"Lurid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tints, and furrowed by the black gorge of the Niagara, stretched to the horizon. Across all, shadows of racing clouds gave emphasis to the brilliant flood of sunshine. No fairer scene ever greeted the eye of man. The entire landscape breathed peace. Above it, however, in detached masses, hung lurid billows—the smoke of battle.... The serene vision faded, and in its place, in brutal contrast, came cruel, imperious bugle calls, the metallic rattle of fire-arms, the deep thunder of artillery, the curdling cry of ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... of Darkness, which at least in the ghastly power of the close, where the survivors meet by the lurid light of a dim altar fire, and die of each other's hideousness, surpasses Campbell's Last Man[1]. At Lausanne the poet made a pilgrimage to the haunts of Gibbon, broke a sprig from his acacia-tree, and carried off some rose leaves from his garden. Though entertaining friends, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... with herself about the interest she took in conversations relating to the Prince. She could not restrain her desire to hear of him, but she explained it now by telling herself he was a rather lurid and unusual foreign character, which must naturally be an interesting ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... ground, and they made the most of the occasion. Such competition as there was! Each, of course, felt obliged to uphold the honor of his party and out-yarn his fellows. Their stories grew in the telling, each more lurid than the last. There were thrilling tales of bear fights; of battles with arctic storms above timberline; of finding rich gold-strikes and ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... back into the shadowy realm where Cocytus flows in black nitrate of silver, and Acheron stagnates in the pool of hyposulphite, and invisible ghosts, trooping down from the world of day, cross a Styx of dissolved sulphate of iron, and appear before Rhadamanthus of that lurid Hades." ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... with the fresh faces, that look stung by the cold, and the hurrying trot of the chilled horses. A January day was drawing to its close; the cold evening was more keen than ever in the motionless air, and a lurid sunset was rapidly dying away. There were lights burning in the windows of the house at Maryino; Prokofitch in a black frockcoat and white gloves, with a special solemnity, laid the table for seven. A week before in the small parish church two weddings had taken place quietly, and almost ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... thought by some that in the pages which follow I have painted in too lurid colours the horrors of a foreign invasion of England. Realism in art, it may be argued, can be carried too far. I prefer to think that the majority of my readers will acquit me of a desire to be unduly sensational. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... and beetling cliffs frowned like dark clouds over the spot where the travellers lay in deepest shade, with only a few red embers of the camp-fire to throw a faint lurid light on their slumbering forms—a tall savage emerged from the surrounding gloom, so stealthily, so noiselessly, and by such slow degrees, that he appeared more like a vision than a reality. At first his painted visage only ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... kingdom of the West-Wind, To the realms of Mudjekeewis, Lest he harm you with his magic, Lest he kill you with his cunning!" 55 But the fearless Hiawatha Heeded not her woman's warning; Forth he strode into the forest, At each stride a mile he measured; Lurid seemed the sky above him, 60 Lurid seemed the earth beneath him, Hot and close the air around him, Filled with smoke and fiery vapors, As of burning woods and prairies. For his heart was hot within him, 65 Like a living coal his heart was. So he journeyed westward, ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... shorter time than he expected, and the same night found him hurrying back by the last train to Slumberleigh. It was a wild night. He had watched the evening close in lurid and stormy across the chimneyed wastes of the black country, until the darkness covered all the land, and wiped out even the last memory of the dead day from ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... and benign, that goest through the lurid air visiting us who stained the world blood-red,—if the King of the universe were a friend we would pray him for thy peace, since thou hast pity on our perverse ill. Of what it pleases thee to hear, and what to speak, we will hear and we will speak to you, while the wind, as now, is ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... that it was no uncommon thing to accuse a woman of being a scold in these times and the following written in 1602[1] throws a lurid light on the methods for removing the effects ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... camp-fire, when Night had spread her sable mantle over the sleeping earth, and only the wakeful wood-hen and the hoarsely-hooting owl stirred the silence of the leafy solitude, that Moonlight was "swapping" yarns with the Prospector. As the flames shot up lurid tongues which almost licked the overhanging boughs, and the men sat, smoking their black tobacco, and drinking from tin pannikins tea too strong for the urban stomach, Bill the Prospector expectorated into the flames, ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... oh friend, because I let the light On lurid London through the cloak of night (As was my undertaking.) That I've a spirit wholly given to scorn, Or blind to all, save sin, that with the morn Will see ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 1, 1890 • Various
... while the plains were quite bare of vegetation, except a few salsolaceous bushes. At the distance of five miles low ridges of red drift sand showed the desert character of all around; even the lower surfaces of the clouds assumed a lurid tinge from the reflection of the bare surface of ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... always looked to see the cottage. For a moment he was utterly bewildered: no cottage was to be seen. From the top of the rock against which it was built, shot the whole mass of the water he had been pursuing, now dark with stones and gravel, now grey with foam, or glassy in the lurid light. ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... turned away to glance at the lurid reflection in the sky. Presently his eyes came ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... the sky, flew over Hebuterne to attack the station of Valenciennes; throughout this day the roar of the guns to north and south was continuous; as the sun set a fierce thunderstorm came up, and the rival rumblings and flashes of nature and machinery in the dusk made a sufficiently lurid prelude for battle. On the 24th it became generally known that in certain contingent events, carefully kept secret, the Brigade would attack between Gommecourt Wood and the Puisieux road, with the Berks and the Bucks in the leading waves. Accordingly, the gunners got to work, and the ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... were exchanged between brother and sister after they had penetrated the woods a considerable distance on their return home. It had become like night around them, except that, as has been shown, the gloom was of that peculiar lurid nature which can hardly be described, and can never be forgotten by those ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... atmosphere in the room began now to redden as if in the air of some near conflagration. The larvae grew lurid as things that live in fire. Again the room vibrated; again were heard the three measured knocks; and again all things were swallowed up in the darkness of the dark Shadow, as if out of that darkness all had come, into ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... this expeditionary force appeared in the daily papers the next morning and it is related that there was a brisk conversation between Mr. Hedges and the mayor, when the former arrived at the City Hall, which took on, not an orange and black hue, but rather a lurid flame, of which Mayor Strong was supposed to be but was ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... impersonate you, when you leave, so that this man tries to send me after the other three. Don't interrupt, let me finish—You will say that it is impossible to deceive any one at close range. Surely, it does sound melodramatic, like a lurid tale of a paper back novel. But I have studied the photographs of your friends. You and I bear the closest resemblance of any in the group. Your weight is about the same as mine—your shoulders are a trifle ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... over, and on the evening of that same day a quiet, deep sleep came to Lillian Earle. It saved her life; the wearied brain found rest. When she awoke, the lurid light of fever died out of her eyes, and they looked in gratified amazement upon Lady Dora ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... gloom as the diver sees in deep-sea water, a lurid twilight. In the midst a throne, ebon-coloured, and upon it an awful figure seated— Emma Dai-O, Lord of Death and Judge of Souls, unpitying, tremendous. Frightful guardian spirits hover about him—armed goblins. On the left, in the foreground below the throne, stands the wondrous Mirror, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... thicker—ahead, the sky appeared slashed with a lurid light; I fancied I could hear the crackling of the flames. The air felt hot and dry: a choking sensation was produced in our throats, and one and all were hacking and ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... fracas assumed a particularly lurid character in 1860 and the printed program was especially objectionable, a fault quite characteristic of those days. The night had been a wild one and when it became known that Dr. Tappan was to discuss ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... for sacrifice. Here, too, they often heard the startling cry of war, and saw their frightened neighbours fly before the murderous spear and plundering hand of lawless power. The invader's torch reduced the native hut to ashes, while the lurid flame seared the green foliage of the trees, and clouds of smoke, rising up among their groves, darkened, for a time, surrounding objects. On such occasions, and they were not infrequent, the contrast between ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... lingering over a picture that had often gripped hard at his heart during the last two years, a picture drawn for him in a letter from his remaining son, Jack. The letter lay in the desk at his hand. He saw in the black night that shell-torn strip of land between the lines, black as a ploughed field, lurid for a swift moment under the red glare of a bursting shell or ghastly in the sickly illumination of a Verry light, and over this black pitted earth a man painfully staggering with a wounded man on his back. The words ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... The lurid fiction fever soon runs its course with Mademoiselle, if she is let alone, and she turns her attention once more to her schoolmates. She has at least a dozen serious attacks before she is twenty, and at that ripe age, is ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... and caresses, in turn. In some respects a camel resembles a bullock; not only does he chew his cud, but he loves to be sworn at; no self-respecting ox will do an ounce of work until his driver has flung over him a cloud of the most lurid and hair-raising language. Now, a camel draws the line at blasphemy, but rejoices in the ordinary oaths and swear-words of every-day life in much the same way as a retriever. There is no animal more susceptible to kindness than a camel; but in ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... reach it by the elevated. Their encounter with this metropolitan facility for transportation turned out to be among the most memorable bits of sightseeing of their trip. Neither of the girls had ever imagined anything so lurid as the Saturday noon jam, the dense, packed throngs waiting on the platforms and bursting out through the opened doors like beans from a split bag, their places instantly taken by an even greater crowd, perspiring, fighting grimly ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... building in the near distance. Almost everybody was running in the opposite direction, attracted by the Telegraph Hill fire that flamed vermilion and gold against the grey sky, looking from its elevation like a mammoth bonfire, or like a hundred sunsets massed in one lurid pile of colour. ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... whispered Malcolm, grasping Gilbert's arm. "Ain't they lurid? Oh, crickey! they've got first prize! You're in for it! You'll look like the prize quilt ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... in our borders, and that quiet town in which Mr. Sinclair's life has passed is destined to feel its heaviest curse. Its streets are filled with soldiery. The dark canopy of smoke from which now and then a lurid flame shoots upward, shows that their work is destruction, and that they will do it well. Terrified women flit hither and thither, mingling their shrieks in a wild and fiend-like concert with the crack of musketry, the falling of houses, and the loud huzzas and fierce outcries ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... reached the fifth floor. The daylight had faded. A sea of roofs was beneath us; and, through the panes above our heads, a great red sky cast lurid gleams over our faces and hands. The girl gave a start of pleasure as she entered her room. It was peaceful and white; but the flaming fire and sky at that moment turned it quite rosy, smiling and aglow. From the rather high window we could see nothing but space. I had placed a writing-table ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... You English, what do you know of the war? No enemy has set foot upon your soil, no Englishman has seen his womankind dishonoured or his home crumble into ashes. The war to you is a thing of paper, an abstraction—that same war which has turned the better half of my beloved country into a lurid ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... In rock-like phalanx stand, Cowards no more. Rise in colossal might, Rise till the storm of fight Wrap us in lurid light Where ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... thought she turned languidly to the etagere in the corner, in her search for distraction, and drew from a shelf a small volume which attracted her eye. She then poked a large black coal until it sent a bright lurid flame up the chimney, and filled the room with a cheerful light: slowly, almost tastelessly, she proceeded to turn the pages over, scanning here and there a line or two; at length, smiling, she said to herself, "I used to know these verses long ago. I ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... moment. Across the two-hundred-foot field we could plainly see the invaders—forty or fifty men's figures dispersed in a little group. It seemed a sort of encampment. The green light beams seemed emanating from small hand projectors resting now on the ground. The sheen from them gave a dull lurid-green cast to the scene. The men were sitting about in small groups. And some were moving around, seemingly assembling larger apparatus. We saw a projector, a cylindrical affair, which half a ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... "Turn the lamp as high as you like," and suited the action to the word by turning it so high that one saw a dense cloud of smoke beyond the lurid flame. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... She clasp'd him to her breast, "Embrac'd his clay-cold limbs; and all she said "That wretched parents say; and all she did "That hapless mothers do: then through the town "The melancholy funeral pomp she led, "The lurid members following, on a bier "For burning. In the road the dwelling stood "Through which the sad procession took its way, "And sound of lamentation struck the ears "Of Anaxarete, whom now the power "Of vengeance follow'd. Mov'd, she now exclaim'd— "I will this melancholy ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... In the lurid sheen of them she saw the lad leap from his rock and rush towards her. A flash fell and split a boulder not thirty paces from him, causing him to stagger, but he recovered himself and ran on. Now he was quite close, but the water was closer still. ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... just sinking behind the dark hills of the west, gilding the fading heavens with an autumnal brightness, and shedding a lurid glare upon the already drooping and discolored foliage of the surrounding forests. It was an hour of solemn calm. The cool evening breezes stole softly through the air, as if unwilling to disturb the repose of all around. The crystal waters of the ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... bodies sometimes ascending toward heaven, and sometimes precipitated upon the earth, struggled, as it were, in mutual conflict, whirling in circles with intense velocity, and accompanied by winds, impetuous beyond all conception; while flashes of awful brilliancy, and murky, lurid flames incessantly broke forth. From these confused clouds, furious winds, and momentary fires, sounds issued, of which no earthquake or thunder ever heard could afford the least idea; striking such awe into all, that it was thought the end of the world had arrived, that the earth, waters, ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... the crowd was at an end. The children began crying, and the women calling loudly upon St. Michel and the Holy Virgin. The men gathered about Nicolas and Michel, and went down in a compact group to the causeway beyond the gate. There the lurid sun, shining dimly through the fog, made the most sanguine look grave and shake their heads hopelessly behind the father and mother. The latter sat motionless, looking out with straining eyes to see if Delphine were not coming ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... expression into his eye, as he stole a half timid, half confidant glance at the priest—but it would not do—the effort was a failure, and no wonder—for there before him sat the terrible catechist like an embodied thunder cloud—red, lurid, and ready to explode before him—nay he could see the very lightning playing and scintillating in his eyes, just as it often does about the cloud before the bursting of the peal. In this instance there was neither sympathy nor community of feeling between them, and Darby found that no meditated ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... of Livingstone's eyes contracted ominously; a lurid flash shot out from under his black, bent brows, and there came on his lip that peculiar smile that we fancy on the face of Homeric heroes—more fell, and cruel, and terrible than even their own ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... his hands and nothing whatever to occupy him, Code began to sort over the lurid literature with a view to his entertainment. He hauled a great dusty bundle out of one pigeonhole, and found among the novels some ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a handbarrow, a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the saber cut across one cheek, a lurid white." ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... brave men, magnanimously forgetful of the threatening danger, went down into the flames, although the hope of success was small. True, the two or three uppermost cars had not as yet caught fire; but who could breathe amid that suffocating smoke, that lurid loathsome ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... foot. That voyage left permanent recollections of grand effects and wild scenery of the kind afterwards described by William Black in his "Macleod of Dare." As we sailed across the Sound in the evening from Oban to Auchincraig, the sky was full of torn rain-clouds flying swiftly and catching the lurid hues from the sunset, whilst the distant mountains and cliffs of Mull were of that dark purple which seems melancholy and funereal in landscape, though it is one of the richest colors in the world. It was dangerous weather for sailing, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... expressing the moral significance of each personality. The subject of "The Angelus" is given in its name; its theme is humble piety. From the infinite number of possible examples one more will suffice,—the well-known "War" by Franz Stuck, in the Neue Pinacothek,—the subject a youth, under a lurid sky, trampling under his horse's feet the bodies of the slain. The theme is again a ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... rather tired, sat down on her chair. The loud music of the band, the lines of fire that brought the discolored houses into sharp relief, and that showed her with a distinctness that was fanciful and lurid the moving faces of hundreds of strangers, the dull roar of voices, and the heat that flowed from the human bodies, seemed to mingle, to become concrete, to lie upon her spirit like a weight. Artois stood by her, leaning on his stick and watching the crowd with ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... fail, and no refuge, no hope, seemed near. Alas! to some the race was lost. The blinding effect of the dense smoke that filled the atmosphere, the suffocating smell of the burning mass of vegetable matter, and the lurid glare of the red flames that came on so rapidly, overpowered alike the horses and their riders: while the roaring of the fire—which sounded like a mighty rushing cataract—and the oppressive heat, ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... attitudes of agony or death, all concur to tell us of the catastrophe. The imagination can add nothing to it: the picture is there before our eyes; we are present at the scene; we behold it. Seated in the amphitheatre, we take to flight at the first convulsions, at the first lurid flashes which announce the conflagration and the crumbling of the mountain. The ground is shaken repeatedly; and something like a whirlwind of dust, that grows thicker and thicker, has gone rushing and spinning across the heavens. For some days past there has been talk of gigantic ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... its thunder and the answering flame and roar of the Brooklyn's bow-chaser. The battle had begun. The ship, still half a mile from its mark, was coming on as straight as her gun could blaze, her redskin ally at her side, and all the