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More "Sheer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... friend with the understanding heart no less than a brother dear," as Homer said? More impossible. An unknown enemy, then, had stolen the fleet order from Themistocles? But what man had hated Glaucon? One answer remained,—unwittingly the athlete had offended some god, forgotten some vow, or by sheer good fortune had awakened divine jealousy. Poseidon had been implacable toward Odysseus, Athena toward Hector, Artemis toward Niobe,—Glaucon could only pray that his present welcome amongst the Persians might not draw down ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... violation of integrity as a direct falsehood. Equivocation is often falsehood. Deception in all forms is opposed to integrity. Mock manners, pretended emotions, affectation, policy plans to secure attention and respect are all sheer falsehoods, and in the end injure her who is guilty of them. Respect and affection are the out-growth of confidence. She who secures the firmest confidence will secure the most respect and love. ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... care to secure everything to herself, for her own life, when the father of this girl (a child at that time) died- -of sheer helplessness; no other disorder—and then He renewed the acquaintance that had once subsisted between the mother and Him. He had been put aside for the flaxen-haired, large-eyed man (or nonentity) with Money. He could overlook that for Money. ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... watched the whole proceeding. He could only hold on to a sail and, by the sheer strength of his hands and arms, save himself from being carried overboard, as sea after sea swept over them. He strained his eyes until it seemed as though they would burst, to follow the movements of that ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... the silent water. And then, when one hand was loosed in the struggle, she twisted it through his long hair, and dragged back his head till his eyes were nearly starting from their sockets. Anastasia Bergen had hitherto been a sheer woman, all feminine in her nature. But now the foam came to her mouth, and fire sprang from her eyes, and the muscles of her body worked as though she had been trained to deeds of violence. Of violence, Aaron Trow had known much in his rough life, but never ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... sheer mine in that capacity," said the falconer, while he knotted the kerchief in two or three double folds around his sunburnt bull-neck, calling out at the same time, "Master Roland, Master Roland, make haste! we must back ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... all the time poring over his dear classic authors but for the fortunate intervention of the young members of the Myhrman family, seven in all, who frequently would storm into his room and carry him off by sheer force to their boisterous frolics. To one of these playmates, Anna Myhrman, the youngest daughter of the family, he soon became attached by ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... years. The entire solar system is gradually losing its internal heat, and must inevitably die of sheer inanition. The time is coming when the sun will drift through space, a black star in the midst of dead worlds. Perhaps the system will fall together, perhaps it will run against a star. In either case there would probably be a 'new ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... anger seemed to have possessed him, in presence of this free, independent, exacting woman—this woman who, worst of all, had just beaten him at the game of all games he prided himself on playing well. And despite his every effort, she saw through the veil of sheer, perfunctory courtesy; and seeing, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... With a yell of sheer terror which came quicker than even his sense of pain, the man leaped back, dropping as he did so the rope which held back the iron door. I jumped for it, but was too late, for the cord ran like lightning through the pulley-block, and the ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... people of the South-West, and were, unaided, fully competent to fight their way to the ocean over any obstacles which the powers behind Mr. Slidell could interpose. In the mere matching of local strength, it was sheer folly for the States of the lower Mississippi to attempt to control the mouth ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... volcanic activity associated with the Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge Saint Helena: rugged, volcanic; small scattered plateaus and plains Ascension: surface covered by lava flows and cinder cones of 44 dormant volcanoes; ground rises to the east Tristan da Cunha: sheer cliffs line the coastline of the nearly circular island; the flanks of the central volcanic peak are deeply dissected; narrow coastal plain lies between The Peak and ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Irish, and something like a settlement of these ancient distresses, and there seems no power, no conscience, no sanity in any of us, sufficient to save it from this cantankerous bitterness, this sheer wicked mischief of mutual exasperation.... Just when Ireland is getting a gleam of prosperity.... A murrain ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... for more than thirty years he devoted a considerable part of his time to works of charity and benevolence. He visited successively cities and towns so far remote from each other, as Bayonne and Marseilles, Bagneres and Lyons. He placed his talents at the service of the public from motives of sheer benevolence, for the large collections which were made at his recitations were not of the ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... they who have a land! Passion rooted deeply as the foundations of the hills: a man may adore one woman, but in adoring his land the aggregation of all men's love for all other women overwhelms him and accentuates to a fuller emotion. It is unselfish, impersonal, sheer sentiment clarified at its white heat from all interest and deceit, the noblest joy, the noblest sorrow. Bold should they be, and pure as the priests who bore the ark, that dare to call themselves patriots. And those, Lenore, who live to see their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... liberal as possible to secure their confidence ourselves. We are in St. Mary's paying the highest rate of wages in the island; 1s. 8d. currency per day nett, with allowances, are generally offered; I am giving here, from sheer necessity, 2s. 6d. currency per day, without charging any rent in the mean time. In the present state of things when so few estates are doing anything at all, I have much satisfaction in saying that the people here, on ——, a good proportion of them were at work last week, and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... not plead lost lands or exile for taking part in such massacres as Wyoming or Cherry Valley, but, long since an ally of the Indians, he was now at the head of a Tory band that murdered and burned from sheer pleasure. ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... girl of the Michigan woods; a buoyant loveable type of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and unpromising surroundings those rewards of ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... In itself the sheer creation of such a country—larger far than Great Britain and Germany, as rich as Illinois and Manitoba—would appeal at once to American commerce and industry, but you have only begun to grasp the significance of Manchuria when you compare it to the creation of such an empire ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... and Mikah who were milling about confusedly in the dark, kicked Mikah again out of sheer malice and hatred of all mankind, and led them towards the ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... killing bows and arrows of theirs? What causes respectable parents to take up their carpets, set their houses topsy-turvy, and spend a fifth of their year's income in ball suppers and iced champagne? Is it sheer love of their species, and an unadulterated wish to see young people happy and dancing? Psha! they want to marry their daughters; and, as honest Mrs. Sedley has, in the depths of her kind heart, already arranged a score of ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of showing what it could do. And this feeling evoked sympathy in the breasts of the Irish of the South and West; and they said to them of Ulster, "Rather than see your army wasted we will ourselves raise one for you to shoot at." And this they did, in part for sheer joy of the chance of a fight, and in part for admiration of the sportsmanship of a people that had defied a British Government. And though some joined the new Volunteers for love of Home Rule, and with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... WOLF'S-BANE 1.25 "We hesitate to say how many years it is necessary to go back in order to find their equals in sheer poetic originality."—Evening ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... attack of millions of sandflies on a hot sunny day will appreciate my feelings. About one o'clock we got as a diversion from our tormentors a great fright. A boat's crew of a gun-boat lying about a mile distant from our retreat landed, and out of sheer idleness set fire to the grass about a hundred yards from ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... and capered about him, while he stood and looked at her rather puzzled. He did not see anything to laugh at, and did not yet comprehend that here was a creature so joyous by nature that she must laugh and dance about from sheer spontaneous delight. ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... When a ship at anchor is laid in a proper position to keep clear of her anchor, but is forced by the wind or current out of that position, she is said to break her sheer. Also, for a vessel to break her sheer, or her back, means destroying the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... Queen laid her head upon the pillow which covered the casket, and soon Marie saw her fall asleep through sheer fatigue. She then rose, and, seating herself in a great, tapestried, square armchair, clasped her hands upon her knees, and began to reflect upon her painful situation. Consoled by the aspect of her gentle ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... topic of the lost boy, Harry, is introduced, and later on a boy who had been found by the natives of a Pacific island, comes into the story, being the person who found one of the ship's company who had been lost overboard in heavy weather. The latter had made his way ashore by sheer grit and determination (being a Sandwich Islander). They realise Harry is originally an English boy, and take him on board, and away from his savage masters who had been using ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... that surprised the latter no more than it did his white friends, he drove the head of the weapon sheer through one of the assailants, who went over backward with a screech that drowned all ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... rose hastily and went to the window to look out. This window was in a kind of circular tower projecting from the side of the building, such as one often sees in old Norman architecture;—it overhung not only a wall of dizzy height, but a precipice with a sheer descent of some thousand feet; and far below, spread out like a map in the distance, lay a prospect of enchanting richness. The eye might wander over orchards of silvery olives, plantations with their rows of mulberry-trees supporting the vines, now in the first tender spring green, scarlet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... anxious wits were driven hard. He had drawn to Mr. Frost every splinter of power he could command by barter, and thrown in his own State delegation in the House by sheer stress of that machine which he had upreared for his own defense at home. It was not enough; even the subtraction of two State delegations from the standards of the foe, by the adroit scheme, applied to each delegation, of dragging one of its members forward to be a candidate for Speaker, was not ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... dropping her hand. She wondered, vaguely distressed; and he went on presently: "As a plain matter of fact, I don't know much. It's an astonishing discovery for me, but it's a fact that I am not your mental, physical, or spiritual equal. In sheer, brute strength perhaps I am, and I am none too certain of that, either. But, and I say it to my shame, I can not follow you; I am inferior in education, in culture, in fine instinct, in mental development. You chatter in a dozen languages to your sisters: ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... were hospitably received by the inhabitants, who regaled them freely with their peculiar and very delicious food; after partaking of which, however, the comrades of the hero refused to leave the country, and it was only by sheer force that he at length succeeded in bringing them back to ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... or yielding. The ice broke on the instant; and so rapidly was he moving that a hole twelve or fifteen feet long was torn by the sheer force with which he went against it. As he fell through, he went under once, but luckily came up in the hole he had made, and got his hands and arms on the edges of the ice, which, however, kept bending down and breaking off. The breaking and his fall ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... Caucasus the path of barbarism; this is why the Turks who took the former course could found an empire, and those who took the latter have remained Tartars or Turcomans, as they were originally; because the way of the Caucasus was a sheer descent from Turkistan into the country which they occupy, but the way of the Aral was a circuitous course, leading them through many countries—through Sogdiana, Khorasan, Zabulistan, and Persia,—with ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... stood on the plain outside the City walls, and Lalun's house was upon the east wall facing the river. If you fell from the broad window-seat you dropped thirty feet sheer into the City Ditch. But if you stayed where you should and looked forth, you saw all the cattle of the City being driven down to water, the students of the Government College playing cricket, the high grass and trees that fringed the river-bank, ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... change the scene of their inaction. Yet it is unquestionably true that quite a large proportion of those who went North in this fashion were men honestly seeking remunerative employment, or persons who left through sheer desperation. In the second stage of the movement the club organizations, special parties and chartered cars did most perhaps to depopulate little communities and ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... the people and their desires, if public officers are really the servants of the people, and if political promises and professions have any binding force, our failure to give the relief so long awaited will be sheer recreancy. Nothing should intervene to distract our attention or disturb our effort, until this reform is accomplished by ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... example need not be followed by everyone; but it must be allowed that—at least as long as he was in his tree—he was neither dawdling, grumbling, spending money, nor otherwise harming himself, and perhaps his fellow creatures, from sheer want of employment. ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... flat where the bushes grew sparsely along the tiny arroyo now gone dry, the herd had stopped from sheer exhaustion, and were already nibbling desultorily upon the tenderest twigs. This was what Luck wanted in his scene, though the cattle must be moved into the location he had chosen where was just the background effect he wanted to get, with the bare mesa showing ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... a long time to rest and get back some of his breath before he ventured to the very mouth of the open sewer. As soon as he was sure that the bats had abandoned the chase, he threw himself down and closed his eyes from sheer weariness and exhaustion. Then, with returning strength and hope, he raised himself on his two hind legs, and looked ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh
... peculiar convincing force of these brief representations. They take so little a while to read, and yet in that little while the subject is so repeatedly introduced in the same light and with the same expression, that, by sheer force of repetition, that view is imposed upon the reader. The two English masters of the style, Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exemplify its dangers. Carlyle, indeed, had so much more depth and knowledge of the heart, his portraits of mankind are felt and rendered ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in mathematics, and those that assert there are, are infinite ruffians, ignorant, lying blackguards. There is no differential calculus, no Taylor's theorem, no calculus of variations, &c. in mathematics. There is no quackery whatever in mathematics; no % equal to anything. What sheer ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... as a controversialist, his first object is to refute and convince. The graces of poetry are never for a moment allowed to interfere with the full development of an argument. Much of the poem is a chain of intricate reasoning hammered into verse by sheer force of hand. The ardent imagination of the poet struggles through masses of intractable material which no genius could wholly fuse into a metal pure enough to take perfect form. His language, in the fine prologue to the fourth book of the poem, ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... black and inhospitable even in the sunlight. The rock walls rose sheer, the roofs slanted rakishly, the signs scratched on the rock by facetious riders were pointless and inane. Lone picked his way through the crooked defile that was marked MAIN STREET on the corner of the first huge boulder and came abruptly into the road. Here he turned ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... these as proof that Breitmann, as I have depicted him, is not a contradictory character, I cannot refrain from a word of praise as to the energy and patience with which the German "under a cloud" in America bears his reverses, and works cheerfully and uncomplainingly, until, by sheer perseverance, he, in most cases, conquers fortune. In this respect the Germans, as a race, and I might almost say as individuals, are superior to any others on the American continent. And if I have jested ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... my sausage-stick. I never would have believed that so much could have come from it; but much, of course, depended on what hands it fell into. I became very much agitated, and I wept, as a little mouse can weep, from sheer pleasure. ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... be it said, en passant, is sheer obstinacy. The marchesa is obstinate to folly, and full of contradictions. Besides, there is another powerful motive that influences her—she hates Count Nobili. Not that he has ever done any thing personally to offend her; of this he is incapable—indeed, he has ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... to see the German quail at the frightful precipice and sheer wall before him, but the Hapsburg was primarily a Tirolean mountaineer, and he measured the rock with ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... few alterations, and to Blue Bonnet's great joy Miss Clyde took both—and yet another; a sheer white linen lawn with a pink silk slip, which called forth all the ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... tense flank trembling round the barbed wound, Hateful; and fiery with invasive eyes And bristling with intolerable hair Plunged, and the hounds clung, and green flowers and white Reddened and broke all round them where they came. And charging with sheer tusk he drove, and smote Hyleus; and sharp death caught his sudden soul, And violent sleep shed night ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... certain enjoyment. The slowness of the tempo made it possible for Keith to keep in tune by leaning very close to the boy sitting next to him. Even the reading of the gospels and other recurring features of the service could be borne. But when the sermon began, Keith fell into sheer agony. The other boys seemed capable of letting the words of the preacher drop off them as water drops off the oily feathers of a water-fowl. But one of Keith's characteristics was that he had to listen to anything said loudly enough in his ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... start of recollection, he paused a moment and leaned forward to look at her more closely. "By the way, I had a shot at your friend to-day," he said, "the lady who looks like an old picture and does verse. Why on earth did she take to poetry?" he demanded impatiently. "I hate it—it's all sheer insanity." ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... to no one," the plucky boy in the boat made answer, and with a parting shot and a laughing "Farvl!" he leaped from the sinking boat into the dancing Maelar water. Striking boldly out, he swam twice round the boat in sheer bravado, defying the enemy; now ducking to escape the pursuing stream, or now, while floating on his back, sending a return shot with telling force against the men at the pump—for he still ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... and more pitiable companions never perhaps occurred to him. Yet he could not help feeling the want of that excitement which, singularly enough, was most conducive to that calm equanimity for which he was notorious. He looked at the gloomy walls that rose a thousand feet sheer above the circling pines around him; at the sky, ominously clouded; at the valley below, already deepening into shadow. And, doing so, suddenly he heard his ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... never comes the ship to port Howe'er the breeze may be; Just when she nears the waiting shore She drifts again to sea. No tack of sail, nor turn of helm, Nor sheer of veering side. Stern-fore she drives to sea and night Against the wind ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... modesty, she had said she could not bear for us to see her in the trunk hose. Now that fruition seemed about to crown her hopes she was happy to her heart's core; and when once to herself wept for sheer joy. It is little wonder she was happy. She was leaving behind no one whom she loved excepting Jane, and perhaps, me. No father nor mother; only a sister whom she barely knew, and a brother whose treatment of her had turned her heart against him. ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... of course its relation to death that more than anything else has made it necessary that war should appeal to art, and take an aesthetic form, and without the aid of the aesthetic, war could not maintain itself in the world. As a sheer fulfillment of duty war could not survive. By the strength of its aesthetic appeal war must control and overcome the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... returned to the benches of evening school. He learned to write his beautiful copper-plate hand, and knocked the bottom out of arithmetic and geography. Then came sheer erudition—the nature of chemical elements, stars in their courses, kings of England with their Magna Chartas and habeas corpuses. Nor content even then, he must needs grapple with Roman emperors and Greek republics, and master the fabled lore concerning gods and goddesses, cloven-footed ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... the pair had lived together for twenty years, there had been little intercourse of thought between them, and none of sentiment. Strange had, indeed, throughout shut his nephew, not merely from his heart, but also from his confidence, at first out of sheer neglect, and afterwards, as the lad grew towards manhood, from deliberate intent. For, by continually brooding over his embittered life, he had at last impregnated his weak nature with the savage cynicism which embraced even his one comrade; and the child he had originally chosen as a solace ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... of Madam Taylor, I suppose, of which he had probably heard famous mention, but which I would have believed to have been a longing for Roberta, Marquise of Grez and Bye, if I had heard it so spoken, with an English or Russian or French accent, to me in a robe of tulle or sheer linen. "And may I not return immediately after that supper to that Club of Old Hickory for conversation with you and my Uncle, the General Robert?" I ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... to avenge himself. For, not having store enough in his own land to recruit his forces—so heavy was the blow he had received—he went to Britain, calling himself an ambassador. Upon his outward voyage, for sheer wantonness, he got his crew together to play dice, and when a wrangle arose from the throwing of the cubes, he taught them to wind it up with a fatal affray. And so, by means of this peaceful sport, he spread the spirit of strife through the whole ship, and the ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Year's day, 1887, he laid down his pen to resume it again no more. He was forced to this by sheer exhaustion; his body was wasted to a skeleton, and it was clear to all that the end was near. Having suffered much for several days, but without a murmur, on the evening of Jan. 5 he requested all his family to come to his bedside, and while ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... The body vaporized first, leaving for a fraction of a second the fierce head and the powerful legs apparently supporting themselves in the air. Then part of the head went, and the rest fell to the ground. But sheer momentum carried the green smoky vapor on, so that it surrounded first the old man, then several of the girls, and after them, Bradley himself. They were all yelling, all but Bradley, who put away his gun and muttered to himself in relief, and then the wind began to ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... just yonder where the blue cloak caught the sunlight, there was a sheer bank and how the lapping water had cut into it, gouging it out year after year so that the loose soil above was always ready to crumble and spill into the lake. The wearer of the bright garment stirred and stood up, her back ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... even wink at it," replied his foe. "Still further," continued the warlike mountaineer in sheer desperation, "you must not even ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... fully as common; which is properly called false theory; conclusions drawn, by way of deduction, from properties of some one agent which is known or supposed to be present, all other co-existing agents being overlooked. As the former is the error of sheer ignorance, so the latter is especially that of semi-instructed minds; and is mainly committed in attempting to explain complicated phenomena by a simpler theory than their nature admits of. As when one ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... snapdragons, and dahlias, this floral blaze being backed by crusted grey stone-work remaining from a yet remoter Casterbridge than the venerable one visible in the street. The old-fashioned fronts of these houses, which had older than old-fashioned backs, rose sheer from the pavement, into which the bow windows protruded like bastions, necessitating a pleasing chassez-dechassez movement to the time-pressed pedestrian at every few yards. He was bound also to ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... that box was made for a special occasion; as indeed were all the preparations of the tomb and all belonging to it. Queen Tera did not trouble herself to guard against snakes and scorpions, in that rocky tomb cut in the sheer cliff face a hundred feet above the level of the valley, and fifty down from the summit. Her precautions were against the disturbances of human hands; against the jealousy and hatred of the priests, who, had they known of her real aims, would have tried to baffle them. From her point ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... to escape into that wilderness and wandering alone among the peaks, he shuddered. He came back and studied the sleeper. Something about the nonchalance with which Sinclair had gone to sleep under the very eye of his prisoner affected John Gaspar strangely. Doubtless it was sheer contempt for the man he was guarding. And, indeed, something assured Jig that, no matter how well he employed the next eight hours in putting a great distance between himself and Sour Creek, the tireless riding of Sinclair would more ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... he read the following night, was a much less discouraging work. It told of defeat, but of how glorious a defeat! The escape from Elba, the landing in France and the march to Paris, conquering, where he passed, by the sheer magnetism of his personality! His spirit bounded as he read of this and of the frightened exit of that puny usurper before the mere rumour of his approach. Then that audacious staking of all on a throw of the ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... which the poison does not affect. There are several mammals immune to snake- bite, including various species of hedgehog, pig, and mongoose—the other mammals which kill them do so by pouncing on them unawares or by avoiding their stroke through sheer quickness of movement; and probably this is the case with most snake-eating birds. The mongoose is very quick, but in some cases at least—I have mentioned one in the "African Game Trails"—it permits itself to be bitten by poisonous snakes, treating the ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the gods or not was, in ancient times, the cause of much dispute; it is, of course, not atheism in our sense, but it is certainly evidence that belief in the gods is shaken. The first view, on the other hand, is sheer atheism. Plato consequently reckons with this as a serious danger to the community; he mentions it as a widespread view among the youth of his time, and in his legislation he sentences to death those who fail to be converted. It would seem certain, therefore, that there was, in reality, something ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... M. Asquith, son of the former British Premier, is one of the gallant men attached to the Hood battalion. He has been through the thick of many fights, and has been wounded more than once, escaping death through sheer good fortune. ...
— Some Naval Yarns • Mordaunt Hall
... suffered through the marvelous mechanical development of machines and devices whose sole purpose has been to multiply gross output. Necessary as sheer volume of production has been, it has remained for very recent years to witness a renewal of interest in the beauty of printing, as determined by the principles ...
— Applied Design for Printers - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #43 • Harry Lawrence Gage
... hardly conscious of them and overcome them in the course of the evening. Yet the public, even critics, usually forget this fact and condemn an entire performance for faults which are due at the beginning to sheer nervousness. ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... three other men their chance to gain an entrance at the rear of the wall in the garden, and creep up unawares. It was probably sheer accident that led all three of them along the far side of the house, but it was fortunate for Jeremy and me, for otherwise cold steel between our shoulder-blades would likely have been our first ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... think she was a little sister, by the way I try to speak, and if she only knew how I struggle to suffocate the passion that rises within me, when she looks up so earnestly out of her big dreaming eyes; it is sheer folly and I'll go mad if it must continue—and yet—if uncle ever suspected my love he would separate us then and there. But it is dangerous dust I am flinging in his eyes by being free and easy with her in this way. In a little while more I won't be able to trust myself, and God help me ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... victims I had led into the trouble, and he had our wheelbarrows all picked out for us, and a nice large pile of sand for us to play with when fate interceded in our behalf. The poor man nearly cried out of sheer anguish of soul, and I can't justly blame him. It's hard lines to have a nice fat extra duty party go ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... stories, and smoked till the room was blue, comforting themselves with hot Scotch and general good-fellowship. Mark Twain always had a genuine passion for billiards. He was never tired of the game. He could play all night. He would stay till the last man gave out from sheer weariness; then he would go on knocking the balls about alone. He liked to invent new games and new rules for old games, often inventing a rule on the spur of the moment to fit some particular shot or position on the table. It amused ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... which they have doomed to progress still remain as is Guayra, their towns deserted, with but the broken spire of some old church emerging from the verdure of the tropics, as the St. Paul's Rocks rise sheer out of the sea. If there is charm in the unknown, there is at least as great a charm in the forgotten, and the Salto de Guayra is one of the most forgotten corners of the earth. To this wild place Father Mendoza proposed to lead the Indians from the Reductions of San Jose and ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... was able to remember episodes of an entire month, bringing them up one by one, grouping them together, and connecting together all those little matters which had preceded or followed some important event. She succeeded by sheer force of attention, by force of memory and of concentrated will power in bringing back to mind almost completely her two first years at Peuples. Distant memories of her life came back to her with a singular facility, bringing a kind of relief; but the later ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... made perfect by a passion that has stolen upon her unawares, and which she could not acknowledge, even to herself, without blushing to death. By this preposterous doctrine, the defeat and enslavement of the man is made glorious, and even gifted with a touch of flattering naughtiness. The sheer horsepower of his wooing has assailed and overcome her maiden modesty; she trembles in his arms; he has been granted a free franchise to work his wicked will upon her. Thus do the ambulant images of God cloak their shackles proudly, and divert the ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... entranced, comfortable, but not sublime, content to drink in the sunny sweetness of the summer day, happy only from the pleasant sense of being, tangling each other in silly talk out of mere wantonness, purling up bubbles of airy nothings in sheer effervescence of animal delight; falling into periodic fits of useful knowledge, under the influence of which we consulted our maps and our watches in a conjoint and clamorous endeavor to locate ourselves, which would no sooner be satisfactorily accomplished than something ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... among civilians—to be welcome in the village houses—and generally to experience peace time conditions again. This may not seem to amount to very much, but it meant a lot then. And it certainly had a fine effect on the morale of the Battalion. It was a sheer relief to be out of sound of the guns, to forget the mud, the exhaustion, mental and physical, the weary night watches, ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... Fontanges, bursting with impatience, stood with Newton, at the head of the men. When the collision of the two vessels took place, the Windsor Castle, conned so as not to run down the pirate, but to sheer alongside, stove in the bulwarks of the other, and carried away her topmasts, which, drawn to windward by the pressure on the back-stays, fell over towards the Windsor Castle, and, entangling with her rigging, prevented the separation of ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... he printed up that afternoon was the most horrible collection of mince-pie dreams that ever a sane man run afoul of. Rosy used one of the grass huts for a dark room; and while he was developing them plates, they could hear him screaming from sheer fright at being shut up alone with 'em ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and held on the same course until abreast of the perch, which was only a forked stick. The men came aft and hauled in the mizzen sheer. Chambers put up the helm. The mizzen came across with a jerk, and the sheet was again allowed to run out. The jib came over with a report like the shot of a cannon, and at the same ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... the doctor replied. "Drive that gypsy lassie out of the town before the soldiers reach it. She is firing the men to a red-heat through sheer devilry." ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... having digested the necessary matter, always poured itself forth in writing so copiously that his revision was chiefly devoted to reducing the over-abundance. He never shrank from any of the drudgery of preparation, but I think his own part of the work was sheer pleasure ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the news reached them that the brig had put into Salcombe range. It is a wild-looking yet land-locked harbour on the Devonshire coast. Black rocks rise sheer up out of the water on either side of the entrance, and give it a particularly melancholy and unattractive appearance. One of the owners had come round in the brig, but he had landed and taken a post-chaise back towards London. In the morning the brig ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... roar of an automatic close beside him in the melee as Milton remembered at last through the red haze of his fury the weapon he carried, but before either Randall or Lanier could reach their own weapons a new wave of crocodilian forms had poured onto them that by sheer pressing weight held ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... stiffness and stretching made him uncouth, he grew angry. He resented his captivity, chafed at his being limited like that, did not understand how it had come about. It had come about through love, through sheer sheltering love. She had placed a crystal cup above him to keep him safe, and he had sat safe beneath it all these years, fearing to stir, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... she reeled from sheer weakness as she said the words. Amelius held her up, and looked round him. They were close to a stall at which coffee and slices of bread-and-butter were sold. He ordered some coffee to be poured out, and ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... what is called a Magellanic jacket, and a pair of trowsers. The jacket is made of a thick woollen stuff, called Fearnought, which is provided by the government. We saw, from time to time, a great number of penguins, albatrosses, and sheer-waters, seals, whales, and porpoises: And on the 11th, having passed Falkland's islands, we discovered the coast of Terra del Fuego, at the distance of about four leagues, extending from the W* to S.E. by S. We had here five-and-thirty fathom, the ground soft, small slate stones. As we ranged ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... they had climbed to the loftiest known turret, they would have found it swathed in a garment of clinging vapour, affording no refreshment to the eye, and no hope to the heart. There was one lofty tower that rose sheer a hundred feet above the rest, and from which the fog could have been seen lying in a grey mass beneath; but that tower they had not yet discovered, nor another close beside it, the top of which was never seen, nor could be, for the highest clouds of heaven clustered continually ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... and, in fact, doing always the right thing at the proper time and in the best possible manner. I used to be rather proud of saying that it was necessary for strangers to know me for some time before they liked me. I am almost ashamed now not to have had sense enough to see that this arose from sheer awkwardness and stupidity on my part; from the absence of address, and a careless disregard of the rules of society, which necessarily induce a want of self-confidence, a bashful reserve, annoying to sensible people ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... a combination of the single cane and bow system, and the horizontal arm training, which I first tried on the Concord from sheer necessity; when the results pleased me so much that I have adopted it with all strong-growing varieties. The circumstances which led me to the trial of this method were as follows: In the summer of 1862, when my Concord vines ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... write the possessive of nouns," hardly expecting, we suppose, that the "condition" of a noun will be sounded or written; and they speak of "a noun in the singular with a plural application," in which expression singular must be taken to mean singular form to save it from sheer nonsense. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... waited purposely until February was dead. Cynics may say that this was only wisdom, in that a damnatory notice from me might have inspired that unhappy month to an unusually brilliant run, out of sheer wilfulness. I prefer to think that it was good manners which forbade me to be disrespectful to her very face. It is bad manners to speak the truth to the living, but February is dead. ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... travel was ever able to deter him from doing what his humanity had bidden him do. From place to place, through nineteen States, he had traveled, sowing as he went the seeds of his holy purpose, and watering them with his life's blood. Not Livingstone nor Stanley on the dark continent exceeded in sheer physical exertion and endurance the labors of this wonderful man. He belongs in the category of great explorers, only the irresistible passion and purpose, which pushed him forward, had humanity, not geography, as their goal. Where, in the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... returned to their forests. The natives whom I had taken with me from Goa had proved so lazy and morose that nearly the whole task of making the path through the forest had fallen upon the Igorots. From sheer laziness they threw away the drinking water of which they were the porters; and the Igorots were obliged to fetch water from a considerable distance for our bivouac on the summit. In all my troublesome marches, I have always done better with Cimarrons than with the civilized ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... Convent, and from sheer wantonness I was making my Waler plunge and curvet across the road as I tickled it with the loop of ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... glistened. He was silent for sheer swelling of heart. He gulped down something—and went ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... a weary and fruitless search for game, but late in the afternoon the youth came upon a slight, sheer descent, along the foot of which ran a shallow but broad creek, beyond which was a little grass-grown valley, where were feeding a fine herd of the little deer. They were feeding in the direction of the creek and the wind blew from them to the hunter, so that no rumor of their danger was ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... me, moved by his agonies Through naysaying the drug they had offered him. It brought the end. And when he had breathed his last The woman went. I saw her never again . . . Now glares my moody meaning on you, friend? - That when you talk of offspring as sheer joy So trustingly, you blink contingencies. Fors Fortuna! He who goes fathering Gives ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... good fish in the sea as were ever caught," cried the girl in sheer bravado, brushing away ...
— The Little Gray Lady - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... a lot since I got away. I've realized since, more than I did then, that it must have taken just sheer pluck on all their parts to see it through as they did. Of course, my young sisters couldn't understand all it meant, but my kid brother's read a heap, as I easily found out when we talked about it, and I know he had to do a few swallowings ...
— The Whistling Mother • Grace S. Richmond
... further adventure during this day's journey, than buying bread and cheese from sheer hunger, at a little wooden tavern by the road-side, whose shelves were covered with glittering rows of bottles of brandy and mezcal. At some of the Indian huts also we bought various branches of pltanos, that most useful of fruits, and basis of the food of the poor inhabitants ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... born in rather sordid conditions, lift herself through sheer determination to the better things for which ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... Ebeneezer's dooryard, and the newly acquired bossy cow mooed unhappily in her improvised stable. Harlan had christened the cow "Maud" because she insisted upon going into the garden, and though Dorothy had vigorously protested against putting Tennyson to such base uses, the name still held, out of sheer appropriateness. ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... undressed, denuded, unveiled, exposed, undraped, in puris naturalibus; unadorned, bald, meager, unembellished, uncolored, unvarnished; empty, destitute, unfurnished; threadbare, pileworn, napless; meer, alone, sheer. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... had alarmed or excited its interest. And he did not try to establish more than a casual contact as they made their way down the bank to the edge of the stream, Sssuri splashing in ankle-deep for the sheer pleasure of feeling liquid curl about his ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... unendurable to my weakened nerves. Had it not been for the return, now and then, of the pains I had suffered in my delirium, mercifully less and less violent, which made the periods of their absence hours of comparative pleasure, I think I should have grown into a hopeless nervous invalid from sheer ennui. I had never been ill that I remember since the days of my childish maladies, and I fretted as only such an one can and must fret under the irksome novelty of pain, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... was not yet in sight, because the front of White Face, though apparently a sheer and awful precipice when viewed from the valley, was in fact wrinkled with gullies and buttresses and bucklings of the tortured strata. But the sound of his coming was now quite intelligible to her. That softly ponderous tread, that careless displacing of stones, those undisguised sniffings and ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... put fires out and remain here till the conditions change altogether for the better. It is sheer waste of coal to make further attempts to break through as ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... account. With a hazy idea that something had passed which he had not heard, he caused a diversion by sending Mrs. Church indoors for a pack of cards, and solemnly celebrated the occasion with a game of whist, at which Mrs. Church, in partnership with Mrs. Banks, either through sheer wilfulness or absence of mind, contrived to lose ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... strongly against the distrust with which, in sheer perplexity of mind, Mr. Brock blindly regarded him. He had written to a savings-bank in a distant part of England, had drawn his money, and had paid the doctor and the landlord. A man of vulgar mind, after acting in this manner, ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... life. The college should not be expected to pay much attention to the cultivation of the imagination and the emotions. These faculties, to which literature makes appeal, are not, it was said, under the control of the will, and you cannot cultivate or strengthen them by sheer resolve or strenuous exertion. The first condition of any real appreciation of literature, so ran the argument, is spontaneous enjoyment of it; and you cannot command a right feeling for literature or for anything else. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... in the world an industry which, for sheer pictorial magnificence, rivals the modern manufacturing of steel. In the first place, the scale of everything is inexpressibly stupendous. To speak of a row of six blast furnaces, with mouths a hundred feet above the ground, and chimneys rising perhaps another ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... sometimes the more daring chiefs converted these detached peaks and masses of rock, numbers of which you can see as you come up the Ghaut by railway, into almost impregnable fortresses. Many of these masses of rock rise as sheer up from the hillside as walls of masonry, and look at a short distance like ruined castles. Some are absolutely inaccessible; others can only be scaled by experienced climbers; and, although possible for the ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... the door, he sprang across grasping his flask, but Sweyn dashed between, and caught him back irresistibly, so that a most frantic effort only availed to wrench one arm free. With that, on the impulse of sheer despair, he cast at her with all his force. The door swung behind her, and the flask flew into fragments against it. Then, as Sweyn's grasp slackened, and he met the questioning astonishment of surrounding ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... reckoned with. He could now easily believe the stories he had heard about the tremendous strength of the giant. And it was easy to see how he kept control over the members of the squatter clan by sheer force of character. ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... can find no such thing as a pure conception of wedded love in our old dramatists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. There is scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose abilities are not discussed by the lady or her waiting-woman. In this, as in all things, how transcendant over his age and his rivals was ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... the moment before she is actually overtaken by the breaking crest of the wave, she is apt to refuse to answer her helm, and he who is steering her loses all control over her; she seems to be seized with a perverse determination to take a broad sheer one way or the other, with disastrous results, despite a hard-over helm, and then the only thing to be done to retrieve the situation is to effect a lightning shift of helm against all your past experience ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... thither, observing the surgeon with languid interest. Another nurse, much younger, without the "black band," watched the surgeon from the foot of the cot. Beads of perspiration chased themselves down her pale face, caused less by sympathy than by sheer weariness and heat. The small receiving room of St. Isidore's was close and stuffy, surcharged with odors of iodoform and ether. The Chicago spring, so long delayed, had blazed with a sudden fury the last ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... climbing, and in a short time reached the crest. I sprang upon the summit, and another step would have precipitated me into an immense snow field five hundred feet below. To the edge of this field was a sheer icy precipice; and then, with a gradual fall, the field sloped off for about a mile, until it struck the foot of another lower ridge. I stood on a narrow crest, about three feet in width, with an inclination of about 20 deg. N., 51 deg. E. As soon as I had gratified ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... was Madelon Hautville, in a sheer white gown, which she had fashioned for herself out of an old crape shawl which had belonged to her mother, and cunningly wrought with great garlands of red flowers. She was going to Burr Gordon's wedding, not knowing the lateness of the hour; for her brother Richard had played ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... out, for the amazed old gentleman was mechanically drinking his whiskey out of sheer fright. The rest had forgotten their drinks. "Not one swallow," the boy continued. "No, you'll not put it down either. You'll keep hold of it, and you'll dance all round this place. Around and around. And don't you spill any. And I'll ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... was not there, nor anywhere else in their wanderings, which at last from sheer necessity in the way of ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... gave an indescribable sentiment of pathos and of age to the scenery. Suddenly the boat rounded the corner of the three steps, each five hundred feet high, in which Cape Eternity climbs from the river, and crept in under the naked side of the awful cliff. It is sheer rock, springing from the black water, and stretching upward with a weary, effort-like aspect, in long impulses of stone marked by deep seams from space to space, till, fifteen hundred feet in air, its vast brow beetles forward, and frowns with a ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... altogether, and, through inexperience and in his anxiety to catch up, increased the revolutions of the engines not wisely but rather too much. The next thing that happened was that the squall cleared, and he found himself almost on top of her, and had to put the helm over and sheer out of line to avoid a collision. At the same time he reduced speed to drop back into station. Sometimes he reduced more than he should, with the consequence that the next astern nearly bumped him, while the leader shot ahead and vanished into ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... work which one does out of sheer preference. Work never made an actress and work never made a singer where innate talent for these arts was lacking. Nature, the true maker of every famous name, bestows ninety per cent and man, if he hustles, can provide the other very necessary ten. ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... easy to order the men down the cliffs, but not so easy for them to obey, for the rocks were almost perpendicular at the place, and descended sheer into the water. ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... danger to the Dutch navigators of ancient days; hectoring their tub-built barks in a most unruly style; whirling them about, in a manner to make any but a Dutchman giddy, and not unfrequently stranding them upon rocks and reefs. Whereupon out of sheer spleen they denominated it Hellegat (literally Hell Gut) and solemnly gave it over to the devil. This appellation has since been aptly rendered into English by the name of Hell Gate; and into nonsense ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... seventy-five Irishmen and Americans made as much noise with their guns as a Boer commando of a thousand men usually did, and the result was that the cavalry wheeled about and returned into Ladysmith. Botha and his men, dropping out of their saddles from sheer exhaustion and hunger, came up from Colenso a short time after the cavalry had been driven back and made their memorable journey to Joubert's new headquarters at Glencoe. It was one of the few instances where the foreigners were of any really great assistance ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... succession of rolling terraces. Now he slid along the trough of a bank of snow. One thought was comforting; he was escaping from those strange brown men. Shots had rung out. Bullets whizzed past him, one fairly burning his cheek. It was with a distinct sense of relief that he at last bumped over a sheer drop of six feet to a gentler incline where he was quite ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... a moment with the girl's bundle. And with his return one glance showed him how nearly his plans were upset. Jessie was clasping Jamie in her arms, kissing him hungrily, tears streaming down her cheeks, while, out of sheer sympathy, little Vada was clinging to her mother's skirts, her small face buried in amongst them, sobbing as ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... ages, and see whether man has been so strikingly similar to us of the present day. There are manias and mysteries of the Middle Ages whose history is smothered in darkness; lost to us out of sheer incapacity to be understood from any modern standpoint of sense or feeling whatever. What do you make out of that crusade of scores of thousands of unarmed, delirious Christians, who started eastward to redeem the holy sepulchre; all their faith ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... again, heading straight for what looked like a sheer wall of black rock a thousand feet or more in height, up a path so steep that Robertson and I got out and walked, or rather scrambled, in order to ease the bearers. Billali, I noticed, remained in his litter. The convenience of the bearers did not trouble him; he only ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... said, with fond glistening eyes. He ate little or nothing, and sighed, and said "Good Percival!" when his friend laughed at him. After dinner, he took Laura by the hand, and asked her if she would be "so sweet as to play to him." She complied, through sheer astonishment. He sat by the piano, with his watch-chain resting in folds, like a golden serpent, on the sea-green protuberance of his waistcoat. His immense head lay languidly on one side, and ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... to throw himself into the river from sheer love befo' marriage," said Solomon, "an' two weeks arter the woman had taken him, to fall out with her because she'd put too much shortenin' in ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... never—never to have anything to do with him. Play grandly, honourably. Be not, of course, cast down at losing; but above all, be not eager at winning, as mean souls are. And, indeed, with all one's skill and advantages, winning is often problematical; I have seen a sheer ignoramus that knows no more of play than of Hebrew, blunder you out of five thousand pounds in a few turns of the cards. I have seen a gentleman and his confederate play against another and HIS ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... crept along it till he reached the still sinking man: he caught him by the arm at once, and started to haul him out. Anstey's strength was well known in the regiment, and perhaps he was the only man who could have dragged out the General by sheer force of arm, but he did it somehow, and the cheers of the men simply rent the air as they saw their ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... exercise its increased purchasing power on some new thing. If so, the supply will adapt itself accordingly, and the values of things will continue to conform to their cost of production. At any rate, it is a sheer absurdity that all things should fall in value, and that all producers should, in consequence, be insufficiently remunerated. If values remain the same, what becomes of prices is immaterial, since the remuneration of producers does not depend on how much money, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... with uninterrupted energy she again turned toward the southeast for another military adventure. Rumania still held fast to her neutrality. In Bulgaria the Central Powers were to succeed in gaining a fourth ally, which in sheer military advantage was probably worth more than the accession of Italy to her enemies. Though Russia had won her freedom for Bulgaria in '76, no sentiment drew her to Russia's assistance when Russia was losing. No statesmanship is more matter of fact than that of the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... pause. Then his voice rang again, cheery, confident, unexcited, "Hold fast; I'm going to get you out of this. I can't get to you on this side; the rock is sheer. I'll have to leave you now and cross the rift high up and come down to you on the other side by ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... get the money. For this enterprise he obtained support in England and set out on his exacting adventure. On the voyage his crew mutinied. Armed with cutlasses, they told Phips that he must turn pirate or perish; but he attacked the leader with his fists and triumphed by sheer strength of body and will. A second mutiny he also quelled, and then took his ship to Jamaica where he got rid of its worthless crew. His enterprise had apparently failed; but the second Duke of Albemarle and other powerful men believed in him and helped him to make another trial. This ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... own madman. One would have his eye on devotional curates; another would wander about collecting obstreperous majors; a third would be the terror of animal-loving spinsters, who would flee with all their cats and dogs before him. Short of sheer literal anarchy, therefore, it seems plain that the Eugenist must find some authority other than his own implied personality. He must, once and for all, learn the lesson which is hardest for him and me and for all our fallen race—the fact ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... such a crime against courtly etiquette that the count, from sheer amazement, made no excuses to the king; he only cast a threatening look at the secretary. But as he encountered Willmar's pale, terrified countenance, a tremor seized him, and he cast an eager glance upon the ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... I emanated, trying by sheer mental effort to drive the thought over that stinking waste, and through the massive double hull of the liner. "Ahoy ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... talent, treason against treason—in all this Randal Leslie would have risen superior to Giulio di Peschiera. But what now crushed him was not the superior intellect,—it was the sheer brute power of audacity and nerve. Here stood the careless, unblushing villain, making light of his guilt, carrying it away from disgust itself, with resolute look and front erect. There stood the abler, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... there must be prospecting. This is sheer and unavoidable risk on the face of it, and it is attended with economic waste which cannot be avoided. Of a hundred prospectors, ninety-nine die poor. The failures must be charged off to industrial waste attendant upon inherent ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... the agent in the light of something good. If evil be done, it is done as leading to good, or as bound up with good, or as itself being good for the doer under the circumstances; no man ever does evil for sheer evil's sake. Yet evil may be the object of the will, not by itself, nor primarily, but in a secondary way, as bound up with the good that is willed in the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... boat has her own special course to travel up, and her own special berth of safety, and she knows every jag that will gore her on the road, and every flint from which she will strike fire. By dint of sheer sturdiness of arms, legs, and lungs, keeping true time with the pant and the shout, steadily goes it with hoist and haul, and cheerily undulates the melody of call that rallies them all with a strong will together, until the steep bluff and the burden of the bulk by ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... down on the ground the child swiftly took off her shoes and stockings. Getting up she undid the heavy shawl and the two little dresses. Out she slipped without more ado and stood up in only a light petticoat. In sheer delight at the relief, she threw up her dimpled arms, that were bare up to her short sleeves. To save the trouble of carrying them, her aunt had dressed her in her Sunday clothes over her workday garments. Heidi ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... the man out of sheer delight and happiness. And the while he bent down and kissed the smiling upturned face, and permitted one hand to wander caressingly over the girl's wealth of ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... you can eat it, and drink it, and wear it upon your back,—I own that it is the kind for which I have the most absolute partiality. It is surely better to be spoken well of by your neighbors, who do know you, than by those who do not know you, and who, if they commend, may do so by sheer accident. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... stupid, instinctive way for that; but sometimes she had sickened him. She had wanted so much. She seemed always wanting something. At first her pallid and raven beauty and her clever silliness had been sheer stimulation, but when ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... infinite pains to get the right notes, so he was forcibly removed, and Dennison installed in his place. "The Gondoliers" and the noise began again, while Ward, protesting that it was time we went away, was disregarded entirely. From sheer distaste for punch and only a very limited taste for wine I had not been seeking my enjoyment in drinking, but I had smoked far more than was good for me, and my head felt as large as a pumpkin. It occurred to me, however, that if Ward wished our entertainment to ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... black as night. The fairies must have been sorry at their plight, for, indeed, it was a pitiable one; bruised, blistered, covered with grime and with little else, they stumbled on aimlessly, cutting their bare feet, falling often in sheer weakness, and lying for minutes where they fell before they could summon strength to stumble on. Surely no more pathetic pair than these two ever braved the ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... Pernambucan; hence one could scarcely blame him for drawing a pistol and shooting the launchman—fatally, according to Mr. Schultz. Of course, after that, to have lingered longer inside the three-mile limit would have been sheer insanity, so Mr. Schultz, taking matters into his own hands, had uphooked and skipped with doused lights from the jurisdiction of ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... than given the extra thousand dollars the church insisted on paying him. The demands on him were so urgent, the perfect impossibility of providing men with work and so relieving them had been such a bar to giving help in that direction, that out of sheer necessity, as it seemed to him, Philip had given fully half of the thousand dollars reserved for his own salary. His entire expenses were reduced to the smallest possible amount. Everything above that went where it was absolutely needed. ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... side of that ring of star-shells is conducting a precisely similar undertaking, is able, with all his perfect organisation and cast-iron methods, to achieve a result in any way superior to that which Thomas Atkins reaches by rule of thumb and sheer ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... band, Like to a golden border did appear, Framed in goldsmith's forge with cunning hand; Yet goldsmith's cunning could not understand To frame such subtle wire, so shiny clear, For it did glisten like the glowing sand, The which Pactolus with his waters sheer, Throws forth upon the rivage, round ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... singers who have reached the highest note in their compass, proceed to hum the rest of the air in falsetto, he had to be satisfied with murmuring, smiling the while, as if, after all, there had been something irresistibly amusing in the sheer beauty of the painting: "It smells all right; it makes your head go round; it catches your breath; you feel ticklish all over—and not the faintest clue to how it's done. The man's a sorcerer; the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... either create provisional civil governments for them or recognize them as self-governing States in the Union; but he has no right, under the constitution nor under the war power, to appoint civil governors, permanent or provisional; and every act he has done in regard to reconstruction is sheer usurpation, and done without authority and without the slightest plea of necessity. His acts in this respect, even if wise and just in themselves, are inexcusable, because done by one who has no legal right to do them. Yet his usurpation is apparently sustained ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... himself to forget his skill in the use of the hammer, and to the last he took pleasure in handling it, sometimes in the way of business, and often through sheer love of his art. Mr Nasmyth says, "It was one of my duties, while acting as assistant in his beautiful little workshop, to keep up a stock of handy bars of lead which he had placed on a shelf under his work-bench, which was of thick slate for the more ready making of his usual illustrative ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... eduction of personal characteristics: the other by his apprehension of that quintessential movement or mood or phase wherein the soul is transitorily visible on its lonely pinnacle of light. The elder poet reveals life to us by the sheer vividness of his own vision: the younger, by a newer, a less picturesque but more scientific abduction, compels the complex rayings of each soul-star to a singular simplicity, as by the spectrum analysis. The one, again, fulfils his aim by a broad synthesis based upon the vivid ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... with a tenacity which kept him standing before the canvas until it was dark. Sometimes, when the servant entered at nightfall, he found the luncheon untouched on the table. In the evening the master ate in silence in the dining-room, from sheer animal necessity, not seeing what he was eating, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... upon the Boer War, but here we are given too much flirtation and too little fighting. His liberality in the matter of heroines compensates me not at all for his niggard accounts of the war. That he himself should apparently take more interest in dalliance than in strife seems to indicate sheer perversity, for, when once he has ceased to toy with tennis-teas and trivialities, it is possible to respect the opinions of those admiring critics even if it is impossible to agree with them. The little fighting and the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... we won't, if we have half a chance to do anything else. If a woman was by way of being a Dante or a Darwin, she had better give it up—for Roger—and take to replenishing the earth. She can't do both—that is the main assumption; and if she chooses to serve the world outside of the home that is sheer loss. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... "We all take things in our own way and I in mine. I have not the least intention of throwing up the game, but I know that I am a cripple and shall never be anything else. I thought, a little time ago, that my branches up there would turn into a new crown, but that was sheer folly. They grow and strut and turn green and that is all they do. And then, besides, I feel that I am ...
— The Old Willow Tree and Other Stories • Carl Ewald
... the receding shores of Malta and shouted: "Land, ho!" The ship's fastenings were all giving way; the water on each side was lashed into foam by the tempest of flying bolts that she shed at every pulsation of the cargo. She was quietly wrecking herself without assistance from wind or wave, by the sheer internal energy of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... Leah? Have I not asked you to be brave, even unto the end? If you falter now, I am lost. My health and my strength are already gone. Only the consciousness of innocence sustains me. Leave me now. Sheer me with the hope of acquittal, and be brave as only ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... murder—sheer murder," earnestly replied the minister. "And we are not Spartans, but Christians, to whom the body is not every thing, and who believe that God can work out His wonderful will, if He chooses, through the meanest ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... and I trade my furs off regularly at the settlements on the islands and even along the mainland,—a month's work for a little flour or sugar. Ah, how I have labored! I have felt my muscles crack, I have dropped like a log from sheer weariness. Talk of tortures; which of them have I not felt, with the pains and faintness of exposure and hunger racking me from head to foot? Have I stopped for snow and ice? Have I stopped for anguish? Never; I have worked, worked, worked, with the tears of pain rolling ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... Every Friday evening a party of billiard lovers—Hartford men—gathered and played, and told stories, and smoked, until the room was blue. Clemens never tired of the game. He could play all night. He would stay until the last man dropped from sheer weariness, and then go on knocking the ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... their loyalty is insincere. It is not so with this one's human property; their loyalty is genuine, earnest, sincere, enthusiastic. The sentiment which they feel for her is one which goes out in sheer perfection to no other occupant of a throne; for it is love, pure from doubt, envy, exaction, fault-seeking, a love whose sun has no spot—that form of love, strong, great, uplifting, limitless, whose vast proportions are compassable ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... be added to this is that the later Christian slavery represented a distinct retrogression, deliberately revived from motives of sheer cupidity, and accompanied by more revolting features than the slavery of ancient ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... Your sots are sheer abominations, But they who deserve castigations Much more than poor "drunks," Are those pestilent skunks Who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 26, 1891 • Various
... in feeding the poor ill-nourished monk, so, spite of the refusal, we begged him out of sheer humanity to change his mind, and have some of ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... lay for a time resting in the sand. The sun had sunk behind the ranges. The night shadows in the valley were cool. Partly because of this, partly from sheer nervous and physical exhaustion, Roger shivered. Finally when twilight had settled in the valley, he sat up and gazed across the river. It was too dark to see Peter. There was only the murmur of the river in all that barren ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... will, if possible, make my meaning plain by yet another example. Let us suppose some Walter Scott had compiled some purely fictitious history, professedly laid in the Middle Ages (and surely even miraculous occurrences cannot be more unreal than these products of sheer imagination); and suppose some critic had engaged to prove it fiction from internal evidence supplied by contradictions and discrepancies, and so on, would you not think it strange if he were to enforce that argument ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... bowels of the forest. The path taken by the steed grew every moment more and more intricate and difficult of access, and, but for the interruption already referred to, it is not impossible that a continued course in the same direction, would have brought the rider to a full stop from the sheer inaccessibleness of the forest. ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Plymouth. Next day, they fell in with five ships of Biscay, well manned, coming, as they supposed, from the great bank of Newfoundland, which attacked the Desire; but Mr. Candish gave them so warm a reception, that they were glad to sheer off, and continued their course without giving him any farther disturbance. As it grew dark, and he feared losing sight of his consorts, Mr. Candish did ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... continued to inflame his brain also, and it made him pass through great alternations of hope and fear. Now the army was going to sweep over the wooden wall in spite of everything. With sheer weight and bravery it would crush the French and take Ticonderoga. It must be. Because he wanted it to be, it was going to be. Then he passed to the other extreme. When one of the charges spent itself at the barrier, sending perhaps a few men over it, like foam from a wave that has reached its ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... their houses, but found that their total number of one hundred and five was made up in the proportion of four carpenters to forty-eight "gentlemen." Not inadequately provisioned for their work, they came repeatedly almost to perishing through their sheer incapacity and unthrift, and their needless quarrels with one another and with the Indians. In five months one half of the company were dead. In January, 1608, eight months from the landing, when the second expedition arrived with reinforcements and supplies, only thirty-eight ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... Sally's Aunt Jane, in a cosy little cottage with a wonderful little garden, lived Thomas Kitchener, a large, grave, self-sufficing young man, who, by sheer application to work, had become already, though only twenty-five, second gardener at the Hall. Gardening absorbed him. When he was not working at the Hall he was working at home. On the morning following ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... hands trembling, and a creeping, chilling sensation running through his fingers. It was of finest fabric, sheer and soft and very simply embroidered. It was without, rather than with, surprise lie found the letters "F. F." in one corner. He raised it, and, not knowing what to say for the moment, sat there inhaling the delicate fragrance that hung about the ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... modern reader will become sceptical. These internal struggles assume a rational form only when self-consciousness reviews them—that is to say when they are over. In point of fact, Godwin argues, sheer sensuality has a smaller empire over us than we commonly suppose. Strip the feast of its social pleasures, and the commerce of the sexes of all its intellectual and emotional allurements, ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... done this thing—and in all the world John Cardigan had but one enemy—Colonel Seth Pennington. Had Pennington sent his woods-boss to do this dirty work out of sheer spite? Hardly. The section of burl was gone, and this argued that the question of spite had been purely a matter of ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... young figure, dressed in its trousseau white muslin and with its crown of innocent gold. It made her suddenly seem older than himself and at once more piteous and more sinister. For a moment, after the sheer stupor, he was horribly angry with her; then came dismay at ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... uniquely promotes First Amendment values, by offering low barriers to entry to speakers and listeners. The content of speech on the Internet is as diverse as human thought, and the extent to which the Internet promotes First Amendment values is evident from the sheer breadth of speech that this new medium enables. To survive strict scrutiny, a public library's use of filtering software must be narrowly tailored to further a compelling state interest, and there must be no less restrictive alternative that could effectively further ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... interest. Another nurse, much younger, without the "black band," watched the surgeon from the foot of the cot. Beads of perspiration chased themselves down her pale face, caused less by sympathy than by sheer weariness and heat. The small receiving room of St. Isidore's was close and stuffy, surcharged with odors of iodoform and ether. The Chicago spring, so long delayed, had blazed with a sudden fury the last ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... am,' she persisted, going on now in sheer desperation, having proceeded too far to retract. 'My petals are delicately fair, with just a faint rosy blush, my pistils and stamens of a tender yellow, and my form, if ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... moon, shewed beautifully, against its luminous violet, the outlines of dome and minaret and spire, and far out beyond the crowded city's confines, the two incomparable mountains, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, the huge volcanoes, shrouded in eternal snow, rising a sheer ten thousand feet from the level plain, standing ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... seemed to recognize her authority, and to obtrude itself with a sense of embarrassment into surroundings where all mental maladies were outlawed. She was on her knees busily sorting a pile of sweet potatoes, which she suspected of having been frost-bitten; and by sheer force of character, she managed to convince the despairing lover that a frost-bitten potato was a more substantial fact than a ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... relatives, they live, depending on each other, like tall trees growing in the same forest. We, however, have been forced in exile by the wicked Dhritarashtra and his sons having escaped with difficulty, from sheer good fortune, a fiery death. Having escaped from that fire, we are now resting in the shade of this tree. Having already suffered so much, where now are we to go? Ye sons of Dhritarashtra of little foresight, ye wicked fellows, enjoy your temporary success. The gods are certainly auspicious ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... merely potential, and an experience still to come, would one day occupy. And so, those who cannot admit his actual speculative results, precisely his report on the invisible theoretic world, have been to the point sometimes, in their objection, that by sheer effectiveness of abstract language, he gave an illusive air of reality or substance to the mere nonentities of metaphysic hypothesis—of a mind trying to feed ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... now, and precipitous. To their right rose a sheer cliff. To their left, the path fell off abruptly to a gigantic caldron where red flames leaped ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... their wives to "overwork," it is not from indifference, but from sheer ignorance. They don't know, they don't begin to conceive, of the labor there is in "woman's work." It is true that neither are merchant-princes aware of what it costs their wives to superintend the complicated arrangements of their establishments; to see that all ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... forces. Northern merchants and politicians cried, "Peace!" and the Southern successors of Calhoun lifted the old club, the threat of secession; but the agitation went on all over the North. Toombs, the Southern senator, tried sheer bombast, and said he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill monument. Timid men in the North began to cry: "Conciliate, conciliate!" But there can be warfare, and only warfare between darkness and light, between sickness and health, ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... now, Ready, for want of water, how can we possibly keep up our strength to meet them in a suffocating smoke and flame? we must drop with sheer exhaustion." ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... guarded their great gray sides that were thirty foot in the sheer, When there came a certain trading-brig with news of ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of 10s. which Young says prevailed at this time. With a view to remedy this state of things he studied the agriculture of other counties, and his observations thereon reveal a very poor kind of farming in many places: in Cheshire the rich pasture was wasted and the poor impoverished by sheer ignorance, in Yorkshire luxuriant grass was understocked, in Shropshire there were hardly any sheep; in his own part of Norfolk the usual rotation was three white straw crops and then broadcast turnips.[501] This Coke changed to two white crops and ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... tangle of trees and brush and great snakelike vines behind the town rolled the appalling roars of guaribas, raucous bird calls, dismal hoots, sudden scattered screams. And over all, whelming all other sound by the sheer might of its penetrating power, throbbed the rapid-fire hammering ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... the thickness ahead loomed up a great black British freighter making for St. Petersburg, as the Prince supposed. The two steamers, big and little, were so close that each was compelled to sheer off a bit; then the Captain turned on the bridge and seemed for a moment uncertain what to do with his prisoner. A number of men were leaning over the bulwarks of the British ship, and it would have been quite possible for the person on one boat to give a message to those on ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... the cheerfulness comes at times near to being that of a martyr on the rack, while the fun is perilously apt to swing from themes that are nice for a lady's wit to others that are not so nice, and back to sheer triviality, what, in the name of a population of sand-flies and negroes, can you expect? It is much that so lifelike a picture of a region so desolate should be presented on the whole with sweetness and charm, when no better material is available than ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... us with immortal power, Yet cannot lift us to His realm of light; Love that still shows us heaven for one brief hour Only to daunt the heart with that sheer height; ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... the ridge was almost precipitous and was clothed with brushwood. At last, however, she reached a spot from which it seemed possible to make the descent; but after scrambling and sliding for some distance she was suddenly stopped by a sheer drop of several yards to a ledge. Being agile, she might have reached the ledge by lowering herself by her hands, but it was narrow and slanted outwards, so that she feared to slip off in alighting ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... his friend's passion. He listened to the strange mixture of clear thinking and unreasoning faith with a feeling of something like awe of a man whom he had long since given up attempting to fathom. He was a rough lumberman, a mill-boss, who, by sheer force, had raised himself from the dregs of a lumber camp to a position where his skill and capacity had full play. And in his utter lack of education it was impossible that he should be able to fathom a nature so complex, so far removed from his ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... The sheer impossibility of the thing was only part of the problem it presented. The radar followed it. Moving eastward, far away in the frigid night, it seemed suddenly to put on brakes. According to the radar, its original speed was close to mach 3, thirty-nine miles a minute. ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... in daily life, would be called sheer impertinence; and the person who could talk so before educated gentlemen would probably receive an intimation that he was making himself offensive. He would certainly be looked upon as a weak and conceited person. I really am unable to see why things should be written and printed which ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... distinction between the sheep and the goats? But while Mr. Adams, unmoved by argument, anger, or entreaty, thus alienated many and discouraged all, every one was made acquainted with the antipodal principles of his rival. The consequence was inevitable; many abandoned Adams from sheer irritation; multitudes became cool and indifferent concerning him; the great number of those whose political faith was so weak as to be at the ready command of their own interests, or the interests of a friend or relative, yielded to a pressure against ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... of me throughout, but somehow I blundered through without letting him find the chance for which he looked. I kept my head, and parried by sheer luck his brilliant lunges. I broke ground and won free—if but barely—from his incessant attack. More than once he pricked me. A high thrust which I diverted too late with the parade of tierce drew blood freely. He fleshed me again ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... navigators of ancient days; hectoring their tub-built barks in a most unruly style; whirling them about, in a manner to make any but a Dutchman giddy, and not unfrequently stranding them upon rocks and reefs. Whereupon out of sheer spleen they denominated it Hellegat (literally Hell Gut) and solemnly gave it over to the devil. This appellation has since been aptly rendered into English by the name of Hell Gate; and into nonsense by the name of Hurl Gate, according to ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... about this, I'd like to be shown," pouted Joy. And in sheer boredom she got up, walked to a rocky ledge and scrambled up ...
— The Merriweather Girls in Quest of Treasure • Lizette M. Edholm
... Horace, but it only succeeded in showing Horace that it was hiding a sentiment of indignation against him. Each friendly face as it passed Horace in the street said, without words, 'There goes the youth who probably ruined his young stepbrother's life. And through sheer obstinacy too! He dropped the little darling in spite of warnings and protests, and then fell on the top of him. Of course, he didn't do it ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... material universe and pouring forth indiscriminately its "truth," "beauty," "nobility" and "love," is an entirely materialistic one. It is a clumsy and crude metaphor or analogy drawn from the objective world and projected into that region of sheer unfathomableness which lies ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... dream," said he; "but 'twas droll enough altogether. I fancied that I was the lieutenant over there: and yet the thing was not very much to my taste after all. I missed my good old mother and the dear little ones; who almost tear me to pieces for sheer love." ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... many a lone cottage and farm-house I steer'd, Took their money, and off with my budget I sheer'd; The road I explored out, without form or rule, Still asking the nearest to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... was a trying moment for Tad Butler, down there alone in the branches of the pinyon tree, with fifty feet of nothingness beneath him and a sheer wall that extended an ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... fully here, as his letters in the home press at the time and the volume Footnotes to History brought the knowledge of his views and actions within reach of all. Nothing could have been more unselfish than the attitude of the writer, to whom politics were abhorrent, who, nevertheless, from sheer humanity entered, at some personal risk, into the petty struggle with excellent results for the Samoans. And certainly nothing more courageous can be imagined than the man, whose tender heart winced at the sight of ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... from Paula to Somerset sped through the loophole of Stancy Castle keep, over the trees, along the railway, under bridges, across four counties—from extreme antiquity of environment to sheer modernism—and finally landed itself on a table in Somerset's chambers in the midst of a cloud of fog. He read it and, in the moment of reaction from the depression of his past days, clapped his ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... guard-ship, lying not far distant from the place where the Amphion blew up; who having a great desire to observe every thing relative to a profession into which he had just entered, was looking through a glass at the frigate, as she lay along side of the sheer-hulk, and was taking in her bowsprit. She was lashed to the hulk; and the Yarmouth, an old receiving ship, was lying on the opposite side, quite close to her, and both within a few yards of the Dock-yard ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... awful hinge loud-clanging opens wide The Door of Doom:—and lo, behold what door-ward doth abide Within the porch, what thing it is the city gate doth hold! More dreadful yet the Water-worm, with black mouth fiftyfold, Hath dwelling in the inner parts. Then Tartarus aright Gapes sheer adown; and twice so far it thrusteth under night As up unto the roof of heaven Olympus lifteth high: And there the ancient race of Earth, the Titan children, lie, 580 Cast down by thunder, wallowing in bottomless abode. There of the twin Aloidae the monstrous bodies' load I saw; who ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... other—according to our evolutionists, because when he was a cod, a few milliards of years back, he chose the right side to begin lying down on, that his descendants in the thirty-millionth generation might get flat. His wife, from sheer perversity, lay down upon the other side, and this explains how some of their descendants pulled their eyes through their heads to one side, and some (though comparatively few) to the other. And the worst of it is that the fittest for the ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... tried to get some information out of the old Third, but he just chewed and spat. When I asked the Second he says, 'Oh Hell, I can't stop to show ye now. Take a hand-lamp and go and see the run o' the pipes yerself.' I was nearly dropping for sheer sleepiness, but I made up my mind I would not give in. At breakfast time the Chief said we'd missed a tide and couldn't get away till midnight, and I thanked God. But it's a funny thing about a steamer, that the more time you have the more work there is to do. We had stores to get stowed away, ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... were unreal, spectral. At the door oval, which I could barely see, Gutierrez lurked like a shadow. All of them, and Hans in the cubby above, were garbed in tight-fitting dead-black suits of silklene fabric. Thin, elastic as sheer silk web, opaque, lustreless. It covered their feet, legs and bodies; and their arms and hands like black, silk gloves. Their heads were helmeted with it. And they had black masks which as yet were flapped up and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... and outs of parliamentary law; how to appoint committees and chairmen and count yeas and nays; in other words, how to swing the class along in proper form. They knew all this, but hitherto it had been necessary to call it to their minds each year, when by the sheer force of oratory, ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... masterly; which expression changed slightly as he stood there, the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it seemed, he yawned ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... I opened my eyes I began, from sheer force of habit, to think if I had anything to rejoice over that day. I had been somewhat hard-up lately, and one after the other of my belongings had been taken to my "Uncle." I had grown nervous and irritable. A few times I had kept my bed for the day with ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... you expect to marry another man, but that has not kept me from telling you that I love you, nor will it prevent me from trying to win your love. Pride, if nothing else, has kept my lips sealed, for what right have I to ask any woman to share my lot? In sheer humiliation I must tell you that my life looks like a failure to me. I have a hard struggle ahead of me. You may say that I am young and strong, but I cannot, for my soul, see anything bright ahead." His voice trembled and she glanced up at his face. He was looking at ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... and declared that old Mrs. Scratchard was envious, because she had lost all her own tail-feathers, and looked more like a worn- out old feather-duster than a respectable hen, and that therefore she was filled with sheer envy of anybody that was young and pretty. So young Mrs. Feathertop cackled gay defiance at her busy rubbishy neighbour, as she sunned herself under the bushes on ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... side, their eyes open to what is true on the other; the work of revolution finished or begun, they experience fatigue and reaction. In Hawthorne's romance, after Miles Coverdale had passed his spring and summer among the Utopians of Blithedale, he felt that the time had come when he must for sheer sanity's sake go and hold a little talk with the Conservatives, the merchants, the politicians, 'and all those respectable old blockheads, who still in this intangibility and mistiness of affairs kept a death-grip on ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... saints— A laugh, a cry, the business of the world— (Flower o' the peach, Death for us all, and his own life for each!) And my whole soul revolves, the cup runs over, 250 The world and life's too big to pass for a dream, And I do these wild things in sheer despite, And play the fooleries you catch me at, In pure rage! The old mill-horse, out at grass After hard years, throws up his stiff heels so, 255 Although the miller does not preach to him The only good of grass is to make chaff. What would men have? ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... bounded down by the upper end of the cleft, and entering Zretazoola by the outer gate which looks out sheer on the stars, he galloped suddenly down the narrow streets. Many that rushed out on to balconies as he went clattering by, many that put their heads from glittering windows, are told of in olden song. Shepperalk did not tarry to give greetings ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... bullets. He may at the utmost aspire to introduce an innovation in evening dress,—the Prince Regent, for instance, has invented a really very creditable shoe-buckle. Tradition obligates him to devote his unofficial hours to sheer depravity——" ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... there are two apiece for us. You follow the pilot, if you will; but let me sheer off for this dwelling of Colonel Howard, with my cockswain and boat's crew. I will surprise his house, release the ladies, and on my way back, lay my hands on two of the first lords I fall in with. I suppose, for our business, one is as ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... effort; there was no money in the State treasury; and the soldiery, as soon as their pay was in arrears, began once more to be mutinous. The bolt had been shot without effect, and the year 1607 found both sides, through sheer lack of funds, unable to enter upon a fresh campaign on land with any hope of definite success. But though the military campaigns had been so inconclusive, it had been far different with the fortunes of maritime warfare in these opening years of the seventeenth century. ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... of the bathing pool. Then his heart and breath stopped an instant. Beside the dog walked the Girl, one hand on his head the other holding the flowing white robe around her and grasping one of the Harvester's lilies. His first thought was sheer amazement that she was not afraid, for it was evident now that the backlog had awakened her, and she had taken the dog and gone to her mother. Then she had followed the path leading down the hill, around the cabin, ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... all night long with the bravest captains of his people was devising in his halls sheer treachery against the heroes, with fierce wrath in his heart at the issue of the hateful contest; nor did he deem at all that these things were being accomplished without the knowledge ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... the first year had passed without mishap, and already the second was nearing its close. The school board congratulated itself. Had the faculty known that for most of his scholarship, poor as it often was, Van Blake was indebted to the sheer will power of Bob Carlton they might have felt less sanguine. Day after day Bob had patiently tutored his big chum in order that he might contrive to scrape through his lessons. It was Bob who did the work and Van who serenely accepted the fruits of it—accepted ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... should suddenly enter the tunnel in front of him; but Numa did not appear and the ape-man emerged at length into the open and stood erect, finding himself in a rocky cleft whose precipitous walls rose almost sheer on every hand, the tunnel from the gorge passing through the cliff and forming a passageway from the outer world into a large pocket or gulch entirely enclosed by steep walls of rock. Except for the small passageway from the gorge, there was no other entrance to the gulch ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... POWYS WOLF'S-BANE 1.25 "We hesitate to say how many years it is necessary to go back in order to find their equals in sheer poetic originality."—Evening Post, New ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... decided to put fires out and remain here till the conditions change altogether for the better. It is sheer waste of coal to make further attempts to break through as ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... gathered around the instrument-board and Dunark explained the changes he had made—and to such men as Seaton and Crane it was soon evident that they were examining an installation embodying sheer perfection of instrumental control—a system which only those wonder instrument-makers, the Osnomians, could have devised. The new object-compasses were housed in arenak cases after setting, and the housings were ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... loud, exultant yells continued reverberating through the woods, and glancing upward, Dernor saw the form of a huge Indian suddenly come to view, on the edge of the ravine, some distance ahead of him, and make some menacing motion toward him. As the ravine at this point was a sheer precipice, the hunter did not believe he would attempt to descend it, and feeling there was no danger of being fired upon, he kept ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... times in sheer excitement; for anyone can see how absolutely incriminating the letter was. It was not signed, but it was in the same writing ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of happiness; her one ambition male admiration, and she hadn't character enough to put sufficient curb upon her stomach to retain it. I reasoned with her, I pleaded with her, I bullied her. Had I persisted I might have succeeded by sheer physical and mental strength in restraining her from ruining herself. I was winning. I had made her frightened of me. Had I gone on, I might have won. By dragging her out of bed in the morning, by insisting upon her taking exercise, by regulating every particle of food and drink ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... color, all the picturesqueness, of the late perilous accident. My conversations with Augustus grew daily more frequent and more intensely full of interest. He had a manner of relating his stories of the ocean (more than one half of which I now suspect to have been sheer fabrications) well adapted to have weight with one of my enthusiastic temperament and somewhat gloomy although glowing imagination. It is strange, too, that he most strongly enlisted my feelings in behalf of the life of a seaman, when ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... British administrators in India, it was increasingly held that the only ultimate justification for the British power in India would be that under its guidance the Indian peoples should be gradually enabled to govern themselves. As early as 1824, when in Europe sheer reaction was at its height, this view was being strongly urged by one of the greatest of Anglo-Indian administrators, Sir Thomas Munro, a soldier of distinction, then serving as governor of Madras. 'We should look upon India,' he wrote, 'not as a temporary ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... nonsensical clamour. Others will wilfully hug every false scent, (20) and with a tremendous display of eagerness, whatever they chance upon, will take the lead, conscious all the while they are playing false; (21) whilst another sort again will behave in a precisely similar style out of sheer ignorance. (22) It is a poor sort of hound which will not leave a stale line (23) for want of recognising the true trail. So, too, a hound that cannot distinguish the trail leading to a hare's form, and scampers over that ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... must conclude, she begged so hard to be allowed to speak to me again after my visitor went, that I consented to her waiting. Why? I had already said all that I had to say, and infinitely more than I had contemplated. Perhaps she impressed me more powerfully than I realised; perhaps it was sheer compassion, for she had an invincible instinct that if I sent her away at this juncture, she would never hear from me any more. I had her shown into the next room, and received General de Lavardens in ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... Then they halted in sheer amazement. For the first time the boys noted that no water was running in the fountain, and that the basin underneath ...
— The Grammar School Boys in Summer Athletics • H. Irving Hancock
... again the dark summit of the Roman fort, the black sheer height rising above the valley, and the moonfire streaming around the ring of oaks, glowing about the green bastions that guarded the thicket and ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... said the sergeant, "and I'm thinking that we've just begun. I know from the feel of it that big things are going to happen fast. Sheer away from the woods there, Mr. Mason. We don't want to be ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... pathos, invective, sublimity, and ingenuity which have been characteristic of the greatest advocates. Before a jury as everywhere else he was direct and simple. He awed and terrified jurymen; he convinced their reason; but he commanded rather than persuaded, and carried them with him by sheer force of eloquence and argument, and by ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... her pink dress and white shoes and stockings, and lacy parasol and brown hair, and for a little his eyes went after her quite as they would have followed the flight of a brilliant bird. Then, as in sheer youth, as one who during a night of refreshing sleep has been steeped body and soul in the elixir that is youth's own, she yielded her young body up to an extravagant dance, whirling away as light as thistledown across the meadow. Hands clapped after her; voices, men's voices, filled ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... of human nature in the manifestations we are concerned with will still be at work, an obscure instinct often acting differently in each sex, but tending to drive both into the same risks. Here we need even more fundamental social changes. It is sheer foolishness to suppose that when we raise our little dams in the path of a great stream of human impulse that stream will forthwith flow calmly back to its source. We must make our new channels concurrently with our ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... I love it," replies she, out of a sheer spirit of contradiction; as, if there is one thing she utterly abhors it is ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... stead; so weakened were his companions that it was only by constant encouragement he got them along, and when forcing their way through the matted scrub, he often threw himself bodily on it, breaking a bath through for his weakened followers by the sheer weight of his body. They reached Western Port in a most wretched condition, having subsisted latterly on ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... Fellers had!" Being repeatedly assured that the fee was only a dollar, and that the initiatory process was not very painful, he concluded "to go it, provided they'd promise to run him for constable. Office is the hull any of the scallywags jine 'em for, and I may as well go in for a sheer," said he, thinking if he could not have the privilege of selling liquor, he would at least secure the right of ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... on lonely white hunters and trappers by Crows and Blackfeet. Some of these were exaggerations of the outrages already mentioned, sustained by some of the scattered members of Mr. Hunt's expedition; others were in all probability sheer fabrications, to which the Snakes seem to have been a little prone. Mr. Stuart assured them that the day was not far distant when the whites would make their power to be felt throughout that country, and take signal vengeance on the perpetrators of these misdeeds. ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... sat in the library, with a book at which she stared, though she scarcely read a page. However, as the hours lengthened, she found herself nodding through sheer exhaustion. ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... leaned forward, interested. Rick knew the kind of stuff Steve meant, because he had once watched Zircon getting an electrocardiogram. The big scientist had fainted from sheer overwork, and possible heart complications were suspected. The technician squeezed the paste from a tube and applied it to wrists, ankles, and chest, under the metal terminals of the machine. Its purpose was to ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... did not give way to his "guv'nor" as he might have done. That fine old East Anglian spirit of independence (which is so generally admirable) was in this particular instance sheer brutal ingratitude when shown by Posh to FitzGerald. No one has a greater admiration than I for this magnificent claim of a MAN to be MAN'S equal. It kept the race of Norfolk and Suffolk longshoremen worthy of their traditions until the cockney visitors, with their tips and their ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... off, Master Bumppo, cried Benjamin, your top-light frightens the fish, who see the net and sheer off soundings. A fish knows as much as a horse, or, for that matter, more, seeing that its brought up on the water. Haul oil, Master Bumppo, haul off, I say, and give a wide ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... symptoms, a consequence of his ascetical mode of living; nymphomania of old age; hypochondriacal fancies: all symptoms that are frequently found together. To second his morbid intention of changing his diet and habits would be sheer lunacy; nay, worse, it would be actual murder. Yet first I must win his confidence as a physician, so that he may trust me and take my advice. I embraced him, and thanked him most heartily and tenderly for his kind intentions, which I should never forget ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... he was concerned, his donations to the monastery, and the anecdotes of his life, are all unconnected with my subject; so that I am obliged to pass from this interesting monk, an undoubted bibliophile, from sheer want of information. I cannot but regret that the historian does not inform us more fully of his book collecting pursuits; but he is especially barren on that subject, although he highly esteems him for prosecuting that pleasing avocation. ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... scene where new mountains would still appear to bar us. Our road was much of it level; but scooped out among mountains. The river was a brawling stream, shallow, and roughened by rocks; now we drove on a plane with it; now there was a sheer descent down from the roadside upon it, often unguarded by any kind of fence, except by the trees that contrived to grow on the headlong interval. Between the mountains there were gorges, that led the imagination away into new scenes of wildness. I have never driven through ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... but these things are like birdlime: a man's soul sticks to them, and will not easily come away; they have grown to be a part of him. Nay, 'tis as if men were bound in some chain that nothing can break; and when by sheer force they are dragged away, they cry out and beg for mercy. They are bold enough for aught else, but show them this same road to Hades, and they prove to be but cowards. They turn about, and must ever be looking ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... all manner of fantastic costumes, wash them, over-feed them, and refuse to make them work. If the children of the lower orders differ in this last respect from those of the well-to-do classes, the difference is merely formal; they work from sheer necessity, and not because their parents recognize work as a duty. And in over-fed children, as in over-fed animals, sensuality ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... in a sort of cage, and the Indians "take great care when the female is in season to prevent her uniting with a dog of an inferior description." The Indians told Sir Robert that, if a dog proved bad or useless, {207} he was not killed, but was left to die from sheer neglect. Hardly any nation is more barbarous than the Fuegians, but I hear from Mr. Bridges, the Catechist to the Mission, that, "when these savages have a large, strong, and active bitch, they take care to put her to a fine dog, and even take care to feed her well, that her ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... ourselves with eighteen months' provisions, in pork and flour, calculating that by the time this quantity was consumed, we should have raised enough to support our establishment out of the soil by the sweat of our brows. And thus from sheer ignorance of colonial life, we had laid out a considerable portion of our capital in the purchase of useless articles, and of things which might have been procured more cheaply in the colony itself. Nor were we the only green-horns ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... reserve; the stern dignity of the present day shows itself in quarrelsome perverseness. The stupidity of antiquity showed itself in straightforwardness; the stupidity of the present day shows itself in sheer deceit.' ...
— The Chinese Classics—Volume 1: Confucian Analects • James Legge
... nature. If the first edge was fine, it was the sharp end of the wedge, the broad end of which you never reached, but might infer. This gave momentum to everything he said. He was in the true sense what Chalmers used to call a "man of wecht." His mind acted by its sheer absolute power; it seldom made an effort; it was the hydraulic pressure, harmless, manageable, but irresistible; not the perilous compression of steam. Therefore it was that he was untroubled and calm, though rich; clear, though ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... capturing the pieces. They advanced with that terrific yell which is enough of itself to frighten a nervous man, and with an impetuosity which nothing human could resist. Our regiment recoiled under the shock; but it was forced back by the sheer ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... in which his friend Dekker represents him, shortly after, reaching the Elysian fields, leaves little doubt that his life was shortened not only by his angry passions, but by sheer want: "Marlow, Greene and Peele had got under the shades of a large vyne, laughing to see Nash, that was but newly come to their colledge, still haunted with the sharpe and satyricall spirit that followed ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... it is made up of the beating of human hearts, of the nameless music of men's souls—that is, if you have ears. If you have eyes, you will presently see the church itself—a looming mystery of many shapes and shadows, leaping sheer from floor to dome. The work of ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy
... he put off to the latest moment any decision as to the course which he should take with respect to the Bill when it came up to him for his sanction. As regards a dissolution, indeed, he felt from the beginning that it would be sheer folly, attended by no small risk. Was he to have recourse to this ultima ratio, merely because a parliament elected a year before, under the auspices of the party now in opposition, had passed, by a majority of nearly two to one, a measure introduced ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... previous night. And since Teddy's note had suggested something most urgent, but told her nothing, she entered the drawing-room to meet him with foreboding added to a consuming fear. At the sight of him, so honest and kindly, she could have gone to his arms out of sheer longing for ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... rank-smelling liquor which I did not taste, but my suffering companion drank the whole potful and praised it. The rain was so heavy we decided not to attempt to leave camp until the storm somewhat abated, as we were assured by Toyatte that we would not be able to round Cape Fanshawe, a sheer, outjutting headland, the nose as he called it, past which the wind sweeps with great violence in these southeastern storms. With what grateful enthusiasm the trees welcomed the life-giving rain! Strong, towering spruces, hemlocks, and cedars tossed their ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... he threw his weight into three waves of assault on the front line and attacked later in the rear. The stoutly fortified men did not budge but worked every death dealing weapon with great severity. Rifle grenades came into use as the enemy by sheer weight of masses surged within their 200-yard range. The machine guns faltered only once and then a Yankee Corporal, William Russell, Company "M" 339th Infantry, won for himself a posthumous American citation and D. S. C. for his heroic deed in regaining fire control ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... I did but utter the truth that was in my heart. San Paolo be my witness that did ye but find the stout Count Leonardo in his cups, sheer from the castle's topmost battlements would he hurl ye all! Alack-a-day, the good Lord Luigi reigns not here in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... self-denying will; A hand is stretched to him from out the dark, Which grasping without question, he is led Where there is work that he must do for God. The trial still is the strength's complement, And the uncertain, dizzy path that scales 230 The sheer heights of supremest purposes Is steeper to the angel than the child. Chances have laws as fixed as planets have, And disappointment's dry and bitter root, Envy's harsh berries, and the choking pool ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... you by sight," went on Mrs. Wilkins, who, like all the shy, once she was started; lunged on, frightening herself to more and more speech by the sheer sound of what she had said last in her ears. "Every Sunday—I see you every Sunday ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... it's kill? Then, one may as well take it fighting. Better, anyway, than scattering one's brains on that hearth-rug some morning in the small hours out of sheer disgust with the dead hopelessness of life. That's what it is coming to ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... information that reinforcements were near at hand, and, in fact, the numberless happenings which might occur to change the entire situation, served to drive sleep so far from my eyelids that I despaired of being able to summon it until sheer exhaustion ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... had been capable all through them of that sort of dallying with the vicar which Janet thought unkind. She had been able to find plenty of mind for her work, and for the ambitions of her new profession, and had spent many a careless hour steeped in the sheer physical pleasure of the harvest. Yet, from the beginning, his personality had laid its grip on hers. She had never been able to forget him for long. One visit from him was no sooner over than she ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Sheer Thursday or Maundy Thursday was a special day for cleansing the altars and font, which was done by a priest; but the clerk was required to provide a birch broom and also a barrel in order that water ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... rises gaunt and sheer to some 6000 feet, was entrusted by Nikita to his youngest son, Prince Peter, a young man of marvellous vanity. He used to deny, after the surrender of Lov[vc]en, that he had consorted at Budva with Lieut.-Colonel Hupka, the former military ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... possible that your guess may be correct and this fellow Haddon may be guilty of robbing Colby Hall. But it would be sheer foolishness to accuse the fellow unless you had sufficient evidence against him. This talk about horses and cattle may be a perfectly legitimate affair. However, when we get to the ranch we can look into the matter further and find out what sort of place this Bimbel's ranch is and what ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... as he persisted in calling Mr. Frampton, was going to make a speech. The cry was immediately taken up by the others, who for some moments defeated their own purpose by calling vociferously for "silence for the governor's speech!" Having at length, from sheer want of breath, obtained the required boon, Mr. Frampton, waving his hand with a dignified ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... run up to several tons in weight. Where none is readily obtainable, one can be simulated by ingeniously combining a few small ones and concealing the joints by the planting of such things as stonecrops in earth—which, save in rare cases of sheer necessity, is always used in the construction of a rock ...
— Making A Rock Garden • Henry Sherman Adams
... zum Henker!" growled Peter, with a comical grimace. "Was fuer a casuist! What a swindler you'd make! I wonder you have the face to deny the debt. Well, and how did you leave Frau Sauer-Kraut?" he said, deeming it prudent to sheer off the subject. ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... these cares were a great hindrance to recovery. So at least I judged, and doubtless it had been thus in the case of most men. But the King was not as others, and, as it seemed to me, he drove away his disease by sheer force of will. ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... was taken, past the power of man to break; nothing now remained but endurance. Perhaps another woman, with a strong will and vivid intellect, might have set herself to work, backed by that very vow that defied poor Hitty, and, by sheer resolution, have dragged her husband up from the gulf and saved him, though as by fire; or a more buoyant and younger wife might have passed it by as a first offence, hopeful of its being also the only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... realising that "the mind's the standard of the man," he has applied himself diligently to the acquisition of wisdom, until both in the domain of politics and in the still more cosmopolitan sphere of belles lettres he has, perhaps, made himself more conspicuous by his sheer native worth than any other member of the aristocracy of Scotland. Intimately associated from his earliest years with the civil and ecclesiastical affairs of his native country, he has been enabled, in his time, to do the State some service; and when the "history of Scotland ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... the sky, appeared to be a fairy vision, hanging between earth and heaven, and based upon the clouds. The solemn majesty and beauty of this white peak are together beyond the power of my poor pen to describe. There it rose straight and sheer — a glittering white glory, its crest piercing the very blue of heaven. As I gazed at it with that little girl I felt my whole heart lifted up with an indescribable emotion, and for a moment great and wonderful thoughts ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... temper, such as Botticelli, who was Lippo's pupil, or Benozzo Gozzoli, the pupil of Angelico. Of Sandro Botticelli we know at least that he resembled his master in one respect—he positively refused to learn anything from books, and it was in sheer despair that his father, Filipepe, apprenticed the boy to a goldsmith, who rejoiced in the nickname of Botticello—'the little tun'—perhaps on account of his rotund figure, and it was from this first ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... taken nationally, and not personally, by foreigners. Beyond any other people we wish to be loved by other peoples, even by others whom we do not love, and we wish to be loved in the lump. We would like to believe that somehow our sheer Americanism rouses the honor and evokes the veneration of the alien, and as we have long had a grudge against the English, we would be particularly glad to forget it in a sense of English respect and affection. We would fain believe that ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... often over-pet; but when angered, cruel, jealous, treacherous and vindictive, and always unstable. They are bright and merry companions, talkative, inquisitive and restless, busy in their own pursuits, keen sportsmen and naturally independent, absorbed in the chase from sheer love of it and other physical occupations, and not ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... command enforced by the pursuing bark of her prime minister. This paralysed me. I turned, and there was the fiendish-looking dog close on my heels. I could run no longer. For one moment I felt as if I should sink to the earth for sheer terror. The next moment a wholesome rage sent the blood to my brain. From abject cowardice to wild attack—I cannot call it courage—was the change of an instant. I rushed towards the little wretch. I did not know how to fight him, ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... changing; and it shows also that Arbuthnot had not changed, but still lived in the middle of the century. The French commodore displayed very considerable tactical skill; his squadron was handled neatly, quickly, and with precision. With inferior force he carried off a decided advantage by sheer intelligence and good management. Unluckily, he failed in resolution to pursue his advantage. He probably could have controlled ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... that their pet scheme might be brought to a climax by closer companionship; I, because I was near Aniela; she, maybe for the same reason, felt happy too. She bent down several times to kiss my aunt's hands, apropos of nothing, out of sheer content. She looked very pretty in a long, fluffy boa and a coquettish fur cap, from under which the dark eyes and the almost ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... held on the same course until abreast of the perch, which was only a forked stick. The men came aft and hauled in the mizzen sheer. Chambers put up the helm. The mizzen came across with a jerk, and the sheet was again allowed to run out. The jib came over with a report like the shot of a cannon, and at the same moment split ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... the mountain, sheer for nearly a thousand feet, is broken by narrow ledges that make an ascent possible, and not until the peak passes the timber does snow ordinarily find lodgment upon that side. Swept by the winds from the Spanish Sinks, the ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... his arms, as if beaten, which brought on the attack: by sheer evasion he got away from the sword's lunge, and essayed a second trial of the bite of steel at close quarters; but the Austrian backed and kept him to the point, darting short alluring thrusts, thinking to tempt him on, or to wind him, and then to have him. Weisspriess ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... asteroid-material to a speed of several miles per second by grasping it with your gloved hands, while the shoulder-ionic of your armor was at full power. Start at a great distance, aim your missile with your body, let it go... Impact would be sheer, blasting incandescence. A few hundred chunks of raw metal could finish Pallastown... Were these just crazy, wild slobs whooping it up, or real crud provided with a purpose and reward? Either way, here was the eternal danger to ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... doomed wretches as upon the other; and the strange phantasmagoric haze which is thrown around the ship and the lonely voyager leaves their outlines as clear as if we saw them through the sunshine of the streets of Paris. Coleridge triumphs over his difficulties by sheer vividness of imagery and terse vigour of descriptive phrase—two qualities for which his previous poems did not prove him to possess by any means so complete a mastery. For among all the beauties of his earlier landscapes we can hardly reckon that of intense and convincing truth. He ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... much as exist, and when Reviews sweated their writers at the rate of a guinea per sheet of thirty-two pages. Smollett was continually having recourse to loans. He produced the eight (or six or seven) hundred a year he required by sheer hard writing, turning out his History of England, his Voltaire, and his Universal History by means of long spells of almost incessant labour at ruinous cost to his health. On the top of all this cruel ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... suppose, of which he had probably heard famous mention, but which I would have believed to have been a longing for Roberta, Marquise of Grez and Bye, if I had heard it so spoken, with an English or Russian or French accent, to me in a robe of tulle or sheer linen. "And may I not return immediately after that supper to that Club of Old Hickory for conversation with you and my Uncle, the General Robert?" ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... mechanical instrument of inner life within the world of experience. Moreover, individuality, or personality, or self, or inner life, whatever you may call it, conceived as absolutely independent of physical condition, is sheer abstraction. There is no such concrete personality or ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... been one minute, it may have been five minutes—I took "no note of time"—before the horse again struck bottom, and halted from sheer exhaustion, the water still almost level with his back, and the opposite bank too far-off to be seen through the darkness. After a short rest, he again "breasted the waters," and in a few moments landed us on the shore; not, unfortunately, in the road, ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... in and pour out all their sorrows, and it is so terribly hard always to be ready and willing to listen and sympathise. One actually grows "dof" (dull) from sheer weakness. O the monotony of ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... looked on the little back yard I have before described; there was no ledge without,—nothing to break the sheer descent of the wall. No man getting out of that window would have found any footing till he had fallen on ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... an awfully nice boy," she said, slipping a hand into Judith's and Elinor's arm, as they paced the platform, waiting for Miss Jinny's train. "But for pure, sheer adorableness, give me Mr. Hilton, every time. Don't you think he's ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... Sword Of Michael from the Armory of God Was given him tempered so, that neither keen Nor solid might resist that Edge: It met The Sword of Satan, with steep Force to smite Descending, and in half cut sheer— ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Denise's—inexpressible, unbearable horror, worse than the fear of death could ever be. Her green eyes were widened so that the whites showed around them; her perfect lips were contorted, her whole face strained into a mask of sheer terror. ...
— The Ideal • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... too full of sorrow at the plight of the wife of his bosom to reply. A deep groan of anguish escaped his lips. He leaned back against the log, Foresta still clinging to his neck. After a while both of them from sheer exhaustion fell asleep. ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... mark; at a low ebb; halfway; moderate, modest; tender, subtle. inappreciable, evanescent, infinitesimal, homeopathic, very small; atomic, corpuscular, microscopic, molecular, subatomic. mere, simple, sheer, stark, bare; near run. dull, petty, shallow, stolid, ungifted, unintelligent. Adv. to a small extent [in a small degree], on a small scale; a little bit, a wee bit; slightly &c adj.; imperceptibly; miserably, wretchedly; insufficiently &c 640; imperfectly; faintly &c 160; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... house just as the judge had finished breakfast. He was shown into the room while the old man still lingered in sheer listlessness over ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... human nature in the manifestations we are concerned with will still be at work, an obscure instinct often acting differently in each sex, but tending to drive both into the same risks. Here we need even more fundamental social changes. It is sheer foolishness to suppose that when we raise our little dams in the path of a great stream of human impulse that stream will forthwith flow calmly back to its source. We must make our new channels concurrently ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... Underneath, the little cellar, dug in the dry sand weeks before, and used as a storing place for tents, chairs, vegetables and coal sacks, was filled with water which now came within a foot of the floors. From sheer force of habit, Mary began building a fire in the range, and I to pack the spoons, knives and forks in a basket for removal. Ricka thought this a wise thing to do, ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... and Mohammedans, prominent and unimportant, friends and enemies," he says himself, "a varied crowd, who are looking for my medical advice. There is scarcely time for me to get down from my carriage and wash myself and eat a little, and then until night I am constantly occupied, so that, from sheer exhaustion, I must lie down. Only on the Sabbath day have I the time to occupy myself with my own people and my studies, and so the day is away from me." What a picture it is of the busy medical teacher at all times in the world's history, yet it must ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... so, by degrees, the worthy lady went on, increasing in smiles and decreasing in tears, until at last she could not laugh enough at Miss Monflathers, who, from being an object of dire vexation, became one of sheer ridicule and absurdity. ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... in place of the rings if preferred. The corner spaces are filled in in point Brabancon, and for those at each side point de Bruxelles is used. The doily is edged with a fine picot-braid that finishes it daintily, and very sheer linen lawn is used for ...
— The Art of Modern Lace Making • The Butterick Publishing Co.
... day he had met Louise, or rather until the day of the broncho-busting, and the fateful night on the prairie, he had never grown up. He was wise with the wisdom of a child—sheer instinct, rightness of mind, real decision of character. His giggling laugh had been the undisciplined simplicity of the child, which, when he had reached manhood, had never been formalized by conventions. Something indefinite had marked him until Louise had come, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was a creature contented enough. And why not—with a sufficient income, a comfortable home, and fair health? At the end of a day devoted partly to sheer vacuous idleness and partly to the monotonous simple machinery of physical existence—everlasting cookery, everlasting cleanliness, everlasting stitchery—her mother did not with a yearning sigh demand, "Must this sort of thing ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Howe. Threatening movements might have been made by some of the Canada forces against Ticonderoga, so as to keep Schuyler busy in that quarter; and then the army at New York, thus increased to nearly 40,000 men, might have had a fair chance of overwhelming Washington by sheer weight of numbers. Such a plan might have failed, but it is not likely that it would have led to the surrender of the British army. And if they could have disposed of Washington, the British might have succeeded. It was more necessary ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... on the point of rushing up the station stairway, when he espied a cab at the far corner. A replica of a London cab, something which smacked of home; he could have hugged for sheer joy the bleary-eyed cabby who touched his rusty ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... morning sounds, dear and familiar to Jean's ear, and oh, the sparkle of the dew on the bracken, and the smell of the hawthorn by the garden wall! Jean lifted her pail of water and went singing with it up the hill-slope to the house for sheer joy that ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... steps had started sheer from a cleft in the cliff path, Jacques de Wissant had never used this way of reaching a spot which till last year had been his property, and his favourite bathing-place; and he had also, in those same quiet days ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... vividly the human equation: "The negroes cannot be silent; they talk in spite of themselves. Every passion acts upon them with strange intensity, their anger is sudden and furious, their mirth clamorous and excessive, their curiosity audacious, and their love the sheer demand for gratification of an ardent animal desire. Yet by their nature they are good-humored in the highest degree, and I know nothing more delightful than to be met by a group of negro girls and to be saluted with their kind 'How d'ye massa? ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... the Romanov Family was a national dynasty. It had remained national from sheer necessity, as no European Court would have cared to intermarry with Tatar and Barbarian Princes. Even at the end of Peter the Great's reign the prestige of Russia had scarcely asserted itself in the politics of the West. Peter the Great ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... between fifty and sixty, a sheer wreck, I had noticed earlier in the night standing in Piccadilly, not far from Leicester Square. She seemed to have neither the sense nor the strength to get out of the rain or keep walking, but stood stupidly, whenever she got the chance, ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... two apiece for us. You follow the pilot, if you will; but let me sheer off for this dwelling of Colonel Howard, with my cockswain and boat's crew. I will surprise his house, release the ladies, and on my way back, lay my hands on two of the first lords I fall in with. I suppose, for our business, one is as good ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Duhm and Cornill, along with XI. 22b, 23, XII. 3b, XVII. 18 for no textual or metrical reasons, but only because these scholars shrink from attributing to Jeremiah such outbursts of passion: just as we have seen them for similarly sheer reasons of sentiment refuse to consider as his the advice to desert to the enemy.(724) Yet they admit inconsistently the genuineness of VI. 11, XI. 20, ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... he had realized the essential and eternal distinction between the successive persons who constitute an individuality, he grew dizzy with the sheer wonder of the spectacle as he saw age thus consoling youth, and reflected upon the relation of these ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... this road passes near the verge of a precipice, which, like that at Maury, falls sheer to the road along the River Creuse from Clochonne to Narjec. But, unlike that at Maury, this declivity is ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the most humane of all the avocations. It is to the professions what pastoral occupations are to the trades. Politics and religion both have something to do with institutions. A mechanical man can play a part in them not very well, but passably well. But the literary man is sheer humanity, with nothing to help him but his thoughtfulness and sensibility. He is the unfelled tree, not the timber framed into the ship of state or carved into ecclesiastic grace. He lives as Nature lives, putting on the splendor of green when the air is sunny, and of crystal when the blasts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... condition of the eggs would be noted carefully, and in a short time the hopes of the anxious pioneers would be dashed to the ground by wriggling little insects climbing cheerfully out of their winter quarters and hopping about in a vain search for something green to live upon. Often, in sheer desperation, the harassed settler would sweep the hatching brood into the fire, remarking as he did so, "Burnin's too good for such pests," and always fear gripped the heart. If the crops in spring were eaten, other homes must be sought, and ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... following his own ideas saved his life. When we think of one born in obscurity, living in poverty, handicapped by pain, weakness and deformity; never traveling; and then by sheer persistency and force of will rising to the first place among thinking men of his time, one is almost willing to accept Kant's dictum, "Mind is supreme, and the Universe is but the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... can only be counteracted by opinions and ideas," Vignon continued. "By sheer terror and despotism, and by no other means, can you extinguish the genius of the French nation; for the language lends itself admirably to allusion and ambiguity. Epigram breaks out the more for repressive ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... quail here in great plenty, and they afforded good sport to a First of September shooting party, provided with a setter. At length the poor quail had their quarters so thoroughly beaten up, that several, in attempting to escape from the island, were observed to fall into the water from sheer exhaustion. Nor did the birds receive all the benefit of the shot, for Captain Stanley, while observing with the theodolite, became unwittingly a target for a juvenile shooter; but, fortunately, no damage ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... domain, and was at no pains to conceal the fact. Beyond, the hill went upward suddenly with the curve of a cresting wave. Higher it rose and higher, bearing a tangled growth of vines and ferns and bamboo grass; higher and higher, until it broke, in sheer mid-air, with a coarse foam of rock, thick shrubs, and stony ledges. Almost at the zenith of the cottage garden it poised, and a great camphor tree, centuries old, soared out into the ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... money away as if it were dust. The day on which he gave the thrashing with blows like falling leaves and flowing water, he dragged (lit. pull alive, drag dead) Ying Lien away more dead than alive, by sheer force, and no one, even up to this date, is aware whether she be among the dead or the living. This young Feng had a spell of empty happiness; for (not only) was his wish not fulfilled, but on the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... spider's web, may for a moment forget its situation; but the least effort to escape is apt to frustrate itself and again reveal the imminent peril. Thus he too "kicked against the pricks," hoped, feared, rebelled against his destiny, and again, from sheer weariness, relapsed into a dull, benumbed apathy. In spite of her friendly sympathy, he never felt so keenly his alienism as in her presence. She accepted the spontaneous homage he paid her, sometimes with impatience, as something that was really beneath ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to Billy's and sighed with sheer repletion of content. It seemed she had never lived such a wonderful day. It was as if all old dreams were coming true. Such beauty of the world she had never guessed in her fondest imagining. Billy pressed her ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... contention between himself and his wife. Besides, for Alice's sake, it was clearly his duty to get the fellow out of the way. Girls, Mr. Anthony considered, were always falling in love with the very last people in the world with whom they should do so, and out of sheer contrariety it was more than possible that Alice might take a fancy for this penniless vagabond, and if she did Mrs. Anthony was fool enough to support her in ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... direction of his energies so radically as to make his whole life seem weaker and lower. As long as his love-dreams went out toward a vague and ideal woman, supposedly higher and grander than himself, he was spurred on to face the terrible sheer escarpment of social eminence; but when he met, by accident, the actual woman who was to inspire his future efforts, the difficulties he faced took on solid reality. His aspirations fell to the earth, their wings ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... mainly at the British under command of Sir John French. There followed a retreat that for sheer heroism and dogged determination has become one of the great battles of all time. The British, outflanked and outnumbered three to one, fought and marched without cessation for six days and nights. Time after time envelopment and disaster threatened them, but with a determination that ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... librettist did not treat the episode cleverly, and indeed all the last scene is terribly prosaic, and lacking in poetical atmosphere. To see how the appearance of the lusty hero in the halls of woe can heighten the tragic interest by the sheer force of contrast, we must turn to the 'Alcestis' of Euripides, where the death of Alcestis and the strange conflict of Hercules with Death is treated with just that touch of mystery and unearthliness which is absent from the ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... October, seventeen hundred and twenty-four, I entered the Carmelite convent at Lyons, eighteen months after my flight from the world, and my abandonment of my profession—to adopt which, I may say, in my own defence, that I was first led through sheer poverty. At the age of seventeen years, and possessing (if I may credit report) remarkable personal charms, I was left perfectly destitute through the spendthrift habits of my father. I was easily persuaded to go on the stage, and soon tempted, with my youth and inexperience, ...
— A Fair Penitent • Wilkie Collins
... At daybreak, having met no one, we hid our horses and climbed to the top of the nearest butte to take an observation. It was a very hot day. We lay flat on our blankets, facing the west where the cliff fell off in a sheer descent, and with our backs toward the more gradual slope dotted with scrub pines and cedars. We stuck some tall grass on our heads and proceeded to study the landscape spread before us ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... large expense of laundry cannot be met financially by saleswomen, it has to be met by sheer personal strength. One department-store girl, who needed to be especially neat because her position was in the shirt-waist department, told us that sometimes, after a day's standing in the store, she worked over tubs and ironing-boards at home till ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... States-General in 1614, says the Parlement, which means that the Tiers Etat will be of no account, if the noblesse and the clergy agree. Wherewith terminates the popularity of the Parlement. As for the "thinkers," it is a sheer snowing of pamphlets. And Abbe Sieyes has come to Paris to ask three questions, and answer them: What is the Third Estate? All. What has it hitherto been in our form of government? Nothing. What does ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... anything cross, that everyone looked up surprised. Miss Fosbrook saw that it was sheer unhappiness that made her speak sharply, and would not take any notice, except by gently taking away the ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I declared to Bhima Gandharva that it was not often in a lifetime that we could get so many centuries together to talk with at once, and wrought upon him to spend several days with me, unattended by servants, in this tranquil society of the dead ages, which still live by sheer force of the beautiful ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... about them everywhere. Their trail they made, and there were days when from sunrise to sunset they did not progress five miles. Their two pack animals found insecure footing; death awaited them hourly upon many a day at the bottom of some sheer walled cliff. They climbed with the sharp slopes on the mountains, they dropped down into the narrow, flinty canons, they heard only the swish of tree tops and the quarrelling of streams lost to their eyes in the depths below them. And they came in two weeks to Blue Lake having ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... representations of girls, their heads thrown back and their long hair flying, merrily twanging a guitar as they skip round the room. In the civil and religious processions many of the participators danced along as though from sheer lightness of heart; and on some occasions even the band footed it down the high-road, circling, jumping, and skipping ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... wearily moving an incandescent light hither and thither, observing the surgeon with languid interest. Another nurse, much younger, without the "black band," watched the surgeon from the foot of the cot. Beads of perspiration chased themselves down her pale face, caused less by sympathy than by sheer weariness and heat. The small receiving room of St. Isidore's was close and stuffy, surcharged with odors of iodoform and ether. The Chicago spring, so long delayed, had blazed with a sudden fury the last week in March, and now at ten o'clock not a capful of air strayed into the room, even ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... in front, and the tailboards used so as to span the slight space between them. The plan worked well as long as the material lasted, but no other wagons than my twenty-five coming on the ground, the work stopped when the bridge was only half constructed. Informed of the delay and its cause, in sheer desperation I finished the bridge by taking from my own division all the wagons needed to make ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... initiate a broad and liberal line of policy in colonial affairs on principles which, it appeared to the government, would be adverse to the interests and subversive of the authority of the parent country. Mr. Gladstone was actuated by sheer party opposition. Only forty-two votes were found in favour of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... up at one end of the large smoking-room with the names of the constituencies that were voting that day, and directly the figures came to hand, up they went, amidst cheers that at last lost their energy through sheer repetition, whenever there was record of a Liberal gain. I don't remember what happened when there was a Liberal loss; I don't think that any were announced while I ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... stopping-place was the little tavern of the Star, an out-of-the-way corner in the town of Salzig. It stands on the banks of the Rhine; and, directly in front of it, sheer from the water's edge, rise the mountains of Liebenstein and Sternenfels, each with its ruined castle. These are the Brothers of the old tradition, still gazing at each other face to face; and beneath them in the valley stands a cloister,—meek ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... from Antrim. If Antrim expected him to come to his cabin, Antrim would be ready for him. He might expect craft and cunning from the outlaw—an ambuscade, a trap—anything but the cold, sheer courage that would be required for him to face an enemy upon equal terms. And so as Lawler rode he kept an alert eye upon the coverts and the shelters, upon the huge rocks that littered the sides of the trail, upon the big trees ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... another voice; and I stopped in sheer surprise, to peer closer and to see, for the first time, that it were really the dreamer and the chit, these two and no more, who sat there in the underground chamber. They seemed to be sitting in some sort of ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... in a great leap off the platform onto the rocks, and rolled in a bright patch of Earthlight. First one on top, then the other, they rolled, unheeding, to the brink. Here, beyond the midway ledge which held the camp, it was a sheer drop of a thousand feet, on ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... reaching their final hiding place, must give a call of "Smugglers!" This is the signal for the Ins to start on the chase. The object of the Ins is to catch the one player among the Outs who is custodian of the geg. The identity of this player may be a sheer matter of surmise on their part, when they will have to challenge any player whom they may catch. If the player holding the geg can return to the den without being caught, his party wins, and again goes out for the next game. But if the holder of the geg be ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... Curly-head was an accomplished rider, and Sam felt that he himself cut but an awkward figure. In reality he was too conscious of his defects. By strict attention he was proving himself a fair ordinary rider, but when Hollis, out of sheer showiness, turned aside from the path to jump his horse over a fallen tree, and Miss Stevens out of bravado followed him, Sam Turner well-nigh ground his teeth, and, acting upon the impulse, he too attempted the jump. The horse got over safely, but ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... vague or inapplicable notions, involving only relations of space or emotions of wonder.' This is doubtless true; but the word 'neglect' implies mere intellectual misdirection, whereas in Aristotle, as in Goethe, it was not, I believe, misdirection, but sheer natural incapacity which lay at the root of his mistakes. As a physicist, Aristotle displayed what we should consider some of the worst of attributes in a modern physical investigator—indistinctness of ideas, confusion of mind, and a confident use of language which led ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Malahide was it?, was, he was bound to admit, an exceedingly plucky deed which he could not too highly praise, so that frankly he was utterly at a loss to fathom what earthly reason could be at the back of it except he put it down to sheer cussedness ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... what foot could find a track In that deep gully, sheer and black ... And singing wildly in the night! So, wondering I lay awake, Until the coming of the light Brought day's ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... ordained some to damnation only from His mere counsel, purpose, and will, so that they cannot be saved? Never in all eternity, try as they may, will they prove this proposition from God's revealed Word. For nowhere do the Holy Scriptures speak thus. Yet from sheer foolhardiness they dare employ, contrary to Scripture, such blasphemous doctrine and speech and spread it in all Christendom." ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... have recourse. Hence with tens of thousands it is literally a case of "steal or starve." I suppose that nine-tenths of the thefts and robberies, besides a large proposition of the other crimes committed in India, are prompted by sheer starvation, and until the cause be removed, it will be in vain to look for a diminution of the evil, multiply our police and soldiery ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... him: completely without humour or bitterness, without the smallest tendency to twist the reality into caricature or monstrosity, nay, perhaps without much psychologic analysis to tell him the exact meaning of what he is painting, going straight to the point, and utterly ruthless from sheer absence of all alternative of doing otherwise than he does. There is nothing more cruelly realistic in the world, cruel not only to the base originals but to the feelings of the spectator, than the harmony of villainies, of ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... to see your neighbor?" The girl's clear eyes gave no hint that she knew—as she well did—the trouble between the houses, and the widow stared in sheer amazement, for mountaineers do not talk with strangers ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... his savings, and had his pockets full of Chapman's "equivalents," from which he looked for a fortune in a very short time. Finally the innocent settlers began to regard Chapman as a great genius, who had invented this new way of making their fortunes out of sheer goodness. "I want to tell you, my good friends," he would say to them, patronizingly, "you will appreciate me better as we become better acquainted. Invest your money, and there's a fortune for you all." And they took his ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... up the face of a sheer perpendicular cliff near Milau is the cave of Riou Ferrand, 45 feet below the brow of the precipice. The mouth of the grotto is partly blocked by a well- constructed wall. It has been entered from above and explored. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... so a week; and a shilling goes a long way with a woman who lives upon tea and sops. In their latter days these women resemble the pollard oaks, which linger on year after year, and finally fall from sheer decay. ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... always poured itself forth in writing so copiously that his revision was chiefly devoted to reducing the over-abundance. He never shrank from any of the drudgery of preparation, but I think his own part of the work was sheer pleasure to him." ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... regularly at the settlements on the islands and even along the mainland,—a month's work for a little flour or sugar. Ah, how I have labored! I have felt my muscles crack, I have dropped like a log from sheer weariness. Talk of tortures; which of them have I not felt, with the pains and faintness of exposure and hunger racking me from head to foot? Have I stopped for snow and ice? Have I stopped for anguish? Never; I have worked, worked, worked, with the tears of pain rolling down my cheeks, ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... men that he scarcely brought back home from India the fourth part of his army, which originally amounted to a hundred and twenty thousand foot, and fifteen thousand horse. Most of the men perished from sickness, bad food, and the excessive heat of the sun, and many from sheer hunger, as they had to march through an uncultivated region, inhabited only by a few miserable savages, with a stunted breed of cattle whose flesh had acquired a rank and disagreeable taste through their habit ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... with my identity. It leaped frantically at me, raced around me, through me, finally stopped, pervading me, while vibrating in sheer relief and happiness. I felt the great fear-loneliness in the other Marl begin to recede and in its place came an almost overpowering euphoria. It was contentment, and it stemmed from the basic emotion love. I knew this ...
— Cogito, Ergo Sum • John Foster West
... with melancholy. The intellectual defect, too, is different. In retarded depression the patient is morbidly aware of difficulty and slowness, but on urging often performs tests surprisingly well. In the stupor, however, one is faced with an unquestionable defect, a sheer intellectual incapacity. ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... strong chap,' said Toffy. He had been delicate ever since he was a little boy. School games had often been an agony to him. He had ridden races and had lain awake all night afterwards, unable, through sheer exhaustion, to sleep; he had played polo under burning suns, and had concealed the fact (as though it had been a crime) that he had fainted in the pavilion afterwards. He very seldom had a good night's sleep, and habitual bad luck or the ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... with the Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge Saint Helena: rugged, volcanic; small scattered plateaus and plains Ascension: surface covered by lava flows and cinder cones of 44 dormant volcanoes; ground rises to the east Tristan da Cunha: sheer cliffs line the coastline of the nearly circular island; the flanks of the central volcanic peak are deeply dissected; narrow coastal plain lies between The Peak ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... of Keats. John Keats was a very different person from Shelley. The son of a livery-stable keeper, he had been an apothecary's apprentice, and for a short time had walked the hospitals. He was driven into literature by sheer artistic passion, and not at all from any craving to ameliorate the world. His odes are among the chief glories of the English language. His life, unlike Shelley's, was devoted entirely to art, and was uneventful, its only incidents an unhappy ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... to him. Yet he could not help feeling the want of that excitement which, singularly enough, was most conducive to that calm equanimity for which he was notorious. He looked at the gloomy walls that rose a thousand feet sheer above the circling pines around him; at the sky, ominously clouded; at the valley below, already deepening into shadow. And, doing so, suddenly he ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... unwilling heart by storm, claiming it as his right before he was out of his cradle. And later the attachment between them had grown and thriven, for Piers had never relinquished the ground he had won in babyhood. By sheer arrogance of possession he had held his own till the impetuous ardour of his affection and the utter fearlessness on which it was founded had made of him the cherished idol of the heart which had tried to shut him out. Sir Beverley gloried in the boy though he ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... smiling and talking of brotherly love. The men who swore never to forget when they were in the trenches will accept all the explanations and congratulations that are offered them. It is such a bore not to forget! Five years of exhausting fatigue make you accept anything through sheer weariness or boredom, or the wish to finish it all, so the flourishes of triumph will drown the cries of the vanquished. The one thought of most people will be to go back to their sleepy before-the-war habits; first they will dance on the graves, and then lie down ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... is too real a city to be 'seen' in such a manner. And a better way of spending a few days, or years, is to sit on Dufferin Terrace, with the old Lower Town sheer beneath you, and the river beyond it, and the citadel to the right, a little above, and the Isle of Orleans and the French villages away down-stream to your left. Hour by hour the colours change, and sunlight follows shadow, and mist rises, and smoke ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... away from the village, and in and out among the rocks for quite two miles, till they were where the cliff went sheer up like a vast wall of rugged granite, at a part of which, where a mass of broken stone had either fallen or been thrown down, Will stopped and looked round to see if they were observed. As they were alone with no other watchers ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... the walls of the building went sheer down, sixty feet or more, without a break, into a yard which bristled with broken wood and old lumber. Evidently death faced them in that direction. The third side was the gable-end of the garret. On the fourth ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... What an eternity it had seemed before he had got him to sleep. How the child had suffered. Mad! Absolutely stark, staring, raving mad with sheer terror.... Had he acted rightly in showing him the picture? He had meant well, anyhow. Cruel phrase, that. How cuttingly his friend de Warrenne had observed, "You mean well, doubtless," on more than one occasion. He could make it the most stinging of insults.... ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... day deepened by a fog; a dense haze settled on the sea, seeming by sheer weight to still its restless motion. Now was the skipper much more perturbed than during the rough weather: wrapt in a mighty pea-coat, he kept a perpetual look-out in person, chewing the tobacco ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... sturdy trees was backed close against the base of the cliff, and the rocky wall was sheer, mounting at least eight hundred ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... doing his duty," answered Outzen calmly. "But to disturb the peace of the grave from sheer daring, with the fumes of the punch still in your head,—that is a different matter,—that will surely ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... immense; Mr. Bayfield ascertained during his passage up, at a season when the waters were low, that in many places no bottom was to be found at a depth of 45 fathoms. The necessity of this enormous depth is at once evident, and is pointed out by the configuration of the banks, which are in many places sheer precipices. Two other defiles exist between Bamo and Ava, of these the middle or second is the shortest, in both the stream flows sluggishly, and there is no impediment whatever to navigation. In these the depth is great, but owing to their greater width, ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... Men Scryfa was crested with that fine yellow-gray lichen which finds life on exposed stones; upon the windward side clung a few atoms of golden growth; and its rude carved inscription straggled down the northern face. The monument rose sheer above black corpses of crooked furze, for fire had swept this region also, adding not a little to the prevailing sobriety of it, and only the elemental splendor of weather and the canopy of blue and gold beneath which spread ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... panting fiercely, our faces flushed, the perspiration dripping from our bodies, our swords darting swiftly back and forth. He was my match, and more, and, had we been permitted to go on to the end, would have worn me down by sheer strength. Suddenly, above the clash of steel, came the sound of voices; our blades were struck up, and the dark forms of men ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... it must accept conditions as they are. The first of these conditions is that the United States is a world power neither because of its virtue nor because of its intelligence in the delicacies of the world politics, but because of the sheer ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... George Stokes had snored in that characteristic manner from boyhood, ever since he and George had slept in a hayloft together; and how he, kept wakeful and driven to distraction by George Stokes' nose, had been occasionally compelled, in sheer self-defence, madly to start up and hold that pertinacious alarum in tight compression between thumb and forefinger; and how George Stokes, thus severely handled, had burst his hold with a tremendous snort, as big as a bull, and had invariably uttered the exclamation, 'Hulloa!—same to you, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he is in deadly earnest; as a controversialist, his first object is to refute and convince. The graces of poetry are never for a moment allowed to interfere with the full development of an argument. Much of the poem is a chain of intricate reasoning hammered into verse by sheer force of hand. The ardent imagination of the poet struggles through masses of intractable material which no genius could wholly fuse into a metal pure enough to take perfect form. His language, in the fine prologue to the fourth book of the poem, shows his attitude ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... halls of old Romance Strike through the clouds of clamor: who be these That, paired in rich processional, advance From darkness o'er the murk mad factories Into yon flaming road, and sink, strange Ministrants! Sheer down to earth, with many minstrelsies And motions fine, and mix about the scene And fill the Time ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... from Tscherkask to Togarog, and not far from the latter village, there stood, in the year 1850, a large and inhospitable-looking inn. Its shingled walls, whose rough surface no paint-brush had touched for long generations, seemed decaying from sheer old age. Its tiled roof was in a most dilapidated state, displaying large gaps imperfectly stuffed with straw, and serving rather to collect the rain and snow for the more thorough inundation of the rooms below ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... have been besieged with requests to open a "Speakers' Class" or "A School of Oratory," or, as one ingenious correspondent puts it, a "Forensic Club." With these requests it is impossible to comply for sheer ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... acknowledged such holiday missiles with showers of brickbats, and eggs not filled with aromatic dew. What was the result? The Tories increased in confidence and strength with every new assault; whilst the battered Whigs, from their sheer pusillanimity, became noisome in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... pretty soon tied up my boat, and struck off into the woods. It was consid'able of a walk; and I strolled along easy till I came to the place whar the harebells growed, 'bout a mile and a half from the river. This was a high clift, covered with brush and trees on one side, and on the other falling sheer down to a little deep valley, with another clift rising opposite. These clifts joined each other at the two ends of the valley: so there was no getting into it anyway but down the faces of 'em, and that was as much as a man's neck was worth; but, fur's I ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... late that night, we could neither test nor speak. Reuter was at Norderney, and I had to do the best I could, which was not much, and went to bed early; I thought I should never sleep again, but in sheer desperation got up in the middle of the night and gulped a lot of raw whiskey and slept at last. But not long. A Mr. F- washed my face and hands and dressed me: and we hauled the cable out of the sea, and got it joined to the telegraph station, and on October 3rd telegraphed ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... motives, what are called the spontaneous acts of the mind must be the necessary result of motives which direct and command its elections. "To say that in our choice we reject the stronger motive, and that we choose a thing merely because we choose it, is sheer nonsense and absurdity. And whoever, with a sound understanding, will fix his mind upon the state of the question, will ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... ascent of one of the mountains of the main range. It still lacked a little of midday when he at last found himself on a narrow bench, near the summit, in a small growth of pines and firs. He stopped from sheer exhaustion and looked about him. Not a sign of human life was visible; not a sound broke the stillness save an occasional breath of air murmuring through the pines and the trickling of a tiny rivulet ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... 1869.*—Since the dawn of constitutionalism political life in Spain has comprised much of the time a sheer game between the "ins" and the "outs", in which issues have counted for little and the schemings of the caciques, or professional wire-pullers and bosses, have counted for well-nigh everything. For the exercise of independent ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Aeneas slew withal Antimachus and Pheres, twain which left Crete with Idomeneus. Agenor smote Molus the princely,—with king Sthenelus He came from Argos,—hurled from far behind A dart new-whetted, as he fled from fight, Piercing his right leg, and the eager shaft Cut sheer through the broad sinew, shattering The bones with anguished pain: and so his doom Met him, to die a death of agony. Then Paris' arrows laid proud Phorcys low, And Mosynus, brethren both, from Salamis Who came in Aias' ships, and nevermore Saw the home-land. ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... born as old as their grandmothers," said Agatha, accepting a fieldfare from the sewer, and squeezing a lemon over it. "I would fain enjoy my youth, though I'm little like to do it whilst here I am. Howbeit, it were sheer waste of stuff for any maid to set her heart on Master Norman; he wist not how to discourse with maids. He should have been a monk, in very sooth, for he is fit for nought no better. There ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... instructor scented the truth of the matter and then Steve's life became a burden to him. Mr. Simkins took delight, it seemed, in calling on him at the most unexpected moments until, one day, in sheer desperation, Steve gave utterance to the answer "not prepared." That was to Uncle Sim what a red rag is to a bull! There was a scathing dressing-down then and there, followed by a visit that evening from Mr. ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the pursuers now rein up sharply. It seemed to them sheer madness to ride out thus to their ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock
... all means," he said. "I don't suppose there's a soul in all England but myself knows your secret—and Mallalieu's. It was sheer accident, of course, that I ever discovered it. But—I know! Just consider what I do know. Consider, too, what you stand to lose. There's Mallalieu, so much respected that he's Mayor of this ancient borough for the ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... would sooner have cut away his hand than questioned his friend concerning his sister. Thus the two men, illogically but humanly enough, continued to grow apart, until, with never a thought but of friendliness, their intercourse became limited, through sheer embarrassment, to the commonplaces of fellow-soldiers who held light acquaintance with each other's names ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... not be realized, or denounced the proceedings of those who made the promise? All else, of course, was of secondary importance at the time, in comparison with the expectations and the hopes placed before you; any contradiction appeared to be nothing but sheer obstruction and malignity, while the proceedings described seemed to be of incredible importance ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... though disdaining his present weakness, left him free from attack. Forsaken by the Divine grace, he was incapable of entering upon any struggle, the thought of sin could no longer even impassion him; it was sheer stupor alone that now rendered him willing to accept that which he had the day before so ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... morning, excited by the intensity of the strain he was undergoing, by the pull on his body, but far more by the pull on his soul, he came to a sudden and crude decision; at all costs the blatant thing should be his, the popular triumph, the success, if not of the high-bred merit, then of sheer spectacular sensation. There is an intimate success that seems to be of the soul, and there is another, reverberating, resounding, like the clashing of brass instruments beaten together. Claude seemed to hear them at this moment as he talked with ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... privation of the delicate and plentiful fare to which his excellency had accustomed me was most painful, besides all the enjoyments from which I was excluded through the atrocious conduct of the virulent priest, who was my godfather. I wept from sheer vexation; and my rage was increased by the consciousness that there was in this insult a certain dash of comical fun which threw over me a ridicule more disgraceful in my estimation ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the intervals of the storm, a low continuous growling made itself evident. At first it was disregarded by the writer, but presently, by its sheer pertinacity, the sound so irritated him that he rose from his seat, and, striding to a narrow door covered with a heavy curtain, he threw it wide open to the wall. Then through the black oblong so made, a huge and shaggy she-wolf slouched slowly ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... a sad chapter in the history of this eminent man wherein is told the heart-breaking story of his sacrifice—the giving up through sheer love of his country of the only woman he had ever loved, and we should prefer to pass it over in silence. We allude to it here merely to show that it was brought about by the exigencies of his office, and that it ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... general-utility man; lodging he will find for himself. If not pressed too hard, he will follow his superior like a faithful dog. If treated with kindness, according to European notions, he is lost. The native never looks ahead; if left to himself, he will do all sorts of imprudent things, from sheer want of reflection on the consequences, when, as he puts it, "his head is hot" from ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... was necessary at greeting or parting, of touching her caressingly, of looking at her with the eyes of a lover instead of a friend. She did not like these things. For some mysterious reason—from sheer perversity, she thought—she had taken a strong physical dislike to him. Perfectly absurd, for there was nothing intrinsically repellent about this handsome, clean, most attractively dressed man, of the best type of American and New-Yorker. No, only perversity could explain ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... day and looked, we abused the man who invented quarantine, we held half a dozen mass-meetings and crammed them full of interrupted speeches, motions that fell still-born, amendments that came to nought and resolutions that died from sheer exhaustion in trying to get before the house. At ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... white middy blouse, and her brown, bare forearms flashed pleasantly in the spring sun. Her brown hair was disarranged by the wind that found a passway down the river, and her eyes shone with the sheer, unadorned love of living. Evidently she had just enjoyed a brisk paddle through the still stretches of the river. With sure, steady strokes she pushed the craft close to the little, board landing where ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... asks you. 'Why, of course you can,' reply they; and then you hand over your money, and then they hand you back a little bit of paper. 'That's your receipt,' say they. 'All right,' say you; and off you sheer. Perhaps you feel just a little bit queerish, when you get outside, to think that all your solid cash has been melted down into that morsel of paper; but being a light-hearted, easy-going fellow, you don't think any more of it, till you come home ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... England's military power has remained almost stationary, that we need now be under no apprehensions from her land-forces; for, even if checked in the beginning, we could not help conquering in the end by sheer weight of numbers, if by nothing else. So that there is now no cause for our keeping up a large army; while, on the contrary, the necessity for an efficient navy is so evident that only our almost incredible short-sightedness prevents our ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... wide his hands in sheer inability to find words that would express the hopelessness of retrieving his shattered fortunes. Dale was fidgeting, fingering taps and screws unnecessarily, but Medenham was pondering his former trooper's plight. He refused to admit ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... strong man made tender as a woman's by a power centering in her own humble self, and, being utterly without experience of the emotion even in its protective form of calf-love, which is the varioloid of the genuine infection, she imagined through sheer sympathy that she shared his passion. So she assented with maidenly reserve to his plea that she promise to marry him when he should return and provide a home for her. Her more cautious mother secured a modification of this pledge by limiting the time that ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... they came teeming but dim, and slipped and fell away; and only the one circumstance of his recent cruelty, mixed with remembrance of George Feval, recurred and clung with vivid persistence. This tortured him. Sitting there, with arms tightly interlocked, he resolved to wrench his mind down by sheer will upon other things; and a savage pleasure at what at once seemed success, took possession of him. In this mood, he heard soft footsteps and the rustle of festal garments on the stairs, and had a fierce ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... emerged, where the road stretched level before them, for a quarter of a mile. On one side rose the huge bulk of the mountain. On the other side the steep wall of the canyon fell away in impossible slopes and sheer drops to the torrent at the bottom. It was an abyss of green beauty and shady depths, pierced by vagrant shafts of the sun and mottled here and there by the sun's broader blazes. The sound of rushing water ascended on the windless ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... for him who curses the Holy Ghost, he would, in the frenzy of his despair, swear at that mysterious portion of the Trinity by the hour, and then employ the next in beating his breast in the agony of repentance. Many may think all this sheer madness; but he was not more mad than most of the hot-headed methodists, whose preachers, at that time, held uncontrolled sway over the great mass of people that toiled in the humbler walks of life. Two nights in the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... amid the rocks through which it has cut its channel, and in walking up the bed against the stream, in climbing the sides of the various falls, and sticking close to the river till an envious block is reached which comes sheer down into the water and prevents farther progress. This is nearly two miles above the steps by which the descent is made; and not a foot of this distance but is wildly beautiful. When the river is very low there is a pathway even beyond ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... Fossiologist of the British Museum, says: "Nine-tenths of the talk of Evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by facts. This museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... and assist him, but they, after making an abortive attempt to send a canoe load across, remained idle spectators of the terribly unequal conflict. Dale, seeing that no help was to come from them, and knowing that the Indians would shortly overcome him by sheer force of numbers, resolved upon a recklessly daring manoeuvre, namely, an attempt to capture the Indian canoe! He called out ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... convent. The mother wore rich but dowdy black and an impossible headgear, a rather hawklike affair which appeared to have alighted by mistake on the piles of dusky hair where it was shakily balancing itself, but Mariquita's narrow blue serge was entirely modish, and her tan pumps, and sheer amber silk hose, and her impudent hat. The Senor spent a large portion of his time in the smoker and the Senora bent over a worn prayer book or murmured under her breath as her fingers slipped over the beads in her lap, but the girl chattered unceasingly. Her English was fluent but she had ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... search of work, the desperate rage experienced at feeling so small, so lost, and unknown in the immense crowd that pushes, hustles, upsets, and crushes. And yet all alone, without patronage or money, he had managed to rise. By sheer talent, sir! And his head thrown back, and eyes half-shut, the worthy man kept repeating out loud to himself: "By sheer talent. Nothing ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... among the rocks they came to the face of what subsequently proved to be a sheer wall of stone. He flashed the light, and, with an exclamation, started back. Not six feet ahead of them the earth seemed to end; a yawning black gulf lay beyond. Apparently they were on the very edge of ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... rock; and the exceeding stillness so awful, that even the boy-sailor scarce dared to speak above his breath. Rosita began to repent of having come near so horrible a place; and when she put her head out of her litter, and beheld herself winding along a ledge projecting from the face of a sheer precipice, she would have begged to go back instantly; but her husband spoke in a voice of authority which subdued her; she drew in her head into her basket-work contrivance, and had recourse to vows to Sta Rosa of Lima of a chaplet of diamond roses, if she ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... drawing my thread through the sheer cloth. "No, Nickols will live his own way regardless of the cogs on which it grinds. I shall have an enormous task in keeping up with the social side of his life, but Nickols is not the kind of a man who takes a woman ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... months at Bombay, and almost six months at Calcutta. There were so many gorgeous things,—silks, and bright stuffs with threads of gold, jackets all embroidery, and queer Eastern dresses, two made of pineapple cloth,—a sheer, beautiful fabric,—and one had delicate flowers ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... was Telegraph Hill, the end of the peninsula, a height so abrupt that it had a 200 foot sheer cliff on its seaward frontage. Further along lay Nob Hill, crowned with the Mark Hopkins mansion, which had the effect of a citadel, and in later years by the great, white Fairmount. Further along was Russian Hill, the highest point. Below ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... the enemy, trying in vain to rally the flying Walloons he met on the way. For a few minutes the two parties of Germans made a brave stand; but they were unable to resist the weight and number of the Spaniards, who bore them down by sheer force. Champagny had fought gallantly in the melee, and Ned, keeping closely beside him, had well seconded his efforts; but when the Germans were borne down they rode off, dashing through the streets and shouting to the burghers everywhere to rise ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... imposition, the fruit of a depraved heart, and a lying tongue, implies so much home-born deceit that, till the heart capable of such a prejudice be completely changed, no reasoning can have any solid fulcrum of truth or goodness to rest on. It is sheer folly to talk of one's being wholly unprejudiced in such an inquiry. No man ever was, or could be so. As his sympathies are toward goodness and virtue, and the happiness of mankind, or toward pride and deceit, and selfishness and ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... tribe who kept to the full Romany dress. There were big gold loops in her small ears, and on her arms, many gold bracelets, whose lightness testified to their freedom from alloy. Her skirt was of red, heavily embroidered in blue, and her waist, with short sleeves, was of sheer white cloth, with an embroidered bolero. Her hair she wore in the ancient fashion, in two braids on either side of her face. She could well afford to, the chis muttered among themselves. Any girl with hair ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... of a smaller wage than P. Sybarite (who earned fifteen dollars per week) George squandered fifteen cents on newspapers every Sunday morning for sheer delight in the ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... this same block divine Inheritance, or hidden mine, Or luck at play, or any favour. Nay, more, if any storm whatever Brew'd trouble here or there, The man was sure to have his share, And suffer in his purse, Although the god fared none the worse. At last, by sheer impatience bold, The man a crowbar seizes, His idol breaks in pieces, And finds it richly stuff'd with gold. "How's this? Have I devoutly treated," Says he, "your godship, to be cheated? Now leave my house, and go your way, ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... following the shore with the wind quartering in our faces. We had gone but a mile from camp when I caught an indistinct outline of a bear feeding on the grass at the edge of the timber, about 125 yards away. I quickly fired, missing through sheer carelessness. ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... there was that story of the De Willoughbys of Delisleville—handsome, aristocratic lot, among the biggest bugs in the State—the fine old Judge with his thousands of acres lying uncultivated, and he paying his taxes on them through sheer patriarchal pleasure in being a big landowner. For years the Government had benefited by his tax-paying, while he had gained nothing. And then there was the accidental discovery of the splendid wealth hidden in the bowels ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... remained at Manor Cross, but under no circumstances could he have had much more to say to the lady. They understood each other now. He was quite certain that any evil thing spoken of her had been sheer slander, and yet he had managed to tell her everything of himself without subjecting himself to her undying anger. When she left the drawing-room, the conversation turned again upon the great Popenjoy question, and from certain words which fell from the Dean, Jack was enabled to surmise that ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... "Sheer necessity, but don't do it if it is so very dreadful to you. I must go to several more parties, because they are made for me, but after that I'll refuse, and then no one need be troubled ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... kind to the Russian Commander at Trieste which had been rejected. There is not a syllable of truth in it. I have had no correspondence with Russia, nor anything happened that could have given rise to such a conjecture. It must therefore be sheer mischief. There are such diabolical spirits, who, incapable of good, cannot rest inactive but fester the world with ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... had first used, and then set aside, Henry's will. Hertford in turn by the use of his nephew's name set aside both the will and the Council. A country gentleman, who had risen by the accident of his sister's queenship to high rank at the Court, had thus by sheer intrigue and self-assertion made himself ruler of the realm. But daring and self-confident as he was, Somerset was forced by his very elevation to seek support for the power he had won by this surprise in measures which marked the retreat of ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... that smart of wounded love whose sweetest balm revenge seems to supply, Eve lay awake until the gray light of day had filled the room, and then, from sheer exhaustion, she fell into a doze which gradually deepened into a heavy sleep, so that when she again opened her eyes the sun ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... girl, born in rather sordid conditions, lift herself through sheer determination to the better things for which her ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... long, long time, she took a slow, sinuous step toward him—then another.... He stepped back, still looking at her, his eyes still on hers.... He was back to the great cliff—the sheer cliff at the base of which the huge seas ever beat in sullen, unceasing impotence.... Yet, another step ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... Despair. An ancient spruce tree, one that had watched the forest drama for uncounted years, whose tall head lifted above all the surrounding forest and who had known the silence and the snow of a hundred winters, had languished, withered and died from sheer old age. For some seasons it had stood in its place, silent and grim and majestic in death. On the day that the three hunters emerged on their snowshoes in search of meat for their depleted larder, the wind pressed gently against it. Because ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... reformer regards as a sad deviation from the original plans is a poor rickety attempt to adapt the machine to changing conditions. Think what would have happened had we actually remained stolidly faithful to every intention of the Fathers. Think what would happen if every statute were enforced. By the sheer force of circumstances we have twisted constitutions and laws to some approximation of our needs. A changing country has managed to live in spite of a static government machine. Perhaps Bernard Shaw was right when he said that "the famous Constitution survives only because whenever ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... horse of his own—although Berrie insisted upon his retaining Pete—and sent for a saddle of the army type, and from sheer desire to keep entirely clear of the cowboy equipment procured puttees like those worn by cavalry officers, and when he presented himself completely uniformed, he looked not unlike a slender, young lieutenant of the cavalry on field duty, and in ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... streams, The lilied marge their waves caress; And the sheer constellations sway O'er ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... respects to the most gorgeous tree of the island, it would be sheer gracelessness to withhold a tribute to one of the commonest, though ever novel and remarkable—the umbrella-tree. Less conspicuous in its blooming than the flame-tree, it flourishes everywhere—on the beaches with its roots awash at high tide; on the rearguard ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... in sheer kindness of heart, shone with good humour, readiness of reply and flow of conversation. Randal, while he felt that she now and then forced the note, caught her motive, and responding, smoothed her way. But Dick, having from childhood accepted Randal's immunity from ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... Then they sat out a dance; and then they danced again. Yae was tiny, but she danced well; and Geoffrey was used to a small partner. For Yae it was sheer delight to feel the size and strength of this giant man bending over her like a sheltering tree; and then to be lifted almost in his arms and to float on tiptoe over the floor with the delightful airiness ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... monasteries, nestling in green pastures, where still the bare-footed and bare-headed friar, his rope girdle tight about his loins, shepherds, with crook in hand, his sheep upon the hill sides; through rocky woods; between sheer walls of cliff, whose every towering crag stands crowned with ruined fortress, church, or castle; together with a blick at the Vosges mountains, where half the population is bitterly pained if you speak to them in French, the other ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... for they sailed over rough ground, irrigation checks, and the like without a break in their stride, and without a jar. By the same token it was necessary to ride them. At odd moments they were quite likely to give a wide sidewise bound or a stiff-legged buck from sheer joy of life. One got genuine "horse ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... motion; by which change of direction, order succeeded to confusion in the arrangement of its component parts. The philosopher adds that the deluge was produced by an uncourteous salute from the watery tail of another comet; doubtless through sheer envy of its improved condition; thus furnishing a melancholy proof that jealousy may prevail even among the heavenly bodies, and discord interrupt that celestial harmony of the spheres so melodiously sung by ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... "taken" very severely, which is a sign that we badly needed vaccinating, but makes the discomfort no easier to endure. It is no joke handling a rifle when your left arm is swelled to the full compass of your sleeve; and the personal contact of your neighbour in the ranks is sheer agony. However, officers are considerate, and the work is made as light as possible. The faint-hearted report themselves sick; but the Medical Officer, an unsentimental man of coarse mental fibre, who was on a panel before he heard his country calling, ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... admitted, so as to clear the way for anything you have to say, that Mr. Morrison would not care to have his name mentioned in connection with this affair. But because he left your bar a few minutes after the murdered man, it is sheer folly to assume that therefore he is necessarily implicated in his death. I ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the first floor and looked out. The tide of the affray was surging gradually back into the wide open space before the inn, and very shortly this was filled with a chaos of furious faces and struggling arms. The University were evidently recoiling, pressed back by the sheer weight of their opponents; but soon came a re-enforcement of grooms and stable-men, lightweights, active and wiry; and these, with their hunting-crops and heavy cutting-whips used remorselessly—like Caesar's legionaries, they ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... personally, by foreigners. Beyond any other people we wish to be loved by other peoples, even by others whom we do not love, and we wish to be loved in the lump. We would like to believe that somehow our sheer Americanism rouses the honor and evokes the veneration of the alien, and as we have long had a grudge against the English, we would be particularly glad to forget it in a sense of English respect and affection. We would fain believe that the English have ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... who set on dishes and tasted them, Shaft-mon, handbreadth, Shaw, thicket, Sheef, thrust, Sheer-Thursday, Thursday in Holy Week, Shend, harm, Shenship, disgrace, Shent, undone, blamed, Shour, attack, Shrew, rascal, Shrewd, knavish, Sib, akin to, Sideling, sideways, Siege, seat, Signified, likened, Siker, sure, Sikerness, assurance, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... the restorations pictures have undergone. Injured by time or obscured by repeated varnishings, they often require some degree of cleaning to make them intelligible. Unfortunately, in most instances, the process is sheer assassination. Many of the best works of public galleries have been subjected to scrubbings more analogous to the labors of a washtub than to the delicate and scientific treatment requisite to preserve intact the virgin surface of the painting. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... finish, Jason. Jay Allison may have been repressed, overcontrolled, but you are seriously impulsive. You lack a balance-wheel, if I could put it that way. And if you run too many risks, your buried alter-ego may come to the surface and take over in sheer self-preservation." ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... off to the right, and a little later splashed through the water for a few minutes and came out into a spreading valley beyond the sheer walls of the retreat they had left. Taking the road again, they traveled faster than they had been able ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... them a toss which, instead of sending them back into the hut, sent them over the edge of the trail. They went down six hundred feet before they lodged in a poplar, and if his lordship followed the trail he could get round to them, but there would then be a hundred feet of sheer rock between the trail and the trousers. "I hope it will teach him to study his Lord Chesterfield to better purpose, for if politeness doesn't cost anything, rudeness can cost considerable," I chuckled ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... It was sheer will-power that gained her a little strength to face the ordeal of the official visit. She determined to make no change whatever in the course of her daily life, and she was afraid the deputies might not find ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... friends, I am afraid, with most of us is, sheer folly—not want of cunning and cleverness, but want of heart—want of feeling—what Solomon calls folly (Prov. i. 22-27), stupidity of soul, when he calls on the simple souls, How long ye simple ones will you love simplicity or silliness, and the scorners delight in their scorning ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... line of the circle grew nebulous, and Colwyn was fast falling asleep through sheer weariness, when a slight sharp sound, like that made by turning a key in a lock, brought him back to wide-eyed wakefulness. He sat up in bed, listening with strained ears, feeling for the box of matches at his bedside. He found them, and endeavoured ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... fully as tedious and valueless as the catalogue of ships in the second book of Homer. And, oh! the garrulity of the biographers, the minuteness of detail, the petty incidents, the host of dates! With these we are inflicted because some adventurous Yankee happened, by sheer luck, to build the first shanty on what became the site of a great city, or chanced there to be a pioneer victim of the "shakes" or ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... appearance of a continuous cataract, which, falling a large mass of waters at his feet, seems as if it diminished and disappeared in the heavens. The Staubbach, or Fall of Dust, in Lauter Brunen, is beyond question a fine object. The water is thrown sheer off the edge of a perpendicular rock, and reaches the ground in a massive shower nine hundred feet high. But with all respect for this wonder of the world, we are scarcely disposed to admit that it is a grander fall than this rumbling, irregular, unmeasured cataract ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... tree he girdled; Just beneath its lowest branches, Just above the roots, he cut it, Till the sap came oozing outward; Down the trunk, from top to bottom, Sheer he cleft the bark asunder, With a wooden wedge he raised it, Stripped it from the ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... miniature of Monte Maggiore, with some fine mountain scenery in it, and a curious fresh-water lake, the surface of which is only 50 ft. above sea-level, though it is 225 ft. deep in some parts. The finest mountain scenery is near Smergo, where the rock rises sheer from the water to the height of 1,000 ft. Here is the "Dirupo di Smergo," a cave with a domed top. At one time the sea broke into it, laying bare the interior, which is like a giant amphitheatre with ribbed roof and sides. The fragments ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... the live-and-let-live type, who would rather cultivate their own potatoes than quarrel about vestments or the Trinity. Violently acquisitive, of course, like most southerners. I know a parish priest, a son of poor parents, who, by dint of sheer energy, has amassed a fortune of half a million francs. He cannot endure idleness in any shape, and a fine mediaeval scene may be witnessed when he suddenly appears round the corner and catches his workmen wasting ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... particular reason, that the hero of the ballad behaved so handsomely. We perceive a susceptibility to adulteration in their worship at the sight of one of their number, a young maid, suddenly snatched up to the gaping heights of Luxury and Fashion through sheer good looks. Remembering that they are accustomed to a totally reverse effect from that possession, it is very perceptible how a breach in their reverence may ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... resulting from the sheer multitude of varying dispositions, refined by the gentlemanly tone of character indigenous to the college, afford advantages superior to all the rest ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... those savage riders should come darting over the divide and swooping down upon their helpless prey. Men, with eyes that snapped and fists that clinched, or fingers that seemed twitching with mad desire to clasp pistol butt or sabre hilt, or loud barking carbine, ran in sheer nervous frenzy up and down the bluffs, staring only at Blake's far-distant riders, swinging their hats and waving them on, praying only for another sight of the Sioux in front of the envied seven, and craving with all their soldier hearts to share in ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... between Austria-Hungary and the United States is sheer nonsense," he said in his quiet but forceful manner. "I must confess, however, that we were greatly surprised to get the American note. It is far from our intention to get into any quarrel with America. Perhaps I should not say quarrel, because I know it would not be that, but of course matters ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... Fatherland. The dreams of conquest which are the real essence of all imperialism are thus supported in Germany by arguments peculiar to Germans. But the arguments put forward are not the real determinants of the attitude. The attitude, in any country, whatever it may be called, rests at bottom on sheer national vanity. It is the belief in the inherent superiority of one's own civilization, and the desire to extend it, by force if need be, throughout the world. It matters little what arguments in its support this passion ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... nodded at him. "You think marriage a nuisance. So it is. So is everything. By Gad, sir, I wish I were well out of it. I go nowhere—not even to church. I have grown thin through the sheer nuisance of things. But if nothing happens over there and you don't make a mess of it, the next twenty years of your life ought not to be profoundly disagreeable. Now I dislike to be a nuisance myself, but in view of the war, it is necessary that there ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... of the piano and morosely fumbled his beard. Again a wave of anxious hatred, followed by forebodings, crowded her alert brain. She desperately clutched her husband's shoulder; he finished in a burst of sheer pounding and brutal roaring. Then she threw her arms about him in an ecstasy of pride—her ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... stop short at a stage of civilization which indolence or ignorance leads them to be content with; in order that they shall pass beyond it, it is necessary that a superior and far-seeing mind, the civilizer, should assist them, should draw them to himself, raise them a degree by sheer force, as in the 'Deluge' of Poussin, those on the upper terraces stretch their hands to those below, clutch and lift them up. But humanity, I shall be told, is at last emancipated; it has no longer any deluge to fear; it has attained its majority; it finds within itself ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... be the right one. He looked at politics judicially, and was so little of a party man that on several occasions he was accused (quite wrongfully, as I hope hereafter to prove) of gross inconsistency. The position of leadership, which he won so early and kept so long, he held by sheer force of giant intelligence, sleepless industry, and an integrity which no man ever doubted. But he was above all things a man of peace. When in after years, as president of the United States, he was called upon to manage a great ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... they were regarded with amazement, there not being more than sixty-four Frenchmen and ninety English: all the rest had been killed in sorties or had died of want. The cardinal at the same time entered this city, which he had subdued by sheer perseverance; Guiton came to meet him with six archers; he had not appeared during the negotiations, saying that his duty detained him in the town. "Away with you!" said the cardinal, "and at once dismiss your archers, taking care not to style yourself mayor any more on pain ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... early beams of the tomorrow's sun touched, but failed to warm, the lifeless remain of the great War-President and Liberator, as they were borne, in mournful silence, back to the White House, mute and ghastly witness of the sheer desperation of those who, although armed Rebellion, in the open field, by the fair and legitimate modes of Military warfare, had ceased, were determined still to keep up that cowardly "fire in the rear" which had been promised to the Rebel leaders by ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... crank, the conscientious objector would all be left in full strength and the fighting men would be disfranchised. A Parliament elected on such a register would, Mr. Asquith declared, be wholly lacking in moral authority. Therefore, by sheer necessity the Government was forced to introduce legislation dealing with the whole franchise question as it affected the male voter. A Coalition Government of the Liberal, Conservative and Labour Parties had been formed in 1915. This improved suffrage prospects, for many of the new men ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... out of me by sheer anguish. My limbs refused to support me, and a pang, cold and bitter as though naked steel had been thrust through my body, caused me to sink down upon the pavement in a kind of convulsion. The tall and sinewy monk, without a moment's hesitation, ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... ends, Sheer the precipice descends, Loud the torrent roars unseen; Thirty feet from side to side Yawns the chasm; on air must ride He who crosses ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... reason with him, but in vain. At length, by sheer compulsion, he dragged me with him towards the park, reminding me of my vow, and bidding me, as I loved him, be his ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... story to suit special occasions is done sometimes from extreme conscientiousness, sometimes from sheer ignorance of the ways of children. It is the desire to protect them from knowledge which they already possess and with which they, equally conscientious, are apt to "turn and rend" the narrator. I remember once when ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... music, too much drinking, too much eating," wrote Christophe. "Eating, drinking, hearing, without hunger, thirst, or need, from sheer habitual gormandizing. Living like Strasburg geese. These people are sick from a diseased appetite. It matters little what you give them: Tristram or the Trompeter von Saekkingen, Beethoven or Mascagni, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... and rider continued their way. Only at times the young man pulled at the reins sharply, as the animal stumbled from sheer weariness. With one hand he stroked encouragingly the foam-flecked arch of the horse's neck; the other, holding the reins, was clenched like a steel glove. Leaving the brow of a hill, the horseman expectantly ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... catalogue of his virtues," said Elizabeth drily. "I grant he is perfection and therefore unlovable. All that I asked you out of sheer idle curiosity was: How is your friendship ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... rock, as well as that of Elmiseram and others lying in sight, rose sheer up from the plain, filled them with surprise; for, although these natural rock fortresses are common enough in India, they are almost without an example in Europe. After visiting the fort they rambled through the town, and were amused at the scene ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... Her spirit was so cowed that she almost had the look of a stupid person; she became stupid in sheer ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... while and stared dejectedly down upon that wild orgy of the earth's upheaval which is the Badlands. She felt as though it was sheer madness even to think of finding anybody in there. It was worse than a mountain country, because in the mountains there is a certain semblance of some system in the canyons and high ridges and peaks. Here every thing—peaks, ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... mountain sheep rounded a corner with a little flock behind him. Terry dropped the leader with a snapshot and watched the flock scamper down what was almost the sheer face of a cliff—a beautiful bit of acrobatics. They found foothold on ridges a couple of inches deep, hardly visible to the eye from above. Plunging down a straight drop without a sign of a ledge for fifty feet below them, they ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... realization of what it would mean if Numa should suddenly enter the tunnel in front of him; but Numa did not appear and the ape-man emerged at length into the open and stood erect, finding himself in a rocky cleft whose precipitous walls rose almost sheer on every hand, the tunnel from the gorge passing through the cliff and forming a passageway from the outer world into a large pocket or gulch entirely enclosed by steep walls of rock. Except for the small passageway ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... "Don't introduce it to this part of the country. As you render it, through the nose, and with the wail at the end, it is a thing to make a strong man lie down and give up the ghost in sheer disgust. Ches, does it really make you feel good to ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... instrumental music with a wonderful poignancy and power of expression, elevating it to the point of being the medium of expressing some of the greatest thoughts we possess. In so doing, however, he shattered many of the great idols of formalism by the sheer violence of his expression. ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... this method of travelling has not been greatly employed in approaching the Pole. It may, however, be mentioned that Markham took boats with him also on his sledge expedition. Many expeditions have through sheer necessity accomplished long distances over the drift-ice in this way, in order to reach home after having abandoned or lost their ship. Especial mention may be made of the Austro-Hungarian Tegethoff expedition to Franz Josef Land, and ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... Oldest Inhabitant, who, as a man of the past, felt jealous that all notice should be withdrawn from himself to be lavished on the future, "sheer nonsense, to waste so much thought on what only ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and I, for one, am glad we picked the man we did, but I want you boys to approve of our appointment. What you say goes. Stand up!" commanded Tom Gray sternly, fixing his gaze on the red-headed jack, who, from sheer force of habit, ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... in her voice. Her pointed remarks had not been inspired by sheer felinity. It was her purpose to let Madeleine know that she was in danger of scandal or worse, and that the sooner she scrambled back to terra firma the better. Of course she could not refrain from an immediate round of calls upon impatient friends, but she salved her ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... His career in Niggertown formed a record of slight mistakes, but they were not to be undone, and their combined force had swung him a long way from the course he had plotted for himself. There was no way to explain. Hooker's Bend would judge him by the sheer surface of his works. What he had meant to do, his dreams and altruisms, they would never surmise. That was the irony ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... the women apart, pushed Mother Hewitt out, giving her so violent an impetus that she fell forward into the middle of the narrow street, where she lay unable to rise, not from any hurt, but from sheer intoxication. ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... shopkeeper should come out and hold you to the thing you were looking at. Remember also that you are the life-long owners of some things just because they were thrown at your head. Remember how you sauntered into a sale on one occasion, and, out of sheer idleness and pure fun, made a bid, and to your consternation the encumbrance was knocked down to your name; and it fills up your house to- day till you would give ten times its value to some one to take it away for ever out of your sight. Well, what was it that those who were so shamelessly ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... rose. He laughed a little laugh of sheer admiration. Admiration shone, too, in those eyes of his which so many women found irresistible. He took a step forward and laid one well-shaped hand on Emma McChesney's arm. She did not shrink, so he let his hand ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... delicate subject disturbed the civil rights deputy. The services had fortuitously avoided several (p. 565) potentially embarrassing incidents when officials were invited to attend segregated functions, and Fitt warned Paul that "if we don't erect a better safeguard than sheer chance, we're bound somewhere, sometime soon to look foolish and insensitive."[22-33] He wanted McNamara to issue a policy statement on the subject, admittedly a difficult task because it would be hard to write and would require White House clearance that might not be forthcoming. For the ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... that evening Castrillon's name fell with a warning note on Robert's ear. Disraeli, he knew, would not have mentioned him out of sheer idleness. There was some danger threatening in that quarter, and it was impossible to dissociate this from Brigit. The Marquis of Castrillon had been with her in Madrid, and also at Baron Zeuill's palace ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... from their slumbers, and when she opened her eyes she could not realize for a moment where she was. Instead of the plain white walls of her room, she saw the soft gray tints of silk and the sheen of silver, and her hands touched a silken-covered eiderdown quilt. She closed her eyes in sheer happiness, and then opened them again to be sure that it was not all a mirage. At last, not being used to lying in bed, she arose and, putting on the dressing-gown, went to one of the windows and raised the shade to ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... the letter, he turned it over and over curiously, and began to read it again, more out of sheer surprise than from any relish for its contents. It was written by one Madame Josephine Le Maitre, and came from a place which, although not very far from his own home, was almost as unknown to ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... bowsprit," cried the captain; "do not let the enemy sheer off. Now place me on the deck; I fear that I am mortally wounded, but do not let the people know it. In a few minutes the Frenchman's frigate will be ours. See, they are attempting to board, but drive them back and they will ...
— The Heir of Kilfinnan - A Tale of the Shore and Ocean • W.H.G. Kingston
... The chief men among the Ulama were required to sign it. Perhaps if they had been priests or divines they might have resisted to the last. But they were magistrates and judges; their posts and emoluments were in danger. In the end they signed it in sheer desperation. From that day the power of the Ulama was gone; they had abdicated their authority to the padishah; they became mere ciphers in Islam. A worse lot befell their leaders. The head of the Ulama and the obnoxious ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... side of the cliff down which George was slipping was not sheer all the way. It was steep; indeed, so steep that it was impossible for the frightened boy in spite of his desperate attempts to check his flight, to gain a foothold. In his descent some of the loose ground gave way and whenever he tried ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... many hours, and at last, in sheer exhaustion, dropt asleep. My little wife awaked me, ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... essential difference to be noted in the position of these spires, those of the cathedrals at the centre, the crowning point in the composition, those of the parish churches at the west end, springing sheer from the ground. While the former have a more intimate relation to the building the latter have an almost independent existence in keeping with the theory which regards them more as symbols of municipal pride and power than as expressions of ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... out the dark, Which grasping without question, he is led Where there is work that he must do for God. The trial still is the strength's complement, And the uncertain, dizzy path that scales 230 The sheer heights of supremest purposes Is steeper to the angel than the child. Chances have laws as fixed as planets have, And disappointment's dry and bitter root, Envy's harsh berries, and the choking pool ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... opening his eyes and starting up, gazed about him in sheer surprise; for an instant, in that state of bewilderment that comes with sudden awakening, he almost believed himself in a Western ranch bunkhouse, and that some happy cowboy outside roared a grotesque ballad. He gazed at the interior of a ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... The word Kapi is said to mean supreme, and Vrisha is said to mean righteousness. The illustrious God of gods, therefore, is called Vrishakapi. And since Maheswara by means of his two eyes closed (in meditation), created through sheer force of will a third eye on his forehead, he is for that reason called the Three-eyed. Whatever of unsoundness there is in the bodies of living creatures, and whatever of soundness there is in them, represent that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... perhaps—without dreaming for an instant that there was any sort of connection between Pauline and herself! Or else—what would almost be stranger still—not to have read the novel, not to have heard of it! To have inspired such a book, such a beautiful book—yet to remain in sheer unconscious ignorance that there was such a book! Oh, I think it is even more extraordinary from the woman's point of view than from the man's. There is something almost terrifying about it. To have had such an influence on the destiny of someone you've never ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... her memory so bright, that the picture never fades," said Christina gently, and Auntie Elspie kissed her for sheer gratitude. ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... valuable chiefly for the spirit-stirring example it has bequeathed to future generations of English soldiers, for its illustration of death-defying, disciplined courage; the great fight at Inkerman was only converted from a calamitous surprise into a victory by sheer obstinate valour, not by able strategy; and the operations that after Lord Raglan's death brought the unreasonably protracted siege of Sebastopol to a close did but evince afresh how grand were the soldierly qualities of both French and English, and ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... distinction between the sexes. These may have been plausible excuses. They have even been genuine, though minor, anxieties. But the whole thing, I take it, had always one simple, intelligible basis,—sheer contempt for the supposed intellectual inferiority of woman. She was not to be taught, because she was not worth teaching. The learned Acidalius aforesaid was in the majority. According to Aristotle and the Peripatetics, woman was animal occasionatum, as if a sort of ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... proposals, to the verge of despair; rage was added to the passionate agitation of her soul, and for this she had cause to rejoice—but for this mighty resentment during the time of struggle she might have, perhaps, succumbed from sheer weariness and the yearning desire ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the Scarecrow; who crawled to the edge of the nest and looked over. Below them was a sheer precipice several hundred feet in depth. Above them was a smooth cliff unbroken save by the point of rock where the wrecked body of the Gump still hung suspended from the end of one of the sofas. There really seemed to be no means of escape, and as they realized their helpless plight ...
— The Marvelous Land of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... girth. In this embrace were included hundreds of softly-rounded hills, with their intervening valleys, villages, hamlets, church spires and towers, plantations, groves, copses and hedge-row trees, grouped by sheer accident as picturesquely as Turner himself could have arranged them. The elevation of the ridge on which I sat softened down all these distant hills, so that they looked only like little undulating risings by which the valley ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... his arms and the others supported her on either side, and they climbed slowly and gently up to the path, not by the sheer way of their descent but by a diagonal track that joined the ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... the cave. I darted a glance around. My refuge was not the only hole in sheer rock; it was literally honeycombed. From one, then another of the cavern mouths a soldier emerged. Each strode across the uneven, rocky plain to where an officer stood with what was apparently a map in his hand. ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... cleaning, and as for the new drugget on the landing—three new spots of milk this morning, to say nothing of what has gone before! If I had known you were going to be ill I would have made the old one last another year, for it is sheer waste of money buying new things to have them ruined in six months. The last one was down thirteen years, and looked very little worse than ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a great grey horse in a van drawn up by the pavement, the head and neck stand out and conquer the rain and misty dinginess by sheer force of beauty, sheer strength of character. He turns his head—his neck forms a fine curve, his face is full of intelligence, in spite of the half dim light and the driving rain, of the thick atmosphere, and the black hollow of the covered van behind, his head and neck stand out, ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... down the long dining-room, backwards and forwards, from the grate where the fire blazed to the glass-panelled sideboard at the other end, where its reflection sparkled, yawning every now and then from sheer nervous irritation. "Cursed, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... Connecticut river, we entered the 'Old Granite State,' but too far south to see the 'native mountains' in their wildest grandeur and magnificence. One specimen, however, greets us as we leave the village—a huge, perpendicular mass of granite, rising sheer up from the railroad to the height of a thousand feet or more; while the river, a wild receptacle of tumbled rocks and broken falls, stretches along the other side of the track, far beneath us. The labor expended in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the race as programmed; this was the Pitkin annual clean-up as planned. Imagine, then, Pitkin's sheer, dumb amazement at the spectacle of Shea, going to the bat at the rise of the barrier in order to keep his mount within striking distance of the tail end of the procession! Imagine his wrath as the colt continued to lag in last place, losing ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... safety, all would be well. But would they reach him? Would not the silent forces of Mr. Brown already be assembling against them? Even that last picture of Tommy, revolver in hand, failed to comfort her. By now he might be overpowered, borne down by sheer force of numbers.... Tuppence mapped out her plan ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... Edward, who heard this great personage talked of for two whole days, made all possible haste to come to him, not from obedience to his mother, or out of any feeling of gratitude to the count, but from sheer curiosity, and that some chance remark might give him the opportunity for making one of the impertinent speeches which made his mother say,—"Oh, that naughty child! But I can't be severe with him, he is really ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... stronger and quicker to learn than human babies; for when he is only two days old he is able to cling to his mother, so that she can carry him with her on her hunting trips. If he becomes too noisy from sheer delight when she is travelling through the forest with him, she slaps him, in an attempt to quiet him, ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... Force, and the substitution of vague or inapplicable notions, involving only relations of space or emotions of wonder.' This is doubtless true; but the word 'neglect' implies mere intellectual misdirection, whereas in Aristotle, as in Goethe, it was not, I believe, misdirection, but sheer natural incapacity which lay at the root of his mistakes. As a physicist, Aristotle displayed what we should consider some of the worst of attributes in a modern physical investigator—indistinctness ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the colonists set about the work of building their houses, but found that their total number of one hundred and five was made up in the proportion of four carpenters to forty-eight "gentlemen." Not inadequately provisioned for their work, they came repeatedly almost to perishing through their sheer incapacity and unthrift, and their needless quarrels with one another and with the Indians. In five months one half of the company were dead. In January, 1608, eight months from the landing, when the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... interested, not merely for the sake of gossip. He shakes hands with you one day, and next day, for no earthly reason, he returns your hospitality by slapping you on the cheeks in the face of all decent society, if the fancy takes him, out of sheer wantonness. And what's more, the fair sex is everything for them, these butterflies and mettlesome-cocks! Grand gentlemen with little wings like the ancient cupids, lady-killing Petchorins! It's all very well for you, Stepan Trofimovitch, a confirmed bachelor, to talk like that, stick ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... silent water. And then, when one hand was loosed in the struggle, she twisted it through his long hair, and dragged back his head till his eyes were nearly starting from their sockets. Anastasia Bergen had hitherto been a sheer woman, all feminine in her nature. But now the foam came to her mouth, and fire sprang from her eyes, and the muscles of her body worked as though she had been trained to deeds of violence. Of violence, Aaron Trow had known much in his rough life, but never had he combated ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... Colonel Vereker, evidently trying to make out the time in arguing, and loth to leave the scene of action, though apparently ready to drop now from sheer pain and exhaustion combined, "Who ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... X, walking four and a quarter miles an hour, would be overtaking Y, whose powers were limited to three and a half, but who had started two and three quarter hours sooner; the whole argument being reduced to sheer pedantry by reason of no information being afforded to the student concerning the respective thirstiness ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... from dawn to dark as he should choose. Once unfamiliar with the timber country, he grew to love the twinkling gold of the aspens, the twilight vistas of the spruce and pines, and the mighty sweep of the great purple tides of forest that rolled down from the ranges into a sheer of space that had ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... stimulations to activity. Man's "innate tendency to fool" is notorious, a tendency particularly noticeable in children. Objects are responded to, not as means to ends, not with reference to their use, but simply for the sheer satisfaction of manipulation. Facial expressions, sounds, gestures, are made almost on any provocation; they are the expressions of an abundant "physiological uneasiness." The two-year-old is a mechanism that simply ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... we broke camp at an early hour, and moved bag, and baggage, to the place where "Alex Taylor" had shot the deer the preceding afternoon. Notwithstanding my sore feet and tired limbs, I took a load on my shoulders out of sheer shame, for without that I would have been the only one, old or young, biped or quadruped, without something, so I made a martyr of myself. Just after leaving the spot where "Alex" and I had cached the skins yesterday afternoon, "Sam" dropped his burden from his shoulders, grasped his rifle, and, ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... I stopped in sheer bewilderment, shot through and through with keenest agonies of remorseful recollection. For at the moment I had clean forgot the gulf impassable I had set between these two. So I would have lapsed into shamed silence, but ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... there be! What secret misgivings would now be detected and proclaimed! What sudden outpourings of epithets by no means complimentary! How the boldness of many a metaphor would be transformed into sheer impudence! How the profundities would clear up, leaving only darkness behind! They were so mysterious—and now, throw all the light of heaven upon them, and there is nothing there but a blunder or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... are these?" he mused—"fools or knaves? They must be one or the other,—else they would not thus chant praises to a Deity of whose existence there is, and can be, no proof. It is either sheer ignorance or hypocrisy,—or both combined. I can pardon ignorance, but not hypocrisy; for however dreary the results of Truth, yet Truth alone prevails; its killing bolt destroys the illusive beauty of the Universe, but what then? Is it not better so ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... space between them. The plan worked well as long as the material lasted, but no other wagons than my twenty-five coming on the ground, the work stopped when the bridge was only half constructed. Informed of the delay and its cause, in sheer desperation I finished the bridge by taking from my own division all the wagons needed to make ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... our case is dreadful beyond all description or belief when our obstinacy strikes out against God. We know as well as we know anything, that in doing this and in not doing that we are going every day right in the teeth both of God's law and God's grace; and yet in the sheer obstinacy and perversity of our heart we still go on in what we know quite well to be the suicide of our souls. We are told by our minister to do this and not to do that; to begin to do this at this new year and to break off from doing that; but, partly ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... front of the tomb, the procession of mourners ranged themselves about it in a semi-circle. They stood with their backs to the edge of a cliff that rose sheer for sixty feet or more from the plain beneath, across which, but at a little distance from the foot of the precipice ran the road followed by the caravans of merchants in their journeys to and from the ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... said to the effect that all this is sheer poetry, a beautiful chimera without any resemblance to reality. Indeed, it has just been remarked here, that the three centuries under consideration, the middle ages, were, in point of fact, one ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... he told himself; he had been a fortunate man. She was at once conventional and an individual: Fanny never, for example, wore the underclothes of colored crepe de chines, the elaborate trifles, Lee saw in the shop windows, nightgowns of sheer exposure and candy-like ribbons; hers were always of fine white cambric, scalloped, perhaps, or with chaste embroidery, but nothing more. Neither did she use perfumes of any sort, there was no array of ornamental bottles on her dressing-table, no sachet among her handkerchiefs, her cambric ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and that man is not bound to permit the substantial existence of this distinction, this negation. Yet it is possible for him to desire to maintain the difference and even to push it to the point of sheer opposition to God, who is the universal, self-contained and self-sufficing. In this case man is evil. But, alternatively, he may annul this distinction and place his true existence in God alone and in his aspiration towards Him; and in ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... no wise guidance,—he was driven in upon himself, and developed an intense self-will, which would endure no control. Unhappy will be the future of that man, however amiable, affectionate, and generous, who, whether from neglect in youth, like Byron, or from sheer wilfulness in manhood, determines to act as the mood takes him, because he has freedom of will, without regard to the social restraints imposed upon conscience by the unwritten law, which pursues him wherever he goes, even ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... freedom, or Red Gulch and—she is moving. (To JOVITA.) I am harsh, little one, and cold. Perhaps I have had much to make me so. But when (with feeling) I first met you; when, lifting my eyes to the church-porch, I saw your beautiful face; when, in sheer recklessness and bravado, I raised my hat to you; when you—you, Jovita—lifted your brave eyes to mine, and there, there in the sanctuary, returned my salute,—the salutation of the gambler, the outcast, the reprobate,—then, then I swore that you should be mine, if I tore you from the ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... remembers your sermon or the 'orrors an' medicines most, the Lord only knows! But it's in them papers I sees how fine leddies goes on nowadays, and if they misses so much as a two-and-sixpenny 'airpin, some of 'em out of sheer spite, will 'aul a gel up 'fore the p'lice and 'ave 'er in condemned cells in no time, so that ye see, Passon, if so be Miss Maryllia counts over the sparkling diamants and one's lost, we'll all be brought 'fore Sir Morton Pippitt as county mag'strate afore we've 'ad time ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... went on for many years. The boy, Pedro, had worked his way up, by sheer merit—no favoritism—until he was now first mate. Then it came his father's turn to pass on, as the first Pedro had passed. The 'Angel' had put in at Alligator Key, for a few weeks one summer, and while they ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... The wind was from the no'th, an' I went over every bit o' landscape in the country until at last I figgered out the' was only one place in Texas that filled the bill. A path swung around a crag an' the' was a shelf of stone ten feet below it an' eight feet wide, then it cut off sheer, fifty feet to the rocky bank of a creek. I reached out with my hand an' felt the edge of it, an' it give me an awful chill. I don't like ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... associated with the Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge Saint Helena: rugged, volcanic; small scattered plateaus and plains Ascension: surface covered by lava flows and cinder cones of 44 dormant volcanoes; ground rises to the east Tristan da Cunha: sheer cliffs line the coastline of the nearly circular island; the flanks of the central volcanic peak are deeply dissected; narrow coastal plain lies between The Peak and ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... things turned out, I think he really did me more good than harm! I'm confident that but for him I would have married Kenneth, and he certainly did teach me a lot about poetry, Billy, about art and music, and more than that, about the SPIRIT of art and music and poetry, the sheer beauty of the world. So I've let all the rest go, like the fever out of a burn, and I believe I could meet him now, and like him almost. Does that seem very strange to you? Have ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... came down to dinner, Kurt was again visibly impressed by her appearance. She wore another of her recently acquired gowns, a black one of sheer filmy material. Her hair, rippling back from her brows, was coiled low. Her face was pale and yet young and flowerlike. There was a new touch of wistfulness about her—a charm of repose, almost ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... the penalty of," said Bathsheba, firmly. "You know, Gabriel, this is what I cannot get off my conscience—that I once seriously injured him in sheer idleness. If I had never played a trick upon him, he would never have wanted to marry me. Oh if I could only pay some heavy damages in money to him for the harm I did, and so get the sin off my soul that way!... Well, there's ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... right thing at the proper time and in the best possible manner. I used to be rather proud of saying that it was necessary for strangers to know me for some time before they liked me. I am almost ashamed now not to have had sense enough to see that this arose from sheer awkwardness and stupidity on my part; from the absence of address, and a careless disregard of the rules of society, which necessarily induce a want of self-confidence, a bashful reserve, annoying to sensible people ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... mountain sides are honey-combed with tombs, villages and Buddhist lamaseries in the detached localities where population occurs. A pleasure walk through one of these Tibetan towns means a climb by steep flights of steps hewn out of the rock, varied by a saunter up ladders, where the sheer face of a cliff must be surmounted to reach the houses on a ledge above.[1297] Pictures of these recall forcibly the cliff-dwellings of the Pueblo Indians. Even the important market city of Leh covers the lower slope of the mountain at an altitude ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... to intrude upon her thus, out of nothing apparently but sheer moth-like incapacity to keep away! The church footpath indeed was public property, and Miss Harden's burdens had cried aloud to any passing male to help her. But why in this neighbourhood at all?—why not rather on the other side of ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not modesty so much as sheer ignorance which kept the young girl silent; she had never heard of a painter's model; but the tone in which her new acquaintance spoke implied a compliment, and she ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... from her reading, everybody spoke at once. "It's almost too good to be true," was Jack's quick exclamation. "What do you suppose the surprise will be?" Norman's eager question. While Mary, clasping her elbow with her hands, as if hugging herself in sheer ecstasy, cried, "Oh, I just love to be knocked flat and have my breath taken away with unexpected news like that! It makes you tingle all over and at the same time have a queer die-away feeling too, like when you ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... came my release from captivity. I was profoundly affected by the awful disaster, but it would be sheer hypocrisy if I said that I felt personal grief. I knew none of the dead, of whom I verily believe the valet was the worthiest man. My grandfather and uncles had ignored my existence. Not a helping hand had they stretched out ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... a hoarse yell and dashed once more upon the two knights, hurling themselves madly upon their sword-points; clutching, scrambling, biting, tearing, careless of wounds if they could but drag the two soldiers to earth. Sir Nigel was thrown down by the sheer weight of them, and Sir Bertrand with his thunderous war-cry was swinging round his heavy sword to clear a space for him to rise, when the whistle of two long English arrows, and the rush of the squire and the two English archers down the stairs, turned the tide of the combat. The assailants ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... be observed that in thus allowing the wife the possession of her own person, we are giving her only what her husband possesses, and that her possession of herself is of vastly more moment to her than his own liberty to him. Nothing more than sheer equality is being claimed for her, and the claim in her case has a double strength, since it is made valid not only by her own interests but by those of the future. The future must be protected, and therefore she who is its vessel must be protected. This is no more than the sub-human ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall-street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness. This building, too, which of week-days hums with industry and life, at nightfall echoes with sheer vacancy, and all through Sunday is forlorn. And here Bartleby makes his home; sole spectator, of a solitude which he has seen all populous—a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... to his prayer by naming its outward expression—bending the knees. But the external posture, if accompanied by nothing else, is sheer hypocrisy. When prayer is genuine, possessing the fire by which it is kindled, prompted by a sincere heart which recognizes its need and likewise the blessings that are ours as proclaimed in the Word, and when faith in God's Word—in ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... a chair-in a swoon from sheer exhaustion. When I awoke to consciousness, an overturned pale of water was being absorbed by my clothing, my nose was rejecting with violent aversion the pungency of a bottle of prime Durham mustard, to which Kitty had applied as the best substitute for salts which the kitchen afforded; and my ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... Pamela sighed. "He helped me in London on the night I sailed—in fact, he was very useful indeed—but why he invented that story about Nikasti, brought a dummy pocketbook into the room and helped us out of all our troubles, unless it was by sheer and brilliant ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... crowed very loudly, like a cock of spirit, and declared that old Mrs. Scratchard was envious, because she had lost all her own tail-feathers, and looked more like a worn- out old feather-duster than a respectable hen, and that therefore she was filled with sheer envy of anybody that was young and pretty. So young Mrs. Feathertop cackled gay defiance at her busy rubbishy neighbour, as she sunned herself under the bushes on ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... him mightily, making him hold fast to the window-casing for support, while he stood watching it. Just as far as he could see it his eye followed that hood, and when it disappeared from view, he turned from the window, deathly sick, and tottering back to his bedroom, vomited from sheer nervous excitement. ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... an unusual or particularly commanding figure. Yet the man's power of personality, the sheer dominant force of him, radiated like a tower code-beam. No one could be in his presence an instant without feeling it. A power that enwrapped you; made you feel like a child. Helpless. Anxious to placate a possible wrath that would be devastating; ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... hints For galvanizing these dreary prints Is this: That every parson, before He aspires to be parish editor, Should join the staff of a leading daily And learn to write genially and gaily. It may be a counsel of sheer perfection, And yet, perhaps, on further reflection, We may admit that something is gained By the plan of having clergymen trained In the very heart of the Street of Ink To paint their parish magazines pink. So ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... river through the magnificent maple woods I have mentioned elsewhere, and fine views of the fall may be had on that side, both from above and below. It is situated on the main river, where it plunges over a sheer precipice, about two hundred and forty feet high, in leaving the level meadows of the ancient lake basin. In a general way it resembles the well-known Nevada Fall in Yosemite, having the same twisted appearance at the ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... keen as death; The same fixed longing on the changeless face. Over the edge he vanished—came no more: There, as in childhood's dreams, upon that line, Without a parapet to shield the sense, Voidness went sheer down to oblivion: Over that edge ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... to dine in town that night, and, for sheer protection, she made Maudie Sinclair come and share her evening meal. The children were put to bed, and they sat down alone together, talking over the party. Maudie was pleased to relax a little of her severity toward Harry Sterling; she admitted ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... died in his throat; Salzar was on him, clawing, biting, kicking, striving to strangle him, to wrestle him off his feet. Smith reeled, staggering under the sheer rush of the man, almost blinded by blows, clutched, bewildered in ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... moment of all, which is the moment before she is actually overtaken by the breaking crest of the wave, she is apt to refuse to answer her helm, and he who is steering her loses all control over her; she seems to be seized with a perverse determination to take a broad sheer one way or the other, with disastrous results, despite a hard-over helm, and then the only thing to be done to retrieve the situation is to effect a lightning shift of helm against all your past experience and your better judgment. But notwithstanding this, it generally ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... sky," I at last exclaimed, through sheer panic at the imminence of crying aloud my ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... Rejane skins emotions alive, and Duse serves them up to you on golden dishes, it is Sarah Bernhardt who prepares the supreme feast. In "La Dame aux Camelias," still, she shows herself, as an actress, the greatest actress in the world. It is all sheer acting; there is no suggestion, as with Duse, there is no canaille attractiveness, as with Rejane; the thing is plastic, a modelling of emotion before you, with every vein visible; she leaves nothing to the imagination, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... words on any given subject, but wholly non-communicative as regards himself. He perhaps was possessed of more intuition than his manner would reveal, although he gave every appearance of arriving at his conclusions by the sheer force of logic. His words and deeds never betrayed his whole mind, of that she was certain, yet he could assert himself rather forcibly when put to the test, as in the painful incident at the Coffee House. He would never suffer from soul-paralysis, thought she, for ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... I will, if possible, make my meaning plain by yet another example. Let us suppose some Walter Scott had compiled some purely fictitious history, professedly laid in the Middle Ages (and surely even miraculous occurrences cannot be more unreal than these products of sheer imagination); and suppose some critic had engaged to prove it fiction from internal evidence supplied by contradictions and discrepancies, and so on, would you not think it strange if he were to enforce that argument by saying, 'And besides ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... below. Descending to them, we continued climbing, and in a short time reached the crest. I sprang upon the summit, and another step would have precipitated me into an immense snow field, five hundred feet below. To the edge of this field was a sheer icy precipice; and then, with a gradual fall, the field sloped off for about a mile, until it struck the foot of another lower ridge. I stood on a narrow crest, about three feet in width, with an inclination of about 20 deg. N., 51 deg. ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... with France, and he refused to be drawn, by Pope Julius II, into an attitude of opposition to that country. Even before the death of Henry VII, in 1509, there were troubles with regard to the borders, and it was evident that the "perpetual peace" arranged by the treaty of marriage was a sheer impossibility. ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... in Agamemnon or Othello. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, the despair that succeed the crime. But when all is said, the central figure of the book is born out of fantasy. He is a grotesque made alive by sheer imaginative intensity and passion. He is as distantly related to the humanity we know in life and the humanity we know in literature as the sober peasant who cut his friend's throat, saying, "God forgive me, for ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... biggest and the handsomest man in the village; nearly six feet tall, straight as a fir tree, and black as a bull-moose in December. He had natural force enough and to spare. Whatever he did was done by sheer power of back and arm. He could send a canoe up against the heaviest water, provided he did not get mad and break his paddle—which he often did. He had more muscle than he ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... "turns," which owed their success to a maximum of daring—or bluff—coupled with a minimum of scientific knowledge: illusionists basing their effects upon the reflections of invisible mirrors and the cunning use of combined lights; "looping the loop," "circles of death," in which sheer weight did the cyclist's work for him, his arrival at a given point depending upon his accelerated and calculated speed. From seeing so many of this sort scouring the world—erstwhile acrobats, former laboratory-students, who now, venturing all and risking all, ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... was all over Philadelphia that I had cleared out John Guy's the night before, sans merci. True, I am not seven feet high, but some men (like stories) expand enormously when inflated or mad; so my denial was attributed to sheer modesty. But I recognised in the Charles Leland a mysterious cousin of mine, who was really seven feet high, who had disappeared for many years, and of whom I have never ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... some distance from this shape; and, as it became darker, there was something appalling even to the incredulous, in the lonely spectre, whose gambols, if they hardly accorded with spiritual dignity, were beyond human powers. Now it leapt right up in the air, now sheer over a high hedge, and was again the moment after in the road before us. By the time I came up, the fright experienced by the spectators of this ghostly exhibition, began to manifest itself in the flight of some, and the close huddling together ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... shore, so although the CAROLINE did make the splice late that night, we could neither test nor speak. Reuter was at Norderney, and I had to do the best I could, which was not much, and went to bed early; I thought I should never sleep again, but in sheer desperation got up in the middle of the night and gulped a lot of raw whiskey and slept at last. But not long. A Mr. F- washed my face and hands and dressed me: and we hauled the cable out of the sea, and got it joined to the telegraph ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the futility of the operations. Albany on the other hand had been back in Scotland for some months; and in opposition to Angus—in conjunction therefore with Margaret —threatened an invasion as soon as the French expedition started. The ingenious Lord Dacre however by sheer bluff—there is no other word— succeeded in procuring an armistice when the English border was all but defenceless. After this exhibition, Albany found it as well to retire to France; while Wolsey used the occurrence to urge upon Charles that Scotland required too much attention to allow ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... not for sheer hurry of business been able to spare five minutes to finish my letter. Besides my farm business, I ride on my Excise matters at least two hundred miles every week. I have not by any means given up the Muses. You will see in the third volume of Johnson's ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... hideas about Justice, as HUXLEY declares, is all rot. Fancy tigers dividing a carcase, and portioning each his fair lot! "Aren't men better than tigers?" cries BUGGINS. Well, yus, there's religion and law; Pooty fakes! But when sharing's the word they ain't in it with sheer ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... the sloping bank, where the land fell sheer away to a dry, pebbly reach, M. Radisson pulled a ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... share their observations and specialized knowledge is very helpful as we try to produce the best possible publications. Please feel free to continue to write and e-mail us. At least two Factbook staffers review every item. The sheer volume of correspondence precludes detailed personal replies, but we sincerely appreciate your time and interest in the Factbook. If you include your e-mail address we will at least acknowledge your note. Thank ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... broke off. And I, looking at him, saw his eyes screw themselves up with sheer wonder at something he saw. Without another word he folded up the paper, put it in his pocket, and turning to Mrs. Hanson, ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... and dashed once more upon the two knights, hurling themselves madly upon their sword-points; clutching, scrambling, biting, tearing, careless of wounds if they could but drag the two soldiers to earth. Sir Nigel was thrown down by the sheer weight of them, and Sir Bertrand with his thunderous war-cry was swinging round his heavy sword to clear a space for him to rise, when the whistle of two long English arrows, and the rush of the squire and the two ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... might still often seem what their predecessors had been, and might thus retain a powerful influence over the unthinking crowd, and to sheer worldlings appear as heretofore to represent a troublesome memento of unexciting religious obligations; "Preach ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... elders, deep in some Old World history of the Doctor's, would be disturbed by a ringing peal of laughter from the other party, and then the Doctor would laugh, and we would all join; not that we had heard the joke, but from sheer sympathy with the hilarity of the young folks. Desborough was making himself agreeable, and who could do it better? He was telling the most outrageous of Irish stories, and making, on purpose, the most outrageous of Irish bulls. After a shout ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... he continued after a while. "To dare to cross-examine me about the Sunday-schools in the diocese, and Sunday travelling too: I never in my life met his equal for sheer impudence. Why, he must have thought we were two ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... after Steve had fallen down three or four times the instructor scented the truth of the matter and then Steve's life became a burden to him. Mr. Simkins took delight, it seemed, in calling on him at the most unexpected moments until, one day, in sheer desperation, Steve gave utterance to the answer "not prepared." That was to Uncle Sim what a red rag is to a bull! There was a scathing dressing-down then and there, followed by a visit that evening from Mr. Daley. Steve was secretly uneasy, for more ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... believe that these classes, comprising the wholesale and retail merchants, the importers and the small factory men, had an extraordinarily high and sensitive standard of honesty. But this assumption was sheer pretense, at complete variance with the facts. It was a grim sham constantly shattered by investigation. Ever, while vaunting its own probity and scoring those who defrauded it, the whole mercantile element was itself defrauding at ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... the danger. There is no beach along that coast. The rocks rise abruptly from the sea—here, sheer and towering; there, low and broken. When there is a sea running, the swells roll in and break against these rocks; and when the breakers catch a punt, they are certain to smash ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... to have Martha!" said both the Bertrams; while Olive, always gay, spirited, and full of fun, laughed from sheer delight. ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... opposed; and horribly did the latter's heart fail him. But he had no remedy. Fight he must. Rinaldo, desirous to make short work of him, took his station with fierce delight; and at the third sound of the trumpets, the Duke was forced to couch his spear and meet him at full charge. Sheer went the Paladin's ashen staff through the false bosom, sending the villain to the earth eight feet beyond the saddle. The conqueror dismounted instantly, and unlacing the man's helmet, enabled ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... talked well enough, and yet, in point of fact, all this was sheer bravado on his part. He knew better than any one else, on what a frail and uncertain basis his brilliant existence was established. Certainly, society does show great indulgence to people of doubtful reputation. It shuts its eyes and refuses to look or listen. But this is all the more ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... Manila (which was the only one that our Society then had in the Filipinas), of the five priests who had gone thither only three remained. For, as we have said, Father Hernan Suarez urged himself on to work until he died of sheer exhaustion—but certainly with most abundant harvest, and having brought great consolation to that commonwealth, where his loss was deeply felt, and his memory was held for many years in great tenderness and affection by all. Father Alonso Sanchez, although inclined by nature to retirement and solitude, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... should think I have grounds to be interested, not merely for the sake of gossip. He shakes hands with you one day, and next day, for no earthly reason, he returns your hospitality by slapping you on the cheeks in the face of all decent society, if the fancy takes him, out of sheer wantonness. And what's more, the fair sex is everything for them, these butterflies and mettlesome-cocks! Grand gentlemen with little wings like the ancient cupids, lady-killing Petchorins! It's all very well for you, Stepan Trofimovitch, a confirmed ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... York Eclipse was at the top of the immense building on Broadway. It was a sheer mountain to the heights of which the interminable thunder of the streets arose faintly. The Hudson was a broad path of silver in the distance. Its edge was marked by the tracery of sailing ships' rigging and by the huge and ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... and he put on a savage frown, as he was ushered into the room, by way of counteracting the sweet innocence. A glass opposite suddenly revealed to its owner the smooth rosy-brown visage, screwed up in a compound expression. That expression changed so swiftly to sheer surprise, that a burst of involuntary laughter was the result. A deep flush, and silence, followed, as the urchin looked with some confusion round the room to see if he had been observed or overheard, and a sense of relief came as he found that he was alone. No one had seen or ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the famous Groome Street Gang, the most noted of all New York's collections of Apaches. More, he was the founder and originator of it. And, curiously enough, it had come into being from motives of sheer benevolence. In Groome Street in those days there had been a dance-hall, named the Shamrock and presided over by one Maginnis, an Irishman and a friend of Bat's. At the Shamrock nightly dances were given and well attended by the youth of the neighbourhood at ten cents a head. All ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... into one of these houses in my walk through the town to-day. The lower story had been filled with water, and everything in it had been torn out. The carpet had been split into strips on the floor by the sheer force of the rushing tide. Heaps of mud stood in the corners. There was not a vestige of furniture. The walls dripped with moisture. The ceiling was gone, the windows were out, and the cold rain blew in and the only thing that was left intact was one of those worked worsted ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... exaggerated. From the mouth of Loch Laxford to Cape Wrath the whole coast might have represented to Dante the scowling ramparts of hell. Of anything in the nature of a beach no trace was discernible. The huge cliffs, rising sheer from the sea, leaned not inward, but outward, and ceaseless waves were breaking in spouts of foam against them. The yacht began to roll and pitch, so that though none of us were sick except Mrs. Noble's maid, we could very few of us stand. We managed, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... well, it sends us scuttling right across the river in spite of our ferocious swoops at the water, upsetting us among a lot of rocks with the water boiling over them; this lot of rocks being however of the table-top kind, and not those precious, close-set pinnacles rising up sheer out of profound depths, between which you are so likely to get your canoe wedged in and split. We, up to our knees in water that nearly tears our legs off, push and shove the canoe free, and re-embarking return ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... my work that I danced from sheer delight as I carried it back to the inn. I had wished that the whole world could have seen it at one and the same moment. I can remember that I showed it to a cow, which was browsing by the wayside, exclaiming at the same time: "Look at that, my old beauty, you ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... the emphasis of sheer exasperation. "I have told you before that I do not intend to ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... obstacles AFTER forming! Think only of one fact: Daun, on sight of their intention, has opened 400 pieces of Artillery on them, and these go raging and thundering into the hem of the Wood, and to whatever issues from it, now and for hours to come, at a rate of deafening uproar and of sheer deadliness, which no observer can find ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Rank; this is sheer madness. Stop, I tell you. (RANK stops playing, and, NORA suddenly stands still. HELMER goes up to her.) I could never have believed it. You have forgotten everything ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... but he made no move. With the sheer perversity of a child or a savage, he insisted there was no wind, even while the ripples were washing ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... of the Bible, and there they made and published a new version of the Bible in English, by all means the best that had been made. In later years, under Elizabeth, it drove the Great Bible off the field by sheer power of excellence. During her reign sixty editions of it appeared. This was the version called the Genevan Bible. It made several changes that are familiar to us. For one thing, in the Genevan edition of 1560 first appeared our familiar division into verses. The chapter division was made three ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... King Philip. "Do you suppose that any rambling Don is going to take up my time when by a sheer accident his verbosity has started me on a true scent? Out, Aristotle, out! Or, stay, take this note with you to the Captain of the Guard"—and King Philip hastily scribbled upon a parchment an order for the immediate execution of the whole of the ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... I thus attempt of my Oriental dreams, which filled me always with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, that horror seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and left me, not so much in terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... were unsuited to the military strategy at that period; the time required to collect or build the great number of lighters, horse boats, etc., for the strong force required was not available, and it was a sheer impossibility to provide in a short period all the small craft needed for an operation of magnitude, whilst the provision of the necessary anti-submarine defences would have taxed our resources to the utmost and have prevented essential work of this ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe
... gulch; then pass to the left on a bench along the wall; then up again over broken rocks; then we reach more benches, along which we walk, until we find more broken rocks and crevices, by which we climb; still up, until we have ascended 600 or 800 feet, when we are met by a sheer precipice. Looking about, we find a place where it seems possible to climb. I go ahead; Bradley hands the barometer to me, and follows. So we proceed, stage by stage, until we are nearly to the summit. Here, by making a spring, ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... Grecian deities half so moral and pure, in sentiment and conduct, as Socrates; nor were Jupiter and his subordinate celestials better than the average kings and courts of Greece. Out of the hay, wood, and stubble of sheer fancy the human mind was left to raise these fantastic structures. They exercised and entertained the imagination, but brought no light nor strength to the soul; no superior nor additional motives to shape the conduct of life. ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... the man in black, 'a dangerous personage; that poem of his cuts both ways; and then there was Pulci, that Morgante of his cuts both ways, or rather one way, and that sheer against us; and then there was Aretino, who dealt so hard with the poveri frati; all writers, at least Italian ones, are not lickspittles. And then in Spain,—'tis true, Lope de Vega and Calderon were most inordinate lickspittles; the Principe Constante of the last is a curiosity in its way; ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... flung himself into the little group of tormentors, hitting out vigorously right and left. Sheer surprise and the fury of his onslaught gave him the advantage; and the guilty consciences of the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... personality upon her. He had made her recognize him as a force that counted. Though Major Ralston had been engaged upon the same task, she realized that it was his effort alone that had brought Tommy back. And—she saw it clearly—it was sheer love and nought else that had obtained the mastery. This man whom she had always regarded as a being apart, grimly self-contained, too ambitious to be capable of more than a passing fancy, had shown her something in his soul which she knew to be Divine. He was not, it seemed, ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... sentiment—slightly paraphrased from Terence—which he had characteristically adopted as his family motto, Forti nihil difficile; neither could there be any question as to the genuine nature either of his strength or his courage, albeit hostile critics might seek to confound the latter quality with sheer impudence.[70] He abhorred the commonplace, and it is notably this abhorrence which gives a vivid, albeit somewhat meretricious sparkle to his personality. For although truth is generally dull, and although ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... that moment, perhaps for the first time, what it all meant. She realised the significance of those apparently purposeless afternoon calls, when through sheer boredom she had had to send for Helen to help her out; the significance of those long silences, the melancholy eyes which seemed to follow her movements. She felt an unaccountable desire to laugh, and then, at the first twitchings of her lips, she restrained herself. She knew that tragedy was stalking ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lift her again to the seat beside him. "We won't get hurt if you only keep quiet. The driver is doing his best to get control of the horses. They can't keep up this mad pace much longer, and will be obliged to stop from sheer exhaustion." ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... as the first step to the conquest of the world. The world was not as excited as Alison thought fit. Her father, old Tom Lambourne, had commanded reverence in the City and some respect even as far west as St. James's by sheer weight of wealth. A rare capacity for living hard had won him an army of diverse friends. But neither his business nor his pleasures provided him with many who could be bequeathed to his daughter. Her mother, born a baker's daughter in Shoe Lane, having ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... who was dull and heavy and stupid, she began to feel positively desperate; and the result of it all was that when Jan van der Welde came, as he was accustomed to do nearly every evening, to see Koosje, Miss Truide, from sheer longing for excitement and change, began to make eyes at him, with what effect I will ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... this, flushed from a contest with staining re-agents, sat down on the little stool before the microscope, turned the mirror to get the best light, and then, out of sheer habit, shifted the slips. At once he remembered the prohibition, and, with an almost continuous motion of his hands, moved it back, and sat paralysed with astonishment ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... formed, graceful, fair, with fine eyes and fine dark chestnut hair; her absolutely regular features had the proud Tennysonian cast. But the coldness of Tennysonian damsels was not hers. Whether she had Latin blood in her veins, or whether Nature had peculiarly gifted her out of sheer caprice, she possessed in a high degree that indescribable demeanour, at once a defiance and a surrender, a question and an answer, a confession and a denial, which is the universal weapon of women of Latin race in ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... clear up. It's mighty lucky for you, Briggs, that we succeeded in detaching you from that chap who brought you here. If you had remained in his company you would certainly have come to grief. With murderous intent he ran down two women right here in the bay last night. We saved their lives by sheer good luck. You were not with him, I suppose, and I'll charitably assume you don't know ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... man's cheek did not burn any longer as he recalled that incident. He felt nothing now, no anger, no bitterness. To such as he it is so easy to forgive. Forgiveness had ever flowed from him in sheer weakness. It had been the habit of his life to love and admire his brother—he loved and admired him still. He did not think that he himself would have been quite so hard on a poor devil in his place; but his brother was a strong man and ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... 'it is sheer folly to waste more time hunting for this bird. My father is old, and if he dies ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... up sprang, for his messenger, swift-footed Iris; And between Samos anon and the rocks of precipitous Imber Smote on the black sea-wave, and about her the channel resounded: Then, as the horn-fixt lead drops sheer from the hand of the islesman, Fatal to ravenous fish, plung'd she to the depth of the ocean: Where in a cavern'd recess, the abode of the sisterly Sea-nymphs, Thetis the goddess appear'd, in the midst of them sitting dejected; For ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... her hand suddenly from mine and moved toward the edge of the cliff, crying out that we must continue our search. I climbed the orchard wall and looked along the shore. Here the cliff dropped away almost sheer, and the narrow strip of shingle at its base was lost in the surf. Farther to the north it widened a little with the curve of the shore, and through a swaying curtain of rain I could follow it to a point we called the Notch, near the entrance ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... near relations were a source of considerable expense, and that his own heedlessness had by this time further served to embarrass him. Therefore, his conduct towards Miss Eden, which at first sight seems heartless, was probably dictated by sheer financial need. We may also reject the spiteful statement in which Lady Hester Stanhope represented Pitt as saying: "Oh, there was her mother [Lady Auckland],—such a chatterer! and then the family intrigues! I can't keep them out of my house; ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... pausing upon the threshold to speak a last cheery word to those within. Poor Jovannic, it was at this moment that, to the fantastic and absurd character of the whole event, as arranged by Captain Hahn, there was now added a quality of sheer horror. The man upon the threshold was not like a man; vastly pot-bellied, so that the dingy white of his shirt was only narrowly framed by the black of his jacket, swollen in body to the comic point, collarless, with a staircase of unshaven chins ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... were those who thought—poor fools—that you had no grasp of etiquette. How gratified we were, we professionals, who could appreciate your virtuosity—when you placed matters on a comfortable basis by spurning the cats'-meat. It was sheer pleasure then, waiting, to see what form ...
— The Yillian Way • John Keith Laumer
... when Hortensius hit on the idea of a law as to the sacrilege being proposed by the tribune Fufius, in which there was no difference from the bill of the consul except as to the kind of jurymen—on that point, however, the whole question turned—and got it carried by sheer fighting, because he had persuaded himself and others that he could not get an acquittal no matter who were the jurymen, I drew in my sails, seeing the neediness of the jurors, and gave no evidence beyond what was so notorious ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... we do not ruin our own lives. For some people a love match may turn out unhappily, but not for you, with your calmness of temperament; with your serenity of soul. I do beseech you not to marry without love, merely from a feeling of duty, self-denial, or the like. All that is sheer infidelity, and moreover a matter of calculation—and worse still. Trust my words. I have a right to say this; a right for which I have paid dearly. And ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... to have reached its culmination in Sargent, yet there are two other painters, who, if they fall below him in sheer genius, possess a charm and originality all their own. One of these is George de Forest Brush, who, somewhat after the fashion of Holbein, looks for a beauty of spirit independent of form or feature. He paints mothers ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... consented to this adventure from sheer lack of purpose. But whither was it leading her? She was a married woman, with her shackles heavy upon her. Yet she walked that night with a stranger, as one who owned her freedom. The silence between them ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... between the shafts of their toil, so that the city was in danger of becoming disorganized. The visitation developed into the big story of successive days. It was the sort of generalized, picturesque "fluff-stuff" matter which Banneker could handle better than his compeers by sheer imaginative grasp and deftness of presentation. Being now a writer on space, paid at the rate of eight dollars a column of from thirteen to nineteen hundred words, he found the assignment profitable and the test of skill quite to his taste. Soft job though it was in a way, however, the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... become unnatural, as it were, disliked the earth upon which he found himself, and changed the face of it somewhat to his liking. His trend has been, and still is, to perform more and more acts with a rational sanction. He has developed a moral nature, made laws, and by the sheer force of his will and reason curbed ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... thought it indicated the presence of warriors, but Indians did not cut down trees and doubtless it was due to some other cause, perhaps an old, decayed trunk that had been weighted down by snow, falling through sheer weariness. In any event he was going to see, and, emerging from his shelter, ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in the south-west wind, which, as he was steering south-east, was partly in his favour. One of the disabilities which he, in common with all airmen, suffered, was the impossibility of ascertaining the velocity of the wind when he was fairly afloat. He had to make allowance for it by sheer guesswork, unless he was prepared to slow down or even to alight. He had reckoned that, even with the slight assistance of the wind, he could hardly hope to reach the head of the Persian Gulf before six o'clock, which would be past nine by the sun; but ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... will think me a bore for sticking to the point like this, but the fact is, the one thing I pride myself on is my memory for faces. It's a hobby of mine. If I think I remember a face, and can't place it, I worry myself into insomnia. It's partly sheer vanity, and partly because in my job a good memory for faces is a mighty fine asset. It has ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... into a shapeless mass by the other's cunning blows, while Glenister's every bone was wrenched and twisted under his enemy's terrible onslaughts. The miner's chief effort, it is true, was to keep his feet and to break the man's embraces. Never had he encountered one whom he could not beat by sheer strength till he met this great, snarling creature who worried him hither and yon as though he were a child. Time and again Roy beat upon the man's face with the blows of a sledge. No rules governed this solitary combat; the ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... expected. In a few minutes Dick gained a strip of open ground beyond, and found himself on the bank of a broad river, whose evidently deep waters rushed impetuously along their unobstructed channel. The bank at the spot where he reached it was a sheer precipice of between thirty and forty feet high. Glancing up and down the river he retreated a few paces, turned round and shook his clenched fist at the savages, accompanying the action with a shout of defiance, and then running to the edge of the bank, sprang far ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... scent that proceeds from happy souls released, and which they shake down from the trees when they are suckling round and uppards? IS this poatry, Barnet? Lay your hand on your busm, and speak out boldly: Is it poatry, or sheer windy humbugg, that sounds a little melojous, and won't bear the commanest test ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... gang-plank was drawn aboard, and the band struck up the usual lively air. At the first notes the old woman executed a few feeble little jig steps in sheer exuberance. Then the solemnity of the situation sobered her. Her great, wealthy, powerful, kind friends were departing on their long voyage over mysterious seas. Again and again, very earnestly, she repeated the graceful, ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... vie with each other for the love of a beautiful girl, and she subjects them to a test that is full of mystery, magic and sheer amusement. ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... succeeded to confusion in the arrangement of its component parts. The philosopher adds that the deluge was produced by an uncourteous salute from the watery tail of another comet; doubtless through sheer envy of its improved condition; thus furnishing a melancholy proof that jealousy may prevail even among the heavenly bodies, and discord interrupt that celestial harmony of the spheres so melodiously sung by ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... we been ridin' in an' out every little eel grass cove along the shore just for the sheer deviltry of seein' if we could get snagged?" piped Captain Benjamin. "There'll be no more rockin' in the channel for us. My ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... no premonitory cracking or yielding. The ice broke on the instant; and so rapidly was he moving that a hole twelve or fifteen feet long was torn by the sheer force with which he went against it. As he fell through, he went under once, but luckily came up in the hole he had made, and got his hands and arms on the edges of the ice, which, however, kept bending down and breaking off. The breaking and his fall were so sudden that he had not even time ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... By sheer force of will Richard recovered his footing, disengaging himself from her support, shuffling aside ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... of the guiding are the little picture and the exact words: all of it of the easiest to describe; but of the other and the greater guiding I do not know how to tell. It is sheer pure knowledge, received not in parts, pictures, or words, but as a whole and in a mode so exquisitely mysterious as to be at once too intricate for ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... to put fires out and remain here till the conditions change altogether for the better. It is sheer waste of coal to make further attempts to break through as ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... strangeness of the avowal I have just made to you will remain in your memory, and then it is not impossible that after this long rejection you may end by desiring me. If that should happen,—if at the end of many sad deceptions you should return, in sheer remorse, to the religion of art,—then, then, supposing that long years have not made love ridiculous between us, remember this evening. Now, let us part; it is already ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... Through sheer thoughtlessness, I did a very foolish thing. I turned back as I was told, and left the brothers together at the gate ...
— The Dead Alive • Wilkie Collins
... dark with the boughs of giant trees. Forcing their way through tangled supple-jacks and clinging "lawyer" creepers which sought to stay their progress, the wayfarers climbed till, as day dawned, they paused to rest their wearied limbs before a sheer cliff ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... that is not well-nigh soaked in vinegar. And each time that Frederick comes in with some fresh tale, she is like to swoon with fear, and every time she vows that it is the pestilence attacking her, and is like to die from sheer fright. What is a man to do with such a wife ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... amazing architectural proportions erupt into the pride of Eastridge. I saw Cyrus himself, with all his scroll-saw tastes and mansard-roof opinions, by virtue of sheer honesty and thorough-going human decency, develop into the unassuming "first citizen" of the town, trusted even by those who laughed at him, and honored most by his opponents. I saw his aggravating ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... the air in a truly surprising manner. The number of shells—some of which were German make—the enemy wasted on that wood proclaimed an abundant supply of ammunition. To this persistent shelling we had nothing to reply, and at last from sheer exhaustion the enemy fire died down. With darkness he began again, and the feeble reply of three small mountain guns, which we knew were with the Runovka Cossack outpost, indicated that an attack was developing in ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... had probably been reading some miserable cant about Southern humanity, for there are people everywhere who take the wrong side of every subject, from sheer obstinacy. What can disprove the laws of human nature? They require that things should be at the South as our theories lay ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... Hapsburg totters; see, How raveled the thread of its destiny, Sheer hung between cloud ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... prosecuting one another right and left. The Squire, bless his honest, lazy, Leigh Huntish face, comes out strong on these occasions. He has pronounced decisions which, for legal acumen, brilliancy, and acuteness, would make Daniel Webster, could he hear them, tear his hair to that extent—from sheer envy—that he would be compelled to have a wig ever after. But, jesting apart, the Squire's course has been so fair, candid, and sensible, that he has won golden opinions from all; and were it not for his insufferable laziness and good nature, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... Twice Curly went down from chance blows, but each time he rolled away and got to his feet before his heavy foe could close with him. Blackwell had no science. His arms went like flails. Though by sheer strength he kept Flandrau backing, the latter hit cleaner and ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... The dogmatic objection, the sheer instinctive taboo which rules the subject out altogether as indecent, has no age limit. It means that at no matter what age a woman consents to a proposal of marriage, she should do so in ignorance of the relation she ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... said the Captain, when she ceased; and deep attention the Captain had paid to her while she spoke; listening, with his glazed hat all awry and his mouth wide open. 'Awast, awast, my eyes! Wal'r, dear lad, sheer off for to-night, and leave the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... in: "The Austrians in movement again; actually rolling off Dresden-ward again." "Haha, do they smell me already!" laughed he: "Well, I will send Daun to the Devil,"—not adding, "if I can." And instantly ordered sharp pursuit,—and sheer stabbing with the ox-goad, not soft and delicate pricking, as Henri's lately. [Retzow, ii. 168; Tempelhof, iii. 306.] Friedrich, in fact; was in a fiery condition against Daun: "You trampled on me, you heavy ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... all the peculiarities of his position, he set about the duty of securing his ship, in good earnest. The two light boats were brought under the bows, and the stream anchor was lowered, and fastened to a spar that lay across both. This anchor was carried to the bank astern, and, by dint of sheer strength, was laid over its summit with a fluke buried to the shank in the hard sand. By means of a hawser, and a purchase applied to its end, the men on the banks next roused the chain out, and shackled it to the ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... have so much of this work before them. And now this possibility of fruitful co-operation is, for the time being, and it may be for many years, suspended. I say nothing of the loss of markets in the older countries which will be occasioned by sheer loss of population and the lower standard of living. That is one of the more obvious but not perhaps the most important of the ways in which the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... grass-cutting, the grave, measured soliloquy of a blackbird hidden in the flame-flowered chestnut. Hazel felt that she would like to go on picking currants for ever, growing more and more like Mrs. Marston every day, and at least becoming (possibly through sheer benignity) a grandmother. There seemed no place in her life for Reddin, no time for Hunter's Spinney. She thought, 'I wunna go. I'll stay along of Ed'ard, and no harm'll come to me.' But a peremptory voice said that she ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... scarcely be credited. We know of one case where a cab-driver, who was ordered to go at an early hour in the morning to a house in the suburbs to convey a lady and gentleman from an evening party, positively refused to go, through sheer terror of encountering "Jack," as the ghost was named, preferring rather to risk losing his situation. It is said that the girls employed in factories in the vicinity of the Canal would not venture to their work till it was fairly daylight, and even then ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... burial. Some days ago I taxed the band-master, Bond, with the possibility of playing in the dark; for a moment his face was as long as Taylor's bassoon, but since then by means of surreptitious practice and, I fancy, the sheer confiscation of his bandsmen's folios, the impossible has been achieved. Every band is the best in France, but only ours can play in darkness. Thus, as the column swings past the pond and waiting cookers, the Band strikes up one of its best and ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... Sandersen started out to gather what information he could in Sour Creek. He drifted from the blacksmith shop to the kitchen of Mrs. Mary Caluson, but both these brimming reservoirs of news had this day run dry. Mrs. Caluson vaguely remembered a Riley Sinclair, a man who fought for the sheer love of ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... Pete's memory were touched by it. He told of his Christmases abroad—how it was summer instead of winter, and fruits were on the trees instead of snow on the ground—how people who had never spoken to him before would shake hands and wish him a merry Christmas. Then from sheer weariness and a sense of utter desolation, broken by the comfort of Philip's company, he fell ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... prevent his strumming on it all the time between the meals. The good Paramor—he was really a most excellent fellow—became unhappy as far as was possible to his cheery nature, till one dreary day I suggested, out of sheer mischief, that he should employ the dormant energies of the crew in hauling both cables up on deck and turning ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... call of "Smugglers!" This is the signal for the Ins to start on the chase. The object of the Ins is to catch the one player among the Outs who is custodian of the geg. The identity of this player may be a sheer matter of surmise on their part, when they will have to challenge any player whom they may catch. If the player holding the geg can return to the den without being caught, his party wins, and again goes ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... balanced on the balls of his small feet like a boxer, hands hanging loosely at his sides. A bulldog chin jutted out of his rough-hewn face as if it were going to snap off the head of the nearest cadet. He towered over Tom and Roger, and though shorter than Astro, he made up for this by sheer force of personality. When he spoke, his voice was like a deep foghorn that had suddenly learned the use ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... pressed on up the ascent, at length coming into open light upon a small plateau marked by huge, rugged, weather-chipped stones. On the eastern side was a rocky promontory, and close to the edge of this cliff, an hundred feet in sheer descent, rose a gnarled, time and tempest-twisted chestnut tree. Here the borderman laid down his rifle and knapsack, and, half-reclining against the tree, settled himself to ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... soon as we make all those symbols of the historic community, all the ideals of honour and devotion, righteousness and beauty, glory and faithfulness, mere matters of scientific calculation, they stare us in the face as sheer absurdities; and yet we might again misname that as truth. Then it is the untruth which makes us free, it is the non-scientific, humanistic aspect which liberates us from the ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... mountains rose in two tiers before them literally into the clouds, for several of the lower clouds floated far below the highest peaks, and from the summit of the highest range a river, equal to the Thames at Richmond, dropt sheer down a fall of above two thousand feet. Here it met the summit of the lower mountain-range, on which it burst with a deep-toned, sullen, never-ceasing roar, comparable only to eternal thunder. A white cloud of spray received the falling river in its soft embrace, and sent it forth again—turbulent ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... dreams are made of, in more senses than one; and after that flimsiness is over, there ought to be something substantial left. Just as many attractive girls who have something as that haven't. It's sheer perversity when a poor young man sets his heart on additional poverty. Let the Cophetuas have a corner on the beggar maids; but let poor men, and especially young ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... as has been stated, had for twenty years never ceased to hope that her prayers would procure for her the grace of bearing a son to her husband. Out of sheer weariness she had given herself up to all kinds of charlatans, who at that period were well received by people of rank. On one occasion she brought from Italy a sort of astrologer, who as nearly as possible poisoned her with a horrible nostrum, and was sent ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... had fallen early in the morning, and when the sun rose and cast its slanting beams across the forest of grass, there was such a sparkling and glistening and gleaming that you didn't know what to say or do for sheer ecstasy, it was ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... a time, and allowed himself to be hauled, by the united efforts of the crew, some three or four fathoms towards the brig, when, annoyed by the restraint imposed upon him, or disliking the wild and motley appearance of the ship's company, he took a broad sheer to starboard, the hook snapped like a pipestem, and the hated monster swam off in another direction, wagging his tail in the happy consciousness that he ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... comes the ship to port, Howe'er the breeze may be; Just when she nears the waiting shore She drifts again to sea. No tack of sail, nor turn of helm, Nor sheer of veering side; Stern-fore she drives to sea and night, Against the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... silently up the midnight river—of those rocks scaled by the intrepid leader and his troops—of that miraculous security of the enemy, of his present acceptance of our challenge to battle, and of his defeat on the open plain by the sheer valour of his conqueror—we were all intoxicated in England by the news. The whole nation rose up and felt itself the stronger for Wolfe's victory. Not merely all men engaged in the battle, but those at home who had condemned its rashness, felt themselves ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... tyrant has the scantiest share. (3) Seeing his life is such, he cannot even trust his meats and drinks, but he must bid his serving-men before the feast begins, or ever the libation to the gods is poured, (4) to taste the viands, out of sheer mistrust there may be mischief lurking in the cup ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... drunk with blood, and found waiting intolerable; but it had no leader and foamed aimlessly about the causeway. There were women in it with flying hair like Maenads, who shrilled obscenities, and drunken butchers and watermen and grooms who had started out for loot and ended in sheer lust of slaying, and dozens of broken desperadoes and led-captains who looked on the day as their carnival. But to the mob had come one of those moments of indecision when it halted and eddied like ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... it off. That was the Devil in a, wolf's form. The like writes William of Paris,—that a wolf will kill and devour children, and do the greatest mischief. There was a man who had the phantasy that he himself was a wolf. And afterwards he was found lying in the wood, and he was dead out of sheer hunger. ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... the old loves were all dead, and I could almost be thankful for them. They had kept him for me, I thought,—tamed and exhausted him, so that I—so colourless and weak compared to those others!—might just slip into his heart and find the way open—that he might just take me in, and be glad, for sheer weariness.' ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that nothing could serve his purpose but an exercise of sheer weight and brute force, and he pressed on and on with such fury that Tom almost cried aloud in his fear. But Lord Claud was wary and watchful; he gave way for a while, only parrying the thrusts, and that with not so much force as before; then ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... who looked rather purple in the face and spoke in an odd voice. 'I don't think you have ever tried it, or you wouldn't have let me go up first. Why, it is the pleasantest thing, I have ever done. I was shaking my legs from sheer delight, and if you had been there you would ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... realization overtake anticipation. His reins hung loose. He hummed snatches of Spanish, French, and English songs. Their cosmopolitan freedom of variety was as out of keeping with the scene as their lilt, which had the tripping, self-carrying impetus of the sheer ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Lady, I deem they have done him no hurt, though I wot not for sure. There hath been none headed or hanged in the base-court to-day. I heard talk amongst the men-at-arms of one whom they took; they said he was a wonder of sheer strength, and how that he cast their men about as though he were playing at ball. Sooth to say, they seemed to bear him no grudge therefor. But now I would counsel thee to arise; and I am bidden to tire and array ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris
... right, and a little later splashed through the water for a few minutes and came out into a spreading valley beyond the sheer walls of the retreat they had left. Taking the road again, they traveled faster than they had been ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... his horse beside Forrest. Also, Graham realized that the turning of her head and the waving of her arm was only partly in bravado, was more in aesthetic wisdom of the picture she composed, and was, most of all, sheer joy of daring and emprise of the blood and the flesh and the life ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... in five minutes came back in a soft, gray silken gown, narrow and quite short in the skirt, a kerchief of sheer mull muslin crossed on her bosom, and all her hair gathered under a plain cap. Madam Wetherill was hardly through explaining that she had always been a Church of England woman, and one thing she had admired in Mr. Penn more than ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... last sentence gravely and his reply was as grave though his voice was still hoarse. "You were sublime goodness and wisdom. When a woman through the sheer quality of her silence saves a man from slipping over the verge of madness he does not forget. While I was sane I dared scarcely utter her name. If I had gone mad I should have raved as madmen do. For that reason ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... which one has never seen everything. Some of them so entirely forgot their own countries, that death overtook them between the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza de Venizia. If any exiled themselves to their native land, they did it in sheer self-defence, when their pockets were empty. Rome bade them a tender adieu, piously keeping their likeness in its memory and their money ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... plain that in the person of Ruloff one of the most marvelous of intellects that any age has produced is about to be sacrificed, and that, too, while half the mystery of its strange powers is yet a secret. Here is a man who has never entered the doors of a college or a university, and yet by the sheer might of his innate gifts has made himself such a colossus in abstruse learning that the ablest of our scholars are but pigmies in his presence. By the evidence of Professor Mather, Mr. Surbridge, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... it succeeded, at any rate for a time, in arresting these disorders. This was all that could be done at that period, and the Church accomplished it, by taking the high hand; and with as much unselfishness as energy and courage, she regulated society, which had been abandoned by the civil power from sheer impotence and want ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... we glided along, enjoying, not entranced, comfortable, but not sublime, content to drink in the sunny sweetness of the summer day, happy only from the pleasant sense of being, tangling each other in silly talk out of mere wantonness, purling up bubbles of airy nothings in sheer effervescence of animal delight; falling into periodic fits of useful knowledge, under the influence of which we consulted our maps and our watches in a conjoint and clamorous endeavor to locate ourselves, which would no sooner be satisfactorily accomplished than something would ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... if possible, stand and watch the Master Workman doing the work that is to make this region our source of present day joy. We will make the ascent and stand on the summit of Pyramid Peak. This is now 10,020 feet above sea level, rising almost sheer above Desolation Valley ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... the only successful way so far as I know, is by MAKING time for the hour of reading and meditation and silence. She must take the time, by sheer force of will—take it until it grows into a habit which takes her. Out of this hour will come first peace and self-control; and gradually she will find unfolding out of this peace and control, the wisdom ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... Estelle had been almost a recluse since she was seventeen. The rest of the Wilmots went into Saint X's newly developed but flourishing fashionable society. They had no money to give return entertainments or even to pay their share of the joint, dances and card parties Arthur decided to sheer off. "I came to ask you to the house for sup—dinner to-night," said he. "It's lonely—just mother and Del and me. Come and cheer us up. Come along ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... have hitherto considered, relating to the supernatural lapse of time in fairyland, have attributed the mortal's detention there to various motives. Compulsion on the part of the superhuman powers, and pleasure, curiosity, greed, sheer folly, as also the performance of just and willing service on the part of the mortal, have been among the causes of his entrance thither and his sojourn amid its enchantments. Human nature could hardly have been what it is if the supreme passion of love had ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... she pirouetted, out of sheer youthful joy. She had forgotten care and forgotten promiscuity; good fortune had washed her pure. She looked at herself in the massive bevelled mirror, and saw that she was fresh and young and lithe and graceful. And she felt triumphant. Gilbert ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... entered a strip of woods, through which ran the little stream beside which I had observed the clay. We stopped at the creek, the road by which we had come crossing it and continuing over the land of my neighbor, Colonel Pemberton. By the roadside, on my own land, a bank of clay rose in almost a sheer perpendicular for about ten feet, evidently extending back some distance into the low, pine-clad hill behind it, and having also frontage upon the creek. There were marks of bare feet on the ground along the base of the bank, and the face of it seemed freshly disturbed and scored ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... whereas John the Baptist says (John 1:31): 'That He may be made manifest in Israel; therefore am I come baptizing with water.' Moreover, it was fitting that He should not begin to work miracles at an early age. For people would have thought the Incarnation to be unreal, and, out of sheer spite, would have crucified Him before the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... feats helped me to the subjugation of Nelly. Yet, after all, in sheer physical prowess, I could not really rival Fred, who stood a full head taller than I did. But I had a deal more of finesse than he had, made very much better use of my opportunities, and was a far more practised poseur. Fred was well supplied with self-esteem—a ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... and deep valleys and gorges there they could always take refuge, while sometimes the more daring chiefs converted these detached peaks and masses of rock, numbers of which you can see as you come up the Ghaut by railway, into almost impregnable fortresses. Many of these masses of rock rise as sheer up from the hillside as walls of masonry, and look at a short distance like ruined castles. Some are absolutely inaccessible; others can only be scaled by experienced climbers; and, although possible for the natives with ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... the church of St. Sophia, and were therein, besought their lord and the emperor to come to their relief; for if they received no help they could not hold out, especially as they had no provisions. Through sheer distress and sore need, the Emperor Henry and his people agreed that they must once more abandon thought of going to Adrianople, and cross the straits of St. George, to the Turkish side, with as many people as they could collect, ...
— Memoirs or Chronicle of The Fourth Crusade and The Conquest of Constantinople • Geoffrey de Villehardouin
... had gained three hundred pounds by different services about the house, desired to live quietly without opening the front door again; but his good master begged him to marry to please him, assuring him that he need not trouble about his wife. So the good steward wandered out of sheer good nature into this marriage. The day of the wedding, bereft of all her reasons, and not able to find objections to her pursuer, she made him give her a fat settlement and dowry as the price of her ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... Maxwell would read them slowly over to her sister. And in the evening, when Isabel generally came up for an hour or two, the girl would be asked to read them slowly all over again to the two ladies who sat over their embroidery on either side of her, and who interrupted for the sheer joy of prolonging it. And they would discuss together the exact significance of all his marks of emphasis and irony; and the girl would have all she could do sometimes not to feel a disloyal amusement at the transparency of the devices and the simplicity of the loving hearts that marvelled at the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... she had the presence of mind to turn over on her back and rest, and went on again when she had her breath back. Nyoda noted this manoeuver approvingly. It indicated good sense. Gladys covered the last twenty-five yards by sheer grit. Every breath was a gasp, the shore line wavered dizzily before her, and it seemed that she was pushing against an immovable wall. Nyoda watched her closely, and saw her rear up her head and set her teeth and battle on against wind and wave. "She'll do," she said to herself joyfully, ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... intended invasion of India. Doubtless they thought that news would please us greatly. But, having heard so many lies already, I set that down for another one, and the others became all the more determined in their loyalty from sheer disgust at Ranjoor Singh's unfaithfulness. They believed and I disbelieved, yet ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... tolerance for those people with incoherent personalities, who gather in the chapels and meeting-places of certain obscure sects, because I also have felt fixed habits and principles dissolving before a power, which was hysterica passio or sheer madness, if you will, but was so powerful in its melancholy exultation that I tremble lest it wake again and drive me ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats
... Her beauty is sadly wasting now," said Meliora. "She seems to be slowly dying, and I shouldn't wonder if it were of sheer starvation; those models earn so little. Yesterday she fainted as she stood—Michael is so thoughtless. He had to call me to give her some wine, and then we sent the maid home with her. She lives in a poor place, Hannah says, but quite decent and respectable. I shall ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the formality of going to bed, and seemed bent on doing what he could to keep other people awake. He sat monologuing under the seal lamp till the Boy longed to throw the dish of smouldering oil at his head. But strangely enough, when, through sheer fatigue, his voice failed and his chin fell on his broad chest, a lad of fourteen or so, who had also had difficulty to keep awake, would jog Yagorsha's arm, repeating interrogatively the last phrase used, whereon the old Story-Teller would rouse himself and begin afresh, with an iteration ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... that you have been thinking, all the while, that these stories about the wonderful Guy are a sheer fabrication, or, to use a convenient modern term, a myth. Know, then, that the identical armor belonging to him is still preserved here; to wit, the sword, about seven feet long, a shield, helmet, breastplate, ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... left the most striking marks of their habits and mighty power, for there thorny brakes of the most impenetrable character had been trodden flat by them, and trees had been overturned. In traversing such places the great bull-elephant always marches in the van, bursting through everything by sheer force and weight, breaking off huge limbs of the larger trees with his proboscis when these obstruct his path, and overturning the smaller ones bodily, while the females and younger members of the family follow in ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... mistake, for during this same period the development of the older man had been far greater than his own. Covington to-day was, perhaps, as able a business man as Gorham had been when the Consolidated Companies was born, but Gorham in the mean time, by sheer display of extraordinary genius, had become an international figure. The business relations between the two men were closer than ever, but never once was there any question as to which was the master. Covington would not have ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... was I recover'd that, waking early next morning, and finding my sweet nurse asleep from sheer weariness, in a corner of the hut, I stagger'd up from my bed of dried bracken, and out into the pure air. Rare it was to stand and drink it in like wine. A footstep arous'd me. 'Twas Mistress Delia: and turning, I held ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... Sligo—Town of the River of Shells—a tongue of land runs toward the sea between two long bays. Where the two bays join their waters, a mountain rises precipitous, its gray limestone rocks soaring sheer upwards, rugged and formidable. Within the shadow of the mountain is hidden a wonderful glen—a long tunnel between cliffs, densely arched over with trees and fringed with ferns; even at midday full of a green gloom. It is a fitting gateway ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... awning, Asad looked on approvingly, Rosamund drew back, shuddering, choking, and near to fainting from sheer horror. ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... a second. She knows perfectly well that I can go on the stage the day I am twenty-one, yet through sheer obstinacy she refuses to advance me a penny to do as I like with before ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... I found altogether different. Where Sevcik taught his pupils the technic of their art by means of a system elaborately worked out, Auer demonstrated his ideas through sheer personality, mainly from the interpretative point of view. Any ambitious student could learn much of value from either; yet in a general way one might express the difference between them by saying that Sevcik could take a pupil of medium talent and—at least from the mechanical standpoint—make ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... disorder seemed at its highest pitch, the allied army, with commendable good sense, and without paying the slightest heed to the quarrels of its generals, proclaimed General Roger Sherman Potter ruler over all Kalorama; and this was out of sheer respect to his humor, for the army held it good to be ruled over by a gentleman who could afford soldiers so ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... rose hastily with a cry of dismay, and stripping to the skin climbed up to the brambles above his cave, and flung himself on them, and rolled on them writhing with the pain: then he came into his den a mass of gore, and lay moaning for hours; till, out of sheer exhaustion, he fell into a ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... bow, or culverin could not reach, and consequently light and comfort, impossible to a position which had to be guarded, were secured. To the west was a great valley, and then, rising far away, great jagged mountain fastnesses, rising peak on peak, the sheer rock studded with mountain ash and thorn, whose roots clung in cracks and crevices and crannies of the stone. This was evidently the portion of the castle occupied by the ladies in bygone days, for the furniture had more an air of comfort than any I ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... wives to "overwork," it is not from indifference, but from sheer ignorance. They don't know, they don't begin to conceive, of the labor there is in "woman's work." It is true that neither are merchant-princes aware of what it costs their wives to superintend the complicated arrangements of their establishments; to ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... the right moment——before taking the trouble to read Vol. I. This, I say, is just permissible with a novel, where Vol. III has a meaning, even for those who have not read the earlier part of the story; but, with a scientific book, it is sheer insanity: you will find the latter part hopelessly unintelligible, if you read it before reaching it in regular course. pg-xii (2) Don't begin any fresh Chapter, or Section, until you are certain that you thoroughly understand the whole book up to that point, and that you have ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... sentinel over a typical moorland homestead of the smaller sort—a one-storied house of rough stone, the roof of which was secured from storm and tempest by great boulders slung on stout ropes, and having built on to it an equally rough shelter for some small stock of cows and sheep. Out of a sheer habit of reflection on things newly seen, Brereton could not avoid wondering what life was like, lived in this solitude, and in such a perfect hermitage—but his speculations were cut short by the opening of the door ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... he received a full explanation of the marriage through mistake, piously folded his hands and exclaimed, with uplifted eyes: "Wonderful are the dispensations of Providence!" Colin and Marietta kissed his hands; Mother Manon, through sheer veneration of heaven, gave the young couple her blessing, but remarked incidentally that her ...
— The Broken Cup - 1891 • Johann Heinrich Daniel Zschokke
... though only in March, glowing with warmth, as the sun beat against the cliffs behind, of a dark red brown, in many places absolutely black, in especial where a cascade, swelled by the rains into imposing size, came roaring, leaping, and sparkling down a sheer precipice. On either side the cove or chine was closely shut in by treeless, iron-coloured masses of rock, behind one of which the few inhabited hovels were clustered, and the boat which had brought ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... movements, wearily moving an incandescent light hither and thither, observing the surgeon with languid interest. Another nurse, much younger, without the "black band," watched the surgeon from the foot of the cot. Beads of perspiration chased themselves down her pale face, caused less by sympathy than by sheer weariness and heat. The small receiving room of St. Isidore's was close and stuffy, surcharged with odors of iodoform and ether. The Chicago spring, so long delayed, had blazed with a sudden fury the last week in March, and now ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... "is the ultimate physical effect of worry? Why, the same as that of a fatal bullet-wound or sword-thrust. Worry kills as surely, though not so quickly, as ever gun or dagger did, and more people have died in the last century from sheer worry than have ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... together by their own ends, the peculiar convincing force of these brief representations. They take so little a while to read, and yet in that little while the subject is so repeatedly introduced in the same light and with the same expression, that, by sheer force of repetition, that view is imposed upon the reader. The two English masters of the style, Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exemplify its dangers. Carlyle, indeed, had so much more depth and knowledge of the heart, his portraits of mankind are felt and rendered ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been at the threshing machine all day. It had covered her with dirt and chaff; and the process of changing was only half through when she heard the rattle of Ellesborough's cycle outside. She stood now before the glass, a radiant daughter of air and earth; her veins, as it were, still full of the sheer pleasure of her long day among the stubbles and the young stock. She was tired, of course; and she knew very well that the winter, when it came, would make a great difference, and that much of the work before her would be hard and disagreeable. ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... me, and I am not swayed by resentment, these speeches so justly poized, this silent deference, when the animal spirits of other young people were throwing off youthful ebullitions, were not the effect of thought or humility, but sheer barrenness of mind, and want of imagination. A colt of mettle will curvet and shew his paces. Yes; my dear girl, these prudent young men want all the fire necessary to ferment their faculties, and are characterized as wise, only because they ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... the reason for the mulct. It also tried those who conspired for the overthrow of the state, Solon having enacted a process of impeachment to deal with such offenders. Further, since he saw the state often engaged in internal disputes, while many of the citizens from sheer indifference accepted whatever might turn up, he made a law with express reference to such persons, enacting that any one who, in a time [Transcriber's note: of?] civil factions, did not take up arms with either party, ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... the way. He had never told any one of these, not even the girl he loved, but they existed all the same. For many years he had been assisting needy relatives, and thus had hampered himself, in spite of his income. By sheer force of will, so as to force Braddock into giving him Lucy, he had contrived to secure the necessary thousand pounds, without confusing the arrangements he had made to pay off certain debts connected with his domestic philanthropy; but this brought ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... soon as he did, he fell into a paroxysm half hysterical, half frantic. I had completed his ruin, he exclaimed, and his unhappy family would have to curse me as the cause of his destruction. He was ready to sink on the floor in sheer terror, and with difficulty could he utter a request that I should instantly leave his house. This was a command, however harsh and heartless, which I dared not resist, for I was forced to admit to myself that under his terrified exterior might lurk ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... she had yielded to no fears, in carrying out the stratagem by which she had gained admission to St. Crux; and now, when the long array of difficulties at the outset had been patiently conquered, now, when by sheer force of resolution the starting-point was gained, she hesitated to advance. "I shrank from nothing to get here," she said to herself. "What madness possesses me that ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... the boat a sheer in for the beach, to a little bight that made up in the land,—across the mouth of which we had to pull, in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... a cheerful Christmas Day for the one whose heedlessness had brought it all about. But Genevieve mourned so bitterly, and blamed herself so strongly, that at last, out of sheer pity, Mrs. Kennedy, and even Miss Jane Chick, had to turn comforter; for—as Mrs. Kennedy reminded her sister—it was, after all, aside from her thoughtless lack of haste, only Genevieve's unselfish forgetfulness ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... free to continue to write and e-mail us. When submitting corrections or updates to the Factbook, please include your source(s) of information. At least two Factbook staffers review every submitted item. The sheer volume of correspondence precludes detailed personal replies, but we sincerely appreciate your time and interest in the Factbook. If you include your e-mail address we will at least acknowledge your ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... can hardly tell how. Now appealing to the charity of old Rachael Strong, the laundress—a dog-lover by profession; now winning a meal from the light-footed and open-hearted lasses at the Rose; now standing on his hind-legs to extort, by sheer beggary, a scanty morsel from some pair of "drowthy cronies," or solitary drover, discussing his dinner or supper on the alehouse-bench; now catching a mouthful, flung to him in pure contempt by some scornful gentleman of the shoulder-knot, mounted on his throne, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... often chose to call himself, an antiquary; he felt the appeal of all that was old and curious. But he was much more than that. The typical antiquary has his mind so thoroughly devoted to the past that the present seems remote to him. The sheer intellectual capacity of such a man as Scott might be enough to save him from such a limitation, for he could give to the past as much attention as an ordinary man could muster, and still have interest for contemporary affairs; but his capacity was not all that saved Scott. He viewed the ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... signal for a tremendous cheer from those who knew our hero; and those who did not know him, but knew that there was something peculiar and romantic in his case, and in the manner of his arrival, began to cheer from sheer sympathy; while the little boys, who were numerous, and who love to cheer for cheering's sake alone, yelled at the full pitch of their lungs, and waved their ragged caps as joyfully as if the King of England were about to ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... shortened sail, and formed a line of battle; while the rest, under the protection of the six frigates, proceeded on their voyage with all the sail they could carry. The British squadron was likewise drawn up in line of battle; but Mr. Warren, perceiving that the enemy began to sheer off, now their convoy was at a considerable distance, advised admiral Anson to haul in the signal for the line, and hoist another for giving chase and engaging, otherwise the French would, in all probability, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... extend. He heard th' approaching tempest's hollow sigh, And cold despondence trembled in his eye— And lo, it bursts! the boundless whirlwinds sweep, Toss the light clouds, and tear the staggering deep Sheer from its lowest caves—the smoking rain Bursts in white torrents o'er the echoing main: The fiery bolts uninterrupted roll From sky to sky, and shake the stedfast pole: Red volleying o'er the heavens with curving beam The fitful lightnings ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... sort is to be more admired than the rare view of the choir buttresses of Notre Dame at Paris, likened unto "kneeling angels with half-spread wings;" the delicate and symmetrical choir buttresses of Amiens; the sheer fall of Beauvais; or the triply effective termination of the one-time cathedral of Noyon, which falls away in three gracefully gentle slopes to the ground. Again Stevenson's power as a descriptive writer lingers in our memory. He says, of no cathedral in particular, "where ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... curious. It was just wide enough to admit the passage of a sleigh perhaps; the crumbling and dilapidated old houses, which seemed deserted, were connected overhead by a succession of wooden bridges, and those on my left were built into the solid rock, which rose sheer overhead. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... like you,' said the lawyer. He stopped from sheer inability to express what he meant and felt, which was that such an exceptionally pretty girl as Stella Wharton ought not to start life alone in London and be thrown on her own resources, even though she was a thoroughly trustworthy girl and had a younger sister to live with her. ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... or Constitutionalists. But all were driven by desperate circumstances into this terrible form of revolt. And when we turn from parties to individuals who have acted in like manner, we stand appalled by the number of human beings goaded and driven by sheer desperation into conduct obviously violently opposed ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... for a space. Mr. Wason is a very tall gentleman, but in Foulah he met his peers in point of stature. The islanders are a fine set of men, hardy and godly. They are adroit fowlers and nimble cragsmen. It gives one a queer sensation to hear that the face of their sheer precipices used to be (like level land elsewhere) apportioned equitably among the various families. If A did not wish to catch birds on his aerial lot, he could let it to B and claim a certain percentage of the spoil. The population of the island is about 250: ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... friend that happens to be with them, and get him to read or to initialize them instead. As to ourselves (for reasons also to be presently given), we shall write the words at full length, out of sheer sense of their nothingness; only premising, that such was not the opinion entertained of them by this tremendous Lord Chancellor, or by the age in which he lived; otherwise he would not have resorted to them as clenches for his ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... I answered with almost Teutonic ruthlessness. Confound it! I couldn't sit here forever bullying her; sheer desperation lent me strength. "The Espagne sails from Bordeaux on Saturday, I see by the Herald, and if I were you, I should most certainly be on board. In fact, if you lose the chance, I am sure you'll regret it later. The French police authorities are—er—very inquisitive about foreigners; ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... down, and softened with woods, amid which are seen villas, cottages, castles; and beyond the river is a line of crags, perhaps three hundred feet high, clothed with shrubbery in some parts from top to bottom, but in other places presenting a sheer precipice of rock, over which tumbles, as it were, a cascade of ivy and creeping plants. It is very beautiful, and, I might almost say, very wild; but it has those characteristics of finish, and of being redeemed from nature, and converted into a portion of the adornment of a great ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... connection, or rather in connection with the other case of Froude, it is worth while to take another figure from Dickens's history, which illustrates the other and better side of the facile and popular method. Sheer ignorance of the environment made him wrong about Dunstan. But sheer instinct and good moral tradition made him right, for instance, about Henry VIII.; right where Froude is wildly wrong. Dickens's imagination could not re-picture an age where learning and liberty were dying ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... ladder flat, and crept along it till he reached the still sinking man: he caught him by the arm at once, and started to haul him out. Anstey's strength was well known in the regiment, and perhaps he was the only man who could have dragged out the General by sheer force of arm, but he did it somehow, and the cheers of the men simply rent the air as they saw their loved commander ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... him as the Philistines upon Samson; and the question was, what the devil to do with it? He could not raffle it over again; nobody would take tickets. He had half a mind to trundle it over the khud (Anglice, precipice) and be done with it; but then, again, he reflected that this would be sheer waste and might seem to indicate soreness on his part. It cost him a good many pegs before he thought the matter out in all its bearings, for, as has been said, he was a gunner, but as he sauntered away from the ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... more nervous than a bishop among curates. Nevertheless they are wrong; and your humble servant entirely right. B.-P., like the other members of his family, suffers from nervousness, and when he goes on the stage to act, and sits down at the piano to "vamp," it is a sheer triumph of will over nerves. He is not nervous under the wide and starry sky, not bashful when he pricks his horse into the long grass of the veldt and bears down upon a bunch of bloodthirsty savages, not nervous when he gets a child on his knee all by himself and tells her delightful stories,—but ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... sent for on the preceding day had succeeded, though with much difficulty and after a long time, in allaying the girl's excitement, and that she had then dropped into a deep sleep, apparently from sheer exhaustion. She had awoke that morning calm and quiet, and the doctor, who was with her at the time, had gradually, and to his extreme astonishment, discovered that her reason, which had in fact given way two or three years previously amid the horrors of an Indian raid, had partially if not ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... home, as he called it, to be with Mrs Willis at nights. On no other condition would he agree to enter the doctor's service; and I found, on talking over the subject with Mrs Willis herself, that she had become so fond of the boy that it would have been sheer cruelty to part them. In short, it was a case of mutual love at first sight! No two individuals seemed more unlikely to draw together than the meek, gentle old lady and the dashing, harum-scarum boy. ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... her guide, hearing, even in the midst of his triumph song, that faint and distant cry; and he took her hand and drew her back, for she was upon the edge of the precipice, gazing into the black depths, which revealed nothing save the needles of the awful rocks and sheer descents below. 'The moment will come,' he said, 'when we can help; but ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... for a long period thus intricately intertangled. It is hard to believe that the practice of human and animal sacrifice (with whatever revolting details) should have been cultivated by nine-tenths of the human race over the globe out of sheer perversity and without some reason which at any rate to the perpetrators themselves appeared commanding and convincing. To-day (1918) we are witnessing in the Great European War a carnival of human slaughter which in magnitude and barbarity eclipses in one stroke all the ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... have lived so utterly in vain. One by one the struggles of the past came up to him; each had seemed a triumph when he was in the glory of strength and hope. The splendid aims of a higher and nobler government, built by sheer truth and nobility of purpose upon the ashes and dust of present corruption, the magnificent purity of the ideal State of which he had loved to dream—all that he had thought of and striven after as most worthy of a true man to follow, dwindled now away into a ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... when the sky was clear, Ineffably translucent in its blue; The tide was falling, and the sea withdrew In hushed and happy music from the sheer Shadowy granite of the cliffs; and fear Of what life may be, and what death can do, Fell from us like steel armor, and we knew The beauty of the ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... gazed at the moon awhile a thrill of sheer madness set him to tumbling, head over heels, upon the fresh hay. Life was full of gladness for him, and his throat cramped with a delicious longing for he knew not what. He wondered vaguely if it were not something new and unimaginably good ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... Rowe myself very busy in the bar of the White Lion, with a sheet of paper and an old steel pen, which looked as if the point had been attenuated to that hair-like fineness by sheer age. He started at the sight of me, which caused him to drop a very large blot of ink from the very sharp point of the pen on to his paper. I left him wiping it up with his handkerchief. But it never struck me that he was writing a letter ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... with a sorry heart that I bade farewell to my Vienna friends, my musical comrades, the Legation hospitalities, and my faithful little Israelite. But the colt frisks over the pasture from sheer superfluity of energy; and between one's second and third decades instinctive restlessness - spontaneous movement - is the law of one's being. 'Tis then that 'Hope builds as fast as knowledge can destroy.' The enjoyment we abandon is never so sweet as ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... demanded Berkeley, argumentatively. "She'll never do any better; Jim's a handsome fellow, as men go, brave, honorable and sweet-tempered. What more does she want? It looks to me like sheer perversity." ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... had to stop through sheer exhaustion, but Mr Bunker, merely letting her go, pursued his solitary way, double-shuffling and ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... But this is folly, sheer folly. How could she look like Mrs. Urquhart? Imagination carries me too far. Equal innocence and a like gentle temper have produced a like result in sweetening the expression. That is all, and yet I remember the one woman when I look ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... very loudly, like a cock of spirit, and declared that old Mrs. Scratchard was envious, because she had lost all her own tail-feathers, and looked more like a worn- out old feather-duster than a respectable hen, and that therefore she was filled with sheer envy of anybody that was young and pretty. So young Mrs. Feathertop cackled gay defiance at her busy rubbishy neighbour, as she sunned herself under the bushes on ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... ballad poetry (Spectators 70, 74, 85) was not a sheer novelty. He had a ringing English precedent in Sidney, whom he quotes. And he may have had one in Jonson; at least he thought he had. He cited Dryden and Dorset as collectors and readers of ballads; and he ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... triumphantly through a heavy morning's work and have everything ready for the evening. Later there had been the stroll down to the field in the shade of the waning afternoon, to find out what time the men would be in for supper; and the sheer delight of breathing in the pungent smell of the straw as it came flying from the funnel, looking, with the sinking sun shining through it, like a million bees swarming from a hive, while the red-brown grain gushed, a lush ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... limp head, and we saw that the sword had passed just over his shoulder, piercing the linen, not the flesh. He had swooned from sheer terror, being in truth ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... discernible outlines on the walls. Nor did any thought enter his mind of the exactness of the reflected color in the stereo cube. Hands clenched into aching fists, he stood leaning forward; striving by sheer will-power to span the void of space and force the scanner lens closer to the truncated pyramid of steps atop which, on a block of plain black stone, a dessicated mummy sat erect, hands folded in its reedy lap and on its head a blazing, ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow- pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... do, to the risk of their own lives and their neighbors'. Findelkind said never a word; he was as dumb as Theodoric had been to him; he felt stupid, heavy, half blind; his father pushed him some bread, and he ate it by sheer instinct, as a lost animal will do; the cart jogged on, the stars shone, the great church vanished in ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... he didn't mind at all if now and then he got leaves, and some green berries in his mouth with the big ripe berries. He didn't try to get them out. Oh, my, no! He just chomped them all up together and patted his stomach from sheer delight. Now Buster had reached the Old Pasture just as jolly, round, red Mr. Sun had crept out of bed, and he had fully made up his mind that he would be back in the Green Forest before Mr. Sun had climbed very far up in the blue, blue sky. You see, big as he ...
— The Adventures of Buster Bear • Thornton W. Burgess
... or by the hand of man, had been recessed into the face of that gigantic cliff. Going to the edge of this plateau, whereon grew many tree-ferns and some thick green bushes that would have made us invisible from below even had there been any one to see us, we saw that the sheer precipice ran down beneath for several hundred feet. Of these yawning depths, however, we did not at the moment make out much, partly because they were plunged in shadow and partly for ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... course, but evaded any very close answers. After some conversation, Capt. Johnston came on board, and Mr. Irish told him what I wanted. My examination now became much closer, and I found myself driven to sheer fabrication in order to effect my purposes. During my intercourse with different sea-going lads of Halifax, I had learned the particulars of the capture of the Cleopatra 32, by the French frigate Ville de Milan 38, and her recapture by the Leander 50, which ship captured the Ville de Milan ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... remembering her ill-usage in childhood by the cousin who, though younger, was stronger than herself, never wholly trusted her. Besides, out of sheer modesty, she would never have told her domestic sorrows ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... ever full And that thy lovers 'tis, not thou, that wane and waste away? Art thou a god, that thou, indeed, by favouring whom thou wilt And slighting others, canst at once bring back to life and slay? GCod moulded beauty from thy form and eke perfumed the breeze With the sheer sweetness of the scent that cleaves to thee alway. None of the people of this world, an angel sure thou art, Whom thy Creator hath sent ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... than the devil—for the devil was Walter's God, or, perhaps, I should say, Walter's God was a devil—once in sight of Small, he refused to move an inch farther. And Bud, after all his perseverance, was about to give up in sheer despair. ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... said Blunt, straightening his broad back and taking out a huge plug of tobacco. "If that there mud sticks to th' ship like it stuck to this yer mudhook, then we'll need sheer-legs ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... singleness of purpose to crystallize her, she cannot absorb even the gravest of warnings; not from unwillingness or stupid obstinacy, but from sheer inability to grasp any novelty. That her beloved master and mistress—either or both—should not have the best of everything and plenty of it is, at this advanced stage in her career, unthinkable. Even though she read it in print she would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... of Seymour, to study the profession of the law; but this dry kind of study was soon found to have no attractions for one of his volatile turn of mind. Something, however, was to be done to rescue from sheer idleness a youth of nineteen, with very narrow means, few friends, and no definite prospects; and, by the kindness of Dr. Wheelock, the pious founder of Dartmouth College, who had been the intimate friend of his grandfather, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... water grew blurred and dim. Its beauty wholly passed her by, or if she saw it, it was only in vivid contrast to the darkness in her soul. For a little, wide-eyed, she resisted the impulse that tugged at her heart-strings; but at last in sheer weariness she gave in. What did it matter, a tear more or less? There was no one to know or care. And tears were sometimes a relief. She bowed her head upon the sill ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... saw in any part of England before—namely, that going to a church at a country village, not far from Lewes, I saw an ancient lady, and a lady of very good quality, I assure you, drawn to church in her coach by six oxen; nor was it done in frolick or humour, but from sheer necessity, the way being so stiff and deep that no horses could go in it." The old lady was not singular in her method of attending service, for another writer records seeing Sir Herbert Springett, father of Sir William, drawn to church by eight oxen: a determination ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... the history of my life, and I have a perfect right to do so; but am I wise in throwing it before a public of which I know nothing but evil? No, I am aware it is sheer folly, but I want to be busy, I want to laugh, and why should ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Richards Green, better known as John Gifford. Its articles were at times sensational in character, viciously abusing writers of known or suspected republican sentiments. From its pages could be culled a new series of "Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin" which for sheer vituperation and relentless abuse would be without a ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... the window, the captain walked on tiptoe out of the room, and from sheer exhaustion ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... doubt added by other Irish informants. It is true, we must also allow for bias on St. Bernard's part in favour of his friend. Such bias in fact displays itself in Secs. 25, 26. But bias, apart from sheer dishonesty, could not distort the whole narrative, as it certainly must have been distorted in the Life, if the narrative of A.F.M. is to ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... anything but that. Because she's so lucky; born lucky, I reckon. Every time there's a hotel fire she's in it. She's always there—and if she can't be there herself, her diamonds are. Now you can't make anything out of that but just sheer luck." ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... no heed—only sped the faster. But what was my horror to find her command enforced by the pursuing bark of her prime minister. This paralysed me. I turned, and there was the fiendish-looking dog close on my heels. I could run no longer. For one moment I felt as if I should sink to the earth for sheer terror. The next moment a wholesome rage sent the blood to my brain. From abject cowardice to wild attack—I cannot call it courage—was the change of an instant. I rushed towards the little wretch. I did not know how to fight him, but in desperation ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... judges of motives, principles, and character, twenty-fold, than he who lives at the gate, and merely sees the owner of the grounds pass in and out, on his daily avocations. There is, and can be no greater absurdity, than to imagine that the sheer neighbourhood, or proximity of position, makes men acquainted. That was one of Jason Newcome's Connecticut notions. Having been educated in a state of society in which all associated on a certain footing of intimacy, and in which half the difficulties that occurred were "told to the church," he ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... himself to blame, for the reason that the temptations they offer are appeals to the illegitimate desire to get something for nothing or to the foolish notion that one can get-rich-quick in some way whispered about by a stranger, and out of sheer benevolence. The fact is that the wise man will dismiss all thought of making money out of his investments; he will seek only the moderate return which alone is consistent with safety; and with this policy, will turn a deaf ear to ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman
... slight space between them. The plan worked well as long as the material lasted, but no other wagons than my twenty-five coming on the ground, the work stopped when the bridge was only half constructed. Informed of the delay and its cause, in sheer desperation I finished the bridge by taking from my own division all the wagons needed to make up ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... small and trembling, wondering if I can swim across. And—listen, little river—again at the same old place I shall cut me the willow wand, and down the long slope to the certain place I knew I am going to hurry, running the last quarter of a mile in sheer expectation, but forgetting not the binding on of the tough linen line. And now I cast my gaudy float on that same swinging, wimpling, dimpling eddy, and let it swim in beneath the bank. And—No! ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... her back joyfully in the service of her ideal. She would not allow Camilla to pump for herself, but flew to the handle with such energy that the white water gushed out in a flood, overflowing Camilla's cup, spattering over on her fingers, and sparkling on the sheer white of her hemstitched cuffs. This made them both laugh, the ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... here he was, out to seek his fortune and with Stephen to help him! He battled with the crowd dragging the black bag with him and shouting sometimes in sheer excitement and good spirits. Young women tickled him with feathers, once some one linked arms with him and dragged him along, always he was surrounded with this sea of shouting, exultant humanity—this ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... and made me cry out with amazement; but this was not all! The tears sprang to my eyes as I opened the morocco box and took out the chrysoprase necklace: tears partly of gratitude and pleasure, partly of sheer kindness and love and sorrow for the sweet, stately lady who had thought of me in her closing days, and had found (they told me afterward) one of her last pleasures in planning this ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... class—commercial, banking, manufacturing, wage-earning—that what is for its particular interest is, in a peculiar manner, for the general interest, so much as to justify favoring legislation or special exemption from the general law, or even sheer lawlessness. ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... of Men Scryfa was crested with that fine yellow-gray lichen which finds life on exposed stones; upon the windward side clung a few atoms of golden growth; and its rude carved inscription straggled down the northern face. The monument rose sheer above black corpses of crooked furze, for fire had swept this region also, adding not a little to the prevailing sobriety of it, and only the elemental splendor of weather and the canopy of blue and gold beneath which spread this desolation ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... fairly smooth. For more than an hour the fugitives raced up the great cleft between the towering precipices and past narrow side canons. At last they came to a break in the sheer walls. The cliff on the right leaned back in a series of terraces that formed a broken giant stairway to ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... trained to catch and to distinguish sounds of country life, was now becoming alive to the commencement of one of those vast appalling catastrophes in Nature, for which man sees no reason and can detect the furtherance of no plan—law being turned with seeming blindness, and in the spirit of sheer wastage, upon what it has itself achieved, and spending its sublime forces in a ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... himself up there for more than six weeks, without, however, giving up the attempt to collect soldiers. "Howbeit," says Commynes, "he made but little of it; he kept himself quite solitary, and he seemed to do it from sheer obstinacy more than anything else. His natural heat was so great that he used to drink no wine, generally took barley-water in the morning and ate preserved rose-leaves to keep himself cool; but sorrow changed his complexion so much that he was obliged to drink good strong wine without water, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... hope; he had a kingdom indeed, but it was not of earth; and, in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain, earth alone has ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... from this point—at least we are at liberty to think so, if we choose—that many a famous Roman caught his last glimpse of his native city, and of all other earthly things. This is one of the sides of the Tarpeian Rock. Look over the parapet, and see what a sheer tumble there might still be for a traitor, in spite of the thirty feet of soil that have accumulated at ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Sir Amys was in the saddle, and so busy was he with all that had befallen him that he pushed on and never drew rein till his horse dropped dead under him from sheer weariness. As there was no town or house where he might find another, he was forced to proceed on foot. But by-and-by he too fell from lack of sleep, and when Sir Amyle was returning home through the forest after a day's hunting, he discovered his brother stretched ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... and the point that formed one termination of the bay, heading, of course, toward the tree to which the warp had been secured. It was an impulsive feeling, rather than any reason, that made me give the vessel a sheer with the helm, so as to send her directly through the passage, instead of letting her strike the rocks. I had no eventual hope in so doing, nor any other motive than the strong reluctance I felt to have the good craft hit the bottom. Luckily, the Dipper was in the canoes, and it was not an ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... rally the flying Walloons he met on the way. For a few minutes the two parties of Germans made a brave stand; but they were unable to resist the weight and number of the Spaniards, who bore them down by sheer force. Champagny had fought gallantly in the melee, and Ned, keeping closely beside him, had well seconded his efforts; but when the Germans were borne down they rode off, dashing through the streets and shouting to the burghers ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... force of their running, they sing and shout and trumpet at the falls, and the noise of it far outreaches the forest spires. You see from these conning towers how they call and find each other in the slender gorges; how they fumble in the meadows, needing the sheer nearing walls to give them countenance and show the way; and how the pine woods are made ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... if unobserved his bosom swelled. I have never known any one more modest and no one quite so shy. Many actors have played for him for years and never spoken to him, have perhaps seen him dart up a side street because they were approaching. They may not have known that it was sheer shyness, but it was. I have seen him ordered out of his own theater by subordinates who did not know him, and he went cheerfully away. "Good men, these; they know their business," was all his comment. Afterward he was shy of going ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... hat with feeling). "God bless ye, sir, and send ye many happy days, and well spent, with the pretty lady I see alongside; asking your pardon, miss, for parting pleasanter company—so I'll sheer off." ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... him, and entered. Phil closed the door, and followed close upon his heels. Barter, with his pale complexion fallen to the tint of dead ashes, sat huddled in the arm-chair, staring white-eyed like a frightened madman. Steinberg stared back at him in sheer amazement at his looks, and Phil, closing the door, turned the key in ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... unusual dress and had gone through so many vicissitudes, that I really was devotedly attached to it. It had, in the beginning, belonged to my Aunt Bess, and in the days of its first glory had been a sheer Irish linen lawn, with tiny green harps on it at agreeable intervals. But in the course of time, it had to be sent to the wash-tub, and then, behold, all the little lovely harps followed the example ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... child's appreciation of a very considerable industrial triumph. Old engineers, one of them an assistant on his own staff, had shaken their heads and declared that the running of a standard gauge railroad over Plug Pass was a sheer impossibility. ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... there were those who thought—poor fools—that you had no grasp of etiquette. How gratified we were, we professionals, who could appreciate your virtuosity—when you placed matters on a comfortable basis by spurning the cats'-meat. It was sheer pleasure then, waiting, to see what form your ...
— The Yillian Way • John Keith Laumer
... detection. So crude and piercing indeed was this mask confronting her that Domini started and was inclined to shudder. For a minute the man's eyes held hers, and she thought she saw in them unfathomable depths of misery or of wickedness. She hardly knew which. Sorrow was like crime, and crime like the sheer desolation of grief to her just then. And she thought of the outer darkness spoken of in the Bible. It came before her in the sunset. Her father was in it, and this stranger stood by him. The thing was as vital, and fled ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... I be, and I suppose you will think all this sort of thing is clear sheer nonsense, but depend upon it a kiss is a great mystery. There is many a thing we know that we can't explain, still we are sure it is a fact for all that. Why should there be a sort of magic in shaking hands, which seems only a mere form, ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Belfield knew both Mrs. Lenox and Georgy so well—their history, the miserable shortcomings of their home, the girl's scanty education both of intellect and morals—that we could but attribute their faults to sheer worldliness combined with the evils of their bitter poverty. Jack and myself, at least, with the most meagre excuse readily forgave Georgy everything. She was so beautiful, so radiant in all the phases of her dingy life, so good-natured even in her contempt of our stupidity and dulness, so ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... her self control in sheer despair: she suddenly tore her hand from the robber's grasp, and in three bounds, like a terrified deer, reached the threshold of the door she ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... his guards went down from the town to where the faggot burned, near the road upon a rock was a chantry, it stood at a cliff's edge steep and sheer, and it turned to the sea-breeze; in the apse of it were windows glazed. Then Tristan said ...
— The Romance Of Tristan And Iseult • M. Joseph Bedier
... have a temple of Ares set up in this way:—bundles of brushwood are heaped up for about three furlongs 62 in length and in breadth, but less in height; and on the top of this there is a level square made, and three of the sides rise sheer but by the remaining one side the pile may be ascended. Every year they pile on a hundred and fifty waggon-loads of brushwood, for it is constantly settling down by reason of the weather. 63 Upon this pile of which I speak ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... solemn premeditation, which tends, as Madame de Stael says, to bring more poetry into life, some women, in whom virtuous mothers either from considerations of worldly advantage of duty or sentiment, or through sheer hypocrisy, have inculcated steadfast principles, take the overwhelming fancies by which they are assailed for suggestions of the devil; and you will see them therefore trotting regularly to mass, to midday offices, even ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... therefore not astonished when the week went by and no announcement of his wedding appeared. But I was troubled and am troubled still, for if mistakes are made in criminal courts, and the innocent sometimes, through the sheer force of circumstantial evidence, are made to suffer for the guilty, might it not be that in this little question of morals Mrs. Walworth has been wronged, and that when I played the part of arbitrator in her fate, I only succeeded in separating two hearts ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... yellow and lean until from a stately looking man you grow to be a scarecrow, when one word from you would bring your only child back again and with him the wife and sweet grandchild, that you might all enjoy life together! If that isn't sheer folly and a sin and a shame. . ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... waiting to see you at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning. The matter is so utterly vital to the happiness of all your family, that I cannot imagine you will fail to come." Now, what's the meaning of it? Is it sheer impudence, or ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the parcel for this little boy? He can wait, and I cannot—wind and tide wait for no man. Here, my good lad, take your parcel, and sheer off," said the impatient man; and, as he spoke, he took up the parcel of seeds from the counter, as the shopman stooped to look for a sheet of thick brown paper and ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... now, when beyond all hope Zeus hath given me the sight of land, there is no place where I may win to shore from out of the sea. For the crags are sharp, and the waves roar about them, and the smooth rock riseth sheer from the sea, and the water is deep, so that I may gain no foothold. If I should seek to land, then a great wave may dash me on the rocks. And if I swim along the shore, to find some harbour, I fear lest the winds may catch me again and bear me ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... forgery, and an imposition, the fruit of a depraved heart, and a lying tongue, implies so much home-born deceit that, till the heart capable of such a prejudice be completely changed, no reasoning can have any solid fulcrum of truth or goodness to rest on. It is sheer folly to talk of one's being wholly unprejudiced in such an inquiry. No man ever was, or could be so. As his sympathies are toward goodness and virtue, and the happiness of mankind, or toward pride and deceit, and selfishness and savageness, so will his prejudices be for or against ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... nicknames, like Sarmenticii and Semaxii—untranslatable terms of opprobrium derived from the fagots with which they were burned and the stakes to which they were chained. Even the heroic courage which they displayed was described as being sheer obstinacy and stupid fanaticism. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... stand, her hands spread out on each side of her, her eyes turning back to him across the awful space that yawned between. Sheer depth was below her, but she did not seem aware ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... a part of her individuality, as its petals are of a rose; and she appeared to think of them no more than a nun thinks of her veil. But Nick felt this morning that Angela had come down from her shining heights to be human with him. She laughed like a schoolgirl, in sheer pleasure of motion which the big car gave after martyrdom with the Model. She had travelled all over the Old World, yet she said there was nothing anywhere prettier than Riverside; no such petticoated palms as those that trailed ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... stepped forth on the platform, some two hundred yards in circumference, whereon the vessel rested. The mist immediately around me was fast dispersing; five hundred feet below it still concealed everything. On three sides descent was barred by sheer precipices; on the fourth a steep slope promised a practicable path, at least as far as my eye could reach. I placed the weaker and smaller of my birds in portable cages, and then commenced my ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... comedy, has the mountain heaved and brought forth such a ridiculous mouse. Curtis did actually laugh; even his distraught companion tittered in sheer nervous reaction. ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... jest drink this, an' it'll do you good," came in the next second from the same lips, in such dulcet tones, that Caesar rubbed his head in sheer astonishment, and gazed with open mouth and eyes upon Nan, who was holding the glass to Sally's mouth, as caressingly as she would ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... "If it were not sheer madness for your thumb-long parade dagger to cross blades with my good sword," laughed Malfalconnet. "Ere you drew your rapier, I think your lust for murder would have fled. So let us leave our blades in their sheaths and permit ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the seat of a bright red pedlar's wagon, above and behind a dusty, ambling, red pony of that peculiar gait and appearance pertaining to the ponies of country pedlars—a certain placid, unhasting leanness, as of a nag that has encountered troubles of his own and has lived them down by sheer patience and staying power. From the bright red wagon proceeded a certain metallic rumbling and clinking as it bowled along, and two or three nests of tin pans on its flat rope-encircled top flashed back the light so dazzlingly that ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... been, there was the fierce reality of the daily fight for life amid the seething elements of the new things that were yet to be; the preparation for another time of domination and splendour; the deadly wrestling of men who meant to outlive one another by sheer strength and grim power of killing; the dark ignorance, darkest just before the waking of new thought, and art, and learning; the universal cruelty of all living things to each other, that had grown out ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... hatred of Nicholas had been fed upon his own defeat, nourished on his interference with his schemes, fattened upon his old defiance and success. There were reasons for its increase; it had grown and strengthened gradually. Now it attained a height which was sheer wild lunacy. That his, of all others, should have been the hands to rescue his miserable child; that he should have been his protector and faithful friend; that he should have shown him that love and tenderness which, from the wretched ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... Out of sheer bravado Sam set to work again to bind his logs together. His hand shook. There was little likelihood now that ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... one ambition male admiration, and she hadn't character enough to put sufficient curb upon her stomach to retain it. I reasoned with her, I pleaded with her, I bullied her. Had I persisted I might have succeeded by sheer physical and mental strength in restraining her from ruining herself. I was winning. I had made her frightened of me. Had I gone on, I might have won. By dragging her out of bed in the morning, by insisting upon her taking exercise, by regulating every particle of food and drink she put ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... trader, with whip and voice and charging stallion, hustled the wretched animals into the trail once more. And through the long afternoon, with unceasing and brutal ferocity, he belabored the faltering, stumbling, half-starved creatures, till from sheer exhaustion they were like to fall upon the trail. It was a weary business and disgusting, but the demon spirit of Nighthawk seemed to have passed into his master, and with an insistence that knew no mercy together ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... little to originate, but we have unconsciously reproduced many of the discredited and abandoned systems of former ages and other countries—receiving them at second hand, but making them ours by the sheer strength and immobility of the national belief in their newness. Newness! Why, it is not possible to make an experiment in government, in art, in literature, in sociology, or in morals, that has not been ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... for more? The extraordinary devotion to a volume of natural history, which after generations of use has become more like a mop-head than a book, may be seen in the reproduction of a "monkey-book" here illustrated; this curious result being caused by sheer affectionate thumbing of its leaves, until the dog-ears and rumpled pages turned the cube to a globular mass, since flattened by being packed away. So children love picture-books, not as bibliophiles would ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... remoteness and the inherent desolation of Boston they could not suppress some sighs, and in the mean time Aunt Melissa stepped into the waiting-room, which opened on the farther side upon the water, and sat contentedly down on one of the benches; the rest, from sheer vacuity and irresolution, followed, and thus, without debate, it was settled that they should wait there till the boat left. The agent, who was a kind man, did what he could to alleviate the situation: he gave them each the advertisement of his line of boats, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... glad to leave the town—the elder ladies, that their pet scheme might be brought to a climax by closer companionship; I, because I was near Aniela; she, maybe for the same reason, felt happy too. She bent down several times to kiss my aunt's hands, apropos of nothing, out of sheer content. She looked very pretty in a long, fluffy boa and a coquettish fur cap, from under which the dark eyes and the almost childish ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... protestations of a drunkard. Her reasonings are mere sophisms; they could persuade no man. It is not by them, it is by personal appeals, through the admiration she extorts from him, and through sheer force of will, that she impels him to the deed. Her eyes are fixed upon the crown and the means to it; she does not attend to the consequences. Her plan of laying the guilt upon the chamberlains is invented on the spur of the moment, and simply to satisfy her husband. Her true mind is ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... she saw service in every kind of corps. Beginning amongst the villages, with tiny hall and a handful of people to care for, by sheer merit, she rose to command the most important corps in the ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... that now pursues its course, Rocked in the cradle of these storm-tossed waves. Nor helm nor steersman here can aught avail; The storm is master. Man is like a ball, Tossed 'twixt the winds and billows. Far, or near, No haven offers him its friendly shelter! Without one ledge to grasp, the sheer, smooth rocks Look down inhospitably on his despair, And only tender him ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... his thoughtful leisure on the balcony; and at last it seemed to him that he had detected the error of his method. 'This,' he reflected, 'is an age of generous display: the age of the sandwich-man, of Griffiths, of Pears' legendary soap, and of Eno's fruit salt, which, by sheer brass and notoriety, and the most disgusting pictures I ever remember to have seen, has overlaid that comforter of my childhood, Lamplough's pyretic saline. Lamplough was genteel, Eno was omnipresent; Lamplough was trite, Eno original and abominably vulgar; and here have I, a man of ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... I say, I tell thee, that two oars be better than two reefs any day. Le'but the seas take charge o' one o' they boats running afore the wind.... All up! They spins like a top, an' gybes.... 'Tis all up! Howsbe-ever, they'm saafe now, if they don't sheer broadside coming ashore. But they won't learn their lesson; not they. They maakes fun o' us ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... I could have you for my own, what a delight it would be! My whole theory of training is so different,—you should never waste your energies in house-work, my darling, (Johnnie had been dusting the parlor); it is sheer waste, with an intelligence like yours lying fallow and only waiting for the master's hand. Would you come, Johnnie, if Papa consented? Inches Mills is a quiet place, but lovely. There are a few bright minds in the neighborhood; ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... of age ninety-nine hundredths of the "lighter" books seem to me mere rubbish. They come to me occasionally. However, there are younger ones here, so it isn't sheer waste to receive such donations: they soon get out of my room. Not, mind you, that I think this the least evidence of my being wiser, or employing my time more carefully than other folk. Only I want you to know what I am, and what ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and eight miles in length. Judge if I was astounded! But how should we feel it, when travelling on the lunar surface, we should suddenly find ourselves on the brink of a yawning chasm two miles wide, fifty miles long, and so fathomless in sheer vertical depth as to leave its black profundities absolutely invisible in spite of ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... in town that night, and, for sheer protection, she made Maudie Sinclair come and share her evening meal. The children were put to bed, and they sat down alone together, talking over the party. Maudie was pleased to relax a little of ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... fabrication of new discoveries. The first was the noted La Hontan, whose book, like his own, had a wide circulation and proved a great success. La Hontan had seen much, and portions of his story have a substantial value; but his account of his pretended voyage up the "Long River" is a sheer fabrication. His "Long River" corresponds in position with the St. Peter, but it corresponds in nothing else; and the populous nations whom he found on it, the Eokoros, the Esanapes, and the Gnacsitares, no less than their neighbors ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... below them. Arthur knelt down and bent over the sheer edge of the precipice. The great pine trees, dusky in the gathering shades of evening, stood like sentinels along the narrow banks confining the river. Presently the sun, red as a glowing coal, dipped behind a jagged mountain peak, ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... diagnosis and stuck to it; or else an ignorant weakling of alcoholic tendencies. It was shockingly bad luck to run against a cautious scientific practitioner like my learned friend. Then, of course, all this secrecy was sheer tomfoolery, exactly calculated to put a careful man on his guard; as it has actually done. If Mr. Weiss is really a criminal, he has mismanaged his ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... "Europa" to be carried to her destination; this vessel being the first to pass the newly-finished Swing Bridge, another outcome of the inventive genius of the head of the Elswick firm. The gun, which was the largest in the world at that time, was lowered into the "Europa" by the largest pair of "sheer-legs" in existence, and was lifted out again at Spezzia by the largest hydraulic crane of that day, and all these were the work of ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... the pond, the place seemed unpleasantly different from Myanos and where was the Indian camp? She did not dare to shout; indeed, she began to wish she were home again, but the sense of duty carried her fully fifty yards along the pond, and then she came to an impassable rock, a sheer bank that plainly said, "Stop!" Now she must go back or up the bank. Her Yankee pertinacity said, "Try first up the bank," and she began a long, toilsome ascent, that did not end until she came out on a high, open rock which, on its farther ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... or mountains, in ruined castles and abbeys, or ancient but still flourishing cathedrals, the same invariable love of pilfering and mutilating is to be found: some knock off a nose or a finger, others deface a frieze or a mullion from sheer love of havoc, others chip off some unmeaning fragment as a relique or object of curiosity; but the most general taste seems to be that of carving names or initials, and some of the ancient figures are completely tattooed with these barbarous engravings: this propensity I believe to be ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... in the Union; but he has no right, under the constitution nor under the war power, to appoint civil governors, permanent or provisional; and every act he has done in regard to reconstruction is sheer usurpation, and done without authority and without the slightest plea of necessity. His acts in this respect, even if wise and just in themselves, are inexcusable, because done by one who has no legal right to do them. Yet his usurpation is apparently ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... longed to get up and look at him, but she knew the impulse was a mere vent for her restlessness, and the fear of disturbing him restrained her.... The regular movement of his curtain reassured her, she knew not why; she remembered that he had wished her a cheerful good-night; and the sheer inability to endure her fears a moment longer made her put them from her with an effort of her whole sound tired body. She turned on her side ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... are who sing by dint of sheer force and ignorance, but their careers are necessarily short. The too common vulgar striving for power rather than for beauty or purity of tone induces unnatural effort and strain that both directly and sympathetically affect ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... it a business to teach new ideas and disclose chains of reasoning to people who turn pale at the first word. On my word of honor, it is pitiable! But that's the way of the world, and I don't pretend to reform it. Your objection, Monsieur, is really sheer nonsense." ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... of successful achievement is proportionately great. Linley Sambourne alone, who was originally trained as an engineer, has been able to grapple with the chimney-pot hat; Walker all but succeeded by the sheer ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Harris and Ike the Dropper several couples were one-stepping, each in their own sweet way. As the music became more lively their dancing came more and more to resemble some of the almost brutal Apache dances of Paris, in that the man seemed to exert sheer force and the woman agility in avoiding him. It was an entirely new phase of afternoon dancing, an entirely new "leisure class," this strange combination ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... hideous columns that was a nightmare, villas like smug Pharisees, shops again, a church in cheap Gothic, an old garden blasted and riven by the builder, these were the pictures of the way. When he got home again he flung himself on the bed, and lay there stupidly till sheer hunger roused him. He ate a hunch of bread and drank some water, and began to pace up and down the room, wondering whether there were no escape from despair. Writing seemed quite impossible, and hardly knowing what he did he opened his bureau and took out a book from ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... Baring, Bentley, Phillimore, Belloc and G.K.C.; "Mrs. Markham's History" written by Belloc; there was little of this quality in the other weeklies. Side by side with the serious attacks was a line of satire and of sheer fooling. The silver deal in India was being attacked in the editorials, while Mrs. Markham explained to Tommy how good, kind Lord Swaythling, really a Samuel, had lent money to his brother Mr. Montague ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... who is still in confinement, and the talk of the gossips, have a considerable resemblance to the broadest manner of Chaucer." This last remark Godwin at once qualifies. Whereas in Chaucer, he says, we have sheer natural humour, with no ulterior end, the The Satyr against Hypocrites "is an undisguised attack upon the National Religion, upon everything that was then visible in this country and metropolis under the name of Religion." In other words, it is in a vein of anti-Puritanism, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... greatly distressed on account of the removal of her sister, who was five years younger, to a hospital. On Monday afternoon a number of persons who had ascended the Saleve, 4299 feet high, by the funicular railway, were horrified to see a woman walk out on to a ledge overlooking a sheer precipice of three hundred feet, and, after carefully wrapping a shawl round her head and face jump into space. The woman was Mme. Simon, says the Times of India, and she was found on the cliffs below in a ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... whom they had seen several. His excuse for not making more haste to provide help was, that no one could tell the direction in which the runaways had gone, and that to search for them in the north, when the animals might have strayed south, was sheer silliness. ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... day, my friend." I returned directly to the old man and his son; and, let purity or motive go as it may, truth to tell, they were no losers by the priest's conduct; as I certainly slipped them a few additional shillings, out of sheer contempt for him. On tasting a little refreshment in one of the cabins, the son fainted—but on the whole they were enabled to accomplish their journey home; and the father's blessing was surely a sufficient antidote against ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... money you see here is no more yours nor it is mine! It belongs to the land it came from. Ay, ay, stamp away, and go red in the face: you must hear the truth, whether you like it or no. The place we're living in is going to rack and ruin out of sheer bad treatment. There's not a hedge on the estate; there isn't a gate that could be called a gate; the holes the people live in isn't good enough for badgers; there's no water for the mill at the cross-roads; and the Loch meadows is drowned with ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... monstrosity as he looked at it in the bright light of day. But now it was not alone. Beside it a white tower reared upward. Pure white and glistening in the sunshine, a bulging, uneven shaft rose a hundred feet sheer. It looked as solid as marble. Its purpose was unguessable. There was a huge, fan-shaped space where the vegetation about the rocket-ship was colored a vivid red. In air-photos, the rocket-ship would look remarkably like something ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Agnes, with her eyes on the man's face, and her hands clasped in sheer surprise, had sat down on a near couch. She could scarcely believe her ears. "Is this true?" she ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... road or down it, though that's bad enough, but sheer across it, sending the rain slanting down like the lines they used to rule in the copy-books at school, to make the boys slope well. For a moment it would die away, and the traveller would begin to delude himself ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... and from sheer force of habit passed the ends of his moustache slowly through his fingers. "I think the coal- dust would be enough," ...
— Sailor's Knots (Entire Collection) • W.W. Jacobs
... pointed to the front, and as if to a vantage-place. Dallas looked, and saw, at the end of sheer walls, an oblong opening of greyish light. She hailed it dumbly. There was where the coulee narrowed until a man, standing in its bed with arms outstretched, could place the tips of his fingers against either rocky wall. There a last stand ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... Mary Smith snatched her hand suddenly from mine and moved toward the edge of the cliff, crying out that we must continue our search. I climbed the orchard wall and looked along the shore. Here the cliff dropped away almost sheer, and the narrow strip of shingle at its base was lost in the surf. Farther to the north it widened a little with the curve of the shore, and through a swaying curtain of rain I could follow it to a point we called the Notch, near the entrance of the Cat's Mouth; ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... thing—to work, not with the natural easy absorption in a well-loved calling, but with faculties through sheer force of will concentrated on tasks set by others, in which he had no heart; to shut out of mind and heart, while he was working, all other facts of his life. It is a good thing ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... taxed the band-master, Bond, with the possibility of playing in the dark; for a moment his face was as long as Taylor's bassoon, but since then by means of surreptitious practice and, I fancy, the sheer confiscation of his bandsmen's folios, the impossible has been achieved. Every band is the best in France, but only ours can play in darkness. Thus, as the column swings past the pond and waiting cookers, the Band strikes up one of its best ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... of commerce are harmless compared with a bankruptcy of public morals. Should the Atlantic ocean break over our shores, and roll sheer across to the Pacific, sweeping every vestige of cultivation, and burying our wealth, it would be a mercy, compared to that ocean-deluge of dishonesty and crime, which, sweeping over the whole land, has spared our wealth ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... Neewa's neck. Miki, surmising that something momentous was about to happen, watched the proceedings with popping eyes. Then Challoner's fingers closed and the next instant he dragged Neewa forth and held him at arm's length, kicking and squirming, and setting up such a bawling that in sheer sympathy Miki raised his voice and joined in the agonized orgy of sound. Half a minute later Challoner had Neewa once more in the prison-sack, but this time he left the cub's head protruding, and drew in the mouth of the ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... through the crack, with every throb of its heart, the life-blood of the great hull of the world seemed beating out. Already it had scattered masses of gravel on all sides, and down the hill a river was shooting in sheer cataract, raving and tearing, and carrying stones and rocks with it like foam. Still and still it pulsed and rushed and ran, born, like another Xanthus, a river full-grown, from the heart of ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... young. So for a short week or two Catherine did her best to be young, and climbed the mountain grass, or forded the mountain streams with the energy and the grace of perfect health, trembling afterwards at night as she knelt by her window to think how much sheer pleasure the day had contained. Her life had always had the tension of a bent bow. It seemed to her once or twice during this fortnight as though something were suddenly relaxed in her, and she felt a swift Bunyan-like terror of backsliding, of falling away. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as if she wanted to cry from sheer vexation, for the getting ready to start had been trying on all of them. Then the humor of the situation appealed to her, and she exclaimed, as the solemn-eyed ...
— The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale • Laura Lee Hope
... strong passages in giving vent to her feelings of indignation and ambition. At this time we were still wondering where she could have obtained her education; it was not until later that we comprehended that her abilities represented sheer ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... Mid-Ocean Ridge Saint Helena: rugged, volcanic; small scattered plateaus and plains Ascension: surface covered by lava flows and cinder cones of 44 dormant volcanoes; ground rises to the east Tristan da Cunha: sheer cliffs line the coastline of the nearly circular island; the flanks of the central volcanic peak are deeply dissected; narrow coastal plain lies between The Peak and ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... watch them come out of the lower door of the long room, march through the hall, and enter the parlor at the other door. Oh, what a pretty crowd they were! The old Continental styles had not all gone out, but were toned down a little. There were pretty embroidered satin petticoats and sheer gowns falling away at the sides, with a train one had to tuck up under the belt when one really danced. Hair of all shades done high on the head with a comb of silver or brilliants, or tortoise shell so clear that you could see the ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... so often confounded by anti-Christians, and even by non-Christians; the much more important point of difference is not noted, viz. that belief in the one case is purely intellectual, while in the other it is chiefly moral. Qua purely intellectual, belief may indicate nothing but sheer credulity in absence of evidence; but where a moral basis is added, the case is clearly different; for even if it appears to be sheer credulity to an outsider, that may be because he does not take into account the additional evidence supplied ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... cried with a laugh, "Here's the mouse!" And with that he drew it forth from the inside pocket of his frock-coat, where he had shoved it unobserved, while the terrified company fancied he had swallowed it, and in sheer despair had soothed him by making him eat and drink all ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... the half-paralyzed tenor (who still stood with his mouth open) that his daughter was not at all well that evening, and ought not to have appeared at all. This Mrs. Von Brakhiem took up and repeated with endless variations. But the evidences of sheer mental distress on the part of Christine had been too clear, and countless were the whispered surmises of the ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... indeed masterly; which expression changed slightly as he stood there, the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it seemed, he yawned and ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... appears incapable of decision except by the complete overthrow of the one Power or the other. There was no complication of alliances nor any expectation of them. The Anglo-Japanese Treaty had isolated the struggle. If ever issue hung on the sheer fighting force of the two belligerents it would seem to have been this one. After the event we are inclined to attribute the result to the moral qualities and superior training and readiness of ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... most humane of all the avocations. It is to the professions what pastoral occupations are to the trades. Politics and religion both have something to do with institutions. A mechanical man can play a part in them not very well, but passably well. But the literary man is sheer humanity, with nothing to help him but his thoughtfulness and sensibility. He is the unfelled tree, not the timber framed into the ship of state or carved into ecclesiastic grace. He lives as Nature lives, putting on the splendor of green when the air is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... the disease germs and the doctors and the lawyers and the parsons and the restaurant chefs and the tradesmen and the servants and all the rest of the parasites and blackmailers. What are our terrors to theirs? Give me the power to kill them; and I'll spare them in sheer— ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... said the young man, feeling soothed and rested. Duncan Polite's face beamed; he did not answer, from sheer joy, but waited in silence for such words of wisdom as his pastor might be pleased to utter. John Egerton talked easily when his company was pleasant, and he was soon chatting away upon such topics as he considered ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... that shook her no, less than it stirred the emotions and the passions of her hearers. The princes of the royal blood came in succession to see her. King Louis Philippe himself was at last tempted by curiosity to be present. Gifts of money and jewels were showered on her, and through sheer natural genius rather than through artifice she was able to master a great audience and bend it ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... had served. The feeling was so strong, that the attempt was abandoned. "In the matter of sabres," said a grenadier, "I like only the edge." Violent and weak both together, in spite of his real merit and his genuine worth, often giving up wise resolutions out of sheer embarrassment, he nearly always failed in what he undertook; the outcries against the reformers were increased thereby; the faults of M. de St. Germain were put down ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... At dinner, Amaryllis, in sheer kindness of heart, shone with good humour, readiness of reply and flow of conversation. Randal, while he felt that she now and then forced the note, caught her motive, and responding, smoothed her way. ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... had now no choice but to advance and fight a battle for the recovery of their magazines, for, had they retired, the Apulians, who had already suffered terribly from the war, would, in sheer despair, have been forced to declare for Carthage, while it would have been extremely difficult to continue any longer the waiting tactics of Fabius, as they would now have been obliged to draw their provisions from a distance, while Hannibal could victual his army from the country behind ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... cottage and farm-house I steer'd, Took their money, and off with my budget I sheer'd; The road I explored out, without form or rule, Still asking the nearest to ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... recourse. Hence with tens of thousands it is literally a case of "steal or starve." I suppose that nine-tenths of the thefts and robberies, besides a large proposition of the other crimes committed in India, are prompted by sheer starvation, and until the cause be removed, it will be in vain to look for a diminution of the evil, multiply our police and ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... what strange thought floated across my brain. I repelled it at first as sheer madness; but remembering, within the field of my somewhat extended experience, certain facts that lent probability to that thought, I entertained it with a sort of cynical irony, and I was almost ready to admit it, as an odious but decisive denouement. The early ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... French held their fire until the leading boats were well within short musket-shot. Then they began so furiously that Wolfe, whose tall, lank figure was most conspicuous as he stood up in the stern-sheets, waved his cane to make the boats sheer off. ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... upon the wall. He lost many men in the attempt, but at last a breach was made, and at the head of many hundreds of desperate warriors he entered the city. He had depended upon Sweyn following him; and had the Danish king been content to obey, London might indeed have been taken by sheer strength. As it was, however, Olaf quickly found that he had made a fatal mistake. Vast crowds of armed citizens met him at the end of each narrow street and dealt the invaders such lusty blows, with their bills and swords and volleys of ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... Frank that he is a good soldier spoiled, and that it is a pity a man should settle down as a doctor who had made his way in life "by sheer pluck." ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... highest mountain in Great Britain, in SW. Inverness-shire, 4406 ft. high, and a sheer precipice on the NE. 1500 ft. high, and with an observatory on the summit supported by the Scottish ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the impression of some one filled with overwhelming, rapturous joy. There was a light in his eyes that told of dreams at length fulfilled, and hopes, long and wearily postponed, at last realised. He had filled that stiff, solemn room with a spirit of life and strength and sheer animal good health—it was even, as Clare afterwards privately confessed, a ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... myself an impenitent Shakesperian in this respect also. The constant or almost constant presence of that humour which ranges from the sarcastic quintessence of Iago, and the genial quintessence of Falstaff, through the fantasies of Feste and Edgar, down to the sheer nonsense which not unfrequently occurs, seems to me not only delightful in itself, but, as I have hinted already, one of the chief of those spells by which Shakespere has differentiated his work in the sense of universality from that of all ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... her strong, jewelled hand on her shoulder with a grasp like a vice. There was no hurry in her movement or in her air, but by sheer, slow strength she forced her head backward so that the terrified woman was ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sorry—not altogether sorry this has happened!" He moved slowly across the room, and laid a friendly palm on Vyse's shoulder. "In a queer illogical way it evens up things, as it were. I did you a shabby turn once, years ago—oh, out of sheer carelessness, of course—about that novel of yours I promised to give to Apthorn. If I had given it, it might not have made any difference—I'm not sure it wasn't too good for success—but anyhow, I ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... just below the Convent, and from sheer wantonness I was making my Waler plunge and curvet across the road as I tickled it with the loop ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... spite of our ferocious swoops at the water, upsetting us among a lot of rocks with the water boiling over them; this lot of rocks being however of the table-top kind, and not those precious, close-set pinnacles rising up sheer out of profound depths, between which you are so likely to get your canoe wedged in and split. We, up to our knees in water that nearly tears our legs off, push and shove the canoe free, and re-embarking return singing "So Sir" across the river, to have it out with ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... had a peculiar experience at 1 a.m. to-day, while asleep in his "crow's nest". He has taken up his quarters with us in Aberdeen Gully, and has a dugout about 15 feet above the path that winds the length of our Gully. This is almost sheer up and is reached by steps cut in the rock and sandbags. It was formed by levelling a natural recess, and had a galvanised iron roof. Sheer up from this again the rock rises another 70 or 80 feet to the mule track above. A packhorse with two heavy tanks lost its footing on its way up and fell ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... blame through the sheer ignorance of people, while envy and hatred bark and bite at its heels. A man's inability to heal, on the Principle of Christian Science, substantiates his ignorance of its Principle and practice, and incapacitates him for correct comment. This failure ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... for Mother. Her needles want such a chronic lot, you see.' Her face seemed full of stars; there was no puzzled expression in the eyes now. She looked beautiful. And the younger children stared in sheer amazement ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... were going to live in Paradise." In the case of women, ignorance has the further disadvantage that it deprives them of the knowledge necessary for intelligent sympathy with other women. The unsympathetic attitude of women towards women is often largely due to sheer ignorance of the facts of life. "Why," writes in a private letter a married lady who keenly realizes this, "are women brought up with such a profound ignorance of their own and especially other women's natures? They do not ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the soundless step of a murderer, crept down stairs and far out into the forest. Like one driven by an indwelling demon into the wilderness he walked swiftly with great strides away from his trouble. No, not away from it, for it surrounded him like the atmosphere. Sometimes he stopped from sheer exhaustion, and leaned heavily against a tree, while the perspiration stood on his brow in large drops. At one of these times there was a rustling among the thick leaves behind him, and Wanda stole timidly, yet with the fearless ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... Representative of Jesus Christ, who has said to her: "He that heareth you heareth Me; he that despiseth you despiseth Me." She is the Mistress of truth. It is the property of the human mind to embrace truth wherever it finds it. It would, therefore, be not only an act of irreverence, but of sheer folly, to disobey the voice of this ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... brought up in close companionship with men; had slept and ate with them for the first three or four years of his life. He had wrestled with the men cubs and had found in it nothing but sheer delight. Children and their caresses had been his one pleasure during the strenuous year ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... his best, at his grimmest, and, we must add, in his most incoherent mood. To make men think, to rouse men out of the slough of the conventional, the sensual, the mechanical, to make men feel, by sheer force of poetry, pathos, and humour, the religious mystery of life and the "wretchlessness of unclean living"—(as our Church article hath it)—nothing could be more trumpet-tongued than Sartor. The Gospel according to Teufelsdroeckh is, however, a somewhat ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... many were suffocated and crushed. The Comte and Comtesse de Vandieres owed their lives to the carriage. The horses that had trampled and crushed so many dying men were crushed and trampled to death in their turn by the human maelstrom which eddied from the bank. Sheer physical strength saved the major and the grenadier. They killed others in self-defence. That wild sea of human faces and living bodies, surging to and fro as by one impulse, left the bank of the Beresina clear for a few ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... and rocky islet among the Shetlands, 32 m. W. of Lerwick; its sandstone cliffs on the NW. are 1220 ft. in height, and rise sheer from the water; it is sparsely peopled; fishing is ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... was awaking to a sense of its powers, grasping with a splendid audacity at the mighty heritage whose full import was yet unrealised. The Elizabethans were, as a nation, triumphing in the first glow of exuberant and healthy youth: with the faults of youth as well as its virtues. Sheer delight in the exercise of physical energies, in perilous adventure for its own sake irrespective of ulterior ends, in the keen encounter of wit, in the bold fabric-building of imagination, characterised the Elizabethan as they characterised the Marathonomachoi two thousand years before; ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... ou le Festin de Pierre (1665). In Don Juan—whose valet Sganarelle is the faithful critic of his master—the dramatist presented one whose cynical incredulity and scorn of all religion are united with the most complete moral licence; but hypocrisy is the fashion of the day, and Don Juan in sheer effrontery will invest himself for an hour in the robe of a penitent. Atheist and libertine as he is, there is a certain glamour of reckless courage about the figure of his hero, recreated by Moliere ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... And yet hold silence, though I call her dear, Just as of old, save for the tearfulness Of the clenched eyes, and the soul's vast distress? Has she forgotten thus the old caress That made our breath a quickened atmosphere That failed nigh unto swooning with the sheer Delight? Mine arms clutch now this earthen heap Sodden with tears that flow on ceaselessly As autumn rains the long, long, long nights weep In memory of days that used to be,— Has she forgotten these? And in her sleep, Has she ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... craft, talent against talent, treason against treason—in all this Randal Leslie would have risen superior to Giulio di Peschiera. But what now crushed him was not the superior intellect,—it was the sheer brute power of audacity and nerve. Here stood the careless, unblushing villain, making light of his guilt, carrying it away from disgust itself, with resolute look and front erect. There stood the abler, subtler, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as a fundamental characteristic of human language that it includes two distinct elements: first, the purely acoustic element, represented by the sheer succession of sounds, and secondly the variety of meanings represented by various groups of sounds, meanings which seem to have nothing to do with the sounds as such. This state of language, where the sound-value of the word ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... talking together the three older members of the family party had established themselves in a shady arbour of the garden, close to the low parapet, whence one could look down the sheer precipice to the leaping stream and watch the dark swallows shooting through the shadow and the sunshine, or the yellow butterflies and moths fluttering from one resting-place to another, drawn irresistibly to the gleaming water, out of which their wet wings would never bear them up again to the ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... recent rains, but they were not too firmly fixed in their places, as a gap here and there showed. The adventurers agreed that it would be impossible to make their attempt from the inside of the fortress, owing to the strict watch maintained there, and since this decision implied a climb up the sheer crumbling wall-face from below, the help of a rope was very necessary. Since to lower one from above would have attracted attention, it was clear that it must in some way be raised from below, and the two friends had set their wits to work, with the result ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... in front of the tomb, the procession of mourners ranged themselves about it in a semi-circle. They stood with their backs to the edge of a cliff that rose sheer for sixty feet or more from the plain beneath, across which, but at a little distance from the foot of the precipice ran the road followed by the caravans of merchants in their journeys to and from the coast. Then, a hymn having ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... telling my readers who the friends were that made England a second home to us. If any one of them is disturbed by such reference as I have made to him or to her, I most sincerely apologize for the liberty I have taken. I am far more afraid that through sheer forgetfulness I have left unmentioned many to whom I was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... know," Rob had just managed to say in reply, when all of them were suddenly startled to hear a queer, rattling sound from behind that kept swiftly drawing nearer and nearer, until presently Tubby, in sheer alarm, dropped flat to ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... five to twenty inches from the water, according to the tide's phase, goes down under the water to an even table of coral running out many feet into the sea; and is impossible to step on it with bare feet. At the end of this table the reef goes down perpendicularly, a sheer precipice, into the unfathomable sea. No vessel can anchor here, and to make a landing was an exciting matter. The island was approached in small boats on the side sheltered from the wind, and here, with the luck which characterized ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... to my prescription," the doctor replied. "Drive that gypsy lassie out of the town before the soldiers reach it. She is firing the men to a red-heat through sheer devilry." ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... interval that the head hunters had paused to sever Number Twelve's head, Bulan had gained fifty yards upon them, and then, of a sudden, he came to a sheer wall rising straight across the narrow trail he had been following. Ahead there was no way—a cat could scarce have scaled that formidable barrier—but to the right he discerned what appeared to be a steep and winding pathway ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... service again! Only fifty people out, and it was a sheer waste of fuel and light. The sermon was one of the dullest I ever heard. I believe Mr. Jones is growing too old for our church. We need a young man, more up with the times. He is everlastingly harping on the necessity of ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... it is one of the ironies of the barbarous condition we are pleased to call civilisation, that so many rich men—thousands daily—are systematically toiling and moiling till they are unable to enjoy any pleasure which requires vigour of mind and attention, rendering themselves impotent, from sheer fatigue, to enjoy the delights which life gives generously to all those who fervently seek them. And what for? Largely for the sake of those pleasures which can be had only for money, but which can be enjoyed without ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... I had been obliged to; but I should have loved it none the better. Poor Bayard Taylor said a man could serve God and mammon both, but only by hating the mammon which he served from sheer necessity. Say I got my living by a certain craft, would that make the craft noble? 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians,' because we sell her images! Why should I desire to supply the confiding public with shoes, or sugar, or ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... if to buy. That was the reason that Sahib after Sahib, rolling along in a stage-carriage, would stop and open talk. Some would even descend from their vehicles and feel the horses' legs; asking inane questions, or, through sheer ignorance of the vernacular, grossly insulting ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... and her voice was not quite steady, "that I have not given my consent to this. You have simply wrenched it from me by the sheer force of—your personality. You have not altered my conviction by a hair's-breadth. What you have set your heart on is a piece of unjustifiable quixotism; and I have only one thing to beg of you now. Do nothing decisive till you have spoken ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... society as not dissimilar to that once occupied for a brief space in the London world by the clever fted Sterne. Yet the enthusiasm of the friend as biographer doubtless colors the case, forcing a parallel with Yorick by sheer necessity. Before 1768 Bode had published several translations from the English with rather dubious success, and the adaptability of the Sentimental Journey to German uses must have occurred to him, or have been suggested to him directly upon its very importation ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... it was all over Philadelphia that I had cleared out John Guy's the night before, sans merci. True, I am not seven feet high, but some men (like stories) expand enormously when inflated or mad; so my denial was attributed to sheer modesty. But I recognised in the Charles Leland a mysterious cousin of mine, who was really seven feet high, who had disappeared for many years, and of whom I ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... not Lady Byron's, which is perfectly simple. You know that she was buried in the same vault with her father, whose coffin and the box containing his heart were in perfect preservation. Scott's only grandson, too, is just dead of sheer debauchery. Strange! As if one generation paid in vice and folly for the genius of the past. By the way, are you not charmed at the Emperor's marriage? To restore to princes honest love and healthy preference, instead of the conventional intermarriages ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... such comet-like advance Lately on science, we may almost hope, Before we die of sheer decay, to learn Something about our infancy; when lived That great, original, broad-eyed, sunken race, Whose knowledge, like the sea-sustaining rocks, Hath formed the base of ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... down a certain way to the exquisite portico of the Ducal Palace and, entering, find the Gothic room where the duke's precious tapestries are hung. In this sympathetic atmosphere one may dream away hours in sheer joy of association with these shadowy hosts of the past, the relentless slayers in the battle scenes, relentless moralists in the religious subjects—for morality plays had a parallel in the morality ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... contests. Every Friday evening a party of billiard lovers—Hartford men—gathered and played, and told stories, and smoked, until the room was blue. Clemens never tired of the game. He could play all night. He would stay until the last man dropped from sheer weariness, and then go on knocking the ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... about me," said Alexey Alexeitch, frowning. "I know my business. If only my enemy intones the litany in the right key. He may . . . out of sheer ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... West. Into this place there came one day a circuit rider who fearlessly preached the Gospel in the face of opposition and outright hostility. This Methodist minister was utterly sincere, and Nelson saw what could be done by the sheer power of the spirit against the forces of evil. It surged over him that a man can hold the mastery over wrong, an inner conviction which at the same time was set aflame by a Communion Service held for the ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... not speed the one, and yet enjoy the other?" ... The present rises up, in its new-found richness, in its undisguised temptation. The joys which lure him become gigantic; the price of renunciation shrinks to nothing; and at last, the pent up passion breaks forth—that passion for life, for sheer life, which inspired his imagination as a boy, which nerved his ambition as a man; to which his late-found humanities have given voice and shape; which now gathers itself to a supreme utterance in the grasp of death. "The earthly existence now: ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... to his numerous escapes from the prison at Toulon, he was, as it will be remembered, a past master in the incredible art of crawling up without ladder or climbing-irons, by sheer muscular force, by leaning on the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his hips, and his knees, by helping himself on the rare projections of the stone, in the right angle of a wall, as high as the sixth story, if need ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... would not attack a writer or any other public man from sheer wilfulness, but it would probably have no difficulty in bringing down over-praised mediocrity to its proper level or in giving a helping hand to unrecognized talent. But unless its president were a man of unerring ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... to paint seemed to be the only way to be free. It gave me the excuse for coming here, for getting away a few hours a day. Now—well, just to be free seems enough. I don't suppose a man knows how a woman hungers for that—for just sheer, elemental freedom." ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... idiotic things out of sheer obstinacy; possibly they deceive even themselves, and act in good faith; but unfortunately, when the veil falls from before their eyes, they see but the profound abyss into which their folly had ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova • David Widger
... repeated objection that nobody would labor if he were not compelled to do so by sheer necessity, we heard enough of it before the emancipation of slaves in America, as well as before the emancipation of serfs in Russia; and we have had the opportunity of appreciating it at its just ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... remember the story of Gough and his diamond ring—I am determined not to let any diamond ring get between me and my audience. Writing should not get between the reader and the picture. I take a great joy in sheer lucidity, and if any sentence of mine does not at the very first sight express my meaning, I rewrite it. Obscurity of style indicates that the writer is not entirely master of what ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... a hair on my chin? Do you know why? Well, I'll tell you! You see I get mad easy as hell; and when there's nobody to pick on, I pull my hair until my temper passes. If I hadn't pulled my beard hair by hair, I'd have died a long time ago from sheer anger!" ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... of falling into love. Some slip in through means of themselves; to wit, from sheer vanity, being never so well pleased as when they are the objects of admiration. Some from sheer contradiction, and from the well-known tendency of extremes to meet. Some, for very idlesse; and some for very love. But in none of these modes had the boy Cupid made arrow-holes through the heart ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... commerce are harmless compared with a bankruptcy of public morals. Should the Atlantic ocean break over our shores, and roll sheer across to the Pacific, sweeping every vestige of cultivation, and burying our wealth, it would be a mercy, compared to that ocean-deluge of dishonesty and crime, which, sweeping over the whole land, has spared our wealth and taken our virtue. What are cornfields and vineyards, ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... child is coming. I do so hate writing letters. I wish all my friends would come and live in town. Charles has been telling me even it is better [than] two months that he ought to write to your brother. [It is not] my dislike to writing letters that prevents my [writing] to you, but sheer want of time, I assure you, because [I know] you care not how stupidly I write, so as you do but [hear at the] time ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... theory necessary. Remembering has to be a present occurrence in some way resembling, or related to, what is remembered. And it is difficult to find any ground, except a pragmatic one, for supposing that memory is not sheer delusion, if, as seems to be the case, there is not, apart from memory, any way of ascertaining that there really was a past occurrence having the required relation to our present remembering. What, if we followed ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... elaborate cakes and meats and fruits, intimidated Lucy even more than the dinner had done. The breach between it and any small housekeeping was more complete. She felt that she was eating like a school-girl; she devoured her toast dry, out of sheer inability to ask for butter; and, sitting for the most part isolated in the unpopular—that is to say, the Lady Driffield—quarter of the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... doctor pulled himself up short. Thrusting his hands into his pockets he took a nervous turn about the kitchen; then sharply he wheeled about. "My dear woman, let us talk no more about the money question. See here, I shall be glad to take that boy into my charge and take care of him for the sheer love of ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... swore an oath of sheer incredulous surprise, but checked himself at that and tried one ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... wide enough to admit the passage of a sleigh perhaps; the crumbling and dilapidated old houses, which seemed deserted, were connected overhead by a succession of wooden bridges, and those on my left were built into the solid rock, which rose sheer overhead. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... desired. The truth was as far off as ever, so he thought, and to those that came to him for wisdom he had nothing to teach. So, at the end of six years, despairing of finding that which he sought, he entered upon a great fast, and he pushed it to such an extreme that at length he fainted from sheer exhaustion and starvation. ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... importance for both good and evil. This mental and moral heredity, over-leaping all boundaries of blood and natural kinship, spreads light and good influence or an immoral contagion through the community. And thus, in sheer self-defence, society passes laws setting limits to the oppression of the poor and weak, lest, degraded and brutalized, they become breeding centres of physical and moral disease in the community. The positive lesson that the surest mode of self-defence is the elevation ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... conclusive. But, strange to say, here, as in so many other instances, this self-styled orthodoxy—more orthodox than the Bible itself—directly contradicts the very Scriptures which it professes to explain, and by sheer misrepresentation succeeds in producing a needless and deplorable collision between the statements of Scripture and those other mighty and certain truths which have been revealed to science and humanity as their ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... any civilized nation to permit the slaughter of the wild birds that protect its crops, its fruits and its forests from the insect hordes, is worse than folly. It is sheer orneryness and idiocy. People who are either so lazy or asinine as to permit the slaughter of their best friends deserve to have their crops destroyed and their forests ravaged. They deserve to pay twenty cents a pound for their ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... Darwinism, fairly bristling with assertions, which are boldly put forth as incontrovertible truths. In view of the author's demand to have at least his sincere love of truth recognized, we can but throw up our hands out of sheer astonishment. To illustrate Haeckel's "love of truth" let it suffice to observe that in the second chapter he asserts that man is not only a true vertebrate, a true mammal, etc.—which indeed is passable—but even a true ape (having "all the anatomical characteristics of true apes"). With a wonderful ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... writings, the uncertainty of their meaning, and the moral character of the persons regarded as messengers of God, whose teachings, precepts, and deeds in no wise correspond to their high mission. Jewish history is a "tissue of sheer follies, shameful deeds, deceptions, and cruelties, the chief motives of which were self-interest and lust for power." The New Testament is also the work of man; all talk of divine inspiration, an idle delusion, the resurrection ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... from others. The punishment fits the crime perfectly and being self-inflicted there is no injustice. It is true that many men possessed of great brain power play "second fiddle" to shallow-minded men of inferior wisdom from sheer lack of forcefulness on their own part. They lack the full quality of leadership while possessing all save one essential—courage. Fear abides in their hearts and spreads itself as a mantle of gloom over their super-sensitive souls until finally they struggle no more. Henceforth ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... less marked; the bows became somewhat sharper and were often made flaring above the water, and the square sprit-sail below the bowsprit was given up. American ship-builders had not yet learned to give their vessels much sheer, however, and in a majority of them the sheer line was almost straight from stem to stern; nor had they learned to divide the topsail into an upper and lower sail, and American vessels were distinguished by ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... boat a sheer in for the beach, to a little bight that made up in the land,—across the mouth of which we had to pull, in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... all good commanders of destroyers that their own craft is the fastest and most efficient of her class. At a pinch he could get thirty-two knots out of the Greyhound, and here was this quiet, determined-looking young man, who had created a vessel of his own, and had reached the rank of captain by sheer genius over the heads of men ten years older than himself, talking calmly of forty-five knots, and of the sinking of destroyers and cruisers, as though it was a mere matter of cracking egg-shells. Wherefore ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... the most stupendous spectacle in the most stupendous and public moment of the world, of sheer romanticism and sentimentality, of one single man with God and forty nations looking on, prinking his soul before the twisted mirror of ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... to your generation, Sir Patrick: some of you old stagers did marvels through sheer professional intuition and clinical experience; but when I think of the average men of your day, ignorantly bleeding and cupping and purging, and scattering germs over their patients from their clothes and instruments, and contrast all that with the scientific ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... his heels to Salt Water, or run a moose down with sheer grit," supplemented Bettles; "but he's the prove-the-rule exception. Look at his woman, Unga,—tip the scales at a hundred an' ten, clean meat an' nary ounce to spare. She'd bank grit 'gainst his for all there was in him, an' see him, an' go him better if it was ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... millions, finds it difficult to maintain herself in such matters, even when in the right, against the influence of England, what can little Geneva look for, in such a dispute with France, but to be put down by sheer volubility. She will be out-talked as a matter of course, clever as ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... all description or belief when our obstinacy strikes out against God. We know as well as we know anything, that in doing this and in not doing that we are going every day right in the teeth both of God's law and God's grace; and yet in the sheer obstinacy and perversity of our heart we still go on in what we know quite well to be the suicide of our souls. We are told by our minister to do this and not to do that; to begin to do this at this ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... no "plot." It is an attempt to present a happy, witty, simple-minded woman who attracted love because she gave it out. This is a very difficult type of book to write. The attention of the reader must be aroused and held by the sheer merit of the writing, and the publishers believe they have found in Catherine Cotton a writer with just the right gifts of wit, sympathy, ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... the Fish Patrol. He only waited to catch up on sleep lost while hammering out "Typhoon Off the Coast of Japan," before applying himself to new fiction. That was what was the matter with it: it was sheer fiction in place of the white-hot realism of the "true story" that had brought him distinction. This second venture he afterward termed "gush." It was promptly rejected by the editor of the Call. Lacking experience in such matters, Jack could not know why. And it did not ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... Majesty was the angel sent from heaven to restore Christendom. God knows how much I rejoiced, and although the sun burned fiercely when I returned to my home, how patiently I bore it! I was not sensitive to it from sheer joy at hearing such sweet words about my master from those who a year ago had maligned him. My chief comfort, however, was to behold that they were right; for it seems as if God were performing miracles by ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... past Gafsa and is nearly half a mile broad in some places, is rich in these worked flints which have been washed out of its steep banks by the floods. Walking here the other day with a miserable young Arab who, I verily believe, had attached himself to me out of sheer boredom (since he never asked for a sou), I observed, in the distance, a solitary individual, a European, pacing slowly along as though wrapped in meditation; every now and then he ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... and over down a sloping rock, ruining, on the way, any quantity of huckleberry bushes and pennyroyal. This started the cow, who made another furious charge at the soldier, who this time, by a well-directed blow, cut one horn sheer off. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... excitement. Mamoe recognized her gyratory equal in this giant, and often their bodies met in the ecstasy of their curveting. Landers, towering above her, and bigger in bone and muscle than she in sheer flesh, was like a figure from a Saturnalia. The call of the isles was ringing in his ears, and one had only to glance at him to hear Pan among the reeds, to be back in the glades where fauns and nymphs ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... probably, that her disapproval was useless and even disastrous, but there was an obstinate rectitude in her character that made it impossible for her to humour him. But Edith Stonehouse and Robert had played up out of sheer terror. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... indistinctness as a veil drawn over aching intensities of expression. "He knows...he knows..." she said to herself, and wondered whether the truth had been revealed to him by some corroborative fact or by the sheer force of divination. ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... must ask him of the lamp." "Even so," said Aladdin, "but thou canst take me to the palace, and set me down under my dear wife's window." He at once found himself in Africa, under the window of the Princess, and fell asleep out of sheer weariness. ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... castle and the lake, and shut out all the neighbourhood. Even if they had climbed to the loftiest known turret, they would have found it swathed in a garment of clinging vapour, affording no refreshment to the eye, and no hope to the heart. There was one lofty tower that rose sheer a hundred feet above the rest, and from which the fog could have been seen lying in a grey mass beneath; but that tower they had not yet discovered, nor another close beside it, the top of which was never seen, nor could be, for the highest clouds of heaven clustered ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... that fairies and gold dollars alone might have entered, and looked at its contents. By sheer good luck and chance, it contained three or four sovereigns—more than sufficient for the return journey. To-morrow morning she would go back to Powyss Place and tell Lady Helena; ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... picturesque village with many schooners and boats of different kinds drawn up on the beach and in every direction fish nets drying. Above and behind towered the ruined castle of Orgueil, rising more than three hundred feet sheer from the sea. ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... transports, torpedo boats, and submarines seek to enter the Gulf of Riga, but sheer off on perceiving the Russian fleet; three German transports are ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... her. With eagerness she embraced the thought of self-effacement. It did not seem to matter whether she were first with Hilary. Her spirit should so manifest its capacity for sacrifice that she would be first with him through sheer nobility. At this moment she could almost have taken that common little girl into her arms and kissed her. So would all disquiet end! Some harmonious messenger had fluttered to her for a second—the gold-winged bird of peace. In this sensuous exaltation her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... well your father can't bear to see you carrying your own satchel and basket to school. He ordered Martha to take them every morning and evening, but she says you will not let her carry them. It is just sheer obstinacy in you." ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... attacked by two American outlaws, while riding on the river bank. One of them seized the bridle of the horse, and the other attempted to drag her from the saddle. Turning upon the latter, she shot him dead, and the other, from sheer amazement at her daring, lost his self-possession and begged for mercy. After compelling him to give up his arms, she allowed him to depart unmolested, as there was no tribunal of justice near by where he could be punished for his villainy. These exploits gained for the borderer's ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... however, two more ships of the line, with another frigate, were perceived coming up fast to their assistance. This was too great odds, so near their own batteries, and our small squadron were obliged to sheer off, under a press of sail. The French pursued them, for some time, still keeping the advantage of sailing; but, fearful of following too far, by the time they were five leagues from Toulon, they were recalled, about ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... allow himself to forget his skill in the use of the hammer, and to the last he took pleasure in handling it, sometimes in the way of business, and often through sheer love of his art. Mr Nasmyth says, "It was one of my duties, while acting as assistant in his beautiful little workshop, to keep up a stock of handy bars of lead which he had placed on a shelf under his work-bench, which was of thick slate for the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... nothing can be more touching than to find on every hand this enthusiastic affection for the poet of the Seven Seas—a writer, too, who has not dealt over-tenderly with American susceptibilities, and has, by sheer force of genius, lived down a ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... and boldness of these granite cliffs, rising in places almost sheer to a height of more than seven hundred feet, with outlying reefs and insular rocks bristling black and jagged through the foaming waters, with gully, creek, and cave, worn by the action of rain and sea, there is a further wildness given to the island by a great ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... as the wave sank, and I felt once more free, and in sheer despair forced the boat lower down the tunnel; but this time, when the tide came in again, I had to lie right back, the boat rose so high, and I felt the dripping seaweed hanging from the roof weep coldly and slimily over my face; when, ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... the meagre advance of his position, first a mere apprentice, then an assistant, finally buoyed up by the advice of friends to study medicine and pharmacy, in the hope of being, some bright day, himself no less than the owner of a drug-store. Did Mr. Anstey know this, or was it the sheer adventure of genius, when he contrasted the qualities of the master into "Pill-Doctor Herdal," compounding "beautiful rainbow-colored powders that will give one a real grip on the world"? Ibsen, it is allowable to think, may sometimes ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... two reasons for the remotest possible permission of this glaring anomaly—this government of anti-reforming reformers—this hospital of sick guides for the healthy, supported by involuntary contributions: first, sheer necessity (which is ludicrous); and second, a facilitation of church reform through the Lords and the bench of Bishops; the desirableness of which facilitation appears to be in no proportion to the compromise ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... her dormitory marveled at the slightness of her body when they saw her in sheer negligee, or darting out wet from a shower-bath. She seemed then but half as large as they had supposed; a fragile child who must be cloaked with understanding kindness. "Psychic," the girls whispered, and "spiritual." Yet so radioactive were her nerves, so adventurous ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... of succeeding in unifying our population is more urgent. Therefore our future development, as a nation, becomes to a greater extent a process of conscious direction; what we have done naively and by sheer force of our powers of growth, we must do now, it is ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... is coming, Sim. Look yonder; how thick it hangs over the Gray Crag sheer ahead! We must push on, ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... to fly to Him with my body, but could not make up my mind to show myself naked. However, I was carried away by a force I could not control, I threw myself on my Saviour's neck, and felt that all was over between the world and me.' From that day, 'by sheer reasoning,' she has understood everything. Previously she thought that the religious life was a renunciation of the joys of marriage and enjoyment generally; now she understands its object. Jesus Christ desires that ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... degree greater than ever before, an appreciation of the necessity of work. This changed attitude is in part due to the policy recently pursued of reducing the amount of subsistence to the Indians, and thus forcing them, through sheer necessity, to work for a livelihood. The policy, though severe, is a useful one, but it is to be exercised only with judgment and with a full understanding of the conditions which exist in each community for which it is intended. On or near the Indian reservations there is ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... again in sheer misery. "I dunno, I'm sure, whatever made me take and do it. I've stood so much more from all of 'ee and never so much as opened my lips. I reckon 'twas the weather made ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... dream, and his mind struggled to remember where he was and what had happened; but one thing was not a dream: Dr. Leigh stood by his bedside, with her left hand on his brow and the right grasping his own right hand, as if to pull him back to life. He saw her face, and then he lost it again in sheer weariness at the effort. After a few moments, in a recurring wave of strength, he looked up again, still ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Jan we were overtaken by the missing member of our party. At this place there is considerable vine cultivation. Very soon afterwards we were suddenly upon the brow of a deep descent—sheer steep down to the plain of Battoof, and the prospect from that spot was amazing, not only beyond expectation, for we had not expected any remarkable scene to come in our way, but beyond ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... throws money away as if it were dust. The day on which he gave the thrashing with blows like falling leaves and flowing water, he dragged (lit. pull alive, drag dead) Ying Lien away more dead than alive, by sheer force, and no one, even up to this date, is aware whether she be among the dead or the living. This young Feng had a spell of empty happiness; for (not only) was his wish not fulfilled, but on the contrary ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... there was no rain falling. "I say it's unreasonable," said Mrs. Masters. "If she can't send a carriage she oughtn't to expect it." This coming from Mrs. Masters, whose great doctrine it was that young women ought not to be afraid of work, was so clearly the effect of sheer opposition that Mary disdained to answer it. Then she was accused of ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... question of relative probability, and can be obtained only by making the probability in favour of the reality of the phenomena so strong that the negative aspect is rendered logically unsound by the sheer weight ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... lot of biscuits for fourpence," said Priscilla, "if you go in for plain arrowroot. Of course they're rather dull, but then you get very few of the better sorts. Take macaroons, for instance. They're nearly a halfpenny each in Brannigan's. Sheer robbery, I call it." ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... the macadamized road which runs south from Tangier one seems to have embarked on a petrified ocean in a boat hardly equal to the adventure. Then, as one leaps and plunges over humps and ruts, down sheer banks into rivers, and up precipices into sand-pits, one gradually gains faith in one's conveyance and in one's spinal column; but both must be sound in every joint to resist the strain of the long miles to Arbaoua, the frontier post of ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... little. Now of this matter was Einar told, and deemed he that the King would not be the more prone to liberate the man because he, Einar, set store by him, so accordingly bade he his men arm themselves and in force to proceed to the mote, and then took Einar the man away by dint of sheer strength. ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... bush-high above the wall. And beyond these was the broad, slow-flowing river, with boats going to and fro upon its shimmering surface. The farther side of the river was walled like the walk, only the wall was a cliff, sheer and dark and timber-edged. And through this timber could be seen the roofs and chimneys of ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... be the position of the seventeenth in respect of letter-writing it is impossible for anything but sheer ignorance, hopeless want of critical discernment, or idle paradox to mistake, in the direction of belittlement, that of the eighteenth. By common consent of all opinion worth attention that century was, in the two European literatures which were equally free from crudity and ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... the summit. The party got away as soon as possible and reached the lip of the active crater in a few hours. Looking down they were unable to see the bottom, for it was full of steam: the sides sloped at a steep angle for some 500 feet, when they became sheer precipices: the opening appeared to be about 14,000 paces round. The top is mostly pumice, but there is also a lot of kenyte, much the same as at sea-level: the old crater was mostly kenyte, proving that this is the oldest ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... I." The man's tone was one of sheer amusement. "I had the pleasure of meeting him at the Rifle Club the other day. Someone introduced us. It was great fun. If there were a little more light, I would show you what he looked like. For some reason he wasn't pleased. Do you really want to go downstairs ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... already disappeared up the staircase, and Madame Vine was disappearing. Archibald lay on the soft carpet of the corridor, where madame had stood; for Joyce, in the act of taking him, had let him slip to the ground—let him fall from sheer terror. She held on to the balustrades, her face ghastly, her mouth open, her eyes fixed in horror—altogether an object to look upon. Archie gathered himself on his sturdy legs, ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... compete with them? For the independent miner, the only hope was the Big Strike, the single lode that could make him rich. He might work all his life without finding it, and then stumble upon it by sheer chance.... ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... across "the most villainous spot God ever made," which was Hindhead, and listens to him praising the bean fields and the turnips here, and the oaks and acacias there, cursing the Wen-devils and place-men and pensioners, the reptiles, toad-eaters and tax-eaters, and yet the sheer honesty and affection of the man shine from every page. There never was such a mixture of execration and the scent of bean-blossom. But Rural Rides remains a book of the library rather ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... tone, gross, leering, assured, half contemptuous, that made my blood boil. He had fairly got me on the raw, and the hammer beat violently in my forehead. I could have wept with sheer rage, and it took all my fortitude to keep my mouth shut. But I was determined not to add to ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... attests; but it may not be amiss to point to a conspicuous contemporary phenomenon which throws an interesting light on the matter. The Christian Scientists regard the ignoring of disease as the primary requisite for health and longevity. That the Christian Science doctrine is a sheer absurdity, no one can hold more emphatically than the present writer; but it cannot be denied that in thousands of cases its acceptance has been of physical benefit through its subjective effect upon the believer. Personally, I would not purchase any benefit to ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... who looks as most of my fair friends do look, to come down with her bright eyes and all her little panoply of graces upon an old fellow like me, and expect him to like a fashion merely because she looks well in it, is all sheer nonsense. Why, girls, if you wore rings in your noses, and bangles on your arms up to your elbows, if you tied your hair in a war-knot on the top of your heads like the Sioux Indians, you would still look pretty. The question ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... hand to get past a rude place; often both hands were needed to swing her over a watercourse or leap her down from a rock. She was agile and light of foot; she did what woman could; it was only by sheer necessity that she yielded the mortifying tacit confession to man's superior strength, and gave so often opportunity to a pair of good eyes to see what she was like near at hand. Wych Hazel's own eyes made few discoveries. She could ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... hundred years," says Johnston, "slaves in Barbados were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death, overworked, underfed, obliged from sheer lack of any clothing to expose their nudity to the jeers of the 'poor' whites."[133] And yet the owners of these slaves were English, of the same stock under which developed the mild patriarchal type of slavery of Virginia. The difference ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... which, commencing in 1739, ended in 1783, with our recognition of your right and power to be a free and independent people. Of those who fought against you I say nought. But I must speak of those who fought for you—who brought to naught, by sheer hard blows, that family compact of the House of Bourbon, which would have been as dangerous to you upon this side of the ocean as to us upon the other; who smote with a continual stroke the trans-Atlantic power of Spain, till they placed her once vast and ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... the box away with his foot, and the moment he did this I knew that my strength was not great enough to hold him; but I remembered that he had said I would not fail him, and I put all my grim vigour into my fibres and held by sheer will. Then the soul shouted to me to ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... But westward over glimmering holt and heath Cloud, wind, and light had made a heaven more fair Than ever dream or truth Showed earth in time's keen youth When men with angels communed unaware. Above the sun's head, now Veiled even to the ardent brow, Rose two sheer wings of sundering cloud, that were As a bird's poised for vehement flight, Full-fledged with plumes of tawny fire and hoar ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... actual suffering to see her young friend toiling for sheer mercenary ends, and squandering the precious years of his youth in writing novels that were frankly hack-work; and it hurt her also to see the condition of financial servitude in which his family kept him. While the father, Francois de Balzac, watched his son's efforts with indulgent irony, ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... at the junction of the Chateanguay with the Outarde, defended by a breastwork of logs and abattis. General Izzard, with a column three thousand five hundred strong, attempted to dislodge him. The Voltigeurs held the enemy well in check till they were in danger of being surrounded by sheer force of numbers. By a clever ruse, De Salaberry distributed his buglers widely through the woods in his rear, and ordered them to sound the charge. The enemy, thinking themselves assailed in force, everywhere gave way, and retreated precipitately from the field. Hampton ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... ours, the year before the war—one day we were in a delicious village near a cathedral town on the Belgian border. A piece of luck had fallen in our way, like a ripe apple tumbling off a tree. A rich Parisian and his wife came motoring along, and stopped out of sheer curiosity to look at a picture Brian was painting, under a white umbrella near the roadside. I was not with him. I think I must have been in the garden of our quaint old hotel by the canal side, writing letters—probably ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... believe I ought to beg your pardon for talking at you last night, though it was in sheer simplicity of heart, and I have been asking myself why it so happened. Faith and troth, it was because there was nobody else worth attacking, or who could converse. C. had wearied me before you entered. But be assured, when I find a man that has anything in him, I shall ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... the "new departure" of many a life has begun, the radial lines often curving downward into the sheer depths of ruin of the Morgue, or the darkened ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... of view, which has fashioned his life and controlled his thought, lending its characteristic mark and color to his whole philosophy and art and learning, is still maintained, partly because of its convenience, no doubt, and partly by force of inertia and sheer conservatism, in the very teeth of the strongest probabilities of biological science. Probably no other single hypothesis has less to recommend it, and yet no other so completely dominates the human mind." (Cassius J. Keyser, ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... that might fairly be compared to caves hollowed in the face of a cliff. The weight upon the lower stories and the substructure was therefore enormous, even to the point of threatening destruction by sheer pulverisation. The whole interior was composed of crude brick, and if, as is generally supposed, those bricks were put in place before the process of desiccation was complete, the shrinkage resulting from its continuance must have had a bad effect upon the structure as a whole, especially as ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... Prince Zaleski to me one day, when I happened to be on a visit to him in his darksome sanctuary—'Russia may be regarded as land surrounded by ocean; that is to say, she is an island. In the same way, it is sheer gross irrelevancy to speak of Britain as an island, unless indeed the word be understood as a mere modus loquendi arising out of a rather poor geographical pleasantry. Britain, in reality, is a small continent. Near her—a little ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
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