"Lurid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the falcons,—projecting, not in frown, but as roof, to shade the eye from interfering skylight,—gives them their apparently threatening and ominous gaze; the iris itself often wide and pale, showing as a lurid saturnine ring under the shadow of the ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... awful. His father found him at last, in a solitary place of the neighbourhood, perched on the branch of a tree, gazing at the tempestuous face of the sky, and watching the flashes as in succession they spread their lurid gleam over it. To the reprimands of his parent, the whimpering truant pleaded in extenuation, "that the lightning was very beautiful, and that he wished to see where it was coming from!"—Such anecdotes, we have long known, are in themselves of small value: the present one ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... an evangelistic preacher who desired to impress his congregation with the unmistakable reality of hell-fire. 'You know the Black Country, my friends,' he had declaimed,' you have seen it, at night, flaring with a thousand furnaces, in the lurid incandescence of which myriads of unhappy beings, our fellow-creatures (God forbid!), snatch a precarious existence—you have seen them silhouetted against the yellow glare, running hither and thither, as it seemed from afar, in the very jaws of the awful fire. Have ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... went on. "I remember, even now, the view from the house-top that night. In a sense, it was finer than this; everything was more lurid and yet more chaotic; one simply felt that underneath all those mysterious places was some great being, toiling and struggling—Life itself, groaning through space with human cogwheels. Up here one sees too much. Oh, my dear ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Shandon had long ago made good his escape and had gone abroad; it was held by many a mild mannered man or timid old maid that he was even now the head of a lawless gang terrorising whatever near or distant city or countryside the most lurid headlines came from; not a few people shook their heads and prophesied that when the Spring thaw came the body of a reckless, blood tainted monster would be found where it had been hurled in desperation from a high cliff. The sheriff's ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... told, the Boxers surrounded us in a constant vapour of words so formidable that one might well have reason to be alarmed. P——, the Minister, was, indeed, very talkative and gesticulative; his wife was sad and sighed constantly—elle poussait des soupirs tristes—at the lurid spectacle her husband's words conjured up. According to him, anything was possible. There might be sudden massacres in Peking itself—the Chinese Government had gone mad. Rendered more and more talkative by the wine and the good fare, he became ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... slate shelf, which served to light the kitchen when we sat up late. On this we burnt chips of pine wood, selected among the most translucent, those containing the most resin. They shed over the room a lurid red light, which saved the walnut oil in ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... grown old after a long and prosperous reign. How soft the air is! How calm and fresh! This is certainly one of the most beautiful of autumn days. Below, in the valley, the river sparkles like liquid silver, and the trees which crown the hill-tops are of a lurid gold and copper color. The distant panorama of Paris is grand and charming, with all its noted edifices and the dome of the Invalides shining like gold outlined upon the horizon. As a loving and coquettish woman, who wishes to be regretted, gives at the moment of departure her most intoxicating ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... pleasure than he had in carving them, into wedged hexagons—reminiscences of the honeycomb of Venus Erycina. His ingenuity plays around the framework of all the noblest things; and yet the brightness of it has a lurid shadow. The spot of the fawn, of the bird, and the moth, may be harmless. But Daedalus reigns no less over the spot of the leopard and snake. That cruel and venomous power of his art is marked, in the legends of him, by his invention of the saw from the serpent's tooth; and his seeking refuge, under ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... Russia created a lurid antithesis to Jewish emancipation at a time when the latter was consummated not only in Western Europe, but also in the semi-civilized Balkan States.... True, the rise of Russian Judaeophobia—the Russian technical term for Jew-hatred—was paralleled by the appearance of ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... minute drew its weary length into thirty; and when Alan Porter came out again, Mortimer saw the boy sought to avoid him. Had he denied taking the money? My God! the full horror of Mortimer's hopeless position flashed upon him like the lurid light of a destroying forest fire. He could read in every line of the boy's face an accusation of himself. He had trembled when it was a question of Alan's dishonor; now that the ignominy was being thrust upon him, the bravery that he possessed in great part made him a hero. If ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... far in ether fade, Deep groves between them cast a solemn shade, Slow moves their settling mist in lurid streams, And dusky radiance streaks the solar beams. Fixt on the view the great discoverer stood, And thus addrest the messenger of good: But why these seats, that seem reserved to grace The social toils of some illustrious race, Why spread so wide and form'd so fair in vain? And why so distant ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... his hearers besought him to desist. Simon yielded at once to their entreaties, and the uplifted foot fell softly on the floor. Soft and noiseless though it was, yet they saw a lurid mist roll upward; and a form, apparently of gigantic size, was faintly visible in the dark vapour, as it swept slowly through the apartment. Even Simon and his royal pupil showed symptoms of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... assailed her. She remembered that she had never read the book, though she had heard much of it from Berrand. He was imaginative and essentially mischievous. Perhaps he had exaggerated its tendency, drawn too lurid a picture of its horrible power. Catherine turned a page or two and glanced at the clear, even writing. It ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... never again to plunge his lurid face beneath the waves of old Ocean? Had some latter-day Joshua arisen, and with stern fiat nailed him in mid-heavens, blazing forever? To me as slowly rolled the westering orb down that final slope as ever turned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... my eyes from the terrible pomp of the lurid forest, and looked fearfully down on the hoof-trampled ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ceased fighting with herself about the interest she took in conversations relating to the Prince. She could not restrain her desire to hear of him, but she explained it now by telling herself he was a rather lurid and unusual foreign character, which must naturally be an interesting study ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... you let the poor man go to his death?" cried O'Hara, proceeding to draw a lurid picture of the deadly machinations of the lawyer for the Crown, Rosenblatt and their associates against this unfortunate patriot who, for love of his country and for the honour of his name, had sought to wreak a well-merited vengeance upon ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... door, letting the drift fall in, and step abroad to face the cutting air. Already the stars have lost some of their sparkle, and a dull, leaden mist skirts the horizon. A lurid brazen light in the east proclaims the approach of day, while the western landscape is dim and spectral still, and clothed in a sombre Tartarian light, like the shadowy realms. They are Infernal sounds only that ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... reddish gold wavelets of the "branch." In the eastern sky the florid face of a hunter's moon looked down, from the level line of a leaden cloud, which striped the star emblazoned shield of night, like a bar sinister; and the white lustre of her rays was dimmed to a lurid dulness ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Portici, beyond Torre del Greco, where Vesuvius towered up aloof, an angry mount of amethystine gloom, the conflagration spread and reached Pompeii, and dwelt on Torre dell' Annunziata. Stationary, lurid, it smouldered while the day died slowly. The long, densely populated sea-line from Pozzuoli to Castellammare burned and smoked with intensest incandescence, sending a glare of fiery mist against the threatening blue behind, and fringing with pomegranate-coloured blots the water where no light now ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... But sabre hilt and rifle true, Oftimes of dark, ensanguined hue, Were ever at the side. They hailed their comrades in the fight, With blazing fires illumed the night, And waged with jest and smile, As toward the lurid torches' light Rode up their chief the while. No pert gallant or Conrad he, With gay plume waving haughtily; Nor donned he aught his troopers o'er, Save that the leathern cap he wore In front a silver crescent bore, Inscribed with "Death or Liberty." ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... a motley throng, Slow measures chanting of a dirge-like song. In one great circle dizzily they swing, A squaw and chief alternate in the ring. Coarse raven locks stream over robes of white, Their deep set orbs emit a lurid light, And as through pine trees moan the winds refrains, So swells and dies away, the ghostly ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... barometer now denoted an immense hight; and, as I looked upward and around, the concave above seemed like a mighty waste of purple air, verging to blackness. Below, it was lighter; but a long, lurid bar of cloud stretched along the west, temporarily excluding the sun. The shadows rushed afar into the void, and a solemn, Sabbath twilight reigned around. I was now startled by a fluttering in my gondola. It was my carrier-pigeon. I had forgotten him entirely. ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... said Muller in a quiet voice, but she, looking into his face, saw that it belied the voice. It was alive with evil passions that seemed to make it positively lurid, an effect that its undoubted beauty ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... head there to shut out the terror. When Tim, kicking in a door three staterooms away, saw this he made one spring back and landed his next kick on a spot that made Jeb flinch. This was followed by another, and still another, while a string of lurid oaths poured from his lips which burned like a lash of fire. Jeb sprang around, one fist drawn back to kill, his eyes glittering as points of iron; but the sergeant's eyes were as points of steel. The next ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... could see that the distant ridges were enveloped in drifts of dense, white fog. From time to time patches of the fog would glow redly and then become brilliantly incandescent and throw up sheets of lurid flame. German shells came whistling over and burst with angry, reverberating roars. Black fountains of earth and smoke spurted up from the fields and left slowly thinning clouds that hung suspended for a while and then dissolved in air. Sepia-coloured puffs appearing in the ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... for many lingering minutes; but presently the obdurate knot gave way, and, turning to gather up her shawl, there, close behind her, so close that his hot breath seemed to sear her cheek, stood her husband, clear in the moonlight, with a sneer on his face, and the lurid glow of drunkenness, that made a savage brute of a bad man, gleaming in his deep-set eyes. Hitty neither shrieked nor ran; despair nerved her,—despair turned her rigid ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... and stormy. The day had been sultry, with a lurid, metallic-looking sky, hanging like a vast galvanic plate over the face of nature. As evening drew on, everything betokened the coming tempest. Unerring indications of its approach were noted by the weatherwise at the hall. The swallow was seen to skim ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... semi-transparent edges of drapery. But the dull red lamplight lit duskily up the folds of her robe, her golden ornaments, and the black tarns, her eyes. She appeared to waver between the light of heaven and the lurid gloom of heaven's opposite. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... of course, they were joined by Mrs. Growler. They had been so seated about an hour when Kate Daly declared that the heavens were on fire. The two young women jumped up, flew to the gate, and found that the whole western horizon was lurid with a dark ...
— Harry Heathcote of Gangoil • Anthony Trollope
... must tell me," she faltered out; and her visitor thereupon proceeded to unfold his story. It threw, even to her confused perceptions, and imperfectly initiated vision, a lurid glare on the whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine. Her husband had made his money in that brilliant speculation at the cost of "getting ahead" of some one less alert to seize the chance; the victim of his ingenuity ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... the test. The greater the occasion, the better he behaved. One thing Froude did not give, and perhaps no biographer could. Carlyle was essentially a humourist. He laughed heartily at other people, and not less heartily at himself. When he was letting himself go, and indulging freely in the most lurid denunciations of all and sundry, he would give a peculiar and most significant chuckle which cannot be put into print. It was a warning not to take him literally, which has too often passed unheeded. He has been compared with Swift, but he was not really a misanthropist, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... but his face was terrible to see, especially in one so young. In every street excited men, women, and children were running to see him pass. He had suddenly become alien and far separated from them all. He perceived them as if through a lurid smoke cloud. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... a new and lurid light the office of the King of the Saturnalia, the ancient Lord of Misrule, who presided over the winter revels at Rome in the time of Horace and Tacitus. It seems to prove that his business had not always been that of a mere harlequin or merry-andrew ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... reader's mind, it is description; if to explain conditions and nothing more, it is exposition; if to prove to the reason the truth or falsity of a proposition, it is argument; while, if the writer addresses himself to the emotions and the will, no matter whether he tells anecdotes or paints lurid pictures, explains conditions or convinces of the dangers of the present course,—if he does all these to urge the reader to do something, the composition belongs to the literature of persuasion. The five forms of discourse ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... told the story of how the idea of the detective priest first dawned. On their second meeting Father O'Connor had startled, indeed almost shattered Gilbert, with certain rather lurid knowledge of human depravity which he had acquired in the course of his priestly experience. At the house to which they were going, two Cambridge undergraduates spoke disparagingly of the "cloistered" habits of the Catholic ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... death's-head hawk-moth, feeds as a rule on the foliage of the potato, and its very varied colouring, as Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, so beautifully harmonises with the brown of the earth, the yellow and green of the leaves, and the faint purplish blue of the lurid flowers, that it can only be distinguished when the eye happens accidentally to focus itself exactly upon the spot occupied by the unobtrusive caterpillar. Other larvae which frequent pine trees have their bodies covered with tufts of green hairs that serve to imitate the peculiar pine foliage. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... When one buys them away from the land of their birth he often buys dross, hence it is a real kindness to send back eatable souvenirs of one's round, much more kind than would be the tawdry jugs and plates emblazoned in lurid colours, or white wood napkin-rings and card-cases, usually gathered in ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... to find there an exhibition of the art of speaking. That is the fault partly of those reporters to whom I have paid a well-deserved tribute. But it is more especially the fault of those other 'graphic' reporters, who write their lurid impressions of the debates. These gentlemen are most wildly misleading. I don't think they mislead you intentionally. If a man criticises one kind of ill-done thing exclusively, he cannot but, in course of time, lower his standard. Seeing nothing good, he will gradually forget what goodness ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... believe that there are many instances where the total cost of house and rejuvenation is considerably below that of a new structure. Since confession stories are just as fascinating in home building as in the lurid fiction of the woodpulp magazines, we cite the experience of a family that bought a home nearly two years ago within the New York commuting zone. They were a larger family than the average and the house, of desired ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... Steyiles, Octave, Les Secretes Pensees de Rafael, Namouna, and Rolla', the last two being very eloquent at times, though immature. Rolla (1833) is one of the strongest and most depressing of his works; the sceptic regrets the faith he has lost the power to regain, and realizes in lurid flashes the desolate emptiness of his own heart. At this period the crisis of his life was reached. He accompanied George Sand to Italy, a rupture between them occurred, and De Musset returned to Paris alone ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... it, and disease," said the Virginian, striking the frying-pan on his knee, for the frogs were all gone. At those lurid words their untamed child minds took fire, and they drew round him again to hear a tale of blood. The crowd ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... contemplation lost, I stood upon a castled height, Dark-beetling o'er a lurid tarn That glassed the brow ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... inn. So far as she could glean from the reports, however, no one had seen the girl, nor was there the slightest hint offered as to her identity. The papers of the previous afternoon had published lurid accounts of the murder, with all of the known details, the name of the victim at that time still being a mystery. She remembered reading the story with no little interest. The only new feature in the case, therefore, ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... be waiting themselves for the precise information that was necessary for successful lectures. After such they would stroll out through the town into the fields, and Langton would criticise the thing in lurid but humorous language, and they would come back to the club and sit ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... and hardening of fibre, the power to do more toilsome things and sustain intenser sensations than I could endure? When I sit upon the bench, a respectable magistrate, and commit some battered reprobate for trial for this lurid offence or that, or send him or her to prison for drunkenness or such-like indecorum, the doubt drifts into my mind which of us after all is indeed getting nearest to the keen edge of life. Are I and my respectable colleagues much more than successful evasions of THAT? ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... countenance of one so still, and then as involuntarily to survey the house to which that countenance was lifted. No such observer so incurious as not to hazard conjecture what evil to that house was boded by the dark lurid eyes that watched it with so fixed a menace. Thus she remained, sometimes, indeed, moving from her post, as a sentry moves from his, slowly pacing a few steps to and fro, returning to the same place, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... who occupied the wing of the building nearest the fire. Wooden houses of many various colors were devoured in a few moments, and had already fallen in; magazines of oil, brandy, and other combustible materials, threw out flames of a lurid hue, which were communicated with the rapidity of lightning to other adjoining buildings. A shower of sparks and coals fell on the roofs of the Kremlin; and one shudders to think that one of these sparks ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... hours later," continued he, "I stood not far from the same spot, and saw that mountain angrily belching forth pitch and flames; the earth beneath my feet groaned with sullen, suppressed rage, or as if it were in pain; vast volumes of lurid smoke rolled through the sky, and streams of melted brimstone coursed down the hill-sides, burning up the pretty flowers, crushing the trees, and ruthlessly devouring the snug farms and cottages of the loving Philemons and Baucises who ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... of the doors when they are opened for an instant, with the fresh faces, that look stung by the cold, and the hurrying trot of the chilled horses. A January day was drawing to its close; the cold evening was more keen than ever in the motionless air, and a lurid sunset was rapidly dying away. There were lights burning in the windows of the house at Maryino; Prokofitch in a black frockcoat and white gloves, with a special solemnity, laid the table for seven. A week before in the small parish church ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... gazed, the sun went lurid down Into the smoke-wrapt sea, and night came on. But through the dark they watched the burning ship Still carried o'er the distant waters.... But fainter, as the stars rose high, it flared; And as, in a decaying winter fire, A charr'd log, falling, ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... remonstrances had the effect of gaining for the victim a coup de grace—which may be taken as a measure of Champlain's prestige. The atrocious savagery practised before and after death is described in full detail. Champlain concludes the lurid picture as follows: 'This is the manner in which these people behave towards those whom they capture in war, for whom it would be better to die fighting or to kill themselves on the spur of the moment, as many do rather than fall into the hands of ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... (Tussaud's). They have now put Richard in the Meccan dress he wore in the desert. They have given him a large space with sand, water, palms, and three camels, and a domed skylight, painted yellow, throws a lurid light on the scene. It is quite life-like. I gave them the real clothes and the real weapons, and dressed him myself. When it was offered to him during his life, his face beamed, and he said, 'That will bring me ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... a lurid light it was only natural that the ethical perspective should be still further distorted; that any lingering doubt of the justice of his late rebellion against the accepted order of things should be banished by the persecutions of the bullying ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... would take a walk with me the next afternoon, and he accepted to do so with a curious eagerness. We started about three o'clock. It was a stormy, chilly afternoon, with great balls of white clouds rolling rapidly in the cold blue sky, and occasional lurid gleams of sunlight, broad and yellow, which made the black ridge of the storm, gathered on the horizon, look blue-black ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... the slave of a habit which had become completely my master, and which fastened its remorseless fangs in my very vitals. Thought was a torturing thing. When I looked back, memory drew fearful pictures, the lines of lurid flame, and, whenever I dared anticipate the future, hope refused to illumine my onward path. I dwelt in one awful present; nothing to solace me—nothing to beckon me ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... pounding cataracts Of midnight streams unknown to us 'Tis builded in the leafless tracts And valleys huge of Tartarus. Lurid and lofty and vast it seems; It hath no rounded name that rings, But I have heard it called in dreams The City of ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... the soldiers of the nation in the late war. In truth, her labors commenced before any overt acts of hostility had taken place, even so long before as December, 1860. Hostility enough there undoubtedly was in feeling, but the fires of secession as yet only smouldered, not bursting into the lurid flames of war until ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... other ground of his alarm—the matter of liberty of speech. Here also he was much more reasonable and philosophic than has commonly been realised. The truth is that the lurid individualism of Carlyle has, with its violent colours, "killed" the tones of most criticism of his time; and just as we can often see a scheme of decoration better if we cover some flaming picture, so you can judge nineteenth-century England much better if you ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... a lurid light. She looked at Gualtier like a wrathful demon. The words which she spoke came hissing out, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... an object of envy to all the young peasant-girls within a circuit of ten miles, although her conduct, from a religious point of view, was supremely reprehensible. Flore, born in 1787, grew up in the midst of the saturnalias of 1793 and 1798, whose lurid gleams penetrated these country regions, then deprived of priests and faith and altars and religious ceremonies; where marriage was nothing more than legal coupling, and revolutionary maxims left a deep impression. This was markedly the case at Issoudun, a land where, as we have seen, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... extreme, the perfectly needless extreme, of political foreboding that marked the advent of Jackson furnished a background of lurid solemnity for all this light comedy. Samuel Breck records in his diary that he conversed with Daniel Webster in Philadelphia, March 24, 1827, upon the prospects of the government. "Sir," said Mr. Webster, "if General ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... lurid posters on paling and chimney-stack Were the terror of every town— Till a League was started by Mr. WILLIAM BLACK For the purpose of putting them down; And the sympathetic invited its efforts to back With an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, May 6, 1893 • Various
... The captain turned a lurid eye upon her, and then, realizing that silence was more dignified and certainly safer than speech, said nothing. He walked on with head erect and turned a deaf ear to the faint sounds which Miss Hartley was endeavouring ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... into the frozen chasms that yawned all round them. At last, however, they reached the mouth of the crater, and, crawling cautiously to the very edge, peered down into its gloomy depths. At the bottom of the abyss, which seemed to them to go down into the very heart of the earth, a lurid flame burned sullenly, sending up a sulphureous steam, which cooling as it rose, fell again in showers upon the sides of the cavity. Into this one of the brave explorers had to descend, and when they had cast lots the choice ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... America awake and made her talkative, which was unfortunate for me. She wanted to know all about the manners and customs of the British. She only knew us from the outside, so to speak. Incidentally she shed a lurid light on the habits of the American male. It seems that young men in America are expected to carry offerings of fruit and flowers and candy to young women—not when they are engaged, mark you; what is expected of them then ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... drew his attention to an uncouth club—'a wife-beater' he called it. The flippancy had jarred upon John terribly: this intrusive reminder of the customs of the slums. It grated like Billingsgate in a boudoir. Now that savage weapon recurred to him—for a lurid instant he saw Winifred's husband wielding it. Oh, abomination of his sex! And did he stand there, in his immaculate evening dress, posing as an English gentleman? Even so might some gentleman burglar bear through a ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... pluck the fatal fruit. Her large, brilliant eyes followed the sinking sun as steadily—as unblinkingly—as an eagle's; but the gleam that rayed out was baleful, presaging storms, as infallibly as that sullen, lurid light, which glares defiantly over helpless earth when to-day's sun falls into the cloudy ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... with the rainbows overhead, And the streets swollen like rivers, and the wet earth's smell, And all the ants with sudden wings filling the heart with wonder, And, afar, the tempest vanishing with a stifled thunder In a glare of lurid radiance from ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... nearly as possible on the small of his back before the breakfast table. If mental anguish can be expressed by unkempt hair and a disordered cravat, that of Mr. Moggridge was extreme; and the untasted bloater, pushed aside and half concealed by the newspaper, was full of lurid significance. ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... via Holland and coming out at Madrid). Mr. O. Howe Lurid, our special correspondent, writing from "Somewhere near Somewhere" and describing the terrific operations of which he has ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... on the wall in front of Hilma stretched upward tall and thin and began to smoke. She went over to where the lamp hung and, standing on tip-toe, lowered the wick. As she reached her hand up, Annixter noted how the sombre, lurid red of the lamp made a warm reflection on her ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... deep fireplace. She had seen a wild, wicked vision there once before. It came again, as things evil never fail to come again at our bidding. Good may delay, but evil never waits. The red fire turned itself into shapes of lurid dens and caverns, changing from horror to horror until her creative fancy formed them into the secret chamber of Beaumanoir with its one fair, solitary inmate, her rival for the hand of the Intendant,—her fortunate rival, if she might believe the letter brought to ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the column, the last stragglers fell into the file behind, the last torch disappeared into the narrow street, and the broad space that had been so full was left utterly deserted, illuminated only by a dozen dim gaslights in exchange for the lurid glow which a moment earlier had lit up every wall and house from corner stone ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... about as much shape as those in a child's Noah's ark, figures resembling Dutch dolls in rigidity, flowers daubed on with the crudest colours, and the final effort, a bird's-eye view of the village, consisting chiefly of tiled roofs and chimney-pots in lurid red ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... the buoy touched the water than it floated away, flaming in our wake; the lurid blue light casting a spectral glare on the phosphorescent foam of the broken wave crests that contrasted weirdly with the last expiring gleams of the setting sun, now nearly hidden by the pall-like black cloud, which had gradually risen along the horizon ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... air! All, all is food for dread to my despair, As thou unveil'st, begirt in lurid light, The pallid ghost that ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... prone Turk's rancorous eye Flashed the barbaric lurid trace Of hate's indomitable hell— Such hate as death alone could quell, As death ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... of a piece with his Tuscan. For example, "Peter signifies an inexpugnable rock, able to evacuate all the plots of hell's divan, and naufragate all the lurid designs of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... could have been done by any quantity of exhortation. He ventured to take a long view at sundown, and he found the experience saddening. The enormous chequered floor of the sea divided with turbulent sweep two sombre hollow hemispheres. Lurid red, livid blue, cold green shone in the sky, and were reflected in chance glints of horror from the spume of the charging seas. Cold, cold it was all round; cold where the lowering black cloud hung in the east; cold where the west glowed with dull coppery patches; cold everywhere; ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... Alexander VI., Julius II. were in many respects remarkable men, but they were scarcely affected by the convictions of the Christian faith. The terrible tragedy which was consummated on the 23rd of May 1498 before the Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence, casts a lurid light upon the irreconcilable opposition in which the wearers of the papal dignity stood to medieval piety; for Girolamo Savonarola was in every fibre a loyal son of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... he hurtled down and over, whirling drunkenly in the void, all clear perception left him. Everything became a swift blur, a rushing confusion of terrible wind, and lurid light, and the wild roar of ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... a lurid spark upon the stone pavement. Then it lengthened out until it became a yellow line, and then, without any warning or sound, a gash seemed to open and a hand appeared, a white, almost womanly hand, ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... without expressing his opinion openly: he tells the people enough to set them all thinking and guessing; but in order to hurt nobody, he wraps his witty oracular judgments in a transparent veil, or rather in a lurid thundercloud, shooting forth bright sparks of wit, that they may fall in the powder-magazine of the ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... through the days of poverty and gloom, with groans and outbursts of fury, kindling to white heat as he imaged to himself the men and events of the French Revolution, and throwing them on to paper in lurid pictures of flame. One terrible misadventure chilled his spirit in 1835, when the manuscript of the first volume was lent to J. S. Mill, and was accidentally burnt; but, after a short fit of despair, he set manfully to work to repair the loss, and the new version was finished in January, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... Starvation brings recklessness, a desperate frenzied courage that is likely to upset all of one's preconceived notions as to the behaviour of animals. It also brings, so that all men may be aware of its presence, a peculiar lurid glow to the balls of ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... to blow up. A mass of thick smoke covered her from stem to stern, and bits of plating flew heavily through the air, and there were a few lurid bursts of flame. Sergeant Walpole suddenly remembered that there ought to be survivors, only he hadn't seen anybody diving overboard to try to ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... administration. Heretofore the Federal Government had declared itself powerless to act in the case of lawlessness in an individual state; but it was now to have an opportunity to deal with violence in Washington itself. On July 19, 1919, a series of lurid and exaggerated stories in the daily papers of attempted assaults of Negroes on white women resulted in an outbreak that was intended to terrorize the popular Northwest section, in which lived a large proportion of the Negroes in the District of Columbia. For three days the violence continued ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... dark within. Something was said in a tone of command, and at the moment one of the party flung forward a bundle of lighted straw and tow, which fell at the foot of the stairs, and for a few seconds lit up the place with a red lurid gleam, showing the steep stair and the iron bars of the little ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... tree left alive, while the plains were quite bare of vegetation, except a few salsolaceous bushes. At the distance of five miles low ridges of red drift sand showed the desert character of all around; even the lower surfaces of the clouds assumed a lurid tinge from the reflection of the ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... with malevolent amusement. The chart! The hints! The will! The cunning of him! What would he tell Hughie and Hannah and Hetty? What would he tell Joan? What was there to tell save that he had put two and two together and made five, a romantic five lurid ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... wild and lurid desert, in the thunder-travelled ways, 'Neath the night that ever hurries to the dawn that still delays, There she clutches at illusions, and she seeks a phantom goal With the unattaining passion that ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... The lurid vapour did not escape the practised eye of the mate of the watch, who immediately reported the circumstance to Mr. Smith. All hands were turned up, and in a few minutes the schooner was placed in readiness to encounter ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... turned once more to the crimson light in the western sky. Some of that lurid splendor lit her dark, colorless face with a vivid glow. Lady Helena looked at her uneasily—there was a depth here she could not fathom. Was Inez "taking ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... from the bluff's top was magnificent. Virginia held Juno to the place and looked in wonder at the vast southwest on this strange September afternoon. Across a reach of level land, miles wide, a prairie fire was sweeping in the majesty of mastery. The lurid flames leaped skyward, while roll on surging roll of black smoke-waves, with folds of gray ashes smothering between, poured out along the horizon. Beyond the fire was the dark blue storm-cloud, banded across the front by the hail ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... hill to hill "leapt the live thunder." Even the distant mountains seemed to have "found a tongue." A zigzag chain of lightning flashed in the lurid sky, and after an appreciable interval another peal, louder than the first, ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of the picture is heightened through the mingling of the pale moonlight with the lurid reflection from the torches, and the coloring altogether is such that it is in ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... admiration and awe. They expected to have capered about and laughed, but they found that they had no disposition to do so. The enjoyment they felt was not of that kind which leads children to caper and laugh. They stood still, and looked silently and soberly on the flashing flames, the lurid light, the bright red reflections on the woods, the banks, and the water,—and on the volumes of glowing smoke and sparks ...
— Rollo at Play - Safe Amusements • Jacob Abbott
... under their proper pennon, and then march them slowly back to the great standard of their leader, around which the main body were again to be assembled, like the clouds which gather around the evening sun—a fanciful simile, which might yet be drawn farther, in respect of the level rays of strong lurid light which shot from those dark battalions, as the beams were flung back ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... lights obtrusive—shrinks from all that tells Unwelcome truths, and vainly seeks repose For startled Fondness, in the opiate balm, Of kind profession, tho', perchance, it flows To hush Complaint—O! in Belief's clear calm, Or 'mid the lurid clouds of Doubt, we find LOVE rise the Sun, or ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... in which trade is only one of the incidents. If the day is such as a lover of the picturesque would choose, or may rather often have without choosing, when the scene is rolled in vaporous smoke, and a lurid gloom hovers from the hidden sky, you have an effect of majesty and grandeur that no other city can offer. As the shadow momently thickens or thins in the absence or the presence of the yellowish-green light, the massive structures are shown or hid, and the meaner houses render ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells |
