"Convulsion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the war which destroyed slavery the two races emerged together into the midst of vast changes. The old social structure had been disrupted in the civil convulsion, and the old political order likewise. The slave half of the national house had tumbled about former masters and slaves. The slave race possessed no more and knew no more as freedmen than they had possessed or known as slaves. Yes, ...
— The Ultimate Criminal - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 17 • Archibald H. Grimke
... conscious that the problems of war are not the last and most important to be solved in our national affairs. It is clear enough that this great convulsion must end; and end, too, in the total extinction of that stupendous system of iniquity in the interests of which it was projected. President Lincoln's Proclamation of emancipation throughout rebeldom, and the recent order to enlist the slaves throughout the Border States in military service ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... to this, his attention being taken up by the fact that, though there was perfect silence, the tree was alive with birds and monkeys, which were huddled together in groups, as if their instinct had taught them that a terrible convulsion of nature was at hand. As a rule they would have taken flight or scampered about through the branches as soon as human beings had come to the tree, but now, as if aware of some great danger, they were content to share the shelter and ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... been fascinated, held by the swift interchange between her friend and enemy. But now she had a convulsion of fear. She had seen men fight, but never to the death. Roberts crouched like a wolf at bay. There was a madness upon him. He shook like a rippling leaf. Suddenly ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... sexual muscular process of detumescence in women—as distinguished from the general muscular phenomena of sexual excitement which may be fairly obvious—is thus seen to be somewhat complex and obscure, in women as well as in men detumescence is a convulsion which discharges a slowly accumulated store of nervous force. In women also, as in men, the motor discharge is directed to a specific end—the intromission of the semen in the one sex, its reception in the other. In both sexes the sexual orgasm and the pleasure and satisfaction ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... not long continue; the Church knows only the faithful and rebels. But the noblest hearts often make a stand at compromises of this kind; they desire that the future should grow out of the past without convulsion and without a crisis. ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... staggered towards Aribert, and fell headlong on the floor. He had swooned. The two men raised him, carried him up the stone steps, and laid him with infinite care on a sofa. He lay, breathing queerly through the nostrils, his eyes closed, his fingers contracted; every now and then a convulsion ran through ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... the desire to preserve our own rights, and promote our own welfare, the separation by the Confederate States has been marked by no aggression upon others, and followed by no domestic convulsion. Our industrial pursuits have received no check, the cultivation of our fields has progressed as heretofore, and, even should we be involved in war, there would be no considerable diminution in the production of the staples which have constituted our ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... gradually accumulated and built up into the blue deep of the sky by successive eruptions of ashes and molten lava which, shot high in the air and falling in darkening showers, and flowing from chasms and craters, grew outward and upward like the trunk of a knotty, bulging tree. Not in one grand convulsion was Shasta given birth, nor in any one special period of volcanic storm and stress, though mountains more than a thousand feet in height have been cast up like molehills in a night—quick contributions to the wealth ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... entertain to them a sentiment very like respect, resulting from my belief that they belong to antediluvian races. The great convulsion which doomed our ancestors, in the eighteenth century of the world, to fish was a season of joy, ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... pierced by one arrow winged with beautiful feathers and well-shot (from Gandiva), fell down on the earth. Many elephants deeply pierced with long shafts, fell down, vomiting blood from their mouths, with the riders on their backs, like hills overgrown with forests tumbling down through some convulsion of nature. Partha, by means of his straight shafts, cut into fragments the bow-strings, standards, bows, yokes, and shafts of the car-warriors opposed to him. None could notice when Arjuna took up his arrows, when he fixed them on the bow-string, when he drew the string, and when he ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... grandfather, along with his eight sons, formed the last relic in our province of that race of petty feudal tyrants by which France had been overrun and harassed for so many centuries. Civilization, already advancing rapidly towards the great convulsion of the Revolution, was gradually stamping out the systematic extortions of these robbers. The light of education, a species of good taste reflected, however dimly, from a polished court, and perhaps a presentiment of the impending ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... for our going. It was such an early day that it came soon, even to me, who was in a fever of expectation, and half afraid that an earthquake or a fiery mountain, or some other great convulsion of nature, might interpose to stop the expedition. We were to go in a carrier's cart, which departed in the morning after breakfast. I would have given any money to have been allowed to wrap myself up over-night, and sleep in my ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... in a great measure disappeared, leaving a shapeless and unsightly hole much larger than the former crater, in which large tree-tops were swaying to and fro in the gurgling mass, forty feet below—the whole appearance bearing testimony to the terrible nature of the convulsion which wrought such destruction. Lieutenant Doane, in his official report to the War Department, thus describes the volcano ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... said the boy, and availed himself of his master's kindness by taking a second mate's nip out of the gin jar which was kept under his bed. The little fellow wondered what had caused such a convulsion of endearment, as Captain Bourne's demeanour had hitherto been the very antithesis of external tenderness. About an hour had elapsed when he was asked again "How ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... Earl who began to bay at his son. "Arthur, Arthur, fling the rascal out; fling the rascal out! He is an impostor, a thief!" He began to fume and sputter, and threw his arms wildly; he was in some kind of convulsion; his pillows tossed, and suddenly a packet fell from under them to the floor. As all eyes wheeled toward it, I stooped swiftly ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... in the paths of political life the statesman was confronted by two figures, whom fear or admiration raised to gigantic proportions. The orthodox historian would angrily declare that they were but the figures of two young men, whose intemperate action had thrown Rome into convulsion and who had met their fate, not undeserved however lamentable, the one in a street riot, the other while heading an armed sedition. But the criticism contained the elements of its own refutation. The youth, the brotherhood, the martyrdom of the men were the very elements that gave ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... intermediary convinced of the continuation of the life and the presence of the Master: all this would have been no sensuous miracle—no break in the course of Nature. But we have to bear in mind how times of strong religious agitation and [p.192] convulsion are so little qualified to judge concerning external phenomena, and how easily a psychic state solidifies into a supposed percept! Within and without Christianity there are numerous examples of the sensuous appearance of a dead person being considered to be fully ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... a worse convulsion, and just under his necktie suddenly appeared a tiny apish head. Before any one could do more than gasp the whole monkey was out of prison, and, with a leap to Dwight's shoulder, began taking observations; then seeing the food on his plate made ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... eyes were opened, and their faith in the system to which they had before clung was greatly shaken. Father Nicholas, however, could not be so easily turned from his old notions, and now came that terrible convulsion caused by the outbreak of the peasantry and the sad blood-shedding ...
— Count Ulrich of Lindburg - A Tale of the Reformation in Germany • W.H.G. Kingston
... water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth," and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, "If we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm must it ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... Thrice he endeavored to regain his feet, and thrice he failed in his attempts. He strove to speak, but he could only utter a few unintelligible words, for his life blood was suffocating him. A violent convulsion shook every limb, then arose a long, deep-drawn sigh, and then ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... curiosity. My lord, meanwhile, wore a propitiatory but doubtful air, as though he prayed but hardly hoped a gracious reception for me. Thus we all stood a moment in complete silence, I invoking an earthquake or any convulsion of nature that should rescue me from my embarrassment. Certainly the King did not hasten to do me this kindly service. He grew grave and seemed displeased, nay, he frowned most distinctly, but then ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... midday. The twelve strokes sounded, she grew docile, and would meekly lie down. Returned to the couch, she usually buried her face deep in the pillow, and drew the coverlets close round her, as if to shut out the world and sun, of which she was tired. More than once, as she thus lay, a slight convulsion shook the sick-bed, and a faint sob broke the silence round it. These things were ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... all unconsciously urged to their ruin by a race of beings inferior in rank, and almost objects of their scorn, yet, rather embodied malignities, and essential mischiefs, than men. France in that fearful time reminded the spectator of Michael Angelo's great picture of the "Last Judgment"—general convulsion above, universal torment below; the mighty of the earth falling, kings, nobles, hierarchs, warriors, plunging down, and met by fiends, at once their tempters, their taunters, and their torturers; a scene ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... to be expected, Nobby paid for his treachery with an attack of biliousness, the closing stages of which were terrible to behold. At one time it seemed as if no constitution could survive such an upheaval; but, although the final convulsion left him subdued and listless, he was as right as ever upon ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... himself down under the rocky ledge at the entrance to the mighty gap in the range, and, lighting his pipe, directed the smoke of the fragrant kin-nik-i-nik toward the heavens. Suddenly there was a terrible convulsion of the earth, and immediately there burst forth fountains of hot water and mud mounds, where before there was not the sign ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... these show their sense of his appeal thus: One of the party crammed the stinging salt down his throat; the others watched him, and kept clear of the brine that he spat vehemently out, and a loud report of laughter followed instantly each wild grimace and convulsion of fear and torture. Thus they employed their reason, and flouted as well as ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... Then came a convulsion in the heavens—the gathering storm-clouds spoke to each other and exchanged lightning glances until the sky was a sea of fire. Great clouds whirled up from the west, and others bore down from the east, and they mingled around the moon in one great aerial war until the ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... water extended across the bay we stood out again, and resumed a course along the most rugged and most stony land I ever saw; the stones are all of rounded form and heaped up in a most extraordinary and confused manner, as if it were effected by some extraordinary convulsion of nature. Might they not have been of diluvian origin? This promontory was named by Lieutenant Jeffreys, Cape Melville. At half past one o'clock we passed between the straggling rocks which lie off ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... Zerubbabel, of the royal line of Judah, with that of Joshua the high priest; and, in particular, by the extraordinary language applied to him—in ii. 23 he is the elect of Jehovah, His servant and signet. Clearly he is to be king in the Messianic kingdom which is to issue out of the convulsion of the world. ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... majestically in a large fur cloak. Seated close to the fire, which cast a reddish gleam through the interior of the wigwam, he felt himself all at once seized with an irresistible desire to imitate the convulsion of nature, and to sing his impressions. So taking hold of a drum which hung near his bed, he beat a slight rolling, resembling the distant sounds of an approaching storm, then raising his voice to a shrill treble, which he knew ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... little from the bedside as Virginia stirred, but I could see the milk-white lids of her eyes—eyes, as I have said, deep and blue and intense like the wall behind her, with their long black lashes. Her slender body shook as if she was undergoing the first rippling torsions of a convulsion. Her face was drawn into such an expression as one might imagine would appear on the face of an angel in agony, and then, gradually, as some renewed circulation relaxed the nerve centres, her breath was expelled with a long patient sigh. And this I noticed,—she ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... it worth while to have a performance. We were waiting for instructions when someone brought in a bolletino hastily prepared in a newspaper office with an account of the avvenimento celeste. We sat round and listened while one of the actors read about the convulsion of nature, the trembling of the palaces, the flashes of flame at a great height in the sky, the terror of the inhabitants of Catania. Was the phenomenon of telluric origin—Etna or an earthquake? Was it of atmospheric origin—a thunderbolt or a waterspout? ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... Daniel's step in the dining-room a violent commotion, a shudder which reached to her very vitals came over her. That convulsion, never felt during all the years of her adventurous existence, told her that she had staked her happiness on this issue. Her eyes, gazing into space, took in the whole of d'Arthez's person; their light poured through his ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... was rewarded by a convulsion of anger on the part of the guest. "Fool! Idiot!" he screamed. "You trick me in here! ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... "It was a convulsion," she told him, simply. "I am afraid she will have another. We haven't been able to get a doctor—will you ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... power on the primary link of the associated motions, as no heat or inflammation attends this violent pain. This kind of strangury recurs by stated periods, and sometimes arises to so great a degree, that convulsion or temporary madness terminates each period of it. It affects women oftener than men, is attended with cold extremities without fever, and is distinguished from the stone of the bladder by the regularity of its periods, and by the pain being ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... rifts and seams in its gray walls—traces of convulsion and revolution. Proud as it is, its very splendor shows the marks of a barbarous age. Its tapestry speaks a language dissonant to the ears of freemen. It tells of exclusive privileges, of divine rights, not in the people, but in the king, of primogeniture, of conformities, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... Colnbrook and Stains they are forced to live in the first floor. Mr. Chute is at the Vine, but I don't expect to hear from him: no post but a dove can get from thence. Every post brings new earthquakes; they have felt them in France, Sweden, and Germany: what a convulsion there has been in nature! Sir Isaac Newton, somewhere in his works, has this beautiful expression, "The globe ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... clearly; there were two women in Foedora, divided perhaps by the line between head and body: the one, the head alone, seemed to be susceptible, and the other phlegmatic. She prepared her glance before she looked at you, something unspeakably mysterious, some inward convulsion seemed revealed ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Europe, who knows nothing of earthquakes but by description, waits with impatience to feel the movement of the earth, and longs to hear with his own ears the subterraneous sounds which he has hitherto considered fabulous. With levity he treats the apprehension of a coming convulsion, and laughs at the fears of the natives. But as soon as his wish is gratified he is terror-stricken, and is involuntarily prompted to seek ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... priest could not begin to stand against. He was bowled sharply over and went down. Craig on top, and there the fight ended as suddenly as it had begun. The priest's head thudded into the smooth rock floor; a convulsion quivered his body; ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... assisted with troops by his father-in-law, he seized the citadel. Whatever might have been his hopes of popular support—and there is reason to believe that he in some measure calculated upon it—the time was evidently unripe for the convulsion, and the attempt was unskilfully planned. The Athenians, under Megacles and the other archons, took the alarm, and in a general body blockaded the citadel. But they grew weary of the length of the siege; many ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I began to get books regularly from The Spectator and to pay periodical visits to the office, where I learned to understand and to appreciate my chiefs. But more of them later. The year 1886 was one of political convulsion, the year of the great split in the Liberal Party; the year in which Lord Hartington and Mr. Chamberlain finally severed themselves from Mr. Gladstone and began that co- operation with the Conservatives which resulted in the formation of the Unionist Party. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... disembarrassed of external impressions, the greater is its activity, the greater its power to frame thoughts, and the greater its lucidity."[25] He admits, further,—"Although most of the convulsionists have, when in convulsion, much more intelligence than in their ordinary state, that intelligence is not always supernatural, but may be the mere effect of the mental activity which results when soul is disengaged from sense. Nay, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... bwoy—Tom? For the love of God, speak, caan't 'e? Why be you all dumb an' glazin' that awful!" cried the woman, knowing the truth before she heard it. Then she listened to the elder Pritchard, who whispered his wife, and so fell into a great convulsion of raving, ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... the old man held the dog so closely that it began to whine with pain. A sort of convulsion shook his body. The soul seemed striving to wrench itself out of the body, to fly away through the fog, down across the plain to the city, to the singer, the politician, the millionaire, the murderer, to its brothers, cousins, sisters, down in the city. The intensity of the old ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... Jacques's garrulous sarcasms, advanced a considerable way toward that artificial perfection which characterizes it now. Music was a topic of discussion, which absorbed the interest of the polite world far more than the mutterings in the politi-cal horizon, which portended so fierce a convulsion of the social regime. Wits, philosophers, courtiers, and fine ladies joined in the acrimonious controversy, first between the adherents of Lulli and Rameau, then between those of Gluck and Piccini. The young gallants of the day were wont to ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... the fight, did not wonder even for a moment from whence came the unexpected help; but he seized the axe and cut with all his might. The fork cracked, broken by the weight and by the last convulsion of the beast, as it fell. There was a long silence broken only by Zbyszko's loud respirations. But after a while, he lifted his head, looked at the form standing beside him and was afraid, thinking that it might not be ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... convulsion of the entire fabric of the big dirigible—as if a giant hand from without were shaking her like ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... aid of our sounding-lines we found that the water was deep, right up to the very rocks, and that no shelving shores prevented us coasting along them. There was not a shadow of doubt as to the rock being of purely volcanic origin, up- heaved by some mighty subterranean convulsion. It is formed of blocks of basalt, arranged in perfect order, of which the regular prisms give the whole mass the effect of being one gigantic crystal; and the remarkable transparency of the sea enabled us plainly to observe the curious shafts of the prismatic ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... part in the fight, striking down the foe with their lashing forelegs. The waters grew more and more polluted; but new myriads came up momentarily and plunged in, heedless of everything but thirst. Such a spectacle of revengeful passion, ghastly fear, the frenzy of hatred, mortal conflict, convulsion and despair as fell on the eyes of the approaching horsemen has rarely been seen, and that quiet mountain lake, which perhaps had never before vibrated with the sounds of battle, was on that fatal day converted into ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... clearly defined stages. In point of government, for example, there has been the savage, nomad, patriarch, kingdom, constitutional monarchy, democracy, republic, federal republic. There have been great epochs of political convulsion in the conflicts with external powers and in civil struggles and revolutions. In the growth of handicrafts, arts, manufactures, and inventions, there has been a series of advances from the time when men first began to cultivate the ground, to reduce the metals, ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... that the great bed of trachyte at the base is an ancient lava bed; that this, perhaps long after it was consolidated, was covered by beds of ashes and scoriae thrown out by a not far distant volcano, and that at last a great convulsion broke through the trachyte bed and hurled the fragments over the country along with dense volumes of dust and ashes. The angular blocks of trachyte imbedded in the stratum Number 5 in section are exactly the same in composition as the great bed below, and ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... Virgin, there lighting up with a warm glow the famous alabaster tomb known as "Le Mourant" or "The Dying One." A strange and awesome piece of sculpture truly, is this same "Mourant"!— showing, as it does with deft and almost appalling exactitude, the last convulsion of a strong man's body gripped in the death-agony. No delicate delineator of shams and conventions was the artist of olden days whose ruthless chisel shaped these stretched sinews, starting veins, and swollen eyelids half-closed ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... but it was no laugh, but a convulsion. She struggled to say, "I shall do very well presently, when I feel I am free. It is only the last prison airs that poison me. If we ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... the fact; for, to his simple mind, it would be like forcing body and soul asunder. All the negroes considered themselves as a part of Clawbonny, and a separation must have appeared in their eyes like some natural convulsion. Neb brought me a letter. It was sealed with wax, and bore the impression of the Hardinge arms. There was also an envelop, and the address had been written by Rupert. In short, everything about this letter denoted ease, ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... adjustment of European affairs under the widening recognition of national rights. The Minister of Austria, to whom at this crisis Castlereagh looked as his natural ally, had no doubt the same dread of a renewed convulsion of Europe, but in his case it was mingled with considerations of a much narrower kind. It is not correct to say that Metternich was indifferent to the Greek cause; he actually hated it, because it gave ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... opened or closed violently, without being touched. The church bells, set in motion by the swaying of the belfries, tolled mournfully to the accompaniment of the wild cries of terrified animals and the shrill screams of equally frightened children. The convulsion of the water was not less fearful than that of the land. The ice, five or six feet in depth, burst with a crash like the roar of cannon; huge blocks were shot up into the air, and fell again to the earth, shivered into powder, while from the openings, clouds of smoke or jets of ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... hand, the party which called itself "Republican," and at the head of which were Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, James Madison, Edmund Randolph, and Patrick Henry, were zealous friends of the French Revolution. They regarded that great convulsion as a desperate attempt on the part of our recent allies to found a republic like that of the United States; and they were in favor of extending the French our aid and sympathy, while the more eager went so far as to advocate our active participation in the war ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... public control—a transfer that would certainly be enormously stimulating to business generally. There would be no "robbery," the former shareholders would become stock or annuity holders. Nor would there be any financial convulsion due to the raising of the "enormous sum" necessary to effect this purchase. The country would simply create stock, while at the same time taking over assets to ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... and when we talk of a remedy, is that any other than the formidable one of a revolutionary one of the people? And is this, in the judgment even of my opposers, to execute, to preserve the constitution and the public order? Is this the state of hazard, if not of convulsion, which they can have the courage to contemplate and to brave, or beyond which their penetration can reach and see the issue? They seem to believe, and they act as if they believed, that our union, our peace, our liberty, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... moment she vanished from his sight, it dawned upon him that she had a secret. As one knows by the signs of the heavens that the matter of a storm is in them and must break out, so Polwarth had read in Juliet's sky the inward throes of a pent convulsion. ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... his astonishment. And he—this jealously guarded secret, the curse of his whole wretched life, had been guessed by this simple girl, without comment, without reserve, without horror! And there had been no scene, no convulsion of Nature, no tragedy; he had not thrown himself into yonder sea; she had not fled from him shrinking, but was sitting there opposite to him in gentle smiling expectation, the golden light of Todos Santos around them, a bit of bright ribbon shining in her ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... your discussion of the means by which a good result toward European order and peace may be brought out of the present convulsion I do not find clear guidance to present action on your part or mine, or on the part of our Government and people. Was it your thought that a congress of the peoples of North and South America should ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... from mere nature, and the humility and penitence in which alone mere nature receive it; yet I think that our movement from one to the other is more naturally described by us in the language of growth than in the language of convulsion. The primal object of religion is to disclose to us this perdurable basis of life, and foster our growth into communion with it. And whatever its special, language and personal colour be—for all our news of God comes to ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... minister of the parish:—"When you enter the Trosachs there is such an assemblage of wildness and of rude grandeur, as fills the mind with the most sublime conceptions. It seems as if a whole mountain had been torn in pieces, and frittered down by a convulsion of the earth, and the huge fragments of rocks, woods, and hills scattered in confusion at the east end, and on the sides of Loch Katrine. The access to the lake is through a narrow pass of half ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... time it was an accident; a letter came to the wrong hand, and I was bare again. A third time I found my opportunity; I built up a place for myself in India with an infinite patience; and then Clive came, my rajah was swallowed up, and I escaped out of the convulsion, like another Aeneas, with Secundra Dass upon my back. Three times I have had my hand upon the highest station: and I am not yet three-and-forty. I know the world as few men know it when they come to die—Court and camp, the East and the West; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... before the great famine of 1847, which shook and in many places uprooted the old order without yet bringing in the new. His son, Martin Ross's father, had the famine to cope with and survived it; but of the second convulsion from which emerged the Ireland of to-day he saw only the beginning, for he died in 1873, when the organised peasant uprising was at most a menace. But his wife knew both periods—the bad times of the late 'forties and the bad times of the early eighties. ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... to, the Evangelists inform us, happened "at the ninth hour," that is, our sixth, when "the rocks were rent," and the convulsion, according to Dante, was felt even in the depths in Hell. See Canto ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... house yet ringing with the first convulsion of terror Costobarus ordered his party with ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... picture which we have undertaken would not be complete, the reader would not see those grand moments of social birth-pangs in a revolutionary birth, which contain convulsion mingled with effort, in their exact and real relief, were we to omit, in the sketch here outlined, an incident full of epic and savage horror which occurred almost immediately ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... face: and with the odious writhings of a wasp creeping out of a rotten apple there clambered forth an appearance of a form, waving black arms prepared to clasp the head that was bending over them. With a convulsion of despair Humphreys threw himself back, struck his head against a hanging lamp, ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... Lulworth's existence until it suddenly breaks on you, and you see the blue bay lying asleep in the arms of giant rocks, which appear to have had a violent convulsion without disturbing the baby sheet of water. I suppose they were angry with the world for finding out their secret; for it has found out, and loves to come to Lulworth Cove. However, the place contrives to look as unknown as ever, as if only some lazy ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... customary sentiments and feelings. The two races have not yet made new mores. Vain attempts have been made to control the new order by legislation. The only result is the proof that legislation cannot make mores. We see also that mores do not form under social convulsion and discord. It is only just now that the new society seems to be taking shape. There is a trend in the mores now as they begin to form under the new state of things. It is not at all what the humanitarians hoped and expected. The two races are separating ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... progress of the insurrection, let them determine whether it has not been fomented by combinations of men, who—careless of consequences and disregarding the unerring truth that those who rouse cannot always appease a civil convulsion—have disseminated, from an ignorance or perversion of facts, suspicions, jealousies, and accusations ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... of her fury. The very glory of a mountain is in the revolutions which raised it into power, and the forces which are striking it into ruin. But we want no cold and careful imitation of catastrophe; no calculated mockery of convulsion; no delicate recommendation of ruin. We are to follow the labor of Nature, but not her disturbance; to imitate what she has deliberately ordained,[64] not what she has violently suffered, or strangely permitted. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... and went, but they ceased to have any form or meaning. He merely sat and drank, and stared.... All at once a strange shadow appeared. A shadow? No; a phantom—a dreadful thing! Suvaroff leaned forward. His breath came quickly, his body trembled in the grip of a convulsion, his hands were clenched. He rose in his seat, and suddenly—quite suddenly, without warning—he began to laugh.... The shadow halted in its flight across the wall. Suvaroff circled the room with his gaze. In the center of the wine-shop stood Flavio Minetti. Suvaroff sat down. He was ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Constantinople is the absolute reversal of European and, in especial, of English policy for the last hundred years. No crime that the Ottoman Government could commit, no act of barbarism, would ever persuade us to do away with the anachronism of Turkey's existence in Europe; but at last the seismic convulsion of the war has knocked this policy into a heap of disjected ruins, and it can never be rebuilt again on the old lines. For among our other avowed objects in prosecuting the war to its victorious end, we have pledged ourselves to uphold the right which all peoples, whether small or great, have ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... claws tore impotently at space, and his body squirmed almost into a ball. Finn's fangs sank half an inch deeper, and hot blood gushed between them. Lupus's great body hunched itself into an almost erect position from the shoulder-blades; he was standing on his shoulders. Then, as in a convulsion, one of his hind-legs was lowered in order that it might saw upward, scoring three deep furrows down the side of the Wolfhound's neck. Finn's fangs met in the red centre of his enemy's throat. There was a faint grunt, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... invidious condition of things might be realized under two further revolutions. We have said, that a second schism in the Scottish church is not impossible. It is also but too possible that Puseyism nay yet rend the English establishment by a similar convulsion. But in such contingencies, we should see a very large proportion of the spiritual teachers in both nations actually parading to the public eye, and rehearsing something very like the treacherous proposal of the late Seceders, viz. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... priest was fat; there was no gainsaying it. After about a minute a sort of earthquake taking place in him began to reach the surface; he rocked on his center in increasing waves that finally brought him with a spasm of convulsion to the floor. There he stood in full sunlight with his bare toes turned inward, holding his stomach with both hands, while Yasmini settled herself in graceful youthful curves on the cushioned bench, with her ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... three years, has much subdued the vivacity and impatience of the national character; for I know of no period in their history, when such a combination of personal suffering and political discontent, as exists at present, would not have produced some serious convulsion. ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... bed startled me. A fresh access of pain seized the unfortunate old lady. The convulsions were of a violence terrible to behold. Everything was confusion. We thronged round her, powerless to help or alleviate. A final convulsion lifted her from the bed, until she appeared to rest upon her head and her heels, with her body arched in an extraordinary manner. In vain Mary and John tried to administer more brandy. The moments flew. Again the body arched itself in that ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... the people. To the honour of our country, and one of the greatest ornaments of the british bar, the honourable T. Erskine, in the year 1789, furnished the french, with some of these great principles of criminal law, which it was impossible to perfect during the long aera of convulsion, and instability which followed, and which will constitute a considerable part of that great, and humane code, which is about to be bestowed upon the nation, and which will, no doubt, prove to be one of the greatest ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... heavily on its knees before Juancho, as if doing homage to his superiority, and after a short convulsion rolled over, its four ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... great upon him,' on the other hand, because Eternity is in our hearts, therefore there is the answer to the longings, the adequate sphere for the capacities in that great future, and in the God that fills it. You go into the quarries left by reason of some great convulsion or disaster, by forgotten races, and you will find there half excavated and rounded pillars still adhering to the matrix of the rock from which they were being hewn. Such unfinished abortions are all human lives if, when Death drops its curtain, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... invigorate the form of government (as we must do, or go to the old boy), we shall tend towards a monarchy. If this comes on gradually, like the changes in the human body, by the slow approach of old age, so much the better; but I fear we shall have fevers, and convulsion-fits, and cholics, and an everlastin' gripin' of the intestines first; you and I won't live to see it Sam, but our ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... spiral heads; but they only grew near the cascade, everywhere else sterility itself reigned with dreary grandeur; for the huge grey massy rocks, which probably had been torn asunder by some dreadful convulsion of nature, had not even their first covering of a little cleaving moss. There were so many appearances to excite the idea of chaos, that, instead of admiring the canal and the works, great as they are termed, and little ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... the city of Paris, like all great towns in times of scarcity (and since 1780 scarcity had become almost permanent), had been invaded by numbers of starving vagabonds—the dregs that always rise to the surface in periods of political convulsion, ready for any villainy. When news came of the capture of Verdun, of the indecent joy of the courtiers, and that the road to Paris was open to the avenging army of Prussians, the horrors of the Armagnac massacres were renewed during four September days at the prisons ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... would not stop. There was no sobbing nor convulsion of throat or breath. They just ran out in tribute ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... of Red Butte and its region. The Havasupais have a tradition that many years ago a large spring of water flowed from near its base, but in the great convulsion of nature which changed the current of the waters of Havasu Creek the spring disappeared, and never has been seen since. The presence of a number of quaking aspens in the region, however, denotes that water is still there. It also has been claimed that documents on file in Tucson prove that silver ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... mere historical curiosity, a sort of political paradox and puzzle. They have described the Irish people at the time as under the spell of something like sorcery. Even in our own days, Mr. Gladstone, in a speech delivered to the House of Commons, treated the convulsion caused by Swift's letters and Wood's halfpence as an outbreak of national frenzy, called up by the witchery of style displayed in the "Drapier's Letters." To some of us it is, on the other hand, a matter of surprise to see how capable writers, and especially how a man of Mr. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... my own safety again yielded place to reflections on the scene before me. I fixed my eyes upon her countenance. My sister's well-known and beloved features could not be concealed by convulsion or lividness. What direful illusion led thee hither? Bereft of thee, what hold on happiness remains to thy offspring and thy spouse? To lose thee by a common fate would have been sufficiently hard; but thus suddenly to ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... than once a treasonable sound. Washington did not hesitate to deprecate the untoward influence of these "self-created societies" and to condemn those "combinations of men, who, careless of consequences, and disregarding the unerring truth that those who rouse cannot always appease a civil convulsion, have disseminated, from an ignorance or perversion of facts, suspicions, jealousies, and accusations of the whole Government." The Democratic societies now fell into disrepute and did not long survive their great prototype, the Jacobin ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... of dynasty. When these became inevitable, M. Perier attached himself firmly to the work of consolidating the new throne of Louis Philippe, and reassembling those elements of order and stability which the convulsion of July had scattered, but not annihilated. On the dissolution of the ministry of M. Lafitte, M. Casimir Perier was called to the head of the government, and immediately entered into the system of conservative policy, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 563, August 25, 1832 • Various
... the Marshalsea, the Marshal, all the turnkeys, and all the Collegians. In his great self-satisfaction he put his cigar to his lips (being evidently no smoker), and took such a pull at it, with his right eye shut up tight for the purpose, that he underwent a convulsion of shuddering and choking. But even in the midst of that paroxysm, he still essayed to repeat his favourite introduction of himself, 'Pa-ancks the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... peace, the yearly expenditure of its Government. Suppose, then, the heir of the House of Bourbon reinstated on the throne; he will have sufficient occupation in endeavouring, if possible, to heal the wounds, and gradually to repair the losses, of ten years of civil convulsion; to reanimate the drooping commerce, to rekindle the industry, to replace the capital, and to revive the manufactures of the country. Under such circumstances, there must probably be a considerable interval before such a monarch, whatever ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... plenary session has been held. There is no doubt that the revolutionary happenings in Austria and in Germany have enormously raised the hopes of the Petersburgers for a general convulsion, and it seems to me altogether out of the question now to come to any peace terms with the Russians. It is evident among the Russians themselves that they positively expect the outbreak of a world-revolution ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... along this dangerous pass. The settlers in that vicinity have given to this singular rise the name of the "Ridge road." There is a sharp ridge of limestone at the back of the township of Thurlow, though of far less dimensions, which looks as if it had been thrown up in some convulsion of the earth, as the limestone is shattered in all directions. The same thing occurs on the road to Shannonville, a small but flourishing village on the Kingston road, nine miles east of Belleville. ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... found an equal want of reliable information; and every work that even touched on the subject was pervaded by the misapprehension which I have collected evidence to correct; that Ceylon is but a fragment of the great Indian continent dissevered by some local convulsion; and that the zoology and botany of the island are identical ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... who squatted in a corner of the tent. She held the metal mirror so as to conceal her face from the captain of the watch, put the little flask to her lips and emptied it at one mouthful. The mirror fell from her hand, she staggered, a deadly convulsion seized her—the officer rushed forward, and while she fixed her dying look ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the statement of object. I think"—slowly—"a disinterested observer would have put the question you ask into my mouth." He stared his tall visitor up and down critically, menacingly. Of a sudden, irresistibly, a very convulsion shot over his face. "God, man, you're brazen!" ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... which the Cyclopean Isles are composed are entirely of volcanic origin, and it is far from improbable that they may have at one time been attached to Sicily, and severed from it by some great volcanic convulsion. A careful examination of these large piles of basaltic columns led Dr. Daubeny to the conclusion, that the lavas from which they have been formed were consolidated under great pressure, and probably at the bottom of the sea, whence they have been afterwards upheaved. ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... me, and longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... with bitter hearts staring at this unexpected obstacle. It was not the result of any convulsion, as in the case of the ascending tunnel. The end wall was exactly like the side ones. It was, and had always ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and attractive spot, known as the "lower Race-course;" it lies on a lower level than the former one, and, like it, is embanked by a ridge of distant hills; both have ravines leading down to the Rice Lake, and may have been the sources from whence its channel was filled. Some convulsion of nature at a remote period, by raising the waters above their natural level, might have caused a disruption of the banks, and drained their beds, as they now appear ready for the ploughshare or the spade. In the month of June these flats are brilliant with the splendid ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... rocks), in the recesses of which we could obtain shelter. Even as he spoke the rain ceased for a space, and we saw, some hundreds of yards before us, the spot of which he had spoken—a number of jagged, tumbled-together coral boulders which some violent convulsion of the sea had torn away from the barrier reef and hurled upon the shore, where, in the course of years, kindly Nature had sent out a tender hand and covered them with a thick growth of a creeper peculiar to the low-lying atolls of the ...
— Susani - 1901 • Louis Becke
... which occurred in Iceland during the year 1783, were greater than those recorded at any other period. About a month previously to the convulsion of 'Skaptar-Jökull,' a submarine volcano burst out at sea, and so much pumice stone was ejected that the sea was covered with it for 150 miles round, ships being stopped in their course, whilst a new island was thrown up, which the King of ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... of the military were attacked: some had become to all appearance idiots, weeping or fixing their hollow eyes stedfastly on the ground. There were others whose hair had become stiff, erect, and ropy, and who, amidst a torrent of blasphemies, a horrid convulsion, or a still more frightful ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... farms, and appear, from the records and documents, to have been respectable, energetic, and intelligent people. Daniel Andrew was one of the strong men of the village; had been a deputy to the General Court, and acted a prominent part before and after the witchcraft convulsion. But the great family of the village—greater in numbers and in aggregate wealth than any other, and eminently conspicuous on both sides in the ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... partial fall, concealed in the coppice, extends seventy yards more; so that the total length of this fragment that fell was two hundred and fifty-one yards. About fifty acres of land suffered from this violent convulsion; two houses were entirely destroyed; one end of a new barn was left in ruins, the walls being cracked through the very stones that composed them; a hanging coppice was changed to a naked rock; and some grass grounds and an ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... ages before. In the incalculably remote period in which the conglomerate base of the Old Red Sandstone was formed, the clay-slate of this district had been exactly the same sort of rock that it is now. Some long anterior convulsion had upturned its strata, and the sweep of water, mingled with broken fragments of stone, had worn smooth the exposed edges, just as a similar agency wears the edges exposed at the present time. Quarries might have been opened in this rock, as now, for ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... an interesting experience and a novel one. For months he had been feeling that he lived in the whirl of a maelstrom of schemes and jobberies, the inevitable result of the policy of a Government which had promised to recoup those it had involuntarily wronged during a national convulsion. Upon every side there had sprung up claimants—many an honest one, and hordes of those not honest. There were obvious thieves and specious ones, brilliant tricksters and dull ones. Newspaper literature had been incited ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett |
