"Lurid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... assailed her. She remembered that she had never read the book, though she had heard much of it from Berrand. He was imaginative and essentially mischievous. Perhaps he had exaggerated its tendency, drawn too lurid a picture of its horrible power. Catherine turned a page or two and glanced at the clear, even ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... to seek the land before a storm arises, were now winging towards their nests with the shrill and dissonant clang which announces disquietude and fear. The disk of the sun became almost totally obscured ere he had altogether sunk below the horizon, and an early and lurid shade of darkness blotted the serene twilight of a summer evening. The wind began next to arise; but its wild and moaning sound was heard for some time, and its effects became visible on the bosom of the sea, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... example of instantly rising, and led the way back along the lake to the Casino, resting at that afternoon hour among its spring flowers and blossoms innocent of its lurid after-dark frequentation. He got some paper from the waiter who came to take their order. She began to draw rapidly, and by the time the waiter came again she was giving Erlcort the last scrap ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... full moon just seen above the horizon; then to the size of two full moons, and a dozen, and a hundred, and a thousand. Still black, still noiseless, still revolving slowly, like a tardy but certain doom. Then a quarter of the leaden space was filled with their gigantic bodies, and the lurid air was darker. Then a half of the heavens was blotted out; She grew faint and sick, as she moved her head to the right and left, and up and down, and watched the dizzy revolutions of those vast orbs, between which she knew that she was to be crushed at last, as by the nether and upper millstones. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... calls it noisy! And Stanislaw Przybyszewski—whom Vance Thompson christened a prestidigious noctambulist-has literally stormed over it. It is barbaric, it is perhaps pathologic, and of it Liszt has said most eloquent things. It is for him a dream poem, the "lurid hour that precedes a hurricane" with a "convulsive shudder at the close." The opening is very impressive, the nerve-pulp being harassed by the gradually swelling prelude. There is defiant power in the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... hunched in his chair staring at the screaming headlines and re-reading the lurid story. Again ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... thine eyes shall I pursue Yon shower-veils from the sunset flying, Blown mid clouds white and lurid-blue That crowd the rainbow's arch, defying Him who in red death shoots them through. Look with me; in this pageant see My love all ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... Dutchman Wagner had exploited the uncanny, the terror and mystery of gray winter seas; in Tannhaeuser he turned to the conflict between the gross, lurid passions of man and the sane, pure side of his nature; and now, in Lohengrin, he was to give us an opera which for sheer sustained loveliness has only one parallel in his works—the Mastersingers. It is the ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... With patience doth he woo; He waiteth long by the shuttered heart, And the Lamb—He waiteth too. Up the lurid passes of dreams that kill, Through the twisting maze of the great Untrue, The Lion followeth the fainting will— And the ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... terrible consequences which often resulted from such thoughtless or wanton proceedings. The loss to settlers is often appalling. The prairies, which in the day-time seem dry, dull, and uninteresting, give place at night to the lurid play of the fire fiend, and the heavens and horizon seem like a furnace. It is a grand, yet awful sight. Cheeks blanch as the wind sweeps its volume towards the ...
— The Story of Garfield - Farm-boy, Soldier, and President • William G. Rutherford
... short. One must concentrate or one achieves nothing. I know what the general idea of a stay-at-home is," she went on. "Many of my friends consider me narrow. Perhaps I am. Anyhow, I prefer to lead a complete and, I believe, useful life here, to looking back in later years upon that hotchpotch of lurid sensations, tangled impressions and restless moments that most of them ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mostly French, from the mass of gallant, dauntless emigrants, many of whom were thus entertained with grateful, commiserating hospitality in households whose members had but lately basked in the sparkling geniality of the southern atmosphere, now lurid and surcharged with thunder. ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... past few months, and the expression on her face now roused all the dormant manhood in Morley's nature. Ignoring the woman by the stairway, he gripped Molly by the shoulders, and holding her so that the lurid light of the flaming logs fell upon her, he drove his questions into the girl's consciousness and brought alarmed truth forth before ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... When Germany lit up her long toasted day with the lurid glare of war, she thought the end of freedom for the peoples of the earth had come. She thought that the power of her sword was hereafter to reign supreme over a world in slavery, and that the divine right of a king was to be established forever. We have seen the drama ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... throughout the whole length and breadth of America, by the exertions of the assembly of Massachusets Bay, stirred up and kept alive the flame of discord, and occasion need but fan it, and it would kindle into a blaze; the lurid glare of which would be seen burning brightly, and raging furiously across the wide Atlantic. The proceedings in America were but as yet, in truth, the warnings of a terrible commotion—the first intimations of an irruption, more frightful in its nature, and more disastrous in its consequences, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... slowly fanned the summits of lofty objects, and in the sky dashes of buoyant cloud were sailing in a course at right angles to that of another stratum, neither of them in the direction of the breeze below. The moon, as seen through these films, had a lurid metallic look. The fields were sallow with the impure light, and all were tinged in monochrome, as if beheld through stained glass. The same evening the sheep had trailed homeward head to tail, the ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... fluttering in the dusk like a summer snowstorm between us and the black cliffs of the Rheinstein, while the broad Rhine beneath flashed blood-red in the blaze of the lightning and the fires of the Mausenthurm - a lurid Acheron above which seemed to hover ten thousand unburied ghosts; and last, but not least, on the lip of the vast Mosel-kopf crater - just above the point where the weight of the fiery lake has burst the side of the great slag-cup, ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... to the apprehension in his heart; and as if to mock his mood the scene, after a lurid sunset, was beautiful and kindly beyond compare. A mist of color like powdered silver filled the air. Soft, near-by stars blinked lazily down upon the scene, illumining it without the effect of brilliance. A half moon ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... idea which, pervading the pages of Eschylus, gives them that peculiar character of simplicity and grandeur, with which no other tragedies are marked in a like degree. Such was the source of the inspiration of classic tragedy, the spring of that stern and severe poetry which throws the lurid hues of a melancholy so profound upon the pallid and affrighted face of humanity. Man, struggling with all the gloomy energy of despair against this vague but formidable Horror, which no virtue or agony could conciliate—this dark Fate, the creation of his own misled and perverted ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the gentleman who saw the handwriting on the wall. Their sleep must be troubled. They must have ugly dreams of treasons, stratagems, and spoils, and when they wake, swearing a prayer or two, they doubtless see through the gloom, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN (I quote from memory), in lurid letters on the ceiling of their stronghold. Their waking visions and their daily talk must be of guns and pikes, of graves and coffins, shrouds and skeletons. Perhaps they, like Mr. MacAdam and some others, have received missives ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... room with glass windows all round. The waves were crowned with foaming white-caps, and the small craft that had to be out in the gale were bobbing up and down, as if possessed. On the river was a strange and lurid light, which seemed to come more from the dashing water than from the sky, so dark was the ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... others,—indeed it is rather less so,—but it is extremely striking, and most conspicuous. There is, in the minds of the hypercritical, the sneaking suspicion that the Black Cat is almost too good to be true; it is too obviously and theatrically lurid with the glow of Montmartre; it is Bohemianism just a shade too much conventionalised. Just the same, it is fascinating. From the moment you pass the outer, polite portals and intermediate anterooms and enter the big, ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... a wizard who transports us into a region of visions, often lurid and disquieting, but always full ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... were burnt to the ground. The city was lighted from river to river with the glare of these conflagrations—this city of "brotherly love;" whole streets looking like pandemonium avenues of brass and copper in the lurid reflected light. Your people have lost little of their agreeable combined facetiousness and ferocity, as I think you will allow when I tell you that, while a large Catholic church was burning, the Orange party caused a band of music to play "Boyne Water;" and when ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... effectively, when Lynde passed through the dingy main street of K—-and struck into a road which led to the hill country. A short distance beyond the town, while he was turning in the saddle to observe the singular effect of the lurid light upon the landscape, a freight-train shot obliquely across the road within five rods of his horse's head, the engine flinging great flakes of fiery spume from its nostrils, and shrieking like a maniac as it plunged into ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... boats were out of danger and all lingered to watch the splendid yet awesome spectacle of the burning ship alone on the wide sea, reddening the night and casting a lurid glare upon the water, where floated the frail boats filled with pale faces, all turned for a last look at the fated Brenda, slowly settling to her watery grave. No one saw the end, however, for the gale soon swept the watchers far away and separated them, some never to meet again till the ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... and appalling sight. The flames were red and lurid, the green hills, the dark rocks, and the sands were lit up with a brilliancy as of noonday, while the rolling clouds of smoke, laden as thickly with sparks as the sky in a snowstorm, were carried far away southwards and ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... vision of the lost—delivered in short abrupt sentences—the form of the speaker drawn rigidly up meanwhile to its full height, the long arm outstretched. The utterance had very little of the lurid materialism, the grotesque horror of the ordinary ranter's hell. But it stole upon the imagination little by little, and possessed it at last with an all-pervading terror. Into it, to begin with, had gone the whole life-blood and passion of ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. All the time the heat was so intense that butchers' meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... flocked to conventions and crowded the country schoolhouses for the discussion of methods and men. Perhaps it was true, as one of their critics asserted, that they put a "gill of fact and grievance into a gallon of falsehood and lurid declamation" so as to make an "intoxicating mixture." If so, the mixture took immediate effect. Alliance governors were elected in several southern states; many state legislatures in the South and West had strong farmer delegations; ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... were taken by the Powers to stop the spread of the conflagration it would soon wrap the whole of the Balkan Peninsula in flames. An outbreak of Moslem fanaticism at Salonica (May 6), which led to the murder of the French and German Consuls at that port, shed a lurid light on the whole situation and convinced the Continental Powers that sterner measures must be adopted towards ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... an incident, nor a token, not even a name has floated to us across the intervening years, from all that multitudinous misery, from such an unspeakable tragedy, except that the ship reached its destination, and the slaves were sold. Like boats that pass at sea, that slave vessel loomed for a lurid instant on the horizon, and was gone forever—all but Denmark Vesey. How it happened that he did not vanish with the rest of his ill-fated fellows, will be set down in this paper, which has essayed to describe the slave plot which he planned, ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... horse, rushed onward in the direction of Marian. The latter had turned away at the conclusion of her frantic speech; and was now close to the bank of the stream, with her back towards us. There was no mistaking the intention of the Chicasaw. The hideous expression of her face—the lurid fire burning in her oblique eyes—the white teeth shining and wolf-like—all betrayed her horrid design; which was further made manifest by a long knife seen glittering in her grasp! With all my voice I raised a warning shout! Wingrove did the same—so, too, the Utahs, who were following their ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... sir, humanly speakin'." The Parson told the lurid story, Fannie holding Barbara's hand as they listened. The church's first bell began to ring ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... before the report of the Committee was made public, and the bloom had already been taken off it for most Indians by the report of a Commission instituted on its own account by the Indian National Congress which, partisan and lurid as it was, never received full refutation, as the witnesses upon whose evidence it was based were, for technical reasons, not heard by the Hunter Committee. The complete surrender of civil authority ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... expiring sound of a shout rose above the roar of the ice and waters—but it failed to arouse me. The lights, though, we soon plainly discerned; and on the bluff, at the very mouth of the river, a column of flame began to rise, which cast a lurid light far over the surface of the raging lake. Some persons stood at the edge of the flood waving lighted torches; and I thought from their manner that we ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... atmosphere in the room began now to redden as if in the air of some near conflagration. The larvae grew lurid as things that live in fire. Again the room vibrated; again were heard the three measured knocks; and again all things were swallowed up in the darkness of the dark Shadow, as if out of that darkness all had come, into ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... those who once taste its fascination go back to it again and again, and usually end by placing it with the books that are "the bosom friends" of men. Now the grim Scotchman lit up Horace's letters with the lurid furnace-glow of his genius; Sir George held the serene lamp of the scholar above the same letters, and lo, we have two pieces that can only die when the language dies! What a feat for a mere letter-writer to achieve! Let ambitious correspondents ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... decision. "Until we are positively informed that our Ministers are guilty of the great crime attributed to them," the Herald declared, "we must hope against hope that they are innocent." If guilty they were responsible for the misery of Lancashire (depicted in lurid colours): ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... yards from the door, but lacked the courage to rise and fly. Her knees shook, her breath came fast, she almost felt the lurid effect of those tiny patches of rouge upon her pallor-stricken cheeks. Her eyes were dilated—fixed in a horrified stare at the parting in the curtains which hung before ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to the Ruetli to stand on that spot where, in 1307, Walter Fuerst, Arnold of Melchthal, and Werner Stauffacher took the famous oath, and very reluctantly she gave up the wish when Jack pointed to the rising waves, painting in lurid colours the sudden and dangerous storms that sweep the Lake of Uri. When he went on, however, to insinuate doubts as to the historic accuracy of these old stories, and to hint that even William Tell might himself he an incorporeal legend, Molly clapped a little hand over his mouth, crying ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... on his hands and nothing whatever to occupy him, Code began to sort over the lurid literature with a view to his entertainment. He hauled a great dusty bundle out of one pigeonhole, and found among the novels some ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... in his corner as he listened; his mental language became impossibly lurid. He felt that he would willingly have given a thousand or two to plant them both into that bit of the outpost line, where a month before he had crawled round on his belly at dawn to see his company. Grey-faced and grey-coated with the mud, their eyes had been clear and steady and cheerful, ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... that scene. The lurid glare of the fire cast a ruddy glow over the figures of the men as they gathered round the crater-like opening which had been made, while dark wreaths of smoke hung over the deck above us, and curled up towards the hatchway. Scarcely, however, had a fresh supply of ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... occurred. At this date, smoke, pumice, and cinders, fell without intermission. For eight weeks Krakatau blazed and thundered, the explosions being audible at Batavia, eighty miles off. As the fatal dawn of an August morning broke with lurid light, the culminating shock of an appalling detonation, described as "the very crack and crash of doom," echoed across the ocean, and was heard even in India and Australia, two thousand miles away. Gigantic tidal waves swept the Sundanese shores, destroying the adjacent villages, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... and we lounged on the rock ledges inside, thoroughly protected from the wind and cold. A storm was brewing. We could hear the pine trees whistle and shriek as they were lashed about in the forest across the brook. The lurid light of the fire showed us ourselves in distorted shadows. The whole place seemed wild and wicked, like a robber camp, and under its spell one thought things and felt things that would have been impossible in the sun shine, where everything is revealed. It began to snow, but we laughed ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... worry people for interviews and write "catchy" articles about them, so, of course, they can't stick to the truth; and as the people who read like to hear something spicy, they are obliged to give it all a lurid turn. The female ones are sometimes spiteful; I expect because women often can't help being so about everything. These wonderfully sensational papers have only developed in the last ten years, we are ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... and thirteenth year of the Christian Era, some three hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting sand. Behind him the desert sand-waste stretched, lifeless, interminable, reflecting its lurid glare on the horizon of the cloudless vault of blue. At his feet the sand dripped and trickled, in yellow rivulets, from crack to crack and ledge to ledge, or whirled past him in tiny jets of yellow smoke, before the fitful summer airs. Here and there, upon the ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... hosts are skirmishing, The burning sun reflects the lurid scene; The German Army fighting for its life, Rallies its torn and terrified left wing; And, as they near this place The imperial eagles see Before them in their flight, Here, in the solemn night, The old ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... camped by the road-side near Lithonia. Stone Mountain, a mass of granite, was in plain view, cut out in clear outline against the blue sky; the whole horizon was lurid with the bonfires of rail-ties, and groups of men all night were carrying the heated rails to the nearest trees, and bending them around the trunks. Colonel Poe had provided tools for ripping up the rails and twisting them when hot; but the best and easiest ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... a prey to his ambition. He starts in once to drink all the whiskey in Wolfville. By his partic'lar request most of the white male people of the camp stands in on the deal, a-backin' his play for to make Wolfville a dry camp. At the close of them two lurid weeks Mace lasts, good jedges, like Enright an' Doc Peets, allows he's shorely made ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... was over no battle-field, the most sacred to truth and liberty, these angels hovered; no blazing homesteads nor burning cities shed their lurid gleam on the skies they made radiant with light; nor was it where their sweet voices strangely mingled with the clash of arms and the shouts of charging squadrons that they sang of glory, good-will, and peace. This had been out of keeping with the congruity which characterises all God's ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... for fatherland; In rock-like phalanx stand, Cowards no more. Rise in colossal might, Rise till the storm of fight Wrap us in lurid light ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... had elapsed since, with the flames of the burning Bell House reddening the night behind me, and throwing into lurid relief the fir-groves surrounding Dr. Damar Greefe's mysterious stronghold, I had been borne along the road towards London. That Gatton had hoped for much from a detailed search of the Eurasian's establishment, I knew, ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... on and off with the lurid glare of sulphur pits burning in hell, and screaming, winged Orconites, all mixed up together, pelted toward us as thickly as the snowflakes of a blizzard. I don't suppose the destruction of one little mesh of wires had ever created ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... piercing cries and gesticulations of maniacs, flung their new-born babes into the flames to pacify their irritated deity—the increasing anger of the heavens—blackening with the impending storm, the lurid flashes of lightning darting as it were in mutual enmity from the clashing clouds—the low, distant growling of the coming tempest—the long column of smoke and fire shooting upward from the funeral pyre, and looking like one of the gigantic torches of Pandemonium—the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... eruption. The Moon, in fact, is a world which has burned itself out. How strange the thought that in a far-back period the inhabitants of Earth, had Earth then been inhabited, might have seen the glare of countless volcanoes diffused, lurid and threatening, over the face of their satellite! How strange the thought that the once active fires should all have died away, and the Moon have thus been prepared for the better reception and reflection of the solar radiance in order ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... every turn; the characters stand out sharp and clear, and we are brought face to face with the passion that makes for tragedy. The poem is purged clean of all sentiment and moralising: it is narrative pure and simple, but aglow with the lurid flame of a passion that burns to the very roots of life. It is no exaggeration to say that Leet Livvy is the greatest achievement in Yorkshire dialect poetry up to the present time; let us hope that it is an earnest of even greater things ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... darkness. It was in one of these moments of obscurity, that she observed a small and lambent flame, moving at some distance on the terrace. While she gazed, it disappeared, and, the moon again emerging from the lurid and heavy thunder clouds, she turned her attention to the heavens, where the vivid lightnings darted from cloud to cloud, and flashed silently on the woods below. She loved to catch, in the momentary gleam, the gloomy landscape. Sometimes, a cloud opened its light upon a distant mountain, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... night time, when the lurid glare of flame lights up the foggy darkness, the old gentleman is put to his trumps. "See!" they say; "Fort George is on fire"; and over at Fort George the bucket brigade works hard as the cannoneers. But the fog is too good a chance to be missed by ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... to give him an extra fee, she silently retired to her stone-floored bower, and fell asleep in a stuffy little bed, whose orange curtains filled her dreams with volcanic eruptions and conflagrations of the most lurid description. ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... lamp on the wall in front of Hilma stretched upward tall and thin and began to smoke. She went over to where the lamp hung and, standing on tip-toe, lowered the wick. As she reached her hand up, Annixter noted how the sombre, lurid red of the lamp made a warm reflection on her smooth, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... streets were thronged with working people. The hum of labour resounded from every house; lights gleamed from the long casement windows in the attic storeys, and the whirl of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls. The fires, whose lurid, sullen light had been visible for miles, blazed fiercely up, in the great works and factories of the town. The din of hammers, the rushing of steam, and the dead heavy clanking of engines, was the harsh music which arose from every quarter. ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... and take the light off the landscape with an eclipse which will stop the singing of the birds and the motion of the leaves, together; and then you will see horizontal bars of black shadow forming under them, and lurid wreaths create themselves, you know not how, along the shoulders of the hills; you never see them form, but when you look back to a place which was clear an instant ago, there is a cloud on it, hanging by the precipices, as a hawk pauses over his prey.... And ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... it is madness; very, very madness! 'tis the madness of the fascinated bird; 'tis the madness of the murderer who is voluntarily broken on the wheel; 'tis the madness of the fawn that gazes with adoration on the lurid glare of the anaconda's eye; 'tis the madness of woman who flies to the arms of her Fate;" and here she sprang like a tigress round Vivian's neck, her long light hair bursting from its bands, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... softened by semi-transparent edges of drapery. But the dull red lamplight lit duskily up the folds of her robe, her golden ornaments, and the black tarns, her eyes. She appeared to waver between the light of heaven and the lurid gloom of ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... letter and never afterwards composed for money. Unfortunately the "Rock of Independence" to which he had proudly retired was but a castle of air, over which the meteors of French political enthusiasm cast a lurid gleam. In the last years of his life, exiled from polite society on account of his revolutionary opinions, he became sourer in temper and plunged more deeply into the dissipations of the lower ranks, among whom he found his only companionship ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Pentegoet, and close to those battlements which form the coast line here. The tide made thunder as it rose among caverns and frothed almost at the verge of the heights. From this headland Mount Desert could be seen, leading the host of islands which go out into the Atlantic, ethereal in fog or lurid ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... worst—not aristocracy, but kakistocracy—a state of things, which to the honor of our nature, has seldom obtained among men, and which perhaps was only fully exemplified during the worst times of the French Revolution, when that horrid hell burnt with its most lurid flame. In such a state of things, to be accused is to be condemned—to protect the innocent is to be guilty; and what perhaps is the worst effect, even men of better nature, to whom their own deeds ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... given to the flames; and during the whole of the 19th they were still burning. 'The clouds of smoke,' says Mr. Loch, 'driven by the wind, hung like a vast black pall over Pekin;' well calculated to enforce with their lurid gloom the lesson conveyed to the citizens in a proclamation which Lord Elgin had caused to be affixed in Chinese to all the buildings and walls in the neighbourhood, to the effect 'that no individual, however exalted, could escape from the responsibility ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... an exact copy of things as they were in that far-off age. The barbarism of the time is in these old tales—deeds which make one shiver, customs regarding the relations of the sexes now found only among savages, social and domestic arrangements which are somewhat lurid and disgusting. And yet, withal, the note of bravery, of passion, of authentic life is there; we are held in the grip of genuine manhood and womanhood. MacPherson gives a picture of the Ossianic age as ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... the great executive forces of humanity, the child. The soul can paint, execute its ideas, its hopes and its fears in any color—the lurid red of blood, the black of ignorance and crime, or in the living light of beauty. All the same, it is the childhood of man painting its ideals in ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... equal, I am not in a position to say. All I know is, that Benacre Hall, such as it is, remains; but I can never forget the feeling of terror with which, on those dark and dull winter nights, I looked out of my bedroom window to watch the lurid light flaring up into the black clouds around, which told how wicked men were at their mad work, how fiendish passion had triumphed, how some honest farmer was reduced to ruin, as he saw the efforts of a life of industry consumed ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... flash played as it were round the burnished cornice of the chamber, and threw a lurid hue on the scenes of Watteau and Boucher that sparkled in the medallions over the lofty doors. The thunderbolts seemed to descend in clattering confusion upon the roof. Sometimes there was a moment of dead silence, broken only by the pattering of the rain in the street without, or the pattering ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... sky is clouded, Gaspard, And the vexed ocean sleeps a troubled sleep, Beneath a lurid gleam of parting sunshine. Such slumber hangs o'er discontented lands, While factions doubt, as yet, if they have strength To front the open ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... good Major Yeates Contending with litigious peasants, With "hidden hands" within his gates, With claims for foxes and for pheasants; We saw Leigh Kelway drop his chin— That precious English super-tripper— In shocked amazement drinking in The lurid ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various
... sympathies were all aroused. He caught the color of what was passing about him, and threw it back more vividly than he received it, but mixed, nevertheless, with a lurid and portentous hue. Hepzibah, on the other hand, felt herself more apart from human kind than even in the seclusion which she had ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and rolling stock wore out, it became impossible to renew them from England or France. Unable to export their cotton, planters on the seaboard burned it in what were called "fires of patriotism." In their lurid light the fatal weakness of Southern ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... lodges pour a motley throng, Slow measures chanting of a dirge-like song. In one great circle dizzily they swing, A squaw and chief alternate in the ring. Coarse raven locks stream over robes of white, Their deep set orbs emit a lurid light, And as through pine trees moan the winds refrains, So swells and dies away, the ghostly ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... light being produced, whereas in the earlier method, the scale being commenced from the light end, so much of the picture was dark that the impression of light and air was lost and a dark gloomy land took its place, a gloom accentuated rather than dispelled by the streaks of lurid light where the ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... beds,' she found the Communion of Saints in Paradise and on earth knit together in one fellowship as truly and preciously brought home to her as ever it had been to Pauline, and moreover when she thought of her mother, 'the lurid mist' was dispelled which had so haunted her the ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with more alacrity than I had seen him exhibit since I had joined the Mercury. Meanwhile the watch below, awakened by the racket, had come on deck, and were having the situation explained to them with much gesticulation and lurid language by their comrades, the watch on deck, all of whom had knocked off the work upon which they happened to have been engaged, and were now talking excitedly, casting occasional glances from us on the poop to the junk away down on the ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... eyes transformed with fury, the white teeth champing with rage, and the fair cheeks blazing red with passion. But the Count! Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even to the demons of the pit. His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell fire blazed behind them. His face was deathly pale, and the lines of it were hard like drawn wires. The thick eyebrows that met over the nose now seemed like a heaving bar of white-hot metal. With a fierce ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... how inflexible, inexorable, and of peril and horror incalculable to Mother and Sister and self and royal House; and that there is one possibility of good issue, and only one: that of loyally yielding, where one cannot resist. By degrees, some lurid troublous but perceptible light-gleam breaks athwart the black whirlwind of our indignation and despair; and saner thoughts begin to insinuate themselves. "Obey, thou art not the strongest, there are stronger than thou! All men, the highest ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... sets in a new and lurid light the office of the King of the Saturnalia, the ancient Lord of Misrule, who presided over the winter revels at Rome in the time of Horace and Tacitus. It seems to prove that his business had not always been that of a mere harlequin or merry-andrew whose only care was ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... devastation. The clouds have gathered into one thick low canopy, dark and vapoury as the smoke which overhangs London; the setting sun is just gleaming underneath with a dim and bloody glare, and the crimson rays spreading upward with a lurid and portentous grandeur, a subdued and dusky glow, like the light reflected on the sky from some vast conflagration. The deep flush fades away, and the rain begins to descend; and we hurry homeward rapidly, yet sadly, forgetful alike of ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... figure, the haughty torch-bearer, draws nearer, until Chios sees by the lurid glare the dark masses of hair floating on the wind, and fancies he sees the mysterious eyes beneath the marble brow. He could not mistake her—he knew her too well. It was Saronia, the priestess, arrayed ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... scarcely breathe. These sultry days are the lull before the storm—the pause before the moisture-laden clouds of the monsoon roll over the land 'rugged and brown,' and the wild rattle of thunder and the lurid glare of quivering never-ceasing lightning herald in the annual rains. The manufacture however ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... come within sight of the city, than the work of destruction commenced. Vast columns of smoke darkened the face of heaven and obscured the noonday sun; for five miles along the levee fierce flames darted through the lurid atmosphere. Great ships and steamers wrapped in fire floated down the river, threatening the Federal vessels with destruction. Fifteen thousand bales of cotton, worth one million and a half of dollars, were consumed. About a dozen ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... going to have a storm, Yussuf?" said Mr Burne, as he looked round at the lurid brassy aspect of the heavens, and the ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... spurred to keep pace with the sex appeal. The news columns became constantly more lurid. They shrieked, yelled, blared, shrilled, and boomed the scandals and horrors of the moment in multivocal, multigraphic clamor, tainting the peaceful air breathed by everyday people going about their everyday ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the sonnet against the people of Pistoja, which breathes the spirit of Dantesque invective. Sometimes the fierceness of it is turned against himself, as in the capitolo upon old age and its infirmities. The grotesqueness of this lurid descant on senility and death is marked by something rather Teutonic than Italian, a "Danse Macabre" intensity of loathing; and it winds up with the bitter reflections, peculiar to him in his latest years, upon the vanity of art. "My much-prized art, on which I relied and which brought ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... accursed and detested of all criminals, that have drenched a continent in needless blood, and moved the foundations of their times with hideous crimes and cruelty, caught up in black clouds, full of voices of vengeance and lurid with punishment, shall be whirled aloft and plunged downwards forever and forever in an endless retribution; while God shall say, "Thus shall it be to all who betray their country"; and all in heaven and upon the earth ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... by Signor Venturi as the master's own,[72] and with that view I am entirely agreed. The stories represented are not easily determinable (as is so often the case with Giorgione), but probably refer to the legends of Adonis.[73] The splendour of colour, the lurid light, the richness of effect, are in the highest degree impressive. What artist but Giorgione would have so revelled in the glories of the evening sunset, the orange horizon, the distant blue hills? The same gallery ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... himself up completely to black thoughts. He recalled his words to her, uttered years ago, half in jest and half in earnest; he had horrified her beyond expression by telling her how he would punish a wife if he were the husband she deceived. With a grim, lurid smile he remembered the penalty. He had said he would not kill; he would disfigure the woman frightfully and permit her to live as a moral example to other wives. Slitting her mouth from ear to ear or cutting off her nose—these were two of the penalties he would inflict. ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... sleepless night for the Ambassador. This was just such a complication as might embroil the nations of Europe in strife, an excuse which might serve to snap diplomatic relations and spread the lurid clouds of war from the Ural range to the shores of the Atlantic. One thing seemed certain, De Froilette had not repeated his information broadcast. No intimation reached Lord Cloverton that the report had even been whispered in ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... lies deep in the mountains. A cascade tumbles down the side of a mighty crag on the one hand; on the other sits a monstrous owl on the branch of a blasted tree, blinking evilly. A path leads steeply down to a great cave. The moon throws a lurid light on the scene and shows us Caspar in his shirt-sleeves preparing for his infernal work. He arranges black stones in a circle around a skull. His tools lie beside him: a ladle, bullet-mould, and eagle's-wing fan. The high voices of an invisible chorus utter the cry of ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the horse, which was put to the trot, and we hurried on. The bells came nearer and nearer with their fantastic clanging, and the sky grew more lurid as they rang. Then there was a bend in the canal, and we caught sight of the two towers of S. Philip and S. James, dark against ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... laggard steps, with what oppressive tardiness, came the dawn, in long streaks of lurid light above the ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... about sunset, but along the line of the distant horizon we could see the dark and heavy clouds begin to boil up in thick and ominous columns. The lightning was darting to and fro like lurid sheets of fire, and the storm seemed to be gathering; we could hear the storm king in his chariot in the clouds, rumbling as he came, but a dead lull was seen and felt in the air and in nature; everything was in a holy hush, except the hoarse belchings of the engines, the sizzing and frying ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... lingering minutes; but presently the obdurate knot gave way, and, turning to gather up her shawl, there, close behind her, so close that his hot breath seemed to sear her cheek, stood her husband, clear in the moonlight, with a sneer on his face, and the lurid glow of drunkenness, that made a savage brute of a bad man, gleaming in his deep-set eyes. Hitty neither shrieked nor ran; despair nerved her,—despair turned her rigid before ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... fled over the sea? Ah, if he could be sure of that, and sure that the dreaded man would not return! Or was he lurking in some secret hole, ready to steal out and avenge a violation of Rule 3? The doorkeeper had always feared the man; in the lurid light of this deed, Gaspard's image grew into a monster of horror, threatening sudden and swift revenge for disobedience or treachery. No; he must stand firm. But what of the police? Well, men sleep somehow, and at last he fell asleep, holding the band of the night-shirt away from his throat: ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... on three sides, and to the south the lofty hills of a large island, and at one end the peaks of a mountain towering over the rest. There was, instead of the bright, pure, clear atmosphere which generally exists at that hour, a very peculiar lurid glare, which, as the sun rolled upwards in his course, increased in intensity, till the sky became of almost a copper hue. Fairburn had gone aloft with his glass, to satisfy himself more fully as to there being anything in sight from the point ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... combustion, ignition, burning; phlogiston; conflagration, holocaust, deflagration; flame, blaze; bonfire, balefire, feu de joie, beacon. Associated Words: pyrology, pyrography, pyromania, pyrophobia, incendiary, incendiarism, arson, lurid, Moloch, fuel, combustible, pyroleter, smolder, ignis fatuus, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... inclination to look to aught beyond its effect on the brig. Had one been otherwise disposed, the attempt would have been useless, for the wind had filled the air with spray, and near the islets even with sand. The lurid but fiery tinge, too, interposed a veil that no human eye could penetrate. As the tornado passed onward, however, and the winds lulled, the air again became clear, and in five minutes after the moment when the Swash lay nearly on her side, with ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... of the new movement shall not be discovered talking with the doctors, or defining art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at first by peerers in books. The passer-by shall see him, perhaps, through the door of a foundry at night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, and humbled with labor, but with the fire from the heart of the earth playing upon his face. His hands—innocent of the ink of poets, of the mere outsides of things—shall be beautiful with the grasp of the thing called ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... gold wavelets of the "branch." In the eastern sky the florid face of a hunter's moon looked down, from the level line of a leaden cloud, which striped the star emblazoned shield of night, like a bar sinister; and the white lustre of her rays was dimmed to a lurid dulness solemn ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... strange dishabille, gathered round; two long lines of them handing bucket after bucket, with machine-like regularity, from the fountain; others removing the furniture from the terrace; cushions, ormolu, fine china, handed out of the lower windows; the whole seen by the wild lurid light that flashed from the windows above, strangely illuminating the quiet green trees, and bringing out every tiny leaf and spray by its fierce brilliancy, that confused every accustomed shadow, while the clouds of smoke rolled down as ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sending up volumes of smoke, and showers of sparks; and in their light the demon-like forms of the mischief-doers, some seated upon their horses and looking quietly on, others flitting to and fro in the lurid glare; while the roar and crackling of the flames, and the sound of falling timbers came distinctly ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... magic touch of a master. The wind moans drearily without, the rain beats dismally against the windows, the fagots flicker blue-flamed and weird in the dark recesses of the chimney-place; but what care I? The white walls are lurid in the flare, the great bed stands out in the darkness like a grotesque engine of the Inquisition; but who suffers? Au troisieme, No. 30, Rue Lepelletier, was never noted for its comforts; but who would ask a repose more secure, a peace more perfect, than are enjoyed by the occupant ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... manager was summoning by telegraph some of the most expert guides of the state for a thorough search of the neighborhood, and, at the same time, a New York newspaperman, at the Wayside for a vacation, was clicking off to his city editor, from the town telegraph station, the most lurid details of ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... falling into the frozen chasms that yawned all round them. At last, however, they reached the mouth of the crater, and, crawling cautiously to the very edge, peered down into its gloomy depths. At the bottom of the abyss, which seemed to them to go down into the very heart of the earth, a lurid flame burned sullenly, sending up a sulphureous steam, which cooling as it rose, fell again in showers upon the sides of the cavity. Into this one of the brave explorers had to descend, and when they had cast lots the choice fell upon Montano himself. His preparations were soon ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... and the most striking articles of his attire, when sweeping, were a flame-colored flannel shirt and a shiny black hat with "Prepare to Meet Thy God" on the front in large silver letters. The combination of color was indescribably pictorial, and as lurid and suggestive as an ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... excited. He felt ashamed that a token of weakness should have betrayed him before man, and with a strong exertion strove to smother the commotion which swelled his breast. He dashed away the drop that fain would soften the lurid expression of his eye. His pride succeeded in the conflict: soon that lip recovered its sardonic curl, and his features relapsing into their calm and ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... to say about things! Weird! Delightful! I dare say that's what Rivers would expect a nice girl to say of his books. He spends half his time being afraid people should think his work is lurid, and the rest in being simply terrified that people should think it's not. He's very clever ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... and was cooped up in a train for seven hours, that I am now driving in a pelting rain through, so far as I can see for the mist, what appears to be a howling wilderness, I ask myself if I am still in possession of my senses. I ask myself why I should commit such lurid folly. Last night I was sitting over the fire with a book—for it was cold, though not so cold as this," the speaker shivered and dragged the collar of his overcoat still higher—"at peace with all the world, with Omar purring placidly by my side, ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... cookery prevails to make it exceedingly piquant; the sauce is better than the substance. Burton's melancholy is not, like Johnson's, a deep, hopeless, 'inspissated gloom,' thickened by memories of remorse, and lighted up by the lurid fires of feared perdition; it is not, like Byron's, dashed with the demoniac element, and fretted into universal misanthropy; it is not, like Foster's, the sad, fixed fascination of a pure intelligence contemplating ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the mind, emancipated from the control of the will, ran riot; and the quick-changing pictures that were presented to him were full of fearful things that shook his very life with terror. Awake he could force himself to think of this or that; asleep, he was at the mercy of this lurid imagination that seemed to dye each successive scene in the hue of blood. First of all, he was in a great cathedral, sombre and vast, and by the dim light of the candles he saw that some solemn ceremony was going forward. Priests, mitred and robed, sat in a semicircle in front of the ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... rapid, Hamlet the slowest, in movement. Lear combines length with rapidity,—like the hurricane and the whirlpool, absorbing while it advances. It begins as a stormy day in summer, with brightness; but that brightness is lurid, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... began to justify them by thoughts of the other incongruities of existence—the strange, the passionate incongruities of youth and age, wealth and poverty, life and death; the wonderful odd bedfellows of this world; all those lurid contrasts which haunt a man's spirit till sometimes he is ready to cry out: "Rather than live where such things ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Dick did not fire till the muzzle of his pistol was against his enemy's breast. The darkness, now deeper than ever, prevented him from being distinctly seen by the furious crowd, who thought only of the Senator. But now the fire shooting up brightly at the sudden breath of a strong wind threw a lurid light upon ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... seemingly harmless, the weak spot was sure to betray itself. He called himself a disciple of Carlyle, but would have been the first to laugh at the absurdity of making any comparison between the playful heat-lightnings of his own satire and that lurid light, as of the Divine wrath over the burning cities of the plain, that flares out on us from the profoundest humor of modern times. Beside that ingenium perfervidum of the Scottish seer, he was but ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... approaching the tank and men clambering on to the cars in which he had traveled. Soon after he joined them, the train rolled out of the side-track and sped west, clattering and jolting toward the lurid sunset that burned upon the edge of the plain. Jack-pines and scattered birches stood out hard and black against the glare, the rails blazed with crimson fire and faded as the ruddy light changed to cold green, and there was a sting of ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... ago he had opened with almost a shudder. He undid the wrapper, shook it open and looked at it. Then suddenly he sat like a man turned to stone. The cigar burnt out between his teeth, his eyes were riveted upon that page, the black letters seemed to have become lurid. The sentences stabbed, he was face to face with the impossible. The paper which he read was dated on the preceding day. Before him was a fourth article, dated from Paris, dated less than forty-eight hours ago, signed "Julien Portel." The title of the article ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had so lately quitted. The latter was now hove-to, under full sail, an occasional puff of smoke alone betraying the presence of the demon of destruction within. The sky was dark and lowering, the sunset red and lurid in its grandeur, the clouds numerous and threatening, the sea high and dark, with occasional streaks of white foam. Not a breath of wind was stirring. Everything portended a gale. As we lay slowly rolling from side to side, both ship and boat ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... a lurid spark upon the stone pavement. Then it lengthened out until it became a yellow line, and then, without any warning or sound, a gash seemed to open and a hand appeared, a white, almost womanly hand, which felt about in the center of the little area of light. For a minute or more the hand, ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... shadows on the trees made the journey one of great beauty; while the mountain air lessened the sense of fatigue that would otherwise have pressed heavily on us after so long a day amid such novel surroundings. The only thing to disturb the solitude is the clank of machinery; and the lurid lights, as we pass a colliery; and then a mile of two more with but the sound of our own wheels and the rhythm of the horses' feet, and we suddenly draw up at an hotel in the midst of the Forest, its quiet well-lighted interior inviting us through the doorway, left open to the cool summer night ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... love and strife Glimmered through his lurid life, As the stars' intenser light Through the red flames o'er him trailing, As his ships went sailing, sailing, Northward in the ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... might shudder and turn to a private hearth, or they might give loosest rein to desire for Fame. In the columns of the newspapers, above the name of every Roman patriot, each party found voice. From a lurid background of Moreau's conspiracy and d'Enghien's death, of a moribund English King and Premier, of Hayti aflame, and Tripoli insolent, they thundered, like Cassandra, of home woes. To the Federalist, reverencing the dead Washington, still looking for leadership ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... pleasure. Moreover, towards afternoon some of them broke, grew pale and elongated, and sank to the horizon again, while others of them changed to the likeness of white transparent fish-scales. In the east, over Maslovska, a single lurid mass was louring, but Karl Ivanitch (who always seemed to know the ways of the heavens) said that the weather would still continue to be ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... strong-boned hunter that has carried you over post and rail, in a cab,—are sore trials; but nothing, according to my companion's description, to the desecration of your house and home by its conversion into a factory. Such an air of the "Inferno," too, pervades the smelting-house, with its lurid glow, its roar, its flash, and its furious heat, that I could readily forgive him the passionate warmth with ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... wastelands, wide and woodless, glittering miles and miles away, Where the south wind seldom wanders and the winters will not stay; Lurid wastelands, pent in silence, thick with hot and thirsty sighs, Where the scanty thorn-leaves twinkle with their haggard, hopeless eyes; Furnaced wastelands, hunched with hillocks, like to stony billows rolled, Where the naked flats lie swirling, like ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... that work a highly wrought account of the alleged conspiracy of December, 1776, as involving "nothing less than the substitution of a despotic in lieu of a limited monarch;" and then proceeded to bring the accusation down from those lurid generalities of condemnation in which Jefferson himself had cautiously left it, by adding this sentence: "That Mr. Henry was the person in view for the ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... her to leave the capital, and painted in lurid colours the possible effects of further defeat and the resulting fall of the ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... almost completely on fire by the end of the second day. It had been visible in the telescopic screen even after they were out of atmosphere, a black smear until the turning planet carried it into darkness and then a lurid glow. ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... nothing of the splendour of the sea. One day the sun deceived us; we set out as usual; but had not got half to the end of the ramparts, when a series of dark clouds came creeping over the blue sky; a hollow wind began to sigh amongst the leaves, and the light became fitful and lurid, till, on a sudden, a loud crack in the sky was heard, and in an instant down rushed the rain in a perfect deluge. We had reached the most exposed part of the boulevard; all the trees here were young; indeed, as we observed the quick flashes of lightning, we were scarcely sorry to be at a distance ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... his spiritual brother, SCHOPENHAUER, that dyspeptic sage, Monthly grow so very like each other, As portrayed in MAXSE'S lurid page, That it passes MAXSE'S Christian charity ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... it bodily here, for, without any gleam of romance or adventure, the experience was one typical of the land and of our life here, which I believe the generous reader will be willing to accept without any attempt on my part to embellish it with excitement and lurid writing. ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... observation was astounding. It is true that he began to be surprised and rather bewildered. He even noted that 'there seemed a bloomin' lot of 'em;' and the quality of his arithmetical feats and his verbal enrichments became, alike, increasingly lurid. I believe he would have gone on until daylight if I had not tried him too often with a Queen Anne teapot. It was that teapot, with its conspicuous urn design, that finally disillusioned him. I had just returned from putting it back in the chest for the third time when he missed it; and he ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... a matter of fact he is Cyril Oswald, the lawful inheritor of Oswald Hall and great estates, which, of course, pass into the possession of the nearest villain. This is Major Harley, a gentleman of a lurid past and an infamous present, mitigated only by the fact that he has a beautiful and amiable daughter, Dorothy, who, having been educated at Roedean School, conceives herself to be qualified to run after beagles. In the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... hall. Out sprang the male first, and then Marion Webster was handed, with great state, and led into the interior of the old castle. She was led direct into the hall, which was lighted up in a very fanciful manner, by means of many skulls arranged round the room, and through the eyes and jaws of which lurid lights streamed all around. Marion was filled with terror as she cast her eyes on these shining monuments of mortality; and had, in her fear, scarcely noticed a man in black, sitting at the end of the room, poring ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... took up his case rather warmly and declared that he was a cute little thing, and that his manners were all right if he was treated with good manners in the first place. The consequence was that by the time they reached her gate they were deep in the lurid entanglements of a ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... afterthought. I'd worked up to it by havin' some of my lurid locks trimmed, and as Giuseppe quits shearin' and asks if there'll be anything else I rubs my hand casual across ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford |
