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More "Stark" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never dreamt of claiming plenary inspiration for the forty-seven. Nay, if you will have it, they now and again wrote stark nonsense. Remember that I used this very same word 'miracle' of Shakespeare, meaning again that the total Shakespeare quite outpasses my comprehension; yet Shakespeare, too, on occasion talks stark nonsense, or at any rate stark bombast. He never blotted a line—'I would he ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... math agut!' (Pretty well, thank you,) says the bear. The people were surprised to hear how plainly he spoke—but the mayor ordered him directly to be ripped up; and after some opposition, and a good deal of difficulty, Pat stepped forth stark naked out of the bear's-skin wherein he had been fourteen or fifteen days most cleverly stitched. The women made off—the men stood astonished—and the mayor ordered his keepers to be put in goal unless they satisfied him; but that was presently done. The bear afterwards ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... hundred yards outside Reninghelst where we stayed until the 28th. The weather remained hot and fine, except for two very heavy showers in the middle of one day, when most of the officers could be seen making furious efforts to dig drains round their bivouacs from inside, while the other ranks stood stark naked round the field and enjoyed the pleasures of a cold shower-bath. We spent our time training and providing working parties, one of which, consisting of 400 men under Capt. Jeffries, for work at Zillebeke, proved an even greater ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... feet in amazement and horror, and stood staring at the body of his master and friend lying stiff and stark beneath the yellow light of the hanging lamp. Then suddenly he sprang forward and kneeled again beside the pale noble head that looked so grand in death. He took one of the hands and chafed it, he listened for the beating of the heart ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... along the highroad, a tramcar went rocking by, doubtless bearing a few belated workers homeward. The stark incongruity of the thing was appalling. How little those weary toilers, hemmed about with the commonplace, suspected that almost within sight from the car windows, in a place of prosy benches, iron railings, and unromantic, flickering ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... and hotter yet, till at last we could scarcely breathe, and the perspiration poured out of us. Half an hour more, and though we were all now stark naked, we could hardly bear it. The place was like an antechamber of the infernal regions proper. I dipped my hand into the water and drew it out almost with a cry; it was nearly boiling. We consulted a little thermometer ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... saw where stark and cold he lay, Beneath the gallows-tree, And every one did point and say, ''Twas there he died ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... which the name Of fair Savitri, men would give,— And then he vanished in a flame. "Adieu, great god!" She took the soul, No bigger than the human thumb, And running swift, soon reached her goal, Where lay the body stark and dumb. ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... that Susanna Martin, upon a Causeless Disgust, had threatned him, about a certain Cow of his, That she should never do him any more Good: and it came to pass accordingly. For soon after the Cow was found stark dead on the dry Ground, without any Distemper to be discerned upon her. Upon which he was followed with a strange Death upon more of his Cattle, whereof he lost in one Spring to the Value of Thirty Pounds. But the said John Kembal had ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... Alix, what on earth are you saying? Are you stark, staring crazy? You come right upstairs and get into bed this minute. My land, I—I believe you're going to be sick. You've got the queerest look in your eyes. Come on, ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... STARK'S Experiments on Diet, p. 110, that "when he fed upon roasted goose, he was more vigorous both in body and mind ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... the cold hour of dawn, sat the poor girl, with rosy cheeks and with a smiling mouth, leaning against the wall—frozen to death on the last evening of the old year. Stiff and stark sat the child there with her matches, of which one bundle had been burnt. "She wanted to warm herself," people said: no one had the slightest suspicion of what beautiful things she had seen; no one even dreamed of the splendor in which, with her grandmother she had entered ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... stark ruin. This man had drawn into his hands every penny she possessed, and was utilizing it for the furtherance of his own nefarious business. She had an idea—vague as yet, but later taking definite shape—that if she might ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... ruins of the stable. His shelter had not escaped the fury of the battle. He could not run away, for they had tied him fast when they carried his old mother off. So now he lay amid that debris, his eyes half open in death and his legs stretched out stark ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... of the utility of knowledge, is its promoting the happiness of mankind."—Dr. Stark on Diet, ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... chance escaped from the guardians which the good Earl of Kent had put over him to take care of him in his lunacy, was found by some of Cordelia's train, wandering about the fields near Dover, in a pitiable condition, stark mad, and singing aloud to himself, with a crown upon his head which he had made of straw, and nettles, and other wild weeds that he had picked up in the corn-fields. By the advice of the physicians, Cordelia, though earnestly ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... for me, to look at; and one day, who should come in but Elliott, who was staying with his governor on the West Cliff, where the old gentleman has taken a house. Well, you know, I told you what a madcap fellow Poole is; and what should he do, but tell Elliott that I was going stark mad for a girl that couldn't have me because her dad had engaged her to somebody else; and then he shewed him the music that was lying on the table with your name on it. So you may guess how Elliott stared, and all the questions he asked me about ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... No mechanical contrivance has ever been designed that is comparable to the hand in flexibility, deftness, adaptability, or power of prehension. It can pick up a needle or a cannon-ball at will. Its touch is as light as a feather or as stark as a catapult. It can be as gentle as mercy or as harsh as battle. It can soothe to repose or rouse to fury. It can express itself in the gentle zephyr or in the devastating whirlwind. Its versatility is altogether worthy of notice, and we may well hold the lesson ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... bring. Stark-eyed the hero dies. Do you not know that thus for twenty years I've faced both ball and bullet!—for no prize But weal of France, my country? In man's ears, Yea and before God's all-beholding eyes, I swear I ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... necessary to reach the river. When I overtook the party I altered the course and at 3.20 p.m. reached a creek that probably drains a great deal of back country. As there was water in its channel we encamped. The creek I named Stark Creek. Before we reached here we crossed two other creeks; the first I named Salton Creek and other Isabella Creek. The country we passed over from our last camp consists chiefly of high and wooded downs, and though the soil was rich the grass and saltbush, from the want of rain, ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... people, foremost one who swung An earthen bowl with lighted coals, behind The kinsmen shorn, with mourning marks, ungirt, Crying aloud, "O Rama, Rama, hear! Call upon Rama, brothers"; next the bier, Knit of four poles with bamboos interlaced, Whereon lay, stark and stiff, feet foremost, lean, Chapfallen, sightless, hollow-flanked, a-grin, Sprinkled with red and yellow dust—the Dead, Whom at the four-went ways they turned head first, And crying "Rama, Rama!" carried ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... into the recesses of man's natural appetites will never be surpassed. How under the glance of his Norman anger, all manner of pretty subterfuges fade away; and "the real thing" stands out, as Nature and the Earth know it—"stark, bleak, terrible and lovely." His subjects may not wander very far from the basic situations. He does not deal in spiritual subtleties. But when he ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... master's heart, The Douglas, stark and grim; And woe is me I should be here, Not side by side ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... creepy dark, Have told of arrows, cloth-yard long, Whistling before them clean and strong, Of Huns that got them, pierced and stark; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 30, 1917 • Various
... from which he had suffered, he peered at this apparition, a mystic figure in the aura of the fog—the shade of Frank Vaniman, so his frantic belief insisted—and leaped up, screaming like a man who had gone stark, staring mad. ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... brothers follow on the trail we blaze. Where howled the wolf and ached the naked plain Spring bounteous harvests at our brothers' hands; In place of war's alarums, peaceful days; Above the warrior's grave the golden grain Turns deserts grim and stark to laughing lands. ...
— The Acorn-Planter - A California Forest Play (1916) • Jack London
... it was time to lead his family to the orange orchard. One day they flamed and rioted up and down the shining river, raced over the corn field, and tilted on the sumac. The next, a black frost had stripped its antlered limbs. Stark and deserted it stood, ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... desire faded; and even during the day, indoors, he shrugged desire aside. It was night that he dreaded—the long hours, lying there tense, stark-eyed, sickened with desire. ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... one corner lay a child sleeping. On the bed, covered with a dingy sheet, lay the stark form out of which the miserable ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... for which he was peculiarly fitted. It would be difficult to say whether Fulc Nerra, the founder of the dynasty, or Black Angers, the home of the race, was more vividly present to him. Grim piles of masonry, stark force of character, alike compelled his admiration and he could make them live again in print. As it proved, his life was too short to realize this ambition and he has only left fragments of what he had to tell, though we are fortunate in having other books on parts of the subject ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... opportunity of seeing some of these at Bhopal, and the following is the picturesque description that he gives of them: "I remarked some groups of religious mendicants of a frightfully sinister character. They were Jogins, who, stark naked and with dishevelled hair, were walking about, shouting, and dancing a sort of weird dance. In the midst of their contortions they brandished long, sharp poniards, of a special form, provided with steel chains. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... by flitter—Asaki, one of his Hunter pilots, and the three from the Queen—lifting over the rim of mountains behind the fortress-palace and speeding north with the rising sun a flaming ball to the east. Below, the country was stark—rocks and peaks, deep purple shadows marking the veins of crevices. But that was swiftly behind and they were over a sea of greens, many shades of green, with yellow, blue, even red cutting into the general verdant carpet of treetops. Another chain of heights and ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... lorry had gone into the mud at the side of the road and was being dug out. A horse neatly disembowelled lay on its back in the road, its four stark legs pointed upward. ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Unyoro people and the tribes we had hitherto seen was most striking. On the north side of the river the natives were either stark naked or wore a mere apology for clothing in the shape of a skin slung across their shoulders. The river appeared to be the limit of utter savagedom, and the people of Unyoro considered the indecency of nakedness precisely in the same ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... FLORIO sent (to cool His flame for BIANCAFIORE) to school, Where pedant made his pathic bum For her sake suffer martyrdom? Did not a certain lady whip 885 Of late her husband's own Lordship? And though a grandee of the House, Claw'd him with fundamental blows Ty'd him stark naked to a bed-post, And firk'd his hide, as if sh' had rid post 890 And after, in the sessions-court, Where whipping's judg'd, had honour for't? This swear you will perform, and then I'll set you from th' inchanted den, And ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... thriller. It was full of hair-breadth escapes and tragic scenes. There was a shipwreck in it, and passengers were brought ashore in the breeches buoy, just as she had seen sailors brought in on practice days over at the Race Point Lifesaving station. And there was a still form stretched out stark and dripping under a piece of tarpaulin, and a girl with long fair hair streaming wildly over her shoulders knelt beside it wringing ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... was overheard by another madman, who was in an opposite cell; and raising himself up from an old mat, whereon he had thrown himself stark naked, he demanded aloud, who it was that was going away recovered ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... thirty thousand men were we to force the Jumna fords — The hawk-winged horse of Damajee, mailed squadrons of the Bhao, Stark levies of the southern hills, the Deccan's sharpest swords, And he the harlot's traitor son ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... our peoples melt In covert to abide; Now, crouched and still, to cave and hill Our Jungle Barons glide. Now, stark and plain, Man's oxen strain, That draw the new-yoked plough; Now, stripped and dread, the dawn is red Above ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... case; but the truth is, I see nothing that can be done for the Daltons. To talk of putting a family, in such a state as they are now in, back again, upon such a farm, is stark nonsense—without stock or capital of any ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... could possibly secure arms and ammunition with which to equip the army of Albert Sidney Johnston, these gunboats were steaming down the Ohio and Mississippi bearing thousands of troops armed, drilled and led by stark, game-fighting generals from ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... across to the barn where it lay, stark and lifeless in the shade in which it had taken refuge ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... a delay and an anxious inquiry from above: 'What's the matter?' 'Haul away,' is the response, and the bucket comes heavy this time. Oh, it's only a man, stark naked, fainting, with a rope beneath his arms, and head away to one side. 'Hospital case, overcome, haul away,' and another bucket ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... troubled, for he felt that he had been the unwilling cause of the young wife's unhappiness, although entirely innocent of any wrong intention. So when Mrs. Robards had fully determined to undertake the journey to Natchez, accompanied only by Colonel Stark and his family, he offered to go with them as an additional protection against the Indians who were then especially active, and his escort was very gladly accepted. The trip was made in safety, and after seeing the lady ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... ridiculous fashion, as if he were a blacksmith's fire, and then squeezing out a single drop of essence of pepper, vinegar, or beef-tea from a glass syringe upon the dry surface, not unnaturally arrive at the conclusion that master has gone stark mad, and that, in their private opinion, it's the microscope and the skeleton as ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... unheard, for the grave-digger was looking at the stark body rolled in a soiled blanket now lying face downward in ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... we went to work in a new place, a place where some time previously a fire had swept through a strip of the woods, killing the trees, but leaving them standing, stark and bare, but still sound as nuts—just the thing we wanted. Our chief difficulty this time was in getting the felled timbers out from amidst their fellows—for the dead trees were very thick and the mountain-side ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... and each man his boat, ffor they are that makes the least boats. The company that we had filled above 360 boats. There weare boats that caryed seaven men, and the least two. It was a pleasur to see that imbarquing, ffor all the yong women went in stark naked, their hairs hanging down, yett it is not their coustoms to doe soe. I thought it their shame, but contrary they thinke it excellent & old custome good. They sing a loud and sweetly. They stood in their boats, and remained in that posture halfe a day, to ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... sides, and as the squadron swept by the men showered on the poor dead body remarks expressive of their contempt. Corporal Glazier was an exception. Moved by an impulse born of our common humanity, he returned and buried the cold, stark corpse, covering it with mother Earth; and when questioned why he gave such consideration to a miserable dead rebel, replied, that he thought any man brave enough to die for a principle, should be respected for that bravery, whether his cause were ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... up his bright shining sword, cleared of its ten years' rust, and struck him so strong a blow that his head was cleft asunder, and he fell stark dead to the ground. Thereupon Peter Unticare went in and told the rest how it was with the keeper, and at once they came forth, and with their weapons ran him through and cut off his head, so that no man should know who ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... go drawing on down or cliff Let no soft curves intrude Of a woman's silhouette, But show the escarpments stark and stiff As in utter solitude; So shall you ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... devour the grass That grows on graves, and gnaw the bare bones down Which wolves have left! Stark-naked may she pass, Chased by the ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... Bureau county, laid about sixty rods of two-inch tile up a slight depression in his corn-field, discharging the same under a box culvert in the public road. This depression continued into a pasture field of Mr. J. H. Mellor, of Stark county, about eighteen rods to a running stream. Mr. Mellor sued Mr. Pilgrim for trespass, and the case was twice tried successively in the circuit courts of Stark and Bureau counties. The juries each time decided for Mr. Pilgrim, but the Appellate court each time reversed the ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... absorb it, or at least give a background to shadow over its likelihood, the scenery and atmosphere to lend an evanescent credibility, changing it in time to a mere legend, a tale told out of the hazy distance. But in America it obtrudes; it stares eternally on in all its stark unforgetfulness, absorbing its background, constantly rescuing itself from legend by turning guesswork and theory into facts, till it appears bare, irremediable, and complete,—witnessed at high noon, and in New Jersey of all places, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... nothing to measure it; for his vibration had already changed—as just by the effect of its intensity. Shut up there, at bay, defiant, and with the prodigy of the thing palpably proveably done, thus giving notice like some stark signboard—under that accession of accent the situation itself had turned; and Brydon at last remarkably made up his mind on what ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... yards from the shed, Sunbeam shied violently. Looking to one side, she beheld in the shadow of a mass of scrub-oaks the body of a horse lying stark and still. Close beside the head was a dark spot in ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... hurried to the door. The unfortunate man had shot himself dead! The next morning what should come rolling out of the lottery wheel but his numbers—16, 42, 51—a prize of twenty thousand dollars! Tricked by fortune, the man lay cold and stark at the Morgue. ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... discovering the north pole, or about the President's message when the dog had a rat cornered under the corn-crib and was barking like mad. But, then, parents can't see things in their right relations and proportions. And there sat mother, too, darning stockings, and the dog just stark crazy about that rat. 'Tis enough to make a boy lose faith in parents forevermore. A dog, a rat, and a boy—there's a combination that recks not of the fall of empires or the tottering of thrones. Even chicken-noodles must take ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... my care of her. Heaven and earth should not restrain me,—no, they should not,——But her least frown should still me, tame me, and make me a calm coward: say this, say all, say any thing to charm her rage and tears. Oh I am mad, stark-mad, and ready to run on business I die to think her guilty of: tell her how it would grieve her to see me torn and mangled; to see that hair she loves ruffled and diminish'd by rage, violated by ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... housings bright are trailed amid their gore; Dark blood is on their manes and sides, all deeply clotted o'er; All vainly now the spur would strike these cold and rounded flanks, To wake them to their wonted speed amid the rapid ranks: Here the bold riders red and stark upon the sands lie down, Who in their friendly shadows slept throughout the halt at noon. Oh, Allah! who will give me back my terrible array? See where it straggles 'long the fields for leagues on leagues away, Like riches from ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... were ordered into the "brig," a jail-house between two guns on the main-deck, where prisoners are kept. Here they laid for some time, stretched out stark and stiff, with their arms folded over their breasts, like so many effigies of the Black Prince on his monument ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... ruffled into low foothills. Although he laid a zigzag course as his searchlight brought cactus clumps and thorn bushes into view, in the main he succeeded in dodging obstacles, and yet held to a fairly direct route. A mound of rocks, stark and almost shapeless in the gloom, guided him like a fingerboard; or a flat-topped hill, or a peculiar-shaped valley between two uplifts, set him on the right track. Mile by mile the black mountains came closer, and then Clancy himself began to pick up a ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... viel Leute schon gegeben, die waren stark in dem Bestreben, Durch Bcherschreiben zu bereiten sich gut Gercht fr alle Zeiten; Und darauf auch gerichtet war ihr starkes Sehnen immerdar, Dass man in Bchern es erzhlte, wie ihnen Tatenlust nicht fehlte. Dazu verlangte ihre Ehre, dass auch ihr Scharfsinn sichtbar wre, 5 So wie ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... and striding over the dead bodies, in silence, and with apparent unconcern; with troops of the sans-culottes running about, covered with blood, and carrying, at the end of their bayonets, rags of the clothes which they had torn from the bodies of the dead Swiss, who were left stark ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... of another autumn swirled through the masonry-lined canons of the metropolis and sighed among the stark trees of its deserted parks. They caught up the tinted leaves that dropped from quivering branches and tossed them high, as Fate wantons with human hopes before she blows her icy breath upon them. They shrieked among the naked spars of the Cossack, drifting with her restless master far out upon ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... independent thinking. Why, Jane, the only reason I had the supper at the Savoy was so that I could drive you home. I didn't see how I was ever going to get hold of you alone. You and Tuppence have been sticking together like Siamese twins. I guess another day of it would have driven me and Beresford stark staring mad!" ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... o'clock—only another hour of daylight, and then! What would happen if no help came within the next hour? Would they have to spend the night together—Norah and she? Out in that lonely path? Would they be found lying cold and stark when at last the searchers came with ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... theories in the world, can for a moment be set in the balance against rigid exactness, even if some of the concomitants of rigid exactness are such as to spoil the subject for popular treatment. The truth, the stark naked truth, the truth without so much as a loin-cloth on, should surely be the investigator's sole aim when, having discovered a new set of facts, he undertakes to present them to the consideration of the ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... at his goggles with nervous hands from which he had forgotten to remove his gloves. "You've got to put a stop to this sort of thing. It can't go on. She must be crazy,—stark, raving crazy. You must not let ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... against excess; made himself for the most part a reasonable and sufficiently agreeable companion; and had no higher tastes, unless a collection of coins, well mounted and arranged and at times added to, may claim that title. He therefore considered Haviland stark mad in spending so much money and brains upon nonsense; and the subject made him testy when he reviewed his refusal to accept some arrangement by which they could share the local political ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... conferring many people had entered the room, although none had purchased the wares. Now there was stark silence and a concentrated fire of attention as Mrs. Black entered with a strange young woman. Mrs. Black looked doubtfully important. She, as a matter of fact, was far from sure of her wisdom in the course she was taking. She was even a little pale, and her lips moved nervously as she introduced ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... tells his story like an old man, past political service, bragging to his sons on winter evenings of the part he took in public transactions when "his old cap was new." Full of scandal, which all true history is. No palliatives; but all the stark wickedness that actually gives the momentum to national actors. Quite the prattle of age and outlived importance. Truth and sincerity staring out upon you perpetually in alto relievo. Himself a party man, he makes you a party man. None of the ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... mad—stark ravin' crazy," he snorts, returning to command. "She says there's a bad blow-out ahead and wants me to pull over to Greenland. I'll see her pithed first! We wasted half an hour fussing over that dead duck down under, and now I'm expected to go rubbin' my back ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... that accompanied Colonel Monckton to the River St. John included several New England companies of Rangers under captains McCurdy, Brewer, Goreham and Stark, a detachment of artillery, the 2nd battalion of the Royal American Regiment[38] and the 35th regiment of light infantry. The troops embarked on board the transport ships "Isabella," "Wade," "Alexander the Second," "Viscount ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... doorway, stood the tardy bride, a figure as white and stark as pagan stone, and a look on her face like the awful, tranquil look of a sleep-walker. Neither did she pay any heed to us, but over our heads she met the eyes of the bridegroom. So for a long breath they confronted each other, steadily. Then ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... content.—So the physicians are let to work, who pinched him with pincers in the fleshy parts of his body, and twisted a bow-string about his head with great force, but no sign of life appearing in him, the physicians pronounced him stark dead, and then there was no more delay to be made; yet Mr. Welch begged of them once more, that they would but step into the next room for an hour or two, and leave him with the dead youth; and this they ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... his shoulders came brusquely in contact with one of them, which happened to be unfastened, and it swung open, revealing to his gaze two stark-white white boys, one of them holding an enormous pistol and both staring at him in stupor of ultimate horror. For, to the glassy eyes of Penrod and Sam, the stratagem of the young coloured man, thus dropping to earth, disclosed, with ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... around, not that his memory was at fault, but because he was perpetually dumbfounded by her genius. Originally, this living-room had been a dolorous cave with varnished yellow-pine woodwork, gas-logs, yellow wall-paper to induce toothache, and a stark chandelier with two anemic legs kicking out at vacancy. She had caused the Orpheum electrician to remove the chandelier; with her own hands, she had painted the woodwork a deep, rich cream-colour; she had ripped out the gas-logs and found what no one had ever suspected—a practicable ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... The very persons who talk so glibly about the "fluidity" and "evasiveness" of life are persons in whose own flesh the wedge-like granite of fate has lodged itself with crushing finality. Life has indeed been too rigid and too stark for them; and in place of seizing it in an embrace as formidable as its own, they go aside muttering, "life is evasive; life is fluid; life ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... as anthropologists knew from sad experience. Suppose a traveler came to a camp where he saw thousands of men and women dancing round the image of a young bull. Suppose that the dancers were all stark naked, that after a time they began to fight, and that at the end of their orgies there were three thousand corpses lying about weltering in their blood. Would not a casual traveler have described such savages as worse than the negroes ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... however, some checks to this downward tendency. We have seen that the intemperate suffer from a high rate of mortality, and the extremely profligate leave few offspring. The poorest classes crowd into towns, and it has been proved by Dr. Stark from the statistics of ten years in Scotland (21. 'Tenth Annual Report of Births, Deaths, etc., in Scotland,' 1867, p. xxix.), that at all ages the death-rate is higher in towns than in rural districts, "and during the first five years of life the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... all here! Time and the sword have thinned your ranks. Prescott, Putnam, Stark, Brooks, Read, Pomeroy, Bridge! our eyes seek for you in vain amid this broken band. You are gathered to your fathers, and live only to your country in her grateful remembrance and your own bright example. But let us not too much ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... stood the Rydal bard—his face was full of woe. 'Now there thou liest, stiff and stark, who never feared a foe: A braver knight, or more renowned in tourney and in hall, Ne'er brought the upper gallery down ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... showers—tell me if for an instant, when to hesitate for an instant was to be lost, the 'aliens' blenched.... On the field of Waterloo the blood of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland flowed in the same stream and drenched the same field. When the chill morning dawned their dead lay cold and stark together; in the same deep pit their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from heaven upon this union in the grave. Partakers in every peril, in the glory shall we not be permitted ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... and hid themselves all night in the rushes. In the morning they took heart, emerged from their hiding-places, descended to Quebec, and went thence to Tadousac, whither Champlain accompanied them. Here the squaws, stark naked, swam out to the canoes to receive the heads of the dead Iroquois, and, hanging them from their necks, danced in triumph along the shore. One of the heads and a pair of arms were then bestowed on Champiain,—touching ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... there rode the disc of a full moon, but it was a moon weirdly different from any that Dixon had ever seen before. This moon was a deep and baleful green; was glowing with a stark malignant fire like that which lurks in the blazing heart of a giant emerald! Bathed in the glow of the intense green rays, the desolate mountain landscape shone with a new and ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... me. I've never known before what it was to be terrified. But when I saw today beginning to end, and to-night getting nearer and nearer ... I felt my finger-tips getting cold. And I knew it was fright ... stark fright. I'm not a fool, and I'm not hysterical ... but I've been sitting in my room looking at myself in the glass, trying to control myself, telling myself what are real things ... and what aren't. I don't know any longer. The day's over. The forest's all round us. Anything may happen.... ...
— Night Must Fall • Williams, Emlyn
... that he had not only been delirious, but stark staring mad, and expressed a very earnest hope that, now he had got his senses hauled taut again, he'd belay them an' make all fast for, if he didn't, it was his, Disco's opinion, that another breeze o' the same kind would blow ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... I had one power—one weapon, still left to me unimpaired: to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God! And the proposition is just this: whether to be stark honest, even against the apparent interests of the very cause you are out to plead, is not in the long run the surest way—if it be of God— to help it make good: whether defeat, with the whole truth told, isn't better than defeat hidden away and disowned, in the hope that something may ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... not that gaunt Professor Noting his man; that stark Assessor Of faulty play in the bat's possessor Clapped for his foeman, We who had seen that figure splendid Guarding the stumps so well defended Wept and cheered when by craft was ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... body, saw a few drops of blood ooze from the wound, held his hand in front of Lorenzi's mouth—but the breath was stilled. A cold shiver passed through Casanova's frame. He rose and put on his cloak. Then, returning to the body, he glanced at the fallen youth, lying stark on the turf in incomparable beauty. The silence was broken by a soft rustling, as the morning breeze stirred ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... and the short of it is,' Mr. Nixon said at last, 'she's gone stark, staring mad, and we had to ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... a little unreasonable! Indeed, my dear friend, I do not think you a little unreasonable, but very nearly stark mad. What! quarrel with your mistress because she is not sorry that your wife is ill, and because she cannot sympathize in your grief for the loss of your son! Where, except perhaps in absurd novels, did you ever meet with ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... [to [4]] my Mistresss Toilet this Morning, for I am admitted when her Face is stark naked: She frowned, and cryed Pish when I said a thing that I stole; and I will be judged by you whether it was not very pretty. Madam, said I, you [shall [5]] forbear that Part of your Dress; it may be well in others, but ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... that he was intently painting a picture of the corpse of a beautiful young lady—terribly oppressed by nervousness, and a fretful sense of incapacity most injurious to the success of his labours—when suddenly, O horror! he beheld the body move, then rise, in a frightful and unnatural manner, stark upright, and with opened lips, but rigidly-clenched teeth, utter shriek upon shriek as it waved its white arms, and tore its streaming hair; then, that his landlady, Mrs Farrell, came up to him, as he crouched weeping and trembling by, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... has been found almost abundant. On one occasion, during a three mile drive from town, six males were seen and heard singing along the roadside. Mr. H. K. Coale says that he saw a mocking bird in Stark county, Indiana, sixty miles southeast of Chicago, January 1, 1884; that Mr. Green Smith had met with it at Kensington Station, Illinois, and that several have been observed in the parks and door-yards ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... violent death of the rider in evidence. The locality offered no other suggestion, and it was but a brief interval before the way would be retraced by the awe-stricken observer, noting with a deep interest impossible hitherto all the environment: the stark chimney of the vanished house, monumental in the weed-grown waste; the dripping forest; the roof of the barn, sleek and shining, and with rain pouring down the slant of its clapboards and splashing from its eaves; the groups of horses hitched to ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... how nearly he had forever ended Girty's brutal career brought before Joe's mind the scene of the fight. He saw again Buzzard Jim's face, revolting, unlike anything human. There stretched Silvertip's dark figure, lying still and stark, and there was Kate's white form in its winding, crimson wreath of blood. Hauntingly her face returned, sad, ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... beaux, are strangely constituted; and so it needed only this—the sudden stark brute jealousy of one male animal for another. That was the clumsy hand which now unlocked the dyke; and like a flood, tall and resistless, came the recollection of their far-off past and of its least dear trifle, of all the aspirations and absurdities and splendors of their common youth, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... to do the like, which he quickly complied with, and made signs that it was very good for him. I kept there with him all night; but, as soon as it was day, I beckoned to him to come with me, and let him know I would give him some clothes; at which he seemed very glad, for he was stark naked. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of settling a difference of opinion with the six-gun had long fallen into disuse, but Saguache was still close enough to the stark primeval emotions to wait with a keen interest for the crack of the revolver that would put a period to the quarrel between Soapy Stone and young Flandrau. It was known that Curly had refused to leave town, just as it was known that Stone and that other prison bird Blackwell were hanging about ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... limitations of an incarnate life; if we consider the manifest potencies of the power that He has brought into operation in the present Christian life; and if we consider, side by side with these, the stark, staring contradictions and as manifest inevitable limitations of the effects of that power, His calling carries in its depths the assurance that what He means shall be done, that Jesus Christ has not died in vain, that He has not ascended to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... saddest fate of all To live beyond my greater self; to see My faculties decaying, as the tree Stands stark and helpless while its green leaves fall. Let me hear rather the imperious call, Which all men dread, in my glad morning time, And follow death ere I have reached my prime, Or drunk the strengthening cordial of life's gall. The lightning's stroke or the fierce tempest ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... leisurely by the light of pine splinters; for rural Honduras has not yet reached the candle stage of progress. For a half-real I bought thirty cigarettes of the size of a lead-pencil, made of the coarse leaves more fitted to cigars. The man and wife, and the child that had been stark naked ever since my arrival, at length rolled up together on a bundle of rags on the dank earth floor, the daughter of eighteen climbed a knotched stick into a cubbyhole under the roof, and when the ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... to the thousand devils, I have discovered a new torture for her heart. She thought to solace her life with a love-episode! Sweet little epicure that she was! She shall have her little crooked lover, shan't she? Oh, yes! She shall have him, cold and stark and livid, with that great, black, heavy hunch, which no back, however broad, can bear, Death, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Cuchullin, With their horses and following, Should rush to her dwelling, And our prince[122] in his trim, They might vainly aspire Without rifle and fire To ruffle or nigh her, Her mantle to dim. Stark-footed, lively, Ever capering naively With motion alive, aye, And wax-white, in shine, When her startle betrays That the hounds are in chase, The same as the base Is the rocky decline— She puffs from her chest, And she ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Cliffs for a second time, we left the "Lady Franklin" and "Sophia," in a stark calm, to do their best. Fewer ships, the faster progress; and heartily did all cheer when, at midnight, we turned to the N.W., leaving the second division to do their work in Wolstenholme Sound. So ended the memorable 14th of August: ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... child, which I suppose she expected to see under a sheet that would have just revealed the stark little form, but the little thing was smiling ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... afterglow touched the broken rows of skyward-pointing tassels, but the valley below her lay shrouded in gloom. Night was creeping up the mountain side; she could see it, feel it in the horrible silence. All alone in that stark vastness of crags, disregarding those who might be "layin' out" for her, she put her hands to her mouth and called; then leaned forward, holding her breath and listening. There was not even an echo. So she turned wearily back to the cabin and tenderly covered that ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... most cadaverous specimens of the startling humor in which the Russians delight. Here you find frozen oxen, calves, sheep, rabbits, geese, ducks, and all manner of animals and birds, once animate with life, now stiff and stark in death. The oxen stand staring at you with their fixed eyes and gory carcasses; the calves are jumping or frisking in skinless innocence; the sheep ba-a at you with open mouths, or cast sheep's-eyes at the by-passers; the rabbits, having traveled hundreds of miles, are jumping, or running, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... light now fell full on her face. Had she deliberately challenged me to look into her secret mind if I could? Anything like the stark insensibility of that young girl to every refinement of feeling, to every becoming doubt of herself, to every customary timidity of her age and sex in the presence of a man who had not disguised his unfavorable opinion of her, I never met with in all ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... I walk barefooted," mumbled my brave companion; but receiving no reply he drew off his shoes and dropped them beside mine in the cluster of stark bushes which figure so prominently in the illustrations that I have just mentioned. Then he took out his revolver, and cocking it, stood waiting, while I gave a ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... his ordinary round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not get into the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the mere thought of Queequeg—not four feet off—sitting there in that uneasy position, stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched. Think of it; sleeping all night in the same room with a wide awake pagan on his hams in this ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... aesthetic infinites, composed of all the forms which nature or imagination might exhibit; and where imagination fails, there are infinite remainders of the unimagined. The version which M. Benda gives us of infinite Being, limited to the mathematical dimension, is therefore unnecessarily cold and stark. His one infinity is monochrome, whereas the total infinity of essence, in which an infinity of outlines is only one item, is infinitely many-coloured. Phenomena therefore fall, in their essential variety, within and not without infinite Being: so that in "returning to ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... you may touch up the story. You will not want to leave it so stark and bare. "They grow in a little place just made for them to grow in. It's in here, the place is, in mothers," and you give a friendly pat against your side. Many children ask where the place is, and many think it is the stomach. Other children have said so. "The ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... tide had stripped the shore; And that foul shape I fancied so remote Lay stark below, just opposite next-door! Who would have said a cod's head could not float? No more my neighbour in his garden sits; My callers now regard the view with groans; For tides may roll and rot the fleshly bits, But what shall mortify those ageless bones? How ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... "I am stark-staring mad," he cried aloud, "and no one knows it but myself. God's worst curse has fallen ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the village, and, gliding cat-like past the station, Jack put the car at the beginning of the real ascent of the famous St. Gothard Road. The higher we went, the more wildly roared the storm. There was something appalling in the fierce volleyings of the wind along the stark and broken faces of the precipice: it was like the rattle of thunder. In the sombre defile of the Schoellenen the air rushed as through a funnel. We could see nothing save the thread-like road illuminated by our steadfast lanterns—the sole beacon of safety in this welter. ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... very good, but pollen apparently equal-sized. I have just examined Hottonia, grand difference in pollen. Echium vulgare, a humbug, merely a case like Thymus. But I am almost stark staring mad over Lythrum (On another occasion he wrote (to Dr. Gray) with regard to Lythrum: "I must hold hard, otherwise I shall spend my life over dimorphism."); if I can prove what I fully believe, it is a grand case of TRIMORPHISM, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... branch, he swung down to where the leaping beast could almost reach him. The heavy club he carried gave him an advantage. With a whistling sweep, as the hyena leaped upward in its ravenous folly, came this huge club crashing against the thick skull, a blow so fair and stark and strong that the stunned beast fell backward upon the ground, and then, down, lightly as any monkey, dropped the cave man. The huge stone ax went crashing into the brain of the quivering brute, and that ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... Bertrand made his plea and complaint to the emperor in the hearing of all, but they consider him an idle babbler because he says that he has seen the empress stark naked. All the town is stirred thereat; some, when they hear this news, esteem it mere folly, others advise and counsel the emperor to go to the tower. Great is the uproar and the tumult of the folk who set out after him. But they find nothing in the tower, ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... Gog's bores, these old stumps are stark tired. Chave here roundabout for life conquired, Where any posting nags were to be hired, And can get none, would they were all vired![385] Cham come too late for Money, I hold a penny, Suitors to Fortune there are so many; ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... not permit anything vague. A word stood out in its stark reality, howling "Illiterate!" at her. Her ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... eyes. His features in profile were pure Greek, and on his low forehead there was a touch of gold. His particular followers or disciples had the silly expression of a mesmerist's subjects; they sat in the dust stark naked and unashamed, and looked ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... for money, and yet on the faces of these frontier refugees I saw stark hunger, the weakness come of long weeks of famine. One man, one fortunate man from Verviers, told me he could purchase as much as 2s. 8d. worth of food for himself, his wife, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... had no further time to waste in argument. Here were Jim Barlow and Monty Stark shaking either hand and bidding a hasty good-by, while Molly Breckenridge was fairly dancing up and down in her anxiety lest the lads should also be left on board, as Alfaretta was likely ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... Thetford was a Sunday, and I need not tell what a pleasure it was to me to hear again the old English services that once I had thought so long, as a boy will. And on that day, for the first time, it came to me that my man, Erling the viking, was a stark heathen, Odin's man. Truly he came to the church with me, and there he stood and stared at all that went on, quietly and reverently enough, but in such wise that I thought that he had somewhere seen the like before. So ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... deign to stoop, and kneel at the foot of the bush. Then the crisp, echoing report of Roscoe's rifle rang out, and on the instant the officer and the remaining soldier disappeared behind the leaf-covered hogshead. Tom was aware of the one German lying beside the bush, stark and motionless, and of Roscoe jerking his head and screwing up his mouth in a sort of spontaneous vexation. Then he looked suddenly at Tom and winked unmirthfully with a ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... poverty to appear, exceedingly popular. My Wednesday receptions became more brilliant than ever. Interesting strangers sought me out, in the hope that they, too, might attain to equal fortune through knowing me. Fraulein Ingeborg Stark, who afterwards married young Hans von Bronsart, put in an appearance among us, a vision of bewitching elegance, and played the piano, in which she was modestly assisted by Fraulein Aline Hund of Weimar. A highly gifted young French musician, Camille Saint-Saens, ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... heart and brain, Feverishly seeking everywhere some sign To guide him, went ashore upon that isle, And lo, turning a rugged point of rock, He rubbed his eyes to find out if he dreamed, For there—a Crusoe's wonder, a miracle, A sign—before him stood on that lone strand Stark, with a stern arm pointing out his way And jangling still one withered skeleton, The grim black gallows where Magellan hanged His mutineers. Its base was white with bones Picked by the gulls, and crumbling o'er the sand ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... saw the reapers take their wages, each a bundle of wheat according to the work he had done—the most lovely sight. The graceful, half-naked, brown figures loaded with sheaves; some had earned so much that their mothers or wives had to help to carry it, and little fawn-like, stark-naked boys trudged off, so proud of their little bundles of wheat or of hummuz (a sort of vetch much eaten both green and roasted). The sakka (water-carrier), who has brought water for the men, gets a handful from each, and drives ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... been left by Zagonyi in charge of his train. The Prairie Scouts reported a loss of thirty-one out of one hundred and thirty: half of these belonged to the Irish Dragoons. In a neighboring field an Irishman was found stark and stiff, still clinging to the hilt of his sword, which was thrust through the body of a Rebel who lay beside him. Within a few feet a second Rebel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... married, en somebuddy give 'em er new broom. De 'oman she proud uv her nice, spankin' new broom en she lay hit on de bed fer de weddin' crowd ter see it, wid de udder things been give 'em. Fo' thee years go by her man wuz beatin' 'er, en not long atter dat she go plum stark crazy. She oughter ter know better'n ter lay dat broom on her bed. It sho' done brung her bad luck. Dey sent her off ter de crazy folks place, ...
— Slave Narratives, Administrative Files (A Folk History of - Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves) • Works Projects Administration
... her sapphire arc Of bay, her perfect sweep of shore; Above her, like a demon stark, The dark fire-mountain evermore Looming portentous, as of yore; Fair Capri with her cliffs and caves; Salerno drowsing 'mid her vines And olives, and the shattered shrines Of Paestum where the gray ghosts tread, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... dewdrop," when he ought to be seeking Mildred's presence in profound stealth and silence, is, dramatically, electrically startling in the mouth of Sebald, among the geraniums of the shuttered shrub-house, where he has passed the night with Ottima, while her murdered husband lies stark ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... mad,' said the Colonel, 'perfectly stark mad. Tell him I shall dump my refuse on it, if I have to finance somebody to locate a mineral claim. What is the name ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... A stark white incandescent light filled the room and made everything sharp and hard. In the open fire-place a hot fire burned red. All was scrupulously clean and perfect. A baby was cooing in a rocker-less wicker cradle by the hearth. The mother, a slim, neat woman with dark hair, was sewing a child's ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... nothing scholastic in his reasoning; nothing sacerdotal in his conclusions. We breathe with him the clear sharp air of mathematics; and his imagination, shaking itself free from all controversial pettifogging, sweeps off into the stark and naked spaces of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... of course from the four New England colonies, commanded by men who were destined to rise to high positions during the war. There was Daniel Morgan of Virginia, with a splendid band of sharpshooters, and Israel Putnam of Connecticut, John Stark and John Sullivan of New Hampshire, Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, Henry Knox of Boston, Horatio Gates of Virginia, and Benedict Arnold and Charles Lee who later ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... French, for the Morgue is a favourite haunt with the irrepressible tourist doing Paris. Strangest of all, the murderer himself, the doer of the fell deed, comes here, to the very spot where his victim lies stark and reproachful, and stares at it spellbound, fascinated, filled more with remorse, perchance, than fear at the risk he runs. So common is this trait, that in mysterious murder cases the police of Paris keep a disguised officer among the crowd at the Morgue, and have ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... no time, Mr. Tietkens and I returned to the three fallen horses, taking with us a supply of water, and using the Fair Maid, Widge, Formby, and Darkie; we went as fast as the horses could go. On reaching the little cob we found him stark and stiff, his hide all shrivelled and wrinkled, mouth wide open, and lips drawn back to an extraordinary extent. Pushing on we arrived where Diamond and Pratt had fallen. They also were quite dead, and ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... exclaimed that admirable slop. With which he placed a warning hand upon the brawler's collarband. We simply hate to tell the rest. No subject here for flippant jest. The mere remembrance of the tale has made our ink turn deadly pale. Let us be brief. Some demon sent stark madness on the well-dressed gent. He gave the constable a punch just where the latter kept his lunch. The constable said 'Well! Well! Well!' and marched him to a dungeon cell. At Vine Street Station out it came—Lord Belpher was the culprit's ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... came to his senses the gray mystery of dawn was passing through the silent forest aisles; the beeches, pallid, stark, loomed motionless on every side; the pale veil of sky-fog hung festooned from tree to tree. There was a sense of breathless waiting in the shadowy woods—no sound, no stir, nothing of life ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... were fast freezing. A few moments he hung, hoping for a lull in the fury of the blizzard, but lull there was none, only that choking, blinding, terrifying Thing that clutched and tore at him. His heart sank within him. This, then, was to be the end of him. A vision of his own body, stark and stiff, lying under a mound of drifting snow, swiftly passed before his mind. He threw it off wrathfully. "Not yet! Not just yet!" he shouted in defiance into the face of ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... to his grave." Nevertheless, his fiery nature kept him for a time with the Americans, and at the very outset he showed his independent spirit, having characteristically refused to "wait for proper orders." From New Hampshire came Stark, the hero of the frontier wars. And from all the towns came the militia leaders, who, gathering their companies into regiments, began the loose organization and crude subordination which should make of the crowd ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... bear to contemplate at length, while from the first I found myself physically unable to face the ferocious gaze of those implacable eyes. But Raffles only laughed at my squeamishness, and flung a dust-sheet over man and chair; and the stark outline drove me from ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... Salamis and Attica we have space to deploy all our ships, while the Barbarians will be crowded by numbers. And if we once retreat?—Let Adeimantus and the rest prate about—'The wall, the wall across the Isthmus! The king can never storm it.' Nor will he try to, unless his councillors are turned stark mad. Will he not have command of the sea? can he not land his army behind the wall, wherever he wills? Have I not dinned that argument in those doltish Peloponnesians' ears until I have grown hoarse? Earth and gods! suffer me rather ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... Cossack, displaying the letter he had brought from the Count's rooms. "Nothing more. Your wife has succeeded very well. He is quite mad now. I found him last night, helpless, in a sort of fit, stiff and stark on the floor of his room. And this was in his pocket. Read it, Herr Fischelowitz. Read it, by all means. I suppose your wife does not mind your reading the ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... shook his head. "'Pailidula, nudula, rigida,"' he completed the quatrain. "'Ghostpale, stark, and rigid.' He's got a grisly imagination, that pin-operator. I shouldn't care to have ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... memorial meeting for Henry B. Blackwell, with addresses by Edwin D. Mead, Julia Ward Howe, the Rev. Charles G. Ames, Professor Sumichrast, Moses H. Gulesian, Francis J. Garrison, James H. Stark of the Victorian Club, Meyer Bloomfield and Mrs. Isabel C. Barrows. Mr. Blackwell was called by Mrs. Catt "one of the world's most heroic men." He was the only man of large abilities who devoted his life to securing equal rights for women. In his ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... times when storms subside Through which thou oarest Life's ill-fitted bark, Dreams rise, from sounds of lapping of the tide, To veil the daylight stark, Its anguish and ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... now the other side of that awful cloud which darkens the horizon of the South—the brute beast mob-vengeance that follows swiftly upon the heels of the unpardonable sin. There must be justice. But what was happening now wasn't justice. It was stark barbarism let loose. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... hour he returned, riding one horse and leading the other, and found that Gerrard had risen and was looking at the bodies of the three men, which lay stark and stiff under the now bright starlight. Tommy's face wore an expression of supreme satisfaction as he ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... quite still, though his face and throat were washed with rain; quite still, with a frightful, lifelike gaze of exultation under his brows, with parted lips and sharp white teeth that sneered—quite still and harmless now; dead and stark. ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... time pass through any part of the city, lest some one should say, 'See, where goes that fool!' The syndics and others forming the assembly remained confounded, first, by the difficult methods proposed by the other masters, and next by that of Filippo, which appeared to them stark nonsense. He appeared to them to render the enterprise impossible by his two propositions—first, by that of making the cupola double, whereby the great weight to be sustained would be rendered altogether unmanageable, and next by the proposal of ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... He was stark mad. There was no question of it. For a moment I stood irresolute. Then I lifted him to his feet and patted ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... animal, taking the shortest cut, had used none of them, bravely jumping into the water, as its streaming fur showed. I had pity on the poor Cat, so faithful to his home. We agreed to do our utmost to take him with us. We were spared the worry: a few days later, he was found lying stiff and stark under a shrub in the garden. The plucky animal had fallen a victim to some stupid act of spite. Some one had poisoned him for me. Who? It is not likely that it was ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... without deserving, his honours, who had spied on him and carped at him day by day and hour by hour! Petitot to succeed him! To be all and own all, and sun himself in the popular eye, and say "Geneva, it is I!" While he, Blondel, lay rotting and forgotten, stark, beneath snow and rain, winter ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... the cab, Clay was already in the right-hand control seat and was running down the instrument panel check. The sergeant lifted the hatch door between the two control seats and punched on a light to illuminate the stark compartment at the lower front end of the car. A steel grill with a dogged handle on the upper side covered the opening under the hatch cover. Two swing-down bunks were racked up against the walls on either side and the front hull door was without an inside handle. This was ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... the gloomy ranges, at the foot of an ironbark, The bonnie, winsome laddie was lying stiff and stark; For the Reckless mare had smashed him against a leaning limb, And his comely face was battered, and ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... hour, the sultry oppressiveness steadily increasing and the stark calm still continuing, the barometer had fallen to 29.70. The mate, being young, lacked the patience of waiting for the portentous. He ceased his restless pacing, and ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... was taken, the prisoners were questioned, and despoiled. Often, indeed, they were stripped stark naked, and granted the privilege of seeing their finery on a pirate's back. Each buccaneer had the right to take a shift of clothes out of each prize captured. The cargo was then rummaged, and the state of the ship looked ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... the room and banged the door, and went forth to declare to the world his opinion of Clem Sypher. He had always been half crazy; now he had gone stick, stark, staring, raving, biting mad. And those to whom he told ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... blood of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland, flowed in the same stream, on the same field. When the still morning dawned, their dead lay cold and stark together; in the same deep earth their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from Heaven upon ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... feeling none due. He came out into the open, followed by a nondescript dog, which had the lack of decency—and also of discretion—to attack my dog Partial with no parley or preliminary. I wot not of what stock Partial came, but somewhere in his ancestry must have been stark fighting strain. Mutely and sternly, as became a gentleman, he joined issue; and so well had he learned the art of war that in the space of a few moments, in spite of the loud outcry of the owner of the invading ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... moved by this, or was it chance, She past my way. Up started from my side The old lion, glaring with his whelpless eye, Silent; but when she saw me lying stark, Dishelmed and mute, and motionlessly pale, Cold even to her, she sighed; and when she saw The haggard father's face and reverend beard Of grisly twine, all dabbled with the blood Of his own son, shuddered, a twitch of pain Tortured her mouth, and ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Major drew Crom-a-boo, a Carrick horse, who had once been a decent hunter, and whose owner had entered it at the instigation of his fellow townsmen, and by the assurance that these sort of races were often won by your steady old horses; and Mr. Stark, the owner, since he had first made up his mind to pay the L5 stake, had gradually deceived himself into the idea that he should probably win; and having never before even owned a horse—for this ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... A Yerba Buena Newspaper Tidings of Woe A Cry of Distress Noble Generosity Subscriptions for the Donner Party The First and Second Reliefs Organization of the Third The Dilemma Voting to Abandon a Family The Fatal Ayes John Stark's Bravery Carrying the Starved Children A ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... luck worse than his. In the evening, Cossacks came round him; stript him stark-naked; threw him, face foremost, into the nearest swampy place, and went their way. One of these devils had something so absurd and Teniers-like in the face of him, that Kleist, in his pains, could not help laughing at remembrance of it. In the night some Russian Hussars, human and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... our day-tale men(7) to feight for t' land, Then tell us we mun keep our staggarths(8) full. What's lasses, gauvies,(9) greybeards stark(10) i' t' hand, To strip wer kye, an' ploo, an' ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... "Thou art stark mad!" cried the earl. Then he went on, "Konrad, I have wronged thee deeply. In my youth I loved one who neglected me as cruelly as thou hast been neglected, and since then a mischievous spirit of vengeance, as it were, has led me to make women my playthings, to be won and thrown ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... was lying out before him, straight and stark in the road. A bolt of lightning which at that moment tore its way through the heavens brought into startling view her face, white with distraction, framed in a mass of iron-gray ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... there with him all that night; but as soon as it was day, I beckoned to him to come with me, and let him know I would give him some clothes; at which he seemed very glad, for he was stark naked. As we went by the place where he had buried the two men, he pointed exactly to the place, and showed me the marks that he had made to find them again, making signs to me that we should dig them up again, and eat them. At this I appeared very ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... Charley Osgood, son of our Lieutenant, a quiet, fair-haired, pleasant-spoken boy, but as brave and earnest as his gallant father, sank under the combination of hunger and cold. One stinging morning he was found stiff and stark, on the hard ground, his bright, frank blue eyes glazed over ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... ascertain where enemy trenches had been. Dotted about over this terrain were the Hun "pill-boxes," concrete shelters in which the enemy had made their last machine gun fight. Whereas at one time they had been skilfully concealed from view, they were now standing stark above the ground which had been torn away from them. Some of the pill-boxes, indeed, had been smashed in by direct hits from the heavies, so deadly had been our gun ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... clustering thickly all round the edges of the Boer main position, and the day was spent in resting the weary men, and in determining at what point the final assault should be delivered. On the right front, commanding the Boer lines on either side, towered the stark eminence of Spion Kop, so called because from its summit the Boer voortrekkers had first in 1835 gazed down upon the promised land of Natal. If that could only be seized and held! Buller and Warren swept its bald summit with their field-glasses. It was a venture. But all war is ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... filthy nose is irksome; for baldness it may be borne, but for blindness or infirmity in the eyes it is intolerable. It is true, Antigonus would joke upon himself, and once, receiving a petition written in great letters, he said, This a man may read if he were stark blind. But he killed Theocritus the Chian for saying,—wh Byzantine to Pasiades saying, Sir, your eyes are weak, replied, You upbraid me with this infirmity, not considering that thy son carries the vengeance of Heaven on his back: now Pasiades's son was hunch-backed. And Archippus the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the stones pulled away. Bender was then discovered lying only a few feet back from the entrance. He appeared to have dashed the kettle aside, as if seeking to quench the fire and smoke. Tige was close behind him, Watch farther back. Very stark and grim all four looked when finally they were hauled out with a pole and hook and given a ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... allowed to write letters, nor to communicate with any member of their family. But the law condescended to allow a minister to visit them periodically in order to awaken their religious thoughts and preach to them how bad a thing it was to steal! Many were driven stark mad or died of disease; others dashed their brains out; while others, when finally released, went out into the world filled with an overpowering hatred of Society, and all its institutions, and a long-cherished thirst for ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... asthmatic heart, have died at the Gables without any one laying a little finger upon them. Oh! there was no jugglery! They weren't poisoned, or bitten by venomous insects, or suffocated, or anything like that. They just died of fear—stark fear." ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Anna Gurney, we know that he literally took to flight and ran without stopping from Sheringham to the Old Tucker's Inn at Cromer. An interview with Mrs. Browning or George Eliot would have probably driven him stark staring mad. Another stumbling block to the critics of 1851 was the peculiar dryness, if we may so describe it, of Borrow's style. He could respond to the thrill of natural beauty. He could enjoy and find utterance for his mood when it came upon him, just as he could enjoy a tankard ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... the spirit which was now drawing to its end, in which Scrope had travelled from the confused, unanalyzed formulas and assumptions and implications of his rectory upbringing to his present stark and simple realization of God, he had at times made some remarkable self-identifications. He was naturally much given to analogy; every train of thought in his mind set up induced parallel currents. He had likened himself to ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... then, happened like a flash of lightning. For a brief second they saw Blythe hanging from the collapsing structure. Then they saw him let go. Perhaps they did not know the full significance of Roy's predicament. They thought Blythe stark mad. ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... imperceptible to his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his instruments, but perceptible to each other, and so to some known ray at the end of the scale. Langley seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused — physics stark mad in metaphysics. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... a low, rough voice. "Nowt like sticking together and helping each other in trouble. Bud don't you fret, Mester Dick. Squire's a fine stark man, and the missus has happed him up waarm, and you see the doctor will set ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... lights of the heavily shaded lamp; the wide, gaping fireplace; the lurking shadows of the corners; the curtain by the opened window bellying slightly in the draught; above, in the soft radiance of the hooded electrics, the glowing, living, radiant personality of the Vandyke; below, the stark, evil face of the dead, with its blue bruised temple ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... then threw down before his very nose a juicy bit of beefsteak, in which a strong dose of poison had been cunningly concealed. The unsuspecting dog took the tempting bait, and the next morning lay stiff and stark in death, before ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... Britons had scarce heard a syllable, squatted on the catamaran. Marcel wielded a short paddle, and an almost imperceptible dip of its broad blade sent the strangely-built craft across the pool. Once in the shadow, it disappeared completely. There was no visible outlet. The rocks thrust their stark ridge against the sky in a seemingly impassable barrier. Some of the men stared at the jagged crests as though they half expected to see the Brazilians making a portage, just as travelers in the Canadian northwest haul canoes up ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... in rum to kingdom come, Full many a lusty fellow. And since they're sped, all stark and dead, They're flaming now in hell O. So cheerly O, Hey cheerly O, They're burning ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... away, accoutred in the harness of war; the lights of little white houses beaming into the darkness; the stars stealing silently out in the hazy bowl of the sky; the trees by the roadside standing stiff and stark in the twilight as if listening and waiting for something to take place; the soft, warm night, half moonlight and half mist, settling over mining villages with their chimneys, railways, signal lights, slag-heaps, rattling engines ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... flushed and drew. Her lot was in the last and smallest buckboard which would carry but two more beside the driver; and it fell out that her companions would be Alfaretta and Monty Stark. The driver was known as Silent Pete, and it certainly was an odd combination which had resulted ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... decoration of woven fabrics. Besides the bands, stars, crosses, forms of the hook, and small prayer niches,—one at the top and one at the bottom, but each facing in the same direction,—are seen. Often a stark tree effect is noticed. In the trade these Turkoman rugs are commonly ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... little one," he said, pressing me closer to his bosom. "Death and I killed it. Come with me to the other side, and you will see it lying there, stiff and stark." ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... the soothed tresses of the air? But there is one hour scant Of this Titanian, primal liturgy; As there is but one hour for me and thee, Autumn, for thee and thine hierophant, Of this grave ending chant. Round the earth still and stark Heaven's death-lights kindle, yellow spark by spark, Beneath the dreadful catafalque of ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... lay upon burnt straw ten thousand brave fellows all stark naked, some leaning upon crowns, some on Mitres, some on bags of gold. Glory, in another corner lay, a feather beaten in the rain. Beauty was turned into a watching candle that went out stinking. Ambition went upon a huge ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... priceless butler, with whom I have already made friends. I seem to have a taste for butlers, though I've never lived with one. He is fifty-two and a volunteer, in stark opposition to the Squire, who jeers at him perpetually. Forest takes it calmly, seems even in a queer way to be attached to his queer master. But he never misses a drill for anybody or any weather, and when he's out, the under-housemaid "buttles" for him like a lamb. The fact ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he met Cospatrick, Earl of March, one sunny day, and foretold that, ere the next noon passed, a terrible tempest would devastate Scotland. The stout Earl laughed, but his laughter was short, for by next day at noon the tidings came that Alexander III., that much loved King, was lying stiff and stark on the sands of Kinghorn. He also foretold the battles of Flodden and Pinkie, and the dule and woe which would follow the defeat of the Scottish arms; but he also ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... cried Nicholas, who had drawn near, his thick curls standing stark with curiosity, "Mamma said 'lies' wasn't a proper word, and you promised ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... against a force like mine in so small a ship? Sirrah, you must be stark mad. I compliment you upon ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... last night. In the evening, at Doctor Thomson's, we heard, just by, there were six people to be dipt. We had Curiosity to see them, and accordingly went. I assure you it is a very Solemn Sight. We brought two Beaux home with us—Mr. Beal[C] and Mr. Stark. ...
— Journal of a Young Lady of Virginia, 1782 • Lucinda Lee Orr
... one hundred and forty-eight actually engaged, twelve men having been left by Zagonyi in charge of his train. The Prairie Scouts reported a loss of thirty-one out of one hundred and thirty: half of these belonged to the Irish Dragoons. In a neighboring field an Irishman was found stark and stiff, still clinging to the hilt of his sword, which was thrust through the body of a Rebel who lay beside him. Within a few feet a second Rebel lay, shot ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... one to Mrs. Jewkes, and one to me: but, as the greatest wits may be sometimes mistaken, they being folded and sealed alike, that for me was directed to Mrs. Jewkes; and that for her was directed to me. But both are stark naught, abominably bad! She brought me up that directed for me, and said, Here's a letter for you: Long-looked-for is come at last. I will ask the messenger a few questions, and then I will read mine. So she went down, and I broke ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... and far-set expressions, and they always prove as far from the purpose. He admires canting above sense. He is worse than one that is utterly ignorant, as a cock that sees a little fights worse than one that is stark blind. He speaks in a different dialect from other men, and much affects forced expressions, forgetting that hard words, as well as evil ones, corrupt good manners. He can do nothing, like a conjurer, out of the circle of his arts, nor in it without canting ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... Lewarne, sunk in a drunken slumber, Calvin Oke bawling in his ear, Old Zeb on hands and knees, scraping the embers together, Toby Lewarne (Jim's elder brother) thumping a pannikin on his knee and bellowing a carol, and a dozen others—in stages varying from qualified sobriety to stark and shameless intoxication—peering across the fire at the game in progress between them and the faint line that marked where sand ended and ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was nothing like the Polar regions of Earth. Stark desolation. A naked land seemingly upheaved by some gigantic cataclysm of nature, lying tumbled and broken where it had fallen in convulsive agony; and then congealed forever in a ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... English language which adequately expresses how cold it was. Our horses, already tired down and half starved, could scarcely hobble. Those of the enemy were in worse condition, and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for ten miles a man could have walked on dead ones. They lay dead and stark frozen in every conceivable and revolting attitude, as death had overtaken them in their agony. Saddles, guns, accouterments of all kinds strewed the road like the debris of a rout. We picked up many stragglers. Some pieces of artillery were ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... smokes and laughs away the sultry hours, in a lazy luxury of enjoyment.... But when winter descends upon the North, sealing up the fountains ... now the hunter can fight no more against the nipping cold and blinding sleet. Stiff and stark, with haggard cheek and shrivelled lip, he lies among the snow-drifts; till, with tooth and claw, the famished wild-cat strives in vain to pierce the frigid ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... new tendencies John Randolph set himself stark and grim. "The question is," said he, replying to Calhoun's new nationalism, "whether or not we are willing to become one great consolidated nation, or whether we have still respect enough for those old, respectable institutions [the States] to regard their integrity and preservation ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... on her in dumb and stark amaze, when from somewhere hard by a man cried out in wild and awful fashion, and as this agonised screaming swelled upon the air, Joanna rose up to her feet and stood transfigured, her eyes fierce ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... returned to the three fallen horses, taking with us a supply of water, and using the Fair Maid, Widge, Formby, and Darkie; we went as fast as the horses could go. On reaching the little cob we found him stark and stiff, his hide all shrivelled and wrinkled, mouth wide open, and lips drawn back to an extraordinary extent. Pushing on we arrived where Diamond and Pratt had fallen. They also were quite dead, and must have died immediately ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... history? He tells his story like an old man, past political service, bragging to his sons on winter evenings of the part he took in public transactions when "his old cap was new." Full of scandal, which all true history is. No palliatives; but all the stark wickedness that actually gives the momentum to national actors. Quite the prattle of age and outlived importance. Truth and sincerity staring out upon you perpetually in alto relievo. Himself a party man, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... like the rustle of winter leaves, Or lone lost winds that arise, unbidden, Or rain that drips from the forest eaves, As they glide again from their silent crosses To meet and talk of their final fight, Where over the group some stark tree tosses Its eerie shadow ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... I lay, stark with fear. But my visitor seemed to be very harmless. She drew up a chair by the side of the bed and took her seat, muttering something I couldn't catch. Then she bent over me and I felt her warm ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... trampled dead and dying are but a tithe of the actual sufferers. There are desolate homes, far away, where want changes sorrow into madness. Wives wail by hearthstones where the household fires have died into cold ashes forever more. Like Rachel, mothers weep for the proud boys that lie stark beneath the pitiless stars. Under a thousand roofs—cottage roofs and palace roofs—little children ask for 'father.' The pattering feet shall never run to meet, upon the threshold, his feet, who lies stiffening in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... through those ten minutes, it was not the men lying stark and still in the grass beside the ambulance that made one astonished; it was the sight of people walking about and talking that made one wonder whether or no one had been dreaming. It was decided to halt. Everyone lay down where he stood, and ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... says the bear. The people were surprised to hear how plainly he spoke—but the mayor ordered him directly to be ripped up; and after some opposition, and a good deal of difficulty, Pat stepped forth stark naked out of the bear's-skin wherein he had been fourteen or fifteen days most cleverly stitched. The women made off—the men stood astonished—and the mayor ordered his keepers to be put in goal unless they satisfied him; but that was presently done. ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... would put any confidence in the noise and rumor. The enemy immediately fired the house of the said master-of-camp, killing him and all the inmates, so that no one escaped except the wife, and her they left grievously wounded and stark naked, believing her to be dead, although she was afterward cured of her wounds. During this time of this their first act of cruelty, the citizens were assured of the truth; and although none of them had ever imagined so unlooked-for an event, finally ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... under pretense of philanthropy; the abbots and archbishops of William wore armor and had their troops of knights like the barons and the dukes. William gave them vast tracts, and at the same time he gave them orders which they obeyed. Says the English chronicler, "Stark he was. Bishops he stripped of their bishopricks, abbots of their abbacies". Green tells us that "the dependence of the church on the royal power was strictly enforced. Homage was exacted from bishop as from baron." And what was this homage? The bishop knelt before William, ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... beating to arms, and a company rushed out of the barracks to protect the patrol. Washington's troops had begun the fight with an attack upon the outermost picket on the Pennington road, and Stark, with the van of Sullivan's party, gave three cheers and rushed upon the enemy's pickets near the river with their bayonets, and they, astonished at the suddenness and fury of the charge, were seized with a panic and fled ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... longer shall language be dumb! Thy vision shall grasp— As one doth the glittering hasp Of a dagger made splendid with gems and with gold— The wonder and richness of life, not anguish and hate of it merely. And out of the stark Eternity, awful and dark, Immensity silent and cold,— Universe-shaking as trumpets, or thunderous metals That cymbal; yet pensive and pearly And soft as the rosy unfolding of petals, Or crumbling aroma of blossoms that wither too early,— ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... the southward and eastward we can just see from the masthead. It may be necessary to observe that these bearings were taken at noon, and as it was then a stark calm the vessel was nearly stationary. By a good observation the latitude was 39 degrees 30 minutes, longitude 147 degrees 18 minutes east, calculated from lunar observation 2 days before. But I take it to be correctly ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... the world be growing dark, And twilight cool thy potent day inclose! The sun, beneath the round earth sunk, still glows All the night through, sleepless and young and stark. Oh, be thy spirit faithful as the lark, More daring: in the midnight of thy woes, Dart through them, higher than earth's shadow goes, Into the Light of which thou art a spark! Be willing to be blind—that, in thy night, The Lord may ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... obscure. Ferdinand was sitting in an easy-chair, supported by pillows. A black handkerchief was just twined round his forehead, for his head had been shaved, except a few curls on the side and front, which looked stark and lustreless. He was so thin and pale, and his eyes and cheeks were so wan and hollow, that it was scarcely credible that in so short a space of time a man could have become such a wreck. When he saw Katherine he involuntarily ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... the moon sailing a good gait among apparently stationary cloudlets; I recall a deep, black shadow lying before distant silvery mountains; I glanced over the stark, motionless canvases, each of which concealed a man; the air trembled with the bellowing of ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... wife. Now that she and her friends are in exile, "lives of the woman Bonaparte" are hawked about, which in England would bring their authors under Lord Campbell's statute. In one caricature she is represented stark naked, with Prince Joinville sketching her. In another, called "the Spanish cow," she is made a sort of female Centaur. In another she is dancing the Can-can, and throwing her petticoats over her head, before King William, who is drinking champagne, seated on a sofa, while her husband ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... to an idle halt near Cleopatra's needle, and leaning against the Embankment wall, looked across the river to the warehouses opposite, which, in the evening mist, had the look of stark cliffs guarded by a solitary watchful lion. The smaller of the two young men took off his soft hat and set it beside him so that he could let the wind brush through his thick red hair. He held himself very straight, his slender ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... gaunt Professor Noting his man; that stark Assessor Of faulty play in the bat's possessor Clapped for his foeman, We who had seen that figure splendid Guarding the stumps so well defended Wept and cheered when by craft was ended ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... creek, and held up a long pole, with a white bit of cloth on it, for a signal of peace to them. We found they understood us presently, for they came flocking to us, men, women, and children, most of them, of both sexes, stark naked. At first they stood wondering and staring at us, as if we had been monsters, and as if they had been frighted; but we found they inclined to be familiar with us afterwards. The first thing we ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... tossed about our persons. Neglect the duty and you must walk alone. For to neglect conventionality is like going abroad without clothes; the naked man appears. Now, nothing can be more utterly horrid to our senses than a stark woman or stark man walking down the street. We should certainly pull aside the blind to have a peep, and the more we could see of the nakedness the further would we crane our heads (provided no one was by to watch); but to ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... irregular changes are also observable in their colours after death; and large alternate blotches of darker and lighter hues may be produced upon their sides and general surface, by the mode of their disposal in the creel. Dr Stark showed many years ago, that the colour of sticklebacks, and other small fishes, was influenced by the colour of the earthenware, or other vessels in which they were confined, as well as modified by the quantity of light to which they were exposed; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... longing for the eternal rest. The cemeteries of wealthy London abound in dear and great associations, or at worst preach homilies which connect themselves with human dignity and pride. Here on the waste limits of that dread East, to wander among tombs is to go hand in hand with the stark and eyeless emblem of mortality; the spirit falls beneath the cold burden of ignoble destiny. Here lie those who were born for toll; who, when toil has worn them to the uttermost, have but to yield their useless breath ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... But we have learned down here to pray for things we want, and, anyhow, just at that moment the miracle occurred. The wind fell off suddenly, and came with a light air from the southward, and then dropped stark calm. The ice was now "all abroad," which I was sorry for, for there was a big safe pan not twenty yards away from me. If I could have got on that, I might have killed my other dogs when the time came, and with their coats I could hope to hold out for two or three ...
— Adrift on an Ice-Pan • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... house, like a fringed pall Where the dead goes by in a funeral?— Soul of mine, Thou the reason canst divine: Into thee the moon doth stare With pallid, terror-smitten air! Thou, and the Horror lonely-stark, Outcast of eternal dark, Are in nature same and one, And thy story is not done! So let the picture face thee from the wall, And let its white ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... that's the woman you've been fooling with and say you're going to marry—not merely an adventuress, but a criminal who has herself instigated common burglaries and has connived at and been an accessory to murders! You must be mad, Jack—stark, staring. For Heaven's sake get ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... skin of her head. Then I held her breasts, that had once seemed to me like two little blind faces raised in prayer. But imagery no longer decorates my thought. My hallucination is no longer a weaver of magical phrases. But stark, real—its heart beating under ribs, its skin glowing with perspiration, its nipples standing out. As I caressed her I ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... admit (not dropping your little chit chat) through the dance, which is considered, undoubtedly, very graceful, and less like a mechanic or dancing-master. The dance finished, march into the bar, and call for a glass of blue-ruin, white-tape, or stark-naked, which is a very fashionable liquor among the 'ton,' and if called on to pay for it, tell the landlord you have left your purse in one of your blues at home; and that you will recollect it at the next ball—this, you know, can be done in a ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... all, then, wholly beside yourselves, and gone stark mad?" cried the Elector passionately, while he rose from his armchair and proudly drew himself up. "Who gives these two young ladies the privilege of entering my cabinet thus, unannounced and without ceremony? Just answer ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... tired old nag halted and sniffed and snorted. If she had had energy enough I reckon she would have shied about and run back the way she had come, for now, just ahead, lay two dead horses—a big gray and a roan—with their stark legs sticking out across the road. The gray was shot through and through in three places. The right fore hoof of the roan had been cut smack off, as smoothly as though done with an ax; and the stiffened leg had a curiously ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Roi Pepin, a racer, is the horse in fashion. I suppose the next shameful practice of ours they naturalize will be the personal scurrilities in the newspapers, especially on young and handsome women, in which we certainly are originals! Voltaire, who first brought us into fashion in France, is stark mad at his own success. Out of envy to writers of his own nation, he cried up Shakspeare; and now is distracted at the just encomiums bestowed on that first genius of the world in the new translation. He sent to the French Academy an invective that bears ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... his face to gather his meaning; and when I did, I laughed out loud. The horror of that new thought—our bright, darling Peter, cold, and stark, and dead! I remember the ring of my ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... and old Charlies—bless 'em!— Wos good for trade, our trade. Ah! if my dad Could see 'ow Larnin', Law, and Light oppress 'em, Our good old cracksmen-gangs, he'd go stark mad. As for the Hartful Dodger and old Fagin, Ah! they're well hout of it. Wot could they do With Science and her bloomin' fireworks plaguin' Their hartfullest little ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 21, 1891 • Various
... a wild and melancholy glen, Made gloomy by tall firs and cypress dark, Whose roots, like any bones of buried men, Push'd through the rotten sod for fear's remark; A hundred horrid stems, jagged and stark, Wrestled with crooked arms in hideous fray, Besides sleek ashes with their dappled bark, Like crafty serpents climbing for a prey, With many blasted oaks moss-grown ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... was very calm in the knowledge. He knew that he could not crawl half a mile. And yet he wanted to live. It was unreasonable that he should die after all he had undergone. Fate asked too much of him. And, dying, he declined to die. It was stark madness, perhaps, but in the very grip of Death he defied Death and ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... man?" the landlord said as he entered. "I didna think o' seeing you again. I thought it likely ye were laying stiff and stark somewhere out on the muirs. Eh, man, you are a foolish fellow to be mixing yourself up in the ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... Susanna Martin, upon a Causeless Disgust, had threatned him, about a certain Cow of his, That she should never do him any more Good: and it came to pass accordingly. For soon after the Cow was found stark dead on the dry Ground, without any Distemper to be discerned upon her. Upon which he was followed with a strange Death upon more of his Cattle, whereof he lost in one Spring to the Value of Thirty Pounds. But the said John Kembal had a further Testimony ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... and I hope it is there still; but it was very shaky when I last saw it, and has probably made an eboulement down to the foot of the fall before now. Some short distance above the head of the fall, near the bridge by which the two villages are connected, the scene is pictorially damaged by a stark, staring paper-mill, the dominant colors of which are Solferino-red and pea-green. This, a comparatively new feature in the landscape, is not visible from below, however, and it is from there that the fall is seen to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... cam', and the Gordons ran, And they were stark and steady, And aye the word among them a' ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... year of his death (1086) by one who had "looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his court." {17} "He who was before a rich king, and lord of many a land, he had not then of all his land but a piece of seven feet. . . . Likewise he was a very stark man and a terrible, so that one durst do nothing against his will. . . . Among other things is not to be forgotten the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man might fare over his kingdom with his bosom full of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... water; waves beating; winds blowing; certain of being drowned; charming prospect!—tossed about for seven hours; driven into the port of Cronsflot. Czar leaves us, saying, 'Too much of a jest, eh, gentlemen?' All got ashore wet as dog-fishes, made a fire, stripped stark naked (a Dutch ambassador stark naked,—think of it, Sir!), crept into some covers of sledges, and rose next morning with the ague,—positive fact, Sir! Had the ague for two months. Saw the Czar in August; 'A charming excursion to my pleasure-house,' ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and techneer, lay on the padded shock cushion of his assigned bunk and stared with wide, disillusioned eyes at the stretch of stark, gray metal directly overhead. He tried to close his ears to the mutter of meaningless words coming from across the narrow cabin. Raf had known from the moment his name had been drawn as crew member that the whole trip would ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... gooid below. An when th' time comes, as come it will, when th' race is at an end, He'll dee noa poorer for what gooid he's ivver done a friend. An when they gently put him by,—unconscious, stiff an stark, His epetaph shall be, 'Here's one 'at ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... Meriones, the peer of swift Ares, quickly bare the spear of bronze from the hut, and went after Idomeneus, with high thoughts of battle. And even as Ares, the bane of men, goes forth into the war, and with him follows his dear son Panic, stark and fearless, that terrifies even the hardy warrior; and these twain leave Thrace, and harness them for fight with the Ephyri, or the great-hearted Phlegyans, yet hearken not to both peoples, but give honour to one only; like these gods did Meriones and Idomeneus, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... The left stair, where at plague-time Machiavel[6] Saw One with set fair face as in a glass, Dressed out against the fear of death and hell, Rustling her silks in pauses of the mass, To keep the thought off how her husband fell, When she left home, stark dead across her feet,— The stair leads up to what the Orgagnas save Of Dante's daemons; you, in passing it, Ascend the right stair from the farther nave To muse in a small chapel scarcely lit By Cimabue's ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... seldom dived head first, as we did, but jumped feet foremost, and the women in a sitting posture, which made a great splash, but prevented their gowns from rising. As I remarked before, we three Americans bathed stark when with men, but the modest Tahitian men never for a moment uncovered themselves, but wore their pareus. Captain Cook said that in their houses he had not seen a single instance of immodesty, though families slept in one room. Choti avowed that he had ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Towers sunward, lightening with three-forked tongue. Of sickness, too, the causes and the signs I'll teach thee. Loathly scab assails the sheep, When chilly showers have probed them to the quick, And winter stark with hoar-frost, or when sweat Unpurged cleaves to them after shearing done, And rough thorns rend their bodies. Hence it is Shepherds their whole flock steep in running streams, While, plunged beneath the flood, with drenched fell, The ram, launched free, goes drifting down the tide. Else, ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... in discord and in dark, When struck by Love on high with will for mace, Keeps rattling till each mote finds its true place, And mountain, fledged with groves, vies with the lark To reach the sunrise; so the madness stark Of gold, dethroning blood as God's best grace, When struck by Glory's voice drops Nadir-base, And blood for Freedom spilt, forms ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... the war. Then he remembered the tones of her voice as she had told her Belgian adventures.... Was it love? Was it tenderness? Was it sensuality? The difference was indiscernible; it had no importance. Against the stark background of infinite existence all human beings were alike and all ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... off of breast-plates, greaves, and buff-coat to the other. But because the soldier is better without his armour it does not exactly follow that it is desirable that our defenders should strip themselves stark naked; and it is not more apparent why laissez-faire—great and beneficial as it may be in all that relates to the accumulation of wealth—should be the one great commandment which the State is to obey in all ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... emperor's son. There is a rush of armed men shouting furiously in Spanish, 'Carne! Sangre! Bourbon!' There is a clanging of steel, a breaking down of gates, and the Constable of Bourbon's horde pours in, irresistible, ravaging all, while he himself lies stark and stiff outside, pierced by Bernardino Passeri's short bolt, and Clement trembles in Sant' Angelo. Christina of Sweden, Monaldeschi's murder red upon her soul, comes next, fawning for forgiveness, to die in due time over there in the Corsini ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Anderson was himself again and able to comprehend the details of the story which involved the disappearance of his ward. It slowly filtered through his mind as he sat stark-eyed and numb before the kitchen fire that this was the means her mysterious people had taken to remove her from his custody. The twenty years had expired, and they had come to claim their own. There ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... subsequent relations. There was no other bond between them than that of their common allegiance to the Government of the mother-country. As an illustration of this may be cited the historical fact that, when John Stark, of Bennington memory, was before the Revolution engaged in a hunting expedition in the Indian country, he was captured by the savages and brought to Albany, in the colony of New York, for a ransom; but, inasmuch as he belonged to New Hampshire, the government of New ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... thankfulness for my deliverance from the stark death that had been so near me all day, I looked up to heaven and remembered the blessed birth eighteen centuries ago when Jesus Christ came to the ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... drawn; but though the light was softened, the apartment was by no means obscure. Ferdinand was sitting in an easy-chair, supported by pillows. A black handkerchief was just twined round his forehead, for his head had been shaved, except a few curls on the side and front, which looked stark and lustreless. He was so thin and pale, and his eyes and cheeks were so wan and hollow, that it was scarcely credible that in so short a space of time a man could have become such a wreck. When he saw Katherine he involuntarily ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... perhaps, although I did not think it curious then, that these men should have accepted so unquestioningly Lancelot's command over them. But they were old soldiers, who had promised to obey Captain Amber, and he had himself devolved his command upon Lancelot. And so, until Lancelot went stark staring mad, which he was not in the least likely to do, they were perfectly prepared to ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... can't take it easy like other folks. He has some writing on hand just now—a paper of sorts which he has undertaken to have ready by a certain time, and it appears to his benighted intellect that a holiday is an excellent opportunity of getting it through. Mad, you see; stark, staring mad, but an excellent fellow all the same. One of the very best. I have a large experience of men, but I've never met one to compare with him for all-round goodness and simplicity of heart. We all have our failings, and there are worse ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... ses, "it isn't Bill; it's Joseph and Emily, stark and stiff, and they've on'y been married a week. 'Ow awful they look! Pore things. ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... stretched himself, with a smile that ended in a yawn. The black windows had faded through every shade of indigo; they now framed their opposite neighbors, stark and livid in the dawn; and the gas seemed turned ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... was my uninvited visitor, with scant ceremony I drew myself away from him. By the light which was streaming through the laboratory door I saw that Woodville was lying close beside me,—stark and still. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... pleasant history? He tells his story like an old man, past political service, bragging to his sons on winter evenings of the part he took in public transactions when "his old cap was new." Full of scandal, which all true history is. No palliatives; but all the stark wickedness that actually gives the momentum to national actors. Quite the prattle of age and outlived importance. Truth and sincerity staring out upon you perpetually in alto relievo. Himself a party man, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... one's boon companion. When the day is sunny and the ground bare, you meet him at all points and hear him at all hours. At sunset, on the tops of the tall Maples, with look heavenward, and in a spirit of utter abandonment, he carols his simple strain. And sitting thus amid the stark, silent trees, above the wet, cold earth, with the chill of winter still in the air, there is no fitter or sweeter songster in the whole round year. It is in keeping with the scene and the occasion. How round and genuine the notes are, and how eagerly our ears drink ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... confronted with a monstrous and insupportable truth—the craven cowardice of the man who had been eligible to service in army or navy, and who had evaded it. In camp and trench and dug-out he had heard of the army of slackers. And of all the vile and stark profanity which the war gave birth to on the lips of miserable and maimed soldiers, that flung on ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... some chance escaped from the guardians which the good Earl of Kent had put over him to take care of him in his lunacy, was found by some of Cordelia's train, wandering about the fields near Dover, in a pitiable condition, stark mad, and singing aloud to himself, with a crown upon his head which he had made of straw, and nettles, and other wild weeds that he had picked up in the corn-fields. By the advice of the physicians, Cordelia, though earnestly ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... But only nods above the world to mock Its restless occupant, then rudely rock It as the cradle of a babe that weeps!" I seemed to see the seconds piled in heaps Like sand about me; and at every shock O' the bell, the piled sands were swirled away As by a desert-storm that swept the earth Stark as a granary floor, whereon the gray And mist-bedrizzled moon amidst the dearth Came crawling, like a sickly child, to lay Its pale face next mine ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... when last I heard. Jim came down here to see me once. That was before he broke the pledge; but afterwards he would always take drink when he was ashore, and a little drink would send him stark, staring mad. Ah! it was a bad day that ever he took a glass in his hand again. First he dropped me, and then he quarrelled with Sarah, and now that Mary has stopped writing we don't know how things are ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the simple act drove home with great force the stark fact that he was face to face with his business at last. Peter, holding out his hand to say good-bye, was struck to speculation by the look of ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... this old, silent place, among the stark figures on the tombs—they made it more quiet there, than elsewhere, to her fancy—and gazing round with a feeling of awe, tempered with a calm delight, felt that now she was happy, and at rest. She took ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... went on,—misty Springs, golden Summers, flaming Autumns, Winters stark and chill, leaving each its tale on the unrolling scroll of time. For in those years the consul departed from Britain with his forces, and the cities ruled themselves, each in a state of feudal independence, now warring amongst themselves, now making ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... who hath transported us hither will sustain us; and that is true, Paul. He sustained us at Bunker Hill, and we should have held it if our powder had not given out. Our regiment was by a rail-fence on the northeast side of the hill. Stark, with his New Hampshire boys, was by the river. Prescott was in the redoubt on the top of the hill. Old Put kept walking up and down the lines. This is the way ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... face in the pillows of a couch, gave way to her first tears in an agony of weeping. And he sat apart, not daring to touch her, nor to speak—wishing, with unavailing bitterness, that it had been he who was left lying stark and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... arose, standing stark, cut out on the background of mist, a tall, opaque mass, vertical, right-angled, a tower of the abyss. They ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... towns, he finds himself in the midst of utter confusion. The eye is bewildered by 'a city become an heap.' He wanders over masses of dislocated stone and mortar, with timbers half buried, prostrate, or standing stark up against the light, and is appalled by spectacles of desolation.... Houses seem to have been precipitated to the ground in every direction of azimuth. There seems no governing law, nor any indication of a prevailing direction of overturning force. It is only by first gaining some commanding ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... of a last hill, They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease And, finding comfortable chests and knees Carelessly slept. But many there stood still To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge, Knowing their feet had come to the end ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... Just queer perhaps. It doesn't seem as though a sane man would live all stark alone over on ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... up in stark silhouette, in the electronic "light" of the radar scope. Two perfect discs, joined by a fine filament. As we watched, their relative positions slowly shifted, one moving across, ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... firm, unbending, inelastic, stark, impliable, rigorous, unyielding, inductile; strong, violent, forcible, inopposable; pertinacious, obstinate, tenacious, uncompromising, incompliant; constrained, formal, starched, affected, unnatural, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... life might be found in him, and with this he was content.—So the physicians are let to work, who pinched him with pincers in the fleshy parts of his body, and twisted a bow-string about his head with great force, but no sign of life appearing in him, the physicians pronounced him stark dead, and then there was no more delay to be made; yet Mr. Welch begged of them once more, that they would but step into the next room for an hour or two, and leave him with the dead youth; and this they granted. Then Mr. Welch fell down before the pallet, and cried to the Lord with all ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... up at the officer, his yellow canines showing like tusks. His matted face was an unlovely sight. In it stark, naked fear struggled with craftiness ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... day and burying his dead, drew off from the field, and we, remaining there, were able to claim the victory, which, however, my son, was one of a kind which was scarce worth winning. It was a sad sight to see so many men stretched stark and dead, and these killed, not in fighting with a foreign foe, but with other Englishmen. It made us all mightily sad, and if at that moment Lord Essex had had full power from the Parliament to treat, methinks that the quarrel ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... in his book when Kate entered with excited greeting. "Morton, do you know that those women have been locked in their rooms all day for fear of Clarke and Pratt? Well, they were! Clarke has gone stark mad with jealousy, and even that besotted mother was afraid of him, and admits it. They would be there in that house prisoners this minute only ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... regretted, in 1837, she proved her gratitude and loyalty to her banker-husband by leaving all she possessed, a fortune now swollen to L1,800,000, to Miss Angela Coutts (grand-daughter of Thomas Coutts and his first wife, Eliza Stark, a domestic servant) who, as the Baroness Burdett-Coutts of later years, proved by her large munificence a worthy trustee and dispenser ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... war's shocks for four years, he had striven titanically for nearly a score, his efforts, beginning with the terrible five-year service in the Lgion des Etrangers, culminating in ever-mounting strain to his last achievement and then—sudden, stark failure! He was, as he had said, burned out, although he was barely thirty-nine years old. He was a man still young in body but with mind and nerves like overstrained rubber from which all ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... Erde Gibt uns Mut zu frischem Tun, Gibt uns Muesse, um am Herde Sonder Sorge auszuruhn. Aus des Bodens Scholle ziehen Wir des Lebens bestes Mark, Aus des Bodens Kraft erbluehen Die Geschlechter frei und stark. ...
— The German Element in Brazil - Colonies and Dialect • Benjamin Franklin Schappelle
... palm With walking in the fashion of their sires, Grope as they might to find a cruel god To work their will on such as human wrath Had wrought its worst to torture, and had left With rage unsated, white and stark and cold, Could hate have shaped a demon more malign Than him the dead men mummied in their creed And taught their trembling children to adore! Made in his image! Sweet and gracious souls Dear to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his own vindication, horridly wished 'that the devil might put out his eyes if he had done as was suspected concerning him.' That very night a rheum fell into his eyes so that within a few days he became stark blind. His company being astonished at the Divine hand which thus conspicuously and signally appeared, put him ashore at Providence, and left him there. A physician being desired to undertake his cure, hearing ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... distinguished the day before, now glittered forth in blooms of unfamiliar beauty. Toward that spot were attracted myriads of happy insects, whose hum of intense joy was musically loud. But the form of the life-seeking sorcerer lay rigid and stark; blind to the bloom of the wild flowers, deaf to the glee of the insects—one hand still resting heavily on the rim of the emptied caldron, and the face still hid behind the Black Veil. What! the wondrous elixir, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... F.C. Lewis and Mr. W.E. Stark, of the Ethical Culture School, New York, for permitting us to make the test upon the pupils of ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent
... were conferring many people had entered the room, although none had purchased the wares. Now there was stark silence and a concentrated fire of attention as Mrs. Black entered with a strange young woman. Mrs. Black looked doubtfully important. She, as a matter of fact, was far from sure of her wisdom in the course she was taking. She was even a little pale, and ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... Jerry's growls changed. The unforgotten and ineffaceable past strummed the fibres of his throat. His teeth flashed with fierce intent, in the desire of sinking as deep in the man's hand as passion could drive. For Jerry by this time was all passion. He had leaped back into the dark stark rawness of the early world almost as swiftly as had Borckman. And this time his teeth scored, ripping the tender and sensitive and flesh of all the inside of the first and second joints of Borckman's right hand. Jerry's teeth were needles that stung, and Borckman, gaining the grasp on Jerry's ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... that wi' willin heart, he does some gooid below. An when th' time comes, as come it will, when th' race is at an end, He'll dee noa poorer for what gooid he's ivver done a friend. An when they gently put him by,—unconscious, stiff an stark, His epetaph shall be, 'Here's one 'at didn't miss ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... was an earnest consultation, and so hazardous seemed the trail and the work to be done that for a time all except Eddy and Foster refused to go farther. Finally, John Stark ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... admire philosophers because they discover a small part of the wisdom that made all things, they must be stark blind not ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... regularity of things and their obscene necessity." The very persons who talk so glibly about the "fluidity" and "evasiveness" of life are persons in whose own flesh the wedge-like granite of fate has lodged itself with crushing finality. Life has indeed been too rigid and too stark for them; and in place of seizing it in an embrace as formidable as its own, they go aside muttering, "life is evasive; life is ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... narrative; which it really seems these moderns think designed for a frequent arrest of the actors in the story and a searching of the internal state of this one or that one of them: who is laid out stark naked and probed and expounded, like as in the celebrated picture by a great painter—and we, thirsting for events as we are, are to stop to enjoy a lecture on Anatomy. And all the while the windows of the lecture-room are rattling, if not the whole fabric shaking, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... exaggerate the strong qualities the masculine sex does possess, and always add a great many strong qualities that it does not possess. That is, briefly, all the reason in the Brontes on this special subject: the rest is stark unreason. It can be most clearly seen in that sister of Charlotte Bronte's who has achieved the real feat of remaining as a great woman rather than a great writer. There is really, in a narrow but intense way, a tradition of Emily Bronte: ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the river pearl-colored, and the fireflies beginning to sparkle, when he rode through the home gates. In the dusk of the world, out of the deeper shadow of the surrounding trees, his house looked grimly upon him. The light had been at the side; all the front was stark and black with shuttered windows. He rode to the back of the house and hallooed to the slaves in the home quarter, where were lights and noisy laughter, and one deep voice ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... rough that we left its purpose dark; Stark was ever the sea, but our ships were yet ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... and did the bidding of the star." And while Morven was yet speaking, a servant of the king's house ran up to the crowd, crying loudly, "The king is dead!" So they went into the palace and found the king stark upon his couch, and his huge limbs all cramped and crippled by the pangs of death, and his hands clenched as if in menace of a foe,—the Foe of all living flesh! Then fear came on the gazers, and they looked on Morven with a deeper awe than the boldest warrior would have called forth; and ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to her stark naked baby, which broke from a tremendous stare into a benignant laugh, that had the effect of shutting up its eyes at the same time that it ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... its full force to the central idea of the passage, as well as to the obscure individual expressions. Most strikingly, then, he goes on to say, carrying out the allusion, 'and that he shall stand at the last upon the dust.' Little did it boot the murdered man, lying there stark, with the knife in his bosom, that the murderer should be slain by the swift justice of his kinsman-avenger, but Job felt that, in some mysterious way, God would appear for him, after he had been laid in the dust, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... obliged to walk without them. Swimming we had been taught by an old sailor, who gave lessons to the school, and at last I could pick up an egg from the bottom of the overfall, a depth of about ten feet. I have also been upset from my boat, and had to lie stark naked on the grass in the sun till my clothes were dry. Twice I have been nearly drowned, once when I wandered away from the swimming class, and once when I could swim well. This later peril is worth a word or two, and I may as ...
— The Early Life of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... 'they were quite sorry, but it wasn't like as if They had killed a decent Whiteman by mistake or in a tiff, It was only some old Injun dog that lay there stark ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... farthingales of our great-grandmothers; or, to speak more soberly, with the powdered wigs and hoops of their daughters. There is music to excite, much to irritate one, and much more to drive a really musical soul stark mad; but none to soothe, save that which is drawn from the hiding-places ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... my own misery. I did not even heed the approach of morning, till suddenly, with a shrillness no ear could ignore, there rose, tearing through the silence of the house, that great scream from my wife's room which announced the discovery of her body lying stark and ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... Linlithgow is only mentioned as being a peel (a pile, that is, an embattled tower surrounded by an outwork). In 1300 it was rebuilt or repaired by Edward I., and used as one of the citadels by which he hoped to maintain his usurped dominion in Scotland. It is described by Barbour as "meihle and stark and stuffed weel." Piers Luband, a Gascoigne knight, was appointed the keeper, and appears to have remained there until the autumn of 1313, when the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... by a nondescript dog, which had the lack of decency—and also of discretion—to attack my dog Partial with no parley or preliminary. I wot not of what stock Partial came, but somewhere in his ancestry must have been stark fighting strain. Mutely and sternly, as became a gentleman, he joined issue; and so well had he learned the art of war that in the space of a few moments, in spite of the loud outcry of the owner of the invading cur, he had ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... founders of the Ursulines as a character could well be. Yet he, too, had mystic {75} dreams and heard voices bidding him found a mission in the tenantless wilderness of Montreal. To the practical man the thing seems sheer moon-stark madness. If Dauversiere had lived in modern days he would have been committed to an asylum. Here was a man with a family, without a fortune, commanded by what he thought was the voice of Heaven to found a hospital in a wilderness ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... elders, who shortly before 'saw the God of Israel,' doing to be passive at such a crisis? Was there no one to bid the fickle multitude look up to the summit overhead, where the red flames glowed, or to remind them of the hosts of Egypt lying stark and dead on the shore? Was Miriam cowed too, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Pope stark mad; he stamped, foamed, and raved like one in a phrenzy: he swore the painter should suffer the most cruel death that could be invented, unless he drew another full as good as the former, for if but the least grace was missing, he would not ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... fro. One was Henry and the other a mighty Shawnee warrior, naked to the waist, and striving to use a tomahawk that he held in a hand whose wrist was clenched in the iron grasp of his foe. Lying almost at their feet was the body of another warrior, stark and dead. ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... I, as he turned his terrible eye to me, 'I bear you no malice, but we must try to get on in the world, you know.' The captain grinned and gave up the ghost. I went upon deck,—what a sight! Twenty bold fellows stark and cold, and the moon sparkling on the puddles of blood as calmly as if it were water. Well, signor, the victory was ours, and the ship mine; I ruled merrily enough for six months. We then attacked a French ship twice our size; what sport it was! And we had not had a good fight so long, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Rodingham! "You are both stark and stoor; "Would you defile the king's own bed, "And make his queen ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... readily. No mechanical contrivance has ever been designed that is comparable to the hand in flexibility, deftness, adaptability, or power of prehension. It can pick up a needle or a cannon-ball at will. Its touch is as light as a feather or as stark as a catapult. It can be as gentle as mercy or as harsh as battle. It can soothe to repose or rouse to fury. It can express itself in the gentle zephyr or in the devastating whirlwind. Its versatility is altogether ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... saith he shall have none (Deut 29:18-20). And this must needs be, for did but men believe this, that it is the Word of God, then they must believe that he that speak it is true, therefore shall every word and tittle be fulfilled. And if they come once to this, unless they be stark mad, they will have a care how they do throw themselves under the lash of eternal vengeance. For the reason why the Thessalonians received the Word, was, because they believed it was the Word of God, and not the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... these our Recreations! thou needst not to be told—yet in love let us tell thee—that there are a thousand ways of dealing in description with Nature, so as to make her poetical; but sentiment there always must be, else it is stark nought. You may infuse the sentiment by a single touch—by a ray of light no thicker, nor one thousandth part so thick, as the finest needle ever silk-threaded by lady's finger; or you may dance it in with a flutter of sunbeams; or you may splash it in as with ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... afire with mad desire, They chased him through the dark, And each soul carried his dead bodie, Grim, and stiff, and stark. ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... believed to be painful, from the shock of a blow to the sting of a harsh word. He had suffered discomforting anticipation of rebukes and restrictions. But he had never before stood face to face with that stark unreasoning terror which gathers its chief power from the intangible character of the ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... widely and splendidly blue. I felt that I walked on a younger earth, just emerged from its fierce chaos of whirling molten matter, and as yet unsoftened by luxuriant vegetable growth, an earth of stark rocks and hot mud, teeming with potential life, of dry thin air and blazing sunshine, very harsh and ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... differences are innate or inherent in the things themselves, we must naturally endeavor to find out why and how they are different; and no matter how far we go along this road we are always headed in the direction of stark materialism. On the other hand, to say that the "properties" of the atoms are not inherent in themselves, but are imposed on them by an external ceaselessly acting power, the will of the Creator, would be in full accord with Biblical theism; and then we might naturally ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... heresies which afflicted either Church or State. He had an uncompromising hostility to what are termed New- England ideas, though the tenderest ties of his life were of New- England origin. "The New-Englander individually I greatly affect," he often said, "but, in the mass, I judge them to be stark mad." "I think, too," he would add, "that if you are going to make much of a New-Englander, he should, like Dr. Johnson's Scotchman, be ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the rattle and roar of the train died away, BROTHER'S hacking cough sounded from behind the closed door, and stark reality laid hold on her again. Her thin hands went together on her breast and then fell slackly to her sides. She seemed visibly to shrink and shrivel. Racked and spent with her one crowded hour, she stood looking into the bleak and empty vista ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... mean not cuckold-mad; but, sure, he's stark mad. When I desir'd him to come home to dinner, He ask'd me for a thousand marks in gold: "Tis dinner time' quoth I; 'My gold,' quoth he: 'Your meat doth burn' quoth I; 'My gold,' quoth he: 'Will you come home?' quoth I; 'My gold,' quoth he: 'Where is the thousand marks I gave ...
— The Comedy of Errors • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the weary spent-up glad, And cheer the orphan lass and lad; Make frailty's heart, so long, long sad, Your kindness feel; And make old crazy-bones stark mad ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... reverberate in the words of this service were, on his lips and in his sympathetic and superb reading, like the overtones and rich harmonies of an organ. There was no formalism nor coldness, no hesitancy to plumb the stark reality of the occasion, but only the vibrant convictions of his own great faith in the goodness of God. Few can fail to recall the clarity and feeling with which he read St. Paul's immortal passage in 1st Corinthians, nor ever forget the prayer ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... a motion of his arm through the wind and rain, summoned a kind of little, white, wooden sarcophagus which was skipping near us on the waves, sculled by two yellow boys stark naked in the rain. The craft approached us, I jumped into it, then through a little trap-door shaped like a rat-trap that one of the scullers threw open for me, I slipped in and stretched myself at full length on a mat in what is called the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the world. Traueling from thence by the Ocean sea 50. daies iourney southward, I came vnto a certain land named Lammori, [Marginal note: Perhaps he meaneth Comori.] where, in regard of extreeme heat, the people both men and women go stark-naked from top to toe: who seeing me apparelled scoffed at me, saying that God made Adam et Eue naked. In this countrey al women are common, so that no man can say, this is my wife. Also when any of the said women beareth a son ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... scandal. All the principal inhabitants were assembled in the cell, with his stark black corpse in their midst, when one of them made the following sensible suggestion: "We never could understand him when he was alive; it was easier to trace the flight of the swallow than to guess at his thoughts. Now that he is dead, let him still follow his own fancy. ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... columns of the American army, but with a lieutenant's commission, was sent south and took no further part in the struggles about Lake Champlain. But Bryce, two years after the capture of Ticonderoga, well sustained the family name and honor while fighting with Stark at Bennington. ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... "So there I lay, stark with fear. But my visitor seemed to be very harmless. She drew up a chair by the side of the bed and took her seat, muttering something I couldn't catch. Then she bent over me and I felt her ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... the bottom, sir, tied neck and heels. He went stark mad last night, and bit and fought till we had to tie him ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... outlet of the valley a strip of blue sea bounds the horizon; westward are the distant mountains. In the foreground, in front of a farmhouse, snug-looking, with its roof of velvety-brown thatch, a troop of sturdy urchins, suntanned and stark naked, are frisking in the wildest gambols, all heedless of the scolding voice of the withered old grandam who sits spinning and minding the house, while her son and his wife are away toiling at some outdoor labour. Close at our feet runs a stream of pure water, in ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... an' I thought the captain was stark, staring mad to fire his fallow on such a windy day, and that blowing right from the lake to the house. When Old Wittals came in and towld us that the masther was not to the fore, but only one lad, an' the wife an' the chilther at home,—thinks I, there's no time to be lost, or the ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... amazement. "Are you goin' stark loony? Payin' that Simmie Crocker fourteen dollars a WEEK for drivin' team and swappin' our good sugar and flour for sewin'-circle lies over folks' back fences! I never heard such a thing in my life. Why, Baker's Bazaar don't pay the man ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Science! Ile lamps and old Charlies—bless 'em!— Wos good for trade, our trade. Ah! if my dad Could see 'ow Larnin', Law, and Light oppress 'em, Our good old cracksmen-gangs, he'd go stark mad. As for the Hartful Dodger and old Fagin, Ah! they're well hout of it. Wot could they do With Science and her bloomin' fireworks plaguin' Their hartfullest little ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 21, 1891 • Various
... perhaps, if they may come to the same fate; one or two are idle sightseers, not always French, for the Morgue is a favourite haunt with the irrepressible tourist doing Paris. Strangest of all, the murderer himself, the doer of the fell deed, comes here, to the very spot where his victim lies stark and reproachful, and stares at it spellbound, fascinated, filled more with remorse, perchance, than fear at the risk he runs. So common is this trait, that in mysterious murder cases the police of Paris keep a disguised officer among ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... sake, Alix, what on earth are you saying? Are you stark, staring crazy? You come right upstairs and get into bed this minute. My land, I—I believe you're going to be sick. You've got the queerest look in your eyes. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... they made their way onward across the Esplanade des Invalides, through the serried lines of trees, stark and formal against the January sky, to the rue Fabert. Here, in the rue Fabert, lay that note of contrast that is bound into the very atmosphere of Paris—the note that touches the imagination to so acute an interest. Here shabby, broken-down shops rubbed shoulders with ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... eighteen brothers Diderik stark Dwells in the hills of Bern; And each I wot twelve sons has got, For ...
— King Diderik - and the fight between the Lion and Dragon and other ballads - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... then he remembered. The whole incident came back to him, etched upon his memory. How he had started from the car, eager to get to Amanda, then Lyman had come with his news of her engagement and the hope in his heart became stark. Where was her blue bunting with its eternal song? Ah, he had killed it with his indifference and caution and foolish blindness! He knew he stumbled along the road, grief and misery playing upon his heart strings. Then came the frantic ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... people killed in ordinary accidents in a single week was greater than the total number killed by the Nipe in the last decade, but nowhere were men banding together to put a stop to that sort of death. Accidental death was a known factor, almost a friend; the Nipe was stark horror. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... toward that unknown husband was one of stark terror, a sick dislike that had grown stronger with the years. In her mind he remained unchanged. She saw him as the gawky, shrinking boy, his lips apart, his eyes looking at her with uncontrollable aversion. Oh, no! Life with Peter Champneys was unthinkable! ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... difficulty by single combat, and the weapons to be used were war-clubs and short knives. A suitable place was selected. The whole village of the Tetons emptied itself to witness the combat. Men, women, and children swarmed about the arena. The two youthful combatants made their appearance, stark naked, and took their positions about thirty yards apart. Just when the signal was given, Do-ran-to's eye caught that of his betrothed Ni-ar-gua in the crowd. Then said his heart, "Be strong and my arm big!" There was ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... States histories were in great demand, and the pages of Shakespeare were turned over for inspiration. Each boy was to compile his own speeches, and many hurried consultations were held over back fences, and in haylofts; one boy, who represented General Stark, selected Hamlet's 'to be or not to be.' A companion objected to the lines as inappropriate, but General Stark replied, "Well, I know the piece because I've spoken it in school, and I ain't going to learn ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... Munin the owl, staring at her from the low mantel. She caught her breath, and the deep silence was broken by the metallic tongue that dirged out "twelve." The last stroke of the bronze hammer echoed drearily; the old year lay stark and cold on its bier; Munin flapped his dusky wings with a long, sepulchral, blood-curdling hoot, and the dying man opened his dim, failing eyes, and fixed them for the last ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... blood-drops stigmatize The western floor. The aisles are mute and cold. A rigid fetich in her robe of gold The Virgin of the Pillar, with blank eyes, Enthroned beneath her votive canopies, Gathers a meagre remnant to her fold. The rest is solitude; the church, grown old, Stands stark and gray beneath the burning skies. Wellnigh again its mighty frame-work grows To be a part of nature's self, withdrawn From hot humanity's impatient woes; The floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn, And in the east one ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... I call 'em," he said. "They're stark naked, and they have nothing. What is there ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... is seen in stark immediacy and directness every now and then in civilized life. Lynchings and mob violence in general are illustrations of what happens when groups throw to the winds the multiple inhibitions of custom and law. And the records of the criminal ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Not far off were two dead artillery horses in their harness. Another had been attended to by a burying-party, who had thrown some earth over him but his last bed-clothes were too short, and his legs stuck out stark and stiff from beneath the gravel coverlet. It was a great pity that we had no intelligent guide to explain to us the position of that portion of the two armies which fought over this ground. There was a shallow trench before we came to the cornfield, too ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... stirred in the streets of the village, and, gliding cat-like past the station, Jack put the car at the beginning of the real ascent of the famous St. Gothard Road. The higher we went, the more wildly roared the storm. There was something appalling in the fierce volleyings of the wind along the stark and broken faces of the precipice: it was like the rattle of thunder. In the sombre defile of the Schoellenen the air rushed as through a funnel. We could see nothing save the thread-like road illuminated by our steadfast ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... is worse even than I thought—it's run the man stark crazy," said Miss Sally Ruth, viewing him ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... crutches, came in and asked so plaintively for a penny; but no sooner had he got it than he let it fall on the floor, and for all he raked and scraped with his crutch he was not able to get hold of it, so stiff and stark was he. ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen
... on the morning of December 3, '84, the rain fell persistently in the midst of a profound silence. The trees stood stark in the grey air as if petrified; there was not wind enough to waft the falling leaf; it fell straight ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... one power—one weapon, still left to me unimpaired: to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God! And the proposition is just this: whether to be stark honest, even against the apparent interests of the very cause you are out to plead, is not in the long run the surest way—if it be of God— to help it make good: whether defeat, with the whole truth told, isn't better than defeat hidden away and disowned, ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... Moscow and St. Petersburg present some of the most cadaverous specimens of the startling humor in which the Russians delight. Here you find frozen oxen, calves, sheep, rabbits, geese, ducks, and all manner of animals and birds, once animate with life, now stiff and stark in death. The oxen stand staring at you with their fixed eyes and gory carcasses; the calves are jumping or frisking in skinless innocence; the sheep ba-a at you with open mouths, or cast sheep's-eyes at the by-passers; the rabbits, having traveled ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... women were celebrated for their beauty, but Mrs. Boreel was usually regarded as the handsomest of the trio. Mrs. Walter Langdon was Dorothea Astor, a daughter of John Jacob Astor, and her husband was a grandson of Judge John Langdon of New Hampshire, who equipped Stark's regiment for the battle of Bennington, and who for twelve years was a member of the United States Senate and was present as President pro tempore of that body at the first inauguration ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... 'Oh—did you want towels?' And stark naked he went out into the hall, striding a strange, white figure between the unliving furniture. He came back with the towels, and took his former position, crouching seated before ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... earth of mine doth tremble, and I feel A stark affrighted motion in my blood; My soul grows weary of her house, and I All over am a trouble to my self; There is some hidden power in these dead things That calls my flesh into'em; I am cold; Be resolute, ...
— The Maids Tragedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... snow was flooded in moonlight and the birch trees wavered their stark shadows across it like supplicating arms. Suddenly I heard the soft padded sound of snow falling upon snow, to slowly perceive a figure, the slender figure of a young child attempting to arouse itself almost at ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... of the sweet-smelling stuff are tossed about our persons. Neglect the duty and you must walk alone. For to neglect conventionality is like going abroad without clothes; the naked man appears. Now, nothing can be more utterly horrid to our senses than a stark woman or stark man walking down the street. We should certainly pull aside the blind to have a peep, and the more we could see of the nakedness the further would we crane our heads (provided no one was by to watch); ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... the north side of the railway there stretched a stark desert, but unlike the one which lay on the other side of the Suez Canal. That one looked as level as would the bottom of the sea, from which the water had disappeared and only wrinkled sand remained, while here the sand was more yellowish, heaped up as if in great knolls, ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... it is easier to remove a dead cow after dissection than before. Madame therefore announced her intention of sending for the butcher, and was upon the point of doing so when Corporal Mucklewame, in whose heart, at the spectacle of the stark and lifeless corpse, ancient and romantic memories were stirring—it may be remembered that before answering to the call of "K(1)" Mucklewame had followed the calling of butcher's assistant at Wishaw—volunteered for the job. His ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... You—good Lord!—do you pretend to put yourself in comparison with me? You, with your other affairs, and your conscious falsity to her, with me! Why, but for me, she would be drifting down the river, and lying stark and dead on the beach of Anticosti. That is what I have done for her. And what have you done? I might laughed over the joke of it before I knew her; but now, since I know her, and her, when you force me to say ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... Perlen klar aus Orient Mir Zhr von Augen schiessen: Wie Rosenwsser wohlgebrennt Mir Thrnen berfliessen. 20 O keusche Lieb, Cupido rein, Allda dein Hitz erkhle, Da dunk dein heisse Flttig ein, Dass dich so stark nit fhle. ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... For the wild grim dice of the iron game. The looks are bent on the shaking ground, And the heart beats loud with a knelling sound; Swift by the breasts that must bear the brunt, Gallops the major along the front— "Halt!" And fettered they stand at the stark command, And the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... account o' me Some wench will go unwed, And 'eaps o' lives will never be, Because 'e's stark and dead? Or if 'is missis damns the war, And by some candle light, Tow-headed kids are prayin' for The Fritz I copped ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... moment only. And so Gral stood stark in his moment of awe, truly frightened as he visioned what such a blow might have done to Obe. But Gral was truly man, truly prototype; for the time of one deep breath he felt it, then awe and fright ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... we were sailing along, we saw people stand on the shore looking at us: we could also perceive they were black and stark naked. I was inclined to go on shore, but Xury cried, "No, no:" however, I approached nearer, and I found they run along the shore by me a good way. They had no weapons in their hands, except one, who held a long stick, which Xury told me was a ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... little picture by Ruysdael, has employed the pencils of several students;—among the most successful of whom are Messrs. Stark, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... you have not gone stark mad, you must have had a sunstroke," said Harold, coming forward, "what's ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... had brought her to the Nuns' Chapel, her orisons had been concluded, for she had turned her back upon the altar, and sat gazing sorrowfully down at her lap, where lay in pathetic pose a white rabbit and a snowy pigeon,—both dead, quite stark and cold,—laid out in state upon the spotless linen apron, around which a fluted ruffle ran crisp and smooth. One tiny waxen hand held a broken lily, and the other was vainly pressed upon the lids of the rabbit's eyes, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... were looking on were two men, stark naked, who had been bathing near by. About fifty or sixty people soon collected, and some time passed before it occurred to any one to remark that these two men had ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... it is in my power to present a drawing, made expressly for the purpose, of the picturesque costume worn by the Royal Company of Archers, or King's Body Guard of Scotland. This is described in Stark's "Picture of Edinburgh" thus:—"Their uniform is 42nd tartan, with green velvet collar and cuffs, and a Highland bonnet, with feathers; on the front of the bonnet is the cross of St. Andrew, and a gold arrow ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... or high-shouldered scavenger's cart, the road was deserted. Once a low-hung two-wheeled vehicle rattled by, on which, insufficiently covered by sacking, lay a dead horse, the great head swinging ghastly over the slanting tail- board, the legs sticking out stark in front. A man, perched sideways on the carcass, swore at the rickety crock he was driving, and lashed it under the belly with a short-handled heavy-thonged whip. He was collarless, and the scarlet and orange handkerchief, knotted about ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... o'er bank, o'er ditch, o'er stark, She flang amang them a', man; The butter-box got many knocks, Their riggings paid for a' then. They got their paiks, wi sudden straiks, Which to their grief they saw, man: Wi clinkum, clankum o'er their crowns, The lads began to ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... Mrs. Carpenter of Chicago sang sweetly, playing her own accompaniment; Mr. Frank Lincoln gave some of his amusing impersonations; Miss Maud Powell of Chicago, only fourteen years of age, who had been taking lessons in France and Germany for some years, played exquisite airs on the violin; Mrs. Flora Stark, Miss Alice Blatch and Miss Conway gave us some fine classical music on the piano, and Nathaniel Mellen sang some pathetic negro melodies.[581] Altogether it was a pleasant occasion and I felt quite proud of the varied talents manifested by our young people. Some English ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... sense of vastness and durability. A dark and waveless sheet lay stretched before him, merging speedily into general blackness. About four yards away and as many apart, two gigantic pillars arose out of the motionless flood stark and ghostly gray. Behind them, suggestive of rows with an aisle between, other pillars were seen, mere upright streaks of uncertain hue fainter growing in the shadowy perspective. Below there was nothing to arrest a glance. Raising his eyes to the roof above him, out of the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... first, then loudly, frantically. But no answer came, except that now the mocking din of the baboons seemed to jeer at us. They appeared to be gathered near us, all together. As we ran towards the sound the moon burst through a rift in the clouds. There ahead of us, stark naked, and running swiftly towards the baboons, we saw the figure of Hector, his body gleaming white in the moonbeams, and by his side the grey figure of ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... the day before, now glittered forth in blooms of unfamiliar beauty. Towards that spot were attracted myriads of happy insects, whose hum of intense joy was musically loud. But the form of the life-seeking sorcerer lay rigid and stark; blind to the bloom of the wild-flowers, deaf to the glee of the insects,—one hand still resting heavily on the rim of the emptied caldron, and the face still hid behind the Black Veil. What! the wondrous elixir, sought with such hope and well-nigh ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... slumbering negress, partly disclosed through the lacework of some rigging, lying, with youthful limbs carelessly disposed, under the lee of the bulwarks, like a doe in the shade of a woodland rock. Sprawling at her lapped breasts, was her wide-awake fawn, stark naked, its black little body half lifted from the deck, crosswise with its dam's; its hands, like two paws, clambering upon her; its mouth and nose ineffectually rooting to get at the mark; and meantime giving a ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... think the Breitmann Must be the greatest man Who ever went a-fighting Since History began, I dressed me like a soldier, For I am stark of limb; With Breitmann for a model, And try to ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... passed away, after which the conversation necessarily drifted into more serious courses. It could hardly be otherwise in view of the circumstances by which they were all surrounded. Youth and beauty and love cannot always feast upon themselves. They must perforce return to the stark realities of life. They spoke of the war and of all the miseries attendant upon it—the sufferings of the poor, the privations of the sick, the anxieties of parents, the pangs of absence, the rigours of the cold, and the terrible sacrifices which even the commonest soldier ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... from the house in the direction of Main Street, he experienced a sudden sense of exaltation. Viola was not his sister! As suddenly came the reaction, and with it stark realization. Viola could never be anything to him ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... shining hull was a thing of beauty through stark grandeur now, but obviously incomplete. The ray projectors were not mounted, but they were to be ray projectors of a type never before possible. Space is the transmitter of all rays, and it is in space that those energy forms exist. Arcot ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... manly blood, and, child as he was, he did not crouch or fawn upon me. I heard him cry that he would try to love me, - not that he did, - and then I saw him running back towards the house. The next I saw was my own sword naked in my hand, and he lying at my feet stark dead, - dabbled here and there with blood, but otherwise no different from what I had seen him in his sleep - in the same attitude too, with his cheek resting upon ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... it—having been rebuilt indeed upon Saxon foundations in the days of William Rufus—yet lies among its ancient elms. Farther on, situate upon the slope of a vale down which runs a brook through meadows, is the stark ruin of the old Nunnery that was subservient to the proud Abbey on the hill, some of it now roofed in with galvanised iron sheets and used ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... be brief, I handed in that stark old traveller from nowhere at the hospital, and as a matter of curiosity sat in the waiting-room while they examined him. In five minutes the house-surgeon on duty came in to see me, and with a shake of his head ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... although I did not think it curious then, that these men should have accepted so unquestioningly Lancelot's command over them. But they were old soldiers, who had promised to obey Captain Amber, and he had himself devolved his command upon Lancelot. And so, until Lancelot went stark staring mad, which he was not in the least likely to do, they were perfectly ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... sympathy," interrupted Flavia. "Ah, my dear, you could not be expected to understand. You can't realize, knowing Arthur as you do, his entire lack of any aesthetic sense whatever. He is absolutely nil, stone deaf and stark blind, on that side. He doesn't mean to be brutal, it is just the brutality of utter ignorance. They always feel it—they are so sensitive to unsympathetic influences, you know; they know it the moment they come into ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... down a dark side way which led them to the water-front. Wharves where work was going on roared and shone. The masts and spars of ships rose stark against the sky. Beyond, the river was dotted with lights against the luminous horizon of Manhattan. He slackened his pace. At his side the ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... Rev. Oliver P. Stark, the first superintendent of this institution, died there at the age of 61, March 2, 1884. He was a native of Goshen, New York, and a graduate of the college and Theological Seminary at Princeton, ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... winding-sheet, There stark she lay on her carven bed: Seven burning tapers about her feet, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... official Church, now another, perhaps the exact opposite of the last. Now they denied something as old as Europe—such as the right to property: now a new piece of usage or discipline such as Communion in one kind: now a partial regional rule, such as celibacy. Some went stark mad. Others, at the contrary extreme, did no ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... heart out before his father's eyes. Hardly any man or woman survived, except by accident. A body of some hundred burghers made their escape across the snow into the open country. They were, however, overtaken, stripped stark naked, and hung upon the trees by the feet, to freeze, or to perish by a more lingering death. Most of them soon died, but twenty, who happened to be wealthy, succeeded, after enduring much torture, ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... nothing but Charming, very charming.—The first sofas were covered with cushions and rich carpets, on which sat the ladies; and on the second, their slaves behind them, but without any distinction of rank by their dress, all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed. Yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture amongst them. They walked and moved with the same majestic grace which Milton describes of our general mother. There were many amongst them as exactly ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... we meet, when shall we be * Again united after severance stark? And I shall win my choicest wish and view? * Blame end and Love abide without remark? Were Nile to flow as freely as my tears, * 'Twould leave no region but with water-mark: 'Twould overthrow Hijaz and Egypt-land * 'Twould deluge Syria and 'twould drown ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... overwhelming evidence. There were persons present (a small minority only) who considered this want of composure on the part of the prisoner to be a sign in his favor. Self-possession, in his dreadful position, signified, to their minds, the stark insensibility of a heartless and shameless criminal, and afforded in itself a presumption, not of innocence, but ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... story we have an account of the brothers in the London house of Captain Con, the happy husband married to a stark English wife of mechanical propriety—a rebellious husband, too, when in the sociable atmosphere of his own upper room, amid the blackened clay pipes and the friendly fumes of whiskey, he sings her praises, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... language, and not even sure before you start whether you will be given enough to eat. Either it is that saddest of courage forced on the timid by necessity, or, as Doctor Johnson would probably have said, it is stark insensibility; and I am afraid when I look at her I silently agree with the apostle of common sense, and take it for granted that she is incapable of deep feeling, for the altogether inadequate reason ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... men—Jim Lewarne, sunk in a drunken slumber, Calvin Oke bawling in his ear, Old Zeb on hands and knees, scraping the embers together, Toby Lewarne (Jim's elder brother) thumping a pannikin on his knee and bellowing a carol, and a dozen others—in stages varying from qualified sobriety to stark and shameless intoxication—peering across the fire at the game in progress between them and the faint line that marked where sand ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... experiences in the Great Republic. It may well be that a long list of inconsistencies might be made out for any country, just as for any individual; but so far as my knowledge goes the United States stands out as preeminently the "Land of Contrasts"—the land of stark, staring, and stimulating inconsistency; at once the home of enlightenment and the happy hunting ground of the charlatan and the quack; a land in which nothing happens but the unexpected; the home of Hyperion, but no ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... that moment Anthony Cardew had an odd sort of vision. He saw the little grocer lying stark and huddled among the phlox by the stable, and the group of men that ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... at present, Stark, I'm crawling on my umbilicus same as the rest of you; the only difference is that I retain the charm ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... pedagogical side of their art, as for instance have Tausig, Ehrlich or Joseffy, all of whom have produced remarkable works on technic. Liszt's contribution to the technic of the instrument was made through his pieces, not through exercises; his contributions to the Lebert and Stark Stuttgart Conservatory method consist of two well-known concert studies. Personally, I am opposed to set methods, that is, those that pretend to teach the pupil factory-wise. Of what value is the teacher if he ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... receive, whose every word deserves To taste of thy most worst? Thy tyranny, Together working with thy jealousies, Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle For girls of nine, O! think what they have done, And then run mad indeed, stark mad; for all Thy by-gone fooleries were but spices of it. That thou betray'dst Polixenes, 'twas nothing; That did but show thee, of a fool, inconstant And damnable ingrateful; nor was't much Thou would'st have poison'd good Camillo's honour, To have him kill a king; ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... farm were, the new manager found, three black fellows and two 'gins,'{*} all of whom were in a state of stark nudity; but they welcomed him with smiles and an overpowering smell of ants, the which latter is peculiar to the Australian nigger. One of the bucks, who when Denison entered was sleeping, with three exceedingly mangy dogs, in the ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... a hand on each of his shoulders, "that ye could not count twenty straight ahead, if your salvation depended on it. And to think that I have been raising a great fellow like you to be ordered about by a slip of a girl. Ye're crazy," he said, going on, "stark, Bedlam crazy!" ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... in praying for a miracle. But we have learned down here to pray for things we want, and, anyhow, just at that moment the miracle occurred. The wind fell off suddenly, and came with a light air from the southward, and then dropped stark calm. The ice was now "all abroad," which I was sorry for, for there was a big safe pan not twenty yards away from me. If I could have got on that, I might have killed my other dogs when the time came, and with their coats I could hope to hold out for two or three days ...
— Adrift on an Ice-Pan • Wilfred T. Grenfell
... Twelve Letters written by Stark Munro, M. B., to his friend and former fellow-student, Herbert Swanborough, of Lowell, Massachusetts, during ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... grey Allan's mates with awe Heard of the visioned sights he saw, The legend heard him say; But the Seer's gifted eye was dim, Deafened his ear, and stark his limb, Ere closed that bloody day. He sleeps far from his Highland heath, But often of the Dance of Death His comrades tell the tale On picquet-post, when ebbs the night, And waning watch-fires glow less bright, And ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... with a curve not larger than that of an oyster-shell, which when open to the tide, his mouth very much resembled. As for his neck, it was so long that no portion of dress at that time discovered was capable of covering more than one third of it; so that there were always two parts out of three left stark naked, and helplessly exposed to the elements. Whenever he smiled he looked as if he was about to weep. As the squire said, he was dreadfully round-shouldered—had dangling arms, that kept napping about him as if they were moved by some machinery that ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... gauzy wrappings that enveloped her from head to foot. There, too, standing near to her were the Khania Atene and her uncle the old Shaman, who looked but ill at ease, and lastly, stretched upon his funeral couch, the fiery light beating upon his stark form and face, lay the ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... find it occupied, and I expected to find, in addition to my books of memoranda, an outfit of clothing. Where is it? No—don't rise. I can see it's gone. Now, just at present, though the days are quite warm enough for an invisible man to run about stark, the evenings are quite chilly. I want clothing—and other accommodation; and I must also have ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... have been to see the lying in state, as lying stark and dead is called whimsically, of the Duke of Sussex. It was a fine ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... way of being baking hot along the Little Missouri, and even in the late afternoon the air was usually like a blast from a furnace. But the country which appeared stark and dreadful under the straight noon sun, at dusk took on a magic more enticing, it seemed, because it grew out of such forbidding desolation. The buttes, protruding like buttresses from the ranges that bordered the river, threw lengthening shadows across the ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... time it was grey dawn, and we were working up in shore, without dreaming of breaking the blockade, when it fell stark calm. Presently the Spanish squadron, anchored under Punto Canoa, perceived us, when a corvette, two schooners, a cutter, and eight gunboats, got under weigh, the latter of which soon swept close to us, ranging themselves ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... near that you cannot but wonder at their recklessness. There is a species of impudence which seems to be specially attached to little birds. In them it reaches the highest pitch of perfection. A bold, swelling, arrogant effrontery—a sort of stark, staring, self-complacent, comfortable, and yet innocent impertinence, which is at once irritating and amusing, aggravating and attractive, and which is exhibited in the greatest intensity in the whisky-john. He will jump down almost under your nose, and seize ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... Louis and Richard Hautville came home. They had been trapping on Green Mountain, they said, camping in the little lodge they had built there. When they came in laden with stark white rabbits and limp-necked birds, and one of them with a haunch of venison on his back, Madelon faced them with sudden fierceness, as if to speak. Then she turned away to her work, without a word of greeting. The boy Richard stared at her with a ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... would involve this country in diplomatic difficulties with Germany. Next, the Germans protested against our selling munitions of war to the Allies. Neither custom nor international law forbade doing this, and the protest stood out in :stark impudence when it came from Germany, the country which, for fifty years and more, had sold munitions to every one who asked and had not hesitated to sell impartially to both antagonists in the Russo-Japanese War. By playing ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... offer; and this is all the work of Nature. How clear the water is! We can see everything on the bottom with perfect distinctness. Rich green water plants bend their limbs gracefully to the force of the current. Old dead sticks lie stiff and stark, that once were living branches swaying and singing above their present burial places, not dreaming of death and decay, so beautiful were they. Great rocks heave their brown backs up to the very top of the water. Beds of gravel still ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... cross blistered the Morning-gold, And the body upon it was stark and cold. The wind of the dawn went merrily past, The high grass bowed her plumes to ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... and Buffalo he succeeded in winning the pennant with that organization, he having the services of John M. Ward and "Bobby" Matthews as pitchers, Lewis J. Brown as catcher; Joe Start, M. H. McGeary and W. L. Hague on the bases; with "Tommy" Stark, Paul Hines and James O'Rourke in the field. Emil Grace and John Farrell replaced Brown and Hague toward the close of ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... garden! The only place where it might fitly grow is by the side of the road that led Childe Roland to the Dark Tower: between the bit of "stubbed ground" and the marsh near to the "palsied oak," with its roots set in the "bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... asphaltum and sand. No more barricades of flagstones—no more assaulting his Majesty's troops with cobbles. I cannot feel friendly toward my quondam fellow-American, Napoleon III., especially at this time,—[July, 1867.]—when in fancy I see his credulous victim, Maximilian, lying stark and stiff in Mexico, and his maniac widow watching eagerly from her French asylum for the form that will never come—but I do admire his nerve, his calm self-reliance, his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... western floor. The aisles are mute and cold. A rigid fetich in her robe of gold The Virgin of the Pillar, with blank eyes, Enthroned beneath her votive canopies, Gathers a meagre remnant to her fold. The rest is solitude; the church, grown old, Stands stark and gray beneath the burning skies. Wellnigh again its mighty frame-work grows To be a part of nature's self, withdrawn From hot humanity's impatient woes; The floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn, And ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... night a sword-light in the sky Flashed a swift terror on the dark. In that sharp light the fields did lie Naked and stone-like; each tree stood Like a tranced woman, bound and stark. Far off the wood With darkness ridged ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... of awnings, with bare decks, stark as gladiators, sombre and terrible, they conveyed a relentless significance heightened by the ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... Blackburn no longer lay peacefully on its back. It had been turned on its side, and remained in a stark and awkward attitude. For the first time the back of the head ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... was addressed to her stark naked baby, which broke from a tremendous stare into a benignant laugh, that had the effect of shutting up its eyes at the same time that it ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... but impregnated the air of the country with such sober and salutiferous steams as very much comforted the heads and refreshed the senses of all that breathed in it. A discarded statesman that, at his first landing, appeared stark, staring mad, would become calm in a week's time, and upon his return home live easy and satisfied in his retirement. A moping lover would grow a pleasant fellow by that time he had rid thrice about the ...
— English Satires • Various
... precious vermin. You moving dirt, you rank stark muck o'the world, You oven-bats, you things so far from souls, Like dogs, you're out of Providence's reach, And only fit for hanging; but be gone, And think of plunder.—You right elder sheriff, Who carved our Henry's image on a table, At your club-feast, and ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... dark-coloured, but not black; that the man and woman appeared to be very old, being both grey-headed; that the hair of the man's head was bushy, and his beard long and rough; that the woman's hair was cropped short, and both of them were stark naked. Mr Monkhouse the surgeon, and one of the men, who were with another party near the watering-place, also strayed from their companions, and as they were coming out of a thicket, observed six Indians standing together, at the distance of about ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... John Randolph set himself stark and grim. "The question is," said he, replying to Calhoun's new nationalism, "whether or not we are willing to become one great consolidated nation, or whether we have still respect enough for those ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... hurdles of reeds covered with a mat, borne from the ground a foot and more by a hurdle of wood On these, round about the house, they lie, heads and points, one by the other, against the fire, some covered with mats, some with skins, and some stark naked lie on the ground, from six to twenty in a house.... In some places are from two to fifty of these houses together, or but little separated by groves of trees." [Footnote: Smith's History of Virginia, Richmond ed., ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... I thought the captain was stark, staring mad to fire his fallow on such a windy day, and that blowing right from the lake to the house. When Old Wittals came in and towld us that the masther was not to the fore, but only one lad, an' the wife an' the chilther ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... land would absorb it, or at least give a background to shadow over its likelihood, the scenery and atmosphere to lend an evanescent credibility, changing it in time to a mere legend, a tale told out of the hazy distance. But in America it obtrudes; it stares eternally on in all its stark unforgetfulness, absorbing its background, constantly rescuing itself from legend by turning guesswork and theory into facts, till it appears bare, irremediable, and complete,—witnessed at high noon, and in New Jersey of all places, flat, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... bred to kintra-wark, And counted was baith wight and stark, Yet that was never Robin's mark To mak a man; But tell him, he was learn'd and clark, Ye ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... after, we saw two sail to leeward from, off the quarter-deck, for they kept no look-out from the mast-head, and we presently observed they were in chace of us. The French and Spaniards on board now began to grow a good deal alarmed, when it fell stark calm, but not before the ships had neared us so much, that we plainly discerned them to be English men of war, the one a two-decker, the other a twenty-gun ship. The French had now thoughts, when a breeze should spring up, of running the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... late one afternoon, and the low sun was beginning to strike athwart the stark columns and down the long aisles of the redwoods on the High Ridge. The doctor, returning from a patient at the loggers' camp in its depths, had just sighted the smaller groves of Laurel Springs, two miles away. He was riding fast, ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a bygone age! He stood there, ludicrous and unreal in his stark black nakedness, his frayed robes of crimson whipping to tatters in the breeze. Yet he had forgotten his wounds—Horab was standing upright—and Garry's hand that held the pistol fell loosely ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... a humbug and fabricator of sham attitudes, and ally myself with democracy. Fact, valiantly faced, is of more value than any reputation. The false aristocrat is robed to the chin and unwashed beneath, the true goes stark as Apollo. The false is ridiculous with undignified insistence upon his dignity; the true says like God, "I ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... slaves jes' like people sell hosses now. I saw a lot of slaves sold on de auction block. Dey would strip 'em stark naked. A nigger scarred up or whaled an' welted up wus considered a bad nigger an' did not bring much. If his body wus not scarred, he brought a good price. I saw a lot of slaves whupped an' I was whupped myself. Dey whupped me ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... straight and stark, as though, thought Rankin despairingly, she were already dead. Her right arm was out over the sheet, her thin hand nerveless. Her face was very white, her lips swollen and bleeding as though she had bitten them repeatedly. She was absolutely motionless, lying on ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... our dead. Stark they came into the world, and stark they passed out over the side of the longboat and down into the dark freezing ocean. Lots were cast for the clothes. This was by Captain Nicholl's command, in ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... consoling household motto. Most of the hotels are in the town, at considerable distance from the ocean, and the majestic old sea, which can be monotonous but never vulgar, is barricaded from the town by five or six miles of stark-naked plank walk, rows on rows of bath closets, leagues of flimsy carpentry-work, in the way of cheap-John shops, tin-type booths, peep-shows, go-rounds, shooting-galleries, pop-beer and cigar shops, restaurants, barber shops, photograph galleries, summer theatres. Sometimes the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... covered only with a blanket), rushed excitedly into the crowd of soldiers and servants. When they tried to stop him, and seized hold of his blanket, he gave a cry of terror, and took to flight like the others, leaving his garment in the hands of the soldiers. And so he ran stark-naked, with desperate leaps, and his bare body ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... not that his memory was at fault, but because he was perpetually dumbfounded by her genius. Originally, this living-room had been a dolorous cave with varnished yellow-pine woodwork, gas-logs, yellow wall-paper to induce toothache, and a stark chandelier with two anemic legs kicking out at vacancy. She had caused the Orpheum electrician to remove the chandelier; with her own hands, she had painted the woodwork a deep, rich cream-colour; she had ripped out the gas-logs ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... this Order who lead the most ascetic life in the world, going stark naked; and these worship the Ox. Most of them have a small ox of brass or pewter or gold which they wear tied over the forehead. Moreover they take cow-dung and burn it, and make a powder thereof; and make ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... clothes even to the skin, which was scourged with nettles till he was blistered from head to foot, notwithstanding all the eloquence of his tears and supplications. When I was satisfied with the stripes I had bestowed, we carried off his clothes, which we hid in a hedge near the place, and left him stark naked to find his way home in the best manner he could, while I took care to be there before him. I afterwards understood that, in his way to the lodgings of a friend, who lived in the skirts of the town, he was picked up by the watch, who carried him to the round-house, from ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... "I defy thee, Swine's-face," said the wench. The fellow, being abashed, said, "What, sweet pigsnie! Be content, for if thou do live until the next year, thou wilt be a foul sow." "Walk, knave, walk!" said she; "for if thou live till the next year, thou wilt be a stark knave, ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... his head, saw for the first time the crumpled debris of the black ship, a hundred feet away, saw stark forms. "There's nothing to be afraid of now," he said. "It's all over. We'll soon be with your father's ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... the full extent of the Cavaliers' loss discovered. Within the lines well-nigh four hundred men lay stark and stiff where they had fallen, struck down by the fire from the houses and the fierce onslaught in front and rear, few ...
— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston
... in the old days she had always been a sincere person; she had deceived me about facts, but she had never deceived me about herself. Her personal, stark frankness had been her essential strength. And it was gone. I came back to find Amanda an accomplished actress, a thing of poses and calculated effects. She was a surface, a sham, a Lorelei. Beneath that surface I could not discover ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... though faint, emaciated, and stark, He buoy'd his boyish limbs, and strove to ply With the quick wave, and gain, ere it was dark, The beach which lay before him, high and dry: The greatest danger here was from a shark, That carried off his neighbour by the thigh; As for the other two, they could not swim, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... his pilotage they anchored on the first of November close to the Isthmus of Darien. One of the greatest princes of the country soon came on board. The courtiers who attended him, ten or twelve in number, were stark naked; but he was distinguished by a red coat, a pair of cotton drawers, and an old hat. He had a Spanish name, spoke Spanish, and affected the grave deportment of a Spanish don. The Scotch propitiated Andreas, as he was called, by a present of a new hat blazing with gold ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... second out of endless time Fell, sundering the night. I saw the Housatonic hurled, A ship of light, Out of a molten sea, Hang an unending pulse-beat, Glowing, stark; While the hot clouds flung back a sullen roar. Then all her pride, so confident and sure, Went reeling ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... were on the campus to-day, and we decided to go down the creek to-morrow afternoon and take our suppers. There'll be Ellen Stark, and Georgia Prentiss, and myself. And the boys will be Tom Angell, and Frank Morris, and Eugene Babler. And Professor Rayburn was there when we were talking about it, and so we asked him to go along, but we told him he must take a girl. And he said, 'I wonder if ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... deadly poison. We all can live here for the next nineteen minutes in perfect safety, then at the first breath we draw we expire instantly. It is a lovely death. There is no pain, no contortion of the countenance, but we will be found here in the morning stark and stiff in our seats. I propose, gentlemen, that we teach London the great lesson it so much needs. No cause is without its martyrs. Let us be the martyrs of the great religion of Anarchy. I have left in my room papers telling ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... boiling in a cast-iron pot over the fire. Outside another two reindeer were being cut up. Each tent contained an inner sleeping-room of deerskin, which was lighted and warmed by lamps of train oil. There played small stark-naked children, plump and chubby as little pigs, and sometimes they ran in the same light attire out over the rime between the tents. The tiniest were carried, well wrapped up in furs, on the backs of their fathers and mothers, and whatever pranks they ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... as though the rushing foam were a firm thing and could save them. She heard the wild thin wind screeching across the ocean furrows, breathless in his race with death. And then all seemed quiet, and she could see a grand form of a man, stiff-limbed and stark, the yellow hair all hanging down and the broad white throat turned up in death, floating solemnly through the deep green water, and seaweed, and ooze, far down ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... blue-white bark of the 'white-box' trees; a dead naked white ring-barked tree, or dead white stump starting out here and there, and the ragged patches of shade and light on the road that made anything, from the shape of a spotted bullock to a naked corpse laid out stark. Roads and tracks through the Bush made by moonlight—every one seeming straighter and clearer than the real one: you have to trust to your horse then. Sometimes the naked white trunk of a red stringy-bark tree, where a sheet ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... and glittering. In the church-yard, upon some of the pews arranged for the purpose, had been placed the lifeless bodies of the three men who had died during the night. There they lay, stark and stiff. Upon these cold, dead faces no mourners' tears would fall; no friends would bear with reverend tread these honored forms to their last resting-place. Rough pine boxes would soon cover the faces once the light of some far-away home, careless hands would place them ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... crowded his mind. When he had first met Niaga, almost a week before, she had been lying on the sandy bank of the stream, idly plaiting a garland of red and blue flowers. Niaga! A copper-skinned goddess, stark naked and unashamed in the bright spot light of sun filtered through the trees. Languorous, laughing lips; long, black hair loosely caught in a net of filmy material that ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... at all events, that he had had enough of it, as he looked along the deck and saw numbers of the men who had been slightly hurt binding up each other's wounds. Several lay stiff and stark, whose bodies were dragged on one side, while not a few, severely hurt, had been carried below to the cockpit, where the surgeon and ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... Jeffreys was at this time tortured by a cruel internal malady which had been aggravated by intemperance. At a dinner which a wealthy Alderman gave to some of the leading members of the government, the Lord Treasurer and the Lord Chancellor were so drunk that they stripped themselves almost stark naked, and were with difficulty prevented from climbing up a signpost to drink His Majesty's health. The pious Treasurer escaped with nothing but the scandal of the debauch: but the Chancellor brought ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a common bird. A few miles further north, however, it has been found almost abundant. On one occasion, during a three mile drive from town, six males were seen and heard singing along the roadside. Mr. H. K. Coale says that he saw a mocking bird in Stark county, Indiana, sixty miles southeast of Chicago, January 1, 1884; that Mr. Green Smith had met with it at Kensington Station, Illinois, and that several have been observed in the parks and door-yards of Chicago. In the extreme southern portion of the state the species is abundant, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... outta them. One was th' Bible Ma brought long when she was married. T'other—that sure was kinda queer how we got that. Pa was in th' Rangers, an' he had this run-in with some Comanches—" Anse's eyes were suddenly bleak, and Drew remembered the few stark sentences the Texan had once spoken to explain his reason for being in the army—a return to a frontier ranch to find nothing left, nothing he wanted to remember, after the Comanches ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... little, Striving in love the traveller to whittle. We went into the house of one John Pinners, (A man that lives amongst a crew of sinners) And there eight several sorts of ale we had, All able to make one stark drunk or mad. But I with courage bravely flinched not, And gave the town leave to discharge the shot. We had at one time set upon the table, Good ale of hyssop, 'twas no AEsop-fable: Then had we ale of sage, and ale of malt, And ale of wormwood, that could ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... dead: "Who spills the foremost foeman's life, His party conquers in the strife."— "Then by my word," the Saxon said, "The riddle is already read. Seek yonder brake beneath the cliff,— There lies Red Murdoch, stark and stiff. Thus Fate has solved her prophecy, Then yield to Fate, and not to me. To James, at Stirling, let us go, When, if thou wilt be still his foe, Or if the King shall not agree To grant thee grace and favour free, I plight mine honour, oath, and word, That, to thy ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... histories were in great demand, and the pages of Shakespeare were turned over for inspiration. Each boy was to compile his own speeches, and many hurried consultations were held over back fences, and in haylofts; one boy, who represented General Stark, selected Hamlet's 'to be or not to be.' A companion objected to the lines as inappropriate, but General Stark replied, "Well, I know the piece because I've spoken it in school, and I ain't going to learn another, I can tell ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... heavily, when the "guards back" and the "flying wedge" were the favorite formations; and the Blue would never forget how, after a series of line plunging, bone-breaking rushes, he had dragged himself over the enemy's goal line with the whole frantic eleven piled on him, while the Blue stands went stark raving mad over the prowess of their champion. That famous goal had won him an undisputed place on the All-American team for that year and the captaincy of his own team ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... west bank of the Big Black, the east bank was watched by a rebel cavalry-division, commanded by General Armstrong. He had four brigades, commanded by Generals Whitfield, Stark, Cosby, and Wirt Adams. Quite frequently they communicated with us by flags of truce on trivial matters, and we reciprocated; merely to observe them. One day a flag of truce, borne by a Captain B...., of Louisville, Kentucky, escorted by about twenty-five men, was reported ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... might brag that he was become a fool by too much wisdom. Some there are who through fear anticipate the hangman; and there was the man, whose eyes being unbound to have his pardon read to him, was found stark dead upon the scaffold, by the stroke of imagination. We start, tremble, turn pale, and blush, as we are variously moved by imagination; and, being a-bed, feel our bodies agitated with its power to that degree, as even sometimes to expiring. And boiling ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... you copied for me, to look at; and one day, who should come in but Elliott, who was staying with his governor on the West Cliff, where the old gentleman has taken a house. Well, you know, I told you what a madcap fellow Poole is; and what should he do, but tell Elliott that I was going stark mad for a girl that couldn't have me because her dad had engaged her to somebody else; and then he shewed him the music that was lying on the table with your name on it. So you may guess how Elliott stared, and all the questions he asked me about you, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... Mr. Speaker; they do not cant it with your book-learning, your orbs, your centres, your prime magnitudes, and your nebulones, things I profess that would make a sober man run stark mad to hear them; while we, who should be considering the honor of our country and that it goes now or never upon our hand, whether it shall be ridiculous to all the world, are going to nine-holes or trow madam for our business, like your dumb Venetian, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... dead, drew off from the field, and we, remaining there, were able to claim the victory, which, however, my son, was one of a kind which was scarce worth winning. It was a sad sight to see so many men stretched stark and dead, and these killed, not in fighting with a foreign foe, but with other Englishmen. It made us all mightily sad, and if at that moment Lord Essex had had full power from the Parliament to treat, methinks that the quarrel could have been settled, ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... the morning of December 3, '84, the rain fell persistently in the midst of a profound silence. The trees stood stark in the grey air as if petrified; there was not wind enough to waft the falling leaf; it fell straight as ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... that led around into Beaver Dam Lake, in which Molly and the boy had been attacked. Sandy viewed the chaparral, the trees that covered the lesser slopes, the stark cliffs above. Part of this lay in the Waterline territory. The chances that Plimsoll had left some one on guard were not to be slighted. But he rode on down the narrow trail. Once in a while he broke a branch and left it swinging ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... Beer (The Century Magazine) has a certain stark faithfulness which makes of somewhat obvious material an extremely vivid and freshly felt rendering of life. There is a certain quality of observation in the story which we are accustomed to think of as a Gallic rather than an American ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... giant arm of land reached out into the water, high and stark and rocky; further on a group of white farallones lay in the tossing foam and over them great flocks of seabirds dipped and circled. Finally, along the coast to the northward, they descried those chalk cliffs which Francis Drake had aptly named New Albion, and still beyond, what seemed to ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... a word of truth in it," said the agitated captain. "I never thought of such a thing. That old mischief-making mummy must be mad—stark, starin' mad." ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... and refuse of the camp, or crouched over small fires as if it were bitter cold. The dogs started up yelping, for a blackfellow's dog doesn't know how to bark properly, as the white men passed, but their masters took no notice. A stark naked gin, with a fillet of greasy skin bound round her head, and a baby slung in a net on her back, came whining to Turner with outstretched hands. She had mixed with the stockkeepers before, and knew a ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... for my deliverance from the stark death that had been so near me all day, I looked up to heaven and remembered the blessed birth eighteen centuries ago when Jesus Christ came to the earth ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... myself, "I may now bid farewell to life, these cursed witches will convey me to the pantry or cellar of some nobleman, and there leave me, to pay with my neck for their robberies; or they will abandon me stark naked, to freeze to death upon the sea-brink of old Shire Caer, {3} or some other cold, distant place;" but on reflecting that all the old hags whom I had once known had long been dead and buried, and perceiving ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... of death fell over the fort, broken only by the groans of some poor, wounded fellow. The people within the fort went about talking in whispers. Three bodies, which they had not had time to bury, lay, stark and silent under the shed, and there were nine fresh graves on the hillside. In addition, more than thirty of the defenders were disabled ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... in the heavens; the gondola drifted away to the northward; the islands of the lagoons seemed to rise and sink with the light palpitations of the waves like pictures on the undulating fields of banners; the stark rigging of a ship showed black against the sky, the Lido sank from sight upon the east, as if the shore had composed itself to sleep by the side of its beloved sea to the music of the surge that gently beat its sands; the yet leafless boughs of the trees above me stirred themselves ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... At the time of the commencement of the armistice and the German retirement "Simplicimus" published a picture of a "Farewell to Strasbourg." It was a stormy sunset and late evening, and the black silhouette of the very memorable cathedral, the stark and ragged grandeur of that cathedral and its spire which looks as if nothing exists in Strasbourg but it, stood for the significance of the city. Some German horse-soldier symbolized the last to go, and lifting his hat, took one last look at the place, and said, ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... weeks since the last one was shot outside the Japanese lines at night, and now there is nothing but regular soldiery encamped around us. This last Boxer was a mere boy of fifteen, who had stripped stark naked and smeared himself all over with oil after the manner of Chinese thieves, so that if he came into our clutches no hands would be able to hold him tight. The most daring ones have always been boys. He had crept fearlessly right up to the Japanese posts armed ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... ranges, at the foot of an ironbark, The bonnie, winsome laddie was lying stiff and stark; For the Reckless mare had smashed him against a leaning limb, And his comely face was battered, and his ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... No, if other things as great in the Church, and in the rule of life both economical and political, be not looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zuinglius and Calvin hath beaconed up to us that we are stark blind. There be who perpetually complain of Schisms and Sects, and make it such a calamity that any man dissents from their maxims.... Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... me cease, for why should I prolong My notes, and vex a Singer with a Song? Oh thou with pen perpetual in thy fist! Dubbed for thy sins a stark Miscellanist, So pleased the printer's orders to perform For Messrs. Longman, Hurst and Rees and Orme. Go—Get thee hence to Paternoster Row, Thy patrons wave a duodecimo! (Best form for letters from a distant land, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... had witnessed their quick kills in the wilds, but this stark ferocity of spitting, howling rage was new. They answered that challenge from the camp, streaking out from under his hands. Yet both animals skidded to a stop before they passed the first dome and were lost in the gloom. A spark glowed for an instant to ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... distance. Mr. Beaseley, C.E., in a lecture on coast-fog signals, May 24, 1872, speaks of these bells as unusually large, saying that they and the one at Ballycottin are the largest on their coasts, the only others which compare with them being those at Stark Point and South Stack, which weigh 313/4 cwt. and 411/2 cwt. respectively. Cunningham, speaking of the fog-bells at Bell Rock and Skerryvore lighthouses, says he doubts if either bell has been the means of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his instruments, but perceptible to each other, and so to some known ray at the end of the scale. Langley seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused — physics stark mad ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... a wild and stark and empty place, as you must perceive. And the far side did be great miles off, as I did say; and everywhere there was abundance of rock and lonesomeness. And before me there went the great and dim length of the gorge, and ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... lighted his cigarette and exhaled his first satisfying puff of smoke, not in rings this time, he took the cigarette from his mouth, and with his eyes on its blazing end expressed his thought with stark simplicity. ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... a hut-ward is—to the aesthetic eye—a hideous structure. Knowing what it stands for, the science, the tenderness and the fundamental civilisation which it represents, we may descry, behind its stark geometrical outlines, a real nobility and beauty. Entering a typical hut-ward you behold thirty beds, fifteen on each side of the room. Between each pair of beds is a locker in which the patient stows his belongings. (Woe ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... said to madam (as she called me), that you was very good, and very forgiving. No, said he, I have been stark naught; and it is she, I hope, will be very forgiving. But all this preamble is to tell you, Mrs. Jewkes, that now I desire you'll study to oblige her, as much as (to obey me) you was forced to disoblige her before. ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... plundered, borne off was booty. His boon was granted that wretched man; and his ruler saw first time what was fashioned in far-off days. When the dragon awoke, new woe was kindled. O'er the stone he snuffed. The stark-heart found footprint of foe who so far had gone in his hidden craft by the creature's head. — So may the undoomed easily flee evils and exile, if only he gain the grace of The Wielder! — That warden of gold o'er the ground went seeking, greedy to find ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... immovable and stark in the open space around the Circus—spoke mutely of combats that had been fierce and bloody: but the people had remained victorious; the people held their ground. One hundred thousand fists and staves, a few agricultural and building implements had asserted ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Fiesolani are not Florentines, people of the valley, but Etruscans, people of the hills, and that you may see in half an hour any day in their windy piazzas and narrow climbing ways. Rough, outspoken, stark men little women keen and full of salt, they have not the assured urbanity of the Florentine, who, while he scorns you in his soul as a barbarian, will trade with you, eat with you, and humour you, certainly without betraying ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... horizon, but it gave no light, and was more oppressive than the night; it made the darkness only darker; it was a deathly light. The clouds came down almost to earth. The hedges grew enormous and moved. The gaunt trees were like grotesque old men. The sides of the wood were stark white. The darkness moved. There were dwarfs sitting in the ditches, lights in the grass, fearful flying things in the air, shrill cries of insects coming from nowhere. Jean-Christophe was always in anguish, expecting some fearsome ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... the forenoon, a man came to Emain Macha. He was grim and swarthy, with great hands and arms. He made no reverence to Concobar or to any of the Ultonians, but standing stark before them, spake thus, not fluently:—"My master, Culain, high smith of all Ulster, bids thee to supper this night, O Concobar; and he wills thee to know that because he has not wide territories, and flocks, and herds, and tribute-paying peoples, ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... all the charm of diction, not all the ingenious theories in the world, can for a moment be set in the balance against rigid exactness, even if some of the concomitants of rigid exactness are such as to spoil the subject for popular treatment. The truth, the stark naked truth, the truth without so much as a loin-cloth on, should surely be the investigator's sole aim when, having discovered a new set of facts, he undertakes to present them to the ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... was flooded in moonlight and the birch trees wavered their stark shadows across it like supplicating arms. Suddenly I heard the soft padded sound of snow falling upon snow, to slowly perceive a figure, the slender figure of a young child attempting to arouse itself almost at ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... reduced to a trickle among the rocks of their beds. The uplands were covered with a mat of baked, dead grass. The second growth of stunted timber, showing everywhere the scars of the wasting rapacity of man, stood stark and wilted to the roots. All roving life, from the cattle to the woodchucks and even the field mice, had moved down to hide itself in the thicker growths near the water courses or had stolen away into the depths of the ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... the armed fugitives from the town. The compounds and huts were full of wounded and unwounded dervishes, most of the latter having Remingtons and waist-belts full of cartridges, besides carrying spears and swords. In the open thoroughfares there were many bodies of women and children lying stark and stiff. The majority of these victims were young girls. Many of the poor creatures had evidently been running towards the river to try and escape when caught and killed by jealous and cruel masters or husbands. The scenes were shocking, the smells abominable ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... witch-dens of ancient Edinburgh, the bat-haunted castles of Drachenfels or Rheinstein, you will come at nothing built of man more informed with the soul of the Middle Ages, more drenched with their peculiar savour of mystery, than these stark keeps whose crests and girouettes rise above encircling woods or frown upon mirroring rivers over the length and breadth of the ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... Judging from the stark horror which I experienced myself, I doubted, now, if Burke could sustain the role allotted him. In beneath the slightly raised window came a hand, perceptible to me despite the darkness of the room. It seemed to project from the black silhouette ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... day is sunny and the ground bare, you meet him at all points and hear him at all hours. At sunset, on the tops of the tall Maples, with look heavenward, and in a spirit of utter abandonment, he carols his simple strain. And sitting thus amid the stark, silent trees, above the wet, cold earth, with the chill of winter still in the air, there is no fitter or sweeter songster in the whole round year. It is in keeping with the scene and the occasion. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... involves chance. Every man realizes it, and even the most bombastic bachelor has moments in which he humbly whispers: "There, but for the grace of God, go I." But that chance has a sugarcoating; it is swathed in egoistic illusion; it shows less stark and intolerable chanciness, so to speak, than the bald hazard of the die. Thus men prefer it, and shrink from the other. In the same way, I have no doubt, the majority of foxes would object to choosing lots to determine the victim of a projected fox-hunt. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... man of God was lamenting the deplorable state of the church of Vervignole in the cloister of the cathedral, his meditations were disturbed by strange shrieks, and he saw a woman, stark naked, walking on all fours, with a peacock's feather for a tail. As she came nearer, she barked, sniffed, and licked the ground. Her fair head was covered with mud, and her whole body was a mass of filth. In this unhappy creature ...
— The Miracle Of The Great St. Nicolas - 1920 • Anatole France
... behind him. Everyone composed himself for miserable sleep. Everyone except Judas, who went on talking to Rockyfeller, and Rockyfeller, who proceeded to light one of his candles and begin a pleasant and conversational evening. The Fighting Sheeney lay stark-naked on a paillasse between me and his lord. The Fighting Sheeney told everyone that to sleep stark-naked was to avoid bugs (whereof everybody, including myself, had a goodly portion). The Fighting Sheeney was, however, quieted by the planton's order; whereas Rockyfeller ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... 1739, under the name of Winnisimmet, Chelsea formed a part of Boston, but in that year it was made a township; it became a city in 1857. In May 1775 a British schooner in the Mystic defended by a force of marines was taken by colonial militia under General John Stark and Israel Putnam,—one of the first conflicts of the War of Independence. A terrible fire swept the central part of the city on ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... nothing in what direction. Exert your instinctive powers of vegetation and emotion; let your philosophy itself be a frank expression of this flux, the roar of the ocean in your little sea-shell, a momentary posture of your living soul, not a stark adoration of ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... cloudy thoughts that moved in some unseen heaven cast exquisitely delicate changes of light and shade as they floated over it. Percivale strode on as if he bore a feather behind him. I did wish we were at the top, for my arms began to feel like iron-cables, stiff and stark—only I was afraid of my fingers giving way. My heart was beating uncomfortably too. But Percivale, I felt almost inclined to quarrel with him before it was over, he strode on so unconcernedly, turning every corner of the zigzag where I expected him to propose a halt, and striding on again, as if ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... abundance. The battering-rams breached the wall and found new walls rising just within. The besieged fished with iron hooks from the top of the walls, and hauled the captured Crusaders alive to their death at the summit. Stripped, they were used as stones for catapults, and stark naked were fired back into the Christian camp. A Goliath among the Saracens being killed, the Crusaders were greatly heartened, and, having gained some advantages, redoubled their attack. The enemy's supplies by way of the lake were cut off, and their resistance grew feebler. ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... table, a work bench deserted, a store smashed and turned to debris and left to petrify as the shell wrecked it—a thousand little details of a life that had gone, the soul vanished from a town, leaving it stark and dead, mere wood and stone and iron—this was the Verdun that we saw in the twilight after the Germans had ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... his mother's lap, by Michael Angelo. The figure of Christ is as much emaciated, as if he had died of a consumption: besides, there is something indelicate, not to say indecent, in the attitude and design of a man's body, stark naked, lying upon the knees of a woman. Here are some good pictures, I should rather say copies of good pictures, done in Mosaic to great perfection; particularly a St. Sebastian by Domenichino, and Michael the Archangel, from a painting ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... A long time had passed since anybody had spoken. A long time had passed since anybody had moved. Indeed, it, looked almost as if they would never speak or move again. So bruised and bloodless of skin were they, so bleak and sharp of feature, so stark and hollow of eye, so rigid and moveless of limb that they might have been corpses. Mentally, too, they were almost moribund. They stared vacantly, straight out to sea. They stared with the unwinking fixedness of those whose gaze is caught in ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... but when one sees a Malay pirate, there is no mistaking her for anything else. At night it is generally a stark calm, and whether one is lying idle, with the sails hanging flat against the mast, or whether one is at anchor, one knows that they can't come upon us under sail, and on a still night one can hear the beat of their oars miles away. There is never any fear of being ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... jes' like people sell hosses now. I saw a lot of slaves sold on de auction block. Dey would strip 'em stark naked. A nigger scarred up or whaled an' welted up wus considered a bad nigger an' did not bring much. If his body wus not scarred, he brought a good price. I saw a lot of slaves whupped an' I was whupped myself. Dey whupped me ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... mad?" cried I, losing all patience, and unconsciously raising my whip as I spoke—"are you stark staring mad, to keep us talking here about flour and butter, and fips and levies, while the rain is falling ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... untruss, and so the other and Coleman stood still; by and by the other keeper desired Coleman to hold his horse, for he had occasion also: Coleman immediately took one of their swords, and ran through two of the horses, killing them stark dead; gets upon the other, with one of their swords; 'Farewell, gentlemen,' quoth he, 'tell my master I have no mind to be whipped in Leicestershire,' and so went his way. The two keepers in all haste went to a gentleman's ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... barns an' big walnut-trees, right away to the left, sir. She's own niece to Poyser's wife, an' they'll be fine an' vexed at her for making a fool of herself i' that way. But I've heared as there's no holding these Methodisses when the maggit's once got i' their head: many of 'em goes stark starin' mad wi' their religion. Though this young woman's quiet enough to look at, by what I can make out; I've not ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... long, winding trail and over another summit to Yucca Pass Casey dreamed, while the stark, scarred buttes on either side regarded him with enigmatic calm. Since the first wagon train had worried over the rough deserts on their way to California, the bleak hills of Nevada had listened while prospectors ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... no knowing beyond his own; though, for his comfort, I said that it might be the wind. Yet, at that, he shook his head; for indeed, it was plain that it could not be by such agency, for there was a stark calm. ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... out in the matter of thy justification, but quarrellest with the doctrine of free grace, or else dost wrest it out of its place to serve thy Pharisaical designs; saying, "God, I thank thee, I am not as other men"; fathering upon thyself, yea, upon God and thyself, a stark lie; for thou art as other men are, though not in this, yet in that; yea, in a far worse condition than the most of men are. Nor will it help thee any thing to attribute this thy goodness to the God of heaven: for that is but a mere toying; the truth is, the God that thou intendest, is nothing ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Stark, Dr., on the death-rate in towns and rural districts; on the influence of marriage on mortality; on the higher mortality of males ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... with convulsive thrills, and the dark Of her spirit wavered like water thrilled with light; And my heart leaped up in longing to plunge its stark Fervour within the pool of her twilight, Within her spacious soul, to ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... neared and reached the horizon. There was no change in the star-studded sky. There were no sunset colorings. The incandescent brightness on the mountains was not lessened in the least. Only the direction of the stark black ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... story thus: "But when they opened the doors they found Cleopatra stark dead, laid upon a bed of gold, attired and arrayed in her royal robes, and one of her two women, who was called Iris, dead at her feet, and the other woman (called Charmion) half dead, and trembling, trimming the diadem which Cleopatra wore upon ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... matter of thy justification, but quarrelest with the doctrine of free grace, or else dost wrest it out of its place to serve thy Pharisaical designs; saying, "God I thank thee, I am not as other men;" fathering upon thyself, yea, upon God and thyself a stark lie; for thou art as other men are, though not in this, yet in that; yea, in a far worse condition than the most of men are. Nor will it help thee anything to attribute this thy goodness to the God of heaven; ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... time, as Odo had hoped, they were putting off from the shore in a blunt-nosed fishing-boat which was the lightest craft the village could provide. The lake was stark calm, and the two boatmen, silhouetted against the moonlight, drove the boat forward with even vigorous strokes. Fulvia, shivering in the autumnal chill, had drawn her hood close about her and sat silent, her face in shade. Measured by their secret ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... world-wide, widespread, far-famed, extensive; wholesale; many &c. 102. goodly, noble, precious, mighty; sad, grave, heavy, serious; far gone, arrant, downright; utter, uttermost; crass, gross, arch, profound, intense, consummate; rank, uninitiated, red-hot, desperate; glaring, flagrant, stark staring; thorough-paced, thoroughgoing; roaring, thumping; extraordinary.; important &c. 642; unsurpassed &c. (supreme) 33; complete &c. 52. august, grand, dignified, sublime, majestic &c. (repute) 873. vast, immense, enormous, extreme; inordinate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... as a poet, year by year, we come to Thoroughfares (1908-14). These are short poems more conventional in form than their predecessors, but just as stark and grim as chronicles of life. Every one remembers the torture inflicted on women in the good-old-times, when they were strapped to posts on the flats at low tide, and allowed to watch the cruel slowness of approaching death. The same ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... now he was to be confronted with a monstrous and insupportable truth—the craven cowardice of the man who had been eligible to service in army or navy, and who had evaded it. In camp and trench and dug-out he had heard of the army of slackers. And of all the vile and stark profanity which the war gave birth to on the lips of miserable and maimed soldiers, that flung on ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... {113} thoughts for his home. Great is therefore his surprise at finding himself repulsed by his own father, who not recognizing him, believes him to be an impostor. All the young man's protestations are of no avail, for in his knapsack are found the papers of a certain Wilhelm Stark, for whom he is now mistaken.—When silly Peter perceives him, he believes him to be the Grenadier, who had so ill-treated him at the wedding, though in reality it was Schwarzbart. Gustav is shut up in a large garden-house of his father's; ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... line, so beautiful when it describes the modesty of Eve, in its new context becomes stark nonsense. It is Ulysses who is "reluctant," and Calypso who is "amorous." The misuse of Milton's line makes the ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... and after grinning at the four men, says he to them, 'Bid your daughters and your brides farewell for awhile. You,' says he to the youngest, 'needn't fear, you'll recover your princess all in good time, and you and she will be as happy as the day is long. Bad people, if they were rolling stark naked in gold, would not be rich. Good-bye.' Away they sailed, and the ladies stretched out their hands, but weren't able ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... in perilous plight were we, Seeing forty of our poor hundred were slain, And half of the rest of us maimed for life In the crash of the cannonades and the desperate strife; And the sick men down in the hold were most of them stark and cold, And the pikes were all broken or bent, and the powder was all of it spent; And the masts and the rigging ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... climes, the polar bear Protects himself with fat and hair, Where snow is deep and ice is stark, And half the year is cold and dark; He still survives a clime like that By growing fur, by growing fat. These traits, O bear, which thou transmittest Prove the ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... He lay stiff and stark upon the sofa, with a few white froth bubbles gathered upon his lips, and a letter clasped tightly in his hand. It seemed that he was not yet dead, for a physician, who had been hastily summoned, was attempting to force open his mouth, as if to administer a restorative ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... across the strait, between Ticonderoga and Mount Independence, the Americans waited for the enemy to come and attack them, for with such leaders as Gates and Stark they felt confident ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... strength encountered strength, Thus long, but unprevailing—the event Of that portentous fight appeared at length. Until the lamp of day was almost spent It had endured, when lifeless, stark, and rent, Hung high that mighty serpent, and at last Fell to the sea, while o'er the continent, With clang of wings and scream, the eagle past, Heavily borne away on ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... copied for me, to look at; and one day, who should come in but Elliott, who was staying with his governor on the West Cliff, where the old gentleman has taken a house. Well, you know, I told you what a madcap fellow Poole is; and what should he do, but tell Elliott that I was going stark mad for a girl that couldn't have me because her dad had engaged her to somebody else; and then he shewed him the music that was lying on the table with your name on it. So you may guess how Elliott stared, and all the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... Revolution of 1776 ten distinct settlements were made by colonists from Londonderry, N.H., all of which became towns of influence and importance. Notable among the descendants of these colonists were Matthew Thornton, Henry Knox, Gen. John Stark, Hugh McCulloch, Horace Greeley, Gen. George B. McClellan, Salmon P. Chase, and Asa Gray. From 1771 to 1773 "the whole emigration from Ulster is estimated at 30,000 of whom ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... heart-sickening. Children began their life in the coal mines at five, six, or seven years of age. Girls and women worked like boys and men, they were less than half clothed, and worked alongside of men who were stark naked. There were from twelve to fourteen working hours in the twenty-four, and these were often at night. Little girls of six or eight years of age made ten to twelve trips a day up steep ladders to the ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... in velveteens unexpectedly found himself doing as he was told. There was a suggestion of compulsion about the gray-blue eyes fastened on his, something in the clamp of the strong jaw that brought him up for a moment against stark reality. ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... and the player at night there is the same difference that lies between a careless husband and the lover swooning under his lady's window. Only with morning comes the real throb of the passion and the craving in its stark horror. Then you can admire the real gambler, who has neither eaten, slept, thought, nor lived, he has so smarted under the scourge of his martingale, so suffered on the rack of his desire for a coup of trente-et-quarante. ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... day comes; thy kisses on my face Shall seal all things that are old, outworn; and anger and regret Shall fade as the dreams and days shall fade, and in thy salt embrace, When thy fierce caresses blind mine eyes and my limbs grow stark and set, All that I know in all my mind shall no more have a place: The weary ways of men and one ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... nothing at all in that direction to excite any attention. The distant mountains provided a stark, dark blue background. Up their foothills and lower slopes was a thick furring of trees with foliage of so deep a green as to register black from this distance. And on the level country was the lighter blue-green of the other variety of wood edging the open ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... Gen. Stark, of Mississippi, who fell at Sharpsburg, was an acquaintance of mine. His daughters were educated with mine at St. Mary's Hall, Burlington, N. J.—and were, indeed, ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... on down or cliff Let no soft curves intrude Of a woman's silhouette, But show the escarpments stark and stiff As in utter solitude; So shall you ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... just before, and since, when he made his Escape from his Enemy Indians at Christanna, where his Queen and abundance of his People were slain, and he ty'd in order to be carried away Prisoner; yet broke loose, and ran directly Home several hundred Miles stark-naked, without Arms or Provision, in the Month of March, when the Trees afforded no Fruit; neither did he go near any other Nation, till he got to his own; therefore I suppose Roots were his Provision, and Water ...
— The Present State of Virginia • Hugh Jones
... party went down the great staircase of Gaunt House, the morning had risen stark and clear over the black trees of the square; the skies were tinged with pink; and the cheeks of some of the people at the ball,—ah, how ghastly they looked! That admirable and devoted Major above all,—who had been for hours by Lady ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the first explosion was still grumbling back in Epping Forest when all Walthamstow, rubbing its eyes, tumbled out into the black streets. Men, women, children, all ludicrously clotheless, swarmed aimlessly like bees in an overturned hive. Stark terror gripped them. It distorted their faces and set their legs quivering. The dullest among these toil-dulled people knew what that explosion meant, knew that it was part of the punishment promised by the German foe. "Gott strafe England" had come to pass. But they could not understand ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... he could see the Beecham's house, stark white in the early morning light. It was after seven o'clock, he thought, and the family would soon be at breakfast. A small stream of smoke drifted up from the kitchen chimney, wavering and drooping in ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... at her from the low mantel. She caught her breath, and the deep silence was broken by the metallic tongue that dirged out "twelve." The last stroke of the bronze hammer echoed drearily; the old year lay stark and cold on its bier; Munin flapped his dusky wings with a long, sepulchral, blood-curdling hoot, and the dying man opened his dim, failing eyes, and fixed them for the ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... smell of hunger was in the air. The armed men were emaciated. Lights came on, and stark, harsh shadows lay black upon the ground. Calhoun's captors were uniformed, but the uniforms hung loosely upon them. Where the lights struck upon their faces, their cheeks were hollow. They were cadaverous. And there were the splotches of pigment ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... Dick, and when I saw her—I went stark, staring, raving mad over her. She is the most beautiful, wonderful girl I ever saw. Her name is Mercedes Castaneda, and she belongs to one of the old wealthy Spanish families. She has lived abroad and in Havana. She speaks French as well ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... a stark Spanish drama, too intense for any but Latins, foreign; debauched vaudeville, incredibly vulgar; or at the concert-hall, sentimental Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon songs, with an audience of grave uncritical exiles—a ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... came along the great thoroughfare dressed like Eve before the fall. We would have called her thirteen at home; but here girls who look thirteen are often not more than nine, in reality. Occasionally we saw stark-naked men of superb build, bathing, and making no attempt at concealment. However, an hour's acquaintance with this cheerful custom reconciled the pilgrims to it, and then it ceased to occasion remark. Thus easily ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Alone, I was stark alone, and the shadows were each a fear; And thinly I laughed, but once, for the echoes were strange to hear; And the wind in the hallways howled as a green-eyed wolf might cry, And I heard my heart: I must look on the face of a ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... actions, as, to the pile of clothing in her arms, she added the revolver that lay on the blanket, and, returning to the little trap-door in the ceiling, hid them away; but her brain was whirling again in a turmoil of doubt. This was madness, utter, stark, blind madness, this thing that she was doing! It was suicide, literally that, nothing less than suicide for one in Gypsy Nan's condition to attempt this thing. But the woman would certainly die here, too, with out medical assistance—only ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... writing of the prophets and apostles abound with tropes, and metaphors, types, and allegories, parables, and dark speeches; and are as much, nay, much more unintelligible in many places, than the writings of the ancients.' It is well this author, who talks of people being stark Bible-mad, stopped here; and did not with a celebrated wit * cry, 'The truly illuminated books are the darkest of all.' The writer above mentioned supposes it impossible, that God's will should be fully revealed by books; 'except,' says he, 'it might be said perhaps ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... judgment, in its simplicity, purity, and integrity,—private judgment, all private judgment, and nothing but private judgment,—is held by very few persons indeed; and that the great mass of the population are either stark unbelievers in it, or deplorably dark about it; and that even the minority who are in a manner faithful to it, have glossed and corrupted the true sense of it by a miserably faulty reading, and hold, not the ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... you face beneath its crown of thorn That figure stark against the smoking skies, The arms outstretched, the sacred head forlorn, And those ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... annihilator of time and space must camp out under the blue and hunt for his dead among the rubbish. Given a violent convulsion (only just such a slipping of strata as carelessly piled volumes will accomplish in a book-case) and behold, the heir of all the ages is stark, raving mad—a brute among the dishevelled hills. Set a hundred of the world's greatest spirits, men of fixed principles, high aims, resolute endeavour, enormous experience, and the modesty that these attributes bring—set ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... Wadham-Colledge, being alone in a Boat (without a Water-man) having newly thrust off from shore, at Medley, to come homewards, standing near the Head of the Boat, were presently with a stroke of Thunder or Lightning, both struck off out of the Boat into the Water, the one of them stark dead, in whom, though presently taken out of the Water (having been by relation, scarce a minute in it) there was not discerned any appearance of life, sense, or motion: the other was stuck fast ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... tragedy [('vide The Rehearsal'), 'British Bards'], unfortunately takes away the merit of originality from the dialogue between Messieurs the Spirits of Flood and Fell in the first canto. Then we have the amiable William of Deloraine, "a stark moss-trooper," videlicet, a happy compound of poacher, sheep-stealer, and highwayman. The propriety of his magical lady's injunction not to read can only be equalled by his candid acknowledgment of his independence of the trammels of spelling, ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... e'er, with finger of thine, Strike asunder one limb of mine; {f:16} I am for thee too woxen and stark, As thou, to thy cost, shalt quickly mark." Look out, ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... pale rays upon thousands of crumbling skeletons, bleached by unnumbered suns, picked bare by dead and gone generations of carrion, white, rigid, sinister. Detached skulls lay in heaps, grinning derisively. Stark digits pointed threateningly, as if the old warriors still guarded their domain. Other frames lay face downward, as though the broken teeth had bitten the dust in battle. Slender forms lay prone, their arms encircling cooking utensils, beautiful in form and colour. Great bowls and urns, ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... Osgood, son of our Lieutenant, a quiet, fair-haired, pleasant-spoken boy, but as brave and earnest as his gallant father, sank under the combination of hunger and cold. One stinging morning he was found stiff and stark, on the hard ground, his bright, frank blue eyes glazed over ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... meantime Amy was next door to stark-mad about her; she durst not see her at my lodgings for her life; and she went days without number to Spitalfields, where she used to come, and to her former lodging, and could never meet with her. At length she took up a mad resolution that she would go directly to the captain's house in Redriff ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... which are to effect this laudable purpose. What else can be the meaning of our preacher's taking upon himself to denounce the sentiments of the most serious professors in great cities, as vitiated and stark-naught, of relegating religion to his native glens, and pretending that the hymn of praise or the sigh of contrition cannot ascend acceptably to the throne of grace from the crowded street as well as from the barren rock or silent valley? Why put this affront upon ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... aghast, amazed that the Almighty did not personally intervene to save a man from his own inefficiency. He began to grasp the hitherto unnoted fact that meals and a bed and fires and clothes and all the other stark necessities involved labor of the hands, skilful ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... lay on the deck, bound up my wound for me with a kindness I did not expect from him. As soon as he was somewhat recovered, he told me to come with him and examine into the state of affairs. Many of the crew lay stiff and stark on deck—their last fight over. We carried the water to the few who remained alive, and very grateful they were for it. Among the killed was the first mate; but poor Charley I did not see. I observed another man moving forward. I crawled up to him. He was Edward Seton. I ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... him to a room and told him to strip for a bath; after which he had to walk down a long gallery, past the grated cell doors of the inmates of the jail. This was a great event to the latter—the daily review of the new arrivals, all stark naked, and many and diverting were the comments. Jurgis was required to stay in the bath longer than any one, in the vain hope of getting out of him a few of his phosphates and acids. The prisoners roomed two in a cell, but that ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... victory at Bennington came, the call was for every able-bodied man to turn out, in order to defeat Burgoyne. Every well man went, including Carleton's two grandfathers, Captain Peter Coffin, who had been out in June, though not in Stark's command, and Eliphalet Kilborn. The women and children were left to gather in the crops. The wheat was ripe for the sickle, but there was not a man or boy to cut it. With her baby, one month old, in her arms, Mrs. Peter Coffin mounted the horse, leaving her ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... perspiration, and my heart thumped wildly. For either I was stark, staring mad, or these were lines from Searles's "Lady Larkspur," the manuscript of which was carefully locked ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... on it, that tiny, telltale initial, his face went white under its tan and his mouth compressed till all the humor and kindliness of it were lost in a line of stark grimness. And then he swung on his heel and packed up his painting kit in a fury of haste, and with one last, upturned look at those mocking windows, he was off down ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... the bed lifted his eyes, great dark eyes full of weariness and stark fear—but bowed his head again and ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... patrol, Captain Malet-Marsac would reflect upon the relativity of things, the false values of civilization, and the extraordinary devitalising and deteriorating results of "education". When it came to vital issues, elementals, stark essential manhood,—then the elect of civilization, the chosen of education, weighed, was found not only wanting but largely negligible. Where the highly "educated" was as good as the other he was so by ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... levelled all distinctions of rank. When an officious benefactor put a pair of new shoes at his door, he threw them away with indignation. He seems to have treated his tutors with a contempt which Boswell politely attributed to "great fortitude of mind," but Johnson himself set down as "stark insensibility." The life of a poor student is not, one may fear, even yet exempt from much bitterness, and in those days the position was far more servile than at present. The servitors and sizars had much to bear from richer ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... point which has any bearing upon their subsequent relations. There was no other bond between them than that of their common allegiance to the Government of the mother-country. As an illustration of this may be cited the historical fact that, when John Stark, of Bennington memory, was before the Revolution engaged in a hunting expedition in the Indian country, he was captured by the savages and brought to Albany, in the colony of New York, for a ransom; but, inasmuch as he belonged to New Hampshire, ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... into a most complex machinery, indefinitely multiplies the combinations, in any one of which chance might have gone astray. From this infinite array of proofs of design, it seems to man's reason, in ordinary moods, stark madness to account for the phenomena of the universe upon any other supposition than that which docs account, and can alone account, for them all,—the supposition of a Presiding Intelligence, illimitable alike in ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... I mean not cuckold-mad; but, sure, he's stark mad. When I desir'd him to come home to dinner, He ask'd me for a thousand marks in gold: "Tis dinner time' quoth I; 'My gold,' quoth he: 'Your meat doth burn' quoth I; 'My gold,' quoth he: 'Will you come home?' quoth I; 'My gold,' quoth he: 'Where is the thousand marks I gave thee, villain?' 'The ...
— The Comedy of Errors • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... augment his good grace to thee, Door! which of old, men say, didst serve Balbus benignly, whilst the oldster held his home here; and which contrariwise, so 'tis said, didst serve with grudging service after the old man was stretched stark, thou doing service to the bride. Come, tell us why thou art reported to be changed and to have renounced thine ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... such real agony in his tone that Peggy and I were suddenly stricken with contrition. What were we doing? We had no right to be listening to this pitiful interview. The pain and protest in his voice had suddenly banished all the humour from it, and left naught but the bare, stark tragedy. We rose and tiptoed out of the room, wholesomely ashamed ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... so, as anthropologists knew from sad experience. Suppose a traveler came to a camp where he saw thousands of men and women dancing round the image of a young bull. Suppose that the dancers were all stark naked, that after a time they began to fight, and that at the end of their orgies there were three thousand corpses lying about weltering in their blood. Would not a casual traveler have described such savages as worse than the negroes of Dahomey? Yet these savages were really the Jews, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... than half an hour he returned, riding one horse and leading the other, and found that Gerrard had risen and was looking at the bodies of the three men, which lay stark and stiff under the now bright starlight. Tommy's face wore an expression of supreme satisfaction as he ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... The Expedition against Bennington: (1) Colonel Baum sent to take supplies from the Americans there. (2) Met General Stark with a force outnumbering him two or three to one. (3) Rain delayed battle, and British entrenched. (4) Baum surrounded; his force captured or killed, including ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... he drinks, he takes his rest, he fears no man nor woman. Though Croesus compassed great wealth, yet he still craved more; He was as needy a beggar still as goes from door to door. Though Ovid was a merry man, love ever kept him sad; He was as far from happiness as one that is stark mad. Our merchant, he in goods is rich, and full of gold and treasure; But when he thinks upon his debts, that thought destroys his pleasure. Our courtier thinks that he's preferred, whom every man envies; When love so rumbles in his pate, no sleep comes ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fountain, sprinkled it on the ground, and in an twinkling of an eye a large river rose up on the spot. When the ogre saw this new obstacle, and that he could not make holes so fast as they found bungs to stop them, he stripped himself stark naked and swam across to the other side of the river with his clothes ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
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