"Overpowering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... polished his spectacles so long at a time to give the deep groove they were making across his nose a chance of filling up; nor whether he would be less bald if he rubbed his head less; nor what he had really got inside that overpowering phrenology of brow, and behind that aspect of chronic concentration. But about the retiring habits of both ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... about two and a half inches square. There are others about the size of a postage-stamp, while the largest one, "The Descent from the Cross" (No. 103), is twenty-two by sixteen and a half inches. The amount of labor on these large plates is overpowering, while the workmanship in the smaller ones is almost unbelievably fine—think of a child's face not over one-eighth of an inch wide, and hands less than a sixteenth of an inch across, yet really eloquent ...
— Rembrandt and His Etchings • Louis Arthur Holman
... serious character, and require careful watching, especially as they may lead to derangement of the mind. Thus, a lady, Mrs. X, was at one time under my professional care, who, at the beginning of her first pregnancy, acquired an overpowering aversion to a half-breed Indian woman who was employed in the house as a servant. Whenever this woman came near her she was at once seized with violent trembling, which ended in a few minutes with vomiting and great mental and physical prostration, lasting several ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... nineteenth of May, and was officially accredited. In that ceremony his pride was touched and his enthusiasm was abated. He found in the presence of Washington an atmosphere of dignity and greatness wholly unexpected, and thoroughly overpowering. He felt his littleness in the presence of that noble representative of the best men and the soundest principles of the American republic, and he returned from the audience abashed and subdued; for the genuine courtesy exhibited by the president, ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... for a second. She got on to the bed, and opened her thighs wide like a well-trained fuckster to help me, I inserted my penis, and she met me with passion. I was not so rapid, the want of a spend was not now overpowering my senses; whilst she had had two hours baudy talk, been fucked, but cheated of her pleasure, and been left at the critical moment, unsatisfied, with my spunk in her. She was dying for a spend, wanting it like a woman who has been for a week unsatisfied. ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... table, chewed lazily, and heard the deaf telegraph clerk monotonously tapping on his apparatus in the next room. I had already drunk five glasses of drugged vodka, and, propping my heavy head on my fist, thought of my overpowering boredom from which there was no escape, while my wife sat beside me and did not take her eyes off me. She looked at me as no one can look but a woman who has nothing in this world but a handsome husband. She loved me madly, slavishly, and not merely my ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... arrest them, and a desperate struggle ensues. The police lose their caps and belts, but eventually succeed in overpowering them. ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien
... naked infant or a red water-jar on the back; black hogs and lean poultry wandering at will into the houses—such is the picture of the motley life in the inland villages. Strange was the contrast between human poverty and natural wealth. We were on the borders of a virgin forest, and the overpowering beauty of the vegetation soon erased all memory of the squalor and lifelessness of La Mona. Our road—a mere path, suddenly entered this seemingly impenetrable forest, where the branches crossed overhead, producing a delightful shade. The curious forms of tropical life were all ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... fires than now in France; While, in their bright white flashes, Wrong's shadow, backward cast, Waves cowering o'er the ashes Of the dead, blaspheming past, O'er the shapes of fallen giants, His own unburied brood, Whose dead hands clench defiance At the overpowering good: And down the happy future runs a flood Of prophesying light; It shows an Earth no longer stained with blood, Blossom and fruit where now we see the bud Of Brotherhood ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... feeble glimmer from the cabin lamp, he made his way in the direction of the state-room appropriated to Blanche and Violet. The smoke got into his eyes and made them water; into his throat and made him cough violently; into his lungs, producing an overpowering sense of suffocation, and impressing unmistakably upon him the necessity for rapidity and decision of movement. Blind, giddy, breathless, he staggered onward, groping for the handle of the state-room door. At length he found it, wrenched the door ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... these difficulties. When, in the hands of a master, they are forced to bend under the onward and impetuous sweep of the passionate rhythm, compelled to sing the tune of the overpowering emotions—the chords of the spirit quiver in response. The heart recognizes the organic law of its own life: the constant recurrence of new effort sinking but to recover itself in accurately proportioned rest, rising again in ever-renewed exertion, to sink ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... of a kneeling monk, to drive the blood in cold waves to her throbbing heart? The sketch represented the head and shoulders of a man, whose cowl had fallen back, exposing the outlines and moulding of a face and throat absolutely flawless in beauty, yet darkened by the reflection of some overpowering and irremediable woe. The features were youthful as St. Sebastian's; the expression that of one prematurely aged by severe and unremitting mental conflict; but neither shaven crown, nor cowl availed to disguise Bertie Brentano, and as his sister's eyes gazed at the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... cowboy there in the darkness, and returned to camp. His conscience questioned him, but he had only satisfaction, even gladness in reply. Blinky had been one of the wild cowboys, and had been going from bad to worse. If an overpowering love gripped him, a yielding to it in a right way might make a better man of him. Pan could not see anything else. He had known more than one good-for-nothing cowboy, drinking and gambling himself straight to hell, who had fooled his detractors and had taken the narrow ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... the guise which they have assumed that they are peaceful emigrants, conceal their real intentions, and especially when they know in advance that their landing will be resisted and can only be accomplished by an overpowering force. This expedient was successfully resorted to previous to the last expedition, and the vessel in which those composing it were conveyed to Nicaragua obtained a clearance from the collector of the port of Mobile. Although, after a careful examination, no arms or munitions of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... must have felt the owner of the proverbial bull in the crockery shop—terror mingled with an overpowering sense of responsibility. All personal considerations are well-nigh merged in the realization of the danger which ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... upon both classes while one side of humanity only is represented, and while one sex has the irresponsible keeping of the rights and privileges of the other. To-day, throughout the length and breadth of our land, woman finds the greatest need of the ballot through an almost overpowering desire to have her wishes and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... the effect of Oedipus' divulged guilt and the misery of this fool of Fate. The music is an outburst of sheer genius. It is overpowering, frightening. The postlude is orchestral, with the chorus speaking above the music. Jocasta has hanged herself, Oedipus has torn out his own eyes with her brooch. The music is a fitting reverie on the great play, and after a wild tumult it subsides ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... sensitive a nature, and at such an age. He was bold and full of fortitude in the front of the ordeal, and solitude pent up his feelings, but the fatherly sympathy and perfect confidence drew forth expression, and a vent once opened, the rush of emotion and anguish long repressed was utterly overpowering. His youthful manhood struggled hard, but the strangled sobs only shook his frame the more convulsively, and the tears burnt like drops of fire, as they fell among the fingers that he spread over his face in the agony of weeping for his young vigorous life, ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... or by sudden flashes of fiery anger: and the last were less trying than the first—indeed, it seemed sometimes to Amphillis that they served as a vent and a relief; that for a time after them the weariness was a shade less dreary, and the languor scarcely quite so overpowering. ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... same degree as with Mildred, for here the truth is with us—Pompilia is a living soul, not a puppet of the theatre. Yet even here the same strange errors recur. She has words indeed that reach the inmost heart—poignant, overpowering in tenderness and pathos; but she has, also, words that cause the brows to draw together, the mind to pause uneasily, then to cry "Not so!" Of such is the analysis of her own blank ignorance with regard to the marriage-state. This, wholly acceptable ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... the progress of that fiery sea whose waves were flame—red, rolling flame. Onward it came with resistless speed, overpowering every obstacle, widening its sphere of action, till it formed a perfect semicircle about them. As the night drew on, the splendour of the scene became more apparent, and the path of the fire better defined; but there was no fear of the conflagration ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... garden, she becomes active. He is forced to flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals—of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself. The street in Brixton is too glowing and overpowering. He has to soothe and quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles. These creatures are indeed very different from himself. But they do not put their shape or colour or custom into a decisive intellectual competition with his own. They do not seek to destroy ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... she fell into a consumption. I cannot tell you what I suffered.... I saw her fade rapidly away, beautiful, and more beautiful, and more angelic to the very last. I was often by her bedside, and when her mind wandered she would talk to me with a sweet, natural, and affecting eloquence that was overpowering. I saw more of the beauty of her mind in that delirious state than I ever had before.... I was by her when she died, and was the last she ever looked ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... brute! He will ruin everything. I must kill him." But how? He had no weapon. He looked about the room in gasping terror—the dog accepting the move as a sign that the eloquence of the tail argument had proved overpowering, supplemented this by an explosion of ecstatic yelps of a deep, bass volume, that murdered the deep silence of the night, like salvos of pistols. The curtains to the windows were held in place by stout dimity bands. Whispering ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... crooked streets out toward the principal shopping district, but soon found it impossible to go even that short distance without a carriage, the heat was so overpowering. We turned to the old city, Manila proper, passed over the drawbridge, and under the arch of its inclosing ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... matter stands thus, you see. When Scudamore spoke, he and I were of opinion that we had accidentally discovered the entirely unsuspected existence of a more than ordinary interest in you on the part of a certain lady; but since then I have come to the conclusion that we mistook overpowering excitement for a more tender feeling; hence I do not consider that I ought to enlighten you at all. If any tender feeling exists, why, it is the girl's own secret, for her to retain or not as she pleases; and if she has ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... weeks that I had sojourned in the country had by no means prepossessed me in its favour. The home-sickness was sore upon me, and all my solitary hours were spent in tears. My whole soul yielded itself up to a strong and overpowering grief. One simple word dwelt for ever in my heart, and swelled it to bursting—"Home!" I repeated it waking a thousand times a day, and my last prayer before I sank to sleep was still "Home! Oh, that I could return, if only to die at home!" And nightly I did ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the city are on a no less grand scale, but the average person will hardly have eyes and ears for more than a contemplation of the wealth of splendour to be seen in its overpowering cathedral. Of the glorious group of monumental churches of northern France, the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Reims, if not admittedly the most beautiful and memorable Gothic edifice in all France, needs but little qualifying comment. It has a preeminence which ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... reprisals made, no remonstrance presented, and, in fact, no notice taken of their atrocious depredations. Hence these desperadoes, from inference and experience of the past, have been led to conclude, that whatever was practicable would be tolerated; that wherever they had the means or opportunity of overpowering, it was their duty, as it was to their advantage, to seize it to their own use, without any other apprehensions of the consequences than what might ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... doctrines with all his heart so that he would have gone to death for them. In the belief that they eventually would succeed and regenerate France and all mankind, he was ready to work with unwearied patience. The paucity of his followers in the National Assembly and the overpowering personality of Mirabeau prevented him from exercising much influence in framing the new constitution, and he gradually turned for support to the people of Paris. He was already a member of the Jacobin Club, which, by the ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... footsteps again, cautiously retreating; and in spite of her will, in spite of her formal disposal of the letters and the presents, she was mastered all at once, not by pain or humiliation, but by an overpowering sense of loneliness. She seemed to be seated high on an empty world of ruins. She rose quickly from her chair, and her eyes fell upon a violin case. With a sigh of relief she opened it, and a little while after one or two of the guests ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... Monsieur Lebigre's—his huge bed, his cosy room, and his business, on which his thoughts now dwelt with tender remorse. And from Lisa, from the furniture, from all his cosy surroundings, he derived a sense of comfort which thrilled him with a delightful, overpowering charm. ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Enriquez to his feet again. "Ah! The little old nigger—you have read?" I began to understand. "My wife, my best friend, and the little old nigger, all in one day. Eet is perfect!" Nevertheless, in spite of this ecstatic and overpowering combination, he hurried to take his wife's hand; kissing it, he led her to a door opening into another room, made her a low bow to the ground as she passed out, and ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... He was sent into space with the precision he expected. The experience was exhilarating and, although he had anticipated each event in advance, he could not possibly have foreseen the overpowering feeling that came over him. Weightlessness he had experienced for brief periods during training, but nothing could match the heady impression of continuous freedom ...
— Egocentric Orbit • John Cory
... unable to control his deep emotion, and his countenance wore the expression of such overpowering grief that Hardy said to him, with interest: ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... that it could not be carried through the tumult and shock of the world without great danger and difficulty. The thing, as he had said, was tricky; it came and went; and the fear of losing it was the most overpowering of all fears. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... severe: but the repugnance we feel to condemning a woman cannot prevent our listening to the voice of justice, which tells us that the comparison is still in favour of the guilty one of antiquity; for she, driven to crime by fierce passion overpowering reason, at least only deprived her husband of physical life, and, in committing the deed, exposed herself to all its consequences; while Lady Byron left her husband at the very moment that she saw him struggling amid a thousand shoals in the stormy sea of embarrassments created by his marriage, ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... came suddenly across the flagged hall at him and seized his trembling hands. Some overpowering force moved with her and ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... scrambling. I must be several miles too high up. I went down along the sides of the Immense Rock, looking at every new shape it assumed to find the place where so quietly I picked up the stones and geologized a few hours before. All was vain. Fatigue was overpowering me, and my senses began to reel like a drunken man. Now was the time to see the visions and mysteries of this dread abode, and unconsciously to utter sounds of unknown tongues. Now, indeed, I fancied I heard people call me; now I saw lights; now I saw a camel with a person mounted ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... contemporaries trained among books, and with the faculty of speech more fully developed than that of thought, seemed colorless and empty to one with—whom natural objects and grandeurs were always present in such overpowering force. Excluded by his social position from taking an active part in the public events of the day, and repelled by the emptiness of the then fashionable literature, he turned to private and humble life as possessing at least a reality. But he thus withheld himself from the contemplation ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... scattered over an open plain. Here and there among the huts are seen houses built of stone in the European fashion. The former lie modestly concealed, under the cooling shade of palm-trees; the latter stand boldly forward, braving the burning sunbeams and dazzling the eye by their overpowering whiteness. Close to the shore the fortress rears its strong turreted walls in a quadrangular form, planted with cannon, and bearing the striped national flag of the Sandwich Islands. The country above the town rises in an amphitheatre, ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... night. The line of trees in the Close were in flower, and their sweetness was overpowering. He did not stay there, however, but wandered out into the city, with his hat pushed back from his forehead, and his hands in his pockets. The gas was not lighted in the streets as the moon was near the full; and beneath her rays, all ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... parts, the lower descending, the higher ascending as on heavenly scale. In the second, optional ending the figure is completed, as the bass descends through the seven whole tones and the treble (of voices and instruments) rises as before to end in overpowering Hallelujah! The style is close knit with the earlier music. A pervading motive is the former brief phrase of aspiration; upon it the angelic groups seem to wing their flight between verses of praise. By a wonderful touch the sigh, that appeared inverted in the plaintive chant of the ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... a very sensitive mood; the world seemed for the moment devoid of human sympathy, and the savageness and turmoil played upon his bare nerves. The artist himself shrank from contact with this overpowering display, and said that he could not endure more than a day or two of it. It needed all the sunshine in the face of Miss Lamont and the serenity of her cheerful nature to make the situation tolerable, and even her ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... spinning down to the work bench top from its broken bearings and the remaining copper rings spun aimlessly for a moment. But the third ring of whitish metal had vanished utterly, and so had the coiled-wire springs which Von Holtz had been unable to distinguish. And there was an overpowering smell of ammonia in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... to write again, lest my last letter should give you too much pain. If you are really oppressed with overpowering and involuntary melancholy, you are to ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... remarkable to be omitted in a general account of amphitheatres, is the awning by which spectators were protected from the overpowering heat of an Italian sun. This was called Velum, or Velarium; and it has afforded matter for a good deal of controversy, how a temporary covering could be extended over the vast areas of these buildings. Something of the kind was absolutely ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... house entered. She was an actress, Rosalie felt sure of that the first moment she saw her; she was dressed in a faded, greasy silk dress which swept up the dust of the floor as she walked in, and she greeted her new lodgers with an overpowering bow. ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... to command you not to move your right arm or to wink your eye. You will find it almost impossible to obey for even a few moments. The desire to move your arm, which was not at all conscious before, will become overpowering. The prohibition acts like a suggestion, and is an implication that you would do the negative act unless you were commanded not to. Miss Alcott, in "Little Men," well illustrates this fact in the story of the children who were told not to put beans ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... of the starry firmament, the moon at the full fills the lower air with a soft, yet bright light, in which you can read without difficulty the smallest print. Under this milder illumination, the overpowering luxuriance of the landscape loses its oppressiveness, the hills assume more rounded forms, and from the general obscurity, the palms, a tree made for moonlight, stand out in soft distinctness. At such a time we forget the foul crimes which disfigure the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... participation in the cause of the combined powers. They were considered as the outlaws of Europe. Two armies were in effect sent against them. One of those armies (that which surrendered Mentz) was very near overpowering the Christians of Poitou, and the other (that which surrendered at Valenciennes) has actually crushed the people whom oppression and despair had driven to resistance at Lyons, has massacred several thousands of them ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... stopped. Albany! One minute late! I descended to watch the romantic business of changing engines. I felt sure that changing the horses of a fashionable mail-coach would be as nothing to this. The first engine had already disappeared. The new one rolled tremendous and overpowering toward me; its wheels rose above my head, and the driver glanced down at me as from a bedroom window. I was sensible of all the mystery and force of the somber monster; I felt the mystery of the unknown railway station, and of the strange illuminated city beyond. And ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... not jealousy now which made him dwell on this question, not the rather mean but natural envy which he knew lurked within him, and with which he had been struggling these three days, but the dread of an overpowering horror; the dread that he himself should believe Jean, his brother, was that ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... of the organism. Whatever other causes have been at work, Natural Selection is supreme, to an extent which even Darwin himself hesitated to claim for it. The more we study it the more we are convinced of its overpowering importance, and the more confidently we claim, in Darwin's own words, that it "has been the most important, but not the ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... distances of the future. No poet has had a more sublime sense of the infinite melancholy of history; indeed, we hardly feel how great a poet Byron was, until we have read him at Venice, at Florence, and above all in that overpowering scene where the 'lone mother of dead empires' broods like a mysterious haunting spirit among the columns and arches and wrecked fabrics of Rome. No one has expressed with such amplitude the sentiment that in a hundred sacred spots of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... last visit. I love my mother; but there has been, ever since boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between persons of strong feelings if they are not managed rightly. I did not expect to be much moved at the time,—that is to say, not to feel any overpowering emotion struggling just then,—though I knew that I should deeply remember and regret her. Mrs. Dike was in the chamber; Louisa pointed to a chair near the bed, but I was moved to kneel down close ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... her, her arse rose and fell almost as well as if she was mistress of the art. The novel combination of prick and finger quickly brought on the ecstatic crisis. I, too, was wild with lust, and we spent together, ending in an annihilation of all our senses by the extreme ecstasy of the final overpowering crisis. We lay panting for some time in all the after-joys. Dear Jane begged me to give her some water, as she felt quite faint. I withdrew, still almost in a standing state, got her some water, helped her up, seated her on the sofa and kissed ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... place, in the pantry, it began to darken; first of all it became light blue, then deepened into an almost inky blackness, exhibiting curious zigzag lines; and, lastly, the whole mass began to putrefy and to emit a stench so overpowering that every one in the house retched, and the whole place had to be disinfected. This occurred day after day. Nothing would stop it. The dairyman who supplied the milk did all he could to counteract it. He had his dairies constantly cleansed, he saw ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... an overpowering irritation. These old wives' tales! These matronly saws! How stupid they were! How meaningless, foundationless and sickening! She did not reply to Mrs. Amber's question, but stirred restlessly in her chair, ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... an all-overpowering rush was made, and Walker was carried off up the rock in the middle of ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... so accustomed to advertising signs," she said, "that we failed to notice how thick they were becoming or how bold and overpowering. From a few scattered announcements on fence boards, they had crowded themselves into more prominent places until the barns and sheds and the very rocks were daubed with glaring letters asking us to buy the ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... cutter, brig of war, or light corvette that could collar the Liberte in any sort of weather. Renaud Charron was a brave young Frenchman, as fair a specimen as could be found, of a truly engaging but not overpowering type, kindly, warm-hearted, full of enterprise, lax of morals (unless honour—their veneer—was touched), loving excitement, and capable of anything, except skulking, or sulking, or running ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... now be a good deal sore and at least a bit winded, Mr. Kramer started in at a lively gait, trying to bear the plebe down with swift, overpowering ...
— Dick Prescott's First Year at West Point • H. Irving Hancock
... trial was on the 3d of October, before Judge Daggett of the Supreme Court, who was a strenuous advocate of the black law. His influence with the jury was overpowering, insisting in an elaborate and able charge that the law was constitutional, and, without much hesitation, the verdict was given against Miss Crandall. Her counsel at once filed a bill of exceptions, and took an appeal to the Court of Errors, which was granted. Before that, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... these, yet winged ones. Easy to utter in academic discussions; hard, bitterly hard, to say under the eye of a cruel and overpowering tyrant whose emissaries watched the speaker from the galleries and mentally marked him down for future ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... left under the high-road, was covered by vineyards in terraces and gardens. The contrast of this verdure with the bare ridge beyond the fertile basin, still in deep shade, and the atmospheric effects of a soft and not overpowering light on the foreground, as well as of the vapour rising in the gorge, and hanging in aërial folds about the mountain tops, can ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... shall see that he had firm hold of the secret. St. Francis's love of nature, of animals, of flowers, of children, his way of breaking into song about the pleasant things of earth, his praise of "our sister the Water, because she is very serviceable to us and humble and clean," show the outrush of an overpowering joy. He had the courage to do what very few men and women ever dare to do, and that is to make a clean sweep of property and its complications; but even so, the old legend distorts some of this into a priggish desire to set a good example, to ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the main instruments in subduing England. The design of the Spaniards was that the armada should give them, at least for a time, the command of the sea, and that it should join the squadron that Parma had collected off Calais. Then, escorted by an overpowering naval force, Parma and his army were to embark in their flotilla, and cross the sea to England, where they were to be landed, together with the troops which the armada brought from the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... three companions, no longer able to withstand the overpowering influence of the mysterious force that mastered them, intoxicated, more than drunk, burned by the air that scorched their organs of respiration, dropped at last, and lay flat, motionless, senseless as dabs of clay, on the floor ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... existence of the Union and to the power which it confers upon the executive, is due the possibility of curbing the violence of religious and political zealots by the interposition of an authority endowed at once with overpowering strength and obvious impartiality. In Belfast even a Nationalist must, if he is a peaceable citizen, feel that the withdrawal of the Queen's troops would not conduce to his comfort. Under a system of Home Rule, it will perhaps be said, one body of fanatics ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... down to clear up his thoughts and to consider of his future motions, Bertram suddenly remembered that immediately before the attack on the revenue officers, a note had been put into his hand—which he had at that time neglected to read under the overpowering interest of the scene which followed. This note he now drew from his pocket: it was written in pencil, ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... iron, on a basis of a million and a half of dollars, can effect in that direction, seems to have been done. The facade, designed by Mr. Schwarzmann, is in ultra-Renaissance; the arch and balustrade and open arcade quite overpowering pillar and pediment. The square central tower, or what under a circular dome would be the drum, is quite in harmony with the main front so tar as proportion and outline are concerned; but there is too much blank surface ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... never in a wilderness before," broke in the earnest voice of the young minister. "I feel an almost overpowering sense of loneliness. I want to get near to you all; I feel lost. ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... see you," there was a glow of amiability, an alluring light in her countenance, that drew one irresistibly to her, and her immense, shapely hand enveloped one's own with a pressure and a warmth that were overpowering in their convincement of her ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... ineradicably in my soul, and which now gloats over you, as you stand in the pillory where my own hands have fastened you? But can Nature be crushed forever? Did I not ruin my nerves, and seriously injure my temper, by the overpowering pressure I laid upon them to keep them quiet when you were by? Could I not, by the sense of coming ill through all my quivering frame, presage your advent as exactly as the barometer heralds the approaching storm? Those three months of agony are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... act of piety on the part of the Swedes, when, having celebrated the festival of Trinity Sunday by whipping their fellow-Christians out of the fort, they commemorated the good work by naming it the Fort of the Holy Trinity. It was a fatal victory. The next year came Governor Stuyvesant with an overpowering force and demanded and received the surrender of the colony to the Dutch. Honorable terms of surrender were conceded; among them, against the protest, alas! of good Domine Megapolensis, was the stipulation of religious liberty ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... discuss We are now able to determine We are told that We can not leave unchallenged the We deny it. We have an instance in We have no right to say We, in our turn, must We know they will not We laugh to scorn the idea We look around us We may have an overpowering sense of We may rest assured that We must not propose in We often speak of We ought, first of all, to note We should pause to consider We will hear much in these days We will not examine the proof ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... other Oriental countries to their warm climate.[17] Buckle attributes a highly wrought imagination and gross superstition to all people, like those of India, living in the presence of great mountains and vast plains, knowing Nature only in its overpowering aspects, which excite the fancy and paralyze reason. He finds, on the other hand, an early predominance of reason in the inhabitants of a country like ancient Greece, where natural features are on a small scale, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... the terms he had offered, disdaining the continental blockade, anchored in her strength by the control of Western seas, was vulnerable in India, and there alone. These considerations returned with overpowering allurement to his imagination, and four millions of francs were appropriated to improve the harbor and restore ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... motley assemblage which now surrounds us it would be difficult to attempt a picture. The pencil of a Cruikshank or a Rowlandson might indeed convey some idea; but all weaker hands would find the subject overpowering. A mob of manufacturers, melting hot, elbowing one another into ill-humour, by their anxiety to teach their offspring the fashionable vice of gaming; giving the pretty innocents a taste for loo, which generally ends in loo-sening what little purity of principle the prejudice ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... and the horror of the devastation it had wrought, presently recovered sense, and with a mighty shout hurled itself against the palisade, burst it, leapt over it and swarmed into the quadrangle, easily overpowering the unnerved guards. I was surrounded; eager hands unbound mine; arms were thrown about me; the people roared, and wept, and triumphed, and fell about me on their knees praising Heaven. I think rain fell, my face was ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... so much authority. For he is another Africanus among them. He is considered of more influence than Lucius Trebellius, of more than Titus Plancus [lacuna] a noble young man. As for Plancus, who, having been condemned by the unanimous vote of every one, amid the overpowering applause of you yourselves, somehow or other got mixed up in this crowd, and returned with a countenance so sorrowful, that he appeared to have been dragged back rather than to have returned, he despises ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... Cumaea would be disgusting, from her overpowering strength in the feminine form, if genius had not made her tremendous. Especially the bosom gives me a feeling of faintness and aversion I cannot express. The female breast looks made for the temple of sweet and chaste thoughts, while this is so formed ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... at noon. It was truly a magnificent spectacle, that of the impatient crowd who thronged around the reserved enclosure, inundated the entire square and adjoining streets, and covered the neighbouring houses from the basements to the slated roofs. The high winds of past days had lulled, and an overpowering heat was radiating from an unclouded sky; not a breath animated the atmosphere. In such weather, one might descend in the very spot he ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... cannot say that my strength did not revive a little as I passed under the heavy branches, and out again into the freer air. Be that as it may, it was terrible enough to me, the approach to those woods. My companions were eager and gay, and shouted out, as we entered them. They little thought how overpowering were my feelings. And I little thought, myself, that I was then and there to receive a lesson that I should never forget; one, perhaps, that would do me more good than any other that I ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... carried barbarism to such a pitch in seizing our ships and condemning their crews to the galleys, that Queen Elizabeth was never averse to meeting murder and plunder by more than the equivalent in retaliation, except when she imagined that Philip was showing signs of overpowering strength; she then became timid and vacillating. She was never mentally disturbed by the moral side of the great deeds that brought her vast stores of plunder. Moreover, she could always find an accommodating bishop to put her qualms (if she ever had any, except those of consequence ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... with nobody else. I have found out that the real use of conversational powers is to put them forth in tete-a-tete. A man is flattered by your talking your best to him alone. Ten to one he is piqued by your overpowering him before a company. Denison was agreeable enough. I heard only one word from Lord Plunket, who was remarkably silent. He spoke of Doctor Thorpe, and said that, having heard the Doctor in Dublin, he should like to hear him again in London. "Nothing easier," quoth Littleton; "his chapel ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... seas thundering on the rock, and the wind whistling through the beacon, a drowsiness overpowered me, and I found myself dropping off to sleep. I was still conscious in some degree how I was situated. I felt all the time an overpowering sense of danger. Sometimes I was in my little boat, gliding calmly over the ocean; now I was suddenly chased by big waves, which threatened every instant to engulf me. Then I found myself cast upon the ...
— Dick Cheveley - His Adventures and Misadventures • W. H. G. Kingston
... called genius; that the total of his character would be made up of the sum of the commonest qualities, the most ordinary virtues within the reach of the poorest youth in the land. There is no one quality in his entire make-up so overpowering, so commanding that it could be ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... perhaps claim the palm among the Presidents of those days, for sheer, deleterious insignificance. The favourite observation of his contemporaries upon him was that he was a gentleman, but his convivial nature made the social attractiveness of Southern circles in Washington overpowering to any brain or character that he may have possessed. A new generation of political personages now came to the front. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, a man of force and considerable dignity, began to take the leading part in the powerful group ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... into Palace Yard. An eye-witness thus reported the scene in the Press: "The strong, broad, heavy, powerful frame of Mr. Bradlaugh was hard to move, with its every nerve and muscle strained to resist the coercion. Bending and straining against the overpowering numbers, he held every inch with surprising tenacity, and only surrendered it after almost superhuman exertions to retain it. The sight—little of it as was seen from the outside—soon became sickening. The overborne ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... the way along which her ancestors have always walked? How shall I then be able to impart unto this child every desirable accomplishment to make him virtuous as thyself, in that season of want when I shall become masterless? Overpowering myself who shall be masterless, unworthy persons will demand (the hand of) this daughter of thine, like Sudras desiring to hear the Vedas. And if I bestow not upon them this girl possessing thy blood and qualities, they may even take her away by force, like crows carrying away the sacrificial butter. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... black sand. Grass is their natural production, although corn, oats and potatoes flourish upon them. Never can I forget the first time I entered White Pigeon Prairie. Sleeping beneath the shadows of sunset, as it was, the effect upon me was like that which is felt on first beholding the ocean,—overpowering awe. All that the poet has said about these gardens of ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... end of this poor life has come—with heart-breaking sorrow of mind and struggle of body, overpowering horror at the writhings of torture in the limbs lashed against his—and vainly he strives to force his last breath into ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... at his ablutions where he squatted by the water's edge, scrubbing away as industriously as a washer-racoon. It did not occur to her to flee; curiosity dominated—an overpowering desire to see what he really ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... eloquent thumb Philip expatiated on the charming work. He used the jargon of the studios with overpowering effect. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... looks about.] Well! Here in the fifth court the overpowering smell of asafetida and oil is attractive enough to make a poor devil's mouth water. The kitchen is kept hot all the time, and the gusts of steam, laden with all sorts of good smells, seem like sighs issuing from its mouth-like doors. The smell ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... magnificent contempt for our opinion of him by informing us at the outset that while we were reverencing him like a God for his wisdom he was no better than a tadpole, not to speak of his fellow-men—would not this have produced an overpowering effect? For if truth is only sensation, and no man can discern another's feelings better than he, or has any superior right to determine whether his opinion is true or false, but each, as we have several times repeated, is to himself the sole judge, and everything ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... Staten Island, who sent $100, she wrote: "I wonder why it is that I must forever feel compelled to take the rough things of the world. Why can't I excuse myself from the overpowering and disagreeable struggles? I can not tell, but after such a day as yesterday, my heart fails me—almost. Then I remember that the promise is to those only who hold out to the end—and nerve myself ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... succeeded; for, in despite of the skill with which his machine had been constructed, the straps designed to support the body had stretched so considerably as to occasion the sense of suffocation becoming extremely overpowering. But the address of the surgeon triumphed over all obstacles; and, after sneezing and stretching himself, with one or two brief convulsions, Bonthron gave decided proofs of reanimation, by arresting ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... Rubeho. Our road left the right bank and followed the left over a country quite the reverse of the Mukondokwa Valley, enclosed between mountain ranges. Fertile soils and spontaneous vegetation, reeking with miasma and overpowering from their odour, we had exchanged for a drouthy wilderness of aloetic and cactaceous plants, where the kolquall and ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... other boys and vent his emotions in whoops of delight. He knew that some little plot was being concocted for his birthday, but never dreamed of any thing so grand as asking the whole school, Teacher and all. The effect of the invitation was seen with comical rapidity, for the boys became overpowering in their friendly attentions to Ben. Even Sam, fearing he might be left out, promptly offered the peaceful olive-branch in the shape of a big apple, warm from his pocket, and Mose proposed a trade of jack-knives which would be greatly ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... stretched across the river beyond the boiling water at the bottom of the Fall, rough and uneven like some of the Swiss glaciers. Clouds of spray flew about, seemingly like smoke or steam. Words fail to describe a scene of such overpowering grandeur as this. ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... career, no one, I believe, who ever came in contact with him failed to recognise his singular charm in private life. His conversation differed from that of some of the more illustrious of his contemporaries. It was not a copious and brilliant stream of words, dazzling, astonishing, or overpowering. It had no tendency to monologue, and it was not remarkable for any striking originalities either of language, metaphor, or thought. Few men steered more clear of paradox, and the charm of his talk lay mainly ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... on this side—moving. You will also understand why that one word comprises, to my thinking, all the discomforts short of absolute physical torture that can be condensed into the human lot. Condensed, did I say? If it were a condensed agony, I could endure it. One great, stunning, overpowering blow is undoubtedly terrible, but you rally all your fortitude to meet and resist it, and when it is over it is over and the recuperative forces go to work; but a trouble that worries and baffles and pricks and rasps you, that penetrates into all the ramifications of your life, that fills ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... much simpler and saved a great deal of foolery. Why such a thing as sex, when the tuber of the Jerusalem artichoke can do without it? These are the pregnant questions suggested to me, in the end, by Monodontomerus cupreus, the insect so infinitesimal in body and so overpowering in name that I had really vowed never to speak of it again ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... few moments she was possessed by an almost overpowering desire to flee from the awful sight; and then again he stirred and whimpered, and pity—element most divine—came ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... traditions prevalent in his day, Griesinger saw that it was not so much masturbation itself as the feelings aroused in sensitive minds by the social attitude toward masturbation which produced evil effects. "That constant struggle," he wrote, "against a desire which is even overpowering, and to which the individual always in the end succumbs, that hidden strife between shame, repentance, good intentions, and the irritation which impels to the act, this, after not a little acquaintance with onanists, we consider to be far more important than ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... passed for the last time through her loved garden, gathering as she went vast heaps of flowers. More and more she gathered, till her room was nearly full; then, closing the door and windows, she lay down amongst the flowers, and allowed herself to be suffocated by their overpowering perfume. La Faute de ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... restraints on the freedom of learning and teaching which every Church exercises, when it is strong enough; to the conscientious soul, by the introspective hunting after sins of the mint and cummin type, the fear of theological error, and the overpowering terror of possible damnation, which have accompanied the Churches like their shadow, I need not now consider; but they are assuredly not small. If agnostics lose heavily on the one side, they gain a good deal on the other. People ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... followed, the British monopoly of sea power, of sea-carriage, of manufacturing industry, and of international trade were equally disliked by almost all the nations of Europe. Protective duties were regarded as the means of fostering national industries and of sheltering them against the overpowering competition of British manufactures. The British claim to the dominion of the sea was regarded as unfounded in right, and was in principle as strongly denounced as had been the territorial domination of ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... not a time to permit of argument. Overpowering him with his great strength, Edestone simply dragged him back, and flung him into a corner of the car, where he sat crying like a baby ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... spot where the most brilliant temporary star on record made its appearance on November 11, 1572. Tycho Brahe studied this phenomenon during the entire period of its visibility, which lasted until March, 1574. It burst out suddenly with overpowering splendor, far outshining every fixed star, and even equaling Venus at her brightest. In a very short time it began to fade, regularly diminishing in brightness, and at the same time undergoing changes of color, ending in red, until it disappeared. It has never been seen since, and the ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... remained uncaptured, General Leman maintained that, strategically, Liege had not fallen. He thus held in check the armies of Von Kluck and Von Buelow, when every hour was of supreme urgency for their respective onsweep into central Belgium and up the Meuse Valley. The Germans presently brought into an overpowering bombardment ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... to "increase, multiply, and replenish the earth," overflowing all bounds, overpowering by mere populousness all the severe laws against them of whipping, burning in the hand, in the forehead or in the breast, and hanging, and filling the whole country with alarm, is evident by the very ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... the eye glad welcome. Some of these monarchs were eight feet thick at the base and two hundred feet high. Here and there one lay, gaunt and prostrate, a victim of the wind. The smell of pitch pine was sweetly overpowering. ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... nothing more depressing than a calm in the tropics,—a raging sun overhead, around an endless expanse of dead sea, and a feeling of utter helplessness that is overpowering. What if this should last? what a fate! The Rime of the Ancient Mariner comes to our mind. Come storm and tempest, come hurricanes and blizzards, anything but an endless stagnation. For some hours we watched earnestly ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... road cross the canal and run parallel to it. I saw the canal run another mile or so under a fine bank of deep woods. I saw an old bridge leading over it to that inviting shade, and as it was now nearly six and the sun was gathering strength, I went, with slumber overpowering me and my feet turning heavy beneath me, along the tow-path, over the bridge, and lay down on the moss under these delightful trees. Forgetful of the penalty that such an early repose would bring, and of the great heat that was to follow at midday, I quickly became part of ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... concrete example," he resumed; "suppose some young man, with the delicate constitution I have spoken of, forms an overpowering attachment to a young woman, yet perceives that it is not welcomed, and is man enough to repress its outward manifestations. In such a case, supposing his Double be easily projected, the very repression of his love ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... hum of the conversation, and the laughter, are overpowering, and you wander through the vast crowd with your ears deafened by the sound. Suddenly the leader of the orchestra raps sharply on his desk, and there is a profound silence all over the hall. In an instant ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... there is no outlet, indignant at the barriers which restrain it, and grappling darkly with the phantoms to which its own energy thus painfully imprisoned gives being. A rude simplicity, combined with a gloomy and overpowering force, are its chief characteristics; they remind us of the defective cultivation, as well as of the fervid and harassed feelings of its author. Above all, the latter quality is visible; the tragic interest of the Robbers is deep throughout, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... every day, and we were all convinced that this illness was his last. God knows whether he was equally convinced, but he certainly had a foreboding of his death, for he hardly ever talked now. For a few days longer he obstinately struggled against the weakness which was overpowering him, and walked about his yurta, even tinkered at some brushes which he had begun; at last he gave it up and took to his bed. One morning, when I had just sat down to my breakfast, the locksmith Wladyslaw Piotrowski, Kowalski's nearest friend, ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... Presently a figure emerges from the doorway of a neat residence and crosses the street. It is the Lord Bishop, who for so many years has crossed the same well-beaten path. The calm serenity of the place, the hour and the solemnity of the scene was overpowering. I dared not wait until the ethereal sweetness of the music would cease. I took one lingering gaze and murmured: This is indeed Elysium—a step nearer Heaven, and with feelings of reverential awe ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... Just a few bold, rapid strokes, and some caricature breathed before them, so real that the character was guessed before the explanation was given, and the ground rang with continued and overpowering roars of laughter. ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... tourists company's agent in the town that a party of one hundred and sixty-nine would arrive the next day but one from Munchen, bent on visiting my ruin. In great trepidation, I had all of the gates and doors locked and reinforced by sundry beams and slabs, for I knew the overpowering ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... flight, than it could ever have journeyed otherwise. Man would not have known distance veritably without the clouds. There are mountains indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those of the earth are pigmy. Yet the sky-heights, being so far off, are not overpowering by disproportion, like some futile building fatuously made too big for the human measure. The cloud in its majestic place composes with a little Perugino tree. For you stand or stray in the futile building, while the cloud ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... glued to the blue of the sea, Peter the Brazen felt the confidence oozing from him as water oozes out of a leaky pail. He felt himself in the presence of a relentless power which was slowly settling down upon him, crushing him, and overpowering him. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... promising. Even did I wish merely to get the intellect of all Dublin into our rooms, I should not dream of doing it all at once, but at length. I should not rely on sudden, startling effects, but on the slow, silent, penetrating, overpowering effects of patience, steadiness, routine, and perseverance. I have known individuals set themselves down in a neighbourhood where they had no advantages, and in a place which had no pretensions, and upon a work which had little or nothing of authoritative sanction; and they have gone on steadily ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... an hour before attempting to drink. Contrary to our expectation, they drank very little at first, but stood in the water for hours. After coming out, they would lie down and rest for hours longer, and then drink again before attempting to graze, their thirst overpowering hunger. That they were blind there was no question, but with the causes that produced it once removed, it was probable their eyesight ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... overpowering temptation to drink freely and quench the thirst that scorched me like a fire, I left the water and allowed my gaze to wander over the face of the cliff that towered some eighty feet aloft from the inner margin of the beach. I soon saw that, steep as at first sight it appeared to be, there ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... she blurted out, nervousness once more overpowering her as she realised that the moment of her ordeal was approaching. "I've come ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... Superstition has her figures as certainly as Poesy, the perils of a wild mountain-born stream, flowing between thinly-inhabited banks, were personified in the beliefs of the people by a frightful goblin, that took a malignant delight in luring into its pools, or overpowering in its fords, the benighted traveller. Its goblin, the "water-wraith," used to appear as a tall woman dressed in green, but distinguished chiefly by her withered, meagre countenance, ever distorted by ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... finally, who have no apparent object in the world, but just purely, simply, merely, incessantly, indefatigably, and ineffugibly—to tout. And in the midst of all this, overwhelming it all, are the Falls. He who sees them instantly forgets humanity. They are not very high, but they are overpowering. They are divided by an island into two parts, the Canadian and ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... continuous and situations overpowering The Lyons Mail isn't a marker to an evening of ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... it however, a little difficult to sympathize with Tennyson's overpowering horror of the troublesomely affectionate curiosity of which he is the object. Even such extreme cases of hero-worship as that of the American who climbed the tree at Farringford to survey its master at his leisure, and that of the bevy of ladies at a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... Mr. Breeze had that overpowering knowledge of the world which only comes with the experience of twenty-five, and to this he superadded the active imagination of a newspaper man. A plot to rob the bank? These mysterious absences, that luggage which he doubted not was empty and intended for ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... officer said, claimed to have news that meant life or death, and he carried on his person a letter from President Lincoln, empowering him to go where he pleased. He had shown that letter, and his manner indicated the most intense and overpowering anxiety. ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... socially destructive to throw away the overpowering instinct of human nature which we have ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... richest men in this town of M'fetta have personally taken up the contract—Kiva my host, Fika a fine young fellow, and Wiki, another noted elephant hunter. These three Fans, the four Ajumba and the Igalwa, Ngouta, I think will be enough. Moreover I fancy it safer not to have an overpowering percentage of Fans in the party, as I know we shall have considerable stretches of uninhabited forest to traverse; and the Ajumba say that the Fans will kill people, i.e. the black traders who venture into their country, and cut them up into neat pieces, eat what ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... faces in the public wash-room. When I entered it the barber and his assistants were asleep there, and four or five citizens from the railway were busy at the basins. There is a fixed resolution in these places that you shall be drenched with dirt and drowned in abominations, which is overpowering to a mind less strong than Mark Tapley's. The filth is paraded and made to go as far as possible. The stranger is spared none of the elements of nastiness. I remember how an old woman once stood over me in my youth, forcing me to swallow the gritty dregs of her terrible medicine cup. ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... as she speaks, and I feel an overpowering wish to have her put out her hand. But she does not, she only takes the work-basket and a book, and says good night with an inclination ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... boys threw themselves down upon the ground and gave way to merriment that was none the less overpowering because it had to be indulged in "with the soft pedal on," ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... Not a breath cooled the atmosphere, parched by the burning summer sun's rays. In the afternoon the usual sea breeze failed to appear, and there was no relief from the intense closeness and almost overpowering warmth. The sky was clear, but with a misty, steamy appearance which reminded one strongly ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... come to the open door of a great, weather-beaten building, from whose open windows an aromatic breath wandered out into the summer air. As they crossed the worn threshold, Athalia stopped and caught her breath in the overpowering scent of drying herbs; then they followed Brother Nathan up a shaky flight of steps to the loft. Here some elderly women, sitting on low benches, were sorting over great piles of herbs in silence—the silence, apparently, ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... stay at New York, I found the heat almost overpowering, the Indian summer (as the period between autumn and winter is there termed) having set in. An umbrella was quite a necessary appendage at times, to avoid its effects, which are often fatal to Europeans at the time of the ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... that passage till it might be the noblest air of Handel or of Mozart. By a sheer and unashamed reliance on her command of style, Miss Garden works that miracle, transfigures Massenet into something superearthly, overpowering. Will you rise up ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... Babe. And as he read, a slight motion of the hand or a glance of an eye made us see, as he was seeing, that whole radiant drama. The wonder, the timid joy, the tenderness, the mystery of it all, were borne in upon us with overpowering effect. He closed the book, and in the same low, clear voice went on to tell us how, in his home years ago, he used to stand on Christmas eve listening in thrilling delight to his mother telling him the story, and how she used to make him see the ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... given up for domestic needs to a local spoil-sauce, expert at a stoffato, a risotto; also to two stablemen, who clothed themselves at meal-time with the dress-coat and white tie of office. Happily, de Gery was only going to remain there for an hour or two, to rest his eyes from the overpowering light, his head from the dolorous grip ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... round, which seems a sort of lullaby, contrived mercifully to make the traveller drowsy and enwrap him in gentle sleep. Railway sleeping is, after all, a not unrefreshing form of slumber. There is the grateful 'nod, nod, nodding,' with the sudden jerk of an awakening; until the nodding becomes more overpowering, and one settles into a deep and profound sleep. Ugh! how chilly it gets! And the machinery—or is it the sea?—still roaring in ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... brilliancy, such as is gold and any gem. Sure I am that by being entirely transparent, not only do they receive the light, but that they do not intercept it; nay, they pass it on, like stained glass, coloured with their own colour, to other things. And there are certain other bodies so overpowering in the purity of the transparency that they become so radiant as to overpower the adjustments of the eye, and you cannot look at them without fatigue of sight; such as are the mirrors. Certain others are so free from transparency, that but little light can they receive; as is the Earth. Thus ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... with a few followers, seized the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry in 1859, defended it heroically against overpowering numbers, but was finally taken, tried and condemned for treason. This incident served as an argument in the South for the necessity of secession to protect the institution ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... heavily from his chair and stood trembling as though in an overpowering rage, and visibly struggling for his ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher |
