"Gape" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the snow there appears besides a number of inequalities, and the clefts previously covered with a fragile snow-bridge now gape before the wanderer where he goes forward, with their bluish-black abysses, bottomless as far as we can depend on ocular evidence. At some places there are also to be found in the ice extensive shallow depressions, down whose sides ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... neither the featherless biped of the Greek Philosopher, nor the tool-using animal of the Sage of Chelsea. For animals, too, have their tools, and man, in his visible flounces, has feathers enough to make even a peacock gape. Both my Philosophers have hit wide of the mark this time. And Man, to my way of thinking, is a flounce-wearing Spirit. Indeed, flounces alone, the invisible ones in particular, distinguish us from the beasts. For like ourselves they have their fashions in clothes; ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... stroll along the ground-floor rooms, Colney Durance found himself beside Dr. Schlesien; the latter smoking, striding, emphasizing, but bearable, as the one of the party who was not perpetually at the gape in laudation. Colney was heard to say: 'No doubt: the German is the race the least mixed in Europe: it might challenge aboriginals for that. Oddly, it has invented the Cyclopaedia for knowledge, the sausage for nutrition! How ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dwelling-place. Over its gateways may still be traced the pipes for molten lead, and on its walls the eyeloops for arrows, with brackets for the feet of archers. Masses of building have been shaken down by earthquakes. The ruins of what once were houses gape with blackened chimneys and dark forlorn cellars; mazes of fungus and unhealthy weeds among the still secure habitations. Hardly a ray of light penetrates the streets; one learns the meaning of the Italian word uggia from ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of the matter wrote to the Lord Chancellor and the Earl of Salisbury declining the honour. He says: "My mynde in my younger times hath been ever free from ambition and now I am going to my grave, to gape for such a thing were mere dotage in me." Further, he prayed for "free liberty to dispose of myne owne as other of his ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... gully below. As it was, it was not the powerful haunch of the black leader which caught our wheel, but the forequarter, which had not weight enough to turn us from our course. I saw a red wet seam gape suddenly through the black hair, and next instant we were flying alone down the road, whilst the four-in-hand had halted, and Sir John and his lady were down in the road together tending to ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ruins; the man on some money-making quest, and the girls just to be able to say they had seen them. His eyes rested on the temple wall, and he felt suddenly absurdly resentful that these rich pleasure-seekers should come even there to gape and stare. He had grown to love the ruins dearly, until that moment he had scarcely known how dearly, and to him it seemed for the moment like showing some treasured personal relics ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... proud maid, for the grave doth gape, And strangely altered reflects thy shape; No dainty charms it doth disclose, Death will ravish thy beauty's rose; And all the rest will leave to thee When dug thy ...
— Mollie Charane - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... On the title-page there were the old names and some new ones, but the same grist,—a "homely" story of "real life" among the tenements, a "humorous" story of the new school, an article on a marvellous invention to set the public on the gape, etc.... Fosdick had an article of a serious nature, on Trades Unions and Socialism. 'So Dickie, having ceased to roll about the world,' thought Isabelle, 'has begun to write about it.' She turned down the page at his article and ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... and utterly deserted, formed of lofty ledges of rock, hollowed into caverns underneath, by the insidious beating of the trade wind waves. The chiseled doorways to those caves are rare specimens of Nature's mysterious work; some large, some small and of queer, fantastic shapes; that black-mouthed gape at chance passers, while towering high above, a roof of table land—arid, scorching pampas, is just as uninviting as the water way below. So desolate is that part of the coast that it is but little ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... reclamation of the Dead Sea, passionate temples clapped to the lower clouds about the perpetual lamp, and that baroque Art of the Orient which at the Judges progresses in Summer through the country would draw multitudes of foreigners to gape at so great pomp, at Corinthian cities full of grace and riches which had arisen to crown with many crowns that plain of Mesopotamia, and where desolate Tyre had mourned her purples, and old Tadmor in the Wilderness (Palmyra) had sat in dirt; to gape, too, at a Jerusalem which in ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... the characteristic features of an incised wound is its tendency to gape. This is evident in long skin wounds, and especially when the cut runs across the part, or when it extends deeply enough to divide muscular fibres at right angles to their long axis. The gaping of a wound, further, is more marked when the underlying tissues are in a state of tension—as, ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... polished Louis-XIVth-Street furniture—he hurried into the darkness of his mighty van, while those pieces which in every household are regarded more as matters of use than ornament he left ranged along the pavement for all the world to gape at. Now and then he paused to recount incidents of his former varied experience and to try on such of my old clothes as came within his reach. I realized now why most of the things he wore did not fit him. His wardrobe was the accumulation ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... election, that fell into the broth, and ultimately into the jaws of an illiterate animal? Books are such delicate things! Yet men—and still more frequently women—read them so close to the fire that the bindings warp, and start, and gape like the shells of a moribund oyster. Other people never have a paper- knife, and cut the leaves of books with cards, railway tickets, scissors, their own fingers, or any other weapon that chances to seem convenient. ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... first of virtues! let no mortal leave Thy onward path, although the earth should gape, And from the gulph of hell destruction cry. To take ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... ugly gape of the formidable Gulf, the waves increased in size, and coursed to all directions, as if distorted by the sunken reefs. The eastern jamb is formed by Trn Island; the western by the sandy Ras Nasrni, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... who seek to bridge the chasm 'Twixt man to-day and protoplasm, Who theorize and probe and gape, And finally evolve an ape— Yours is a harmless sort of cult, If you are pleased with the result. Some folks admit, with cynic grace, That you have rather proved your case. These dogmatists are so severe! Enough for me that Fanny's here, Enough that, ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... social equality, creatures towards whom their predominant feeling is one of mingled terror and abhorrence, and who, during the whole of their national existence, have been, as the earth, trampled beneath their feet, yet ever threatening to gape and swallow them alive. It is not all this alone which makes it unlikely that the Southern planter should desire to free his slaves: freedom in America is not merely a personal right, it involves a political privilege. Freemen there are legislators. The rulers of the land are the ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... on the fifth of the next month, about the second gape (the whale, I should say, gaped regularly once an hour, and we reckoned time that way)—about the second gape, then, a sudden shouting and tumult became audible; it sounded like boatswains giving the time and oars beating. Much ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... prosperity and adversity; they are cunning, arrogant, and cruel, exercising the power of life and death over their slaves, and all low-born plebeians. They flay men alive, both piecemeal, and by stripping off the whole skin. No servant while waiting on them, or standing at their table, may gape, speak, or spit, so that their ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... up the receiver, blew a contemptuous kiss into the gape of the celluloid mouthpiece, and turned to go. There was another ring-up as ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Till they're rugged at edge and at rim; Scrub! Scrub! Scrub! Till with scissors the cuffs I must trim. Seam, and gusset, and band, Band, and gusset, and seam; And all the buttonholes gape, and the studs Drop ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... frets, and trickling everywhere over the efflorescence of the plaster decorations. There are two or three committee-rooms, likewise, very elaborately, though very questionably, decorated, and usually on exhibition to rural visitors, who gape at them with a happy sense of the proprietorship of such pomp. The least unworthy of these is the room set apart for the Committee on Military Affairs: vivid wreaths of laurel decorate the ceiling much more effectively than do the sprawling females ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... tricklings from above, and are accordingly not beautiful—their faces are like that of a pale, dirty, and weeping child with a cold in its head, who does not use a pocket-handkerchief. Jackdaws haunt the upper ledges and smaller caves that gape on all sides chattering like boys escaped from school, and anon a raven starts forth and hoarsely calls for silence. At the foot of the stooping crags, bowing to each other across the stream, lie masses that have broken from above, and atop and behind these is to ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... Indian seas. And he has heard from them of mightier monsters than his own Mediterranean breeds; of the Leviathan, the whale, larger than the largest ship which he has ever seen, rolling and spouting among the ocean billows, far out of sight of land, and swallowing, at every gape of its huge jaws, hundreds of living creatures for its food. But he does not talk of it as a cruel and devouring monster, formed by a cruel and destroying deity, such as the old Canaanites imagined, when—so ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... her face was the truth, and strangely, without consequence, while their talk of it as dreadful was still in the air, she appeared to present it as inordinately soft. This, prompting bewilderment, made him but gape the more gratefully for her revelation, so that they continued for some minutes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all kind but all expectant. The end, none the less, was ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... and incense-sticks smoulder, all of which, as shall be explained later, are precautions to thwart the machinations of the peculiarly malevolent local devils. In food shops, hideous and obscene entrails of unknown animals gape repellently on the stranger, together with strings and strings of dried rats, and other horrible comestibles; in every street the yellow population seems denser and denser, the colour more brilliant and the smells more sickening. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... but living men may die; and this pick never, for man or woman, opened a mouth that was left to gape long ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Flemish weavers who settled in Pembrokeshire in the reign of Henry I. It is in the border counties, Cheshire, Shropshire, Hereford, and Monmouth, that we find the old Welsh names such as Gough, Lloyd, Onion (Enion), Vaughan (Chapter XXII). The local Gape, an opening in the cliffs, is pretty well confined to Norfolk, and Puddifoot belongs to Bucks and the adjacent counties as it did in 1273. The hall changes hands as one conquering race ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... or mad?" and the Laureate's face expressed a kind of sarcastic astonishment,—"What a fool thou hast made of thyself, good comrade! ... By my soul, how shall thy condition be explained to these open-mouthed starers below! See how they gape upon thee! ... thou art most assuredly a noticeable spectacle! ... and yon maniac Prophet doth evidently judge thee as one of his craft, a fellow professional howler of marvels, else he would scarcely deign to ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... A scarfe of maiden-blush did seeme to hide her, Wherein Diana when Acteon spide her, Herselfe had wrought, looking with such disdaine, As witnest well his after-following paine; One end whereof had yong Leanders shape, When through the swelling main (whose waues did gape) He sought his chastest Hero, beating from him The waues, which murmuring stroue for to com nere him: And at the other, matchlesse Hero stood Viewing Leander tossed by the flood, And how the churlish ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... whence it seemed to come. And when he had arrived upon the spot he saw in a cleared space a lion, and a serpent which held him by the tail, burning his hind-quarters with flames of fire. My lord Yvain did not gape at this strange spectacle, but took counsel with himself as to which of the two he should aid. Then he says that he will succour the lion, for a treacherous and venomous creature deserves to be harmed. Now the serpent is poisonous, and fire bursts ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... The only thing is to see our steps as we take them—to understand them as we go. That, no doubt, I shall always do. I needn't be afraid of becoming too pliable; isn't it my fault that I'm not pliable enough?" It is said that imitation is the sincerest flattery; and if Isabel was sometimes moved to gape at her friend aspiringly and despairingly it was not so much because she desired herself to shine as because she wished to hold up the lamp for Madame Merle. She liked her extremely, but was even more dazzled than attracted. She sometimes ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... of 60, with fingers close to the seams of their breeches (when not breekless), heads up and eyes front. Face and body were motionless, as if cast in ebony: nothing moved but the saucer-like white eyes and the ivory-lined mouths, from whose ample lips and gape issued a prodigious volume of sound. Native assistants, in sable skins and yellowish white chokers, carrying music-scores and armed with canes, sloped through the avenues, occasionally halting to frown down some delinquent, whose body ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... strange world that we live in. Things turn out in a very odd manner. Every day produces something more wonderful than another. Earthquakes, murders, conflagrations, inundations, jubilees, operas, marriages, and pestilence, unite to make mortal men gape and stare. But your last letter and mine being wrote on the same day, astonishes me still more than ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... arms, I feel that my better plan will be to seek once more the quiet, empty steppe, and, bearing in me the recollection of this woman, to resume my lonely journey towards the region where the silver wall of the mountains merges with the sky, and the dark ravines gape at the steppe with their chilly jaws. At the moment, however, I cannot so do, for the Cossacks have temporarily ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... kinsman, but a little before you came to me, that he had followed me to half a dozen shops to see when I would take notice of him, and was at last going away with a belief 'twas not I, because I did not seem to know him. Other people make it so much their business to gape, that I'll swear they put me so out of countenance I dare not ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... angry or disappointed, it was very hideous; for he would so contort his face that the scar would, as it were, stretch itself out, revealing all its horrors, and his countenance would become all scar. "He looked at me like the devil himself—making the hole in his face gape at me," the old squire had said to John Vavasor in describing the interview in which the grandson had tried to bully his grandfather into assenting to his own views about the mortgage. But in other ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... from my carriage at the palace gate; a knot of people, a small crowd, perhaps, collects to salute me and gape at the horses and livery. I sweep up the stoop, lined by my own, and the Countess's, servants. The bronze doors open. The Countess advances with stately curtsy; a few words sub rosa, and I—fly into the arms ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... do nothing but gape and stare around at the bustling crowd and the number of men busily carrying great baskets on the top of porters' knots. Women, too, in caps, ready to put the same great pad round forehead and make it rest upon their shoulders, and bear ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... that wee pickle saut; the maid was scolded, and the stocking filled. He spent all his evenings at the back of the Woodhouse kitchen fire, and got at least one meal every day, where he used to make the rustics gape and stare at the many ghost, fairy, and robber stories which he had either heard of or invented, and poured out with unceasing volubility, and so often that he believed them all true. But the Ballantyne family had ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... never thought anything about it, but he can be anything he likes. Is not that a good one? Anything he likes!" And he laughed with a choked and heavy effort till the scar upon his face fired like blood, and Gilian seemed to see it gape and flow as it did when the sword-slash struck ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... has to sit through, of course: the only good matter being the chants. I can sing out, and I do. Then come the sermon, which is unto me sore weariness, and I gape through it as I best may. Dear heart, what matter is it to me if Peter were ever at Rome or no, or if Saint James and Paul do both say the same thing touching faith and works? We have all faith—say we not the Creed every ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt
... whipped the Royal Umbrella which she had patched up with an old scarlet silk petticoat, and there was Baby Akbar under its shadow; and, having—young as he was—been taught to salute to a crowd, he began waving his little fat hand with much dignity, until the people who had come out to gape whispered among themselves ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... prodigy thou shalt be, when thou goest forth; Hrimnir shall at thee gaze, all beings at thee stare; more wide-known thou shalt become than the watch among the gods,[37] if thou from thy gratings gape. ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... it. It won't wash, I can tell you. What business has he to make us tub, eh, do you hear? That's only one thing. He came and jawed us in the big room this morning, and said he meant to make football compulsory! There! You needn't gape as if you thought I was gammoning. I'm not, I mean it. Football's to be compulsory. Every man Jack's got to play, whether he can or not. I call it brutal! The only thing is, it won't be done. The fellows will kick. I shall. I'm ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... monstrous; only Need Gives forme and worth to every humane seed. As cedars beaten with continuall stormes, 5 So great men flourish; and doe imitate Unskilfull statuaries, who suppose (In forming a Colossus) if they make him Stroddle enough, stroot, and look bigg, and gape, Their work is goodly: so men meerely great 10 In their affected gravity of voice, Sowrnesse of countenance, manners cruelty, Authority, wealth, and all the spawne of Fortune, Think they beare all the Kingdomes worth before them; Yet differ not from those colossick statues, 15 ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped. The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... things and effects in Nature are not without charm and beauty, as the little cracks in the crust of a loaf, though not intended by the baker, are agreeable and invite the appetite. Thus figs, when they are ripest, open and gape; and olives, when they are near decaying, are peculiarly attractive. The bending of an ear of corn, the frown of a lion, the foam of a boar, and many other like things, if you take them singly, are far from beautiful; but seen in their natural relations are characteristic ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... many stone images. They made laws which nobody minded and which could not be executed. The federal judges opened court in a land filled with crime and violence and sat as holiday spectacles for insolent crowds to gape at—for there was nothing to try, nothing to do nothing on the dockets! And if a Gentile brought a suit, the Mormon jury would do just as it pleased about bringing in a verdict, and when the judgment of the court was rendered no Mormon cared for ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... began to show the first signs of breaking up: hammered to death by the sea, she discharged the oakum from her opening seams, and her decks began to gape and grin fore and aft. Corpses of drunken sailors drowned between decks now floated up amidships, and washed and rolled about among the survivors' feet These, seeing no hope, went about making up all quarrels, and shaking hands in token of a ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... they soon began to miss the agreeable life and companionable echoes of the canon they had quitted. Huge fissures in the parched soil seemed to gape as with thirsty mouths. A few squirrels darted from the earth, and disappeared as mysteriously before the jingling mules. A gray wolf trotted leisurely along just ahead. But whichever way Father Jose turned, the mountain always asserted itself and arrested his wandering eye. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... visioned Life as it might be, And from his dream forthright a picture grew, A painting all the people thronged to see, And joyed therein — till came the Man Who Knew, Saying: "'Tis bad! Why do ye gape, ye fools! He painteth not ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... cawch thAc dring'd— Tha countryman and townsman; An young an awld, an man an maid— Wi' now an tan, an here an there, Amang tha crowd to gape an stare, ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... "Alas! What an inconsiderable creature am I in this prodigious ocean of waters; my existence is of no concern to the universe; I am reduced to a kind of nothing, and am less than the least of the works of God." It so happened that an oyster which lay in the neighbourhood chanced to gape and swallow it up in the midst of this its humble soliloquy. The drop, says the fable, lay a great while hardening in the shell, until by degrees it was ripened into a pearl, which, falling into the hands of a diver after ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... the shuttle, be careful not to wind on too much thread at once, or the blades will gape open at the ends and the thread get soiled by constant contact with the ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... dislocated; so that when he opened his mouth wider than ordinary, or when he yawned, he could not shut it again. In the midst of his harangues, therefore, if any of his pupils began to be tired of his lecture, he had only to gape or yawn, and the professor instantly caught the sympathetic affection; so that he thus continued to stand speechless, with his mouth wide open, till his servant, from the next room, was called in to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... set on dogs; citizens stand and gape, people come running up, others walk quietly to and fro, others play all sorts of ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... large department store was reached and Mrs. Bobbsey let Freddie and Flossie take their time in looking into the several windows. One was full of dolls, which made the little girl gape ...
— The Bobbsey Twins - Or, Merry Days Indoors and Out • Laura Lee Hope
... this latter edifice (its body perished when the Boucherie and the Chastelet disappeared) still rises in gloomy majesty above all the surrounding buildings. It is as high as those of Notre Dame; and from its upper corners, enormous gargouilles—those fantastic water-spouts of the middle ages—gape with wide-stretched jaws, but no longer send down the washings of the roof on the innocent passengers. Hereabouts lived Nicholas Flamel, the old usurer, who made money so fast that it was said he used to sup nightly with his Satanic majesty, and who thereupon built part ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... instant, his passion completely overmastering him: "I'm no 'soldier,' and as good a man as you, you mean old Gape Cod water-rat. I'll never lift another iron or steer a boat for you as long as ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... rogues who, in the infamous boldness of their behaviour, as far exceed the ordinary class of rogues as they do honest people; and whenever such a monster as this appears in the world, there are enough fools to gape at him, and to make such a noise and outcry about his conduct as is sure to invite others of the gang to imitate the obstinacy of his deportment, through that false love of fame, which seems inherent to human nature. Amongst the number of these, ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... in luxurious motors, the hurrying to and fro of orderlies, the perpetual depleting and refilling of the long rows of grey vans across the square, the movements of Red Cross ambulances and the passing of detachments for the front, all these are sights that the pacific stranger could forever gape at. And in the hotel, what a clatter of swords, what a piling up of fur coats and haversacks, what a grouping of bronzed energetic heads about the packed tables in the restaurant! It is not easy for civilians to get to Chalons, and almost every table is ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... of the quartet unable to give utterance to his feelings. He could only cower there, and gape, while the unknown sailing craft was bearing down straight for the little motor-boat, and apparently bound to ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... his punch and set down his mug, and he now yawned with a completeness that revealed vastly more of red toothless mouth than one might have calculated his face could contain. "Some take it easier than others," he went on. "It's harder with young men like you." Again he opened his jaws in a gape as whole-souled as that of a house-dog before a kitchen fire. "It must be disagreeable to have a rope tightened around your neck. I don't know." He thrust his pipe-stem absently between his lips, closed his eyes, mumbled absently, "I don't know," and in a few moments ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... sepulchres hollowed and shaped of the wind in the swerve of the seas, The graves that gape for their pasture, and laugh, thrilled through by the breeze, The sweet soft merciless waters, await and are ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage—who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder—the man knows, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with his own true stuff—with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won't ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... falsetto of Mr. Lincoln's opening words. If Stephen expected the Judge to tremble, he was greatly disappointed. Mr. Douglas was far from dismay. As if to show the people how lightly he held his opponent's warnings, he made them gape by putting things down Mr. Lincoln's shirt-front and taking them out of his mouth: But it appeared to Stephen, listening with all his might, that the Judge was a trifle more on the defensive than his attitude might lead one to expect. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... driven to the heart, until again the sides were spread a-gape. In climbed the giant,—he did not think the fit would ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... Nisa downe with Tigers, Curbing with viny rains their wilful heads Whilst some doe gape upon his Ivy Thirse, Some on the dangling grapes that crowne his head, All praise his beautie and continuing youth; So strooke amased India with wonder As Neroes glories did the Greekish townes, Elis and Pisa and ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... Let other hungry mortals gape on, And on the bones their stomach fill hard; But let All Souls men have their mallard. Oh, by the blood of King Edward, It was a wopping, ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... portion of the screened verandah. On the table beside him was a tall glass, a decanter of cognac and a box of cigars; and suspended from the roof swung a canvas bag of water with a syphon attachment. A gape fly, which somehow had gotten through the screen, hit the lieutenant's forehead, fell on to the book and whirred up against ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... howling under a ship, and with a buffet dashed it into air, and chased it upwards with thunder stroke on stroke, and followed again, close as a chasing wolf, trying with hammering on hammering to beat in the wide-wombed bottom and suck out the frightened lives through one black gape. A wave fell on a ship and sunk it down with a thrust, stern as though a whole sky had tumbled at it, and the barque did not cease to go down until it crashed and sank in the sand at the bottom ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... cut him short. "Ben, get the Matron, quick, and get a bed ready with warm blankets and hot water bottles. Go, man! Don't gape there!" ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... from the rest of its tribe, by having its tongue free and pointing forwards. Its rounded head sinks completely into the body, the muzzle being abruptly truncated, so as to form a circular disc in front. So extremely small is the gape, that it would not be supposed, if separated from the body, to have belonged to a frog. On each side of the neck there is a gland, deeply sunk, and almost concealed ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... true to their disgrace. They both felt the reproach. How were they better than the rest of the neighborhood, who were content to gossip and gape and take the fortunes of the Tristrams as mere matter for their ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... nature; climate and all those physical circumstances belonging to localities, which work such wonderful changes in the physical character of man, appear to have no influence upon the tribe of Israel. The circumcised of Monmouth-street is as like that of Judea-Gape, in Frankfort, as two individuals of the same nation can be; let them be by birth and residence German, English, Russian, Portuguese, or Polish, still the one and only set of features belonging to the race will be seen equally ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various
... tenderness, Sighed, "Think how one, whose life thou wert to bless, Will be cast down, and grope in doubt and fear! Wouldst thou wound him, to give thy friend relief? Can wrong make right?" "Nay!" Conscience said, "but Pride And Time can heal the saddest hurts of Love. While Friendship's wounds gape wide and yet more wide, And bitter ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... haunts, the waves beneath Sits the grim monarch of insatiate Death; The shark rapacious with descending blow Darts on the scaly brood, that swims below; The crawling crocodiles, beneath that move, Arrest with rising jaw the tribes above; 60 With monstrous gape sepulchral whales devour Shoals at a gulp, a million in an hour. —Air, earth, and ocean, to astonish'd day One scene of blood, one mighty tomb display! From Hunger's arm the shafts of Death are hurl'd, And one great Slaughter-house ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... chimeras dire," of classical fable, frown on the passing visitor; and, though wrapped up in their dead and stony sleep of ages, seem not only the most strange, but also the most terrible things on which his eye ever rested. Enormous jaws, bristling with pointed teeth, gape horrid in the stone, under staring eye-sockets a full foot in diameter. Necks that half equal in length the entire body of the boa-constrictor stretch out from bodies mounted on fins like those of a fish, and furnished with tails somewhat resembling ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... his incantations, recalling the erring nuns from the dead. Very slowly the tombs in the cloister open, and dim grey figures, barely visible in the darkness, creep silently out from the graves. Bertram waves his arms over the cloister-garth, and there, too, the tombs gape apart, and more shadowy spectres emerge. Soon the stage is full of these faint grey spectral forms. Bertram lifts his arms. The wicked nuns throw off their grey wrappers, and appear glittering in scarlet and gold; the stage blazes with light, ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... name. The few men of worth and consideration who offer you their intimacy on that score, and whose regard is really worth coveting, are too disagreeably counterweighed by the baleful swarm of creatures who keep humming round you, like so many flesh-flies; gape at you as if you were a monster, and condescend moreover, on the strength of one or two blotted sheets, to present themselves as colleagues. Many people cannot understand how a man that wrote the Robbers should look like another son of Adam. Close-cut hair, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... had, at this instant, dared to be myself! But my fear of ridicule was greater than my fear of vice. 'Bless me, my dear Lady Delacour,' whispered Harriot, as we left this house, 'what can make you in such a desperate hurry to get home? You gape and fidget: one would think you had never sat up a night before in your life. I verily believe you are afraid to trust yourself with us. Which of us are you afraid of, Lawless, or me, or yourself?' There was a tone of contempt in the last words which piqued me to the quick; and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... was over fifty, tall and large-limbed, with a hoary shock of hair and a snub nose. I knew he had a host of children—I had been at his door once, and they had run, pattered, waddled, crept, and rolled through the doorway to gape at me. It had seemed as hopeless to try to count them as a large flock of sheep. I knew there was no income except what the old man and woman—and possibly the elder children—managed to earn from day to day. My employer in Copenhagen had strictly forbidden us to give credit to such—and of course ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... stood to rub his arm and gape in wonderment, he started to find the Duchess beside him; and her eyes were very bright and her cheeks very red, and, meeting her look, poor ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... I'll tell thee when I catch my breath! I've been in the stocks with the whole of Wollaston to gape at me. Puritan heads a-wagging! Puritan eyes a-staring! And after the stocks 'twas towards the whipping-post that they were leading me! But I've learned a trick or two from our lanes here at Merrymount. I gave a sudden twist—the constable loosened his hold—I ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... presence.[1416] At Bagdad, in the tenth century, the court of the caliphs had become luxurious, and a very severe and minute etiquette had been introduced. It was forbidden to spit, clear the throat or nose, gape, or sneeze in the presence of the sovereign. The nobles imitated this etiquette and adopted rules to regulate salutations, entrance into company, reception of visitors, table manners, and approach to one's wife. "If any one refused to conform to this etiquette, he exposed himself to ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Cham. Gape, earth, and swallow me to quick destruction, If I forgive your house! Ye've overpower'd me now! But, hear me, heav'n!—Ah! here's a scene of death! My sister, my Monimia, breathless!——Now, Ye powers above, if ye have justice, strike! Strike bolts through me, ...
— The Orphan - or, The Unhappy Marriage • Thomas Otway
... and his attendants kneel and rise,—he lifts the Host, and the world prostrates itself. A great procession of dignitaries with torches bears a fragment of the original cradle of the Holy Bambino from its chapel to the high altar, through the swaying crowd that gape and gaze and stare and sneer and adore. And thus the evening passes. When the clock strikes midnight all the bells ring merrily, Mass commences at the principal churches, and at San Luigi dei Francesi and the Gesu there is a great illumination (what the French call un joli spectacle) and very ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... earlier in the evening gathered to gape at our big tent were now noisiest in the square, where the endless drone of the ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... said, low drooped her head, and Ranulph's life-blood froze, For the earth did gape, as an awful shape from out its depths arose: "Thy prayer is heard, Hell hath concurred," cried the fiend, "thy soul is mine! Like fate may dread each dame shall wed ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... come most often about half an hour after lunch), the old angel of peregrination lifts himself up in me, and I yearn and wamble for a season afoot. When a blue air is moving keenly through bare boughs this angel is most vociferous. I gape wanly round the lofty citadel where I am pretending to earn the Monday afternoon envelope. The filing case, thermostat, card index, typewriter, automatic telephone: these ingenious anodynes avail me not. Even the visits of golden nymphs, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... stretched out before us. My uncle eagerly went forward to the tree, and looking up about fifteen feet from the ground, we saw a small hole surrounded by mud. Directly afterwards, out came the white end of a beak, which seemed to gape as if expecting to have some food put into it. We were silent for an instant, and then heard the harsh croaking of a bird, which seemed to come from the interior of the tree. How to get at ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... constitute an almost negligible minority of the race. Their influence too is much less potent than is supposed. A slightly vulgarizing tendency proceeds from them, but in waves of decreasing intensity. Their vogue is chiefly a succes de scandale. Sensible people will gape at the spectacle without admiration, and even the reader of the society column in the sensational newspapers keeps more critical detachment than he is usually credited with. In any case neither the boisterous nor the shrinking multimillionaire has any representative standing. ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... that fell from her lips, and each of whom appeared anxious to say something clever in return. They all laughed, the lady most, and sometimes all spoke at once. Notwithstanding these outbreakings, Miss Ring did most of the talking, and once or twice, as a young man would gape after a most exhilarating show of merriment, and discover an inclination to retreat, she managed to recall him to his allegiance, by some remark particularly pertinent to himself, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... to be objects of admiration, and the War Office would have howled with exquisite torture at sight of their hair and clothes. Speak of wrapping clothes around head or body to keep out the dust? It is sheer nonsense to prate so. Why it is hard enough to gape and gasp and catch a mouthful of sanded breath, without that added worry. There is nothing for it, but to grin and bear it and get through with the swallowing of that proverbial peck of dust in a life-time, as quickly and quietly ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... your game—to be sure, he will. Cinque ace! well, curse it! the same throw over again! 'Tis too bad. I missed taking you last time, with that stupid blot you've covered—and now, by Jove, it ruins me. There's no playing when fellows are getting up every minute to gape after doctors' coaches, and leaving the door open—hang it, I've lost the game by it—gammoned twice already. 'Tis very pleasant. I only wish when gentlemen interrupt play, they'd be good enough to pay ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... how inconvenient it is to have no pocket in her gown, and she also knows how strongly the dressmakers protest against putting one in, because it is sure to gape open and look ugly. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 30, June 3, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... and 25. we sailed our direct course with a small gale of winde, and this day we had sight of the Island of Cyprus. [Sidenote: Cauo de la Griega.] The first land that we discouered was a headland called Cauo de la Criega, and about midnight we ankered by North of the Gape. This cape is a high hil, long and square, and on the East corner it hath a high cop, that appeareth vnto those at the sea, like a white cloud, for toward the sea it is white, and it lieth into the sea Southwest. This coast of Cyprus is ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... be thy title right or wrong, Lord Clifford vows to fight in thy defence. May that ground gape and swallow me alive, Where I shall kneel to him ...
— King Henry VI, Third Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... Queen Mary, Thou gentleness that dost enmoss and drape The Cross's rigorous austerity, Wipe thou the blood from wounds that needs must gape. ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... something?" cried the girl, at length. "It seems to me if I were a man I could think of something to do besides stand and gape!" ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... I had been lounging around the big wheel for some time—that monster has a sort of fascination for me; it makes me feel like a small boy, unable to gape enough. I was looking at the people coming and going, and I almost forgot that it was noon, until I heard someone say close beside me, "Almost noon, Jack. Let's get out of this." That startled me. I had not thought it was so late, and I took a look ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... grandsire's tomb That fell on sleep, a bird of rifled nest; Soft as the lips whose smile unsaid the doom That gave their sire to violent death's arrest. Even for such love's sake strong, Wrath fires the inveterate song That bids hell gape for one whose bland mouth blest All slayers and liars that sighed Prayer as they slew and lied Till blood had clothed his priesthood as a vest, And hears, though darkness yet be dumb, The silence of the trumpet ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the ground: But no—a pump and ginger pop As soon would get a bird to drop! So there you stand, quite struck a-heap, Till all your tail is gone to sleep; A sort of stiffness in your nape, Holding your head well up to gape; While off go birds across the ridges, First small as flies, and then as midges, Cocksure, as they are living chicks, Death's Door is not ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... monmorency after that they left the place of their wintring, which was over against Tadousac, att the height of the Chaudiere (so called in french), and after many years they retourned to live att the gape of their lake, which is 200 Leagues long & 50 or 60 leagues large. Those hurrons lived in a vast country that they found unhabited, & they in a great number builded villages & they multiplied very many. The Iroquoits ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... to sit here, as long as I think proper, ma'am,' rejoined Mr. Bumble; 'and although I was not snoring, I shall snore, gape, sneeze, laugh, or cry, as the humour strikes me; such ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... there in their fishing-boats and look wonderingly after the Fram as she slowly and heavily steams along on her northward course. Many of them wave their sou'-westers and shout "Hurrah!" Others have barely time to gape at us in wonderment. In on the point are a troop of women waving and shouting; outside a few boats with ladies in light summer-dresses, and gentlemen at the oars entertaining them with small-talk as they wave their parasols and pocket-handkerchiefs. Yes; it is they ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... Corso, they will wear out the alleys of the Pincian Hill, the Villa Borghese, and the Villa Pamphili. They will ride, drive, and walk about, armed with a whip, eye-glass, or cane, as may be, until they are made to marry. Regular at Mass, assiduous at the theatre, you may see them smile, gape, applaud, make the sign of the cross, with an equal absence of emotion. They are almost all inscribed on the list of some religious fraternity or other. They belong to no club, play timidly, rarely ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... five gaping mouths shrieked a shrill and hungry welcome. Then, back again—swift as an arrow from the archer's bow—noting, with bright eye, and head turned sidewise, that the hand resting on the coping had moved nearer; yet brave to take all risks for the sake of those yellow beaks, which would gape wide, in expectation, at sound of ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... a fountain of sweet water, and feasted on the loin of a buck. The fallen shades of night soon overspread the whole hemisphere, and the earth seemed to gape after the hovering moisture. My roving excursion this day had fatigued my body and diverted my imagination. I laid me down to sleep, and I woke not until the sun had chased away the night. I continued this tour, and in a few days explored a considerable part of the country, each day equally ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... one hand, the whip poised lightly in the other was in the seventh heaven of bliss. He was driving a caravan. He was driving a caravan. He was driving a caravan. The very telegraph posts seemed to gape with envy and admiration as he passed. What ultimately he was going to do with his caravan he neither knew nor cared. All that mattered was, it was a bright sunny morning, and all the others were in school, and he ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... They come to look, and they prefer to stare. Reel off a host of threads before their faces, So that they gape in stupid wonder: then By sheer diffuseness you have won their graces, And are, at once, most popular of men. Only by mass you touch the mass; for any Will finally, himself, his bit select: Who offers much, brings something unto many, And each ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... foot most light, Who are in the height now of your spring, Fly, fly, and ye will make us gape, If ye can scape ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... at once one of the Princesses appeared before him. If she had looked a beauty when he saw her in the mountain she was ten times lovelier, now that he saw her in the light of day. The Prince could only gape and gape at her. ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... men to yawn or gape? A. It proceeds from the thick fume and vapours that fill the jaws; by the expulsion of which is caused the stretching out and expansion of the jaws, and opening of ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... seven, her cargo might be transferred across the isthmus of Tehuantepec to the Pacific, and in fifty more reach China—total, sixty-three days. As an elucidation, let us suppose that the usual route to the same destination, round Gape Horn, from a more central part of the Union—Philadelphia, for example—is 16, 150 miles; in that case the distance saved, independent of less sea risk, would be as follows:—From the Delaware to Guassacualco, 2100 miles; across Tehuantepec to the Pacific, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... doorway of my little house. It is the middle hour of the night, when tomb-yards gape, as your Shakespeare says. Am I sleepy? No! The camp slumbers, but I—I am awake, and I watch. I had a very long siesta, too. The moon is full, and the little glade is bathed in silver light. Here in Cuba, Marguerite, the moon ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... enough figure as we rode down the Rue Vieille attended by our servants, and many a rustic Blaisois stopped to gape at us, to nudge his companion, and point us ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... by one of these groves already spoken of. When they came nigh they halted irresolutely: the man who was in front (a silent and perturbed sergeant) turned fiercely to the others "Come on, can't you?" said he; "what the devil are you waiting for?" and he strode forward into the black gape. ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... how many sons have you Who call you mother, whom you never knew! But most of them who that relation plead Are such ungracious youths as wish you dead; They gape at rich revenues which you hold, And fain would nibble at your grandame gold. ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... behind which the dead stones and the dead sands commence at once. And sometimes, even, the desert chain closes in so as to overhang the river with its reddish-white cliffs, which no rain ever comes to freshen, and in which, at different heights, gape the square holes leading to the habitations of the mummies. These mountains, which in the distance look so beautiful in their rose-colour, and make, as it were, interminable back-cloths to all that happens on the river banks, were perforated, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... desires knowledge] inquirer; sightseer; quidnunc[Lat], newsmonger, Paul Pry, eavesdropper; gossip &c. (news) 532; rubberneck; intellectual; seeker[inquirer after religious knowledge], seeker after truth. V. be curious &c. adj.; take an interest in, stare, gape; prick up the ears, see sights, lionize; pry; nose; rubberneck*[U. S.]. Adj. curious, inquisitive, burning with curiosity, overcurious; inquiring &c. 461; prying, snoopy, nosy, peering; prurient; inquisitorial, inquisitory[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... been better, Sir, and more appropriate; and under that modest title you would not have used the unintelligible stars that blaze to so little purpose in my last paper. Ah! Sir, you should have considered how difficult it is to gape—shocking word!—to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... were off—in a cab engaged by Max, in deference to Sally's wishes. Neil and Dorothy took a jocose farewell, the one declaring that their presence had stretched the apartment till it could be seen to gape at the seams, the other vowing that Sally must come to see her soon, in order to be able to take a full breath again. Then the cab ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... the swearing Hopalong inside, and then the lead they pumped into the wrecked door was scandalous. Another panel fell in and Hopalong's "C" was destroyed. A wide crack appeared in the one above it and grew rapidly. Its mate began to gape and finally both were driven in. The increase in the light caused by these openings allowed Red and Lanky to secure better aim and soon the fire of the ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... rot first in too many cases, and that is why I smile at the notion of mere book-learning making us any better. If I were to make out a list of the scholars whom I have met starving and in rags, I should make people gape. I once shared a pot of fourpenny ale with a man who used to earn L2000 a year by coaching at Oxford. He was in a low house near the Waterloo Road, and he died of cold and hunger there. He had been the friend and counsellor of statesmen, but the vice from which statesmen ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... whistled all the droll bits of Marthy's songs that she remembered. Piqueur only listened solemnly, with his smothered briar pipe held politely in his hand; but Margot, buxom, and red cheeked with her iron gray hair tucked under her flaring cap would sit and gape and laugh and quite forget her ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... denying that the procession looked strange. File clerks and receptionists stopped their work to gape at the four bedizened walkers and their plainly dressed satellites. Malone needed no telepathic talent to ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... 4:19 And letting all those things go, do they not gape, and even with open mouth fix their eyes fast on her; and have not all men more desire unto her than unto silver or gold, or any ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... there is Something Beyond, Behind: I wis All Gods are haunted, and there clings, As hound behind fled sheep, the things Beyond the Universe's ken: Gods haunt the Half-Gods, Half-Gods men, And Man the brute. Gods, born of Night, Feel a blacker appetite Gape to devour them; Half-Gods dread But jealous Gods; and mere men tread Warily lest a Half-God rise And loose on them from empty skies Amazement, thunder, stark affright, Famine and sudden War's thick night, In which loud Furies hunt the Pities Through ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... Trojan, leaping on the tomb Of noble Menelaus, thus shall say: 'On all his foes may Agamemnon so His wrath accomplish, who hath hither led Of Greeks a mighty army, all in vain; And bootless home with empty ships hath gone, And valiant Menelaus left behind;' Thus when men speak, gape, earth, ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... resentment everywhere against the Sinn Feiners. Behind one of the gates of the Park, a Sinn Feiner was lying face downwards in the hole he had made to be a trench, and the crowd climbed up the railings to gape at him. A youth thrust his way through the people and peered at the dead man, and then he turned to the crowd and said to them, "Let's get the poor chap out and bury him!" A girl looked at him resentfully, and hurried to a towsled woman standing on ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... ball was rather more amusing than I expected. Martha liked it very much, and I did not gape till the last quarter of an hour. It was past nine before we were sent for, and not twelve when we returned. The room was ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... road runs up a hill, and as soon as you pass along its green channel, between rising thickets where rabbits come out to gape, you feel as though walking into a poem by Walter de la Mare. This road, if pursued, passes by a pleasing spot where four ways cross in an attenuated X. Off to one side is a field that is very theatrical ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... of Edinburgh gape at my sermons. In the middle of an exquisite address to Virtue, beginning 'O Virtue!' I saw a rascal gaping as if his jaws ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... use, anyway, getting hold of respectable nags," Rob explained, when he saw even Tubby gape at sight of the poor looking animals they had offered to them at exorbitant prices, "because we'd never have the least chance to get anywhere on their backs. No matter how many passes we had from burgomasters, or ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... there ainything in that to gape at?" snapped his father, in sudden irritation at ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... admitted. This, to the neophyte, was the pleasantest part of the evening. He seemed to hear of everything that was going on in London, and a good deal more besides. He was behind the scenes of all the commercial, social and political performances which were causing the vulgar crowd to gape. He discovered the true history of the hostility shown by So-and-so to the premier; he was told the little scandal which caused Her Majesty to refuse to knight a certain gentleman who had claims on the government; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... and the other idle hussies to gape and grin at? No. Bring them to the library," he snapped, and then ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... mystery conveyed by the closed door weighed upon her. Her susceptibilities were tensely alert as she watched Loder search for his key and insert it in the lock. With mingled dread and curiosity she saw the door yield, and gape open like a black gash in the dingy wall; and with a sudden sense of desertion she saw him pass through the aperture and heard him strike ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... attempt of Aristotle to explain the phenomenon otherwise than as a supernatural warning from God to sinful man, he assures his hearers that "whoever would know the comet's real source and nature must not merely gape and stare at the scientific theory that it is an earthy, greasy, tough, and sticky vapour and mist, rising into the upper air and set ablaze by the celestial heat." Far more important for them is it to know what this vapour is. It is really, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... fifteen minutes some one yelled, and even the very old men, who had stayed beside us to gape at Fred's rifle and our clothes and boots, began running like hares toward the sound. In twenty minutes after that, with the aid of grass ropes and leather thongs, they had hauled the huge carcass to the shore and rolled it ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... "Go ahead, Hooker," he relented testily; "go ahead. Got a date with her, eh? I thought maybe you'd just go down there and gape at her through the window. Go ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... to be laughable, it was comic in a way to make one want to weep. So that Lanyard, who refused to weep in public, could merely gape in speechless and transfixed rapture. And perhaps this was fortunate; otherwise Monk must have seen that his idiotic secret was out, the sport of ribald mirth, and the situation must have been precipitated with a vengeance and an outcome impossible ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... around Mr. Ricardo listened in silence, not mocking him. There were wide-eyed, haunted-looking children, and men and women not quite sober who drifted out from the public-houses to gape heavily at this cheaper form of entertainment. Possibly they thought he was some missionary trying to induce them to sign the pledge. Some of them must have known that he was mad. But even they did not laugh at him. Into their own dark ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... She was a vessel of great size, and carried seven hundred tons of spices of all kinds. We passed the island of St Helena, near which we saw certain fishes of such enormous bigness that one of them was as large as a great house. When they rise above water, or gape or yawn, the upper jaw covers all the forehead, as it were a soldier in shining armour, and when they swim along the surface of the deep, the forehead seems three paces broad. As they swam about near the ships, they raised such a commotion in the sea that we discharged all our artillery to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... the whispering, crowded room, The friends who come, and gape, and go; The ceremonious air of gloom— All, which makes ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... lightning revelation made him stand up in the carriage and gape at the photographs of Irish scenery in ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... world gape in a much easier way," Leonard replied, dryly. "Well, Amy, if you are as fond of honey as I am, you will think a swarm of bees a very nice present. Fancy buckwheat cakes eaten with honey made from buckwheat ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... instance, you now send to an upholsterer to have an old window-blind or blind fixture repaired, his apprentice will replace the entire thing, at a proportionate cost, leaving the old screw-holes to gape at the gazer. I would train women to wash, repair, and replace in part, and to carry in their pockets little vials of white or red lead to fill the gaping holes. Full employment could be ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... on her,' said she, 'but I niver thought she's be so pretty, and so staid and quiet-like too. T' most part o' girls as has looks like hers are always gape-gazing to catch other folks's eyes, and see what is thought on 'em; but she looks just like a child, a bit flustered wi' coming into company, and gettin' into as dark a corner and bidin' as still ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... work in the field as well as the men, they being used to it. They will not believe us when we tell them that our women do not work in the field. When an acre of ground yields twelve bushels of corn it is thought to be a fine crop. They gape with wonder when we tell them we break our ground with two horses, plow our corn with a plow on which we can ride; that one man can tend forty acres and raise forty bushels to the acre. When we ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear
... want, poor things, An' cannot do withaat it, Go arm yorseln to th' teeth, he sed, An' doant be long abaat it; Both rakes an' powls an' props an' ropes Yo cannot get ta sooin, An' take the Cowinheaders' plan When thay discovered th' mooin. Doant gape abaat, but when arm'd Tak each a different rowt, An' let yor cry be ivery man, Th' ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... round him in terror and astonishment, Halbert's eyes fell upon the place of sepulture which had so lately appeared to gape for a victim. It was no longer open, and it seemed that earth had received the expected tenant; for the usual narrow hillock was piled over what had lately been an open grave, and the green sod was ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... yield; for the grave does gape, And horribly alter'd reflects thy shape,— For ah! think not those childish charms Will rest unrifled in its cold arms, And think not there, that the rose of love Will bloom on thy ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... it," she cried impatiently. "Canst do naught but stare? Am I the mother of a fool? Wilt thou simper and gape and trifle away thy days whilst that dog-descended Frank tramples thee underfoot, using thee but as a stepping-stone to the power that should be thine own? And that be so, Marzak, I would thou hadst ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... Trojan treasuries. And now Ilioneus' stout ship, her that Achates leal 120 And Abas ferried o'er the main, and old Aletes' keel The storm hath overcome; and all must drink the baneful stream Through opening leaky sides of them that gape at every seam. ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil |
