... very gently, then looked into her face with eyes which seemed to be new from some high vision, then drew her within the paradise of an embrace. The kiss was once more like that first touch of lips which had come to Adela on the verge of sleep; she ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... warp, and weave the woof, The winding-sheet of Edward's race. Give ample room, and verge enough The characters of hell to trace. Mark the year, and mark the night, When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death, thro' Berkley's roofs that ring, Shrieks of an agonizing King! She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... atmosphere of chaperonage that always hung about Sir Charles in Hyacinth's house did not interfere with his personal air of enjoying an escapade, nor with his looking distinguished to the very verge of absurdity. As to Cecil, the reaction from his disappointment of the afternoon had made him look more vivid than usual. ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... forevermore affairs of men, And visibly grindeth with its heel in mire The lictors' glorious rods and axes dire, Having them in derision! Again, when earth From end to end is rocking under foot, And shaken cities ruin down, or threaten Upon the verge, what wonder is it then That mortal generations abase themselves, And unto gods in all affairs of earth Assign as last resort almighty powers And wondrous energies to ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... little while before. Presently a light step sounded in the lobby, and Lucy came in dressed for walking. Five years make a great change; for she had grown from a slight, diminutive girl, to a tall, lithe, graceful young lady, just on the verge ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... off by nine, you know. I think he goes off and plays bowls at the madhouse. You see, Reggie, old man, we have to study Ponsonby a little. He's always on the verge of giving notice—in fact, it was only by coaxing him on one or two occasions that we got him to stay on—and he's such a treasure that I don't know what we should do if we lost him. But, if you think that I ought ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... of succeeding events in the domain of intellectualism it is impossible to deny that there was some justification for their gloomy apprehensions. In St. Thomas Aquinas this intellectualizing process marked its highest point and beyond there was no margin of safety. He himself did not overstep the verge of danger, but after him this limit was overpassed. The perfect balance between mind and spirit was achieved by Hugh of St. Victor, but afterwards the severance began and on the one side was the unwholesome hyper-spiritualization ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... salvation of France lay in putting an end to such alarming exhibitions of discord, from the frequent recurrence of which it was to be feared that the country stood upon the verge of civil war. For this reason, Catharine de' Medici yielded to the persuasions of Chancellor L'Hospital, and, on the nineteenth of April, caused a royal letter to be addressed to all the judges, in which the ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... adult population. This may be an excessive estimate, but, if we take half of a million, we shall not be accused of exaggeration. Of these some are in the last stage of confirmed dipsomania; others are but over the verge; but the ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... skirmishing, he at length gained a field upon the road, now belonging to Mr. Matthew James; and as it was open and enclosed, he posted himself on the west of the road, within the enclosure. On the east, skirting the road, there is a large cypress pond stretching towards Halfway swamp, and on the verge of this Marion pitched his camp. Here M'Ilraith sent him a flag, reproaching him with shooting his pickets, contrary, as he alleged, to all the laws of civilized warfare, and defying him to a combat in the open field. Marion replied, that the practice of the British in burning the houses of all ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... acquaintance. Coming to the side of his chair, and throwing an arm carelessly across Franklin's shoulder, the waiter asked in a confidential tone of voice, "Well, Cap, which'll you have, hump or tongue?" Whereby Franklin discovered that he was now upon the buffalo range, and also at the verge of ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... calculated to be worth five hundred thousand dollars. That's the second stone of extraordinary size that we have found. Possibly there is some exaggeration in the reports, but there is no doubt whatever that we are on the verge of discoveries little short of sensational. Meantime, the treasury of the Americo-African Mining Company has been enriched by at least a million. When Kenneth returns to New York with these wonderful ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... from the high ground to the south and east. The highest part of the town is the citadel, or Fort du Chateau, built upon a peak of rock on the site of the ancient castle. It was doubtless the nucleus round which the early town became clustered, until it filled the lower plateau to the verge of the walls and battlements. There being no room for the town to expand, the houses are closely packed together and squeezed up, as it were, so as to occupy the smallest possible space. The streets are narrow, dark, gloomy, and steep, being altogether impassable for carriages. The liveliest ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... collection can be made up of pictorial watch papers, those rare little pictorial views which once reposed in the interior of the cases of old watches. Watches are by no means common curios of the household, but now and then an old silver verge or a decorated watch case thought little of is found to contain one of those pretty pictures which were chiefly engraved and printed in the eighteenth century. Many of the designs were printed on satin; some were devices in needlework; ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... wholeness of soul, enacts the same dramas. He hears voices on all occasions; he incorporates what little he observes of nature into his verbal dreams; and as each new impulse bubbles to the surface he feels himself on the verge of some inexpressible heaven or hell. He needs but to abandon himself to that seething chaos which perpetually underlies conventional sanity—a chaos in which memory and prophecy, vision and impersonation, sound and sense, are inextricably jumbled together—to ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... might scan a mountain to be scaled. Then, as it were, a voice unearthly still Cried in the cavern of his bristling ear, "His name is Death!" ... And, like the flush That dyes Sahara to its lifeless verge, His brows' bright brass flamed into sudden crimson; And his great spear leapt upward, lightning-like, Shaking a dreadful thunder in the air; Spun betwixt earth and sky, bright as a berg That hoards the sunlight in a myriad spires, Crashed: and struck echo through an army's ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... in order to make act of serfdom. The goldsmith, to whom every one spoke of the obstinacy of the monks, saw plainly that the abbey would adhere inflexibly to this sentence, and was driven to the verge of despair. At one time he thought of setting fire to the four corners of the monastery,—at another, he proposed to inveigle the abbot into some place where he might torment him till he signed the manumission papers of Tiennette,—in fine, he projected a thousand schemes, which all ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... him; and such difficulties as he might occasionally encounter, were, to a man of his energy, rather matter of amusement than serious annoyance. With all the merits of a sanguine temper, our young English drover was not without his defects. He was irascible, and sometimes to the verge of being quarrelsome; and perhaps not the less inclined to bring his disputes to a pugilistic decision, because he found few antagonists able to stand up to him ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... Donald's hints of stern retribution were calculated to relieve his mind; and when Long Lauchie came across the fields on a Sabbath afternoon to mourn over him and see dire fulfilment of prophecy in his woeful case, he was driven to the verge of desperation. ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... come to the verge of understanding one thing. Man has so fanned the flame of the loves of men and women, as to make it overpass its rightful domain, and now, even in the name of humanity itself, he cannot bring it back under control. Man's worship has idolized his passion. But there must be no more human sacrifices ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... topsail-yard thus bestridden plainly proclaimed that a ship had been wrecked, although no other evidence of the wreck was within sight. Not a speck was visible upon the sea to the utmost verge of the horizon: and if a ship had foundered within that field of view, her boats and every vestige of the wreck must either have gone to the bottom, or in some other direction than that taken by the topsail-yard, which supported the three ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... that there was no bridge, while one nostril, the size of a pea, opened downward, and the other, the size of a robin's egg, tilted upward to the sky. One eye, of normal size, dim-brown and misty, bulged to the verge of popping out, and as if from senility wept copiously and continuously. The other eye, scarcely larger than a squirrel's and as uncannily bright, twisted up obliquely into the hairy scar of a bone-crushed eyebrow. And he had but ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... peered out and seen nothing but its tower, framed in the square of the half-opened window, while, with the heroic scruples of a traveller setting forth for unknown climes, or of a desperate wretch hesitating on the verge of self-destruction, faint with emotion, I explored, across the bounds of my own experience, an untrodden path which, I believed, might lead me to my death, even—until passion spent itself and left me shuddering among the sprays of flowering currant which, creeping ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... anxious to keep up with us. The work that man went through, leaping on his crutch till the muscles of his chest were fit to burst, was work no sound man ever equalled; and so thinks the doctor. As it was, he was already thirty yards behind us and on the verge of strangling when we reached the brow ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was puzzled by his companion's horsemanship, for Dan rode leaning far to the right of his saddle, with his head bowed. Several times Haines was on the verge of speaking, but he refrained. He commenced to sing in the exultation of freedom. An hour before he had been in the "rat-trap" with a circle of