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More "Verge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... adhered to the stone. This hall, dignified, grand, but happy, was open on all sides to the sun and air. From it I could see tamarisk- and acacia-trees, and far-off shadowy mountains beyond the eastern verge of the Nile. And the trees were still as carven things in an atmosphere that was a miracle of clearness and of purity. Behind me, and near, the hard Libyan mountains gleamed in the sun. Somewhere a boy was singing; and suddenly his singing died away. And I thought of the "Lay of the Harper" ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... reflect upon its origin, to investigate its source. He had to steel his nerves to face it because he dared not do otherwise. But its sudden effect on the nerve centres of his brain, previously strained almost to the breaking point, must have brought him to the verge of ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... the conversation, very often by reason of his defective hearing and his appalling habit of falsehood, bringing his companions to the verge of hysterics. ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... institutions, she would then possess a graded set of organisations for dealing with the young, which would cover the whole period of youthful life. The Truant School would catch the child on the first symptoms of waywardness, the Industrial School would arrest him standing on the verge of crime, the Reformatory School would dual with actual offenders against the law, and the Penal Reformatory would grapple with habitual offenders under the ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... I shall never forget the sight that met my gaze. I was just on the northern verge of the Great Kaap Basin. It is in extent probably thirty miles long by twenty wide, and is shaped somewhat like a pear the larger end being scooped out of the mighty mass of the Drakensberg. At the narrow end the hills dwindled somewhat, but straight across the widest ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... ground, with the motto TANDEM TRIUMPHANS. The few cavalry being chiefly Lowland gentry, with their domestic servants and retainers, formed the advanced guard of the army; and their standards, of which they had rather too many in respect of their numbers, were seen waving upon the extreme verge of the horizon. Many horsemen of this body, among whom Waverley accidentally remarked Balmawhapple, and his lieutenant, Jinker (which last, however, had been reduced, with several others, by the advice of the Baron of Bradwardine, to the situation of what he called reformed officers, or reformadoes), ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... asked him how he was. And he answered her, in the habit of more than thirty years: 'Well, I don't think I'm any the worse, dear.' But he was frightened of her, underneath this safeguard of habit, frightened almost to the verge ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... dying hours! Although we can merit nothing at the hand of God, yet I have a notion, that we cannot deserve more of one another, and in some sense, for that reason, of him, than in our charities on so trying an exigence! When the poor soul stands shivering, as it were, on the verge of death, and has nothing strong, but its fears and doubts; then a little balm poured into the wounds of the mind, a little comforting advice to rely on God's mercies, from a good person, how consolatory must it be! And how, like morning mists before the sun, must all diffidences and gloomy ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... available wealth. What had been possible during the decade preceding the war,—had the nation so willed,—was to place the navy on such a footing, in numbers and constitution, as would have made persistence in the course Great Britain was following impolitic to the verge of madness, because it would add to her war embarrassments the activity of an imposing maritime enemy, at the threshold of her most valuable markets,—the West Indies,—three thousand miles away from her ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... Torvested, and the attempts of his mother-in-law to convert him, are described, not with the merely superficial drollery to which the subject invites, but with a sweet and delicate humor, which trembles on the verge ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... little balcony at his command, and as he noiselessly stepped out upon it, between three and four o'clock, he felt himself the solitary comrade of the mist-veiled lake, of those high, rosy mountains on the eastern verge, the first throne and harbor of the light—of the lower forest-covered hills that "took the morning," one by one, in a glorious and golden succession. All was fresh, austere, and vast—the spaces of the lake, the distant hollows of high glaciers filled with purple shadow, the ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... certain number of eggs, five or six for instance, of which the lower ones are more or less developed, the middle ones half-way towards maturity, and the upper ones very rudimentary. Every stage of evolution is here represented, distributed regularly from bottom to top, from the verge of maturity to the vague outlines of the embryo. The sheath clasps its string of ovules so closely that any inversion of the order is impossible. Besides, an inversion would result in a gross absurdity: the replacing of a riper egg by another in ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... friend's new air of cold superiority, Zoie was now on the verge of tears. "Somebody must have a new baby," she faltered. "Somebody ALWAYS has a ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo
... palme, or suture de la verge of the French, is the name given to those examples of single cutaneous envelope for both the testicles and penis; the penis is adherent to the scrotum by its inferior face; the glans only is free and erection is impossible. Chretien cites an instance in ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... mystery was solved by the girls, and other members of the company—a mystery that involved the happiness of the old couple who owned Oak Farm, but were on the verge of ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... lend themselves to sound slumber. All night the officers of the Wolverine slept on the verge of waking, but it was not until dawn that the cry of "Sail-ho!" sent them all hurrying to their clothes. Ordinarily officers of the U.S. Navy do not scuttle on deck like a crowd of curious schoolgirls, ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Steve Gadd and Joe Gibbons told me the time they took you to Washington County to the turkey shoot, that they'd all been down sick if it hadn't been for you. They say it rained a cold rain and you all got wet. Uncle Jake is subject to the quinsy and he was on the verge of it. They tried the drug store and everywhere and they couldn't get nothing. Steve said you went to the drug store and got all they wanted, only you didn't ask for whiskey; you called it fermenting spirits. Steve said the druggist ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... memory of one of those men had always power to drive her to the verge of madness. He was a handsome, brown-haired man of powerful physique. A man whose gentle manner and swift, hot temper she abhorred, and the memory of whose influence upon her life had still power to grind to ashes every gentle feeling ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... with the impulsive and often irresistible longings for food delicacies which are apt to overcome children, and in girls often persist or revive through adolescence and even beyond. Such sudden fits of greediness belong to those kind of normal psychic manifestations which are on the verge of the abnormal into which they occasionally pass. They may occur, however, in healthy, well-bred, and well-behaved children who, under the stress of the sudden craving, will, without compunction and apparently without reflection, steal the food they long for or even steal from their parents the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... out from thy still hour With eyes that know and bear His fire; Till kindling on thy wonder's verge The transient days immortal merge In Him fulfilled as worlds expire In nestled ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... not answer. He could see that she was trembling violently and on the verge of an hysterical crisis. He rather hoped she would break down. It would seem more natural. Women were privileged to cry and scream, not that it was possible to imagine her screaming. He dragged forward a chair from the ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... to haggle!" Cappy wailed. He was almost on the verge of tears. "It's the basic principle of all trading. Why, I've made my everlasting fortune by haggling. Drat your picture, don't you know that the very pillars of financial ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... moment to buy up the outstanding stock. The finances of the town and its citizens were at the lowest ebb—on the verge of collapse, in fact, if something did not turn up. Furthermore—he imparted the information in a voice lowered to a confidential pitch—he had it from a reliable source that the bank itself had been caught in a pinch and had been obliged to transfer its stock ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... fantasia on the old theme of Cinderella, both succeeded in hitting Parisian taste. No less fortunate was 'Griselidis' (1901), a quasi-mediaeval musical comedy, founded upon the legend of Patient Grizel, and touching the verge of pantomime in the characters of a comic Devil and his shrewish spouse. Of Massenet's later works none has been more successful than 'Le Jongleur de Notre Dame' (1902), which, besides winning the favour of Paris, has ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... brought to a crisis on account of the pressure on the part of the French and Italian governments for the payment of the claims of their citizens. The republic was on the verge of dissolution when President Roosevelt intervened. European governments were satisfied, for it signified the payment of their claims. An agreement was signed by representatives of the government of Santo Domingo and of the ...
— History of the United States, Volume 6 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... of tenderness for so amiable a princess. The king's jealousy laid hold of the slightest circumstance; and finding no particular object on which it could fasten, it vented itself equally on every one that came within the verge ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... connivance of the indulgent, As we entreat thee to exempt us from exposure To the slight of the detractor or aspersion of the defamer: And we ask thy forgiveness Should our frailties betray us into ambiguities, As we ask thy forgiveness Should our steps advance to the verge of improprieties: And we beg thee freely to bestow Propitious succor to lead us aright, And a heart turning in unison with truth, And a language adorned with veracity, And style supported by conclusiveness, And accuracy ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... that she was on the verge of tears, and he kindly and quietly helped her to despatch her arrangements for Lance before any more was said; only as they turned to bid the tired boy goodnight, he said, 'Where does the uncle live? I shall telegraph to- morrow, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the pistol and stepped delicately to the verge of the mud, her hand firmly closed on the butt, her mouth and left ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... Constance in her usual manner,—"you have lived up there among the solitudes till you have got morbid ideas of life—which it makes me melancholy to observe. I am very much afraid they verge towards stagnation." ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... morrow, till her great Dread eyes 'gan tell of other gifts than those, And her advancing wings gloomed like a pall; Her speech foretelling joy became a dirge As piteous as pitiless; and all My company had passed beyond the verge And lost me ere Fate raised her blinding wings.... Hark! through the dusk a bird "at heaven's ...
— Songs, Sonnets & Miscellaneous Poems • Thomas Runciman
... them who have seen the sight, that "them Persian dancin' girls carry dancin' clear to the very verge of ondecency, and drop ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... letters which may want my immediate attention, and I can call at the telegraph office on my way. May I give you my company so far?' he asked. There was a touch of the lackey about Purvis, and his voice was humble sometimes to the verge of irritation. ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... and contempt, the daily jeers, and the cut direct from his schoolfellows? All was soon made plain. This boy's parents were old and very poor—so poor, helpless, and friendless that they were often brought to the verge of starvation. In those days, remember, there was not the same attention paid to the poor of all classes, nor loving provision made for their wants, as there is now. So the noble son—for truly noble he was—submitted cheerfully to every trouble ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... troubled stream, and had struggled through many windings and many difficulties, was reposing there, and gaining strength for its last great leap over the dark precipice. As Oriana and Mailah approached the verge of the scattered forest, and stood to gaze on the magnificent scene before them, they perceived the canoe descend a narrow rapid, and then take up a position below an elevated mass of rock, where the water was perfectly still, and where the fishermen could quietly pursue ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... easy-going editor, or one of that kind which allows a certain number of privileged writers to send in what they like. We are told in many places that he "greatly improved" his contributors' articles; and I should say that if there is one thing which drives a contributor to the verge of madness, it is to have his articles "greatly improved." A hint in the Noctes (and it may be observed that though the references to Lockhart in the Noctes are not very numerous, they are valuable, for Wilson's friendship seems to have been mixed with a small grain ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... had reached the other verge of the forest of Beaumanoir. A broad plain dotted with clumps of fair trees lay spread out in a royal domain, overlooked by a steep, wooded mountain. A silvery brook crossed by a rustic bridge ran ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... what is the matter with me. I feel always just on the verge of becoming an absurd old hypochondriac, and as if it only wanted a touch to send ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... that second day, the boy, worn to the verge of exhaustion, staggered into his mother's kitchen, and almost frightened Peggy to death ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... go on. Cora held her close and the thought came to her that Freda herself was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The girl had changed very much from the happy, laughing chum of a ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... civilization, to the bright and beautiful Athens,—Athens, whose schools drew to her bosom, and then sent back to the business of life, the youth of the Western world for a long thousand years. Seated on the verge of the continent, the city seemed hardly suited for the duties of a central metropolis of knowledge; yet what it lost in convenience of approach, it gained in its neighborhood to the traditions of the mysterious East, and in the loveliness of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... Gentleman first proposed and promoted the establishment of the town of Alexandria, and was its first inhabitant. He was consoled on the verge of life, with the reflection of having acted his part well, and of having reared and leaving to represent him a numerous and amiable family, in possession of as much happiness as generally falls to the lot of humanity. Thus he met the ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... modest attitude, at her little timid airs of a young girl on the verge of matrimony; he had imagined nothing like it in such a connection as this, nor ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... ruined. For the rest, the inspection was made in silence. On the way back they found Uli standing gloomily in the front shed and took him in with them; but he remained down-cast the whole evening—indeed on the verge of tears whenever any ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... eaten into individual character; whence the tendency to fly off at tangents. We see the same thing in any decadent people; by which I mean, any people at the end of one of its manvantaras, and on the verge of a pralaya. And remember that a pralaya, like a night's rest or the Devachanic sleep between two lives, is simply a means for restoring ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... tender is the Son of God to his afflicted members?"-(Saint's Privilege, vol. 1, p. 674). The text here quoted forms the foundation of Bunyan's admirable Advice to Sufferers, in which he delightfully dwells upon the topics which Evangelist addresses to the Pilgrims, when on the verge of bitter persecution-(ED). ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... they were in exact response to their own, leaving the unfortunate sufferers uncertain whether, in the darkening twilight and increasing storm, they had made the persons who apparently were traversing the verge of the precipice to bring them assistance, sensible of the place in which they had found refuge. At length their halloo was regularly and distinctly answered, and their courage confirmed, by the assurance that they were within hearing, if not within ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... dead and buried; and the disease went creeping about the streets and lanes for weeks after—here striking down a strong man in the full vigour of middle life—there shortening, apparently by but a few months, the span of some worn-out creature, already on the verge of the grave. The visitation had its wildly picturesque accompaniments. Pitch and tar were kept burning during the night in the openings of the infected lanes; and the unsteady light flickered with ghastly effect on house and wall, and tall chimney-top, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... haunted by the demon of unrest which rode him, begged food and a cup of milk at a farmhouse by the road, and started on again. All that day he walked, a mere machine dominated by a force which would drive it forward to the very verge of dissolution; and in the late evening he reached Cunetio. Here he did not know when he stopped, for he went to sleep on his feet, and woke and found himself on his back by the roadside, with the sun at high noon. Desperate for the time he had lost, he hastened on, and in an ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... of a convent bell varied the monotony of the scene, as it called the faithful to prayer. A sudden sound, as of many riders riding briskly, and a band of lances—the avant garde of a mighty army—drew rein at the verge of the yawning and smoking furnace which had been the castle. There they paused abruptly, and one who seemed almost overwhelmed by surprise and disappointment, gazed as if stupefied upon the ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... brought along as a kind of scattering lunch. C. was descried, at length, climbing the broad, rocky ridge, the eastern point of which we had doubled on our passage from Torbay. Making haste up the crags by a short cut, I joined him on the verge of the promontory pretty well heated and out of breath. The effort was richly rewarded. The mist was dispersing in the sunny air around us; the ocean was clearing off; the surge was breaking with a pleasant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... threw them on the ground. The sight of our Blessed Lord at this moment was, indeed, calculated to move the hardest heart to compassion; he stood or rather bent over the cross, being scarcely able to support himself; his heavenly countenance was pale and was as that of a person on the verge of death, although wounds and blood disfigured it to a frightful degree; but the hearts of these cruel men were, alas! harder than iron itself, and far from showing the slightest commiseration, they threw him brutally down, exclaiming in a jeering ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... any system of religion: but now here, now there, in his books, one comes upon the pure gold of religion, enshrined in exquisite jewelries of diction, which glimmer on (if I may say so) to the utmost verge of emotion, and more successfully than any formal harangue, work out their intended function. Such works as Unto this Last and Munera Pulveris, however keen the mental antagonism they may initially ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... they were, standing together on the very verge of the mound, beyond the firs, some ten yards in front of the last comers, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... French theorists and economists giving the world new ideas as to the function of the State; enlightened despots on the thrones of Prussia, Austria, Spain, and Russia; and the hatreds of the hundred years of religious warfare dying out; the world seemed to many, about 1775, as on the verge of some great and far-reaching change in methods of living and in government, and about ready to enter a new era and make rapid advances in nearly all lines of human activity. The change came, but not in ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... rocks, and torn by the brambles. Finally they reached the ranch at the head of the canyons and were found by a half-breed Indian, who cared for them. Their underwear had been made into bindings for their lacerated feet; they were nearly starved, and on the verge of mental collapse. After two weeks' treatment in the hospital at Green River City they were partially restored to health. Quite likely they spent many of the long hours of their convalescence on the river bank, or on the little island, watching ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... he battled fiercely with the seeming destroyer, while her suffering drove them all to the verge of despair. ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... in this way, they got under cover of a little clump near the water's edge, and near enough to the gigantic game. Upon their hands and knees they now approached the verge of the underwood; and, having parted the leaves, looked through. The mighty quadruped was right under their eyes, within twenty ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... to work. Hear my opinion. On the lake's left bank, As we sail hence to Brunnen, right against The Mytenstein, deep-hidden in the wood A meadow lies, by shepherds called the Rootli, Because the wood has been uprooted there. 'Tis where our Canton boundaries verge on yours;— ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... did not beam. It never had done so, but it brightened with a grin as he slowly and cautiously backed out of the shrubs on to the path, stepped across on to the grassy verge, and set off at a trot in true sailor fashion up the garden toward the ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... forgot to do anything about our trunks, which contained our evening apparel. During the run to the house we were both on the verge of hysteria owing to the speed at which we were driven—seventy miles an hour at the least. And at one corner we were thrown forward, clear of the seats and against the partition, by an unexpected ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... rather you didn't ask questions about the Bishop," his mother replied, and discerning that she was on the verge of one of those headaches that while they lasted obliterated the world for Mark, he was silent. Later in the afternoon Mr. Astill, the Vicar, came round to see the Missioner and they had a long talk together, the murmur of which now softer now louder was audible in Mark's ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... that," she exclaimed. "Forgive me, but you made me think—do you remember that night at Enton, when Lord Arranmore spoke of his work amongst the poor, how the hopelessness of it began to haunt him and weigh upon him till he reached the verge of madness. You had something of ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... suffered in his general character or reputation for an unconsidered trifle like this, nor otherwise to have declined in the favour of his chief, beyond the necessity of transporting himself to a situation somewhat nearer the verge of Cape Wrath than the bosom of the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... thoughts become bright like yon edging of Pines On the steep's lofty verge—how it blackened the air! But touched from behind by the sun, it now shines With threads that seem part ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... to her disconnected, incoherent words, drawing but one conclusion from them—"the lover who had cast her off was pursuing the child, as her relentless foe, to the very verge of ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... presence. After a few moments of silence, for after my exclamatory utterance of his name, neither of us had spoken, he turned his eyes, in which the light of disease painfully burned, and said,—'You do well not to reproach me; the time for that is past, for I am, as you may see, on the verge of the grave. I have striven with disease, that I might reach this place, and if possible, obtain your forgiveness 'ere my eyes shall close in death. I know I have darkened a life, which, but for me, might have been bright and joyous. It is too much for me to ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... his recollection, but on mention of the Portugal piece of gold, the whole returned upon his memory; he made an immediate search for the papers, and recovered them; so that Mr. R——d carried to Edinburgh the documents necessary to gain the cause which he was on the verge of losing. The author has often heard this story told by persons who had the best access to know the facts, who were not likely themselves to be deceived, and were certainly incapable of deception. He cannot therefore refuse to give it credit, however ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various
... troubled in a way by doubt and longing, but these had made no deeper impression than could be traced in a certain open wistfulness of glance and speech. The mouth had the expression at times, in talking and in repose, of one who might be upon the verge of tears. It was not that grief was thus ever present. The pronunciation of certain syllables gave to her lips this peculiarity of formation—a formation as suggestive and moving as ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... subtle pitch can be boiled down to, "Step right up folks and put a donation in the pot. I'm just on the verge of learning the spaceman's secrets and with a little money to carry out my work I'll give you ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... surround it on every side. It is, above all, rich in public walks and promenades, one of these, the Promenade Chamart—a corruption of Champ de Mars—possessing some of the finest plane trees in Europe—a gigantic bit of forest on the verge of this city—of wonderful beauty and stateliness. These veteran trees vary in height from thirty to thirty-five yards. The Promenade Micaud, so called after its originator, Mayor of Besancon, in 1842, winds along the river-side, and affords lovely views at every turn. Then there are ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... she revisited all these hallowed spots. She thrilled on the very verge of the river and quivered amid the waving corn. She scaled the sentinel hickory and turned her eyes upon the Southern city. It was nearly a week since she had been allowed to wander so far afield, and Camelot seemed more than ever wonderful ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... and Hydra of the lake Of Lerna, and the twi-form prancing throng Of Centaurs,—insolent, unsociable, Lawless, ungovernable:—the tusked pest Of Erymanthine glades; then underground Pluto's three-headed cur—a perilous fear, Born from the monster-worm; and, on the verge Of Earth, the dragon, guarding fruits of gold. These toils and others countless I have tried, And none hath triumphed o'er me. But to-day, Jointless and riven to tatters, I am wrecked Thus utterly by imperceptible woe; I, proudly named Alcmena's child, and His Who reigns ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... to me again: but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood: Who, once a day with his embossed froth ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... the fine gray sand of the verge to shake himself vigorously. Then the wolverine came upslope at a clumsy gallop to Shann. With an unknown feeling swelling inside him, the Terran went down on both knees, burying both hands in the coarse brown fur, warming to the uproarious welcome ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... to the period whereabout the whole mystery of the Red Triangle began to be cleared up if I say that at the time of Plummer's visit this country was on the very verge of war with a great European State. It is a State with which the present relations of England are of the friendliest description, and, since the dreaded collision was happily averted, there is no need to particularise in the matter ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... magnificent vantage-ground lies the valley of the Rio Las Animas Perdidas. On the other verge of the great depression rise the peerless, everlastingly snow-wreathed Spanish Peaks,[75] whose giant summits are grim sentinels that for untold ages have witnessed hundreds of sanguinary conflicts between the wily nomads of the vast plains watered ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... I had brought these people step by step to the verge of starvation. I had laid waste alike their happiness and their prospects in life. The least amends I could make was to see that at all events they did not want for the necessities ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... and not a word to say, By silence overborne, until at last The young man breathed, "Look how the end of day Falls heavily, as though the earth were cast Into a shapeless soundless pit, where ray Of heavenly light never the verge has past. Yet will the late moon's light anon shine here, And then gray light, and then the ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... now flat and straight, and putting his horse into a trot Scarlett covered the ground rapidly. After some ten miles of riding, he came to a ford where the track crossed the river, and entered rougher country. As he drew rein at the verge of the water to let his horse drink, he noticed that the heavens had suddenly become dark. Looking at the strip of sky revealed by the treeless stretch above the waters, he saw a phenomenon in the upper air. Across ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... thirsted to kill him for his treachery. It was only by his bold front and constant watchfulness that he kept the dusky demons at a distance. Some of them were seen when the three ventured out, and though the pirates dared not attack them in open daylight, they were on the verge of doing so more than once. But their fury was directed principally against Captain Fred Sanders, and there can be no doubt the youth spoke the truth when he declared that if he attempted to stay on land until morning, he would not live ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... dozen times did he softly turn the handle of some bedroom door, which resembled his own, when a gruff cry from within of "Who the devil's that?" or "What do want here?" caused him to steal away on tiptoe, with a perfectly marvellous celerity. He was reduced to the verge of despair, when an open door attracted his attention. He peeped in—right at last. There were the two beds, whose situation he perfectly remembered, and the fire still burning. His candle, not a long one when he first received it, ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... above half way up the lake, and the young gentleman was pointing to his attendants the spot where their intended road turned northwards, and, leaving the verge of the loch, ascended a ravine to the right hand, when they discovered a single horseman coming down the shore, as if to meet them. The gleam of the sunbeams upon his head-piece and corslet showed that he was in armour, and the purpose of the other travellers required that he ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... (intended) ends of his measures. That king of infirm soul, who, yielding to the influence of wrath and malice, does not love and honour those amongst his kinsmen that are possessed of good qualities, is said to live on the very verge of destruction. That king, who attaches to himself accomplished persons by doing good to them even though he may not like them at heart, succeeds in enjoying fame for ever. Thou shouldst never impose taxes ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... on being on the verge of success, for after the explanation I had had with the aunt, and having, as I thought, a friend in her, I did not doubt that I ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... cruel, and when they get a victim he is tortured with all the horrible rites of the true savage. They know that the moment they are caught that is the end for them, so that they are reckless to the verge of insanity. ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... other sex and fell out with his dearest and truest friends. A fifth showed signs of mental aberration and was brought into Court upon charges of discreditable conduct. A sixth shot himself to escape the consequences of criminality, on the verge of detection! And so we might go on and on. All these were apparently sincere searchers after truth, and passed in the world for respectable persons. Externally, they were fairly eligible as candidates for Chelaship, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... 'Neath the heavens arching their heaven; o'er-hazing the eye of the soul. Then the vision is pure no longer; refracted above us arise The phantasmal figures of passion; earth's mirage exhaled to the skies. And they go as the castled clouds o'er the verge when the tempest is laid, Towering Ambition, and Glory, and Self as Duty array'd:— Idols no less than that idol whom lustful Ammon of yore With the death-scream of children, a furnace of blood, was fain to adore! So these, in the shrine ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... enjoyment of sensuous harmonies for their own sake, are lacking or subordinate. Glory and luxury are too often mere masks of ambition and appetite, and at best counterfeits of beauty. Nevertheless, the luxurious developments of ambition and appetite are ever on the verge of tending toward the aesthetic. For when ambition has no longer to struggle against the world and is satisfied, the imagination that served it may become free; and when appetite is cloyed, the instrumentalities ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... long and delightful experience, that I can never love any body better than my brothers. I have no expectation of ever finding their equal in worth and attraction, therefore—do not be alarmed; I am not on the verge of a vow of celibacy, nor have I the slightest intention of adding any rash resolutions to the ghosts of those that have been frightened to death by the terrors of maiden life; but therefore—I shall never change my condition until I change ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... savages closed round them. All was useless; not an enemy could they shoot, while the savages thrust them forward with wild yells to the very verge of a precipice five hundred feet high. Over it they were driven, hurled to destruction by the mass of Latookas pressing onward. A few fought to the last; but all were at length forced over the edge of the cliff, and met the just reward of their atrocities. No quarter had been given, and upwards ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... movement, the awe of Austria's military power hushed the rising tempest. A few weeks more revealed to an astonished world the secret that the Austrian State, so great and so formidable in the eyes of friend and foe, was itself on the verge of dissolution. ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... like living statues. In its pages you find the blood and flame, the ferocity and self-sacrifice of the French Revolution. In the bosom of the Vengeance is the heart of the horror. In 105, North Tower, sits one whom sorrow drove beyond the verge, rescued from death by insanity, and we see the spirit of Dr. Manette tremblingly cross the great gulf that lies between the night of dreams and the blessed day, where things are as they seem, as a tress ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... came up to the port of Algiers, June 12, 1830, the unity between the soldiers and their master, Hussein Pacha, was tottering on the verge of dissolution; a plot against his life had just been discovered, he had punished the ringleaders with death, and many who had been concerned in the conspiracy felt that there was no safety for them with him. Beaten constantly in every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... had made him change—what do you mean?" she pressed, feeling herself on the verge of an explanation, but determined not to ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... into Cheshire; his approach had relieved Chester; he had then turned eastwards into Staffordshire, had crossed that county, entered Leicestershire, and (May 30) taken the town of Leicester by storm. He was thus on the very verge of the Parliament's own faithful Association of the Eastern Counties, and might be expected to break into that Association. Immediately, therefore, the plans of the Parliament were changed. On the very day on which the news ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... Ports. But Earl Warenne, in Rochester castle, blocked the passage of the Dover road over the Medway. Accordingly Montfort marched with a large following of Londoners to Rochester, captured the town, and assaulted the castle with such energy that it was on the verge of surrendering. The news of Warenne's peril reached Henry in the midlands. In five days the royalists made their way from Nottingham to Rochester, a distance of over 160 miles. On their approach ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... dim verge of the known world there were other perils than those of the waves. The rocks and shores of those sequestered seas had, so thought the voyagers, other tenants than the seal, the walrus, and the screaming sea-fowl, the bears which stole away their fish before their eyes, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... drawing out a handkerchief, and wiping the moisture from his beard and long grey hair as he stood on the verge of the rug, with his eyes ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... wish to bring one collar into the bosom of this family. I have in this suit-case one collar. I never travel without one extra collar. It is the two-for-a-quarter kind, with a name like a sleeping car, and it has been laundered twice, which brings it to the verge of ruin. How much do I have to pay on ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... the equivalent of thirteen years. O represser of foes, this is the time to slay Duryodhana with his adherents. Else, O king, he will beforehand bring the whole earth obedient to his will. O foremost of monarchs, all this is the result of thy addiction to gambling. We are on the verge of destruction already, in consequence of thy promise of living one year undiscovered. I do not find the country where, if we live, the wicked-minded Suyodhana may not be able to trace us by his spies. And finding us out, that wretch will again deceitfully send us into such ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... to argue with unexpected if sophistic skill. Her tears were now dry, her eyes very bright beneath the darkness; she talked and talked with feverish volubility, and her voice faded into a long-drawn murmur as Will's hearing weakened on the verge of unconsciousness. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... by the announcement that "God assures me there is mercy for his soul." And it is at once pathetic and impressive to read of the consolation which this assurance gave to the chivalrous Kirkaldy on the verge of the scaffold; and the awe-inspiring spectacle presented to the believers, who after his execution saw his body slowly turn and hang against the western sun, as it poured over the Churchyard of St. Giles's, "west, about off the northward neuk of the steeple." ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... mother! ) but now, from the interior of that dark niche which has been already mentioned as forming a part of the Old Republican prison, and as fronting the lattice of the Marchesa, a figure muffled in a cloak, stepped out within reach of the light, and, pausing a moment upon the verge of the giddy descent, plunged headlong into the canal. As, in an instant afterwards, he stood with the still living and breathing child within his grasp, upon the marble flagstones by the side of the Marchesa, his cloak, heavy with the drenching water, became unfastened, and, falling in folds ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and insipid. The simple way to fatten ducks is to let them have as much, substantial food as they will eat, bruised oats and pea-meal being the standard fattening food for them. No cramming is required, as with the turkey and some other poultry: they will cram themselves to the very verge of suffocation. At the same time, plenty of exercise and clean water should ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... dancing billows dip, Far off to Ocean's misty verge, Ploughs Morning, like a full-sailed ship, The Orient's cloudy surge. With spray of scarlet fire, before The ruffled gold that round her dies, She sails above the sleeping shore, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... foreign alliance against us. So much for our domestic—now for our foreign condition and prospects. He would see Europe exhibiting serious symptoms of distrust and hostility: France, irritated and trifled with, on the verge of actual war with us: our criminally neglected differences with America, fast ripening into the fatal bloom of war: the very existence of the Canadas at stake. In India, the tenure by which we hold it in the very act of being loosened; our troops shedding their blood in vain, in the prosecution ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... miser once who was on the verge of suicide by the side of a river. A little girl came to him saying: "Please sir, my mother is sick and hungry. Please give me something so I can get her something to eat." The man said within himself: "I will do this for the child before I die." He went to a bakershop ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... succeeded in escaping accidents I cannot explain. Providence seemed to watch over both pursuers and pursued. We were always on the verge of a collision with somebody or something. Cottages, carts, pedestrians, cyclists, seemed to be flying by in a never-ending procession. ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... and all are of vital, human interest, and are extremely attractive on account of their importance in the civilization of today. Mighty, sublime, wonderful, as have been the achievements of past science, as yet we are but on the verge of the continents of discovery. Where is the wizard who can tell what lies in the womb of time? Just as our conceptions of many things have been revolutionized in the past, those which we hold to-day of the cosmic ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... rents not sufficing to defray their expenditure, they began to sell and pledge their property, and disposing of it by degrees, one item to-day and another to-morrow, they hardly perceived that they were approaching the verge of ruin, until poverty opened the eyes which wealth had fast sealed. So one day Lamberto called his brothers to him, reminded them of the position of wealth and dignity which had been theirs and their father's before ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... reason for staying and taking my degree was good. My lot will be very much harder than yours, for you will forget me in the excitement of discovery and adventure; but I—what can I do in the midst of all the old associations?" "Never mind, sweetheart," he said, kissing her hand, "I have seemed on the verge of despair all the time." Seeing that their separation must shortly begin, Ayrault tried to assume a cheerful look; but as Sylvia turned her eyes away they were suspiciously moist. Just one minute before the starting-time ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... verge of war with another race, the Jarmuthians, descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel, when Nelson is transported to Heliopolis, the Atlantean Capital, for trial. All strangers must prove their value to the State or be condemned to ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... difference, it lies not so much in the artist's work as in the greater generality of its appreciation. Humor flits easily there at the sea-level of the multitude. For the Japanese temperament is ever on the verge of a smile which breaks out with catching naivete at the first provocation. The language abounds in puns which are not suffered to lie idle, and even poetry often hinges on certain consecrated plays on words. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... have reined up on its summit, and behold the great South Sea, stretching to far horizon's verge, to the limit of their vision. Before them all is bright and beautiful. Only some specks in the dim distance—the lone isles of the Farrallones. More northerly, and nearer, the "Seal" rocks and that called Campana—from its arcade hollowed out by the wash of ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... had been engaged from the swarms of colored persons who infest the stations and public resorts along the coast. They had given trouble ever since the hotel was opened. They complained and annoyed him first about one thing, then about another, till he was well on to the verge ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... great; it showed, too, but little inheritance from the proud beauty of de Montespan. Vastly inferior to both, and to his ambitious wife whose schemes he adopted when they succeeded and disowned when they failed, the Duke trembled now upon the verge of a mighty intrigue which perchance would make him master of an empire, perchance consign him to the Bastille or to the block. Well he knew that the abandoned Philip of Orleans, though he sometimes ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... head. Consequently he was for the moment, fleeting as everybody considered it, in request. But he did not respond readily to the social patronage of Fairbridge. He was, seemingly, quite oblivious to its importance. Karl von Rosen was bored to the verge of physical illness by Fairbridge functions. Even a church affair found him wearily to the front. Therefore his presence at the Zenith Club was unprecedented and confounding. He had often been asked to attend its special ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the Dardanelles expedition was still on the shores of Gallipoli, and the menace to Constantinople acute. It was possible that if she opposed a firm front to the Armenian massacres, the Turks, already on the verge of despair with regard to saving the capital from capture, might have made terms with the Allies. But now no such imminence of danger threatened them, and, with Germany's domination over them vastly more secure than it had been in 1915, she could afford to treat them less ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... with their perpetual mantles of snow. Nearer, on the verge of the valley, were the red peaks of the foot-hills. To the right lay the quiet waters of the lake glistening in the sunbeams. In front, a great black fissure stretched from the shores of the lake to the base of the mountains, presenting to the eye an impassable barrier. This was the famous ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... storm had vexed the soul of the silver streak, which had turned to a grey pewter streak of a peculiarly streaky nature, with white tops to the waves that slung themselves over the head of the pier. Cabin-boys and stewards were making horrible dispositions of tinware, and the head steward was on the verge of distraction, since the whole world seemed to have chosen this particular day to return to England, and the whole world, with an eye on the Channel, desired private cabins, which were numerically less than the demand. ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... Life stands on the verge of a single breath; and this world is an existence between two nonentities. Such as truck their deen, or religious practice, for worldly pelf are asses. They sold Joseph, and what got they by their bargain?—"Did I not covenant ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... said Doll, with relief, who hated definitions, and felt the conversation was on the slippery verge of becoming deep. "Do you know him? Looks as if he'd seen a ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... astonished at her modest attitude, at her little timid airs of a young girl on the verge of matrimony; he had imagined nothing like it in such a connection as this, nor I either, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... become bright like yon edging of Pines On the steep's lofty verge—how it blackened the air! But touched from behind by the sun, it now shines With threads that seem part of its own ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... for the assurance of any help I may need, for it's quite likely that I may have to call upon you. If a ring of government speculators can come out here and refuse service, or dictate to my office, then old Keith County is certainly on the verge of decadence. Now, I'll be all ready to start for the North Fork in fifteen minutes, and I'd admire to have you all ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... was anxious to keep up with us. The work that man went through, leaping on his crutch till the muscles of his chest were fit to burst, was work no sound man ever equaled; and so thinks the doctor. As it was, he was already thirty yards behind us, and on the verge of strangling, when we reached the brow ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they started again, at dawn, and the road, always the same, stretched out, uphill, to the verge of the horizon. Yards of stones came after each other; the ditches were full of water; the country showed itself in wide tracts of green, monotonous and cold; clouds scudded through the sky. From time to time there ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... death, and amid the mortal tug of combat itself, strong belief has wrought the same wonder, which we have hitherto mentioned as occurring in solitude and amid darkness; and those who were themselves on the verge of the world of spirits, or employed in dispatching others to these gloomy regions, conceived they beheld the apparitions of those beings whom their national mythology associated with such scenes. In such ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... of the group it forms with the cathedral dome and tower and the square masses of numerous out-buildings. Yet this peculiar position of the palace, though baffling to a close observer of its details, is one of singular advantage to the inhabitants. Set on the verge of Urbino's towering eminence, it fronts a wave-tossed sea of vales and mountain summits toward the rising and the setting sun. There is nothing but illimitable air between the terraces and loggias of the Duchess's apartments and the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... Lanfear once more that she was on the verge of the knowledge so long kept from her. But she went confidently on like a sleepwalker who saves himself from dangers that would be death to him in waking. She spoke of the earthquake as if she had ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... undignified treatment of the human race that gave a kind of sting to my running, for I certainly got over the ground at twice the speed I had ever done before, or ever thought myself capable of doing. At times my limbs were on the verge of mutiny, but I forced them onward, and though my lungs seemed bursting, I never paused. At last a clearing was reached and the kulpa-tree stood fully revealed. I glanced at once at the trunk. The lowest branch of any size was some eight feet from the ground. . . . Could I reach ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... the other nineteen Canary Islands; the eye then glances over an immense expanse of waters, beyond which may be descried in the distance the dark forests of the African coast, and even the yellow stripe which marks the verge of the great Desert. With thoughts full of the enjoyments which awaited us, we approached the town. We planned parties to see the country and climb the Peak; and our scientific associates, holding themselves in readiness ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... of acquiring the loaned capital by the possessors, or their predecessors in ownership. More especially, we have, in times of "over-population," whole masses of honest men asking not alms, but only work, an opportunity to earn their bread, and yet on the verge of starvation.(473) ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... shall proue it true, That Mowbray hath receiu'd eight thousand Nobles, In name of lendings for your Highnesse Soldiers, The which he hath detain'd for lewd employments, Like a false Traitor, and iniurious Villaine. Besides I say, and will in battaile proue, Or heere, or elsewhere to the furthest Verge That euer was suruey'd by English eye, That all the Treasons for these eighteene yeeres Complotted, and contriued in this Land, Fetch'd from false Mowbray their first head and spring. Further I say, and further will ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... night when Troy was set on fire, The time when screech-owls cry and ban-dogs howl And spirits walk and ghosts break up their graves, That time best fits the work we have in hand. Madam, sit you and fear not; whom we raise, We will make fast within a hallow'd verge. ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... gleamed through the trees, and a dog barked simultaneously: they were on the verge of a clearing; and, hearing the voices outside, the owner of the house came forth to welcome the travellers, with a heartiness widely different from the commonplace ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... after its refreshment has come, it is too wet and muddy. Spacious verandahs, shaded with vines, and well-made walks, always firm and dry, bordered with shrubbery, or overhung with trees, will give us "ample scope and verge enough." ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... said thickly. It takes time for throbbing throats to come back to their own. "It's too late to find out. If I'd gone yesterday—" She stopped hastily, on the verge of ...
— Judith Lynn - A Story of the Sea • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... furlough—the reinforcements for Forts Armstrong and Crawford were already on their way. So, altogether, I faced the task of eluding Kirby with a lighter heart, and renewed confidence. Alone, as I believed him to be, and in that new country on the very verge of civilization, he was hardly an antagonist I needed greatly to fear. Indeed, as man to man, I rather ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... he said, "and sit beside me while I reveal the straits to which you have brought me. Verily, a short time ago I had deemed it impossible for any one to thrust me so near to the verge of falsehood as ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... everything according to his wish, the emperor, rising higher in spirit as his difficulties increased, and building such hopes on Fortune, which had not yet proved unfavourable to him, that he often pushed his boldness to the verge of temerity, unloaded some of the strongest of the vessels which were carrying provisions and warlike engines, and put on board of them eight hundred armed men; and keeping the main part of the fleet with him, which he divided into ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... smile of morn. The magic car moved on. From the swift sweep of wings The atmosphere in flaming sparkles flew; 125 And where the burning wheels Eddied above the mountain's loftiest peak Was traced a line of lightning. Now far above a rock the utmost verge Of the wide earth it flew, 130 The rival of the Andes, whose dark brow Frowned o'er the silver sea. Far, far below the chariot's stormy path, Calm as a slumbering babe, Tremendous ocean lay. 135 Its broad and silent mirror gave to view The pale and waning stars, The chariot's fiery track, ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... seasons ago I feared the tribe of bluebirds were on the verge of extinction from the enormous number of them that perished from cold and hunger in the South in the winter of '94. For two summers not a blue wing, not a blue warble. I seemed to miss something kindred and precious from my environment — the visible embodiment of the tender sky and the wistful ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... Grant fought hard for delay, using every effort to encourage his men to stand fast and present the boldest possible front to the foe. Meanwhile, however, Sherman was wounded, and when darkness put an end to the furious combat the shattered Union army was on the verge of collapse. So perilous, indeed, was the situation that when Buell arrived on the field his first inquiry was as to what preparations Grant had made to effect a retreat. But the silent commander instantly shook his head and announced, to the intense astonishment ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... Joey's barking speedily rose to a shrill and breathless hysteria. Some savage, more skilled than his fellows, reproduced this falsetto with marvelous exactness. There never was a death struggle heralded by such grotesque humor; it might have been a tragedy of marionettes, a Dutch concert on the verge of the pit. ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... behind the mountains of the West, he shone upon man also. Six Indians, the first men that were ever on earth, and the ancestors of the tribe of Nanticokes, all at once, they knew not how, nor by what means, found themselves sitting upon the same shore, upon the verge of the ocean. Whether they were created on the spot, or came from some other place beyond the seas; whether they had swum up from the waters, or crawled out of the mud, or bounded from the depths ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... said just now, these phenomena formerly had the power of terrifying ignorant mortals, either when the orb of light and life seemed on the verge of extinction, or when the beautiful Phoebus was covered with a veil of crape and woe, or took on a deep ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... and weave the woof, The winding-sheet of Edward's race. Give ample room, and verge enough The characters of hell to trace. Mark the year, and mark the night, When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death, thro' Berkley's roofs that ring, Shrieks of an agonizing King! She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... She had seen the matter the night before just as it was. For just at that hour young Dave, sobered, but still on the verge of tears from anger and humiliation, was telling the story of the day in her father's cabin. The old man's brows drew together and his eyes grew fierce and sullen, both at the insult to a Tolliver and at the thought of a certain moonshine still up a ravine not far away and the ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... nought can tempt the timid things That steep and rugged path to try, Though sweet the shepherd calls and sings, And seared below the pastures lie; Till in his arms their lambs he takes Along the dizzy verge to go,— Then, heedless of the rifts and breaks, They follow on o'er ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... Gordian knot is cut and a way is quickly found out of the present impasse, the most serious results are to be apprehended, as numbers of prisoners here—and the case can be no better in other countries—are on the verge of insanity....[28] ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... are now on the verge of one of the most important presidential campaigns. The party in power holds its reins by a very uncertain tenure. If the decision shall favor the one which has been on the anxious bench for lo! these twenty ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... proportioned to their strength. These occupations are not conducive to the morality of either sex. If the well be far from the village, the girls usually form parties to go thither, and amuse themselves on the road by singing sentimental or love songs, which not unfrequently verge upon the obscene, and indulge in conversation of a similar description; while, during their halt at the well for an hour or so, they engage in romps of all kinds, in which parties of the other sex frequently join. This early license lays the foundation ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... thirst-tormented people who sat or wandered about in the coolness of the night, they passed through the gates of the kraal unheeded, and walking quickly across the wide stretch of tableland reached the eastern edge of the cliff. Now upon the very verge of this cliff rose a sharp pinnacle of rock fifty feet or more into the air, and upon the top of this pinnacle was that stone shaped like a great chair, in which Suzanne sat day by day, poised like an eagle over the dizzy gulf of space, ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... moved with a faint sighing rustle, and he knew he must be nearing the edge of the thicket. The spell of silence thus broken was followed by a fainter, more musical interruption—the glassy tinkle of water! A step further his foot trembled on the verge of a slight ravine, still closely canopied by the interlacing boughs overhead. A tiny stream that he could have dammed with his hand yet lingered in this parched red gash in the hillside and trickled into a deep, irregular, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... McNeill, was one of extreme suffering. Midwinter found tens of thousands of people on the verge of starvation, suffering for food, for the need of proper clothing, and for medical attendance. Meetings of the unemployed were held in many places, and public attention called to the needs of the poor. The men asked for work and found it not, and children ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... by the vexations and failures attending his philanthropic endeavours, at length obsessed Tolstoy to the verge of suicide. ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... nation of vast extent of territory, situated far from us to the east, near the reflux of the ocean and the rising of the sun, under the first beams of the stars, and at the extreme verge of the earth, beyond the learned Egyptians and the superstitious Jews and the mercantile Nabathaeans; and the flowing robed Aracidae, and the Ityraeans, poor in crops, and the Arabians, ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... it isn't," said Mrs. Ellison; and Kitty, who had been blushing to the verge of tears, laughed instead, and then was consumed with vexation when Mr. Arbuton came up, feeling that he must suspect himself the motive of her ill-timed mirth. "The champagne ought to be cooled, I suppose," observed Mrs. ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... flower. He could not echo with his heart the fiendish sentence of eternal fire. In spite of book and creed, he read "between the lines" the words of tenderness and love, with promises for all the world. Above, beyond the dogmas of his church—humane even to the verge of heresy—causing some to doubt his love of God because he failed to hate his unbelieving fellow-men, he labored for the welfare of mankind, and to his work gave up his life ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... imagination go a little. It was a pampered imagination, that led him occasionally into indiscretions which he afterwards regretted—not too deeply, however, for after all, one owes something to one's art. "Psychological experiments," he named these indiscretions. He suspected that he was on the verge of one now, and tasted in advance some of the thrills of ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... not here omit a practice that is in use among the vainer part of our own sex, who will often ask a friend's advice, in relation to a fortune whom they are never likely to come at. Will Honeycomb, who is now on the verge of threescore, took me aside not long since, and ask me in his most serious look, whether I would advise him to marry my Lady Betty Single, who, by the way, is one of the greatest fortunes about town. I stared him full in ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... myself on being on the verge of success, for after the explanation I had had with the aunt, and having, as I thought, a friend in her, I did not doubt that I ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the back of the capitol to treat yourself to a view, and it is a very noble one. You understand, the capitol stands upon the verge of a high piece of table land, a fine commanding position, and its front looks out over this noble situation for a city—but it don't see it, for the reason that when the capitol extension was decided upon, the property owners at once advanced their prices ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... brimstone match. It gives me an almost proud satisfaction to tell how we used, when those implements were not at hand or not employed, to light our whale-oil lamp by blowing a live coal held against the wick, often swelling our cheeks and reddening our faces until we were on the verge of apoplexy. I love to tell of our stage-coach experiences, of our sailing-packet voyages, of the semi-barbarous destitution of all modern comforts and conveniences through which we bravely lived and came out the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... introduction of anaesthetics or antiseptics, the discovery of the knee-jerk, bacteriology, or even of such a doctrine as the circulation of the blood. We are at this very time, if I mistake not, on the verge of new insights which will enable man to laugh at disease—laugh at it in the sense of over-ruling its natural tendency to produce death, not by any means in the sense of destroying its ever-expanding existence. Do you know that at this moment your hospitals ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... day was much as other days. Turner ate no dinner that night. He was pale, and twitching; even with my small experience, I knew he was on the verge of delirium tremens. He did not play cards, and spent much of the evening wandering restlessly about on deck. Mrs. Turner retired early. Mrs. Johns played accompaniments for Vail to sing to, in the chart-room, until something after eleven, when they, too, ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the sole purpose of stimulating those who may have been for years "pulling hard against the stream," unable, perhaps, to ascertain where they properly belong, and possibly on the verge of giving up all hope, because of failure, after making repeated ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... sprang. And down the road We henchmen followed, hard beside the rein, Each hand, to speed him, toward the Argive plain And Epidaurus. So we made our way Up toward the desert region, where the bay Curls to a promontory near the verge Of our Trozen, facing the southward surge Of Saron's gulf. Just there an angry sound, Slow-swelling, like God's thunder underground Broke on us, and we trembled. And the steeds Pricked their ears skyward, and threw back their ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... that after less than a year of married life you stood on the verge of an abyss? That you forsook your house and home? That you fled from your husband? Yes, Mrs. Alving—fled, fled, and refused to return to him, however much he ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... life hovers, like a star' Twixt night and morn upon the horizon's verge. How little do we know that which we are! How less what we may be! The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar Our bubbles: as the old burst, new emerge, Lash'd from the foam of ages: while the graves Of empires heave but ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... blamed Corneille's theatrical ferocity in terms so severe that Voltaire called the passage "a detestable piece of criticism" and ran his blue pencil through it. No doubt the fact is that Vauvenargues saw in the rhetoric of Corneille a parody of his own sentiments, carried to the verge of rodomontade. ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... leaves of books and magazines with their fingers—a barbarism which renders him who would be guilty of it worthy of banishment from the resorts of civilization. In cutting books, the leaves should always be held firmly down—and the knife pressed evenly through the uncut leaves to the farthest verge of the back. Books which are cut in the loose fashion which many use are left with rough or ragged edges always, and often a slice is gouged out of the margin by the mis-directed knife. Never trust a book to a novice to be cut, without ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... last. She felt that it was going, going. She prayed that the minister might be quick, while yet she retained a little self-command, and give her an opportunity to utter some binding vow which should make good her solemn engagement, and avert the scandal of the outbreak on the verge of which she was trembling. "Do you," said the minister to Mr. Whitcomb, "take this woman whom you hold by the hand to be your wife, to honor, protect, and love while you live?" "I do," replied the bridegroom ...
— At Pinney's Ranch - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... entered the mouth of the pass, which was girt on either side by magnificent precipices; the road was narrow and slippery—of course without even an apology for a parapet—running along a natural ledge on the verge of a perpendicular cliff, and so sheer was the side, that from a horse's back you might sometimes have dropped a stone into the apparently bottomless ravine—bottomless, for the rays of a noon-day sun have never broken the eternal darkness of the awful chasm ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... that he ought to have been on the verge of exhaustion from lack of food and from fatigue, and he vaguely wondered why he was not. The truth was that the excitement of the attack, coupled with the chill of the night, had restored him in mind and body, although he had ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... work there was none so bitter as the citizen whose children Franz had been teaching. For this man considered himself to be a genius, and was inordinately vain, and his ignorance was equal to his conceit. He dismissed Franz from his service. All doors were now closed to him, and being on the verge of starvation he was reduced to earning his bread in the streets by playing his pipe. This also proved unsuccessful, and it was with difficulty that he earned a few ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... inquired, and when no one answered he grunted and tied up the hole. There was a silence, and the crowd began to filter away—all but Lynch, who stood staring like an Indian. Then he too turned away, his haggard eyes blinking fast, like a woman on the verge of bitter tears. ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... field; our rangers and some few other light troops under the command of Col. Knowlton, of Connecticut and Major Leitch of (I, believe) Virginia, were in waiting for them. Seeing them advancing, the rangers, &c, concealed themselves in a deep gully overgrown with bushes; upon the western verge of this defile was a post and rail fence, and over that the forementioned field. Our people let the enemy advance until they arrived at the fence when they arose and poured in a volley upon them. How many ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... intent of his covenant, was theirs, to give a license to take such property,—and that one mode of obtaining a revenue was by the breach of the very covenants which were meant to prevent extortion, peculation, and corruption? What sort of body is the India Company, which, coming to the verge of bankruptcy by the robbery of half the world, is afterwards to subsist upon the alms of peculation and bribery, to have its strength recruited by the violation of the covenants imposed upon its own servants? ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... party went into camp near a shabby village which was caving, house by house, into the hungry Mississippi. The river astonished the children beyond measure. Its mile-breadth of water seemed an ocean to them, in the shadowy twilight, and the vague riband of trees on the further shore, the verge of a continent which surely none but they had ever ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything they could carry; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits by assuming for ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... I had lain a weeping child under the shadow of the oaks, smarting from the lash of derision, burning with shame, shrinking with humiliation. I was now fifteen years old,—at that age when youth turns trembling from the dizzy verge of childhood to a mother's guardian arms, a mother's sheltering heart. How weak, how puerile now seemed the emotions, which three years ago had worn ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... armed with swords and arquebuses, and wore steel caps and coats of buff. Their sleeves were embroidered with the five wounds of Christ, encircling the name of Jesus—the badge of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Between them, on the verge of the mountain, was planted a great banner, displaying a silver cross, the chalice, and the Host, together with an ecclesiastical figure, but wearing a helmet instead of a mitre, and holding a sword in place of a crosier, with ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... beautiful as Love Can make thee, and the ministering hands Of milliners, incapable of more, Be lifted at thy shapeliness and air, And still 'twixt me and thee, invisibly, May rise a wall of adamant. My breath Upon my pale lip freezes as I name Manhattan's orient verge, and eke the west In its far down extremity. Thy sire May be the signer of a temperance pledge, And clad all decently may walk the earth— Nay—may be number'd with that blessed few Who never ask for discount—yet, alas! If, homeward wending from his daily cares, He go by Murphy's Line, thence ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... human. She has then a wild, unhuman, unmoral, unspiritual interest in us, like a being who has an elemental life, but no soul. But sometimes she is made to go farther, and has the same kind of interest in us which Oberon has in the loves of Helena and Hermia. When we are loving, and on the verge of such untroubled joy as Nature has always in her being, then she seems able, in Browning's poetry, actually to work for us, and help us into the fulness of our joy. In his poem, By the Fireside, he tells how he and the woman he loved were brought to know their love. It ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... a grandmother!" roared the King, upon the verge of madness, as the Crown Prince, at the head of six Army Corps surrounded the building and captured ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... truths, which would enable man to rise above the abject state into which he has fallen, and to return to his original perfection." To the evil offices of these demons, he attributed his late disaster. He had been on the very verge of the glorious discovery; never were the indications more completely auspicious; all was going on prosperously, when, at the critical moment which should have crowned his labours with success, and have placed him at the very summit of human power and felicity, the bursting of a retort had reduced ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... move down the Mississippi by the middle of November. Unfortunately for Burr, however, Wilkinson was far too expert in the usages of iniquity to be taken in by such audacious lying as this. He guessed that the enterprise was on the verge of collapse and forthwith made up his ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... very agile; and, secluding itself among the most inaccessible mountain-crags, delights in capering upon the very verge of the most frightful precipices, and skipping from rock to rock across yawning chasms hundreds of ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... I had got to about the lowest verge, vague rumors of an English visitor reached me. I thought of myself as the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho; but neither priest, Levite, nor Samaritan could possibly pass my way. Yet the good Samaritan was close at hand, and one of my people rushed up at the top of his speed, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... do lots o' good here," declared Racey, who felt sure that he was on the verge of a discovery. "Somebody is a-trying to jump yore ranch, and if you'll lemme talk to him I can find out ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... from weariness and lonely to the verge of exhaustion, she thought of Kenmore—not Travers—with positive yearning. The woman of her, madly defending, or about to defend, woman, excluded even her own love and her own man. It was sex against sex; ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... banish'd? Know, the cause Comes not within the verge of vulgar laws. Against all rules of fashionable life, The rogue had dared to sleep ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... sitting in our little room upon the verge of despair, all at once my wife raised her head, and with a smile upon her face, which was a moment before bathed in tears, said, "I think I have it!" I asked what it was. She said, "I think I can make a poultice and bind up my ...
— Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom • William and Ellen Craft
... days it provoked wild excitement, which forced him to take special measures; and what would now happen, as it wended its way through this dense multitude of thirty thousand persons, consumed by such a fever of faith, already on the verge of divine frenzy? Accordingly, in a sensible way, he took advantage of this opportunity to give ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... as he could assume, considering that he had one armful of shabby parcels and the other hand holding at arm's length a disgraceful looking mongrel, went out, almost on the verge of tears. ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... asked quietly, watching the tears well up in her eyes. She hadn't lost her composure yet, but she felt so strongly about him she was on the verge of breaking down. ...
— Stopover • William Gerken
... the promise of his youth had begun to blossom, he sent him to Paris, although the expenditure just at that time demanded a sacrifice which might have been the ruin of Maurice's own career. Francis's promise had never come to entire fulfilment. He was always trembling on the verge of a great success without quite plunging into it. Despite the joy which his presence gave his brother and sister-in-law, most of his time was spent abroad, where he could find just the atmosphere that suited his delicate, artistic ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Beatrice, softly. "Give me one moment yet." She passed slowly and falteringly towards Leonard, placed her hand, that trembled, on his arm, and led him aside to the verge of the vessel. Frank, startled by her movement, made a step as if to follow, and then stopped short and looked on, but with a clouded and doubtful countenance. Harley's smile had gone, and ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... prettiest girl I ever saw in my life," he admitted. "I wanted to speak to you. Two or three times I was on the verge of it but I never could quite get up the courage. I'm not much good at starting conversations with girls. My kid brother, Ted, has the monopoly of that sort of thing ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... I felt an extraordinary persuasion that I was being played with, that presently, when I was upon the very verge of safety, this mysterious death—as swift as the passage of light—would leap after me from the pit about the cylinder and strike ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... just as our impatience had reached the verge of indignation, a little figure emerged from the shadow of the farm-house, and sauntered towards us. She was a pretty child, a true daughter of the Saxon race, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and sunny-complexioned. She was the pink of neatness, too, and it was evident that the time we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... named. Germany and France were unfriendly and Aguinaldo treacherous, though Great Britain and Japan were ardent in their sympathy for the United States. Germany especially was a constant cause of irritation to Admiral Dewey, whose patience was often tried to the utmost verge. To his tact, prudence, self-control, firmness, diplomacy and masterful wisdom were due the fact that no complication with foreign powers occurred and that the United States escaped a tremendous war, whose consequences no one ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... class. There are rumours of tremendously wild financial measures, only I believe in no rumours just now, and apparently the Bourse is as incredulous on this particular point. If I thought (as people say) that we are on the verge of a 'law' declaring the Roman Catholic religion the State religion, I should give him up at once; but this would be contrary to the traditions of the Empire, and I can't suppose it to be probable on ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... had died some years before, made the move which finally brought his mounting prospects to the verge of ruin. Just when he was on the point of being recognized as a contractor of consequence, and owned a big, fine outfit of stock and tents and implements, he decided to change his activities to those of ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... hope the springs of her life. It may surprise even those who knew her well to learn that her physical timidity was great, and at times painful. But her moral and intellectual courage impelled her at times almost to the verge of audacity, and was held under restraint only by conscience and good sense. Humor and wit can hardly be said to have been marked traits in her mentality. There was something delphic and oracular often in her familiar ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... second to none. And this was not by any means surprising, for he had been born (and for its saintly patron had been christened) close by the small old town of Andreasberg: which stands barely within the verge of the Black Forest, on the southern declivity of the Harz—and which, while famous for its mines, is renowned above all other cities for the excellence of the bird songsters which there and ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... clere-story windows shines, And the wind washes through the mountain-pines. Then, gazing up 'mid the dim pillars high, The foliaged marble forest deg. where ye lie, deg.39 Hush, ye will say, it is eternity! 40 This is the glimmering verge of Heaven, and these The columns of the heavenly palaces! And, in the sweeping of the wind, your ear The passage of the Angels' wings will hear, And on the lichen-crusted leads deg. above deg.45 The rustle of the eternal rain ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... lying on the very verge of one of the openings made by the missing planks, was the packet, which Jack was sure contained jewelry, ...
— Jack of the Pony Express • Frank V. Webster
... notice one or two facts connected with glass, which show that the ancients were on the verge of making one or two very important discoveries in physical science. They were acquainted with the power of transparent spherical bodies to produce heat by the transmission of light, though not with the manner in which that heat was ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... committee, which gave a vote to every male citizen twenty-one years old, who had resided six months in the State and who had within one year paid taxes or a road assessment, or had been enrolled and served in the militia. Although, said Van Buren, this report is on the verge of universal suffrage, it did not cheapen the invaluable right, by conferring it indiscriminately upon every one, black or white, who would condescend to accept it. He was opposed, he said, to a precipitate ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... too bad," said Dick, on the way. "Mrs. Stanhope is on the verge of a nervous collapse, and I believe it is all on ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield
... Miss GLADYS COOPER, over her petit dejeuner, preserves a natural demeanour, even to the point of talking with her mouth full; the light humour of the First Act declines to the verge of buffoonery. The devastating confusions which ensue in the matter of identity and relationship (in our author's Ostend you assume, till corrected, that all couples are married); the intervention of the local gendarmerie, headed by a British detective; the arrest of half ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... perfect beauty, in whatever form it may come, that the deep craving it arouses is meant to receive a satisfaction more deep and real than the act of mere contemplation can give. I have felt in such moments as if I were on the verge of grasping some momentous secret, as if only the thinnest of veils hung between me and some knowledge that would set my whole life and being on a different plane. But the moment passes, and the secret delays. Yet we are right to regard such emotions ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... large red disk of the descending orb was seen between the sea and the edge of the clouds that hung upon the verge of the sky, pouring forth from the horizon to the very shore a long line of blood-red light, which, resting upon the boiling waters of the ocean, seemed as if the setting star could indeed "the multitudinous sea incarnadine, making the ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Iceland in 1477, his opinion that the same shore might be reached by crossing the Atlantic, where it had never been traversed before, was based upon mere surmise. No wonder that his crew were disheartened and on the verge of open mutiny when, under such circumstances, after about sixty-nine days had elapsed since they had sailed from Palos on August 3, 1492, they had still not reached the longed-for land. What faith, almost ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... smiters, desirous of giving away the whole of his wealth, 'O thou of multifarious vows, I am a candidate for thy eternal wealth,' 'O thou of ascetic wealth, returned Rama, 'My gold and whatever other wealth I had, have all been given away unto Brahmanas! This earth also, to the verge of the sea, decked with towns and cities, as with a garland of flowers, I have given unto Kasyapa. I have now my body only and my various valuable weapons left. I am prepared to give either my body or my weapons. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... were going on, Disco observed that hyenas were occasionally to be seen prowling near the verge of the bushes around them, as if anxious to join in the feast, which no ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... and then came a messenger. It was Shepard who had reported to headquarters and who afterwards came over to the shade of a tree where Colonel Winchester and his little staff were gathered. He was on the verge of exhaustion. He was black under the eyes and the veins of his neck were distended. Dust covered him from head to foot. He threw himself on the ground and drank deeply from a canteen of cool water that Dick handed to him. All saw that Shepard, ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... with disfavor by the inhabitants of the district as too respectful, too humble, too prompt in removing his cap to every one, and trembling and smiling in the presence of the gendarmes,—probably affiliated to robber bands, they said; suspected of lying in ambush at verge of copses at nightfall. The only thing in his favor was ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... previous intention of crossing the stream, there seemed nothing better for him to do than to follow the truant's advice and take the road back to Green Springs. Yet he was loath to leave the wood, halting on its verge, and turning to look back into its charmed recesses. Once or twice—perhaps because he recalled the words of the poem—that yellowish sea of ferns had seemed instinct with hidden life, and he had even fancied, here and ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... discovered my driver behind Amy's back and was preparing to get away, but these views of Amy's mother were so complete an innovation that I paused. On the verge of a first drive I had never in my life stopped to consider the ethics of golf-club cleaning. Why had not Amy a pocket and a rag of sand-paper like resourceful Jimmy Baines? I don't remember to have ever read anything on the niceties ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... incognita to railways. It is on the extremest verge of Europe towards the Atlantic; and European civilisation finds entrance there with remarkable slowness. In 1845, the government tried to invite offers from capitalists to construct railways; in 1849, the invitations were renewed; but the moneyed men were coy, and would not ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... one thing, however, which, if it did not throw the laird into a passion—nothing, as I have said, did that—brought him nearer to the outer verge of displeasure than any other, and that was, anything whatever to which he could affix the name of superstition. The indignation of better men than the laird with even a confessedly harmless superstition, is sometimes very amusing; and it was a point of Mr. Galbraith's ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... here in Englande. The table wherupon thei eate, is for the mooste parte of a Bullockes hide, or a Hartes skinne. Not dressed, but in the heare, facioned rounde, beyng a fowre or fiue spanne ouer, and so set rounde about on the bordre, or verge, with ringlettes of iron: that putting a couple of stringes throughe the ringes, it maye be drawen together, and shutte and opened like a purse. House, or Churche, or any other place wher they entende to ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... own descendant, Lord Derwentwater is believed to have hesitated upon the verge of his fate, but to have been urged into it by his brother Charles. Young and ardent, courageous even to rashness, the first to offer himself where an enterprise was the most hazardous, seeming to set no value upon his ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... no other advice in the large businesse of his revennue, nor was any man so much his superiour, as to be able to lessen him in the Kings affection, by his power; so that he was in a post in which he might have founde much ease and delight, if he could have contayned himselfe within the verge of his owne Provence, which was large enough, and of such an extente, that he might at the same tyme have drawne a greate dependance upon him of very considerable men, and appeared a very usefull and profitable Minister to the Kinge, whose revennue had bene very loosely managed ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... knocks Goldsmith down. This insult, received before his friends, was too much for the unlucky sizar, who, the very next day, sold his books, ran away from college, and ultimately, after having been on the verge of starvation once or twice, made his way to Lissoy. Here his brother got hold of him; persuaded him to go back; and the escapade was condoned somehow. Goldsmith remained at Trinity College until he took his degree (1749.) He was again lowest in the list; but still he had passed; and ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... make the scar burn and throb after long years? Or was it regret at the besmirching of a picture which till now had shone so purely and been so sweetly framed in his memory? He did not know, but for days it depressed him to the verge of melancholy. ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... with gas, or rather it was so illuminated a few weeks since; but it was quietly whispered about that the corporation had failed to pay for this service last year, and that the monopoly itself was on the verge of bankruptcy, like nearly everything else of a business character in Cuba. The gaslights certainly appeared pale and sickly enough, as though only half confirmed in the purpose of giving any light at all, and were prematurely extinguished in many ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... supplies for the journey. This was readily agreed to, and, accordingly, next day about noon, they came in sight of Rocky Mountain Fort—so-called because of its being situated in a somewhat wild glen, near the verge of one of the eastern spurs ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... was moved by certain advisers to institute a persecution against us. And there was great talk about it everywhere. But as he was about to do it, and was, so to speak, in the very act of signing the decrees against us, the divine judgment came upon him and restrained him at the very verge ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... led Shakespeare from shame to shame, to the verge of madness. The sonnets give us the story, the whole terrible, sinful, ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... and granting the prayer of the petitioners. The clergy had ministered to their flocks all along in the face of intolerance and bitter opposition from the Puritan body, and the war for independence had subjected them to peculiar trials and reduced them to the verge of ruin. But, without thinking of themselves, or how they should be supported in the broken and disastrous condition of their cures, their first effort or chief anxiety was to provide for the now entirely ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... every thing about him; and such difficulties as he might occasionally encounter, were, to a man of his energy, rather matter of amusement than serious annoyance. With all the merits of a sanguine temper, our young English drover was not without his defects. He was irascible, and sometimes to the verge of being quarrelsome; and perhaps not the less inclined to bring his disputes to a pugilistic decision, because he found few antagonists able to stand up to him ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... the ultimate happiness, and because he had bequeathed her nothing but memories full of fragrance, yet full of torment. And there she was, sitting in her lonely room amongst the faded mementoes of a youth that had passed unprofitably and friendlessly; there she was, on the verge of the time when there would be no more hopes and no more desires—life had slipped through her fingers, and she was thirty ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... enter into details, but I may inform you that I have suffered irreparable loss and injury at the hands of the English. They have chosen to regard the method by which I earn my living as unlawful, and on no less than four occasions have brought me to the verge of ruin at the moment when I was upon the point of realising a handsome competence. They have persecuted me relentlessly, confiscated my property, slain my two brothers in action, and would have hanged me ignominiously, had I not been fortunate enough to effect my escape from them; and it was ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... Craig, "I have asked you to call alone because, while I am on the verge of discovering the truth in an important case affecting Morton Hazleton and his wife, I am frankly perplexed as ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... them dragged themselves forward with stumbling footsteps. Their faces were haggard, their hands moving restlessly and their features twitching. They looked like men who had been for days undergoing severe mental and physical strain and were on the verge of collapse. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... and that at some day, not far distant, perhaps, the throne of the Incas might be shaken by these strangers, endowed with such incomprehensible powers.1 To the vulgar eye, it was a little speck on the verge of the horizon; but that of the sagacious monarch seemed to descry in it the dark thunder-cloud, that was to spread wider and wider till it burst in fury on ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... unpleasantly conscious that she had been on the verge of speaking as "one of the foolish women speaketh"—telling first and entreating silence after. But she had not entreated silence, and to prevent Caleb's blame she determined to blame herself and confess all to him that very night. It was curious what an awful tribunal the mild ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... come when the name of Lafayette will be forgotten; or when the star of his fame, no longer glittering in the zenith, shall be seen, pale and glimmering, on the verge of the horizon. But the name of Robert Raikes shall never be forgotten; and the lambent flame of his glory is that eternal fire which rushed down from heaven to devour the sacrifice of Elijah. Let mortals then admire and imitate Lafayette more than Robert Raikes. But the just made ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... malignant hatred from which they proceeded. Hugh took the letter and smiled. "Oh," he said, "I have put my case before the people who matter, and you can't do anything. He is certainly mad, or on the verge of madness. Don't answer it—you will only be drenched with these communications. I don't trouble my head about it." "But don't you mind?" I said. "No," he said, "I'm quite callous! Of course I am sorry that he should be such a beast, ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the country will continue to lay their precious sons upon the altar, not as "Union soldiers," as before, but as heroes of a new republic. Do this, and woman, the subtle architect of society, will teach you how to walk the very verge of death with an unflinching hope of life; her faith will separate your light from darkness, truth from error, liberty from slavery. She will demonstrate for you that self-reliance is the condition of all creations, that as "the flower looks to no ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... on its immediate site. These wings were only of a story and a half each, and doubling on each side of the main edifice just far enough to form a sufficient communication, they ran back to the very verge of a cliff some forty feet in height, overlooking, at their respective ends, a meandering rivulet, and a wide expanse of very productive flats, that annually filled my barns with hay and my cribs with corn. Of this level and fertile bottom-land there was near a thousand acres, stretching in ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... to Monsieur to know whether I should send it back," said Antoinette, on the verge ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... at the time of which I am speaking, the stage-coach contained, if not actually a bad character, I a person on the very verge of being one—that I was that graceless, yet tolerated being, a scamp, was very certain—yet my gentle demeanour, my smooth, bright countenance, and never-ceasing placid smile, would have given a very different impression of my qualities. I have been thus liberal in my confessions, in order ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... are the accepted symbols of Bohemia. What reader of Henri Murger's "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme" has ever forgotten the Cafe Momus, where the riotous behaviour of Marcel, Schaunard, Rodolphe, and Colline brought the proprietor to the verge of ruin? Who has not in his heart a tender spot for Terre's Tavern, in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, where the bouillebaisse came from—the bouillebaisse, of which some of the ingredients were "red peppers, garlic, saffron roach, and dace"? It is of no great importance whether the particular scene ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... ferns and irregular mass of polypodium edged with fawn-coloured, infertile fronds fringe the sea-ward ending. Orchids, old gold and violet, cling to the rocks with the white claws of the sea snatching at their toughened roots, and beyond the extreme verge of ferns and orchids on abrupt sea-scarred boulders are the stellate shadows of the whorled foliage of the umbrella tree, in varied pattern, precise and clean cut and in delightful commingling and ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... thinking, on and on he went, Till he attained the forest's verge, The garish day was well-nigh spent, Birds had already raised its dirge. Oh what a scene! How sweet and calm! It soothed at once his wounded pride, And on his spirit shed a balm That all its ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... of character and expression, but he gives them with perfect truth and accuracy. This is, in fact, what distinguishes his compositions from all others of the same kind, that they are equally remote from caricature, and from mere still life.... His faces go to the very verge of caricature, and yet never (we believe in any single instance) go ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... prospect is very good for a grand naval engagement which shall eclipse anything ever seen before. There are many who would like the engagement to occur, who do not much relish the prospect of its occurring very near the city. They think deeper water and scope and verge enough for such an encounter may be found farther up the river. All, however, are rejoiced to learn that Memphis will not fall till conclusions are first tried on water, ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... nothing but uniform blackness, the fault is with our eyes or is due to an obscuring medium. Since our universe is limited in extent, there must be other universes beyond it on all sides. Perhaps if we could carry our telescopes to the verge of the great "Coal-sack'' near the "Cross,'' being then on the frontier of our starry system, we could discern, sparkling afar off in the vast night, some of the outer galaxies. They may be grander ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... and stepped delicately to the verge of the mud, her hand firmly closed on the butt, her mouth and left ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... never let the riata touch him, Senor. Truly, it is well that he will come at the call, for otherwise he would never again he caught!" Diego grinned, checked himself on the verge of venturing another comment, and tilted his head sidewise instead, his ears perked toward the ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... fluting a wild carol ere her death, Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere Revolving many memories, till the hull Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn, And on the mere the wailing died away. But when that moan had past for evermore, The stillness of the dead world's winter dawn Amazed him, and he groan'd, "The King is gone." And therewithal came on ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... brought the millions to the verge of ruin, By pledging them to Continental quarrels Of which ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... kept the sensation of love for their partners, any more than by will they could have ceased to care for them. They could only by will have been able to control the expression of their feelings. I seem to be reiterating this point to the verge of tiresomeness, but it is so vitally important to understand, because its non-comprehension produces such injustice. If John by his will were able to make himself remain in love with Mary, and failed to do so, then she might have a right to blame him because he had sworn that he would at the ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... resolute manner, the baffled driver muttered and swore, while he applied the whip to his horse's flanks, and pursued the route indicated by May until they came to the very verge of the city limits, where grand old oaks still waved their broad limbs in primeval vigor over sloping hills and picturesque declivities. Near a rustic bridge, which spanned a frozen stream, stood a few scattered ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... lightness had crept into Diana's voice; the shadow of a smile into her eyes. She felt on the verge of being a little unnerved, and a feigned or real inconsequence was ever ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... little opportunity for architectural variety. By referring to Fig. 23, section, and Fig. 24, ground plan, it will be observed that rafters to support the roof are dispensed with, except two at each end to form the verge and finish. The ridge and purlins are supported by light 2x3 inch posts, which rest upon larger posts beneath the ground. This is a considerable saving, both in material and workmanship. Posts set three feet into the ground form the ...
— Woodward's Graperies and Horticultural Buildings • George E. Woodward
... the departing soul, she prays for the beloved of her heart, sprinkles holy water on that much-loved form, reads aloud the history of the Passion of our Lord; and Vannozza, supported by those sacramental graces which Satan cannot withstand, followed almost beyond the verge of life by that watchful tenderness which had been her joy on earth, sees the evil spirit retire before the might of Francesca's angel, and breathes her last in perfect peace. The soul which had served and loved God so fervently upon earth was carried ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... wade. Blue dragon-flies darted to and fro, or sat on water-plants as if they were flowers. Snakes swam across the channels, vibrating their heads from side to side. Swallows swept over his head. Pike "struck" from the verge of the thick weeds as he came near. Perch rose for insects as they ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... years in England? Who should say? But he had had the wild daring to uproot himself from his childhood's home and adventure himself upon an unknown shore, and there, by hook or crook, for better or for worse, through vicissitudes innumerable and crises beyond calculation, ever on the perilous verge of nothingness, he had scraped through the days and the weeks and the years, fearlessly contributing perhaps more important items to posterity than the dead stones, which were all he, the sculptor, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... leaving things alone has been tried for years, and it has led to their going from bad to worse. It is not true that this is owing to the Raid. They were going from bad to worse before the Raid. We were on the verge of war before the Raid, and the Transvaal was on the verge of revolution. The effect of the Raid has been to give the policy of leaving things alone a new lease of life, ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... against the warm breast of his mother—the tyranny of these he cannot shake off. Servants of his will, they at the same time master him. They may not coerce genius, but they dictate and sway every action of the clay-born. If he hesitate on the verge of a new departure, they whip him back into the well-greased groove; if he pause, bewildered, at sight of some unexplored domain, they rise like ubiquitous finger-posts and direct him by the village path to the communal ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... fellow-workmen who came in to see him with ghastly Heine-like jokes on his own hideous disease, living no one exactly knew how, though it was supposed on supplies sent him by a shopkeeper uncle in the country, and constantly on the verge, as all his acquaintances felt, of some ingenious expedient or other for putting an end to himself and his troubles. He was unmarried, and a misogynist to boot. No woman willingly went near him, and he tended himself. How Robert had gained ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... did not possess, or trouble himself to acquire. He was, to use his own phrase, "passionate of body," and his desires were stronger than his will. There are points of Byron's character with regard to which opinion is divided. Candid he certainly was to the verge of brutality, but was he sincere? Was [v.04 p.0904] he as melancholy as his poetry implies? Did he pose as pessimist or misanthropist, or did he speak out of the bitterness of his soul? It stands to reason that Byron ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... but the porter hurrying along, bent down under the weight of my bag, and the wind blew icily. I buttoned up my coat. And then I regretted the warmth of the carriage, the comfort of my corner and my rug; I wished I had peacefully continued my journey to Madrid—I was on the verge of turning back as I heard the whistling of the train. I hesitated, but the porter hurried on, and fearing to lose him in the night, I sprang forwards. Then the puffing of the engine, and on the smoke the bright reflection of the furnace, and the train steamed ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... I like them soft. Two minutes and a half, or three-quarters at the outside. An egg should never rashly verge upon hardness—never. Three minutes is the excess ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fade; the world-mists thicken and roll, 'Neath the heavens arching their heaven; o'er-hazing the eye of the soul. Then the vision is pure no longer; refracted above us arise The phantasmal figures of passion; earth's mirage exhaled to the skies. And they go as the castled clouds o'er the verge when the tempest is laid, Towering Ambition, and Glory, and Self as Duty array'd:— Idols no less than that idol whom lustful Ammon of yore With the death-scream of children, a furnace of blood, was fain to adore! So these, in the shrine of the soul, for a Moloch ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... printed a few copies of this account, and that its private perusal had been eminently serviceable to more than one of the most popular poets of the present age. But these were only vague reports; and Mr. Beckford, after achieving, on the verge of manhood, a literary reputation, which, however brilliant, could not satisfy the natural ambition of such an intellect—seemed, for more than fifty years, to have wholly withdrawn himself from the only field of his permanent distinction. The world ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... that of any people in the world, let alone Europe. I believe that these people are made as we are, that they are patient beyond belief, loyal, but, at the same time, broken-spirited and desperate, living on the verge of starvation in places in which we would ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... both the boys and dragging them hurriedly backwards, "we are standing at this moment on the very verge of the chasm. It won't do to go on; every ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... way into the Black Sea. Stress of weather compelled them to put into the little port of Yalta, on the north coast, where they went on shore. The Colonel, on the Lucretian principle of "Suave mari magno," &c., proceeded the next morning to the verge of the precipice to observe the magnificent prospect of a sea running mountains high. As it was raining at the time, he put up a huge gingham Umbrella he happened to find in the hotel. Suddenly, however, a furious blast of wind ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... asterisks; but at that moment Norman encountered his wife's eye and he fell back with a thud on Holy Writ. "You whited sepulchre!" he bellowed, with a final shake, and cast Whiskers-on-the-moon from him with a vigour which impelled that unhappy pacifist to the very verge of the choir entrance door. Mr. Pryor's once ruddy face was ashen. But he turned at bay. "I'll have the law on you for this," ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... there is still a large double coffin, in which, according to tradition, lies a chain of gold of incalculable value. Some twenty years ago, the owner of Mellenthin, whose unequalled extravagance had reduced him to the verge of beggary, attempted to open the coffin in order to take out this precious relic, but he was not able. It appeared as if some powerful spell held it firmly together; and it has remained unopened down to the present time. May it remain ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... even held out of her entering into a foreign alliance against us. So much for our domestic—now for our foreign condition and prospects. He would see Europe exhibiting serious symptoms of distrust and hostility: France, irritated and trifled with, on the verge of actual war with us: our criminally neglected differences with America, fast ripening into the fatal bloom of war: the very existence of the Canadas at stake. In India, the tenure by which we hold it in the very act ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... heel of the bowsprit; his big body reposed on a confused heap of blocks and cordage, and his neck rested on the stock of an anchor, so that his head hung down over it, presenting the face to view, with the large mouth wide open, in an upside down position. The man was evidently on the verge of choking, but, being a strong man, and a rugged man, and a healthy man, he did not care. He seemed to prefer choking to the trouble of rousing himself ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... longing to be alone with his thoughts, longer, indeed, than was his usual custom. George Delphin was not often given to serious thought—his nature was too frivolous and unstable; but to-day he felt that there must be a reckoning, and on the very verge of the sea he threw himself on the sand, which was now warmed by the afternoon sun. At first his thoughts surged like the billows over which he gazed. He was furious with Pastor Martens. Who could have believed ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... many severe and cutting things. If anybody else said and did such things, they would at once get into hot water; but he says and does them in such a manner, that even his enemies, and those against whom his censures are aimed, cannot be offended with him. He is always on the verge of difficulty, but never ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... justification for their gloomy apprehensions. In St. Thomas Aquinas this intellectualizing process marked its highest point and beyond there was no margin of safety. He himself did not overstep the verge of danger, but after him this limit was overpassed. The perfect balance between mind and spirit was achieved by Hugh of St. Victor, but afterwards the severance began and on the one side was the unwholesome hyper-spiritualization of ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... were taking on their golden hue, and the long, free shoots of tender growth were reaching out for conquest on right and left in all manner of graceful curves and spirals. Through an opening in this shadowy foliage came a glimpse of the hill-side slope across the valley upon whose verge my studio is perched, and as my eye penetrated this pretty vista it was intercepted by what appeared to be a shadowed portion of a rose branch crossing the opening and mingling with the bittersweet stems. In my idle mood I had for some moments so accepted it without ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... billows dip, Far-off, to ocean's misty verge, Ploughs Morning, like a full-sailed ship, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... a size or two larger, and the ruddy hue of its breast does not verge so nearly on an orange, but the manners and habits of the two birds are very much alike. Our bird has the softer voice, but the English redbreast is much the more skilled musician. He has indeed a fine, animated warble, heard nearly the ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... the wild spirits of the storm had drawn a translucent drapery of vapour from the dark thundercloud hovering overhead to where the fringe of the forest broke the blood-stained bar upon the horizon's verge, and this luminous orange-coloured curtain was crossed every moment upwards and downwards by silvery shafts of lightning. Such an effect of sunset combined with storm was like a new revelation of nature, and the sublimity of the spectacle would have held me fast to the patch ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... hundred fires blazed upon the mountains—far as the eye could reach, for miles and many miles, one dazzling gigantic illumination. Papal monograms, crosses, tiaras shone forth in startling proportions. High up, far from any human habitation, on the verge of the snow, in clearings of the mountain forests, on Alpine pastures, these fiery letters had been patiently traced by toiling men and lads. Anton and Jacobi were not behind-hand, and by means of two hundred little bonfires had devised the papal initials ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... with his countenance. "You know what it is to have to do exclusively with fools and brutes, to rave under the vile restraints of Philistine surroundings? Then you can form some notion of the state I was in when I took the step of writing that advertisement; I was, I firmly believe, on the verge of lunacy! For two or three days I had come back home from the school only to pace up and down the room in an indescribable condition. I get often like that, but this time things seemed reaching a head. Why, I positively cried ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... figure the end. Years ago, when I was a youngster, I yearned for fortune. And I realised that I had it in me to get it quick by means of that crazy talent for figures you reckon is so wonderful. I got the chance and jumped, for it. But every step I took left me scared to the verge of craziness. When I hit up against Hellbeam I got a desire to beat him that was irresistible, and I jumped into the fight with my heart in my mouth. It was easy—so easy. Hellbeam was a babe in my hands. I could play with him as ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... words which he had uttered and still more by those which he had been on the verge of uttering, Philippe suddenly, in the girl's presence, felt a need to be gentle and friendly and to make amends for his inexplicable rudeness. An unexpected sense of pity softened him. He took the small, ice-cold hands between his own and said, ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... of bank notes but among the class of people I have just mentioned, and the means of doing this could be best effected by coining five-pound notes. This conduct has the appearance of that of an unprincipled insolvent, who, when on the verge of bankruptcy to the amount of many thousands, will borrow as low as five pounds of the servants in his house, and break ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... thing, however, which, if it did not throw the laird into a passion—nothing, as I have said, did that—brought him nearer to the outer verge of displeasure than any other, and that was, anything whatever to which he could affix the name of superstition. The indignation of better men than the laird with even a confessedly harmless superstition, is sometimes very amusing; ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... to me again; but say to Athens Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood, Who once a day with his embossed froth The turbulent surge shall cover. Thither come, And let my gravestone be your oracle. Lips, let sour words go by and language end: What is amiss, ...
— The Life of Timon of Athens • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... themselves to sound slumber. All night the officers of the Wolverine slept on the verge of waking, but it was not until dawn that the cry of "Sail-ho!" sent them all hurrying to their clothes. Ordinarily officers of the U.S. Navy do not scuttle on deck like a crowd of curious schoolgirls, but all hands ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... man walking on the sandy margin of a river, about two or three miles from Carl's house, saw a skull before him. As the steep bluff nearly overhung the spot where he stood, he conjectured that the body to which the skull belonged was to be found above on its verge. He climbed up, and there saw a headless skeleton. It was the body of Stolzen, as his memorandum-book and other articles showed. His pistol was in his pocket, and still loaded; that fact precluded the idea of suicide. Moreover, upon examining more closely, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... but it is a great exertion to lay one every day, and no sooner is the work finished than I think of the same task to be done on the morrow, until I'm on the verge of nervous prostration,' and Mrs. Goose waddled up and down the room as if she was a living skeleton, instead of the fattest bird ...
— The Gray Goose's Story • Amy Prentice
... their tendencies, combinations, and contrasts.... He is carried away by a passion for the ridiculous. His object is not so much 'to hold the mirror up to nature' as 'to show vice her own feature, scorn her own image.' He is so far from contenting himself with still-life that he is always on the verge of caricature, though without ever falling into it. He does not represent folly or vice in its incipient, or dormant, or grub state; but full-grown, with wings, pampered into all sorts of affectation, ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... declaration of principles. But they had lost their Democratic allies of four years earlier, and threw only 150,000 votes—less by 100,000 than at the previous election. The Whig party proved to be on the verge of dissolution. It had lost its hold on the "conscience vote" of the North, and was less trusted than its rival by the South. Pierce was chosen by a great majority; he carried every State except ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... latter part of the year 1860, the air was full of threatenings. The country was clearly on the verge of civil war, and the feeling almost as intense as it was in the following April, after the flash of Edmund Ruffin's gun had fired the ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... finance of that day desired. He had actually held court in one of that financier's rooms. One expression in one of the judge's letters to this financier I shall always remember: "I am willing to go to the very verge of judicial discretion to serve your vast interests." The curious thing was that I was by no means certain that the judge himself was corrupt. He may have been; but I am inclined to think that, aside from his being a man of coarse moral fiber, the trouble ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... corrupt governments had contracted foreign loans under conditions that made their repayment almost impossible and had spent the proceeds in so reckless and extravagant a fashion as to bring the country to the verge of bankruptcy. Bolivia, similarly governed, was still the scene of the orgies and carnivals which had for some time characterized its unfortunate history. One of its buffoon "presidents," moreover, had entered into boundary agreements with both Chile and ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... boy," Sinclair protested, "while that sort of philanthropy is very delightful when one can afford the luxury, it is scarcely practical when one is teetering on the verge of financial ruin. After all, Bryce, self-preservation is the first law of human nature, and the sale of those farms would go a long way toward helping the Cardigan Redwood Lumber Company out of the hole it ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... chart pictorial of the past is made, In which minute events are all portray'd— One painful glance the scroll entire surveys And then in death the blasted eye-balls glaze— Perchance at that dark moment when the maid On life's dim verge her coming doom survey'd, Such vision flash'd across her spirit pure, And help'd the youthful beauty to endure. Her infant sports beneath the spreading lime, Her recent school-days, in a northern clime— Her gentle deeds—her treasur'd ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... his way, to Max's horror, close to the verge, and, with a grin of delight, the young gillie followed him, to climb every now and then on the top of some projecting block right over the brink, and so that had he dropped a stone it would have fallen ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... sufferer, and skillful and assiduous in providing for them every needed comfort so far as lay in her power, she proved herself a true Christian heroine in the extent and spirit of her labors, and sent joy to the heart of many who were on the verge of despair. ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... another, and you determine to paint up to yourself, if you cannot come up to Nature. Every object becomes lustrous from the light thrown back upon it by the mirror of art: and by the aid of the pencil we may be said to touch and handle the objects of sight. The air-drawn visions that hover on the verge of existence have a bodily presence given them on the canvas: the form of beauty is changed into a substance: the dream and the glory of the universe is made 'palpable to feeling as well as sight.'—And ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... of encyclopaedists. Force inexhaustible, and inexhaustible willingness to give out force; unappeasable curiosity to know; irresistible impulse to impart knowledge; versatile capacity to do every thing, carried to the verge, if not carried beyond the verge, of incapacity to do any thing thoroughly well; quenchless zeal and quenchless hope; levity enough of temper to keep its subject free from those depressions of spirit and those cares of conscience which weigh and wear on the over-earnest man; abundant ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... behaved so badly and flirted so outrageously with his withered lordship, that he became perfectly imbecile toward the close of the entertainment, and his poor old wife was reduced almost to the verge of tears. I blushed for her; I ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... irresistible. We danced and danced until the earth seemed to reel around us. I could perceive, however, even in the whirl of tumultuous delight which forced me onward, that we neared the water's edge in every successive figure. We stood at length on the verge of the stream. The current caught my dress, the villagers shrieked aloud, and rushed to rescue me ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... the same. For where had been a progress, otherwise? Mankind, made up of all the single men— In such a synthesis the labor ends. Now mark me! those divine men of old time Have reached, thou sayest well, each at one point The outside verge that rounds our faculty; And where they reached, who can do more than reach? It takes but little water just to touch At some one point the inside of a sphere, 100 And, as we turn the sphere, touch all the rest In due succession: but the finer air Which not so palpably nor obviously, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... a few miles of the frozen Baltic on the very verge of Russia, at that point where old Europe stretches a long arm out into the unknown. The cobbler was wrapped in a sheepskin coat, which stood out all round him with the stiffness of wood, so that he seemed to be living inside a box. To keep himself warm he occasionally limped ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... earth as one. 'Tis the same with the other subjects,—one and all are of vital, human interest, and are extremely attractive on account of their importance in the civilization of today. Mighty, sublime, wonderful, as have been the achievements of past science, as yet we are but on the verge of the continents of discovery. Where is the wizard who can tell what lies in the womb of time? Just as our conceptions of many things have been revolutionized in the past, those which we hold to-day ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... what I had preconceived it, though I was not prepared to find it turned into a sort of Christian church, with a pulpit on the verge of the open space. . . . . The French soldiers, who keep guard within it, as in other public places in Rome, have an excellent opportunity to secure ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... nothing of the edict at the time—for bushmen do not advertise their chivalry—and wandered round the straggling Settlement vaguely surprised at its sobriety, and turning up in such unexpected places that the little bushman was constantly on the verge of apoplexy. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... Literature by Mr. Van Laun, one of the masters of the Edinburgh Academy, where I will venture to hope that other authorities on English Literature are at the same time admitted. "Jonas" (also in Chuzzlewit) "is on the verge of madness. There are other characters quite mad. Dickens has drawn three or four portraits of madmen, very agreeable at first sight, but so true that they are in reality horrible. It needed an imagination like his, irregular, excessive, capable ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the report of the committee, which gave a vote to every male citizen twenty-one years old, who had resided six months in the State and who had within one year paid taxes or a road assessment, or had been enrolled and served in the militia. Although, said Van Buren, this report is on the verge of universal suffrage, it did not cheapen the invaluable right, by conferring it indiscriminately upon every one, black or white, who would condescend to accept it. He was opposed, he said, to a precipitate and unexpected prostration ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... stands on yonder snowy horn Having nought o'er him but the boundless blue, So, these sins being slain, the man is come NIRVANA's verge unto. ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... this way and that, only seven or eight feet wide at its best. It was filled with noisy crowds of men who acted as if they were on the verge of a terrible fight. But the older missionaries knew that they were merely acting as Chinese crowds always do. On each side were shops,—tea shops, rice shops, tobacco shops, and many other kinds. And most numerous ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... less real than it seemed, but helped to steady one who was holding herself together with a struggle, on the verge ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the deepest and most genuine sort; and, all the time that it lasted, he had never once thought of either wives, children, or sweethearts, save in the way of dreaming about them; but, as his spirit began again by slow degrees to verge towards the boundaries of reason, it became lighter and more buoyant from the effects of deep repose, and his dreams partook of that buoyancy, yea, to a degree hardly expressible. He dreamed of the reel, the jig, the strathspey, and the corant; ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... conquest—that estate which spread out under the setting sun. And again, as in the morning, did recollections crowd upon him; he remembered a morning more than forty years previously when he had left Marianne, with thirty sous in her purse, in the little tumbledown shooting-box on the verge of the woods. They lived there on next to nothing; they owed money, they typified gay improvidence with the four little mouths which they already had to feed, those children who had sprung from their love, their ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... abstract womanliness—to the "wimmen nater," of which Jim was so frank an admirer. The gulf which was between them had never yet been crossed, even in imagination, though it is presumable; that, unknown to himself, Jim was trembling on the verge of it at this moment, dragged thither by the excitement of prospective wealth and the possibilities involved in it, and by the recollection of the pleasant words and smiles of this, to him, queen ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... things frowned on elsewhere, without losing caste. He may, for instance, drink heavily, appearing in public when plainly intoxicated, and no one thinks much the worse of him. He may be in debt up to the verge of bankruptcy and yet retain his position in society. But he may not marry his cook. When old Sir Tony Corless did that, he lost caste. He was a baronet of long descent, being, in fact, the fifth Corless ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... place of execution, Hamp appeared very composed and with a cheerfulness that is seldom seen in the countenances of persons when they come to the tree, and are on the very verge of death. He spoke for a few moments to the people saying that he been a grievous sinner, much addicted to women, and much more to drinking; that for these crimes, he thought the Justice of God righteous in bringing him to a shameful death; but as ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... sun went down like a shield of burning brass over the gray line of the prairie on the morrow, a cringing, stealthy-looking man might be seen riding a sorrel pony towards the verge of Alka Swamp, near which were camped the painted warriors of Tall Elk. As he drew near the squaws began to clap their hands, and the lean, ugly dogs gave several short yelps. Tall Elk came to the door of his wigwam, wherein sat several pretty young Cree wives sewing beads and dainty work upon ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... ladies, in their usual health, saw their husbands in their rooms, when, in fact, they were in the drawing- room or study. Here then are eight cases of non-coincidental hallucination, some of people awake, some of people probably on the verge of sleep, which are wholly without 'coincidence,' wholly unveridical. None of the 'percipients' was addicted to seeing 'visions ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... violently that she sprang forward and dropped the bucket. The sound of voices reached her from the thick wood bordering the path, and, without reflection, she followed the dog, who bounded off toward the point whence it issued. Upon the verge of the forest she paused, and, looking down a dewy green glade where the rising sun darted the earliest arrowy rays, beheld a spectacle which burned itself indelibly upon her memory. A group of five gentlemen stood beneath the dripping chestnut and sweet-gum arches; ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... you read these papers. He soon discovered what manner of man your uncle was, and the kind of company the Abbey gave shelter to. It was worse than you have imagined—a whirlpool of vice and debauchery. Such vice is expensive, and a long run of bad luck at play might easily bring a man to the verge of ruin. Your uncle came to the brink of the precipice, his appetite for vice and play still insatiated. Your fortune was in his ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... their traditional generosity not merely to aid the European Relief Council in its efforts to keep alive three million, five hundred thousand starving children in Central Europe, but in addition to contribute to that enormous fund to save the thirty million Chinese who find themselves at the verge of starvation, owing to one of those recurrent famines which strike often at that densely populated and inert country, where procreative recklessness is encouraged as a matter of duty. The results ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... See had been on the verge of making a confidante of the old lady, and felt a sense of relief when the subject was ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... lady lives in Paris, as usual. After this she puts neither 'monsieur,' nor 'my friend,' nor 'dear count,' nothing at all. She begins abruptly: 'Once before, many years ago, I came to you as a suppliant. You were pitiless, and did not even deign to answer me. And yet, as I told you, I was on the verge of a terrible precipice; my brain was reeling, vertigo had seized hold of me. Deserted, I was wandering about Paris, homeless and penniless, and ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... sitting-room, behind it. A matting covered the floor, candlesticks rested on the chimney-piece, and there was no meaningless bric-a-brac, nor other objects of suspected beauty to distract attention. As you enter the house, the library occupies the large right-hand corner room. It was simple to the verge of austerity, and the farthest possible removed from a "collection." There was no effort at arrangement—they were just books, for use and for their own sake. The portfolio of fugitive notes and possible material for future ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... he was terribly afraid that this fine young gentleman, with his handsome face and graceful figure, and pleasant voice and ways, would altogether cut him out with saucy Mistress Joan, who, it must be confessed, was fond of teasing her faithful swain, and driving him to the verge of distraction. So it showed Will's good-heartedness that he did not shun and dislike his rival, but rather, when he found him bent on an errand into the forest, offered to go with him part of the way, to make sure that ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... up, leaving behind them most of their Cannon and Mortars, together with vast Quantities of all sorts of Ammunition and Provisions, scarce stopping to look back till they had left all but the very Verge of ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... any, has been committed. No competent observer, sincerely desirous of finding out the facts and influenced only by a desire for the welfare of the natives, can assert that we have not gone far enough. We have gone to the very verge of safety in hastening the process. To have taken a single step farther or faster in advance would have been folly and weakness, and might well have been crime. We are extremely anxious that the natives shall show the power of governing ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of the post-office, and for a long time without success. This little town of Grasmere seems to me as pretty a place as ever I met with in my life. It is quite shut in by hills that rise up immediately around it, like a neighborhood of kindly giants. These hills descend steeply to the verge of the level on which the village stands, and there they terminate at once, the whole site of the little town being as even as a floor. I call it a village; but it is no village at all, all the dwellings standing apart, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... of God," said Mr. Brownlow, solemnly, "do not say that now, upon the very verge of death, but tell me where they are. You know that Sikes is dead, that Monks has confessed, that there is no hope of any further gain. ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... Confederate Government, under the circumstances, is perhaps unexampled in history. It was carried to the extreme verge, short of a disregard of the safety of the people who had intrusted to that government the duty of their defense against their enemies. The attempt to represent us as the aggressors in the conflict which ensued is as unfounded as the complaint made by the wolf against the lamb in the familiar ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... Bible in terms of lordly condescension, and then, changing his manner suddenly, he spoke of the rise and fall of Stratford-upon-Avon in such mournful tones that any one who did not know him might have imagined that he was on the verge of tears. ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... sunset's crimson flags perhaps it goes, And reappears with yellow Jupiter, Riding the West beside the crescent moon. Comes it with sunrise, when the sunrise floats From Night's bold towers, vast in the East, and gray Till tower and wall flash into fiery clouds, Moving along the verge, stately and slow, Ordered by the old music of the spheres? Perchance it trembles in October's oaks; Or, twining with the brilliant, berried vine, Would hide the tender, melancholy elm. Well might it rest within those solemn woods Where sunlight ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... whimsically pretending to clip the locks of the male patrons with a pair of drumsticks held scissor-wise. And so it came about that, just as Mr. Carmyle was bending towards Sally in an access of manly sentiment, and was on the very verge of pouring out his soul in a series of well-phrased remarks, he was surprised and annoyed to find an Ethiopian to whom he had never been introduced leaning over him and taking quite unpardonable liberties with ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... pleading, passionate strain The yearning theme, and let the flute reply In placid melody, while violins complain, And sob, and sigh, With muted string; Then let the oboe half-reluctant sing Of bliss that trembles on the verge of pain, While 'cellos plead and plead again, With throbbing notes delayed, that would impart To every urgent tone the beating of the heart. So runs the andante, making plain The hopes and fears of love without a word. Then comes ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... no means subsided, and presently he found himself on the verge of tears—a pitiable, despicable object. The Vicomte—soothing and benevolent—went on to explain more fully the position of his own affairs. He told us that on information received from a sure source he had months earlier concluded that the Emperor's illness ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... des enfans au Sabbat auec du Cresme, que des femmes apportent, & frottent la verge de quelque homme, & en font sortir de la semence qu'elles amassent, & la meslent auec le Cresme, puis mettent cela sur la teste de l'enfant en prononcant ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... abolished, and adoption itself, destined to lose almost all its ancient importance in the reformed system of Justinian, can no longer be effected without the assent of the child transferred to the adoptive parentage. In short, we are brought very close to the verge of the ideas which have at length prevailed in the modern world. But between these widely distant epochs there is an interval of obscurity, and we can only guess at the causes which permitted the Patria Potestas to last as long as it did by rendering it more tolerable ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... was in a state of suppressed excitement. The German men servants, without the usual protection of a brilliant uniform, looked as if they would like to drop everything and hide themselves in the coal cellar. The maids were almost on the verge of tears. Mrs. Jones, with all the jewelry on that she possessed, was moving about with a flushed face seeing that everything was ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... secret, ubiquitous societies were organized, the democratic papers were preparing to reappear, the reports from the Departments were unfavorable, the fugitives of Geneva conducted a conspiracy via Lyons through the whole of southern France, France stood on the verge of an industrial and commercial crisis, the manufacturers of Roubaix were working shorter hours, the prisoners of Belle Isle had mutinied;—it was enough that even a mere Baisse should conjure up the "Red Spectre" for the party of Order to reject without discussion a ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... was the crack in the plain below their feet, and they were standing upon its very verge where it came in close to the mountain, whose top was some seven hundred feet above their heads, while here its perpendicular side went down for fully another thousand to where, in the solemn dark depths of the vast canyon or crack in the rocky crust ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... this, and the word drawers, which was also once a most refined expression, are falling into disuse, and people talk vaguely of "underlinen" in speaking of these garments. The shops which are always refined to the verge of vulgarity only allow themselves to use the ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... Persia, the Mogul Empire, the Indies as far as the frontier of China, and the Islands of Sunda. Dazzled by the immense fortune which his traffic had obtained for him, Tavernier would play the lord, and soon saw himself on the verge of ruin, which he hoped to avert by sending one of his nephews to the east with a considerable venture, but instead, his ruin was consummated by this young man, who, judging it best to appropriate the goods which had been confided to him, settled down at Ispahan. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... was our fate to push bad as well as good fortune to the utmost verge of improbability, I will endeavour to keep the promise I have made you to the conclusion. Moreover, when the history of great men relates even their last moments, how can I conceal the last sighs of the grand army when it was expiring? Every thing connected ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... the same day, Anna Vassilyevna was sitting in her drawing-room and was on the verge of weeping. There were also in the room her husband and a certain Uvar Ivanovitch Stahov, a distant cousin of Nikolai Artemyevitch, a retired cornet of sixty years old, a man corpulent to the point of immobility, with sleepy yellowish eyes, and colourless ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... over his drowning head, When his nostrils and lungs were filled, when his feet and hands were as lead, When against the rock he was hurl'd, and suck'd again to the sea, On the shores of another world, on the brink of eternity, On the verge of annihilation, did it come to that swimmer strong, The sudden interpretation of your ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... god's motive was probably to assert himself. I doubt if Chu-bu understood or cared for his motive; it was sufficient for an idol already aflame with jealousy that his detestable rival was on the verge of a miracle. All the power of Chu-bu veered round at once and set dead against an earthquake, even a little one. It was thus in the temple of Chu-bu for some time, and ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... moment over Mrs. Sherwood, but finally let her go without protest. When the last guest had departed she sank into a chair. As she was already on the verge of hysterics, she easily kept up an ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... his hand on his thigh and stood hesitating on the verge. "Gibberne," I cried, coming up, "put it down. This heat is too much! It's our running so! Two or three miles a second! ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... far as I have observed, as a rule gets up with reluctance, and begins with difficulty. Just as you are beginning to feel seriously anxious for him, you gradually discover that he is on the verge of saying some uncommonly good thing. Before you are fully prepared for it he says that good thing, and then to your infinite amazement he ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... happened except in a place like this!" declared the Queen, now on the verge of hysteria. "And why it should have been permitted to happen to US!—It wouldn't have, Sidney, if you had only had the sense to insist on that thing being destroyed! But you didn't—and this ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... the lagoon he halted suddenly. Something startled him. He was quite certain that he had counted fourteen corpses. Now there were only twelve. The two Lascars' bodies, which rested on the small group of rocks on the verge of the lagoon, ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... posted from a distant country, and his way through Dijon had been truly a Via Dolorosa. Thirty-six people standing in the corridor, and in his own crowded compartment—he had surrendered his royal prerogative of exclusion—was a woman on the verge of hysteria, finding relief not in tears but in an endless recital of her sorrow. She and her husband had a son—the only son of his mother—gone to the front, reported badly wounded, and for days, like Joseph and Mary, the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... indifference towards the foot-bridge that shortened the walk to the Church, but he was still more than one hundred yards from it, when on the opposite side he beheld Sydney herself. She was on the very verge of the stream, below the steep, slippery clay bank, clinging hard with one hand to the bared root of a willow stump, and with the other striving to uphold the head and shoulder of a child, the rest of whose person was in ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nature of Pa's recently acquired eccentricities, but Allie was flushing and paling as a result of her sudden excursion into the audible. Eventually she trembled upon the verge of speech once more, then she took ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... the verge of Jordan Bid my anxious fears subside; Death of death, and hell's destruction, Land me safe on Canaan's side. Songs of praises I will ever give ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... perfectly in the right. She has a sphere of her own, which has no more to do with our world than if she lived in the evening-star. She exists simply to enjoy homage, and to reward it, as you have seen, by a song or a smile; yet she has been on the verge of the scaffold. Some of our most powerful political characters are contending for her influence, her fortune, or her hand; and whether the contest will end in raising M. Tallien to the head of the Republic, or extinguishing him within ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... may be said "their name is legion." So many species exist, and the various species are so difficult to differentiate, that the family drives most field ornithologists to the verge of despair. Many of the Indian warblers are only winter visitors to India. Eliminating these, only two warblers are entitled to a place among the common birds of the Nilgiris. These are the tailor-bird and ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... glance. Masterson still suspected him, and was listening! Monroe frankly laughed and made a little sound, the mere whisper of a whistle, as he met Masterson's baffled look with one of cool mockery; it was nonchalant to the verge of insolence, and enraged the Southerner, strong in his convictions of right, as a blow could not have done. For a blow a man could strike back, ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... on and "clues" came to nothing, the police had no greater concern than quietly to forget, according to custom, a problem beyond their limited powers. With the release of the German musician, who was found to be simple-minded to the verge of half-wittedness, public interest waned, and the case faded out of ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... family. He had been there eleven years, but they had been hard years of poverty, and he could leave without regret were it not that he should have to leave Tycho's instruments and observations behind him. While he was hesitating what best to do, and reduced to the verge of despair, his wife, who had long been suffering from low spirits and despondency, and his three children, were taken ill; one of the sons died of small-pox, and the wife eleven days after of low fever ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... deducing from my melancholy that I was tired of holidays and would be glad to get back to school, and my brother burdening me with idle messages to the other boys-messages that shattered my hardly formed hope that school did not really exist. I stood ever on the verge of tears, and I dreaded meal-times, when I had to leave my solitude, lest some turn of the conversation should set me weeping before them all, and I should hear once more what I knew very well myself, that it was a shameful thing for a boy of my age to cry like a little ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... envelope!—But I forgive her, Since she did leave the rich contents behind. Amelia, give this feather more a slope, That it sit droopingly. I would look all Dissolvement, nought about me to bespeak Boldness! I would appear a timid bride, Trembling upon the verge of wifehood, as I ne'er before had stood there! That will do. Oh dear!—How I am agitated—don't I look so? I have found a secret out,— Nothing in woman strikes a man so much As to look interesting! Hang this cheek Of mine! It is too saucy; what a pity To have ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... flattery of the admirer or connivance of the indulgent, As we entreat thee to exempt us from exposure To the slight of the detractor or aspersion of the defamer: And we ask thy forgiveness Should our frailties betray us into ambiguities, As we ask thy forgiveness Should our steps advance to the verge of improprieties: And we beg thee freely to bestow Propitious succor to lead us aright, And a heart turning in unison with truth, And a language adorned with veracity, And style supported by conclusiveness, And accuracy that may exclude incorrectness, And firmness of purpose ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with his accustomed sense of critical values has to our notion definitely summed up the question: "His classicism is absolutely unacademic, his romanticism unreal beyond the verge of mysticism and so preoccupied with visions that he may almost be called a man for whom the actual world does not exist—in the converse of Gautier's phrase. His distinction is wholly personal. He lives evidently on a high plane, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... have had to encounter since I last wrote to you have been so many and formidable that I have been frequently on the verge of despairing ever to obtain permission to print the Gospel in Spain, which has become the most ardent wish of my heart. Only those who have been in the habit of dealing with Spaniards, by whom the most solemn promises are habitually ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... Mr Devlin take all the credit that is due to him for preventing Sir Edward Carson's arrest, considering that he and his Order had been mainly the cause of bringing Carson to the verge of rebellion, but that gentleman himself seems to have a different opinion about it if we are to put any credence in the following extract from Colonel Repington's Diary of the First World War, ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... Western Express had swept her through a thousand miles of wilderness, a vast tract of forest filled with rocks and lakes and rivers; and then she had spent two days in Winnipeg on the verge of the prairie. This city she found perplexing. The station hall was palatial, part of wide Main Street and Portage Avenue with their stately banks and offices could hardly be too much admired, ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... himself together. Even if he did not take her, he would make her relax, he would fuse away her resistance. So softly, softly, with infinite caressiveness he kissed her, and the whole of his being seemed to fondle her. Till, at the verge, swooning at the breaking point, there came from her a beaten, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... ruching in her bonnet. The exquisite simplicity of her soul was reflected in the rose-leaf delicacy of her skin, in her benignant and innocent smile, in the serene and joyous glance of her eyes. Never in her life had she thought evil of any one, and she did not mean to begin on the verge of the grave, with the hope of a peaceful eternity before her. If dear Gabriella had "discarded" dear Arthur, then she could only hope and pray that dear Gabriella would not live ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... sprung astraddle the corner of the billiard table, where, absurdly solemn, he declaimed tragically, combing the classics for sepulchral passages, plunging the intent listeners into deepest melancholy but concluding with a droll extemporization that swept them from verge of ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... stood on the verge of the great upheaval and knew it not. We were thinking of holidays; of cricket and golf and bathing, and then were suddenly plunged in the deep waters of the greatest of all Wars. It has been a month ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... the new company took an honest view of its obligations—but only for a time. Within a year or so, Quebec was again on the verge of starvation; and in the spring of 1629 the famished inhabitants were eagerly awaiting the Company's ships from France. By July their patience was almost worn out, when at last the watchers at Cap Tourmente brought the news that a fleet of six vessels had reached ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... that it was time he went in. He found Platt in the silk department, apparently on the verge of another plunge into the exterior world. "Cosy Comfort at Cut Prices," said ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... the Coombe of Coombes. I write while waiting for the fly, and shall post this at Weymouth, where we are to be met. We have been so happy here, that I could be sentimental, if Leonard were not tete-a-tete with me, and on the verge of that predicament. "Never so happy in his life," quoth he, "and never will be again—wonders when he shall gee this white cliff again." But, happily, in tumbles Aubrey with the big claw of a crab, which he insists on Leonard's wearing next ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hour or two the sun was hidden by banks of leaden cloud, but the temperature did not fall and there was an oppressive heaviness in the air. The prairie had faded to a sweep of lifeless gray, obscured above its verge. The men made progress, however; and late in the afternoon a winding line of timber that marked the river's course appeared ahead. Shortly afterward, Edgar ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... oligarchy; while those who dwelt along the seashore, called Parali, preferred a constitution midway between these two forms, and thus prevented either of the other parties from carrying their point. Moreover, the state was on the verge of revolution, because of the excessive poverty of some citizens, and the enormous wealth of others, and it appeared that the only means of putting an end to these disorders was by establishing an absolute despotism. The whole people were in debt ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... it is a pure spring melody. The little piper will sometimes climb a bulrush, to which he clings like a sailor to a mast, and send forth his shrill call. There is a Southern species, heard when you have reached the Potomac, whose note is far more harsh and crackling. To stand on the verge of a swamp vocal with these, pains and stuns the ear. The call of the Northern species is far more tender ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... praise thee, (Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee) Alike from Priestcraft's harpy minions, 95 And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves, Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions, The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves! And there I felt thee!—on that sea-cliff's verge, Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above, 100 Had made one murmur with the distant surge! Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare, And shot my being through earth, sea and air, Possessing all things ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to aid the European Relief Council in its efforts to keep alive three million, five hundred thousand starving children in Central Europe, but in addition to contribute to that enormous fund to save the thirty million Chinese who find themselves at the verge of starvation, owing to one of those recurrent famines which strike often at that densely populated and inert country, where procreative recklessness is encouraged as a matter of duty. The results of this international charity have not justified ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... slope. When I reached the point where the cougar had entered the slide, I called the hounds, but they did not come nor answer me. Notwithstanding my excitement, I appreciated the distance to the bottom of the slope before I reached it. In my haste, I ran upon the verge of a precipice twice as deep as the first rim wall, but one glance down ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... a sensitive and sympathetic mind than that of a minister when he stands up in the pulpit and looks down on the congregation? What a variety of conditions are before him! In one pew there is a man who during the week has been fighting a losing battle with his business and sees himself on the verge of bankruptcy; in the next may be a merchant into whose lap fortune has been pouring her gifts in handfuls. Here is a mother who is thinking of her son who has just left his home and is sailing on the sea; and there a girl whose heart is rejoicing in the happy dreams of youth. On the ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... pretext for absence as a positive flight from derision. She met the good priest's eyes before they separated, and priests were really, at the worst, so to speak, such wonderful people that she believed him for an instant on the verge of saying to her, in abysmal softness: "Go to Mrs. Verver, my child—YOU go: you'll find that you can help her." This didn't come, however; nothing came but the renewed twiddle of thumbs over the satisfied stomach and the full flush, the comical candour, of reference ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... while to notice cases in which the rod acts like those of the Melanesians, Africans, and other savages. A Mr. Thomas Welton published an English translation of 'La Verge de Jacob' (Lyon, 1693). In 1651 he asked his servant to bring into the garden 'a stick that stood behind the parlour door. In great terror she brought it to the garden, her hand firmly clutched on it, nor could she let it go.' When Mrs. Welton took the stick, 'it drew her with very ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... have come up here to defend this city. You ask me my opinion of the present state of the country. It is bad enough. The utter incompetency of Mr. Davis and his West Point generals have brought us to the verge of ruin. If McClellan is unwise enough to fight us here, we shall whip and drive him out of Virginia.... As to Richmond, it will never be taken while ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... to take Polly over to Colonel Gresham's," the Doctor explained. "He keeps on calling for 'Eva,' and nothing will quite him. He is on the verge of collapse." ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd
... filled the ravine, and there was little difference between the darkness underneath the trees and that outside in open spaces of the grove. We trusted to our horses to make out the path, which sometimes ran along the verge of precipices. ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... holidays; he also suggested that their affair—"their" affair!—be kept quiet for the present. Yet he had all too facile a vision of beatific meditations that were like enough to give the situation away to all the household; and he was nervously aware of Amy Leffingwell as continually on the verge ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... hereditary estates, but whose name was not preceded by the little word to which the throne owed so many partisans, and his second to a magistrate too lately Baronified to obscure the fact that his father had sold firewood. This noteworthy change in the ideas of a noble on the verge of his sixtieth year—an age when men rarely renounce their convictions—was due not merely to his unfortunate residence in the modern Babylon, where, sooner or later, country folks all get their corners rubbed down; the Comte ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... done growling Lancelot usually started. He paced up and down the room, swearing audibly. Then he would sit down at the table and cover ruled paper with hieroglyphics for hours together. His movements were erratic to the verge of mystery. He had no fixed hours for anything; to Mary Ann he was hopeless. At any given moment he might be playing on the piano, or writing on the curiously ruled paper, or stamping about the room, or sitting ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... floor with nervous, uneven strides. He plunged his hand into his coat pocket and drew out the letter again. He re-read it, with hot eyes and straining thought. Every word seemed to sear itself upon his poor brain, and drive him to the verge of distraction. Why? Why? And he raised his bloodshot eyes to the roof of his hut, and crushed the paper in ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... streams and pools reflecting the darkly mournful sunset." He described visits to his country neighbours and long drives in gay company, during which, he says, "we ate every half hour, and laughed to the verge of colic." ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... of Smart's works expressly omitted to print it on the ground that it bore too many "melancholy proofs of the estrangement of Smart's mind" to be fit for republication. It became rare to the very verge of extinction, and is now scarcely to be found in its entirety save in a pretty reprint of 1819, itself now rare, due to the piety of a ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... cake, and wondered whether he was wise in looking so decided. Perhaps he ought to suppress his undoubted force; perhaps all his life, without knowing it, he had hovered on the verge of the blatant. ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... very late for dinner, and found his hostess on the verge of annoyance. Mrs. Watton was a large, commanding woman, who seldom thought it worth while to disguise any disapproval she might feel—and she had a great deal of that commodity to expend, both on persons ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and the United States between Peru and Ecuador; the bringing of the boundary dispute between Panama and Costa Rica to peaceful arbitration; the staying of warlike preparations when Haiti and the Dominican Republic were on the verge of hostilities; the stopping of a war in Nicaragua; the halting of internecine strife in Honduras. The Government of the United States was thanked for its influence toward the restoration of amicable ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... MacRae came slowly to these half-formed, disturbing conclusions he was already upon the verge of other disturbing discoveries in the realm ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... with grandmamma, and he used sometimes to look in on me, and talk to me about this Magdalen. Once he showed me her photograph and I thought I knew her face again. But my father went off, very angry. I have always feared he found poor Hal on the verge of tampering with the bank money, but he never would say a word. He broke everything up, put an end to the engagement if there was one, and sent Hal off to John and George, who had just got their farm in Manitoba, and were getting on ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... been a hard one for Janet, and she was now on the verge of giving way under it. Her shoulders shook, and she put her face in her hands. David heard ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... detailed from Company D, for guard duty. The camp ground was a large, open plain, bordering on one side upon a dense forest. The night was dark and dismal, and at nine o'clock Richard found himself walking his lonely beat, on the verge of the forest. There was a novelty about the situation that was very attractive to him, and as he walked his solitary round, he actually enjoyed it. It was not to all probable that an enemy, or even a straggler, would disturb the quiet of the scene ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... triumph of party is infinitely dearer than the maintenance of principle. Hence the conflict becomes a struggle, not for principle, but for victory. The people are distracted and the nation brought to the verge of ruin over the most trivial matters. The Eastern empire was once shaken to its foundation by parties which differed only about the merits of charioteers at ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... him?" Larry was quite eager now. He seemed to be on the verge of discovering something; if not of the Potter mystery then of the other, that cropped up every now and again—that of the man he had ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis
... person who was ever known to lie under the suspicion of one single Tory principle, or who had been once seen at a great man's levee in the worst of times,[148] should be allowed to come within the verge of the Castle; much less to bow in the antechamber, appear at the assemblies, or dance at a birth-night. However, I dare assert, that this maxim hath been often controlled, and that on the contrary a considerable number ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... affectionate parent considers his child like a flower in the bud, as a mine of power that is to be unfolded, as a creature that is to act and to pass through he knows not what, as a canvas that "gives ample room and verge enough," for his prophetic soul to hang over in endless visions, and his intellectual pencil to fill up with various scenes and fortunes. And, if the parent does not understand his child, certainly as little does the child ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... Her husband's noisy outburst seemed to have shaken her nerves; the downward lines formed themselves at the corners of her mouth; and her eyelids fluttered as if she were on the verge of tears. "Will," she murmured, "you—you ought to listen, if it's good advice. Mr. Ridgett knows the ropes—he, he has ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... not wish to force myself upon you," I said icily as I left. The poor man appeared to be on the verge of having ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... and less privileged portion of the ship. The violence of the passage, the hurried reeving of cords, and all the fearful preparations of a nautical execution, appeared but the business of a moment, to him who stood so near the verge of time. ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... Kalevala, Sailing o'er the rolling billows, Sailing through the azure vapours, Sailing through the dusk of evening, Sailing to the fiery sunset, To the higher landed regions, To the lower verge of heaven; Quickly gained the far horizon, Gained the purple-coloured harbour, There his bark he firmly anchored, Rested in his boat of copper; But he left his harp of magic, Left his songs and wisdom sayings To ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... cider mill (for such things were in New England) in the orchard was the remotest verge in one direction; to sit near it, and watch the horse go slowly round and round, and chat with Chauncey, the youngest son of the house, who was superintending it, was a great pleasure; but most of my out-of-doors ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... he sat in a corner fenced off from the rest of us by a small table; but he barely tasted it, and after a bit he lay down in his corner, with his arm for a pillow, and almost instantly was asleep, breathing heavily, like a man on the verge of exhaustion. A few minutes later we heard, from Sergeant Rosenthal, that the prisoner's brother-in-law had been killed the day before, and that he—the little officer—had ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... close to the brute a man may remain than it is to see how far he may leave the brute behind. How it began I cannot recall; but this youth, a lad of seventeen, whether moved by dislike or the mere fascination of injury, was in the habit of teasing me beyond the verge of endurance as often as he had the chance. I did not like to complain to my father, though that would have been better than to hate him as I did. I was ashamed of my own impotence for self-defence; but ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... symbols which they used; and teach the same great cardinal doctrines that they taught, of the existence of an intellectual God, and the immortality of the soul of man. If the details of their doctrines as to the soul seem to us to verge on absurdity, let us compare them with the common notions of our own day, and be silent. If it seems to us that they regarded the symbol in some cases as the thing symbolized, and worshipped the sign as if it were itself Deity, let us reflect ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... one always does in Devon, she had walked herself to the verge of scragginess, then had gradually put on weight, as is the correct method. Her whistle could be heard in the woods and fields, and on the beach from Lee to Hartland way; all the country folk loved her, and scolded her for the risks she took in swimming, ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... arrangement was not calculated to produce any result in the way of a steam-blast in the chimney. In fact, the waste steam seems to have been turned into the chimney in order to get rid of the nuisance caused by throwing the jet directly into the air. Trevithick was here hovering on the verge of a great discovery; but that he was not aware of the action of the blast in contributing to increase the draught and thus quicken combustion, is clear from the fact that he employed bellows for this special purpose; and at a much ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... in her kitchen. He could imagine Mrs. Lawton's fatuous conversation in the de Laney's drawing-room, or Maude Eliza's dressed-up self-consciousness. The experience of having the three Westerners to dinner just once would, Bennington knew, drive his lady mother to the verge of nervous prostration—he remembered his father's one and only experience in bringing business connections home to lunch—; his imagination failed to picture the effect of her having to endure them as actual members of the family! As ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... plant upon which the caterpillars, when they hatch out of these eggs, must feed. The study of the Life History of Insects has always been of great interest to me, as I firmly believe that we are on the verge of a great discovery, and that the first indications are being revealed to us through the investigation of the Biology of Insects. Some of you may, perhaps, have watched this progress of ovipositing, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... paralyzed, and my limbs so stiffened with cold as to be almost immovable. Fearing lest paralysis should suddenly seize the entire system, I literally dragged myself through the forest to the river. Seated near the verge of the great canon below the falls, I anxiously awaited the appearance of the sun. That great luminary never looked so beautiful as when, a few moments afterwards, he emerged from the clouds and exposed his glowing beams to the concentrated powers of my lens. I kindled a mighty flame, ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts
... youngest daughter of Montezuma, and was hardly yet on the verge of womanhood. On the accession of her cousin Guatemotzin to the throne, she had been wedded to him as his lawful wife. She is celebrated by her contemporaries for her personal charms; and the beautiful Princess Tecuichpo is still commemorated by the Spaniards, since ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... of Girlhood," full of incident and humor. The "Seven Daughters" are characters which reappear in some of Miss Douglas' later books. In this book they form a delightful group, hovering on the verge of Womanhood, with all the little perplexities of home life and love dreams as incidentals, making a fresh ...
— All Adrift - or The Goldwing Club • Oliver Optic
... is acquainted with his Writings, will remember that the elder Cato is introduced in that Discourse as the Speaker, and Scipio and Lelius as his Auditors. This venerable Person is represented looking forward as it were from the Verge of extreme Old Age, into a future State, and rising into a Contemplation on the unperishable Part of his Nature, and its Existence after Death. I shall collect Part of his Discourse. And as you ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... sons of Boreas, whom once Oreithyia, daughter of Erechtheus, bare to Boreas on the verge of wintry Thrace; thither it was that Thracian Boreas snatched her away from Cecropia as she was whirling in the dance, hard by Ilissus' stream. And, carrying her far off, to the spot that men called the rock of Sarpedon, near the river Erginus, he wrapped her ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... artists can give us. Long after we have exhausted both the intensest sympathies and the most violent antipathies with which the representative elements in his pictures may have inspired us, we are only on the verge of fully appreciating his real genius. This in its happiest moments is an unparalleled power of perfectly combining values of ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... imagination. There are few people in real life sufficiently interesting or uncommonplace to suit the novelist's purpose, but he must idealize or intensify them before they are fit subjects for art. Dickens intensified to the verge of the impossible, yet we never feel that Dick Swiveller and Sam Weller and Mr. Micawber, and the rest of them, are unnatural; they are only, if I may coin the word, 'hypernatural.' It is the business of art to idealize. Even at its best art is so inferior ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... to write verse without rhyme or very much reason, whose only virtue shall be lines of exact length with meter regular to the verge of singsongness. As an exercise, too, it is helpful to take a dozen lines or more of good verse and break them up into feet. The greatest poets are not necessarily the best for this purpose, owing to the irregularity of much of their work. It is better for ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... about evening when I came onto a fine large plain. Behind me was the canyon, gloomy like the lair of some evil beast, while before me the sun was setting, and made the valley like a sea of golden glaze. I stood, knight-errant-wise, on the verge of one of those enchanted lands of precious memory, seeking the princess of my dreams; but all I saw was a man coming up the trail. He was reeling homeward, with under one arm a live turkey, and swinging from the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... the deep husky voice of the prisoner, snatched back, as it were, from the very verge of the grave to liberty and life. "Amen, with all ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... danger, which you thought proper yourselves to aggravate, and to display to the world with all the parade of indiscreet declamation. The monopoly of the most lucrative trades and the possession of imperial revenues had brought you to the verge of beggary and ruin. Such was your representation; such, in some measure, was your case. The vent of ten millions of pounds of this commodity, now locked up by the operation of an injudicious tax, and rotting ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... chime of bells,— perhaps both, at different times,—has tumbled down; but the present church is what we Americans should call venerable. When the first church was built, and long afterwards, it must have stood on the grassy verge of the Mersey; but now there are pavements and warehouses, and the thronged Prince's and George's Docks, between it and the river; and all around it is the very busiest bustle of commerce, rumbling wheels, hurrying men, porter-shops, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hearts of kings!" Ferdinand crossed himself devoutly; and then, rising, drew aside a part of the drapery of the pavilion, and called; in a low voice, the name of Perez. A grave Spaniard, somewhat past the verge of ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... crosses the Canal towards the Northern verge of the Regent's Park; and nearly opposite to it is a road leading to Primrose Hill, as celebrated in the annals of Cockayne as was the Palatino among the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... did not give it "a wide berth." There were two roads to the hut, and the shorter was that which passed the public-house. Trusting to the strength of his own resolution, he chose that road. When close to the blue monster, whose creaking sign drew so many to the verge of destruction, and plunged so many over into the gulf, he was met by Skipper Ned Bryce, a sociable, reckless sort of man, of whom he was rather fond. Bryce was skipper of the Fairy, an iron smack, which was known in the fleet as ...
— The Lively Poll - A Tale of the North Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... Jesuits, and was himself of that order until its dissolution. He died as bishop of Luck. In respect to time he stands as the first eminent writer of a new period, just on the verge of the past; and even his warmest admirers do not deny that he participated, in some slight degree, in the character of that past, by a certain inclination to panegyric and a flowery style. But in energy and richness of thought, he ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... this moment was, indeed, calculated to move the hardest heart to compassion; he stood or rather bent over the cross, being scarcely able to support himself; his heavenly countenance was pale and was as that of a person on the verge of death, although wounds and blood disfigured it to a frightful degree; but the hearts of these cruel men were, alas! harder than iron itself, and far from showing the slightest commiseration, they threw him brutally down, exclaiming in a jeering ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... into with such impetuosity was upon the verge of anarchy. A strong constitutionalist, Chenier took the view that the Revolution was already complete and that all that remained to be done was the inauguration of the reign of law. Moderate as were his views and disinterested ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... shortened at both ends. Many more instances of organs, of which the beginning and end have been cut off, might be mentioned; e.g. the muscle-plate coelom of Aves, the primitive streak and the neurenteric canal of amniote blastoderms. In yet other cases in which the reduced organ is almost on the verge of disappearance, it may appear for a moment and disappear more than once in the course of development. As an instance of this striking phenomenon I may mention the neurenteric canal of avine embryos, and the anterior neuropore of Ascidians. Lastly the reduced organ may disappear ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... acknowledging the irregular marriage. This he deposited with Mr. Aitken of Ayr, who, as Burns heard, deleted the names, thus rendering the marriage null and void. This was the circumstance, what he regarded as Jean's desertion, which brought Burns, as he has said, to the verge ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... went on to talk of other things, while I stood there gasping, staring, sick at heart. All my vinous joy was gone, leaving me a haggard, weary wretch of a man, disenchanted and miserable to the verge of—what? I shuddered. The lights seemed to have gone blurred and dim. The hall was tawdry, cheap and vulgar. The women, who but a moment before had seemed creatures of grace and charm, were now nothing more than painted, posturing harridans, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... cross-examined by Mr. Dunning, was repeatedly asked if he did not lodge in the verge of the court; at length he answered that he did. "And pray, Sir," said the counsel, "for what reason did you take up your residence in that place?" "To avoid the rascally impertinence of dunning," answered ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... nuances of meaning. Tjaelde, in the author's opinion, certainly does steal, when, in order to save himself (and thereby the thousands who are involved in his affairs), he speculates with other people's money and presents a rose-colored account of his business, when he knows that he is on the verge of bankruptcy. But, on the other hand, it is extremely difficult to determine the point where legitimate speculation ceases and the illegitimate begins. And if Tjaelde neglected any legitimate ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... shone clear and cold on grey Staneholme, standing on the verge of a wide moor, with the troubled German Ocean for a background, and the piping east wind rattling each casement. There was haste and hurry in Staneholme, from the Laird's mother down through her buxom merry daughters to the bareheaded servant-lasses, and the ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... case is dull," said Jennie; "because it has brought Austria and England to the verge ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... nothing more, and he led her to the eastern side of the mountain, where, near the verge of an almost precipitous descent, they sat down together under the shadow of a great gray rock. From this point the view was more extensive than any they had commanded before. The rolling country, with the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... be seen in passing, so much does it nestle under flags and behind sedges, and it is not easy to gather because it flowers on the very verge of the running stream. The shore is bordered with matted vegetation, aquatic grass, and flags and weeds, and outside these, where its leaves are washed and purified by the clear stream, its blue petals open. Be cautious, therefore, in reaching for the forget-me-not, ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... circles. We English have rattled deep into a paradise of machines, chimneys, cinemas, and halfpenny papers; have bartered our heritage of health, dignity, and looks for wealth, and badly distributed wealth at that. France was trembling on the verge of the same precipice when the war came; with its death and wind of restlessness the war bids fair to tip her over. Let her hold back with all her might! Her two dangers are drink and the lure of the ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... snow. Concerning this part of the journey Fremont says: "We had reached and run over the position where, according to the best maps in my possession, we should have found Mary's lake or river. We were evidently on the verge of the desert, and the country was so forbidding that we ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... in Monica's eyes even more awful than the former, makes great havoc in her face, rendering her eyes large and sorrowful, and, indeed, so suffused with the heart's water that she seems upon the very verge of tears. She turns these wet but lovely orbs ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... asked concerning supposed cases, in which I was said to have been placed on the verge of discovery; but, as I maintained my point with the composure of a lawyer of thirty years' standing, I never recollect being in pain or confusion on the subject. In Captain Medwyn's Conversations of Lord Byron the reporter states himself to ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... name of slaveholder." The limit of the box not admitting of straightening himself out he was taken with the cramp on the road, suffered indescribable misery, and had his faith taxed to the utmost,—indeed was brought to the very verge of "screaming aloud" ere relief came. However, he controlled himself, though only for a short season, for before a great while an excessive faintness came over him. Here nature became quite exhausted. He thought he must "die;" ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... Anerly, who should have officiated as best man, had received instructions an hour before the ceremony to proceed to the capital of the Power with whom Britain was on the verge of war. Sheard would have given a hundred pounds for a glimpse of the dispatch ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... recording. Added to this was the intellect and the wit and erudition of the man, which were at any rate supreme. And then, though we can now see that his efforts were doomed to failure by the nature of the circumstances surrounding him, he was so nearly successful, so often on the verge of success, that we are exalted by the romance of his story into the region of personal sympathy. As we are moved by the aspirations and sufferings of a hero in a tragedy, so are we stirred by the efforts, the fortune, and at last the fall of this man. There is ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... of the district as too respectful, too humble, too prompt in removing his cap to every one, and trembling and smiling in the presence of the gendarmes,—probably affiliated to robber bands, they said; suspected of lying in ambush at verge of copses at nightfall. The only thing in his favor was ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... a sound of a door shutting; the Prince started, looked at Wogan, and laughed. He had been upon the verge of yielding; but for that door Wogan felt sure he would have yielded. Now, however, he merely walked away to the Countess of Berg, and sitting beside her asked her to play a particular tune. But he still held the slip of paper in his hand and paid but a scanty heed to the music, ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... them in and out among the rocks, and the scrub that grew close to the verge of the river. Several times he seemed a little in doubt, as the marks faded entirely away; but on such occasions his common-sense came to the rescue, and, after a look around, Frank was able to once more find ...
— The Saddle Boys in the Grand Canyon - or The Hermit of the Cave • James Carson
... farmer, rose here and there in the fields, with their thick and branching crowns; and under each was an oasis of grass and bushes, gayly colored by the fallen leaves. These trees, the dwelling-places of countless birds, alone broke the monotonous surface of the plain—these, and at the verge of the horizon, on all sides, the dark forest mentioned above. The sky was gray, the ground colorless, the trees and bushes that bordered the brook were bare, and the forest, with its promontories and bays, looked like a wall that separated this spot of earth from the rest of humanity, from civilization, ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... proud of his father, but never so proud as now, when he sat there talking to real gypsies as if they were no greater than any one. He was quite ashamed when the gypsies' dog, a gaunt, hungry-looking beast, narrowly escaped being eaten up by his own dog. But Frank, at the sheer verge of a deplorable offense, implicitly obeyed his master's command and forbore to destroy the gypsy mongrel. Again he flopped to his back at the interested approach of the other dog, held four limp paws aloft, and ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... since the shadow fell upon her; and when 'Lena produced the note, and she saw it was indeed true, the ice about her heart was melted, and in choking, long-drawn sobs, her pent-up feelings gave way, as she saw the gulf whose verge she had been treading. Crouching at 'Lena's feet, she kissed the very hem of her garments, blessing her as her preserver, and praying heaven to bless her, also. It was the work of a few moments to array her in her traveling ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... high in the air, on the look-out for breakfast; flying-fish sparkled like glittering gems out of the bosom of the heaving deep; dolphins leaped and darted here and there; a school of porpoises rotated lazily past, heading to the westward; and away upon the very verge of the horizon a large school of whales appeared spouting ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... well. We next arranged to ride over to Kucainia, a place some twenty-five miles off. It was settled that we were to start at seven o'clock in the morning, but a dense white fog obliterated the outer world—we might have been on the verge of Nowhere. It was more than two hours before the fog lifted sufficiently to enable us to proceed. We went on our way some three miles when a drenching shower came on, and we took shelter in the cavernous interior of an enormous, half-ruined oak-tree. Natural decay and the pickaxes of the woodman ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... deep wounds a nature so pale and delicate, so exposed that it seemed as if wanting an outer skin; and as Thornby Place appeared to him little more than a comprehensive symbol of what he held mean, even obscene in life, his visits had grown shorter and fewer, until now his absence extended to the verge of the second year, and besieged by the belief that he was contemplating priesthood, Mrs Norton had written to her old friend, saying that she wanted to speak to him on matters of great importance. Now maturing her plans for getting her ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... yet she was not dexterous in handling the baby, her hands were both occupied, and her attention absorbed, and she could not speak, she felt it so mournful to show this frail motherless creature to a father more like its grandfather, and already almost on the verge of the grave. She came up to Lord Keith, and held the child to him in silence. He said, "Thank you," and kissed not only the little one, but her own brow, and she kept the ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... two leagues of a town called Igualada, which is nine leagues from Barcelona, and there they learned that a cavalier who was going as ambassador to Rome, was waiting at Barcelona for the galleys, which had not yet arrived. Greatly cheered by this news, they pushed on until they came to the verge of a small wood, from which they saw a man running, and looking back over his shoulder with every appearance of terror. "What is the matter with you, good man?" said Don Rafael, going up to him. "What has happened to you, that you seem so ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... first faint flush of morn Rosendo departed for the hills. The emerald coronels of the giant ceibas on the far lake verge burned softly with a ruddy glow. From the water's dimpling surface downy vapors rose languidly in delicate tints and drew slowly out in nebulous bands across the dawn sky. The smiling softness of the velvety hills beckoned ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Wash; but the latter was far ahead. There was a second volley of gunshots and at that moment Wash came to the verge of the steep descent ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... rock. The glacis is formed of a bed of basalt in all stages of decomposition, with which this, like the other sandstone hills of Central India, was once covered, and of the debris and chippings of the rocks above. The walls are raised a certain uniform height all round upon the verge of the precipice, and being thus made to correspond with the edge of the rock, the line is extremely irregular. They are rudely built of the fine sandstone of the rock on which they stand, and have some square and some semicircular bastions of different sizes, few of these ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... warp and weave the woof The winding-sheet of Edward's race: Give ample room and verge enough The characters of hell to trace. Mark the year and mark the night When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death thro' Berkley's roof that ring, Shrieks of an agonising king! She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... well-dressed and highly cultured men and women, whose thoughts and life seemed to him to be deadly dull and uninteresting when contrasted with his own exciting life in the South Seas, palled upon and bored him to the verge of desperation. From his boyhood—from the time of his father's death he had moved among rough men—men who held their lives cheaply, but whose adventurous natures were akin to his own; men "who never had 'listed," but who traded and sailed, and fought and died from bullet, ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... the crown. Feudalism, land-tenure, military service, taxation, the church—to all was imparted, by force or by craft, such a bent that the will of the sovereign acquired the practical effect of law, and monarchy in England, traditionally weak, was brought to the verge of sheer absolutism. ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... editor of Theodore Roosevelt and His Time.] I have not called on, though I have twice started to do so, and have been switched off. ... I will go within a couple of days for the spirit must be revived. One day early in this week I had an intense desire to visit you immediately and was almost on the verge of letting things go and rush off, but duty held ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... that part of the lake. The mountains between Como and that village, or rather cluster of villages, are covered on high with chestnut forests (the eating chestnuts, on which the inhabitants of the country subsist in time of scarcity), which sometimes descend to the very verge of the lake, overhanging it with their hoary branches. But usually the immediate border of this shore is composed of laurel-trees, and bay, and myrtle, and wild fig-trees, and olives which grow in the crevices of the rocks, and overhang the caverns, and shadow ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... it was obviously prudent not to engage myself until I knew more of her, I instigated my niece in a careless way to invite her to stay a fortnight with us. She came, and once or twice I was on the verge of saying something decisive to her, but I could not. A strange terror of change in my way of life took hold upon me. I should now have to be more at home, and although I might occupy myself with the fowls during the morning and afternoon, the evening must be spent in company, and I ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... this world of theirs, in sisterly harmony. Stallard declared always that a final gift of fate and the gods preserved them to harmony: their tastes in men differed. They had choice enough, God wot—poets and novelists struggling on the verge of fame; attractive, irresponsible, magnetic journalists, destined never to arrive anywhere, but following a flowery path along which a woman might smile; sons of new-rich millionaires who followed and backed and corrupted the artists of that budding Paris ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... moment! What do you mean?" Pentfield demanded, a sudden fear at his heart, for he felt himself on the verge of a great gulf. ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... after some scores of the most precipitous miles in the world. It is a preposterous country. I myself have been on the verge of it, and know it as well as most. The geographical importance, too, is absurdly exaggerated. It has never been mapped because there is nothing about it to map, no passes, no river, no conspicuous mountain, nothing but desolate, ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... destinies with the merry Mrs. Margaret; the prospect of a handsome legacy, or perhaps an annuity, gave an additional spur to John's affectionate feelings, and that night he resolved to put the question. All this Mrs. Margaret had anticipated, and as she was now on the verge of forty, she very prudently thought there was no time to lose. "They are a pair of oddities," continued the waiting-maid; "I have sometimes surprised them both crying, as if their hearts would break, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Scarlett," said Doll, with relief, who hated definitions, and felt the conversation was on the slippery verge of becoming deep. "Do you know him? Looks as if he'd seen a ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... be acknowledged that Mr. Gager had bidden high for success, and had allowed himself to be carried away by his zeal almost to the verge of imprudence. It was essential to him that he should take Patience Crabstick back with him to London,—and that he should take her as a witness and not as a criminal. Mr. Benjamin was the game at which he was flying,—Mr. Benjamin, and, if possible, Lord George; and he conceived ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... determination. Nothing is more fatal to the very foundations of political society, than the spectacle of a government that can be defied with impunity.[45] That demoralizing spectacle has been seen far too often during recent years, and at the moment when the war broke out it had led us to the verge of national disaster. The war has brought us into closer touch with realities than we had been for many a long year before, and it has taught us how ruinous it is in fatuous complacency to "wait and see" whither disorder, disloyalty, and disobedience will conduct us. If, however, there are still ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... hoping and fearing that Pepeeta would be asleep. He had a vague presentiment that he was on the verge of some great event. The guilty secret so long hidden in the depths of his soul seemed to have festered its way dangerously near to the surface, and he felt that if anything more should happen to irritate him he ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... tense and continuous work means thought; and he is lazy and fat in the head. But as long as he is himself, and grumbles, it does not matter. Given a furious Opposition screaming for the disgrace of tyrannical and corrupt ministers, and a press on the very verge of inviting Napoleon to enter London in triumph and deliver a groaning land from the intolerable burden of its native rulers' incapacity and rapacity and obsolescence, and the departments will work as ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... empty door and pondered—really on the verge of tears. The whole proceeding violated all precedents ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... placed on a pinnacle from which he is called upon to take a perspective survey of the range of science, and to tell us what he can see from his vantage ground; if at such a moment after straining his gaze to the very verge of the horizon, and after describing the most distant of well-defined objects, he should give utterance also to some of the subjective impressions which he is conscious of receiving from regions beyond; if he should depict possibilities which seem opening to his ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... a whole stood still, while these two common and familiar articles of household furnishing took on a form and an expression utterly foreign to what he had always known as a cupboard and a curtain. This outline, this expression, moreover, if not actually sinister, was grotesque to the verge ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... anything else, for he had been sick, and had lost all his money, and had years of poverty that made him ashamed to think of her. But his luck had taken a wonderful turn. He had made his pile. He was just on the verge of losing everything again, and going to the dogs last winter, when a fine old chum of his sent him a haul of money. It came just in the nick of time, and not only saved him, but made his fortune. Yes, that friend was a bully old chap, but he ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... he made his way, to Max's horror, close to the verge, and, with a grin of delight, the young gillie followed him, to climb every now and then on the top of some projecting block right over the brink, and so that had he dropped a stone it would have fallen ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... to time her eyes closed. When spoken to she had to exert considerable effort to shake off her languor before she could reply. She became still more drowsy; evidently she was on the verge of freezing to death. From speaking kindly her husband dropped into sharp tones for the sole purpose of keeping her awake. Presently he was forced to resort to light blows in order to bully her into wakefulness. Once she fell soundly asleep ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... from the Euphrates to the Tigris, each of them joining this larger canal at a different point of its course. Within less than two miles of the Tigris was a large and populous city named Sittake, near which the Greeks pitched their camp, on the verge of a beautiful park or thick grove full of all kinds of trees; while the Persians all crossed the Tigris, ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... trembling, back unto the bed she crept, And lay down by his side, and no more wept, Nay scarce could think of death for very love That in her faithful heart for ever strove 'Gainst fear and grief: but now the incense-cloud The old familiar chamber did enshroud, And on the very verge of death drawn close Wrapt both their weary souls in strange repose, That through sweet sleep sent kindly images Of simple things; and in the midst of these, Whether it were but parcel of their dream, Or that they woke to it as some might deem, I know not, but the door was opened ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... long before his day, Passed out of the Italian sun To the dark where all is done, Fallen upon the verge of May; Here at life's and April's end How should song salute my friend Dead so long before ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... cakes have you, son?" inquired Andrew. "Five," answered the boy. "Wait a minute," said Andrew. Something had flashed into his mind. It was a big moment for Andrew; he was on the verge of doing a fine thing, himself, and he stepped quickly to where ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... you know that the government were on the verge of concluding a most far-reaching treaty with that man? Do you know that the position was just touch-and-go? The concessions we were prepared to make would have cost the State thirty million pounds, and it would have been cheap. Do you ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... had brought the frenzied Caesar to the verge of death. He nearly choked with the violence of his rage. He had believed in the honesty of Taurus Antinor: had even looked on him as a lucky fetish. This man's treachery was more infuriating than that ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... very well be traced to outside sources, have been thrown on the market, and we have every reason to believe that all of it comes from the same place. The result is that American Match, and Mr. Hull and Mr. Stackpole, are on the verge of collapse." ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... tones is stern to the verge of being ferocious; 'Boggs, onless you wants the law-abidin' element to hang you in hobbles, you had better hold yourse'f in more subjection. Moreover, what you proposes is childish. If you was to appear ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the grass under the lilacs, listlessly watching the woodpeckers on the dead pines. Chewing a sprig of mint, he lay there sprawling, hands clasping the back of his well-shaped head, soothed by the cadence of the chirring locusts. When at length he had drifted pleasantly close to the verge of slumber a voice from the road ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... giving them local self-government. It is on this side that our error, if any, has been committed. No competent observer, sincerely desirous of finding out the facts and influenced only by a desire for the welfare of the natives, can assert that we have not gone far enough. We have gone to the very verge of safety in hastening the process. To have taken a single step farther or faster in advance would have been folly and weakness, and might well have been crime. We are extremely anxious that the natives shall show the power of governing ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... pattering drops. It was a dreary moment. The dogs were fast drawing on their victim, and nothing but despair and death stared him in the face. The ground now began to get irregular and varied, and a hope arose in his heart that he was getting on the verge of the moors. Still he was entirely ignorant as to the direction. The clouds then burst with a violence which their threatening aspect had long foretold, and in an instant Smyth was drenched to the skin; the ground became slippery, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... thee, my dearest and loveliest!" said the Earl, scarce tearing himself from her embrace, yet again returning to fold her again and again in his arms, and again bidding farewell, and again returning to kiss and bid adieu once more. "The sun is on the verge of the blue horizon—I dare not stay. Ere this I should have ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... seems to be a part of my nature; it was, I suspect, too much indulged in youth; break your children of this tendency, my dear Gosse, from the first. It is, when once formed, a habit more fatal than opium—I speak, as St. Paul says, like a fool. I have been very very sick; on the verge of a galloping consumption, cold sweats, prostrating attacks of cough, sinking fits in which I lost the power of speech, fever, and all the ugliest circumstances of the disease; and I have cause to bless God, my wife that is to be, and one Dr. Bamford (a name the Muse repels), that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we were enabled to spend our sabbatical year abroad—just in time to give Carl a new lease of life mentally and me physically; for both of us were on the verge of breaking down before ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... to be kindly and useful to fellow-mortals. Then he plants these beliefs on the soil of a happy and genial home, which tends to confirm and strengthen and call them into daily practice; and when he goes forth from home, even to the farthest verge of the circle that surrounds it, he carries with him the home influences of kindliness and use. Possibly my line of life may be drawn to the verge of a wider circle than his; but so much the better for interest and amusement, if it can be drawn ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 100 degrees in the evening. When exhausted with fever and sleeplessness, but unable to touch food, it was needful to mount, and, in a half-dead state of sleepiness, be carried by the sure-footed mountain pony up steep ascents, and along the verge of giddy precipices, with a general dreamy sense that it was magnificent scenery for any one who was in a bodily condition to ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the north channel; that day we saw the last of the Hebrides, and before night lost sight of the north coast of Ireland. A wide expanse of water and sky is now our only prospect, unvaried by any object save the distant and scarcely to be traced outline of some vessel just seen at the verge of the horizon, a speck in the immensity of space, or sometimes a few sea-fowl. I love to watch these wanderers of the ocean, as they rise and fal with the rocking billows, or flit about our vessel; and often I wonder whence they came, ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... there is Nat Bonnell, and a lot more little waves and ripples like him, but they always were out of the question, and now they are ten times more so. That is the reason, Eloise," the mother's voice became impressive to the verge of solemnity, "why I feel that Dr. ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... night had fairly set in a hundred fires blazed upon the mountains—far as the eye could reach, for miles and many miles, one dazzling gigantic illumination. Papal monograms, crosses, tiaras shone forth in startling proportions. High up, far from any human habitation, on the verge of the snow, in clearings of the mountain forests, on Alpine pastures, these fiery letters had been patiently traced by toiling men and lads. Anton and Jacobi were not behind-hand, and by means of two hundred little bonfires had devised the papal initials on the upland ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... couverte; and that, unless I made my escape immediately, I should be arrested for a debt of her contracting, by bailigs employed and instructed for that purpose. Startled at this intimation, I rose in a twinkling, and taking leave of my spouse with several hearty damns, got safe into the verge of the court, where I kept snug, until I was appointed surgeon's mate of a man-of-war at Portsmouth; for which place I set out on Sunday, went on board of my ship, in which I sailed to the Straits, where I had the good fortune to be made surgeon of a sloop that came home a few months after, and ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... it was evening when I arrived; after I had delivered the message with which I was charged, I asked for Asur. The priest to whom I spoke did not answer me. He led me in silence up to the terrace that overlooked the desolate eastern desert. The moon was looming white upon the verge, the world was trembling with heat, the winged bulls along the walls shone with a dull glow through the sultry air. The priest pointed to the far end of the terrace. A figure was seated looking out over the desert, his robes were motionless as if their wrinkles were carved of ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... with all its lovely scenery; round it the other nineteen Canary Islands; the eye then glances over an immense expanse of waters, beyond which may be descried in the distance the dark forests of the African coast, and even the yellow stripe which marks the verge of the great Desert. With thoughts full of the enjoyments which awaited us, we approached the town. We planned parties to see the country and climb the Peak; and our scientific associates, holding themselves in readiness ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... itself, and gentleness, and prudence personified. You know perfectly how to manage a friend, whom you fear you have driven just to the verge of madness. But tell me, good, gentle, prudent Miss Portman, why need you dread so much that I should go mad? You know, if I went mad, nobody would mind, nobody would believe whatever I say—I should be no evidence against you, and I should ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... plants can be so easily collected and preserved as lichens—requiring merely to be cleaned, dried, pulverised, and packed; and if their bulk be an objection to transport, their whole colorific matter may be collected in the way I have already mentioned. Ascending to the verge of eternal snows, and descending to the ocean level—with a geographical diffusion that is co-extensive with the surface of our earth, it is difficult to say where lichens shall not be found. There are myriads of small rocky islets in the boundless ocean, and there are ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... west, rent the clouds asunder, and the various districts spread out, motly with ever-changing lights and shadows. For a time the whole of the left bank was of a leaden hue, while the right was speckled with spots of light which made the verge of the river resemble the skin of some huge beast of prey. Then these resemblances varied and vanished at the mercy of the wind, which drove the clouds before it. Above the burnished gold of the housetops dark patches floated, all in the ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... theme of Cinderella, both succeeded in hitting Parisian taste. No less fortunate was 'Griselidis' (1901), a quasi-mediaeval musical comedy, founded upon the legend of Patient Grizel, and touching the verge of pantomime in the characters of a comic Devil and his shrewish spouse. Of Massenet's later works none has been more successful than 'Le Jongleur de Notre Dame' (1902), which, besides winning the favour of Paris, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... advanced the whole division through the woods to the open fields on their farther or western verge, and seeing the Confederates in force on the knoll beyond, to which they had retired, halted and began ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... maddened bull, when suddenly, within 12 ft. of the rock, there was a thrilling cry from Kenneth Moore, and up we shot, almost clearing the projecting summit. Almost—not quite—sufficiently to escape death; but the car, tripping against the very verge, hurled Phillip and myself, clasped in each other's arms, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... to the steamboat pier was flanked on one side by a row of one-story buildings, used as stores. I had jumped on one of these shops, and thence to a narrow space on the verge of the wharf. Before any one could go round the storehouse, I had reached the street. I did not dare to run, lest some one should suspect me of being a fugitive. The street was crowded with people, who ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... has given them into my charge, and I am glad of it. Not that I care for all children," said Elizabeth, with the cool impartiality that was wont to drive Percival to the very verge of distraction. "I dislike some children very much, indeed, but, you see, I happen—fortunately for myself—to be fond of Harry, Willie, ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... vault under the church there is still a large double coffin, in which, according to tradition, lies a chain of gold of incalculable value. Some twenty years ago, the owner of Mellenthin, whose unequalled extravagance had reduced him to the verge of beggary, attempted to open the coffin in order to take out this precious relic, but he was not able. It appeared as if some powerful spell held it firmly together; and it has remained unopened down to the present time. May it remain so ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold
... Edward Grey's speech in parliament on August 3, when it was fully realized that Germany and England were on the verge of war. What followed was related in the House of Commons ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... Garenne, and were pushing up the right bank, likewise in full march upon the plateau of Illy. Their task was almost done; one effort more, and up there at the north, among those barren fields, on the very verge of the dark forests of the Ardennes, the Crown Prince of Prussia would join hands with the Crown Prince of Saxony. To the south of Sedan the village of Bazeilles was lost to sight in the dense ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... the others as though constituting himself my protector. Some Indian Romeo is serenading his dusky Juliet in the neighboring town; flocks of roysteriug parrots go whirring past at all hours of the night, and a too liberal indulgence in red-hot curry keeps me on the verge of a nightmare almost till the silvery tinkle-tinkle of the Brahman bells announces the break ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... spot possible for the fugitive to land, being covered with wood and undergrowth, extending almost to the verge of ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... she ran, she rested; she walked and ran and walked again. The moon ascended to the zenith, crossed the levels of the upper sky, went down in the west; a long bar of dusky gray outlined a cloud low upon the horizon in the northeast. She was on the verge of collapse. Her skin, the inside of her mouth, were hot and dry. She had to walk along at snail's pace or her heart would begin to beat as if it were about to burst and the blood would choke up into the veins of her throat to suffocate her. A terrible pain came in her side—came and went—came ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... off, until three only remained together, in a narrow and gloomy lane little frequented. The stranger paused, and, for a moment, seemed lost in thought; then, with every mark of agitation, pursued rapidly a route which brought us to the verge of the city, amid regions very different from those we had hitherto traversed. It was the most noisome quarter of London, where every thing wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime. By the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... was on the verge of her freedom. In thus looking at him who had been her lord yesterday and would be her lord to-morrow, she was taking his measure. In her exalted mood she found that she could read him like a book. There was no doubt about his present docility, ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... time she had discovered this last fact she had covered about one-third of the distance and was crouching beside a protruding rock to get her breath. "It's rather foolish to tear up a perfectly good pair of riding boots just at the psychological moment when leather is villainously high and I'm on the verge of marrying a poor man. I guess ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... back from her, and hung his head. In a moment the force of his passion was checked, and from the supreme verge of unspeakable and rapturous delight, he was cast suddenly into the depths of his own remorse. He stood silent before her, ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... with a sort of fearful sprightliness: "There's a good fellow! I will send instructions; so glad to see you well." Conferring on Scorrier a look—fine to the verge of vulgarity—he withdrew. Scorrier remained, seated; heavy with insignificance and vague oppression, as if he had drunk a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... spirit of Christianity is antagonistic to the world, whatever form the spirit of the world assumes, the ideals of Christianity will of course be their opposite; as one verges into one extreme, the other will verge into the contrary. In those rough times the law was the sword; animal might of arm, and the strong animal heart which guided it, were the excellences which the world rewarded; and monasticism, therefore, in its position of protest, would be the destruction and abnegation of the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
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