"Gape" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... immense crowd. At a smaller ball Theodora's exquisite beauty must have commanded instant attention, but this was a special occasion, and the world was too occupied with a desire to gape at the foreign king to trouble about any new-comers. Certainly for the first hour ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... passing visitor; and, though wrapped up in their dead and stony sleep of ages, seem not only the most strange, but also the most terrible things on which his eye ever rested. Enormous jaws, bristling with pointed teeth, gape horrid in the stone, under staring eye-sockets a full foot in diameter. Necks that half equal in length the entire body of the boa-constrictor stretch out from bodies mounted on fins like those ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... he stood at the club bar, drinking one cocktail after another with that supreme indifference to consequences to health which made his fellow men gape and wonder—and cost an occasional imitator health, and perhaps life. Nor did the powerful liquor have the least effect upon him, apparently. Possibly he was in a better humor, but not noticeably so. He dined at the club and spent the evening at ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... stand in the street and gape at the passers-by: thus do they also wait, and gape at the thoughts ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... sapless trunks of wither'd oaks— The night, methinks, grows ruder than it was, Thus should it be, thus nature should be shock'd, And Prodigies, affrighting all mankind, Foretell the dreadful business I intend. The earth should gape, and swallow cities up, Shake from their haughty heights aspiring tow'rs, And level mountains with the vales below; The Sun amaz'd should frown in dark eclipse, And light retire to its unclouded heav'n; While darkness, bursting from ...
— The Prince of Parthia - A Tragedy • Thomas Godfrey
... assume my noble father's person, I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape, And bid me hold ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... in it; that is to say, they went up above monmorency after that they left the place of their wintring, which was over against Tadousac, att the height of the Chaudiere (so called in french), and after many years they retourned to live att the gape of their lake, which is 200 Leagues long & 50 or 60 leagues large. Those hurrons lived in a vast country that they found unhabited, & they in a great number builded villages & they multiplied very many. The Iroquoits also gott ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... mouth was very large, which was a pity, because when he stopped before them and bowed in a polite way, all of a sudden he opened this great mouth and gaped; and when poor, sleepy Little Boy saw this, what could he do but gape for company, and at once fall down sound asleep before the kind Prince ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... think. Ach! Gott im Himmel! He's in the hall!" She sank wretchedly into a chair. "Can you do nothing but gape and mutter?" In her desperation her ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... universal man; and talked some sense not only on every subject, but, so far as it is logically possible, in every sense. But the glaring deficiencies of the Victorian compromise had by that time begun to gape so wide that he was forced, by mere freedom of philosophy and fancy, to urge the neglected things. And yet this very urgency certainly brought on an opposite fever, which he would not have liked if he had lived to understand it. He liked Kipling, though with many healthy ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... yourself, with what a sting we read Plato's "Atlantic" and the conclusion of the "Iliad," and how we hanker and gape after the rest of the tale, as when some beautiful temple or theatre is shut up. But now the informing of ourselves with the truth herself is a thing so delectable and lovely as if our very life and being were for the sake of knowing. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... very turn of each phrase in as Greek a fashion as English will bear: while, with respect to amplifications and embellishments, anything rather than, with the good farmer, experience that most signal of mortifications, 'to gape for AEschylus and get Theognis.' I should especially decline,—what may appear to brighten up a passage,—the employment of a new word for some old one—[Greek: phonos], or [Greek: megas], or [Greek: telos], with its congeners, recurring four times in ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... the hallow'd ground, And somber yews their dewy branches wave O'er many a motey stone and mounded grave: Where parish church, confus'dly to the sight, With deeper darkness prints the shades of night, And mould'ring tombs uncouthly gape around, And rails and fallen stones bestrew the ground: In loosen'd garb derang'd, with scatter'd hair, His bosom open to the nightly air, Lone, o'er a new heap'd grave poor Basil bent, And to himself began his ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... wind sweeps over Sydney sometimes, and brings with it what is called a "dust-storm." It is said that most Australian towns are acquainted with the dust-storm. I think I know what it is like, for the following description by Mr. Gape tallies very well with the alkali duststorm of Nevada, if you leave out the "shovel" part. Still the shovel part is a pretty important part, and seems to indicate that my Nevada storm is but a poor ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... are three distinct species of worms (called the oyster-worm,) half an inch long, found in oysters, which shine in the dark like glow-worms. The sea-star, cockles, and muscles, are the great enemies of the oyster. The first gets within the shell when they gape, and sucks them out. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... yawn or gape? A. It proceeds from the thick fume and vapours that fill the jaws; by the expulsion of which is caused the stretching out and expansion of the jaws, and opening of ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... Bardolph's foe, and frowns on him; For he has stolen a pix,[9] and hang'd must 'a be.(B) A damned death! Let gallows gape for dog; let ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... set on dogs; citizens stand and gape, people come running up, others walk quietly to and fro, others play all sorts ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... half-past five to six, Our long wax-candles, with short cotton wicks, Touch'd by the lamplighter's Promethean art, Start into light, and make the lighter start; To see red Phoebus through the gallery-pane Tinge with his beam the beams of Drury Lane; While gradual parties fill our widen'd pit, And gape, and gaze, and wonder, ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... either of doubt or disputation. I could put the question in such a form as would bring the million to agree with me. Look, for instance, at the execution of a criminal. See the thousands that will assemble, day after day, after travelling miles for that single object, to gape and gaze upon the last agonizing pangs and paroxsyms of a fellow-creature—not regarding for an instant the fatigue of their position, the press of the crowd, or the loss of a dinner—totally insusceptible, it would seem, of the several influences ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... a frantic dance round the combatants, screamed shrilly, and made dangerous, ineffectual darts at Tray. The servant girl neither danced, nor screamed, nor made darts; she stood stolidly still, with something between a gape and a grin on her broad red face. She had not the passion for dog-fights entertained by the gamins of the streets, such fights were simply immaterial trifles to her amidst the weightier concerns of her life; and she had ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... prosperity and adversity; they are cunning, arrogant, and cruel, exercising the power of life and death over their slaves, and all low-born plebeians. They flay men alive, both piecemeal, and by stripping off the whole skin. No servant while waiting on them, or standing at their table, may gape, speak, or spit, so that their mouths ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... once one of the Princesses appeared before him. If she had looked a beauty when he saw her in the mountain she was ten times lovelier, now that he saw her in the light of day. The Prince could only gape ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... speech, the State Councillor could only gape, for he had not expected Tientietnikov's torrent of words. He reflected a few moments, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... fishing, and on the day when I killed the 'lunge Ben took me out in the evening equipped with the correct tackle for bass. It consisted of a single piece of bamboo, about 15 ft. long, a strong line a few inches longer, a bung as float, and a hook with 2-in. shank, and gape of about 3/4 in. You will remember this kind of rig-out, only with hook of moderate size, as often used by Midland yokels in bream fishing. It is delightfully primitive. Heavily leaded, you swing ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... even to Greece we run, With every rill from Helicon! And if this rage for travelling lasts, If Cockneys of all sects and castes, Old maidens, aldermen, and squires, Will leave their puddings and coal fires, To gape at things in foreign lands No soul among them understands; If Blues desert their coteries, To show off 'mong the Wahabees; If neither sex nor age controls, Nor fear of Mamelukes forbids Young ladies with pink parasols ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... off, all of you— don't stand and gape at a woman who is crying! (Felicity exits R., D. Mercury assisted off. Fel. places his chair back as before. Dormer goes off through the group; the rest sorrowfully disperse, looking over their shoulders at Kate. As they leave Gil. comes through them, ...
— The Squire - An Original Comedy in Three Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... had come down last year"—he added, turning to Jane—"you would have seen the bridegroom going from door to door, followed by all the boys in the village—he never recovered. There he went, shake, shaking his head—and gape gaping with his mouth. "Twas good sport to teaze him. I've set my dogs on him myself; but he never took the least notice. 'Twas a good ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... may open your eyes when I mention it, but I know you won't funk it. We mean to get hold of all the School prizes at Grandcourt this term, if we can. (Sensation.) Yes, you may gape, but it's a fact! Of course, I can't beat Smedley for the gold medal. (Yes, have a try!) Rather! I mean to try; and Smedley will have to put on steam. (Loud cheers.) Then Stafford is going to cut out Branscombe—(Boo-hoo!)—for the Melton ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... intimate with him were at a loss to conjecture. And now on the morning after the meeting, when he walked into the mill-yard, while some looked on him with the sort of wonder with which a crowd would gape at some strange animal, the like of which they had neither seen nor heard of before, others began to assail him with gibes and taunts and coarse would-be witticisms. But Foster bore it all unmoved, never uttering a word in reply, but going ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... was the pleasantest part of the evening. He seemed to hear of everything that was going on in London, and a good deal more besides. He was behind the scenes of all the commercial, social and political performances which were causing the vulgar crowd to gape. He discovered the true history of the hostility shown by So-and-so to the premier; he was told the little scandal which caused Her Majesty to refuse to knight a certain gentleman who had claims on the government; he heard what the duke really ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... middle classes, are neither so ostentatiously devout, nor so basely perverse. They go to church as to the play, to gape at others, or to be stared at themselves; to pass the time, and to admire the show; and they do not conceal that such is the object of their attendance. Their indifference about futurity equals their ignorance of religious duties. Our revolutionary charlatans have as ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Japanese: 70 Gape-jaw and goggle-eye, the frog; Dragons, owls, monkeys, beetles, geese; Some crush-nosed human-hearted dog: Queer names, too, such ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... gingerbread. Make you it fit. He that hath pleas'd her grace Thus far, shall not now crincle for a little.— Gape, sir, and let ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... slippers with rosettes almost as big as dahlias. Presently Charlie came lounging in, looking rather sleepy and queer, Rose thought. On seeing her, however, he roused up and said with a smile that ended in a gape, ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... come to a pretty pass, When a trifle small as this, Moving and bartering nigger slaves, Can open an abyss, With jaws a-gape for "the two great parties;" A pretty ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... are touched to tenderest sympathy. But Ugolino is to Lear what a single fire-freighted cloud that discharges five or six terrific strokes is to a night-long tempest, wherein the thundering heavens gape ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... see what you'll catch In a powder-mill with a lighted match. Intervene! if you think fit, By jumping into the bottomless pit. Intervene! How you'll gape and gaze When you see all Europe in a blaze! Russia gobbling your world half in, Red Republicans settling with sin; Satan broke loose and nothing between— That's what you'll catch ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the snow there appears besides a number of inequalities, and the clefts previously covered with a fragile snow-bridge now gape before the wanderer where he goes forward, with their bluish-black abysses, bottomless as far as we can depend on ocular evidence. At some places there are also to be found in the ice extensive shallow depressions, down whose sides innumerable rapid streams flow in beds of ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... most impressive, that departure of the night-express. The two hundred miles it is to travel stretch before it, traced by those slender clews, to lose which is ruin, and about which hang so many dangers. The drawbridges that gape upon the way, the trains that stand smoking and steaming on the track, the rail that has borne the wear so long that it must soon snap under it, the deep cut where the overhanging mass of rocks trembles to its fall, the obstruction ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... yawn, a deliberate yawn—not the kind you can't repress because the air is close and you feel like a goldfish when the water in the bowl has not been changed and you must gape for breath. The fat boy had been dancing attendance on her for the last hour and she was wearied with his witty sallies. Jeff and Willis Truman, a former classmate, had started a game of bridge with two of ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... sometimes superlative rogues who, in the infamous boldness of their behaviour, as far exceed the ordinary class of rogues as they do honest people; and whenever such a monster as this appears in the world, there are enough fools to gape at him, and to make such a noise and outcry about his conduct as is sure to invite others of the gang to imitate the obstinacy of his deportment, through that false love of fame, which seems inherent to human nature. Amongst the number of these, ...
— 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
... side of the Blithers syndicate," said Robin soberly, after his mirth and subsided before her wrath. "Good Lord, Aunt Loraine, I simply cannot go up there and stand in line like a freak in a side show for all the ladies and girls to gape at I'll get sick the day of the party, that's what I'll do, and you can tell 'em how desolated I am ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... he stood all bowed and shaking, I saw that he was suddenly become an old man; his twisted frame seemed shrunken, while spade and mattock shook and rattled in his palsied hands. "Come, lad, come!" cried he querulously. "Why d'ye gape—bring along the body; 'tis nought else! Ah, God, how still now, she that was so full o' life! Bring her along to high water-mark and tenderly, friend, ah, tenderly, up wi' her to your heart!" So I did as he bade and followed Resolution's bowed and limping ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... vessel in tow, having with much difficulty kept clear of the rocks: The passage being very narrow, we sent the boats, about noon, to seek for anchorage on the north shore. At this time, Cape Notch bore W. by N. 1/2 N. distant between three and four leagues, and Gape Quod E. 1/2 N. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... "ghost of a garden" whose minister Fosters strange blossoms that startle and scare. Red as man's blood is the sun that, with sinister Flame, is a menace of hell in the air. Wrinkled and haggard the hills are—the jags of them Gape like to living and ominous things: Storm and dry thunder cry out in the crags of them— Fire, and the wind with ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... forts, irrigation of deserts, reclamation of the Dead Sea, passionate temples clapped to the lower clouds about the perpetual lamp, and that baroque Art of the Orient which at the Judges progresses in Summer through the country would draw multitudes of foreigners to gape at so great pomp, at Corinthian cities full of grace and riches which had arisen to crown with many crowns that plain of Mesopotamia, and where desolate Tyre had mourned her purples, and old Tadmor in ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... be myself! But my fear of ridicule was greater than my fear of vice. 'Bless me, my dear Lady Delacour,' whispered Harriot, as we left this house, 'what can make you in such a desperate hurry to get home? You gape and fidget: one would think you had never sat up a night before in your life. I verily believe you are afraid to trust yourself with us. Which of us are you afraid of, Lawless, or me, or yourself?' There was a tone ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... for the damages he had sustained as well as for those suffered by his groom, Herse, who had fallen at Muehlberg in behalf of the latter's old mother. When this was done Kohlhaas returned home, accompanied by the crowd that still continued to gape at him, firmly resolved in his mind not to leave the house again unless ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... essential part of it, the ruin of the whole, or nearly of the whole, was, at some time or other, a certainty. For that reason I honor and shall forever honor and love you, and those who first caused it to stagger, crack, and gape. Others may finish; the beginners have the glory; and, take what part you please at this hour, (I think you will take the best,) your first services will never be forgotten by a grateful country. Adieu! Present my best regards ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the meadow grass, Danny boy," Darrin whispered, giving his friend's arm a hard grip. "If the 'loot'nant' comes back, get up fearfully drowsy when he orders you. Gape and look too ...
