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More "Abject" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... longer serve it,—when he could no longer defend innocence against oppression? Wherefore should I continue in an order of things, where intrigue eternally triumphs over truth; where justice is mocked; where passions the most abject, or fears the most absurd, over-ride the sacred interests of humanity? In witnessing the multitude of vices which the torrent of the Revolution has rolled in turbid communion with its civic virtues, I confess that I have sometimes feared that I should be sullied, in ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... than the two hundred yards that they have heard about they can drive at the first attempt or two. Then comes the inevitable disappointment, the despair, the inclination to give it up, and finally the utter abject despondency which represents the most miserable state on earth of the golfer, in which he must be closely watched lest he should commit murder upon the beautiful set of clubs of which at the beginning he was so proud, and which he spent his evenings in brightening to the degree that they resembled ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... we walked alone under the moonlight the Englishman opened his heart to me and said, "You are going to visit the Head-Hunting Dyaks to-morrow. You will see their abject squalor and filth. You will be surprised when I tell you that my wife was a Dyak girl and that I took her out of a Kampong fifteen years ago and ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... of view from which he will look at her poutings and tossings and mysterious inability to be pleased will be seriously altered. And if slavery to a pretty woman, which seems among the least conditional forms of abject service, will not bear too great a strain from her bad temper even though her beauty remain the same, it is clear that a man whose claims lie in his high character or high performances had need impress us very constantly with his peculiar value and indispensableness, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... covers His race for me. These were reported to have enjoyed in earlier times a period of much prosperity, which had been destroyed in one of the dramatic political reverses frequent in Eastern annals. Since then they had remained a degraded and abject class. Certainly, they were externally a very peculiar and unprepossessing people. The physiognomy commonly associated with the name Jew was very evident, though the cast of feature had been brutalized by ages of oppression and servility. A singular ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... gospel stories which have not one word of truth in them. In fact, the term "English tourist" has come to mean the same as gobemouche in France; and clever Pat knows well enough that there is not a fly in the whole region of fable which is too large for the brutal Saxon to swallow. Abject poverty without shoes to its feet, with only a few rags to cover its unwashed nakedness, and an unfurnished mud cabin shared with the pigs and poultry for its sole dwelling-place—abject poverty begs a copper from "his honour" for the love of God and the glory of ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... I am abject. What can I say to you, who have just come through such an experience on my account? How can I apologize or explain? Especially as I am confused myself as to what really happened. Did Muldoon actually attack the cave? Were you in it when he arrived? Or is it possible ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... within the same," said he, "Madam. And, albeit I neither be earl, lord, nor baron within it, yet has God made me—how abject that ever I be in your eyes—a profitable member within the same. Yea, Madam, to me it appertains no less to forewarn of such things as may hurt it, if I foresee them, than it does to any of the nobility; for ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... most distinguished woman in the history of Versailles. As a girl, in abject poverty, she married in 1652 the good old poet Scarron. There was no love lost there. She merely took the gentle-hearted man because he offered either to pay for her entrance into a convent or to make ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... the more showy, though by no means less ill-famed Suburra. Into this they struck instantly, walking in single file, and keeping as nearly as possible in the middle of the causeway. The lane, which was composed of dwellings of the lowest order, tenanted by the most abject profligates, was dark as midnight; for the tall dingy buildings absolutely intercepted every ray of light that proceeded from the murky sky, and there was not a spark in any of the sordid casements, nor any votive lamp in that foul alley. The ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... to our superiors two extremes are to be avoided; namely, an abject and base servility, and an impudent and encroaching freedom. When the well-bred Hyperdulus approaches a nobleman in any public place, you would be persuaded he was one of the meanest of his domestics; his cringes fall little short of prostration; ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... disagreeable this might be to himself, that he could give a thorough explanation and could test the effectiveness of kinship. No sooner had Lydgate begun to represent this step to himself as the easiest than there was a reaction of anger that he—he who had long ago determined to live aloof from such abject calculations, such self-interested anxiety about the inclinations and the pockets of men with whom he had been proud to have no aims in common—should have fallen not simply to their level, but to the level of ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... owned, and for the most part controlled, a violent temper; it broke bounds sometimes, to our great amusement as we read to-day, to the occasional discomfiture of attaches or of dependents, {19} to the abject terror of Turkish Sublimities who had outworn his patience. But he knew when to be angry; he could pulverize by fiery outbreaks the Reis Effendi and his master, Abdu-l-Mejid; but as Plenipotentiary to the United States he could "quench the terror ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... railing and looked down, his face yellow, his eyes staring, evidently in abject fear ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... that I should stand Quiet, and bend to him. Ah me! how full Of noble anger seem'd he! To the gate He came, and with his wand touch'd it, whereat Open without impediment it flew. "Outcasts of heav'n! O abject race and scorn'd!" Began he on the horrid grunsel standing, "Whence doth this wild excess of insolence Lodge in you? wherefore kick you 'gainst that will Ne'er frustrate of its end, and which so oft Hath laid on you enforcement of your pangs? What profits at the fays ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... out there watching the soldiers, and Frau Berg and her boarders are the public, and so are the soldiers themselves. The public here are all the people who obey, and pay, and don't know; an immense multitude of slaves,—abject, greedy, pitiful. I don't think I ever could have imagined a thing so pitiful to see as these respectable middle-aged Berlin citizens, fathers of families, careful livers on small incomes, clerks, pastors, teachers, professors, drunk and mad out there publicly on ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... on theirs. We, born servitors and underlings, it was thought, had forgotten our proper places,—nay, had presumed to strike back, when our masters chastised us. Of course, we should soon be whipped to our knees again. And when we were again submissive and abject, Europe must so have demeaned itself as still to be on good terms with the conquerors. As for us, our final opinion of their demeanor, so they deemed, mattered very little. The ill opinion of the servants can be borne; but one must needs be on friendly terms with the master ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... experience, made hardy and strong by exposure and suffering. Yet what nation, in the world's history, ever improved so much in forty years? What ruler ever did so much for a people in a single reign? This abject race of slaves in forty years was transformed into a nation of valiant warriors, made subject to law and familiar with the fundamental principles of civilization. What a marvellous change, effected ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... sort of superstition is that of which, as we have seen, Aunt Charlotte was an exemplification. Here, again, there is a splendid disregard of evidence, testimony, and causal laws. But it takes the form of scepticism, and a scepticism so blindly partial as to sink into the most abject credulity. The wildest sophistries are dragged in to account for an unfamiliar happening, and scientific students are accused, now of idiocy, now of fraud, rather than the fact should be confessed that our knowledge of ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... of land, showing that in ancient times the people had many privileges long since denied. They even had forests and commons and the road-side, where their cows, sheep and geese could glean something. The facts and figures given in these two lectures as to the abject poverty of the people and the cruel system by which every inch of land had been grabbed by their oppressors, were indeed appalling. A few days before sailing we made our last visit to Ernestine L. Rose and found our noble coadjutor, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... touching a county newspaper,—"a fair type, with its cant, and bigotry, and weight of uncomprehended fact. Bargain and sale,—it taints our religion, our brains, our flags,—yours and mine, Knowles, with the rest. Did you never hear of those abject spirits who entered neither heaven nor hell, who were neither faithful to God nor rebellious, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... draughty tents. Faith, you have descended, sir, like an agreeable meteor, upon two of the most scandalously henpecked husbands in all the universe. In fact, you will not find a gentleman at Ingilby—save Mr. Erwyn, perhaps—but is an abject slave to his wife, and in consequence most ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... says one of the Campbells. He alleges, however, that in April, before the murder, James of the Glens visited James More, then a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle, 'caressed him,' and had a private conversation with him. The abject James More averred that, in this conversation, James of the Glens proposed that James More's brother, Robin Oig, should kill Glenure for money. James More was not examined at the trial of James of the Glens, perhaps because he had ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... the earth," continued Moggs, stretching himself to his full height and pointing to the farthest confines of the inhabited globe;—"since man first crawled upon the earth." There was a sound in that word "crawl" typical of the abject humility to which working shoemakers were subjected by their employers, which specially aroused the feelings of the meeting. "And whence comes the battle?" The orator paused, and the glasses were jammed upon the table. "Yes,—whence comes ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... habits of settled industry. Thus the liberated servant became an idler, socially corrupt, and often politically dangerous. He furnished that class justly described by a Virginian of that day as "a foeculum of beings called overseers, a most abject, unprincipled race." He was the forerunner, and possibly in some degree the progenitor, of that class who did so much to intensify the evils of slavery, the ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... to live a single day without sugar; no tea, no coffee, no jam, no pudding, no cake, no sweets, no hot toddy before one goes to bed; the bare idea of it is too terrible. And yet that was really the abject condition of all the civilised world up to the middle of the middle ages. Horace's punch was sugarless and lemonless; the gentle Virgil never tasted the congenial cup of afternoon tea; and Socrates went from his cradle to his grave without ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... with the moonlight shining full upon my white shirt-sleeves, I must have seemed a very ghost; for a look of abject terror swept across her face; her voice broke off and both her hands were ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "horrid old woman," which perhaps, when her maid undressed her, she was. But she was having a distinctly "good time" in Cairo; she called her son, who was in delicate health, "my poor dear little boy!" and he, though twenty-eight on his last birthday, was reduced to such an abject condition of servitude by her assertiveness, impudent gayety and general freedom of manner, that he could not open his mouth without alluding to "my mother," and using "my mother" as a peg whereon to hang all his own opinions ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... him all about her meetings with Mr. Hayne,—he had written again and again, reproaching himself for his doubts and fears, begging her forgiveness for having written and telegraphed to Kate, humbling himself before her in the most abject way, and imploring her to reconsider her determination and to let him write to Captain and Mrs. Rayner to return to their Eastern home at once, that the marriage might take place forthwith and he could bear her away to Europe in May. Letter after letter came, eager, imploring, full ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... overshadowed his spirit. It was a wavy harvest morning in a village of the north. A golden wind was blowing, and little white clouds flying aloft in the sunny blue. The church was full of well known faces, upturned, listening, expectant, critical. The hour vanished in a slow mist of abject misery and shame. But had he not learned to rejoice over all dead hopes, and write Te Deums on their coffin lids? And now he stood in dim light, in the vapour from damp garments, in dinginess and ugliness, with a sense of spiritual squalor and destitution in his very soul. He had tried to ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... South,—if you choose to hug to your bosom that system which is continually injuring and impoverishing you; that system which reduces two millions and a half of native Americans in your midst to the most abject condition of ignorance and vice, withholding from them the very key of knowledge; that system which is at war with every principle of justice, every feeling of humanity; that system which makes man the property of man, and perpetuates that relation from one generation ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... the Civil War have put that blame highest. The South became arrogant and wrong-headed, and no defence is possible for the chief acts of Southern policy which will be recorded later; but the North was abject. To its own best sons it seemed to have lost both its conscience and its manhood, and to be stifled in the coils of its own miserable political apparatus. Certainly the prevailing attitude of the Northern to the Southern politicians was that of truckling. And Southerners ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... did not altogether succeed in hiding the fact from him. Finally, he whispered his most ardent vows in the ear of the citoyenne Hasard, which she received with an air of bewildered stupefaction that might equally express abject submission or chill indifference. And Desmahis did not believe ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... the entire Island to smoke and drink and weep for the Captain. Dictator Jaffier sent his "abject bereavement" by pony pack-train, which, having formed in a sort of hollow square, received the thanks of Bedient, and assurances that his policy would continue in the delightful groove worn by the late best of men. The reply of Jaffier was the offer of a public funeral in Coral City, but Bedient ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... word," she answered, with an air of abject confession. "It don't interest me a mite! I give because it's my bounden duty, but I'll be whipped if I want to knit warm mittens all my life, an' fill poor barrels. Sometimes I wisht I could git a chance to provide folks with what they don't ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... At the Cafe Royal that day I calmly asked him whether I was not right. He indignantly repudiated my guess, and said loftily (the only time he ever tried on me the attitude he took to John Gray and his more abject disciples) that he was disappointed in me. I suppose I said, 'Then what on earth has happened to you?' but I recollect nothing more on that subject except that we did ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... not usually disturb the placidity of the bullock, but if he once gets frightened and loses his head, he gives way to unmitigated panic. The first appearance of the motor-car, which is now almost as common in parts of India as it is in England, reduced many bullocks to a state of abject terror. Fortunately most mishaps with bullock-carts are not very serious in their results. The cart is not easily broken, and is quickly righted. But having occasion to travel in a public motor-car through a country district where the car was then a novelty, it was alarming to see the ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... inferior to your ancestors, but because they were in a condition to think highly of themselves, while from you, men of Athens, this power is taken away. It can never be, methinks, that your spirit is generous and noble, while you are engaged in petty and mean employments; no more than you can be abject and mean-spirited, while your actions are honorable and glorious. Whatever be the pursuits of men their sentiments ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... views of God, and infusing superstitious fear of innocent enjoyment, instead of aiding sober habits, will, by making men abject and sad, impair their moral force, and prepare them for intemperance as a ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... have passed; and where The Gallic bugles stirred the air, And, through breached batteries, side by side, To victory stormed the hosts allied, And brave foes grounded, pale with pain, The arms they might not lift again, As abject as in that old day The slave ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... but the old ones, who remember the former abject position of the Christians, cannot reconcile themselves to my riding on horseback through the bazaars, and get angry when the Servians sing in the woods, or five off muskets during ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... was profoundly moved. The utter helplessness of the man; his abject and complete surrender to the demon which possessed him—all this appalled him. He had seen many drunken men in his time—roysterers and brawlers, most of them—but never one like Poe. The poet seemed to have lost his identity—nothing of the man of the ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of policy in the kitchen cabinet. In fact, after Zibbie cooled off, she found that she was not ready for "the world to come to an end" (or its equivalent, her leaving the Waltons after so many years of service and kindness). She had not yet reached the point of abject apology, though she knew she would go down on her old rheumatic knees rather than leave her ark of refuge and go out into the turbulent waters of the world; still she made propitiating overtures in the ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... discovered, when he makes one desperate and final effort to escape, but ceases all struggling as you come up, and behaves in a manner that stamps him a very timid warrior,—cowering to the earth with a mingled look of shame, guilt, and abject fear. A young farmer told me of tracing one with his trap to the border of a wood, where he discovered the cunning rogue trying to hide by embracing a small tree. Most animals, when taken in a trap, show fight; but Reynard has more faith in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... what we will! Paris! a city of bloodshed, of humanity in its lowest, most degraded aspect. France herself a gigantic self-devouring monster, her fairest cities destroyed, Lyons razed to the ground, Toulon, Marseilles, masses of blackened ruins, her bravest sons turned to lustful brutes or to abject cowards seeking safety at the cost of ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... In her contrition she was half ready to go down at his feet and confess her sins; her hysterical dread of sorrow and suffering, her narrow sympathies, her feeble faith, her miserable selfishness, her abject cowardice. Every nerve in her body tingled with shame when she thought what a miserable fraud she was; what a mass of pretensions unfounded, of deceit ingrained. She was ready to hide her face in her hands. She was disgusted, outraged with ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... admiring posture at the door of his cave. It was Flavius, the honest steward, whom love and zealous affection to his master had led to seek him out at his wretched dwelling and to offer his services; and the first sight of his master, the once noble Timon, in that abject condition, naked as he was born, living in the manner of a beast among beasts, looking like his own sad ruins and a monument of decay, so affected this good servant that he stood speechless, wrapped up in horror and confounded. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... bill of the charges against him in writing. At this stage he was usually remanded, and the judicial proceedings were deliberately lengthened out with a view of crushing his spirit and bringing him to abject submission. For his defence he might select one advocate, but only from a list furnished by his judges; and this advocate in no case saw the original documents of the impeachment. It rarely happened, upon this one-sided method of trial, that an accused person was acquitted altogether. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Rodicaso and friends, Fidelia rose, turned toward them, and made a profound courtesy, as if to signify her abject submission. Signor Rodicaso bowed with equal profundity, and straightway proceeded to make a speech to the lady, in which he spoke of the wild idolatry that he had long felt for her, and alluded most disparagingly to his own merits. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... two ways: the one according to its end, and then he is great and incomparable; the other according to the multitude, just as we judge of the nature of the horse and the dog, popularly, by seeing its fleetness, et animum arcendi; and then man is abject and vile. These are the two ways which make us judge of him differently, and which ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... of the knowledge of the true principles of administration, the aim and the rights of social life, the real interests of men, and the duties which unite them, the princes are become, in almost every land, licentious, absolute, and perverse; and their subjects abject unhappy, and wicked. It was to avoid the trouble of studying these important subjects, that they felt themselves obliged to have recourse to chimeras, which so far, instead of being a remedy, have but increased ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... is an Elliptical Language.—We call ellipse a hidden meaning whose revelation belongs to gesture. A gesture must correspond to every ellipse. For example: "This medley of glory and gain vexes me." If we attribute something ignominious or abject to the word medley, there is an ellipse in the phrase, because the ignominy is implied rather than expressed. Gesture is then necessary here to express the value of ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... of the county—such abject snobbery!" she retorted, sharply. "Do you think that would influence me? You ought to know me well enough—but that's just it, you do not know me. I realize it at last. Listen now. I will not sing to-night, and you will go and tell Mrs. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... abject as any one could have wished. It was my minute of triumph, but I can not pretend that I was happy. Evidently it had been only a passing impulse. If he had really cared, now that he knew I was free, he would have forgotten himself again at once. Then a new explanation occurred to me. Suppose it had ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... about to leave him, but Steel Spring was not desirous of having a horde of desperadoes at his heels, as he inferred that he would have, if he suffered us to leave him displeased. "O, don't quit a covey that vay," he cried, in an abject manner; "I don't vant to 'ave lots of henemies varever I goes, and ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... and in tears before the nervous little man who humbly styled himself the "servant of the servants of God," has always been regarded as most completely typifying the power of the Church and the potency of her curses, against which even the most exalted of the earth found no weapon of defense except abject penitence.[115] ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... terminating in this present scene of existence, man has serious and interesting business on hand. Whether a man shall shake hands with welcome in the distinguished elevation of respect, or shrink from contempt in the abject corner of insignificance: whether he shall wanton under the tropic of plenty, at least enjoy himself in the comfortable latitude of easy convenience, or starve in the arctic circle of dreary poverty; whether he shall rise in the manly ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... must have betrayed my abject despair. I was so completely knocked over that I offered no opposition when the Colonel impudently took the telegram out of my hand and ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... it all, sir, if it comes to THAT—the Arguellos—if there's a hound of them living—might go down on their knees to have their name borne by such a creature! By the Eternal, sir, if one of them dared to cross her path with a word that wasn't abject—yes, sir, ABJECT, I'd wipe his dust off the earth and send it back to his ancestors before he knew where he was, or my ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... of him that begot, And the travail of her that bore, Behold, they are evermore As warp and weft in our lot. We are children of splendour and flame, Of shuddering, also, and tears. Magnificent out of the dust we came, And abject ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... the business of politics and keep his hands quite clean. The leniency with which Butler was treated on this occasion must always remain an almost solitary stain upon the memory of Abraham Lincoln. On the memory of Benjamin Butler stains hardly show. At a later stage of the war Butler showed such abject cowardice that Grant begged that if his political importance required that he should have some military command he should be placed somewhere where there was no fighting. This time Butler saved himself by blackmailing ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... remainder of his task, and read a series of pitiful personal appeals that would have melted any heart but his own. They were from needy men and women whom he had despoiled. They were a detail of suffering and disappointment, and in some cases they were abject prayers for restitution. He read them all, to the last letter and the last word, and then quietly tore them into strips, and ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... curiosity. As he passed the girl he told her to follow him, and in a few moments they were alone in a thicket. He had hard work to persuade her to take the note to her mistress, for she stood in abject awe of Dona Jacoba; but love of Elena and sympathy for the handsome stranger prevailed, and the girl went ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... apparitions and the two men haunted. But there are none to be found. Macbeth has a purely physical dislike for Banquo's spirit and the 'twenty trenched gashes.' He is afraid of he knows not what. He is abject, and again blustering. In the end he so far forgets himself, his terror, and the nature of what is before him, that he rushes upon it as he would upon a man. When his wife tells him he needs repose, there is something really childish ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... yet further, and asked him: "Have you ever heard say that some men have abject and servile minds?" "I have." "Is it said of them because they are learned or because they are ignorant?" "Surely because they are ignorant." "Perhaps," said Socrates, "it is because they understand ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... Mall into a side street, when whom should I strike against but her false swain! It was my fault, but I hit out at him savagely, as I always do when I run into anyone in the street. Then I looked at him. He was hollow-eyed; he was muddy; there was not a haw left in him. I never saw a more abject young man; he had not even the spirit to resent the testy stab I had given him with my umbrella. But this is the important thing: he was glaring wistfully at the post-office and thus in a twink I saw that he still adored my little governess. Whatever had been their quarrel he was as ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... tale to relate all their follies, surrounded as they were by a bountiful nature and a kindly people, and yet soon reduced to abject want. In the party there were brawling soldiers and piratical sailors, with only a few quiet, decent artisans and shop-keepers, but with a swarm of reckless young nobles, who had nothing to recommend ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... that he, the abject slave of Madam Silverkoop, had been victorious over Mrs. Cat? The first blow is, I believe, the decisive one in these cases, and the Countess had stricken it a week after their marriage;—establishing a supremacy which the Count ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... themselves, no doubt, looked upon it merely as a form of amusement, a thing to be wondered and stared at, and to be dismissed from the mind as soon as the curtain dropped. Bjoernson, whose patriotic soul could not endure the thought of this abject foreign dependence, ascribed all the existing abuses to the predominance of the Danish element, and in a series of vehement articles attacked the Danish actors, managers, and all who were in any way responsible for the unworthy condition of the national stage. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to her cheek and brightness to her eye. Her breath shortened after feline fashion. Deep was calling unto deep, ancient unto ancient, primitive unto primitive. Without the gate of London prison there was one abject prisoner. Within its gates there were two prisoners, and one of ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... Union; never before in the history of this Government have we had a four years' civil war; never before in the history of this Government have nearly four million people been emancipated from the most abject and degrading slavery ever imposed upon human beings; never before has the occasion arisen when it was necessary to provide for such large numbers of people thrown upon the bounty of the Government unprotected and unprovided for. But, sir, wherever the necessity did exist the ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... Strong, beautiful, and armed like thee With lyre and sword, with song and steel; A hand to smite, a heart to feel! Thy heart, thy hand, thy lyre, thy sword, Thou givest all unto thy Lord; While I, so mean and abject grown, Am ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Carson, The Northern Whig and other Unionist and Orange bravoes and journals were denouncing the Devolution proposals as "worse than Home Rule," Irish Nationalists should have long hesitated before they joined them in their campaign of destruction and became the abject tools of their insensate hate. Sir Edward Carson wrote that, much as he detested the former proposals of Home Rule, he preferred them to "the insidious scheme put forward by the so-called Reform Association." So incorrigibly ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... it, but I was frightened, downright frightened. I quailed and I quaked. The sight of Sir Charles stepping out of the study window filled me with abject rapture. Metaphorically speaking, my craven soul squirmed at his heels. He was to me as a strong tower and house of defence.—But look here, Damaris, joking apart, tell me weren't you disturbed, didn't you hear ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... burst out Kranitski. "Lili and superhumanity, the ideal! Why, she is a little beast that sings abject things marvellously." ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... brother-in-law and then looked away. After all his desire to see him humbled, he felt a sense of shame in watching the old man's abject humility and remorse. Thereafter he kept his eyes fixed on his son, as he struggled with the throng packed closely around him and shouting now his name. Suddenly, when he could no longer progress, Richard felt himself lifted ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... The abject Tim—poor tool!—frightened and cowering, nodded to admit it. "Gimme the grant, Birt," he faltered, helplessly. "I oughtn't ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... man was beside himself with fear; he caught at his last, desperate chance of favor, dragging himself to the feet of Fra Paolo and pouring out an abject tale of petty jealousies and offenses for which he obsequiously craved pardon of this "idol of the convent," protesting, with horrible oaths, that he ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... the summit of his ambition; its reckless sacrifice in his daughter's honor appeared the only adequate expression of his love. The intervals of his devotion were passed in idle boasting, and to me he detailed every incident. There was something really touching in the abject way in which he mentioned each trifle concerning her. Little circumstances connected with her daily life were described as one would describe the traits of some rare animal. His career of degradation seemed to have blunted every idea of responsibility. He looked upon her as a superior ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... and power of Jesus Christ as if they needed it not. Whether you know it or not, you are a broken reed; and the only way of your ever being bound up and made strong is that you shall recognise your sinfulness, your necessity, your abject poverty, your utter emptiness, and come to Him who is righteousness, riches, fulness, and say, 'Because I am weak, be Thou my strength.' The secret of all noble, heroic, useful, happy life lies in the paradox, 'When I am weak, then am ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... found the producer in abject slavery and without the understanding of an organized form of resistance. Exploitation reigned supreme, ever seeking to sap the last drop of strength of its victims. No mercy for the common man, nor any consideration ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... moral nature of these men and women, Governor Aiken, during a yellow-fever season in Savannah after the war, while visiting the poor sufferers, intent upon charitable works, found in the lowest quarter of the city, sunk in the most abject depths of vice, men and women who had once been ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... in the light of the moon he saw that he was surrounded by vast hordes of men. No one spoke to him, however; but he saw by the many glances that were cast at him, that he was an abject of great interest. ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... have been. For to the eyes of all the Utopians, except very few, which had been in other countries for some reasonable cause, all that gorgeousness of apparel seemed shameful and reproachful; in so much that they most reverently saluted the vilest and most abject of them for lords; passing over the Ambassadors themselves without any honour; judging them by their wearing of ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... on the coast, five hundred dollars only (whatever may be the contents) being charged upon each waggon; and it is this privilege which supports the trade. But the real market commences at Chihuahua; north of which nothing is met with by the traveller, except the most abject moral ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... man were, servility to his superiors, and tyranny towards his inferiors: the poor detested this race of beings. In speaking to them, however, they always used the most abject language, and the most humble tone and posture—"Please your honour; and please your honour's honour" they knew must be repeated as a charm at the beginning and end of every equivocating, exculpatory, or supplicatory sentence; ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... He soon manifested an abject devotion to her, and would barely listen even to "Scotty" when she was near—the moment he heard her footsteps howling insistently till she ignored all of the others and came directly to him. It became a matter of pride with her to take him into the streets where people would still look ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... naturally, were frantic, and the coachman was arrested. This was late in the afternoon, and I was alone in the office when the telephone rang. Hurrying to the police station, I found Mr. Weill in a state of excitement and abject fear, for an ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... long time, Blassemare met his abject and agonized entreaties with a stoical scorn; at ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... method of correspondence with the universe is not to be identified with "mere feeling" in its lowest and least orderly forms. Contemplation does not mean abject surrender to every "mystical" impression that comes in. It is no sentimental aestheticism or emotional piety to which you are being invited: nor shall the transcending of reason ever be achieved by way of spiritual silliness. All the powers of the self, raised to their in tensest ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... him, spending their utmost strength to placate him, while the naked spirit of murder moved in every heart among them. At the tail of the brace, Conroy, with his cuts stanched, pulled with them. His abject eyes, showing the white in sidelong glances, watched the great, squat figure of the mate with ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... turn—to assure us that the expensive splendor of the house of worship has an appreciable uplifting and mellowing effect upon the worshipper's frame of mind. It will serve to enforce the same fact if we reflect upon the sense of abject shamefulness with which any evidence of indigence or squalor about the sacred place affects all beholders. The accessories of any devout observance should be pecuniarily above reproach. This requirement is imperative, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... whose humanity overstepped the bounds of discretion: for though she knew Miss La Rue had eloped from a convent with a young officer, and, on coming to England, had lived with several different men in open defiance of all moral and religious duties; yet, finding her reduced to the most abject want, and believing the penitence which she professed to be sincere, she took her into her own family, and from thence recommended her to Madame Du Pont, as thinking the situation more suitable for a woman ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... same people there were another set of traditions, illustrated sufficiently for our purpose by the story of Prometheus. According to this the first age of humanity was its worst and poorest and lowest age. The people lived in abject poverty and misery. They were even neglected on the part of the gods, who did not seem to care for them, but treated them with contempt. Prometheus is represented as pitying their evil estate, caring more for them than the gods did; and so he steals the celestial fire, and comes ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... them outfit and dowries out of my money; and they fared forth with their mates. In a mighty little time their husbands played them false and, taking whatever they could lay hands upon, levanted and left them in the lurch. Thereupon they came to me ashamed and in abject case and made their excuses to me, saying, Pardon our fault and be not wroth with us;[FN305] for although thou art younger in years yet art thou older in wit; henceforth we will never make mention of marriage; so take us back ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... "it is to be hoped she is! I have the most abject horror of fevers and that is enough to make me catch it. Fancy having one's head shorn like a convict! ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... in its beauty, and the smaller size enabling you to see it all at once, and feel it more like an exquisite picture. The city he conceived the greatest dislike to.[98] "The condition of the common people here is abject and shocking. I am afraid the conventional idea of the picturesque is associated with such misery and degradation that a new picturesque will have to be established as the world goes onward. Except Fondi, there is nothing on earth that I have seen so dirty as Naples. I don't know what ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... its appearance, it was hung up for a month because it was felt that whereas the booksellers might display a book containing a certain passage which referred to a woman's bosom, they would not do so if it contained a plural synonym. (I offer abject apologies for these dreadful details.) And when it finally appeared, the main portion of the English Press cried to heaven against it, and a smaller section clamoured for disciplinary action. For a hectic month the author, who had simply ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... and in the hands of the British race, might become a matter of transcendent importance. Think for a moment of the colossal, and indeed appalling, proportions which our great towns are assuming! Think of all the vice and ignorance and disease, of all the sordid abject misery, of all the lawless passions that are festering within them! And then consider how precarious are many of the conditions of our industrial prosperity, how grave and how numerous are the dangers that threaten it both from within and from without. Who can reflect ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... He went nearer, almost abject in the joy of this sudden reaction, promising her with glowing visions, state, glory, luxury, honor, favor of the Senate, ease, everything that his vivid imagination could seize upon to tempt the fancy of a woman; but she waved her hand impatiently to arrest his quick flow ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... County hall, the great hall of Winchester Castle, known as Arthur's Hall from a picture of the Round Table at the east end. 'Never,' reported Sir Dudley Carleton, afterwards Lord Dorchester, who was present at both trials, 'was there so poor and abject a spirit.' He listened to his indictment with fear and trembling. He confessed he had hammered in his brains imaginations of the matters charged against him, but never had purposed to bring them to effect. He repeated in an incoherent manner his charges against Ralegh. ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... of the Laws; both Laws and States were now only mere Phantoms, which he could raise or annihilate at his Pleasure. It is true, that this has made the King of the Kofirans the most powerful Monarch in the Universe; but perhaps, it also makes the People the most miserable; tho' an abject Veneration for their Kings will not permit them to own their Slavery, ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... at the engine of torture in abject terror—a closet in the walls of the fort just big enough to admit the body, with an adjustable top to press down too low for the head to be held erect. The door closed tight against the breast of the victim. The only air admitted was through ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... The six hundred thousand armed Frenchmen were used up, and the whole fabric falls; the six hundred thousand are reduced to sixty thousand, and straightway all the rest of the fine imperial scheme vanishes: the miserable senate, so crawling and abject but now, becomes of a sudden endowed with a wondrous independence; the miserable sham nobles, sham empress, sham kings, dukes, princes, chamberlains, pack up their plumes and embroideries, pounce upon what money ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... (and perhaps most of them) who are as noble, in their line of descent as Indians, as is any Spaniard; and some of them much more than many Spaniards who esteem themselves as nobles in this land. For, although their fate keeps them, in the present order of things, in an almost abject condition, many of them are seigniors of vassals. Their seigniory has not been suppressed by the king, nor can it be suppressed. Such we call cabezas de barangay in Tagalog, and Ginhaopan in Visayan. They and their ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... by four lean horses, escorted by six firemen in red shirts, and preceded by two Dutch drummers with serious faces, and long, light beards, and a dyspeptic negro fifer, through sundry of our most crowded streets. And there shall follow him a procession of urchins, so abject in raiment that all peaceable lookers on will wonder where they came from, and how it happened that in a city so well supplied with water their unclean appearance, and the evident satisfaction they derived from scratching, was a sight for the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... them. 'Mon Dieu,' says Lyndon, 'what fools they are; what dullards, what fribbles, what addle-headed coxcombs; this is one of the lies of the world, this diplomacy'—as if it were not also a most important and difficult branch of the national services. Abject reverence of great folk he regarded as the besetting disease of middle-class Englishmen; and so we find Lyndon remarking, by the way, that Mr. Hunt, Lord Bullingdon's governor, 'being a college tutor and an Englishman, was ready to go on his knees ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... beginning of her sophomore year, she had made a reputation for brilliant literary work? Eleanor had been right, when she was a freshman, in insisting that it was the start which counted. Then, despite her first abject failure, she had compassed the difficult achievement of a second start. How proud Betty had been of her! And now all her fair hopes and high ambitions had crumbled to dust and ashes. Was it right to help her cover up ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... staring vacantly at the floor; with a lustreless and stupid smile. A spectacle of such deep degradation, of such abject hopelessness, of such a miserable downfall, that she put her hands before her face and turned away, lest he should see how ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... queenship. Lastly, Prince Charles himself ran a shrewd risk in assuming the crown, lest, should his relations with Norway become difficult, he might be forced to resign, and find himself—having abandoned his naval career for the throne—in a state of abject poverty. ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... spectacle like this. "What has a man," says Blank in his Angels of the Nineteenth Century,—"What has a man who consents to be a knee-bumping, elbow-jamming, foothold-struggling strap-hanger—an abject commuter all his days (for no better reason than that he is not well enough to keep still and that there is not enough of him to be alone)—to do with angels—or to do with anything, except to get done with it as fast as he can?" So say we all of us, hanging on straps ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... natural, therefore, that the royal recommendations of clemency remained a dead letter, and that, under the pressure of the incessant demand for gold, the Indians were reduced to the most abject state ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... tyrannising over him. To see a girl ordering her fiance about, making him fetch and carry like a black boy, and taking his submission as her due, is enough to justify the hope that the worm will turn to some purpose when she least expects it. There should be nothing abject in love on either side. It hurts to see the dog-like look of entreaty in human eyes. Things should be more on a level; the hearts of man and woman should give and take gladly of their best, with love that ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... with great joy by the inhabitants, who had been in a state of abject terror. A runner, who was the bearer of a message to the rajah from the headman, had left on the morning after Harry's party had started; and had returned with the news that he had found the headless bodies ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... of what is termed gentility, I found darker and deeper themes for speculation. I saw Jew pedlars, with hawk eyes flashing from countenances whose every other feature wore only an expression of abject humility; sturdy professional street beggars scowling upon mendicants of a better stamp, whom despair alone had driven forth into the night for charity; feeble and ghastly invalids, upon whom death had placed a sure hand, and who sidled and tottered through the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... is herself deceived," exclaims the more candid separatist or sceptic, taking up the argument declined by his scoffing brother. Catholics, it is supposed, are under the dominion of so abject a superstition, that the moment the subject of their religion is introduced, they cease to exert their ordinary common sense and powers of criticism, and believe any thing and every thing that seems to be marvellous. ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... Charles II rendered the change wonderfully rapid and violent. A deep and general taint infected the morals of the most influential classes, and spread itself through every province of letters. Poetry inflamed the passions; philosophy undermined the principles; divinity itself, inculcating an abject reverence for the court, gave additional effect to its licentious example. ... The favourite duchess stamps about Whitehall, cursing and swearing. The ministers employ their time at the council board in making mouths at each other, and taking off each other's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... in abject fear against the wall. She could not know that this officer was suffering a bad attack of shame for his shabby part in the affair. Satisfied that the little dog really did live in the kirkyard, he turned back to the bridge. When Tammy came out presently he found Ailie crumpled up in a limp ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... restlessness &c. adj.; inquietude, disquietude, worry, concern; batophobia[obs3]; heartquake[obs3]; flutter, trepidation, fear and trembling, perturbation, tremor, quivering, shaking, trembling, throbbing heart, palpitation, ague fit, cold sweat; abject fear &c. (cowardice) 862; mortal funk, heartsinking[obs3], despondency; despair &c. 859. fright; affright, affrightment[obs3]; boof alarm[obs3][U.S.], dread, awe, terror, horror, dismay, consternation, panic, scare, stampede [of horses]. intimidation, terrorism, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... angrily, without effect. Wutzler stood abject, a magician impotent against his swarm of familiars. Gradually the rats, silent and leaping, passed away into the darkness, as though they heard the ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... when with fierce winds Orion armed Hath vexed the Red-Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew Busiris and his Memphian chivalry, While with perfidious hatred they pursued The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld From the safe shore their floating carcases And broken chariot-wheels. So thick bestrown, Abject and lost, lay these, covering the flood, Under amazement of their hideous change. He called so loud that all the hollow deep Of Hell resounded:—"Princes, Potentates, Warriors, the Flower of Heaven—once yours; now lost, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... his beaten enemies were resolute enough, accepting defeat with grim carelessness, or with sphinx-like indifference, or even with airy jocularity. But for the most part their alert, eager deference, their tame subservience, the abject humility and debasement of their bent shoulders drove Jadwin to the verge of self-control. He grew to detest the business; he regretted even the defiant brutality of Scannel, a rascal, but none the less keeping his head high. The more the fellows cringed to him, the tighter he wrenched the ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... allowed to keep a cow. But if they had been in comfortable circumstances, they would have had visitors and lodgers, who might have carried guns to destroy the gentleman's creation, i.e. game; and for this risk the wretches were kept in absolute and abject poverty. I would rather be—himself than this brutal Earl. The daughter showed Lady Sinclair a well in the midst of a small bog, of great depth, into which, like Thurtell and Probert, they used to thrust the bodies of their victims till they had an opportunity of burying them. Lady Sinclair ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... cabin door—and the door was wide open. He could see no life, but he could SMELL it. And smoke was rising from the chimney. He slunk across the open. In the manner of his going there was an abject humiliation—a plea for mercy if he had done wrong, a prayer to the creatures he worshipped that he might not ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... he had scaled her side as noiseless as a mouse; and he was amazed to see the pirates cowering from him, with Hook in their midst as abject as if ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... wish that this revolution should not have the same end, beware of abject Materialism, degrading Sensualism, gross Socialism, of besotted Communism; of all these doctrines of flesh and blood, of meat and drink, of hunger and thirst, of wages and traffic, which these corruptors of the soul of the ...
— Atheism Among the People • Alphonse de Lamartine
... laughing, singing, talking loudly. Stumbling over a log his burning eyes had not seen, he turned in grotesque humor to offer curtsy and abject apology, then hastened on upward. Later, carroming from a huge tree he had hit head on, he addressed it in grave good humor: "Please keep to the right." His flushed face purple in the green light of the deep woods, he hurried on, again worrying over ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... lies in it. They hear the Chief Clerk read of "the efforts made by the Government during the past thirty years in the interest of education," and applaud; while at the Royal Banquet they jostle and hustle each other to kiss the edge of Majesty's frock-coat. The abject slaves! ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Whether these two dependents understood that they were being reproached for living at his expense, I don't know, but their stomachs looked more pinched than ever, and their whole figures shrivelled up, grew gloomier and more abject than before. . . . Their submissive air exasperated ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... like an embryo among these men; he had admired Nathan's book, he had reverenced the author as an immortal; Nathan's abject attitude before this critic, whose name and importance were both unknown ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... of warmth Rose-Marie moved just a fraction of an inch closer to the boy. She knew, somehow, that his small, curiously abject apology was in a way related to the "kid sister"; she knew, almost instinctively, that this Lily who could make a smile come to the dark little face, who could make a tenderness dwell in those hard young eyes, was the only avenue by ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... Blake's departure—he came to join them. They watched his approach in silence, and both noted—though with different eyes and different feelings—the pallor of his fair face, the dark lines under his colourless eyes. His condition was abject, and his manners, never of the best—for there was much of the spoiled child about Richard—were clearly ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... is not dead, the ideal love, but indwells, a redeeming power, wherever there are desolate hearts and minds to be updrawn and united by its ministry; a power so lustral in its nature, that no abject and despairing thought creeps into its presence but is purified and exalted by its regard. This love brings hope and cheerful constancy; with a shining falchion it affrights into their natal darkness ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... one after another, all because, at the beginning of her sophomore year, she had made a reputation for brilliant literary work? Eleanor had been right, when she was a freshman, in insisting that it was the start which counted. Then, despite her first abject failure, she had compassed the difficult achievement of a second start. How proud Betty had been of her! And now all her fair hopes and high ambitions had crumbled to dust and ashes. Was it right to help her cover up the ruin? ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... pain he evidently suffered, Jock could hardly wait to lead his masters back to the flock. Hurrying on with him they crossed a little rise of ground and came upon the sheep which were crowded close to one another, panting in abject terror. ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... place with which to get mixed up with that I know, and I've gone over a great many maps since I left home and know just how small the world is. So, I sent the Khedive my books after having asked his permission, and received the most abject thanks. And as Cromer called on me, I am going to drop around on him with a few of them. Some day there will be fine things going on here, and there is only one God, and Lord Cromer is his Prophet in ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... me the abject thing I was. Her conditions were harder than death; but the hope she had spoken was like a glimpse of ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... follow still further what happened. The shopkeepers, finding their trade quite gone, for it was almost worth a person's life to go into their shops, watched as they were by paid spies, had to capitulate to the League. An abject apology and a promise to let themselves be evicted next time were the price they had to pay to be allowed in a free country to carry on their trade. Ruin faced them both ways. After having the ban of boycotting taken ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... with a threatening demeanour. Our landing was opposed, but a few well-directed volleys from a Gardiner gun (which did not jam) caused the hostile force to disperse, and we landed in great state. Marching on the chief's house, we were received with an abject submission that I had scarcely expected. The people were absolutely cowed, more by the fulfilment of the prophecy, I think, than even by the execution done by our Gardiner machine gun. At the bishop's request, I delivered a ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... position was not one to encourage impartiality in his presentation of facts, and that the imperial favour was not won by plain speaking; nevertheless we have before us a man who could not obliterate himself enough to play the abject flatterer always, and he gives us the reverse, too, of his brilliant picture, as we shall ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... left the water, but a few seconds had elapsed and the saurian was not two yards from me. The abject horror and hopelessness of that moment was something I can never forget. Suddenly Lekas came floundering through the mud; a second more, and he perceived my enemy when almost within reach of ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... the best war, and therefore she has suffered all the evils of the worst war and the worst peace. The average Chinaman took the view that China was too proud to fight and in practice made evident his hearty approval of the sentiments of that abject pacifist song: "I Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier," a song which should have as a companion piece one entitled: "I Didn't Raise my Girl to be a Mother," approval of which of course deprives any men or women of all right of kinship with the soldiers and ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... of such abject terror and despair, as froze the very blood of the two gentlemen below. They saw it but for a glimpse, for the window was instantly thrust down; but that glimpse had been sufficient, and they turned and left the court without a word. In silence, too, they ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... and swift rising anger. Twisting, struggling, writhing, cursing, two men lay upon the ground held in a fierce embrace, much in the manner of two wildcats. Beyond them, huddled upon the ground, her face covered with her hands, a picture of abject terror, crouched ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... merely as a form of amusement, a thing to be wondered and stared at, and to be dismissed from the mind as soon as the curtain dropped. Bjoernson, whose patriotic soul could not endure the thought of this abject foreign dependence, ascribed all the existing abuses to the predominance of the Danish element, and in a series of vehement articles attacked the Danish actors, managers, and all who were in any way responsible ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... abject, lamentable, paltry, sorrowful, base, miserable, pathetic, touching, contemptible, mournful, piteous, woful, despicable, moving, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... governor. A slight prolongation of the voyage would have rendered her as helpless as if peopled by a phantom crew; and she must have been blown before the wind until dashed to fragments on the rocks on some uninhabited part of the coast. The extremity of abject powerlessness had unquestionably been reached when the wide entrance to Port Jackson could not ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... an interruption. At the moment he was bounding up the companion-ladder, a young man of feeble character—who would have been repudiated by the sex, had he been born a woman—sprang down the same ladder in abject terror. He went straight into the bosom of the ascending doctor, and they both went with a ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... The voice again; or, like a gate of steel Fronting the sun, receives and renders back His figure and his heat. I was much rapt in this; And apprehended here immediately Th' unknown Ajax. Heavens, what a man is there! A very horse that has he knows not what! Nature, what things there are Most abject in regard and dear in use! What things again most dear in the esteem And poor in worth! Now shall we see to-morrow— An act that very chance doth throw upon him— Ajax renown'd. O heavens, what some men do, ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... the woman who worships at your side? You surprise me! Worth fifty, a thousand dollars!—wearing diamonds, buying $1,000 dresses—for what? To wear to church—in which to worship Him who had not where to lay his head! And a thousand people in this one city alone in abject poverty— "And the greatest of these is Charity." What a cruel stone is Selfishness to ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... without another word, ran right away, neighing as it went, leaving Dirk in a state of abject terror. ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... long that people began to say (as they say now of the creator of Rip Van Winkle) that he could not play anything else, Lemaitre startled the town with a new creation, utterly distinct from anything he had hitherto done. From depicting the most abject rascality he passed in a moment, as it seemed, to the representation of delicacy of sentiment and grandeur of soul in Alexandre Dumas's play of Richard d'Arlington, and again as Gennaro in Victor Hugo's Lucretia Borgia. Yet the wild dissipation of the man's life was never so great as at this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... violently. I submitted without a struggle, experiencing a curious sensation of pleasure in the midst of my pain. When he repeated his order I found its accomplishment no longer repulsive. One of the few pleasurable memories this intimacy, extending over years, has left for me is that moment of abject abasement to one who, with no warmth of feeling, had yet once had sufficient energy to be brutal ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... betrayed my abject despair. I was so completely knocked over that I offered no opposition when the Colonel impudently took the telegram out of my ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... Notwithstanding this abject poverty, a bullying tax-gatherer, with half a dozen louting soldiers, have been up here prowling about, and wresting with violence the means of supporting life from these miserable beings. The scenes which I witness are heart-rending, beyond all I have heard of Irish misery and rent-distraining ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... father-land; that he teaches us peace, unity and all the lovely charities of life (nothing else is Christianity), as of old, Plato, who is truly worthy of being counted a great prophet, dreamed of them in his republic; that he would lift us above a state of abject dependence on country, parents, kindred, health, and all the blessings of earth, and convince us that poverty and the other miseries of life are in no wise evil. These doctrines Christ has confirmed ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... uneasy shifting of position. You should stand on both feet, bearing a little more heavily on one than the other. The same general principles apply to the sitting posture. This may be either graceful, dignified, and elegant, or awkward, abject, and uncouth. The latter class of qualities may be got rid of and the former acquired, and depend upon it, it is a matter of some consequence which of them characterizes your position and movements. Walking is not so difficult an accomplishment as standing ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... the grace and power of Jesus Christ as if they needed it not. Whether you know it or not, you are a broken reed; and the only way of your ever being bound up and made strong is that you shall recognise your sinfulness, your necessity, your abject poverty, your utter emptiness, and come to Him who is righteousness, riches, fulness, and say, 'Because I am weak, be Thou my strength.' The secret of all noble, heroic, useful, happy life lies in the paradox, 'When I am weak, then am I strong,' and the secret of all failures, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Murphy, unbuckled the leather despatch-bag, and rebuckled it across his own shoulder. Then he set to work to revive the prostrate man. The eyes, when opened, stared up at him, wild and glaring; the ugly face bore the expression of abject fear. The man was no longer violent; he had become a child, frightened at the dark. His ceaseless babbling, his incessant cries of terror, only rendered more precarious any attempt at pressing forward through a region overrun with hostiles. But ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... themselves have formed,—that is a very grave one. Mr. George thought that it was owing to those laws and institutions, and not to any thing in the natural or physical condition of the country itself, that there was so much abject poverty in Great Britain. ...
— Rollo in London • Jacob Abbott
... lover, My name seems dear since uttered by thy voice; Yet, argus-eyed, I watch and would discover Each blemish in the object of thy choice. I coldly sit in judgment on each error, To my soul's gaze I hold each fault of me, Until my pride is lost in abject terror, Lest I become ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... grandees came the smaller landholders, composing the second and more numerous class of the Arabs; then the great mass of the inhabitants, who had sunk into the state of absolute helots. These last were hired peasants or fellahs who cultivated the land, and lived in abject poverty. There was also a class of Arabs, namely, the Bedouins or rovers, who would never attach themselves to the soil, but were the children of the desert. These wandering Arabs, divided into tribes on both sides of the valley, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... thou didst thirst for, take thy fill of blood!" Was shown how routed in the battle fled Th' Assyrians, Holofernes slain, and e'en The relics of the carnage. Troy I mark'd In ashes and in caverns. Oh! how fall'n, How abject, Ilion, was thy ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... quelled, things returned for a time into substantially the same condition as before, and yet the bondage of the people was never afterward so abject and hopeless as it had been. A considerable general improvement was the result. Indeed, such outbreaks as this against oppression are like the earthquakes of South America, which, though they cause for the time great terror, and often much destruction, still have the effect to raise the ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... obstinate, but unable to restrain his ambition: his ambition was still less dangerous than the tyranny and violence of his temper. An implacable enemy, but a lukewarm friend; insolent to his inferiors, but abject to his superiors; though in his whole character and deportment he was almost diametrically opposite to the king, he had the fortune, beyond any other minister, to maintain, during the greater part of his reign, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... house was inverted and disorganized, hopelessly. And the doctor came into the room. She smiled at the doctor apologetically, foolishly, as if saying: "We all come to it. Here I am." She was calm without. Oh, but what a prey of abject fear within! "I am at the edge of the precipice," her thought ran; "in a moment I shall be over." And then the pains—not the heralds but the shattering army, endless, increasing in terror as they thundered across her. Yet she could think, quite clearly: "Now I'm in the middle of it. This ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... family resentment; the unjust dismissal of a wife being counted as an insult to her kindred. He might disinherit an only son; but in that event he would be obliged to adopt a kinsman. He might kill or sell either son or daughter; but unless he belonged to some abject class, he would have to justify his action to the community.* He might be reckless in his management of the family property; but in that case an appeal to communal authority was possible, and the appeal might result in his ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... in the Place d'Armes to get my medicine, and ran back again to give it me, before I knew where I was (such is the debilitating influence of malaria), instead of forgiving him, I found myself, in abject contrition, actually ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... from side to side with that curious movement which only dogs use to express their gladness. Then the strange, three-legged beast went further. Down he threw himself full length upon the floor and grovelled effusively, whining and scraping the boards in a perfect fervour of abject delight. ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... not hesitate any longer. I rose to my feet, and crossed the space which lay between the two tables. As I drew nearer to her I watched the child's face. At first a flash of desperate hope seemed suddenly to illumine it; then a fear more abject even than before took its place as she glanced at her companion. She watched me come, reading without a doubt the purpose in my mind with a sort of fascinated wonder. Her eyes were still fastened upon mine when at last I paused before her. I leaned over the table, keeping ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... daily San Francisco letter for the "Enterprise," for which he received thirty dollars a week. This, with his earnings from the "Californian," made his total return larger than before. Very likely he was hard up from time to time—literary men are often that—but that he was ever in abject poverty, as he would have us believe, is just a good story and ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... proof. He had received bribes; he had given false judgments for money; he had perverted justice to secure the smiles of Buckingham, the favorite; and when a commission was appointed to examine these charges he was convicted. With abject humility, he acknowledged his guilt, and implored the pity of his judges. The annals of biography present no sorrier picture than this. "Upon advised consideration of the charges," he wrote, "descending into my own conscience, and calling my memory to account so far as I am able, I ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... thy trespasses; and, at this day, If for Greece, Egypt, India, Africa, Aught good were destined, thou wouldst step between. England! all nations in this charge agree: But worse, more ignorant in love and hate, Far, far more abject is thine Enemy: Therefore the wise pray for thee, though the freight Of thy offences be a heavy weight: Oh grief, that Earth's best hopes rest ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... for him his flogging, he determined to have a little amusement at Walford's expense before according to him the pardon which he knew his shipmates expected of him. When, therefore, Walford staggered up to the side of the berth, and began eagerly and incoherently to stammer forth the most abject apologies and the wildest prayers for forgiveness, Rudd simply growled forth an oath and impatiently flung himself over in the berth with his back to the petitioner. This had the intended effect of causing Walford's apologies and prayers to be reiterated with increased eagerness and incoherence, ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... for themselves. But they made no complaint, although their hardships increased daily. They were compelled to dispose of almost everything they possessed to keep the frog supplied with food, and at last they were left in a state of abject poverty. Then only did the courage of Hanina's wife give way and she ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... ministry. I hope you have received mine regularly since, that you may know all the consequent steps. I like the Pasquinades you sent me, and think the Emperor's(509) letter as mean as you do. I hope his state will grow more abject every day. It is amazing, the progress and success of the Queen of Hungary's arms! It is said to-day, that she has defeated a great body of the Prussians in Moravia. We are going to extend a helping hand to her at last. Lord Stair (510) has accepted what my Lord Argyll ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... Richard determined to proceed to Normandy, with a view of there making war upon Philip and punishing him for his treachery. On his landing in Normandy, John came to him in a most abject and submissive manner, and, throwing himself at his feet, begged his forgiveness. Eleanora joined him in the petition. Richard said that, out of regard to his mother's wishes, he ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... of Darius was soon made fatal by his abject cowardice. The Macedonians having made a sudden assault on the Persian left wing, it gave way and fled. Darius, who was in his chariot in the centre, seeing himself in danger from this flight, suddenly lost his over-confidence, ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... factor in experience. Caution, circumspection, prudence, desire to foresee future events so as to avert what is harmful, these desirable traits are as much a product of calling the impulse of fear into play as is cowardice and abject submission. The real difficulty is that the appeal to fear is isolated. In evoking dread and hope of specific tangible reward—say comfort and ease—many other capacities are left untouched. Or rather, they are affected, but in such a way as to pervert them. Instead of operating ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... and sweeping courtesy and chanting of the weird words. The final "dosh!" held, in its low, fierce tone, all the significance of abject adoration. With that "dosh" had the child Priscilla wooed the favour and recognition of the god. It was a ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... lips and blazing eyes Landless sprang forward, and clapped the mouth of the pistol to the ruffian's temple. Roach recoiled, then sunk upon his knees with an abject whine for mercy. ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... this lion-tamer of twenty-one, who, without in the least wishing to do so, unconsciously even (she was the quietest of the party), had made the monarch of the forest crouch at her feet and gaze at her in abject humility? ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... dilapidated and poverty-stricken country. Capable as it is of producing almost every thing, and actually producing nothing which might not become a staple with a proper application of capital and skill, its inhabitants are miserably poor, and daily sinking deeper and deeper into the utter helplessness of abject want. ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside. Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... sagacious diviners must have been well acquainted with the military energy of the Tartar government, and the abject weakness of their own; and certainly knew, from their brethren in Kathay, the significant name of the Tartar general; on which foundation, they constructed the enigma of their prophecy, which, like many others, contributed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... thousand men. They were all in rags, ludicrously armed with weapons of every description, and were proceeding hastily towards the Tuilleries, vociferating all kinds of gross abuse. It was a collection of all that was most vile and abject in the purlieus of Paris. "Let us follow the mob," said Bonaparte. We got the start of them, and took up our station on the terrace of the banks of the river. It was there that he witnessed the scandalous scenes which ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... and read, opened new, undreamt-of vistas. The Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare began now to be considered of all books the most worthy to be studied. And thus it came to pass that in a short time a most complete revolution was accomplished in literature, from abject slavery to ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... companion in abject terror, unable to move. Her fear stricken eyes were wild and staring as the mountain of flesh pushed ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... for a beholder to predicate any particular age in the object. You can scarce make a guess between seventeen and seven-and-thirty. This antique cast always seems to promise ill-luck and penury. Yet it seems he was not always the abject thing he came to. My sister, who well remembers him, can hardly forgive Mr. Thomas Ranson for making an etching so unlike her idea of him when he was a youthful teacher at Mr. Bird's school. Old age and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... And with a bewildered feeling of abject fear, Anna heard the quick steps of the soldier echoing down ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... in order to see what progress his son had made in mechanics and mathematics, asked him to draw something of a technical nature for his inspection. Alexius, in order to escape such an ordeal, resorted to the abject expedient of disabling his right hand by a pistol-shot. In no other way could the tsarevich have offended his father so deeply. He had behaved like a cowardly recruit who mutilates himself to escape military service. After this, Peter ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... cause, those who had already absented themselves being ordered to return.(1290) The good example thus set was unhappily not followed by the city rectors. Many of them, to their shame, forsook their cures in abject fear, leaving their parishioners to die without the consolations of the Church, whilst their pulpits were seized upon by Presbyterian ministers, who embraced the opportunity of publicly declaiming against the sins of the court and the ill usage to which they had been compelled to submit.(1291) ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... no notice of this coarse pleasantry, she simply adhered to her thesis. "One has taken one's dose and one isn't such a fool as to be deaf to some fresh true note if it happens to turn up. But for abject horrid unredeemed vileness from ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... occupied before I came on board; so that if we had been detained at sea a whole week by contrary winds and bad weather, one half of the passengers must have slept upon the boards, howsoever their health might have suffered from this want of accommodation. Notwithstanding this check, he was so very abject and importunate, that we gave him a crown ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... and their meannesses, as elsewhere in their glory and beauty. And not so much their meanness and weakness, as that of those who have distorted these innocent servants of truth to become tools of falsehood and the abject instruments of the extinction of all honesty ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... replied by inarticulate groans and wheezes, and while he yet struggled for breath Nero came trotting back through the woods with a mortified and contrite expression pervading his body from eloquent eyes to abject tail, while Pike, as the spaniel was called, followed at some distance with an affected carelessness of demeanor as if she would have it clearly understood that she had been running solely for her own pleasure, with no idea of chasing the deer. The men laughed, and patting their favorites ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... half-brother, and hinted that I would be wise to conciliate him if I wished to have my own way. In the act of entering one of the rooms, I turned upon him angrily, and bade him be off. The next moment this half-brother of a Siamese magnate was kneeling in abject supplication in the half-open doorway, imploring me not to report him to his Excellency, and promising never to offend again. Here was a miracle of repentance I had not looked for; but the miracle was sham. Rage, cunning, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... was a match for any two in the country side, and yet, I am happy to think, he was as bad as any one. As for me, to say that my heart became like water and my knees like soft wax, is to express in mild words my state of abject terror. There was no need to inquire what the maids thought, for smothered shrieks, louder and louder as each peal of knocks vibrated through the little house, proclaimed sufficiently their ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... shells, or piping on flageolets or beating tom-toms, accompanied them. The crowd carrying torches or high crates with flaming coco-nuts, walked or rather danced along on each side, elated and excited with the sense of the present divinity, yet pleasantly free from any abject awe. The whole thing indeed reminded one of some bas-relief of a Bacchanalian procession carved on a Greek sarcophagus—and especially so in its hilarity and suggestion of friendly intimacy with the god. There were singing of hymns and the floating ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... I visit the depths of the fiord; the sea is my steed and I bridle it; I know where the singing flower grows, and the talking light descends, and fragrant colors shine! I wear the seal of Solomon; I am a fairy; I cast my orders to the wind which, like an abject slave, fulfils them; my eyes can pierce the earth and behold its treasures; for lo! am I not the virgin to whom the pearls dart from ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... now propitiated as gods, had taken toll of my villagers for two long years. The people were in abject terror, for none knew the day, hour, or place of the monsters' next leap. Many were already resigned to death. "It's written on our foreheads," they said, with gentle misery. Poor devils! Think of the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... ring, kissed the hand offering it, and took his departure, moving backward, and with downcast eyes, his manner declarative of the most abject humility. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... sudden change of hostility to abject admiration and worship was embarrassing. His mind was all in a whirl, and when the others knelt before him and kissed his paw he could find no words to say. He simply smiled as graciously as he could, and accepted ...
— Bumper, The White Rabbit • George Ethelbert Walsh
... city, where all the nobler organs of expression are closed by political conditions, the viler channels run continual filth and poison, and the people, shut out from public and free discussion of religious and political themes, occupy themselves with private slander, and rend each other in their abject desperation. As it is part of the existing political demonstration to avoid the opera and theatre, the Venetians are deprived of these harmless distractions; balls and evening parties, at which people, in other countries, do nothing ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... of all law, the Senate and the people being no longer considered in the state. But this arbitrary rule, introduced by Severus, is thought to have tended more than any thing else to destroy the vigor of the Roman Empire, by leading the people to an abject dependence upon ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... manifested an abject devotion to her, and would barely listen even to "Scotty" when she was near—the moment he heard her footsteps howling insistently till she ignored all of the others and came directly to him. It became a matter of pride with her to take him into the ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... views of Members in all parts of the House, anxious only to do his duty to his QUEEN and Country. Whereas it is clear he is a martinet of the severest type, a ruthless tyrant, a man who rules with a rod of iron, and keeps his followers in a condition of abject personal terror." ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 6, 1891 • Various
... understand, the East? We Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches. It is either impotent fanaticism or else abject voluptuousness. Indian spirituality has been derided as ignorance, Chinese sobriety as stupidity, Japanese patriotism as the result of fatalism. It has been said that we are less sensible to pain and wounds on account of the callousness of ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... salvation of their women. "Women," replied the Chinaman; "women have no souls. You can't make Christians of them." Few persons born in civilized lands, unless brought into immediate contact with the heathen, can have any idea of the wretched condition of their women, even at this day. Kept in a state of abject bondage, they are compelled to serve with rigor. Controlled as though they were possessed of less intelligence than male children of tender years, it might yet be supposed, from the burdens laid upon them, that they were possessed of far superior strength, physically, than men. In some countries—not ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... the accursed of Hecate. Saronia commands those spirits by her goodness; I draw them by the evil within me. But those shades are the slaves of the priestess, slaves like she was a slave to thee, with this difference: she treats the most abject with compassion; thou ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... that he drank off the cup of suffering to the very extremity of what his peculiar nature allowed. And in no life of so short a duration, have there ever been crowded equal extremities of gorgeous prosperity and abject infamy. It may be added, as another striking illustration of the rapid mutability and revolutionary excesses which belonged to what has been properly called the Roman stratocracy then disposing of the world, that within no very great succession of weeks that same victorious rebel, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... to come in before I conclude—namely, that infelicities of various kinds belong to the state here below. Who are we that we should not take our share? See the slight amount of personal happiness requisite to go on with. In noisome dungeons, subject to studied tortures, in abject and shifty poverty, after consummate shame, upon tremendous change of fortune, in the profoundest desolation of mind and soul, in forced companionship with all that is unlovely and uncongenial—men, persevering nobly, live on, and live through all. The mind, like water, passes ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... accordance with his children's wishes, Mr Maurice accompanied Harry to the residence of the poor woman they had seen at Mr T.'s shop. It was a miserable hovel, but after all there was an air of cleanliness and comfort about it, that the most abject poverty can seldom of itself destroy. A white curtain, mended it is true, in very many places, yet looking quite respectable, still shaded the only window of the apartment. There were a few coals, on which was laid a single stick of wood, in the open fire-place, but ...
— Effie Maurice - Or What do I Love Best • Fanny Forester
... today find itself more advanced on the road to progress. But as it was, the myth of religion was foisted on the superstitious brain, and man resigned himself to his fate, and lived in such a manner as to please this hypothetical supernatural being. The inevitable result was the abject misery, both material and spiritual, of Europe during the period when the Church was in ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... for many years the recluse headquarters of the Jesuits, so of all enslaved Spanish-Americans probably the Guaranis are the worst. During Lent they will inflict stripes on their bodies, or almost starve themselves to death; and their abject humility to the Pa is sad to witness. On special church celebrations large processions will walk the streets, headed by the priests, chanting in Latin. The people sometimes fall over one another in their eager endeavors to kiss the priest's garments, They prostrate themselves, count ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... gospel to you that are at Rome also; for I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth." But now, when he found himself actually at its gates and thought of the abject condition in which he was—an old, gray-haired, broken man, a chained prisoner just escaped from shipwreck—his heart sank within him, and ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... M. Fustel de Coulanges himself points out, corresponded very closely to that of the Sudras. The plebeians had no religion and no ancestors; they did not belong to a family or a gens. [192] They were a despised and abject class, who lived like beasts outside the proper boundary of the city. The touch of the plebeian was impure. [193] "When tribunes were created a special law was necessary to protect their life and liberty, and it was promulgated as follows: 'It is forbidden ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... matter for the present, she resumed her examination of the apartment, and was more and more attracted by it as she proceeded. For, thanks to her eminence as a local beauty, she had not that fear of beautiful and rich things which renders abject people incapable of associating costliness with comfort. Had the counterpane of the bed been her own, she would have unhesitatingly converted it into a ball-dress. There were toilet appliances of which she had never felt the need, and could only guess ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... o'clock, why force him to come away from his lodgings with his breakfast in his throat? To tell the truth, it was policy on the part of Mr. Slope. Mr. Slope had made up his mind that Mr. Harding should either accept the hospital with abject submission, or else refuse it altogether, and had calculated that he would probably be more quick to do the latter, if he could be got to enter upon the subject in an ill-humour. Perhaps Mr. Slope was not altogether wrong ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... gained the advantage; and that if he paid his court badly to the minister, he had the consolation to find, that those who suffered themselves to be cheated, in the end gained no great advantage from their complaisance; for they always continued in an abject submission, while the Chevalier de Grammont, on a thousand different occasions, never put himself under the least restraint. Of which the following ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... saved up much money by his having had the command of a vessel for so many years, during which he had defrauded and pilfered both from the men and the government. Friends and connections he had none on this side of the water, and, when on shore, he had lived in a state of abject misery, although he had the means of comfortable support. He was now fifty-five years of age. Since he had been appointed to the Yungfrau, he had been employed in carrying despatches to the States-General from King William, and had, during ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... do not," I said, still with my abject humility. "Don't take any more trouble—let me go ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... a high official of the Criminal Investigation Department reached an outlying police station under the conduct of a young constable whose swelling pride was soon reduced to abject misery as the divisional detective-inspector, who was leaning on a high desk and chatting with a station-sergeant, sprang forward to ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... of the needs of the other departments, will naturally take the word of its administrative head, especially since he desires the same freedom. This was actually the case in Sacramento, Cal., where the commission plan was tried for fifteen years and given up as an abject failure. Says the Hon. Clinton White of that city: "In almost every instance, the board soon came to the understanding that each man was to be let alone in the management of the department assigned to him. This resulted in there ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... same," said he, "Madam. And, albeit I neither be earl, lord, nor baron within it, yet has God made me—how abject that ever I be in your eyes—a profitable member within the same. Yea, Madam, to me it appertains no less to forewarn of such things as may hurt it, if I foresee them, than it does to any of the nobility; for both my vocation and conscience craves plainness ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... entring otherwise into the justice or merit of this part; for I take it that these are sufficient for any body that is forc'd to follow them. Agathocles the Sicilian, not of a private man onely, but from a base and abject fortune, got to be King of Siracusa. This man borne but of a Potter, continued alwayes a wicked life throughout all the degrees of this fortune: neverthelesse he accompanied his lewdnesse with such a courage and resolution, that applying himselfe to military affaires, by the degrees ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... (No sign of the abject life— Not even a blasphemy...) But the spindle legs keep time To a limping rhythm, And the shadows twitch upon the snow Convulsively— As though death played With ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... Ryan, "it won't last a month! We'll put them out of business if it does. They'll weaken, Mr. Barwig, you'll see! They'll weaken all right." The ashen appearance of Von Barwig's face, the abject despair he saw depicted there aroused the man's sympathy. "It won't be long, Mr. Barwig," he repeated in a softened voice. "I know it's hard, but what are we to do? If we don't stand together, ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... in shades of midnight darkness Abject sits the Pagan world; There the banner of salvation Ne'er hath been by time unfurled; Nor their idols From their ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... now served but to haunt him with the images of death in those ghastliest shapes familiar to them who look only into the bottom of the charnel, and see but the rat and the worm and the loathsome agencies of corruption. It was not the despair of conscience that seized him, it was the abject clinging to life; not the remorse of the soul,—that still slept within him, too noble an agency for one so debased,—but the gross physical terror. As the fear of the tiger, once aroused, is more paralyzing than that of the deer, proportioned to the savageness of a disposition to which fear ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... feel your lady's unkind (I will not call it ungenerous) recapitulation of the favours I have received; and, as I take it for granted that you knew and approved of her letter, I must beg leave to assure you, that, far from being swayed by menaces and reproach, I am determined to embrace the most abject extremity of fortune, rather than submit to such dishonourable compulsion. When I am treated in a more delicate and respectful manner, I hope I shall behave as becomes,—Sir, your ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... with an expression of wooden-headed, abject innocence on his big, broad face, and looked ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... bull within a few yards was altogether too much for the tiger, which now turned and commenced to sneak off with astonishing rapidity, keeping completely out of the bison's sight, and looking like the most abject wretch imaginable. My goudas became frantic at this, and seeing that there was now no chance of a fight between the bull and the tiger, I rushed along the hill with the view of trying to get a good shot at the latter, but this I found would be impossible, so I rested my rifle on ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... the truth of the said remonstrances was not disputed, nor the tone in which they were written complained of, the same being submissive, and even abject, though the cause (his distresses) was by the said Hastings, in a great degree, and in terms the most offensive, attributed to the Nabob himself; but no relief was given, and the same unwarrantable establishments, maintained at the same ruinous ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... that the tongue used by Moses was not even a pure dialect of one of the languages resulting from "the confusion." He makes man the inventor of speech, and resorts to raillery: speaking against his opponent Eunomius, he says that, "passing in silence his base and abject garrulity," he will "note a few things which are thrown into the midst of his useless or wordy discourse, where he represents God teaching words and names to our first parents, sitting before them like some ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... guileless, and noble soul for the fanaticism of Madame Hulot's love. Having fully persuaded herself that her husband could do her no wrong, she made herself in the depths of her heart the humble, abject, and blindfold slave of the man who had made her. It must be noted, too, that she was gifted with great good sense—the good sense of the people, which made her education sound. In society she spoke little, and never spoke evil of ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... inferior woman, a sworn member of the Coffinkey clique, admiring and looking up to her Serene Highness as the great lady of the place, and wearing an almost abject manner when receiving good counsels from her. Neither of them commanded respect, nor were they likely to change the belief, which prevailed at the Folly, that all ability ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... policeman within hearing in chase. And then goodness only knew what she would say of him. He was so frightened that for a moment the insane notion of strangling her in the dark passed through his mind. And he became more frightened than ever! She had him! He saw himself living in abject terror in some obscure hamlet in Spain or Italy; till some fine morning they found him dead too, with a knife in his breast—like Mr Verloc. He sighed deeply. He dared not move. And Mrs Verloc waited in silence the good pleasure of her saviour, ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... to hope that Gabriella will never marry," replied Mrs. Carr with the uncompromising bitterness of abject despair; "the Carrs all seem to marry ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... side, not on theirs. We, born servitors and underlings, it was thought, had forgotten our proper places,—nay, had presumed to strike back, when our masters chastised us. Of course, we should soon be whipped to our knees again. And when we were again submissive and abject, Europe must so have demeaned itself as still to be on good terms with the conquerors. As for us, our final opinion of their demeanor, so they deemed, mattered very little. The ill opinion of the servants can be borne; but one must needs be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... medicine he had a horror, grounded upon scenes of contract surgery upon the fields of battle. The ministry he set aside. From commerce, as he had always seen it in his native town, twelve hours a day of haggling and smirking, he shrank with all the impulses of his soul. The abject country newspaper gave him no inkling of that fourth estate which was later to spring up in the land. Arms he loved, but there was now no field for arms. There were no family resources to tide him over the season of experiment, and, indeed, but for a brother and a sister, who lived ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... of passion. What life would he lead when she was gone? For she would go! Her resolution was irrevocable. All dropped from his side at once. The mistress, to whom he had sacrificed the noblest and most loving heart, he had lost under circumstances as abject as their two years of passion had been dishonorable. His wife was about to leave him, and would he succeed in keeping his son? He had returned to be avenged, and he had not even succeeded in meeting his rival. That being so impressionable had experienced, in the face of so many repeated blows, ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... own: he could however have borne and put up with all this, if he could only have got his will of his sister; but to give up to her, who had been his slave all his life—to own, at last, that he had no power over her, whom he had always looked upon as so abject, so mean a thing; to give in, of his own accord, to the robbery which had been committed on him by his own father; and to do this, while he felt convinced as he still did, that a sufficiently unscrupulous ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... "the studio mantelpiece" of No. 7; no young lady author had ever commented on "the unaffected simplicity" with which Mr. Pitman received her in the midst of his "treasures." It is an omission I would gladly supply, but our business is only with the backward parts and "abject rear" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 'Yes, Sir,' replied the abject Grinder, 'I'm sure you would be down upon me dreadful, Sir. I wouldn't attempt for to go and do it, Sir, not if I was ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... found in his eventful voyage from India. He told her about the outbreak of the flames, the alarm of the passengers, the coward mob of panic-stricken wretches, who had lost all manliness and all human feeling in their abject fear. Then he described the tall form of Obed Chute as it towered above the crowd. Obed, according to Windham's account, when he first saw him, had two men by their collars in one hand, while in the other he held his revolver. His voice with its shrill accent rang out ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... much better dressed, he was certain of that. But he was equally assured that not one of them would have forborne to laugh at his plight, as he sat abject and ridiculous in the very largest puddle in ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... the latter being more perfect in its beauty, and the smaller size enabling you to see it all at once, and feel it more like an exquisite picture. The city he conceived the greatest dislike to.[98] "The condition of the common people here is abject and shocking. I am afraid the conventional idea of the picturesque is associated with such misery and degradation that a new picturesque will have to be established as the world goes onward. Except Fondi, there is nothing on earth that I have seen so dirty as Naples. I don't know ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... with her was gone the secret of his treason. Then he began to doubt. I had MEANS to penetrate all his thoughts, as well as to know his acts. Then he became a slave to a horrible fear. He fled in abject terror to a convent. They still existed in Paris; and behind the walls of Jacobins the wretch thought himself secure. Poor fool! I had but to set one of my somnambulists to sleep. Her spirit went forth and spied the shuddering wretch in his cell. She described the street, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... passages, and the most remote from the organs of the senses, lest these be offended at them. Thus the wonders of this machine are so great and numerous, that we find some unfathomable, even in the most abject and mortifying functions of the body, which modesty will not allow ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... had gone yawning to bed, he returned and sat at the window for a little, smoking hard and puzzling out the knots which confronted him. He had a dismal anticipation of failure. Not defeat—that was a little matter; but an abject show of incompetence. His feelings pulled him hither and thither. He could not utter moral platitudes to checkmate his opponent's rhetoric, for, after all, he was honest; nor could he fill the part of the cold critic of hazy sentiment; ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... over the sick man. One slim, white hand was stroking his face gently, and she was speaking to him in a voice so sweet and soft that it stirred like wonderful music in Wapi's warped and beaten soul. And then, with a great sigh, he flopped down, an abject slave, on ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... Street, and Matterson, of Pitt Street, make a highly creditable show, and in the southern capital, Jenkins, of Swanston Street, is well known for his excellent display. Otherwise the exhibition of fish for sale in either city is disappointing in the extreme, and is nothing less than an abject confession of our inability to develop ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... of St. Genevieve were taken round the walls. In several places the Danes had formed breaches in the walls, and although the besieged still struggled, hope had well-nigh left them, and abject terror reigned in the city. Women ran about the streets screaming, and crying that the end was at hand. The church bells tolled dismally, and the shouts of the exultant Danes rose higher and higher. Again a general cry rose to St. Germain to come ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... could do it, by almost any distant allusion. As likely as not he would start his endless denunciations in the very billiard-room where Mrs. Schomberg sat enthroned as usual, swallowing her sobs, concealing her tortures of abject humiliation and terror under her stupid, set, everlasting grin, which, having been provided for her by nature, was an excellent mask, in as much as nothing—not even death itself, perhaps—could ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... afterwards, the honor and worship due to Him to a calf, which they believed to be the god who had brought them out of Egypt. In truth, it is hardly likely that men accustomed to the superstitions of Egypt, uncultivated and sunk in most abject slavery, should have held any sound notions about the Deity, or that Moses should have taught them anything beyond a rule of right living; inculcating it not like a philosopher, as the result of freedom, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... the sunshine. A thrush came out and sang to him. A west wind brought him wafts of perfume from the gardens below. The serenity of the perfect afternoon mocked his disturbed frame of mind. What was the use of it all? The longer he remained here the more abject he became! . . . Suddenly Edith reappeared alone. She came across the lawn to him with a slight frown upon her forehead. He lay there and watched her until the last moment. Then he rose and dragged out a chair ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Theognis to have been a man altogether of a base and abject spirit, for saying, as one overfearful in regard to poverty, which ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... cases are not strictly analogous to that of our West Indian slaves, whose emancipation we are seeking. It will be contended, that the slaves in our West Indian colonies have been constantly in an abject and degraded state. Their faculties are benumbed. They have contracted all the vices of slavery. They are become habitually thieves and liars. Their bosoms burn with revenge against the whites. How then can persons in such a state be fit to receive their freedom? The slaves, ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... one apart from the dangers and hysteric strivings of his fellows. Once when Theriere happened to glance in his direction the Frenchman mentally ascribed the mucker's seeming lethargy to the paralysis of abject cowardice. "The fellow is in a blue funk," thought the second mate; "I did not misjudge him—like all his kind he is ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... from the first under the crowning unhappiness of unhappiness, that it ceases to be interesting. The five books of the Tristia, written during the earlier years of his banishment, still retain, through the monotony of their subject, and the abject humility of their attitude to Augustus, much of the old dexterity. In the four books of Epistles from Pontus, which continue the lamentation over his calamities, the failure of power is evident. He went on writing profusely, because there was nothing else ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... interesting as well as historically important. One must admit that his position was not one to encourage impartiality in his presentation of facts, and that the imperial favour was not won by plain speaking; nevertheless we have before us a man who could not obliterate himself enough to play the abject flatterer always, and he gives us the reverse, too, of his brilliant picture, as we ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... accompanied them. The crowd carrying torches or high crates with flaming coco-nuts, walked or rather danced along on each side, elated and excited with the sense of the present divinity, yet pleasantly free from any abject awe. The whole thing indeed reminded one of some bas-relief of a Bacchanalian procession carved on a Greek sarcophagus—and especially so in its hilarity and suggestion of friendly intimacy with the god. There were singing of hymns and the floating of the chief actors on a raft round a sacred ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... stinging blow on one ear, followed immediately by a sharp slap on the side of her head from the big grey cat, sent her reeling dizzily away from the dish. She recovered herself and turned in abject terror, her one thought to escape from this uncalled for abuse, but directly in her path stood the black-and-white cat with lashing tail and flaming eyes. Another turn, and she was again confronted by the grey, crouching angrily ready ...
— The Book of the Cat • Mabel Humphrey and Elizabeth Fearne Bonsall
... through their sinful folly Are workers of iniquity, Living on Jehovah's bounty, Wasting in abject poverty. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... and such a night as this, that I scarcely knew what to do. Recovering myself, I called out to know if I could render assistance—if she wished to ride? No answer. I drove faster, the horse blinking, and shying, and trembling the while, his ears laid back in abject terror. Still the figure maintained its position close to my horse's head. Then I thought that what I saw was no woman, but perchance a man disguised for the purpose of robbing me, seeking an opportunity to seize the bridle and stop the horse. ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... to be said. I went home to my morning's work, and returned in the afternoon to receive the apologies of the minority for the conduct of the majority, and to see Mr Granville Barker, overwhelmed by the conscience-stricken politeness of the now almost abject Committee, and by a powerful smell of carnations, heading the long list of playwrights who came there to testify against the censorship, and whose treatment, I am happy to say, was everything ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... me get you to your feet," Harry said, holding out his hands, but with a feeling of some disgust at the abject fear expressed in the tones of the man's voice. He was indeed trembling so that even when Harry hauled him to his feet he ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... the long summer months. In those days her eyes had filled with tears of pity for herself. They were dry now, for the suffering was real and the pain was in her bodily heart. Yet she was so strong, and she feared Paul Griggs with such an abject fear, that she played the comedy when she could not make him ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... like a groveling serpent in the ooze, there lies Caliban, abject in fear, with not a ray of love. Hopeless, loveless, see him lie—a spectacle so sad as to make the ragged ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... trail, and everything seems to conspire toward a pleasant trip. To prove it, Luck found another telegram waiting for him in Albuquerque. This was from Martinson, and might be interpreted as an apology more or less abject. Certainly it was an urgent request that he return immediately to Los Angeles and to his old place at the Acme, and produce Western pictures under ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... prerogatives, should have been occasionally styled by the English colonists "the emperor of the Five Nations." It might seem, indeed, at first thought, that the founders of the confederacy had voluntarily placed themselves and their tribes in a position of almost abject subserviency to Atotarho and his followers. But they knew too well the qualities of their people to fear for them any political subjection. It was certain that when once the league was established, and its representatives had met in council, character ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... that scarcely one of them but contains the outline of some rainbow-chasing scheme, full of wild optimism, and the certainty that somewhere just ahead lies the pot of gold. Only, now and then, there is a letter of abject humiliation and complete surrender, when some golden vision, some iridescent soap-bubble, had vanished at his touch. Such depression did not last; by sunrise he was ready with a new dream, new ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... establishment in Ohio, is getting servants, or, as it is there called, "getting help," for it is more than petty treason to the Republic, to call a free citizen a servant. The whole class of young women, whose bread depends upon their labour, are taught to believe that the most abject poverty is preferable to domestic service. Hundreds of half-naked girls work in the paper-mills, or in any other manufactory, for less than half the wages they would receive in service; but they think their equality is compromised by the latter, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... bare floor is a sign of mourning, and so, by association of ideas, of an abject attitude ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... servant, knowing the people he has to deal with down to the very marrow of their bones, has become rarer of late years. The Brahmin clerk was a very intelligent man, and spoke English admirably, but I took a great dislike to him, noting the abject way in which the natives fawned on him. Colonel Erskine had to discharge him soon afterwards, as he found that he had been exploiting the villagers mercilessly for years, taking bribes right and left. From much ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... some three weeks or less after his parting with Sally, he took her out to dinner. He donned evening dress, loudly cursing the formality, and brought her to a fashionable restaurant, where he gently cursed the abject civility of the waiters beneath ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... they have been proscribed on account of their color; there is a bitter and cruel prejudice against them everywhere, and a large minority of the people of this country to-day, if they had the power, would deprive them of all political and civil rights and reduce them to a state of abject servitude. Women have not been enslaved. Intelligence has not been denied to them; they have not been degraded; there is no prejudice against them on account of their sex; but, on the contrary, if they deserve ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... ourselves and our children in eternal ignorance and wretchedness to support them and their families, would he be to us a God of Justice? I ask, O, ye Christians, who hold us and our children in the most abject ignorance and degradation that ever a people were afflicted with since the world began—I say if God gives you peace and tranquility, and suffers you thus to go on afflicting us, and our children, who have ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... querulously. "I am tired of it. Here is its type and history," touching a county newspaper,—"a fair type, with its cant, and bigotry, and weight of uncomprehended fact. Bargain and sale,—it taints our religion, our brains, our flags,—yours and mine, Knowles, with the rest. Did you never hear of those abject spirits who entered neither heaven nor hell, who were neither faithful to God nor rebellious, caring ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... first rebuff," he was saying complacently to himself; "the girl will reflect, and that old schemer will think better of it. Her round eyes fairly blinked at the sight of my gold; it dazzled her like the noonday sun. Besides, their abject misery will plead in my favor, and I have no reason to despair. Two months of fat living will suffice to make the girl the prettiest woman in Paris; and she will do me credit at very small cost. But I must think of business now; I have made a ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... himself. No one acquires love for God without being soon wholly enkindled by it; thus it was no longer sufficient for Mgr. de Laval to instruct and console the poor and the sick, he served them also in the most abject duties, going as far as to wash with his own hands their sores and ulcers. A madman, the world will say; why not content one's self with attending those people without indulging in the luxury of heroism so repugnant? This would have sufficed ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... body, and suddenly the portal disgorged Lee—in erratic haste. His hat presently followed. Dazedly awhile he surveyed the grinning trio of witnesses to his discomfiture; then, picking up his battered head-piece he crammed it down upon his bald cranium with a vicious, yet abject, gesture. ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... done—but yesterday a King! And armed with Kings to strive— And now thou art a nameless thing: So abject—yet alive! Is this the man of thousand thrones, Who strewed our earth with hostile bones, And can he thus survive?[243] Since he, miscalled the Morning Star,[244] Nor man nor fiend hath ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Eugene and Hortense conducted their mother to her apartment, where she threw herself upon her couch in abject misery. In equally sleepless woe, Napoleon retired to his cabinet. Two days of wretchedness passed away. On the third, the love for Josephine, which still reigned in the heart of Napoleon, so far triumphed that he entered ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... politeness—a singular intuitive refinement pervading all his actions, which indicated, through many centuries of brutalisation, that fountain-source of all politeness—the Oriental. Many a time I have found among Gipsies whose life, and food, and dress, and abject ignorance, and dreadful poverty were far below that of most paupers and prisoners, a delicacy in speaking to and acting before ladies, and a tact in little things, utterly foreign to the great majority of poor ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... as yet contains only one forty-second part of the population of France; and one half of its inhabitants, being in the most abject indigence, consume but little. Its revenue is nearly equal to that of the Republic of Columbia, and it exceeds the revenue of all the custom-houses of the United States* before the year 1795, when that confederation had 4,500,000 inhabitants, while ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... better elements of the country realize that Madero no longer represents an individual or even a political administration. He represents the civilization of Mexico struggling against the unreined savagery of a population which has known no law but abject fear, and having lost that fear and the restraint which it imposed upon it, threatens to deliver Mexico to such a reign of anarchy, rapine, and terror as would be without a parallel in modern ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... Candians (Cretans) their voices would be forcibly heard, and the Turkish rule beneath the British uniform would be quickly overthrown. The Cypriote, down-trodden for centuries, is like sodden tinder that will not awaken to the spark: he is what is called "easily governed;" which means an abject race, in which all noble aspirations have been stamped out by years of unremitting oppression and injustice; still, like the Cyprian ox, he ploughs the ground. It is the earth alone that yields the world's wealth: if we have no other thoughts but avarice, let us treat the Cypriote as we should ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... now; but be d—d careful how you say it," was the reply, with a sneer that would have stung an abject slave into a longing for revenge, and that grated on Mr. Billings's nerves in a way that made him clinch his fists and involuntarily grit his teeth. Could it be that O'Grady detected it? One quick, wistful, half-appealing glance flashed from ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... woman must have loved him much, who, after seeing that look of hers, would have married him. But a moment after she was listening with abject ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... uneasy conscience, he has recourse to penance and mortification, to painful sacrifices and ritual observances, in the hope, that by these he may propitiate an offended Deity. In the one case, the conflict ends in practical Atheism, in the other, in abject Superstition. And these two, Atheism and Superstition, however different and even opposite they may seem to be, are really offshoots from the same corrupt root,—"the evil heart of unbelief which departeth from the living God." In the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... to be present when such exhibitions of negro feeling and susceptibility took place. How could he, seeing that men and women and children—if black—fled from him, and such as he, in abject terror? Neither did Yoosoof ever chance to be present when women sat down beside their blackened hearths, as they did that night, and quietly wept as though their hearts would burst at the memory of little ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... guarded only from the sun. During canoe season the dogs are treated atrociously. Let us remember, first, that these are dogs in every doggy sense, the worshipping servants of man, asking nothing but a poor living in return for abject love and tireless service, as well as the relinquishment of all family ties and natural life. In winter, because they cannot serve without good food, they are well fed on fish that is hung on scaffolds in the fall in time to be frozen before wholly spoiled. The ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... by the happiness which it diffuses, whose claim, by that proof, shall stand higher than that of Mrs. Montagu, from the munificence with which she celebrated her annual festival for those hapless Artificers who perform the most abject offices of any authorised calling in being the active guardians of our blazing hearths? Not to vain glory but to kindness of heart, should be adjudged the publicity of that superb charity which made its jetty ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... the contempt he was forming for King James. His Majesty had consented to see Monmouth. To have done so unless he intended to pardon him was a thing execrable and damnable beyond belief; for the only other object in granting that interview could be the evilly mean satisfaction of spurning the abject penitence ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... saw through you and hated you long ago; from the day I first heard of you. I hated you with my whole heart. You have contrived all this! You have driven me into this state! You have made a dying man disgrace himself. You, you, you are the cause of my abject cowardice! I would kill you if I remained alive! I do not want your benefits; I will accept none from anyone; do you hear? Not from any one! I want nothing! I was delirious, do not dare to triumph! I curse every one ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... other saddle-blanket over him. He lay on his side, his face to the fire, one moment saying over the words of the psalm, but the next listening in abject terror to something ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... but yesterday I rescued him From abject wretchedness. Let that go by; I never reckon'd yet on gratitude. And wherein doth he wrong in going from me? He follows still the god whom all his life He has worship'd at the gaming-table. With My fortune, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... her self-abasement. Her own character stood revealed, to herself in all its meanness—its sordid longing for worldly wealth—its willingness to stoop to falsehood in the pursuit of a woman's lowest aim, a good establishment. Seen in the light of abject failure, the scheme of her life seemed utterly detestable. Success would have gilded everything. As the wife of the rich Brian she would have done her duty in all wifely meekness and obedience, and would have gone down ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... in existence which furnish a luxuriant soil for a baleful crop of future evil. But a few years ago three and a half millions of human beings were held in our country in a state of abject bondage, deprived of every vestige of freedom and every trace of manhood. But why refer to slavery, it may be asked, since it has already become a thing of the past? Slavery, to be sure, on the ground of political ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... to the highest places by his sword or his luck. Every single Grand Vizier and Kapudan Pasha has a nickname which points to his lowly origin; this one was a woodcutter, that one a stone-mason, that other one a fisherman. Therefore a Mohammedan never looks down upon the most abject of his co-religionists, for he knows very well that if he himself happens to be uppermost to-day and the other undermost, by to-morrow the whole world may have turned upside down, and this last may have ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... fiord; the sea is my steed and I bridle it; I know where the singing flower grows, and the talking light descends, and fragrant colors shine! I wear the seal of Solomon; I am a fairy; I cast my orders to the wind which, like an abject slave, fulfils them; my eyes can pierce the earth and behold its treasures; for lo! am I not the virgin to whom the pearls dart ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... and pictures and books and theatres, and sufficient food and clothing. Isn't it strange that when we might have been so happy we preferred to be so wretched? For even if we had all we wanted ourselves, we could not escape the sights and sounds that told of abject misery." ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... withdrawal of the words. When Thomas refused, he broke up the council in a burst of anger, and suddenly rode away from London, instantly followed by the whole body of trembling bishops, who hurried after him in abject terror, "lest before they should be able to catch him up, they should already have lost their sees." Thomas was left alone—"there was not one who would know him,"—while the prelates, coming up in time with their terrible lord, ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... of Apollo.[172] To the actual conversation there were only two witnesses, Cluvius Rufus[173] and Silius Italicus,[174] but the expression of their faces was watched from a distance. Vitellius was said to look abject and demoralized: Sabinus showed less sign ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... company & fought a batail. Some weare slaine of both sids. The Captayne of these of the Sault lost his eye by an arrow. The batail being over he made a speech, & said that he lost his fight of one side, & of the other he foresee what he would doe; his courage being abject by that losse, that he himselfe should be ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... unconscious to himself) which I am always looking for. To me all of them told the full story of what went before and necessitated the great French revolution—the long precedent crushing of the masses of a heroic people into the earth, in abject poverty, hunger—every right denied, humanity attempted to be put back for generations—yet Nature's force, titanic here, the stronger and hardier for that repression—waiting terribly to break forth, revengeful—the pressure on the dykes, and the bursting at last—the storming of the Bastile—the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... two dependents understood that they were being reproached for living at his expense, I don't know, but their stomachs looked more pinched than ever, and their whole figures shrivelled up, grew gloomier and more abject than before. . . . Their submissive air ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of a brave resistance or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or to die. Our own, our country's honor, calls upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion; and, if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... seemed to be absent a good while, though that feeling might have been occasioned by Duane's thrilling interest and anxiety. Finally he heard heavy steps. Lawson came in alone. He was leaden-faced, humiliated. Then something abject in him gave place to rage. He strode the room; he cursed. Then Longstreth returned, now appreciably calmer. Duane could not but decide that he felt relief at the evident ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... fiends of pride Caught Earth to brake their fall. The regions gave And sank with all the hosts beneath the wave! 'Tis in those sunken regions which divide The new world of the resolute and brave, From the old world of king and abject slave, Where Torries, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... and shame were dreadful for Joan to see, because she felt sorry for him, and divined that behind them would rise the darker, grimmer force of the man. And she was right, for suddenly he changed. That which had seemed almost to make him abject gave way to a pale and bitter dignity. He took up Dandy Dale's belt, which Joan had left on the bed, and, drawing the gun from its sheath, he opened the cylinder to see if it was loaded, and then threw ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... is of course a worshipper of Charles, and a hater of Puritans. We do not wish to raise a prejudice against so young a man by quoting any of the ridiculous, and often somewhat abject, rant with which he addresses their majesties on their return from Scotland, on the queen's delivery, on the birth of the Duke of York, and so forth; for in that he did but copy the tone of grave divines and pious prelates; but he, unfortunately for his fame, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... with one white ear; it was awful cunning," she confided mumblingly. "And it ate from my hand—all warm and sticky, like—loving sandpaper." There was no protest in her voice, nor any whine of complaint, but merely the abject submission to Fate of one who from earliest infancy had seen other crops blighted by other frosts. Then tremulously with the air of one who, just as a matter of spiritual tidiness, would purge her soul of all ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... departure—he came to join them. They watched his approach in silence, and both noted—though with different eyes and different feelings—the pallor of his fair face, the dark lines under his colourless eyes. His condition was abject, and his manners, never of the best—for there was much of the spoiled child about ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... of his ambition; its reckless sacrifice in his daughter's honor appeared the only adequate expression of his love. The intervals of his devotion were passed in idle boasting, and to me he detailed every incident. There was something really touching in the abject way in which he mentioned each trifle concerning her. Little circumstances connected with her daily life were described as one would describe the traits of some rare animal. His career of degradation seemed to have blunted ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... convulsively and had drawn back in abject, cowering terror. What was it she saw? Evidently it was very real and very ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... You are within my gates. To touch you, is to touch me. She fully realizes that. Besides brother Thomas is her abject tool in most things; but some things even he would ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... Since you will be abject, since you will behave as though I was not a man of honour, here, right under your embedded eyes, I write the thing down—the plain truth about Pyecraft. The man I helped, the man I shielded, and who has requited me by making my ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... observe that the teeth they revealed were creditably white; her cotton-gloved hand repressed her fluttering heart, but he did not see its tumultuous throbbing. He gulped as he said, with a fallen jaw and a look of abject misery that pierced ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the door of his cave. It was Flavius, the honest steward, whom love and zealous affection to his master had led to seek him out at his wretched dwelling and to offer his services; and the first sight of his master, the once noble Timon, in that abject condition, naked as he was born, living in the manner of a beast among beasts, looking like his own sad ruins and a monument of decay, so affected this good servant that he stood speechless, wrapped up in horror ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... appears to demonstrate the possibility of reclaiming even the most abject and depraved of our juvenile population at a very moderate expense. The schools have been so long in operation, that, if there had been anything erroneous in the principles or the management of them, it must ere now have appeared; ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... influence, why is it that you thus throw obstacles in the way of advancing thought? Is it the law of God that you should persecute and put to shame that which eventually you will be compelled to adore? Had I been pliant, abject and a flatterer, I might have succeeded! In me you have persecuted that which represents all that is noblest in man—His consciousness of his own power, the majesty of his labor, the heavenly inspiration ...
— The Resources of Quinola • Honore de Balzac
... revenge by a Native a difficult and risky undertaking and, furthermore, there is to be considered the spirit of traditional submissiveness which at all times and in all places marks the attitude of the slave or serf towards his master. One has only to remember the many accounts of abject resignation by the peasants of France and the moujiks of Russia before the revolutions that changed the order of the past in those countries. No such considerations affect the Native where his anger and hatred are directed against one ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... Holding in his hands the malachite casket that was the symbol of his triumph, the Duke smiled dictatorially at his darling. He came near to thinking of her as a chattel. Then with a pang he remembered his abject devotion to her. Abject no longer though! The victory he had just won restored his manhood, his sense of supremacy among his fellows. He loved this woman on equal terms. She was transcendent? So was he, Dorset. To-night ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... old Mackenzie school, and the men under whom Canada was to secure unrestricted self-government. The truth is that the situation up to 1837 had been too abnormal to permit the constitutional radicals to show themselves in their true character. Mackenzie himself, in the rather abject letter with which he sought reinstatement in 1848, admitted the falsity of his old position: "Had I seen things in 1837 as I do in 1848, I would have shuddered at the very idea of revolt, no matter what our wrongs might ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... have saved Paul Linmere. His fate was decided. Twice I waylaid him in the streets, and showed him my pale face, which was not unlike the face of the dead. And as he believed that I was drowned, the sight of me filled him with the most abject terror. How I enjoyed the poor wretch's ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... of great reward. Until human nature changes we can expect nothing different. Socialism implies popular selection of industrial leadership. Wherever tried thus far in the world's history there has usually been abject failure. The mass can choose leaders in emotion but not directors of industry. The selection of experts by the non-expert can be wise only by accident. If the selection is not popular, then Socialism is tyranny, as its enemies charge. If it be popular, or in so far as it is popular, direction ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... by the emperor and his nobles. They placed Ernst under the ban of the empire, and thus deprived him of rank, wealth, and property, reducing him by a word from high estate to abject beggary. His life and liberty were left him, but nothing more, and, driven by despair, he sought the retreat of his fugitive friend Werner, who had taken refuge in the depths of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... already observed, the native princes, the nominal governors of the greater part of the country, are kept in the most perfect subjection by the Company; and the common Javanese are in the most abject state of slavery. The labourer is not only obliged, at fixed periods, to deliver a certain quantity of the fruits of his industry to the regent placed over him on behalf of the Company, for whatever price the latter chooses to allow ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... dependants and slaves. He was not more engaging in his carriage towards us; he would give no part of what he had to spare to any but Captain Cheap, whom his interest led him to prefer to the rest, though our wants were often greater. The captain, on his part, contributed to keep us in this abject situation, by approving this distinction the cacique shewed to him. Had he treated us with not quite so much distance, the cacique might have been more regardful of our wants. The little regard ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... Surroundings.—Undoubtedly the accommodations for physical comfort amidst which Jesus was born were few and poor. But the environment, considered in the light of the customs of the country and time, was far from the state of abject deprivation which modern and western ways would make it appear. "Camping out" was no unusual exigency among travelers in Palestine at the time of our Lord's birth; nor is it considered such to-day. It is, however, beyond question that Jesus was born into a comparatively ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Manwaring made accordingly a most abject submission at the bars of both Houses, Heylin says, on his knees and with tears in his eyes, confessing his sermons to have been "full of dangerous passages, inferences, and scandalous aspersions in most ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... sometimes in the absence of her husband, as accident, not arrangement, directed. They approached her with all the agitation and tenderness of the most ardent lovers. Amongst the number, was a certain celebrated orator. This man was her abject slave. A glance from her expressive eye raised him to the summit of bliss, or rendered his night sleepless. The complacent husband of Madame G——regarded these men as his most beloved friends, because they enlarged the happiness of ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... almost logical the moment before. Win Lou Macon by the power of fear, well enough, for was not fear the thing which she had followed all her life? Was it not through fear that the colonel himself had reduced her to such abject, unquestioning obedience? ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... and the emperor had the folly and arrogance, after all the disaster and defeat experienced by the arms of Ava, to demand homage from the English envoys. The firmness of these gentlemen, and the fear of renewed hostilities, caused the sovereign to waive his claims to forms and ceremonies of abject submission, and the issue was peaceful. Cordial relations with the Birmese dominions were not however established, either at that juncture or subsequently: but the salutary fear of British power, caused by the war of 1851-2-3, prevented ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... thousand dollars a year, and his expenditures could not have been more than six hundred. His dementia, ironically enough from the day that he came into his fortune, took the form of a most pitiable and abject fear that he would die in poverty, misery, and want; and so, year after year, cashing his checks as fast as he got them, never trusting the bank with a penny, he kept hiding away somewhere in his house every cent he could scrape and save from his income—which ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... up my fetter-chains to smite, was tripped heavily, felt my limbs close-pinioned and was dragged forth of the dungeon. And now, thus helpless at the mercy of these hideous, hooded forms that knew no mercy, my soul shrank for stark horror of what was to be, and my body shook and trembled in abject terror. ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... me to do?" The wretched man's tone was not merely humble—it was abject. His grand Prince Albert coat was torn in three places; one tail hung down dejectedly over his hip; one sleeve was ripped half-way out. His collar was unbuttoned and the ends rode up hilariously over his cheeks. His necktie was gone. His sleek hair stuck out in damp wisps about his frightened ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... population lives in abject poverty. Nearly 70% of all Haitians depend on the agriculture sector, which consists mainly of small-scale subsistence farming and employs about two-thirds of the economically active work force. The country has ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... with the temptation to feel completely happy again. A feeling of outrage, of resentment against nature itself, mingled with an agony of pity, as he noted on the now placid features a certain look of humility, almost abject, like the expression of a smitten child or animal, as of one, fallen at last, after bewildering struggle, wholly under the power of a merciless adversary. From mere tenderness of soul he would not ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... remanded to the guard-house and Paine brought over in his place. Howard swaggered insolently past the sergeant of the guard on his return, and when told to get ready to go out to work, replied, "I guess not, Johnny, unless you want to lose your stripes." But Paine came "home" scared and abject. Men in quarters said that both the captain and Sergeant Haney stormed at him until he didn't know black from white, and the temporary company clerk, excluded from the office during the conference, was called in finally to witness Paine's signature to a paper, the contents of which ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... ferocious in the hour of victory, as they were prone to fly at the first suspicion of defeat—men who delighted in bloodshed, but who preferred finding their victims ready bound for the slaughter. It was the abject cowardice of these troops, which gave so wonderful a career of success to the Vendeans; it was their diabolical cruelty which has made the sufferings of the royalists more notorious ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... full of spirit and the pride of life? The kitchen became her own domain where the three of us fought for the position of her most abject slave. Even Mary Ellen could scarcely work for watching her antics with an old stocking, which she pretended was a rat. Once she caught a live mouse and set us all shouting. Mary Ellen, in her excitement, upset a gravy-boat of hot gravy, and ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... me, Helen?" the man asked in a faint, trembling voice, and went on pleading with her, in words so abject and so wretched that they wrung the girl's heart more ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... without hitch or let up, reels off destruction. To such desperate beings the stock operator—the market-maker—is the straw to save them from drowning, and to him they turn as the one possible source of aid and hope. I only knew these men at sight's end, but they knew me and were sure in their abject plight that I could help them—by what wizardry they never stopped to think. They were terribly certain that unless the market turned, their brokers must have additional margin or their stock would be thrown overboard, sinking prices still lower and bringing down their friends' stock, and so ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... There was abject terror in it, and yet there was also a sort of grisly joy, and his eyes feasted on the silent agony ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... a train; only our friend beneath us seems superior to haste." "I would give a good deal to know," said Cortlandt, "what is pursuing those giants, and whether it is identical or similar to the mutilator of the mastodon. Nothing but abject terror could make them run like that." "I have a well-formed idea," said Bearwarden, "that a hunt is going on, with no doubt two parties, one in the woods on either side, and that the hunters may be on a scale commensurate with that of their victims." "If the excitement is caused by men," ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... Dunc, and then for Jock Howieson, which homage and tribute of victory Speug received with affected contempt but great pride of heart. In order to conceal his feelings he turned to his faithful henchman, little Nestie Molyneux, who, always a delicate-looking little laddie, was now an altogether abject spectacle, with torn clothes, dripping hair, and battered face. "Nestie," said Speug, in hearing of the whole school, "ye're a plucky little deevil," and although since then he has been in many places and has had various modest triumphs, that ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... therefore heir to all the family property; the second is his younger brother, the husband of Pamela, who has been disinherited on account of his marriage, and lives on half-pay in a state but little removed from abject poverty. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... "it won't last a month! We'll put them out of business if it does. They'll weaken, Mr. Barwig, you'll see! They'll weaken all right." The ashen appearance of Von Barwig's face, the abject despair he saw depicted there aroused the man's sympathy. "It won't be long, Mr. Barwig," he repeated in a softened voice. "I know it's hard, but what are we to do? If we don't ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... by no means certain that I should be a hero at the Equator, but I am fully convinced that I should be an abject coward at the North Pole. Three mornings ago I stood for two hours by the Ambulances de la Presse, and my teeth have not ceased to chatter ever since. I pity the unfortunate fellows who had to keep watch all night on the plateau of Villiers more than those who were put out of their misery the ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... this house. They're not the public. The public is that shouting, perspiring mob out there watching the soldiers, and Frau Berg and her boarders are the public, and so are the soldiers themselves. The public here are all the people who obey, and pay, and don't know; an immense multitude of slaves,—abject, greedy, pitiful. I don't think I ever could have imagined a thing so pitiful to see as these respectable middle-aged Berlin citizens, fathers of families, careful livers on small incomes, clerks, pastors, teachers, professors, drunk and mad out there publicly on the pavement, dancing ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... indignation, devoted them as sacrifices to her vengeance. Nor was her surprise so much the effect of his dissimulation, as of his want of taste and discernment. She inveighed against him, not as the most treacherous lover, but as the most abject wretch, in courting the smiles of such an awkward dowdy, while he enjoyed the favours of a woman who had numbered princes in the train of her admirers. For the brilliancy of her attractions, such as they at present shone, she appealed to the decision of her minister, who consulted ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... reduced him to a state of abject misery. He began to fear that he was really growing mad. In that case he would be a fit subject for a "keeper." He longed with unutterable longing to throw off this terrible restraint; but he could ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... said. "I'm all foam. But I've conquered his majesty King Devil for once. He's come back positively abject. My dear, do get up! ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... of the trial, Delano had maintained his confidence and composure; but at length the evidence of his own people, and the master and crew of the Helen, became so overwhelming that he lost all hope, and, overcome by the most abject fear, sunk down, and would have fallen, had he not been supported. Recovering himself a little, he broke forth into earnest petitions that his life might be spared. He made the most trivial and weak excuses for his conduct, ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... 'em to? Where is it drawin' the hull nation to? Is it drawin' 'em down into a slavery ten times more abject and soul-destroyin' than African slavery ever wuz? Tell me," sez ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... the military profession arises a corresponding contempt of all other professions whatsoever paid by fellow-citizens, and not by the king or the state. The clerical profession is in the most abject degradation throughout Southern Germany; and the reason why this forces itself less imperiously upon the public notice is, that, in rural situations, from the absence of a resident gentry (speaking generally), the pastor is brought into rare collision with those who style themselves ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Turn now to the second great civilization, the Roman. During the first centuries after the founding of Rome the Roman woman had no rights whatever, her condition being as abject as that of the Grecian. With the growth of riches and of power in the State, more social but still no legal freedom was accorded. The elder Cato complained of the allowing of more liberty, and urged that every father of a family should keep his wife in the proper state of servility; but in ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... had been evident to Stepton from the moment when his visitor came in that he was in great agony of mind. There was in his face a sort of still and abject misery which Stepton thought exceedingly promising. As he turned round, leaning his sharp elbow on his writing-table, Stepton was considering how to exploit this misery for the furthering of ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Popular Antiquities, 'usually the boldest Men alive, are yet frequently the very abject slaves of superstitious Fear. They have various puerile Apprehensions concerning Whistling on Shipboard, carrying a Corpse, etc., all which are Vestiges of the old Woman in human Nature, and can only be erased by the united Efforts of ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... proud of her; he was proud that she had "taken" so well among his friend, proud that she bore herself so complacently in the drawing-rooms of the wives of pompous Government officials, but doubly proud of her almost abject devotion to him. If ever human being was worshipped that being was Charlie McDonald; it could scarcely have been otherwise, for the almost godlike strength of his passion for that little wife of his would have mastered and melted a far more invincible citadel ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... it boasts, securing human interests even against the destructive agencies that man himself develops in his endeavors to subserve them. Fire, the fourth element, as the old philosophers deemed it, is his most useful and abject servant. Why cannot man prevent his ever breaking that ancient indenture, old as Prometheus, old as Adam? Why can he not be certain that at any moment his terrible subject may not break forth and tower up into his master, tyrant, destroyer? It is because it also is a power of nature; which, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the administration of Numidia belongs to him, but that the legal title and supremacy belong to Rome—the language of abject servility, by which he wishes to recommend himself to the protection of the senate. [79] Affines are those connected with one another by marriage, whereas cognati are relations by blood. [80] ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... against him were varied and numerous, and easy of proof. He had received bribes; he had given false judgments for money; he had perverted justice to secure the smiles of Buckingham, the favorite; and when a commission was appointed to examine these charges he was convicted. With abject humility, he acknowledged his guilt, and implored the pity of his judges. The annals of biography present no sorrier picture than this. "Upon advised consideration of the charges," he wrote, "descending into my own conscience, and calling my memory ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... devices while preparing for her journey, and the antique attendant who had been sent to protect her was grievously scandalized by the jaunty little sailor's hat and double-breasted jacket which she had selected for her travelling costume. But the woman had been bred to almost abject subservience, and had no idea of venturing upon spoken criticism or advice. She was greatly troubled, however, about the impression this singular costume might produce on her old mistress, and felt really shocked when she saw the half-puzzled, half-amused expression of their fellow-passenger's ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... turned into a sunny bit of road when an abject-looking white dog with a black patch over his eye suddenly wriggled himself through a ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the Hightower Hotel, escorted by a pleased and beefy youth of his acquaintance, who later told him of their meeting at the American Embassy in Paris, and who unsuspectingly presented him. Since their meeting the young man had been her abject cavalier. The elder Milbrey, too, had met her at his son's suggestion. He had been as deeply impressed by her helplessness in the matter of a million and a half dollars of idle funds as she had been by his aristocratic bearing and enviable position ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... maintenance of a strict discipline in the army was the first condition of successful campaigning at great distances from the mother country and in the midst of hostile people, and the unquestioning respect which they had to pay to the orders of their general prepared them for abject submission to the will of their sovereign. To their bravery, moveover, they owed not only money and slaves, but also necklaces and bracelets of honour, and distinctions and offices in the Pharaonic administration. The king, in addition, neglected no ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... breath went out between the parted lips of Bas Rowlett he wilted into a spectacle of abject surrender, then turning he led the way to the house, found pencil and paper, and wrote laboriously as the other dictated. At the end ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... administration, the aim and the rights of social life, the real interests of men, and the duties which unite them, the princes are become, in almost every land, licentious, absolute, and perverse; and their subjects abject unhappy, and wicked. It was to avoid the trouble of studying these important subjects, that they felt themselves obliged to have recourse to chimeras, which so far, instead of being a remedy, have but increased the evils of the human ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... but was he not possessed of evil spirits? He was always without rupees, too, a creature of the wild that could not seem to understand the gathering of money. As a man, according to the standards of men, he was an abject failure. ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... and away the most unworthy. The voices and the concert of voices of angels and men be to Thee; the concert of all thy saints in heaven and of all Thy creatures in heaven and on earth; and of me, beneath their feet an unworthy and wretched sinner, Thy abject creature; my praise also, now, in this day and hour, and every day till my last breath, and till the end of this world, and then to all eternity, where they cease not saying, To Him who loved ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... grudge, being quite aware that it was he who was in the habit of removing the famous Canterville blood-stain by means of Pinkerton's Paragon Detergent. Having reduced the reckless and foolhardy youth to a condition of abject terror, he was then to proceed to the room occupied by the United States Minister and his wife, and there to place a clammy hand on Mrs. Otis's forehead, while he hissed into her trembling husband's ear the awful secrets of the charnel-house. With regard to little Virginia, he had not quite ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... "How abject is the equine race, Condemned to slavery's disgrace! Consider, friends, the deep reproach— Harnessed to drag the gilded coach, To drag the plough, to trot the road, To groan beneath the pack-horse load! Whom do we serve?—a two-legged man, ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... liberty, but have yet to learn in this strange new land the true significance of life. We have made the dollar the god of our idolatry, the Alpha and Omega of our existence, and bow the knee to it with a servility as abject as that of courtiers kissing the hand of Kings. As the old pagans sometimes incorporated their lesser in their greater deities that they might worship all at once, so have we put the Goddess of Liberty and Saving Grace on the silver dollar that ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... precise moralists, who affect to be better than their neighbours, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors, and hard-hearted villains; and your men of spirit, who take their girl and their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of honour, and, (that no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied,) reform in the last scene, and ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... He, the avenger of the family's honour? He, the insurer of little Roger's continuance with the family at a cost the one who loved him best would rather have died himself than pay? Yes! there is no misdoubting this old servitor's attitude of abject appeal, or the meaning of Homer Upjohn's joyfully uplifted countenance and outspreading arms. The servant begs for mercy from man, and the master is giving thanks to Heaven. Why giving thanks? Has ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... makes me chaw upon Iron. My second son must be a promoter, and my third a thief, or an underputter, a slave pander. Oh beggery, beggery, to what base uses dost thou put a man! I think the Devil scorns to be a bawd. He bears himself more proudly, has more care on's credit. Base, slavish, abject, filthy poverty! ...
— A Yorkshire Tragedy • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... evils, will not the most miserable of men be still more miserable in a public station? Master of others when he is not master of himself; like a sick man who is compelled to be an athlete; the meanest of slaves and the most abject of flatterers; wanting all things, and never able to satisfy his desires; always in fear and distraction, like the State of which he is the representative. His jealous, hateful, faithless temper grows worse with command; he ...
— The Republic • Plato
... their vanquished foes to slavery, but it has always been a puzzle to me how a civilized man could drag his own children, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, down to the position of social outcasts, abject slaves, and ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... commissioner, knowing little of the needs of the other departments, will naturally take the word of its administrative head, especially since he desires the same freedom. This was actually the case in Sacramento, Cal., where the commission plan was tried for fifteen years and given up as an abject failure. Says the Hon. Clinton White of that city: "In almost every instance, the board soon came to the understanding that each man was to be let alone in the management of the department assigned to him. This resulted in there being in fact no tribunals exercising a supervisory ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... Signor Rodicaso and friends, Fidelia rose, turned toward them, and made a profound courtesy, as if to signify her abject submission. Signor Rodicaso bowed with equal profundity, and straightway proceeded to make a speech to the lady, in which he spoke of the wild idolatry that he had long felt for her, and alluded most ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... my abject slaves before I am done with them," he remarked cheerfully, and relying on their ignorance of English he explained fully what he proposed to do. Not only would he repeat the tricks that had already proved so successful, ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... symptoms of a similar character. As for Gaunt, he was thoroughly alarmed; for not only did the feeling of feebleness increase, but he also found himself gradually becoming the victim of a blind unreasoning terror for which the term "abject cowardice" afforded but a very inadequate description. And to this very unpleasant sensation was added that of a morbid sense of touch, so acute that even the very pressure of his clothes became almost unendurable. Fully alive, however, to the possibly critical ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... the Ariel. While Barnstable was attending to this duty, an unusual bustle drew his eyes to one of the hatchways, where he beheld a couple of his marines dragging forward a gentleman, whose demeanor and appearance indicated the most abject terror. After examining the extraordinary appearance of this individual, for a moment, in ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... to oppose a sheik of the Koran, who could accomplish such wonders, was alike vain and impious. They came in by hundreds, bowing themselves to the ground, and casting sand on their heads, in token of the most abject submission. At length, Malem Fanamy, the leader of the rebellion, saw that resistance was hopeless. After vain overtures of conditional submission, he appeared in person, mounted on a white horse, with one thousand followers. He was clothed in rags, and having fallen prostrate, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... leaving its dismal vicinity he was glad to "breathe the pure air in St. Paul's coffee-house," but he was obliged to add that as he entertained the highest veneration for the clergy he could not "contemplate the magnificence of the cathedral without reflecting on the abject condition of those 'tatter'd crapes,' who are said to ply here for an occasional burial or sermon, with the same regularity as the happier drudges who salute us with the cry of 'coach, sir,' or 'chair, your honour.'" Somewhat late in the eighteenth century St. Paul's coffee-house had a distinguished ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... the way, they were charged exorbitant rents, far higher than what they would now pay for the well-ventilated and well-equipped self-contained houses of the London County Council and building companies which provide accommodation for the industrial classes. Sir Charles saw the abject and helpless condition of the people of London, and resolved, when he succeeded to office, to try and remedy the evils under which they laboured. His enthusiasm in the cause of the poor caught on, and in a short time "slumming" became a fashionable craze. Committees were formed—the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... light that surrounded them she could notice the color go out of his intent and puzzled face. From that moment, in some mysterious way, she lost the last shred of sympathy for his abject and isolated figure, and yet she was the one, she knew, who had ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... hazardous attempt with the Turks; it was successful, and since that time the necessary tragical dignity has been allowed to this barbarous people, among whom the customs and habits of the rudest despotism and the most abject slavery are often united in the same person, and nothing is known of love, but the most luxurious sensuality; while, on the other hand, it has been refused to the Europeans, notwithstanding that their religion, their sense of honour, and their respect ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... man per week. It does not change the character of the crime against these humble laborers, but it certainly enhances its degree that the law-makers of Alabama preferred an oppressive fraud to the honest payment of a consideration so small as to be almost nominal. A man must be in abject poverty when he is willing to work an entire week for a sum usually accorded in the Norther States for the labor of one day. But only a community blind to public justice and to public decency as well, could enact a law that in effect declares the poverty ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... The utter helplessness of the man; his abject and complete surrender to the demon which possessed him—all this appalled him. He had seen many drunken men in his time—roysterers and brawlers, most of them—but never one like Poe. The poet seemed to have lost his identity—nothing of the man of the world ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... received with great joy by the inhabitants, who had been in a state of abject terror. A runner, who was the bearer of a message to the rajah from the headman, had left on the morning after Harry's party had started; and had returned with the news that he had found the headless bodies of all the escort, but had seen no traces of ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... in short the burden of our obloquy, our failure, our resignation, our sacrifice of what we should have liked, even if it be a matter we scarce dare to so much as name to each other; and above all of our insufferable reputation for an abject meekness. We're really not meek a bit—we're secretly quite ferocious; but we're held to be ashamed of ourselves not only for our proved business incompetence, but for our lack of first-rate artistic power as well: it being now ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... especially to their workmen, who have hitherto borne their sufferings with extreme patience." The distress was aggravated by a bad harvest and a severe winter, all of which contributed to bring the productive classes of the community, and especially the lowest orders, into a state of abject misery. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... rage of the soldiers was suddenly appeased, and gave place to the most abject cowardice. Several threw themselves at our feet, and implored our pardon, which was instantly granted. Thinking that order was re-established, we returned to our station on the centre of the raft, only taking the precaution of keeping ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... forehead and glanced at the sun, burning hotly down upon the prairie. They had made a short move that day and it was still early. But the way to Nelson's and back had been hot and tumultuous and he was tired. For the first time since his abject surrender to the waxed smile, Happy Jack chafed a bit under the yoke of voluntary servitude. "Aw, can't yuh cook something that don't take so many eggs?" he asked in something like his ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... of beauty, attract you more and more, and often come back to you when the Sistine Madonna and the Virgins of Fra Angelico are forgotten. At first, contrasting them with those, you may have thought that there was something in them mean or abject even, for the abstract lines of the face have little nobleness, and the colour is wan. For with Botticelli she too, though she holds in her hands the "Desire of all nations", is one of those who are neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies; ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... is it possible that people possessed of such magnificence at home, could think of envying Carac'tacus a humble cottage in Britain!" 19. When he was brought before the emperor, while the other prisoners sued for pity with the most abject lamentations, Carac'tacus stood before the tribunal with an intrepid air, and though he was willing to accept of pardon, was not mean enough to sue for it. "If," said he, "I had yielded immediately, and without opposing ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... extended to the outer wall and was entered from the outside. If so, the person desiring to visit the estufa [kiva] would have to enter an aperture about 22 inches high by 30 wide and crawl in the most abject manner possible through a tube-like passageway nearly 20 feet in length. My first impression was that this peculiarly constructed doorway was a precaution against enemies and that it was probably the only means of entrance to the interior ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... none like him to trumpet about the streets the brave nature, the wise conduct, and great glory of the King Diabolus. He would range and rove throughout all the streets of Mansoul to cry up his illustrious Lord, and would make himself even as an abject, among the base and rascal crew, to cry up his valiant prince. And I say, when and wheresoever he found these vassals, he would even make himself as one of them. In all ill courses he would act without bidding, and do mischief ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... lion-tamer of twenty-one, who, without in the least wishing to do so, unconsciously even (she was the quietest of the party), had made the monarch of the forest crouch at her feet and gaze at her in abject humility? ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... snapping of twigs, and, to her horror, two tramps, with singularly sinister faces, sprang out, and were about to strike her with their bludgeons, when the dog, uttering a low, ominous growl, dashed at them. In an instant the expression of murderous joy in their eyes died out, one of abject terror took its place, and, dropping their weapons, they fled, as if the very salvation of their souls depended on it. As may be imagined, Miss Lefanu lost no time in getting home, and the first thing she did on arriving there was to go into the kitchen and order the cook ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... good of all creatures is considered to be truth. Virtue is thus perverted; mark thou its subtle ways. O best of virtuous men, man's actions are either good or bad, and he undoubtedly reaps their fruits. The ignorant man having attained to an abject state, grossly abuses the gods, not knowing that it is the consequence of his own evil karma. The foolish, the designing and the fickle, O good Brahmana, always attain the very reverse of happiness or misery. Neither learning nor good ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... wish to survive the moment when he could no longer serve it,—when he could no longer defend innocence against oppression? Wherefore should I continue in an order of things, where intrigue eternally triumphs over truth; where justice is mocked; where passions the most abject, or fears the most absurd, over-ride the sacred interests of humanity? In witnessing the multitude of vices which the torrent of the Revolution has rolled in turbid communion with its civic virtues, I confess that I have sometimes ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... this, and much more, did he deliver with abject humility to Ram Lal Singh, when that worthy appeared the next day to crave his mysterious patron's orders. It seemed a tough nut to crack, this tripartite ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... she has been fed a little and freed from fear. That fair type recovers itself very quickly. You won't know her in a week or two, when that abject fear has died out of her eyes. She'll be too happy and smiling for ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... castle, were traces that the family had fled with precipitation. Here was a bicycle leaning abject against a wall; there, an open book thrown on the floor; here, a fallen chair; there, a dropped ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... which judgment may be influenced by familiarity with perversions of the taxing power. And when we seek to reinstate the self-confidence and business enterprise of our citizens by discrediting an abject dependence upon governmental favor, we strive to stimulate those elements of American character which support the ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... the infuriated bull within a few yards was altogether too much for the tiger, which now turned and commenced to sneak off with astonishing rapidity, keeping completely out of the bison's sight, and looking like the most abject wretch imaginable. My goudas became frantic at this, and seeing that there was now no chance of a fight between the bull and the tiger, I rushed along the hill with the view of trying to get a good shot at the latter, but this I found would be impossible, so I rested my rifle on a ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... the population lives in abject poverty. Nearly 70% of all Haitians depend on the agriculture sector, which consists mainly of small-scale subsistence farming and employs about two-thirds of the economically active work force. The country has experienced little or no job creation since ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... they gave him, loathed it, paid and staggered on. When he reached his hotel he crept upstairs, dreading to meet any of the harsh-faced people who frowned as he passed them. He had done abject things these last three days to conciliate them—tipped the waiter, ordered food, not that he might eat it but that he might pay for it, bowed to the landlady—all to save the shrinking of his sore and quivering nerves. In vain! It seemed ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not have been entirely sincere—something had to be said for the Liberal Press tables, which cheered while the Imperialists sat glum; but there, I believe, lies the ultimate and only possible chance of hope. We must revolutionise our Governments; we must recognise the abject folly of allowing these vital questions of peace, war, and armaments to be decided according to the caprice or advantage of a single man, a clique of courtiers, a gang of adventurers, or the Cabal of a Cabinet ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... reserve, should any hour of forgetfulness hereafter come to him with the temptation to feel completely happy again. A feeling of outrage, of resentment against nature itself, mingled with an agony of pity, as he noted on the now placid features a certain look of humility, almost abject, like the expression of a smitten child or animal, as of one, fallen at last, after bewildering struggle, wholly under the power of a merciless adversary. From mere tenderness of soul he would not forget one circumstance in all that; as a man might piously ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... see a city given over, Soul and body, to a tyrannising game? If you would, there's little need to be a rover, For St. Andrews is the abject city's name.' ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... and we'll have no further trouble," remarked Rob, who had hard work to keep from laughing at the man's abject terror. ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... served. At breakfast one of the women, no longer quite young, advanced and publicly kissed Job. I think it was in its way the most delightful thing (putting its impropriety aside for a moment) that I ever saw. Never shall I forget the respectable Job's abject terror and disgust. Job, like myself, is a bit of a misogynist—I fancy chiefly owing to the fact of his having been one of a family of seventeen—and the feelings expressed upon his countenance when he realised that he was not only being embraced publicly, and without authorisation ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... personal safety. All of them were furious with the sculptor Hanel, who had never ceased insisting upon the expedience of bolting the house to prevent an entry of the revolutionaries. All the women without exception were joking about his abject terror at the sight of some men armed with scythes who had appeared in the street In this way Sunday passed like ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... steward, whom love and zealous affection to his master had led to seek him out at his wretched dwelling and to offer his services; and the first sight of his master, the once noble Timon, in that abject condition, naked as he was born, living in the manner of a beast among beasts, looking like his own sad ruins and a monument of decay, so affected this good servant that he stood speechless, wrapped up in horror and confounded. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... eyes were a soft shade of blue. His features were so finely cut and chiselled that they resembled some exquisite piece of statuary. He smiled as his nephew came slowly towards him. One might almost have fancied that the young man's abject state was a source ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... charitably released the almost dead tailor, and reproving him for his impertinence, declared if he ever again looked up at her balcony she would contrive his death. The tailor, perfectly cured of love for his superior in life, made the most abject submission, thanked her for his deliverance, hurried home, prayed heartily for his escape, and the very next day took care to move from so dangerous ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... these far-off latitudes, around the central luminaries? Have we not found, are we not still finding every day, that the brain-dizziness—Xenophon calls it kephalalgeia—induced by sudden promotion has transformed the abject suppliants at the Downing Street backstairs into the arrogant defiers of the opinions, and violators of the rights, of the populations whose subjection to the British Crown alone could have rendered ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... realm," said Munnich, with a smile. "Wait but a little, and you will soon see all the great nobility flocking here to pay you homage. My carriage stops before your door, and these sharp-scenting hounds now know which way to turn with their abject adoration." ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... myself under the bed-covers, in the most abject terror lest she might come back the same way; and, true enough, she did, with a most piercing cry. I never had much rest after that occurrence, as we had ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... tedious tale to relate all their follies, surrounded as they were by a bountiful nature and a kindly people, and yet soon reduced to abject want. In the party there were brawling soldiers and piratical sailors, with only a few quiet, decent artisans and shop-keepers, but with a swarm of reckless young nobles, who had nothing to recommend them but a long name, and who expected to prove themselves Pizarros in ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... immortal foes, which either party might violate at pleasure. 'Because the gods were wicked, man was religious; because Olympus was cruel, earth trembled; because the divine beings were the most lawless of Thugs, the human being became the most abject of sycophants.' Even in the most solemn mysteries no such thing as instruction was known—'the priest did not address the people at all.' Hence all moral theories, all doctrinal teaching was utterly disjoined ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... shrinking with every breath she draws, because she knows the very air she breathes comes to her over the lands of the Coal Barons—a haggard widow of the mines will be deprived of her miserable shelter, not fit for a beast of burden, by the richest coal corporation on earth. Why? Because her abject misery is a lesson too graphic in its horrible details to be constantly before the miners. Allowed to remain there, the widow will breed trouble among the men who are all risking their lives every ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... to his native State, wishing that he had the persuasive power of a Demosthenes to make his fellow citizens accept this proposition.[35] In 1779 Laurens said: "I would advance those who are unjustly deprived of the rights of mankind to a state which would be a proper gradation between abject slavery and perfect liberty, and besides I am persuaded that if I could obtain authority for the purpose, I would have a corps of such men trained, uniformly clad, equipped and ready in every respect to act at the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... Exchange, for whom he wrote prefaces, and other occasional pieces. But having, as Mr. Malone has observed, a patrimony, though a small one, of his own, it seems impossible that our author was ever in that state of mean and abject dependence, which the malice of his enemies afterwards pretended. The same malice misrepresented, or greatly exaggerated, the nature of Dryden's obligations to Sir Robert Howard, with whom he became acquainted probably about the ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... indifferent, irresolute manner. A man who would never get on in the world; but who would not hurt a worm. Indeed, his chambers were converted into a perfect dog-kennel, by his habit of bringing home stray and benighted curs, who were attracted by his looks in the street, and followed him with abject fondness. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... Cuba as yet contains only one forty-second part of the population of France; and one half of its inhabitants, being in the most abject indigence, consume but little. Its revenue is nearly equal to that of the Republic of Columbia, and it exceeds the revenue of all the custom-houses of the United States* before the year 1795, when that confederation had 4,500,000 ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... sympathy with it—that I shall always be. I don't know that I shall ever be ill-natured with old people—I hope not; there are certainly some old people I adore. But I shall never be anything but abject with the young; they touch me and appeal to me too much. I give you carte blanche then; you can even be impertinent if you like; I shall let it pass and horribly spoil you. I speak as if I were a hundred years old, you say? Well, I am, if you please; I ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... understand. The rumor reached Miss Lucy's ears and she and the Major had a spirited discussion that rather staggered Chad's kind-hearted companion. It reached the school, and a black-haired youngster, named Georgie Forbes, who had long been one of Margaret's abject slaves, and who hated Chad, brought out the terrible charge in the presence of a dozen school-children at noon-recess one day. It had been no insult in the mountains, but Chad, dazed though he was, knew it was meant for an insult, and his hard fist shot out promptly, landing in his ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... Peking, having sent word to Feyanku to pursue Galdan with unrelenting vigor, there being no security while he remained at large. The recent powerful chief was now at the end of his resources. He fled for safety from camp to camp. He sent an envoy to Peking with an abject offer to surrender. He made new overtures to the Russians, and sought in a dozen ways to escape from his implacable enemies. But Feyanku kept up the pursuit, ceasing only when word came to him that the fugitive was dead. Anxiety, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... feeling a kind of angry contempt for the magnificently dressed men who bowed down before this eastern potentate, and I believe I drew myself up stiffly in face of all this abject humility. I suppose it was pride—the pride of race; of one who knew that these were a conquered people, men of an old-world, barbaric civilisation, which had had to bow before the culture and advance of England; and in the midst of all the gorgeous ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... face. Yet he knew the man was of near kin to him. And to them he tried to speak. But it was useless. For now he was not Richard any more. He was not even Witherington, the crippled fighting-man of the Chevy Chase ballad. He was—he was the winged sea-gull, with wild, pale eyes, hiding—abject yet fierce—among the vegetable beds in the Brockhurst kitchen-gardens, and picking up loathsome provender of snails and slugs. Roger Ormiston, calm, able, kindly, yet just a trifle insolent, cigar in mouth, sauntered up and looked at the bird, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... changes into the court ceremonial. He surrounded himself with officials of foreign race, probably kinsmen of his mother, and required from them an open display of submission and servility which Egyptian courts had not witnessed previously. An abject prostration was enforced on all, while the king posed before his courtiers as a benevolent god, who showered down his gifts upon them from a superior sphere, since his greatness did not permit a closer contact. He was himself the ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... obtain such information from the natives as might assist our further proceedings. This was a tedious task, and called for the exercise of all our patience; for it is impossible to convey in language an adequate idea of the abject ignorance of most of the inhabitants of Central America concerning its geography and topographical features. Those who would naturally be supposed to be best informed, the priests, merchants, and lawyers, are really the most ignorant, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... administered, moreover, out of paternal affection by a spiritual father, whom it did not mis-become, to a son who was not dishonoured by receiving it. The unfortunate elector not only suffered in the ear, but was also obliged to make an abject apology, and to kiss the offender's feet before he was re-admitted to communion. At Maopongo the priests lost favour with the court and the women by whipping the queen, and, by the same process they abated the superhuman pretensions ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... repudiated. Baretti had then returned from living in London, where he had seen the prosperity of "the trade of an author" in days which we do not now think so very prosperous, and he viewed with open disgust the abject state of authorship in his own country. So there was nothing for Parini to do but to become a maestro in casa. With the Borromei he always remained friends, and in their company he went into society a good deal. Emiliani-Giudici supposes that he ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... since that August evening when, terrified by his brother's sudden and violent death, Edward Duke of York had dictated his will in terms of such abject penitence. The effect of that terror was wearing away. The unseen world, which had come very near, receded into the far distance; and the visible world returned to its usual prominence. And York's ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... fact. James Wilkinson, by birth a Marylander, came to Kentucky in 1784. He had done his duty respectably as a soldier in the Revolutionary War, for he possessed sufficient courage and capacity to render average service in subordinate positions, though at a later date he showed abject inefficiency as commander of an army. He was a good-looking, plausible, energetic man, gifted with a taste for adventure, with much proficiency in low intrigue, and with a certain address in influencing ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Josephine at a single bound spring toward the window. The young woman gazed steadily in front of her, her arms outstretched in a posture of horror. She seemed in a state of abject terror. There was no mistaking her motions. She was panic-stricken, panting, trembling in all her limbs. Juve, who lost no movement of the hapless woman, felt a cold sweat break out ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... garden with a police sergeant, and then to sit on his lap and weep. Yet this last I do not wholly believe, for the sergeant in question is a veteran scarcely able to put one foot before the other. Also, Jonah, though a brute, lives in abject fear ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... her on his knee, and whittle wonderful wooden dogs and dolls and boats and boxes for her with his jack-knife, as Walley Johnson and the others did. With Walley she would hardly condescend to coquet, so sure she was of his abject slavery to her whims; and, moreover, as must be confessed with regret, so unforgiving was she in her heart toward his blank eye. She merely consented to make him useful, much as she might a convenient and altogether doting but ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Jew-baiting folly is a phase of the same nonsense. It is foolish, because if the possession of capital is denied to the men who can best acquire and hence best continue to employ it, then commercial civilization must take a back seat—in fact, go, and go to stay; and this means abject poverty for everybody but a handful of state and church aristocrats. It is brutal, because it is unreasoning and mistakenly vindictive. It is the howl of the mentally weak—of the mob; and the ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... one resource: if I "didn't like it," meaning the state of things in Gombroon, I might "abdicate." Yes, I knew that. I might abdicate; and, once having cut the connection between myself and the poor abject islanders, I might seem to have no further interest in the degradation that affected them. After such a disruption between us, what was it to me if they had even three tails apiece? Ah, that was fine talking; but this connection with my poor subjects had grown up so slowly and so genially, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... a gray donkey came tearing down the beach. Max dressed as a farmer, with blue overalls and straw hat, was making a desperate effort to control the donkey, while Gwen in a chintz frock and pink sunbonnet sat close beside him, clinging to her seat in abject fear. ...
— Princess Polly At Play • Amy Brooks
... poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with 80% of the population living under the poverty line and 54% in abject poverty. Two-thirds of all Haitians depend on the agricultural sector, mainly small-scale subsistence farming, and remain vulnerable to damage from frequent natural disasters, exacerbated by the country's ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... King or Pope; he has placed himself above law, and substituted his own will for justice. With his pen, as Cellini with his dagger, he assassinates; his cynicism serves him for a coat of armour. And so abject is society, so natural has tyranny become, that he extorts blackmail from monarchs, makes princes tremble, and receives smooth answers to his insults from Buonarroti. These three men, Machiavelli, Cellini, and Aretino, each in his own line, and ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... by (for there is quite a little menagerie here) are three small Sapajous, {90} two of which belong to the island; as abject and selfish as monkeys usually are, and as uninteresting; save for the plain signs which they give of being actuated by more than instinct,—by a 'reasoning' power exactly like in kind, though not equal in degree, to that of man. If, as people are now ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... was lost in the general gloom. He carefully avoided looking at the bride, fearing perhaps some appeal on her part such as would make his situation perplexing. Contempt and poverty had brought his stamp of clergymen very low, and rendered them abject. He had been taken by surprise, and though assured that this was according to my Lady's will, and with the consent of the maiden's father, he was in an agony of fright, shifting awkwardly from leg to leg, and ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... there—were commingled in utter, distracted confusion; a heaving, surging herd of humanity, smitten with a very frenzy of fright and despair, every sense of manly pride, of honor, and duty, completely paralyzed, and dead to every feeling save the most abject, pitiful terror. A number of officers could be distinguished amid the tumult, performing, with violent gesticulations, the pantomimic accompaniments of shouting incoherent commands, mingled with threats and entreaties. There ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... thankful to admit that this is so. Yet scarcely a year passes without some part of India suffering severely from partial droughts. Only last year hundreds of poor starving wretches, crowded into Bombay from Kattiyawar, and were for weeks encamped on the Esplanade, an abject multitude, dependent on the charity of the rich. And yet it was "no famine" that had driven them hundreds of miles from their ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... these individuals stand out in bold relief, either singly or in groups upon the stage, while the emperor forms the principal figure, and the moral sense of the reader is awakened to admire instances of patient suffering and determined bravery, or to witness abject ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... supremacy of the mother country. The Banner is astonished by the unblushing avowal of these doctrines, which had not been so openly proclaimed since the days of "High Church and Sacheverell," and which if acted upon would reduce the people to the level of abject slaves. Whence, it asks, comes this doctrine of the irresponsibility of kings? "It has been dug up from the tombs of Roman Catholic and High Church priests and of Jacobite bigots. Wherever it gets a footing it carries bloodshed and persecution in its train. It cramps the freedom of thought. ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... the Indies, and of his shoes that were all to pieces, and of his hose that were all in tatters, he told her in a tone that would have become the Sieur de Chatillon, that he was minded to rehabit her and put her in trim, and raise her from her abject condition, and place her where, though she would not have much to call her own, at any rate she would have hope of better things, with much more to the like effect; which professions, though made with every appearance of good will, proved, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... I ever wanted to send flowers to," he said presently; and added with abject infelicity: ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... the three first cases are not strictly analogous to that of our West Indian slaves, whose emancipation we are seeking. It will be contended, that the slaves in our West Indian colonies have been constantly in an abject and degraded state. Their faculties are benumbed. They have contracted all the vices of slavery. They are become habitually thieves and liars. Their bosoms burn with revenge against the whites. How then can persons in such a state ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... expand, reflecting the greater use of modern farming techniques and improved seed that have helped to make India self-sufficient in food grains and a net agricultural exporter. However, tens of millions of villagers, particularly in the south, have not benefited from the green revolution and live in abject poverty. Industry has benefited from a liberalization of controls. The growth rate of the service sector ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... letter she had written telling him all about her meetings with Mr. Hayne,—he had written again and again, reproaching himself for his doubts and fears, begging her forgiveness for having written and telegraphed to Kate, humbling himself before her in the most abject way, and imploring her to reconsider her determination and to let him write to Captain and Mrs. Rayner to return to their Eastern home at once, that the marriage might take place forthwith and he could bear her away to Europe in May. Letter after letter came, eager, ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... Spanish Government is famous; the resources of the countries had been crippled in order that each day's greed might be satisfied; and the inhabitants, who, for the most part, were the mixed offspring of Spanish and native parents, had been kept in abject dependence and in ignorant ferocity. There was plenty of internal hatred and strife; but no serious thought of winning their liberty and working out their own regeneration seems to have existed among the people of the several provinces, until it was suggested by the triumphant success ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... the world is judged by you, are you unworthy of the lowest courts? [6:3]Know you not that we shall judge angels? Much more then things pertaining to this life? [6:4]If then you have courts for the business of this life, do you constitute them of the most abject in the church? [6:5]I speak to your shame. Is there not now a wise man among you? not one who can judge between his brothers? [6:6]But brother goes to law with brother, and that before unbelievers. [6:7]Now therefore there is a great fault among you, that you go to law one with another. Why not rather ...
— The New Testament • Various
... acted wilfully, deliberately, and with her object clearly conceived before she began, she could not have achieved any greater success; for Malster was her abject slave. Jealous of every look or word she vouchsafed to another, hating even the kitten that her rosy well-made fingers clasped, literally ill away from her presence, and thrilled almost painfully by the sound of her voice when she returned, the whole of Brineweald ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... desire, I saw Xerxes and his army, tossed and glittering, rank upon rank, multitude upon multitude, out of sight, but ever regularly advancing, and with confused roar of ceaseless music, prostrating themselves in abject homage. Or, as with arms outstretched and hair streaming on the wind, he chanted full lines of the resounding Iliad, I saw Homer pacing the Aegean sands of the Greek sunsets of ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... and the deep sea of the predatory landlord, each intent upon taking from him the limit that the law allows and giving him as little as possible for his money. Going down the scale of indigence we find an itinerancy amounting almost to homelessness, or houses so abject that they are an insult to the very name ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... can befall any man whatsoever; for it not only leaves him little better than the beasts which perish, exposed to a thousand inconveniences against which there is no guard but that of a clear and unbiased reason, but it renders him also base and abject when under misfortunes, the sport and contempt of that wicked and debauched part of the human species who are apt to scoff at despairing misery, and to add by their insults to the miseries of those who sink under ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... prison, grew pale, and left the room. Smollett and Carlyle then walked home through secluded streets, and were silent, lest their speech should bewray them for Scots. "John Bull," quoth Smollett, "is as haughty and valiant to-day, as he was abject and cowardly on the Black Wednesday when the Highlanders were ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... million gulden to get rid of them. These were the conditions under which Hoelderlin grew up into young manhood. But deeper than in the mere existence of these conditions themselves lay the cause of the poet's most abject humiliation and grief. It was the stoic indifference, the servile submission with which he charged his compatriots, that called forth his bitterest invectives upon their insensible heads. His own words will serve best to show ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... are much like feral dogs and wolves in their habits. Their quarrels are incessant; but when a fight begins, the head of the pack as a rule rushes to the spot, whereupon the fighters separate and march off in different directions or else cast themselves down and deprecate their tyrant's wrath with abject gestures and whines. If the combatants are both strong and have worked themselves into a mad rage before their head puts in an appearance, it may go hard with him; they know him no longer and all he can do ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... doctrine, And that the faultes which be in them alone, And be common in other men eche one. Thus bide good poetes oft time rebuke and blame, Because of other which haue despised name. And thus for the bad the good be cleane abject. Their art and poeme counted of none effect, Who wanteth reason good to discerne from ill Doth worthy writers interprete at his will: So both the laudes of good and not laudable For ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... vainly lied; the steadfast friend has betrayed his neighbor, the just person has oppressed him. This is the fruitful moment, apparently so sterile, in which character may spring and flower anew; but the mood of abject humility in which the theorist of his own character is plunged and struggles for his lost self- respect is full of deceit for others. It cannot last: it may end in disowning and retrieving the error, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... in the development of the middle class extends from 1700 to the Revolution. It is marked by a split in the class, some of the small planters becoming wealthy, others failing to advance in prosperity, while still others degenerated, falling into abject poverty. This was almost entirely the result of the substitution of slave labor for the labor of the indentured servant. The importation of negroes had begun early in the 17th century, but for many years their numbers were so few that the vast bulk of the work in the fields ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... rejected, and supplications which are scorned? Shake off this weakness, Alice, and be yourself again. Once you had pride enough, and a little of it would now be of service to you. You would then see the folly of this abject conduct—humbling yourself to the dust only to be spurned, and suing for mercy only to be derided. Pray as loud and as long as you will, the ears of Heaven will ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was stiff and stately in her manner, and uttered, with the proudest mien, words expressive only of the most abject humility. "If her fair sister would come and see her at her poor house at Kennington, she would be right glad of so great honour." Margery replied courteously, but she had no desire to see much ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... off. Faster ... with an amorous mumble soothing him and the hurt. After all, was it so important? Yes ... no. Forgive himself, but not too quickly. He walked.... Words made circles in his head—abject and sorrowful circles about the dream of the ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
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