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More "Shrinking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... swoon in the court-room, when I held your hand, you looked at me without shrinking, and called me Tiberius. Again, when for hours I sat beside your cot, watching the crisis of your first terrible illness, you opened your eyes and held out your hand, saying: 'Have you come for me, Tiberius?' Why have you told me you were ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... it steals from nature its glory and its exhilaration—not its tenderness. And what, perhaps, is better than all, to mourn deeply for the death of another, loosens from ourself the petty desire for, and the animal adherence to, life. We have gained the end of the philosopher, and view, without shrinking, the coffin ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 488, May 7, 1831 • Various
... headache when Francis came to take possession of his new home, and scarcely made her appearance; but Jane, who felt none of her sister's shrinking from him, showed him over the house, and told him how it had been managed, hoped he would keep the present servants, and particularly recommended to his care the gardener, who, though rather superannuated ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... the author of the screams; on the other, three men close-locked in grimmest combat, one defending himself against two with indifferent success; while in between stood a third woman with her back to and perilously near the chasm, shrinking from the threat of a pistol in the ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... extinguished lights, and clapping their hands, as they pass on, crying, 'Senza Moccolo! Senza Moccolo!'; low balconies full of lovely faces and gay dresses, struggling with assailants in the streets; some repressing them as they climb up, some bending down, some leaning over, some shrinking back—delicate arms and bosoms—graceful figures—glowing lights, fluttering dresses, Senza Moccolo, Senza Moccoli, Senza Moc-co-lo-o-o-o!—when in the wildest enthusiasm of the cry, and fullest ecstasy of the sport, the Ave Maria rings from the church steeples, and the Carnival is over ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... integrity, but he cannot even dream of the ordeal to which he cannot fail to be exposed; of how much courage he must possess to resist the temptations which must daily beset him; of that sensitive shrinking from undeserved censure which he must learn to control; of the ever recurring contest between a natural desire for public approbation and a sense of public duty; of the load of injustice he must be content to bear even from those who should be his friends; the imputations on his motives; the sneers ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... arm round her, and assured her that no one could harm her, Colonel Keith let his fingers be very hard pinched, and her aunt came nearer, all telling her that she had only to make her answers distinctly; and though still shrinking, she could reply to Mr. Grey's question whom she ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a very general human shrinking from the thought of any operation on the eye—it is so delicate, so sensitive in every way, but as a matter of fact, science can do many things by way of operation upon the eye. If I did not think I could give you back your sight, you may be sure ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... pitiful if for pride's sake, if for fear of the sneers of men, he were to kill her joy and defile his own soul with her heart's blood. People would laugh at the converted celibate—was it that he feared? Had he fallen so low as that? or was the shrinking he felt not rather the dread that his fall would be a stone of stumbling to others? for in his infatuation he had assumed to be an example. Was there no distinguishing good and evil? Could every motive and every act change ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... case of Cactuses, very large specimens, when imported from their native haunts to be placed in our glass houses, soon perish. At Kew, there have been, at various times, very fine specimens of some of the largest-growing ones, but they have never lived longer than a year or so, always gradually shrinking in size till, finally, owing to the absence of proper nourishment, and to other untoward conditions, they have broken down and rotted. This rotting of the tissue, or flesh, of these plants is the great enemy to their cultivation in England. ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... heir to all the Messianic ideas of his people. In these, glory, not rejection and death, was to be the Messiah's portion. That he was always superior to current expectations is no sign that he did not feel their force. They quite mistake who find the bitterness of Jesus' "cup" simply in his physical shrinking from suffering. The temptation was ever with him to find some other way to the goal of his work than that which led through death. What Peter said hid a force greater than any word of the disciple's. It voiced the crucial temptation of Jesus' life. The answer addressed to Peter showed ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... we are thinking, our fathers would think; From the death we are shrinking from, they too would shrink; To the life we are clinging to, they too would cling; But it speeds from the earth like a bird ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... that, although I should be utterly ashamed to come wittingly, I feel no confusion when I find myself here. When I feel myself coming awake, I lie for a little while with my eyes closed, wondering and hoping, and afraid to open them, lest I should find myself only in my own chamber; shrinking a little, too—just a little—from the first ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... ages as winds over the blue AEgean, and woman, shrinking from their blasts and the agitations that have followed them, has prayed to her gods, and been suspended between the depths of man's depravity and the heights of his achievements, around whose wintry peaks winds of ambition have roared, storms of vaulting self-love have gathered, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... across Friedrich's mental view his cabin, differing in no respect from those of the "mountain whites," his neighbors. Then a picture of a little figure with white neck and arms shining through the filmy blackness of her gown, shrinking into an arm-chair, and saying, "I always had enough ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... married her, to find her impatient of his grief, nor of the many times since when she had appeared almost wilfully blind to his ideals and purposes. His judgment held only this, that she had never understood him. For this he had seldom blamed her; but to-night he blamed himself. Instead of shrinking away sensitively, keeping the vital part of his life to himself and making what he could of it alone, he should have set himself steadily to create a place for it in her understanding and sympathy. Was not a perfect married love ...
— Different Girls • Various
... beneath him: clanged with a thundercrash His arms, as Peleus' son the princely fell. And still his foes with most exceeding dread Stared at him, even as, when some murderous beast Lies slain by shepherds, tremble still the sheep Eyeing him, as beside the fold he lies, And shrinking, as they pass him, far aloof And, even as he were living, fear him dead; So feared they him, Achilles now ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... to take his arm, or perhaps to caress him, or at least to encourage him by her gentlest words and her prettiest smiles. The steady self-restraint which she now manifested was a sign, as he interpreted it, of suppressed resentment. Shrinking, honestly shrinking, from the bare possibility of another quarrel, he confronted the ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... therefore, of the faith of the Trinity it behoves me to distinguish without shrinking from danger, and to make known the gift of God and everlasting consolation, and, without fear, confidently to spread abroad the name of God everywhere, so that after my death I may leave it to my Gallican brethren ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... inflicted a good deal of pain upon the poor fellow, for the perspiration streamed down his face like rain. Yet all the time he sat motionless and impassive as a statue, never moving a muscle or shrinking ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... Mr Gale exploded in tones low and fierce. "But I call it a swindle." And he walked, with an undecided, longing, shrinking air, in the wake of the shabby man who ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... eyes; her lips quivered; she leaned back feebly in her chair, breathing a name. The crisis lasted a few minutes, while the momentary vision faded and the sun-light crept on. The eyelids unclosed at last, slowly and painfully, as though shrinking from what might greet the eyes beneath them. But the farther wall was now in deep shade. Mrs. Verrier sat up; the emotion which had mastered her like a possession passed away; and rising hurriedly, she went back to the front drawing-room. She had hardly reached it when Miss Floyd's voice ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... separated and fell back, showing on each weak or wicked face the particular passion which had driven them into crime and made them the victims of this wholesale revenge. There had been some sort of bond between them till the vision of death rose before each shrinking soul. Shoulder to shoulder in crime, they fell apart as their doom approached; and rushing, shrieking, each man for himself, they one and all sought to escape by doors, windows or any outlet which promised ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... confronts the objection that he has deposed knowledge and degraded humanity to the rank of an ass whose highest attainment is to love—what? "Husked lupines, and belike the feeder's self." The Dervish declares without shrinking the faith that ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... dragged by constables, she entered the prisoner's dock. There she clutched the bar before her as if to keep herself from falling. Her head was bent down between her shrinking shoulders as if she were going through the agony ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... short wigs, black cloaths, or dark camblet trimmed black, with mourning gloves and hat-bands, who went on certain days at each tavern successively, and keep a sort of moving club. Having often met with their faces, and observed a certain shrinking way in their dropping in one after another, I had the unique curiosity to inquire into their characters, being the rather moved to it by their agreeing in the singularity of their dress; and I find upon due examination they are a knot of parish clerks, who have taken ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... prose, and that the Book contains no Oracles from him, beyond some sixty short poems in a uniform measure. These Duhm alleges—and this is all that he finds in them—reveal Jeremiah as a man of modest, tender, shrinking temper, "no ruler of spirits, a delicate observer, a sincere exhorter and counsellor, a hero only in suffering and not in attack."(51) Every passage of the Book, which presents him in any character beyond this—as an advocate for the Law or as a didactic prophet—is the ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... he softly, scowling from one to other of the shrinking company. "You, Amos Penarth, and you, Richard Farnaby, aye and half a dozen others o' ye, you've sailed wi' me ere now and you know when I say a thing I mean it. And you'd fight, would ye, my last words to you being 'see to it there ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... of St. Paul's, and the mean archway of Dean's Court, into a region of gorgeous blazonments, we come to that quiet and grave house, like an old nobleman's, that stands aside from the new street from the Embankment, like an aristocrat shrinking from a crowd. The original Heralds' College, Cold Harbour House, founded by Richard II., stood in Poultney Lane, but the heralds were turned out by Henry VII., who gave their mansion to Bishop Tunstal, whom he had driven from Durham ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... carriage who ought to have it; but neither do I want them to refuse the coals. I should indeed be sorry if any change in our views on these subjects involved the least lessening of self-dependence in the English mind: but the common shrinking of men from the acceptance of public charity is not self-dependence, but mere base and selfish pride. It is not that they are unwilling to live at their neighbours' expense, but that they are unwilling to confess they do: it is not dependence ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... weakness and exhaustion, he succeeded in rising from his seat, and, with a countenance contracted by rage and despair, he seized a knife, before they had time to prevent him, and turned it upon Cephyse. But at the moment he was about to strike, shrinking from an act of murder, he hurled the knife far away from him, and falling back into the chair, covered his face ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... muttered, the mother-love, the honor and justice in her quailing heart shrinking back before the threat ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... across the square to an old house set back between its neighbors, as though it were modest and shrinking from observation, or desirous of keeping a secret. Its door was narrow and down a step from the roadway; its windows small, ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... shrinking back from closer approach, her white face horror-stricken. I drew a quick breath, fairly quivering under the ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... is not he!" she cried, shrinking away in terror, and she stood face to face with the conscript, gazing at ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... we're settled;—I don't see any sense, you know, in your grey cloaks—I'm old, and you won't mind me saying so; but I know what Frank Wentworth is," said the indignant aunt, making a severe curtsy, accompanied by lightning glances at the shrinking background of female figures, as she went out of ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... child received a savage blow from the woman's hard hand full in the face without shrinking. It was Madge who winced. Tears rose to her eyes. She put her arms about the child and tried to ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... driven him into this comedy, as destiny had driven him to Heart's Desire. It was not comedy now, when Dan Anderson faced judge and jury here in Blackman's adobe. There came a swift, sudden chill, a gripping as of iron, a darkening, a shrinking of the heart of each man in that little room. It was the coming of the Law! Ah! Dan Anderson, you ruined our little paradise; and now its walls are down forever, even the walls of ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... the east side, in which, as twilight falls, Satan sets up his recruiting office. A mighty host of children danced and ran and played in the street. Some in rags, some in clean white and beribboned, some wild and restless as young hawks, some gentle-faced and shrinking, some shrieking rude and sinful words, some listening, awed, but soon, grown familiar, to embrace—here were the children playing in the corridors of the House of Sin. Above the playground forever hovered a great bird. The bird was known to humorists ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... is no way of keeping apples quite so good and practicable as packing in light barrels and storing in cool cellars; the barrel forms a room within a room, and prevents circulation of air and consequent drying and shrinking of the fruit, and also lessens the changes of temperature, and besides more fruit can be packed and stored in a given space than in any other way. The poorest of all ways is the large open bin, and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... attended her devotedly to the last, was inconsolable at her loss. "When he had deposited her remains in their last resting-place," relates his biographer, "he seemed as if left without an object on earth. Shrinking even from the affectionate attentions of his family, he went at once to Wiseton, where he passed several months in complete retirement ... his grief was too deeply seated to be otherwise than lasting; and for many years its poignancy ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... him like a man who looks through his window at the wide expanse of meadow and waving wood and distant hill which has met his eye every morning of his life and finds it—gone. It was incredible. He turned giddy. His reeling mind, shrinking back from the abyss, struck against a fixed point, and, clutching it, came violently to ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... to the failure to treat more extensively the biographical material of the whole race the editor states that such accounts cannot be secured in many instances for the reason that, some are indifferent to fame, experience a shrinking from publicity, or are too busy to give attention to matters of this kind. The defects of this book, however, cannot be ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... was, however, abundantly rich in personal treasures, such as flesh, firm, plump, and replete with the juices of youth, and robust well-knit limbs. My fingers too had now got within reach of the true, the genuine sensitive plant, which, instead of shrinking from the touch, joys to meet it, and swells and vegetates under it: mine pleasingly informed me that matters were so ripe for the discovery we meditated, that they were too mighty for the confinement they were ready to break. A waistband that I unskewered, ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... Olney!" Ethelyn gasped, thinking how near that was to her mother-in-law, and shrinking from the espionage to which ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... her hair, which waved softly around her forehead, was wound in a flat knot low in her neck, making her look very young, as she sat shrinking from the fire of eyes directed towards her and saw, if she did not hear, the low whispers of the people, many of whom had never seen her before, and were surprised at her extreme youth and beauty. Ruby Ann was at a distance, trying ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... asked, clinging to the others and shrinking back in alarm from its sheer edge and bottomless depth, for that this was enormous we could see by the shaft of light which flowed downwards farther than ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... Soubise, and other Huguenot chiefs had incited him to murder the Duke of Guise, persecutor of the faithful, "as a meritorious deed in the eyes of God and men." Coligny repudiated this allegation point blank. Shrinking from the very appearance of hypocrisy, he abstained from any regret at the death of the Duke of Guise. "The greatest blessing," said he, "which could come to this realm and to the church of God, especially to myself and all my house;" and he referred to ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... imagined at once more powerful or more pathetic than that picture of a "noble mind o'erthrown," alternating between crushed, hopeless misery and wild excitement—thirsting for the rest and peace that only death can bestow, yet shrinking from the fearful leap into the dim unknown beyond the grave. The scene with the Queen is inimitably grand. One feels that the entrance of the Ghost comes only in time to stay the frenzied hand, and then follows the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, the human shrinking from the cup of pain. They saw the false friend, Judas, betray him with a kiss. (Alas! poor Judas! He loved Jesus, in a way, like the rest did. It was only his fear of poverty that made him betray his Master. He was so poor—he wanted the money so badly! ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... some private soldier straying out of bounds with a woman of the camp as companion, he had thrown himself from the saddle to investigate. Whatever was to be done must be accomplished quickly, or it would prove all too late. To think was to act. Stepping instantly in front of the shrinking girl and facing him, I ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... she knew not whither; for clouds and darkness were in the forward distance. At every step, she found a new strength and a new power of endurance growing up in her young spirit. Thought, too, was becoming clearer and stronger. The mature woman had suddenly taken the place of the shrinking girl. ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... as with smiling face but shrinking soul he made his way through that crowd of his fellow-creatures whose contact was defilement. He would have lost them all rather than a song of Hester's—and yet that he would on occasion have lost for a good rubber ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... bring the bottle—no room," he said, patting his shrinking pocket. "The tangle-foot all went down the pussyfoot's neck, so I left 'Robbie Burns' in the car. By the way, don't forget to ring up about that car. Old Mut-mut cut the cushions to ribbons; that bit of evidence might ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... well, and was to accompany her fortune-hunting in Ferrara for precisely opposite reasons. Was this fair? she wondered. She, Bellaroba, was to go because she was of a piece with the Ferrarese; Olimpia, because she could furnish a provoking contrast. She was an affectionate, docile creature, this shrinking Bellaroba, absurdly young, absurdly your servant; but tears smarted in her eyes as she stood adorned for sacrifice—in her tight crimson dress, lace at her neck and wrists, a jewel on her forehead, a chain in her hair, and a cold block of lead dragging at her heart. She had never ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... him full in the face while a great storm was surging in her mind. "I can't obey my father," she was saying to herself, I can't! It's too hard—too hard! The old man mistook her silence for the rejection of his prayer and slowly turned to go. The shrinking figure, the concentrated misery, the hopeless expression on his face, the tears in his eyes, the pathetic woebegone listlessness in his walk were too much for her; ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... to him and she yielded, not wholly, but with a shrinking of her small body, and a soft, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... fanciful and erroneous notion "led to serious errors in practice," [1] and was occasionally productive of the most fatal results. Although, indeed, Pliny spoke of the folly of the magicians in using the catanance (Greek: katanhankae, compulsion) for love-potions, on account of its shrinking "in drying into the shape of the claws of a dead kite," [2] and so holding the patient fast; yet this primitive idea, after the lapse of centuries, was as fully credited as in the early days when it was originally started. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... in his quality of Sage Emerson always haunted the perilous altitudes of Transcendentalism, 'seeing nothing under him but the everlasting snows of Himalaya, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and the indigo Firmament sowing itself with daylight stars.' He never thinks it beneath his dignity to touch a point of minor morals, or to say a good word for what he somewhere calls subterranean prudence. Emerson values mundane circumspection as highly as Franklin, and ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... saw nor heard any thing that indicated the approach of an enemy. Lily, though very much alarmed, was as resolute as her companions; for she knew and felt what slavery would be if its shackles were again fastened upon her. She was a gentle, timid, shrinking girl; but she was determined to die rather than be restored to the tyranny of her capricious mistress, and the more terrible fate ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... more exalted strategies. A woman who made less a point of sympathizing with their delicate organisms, might have sought to plunge these phosphorescent pieces into the tepid bath of domestic life; but Flavia's discernment was deeper. This must be a refuge where the shrinking soul, the sensitive brain, should be unconstrained; where the caprice of fancy should outweigh the civil code, if necessary. She considered that this much Arthur owed her; for she, in her turn, had made concessions. ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... forty years of carnage the fighting propensities had glutted themselves. A reaction followed, and in the early years of Henry VIII. the statutes were growing obsolete, and the "unlawful games" rising again into favour. The younger nobles, or some among them, were shrinking from the tilt-yard, and were backward on occasions even when required for war. Lord Surrey, when waiting on the Border, expecting the Duke of Albany to invade the northern counties, in 1523, complained of the growing "slowness" of the young lords "to be at such journeys,"[67] and of their "inclination ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... till then, she had never envisaged. The Marchesino's madness had carried her one step further. She had not actually looked into the abyss. But she had felt herself near to something that she hated even more than she feared it. And she had returned to the hotel full of a shrinking delicacy, not to be explained, intense as snow, which had made the meeting with her mother and Artois a torture to her, which had sealed her lips to silence that night, which had made her half apology to Gaspare in the morning a secret agony, which had even set a flush on her face when she ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... had faced the task with all the splendid, impetuous courage that was hers. There was no shrinking. Her mind was swiftly and irrevocably made up. She would abandon the Skandinavia for ever. She would abandon everything and follow those dictates which had prompted her so often in the past. Father Adam's self-sacrificing example was always before her. The forests. Those submerged legions which ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... can't go togged out like that!" she ordered in quite a different tone. She flung off her own long coat and threw it around the shrinking little white figure, then knelt and deftly turned up the long satin draperies out of sight and fixed them firmly with a pin extracted from somewhere about her person. Quickly she stood up and pulled off her rubbers, her eye ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... poring over his books, in the hope that, despite his misfortune, he may one day minister to parental vanity. Finally he breaks away from Rita, for the first time "in all these ten years," goes up "into the infinite solitudes," looks Death in the face, and returns shrinking from passion, yearning towards selfless love, and filled with a profound and remorseful pity for the lot of poor maimed humanity. He will "help Eyolf to bring his desires into harmony with what lies attainable before him." He will "create a conscious happiness ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... pity and forgive. The principal said he thought I would be more apt to find my family if I joined a colored regiment in the West than if I joined one of the Maine companies. I confess at first I felt a shrinking from taking the step, but love for my mother overcame all repugnance on my part. Now that I have linked my fortunes to the race I intend to do all I ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... to haul the supplies for the North West Mounted Police this spring. I'll be in Fort Macleod 'most as soon as you, I reckon. What is it, Winnie?" he questioned, as the child drew shrinking ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... I crossed the interminable length of floor that separated me from the door I could feel that contemptuous smile rowelling my shrinking vertebrae. Halfway across, the Blue Himalyan guinea-pig could have given me three drachms and whipped me by sheer brute strength. As I sped towards the door an attendant opened it. It was unnecessary. I could easily have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... and scolded each other for a minute, then each returned to her own room. But I not to sleep. Listening acutely for every sound, yet shrinking from every sound as it came, I tossed and turned with wide-open, feverish eyes. Suspicious circumstances at which I had been disposed to laugh in the day, took on a sinister complexion in the watches of the night. The loneliness of the place, its distance from every habitation—details to ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... hurricane; hastening desperately to recover what it enjoyed before life was wrecked and pillaged by these blasts of death. Hearts, which now swell with pity and gratitude when our maimed soldiers pass the streets, will, from sheer familiarity, and through natural shrinking from reminder, be dried to a stony indifference. "Let the dead past bury its dead" is a saying terribly true, and perhaps essential to the preservation of mankind. The world of ten years hence will shrug its shoulders if it sees maimed and useless men crawling the ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... Shrinking at last from the tyranny of thoughts till of late unknown, her eye rested upon the gipsire which Alwyn had sent her by the old servant. The sight restored to her the holy recollection of her father, the sweet joy of having ministered to his wants. She put up the little ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... meek, angelic monk dreaded the life of his days; dreaded to leave the cloister where the sunshine was tempered and the noise reduced to a mere faint hum, and where the flower-beds were tidy and prim; dreaded to soil or rumple his spotless white robe and his shining black cowl; a spiritual sybarite, shrinking from the sight of the crowd seething in the streets, shrinking from the idea of stripping the rags off the beggar in order to see his tanned and gnarled limbs; shuddering at the thought of seeking for muscles in the dead, cut-open body; fearful of every whiff of life that ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... farm, or at a show of beasts:- do we not know that that man, whenever his wrath is kindled up, will be a brutal savage? Do we not know that as he is a coward in his domestic life, stalking among his shrinking men and women slaves armed with his heavy whip, so he will be a coward out of doors, and carrying cowards' weapons hidden in his breast, will shoot men down and stab them when he quarrels? And if our reason did not teach us this and ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... in deede, but namelie, for the greate abhominable sin of vn- // Contempt kindnesse: but what vnkindnesse? euen such // of Gods vnkindnesse as was in the Iewes, in contemninge // trewe Re- Goddes voice, in shrinking from his woorde, in // ligion. wishing backe againe for gypt, in committing aduoultrie and hordom, not with the women, but with the doctrine of Babylon, did bring all the plages, destructions, and Captiuities, that fell so ofte and horriblie, ...
— The Schoolmaster • Roger Ascham
... been gay, spirituette, and coquettish; gradually, she became quiet and reserved. The giddy school-girl had given place to the shrinking virgin. ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... his voice fairly trembling with emotion; "why, look here! We was all shrinking away to nothing in that wanishing garden. Bob Scarlet himself was no bigger than an ant when we ...
— The Admiral's Caravan • Charles E. Carryl
... acts, the exhaustion resulting from their accomplishment, renders them fearful to the patient who has the fear, the phobia of these acts, just as he has the terror of that depression which gives the feeling of the diminution of life. The shrinking of activity and conscience, phobias, negativisms, generally take their starting point in this fear of exhaustion caused by some difficult action. In other cases the patient feels incapable of accomplishing correctly the reflected acts necessary to social and ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... perfect fright lest he should guess right too soon; shrinking away, as she held the basket towards him; curling up her pretty shoulders; stopping her ear with her hand, as if by so doing she could keep the right word out of Toby's lips; and laughing ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... and shrinking, was dressed in a queer, old-fashioned black silk that had evidently been taken up and made short for the occasion. Mrs. Harlowe's heart was touched to the quick and she bent and kissed the young ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... him. The same 'net was privily laid for him.' All that had seemed to him half an hour before as wellnigh desperate, continued utterly unaltered. But what had altered? God had come into the place, and that altered the whole aspect of matters. Instead of looking with shrinking and tremulous heart along the level of earth, where miseries were, he was looking up into the heavens, where God was; and so everything was beautiful. That will be our experience if we will commit the keeping of our souls ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... her prison he rose and entered the hut, where he tried to engage in conversation with her. Groping across the interior he leaned his short spear against the wall and sat down beside her, and as he talked he edged closer and closer until at last he could reach out and touch her. Shrinking, ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... immediately ceased to weep, and said "Yes," calmly and with firmness. Bending beside her brother, without faltering or shrinking, she gave her white fingers to the ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... them, and where did you find them,' Harold asked next, shrinking a little from the glittering stones which seemed ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... she had suspected as she had talked to her sister was, before the interview ended, made curiously clear. The first obstacle in her pathway would be the shrinking of a creature who had been so long under dominion that the mere thought of seeing any steps taken towards her rescue filled her with alarm. One might be prepared for her almost praying to be let alone, because she ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... combination, ma foi!" said Merlin, with an oath, as he turned to the two other women, who sat pale and shrinking in a corner of the room, not understanding what was going on, not knowing what to think or what to believe. They had known nothing of Deroulede's plans for the escape of Marie Antoinette, they didn't know what the letter-case ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... results in this as in other fields of activity. The task is a great one and underlies the task of dealing with the whole industrial problem. But the fact that it is a great problem does not warrant us in shrinking from the attempt to solve it. At present we face such utter lack of supervision, such freedom from the restraints of law, that excellent men have often been literally forced into doing what they ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... softly queried a tragic-faced youth, sensitive and shrinking, crowned with an abominably trimmed head of ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... boys were present, and Mrs. Bertram, though shrinking at all times from their high spirits and love of fun, yet looked forward every day to their short visit. She was a confirmed invalid, and rarely left the house, and her daughter Julia in consequence took her place as ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... not well, and mother'll be alarmed about me—I ought not to have left father alone to tend store, and I feel that I've taken cold. I presume some of these folks will have a spare seat, and my boots have shrunk, and I don't care for picnics as a general thing, anyway. My clothes are shrinking all the time, and I think we're going to have a thunder-shower, and I guess ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... was dear to the Madigans. They seized upon each blunder she made, and held it up, shrinking and bare, under the light of their laughter-loving eyes. They ridiculed it interminably, and were unflaggingly entertained by it, repeating it for the edification of each new-comer so often and so faithfully that from conscious mimicry they turned to use of it without ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... meeting-house, a seat of gloom, still throws its darksome shadow down through the years,—the stool of repentance. "Barbarous and cruel punishments" were forbidden by the statutes of the new colony, but on this terrible soul-rack the shrinking, sullen, or defiant form of some painfully humiliated man or woman sat, crushed, stunned, stupefied by overwhelming disgrace, through the long Christian sermon; cowering before the hard, pitiless gaze of the assembled and ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... round the helpless girl in her prison, bringing the stake in all its horror before the eyes of the judges as before her own. No other thing could have been suggested by that piteous prayer. The stake, the scaffold, the fire—and the shrinking figure all maidenly, helpless, exposed to every evil gaze, must have showed themselves at least for a moment against that dark background of prison wall. It was enough that it should be long—to hide her as much as was possible from those dreadful ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... nothing but my duty, sir," she said. "That is the myrrh and balsam to a racking 'ed. Not but what I owns to a shrinking like unto death over the thought of what lays before me this very morning. Rest and quiet is needful, but it's little I shall get of either out of a kitching fire in the dog days. And what would you fancy for your ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... shuddered Gila, shrinking back into the depths of the chair. "But you know you mustn't believe a story like that! Poor people are always getting up such tales about rich people's automobiles. It isn't true at all. No chauffeur ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... was the dark, dank night that settled down upon Elizabeth as she sank under her burdens, her temptations, and cruel, wicked unbelief. In this dismal, hopeless "hell upon earth" she pined away for weeks and months, utterly shrinking from Bible reading, prayer, song, or religious conversation, and studiously guarding against religious reasoning, and even thought, as abominable for ...
— Elizabeth: The Disinherited Daugheter • E. Ben Ez-er
... have been more conscious of that feeling of relief than he was of its coming. It spoke to him in the swift glance she gave toward those distant, fog-blurred lights, in the white, drained face of her, in the shrinking backward movement of her body when he spoke again; and something within him ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... abbreviate, curtail, truncate, syncopate. Show (noun), display, ostentation, parade, pomp, splurge. Show, exhibit, display, expose, manifest, evince. Shrink, flinch, wince, blench, quail. Shun, avoid, eschew. Shy, bashful, diffident, modest, coy, timid, shrinking. Sign, omen, auspice, portent, prognostic, augury, foretoken, adumbration, presage, indication. Simple, innocent, artless, unsophisticated, naive. Skilful, skilled, expert, adept, apt, proficient, adroit, dexterous, deft, clever, ingenious. Skin, hide, pelt, fell. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... with much adroit delicacy concerning the shoes, and had elicited the story of the father's purchase. Though she read correctly the child's real shrinking from the thought of being the cynosure of many amused eyes, ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... times. I don't find that he is charged with any practices that the law deems dishonest, or that his wealth has made him arrogant and inaccessible; on the contrary, he takes great pains to appear affable and gracious. But, they say, he is remarkable for shrinking from his former friendships, which were generally too plain and home-spun to appear amidst his present brilliant connexions; and that he seems uneasy at sight of some old benefactors, whom a man of honour would take pleasure to acknowledge — Be that as it may, he had so effectually engaged ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... towards her. It was the worse for her. But, so long as thou art good daughter to me, thou shalt find me good father to thee;" and for a moment there was a kindliness in his eye which made it sufficiently like that of his brother to give some consolation to the shrinking heart that he was rending from all it loved; and she steadied her voice for another gentle profession of obedience, for which she felt ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... closed; then, smoke rose slowly from the chimneys, and sashes were thrown up to let in air, and doors were opened, and servant girls, looking lazily in all directions but their brooms, scattered brown clouds of dust into the eyes of shrinking passengers, or listened disconsolately to milkmen who spoke of country fairs, and told of waggons in the mews, with awnings and all things complete, and gallant swains to boot, which another hour would see upon ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... wanted,she did not seem to know how to get it. Those shining words lay up so high, above her reach: a mountain head lifting itself out of the fogs of the valley wherein she dwelt. As for the first verse of her psalm, it might as well have been a description of Gabriel, for any use to her,so she thought, shrinking back from the words. Then for the second verse,yes, there was human weakness thereor had been. Some time a refuge had been needed: but so long ago, that the years of calm security had wiped out even the thought of defencelessness. ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... had all an Englishman's shrinking reluctance to discuss his belief, or his inner life; "yours is a nice easy path—too good to be true, I'm afraid. My creed is, to do our best, to help other people, and to ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... for himself at Suffolk. On the seventeenth, just two weeks before the supreme test came on Lee's weakened army at Chancellorsville, Longstreet reported to Seddon that Suffolk would cost three thousand men, if taken by assault, or three days' heavy firing if subdued by bombardment. Shrinking from such expenditure of life or ammunition, Davis, Seddon, and Longstreet fell back on a siege, which, preventing all junction with Lee, might well have cost the ruin of ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... where he a hero shines; The hopeful youth, in Scottish senate bred, Who owns a Bushby's heart without the head; Comes, 'mid a string of coxcombs to display That veni, vidi, vici, is his way; The shrinking bard adown the alley skulks, And dreads a meeting worse than Woolwich hulks; Though there, his heresies in church and state Might well award him Muir and Palmer's fate: Still she undaunted reels and rattles on, And dares the public like a noontide sun. (What scandal call'd Maria's janty ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... bonnie queen of Fay! Call thy sisters from the gloam, And, whilst I am on my way, Feast and frolic in my home,— Kiss the moonbeams, blanching white, Shrinking, ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... lights,[162] appear with great brilliancy in the clear Canadian sky, especially during the winter nights. Starting from behind the distant horizon, they race up through the vault of heaven, spreading over all space one moment, shrinking to a quivering streak the next, shooting out again where least expected, then vanishing into darkness deeper than before; now they seem like vast floating banners of variegated flame, then as crescents, again as majestic columns of light, ever changing ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... ran to her father, and kissed him, and then shook hands with Marcus. He observed a shrinking in her touch. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... away from the pump, I saw in the doorway the station-master, of whom I had twice made complaints to his superiors, turning up the collar of his coat, shrinking from the wind and the snow. He came up to me, and putting two fingers to the peak of his cap, told me with an expression of helpless confusion, strained respectfulness, and hatred on his face, that the train was twenty minutes late, and asked ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... eyes of appeal the unhappy Iris called upon heaven to witness that she would die a thousand deaths rather than betray her solemn trust. But even as she spoke the fictitious flame of courage withered away in her shrinking frame; and at the mere touch of her brother's finger and thumb upon her wrist, the mere sight of his face bending masterfully over her with white teeth just gleaming between his twisting smile and half-veiled eyes of insolent determination, she allowed him, unresisting, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... England's sin, of England's modern wickedness. I believe they are the maggots bred out of the sore upon which our modern industrialism is based. When I looked upon the vilest of this city spawn, if my rising gorge permitted thought at all, I always had visions of little shrinking children whipped to work in English factories and mines and potteries; of souls ground out of anaemic bodies that Manchester might fatten. Free trade—licensed slaughter! The rights of the individual—the sacred liberty of the subject! ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... the horrible quest, shrinking where others stared. For it was a pitiless time, and the squadron of the Queen-mother were as lost to womanhood as the fishwomen of two centuries later. But Diane saw no corpse at once so tall, ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... landowners. Drought in 1998 further damaged the sugar industry, but its recovery in 1999 contributed to robust GDP growth. Long-term problems include low investment and uncertain property rights. The political turmoil in Fiji has had a severe impact with the economy shrinking by 8% in 1999 and over 7,000 people losing their jobs. The interim government's 2001 budget is an attempt to attract foreign investment and restart economic activity. The government's ability to manage the budget and fulfill predictions of 4% growth ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Davy; it's too big a job for a boy built like me, you understand, though sure I'd like to accommodate first rate," replied the scout with the red hair and mild blue eyes, shrinking back, ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... she saw his face contract as they scrambled over some shelf of jutting stone; but they pushed on cautiously until they came to a precipitous descent. Ida sat down gasping, when her companion stopped, and gazed with an instinctive shrinking into the gulf below. She could now see the climbing pines, black beneath the moon, and the river shining far away in the midst of them, but they seemed to go straight down. She was very weary, and scarcely ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... keel. I seized the chance thus afforded me to claw my way to the skylight and glance through it at the barometer, illuminated by the wildly swaying lamp which the steward had lighted when darkness fell, but, to my intense disappointment, the mercury, which had steadily been shrinking all day, exhibited a further drop since the index had been set ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... says: "Clay lands always shrink and crack with drought; and the stiffer the clay, the greater the shrinking, as brick-makers well know. In the great drought thirty-six years ago, we saw, in a very retentive soil in the Vale of Belvoir, cracks which it was not very pleasant to ride among. This very Summer, on land, which, with reference to this very subject, the owner stated to be impervious, ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... they appreciate the perfume of flowers, and I am sure that they never mind the most noisome stench or the most loathsome sight. A dead horse will draw a crowd of small boys, who will dwell without shrinking upon the details of his putrefaction, when they would pass by a rose-tree in bloom with indifference. Hideous reptiles and insects interest them more than the loveliest form of leaf or blossom. ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... did not laugh when Dora, who had been with her mother, came slowly across the lobby and followed the visitor into the drawing-room in order to administer the coup de grace. It might have been a veritable dagger-thrust to be dealt by a weak little shrinking hand, with the owner's head turned and face averted—such a white, grieved, frightened ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... with a certain shrinking he stopped his team in front of the hotel. The bare windows were open and the door was hooked back, so that one could see into the hall, where a row of tin wash-basins stood on a shelf. Dirty towels were scattered about, and the boarded ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... in that case whether anaesthetics which suppress corporal pain do not bring into debt those who use them? Who knows whether chloroform is not a means of revolt, and if the shrinking of the creature from suffering is not seditious, a rebellion against the will of Heaven? If this be so, the arrears of torture, the balance of distress, the warrants of pain avoided must accumulate terrible interest above, and justify the war cry of Saint Teresa, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... straight out to this quiet, fatherly man—his terrors, his shrinking from the unfamiliar atmosphere of thought to which he had awakened, it seemed, a few months before, his sense that Christianity had lost its spirit, and, above all, the strange absence of any definite religious emotion in himself. He found this difficult ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... You don't make no doubt of that, do you, sir?" The man spoke in a hushed voice, with a shrinking glance back of him. ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... lass, yes!" replied Colonel Zane heartily. "People out here are not as they are back east. An educated man, polished and all that, but incapable of hard labor, or shrinking from dirt and sweat on his hands, or even blood, would not help us in the winning of the West. Plain as Jonathan is, and with his lack of schooling, he is greatly superior to the majority of young men on ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... not of caprice, and pardon my irresolution, when you find me shrinking with terror from the promise I have made, and no longer either able or willing to perform it. The reproaches of your family I should very ill endure; but the reproaches of my own heart for an action I can neither approve nor defend, would be still more oppressive. ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... peace," said Caleb, shrinking back before her. "Spare your reproaches; if I have sinned much it is because I have ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... in the present day is shrinking until the letter threatens to become a telegram, a telephone message, a post-card. Since the events of the day are transmitted in newspapers with far greater accuracy, detail, and dispatch than they could be by the single effort of even Voltaire himself, the circulation of general ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... desert with dunes; broad, flat intensely irrigated river valleys along course of Amu Darya, Syr Darya (Sirdaryo), and Zarafshon; Fergana Valley in east surrounded by mountainous Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan; shrinking Aral ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Shock, after his friend's passion of grief had subsided. "It was not to grieve you, you know, but to show you what is worth while seeing—the manner of God's forgiveness; for as she forgave and took you to her pure heart again without fear or shrinking, so God forgives us. And, Don, it is not worth while, in the face of so great a forgiveness, to do anything else but forgive, and it is a cruel thing, and a wicked thing, to keep at a ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... these germs of Spirit-life are not bound by time. Jesus is drawing so near that already our thoughts and hopes begin to step over the shrinking foreground of "the present age," and to rest in the ever-opening horizon beyond. Who can tell what harvest after harvest may be waiting in the eternal years, after the summer of earth has ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... so final. The last tears she was ever to shed dropped from her closed eyes, as she listened to his departing steps; and the roll of the carriage carrying him away forever, seemed to roll over her shrinking heart. She cried out feebly—a pitiful little shrill cry, that she hushed with a sob still more full of anguish. Then she began to cast over her suffering soul the balm of prayer, and prostrate with closed eyes, and hands feebly hanging down, Doctor Roslyn found her. He did not need to ask ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... a mother, and how she had turned away when other girls were being caressed and loved. But never had it entered her mind to imagine that her parents were like this. The picture of the hut in which the wee woman had died rose within her—the death agony had been so plainly described. The tall, shrinking, sobbing man against the wall was her father! Even that afternoon, when Governor Vandecar had told her of her birth and her mother's death, and of her father in the lake hut, she had not imagined him like this man. Yet something pleaded for him, some subtle, gentle spirit ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... sector of light stood Wutzler, shrinking and apologetic, like a man caught in a fault, his wrinkled face eloquent of fear, his gesture eloquent of excuse. Round him, as round a conjurer, scores of little shadowy things moved in a huddling dance, fitfully hopping like sparrows over ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... Lady Mary, "Votary alike of Crispin and the Muse, "Makes her own splay-foot epigrams and shoes. "For me the eyes of young Camilla shine, "And mingle Love's blue brilliances with mine; "For me she sits apart, from coxcombs shrinking, "Looks wise—the pretty soul!—and thinks she's thinking. "By my advice Miss Indigo attends "Lectures on Memory, and assures her friends, "''Pon honor!—(mimics)—nothing can surpass the plan "'Of that ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... He went stealthily up the road past Hartledon, keeping in the shade of the hedge, and shrinking into it when he saw any one coming. Striking off when he neared the mill, he approached it cautiously, and halted amidst some trees, whence he had a ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... fantastic tale. A young man becomes the possessor of a certain magic skin, the peculiarity of which is that, while it gratifies every wish formed by its possessor, it shrinks in all its dimensions each time that a wish is gratified. The young man makes every effort to ascertain the cause of its shrinking; invokes the aid of the physicist, the chemist, the student of natural history, but all in vain. He draws a red line around it. That same day he indulges a longing for a certain object. The next morning there is a little interval between the red line and the skin, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... point is, that second marriage is more a matter of business. "I'll give you a home, if you'll take care of my children." "It's a bargain," is the way most second matches are made. There is little of the poetry of first-love, and little of the coyness and shrinking diffidence which characterize the first attachment. Still these remarks apply almost equally to a second attachment, as to ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... example of that strange, fanatical courage for which the red man is so famous. To pass the breach was like passing through a living furnace, for the fire was raging at its full height upon each side. There was no hesitation, no shrinking. ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... other surviving souls, let them be open to men hereafter, even as they are to God now. Dust to dust, and soul-secrets to humanity—there are natural heirs to all these things. Not that I do not intimately understand the shrinking back from the idea of publicity on any terms—not that I would not myself destroy papers of mine which were sacred to me for personal reasons—but then I never would call this natural weakness, virtue—nor would I, as a teacher of the public, announce ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... surface owing to pressure on the reservoir from which it comes. The view perhaps most favorably entertained at present, in reference to the general nature of volcanic eruptions, is that the rigid outer portion of the earth becomes fractured, owing principally to movements resulting from the shrinking of the cooling inner mass, and that the intensely hot material reached by the fissures, previously solid owing to pressure, becomes liquid when pressure is relieved, and is forced to the surface. As the molten material ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... deal upon his disposition and state of mind. But in most cases such counsels, given at such a time, involving, as they would, some covert though very gentle censure, would cause the heart of the boy to close itself in a greater or less degree against them, like the leaves of a sensitive-plant shrinking from the touch. The reply would very probably be, "Well, he had no business to be on the sidewalk, right in ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... spot from which the noise came, the dog was standing at the edge of a pit, out of which came a frightened cry. The old man looked in, and there he saw a child clad in garments that shone like gold, shrinking timidly into the ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... spacious, but having been constructed of the green trees of the forest, cut down and sawed into boards by the bands of the soldiers, they were considerably given to shrinking and warping, thus leaving many a yawning crevice. Stuffing the cracks with cotton batting, and pasting strips of paper over them, formed the employment ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... unbidden in his presence, and lo! Esther stood speechless before him. Her long fastings and watchings had taken the color from her cheeks, but had given a greater transparency in its place, and as she stood, half shrinking, with the shadow of profound melancholy on her pallid, but indescribably beautiful countenance, her pencilled brow slightly contracted in the intensity of her excitement, her long lashes dripping in tears, and lips trembling ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley
... language that he was determined to do his best to merit their love by constant care to preserve their liberty and their religion, by a pure administration of justice, by countenancing virtue, by discouraging vice, by shrinking from no difficulty or danger when the welfare of the nation was at stake. "These," he said, "are my resolutions; and I am persuaded that you are come together with purposes on your part suitable to these on mine. Since ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of his heir, and bring him up to have better notions of hospitality and good manners than could be learned at Howth Castle. Then she hurried back to her ship, with the poor little lordling who seemed too frightened to cry, and hid his face against her bosom, as though shrinking from the look of her dark, angry eyes. Immediately she ordered all sails to be set, and sped away toward Connaught. The nurse ran up to the castle with the news, but as she could not be admitted till the Earl ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... are often called Sensitive Plants, on account of the leaves of several of the species of this genus shrinking when touched. They grow well in loam and peat with a little sand, but require to be planted in a warm situation or to have greenhouse care. Cuttings of the young wood root readily in sand under a glass. They ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... good service without shrinking; and whensoever thereafter I had some hateful duty to do which meseemed I might never bring myself to fulfil, I would remember Ann holding my aunt's wound. And out of all this grew the good saying, "They who will, can"—which the children are ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... God!" The Count cried, shrinking away from her. "Let me punish her. To the stake with her!" and she was instantly ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... if to dispel all doubt as to the identity, the majestic lady suddenly tore aside her veil, and disclosed to the trembling, shrinking Agnes, ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... from his interview with Mr. Peters, was intercepted by a respectful small boy and conducted to the housekeeper's room, he was conscious of a sensation of shrinking inferiority akin to his emotions on his first day at school. The room was full and apparently on very cordial terms with itself. Everybody seemed to know everybody and conversation was proceeding in a manner reminiscent ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... as literature is a luxury, and for the cultured, privileged few, its interests are not in Whitman; so far as poetry represents the weakness of man rather than his strength; so far as it expresses a shrinking from reality and a refuge in sentimentalism; so far as it is aristocratic as in Tennyson, or mocking and rebellious as in Byron, or erotic and mephitic as in Swinburne, or regretful and reminiscent as in Arnold, or a melodious baying of the moon ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... noticed that the female creature to whom they had grown so accustomed appeared little now, a shrinking vision that every day shortened its wanderings; that it walked differently, that it seemed more bent. But the sea elephants knew nothing of Loneliness or its works, nor did they notice, one morning, that though the sun was shining the figure did ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... horses. Day again hot, with a few clouds round the horizon. The natives had again set fire to the country all around, which increases the heat. I wish it would come on to rain, and put out their fires, and fill the ponds, which are shrinking a great deal more than I expected. Wind, ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... twinkling, through their sad setting of darkness, with enthusiasm, and often suffused with tears. In some minds the conception of this blind wandering bard may awaken ludicrous emotions, but to us it suggests a certain sublimity. Blind Harry has powerfully described Wallace standing in the light and shrinking from the ghost of Fawdoun, (see the 'Battle of Black- Earnside,' in the 'Specimens,') but Harry himself seems walking in the light of the ghost of Wallace, and it ministers to him, not terror, but inspiration. Entering a cot at night, and asked for a tale, he begins, in low ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... stock-still and erect, his flesh shrinking a little, while his drenched flannel shirt clung yet more closely and clammily ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... watching with straining eyes the still figure, speaking with so obvious a repression of feeling, his eyes steadily fixed upon the distant horizon. Once or twice an ominous flush had suddenly flamed up in her eyes. A deep flush had stained her cheeks. But as he ceased speaking the same shrinking, the same humility marked her attitude. She knew instinctively she dared not say the things she was yearning to pour out. She knew instinctively that any such course would at once break down that thin veneer ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... gentleman knows"—June said, retreating backwards as she spoke, and so fast that she soon got out of their neighbourhood. The shrinking, gliding action accorded perfectly with the smothered tones and subdued face of ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... Mrs. Vanadam there was awe. For the portly General with mutton-chop whiskers, overlooking eyes and the air of a dictator, there was awe, also, not unmingled with envy. For the tall man in the frock-coat, whose face reminded him of his Uncle Silas, there had been shrinking antagonism at the first glance—which keen first impression was presently dulled and all but effaced by the enthusiasm, the suave tongue, and the benignant manner. Which proves that insight, like the film of a recording camera, should have the dark ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... and raising there a temple to the living God, which might influence the future welfare of millions, and even effect the salvation of his country, he began to ask himself whether he could incur the responsibility of shrinking from the fulfilment of this ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... real life work, he cannot but have partaken fully of the satisfaction this gave to them, whilst they were, as yet, buried amidst the mass of East-End misery. It was shortly before the foundation of the Work that he was converted at one of his mother's own Meetings. The shrinking from publicity, which seems an essential part of every conscientious person, held him long back from resolving to become one of their Officers. But during all the years between his being saved and that great decision, he was constantly ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... the rider noted his nervous glance, and his shrinking, dreading manner. Harlan's eyes gleamed with suspicion, and in a flash he was off the black and standing before Laskar, ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... public her father's crime has been; everywhere his wickedness is known; and should you marry this girl, your wife, however innocent, must bear the stigma of being that man's daughter. How would you, a sensitive and refined man shrinking from public scandal, bear the shame of hearing your wife spoken about ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... Rome was bound up with the cause of Antichrist by the Council of Trent. When it was that in my deliberate judgment I gave up the notion altogether in any shape, that some special reproach was attached to her name, I cannot tell; but I had a shrinking from renouncing it, even when my reason so ordered me, from a sort of conscience or prejudice, I think up to 1843. Moreover, at least during the Tract Movement, I thought the essence of her offence to consist in the honours which she paid to ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... into the study, dragging with him the shrinking figure of the clerk, Langhorn. His intrusion was startling enough, but there was still a deeper significance in the slight lurch that the manager gave as he halted, glowering, before Simon Varr. His ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... are a severe effort to my mind, and, besides shrinking from the mere mental labor of considering them, I find it difficult, in the rapid and desultory manner in which I must needs answer letters, to place even the few ideas that occur to me upon them clearly ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... all that!" said Charles, with a trembling voice. "You have been more than this to me, and I will never forget it. I was a poor, shrinking youth when I came to this camp; I knew nothing—could do nothing. My comrades, who soon found me out, mocked and complained of me, and played all manner of jokes upon me. They ridiculed me, because ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... point or climax. I cannot think of any other woman of this country who has caused so much hearty laughter by this enviable gift. She can compress a word-picture or character-sketch into a few lines, as when she said of the early Yankee: "No matter how large a man he was, he had a look of shrinking and collapse about him. It looked as if the Lord had made him and then pinched him." And a woman who has done such good work in poetry, juvenile literature, journalism, on the platform, and in books of travel and biography, will not soon be forgotten. There is a list ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... intrepidity and the emulation, which were lacking on the battle fields of this age, were universal in the armies of the arena and, where the law of the duel required, every gladiator allowed himself to be stabbed mutely and without shrinking; that in fact free men not unfrequently sold themselves to the contractors for board and wages as gladiatorial slaves. The plebeians of the fifth century had also suffered want and famine, but they had not sold their freedom; and still less would the jurisconsults ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Mr. Robert Carruthers, I do not entirely understand you," she said with a great and beautiful calmness as she lighted a cigarette and looked at me trembling before her. "You are a very bold young cavalier but you have the shrinking nature ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... promptly and heartily, without the slightest wish to receive pay in return for them; and during all this terrible summer he was to be seen ministering to these poor creatures in the foulest, most plague-stricken quarters of the city, shrinking from no danger, and deterred from his work of mercy by no thought of his own safety. He has left us the following picture of the city during ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... too slow, and yet too fast. All day I argued with my foolish heart That bade me play the shrinking coward's part And hide from pain. And when the day had past And time for Vivian's call drew near and nearer, It pleaded, "Wait until the way seems clearer; Say you are ill—or busy; keep away Until you gather strength enough to ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... begun to experience a kind of shrinking from the horrid faces in his own pictures, and to feel disgusted at the abortions of his own mind. But all that he and the old woman now felt was an increasing fear as the night drew on, a kind of sickening and paralysing terror. ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... gas-lighted streets, the hurrying passengers, with a comfortable sense of security and rest. But when she was set down near Guilford Square, her courage, which in real danger had never failed her, suddenly ebbed away, and left her merely a young girl, with aching back and weary limbs, with a shrinking dislike of walking alone so late in the evening. Worse of all, her old childish panic had taken hold of her once more; her knees trembled beneath her, as she remembered that she must pass the spy, who would assuredly still be keeping watch in Guilford Terrace. The dread of ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... that his obedience is further tested, and this in a way which to many might prove a more severe trial. GOD claims the right of determining the personal appearance of His servant, and directs that separated ones should be manifestly such. To many minds there is the greatest shrinking from appearing peculiar; but GOD would often have His people unmistakably peculiar. We sometimes hear the argument, "all the world" thinks this, or does that, given as a reason for our doing likewise; but that is an argument that should have no ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... pursued a portion of her abductors towards Montreal, and would continue his efforts, with those of her guardian and the inmates of Stillyside, to find and recover her she did not doubt; but in the meantime what might she not have to endure? And shrinking from the contemplation of the uncertain gulf before her, she was at length recalled to a sense of external things, by a sudden change of sound, from that of the clatter of the horses' hoofs on the hard road, to one like the roll of a ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... page elbowed his way among the money calling plaintively for "Felix! Mr. Felix." Shrinking at the thought of such publicity in such distinguished company, Felix caught the boy's arm and learned that he was wanted at the telephone booth ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... wouldn't. But everyone was at the dinner. Some of them came home early, I believe. But it was all kept quiet, because Aline Pearsall is such a little shrinking violet, I suppose," Mrs. Breckenridge said. "The Pearsalls are to think it was just an impromptu affair. Billy and Aline of course have no idea what a party it was. But Clarence says that poor Berry was worse than he, and a few of them are still keeping it up. ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... that, if He does not damn the wicked, confessors will have died with Him in vain. It is singular that, while Michelangelo depicted so many attitudes of expectation, eagerness, anxiety, and astonishment in the blest, he has given to none of them the expression of gratitude, or love, or sympathy, or shrinking awe. Men and women, old and young alike, are human beings of Herculean build. Paradise, according to Buonarroti's conception, was not meant for what is graceful, lovely, original, and tender. The hosts of heaven are adult and over-developed gymnasts. Yet, while we record these impressions, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... somewhat sulkily, her beauty clouded by a shade of reluctance—Phoebe, shrinking, palpitant, staying in ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... at him for a moment, and I could guess at the surprise and suspicion in his eyes. I myself was ill at ease, for there was something in Swain's face—a sort of vacant horror and dumb shrinking—that filled me with a vague repulsion. And then to see his jaw working, as he tried to form articulate words and could not, sent a shiver over ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... over the thought of the terrible fate that awaited his enemies! Brave men though they were, they could not but feel a sense of shrinking at the picture that this man's attitude and tone conjured up. There are times when anticipations of pleasure seem to be rendered more alluring by reason of description. It is also so with expectancy of pain. Words may paint that picture in crimson colours ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... proceeding from pride of reason, selfishness, carelessness, hardness of heart, vanity, evil speaking." These extracts are sufficient to show that there was a very severe introspection—a very real shrinking from sin, and sense of unworthiness. Some of the faults she lamented seemed to others remarkably absent in the duchess Evil speaking, for example, was about the last thing she could be accused of. There was no one ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... a low horror-struck tone. She had heard his sharp, agonised breathing as he reeled unsteadily against the rock behind him. She was a rarely courageous girl. Instead of shrinking she made a step forward and took him ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... fathoming Dr. Rank's love for her, or at least in her refusal to formulate it, content to take his friendship and ask herself no questions. Truly womanly again is her attitude when he speaks out at last and thrusts upon her the knowledge of his passion,—her shrinking withdrawal, her instant ordering in of the lights, and her firm refusal then, in her hour of need, to profit by the ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... he must be one of the guests unknown to us, who had come with some country neighbour, and that he had lost his way amongst the almost interminable passages of the place.' He saw himself and Jane making for the leather-covered door which led to the bridge, and the shrinking stranger, with his hopelessly timid manner, who had drawn back at their approach; and he thought he heard himself saying, 'Shall I get him some partners, or leave the people who brought him to the dance to look after him?' It was only a fleeting look that he had caught of ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... at Fort Redwood had been supplemented full five minutes by the voice of Lieutenant George Calvert's servant, before that young officer struggled from his bed. His head was splitting, his tongue and lips were dry and feverish, his bloodshot eyes were shrinking from the insufferable light of the day, his mind a confused medley of the past night and the present morning, of cards and wild revelry, and the vision of a reproachfully trim orderly standing at ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... heavily, but immediately ceased to weep, and said "Yes," calmly and with firmness. Bending beside her brother, without faltering or shrinking, she gave her white fingers to the ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... frantic incoherence with one another. But there is a great multitude who know me through my writings and who do not know me otherwise, and I cannot bear that one of them should be left in doubt or hazard of doubt through my poorly shrinking from taking the unusual means to which I now resort of circulating the truth. I most solemnly declare then—and this I do both in my own name and my wife's name—that all lately whispered rumors touching the trouble at which I have glanced ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... understand that his cry had been productive of general and intense alarm throughout the vessel, the Indian had viewed the sudden rushing of the crew towards him as an act of gratuitous hostility; and, without shrinking from the attack, had once more resumed his original air of dogged sullenness. It was evident to him, from the discussion going on, that some violence, about to be offered to his person, had only been prevented by the interference ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... time they stopped, had power to rouse her; and when at last Havana was reached she laid her weary head upon her pillow, whispering to no one of the love which was wearing her life away. With untold anguish at their hearts, both her aunt and Henry watched her, the latter shrinking ever from the thought of losing one who seemed a part ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... spoke, I indicated the shrinking figure of Agnes, and turned to meet the storm. Verily the storm did come, but from a ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... his life is of interest and importance in many ways: it reveals many amiable qualities, which had hitherto been blighted by the real or fancied scorn of the wealthy cadets. At Valence, while shrinking from his brother officers, he sought society more congenial to his simple tastes and restrained demeanour. In a few of the best bourgeois families of Valence he found happiness. There, too, blossomed the tenderest, purest idyll of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... as typically American, and which will in the end achieve good results in this as in other fields of activity. The task is a great one and underlies the task of dealing with the whole industrial problem. But the fact that it is a great problem does not warrant us in shrinking from the attempt to solve it. At present we face such utter lack of supervision, such freedom from the restraints of law, that excellent men have often been literally forced into doing what they deplored ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... me. She seemed to have lost much of her shyness. I don't know why, but I preferred my timid, shrinking Berna. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Tydides to his aid. 380 Whence comes it, Diomede, that we forget Our wonted courage? Hither, O my friend! And, fighting at my side, ward off the shame That must be ours, should Hector seize the fleet. To whom the valiant Diomede replied. 385 I will be firm; trust me thou shalt not find Me shrinking; yet small fruit of our attempts Shall follow, for the Thunderer, not to us, But to the Trojan, gives the glorious day. The Hero spake, and from his chariot cast 390 Thymbraeus to the ground pierced through the pap, While by Ulysses' ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... gazed and sighed and puffed portentously. "That coat is very tight for Milor," Isidor said, still having his eye on the frogs; but his master heard him not: his thoughts were elsewhere: now glowing, maddening, upon the contemplation of the enchanting Rebecca: anon shrinking guiltily before the vision of the jealous Rawdon Crawley, with his curling, fierce mustachios, and his terrible duelling ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Coralth fairly bellowed with rage. But Pascal did not heed him. "The other criminal is the Marquis de Valorsay," he added, in the same ringing tone. There was, moreover, a third culprit who would have inspired mingled pity and disgust if any one had noticed him shrinking into a corner, terrified and muttering: "It wasn't my fault, my wife compelled me to do it!" This ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... bare in the last of the sun; and we surveyed this upper world, letting our animals get breath. Our bleak, crumbled rim ran like a rampart between the towering tops, a half circle of five miles or six, very wide in some parts, and in some shrinking to a scanty foothold, as here. Here our trail crossed over it between two eroded and fantastic shapes of stone, like mushrooms, or misshapen heads on pikes. Banks of snow spread up here against the black rocks, but half an hour would see us descended to the green and ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... time had all started to their feet. Nero, shrinking backwards behind them, called loudly for help. Rufinus, who had shown bravery in the wars, drew a dagger from beneath his toga and sprang at Beric. The latter caught his uplifted wrist, and with a sharp ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... speaking almost eagerly. "Tell me this is so. But you do not know how I feel. I can bear it somehow, or else I can die. I could never accept such a sacrifice from you, and, oh, I could never think of marriage again, even to the best and noblest creature on God's earth, without a shrinking ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... us not only in self-praise but even in a thorough self-appreciation. We desire of the ideal character that his faculties of admiration should be, as it were, absorbed in an eager perception of the merits of others,—that a kind of shrinking delicacy should prevent him from appraising his own achievements with a similar care. Often, indeed, there is something most winning in a touch of humorous blindness: "Well, Miss Sophia, and how do you like the Lady ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... not laden with any of that haughty pride and ill-befitting knowledge with which the Roman world about her reeked, but rather as she herself had once come—with all her unstained provincial innocence of thought yet nestling in her shrinking soul—one, like herself, an exile from a lowly state, and with a heart filled with those simple memories which must not be too carelessly exposed—so seldom do they gather from without anything but cruel ridicule or cold lack of comprehension—one whom she could educate into an easy ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... my board, my bed, I warmed him in my shrinking breast, I gave him all I had, and said: "You, only you, have ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... was I didn't find out for some time, when one of the boys tauld me that Dan intended to get hold of one of the lawyers, or a magistrate, or a gintleman of consequence, and to threaten to hang him if Tim was not set free. I was almost shrinking in my brogues when I thought that Dan Hoolan might be after getting hold of yer honour, but my oath prevented me from setting off till the boys came rushing out of the court saying that Tim was acquitted. I thin tauld them about all I was afraid of, so they jumped on the backs of the horses without ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... so many centuries, was still as perfectly preserved as if it had been embalmed. The sight had a most cruel fascination; and while one of the horror-seekers stood helplessly conjuring to his vision that scene of unknown dread,—the shrinking, shrieking woman dragged to the block, the wild, shrill, horrible screech following the blow that drove in the spike, the merciful swoon after the mutilation,—his companion, with a sudden pallor, demanded to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... never spoken but twice to Egalite. I am, therefore, not open to the suspicion of partiality, but I have closely observed his conduct in the Revolution. I have seen him deliver himself up to it entirely, a willing victim for its promotion, not shrinking from the greatest sacrifices; and I can truly assert that but for Egalite we never should have had the States-General—we should never have ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... sight of evil shrinking, From thought of grief like thine At the first summons sinking Into the arms divine. Oh! thou who knowest life, Temptation, trial, toil and strife, Wilt thou not still thine aching breast ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... so fast; subdue these gloomy fears; Behold! he quickly on the roof appears, Bearing the tender child, his jacket warm Flung round her shrinking form to guard from harm. Up with your ladders! Quick! 'tis but a chance! Behold how fast the roaring flames advance! Quick! quick! brave spirits to his rescue fly; Up! up! by heavens! this hero ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... added pedantry which makes them more inhuman. The perpetrators of the crime calculated quite correctly that they need fear no reluctance on the part of the nation, no qualms of conscience, no compassionate shrinking, no remorse. It must, indeed, be a bad cause that cannot count on the support of the large majority of the people at the beginning of a war. Pugnacity, greed, mere excitement, the contagion of a crowd, will fill the streets of almost any capital with a shouting and jubilant ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... in the door resplendent in her red woolen petticoat and fanciful head-dress, knitting a pair of stockings, or some such token of love, for her absent lord—there, a pretty little village, with a church, a wharf, and a few store-houses, shrinking back behind the protecting wing of some huge and rugged citadel of rocks, the white cottages glittering pleasantly in the rays of the evening sun, and the smoke curling up peacefully over the surrounding foliage, and floating off till it vanished in the rich glow of the sky—all ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... a profound intuition assures me, something that you are constrained to hide. The truth about this monstrous tragedy, which suddenly flashed upon you, this truth, if it were known, would spell dishonour to you, disgrace ... and you are shrinking from your duty." ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... she had been gay, spirituette, and coquettish; gradually, she became quiet and reserved. The giddy school-girl had given place to the shrinking virgin. ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... one corner, his shock of black hair and his ragged coat. But at the moment she had the ability to see only one thing—the scrawny gray kitten that the boy had tied to the iron leg of the bench; the shrinking kitten that the boy was torturing with ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... Fruit Company at Pier 9, to apply for a pass, and were surveyed with grim suspicion. Why, we asked gently, in these peaceful times is it so difficult to visit a friend who happens to be in a ship? Prohibition, said the candid clerk, and a whole province of human guile was thereby made plain to our shrinking mind. Mortals incline readily to sin, it seems, and apparently evil and base men will even go so far as to pretend a friendship with those who go down to wet territory in ships, simply for the sake of—well, we cannot bring ourself to mention it. "How ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... position, and also by changes in atmospheric conditions and temperature. It is characterised objectively by a swelling of the mucous membrane, which is pink or red in appearance and of a soft consistence, pitting when touched with the probe, and shrinking on the application of a 5 per cent. solution of cocain. Its soft consistence and the fact that it becomes smaller when painted with cocain differentiate it from true hypertrophy of the mucous membrane. Its situation and immobility, its pink colour, and the shrinkage under cocain, distinguish ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... their conversation, for they were not talking, but of their—her—thoughts. He did not know precisely what she was thinking of him, but he was certain that it was not anything favorable how could it be? In fact, fight though she did against the thought, into her mind as she looked, pitying yet shrinking, came his likeness to a wolf—starved and sick and gaunt, by weakness tamed into surface restraint, but in vicious teeth, in savage lips, in jaw made to crush for love of crushing, a wicked wolf, impatient to resume the life of the ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... divine, severe Minerva, musing under the shadow of her awful helmet; the athlete with the strigil, resting so lightly on his tireless feet; the royal Apollo, disdaining his own victory; the Venus, half shrinking from the exquisiteness of her own beauty; the swaying poise of the Discobulus, caught forever as he drew his breath for the throw; the smooth-limbed, brooding Antinous; the terrible Laocoon, which fascinated me, though it always ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... I awoke to the presence of an earnest, large-souled woman, who was my peer, and in many respects my superior; whom, so far from being a mere household pet, could be counsellor and friend, and a daily inspiration. Instead of shrinking from the world with which I must grapple, she already looked out upon its tangled and cruel problems with clear, intelligent, courageous eyes; single-handed she had coped with it and won from it a place and respect. And yet, with all her ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... Back there, somewhere, were her hot little room and her still hotter bed; but between her and them lay a horrid desert of blackness across which one must feel one's way with outstretched, shrinking arms; while before her, out on the sun-parlor roof, were the moonlight and the cool, sweet ...
— Pollyanna • Eleanor H. Porter
... know how to get it. Those shining words lay up so high, above her reach: a mountain head lifting itself out of the fogs of the valley wherein she dwelt. As for the first verse of her psalm, it might as well have been a description of Gabriel, for any use to her,so she thought, shrinking back from the words. Then for the second verse,yes, there was human weakness thereor had been. Some time a refuge had been needed: but so long ago, that the years of calm security had wiped out even the thought of defencelessness. ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... I was startled, Mrs. Carlingford seemed ready to drop with fright. The little woman—she was a very small, shrinking creature, with a pallid face and large nervous eyes—put out a hand against the jamb of the door, ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Had he told me that to give me courage in my hour of shrinking? Wherever he was to-night I knew his heart was with me, who so little deserved the love he gave me. At last I rolled myself snugly in my blanket, for the September evenings are cold in Colorado. The simple prayers of childhood came back to me, and I repeated ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... helpless girl in her prison, bringing the stake in all its horror before the eyes of the judges as before her own. No other thing could have been suggested by that piteous prayer. The stake, the scaffold, the fire—and the shrinking figure all maidenly, helpless, exposed to every evil gaze, must have showed themselves at least for a moment against that dark background of prison wall. It was enough that it should be long—to hide her as much as was possible from those ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... thought. For several years he had explored little-known sections of the world. He had visited every country. He had entered every port that could be reached from the ocean—and all the time he had felt the Earth shrinking before the gods of speed. The time would soon come when everything on Earth would be commonplace. Then man's urge to go places he hadn't seen before would take him away from the Earth entirely—when ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... was ordain'd, my lords, Knights of the garter were of noble birth, Valiant and virtuous, full of haughty courage, Such as were grown to credit by the wars; Not fearing death, nor shrinking for distress, But always resolute in most extremes. He then that is not furnish'd in this sort Doth but usurp the sacred name of knight, Profaning this most honorable order, And should, if I were worthy to be judge, Be quite ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... until he saw Jack duck his head under the tent flaps of the jail and the white-faced youth follow shrinking after. He stood while the armed guards took up their stations on the four sides of the tent and began pacing up and down the paths worn deep in tragic significance. He saw the wounded man carried into Pete's place across ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... examination. He regrets that the very artlessness of those who are most pure in the one sex, subjects them to the suspicions of the grosser-materials which compose the other He believes that innocency, singleness of heart, ardency of feeling, and unalloyed, shrinking delicacy, sometimes exist in the female bosom, to an extent that but few men are happy enough to discover, and that most men believe incompatible with the frailties of human nature. Grace Chatterton possessed no little of what may almost be called this ethereal spirit and a visit to Bolton parsonage ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... made the victim of another's crime; I have been denied the rights and name of son; perhaps (and I say this bitterly) justly denied them, despite of my own innocence. What would you have me do? Resume a name never conceded to me,—perhaps not righteously mine,—thrust myself upon the unwilling and shrinking hands which disowned and rejected me; blazon my virtues by pretensions which I myself have promised to forego, and foist myself on the notice of strangers by the very claims which my nearest relations ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I would have been friendly towards her. It was the worse for her. But, so long as thou art good daughter to me, thou shalt find me good father to thee;" and for a moment there was a kindliness in his eye which made it sufficiently like that of his brother to give some consolation to the shrinking heart that he was rending from all it loved; and she steadied her voice for another gentle profession of obedience, for which she felt strengthened ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... young woman, meantime? Let me tell the truth: motherhood became her so well that she was brazen from the very beginning. No delicacy, no pretty shame, no shrinking—she gloried in the growing fact. When she was brought to bed she made a quick recovery; she insisted upon a devout churching, an elaborate christening of the doubtful son (whereat, if you will believe me, no other than Fra Battista himself must do the office!); thenceforth she was ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... action, modest of demeanour, shrinking from the slightest breath of scandal; while she is not ashamed, when Ulysses, bathed and dressed, looks himself again, to whisper to her maidens her wish that the Gods might send her such a spouse.—This ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... The shrinking of wild birds from the hand of man is almost as pronounced in captivity as it is in the wilderness, and this fact renders psychological experiments with birds extremely difficult. It is really strange that the parrots and cockatoos all should take kindly to man, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... been expecting, and mentally shrinking from, just that. Now that it was out, however, he felt relieved. He ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... for surprise that there should be so great a resentment shown against religious disbelief in general and against Atheism in particular. We have here more than the mere rejection of a theory or view of life. There is a certain emotional resentment, a shrinking from the one who is guilty of disbelief, such as is not explainable on ordinary grounds. The attitude is ridiculous, so ridiculous that many who adopt it are ashamed to openly acknowledge it, but it is there, and its existence ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... But a wise man is not affected by any present evil; while the grief of a fool proceeds from being affected with an imaginary evil, by which his mind is contracted and sunk, since it is not under the dominion of reason. This, then, is the first definition, which makes grief to consist in a shrinking of the mind, contrary to the dictates of reason. Thus, there are four perturbations, and but three calm rational emotions; for ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... joyland, while mellow chimes of the neighboring Trinity pealed their glad welcome to the New Year. At that magic moment, when you pressed far out of the window to hear the bells—she and you—suspended above that vast expanse of earth, sea and air shrinking away, as if you two together were flying aloft with arms entwined, you passed very close to heaven. The shouts from the street were heard but faintly, and awoke sighing echoes in your heart, like the minor chord accenting the ecstatic movement which seemed to hold the world ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... passion,—democratic in his sympathy with the rudest political and religious feelings of his party, autocratic in the consciousness of superior abilities and tyrannic will,—emancipated from the illusions of vanity, but not from those of ambition and pride,—shrinking from no duty and no policy from the fear of obloquy or the fear of death,—a fanatic and a politician,—a demagogue and a dictator,—seeking the kingdom of heaven, but determined to take the kingdom of England by the way,—believing in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... life to men! Why should you go on trying to be a poet, go on putting your secret soul into books, to be spurned at by the rabble? Your soul is your own—it is your God's—and what have the rabble to do with it! And all its tenderness! all its shrinking ecstasy! all its holiest consecration!—You will take them out to sell them ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... there lived an earl Who had a charming niece: And never gave the timid girl A single moment's peace! Whatever low and menial task His fancy flitted through, He did not hesitate to ask That shrinking child to do. (I see with truly honest shame you Are blushing, and I do not blame you. A tale like this the feelings softens, And brings the ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... him, however, and unsuspected, were the heights to which he subsequently rose. He devoted himself to his farm, becoming the best agriculturist in the region in which he lived, and also performed the duties of a good citizen, never shrinking from his share of civic burdens. The youth of to-day could not do better than emulate the example of this illustrious American; and they might do worse than take part in the patriotic pilgrimages annually made to the scenes ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... respects a more important, part is that due to the separation of its particles. If we allow the particles to come closer together we shall diminish the energy due to separation, and the energy thus set free can take the form of heat. But this drawing in of the particles necessarily involves a shrinking of ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... ceases shrinking. Only last summer taught me the uselessness of an extra pair of trousers. It rains in the woods; streams are to be waded; the wetness of leaves is greater than the wetness of many rivers. Logically, naturally, inevitably, such conditions point to change of garments when camp is made. ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... her aunts, deemed it highly indelicate in Her Majesty to have given public marks of her satisfaction to those deputed to compliment her on her prosperous situation. To avow the joy she felt was in their eyes indecent and unqueenly. Where was the shrinking bashfulness of that one of these Princesses who had herself been so clamorous to Louis XV. against her husband, the Duke of Modena, for not ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... had been so busy bolstering up the shrinking nature of Mr. Ruse that they had given small heed to the enormous concourse of citizens in the hall. Indeed, Colonel Sneekins, having ascertained that it would be sufficient in point of numbers for the purposes of a "grand rally," had not bestowed a further ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... to believe that it could have furnished the navy with 21,000 men, or, indeed, with any number approximating thereto. It could not possibly have done so without restricting its operations, if only for a time. So far were its operations from shrinking that they were positively extended. The English tonnage 'cleared outwards' from our ports was for the years mentioned as follows: 1770, 703,495; ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... might have been with shame for the vocation in which he had come so far, or it might have been in resentment at so direct a hint that the sooner his disagreeable office should be ended, the better it would please his host. Still, he betrayed no intention of shrinking from its performance. On the contrary, discarding somewhat of that subdued manner which he had probably thought it politic to assume, while sounding the opinions of one so rigid, he broke out rather suddenly in the exhibition of a humor ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... together (or twist them) so as to have the gold on the outside, and then fill any cavity with it. Since adopting the above combination I have almost abandoned amalgam. This is recommended on account of its density, ease of insertion, capacity for fine finish, non-conducting and non-shrinking qualities, and compatibility with tooth-substance. Those who have not used it will be surprised at the rapidity with which it can be manipulated. It may be employed in any cavity not exposed to view, also in crown, buccal, and ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... that wide. Ah! Madame Zenobie, you did it well!" He softly smote the memorable spot, first with one hand and then with the other, shrinking forward spasmodically with each contact, and throwing utter woe into his countenance. The general company smiled. He suddenly put ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... like her, and that she likes them much, for "kindness is a potent heart-winner." She had stipulated that she should not be expected to see many people. The recluse life she had led, was the cause of a nervous shrinking from meeting any fresh face, which lasted all her life long. Still, she longed to have an idea of the personal appearance and manners of some of those whose writings or letters had interested her. Mr. Thackeray was accordingly invited to meet ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... displays, together with footprints, the casts of cracks (a, a') of various sizes. The origin of such cracks in clay, and casts of the same, has before been explained, and referred to the drying and shrinking of mud, and the subsequent pouring of sand into open crevices. It will be seen that some of the cracks, as at b, c, traverse the footprints, and produce distortion in them, as might have been expected, for the mud must have been soft when the animal walked over it and left the impressions; ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... imports no mischief to society, so long as the change is in one direction. Who has ever heard from an Eastern journal any complaint against a contraction of our money volume; any admonition that in a shrinking volume of money lurk evils of the utmost magnitude? On the other hand, we have been treated to lengthy homilies on the evils of "inflation," whenever the slightest prospect presented itself to a decrease in the value of money—not with the view of giving the ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... fifty. Some "necessary" cruelty is involved in the stockman's business, however humane he may be. The system is one of terrorism, and from the time that the calf is bullied into the branding pen, and the hot iron burns into his shrinking flesh, to the day when the fatted ox is driven down from his boundless pastures to be slaughtered in Chicago, "the fear and dread of ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... along from bed to bed of the ward, equipped with a certain formula of phrases, nevertheless dropped from time to time some practical common-sense questions that showed an almost masculine intuition of the patients' needs and requirements. Nor did she betray any of that over-sensitive shrinking from coarseness which the good Pastor had feared, albeit she was quick to correct its exhibition. The languid men listened to her with half-aggressive, half-amused interest, and some of the satisfaction of taking a bitter but wholesome tonic. It was not until she reached the bed at the farther ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... him over his spectacles; then he glanced at the small, embarrassed figure shrinking into the depths ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... poles, and more were wading and splashing up both sides of the pool. The otter's pace was getting slower; sometimes it seemed to stop; and now and then it vanished among the ripples. Carroll saw that Evelyn's face was intent, though there were signs of shrinking in it. ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... almost pathetically, shrinking back into his corner like a scared child, and Rachel's eyes began to dance. Something in the situation pleased her wonderfully. That Dan, who had scarcely spoken to her since the tragedy of his brother's death, should be cringing and pleading before her, all his prideful gloom quivering ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... hands in both of his and looking intently into her face). Then Gillie's look of amazement gave place to one of intense, quite touching—we might almost say sympathetic—anxiety as he placed a hand on each knee and stooped (that was the Doctor's right hand stealing round Emma's waist, and Emma shrinking from him with averted face). The urchin's visage suddenly lighted up with a blaze of triumph, and he seized his cap as if about to cheer (that was the Doctor's superior strength prevailing, and Emma's head, now turned the other way, laid on his shoulder). All at once Gillie went into quiet ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... ordinance which is uniform in action, it so falls out that the conquerors derive enhanced pleasure from the memory of difficulties beaten down and sorrows vanquished. Where then is the use of craven shrinking? Let us rather welcome our early failures as we would welcome the health-giving rigour of some stern physician. Think of the heroes and heroines who have conquered, and think joyfully also of those who have wrought out their strenuous day in seeming failure. There are four lines of poetry which ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... I couldn't stand it here in this room," said Lightbody bitterly. His fingers wandered lightly over the familiar objects on the desk, shrinking from each fiery contact. He sat down. "You're ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... and incredible storm burst upon him, and he who had sat all the session shrinking unnoticed in his quiet, back seat, unnerved when a colleague asked the simplest question, found himself the centre and point of attack in the wildest melee that legislature ever saw. A dozen men, red, frantic, with upraised arms, came at him, Hurlbut the first of them. But the lobby was there, ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... one. Pause of deep silence: a lean angry little Figure, with broad bald brow, strode swiftly towards the tribune, taking papers from its pocket: 'I accuse thee, Robespierre,—I, Jean Baptiste Louvet!' The Seagreen became tallow-green; shrinking to a corner of the tribune, Danton cried, 'Speak, Robespierre; there are many good citizens that listen;' but the tongue refused its office. And so Louvet, with a shrill tone, read and recited crime after crime: dictatorial temper, exclusive popularity, bullying ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... eagerness, of youthful hurry. Perhaps she grew more easily tired now than formerly; her face then seemed thinner than ever, the temples sunken and cheek- bones evident, and her eyes startling in their size and blueness and prominence. She kept, too, the almost shrinking delicacy of a girl's mind: Fanny never repeated stories not sufficiently saved from the gross by their humor. Her private severity with women who did, he felt, was too extreme. The truth was that she regarded the mechanism of nature with distaste; Fanny was never ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... appealed to by the coarse sympathy with physical pain: the rags that covered the sores, the tainted corruption of the ulcers, are brought to bear, not so much on the mind as on the nerves; and when the hero is represented as shrinking with corporeal agony—the blood oozing from his foot, the livid sweat rolling down the brow—we sicken and turn away from the spectacle; we have no longer that pleasure in our own pain which ought to be the characteristic of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... enumerated and compared with the opinions of Cotton and Wheelwright, only five points of possible heterodoxy on their part appeared. Over these there was a solemn wrangle for days, till Cotton, shrinking from his position, contrived, through abundant use of doubtfull expressions, to effect his reconciliation with the dominant party. After a session of twenty-four days the synod adjourned, and Wheelwright, ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... sudden rush of confused emotion. A love for her aunt, desire to help her, and at the same time shrinking as though she saw the whole house which had been, from the first, unhappy to her was now diseased and evil and rotten. The hot life in her body told her against her moral will that she must escape, and her soul, moving in her and speaking to her, told her that now, more than ever, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... be careful!" cried Zaidie, shrinking up beside him as the huge, hideous head, with its saucer eyes and enormous beak-like jaws wide open, came towards them. "And look! there are more coming. Can't we go up and get away ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... for all his years and unwieldiness, was still a collie. And, by the time he stopped rolling, he was scrambling to his feet. Shrinking quickly to one side, as the sow bore down upon him, he eluded her rush, by the fraction of an inch; and made a wolflike slash for her underbody, as ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... according to the mind of that great one who has bestowed such power to rule, upon thee. Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry (Col 3:5). Nor do I think that murmuring, shrinking, wincing, complaining, and the like, when men, governors, lay a yoke upon our necks, flow from any thing else, but love to our flesh, and distrust of the faithfulness of God to manage men, things, and actions for his church. The powers that be ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the month of heat and sunshine, of clear, fervid skies, dusty roads, and shrinking streams; when doors and windows are thrown open, a cool gale is the most welcome of all visiters, and every drop of rain "is worth its weight in gold." Such is July commonly—such it was in 1825, and such, in a scarcely less degree, in 1826; yet it is sometimes, on the contrary, a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... it was a cow, and immediately in the animal's wake appeared another blur. This was the form of a woman. In a mellow, soothing tone she called out to the cow, and Henley recognized the voice. It was Dixie Hart. Instinctively, and shrinking even from her, he started on, but she suddenly ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... had to be covered over during the day in order to prevent the wood shrinking; if this had not been done, very little transport could have been brought out of the valley at the end of the ...
— Through Palestine with the 20th Machine Gun Squadron • Unknown
... My mind went to Venza, back there on the asteroid. The wandering little world was already shrinking to a convex surface beneath us. Venza, with her last unknown play, gone to failure. Had I missed my cue? Whatever my part, it seemed now that I must ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... among the bushes near the cavern there was one which was smeared with blood. Of course, my reason tells me that if sheep wander into such rocky places they are likely to injure themselves, and yet somehow that splash of crimson gave me a sudden shock, and for a moment I found myself shrinking back in horror from the old Roman arch. A fetid breath seemed to ooze from the black depths into which I peered. Could it indeed be possible that some nameless thing, some dreadful presence, was lurking down yonder? I should have been incapable of such feelings in the ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... immediate period of the writer. Upon which theories, as men ought physically to have dwindled long ago into pygmies, so, on the other hand, morally they must by this time have left Sodom and Gomorrah far behind. What a strange animal must man upon this scheme offer to our contemplation; shrinking in size, by graduated process, through every century, until at last he would not rise an inch from the ground; and, on the other hand, as regards villany, towering evermore and more up to the heavens. What a dwarf! what a giant! Why, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... minutes past five by the clock of the Bourse. The hill shadows are shrinking back from the shore;—the long wharves reach out yellow into the sun;—the tamarinds of the Place Bertin, and the pharos for half its height, and the red-tiled roofs along the bay are catching the glow. Then, over the light- house—on the outermost ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... an American face, nor an English one. The man on whom he fixes his eye is conscious of him. In his natural disposition, he seems calm and self-possessed, sustaining his great responsibilities cheerfully, without shrinking, or weariness, or spasmodic effort, or damage to his health, but all with quiet, deep-drawn breaths; just as his broad shoulders would bear up a heavy burden ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... her forehead, arranged her hair before a mirror pinned to the sloping canvas. But all the time that she did these things she was listening to the enormous silence, was feeling it like a weight, was shrinking, or trying to shrink away from its outstretched, determined arms. From without came sometimes sounds of voices that presented themselves to her ears as shadows, skeletons, spectres, present themselves to the eyes. Was that really Ibrahim? Was that Nigel speaking, laughing? And that long stream of ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... When once the shrinking dizzy spell was gone, I saw below me, like a jeweled cup, The valley hollowed to its heaven-kissed lip— The serrate green against the serrate blue— Brimming with beauty's essence; palpitant With a divine elixir—lucent floods Poured from the golden chalice of the sun, At ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... formulated distrust of the energetic rational judgment in comparison with the emotional, affective, contemplative parts of man, which underlies the various forms of religious mysticism. If you look closely into our present mood, it is seen to be the product mainly and above all of a shrinking deference to the status quo, not merely as having a claim not to be lightly dealt with, which every serious man concedes, but as being the last word and final test of truth and justice. Physical science is allowed to be the sphere of accurate reasoning and distinct ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... one the idea that he was hardly to be trusted astride anything more spirited than a gold-headed cane. And yet, somehow, he aroused compassion rather than any sense of the ludicrous: he had that look of shrinking self-effacement which comes of a recent humiliation, and, in spite of all extravagances, he was obviously a gentleman; while something in his manner indicated that his natural tendency would, once at all events, have been to avoid ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... woods was being permeated with a detestable odor. The great balloon above their heads was shrinking. It was growing smaller and smaller. The gas was being allowed slowly ...
— The Automobile Girls in the Berkshires - The Ghost of Lost Man's Trail • Laura Dent Crane
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