|
|
|
More "Demoniac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will, may see in such a work as this no divine Providence, they may think it philosophical enlightenment to hold that Christianity and Christendom are adequately accounted for by the idle dreams of a noble self-deceiver and the passionate hallucinations of a recovered demoniac. We persecute them not, we denounce them not, we judge them not; but we say that, unless all life be a hollow, there could have been no such miserable origin to the sole religion of the world which holds the perfect balance between philosophy and popularity, between religion and morals, between meek ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... you know, who comes every day to dance on the church square, in spite of the official's prohibition! She hath a demoniac goat with horns of the devil, which reads, which writes, which knows mathematics like Picatrix, and which would suffice to hang all Bohemia. The prosecution is all ready; 'twill soon be finished, I assure you! A pretty creature, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... James Rawjester, Esq., was encompassed by dark pines and funereal hemlocks on all sides. The wind sang weirdly in the turrets and moaned through the long-drawn avenues of the park. As I approached the house I saw several mysterious figures flit before the windows, and a yell of demoniac laughter answered my summons at the bell. While I strove to repress my gloomy forebodings, the housekeeper, a timid, scared-looking old woman, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... fairly blazed with fury as, catching sight of me, it suddenly halted, glaring at me, emitting a low, angry, hissing sound, and clashing its formidable jaws together in what looked like an access of perfectly demoniac ferocity. Struck motionless for the moment, in sheer amazement, I quickly recovered myself and, believing that the thing was about to spring at my face and inflict a possibly fatal bite, I raised my cutlass and, with a slashing ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... They were cornering the stranger, no doubt, and Vic struggled to lift himself to his feet and watch until a faint sound from the dog made him look down. Bart lay with his haunches drawn up under him, his forepaws digging into the soft loam, his eyes demoniac. Instinctively Vic reached for his absent gun, and then, despairing, relaxed to his former position. The wolf-dog lowered his head to his paws and there remained with the eyes following each intake of Gregg's breath. A rattle of gunshots flung back loosely from the hills, and among them Vic ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... words rang in her ears—"One by one shall your children be taken from you to serve my purposes!" Through the dense fog she fancied that he glared upon her in bitter hatred—his deep-set eyes flashing with demoniac fire, and his smile, now extending, now contracting, into all the varied expressions of triumphant malignity! She pressed her hand on her eyes to shut out the horrid vision, and, a prayer, a simple prayer, rose to her lips. Like oil upon the troubled waters, it soothed and composed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... these wars, Cathedrals, as well as towns and their inhabitants, were scarred and wounded. Hardly had these dissensions ended in 1494, when the Wars of Religion commenced under Charles IX, and Gascony was again one of the most terrible fields of battle. Here the demoniac enthusiasm of both sides exceeded even the terrible exhibitions of Languedoc. The royal family of Navarre was openly Protestant and contributed more than any others to the military organisations of their Faith. Jeanne ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... sacred duties without any discovery of the impropriety of their conduct. It is true they encountered in their course a patrol of the civic guard; but the representatives of law and order, forming probably their own conclusions as to the significance of the demoniac apparition, are said to have prudently taken to flight in ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... shriek of demoniac glee the wind entered into and took possession of the room. A cloud of snow swept across the floor like a veil. The door battered against the wall as if trying to break it down. A pile of newspapers was swept from the ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... yet another and very different side to Stevenson which struck others more than it struck myself, namely, that of the freakish or elvish, irresponsible madcap or jester which sometimes appeared in him. It is true that his demoniac quickness of wit and intelligence suggested occasionally a "spirit of air and fire" rather than one of earth; that he was abundantly given to all kinds of quirk and laughter; and that there was no jest (saving the unkind) he would not make and relish. The late Mr. J. A. Symonds ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thin board partitions, the light door fastened only by a pine stick thrust into a wooden loop on the casing, seemed small protection in case of assault; but we lay down to sleep in quiet trust. But we had scarcely fallen asleep before we were awakened by the demoniac howlings and yellings of a man just brought into the next room, and allowed the liberty of the whole house. He was drunk, and further seemed to be labouring under delirium tremens. He crashed about furiously, and all the ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... by this bird's-eye view from the Citadel (of course, I had to trot them up again for the sunset), my charges let themselves be led from mosque to mosque, from tomb to tomb. Some, possessed with a demoniac desire to get their money's worth of Egypt, were unable to enjoy any sight, in their nervous dread of missing some other spectacle, which people at home might ask them about. These strained their wearied intelligences to see more than they possibly ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... gone away, behold, the people brought to him a man, a dumb demoniac. [9:33]And the demon being cast out, the dumb spoke; and the multitudes wondered, saying, It was never so seen in Israel. [9:34]But the Pharisees said, He casts out demons by the ruler ...
— The New Testament • Various
... honour, low thou liest, By a ruthless foot down trodden!— I will die with thee, united We two will together conquer These barbarians. Then since little, But a span at best, belongeth To my life, a noble vengeance Let this dagger take upon me!— But, good God! what evil impulse With demoniac instinct prompteth Thus my hand? I am a Christian, I've a soul, and share the godly Light of faith: then were it right, 'Mid a crowd of Gentile mockers, Thus the Christian faith to tarnish By an action so improper? What example would I give them By a death so sad and shocking, Save ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... the scene, or a sample of it, ten minutes after. Among the wounded officers in the ambulances were one, a lieutenant of regulars, and another of higher rank. These two were dragg'd out on the ground on their backs, and were now surrounded by the guerillas, a demoniac crowd, each member of which was stabbing them in different parts of their bodies. One of the officers had his feet pinn'd firmly to the ground by bayonets stuck through them and thrust into the ground. These two officers, as afterwards found on examination, had receiv'd about twenty such thrusts, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... tremble, and caused me to grind my teeth with rage. It was a long, drawn-out sigh, the moan of a man in agony of flesh or spirit. It was Newman's voice. Mingling with it, and following it, came the low, demoniac chuckle ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... happenings. Berenice had been an impressionable child. Some things had gripped her memory mightily—once, for instance, when she had seen her stepfather, in the presence of her governess, kick a table over, and, seizing the toppling lamp with demoniac skill, hurl it through a window. She, herself, had been tossed by him in one of these tantrums, when, in answer to the cries of terror of those about her, he had shouted: "Let her fall! It won't hurt the little devil to break a few bones." This was ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... exclaimed the hunter with a wild, demoniac laugh. "I can resist any power—all powers. There is nothing that ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... which may be mere disease, but as a savage and a raging maniac, such as, thank God, are rare in Christian countries, though they were common among our own forefathers before they were converted to Christianity,—men like the demoniac of whom the text speaks, tormented by devils, given up to blind rage and malice against himself and all around, to lust and blasphemy, to confusion of mind and misery of body, God's image gone, and the image of the ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... aghast with horror, and his eyes fell upon the countenance of Richard Delany, which was now lit up with demoniac joy, as he ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... fatal shot the Indians were so infuriated, that, setting up their demoniac yells, they plunged down the banks of the stream, determined to ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... that of the apparition, by implying the lesser miracle in the greater. In subordinating the cure to the vision, he obtained sublimity; in placing the crowd and patient on the foreground, he gained room for the full exertion of his dramatic powers. It was not necessary that the demoniac should be represented in the moment of recovery, if its certainty could be expressed by other means. It is implied, it is placed beyond all doubt, by the glorious apparition above; it is made nearly intuitive by the uplifted hand and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Now, in Dr. Nevius's book, this evidence rests almost entirely on the written reports of native Christian teachers, for the Chinese were strictly reticent when questioned by Europeans. 'My heathen brother, you have a sister who is a demoniac?' asks the intelligent European. The reply of the heathen brother is best left in the obscurity of a remarkably difficult and copious Oriental language. We are thus obliged to fall back on the reports of Mr. Leng and other native Christian teachers. They are perfectly ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... turned him out from their games; and it gave him a momentary activity, and an unsettled sort of spirit, which he had never known since then. He had been shunned and abhorred; and he believed himself the victim of some demoniac power. To have another in this fearful bondage with him, as Paul had intimated, was a relief from his dreadful solitariness in his terrors and sufferings. "And he said that it was I who was to work a curse on ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... boldness, and saw the slave's face flush with delight at the judge's words, she became terribly enraged; made use of the most fearful threats, and would have wreaked summary vengeance on her late chattel had not the clumsy soldiery interfered. Then, with demoniac refinement of cruelty, she bethought herself of the girl's baby at New Orleans still in her power, and threatened most horrible torture to the child if its mother dared to accept ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... whether in the classic personifications of Greece, the horrible shapes worshipped by mere barbarians, or the hieroglyphical enormities of the Egyptian Mythology. The idea of identifying the pagan deities, especially the most distinguished of them, with the manifestation of demoniac power, and concluding that the descent of our Saviour struck them with silence, so nobly expressed in the poetry of Milton, is not certainly to be lightly rejected. It has been asserted, in simple prose, by authorities of no mean weight; nor does there appear anything inconsistent ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... four sons had his own fashion of fighting. Renault fought best on horseback, and to him Maugis son of Buves brought a great horse named Bayard ("Beiaard" in Flemish) of magic origin, possessed of demoniac powers, among which was the ability to run like the wind and never grow weary. Here in this stronghold the four sons of Aymon dwelt, making occasional sallies against the vassals of Charlemagne, until at length the Emperor gathered a mighty force of soldiers and horses and engines ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... sentence of this libel—this taunting us with the torch of the negro at our threshold, and his knife at our throats—this fiendish allusion to the beauty and chivalry of the South; it displays cool and demoniac malignity! Mr. K. then alluded to the pictures, saying that they could be meant only for the illiterate, and tended only to insurrection and violence. Mr. K. animadverted upon the speeches and opinions of eminent Southern men, ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... arm. They instantly set upon and beat him and, after nearly killing him, hung him to a lamppost. His body was left suspended for several hours. A fire was made underneath him, and he was literally roasted as he hung, the mob revelling in their demoniac act. Recognition of the remains, on their being recovered, was impossible; and two women, mourned for upwards of two weeks, in the case of this man, for the loss of their husbands. At the end of that time, the husband ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... would not unlock. That animal, exultant laughter ran on in demoniac music. In his great agony the outlaw rolled his eyes in appeal to the crowd which surrounded the struggling two. Every man seemed about to spring forward, yet they could not move. Some had their fingers stiffly extended, as if in the act of gripping with hands ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... in this way, I thought no more of cabs, of the town, and of Kisotchka, and abandoned myself to the sensation I was so fond of: that is, the sensation of fearful isolation when you feel that in the whole universe, dark and formless, you alone exist. It is a proud, demoniac sensation, only possible to Russians whose thoughts and sensations are as large, boundless, and gloomy as their plains, their forests, and their snow. If I had been an artist I should certainly have depicted the expression of a Russian's face when he sits motionless and, ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... world has aged. Yet the shapes are young; they do but change their clothes and follow the fashion in externals. They laugh as of old. How they laugh! No mortal can laugh so heartily. No mortal has such good cause. Theirs is not the serene mirth of Olympian spheres; it sounds demoniac, from the midway region. What are they laughing at, these cheerful monsters? At the greatest jest in ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... have negro regiments on the Rappahannock and in the West. This is utterly untrue. We have no armed slaves to fight for us, nor do we fear a servile insurrection. We are at no loss, however, to interpret the meaning of such demoniac misrepresentations. It is to be seen of what value the negro regiments employed against us will be ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... clung to him in rags, while the powder-flash within the cellar had blackened his face and made sad havoc with his gay mustache. He endeavored to smile at me as our eyes met, but the effort produced only what seemed like a demoniac grin. ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... Kidd's Pines often enough, doing my secretarial work (a howl of laughter here, please!), to see pretty well all that goes on, and the demoniac joy I feel in acting as deus ex machina I can't express to you, because I don't entirely understand it myself. But I wouldn't be out of ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... bailer's cold metal had given him a momentary sense of oneness with his own world. Now this inrush of hideous, demoniac figures beneath the flare of green flames was like a fevered vision of the infernal regions come ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... asleep on a pillow (chap. 4:38); Jairus' daughter arises and walks, for she was of the age of twelve years (chap. 5:42); the multitudes that are to be fed sit down in ranks by hundreds and by fifties (chap. 6:40), etc. As examples of vivid description may be named the account of the demoniac (chap. 5:2-20), and the lunatic. Chap. 9:14-27. It is not necessary to assume that Mark was himself a disciple of our Lord. If, as ancient tradition asserts, he was the disciple and interpreter of Peter he could receive from his lips those circumstantial ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... who planted the swag in my pockets, and let me into this hole for fourteen years?" Then, with all his self-command, he burst into a torrent of curses, and his pale face was ghastly with hate, and his eyes glared with demoniac fire, for hell raged ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... was so hideous fire would not burn her! These damned her for a malignant witch; those upheld her as a heavenly angel, urged by love divine to expiate, through voluntary suffering, the nameless crimes of the demoniac Doctor. But unless the redemption were effected within a certain time, she must be swallowed up with him in common destruction. Were the how and wherefore of these alternatives called in question, the answer was a wise shake of ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... while he slept a storm had swept down upon the region of the Saskatchewan, and was howling through the forest and over the waters with demoniac glee, though as yet not a drop of rain had fallen, or a flake of snow descended, though one or the other ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... and plain faces of rock, destitute of minor finish and of color. They had their horrible decorations; they showed the ingenuity and the artistic force of the Afreets who had fashioned them; they were wrought and tinted with a demoniac splendor suited to their magnitude. It seemed as if some goblin Michel Angelo had here done his carving and frescoing at the command of the lords of hell. Layers of brown, gray, and orange sandstone, alternated from base to summit; and these tints were laid on with a breadth of effect ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... ordered, sternly, and Kate accompanied the command with an ominous click of her revolver. The wretch cowered into silence, but his eyes glowed with fairly demoniac fury. ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... mind, that fools are not always merely imbecile and obstructive; they are at times ferocious, dangerous, mad. There is in human nature what Goethe used to call a demoniac element, defying all law, and all induction; and we can, I fear, from that one cause, as easily calculate the progress of the human race, as we can calculate that of the vines upon the slopes of AEtna, with the lava ready to boil up and ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... more forbidding and repulsive. His eyes shone with excitement, determination, and reckless courage. His teeth were clenched, and the muscles of his lips drawn over them gave him an expression half laughing, half demoniac. On the first round his cap had fallen off, and the shaggy hair of his head and face streamed in the wind, adding greatly to the fierceness of his looks. He had perfect control of himself and horse, and rode like a centaur, ready to take any advantage which circumstances ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... a knife and bent over Jake's body. A yell greeted this. Dogs and men moved confusedly around the thing on the ground, in a sort of demoniac circle upon which the hissing, flaring pitch-pine torches danced with infernal effect. Peter Champneys watched it, his soul revolting. He had no sympathy for Jake; he felt for him nothing but hatred. He couldn't think of that gay and innocent girl coming down the corn-field ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... amidst flowing fountains and pellucid lakes—like the lakes of "The Thirst of the Antelope" in the marvellous mirages of Rajputana and Mesopotamia—that ever elude his anguished approaches; and with Ixion, the meanest and basest of cheats, and most demoniac of murderers, whose posthumous punishment was in being stretched, and broken, and bound, in the figure of the svastika, on a wheel which, self-moved—like the wheels of the vision of Ezekiel—whirls forevermore round and round ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... jaws the arch-traitors, Judas, Brutus and Cassius; Ugolino appeasing his famine upon the tough nape of Ruggieri; Bertrand de Born looking (if I may be allowed the expression) at his own dissevered head; the robbers exchanging form with serpents; the whole demoniac troop of Malebolge,—are not all these things grotesque beyond everything else in poetry? To us, nurtured in this scientific nineteenth century, they doubtless seem so; and by Leigh Hunt, who had the eighteenth-century ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... case of leprosy was ever beyond the power of the Lord to cleanse. No blindness was ever too dark for him to remove. No palsy was ever too dead for him to quicken into healthy life. No fever was ever too burning for him to cool. No demoniac was ever so insane or epileptic, under the power and in the possession of even a legion of devils, but that he could have them all cast out and the possessed one sit calmly, be clothed and in his right mind. Nothing is impossible with God. The good-ground hearer brings ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... heavenly lover fallen to serve for feast Of rancours and raw hungers; she, the untrue, Yet pitiable, not despicable, gazed. Fawning, her body bent, she gazed With eyes the moonstone portals to her heart: Eyes magnifying through hysteric tears This apparition, ghostly for belief; Demoniac or divine, but sole Over earth's mightiest written Chief; Earth's chosen, crowned, unchallengeable upstart: The trumpet word to awake, transform, renew; The arbiter of circumstance; High above limitations, as the spheres. Nor ever had heroical Romance, Never ensanguined History's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to that delirium of the mind which is known to every man of genius, that will which is independent of the will, "the ineffable enigma of the world and life" which Goethe calls "the demoniac," against which he was always armed, though it always ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... the whole matter; they often denote it by some mark only, as these others, Andria, Eunuchus; or these, Sylla, Cicero, Toyquatus. I love a poetic progress, by leaps and skips; 'tis an art, as Plato says, light, nimble, demoniac. There are pieces in Plutarch where he forgets his theme; where the proposition of his argument is only found by incidence, stuffed and half stifled in foreign matter. Observe his footsteps in the Daemon of Socrates. O God! how beautiful are these frolicsome sallies, those variations and digressions, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... to answer me and none other." The inquisitor proceeded accordingly to catechize him, and soon satisfied himself of the schoolmaster's heresy. He commanded him to make immediate recantation. The schoolmaster refused. "Do you not love your wife and children?" asked the demoniac Titelmann. "God knows," answered the heretic, "that if the whole world were of gold, and my own, I would give it all only to have them with me, even had I to live on bread and water and in bondage." "You have then," answered the inquisitor, "only ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the whole plant looks as if it had been a violet unjustly banished to a bog, and obliged to live there—not for its own sins, but for some Emperor Pansy's, far away in the garden,—in a partly boggish, partly hoggish manner, drenched and desolate; and with something of demoniac temper got into its calyx, so that it quarrels with, and bites the corolla;—something of gluttonous and greasy habit got into its leaves; a discomfortable sensuality, even in its desolation. Perhaps ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... and drawing my pistol, stepped out in full view of the startled party. The Band-lu did not run away as had some of the lower orders of Caspakians at the sound of the rifle. Instead, the moment they saw me, they let out a series of demoniac war-cries, and raising their spears above their heads, ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... The demoniac interest excited by this scene withdrew the attention of those who were enjoying it from me, and gave me the opportunity of escaping unperceived, merely with the loss of my bandbox. Of that the infuriated ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... man's dwelling, they wander through the streets, they make their way into food and drink. There is no place, however small, which they cannot invade, and none, however large, that they cannot fill. In a text which furnishes the sacred formulas by means of which one can get rid of the demoniac influence, a description is given of the demons which may serve as an illustration of what has just been said. The incantation is directed against ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... she is, as her name might have informed you; and as for her eyes, I consider them, or used to do so, of course—for her injured nation have been long expelled from Alexandria by your fanatic tribe—as altogether divine and demoniac, let the base imagination of monks call them ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... face downward in the cold, damp woods. Men of no compassion, unreached by ordinary sympathies, they felt the furtive skulking back, step by step, along ways commonplace enough in the daytime, but begirt with terrors now and full of demoniac suggestion. ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... wash of a fellow, plump overboard, when the captain, jumping to his feet, seized him by his long yellow hair, vowing he would slaughter him. Meanwhile the cutter flew foaming through the channel, as if in demoniac glee at this uproar on her imperilled deck. While the consternation was at its height, a dark body suddenly loomed at a moderate distance into view, shooting right athwart the stern of the cutter. The next moment a shot struck the water ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... the hands of your honourable excellency, &c. &c. With regard to your slave, Asaad Esh Shidiak, the state into which he is fallen, is not unknown to your excellency. His understanding is subverted. In some respects he is a demoniac, in others not. Every day his malady increases upon him, until I have been obliged to take severe measures with him, and put him under keepers, lest he should escape from here, and grow worse, and infuse his poison into others. ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... has come out with a strong denunciation of "devilry" in German music. How little we suspected, before the War opened our deluded eyes, that it was no mere lack of skill but the fierce promptings of a demoniac hate that marred our evenings on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... sharply misogynist; the poet does not even attempt to blunt their point. They include "The Widow's Vow" (the widow, protesting undying constancy to her first love, eagerly weds another) and "Woman's Contentions." In the latter, a wicked woman is denounced with the wildest invective. She has demoniac traits; her touch is fatal. A condemned criminal is offered his life if he will wed a wicked woman. "O King," he cried, "slay me; for rather would I die once, than suffer many deaths every day." Again, once a wicked woman pursued a heroic ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... the fifteenth century, that is to say at the time of Gilles de Rais—to go no further back—Satanism had assumed the proportions that you know. In the sixteenth it was worse yet. No need to remind you, I think, of the demoniac pactions of Catherine de Medici and of the Valois, of the trial of the monk Jean de Vaulx, of the investigations of the Sprengers and the Lancres and those learned inquisitors who had thousands of necromancers and sorcerers roasted alive. All that is known, too well known. One case is not ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... here," I began, and was just about to tell him that Freedham was an unwholesome creature who had mysterious fits like a demoniac, when I remembered my promise of silence: so I went on lamely: "You will tell me one ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... pressing want of food drove me back, I remained: for more and more the earth over-grows me, wooes me, assimilates me; so that I ask myself this question: 'Must I not, in time, cease to be a man, and become a small earth, precisely her copy, extravagantly weird and fierce, half-demoniac, half-ferine, wholly mystic—morose and turbulent—fitful, and deranged, and ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... members of all classes, the debts that are their inevitable consequence, the universal longing, partly unsatisfied for lack of means, for the pleasures of the subtle Asiatic civilisations, infused into this whole history a demoniac frenzy that to-day, after so many centuries, ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... asked myself with almost superstitious awe, if he were not indeed a demoniac being, ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne
... men are frequently cowards. Lady Isabel trembled in hers; and well she might, hearing that one allusion. They set upon him, twenty pairs of hands at least, strong, rough, determined hands; not to speak of the tagrag's help, who went in with cuffs, and kicks, and pokes, and taunts, and cheers, and a demoniac dance. ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... were fascinated, and soon began to peep out between the branches, and one by one deserting the shady covert, drew near under the irresistible attraction of the music. Then the goat-men rushed upon them with a demoniac fury. Folded in the arms of their ruthless assailants, the nymphs strove to keep up a while longer their raillery and loud laughter, but the mirth died on their lips. With heads thrown back and eyes swooning with joy and terror, they could ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... suggests some affinity between the demoniac and the animal nature, and though it is easy to ridicule, it is impossible to disprove, the suggestion. We know too little about either to do that, and what we cannot disprove it is somewhat venturesome hardily to deny. There are depths in the one nature, which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... of the Pi Utahs; the fearful cries of the demoniac Indians; the shrieks of the females and children; the rapid and effective fire of the rifles; the stampede of the oxen; their recovery and the final repulse, the Pi Utahs being routed after a loss of thirty-six killed and wounded, while the Pikes lose but one scalp ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... corps of royal troops closed. Then there was everywhere a hand-to-hand battle there was no time to load and fire; swords flashed and fell, bayonets stabbed, the royals and the Camisards took each other by the throat and hair. For an hour this demoniac fight lasted, during which Cavalier lost five hundred men and slew a thousand of the enemy. At last he won through, followed by about two hundred of his troops, and drew a long breath; but finding himself ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... melancholy maniacs; Napoleon an ambitious maniac, in whom the sense of impossibility became gradually extinguished by visceral and cerebral derangement; Porson an oinomaniac; Luther a phrenetic patient of the old demoniac breed, alluded ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... thought, which in itself is far nobler and more poetic than the Miltonic, but she has not been strong enough to use it. She has fallen under the weight of her chosen theme, and the result is that her demoniac hero is at one time presented as a majestic and suffering spirit, and at another as a ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... returned with the report that as Luther alighted from his carriage a man had taken him into his arms, and having touched his coat three times had gone away glorying as if he had touched a relic of the greatest saint in the world. On the other hand, Luther looked round about him, with his demoniac eyes, and said, "God ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... the direction and in the intensity of our intellectual and moral activities. Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang, and produce, by dint of intense thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania. Demoniac possession is mythical; but the faculty of being possessed, more or less completely, by an idea is probably the fundamental condition of what is called genius, whether it show itself in the saint, the artist, or the man of science. One calls it faith, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... which I now recognized as coming from Stilton's brain was present, and I saw myself whirling nearer and nearer to its grasp. I felt, by a sort of blind instinct, too vague to be expressed, that some demoniac agency had thrust itself into the manifestations,—perhaps had been mingled with them ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... catamount cries, Gibbering, yipping, with hollow-skull clacks, Riding white bronchos with skeleton backs, Scalp-hunters, beaded and spangled and bad, Naked and lustful and foaming and mad, Flashing primeval demoniac scorn, Blood-thirst and pomp amid darkness reborn, Power and glory that sleep in the grass While the winds and the snows and the great rains pass. They crossed the gray river, thousands abreast, They rode in infinite lines to the west, Tide upon tide ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... corner before them, waited Clematis, roguishly lying in a mud-puddle in the gutter. He had run through alleys parallel to their course—and in the face of such demoniac cunning the wretched William despaired of evading his society. Indeed, there was nothing to do but to give up, and so the trio proceeded, with William unable to decide which contaminated him more, Genesis or the loyal Clematis. To his way of thinking, ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... eating-room of the station. The little girl cried with broken sleep and the strangeness, and Olive tried to quiet her. Marcia clung to Halleck's arm, and shivered convulsively. Squire Gaylord stalked beside them with a demoniac vigor. "A few more hours, a few more hours, sir!" he said. He made a hearty supper, while the rest scalded their mouths with hot tea, which they forced with loathing ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... stepped out this time with a honeyed smile, but with a new-born light in his hazel eyes—a demoniac light, lambent and almost playful. Master Randall, caressed by them, read the danger signal a thought too late. A swift and apparently reckless feint drew another of his slogging strokes, and in a flash the enemy was under his guard. Even so, for the fraction of a second, victory ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... lazar-house it seemed; wherein were laid Numbers of all diseased—all maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies and asthmas, and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... gentleman laughs a laugh belonging only to poets and Mr. O. Smith of the Adelphi Theatre, and sits down, pen in hand, to throw off a page or two of verse in the biting, semi-atheistical demoniac style, which, like the poetical young gentleman himself, is full of sound ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... dominates the world. To him are only two entities that matter—himself and the Eternal; or, if another, it is his fellow-man, whom serving he serves the ultimate of being. But he is master of the outer world. The mind, indeed, in its first blank outlook on life is terrified by the demoniac force of nature and the swarming misery of man; by the vast totality of things, the cold remoteness of the starry heavens, and the threat of the devouring seas. It is ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... Oolichuk not only quivered from head to foot, but gave a little jump and anything but a little yell. Benjy's powers of self-restraint were by that time exhausted. He sent the handle round with a whirr and Oolichuk, tumbling backwards off the mat, rent the air with a shriek of demoniac laughter. ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... elsewhere; 'yet has it many points in common therewith. I call it rather a discerning of the Infinite in the Finite, of the Idea made Real; which discerning again may be either true or false, either seraphic or demoniac, Inspiration or Insanity. But in the former case too, as in common Madness, it is Fantasy that superadds itself to sight; on the so petty domain of the Actual plants its Archimedes-lever, whereby to move at will the infinite Spiritual. Fantasy ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... thousand warriors. A man will fight with terrible persistence when he knows that defeat is inevitable death by torture. It is a thousandfold better to fall beneath the arrow, the tomahawk or the war-club, than to be consumed alive amid the jeers and tortures of yelling Indians inspired with demoniac instincts. Thus with the trapper it was always either victory ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... if one was on his lips, was interrupted by a violent cursing. The train was well under way, and the baggage-man had sat down to a small table with his back toward them. He had leaped to his feet now, his face furious, and with another demoniac curse he gave the coal skuttle a kick that sent it with a bang to the far end of the car. The table ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... and cockney vulgarities of wretched taste; Disraeli, with all his wit and savoir faire, has printed some rank fustian, and much slip-slop gossip; and George Meredith at times can be as jerky and mysterious as a prose Browning. Charlotte Bronte and Kingsley could both descend to blue fire and demoniac incoherences. Macaulay is brilliant and emphatic, but we weary at last of his everlasting staccato on the trumpet; and even the magnificent symphonies of Ruskin at his best will end sometimes in a sort of coda of fantasias which suggest limelights and coloured lenses. Carlyle, if ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... the blessings of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity was received by the Neapolitans with a frenzy from which there sprang a demoniac retaliation. Societies were formed to carry out the most atrocious crimes against the Neapolitan revolutionists, whom the Royalists hated more than they did the French. The fishermen and other miscreants came to a solemn ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... foe. Of course this Whig maxim lasted just so long as the Whigs were out of office, and could use it as a weapon against the Minister. But, from the moment when France became actually dangerous, when her councils became demoniac, and her factions frenzied, Whiggism, despairing of turning out the Minister by argument, resolved to make the attempt by menace. Hopeless in the House, it appealed to the rabble, and France was extolled to the skies. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... it would be wise to give birth to demoniac monsters and let them devour the evil ones, but First Man objected, and finally the council agreed that the Winds should perform the task by bringing forth a devastating storm. The faithful were warned and ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... were translated thence to the abbey of St. Germain-des-Prez, where they are preserved in a rich shrine.[4] An arm of this saint was with great devotion translated to mount Cassino, in the eleventh century,[5] and by its touch a demoniac was afterwards delivered, as is related by Desiderius at that time abbot of mount Cassino,[6] who was afterwards pope, under the name of Victor III. See Mabill. Annal. Bened. t. 1, l. 3 and 4; and the genuine history of the translation of the body of St. Maurus to the ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... of the reality of possessions; they show that at all times the Church and her ministers have believed them to be true and real, since they have always practiced these exorcisms. The ancient fathers defied the heathen to produce a demoniac before the Christians; they pride themselves on curing them, and expelling the demon. The Jewish exorcists employed even the name of Jesus Christ to cure demoniacs;[253] they found it efficacious in producing this effect; it is true that sometimes they employed the name of Solomon, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... and feelings thrust up their heads like beasts of prey which have long lain bound. She felt strange and homeless in her glittering life, and thought with a sort of demoniac longing of the horrible places ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... sentence, a gun barked outside, there was a howl of demoniac pain and rage, and then a scream that would tingle in the ear of Doctor Randall ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... down with meek, seraph glances over the mighty metropolis along whose thousand thoroughfares lay the white carpet of the snow-king; and Boreas, loosed from his ice caverns on the frozen floor of the Arctic, was holding mad revels, and howling with demoniac glee along the streets, wrapped in the pall shadows ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... that glared at my agonies! A richer tint of crimson diffused itself over the pictured horrors of blood. I panted! I gasped for breath! There could be no doubt of the design of my tormentors—oh! most unrelenting! oh! most demoniac of men! I shrank from the glowing metal to the centre of the cell. Amid the thought of the fiery destruction that impended, the idea of the coolness of the well came over my soul like balm. I rushed to its deadly brink. I threw my straining vision below. The glare from the enkindled roof illumined ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... there on the 30th of December 1832. Ludwig Devrient was equally great in comedy and tragedy. Falstaff, Franz Moor, Shylock, King Lear and Richard II. were among his best parts. Karl von Holtei in his Reminiscences has given a graphic picture of him and the "demoniac fascination" of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... in the wilderness, and was an adept in its ways. With the noiseless motion of a redskin he wormed his way through the underwood until close alongside of the nocturnal visitor, and then suddenly stopped a howl of more than demoniac ferocity by clapping a hand on ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... The weather has been demoniac; I have had a skiff of cold, and was finally obliged to take to bed entirely; to-day, however, it has cleared, the sun shines, and I ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reached the summit of the pass the sea-breeze from the Gulf of Corinth cleared the air and he saw for the first time the peaks on one side and the gulfs on the other, with the road writhing down canyons and gorges like a demoniac corkscrew. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... been charged to both the great political parties, it is probably nearer to truth to say that it originated spontaneously with that demoniac mob soon to rule France, and which from this time carried all political organizations with it. The Girondists, however, still retained enough of their constitutional conservatism to be the only hope which royalty ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... not wonder at the zeal which caused the artistic Italian nature to love to celebrate the passing away of an era of unnatural vice and demoniac cruelty by visible images of the purity, the tenderness, the universal benevolence which Jesus ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... bed; his candle was still burning, and he himself, half dressed, stood in the center of the floor, shaking and livid, his eyes burning with the preterhuman fires of insanity. As Doctor Parkes entered the chamber, another shout, or rather yell, thundered from the lips of this demoniac effigy; and the mad-doctor stood freezing with horror in the doorway, and yet exerting what remained to him of presence of mind, in the vain endeavor, in the flaring light of the candle, to catch and fix with his own ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... soldiers stripped and forced their horses in, but in turn became scared, and gave it up amidst chaff and laughter. At last a line of men, armed with stones, drove the whole herd of seventy-five animals into the water with demoniac howls and a shower of missiles. Once in, they took it calmly enough, and, the brave little foal leading, soon reached the farther bank. One old war-horse of recalcitrant views turned back, and had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... the foul coalition of slavery and treason. This rebellion is the most stupendous crime in the annals of our race, and its projectors and coadjutors, at home or abroad, individual or dynastic, are doomed to immortal infamy. With its demoniac passions, its satanic ambition, desecrating the remains of the slain, making goblets of their skulls, and trinkets of their bones, this revolt is a heliograph of Dahomey, and Devildom daguerreotyped more vividly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... I saw that the cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin. I laid down the razor, turning as I did so half round to look for some sticking plaster. When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I drew away and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly believe that ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... Order, Order! The honorable member from Ballynamuck must resume his seat. He is out of order. The question before the House is not the good taste of demoniac visitants. I call upon the right honorable gentleman, the Minister for ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... Spaniards upon the unoffending natives of these climes seem to have been as senseless as they were fiendlike. It is often difficult to find any motive for their atrocities. These crimes are thoroughly authenticated, and yet they often seem like the outbursts of demoniac malignity. Anything like a faithful recital of them would torture the sensibilities of our readers almost beyond endurance. Mothers and maidens were hunted and torn down by bloodhounds; infant children were ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... attempt to get out of his way. Again the helm was put up and the men ran to the braces, but the water-laden ship, already well down by the head, and more sluggish than ever, had fallen off only one point when the whale leaped upon her with demoniac energy, and—so it appeared to the seamen—rammed ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... superannuated prejudice, we must ascribe the slowness of the German movement on the path of reascent. Meantime the earliest torch-bearer to the murky literature of this great land, this crystallization of political states, was Bodmer. This man had no demoniac genius, such as the service required; but he had some taste, and, what was better, he had some sensibility. He lived among the Alps; and his reading lay among the alpine sublimities of Milton and Shakspeare. Through his very eyes he imbibed a daily ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... For an instant her face was convulsed with a fairly demoniac fury. Then a mask of blankness obliterated ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... beings of its own creation. The rivers had their Undines, the ocean its Nixes, the caverns their Gnomes, and the woods their Sprites. Christianity did not deny the existence of these supernatural races, but it invested them with a demoniac character. They were not regarded as immortal, although permitted to attain an age far beyond that granted to mankind, and they were denied the hope of salvation, unless purchased by a union with creatures of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... emulating than at criticising Falconer's 'chef-d'oeuvre'. We have already once or twice alluded to 'his' Shipwreck—surely the grandest and most characteristic effort of his genius, in its demoniac force, and demoniac spirit. As we have elsewhere said, "he describes the horrors of a shipwreck, like a fiend who had, invisible, sat amid the shrouds, choked with laughter—with immeasurable glee had heard the wild farewell rising from ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... front was seen Wife Gougeon brandishing her pistol. The Admiral and Hache were at her side haranguing the leaders. Surging along, the demoniac screams of drunken women and the babel of shouting men, as they approached each new neighbourhood, seemed to stir it to its depths and to add to ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... greatly in quality; none, perhaps, has the grandiose dramatic and ethical note of Schiller's The Cranes of Ibycus and none the power of revealing the hidden forces of nature in anthropomorphic and demoniac form as Goethe does in his Erlking and The Fisher. But Uhland's poems are more varied in treatment, even though he cannot be said to have brought any new forms and themes into German verse. There is much talk of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... ferocity the fearful gash he has just received; as, a moment after, overcoming in personal conflict yon stalwart chief, he decapitates, with one blow of his heavy sabre, the yet palpitating corpse, and waves the gory head with demoniac triumph in the air; and as he returns home, yet reeking with blood and intoxicated with victory, and suspends above his threshold the ghastly trophy. Look again—the scene is changed—the glittering arms are flung aside. With his mantle floating in the breeze, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... that wonderful mountain background, a colossal marble lion stood guard over the ruins of the city that slept upon the coast below—with demoniac, fiery eyes of flashing jewels, striking terror to the souls of mariners who might have wandered with sacrilegious feet among those crumbling tombs and temples in ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... charm with a solitary fault—too facile vulnerability to the prying eyes of those to whom Paris meant those days and social strata in which Michael Lanyard had moved and had his being. Witness—according to Crane—the demoniac cleverness of the Brazilian in unmasking the ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... wonderful mountain background, a colossal marble lion stood guard over the ruins of the city that slept upon the coast below—with demoniac, fiery eyes of flashing jewels, striking terror to the souls of mariners who might have wandered with sacrilegious feet among those crumbling tombs and temples in search of ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... start as of surprise, opened his mouth to speak, and then stood dumb, with staring eyes. For several seconds he seemed undecided what to do next. Then he put himself in motion and advanced toward the ladies, his face at the same time assuming a wild, demoniac expression. He lowered his scythe from his shoulder, and grasped it in ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... a while to knock on wood. I abhorred the thought of ritualistic bedroom calisthenics such as were recommended by divers health experts. Climbing out of a warm bed and standing out in the middle of a cold room and giving an imitation of a demoniac semaphore had never appealed to me as a fascinating divertisement for a grown man. As I think I may have remarked once before, lying at full length on one's back on the floor immediately upon awakening of a morning and raising the legs to full length twenty ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... the open air; but Oriana could see him pause an instant at the threshold, and stooping, point into the cabin. The low hissing word of command that accompanied the action reached her ear. She knew what it meant and a faint shriek burst from her lips, more perhaps from horror at the demoniac cruelty of the man, than from fear. The next moment, a gigantic bloodhound, gaunt, mud-bespattered and with the froth of fury oozing from his distended jaws, plunged through the doorway and stood glaring in the ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... dragons, basilisks, sphinxes,—till at length the whole vision of fighting images crowds into one towering armorial shield, a vast emblazonry of human charities and human loveliness that have perished, but quartered heraldically with unutterable horrors of monstrous and demoniac natures, whilst over all rises, as a surmounting crest, one fair female hand, with the fore-finger pointing, in sweet, sorrowful admonition, upwards to heaven, and having power (which, without experience, I never could have believed) to awaken the pathos ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... with its mystery on the forest, and gave their demoniac look again to the trees, and rolled up out of misty hollows a huge and ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... the technical term for demoniac insiliation or possession: the idea survives in our "succubi" and "incubi." I look upon these visions often as the effects of pollutio nocturne. A modest woman for instance dreams of being possessed by some man other ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... greater. In subordinating the cure to the vision, he obtained sublimity; in placing the crowd and patient on the foreground, he gained room for the full exertion of his dramatic powers. It was not necessary that the demoniac should be represented in the moment of recovery, if its certainty could be expressed by other means. It is implied, it is placed beyond all doubt, by the glorious apparition above; it is made nearly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... bursting of a world, whereupon all that restless sea of shadows, and their bright abode, vanished suddenly; and there ensued a flood of darkness, peopled with shoaling fears, and I heard the approach of hurrying sounds, with demoniac laughter, and shouts coming as for me, nearer and louder, saying, 'Cast out! Cast out!' and it rushed up to me like an unseen army, and I fled for life before it, until I came to the extreme edge of that spiritual world, where, as I ran looking backwards for ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... not yet been adopted, for him to appear anywhere. And then he had himself tied to his chair with ropes hidden under his cloak, and spent day after day looking at his mistress' windows, quite unable to read a word or attend to conversation, raging and sobbing and howling like a demoniac, but never asking to be untied; until, at the end of a fortnight or three weeks, he was rewarded, most characteristically, by being at once delivered of all love for his lady, and inspired with the idea for ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... significance in that connection. It recurred. Several times I determined to ask the Captain what he meant us to understand by that word; but I lacked moral courage. I doubt whether in all the lethal apparatus that I saw in France I saw anything quite equal to the demoniac ingenuity of these massive guns. The proof of guns is in the shooting. These guns do not merely aim ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... and then the rush of hoofs fell away. They were cornering the stranger, no doubt, and Vic struggled to lift himself to his feet and watch until a faint sound from the dog made him look down. Bart lay with his haunches drawn up under him, his forepaws digging into the soft loam, his eyes demoniac. Instinctively Vic reached for his absent gun, and then, despairing, relaxed to his former position. The wolf-dog lowered his head to his paws and there remained with the eyes following each intake of Gregg's breath. A rattle ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... night in the latter end of October. Disguising himself in a demoniac mask, a pair of huge wings, and a forked tail, he seated himself on a ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... disease, but as a savage and a raging maniac, such as, thank God, are rare in Christian countries, though they were common among our own forefathers before they were converted to Christianity,—men like the demoniac of whom the text speaks, tormented by devils, given up to blind rage and malice against himself and all around, to lust and blasphemy, to confusion of mind and misery of body, God's image gone, and the image of the devil, ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... endure with unshaken fortitude[277] is the greatest triumph of an Indian warrior, and the highest confusion to his enemies, but often the proud spirit breaks under the pangs that rack the quivering flesh, and shouts of intolerable agony reward the demoniac ingenuity of the tormentors. ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... scene of this engagement the morning after its occurrence, and for the first time beheld the horrible evidences of the demoniac spirit of these rebel fiends in their treatment of our dead and wounded. Men were found with their brains beaten out with clubs, and the bloody weapons left by their sides and their bodies most ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... and by some demoniac possession, a desire that had been only intermittently present in Mrs Quantock's consciousness took full possession of her, a red revolutionary insurgence hoisted its banner. Why with this stupendous novelty in the shape of a ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... glittered with a demoniac light; his thin lips were tightly drawn over his sharp teeth; he was evidently expecting some proposition to murder, and he ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... the safe side, I yelled "Vite!" a while and then "Doucement" a while; and then "Doucement" and "Vite!" alternately, and mixed in a few short, simple Anglo-Saxon cusswords and prayers for dressing. But nothing I said seemed to have the least effect on that demoniac scoundrel. Without turning his head he merely shouted back something unintelligible and threw ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Besides Waldmann there was another German. This was Siebecker. Tall, slim, with yellow hair and moustache, he had some claim to good looks; his attire was quite respectable compared to that of the rest; had he not possessed a pair of restless, demoniac eyes, he might have passed for a person of tolerably fair repute, but those glaring, tiger-like orbs betrayed his true character and stamped him as a very dangerous member of the criminal fraternity. Waldmann appeared to be the leader of the coterie. The Italians wore blue blouses, ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... gardeners are feverishly addicted to early rising. Men with gardens are like those hard drinkers whose susceptibilities are hopelessly blunted. Who but a man diverted from the paths of honest feeling and natural enjoyment, possessed of a demoniac mania, lost to the peace and serenity of the virtuous and the blessed, could find pleasure amid the damps, and dews, and chills, and raw-edgedness of a garden in the early morning, absolutely find pleasure in saturated ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... himself on his manner of life and his age, acknowledged one principle [i.e., source of existence], but says that the prophecies were from an opposing spirit. And he was persuaded of the truth of this by the responses of a demoniac maiden named Philumene. But others hold to two principles, as does the mariner Marcion himself, among these are Potitus and Basiliscus. These, following the wolf of Pontus and, like him, unable to discover the divisions of things, became reckless, and ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... himself violently from the kindly clasp, he turned away from Ivan and stood for a moment mute. When he again faced round, his face was all but irrecognizable. And through the tirade that followed, this demoniac look grew more and more horrible, till Ivan felt himself overwhelmed: as much by Joseph's appearance as by his words. For the moment, the man was beyond sanity. And from the depths of his bemired soul poured fragments of that ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... was expressed by this actor did not materially differ from that which has been manifested by great tragic actors from Garrick to Booth. He embodied a demoniac scoffer who, nevertheless, is a human being. The infernal wickedness of Richard was shown to be impelled by tremendous intellect but slowly enervated and ultimately thwarted and ruined by the cumulative operation of remorse—corroding ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... the absence of larger creatures; of which in the day-time, the only audible signs are the stampede of a herd of kangaroo, or the rustle of a wallabi, or a dingo stirring the grass as it creeps to its lair. But there are the whirring of locusts, the demoniac chuckle of the laughing jack-ass, the screeching of cockatoos and parrots, the hissing of the frilled lizard, and the buzzing of innumerable insects hidden under the dense undergrowth. And then at night, the melancholy wailing of the curlews, the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... startling discovery, a man laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, and Jasper Wilde's voice, with a demoniac ring, cried in my ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... twenty-eight perhaps, thick set and powerful, tanned to the brownness of an Indian by sun, wind and rain, but the features obviously were those of the white race. It was an evil face, but a strong one. Henry felt a shiver of repulsion. He felt that something demoniac had entered the lodge, because he knew that this was Simon Girty, the terrible renegade, now fully launched upon the career that made his name infamous throughout the Ohio Valley ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... may—I feel that there is goodness in your face, and mercy in your heart. But I did see a face, one day, in the inn," he added, in a voice that gradually became quite frantic—"a face that was dark, damnable, and demoniac—oh, oh! may God of heaven ever preserve me from seeing that face again!" he exclaimed, shuddering wildly. "Open me up the shrouded graves, my friend; I will call you so notwithstanding what has happened, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... must now use the phrase military) of the demonstration made by the young gentlemen in the schoolroom. He hurried with the pitchfork in his hand, which he had been using, and appeared at the entrance of his pandemonium, almost, considering his demoniac look, in character. He made a speech, enforced by thumping the handle of the fork against the floor, which speech, though but little attended to, was marked by one singularity. He did not tell the lads to turn up any of his hard words. However, he hoped that the young gentlemen had yet ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... and he lifted in his arms the body of a child of some four or five years old. I could endure no more; I thought the voices of my own innocents cried to me for help, and in the frenzy of the moment I left the godly man, and fled like a demoniac, not ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... call, and at each name a head was jerked up in answer, and two glittering eyes flashed at Andrew—flashed, sparkled, and then became dull. The moonlight had made his pale skin a deadly white, and it was a demoniac face they saw. The silence ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... whistling spheres of light He flashes and he flames; He turns not to the left nor right, He asks them not their names; One spurn from his demoniac heel,— Away, away they fly, Where darkness might be bottled up And ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "Devils, Drugs, and Doctors," declares, "The early and Medieval Christians accepted the doctrine of the power of demons in the lives of men; they saw this power particularly in the demoniac production of diseases. They believed in miracles and especially in the miraculous healing of diseases. The demonological belief of the Christians was inherited from the doctrine of the Jews, who were believers in demons and the 'possession by the devil.' Jesus himself ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... glorious literature; the sweet and lovely creations of the souls of men long since perished, and now the inestimable heritage of humanity; all, all crushed, torn, leveled in the dust. And all that is savage, brutal, cruel, demoniac in man's nature let loose to ravage the face of the world. Oh! horrible—most horrible! The mere thought works in me like a convulsion; what must the inexpressible reality be? To these poor, suffering, hopeless, ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... world, and man, a strange animal, guided, it is true, usually by most common-place motives; but, for that reason, ready and glad at times to escape from them and their dulness and baseness; to give vent, if but for a moment, in wild freedom, to that demoniac element, which, as Goethe says, underlies his nature and all nature; and to prefer for an hour, to the normal and respectable ditch- water, a bottle of champagne or even a carouse on fire-water, let the consequences be ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... to the scaffold. What use to put a witness up, when he was shouted down, cursed at, and threatened by the Chief Justice, who bellowed and swore until the frightened burghers in Fore Street could hear him? I have heard from those who were there that day that he raved like a demoniac, and that his black eyes shone with a vivid vindictive brightness which was scarce human. The jury shrank from him as from a venomous thing when he turned his baleful glance upon them. At times, as I have been told, his sternness gave place to a still more terrible merriment, and he would lean back ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... not where the parent Demon fled; None of our spears might pierce his ancient mail, Welded with skill demoniac scale on scale. Some watery realm he wanders, and 'tis said That he is changed and bears a brighter form, And goodly sons again about him swarm; And peace, 'tis but a hollow truce I know, Now reigns ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... is purely ludicrous. Miss Corelli has seized the Theosophic thought, which in itself is far nobler and more poetic than the Miltonic, but she has not been strong enough to use it. She has fallen under the weight of her chosen theme, and the result is that her demoniac hero is at one time presented as a majestic and suffering spirit, and at another as a ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... rose on the second day the hills about us swarmed with savages, whose demoniac yells rent the air. Leonidas had his back against a rock at old Thermopylae, but our Kansas plainsmen fought ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... delicately nurtured, and knowing of danger, evil and wrong only by name and report, had first endured all that nature most abhors, and then, there where their souls had died, were slain by their brutal violators with every circumstance of most demoniac cruelty. Happy for those who, like Gracchus, foresaw the tempest and fled. These calamities have fallen chiefly upon the adherents of Antiochus: but among them, alas! were some of the noblest and most honored families of the capital. Their bodies now lie blackened ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... in the presence of Vespasian, and his sons, and his captains, and the whole multitude of his soldiers. The manner of the cure was this; he put a ring that had under the seal a root of one of those sorts mentioned by Solomon, to the nostrils of the demoniac, after which he drew out the demon through his nostrils: and when the man fell down immediately, he abjured him to return unto him no more, making still mention of Solomon, and reciting the ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... with a wild shriek of rage, and swept through them like a mist, extinguishing Washington Otis's candle as he passed, and so leaving them all in total darkness. On reaching the top of the staircase he recovered himself, and determined to give his celebrated peal of demoniac laughter. This he had on more than one occasion found extremely useful. It was said to have turned Lord Raker's wig grey in a single night, and had certainly made three of Lady Canterville's French governesses give warning ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde
... unto God by him. No case of leprosy was ever beyond the power of the Lord to cleanse. No blindness was ever too dark for him to remove. No palsy was ever too dead for him to quicken into healthy life. No fever was ever too burning for him to cool. No demoniac was ever so insane or epileptic, under the power and in the possession of even a legion of devils, but that he could have them all cast out and the possessed one sit calmly, be clothed and in his right mind. Nothing is impossible with God. The good-ground hearer brings forth fruit unto perfection ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal—these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... passengers taking leave of us. Our boxes were brought up by a couple of sailors, and after about a quarter of an hour's wait, during which time the vessel rose and fell with the swell, the craft that had hailed us loomed up slowly in the darkness, amid the excited jabber of her demoniac-looking crew. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... devil on stilts, not more than three or four inches tall, but there was no mistaking his identity. No other living thing could possess such demoniac little red-hot pin points of eyes, or be so bristly and grisly and vicious. The stilts suddenly folded flat, and the devil rushed upon his prey. The girl stepped back; her ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... wanting to make this trip with the demoniac Antazzo. It was the effects of the pink gas. Even with the misshapen guard down there in the engine room the power of his will was effective. The devil must be an Ionian, he thought. But how in the name of the sky-lane imps ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... divine Providence, they may think it philosophical enlightenment to hold that Christianity and Christendom are adequately accounted for by the idle dreams of a noble self-deceiver and the passionate hallucinations of a recovered demoniac. We persecute them not, we denounce them not, we judge them not; but we say that, unless all life be a hollow, there could have been no such miserable origin to the sole religion of the world which holds ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... boggart[obs3], banshee, loup-garou[Fr], lemures[obs3]; evil eye. merman, mermaid, merfolk[obs3]; siren; satyr, faun; manito[obs3], manitou, manitu. possession, demonic possession, diabolic possession; insanity &c.503. [in jest, in science] Maxwell's demon. [person possessed by a demon] demoniac. Adj. demonic, demonical, impish, demoniacal; fiendish, fiend-like; supernatural, weird, uncanny, unearthly, spectral; ghostly, ghost-like; elfin, elvin[obs3], elfish, elflike[obs3]; haunted; pokerish [obs3][U.S.]. possessed, possessed by a devil, possessed ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... himself that it was no time to think of the past. His business—acutely—was the present. If only he could get his hands untied! If only he could get those untied hands upon that demoniac Turk! ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... the distracted mother, rushing toward Villefort; "I kill my son? Ha, ha, ha!" and a frightful, demoniac laugh finished the sentence, which was lost in a hoarse rattle. Madame de Villefort fell at her husband's feet. He approached her. "Think of it, madame," he said; "if, on my return, justice his not been satisfied, I will denounce you with my own mouth, and arrest you with my own hands!" She listened, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... with enchanters and sorcerers,' replied Emma; 'nature is uttering a summons to thee, and—whilst a devoted wife embraces thee—protects and defends thee against demoniac powers, bids thee renounce all witchcraft, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... thought at first that they were all of common stature and costume, with the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he looked at the others, he began to see in each of them exactly what he had seen in the man by the river, a demoniac detail somewhere. That lop-sided laugh, which would suddenly disfigure the fine face of his original guide, was typical of all these types. Each man had something about him, perceived perhaps at the tenth or twentieth glance, which was not normal, and which seemed hardly human. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... infernal act we see but another instance of the demoniac hate of the slave power, arrested by the strong arm of the government, under the heaven inspired leadership of Abraham Lincoln, in its career of treason, murder and despotism; and we are admonished anew to insist upon no compromise with the infamy, and ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... was no longer on his guard, and the outlaw, profiting by the darkness, had already detached his carbine from the saddle. In another moment, beyond doubt, he would have carried into execution his demoniac purpose, had it not been for the appearance of a horseman, who was coming at full gallop along the road. Besides the horse which he rode, the horseman led behind him another, saddled and bridled. He was evidently a messenger ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... Louvre in Paris, in 1750. The same year the relics of St. Maurus were translated thence to the abbey of St. Germain-des-Prez, where they are preserved in a rich shrine.[4] An arm of this saint was with great devotion translated to mount Cassino, in the eleventh century,[5] and by its touch a demoniac was afterwards delivered, as is related by Desiderius at that time abbot of mount Cassino,[6] who was afterwards pope, under the name of Victor III. See Mabill. Annal. Bened. t. 1, l. 3 and 4; and the genuine history of the translation of the body of St. Maurus to the monastery ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... drama "Limping Hulda" ("Halte-Hulda") (1858) was a partial fulfilment of this pledge. If it is not high tragedy, in the ancient sense, it is of the stuff that tragedy is made of. Hulda is an impressive stage figure in her demoniac passion and tiger-like tenderness. Though I doubt if Bjoernson has, in this type, caught the soul of a Norse woman of the saga age, he has come much nearer to catching it than any of his predecessors. If Gudrun Osvif's Daughter, of the Laxdoela Saga, was his model, he has ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... right. Young Wesley stepped out this time with a honeyed smile, but with a new-born light in his hazel eyes—a demoniac light, lambent and almost playful. Master Randall, caressed by them, read the danger signal a thought too late. A swift and apparently reckless feint drew another of his slogging strokes, and in a flash the enemy was under his guard. Even so, for the ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... expression of sullen malice that displays itself upon the countenance of the medicine chief. It is altogether an Indian expression—that of dogged determination to die rather than yield what he has made up his mind to keep. It is a look of demoniac cunning, characteristic of men of his peculiar ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... letters, Miriam? What are they like? What is their purport? It seems to me that they would not only give a hint, but afford direct evidence against that demoniac assassin. And it seems strange to me that they were not examined, with ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... by him with a demoniac whine and he sank back onto his bench, gasping as the two cloven halves of the strip ...
— The Dark Door • Alan Edward Nourse
... lust for power, insane with illusions of personal aggrandizement. You don't believe? Listen to me, then, appreciate to what demoniac lengths he was prepared to go to ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the double discharge, the demoniac laughter of the Erie rang, and my Oneidas, retreating, hurled back insult and anathema, promising to return and annihilate every living sorcerer in the ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... battery of guns came many a time, but the reward remained unclaimed. The murderess of the forest would come out even in broad day-light and leisurely take her victims from away their companions. Nothing could circumvent her demoniac cunning. When all hopes had nearly vanished, the villagers went to Kaloo Singh, who possessed an old matchlock. At the special sanction of the Magistrate he was allowed to buy a quantity of gunpowder; the bullets he himself made by melting bits of lead. With his primitive ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... of the German movement on the path of reascent. Meantime the earliest torch-bearer to the murky literature of this great land, this crystallization of political states, was Bodmer. This man had no demoniac genius, such as the service required; but he had some taste, and, what was better, he had some sensibility. He lived among the Alps; and his reading lay among the alpine sublimities of Milton and Shakspeare. ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... feruntur), even now we never laugh so well as when Mascarille and Vadius and M. Jourdain tread the boards in the Maison de Moliere. Since those mobile dark brows of yours ceased to make men laugh, since your voice denounced the "demoniac" manner of contemporary tragedians, I take leave to think that no player has been more worthy to wear the canons of Mascarille or the gown of Vadius than M. Coquelin of the Comedie Francaise. In him you have a successor ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... my wrath. The silly fanatic repeats to me, after others, that it is not for us to judge what is reasonable and just in the great Being, that His reason is not like our reason, that His justice is not like our justice. Eh! how, you mad demoniac, do you want me to judge justice and reason otherwise than by the notions I have of them? do you want me to walk otherwise than with my feet, and to speak otherwise than with ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... Robert raised his face from his hands and looked to see if Tandakora was among them, but he caught no glimpse of the gigantic Ojibway. The French soldiers who were guarding the prisoners gazed curiously at the demoniac figures. They were of the battalions Bearn and Guienne and they had come newly from France. Plunged suddenly into the wilderness, such sights as they now beheld filled them with amazement, and often created a certain apprehension. They were not so sure that their ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... turned away, aghast with horror, and his eyes fell upon the countenance of Richard Delany, which was now lit up with demoniac joy, as ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... Even in those collisions into which she had come with him she had risen in his estimation. At Chetwynde she had shown some weakness, but in her attitude to him he had discovered and had adored her demoniac beauty. At Lausanne she had been even grander, for then she had defied his worst menaces, and driven him utterly discomfited from her presence. Such was the Hilda of his thoughts. He found her now changed from this, her lofty calm transformed ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... asked I. 'Knowing as much as I do, I may surely know more—know all. Tell me, I entreat you, madam, all that you can conjecture respecting this demoniac persecution of ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... there—and who was therefore worthy of special attention. At all events, the wealthy merchant did not appear above-board until the lapse of two weeks after leaving his native land. At the end of that period something like the ghost of him crawled on deck one rather fine day, but a demoniac squall rudely sent him below, where he remained until those charming regions of the Equatorial calms were entered. Here a bad likeness—a sort of spoiled photograph—of him again made its appearance, and lay down helplessly on a mattress, or ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... mad, Allan!" answered Menteith, astonished alike at his sudden appearance, and at the unutterable fury of his demeanour. His cheeks were livid—his eyes started from their sockets—his lips were covered with foam, and his gestures were those of a demoniac. ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... thee, united We two will together conquer These barbarians. Then since little, But a span at best, belongeth To my life, a noble vengeance Let this dagger take upon me!— But, good God! what evil impulse With demoniac instinct prompteth Thus my hand? I am a Christian, I've a soul, and share the godly Light of faith: then were it right, 'Mid a crowd of Gentile mockers, Thus the Christian faith to tarnish By an action so improper? What example would I give them By a death so sad and shocking, Save that I thus ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... of the Third division opened the flank and rear of the First division to the charge of the rebels, who now rushed on with redoubled fury and with demoniac yells, carrying everything before them. The First division fell back, but not in the disorder and confusion of the other. General Shaler, with a large part of his brigade, which held that part of the line joining the Third division, was captured while vainly striving ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... the tin cup. He drank hastily and went on. Now it was by a field hospital, ghastly sights and ghastly sounds, pine boughs set for torches. He shut his eyes in a moment's faintness. It looked a demoniac place, a smoke-wreathed platform in some Inferno circle. He met a staff officer coming up from the plain. "General Lee has ridden to the right. He is watching for McClellan's next move. There's a rumour ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... commenced an assault with all the courage and address of a practised swordsman. Thrust succeeded thrust with mortal rapidity, but the active eye of Gomez Arias foiled their deadly aim with consummate skill and dexterity. A demoniac spirit seemed to agitate Don Rodrigo, and he continued for some minutes wasting his strength in the fruitless attack, and impairing his own means of resistance. The combat was too fierce to be of long duration, and a few moments would have brought ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... by the priests, according to the white men. The evil spirits who appear in the half-darkness of these caves, leaping and screaming, goading the company to frenzy, are priests in disguise and in demoniac possession. ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... ringing voice: "A man's a man for a' that!" Afterward they sat in silence that grew more tense as the minutes passed, but it seemed that Henshaw, with demoniac cunning, had decided to prolong the agony by delaying his written order and the consequent decision of the engineer. And Harrigan, watching the suffused face of Campbell, knew that the time had come when his will would not suffice to make him follow ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... recalled the day he fell dying at the corner under the Black Stone. He saw the draped heap funereally dismal in the midst of the cloisters. How bare and poor it seemed to him now! He remembered the visages and howling of the demoniac wretches struggling to kiss the stone, though with his own kiss he had just planted it with death. How different the worship here! ... This, he thought next, was his mother's religion. And what more natural than that he should see that mother descending to the chapel in her widow's ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... troops closed. Then there was everywhere a hand-to-hand battle there was no time to load and fire; swords flashed and fell, bayonets stabbed, the royals and the Camisards took each other by the throat and hair. For an hour this demoniac fight lasted, during which Cavalier lost five hundred men and slew a thousand of the enemy. At last he won through, followed by about two hundred of his troops, and drew a long breath; but finding himself in the centre ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... once more, that little wisp of humanity that was but a few days old held now aloft, naked, in his criminal hands. His muttering, slobbering voice pronouncing the words of that demoniac consecration reached the ears of the ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... her throbbing brow against the door-post, to which she had clung for support. Her husband's words rang in her ears—"One by one shall your children be taken from you to serve my purposes!" Through the dense fog she fancied that he glared upon her in bitter hatred—his deep-set eyes flashing with demoniac fire, and his smile, now extending, now contracting, into all the varied expressions of triumphant malignity! She pressed her hand on her eyes to shut out the horrid vision, and, a prayer, a simple prayer, rose to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... even the London gamin knows a poet when he doesn't see one. Probably it rests upon the ancient tradition of oracles and sibyls, foaming at the mouth like champagne bottles. Inspiration meant originally demoniac possession, and to "modern thought" prophecy and poetry are both epileptic. "Genius is a degenerative psychosis of the epileptoid order." A large experience of poets has convinced me as little of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... before them, waited Clematis, roguishly lying in a mud-puddle in the gutter. He had run through alleys parallel to their course—and in the face of such demoniac cunning the wretched William despaired of evading his society. Indeed, there was nothing to do but to give up, and so the trio proceeded, with William unable to decide which contaminated him more, Genesis or the loyal Clematis. To his way of thinking, ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... peal of demoniac laughter, the Indian held the point of the knife close to my forehead—as if about to drive the blade into my eyes! It was but a feint to produce terror—a spectacle which this monster ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal: these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... steps. They had not gone half a block before she fell again. A wild beast could hardly have growled more savagely than did this insane man as he caught her up from the bed of snow into which she had fallen and shook her with fierce passion. A large, strong man, with an influx of demoniac, strength in every muscle, his wife was little more than a child in his hands. He could have crushed the life out of her at ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... named Stanton, who had travelled in Spain in the seventeenth century. On one night of storm, Stanton had seen carried past him the bodies of two lovers who had been killed by lightning. As he watched, a man had stepped forward, had looked calmly at the bodies, and had burst into a horrible demoniac laugh. Stanton saw the man several times, always in circumstances of horror; he learnt that his name was Melmoth. This being exercised a kind of fascination over Stanton, who searched for him far and wide. Ultimately, Stanton ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... awful shudder of unnatural evil; they are lukewarm, neither good nor bad. Their abominable love is in their own eyes a mere weakness of the flesh; there is no sense of revolt against man and nature and God; they are neither dragged on by irresistible demoniac force nor held back by the grip of conscience; they slip and slide, even like Francesca and Paolo. They pay each other sweet and mawkish compliments. The ferocious lust of Francesco Cenci is moral compared with the way in which the "trim youth" Giovanni ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Through my servant I learned of fantastic tales. The saint's direful prediction to my father had somehow got abroad, enlarging as it ran. Many simple villagers believed that an evil spirit, cursed by the gods, had reincarnated as a tiger which took various demoniac forms at night, but remained a striped animal during the day. This demon-tiger was supposed to be the one sent ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... practiser of it from being a fit organ for supernatural revelation. He never enters into such subjects. 'Tis the common uninspired tailor which he speaks of. Again the person who makes his smiles to be heard, is evidently a man under possession; a demoniac taylor. A greater hell than his own must have a hand in this. I am not certain that the cause which you advocate has much reason for triumph. You seem to me to substitute light headedness for light heartedness by a trick, or not to know the difference. I confess, a grinning ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... darkness, for not yet had the moon risen. When at length its rays fell upon the pillars of the upper gallery where Veranilda slept, he stood looking towards her chamber, and turned away at length with a wild gesture, like that of a demoniac in torment. ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... the character of the hostilities in that "debatable land." War is a bad thing always, but when it gets into a simple neighborhood, and teaches the right and duty of killing one's friends and relatives, it becomes demoniac. Down about Knoxville they practiced a better method. There it was the old game of "Beggar your Neighbor," and they denounced and "confiscated" each other industriously. Up in the poor hills they could only kill and burn, and rob the stable and smoke-house. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... his arm. They instantly set upon and beat him and, after nearly killing him, hung him to a lamppost. His body was left suspended for several hours. A fire was made underneath him, and he was literally roasted as he hung, the mob revelling in their demoniac act. Recognition of the remains, on their being recovered, was impossible; and two women, mourned for upwards of two weeks, in the case of this man, for the loss of their husbands. At the end of that time, the husband of one of the mourners, to her great joy, returned like one ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... is hallucination in these etchings, beginning with Le Stryge, and its demoniac leer, "insatiable vampire, l'eternelle luxure." That gallery of Notre Dame, with Wotan's ravens flying through the slim pillars from a dream city bathed in sinister light, is not the only striking conception of the poet-etcher. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... his quieter moods, when there was no provocation to send pistol-balls between two sailors quietly conversing, or to perform some other demoniac trick, Blackbeard would talk to Dickory and ask all manner of questions, some of which the young man answered, while some he tried not to answer. Thus it was that the pirate found out a great deal more about ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... bearded, broad-shouldered, beetle-browed, brusque bully of a brigand; this fierce, ferocious, bloodthirsty, relentless, ruthless ruffian; this hard-hearted, implacable, inexorable villain; this cruel, vengeful, vindictive, griping, grasping, scowling fiend; this demoniac miscreant, without pity, and without remorse, opened ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... it does not stop there. If the world is so pitiful, so fragile, it is not worth a tear, not worth hatred, or contempt. The only sensible course is to accept it as it is, as a nothing, an absolute contradiction, calling forth ridicule. At this point, a sense of tragedy is transformed into demoniac glee. No more is this a permanent state. The humorist is too impulsive to accept it as final. Moreover, he feels that with the world he has annihilated himself. In the phantom realm into which he has turned the world, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... thrust up their heads like beasts of prey which have long lain bound. She felt strange and homeless in her glittering life, and thought with a sort of demoniac longing of the horrible places from which ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... with the wild glare of a demoniac, "I will sit astraddle her waist, and Frank must ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... once from schoolroom's form. Instead of all this angry storm, Another might have thanked you well For saving prey from that grim cell, That hollowed den 'neath journals great, Where editors who poets flout With their demoniac laughter shout. And I have scolded you! What fate For charming dwarfs who never meant To anger Hercules! And I Have frightened you!—My chair I sent Back to the wall, and then let fly A shower of words the envious use— "Get out," I said, with hard abuse, "Leave me ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... have delighted the old poets. Its wild, demoniac laughter awakens the echoes on the solitary lakes, and its ferity and hardiness are kindred ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... and jumped to strange, inconsistent, true conclusions, as women do. He had the art of reading her face, her gestures; he had learned to listen to the tone of her voice more than to what she said. In his cups, too, he had fitful but almost demoniac inspirations ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... vaguely; it was at the man himself as he straddled in the middle of the polished floor, staring at her, that she gazed with a startled attention a face like the feeble and idiot countenance of an old sheep, with the same flattened length of nose and the same weakly demoniac touch in the curve and slack hang of the wide mouth. It was not that he was merely ugly or queer to the view; it seemed to Annette that she was suddenly in the presence of something monstrous and out of the course of Nature. His eyes, narrow and seemingly ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... he knew she laughed at him. Yes, laughed at him, for she had more than human intelligence. There was something demoniac in her cleverness, her immunity from harm, her prodigious energy, her malevolent mischief, her raillery. Actually, he had grown morbid about the beast; he had a superstitious feeling that in the end she would bring him bad luck. How ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... was not real because, in it, Eben's usually calm face was distorted into a demoniac frenzy and his voice quavered and ranted ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... combination of disastrous circumstances wrought havoc with my temper. I lost my train; my head hummed like a bumblebee with weary pain, and the elastic that held my hat to its moorings broke, so that that capering compromise between inanimate matter and demoniac possession blew half a block up street on its own account, and was brought back to me by a youthful son of Belial, who took my very last quarter as ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... manse. Indeed, they existed only in a rudimentary form even in the great Bible in the kirk (in which by some oversight a heathen binder had bound them), but Allan Welsh had rectified this by pasting them up, so that no preacher in a moment of demoniac possession might give one out. What would have happened if this had occurred in the Marrow kirk it is perhaps better only guessing. At twelve Ralph was already far on in Latin and Greek, and at thirteen he could read plain narrative Hebrew, and had ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... discovers that she knows him fully, and can be deceived by him no more. Some such hour always must come for strong decided natures irrevocably pledged—one to the service of good, and the other to the slavery of evil. The demoniac cried out, 'What have I to do with thee, Jesus of Nazareth? Art thou come to torment me before the time?' The presence of all-pitying purity and love was a torture to the soul possessed by the demon ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... glad tidings of a free salvation. He knew that Romish devotees, led astray by their priests, as were the poor blinded Jews, would call the apostles of truth liars, seducers, possessed of the devil, as Christ was constantly called a demoniac, an impostor, and finally put to ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... that fools are not always merely imbecile and obstructive; they are at times ferocious, dangerous, mad. There is in human nature what Goethe used to call a demoniac element, defying all law, and all induction; and we can, I fear, from that one cause, as easily calculate the progress of the human race, as we can calculate that of the vines upon the slopes of AEtna, with the lava ready to boil up and overwhelm them at any and every moment. Let us learn, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... and the sea high running, Steady the roar of the gale, with incessant undertone muttering, Shouts of demoniac laughter fitfully piercing and pealing, Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing, Out in the shadows there milk-white combs careering, On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... infuriated by the loss of friends, or excited by the sanguinary scenes around her, seemed possessed by a demoniac ferocity. She seized a stable-fork and assaulted one miserable victim, who lay groaning and writhing in the agony of his wounds, aggravated by the scorching beams of the sun. With a delicacy of feeling scarcely to have been expected under such circumstances, ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... things, said a man of reputed wisdom. And the time for considering the sufferings of a people or for being in anywise tender hearted, is not when a madman or a cohort of madmen are howling about your houses or your city, with knives and torches, blood in their eyes, fiery rum in their veins, demoniac rage in their hearts, and the instincts of hell in their natures. A mob has no mind, only passions. It were as idle to attempt to make it listen to reason, as to argue with a lunatic in the height ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... private devotion; and in about an hour afterwards I saw the whole camp as joyously and eagerly employed in preparing and devouring their most substantial breakfasts as if the night had been passed in dancing; and I marked many a fair but pale face, that I recognised as a demoniac of the night, simpering beside a swain, to whom she carefully administered hot coffee and eggs. The preaching saint and the howling sinner seemed alike to relish this mode ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... another, the flying overtaking and trampling upon the flying. Again and again the imperial guards endeavored to place themselves in line of battle; they were at once overpowered by the Prussian cavalry, who, intoxicated with victory, threw themselves upon them with demoniac strength. Yes, intoxicated—mad with victory, were these Prussians. With perfect indifference they saw their friends, their comrades, fall beside them; they did not mourn over them, but revenged their death tenfold upon the enemy. Those even who fell were inspired by enthusiasm ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... arch smile; and when she came to the side of the bed, she drew the curtains, and, by the light of the lamp, which she held towards its contents, she disclosed to the horror-stricken painter, sitting bolt upright in the bed, the livid and demoniac form of Vanderhausen. Schalken had hardly seen him, when he fell senseless upon the floor, where he lay until discovered, on the next morning, by persons employed in closing the passages into the ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... view from the Citadel (of course, I had to trot them up again for the sunset), my charges let themselves be led from mosque to mosque, from tomb to tomb. Some, possessed with a demoniac desire to get their money's worth of Egypt, were unable to enjoy any sight, in their nervous dread of missing some other spectacle, which people at home might ask them about. These strained their wearied intelligences to see ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... alone excepted!—which Albyn can send down from her mountains, all athirst for each other's blood, while a king and his nobles, and shouting thousands besides, attend, as at a theatre, to encourage their demoniac fury! Blows clang and blood flows, thicker, faster, redder; they rush on each other like madmen, they tear each other like wild beasts; the wounded are trodden to death amid the feet of their companions! Blood ebbs, arms become weak; but there must be no parley, no ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... about the work of preparation to meet the next American force which might be sent against them. In a body, these savages, led by Little Turtle, LeGris and Blue Jacket, proceeded to Detroit, where they "paraded the streets, uttering their demoniac scalp yelps while bearing long poles strung with the scalps ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... to a sitting posture, he threw his arms above his head, and shrieked with a demoniac fury. Presently he became a trifle calmer. Reverting to his recumbent position, resting his head upon his hand, he eyed me steadily; then asked me a question which struck me as being, under the circumstances, more than ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... divinities whom crime gratified and suffering pleased. Hence the number of impious practices performed in the dark, practices the horror of which is equaled only by their absurdity: preparing beverages that disturbed the senses and impaired the intellect; mixing subtle poisons extracted from demoniac plants and corpses already in a state of putridity;[78] immolating children in order to read the future in their quivering entrails or to conjure up ghosts. All the satanic refinement that a perverted imagination in ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... pair of wicked-looking eyes that fairly blazed with fury as, catching sight of me, it suddenly halted, glaring at me, emitting a low, angry, hissing sound, and clashing its formidable jaws together in what looked like an access of perfectly demoniac ferocity. Struck motionless for the moment, in sheer amazement, I quickly recovered myself and, believing that the thing was about to spring at my face and inflict a possibly fatal bite, I raised my cutlass and, with a slashing ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... fired his fatal shot the Indians were so infuriated, that, setting up their demoniac yells, they plunged down the banks of the stream, determined ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... me; I reasoned against the feeling, and strove more strenuously than I had ever done before; I even made a solemn vow not to give way to the temptation, but I believe nothing less than chains, and those strong ones, could have restrained me. The demoniac influence, for I can call it nothing else, at length prevailed; it compelled me to rise, to dress myself, to descend the stairs, to unbolt the door, and to go forth; it drove me to the foot of ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... stone; in the sympathetic pages created by feminine intuition he dominates the machine. When the heroine takes into her own hands the right of the individual to a second chance for happiness," the Colonel declaimed with a demoniac grin, "she turns to experience with such a one perfect love, as the honoured wife of a splendid and prosperous man and the mother of ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... it, and winds demoniac May howl their menaces, and hail descend: Yet it will bear with them, serenely, steadfastly, Not even scornfully, and ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... another sound which made the lady gasp and tremble, and caused me to grind my teeth with rage. It was a long, drawn-out sigh, the moan of a man in agony of flesh or spirit. It was Newman's voice. Mingling with it, and following it, came the low, demoniac chuckle ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... cypress Met in a dusky arch, and trailing mosses in midair Waved like banners that hang on the walls of ancient cathedrals. Deathlike the silence seemed, and unbroken, save by the herons Home to their roosts in the cedar-trees returning at sunset, Or by the owl, as he greeted the moon with demoniac laughter. Lovely the moonlight was as it glanced and gleamed on the water, Gleamed on the columns of cypress and cedar sustaining the arches, Down through whose broken vaults it fell as through chinks in a ruin. Dreamlike, and indistinct, and strange were all things around ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... began, and was just about to tell him that Freedham was an unwholesome creature who had mysterious fits like a demoniac, when I remembered my promise of silence: so I went on lamely: "You will tell me one ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... years the popular idol. He died there on the 30th of December 1832. Ludwig Devrient was equally great in comedy and tragedy. Falstaff, Franz Moor, Shylock, King Lear and Richard II. were among his best parts. Karl von Holtei in his Reminiscences has given a graphic picture of him and the "demoniac fascination" of his acting. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... duellist. Never had any one less vocation for the spiritual duties of an ecclesiastic; but, being a churchman, he would be an illustrious actor on the ecclesiastical stage. There was something demoniac in his audacity, and with the spirit of turbulence and intrigue was united a certain power of self-restraint. When fallen, he still tried to be magnificent, though in disgrace: he would resign his archbishopric, pay his enormous ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... but, doubtless, upon that sweet creature his love must have settled, who suggested, in her soft, relenting voice, a penitence in me that, alas! had not dawned, saying, "Yes; but perhaps he will not do so any more." Thinking, as I ran, of her beauty, I felt that this jealous demoniac must fancy himself justified in committing seven times seven murders upon me, if he should have it in his power. But, thank Heaven, if jealousy can run six miles an hour, there are other passions—as, for instance, panic—that can run, upon occasion, six and a half; so, as I had the start of ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... as her name might have informed you; and as for her eyes, I consider them, or used to do so, of course—for her injured nation have been long expelled from Alexandria by your fanatic tribe—as altogether divine and demoniac, let the base imagination of monks call them what ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... no doubt, and Vic struggled to lift himself to his feet and watch until a faint sound from the dog made him look down. Bart lay with his haunches drawn up under him, his forepaws digging into the soft loam, his eyes demoniac. Instinctively Vic reached for his absent gun, and then, despairing, relaxed to his former position. The wolf-dog lowered his head to his paws and there remained with the eyes following each intake of Gregg's breath. A rattle of ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... night! To know that death was feasting in that blackness; to feel that vigilance was of no avail; to turn away convulsed from the iron push of the demoniac force which for the time seemed to have taken the place of an atmosphere. Smash! Rattle. Then a wild whistling; a many lashes, that flapped and cracked; then the fall of the spar, and the deep, quick sigh from ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... proposition I decidedly objected, although Couttet was right, as it turned out; for in another hour the storm, which had not entirely ceased at any time, whipped itself into renewed fury, and before noon the wind was howling and shrieking with demoniac energy, and flinging gritty snow and ice in blinding clouds against the hut, which, situated on a ridge, was completely exposed. Fortunately it is strongly built and solidly anchored. While I entertained no reasonable doubt of its security, yet when ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... farmer, boy and heifer do manage to reach the home village, where the farmer, who is riding in his carriage, stops at the bank and tells the boy to be "boss and all hands" and go on alone with the heifer. This is terrible. Night is at hand, the demoniac beast is wilder than ever, and the boy knows that, though palpitating with fatigue through all his frame, there are the chores at home yet for him to do. Well, it is then he determines to go on a whaling-voyage or to go and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... accomplished their sacred duties without any discovery of the impropriety of their conduct. It is true they encountered in their course a patrol of the civic guard; but the representatives of law and order, forming probably their own conclusions as to the significance of the demoniac apparition, are said to have prudently taken to ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... the work of preparation to meet the next American force which might be sent against them. In a body, these savages, led by Little Turtle, LeGris and Blue Jacket, proceeded to Detroit, where they "paraded the streets, uttering their demoniac scalp yelps while bearing long poles strung with the scalps of many ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... my agonies! A richer tint of crimson diffused itself over the pictured horrors of blood. I panted! I gasped for breath! There could be no doubt of the design of my tormentors—oh! most unrelenting! oh! most demoniac of men! I shrank from the glowing metal to the centre of the cell. Amid the thought of the fiery destruction that impended, the idea of the coolness of the well came over my soul like balm. I rushed to its deadly brink. I threw my straining vision below. The glare from the enkindled roof illumined ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... locked and the windows barred, when suddenly the sound of demoniac cries roused the slumberers ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... whistle of the air-brakes, the harsh, sustained note of the shrieking wheel-flanges shearing the inner edges of the railheads on the curves, and the stuttering roar of the 266's safety-valve were continuous; a deafening medley of sounds multiplied a hundred-fold by the demoniac ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... Kaaba was a relative. He recalled the day he fell dying at the corner under the Black Stone. He saw the draped heap funereally dismal in the midst of the cloisters. How bare and poor it seemed to him now! He remembered the visages and howling of the demoniac wretches struggling to kiss the stone, though with his own kiss he had just planted it with death. How different the worship here! ... This, he thought next, was his mother's religion. And what more natural than that he ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... this savage king of the forest stands there at bay, there is a something grand and majestic about him, something of barbaric and unconquerable pride and courage, despite his demoniac and ogre-like ugliness; but, I am afraid, no one sees anything but a big fierce pig, who must be slaughtered as speedily and cleverly ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... that defeat is inevitable death by torture. It is a thousandfold better to fall beneath the arrow, the tomahawk or the war-club, than to be consumed alive amid the jeers and tortures of yelling Indians inspired with demoniac instincts. Thus with the trapper it was always either ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... from out the waves' abyss— A monstrous little man with a black hide, Scarce four feet high, yet he was not remiss, But dash'd the waves about—and then he cried, With a demoniac laugh, or rather hiss, "Die, mortal, die!" and John sank down and died, The which, when Jeannie saw, she only sigh'd, "I come, my John, I come, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... bowed down by old age or infirmities; this man, with the wonderous countenance, of which no one could decide if it was the face of a satyr or a demi- god; whose eyes flashed with heavenly inspiration at one moment, and in the next glowed with demoniac fire; whose lips were distorted by the most frightful grimaces or relaxed into the most ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... of dramatic writing, in its succession of striking situations, and its cumulative interest. From beginning to end, however, Mr. Heavysege makes no attempt to produce a dramatic effect. It is true that he has availed himself of the phrase "an evil spirit from the Lord," to introduce a demoniac element, but, singularly enough, the demons seem to appear and to act unwillingly, and manifest great relief when they are allowed to retire from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... murmurings such as she had never heard before, and that made her start in terror; the stifled hum of marching men, the neighing and snorting of steeds, the clash of arms, hoarse words of command, given in guttural accents; an evil dream of a demoniac crew, a witch's sabbat, in the depths of those unholy shades. Suddenly a single cannon-shot rang out, ear-rending, adding fresh terror to the dead silence that succeeded it. It froze her very marrow; what could it mean? ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... Here is the scene, or a sample of it, ten minutes after. Among the wounded officers in the ambulances were one, a lieutenant of regulars, and another of higher rank. These two were dragg'd out on the ground on their backs, and were now surrounded by the guerillas, a demoniac crowd, each member of which was stabbing them in different parts of their bodies. One of the officers had his feet pinn'd firmly to the ground by bayonets stuck through them and thrust into the ground. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the point at issue nor yet the tide of victory or loss. Only they knew that back and forth the torches flared, the war-drums boomed and rattled, the yelling, slaughtering, demoniac hordes surged in a swirl of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... go on the stage. These wild paroxysms, half-pathetic, half-demoniac, tell splendidly with the public: a little dash of blasphemy now, and you are perfect. The best society would run wild about you—ladies, most of all, especially if they knew exactly who and what ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... up with a wild shriek of rage, and swept through them like a mist, extinguishing Washington Otis's candle as he passed, and so leaving them all in total darkness. On reaching the top of the staircase he recovered himself, and determined to give his celebrated peal of demoniac laughter. This he had on more than one occasion found extremely useful. It was said to have turned Lord Raker's wig gray in a single night, and had certainly made three of Lady Canterville's French governesses give warning before their ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... still the same tendency to people earth, air, and water with beings of its own creation. The rivers had their Undines, the ocean its Nixes, the caverns their Gnomes, and the woods their Sprites. Christianity did not deny the existence of these supernatural races, but it invested them with a demoniac character. They were not regarded as immortal, although permitted to attain an age far beyond that granted to mankind, and they were denied the hope of salvation, unless purchased by a union with creatures of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... beauty, her superiority to all human weakness, whether of love or of remorse. Even in those collisions into which she had come with him she had risen in his estimation. At Chetwynde she had shown some weakness, but in her attitude to him he had discovered and had adored her demoniac beauty. At Lausanne she had been even grander, for then she had defied his worst menaces, and driven him utterly discomfited from her presence. Such was the Hilda of his thoughts. He found her now changed from this, her lofty calm ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... rodomontades. The Reformation, he told the people, had ruined everything. But fine times were coming. The Catholics would soon be uppermost. The heretics should pay for all. Raving and blaspheming incessantly, like a demoniac, he came to the court. [52] As soon as he was there, he allied himself closely with Castelmaine, Dover, and Albeville. These men called with one voice for war on the constitution of the Church and the State. They told their master that he owed it to his religion and to the dignity ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of frail build, but he now seemed to be possessed of a demoniac's strength, and my arms failed to hold him. I felt his hands upon my neck ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... any sort, whether for the bread that perishes or for His kingdom and righteousness, will never become so absorbing but that in it we may have our hearts in heaven, and the silent hour of communion with Him will never be so prolonged as to neglect outward duties. There was a demoniac boy in the plain, and therefore it was impossible to build tabernacles on the Mount of Transfiguration. But the disciples that had not climbed the Mount were all impotent to cast out the demoniac ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... whether pure or sinful. As, the fear and love of the Creator, who preserves and bountifully blesses his creatures; and flowing from this is love to all his creation. He who wantonly destroys life in order that he may glut a demoniac propensity with the agonizing death struggle, is a practical atheist. The Christian will cherish and promote the happiness of all; he dares only to take away life to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... leave of us. Our boxes were brought up by a couple of sailors, and after about a quarter of an hour's wait, during which time the vessel rose and fell with the swell, the craft that had hailed us loomed up slowly in the darkness, amid the excited jabber of her demoniac-looking crew. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... words necessary to inform Agnes what had happened. But, collecting my faculties, I was about to speak, when suddenly, with the force of the hind leg of a mule, I was pushed away from the aperture, and the demoniac Italian clapped his great mouth to the end of the tube and roared through it a volume of oaths and supplications. I attempted to thrust aside the wretched being, but I might as well have tried to move the ice barrier itself. He had perceived that some one outside was talking ...
— My Terminal Moraine - 1892 • Frank E. Stockton
... together, and bursting from the calm mastery with which they had repressed their feelings during the solemnity, gave way to frantic exultation. They were all drunk; they sang, they shouted, and their barouche was driven like a whirlwind through the forest. I can conceive nothing descriptive of the demoniac revelry of that flight, but scraps of the dead man's own song of Faust, Mephistophiles, and Ignis Fatuus, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... her of his friendship for her husband, and had a costly monument erected for him in a foreign land. The great prince fared similarly with most of his intimates. Magic as was his power to attract, he had demoniac faculties for repelling. But if any one is disposed to blame the man for this, let him be told that hardly another king in history has so unsparingly disclosed his most intimate soul-life to ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... least decorous plays of Fletcher with those contained in the volume before us will see how much the profligacy which follows a period of overstrained austerity goes beyond the profligacy which precedes such a period. The nation resembled the demoniac in the New Testament. The Puritans boasted that the unclean spirit was cast out. The house was empty, swept, and garnished; and for a time the expelled tenant wandered through dry places seeking rest and finding none. But the force of the exorcism was spent. The ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... its rays, for there was in Dead Man's Diamond a certain sinister look and a boding of things to happen that are better not mentioned here. The face of the spider-idol was lit by that fatal gem; there was no other light. In spite of his shocking limbs and that demoniac body, his face was serene ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... blood was flowing from his nostrils and lips. He paid no heed to this, however, for there was murder in his heart, and already his plans of revenge were being formed—plans which fiends incarnate might well shrink from, and from the execution of which even demoniac natures ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... scarred and wounded. Hardly had these dissensions ended in 1494, when the Wars of Religion commenced under Charles IX, and Gascony was again one of the most terrible fields of battle. Here the demoniac enthusiasm of both sides exceeded even the terrible exhibitions of Languedoc. The royal family of Navarre was openly Protestant and contributed more than any others to the military organisations of their Faith. Jeanne ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... the Pi Utahs; the fearful cries of the demoniac Indians; the shrieks of the females and children; the rapid and effective fire of the rifles; the stampede of the oxen; their recovery and the final repulse, the Pi Utahs being routed after a loss of thirty-six killed and wounded, while the Pikes lose but ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... The Indians, uttering their demoniac yells, followed as fast. They were rendered more furious, that their hated foe was likely to escape them. The latter were indebted to us for having put them upon the alert. But for that circumstance, the Indians would have charged them while dismounted, and far different might ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... doorway through which she had just fled stood a fearsome apparition. It was her uncle, that man so given to carnage among the beasts and birds of the field, that unerring, that unfailing marksman. He was in his shirt sleeves, his arms bared to his elbows. Upon his face was a fixed grin of demoniac determination—the look of one who smiles even as he slays his prey. And in his hands—ah, dreadful final detail of this dreadful picture—he held outstretched, extended and presented in my general direction, a double-barrelled fowling piece, enormous ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... on in a tumultuous mass: they sway, they bend, they leap, they shout. The other half of Pandemonium has turned out, and surrounding ears are deafened by the demoniac chorus. ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... himself as he straddled in the middle of the polished floor, staring at her, that she gazed with a startled attention a face like the feeble and idiot countenance of an old sheep, with the same flattened length of nose and the same weakly demoniac touch in the curve and slack hang of the wide mouth. It was not that he was merely ugly or queer to the view; it seemed to Annette that she was suddenly in the presence of something monstrous and out of the course of ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... of his haunting devils. Extricating himself violently from the kindly clasp, he turned away from Ivan and stood for a moment mute. When he again faced round, his face was all but irrecognizable. And through the tirade that followed, this demoniac look grew more and more horrible, till Ivan felt himself overwhelmed: as much by Joseph's appearance as by his words. For the moment, the man was beyond sanity. And from the depths of his bemired soul poured fragments of that understanding that ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... and again without further provocation rising into infernal sublimity, shook the roof of Tammany. Sex—the sex of women—was the subject of this infernal scorn; and the great Democratic gathering, with yells and shrieks and demoniac, deafening howls, consigned the memorial of Susan B. Anthony ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... and its pageantry, it has also revolting hideousness and demoniac woe. The young, the noble, the sanguine were writhing there in agony. Bullets respect not beauty. They tear out the eye, and shatter the jaw, and rend the cheek, and transform the human face divine into an aspect upon which one can not gaze but ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... Further, my lords, I could not acknowledge culpability for the acts and words of others at a distance of three thousand miles—others whom I had never seen, of whom I had never heard, and with whom I never had had communication. I could not admit that the demoniac atrocities, described as Fenian principles by the constabulary-spy Talbot, ever had my sanction or approval or the sanction or approval of ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... war, insane and demoniac, to fill the world with tears and woe. As we read the record of these horrid outrages which through all the centuries have desolated this globe, it would seem that there must be a vein of insanity as well as of depravity, in ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... with the excitement of the chase. Uttering discordant ear-piercing yells, they rushed onward, impatient to witness the struggles of the multitudes of victims certain to be precipitated into a hole, towards which they were rushing heedless of all else but fear. Every demoniac passion existing in earthly life appeared to be fully aroused within the souls of their pursuers. They seemed frantic with rage at the escape of the elephants, though these would undoubtedly have defeated ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... act we see but another instance of the demoniac hate of the slave power, arrested by the strong arm of the government, under the heaven inspired leadership of Abraham Lincoln, in its career of treason, murder and despotism; and we are admonished anew to insist upon no compromise with the infamy, and upon the condign punishment ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... distorted and horribly suffused; then he lurched to the window and leaned, choking, from the lattice. Suddenly his bowed shoulders began to heave, and I heard him laugh in dreadful manner and when he turned his look was demoniac. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... seized the Theosophic thought, which in itself is far nobler and more poetic than the Miltonic, but she has not been strong enough to use it. She has fallen under the weight of her chosen theme, and the result is that her demoniac hero is at one time presented as a majestic and suffering spirit, and at another ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... went through the complete dramatic course,—tragedies of jealousy, pantomimes of rapture, and farces of parting. There were billets on one side and the other; hints of a fatal destiny, and a ruthless, lynx-eyed tyrant, who held a demoniac grasp over the Duchess by means of certain secrets which he knew: there were regrets that we had not known each other sooner: why were we brought out of our convent and sacrificed to Monsieur le Duc? There ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... both poems of the fictions of pagan mythology. This is an objection as old as Miltonic criticism. The objection came from those readers who had no difficulty in realising the biblical scenes, or in accepting demoniac agency, but who found their imagination repelled by the introduction of the gods of Greece or Rome. It is not that the biblical heaven and the Greek Olympus are incongruous, but it is that the unreal is blended with the real, in ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... precious unworldly studies, those cloister thoughts picturing ecclesiastical and demoniac scenes, which have prepared me for the present folly," he said to himself. His unsuspected, and hitherto unexpressed, mysticism, which had determined his choice of subject for his last work was now sending him out, in disorder, to seek new pains ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... a Sick Bed—yet Praising God Terribly in Earnest That is the Price of my Soul "That is Your Fault" The Arrows of Conviction The Artist and the Beggar The Bible The Blind Beggar The Blood The Cross and Crown The Cruel Mother—Hypothetical The Czar and the Soldier The Demoniac The Drunken Father and his Praying Child The Dying Boy The Dying Child The Eleventh Commandment The Faithful Aged Woman The Faithful London Lady The Faithful Missionary The Family that Hooted at Moody The Fettered Bird Freed The Finest Looking Little ...
— Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations - Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangilist • Dwight L. Moody
... believed that they saved souls by the stake and the rack and thumbscrew. There were men and women who did believe it with rigid honesty. There were men and women who, believing in other forms, died in torture for their belief. There is no God Who would ask such demoniac sacrifice. We have come to clearer ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of course, was excellent fooling, intended to dispel the brooding horror which had suddenly descended upon Forbes since it was borne in on him that the demoniac wrath wreaked on Mrs. Lester was now directed with equal ferocity against ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... people, conquered the old gods. The Tuatha De Danann became the Daoine-sidhe, a fairy folk, still occasionally called by their old name, just as individual fairy kings or queens bear the names of the ancient gods. The euhemerists gave the Fomorians a monstrous and demoniac character, which they did not always give to the Tuatha De Danann; in this continuing the old tradition that Fomorians were hostile and the Tuatha De Danann beneficent ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... joyously and eagerly employed in preparing and devouring their most substantial breakfasts as if the night had been passed in dancing; and I marked many a fair but pale face, that I recognised as a demoniac of the night, simpering beside a swain, to whom she carefully administered hot coffee and eggs. The preaching saint and the howling sinner seemed alike to relish this mode ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... a prey to that delirium of the mind which is known to every man of genius, that will which is independent of the will, "the ineffable enigma of the world and life" which Goethe calls "the demoniac," against which he was always armed, though it always ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... idyllic pleasure in the simple charms of Nature, especially in the monastery garden of the Carlovingian time, contrasts strikingly with the tone of these very mundane vagantes clerici, for whom Nature had not only long been absorbed and freed from all demoniac influence, but peopled by the charming forms of the old mythic poems, and made for the joy and profit of men, in the widest and naivest sense of ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... pertaining to national welfare, however keen his grievance, fancied or real, his regard for the honor of the government and the maintenance of its power, induces him to throw his head-gear in air, out-yell the lustiest lung in the crowd and attest his enthusiasm by demoniac courage on the field ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... delighted the old poets. Its wild, demoniac laughter awakens the echoes on the solitary lakes, and its ferity and hardiness are ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... his men joined these barbarians, merry in their pleasant sports. Such are the joys of peace, so different from the miseries of demoniac war. At length the festivities were closed, and all began to prepare to retire ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... have written, but I can see that I give you no real insight into the demoniac cleverness of Cullingworth. His views upon medicine were most revolutionary, but I daresay that if things fulfil their promise I may have a good deal to say about them in the sequel. With his brilliant and unusual gifts, his fine athletic record, his strange way of dressing ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... bread under his arm. They instantly set upon and beat him and, after nearly killing him, hung him to a lamppost. His body was left suspended for several hours. A fire was made underneath him, and he was literally roasted as he hung, the mob revelling in their demoniac act. Recognition of the remains, on their being recovered, was impossible; and two women, mourned for upwards of two weeks, in the case of this man, for the loss of their husbands. At the end of that time, the husband ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... fifteenth century, that is to say at the time of Gilles de Rais—to go no further back—Satanism had assumed the proportions that you know. In the sixteenth it was worse yet. No need to remind you, I think, of the demoniac pactions of Catherine de Medici and of the Valois, of the trial of the monk Jean de Vaulx, of the investigations of the Sprengers and the Lancres and those learned inquisitors who had thousands of necromancers and sorcerers roasted ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... stepped out in full view of the startled party. The Band-lu did not run away as had some of the lower orders of Caspakians at the sound of the rifle. Instead, the moment they saw me, they let out a series of demoniac war-cries, and raising their spears above their heads, ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... thronged the sidewalks, the newsboys chanted the evening papers. Then all at once the street fell quiet; hardly a soul was in sight; the sidewalks were deserted. It was supper hour. Evening began; and one by one a multitude of lights, from the demoniac glare of the druggists' windows to the dazzling blue whiteness of the electric globes, grew thick from street corner to street corner. Once more the street was crowded. Now there was no thought but for amusement. The cable cars were loaded with theatre-goers—men ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... groan. They would show the blood-tipped spear. They would depict the demoniac grin of ecclesiastics who gladly heard perjurers testify against the best Friend the world ever had, but who declined to hear anything in His defence. They would reproduce the spectacle of silence amid wrong; a silence with not a word of protest, or vindication, ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... on her way stayed in Vienna, studying under Professor Hellmer. One year later, at the Vienna Spring Exhibition, she exhibited her 'Die Hexe.' Here is no traditional witch, though the broomstick on which she will ride through the air is en evidence. She is a demoniac being, knowing her own power, and full of devilish instinct. The marble is full of life, and one seems to feel the warmth of her delicate, powerfully chiselled, though soft ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... Hulda" ("Halte-Hulda") (1858) was a partial fulfilment of this pledge. If it is not high tragedy, in the ancient sense, it is of the stuff that tragedy is made of. Hulda is an impressive stage figure in her demoniac passion and tiger-like tenderness. Though I doubt if Bjoernson has, in this type, caught the soul of a Norse woman of the saga age, he has come much nearer to catching it than any of his predecessors. If Gudrun Osvif's Daughter, of the Laxdoela Saga, was his model, he has modernized ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... raised his fist, which still clutched the chunk of quartz, and shook it at the pillar of dust. His throat was dry and no words came, to carry the burden of his hate, but as he stumbled along his eyes were on the dust-cloud and he choked out gusty oaths. A demoniac strength took possession of his limbs and once more he broke into a run, the muttered oaths grew louder and gave way to savage shouts and then to delirious babblings; and when he awoke he was groveling in a sand-wash and the sun had sunk ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... gave a great leap into the air—then fell, motionless. They crowded around him. The fiendish look was gone—the demoniac laughter stilled. ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... throbbing brow against the door-post, to which she had clung for support. Her husband's words rang in her ears—"One by one shall your children be taken from you to serve my purposes!" Through the dense fog she fancied that he glared upon her in bitter hatred—his deep-set eyes flashing with demoniac fire, and his smile, now extending, now contracting, into all the varied expressions of triumphant malignity! She pressed her hand on her eyes to shut out the horrid vision, and, a prayer, a simple prayer, rose to her lips. Like oil upon the troubled waters, it soothed and composed her spirit. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... his own playing—although eminent in his profession—"that they were only fiddlers." Paganini's playing was most unearthly and inhuman. I never heard anything like the tones he produced from his violin—the sounds now crashing as if a demoniac was tearing and straining at the strings, now melting away with the softest and tenderest harmonies. He kept his hearers enthralled by his magical music, and astonished by his wonderful execution. I shall never forget hearing him play the "Walpurgis Nacht," when he appeared ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... incense made him cough and sputter; the lights and singing raised the very devil within him. His cries drowned the prayers. He frightened his conductress by the redness of his face. He ruined the red cross with ejected matter. You would have taken him for an infant demoniac. Mother Suspiciosa, though annoyed, was encouraged. She looked upon this as an evident testimony to little Ginx's value. The devil and St. Michael were contending for his body. At length he was baptized, and carried out. Credat Judaeus. He instantly sank into ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... the moon risen. When at length its rays fell upon the pillars of the upper gallery where Veranilda slept, he stood looking towards her chamber, and turned away at length with a wild gesture, like that of a demoniac in torment. ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... returned Miss Brewer, passionately. "The blind, besotted dupes of your demoniac wickedness! Paulina Durski ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... hand while he lay dreaming about the thirty-sixth hour of his struggle. His eyes were closed for less than a minute by the watch, but he awoke in a horrible agony of fear from what seemed to have been a year-long siege of some colossal and demoniac Vicksburg. ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... how my heart goes out to you! Joyfully indeed are we preparing for our move to Chantepleurs, where we can rest from the comedy of the Rue de Bac and of the Paris drawing-rooms. Having just read your letter again, I feel that I cannot better describe this demoniac paradise than by saying that no woman of fashion in Paris can possibly be ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... travelled in Spain in the seventeenth century. On one night of storm, Stanton had seen carried past him the bodies of two lovers who had been killed by lightning. As he watched, a man had stepped forward, had looked calmly at the bodies, and had burst into a horrible demoniac laugh. Stanton saw the man several times, always in circumstances of horror; he learnt that his name was Melmoth. This being exercised a kind of fascination over Stanton, who searched for him far and wide. Ultimately, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... with a demoniac light; his thin lips were tightly drawn over his sharp teeth; he was evidently expecting some proposition to murder, and ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... a little, and trying to keep the car straight by feeling rather than sight. When I had accomplished these feats, and had not brought the car to grief (even though we passed several vehicles, and I was drawn by a demoniac influence to swerve towards each one as if it had been the loadstone to my magnet, or the candle to my moth), Jack finally consented to grant my request. He told me clearly what to do, and I did it, or some inward servant of myself did, whenever the master was within an ace of losing ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... demoniac; he lay glaring and writhing on the deck, without attempting to rise. Cowed, as they supposed he was, from his attitude, the men, rejoiced at seeing him thus humbled, left him; after rating him, in sailor style, for a cannibal ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... pitiful, so fragile, it is not worth a tear, not worth hatred, or contempt. The only sensible course is to accept it as it is, as a nothing, an absolute contradiction, calling forth ridicule. At this point, a sense of tragedy is transformed into demoniac glee. No more is this a permanent state. The humorist is too impulsive to accept it as final. Moreover, he feels that with the world he has annihilated himself. In the phantom realm into which he has turned the world, his laughter ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... for she was of the age of twelve years (chap. 5:42); the multitudes that are to be fed sit down in ranks by hundreds and by fifties (chap. 6:40), etc. As examples of vivid description may be named the account of the demoniac (chap. 5:2-20), and the lunatic. Chap. 9:14-27. It is not necessary to assume that Mark was himself a disciple of our Lord. If, as ancient tradition asserts, he was the disciple and interpreter of Peter ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... fearfully tragic than the one between Romola and Tito, when he finally discovers that she knows him fully, and can be deceived by him no more. Some such hour always must come for strong decided natures irrevocably pledged—one to the service of good, and the other to the slavery of evil. The demoniac cried out, 'What have I to do with thee, Jesus of Nazareth? Art thou come to torment me before the time?' The presence of all-pitying purity and love was a torture to the soul possessed by the demon ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... precautions, the heavy craft pitched stern foremost into the sea. She sank like a stone, and with her went a number of Chileans; their despairing yells, coming up from the churning froth, seemed to be a signal for the demoniac passions latent in the crew to burst forth again, this time in a consuming blaze that would not be stayed. Each man fought blindly for himself, heedless now of all restrictions. The knowledge of this latest disaster spread with amazing rapidity. Up from the saloon came ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... Goethe does in his Erlking. Uhland's ballads and romances vary greatly in quality; none, perhaps, has the grandiose dramatic and ethical note of Schiller's The Cranes of Ibycus and none the power of revealing the hidden forces of nature in anthropomorphic and demoniac form as Goethe does in his Erlking and The Fisher. But Uhland's poems are more varied in treatment, even though he cannot be said to have brought any new forms and themes into German verse. There is much talk of poets and poetry in his verse and much of the tender melancholy ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... repeats to me, after others, that it is not for us to judge what is reasonable and just in the great Being, that His reason is not like our reason, that His justice is not like our justice. Eh! how, you mad demoniac, do you want me to judge justice and reason otherwise than by the notions I have of them? do you want me to walk otherwise than with my feet, and to speak ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... ruthless foot down trodden!— I will die with thee, united We two will together conquer These barbarians. Then since little, But a span at best, belongeth To my life, a noble vengeance Let this dagger take upon me!— But, good God! what evil impulse With demoniac instinct prompteth Thus my hand? I am a Christian, I've a soul, and share the godly Light of faith: then were it right, 'Mid a crowd of Gentile mockers, Thus the Christian faith to tarnish By an action so improper? What example would I give them By a death so sad and shocking, Save ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... "he turns a somersault and alights on his feet. The European is as far behind the Asiatic in horsemanship as in everything else which is manly and not demoniac. The use of the sword, for example. The dragoon has a straight weapon, with which he is taught to cut or thrust. If he does the former, and the blow is not parried, he may knock his opponent down, but he seldom inflicts a dangerous wound. If he gives point, he may kill ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... rubbed its shaggy sides against us in the most companionable way. In the flickering light of my lamp I caught sight of its long ears waving over me—I don't believe I had seen three donkeys before in my life; there were none where I came from—and heard that demoniac shriek, and I verily believe I thought the evil one had come for me in person. I know ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... seat in his eagerness to get beyond my range, for I had him point blank, full in the left eye; and several persons starting to their feet, exclaimed that I must be crazy. So I was at that time; for otherwise I know not how to account for my demoniac feelings, of which I was afterward heartily ashamed, as I ought to have been, indeed; and much ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... on the part of Le Gros was now explained:—he was not acting for himself, but as the deputy of the others! it was plain they had given him orders, and from the attitude in which they stood, and the demoniac expression already noticed, I felt satisfied that some new ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... "Memoires," II., 34. On the 7th of November, 1793, in the great scene of the abjurations, Gregoire alone resisted, declaring: "I remain a bishop; I invoke freedom of worship." "Outcries burst forth to stifle my voice the pitch of which I raised proportionately.... A demoniac scene occurred, worthy of Milton.... I declare that in making this speech I thought I was pronouncing sentence of death on myself." For several days, emissaries were sent to him, either deputies or bandits, to try and make him retract. On the 11th of November a placard posted throughout ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... for minutes that seemed hours to the horrified nurse—round and round with all the strength and speed the young man could put forth—round and round until the room was a blur before his throbbing eyes, until his expression became fully as demoniac as Nora had been fancying it. Just as she was recovering from her paralysis of horror and was about to fly shrieking from the room she was halted by a sound that made her draw in air until her bosom swelled as if it would burst its gingham prison. She craned eagerly toward ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... one was on his lips, was interrupted by a violent cursing. The train was well under way, and the baggage-man had sat down to a small table with his back toward them. He had leaped to his feet now, his face furious, and with another demoniac curse he gave the coal skuttle a kick that sent it with a bang to the far end of the car. The table was ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... connection. It recurred. Several times I determined to ask the Captain what he meant us to understand by that word; but I lacked moral courage. I doubt whether in all the lethal apparatus that I saw in France I saw anything quite equal to the demoniac ingenuity of these massive guns. The proof of guns is in the shooting. These guns do not merely aim at Taubes: ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... lying face downward in the cold, damp woods. Men of no compassion, unreached by ordinary sympathies, they felt the furtive skulking back, step by step, along ways commonplace enough in the daytime, but begirt with terrors now and full of demoniac suggestion. ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... most despotic tyranny that ever cursed the earth; that fire and faggot, confiscation and torture have been its favorite weapons; that no age, or sex or condition has been exempt from its inhuman butcheries and demoniac lusts; that it exterminated the Albigenses and Waldenses; that it caused the gutters of Paris to run with human blood on St. Bartholomew's day; that it lighted the fires of Smithfield; that through the instrumentality of Tyrconnel ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... prophets had ignorance and dread. The gods were not then. There were demons only, more exactly there were diabolized expressions invented to denominate natural phenomena and whatever else perturbed. It was in the evolution of the demoniac that the divine appeared. Through one of time's unmeasurable gaps there floated the idea that perhaps the phenomena that alarmed were but the unconscious agents of superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistibly a dramatization of nature began in which the gods were ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... forty-three avoirdupois pounds forcibly upon my lungs. He repeated this operation several times before I fully recovered from the shock conveyed by his combined impudence and weight; but pain finally brought my senses back, and with a wild plunge I unseated my demoniac riders and gained a clear space in the ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... in these etchings, beginning with Le Stryge, and its demoniac leer, "insatiable vampire, l'eternelle luxure." That gallery of Notre Dame, with Wotan's ravens flying through the slim pillars from a dream city bathed in sinister light, is not the only striking conception of the poet-etcher. The grip of reality is shown in such plates as Tourelle, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... stood at the window of the palace trembling in every nerve. Hardly had the first tones of the alarm-bell fallen upon his ear when the report of a musket was heard, and the first victim fell. The sound seemed to animate to frenzy the demoniac Catharine, while it almost froze the blood in the veins of the young monarch, and he passionately called out for the massacre to be stopped. It was too late. The train was fired, and could not be extinguished. The signal passed with the rapidity of sound ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal—these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... a beneficent deity, as a result of the growth of civilization, he had also a demoniac form, and had to be propitiated. The worshippers of the fish god retained ancient modes of thought ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... animals—griffins, dragons, basilisks, sphinxes—till at length the whole vision of fighting images crowds into one towering armorial shield, a vast emblazonry of human charities and human loveliness that have perished, but quartered heraldically with unutterable and demoniac natures, whilst over all rises, as a surmounting crest, one fair female hand, with the forefinger pointing, in sweet, sorrowful admonition, upwards to heaven, where is sculptured the eternal writing which proclaims the frailty of ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... bringing to them the glad tidings of a free salvation. He knew that Romish devotees, led astray by their priests, as were the poor blinded Jews, would call the apostles of truth liars, seducers, possessed of the devil, as Christ was constantly called a demoniac, an impostor, and finally put to death by ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... and winds demoniac May howl their menaces, and hail descend: Yet it will bear with them, serenely, steadfastly, Not even scornfully, and ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... need a little stir and amusement. I think, perhaps, after all, the most remarkable being exhibited in the reptile house is Tyrrell. I don't think much of the Indian snake-charmers now. See a cobra raise its head and flatten out its neck till it looks like a demoniac flounder set on end; keep in mind that a bite means death in a few minutes; presently you will feel yourself possessed with a certain respect for a snake-charmer who tootles on a flute while the thing crawls about him. But Tyrrell comes along, without a flute—without ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