lynchers around him, and only two terror-stricken guards to save him from the most horrible ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... often to make in his thinking. It is so difficult to keep out of mind the idea of substance in connection with the Natural Laws, the idea that they are the movers, the essences, the energies, that one is constantly on the verge of falling into false conclusions. Thus a hasty glance at the present argument on the part of any one ill-furnished enough to confound Law with substance or with cause would probably lead to its immediate rejection. For, to continue the same ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... obliged to your mother. I have only just breakfasted, and I can wait quite well till supper-time comes. Stop a minute! Here is my nephew driving me to the utmost verge of human endurance, by making a mystery of Mr. Engelman's absence from Frankfort. Should I be very indiscreet if I asked—Good gracious, how the girl blushes! You are evidently in the secret too, Miss Minna. Is it an opera-dancer? Leave ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... river towards the field of our first labours. It is fifteen miles to the mouth; drab, dreary miles like the dullest reaches of the lower Thames; but scenery was of no concern to us, and a south-westerly breeze blowing out of a grey sky kept us constantly on the verge of reefing. The tide as it gathered strength swept us down with a force attested by the speed with which buoys came in sight, nodded above us and passed, each boiling in its eddy of dirty foam. I scarcely noticed at first—so calm was the water, and so regular were the buoys, like ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... mouth, it seemeth to stir something in me, as if I had been there one time and longed to be there again. Is there aught in the place whereof folk tell wide about, so that I might have heard it told of and not noted it at the time? Nay, lady, said the dame, save perchance that it is on the verge of a very great and very evil wood, otherwise it was once a merry town and of much resort from ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... chance, he was safe to slide in some of his vulgar bathos after any heroic sentiment or personal opinion I may have uttered. This, naturally, would rouse my temper, never very pacific; and made me so cross, that I was often on the verge of quarrelling with Min ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the shower, and after its refreshment has come, it is too wet and muddy. Spacious verandahs, shaded with vines, and well-made walks, always firm and dry, bordered with shrubbery, or overhung with trees, will give us "ample scope and verge enough." ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... affairs—to expenditure, to debt, and to taxation. Upon this subject the people are compelled to feel a very deep interest. The flush times of the war have been followed by a financial reaction, and for the last three or four years the country has been on the verge of a financial crisis. The burdens of taxation bear heavily upon labor and upon capital. The Democratic party, profuse alike of accusations against their adversaries, and of promises of retrenchment and reform, were clothed ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... covered with the blossoms of the spring. Only a single dwelling was seen on one of those swelling hills which rose above each other, gently and far away, till their last undulating lines were limited by the horizon's blue verge. The eye wandered with pleasure over the diversified prospect, which included the boundaries of three sovereign states, with various rivers, valleys and fertile fields. On such a spot, where Nature reigned and developed herself in quiet beauty, whether in the voluptuous ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... halting step, reeling now and again, a big man, hatless, coatless, apparently at the last verge of exhaustion. Now his foot apparently struck a small rock, and he pitched to his face. It required a long struggle before he could regain his feet; and now he continued his journey at the same gait, only more uncertainly ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... be seen, we were on the verge of a quarrel; but we were old and sincere friends, and stopped in time. The discussion was dropped. The fact was, that our mistake was by no means a very surprising one. The country in which we were, seemed made on purpose ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... marched off to the billiard-room. Killigrew touched Kitty's arm and motioned her to follow. She was rather glad to go. She was on the verge of most undignified tears. When she had gone in search of Mrs. Crawford, Killigrew walked over to Thomas and laid a hand ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... edge, verge, brink, brow, brim, margin, border, confine, skirt, rim, flange, side, mouth; jaws, chops, chaps, fauces; lip, muzzle. threshold, door, porch; portal &c. (opening) 260; coast, shore. frame, fringe, flounce, frill, list, trimming, edging, skirting, hem, selvedge, welt, furbelow, valance, gimp. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... heretofore, are yet mellowed in the hues of time, and Faith softens into harmony all their asperities and harshness; till nothing within us remains to cast a shadow over the things without; and on the verge of life, the Angels are nearer to us than of yore. There is an old age which has more youth ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book V • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a few cakes, brought along as a kind of scattering lunch. C. was descried, at length, climbing the broad, rocky ridge, the eastern point of which we had doubled on our passage from Torbay. Making haste up the crags by a short cut, I joined him on the verge of the promontory pretty well heated and out of breath. The effort was richly rewarded. The mist was dispersing in the sunny air around us; the ocean was clearing off; the surge was breaking with a pleasant sound below. At the foot of the precipice were four or five whales, from thirty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... other verge of the forest of Beaumanoir. A broad plain dotted with clumps of fair trees lay spread out in a royal domain, overlooked by a steep, wooded mountain. A silvery brook crossed by a rustic bridge ran through the park. In the centre was a huge cluster ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... go and dance with Miss Carter," she told me, adducing incontrovertible arguments. I am terrified of Miss Carter, who can only be described as "statuesque" and always does the right thing (which makes her crushing to the verge of discourtesy). I am always being asked if I know whether she is "only twenty-two." It was not without satisfaction that I initiated her into my style ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... earliest, and becomes ruddy—it is as early as the catkins on the hazel; willow, aspen, oak, sycamore, ash, all have flower or catkin—even the pine, whose fructification is very interesting. The pines or Scotch firs by the Long Ditton road hang their sweeping branches to the verge of the footpath, and the new cones, the sulphur farina, and the fresh shoots are easily seen. The very earliest oak to put forth its flowers is in a garden on Oak Hill; it is green with them, while yet the bitter winds have left a sense of winter ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... laborious, of the cure." No miracles showed more clearly his extraordinary gifts and graces than the power which his spirit possessed over his poor emaciated body; and no miracle was greater than his absolute control over his physical state when he seemed on the verge of dissolution, a control that enabled him to bear the over-powering burden of his incessant labors for souls, without sinking under the load. A miracle alone ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous
... island. In a tremendous storm off a cape, which he ironically christened Consolationhook (Troost-hoek), his ship, drifting under bare poles amid ice and mist and tempest, was nearly dashed to pieces; but he reached at last the cluster of barren islets beyond the utmost verge of Nova Zembla, to which he hastened to affix the cherished appellation of Orange. This, however, was the limit of his voyage. His ship was ill-provisioned, and the weather had been severe beyond expectation. He turned back on the 1st of August, resolving to repeat his experiment ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... education. They gave, and long preserved, to the site of the city, the name of camp: thus the first efforts at cultivation were unfortunate: they had passed two years in New Holland, scratching up the earth with hoes, and ought to have gathered a harvest, when they were on the verge of starvation.[80] ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... present, and her to receive, without regard to maidenly scruples. It was a small ruby cut into the form of a heart, transfixed with a golden arrow, and was inclosed in a small purse made of links of the finest work in steel, as if it had been designed for a hauberk to a king. Round the verge of the ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... her, but she made no effort to return my acknowledgement. As we cast our eyes dilating with horror, down some horrible pit upon whose verge we suddenly find ourselves, she allowed her gaze for a moment to dwell upon my face, then with a sudden lifting of her hand, pointed towards the door as if to bid me depart—when it swung open with that shrill rushing of wind that involuntarily awakes ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... the Fifth and Queen Mary the other four fifths. It consists of the head of the family, to be known hereafter as the Head, the Big Boy, the Middle Boy, the Little Boy, and myself. As the Big Boy is very, very big, and the Little Boy is not really very little, being on the verge of long trousers, we make a comfortable traveling unit. And, because we were leaving the beaten path and going a-gypsying, with a new camp each night no one knew exactly where, the party ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... grass—this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a classic result. A very agricola laboriosus was I to travellers bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where; they ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... while, Johanna seats herself on the garden bench with her hands clasped across her knees. Sala enters. He is forty-five, but looks younger. Slender to the verge of leanness, and smooth-shaven. His brown hair, which has begun to turn gray at the temples, and which he wears rather long, is parted on the right side. His features are keen and energetic; his eyes, gray ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... parishes of the country to which we both belong, a building expressly set apart for the accommodation and support of the destitute and disabled poor. It usually contains inmates of all ages, from the infant just born to the very aged, whose infirmities show them to be on the verge of the grave. They are all known to be in a state of helpless poverty, and quite unable to earn a subsistence for themselves. In this building they are clothed and fed; the younger provided with instruction necessary to put them in the way of earning a livelihood; the elders ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... married in Norfolk, and thenceforward gone in and out among its people—should be insensible to these influences, or look without grief to a contingency which should force him to sunder all these associations and go forth, on the verge of old age, to seek elsewhere a new home. Nor is it possible to many, however conscious of right, to bear without suffering the alienation and the contempt visited upon those who, in times of keen political excitement, dare to differ from the general ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... over his gentle letter, and was on the verge of asking herself why she had chosen Griffith instead of this chevalier. She sent him a sweet, yet prudent reply; she did not encourage him to visit her; but said, that, if ever she should bring herself to receive visits from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... South America, and that no less than twelve genera out of the thirty-two formerly ranged very differently from the existing species of the same genera, we must admit that these deposits are of considerable antiquity, and that they probably verge on the commencement of the tertiary era. May we not venture to believe, that they are of nearly contemporaneous origin with the Eocene formations of the ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... or faction that was driven out by the Scythians and passed into Asia from the Lake Maeotis, under the command of Lygdamis: they further say that the chief part of the Scythian nation and the most warlike part lived at the very verge of the continent, on the coast of the external sea, in a tract shaded, woody, and totally sunless, owing to the extent and closeness of the forests, which reach into the interior as far as the Hercynii[74]; and with ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... sufficiently the characteristics of Heyne's rendering. In the first place, attention may be called to the extreme freedom of the verse, afreedom which at times makes the composition verge upon prose. In the second place, the translation of the Old English phrase beadu-runen onband should be noticed, and compared with the translations of Ettmller, Grein, and Simrock, who ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... through the distant haze My byegone life in the good old days; I see in my vision a field of wheat— I knew I was there that the world might eat— I drank of the showers and the morning dew; In the noonday sun I throve and grew— Grew on the verge of a sunny crest, Just as fast as I could for ...
— A Little Book for A Little Cook • L. P. Hubbard
... with the bitterness of the aloes still on his tongue, fell a swearing that he had not had it. Whereupon:—"Nay, but, comrade," quoth Buffalmacco, "upon thy honour, what did it fetch? Six florins?" Whereto, Calandrino being now on the verge of desperation, Bruno added:—"Now be reasonable, Calandrino; among the company that ate and drank with us there was one that told me that thou hadst up there a girl that thou didst keep for thy pleasure, giving her what by hook or by crook thou couldst get together, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... nearing the end, Procopio," he said to me that evening. "I can't live much longer. I am upon the verge of the grave. You will go to my burial, Procopio. Under no circumstances will I excuse you. You shall go, you shall pray over my tomb. And if you don't," he added, laughing, "my ghost will come at ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... of Girlhood," full of incident and humor. The "Seven Daughters" are characters which reappear in some of Miss Douglas' later books. In this book they form a delightful group, hovering on the verge of Womanhood, with all the little perplexities of home life and love dreams as incidentals, making a fresh and ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... certainly remember the terrible crush at the Saint-Lazare station. The ordinary trains were so full that special trains had to be made up. The article in the "Epoque" had so excited the populace that discussion was rife everywhere even to the verge of blows. Partisans of Rouletabille fought with the supporters of Frederic Larsan. Curiously enough the excitement was due less to the fact that an innocent man was in danger of a wrongful conviction than to the interest taken in their own ideas as to the Mystery of The Yellow Room. Each ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... sensory,—through sight and sound and scent,—but often indirect, seemingly by occult means. Time after time, on an impulse, I followed some casual line of thought and action, and found myself at last on or near the beach, on a lead that eventually would take me to the verge ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... margin. When I visited the reef at Tahiti, although it was low water, the surf was too violent for me to see the living masses; but, according to what I heard from some intelligent native chiefs, they resemble in their rounded and branchless forms, those on the margin of Keeling atoll. The extreme verge of the reef, which was visible between the breaking waves at low water, consisted of a rounded, convex, artificial-like breakwater, entirely coated with Nulliporae, and absolutely similar to that which I have described ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... forward with stumbling footsteps. Their faces were haggard, their hands moving restlessly and their features twitching. They looked like men who had been for days undergoing severe mental and physical strain and were on the verge of collapse. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... (1844) of my sojourn at the farm it was decided to build a large unitary building on the high ground, almost directly in front of the Eyry, though at some distance from it, on the eastern verge of the slope facing the meadow, and nearly in line with the distant town road. It was late when the preparations were concluded and the work was commenced. There was not money enough in the treasury to pay for it, but it was thought that means would come. The result of the season's work was that ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... victory (1782) and the successful defence of Gibraltar (1779-1783) enabled her to obtain tolerable terms from her European enemies, American independence had to be granted (1783). For Ireland was on the verge of revolt, and British dominion in India was shaken to its foundations. So the two great sections of the English people parted company, perhaps to their mutual profit. Certainly each government has now enough to do without solving the other's problems, and ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... ideal of bliss; but, being a candidate, he could not bear the idea of being defeated, particularly by a young ruffian like Culver. So he indulged in all sorts of extravagances on the last day of his probation, and led Heathcote on to the very verge of a further punishment in order to recover some of the ground he had ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... Liberty it is reserved for us to teach the World that, under the American Stars and Stripes, Slavery marches in solemn procession; that, under the American flag, Slavery is protected to the utmost verge of acquired territory; that under the American banner, the name of Freedom is to be faintly heard, the songs of Freedom faintly sung; that, while Garibaldi, Victor Emanuel, every great and good man in ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... to be held firmly hooked up against the symphysis pubis, and then steadied by the left forefinger in the rectum. The operator pierces the raphe of the perineum with a long straight bistoury about half an inch above the verge of the anus, enters the groove of the staff, and cuts inwards, almost, but not quite, into the bladder. In withdrawing the knife the wound in the urethra is enlarged upwards towards the scrotum. A ball-pointed probe is then passed on the staff into the bladder, the staff ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... sphere, And wonder if you see and hear Those shapes and sounds that stir the wide Conjecture of the world outside; 200 In your pent lives, as we in ours, Have you surmises dim of powers, Of presences obscurely shown, Of lives a riddle to your own, Just on the senses' outer verge, Where sense-nerves into soul-nerves merge, Where we conspire our own deceit Confederate in deft Fancy's feat, And the fooled brain befools the eyes With pageants woven of its own lies? 210 But are ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... will not be upon education any more till after dinner, if you please," or some such speech. But when there was nobody to restrain his dislikes it was extremely difficult to find anybody with whom he could converse without living always on the verge of a quarrel, or of something too like a quarrel to be pleasing. I came into the room, for example, one evening where he and a gentleman, whose abilities we all respect exceedingly, were sitting. A lady who walked in two minutes before me had blown 'em both into a flame by whispering ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... to the period whereabout the whole mystery of the Red Triangle began to be cleared up if I say that at the time of Plummer's visit this country was on the very verge of war with a great European State. It is a State with which the present relations of England are of the friendliest description, and, since the dreaded collision was happily averted, there is no need to particularise in the matter now, especially as the name of the country with which we were at ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... to the permanency of the Union. The line of separation between them is day by day growing broader and deeper; geographically and politically united, we are already, in a moral point of view, a divided people. But a few months ago we were on the very verge of civil war, a war of brothers, a war between the North and the South, between the slave-holder and the free laborer. The danger has been delayed for a time; this bolt has fallen without mortal injury to the Union, but the cloud from whence it came still hangs ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... trembling on the verge of revolt. The Punjaub was honeycombed with sedition. Men said that the warlike castes and races that had helped Britain to hold the land in the Black Year of the Mutiny would be the first to tear it from her now. In the Bengals outrages ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... the year, I am told, on account of the bellicose character of the mosquitoes that inhabit this particular region; their special mode of attack being to invade the camels' sensitive nostrils, which drives these patient beasts of burden to the last verge of distraction, sometimes even worrying them to death. Stopping for dinner at the village of Sabanja, the scenes familiar in connection with a halt for refreshments in the Balkan Peninsula are enacted; though for bland and childlike ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... hands and seemed upon the verge of eloquence. Then he spoke unanswerably. "But I love ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... turned the conversation aside to the subject of Scott Gholson, saying, to begin with, that Gholson had wonderful working powers, he replied, "'Tis true. Yet he says the brigade surgeon told him to-day he is on the verge of a nervous break-down." But on my inquiring as to the cause of our friend's condition, my bedmate pretended to ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... at dawn, and the road, always the same, stretched out, uphill, to the verge of the horizon. Yards of stones came after each other; the ditches were full of water; the country showed itself in wide tracts of green, monotonous and cold; clouds scudded through the sky. From time to time there was a fall of rain. On the third day squalls arose. The awning of the ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... survey that country in all its stern ruggedness and picturesque beauty. It was small compared with Assyria or Persia. Its original name was Hellas, designated by a little district of Thessaly, which lay on the southeast verge of Europe, and extended in length from the thirty-sixth to the fortieth degree of latitude. It contained, with its islands, only twenty-one thousand two hundred and ninety square miles—less than Portugal or Ireland, but its coasts exceeded the whole Pyrenean peninsula. Hellas is itself a peninsula, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... diseases, famine, Sword, fire, and all thy ever open gates, That day and night stand ready to receive us. But what, beyond them? who will draw that veil? Yet death's not there.——No, 'tis a point of time; The verge 'twixt mortal, and immortal Being. It mocks our thought——On this side all is life; And when we've reach'd it, in that very instant, 'Tis past the thinking of——O if it be The pangs, the throes, the agonizing struggle, When soul and body part, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... was sympathy—the other, antipathy; which exercised over him the same kind of fascination which the bird feels whom the serpent's glance has fascinated, or like the unaccountable impulse which causes a man to throw himself down the precipice on the verge of which ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... disorder showed itself in sudden and singular sensations in his head. They came only after lengthened intervals. They did not last long, but were intensely violent. The terrible idea that his brain was deeply and hopelessly diseased,—that his mind was on the verge of ruin,—took hold of him, and stood out before his eye in all that appalling magnitude in which such an imagination as his alone could picture it. It was mostly at night that these wild paroxysms of the brain visited him; but up till last Monday he had spoken of them to no one. A ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... people lived in old and humble houses they had room to breathe and an eminence for light and air. Their shanties clung to the side of the hill or hung on the very edge of the precipice overlooking the bay, on the verge of which a wall kept their babies from falling. The effect was picturesque, and this hill was the delight of painters. It was all more like Italy than anything in the Italian quarter of New York and Chicago—the very climate ...
— The City That Was - A Requiem of Old San Francisco • Will Irwin
... himself. His pupil had become his master. The fact itself did not surprise him. Woman is more exalted than man in morality. There is no virtue, no devotion, no heroism in which she does not surpass him; but once impelled to the verge of the abyss, she falls faster and lower than man. This is attributable to two causes: she has more passion, and she has no honor. For honor is a reality and must not be underrated. It is a noble, delicate, and salutary quality. It elevates manly attributes; ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... organization, their solidarity and united action, keep up their wages in spite of the invasion of their domain by new and improved machinery. On the other hand, the garment-workers, the sweaters' victims, poor, unorganized, unintelligent, despised, remain forever on the verge of pauperism, irrespective of their endless toil. If, now, by some untoward fate the printers should suddenly find themselves disfranchised, placed in a position in which their members were politically inferior to the members of other trades, no effort of their own short ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... It is possible that had war broken out three months ago that loyalty would have been demonstrated for all time. War after three months of hesitation—for such it was considered—has proved too severe a test, and it is no exaggeration to say that a considerable part of the Colony trembles on the verge of rebellion. On such a state of public opinion the effect of any important military reverse ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
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