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More "Startle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whom one does not fully know?" It was one of the sharp searching questions that Mr. Gwynne sometimes put, which never failed to startle Olive, and to which she could not always reply; but she made an ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... really cynical," she told herself. "He says things, not because he means them, but because he likes to startle people." ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... challengingly. Peter knew he was experiencing a ceremony of some kind, the significance of which he must learn. It was the first time Linda had voluntarily touched him. He breathed lightly and held steady, lest he startle her. ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... home—the strangest home-going,—for by this time her mission and her aspirations could no longer be hid, and rumour must have carried the news almost as quickly as any modern telegraph, to startle all the echoes of the village, heretofore unaware of any difference between Jeanne and her companions save the greater goodness to which everybody bears testimony. No doubt, it must have reached Jacques d'Arc's cottage even before she came back with the kind Durand, a changed creature, ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... six weeks of this before the boy's dreadful secret was revealed to Winona; six weeks before he appeared to startle her with one eye radiating the rich hues of a ripened eggplant. It had been simple enough. He had seen his chance to step in and punish Spike, and he had stepped—and Spike's ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... out. I do not doubt that some day she'll murder her husband or her mother, or startle the world by some newly-invented crime; but that only ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... more restless man in all Europe than the kaiser. It is related of him at the Court of Berlin that when on one occasion he inquired of his brother, Prince Henry, if he could suggest to him anything new wherewith to startle both his own subjects and the world in general, the sailor prince, with a merry laugh, proposed that his majesty should remain perfectly quiet, without saying or doing anything, for an entire week! That, he assured his imperial brother, ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... parted lips. He seemed afraid to breathe lest he startle away some hesitant hope. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Kate, though grown into more matronly proportions than when he last had seen her. Near her was a fair girl. He required not a second glance to convince him that she was Elizabeth. He hurried forward, forgetting how he might startle them. A cry of delight escaped Elizabeth as she advanced to meet him. In another minute he found himself in the arms of his sister, while a sob of joy escaped from ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... woman, busy at her wheel, with two children playing on the ground before her, were the objects that now presented themselves. The uncouthness of my garb, my wild and weatherworn appearance, my fusil and tomahawk, could not but startle them. The woman stopped her wheel, and gazed as if a spectre ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... was a great deal of trouble to take care of them. The first morning after Carl left, Billy, and Bella, and Davy, and I followed Miss Laura upstairs. She made us sit in a row by the door, lest we should startle the canaries. She had a great many things to do. First, the canaries had their baths. They had to get them at the same time every morning. Miss Laura filled the little white dishes with water and put them in the cages, and then came and sat on ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... plain enough, and whether venomous or not it was enough to startle the watcher, as a serpent some seven or eight feet in length came into sight, travelling through the undergrowth, with its scales ever changing in tint as its folds came more or less into connection with the light that ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... Audley; this philosophical usurer never pressed hard for his debts; like the fowler, he never shook his nets lest he might startle, satisfied to have them, without appearing to hold them. With great fondness he compared his "bonds to infants, which battle best by sleeping." To battle is to be nourished, a term still retained at the University of Oxford. His familiar companions were all subordinate actors ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... composer of Louis XIV. Purcell followed in the new track, taking for his models the productions of the first Italian composers. The fact, that Purcell was under obligations to the Italians, may startle many of his modern admirers; but with a candour worthy of himself, in the dedication of his Dioclesian to Charles Duke of Somerset, he says, that "music is yet but in its nonage, a forward child. 'Tis now learning Italian, which is its best master." And in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... and courage and a deeper understanding of the realities of life, it is likely that panic would have sent her fleeing headlong from a presence that filled her with nothing but loathing. But she had been spared all this knowledge, and Nicol saw to it that nothing should startle her, nothing should excite her distrust until, in the fulness of time, his purposes ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... more than startle. At about 11 in the morning two six-inch shells hit the Hardinge near the southern entrance of the lake. The first damaged the funnel and the second burst inboard. Pilot Carew, a gallant old merchant seaman, refused to go below when the firing opened and lost a leg. Nine others ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... range Of woods and wilds alone, thou blendest thus The dirge note and the song of festival; But in one heart, one changeful human heart,— Ay, and within one hour of that strange world,— Thou call'st their music forth, with all its tones To startle and to pierce!—the dying Swan's, And the glad Sky-lark's,—Triumph ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... decrepitude it occasions he dignifies with the appellation of repose; and, on the strength of comprehensiveness and repose, is of course qualified to take his seat beside Shakspeare, and chat cosily with Bacon, and wink knowingly at Goethe, and startle Leibnitz with a slap on the shoulder,—the true Red-Republican sign of liberty in manners, equality in power, and fraternity in ideas! These men, to be sure, have a way of saying things which he has not yet caught; but then their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... of the earliest if not the first remarkable animal to startle a stranger on arriving in Ceylon, whilst wending his way from Point-de-Galle to Colombo, is a huge lizard of from four to five feet in length, the Talla-goya of the Singhalese, and Iguana[1] of the Europeans. It may be ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... Priscilla quickly moved to the mother's side, but great joys do not kill even though they startle, and presently the white white face was raised with a smile almost of heaven illuminating it, and the dame ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... his courtship, for he believed that he had a clear field before him, and he was too sagacious to startle Clara by overmuch energy. Meantime he began to be conscious that an influence from her was reaching his spirit. He had hitherto considered her a child; one day he suddenly recognized her as a woman. Now a woman, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... a low voice, but with such passionate earnestness as quite to startle me. "Is 262 laughing, then, such an infallible ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... 'I'm afraid it did startle her,' grandmamma replied, 'but fortunately she thought it was something in the basement. I must go back to her at once,' and without another word to me she turned ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... mystic and meaningless. When walking in procession, they warn the profane out of the way by striking one slip of wood upon another. They are wilder in appearance than the Hindu Jogi or Sanyasi, who also affects the use of ashes, but neglects that of the palm-thatch. It is certainly enough to startle a man of impressible nerves— one, for instance, who cannot enter a room without a side-long glance at an unexpected coffin—to see these hideous beings starting with their savage cry from the depths of an African forest. Evidently, also, such is ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... here, and I have come to the conclusion that this is the business I ought to do. I have only one parishioner on my hands to-day," he went on with a slight smile, "and I may as well attend to her. I am going to tell you my plan. I shall not startle you? Just now you allowed that you ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... an architect, you're a critic," he said to him early in their accidental acquaintance. "Now, I want to experiment on you. I want you to see Irving to-night and write your impressions of it. I have a notion you'll startle ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... well he might. Not that he was afraid—you may be pretty sure of that; but to hear this quiet, bashful lad, who looked as if he had nothing in him, coolly propose to hold a lighted shell in his arms to see if it would go off, and ask him to stand by and watch it, was enough to startle anybody. However, he wasn't one to think twice about accepting a challenge; so he folded his arms and stood there like a statue. The young officer lighted the fuse, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... to surprise. It is like the true reading of the passage;—'God said, Let there be light, and there was light;'—not there was light. As the feeling with which we startle at a shooting star, compared with that of watching the sunrise at the pre-established moment, such and so low ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... source of puzzling surprises. While she was from the South, she was not Southern in speech, sentiments, ideas, or ideals. Her voice was not Southern and, while she elided final consonants, her intonation was not of the South. Indeed she would startle him every now and then by dropping some archaic word or old form of expression that made him think of Chaucer. Her feeling toward the negro was precisely what his was, and once when he halted in some stricture on the Confederacy and started to ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... fixed there for his strength to be of any avail; our roots were the growth of years, and, besides, we clasped him so tightly—for unity is indeed strength—that at last the cowardly fellow roared aloud with mingled pain and fright; perhaps he thought to startle us, and make us lose our hold. But we knew better than that—we only gripped him the faster; but the noise aroused Dash, who came bounding to the spot (he was always unchained at night), and, flying at Mr. Reynard's throat, he soon pinned ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... be with the nervous little seed-pods of the touch-me-not, which children ever love to pop and see the seeds fly, as they do from balsam pods in grandmother's garden, they still startle with the suddenness of their volley. Touch the delicate hair-trigger at the end of a capsule, and the lightning response of the flying seeds makes one jump. They sometimes land four feet away. At this rate of progress a year, and with the other odds ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... While members of learned societies discuss such questions with upturned noses, a rock above them will sometimes be unable to keep its own countenance, but, simulating without flattery one of the human visages below, will wear an expression of humour fiendish enough to startle the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... apt to startle an Imagination, which has not been raised and qualify'd for such a Description, by the reading of the ancient Poets, and of Homer in particular. It was certainly a very bold Thought in our Author, to ascribe the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... than the French fiddle mentioned by Shakespeare appears to be a question solely within the province of the pathologist. As pantagruelism is proceeding almost exclusively on micrological lines, we may expect that, sooner or later, some "eminent physician" will startle the world by discovering the bicycle bacillus. All our ills appear to be caused by minute insects that get inside of us, demoralize our system of government and inaugurate a reign of anarchy. Everything, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... church, Whom we all have to think of nowadays, I would have changed the Creed a very little? Not that she ever had to ask me not to; It never got so far as that; but the bare thought Of her old tremulous bonnet in the pew, And of her half asleep was too much for me. Why, I might wake her up and startle her. It was the words 'descended into Hades' That seemed too pagan to our liberal youth. You know they suffered from a general onslaught. And well, if they weren't true why keep right on Saying them like the heathen? ...
— North of Boston • Robert Frost
... And swift and sudden it went on to the end. She had come on board the yacht that first night to startle it with her beauty and her voice; last night, silent and stately, she had slipped through the evening like a dream; now she stood before him a dazzling creature of the morning: yesterday she was Penseroso; to-day she was Allegro; what would ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... forest," says Bates. "The few sounds of birds are of that pensive or mysterious character which intensifies the feeling of solitude, rather than imparts a sense of life and cheerfulness. Sometimes, in the midst of the stillness, a sudden yell or scream will startle one. This comes from some defenceless fruit-eating animal, which is pounced upon by a tiger-cat or stealthy boa-constrictor. Morning and evening howling monkeys make a most fearful and harrowing noise, under which it is ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... prudent!—but I did shrink from running any risk with that calm and comfort of the winter as it seemed to come on. And was it more than I said about the cloak? was there any newness in it? anything to startle you? Still I do perfectly see that whether new or old, what it involves may well be unpleasant to you—and that (however old) it may be apt to recur to your mind with a new increasing unpleasantness. We have both been carried too far perhaps, by late events and ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... extend the sense of the unbearable beyond all possible bounds. Thus, sir, the circulation of the blood and the fluids of the body will not give me pause; you shall hear them flow with the impetuosity of cataracts; you shall perceive them so distinctly as to startle you; the slightest irregularity of the pulse, the least obstacle, is striking, and produces the same effect as a rock against which the waves of a ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... pebble down on them, "Away! I see you well!" A few more stones, and every man of them might have been hurled from the cliff by the soldiers merely rolling down stones on them. They dared not more, and a few moments' silence proved that the alarm had been merely a trick to startle the garrison—a jest soon to ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... just as Charlotte does about Mr. Goodloe, and he'll say so to everybody," said Martha, with a sad smile after the door had closed with vigor enough to startle the household. ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... its perfect fabric hangeth Threatening ruin o'er my head, With terrific pride and grandeur. Darker grows the air around me, Chained, my feet proceed no farther, Even the seas retire before me. What, here fly me not nor startle, Are the wild beasts, which to rend me Bit by bit come on to attack me. Mercy, mighty Lord, oh, mercy! Pardon, gracious Lord, oh, pardon! Holy baptism I implore, That in grace I may depart hence. Mortals, hear, oh, mortals hear, Christ ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... fellow would fall into my hands," replied my companion. "If so, then revelations will be made that will startle Europe." ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... in the porch. The lateness of the hour, perhaps some other reason, seemed to startle her, and she half rose. The next moment the figure of Miguel appeared at the doorway, and with a quick, hurried look around him, and at the open window, he approached her. He was evidently under great excitement, his hollow shaven cheek looked like a waxen ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... less extent spring up within them. These doubts enter into the mind at first almost imperceptibly: they exist only as vague indistinct surmises, and by no means take the precise shape or the substance of a formed opinion. At first, probably, they even offend and startle by their intrusion: but by degrees the unpleasant sensations which they once excited wear off: the mind grows more familiar with them. A confused sense (for such it is, rather than a formed idea) of its being desirable that their doubts should prove well founded, ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... in the blood of your poor friend would indeed be of a nature to startle you; but this is nought but harmless red ink, or, as the witty mercantile phrase hath it, Clerk's Blood. Damn 'em! my brain, guts, skin, flesh, bone, carcase, soul, TIME, is all theirs. The Royal Exchange, Gresham's Folly, hath me body and ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... But after one or two ineffectual efforts, he cast the paper from him, in despair, and rising, walked his room again. To an orderly who entered on business relating to his regular duty, he spoke so brief and abruptly as to startle the man, who understood him only in his better and calmer moods. Again was his cup of ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... very word has power to startle, as if the crime were a new thing, not as old (so all religions tell us) as the first brothers. As a meteoric stone falls on our planet, strange and unexplained, a waif of the universe, from a nameless system, so the horror of murder descends on us, when we meet it, with an alien dread, ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... hair-brushes, and half a dozen toothbrushes, and a small collection of combs, and four or five little glass bottles, looking as though they contained poison,—all with silver tops. I can only suppose you desired to startle the weak mind of the chambermaid. I have put them all up; but remember this, if they are taken out again you are responsible. And I will not put up your boots, George. What can you have wanted with three ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... came out upon a slight knoll, and found ourselves close beside the low charred walls of what remained of Ouilmette's log-cabin. 'T was a most gloomy and desolate spot, but quiet enough, with never the rustle of a leaf to awake the night, or startle us. ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... peculiarly vicious education, early familiarity with bad models, corrupting associations, or other plausible key to effects, which, taken separately, and out of their natural connection with their explanatory causes, are apt rather to startle and revolt the feelings of sober thinkers. Except, perhaps, in some chapters of Italian history, as, for example, among the most profligate of the Papal houses, and amongst some of the Florentine princes, we ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... booming in his ears like the surf of a far-off sea. Away to the side, with a stretch of sunburnt grass between, lay the river. Let Bertrand keep to the winding road and all was well. Gallop how he might Grey Roland would wear him down, but let him swerve, let the fluttering of a bird startle him aside, and Ursula de Vesc's prophetic ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... request him to re-peruse any one poem, of any confessedly great poet from Homer to Milton, or from Aeschylus to Shakespeare; and to strike out (in thought I mean) every instance of this kind. If the number of these fancied erasures did not startle him, or if he continued to deem the work improved by their total omission, he must advance reasons of no ordinary strength and evidence, reasons grounded in the essence of human nature. Otherwise, I should not hesitate ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... bald to the heart inhabiting me then, as if quite shaven. She could speak her affectionate mind as plain as print, and it was dull print facing me, not the arches of the sunset. Julia had only to lisp, 'my husband,' to startle and agitate me beyond expression. She said simple things—'I slept well last night,' or 'I dreamed,' or 'I shivered,' and plunged me headlong down impenetrable forests. The mould of her mouth to a reluctant 'No,' and her almost ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... victims. He was unable to determine whether they were friends or foes, they were so far before him. He hesitated after he had raised his gun to his shoulder to proclaim his presence by a shot, and then lowered his rifle. A shot might startle the unsuspecting men who were struggling to gain the rim and the report of his rifle might increase their danger. At the same time, however, he began to advance more rapidly and in a brief time was able to recognize the men whose actions he ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... let me sink to Earth, With no officious mourners near: I would not mar one hour of mirth, Nor startle Friendship ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... thoughts may startle, but will not, astound The virtuous mind, that ever walks attended By a strong-siding ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... present Bill is much less ambitious." It is. And it is introduced by one who knows and dreads, as much as any of us, the dangerous and unballasted condition into which we have drifted; introduced with, as it were, apology, as if he feared that, unambitious though, it be, it will startle the nerves of Parliament. On a question so vast and vital you are bound to startle by any little measure. Nothing but an heroic measure would arouse debate on a scale adequate to reach and stir the ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... passed—not even to your wife. She might not like the thoughts of a ghostly visitor: and the reputation of conversing with the dead might be almost as inconvenient as that of dealing with the devil. For the present, then, farewell! I will never startle you with too sudden an apparition; but you may learn to behold my ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... the policeman to take you away. Thin do you sing out for justice, because when people sings out for justice everybody's bound to hearken, and say how as you wants a warrant agin him for bigamy, and show them the marriage lines. Don't you be put down, and don't you spare him. If you don't startle him you'll niver ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... to the lack-lustre gaze of town-bred folk, in the sight of an eye as keen and wild as a hawk's from sheer solitude and lonely travelling. He was so bent and scarred with weather that he seemed as much a part of that woodland place as the birks themselves, and the noise of his labours did not startle the birds ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... impossible. Such a purification from the passion of hate is often easier on the field than at home. Those who remain behind have an abstract enemy in view. The soldier sees living men who suffer and die like himself." It will startle the English reader to find Dr. Foerster pleading earnestly that the English soldier is not responsible for the ways of his government or of his leaders. The Germans are to remain true to themselves whatever ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... about it; but he seemed to think that he was not responsible for the cow's voice. I then told him to take her away; and he did, at intervals, shifting her to different parts of the grounds in my absence, so that the desolate voice would startle us from unexpected quarters. If I were to unhitch the cow, and turn her loose, I knew where she would go. If I were to lead her away, the question was, Where? for I did not fancy leading a cow about ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... opened the trap door, and stepped out into the little observatory the sound was so plain as to startle him. He looked up quickly, and, directly overhead ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... the other, and if the tales told me of the passage of news from South to North Africa during the recent war were not so extravagant as they seem at first hearing, I would set them down here, well assured that they would startle if they could not convince. In the south of Morocco, during the latter days of my journey, men spoke with quiet conviction of the doings of Sultan and Pretender in the North, just as though Morocco possessed ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... of window, and the height of the sun seemed suddenly to startle her. Her more gentle look suddenly vanished and one ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... said the Grand Duchess. "She wasn't too patriotic to marry an English Duke, and startle London as the first American Duchess. Heavens, the things she used to do, if one could believe half the wild stories my father's sister told me in warning! And as for my father, though a most charming ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... harvest-field; while his attendants, on whom the name of the sixth knight seemed to produce an effect almost electrical, hung in suspense upon their master's looks. But when Rowena spoke, the sound of her voice seemed to startle him from his silence. ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... denounce that shocking impiety; I could almost recommend to you to add a slight postscript on the massacre of that wretch Manuel. I do not love such insects as we are dispensing judgments yet, if the punishment of that just victim might startle such profane criminals, it might be charity to suggest the ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... door—trickling noiselessly down the knots of the carved oak. Still I stood and watched it, and it crept on slowly, slowly, like a living thing, and growing as it came, to my very feet. I cannot say how long I might have stood there, fascinated by it, had not something suddenly occurred to startle me into my senses again; for full upon the back of my right hand fell, with a sullen, heavy sound, a second drop of blood. It stung and burnt my flesh like molten lead, and the sharp, sudden pain it gave me shot ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... conversation. There was no whit of timidity about him, nor was he the least impertinent. He was frankly interested and wanted to know what was being said. He received the dime and the pennies with a pleasant grin and a (grandmother prompted) "Thank you". But the gift didn't startle him. Dimes must have been a fairly usual part of his life. But a few minutes before the interviewer left she dropped her pencil. It was new and long and yellow. The child's eyes clung to it as he returned it. "Would you like to have it." the young woman ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... very things which he purposely intended to keep secret. Still Lawrence did not tell him the whole truth, and often thus misled him more than if he had not said a word on the subject. Often, too, he would startle him as he walked away by breaking out, as if unconsciously, with "The prince will hae his ain again! The prince will hae his ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... woods in the morning sun? Hear it nearer and nearer draw! It winds in and out in columns dun, And the trumpet-notes on the roused winds run, And they startle the soul with awe. Should you of the comrades black demand— That is ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... said, thinking that Alan would be pleased; but the Highlandman's vanity was ready to startle at ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the short gallery had also been shut. Lily, whose manifold misfortunes had not quenched her interest in the 'Incroyable' corset, opened her parcel, and found that the corset was not an 'Incroyable' at all, but an inferior substitute, with no proper belted band, and of a shape to startle even a Brighton bathing-woman! The change must have been effected by the assistant in ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... hear that you think so. He's a prancing beast, and so we mustn't startle him—not till I have ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... startle Dorsenne was only augmented during dinner, so much the more so as, on discussing the conditions of that arrangement he hoped to bring about, the recollection of his terrible youth filled the thoughts and the discourse of the former duellist. ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... general direction of those faults has been previously suggested. The chief of his faults, a certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life, and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years before his death. But any one who wishes to understand how deep was the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly worthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... A big one with a gong To startle all the people, As they saw him speed along; A big one, with a cushion, And painted red and black, To make the others jealous And clear ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... life, by it interpret the problems to hand, make our choice between opposing standards, and maintain our fidelity to the true one against every opposition and through every fitful though terrible depression; so shall we startle people with its reality, and make for it a disciple or an opponent, but always at once convince the generation that there is a ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... in the Forum and seen the Coliseum. Penini says: 'The sun has tome out. I think God knows I want to go out to walk, and so He has sent the sun out.' There's a child who has faith enough to put us all to shame. A vision of angels wouldn't startle him in the least. When his poor little friend died, and we had to tell him, he inquired, fixing on me those earnest blue eyes, 'Did papa see the angels when they took away Joe?' And when I answered ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... leading man in Cluhir, leader in its councils and its politics. On his professional side, his advice and ministrations were in demand even beyond the range of his motor car, and the measure of his greatness may be best estimated when it is mentioned that his motor had been the first to startle the ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... start. I had been dreadfully given to starting for a long time,—so much so that I was quite ashamed sometimes, for I would even cry out,—I who had always been so sharp on feminine affectations before; but now it seemed as if nothing could startle me. I only opened my eyes; and there was my great big huge bear looking down on me, with something in his eyes I had never seen there before. But even his presence could not ripple the waters of my deep rest. I gave him half a smile,—I knew it was ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... you want to startle anybody like that for? Don't you know that the wicked flea pursueth every man, but the righteous shall escape ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... is much discussed. I myself have heard much of him—but of things connected with another part of his character. It is true that he is in favour with great personages. It is because they are aware that he has observed much for many years. He is light and ironic, but he tells truths which sometimes startle those ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to his charge, necessarily caters to them. In schools for the upper classes, where the number of pupils is small and select, he spends his energies in giving them a show of knowledge wherewith they may startle friends and relations into admiration of his superior system. In common schools, where the charges are small, he is forced, in order to support himself, to multiply the number of pupils until it is impossible for him to do any ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... not only of the beast he fronted, but of the Wyverns as well, brought that old rallying cry to his lips—the call used on the Dumps of Tyr to summon gang aid against outsiders. Fork-tail had crouched again for a spring, but that throat-crackling blast appeared to startle it. ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... hear your opinions regarding the antiquity of our race: geologists are daily becoming bolder and more unhesitating in their assertions on the subject; and we are fast drifting toward conclusions that seem to startle the religious world, and threaten to upset our confidence in that Book which we have been accustomed to regard with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... past. Then, again, I learnt the utter and wonderful kindness of my friends. I felt so selfish and so surprised at the goodness they showed me. Again, I saw something of the mystery of pain. My own was so trivial compared with that which some others had to bear. Yet I had enough to startle me that such a fact should be permitted on earth at all. I don't suppose we can understand its meaning; but my consolation was that it is not necessarily a sign of God's displeasure—that the highest life was a life of suffering, that the Son of Man was a 'Man of Sorrows.' Everything ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... a year's time he may not be rowing an Algerian galley under the lash of the slave-driver. Above all do not teach him this, like his catechism, in cold blood; let him see and feel the calamities which overtake men; surprise and startle his imagination with the perils which lurk continually about a man's path; let him see the pitfalls all about him, and when he hears you speak of them, let him cling more closely to you for fear lest he should fall. "You will make him timid and cowardly," do you say? We shall see; ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... then, not too often. He did not mean to startle any one with his purpose, but to let it grow gradually. Still, at the last assembly of the season, his attentions were somewhat pronounced. It was partly her doings, she was sheltering herself from other rather ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... four-and-thirty years Bourdaloue distributed, to those who would take it, the bread of life—plain, wholesome, prepared skilfully and with clean hands, never varying from the evenness and excellence of its quality. He does not startle or dazzle a reader; he does what is ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... been fairly successful, for I had shot four rare humming-birds; but so far we had seen no specimens of the gorgeous quetzal, and it was for these that our eyes wandered whenever we reached a patch of woodland, but only to startle macaws, parroquets, or the clumsy-looking—but really light and active—big-billed toucans, which ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... "Quite enough to startle a red deer, Edward, as you will find out before you have been long a forester. These checks will happen, and have happened to me a hundred times, and then all the work is to be done over again. Now then to make the circuit—we had better not ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... hither and thither, bringing all manner of things and completely losing his head; Julien walked up and down looking very troubled, but really feeling quite calm, and the Widow Dentu, whom nothing could surprise or startle, stood at the foot of the bed with an expression suited to the occasion on ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... meaning, as crisp and fresh as just-minted bank-notes. They should have no taint of flatness or insipidity. They should show not the faintest trace of wear. With them, one might hope, now and then, to startle the imagination, to set it running in channels which are strange and delightful to it. For there is something new under the sun: aerial adventure; and the most lively and unjaded fancy may, at first, need direction toward the realization ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... His hearers for what is coming by putting it in the gentle form of an hypothesis. The frequency with which 'If' occurs in this section is very remarkable. He will not startle them by the bare, naked statement which they, in that hour of depression and agitation, were so little able to endure, but He puts it in the shape of a 'suppose that,' not because there is any doubt, but in order to alleviate the pain of the impression which He desires ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... certain she knew something and feared lest it should come to his knowledge. Therefore he resolved to startle her by a blunt question. "I never knew you were ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... awoke to the fact that he owned a good voice, and that one of the enemies for whom he and the rest of the Pawnees were hunting, was much nearer than was supposed. He emitted a screeching yell, enough to startle all who heard it, and, looking around and seeing nothing of the white archer, he stopped and again signaled for the rest to hasten while ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... selfe would startle at this letter, And play the swaggerer, beare this, beare all: Shee saies I am not faire, that I lacke manners, She calls me proud, and that she could not loue me Were man as rare as Phenix: 'od's my will, Her loue is not the Hare that I doe ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of goods in Cap'n Abe's store did not so much startle the visitor, as the figure that rose from behind the counter, where he was stooping at ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... various heavy-handed and unquenchable preliminaries he kissed her as nearly on the mouth as possible, clinging to a half-lit cigar the while, just before she whipped around into the hotel drive. She avoided a collision with one of the stone posts narrowly enough to startle him into releasing her,—he hadn't realized the turn was so close—and stopped at the lighted carriage door with a jerk that left him no option but to ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... knows I had no will to startle you; and, indeed, there should be nothing startling in the presence of one who wishes you so well as I do. And, believe me, I am acting rather from necessity than choice. We have many things in common, and I am sadly in the dark. There is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... country, getting lost in valleys where it piled up into fleecy mounds, getting caught in tree-tops where it fluttered like tattered banners. Every now and then, with the suddenness of our approach, we would startle an aged shepherd, muffled and pensive as an Arab, strolling slowly across moorlands, followed closely by the sentinel goats which led his flock. The day had been strangely mystic. Time seemed a mood. I had ceased ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... at starting, begging your worship's pardon. Why, the very sight of you might startle her into her grave. Nay, you'll give me the money—for mine is all in the savings bank—and I shall go for her myself. I shall tell her squire is longing for her, and that I'm to be here for fear she might feel strange. She always liked me, poor soul. I shall get her safe here, you needn't fear ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... dear Dorothy, that the time will be long ere any but fortified places will be safe abodes. It is a question in my mind whether it would not be better to seek refuge for you—. But stay; let me suggest my proposal, rather than startle you with it in sudden form complete. You are related to the ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... vision dispelled with painful suddenness. But now I find its advantage, for nobody believes it is my own, but confidently expects that Ann Tubbs or Susan Bucket will appear from a long suppression, like a Jack-in-a-box, and startle the public as she throws ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... Peter, "always acts as though he quite disapproves of you and yet he'll go to any amount of trouble to do things to make you happy or comfortable. Then he conceals his graciousness by being curt about it. Then, when he's at his crankiest, he's apt to startle you by saying the divinest things point-blank in your face, and as likely as not, after treating you as he would a rather backward child of whom he rigidly disapproves, he'll make love to you and do it with ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... greater truths of his art. It may be the golden sunset or the breezy noon, the solemn breadth of twilight, or the silvery freshness of morn—the something of colour, of form, of light and shade, floating rapidly away, that makes the meanest and most commonplace view at times startle us with wonder at its beauty, when treated ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... already resolved upon appealing to your future dictates with the lowest and most resigned submission, fate having decreed you sole arbiter of the productions of human wit in this polite and most accomplished age. Methinks the number of appellants were enough to shock and startle any judge of a genius less unlimited than yours; but in order to prevent such glorious trials, the person, it seems, to whose care the education of your Highness is committed, has resolved, as I am told, to keep you in almost an universal ignorance ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... turned in the startle of surprise at being observed. The sharp, authoritative words of Van Horn were a call across the million years. Borckman's anger-convulsed face ludicrously attempted a sheepish, deprecating grin, and he ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... heard of her son's state! And Maurice and Bertha,—would they not be greatly alarmed? How could intelligence of the calamity be most gently communicated? Should Madeleine write? A note bearing the tidings might startle his mother too much. Madeleine saw but one alternative,—it was to go in person and break the sorrowful news as delicately as possible. She did not waste a moment in pondering upon the manner in which the haughty countess might receive her, but ordered her carriage, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... prayer to him. It is a unique thought in "A Rhyme About An Electrical Advertising Sign," the lines of which startle one almost ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... accept. An impure young woman is an awful sight. She outrages all just ideas of womankind, all proper conceptions of spiritual beauty. To have evil imaginings, corrupt longings, or deceitful propensities ought to startle any young woman. To feel a disposition to sensuality, a craving for the glitter of a worldly life, or a selfish ambition for unmerited distinction is dangerous in the extreme. It is the exuding of impure waters from the heart. Who feels such utterings within should beware. They are the ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... over,' said Yule. He was in visible agitation and his voice shook. 'The idea may well startle you at first. It will seem to you that I propose to make away with your property before you have even come into possession of it.' He laughed. 'But, in fact, what I have in mind is merely an investment for your capital, and that an admirable one. Five thousand pounds at three per ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... as she recalled the incident, "what a startle we got. As we think, Pete kicks open the door and cries oot, 'Ony rozetty roots?' and Leeby says 'No,' and gangs to shut the door. Next minute she screeches, 'What, what, what!' ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... war. Dilke explained in one of his chapters that, "according to the calculations of the French Staff, the total number of armed men upon which Germany would be able to draw for all purposes would exceed 7,000,000." [Footnote: The British Army, p. 161.] This and other forecasts may startle those readers whose curiosity tempts them to read the volume again in 1917. But the work produced no practical result except to put Dilke into the front rank of army reformers. The Government took no action to remedy the military weakness which ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... of a natural instinct, and these sudden lapses from virtue which startle a small portion of community and afford a filthy kind of pleasure to the other part, are but the outgrowths of mental unchastity. "Filthy dreamers," before they are aware, become filthy in action. The thoughts mold the brain, as certainly as the brain molds the thoughts. Rapidly down the ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... you want to,' I says to Perry, 'but don't startle the bartender. He may have heart-disease. Come on, now; your tongue got twisted. The tall glasses,' I orders, 'and the bottle in the ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... Paris. French mirrors and Italian statuettes may have for their vis-a-vis the exquisite mosaics, the massive gold vases and the costly bijouterie of the Orient, strewn so profusely around as to startle unaccustomed eyes; and a genuine Meissonier will be just as likely to be placed side by side with a Persian houri as anywhere else. The Parsees drive the finest Arab steeds, but on their equipages there is a more lavish display of ornament than we should ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... summer, when she sat, in the face of all the conventions of the village, reading under the butternut tree before the house, she would feel his eyes upon her, and the mysterious yearning in them would startle her. Often during her lessons with Mr. Satterlee in the parlor of the parsonage she would hear a noise outside and perceive Jethro leaning against the pillar. Both Cynthia and Mr. Satterlee knew that he was there, and both, by a kind ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... proud impulse he raised his head and looked at her with a bold steadfastness,—a critical scrutiny,—a calmly discriminating valuation of her physical charms that for the moment certainly appeared to startle her self-possession, for a deep flush colored the fairness of her face and then faded, leaving her pale as marble. Her emotion, whatever it was, lasted but a second,—yet in that second he had measured his mental strength against hers, and had become ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... faults has been previously suggested. The chief of his faults, a certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life, and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years before his death. But any one who wishes to understand how deep was the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly worthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study one most striking ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... The pictures in her mind were so obtrusive and exact that, as the twilight deepened, she dreaded to raise her head and look at the dark corners of the room, lest his wraith, the offspring of her excited imagination, should be waiting there, to startle her. Once she had such a fancy of his being in the next room, hiding—though she knew quite well what a distempered fancy it was, and had no belief in it—that she forced herself to go there, for her own conviction. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... and she gravely put her small hand into it. A sense of solace, as if some one had slipped a finger in and smoothed his heart, came over Winton. Gently, so as not to startle her, he raised her hand a little, bent, and kissed it. It may have been from his instant recognition that here was one as sensitive as child could be, or the way many soldiers acquire from dealing with their men—those simple, shrewd children—or some deeper instinctive sense of ownership ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... gazing over the lake, oblivious to all things save the entrancing allurement of a perfect spring night beside undulant water. Screened from her with bushes and trees the Harvester scarcely breathed lest he startle her. Then his head swam, and his still heart leaped wildly. She was coming toward him. On her left lay the path to the hill top. A few steps farther she could turn to the right and follow the driveway to the front of the cabin. He ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... speak of this now; yet I have spoken, for the subject makes me feel too much. I could give instances that would startle the most vulgar and callous; but I will not, for the public opinion of their own sex is already against such men, and where cases of extreme tyranny are made known, there is private action in the wife's favor. But she ought not to need this, nor, I think, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... most restless, care-worn faces in the city are to be seen on this street. Women clad in the richest attire pass you with unquiet face and wistful eyes, and men who are envied by their fellows for their "good luck," startle you by the stern, hard set look their features wear. The first find little real happiness in the riches they have sold themselves for, and the latter find that the costly pleasures they courted have been gained ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... remember how often the Agitation of the Slavery question has been done to death in Congress, and how sure it was to appear again to startle its murderers from their propriety. Like "the blood-boltered Banquo," it would confront again the eyes that had hoped to look upon it no more. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... square Lay mine, as much at my beck and call, Through the live translucent bath of air, As the sights in a magic crystal-ball. And of all I saw and of all I praised, The most to praise and the best to see Was the startling bell-tower Giotto raised: But why did it more than startle me? ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... to the conclusion that this is the business I ought to do. I have only one parishioner on my hands to-day," he went on with a slight smile, "and I may as well attend to her. I am going to tell you my plan. I shall not startle you? Just now you allowed that ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... rigid Calvinist. His sermons were gloomy, and so long that he occasionally would startle the congregation by calling out to some culprit, "Sit up there, how daur ye sleep i' the kirk." Some saw-mills in the neighbourhood were burnt down, so the following Sunday we had a sermon on hell-fire. ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... groups in his store, sitting with his stout legs hanging over the counter, with a coarse brilliancy, original and sagacious, from which the more cultured might cull gems of thought, fresh and striking, despite the terrible swearing, which would startle even ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... those astonishing and yet natural things which sometimes startle us is the value some minds attach to mere modernity in art. An old thing is tossed up in a new way, and there are those who attach more value to the way than the thing, and are instantly agape with admiration ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... writing, nevertheless, is not affected by the desire either to impress or to startle his readers, any more than the writing of a good poet springs from an aiming at effect: it is like all true literature, in the first place, the outcome of a strong and personal passion, the passion for the past. ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... (the Wayward Recluse*). His most intimate friends were the shogun's father-in-law, Shimazu Ei-O, and Ikeda Isshinsai. The latter two were also inkyo and shared the tastes and foibles of Harunari. One of their greatest pleasures was to startle society. Thus, when Sadanobu was legislating with infinite care against prodigality of any kind, the above three old gentlemen loved to organize parties on an ostentatiously extravagant scale, and ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... that most earnestly and constantly, for some terrific shock to startle the women o f the nation into a self- respect which mill compel them to, see the absolute degradation o f their present position; which will compel them to break their yoke of bondage and give them faith in themselves; ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... "How you did startle me! Why, where did you come from? Yessir!" and he deftly manoeuvered so as to catch a glimpse of the bar over Cassidy's shoulder. "You surely startled me bad. Excuse me," he murmured absently; "I ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... from her with her foot, and never once looked, though her eyes were cast down too, upon the dainty shoe she generally was so mindful of. Absorbed in thought, she stood there, heedless alike of the tea and John (although he called to her, and rapped the table with his knife to startle her), until he rose and touched her on the arm; when she looked at him for a moment, and hurried to her place behind the teaboard, laughing at her negligence. But, not as she had laughed before. The manner and the music ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... hour, when at length the moose rose to the surface, and, swimming a short distance, began to wade towards where we were concealed. We were afraid of moving, even to get our guns pointed at it, lest we should startle it—as these animals are very sharp of hearing—and it should swim off in ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... (which generally means a negation) of Christian truth, we have a clear right to look forward with quiet confidence. Often in the past has the religion of Jesus seemed to be wearing or worn out, but it has a strange recuperative power, and is wont to startle its enemies' paeans over its grave by rising again and winning renewed victories. The Title on the Cross is for ever true, and is written again in nobler fashion 'on the vesture and on the thigh' of Him who rides ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... things!" the lady exclaimed. "I think it's awful to startle you so, but it's the joke of your father and your Cousin Jack. I was afraid it would scare ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... not fire, because of the men. I dared not move, lest I should disturb the robber. I was even afraid the click of cocking the pistol would startle him and prevent my getting a quiet shot. But patience was rewarded. When satiated, the brute retired as stealthily as he had advanced; and as he passed within seven or eight yards of me I let him have it. Great was my disappointment to see him scamper off. How was ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... his heart, he will begin by sharing her pursuits only as a means to an end, for when love-making once steps in other pursuits are neglected, if not totally shelved, for the time being. This transition stage requires great tact. He must not startle her by too sudden a development. Some women may like to be taken by storm, to be married by capture as it were, but the average girl likes to have time to enjoy being wooed and won. She basks in the gradual unfolding of his love; she rejoices over each new phase of their courtship; she lingers longingly ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... or so from shore, my boat would startle a great amphibious ox standing in the water up to his middle, calmly eating the succulent water grass. To secure it he had to plunge his head and neck ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... dell, where in the perfection of its English woodland one might have thought to meet Robin Hood himself, or startle Little John beside a fallen deer, I looked carefully about, got out my pale crackers, and wondered whether I dared begin. It is always an eerie sensation to be alone in the forest, what with the whispering leaves overhead, the stir and hum of insects, the rustle of ghostly ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... more disciplined and plodding competitors far behind. The list, indeed, which he has left on record of the works, in all departments of literature, which he thus hastily and greedily devoured before he was fifteen years of age, is such as almost to startle belief,—comprising, as it does, a range and variety of study, which might make much older ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... swifts were abed, he took a dark lantern and went in. He turned the light upon them little by little, so as not to startle them. Then he saw the whole inside of the tree full of birds. They were hanging by their claws, side by side, as thick as they could hang. He thought there were as many as twelve thousand in ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... know (but why should we not know again?) the story of the Grecian mother who saw her child sporting on the edge of the bridge. She knew that a cry would startle it over into the raging stream—she came gently near, and opening her ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... conduct of my Hero and Heroine, there is one circumstance which was intended to startle the reader from the trance of ordinary life. It was my object to break through the crust of those outworn opinions on which established institutions depend. I have appealed therefore to the most universal of all feelings, and have endeavoured to strengthen the moral ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Montauk. All else, to where Womponomon—the Indian name of the eastern point—juts out into the sea, are hills and rolling downs which rise and fall like the sea when the waves are running "mountains high." Here and there we pass a pond, and often startle the cattle that graze over the greater part of Montauk; and at length pause, spellbound by the view from the hills looking down upon Fort Pond, or Kongonock. The road runs past its southern extremity, where, until ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... had meant to startle her by the sudden action, he amply succeeded. At the first sight of the murderous weapon she shrank back, and a horrified, but quickly suppressed shriek, burst from her lips. "Oh, no, no!" she moaned, flinging ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... particularly careful to allow no persons to enter upon the possession of these houses, whose characters have not undergone the most searching and thorough enquiry." Finally, the author announces that he will state three facts which he thinks will startle his English readers: "Firstly, there is a joint-stock piano in a great many of the boarding-houses. Secondly, nearly all these young ladies subscribe to circulating libraries. Thirdly, they have got ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... spring upon Phoebe, as though it had been something visible to startle her. It shook off her old English self for a moment, and she leaped to ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... through fear for the girls' safety—fear that the hostages, if aware of pursuit, would wreak instant death. But now, as their lieutenant advanced to the shack, the men behind, while trying their utmost to gain, sent forward yell upon yell to startle the Indians into dropping their captives and ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... should. What they have just seen is sufficient to terrify the stoutest hearts—even those of tried tars, as all of them are. A ship manned by hairy men—a crew of veritable Orsons! Certainly enough to startle the most phlegmatic mariner, and make him tremble as he tugs at his oar. But they have ceased tugging at their oars, and hold them, blades suspended. Almost the same is their breath. One alone, at length, musters ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... rising from his seat on the church step when he heard sounds like muffled groans. Recovering quickly from the first boyish startle of fear oozing like a cool breeze blowing up the back of his neck, he saw that the church door was ajar. By cautiously adding another inch to the aperture he could see the interior of the building, its outlines taking shape when his eyes had become accustomed ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... with stealthy tread, To the belfry chamber overhead, And startle the pigeons from their perch On the sombre rafters, that round him make Masses and moving shapes ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... he, in a low voice—and he was himself rather pale—"I am going to tell you something that may perhaps startle you, and even grieve you; but you must keep command over yourself, or you will alarm ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... speech back. It was a very stubborn and perplexing case. For eighteen months he had not succeeded in uttering a word, though understanding everything that was said to him. All the usual devices had failed; every kind of sudden surprise to startle him into articulation had been attempted; electricity had been passed through the muscles of the tongue and larynx; doctors had discussed him with a volubility only equalled by his own silence. But he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... savor of heresy, the independence of Francis, who had scattered his friars in all the four corners of the globe without trying to gain a confirmation of the verbal and entirely provisional authorization accorded him by Innocent III.—all these things were calculated to startle the clergy. ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... by Matter. In most cases sound reaches the ear through the air; but air is not the only medium through which sound is carried. A loud noise will startle fish, and cause them to dart away, so we conclude that the sound must have reached them through the water. An Indian puts his ear to the ground in order to detect distant footsteps, because sounds too faint to be heard ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... the man about it; but he seemed to think that he was not responsible for the cow's voice. I then told him to take her away; and he did, at intervals, shifting her to different parts of the grounds in my absence, so that the desolate voice would startle us from unexpected quarters. If I were to unhitch the cow, and turn her loose, I knew where she would go. If I were to lead her away, the question was, Where? for I did not fancy leading a cow about till I could find somebody who was willing to pasture her. To this dilemma had my excellent neighbor ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... enough, and whether venomous or not it was enough to startle the watcher, as a serpent some seven or eight feet in length came into sight, travelling through the undergrowth, with its scales ever changing in tint as its folds came more or less into connection with the ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... room. If your patient be well enough, and wishes you to talk to him, speak in a low, distinct voice, on cheerful subjects. Don't relate painful hospital experiences, nor give details of the maladies of former patients, and remember never to startle him with accounts of dreadful crimes or accidents that you have read ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... this struggle which animates the nature of Holland with a varied and fantastic life, and by the act of reproducing it the struggle passed into their minds, and then, instead of imitating, they created. Then they themselves made the two elements contend; they increased the darkness to startle and disperse it with every manner of luminous effects and flashes of light; sunbeams stole through the gloom and then gradually died away; the reflections of twilight and the mellow light of lamps were delicately blended into mysterious shadows, which were animated with ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... surmise the oldest Rover boy was sadly mistaken. Many things of which he and his cousins did not dream were to occur, not only to startle and annoy them, but also to place them ...
— The Rover Boys on Snowshoe Island - or, The Old Lumberman's Treasure Box • Edward Stratemeyer
... seconds, until Maurice, fearing that his chum might be almost paralyzed with fright, gave a shriek to startle him into action. ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... feet from under Slip the crumbling banks for ever: Like echoes to a distant thunder, 55 They plunge into the gentle river. The river-swans have heard my tread. And startle from their reedy bed. O beauteous birds! methinks ye measure Your movements to some heavenly tune! 60 O beauteous birds! 'tis such a pleasure To see you move beneath the moon, I would it were your true delight To sleep by ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... We know to be glad of life as we were gods Timelessly glad of deity; yea, to enjoy Fleshly, spiritual Being till the swift Torrent of glee (as hurled star-dust can change Dim earthly weather to a moment like the sun,) Doth startle life to self-adoring godhead,— Divine body of Power and divine Burning soul of Light and self-desire. And having given ourselves all to amazement, We are made like a prophesying song Of life all joy, a bride in the arms of God.— Yea, God shall marry his people ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... rose really to sublime heights in the barn scene where the little Prince is in the hands of the mob. Never in the history of the stage has there been assembled a mob more wonderful than that. These children knew mobs! A mob to them was a daily sight, and their reproduction of it was a thing to startle you with its realism. Never was it absurd; never was there a single note of artificiality in it. It was Hogarthian in ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... be remarked that it would startle those unaccustomed to Freeland ideas to hear the amounts of these allowances. In the first year the maintenance unit reached 160L; therefore an unmarried woman or a widow received 48L; a married woman 24L; a family with three children and a wife 48L; an old ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... right hand lead with thee The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty; And if I give thee honor due, Mirth, admit me of thy crew To live with her, and live with thee, In unreproved pleasures free; To hear the lark begin his flight, And, singing, startle the dull night, From his watch-tower in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise; Then to come, in spite of sorrow, And at my window bid good-morrow, Through the sweetbrier, or the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... exercise of the will, or suddenly, as in some great physical shock, and of a necessity comes to all in the event called death. Were I to tell you how I acquired this knowledge, Mr. Henley, it would startle you, far more than any exhibition of the power itself. No, I can not tell you; at least, not at present; perhaps some day you may be ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... take the salutation quite calmly, and even the wildest, most spectacled and knobby-browed aborigine cannot startle me. Nonchalantly I reply, "Nabben'," and wish that Norah could but see ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... we have made! this is not to put down prelaty; this is but to chop an episcopacy; this is but to translate the Palace Metropolitan from one kind of dominion into another; this is but an old canonical sleight of commuting our penance. To startle thus betimes at a mere unlicensed pamphlet will after a while be afraid of every conventicle, and a while after will make a conventicle of every Christian meeting. But I am certain that a State governed by the rules of justice ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... means of evoking true repentance is the contemplation of the Cross. Law and the fear of hell may startle into sorrow, and even lead to some kind of repentance. But it is the great power of Christ's love and sacrifice which will really melt the heart into true repentance. You may hammer ice to pieces, but it is ice still. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to startle strangers to hear "The Hardy Norseman," "The Cuckoo," and such-like songs from the lips of little Chinese boys. Every Saturday evening they came to the house to practise the hymns and chants for Sunday; I had ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... lingering wanderer of the race which the Romans worshipped; hither I followed their victorious steps, and in these green hollows have I remained. Sometimes in the still noon, when the leaves of spring bud upon the whispering woods, I peer forth from my rocky lair, and startle the peasant with my strange voice and stranger shape. Then goes he home, and puzzles his thick brain with mopes and fancies, till at length he imagines me, the creature of the South! one of his northern demons, and his poets adapt the apparition ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... banished from their native waves. Large poles twisted with fir branches, stuck thickly around the lake, gave to the waters the becoming Helvetian gloom. And here, beside three cows all bedecked with ribbons, stood the Swiss maidens destined to startle the shades with the Ranz des Vaches. To the left, full upon the sward, which it almost entirely covered, stretched the great Gothic marquee, divided into two grand sections—one for the dancing, one for ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... blacking-brush, with hardly any bristles left in it, which he was rubbing backwards and forwards on the boards, as gravely and steadily as if he had been at scouring-work for years, and had got a large family to keep by it. The coming-in of Trottle and the old woman did not startle or disturb him in the least. He just looked up for a minute at the candle, with a pair of very bright, sharp eyes, and then went on with his work again, as if nothing had happened. On one side of him was ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... die Were all, it were most sweet to rest my head On the cold clod, and sleep the sleep of Death. But if the Archangel's trump at the last hour Startle the ear of Death and wake the soul To frenzy!—dreams of infancy! fit tales For garrulous beldames to affrighten babes! I have been guilty, yet my mind can bear The retrospect of guilt, yet in the hour Of deep contrition to THE ETERNAL ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... altogether omitted from his official list of counties organized in the month of February. In that brief interval, the Government policy of provocation had the desired effect, though the explosion was of a nature to startle those who ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... on the opposite side of the lane, so that their hurried approach did not startle the strangers; but Phoebe, looking up at the sound of the footsteps, saw a face she knew looking wistfully, eagerly at her, with evident recognition. Phoebe had a faculty quite royal of remembering ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... escape," he murmured. "Forgive me, gnaedige Frau. It is a startle to think that perhaps you have given to ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... fast, there will be throngs here presently. Maitland,—nay, do not let me startle you ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... listen to me. I am going to say something which will startle you. All these quiet years, all the time which has gone by and left only a dim memory of a certain man to you, have been spent by me smothering down regrets, stifling my youth, crushing what would have made me joyous and womanly—for Philip Arnold has not been remembered at all dimly by me, father, ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... its petals. And if there be two lovers equally sincere, both are likely to feel at the same moment the same impetus to revelation. Besides which, Fate of any kind seeks the unusual and the unexpected; it desires to startle, and ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... fellowship with his kind which Paracelsus needs can be poorly learnt from such a distracted creature as Aprile. It is indeed Aprile's example and the fate which has overtaken him rather than his wild words which startle Paracelsus into a recognition of his own error. But the knowledge that he has left love out of his scheme of life is no guarantee that he will ever acquire the fervour and the infinite patience of love. The whole scene, with its extravagant poetic beauties ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... threw up his head and gave a tremendous neigh. The sound startled her, as these things will startle the strongest when all is profoundly silent. But what followed was more startling still. Not one, but half a dozen echoes at least responded, and, with a thrill, the girl sat up. The next moment she had spurred her horse and charged, regardless of the thorns, into the midst ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... and now and then an extra one on Thursday or Saturday. I do not think anything would persuade her to have an assembly, or play cards, on a Friday. But on a Sunday evening she always has her rubber, to Flora's horror. It does not startle me, because I remember it always was so when I lived with her at Carlisle: nor Annas, because she knew people did such things in the South. I find Grandmamma usually spends the winter at the Bath: ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... nor even Mozart's—could be a more veracious expression of his inner nature; and if Dvorak's music is at times odd and whimsical, and persistently wrong-headed and outre through long passages, it does not mean that Dvorak is trying to impress or startle his hearers by doing unusual things, but merely that he himself is odd and whimsical and has his periods of persistent wrong-headedness. He is Slav in every fibre—not a pseudo-Slav whose ancestors were or deserved to be ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... even if she were here, Mas'r Harry. Nothing never did startle she, though she ain't ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... said. "I didn't realize the shot might startle you even more than the wildcat. It seems I'm not fit to have charge of a lady. I told you I was ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... I was heard; but at length the door was opened, and I was accosted by an Englishman, who, in a strange compound of French and English, asked, "What the devil I meant by all that uproar?" Determining to startle my old friend the major, I replied, that "I was aide-de-camp to General Picton, and had come down on very unpleasant business." By this time the noise of the party within had completely subsided, and from a few whispered ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... fireplace, leaning on the mantelpiece, and looking up into the eyes of the girl above, smiling and talking softly to her, Miss Ludington entered the room and laid her hand gently on his arm. Her appearance did not seem to startle him in the least. "Paul, my dear boy!" she said, "you ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... our officers were not above half of what he had been offered for one of them, and did make it good by bringing a gentleman to give us L700 for the Wildboare, which they valued but at L276, which made us all startle and stop the sale, and I did propose to acquaint the Duke of York with it, and accordingly we did agree on it, and I wrote a severe letter about it, and we are to attend him with it to-morrow about it. This afternoon my Lord Anglesey tells us that ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... My first shot had struck one of his back teeth, breaking it squarely off, and then passed through the fleshy part of the neck. It was a wound that would startle, but not kill. The second shot had hit him between the eyes, but had glanced off the skull, merely ripping open the skin on the forehead for five inches. The third shell had killed him, except for the convulsive heaving ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... to make. Now and then a squirrel darted across from one tree to another, disappearing among the branches almost before Olive could be sure she had seen it, or some wild wood birds, less familiar to the little foreigner, would startle her with a shrill, strange note. There were here and there lovely flowers growing among the moss, and more than once she heard the sound of not far off trickling water. It was all strangely beautiful, ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... sound that issued from the tube. But wouldn't it be absurd for the commander of the Hugh Frazer, amid the quiet waters of Loch-Lomond, to give orders to the little boy that holds the helm, or point out the beauties of Inversnaid, through an instrument that would startle all the cattle on the surrounding hills? Just so with Shakspeare's kings and lovers. They have "prave 'ords enough, look you," to fill the biggest speaking-trumpet that ever was cast; but miserable is it for men who have not such ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... ambition is not to perform feats which startle the world and give him fame, but rather to live the life of the moderate and harmonious one; yet how often for lack of true discernment he fails! This middle path is not, however, hidden from the sincere and ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... hope you will find Piers. Tell him to bring two men, and something that they can carry him on. Jeanie dear, you run home to your mother and tell her how it is that we shall be late for tea. You won't startle her, I know." ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... the hall and awakened Heloise, Mimi, and Marie and told them what she had done. No novelty in horror could startle European women in those days. They dressed themselves hastily in their gray uniforms and followed her to the Saal. With Mimi's assistance she put on his coat, the hilt of the dagger thrusting forward the row of medals on his breast. Marie went out into the street and flitted up and down ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... grieved for the poor and gave himself to the care of the sick, especially the lepers. During a visit to Rome he became so sad at the sight of desperate poverty that he impetuously flung his bag of gold upon the altar with such force as to startle the worshipers. He went out from the church, exchanged his clothes for a beggar's rags, and stood for hours asking alms among a ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... official criticism. I have not taken space to mention certain episodes of the more recent intercourse of these ladies, and must content myself with tracing them, lightly, in their consequences. These may be summed up in the remark, which will doubtless startle no one by its freshness, that two imperial women are scarcely more likely to hit it off together, as the phrase is, than two imperial men. Since that party at Miss Birdseye's, so important in its results for Olive, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... the color deepen in her cheeks while she read, her heart would bound hopefully within her. But she was a wise woman in her way, and she wanted Katy for a sister very much; so she never said a word or looked a look to startle or surprise her, but left the thing to work itself out, which is the best course ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... Catholic and an affectionate mother! The mixture of old and new in her—the fresh habits of growth imposed on the original plant—startle me at every turn. Her Catholicism, which resolves itself, perhaps, into the cult of a particular church and of two or three admirable and sagacious priests, seems to me one long intrigue of a comparatively harmless kind. It provides ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... thinking a good deal about it, and I have a proposal to make which may at first startle you, but it appears to me that it is our only, and our best, resource. The few hundred pounds which you have left are of no use in this country, except to keep you from starving for a year or two; but in another country ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... new-comer. "Frighten people, indeed! Do you not call that naughty? It's a wicked and dangerous thing to do, and you would be punished severely if you attempted it. I have read of people who died of fright. How would you feel if you played bogey, as you call it, to startle one of the girls, and she had a weak heart and died before your eyes? You would feel pretty miserable then, ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... anything about Parker's Hotel,—and the Colonial Office. He spoke of Miss Nora, and even knew the names of the other two young ladies, Miss Sophia and Miss Lucy. It was a weakness with Bozzle,—that of displaying his information. He would have much liked to be able to startle Sir Marmaduke by describing the Government House in the island, or by telling him something of his old carriage-horses. But of such information as Sir Marmaduke ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... spiritual or sensual, of the moment. It is a quality, perhaps, in which the young poet is richer than the mature, his very inexperience making him more venturesome in those leaps of language that startle us with their rashness only to bewitch us the more with the happy ease of their accomplishment. For this there are no existing laws of rhetoric, for it is from such felicities that the rhetoricians ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... got dere. Big trees on de banks and 'round, wid long moss hangin' from de limbs. I baited my hook wid a small, wigglin', live, minnow and throwed out into de water. Nothin' happen. In de warm sunshine I must have gone to sleep, when I was startle out my doze by Henry a shoutin': 'Marse Johnnie, Marse Johnnie, your cork done gone down out of sight!' I made a pull but felt at once it would take both hands to land dat fish. I took both hands, put my ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... an Industrial Congress in which women occupied in every branch of labor are to be represented, you may think this question could not legitimately come before you. And even if it could, you may not think best to startle the timid or provoke the powerful by the assertion that a fair day's wages for a fair day's work and the dignity of labor, alike depend on the political status of the laborer. Perhaps in your country, where the right of representation is ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... deadly ailin',— Folks thet's afeared to fail are sure o' failin'; 320 God hates your sneakin' creturs thet believe He'll settle things they run away an' leave!' He brought his foot down fiercely, ez he spoke, An' give me sech a startle ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... convictions. As he had little sympathy with those with whom he was brought in contact, so he was very uncharitable in his judgment of them; and thus having really a low opinion of so many of them he could indulge his vindictive rancor without stint; his invective, always powerful, will sometimes startle us by its venom, and we shall be pained to see him apt to make enemies for a good cause ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... of nations, and the limbs of its corpses tossed out of its whirling, like water-wheels. Bat like, out of the holes and caverns and shadows of the earth, the bones gather, and the clay-heaps heave, rattling and adhering into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the clay clinging to their clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed by the earth darkness yet, like his of old who went his way unseeing to Siloam Pool; shaking ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... expiring faction was revived, and united, and perpetuated, by the labors of a monk; and the name of James Baradaeus [129] has been preserved in the appellation of Jacobites, a familiar sound, which may startle the ear of an English reader. From the holy confessors in their prison of Constantinople, he received the powers of bishop of Edessa and apostle of the East, and the ordination of fourscore thousand bishops, priests, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... room Lady Constantine managed, at the last juncture, to state her errand in tones so collected as to startle even herself to which her listener replied also as if the whole thing were the most natural in the world. When it came to the affirmation that she had lived fifteen days in the parish, ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... Croix and her daughter were possessed of good nerves, for the dramatic entrance of the Bradys did not seem to startle them ...
— The Bradys and the Girl Smuggler - or, Working for the Custom House • Francis W. Doughty
... conducted by Diderot alone after the great schism of 1759. On the subject of sport, however, the writer of the article Chasse enumerates all the considerations which a patriotic minister could desire to see impressed on public opinion. Some of the paragraphs startle us by their directness and freedom of complaint, and even a very cool reader would still be likely to feel some of the wrath that was stirred in the breast of our shrewd and sober Arthur Young a generation later (1787). "Go to the residence of these great nobles," he says, "wherever it ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... so far away that communication with him was likely to be delayed. A sword hung over the head of Truxton King, an innocent outsider, and there was a prospect that it would fall in advance of the blow that was intended to startle the world. Olga Platanova was the only one who did not look upon the sprightly American as a spy in the employ of the government—a dangerously clever spy ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... singularly youthful beauty of several of the males; the superb robes they wear; the expression of their faces and their figures; the details of hair, stuffs, ornaments, jewels; the refinement and feminine taste of the whole, are enough to startle our interest if we recognize what meaning they ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... was grievous news wherewith to startle the parish. And Mrs. Carradyne, a martyr to belief in ghosts and omens, grew to dread the chimes with a ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... announced Angel, as usual, was the first to appear, and when he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror he thought one of his friends had come to visit him. It did not seem to startle him in the least, but like all children ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... hysterical terror. Then, with one accord, we lifted up our voices, weak with weeping, in a thin screech. I said "Help! help! help!" she cried, "Murder! murder!" and "Cap'n Ga-a-tes!" We made enough noise to startle the dogs in the house-yard and at the stables, and brought from the nearer "quarters" and corn-field a gang of negroes, of all sizes and ages, all running at the top of their speed, and the faster as they descried us. It would have been excruciatingly funny at any other time, and to one ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... settled, and of late (which you will be glad to hear) considerably improved, I begin to think myself too far advanced in life for such youthful undertakings, not to mention some other petty reasons that are apt to startle the delicacy of difficult old bachelors. I am, however, not a little suspicious that, was I to pay a visit to Scotland, (which I have some thoughts of doing soon,) I might, possibly, be tempted to think ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... establishment of one of those fashionable dressmakers whom you patronise, and whose bills startle all save the most hardened. She is a very handsome woman. She has a husband and two little boys. They are all there. The husband is a retired professional soldier. He has a small and easy post in ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... If he expected to startle the young man he was in error. Roseleaf merely nodded and said he would take one of the weapons owned by ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... the more irresistible. The eyes of the man were soon riveted upon the gorgeous vision of loveliness before him, and the contagion of the girl's animation showed itself even in him, for he brightened a little, and was clever enough to startle himself. It was a new delight and stimulus to Helen to perceive it, and she was soon swept away in much the same kind of nervous delight as her phantasy with the thunderstorm. The sofa upon which the two were seated had been somewhat apart from the rest, and so they had nothing to disturb ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... trees, apparently unconscious of the presence of a few dogs, and not caring for the numerous turkeys, geese, and other domestic animals that gabbled and screamed around them. Nor did my own approach startle the wild, beautiful creatures, that seemed as docile as ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... whether a month hence he will be rich or poor, whether in a year's time he may not be rowing an Algerian galley under the lash of the slave-driver. Above all do not teach him this, like his catechism, in cold blood; let him see and feel the calamities which overtake men; surprise and startle his imagination with the perils which lurk continually about a man's path; let him see the pitfalls all about him, and when he hears you speak of them, let him cling more closely to you for fear lest he should fall. "You ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... thee The mountain-nymph, sweet Liberty; And if I give thee honour due, Mirth, admit me of thy crew, To live with her, and live with thee, In unreproved pleasures free; To hear the lark begin his flight And singing startle the dull night From his watch-tower in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise: Then to come, in spite of sorrow, And at my window bid good-morrow, Through the sweetbriar, or the vine, Or the twisted eglantine: While the cock with lively din, Scatters ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... my micracoustic ear trumpet extend the sense of the unbearable beyond all possible bounds. Thus, sir, the circulation of the blood and the fluids of the body will not give me pause; you shall hear them flow with the impetuosity of cataracts; you shall perceive them so distinctly as to startle you; the slightest irregularity of the pulse, the least obstacle, is striking, and produces the same effect as a rock against which the waves of ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... said L'Isle. "Our host has flocks so numerous, that it would startle you to hear their numbers told. The whole country for miles around is pastured by them. He is a farmer, or rather grazier, on a grand scale. Not to puzzle you longer, he is a bee-farmer, having many hundred hives. ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... explosion, differing much in sound from those which continued to startle the night, rang suddenly out of the distance. It arose from a spot on the confines of the orchard, and was sharp in tone—sharp almost as the human cries which followed it. Then the distant lights hastened ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... resulted in the foundation of the so-called Catholic Apostolic Church was of somewhat earlier date, and its author had already been disavowed as a minister by the presbyterian Church before the Tracts for the Times began to startle the religious world. The most brilliant part of Edward Irving's career falls within the reign of George IV., when his chapel in London was crowded by the fashionable world, and even attended occasionally by statesmen like Canning. According to all contemporary testimony ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... it; but he seemed to think that he was not responsible for the cow's voice. I then told him to take her away; and he did, at intervals, shifting her to different parts of the grounds in my absence, so that the desolate voice would startle us from unexpected quarters. If I were to unhitch the cow, and turn her loose, I knew where she would go. If I were to lead her away, the question was, Where? for I did not fancy leading a cow about till I could find somebody ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the thirst of the human heart for the beauty of God's working—to startle its lethargy with a deep and pure agitation of astonishment—are their higher missions. They are as a great and noble architecture, first giving shelter, comfort, and rest; and covered also with mighty sculpture ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... To startle him back into hiding would have only deferred my getting truly rid of him, so I was most tiptoe and diplomatic in my doings. Finally, a paper bag, put into a likely nook with some sentimentally preserved wedding-cake crumbled into it, crackled to me of his arrival. In a brave moment I noosed ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... to-night except this—I find that you are influencing all my thoughts and all my days in what is to me a very new and a very happy way. You hear as much as that often, and from many people, don't you? So there is nothing in it that need startle you or make you uncomfortable." He paused, and she nodded in a visible effort to ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... acts Ursus exhibited his power as an engastrimist, and executed marvels of ventriloquism. He imitated every cry which occurred in the audience—a song, a cry, enough to startle, so exact the imitation, the singer or the crier himself; and now and then he copied the hubbub of the public, and whistled as if there were a crowd of people within him. These were remarkable talents. Besides this he harangued like Cicero, as ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... saw an apple fall, he found In that slight startle from his contemplation— 'T is said (for I 'll not answer above ground For any sage's creed or calculation)— A mode of proving that the earth turn'd round In a most natural whirl, called 'gravitation;' And this is the sole mortal who ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Ben; "and as I have already said, may be developed slowly, through the exercise of the will, or suddenly, as in some great physical shock, and of a necessity comes to all in the event called death. Were I to tell you how I acquired this knowledge, Mr. Henley, it would startle you, far more than any exhibition of the power itself. No, I can not tell you; at least, not at present; perhaps some day you may be better prepared ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... collecting the pennies for the Holiday Fund Savings Bank from the children who came weekly to her house. She noticed on three consecutive Mondays that one little lad deliberately helped himself to a new envelope from her table. Not wishing to frighten or startle him, she allowed this to continue for some weeks, and then one day, having dismissed the other children, she asked him quite quietly why he was taking the envelopes. At first he was very sulky, and said: "I need them more than you do." She quite agreed this might be, but reminded ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... victory o'er the routed foe— Will startle from their rest no more The fallen brave of Mexico. To God alone such spirits yield! He took them in their strength and bloom, When gathering, on the tented field, The garlands woven ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... in the face of my little dinner to go startle me with a thing of the sort! I'm not worth the ground I stand on! For the Champion of next Thursday! I to be dead ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... Letter written in the blood of your poor friend would indeed be of a nature to startle you; but this is nought but harmless red ink, or, as the witty mercantile phrase hath it, Clerk's Blood. Damn 'em! my brain, guts, skin, flesh, bone, carcase, soul, TIME, is all theirs. The Royal Exchange, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... a century and a half adventures in themselves unimportant enough. In spite of disappointments and dark hours of desertion, Charles, who was much of a boy, probably enjoyed the mystery which he now successfully created. If he could not startle Europe by a brilliant appearance on any stage, he could keep it talking and guessing by a disappearance. He obviously relished secrecy, pass-words, disguises, the 'properties' of the conspirator, in the spirit ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... examined some forty years after his interment, and the skull was found to be without sutures. (Gomez, De Rebus Gestis, fol. 218.) Richelieu's was found to be perforated with little holes. The abbe Richard deduces a theory from this, which may startle the physiologist even more than the facts. "On ouvrit son Test, on y trouva 12 petits trous par ou s'exhaloient les vapeurs de son cerveau, ce qui fit qu' il n'eut jamais aucun mal de tete; au lieu que le Test de Ximenes etoit sans suture, a quoi l'on attribua les effroyables douleurs ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... try if I can remember anything to startle you, if you're out for sensations. It's a kind of literary society, isn't it? Can you lend me a pencil, please, and some waste paper? I don't know what I've done with my blotter. Thanks! Now I'm going right up to my bedroom ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... or they know how, in the mood for free and friendly talk. People often wonder, 'How do you catch So-and-so? He is so shy! I have invited and invited, and he never comes.' We never invite, and he comes. We take no note of his coming or his going; we do not startle his entrance with acclamation, nor clog his departure with expostulation; it is fully understood that with us he shall do just as he chooses; and so he chooses to do much that ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the people with that of his own country. The existence, almost under the shadow of the flag of the freest institutions the earth ever knew, of a government as purely despotic as that of the autocrat of Russia is a monstrous fact that must startle the ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... well, doctor. At any rate, you are a brick, I will say that. But I'll think of all this, I'll think of it; but it does startle me to find that poor Mary has a child living ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... conclusion that this is the business I ought to do. I have only one parishioner on my hands to-day," he went on with a slight smile, "and I may as well attend to her. I am going to tell you my plan. I shall not startle you? Just now you allowed that you had confidence ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... fly or butterfly perched on the back of it. The combination of a familiar sight and a threatening sound would very plausibly result in cautious immobility. As for its instantaneous assumption of the pose, to move instantaneously is the next best thing to not moving at all. It is less likely to startle than a slow movement. Twigs which have been bent get suddenly released in the natural course of events; they do not move slowly. The instantaneous appearance of a twig where no twig was before may possibly ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... noted, he was turned away in disgrace. Again he presented himself before the rector of St. Michael's, knowing as little of popish plots as he did on his previous return. But Tonge, though disappointed, was not disheartened; if no scheme existed, he would invent one which should startle the public, and save the nation. Such proposals as he made towards the accomplishment of this end were readily assented to by Oates, in whose breast wounded pride and bitter hate rankled deep. Therefore, after many ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... hiding the details in the thickets, and all the hot day, he had been thrusting his way through thicket after thicket, in obedience to the instructions of the foresters. He had struck trees with his short club and had grunted and squealed, to startle the khada into flight. A few of the ugly beasts had come out, charging into the open, to be run down ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... things round about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn; A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... light in a window and heard the scraping of a fiddle. At the edge of a clearing enclosed by a worm fence I came to a row of slave-cabins. Mongrel dogs barked through the fence, and in one angle of it a young white man with long straight hair showed himself so abruptly as to startle my horse. Only the one cabin was lighted, and thence came the rhythmic shuffle of bare-footed dancers while the fiddle played "I lay ten dollars down." There were three couples on the floor, and I saw—for the excited dogs had pushed the door ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... Leslie? I thought I heard a sound, and then it was so quiet that I came out to see what it meant. Every little noise seems to startle me this afternoon." ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... with as much ease and willingness as another man could put off his clothes. He even wished, every step of his journey, to meet with the wild beasts; and though that death was most shocking and barbarous, and presented the most frightful ideas, sufficient to startle the firmest resolution; yet it was incapable of making the least impression upon his courageous soul. The perfect mortification of his affections appears from his heavenly meekness; and he expressed how perfectly he ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... give her assistance, but Marian shook her head at her, with a kindly look, that seemed to say, "Do not startle her—she is used only to me lately," and bore her out of sight into ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... take wings at some other's word—a mind skilled at scheming"—he stopped and laughed—"Why, Esther, before the new moon which in the courts of the Temple on the Holy Hill they are this moment celebrating passes into its next quartering I could ring the world so as to startle even Caesar; for know you, child, I have that faculty which is better than any one sense, better than a perfect body, better than courage and will, better than experience, ordinarily the best product of the longest lives—the faculty divinest of men, but which"—he stopped, and laughed ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... her with torture until she confess where be her Robber of a son-in-law." But Hasan the fourth officer dissuaded them saying, "O good folk, do ye fear Almighty Allah and be not over hasty, saving that hurry is of old Harry. These be all women without a man in the house; so startle them not; and peradventure the son-in-law ye seek may be no thief and so we fall into an affair wherefrom we may not escape without trouble the most troublous." Thereupon Shamamah came up and cried out, "O Hasan, it ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... naught between me and high heaven but that white face. Ah, how I loved her! I knew it—I never doubted it. Could years of passionate adoration touch her heart—her little heart, now beating so calmly with no thought of love to startle it from its quiet and send it fluttering against the gentle breast? In her lap her clasped hands tightened—her eyelids drooped as though some pleasant thought was passing. I saw the color dye her temples, I saw the blue eyes turn, half frightened, ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... too bad of me to startle you like that," he acknowledged. "Please forgive me. I caught sight of you both through the trees and declared myself rather ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... my experience of 'ladies' of one kind and another, I never saw a woman—not a basket woman or a gipsy—smoke before!" This last remark is highly significant. Forster says that Dickens "lived to have larger and wider experience, but there was enough to startle as well as amuse him in the scene described." The words "cigar" and "cigarette" are used indifferently by the novelist, but it seems clear from the description and from the number smoked by the lady in an hour or two, that it ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... impression that one sometimes gets by a glance at these public-inflicted trade-marks, and without having heard or seen any of their music, is that the one great underlying desire of these appearing-artists, is to impress, perhaps startle and shock their audiences and at any cost. This may have some such effect upon some of the lady-part (male or female) of their listeners but possibly the members of the men-part, who as boys liked hockey better than ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... this was a case in which his Walworth sentiments only could be taken. It was a relief to get out of the room where the night had been so miserable, and I needed no second knocking at the door to startle ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... of the heat of the weather, the performances of Dick and Jack upon strong venison essence and roast gazelle were enough to startle any housekeeper of small income and an anxiety about the state of the butcher's bill. But of course the outdoor life and constant exertion produced a tremendous appetite; and as Mr Rogers noted the change in Dick, whose palate had to be tempted only a short ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... man in all Europe than the kaiser. It is related of him at the Court of Berlin that when on one occasion he inquired of his brother, Prince Henry, if he could suggest to him anything new wherewith to startle both his own subjects and the world in general, the sailor prince, with a merry laugh, proposed that his majesty should remain perfectly quiet, without saying or doing anything, for an entire week! That, he assured his imperial ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... he continued; "Heaven knows I had no will to startle you; and, indeed, there should be nothing startling in the presence of one who wishes you so well as I do. And, believe me, I am acting rather from necessity than choice. We have many things in common, and I am sadly in the dark. There is much that I should be doing, and ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... high station on the poop of his ship, and sees the first uncertain glimmer of the light, 'rising and falling with the waves, like a torch in the bark of some fisherman,' which is the shining star of a new world. Bruce is caged in Abyssinia, surrounded by the gory horrors which shall often startle him out of his sleep at home when years have passed away. Franklin, come to the end of his unhappy overland journey - would that it had been his last! - lies perishing of hunger with his brave companions: each emaciated figure stretched upon its miserable bed without ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... sometimes wonder what opportunity might have done for Osceola. As great as Napoleon, some one said. What might opportunity do for this strange, exotic flower of Osceola's people? She has brains and beauty and instinctive grace enough to startle a continent. I am greatly tempted. Ann, I beg of you, don't breathe any of this to Aunt Agatha. Some day I may carry Keela away to the cities of the North for an experiment quite my own. Her delicate beauty—her gravity—her shy, sweet dignity, hold me powerfully. It ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... oars it was for a good reason. I wanted to slip past a cove where some native craft were moored. That was common prudence in such a small boat, and not armed—as I am. I saw you right enough, but I had no intention to startle anybody. Take my word ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... to herself, "now I will wait and startle these girls from Tabeaue as they come along." And so she sank low down in the water, so that only her dark ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... Liberator left the city. That night the bleaching skeleton of the venerable patriot Hermano was taken down from the gibbet where it had hung so long, by hands that left the revolutionary banner waving proudly in its place. This was an event to startle the viceroy. It was followed by other events. In a few days more and the sounds of insurrection were heard throughout the province—the city still moving secretly—sending forth supplies and intelligence by stealth, but unable to raise ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... boarding-houses near at hand. The owners of the mills are particularly careful to allow no persons to enter upon the possession of these houses, whose characters have not undergone the most searching and thorough enquiry." Finally, the author announces that he will state three facts which he thinks will startle his English readers: "Firstly, there is a joint-stock piano in a great many of the boarding-houses. Secondly, nearly all these young ladies subscribe to circulating libraries. Thirdly, they have got up among themselves a periodical called 'The Lowell ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... evading the law even when he contrives to kill two at one time. He does not like to do it, but there is money in it, you know; and he pockets his unholy blood money without a squirm. Don't prosecute him; if you do, he will make revelations that will startle the town. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... care-worn faces in the city are to be seen on this street. Women clad in the richest attire pass you with unquiet face and wistful eyes, and men who are envied by their fellows for their "good luck," startle you by the stern, hard set look their features wear. The first find little real happiness in the riches they have sold themselves for, and the latter find that the costly pleasures they courted have been gained at too ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... and death, but that one's experience is a much larger and older thing than the experience which mere memory records. It is that which one has lost; and one of the greatest mysteries of art lies in the fact that a picture, or a sudden music, or a page in a book, will sometimes startle one into the consciousness of having heard, seen, known, felt the emotion before, elsewhere, beyond ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and over again! What a pity that she is at her old Marshal's now! We would have had a good laugh! So that old woman wants to take the bread out of my mouth. I will startle ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... polished. Some of them were mere clerks and chroniclers, and their writings are dry and common-place; others were fervid, powerful geniuses, and their works are full of fire and originality. Their thoughts startle you. Their words warm you. They are spirit and life. All the writers show their natural qualities and tempers. All exhibit the defects of their learning and philosophy. All write like men,—like men of the age, and of the rank, and of the profession, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... to die Were all, it were most sweet to rest my head On the cold clod, and sleep the sleep of Death. But if the Archangel's trump at the last hour Startle the ear of Death and wake the soul To frenzy!—dreams of infancy! fit tales For garrulous beldames to affrighten babes! I have been guilty, yet my mind can bear The retrospect of guilt, yet in the hour Of deep contrition to ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... it, as if they had never seen it before, and then one of them turned on me quickly, as if to startle me. "Vous etes ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... "it is because I have been ill that things perplex me, and sometimes startle me by an effect of strangeness. There are moments when even the stars look odd to me, and when the countryside, viewed from the tower above us, is bewildering. In one direction I see woods where I should have expected meadows; in another direction, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... at the door, as to quite startle his wife and the charity-girl, both of whom had fallen into a sound sleep, as they sat together awaiting his return. Mr. Morton, who, as we have said before, was not entirely sober, was singing a popular melody, and keeping time upon the door with the head of his cane. ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... we started out to gain; the way we content ourselves with the environments of evil and forego forever the voice that calls us away to partake of things which shall be as wine and honey to the soul, frightens me; startles me as the sudden thunder of the surf might startle one who sojourned by ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... the Ghetto, heralded by a month of special matins and the long-sustained note of the ram's horn. It was in the midst of the Ten Days of Repentance which find their awful climax in the Day of Atonement that a strange letter for Hannah came to startle the breakfast-table at Reb Shemuel's. Hannah read it with growing ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... physics, ought to produce a more tolerant spirit amongst the scientific for speculations even which may afford the slightest promise of a solution, although emanating from the humblest inquirer after truth. The hypothesis of an undiscovered planet, exterior to Neptune, is of a nature to startle the cautions timidity of many; but, if the general theory be true, this hypothesis becomes extremely probable. We may not have located it exactly. There may be even two such planets, whose joint effect shall be equivalent to one in the position ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... Chastisements for due offences Do not fright me, do not startle, For if they through arrogance And ambition sought this garden, Me the worship of the gods Here has led, and so I 'm guarded 'Gainst all sorceries whatsoever, 'Gainst all forms of Christian magic:— Art thou ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... sublimity, his fitful transitions from mood to mood, his wild bursts of laughter, his passion of tears, Hamlet or Hamlet's gravedigger, Lear or Lear's fool, would have startled the readers of the "Spectator" as they would startle the group ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... meal was announced Angel, as usual, was the first to appear, and when he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror he thought one of his friends had come to visit him. It did not seem to startle him in the least, but like all children ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... improbable that the desire to surpass Suevius influenced Virgil in attempting the same task again." [19] Trifling as this circumstance is, nothing that throws any light on the growth of Virgil's muse can be wanting in interest. Virgil was not one of those who startle the world by their youthful genius. His soul was indeed a poet's from the first, but the rich perfection of his verse was not developed until after years of severe labour, self-correction, and even failure. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... either from idleness or curiosity, while they strive to find evil in everything, they do not comprehend that others still believe in the good. Therefore they have to be so nonchalant as to stop their ears, lest the hum of the busy world should suddenly startle them from sleep. The father allows his son to go where so many others go, where Cato himself went; he says that youth is but fleeting. But when he returns, the youth looks upon his sister; and see what has taken place in him ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... chamber of the Sangraal, Rowena IV was arranging the red samite cover around the Grail. She jumped when she saw him. "Marry! fair sir, ye did startle me. Methinketh ye be ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... secure because there is hope, Thou shalt look around and take thy rest in safety; Thou shalt lie down and none shall startle thee, Yea, many ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... lack-lustre gaze of town-bred folk, in the sight of an eye as keen and wild as a hawk's from sheer solitude and lonely travelling. He was so bent and scarred with weather that he seemed as much a part of that woodland place as the birks themselves, and the noise of his labours did not startle the birds that hopped on ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... the repugnance she felt toward the miserable, misshapen creature, now sleeping on the floor, and after one glance in his direction looked swiftly away. But that glance had been sufficient to startle her by its resemblance to another face she ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... due time, a worthy consort, and a certain Crown Prince would, in further due time, startle the world with his left-handed pitching. It was a prospect all golden to dream upon. His spirit grew tall and ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... this. Her silence encouraged Mr Welles to proceed. He thought his tactics had succeeded, and the creature was coming round by degrees. The only point now requiring care was not to startle ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... standpoint of the Greek was the exact opposite. He did not seek advertisement and notoriety. He was happy with his inner vision of beauty, and intent only on its realization. He had not the smallest desire to shock or startle any one. There are occasions when shock tactics are necessary, but they are not necessary every day in the week, nor is it necessary to make a clean sweep of the past before one sets to work in one's own ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... nor more than that. It is never frank, uncompromising nature. The fact is, that Beddoes wrote from the head, collectively, and without emotion, or without inspiration, save in literature. All Beddoes' characters speak precisely the same language, express the same desires; all in the same way startle us by their ghostly remoteness from flesh and blood. 'Man is tired of being merely human,' Siegfried says, in Death's Jest-Book, and Beddoes may be said to have grown tired of humanity before he ever ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... little daughter of a gamekeeper to nobility was preparing to emigrate with her father to a new home in the Western world, where she would learn to perform miracles with rifle and revolver, and where the beauty of the hermit thrush's song would startle her into comparing it to the beauty of her own untried voice. But to her father, and to her, the most beautiful thing in all the ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... until the hubbub rivaled that of a Woman's Suffrage Convention. Thomas Haviland Hicks, Jr., was actually returning to old Bannister; and he was bringing "The Prodigious Prodigy," whatever that was, with him. Knowing the cheery Senior's intense love of doing the dramatic and his great ambition to startle his Alma Mater with some sensational stunt, they could hardly wait for old Dan Flannagan's jitney-bus to roll up ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... son, was a strange child. He had a Norseman's taste for the fabulous and fantastic, and although he never heard a tale of Necken or the Hulder, he would often startle his mother by the most fanciful combinations of imagined events, and by bolder personifications than ever sprung from the legendary soil of the Norseland. She always took care to check him whenever he indulged in these imaginary flights, and he ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... determine whether they were friends or foes, they were so far before him. He hesitated after he had raised his gun to his shoulder to proclaim his presence by a shot, and then lowered his rifle. A shot might startle the unsuspecting men who were struggling to gain the rim and the report of his rifle might increase their danger. At the same time, however, he began to advance more rapidly and in a brief time was able to recognize the men whose actions he had ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and Simon's Mine • Ross Kay
... has then most effect on an audience when it appears to flow naturally from the occasion, not to have been laboured by the art of the speaker; and this device of questioning and replying to himself reproduces the moment of passion. For as a sudden question addressed to an individual will sometimes startle him into a reply which is an unguarded expression of his genuine sentiments, so the figure of question and interrogation blinds the judgment of an audience, and deceives them into a belief that what is really the result of labour in every detail has ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... attention—this gaunt, restless preacher. With his long hair, his flowing beard, his harsh voice, and his wild gesticulation, he was so rude and unkempt as to startle all conservative hearers. Said one of his opponents: "His manners (are) clownish in the extreme; his habit and appearance more filthy than a savage Indian, his public discourses a mere rhapsody, the substance often an insult upon the gospel." ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... long, the organs of the human body; that a light has been found which can penetrate, so as to make a photographic record, through everything from a purse or a pocket to the walls of a room or a house, is news which cannot fail to startle everybody. That the eye of the physician or surgeon, long baffled by the skin, and vainly seeking to penetrate the unfortunate darkness of the human body, is now to be supplemented by a camera, making ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... did startle me!" he exclaimed. "No, there's no one in there—I came up to look for a book. But as I told them to delay dinner yet a little longer, would you mind if we went in and saw Bubbles together on our way downstairs? I feel I should rather like to get my first interview with ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... about you that is comforting," I sniffed. "You said precisely the same thing to me at three o'clock this morning. You never startle me by ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... "He'll startle you mair afore you're done wi' him," the atheist said maliciously. "I ken the ways o' thae ministers preaching for kirks. Oh, they're cunning. You was a' pleased that Mr. Dishart spoke about looms and webs, but, lathies, it was a trick. Ilka ane o' thae ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... suspecting that his talents were inconsiderable, even among those who had their reasons not to like him. The degradation which his literary character has suffered has been inflicted by more recent hands; and it may startle the last echoer of Pope's "Pedant-reign" to hear that more wit and wisdom have been recorded of James the First than of any one of our sovereigns. An "Author-Sovereign," as Lord Shaftesbury, in his anomalous but emphatic style, terms this class of writers, is placed between a double eminence ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... a great deal to startle your commercial New Yorker. The small tailor, standing in his doorway, seemed in no way surprised at the spectacle of Archie, whom he had seen pass at a conventional walk some five minutes before, returning like this at top speed. He assumed ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... Reader, since the sermon is over, and we are still sitting here in this Miserere, let us read aloud a page from the old parchment manuscript on the lettern before us; let us sing it through these dusky aisles, like a Gregorian Chant, and startle ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... any case, music. I am in a mood for music. I am in a mood where if something be not done To startle me, I ...
— The Lamp and the Bell • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... afternoon. Didn't you notice the lurid mixture of colors I was daubing on my block? And all because I knew you were having psychic thoughts and I was so afraid you would say what I thought you were thinking and startle Estelle. I wanted so much to know myself just what you were driving at with your watch-chains that I almost chewed my tongue ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... very nature of his being, could not spend an evening except at cards. Nikolay Parfenovitch Nelyudov had been intending for three days past to drop in that evening at Mihail Makarovitch's, so to speak casually, so as slyly to startle the eldest granddaughter, Olga Mihailovna, by showing that he knew her secret, that he knew it was her birthday, and that she was trying to conceal it on purpose, so as not to be obliged to give a dance. He anticipated a great deal of merriment, many playful jests about ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... got into his system, and crept where it yet lay lurking in hidden corners and crannies, a noise at night would on shore startle him awake, and set his heart beating hard; but no loudest sea noise ever woke him; the stronger the wind flapped its wings around him, the deeper he slept. When a comrade called him by name, he was up ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... her, in his absent-minded, startled way. He had never understood her since she was first put into his hands, aged six months, a fluffy bundle of motherless babyhood. She never ceased to startle him. She was an enigma beyond any puzzle in mathematics he had ever brought his ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... relieved Mrs. Upton of her usual task of taking a collection and among her witty remarks was one on Bartholdi's statue of Liberty. "The real goddesses of Liberty in this country do not spend a large amount of time standing on pedestals in public places; they use their torches to startle the bats in political cellars." Referring to the ignoring of women's work in the histories she said: "When I was a child and studied about the Pilgrim Fathers I supposed they were all bachelors, as I never found a word about their wives." Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's topic was Masculine, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... Blew them together; and round its lords that met Paused all the reeling battle; two main waves Meeting, one hurled sheer from the sea-wall back That shocks it sideways, one right in from sea Charging, that full in face takes at one blow That whole recoil and ruin, with less fear Startle men's eyes late shipwrecked; for a breath Crest fronting crest hung, wave to wave rose poised, Then clashed, breaker to breaker; cloud with cloud 1550 In heaven, chariot with chariot closed on earth, One fourfold flash and thunder; yet a breath, And with the king's spear through ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... stand the moral test. We screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... themselves from the church, is at best but ephemeral in its existence, contracted in spirit, moving and operating by mere impulse and irregular starts, and withal destitute of vitality and saving influence. A death-bed scene may awaken a transient and visionary sense of duty; adversity may startle the drowsy ear, and cause the parents to turn for the time to the souls of their children; but these continue only while the tear and the wound are fresh, and the apprehensions of the eternal world are moving in their terrible visions ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... habitants, who had been all expatriated and banished from their native waves. Large poles twisted with fir branches, stuck thickly around the lake, gave to the waters the becoming Helvetian gloom. And here, beside three cows all bedecked with ribbons, stood the Swiss maidens destined to startle the shades with the Ranz des Vaches. To the left, full upon the sward, which it almost entirely covered, stretched the great Gothic marquee, divided into two grand sections—one for the dancing, one for ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... a thousand other things. Their days are haunted by fear of this thing or that. Their peace is marred and their hearts are troubled. For all this, trust is the cure. I do not mean to say that if you trust, nothing will ever startle you or frighten you, or that you will never feel physical fear in time of danger; but in such times trust will bring to us a consciousness that the Lord knows and cares, and that his helping presence is ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... not startle Addison, or cause him any misgiving; on the contrary he boldly asserts (Spectator, No. 135), "The same single letter 's' on many occasions does the office of a whole word, and represents the 'his' or 'her' of ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... with more freedom than in this State, nor with more firmness of mind. They might need a preparatory discourse on the text of 'Prove all things, hold fast that which is good,' in order to unlearn the lesson that reason is an unlawful guide in religion. They might startle on being first awaked from the dreams of the night, but they would rub their eyes at once, and look the spectres boldly in the face. The preacher might be excluded by our hierophants from their churches and meeting-houses, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... you startle the audience with such a speech as that, what will Mr. Hartman think? You must put on your prettiest behavior, Bob. Make a desperate effort, and try to keep it ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... lessons taught in his journal may well startle the incredulous and unbelieving spirit of our skeptical day. Those who doubt the power of prayer to bring down actual blessing, or who confound faith in God with credulity and superstition, may well wonder and perhaps ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... human hopes and the folly of friendship?" inquired Adrien, so coldly as to startle both the company and Lord Standon himself, who not being in Lady Constance's confidence, was naturally at a loss for the reason of this sudden anger on the part of Leroy. He drew back in surprise, but any further reference ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... to move, having occasion to ask the mate (he stood by my side) to take a compass bearing of the Pagoda, I caught myself reaching up to his ear in whispers. I say I caught myself, but enough had escaped to startle the man. I can't describe it otherwise than by saying that he shied. A grave, preoccupied manner, as though he were in possession of some perplexing intelligence, did not leave him henceforth. A little later ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... as well as his audience, is to be his judge. Lord Vargrave's utter incapacity to comprehend political morality, his contempt for all the objects of social benevolence, frequently led him into the avowal of doctrines, which, if they did not startle the men of the world whom he addressed (smoothed away, as such doctrines were, by speciousness of manner and delivery), created deep disgust in those even of his own politics who read their naked exposition in the daily papers. Never did ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a great comfort to have aunt Madge so near. If it had been Susy instead, Prudy would have had no company but the sound of her breathing. It was of no use to try to wake Susy in the dead of night. Pricking her with pins would startle her, but she never knew anything even after she was startled. All she could do was to stare about her, cry, and act very cross, and then—go to ...
— Little Prudy's Sister Susy • Sophie May
... husband a young lady would then add the not less important business of making herself a rational person, instead of a more or less tastefully decorated doll with a passion for a great deal of money. She might awaken to the fact, which would at first startle her very much no doubt, that there is a great portion of a universe outside her own circle and her own mind. This simple discovery would of itself effect a revolution that might transform her from being an insipid idiot into a tolerably ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... threads of light under the window; and at the little flowers just peeping above the ground; and at the foliage, with its many-shaded green; and occasionally I looked at the body stretched upon the bed. And each time that I looked it seemed to me that it gently stirred. This did not startle me at all, for I was accustomed to the appearance of death. Who that has lost a friend does not find it impossible to realize that the form is utterly without life? And who has ever gazed long at a corpse without fancying that it moved? So again and again ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the likeness flashed upon Lynde suddenly, as it had done in the grove the previous day, that it now had the power to startle him. At the present moment it did not even seriously annoy him. In an idle, pensive way he noted the coincidence of the man leading the mule. The man was Morton and the mule was Mary! Lynde smiled to himself at the reflection that Mary would probably not accept ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the proceedings may not be interrupted," said Mr Morgan; and then everybody looked towards the open door: the sight they saw there was enough to startle the calmest spectator. Elsworthy, who was seated close by, sprang from his stool with a low resounding howl of amazement, upsetting his lowly seat, and staggering back against the wall, in the excess of his wonder and consternation. The judges themselves ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... busy at her wheel, with two children playing on the ground before her, were the objects that now presented themselves. The uncouthness of my garb, my wild and weatherworn appearance, my fusil and tomahawk, could not but startle them. The woman stopped her wheel, and gazed as if a ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... them. These doubts enter into the mind at first almost imperceptibly: they exist only as vague indistinct surmises, and by no means take the precise shape or the substance of a formed opinion. At first, probably, they even offend and startle by their intrusion: but by degrees the unpleasant sensations which they once excited wear off: the mind grows more familiar with them. A confused sense (for such it is, rather than a formed idea) of its being desirable that their doubts should prove well founded, and of the comfort and enlargement ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... stick it in an envelope. Then I "dash off the address." Obviously I am not at all original at home. I replied to a letter from the president of a theological seminary, asking me to speak to his young men. I like young men so I agree to do so if I can. I "startle" the reporter finally, by a sudden burst of unexpected hilarity over a letter from a man in Pennsylvania who wants me to send him a cheque by return mail for one hundred thousand dollars, on a sure thing investment. ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... fashion will scarcely have the breath of life in it. If, on the other hand, in the course of his legendary, romantic, or historical reading, some character should take hold upon his imagination and demand to be interpreted, or some episode should, as it were, startle him by putting on vivid dramatic form before his mind's eye, then let him by all means yield to the inspiration, and try to mould the theme into a drama. The real labour of creation will still lie before him; but he may face it with the hope ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... speak of the humbugs who deliberately exploit the credulity of fools. I speak of the sincere believers—people like my dear old friend W.T. Stead, who was the most extraordinary combination of wisdom and moonshine I have ever known. He would startle you at one moment by his penetrating handling of the facts of a great situation, and the next moment would make you speechless with some staggering story of spirit visitors or starry conspiracies that seemed to him just as actual as the ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... grieved at the shock, that Minnie had received, "did thee startle her by so suddenly claiming her in the street? Would it not have been better for thee to have waited and found out where she lived, and then discovered ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... in the ear, ring in the ear, thunder in the ear; pierce the ears, split the ears, rend the ears, split the head; deafen, stun; faire le diable a quatre[Fr]; make one's windows shake, rattle the windows; awaken the echoes, startle the echoes; wake the dead. Adj. loud, sonorous; high-sounding, big-sounding; deep, full, powerful, noisy, blatant, clangorous, multisonous[obs3]; thundering, deafening &c. v; trumpet-tongued; ear-splitting, ear-rending, ear- deafening; piercing; obstreperous, rackety, uproarious; enough ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... keys and, going to the desk, unlocked the centre compartment with a jerk. Afterward he gave a sharp exclamation. He had found a paper in the secret drawer at the back which appeared to startle him. ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... strength; he then gathered himself for another effort while the split end of the tiller floated on the water; then came another strong muscular effort, and then another resounding splash. If the boat drew near the brown rocks the blows of the tiller would startle a piper or a curlew; a long note of warning would pierce the stillness, and a wailing answer came from the next point; then a shrill clamour passed all round the bay, and the birds skimmed towards the island ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... formerly,* that all dealers, though but for pins, may be taken in by customers for pins, sooner than by a direct bribe of ten times the value; especially if pretenders to conscience: for the offer of a bribe would not only give room for suspicion, but would startle and alarm their scrupulousness; while a high price paid for what you buy, is but submitting to be cheated in the method of the person makes a profession to get by. Have I not said that human nature is a rogue?**—And do not I know that ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... quite forget myself, and sit staring into vacancy, till Mr. Davies, lifting his nose from his volume, would note my absence and call on me by name, and thump his desk, and startle me with some question on the matter we were supposed to have in hand. A mighty matter, truly, the name of some emperor or the date of some campaign—matter infinitely less real than the name of the ship that ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the rivers sustained, and the earth must have become for the most part desert plain, or stagnant marsh. But the feeding of the rivers and the purifying of the winds are the least of the services appointed to the hills. To fill the thirst of the human heart for the beauty of God's working,—to startle its lethargy with the deep and pure agitation of astonishment,—are their higher missions. They are as a great and noble architecture; first giving shelter, comfort, and rest; and covered also with mighty sculpture and painted ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... another wins her from me," interrupted Mr. Hastings, somewhat bitterly; and his sister answered, "I am sure that will never be, though were you now to startle her with your love she probably would ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... Channa thrice, swept by the stand, The prince saw that another round would test, Not overtax, their powers, and gave the sign, When three loud trumpet-blasts to all proclaimed That running one more round would end the race. These ringing trumpet-calls that brought defeat Or victory so near, startle and rouse. The charioteers more ardent urge their steeds; The steeds are with hot emulation fired; The social multitude now cease to talk— Even age stops short in stories often told; Boys, downy-chinned, in rough-and-tumble sports Like half-grown ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... was quite enough to startle and alarm them, for Nanahboozhoo was also much feared, as ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... in that which need startle or surprise any man who believes in a living God at all, and in the possibility, therefore, of a connection between the Great Spirit and all the human spirits which are His children. I would maintain, in opposition to many modern conceptions, the actual ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... remains soft during babyhood. He could have broken connection with Barter for these two by jerking the controls free. And then what? He would never get through to Barter and would release in Bronx Park two men whose strange type of madness, when they were discovered, would startle the countryside. Two men with the savagery of anthropoid apes! He shuddered as he carefully ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... awhile he knelt upon his side, and she remained on hers, both trembling; but at last the King, dreading to startle her away, rose softly and went round the Pond to where he ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... gun-bearers were staggering under the weight of the deer, and the spare guns were carried by my tracker. We were proceeding slowly along, when the tracker, who was in advance, suddenly sprang back and pointed to some object in the path. It was certainly enough to startle any man. An enormous serpent lay coiled in the path. His head was about the size of a very small cocoa-nut, divided lengthways, and this was raised about eighteen inches above the coil. His eyes were fixed upon us, and his forked tongue played ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... winter—giving their cottage all its fresh inclemency before it descended on the valley of the Saco) They dwelt in a cold spot and a dangerous one; for a mountain towered above their heads, so steep, that the stones would often rumble down its sides and startle them at midnight. ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... over the "land of Mizraim." Where nature is most tame and commonplace, man is tempted to his highest flights of audacity. As in the level Babylonia he aspired to build a tower that should "reach to heaven" (Gen. xi. 4), so in Egypt he strove to startle and surprise by gigantic works, enormous undertakings, enterprises that might have seemed wholly beyond his powers. And these have constituted in all ages, except the very earliest, the great attractiveness of Egypt. ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... pray, And suck the ripe world to its rotten core? Yet do you reek if my reign be done? E're I pass ye crown the newer one! At ball and rout ye dance and shout, Shutting men's cries of suffering out, That startle the white-tressed silences Musing beside the fount of light, In the eternal space, to press Their roses, each a nebula bright, More close to their lips serene, While ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... reaction which served as a superstructure for it." The objection, raised even by Caspari, that a prophecy of the victorious struggles in the time of the Maccabees must be strange and surprising in a prophet of the Assyrian period, will not startle those who look at the analogies—such as the prophecy in Is. vi. In the latter prophecy, first the Chaldean, and then the Roman catastrophes, are described in sharp outlines, but without any mention of the names of the instruments of punishment. ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... difficulty. Philosophy itself, mental and moral, has its preparation, its forethoughts, in the poetry that preceded it. A powerful generalisation thrown into some salient phrase, such as [6] that of Heraclitus—"Panta rhei," all things fleet away—may startle a particular age by its novelty, but takes possession only because all along its root was somewhere among the natural though but half- developed instincts of the human ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... rickety bridge by which we have crossed the Jordan soon disappears behind us, as we trot along the winding bridle-path through the river-jungle, in the stifling heat. Coming out on the open plain, which rises gently toward the east, we startle great flocks of storks into the air, and they swing away in languid circles, dappling the blaze of morning with their black-tipped wings. Grotesque, ungainly, gothic birds, they do not seem to belong to the Orient, ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... modern, his friends brandished the teapot, morally speaking, in his defense, and put it in the clouds as a kind of rainbow—a promise that Puritan blood could not go wrong. Nevertheless, John Harrington continued to startle his fellow-townsmen by his writings and sayings, so that many of the grave sort shook their heads and swore that he sympathized with the Irish and believed ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... they'll blaze a good deal, and one way and another there'll be enough to burn to last till, say, eight o'clock this morning, by which time the beauties will have got into the place; and then let 'em look out for promotion, for there's enough powder there to startle two or ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... war therein An angry war among the heavy clouds. And at the sound the wicked tremble sore, For now they know an awful doom at hand, And quail to find no rescue from its power. The robber drops the plunder from his hand; The lusty startle at the mighty sound, And from their beds of sin turn wildly forth; And from his game the gambler leaps amazed And terror-struck; whereas the drunkard wakes— The sotted drunkard—from his stupid sleep, And feels the awful terrors of the hour. But by the righteous ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... drifting across the country, getting lost in valleys where it piled up into fleecy mounds, getting caught in tree-tops where it fluttered like tattered banners. Every now and then, with the suddenness of our approach, we would startle an aged shepherd, muffled and pensive as an Arab, strolling slowly across moorlands, followed closely by the sentinel goats which led his flock. The day had been strangely mystic. Time seemed a mood. I had ceased to trouble about where I was going; that I knew my ultimate destination ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... it began. And swift and sudden it went on to the end. She had come on board the yacht that first night to startle it with her beauty and her voice; last night, silent and stately, she had slipped through the evening like a dream; now she stood before him a dazzling creature of the morning: yesterday she was Penseroso; to-day she was Allegro; what would she be to-morrow? How sparkling, as one day ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... of the invisible horses that seemed to be listening too moved slightly in his harness. But this only appeared to accentuate the profound stillness. The moments were growing interminable, when the voice, so near as to startle Hale, broke once more from ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... she looked around her; and when she saw that all the guard were asleep, she smiled an ominous smile, and was going up to the Prince's bedside, when she perceived that in one corner of the room there was a man yet awake. This seemed to startle her, but she went up ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... Budget. (A little later the war cut the project short.) "I am going for a walk up to the mountains," he said. "I can do my thinking best when I am out walking alone." Afterward I wondered what new revolution to startle the landed aristocracy of Britain he devised on that summer day by himself among the mountains. Curiously enough, Lloyd George does not like exercise for his own sake, but he enjoys it when he has a mental task in hand; he also enjoys it during a game of ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... you have a taste for refined morality and delicate sentiment, for chaste acting and spirited dialogue, for scenery painted on the spot, but like nothing in nature except canvas and colour—go to the Victoria and see "Mary Clifford." It may, perhaps, startle you to learn that the incidents are faithfully copied from the "Newgate Calendar," and that the subject is Mother Brownrigg of apprentice-killing notoriety; but be not alarmed, there is nothing horrible or revolting in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... volumes which were conducted by Diderot alone after the great schism of 1759. On the subject of sport, however, the writer of the article Chasse enumerates all the considerations which a patriotic minister could desire to see impressed on public opinion. Some of the paragraphs startle us by their directness and freedom of complaint, and even a very cool reader would still be likely to feel some of the wrath that was stirred in the breast of our shrewd and sober Arthur Young a generation later (1787). "Go to ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... a crack in the high wall—from its eyrie without doubt—a huge female eagle suddenly shot down toward the drifting aeroplane. The flying machine seemed not to startle the great bird at all; it only angered her. Perhaps she had young up there in the cliff and she feared her hereditary enemy, Man, was coming on wings to deprive ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... come;— All this I hear, or seem to hear; But when, enchanted, I draw near To fix in notes the various theme, Life seems a whiff of kitchen-steam, History a Swiss street-singer's thrum, And I, that would have fashioned words To mate that music's rich accords, By rash approaches startle thee, Thou mutablest Perversity! The world drones on its old tum-tum, But thou hast slipped from it and me, And all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... without them than what we have, yet our thoughts can go no further than our own: so impossible it is for us to enlarge our very guesses beyond the ideas received from our own sensation and reflection. The supposition, at least, that angels do sometimes assume bodies, needs not startle us; since some of the most ancient and most learned Fathers of the church seemed to believe that they had bodies: and this is certain, that their state and way of ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... days hence for the final word from Marlanx, who, it seems, was not so far away that communication with him was likely to be delayed. A sword hung over the head of Truxton King, an innocent outsider, and there was a prospect that it would fall in advance of the blow that was intended to startle the world. Olga Platanova was the only one who did not look upon the sprightly American as a spy in the employ of the government—a dangerously ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... her, then," said Beatrice, feeling scarcely so much convinced as overwhelmed. "It will startle her if she ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... and most resigned submission, fate having decreed you sole arbiter of the productions of human wit in this polite and most accomplished age. Methinks the number of appellants were enough to shock and startle any judge of a genius less unlimited than yours; but in order to prevent such glorious trials, the person, it seems, to whose care the education of your Highness is committed, has resolved, as I am told, to keep you in almost ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... that, marked by the blue veins of the bared temples, was to her mind death-like. Mary had not been sheltered from taking part in scenes of suffering; she had seen sickness and death in cottages, as well as in her own home, and she had none of the fanciful alarms, either of novelty or imagination, to startle her in the strange watch that had so suddenly been thrust on her but what did fill her with a certain apprehension, was the new and lofty beauty of expression that sat on that sleeping countenance. 'A nice boy,' 'rather a handsome lad,' ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reading the article on gliders in June, 1905, so early in the history of air conquest that its suggestions were miraculous to him; for it was three years before Wilbur Wright was to startle the world by his flights at Le Mans; four years before Bleriot was to cross the Channel—though, indeed, it was a year and a half after the Wrights' first secret ascent in a motor-driven aeroplane at Kittyhawk, and fourteen years after Lilienthal had begun that epochal series ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... said to himself. "He's getting into mischief. I'll startle him. If he knows that an army of his dollars is playing at fox- and-geese, he'll not make eyes at ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... warrior; and even now, when recounting, as he often did, the scenes of the battle field, his eye would burn with savage fire, lighting up his whole countenance with the fiercest kind of bravery, and often with a hideous yell that would startle our very souls, he would burst from the room and bound over the fields and forest, with the fleetness of a deer—making the woods ring with his frightful war-cry, until the blood seemed ready to curdle in our veins. He had also been one of the famous Tecumseh's braves; ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... do you know, I will; for who knows what might happen? They tell me down in the village that there's trouble uppards, and people gets talking agen the king. Ah! I'd talk 'em if I had my way, and make some of 'em squirm.—Yes, I will tidy things up a bit. Startle some on 'em if we was to fire off a gun or two ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... haste was necessary, but did not dare show it. Above everything we must not be precipitate; not startle the Robot. At worst, if Tugh should return, I could seize this weapon at my feet and ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... impertinent. He was frankly interested and wanted to know what was being said. He received the dime and the pennies with a pleasant grin and a (grandmother prompted) "Thank you". But the gift didn't startle him. Dimes must have been a fairly usual part of his life. But a few minutes before the interviewer left she dropped her pencil. It was new and long and yellow. The child's eyes clung to it as he returned it. ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... the head of the fleeing man, then started in pursuit. The Indian slashed the tether of Buckey, Stacy Brown's mustang, and with a yell to startle the animal, leaped on its back ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... They paused to see what she was about to do. Should she by any mishap lose her footing, she must roll into the stream, and, without aid, must drown. They thought of shouting; but they feared an unexpected salute might startle her, and thus ensure what they were anxious to prevent. They watched in breathless silence. The willful sheep came furi- ously leaping and bounding far in advance of the flock. Just as he leaped for the dish, she suddenly ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... events are brought about by minorities, since the majority are indifferent to politics. But there is a difference between a minority in which the indifferent acquiesce, and a minority so hated as to startle the indifferent into belated action. To make the Bolshevik doctrine reasonable, it is necessary to suppose that they believe the majority can be induced to acquiesce, at least temporarily, in the revolution made by the class-conscious minority. This, again, is based upon Russian ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... seen a whole audience burst into tears at a single tone of her voice. Her natural conception was so fine, that the merest commonplace often received a living spirit from her lips. I have seen a single glance from her powerful eye hush an audience—I have seen her acting sometimes even startle and bewilder the actors beside her. There is perhaps a genius for every art, and hers was the genius of the stage—a faculty of instant communication between the speaker and the hearer, some unaccountable sympathy, the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... before hand. They can be commanded less by artists than by other men, for they are all more or less struck by some sacred malady whose paralyzing torpor they must shake off, whose benumbing pain they must forget, to be joyous and amused by those pyrotechnic fires which startle the bewildered guests, who see from time to time a Roman candle, a rose-colored Bengal light, a cascade whose waters are of fire, or a terrible, yet quite innocent dragon! Gayety and the strength necessary ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... disclosure of his relation to her; and not even by the long deferring of her hope to see him yet again, had she come to pretermit her vigilance. She did not intend to avoid him altogether, only to take heed not to startle him into any recognition of her in the presence of his mother. But when she saw him approaching the house, her courage failed her, and she fled to avoid the danger of betraying both, herself and him. She was in truth ashamed of meeting him, in her imagination feeling guiltily ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... Tetchen tread with feet as light as that. She sat up, and then the knock was repeated,—very low and very clear. She still paused a moment, resolving that nothing should frighten her,—nothing should startle her. No change that could come to her would, she thought, be a change for the worse. She hastened up from off the bed, and stood upon the floor. Then she gave the answer that is usual to such a summons. "Come in," she said. She spoke low, but with clear voice, so that her word might certainly ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... and oaks. Several graceful fawns, and a noble elk, were stalking in the shade of the trees, apparently unconscious of the presence of a few dogs, and not caring for the numerous turkeys, geese, and other domestic animals that gabbled and screamed around them. Nor did my own approach startle the wild, beautiful creatures, that seemed as docile as any of ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... Mrs. Gaskell has perhaps done more than any woman of this century, not confessedly devoted to our cause, to elevate the condition of her sex, and disseminate liberal ideas as to their needs and culture. The first part of her career was one of those brilliant successes which startle us into surprise and admiration. It was checked midway by the publication of her life of Charlotte Bronte, the best and noblest of her works. Checked, because condemned, in that instance, without a hearing. She could never afterward feel the elastic pleasure, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... any peculiarly vicious education, early familiarity with bad models, corrupting associations, or other plausible key to effects, which, taken separately, and out of their natural connection with their explanatory causes, are apt rather to startle and revolt the feelings of sober thinkers. Except, perhaps, in some chapters of Italian history, as, for example, among the most profligate of the Papal houses, and amongst some of the Florentine princes, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... worse but his better nature, it seems as if there could be no warning to him from within of his danger: for even the impassioned joy which he draws at times from the works of nature, and from those of her mightier sons, and which would startle him from a dream of unworthy passion, serves only to fix the infatuation:—for those deep emotions, proving to him that his heart is uncorrupted, justify to him all its workings, and his mind, confiding and delighting ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... said Myra placidly. "Those things underneath, like foot-rests, which startle you horribly ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... to give an idea of the imperious tone and stern look of the princess, as she pronounced these words which were calculated to startle a girl, until now accustomed to live in a great measure as she pleased: yet, contrary perhaps to the expectation of Madame de Saint Dizier, instead of answering impetuously, Adrienne looked her full in the face, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... these words excitedly, as Don clung to him and held him back, gazing wildly all the time at the disturbed water, as the great fish swiftly approached, till, just as it was within a few yards, the shallowness of the water seemed to startle it, making it give quite a bound showing half its length, and then diving down with a kind of wallow, after which the occupants of the boat saw the wooden pole go trailing along the surface, till once more it was snatched, as it ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... thin that, that th' town humorist has named him th' orange-peel hero, an' he'll go to his grave with that name. Th' war is over an' th' state iv war exists. If ye saw a man fall fr'm th' top iv a tin-story buildin' 'twud startle ye, wanst. If it happened again, 'twud surprise ye. But if ye saw a man fall ivry fifteen minyits ye'd go home afther awhile f'r supper an' ye wuddent even mintion ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... felt him to be a man whom you could neither neglect nor trifle with; who was addressing your intellect in weighty words, fathoming your intentions, and detecting your inclinations and prepossessions, and leading you in some given direction with gentle but irresistible force. He would often startle you with the boldness of his propositions, but never till he had contrived, somehow or other, to predispose you in favour of that view of the case which he was presenting. He had a most seductive smile; truth, candour, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... diameter at the entrance, and extends but a short distance in a horizontal direction. The floor is littered with the bones of the animals slaughtered for food during the war. Some eager archaeologist may hereafter discover this cabin and startle his world by announcing another of the Stone Age caves. The sun shines freely into its mouth, and graceful bunches of grass and eriogonums and sage grow about it, doing what they can toward its redemption from degrading ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... nor moved a mite. That is one of the peculiarities of the boy, you can't surprise him: nothin' seems to startle him. ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... a shout. She slipped her hand away gently, and ran a little way before answering, lest the cry should startle him. Then she shouted with all her strength; and soon the beat of hoofs came nearer and out of the darkness Jim came back, ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... variety of basses of the boatswain and his mates, at either hatchway—one of the youngsters of the watch running down at the same time to acquaint the officers, in his shrill falsetto, with that which had been roared out loud enough to startle even the deaf purser. The first-lieutenant, followed by the master, brushed by him, and was up the ladder before his supererogatory communication ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... well. She's mad, you know,—mad as a hatter,—and no one can ever guess what freak may come next. One always feels that she'll do something sooner or later that will startle ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... quick look up at him. The action was purely involuntary, and, in fact, had been half a startle of surprise. The next instant her eyes had dropped again, and she sat waiting to go on with the dictation. But in that moment of her glance Daylight had noted that her eyes were gray. He was later to learn that at times there were golden lights in those same gray eyes; but he had seen enough, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... ambitions of both were unlimited, and so aequally incapable of beinge contented, and both unrestrayned by any respecte to good nature or justice from pursuinge the satisfaction therof, yett Willmott had more scruples from religion to startle him, and would not have attayned his end, by any grosse or fowle acte of wickednesse; Goringe could have passed through those pleasantly, and would without hesitation have broken any trust, or done any acte ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... that the noise would startle the audience and perhaps throw them into a panic. The mayor of the town stepped forward to give warning. The audience, however, had not assembled to listen to the mayor, and overwhelmed him with cries of ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... her crime. But how can any punishment be devised or imposed for such a huge panorama of sorrow? I think she has already punished herself horribly, and will continue to do so. My prayer is that what we have gone through will startle the world into some new realization of the sanctity of life—all life, animal as well as human. Don't you find that a visit to a zoo can humble and astound you with all that amazing and grotesque ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... dragged out of the lake dead on her account, and with that pathetic vision in her mind she vowed she'd rather die than desert him. And as for all the ills which her brother foreboded for her in case she should marry Smith Westcott, they did not startle her at all. Such simple, loving natures as Katy Charlton's can not feel for self. It is such a pleasure to them to throw ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... le rape," says his good son; videlicet, he was fond of turnips. In his fourth Satire, he mentions as a favourite dish, turnips seasoned with vinegar and boiled must (sapa), which seems, not unjustifiably, to startle Mr. Panizzi.[39] He cared so little for good eating, that he said of himself, he should have done very well in the days ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... has suddenly arisen which can photograph the bones, and, before long, the organs of the human body; that a light has been found which can penetrate, so as to make a photographic record, through everything from a purse or a pocket to the walls of a room or a house, is news which cannot fail to startle everybody. That the eye of the physician or surgeon, long baffled by the skin, and vainly seeking to penetrate the unfortunate darkness of the human body, is now to be supplemented by a camera, making all the parts of the human body ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... man's dominion Has broken Nature's social union, An' justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor, earth-born ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... following pages, the reader will learn the history of a class of men, who, for talent, cannot be excelled. He may startle at the horrid features which naked truth will depict—at deeds of darkness which, though presented to an enlightened people, may require a stretch of credulity to believe were ever perpetrated in the glorious ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... then glutted its maw with its intended prey (the sharpness of Mr. Godwin's pen cut the legal cords with which it was attempted to bind them), it might have done so sooner, and with more lasting effect. The world do not know (and we are not sure but the intelligence may startle Mr. Godwin himself), that he is the author of a volume of Sermons, and of a ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... of a conquered province, the little daughter of a gamekeeper to nobility was preparing to emigrate with her father to a new home in the Western world, where she would learn to perform miracles with rifle and revolver, and where the beauty of the hermit thrush's song would startle her into comparing it to the beauty of her own untried voice. But to her father, and to her, the most beautiful thing in all the ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... a feller sittin' one day by the org'n," came a voice from behind John's shoulder, so like David's as fairly to startle him, "an' not feelin' exac'ly right—kind o' tired an' out o' sorts, an' not knowin' jest where he was drivin' at—jest joggin' along with a loose rein fer quite a piece, an' so on; an' then, by an' by, strikin' ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... clouds hang drooping to the mountain peaks, Like a maiden's heart, that distant lover seeks: The peacocks startle, when the thunder booms, And fan the heaven with all their jeweled ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... And that is what I must find out. I have my suspicions. My dear, don't let me startle you, but have you ever thought that it ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... through a phase, and one not altogether natural to her, and which readily passed away with the abnormal conditions that had occasioned it. She was by no means one of those dreamy, thoughtful, often melancholy children who startle us by the precocious grasp of their intellect, by their intuitive perception of truths which we had deemed far above their comprehension. Madelon's precocity was of quite another order. In her quick, impulsive, energetic little ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... shook in my shoes this afternoon. Didn't you notice the lurid mixture of colors I was daubing on my block? And all because I knew you were having psychic thoughts and I was so afraid you would say what I thought you were thinking and startle Estelle. I wanted so much to know myself just what you were driving at with your watch-chains that I almost chewed my tongue ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... began the descent through the woods, the moccasined feet of our dusky allies falling noiselessly upon the pine quills. We almost held our breath, lest the least noise, the accidental breaking of a twig, should startle the enemy. Though this was to be my first real Indian fight, I felt no fear and not so much excitement as when stalking my first buck. As we neared the edge of the wood and were almost prepared for the ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... days it was the fashion for young ladies to be frail and delicate and the least noise was apt to startle them and make ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... the Bedchamber, she should have a suite of apartments appropriated to her use in the Louvre; but in a few days, when he had accustomed her to converse freely with him upon the subject, Henry put a leading question which must, after all these gracious promises, have tended to startle Mademoiselle de Montmorency, by demanding to know if she personally desired the marriage, as, should it be otherwise, she need only confess the truth with frankness, when he would break off the match, and procure for her an alliance more to her taste; adding ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... relation which has been shown to exist between criminality and household occupations. Nothing, indeed, which recent investigation has established ought to startle the American woman more. Contrary to public opinion, it is not the factory and shop which are making the greatest number of women offenders of all kinds; it is the household. In a recent careful study of over 3000 women criminals, the Bureau of Labor found ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... though apparently he seemed fairly well pleased to find that they had not succeeded in capturing his ally. Max awaited developments. He was satisfied with the way things were going, and deep down in his heart believed the thrilling announcement he was storing up with which to startle his three chums would ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... replied the artist, laying down his weapons and grasping Gibault's proffered hand with a sigh of evident relief, "I am well, excellently well. You did, indeed, startle me by your sudden appearance; but no harm is done, and where none was intended no apology is necessary. You are a Frenchman, ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... himself for his own child to signify seaborn: "O, I am mocked," said he, "and you are sent hither by some incensed god to make the world laugh at me." "Patience, good sir," said Marina, "or I must cease here." "Nay," said Pericles, "I will be patient; you little know how you do startle me, to call yourself Marina." "The name," she replied, "was given me by one that had some power, my father, and a king." "How, a king's daughter!" said Pericles, "and called Marina! But are you flesh and blood? ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... which shows itself in our vast output of fiction; but even here we have few masters, and our critics know and care little for style; they are entirely preoccupied with plot and incident and situation. What we lack is true originality, tranquil force; we are all occupied in trying to startle and surprise, to make a sensation. How little the Greeks cared for that! It was beauty and charm, delicate colour, fine subtlety of which they were, in search; they held all things holy, yet nothing solemn. Their ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... nearly the end of the season Audrey had no time to lose, and the first thing she did after her arrival was to startle Miss Craven ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... there was a heavy breathing as the visitors swung themselves up on to the wagon-box, Dyke judging from the sounds that either three or four people had climbed up. Then the canvas was dragged back, and as Dyke pointed his gun, hesitating about firing, and then deciding to shoot overhead to startle the ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... song, my haughty moon. It is not my song. It is the Mountain Lad's. It is what he nickers. Listen! He sings it again. This is what he says: 'Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills. I fill the wide valleys. The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures; for they know me. The grass grows rich and richer, the land is filled with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the spring. The spring is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the spring. The mares remember my voice. They know me aforetime through their mothers ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... that," said Miss Ingate. "It wouldn't startle me to hear that he knew you were intending to come. All I know is that Miss Foley's been here for several days. Not a soul knows except me and Aguilar. And it seems to get safer every day. She does venture about the house now, though ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... for ratification and agreement, Mary would set about her personification, shed her apron lest its damaged appearance convict her in older eyes, and speed toward her goal. But the mad bull's shrieks of protest and repudiation would startle every bit of chivalry ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... State, nor with more firmness of mind. They might need a preparatory discourse on the text of 'Prove all things, hold fast that which is good,' in order to unlearn the lesson that reason is an unlawful guide in religion. They might startle on being first awaked from the dreams of the night, but they would rub their eyes at once, and look the spectres boldly in the face. The preacher might be excluded by our hierophants from their churches and ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... thoughts as I stood toying with the rope, and I believe I should have turned the whole thing up, had it not been that at this juncture there floated into my mind a picture of the Bassett hearing that bell for the first time. Coming as a wholly new experience, it would probably startle her into a decline. ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... seemed to startle Browning. "That reminds me," he said, doubtingly, "that I have neither seen my governor nor old man Jenvie. I left home telling mother and Grace that before I went home to live I would have to be ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... the valley, it as suddenly disappeared, leaving an evanescent trail of flame behind it. There could be little doubt that the old shepherd had merely seen one of those shooting lights that in mountain districts so frequently startle the night traveller; but the apparition now filled his whole mind, as one vouchsafed from the spiritual world, and of strange and ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... thy right hand lead with thee The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty; And if I give thee honor due, Mirth, admit me of thy crew To live with her, and live with thee, In unreproved pleasures free; To hear the lark begin his flight, And, singing, startle the dull night, From his watch-tower in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise; Then to come, in spite of sorrow, And at my window bid good-morrow, Through the sweetbrier, or the vine, Or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... advance of the cars, looking, I must confess, much more like a sort of mechanical demon that would hurry us to the infernal regions than a laudable contrivance for smoothing our way to the Celestial City. On its top sat a personage almost enveloped in smoke and flame, which, not to startle the reader, appeared to gush from his own mouth and stomach as well as ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... she replied in a low voice, but with such passionate earnestness as quite to startle me. "Is 262 laughing, then, such an infallible indication of happiness?" ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... man of science, he is on dangerous ground. I need say nothing of the blunders he is pretty sure to make. The imaginative writer is after effects. The scientific man is after truth. Science is decent, modest; does not try to startle, but to instruct. The same scenes and objects which outrage every sense of delicacy in the story teller's highly colored paragraphs can be read without giving offence in the chaste language of the physiologist ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... patient be well enough, and wishes you to talk to him, speak in a low, distinct voice, on cheerful subjects. Don't relate painful hospital experiences, nor give details of the maladies of former patients, and remember never to startle him with accounts of dreadful crimes or accidents that you have read in ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... really work out in practice? Evidently the sole performer of my experiment must be myself; the subject—whom or what? Accident should determine. I itched to commence with murder—to tackle the stiffest problems first, and I burned to startle and baffle the world—especially the world of which I had ceased to be. Outwardly I was calm, and spoke to the people about me as usual. Inwardly I was on fire with a consuming scientific passion. I sported with ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... diable;' then follows a long account of a poisoning case in Paris, and some songs from a cafe chantant, interspersed with illustrations of the broadest kind. But let us not be too critical; we have seen many things in France which would startle Englishmen, but nothing, we venture to say, more harmful in its tendency, than the weekly broad-sheet of crime which is spread out over our own land (to the number, the proprietors boast, of at least a hundred thousand[53]), wherein John and ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... that night a solemn vow, To startle all beholders: I wore white muslin on my brow, Green velvet on my shoulders— My trousers were supremely wide, I learn'd to swear "by Allah"— I stuck a poniard by my side, And ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... lads," the captain ordered, "she is going to give us a broadside. When it is over start one of those sea beggar songs you picked up at Brill; that will startle them, and they will think we are crowded with men and going to ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... took him into his arms, that he might be able to stroke it, and play with the silver flowers. It was little fatigue, now, except to the spirits, to nurse poor George. He was shrunk to skin and bone, and so light as to startle those who had been accustomed to lift him. It was grievous, however, to look at the ghastly stretched features, the flabby tremulous little arms, and the suffering expression of countenance. To hear his feeble cry was worse still. ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau
... night as usual. No word had fallen from my lips, at that time or at any time before it, that could betray me, or startle her into sudden knowledge of the truth. But when we met again in the morning, a change had come over her—a ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... of several minutes, and neither looked at the other. At last Edmund rose and went to the side of the boat and looked over at the water, and then, turning half-way towards her, said: "Why does it startle you so much?" ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... his arm so suddenly that Sinnet was startled,—in so far as anything could startle anyone who had lived a life of chance and danger and accident, and his face grew a shade paler; but he did not move, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a day passed but that her coldly dispassionate dissection of this or that foible of their own set, did not startle or sometimes distress Barbara Allison; hardly a day but that her cool voice, which could be as tempered as edged steel, did not cut through the veneer of some custom or other and expose the crooked grain beneath. Barbara ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... addressed one word, she would droop her head and raise it bravely, to imply that I make her very sad but very proud, and she would be wishful to lend me her absurd little pocket handkerchief. And then, had I the heart, I might make a disclosure that would startle her, for it is not the face of David's mother that I see in ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... I blabbed The family-secrets to, unsnecking the cupboard, And setting the skeleton rattling his bones? I took you For one of us, who'd ken our pretty ways; And reckoned naught I could tell of Jim to Jim's wife Could startle her, though she'd ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... constituents, of which the pith is in the final sentences: '"But," I think I hear some one say, "after all, friend Howe, was not the supposititious case, which you anticipated might occur, somewhat quaint and eccentric and startling?" It was, because I wanted to startle, to rouse, to flash the light of truth over every hideous feature of the system. {86} The fire-bell startles at night; but if it rings not the town may be burned; and wise men seldom vote him an incendiary ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... for due offences Do not fright me, do not startle, For if they through arrogance And ambition sought this garden, Me the worship of the gods Here has led, and so I 'm guarded 'Gainst all sorceries whatsoever, 'Gainst all forms of Christian magic:— Art thou ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... perpendicular streets anything may dwell or happen, and it is in one of them, I believe, that the inquirer may find the offices of the Club of Queer Trades. It may be thought at the first glance that the name would attract and startle the passer-by, but nothing attracts or startles in these dim immense hives. The passer-by is only looking for his own melancholy destination, the Montenegro Shipping Agency or the London office of the Rutland ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... simple. But when talk rose into graver and more contemplative topics, her attention became earnest and absorbed; and sometimes a rich eloquence, such as I have never before nor since heard from lips so young, would startle me first into a wondering silence, and soon into a disapproving alarm: for the thoughts she then uttered seemed to me too fantastic, too visionary, too much akin to the vagaries of a wild though beautiful imagination. And then I would seek to check, to ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... myrtles and sedges on the water's brim are quiet. It is a dream in halftones that he gives us, gray and green and steely blue; and just that, and some homely magic of his own, hint the commerce of another world with man's discarded domain. Men and women are asleep, and as in an early walk you may startle the hares at their play, or see the creatures of the darkness—owls and night-hawks and heavy moths—flit with fantastic purpose over the familiar scene, so here it comes upon you suddenly that you have surprised Nature's self at her mysteries; you are let into the secret; you have caught the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... spurring, to bring himself to talk about the business. When a man carries a secret of a quite harmless nature, it happens often, as almost everybody knows, that casual words and quite innocent glances startle him with hints of understanding and participation. What is it when the detection of the secret involves open shame and penal servitude? Can a man of genuine courage be a thief? Is not courage after all at the very bottom of all manly honour, of all sound honesty, ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... scarce perceptible menace of that one little cloud is lost in the wide brightness of a summer sky. The traveller jogs on contented and unthinking, till the hoarse roar of stormy winds, or the first big drops of the thunder-shower, startle him with a sudden consciousness ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... strong. It was wrong of Marguerite to give way like that when I had not even the strength to turn my head on the pillow and smile at her. The next time that she moaned out, "He is dead! Dead!" I would embrace her and murmur softly so as not to startle her: "No, my darling, I was only asleep. You see, I am ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... Will Startle is a man of exquisite sensibility, whose delicacy of frame and quickness of discernment subject him to impressions from the slightest causes; and who, therefore, passes his life between rapture and horrour, in quiverings of delight, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... fly in the room to intrude on us in our privacy; there were no cocks and hens in the yard to cackle on us in our privacy; nobody walked past the outer passage, or made any noise in any part of the house, to startle us in our privacy; and a steady rain was falling propitiously to keep us in our privacy. We dined in our retired situation on some rugged lumps of broiled flesh, which the landlady called chops, and the servant steaks. We broke out of ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... across her path. A few yards further on lay the senseless form of the Breton horseman, and it was clear to Annette that Jean of Kerdual had purposely stayed the rider by throwing the shadow across the road to startle his horse. ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... read that the police bullied suspected persons in this way. If you make a guilty person believe that you know him to be guilty, you can also get him to confess if you startle him sufficiently. It occurred to me that this was what these men were doing, especially as they had not been sure of me when I ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... micracoustic ear trumpet extend the sense of the unbearable beyond all possible bounds. Thus, sir, the circulation of the blood and the fluids of the body will not give me pause; you shall hear them flow with the impetuosity of cataracts; you shall perceive them so distinctly as to startle you; the slightest irregularity of the pulse, the least obstacle, is striking, and produces the same effect as a rock against which the waves of a ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... stood in the Forum and seen the Coliseum. Penini says: 'The sun has tome out. I think God knows I want to go out to walk, and so He has sent the sun out.' There's a child who has faith enough to put us all to shame. A vision of angels wouldn't startle him in the least. When his poor little friend died, and we had to tell him, he inquired, fixing on me those earnest blue eyes, 'Did papa see the angels when they took away Joe?' And when I answered 'No' (for I never try ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... out Spike, in a voice of thunder, loud enough to startle even Mrs. Budd and Biddy ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw every thing up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the mood for free and friendly talk. People often wonder, 'How do you catch So-and-so? He is so shy! I have invited and invited, and he never comes.' We never invite, and he comes. We take no note of his coming or his going; we do not startle his entrance with acclamation, nor clog his departure with expostulation; it is fully understood that with us he shall do just as he chooses; and so he chooses to ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... far as possible, the veil which has concealed for a century and a half adventures in themselves unimportant enough. In spite of disappointments and dark hours of desertion, Charles, who was much of a boy, probably enjoyed the mystery which he now successfully created. If he could not startle Europe by a brilliant appearance on any stage, he could keep it talking and guessing by a disappearance. He obviously relished secrecy, pass-words, disguises, the 'properties' of the conspirator, in the spirit of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He came of an evasive race. His grandfather, ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... of $40,000,000 of the people's savings and business capital, and by destroying the producing power of commercial enterprise reduce the community's income by twenty-eight millions more, the catastrophe would startle the world. ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... up from the table the very volume which had originally inspired this train of thought, and Shelton could see his solemn pleasure as he read. In the white of his eye there was a torpid and composed abstraction. There was nothing in that book to startle ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the doctor, and making his beard wag with enjoyment. "Yes, that would startle them. White man's magic. Fancy, Fred, old chap, a wounded man with a bullet in him, and I at work with my black slave, Frank, here, to help me, in a dark tent, while I made the poor wretch transparent to find out where ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... Apparition sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair; Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful Dawn; A dancing Shape, an Image gay, To haunt, to startle, and way-lay. ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... this late day, no such excitement can be created by any human invention, but the sight of a creature speeding over the country, impelled by steam, and bearing such a grotesque resemblance to a gigantic man, could not but startle all who should see ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... how great I am," declared the inventor, instantly off, on the hint supplied by his visitor. "But just the minute that insurance company gives me the money, I'll be ready to startle the skies! I'll blot out the stars for 'em! I'll show New York! I know what I'm doing! And nothing on earth is going to stop me! All these fool balloonists, with their big silk floating cigars! Deadly cigars is ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... far from the ideals we started out to gain; the way we content ourselves with the environments of evil and forego forever the voice that calls us away to partake of things which shall be as wine and honey to the soul, frightens me; startles me as the sudden thunder of the surf might startle one who sojourned by an ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... exemption from official criticism. I have not taken space to mention certain episodes of the more recent intercourse of these ladies, and must content myself with tracing them, lightly, in their consequences. These may be summed up in the remark, which will doubtless startle no one by its freshness, that two imperial women are scarcely more likely to hit it off together, as the phrase is, than two imperial men. Since that party at Miss Birdseye's, so important in its results for Olive, she had had occasion to approach Mrs. Farrinder more nearly, and those overtures brought ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness." Notice what the Apostle says: "To him that worketh not." That is plain language, is it not? I may perhaps startle some of you by saying that many of you have been kept out of the kingdom of God by your good works. Nevertheless it is true. If you put works in the place of faith, they become a snare to you. It is "to him ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody
... jumped, or threw their hats on the deck suddenly, and the poor steward, suddenly startled, would echo them all precisely, and sometimes several consecutively. Frequently he would expostulate, begging people not to startle him, and again would grow furiously angry, but even in the midst of his passion he would helplessly imitate some ridiculous shout or motion directed at him by his pitiless tormenters. Frequently he shut himself up in his pantry, which was without ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... trilogy called The Sensationalists, three books giving the history for a few years before the war, during and immediately after the war, of a group of sensation-mongers, emotion-hunters or whatever you like to call them, whose principle and practice it was to startle the world by the extravagance of their behaviour, speech, dress and thought and, in the other sense of the word, sensationalism, to live on the excitement of new experiences. Such people have always existed and always will exist, receiving perhaps undue attention ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... if not the first remarkable animal to startle a stranger on arriving in Ceylon, whilst wending his way from Point-de-Galle to Colombo, is a huge lizard of from four to five feet in length, the Talla-goya of the Singhalese, and Iguana[1] of ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... that with a tiny wild thing by being so tender of him— of his little timidities and feelings—so adoringly anxious not to startle him or suggest by any movement the possibility of your being a creature who COULD HURT—that your very yearning to understand his tiny hopes and fears and desires makes you for the time cease to be quite a mere human thing and gives you another ...
— My Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale. The great lady was simple in her own way. His views and beliefs had nothing in them to shock or startle her, since she judged them from the standpoint of her lofty position. Indeed, her sympathies were easily accessible to a man of that sort. She was not an exploiting capitalist herself; she was, as it were, above the play of economic conditions. ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... its source and its meaning; "it yieldeth the peaceable fruits of righteousness" only "to them that are exercised thereby." Otherwise, it may come and go as the storm that rends the oak, or the drenching tempest that glides off as it falls. It may startle us for a moment,—it may hurt us with a sense of pain and loss,—it may awe us with its mystery; but unless it rouses us to solemn thought upon the meaning of life, to self-communion and prayer, to higher and holier action, it ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... break it to her, then," said Beatrice, feeling scarcely so much convinced as overwhelmed. "It will startle her if she ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... perpetually speaks in Society. And then she remembered Carey's eyes. They were ugly eyes. She had always thought them ugly. Yet, now and then, there was something in them, something to hold a woman—no, perhaps not that—but something to startle a woman, to make her think, wonder, even to make her trust. And the scene which had just occurred, with all its weakness, its fatuity, its maundering display of degradation and the inability of any self-government, had not somehow destroyed the impression made upon Lady ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... and impudence of the speaker were admirable in their way. I never saw better acting, even in Kean. His look, his manner, his long arm, his elvish fore-finger,—like an exclamation-point, punctuating his bitter thought,—showed the skill of a master. The effect of the whole was to startle everybody, as if a pistol-shot had rung through the ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... mysterious night, oppressively warm, the moonlight shining on the little white figure, the deep silence, broken only by the faint murmur of the river and the distant singing of a nightingale, the gleam of the glowworms, compose a scene of fantastic beauty. The slightest sounds startle her, whether it be a fish leaping at the surface of the water to seize a fly, the gurgling of a little eddy, or the shrill cry of a bat. There is a certain voluptuous beauty in the very sound of the words that describe the little nymph, ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... not been discussed in these pages. Webster states the facts without exaggeration:[41] "For the most of them are not credible, by reason of their obscenity and filthiness; for chast ears would tingle to hear such bawdy and immodest lyes; and what pure and sober minds would not nauseate and startle to understand such unclean stories ...? Surely even the impurity of it may be sufficient to overthrow the credibility of it, especially among Christians." Professor Burr has said that "it was, indeed, no small part of ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... young supercargo, it was his second voyage in such capacity, and he suffered much secret worry from his lack of experience in pricing pearls. But when Mapuhi exposed the pearl to his sight he managed to suppress the startle it gave him, and to maintain a careless, commercial expression on his face. For the pearl had struck him a blow. It was large as a pigeon egg, a perfect sphere, of a whiteness that reflected opalescent lights from all colors about it. ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... loved dramatic situations in real life quite as well as in make-believe, planned to conceal her radiance until her first appearance on the stage, when she would startle them all, and especially Lysander, with her dazzling loveliness. She stood in a shadow of the wings with her coat wrapped about her. Except for Jerry, waiting to do her humble part, she was alone. She listened to the ceaseless chatter in the dressing-room with a happy smile. She ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... without moving a muscle, he suddenly sat bolt upright and looked round at the player. The character of the music, always individual, had grown more marked, and at this point an effect was produced which appeared to startle the musician. He withdrew his gaze, after a moment, muttering something to himself, and resumed his former attitude, slowly and gravely nodding his head. There was a long silence after the last of the lingering, ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... if I can remember anything to startle you, if you're out for sensations. It's a kind of literary society, isn't it? Can you lend me a pencil, please, and some waste paper? I don't know what I've done with my blotter. Thanks! Now I'm going right up to my bedroom ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... does Paley, why does Jeremy Taylor, when no practical matter is actually before him, lay down a maxim about the lawfulness of lying, which will startle most readers? The reason is plain. He is forming a theory of morals, and he must treat every question in turn as it comes. And this is just what St. Alfonso or Scavini is doing. You only try your hand yourself at a treatise on the ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... forth from her those pleasantries at which you will be the first to laugh and those reflections which will startle you by their profundity; now you will see sudden changes of mood and the caprices of a mind which hesitates. At times she will exhibit extreme tenderness, as if she repented of her thoughts and her projects; sometimes ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... volume of a trilogy called The Sensationalists, three books giving the history for a few years before the war, during and immediately after the war, of a group of sensation-mongers, emotion-hunters or whatever you like to call them, whose principle and practice it was to startle the world by the extravagance of their behaviour, speech, dress and thought and, in the other sense of the word, sensationalism, to live on the excitement of new experiences. Such people have always existed and always will ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... take some noisy instrument to the lake to startle the echoes; a whistle his father made him served for a time; after that he marched up and down the banks, rattling a tin canister with pebbles in it; then he got a large frying-pan from the kitchen, and beat on it with a stick every day for about a fortnight. When he grew tired of ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... read the sign—"H. H. Hardwill, Publisher." His heart half-failed him, and he stood looking in the large, book-filled window, with that romance which was to startle the literary world folded quietly under his arm, like any common paper. What kind of a man is Mr. Hardwill? he thought. Is he a large man, with a heavy watch-chain, or a thin, sky-rockety piece of humanity, ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... dominion Has broken Nature's social union, An' justifies that ill opinion, Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor, earth-born ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... picture of an hauke swiftenes and spiede, by the shape of a crocodile [Transcriber's note: 'crocoiled' in original] displeasure or misfortune, by the figure of an eye, good watche or regarde, and so forthe of other. Emong their priestes, loke whome they sawe startle aboute as haulfe wood, [Footnote: Mad, from the Saxon wod. See "Two Gentlemen of Verona," ii., 3, and "Mids. N. Dr.," ii., 3.] him did iudge of all othermooste holy, and making him their king, they fall downe and worship him, as thoughe there ware in him a Godhead, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... and fro through the room with a cautious tranquillity which nothing could startle; she prepared her decayed roots for food with a patient attention which nothing could divert. Lost, through the aggravated miseries of her position, to recent grief and present apprehension, she could still instinctively perform the simple offices of ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... rape," says his good son; videlicet, he was fond of turnips. In his fourth Satire, he mentions as a favourite dish, turnips seasoned with vinegar and boiled must (sapa), which seems, not unjustifiably, to startle Mr. Panizzi.[39] He cared so little for good eating, that he said of himself, he should have done very well in the days when people lived ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... temper no doubt aroused by some vague shadow which surely no other eyes than his could possibly have detected in the darkness; sometimes the distressful plaint of a hungry coyote, hunting for what it never seems to find—for he is always prowling and hunting—would rouse the echoes and startle the "tenderfoot" with the suddenness and nearness of its uncanny call. But for the rest all was still. And he paced to and ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... disparaging to Dr Johnson. He was rather ostentatious in his preference of the writings of Mr Boz; would walk through the streets so absorbed in them that he all but ran against Miss Jenkyns; and though his apologies were earnest and sincere, and though he did not, in fact, do more than startle her and himself, she owned to me she had rather he had knocked her down, if he had only been reading a higher style of literature. The poor, brave Captain! he looked older, and more worn, and his clothes were very threadbare. But he seemed as bright and cheerful as ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... I knew what he thought of the whole performance; but a friend of the lean man, who sat just in front of Arick, tells me what seemed to startle him most. The first thing was when two of the officers came out with blackened faces, like minstrels, and began to dance. Arick was sure that they were really black, and his own people, and he was wonderfully surprised to see them dance in this ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which gives perpetual warning of those smouldering forces ever ready to devastate the surrounding country. Subterranean activity increases during the rainy season, and tremors of earthquake occasionally startle the equanimity of those unused to the perils of existence on this thin crust of Mother Earth, for Java's teeming soil and population rest upon an ominous fissure of the globe's surface, and twelve of the forty-five volcanos on this island of terror and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... wreak thy murder. Hissing fire of flaming stead, Groan of spear-carles, wail of women, Soon shall startle through the night. Then on Mosfell, Kirtle-Wearer, Eric waits the face of Death. Freed from weary life and sorrow, Soon we'll kiss ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... Lawrence, and I started for the theatre. I can't say that I was expecting a very pleasant evening, but the deathlike stillness, both of ourselves and the town did, I confess, startle me. Scarcely a word was exchanged by us between the English Prospect and Saint Isaac's Square. The square looked lovely in the bright moonlight, and I said something about it. It was indeed very fine, the cathedral ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... I should startle you," he said; "and do you know, you looked so busy that I hoped it would have fallen souse on your heads before you were aware of it. What was the Master ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... the independence of Francis, who had scattered his friars in all the four corners of the globe without trying to gain a confirmation of the verbal and entirely provisional authorization accorded him by Innocent III.—all these things were calculated to startle the clergy. ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... go it, my hearties," sang out Mr McCarthy; and, the hands, giving a responsive cheer and putting their backs into each stroke, made the boat race along—dragging the raft behind it at a speed that caused it to rock from side to side, and slightly startle the ladies, while the boat, too, shipped a little water that came in over the bows as it dipped forward from the jerk ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... lines of her thick grey garment giving a gliding character to her rapid walk, her hair rolling backward and illuminated on the left side by the sun-rays, the little olive baby on her right arm now looking out with jet-black eyes, she might well startle that youth of fifteen, accustomed to swing the censer in the presence of a Madonna less fair ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... that startle us with their unforeseen vividness or some unexpected blaze of colour; when the fleece of gold is taken from the tree where it had long since shone like a beacon through the dark, the tree sinks back ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... are not made by Tyndall or Huxley; but they are objections made by me, which I stated to them, and in which they agreed—Tyndall expressing the opinion that I ought to make them public. I name this because you may otherwise some day startle Tyndall or Huxley by speaking to them of their objections, and giving me as the authority for so ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... It used to startle strangers to hear "The Hardy Norseman," "The Cuckoo," and such-like songs from the lips of little Chinese boys. Every Saturday evening they came to the house to practise the hymns and chants for Sunday; I had an harmonium in the dining-room. ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... dark wood rings with our voices shrill, That startle the sleeping bird! To-morrow eve must the voice be still, And the step must fall unheard. The Briton lies by the blue Champlain, In Ticonderoga's towers, And ere the sun rise twice again, Must they ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... boy with a sleepy face and hair as stiff and hard as the bristles of a brush yawned until he seemed to be about to dislocate his jaws, and stretched himself with his arms extended as though he were in his bed. The professor saw this and wished to startle him. ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... into the Cave my self, and see what it was that had produced such wonderful Effects upon the Company; but as I was stooping at the Entrance, the Door being something low, I gave such a Nodd in my Chair, that I awaked. After having recovered my self from my first Startle, I was very well pleas'd at the Accident which had befallen me, as not knowing but a little Stay in the Place might ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... surpass Suevius influenced Virgil in attempting the same task again." [19] Trifling as this circumstance is, nothing that throws any light on the growth of Virgil's muse can be wanting in interest. Virgil was not one of those who startle the world by their youthful genius. His soul was indeed a poet's from the first, but the rich perfection of his verse was not developed until after years of severe labour, self-correction, and even failure. He began by essaying various ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... passages of interest or beauty, which we have quoted, and omitted to quote, there are scattered up and down the book, and in the midst of its most repulsive portions, a very great number of single lines and images, that sparkle like gems in the desart, and startle us with an intimation of the great poetic powers that lie buried in the rubbish that has been heaped around them. It is difficult to pick up these, after we have once passed them by; but we shall endeavour to light upon one or two. The beneficial effect of intervals ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... omens, I should rather see them pointed at the vices which prevail; at the corruptions of the public morals, which are fouler than aught I had so much as dreamed of before I was myself a witness of them, and may well be supposed to startle the gods from their rest, and draw down their hottest thunderbolts. But I will not say more, when there must be so many able to do so much better in behalf of what I must still believe to be a good cause. Let me entreat the Emperor, before he condemns, to hear. There are those in Rome, of warm ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... gazelle would timidly approach to slake his thirst at the water; the noble lion would stalk out in all his majesty for the same purpose, while ever and anon, now close to the canoes, now yards away, a loud snort would startle us, and the huge ugly head of a hippopotamus would be thrust ...
— Harper's Young People, March 2, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... respect good reading. Rather than deplore their frankness, as one critic has done, we ought to rejoice in their utter want of affectation, in their boyish honesty. At every turn there is something to amuse or to startle one into thinking. We are carried back in a vivid way to the period of their composition. Not a little of the pulsing life of that time throbs anew, and we catch glimpses of notable figures. Often, the feeling is that we have been called ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... while I have been knocking about the world. You are now more than "sweet": you are almost handsome. I suppose it is a question of lights and the time of day whether or not you are really brilliant. And you carry surety in your face. There is nothing in Chicago to startle you, perhaps not in ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... that he was somewhat out of breath. The night had fallen and the house revealed but little light from the front. Through the door he could see that the dining-room was lighted. He tried the door stealthily and entered with caution. It would not do to startle Sylvia. ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... in the midst of solitude could reach no other human ear, would startle the bashful creature into alarm; and whilst her cheek became alternately pale and crimson at such an avowal thus uttered aloud, she would wipe away the tears that arose to her eyes whenever the depths of her affection were stirred by those pensive ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... "Would it startle you to hear," he said, as if he hardly had breath to utter the words, "that she who was to me what he was to you is ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... nevertheless, is not affected by the desire either to impress or to startle his readers, any more than the writing of a good poet springs from an aiming at effect: it is like all true literature, in the first place, the outcome of a strong and personal passion, the passion for the past. He ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... clattering of hoofs was heard, and looking toward the sound, I perceived the Chancellor cantering down the road. When abreast of the carriage he dismounted, and walking up to it, saluted the Emperor in a quick, brusque way that seemed to startle him. After a word or two, the party moved perhaps a hundred yards further on, where they stopped opposite the weaver's cottage so famous from that day. This little house is on the east side of the Donchery road, near its junction ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 6 • P. H. Sheridan
... stones, and every man of them might have been hurled from the cliff by the soldiers merely rolling down stones on them. They dared not more, and a few moments' silence proved that the alarm had been merely a trick to startle the garrison—a jest soon ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... origin, but is sent directly by God himself, as David intimates in the Psalm, "out of His secret places." As to the hailstorm, he lays great stress upon the plague of hail sent by the Almighty upon Egypt, and clinches all by insisting that God showed at Mount Sinai his purpose to startle the body before impressing ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the edge of a clearing enclosed by a worm fence I came to a row of slave-cabins. Mongrel dogs barked through the fence, and in one angle of it a young white man with long straight hair showed himself so abruptly as to startle my horse. Only the one cabin was lighted, and thence came the rhythmic shuffle of bare-footed dancers while the fiddle played "I lay ten dollars down." There were three couples on the floor, and I saw—for the excited dogs had pushed the door open—that two ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... selfish and so surprised at the goodness they showed me. Again, I saw something of the mystery of pain. My own was so trivial compared with that which some others had to bear. Yet I had enough to startle me that such a fact should be permitted on earth at all. I don't suppose we can understand its meaning; but my consolation was that it is not necessarily a sign of God's displeasure—that the highest life was a life of suffering, that the Son of Man was a 'Man of Sorrows.' ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... objective' are getting into general use now, and Donne has begun with aesthetics and exegetical in Kemble's review. Kemble himself has written an article on the Emperor Nicholas which must crush him. If you could read it, no salvos of mortalletti could ever startle you again. And now my paper is almost covered: and I must say Good bye to you. This is Sunday March 21—a fine sunny blowing day. We shall dine at one o'clock—an hour hence—go to Church—then walk—have tea at six, and pass rather a ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... typical English girl.' Miss Heriot fulfilled to a nicety the requirements of those who are sensibly reassured by the spectacle of careful conventionality allied to feminine charm—a pleasant conversability that may be trusted to soothe and counted on never to startle. Hermione would almost as soon have stood on her head in Piccadilly as have said anything original, though to her private consternation such perilous stuff had been known to harbour an uneasy instant in her bosom. She carried such inconvenient cargo as carefully hidden as a conspirator ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... once; easy manner). I'd like to know about this swindle that's going to be sprung on him. I didn't mean to startle the old man. You see, on my way here I dropped into a barber's to get a twopenny shave, and they told me there that he was something of a character. He has been a ...
— One Day More - A Play In One Act • Joseph Conrad
... something now and then that seemed to startle Cub into a mood of reflection, and whenever Cub reflected his dominance wavered. Tee-hee was able to accomplish the same effect without a "blurt". Tee-hee was sly, "as sly as they make 'em", but it was a kind of slyness that commands respect. ...
— The Radio Boys in the Thousand Islands • J. W. Duffield
... light fantastic toe; And in thy right hand lead with thee The mountain-nymph, sweet Liberty; And if I give thee honour due, Mirth, admit me of thy crew, To live with her, and live with thee, In unreproved pleasures free; To hear the lark begin his flight And singing startle the dull night From his watch-tower in the skies, Till the dappled dawn doth rise: Then to come, in spite of sorrow, And at my window bid good-morrow, Through the sweetbriar, or the vine, Or the twisted eglantine: While the cock with lively din, Scatters the rear of darkness thin, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the sack summarily, when he might have had a further month of service or a month's pay. Had not the workmen's forbearance been much tried? And they had not stolen, they had bought the powder, only intending to startle. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is the relation which has been shown to exist between criminality and household occupations. Nothing, indeed, which recent investigation has established ought to startle the American woman more. Contrary to public opinion, it is not the factory and shop which are making the greatest number of women offenders of all kinds; it is the household. In a recent careful study of over 3000 women criminals, the Bureau of Labor found that 80 per cent ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... that can shake Thy sweet composure, and thy heart dismay? Perhaps some murderer's cruel eye agleam Is fixed upon me, or some monstrous dream Might bring such fearful guilt upon the head Of my unvigilant soul as would arouse The Borgian snake from her envenomed bed, Or startle Nero in his ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... and thither through the country, and bewilder the traveller who, having strayed from his waggon, vainly hopes by following them to find his way back to the main track, or the wreaths of blue smoke which indicate the spot where a Kafir has set the grass on fire to startle and kill the tiny creatures ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... very curious kind of man. In the coldest weather, when even the hardiest soldiers were wrapping themselves up, he would go about in his shirt sleeves just as if it were summer; and very often he would be up before any one else in the camp was astir, and startle the first officer whom he saw coming out of his tent by crowing like a rooster as loud as he could, just as if to say, "You ought to have been out before." Then, too, Count and General though he was, dining with the Empress herself almost every week, ...
— Harper's Young People, February 17, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... sharper than the others, as though calculated to startle Galloway into a quick answer. But the proprietor of the Casa Blanca was lighting his cigar and took his time. When he looked up, his eyes told Norton that he had understood any danger which might lie under a question so simple in ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... neglect nor trifle with; who was addressing your intellect in weighty words, fathoming your intentions, and detecting your inclinations and prepossessions, and leading you in some given direction with gentle but irresistible force. He would often startle you with the boldness of his propositions, but never till he had contrived, somehow or other, to predispose you in favour of that view of the case which he was presenting. He had a most seductive smile; truth, candour, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... practice? Evidently the sole performer of my experiment must be myself; the subject—whom or what? Accident should determine. I itched to commence with murder—to tackle the stiffest problems first, and I burned to startle and baffle the world—especially the world of which I had ceased to be. Outwardly I was calm, and spoke to the people about me as usual. Inwardly I was on fire with a consuming scientific passion. I sported with my pet theories, and fitted them mentally on everyone I met. Every friend or acquaintance ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... said Diana. "I know the house, and I will call a servant; your sudden appearance might startle the old gentleman even to choking;" and she escaped from me, leaving me uncertain whether I ought to advance or retreat. It was impossible for me not to hear some part of what passed within the dinner apartment, and particularly several apologies ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... as a hawk's from sheer solitude and lonely travelling. He was so bent and scarred with weather that he seemed as much a part of that woodland place as the birks themselves, and the noise of his labours did not startle the birds that ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... that I startle from its shaded restin' place, Seems a furry shaft o' silence shootin' into noiseless space, An' a rattlesnake a crawlin' through the rocks so old an' gray Helps along the ghostly feelin' in a rather startlin' way. Every breeze that dares to whisper does it with a bated breath, Every ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... those stronger alcoholic beverages that are the product of distillation. In addition to those commonly designated as such we may reckon brandy, gin, and rum, and at the same time those subtle combinations called mixed-drinks, for which they serve as a basis. It will, perhaps, startle the average reader when the statement is made that whisky and its near relatives just referred to, particularly when diluted by water, are by far the least harmful of all alcoholic drinks. Their bad reputation lies in the fact that on account of their large percentage of alcohol ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... forbidden by the laws of life; but that life is full of indirect messages from the unseen world; that all our "simulated thunder-claps," all our "counterfeited truths," all those glimpses of beauty which startle while they elude the soul, are messages of this kind: darts shot from the spirit world, which rebound as they touch, yet sting us to the consciousness of its existence. And so Rene Gentilhomme had had a true revelation, in what reminded him that there are things higher ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... cannot go into the Joys like this: most of them cannot endure me. But I have here the thick veil with which I cover myself when I visit happy people.... (She unfolds a long veil and wraps herself in it carefully.) Not a ray of my you! must startle them, for there are many Happinesses that are afraid and are not happy.... There... like this, even the ugliest and coarsest of them ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... cough was one of the peculiarities of my friend, and determined to assume the character in toto, I allowed myself to startle the silence now and then with a series of gasps and chokings that whether agreeable or not, certainly were of a character to show that I had no desire to conceal my presence from those I had come among. Indeed it was my desire to acquaint them as fully ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... would request him to re-peruse any one poem, of any confessedly great poet from Homer to Milton, or from Aeschylus to Shakespeare; and to strike out, (in thought I mean), every instance of this kind. If the number of these fancied erasures did not startle him; or if he continued to deem the work improved by their total omission; he must advance reasons of no ordinary strength and evidence, reasons grounded in the essence of human nature. Otherwise, I should not hesitate to consider him as a man not so much proof against all authority, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... sight; A lovely Apparition sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair; Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful Dawn; A dancing Shape, an Image gay, To haunt, to startle, and way-lay. ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... heard. I doubt it—with men. It may be with women.—But you won't surprise them? It might startle your mother too much. She is not strong, you say. Hadn't I better tell Clara Coningham? She can let them ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... dominion Has broken nature's social union, An' justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... approaching. Before we have reached victory we have reached bankruptcy. We are to-day flooding the country with an irredeemable currency. In ninety days, with the patriotism of the people paralyzed by the inaction of our great army, the funded debt of the country will depreciate with a rapidity that will startle us. In ninety days more the nations of the world will, I fear, be justified in saying to us, "You have no more right to shut up the cotton fields of the world by a vain and fruitless effort to reconquer the territory ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... Gadol so much as the manner in which I received his confidences. He half expected to startle me by his boldness, but was himself confounded by my words. I told him that in my country self was the chief consideration, self-preservation the law of nature; death the King of Terrors; wealth the object ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... making faggots of myrtle-branches. She listened sullenly to Gertrude's offer and explanations; indifferently to my admonitions not to accept. The thought of stripping for the view of a man, which would send a shudder through our most brazen village girls, seemed not to startle her, immaculate and savage as she is accounted. She did not answer, but sat under the olives, looking vaguely across the sea. At that moment Waldemar came up to us; he had followed with the intention of putting an end ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... we realized it before we reached home. The flock was very timid, and when disturbed on North Head invariably came past the wireless station close to the engine-hut. Sandell concealed himself there with a gun, while I went out to startle the animals. They did not fail to do their part, but Sandell missed and the shot frightened them. He then rushed out and fired another shot as they were running, managing to hit one, which immediately dropped behind and ran to the edge of the cliff. We did not want to shoot the sheep at this ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... creaked whenever he went along the passages, and neither did her aunt or Tetchen tread with feet as light as that. She sat up, and then the knock was repeated,—very low and very clear. She still paused a moment, resolving that nothing should frighten her,—nothing should startle her. No change that could come to her would, she thought, be a change for the worse. She hastened up from off the bed, and stood upon the floor. Then she gave the answer that is usual to such a summons. "Come in," she said. She spoke low, but ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... you stay here in the hall with Bob," she directed her youngest daughter. "You won't be afraid with Bob, will you, dear? I don't want too many to go down or we may startle Libbie." ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... in the utmost genial and kind in his look and way; he was not a person from whom one would keep back anything he wanted to know; as also evidently he was not one to ask anything he should not. The request did not even startle Eleanor. She looked thoughtfully over the heaving sea ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... began. And swift and sudden it went on to the end. She had come on board the yacht that first night to startle it with her beauty and her voice; last night, silent and stately, she had slipped through the evening like a dream; now she stood before him a dazzling creature of the morning: yesterday she was Penseroso; to-day she was Allegro; what would she be to-morrow? How sparkling, as one day ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... greatest dramatists asserts itself not only in their thoughts but even in the mere form of their plays. It is the lesser men who invent new tricks of technique and startle the public with innovations. Moliere merely perfected the type of Italian comedy that his public long had known. Shakespeare quietly adopted the forms that lesser men had made the crowd familiar with. He imitated Lyly in Love's Labour's Lost, Greene in As You ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... end. Even in a corner of it, in a private park, or in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather and the seasons keep so deftly changing that although we walk there for a lifetime there will be always something new to startle and delight us. ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... old in the angel-hymn of the Advent, breathes of "glory to God, peace on earth, and good-will to men," in the serene atmosphere of that "perfect love which casteth out fear," smiles at the terrors which throng the sick dreams of the sensual, which draw aside the nightcurtains of guilt, and startle with whispers of revenge the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the lion. My first shot had struck one of his back teeth, breaking it squarely off, and then passed through the fleshy part of the neck. It was a wound that would startle, but not kill. The second shot had hit him between the eyes, but had glanced off the skull, merely ripping open the skin on the forehead for five inches. The third shell had killed him, except for the convulsive heaving that was finally stilled ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... was renewed and the visitor took his leave, declining Alec's offer to "run him home" in the car. "The car might startle my old friend," he pleaded. Alec saw him off, and returned to find the General, who had contrived to avoid more than a distant bow of farewell to Beaumaroy, standing on the hearthrug apparently in ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... With their horses and following, Should rush to her dwelling, And our prince[122] in his trim, They might vainly aspire Without rifle and fire To ruffle or nigh her, Her mantle to dim. Stark-footed, lively, Ever capering naively With motion alive, aye, And wax-white, in shine, When her startle betrays That the hounds are in chase, The same as the base Is the rocky decline— She puffs from her chest, And she ambles her crest And disdain is express'd In her nostril and eye;— That eye—how it winks! Like a sunbeam it blinks, And it glows, and it sinks, And is jealous ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... man gripped his arm so suddenly that Sinnet was startled—in so far as anything could startle any one who had lived a life of chance and danger and accident—and his face grew a shade paler; but he did not move, and ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... that a light has been found which can penetrate, so as to make a photographic record, through everything from a purse or a pocket to the walls of a room or a house, is news which cannot fail to startle everybody. That the eye of the physician or surgeon, long baffled by the skin, and vainly seeking to penetrate the unfortunate darkness of the human body, is now to be supplemented by a camera, making all the parts of the human body as visible, in a way, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only needs to be decently buried. Just think a moment, and it will startle you to see what slaves we are to bygone times,—to Death, if we give the matter ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... a sudden proud impulse he raised his head and looked at her with a bold steadfastness,—a critical scrutiny,—a calmly discriminating valuation of her physical charms that for the moment certainly appeared to startle her self-possession, for a deep flush colored the fairness of her face and then faded, leaving her pale as marble. Her emotion, whatever it was, lasted but a second,—yet in that second he had measured his mental strength against hers, and had become aware of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Did I startle you? I 'm so sorry," said Miss Sandus, coming up to her. "Yes, Don Antonio has arrived. I saw him as he disembarked at his native railway-station. I was ordering a book at Smith's. And such luggage, my dear. Boxes and bags, bags and boxes, till you ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... this moment the mob opened fire on the soldiers. This appeared for a moment to startle the captain and his men. But it was only for a moment. Then he coolly gave the command: "Ready! aim! fire!" The company obeyed to the instant, and poured a volley of bullets into that part of the mob which was trying to batter down the side door of ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... courtship, for he believed that he had a clear field before him, and he was too sagacious to startle Clara by overmuch energy. Meantime he began to be conscious that an influence from her was reaching his spirit. He had hitherto considered her a child; one day he suddenly recognized her as a woman. Now a woman, a ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Rue Lafitte, who I believe has been most malignantly traduced by the third-rate English Colony in Paris—all his faults exaggerated, none of his good qualities even hinted at. The good British public has so long been used to look upon him as a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and amuse it to be told that he ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... I'm so excited I'm all mixed up! She's had an awful spell, but she's better now; but you mustn't startle her. Something's the matter with her heart. It was beating like a ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... little enough here in America, either in the towns or in the cities," he said rapidly. "We are all on the rush. We are all for action. I sit still and think. If I wanted to write I'd do something. I'd tell what everyone thought. It would startle people, frighten them a little, eh? I would tell you what you have been thinking this afternoon while you walked here on this railroad track with me. I would tell you what your mother has been thinking at the same time and what she would like to ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... the earliest if not the first remarkable animal to startle a stranger on arriving in Ceylon, whilst wending his way from Point-de-Galle to Colombo, is a huge lizard of from four to five feet in length, the Talla-goya of the Singhalese, and Iguana[1] of the Europeans. It ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... waitin' in it," he growled. "I have waited long enough, and too long, and you must choose between us now. You know we will soon be at 'Five Fingers,' and you must be good or they may get you," with a wicked leer and clutch at her arm calculated to startle her as she carelessly sat on the ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... electoral franchise; there, you will find a free Church, a free school, free land, a free vote, and a free career for the child of the humblest born in the land. My countrymen who work for your living, remember this: there will be one wild shriek of freedom to startle all mankind if that ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... thoughts. Week after week pours onward its stream of low-born, corrupt, unspiritual feelings. Year after year accumulates that hardening mass of carnal-mindedness, and distaste for religion, which is sometimes a more insuperable obstacle to the truth, than positive faults and vices which startle and shock the conscience. And yet the man thinks nothing about all this action of his mind and heart. He does not subject it to any self-inspection. If he should, for but a single hour, be lifted ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... to be moral was to believe that under certain circumstances you would at some future time go to hell. Virtue of that kind was not to Edwards' taste, though few men have been less sparing in using the appeal to damnation. But threats of hell-fire were only meant to startle the sinner from his repose. His morality could be framed from no baser material than love to the Divine perfections. 'What thanks are due to you for not loving your own misery, and for being willing to take some pains to escape ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... burglars in the night—priding herself indeed on this timidity, and telling people that when you once had had a husband you lost your nerve for sleeping alone. So Caroline knew there was no help to be had in that quarter, and yet she did not like to startle Miss Ethel after that fall among the half-built houses which had been more than an ordinary faint, though no one made anything ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... the knight, 'I was anxious to hasten as quickly as possible through the forest, for it seemed to me that not only might I find it difficult to regain the pathway I had lost, but that strange beings might again startle both me and my ...
— Undine • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... rhythmic arrangement will be felt to bear force and impressiveness both to reader and to hearer. In the remaining Books changes will be found fewer in number and less striking; but occasionally, as for example in 1 Kings xx. 27, we come across changes that startle us by their unlooked-for character, but which, if correct, add a deeper degradation to the outpoured blood of Ahab ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... sometimes is apt to run away with him. He must give us next, not scattered scenes, but a whole epic, the middle of which shall be as obvious as the beginning or the end. He should, in his next work, seek less to please, startle, or gain an audience, than to tell them in thunder and in music what they ought to believe and to do. Thus acting, he may "fill his crescent-sphere;" revive the power and glory of song; give voice to a ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... trees on de banks and 'round, wid long moss hangin' from de limbs. I baited my hook wid a small, wigglin', live, minnow and throwed out into de water. Nothin' happen. In de warm sunshine I must have gone to sleep, when I was startle out my doze by Henry a shoutin': 'Marse Johnnie, Marse Johnnie, your cork done gone down out of sight!' I made a pull but felt at once it would take both hands to land dat fish. I took both hands, put ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... Turgenieff's stories with the knowledge that they were composed—or rather that they came into being—in this way, one can trace the process in every line. Story, in the conventional sense of the word—a fable constructed, like Wordsworth's phantom, 'to startle and waylay'—there is as little as possible. The thing consists of the motions of a group of selected creatures, which are not the result of a preconceived action, but a consequence of the qualities of the actors."—And ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... patting him paternally on the back, not to startle everybody again. If he should see another onca he had better come to me. I seldom missed when I fired at all—as I had been able to show them a few days before. I did not wish my men to behave like so many timid young girls, as I wished to be able to tell people in Europe that Brazilians ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... property altogether. They were extreme Communists, and so were many of the earlier Socialists; in More's Utopia, doors might not be fastened, they stood open; one hadn't even a private room. These earlier writers wished to insist upon the need of self-abnegation in the ideal State, and to startle and confound, they insisted overmuch. The early Christians, one gathers, were almost completely communistic, and that interesting experiment in Christian Socialism (of a rather unorthodox type of Christianity), the American Oneida community, was successfully communistic in every respect for ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... the puppets turn independent agents. He represented to Talboys that Lucy was young and very innocent in some respects; that marriage did not seem to run in her head as in most girls'; that a precipitate avowal might startle her, and raise unnecessary difficulties by putting her on her guard too early in their acquaintance. "You have no rival," he concluded; "best win her quietly by degrees. Undermine the coy jade! she is worth it." ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... whom he was brought in contact, so he was very uncharitable in his judgment of them; and thus having really a low opinion of so many of them he could indulge his vindictive rancor without stint; his invective, always powerful, will sometimes startle us by its venom, and we shall be pained to see him apt to make enemies for a good cause by making ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... very much upset?" queried Flora de Barral, meaning, of course, Mrs. Fyne. And I admitted that she was less so than her husband—and even less than myself. Mrs. Fyne was a very self-possessed person which nothing could startle out of her extreme theoretical position. She did not seem startled when Fyne and I proposed going ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... late at night, and even if they startle me a little when I'm in bed, the pleasure of going to sleep again is all the greater. But in the morning I awaken them, when I put my room in order. Then they scold a little and go." I had been observing him in the mean time. His clothes were scrupulously clean, his figure ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and whether venomous or not it was enough to startle the watcher, as a serpent some seven or eight feet in length came into sight, travelling through the undergrowth, with its scales ever changing in tint as its folds came more or less into connection with the light that penetrated ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... not wish to be in a hurry to make my revelations to the world at large. I do not wish to startle people without being able to show them proof of what I say. I wish to speak only to persons who are worthy to hear my story, and I have begun with you. I do not want you to believe me until you are quite ready to do so. Think over what I have said, consider it carefully, ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... ascendency, and his finest renditions grew "out of tune and harsh." In depicting the pathetic frenzy of Lear, such actors as he and Kean, when at their best, can surpass all rivals; and the grotesque, darkly-powerful ideals of Richard and Shylock are precisely those in which they will startle us to the last, gathering new, though fitful, expressions of hate and scorn, as their own natures sink from ethereal to grosser atmospheres. The mouth catches most surely the growing tendency of a soul; and on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... beauty of their individual sky-blue flowers. No wonder a neat housewife finds them an eyesore. But I never pass the spot in August (I do not pass it at all after that) without seeing that hers is only one side of the story. My approach is sure to startle a few goldfinches (and they too are most estimable neighbors), to whom these scraggy herbs are quite as useful as my excellent lady's apple-trees and pear-trees are to her. I watch them as they circle ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... to engage the wonder at any price; that it would startle the naturalists, wake up the whole scientific world, draw in the masses, and make $20,000 for the Museum. Barnum told him that he thought well of the speculation, only he did not like ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... as if they had never seen it before, and then one of them turned on me quickly, as if to startle me. "Vous etes ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... traffic in the Edgware Road. Then she would drop back again, to crouch against the wall, drawing the quilt about her, and remain motionless until a step on the stair or the banging of a door below would startle her ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... she will kill herself," I answered, thinking that this resolve would startle Henriette. But when she heard it a disdainful smile, more expressive than the thoughts it conveyed, flickered on her lips. "My dear conscience," I continued, "if you would take into account my resistance and the seductions that led to my fall you ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... I'll startle you. Sixty years ago, the grandfather of Admiral Semmes made whisky ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... I. And that is what I must find out. I have my suspicions. My dear, don't let me startle you, but have you ever thought that it might ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... give happiness? look round, and see What gay distress! what splendid misery! Whatever fortune lavishly can pour, The mind annihilates, and calls for more! Wealth is a cheat; believe not what it says; Like any lord it promises—and pays. How will the miser startle, to be told Of such a wonder, as insolvent gold! What nature wants has an intrinsic weight; All more, is but the fashion of the plate, Which, for one moment, charms the fickle view; It charms us now; anon we cast anew; To some fresh birth of fancy more inclin'd: Then wed not acres, but a noble ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... goods in Cap'n Abe's store did not so much startle the visitor, as the figure that rose from behind the counter, where he ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... an' flung him down against the wall. I got one glance out into the hall, an' didn't care no more what become o' him. You was facin' the whole mob of 'em, swingin' a gun barrel, an' I knew where I belonged. But damned if that feller didn't startle me. He was up like a flash to his feet, an' I thought he was trying to get me. But he wasn't. When I run to you, he wasn't two steps behind, an' may I be jiggered, sir, if he didn't jump in there on ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... migrations, but, on the contrary, goes as far away from them as possible, preferably to some mountain region, beside a cool and dashing brook, where a party of adventurous young climbers from a summer hotel or the lonely trout fisherman may startle it from its mossy nest ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... one night as usual. No word had fallen from my lips, at that time or at any time before it, that could betray me, or startle her into sudden knowledge of the truth. But when we met again in the morning, a change had come over her—a change ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... fingers over the big staring letters, as over the black and white keys of a piano, drumming out of them a mild melody of perfect repose. With what delight do we disport us in the illimitable void of its nothingness, as who should swim in air! Here is nothing to startle-nothing to wound. The very atmosphere is saturated with "the spirit of the rural press;" and even our dog stands by, with pendant tail, slowly dropping the lids over his great eyes; and then, jerking them suddenly ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
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