"Incubus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... trading quarters, the huge public markets, the theatres, houses of resort, betting palaces, miles of billiard saloons, baseball and football circuses, wild beast rings and the innumerable temples of the Christian and quasi-Christian sects, the Mahomedans, Buddhists, Gnostics, Spook Worshippers, the Incubus Worshippers, the Furniture Worshippers, and so forth; and to the south again a vast manufacture of textiles, pickles, wines and condiments. And from point to point tore the countless multitudes along the roaring mechanical ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... I thought; yet it would ease me of a great weight if she would. This fortune, suddenly thrown into my lap, sits like an incubus upon me, Mr. Raymond. When the will was read to-day which makes me possessor of so much wealth, I could not but feel that a heavy, blinding pall had settled upon me, spotted with blood and woven of ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... extraordinary states of mental disintegration evince the separate and irregular function of certain mental nerve tracts, or grouped nerve tracts with which goes necessarily a coincident suspension, partial or complete, of the functions of all the rest; the supernatural incubus, therefore, neither demoniac nor divine, only morbid. Thus the strange nervous seizures, with their mental concomitants, not being outside the range of positive research, but interesting events within it, become useful natural experiments ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... essence of the plan, which made it palatable to the King and the object of all Downing's scheming, was that "it was to new-model the whole Government of the country, in which the King resolved to have no more superior officers." The power of these superior officers was an incubus of which Charles longed to ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... almost with despair, that he had not yet at all succeeded as became a man and a brother; his memory told him of but one or two of the slightest touches that had gone well home to the offender. He made a desperate effort to throw off that incubus round his neck and rush again to ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... going to dig myself," with a deep-laid purpose in her mind, "and you may dig, too. You start another hole, right here. I'll dig this big one out more, and I'll be an incubus"—meaning nobody knows what—"and live in it, and you be little crabs trying to get out of my way in ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... beyond this aggravating record of their existence. It is one which adds something to the cost of every particle of food consumed by the people, every shred of clothing worn by them. Additions to this incubus of debt little disturb the rules when blithely or bitterly engaging in new wars, but every such addition adds to the burdens of taxation laid on the shoulders of the groaning citizens, and is sure to deepen the harvest ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... long years that the German people would themselves throw off the incubus of the military Government which was crushing out their individuality and making their country an object of distrust and fear to all those interested in the progress of civilisation; but if you will not rid yourselves of the ...
— Plain Words From America • Douglas W. Johnson
... ear to ear and create a laugh throughout the country. Gondremark has thus some of the clumsier characters of the self-made man, combined with an inordinate, almost a besotted, pride of intellect and birth. Heavy, bilious, selfish, inornate, he sits upon this court and country like an incubus. ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this period, presented a most hopeful aspect. They yet displayed a united front, for they had hitherto been almost entirely free from the evils of sectarianism; and now, that they were relieved from the terrible incubus of a ruthless tyranny, their spirits were as buoyant as ever; for though intolerance had thinned their ranks, it had also exhibited their constancy and stimulated their enthusiasm. Their intense attachment to the evangelical cause stood out in strange and impressive contrast with the apathy ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... of the frightful effects of the general expectation of the impending judgment and destruction of the world have rolled down to the present time. The portentous season passed, all things continuing as they were, and the immense incubus rose and dissolvingly vanished. And the Mediaval Church, like the Apostolic Church before, instead of logically saying: Our expectation of the physical return of Christ was a delusion, fancifully concluded: We were wrong as to the date; and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... not why, but it has chilled my heart Like some dread thing of evil. All night long My nerves were shaken, and my pulse stood still, And waited for a terror yet to come To strike harsh discords through my life's sweet song. Sleep came—an incubus that filled the sum Of wretchedness with dreams so wild and chill The sweat oozed from me like great drops of gall; An evil spirit kept my mind in thrall, And rolled my body up like a poor scroll On which is written curses that the soul Shrinks back from ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... it ought, That his simple schemes he wrought Through the lagging summer's day In a solitary way. So it happened, as was best, That he took his nightly rest With no dreadful incubus This way eyed and that way tressed, Featured thus, and thus, and thus, Lying lead-like on a breast By cares of State enough oppressed. Yet in dreams his fancies rude Claimed a lordly latitude. Town of Dae by the sea, Dreamers mate above their state ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... like little rock-islands studding the surface of an ocean, and telling of the sunken continent below: this monstrous thousand odd pounds he had been fool enough to borrow. Never would he be able to pay off such a sum, never again be free from the incubus of debt. Meanwhile, not the ground he stood on, not the roof over his head could actually be called his own. He had also been too pushed for money, at the time, to take Ocock's advice and ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... copied in a great measure from ourselves. Hitherto the American office has not taken upon itself the task of returning to their writers undelivered and undeliverable letters. This it is now going to do. It is, as I have said, shaking off from itself that terrible incubus, the franking privilege. And the expediency of introducing a money-order office into the States, connected with the post-office as it is with us, is even now under consideration. Such an accommodation is much needed in the country; but I doubt whether ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... dint of hints and innuendoes, contrived to impress upon Lady Isabel the unfortunate blow to his own interests that Mr. Carlyle's marriage had been, the ruinous expense she had entailed upon the family. It struck a complete chill to Isabel's heart, and she became painfully impressed with the incubus she must be to Mr. Carlyle—so far as his pocket was concerned. Lord Mount Severn, with his little son, had paid them a short visit at Christmas and Isabel had asked him, apparently with unconcern, whether Mr. ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... proceed to Kui-kiang by land after all, I determine at once that, if the country gets no worse by to-morrow, I will dismiss the boatmen and pursue my way alone again on the bicycle. This resolve very quickly develops into an earnest determination to rid myself of the incubus of the snail-like movements of my new carriers, who are decidedly out of their element when walking, as I am very quickly brought to understand by the annoying frequency of their halts at way-side tea-houses to rest and smoke ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... New England town, Douglass began the life of a freeman, from which, relieved now of the incubus of slavery, he soon emerged into the career for which, in the providence of God, he seemed by his multiform experience to have been especially fitted. He did not find himself, even in Massachusetts, quite beyond the influence of slavery. While before the law of the State he ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... moment the incubus of Grizzle's meal-pock was lifted from his bosom. The shame was, if shame was any, that they should have been living in such a house while the thing was done. When the house was sold, let people say what they would! In proportion as a man cares to do what ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... the fall of the ancient governments, which rested like an incubus on the peoples of the Central Empires, has come political change not merely, but revolution; and revolution which seems as yet to assume no final and ordered form, but to run from one fluid change to another, until thoughtful men are forced to ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... incubus," he contradicted me, almost indignantly. "You're entirely different from what I thought ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... is now placing all his individual strength to the task of heaving off this incubus from the breast of our body politic, but with small avail, for he has no lever to assist him—no fulcrum whereon to rest it; otherwise he might say with Archimedes, 'With these I could move a world.' He is unaided, this eagled-eyed prophet of ours, looking sorrowfully, sagaciously ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... which fills him. Let the preacher consider this, and be persuaded of it,—and it will do much to relieve him from the distress which attends the loss of self-possession, which distorts every feature with agony, and distils in sweat from his forehead. It will do much to destroy that incubus, which sits upon every faculty of the soul, and palsies every power, and fastens down the helpless sufferer to the very evil from which he strives ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... from this incubus, prepared for the siege of Niksich in good earnest, and, with the diplomatic representatives and the Russian staff, we returned and pitched our camp in the plain, by the side of a cold spring (Studenitzi), which supplied us with an abundance of water, but within cannon shot of the fortress, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... causes of this backwardness in agricultural pursuits. The implements made use of here on the plantations are such as were rejected by New England farmers over half a century ago; and the methods of cultivation are a century behind the times. Slavery and land-monopoly are the incubus. ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... future memorial of the matter.... In truth it has come to our ears, not without immense trouble and grief to ourselves, that in some parts of Higher Germany ... very many persons of both sexes, deviating from the Catholic faith, abuse themselves with the demons, Incubus and Succubus; and by incantations, charms, conjurations, and other wicked superstitions, by criminal acts and offences have caused the offspring of women and of the lower animals, the fruits of the ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... either gradually awake by the exertion of volition, or the muscles connected by habit with such sensations alter the position of the body; but where the sleep is uncommonly profound, and those uneasy sensations great, the disease called the incubus, or nightmare, is produced. Here the desire of moving the body is painfully exerted, by the power of moving it, or volition, is incapable of action, till we awake. Many less disagreeable struggles in our ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... England. Half a million of men, I believe, perished in that great undertaking. Nor are the evil consequences of that war adequately described by what I have said. All the disorders and disturbances of Europe, those immense armaments that are an incubus on national industry and the great obstacle to progressive civilization, may be traced and justly attributed to the Crimean War. And yet the Crimean ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... though I will not name him just now. This enemy of mine, knowing him to be weak,—knowing him to be an idiot, has got hold of him and persuaded him. He believes the story which is told to him, and then feels happy in shaking off an incubus. No doubt I have not been very soft with him,—nor, indeed, hard. I have kept out of his way, and he is willing to resent it; but he is afraid to face me and tell me that it is so. Here are the girls come back from Buntingford. ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... than one really knows. So long as the hypocrite realises that he is a hypocrite, there is hope for him. But when hypocrisy develops into self-deception, the severance between outward and inward, between appearance and reality, is complete. In a school which is ridden by the examination incubus, the whole atmosphere is charged with deceit. The teacher's attempt to outwit the examiner is deceitful; and the immorality of his action is aggravated by the fact that he makes his pupils partners with him in his fraud. The child who is being crammed for an examination, ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... little to add. Like others with whom I was at one time so long and intimately allied, I have seen nothing of him now for years. The Dean was relieved as if from an incubus when he left college, though I believe there was a cessation of all open hostility after his return from Chesterton's. At least the only authenticated mention of any allusion to old grievances on my friend's part is, that when he paid Mr Hodgett the usual fees which fall ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... can see in the multiplication table the power that throws the bridge across the river, that builds pyramids, that constructs railways, that sends ships across the ocean, that tunnels mountains and navigates the air, this table becomes a stupid thing, a dead thing, and an incubus upon the spirits of her pupils. To such a teacher mathematics is a lifeless thing, without hope or potency, the school is a mere convenience for the earning of a livelihood, the work is the drudgery of bondage, and the children are little less than an impertinence. The vitalized teacher ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... had lasted several minutes, it was discovered that the wind was carrying the raft, with its incubus, toward the western shore again, and Nick, afraid that if they all landed together, the bear might seize the occasion to make a supper off of them, reached the pole over the side, and began working the logs to the middle ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... many persons connected with the Protestant churches who would be with the movement were it not for the supposed Bible difficulty. They shudder at anything they think against the Bible, as against the will of God. Take away this incubus, and these persons would experience a change in their views; they would ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... cash, you shall command me always. Give me your IOU—that will be quite sufficient, and pay the money back when it is quite convenient.' Disinterested, most praiseworthy man! He left me, impressed with his benevolence, and with my spirit at rest. With the dismissal of my incubus, my appetite was restored. I partook of a hearty dinner, and returned home, happy as a boy again. At the end of a week, I was enabled to repay my benefactor; but, at the end of a fortnight; I was again in need of his assistance. Emboldened by his offer, I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... leaders at the Hotel de Ville were taken captive. The Palais Bourbon was cleared, and the Deputies were reconvened in their assembly hall. Encouraged by this success, the government resolved to rid itself of the incubus of the national workshops, after a variety of schemes with this purpose in view had been brought forward in the Assembly. The government cut the Gordian knot by a violent stroke. On June 21, an edict ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... management was compelled to resort to printing in self defence. Before the printing had reached any where near the concluding letters of the alphabet, the MS. catalogue had grown to three thousand volumes, and was a daily and hourly incubus ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and at length there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened—I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me—to certain ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... you, Christian men and women, to lay to heart the duty of Christ's followers in reference to the influence and leavening of public opinion upon this matter, and to see to it that, in so far as we can help, we set ourselves steadfastly against that devilish spirit which still oppresses with an incubus almost intolerable, the nations of so-called Christendom. Lift up your voices be not afraid, but cry, 'We are the followers of the Prince of Peace, and we war against the war that is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia. When life was really vigorous and young, in Homeric times for instance, no one seemed to fear that it might be squeezed out of existence either by the incubus of matter or by the petrifying blight of intelligence. Life was like the light of day, something to use, or to waste, or to enjoy. It was not a thing to worship; and often the chief luxury of living consisted in dealing ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... a certain number of hours he could no more bear the incubus of this thought than he could put up with the flat prospects of married life the night before. He was all at sea, barely sane, in fact. His life had been so long purely intellectual that this sudden strain of passion and fierce practical interests seemed ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bon sens, with the lumen siccum ac purum notionum verarum. He seems to see the injury inflicted upon the sum of thought by the posteriori superstition, the worship of facts, and the deification of synthesis. Lastly, came the reckless way in which Locke freed philosophy from the incubus of innate ideas. Like Luther and the leaders of the great French Revolution, he broke with the Past; and he threw overboard the whole cargo of human tradition. The result has been an immense movement of the mind which we love to call Progress, when it has often been retrograde; together ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... books of engravings, or odd things purchased from the Jew-basket. She was obliged to be a purchaser, though she was but a slack contributor; and if she had possessed plenty of money, she would rather, when it was brought to the rectory—an awful incubus!—have purchased the whole stock than contributed a ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... I shall follow this up with a portrait of the least acceptable type of Conservative candidate, wherein all will recognise our Parliamentary incubus. Thus do we open the great campaign! If you would care to, pray keep that proof; some day it may amuse you to look at it, and to recall these early days of our acquaintance. Now I will take you to my house, which, I need not say, you honour by ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... Machiavellian twist, Tickle the ears of those smart word-fence blinds, And garbled catch-words win unwary minds, And, maybe, witless votes. Poor London dreams Of—many things most horrible to WEMYSS! The nightmare-incubus of old abuse Propertied privilege, expense profuse Of many lives for one, the dead-hand's grip On the slow generations, the sharp whip Of a compulsory poverty, the gloom Of that high-rated den, miscalled a Home! All these it ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various
... first time since the adder episode, he was really happy. Why, he did not know, save that he was about to "get some of his own back," to strike a blow against the cruel coward Incubus (for he persisted in identifying Harberth with the Snake and in regarding him as a materialization of the life-long Enemy), and possibly to enjoy a brief triumph over what had so long ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... principle, "That all men in the sight of God are equal," and the wrongs of whose victims have of late been so touchingly and truthfully illustrated by that eminent philanthropist, Mrs. Stowe, to the eternal shame of the upholders of the system, and the fearful incubus of guilt and culpability that will render for ever infamous, if the policy is persisted in, the nationality ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... by him and Virchow (tenth yearly part, X. 1878, p. 66) as follows:—"At the Munich meeting of naturalists, Virchow by a few weighty words cleared the atmosphere, which was heavy and stifling under the pressure of the incubus called Descent, and once more freed science from that nightmare which it has so long—in many opinions so much too long—allowed to weigh upon it; freed it, let us hope, once and for ever. The forecasts of this storm were discernible many ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... Vikings or Royalist followers of Vikings, like Sigurd the Crusader, sailed the seas beyond Norva's Sound and Serkland,[19] and as pilgrims, traders, travellers, and conquerors in the Mediterranean, their work was of course not one of exploration. They bore a foremost share in breaking down the Moslem incubus on southern Europe; they ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... these fireside fancies: "And they have so fraid us with host bull-beggars, spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, syrens, kit with the can sticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giantes, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphes, changelings, incubus, Robin-goodfellow, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell-waine, the fier drake, the puckle, Tom Thombe, hobgoblins, Tom Tumbler, boneless, and such other bugs, that we were afraid ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... should have been resting and reaping the fruit of her early industry, she was obliged to toil more assiduously than ever. It was little consolation to her that she was but a type of many women, who, hardworking and thrifty themselves, are married to men who are nothing but an incubus to their wives and to their families. Small wonder, then, that Mrs. Hableton should condense all her knowledge of the male sex into the one bitter aphorism, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... sleepless, horror-stricken wretch. That livid face with goggling eyes, stuck to him like a shadow; he always felt its presence, and sometimes, also, could perceive it as if bodily peeping over his shoulder, next his cheek; it dogged him by day, and was his incubus by night; and often he would start and wrestle, for the desperate grasp of the dying appeared to be clutching at his throat: so, in his ghostly fears, and bloody conscience, he had girded round his neck a ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... more, and my friends continually intruded their relentless remarks upon the apparition in my room; a great change was wrought in me. I resolved to gather all my faculties together, and forever rid me of this intolerable incubus. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... control when they appear. We are afraid that Mr Aiken is almost a slave of the spirits he has evoked. Dostoevsky's devil wore a shabby frock-coat, and was probably managing-clerk to a solicitor at twenty-five shillings a week. Mr Aiken's incubus is, unfortunately, devoid of definition; he is ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... Turkish officials, so long as it is well administered. Or rather one should go further: if French, German, or Italian colonization of the past is any guide, the nation which wins in the conquest for territory of this sort has added a wealth-draining incubus. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... the utmost straining of his ability to raise and to contribute funds towards the completion of their house of worship, he was just beginning to enjoy the comfort of seeing the debt, which had hung as an incubus over it for years, wiped out, when this new call was made upon him. A few young people proposed to go out to the assistance of the feeble church, upon the condition that Mr. Charless and Mr. Keith would go with them —wisely concluding that the attempt ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... this prospect of work as a day laborer greatly cheered the young man. Instead of depressing his spirits, it for the first time lifted from his soul that incubus of melancholy with which every Confederate soldier of his class was at first oppressed. Ever since Grant had refused in the Wilderness—a year before—to retire beyond the river after receiving Lee's tremendous blows, Guilford Duncan ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... governments, in the toils of a system which on the one hand had served their remote forbears with good effect, but which on the other hand civilized peoples had long and almost universally discarded as an incubus. In these colonial beginnings the negroes were to be had so cheaply and slavery seemed such a simple and advantageous device when applied to them, that no qualms as to the future were felt. At least no expressions of them appear in the records of thought extant ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... mysterious visions of the soul! Ye wild and freakish gambolings of the spirit, freed from the incubus of matter, and unfettered by the control of reason, of what fantastic caprices are ye the originators 137—what caricatures of the various features of our waking life do ye not exhibit to us, ludicrous and ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... head; ever labouring to infuse fresh valour into his beaten, disheartened followers. That the governing party had any right to be in power, or possessed any virtue of any kind, or were, in fact, anything but an incubus and a curse to the Banda Oriental, she would not for one moment admit. To her mind her country always appeared like Andromeda bound on her rock and left weeping and desolate to be a prey to the ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... Norton pointed out the shadowy form of Mt. Temple looming ever vaster before them, its mass of rock, of wind-blown, wind-carved peaks lifted in sombre defiance against the stars. It brooded darkly over the lower slopes, like an incubus it dominated the other spines and ridges, its gorges filled with shadow and mystery, its precipices making the sense reel dizzily. And somewhere up there high against the sky, alone, suffering, perhaps dying, a man had waited ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... much out of place and keeping with the small, oddly-shaped rooms of their future home in East Chester Close. None knew how strong was the instinct of self-preservation, it may almost be called, which impelled Ellinor to shake off, at any cost of present pain, the incubus of a terrible remembrance. She wanted to go into an unhaunted dwelling in a free, unknown country—she felt as if it was her only chance of sanity. Sometimes she thought her senses would not hold together till the time when all these arrangements were ended. But she did not speak ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... was as if this departure had relieved him from an incubus; he was in better spirits from that moment, and returned to his habits of kindness to ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... leisurely filled their baggage trains and packed their portmanteaus. My intention in going to St. Meuse was to witness this evacuation scene, and to be a spectator of the return of light-heartedness to the French population of the place, on the withdrawal of the Teuton incubus which for three years had lain upon the safety-valve of their constitutional sprightliness. I had been a little out of my reckoning of time, and when I reached St. Meuse I found that I had a week to stay there before the event should occur which I had come to witness; but the interval ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... gifts or promises of cash from the British treasury, by war and foreign relations hovering on the verge of war and necessitating extended preparations, the whigs had brought the national resources into an embarrassment that was extreme. The accumulated deficits of five years had become a heavy incubus, and the deficit of 1842-3 was likely to be not less than two and a half millions more. Commerce and manufactures were languishing. Distress was terrible. Poor-rates were mounting, and grants-in-aid would extend impoverishment from the factory districts to the rural. 'Judge then,' ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... defences of Maubeuge. Without a doubt, the same fate would be meted out to the forts at Verdun, were the French to rely upon them. But France is a nation of brilliant soldiers. Realizing at once that what was an impregnable fort in former days is now hardly better than an incubus—a mere house of cards, something utterly unreliable—she poured her forces out beyond those forts, dug her trenches on the eastern and northern slopes of the heights of the Meuse, and surrounded Verdun and its encircling forts with a network ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... nomadic sort, and when I have no case before the courts I make it a habit to visit continental spas: not that I have ever been ill; but then I am no longer young, and I am always happy in a crowd. Well, to come more shortly to the point, I am now on the wing for Evian; this incubus of a house, which I must leave behind and dare not let, hangs heavily upon my hands; and I propose to rid myself of that concern, and do you a very good turn into the bargain, by lending you the mansion, with all its fittings, as it stands. The idea was sudden; it appealed to me as humorous: ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... exist without the sight of that wretch, Sibley, I wish she would follow him to New York. If she dotes on such scum, they had better be married, as far as such people can be, and so relieve her relatives of an incubus that is well-nigh intolerable." ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... any woman could reasonably be expected to desire. She had triumphed over her sister-in-law and those of her husband's relatives who had circulated rumors detrimental to her character, and had become the possessor of a comfortable home, without the incubus of an impotent husband. But she was not content; Randolph Thomson, turning his back on her and his boy, had married a young lady of fortune; so vowing vengeance against men in general for their falseness and inconstancy. Mrs. Clarkson laid herself out to entrap and ensnare every man who ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... prudential considerations against which Shaftesbury and a few others protested weighed like an incubus both upon religion and on morals. 'Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim,'[285] was the seldom failing refrain, echoed in sermons and essays, in theological treatises and ethical studies. And though the idea of happiness ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... that, even in the worst of worlds, righteousness and justice and truth had been something more than names. Doom had fallen; for more than a twelvemonth the ruins had smouldered, and to-day they were but the harmless haunt of bat and badger. And the world relieved of that intolerable incubus, and recovered of its purging and cleansing sickness, had started once more upon its appointed path—slowly, indeed, at the first, but ever ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... sens, with the lumen siccum ac purum notionum verarum. He seems to see the injury inflicted upon the sum of thought by the a posteriori superstition, the worship of "facts," and the deification of synthesis. Lastly, came the reckless way in which Locke "freed philosophy from the incubus of innate ideas." Like Luther and the leaders of the great French Revolution, he broke with the Past; and he threw overboard the whole cargo of human tradition. The result has been an immense movement ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... fiat of God that fixes these things as eternal. Even they also may be made the instruments of revelation and re-creation. Paris and London, Rome, Berlin and Washington are meshed in the tangled web of the superannuated who cannot escape the incubus of the old ways and the old theories that were themselves the cause of the war and of the failure of "modern civilization," but another generation is taking the field and we must believe that this has been burned out of them. They ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... meagre outline of a Greek tragedy, will not do. Let experiments be tried upon worthless subjects; and if this of Mendelssohn's be Greek music, the sooner it takes itself off the better. Sophocles will be delivered from an incubus, and we from an affliction of the ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Caesars! Heraclian, by one decisive victory, has gained, by the favour of—of Heaven, the imperial purple; and a new era opens for the world. Let the conqueror of Rome balance his account with that Byzantine court, so long the incubus of our Trans-Mediterranean wealth and civilisation; and let a free, independent, and united Africa rally round the palaces and docks of Alexandria, and find there its natural centre of polity ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... leaked like a sieve, two windows had been blown in, the paint had turned a gray-black, the gutters had been out of order. He had not quite settled the bill for these repairs. He realized it always as an actual physical incubus upon his slender, bowed shoulders. He came of a race who were impatient of debt, and who regarded with proud disdain all gratuitous benefits from their fellow-men. Henry always walked a long route from the shop in ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... bewilderment, gazing about him far and wide, until his wondering thoughts and wandering eyes reverted directly to his personal self. He looked down; his feet were bare. Where were the red moccasins? Red moccasins! They were but a part of the dream; or, rather, the very master-fancy of it—the incubus! Never had he seen such things in bodily form. Assuredly, he must be at home, aflat of his back on the ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... manner to himself, his defiant taunts, his final challenge! Langholm was not sorry to remember the last; it relieved him from the moral incubus of the clandestine and the underhand; it bid him go on and do his worst; it set his eyes upon the issue as between himself and Steel, and it shut them to the final possibilities as touching the woman in ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... fire had been out when he went in. "He wouldn't have downed me so easy if I had had anything in me," he muttered, and his anger grew as he thought of all he had been made to suffer. For he was still the swaggerer. Now that the incubus of his father's tyranny no longer pressed on him directly, a great hate rose within him for the tyrant. He would go back and have it out when he was primed. "It's the only hame I have," he sobbed angrily ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... political misrule, which undermined the empire. Slavery proved at Rome a monstrous curse, destroying all manliness of character, creating contempt of honest labor, making men timorous yet cruel, idle, frivolous, weak, dependent, powerless. The empire might have lasted centuries longer but for this incubus, the standing disgrace of the Pagan world. Paganism never recognized what is most noble and glorious in man; never recognized his equality, his common brotherhood, his natural rights. It had no compunction, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... is most animal! A phantom of air, an abstraction of the dawn and of vesper sun-lights, a bodiless sylph on the one hand; on the other a gross carnal monster, like the Miltonic Asmodai, "the fleshliest incubus" among the fiends, and yet so far ennobled into interest by his intellectual power, and by the grandeur of misanthropy! [Endnote: 25] In the Midsummer-Night's Dream, again, we have the old traditional fairy, a lovely mode of preternatural life, remodified ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... monster, in "The Tempest." He seems there to have created a person which was not in nature, a boldness which, at first sight, would appear intolerable; for he makes him a species of himself, begotten by an incubus on a witch; but this, as I have elsewhere proved, is not wholly beyond the bounds of credibility, at least the vulgar still believe it. We have the separated notions of a spirit, and of a witch; (and spirits, according to Plato, are vested with a subtle body; according to ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... four acres in the country, to seek a dwelling near the factory which employed him; and the Elizabethan Act, insisting upon the allocation of four acres to each new cottage built, was repealed. But for that repeal, factory slums would be garden cities, unless the incubus of this provision had stopped the factory development. The final result of the inclosure movement upon the country was to deprive the public of most of its commons and open spaces, to deprive the agricultural labourer of all right in the soil he tilled, and to rob ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... sweet unconsciousness. Miss Pomeroy fell asleep. In that helpless condition she was quietly conveyed from her father's arms to bed, to the unspeakable relief of Guy, who felt, as the door closed, as if a fearful incubus had been removed. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... descended on their fervid joy, and they looked at each other in consternation. This public call on Mr. Brassfield now became an incubus to Mr. Amidon, pinning him to earth as he essayed to rise and fly. Gradually, as he looked fondly in his lady-love's face, the hope dawned in his heart that perhaps her desire that he should have a "career" might not be much greater ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... I hear he is a good worker, too. But I knew him when we were boys. It was one of those rash friendships that so often prove an incubus in afterlife. I may as well tell you plainly, we were once on very intimate terms with one another. But this tactless fellow lays no restraint on himself when other people are present. On the contrary, he thinks ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... the capitulation. A persistent apprehension haunted him; a dread lest the conflict might be renewed, and the horrible thought of what the consequences must be in such an event, of which he could not speak, but which rested on his bosom like an incubus. When he had reascended to his study, where he found Maurice and Jean in exactly the same position he had left them in, it was all in vain that he settled himself comfortably in his favorite easy-chair; sleep would not come to him; just as he was on the point of ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... the fatherland, they come from old Ireland. They are the active spirits, native and naturalized, of a generation of free men who never felt the incubus of slavery, and who wish only as Americans to make stronger and plant deeper the principles of the Republican party. It is to these men we who have grown old in this conflict wish now to hand over the banner ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... increase. In the first place the abolition of the Steelyard, though ordered by Edward VI., was not completely carried out till many years afterwards. During this period the merchants were learning the immense possibilities open to them when this incubus should be removed. Next, the great rival of London, Antwerp, suffered, like the rest of the Netherlands, from the religious wars. Thirdly, the wise and farseeing action of Gresham transferred the commercial centre of the northern world from that town ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... Renaissance are so drummed into him during his years of training, and exercise so tyrannical a spell over his imagination that he loses the power of clear and logical thought, and never becomes truly creative. Free of this incubus the engineer has succeeded in being straightforward and sensible, to say the least; subject to it the man with a so-called architectural education is too often ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... isolation, and the evil effects of railway domination account wholly for San Francisco's slow growth toward the end of the century. For, following the several spasms of development incident to the ages of gold, of grain, and of fruit, and the advent of the railway incubus, California for a time betook herself to rest, which indeed was largely paralysis. Then, too, those who had come first and cleared the ground, laying the foundations of fortunes, were passing away, and their successors seemed more ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... bent his steps to the place Dancourt, and having deposited the incubus beside him, stretched his limbs on a bench beneath a tree. His attitude, and his luxuriant locks, to say nothing of his melancholy aspect, rendered him a noticeable figure in the little square, and monsieur Petitpas, from Bordeaux, under the awning of the cafe opposite, ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... his terrible forebodings of August and September. Ruin? He was actually going to make money out of the greatest war that the world, etc. etc. And why not? Somebody had to make money, and somebody had to pay for the war in income tax. For the first time the incubus of the war seemed lighter upon G.J. And also he need feel no slightest concern about the financial aspect of any possible developments of the Christine adventure. He had a very clear and undeniable sensation ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... be rolled off, as man has rolled away the curse of labor; as the curse has been rolled from the descendants of Ham. My mission is to preach this new gospel. If you suffer, it is not because you are cursed of God, but because you violate His laws. What an incubus it would take from woman could she be educated to know that the pains of maternity are no curse upon her kind. We know that among the Indians the squaws do not suffer in childbirth. They will step aside from the ranks, even on the march, and return in a short time to them with the newborn ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... old stairway outside his door, weighted with the tread of Mrs. Greeve. The tread and the creaking ceased; there came a knock, then heavy descending footsteps on the aged stairway, every separate step protesting until the incubus had sunk once more into the depths ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... been, The learning of the parish now is seen, The midnight parson, posting o'er the green, With gown tuck'd up, to wakes, for Sunday next, With humming ale encouraging his text; Nor wants the holy leer to country girl betwixt. From fiends and imps he sets the village free, 40 There haunts not any incubus but he. The maids and women need no danger fear To walk by night, and sanctity so near: For by some haycock, or some shady thorn, He bids his ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... least, although my reservation of confidence in only giving her a hint of the truth, checked her advances. You may think this an insane indiscretion on my part; but if you knew how often I have longed to stand up before everybody and proclaim who I am, and so get rid of the incubus of a perpetual falsehood, you would not be so much surprised. There is one unspeakable blessing in American law. It is quite easy to obtain a divorce. One can get free without sacrificing everything except bare existence. I do not care what anybody may argue ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... discover, with inspiration from whatever supernatural source the discriminating reader may elect, that the darker race, docile by instinct, humble by training, patiently waiting upon its as yet uncertain destiny, was an incubus, a corpse chained to the body politic, and that the negro vote was a source of danger to the state, no matter how cast ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... food and perversion of the strength of the nation, as a public sin, are maundering about schism. There's another idle army! Then we have artists, authors, lawyers, doctors—the honourable professions! all hanging upon wealth, all ageing the rich, and all bearing upon labour! it's incubus on incubus. In point of fact, the rider's too heavy for the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... incubus, the little party now went on cheerily. She-wee-she kept them in fun as well as food. His hunting was always successful; he was ever ready to render any assistance in the camp or on the march; while his jokes, his antics, and the very cut of his countenance, so full ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... condition in which Philadelphia will be left, unless speedily supplied with railroad connection in some way or other with this garden spot of the universe. (Laughter.) And besides, sir, this discussion has relieved my mind of a mystery that has weighed upon it like an incubus for years. I could never understand before why there was so much excitement during the last Congress over the acquisition of Alta Vela. I could never understand why it was that some of our ablest statesmen and most disinterested patriots should entertain such dark forebodings ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... are in Sardinia upwards of 2000 curates, not one of whom has so much as 800 francs, or about L.35 sterling. These are thus tempted to prey upon the people. Such is the terrible organization which the King and Parliament have to encounter in carrying out their reforms, and such is the fearful incubus which has pressed for ages upon the social rights and industrial energies ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... convention at an early day. Louisiana will follow. Her Legislature is to meet; and although there is a clog in the way of the lone star State of Texas, in the person of her Governor, ... if he does not yield to public sentiment, some Texan Brutus will arise to rid his country of the hoary-headed incubus that stands between the people and their sovereign will. We intend, Mr. President, to go out peaceably if we can, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... for the lower castes to rise in rebellion against their lot. They discovered that they were merely butting their heads against an adamantine rock. So they have lost every ambition and hope; and he who would lift them up must first remove that leaden despair which rests upon them like a mighty incubus. ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... twin Which erst could rein submissive millions in, Are now spent forces on the eddying surge Of Thought enfranchised. Agencies emerge Unhampered by the incubus of dread Which cramped men's hearts and clogged their onward tread. Dynasty, Prescription! spectral in these days When Science points to Thought its surest ways, And men who scorn obedience when not free Demand the logic of ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... and opened my box of colors, and determined to produce a work of art. To my astonishment, the brutal figure of the carter forced its way into my memory again and again. It (without in the least knowing why) as if the one chance of getting rid of this curious incubus, was to put the persistent image of the man on paper. It was done mechanically, and yet done so well, that I was encouraged to add to the picture. I put in next the poor beaten horse (another good likeness!); and then I introduced a life-like portrait of myself, giving ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... the bustle of the early morning departure his partners might not notice any change. Stopping before the bunk of Stacy he glanced at the sleeping man. He was lying on his back, but breathing heavily, and his hands were moving towards his chest as if, indeed, his strange fancy of the golden incubus were being realized. Demorest would have wakened him, but presently, with a sigh of relief, the sleeper turned over on his side. It was pleasanter to look at Barker, whose damp curls were matted over his smooth, boyish forehead, and whose lips were parted in a smile under the silken wings of his ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... not held by the throat, as General Grant announced, Richmond and all the South in that autumn of 1864, was staggering, suffocating, reeling to and fro under the immense incubus of all-destroying war. ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... tiny touch of blood at the point, but there is no wound on Mr Todhunter. Mr Glass took that wound away with him, dead or alive. Add to all this primary probability. It is much more likely that the blackmailed person would try to kill his incubus, rather than that the blackmailer would try to kill the goose that lays his golden egg. There, I think, we have a pretty ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... will sometimes intrude themselves in spite of his efforts to avoid them. It is an awful thing to allow the mind to be thus contaminated; and many a man would give the world, if he possessed it, to be free from the horrible incubus of ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... through a frightful solitude of its own making in the mind of the Gamester; the slowly quickening, but ever quickening, descent of appetite down which the Miser is propelled; the agony and cleaving oppression of grief; the ghost-like hauntings of shame; the incubus of revenge; the life-distemper of ambition ... these demonstrate incontestably that the passions of men, (I mean the soul of sensibility in the heart of man), in all quarrels, in all contests, in all quests, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... cases were supposed to occur, they were not ascribed to any natural process such as we now recognise in the "parthenogenesis" of insects and crustaceans, but to the visitation of the mother by a spirit—a floating, volatile demon or angel (known as an "incubus" in the Middle Ages) beneficent or malicious as the case might be. Stories of the nocturnal visits of these mysterious ghostly "incubi" are on record in great number and variety, both in European ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... also to the Protestants, and such of the Roman Catholic citizens as were opposed to the O'Brien movement; but the Young Irelanders, and most of the Old Irelanders, were exasperated, and in their speeches and newspapers denounced Lamartine as the enemy of liberty, the sycophant of England, and the incubus of the French provisional government. It was said that he had married an English lady, and was more English at heart than French—that he would betray the republic to England or to monarchy. Those persons who had been foremost in holding him up as a demi-god, now abused him not only as ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... fifteen years ago. Doubtless were I to repeat my visit I should find progressive changes too numerous for detail. Happy little middle-class Parisians now run to and from their Lyces unattended. Young ladies in society imitate their Anglo-Saxon sisters and have shaken off that incubus, la promeneuse ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... got rid of his incubus, and rolls forth words of command; the propeller churns up the water behind, hawsers fly through the air, and the steam winch starts with a ringing metallic clang, while the vessel works herself broadside in to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... so successfully rid himself of such an incubus, he made his valet-de-chambre slip over to Margari to tell the worthy man to wait upon him on the morrow at 11 o'clock precisely, as he had a very pleasant piece of news to impart to him; for he meant to make Margari believe that it was through his, Mr. John Lapussa's special ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... of finding out how the Holden lot barber would regard a proposition from a new patron to open a charge account. If nothing worse than remaining unshaven was going to happen to him, what cared he? The collar was still pretty good. Why let his beard be an incubus? He forgot it presently in noticing that the people arriving on the Holden lot all looked so extremely well fed. He thought it singular that he should never before have noticed how many well-fed people one saw ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... now made to feel the incubus-load, which perseverance in sin heaps on the breast of the reckless offender. What was the most grievous of all, his power to shake off this dead weight was diminished in precisely the same proportion as the burthen was increased, the moral force of every man lessening in a very ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... dream, rescue and safety depended upon my getting to the end of the text. I tried again and again, always to be driven back in despair before the crucial words were uttered. At last, with a desperate effort, I seemed to shake off the incubus which was weighing me down, and I finished the words triumphantly, and so loud that I had positively wakened myself up by shouting them out. With returning memory I knew this had happened, and hearing ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... Salamander! Inward, spirally flowing, Gurgle, Undine! Gleam in meteoric splendor, Airy Queen! Thy homely help render, Incubus! Incubus! Forth and end the ...
— Faust • Goethe
... battlefield. I don't think women have shared this feeling to the same extent. I am told there were never so many sealskin coats to be seen as during last winter. But, perhaps, the women will say that men have been only too glad to use the war as an excuse for getting rid of an incubus. And they may be right. We had better not make too great a virtue of what is, after all, a comfortable change. Let us enjoy ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... history must have derived the greatest advantage on special points from the conscientious research, and frequently also from the acute analysis, even of writers of the most extreme school. But it is high time that the incubus of fascinating speculations should be shaken off, and that Englishmen should learn to exercise their judicial faculty independently. Any one who will take the pains to read Irenaeus through carefully, endeavouring to enter into his historical position in all its bearings, striving to realize ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... often accompanied with fear. At times, violence stalked abroad unchallenged and dark lowering faces skulked about. Even when we felt no personal danger this incubus of savage life all around weighed on our hearts. Thus it was day and night. Even those hours of twilight, which brood with sweet influences over so many lives, bore to us, on the evening air, the weird cadences of the heathen dance or the chill ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... one time to punish a boy with a fair degree of severity (may the Lord forgive me), and now. I know that in so doing I was guilty of a grave error. What I interpreted as misconduct was but a straining at his leash in an effort to extricate himself from the incubus of the negative self-feeling. He was, and probably is, a dull fellow and realized that he could not cope with the other boys in the school studies, and so was but trying to win some notice in other fields of activity. To him notoriety was preferable to ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... actually seen one with my own eyes. Demons in women's form rush up the mountain out of the oasis to tempt and torture us in our sleep. What could it have been that the goblin in a white robe and with flowing hair held in its arms? Very likely the stone with which the incubus loads our breast when he torments us. The other one seemed to fly, but I did not see its wings. That side-building must be where the Gaul lives with his ungodly wife, who has ensnared my poor Hermas. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... moved the mark maybe ... here now is the part he was reading to me himself ... "the remedies for diseases belonging to the skins next the brain: headache, vertigo, cramp, convulsions, palsy, incubus, ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... is no subject on which a man should speak so gravely as that industry, whatever it may be, which is the occupation or delight of his life; which is his tool to earn or serve with; and which, if it be unworthy, stamps himself as a mere incubus of dumb and greedy bowels on the shoulders of labouring humanity. On that subject alone even to force the note might lean to virtue's side. It is to be hoped that a numerous and enterprising generation of writers will follow and surpass the present one; but it ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... blase. Even Matthew Arnold could not help noticing the "buoyancy, enjoyment, and freedom from restraint which are everywhere in America," and which he accounted for by the absence of the aristocratic incubus. The nervous fluid so characteristic of America in general flows briskly in the veins of its social organism; the feeling is abroad that what is worth doing is worth doing well. There is a more general ability ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... sixpences? A man of spirit desires certainty in a thing of such a nature; he must see to it that there is some reciprocity between him and mankind; that he pays his expenditure in service; that he has not a lion's share in profit and a drone's in labour; and is not a sleeping partner and mere costly incubus on the great mercantile ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... intelligence, they undoubtedly subserve a noble purpose. But the quarantine laws all over the world, with some rare exceptions, being the offspring of ignorance and terror, are not only the climax of absurdity, but act as an incubus on commerce, causing ruinous delays in mercantile operations, much distress, and ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... was not yet aeons distant from this Japanese institution, the male incubus of the girl child. She did not speak, for she was thinking of what she had said in the studio—of the edginess of her temper. "Spinsters may scold, but not spiritual mothers," she thought. She might have been very happy, but for a mental anchor fast to that gloomy mood of the morning.... Hours ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... therefore, that the study of philosophy has a high cultural value: it encourages the student to reflect upon himself and his human and natural surroundings (society and nature) and to come to grips with reality; it frees him from the incubus of transmitted opinions and borrowed beliefs, and makes him earn his spiritual possessions in the sweat of his face,—mindful of Goethe's warning that "he alone deserves freedom and life who is compelled to battle for them day ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... object—where was her child? It deprived her of rest at night; she remained meditating on her fate for hours during the day; it would rush into her mind in the gayest scenes and the happiest moments; it was one incessant incubus—one continual source of misery. Of her husband she thought less; for she knew how sincerely contrite he was for the deed he had done—how bitterly he had repented it ever since, and how it would, as ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... the justice of scientific conclusions, in all that relates to the origin of things, and, among them, of species. In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of Bibliolaters? Who shall count the host of weaker ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... last year, the nation required funds to maintain its armies in the field; it had put forth its arms and grasped the money of the country, and would reduce and equalize the taxes when the war was ended. The Revenue Commission find the taxes on our manufactures and their materials an incubus upon the industry and a check to the progress of the country, and recommend their remission. And this we may reasonably expect from Congress at its present session. But, it may be urged, how are we to meet the interest on our debt and current expenses ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... leading men of the town and all Eastern North-Carolina make an effort and throw off the incubus that slavery has for a century placed over it, a bright career of prosperity would open before them. A new emigration, bringing energy and industry, would restore their worn-out lands, drain their swamps, educate their youth, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... including "pynsons," a kind of boot or shoe. He was also obliged to visit all the schools, invite the masters to be present on the day of inception, and provide them, one and all, with a suit of clothes. This was such a serious incubus that statutes were passed limiting such perquisites to kinsmen or members of the same hall; and it probably explains the custom of incepting for others—the rich acting for the poor. From every inceptor the bedels were entitled ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... Hedrick knew not whither to direct his flight: he dared not dash for the street with this imminent tattered incubus—she was almost upon him—and he frantically made for the kitchen door, only to swerve with a gasp of despair as his foot touched the step, for she was at his heels, and he was sickeningly assured she would cheerfully follow him through the house, shouting that ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... with respect to those other interests and projects, which they are really in earnest to promote, though those concerns may lie in no greater proportion than the one in question does within the scope of their individual ability. The incubus has then vanished; and they find themselves in possession of a free agency, and a degree of power, which they will not patiently hear estimated in any such contemptuous terms. What is there then that should reduce them, as individual agents, to such utter and willing insignificance ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... justifiable, to discover the reason for the failure of the theatrical season, some people have made quite a ferocious attack upon the "deadhead," who really has nothing to do with the case. He has been spoken of as an incubus. Some people regard the free entry of the caput mortuum with a hostility like that shown by our ancestors (and to some extent ourselves) to the mortmain ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... until man is developed. Well, was there ever such stuff concocted before? I almost hear the bray of that donkey, who originated in a flower. And pray, most sapient self! what is nature? It seems now, to me, a form, a mere dead incubus of matter. And could this inert tangible matter, sublimate in its hard, dead bosom, an essence so subtle, as to be freer of the bonds of time and space? At such a preposterous suggestion even a donkey might bow his ears with shame. So I will hand this "progressive ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... institution, is even harmful in many ways and terribly destructive. It promotes war. It makes the individual helpless, and crushes him with a sense of his unimportance. It abets the injustice of capitalism. It excludes citizens from any participation in foreign affairs. We must indeed not let this incubus of state overwhelm us. We must keep it in its proper place, even in performing its necessary functions, such as preserving public health. It is better to take some risk, even in such matters, than to override too much the individual's personal rights. All the functions of the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... she said. "Woman in time of peace may add a certain welcome pleasantness to life. In time of war she is nothing but a helpless incubus." ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... wave of the hand lift the cloud from her brain. 'Not on your tintype,' says I; 'I guess this is a case for the police. If I put this spell on that hell-cat it must have been by "absent treatment" during sleep, and it's me to my studio again.' ... 'No you don't,' said Henry. 'You stay till this incubus is cleared away. It ain't reasonable to suppose that an ignorant maid like this is going to charge a complete stranger with a ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the capital—the natural consequence of the largesses of corn—became at once utterly demoralized and aware of its power, and which—with its demands, sometimes stupid, sometimes knavish, and its talk of the sovereignty of the people—lay like an incubus for five hundred years upon the Roman commonwealth and only perished along with it And yet—this greatest of political transgressors was in turn the regenerator of his country. There is scarce a structural idea in Roman monarchy, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... life by a great school of rhetorical acting. The playwright who sets forth with the idea that, in writing a poetical drama, he is going to continue the great Elizabethan tradition, is starting on a wild-goose chase. The great Elizabethan tradition is an incubus to be exorcised. It was because Mr. Stephen Phillips was not Elizabethanizing, but clothing a vital and personal conception of drama in verse of very appealing lyrical quality, that some of us thought we saw in Paolo and Francesca the dawn of a new ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... forced into sight, there yet remained an abyss of evil which the English tongue refused to mention, but which weighed upon the English mind; and which, unspoken, nay (and it is the glory of the Elizabethan dramatists excepting Ford), unhinted, yet remained as an incubus in the consciousness of the playwrights and the public, was in their thoughts when they wrote and heard such savage misanthropic outbursts as those of Tourneur and of Marston. The sense of the rottenness of the country whence they were obtaining their ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee |
