"Verge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ports. But Earl Warenne, in Rochester castle, blocked the passage of the Dover road over the Medway. Accordingly Montfort marched with a large following of Londoners to Rochester, captured the town, and assaulted the castle with such energy that it was on the verge of surrendering. The news of Warenne's peril reached Henry in the midlands. In five days the royalists made their way from Nottingham to Rochester, a distance of over 160 miles. On their approach ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... dim verge of the known world there were other perils than those of the waves. The rocks and shores of those sequestered seas had, so thought the voyagers, other tenants than the seal, the walrus, and the screaming sea-fowl, the bears which stole away their fish before their eyes, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... drawing out a handkerchief, and wiping the moisture from his beard and long grey hair as he stood on the verge of the rug, with his eyes ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... wish to bring one collar into the bosom of this family. I have in this suit-case one collar. I never travel without one extra collar. It is the two-for-a-quarter kind, with a name like a sleeping car, and it has been laundered twice, which brings it to the verge of ruin. How much do I have to pay on ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... the equivalent of thirteen years. O represser of foes, this is the time to slay Duryodhana with his adherents. Else, O king, he will beforehand bring the whole earth obedient to his will. O foremost of monarchs, all this is the result of thy addiction to gambling. We are on the verge of destruction already, in consequence of thy promise of living one year undiscovered. I do not find the country where, if we live, the wicked-minded Suyodhana may not be able to trace us by his spies. And finding us out, that wretch will again deceitfully send us into such ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... to argue with unexpected if sophistic skill. Her tears were now dry, her eyes very bright beneath the darkness; she talked and talked with feverish volubility, and her voice faded into a long-drawn murmur as Will's hearing weakened on the verge of unconsciousness. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... by the announcement that "God assures me there is mercy for his soul." And it is at once pathetic and impressive to read of the consolation which this assurance gave to the chivalrous Kirkaldy on the verge of the scaffold; and the awe-inspiring spectacle presented to the believers, who after his execution saw his body slowly turn and hang against the western sun, as it poured over the Churchyard of St. Giles's, "west, about off the northward neuk of the steeple." ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... mother! ) but now, from the interior of that dark niche which has been already mentioned as forming a part of the Old Republican prison, and as fronting the lattice of the Marchesa, a figure muffled in a cloak, stepped out within reach of the light, and, pausing a moment upon the verge of the giddy descent, plunged headlong into the canal. As, in an instant afterwards, he stood with the still living and breathing child within his grasp, upon the marble flagstones by the side of the Marchesa, his cloak, heavy with the drenching water, became unfastened, and, falling in folds ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and insipid. The simple way to fatten ducks is to let them have as much, substantial food as they will eat, bruised oats and pea-meal being the standard fattening food for them. No cramming is required, as with the turkey and some other poultry: they will cram themselves to the very verge of suffocation. At the same time, plenty of exercise and clean water should ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... dancing billows dip, Far off to Ocean's misty verge, Ploughs Morning, like a full-sailed ship, The Orient's cloudy surge. With spray of scarlet fire, before The ruffled gold that round her dies, She sails above the sleeping shore, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... foreign alliance against us. So much for our domestic—now for our foreign condition and prospects. He would see Europe exhibiting serious symptoms of distrust and hostility: France, irritated and trifled with, on the verge of actual war with us: our criminally neglected differences with America, fast ripening into the fatal bloom of war: the very existence of the Canadas at stake. In India, the tenure by which we hold it in the very act of being loosened; our troops shedding their blood in vain, in the prosecution ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... miser once who was on the verge of suicide by the side of a river. A little girl came to him saying: "Please sir, my mother is sick and hungry. Please give me something so I can get her something to eat." The man said within himself: "I will do this for the child before I die." He went to a bakershop ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... succeeded in escaping accidents I cannot explain. Providence seemed to watch over both pursuers and pursued. We were always on the verge of a collision with somebody or something. Cottages, carts, pedestrians, cyclists, seemed to be flying by in a never-ending procession. ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... and all are of vital, human interest, and are extremely attractive on account of their importance in the civilization of today. Mighty, sublime, wonderful, as have been the achievements of past science, as yet we are but on the verge of the continents of discovery. Where is the wizard who can tell what lies in the womb of time? Just as our conceptions of many things have been revolutionized in the past, those which we hold to-day of the cosmic ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... rents not sufficing to defray their expenditure, they began to sell and pledge their property, and disposing of it by degrees, one item to-day and another to-morrow, they hardly perceived that they were approaching the verge of ruin, until poverty opened the eyes which wealth had fast sealed. So one day Lamberto called his brothers to him, reminded them of the position of wealth and dignity which had been theirs and their father's before ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... reason for staying and taking my degree was good. My lot will be very much harder than yours, for you will forget me in the excitement of discovery and adventure; but I—what can I do in the midst of all the old associations?" "Never mind, sweetheart," he said, kissing her hand, "I have seemed on the verge of despair all the time." Seeing that their separation must shortly begin, Ayrault tried to assume a cheerful look; but as Sylvia turned her eyes away they were suspiciously moist. Just one minute before the starting-time ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... verge of war with another race, the Jarmuthians, descended from the Lost Tribes of Israel, when Nelson is transported to Heliopolis, the Atlantean Capital, for trial. All strangers must prove their value to the State or be condemned to ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... difference, it lies not so much in the artist's work as in the greater generality of its appreciation. Humor flits easily there at the sea-level of the multitude. For the Japanese temperament is ever on the verge of a smile which breaks out with catching naivete at the first provocation. The language abounds in puns which are not suffered to lie idle, and even poetry often hinges on certain consecrated plays on words. ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... have reined up on its summit, and behold the great South Sea, stretching to far horizon's verge, to the limit of their vision. Before them all is bright and beautiful. Only some specks in the dim distance—the lone isles of the Farrallones. More northerly, and nearer, the "Seal" rocks and that called Campana—from its arcade hollowed out by the wash of ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... had been engaged from the swarms of colored persons who infest the stations and public resorts along the coast. They had given trouble ever since the hotel was opened. They complained and annoyed him first about one thing, then about another, till he was well on to the verge ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... great; it showed, too, but little inheritance from the proud beauty of de Montespan. Vastly inferior to both, and to his ambitious wife whose schemes he adopted when they succeeded and disowned when they failed, the Duke trembled now upon the verge of a mighty intrigue which perchance would make him master of an empire, perchance consign him to the Bastille or to the block. Well he knew that the abandoned Philip of Orleans, though he sometimes ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... head. Consequently he was for the moment, fleeting as everybody considered it, in request. But he did not respond readily to the social patronage of Fairbridge. He was, seemingly, quite oblivious to its importance. Karl von Rosen was bored to the verge of physical illness by Fairbridge functions. Even a church affair found him wearily to the front. Therefore his presence at the Zenith Club was unprecedented and confounding. He had often been asked to attend its special ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the Dardanelles expedition was still on the shores of Gallipoli, and the menace to Constantinople acute. It was possible that if she opposed a firm front to the Armenian massacres, the Turks, already on the verge of despair with regard to saving the capital from capture, might have made terms with the Allies. But now no such imminence of danger threatened them, and, with Germany's domination over them vastly more secure than it had been in 1915, she could afford to treat them less ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... with their perpetual mantles of snow. Nearer, on the verge of the valley, were the red peaks of the foot-hills. To the right lay the quiet waters of the lake glistening in the sunbeams. In front, a great black fissure stretched from the shores of the lake to the base of the mountains, presenting to the eye an impassable barrier. This was the famous ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... storm had vexed the soul of the silver streak, which had turned to a grey pewter streak of a peculiarly streaky nature, with white tops to the waves that slung themselves over the head of the pier. Cabin-boys and stewards were making horrible dispositions of tinware, and the head steward was on the verge of distraction, since the whole world seemed to have chosen this particular day to return to England, and the whole world, with an eye on the Channel, desired private cabins, which were numerically less than the demand. ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... Life stands on the verge of a single breath; and this world is an existence between two nonentities. Such as truck their deen, or religious practice, for worldly pelf are asses. They sold Joseph, and what got they by their bargain?—"Did I not covenant ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... said Doll, with relief, who hated definitions, and felt the conversation was on the slippery verge of becoming deep. "Do you know him? Looks as if he'd seen a ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... astonished at her modest attitude, at her little timid airs of a young girl on the verge of matrimony; he had imagined nothing like it in such a connection as this, nor I either, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... become bright like yon edging of Pines On the steep's lofty verge—how it blackened the air! But touched from behind by the sun, it now shines With threads that seem part of its own ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... for the assurance of any help I may need, for it's quite likely that I may have to call upon you. If a ring of government speculators can come out here and refuse service, or dictate to my office, then old Keith County is certainly on the verge of decadence. Now, I'll be all ready to start for the North Fork in fifteen minutes, and I'd admire to have you all ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... was anxious to keep up with us. The work that man went through, leaping on his crutch till the muscles of his chest were fit to burst, was work no sound man ever equaled; and so thinks the doctor. As it was, he was already thirty yards behind us, and on the verge of strangling, when we reached the brow ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they started again, at dawn, and the road, always the same, stretched out, uphill, to the verge of the horizon. Yards of stones came after each other; the ditches were full of water; the country showed itself in wide tracts of green, monotonous and cold; clouds scudded through the sky. From time to time there ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... death, and amid the mortal tug of combat itself, strong belief has wrought the same wonder, which we have hitherto mentioned as occurring in solitude and amid darkness; and those who were themselves on the verge of the world of spirits, or employed in dispatching others to these gloomy regions, conceived they beheld the apparitions of those beings whom their national mythology associated with such scenes. In such ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... of the group it forms with the cathedral dome and tower and the square masses of numerous out-buildings. Yet this peculiar position of the palace, though baffling to a close observer of its details, is one of singular advantage to the inhabitants. Set on the verge of Urbino's towering eminence, it fronts a wave-tossed sea of vales and mountain summits toward the rising and the setting sun. There is nothing but illimitable air between the terraces and loggias of the Duchess's apartments and the ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... Lanfear once more that she was on the verge of the knowledge so long kept from her. But she went confidently on like a sleepwalker who saves himself from dangers that would be death to him in waking. She spoke of the earthquake as if she had ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... undignified treatment of the human race that gave a kind of sting to my running, for I certainly got over the ground at twice the speed I had ever done before, or ever thought myself capable of doing. At times my limbs were on the verge of mutiny, but I forced them onward, and though my lungs seemed bursting, I never paused. At last a clearing was reached and the kulpa-tree stood fully revealed. I glanced at once at the trunk. The lowest branch of any size was some eight feet from the ground. . . . Could I reach ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... the other nineteen Canary Islands; the eye then glances over an immense expanse of waters, beyond which may be descried in the distance the dark forests of the African coast, and even the yellow stripe which marks the verge of the great Desert. With thoughts full of the enjoyments which awaited us, we approached the town. We planned parties to see the country and climb the Peak; and our scientific associates, holding themselves in readiness ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... of acquiring the loaned capital by the possessors, or their predecessors in ownership. More especially, we have, in times of "over-population," whole masses of honest men asking not alms, but only work, an opportunity to earn their bread, and yet on the verge of starvation.(473) ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... shall proue it true, That Mowbray hath receiu'd eight thousand Nobles, In name of lendings for your Highnesse Soldiers, The which he hath detain'd for lewd employments, Like a false Traitor, and iniurious Villaine. Besides I say, and will in battaile proue, Or heere, or elsewhere to the furthest Verge That euer was suruey'd by English eye, That all the Treasons for these eighteene yeeres Complotted, and contriued in this Land, Fetch'd from false Mowbray their first head and spring. Further I say, and further will ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... night when Troy was set on fire, The time when screech-owls cry and ban-dogs howl And spirits walk and ghosts break up their graves, That time best fits the work we have in hand. Madam, sit you and fear not; whom we raise, We will make fast within a hallow'd verge. ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... gleamed through the trees, and a dog barked simultaneously: they were on the verge of a clearing; and, hearing the voices outside, the owner of the house came forth to welcome the travellers, with a heartiness widely different from the commonplace ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... after its refreshment has come, it is too wet and muddy. Spacious verandahs, shaded with vines, and well-made walks, always firm and dry, bordered with shrubbery, or overhung with trees, will give us "ample scope and verge enough." ...
— Woodward's Country Homes • George E. Woodward
... said thickly. It takes time for throbbing throats to come back to their own. "It's too late to find out. If I'd gone yesterday—" She stopped hastily, on the verge of ...
— Judith Lynn - A Story of the Sea • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... furlough—the reinforcements for Forts Armstrong and Crawford were already on their way. So, altogether, I faced the task of eluding Kirby with a lighter heart, and renewed confidence. Alone, as I believed him to be, and in that new country on the very verge of civilization, he was hardly an antagonist I needed greatly to fear. Indeed, as man to man, I rather ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... he said, "and sit beside me while I reveal the straits to which you have brought me. Verily, a short time ago I had deemed it impossible for any one to thrust me so near to the verge of falsehood as ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... everything according to his wish, the emperor, rising higher in spirit as his difficulties increased, and building such hopes on Fortune, which had not yet proved unfavourable to him, that he often pushed his boldness to the verge of temerity, unloaded some of the strongest of the vessels which were carrying provisions and warlike engines, and put on board of them eight hundred armed men; and keeping the main part of the fleet with him, which he divided into ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... smile of morn. The magic car moved on. From the swift sweep of wings The atmosphere in flaming sparkles flew; 125 And where the burning wheels Eddied above the mountain's loftiest peak Was traced a line of lightning. Now far above a rock the utmost verge Of the wide earth it flew, 130 The rival of the Andes, whose dark brow Frowned o'er the silver sea. Far, far below the chariot's stormy path, Calm as a slumbering babe, Tremendous ocean lay. 135 Its broad and silent mirror gave to view The pale and waning stars, The chariot's fiery track, ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... seasons ago I feared the tribe of bluebirds were on the verge of extinction from the enormous number of them that perished from cold and hunger in the South in the winter of '94. For two summers not a blue wing, not a blue warble. I seemed to miss something kindred and precious from my environment — the visible embodiment of the tender sky and the wistful ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... Grant fought hard for delay, using every effort to encourage his men to stand fast and present the boldest possible front to the foe. Meanwhile, however, Sherman was wounded, and when darkness put an end to the furious combat the shattered Union army was on the verge of collapse. So perilous, indeed, was the situation that when Buell arrived on the field his first inquiry was as to what preparations Grant had made to effect a retreat. But the silent commander instantly shook his head and announced, to the intense astonishment ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... Joey's barking speedily rose to a shrill and breathless hysteria. Some savage, more skilled than his fellows, reproduced this falsetto with marvelous exactness. There never was a death struggle heralded by such grotesque humor; it might have been a tragedy of marionettes, a Dutch concert on the verge of the pit. ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... behind the mountains of the West, he shone upon man also. Six Indians, the first men that were ever on earth, and the ancestors of the tribe of Nanticokes, all at once, they knew not how, nor by what means, found themselves sitting upon the same shore, upon the verge of the ocean. Whether they were created on the spot, or came from some other place beyond the seas; whether they had swum up from the waters, or crawled out of the mud, or bounded from the depths ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... said just now, these phenomena formerly had the power of terrifying ignorant mortals, either when the orb of light and life seemed on the verge of extinction, or when the beautiful Phoebus was covered with a veil of crape and woe, or took on a deep ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... and weave the woof, The winding-sheet of Edward's race. Give ample room, and verge enough The characters of hell to trace. Mark the year, and mark the night, When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death, thro' Berkley's roofs that ring, Shrieks of an agonizing King! She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... She had seen the matter the night before just as it was. For just at that hour young Dave, sobered, but still on the verge of tears from anger and humiliation, was telling the story of the day in her father's cabin. The old man's brows drew together and his eyes grew fierce and sullen, both at the insult to a Tolliver and at the thought of a certain moonshine still up a ravine not far away and the ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... nought can tempt the timid things That steep and rugged path to try, Though sweet the shepherd calls and sings, And seared below the pastures lie; Till in his arms their lambs he takes Along the dizzy verge to go,— Then, heedless of the rifts and breaks, They follow on o'er ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... Gordian knot is cut and a way is quickly found out of the present impasse, the most serious results are to be apprehended, as numbers of prisoners here—and the case can be no better in other countries—are on the verge of insanity....[28] ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... are now on the verge of one of the most important presidential campaigns. The party in power holds its reins by a very uncertain tenure. If the decision shall favor the one which has been on the anxious bench for lo! these twenty ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... proportioned to their strength. These occupations are not conducive to the morality of either sex. If the well be far from the village, the girls usually form parties to go thither, and amuse themselves on the road by singing sentimental or love songs, which not unfrequently verge upon the obscene, and indulge in conversation of a similar description; while, during their halt at the well for an hour or so, they engage in romps of all kinds, in which parties of the other sex frequently join. This early license lays the foundation ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... thirst-tormented people who sat or wandered about in the coolness of the night, they passed through the gates of the kraal unheeded, and walking quickly across the wide stretch of tableland reached the eastern edge of the cliff. Now upon the very verge of this cliff rose a sharp pinnacle of rock fifty feet or more into the air, and upon the top of this pinnacle was that stone shaped like a great chair, in which Suzanne sat day by day, poised like an eagle over the dizzy gulf of space, ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... moved with a faint sighing rustle, and he knew he must be nearing the edge of the thicket. The spell of silence thus broken was followed by a fainter, more musical interruption—the glassy tinkle of water! A step further his foot trembled on the verge of a slight ravine, still closely canopied by the interlacing boughs overhead. A tiny stream that he could have dammed with his hand yet lingered in this parched red gash in the hillside and trickled into a deep, irregular, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... McNeill, was one of extreme suffering. Midwinter found tens of thousands of people on the verge of starvation, suffering for food, for the need of proper clothing, and for medical attendance. Meetings of the unemployed were held in many places, and public attention called to the needs of the poor. The men asked for work and found it not, and children ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... by the vexations and failures attending his philanthropic endeavours, at length obsessed Tolstoy to the verge of suicide. ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... nation of vast extent of territory, situated far from us to the east, near the reflux of the ocean and the rising of the sun, under the first beams of the stars, and at the extreme verge of the earth, beyond the learned Egyptians and the superstitious Jews and the mercantile Nabathaeans; and the flowing robed Aracidae, and the Ityraeans, poor in crops, and the Arabians, ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... it isn't," said Mrs. Ellison; and Kitty, who had been blushing to the verge of tears, laughed instead, and then was consumed with vexation when Mr. Arbuton came up, feeling that he must suspect himself the motive of her ill-timed mirth. "The champagne ought to be cooled, I suppose," observed Mrs. ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... flower. He could not echo with his heart the fiendish sentence of eternal fire. In spite of book and creed, he read "between the lines" the words of tenderness and love, with promises for all the world. Above, beyond the dogmas of his church—humane even to the verge of heresy—causing some to doubt his love of God because he failed to hate his unbelieving fellow-men, he labored for the welfare of mankind, and to his work gave up his life ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... imagination go a little. It was a pampered imagination, that led him occasionally into indiscretions which he afterwards regretted—not too deeply, however, for after all, one owes something to one's art. "Psychological experiments," he named these indiscretions. He suspected that he was on the verge of one now, and tasted in advance some of the thrills of ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... not here omit a practice that is in use among the vainer part of our own sex, who will often ask a friend's advice, in relation to a fortune whom they are never likely to come at. Will Honeycomb, who is now on the verge of threescore, took me aside not long since, and ask me in his most serious look, whether I would advise him to marry my Lady Betty Single, who, by the way, is one of the greatest fortunes about town. I stared him full in ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... myself on being on the verge of success, for after the explanation I had had with the aunt, and having, as I thought, a friend in her, I did not doubt that I ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the back of the capitol to treat yourself to a view, and it is a very noble one. You understand, the capitol stands upon the verge of a high piece of table land, a fine commanding position, and its front looks out over this noble situation for a city—but it don't see it, for the reason that when the capitol extension was decided upon, the property owners at once advanced their prices ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... brimstone match. It gives me an almost proud satisfaction to tell how we used, when those implements were not at hand or not employed, to light our whale-oil lamp by blowing a live coal held against the wick, often swelling our cheeks and reddening our faces until we were on the verge of apoplexy. I love to tell of our stage-coach experiences, of our sailing-packet voyages, of the semi-barbarous destitution of all modern comforts and conveniences through which we bravely lived and came out the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... introduction of anaesthetics or antiseptics, the discovery of the knee-jerk, bacteriology, or even of such a doctrine as the circulation of the blood. We are at this very time, if I mistake not, on the verge of new insights which will enable man to laugh at disease—laugh at it in the sense of over-ruling its natural tendency to produce death, not by any means in the sense of destroying its ever-expanding existence. Do you know that at this moment your hospitals ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... day was much as other days. Turner ate no dinner that night. He was pale, and twitching; even with my small experience, I knew he was on the verge of delirium tremens. He did not play cards, and spent much of the evening wandering restlessly about on deck. Mrs. Turner retired early. Mrs. Johns played accompaniments for Vail to sing to, in the chart-room, until something after eleven, when they, too, ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the sole purpose of stimulating those who may have been for years "pulling hard against the stream," unable, perhaps, to ascertain where they properly belong, and possibly on the verge of giving up all hope, because of failure, after making repeated ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... sprang. And down the road We henchmen followed, hard beside the rein, Each hand, to speed him, toward the Argive plain And Epidaurus. So we made our way Up toward the desert region, where the bay Curls to a promontory near the verge Of our Trozen, facing the southward surge Of Saron's gulf. Just there an angry sound, Slow-swelling, like God's thunder underground Broke on us, and we trembled. And the steeds Pricked their ears skyward, and threw back their ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... that after less than a year of married life you stood on the verge of an abyss? That you forsook your house and home? That you fled from your husband? Yes, Mrs. Alving—fled, fled, and refused to return to him, however much he ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... life hovers, like a star' Twixt night and morn upon the horizon's verge. How little do we know that which we are! How less what we may be! The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar Our bubbles: as the old burst, new emerge, Lash'd from the foam of ages: while the graves Of empires heave but ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... blamed Corneille's theatrical ferocity in terms so severe that Voltaire called the passage "a detestable piece of criticism" and ran his blue pencil through it. No doubt the fact is that Vauvenargues saw in the rhetoric of Corneille a parody of his own sentiments, carried to the verge of rodomontade. ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... leaves of books and magazines with their fingers—a barbarism which renders him who would be guilty of it worthy of banishment from the resorts of civilization. In cutting books, the leaves should always be held firmly down—and the knife pressed evenly through the uncut leaves to the farthest verge of the back. Books which are cut in the loose fashion which many use are left with rough or ragged edges always, and often a slice is gouged out of the margin by the mis-directed knife. Never trust a book to a novice to be cut, without ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... last. She felt that it was going, going. She prayed that the minister might be quick, while yet she retained a little self-command, and give her an opportunity to utter some binding vow which should make good her solemn engagement, and avert the scandal of the outbreak on the verge of which she was trembling. "Do you," said the minister to Mr. Whitcomb, "take this woman whom you hold by the hand to be your wife, to honor, protect, and love while you live?" "I do," replied the bridegroom ...
— At Pinney's Ranch - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... entered the mouth of the pass, which was girt on either side by magnificent precipices; the road was narrow and slippery—of course without even an apology for a parapet—running along a natural ledge on the verge of a perpendicular cliff, and so sheer was the side, that from a horse's back you might sometimes have dropped a stone into the apparently bottomless ravine—bottomless, for the rays of a noon-day sun have never broken the eternal darkness of the awful chasm ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... that he ought to have been on the verge of exhaustion from lack of food and from fatigue, and he vaguely wondered why he was not. The truth was that the excitement of the attack, coupled with the chill of the night, had restored him in mind and body, although he had ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... work there was none so bitter as the citizen whose children Franz had been teaching. For this man considered himself to be a genius, and was inordinately vain, and his ignorance was equal to his conceit. He dismissed Franz from his service. All doors were now closed to him, and being on the verge of starvation he was reduced to earning his bread in the streets by playing his pipe. This also proved unsuccessful, and it was with difficulty that he earned a few ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... inquired, and when no one answered he grunted and tied up the hole. There was a silence, and the crowd began to filter away—all but Lynch, who stood staring like an Indian. Then he too turned away, his haggard eyes blinking fast, like a woman on the verge of bitter tears. ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... field; our rangers and some few other light troops under the command of Col. Knowlton, of Connecticut and Major Leitch of (I, believe) Virginia, were in waiting for them. Seeing them advancing, the rangers, &c, concealed themselves in a deep gully overgrown with bushes; upon the western verge of this defile was a post and rail fence, and over that the forementioned field. Our people let the enemy advance until they arrived at the fence when they arose and poured in a volley upon them. How many ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... intent of his covenant, was theirs, to give a license to take such property,—and that one mode of obtaining a revenue was by the breach of the very covenants which were meant to prevent extortion, peculation, and corruption? What sort of body is the India Company, which, coming to the verge of bankruptcy by the robbery of half the world, is afterwards to subsist upon the alms of peculation and bribery, to have its strength recruited by the violation of the covenants imposed upon its own servants? ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... party went into camp near a shabby village which was caving, house by house, into the hungry Mississippi. The river astonished the children beyond measure. Its mile-breadth of water seemed an ocean to them, in the shadowy twilight, and the vague riband of trees on the further shore, the verge of a continent which surely none but they had ever ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... ferocious dragoons, sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. They were all alike, they took everything they could carry; they burned, harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until everything English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such, however, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent and dignified men now existing boast their descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction of their own merits by assuming for ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... I had lain a weeping child under the shadow of the oaks, smarting from the lash of derision, burning with shame, shrinking with humiliation. I was now fifteen years old,—at that age when youth turns trembling from the dizzy verge of childhood to a mother's guardian arms, a mother's sheltering heart. How weak, how puerile now seemed the emotions, which three years ago had worn ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... armed with swords and arquebuses, and wore steel caps and coats of buff. Their sleeves were embroidered with the five wounds of Christ, encircling the name of Jesus—the badge of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Between them, on the verge of the mountain, was planted a great banner, displaying a silver cross, the chalice, and the Host, together with an ecclesiastical figure, but wearing a helmet instead of a mitre, and holding a sword in place of a crosier, with ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... beautiful as Love Can make thee, and the ministering hands Of milliners, incapable of more, Be lifted at thy shapeliness and air, And still 'twixt me and thee, invisibly, May rise a wall of adamant. My breath Upon my pale lip freezes as I name Manhattan's orient verge, and eke the west In its far down extremity. Thy sire May be the signer of a temperance pledge, And clad all decently may walk the earth— Nay—may be number'd with that blessed few Who never ask for discount—yet, alas! If, homeward wending from his daily cares, He go by Murphy's Line, thence ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... human. She has then a wild, unhuman, unmoral, unspiritual interest in us, like a being who has an elemental life, but no soul. But sometimes she is made to go farther, and has the same kind of interest in us which Oberon has in the loves of Helena and Hermia. When we are loving, and on the verge of such untroubled joy as Nature has always in her being, then she seems able, in Browning's poetry, actually to work for us, and help us into the fulness of our joy. In his poem, By the Fireside, he tells how he and the woman he loved were brought to know their love. It ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... a grandmother!" roared the King, upon the verge of madness, as the Crown Prince, at the head of six Army Corps surrounded the building and captured ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... truths, which would enable man to rise above the abject state into which he has fallen, and to return to his original perfection." To the evil offices of these demons, he attributed his late disaster. He had been on the very verge of the glorious discovery; never were the indications more completely auspicious; all was going on prosperously, when, at the critical moment which should have crowned his labours with success, and have placed him at the very summit of human power and felicity, the bursting of a retort had reduced ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... move down the Mississippi by the middle of November. Unfortunately for Burr, however, Wilkinson was far too expert in the usages of iniquity to be taken in by such audacious lying as this. He guessed that the enterprise was on the verge of collapse and forthwith made up his ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... very agile; and, secluding itself among the most inaccessible mountain-crags, delights in capering upon the very verge of the most frightful precipices, and skipping from rock to rock across yawning chasms hundreds of ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... verge of setting out he hesitated. There was more than one reason why he should do so. In the first place, it was exceedingly dangerous to attempt to make his way up the canyon even by daylight, and the sun had already disappeared. He was totally unfamiliar with ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... I had got to about the lowest verge, vague rumors of an English visitor reached me. I thought of myself as the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho; but neither priest, Levite, nor Samaritan could possibly pass my way. Yet the good Samaritan was close at hand, and one of my people rushed up at the top of his speed, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... do lots o' good here," declared Racey, who felt sure that he was on the verge of a discovery. "Somebody is a-trying to jump yore ranch, and if you'll lemme talk to him I can find out ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... from weariness and lonely to the verge of exhaustion, she thought of Kenmore—not Travers—with positive yearning. The woman of her, madly defending, or about to defend, woman, excluded even her own love and her own man. It was sex against sex; ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... banish'd? Know, the cause Comes not within the verge of vulgar laws. Against all rules of fashionable life, The rogue had dared to sleep ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... sitting in our little room upon the verge of despair, all at once my wife raised her head, and with a smile upon her face, which was a moment before bathed in tears, said, "I think I have it!" I asked what it was. She said, "I think I can make a poultice and bind up my ...
— Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom • William and Ellen Craft
... days it provoked wild excitement, which forced him to take special measures; and what would now happen, as it wended its way through this dense multitude of thirty thousand persons, consumed by such a fever of faith, already on the verge of divine frenzy? Accordingly, in a sensible way, he took advantage of this opportunity to give ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... as he could assume, considering that he had one armful of shabby parcels and the other hand holding at arm's length a disgraceful looking mongrel, went out, almost on the verge of tears. ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... asked quietly, watching the tears well up in her eyes. She hadn't lost her composure yet, but she felt so strongly about him she was on the verge of breaking down. ...
— Stopover • William Gerken
... the promise of his youth had begun to blossom, he sent him to Paris, although the expenditure just at that time demanded a sacrifice which might have been the ruin of Maurice's own career. Francis's promise had never come to entire fulfilment. He was always trembling on the verge of a great success without quite plunging into it. Despite the joy which his presence gave his brother and sister-in-law, most of his time was spent abroad, where he could find just the atmosphere that suited his delicate, artistic ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Beatrice, softly. "Give me one moment yet." She passed slowly and falteringly towards Leonard, placed her hand, that trembled, on his arm, and led him aside to the verge of the vessel. Frank, startled by her movement, made a step as if to follow, and then stopped short and looked on, but with a clouded and doubtful countenance. Harley's smile had gone, and ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... prettiest girl I ever saw in my life," he admitted. "I wanted to speak to you. Two or three times I was on the verge of it but I never could quite get up the courage. I'm not much good at starting conversations with girls. My kid brother, Ted, has the monopoly of that sort of thing ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... I felt an extraordinary persuasion that I was being played with, that presently, when I was upon the very verge of safety, this mysterious death—as swift as the passage of light—would leap after me from the pit about the cylinder and strike ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... just as our impatience had reached the verge of indignation, a little figure emerged from the shadow of the farm-house, and sauntered towards us. She was a pretty child, a true daughter of the Saxon race, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and sunny-complexioned. She was the pink of neatness, too, and it was evident that the time we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... named. Germany and France were unfriendly and Aguinaldo treacherous, though Great Britain and Japan were ardent in their sympathy for the United States. Germany especially was a constant cause of irritation to Admiral Dewey, whose patience was often tried to the utmost verge. To his tact, prudence, self-control, firmness, diplomacy and masterful wisdom were due the fact that no complication with foreign powers occurred and that the United States escaped a tremendous war, whose consequences no one ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... verge of the mighty forest called the Andredsweald, or Anderida Sylva, Gilbert d'Aquila, last of that name, founded the Priory of Michelham for ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... class. There are rumours of tremendously wild financial measures, only I believe in no rumours just now, and apparently the Bourse is as incredulous on this particular point. If I thought (as people say) that we are on the verge of a 'law' declaring the Roman Catholic religion the State religion, I should give him up at once; but this would be contrary to the traditions of the Empire, and I can't suppose it to be probable on ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... had died some years before, made the move which finally brought his mounting prospects to the verge of ruin. Just when he was on the point of being recognized as a contractor of consequence, and owned a big, fine outfit of stock and tents and implements, he decided to change his activities to those of ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... hope the springs of her life. It may surprise even those who knew her well to learn that her physical timidity was great, and at times painful. But her moral and intellectual courage impelled her at times almost to the verge of audacity, and was held under restraint only by conscience and good sense. Humor and wit can hardly be said to have been marked traits in her mentality. There was something delphic and oracular often in her familiar ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... second to none. And this was not by any means surprising, for he had been born (and for its saintly patron had been christened) close by the small old town of Andreasberg: which stands barely within the verge of the Black Forest, on the southern declivity of the Harz—and which, while famous for its mines, is renowned above all other cities for the excellence of the bird songsters which there and ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... clere-story windows shines, And the wind washes through the mountain-pines. Then, gazing up 'mid the dim pillars high, The foliaged marble forest deg. where ye lie, deg.39 Hush, ye will say, it is eternity! 40 This is the glimmering verge of Heaven, and these The columns of the heavenly palaces! And, in the sweeping of the wind, your ear The passage of the Angels' wings will hear, And on the lichen-crusted leads deg. above deg.45 The rustle of the eternal rain ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... lying on the very verge of one of the openings made by the missing planks, was the packet, which Jack was sure contained jewelry, ...
— Jack of the Pony Express • Frank V. Webster
... notice one or two facts connected with glass, which show that the ancients were on the verge of making one or two very important discoveries in physical science. They were acquainted with the power of transparent spherical bodies to produce heat by the transmission of light, though not with the manner in which that heat was ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... committee, which gave a vote to every male citizen twenty-one years old, who had resided six months in the State and who had within one year paid taxes or a road assessment, or had been enrolled and served in the militia. Although, said Van Buren, this report is on the verge of universal suffrage, it did not cheapen the invaluable right, by conferring it indiscriminately upon every one, black or white, who would condescend to accept it. He was opposed, he said, to a precipitate ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... too bad," said Dick, on the way. "Mrs. Stanhope is on the verge of a nervous collapse, and I believe it is all on ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield
... Miss GLADYS COOPER, over her petit dejeuner, preserves a natural demeanour, even to the point of talking with her mouth full; the light humour of the First Act declines to the verge of buffoonery. The devastating confusions which ensue in the matter of identity and relationship (in our author's Ostend you assume, till corrected, that all couples are married); the intervention of the local gendarmerie, headed by a British detective; the arrest of half ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... perfect beauty, in whatever form it may come, that the deep craving it arouses is meant to receive a satisfaction more deep and real than the act of mere contemplation can give. I have felt in such moments as if I were on the verge of grasping some momentous secret, as if only the thinnest of veils hung between me and some knowledge that would set my whole life and being on a different plane. But the moment passes, and the secret delays. Yet we are right to regard such emotions ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... large red disk of the descending orb was seen between the sea and the edge of the clouds that hung upon the verge of the sky, pouring forth from the horizon to the very shore a long line of blood-red light, which, resting upon the boiling waters of the ocean, seemed as if the setting star could indeed "the multitudinous sea incarnadine, making the ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Iceland in 1477, his opinion that the same shore might be reached by crossing the Atlantic, where it had never been traversed before, was based upon mere surmise. No wonder that his crew were disheartened and on the verge of open mutiny when, under such circumstances, after about sixty-nine days had elapsed since they had sailed from Palos on August 3, 1492, they had still not reached the longed-for land. What faith, almost ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... smiters, desirous of giving away the whole of his wealth, 'O thou of multifarious vows, I am a candidate for thy eternal wealth,' 'O thou of ascetic wealth, returned Rama, 'My gold and whatever other wealth I had, have all been given away unto Brahmanas! This earth also, to the verge of the sea, decked with towns and cities, as with a garland of flowers, I have given unto Kasyapa. I have now my body only and my various valuable weapons left. I am prepared to give either my body or my weapons. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... were going on, Disco observed that hyenas were occasionally to be seen prowling near the verge of the bushes around them, as if anxious to join in the feast, which no ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... not answer. He could see that she was trembling violently and on the verge of an hysterical crisis. He rather hoped she would break down. It would seem more natural. Women were privileged to cry and scream, not that it was possible to imagine her screaming. He dragged forward a chair from the ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... and then came a messenger. It was Shepard who had reported to headquarters and who afterwards came over to the shade of a tree where Colonel Winchester and his little staff were gathered. He was on the verge of exhaustion. He was black under the eyes and the veins of his neck were distended. Dust covered him from head to foot. He threw himself on the ground and drank deeply from a canteen of cool water that Dick handed to him. All saw that Shepard, ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... with disfavor by the inhabitants of the district as too respectful, too humble, too prompt in removing his cap to every one, and trembling and smiling in the presence of the gendarmes,—probably affiliated to robber bands, they said; suspected of lying in ambush at verge of copses at nightfall. The only thing in his favor was ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... previous intention of crossing the stream, there seemed nothing better for him to do than to follow the truant's advice and take the road back to Green Springs. Yet he was loath to leave the wood, halting on its verge, and turning to look back into its charmed recesses. Once or twice—perhaps because he recalled the words of the poem—that yellowish sea of ferns had seemed instinct with hidden life, and he had even fancied, here and ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... discovered my driver behind Amy's back and was preparing to get away, but these views of Amy's mother were so complete an innovation that I paused. On the verge of a first drive I had never in my life stopped to consider the ethics of golf-club cleaning. Why had not Amy a pocket and a rag of sand-paper like resourceful Jimmy Baines? I don't remember to have ever read anything on the niceties ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... incognita to railways. It is on the extremest verge of Europe towards the Atlantic; and European civilisation finds entrance there with remarkable slowness. In 1845, the government tried to invite offers from capitalists to construct railways; in 1849, the invitations were renewed; but the moneyed men were coy, and would not ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... one thing, however, which, if it did not throw the laird into a passion—nothing, as I have said, did that—brought him nearer to the outer verge of displeasure than any other, and that was, anything whatever to which he could affix the name of superstition. The indignation of better men than the laird with even a confessedly harmless superstition, is sometimes very amusing; and it was a point of Mr. Galbraith's ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... here in Englande. The table wherupon thei eate, is for the mooste parte of a Bullockes hide, or a Hartes skinne. Not dressed, but in the heare, facioned rounde, beyng a fowre or fiue spanne ouer, and so set rounde about on the bordre, or verge, with ringlettes of iron: that putting a couple of stringes throughe the ringes, it maye be drawen together, and shutte and opened like a purse. House, or Churche, or any other place wher they entende to ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... own descendant, Lord Derwentwater is believed to have hesitated upon the verge of his fate, but to have been urged into it by his brother Charles. Young and ardent, courageous even to rashness, the first to offer himself where an enterprise was the most hazardous, seeming to set no value upon his ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... no other advice in the large businesse of his revennue, nor was any man so much his superiour, as to be able to lessen him in the Kings affection, by his power; so that he was in a post in which he might have founde much ease and delight, if he could have contayned himselfe within the verge of his owne Provence, which was large enough, and of such an extente, that he might at the same tyme have drawne a greate dependance upon him of very considerable men, and appeared a very usefull and profitable Minister to the Kinge, whose revennue had bene very loosely managed ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... knocks Goldsmith down. This insult, received before his friends, was too much for the unlucky sizar, who, the very next day, sold his books, ran away from college, and ultimately, after having been on the verge of starvation once or twice, made his way to Lissoy. Here his brother got hold of him; persuaded him to go back; and the escapade was condoned somehow. Goldsmith remained at Trinity College until he took his degree (1749.) He was again lowest in the list; but still he had passed; and ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... make the scar burn and throb after long years? Or was it regret at the besmirching of a picture which till now had shone so purely and been so sweetly framed in his memory? He did not know, but for days it depressed him to the verge of melancholy. ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... with gas, or rather it was so illuminated a few weeks since; but it was quietly whispered about that the corporation had failed to pay for this service last year, and that the monopoly itself was on the verge of bankruptcy, like nearly everything else of a business character in Cuba. The gaslights certainly appeared pale and sickly enough, as though only half confirmed in the purpose of giving any light at all, and were prematurely extinguished in many ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... supplies for the journey. This was readily agreed to, and, accordingly, next day about noon, they came in sight of Rocky Mountain Fort—so-called because of its being situated in a somewhat wild glen, near the verge of one of the eastern spurs ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... was moved by certain advisers to institute a persecution against us. And there was great talk about it everywhere. But as he was about to do it, and was, so to speak, in the very act of signing the decrees against us, the divine judgment came upon him and restrained him at the very verge ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... led Shakespeare from shame to shame, to the verge of madness. The sonnets give us the story, the whole terrible, sinful, ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris |
