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More "Lurid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... here go ironed every day. Away on the horizon westwards is the black line of pine forests, in whose shadows is night everlasting. A wolf howls beneath my window every night, and for months I have seen no colour save in an occasionally lurid sunset with crimson afterglow. In the daytime I help in the hospital—at night I sit before a wood fire and look out beyond my whitewashed walls across the mighty forest, back to London, and then, dear, you may know that it is you of whom ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... roof of some temple that they now moved; instead of the bed of glowing flowers from which he was about to pluck an offering for her bosom, an altar rose, from the centre of which upsprang a quick and lurid tongue of fire. The dreamer gazed upon his companion, and her form was tinted with the dusky hue of the flame, and she held to her countenance a scarf, as if pressed by the unnatural heat. Great fear suddenly came over him. With haste, yet with tenderness, he himself withdrew ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... something into the kettle, and fill it with water. Then he put charcoal into the oven, kindled it, and blew it laboriously with his mouth until it became red-hot. This flameless fire did not tend much to enlighten surrounding objects; it merely added to them a lurid tinge of red. The operator's face, being close in front of the fire as he blew, seemed almost as hot as ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... certain amount of consent to his abductions—he had left the real for the chimerical; the true for the false; Dea for Josiana; love for pride; liberty for power; labour proud and poor for opulence full of unknown responsibilities; the shade in which is God for the lurid flames in which the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... broken into thousands of confused shapes, but none, Hans thought, like the ordinary forms of splintered ice. There seemed a curious expression about all their outlines,—a perpetual resemblance to living features, distorted and scornful. Myriads of deceitful shadows and lurid lights played and floated about and through the pale blue pinnacles, dazzling and confusing the sight of the traveller; while his ears grew dull and his head giddy with the constant gush and roar ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... the chasms strangely gleams, A lurid light, like dawn's red glow, Pervading with its quivering beams, The gorges of the gulf below! Here vapours rise, there clouds float by, Here through the mist the light doth shine; Now, like a fount, it bursts on high, Meanders now, a slender line; Far reaching, with a hundred ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... room, which, when the dark, high-ceilinged hall was entered, revealed depths of dingy gloom which appeared splashed in spots with incongruous brilliancy of color. This effect was produced by richly framed department-store chromo lithographs on the walls, aided by lurid cushion-covers, or "tidies" representing Indian maidens or chieftains in full war paint, or clusters of poppies of great boldness of hue. They had either been Christmas gifts bestowed upon Mrs. Bowse or department-store bargains of her own selection, purchased ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... impulse sent a rare, faint flush to the olive cheeks, and filled the uplooking clear eyes with light. This purple-clad shape, with fiery nasturtiums burning on the breast and filling the air with their peculiar odor, with the barbaric splendor of tiger lilies reflecting their lurid glare about her as she stood, bore no more likeness to the ordinary haughty woman than fire to snow. He would have liked to have crowned her with pomegranate blossoms—have dropped the silvery sheen of ermine under her feet, and have knelt there ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... completely to black thoughts. He recalled his words to her, uttered years ago, half in jest and half in earnest; he had horrified her beyond expression by telling her how he would punish a wife if he were the husband she deceived. With a grim, lurid smile he remembered the penalty. He had said he would not kill; he would disfigure the woman frightfully and permit her to live as a moral example to other wives. Slitting her mouth from ear to ear or cutting off her nose—these were two ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... we find new charms in after making her mother's acquaintance. You know how some young people would be passable enough if it were not for a lurid light thrown upon their identity by other members of their family. You know the sister you thought was a beauty and dear, until you met her sister, who was gristly and a jade. But it's a great shame in Tishy's case, because we do honestly believe her seeming da capo ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... along a moment in silence. All about us the lurid special editions of the afternoon were flaunting their predictions of the horror to come. The face ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... day by day A smouldering flame, a lurid crimson creeps Into the ashy whiteness of her cheeks, And burns her ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... him a salary, and had taken another tutor for Zyozya.... Fofa had been sent to a school of cadets. Avenir was sitting near the window in an old easy-chair. It was exquisite weather. The clear autumn sky was a bright blue above the dark-brown line of bare limes; here and there a few last leaves of lurid gold rustled and whispered about them. The earth had been covered with frost, now melting into dewdrops in the sun, whose ruddy rays fell aslant across the pale grass; there was a faint crisp resonance in the air; the voices of the labourers in the garden reached us clearly and ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... less pitiful than either were greedily enjoying it, that suddenly the ground trembled violently. This perhaps was not perceived in the circus, on account of the excitement all were in, and the noise that was going on in the arena. But it was soon followed by a whirlwind of ashes, and lurid flashes of flame darted across the sky. The beasts were instantly tamed, and cowered down in abject terror, and the gladiators, for the first time in their lives, grew pale with fear. Then the startled crowd within the vast building heard from the streets the fearful cry: "Vesuvius is on fire!" ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... his big guns flashing their defiant answer to Beauregard's batteries. Jennie watched the lurid track of his ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... hawk-moth, feeds as a rule on the foliage of the potato, and its very varied colouring, as Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, so beautifully harmonises with the brown of the earth, the yellow and green of the leaves, and the faint purplish blue of the lurid flowers, that it can only be distinguished when the eye happens accidentally to focus itself exactly upon the spot occupied by the unobtrusive caterpillar. Other larvae which frequent pine trees ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... who choked on his food. He instinctively guessed the worst, and saw his home in lurid ruin about him, but was powerless to ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... recognition of American independence could allay. Associations formed throughout the whole length and breadth of America, by the exertions of the assembly of Massachusets Bay, stirred up and kept alive the flame of discord, and occasion need but fan it, and it would kindle into a blaze; the lurid glare of which would be seen burning brightly, and raging furiously across the wide Atlantic. The proceedings in America were but as yet, in truth, the warnings of a terrible commotion—the first intimations of an irruption, more frightful ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... him. He is not, however, as you suppose, dizzy with magnificence, nor drunk with the ecstatic breath of those innumerable censers. C'est vrai que de toutes ces choses il a pense beaucoup—mais! The Duc De L'Omelette is terror-stricken; for, through the lurid vista which a single uncurtained window is affording, lo! gleams the most ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... swimming strongly—and after a time a lurid flash of lightning showed him a black mass of trees close ahead. They vanished, the succeeding darkness was impenetrable, and the crash of thunder was deadened by the roar of water. For a moment or two ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... sympathy with Mont Pelee in 1902, and continued restless after that time, but it was not until about the middle of February, 1906, that it became threatening, lava beginning to overflow from the crater and make its lurid way ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... it really meant. He started in the New England ministry a strenuous speculation, which was not to rest till it destroyed the foundation from which he worked. The hell as to which comfortable churchmen were getting silent, he painted in such lurid colors that reaction and ultimate revolt were necessities of human nature. The life of holiness and love—in himself a most genuine reality—he defined in such terms of introspection and self-consciousness, that there opened a wide gulf between ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... evening sacrifice begun, When evil demons, lurid as the clouds That gather round the dying orb of day, Cluster in hideous troops, obscene and dread, About our altars, casting far and near Terrific shadows, while the sacred fire Sheds a pale ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... between brother and sister after they had penetrated the woods a considerable distance on their return home. It had become like night around them, except that, as has been shown, the gloom was of that peculiar lurid nature which can hardly be described, and can never be forgotten by those ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... lurking in the light, He ventures forth along the edge of night; With silent foot he scouts the coulie's rim And scents the carrion awaiting him. His savage eyeballs lurid with a flare Seen but in unfed beasts which leave their lair To wrangle with their fellows for a meal Of bones ill-covered. Sets he forth to steal, To search and snarl and forage hungrily; A worthless prairie vagabond ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... goin' to lose any dollars unless he has to," said McGinnis. "I don't think you need to be afraid of that." Then, following along the train of thought that had been suggested, he told the boy some lurid stories of life in the lumber camps of Michigan and Wisconsin in the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... And of all the poems published in the early days of the struggle, none equalled in high excellence August 1914, by John Masefield. And its tone was precisely the opposite of what his most famous efforts had led us to expect. It was not a lurid picture of wholesale murder, nor a bottle of vitriol thrown in the face of the Kaiser. After the thunder and the lightning, came the still small voice. It is a poem in the metre and manner of Gray, with the same silver tones of twilit peace—heartrending ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... glowed, As thro' the whirling gloom she rode, Her laboring breath drawn sharply in; Pitted against yon rushing wheels Were tireless grit and trusty heels, And with God's favor they might win! And soon along the perilous line Flamed out the lurid warning sign, While round her staggering horse the crowd Surged with wild cheers and plaudits loud.— And this is how, thro' flood and rain, Brave ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... There's a phrase I noticed in that rather lurid magazine Bud brought me two or three weeks ago." Her eyes twinkled. "'Cave-man stuff,' I think it was." Coming from her lips the words had an oddly bizarre sound. "It seemed descriptive. Of course one ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... blazing! He's having one, Hegio! See how his whole body is covered with lurid spots? It's black fury ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... kings' mistresses, and Dr. Warners were kissing the shoebuckles of great ladies for sheer love of their faces, plastered red and white, The parasites of the Manx clergy were not far behind some of their English brethren. There is a story told of their life among themselves which casts lurid light on their character and ways of life. It is said that two of the Vicars-general summoned a large number of the Manx people to Bishop's Court on some business of the spiritual court, Many of the people ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... his letters. This brief passage touches the sublime. The hunters enter, and from the moment Wolfram begins his really beautiful song about Elisabeth, it remains on Wagner's highest level. The finale is a set piece, of course, and is in free and joyous contrast to the lurid heat and sensual abandonment of the first scene. While the trees wave in the wind and the sun shines, the men shout merrily, and the huntsmen blow away at their horns—and Tannhaeuser has returned to his ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... been a scene in hell with the Motombo playing the part of Satan. Indeed, his swollen, diabolical figure supported on the thin, toad-like legs, the great fires burning on either side, the lurid lights of evening reflected from the still water beyond and glowering among the tree tops of the mountain, the white-robed forms of the tall Pongo, bending, every one of them, towards the wretched culprit ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... conflagration of the headsman's house must be numbered among the finest passages that have ever flowed from Jokai's pen. But the mild, idyllic strain, so characteristic of Jokai, who is nothing if not romantic, runs through the sombre and lurid tableau like a bright silver thread, and the denouement, in which all enmities are reconciled, all evil-doers are punished, and Gentleness and Heroism receive their retributive crowns, is a singularly ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... sunshine, the fly bouncing up and down the little window, the movements of the cat, who, rising from her nap, stretched every limb separately, yawned, lazily lapped at her saucer of milk, and then, seating herself in the patch of lurid sunshine, with her tail curled round her fore-paws, blinked drowsily for a few minutes, and then dozed ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... overblows itself. My spent passions gradually sunk into a lurid calm; and by degrees I have subsided into the time-settled sorrow of the sable-widower, who, wiping away the decent tear, lifts up his grief-worn eye ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... oars; swung until every muscle in the young Easterner's back had turned to live nerve-fiber, and the flesh had begun to strip from the palms of his hands. Even so, the hardy captain had done most of the work. Aided by the current, they turned the shoulder of the Cocopah range as the dawn shone lurid in the east, and the captain swung the boat's head to the southern shore of the lake. Meantime, between spells at the oars, Average Jones had outlined the case in full to Funcke. He could have ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of Allan's tongue. At the very instant, however, when he opened his lips, the abhorrent high tenor of Pedgift Junior, shouting for "Mr. Armadale," rang cheerfully through the quiet air. At the same moment, from the other side of the carriage, the lurid spectacles of the Reverend Samuel showed themselves officiously on the search; and the voice of the Reverend Samuel's mother (who had, with great dexterity, put the two ideas of the presence of water ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... time, Lord Geoffrey, who had seated himself at the tiller,—yoke-lines were not used a century since,—steered by the top-light of the rear-admiral; but now the maze of hamper was seen waving slowly to and fro in the lurid heavens, and the huge hull became visible, heaving and setting, as if the ocean groaned with the labour of lifting such a pile of wood and iron. A light gleamed from the cabin-windows, and ever and anon, one glanced athwart an open gun-room port. In all other respects, the ship presented ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... rain awnings are spread, and we can have no wind sails up; if we could, there is not a breath of wind to fill them; and consequently the lower and main decks are utterly unventilated: a sort of solution of man in steam fills them from end to end, and surrounds the lights with a lurid halo. It's too hot to sleep, and my sole amusement consists in watching the cockroaches, which are in a state of intense excitement and happiness. They manifest these feelings in a very remarkable manner—a sudden unanimous impulse seems to seize the obscene thousands ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... all yelling fearfully. On streamed the living mass; closer and closer they approached, till their faces were distinctly visible. They carried with them a hideous burden—a swathed and ghastly corpse, the rigid features of which looked ghastlier still in the lurid glare of the torch-light! This they flung, with frantic gestures, from one to another, receiving it in their arms with a yell and a scream, gibbering in fiendish glee, and dancing and whirling about. Sickening ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... familiar with the facts in the case, that a powerful confederacy of warlike Indians, after years of secret preparation, had made a sudden and bold descent upon the state of Illinois, and were about to carry war and desolation throughout the frontiers—to make the heavens lurid with the conflagration of dwelling houses, and the air resonant with the wails of women and children sinking beneath the murderous tomahawk: and, that this banded horde of northern savages, had been successfully met, captured or dispersed, by the patriotism, valor and ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... made dark blots of foliage. Nantbrook seemed unreal, a place of thin shadow, the future unsubstantial as well; only the past was actual in Lemuel Doret's mind—the gray cold prison, the city at night, locked rooms filled with smoke and lurid lights, avaricious voices in the mechanical sentences of gambling, agonized tones begging for a shot, just a shot, of an addicted ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... communication with each other, or with those who could form any rational estimate of the probabilities of our destiny; no officials appeared; the ordinary invariable routine of the steward department was suspended without notice; the sounds were tremendous, and a hot lurid obscurity filled the atmosphere. Soon after four the clamour increased, and the shock of a sea blowing up a part of the fore-guards made the groaning fabric reel and shiver throughout her whole huge bulk. At that time, by common consent, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... there was to be enacted a rapid drama of material progress such as the world has never elsewhere seen; but first there must be played the wild prologue of the West, never at any time to have a more lurid scene than here at the Halfway House of a continent, at the intersection of the grand transcontinental trails, the bloody angle of the plains. Eight men in a day, a score in a week, met death by violence. The street in the cemetery ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... a subject (in case I should unhappily be called on to occupy your attention for a moment), I had thought on offering a few observations upon Plymouth Rock; but I was deterred by a weird and lurid announcement which I saw in your papers, appearing in connection with the name of an eminent clothing dealer, which led me to apprehend that Plymouth Rock was getting tired. [Laughter.] The announcement read, "Plymouth Rock pants!" I presumed that ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... worse, for I have walked to look at them, or rather hopped, leaning on the shoulder of a very sniffy Swazi boy. Do you know, old fellow, I believe there never were any Basutos; also that the venerable Marnham and the lurid Rodd had no real existence, that they were but illusions, a prolonged nightmare—no more. Here is your shirt. I am sorry that I have not had time to wash it, but it has cooked well in the sun, which, being flannel, is ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... not hear, or, hearing, paid no heed. He was at the second floor, the evil-smelling smoke thick about him, blinding his eyes and smarting his throat. Above him was a strange lurid glare and the roaring of the flames. For a moment his heart failed him and he leaned weak and panting against the banister. Then a ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... lamp on the wall in front of Hilma stretched upward tall and thin and began to smoke. She went over to where the lamp hung and, standing on tip-toe, lowered the wick. As she reached her hand up, Annixter noted how the sombre, lurid red of the lamp made a warm reflection on ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... clouds of flame color hung above the dark summits of the mountain, and the reflected light turned the ghostly dwellings to a place of blood-tinged mystery. More than one of the adventurers crossed themselves. Don Ruy said it looked, in the lurid glow, ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... and yet this idealistic interpretation would falsify the true motives on both sides. The crowd went because it found the satisfaction of sexual curiosity and erotic tension through the unveiled discussion of social perversities. And the managers produced the plays because the lurid subjects with their appeal to the low instincts, and therefore with their sure commercial success, could here escape the condemnation of police and decent public as they were covered by the pretence of social reform. How far the writers of the play of prostitution prostituted ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... created them to lie securely in their shells, or deep in the caverns of the earth; for the rivers to wash them with sweet waters or the lurid fire to shape them in the bowls of the mountains. The beauties given us to enjoy are those upon which our eyes may light in the woodlands or from the heights—the glory of the sunset, the stillness of the sea, the thousand Hues of a garden of flowers, or the cascade as ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... friend, do keep up a correspondence with one or more; or if it were possible for you, with several. I know by a little what your sufferings are, and that to shut the eyes, and stop up the ears, is to give one's self up to storm and darkness, and the lurid forms and horrors of a dream. I scarce know why it is; a feeling I have, and which I can hardly understand. I could not endure to live if I had not a firm faith that the life within you will pass forth out of the furnace, ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... before another word was spoken, during which period the men had been rowing hard, and the boatswain, who had got hold of the rudder-lines, was steering almost at random for the shore, taking his bearings as well as he could from the gunboat, out of whose funnel sparks kept flying, and a lurid glare appeared upon the cloud of smoke which floated out, pointing to the fact that the ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... and seldom allowed anyone to interrupt him. Some man, who was greatly disgusted over one of Greeley's editorials, climbed up to his sanctum, and as soon as his head showed above the railing, he began to rave and rage, using the most lurid style of profanity. It seemed as if he never would stop, but at last, utterly exhausted and out of breath and all used up, he waited ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... condition when Clarence Weston crawled out of the swamp one evening and sat down on a cedar log before he followed his comrades up the track, though he supposed that supper would shortly be laid out in the sleeping-shanty. The sunlight that flung lurid flecks of color upon the western side of the fir trunks beat upon his dripping face, which, though a little worn and grim just then, was otherwise a pleasant face of the fair English type. In fact, though he had been some years in the country, Englishman was unmistakably ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... obscure, and in the Old Testament altogether unique. Contemporary historical facts are seen now in the lurid light of fear, more often in the more brilliant light of eschatological hopes. In ch. xxiv. a great catastrophe is impending. The world is weary, and joy has vanished. The city (Jerusalem?) is desolate. Something has happened to revive Jewish hopes and kindle high expectations as to the ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... islands between Loo-Choo and Japan appear to be volcanic, and at certain seasons of the year they break out in a similar manner to those which we saw. At noon the smoke from the large volcano became lurid; but whether this was the breaking out into flame, or from the rays of the sun pouring down upon the smoke, it was impossible to say, as we were then several miles off. During the whole of the following ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... death, and in an universal tremor. The women who were with her said she had been so outrageous before our going, that they thought a man must be sent for to manage her. However, after a serious time with her, her troubled soul became calmed." Another entry in the same journal casts a lurid light upon the interior of Newgate. "Besides this poor young woman, there are also six men to be hanged, one of whom has a wife near her confinement, also condemned, and seven young children. Since the awful report came down he has become quite ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... by Ditton Green, off the heathy commons, past the poor, scattered farms, on to the vast rushy meadows, while upon them was the dull weight of disappointment, shame, all but despair; their race enslaved, their country a prey to strangers, and all its future, like their own, a lurid blank,—little they dreamed of what that vale would be within eight hundred years,—the eye of England, and it may be of the world; a spot which owns more wealth and peace, more art and civilization, more beauty ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... gave evidence with as much confidence as though he had been talking with his Marfa, only perhaps more respectfully. It was impossible to make him contradict himself. The prosecutor questioned him first in detail about the family life of the Karamazovs. The family picture stood out in lurid colors. It was plain to ear and eye that the witness was guileless and impartial. In spite of his profound reverence for the memory of his deceased master, he yet bore witness that he had been unjust to Mitya and "hadn't brought up his children as he should. He'd have been devoured ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... investing self-government with something of the menace of independence, and treating the responsibility they sought in the most irresponsible way. The British theory, too, as guaranteeing a definitely British predominance in Canada, brought into rather lurid relief the mistaken fervour ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... dead; the everlasting roar of the surf was gone; and the only noise was the crashing of the branches snapped by the weight of the clammy dust. About one o'clock the veil began to lift, a lurid sunlight stared in from the horizon, but all was black overhead. Gradually the dust-cloud drifted away; the island saw the sun once more, and saw itself inches deep in black, and ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... and drinking that frightful pledge to meet them all again in one hundred years. Had he kept his appointment already? He would have a long while to wait. The act had seemed to him nothing, the recollection of it now made him shudder. All at once, the scene stood out to him in a lurid light, and through this he seemed to see a horror in Elizabeth Royal's face. For one moment the whirl of anguish and remorse blinded him. The next, that Archdale pride, so grand in a worthy cause, so fatal when in the hands of caprice and passion, was driving ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... light. In a very few minutes the terrible truth flashed upon the mind of Glenn. The dim light along the horizon was changed to an approaching flame. Columns of smoke could be seen rolling upward, while the fire beneath imparted a lurid glare to them. The wind blew more fiercely, and the fire approached from almost every quarter with the swiftness of a race-horse. The darkened vault above became gradually illuminated with a crimson ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... the dense obscurity and murky shadow of the heaven above; the long, heavy roll of the convulsed sea; the strident noise of the vapors and gases escaping from the mountain-crater; the shifting electric lights, crimson, emerald green, lurid yellow, azure, blood red, which at intervals relieved the blackness, only to make it ghastlier than before; the hot, hissing showers which descended like a rain of fire; the clash and clang of meeting rocks and riven stones; the burning ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... went down in a bank of lurid fire, and the Bridget was still a mile from the ship. A new apprehension now came over our hermit. Should a tempest bring the wind violently from the westward, as was very likely to be the case under ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... turned toward the lurid south. The air was very still. From away down the river sounded the bells of Lambeth Church, their volleying clang softened by distance to a monotonous refrain, drearily at one with the sadness of the falling night. Warburton heard them, yet heard ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... burning fiercely under the beautiful land. No spectacle could have been more sublime than that which the Roman Campagna presented at this period, when no less than ten volcanoes were in full or intermittent action, and poured their clouds of smoke and flame into the lurid sky all around the horizon. Up to the foot of the mountains the sea covered the vast plain; and the action of these waves of fire and steaming floods forms a natural epic of the grandest order. Prodigious quantities of ashes and cinders were discharged ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... gazed, the sun went lurid down Into the smoke-wrapt sea, and night came on. But through the dark they watched the burning ship Still carried o'er the distant waters.... But fainter, as the stars rose high, it flared; And as, in a decaying winter fire, A charr'd ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... Rose, and yet the undertone of all that night's uneasiness was a something that had been roused and quickened in him by his acquaintance with her. How he loathed himself for the last few weeks of his life! How he loathed that hot, lurid, murky atmosphere of flirtation and passion and French sentimentality in which he had been living!—atmosphere as hard to draw healthy breath in as the odor of wilting tuberoses the day ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... chances of coming up with the Indian were few did not deter the cattleman; the obscurity of night on the desert did not give him halt or hesitation. The name of his wrath burned high and hot in his brain and in its lurid light he saw his desire fulfilled. Had one tried at the moment to reason with him, Howard would have cursed him and gone on. His anger had spurted up in a brain already mad with the ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... size of two full moons, and a dozen, and a hundred, and a thousand. Still black, still noiseless, still revolving slowly, like a tardy but certain doom. Then a quarter of the leaden space was filled with their gigantic bodies, and the lurid air was darker. Then a half of the heavens was blotted out; She grew faint and sick, as she moved her head to the right and left, and up and down, and watched the dizzy revolutions of those vast ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... looked at his watch. Eight o'clock. The great street was ablaze. The crowds were parading from the restaurants to the theaters. The electric signs were pasting lurid legends on a long suffering sky; the taxis were spraying throats with gasoline; the traffic cop at Broadway and Forty-second Street was madly earning his pay. Mr. Magee got up and walked the floor. ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... occurrences attending the flurries of last autumn in the money markets, when half a dozen men, in order to obtain control of certain railways, entered into a conspiracy that came near wrecking the entire industrial and commercial interests of the country, having shed a lurid light upon the enormous and baleful power which the corporate control of the railways places in the hands of what Theodore Roosevelt aptly termed "the dangerous wealthy classes," has had the effect of converting to the advocacy of national ownership not only ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... floating of ships, and the near wading of children through the surf. Endless trains of thoughts, like little waves, rippled forward and broke on the shore of her drowsiness. But each thought-ripple, though it ran lightly, was tinged with copper-coloured gleams as from a lurid sunset. Helena felt that the sun was setting on her and Siegmund. The hour was too composed, spell-bound, for grief or anxiety or even for close perception. She was merely aware that the sun was wheeling down, tangling Siegmund and her in the traces, like overthrown ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... the florid face of a hunter's moon looked down, from the level line of a leaden cloud, which striped the star emblazoned shield of night, like a bar sinister; and the white lustre of her rays was dimmed to a lurid dulness solemn and presageful. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... war-clad steed That prances o'er the mead, And neighs to be among the pointed spears— Or in black armour stalk around Embattled Bristol, once thy ground, Or haunt with lurid glow the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... plainly showed seemed to gather about the injury done and the appeal of Ibycus. The earlier Ibycus had not seemed greatly to interest him. Strickland was used to stormy youth, to its passional moments, sudden glows, burnings, sympathies, defiances, lurid shows of effects with the causes largely unapparent. It was his trade to know youth, and he had a psychologist's interest. He said now to himself, "There is something in his character that connects itself with, that responds to, the idea of vengeance." There ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... the Squire promptly, and then drew a lurid picture of a place delivered over entirely to the hovels of nameless people of the lower middle classes, and worse, a place in which you would be as effectually cut off from your fellows as if you went to live in Kamschatka. ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... the change. She looked in the glass and was astonished at her beauty. She resolved to make her death toilet perfect. She took off her handkerchief turban and dressed her glossy wealth of hair "like white folks"; she added some odds and ends of rather lurid ribbon and a spray of atrocious artificial flowers; finally she threw over her shoulders a fluffy thing called a "cloud" in that day, which was of a blazing red complexion. Then she was ready for ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... turned my eyes from the terrible pomp of the lurid forest, and looked fearfully down on the hoof-trampled sward for my ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... down, and he blows—and blows,— While I drum on his swollen cheek, And croak in his angered eye that glows With the lurid lightning's streak; While the rushes drown in the watery frown That his ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... quick and startling enlightenment in the middle of a lurid July morning, while he and Joe were at work with one-horse cultivators, "laying by" the corn. Joe threw his plow down in the furrow, cast the lines from his shoulders, and declared that he was starving. He vowed that he would not cultivate another row unless assured, ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... hour later found Mac, suitably adorned, sitting on a bench at Helmeih Station having his boots and bandolier polished by four jabbering, disreputable "Gyppie" youngsters, who swore glibly the while the most lurid English oaths. Incidentally, they often terminated an exceptionally fluent flow with "Eh, Mistah Mickkenzie?" the usual mode of native address to New Zealanders after the High Commissioner's visit, which sometimes ruffled Mac's dignity, but more ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... and regulations, the company granted me a pass in a first-class carriage to Wolverhampton. I returned to Birmingham by omnibus after dark the same evening, and passing through the heart of the Black Country, made my first acquaintance with that dingy region—its lurid light, its flashing tongues of intercessant flame, and its clouds ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... rode out upon a bare peak. But its outlook told them nothing. Behind rose other peaks, below was the dense primeval forest, rising and falling on other slopes. There was no glimpse of valley anywhere. The sky was heavy with the grey lurid clouds of ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... a storm, Yussuf?" said Mr Burne, as he looked round at the lurid brassy aspect of the heavens, and the wild reflections upon ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... flames, now bending down low to feed on the green bushes, devouring acres of them at a breath, now towering high in the air as if looking abroad to choose a way, then stooping to feed again,—the lurid flapping surges and the smoke and terrible rushing and roaring hiding all that is gentle and orderly in the work. But as soon as the deep forest was reached, the ungovernable flood became calm like a torrent entering a lake, creeping and spreading beneath the trees where the ground was level ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... wild cosmopolite backward generations that accounted for anything; and to have got nearer the luxuriant tribe of which the rare creature was the final flower, the immense, extravagant, unregulated cluster, with free-living ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all busts and curls, preserved, though so exposed, in the marble of famous French chisels—all this, to say nothing of the effect of closer growths of the stem, was to have had one's small world-space both crowded ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... serpent coiled round my ribs! Now my ribs seemed expanding—to hold my heart—and all the divine joy of existence thrilled me to a religious rapture. And with the lifting of the mists all that ghastly mediaeval nightmare was lifted from my soul; in that sacred moment all the lurid tragedy of the crucified Christ vanished, and only Christ was left, the simple fellowship with man and beast and nature, the love of life, the love of love, the love of God. And in that yearning ecstasy my picture came to me—The Joyous ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... a bush publican and store-keeper he had an unusual reputation for honesty—and well deserved it, for all his roughness and lurid language when aroused to wrath. He asked Gerrard ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... towards their nests with the shrill and dissonant clang which announces disquietude and fear. The disk of the sun became almost totally obscured ere he had altogether sunk below the horizon, and an early and lurid shade of darkness blotted the serene twilight of a summer evening. The wind began next to arise; but its wild and moaning sound was heard for some time, and its effects became visible on the bosom of the sea, before the gale was felt on shore. The mass of waters, now dark and ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... to the edge of the cut and looked off across the country beyond where the waning sunlight fell upon the dense woods, touching the higher trees with its lurid glow. Over that way smoke arose and curled away ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... lakes. The morning was calm and sultry. A deep stillness pervaded Nature, which tended to produce a corresponding quiescence in the mind, and to fill it with those indescribably solemn feelings that frequently arise before a thunderstorm. Dark, lurid clouds hung overhead in gigantic masses, piled above each other like the battlements of a dark fortress, from whose ragged embrasures the artillery of heaven was about ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... the crater of Vesuvius, and leaps in fiendish waves along the land. Few the souls escaping, and God have mercy upon those who stumble through the blinding darkness, made more torturingly hideous by the intermittent flashes of lurid light. And yet there come three, whom the darkness seems not to deter, nor obstacles impede. Only a blind person, accustomed to constant darkness, and familiarized with these streets could walk that way. Nearer they come, a burst of flames thrown into ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... hands in hopeless despair. She has helped save the books, still she "expects they will burn up, somehow, on the road." Her pony has been trotting about through the night; his hair is singed, and she "presumes it will strike in and kill him." The world is, to Susy's view, one vast scene of lurid horrors. If she couldn't cry, she ...
— Dotty Dimple At Home • Sophie May
... killed the Chief!" another yelped; and the cries rippled along from mouth to mouth; tulwars flashed in the light of the lurid torches as they swept upward at the end of long arms threateningly; but the jamadar roared: "Back, back! you're like jackals snapping and snarling. Back! if the one is killed how shall we know ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... your wife's faults does not kill your love. You cannot turn from your brother or your friend if he commit even a lurid act; you cannot turn from a stranger; much less can you turn from your beloved. Herbert, when men set themselves to judge, they are invariably ridiculous and an offence to high heaven. Believe me, it is artificial. The true judge cares not for the fact of the deed, but for its motive. ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... James Fox." To praise this book is almost an impertinence. I content myself with saying that those who once taste its fascination go back to it again and again, and usually end by placing it with the books that are "the bosom friends" of men. Now the grim Scotchman lit up Horace's letters with the lurid furnace-glow of his genius; Sir George held the serene lamp of the scholar above the same letters, and lo, we have two pieces that can only die when the language dies! What a feat for a mere letter-writer to achieve! Let ambitious correspondents take example by Horace ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... of flame, me-thought Shelley's poetry emitted a purer light than almost any other productions of his day, contrasting beautifully with the fitful and lurid gleams and gushes of black vapor that flashed and eddied from ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... Blois, where he made some friends and spent most of a year. He returned to Paris in October 1792. France was no longer standing on the top of golden hours. The September massacres filled the sky with a lurid flame. Wordsworth still retained his ardent faith in the Revolution, and was even ready, though no better than "a landsman on the deck of a ship struggling with a hideous storm," to make common cause with the Girondists. But the prudence of ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... a young woman was perched, thin shoulders rounded over the ink-stained drawing-board resting on her knees. She had a large, self-willed mouth and dark Bohemian hair, and wore a dreary cotton kimono over a silk petticoat whose past had been lurid. One hand clutched gingerly a bottle of India ink, the other wielded a ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... which bore it in Latin. The stressed vowel, except in au, eu, is short, even when, as in 'vivid', 'florid', it was long in classical Latin. This, of course, is in accord with the English pronunciation of Latin. Examples are 'acid', 'tepid', 'rigid', 'horrid', 'humid', 'lurid ', 'absurd', 'tacit', 'digit', 'deposit', 'compact', 'complex', 'revise', 'response', 'acute'. Those which have the suffix -es prefixed throw the stress back, as 'honest', 'modest'. Those which ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... blood, and destroyed the innocent and helpless for gain or hate. The air was laden with the cries and sighs of the stricken multitudes, who beheld their sin for the first time in the light of eternity and of its inevitable doom. The lurid flames of "the wrath to come" cast their searching light on practices which, in the comparative twilight of ignorance and neglect, had passed ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... Fairy Island, I must say, yes; but very seldom. And never but in the evening when the sun was setting, and that under particular circumstances—namely, when he went down into a dark red bank of clouds, or when there was a lurid crimson hue over the sky just above the horizon. Then occasionally you might see the dim hazy outline as of a beautiful mountainous island against the clouds, or the deep-coloured sky. There is an island sometimes seen from our western coast, under similar circumstances, but which you ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... all over, and on the evening of that same day a quiet, deep sleep came to Lillian Earle. It saved her life; the wearied brain found rest. When she awoke, the lurid light of fever died out of her eyes, and they looked in gratified amazement upon Lady Dora who sat ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... got up feigning unconcern. Just then Toddles came bounding up against his sister. They went off arm in arm. She had seen him at the window, yet she gave no friendly glance; Shelton felt more miserable than ever. He stepped out upon the drive. There was a lurid, gloomy canopy above; the elm-trees drooped their heavy blackish green, the wonted rustle of the aspen-tree was gone, even the rooks were silent. A store of force lay heavy on the heart of nature. He started pacing slowly up and down, his pride forbidding him to follow her, and presently sat down ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... destroy their trenches and put up the question, "Tommy, how do you like your new trenches?" But why smear filth over the photograph of three little girls, a family treasure? All around Bapaume the villages were looted and the night the deliverers entered the destroyers made the sky lurid with the fires of towns and hamlets. Some 300 in ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... express purpose of catching the susceptible. The shops were modestly attractive from their nature, but the booths deliberately make eyes at you, and with telling effect. The very atmosphere is bewitching. The lurid smurkiness of the torches lends an appropriate weirdness to the figure of the uncouthly clad pedlar who, with the politeness of the arch-fiend himself, displays to an eager group the fatal fascinations of some new conceit. Here the latest thing in inventions, a gutta-percha ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... see the birth-place of Nelson or the death-scene of Simon de Montfort strike a strange chill to the soul? I can tell quite easily what this dim aversion to tourists and their antiquities does not arise from—at least, in my case. Whatever my other vices (and they are, of course, of a lurid cast), I can lay my hand on my heart and say that it does not arise from a paltry contempt for the antiquities, nor yet from the still more paltry contempt for the tourists. If there is one thing more dwarfish and ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... desolation which mark this region, condemned of nature, the lurid glare of a burning forest was almost constantly visible after sunset, and when the wind so willed, the smoke arising from it floated in heavy vapour over our heads. Not all the novelty of the scene, not all its vastness, could prevent its heavy horror wearying the spirits. Perhaps the dinners ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... they were coming! The "Jews" could be heard, with their band, down the street. They would be wanting their banner. Dolores hastily threw a wrapper on, while the captain advanced to the frontiers of his domain to welcome his army. The lurid company drew up in front of the house. The drum-beat softened in tone, but continued to give the rhythm for the privates who stood there marking time, keeping their heads and bodies and legs moving energetically ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... disease," said the Virginian, striking the frying-pan on his knee, for the frogs were all gone. At those lurid words their untamed child minds took fire, and they drew round him again to hear a tale of blood. The crowd seemed ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... feelings. He will see this aura flooded with the beautiful rose-color of pure affection, the rich blue of devotional feeling, the hard, dull brown of selfishness, the deep scarlet of anger, the horrible lurid red of sensuality, the livid grey of fear, the black clouds of hatred and malice, or any of the other hundredfold indications so easily to be read in it by the practiced eye; and thus it will be impossible for any persons to conceal from his the real state ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... always refuse that, sir." And therewith Mr. Ray was remanded to his quarters. Verily there was some reason for Blake's outburst when he came in after hearing Warner's brief description of the official interview which Mrs. Whaling had given in lurid exaggeration ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... Olympia, where, for a month past, "Van Zant's Royal Belgian Circus and World-famed Menagerie" had been holding forth to "Crowded and delighted audiences." Much was made of two "star turns" upon this lurid bill: "Mademoiselle Marie de Zanoni, the beautiful and peerless bare-back equestrienne, the most daring lady rider in the universe," for the one; and, for the other, "Chevalier Adrian di Roma, king of the animal world, with his great aggregation of savage and ferocious wild beasts, including ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... until midnight, notwithstanding the rain, to see the grand rock of Hornelen, a precipice 1200 feet high. The clouds lifted a little, and there was a dim, lurid light in the sky as our steamer swept under the awful cliff. A vast, indistinct mass, reaching apparently to the zenith, the summit crowned with a pointed tour, resembling the Cathedral of Drontheim, and the sides scarred with deep fissures, loomed over us. Now a splintered spire ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... widower and kept bachelor's hall, so to speak. We found him seated on a keg, by the side of an enormous caldron that might have contained the witches' compound, judging from the strange forms of steam that arose from it, while the lurid flames beneath, fed by the oily drippings, lent a still greater weirdness ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... young lily. The white lilies are never more beautiful than when they wave capriciously in the summer wind; and if Laura Dunbar was a little passionate when you tried to thwart her; and if her great blue eyes at such times had a trick of lighting up with sudden fire in them, like a burst of lurid sunlight through a summer storm-cloud, there were plenty of gentlemen in Warwickshire ready to swear that the sight of those lightning-flashes of womanly anger was well worth the penalty of incurring Miss ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Practically ignorant of the spoliation and persecution practised under Henry the Eighth—of blessed domestic memory—of the further persecution which disfigured the "spacious days of great Elizabeth," not to mention the long and shameful history of the Penal Laws, he fixed his mind upon lurid legends of the reign of unhappy Mary Tudor, illustrated by prints in Fox's Book of Martyrs; upon inquisitorial tortures, the very thought of which—even out of doors in the pleasant spring sunshine—made him break into a heavy sweat, and which, by some ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... and a great deal of it was of wood. Fires started almost at once, and it was almost completely on fire by the end of the second day. It had been visible in the telescopic screen even after they were out of atmosphere, a black smear until the turning planet carried it into darkness and then a lurid glow. ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... the merciful amongst us would slay a dog, stood unmoved in the shadow, with his ruthless calm, his deadly serenity, which had no remorse as it had had no mercy, while about his lips there was a cold and evil smile, and in his eyes gleamed the lurid flame of a tiger's triumph—the triumph when it has tasted blood, and slaked its thirst ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... action, doubts assailed her. She remembered that she had never read the book, though she had heard much of it from Berrand. He was imaginative and essentially mischievous. Perhaps he had exaggerated its tendency, drawn too lurid a picture of its horrible power. Catherine turned a page or two and glanced at the clear, even writing. It ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and darts down upon them from the roofs above, supposing, from the armor and the plumes which they wore, that they were enemies. They saw the royal palace besieged, and the tortoise formed for scaling the walls of it. The tumult and din, and the frightful glare of lurid flames by which the city was illuminated, a scene ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... thunder and lightning; but through the cloud-rifts, now and then, the moonlight streamed down. Isabella and Otho had been talking earnestly,—so earnestly, that they were quite unobservant of the coming storm, of the strange lurid ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... for, his thoughts went back to a scene he had once had with a half drunken machine-minder whom he had had to pay off. The man had epitomised the chief engineer's qualities and character, as those who encountered his authority understood them, in a few lurid, illuminating phrases. "You know," he had said, "that guy ain't a man. No, sir. He's the mush-fed image of a penitentiary boss. I guess he'd set the grease box of a driving shaft hot with a look. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... merely the warming up exercise of the editor's vocabulary. When he really cut loose on Andy P. Symes the graves of dead and buried adjectives opened to do him honor. In the lurid lexicon of his eloquence there was no such word as obsolete and no known synonym failed to pay tribute to this "mental and physical colossus." In his shirt sleeves, minus his cuffs, with his brain in a lather, one might say, Sylvanus Starr painted a picture of the coming ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... his eyes mutely upon the ruffian. The curate had had the precaution to send on before for torches, for the wintry evening now darkened round them, and the light from the torch-bearers, who met them at the cavern, cast forth its red and lurid flare at the mouth of the chasm. One of these torches Walter himself seized, and his was the first step that entered the gloomy passage. At this place and time, Houseman, who till then, throughout their short journey, had seemed to have recovered ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rain came trampling along the dark streets of the capital a body of four thousand troopers and lansquenettes. Many torch-bearers attended on the procession, whose flambeaux threw a lurid ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... coming of dawn the storm passed away northwards, across a sea snow-flecked and still panting with its fury, and leaving behind many traces of its violence, even upon these waste and empty places. A lurid sunrise gave little promise of better weather, but by six o'clock the wind had fallen, and the full tide was swelling the creeks. On a sand-bank, far down amongst the marshes, Jeanne stood hatless, with her hair streaming in the breeze, her face turned seaward, her eyes full of an unexpected ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... public. My name is, I believe, tolerably well known to the people as a writer of tragic tales, but the somberest imagination never conceived anything so tragic as my own life and history. Not in incident: my life has been destitute of adventure and action. But my mental career has been lurid with experiences such as kill and damn. I shall not recount them here—some of them are written and ready for publication elsewhere. The object of these lines is to explain to whomsoever may be interested that my death is voluntary—my own act. I shall die at twelve o'clock on ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... possessed all men; and with arms rigidly outstretched towards the threatening heavens, they trembled and shrieked aloud. But the nucleus of the destroyer was now upon us;—even here in Aidenn, I shudder while I speak. Let me be brief—brief as the ruin that overwhelmed. For a moment there was a wild lurid light alone, visiting and penetrating all things. Then—let us bow down, Charmion, before the excessive majesty of the great God!—then there came a shouting and pervading sound, as if from the mouth itself of HIM; while the whole incumbent mass of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... example of what we may call the ennobling power of a passionate enthusiasm for Christ. Remember that he is a prisoner, shut out from his life's work, waiting to be tried before Nero, whose reign had probably, by this time, passed from its delusive morning of dewy promise to its lurid noon. The present and the future were dark for him, and yet in spite of them all comes forth this burst of undaunted courage and noble gladness. We simply follow the course of the words as they lie, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... no wind to blow the flame; but it was a clear frost; and soon fiery tongues shot out of three garret-windows into the night, and lurid gleams burnished four more, and the old house was burning merrily overhead, and ringing with hilarity on the ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... Lady Irmingard, Born of a noble race and name! Many a wandering Suabian bard, Whose life was dreary, and bleak, and hard, Has found through me the way to fame. Brief and bright were those days, and the night Which followed was full of a lurid light. Love, that of every woman's heart Will have the whole, and not a part, That is to her, in Nature's plan, More than ambition is to man, Her light, her life, her very breath, With no alternative ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... had deceived myself. Beneath the snow-capped mountain, the volcano conceals its hottest fires. My uncle's cold exterior was but the icy crust that hid the fierce passions which burnt within his breast. He forgot my presence in the excitement of the moment, and the stern unfeeling eye blazed with lurid fire. ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... chosen out of many volumes of Japanese bogies. We have not ventured to copy the very most awful spectres, nor dared to be as horrid as we can. These native drawings, too, are generally coloured regardless of expense, and the colouring is often horribly lurid and satisfactory. This embellishment, fortunately perhaps, we cannot reproduce. Meanwhile, if any child looks into this essay, let him (or her) not be alarmed by the pictures he beholds. Japanese ghosts do not live in this country; there are none of them even at ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... practitioner, allegiance would be transferred to some new claimant of occult powers, and the breaking of the monopoly of magic would be followed by a temporary lightening of the burdens. Some of the most lurid of Alaskan legends deal with the thaumaturgic contests of rival medicine-men, and one judges that sleight of hand and even hypnotic suggestion were cultivated to a ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... sides to it. The prophet Malachi, in almost his last words, has a magnificent apocalypse of what he calls 'the day of the Lord,' which he sets forth as having a double aspect. On the one hand, it is lurid as a furnace, and burns up the wicked root and branch. I saw a forest fire this last autumn, and the great pine-trees stood there for a moment pyramids of flame, and then came down with a crash. So that hereafter will be to godless men. And ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... portentous change took place. The darkness slowly became less intense, giving place to a lurid ruddy twilight that appeared to emanate from the clouds, for by imperceptible degrees they grew visible and became streaked and blotched with patches of red that suggested the idea of their being on fire within, the incandescence showing through here and ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... poet,—and to be taken round by him and shown all the principal private galleries in London. He first drew my attention to the pictures by Constable, and pointed out their quiet beauty to my uneducated eye, thus instructing me to hate all those intemperate landscapes and lurid compositions which abound in the shambles of modern art. In the company of Leslie I saw my first Titians and Vandycks, and felt, as Northcote says, on my good behavior in the presence of portraits so lifelike and inspiring. It was Leslie who inoculated me with a love ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Fields was concerned. Nor was he left with any illusions. Pap had no intention of sitting down under this terrible public and private hurt a boy from the "inside" had inflicted upon him. The stories abroad were lurid in detail. It was said that the storm which had raged in the final scene between Pap and his mistress, when she quit the shelter he had provided for her for good, had been terrible indeed. It was said he had threatened her life in a moment of passion. It was said she had dared ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... rolling stock wore out, it became impossible to renew them from England or France. Unable to export their cotton, planters on the seaboard burned it in what were called "fires of patriotism." In their lurid light the fatal weakness of ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... slave of a habit which had become completely my master, and which fastened its remorseless fangs in my very vitals. Thought was a torturing thing. When I looked back, memory drew fearful pictures, the lines of lurid flame, and, whenever I dared anticipate the future, hope refused to illumine my onward path. I dwelt in one awful present; nothing to solace me—nothing to beckon me ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... Dennie's story was broken by a sudden peal of thunder overhead. At the same instant the blackness of midnight lifted itself above the stone ledges and dropped down upon the Corral, smothering everything in darkness. A rushing whirlwind, a lurid blaze of lightning, and a second peal of thunder threw the camp into blind disorder. In the minute's lull following the first storm herald, there was a wild scrambling for wraps and lunch baskets. Then the darkness thickened and the storm's fury ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... and of peril and horror incalculable to Mother and Sister and self and royal House; and that there is one possibility of good issue, and only one: that of loyally yielding, where one cannot resist. By degrees, some lurid troublous but perceptible light-gleam breaks athwart the black whirlwind of our indignation and despair; and saner thoughts begin to insinuate themselves. "Obey, thou art not the strongest, there are stronger than ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... the rising sun, each morn, for news of thee, And of the lightning's lurid gleam I do for thee enquire. The hands of passion and of pain sport with me all the night; Yet I complain not of the ills I suffer from desire. O my beloved, if the times be yet for me prolonged, be all consumed with separation's fire. ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... grand effects and wild scenery of the kind afterwards described by William Black in his "Macleod of Dare." As we sailed across the Sound in the evening from Oban to Auchincraig, the sky was full of torn rain-clouds flying swiftly and catching the lurid hues from the sunset, whilst the distant mountains and cliffs of Mull were of that dark purple which seems melancholy and funereal in landscape, though it is one of the richest colors in the world. It was dangerous weather for sailing, being ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... calm and peaceful retirement of Horton, of which L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas are the expression. In the second act he is breathing the foul and heated atmosphere of party passion and religious hate, generating the lurid fires which glare in the battailous canticles of his prose pamphlets. The three great poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, are the utterance of his final period of solitary and Promethean grandeur, when, blind, destitute, friendless, he testified of righteousness, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... precaution Young Dick paid beyond Tracy and as far as Modesto. After that, under the teaching of Tim, he traveled without paying, riding blind baggage, box cars, and cow-catchers. Young Dick bought the newspapers, and frightened Tim by reading to him the lurid accounts of the kidnapping of the young ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... cataracts Of midnight streams unknown to us 'Tis builded in the leafless tracts And valleys huge of Tartarus. Lurid and lofty and vast it seems; It hath no rounded name that rings, But I have heard it called in dreams The City of the End ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... a lurid antithesis to Jewish emancipation at a time when the latter was consummated not only in Western Europe, but also in the semi-civilized Balkan States.... True, the rise of Russian Judaeophobia—the Russian technical term for Jew-hatred—was paralleled ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... appear to cause any apprehension of danger in the mind of Devereux. The night came on, and though the air even then was hot, the weary crew were refreshed by sleep. The sun rose, and the air was hotter than ever, notwithstanding a dense mist, which gradually filled the atmosphere, while soon a lurid glare spread over it. Croxton, as he watched the change, looked even graver than before. "You've not been in these seas before, Mr Devereux, ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... distress or pain. The ice was broken into thousands of confused shapes, but none, Hans thought like the ordinary forms of splintered ice. There seemed a curious expression about all their outlines—a perpetual resemblance to living features, distorted and scornful. Myriads of deceitful shadows, and lurid lights, played and floated about and through the pale-blue pinnacles, dazzling and confusing the sight of the traveller; while his ears grew dull and his head giddy with the constant gush and roar of the concealed waters. These ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... her turned involuntarily to glance at the countenance of one so still, and then as involuntarily to survey the house to which that countenance was lifted. No such observer so incurious as not to hazard conjecture what evil to that house was boded by the dark lurid eyes that watched it with so fixed a menace. Thus she remained, sometimes, indeed, moving from her post, as a sentry moves from his, slowly pacing a few steps to and fro, returning to the same place, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... style was kind of cramped by the presence of her husband. Every once in a while, when she would be about to paint something in lurid colors, he would drop in a word and she would roll her phrases around in her mouth, so to speak, and shift and go ahead in a different ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... through the black night, its canvas still dyed with the sunset glow. The faces of the crew, turned to watch the spectacle, curiously fixed and inhuman, were picked out of the gloom by the same fantastic light. It was as if the schooner, with masts and riggings, etched black against the lurid sky, sailed on into ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... forms the most striking part of a story; a word acts as a flash of lightning, which displays some gloomy neighbourhood, where a tower is standing, with dreadful faces at the window; or where, at your feet, full of eternal voices, one abyss is beheld dropping out of another in the lurid light of torment. In the present volume a story will be found which tells a long tragedy in half-a-dozen lines. Dante has the minute probabilities of a Defoe in the midst of the loftiest and most generalising poetry; and this feeling of matter-of-fact is impressed ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... strife, 25 The turmoil of expiring life— He said: The end is everywhere, Art still has truth, take refuge there! And he was happy, if to know Causes of things, and far below 30 His feet to see the lurid flow Of terror, and insane distress, And headlong ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... from this vigil; but with unruffled consideration for their comfort their guardian and his assistants made up two beds forthwith. The Baron, subdued to a fierce and snarling moodiness, watched their preparations with a lurid eye. ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... nearly dark, the sky was overcast with heavy leaden clouds, and only a faint lurid glow on the horizon in the west showed where the sun had gone down. An icy wind, blowing full in their faces, and the hard, frozen surface of the snow, made their progress both difficult and painful. The ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... Djied. Disorder reigned supreme, in all the desert freedom; horses and mules, goats and camels, tethered, strayed among the conical houses of hair, browsing off the littered straw or the tossed-down hay; and caldrons seethed and hissed over wood fires, whose lurid light was flung on the eagle features and the white haiks of the wanderers who watched the boiling of their mess, or fed the embers with dry sticks. Round other fires, having finished the eating of their couscousson, the Bedouins lay full-length; enjoying the solemn ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... perceived through the gloom a thick smoke ascending from the hatchways, followed quickly by forked flames, which leaped upwards, and rapidly enveloped the masts and lower, rigging. The whole hull was rapidly in a blaze, which lighted up with a lurid glare the two misticoes; the grim visages of their fierce crew, their red caps, and varied-coloured costume being clearly visible at that distance through the telescope. The fiery tinge falling also on the rocky cliffs, and the towers and walls of the castle, and converting ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... acquaintance with your wife's faults does not kill your love. You cannot turn from your brother or your friend if he commit even a lurid act; you cannot turn from a stranger; much less can you turn from your beloved. Herbert, when men set themselves to judge, they are invariably ridiculous and an offence to high heaven. Believe me, it is artificial. The true ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... expiring sound of a shout rose above the roar of the ice and waters—but it failed to arouse me. The lights, though, we soon plainly discerned; and on the bluff, at the very mouth of the river, a column of flame began to rise, which cast a lurid light far over the surface of the raging lake. Some persons stood at the edge of the flood waving lighted torches; and I thought from their manner ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... of the heavens, studded with innumerable stars. Some were brighter than others, and they were of every imaginable color. Tiny glintings of lurid tint—through the Earth's atmosphere they would blend into an indefinite faint luminosity—appeared so close together that there seemed no possible interval. However tiny the appearance of a gap, one had but to look at it for an instant to perceive ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... seething sun never again to plunge his lurid face beneath the waves of old Ocean? Had some latter-day Joshua arisen, and with stern fiat nailed him in mid-heavens, blazing forever? To me as slowly rolled the westering orb down that final slope as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... But, sad to say, even these few hours had made great ravages: sorrow, anxiety, and misery are the most zealous accessories of age. She really looked years older: this might have been partly the effect of the lurid, flickering light, and the disorder of her dress; but sure I am that no one could have recognized the haughty, dignified, imposing woman, who but a few hours since had swept ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... "leapt the live thunder." Even the distant mountains seemed to have "found a tongue." A zigzag chain of lightning flashed in the lurid sky, and after an appreciable interval another peal, louder ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... profoundly in three years. The United States have made their separate peace and want no responsibility. In Italy there scarcely exists any hatred for the Germans, and apart from certain capitalists who paint in lurid colours the danger of German penetration in their papers because they want higher tariff protection and to be able to speculate on government orders, there is no one who does not desire peace with all peoples. The great majority of the Italian people only ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... occurred. At this date, smoke, pumice, and cinders, fell without intermission. For eight weeks Krakatau blazed and thundered, the explosions being audible at Batavia, eighty miles off. As the fatal dawn of an August morning broke with lurid light, the culminating shock of an appalling detonation, described as "the very crack and crash of doom," echoed across the ocean, and was heard even in India and Australia, two thousand miles away. Gigantic tidal waves swept the Sundanese shores, destroying ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... those portals Red Jabez, Sultan of pirates, arbiter of life and death over the motley community, lay at grips with the grim specter to whom he had consigned scores far more readily than he now yielded up his own red-stained soul. Red Jabez was dying a death as hard as his lurid life had been. ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... heated her veins with fire, and caused a hot flush to burn on either cheek. Ho! how exulted the tempter now; he had long laid in wait for her soul, and now, while it oscillated and wavered, how triumphant he was; how defiantly he lifted his lurid brow towards the Almighty, while he spread out the snare for that tempted, trembling one! but let us listen—for angels guard her, and watch, with sorrowful eyes, the dread conflict, while they pray for heavenly strength to ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... placed it on a table near the bed. Then Jane stood up and if an unhappy soul had risen from the grave, it could not have shocked them more. She stood erect and looked at them. Her tall form, in its crushed white gown, her deathly white face, her black eyes gleaming with the lurid light of despair, her pale quivering lips, her air of hopeless grief, shocked even these men, used to the daily sight of real or pretended mourners. With a motion of her hand she prevented them coming closer to the dead ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... noticed as of frequent occurrence in the great lakes. The morning was calm and sultry. A deep stillness pervaded Nature, which tended to produce a corresponding quiescence in the mind, and to fill it with those indescribably solemn feelings that frequently arise before a thunderstorm. Dark, lurid clouds hung overhead in gigantic masses, piled above each other like the battlements of a dark fortress, from whose ragged embrasures the artillery of heaven was about ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... but for the glassiness of despair, alone were visible. Above the temples, amidst wreathed turban folds of black drapery, vague in its character and consistency as cloud, gleamed a ring of white flame, gemmed with sparkles of a more lurid tinge. This pale crescent was "the likeness of a Kingly Crown"; what it diademed was "the shape which shape ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... conventions and crowded the country schoolhouses for the discussion of methods and men. Perhaps it was true, as one of their critics asserted, that they put a "gill of fact and grievance into a gallon of falsehood and lurid declamation" so as to make an "intoxicating mixture." If so, the mixture took immediate effect. Alliance governors were elected in several southern states; many state legislatures in the South and West had strong farmer ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... they saw the occupants distinctly. In the first boat, a large one for those waters, containing six paddles, sat no less a person than the great Ojibway chief himself, bare as usual to the waist and painted in many a hideous design. Gigantic in reality, the gray night and the lurid light of the fires made him look larger, ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... building, and seldom allowed anyone to interrupt him. Some man, who was greatly disgusted over one of Greeley's editorials, climbed up to his sanctum, and as soon as his head showed above the railing, he began to rave and rage, using the most lurid style of profanity. It seemed as if he never would stop, but at last, utterly exhausted and out of breath and all used up, he waited for ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... above the Pass of Dariel,—that terrific gorge which like a mere thread seems to hang between the toppling frost-bound heights above and the black abysmal depths below,—clouds, fringed ominously with lurid green and white, drifted heavily yet swiftly across the jagged peaks where, looming largely out of the mist, the snow-capped crest of Mount Kazbek rose coldly white against the darkness of the threatening sky. Night was approaching, though away ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... by the sensational contents of the newspapers and the dramatic excitement of street life, and some of the lurid representations of the cinematograph, is so much stimulated that the interest in normal stories is difficult to rouse. I will not here dwell on the deleterious effects of over-dramatic stimulation, which has been ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... detonator. Heated in contact with air to a temperature of 480 deg. C., acetylene ignites and burns with a flame, the appearance of which varies with the way in which it is brought in contact with the air. With the gas in excess a heavy lurid flame emitting dense volumes of smoke results, whilst if it be driven out in a sufficiently thin sheet, it burns with a flame of intense brilliancy and ulmost perfect whiteness, by the light of which colours can be ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... impersonate you, when you leave, so that this man tries to send me after the other three. Don't interrupt, let me finish—You will say that it is impossible to deceive any one at close range. Surely, it does sound melodramatic, like a lurid tale of a paper back novel. But I have studied the photographs of your friends. You and I bear the closest resemblance of any in the group. Your weight is about the same as mine—your shoulders are a trifle stooped and you walk with a curious drag of your left foot. ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... so unstable, that I fell over a coil of rope and fetched up in the arms of the Honorable Cuthbert Vane. Fortunately this occurred around the corner of the deck-house, out of sight of my aunt and Miss Browne, so the latter was unable to shed the lurid light on the episode which she doubtless would if she had seen it. Mr. Vane stood the shock well and promptly ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... took up his case rather warmly and declared that he was a cute little thing, and that his manners were all right if he was treated with good manners in the first place. The consequence was that by the time they reached her gate they were deep in the lurid ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... him flits thy aggravated form! Then as new fears o'er all his senses press, Unwilling words the guilty truth confess! These, these be they whom secret terrors try. When muttered thunders shake the lurid sky; Whose deadly paleness now the gloom conceals And now the vivid flash anew reveals. No storm as Nature's casualty they hold. They deem without an aim no thunders rolled; Where'er the lightning strikes, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... from the limbs of the pilgrim. He saw his form dilate and expand in height and in breadth, until his head seemed to touch the pale crescent moon, and his bulk shut out from view all beyond itself. He saw his eyes firing and flaming like globes of lurid light, and he saw his hair and beard converted into one mass of living flame. The fiend stood revealed in ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... Annunzio himself that evening, Rita found him far less guarded than his wife in his expression of patriotic zeal. He echoed her saying, that every Mambi in the country knew where to come when he wanted anything; and he went on to draw lurid pictures of what he would do to the Gringos if he but ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... at a rate inconceivable, so that it looked like a gigantic wheel of fire. Yet it was not fire that clothed it but rather some phosphorescence, since from it came no heat. Yes, a phosphorescence arranged in bands of ghastly blue and lurid red, with streaks of other colours running up between, and a kind of ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... the Christian era, some 300 miles from Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting sand. Behind him the desert sand waste stretched, lifeless, interminable, reflecting its lurid blare on the horizon of the cloudless vault of blue. Presently he rose and wandered along the cliffs in search of fuel for the monastery from whence he came, for Abbot Pambo's ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... there was a boat-house where orderlies from the New Zealand hospital in Amiens used to get skiffs for an hour's rowing, leaning on their oars to look at the picture of the cathedral rising like a mirage beyond the willows and the encircling water, with fleecy clouds above its glittering roof, or lurid storm-clouds with the red glow of sunset beneath their wings. In the dusk or the darkness there was silence along the banks but for a ceaseless throbbing of distant gun-fire, rising sometimes to a fury of drumming when the French soixante-quinze was ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... lady was ensconced comfortably on her bed, smoking cigarettes and deep in the perusal of Garnaby Williams, the Boy Detective, which, with other threepenny works of lurid fiction, she had sent out to purchase. She felt, and rightly, that before the strain of attempting further intercourse with Albert, it would be as well to fortify herself with a good supply of ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... and popular tradition tell us alike of a flame which often would arise from the grave, in a moss near Carnwath, of some of those poor rebels: of how it crept along the ground; of how it covered the house of their murderer; and of how it scared him with its lurid glare. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Moreover, towards afternoon some of them broke, grew pale and elongated, and sank to the horizon again, while others of them changed to the likeness of white transparent fish-scales. In the east, over Maslovska, a single lurid mass was louring, but Karl Ivanitch (who always seemed to know the ways of the heavens) said that the weather would still continue to be ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... conflict gave place to the rasp of reverse levers, hoarse cries of warning and the labored chug of heavy-duty motors going full astern. In the ever-widening cleared space about the ill-fated derelict the lurid waters were churned into a roseate foam by the frenzied lashing of the heavy propellers of the fishing craft as their masters sought ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... of the copper-works was obtained in the 'gloaming' of a lovely night in August last year, as we rattled over the Landore viaduct of the South Wales Railway. On each side of us, we could behold, given out by the chimneys, innumerable flashes of lurid flame, which rose like meteors into the atmosphere, and scattered around a brilliant light, that was seen in the distance to blend with the waters of Swansea Bay. The scene was very beautiful, and singularly picturesque: we could have wished ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... horror. Like a deluge the army poured in on their snorting Bactrian horses, Rattled the Parthian quivers, rang the Parthian harness of iron, High upon spears rode the torches, and from them in showery blazes Rained splendour lurid and fierce on the dreamlike ruinous uproar, Such as delusions often from fever's fierce vertical ardour Show through the long-chambered halls and corridors endless, Blazing with cruel light—show to the brain of the stricken man; ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... leaves an incessant hunger. But the biggest game of all is man, and the fiercest sensation is hate. Stark had been a killer, and his brain had been seared with the flame till the scar was ineradicable. He had lived those lurid seconds when a man gambles his life against his enemy's, and, having felt the great sensation, it could never die; yet with it all he was a cautious man, given more to brooding on his injuries and building up a quarrel than to reckless paroxysms of passion, and experience ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... Ages, that august and venerable monument of immemorial antiquity, we cannot close our eyes to the contradictions between practice and pretension upon which the History of the Italian Renaissance throws a light so lurid. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... deep influence, if not a school. The younger Lytton, George Meredith, Buchanan, here and there Swinburne and William Morris, seem to break loose from the graceful harmony which the Tennysonians affect, and to plunge headlong into the obscure, the uncouth, the ghastly, and the lurid. No one denies originality and power in many of these pieces: but they are flat blasphemy against the pellucid melody of the Tennysonian idyll. Our poetry seems to be under two contrary spells: it is enthralled at one time by the ravishing symmetry of ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... scene began to shake as if I had been looking at a mirage, while just behind my car I had a flashing glimpse in that lurid light of an emerald-green deluge bursting in like a dark sky of solid water, and in that split-second before a crushing blow upon my back, even through that tangle of bedclothes, knocked me into unconsciousness, I seemed ...
— The Undersea Tube • L. Taylor Hansen
... now denoted an immense hight; and, as I looked upward and around, the concave above seemed like a mighty waste of purple air, verging to blackness. Below, it was lighter; but a long, lurid bar of cloud stretched along the west, temporarily excluding the sun. The shadows rushed afar into the void, and a solemn, Sabbath twilight reigned around. I was now startled by a fluttering in my gondola. It was my carrier-pigeon. I had forgotten him entirely. I attached a string ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... to strange and novel scenes, they looked up to the bright round moon, pleased with the expression of cheerfulness and companionship which beams always in her light, to find her suddenly waning, changing her form, withdrawing her bright beams, and looking down upon them with a lurid and murky light, it was not surprising that they felt an emotion of terror. In fact, there is always an element of terror in the emotion excited by looking upon an eclipse, which an instinctive feeling of the heart inspires. It invests the spectacle with a solemn grandeur. It holds the ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... exclaimed. "Are you—I say nothing of your brother, who is nothing to me or to her—are you guiltless, in the sense in which she would regard guilt, of David Barrows' death?" And her fierce eyes, shining through her half-closed lashes like lurid fires partly veiled, burned upon his face, which, turning paler and paler, drooped before her gaze till his chin settled upon his breast and we could barely hear the words that fell ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... bravery of her words to him still fluttered in her voice and eyes. Yes, she was matchless—it was the one word for her; and he could give his admiration the freer play because so little personal feeling remained in it. His real detachment from her had taken place, not at the lurid moment of disenchantment, but now, in the sober after-light of discrimination, where he saw her definitely divided from him by the crudeness of a choice which seemed to deny the very differences he felt in her. It was before him again in its completeness—the choice in which she was content to rest: ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... have said, intensely dark, and they each carried a fat, resinous pine torch, which diffused a lurid light around. The stones of the courtyard were slimy from long neglect; and the light, drizzly rain which was falling churned the dust and slime into thin mud. As they drew near the wood pile, Hubert going boldly first, they both fancied ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... citizens of London was yet more forcibly increased by the appearance in April of a blazing star or comet, bearing a tail apparently six yards in length, which rose betimes in a lurid sky, and passed with ominous movement from west to east. [It is worthy of notice that Lilly in his "Astrological Predictions," published in 1648, declared the year 1656 would be "ominous to London, unto her merchants at sea, ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... violent crash of continuous thunder. Ceaseless fiery arrows dart in and out amongst the flying thunder-clouds; the vaporous mass soon glows with incandescent heat; hailstones rattle fiercely down, and as they dash upon our iron tools they too emit gleams and flashes of lurid light. The heaving waves resemble fiery volcanic hills, each belching forth its own interior flames, and every crest is plumed with dancing fire. My eyes fail under the dazzling light, my ears are stunned with the incessant crash of thunder. ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... violently. This perhaps was not perceived in the circus, on account of the excitement all were in, and the noise that was going on in the arena. But it was soon followed by a whirlwind of ashes, and lurid flashes of flame darted across the sky. The beasts were instantly tamed, and cowered down in abject terror, and the gladiators, for the first time in their lives, grew pale with fear. Then the startled crowd within the vast ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... was a strong temperance man, and in the habit of making temperance speeches. The rummies, I found, were men addicted only to their cider barrels; hard working citizens with red faces and rather lurid speech. On the whole, I thought them much more interesting characters than the faction to which I was supposed to belong. But they would have none of me, and I had not sufficient tact to win them to myself. The ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... grey shadow lurking in the light, He ventures forth along the edge of night; With silent foot he scouts the coulie's rim And scents the carrion awaiting him. His savage eyeballs lurid with a flare Seen but in unfed beasts which leave their lair To wrangle with their fellows for a meal Of bones ill-covered. Sets he forth to steal, To search and snarl and forage hungrily; A worthless prairie vagabond is he. Luckless the ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... afterthought. I'd worked up to it by havin' some of my lurid locks trimmed, and as Giuseppe quits shearin' and asks if there'll be anything else I rubs my hand casual across my jaw ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... the spot where the fire was burning, by the lurid light which it cast on the neighbouring trees; and, with more confidence than before, he was hurrying on, when he saw to his right a number of glowing eyeballs, and the yelping of the wolves sounded ...
— The Frontier Fort - Stirring Times in the N-West Territory of British America • W. H. G. Kingston
... of the new movement shall not be discovered talking with the doctors, or defining art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at first by peerers in books. The passer-by shall see him, perhaps, through the door of a foundry at night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, and humbled with labor, but with the fire from the heart of the earth playing upon his face. His hands—innocent of the ink of poets, of the mere outsides of things—shall ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... to gain a good appetite. We, who can have all for a wish, little enjoy that all when we have possessed it. Seest thou yonder thick cloud, which is about to burst to rain? It seems to stifle me—the waters look dark and lurid—the shores have ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... water. All the metals can be made to flash forth lightnings, under suitable electric and magnetic excitements. The crystals of several rocks give out light during the process of crystallization. Thousands of miles of the earth's surface must once have presented the lurid glow of a vast furnace full of igneous rocks. Even now, the copper color of the moon during an ellipse shows us that the earth is a source of light.[262] The mountains on the surface of Venus and ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... were lighted up with a preternatural glare. It was a wild, pompous, theatrical spectacle. The array of soldiers on both aides the river, along the dykes and upon the bridge, with banners waving, and spear and cuirass glancing in the lurid light; the demon fleet, guided by no human hand, wrapped in flames, and flitting through the darkness, with irregular movement; but portentous aspect, at the caprice of wind and tide; the death-like silence of expectation, which had succeeded the sound of trumpet and the shouts of the soldiers; and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... altogether charming. Don't be envious; I will find something mad for you to do, too. One of us is always submitting to the will of the majority; now let us be as individually silly as we like for a week, and then take a long farewell of freakishness and freedom. Let the third volume die in lurid splendour, since there is never to ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... four, a struggling composite mass of legs and arms, went rolling down to the next landing surrounded by a special and lurid atmosphere of oaths. ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... rare gleams of sunshine in a life of lurid storms, we have the expression of his passionate independence, his ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... regular, passionless features, the dark eyes and pale complexion of Ethel's lover. And as soon as he saw that face, a great change came over the mental condition of Francis Trent. He stood for a moment as if paralyzed, his worn features strangely convulsed, a strange lurid light showed itself in his haggard eyes. Then he threw his arms wildly in the air, uttered a choked, gasping cry, and rushed madly and vainly after the retreating carriage, heedless of the shouts which the ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... fresh and scented after dark. He knew the little gate that was never closed. He would dine lightly, and go for a ten-mile stretch among the oaks, surprise the deer asleep, listen to the hum of distant London, and watch the fairy battle between the lurid reflection of its million lights and the little stars.... There were places in the ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... that tells Unwelcome truths, and vainly seeks repose For startled Fondness, in the opiate balm, Of kind profession, tho', perchance, it flows To hush Complaint—O! in Belief's clear calm, Or 'mid the lurid clouds of Doubt, we find LOVE rise the Sun, or ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... came down out of the sky with a terrific velocity. Tracer bullets sprayed all around it. Some could be seen to ricochet off its sides. Flashings came from the alien craft. They were not explosions from guns. They were lurid, actinic, smokeless blasts of pure light. The Thing seemed to be made of polished metal. It dodged, trying to approach the transport. The fighters lunged to prevent it. The ghastly game of interception seemed to rush here and ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god— and always like a god. Christ had even a literary style of his own, not to be ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... it, and disease," said the Virginian, striking the frying-pan on his knee, for the frogs were all gone. At those lurid words their untamed child minds took fire, and they drew round him again to hear a tale of blood. The crowd seemed to ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... I, cutting him short, for I had become wearied of the invariable profanity which lent a lurid ending ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... Mecca, pray'd At burning noon; so warriors said, Scarf'd with the cross, who watch'd the miles Of dust which wreathed their struggling files Down Lydian mountains; so, when snows Round Alpine summits, eddying, rose, The Goth, bound Rome-wards; so the Hun, Crouch'd on his saddle, while the sun Went lurid down o'er flooded plains Through which the groaning Danube strains To the drear Euxine;—so pray all, Whom labours, self-ordain'd, enthrall; Because they to themselves propose On this side the all-common ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... to lose any dollars unless he has to," said McGinnis. "I don't think you need to be afraid of that." Then, following along the train of thought that had been suggested, he told the boy some lurid stories of life in the lumber camps of Michigan and Wisconsin ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... fairway—a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... ignition, burning; phlogiston; conflagration, holocaust, deflagration; flame, blaze; bonfire, balefire, feu de joie, beacon. Associated Words: pyrology, pyrography, pyromania, pyrophobia, incendiary, incendiarism, arson, lurid, Moloch, fuel, combustible, pyroleter, smolder, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... that a bathe in a clear pool of cold fresh water would be very conducive to its health. Thus directly the sun, red as a shot which leaves the furnace, falls below the horizon, and that the clouds surrounding the spot where it disappears, at first lurid and bright like fire, then yellow like a sea of gold, become cool, pale, and at length sink into more sober hues, the woodcock,—which waits only for this moment to open its wings and promenade the neighbourhood,—comes forth and commences a study of the winds. Guided by instinct, ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... me," she faltered out; and her visitor thereupon proceeded to unfold his story. It threw, even to her confused perceptions, and imperfectly initiated vision, a lurid glare on the whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine. Her husband had made his money in that brilliant speculation at the cost of "getting ahead" of some one less alert to seize the chance; the victim of his ingenuity was young Robert Elwell, who had "put him on" to the Blue ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... work he had to do. At times he even appreciated with a certain enjoyment the exquisite irony of his fate. Perhaps, when it came to the Gin Palace of Art, he had felt that the thing was getting almost beyond a joke. He had not been prepared for that lurid departure. He did not realize that he was in it, that his father had staked, not only his hopes, but his capital on him. He simply knew that "the guv'nor" was wrapt up in the horrid thing, that he had ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... Burned lurid with black stains, and smote My thought with waking pangs; I saw The white arm drooping from the boat, Round-moulded, pure ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... her again. "You might be very much the reverse sometimes," he said, "if you knew some of the secrets I had to keep. India is India, and she can be very lurid upon occasion. There is only one way of treating her then; but I am not going to let you into any unpleasant secrets. That is Bluebeard's Chamber, and you have ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... liked working in the wards, he suffered a pang at the pathos of her innocent guile. And if Dyan had his own suspicions, he kept them to himself. He also kept to himself the vitriolic outpouring which he had duly found awaiting him at Jaipur. It contained too many lurid allusions to 'that conceited, imperialistic half-caste cousin of yours'; and Roy might resent the implied stigma as much as Dyan resented it for him. So he tore up the effusion, intended for the eye of Roy, merely remarking ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... autumn, when the sun set in lurid clouds full of storm and rain, the little town was shrouded in a darkness which was only relieved by a small lantern, which glimmered on the wall at the door ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... she rose and left the house. As she walked down Beacon street, the sun was just sinking in the West, and its red glow mounted midway up the heavens. As she looked at it, the sky seemed one great molten sea, with its hot, lurid waves surging all around her. She thought it came nearer; that it set on fire the green Common and the great houses, and shot fierce, hot flames through her brain and into her very soul. For a moment, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... invisible of red; it nourished that rich radiant energy of passion; it flowed from men as they walked and brooded in loneliness, or as they tossed in sleep. I withdrew my gaze from this face which awoke in me a lurid sense accompaniment, and turned it on the other. An aura of pale soft blue was around this figure through which gleamed an underlight as of universal gold. The vision was already dim and departing, ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... a whole speech from the one word revolution. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color—wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenia and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... doubt in Lawler's mind, nor in Ruth's, that he had gone to relate his trouble to his "paw;" and that "paw" would presently appear to exact the lurid punishment Jimmy desired. ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... roar; a rattling crash as of a peal of heaviest thunder; and the whole scene was suddenly lit up with a lurid ruddy glow. Turning their startled glances inland, our adventurers saw that the lofty hill- top, dominating the head of the ravine, near which was situated the gold cavern, had burst open and was vomiting forth vast volumes of flame and smoke. ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... thousand details, which leave his achievement magnificently original; he has recommended it to posterity by great ideas which it is difficult to liberate by analysis, when, in one's youth, one reads this work with the object of finding in it the lurid representation of the most physical of our feelings, whereas serious and philosophical writers never employ its images except as the consequence or the corollary of a vast thought; and the adventures of Lord Edward are one of the most ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... suddenly came over the face of Nature. The sombre gloom was relieved only by a strange lurid glare, which hung on the distant horizon far away across that weird land. The air was soon filled with fine ashes, which descended in such quantities as to cover all vegetation, and completely ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... house facing the stadt, and therefore sheltered from the hail of bullets coming from the east; and just as we were noticing that objects could be discerned on the road, that before were invisible, forked tongues of lurid light shot up into the sky in the direction where, snug and low by the Malopo River, lay the natives' habitations. Even then one did not realize what was burning, and someone said: "What a big grass fire! ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... surprise, and uttering their comments on my courage. Now and then a dog ran by, with a terrified air and drooping tail, keeping close to the houses as if for protection. One might have fancied oneself in some city ravaged by the plague, and the burning heat of the atmosphere, and lurid red of the clouds, might have strengthened ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... That lurid embodiment of fascinating evil, part vampire, part Mephistopheles, whose grand manner and heroic abilities might have made him a great and good man but for 'the malady of not wanting,' is the light and meaning of the whole book. Innocent and benevolent ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... hoop. Tom gave the word to hoist away, and "the flying beacon," as Desmond called it, soon afterwards burst forth into a bright flame. The fire below was then lighted, and as it blazed up it cast a lurid glare over the whole island, on the ribs of their vessel, their hut below the tall cocoa-nut trees, and the lower shrubs. At the same instant loud screams were heard—the birds, startled by the unusual appearance, mounted into the air, numbers flying towards the ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... beauties of the stream, bordered by picturesque woods festooned with graceful creepers, many of them producing rich blossoms of many hues. At night we proceeded, lighted by pitch-pine-torches stuck in the bows of the vessel, which cast a lurid glare on either bank, scaring the numberless alligators which ever and anon put their heads above the surface of the water. At times I fancied that I could see the figures of Indian warriors brandishing their spears, ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... the great executive forces of humanity, the child. The soul can paint, execute its ideas, its hopes and its fears in any color—the lurid red of blood, the black of ignorance and crime, or in the living light of beauty. All the same, it is the childhood of man painting its ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... In such a lurid light it was only natural that the ethical perspective should be still further distorted; that any lingering doubt of the justice of his late rebellion against the accepted order of things should be banished by the ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... a high, black throne, with the face turned towards them, and the arms (artificially supported) stretched out as if in denunciation over the banqueting-table. The lamp of yellow glass, which burnt high above the body, threw over it a lurid and flickering light; the eyes were open, the jaw had fallen, the long grey tresses drooped heavily on either side of ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... armed hosts are skirmishing, The burning sun reflects the lurid scene; The German Army fighting for its life, Rallies its torn and terrified left wing; And, as they near this place The imperial eagles see Before them in their flight, Here, in the solemn night, The old cathedrals, to the years to be Showing, with wounded ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... bits, as the painters say; and there are usually three or four of the fraternity with their easels set up in uncertain equilibrium on the undulating floor. It is not easy to catch the real complexion of St. Mark's, and these laudable attempts at portraiture are apt to look either lurid or livid. But if you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble slabs, the great panels of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes of which the lonely anguish looks deeper in the vertical light, the tabernacles whose open doors disclose a dark Byzantine image spotted with dull, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... unextinguishable but unconsuming flames. Wherever he trod, as he wandered through his vast and blazing prison, the molten fire was his footing, and the breath of fire was his air. Flowers, and trees, and hills were in that world as in ours, but wrought from one lurid and intolerable light; and, scattered around, rose gigantic palaces and domes of the living flame, like the mansions of the city of Hell. With every moment there passed to and fro shadowy forms, on whose ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... but her own eyes were always for One only, one whom she held by the hand. For she was leading the dance in some tempestuous orgy to the music of chanting voices, and the dance she led circled about a great and awful Figure on a throne, brooding over the scene through lurid vapours, while innumerable other wild faces and forms crowded furiously about her in the dance. But the one she held by the hand he knew to be himself, and the monstrous shape upon the throne he knew to be ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... extent of the danger to which he was exposed, reached Bristoe Station. There, while the explosion of the piles of shells resembled the noise of a great battle, from the ridge above Broad Run he saw the sky to the north-east lurid with the blaze of a vast conflagration; and there he learned for the first time that it was no mere raid of cavalry, but Stonewall Jackson, with his whole army corps, who ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Pensees de Rafael, Namouna, and Rolla', the last two being very eloquent at times, though immature. Rolla (1833) is one of the strongest and most depressing of his works; the sceptic regrets the faith he has lost the power to regain, and realizes in lurid flashes the desolate emptiness of his own heart. At this period the crisis of his life was reached. He accompanied George Sand to Italy, a rupture between them occurred, and De Musset returned ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... woodwork. The terror-stricken fugitives saw, here and there, in all directions around them, the alarming vision of red flames curling upward and outward, in gleaming contrast to the white light of dawn just showing in the eastern sky. Those lurid gleams climbed upward in devouring haste, and before the sun had fairly risen a dozen or more conflagrations were visible in all sections of the business part of the city, and in places great buildings broke with startling suddenness into flame, which shot hotly high ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... It is even asserted that the czar wielded the axe himself, though of this there is some doubt. The opinion grew among the people that neither Peter nor Prince Ramodanofsky, his cruel viceroy, could sleep until they had tasted blood, and a letter from the prince contains the following lurid sentence: "I am ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... place the coffin upon the funeral pile. The class, each member bearing a torch, form a circle around the pyre. At a given signal they all bend forward together, and touch their torches to the heap of combustibles. In an instant "a lurid flame arises, licks around the coffin, and shakes its tongue to heaven." To these ceremonies succeed festivities, which ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... busy to break up into individual cases. To talk about hundreds of millions of idolaters leaves the heart untouched. But take one soul out of all that mass, and try to feel what his life is in its pitchy darkness, broken only by lurid lights of fear and sickly gleams of hope, in its passions ungoverned by love, its remorse uncalmed by pardon, its affections feeling like the tendrils of some climbing plant for the stay they cannot ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... form any rational estimate of the probabilities of our destiny; no officials appeared; the ordinary invariable routine of the steward department was suspended without notice; the sounds were tremendous, and a hot lurid obscurity filled the atmosphere. Soon after four the clamour increased, and the shock of a sea blowing up a part of the fore-guards made the groaning fabric reel and shiver throughout her whole huge bulk. At that time, by common consent, we assembled ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... the most striking articles of his attire, when sweeping, were a flame-colored flannel shirt and a shiny black hat with "Prepare to Meet Thy God" on the front in large silver letters. The combination of color was indescribably pictorial, and as lurid and suggestive as an ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... and it was the woman capable of that ignoble threat who, his sharper sense of her quality having become so quite deterrent, was now making for him a crime of it that he shouldn't wish to tie himself to her for life. The vivid, lurid thing was the reality, all unmistakable, of her purpose; she had thought her case well out; had measured its odious, specious presentability; had taken, he might be sure, the very best advice obtainable at Properley, where there was always ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... to cut. Horrible old man! Who's over him, he cries;—aye, he would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I plainly see my miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... of life is very great," Bernard went on, looking up at the dusky hills and the summer stars, seen through a sort of mist of music and talk, and of powdery light projected from the softly lurid windows of the gaming-rooms. "The charm of life is extreme. I am unacquainted with odious necessities. ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... perceive the shadow of Boyd behind her on the tent wall, wavering, gigantic, towering to the ridge-pole as he set the camp-torch in its socket on the flooring." She passed her slim hand across her eyes. "It was like an unreal scene—a fevered vision of two phantoms in the smoky, lurid lustre of the torch. Boyd stood there dark against the light, edged with flickering flame as with a mantle, figure and visage scintilant with Lucifer's own beauty—and Lana, her proud head drooping, and her sad, young eyes fixed on me—Oh, Euan!" She stood pressing down both eyelids with ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... and his spiritual brother, SCHOPENHAUER, that dyspeptic sage, Monthly grow so very like each other, As portrayed in MAXSE'S lurid page, That it passes MAXSE'S Christian charity To detect ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... great movements shook the land. They might not be distinctly Homeric, but there seemed to be much glory in them. He had read of marches, sieges, conflicts, and he had longed to see it all. His busy mind had drawn for him large pictures extravagant in color, lurid ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... went, yet still the awful struggle continued. Suddenly a shot struck the flag-staff, and the banner, which had waved in that lurid atmosphere all day, fell on the beach outside the fort. For a moment there was a pause, as if at a presage of disaster. Then a grenadier, the brave and immortal Serjeant Jasper, sprang upon the parapet, leaped down to the beach, and passing along nearly ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... good people of those days would have objected to their use. Those who remember the three early churches I have mentioned—and those who do not can readily picture them with their fittings and seating capacity—will recall the dim, lurid light cast on the audience by the flickering candles. Turn, now, for example, to the Metropolitan Church on an evening's service. Notice the long carpeted aisles, the rich upholstery, the comfortable seats, the lofty ceilings, the spacious ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... between them, which gave special joy to Buckner, as it meant an increased supply of money and a renewed lease of life in New York City, which he had learned to "love." Besides the agreement, he was asked to sign a letter to Mrs. Gorham, which had been carefully worded by Levy and was filled with lurid descriptions of his affection and loneliness. He had accidentally become aware of the fact that their separation was not legal, and the unexpected knowledge had served to revive in him all the fondness of the early days. He had mastered the ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... west was one great lurid, brassy glare, overhung with banks of sinister clouds, a leaden purple above, fiery crimson below. The unnatural light fell strongly upon us both. A big shadow passed for an instant across the sunset, and we, looking instinctively up, saw the circling bulk of some huge bird of prey. ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... up with the weird light of the dying day the pallid, clean-shaven faces of gallant British boys, the rugged faces of the Scot, the olive skin of the child of Provence, the bronzed cheeks of old veterans: it threw its lurid glow on red coats and black coats, white facings and gilt epaulettes; it drew sparks as of still-living fire from breastplates and broken swords, discarded casques and bayonets, sabretaches and kilts and bugles and drums, and dead horses and ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... not be effected suddenly. She must rely on a slower appeal to Stephen's better self; she must be prepared for a harder task than that of rushing away while resolution was fresh. She sat down. Stephen, watching her with that look of desperation which had come over him like a lurid light, approached slowly from the door, seated himself close beside her, and grasped her hand. Her heart beat like the heart of a frightened bird; but this direct opposition helped her. She felt her ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... baronet read these lines, than he examined the several names on the note, and on coming to one which was underlined evidently by the same ink that was used by Fenton in the memoranda, his eyes gleamed with delight, and he waved it to and fro with a grim and hideous triumph, such as the lurid light of his foul principles flashing through such eyes, and animating such features ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... parents, in whom she had always had perfect confidence, and whom she had known and loved as long as she could remember anything, had failed her, than because she had been obliged to cast a man out of her life who had merely lighted it for a few months with a flame which she recognized now as lurid at the best, and uncertain, and which she would never have desired to keep burning continually with that feverish glare to the extinguishing of every other interesting object. She would have been happiest when passion ended ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... moment, seemed to rock on its foundations; to shatter itself to bits in a chaotic jumble of sound and of movement, shot through and through with lurid flames. Kleig felt himself hurled upward and outward, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... in the deep fireplace. She had seen a wild, wicked vision there once before. It came again, as things evil never fail to come again at our bidding. Good may delay, but evil never waits. The red fire turned itself into shapes of lurid dens and caverns, changing from horror to horror until her creative fancy formed them into the secret chamber of Beaumanoir with its one fair, solitary inmate, her rival for the hand of the Intendant,—her fortunate rival, if she might believe the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... roaring winds Are in the awful silence only heard. But when the double victory is gained, Drums, shells and trumpets mingle with the shouts From hill to hill re-echoed and renewed— As when, after the morning's threatening bow, Dark, lurid, whirling clouds obscure the day, And forked lightnings dart athwart the sky, And angry winds roll up the boiling sea, And thunder, raging winds and warring waves Join in one mighty and ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... object of envy to all the young peasant-girls within a circuit of ten miles, although her conduct, from a religious point of view, was supremely reprehensible. Flore, born in 1787, grew up in the midst of the saturnalias of 1793 and 1798, whose lurid gleams penetrated these country regions, then deprived of priests and faith and altars and religious ceremonies; where marriage was nothing more than legal coupling, and revolutionary maxims left a deep ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... shows himself: She fans the fires of vengeance into flame, Which in the sacred presence of a mother Had burn'd more dimly. Silently she leads Her brother to the spot where fell their sire; Where lurid blood-marks, on the oft-wash'd floor, With pallid streaks, anticipate revenge. With fiery eloquence she pictured forth Each circumstance of that atrocious deed, Her own oppress'd and miserable life, The prosperous traitor's insolent demeanor, The perils ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to pound sand. She must do it. So, quick as a flash she picked up the red-light standing near, and started down the track. The rain was coming down in a perfect deluge, and the wind was sweeping across the Nebraska prairies like a hurricane. Lightning was flashing, casting a lurid glare over the soaked earth, and the thunder rolled peal after peal, resembling the artillery of great guns in a big battle. Truly, it was like the setting for a grand drama. Undaunted by it all, this brave little woman, ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... ignorance about how to drink and when to drink that is accountable for most of his tragedies. I do not propose (like some of my revolutionary friends) that we should abolish the public schools. I propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we should make them public. I do not wish to make Parliament stop working, but rather to make it work; not to shut up churches, but rather to open them; not to put out the lamp of ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... for the moment. But then she saw that it was a red light like a stormy sunset, with masses of clouds in the sky, and a low sun very fiery and dazzling, which no doubt to a hasty glance must have looked, with its dark shadows and high lurid lights, like the fires of the bottomless pit. But when you looked down you saw the reality what it was. The country that lay beneath was full of tropical foliage, but with many stretches of sand and dry plains, and in the foreground was ...
— A Little Pilgrim - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... corner as he listened; his mental language became impossibly lurid. He felt that he would willingly have given a thousand or two to plant them both into that bit of the outpost line, where a month before he had crawled round on his belly at dawn to see his company. Grey-faced and grey-coated with the mud, their eyes had been clear and steady ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
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