others, large and less, bounding after by twos. And now in lurid flash and steady roar the lightning and thunder darted and rolled from Morgan, its water-battery, and the Mobile squadron, and from the bow guns of ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... was not a Yeoman of Signals I never discovered. Perhaps he had a lurid past. But conjecture is useless. Promotion now would come too late to be of any use ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... like this when the first glow of joy had suffused his life; and then had come that night, that wonderful night, which began, in the lurid fire, and ended foully with Preston's words. Here was the key: she too loved, as he had, and this feeling which had drawn them together from the very moment when he had looked from the helpless form on the hospital chair to her had grown, surging up in her heart as in his—until, until she had ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... summit of the pile, the dead, the mast, And ate the shriveling sails; but still the ship Drove on, ablaze above her hull with fire. And the gods stood upon the beach and gazed, And while they gazed, the sun went lurid down Into the smoke-wrapt sea, and night came on. Then the wind fell, with night, and there was calm; But through the night they watched the burning ship Still carried o'er the distant waters on, Farther and farther, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... sway he held,— His day and power have passed away; His goodly forests all are felled, And songs of mirth rise, clear and gay, Chaunted by youthful voices, where His battle-hymn once filled the air— Where blazed the lurid council fire, The village church erects its spire; And where the mystic war-dance rang, With its confused, discordant clang, While stern, fierce lips, with many a cry For blood and vengeance, filled the sky, Mild Mercy, gentle ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... administration. Heretofore the Federal Government had declared itself powerless to act in the case of lawlessness in an individual state; but it was now to have an opportunity to deal with violence in Washington itself. On July 19, 1919, a series of lurid and exaggerated stories in the daily papers of attempted assaults of Negroes on white women resulted in an outbreak that was intended to terrorize the popular Northwest section, in which lived a large proportion of the Negroes in the District of Columbia. For ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... blood of his forebears and himself. Brooding, in the dangerous disproportion that enforced continence brings to certain natures, loading the brain with violence till the storm bursts and there leap out the lurid, dark insanities of crime. Brooding, while in the air flies chased each other, insects crawled together in the grass, and the first principle of nature worked everywhere its sane fulfilment. They might talk and take ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... When the lurid fires were lighted which blazed red and fearful through that crowded square, all in that silent chamber fell on their knees, and Father Antonio repeated prayers ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... terrible Tornadoes, or Tempests of wind and rain, so common in the Western Indies. The water came down in great solid sheets, drenching us to the skin in a moment; the sky was lit up for hundreds of miles round by huge blasts of lurid fire; the wind tore great branches off trees, and hurled them across the bows of our saddles, or battered our faces with their soaked leaves or sharp prickles. The very Dogs were blinded and baffled by this tremendous protest of nature; and in the very midst ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... could establish the Church of England with all its creeds, articles, ceremonies, and prohibit all other churches as conventicles and schism-shops." [s] Therefore, when England declared her right to tax the colonies, and followed it by Sugar Act and Stamp Act, the political situation threw a lurid light about the Chandler-Chauncy controversy [t] of 1767-71 as it rehearsed the pros and cons of the proposed episcopate. The New England colonies were greatly excited, and others shared the unrest, for, even where the Church of England was strongest, the laity as a body ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... you know what to say about things! Weird! Delightful! I dare say that's what Rivers would expect a nice girl to say of his books. He spends half his time being afraid people should think his work is lurid, and the rest in being simply terrified that people should think it's not. He's very clever really, and a ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... to the west was one great lurid, brassy glare, overhung with banks of sinister clouds, a leaden purple above, fiery crimson below. The unnatural light fell strongly upon us both. A big shadow passed for an instant across the sunset, and we, looking instinctively up, saw the circling bulk of some huge bird ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... Burned lurid with black stains, and smote My thought with waking pangs; I saw The white arm drooping from the boat, Round-moulded, pure ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the batteries behind and all about us open fire. Flash after flash of spurting flame leaps out from the great guns. Boom upon boom, deep voiced and varied, follows from the many calibred guns in the darkness, till the night is lurid and the ground beneath us quivers with the earthquake ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... a lurid gleam, and the stout planks of the door were torn and shattered, and a yell of delight pealed from the bandits, for an opening had been made ...
— Jack Wright and His Electric Stage; - or, Leagued Against the James Boys • "Noname"
... horse sometimes bites and sometimes kicks the groom. He set out between two and three in a gloomy frame of mind; he knew too well what spending the afternoon with honest manly boys meant. He found the reality more lurid than his anticipation. The boys were in the field, and the first remark he heard when he got in sight ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... thousands of confused shapes, but none, Hans thought, like the ordinary forms of splintered ice. There seemed a curious expression about all their outlines—a perpetual resemblance to living features, distorted and scornful. Myriads of deceitful shadows, and lurid lights, played and floated about and through the pale blue pinnacles, dazzling and confusing the sight of the traveller; while his ears grew dull and his head giddy with the constant gush and roar of the concealed ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... French, from the mass of gallant, dauntless emigrants, many of whom were thus entertained with grateful, commiserating hospitality in households whose members had but lately basked in the sparkling geniality of the southern atmosphere, now lurid and ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... the periscope, McClure beheld the most spectacular picture that had yet been glimpsed through the eye of the American submarine. The torpedo had struck squarely abaft the ship's magazine and wrecked her completely. The night was painted a lurid glow as a titanic explosion shook the sea and a mass of yellow flame completely enveloped the doomed warship from ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... the burning edifice; the demoniac fury with which mothers rushed to the fatal spot, and, with the piercing cries and gesticulations of maniacs, flung their new-born babes into the flames to pacify their irritated deity—the increasing anger of the heavens—blackening with the impending storm, the lurid flashes of lightning darting as it were in mutual enmity from the clashing clouds—the low, distant growling of the coming tempest—the long column of smoke and fire shooting upward from the funeral pyre, and looking like one ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... they leap within the human circle. Their painted faces are distorted with the effort of their wild exertions; their befeathered heads are rendered still more hideous by the lurid blending of conflicting lights. Thirty creatures, hardly recognizable as human beings, dance to the accompaniment of a strange crooning of the women onlookers; to the beating of sad-toned drums, and the harsh scraping of stringed instruments. But the dance is marked ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... cried, and pointed out a lurid headline that ran half across the head of the sporting section. "There 'tis—or leastwise that's a part on it. But they's more a-comin'—more that that won't be a patch to! But you just ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... the candle-shine Take on suspicious purples. All The viands in their gravy's wine Grow lurid ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... it necessary to stand and act the story she is telling. Her memory is amazing and she turns with equal readiness to copious quotations from the Scripture and other pious observations to amusing but wholly unprintable anecdotes of her somewhat lurid past. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Mississippi Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... form dilate and expand in height and in breadth, until his head seemed to touch the pale crescent moon, and his bulk shut out from view all beyond itself. He saw his eyes firing and flaming like globes of lurid light, and he saw his hair and beard converted into one mass of living flame. The fiend stood revealed ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... city of Florence. My only consolation was to eat unnumbered cherries and apricots, for I did not as yet like the figs. My brother and I sometimes had a lurid delight in cracking the cherry and apricot stones and devouring the bitter contents, with the dreadful expectation of soon dying from the effects. Altogether I considered our sojourn in the town house, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... having no money wherewith to enjoy himself in a tavern. He had seen something of the lading of the Northumberland, and heard more from a stevedore. No sooner had he cast off the falls and seized the oars, than his knowledge awoke in his mind, living and lurid. He gave a whoop that brought the two ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... On—on the fiery glory rode— Thy lonely lake, Gorgopis, glowed— To Megara's Mount it came; They feed it again, And it streams amain A giant beard of flame! The headland cliffs that darkly down O'er the Saronic waters frown, Are pass'd with the swift one's lurid stride, And the huge rock glares on the glaring tide, With mightier march and fiercer power It gain'd Arachne's neighbouring tower— Thence on our Argive roof its rest it won, Of Ida's fire the long-descended son Bright harbinger of glory and of joy! So first and last with equal ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with working people. The hum of labour resounded from every house; lights gleamed from the long casement windows in the attic storeys, and the whirl of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls. The fires, whose lurid, sullen light had been visible for miles, blazed fiercely up, in the great works and factories of the town. The din of hammers, the rushing of steam, and the dead heavy clanking of engines, was the harsh music which arose from every quarter. The postboy ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... found it difficult to diagnose;—in an unwholesome sense, something out of the common, non-natural; an atmosphere of your own. Events, so far as you are concerned, have, during the last few days moved quickly. They have thrown an uncomfortably lurid light on that peculiarity of yours which I have noticed. Unless you can explain them to my satisfaction, you will withdraw your pretensions to Miss Lindon's hand, or I shall place certain facts before that lady, and, if necessary, publish ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... lamps began to cast lurid lights before us as the darkness thickened, just as my soul's fire is luminous now in an atmosphere ordained to bring forth all its normal glory—and all the while the back seats were empty; empty dear. Do you know the luxury ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... rooks—the brooks—the gales—the vales—the fountains and the mountains cry, "You love this maiden—take her, we command you!" 'Tis writ in heaven by the bright barbed dart that leaps forth into lurid light from each grim thundercloud. The very rain pours forth her sad and sodden sympathy! When chorused Nature bids me take my love, shall I reply, "Nay, but a certain Chancellor forbids it"? Sir, you are England's Lord High Chancellor, but are you Chancellor of birds and trees, King of the winds ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... the employ of a villainous and anonymous "duke." Fair Elenor retires to her bed and gives utterance to an outburst of similes in praise of her dead lord. Thus encouraged, the bloody head of her murdered husband describes its lurid past, and warns Elenor to beware of the duke's dark designs. Elenor wisely avoids the machinations of the villain, and brings an end to the poem, by breathing her last. Blake's story is faintly reminiscent of the ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... still the awful struggle continued. Suddenly a shot struck the flag-staff, and the banner, which had waved in that lurid atmosphere all day, fell on the beach outside the fort. For a moment there was a pause, as if at a presage of disaster. Then a grenadier, the brave and immortal Serjeant Jasper, sprang upon the parapet, leaped down to the beach, and passing along nearly the whole front of the fort, ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... certain amount of consent to his abductions—he had left the real for the chimerical; the true for the false; Dea for Josiana; love for pride; liberty for power; labour proud and poor for opulence full of unknown responsibilities; the shade in which is God for the lurid flames in which the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... a strange desolate look, though seen in its wonted bright light of fire and candles, and in itself nice and cheerful as usual. Fleda looked at it also through that vague fear which casts its own lurid colour upon everything. The very flickering of the candle blaze seemed of ill omen, and her grandfather's empty chair stood a signal of pain to little Fleda whenever she looked at it. She sat still, in submissive patience, ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... surcease to the apprehension in his heart; and as if to mock his mood the scene, after a lurid sunset, was beautiful and kindly beyond compare. A mist of color like powdered silver filled the air. Soft, near-by stars blinked lazily down upon the scene, illumining it without the effect of brilliance. A half moon hung idly in the mists above the cypress ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... fall, And the yellow vapors choke The great city sounding wide; The day comes—a dull red ball Wrapt in drifts of lurid smoke On ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... fruits and rubbishy French goods, and through what may be called the Government town or official quarter. It was getting dark when I reached the wharf, and the darkness enabled me to hobble unperceived on board on my bandaged feet. The heat of the murky, lurid evening was awful, and as thousands of mosquitoes took possession of the ship, all comfort was banished, and I was glad when we steamed down the palm-fringed Saigon or Donnai waters, and through the mangrove swamps at the mouths of the Me-kong ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... through whose instrumentality the Colonies secured the friendship and support of France, and "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, whose legion following his plume, struck the enemy in the bivouac, on the march, in the lurid glare of battle, on the flank, and in the front like a thunderbolt from the skies, were born. It was in this land that Robert Edward Lee, whose services on the fields of Mexico decked his brow with the ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... trees or flowers; even the grass does not grow there; the very air is dense with black smoke from the numerous chimneys, so that the sky is hidden, as it were, by a thick, murky veil. But, if thus dreary by day, how much more dreadful does it look at night, when the lurid glare from the furnaces lights up the sky with a red gleam, which can be seen far and wide! it has then in ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... cavern wide In the rent cloud's side, In sulphurous showers The red flame pours. The palaces fall In the lurid light, Which casts a red pall O'er their ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... mystical in the exact hour of midnight. The rich note startles Hardin. Cold, haughty, crafty, and able, his devotion to the South is that of the highest moral courage. It is not the exultation which culminates rashly on the battle-field. These lurid scenes are for ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... the lurid air, Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare— Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see; And look not ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... struggled in custody another group of dark figures came suddenly at a swinging trot round the dark outline of one of the nearer houses. They brought with them the same kind of lurid torch and a smoking kettle or cauldron carried between two. The foremost among them were also carrying the body of a man, whether dead or alive she could not see. When he was thrown upon the ground he moved and spoke. It was Rigdon's voice. She perceived that he was helpless ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... lo! this night, Forgetful of my prayers, and thine own promise, Thou turnest from us; Lettest the heathen enter in our city, And, without pity, Murder out burghers, seize upon their spouses, Burn down their houses! Is such a breach of faith to be endured? See what a lurid Light from the insolent invader's torches Shines on your porches! E'en now, with thundering battering-ram and hammer And hideous clamor; With axemen, swordsmen, pikemen, billmen, bowmen, The conquering foemen, O Sophy! beat your gate about your ears, Alas! and here's A humble ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... these pages in the expectation of finding a sensational "exposure" of Bolshevism and the Bolsheviki will be disappointed. It has been my aim to make a deliberate and scientific study, not an ex-parte indictment. A great many lurid and sensational stories about the Bolsheviki have been published, the net result of which is to make the leaders of this phase of the great universal war of the classes appear as brutal and depraved monsters of iniquity. There is not a ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... water, delicately balanced in a bully-beef tin containing sodium. The tins were tied to the barbed-wire entanglements in front of our trenches, and when the stealthy Hun, creeping on his stomach, bumped against the wire the test-tube overflowed into the tin and a lurid patch of greenish flame revealed the clumsy visitor to our look-outs. That was before we were supplied with calcium flares. Then, too, the sappers went in for experimental research by making trench-mortars out of ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... a sleepless night for the Ambassador. This was just such a complication as might embroil the nations of Europe in strife, an excuse which might serve to snap diplomatic relations and spread the lurid clouds of war from the Ural range to the shores of the Atlantic. One thing seemed certain, De Froilette had not repeated his information broadcast. No intimation reached Lord Cloverton that the report ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... At eventide came to lurid and disordered brains the knowledge that the other branch was here. And, mercifully, it was shallower than the first. Holding his rifle high, with a war-whoop Bill Cowan plunged into the stream. Unable to contain myself more, I flung my ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a few days ago he had opened with almost a shudder. He undid the wrapper, shook it open and looked at it. Then suddenly he sat like a man turned to stone. The cigar burnt out between his teeth, his eyes were riveted upon that page, the black letters seemed to have become lurid. The sentences stabbed, he was face to face with the impossible. The paper which he read was dated on the preceding day. Before him was a fourth article, dated from Paris, dated less than forty-eight hours ago, ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... nobility of character. Beliani likened him to Bayard, it is true, and Marulitch had scoffingly adopted the simile; but that was because each thought Bayard not admirable, but a fool. The somber history of the Kosnovian monarchy, a record of crass stupidity made lurid at times by a lightning gleam of passion, justified the belief that Alexis would follow the path that led Theodore, and Ferdinand, and Ivan, and Milosch to their ruin. Each of these rulers began to reign under favorable auspices, yet each succumbed to the siren's spell, ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... strophe such as Klopstock often used; the substance a rhetorical denunciation of military ambition. The most awful curses are imprecated upon the head of the ruthless 'conqueror', whose badness is portrayed in lurid images and wild syntax that fairly rack the German language.[9] No wonder that editor Haug cautioned the young poet against ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the wounded women kneeling and imploring for mercy in vain. The burning house was the funeral pyre from which the loving spirit of Mrs. Senseman took its flight to eternal rest. Gazing through the windows which the fire now illumined with a lurid glare, she saw Mrs. Senseman surrounded by flames standing with arms folded and exclaiming—"'Tis all well, ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... the vapours hanging nearer the earth. Sometimes the moon was totally eclipsed; at others, it shed a wan and ghastly glimmer over the masses rolling in the firmament. Not a star could be discerned, but, in their stead, streaks of lurid radiance, whence proceeding it was impossible to determine, shot ever and anon athwart the dusky vault, and added to the ominous and threatening ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth |
