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More "Swooning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... least hint having been given me, and grasping a backstay, waited, not knowing what was to happen next. Unless it be the heave of an earthquake, I can imagine no motion capable of giving one such a swooning, nauseating, terrifying sensation as the rending of ice under a fixed ship. In a few moments there were several sharp cracks, all on the starboard side, like a snapping of musketry, and I felt the schooner very faintly heave, but this might have been a deception of the senses, ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... chignon was loose, her dress dishevelled. On recognising Mahony, she uttered a cry and fell on his neck—he had to disengage her arms by force and speak severely to her, declaring that he would go away again, if she carried out her intention of swooning. ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... by my tail,' said Snati; and in this way he pulled Ring up on the lowest shelf of the rock. The Prince began to get giddy, but up went Snati on to the second shelf. Ring was nearly swooning by this time, but Snati made a third effort and reached the top of the cliff, where the Prince fell down in a faint. After a little, however, he recovered again, and they went a short distance along a level plain, until they came to a cave. This was on ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... quoted, he relates how Trajan had five Christian women burnt alive; the emperor then mingled their ashes with the metal from which the vessels used for the baths were cast; the bathers were seized with swooning-fits in consequence; the vessels were again melted up; and out of the same metal were erected five pillars in honour of the five martyrs by the emperor's orders. These pillars, adds Malalas, stand in the bath to the present day. As if this ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... the tall mountains, with their snowy crests seemed to wear silver crowns; the waters of the lake glittered with tiny rippling motions. The air was mild, with that kind of penetrating freshness which softens us till we seem to be swooning, to be deeply affected without any apparent cause. But how sensitive, how vibrating, the heart is at such moments! How quickly it leaps up, and how intense ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... and after his death, when he could not. All the time he was poignantly sensible of her grace, her elegance, her style; they seemed to intoxicate him; some tones of her voice thrilled through his nerves, and some looks turned his brain with a delicious, swooning sense of her beauty; her refinement bewildered him. But all this did not admit the idea of possession, even of aspiration. At the most his worship only set her beyond the love of other men as ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... which they supposed to be divine and from above, issued out of the lips of the gashed and bleeding Pythoness, the multitude that hitherto had listened in perfect silence, shouted aloud, while the girl herself, utterly exhausted, fell to the earth swooning. ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... Flora, you are unwell!" Indeed, she was pale enough, poor child, and trembling. "Major, she will be swooning in another minute. Get her to the tea-room, quick! while I fetch Miss Gilchrist. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Lear had a vial of smelling salts in her hand, and this vial dropping suddenly on the floor called attention to the fact that the lady had a little swooning turn. She was herself again in a minute, and her eyes slowly unclosed and lifted ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... Lake was as near fainting as ever lady was, without actually swooning. It was well they had stopped just by the stem of a great ash tree, against which Rachel leaned for some seconds, with darkness before her eyes, and the roar of a whirlpool ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... to the ground, dismounted, and began to climb, leading Rubh by the bridle and seeking for a pathway. Behind him the voices of crashing trees filled the windless night. He found a ledge at length, and there the three huddled together—Niotte between swooning and sleep, Graul seated beside her, and Rubh standing patient, waiting for the day. When the crashing ceased around them, the King could hear the soft flakes of sweat dripping from the stallion's belly, and saw the stars reflected now from ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... The acolyte Amid the chanted joy and thankful rite May so fall flat, with pale insensate brow, On the altar-stair. I hear thy voice and vow, Perplexed, uncertain, since thou art out of sight, As he, in his swooning ears, the choir's Amen. Beloved, dost thou love? or did I see all The glory as I dreamed, and fainted when Too vehement light dilated my ideal, For my soul's eyes? Will that light come again, As now these tears come—falling hot ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... to all ranks of persons. O noblemen, who are the high mountains of this kingdom, bow your tops, and look on the kirk of Christ, lying in the vallies, sighing, groaning, swooning and looking towards you with pitiful looks: if the Sun of Righteousness hath shined on you, let her have a shadow, as ye would have God to be a shadow to you in the day of ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... most intoxicating laugh, all charged with some sweet velvety charm, put out her hands, and caught his. "Oh, Lord! I wish it would choke him, Sim," said she, fervently, then lifted up her mouth and dropped a swooning eyelash over ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... door-keeper—Capigi Bashi Otorak," he replied deprecatingly. "He is merciful and forgiving. May Allah exalt his dominion. The salary is large; he is a generous paymaster. I testify that there is no God but God. I testify that Mohammed is God's prophet." He caught the swooning Melisselda in his arms and covered her ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... had a dream, wherein being straitly enjoined to entreat the youth with kindness as the only way to save a life which would hereafter be of great service to the world, she arose and came to a bower in the garden where Guy lay swooning on the floor. Felice would not stoop to help him, but her maids having restored him to his senses, Guy fell at her feet and poured out all his love before her. Never a word answered Felice, but stood calmly regarding ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... like a madman and one devoid not only of conscience but of natural reason, for, thrusting his hand under her dress, he scratched wherever his nails could reach with such fury that the poor girl shrieked out, and fell swooning at full ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... an awkwardness in waiting, and in approaching Christ, and then an apathy which nothing could shake off. And this state was prolonged in a sort of cold, enveloping mist, or rather in a vacuum all round the soul, deserted and swooning ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... wife tottered a step or two toward her daughter's room, and fell swooning at the threshold. Mildred opened the door, and her deep pallor showed that instead of sleeping she had heard words that would leave scars on memory ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... thought he, his leaden eyes closing in an overmastering lassitude, a vast swooning weakness of blood-loss and exhaustion. Not even his parched thirst, a veritable torture now, could keep his thoughts from wandering. "If they'd tackle again, I could score with—with lead—what's that I'm thinking? I'm not delirious, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... within their scent to-day.' Then, musingly: 'I should not give much for the life of a traveler who happened to wander in these parts just now.' Here he interrupted himself hastily and went over to his wife, who had sunk back on her chair, livid, seemingly on the point of swooning. ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... Frau von Kerich and the blue eyes of Minna; on his hands he felt the sweet contact of soft fingers, soft as flowers, and a subtle perfume, which he had never before breathed, enveloped him, bewildered him, brought him almost to swooning. ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the woodland; the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the ...
— A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Mark Twain
... that at this moment are both shut close, there stands beneath a brocaded canopy an ebony bed, supported on four twisted columns carved with symbolic figures. The king, after a struggle with a violent paroxysm, has fallen swooning in the arms of his confessor and his doctor, who each hold one of his dying hands, feeling his pulse anxiously and exchanging looks of intelligence. At the foot of the bed stands a woman about fifty ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... stars; his hair lengthened into sunbeams; the breath of his nostrils had the scent of roses; a cloud of incense rose from the hearth, and the waters began to murmur harmoniously; an abundance of bliss, a superhuman joy, filled the soul of the swooning Julian, while he who clasped him to his breast grew and grew until his head and his feet touched the opposite walls of the cabin. The roof flew up in the air, disclosing the heavens, and Julian ascended into ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... look at the ghastly corpse, or the swooning murderess upon the floor, he rushed from the house, and fled rapidly from it, as though it were the ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... said Charteris, "I wanted to see you. It is currently reported that you are in love. At dinner, you looked as if you had influenza. What's your trouble? For goodness' sake, bear up till the show's over. Don't go swooning on the stage, or anything. Do ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... to his hair—to all his long, pretty locks? How strange he looks with his head shaven thus! And see! what is the torturer to do with that glowing iron in his hand? Ugh!" and she fell back, near swooning. ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... those of to-day. Ladies wore the crinoline (successor to the hoop of earlier times), chignons and other absurdities, but had not ventured upon short skirts or cigarettes. They were much given to blushing, now a lost art; and to swooning, a thing of the past; the "vapours" of the eighteenth century had, happily, vanished for ever; but athletic exercises, such as girls enjoy to-day, were then undreamed of. Why has the pretty art of blushing gone? One now never sees a blush to mantle ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... transport it to Tozeur on donkeys. It undergoes no preparation whatever, but is sold as it comes out of the Chott, agreeable to the palate though rather yellowish in colour. Needless to say the Government runs no risk of the supply failing; there is salt, a swooning stretch of salt, as far as eye ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... duly took from her the paper, whilst a mist rose, and swam before my eyes, as I did so, and my legs became perfectly numb. What I next did I hardly know, for inwardly I was swooning. Indeed, until Kliachka's arrival the same evening I remained practically in a state ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... my beloved lord, of Kuhleborn, my evil-disposed uncle, and have often felt displeasure at meeting him in the passages of this castle. Several times has he terrified Bertalda even to swooning. He does this because he possesses no soul, being a mere elemental mirror of the outward world, while of the world within he can give no reflection. Then, too, he sometimes observes that you are displeased with me, that in ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... blood and hair, to the side of the heroine, take her by the wrist with his bloody hand, and shout, "What wiltest thou, Mary Anderson de Montmorence?" Then they could sit down on a box of intestines and liver and things and talk it over, and the curtain could go down with the heroine swooning in the ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... felt came back upon it. So also the bare, miserable board which served for the bed, and its rude pillow, were glorified. A stray sunbeam, too, fluttered down on the floor like a pitying spirit, to light up that pale, thin face, whose classic outlines had now a sharp, yellow setness, like that of swooning or death; it seemed to linger compassionately on the sunken, wasted cheeks, on the long black lashes that fell over the deep hollows beneath the eyes like a funereal veil. Poor man! lying crushed and torn, like a piece of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... taking in his strong sinewy arms the fading and almost swooning form of Amy, "she is a lovely child; and tho a rough nurse, your Grace hath given her a kind one. She is safe with me as one of my own ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... at once she broke into hysterical tears. And her face had the same senseless blank expression that I had seen in the summer-house when I lighted the matches. Without asking her consent, preventing her from speaking, I dragged her forcibly towards my hotel. She seemed almost swooning and did not walk, but I took her under the arms and almost carried her. . . . I remember, as we were going up the stairs, some man with a red band in his cap looked wonderingly at me and bowed to Kisotchka. . ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... hoard which he sought to open being not to be opened save by means of Alaeddin. So noting this attempt to run away, the Magician arose and raising his hand smote Alaeddin on the head a buffet so sore that well nigh his back-teeth were knocked out, and he fell swooning to the ground. But after a time he revived by the magic of the Magician, and cried, weeping the while, "O my uncle, what have I done that deserveth from thee such a blow as this?" Hereat the Maghrabi fell ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... was playing a risky game, and that one false move might lose him his one chance. It was all the veriest guesswork; but he believed he had guessed aright. Whilst Raymond had been stretched upon the rack, swooning from extremity of pain, Sanghurst's eyes, fixed in gloating satisfaction upon the helpless victim, had been caught by the sight of this token about his neck, secured by a strong silver cord. To possess himself of the ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Mlle. Moiseney extended both arms, that she might receive into them Mlle. Moriaz, whom she believed to be already swooning. ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... spoild warrior there: And the brown gipsy in the swooning air Spreads amber arms the purple glow stains red; Nor hath she seen, nor known with shuddering breath. Symbols of Doom, those Youths Divine who shed Rose-leaves on sombre deeps—Desire ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... and Sir Bedivere went to the King where he lay, swooning from the blow, and bore him to a little chapel on the seashore. As they laid him on the ground, Sir Lucan fell dead beside the King, and Arthur, coming to himself, found but Sir Bedivere alive ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... manly grief appears; Silent, he wept, ashamed to show his tears: Emilia shriek'd but once, and then, oppress'd With sorrow, sunk upon her lover's breast: Till Theseus in his arms convey'd with care, Far from so sad a sight, the swooning fair. 'Twere loss of time her sorrow to relate; 860 Ill bears the sex a youthful lover's fate, When just approaching to the nuptial state. But like a low-hung cloud, it rains so fast, That all at once it falls, and cannot ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... in her great tenderness, had put me to the torture, squeezing my hand under her arm, and stuffing my nose with spirit of hartshorn, till the whole inside was excoriated. I no sooner got home, than I sent for Doctor Ch—, who assured me I needed not be alarmed, for my swooning was entirely occasioned by an accidental impression of fetid effluvia upon nerves of uncommon sensibility. I know not how other people's nerves are constructed; but one would imagine they must be made of very coarse materials, to stand the shock ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... those low-spoken words as they had never vibrated to thunder—my blood felt their subtle violence as it had never felt frost or fire; but I was collected, and in no danger of swooning. I looked at Mr. Rochester: I made him look at me. His whole face was colourless rock: his eye was both spark and flint. He disavowed nothing: he seemed as if he would defy all things. Without speaking, without smiling, without seeming to recognise in me a human being, he only twined ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... drawing-room scene, in its native element, the moon squinting through inky clouds at Lucy swooning on the sofa, while the lofty presence of the Polysyllable discharged ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... up my heart for thy fervent lips To kiss, my sweet. I would lift up my soul, but she swooning slips Down at thy ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... night of Brittany Hear you no voice divide the night like flame? In these gray walls the inmost soul of me Is swooning with the music ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Woe!" she vanished over the side of the vessel. Her last words were, "Remain true! Woe! Woe!" Huldbrand lay swooning on the deck, and little waves seemed to be sobbing on the surface of the Danube, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... fan, such jewels—and her face! One knew at a glance how it was with her. When Armand, with the terrible words, "Look, all of you, I owe this woman nothing!" flung the gold and bank-notes at the half-swooning Marguerite, Lena cowered beside me and covered her face with ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... and no tidings of her had penetrated to him through the solitary prison walls. Did the queen still live? Or had the king in his wrath murdered her on that very night when Henry was carried to the Tower, and his last look beheld his beloved lying at her husband's feet, swooning and rigid. ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... saw the spear he seized it in his hand, and turned upon King Pelles, and smote at him so fiercely and so sore that he dropped swooning ...
— The Legends Of King Arthur And His Knights • James Knowles
... stood long enough to be sworn to, when her white face turned blue and she fell swooning into ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... swooning summer sun sank low, And all the dusty air Held breathlessly beneath his glow, So tir'd, so quiet and fair, I would not think that men could live In such glory a minute, To hate and grudge, to slay and reive ...
— The Village Wife's Lament • Maurice Hewlett
... blending, 95 Yea, thou queen of Golgi, of Idaly leaf-embower'd, O'er what a fire love-lit, what billows wearily tossing, Drave ye the maid, for a guest so sunnily lock'd deep sighing. What most dismal alarms her swooning fancy did echo! Oft what a sallower hue than gold's cold glitter upon her! 100 Whiles, heart-hungry in arms that monster deadly to combat, Theseus drew towards death or victory, guerdon of honour. Yet not lost the devotion, or offer'd idly the virgin's Gifts, as her unvoic'd ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... and not amiss for any pallate neither, and I'm sure the better I feed my Pig, the better it is for me in the soucing out. And this discourse then is held up with such an earnestness, and continues so long, that the Child-bed woman almost gets an Ague with it, or at the least falls from one swooning into another, whilest there is not so much as any one that ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... offered you it kneeling: then you drank And knew no more, nor gave me one poor word; O no more thanks than might a goat have given With no more sign of reverence than a beard. And when we halted at that other well, And I was faint to swooning, and you lay Foot-gilt with all the blossom-dust of those Deep meadows we had traversed, did you know That Vivien bathed your feet before her own? And yet no thanks: and all through this wild wood And all ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... untrue; And to each other, helpless couple, moan, As the sad tortoise for the sea does groan: But most they for their darling Charles complain, And were it burned, yet less would be their pain. To see that fatal pledge of sea-command, Now in the ravisher De Ruyter's hand, The Thames roared, swooning Medway turned her tide, And were they mortal, both for grief ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... almost swooning. "It's he, mamma.... I am sure that he'll be able to tell us everything ... and that M. Morestal is ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... Wanderer was a grim and silent figure, misty and unreal when compared with those material, emotion-torn beings of the rooftop. The woman, swooning, had wilted over the rim of the bowl, and the two boys with their strange amphibious pet splashed out from the pool and came running to ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... way she came in and the kitchen wall closed upon her. When the cook maiden recovered from her fainting fit, she saw the four fishes charred black as charcoal, and crying out, "His staff brake in his first bout,"[FN107] she again fell swooning to the ground. Whilst she was in this case the Wazir came for the fish and looking upon her as insensible she lay, not knowing Sunday from Thursday, shoved her with his foot and said, "Bring the fish for the Sultan!" Thereupon recovering ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... it will cease." When her mother went out from her, Mariyah took to chiding the damsel for that which she had done and said to her, "Verily, death were dearer to me than this; so discover thou not my affair to any and I charge thee return not to the like of this fashion." Then she fainted and lay swooning for a whole hour, and when she came to herself, she saw Shafikah weeping over her; whereupon she pluckt the necklace from her neck and the mantle from her body and said to the damsel, "Lay them in a damask napkin and bear them to Al-Abbas and acquaint him ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Highlandmen were at Derby did not prevent the Hostess of the Stone Kitchen—that famous Tavern in the Tower—from bringing in one's reckoning and insisting on payment. That there was consternation at St. James's, with the King meditating flight and the Royal Family in tears and swooning, did not save the little schoolboy a whipping if he knew not his lesson at morning call. It will be so, I suppose, until the end of the world. We must needs eat and drink, and feel heat and cold, and marry or be given in marriage, whatsoever party prevail, and whatsoever King carries ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... was really a deplorable one. They were too old to be cared for as infants, and they had been obliged, with the strength of children, to accomplish the labor of men and women. Many were crippled in their feet, others were continually on the point of swooning. ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... almost as much as among any in the land. I have seen church members so decked and bedaubed with their fangles and toys that when they have been at worship I have wondered with what faces such painted persons could sit in the place where they were without swooning. I once talked with a maid, by way of reproof for her fond and gaudy garment; she told me the tailor would make it so. Poor proud girl, she gave orders to the tailor to make ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... obstructed her gaze. She felt the swell and ripple and stretch—then the bind of his muscles, like huge coils of elastic rope. Then with savage rude force his mouth closed on hers. All Ellen's senses reeled, as if she were swooning. She was suffocating. The spasm passed, and a bursting spurt of blood revived her to acute and terrible consciousness. For the endless period of one moment he held her so that her breast seemed crushed. His kisses burned and braised her lips. And then, shifting violently to her neck, ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... to droop, or the mist began to stoop, The youthful bride lay swooning in the hall; Empty saddle on his back, broken bridle hanging slack, The steed returned full gallop to ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... glance at it myself, aunty," he said. He opened it, read a line or two, and then, with a scream, fell back swooning, while it dropped ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... been observing him through the window, suppressed an incipient scream that almost escaped her lips, and rushed to her son's side. She had seen the effects of the letter, and her first act was to attempt to gain possession of it for the possible protection of her boy. But even in his swooning condition he clutched the letter with so powerful a grasp that she could not wrest it from him. She now cried aloud for help, and neighbors came ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... to save; it cast itself before its nestling ... but all its tiny body was shaking with terror; its note was harsh and strange. Swooning with fear, it offered ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... gray-bearded Americano began to beam upon her with admiring eyes and to hover over her with jerky, heavy attempts at gallantry. He asked her name, but she took sudden alarm and answered only with a shrug of her shoulders and a swooning glance of her great black eyes. He put his arm about her waist and stooped to kiss her smiling mouth. She struggled away from him with a terrified, appealing cry, "No, no, senor!" of whose meaning there could be ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... appeared at the door, suspended in mid-air by invisible agency. Mrs Boffin, plunging at it, brought it to Bella's lap, where both Mrs and Mr Boffin (as the saying is) 'took it out of' the Inexhaustible in a shower of caresses. It was only this timely appearance that kept Bella from swooning. This, and her husband's earnestness in explaining further to her how it had come to pass that he had been supposed to be slain, and had even been suspected of his own murder; also, how he had put a pious fraud upon her which had preyed upon his mind, as the time for its disclosure approached, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... than the utmost East; And o'er the heart of sad Yasodhara, Sitting forlorn at Prince Siddartha's bed, Came sudden bliss, as if love should not fail Nor such vast sorrow miss to end in joy. So glad the World was—though it wist not why— That over desolate wastes went swooning songs Of mirth, the voice of bodiless Prets and Bhuts Foreseeing Buddh; and Devas in the air Cried, "It is finished, finished!" and the priests Stood with the wondering people in the streets Watching those golden splendours flood the sky And saying, "There hath happed some mighty thing." ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... indicative of either a very thick or very thin skin. Any of them will lend you a hymn book, and whilst none of them may be inclined to pay your regular pew rent, the bulk will have no objection to find you an occasional seat, and take care of you if there would be any swooning in your programme. Clear-headed and full of business, they believe with Binney in making the best of both worlds. They will never give up this for the next, nor the next for this. Into their curriculum there ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... seemed on the point of swooning. In a few moments more, his mind began evidently to wander somewhat; and just as Merle (who, with his urchin-guide, had wandered vainly over the old town in search of the pedlar, until told that he had been ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Vain the few shots aimed in haste and excitement. Vain the rallying cry of a fighting chief. A blow from the butt of Ned Connell's revolver sprawled him headlong over a prostrate form—a white man "staked out" in front of the fire, swooning from mingled misery, weakness, ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... fairies had foretold it, and he caused the Princess to be carried into the finest room in his palace, and to be laid upon a bed all embroidered with gold and silver. One would have taken her for a little angel, she was so beautiful; for her swooning had not dimmed the brightness of her complexion: her cheeks were carnation, and her lips coral. It is true her eyes were shut, but she was heard to breathe softly, which satisfied those about her ...
— The Tales of Mother Goose - As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696 • Charles Perrault
... screamed with terror, but her hand was seized, and a voice cried "Hush!" The next minute a man in a mask (it was the Duke himself) rushed forward, gagged her with a handkerchief, her hands and legs were bound, and she was carried swooning with terror into a vaulted room, where she was placed by a person there waiting, and tied in an arm-chair. The same mask who had gagged her, came and bared her neck and said, "It had best be done now ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... snub-nosed girl would be better. There is scarce a week passes she does not set the country by the ears with some fury or frolic. One time 'tis clouting a Chaplain till his nose bleeds; next 'tis frightening some virtuous woman of fashion into hysteric swooning with her impudent flaming tongue. The women hate her, and she pays them out as she only can. Lady Maddon had fits for an hour, after an encounter with her, in their meeting by chance one day at a mercer's ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... between them they got the swooning Gussie to her room; Afterwards, when Cyrus tiptoed down-stairs, he found the Captain at the cabin door. The old ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland
... upon them with a demoniac fury. Folded in the arms of their ruthless assailants, the nymphs strove to keep up a while longer their raillery and loud laughter, but the mirth died on their lips. With heads thrown back and eyes swooning with joy and terror, they could only call upon their mother, or scream a shrill "You are killing me," ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... ghastly as scars on the face of nature. Shifting hills of treacherous sand were heaped like tombs along the horizon. By day, the fierce heat pressed its intolerable burden on the quivering air. No living creature moved on the dumb, swooning earth, but tiny jerboas scuttling through the parched bushes, or lizards vanishing in the clefts of the rock. By night the jackals prowled and barked in the distance, and the lion made the black ravines echo with his hollow roaring, while a bitter, blighting chill followed the fever of the day. ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... behind the accustomed panel, and alone in the chamber was left poor Margaret: his last sneering speech, the mockery of his sarcastic pity, were still haunting her ear with echoes full of wretchedness; and she had uttered one faint cry, and sunk swooning on a ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... sides with laughter. Indeed, I venture to say without fear of contradiction, that never did military hero cut so extravagant a figure before females; and as he had that scrupulous regard for their good opinion, so common with his brethren in arms, so was he only saved from swooning by the aid of a little whiskey and water. This, however, was not applied until the cause of the alarm was discovered. "Upon my life, Colonel," said the major, as the host aided him in securing his garments with a few pins, "I never was known to offer a discourtesy to ladies through the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... shadowed coolness, aching gratefully in many joints, I had plunged into the hammock's Lethe, swooning shamelessly to a benign oblivion. Dreamless it must long have been, for the shadows of ranch house, stable, hay barn, corral, and bunk house were long to the east when next I observed them. But I fought to this wakefulness through one of those dreams of a monstrous futility that sometimes madden ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... murmurs of the "Grail," the "Spear," the "Pain," the "Love and Faith" motives—hollow murmurs, confused, floating out of the depths of lonely caves. Then I have a feeling of void and darkness, and there comes a sighing as of a soul swooning away in a trance, and a vision of waste places and wild caverns; and then through the confused dream I hear the solemn boom of mighty bells, only muffled. They keep time as to some ghastly march. I strain my eyes into the thick gloom ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... heard what he said, she could no longer restrain her soul, but threw herself upon him and discovered to him her case. When he knew her, he threw himself upon her swooning awhile; after which he came to himself and cried, "Lauded be the Lord, the Bountiful, the Beneficent!" Then they plained each to other of that they had suffered from the pangs of parting, whilst Salim's wife wondered at this and Salma's patience ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... freshness of the wind with great sighs; he spread out his arms, moving his fingers that he might the better feel the cares that streamed over his body. Hopes of vengeance came back to him and transported him. He pressed his hand upon his mouth to check his sobs, and half-swooning with intoxication, let go the halter of his dromedary, which was proceeding with long, regular steps. Matho had relapsed into his former melancholy; his legs hung down to the ground, and the grass made a continuous rustling as it ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... die, say the Scriptures (Judg. xiii. 22); and may it not be that the eternal vision of God is an eternal death, a swooning away of the personality? But St. Teresa, in her description of the last state of prayer, the rapture, transport, flight, or ecstasy of the soul, tells us that the soul is borne as upon a cloud or ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... the morning, when they donned their feather-suits, and resuming dove shape flew off and went their way. But as he saw them disappearing from sight, his reason well nigh fled with them, and he gave a great cry and fell down in a fainting fit and lay a-swooning all that day. While he was in this case Shaykh Nasr returned from the Parliament of the Fowls and sought for Janshah, that he might send him with them to his native land, but found him not and knew that he had entered the forbidden room. Now he had already said to the birds, 'With ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... eyes, the full throat clasped about with a single strand of coral. Yes, it was she! He lifted himself on his elbow. He was in bed. Surely this was the room into which she had drawn him with her eyes. Did he sink on the threshold, all his senses swooning into delicious faith? Or had he, indeed, in that last moment thrown himself on his knees by her couch? He could not remember, and he ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... dead his sword she caught, And fell in trance that wist of nought, Swooning: but softly Balen sought To win from her the sword she thought To die on, dying by Launceor's side. Again her wakening wail outbroke As wildly, sword in hand, she woke And struck one swift and bitter stroke That healed her, ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... boy told the story to the poor student, who hurried into the forest, and under the inspiration of his scorned love, ran and ran until he found the swooning maiden under the snow, took her up in his arms, placed his garments upon her, and bore her through the cold and rapid stream, found a shelter under the rocks on the other side, kindled a fire, gave the maiden, proud no longer, a cordial, warmed and ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... the doctor came, I saved him a good deal of trouble by swooning away the moment he touched my wound, and remained in that condition, on and off, till I heard the anchor running out at the bows, and understood from those who lay near that we were at ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... where the Queen had suffered; and he had told the story so well that his listeners had seemed to see it for themselves—the great hall hung with black throughout; the raised scaffold at the further end beside the fire that blazed on the wide hearth; the Queen's servants being led away half-swooning as he came in; the dress of velvet, the straw and the bloody sawdust, the beads and all the other pitiful relics being heaped upon the fire as he stood there in the struggling mob; and, above all, the fallen body, in its short skirt and bodice lying ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... heart alone. Man, who walketh in a show, Sees before him, to and fro, Shadow and illusion go; All things flow and fluctuate, Now contract and now dilate. In the welter of this sea, Nothing stable is but Thee; In this whirl of swooning trance, Thou alone art permanence; All without Thee only seems, All beside is choice of dreams. Never yet in darkest mood Doubted I that Thou wast good, Nor mistook my will for fate, Pain of sin for heavenly hate,— Never dreamed the gates of pearl ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Princess to be carried into the finest apartment in his palace, and to be laid upon a bed all embroidered with gold and silver. One would have taken her for an angel, she was so very beautiful; for her swooning away had not diminished one bit of her complexion; her cheeks were carnation, and her lips like coral; indeed her eyes were shut, but she was heard to breathe softly, which satisfied those about ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... trapped—two miles below the earth. There was no hope of rescue, the hope that miners feel in deep shafts. There could be no rescue for Asher. No one could get to him. He cried out his horror, fighting to keep from swooning. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... when the air was swooning with a ghastly fear; When the Moslem swept before us, driven like a herd of deer; When our voices mocked the thunder, shouting 'England and Saint George!' And the lightning of our falchions fell like ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... things necessary to restore the swooning woman, noting with a doctor's eye the first faint flush of pink under the dead white nails, then the flutter of breath through the parted lips and the slow unclosing of the hazel eyes which, at sight of him, ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... your comrade; men," said Cuticle, turning round. "I tell you it is not an uncommon thing for the patient to betray some emotion upon these occasions—most usually manifested by swooning; it is quite natural it should be so. But we must not delay the operation. Steward, that knife—no, the next one—there, that's it. He is coming to, I think"—feeling the top-man's wrist. "Are you all ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... an exhausting talk we sat, inert, on the grass hummock beside the stream. Heavy clouds had gathered in the sky, the light had deepened to amethyst, the valley was still, swooning with expectancy, louder and louder the thunder rolled from behind the distant hills, and presently a veil descended to hide them from our view. Great drops ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... quite died away. There was not a sound,—a slight breeze blew, but there were no leaves to rustle. I put my head down on the neck of my dead horse. Extreme fatigue was benumbing the pain of my now swelling arm; perhaps sleep was near, perhaps I was swooning. ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... well—yet well—having enjoyed a great deal in spite of drawbacks. Murray, the traitor, sent us to Fano as "a delightful summer residence for an English family," and we found it uninhabitable from the heat, vegetation scorched into paleness, the very air swooning in the sun, and the gloomy looks of the inhabitants sufficiently corroborative of their words that no drop of rain or dew ever falls there during the summer. A "circulating library" which "does not give out books," ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... and in the other his horn Olifant. Under a little clump of pines were some rough steps hewn in a boulder of marble leading yet higher up the hill, and these Roland would have climbed, but his throbbing heart could no more, and again he fell swooning on the ground. A Saracen who, out of fear, had feigned death, saw him lying there and crawled out of the ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... Rheou meets them and leads them away. Satni enters with some men bearing Pakh, who is wounded. Kirjipa almost swooning follows, supported by some women who lead her into the house. The Exorcist, who with his two assistants follows Pakh, takes some clay from a coffer carried by one of his men, shapes it into a ball, and begins, then, ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... be accepted. For the term 'swoon' may be explained as denoting either deep sleep or some other acknowledged state, and there is no authority for assuming an altogether different new state.—This view the Stra sets aside. The condition of a swooning person consists in reaching half, viz. of what leads to death; for this is the only hypothesis remaining. A swoon cannot be either dreaming or being awake; for in a swoon there is no consciousness. And as it is different in character as well as in the occasions ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... lord," said Mora. "Truth to tell, it was not so. Once fairly started on the telling, she seemed lifted into a strange sublimity of utterance. I marvelled at it, and at the unearthly radiance of her face. At the end, I thought she slept; but later I heard from the Sub-Prioress that she was found swooning before the crucifix and they had much ado to ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... the farmer: "Nous vous remercions infiniment. Vous aurez mille choses a faire chez vous, je n'en doute. Nous reglerons notre compte tout-a l'heure.... Pour le moment, adieu." She clutched the handbags of valuables, slung them somehow on her left arm, while with her other she piloted the nearly swooning Mrs. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... he folded together, and stretching his hand behind him, threw them in the direction of the haunted wardrobe. His fear that, even now, he might be assassinated, grew to such dimensions that he came near to swooning. But upon no ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... virgins, Queen of all saints. Queen conceived without sin!' She, ever before him, shone in splendour; and he, on the topmost step, only reached by Mary's intimates, remained there yet another moment, swooning amidst the subtle atmosphere around him; still too far away to kiss the edge of her azure robe, already feeling that he was about to fall, but ever possessed by a desire to ascend again and again, ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... rioting over the gardens and fields and hills, rich, lush colored, radiant, redolent, gorgeous, rose-scented and pulsing with a life that made me breathless. Even the roads along the valley were bordered with flowers that the sun had wooed to the swooning point. ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... though he knew beforehand that all manner of remedies were in vain. A chirurgeon of the ship, who was awkward at his work, and of small experience in his art, bled him so unluckily, that he hurt the nerves, and the patient fell immediately into swooning convulsions; yet they drew blood from him a second time; and that operation had all the ill accidents of the former. Besides which, it was attended with a horrible nauseousness; insomuch, that he could ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... unsteadily in arcs of circles in a fiery sky. His hand fell away from his weapon, his head slowly dropped until his face rested on the leaves in which he lay. This courageous gentleman and hardy soldier was near swooning from intensity ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... vibrated to those low-spoken words as they had never vibrated to thunder—my blood felt their subtle violence as it had never felt frost or fire; but I was collected, and in no danger of swooning. I looked at Mr. Rochester: I made him look at me. His whole face was colourless rock: his eye was both spark and flint. He disavowed nothing: he seemed as if he would defy all things. Without speaking, without smiling, without seeming to recognise in me a human being, he ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the door, suspended in mid-air by invisible agency. Mrs Boffin, plunging at it, brought it to Bella's lap, where both Mrs and Mr Boffin (as the saying is) 'took it out of' the Inexhaustible in a shower of caresses. It was only this timely appearance that kept Bella from swooning. This, and her husband's earnestness in explaining further to her how it had come to pass that he had been supposed to be slain, and had even been suspected of his own murder; also, how he had put a pious fraud upon her which had preyed ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... happy, as was evident on the screen, still as attractive as ever and still besieged by the greatest variety of suitors. Nobles and commoners, peasants and financiers, men of all kinds fell swooning at her feet; and prominent among them was a sort of boorish solitary, a shaggy, half-wild woodcutter, whom she met whenever she went out for a walk. Armed with his axe, a formidable, crafty being, he prowled around the cottage; and the spectators felt with a ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... in wonder, and then a light broke over her face like the morning. His arm slipped about her waist and she leaned against him suddenly weak, almost to swooning. Mr. Hazlewood started up from ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... brought him safely to the mouths of the river. And his knees bowed and his stout hands fell, for his heart was broken by the brine. And his flesh was all swollen and a great stream of sea water gushed up through his mouth and nostrils. So he lay without breath or speech, swooning, such terrible weariness came upon him. But when now his breath returned and his spirit came to him again, he loosed from off him the veil of the goddess, and let it fall into the salt flowing river. ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... then sank she / ere she a word did say, And reft of all her pleasure / there the fair lady lay. Soon had Kriemhild's sorrow / all measure passed beyond: She shrieked, when past the swooning, / that did the chamber ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... And sometimes into cities she would send Her dream, with feast and rioting to blend; And once, while among mortals dreaming thus, She saw the young Corinthian Lycius Charioting foremost in the envious race, Like a young Jove with calm uneager face, And fell into a swooning love of him. Now on the moth-time of that evening dim 220 He would return that way, as well she knew, To Corinth from the shore; for freshly blew The eastern soft wind, and his galley now Grated the ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... members too, so decked and bedaubed with their fangles[62] and toys, and that when they have been at the solemn appointments of God in the way of his worship, that I have wondered with what face such painted persons could sit in the place where they were without swooning. But certainly the holiness of God, and also the pollution of themselves by sin, must need be very far out of the minds of such people, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Lady!" said Hunsdon, taking in his strong sinewy arms the fading and almost swooning form of Amy, "she is a lovely child; and tho a rough nurse, your Grace hath given her a kind one. She is safe with me as one of my own ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... the approaching waves had met, and rising high in the air in their furious contact, had fallen with terrific force, sweeping her and her rescuer into the boiling surf. Valmai became unconscious at once, but Cardo's strong frame knew no sense of swooning nor faintness. His whole being seemed concentrated in a blind struggle to reach the land—to save Valmai, though he ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... point of swooning. In a few moments more, his mind began evidently to wander somewhat; and just as Merle (who, with his urchin-guide, had wandered vainly over the old town in search of the pedlar, until told that ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... comes to herself after swooning, her anger is characteristic because wholly unexpected; it is one sign more that Shakespeare had a ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... rose to his head. "Then you refuse to do my bidding! Take her, men! Give to her the death that is due to a traitor to the king!" As they bore Kwan-yin away from his presence the white-haired monarch fell, swooning, from his chair. ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... were perfectly well in other respects, but they could not hear; at other times they could not see. Sometimes they lost their speech for one, two, and once for eight days together. At times they had swooning fits, and, when they could speak, were taken with a fit of coughing, and vomited phlegm and crooked pins; and once a great twopenny nail, with above forty pins; which nail he, the examinant, saw vomited up, with many ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Clarissa, almost swooning with joy as she reclined palpitating upon the manly breast of Captain William Leadbury, said never a word, for the power of speech was not in her; the power of song, of uttering peans of joy, perhaps, but not the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... he could recover from the confusion and weakness of the moment, his hands were dragged from their hold, and he went flashing down from the eyes of his mother like the passing of a lightning gleam. Another scream thrilled on the air, and then Mrs. Howland sunk swooning to the floor. ...
— The Iron Rule - or, Tyranny in the Household • T. S. Arthur
... have become quite aware that I had gone to sea for the first time. It was my bench which properly woke me. It fell away from me, and I, of course, went after it, and my impression is that I met it halfway on its return journey, for then there came the swooning sensation one feels in the immediate ascent of a lift. When the bench was as high as it could go it overbalanced, canting acutely, and, grabbing my blanket, I left diagonally for a corner of the saloon, accompanied by some sea-boots I met under the table. As I was slowly ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... most they for their darling Charles complain, And were it burned, yet less would be their pain. To see that fatal pledge of sea-command, Now in the ravisher De Ruyter's hand, The Thames roared, swooning Medway turned her tide, And were they mortal, both ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... of feeling was so great that a faintness seized me and I leaned half-swooning against a tree. And in this moment Diana's arm was about me and her voice ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... of the "Grail," the "Spear," the "Pain," the "Love and Faith" motives—hollow murmurs, confused, floating out of the depths of lonely caves. Then I have a feeling of void and darkness, and there comes a sighing as of a soul swooning away in a trance, and a vision of waste places and wild caverns; and then through the confused dream I hear the solemn boom of mighty bells, only muffled. They keep time as to some ghastly march. I strain my eyes into the thick gloom ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... The horror of the yellow fell, the red Hot mouth, and white teeth gleaming o'er his head; So Psyche felt, as sinking on the ground She cast one weary vacant look around, And at the ending of that wretched day Swooning beneath the risen moon ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... wild things that have their homes in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the woodland; the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and ...
— A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Mark Twain
... long iron nails in a basket. The Nazarene was not to be tied, but nailed, because He had once said that He should descend from the cross. When they noticed that Jesus was nearly swooning, they offered Him a refreshing drink of vinegar and myrrh. He refused it with thanks, and when He began to sink down the executioners caught Him and ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... her niece are welcome," and Lady Warner made a deep curtsy, not like one of Lady Fareham's sinking curtseys, as of one near swooning in an ecstasy of politeness, but dignified and inflexible, straight down and ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... she sank on a seat half swooning, while Elizabeth, her eldest girl, finished the story in low, trembling tones. Tom o' the Gleam meanwhile stood rigidly upright and silent. To him the chief officer of ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... grouping of this Divine tragedy, and Quintin Matsys has followed the tradition. The body of the Lord is supported by two venerable old men—Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus—while the holy women anoint the wounds of the Saviour; the Virgin swooning with grief is supported by St John. The figures are full of individuality, and their action is instinct with pathos. For this picture Quintin Matsys—popular painter as he was—got only three hundred florins, equivalent to twenty-five pounds (although, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... sword she caught, And fell in trance that wist of nought, Swooning: but softly Balen sought To win from her the sword she thought To die on, dying by Launceor's side. Again her wakening wail outbroke As wildly, sword in hand, she woke And struck one swift and bitter stroke That ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... priests was a blow that knocked the graybeard senseless, and lifting Diane up, half-swooning, they flung ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... remember our silent evening walks, the four of us together, beside your garden fence, after some long, warm, spirited conversation? Do you remember those blissful moments? Nature, benign and stately, took us to her bosom. We plunged, swooning, into a flood of bliss. All around, the sunset with a sudden and soft flush, the glowing sky, the earth bathed in light, everything on all sides seemed full of the fresh and fiery breath of youth, the joyous triumph of some deathless ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... technically, and once Doctor Dillon was so unfeeling as to crack a joke—they could not distinctly hear what—and hee-haw brutally over it. And poor little Mrs. Sturk was taken with a great palpitation, and looked as white as a ghost, and was, indeed, so obviously at the point of swooning that her women would have removed her to the nursery, and placed her on the bed, but that such a procedure would have obliged them to leave the door of their sick master's room, just then a point of too lively interest to be deserted. So they consoled their mistress, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... administered a little sal volatile and nux vomica to the swooning patient; while Hilda set about remedying the damage. "That's better," Sebastian said, in a mollified tone, when she had brought another basin. There was a singular note of cloaked triumph in his voice. "Now, we'll begin again.... I was just saying, gentlemen, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... this unpatriotic surrender. Defiance flashed forth once more from the bath; and the First Consul finally ended their bitter retorts by spasmodically rising as suddenly falling backwards, and drenching Joseph to the skin. His peals of scornful laughter, and the swooning of the valet, who was not yet fully inured to these family scenes, interrupted the argument of the piece; but, when resumed a little later, a sec, Lucien wound up by declaring that, if he were not his ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Swooning, or slight mental mistiness, is not very unusual in ghost seers. The brother of a friend of my own, a man of letters and wide erudition, was, as a boy, employed in a shop in a town, say Wexington. The overseer was a dark, rather hectic-looking ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... my lips to the tankard, and drank long, to hide my face, and for that I was nigh swooning with a ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... breaking out, but Laura stopped her: "Silence, hush, dear mother," she cried, and the widow hushed. Savagely as Pen spoke, she was only too eager to hear what more he had to say. "Go on, Arthur, go on, Arthur," was all she said, almost swooning away as she spoke. ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... O holy boy, who mingles men's cares and their joyings, and thou queen of Golgos and of foliaged Idalium, on what waves did you heave the mind-kindled maid, sighing full oft for the golden-haired guest! What dreads she bore in her swooning soul! How often did she grow sallower in sheen than gold! When craving to contend against the savage monster Theseus faced death or the palm of praise. Then gifts to the gods not unmeet not idly given, with promise ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... they were almost within hail; Dan saw her hair streaming on the wind; he waited only for the long wave. On it came, that long wave,—oh! I can see it now!—plunging and rearing and swelling, a monstrous billow, sweeping and swooning and rocking in. Its hollows gaped with slippery darkness, it towered and sent the scuds before its trembling crest, breaking with a mighty rainbow as the sun burst forth, it fell in a white blindness everywhere, rushed seething up the sand,—and the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... to a shed in the great court of Gleys, and set me on straw: and there, till far into the afternoon, I lay betwixt swooning and trembling, while Delia bath'd my head in water from the sea, for no other was to be had. And about four in the afternoon the horror left me, so that I sat up and told ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... was, even then, so bad and fitful that be could never work. He tried his best; but what chef can afford to employ a youth who is always sending in doctor's certificates to excuse his absence from his desk, and breaking down with headache or swooning on the floor in office-hours? He was totally unfit to earn his living, and the little money he had would not suffice to keep him decently. Moreover, in his delicate condition he positively needed comforts which to other lads would have been superfluous. Still he managed to struggle on for ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... prevent the Hostess of the Stone Kitchen—that famous Tavern in the Tower—from bringing in one's reckoning and insisting on payment. That there was consternation at St. James's, with the King meditating flight and the Royal Family in tears and swooning, did not save the little schoolboy a whipping if he knew not his lesson at morning call. It will be so, I suppose, until the end of the world. We must needs eat and drink, and feel heat and cold, and marry or be given in marriage, whatsoever party prevail, and whatsoever ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... losing their original identity. You may place the bit of contentment in the mouth of ambition, so to speak, and jog along in your sterile course between the vast wheat fields groaning under the thousand-toothed plough and the gardens of delight swooning with devotion and sensuality. But cross ambition with contentment and you get the hinny of indifference or the monster of fatalism. We do not say that indifference at certain passes of life, and certain stages, is not ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... the crowd made way, how everyone stepped aside at this word of command; she saw even the shaking widow sit down somewhere; but then everything began to grow black before her eyes and she sank swooning into the arms of the man whom, hitherto, she had hated so much, and who in this most awful moment had been her sole deliverer! When she came to again, she found herself in the carriage. Her husband had not stayed a single instant longer in that town, ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... searched her very soul. She felt her flesh growing cold and her senses swooning. It had been a great effort to come up and face him at such a time, but her mission was urgent. She came to entreat an amnesty, to beg that he would not drag the miserable business of the checks into court by a dispute with the bank, ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... at it myself, aunty," he said. He opened it, read a line or two, and then, with a scream, fell back swooning, while it dropped out ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... transported in memory to the midst of a crowded street. In the mad bustle and noise you are conscious only of mechanical power; of speed - always of speed. Your voice far away - 'The child, oh, the child!' A swooning sensation. Men's faces as triangles and horses with countless legs. The chaos of ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams
... of both my hands And offered you it kneeling: then you drank And knew no more, nor gave me one poor word; O no more thanks than might a goat have given With no more sign of reverence than a beard. And when we halted at that other well, And I was faint to swooning, and you lay Foot-gilt with all the blossom-dust of those Deep meadows we had traversed, did you know That Vivien bathed your feet before her own? And yet no thanks: and all through this wild wood And all this morning when I fondled you: Boon, ay, there was a boon, one not so strange— ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... to avail her naught, and she finally sank, swooning, with her head against the cruel barrier. Back in the railroad station, Percy and his kind-faced assistant, Pop, were prospecting ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... and perhaps saved his life. He can have no other conjecture. He remembers seeing a house as they approached its outside. It must be that he is now in; though, from the last conscious thought, as he felt himself swooning in the saddle, all has been as blank as if he had been lying lifeless in a tomb. Even yet it might appear as a dream but for the voice of Walt Wilder, who, outside, seems labouring hard to make himself intelligible to some personage with ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... drew me from the pocket, and, disengaging the chain from his button-hole, he laid us both in a drawer and shut it up. I was in despair, and already was nearly swooning from weakness. ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... when he heard Cordelia's death, Who died indeed for love Of her dear father, in whose cause She did this battle move, He swooning fell upon her breast, From whence he never parted: But on her bosom left his life, That was ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... score shows how sadly the pedagogue might go astray in judgment of the work, without a hearing of it, and furthermore, the imagination of the hearer must be in sympathy with the imagination of the composer, if he would know full enjoyment: for this symphonic poem provokes swooning thoughts, such as come to the partakers of leaves and flowers of hemp; there are the stupefying perfumes of charred frankincense and grated sandal-root. The music comes to the listener of western birth and mind, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... uttered in a loud voice a long harangue. Then they paddled for the shore; and no sooner did they reach it than each fell flat like a dead man in the bottom of the canoe. Aid, however, was at hand; for Donnacona and his tribesmen, rushing pell-mell from the adjacent woods, raised the swooning masqueraders, and, with shrill clamors, bore them in their arms within the sheltering thickets. Here, for a full half-hour, the French could hear them haranguing in solemn conclave. Then the two young Indians whom Cartier had brought ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... spiritual part of love. All will agree on that, schisms only arise when one tries to decide what does go farthest from the bird's automatic mechanism. Certainly not a Dante-Beatrice affair which is only the negation of the rooster in terms of the swooning bombast of adolescence, the first onslaught of a force which the sufferer cannot control or inhabit with all the potentialities of his body and soul. But the rooster is troubled by no dreams of a divine orgy, no carnival-loves ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... heart of her to send such a tender young creature to prison...." At the word "prison!" every drop of my blood chilled, and my fright acted so strongly upon me, that, turning as pale and faint as a criminal at the first sight of his place of execution, I was on the point of swooning. My landlady, who wanted only to terrify me to a certain point, and not to throw me into a state of body inconsistent with her designs upon it, began to sooth me again, and told me, in a tone composed to more pity and gentleness, that "it would be my own fault, if she was ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... the almost swooning mother to the inner room under the awning, where a bed had been made for her, while Mrs. Bodine and Mrs. Willoughby cared for the child. The husband was so prostrated by anxiety for his wife as ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... contained in the stems of the Dodder, this will serve to kill the parasite without doing any injury to the clover or lucerne. Although a parasite the plant springs every year from seed. It is a remedy for swooning or fainting fits. ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... so; for I can tilt right well, Let me not say I could; I know all tricks, That sway the sharp sword cunningly; ah you, You, my Lord Clisson, in the other days Have seen me learning these, yea, call to mind, How in the trodden corn by Chartres town, When you were nearly swooning from the back Of your black horse, those three blades slid at once From off my sword's edge; ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... rising, shooting, Heaving, sinking, creeping; Hid in corners crooning; Splitting, poking, leaping, Gathering, towering, swooning. When we're lurking, Yet we're working, For our labour we must do, Shadow men, as well as you. Flicker, flacker, fling, fluff! Swing, ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... of the fresco, near the swooning Virgin, stands St. John Baptist pointing to the Saviour; St. Mark kneeling shows his gospel; St. Laurence clasps his hands on his breast; and St. Cosmo wrings his hands as he contemplates the Cross; while St. Damian turns, covering ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... him close and presently his eyes shone like stars; his hair lengthened into sunbeams; the breath of his nostrils had the scent of roses; a cloud of incense rose from the hearth, and the waters began to murmur harmoniously; an abundance of bliss, a superhuman joy, filled the soul of the swooning Julian, while he who clasped him to his breast grew and grew until his head and his feet touched the opposite walls of the cabin. The roof flew up in the air, disclosing the heavens, and Julian ascended into infinity ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... see King George the Second toppled from his throne—yet to those who lived quiet {220} lives and kept civil tongues in their heads all things went on pretty much as usual. . . . That there was consternation at St. James's, with the King meditating flight, and the royal family in tears and swooning, did not save the little school-boy a whipping if he knew not his lesson after morning call. . . . So, while all the public were talking about the rebellion, all the world went nevertheless to the playhouses, where they played loyal pieces, and sang 'God ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... opened [from Homoly Hill, on our left], and we were still pushing on,—might now be about two hundred steps from the Enemy's Line, when I had the misfortune, at the head of Regiment Schwerin, to get wounded, and, swooning away (VOR TOD), fell from my horse to the ground. Awakening after some minutes, and raising my head to look about, I found nobody of our people now here beside or round me; but all were already behind, in full flood of retreat (HOCH ANSCHLAGEN). The Enemy's Grenadiers were perhaps ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... bathed his face for a few minutes, and then becoming alarmed at the poor fellow's long-continued swooning, he was about to get up and run for help, when Nat slowly opened his eyes again ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... for thy fervent lips To kiss, my sweet. I would lift up my soul, but she swooning slips Down at thy feet, And the ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... the rain work as much against us as for us. We endow them with minds like our own, but magnified by our dismay to be the minds of gods maleficent. Without shelter of our own provision we are comfortless, and without comfort our souls perish, then our bodies. Salisbury Plain, swooning in the heat, is a paradise for insects. In those desolate dwellings both flies and (I am sure) fleas abounded, dreadfully healthy and alive. I only guess at the fleas, but the flies I can answer for. They swarmed on the baking walls and wove webs in ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... step or two toward her daughter's room, and fell swooning at the threshold. Mildred opened the door, and her deep pallor showed that instead of sleeping she had heard words that would leave scars on ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... with Mr. Lee is that he is a kind of Emerson; a constitutional ascete or Brahmin, battling with the staggering voluptuosities of his word-sense; a De Quincey needing no opium to set him swooning. In fact, he is a poet, and has no control over his thoughts. A poet may begin by thinking about a tortoise, or a locomotive, or a piece of sirloin, and in one whisk of Time his mind has shot up to the conceptions of Eternity, Transportation, and Nourishment: his cortex coruscates ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... currents of air, alternating with drier heats, on what appeared to be different levels, moved across the whole garden, or gave way at times to a breathless lull and hush of everything, in which the long rose alley seemed to be swooning in its own spices. They had reached the bottom of the garden, and had turned, facing the upper moonlit extremity and the bare stone bench. Cecily's voice faltered, her hand leaned more heavily on his arm, as if she were overcome by the strong perfume. His right hand began ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... who received the swooning Caesar in his strong arms. Everyone else around was too excited to move. The Augustas, inwardly consumed with jealousy, were striving to keep up an appearance of dignity in the face of the insult which ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... swelled her breast. Success, in any case! To-morrow! And that man was hers, that heart was hers! It was a dream, an enchantment! Her head rolled back, a smile drew up her lips, her eyes, through her tangled curls, seemed all ablaze. Jimmy bent his glowing face over her. Lily, on the point of swooning, raised her ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... her composure, she sank back upon the seat from which she had risen in her fright. A deathly paleness covered her cheeks, and, almost swooning, she rested her head on ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... half-swooning legate found his voice. "Lord Prince," he gasped. "Lord Prince... you cannot do this infamy! You cannot! I warn you that... that..." The threat perished unuttered, slain by mounting terror. "Mercy! Have mercy, lord! as you hope ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... Esperanza rattled through the fleet, and envious men cried "What cheer!" in a doleful manner. After a twelve hours' run the wind fell away, and the sky began to look funny. Hoarse vague noises came over the sea, and it seemed as if certain sounds were growing weary and swooning away. Little breaths of air came softly—oh, so softly, and so deadly cold!—but the tiny puffs were hardly enough to send a feather far. The birds wailed a good deal, and when the ducks began to cry "Karm, kah-ah-arm," the men shouted, "Billee, run, Billee; or I'll bring the policeman!" ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... other, and this occasion gave her a chance that could not be resisted. The day before Nelson's departure for Portsmouth the scalding tears flowed from her eyes continuously, she could neither eat nor drink, and her lapses into swooning at the table were terrible. These performances do not bear out the tale of Nelson's spontaneous and gushing outburst in the garden at Merton of her bravery and goodness in urging him to "go forth." It is possible that her resolution ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... of action, the cool-headed, seemed suddenly bereft of his chilling serenity. "Here, mother, a chair; father, some water, quick." He carried the swooning girl to the shadow of the porch and fanned her tenderly with his broad-brimmed ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... means of the holy things of the church corresponds to filth, and its delight to a stench indescribable by words, and at which angels shudder. Such is the exhalation from their hells when they are opened; but they are kept closed because of the oppression and occasional swooning which they ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg
... seemed as though the soul of that wicked man must be still hovering over his unburied remains, and boding evil to us all. A chill crept over me, the light, the walls, my brother, and Raffaelle all swam round, and I sank swooning on the stairs. ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... give the benediction; when the bell tinkled and the censer flew on high and the organ opened all its throats and the glittering monstrance slowly made a cross in the air and above the heads of the worshippers, she fell forward over her praying-stool and lay like that, swooning in mute adoration, until all was silent again, the candles out and she sitting alone there in the dark with a few black shapes of cloaked women who wandered discreetly from one station of the Cross to the next. Outside she heard her brothers playing in the church-square. There she joined ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... sister Salma heard what he said, she could no longer restrain her soul, but threw herself upon him and discovered to him her case. When he knew her, he threw himself upon her swooning awhile; after which he came to himself and cried, "Lauded be the Lord, the Bountiful, the Beneficent!" Then they plained each to other of that they had suffered from the pangs of parting, whilst Salim's wife wondered at this and Salma's ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... distinguish his figure. We were soon placed in our respective cells and the iron barred doors locked. Some of the officers declared subsequently, that when left alone, and the eyes of the keepers were taken off of them, they came near swooning. It was not the apprehension of hardship or harsh treatment that was so horrible; it was the stifling sense of close cramped confinement. The dead weight of the huge stone prison seemed resting on our breasts. On the next day we were taken out to undergo some of the ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... of ancient torrents, white and ghastly as scars on the face of nature. Shifting hills of treacherous sand were heaped like tombs along the horizon. By day, the fierce heat pressed its intolerable burden on the quivering air; and no living creature moved, on the dumb, swooning earth, but tiny jerboas scuttling through the parched bushes, or lizards vanishing in the clefts of the rock. By night the jackals prowled and barked in the distance, and the lion made the black ravines echo with ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... doors that at this moment are both shut close, there stands beneath a brocaded canopy an ebony bed, supported on four twisted columns carved with symbolic figures. The king, after a struggle with a violent paroxysm, has fallen swooning in the arms of his confessor and his doctor, who each hold one of his dying hands, feeling his pulse anxiously and exchanging looks of intelligence. At the foot of the bed stands a woman about fifty years of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... lilac, into the Prato della Valle. There the three unconscious girls mingled with the concourse of those who took the air under the still trees. Ippolita, that slim, tall marvel, seemed not to be remarked by any; Alessandro, swooning on his friend's ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... within an ace of swooning, but recovered to a deep sense of disgust and discouragement; and settled to go back to Holland at peep of day. This resolution formed, he plucked up a little heart; and being faint with hunger, asked one of the men of garlic whether this was ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... look on Roland swooning there, Surpassed all sorrow he ever bare; He stretched his hand, the horn he took,— Through Roncesvailes there flowed a brook,— A draught to Roland he thought to bring; But his steps were feeble and tottering, Spent his strength, from waste of ...
— The Harvard Classics, Volume 49, Epic and Saga - With Introductions And Notes • Various
... a mighty effort he drew his foot out of the sand which seemed to clutch it, leaving his shoe behind, and then in sheer terror he turned and ran from the place, never stopping till his breath and strength failed him, and he sank half swooning on the grassy path ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... beside her swooning cousin. Lady Blanche, meanwhile, was loosening her daughter's dress, chafing her icy hands, or moaning over her in ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... from every throat, and we sprang towards him. He rolled over on his side, and with a grin of exquisite pain, yet in words of unconquerable derision "You may have my sword now, Monsieur l'Officier," he said, and sank back, swooning. ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... upon her hands, gazed wildly on his ashen face, and then, with a great cry, she sank back swooning. ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... constantly with her under the very eyes of her tiresome courtiers. What an interest in her life! She took up music again for her poet's sake, and revealed the world of sound to him, playing grand fragments of Beethoven till she sent him into ecstasy; and, happy in his delight, turned to the half-swooning poet. ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... few things necessary to restore the swooning woman, noting with a doctor's eye the first faint flush of pink under the dead white nails, then the flutter of breath through the parted lips and the slow unclosing of the hazel eyes which, at sight of him, sprang widely, ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... "Come, no swooning," said Gorju. "You'll only have me missing the coach. A glorious bit of devilment is getting ready, and I'm in the swim; so just give me ten sous to stand ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... mad challenge of mine silence closed down like a shutting trap. Consciousness sank away from me with a sense of swooning quietness. ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... contradiction, that never did military hero cut so extravagant a figure before females; and as he had that scrupulous regard for their good opinion, so common with his brethren in arms, so was he only saved from swooning by the aid of a little whiskey and water. This, however, was not applied until the cause of the alarm was discovered. "Upon my life, Colonel," said the major, as the host aided him in securing his garments with a few pins, "I never was known to offer a discourtesy to ladies through the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... by the way she came in and the kitchen wall closed upon her. When the cook maiden recovered from her fainting fit, she saw the four fishes charred black as charcoal, and crying out, "His staff brake in his first bout,"[FN107] she again fell swooning to the ground. Whilst she was in this case the Wazir came for the fish and looking upon her as insensible she lay, not knowing Sunday from Thursday, shoved her with his foot and said, "Bring the fish for the Sultan!" Thereupon recovering from her fainting fit she wept and in formed him of her ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as he suffered the agony of its penetration. He stretched out his arms in the street to hold fast the frail swooning form that eluded him and incited him: and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... it, by a blind submission to the judgment of his host, though he knew beforehand that all manner of remedies were in vain. A chirurgeon of the ship, who was awkward at his work, and of small experience in his art, bled him so unluckily, that he hurt the nerves, and the patient fell immediately into swooning convulsions; yet they drew blood from him a second time; and that operation had all the ill accidents of the former. Besides which, it was attended with a horrible nauseousness; insomuch, that he could take no nourishment, at least the little which he ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... tortuous journey Annadoah had no clear remembrance—with each step her one urging, predominant thought had been to forge ahead, to keep from swooning,—to escape those who ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... his death, when he could not. All the time he was poignantly sensible of her grace, her elegance, her style; they seemed to intoxicate him; some tones of her voice thrilled through his nerves, and some looks turned his brain with a delicious, swooning sense of her beauty; her refinement bewildered him. But all this did not admit the idea of possession, even of aspiration. At the most his worship only set her beyond the love of other men as ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... suddenly seized with pain and cramp in his sound leg, and great swelling and inflammation ensued. He was treated by a Syracusan physician, who let him blood below the ankle; this soon eased his pain, but then the blood could not be stopped, till the loss of it brought on fainting and swooning; at length, with much trouble, he stopped it. Agesilaus was carried home to Sparta in a very weak condition, and did not recover strength enough to appear in the field for a ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... of sturdy oak in the door give way as though they were egg-shells. The gigantic fist of the monster crashed through and she could discern the dim outline of the enormous head, and the glaring eyes of fire looking toward her. With a shrill shriek she raised her arms above her head and fell swooning to the floor just as ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... he left England. "I stayed till ten at night," continues Minto, "and I took a final leave of him. He goes to Portsmouth to-night. Lady Hamilton was in tears all day yesterday, could not eat, and hardly drink, and near swooning, and all at table. It is a strange picture. She tells me nothing can be more pure and ardent than this flame." Lady Hamilton may have had the self-control of an actress, but clearly not the ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... Master Block overborne or worsted by any odds; and Fortune was kind to me, at least in this, that she let me not see the issue then, for a staff caught me so round a knock on the head as made the diamond drop out of my hand, and laid me swooning on the floor. ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... cried. "For the last six years half the men in Paris have been swooning at the feet of that negress! I believe that they sneer at us. Look at ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... and resuming dove shape flew off and went their way. But as he saw them disappearing from sight, his reason well nigh fled with them, and he gave a great cry and fell down in a fainting fit and lay a-swooning all that day. While he was in this case Shaykh Nasr returned from the Parliament of the Fowls and sought for Janshah, that he might send him with them to his native land, but found him not and knew that he had entered the forbidden room. Now he had already said to the birds, 'With me is ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... that the Duke would carry great weight with him;—that the Duke might induce him to utter the fatal word though she, were she to demand it now, might fail? As she thought of it all she affected to swoon, and almost herself believed that she was swooning. She was conscious but hardly more than conscious that he was kissing her;—and yet her brain was at work. She felt that he would be startled, repelled, perhaps disgusted were she absolutely to demand more from him now. "Oh, Rufford;—oh, ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... a difficulty in describing the scene that followed. The meeting of Seguin with his wife and daughter; my own short embrace and hurried kiss; the sobs and swooning of my betrothed; the mother's recognition of her long-lost child; the anguish that ensued as her yearning heart made its appeals in vain; the half-indignant, half-pitying looks of the hunters; the triumphant gestures and ejaculations of the Indians: all formed points in a picture ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... there follow spasmodic contractions of the muscles, trembling in all the limbs, a total numbness in the feet and hands, partial paralysis of the optic and auditory nerves. I can no longer see, I can hardly hear: vertigo ... almost swooning...." Such was the effect of ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... and all others grew dim, for I was near swooning, and when the door fell with a mighty crash near me, it might have been the fall of a rose leaf on velvet, and I had small heed of the fierce faces which bent over me, yet the hands extended toward my wounds were tender enough. ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... breathes, be it man or brute, can hear unmoved,—the long, loud, stinging whirr, as the huge, thick-bodied reptile shook his many-jointed rattle and flung his jaw back for the fatal stroke. His eyes were drawn as with magnets toward the circles of flame. His ears rung as in the overture to the swooning dream of chloroform. Nature was before man with her anesthetics: the cat's first shake stupefies the mouse; the lion's first shake deadens the man's fear and feeling; and the crotalus paralyzes before he ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... passed. Another was coming fast. The Indians were gathering to take advantage of the brief interval. The agony which had come from rough motion was keeping Smith from swooning now. He saw his companions preparing to stand off the assault. Amos Chapman was holding himself upright by bracing his body against the side of the wallow. Private ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... Pepperill had been ordered to help. He and Carl carried the man whose face Cudjo had slashed. This was the only rebel who had fought obstinately: he had not given up until an arm was broken, and he was blinded by his own blood. Penn and Devitt brought up the rear with the swooning soldier. When half way over they were fired upon by the rebels rallying to the edge of the cliff. Grudd and his men responded sharply, covering their retreat. Penn felt a bullet graze his shoulder. It made but a slight flesh wound there; but, passing down, it entered the heart ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... amazed supporter of Miss Tox's swooning form, who, coming straight upstairs, with a polite inquiry touching Miss Tox's health (in exact pursuance of the Major's malicious instructions), had accidentally arrived in the very nick of time to catch the delicate burden ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... casement shone the gleams Of burning orbs; and modestly she hid Her brow and bosom with her dusky hair. When lo! the bold intruder lurking there Leaped through the fragile lattice, all unbid, And half unveiled her. Then the swooning Night Fell pale and dead, while yet her soul was white Before that lawless Ravisher, ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... deathly pallor spread over Christine's face, dark rings formed round her eyes, she staggered and seemed on the point of swooning. Raoul darted forward, with arms outstretched, but Christine had overcome her passing faintness and said, ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... the weight of an ounce which I picked up and swallowed from the treasury of Kisra Anushirwan the King." But when the Birder heard the Birdie's words he scattered dust upon his head and buffeted his face and plucked out his beard and rent his raiment, and at last slipped down a swooning to the ground. And presently recovering his senses he looked towards his late captive and cried, "O Father of Flight, O thou The Wind hight say me is there any return for thee me-wards, where thou shalt ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... At this News Rinaldo fainted again; and his Servants call'd his Father home, and told him in what Condition they had brought home their Master, recounting to him all that was past. He hasten'd to Rinaldo, whom he found just recover'd of his Swooning; who, putting his Hand out to his Father, all cold and trembling, cry'd, 'Well, Sir, now you are satisfied, since you have seen Atlante married to Count Vernole, I hope now you will give your unfortunate Son leave to die; as you wish'd he should, rather than give ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... I came back I saw there was more company in the room; for Will had come in, and with him a man and woman; but I did not note them much, for it seemed to me that Andrew was swooning, his eyes being closed. But Harry took the broth from me and began to feed Andrew with it; and at the warm scent of the food he revived a little. It charmed me to see the tender skill which my Harry showed in his ministerings. As I stood looking on, the woman came up to me, and ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... new ethereal music; and yet, although their verbal harmony is such, they are never devoid of definite significance for those who understand. Shelley scorned the aesthetics of a school which finds "sense swooning into nonsense" admirable. And if a critic is so dull as to ask what "Life of Life! thy lips enkindle" means, or to whom it is addressed, none can help him any more than one can help a man whose sense of hearing is too gross for the tenuity of a bat's cry. A voice in the air thus sings the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... apparel and carriage of Professors almost as much as among any in the land. I have seen church members so decked and bedaubed with their fangles and toys that when they have been at worship I have wondered with what faces such painted persons could sit in the place where they were without swooning. I once talked with a maid, by way of reproof for her fond and gaudy garment; she told me the tailor would make it so. Poor proud girl, she gave orders to the ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... has passed away, Eternity's undialled course begun; There is a trackless ocean round this life Whose tide is tremulous with unseen gales, And storms that lash it off to fury—shades Of deep chaotic darkness ever hang Above it, like the thunder crags of heaven, And sounds, as of the swooning of a blast Through time-worn caverns, flap their heavy wings On the white foam crest of the surging waves. O man! that standest on the pinnacle Of life's abysmal heights with failing heart And reeling brain, gaze on that troubled gulf— It is thy pathway to the Better-Land, ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... walketh in a show, Sees before him, to and fro, Shadow and illusion go; All things flow and fluctuate, Now contract and now dilate. In the welter of this sea, Nothing stable is but Thee; In this whirl of swooning trance, Thou alone art permanence; All without Thee only seems, All beside is choice of dreams. Never yet in darkest mood Doubted I that Thou wast good, Nor mistook my will for fate, Pain of sin for heavenly hate,— Never dreamed the gates of pearl Rise from out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... is called a Spirit. This idea of the spirit and the soul has come from the fact that spirit and wind in some languages are the same word; also, that when a man dies, he is said to give up the ghost or spirit; also, that life returns, after suffocation or swooning, when the spirit or breath of the lungs comes back. Because in these cases nothing but the breath or air is perceived, it is concluded from the eye and bodily sense that the spirit and soul of man after death is not the man. From this corporeal conclusion about the spirit and soul, various hypotheses ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... go up. Rheou meets them and leads them away. Satni enters with some men bearing Pakh, who is wounded. Kirjipa almost swooning follows, supported by some women who lead her into the house. The Exorcist, who with his two assistants follows Pakh, takes some clay from a coffer carried by one of his men, shapes it into a ball, and ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... girl's body which acted, since at the first instant of the whirlwind which had broken over her, her mind had been shocked into a swooning paralysis. Only her strong, sound body, hardened by work, fortified by outdoor exercise, was ready in its every fiber for this moment. Her body bent suddenly like a spring of fine steel, its strength momentarily ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... lured them on to where twelve houses lay spread about in smoking chaos, a plateau of blazing and noisome havoc. Somewhere a gas-main burst with a roar and drove the crowd back with its choking fumes as no human hands could have done. Women frankly hysterical or swooning were roughly thrust aside. Children shrieking in uncomprehending panic were swept along with the crowd or trodden upon. Lumbering men ran and shouted and cursed and shook hairy fists at the long blot on the clouds. Some of the men leaped over iron palings ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... mine, Bids to the front in radiant defile A trooping host whose pomps incarnadine The faded trophies of the dying day, And, lest I fail before so brave array, She decks the quiet clouds where fancies dwell With sweet translucent gleam and melting hue To woo my swooning sense with softer spell Of blissful pink ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... the Wanderer was a grim and silent figure, misty and unreal when compared with those material, emotion-torn beings of the rooftop. The woman, swooning, had wilted over the rim of the bowl, and the two boys with their strange amphibious pet splashed out from the pool and came running to ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... fainter. She was standing opposite to Perenna, close up against him. Pale and swooning, she ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... of the friction of the bench which were common to all, and which each must endure as best he could. With the slave whose disease conquered him or who, reaching the limit of his endurance, permitted himself to swoon, the boat-swains had a short way. The diseased were flung overboard; the swooning were dragged out upon the gangway or bridge and flogged there to revive them; if they did not revive they were flogged on until they were a horrid bleeding pulp, which was then heaved into ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... manly grief appears; Silent he wept, ashamed to show his tears. Emilia shrieked but once; and then, opprest With sorrow, sunk upon her lover's breast: Till Theseus in his arms conveyed with care Far from so sad a sight the swooning fair. 'Twere loss of time her sorrow to relate; Ill bears the sex a youthful lover's fate, When just approaching to the nuptial state: But, like a low-hung cloud, it rains so fast, That all at ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... her knees sinking under her at every step. The two police-officers had each to lend an arm to support her, and mechanically she accepted their assistance. Then the vociferations and hootings burst forth with redoubled fury. Half-swooning between the two men, the hapless creature seemed to drain the cup of bitterness ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... mean courage in the first place, and secondly the breath of life, the presence or absence of which is the most obvious distinction between the animate and the inanimate, the "ghost" which a man "gives up" at death. But it may also quit the body temporarily, which explains the phenomenon of swooning ([Greek: lipopsychia]). It seemed natural to suppose it was also the thing that can roam at large when the body is asleep, and even appear to another sleeping person in his dream. Moreover, since we can dream ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... some young hero from his fate, I wish you to clearly understand that only my sense of duty as a public man would induce me to do any such thing." At this he turned his eyes dreadfully upon her graceful form still sidling towards him, and, conscious again of that delightful scent, felt a swooning sensation which made him lean against a lamp-post. "Spare me, madam," he said in a faint voice, "for my country's sake I am ready to do anything, but I must tell you that I worship another of your sex from afar, and if you are a woman you will not seek to make ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... given up their finest peaches and nectarines and their earliest grapes to do honour to the occasion. Miss Rylance contemplated the table decorations with mute scorn, which she hardly cared to disguise. No Venetian wine-flasks, no languorous lilies swooning in Salviati goblets, no pottery of the new green and yellow school, but massive silver, and heavy diamond-cut glass—gaudy Staffordshire china of 'too utterly quite' the worst period of ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... dimmed with bleeding, so that he knew not friend from foe; and soon, in the surge of battle, he mistook his swooning comrade for a Moslem, and dealt a fierce blow on Roland's golden crest. The stroke did naught but rouse his unconscious friend, for the arm of the dying Oliver ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... stricken with sudden horror, his blue eyes staring, his gaunt, pinched features ghastly white, and then Sergeant Haney and another trooper sprang from their horses and ran to his side. Weak, worn, starved, he had quailed at the dreadful sight, and was toppling head-foremost to the ground, swooning away. ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... irresistible, and drove Browning and his household to seek elsewhere for fresh interests or for coolness and repose. In 1848, beguiled by the guide-book, they visited Fano to find it quivering with heat, "the very air swooning in the sun." Their reward at Fano was that picture by Guercino of the guardian angel teaching a child to pray, the thought of which ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the hidden hoard which he sought to open being not to be opened save by means of Alaeddin. So noting this attempt to run away, the Magician arose and raising his hand smote Alaeddin on the head a buffet so sore that well nigh his back-teeth were knocked out, and he fell swooning to the ground. But after a time he revived by the magic of the Magician, and cried, weeping the while, "O my uncle, what have I done that deserveth from thee such a blow as this?" Hereat the Maghrabi fell to soothing him, and said, "O my son, 'tis my intent to make thee a man; ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Madame Goesler such a blow that for a few minutes it altogether knocked her down. After reading it once she hardly knew what it contained beyond a statement that Phineas Finn was in Newgate. She sat for a while with it in her hands, almost swooning; and then with an effort she recovered herself, and read the letter again. Mr. Bonteen murdered, and Phineas Finn,—who had dined with her only yesterday evening, with whom she had been talking of ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... enjoyed a great deal in spite of drawbacks. Murray, the traitor, sent us to Fano as a 'delightful summer residence for an English family,' and we found it uninhabitable from the heat, vegetation scorched with paleness, the very air swooning in the sun, and the gloomy looks of the inhabitants sufficiently corroborative of their words, that no drop of rain or dew ever falls there during the summer. A 'circulating library' 'which doesn't give out books,' and 'a refined and intellectual Italian society' (I quote Murray for that ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... cursed with a conscience, had risen that morning in a mood for carousal; at this hour of noon she had reached the point of ecstatic stupor. No state of trance was ever so exquisite. The air was swooning, but how delicate its gasps, as if it fell away into calm! How adorably blue the sky in its debauch of sun-lit ether! The sea, too, although it reeled slightly, unsteadily rising only to fall away, what a radiance of color it maintained! Here in the garden ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... not loudly—I think I was very near to swooning. The hands were withdrawn into the shadow, and my uncle awoke and sat up. He asked, in a low voice, if I were there, and ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... man came to himself and shrieked a mighty loud shriek more violent than the first and put forth his hand to his garment and rent it in rags and fell swooning a second time, when his sides were bared more fully than before until the whole of his back appeared and Al-Rashid was straitened thereby as to his breast and his patience made protest, and he cried, "O Ja'afar, there ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... through the solitary prison walls. Did the queen still live? Or had the king in his wrath murdered her on that very night when Henry was carried to the Tower, and his last look beheld his beloved lying at her husband's feet, swooning and rigid. ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... Lorenzo and Isabella have no individuality apart from their love; passion has absorbed character. The tale is not evolved firmly and continuously, but with lyrical outbursts, a poignancy of sympathy at the points of highest tragic tensity and a swooning sensibility all through, that sometimes breaks into weakness. There can be no question, however, which poem is the more felt; no question, either, as to which method is superior—at least as between these two artists, and as applied to subjects ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... embraced her, cried with her, philosopher that he was; and the woman, after swooning, went off to console herself with the help of one of the dandies of ...
— Romans — Volume 3: Micromegas • Voltaire
... inscription!" replied Mrs. Gordon, faintly, for she seemed very deeply moved, and on the point of swooning. "Bring me a glass ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... 280 A ram goes bleating: Winder of the horn, When snouted wild-boars routing tender corn Anger our huntsman: Breather round our farms, To keep off mildews, and all weather harms: Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, That come a swooning over hollow grounds, And wither drearily on barren moors: Dread opener of the mysterious doors Leading to universal knowledge—see, Great son of Dryope, 290 The many that are come to pay their vows With leaves ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... He was crying in her ears, passionately, triumphantly, "Rosalie! Rosalie!" She was in his arms. Those long, strong arms of his were round her; and she was caught against his heart, her face upturned to his, his face against her own; and she was swooning, falling through incredible spaces, drowning in incredible seas, sinking through incredible blackness; and in her ears his voice, coming to her in her extremity like the beat of a wing in the night, like the first pulsing roll of music ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... crying, "Woe! Woe!" she vanished over the side of the vessel. Her last words were, "Remain true! Woe! Woe!" Huldbrand lay swooning on the deck, and little waves seemed to be sobbing on the surface of the Danube, "Woe! Woe! ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
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