— Dave Darrin's Fourth Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... who seek to bridge the chasm 'Twixt man to-day and protoplasm, Who theorize and probe and gape, And finally evolve an ape— Yours is a harmless sort of cult, If you are pleased with the result. Some folks admit, with cynic grace, That you have rather proved your case. These dogmatists are so severe! Enough for me that Fanny's ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... loved Charlie, and after that I out-larked the lark in early rising; and although Charlie and I did little more than gape in each other's faces for an hour or two, and wish breakfast would come, and wonder what made them take so long, he was perfectly satisfied that we were both on the road that was to make us ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... came out into the market-place, and understood why there had been no crowd at the gate. All the population was in the square and on the roofs that mount above it, tier by tier, against the wooded hillside: Moulay Idriss had better to do that day than to gape at ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... British coasts, but adapted to life in the great abysses. They are very dark in colour, and delicately built; they possess well-developed luminous organs. The third form is called Chauliodus, a predatory animal with large gape ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... could be tired; How often have we stray'd, whilst sportive rhyme Deceived the way and clipp'd the wings of Time, 400 O'er hill, o'er dale; how often laugh'd to see, Yourselves made visible to none but me, The clown, his works suspended, gape and stare, And seem to think that I conversed with air! When the sun, beating on the parched soil, Seem'd to proclaim an interval of toil; When a faint langour crept through every breast, And things most used to labour wish'd for rest, How often, underneath ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... tail of it, and seeing lights in the house, he had just dropped in for a glass of porter—and at this point he became aware of the third person. Archie saw the cod's mouth and the blunt lips of Glenkindie gape at him for a moment, and the recognition twinkle in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... leave each other, and that, in itself, is an annoyance. I can't stand it. I don't dare to gape. I am expected to be forever enacting the woman in love. ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... waves had lulled so much as to allow the gratings to be removed from our hatches, our consternation knew no bounds when we found that nearly all the slaves were dead or dying with the distemper. I will not dwell on the scene or our sensations. It is a picture that must gape with all its horrors before the least vivid imagination. Yet there was no time for languor or sentimental sorrow. Twelve of the stoutest survivors were ordered to drag out the dead from among the ill, and though they were constantly drenched with ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... who stood before a mirror and shut his eyes that he might know how he looked when asleep—a jest which reappears in Taylor's Wit and Mirth in this form: "A wealthy monsieur in France (hauing profound reuenues and a shallow braine) was told by his man that he did continually gape in his sleepe, at which he was angry with his man, saying he would not belieue it. His man verified it to be true; his master said that he would neuer belieue any that told him so, except (quoth ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... of modern types. Teleosts were now abundant. The ocean teemed with sharks, some of them being voracious monsters seventy- five feet and even more in length, with a gape of jaw of six feet, as estimated by the size of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... evening in the week to which people were not invited as a matter of course. She lived with a certain magnificence, but you needed to be a member of her circle to perceive it; for there was nothing to gape at, nothing to criticise, nothing even to admire, in the daily proceedings of Mr. and Mrs. Osmond. Ralph, in all this, recognised the hand of the master; for he knew that Isabel had no faculty for producing studied impressions. She struck him as having a great love of movement, of gaiety, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... knife," said the old sailor, chuckling. "No, there's a better way than that. Lay 'em out in the sun away from the water, and they soon open their mouths and gape." ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... Mr. Dockwrath found that the party was swelled to the number of eight, five other undoubted commercials having brought themselves to anchor at the Bull Inn during the day. To all of these, Mr. Kantwise introduced him. "Mr. Gape, Mr. Dockwrath," said he, gracefully moving towards them the palm of his hand, and eyeing them over his shoulder. "Mr. Gape is in the stationery line," he added, in a whisper to the attorney, "and does for Cumming and Jibber of St. Paul's ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... the guards; but the men knew him, and the Grande Galerie, despite its treasures, or perhaps because of them, is the least popular part of the Louvre. Artists haunt it; but the Parisian, the provincial, the globe trotter, gape once in their lives at Andrea del Sarto, Titian, Salvator Rosa, Murillo of course, and the rest of the mighty dead, and then ask with a yawn, "Where are ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... to pawn, no doubt, (Miss this chance, glance untried aside?) John's shirt, my—no! Ay, so—the lout! Let yet the door gape, store on floor And not ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... woman, hast thou heard not of the heaps Of slain, that into Xanthus' rushing stream Were thrust by these mine hands?—or hast thou heard In vain, because the Blessed Ones have stol'n Wit and discretion from thee, to the end That Doom's relentless gulf might gape ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... I said, falling to work, with the axe I had in thy hand, on the lowest strakes. My men leaped to work as well, and in two minutes the seams began to gape, and then was a rush of water from broken planking that sent us over the side and into the ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... childishly enjoy the way in which things work themselves out— the cul-de-sac resolving itself at the very last moment into a promising corridor toward the outer air. At every rebuff it is my happiness to be hopelessly bewildered; and I gape with admiration when the Gordian knot is untied. If the author be old-fashioned enough to apostrophize the Gentle Reader, I know he must mean me, and docilely give ear, and presently tumble head-foremost into the treacherous ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... the waves beneath Sits the grim monarch of insatiate Death; The shark rapacious with descending blow Darts on the scaly brood, that swims below; The crawling crocodiles, beneath that move, Arrest with rising jaw the tribes above; 60 With monstrous gape sepulchral whales devour Shoals at a gulp, a million in an hour. —Air, earth, and ocean, to astonish'd day One scene of blood, one mighty tomb display! From Hunger's arm the shafts of Death are hurl'd, And one great ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... objected Yarchenko with displeasure. "You remind me of those bourgeois, who, while it is still dark, have gathered to gape at an execution and who say: we have nothing to do with this, we are against capital punishment, this is all the prosecuting attorney's and the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... lightning revelation made him stand up in the carriage and gape at the photographs of Irish scenery in ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... most often about half an hour after lunch), the old angel of peregrination lifts himself up in me, and I yearn and wamble for a season afoot. When a blue air is moving keenly through bare boughs this angel is most vociferous. I gape wanly round the lofty citadel where I am pretending to earn the Monday afternoon envelope. The filing case, thermostat, card index, typewriter, automatic telephone: these ingenious anodynes avail me not. Even the visits of golden ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... chance-mates he is but an eccentric person, an amateur tinker, a slack-baked gipsy, an unlettered hack; to his audience he is his own, strong, indifferent self: presently the rest will recognise him and he will be disdainfully content. And recognise him they do. He throws off his disguise; there is a gape, a stare, a general conviction that Lavengro is the greatest man in the world; and then—as the manner of Lesage commands—the adventure ends, the stars resume their wonted courses, and the self-conscious Tinker-Quixote takes the road once more and passes on to other ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... was no denying that the procession looked strange. File clerks and receptionists stopped their work to gape at the four bedizened walkers and their plainly dressed satellites. Malone needed no telepathic talent to tell what ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... are so very excited... They have hundreds of red, round hands, Still, large, without end Placed around their high, motley bellies. Most people are drinking yellow beer. Grocers, their cigarettes burning, gape. A fine young woman sings vulgar songs. A young Jew plays the ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... Hampstead—build up an Atrium with an Impluvium, add to it a Caldarium if you please, and a Viridarium, too,—and omne quod exit in um: but you will not thereby produce a good dwelling-house; far from it, you will have a show-box fit for Cockneys to come and gape at: ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... following. They come as visitors without either pretensions to superiority, or the insolence of conquerors; they walk quietly their way, offering no annoyance to the citizens, though they themselves are stared at most unmercifully, and pursued by crowds of ragged little boys, while even men gape at them with open mouths. They prove themselves gentlemen, while many of our citizens have proved themselves boors, and I admire them for their conduct. With a conviction that I had allowed myself to be influenced by bigoted, narrow-minded people, in believing them to be unworthy of respect or regard, ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... decency. I felt an anger which battlefields had never aroused, where men moulder above ground and become unsightly beneath the open sky. The slain of battlefields were at least motionless; they did not gape and grin at you with the dreadful humour of these perambulating dead. I felt the Galilean passion which animates every Red Cross worker at Evian: the agony to do something to make these murdered people live again. This last convoy came, I discovered, from ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... rump is among the Chaonians ([Greek: chaino], to gape open), because his anus is distended by pederastic practices; his hands with the Aetolians ([Greek: aiteo], to ask, to beg); his mind with the Clopidians ([Greek: klepto], ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... broke me down. Between my dread of the Captain and her pained astonishment, I could only sit stammering and longing for the earth to gape and swallow me up. Suddenly a dreadful suspicion ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... some of the causes we have stated is the extreme idleness of the Irish labourer. There is nothing of the value of which the Irish seem to have so little notion as that of time. They scratch, pick, dawdle, stare, gape, and do anything but strive and wrestle with the task before them. The most ludicrous of all human objects is an Irishman ploughing. A gigantic figure—a seven-foot machine for turning potatoes in human nature—wrapt up in an immense ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... thee in; thy grones Did make wolues howle, and penetrate the breasts Of euer-angry Beares; it was a torment To lay vpon the damn'd, which Sycorax Could not againe vndoe: it was mine Art, When I arriu'd, and heard thee, that made gape The ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... nize grass a slant' la'va com man dant' slant pa pa' saun'ter ti a'ra gape a las' pal'frey al ter'nate gaunt al'mond rap'ine af fla'tus far scath'less dra'ma hi a'tus swathe pag'eant la'ma ba na'na lance stal'wart da'ta sul ta'na calm aft'er ma'gi man da'mus laugh par'ent ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... store was reached and Mrs. Bobbsey let Freddie and Flossie take their time in looking into the several windows. One was full of dolls, which made the little girl gape in wonder and delight. ...
— The Bobbsey Twins - Or, Merry Days Indoors and Out • Laura Lee Hope
... not by mechanical but by a supernatural or divine art, and has been formed in such a way so that the one part may not injure the other. Hence it happens that the man who endeavors to find out the true causes of miracles, and who desires as a wise man to understand Nature, and not to gape at it like a fool, is generally considered and proclaimed to be a heretic and impious by those whom the vulgar worship as the interpreters both of Nature and the gods. For these know that if ignorance be removed, amazed ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... prettily," she cries in a bantering tone, "and don't gape like an overgrown school-boy, if you ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... path ends: the gaunt rocks gape: the black Deep hollow tortuous night, a soundless shell, Glares darkness: are the fires of old ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... boat in every other rispect completely answers my most sanguine expectation; she is not yet dry and eight men can carry her with the greatest ease; she is strong and will carry at least 8,000 lbs. with her suit of hands; her form is as complete as I could wish it. the stitches begin to gape very much since she has began to dry; I am now convinced this would not have been the case had the skins been sewed with a sharp point only and the leather not cut by the edges of a sharp nedle. about 8 A M. a large herd of buffaloe ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... forth a sweeter, though ignoble praise. Ah, Vice! how soft are thy voluptuous ways! While boyish blood is mantling, who can 'scape[cx] The fascination of thy magic gaze? A Cherub-Hydra round us dost thou gape, And mould to every ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... dismal cry, and he turned in the direction whence it seemed to come. And when he had arrived upon the spot he saw in a cleared space a lion, and a serpent which held him by the tail, burning his hind-quarters with flames of fire. My lord Yvain did not gape at this strange spectacle, but took counsel with himself as to which of the two he should aid. Then he says that he will succour the lion, for a treacherous and venomous creature deserves to be harmed. Now the serpent is poisonous, and fire bursts forth from its mouth—so full of wickedness ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... I think a bout with the gloves will do me good," yawned Archy, with a hideous gape, as he stretched himself at full length upon the velvet cushions, with his feet ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... lines in length. A section thus made is almost perpendicular to the cornea, a circumstance much facilitating the passage of the lens, and the line of incision is nearly straight, so that the wound does not gape. The iris should be excised to the very end of the wound, and the capsule most freely opened by a V-shaped laceration. Any lens, even the hardest, may then be removed without the introduction of an instrument into the eye, but Von Graefe's experience shows it to be advisable to assist the ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... do something?" cried the girl, at length. "It seems to me if I were a man I could think of something to do besides stand and gape!" ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... cabs even; nay, the first which he could lay his hands on, though belonging to people below him of whom he knew nothing. He jumped in, and had himself driven all over the city, and outside it. On one occasion he seized hold of the coach of Madame de Mattignon, who had come to gape at him, drove off with it to Boulogne and other country places near Paris. The owner was much astonished to find she must journey back on foot. On such occasions the Marechal de Tesse and his suite had often hard work to find the Czar, who had thus ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... that fell into the broth, and ultimately into the jaws of an illiterate animal? Books are such delicate things! Yet men—and still more frequently women—read them so close to the fire that the bindings warp, and start, and gape like the shells of a moribund oyster. Other people never have a paper- knife, and cut the leaves of books with cards, railway tickets, scissors, their own fingers, or any other weapon that chances to seem convenient. ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... Ki! wouldn't dey look an' gape an' pint in dar yonder w'en yer come a-sailin' in ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... yet seen this castle except in his dreams: two giants have just built it for him whilst he slept; and the reality is before him for the first time when Fricka wakes him. In that majestic burg he is to rule with her and through her over the humble giants, who have eyes to gape at the glorious castles their own hands have built from his design, but no brains to design castles for themselves, or to comprehend divinity. As a god, he is to be great, secure, and mighty; but he is also to be passionless, affectionless, wholly impartial; for Godhead, if it is to live with Law, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... felt, and producing results. And self-expression, I find, is the breath of life to my soul. But I've scarcely time to do my hair, and my complexion is gone, and I've got cracks in my cheek-skin. I'm getting old and ugly, and no human being will ever again love me. Even my own babies gape at me kind of round-eyed when I take ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... business man of Chung-king, and Mr. Cheo, the elderly head of the Chinese Imperial Telegraph, who has now been succeeded by another member whom I also met. When I left they all escorted me most courteously to my chair, the passers-by stopping to gape with surprise. So far as I know the club is a new departure in mission work, and most worthy of support as a rational and hopeful method of presenting the best of Christian civilization to a class often repelled by ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... spirit stands before him. Thrilled and startled he pauses not, "harrowed with fear and wonder like Horatio on the previous night, but at once addresses it, as he said he would, though hell itself should gape." No more dignified rebuke ever shamed terror from the soul than Hamlet administers to his panic-stricken friends, and when they would forcibly withhold him from following the Ghost, the steady determination with which he draws his sword is marked ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... upwards as though it were composed of mere straws. With the flying timbers came what seemed to be a stream of dirty water, flying far up in the air, as though a fireman's hose had been turned on! That must be the dark-looking crude oil, mingled with water, Toby conjectured, as he continued to gape and wonder. Then after all the suspicions of Maurice Dangerfield had proven true, and the Pontico Hills region did harbor ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... Des Sarts, as yet un-visited, we skirted the gape of the crater, climbing over craggy accumulations of wreckage, and traversed a tunnel with an arched roof and mildewed brick walls, like a wine vault. The floor of it was littered with the knapsacks and water bottles of dead or captured men, with useless rifles broken at the stocks and ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... to whom life was a succession of laborious days spent between the cooking stove and the washtub with a regular Saturday night, in her best clothes, at the motion-picture theater at Sag Harbor to gape at the abnormality of Theda Bara and scream with uncontrolled mirth at the ingenious antics of Charlie Chaplin. An ancient Ford made possible this weekly dip into ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... been a big whaling centre. She wouldn't have bothered with John Winthrop's historic mill, which has never been out of use from his day to ours. She wouldn't have rushed from Nathan Hale's schoolhouse to gape at the Perkins Mansion, where Washington and Lafayette stayed; or if she had she would have consented to go in the car. As it was, however, that girl's energy was frenzied, and her exertions were rewarded at last by the dropping out of Caspian from her train. He limped back to the hotel, furious, ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... inconvenient it is to have no pocket in her gown, and she also knows how strongly the dressmakers protest against putting one in, because it is sure to gape open and look ugly. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 30, June 3, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... no use, anyway, getting hold of respectable nags," Rob explained, when he saw even Tubby gape at sight of the poor looking animals they had offered to them at exorbitant prices, "because we'd never have the least chance to get anywhere on their backs. No matter how many passes we had from burgomasters, or even King Albert ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... And now Ilioneus' stout ship, her that Achates leal 120 And Abas ferried o'er the main, and old Aletes' keel The storm hath overcome; and all must drink the baneful stream Through opening leaky sides of them that gape at every seam. ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... not move, but stood as if carved out of a block of hardened putty by the hand of an artistic drill-sergeant; listening, though, with his ears, which looked preternaturally large from the closeness of the regimental barber's efforts, and seeming to gape. Then he left his rifle in ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... this more clean, uncleaner nothing that other, Yet I ajudge —— cleaner and nicer to be; For while this one lacks teeth, that one has cubit-long tushes, 5 Set in their battered gums favouring a muddy old box, Not to say aught of gape like wide-cleft gap of a she-mule Whenas in summer-heat wont peradventure to stale. Yet has he many a motte and holds himself to be handsome— Why wi' the baker's ass is he not bound to the mill? 10 Him if a damsel kiss we fain must think she be ready With ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... banish'd wight shall anchor in this port; Our realm it brooks no strangers' force, let them elsewhere resort. Our rusty sword with rest shall first his edge employ, To poll their tops that seek such change, and gape for joy. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... of the seneschal had scarcely been put forth, when, lo! the astonished deputy shrank back in dismay. A sudden change came over his angry countenance—a look of surprise mingled with horror, as though he could have wished the earth to gape and hide him from the object of his apprehensions. He stood trembling, speechless, pale as ashes, expecting immediate and condign punishment. So suddenly this change was wrought that the spectators fancied it to be ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... have flung the dice; The destinies depend On feet that run for fearful price, And fangs that gape to rend; And still the footsteps of his Vice Pursue him to the end:— The feet of his incarnate Vice Shall ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fingers; but as he was about to deliver his hint that he was greatly displeased at the antics of the bench, a sob came to his ears. Turning his head swiftly, he caught sight of the stranger's face, and sorrow was marked so strongly upon it that the sight made Hopalong gape. His hand opened slowly and he cautiously sidled back again, disgruntled, puzzled, and vexed at himself for having strayed into a game where he was so hopelessly at sea. He thought it all over carefully and then gave it up as being too deep for him to solve. But he determined one thing: He was ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... this impoverished nation has been goaded into giving; of the thousands of lives lost in the building of these aqueducts; of the countless years and countless energy spent in devising and carrying out these schemes for royal aggrandizement and pleasure. We come here and gape and wonder at it all, and little think at what stupendous cost our senses ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... "Dearest, I told you, I warned you. I left you alone for ten weeks; but could that make you doubt it was coming? Not for worlds, not for millions, shall you give yourself to that roaring crowd. Don't ask me to care for them, or for any one! What do they care for you but to gape and grin and babble? You are mine, you ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... Let him always, if possible, stoop. We are sometimes tempted to lay sprawling in the mud fellows of from five feet to five feet eight, who carry the back of their heads on the extreme summit of their back-bone, and gape up to heaven as if they scorned the very ground. Let no little man wear iron heels. When we visit a friend of ours in Queen-street we are disturbed from our labours or conversation by a sound which resembles ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... high-ceilinged, old-fashioned room. To be sure, it was ill lighted and ill ventilated—giving on a court; but its furniture, from the marble-topped wash-stand to the great double bed, was very grand and overpowering. Daisy could only gape with wonder and delight. To call such a room her own, to earn three dollars a week—with a golden promise of more later on if she proved a good girl—it was all very much too ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... What an inconsiderable creature am I in this prodigious ocean of waters; my existence is of no concern to the universe; I am reduced to a kind of nothing, and am less than the least of the works of God." It so happened that an oyster which lay in the neighbourhood chanced to gape and swallow it up in the midst of this its humble soliloquy. The drop, says the fable, lay a great while hardening in the shell, until by degrees it was ripened into a pearl, which, falling into the hands of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... The citadel whose outline rose bold and clear toward the blue heavens seemed suddenly to be turned into a seething, glowing crater, vomiting flame. Within the bursting walls a very hell seemed to gape, as the shower of stones rose in the air only to sink again in the fiery hollow, and, as the gigantic wreck burned and blazed, it made one mighty pillar of fire reaching to the very heavens above—a vengeful, hideous ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... themselves forward, patched with lichen and moss, seamed and fringed with fern and heath. Roots of trees, huge and twisted, spread and clutched like guardian serpents. In places where rock had fallen the earth seemed to gape. In the shadow it looked a gnome world—a gnome or a dragon world. Then upon ledge or bank showed bells or disks or petaled suns of June flowers, rose and golden, white and azure, while overhead was heard the evening song of birds alike ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... midst of death, the jaws Of hell against us gape. Who from peril dire as this Openeth us escape? 'Tis thou, O Lord, alone! Our bitter suffering and our sin Pity from thy mercy win, Holy Lord and God! Strong and holy God! Merciful and holy Saviour! Eternal God! Let us not despair For the fire ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Nogiva's charms: And, for his cause seem'd good, anon behold Many a strange knight, and many a baron bold, Brought by the tourney's fame, on fiery steeds Couch lance to aid; and mortal strife succeeds. Long time beleagur'd gape the castle walls; First in the breach the indignant monarch falls: Nogiva's lord next meets an equal fate; And Gugemer ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... as complete as Pompeii, as desolate as Timgad amongst its African hills, you see the remnant of a pack of cards lying with what remains of the stock of a draper's shop; and the front part of the shop and the snug room at the back gape side by side together in equal, misery, as though there had never been a barrier between the counter with its wares and the good mahogany table with its decanters; then in the rustling of papers that blow with dust along long-desolate floors ...
— Unhappy Far-Off Things • Lord Dunsany
... clear and crisp enunciation; but, in doing so, I have flattered him. In reality, his mode of speech suggested that he had something large and unwieldy permanently stuck in his mouth; and it was not easy for a stranger to follow him. Mr Abney signally failed to do so. He continued to gape helplessly till the tension ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... by name with the assurance of old friendship. Nor was he astonished that even in the wan light those brick-dust cheeks should deepen to terra-cotta, those hard blue eyes glitter with recognition, and the small thin-lipped mouth lose for a moment its immobility and gape, yes, gape, in the amazement of meeting somebody whom he never could have expected to meet at such an hour in ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... apathetic and purblind. Critics rage and quarrel before a canvas, but the nations do not care; quarries of marble are hewn into various shapes, and the throngs gape before them and are indifferent; writers are so many that their writings blend in the public mind in a confused phantasmagoria, where the colours run into one another, and the lines are all waved and indistinct; the singer alone still keeps the old magic power, "The beauty that was Athens, once ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... same air as my brother-in-law; whose value is that he has thirty "business ideas" a day, while I shall never have had the thirtieth fraction of one in my whole life. He just hums, Tom Price, with business ideas, whereas I just gape with the impossibility of them; he moves in the densest we carry our heads here on August evenings, each with its own thick nimbus of mosquitoes. I'm but too conscious of how, on the other hand, I'm desolately outlined to all eyes, in an air as pure and ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... earthling, be he kingling or common sodling, goes into desuetude, either by the operation of natural laws, or the sharp application of steel or shot! Verily, it makes precious little difference to the Great Reaper, by what process we finally become harvested. He is sure of us, though no graves gape, no stars fall, no comets rush out, like young colts from their stables, flinging their tails into the faces of the more sober and pacific brotherhood of lights. But, denied the satisfaction of chuckling at ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... knew him, was not in the least like that infant. At the rest of the photographs she looked politely, but it was hard work to keep from yawning, and at last her mouth suddenly opened of itself and gave a great gape. ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... eat instantly and put some saul in ye, by the bread and the salt, I'll put it down your throat wi' the cutty spoon, scaulding as it is, and whether ye will or no. Gape, sinner, and swallow!' ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... careers as he traces the course of them. I have seen too much of success in life to take off my hat and huzzah to it as it passes in its gilt coach: and would do my little part with my neighbors on foot, that they should not gape with too much wonder, nor applaud too loudly. Is it the Lord Mayor going in state to mince-pies and the Mansion House? Is it poor Jack of Newgate's procession, with the sheriff and javelin-men, conducting him on his last journey to Tyburn? I look into ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... Gods pass through the great Time-hall, Stately and high; The little men climb the low clay wall To gape and spy; "We wait for the Gods," the little men cry, "But these are our brothers ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... greatly to Jimmy's delight, and for once he could eat all he wanted with nobody to criticize, for the lumbermen were no tyros at this sort of thing, and packed away food in quantities and at a speed that made the boys gape. ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman |
