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More "Ill-starred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some had died; the voice in my throat, the sight of my eyes, the tears that now sprang there, the whole man of me, was fashioned of French earth and born of a French mother; I had been tended and caressed by a succession of the daughters of France, the fairest, the most ill-starred; I had fought and conquered shoulder to shoulder with her sons. A soldier, a noble, of the proudest and bravest race in Europe, it had been left to the prattle of a hobbledehoy lackey in an English chaise to recall me to the consciousness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Zeitgeist; and, inasmuch as no task can be more distasteful than to attack the teaching of a man whose genius and character one recognizes among the formative influences of one's life, I will leave the upshot of this ill-starred endeavour to be summarized by ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... tales of the old Camaralzaman, Ayoub, the Slave of Love, or the Calendars, Blind-eyed and ill-starred royal scions, Charm us in age as they ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Egypt; his brother Jehoiakim, a puppet set up by Egypt, knocked down by Babylon; his son Jehoiachin, who reigned eleven years and was carried captive to Babylon; and last, Zedekiah, Josiah's son, under whom the ruin of the kingdom was completed. The genealogy does not mention the names of these ill-starred 'brethren,' partly because it traces the line of descent through 'Jeconias' or Jehoiachin, partly because it despises them too much. A line that begins with David and ends with such a quartet! This was what ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... grieve over the loss of his letter-of-credit, left on board the ill-starred Fleuron, for he was exchanged, after a few weeks, and was sent back to England with his crew. This was in 1745. He lost no time in reporting to the owners of the Mars, and so well did they think of him, that in a short while they sent him upon another privateering venture aboard ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... having studied architecture conceived the idea of combining his two arts by the construction of a grand theatre on the site of the present Haymarket Opera House. The enterprise was doomed to be one of the many failures from which that ill-starred spot has become remarkable, and Vanbrugh after vainly attempting to support his undertaking by the exertion of all his dramatic power, determined to quit literature altogether, and devoted himself to the more ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... hills abound; Ke and e in marshy ground. Each can boast its proper place, Where it grows for use or grace. I can only sing the woe, Which, ill-starred, I undergo. ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... record! Add to it the ill-starred influence he had always attempted to exert over Johnny and Jane (he had, even in Oxford days, brought out their worst side) his quarrels with Oliver in the press, his unconcealed hatred of what he was pleased to call 'Potterism' (he was president of the foolish ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... of the members. The "Black Watch" included Mozambique and Zambesi boys, Shangaans and others from among the blackest races of South Africa. The greatest disaster sustained by this company was when a party of thirty-three of them dashed into the Boer lines on an ill-starred attempt to loot cattle from the enemy's herds. After their night's dash out of the garrison they got to a hiding place for the day, but they were followed there and were surrounded by a Boer commando, which peppered them with a maxim and a big gun. They fought up to the last ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... ill-starred colony and the conjectural refuge of its remnants among the Croatan Indians of Virginia—as Raleigh named the whole region, including the present North Carolina—fittingly completes the history of Sir Walter's American enterprise. The failure of the colony ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... Mexico, I met him in New Orleans, in company with that ill-starred man, General Shields, of Illinois, and who, Irishman as he was, fell fighting to fasten upon the South the fetters she now wears. We had not conversed ten minutes before, taking my arm, he walked apart from his visitors ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... the thought acted like a sedative. He grew strangely calm; he almost experienced pleasure and comfort under its influence. Why struggle? Nothing could go right with him. Nothing. He was cursed—cursed with an ill-starred fortune. This sort of thing was his fate. Fate. That was it. Why struggle ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... the field. For how could I prepare the charms without my parents' knowledge? What story can I tell them? What trick, what cunning device for aid can I find? If I see him alone, apart from his comrades, shall I greet him? Ill-starred that I am! I cannot hope that I should rest from my sorrows even though he perished; then will evil come to me when he is bereft of life. Perish all shame, perish all glory; may he, saved by my effort, go scatheless wherever his heart desires. ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... and corresponded with Giuseppe Mazzini and other members of the Giovane Italia (Young Italy), a patriotic and revolutionary secret society. During the year 1843 the air was full of conspiracies, and various ill-starred attempts at rising against the Italian despots were made. The Bandieras began to make propaganda among the officers and men of the Austrian navy, nearly all Italians, and actually planned to seize a warship and bombard Messina. But having ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... 'warn the city—warn Lothian and Fife—saddle our Spanish barb, and bid French Paris see our petronel be charged. Better to die at the head of our brave Scotsmen, like our grandfather at Flodden, than of a broken heart like our ill-starred father.' 'Be patient—be composed, dearest sovereign,' said Catherine; and then addressing Lady Fleming angrily, she added, 'How could you say aught that reminded her of her husband?' The word reached the ear of the unhappy princess who caught it ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... story of the unfortunate Andre, who had been taken prisoner hard by; and was universally known by the name of Major Andre's tree. The common people regarded it with a mixture of respect and superstition, partly out of sympathy for the fate of its ill-starred namesake, and partly from the tales of strange sights, and doleful ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... thou ill-starred midnight ranger! dark, forlorn, mysterious stranger! Wildered wanderer from the eternal lightning on Time's stormy shore! Tell us of that world of wonder—of that famed unfading "Yonder!" Rend—oh rend the veil asunder! Let our doubts and fears be ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... Gentlemen, Justice is a machine that, when some one has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself. Is this young man to be ground to pieces under this machine for an act which at the worst was one of weakness? Is he to become a member of the luckless crews that man those dark, ill-starred ships called prisons? Is that to be his voyage-from which so few return? Or is he to have another chance, to be still looked on as one who has gone a little astray, but who will come back? I urge you, gentlemen, do not ruin this young man! For, as a result of those four minutes, ruin, utter ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that this mob, like that of the week before, would, after making an uproar for a day or two, disappear and leave the community in quiet, they were destined to disappointment. The popular exasperation and apprehension which the Squire's ill-starred attempt to regain authority had produced, gave to the elements of anarchy in the village a new cohesive force and impulse, while, thanks to the news of the spread and success of the rebellion elsewhere, the lawless were encouraged by entire confidence ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... me! often enough (replied Socrates). In the event, for instance, of some ill-starred expedition or of some disastrous voyage or other incident of the sort, of which veritably there are enough to spare—when those who owing to their health and strength take a part in the affair are lost; whilst those who were left behind—as hors de combat, on account of ill-health of other ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... a poor, unfortunate maiden, dumb of tongue and mind," he answered. "In my country we would call her mute and senseless, but here among the Kemi they revere such ill-starred creatures, thinking that because they act strangely, and look not upon the world as others do, their souls must be turned within to the contemplation of hidden and spiritual things. They think such ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... intended them for the transport of timber from the immense forests that crowned the Limousin hills. Unluckily, their beds were so thickly bestrewn with rock that neither of them was navigable for any considerable part of its long course through the ill-starred province. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... fellow had taken advantage of the passing of Polish refugees, who had at that time already been driven over the frontier and were making their way through Germany to France, to disguise himself as an ill-starred champion of freedom, and he subsequently found his way to the Foreign Legion in Algeria. On the way home from the gathering, Degelow, whom I was to meet in a few weeks, proposed a 'truce.' This was a device which, if it was accepted, as it was in this case, enabled the future ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... piquant and impossible stories, which convulsed us until I felt sure that the irritated Mr. Frost must cherish a secret but lively desire to punch his head. Possibly Brian was the only one who thoroughly enjoyed himself at that ill-starred dinner, for he is keen on the scent of a precarious situation which is liable to involve everybody in total collapse. In this instance he seemed to snuff the battle from afar and stirred up all the slumbering elements of discord with unctuous satisfaction; and if it had not been for the wicked ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... Mr. Hayes had caused the banns to be published at the town of Worcester; judging rightly that in a great town they would cause no such remark as in a solitary village, and thither he conducted his lady. O ill-starred John Hayes! whither do the dark Fates lead you? O foolish Doctor Dobbs, to forget that young people ought to honour their parents, and to yield to silly Mrs. Dobbs's ardent propensity ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the good AEneas, "the award Is fixt, and no man shall the palm withhold. Yet be it mine to cheer a friend ill-starred." He spake, and Salius with a gift consoled, A Moorish lion's hide, with claws of gold And shaggy hair. Then Nisus with a frown: "If gifts so great a vanquished man may hold, If falls win pity, and defeat renown, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... in the same chamber, and nearly at the same hour, in which we first presented to the reader Boabdil el Chico, that we are again admitted to the presence of that ill-starred monarch. He was not alone. His favourite slave, Amine, reclined upon the ottomans, gazing with anxious love upon his thoughtful countenance, as he leant against the glittering wall by the side of the casement, gazing abstractedly on ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... at him, Pickwick,' cried Wardle, as he rushed at the ill-starred youth. 'He was bribed by that scoundrel, Jingle, to put me on a wrong scent, by telling a cock-and-bull story of my sister and your friend Tupman!' (Here Mr. Tupman sank into a chair.) 'Let me get ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... which he would follow when the conflict began. He was certain that he would be chosen to lead his people, for he had led them in numerous native wars, in the conflict in 1881, and later when Jameson made his ill-starred entry into the Transvaal. Cronje was a man who loved to be amid the quietude of his farm, but he was in the cities often enough to realise that war was the only probable solution of the differences between the Uitlanders and the Boers, and ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... palaces, temples, and hospitals, and the seared and mutilated corpses of the dead who have been crushed by the falling walls or burnt in the flames. Then the invading hosts, stricken with dismay, fly from this fated and ill-starred city to darken the snows of Lithuania with their bodies; and of five hundred thousand men—the flower of French chivalry—but forty thousand cross the Beresina to tell the tale! Surely Moscow, like Jerusalem, hath "wept sore in ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... and the friendship of Ferdinand. The last was by far the most baneful: his fortunes withered under it. He was looked upon as the enemy of his faith and of his country. The cities shut their gates against him; the people cursed him; even the scanty band of cavaliers who had hitherto followed his ill-starred banner began to desert him, for he had not wherewithal to reward nor even to support them. His spirits sank with his fortune, and he feared that in a little time he should not have a spot of earth whereon to plant his standard nor an adherent ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... surface were quickly made. Up and up went the M. N. 1, leaving the ill-starred Pandora to whatever else fate had in store ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... confines of the noisome cellars beneath the building where the inquisition had taken place. There in lonely solitude did I languish; and at intervals I heard through the thick walls, from the adjoining keep, the dismal, despairing accents of my ill-starred fellow countryman bewailingly uplifted. True, he had wilfully deceived me. Most certainly he told me those cannon ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... picture to admit me to a sight of it. I confessed my impatience for the interval to pass; for my interest was now fully awakened and very lively;—so well-informed and so polished a gentleman, so accomplished and so fluent, so ill-starred and sad, so every way ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... hung Hoppner's miniature of that lovely and ill-starred girl, with her soft dark eyes, and her curls all astray from beneath her little blue turban. And the Duke was telling Mr. Oover her story—how she had left her home for Humphrey Greddon when she was but sixteen, and he an undergraduate at Christ Church; and had lived for him in a cottage at ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... the countries of their toils from the deck of the ship "Kalyan" as they steamed out of Alexandria harbour on March 3rd, 1917. There were many present who had accompanied the battalion on their venture from this same harbour nearly two years before, to try their fortunes upon ill-starred Gallipoli, and I have no doubt they wondered what these new experiences would bring them. One thing is certain, however, and that is no one imagined we should be compelled to continue our wanderings for full ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... funeral, Dr. Merrick called in for the last time at her lodgings. He brought in his hand a legal-looking paper, which he had found in searching among Alan's effects, for he had carried them off to his hotel, leaving not even a memento of her ill-starred love to Herminia. "This may interest you," he said dryly. "You will see at once it is ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... Scandinavian legend. Sigurd discovered Brynhild, encased in a complete armor, lying in a death-like sleep, to which she had been condemned by Odin. Sigurd woke her by opening her corselet, fell in love with her, promised to marry her, but deserted her for Gudrun. This ill-starred union was the cause of an Iliad ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... France to Turin, to Frankfort, to Metz, to Coblentz, and to London. Many of those salons which Mr. Morris and Calvert had frequented were already closed, hostesses and guests alike in exile and poverty. Alarm succeeded alarm in Paris until, with the ill-starred feast to the Regiment of Flanders and the march on Versailles, alarm rose to panic. The incredible folly and stupidity which precipitated these events aroused Mr. Morris's contempt and indignation ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... mother, her good-natured father, and the monkey-tricks of her little brothers; and she told all this with a simple grace and innocent frankness not a little alluring. Yet I was pretty near the truth; for, without being aware of it, she uniformly concluded with the one favourite theme: her ill-starred love. Still I went on acting the part of the UNAMIABLE, in the hope that she would take a spite against me. But whether from inadvertency or design, she would not take the hint, and I was at last fairly compelled to give up by sitting down contented to let her ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... Courier-Journal stood alone, having no party or organized following. At length it was joined on the Northern side by Greeley. Then Schurz raised his mighty voice. Then came the great liberal movement of 1871-72, with its brilliant but ill-starred campaign and its tragic finale; and then there set in what, for a ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... weren't; but I'm speaking to you! Take that, for being howling young cads, both of you!" and he knocked their two ill-starred heads together with a vigour which made the epithet "howling" painfully accurate. "Now beg Riddell's pardon at once!" ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... to us The rich gift of thy genius gave, to thee Nought else but misery. Ill-starred Torquato, whom thy song, So sweet, could not console, Nor melt the ice, to which The genial current of thy soul Was turned, by private envy, princely hate; And then, by Love abandoned, life's last dream! To thee, nought real seemed but nothingness, The world a dreary wilderness. ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... it originally, had been the very first thing to perish aboard our ill-starred ship; the officers, I am afraid, were not much better than poor Ready made them out (thanks to Bendigo and Ballarat), and little had been done in true ship-shape style all night. All hands had taken their spell at everything as the fancy seized them; not a bell had been struck from first to last; ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... was a time of war far surpassing in bloodshed and ruin anything witnessed in the Islands before or since. For the first time the Maoris used firearms. Probably a fourth of their race perished in this ill-starred epoch. Hongi, the chief of the Ngapuhi tribe, before referred to, is usually spoken of as the first to introduce the musket into the tribal wars. This was not so. His tribe, as the owners of the Bay of Islands ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... Napoleon, previously to his ill-starred expedition to Boulogne, had left instructions for his furniture and jewellery to be sold; and sold they accordingly were by Christie and Manson on 21 Aug., and Mr. Bernal and other virtuosi went to the sale to see what Napoleonic relics they could pick up. Among these were two silver cups, ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... phrased the heroine as Annabellee?—falling thus into the trap the poet had so recklessly laid for us, as he had laid one for our interminable droning, not less, in the other pieces I have named. So far from misprizing our ill-starred magician we acclaimed him surely at every turn; he lay upon our tables and resounded in our mouths, while we communed to satiety, even for boyish appetites, over the thrill of his choicest pages. Don't I just recognise the ghost of a dim memory of a children's ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... Kriloff or Tourgueneff, can believe; but the comic journals themselves have fallen far too much into the hands of the Imperial University, whose literary style is a combination of the humor of the cider-cellars with the verbal fluency of Billingsgate. Under such auspices the ill-starred periodicals naturally oscillate between insipid propriety and labored coarseness. For a month or two the talented contributors go smoothly on in their career of untranslatable pleasantry, till some special atrocity calls forth the fatherly admonition of the police. Immediately a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... time-using diversions of extravagance, with a knowledge of wines, and a bent for selecting the proper kind of buttons for the coat in which to attend a cock-fight, he was the man for his circle and age. A Brummel? Hardly that. There was nothing of the ill-starred Beau in his appearance. His influence was good, as Brummel's was occasionally good. You recall the saying of the Duchess of York to the effect that it was Brummel's influence which more or less reformed the manners of the smart young men who were notorious for their excesses, their self-assertiveness, ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... by relating dismal stories of omens and apparitions, and then groans piteously outside her door and causes the mysterious music of an AEolian harp to sound upon the midnight air. Celinda sleeps, too, like the ill-starred heroine of the novel of terror, "at the end of a long gallery, scarce within hearing of any other inhabited part of the house."[28] The scene in Count Fathom, in which Renaldo, at midnight, visits, as he thinks, the tomb of Monimia, is surrounded with circumstances ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Jane's rapidly failing strength; and the probability of her death, which a year ago would have been entirely endurable as an avenue to wealth, now appeared the direst catastrophe that had yet threatened her ill-starred life. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... unutterable indignation, rose slowly into the air, followed by the bewildered Owl, who had not had time to explain the boy's 'new departure' to himself on scientific principles. It was not till they were fully half a mile from the ill-starred spot that the Owl opened his beak to murmur, with an air of long-suffering melancholy but scientific delight, ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... Ill-starred and ill-timed as this marriage seemed to be, it was the one bright and beautiful thing about the life of Poe. He remained passionately devoted to the youthful wife as long as she lived; and it is thought by those who ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... the old belief in planetary influence is found in our language in the words "jovial," "mercurial," "saturnine," "martial," "disastrous," and "ill-starred." ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... considered as sufficient ground, by many of the ablest jurists and theologians of Spain, for selling them as slaves. On the return of the caravels, the Adelantado dispatched three hundred Indian prisoners, and three caciques. These formed the ill-starred cargoes about which Nino had made such absurd vaunting, as though the ships were laden with treasure; and which had caused such mortification, ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... EUGENIE, sister of the preceding, ex-queen of Holland; wife of Louis Bonaparte, an ill-starred union; mother of Napoleon III., the youngest ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... there a priest who moves amid the altars Ruthless in deed and word, Fears not the presence of his god, nor falters Lest Right at last be heard? If such there be, oh, let some doom be given Meet for his ill-starred pride, Who will not gain his gain where Justice is, Who will not hold his lips from blasphemies, Who hurls rash hands amid the things of heaven ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... fallen, might, in the advent of the same adverse political power in the Government, be objected to, unless at the same time a similar concession should be granted to the misled and deceived masses of the South, who had with reckless daring been forced into the service of the ill-starred Confederacy. It was therefore expected that Congress would, so far as organic law could attain that end, guard the sacredness of the public debt and the equal sacredness of the National pensions, and that to do this effectively it should be provided that no recognition ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Lavinia descended on the ill-starred young gentleman with a crushing supposition that at all events it was no business of his. This disposed of Mr Sampson in a melancholy retirement of spirit, until the cherub arrived, whose amazement at the lovely woman's occupation ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... once more entered the French service; was sent with a party who vainly attempted to relieve Chandarnagar, and was one of the small party who followed Law when that officer took command of those, who refused to share in the surrender of the place to the British. After the capture of his ill-starred chief, Reinhardt (whom we shall in future designate by his Indian sobriquet of " Sumroo," or Sombre) took service under Gregory, or Gurjin Khan, Mir ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... Foremost among them all Andromache led their wailing as she clasped the head of mighty Hector in her embrace. "Husband," she cried, "you have died young, and leave me in your house a widow; he of whom we are the ill-starred parents is still a mere child, and I fear he may not reach manhood. Ere he can do so our city will be razed and overthrown, for you who watched over it are no more—you who were its saviour, the guardian of our wives and children. Our women ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... accident. "The purse must have fallen on the floor," said he to himself, "or I left it lying on my chair. Or perhaps I have it about me—I am so absent-minded!" He searched himself with hurried movements, but did not find the ill-starred purse. His memory cruelly retraced the fatal truth, minute by minute. He distinctly saw the purse lying on the green cloth; but then, doubtful no longer, he excused Adelaide, telling himself that persons in misfortune should not ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... whither, outcast, fated At fortune's whim, A soul unholy, steep['e]d in Its mortal sin, Against the God who had created Me like to Him. 65 I am that soul ill-starred, unblest, That by nature shone in gleaming Robe of white, Of angel's beauty once possessed, Yea, loveliest, Like a ray refulgent streaming Filled with light. 66 And by my ill-omened fate, My atrocious devilries, Sins ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... thus one of fear—fear lest these events provoke disturbances in Germany itself. In Austria-Hungary, part of our telegram was accepted and, so far as we can tell, has been the source of information for all Europe upon the ill-starred attempt of Kerensky to recover his power ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... projection could not be discerned from below, Karl, standing on the topmost round of the last ladder that had been planted, saw at once, with the eye of an engineer, that the difficulty was insurmountable. It would be as easy for them to fly, is to stand a ladder upon that ill-starred ledge; and with this conviction fully impressed upon his mind, the young plant-hunter returned slowly and sorrowfully to the ground to communicate the disagreeable ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... forward restlessly. I did not need my sight to pace the poop of my ill-starred first command with perfect assurance. Every square foot of her decks was impressed indelibly on my brain, to the very grain and knots of the planks. Yet, all of a sudden, I fell clean over something, landing full length on my hands ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... from Virginia any intimations of hostility to the Union; she has weighed the alternative of success, and she sees now, every sensible man in the South sees, that the greatest calamity that could have befallen the South would have been the ascendency of this ill-starred Confederacy. [Applause.] Because that Confederacy carried to the utmost extreme, to the reductio ad absurdum, the right of secession, carried in its bosom the seed of its own destruction, and even in the progress ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Horrocks devised, when pursuing Kepler's theory of planetary motion,—his intuition being, that the motions of the spheres might be represented by terrestrial movements. We may mention the observation which the ill-starred Horrocks makes, in a letter,[1] on the occasion of this experiment, as one of the sublimities of Science:—"It appears to me, however, that I have fallen upon the true theory, and that it admits of being illustrated by natural movements on the surface of the earth; for Nature ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... even in the prompter's hole [Note: On the Italian stage the prompter rises from a hole in the floor behind the foot-lights, and is hidden from the audience merely by a canvas shade.] places were sought to witness the admired work.... And whilst they wept over the ill-starred love of Imelda, and all hearts palpitated in the touching situation of the drama,—where the public and the personal interests so wonderfully blended, and the vengeance of a people mingled with that of a man outraged in the most sacred affections of ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... reign were fulsome flatteries, allusive to the Maiden Queen; such as—the moon, with the words, Quid sine te coelum? (What would Heaven be without thee?) or, Venus seated on a cloud, with, Salva, me Domina! (Save me, O lady!) The best of the time was worn by the impetuous and ill-starred Essex, to signify his grief on one of the occasions when he had lost the queen's favour. It represented merely a sable field, surrounded by the words. Par nulla figura dolori (Grief cannot be painted.) The 'English Bayard,' Sir ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... personal friends of that ill-starred Prince all escaped. One of them, the noble-minded Count Santorre di Santa Rosa, died fighting for liberty in Greece. In the miseries of exile and poverty he had never lost faith in his country, but fearlessly maintained that 'the emancipation of Italy was an event of the nineteenth century.' ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Confederacy, scarred with the wounds he took at Bull Run, looking back over a wasted life to the youth he sacrificed in that ill-starred cause, remembers now as he remembers nothing else of the whole year of revolution the last plea of Douglas for the old party, the old Constitution, ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... return together was something more than a coincidence, and that Lucien and Louise, loving with all their hearts, had been separated by a double treason. Pique, very likely, had brought about this ill-starred match with Chatelet. And a reaction set in ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... An ill-starred town in England seems to have enjoyed so unenviable a reputation for some centuries for the folly and stupidity of its inhabitants, that I am induced to send you the following Query (with the reasons on which it is founded) in the hope that some of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... through its translation by Chaucer and the Senechal d'Anjou) upon the subject of the loves of Troilus and Cressida and to be in this instance used by him as a synonym for an unhappy lover, whom no rebuffs, no treachery can divert from his ill-starred passion. Such a lover may well be said to be in love with strife, and that the Filostrato of the Decameron sufficiently answers to this description we learn later ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... But all too weak his seer-craft proved To stay the rushing sword. Three servants next the weapon found Stretched 'mid their armor on the ground: Then Remus' charioteer he spies Beneath the coursers as he lies, And lops his downdropt head; The ill-starred master next he leaves, A headless trunk, that gasps and heaves: Forth spouts the blood from every vein, And deluges with crimson rain, Green earth and broidered bed. Then Lamyrus and Lamus died, Serranus, too, in youth's fair pride: That night had seen him long at play: Now by the dream-god tamed ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... have been relieved by comic incidents like those of Knight's escape from his guard; but there is very little record of anything except sorrow and suffering, danger and death. Certainly in the captivity of John Slover, another of Crawford's ill-starred and ill-willed crew of marauders, there were few gleams of happier chance to distinguish it from most histories of the sort. He had been captured by the Indians when a boy of eight years, and carried from his home in Virginia to their town of Sandusky, ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... It was an ill-starred moment for that honest boast. There came a thumping of feet in the hall. The man who burst in was flushed and ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... word; shared his sports and hunting; tried to regain a moment of his lost youth that he might be a comrade as well as a father. At times a strange mood took him, when he, Eudemius the proud, became humbly grateful that Marius should be willing to mate with the ill-starred daughter of his house. In general they accepted each other on terms of complete equality. Each was receiving and conferring a favor; there was no ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... This ill-starred expedition was the last sent from St. Domingo against the buccaneers, who thenceforward became the masters and lord proprietaries of Tortuga. Nor were the buccaneers longer exclusively composed of adventurous Frenchmen. Visions of golden cities in the New World had been flitting before ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... niggard bounty of a cold and selfish relative. Slowly recovering from a severe wound which he had received in the wars of Lombardy, and disgusted with the ingratitude of the prince he served, the ill-starred Francesco was at first rejoiced to obtain any refuge from the storms of a tempestuous world; and the unceasing efforts of his young and affectionate sister to reconcile him to a bitter lot were not wholly unavailing. Summer had spread her richest treasures upon the lap of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... house to which fate has led him, where, ill-starred and unhappy like himself, this other child of Waelse's lives, in subjection to Hunding, her lord, who has come by her through some obscure commerce, and to whom she is no more than ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... turned to hatred in the heart of her brilliant and erratic son. In his short and disastrous sojourn in Boston, when his fortunes were at their lowest ebb, it is not likely that his thought once turned to the old house on Haskins, now Carver, Street, where his ill-starred life began. ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... practically embarrassed. The embarrassment, the distress, the agony, were all for my unhappy father at home in Muskegon, struggling for life and fortune against untoward chances, returning at night, from a day of ill-starred shifts and ventures, to read and perhaps to weep over that last harsh letter from his only child, to which he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reached the Potomac, a short distance above Harper's Ferry. Here we were shown the little round house where John Brown concealed his guns and "pikes" prior to his famous raid three years before. This was his rendezvous on the night before his ill-starred expedition descended upon the State of Virginia and the South, in an insane effort to free the slaves. Our division was headed by the Fourteenth Connecticut, and as we approached the river opposite Harper's Ferry its fine band struck up the then new and popular air, "John Brown's Body," ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... again puzzled certain members of the household; and De Forrest, to his disgust, learned that while he slept she had again been with Hemstead. He resolved on sleepless vigilance till the prize was secured, and mentally cursed the ill-starred visit to the country over ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... step to the overthrow of all New England. A land force was to descend on Albany, proceeding by way of the Richelieu, Lake Champlain, and the Hudson, while two frigates were to assail New York from the sea. The naval project, however, was so feeble and uncertain, so ill-starred, that adverse winds on the Atlantic brought it to ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... footsteps in a westerly direction, carefully avoiding an approach to the sea, lest his troops should rise in mutiny, send for the ships, and escape from the ill-starred enterprise. This certainly indicates, under the circumstances, an unsound, if not a deranged, mind. For four days the troops toiled along through a dismal region, uninhabited, and encumbered with tangled ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... despair! Long wretchedly astray on the face of the earth, and now imprisoned! That gracious, ill-starred creature shut in a dungeon as a criminal, and given up to fearful torments! To this has it come! to this!—Treacherous, contemptible spirit, and thou hast concealed it from me!—Stand, then,—stand! Roll ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... and writing the books which are still carefully studied by every young man who wishes to make himself a master of our law. In private they had perpetual squabbles, and they quarrelled with equal virulence and indecency before the world. The matrimonial settlement of their only and ill-starred daughter was the occasion of an outbreak on the part of husband and wife, that not only furnished diversion for courtiers but agitated the council table. Of all the comic scenes connected with that unseemly fracas, not the least laughable and characteristic ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... him in Narrower and narrower, till at length ye force him— 55 Yes, ye,—ye force him, in his desperation, To set fire to his prison. Father! Father! That never can end well—it cannot—will not! And let it be decided as it may, I see with boding heart the near approach 60 Of an ill-starred unblest catastrophe. For this great Monarch-spirit, if he fall, Will drag a world into the ruin with him. And as a ship (that midway on the ocean Takes fire) at once, and with a thunder-burst 65 Explodes, and with itself shoots ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... gradually being revealed; and the enemies of the Church in Italy learn with an astonishment, which is perhaps feigned, that in that glorious army of martyrs of 1799 more than one ecclesiastic of high rank suffered in the ill-starred and ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... discussion of this odd cab-incident the fact that Fenwick "would have written down the cab-driver's number on his shirt-sleeve," was on the watch for a recollection by one of the three that a something had been found written on the shirt-cuff Fenwick was electrocuted in. The ill-starred shrewdness of Scotland Yard, by detecting a mere date in that something, had quite thrown it out of gear as an item of evidence. By the way, did no one ever ask why should any man, being of sound mind, write the current date on his shirt-sleeve? ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... against us, as always in this ill-starred voyage. I, watching from my sand dune, saw a second figure emerge from the arroyo's mouth. It appeared to stagger as though hurt; and every eight or ten paces it stopped and rested in a bent-over position. The murky light was too dim for ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... country. The English vulgar regarded her as a sorceress—the French as an inspired heroine; while the wise on both sides considered her as neither the one nor the other, but a tool used by the celebrated Dunois to play the part which he assigned her. The Duke of Bedford, when the ill-starred Jeanne fell into his hands, took away her life in order to stigmatize her memory with sorcery and to destroy the reputation she had acquired among the French. The mean recurrence to such a charge against such a person had no more success than ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... forth. Such things were occasionally picked up on Nepenthe; nobody knew to whom they belonged. The Cave of Mercury, on being searched, yielded nothing but a trouser button, apparently of English manufacture. Enquiries were also made as to when the ill-starred gentleman had last been seen, and where. Finally, the judge drew up a list, a fairly long list, of all the suspicious characters on the place with a view to placing them under lock and key, in expectation ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... and be hanged to you!" roared Black Dan, with an oath. Whereupon, dragged over the chests, the ill-starred fellow is ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... forlorn condition of a man who is very clever, who never makes a bad joke, who is such "good company," such a "jolly dog," such a "happy creature" and "fortunate fellow"! Oh the calamity of possessing a romantic country-seat and fine horses!—the ill-starred luck of a person who is always finding a moon that shines beautifully, a sun that is never too hot, long walks that cannot be too long, and drives that are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... scud away like a hare and beat a disordered retreat. Ha, ha, ha, what fun! I say, Polonius, you really are unlucky, each time you come up against Bibi Daubrecq! For it was you who were hiding behind that curtain, wasn't it, my ill-starred Polonius?" ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... silence of the husband, the desperate rally of the suffering wife to shield him from the impending wrath, until at last she was borne away insensible in Hunsdon's strong arms, all followed in quick succession, and Amy's ill-starred career approached its close, in the last interview with ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... forsake your tempting fiend, for such is ambition to the female heart. Yes, you will spend the springtime of your life chasing a painted specter, and go down to a premature grave, disappointed and miserable. Poor child, it needs no prophetic vision to predict your ill-starred career! Already the consuming fever has begun its march. In far-distant lands, I shall have no tidings of you; but none will be needed. Perhaps when I travel home to die your feverish dream will have ended; ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... right and left. Desgrais, chief of the police, by a crafty ruse, penetrated into the secret circle of La Voisin, and she, with a crowd of associates, perished in the fires of the Place de Greve. She left an ill-starred daughter, Marie Exili, to the blank charity of the streets of Paris, and the possession of many of the frightful secrets of her mother and of her ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... other, the gap between things and thought is got over by knowledge. How the connection is brought about may not be known; but, that there is the connection between real things and true thoughts, no one can well deny. It is an ill-starred perversity which leads men to deny such a connection, merely because they have not found ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... suitor now gave the news to his lady-love. Those two horrid men had at last been found guilty, and punished with all the severity of the law. "Poor fellows," said Lady Eustace,—"poor Mr. Benjamin! Those ill-starred jewels have been almost as unkind ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... haunt the Chateau are those of the six pretty daughters of Louis and Marie Leczinska. There are the ill-starred twins, Elizabeth and Henrietta: Madame Elizabeth, who never lost the love of her old home, and, though married, before entering her teens, to the Infanta of Spain, retired, after a life of disappointment, ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... driving there had been added yet another memorial to a Craven who had died tragically and far from home; a record of disastrous calamity that, beginning four hundred years before with the Elizabethan gallant, had relentlessly pursued an ill-starred family. The church lay on the outskirts of the village and close to the south ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... was ever more lonely or loveless than the ill-starred and ill-favoured Queen Mary. She had no near relatives in England except Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, by the irony of fate, was worse than a stranger to her. The awful solitude of a throne excluded her, even more than her own ill-health and brooding temper, from the joys of friendship. ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... flew to the rescue, and made a most enthusiastic attempt to check the fire; but the raging element was now past control. The flames spread through the combustible material which had been stored on the deck; and they were compelled to abandon the ill-starred steamer with the utmost precipitation, in order to ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... poured forth his tale, and the Red Cross Knight learned that once he was happy and free, like other men, till on an ill-starred day he and a friend had fallen in with a cursed wight who called himself 'Despair,' who had plucked all hope from their breasts, and bade them seek death, the one with a rope, the other with a knife. ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... hall shrieked and grimaced and ogled, and after every item of the show, the performer came round with an escallop shell into which the more generously disposed dropped small copper coins. The place was nearly always crowded with men in black frock-coats and crimson fezzes. Ill-starred Valentine Baker had been employed by the Sublime Porte to create an English gendarmerie, and this fact had brought a large number of English military men into Constantinople, who were anxious to enlist under his banner. Many of them were men who had done good service ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... for the hospital, the infirmary, or the insane asylum, enters the bonds of wedlock with never a thought of the consequences; with never a care as to whether he will wreck his own life and happiness or that of the innocent girl he is deceiving; with never a heed of the ill-starred, diseased, puny or idiotic progeny his act may bring into being, a burden to the community, a curse to himself and a constant reminder of ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... Fortune (which of course went the Irish way), who was Scholar, Artist, Newspaper Correspondent, etc. A dozen lines would tell all that is wanted, naming no names. It might be called 'Fragments of Letters by an "Ill-starred" or "Unlucky" Man of Genius,' etc. as S. M. was: 'Unlucky' being still used in Suffolk, with something of Ancient Greek meaning. See if you cannot get this done, will you? For I think many of S. M.'s friends would be glad ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... her gently back. But there came upon me then a compassion for these innocent passengers, fated to have embarked upon this ill-starred voyage. Herded here in this cabin, with brigands like pirates of old guarding them. Waiting now to be marooned on an uninhabited asteroid roaming in space. A sense of responsibility swept me. I swung upon Miko. He stood with a nonchalant grace, lounging against the wall with a cylinder dangling ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... laying the foundations of your religion and locating the stars in heaven. At that time your forbears were gibbering cave savages, sharpening bones and gnawing raw flesh. When you see the negro on the opposite seat, the ill-starred one who has gone down in the human race while we have gone up, think about him, study him, speculate as to his ultimate end—and your own. Don't merely say to yourself, "That's a plain negro," and go on ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... snapped Trenchard. "Ask his craven, numskulled lordship. He had as good a hand in losing it as any. Oh, it was all most infernally mishandled, as has been everything in this ill-starred rising. Grey sent back Godfrey, the guide, and attempted in the dark to find his own way across the rhine. He missed the ford. What else could the fool have hoped? And when he was discovered and Dunbarton's guns began to play on us—hell ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... impending outbreak. How their labours eventuated, and how the Fenian insurrection of March, '67, resulted, it is unnecessary to explain; it is enough for our purpose to state that for several months after that ill-starred movement was crushed, Colonel Kelly continued to reside in Dublin, moving about with an absence of disguise and a disregard for concealment which astonished his confederates, but which, perhaps, contributed in no slight ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... the storm that raged savagely above them, if they felt not the sand that pressed heavily upon them, what was there to warn, what to arouse them from that ill-starred slumber? ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... constantly occurring between the belligerent parties, that his honor, Judge Lynch, for many years, appears to have been not the least among the potentates of this notable republic. Nor was order restored to the ill-starred town till after the close of the war; when every refractory spirit, whether tory or Yorker, was punished or awed into submission by the fiery energy of the iron-heeled Ethan Allen, who, then being relieved ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... lips—"sire, I perceive that your majesty is laughing at me; nevertheless, I deem it incumbent on me to raise my warning voice. Etiquette is something sublime and holy—it is the sacred wall separating the sovereign from his people. If that ill-starred queen, Marie Antoinette, had not torn down this wall, she would probably have met with a ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... hand to the process, too; and romance—it is not an insipid chain of flowerbeds we have to follow, but the holy warriors of Saint Louis, the roistering braves of Henry the Great, the gallant Bourbons, the ill-starred Bonapartes. These as they passed have left their monuments; it may be only in a crumbling old chapel or ruined tower, but there they are, eloquent of days that are dead, of a spirit that lives forever staunch in the heart of the fervent ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... upstairs. She lit the gas in Mr. Sleuth's sitting-room and looked about her with a fearful glance. Somehow everything seemed to speak to her of the lodger, there lay her Bible and his Concordance, side by side on the table, exactly as he had left them, when he had come downstairs and suggested that ill-starred expedition to his landlord's daughter. She took a few steps forward, listening the while anxiously for the familiar sound of the click in the door which would tell her that the lodger had come back, and then she went over to the window ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... tonight," Sid confirmed, returning to his frowning-practice: left eyebrow up, right down, reverse, repeat, rest. "And I must play the ill-starred ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... communicated his instructions to his party, that the apostolic vicar was not to be permitted to pass, as heretofore, to the chapel, and that a most rigid superintendence was to be exercised over his movements. My poor companion had his turn for duty on that ill-starred day; he had not been long at his post when the sound of footsteps was heard approaching, and he soon saw the procession which always attended the holy father to his devotions, advancing towards him; he immediately placed himself across the passage, and with his musket in ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... terrifying sounds, the screaming and cursing of the convicts below, their blasphemous shrieking to be let out! To this turmoil and uproar were added the frantic appeals and inquiries of the passengers who, more or less dressed, had hurried to the deck and who were now speaking to the master of the ill-starred vessel. He answered them briefly: what could be done, would ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... With his own body's vital juices; A man with caoutchouc endurance, A perfect gem for life insurance, A kind of maddened John the Baptist, To whom the harshest word comes aptest, Who, struck by stone or brick ill-starred, Hurls back an epithet as hard, Which, deadlier than stone or brick, Has a propensity to stick. His oratory is like the scream 140 Of the iron-horse's frenzied steam Which warns the world to leave ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... were above and before all bureaucrats, and with commendable promptness he seized the opportunity to resign a post which he thoroughly detested. What he thought on the subject of Yakoob Khan is fully set forth in the following memorandum drawn up as a note to my biography of that interesting and ill-starred prince in "Central Asian Portraits." Whether Gordon was right or wrong in his views about Yakoob Khan is a matter of no very great importance. The incident is only noteworthy as marking the conclusion of his brief secretarial ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... reminded Mrs Quantock of the Guru, but nothing could have been less like that ill-starred curry-cook than this majestic creature. Eventually she gave a great sigh and came out ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... The commanding officer of that ill-starred garrison could not himself have been more astonished, when he was unexpectedly summoned to surrender by an enemy who appeared to start out of the earth, than was le Bourdon, at hearing this intelligence. To western notions, Michilimackinac was another Gibraltar, although ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... not long ere the gods began to find their way to Prometheus's earthly paradise, and who came once came again. The first was Epimetheus, who had probably suffered least of all from the general upset, having in truth little to lose since his ill-starred union with Pandora. He had indeed reason for thankfulness in his practical divorce from his spouse, who had settled in Caucasia, and gave Greek lessons to the Princess Miriam. Would Prometheus lend him half a talent? a quarter? a tenth? a hundredth? Thanks, ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... sentiment, whose heart glows with independence, and melts with sensibility, inly pines under the neglect, or writhes in bitterness of soul, under the contumely of arrogant, unfeeling wealth. Oppressed by thee, the son of genius, whose ill-starred ambition plants him at the tables of the fashionable and polite, must see in suffering silence, his remark neglected, and his person despised, while shallow greatness in his idiot attempts at wit, shall meet with countenance and applause. Nor is it only ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Paganism had infected Christianity. The Church was now victorious and corrupt. The rites of the Pantheon had passed into her worship, the subtilties of the Academy into her creed. In an evil day, though with great pomp and solemnity,—we quote the language of Bacon,—was the ill-starred alliance stricken between the old philosophy and the new faith. [Cogitata et visa.] Questions widely different from those which had employed the ingenuity of Pyrrho and Carneades, but just as subtle, just ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and the gong came shortly. But Carpentier had shown his tiger streak. Scotty Monteith, manager (so we were told) of Johnny Dundee, sat just in front of us in a pink skirt, and had been gathering up substantial wagers from the ill-starred French journalists near by. Scotty was not in any doubt as to the outcome, but even he was moved by Carpentier's gallant sally. "No one knew he was a fighter ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... he felt beside her; already had both, in fine, begun to console each other with the reflection that the child which Hortense now bore beneath her heart would, one day, be to them a compensation for their ill-starred ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... searching. He had not felt his age since he had bought his nephew Soames' ill-starred house and settled into it here at Robin Hill over three years ago. It was as if he had been getting younger every spring, living in the country with his son and his grandchildren—June, and the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... however, only the background of his work. He is no idyllic posture-monger. The march of events as they drive forward the primitive earth-born men and women of Wessex, thrills one with the same weight of accumulated fatality, as—the comparison is tedious and pedantic—the fortunes of the ill-starred houses of Argos and Thebes. One peculiarity of Mr. Hardy's method must finally be mentioned, as giving their most characteristic quality to these formidable scenes—I mean his preference for form over color. Who can forget those desolately emphatic human protagonists ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... has painted for us a romantic picture of the poet in a shepherd's hut.[32] It recalls Erminia among the pastoral people. Indeed, the interest of that episode in the Gerusalemme is heightened by the fact that its ill-starred author tested the reality of his creation ofttimes in the course of this pathetic pilgrimage. Artists of the Bolognese Academy have placed Erminia on their canvases. But, up to the present time, I know of no great painter ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... But the ill-starred folk of Troy could not have shown more enthusiasm in haling within their walls the fatal wooden horse, than did the men and boys of Uppingham, who harnessed themselves, some four-score of them, to that guileless structure, which, ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... there came into my head the ill-starred thought of leading them off the road and through the fields close alongside of it on our left hand. The road itself I knew pretty well, and that it bore gradually to the left, all the way to Alton. Carey, whom I consulted, ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... you tell me all that last night?" cried the ill-starred Lancaster. He dared not tell Bullard that the Green Box was safe in his house. Bullard would never, however great the compensation, forgive trickery against himself; and Bullard's theory remained to be proved. Lancaster's soul now seized on its last hope: that Doris would be able ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... storm that raged savagely above them, if they felt not the sand that pressed heavily upon them, what was there to warn, what to arouse them from that ill-starred slumber? ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... springing from his seat, "and what profit did the immortal and ill-starred Torquato Tasso win from all his genius? A few stolen kisses on the steps of a palace. And he died of famine in a madhouse. I say it: the world's opinion, that empress of humankind, I will tear from her her crown and ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... being revealed; and the enemies of the Church in Italy learn with an astonishment, which is perhaps feigned, that in that glorious army of martyrs of 1799 more than one ecclesiastic of high rank suffered in the ill-starred and ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... thoroughly ashamed of my first unjust suspicions that Henrietta might not be strictly truthful, and I inquired with sincere interest as to the fate of her ill-starred family. ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... little brothers; and she told all this with a simple grace and innocent frankness not a little alluring. Yet I was pretty near the truth; for, without being aware of it, she uniformly concluded with the one favourite theme: her ill-starred love. Still I went on acting the part of the UNAMIABLE, in the hope that she would take a spite against me. But whether from inadvertency or design, she would not take the hint, and I was at last fairly compelled to give up by sitting down contented to ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... upon religion are those parents who say of their pallid, puny, sedentary, lifeless, joyless little offspring, "He is born for a minister," while the ruddy, the brave, and the strong are as promptly assigned to a secular career! Never yet did an ill-starred young saint waste his Saturday afternoons in preaching sermons in the garret to his deluded little sisters and their dolls, without living to repent it in maturity. These precocious little sentimentalists wither away ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... which that fabric, if designed for permanence, should be built—nor with the uneducated and fierce chivalry that longed for a restoration of the warrior empire—nor with the dull and arrogant bigots who connected all ideas of order and government with the ill-starred and worn-out dynasty of the Bourbons. In fact, GOOD SENSE was with him the principium et fons of all theories and all practice. And it was this quality that attached him to the English. His philosophy on this head was ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... any note occurred in the family until the return of that ill-starred man, the Master. But I have to place here a second extract from the memoirs of Chevalier Burke, interesting in itself, and highly necessary for my purpose. It is our only sight of the Master on his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wounds were almost green at his death, sought to chase away the recollections of his ill-starred splendour, by rides and walks in the island, and conversation with his suite in his garden; and Louis XVIII. after his restoration to the throne of France, passed few such happy days as his exile at Hartwell, which though only a pleasant seat enough, had more comfort than the gilded ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... and after the downfall of the Regency in 1333, sanguinary battles were fought between the Imperialists and the rebels. The former, brave and faithful as they were, being outnumbered by the latter, perished in the field one after another for the sake of the ill-starred Emperor Go-dai-go (1319-1338), whose eventful life ended in anxiety ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... the ground. But these great sculptures, among other things, escaped destruction, and at once hidden and preserved by the accumulating debris of the centuries, they stood there age after age, their very existence quite forgotten. When Xenophon marched past their site with the ill-starred expedition of the ten thousand, in the year 400 B.C., he saw only a mound which seemed to mark the site of some ancient ruin; but the Greek did not suspect that he looked upon the site of that city which only two centuries before had been ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... command of the fleet, though the Sailors' Council at first declined to accept him. He was at heart a patriot, but had taken no active part in Yugoslav propaganda and, unluckily for himself, he had been compelled to accompany Count Tisza in his recent ill-starred tour of Bosnia, when the Magyar leader made a last attempt to browbeat the local Slavs. Yet, as no other high officer was available, Koch told the Sailors' Council that they simply must acknowledge Vukovi['c], and at 4 p.m. he took ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... surnamed Lope. This fellow had taken advantage of the passing of Polish refugees, who had at that time already been driven over the frontier and were making their way through Germany to France, to disguise himself as an ill-starred champion of freedom, and he subsequently found his way to the Foreign Legion in Algeria. On the way home from the gathering, Degelow, whom I was to meet in a few weeks, proposed a 'truce.' This was a device ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... pass above them through the air, where the darkness was gathering intensity. Other sounds rose in the distance, like the hollow muttering of the rising storm: were they the "March! march!"—that terrible order from Paris which had driven that ill-starred man onward day by day, dragging behind him along the roads of his defeat the irony of his imperial escort, until now he was brought face to face with the ruin he had foreseen and come forth to meet? What multitudes ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... after a few idle commonplace stories from a gentleman in black ... no one durst say black was his eye; while I ... only wanting that ceremony, am made a Sunday's laughing-stock, and abused like a pickpocket. I was well aware, though, that if my ill-starred fortune got the least hint of my connubial wish, my scheme would go to nothing. To prevent this I determined to take my measures with such thought and fore-thought, such cautions and precautions, that all the malignant planets in the ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... where King Louis XIV was wont to play with his hounds before retiring, became the bed-room of his heir. After the year 1738, Louis XV occupied this chamber, and here he died thirty-six years later. It then became the sleeping-room of the ill-starred Louis XVI—who died in no bed. Locks, door-knobs, chimney ornaments—each detail in gilded bronze reflected rare taste and workmanship. The bed stood in an alcove enclosed between two columns, railed in by a balustrade ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... ere the gods began to find their way to Prometheus's earthly paradise, and who came once came again. The first was Epimetheus, who had probably suffered least of all from the general upset, having in truth little to lose since his ill-starred union with Pandora. He had indeed reason for thankfulness in his practical divorce from his spouse, who had settled in Caucasia, and gave Greek lessons to the Princess Miriam. Would Prometheus lend him half a talent? a quarter? a tenth? a hundredth? Thanks, thanks. Prometheus might ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... descendant of the superstitious old Norsemen, was full of old Norse conceits, and all manner of Valhalla marvels concerning the land of goblins and goblets. No wonder then, that with this catastrophe in prospect, he again entreated me to quit the ill-starred craft, carrying off nothing from her ghostly hull. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... a word of Preface as to the Author: an Irish Gentleman, of Estate and Fortune (which of course went the Irish way), who was Scholar, Artist, Newspaper Correspondent, etc. A dozen lines would tell all that is wanted, naming no names. It might be called 'Fragments of Letters by an "Ill-starred" or "Unlucky" Man of Genius,' etc. as S. M. was: 'Unlucky' being still used in Suffolk, with something of Ancient Greek meaning. See if you cannot get this done, will you? For I think many of S. M.'s friends would be glad of it: and the general Public assuredly not the worse. Some of the names would ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... O Torquato, heaven to us The rich gift of thy genius gave, to thee Nought else but misery. Ill-starred Torquato, whom thy song, So sweet, could not console, Nor melt the ice, to which The genial current of thy soul Was turned, by private envy, princely hate; And then, by Love abandoned, life's last dream! To thee, nought real seemed but nothingness, The world a dreary wilderness. Too late ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... which he could conceive of no better name than CLICKMITOAD. After recovering from their surprise and terror, this 'bold peasant' and his neighbours, all armed with pokers and other formidable weapons, crept up to the ill-starred ticker, and smashed it ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... Albert; Albert by his son William. William, who had married Margaret of Burgundy, daughter of Philip the Bold, dies in 1417. The goodly heritage of these three Netherland provinces descends to his daughter Jacqueline, a damsel of seventeen. Little need to trace the career of the fair and ill-starred Jacqueline. Few chapters of historical romance have drawn more frequent tears. The favorite heroine of ballad and drama, to Netherlanders she is endued with the palpable form and perpetual existence of the Iphigenias, Mary Stuarts, Joans of Arc, or other ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... but, in the 18th century, of a society named after the "tutelar saint" of Pennsylvania. The original Tammany was an Indian chief with whom William Penn negotiated for grants of land about the end of the 17th century. Littoral first became familiar in connection with Italy's ill-starred Abyssinian adventure, and hinterland marked the appearance of Germany ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... counted so securely on the effect of experience and the pressure of events to teach Hadria the desirable lesson, and they were dismayed to find that, unlike other women, she had failed to learn it. Henriette was in despair. It was she who had brought about the ill-starred union. How could she ever forgive herself? How repair the error she had made? Only by devoting herself to her brother, and trying patiently to bring his wife to ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... was elected president of the Freedmans Bank. This ill-starred venture was then apparently in the full tide of prosperity, and promised to be a great lever in the uplifting of the submerged race. Douglass, soon after his election as president, discovered the ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... thought, perhaps, if I waited a few hours where I was, he would be sure to rejoin me, and we could then return to Port Jervis without Sarah's son to be sure; but, otherwise, no worse off than we were when we set out on this ill-starred ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... his nights with unsuspected grief, and disturbed his day-dreams while he puzzled, anxiously, over known facts that had become too inconsistent with his beliefs for comfort. That scene enacted in his mother's rooms, at supper, on the evening after the ill-starred ball, when, at his mother's bidding, he had left her, knowing that she wished to keep him from questions that must not be asked, was neither the first such affair that he had seen, nor yet the tenth. He had left the room with hands clinched and his heart burning with anger: ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... stood the ill-starred hero. Then, just as his team was turning, he let loose the left rein unawares, and struck the farthest pillar, breaking the spokes right at his axles' center. Slipping out of his chariot, he was dragged along, with reins ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... Halifax, where her gallant, gentlemanly, and ill-starred commander died and was buried, with full military honors, in the presence of all the British officers on the station, who uncovered themselves as they laid into the grave all that was earthly ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... An ill-starred wretch, a fiend of wicked heart, Gave answer then, and to his father said:— "We shall not quickly work him any harm, Nor slay him by our wiles; go thou to him; There wilt thou surely find a bitter ...
— Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew • Unknown
... delightful specimens of rural dialogue, culled chiefly from the labouring classes of Cheshire. And, rising in the social scale from the labourer to the farmer, what could be more lifelike than this tale of an ill-starred wooing? "My son Tom has met with a disappointment about getting married. You know he's got that nice farm at H——; so he met a young lady at a dance, and he was very much took up, and she seemed quite ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... this ill-starred concurrence of circumstances, which might have palliated any excesses either of temper or conduct into which they drove him, it was, after all, I am persuaded, to no such serious causes that the unfortunate alienation, which so soon ended in ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... unpleasantly reminded Mrs Quantock of the Guru, but nothing could have been less like that ill-starred curry-cook than this majestic creature. Eventually she gave a great sigh and ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... would not agree to the impulsive proposals of the Athenians, and he opposed them when, elated by their power and good fortune, they talked of recovering Egypt and attacking the seaboard of the Persian empire. Many, too, were inflamed with that ill-starred notion of an attempt on Sicily, which was afterwards blown into a flame by Alkibiades and other orators. Some even dreamed of the conquest of Etruria and Carthage, in consequence of the greatness which the Athenian empire had already reached, and the full tide of success which ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... unfortunate Mary, Queen of Scotland. Her suit of apartments, tradition informs us, was on the west side of the north court. This, in the memory of persons living but a few years since, was the most beautiful part of the building: it communicated with the great tower, whence it is said the ill-starred captive had sometimes an opportunity of seeing the friends approach with whom she held a secret correspondence; and "this tradition appears to have been founded upon good authority."[2] It is inferred that her captivity at Wingfield commenced in 1569, in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various
... associations was still keen and vivid. She described its old-world garden by the side of the Thames, where the little King Edward VI. must often have roamed with his pretty cousin Jane: the two wonderful ill-starred children, playing for a brief hour in happy unconsciousness of the fate that faced them. What did they talk about, she asked, as they stood on the paved terrace and watched the river hurrying by? Plato, perchance, and his philosophy, ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... having acted over in my imagination all the dangers and privations of The Desert, and seen all the wonders of the mysterious regions of Nigritia, I set about my departure from Mourzuk with a heavy heart, lamenting my ill-starred luck and failure, seeing my mission abruptly cut off midway in its accomplishment. Mr. Gagliuffi arranged for my returning to Tripoli with the slave-caravan of Haj Essnousee, whom the reader will be pleased not to confound with my friend ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... asleep. His cares for the present were over, and as Mrs. Royal watched the little curly head lying upon the pillow, she gave a deep sigh as she bent over and kissed him. Must he go through life handicapped? she asked herself, for no fault of his own? Would he always be looked upon as a waif, an ill-starred child, and in the eyes of the world, ...
— Rod of the Lone Patrol • H. A. Cody
... and impossible stories, which convulsed us until I felt sure that the irritated Mr. Frost must cherish a secret but lively desire to punch his head. Possibly Brian was the only one who thoroughly enjoyed himself at that ill-starred dinner, for he is keen on the scent of a precarious situation which is liable to involve everybody in total collapse. In this instance he seemed to snuff the battle from afar and stirred up all the slumbering ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... extraordinary refinements of cruelty were reserved. The aventuriers, when so ill-starred as to fall into the hands of justice, were customarily burned alive at the stake.[76] The same fate overtook those who were detected in frauds against the public treasury. More frightful than all the rest was the vengeance taken by the law upon the counterfeiter of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... battle in far Parthia, and Pompey steals a march by getting a long term in Spain. Caesar demands as much and is refused by Pompey's friends. Then the storm breaks and Caesar comes back from Gaul to cross the Rubicon, and take all Italy in sixty days. Pompey, ambitious, ill-starred, fights losing battles everywhere. Murdered at last in Egypt, he, too, is dead, and Caesar stands alone, master of Rome and of the world. One year he ruled, and then they slew him; but no one of them that struck him died ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... aside her veil in turning to my wife, and showed a face which had all the ill-starred beauty of poor Tedham, with something more in it that she never got from that handsome reprobate—conscience, soul—whatever we choose to call a certain effluence of heaven which blesses us with rest and faith whenever we behold it in any human ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... gravitation,—or rather of specific gravity,—and sink below the surface,—down, down into the fathomless and unknown abysm of the ocean. Along with them, sharing their sad fate, Lilly Lalee,—that pretty, uncomplaining child, the innocent victim of an ill-starred destiny, must disappear forever from a world of which she had as yet seen so little, and that little of ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... back. But there came upon me then a compassion for these innocent passengers, fated to have embarked upon this ill-starred voyage. Herded here in this cabin, with brigands like pirates of old guarding them. Waiting now to be marooned on an uninhabited asteroid roaming in space. A sense of responsibility swept me. I swung upon Miko. He stood with a nonchalant grace, lounging against ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... in a letter of July 6, 1781, contained in the Haldimand Papers, in the British Museum, gives what he calls "a brief account" of his ill-starred expedition. See Roosevelt's Winning of the West, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... he was astonished at the "exquisite distinction" displayed by the players in eating them. The "perfect elegance" which one actress exhibited in consuming an egg had fascinated him and he stated with conviction that he could have spent a happy evening simply watching her eat these ill-starred hopes of chickens. It was pointed out that the management could hardly afford to pay her a sufficient salary for the strain on her digestive faculties, and also that the eggs—real Boat Race eggs, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... "'I gave the ill-starred prince such an education as I should have liked to receive myself, and no acknowledged son of a king ever had a better. The only thing for which I have to reproach myself is that, without intending it, I caused him great unhappiness; for when he was ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... varying fortunes of the lovers in the books she read aloud during the winter evenings; her heart understood that love, which brings the highest joy, may also cause the deepest sorrow. But apart from the sorrows of ill-starred love, she caught glimpses of something else—a terrible something which she did not understand. Dark forms would now and then appear to her, gliding through the paradise of love, disgraced and abject. The sacred name of love was linked with the direst shame and the deepest misery. Among people ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... Hoppner's miniature of that lovely and ill-starred girl, with her soft dark eyes, and her curls all astray from beneath her little blue turban. And the Duke was telling Mr. Oover her story—how she had left her home for Humphrey Greddon when she was but sixteen, and he an undergraduate at Christ Church; ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... and brave blood, is perhaps one of her characteristics, as is many another well born woman's. She had a long list of worthy ancestors in colonial and revolutionary days, and the McNeils, and General Knox, figure largely in her genealogy, as well as the hero who killed the ill-starred Paugus. ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... Canterbury Tales, or Edmund Spenser's immortal Faerie Queene, or Shakespeare's tender women, the Juliet we love, the Rosalind who is ever in our hearts, the Beatrice, the Imogen, gentle Ophelia, or kindly but ill-starred Desdemona, or the great heroes of tragedy, Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello, or I might ask you to hear a word about Ben Jonson, "rare Ben," or poor Philip Massinger who died a stranger, of the Puritan Milton, the great Catholic Dryden, or Swift, or Bunyan, Defoe, Addison, Pope and Burke and grim ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... pathetic, striking, to my eyes with her life-time proof of the reality of her passion, than my untried young lovers who up to that time had seemed to me, in the full fatuous flush of invention as I was, as ill-starred, innocent and touching lovers as anybody ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... of our ill-starred hero" says Jemmy, copying as it seemed to me the style of some of his story-books, "was a worldly man who entertained ambitious views for his only son and who firmly set his face against the contemplated alliance with a virtuous but penniless ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... lead the last revolt against the Martian government, an ill-starred revolt that ended almost before it started when the troopers turned loose the heavy heaters and swept the streets with washing waves ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... resting-place of the unfortunate traveller and his companions, was placed under McIntyre's command. About sixty horses and sixteen camels were obtained for this attempt. The less said about this splendid but ill-starred effort the better. Indignation is a mild term to apply to our feelings towards the man who caused the ruin of so generous an undertaking. Everything that its promoters could do to ensure its success they did, and it deserved a better ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... a statue of Marsyas, Apollo's ill-starred rival. It probably bore an expression of pain, which Horace humorously ascribes to dislike of the looks of the Younger Novius, who is conjectured to have been of the profession and nature of Shylock. A naked figure carrying ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... the fiery sea is quenched That flamed around thy castle. BRUNHILDA. Yet the knight Still lingers who should wield the magic sword And on his war-horse gallop through the flames, When he had won proud Fafner's ill-starred hoard. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... included Mozambique and Zambesi boys, Shangaans and others from among the blackest races of South Africa. The greatest disaster sustained by this company was when a party of thirty-three of them dashed into the Boer lines on an ill-starred attempt to loot cattle from the enemy's herds. After their night's dash out of the garrison they got to a hiding place for the day, but they were followed there and were surrounded by a Boer commando, which peppered them ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... at this dismal epoch, was the ruin of the Louisbourg expedition. The greater part of La Motte's fleet reached its destination a full month before that of Holbourne. Had the reverse taken place, the fortress must have fallen. As it was, the ill-starred attempt, drawing off the British forces from the frontier, where they were needed most, did for France more than she could have done for herself, and gave Montcalm and Vaudreuil the opportunity to execute a scheme which they had nursed ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... eyes for the sight of it, the sight of the simple name "Agnes Bibby" at the head of her first signed story—the story that was to take away the reproach from the name that the ill-starred interview had brought! ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... the least. I speak that which I soberly believe. Just as some ill-starred human creatures are born physically or mentally defective—deformed or idiots—so may they be born spiritually defective. Why not? My reason offers no scientific or moral objection to such a belief. In other respects she is conspicuously perfect. But, verily, she has no soul; and the qualities ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... he once more entered the French service; was sent with a party who vainly attempted to relieve Chandarnagar, and was one of the small party who followed Law when that officer took command of those, who refused to share in the surrender of the place to the British. After the capture of his ill-starred chief, Reinhardt (whom we shall in future designate by his Indian sobriquet of " Sumroo," or Sombre) took service under Gregory, or Gurjin Khan, ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... you will have nothing of the sort, but will produce your card with this addition: "Restant a Boulogne, chez M. Charles Dickens, Chateau des Moulineaux." That you will then be passed out at a little door, like one of the ill-starred prisoners on the bloody September night, into a yelling and shrieking crowd, cleaving the air with the names of the different hotels, exactly seven thousand six hundred and fifty-four in number. And that your heart will be on the point of sinking with dread, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... fates were against us, as always in this ill-starred voyage. I, watching from my sand dune, saw a second figure emerge from the arroyo's mouth. It appeared to stagger as though hurt; and every eight or ten paces it stopped and rested in a bent-over position. The murky light was too dim for me to make out details; but after a moment a rift ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... fair lady, I have the misfortune to bear that ill-starred title, and I beg you to be seated and ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... the Stuarts long before Colonel Francis Townley raised a troop for the Chevalier. The grandfather of this unfortunate man, had been tried for rebellion, in 1715, but acquitted; it was therefore very unlikely that when his accomplished descendant espoused the same ill-starred cause, there would be any mercy shown to a family so deeply implicated in Jacobitism. Francis Townley was afterwards taken prisoner, and tried with other persons, chiefly captains in the Manchester regiment. Of these the greater number ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... belief we still use the expression "born under a lucky star" to describe a person who seems always to be fortunate. But the same metaphor is contained in single words. We speak of an unfortunate enterprise as "ill-starred," and the metaphor is clear. But when the newspapers speak of a railway "disaster," very few people realize that they are speaking the language of the mediaeval astrologers, men who studied the fortunes ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... the funeral, Dr. Merrick called in for the last time at her lodgings. He brought in his hand a legal-looking paper, which he had found in searching among Alan's effects, for he had carried them off to his hotel, leaving not even a memento of her ill-starred love to Herminia. "This may interest you," he said dryly. "You will see at once it is ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... brought over from France, some mementoes of her unwise marriage, the little room in which she sat at supper with Rizzio and three or four friends when the assassins rushed in through a secret door, stabbed her ill-starred favorite, and dragged him bleeding through her bed-room into an outer audience chamber, and there left him to die, his life-blood oozing out from fifty-six wounds. The partition still stands which ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... Senechal d'Anjou) upon the subject of the loves of Troilus and Cressida and to be in this instance used by him as a synonym for an unhappy lover, whom no rebuffs, no treachery can divert from his ill-starred passion. Such a lover may well be said to be in love with strife, and that the Filostrato of the Decameron sufficiently answers to this description we learn later on ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... might and its omniscience, Lanyard doubted if the Pack had as yet identified Michael Lanyard with that ill-starred Marcel who once had been as intimate with this forgotten way as any skulking ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... and the strength of Juliet's passion. And, even as it is, perhaps there are few of our rational and sober-minded islanders who would not honestly confess, if fairly questioned, that they deem the romance and fervour of those ill-starred lovers of Verona exaggerated and over-drawn. Yet, in Italy, the picture of that affection born of a night—but "strong as death"—is one to which the veriest commonplaces of life would afford parallels without number. As in different ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... are passing upon the ocean, others of equally exciting character occur upon that desert isle, where, by ill-starred chance for themselves, the pirate crew of the ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... He had not felt his age since he had bought his nephew Soames' ill-starred house and settled into it here at Robin Hill over three years ago. It was as if he had been getting younger every spring, living in the country with his son and his grandchildren—June, and the little ones of the second marriage, Jolly and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wishes to make himself a master of our law. In private they had perpetual squabbles, and they quarrelled with equal virulence and indecency before the world. The matrimonial settlement of their only and ill-starred daughter was the occasion of an outbreak on the part of husband and wife, that not only furnished diversion for courtiers but agitated the council table. Of all the comic scenes connected with that unseemly ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... evil and tyranny. He gave them food and sent them safe to the Pearl Island [Cubagua], where some Christians dwelt, whom he could have slain, without any one knowing it, and did not: all the Christians finally called Nigoroto's town the mansion and home of everybody. 23. An ill-starred tyrant deliberated within himself to attack this place, as the people felt so safe: so he went there with a ship and invited many people to come on board, as they were used to, trusting the Spaniards. When many men, women, and children were gathered in the ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... us out of the neighbourhood of the ill-starred City of Calcutta held good, and, gradually freshening and working round more from the southward, eventually resolved itself into the south-east trade, under the beneficent influence of which, with our larboard tacks on board and our yards braced flat up against the starboard rigging, ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... has been employed with no small success in the treatment of scrofulous affections, and in combating the ravages of a disease for whose frightful inroads the ill-starred inhabitants of that group are indebted to their foreign benefactors. But the tenants of the Typee valley, as yet exempt from these inflictions, generally employ the 'arva' as a minister to social enjoyment, ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... starting push, rolls on of itself.... Is this young man to be ground to pieces under this machine for an act which, at the worst, was one of weakness? Is he to become a member of the luckless crews that man those dark, ill-starred ships called prisons?... I urge you, gentlemen, do not ruin this young man. For as a result of those four minutes, ruin, utter and irretrievable, stares him in the face.... The rolling of the chariot wheels of Justice over this boy began when it ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... was now victorious and corrupt. The rites of the Pantheon had passed into her worship, the subtilties of the Academy into her creed. In an evil day, though with great pomp and solemnity,—we quote the language of Bacon,—was the ill-starred alliance stricken between the old philosophy and the new faith. [Cogitata et visa.] Questions widely different from those which had employed the ingenuity of Pyrrho and Carneades, but just as subtle, just as interminable, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... will take the field ourself,' she said; 'warn the city—warn Lothian and Fife—saddle our Spanish barb, and bid French Paris see our petronel be charged. Better to die at the head of our brave Scotsmen, like our grandfather at Flodden, than of a broken heart like our ill-starred father.' 'Be patient—be composed, dearest sovereign,' said Catherine; and then addressing Lady Fleming angrily, she added, 'How could you say aught that reminded her of her husband?' The word reached the ear of the unhappy princess ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... of noble ladies. Kabbalistic passion glows in the mysterious love of the Jew. The German minstrel sings of love's sweetness and pain, of summer and its delights, of winter and its woes, now of joy and happiness, again of ill-starred fortunes. And what is the burden of the exiled Hebrew's song? Mysterious allusions, hidden in a tangle of highly polished, artificial, slow-moving rhymes, glorify, not a sweet womanly presence, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... History? Erostratus by a torch; Milo by a bullock; Henry Darnley, an unfledged booby and bustard, by his limbs; most Kings and Queens by being born under such and such a bed-tester; Boileau Despreaux (according to Helvetius) by the peck of a turkey; and this ill-starred individual by a rent in his breeches,—for no Memoirist of Kaiser Otto's Court omits him. Vain was the prayer of Themistocles for a talent of Forgetting: my Friends, yield cheerfully to Destiny, and read since it is written."—Has Teufelsdrockh, to be put in mind that, nearly related ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... scandal, no violence," cried Philometor anxiously. "The best way would be for me to write to Asclepiodorus, and beg him in a friendly manner to entrust this girl—Ismene or Irene, or whatever the ill-starred child's name is—for a few days to you, Cleopatra, for your pleasure. I can offer him a prospect of an addition to the gift of land I made today, and which fell far ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... word I was fearful after this (said the Genoese courier) of our coming to the old palazzo, lest some such ill-starred picture should happen to be there. I knew there were many there; and, as we got nearer and nearer to the place, I wished the whole gallery in the crater of Vesuvius. To mend the matter, it was a stormy dismal evening when ...
— To be Read at Dusk • Charles Dickens
... and were drowned. Among them was Sir John of Orleans, a valiant knight, who bore the French banner. But this was a slight misfortune compared with that which the folly and presumption of one man was preparing for that ill-starred host. ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... Burnet, who was then minister of Saltoun. Being firmly opposed to the arbitrary measures of the Duke of York, afterwards James II., he went to Holland, where he joined Monmouth, whom he accompanied on his ill-starred expedition. Happening to kill, in a quarrel, one Dare, another of the Duke's followers, he fled to the Continent, travelled in Spain and Hungary, and fought against the Turks. After the Revolution he returned ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... "demi-devil," and himself "an honourable murderer"; and Iago calls him a "credulous fool." Othello, too, cries for punishment; instead of "torturers ingenious," he will have "devils" to "whip" him, and "roast him in sulphur." He praises Desdemona as chaste, "ill-starred wench," "my girl," and so forth; then curses himself lustily and ends his ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... hunting; tried to regain a moment of his lost youth that he might be a comrade as well as a father. At times a strange mood took him, when he, Eudemius the proud, became humbly grateful that Marius should be willing to mate with the ill-starred daughter of his house. In general they accepted each other on terms of complete equality. Each was receiving and conferring a favor; there was no debt ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... to the process, too; and romance—it is not an insipid chain of flowerbeds we have to follow, but the holy warriors of Saint Louis, the roistering braves of Henry the Great, the gallant Bourbons, the ill-starred Bonapartes. These as they passed have left their monuments; it may be only in a crumbling old chapel or ruined tower, but there they are, eloquent of days that are dead, of a spirit that lives forever staunch in the heart of the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... Antoinette; the Rohans, through the influence of whose great name an unworthy member of the family was to rise to high dignity in the church and the state, and then to cast a deep shadow on the darkening popularity of that ill-starred princess. Such families as these formed an upper class among nobles, and the members firmly believed in their own prescriptive right to the best places. The poorer nobility, on the other hand, saw with great jealousy ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... the female soakers, whom doctors find to be the most troublesome of all their patients. There is not a medical man in large practice who has not a shocking percentage of lady inebriates on his list, and the cases are hard to manage. An ill-starred woman, whose well-to-do husband is engaged in business all day, finds that a dull life-weariness overtakes her. If she has many children, her enforced activity preserves her from danger; but, if she is childless, the subtle temptation is apt to overcome her. She seeks unnatural exaltation, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... estates confiscated, and themselves dependent upon the niggard bounty of a cold and selfish relative. Slowly recovering from a severe wound which he had received in the wars of Lombardy, and disgusted with the ingratitude of the prince he served, the ill-starred Francesco was at first rejoiced to obtain any refuge from the storms of a tempestuous world; and the unceasing efforts of his young and affectionate sister to reconcile him to a bitter lot were not wholly unavailing. Summer had spread her richest treasures upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... Douay saw the exhausted condition of the troops, and was convinced that it would be useless to attempt to reach la Besace that day. What particularly influenced his determination, however, was the arrival of the train, that ill-starred train that had been trailing in his rear since they left Rheims, and of which the nine long miles of vehicles and animals had so terribly impeded his movements. He had given instructions from Quatre-Champs to direct it straight on Saint-Pierremont, and it was not until Osches that the teams came ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... about a slight resuscitation of warlike operations. The Scots won a victory at Piperden, near Berwick, in 1435 or 1436, and in the summer of 1436, when the Princess Margaret was on her way to France to enter into her ill-starred union with the dauphin, the English made an attempt to take her captive. James replied by an attempt upon Roxburgh, but gave it up without having accomplished anything, and returned to spend his last Christmas at Perth. His twelve years in Scotland had been mainly occupied in attempts ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... evil and from the ill-starred Guelph sympathies of Florence for a foreign prince, which familiarized it with foreign intervention, came all the disasters which followed. But who does not admire the people which was wrought up by its venerated preacher to a mood of such sustained loftiness ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... that your majesty is laughing at me; nevertheless, I deem it incumbent on me to raise my warning voice. Etiquette is something sublime and holy—it is the sacred wall separating the sovereign from his people. If that ill-starred queen, Marie Antoinette, had not torn down this wall, she would probably have met with a less ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... the stricken man poured forth his tale, and the Red Cross Knight learned that once he was happy and free, like other men, till on an ill-starred day he and a friend had fallen in with a cursed wight who called himself 'Despair,' who had plucked all hope from their breasts, and bade them seek death, the one with a rope, the other with a knife. His friend, whose love had been disdained by a proud lady, fell an easy ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... about the affair; only he was more than usually tender to her in his rough way, and thought, morning, noon, and night, on what he could do to give her pleasure, and drive away all recollection of her ill-starred love. ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the place; for by nearly starving there, years before, with the others of Governor la Barre's ill-starred expedition, he had contributed to giving ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... unmolested, were accustomed to fit out for their voyages, and, having disposed of their cargoes, to return. A vessel of this description had arrived at the port of London. The subject of the traffic having become invested with interest, a portion of the members of the House paid a visit to the ill-starred craft. The deplorably narrow quarters where hundreds of human beings were to be stowed away during the weeks that might be necessary to make their passage produced upon the minds of these gentlemen a most unfavorable impression. The various insignia of the trade did not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... suffered a great persecution. But God knows the truth; and it is not permitted, nor do I wish, to interpret the events of His holy will and providence. But it has not seemed proper to me to omit a circumstance which I positively know concerning that ill-starred youth; namely, that after his death, there was found among his papers a letter from his father, Don Basilio de San Miguel (who is said to have been much given to astrology and soothsaying), who told and ordered him not to ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... dispersed Ciconians rallied, gathered together their allies, and attacking the revellers, defeated them with great slaughter, so that less than half of them escaped in their ships. Yet this was only the first of the many mishaps which befell the ill-starred Ulysses. So persistently did misfortune pursue him that the superstitious Greeks declared that he must have incurred the hatred of the sea-god, Neptune, who would not let him ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... that the latest act of the duke on the scaffold, before submitting to the stroke of the executioner, was to call his servant, and put into the man's hand a toothpick-case, the last token of ill-starred love. "Give it," he said, "to that person!" After the description of Monmouth's burial ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
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