"Abject" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... much better dressed, he was certain of that. But he was equally assured that not one of them would have forborne to laugh at his plight, as he sat abject and ridiculous in the very largest puddle in ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... the latter being more perfect in its beauty, and the smaller size enabling you to see it all at once, and feel it more like an exquisite picture. The city he conceived the greatest dislike to.[98] "The condition of the common people here is abject and shocking. I am afraid the conventional idea of the picturesque is associated with such misery and degradation that a new picturesque will have to be established as the world goes onward. Except Fondi, there is nothing on earth that I have seen so dirty as Naples. I don't know ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... with her was gone the secret of his treason. Then he began to doubt. I had MEANS to penetrate all his thoughts, as well as to know his acts. Then he became a slave to a horrible fear. He fled in abject terror to a convent. They still existed in Paris; and behind the walls of Jacobins the wretch thought himself secure. Poor fool! I had but to set one of my somnambulists to sleep. Her spirit went forth and spied the shuddering wretch in his cell. She described the street, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... passages, and the most remote from the organs of the senses, lest these be offended at them. Thus the wonders of this machine are so great and numerous, that we find some unfathomable, even in the most abject and mortifying functions of the body, which modesty will not allow ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... had gone yawning to bed, he returned and sat at the window for a little, smoking hard and puzzling out the knots which confronted him. He had a dismal anticipation of failure. Not defeat—that was a little matter; but an abject show of incompetence. His feelings pulled him hither and thither. He could not utter moral platitudes to checkmate his opponent's rhetoric, for, after all, he was honest; nor could he fill the part of the cold critic of hazy sentiment; ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... over the sick man. One slim, white hand was stroking his face gently, and she was speaking to him in a voice so sweet and soft that it stirred like wonderful music in Wapi's warped and beaten soul. And then, with a great sigh, he flopped down, an abject slave, on ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... Street, and Matterson, of Pitt Street, make a highly creditable show, and in the southern capital, Jenkins, of Swanston Street, is well known for his excellent display. Otherwise the exhibition of fish for sale in either city is disappointing in the extreme, and is nothing less than an abject confession of our inability to develop ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... of St. Genevieve were taken round the walls. In several places the Danes had formed breaches in the walls, and although the besieged still struggled, hope had well-nigh left them, and abject terror reigned in the city. Women ran about the streets screaming, and crying that the end was at hand. The church bells tolled dismally, and the shouts of the exultant Danes rose higher and higher. Again a general cry rose to St. Germain to come ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... could do it, by almost any distant allusion. As likely as not he would start his endless denunciations in the very billiard-room where Mrs. Schomberg sat enthroned as usual, swallowing her sobs, concealing her tortures of abject humiliation and terror under her stupid, set, everlasting grin, which, having been provided for her by nature, was an excellent mask, in as much as nothing—not even death itself, perhaps—could ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... afterwards, the honor and worship due to Him to a calf, which they believed to be the god who had brought them out of Egypt. In truth, it is hardly likely that men accustomed to the superstitions of Egypt, uncultivated and sunk in most abject slavery, should have held any sound notions about the Deity, or that Moses should have taught them anything beyond a rule of right living; inculcating it not like a philosopher, as the result of freedom, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... the sunshine. A thrush came out and sang to him. A west wind brought him wafts of perfume from the gardens below. The serenity of the perfect afternoon mocked his disturbed frame of mind. What was the use of it all? The longer he remained here the more abject he became! . . . Suddenly Edith reappeared alone. She came across the lawn to him with a slight frown upon her forehead. He lay there and watched her until the last moment. Then he rose and dragged out a chair ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Theognis to have been a man altogether of a base and abject spirit, for saying, as one overfearful in regard to poverty, which ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... cases are not strictly analogous to that of our West Indian slaves, whose emancipation we are seeking. It will be contended, that the slaves in our West Indian colonies have been constantly in an abject and degraded state. Their faculties are benumbed. They have contracted all the vices of slavery. They are become habitually thieves and liars. Their bosoms burn with revenge against the whites. How then can persons in such a state be fit to receive their freedom? The slaves, ...
— Thoughts On The Necessity Of Improving The Condition Of The Slaves • Thomas Clarkson
... one apart from the dangers and hysteric strivings of his fellows. Once when Theriere happened to glance in his direction the Frenchman mentally ascribed the mucker's seeming lethargy to the paralysis of abject cowardice. "The fellow is in a blue funk," thought the second mate; "I did not misjudge him—like all his kind he is ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... from the first under the crowning unhappiness of unhappiness, that it ceases to be interesting. The five books of the Tristia, written during the earlier years of his banishment, still retain, through the monotony of their subject, and the abject humility of their attitude to Augustus, much of the old dexterity. In the four books of Epistles from Pontus, which continue the lamentation over his calamities, the failure of power is evident. He went on writing profusely, because there was nothing else ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... interesting as well as historically important. One must admit that his position was not one to encourage impartiality in his presentation of facts, and that the imperial favour was not won by plain speaking; nevertheless we have before us a man who could not obliterate himself enough to play the abject flatterer always, and he gives us the reverse, too, of his brilliant picture, as we ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... accompanied them. The crowd carrying torches or high crates with flaming coco-nuts, walked or rather danced along on each side, elated and excited with the sense of the present divinity, yet pleasantly free from any abject awe. The whole thing indeed reminded one of some bas-relief of a Bacchanalian procession carved on a Greek sarcophagus—and especially so in its hilarity and suggestion of friendly intimacy with the god. There were singing of hymns and the floating of the chief actors on a raft round a sacred ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... stinging blow on one ear, followed immediately by a sharp slap on the side of her head from the big grey cat, sent her reeling dizzily away from the dish. She recovered herself and turned in abject terror, her one thought to escape from this uncalled for abuse, but directly in her path stood the black-and-white cat with lashing tail and flaming eyes. Another turn, and she was again confronted by the grey, crouching angrily ready ...
— The Book of the Cat • Mabel Humphrey and Elizabeth Fearne Bonsall
... through their sinful folly Are workers of iniquity, Living on Jehovah's bounty, Wasting in abject poverty. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... and such a night as this, that I scarcely knew what to do. Recovering myself, I called out to know if I could render assistance—if she wished to ride? No answer. I drove faster, the horse blinking, and shying, and trembling the while, his ears laid back in abject terror. Still the figure maintained its position close to my horse's head. Then I thought that what I saw was no woman, but perchance a man disguised for the purpose of robbing me, seeking an opportunity to seize the bridle and stop the horse. ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... to be said. I went home to my morning's work, and returned in the afternoon to receive the apologies of the minority for the conduct of the majority, and to see Mr Granville Barker, overwhelmed by the conscience-stricken politeness of the now almost abject Committee, and by a powerful smell of carnations, heading the long list of playwrights who came there to testify against the censorship, and whose treatment, I am happy to say, was everything ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... me get you to your feet," Harry said, holding out his hands, but with a feeling of some disgust at the abject fear expressed in the tones of the man's voice. He was indeed trembling so that even when Harry hauled him to his feet he ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... the long summer months. In those days her eyes had filled with tears of pity for herself. They were dry now, for the suffering was real and the pain was in her bodily heart. Yet she was so strong, and she feared Paul Griggs with such an abject fear, that she played the comedy when she could not make him ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... like a groveling serpent in the ooze, there lies Caliban, abject in fear, with not a ray of love. Hopeless, loveless, see him lie—a spectacle so sad as to make the ragged ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... trail, and everything seems to conspire toward a pleasant trip. To prove it, Luck found another telegram waiting for him in Albuquerque. This was from Martinson, and might be interpreted as an apology more or less abject. Certainly it was an urgent request that he return immediately to Los Angeles and to his old place at the Acme, and produce Western pictures under ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... prerogatives, should have been occasionally styled by the English colonists "the emperor of the Five Nations." It might seem, indeed, at first thought, that the founders of the confederacy had voluntarily placed themselves and their tribes in a position of almost abject subserviency to Atotarho and his followers. But they knew too well the qualities of their people to fear for them any political subjection. It was certain that when once the league was established, and its representatives had met in council, character ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... overshadowed his spirit. It was a wavy harvest morning in a village of the north. A golden wind was blowing, and little white clouds flying aloft in the sunny blue. The church was full of well known faces, upturned, listening, expectant, critical. The hour vanished in a slow mist of abject misery and shame. But had he not learned to rejoice over all dead hopes, and write Te Deums on their coffin lids? And now he stood in dim light, in the vapour from damp garments, in dinginess and ugliness, with ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... that scarcely one of them but contains the outline of some rainbow-chasing scheme, full of wild optimism, and the certainty that somewhere just ahead lies the pot of gold. Only, now and then, there is a letter of abject humiliation and complete surrender, when some golden vision, some iridescent soap-bubble, had vanished at his touch. Such depression did not last; by sunrise he was ready with a new dream, new ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... establishment in Ohio, is getting servants, or, as it is there called, "getting help," for it is more than petty treason to the Republic, to call a free citizen a servant. The whole class of young women, whose bread depends upon their labour, are taught to believe that the most abject poverty is preferable to domestic service. Hundreds of half-naked girls work in the paper-mills, or in any other manufactory, for less than half the wages they would receive in service; but they think their equality is compromised by the latter, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... bare floor is a sign of mourning, and so, by association of ideas, of an abject attitude ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... servant, knowing the people he has to deal with down to the very marrow of their bones, has become rarer of late years. The Brahmin clerk was a very intelligent man, and spoke English admirably, but I took a great dislike to him, noting the abject way in which the natives fawned on him. Colonel Erskine had to discharge him soon afterwards, as he found that he had been exploiting the villagers mercilessly for years, taking bribes right and left. From much ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... some three weeks or less after his parting with Sally, he took her out to dinner. He donned evening dress, loudly cursing the formality, and brought her to a fashionable restaurant, where he gently cursed the abject civility of the waiters beneath ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... they have been proscribed on account of their color; there is a bitter and cruel prejudice against them everywhere, and a large minority of the people of this country to-day, if they had the power, would deprive them of all political and civil rights and reduce them to a state of abject servitude. Women have not been enslaved. Intelligence has not been denied to them; they have not been degraded; there is no prejudice against them on account of their sex; but, on the contrary, if they deserve ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... ourselves and our children in eternal ignorance and wretchedness to support them and their families, would he be to us a God of Justice? I ask, O, ye Christians, who hold us and our children in the most abject ignorance and degradation that ever a people were afflicted with since the world began—I say if God gives you peace and tranquility, and suffers you thus to go on afflicting us, and our children, who have ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... querulously. "I am tired of it. Here is its type and history," touching a county newspaper,—"a fair type, with its cant, and bigotry, and weight of uncomprehended fact. Bargain and sale,—it taints our religion, our brains, our flags,—yours and mine, Knowles, with the rest. Did you never hear of those abject spirits who entered neither heaven nor hell, who were neither faithful to God nor rebellious, caring ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... first rebuff," he was saying complacently to himself; "the girl will reflect, and that old schemer will think better of it. Her round eyes fairly blinked at the sight of my gold; it dazzled her like the noonday sun. Besides, their abject misery will plead in my favor, and I have no reason to despair. Two months of fat living will suffice to make the girl the prettiest woman in Paris; and she will do me credit at very small cost. But I must think of business now; I have made a ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... himself. No one acquires love for God without being soon wholly enkindled by it; thus it was no longer sufficient for Mgr. de Laval to instruct and console the poor and the sick, he served them also in the most abject duties, going as far as to wash with his own hands their sores and ulcers. A madman, the world will say; why not content one's self with attending those people without indulging in the luxury of heroism so repugnant? This would have sufficed ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... body, and suddenly the portal disgorged Lee—in erratic haste. His hat presently followed. Dazedly awhile he surveyed the grinning trio of witnesses to his discomfiture; then, picking up his battered head-piece he crammed it down upon his bald cranium with a vicious, yet abject, gesture. ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... done—but yesterday a King! And armed with Kings to strive— And now thou art a nameless thing: So abject—yet alive! Is this the man of thousand thrones, Who strewed our earth with hostile bones, And can he thus survive?[243] Since he, miscalled the Morning Star,[244] Nor man nor fiend hath ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Eugene and Hortense conducted their mother to her apartment, where she threw herself upon her couch in abject misery. In equally sleepless woe, Napoleon retired to his cabinet. Two days of wretchedness passed away. On the third, the love for Josephine, which still reigned in the heart of Napoleon, so far triumphed that he entered ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... do not," I said, still with my abject humility. "Don't take any more trouble—let me ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... politeness—a singular intuitive refinement pervading all his actions, which indicated, through many centuries of brutalisation, that fountain-source of all politeness—the Oriental. Many a time I have found among Gipsies whose life, and food, and dress, and abject ignorance, and dreadful poverty were far below that of most paupers and prisoners, a delicacy in speaking to and acting before ladies, and a tact in little things, utterly foreign to the great majority of poor ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... as yet contains only one forty-second part of the population of France; and one half of its inhabitants, being in the most abject indigence, consume but little. Its revenue is nearly equal to that of the Republic of Columbia, and it exceeds the revenue of all the custom-houses of the United States* before the year 1795, when that confederation had 4,500,000 inhabitants, while ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... better elements of the country realize that Madero no longer represents an individual or even a political administration. He represents the civilization of Mexico struggling against the unreined savagery of a population which has known no law but abject fear, and having lost that fear and the restraint which it imposed upon it, threatens to deliver Mexico to such a reign of anarchy, rapine, and terror as would be without a parallel in modern ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... Candians (Cretans) their voices would be forcibly heard, and the Turkish rule beneath the British uniform would be quickly overthrown. The Cypriote, down-trodden for centuries, is like sodden tinder that will not awaken to the spark: he is what is called "easily governed;" which means an abject race, in which all noble aspirations have been stamped out by years of unremitting oppression and injustice; still, like the Cyprian ox, he ploughs the ground. It is the earth alone that yields the world's wealth: if we have no other thoughts but avarice, let us treat the Cypriote as we should ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... now; but be d—d careful how you say it," was the reply, with a sneer that would have stung an abject slave into a longing for revenge, and that grated on Mr. Billings's nerves in a way that made him clinch his fists and involuntarily grit his teeth. Could it be that O'Grady detected it? One quick, wistful, half-appealing glance flashed from ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... woman must have loved him much, who, after seeing that look of hers, would have married him. But a moment after she was listening with abject ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... uneasy conscience, he has recourse to penance and mortification, to painful sacrifices and ritual observances, in the hope, that by these he may propitiate an offended Deity. In the one case, the conflict ends in practical Atheism, in the other, in abject Superstition. And these two, Atheism and Superstition, however different and even opposite they may seem to be, are really offshoots from the same corrupt root,—"the evil heart of unbelief which departeth from the living God." In the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... to be present when such exhibitions of negro feeling and susceptibility took place. How could he, seeing that men and women and children—if black—fled from him, and such as he, in abject terror? Neither did Yoosoof ever chance to be present when women sat down beside their blackened hearths, as they did that night, and quietly wept as though their hearts would burst at the memory of little ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... guarded only from the sun. During canoe season the dogs are treated atrociously. Let us remember, first, that these are dogs in every doggy sense, the worshipping servants of man, asking nothing but a poor living in return for abject love and tireless service, as well as the relinquishment of all family ties and natural life. In winter, because they cannot serve without good food, they are well fed on fish that is hung on scaffolds in the fall in time to be frozen before wholly spoiled. The ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... by the happiness which it diffuses, whose claim, by that proof, shall stand higher than that of Mrs. Montagu, from the munificence with which she celebrated her annual festival for those hapless Artificers who perform the most abject offices of any authorised calling in being the active guardians of our blazing hearths? Not to vain glory but to kindness of heart, should be adjudged the publicity of that superb charity which made its jetty ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... the contempt he was forming for King James. His Majesty had consented to see Monmouth. To have done so unless he intended to pardon him was a thing execrable and damnable beyond belief; for the only other object in granting that interview could be the evilly mean satisfaction of spurning the abject penitence ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... saw through you and hated you long ago; from the day I first heard of you. I hated you with my whole heart. You have contrived all this! You have driven me into this state! You have made a dying man disgrace himself. You, you, you are the cause of my abject cowardice! I would kill you if I remained alive! I do not want your benefits; I will accept none from anyone; do you hear? Not from any one! I want nothing! I was delirious, do not dare to triumph! I curse every one ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... other saddle-blanket over him. He lay on his side, his face to the fire, one moment saying over the words of the psalm, but the next listening in abject terror to something ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... but yesterday I rescued him From abject wretchedness. Let that go by; I never reckon'd yet on gratitude. And wherein doth he wrong in going from me? He follows still the god whom all his life He has worship'd at the gaming-table. With My fortune, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... her self-abasement. Her own character stood revealed, to herself in all its meanness—its sordid longing for worldly wealth—its willingness to stoop to falsehood in the pursuit of a woman's lowest aim, a good establishment. Seen in the light of abject failure, the scheme of her life seemed utterly detestable. Success would have gilded everything. As the wife of the rich Brian she would have done her duty in all wifely meekness and obedience, and would have gone down ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... in existence which furnish a luxuriant soil for a baleful crop of future evil. But a few years ago three and a half millions of human beings were held in our country in a state of abject bondage, deprived of every vestige of freedom and every trace of manhood. But why refer to slavery, it may be asked, since it has already become a thing of the past? Slavery, to be sure, on the ground of political ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... to the highest places by his sword or his luck. Every single Grand Vizier and Kapudan Pasha has a nickname which points to his lowly origin; this one was a woodcutter, that one a stone-mason, that other one a fisherman. Therefore a Mohammedan never looks down upon the most abject of his co-religionists, for he knows very well that if he himself happens to be uppermost to-day and the other undermost, by to-morrow the whole world may have turned upside down, and this last may have ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... fiord; the sea is my steed and I bridle it; I know where the singing flower grows, and the talking light descends, and fragrant colors shine! I wear the seal of Solomon; I am a fairy; I cast my orders to the wind which, like an abject slave, fulfils them; my eyes can pierce the earth and behold its treasures; for lo! am I not the virgin to whom the pearls dart ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... and pictures and books and theatres, and sufficient food and clothing. Isn't it strange that when we might have been so happy we preferred to be so wretched? For even if we had all we wanted ourselves, we could not escape the sights and sounds that told of abject misery." ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... withdrawal of the words. When Thomas refused, he broke up the council in a burst of anger, and suddenly rode away from London, instantly followed by the whole body of trembling bishops, who hurried after him in abject terror, "lest before they should be able to catch him up, they should already have lost their sees." Thomas was left alone—"there was not one who would know him,"—while the prelates, coming up in time with their terrible lord, ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... of Apollo.[172] To the actual conversation there were only two witnesses, Cluvius Rufus[173] and Silius Italicus,[174] but the expression of their faces was watched from a distance. Vitellius was said to look abject and demoralized: Sabinus showed less sign ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... company & fought a batail. Some weare slaine of both sids. The Captayne of these of the Sault lost his eye by an arrow. The batail being over he made a speech, & said that he lost his fight of one side, & of the other he foresee what he would doe; his courage being abject by that losse, that he himselfe should be ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... unconscious to himself) which I am always looking for. To me all of them told the full story of what went before and necessitated the great French revolution—the long precedent crushing of the masses of a heroic people into the earth, in abject poverty, hunger—every right denied, humanity attempted to be put back for generations—yet Nature's force, titanic here, the stronger and hardier for that repression—waiting terribly to break forth, revengeful—the pressure on the dykes, and the bursting at last—the storming of the Bastile—the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... two dependents understood that they were being reproached for living at his expense, I don't know, but their stomachs looked more pinched than ever, and their whole figures shrivelled up, grew gloomier and more abject than before. . . . Their submissive air ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of a brave resistance or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or to die. Our own, our country's honor, calls upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion; and, if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... seemed to be absent a good while, though that feeling might have been occasioned by Duane's thrilling interest and anxiety. Finally he heard heavy steps. Lawson came in alone. He was leaden-faced, humiliated. Then something abject in him gave place to rage. He strode the room; he cursed. Then Longstreth returned, now appreciably calmer. Duane could not but decide that he felt relief at the evident ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... fiends of pride Caught Earth to brake their fall. The regions gave And sank with all the hosts beneath the wave! 'Tis in those sunken regions which divide The new world of the resolute and brave, From the old world of king and abject slave, Where Torries, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... and shame were dreadful for Joan to see, because she felt sorry for him, and divined that behind them would rise the darker, grimmer force of the man. And she was right, for suddenly he changed. That which had seemed almost to make him abject gave way to a pale and bitter dignity. He took up Dandy Dale's belt, which Joan had left on the bed, and, drawing the gun from its sheath, he opened the cylinder to see if it was loaded, and then threw ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... is of course a worshipper of Charles, and a hater of Puritans. We do not wish to raise a prejudice against so young a man by quoting any of the ridiculous, and often somewhat abject, rant with which he addresses their majesties on their return from Scotland, on the queen's delivery, on the birth of the Duke of York, and so forth; for in that he did but copy the tone of grave divines and pious prelates; but he, unfortunately for his fame, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... with one white ear; it was awful cunning," she confided mumblingly. "And it ate from my hand—all warm and sticky, like—loving sandpaper." There was no protest in her voice, nor any whine of complaint, but merely the abject submission to Fate of one who from earliest infancy had seen other crops blighted by other frosts. Then tremulously with the air of one who, just as a matter of spiritual tidiness, would purge her soul of all ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... for many years the recluse headquarters of the Jesuits, so of all enslaved Spanish-Americans probably the Guaranis are the worst. During Lent they will inflict stripes on their bodies, or almost starve themselves to death; and their abject humility to the Pa is sad to witness. On special church celebrations large processions will walk the streets, headed by the priests, chanting in Latin. The people sometimes fall over one another in their eager endeavors to kiss the priest's garments, They prostrate ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... departure—he came to join them. They watched his approach in silence, and both noted—though with different eyes and different feelings—the pallor of his fair face, the dark lines under his colourless eyes. His condition was abject, and his manners, never of the best—for there was much of the spoiled child about ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... The abject one found a glove of Grizel's, that she did not know she had lost, and put it in his pocket. There it lay, unknown to her. He knew that he must not even ask them to bury it with him in his grave. This was a ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... of his ambition; its reckless sacrifice in his daughter's honor appeared the only adequate expression of his love. The intervals of his devotion were passed in idle boasting, and to me he detailed every incident. There was something really touching in the abject way in which he mentioned each trifle concerning her. Little circumstances connected with her daily life were described as one would describe the traits of some rare animal. His career of degradation seemed to have blunted ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... convulsively and had drawn back in abject, cowering terror. What was it she saw? Evidently it was very real and very ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... You are within my gates. To touch you, is to touch me. She fully realizes that. Besides brother Thomas is her abject tool in most things; but some things even he would ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... Since you will be abject, since you will behave as though I was not a man of honour, here, right under your embedded eyes, I write the thing down—the plain truth about Pyecraft. The man I helped, the man I shielded, and who has requited me by making my ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... observe that the teeth they revealed were creditably white; her cotton-gloved hand repressed her fluttering heart, but he did not see its tumultuous throbbing. He gulped as he said, with a fallen jaw and a look of abject misery that pierced ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the door of his cave. It was Flavius, the honest steward, whom love and zealous affection to his master had led to seek him out at his wretched dwelling and to offer his services; and the first sight of his master, the once noble Timon, in that abject condition, naked as he was born, living in the manner of a beast among beasts, looking like his own sad ruins and a monument of decay, so affected this good servant that he stood speechless, wrapped up in horror ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... appears to demonstrate the possibility of reclaiming even the most abject and depraved of our juvenile population at a very moderate expense. The schools have been so long in operation, that, if there had been anything erroneous in the principles or the management of them, it must ere now have appeared; ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... influence, why is it that you thus throw obstacles in the way of advancing thought? Is it the law of God that you should persecute and put to shame that which eventually you will be compelled to adore? Had I been pliant, abject and a flatterer, I might have succeeded! In me you have persecuted that which represents all that is noblest in man—His consciousness of his own power, the majesty of his labor, the heavenly inspiration ...
— The Resources of Quinola • Honore de Balzac
... revenge by a Native a difficult and risky undertaking and, furthermore, there is to be considered the spirit of traditional submissiveness which at all times and in all places marks the attitude of the slave or serf towards his master. One has only to remember the many accounts of abject resignation by the peasants of France and the moujiks of Russia before the revolutions that changed the order of the past in those countries. No such considerations affect the Native where his anger and hatred are directed against one ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... Holding in his hands the malachite casket that was the symbol of his triumph, the Duke smiled dictatorially at his darling. He came near to thinking of her as a chattel. Then with a pang he remembered his abject devotion to her. Abject no longer though! The victory he had just won restored his manhood, his sense of supremacy among his fellows. He loved this woman on equal terms. She was transcendent? So was he, Dorset. To-night ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... old Mackenzie school, and the men under whom Canada was to secure unrestricted self-government. The truth is that the situation up to 1837 had been too abnormal to permit the constitutional radicals to show themselves in their true character. Mackenzie himself, in the rather abject letter with which he sought reinstatement in 1848, admitted the falsity of his old position: "Had I seen things in 1837 as I do in 1848, I would have shuddered at the very idea of revolt, no matter what our wrongs might ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... have saved Paul Linmere. His fate was decided. Twice I waylaid him in the streets, and showed him my pale face, which was not unlike the face of the dead. And as he believed that I was drowned, the sight of me filled him with the most abject terror. How I enjoyed the poor wretch's ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... of great reward. Until human nature changes we can expect nothing different. Socialism implies popular selection of industrial leadership. Wherever tried thus far in the world's history there has usually been abject failure. The mass can choose leaders in emotion but not directors of industry. The selection of experts by the non-expert can be wise only by accident. If the selection is not popular, then Socialism is tyranny, as its enemies charge. If it be popular, or in so far as it is popular, direction ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... by the emperor and his nobles. They placed Ernst under the ban of the empire, and thus deprived him of rank, wealth, and property, reducing him by a word from high estate to abject beggary. His life and liberty were left him, but nothing more, and, driven by despair, he sought the retreat of his fugitive friend Werner, who had taken refuge in the depths of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... already observed, the native princes, the nominal governors of the greater part of the country, are kept in the most perfect subjection by the Company; and the common Javanese are in the most abject state of slavery. The labourer is not only obliged, at fixed periods, to deliver a certain quantity of the fruits of his industry to the regent placed over him on behalf of the Company, for whatever price the latter chooses to allow ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... dependants and slaves. He was not more engaging in his carriage towards us; he would give no part of what he had to spare to any but Captain Cheap, whom his interest led him to prefer to the rest, though our wants were often greater. The captain, on his part, contributed to keep us in this abject situation, by approving this distinction the cacique shewed to him. Had he treated us with not quite so much distance, the cacique might have been more regardful of our wants. The little regard ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... Surroundings.—Undoubtedly the accommodations for physical comfort amidst which Jesus was born were few and poor. But the environment, considered in the light of the customs of the country and time, was far from the state of abject deprivation which modern and western ways would make it appear. "Camping out" was no unusual exigency among travelers in Palestine at the time of our Lord's birth; nor is it considered such to-day. It is, however, beyond question that Jesus was born into a comparatively ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Manwaring made accordingly a most abject submission at the bars of both Houses, Heylin says, on his knees and with tears in his eyes, confessing his sermons to have been "full of dangerous passages, inferences, and scandalous aspersions in most ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... sometimes in the absence of her husband, as accident, not arrangement, directed. They approached her with all the agitation and tenderness of the most ardent lovers. Amongst the number, was a certain celebrated orator. This man was her abject slave. A glance from her expressive eye raised him to the summit of bliss, or rendered his night sleepless. The complacent husband of Madame G——regarded these men as his most beloved friends, because they enlarged the happiness of ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... almost logical the moment before. Win Lou Macon by the power of fear, well enough, for was not fear the thing which she had followed all her life? Was it not through fear that the colonel himself had reduced her to such abject, unquestioning obedience? ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... and the emperor had the folly and arrogance, after all the disaster and defeat experienced by the arms of Ava, to demand homage from the English envoys. The firmness of these gentlemen, and the fear of renewed hostilities, caused the sovereign to waive his claims to forms and ceremonies of abject submission, and the issue was peaceful. Cordial relations with the Birmese dominions were not however established, either at that juncture or subsequently: but the salutary fear of British power, caused by the war of 1851-2-3, prevented ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... thousand dollars a year, and his expenditures could not have been more than six hundred. His dementia, ironically enough from the day that he came into his fortune, took the form of a most pitiable and abject fear that he would die in poverty, misery, and want; and so, year after year, cashing his checks as fast as he got them, never trusting the bank with a penny, he kept hiding away somewhere in his house every cent he could scrape and save from his income—which ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... up my fetter-chains to smite, was tripped heavily, felt my limbs close-pinioned and was dragged forth of the dungeon. And now, thus helpless at the mercy of these hideous, hooded forms that knew no mercy, my soul shrank for stark horror of what was to be, and my body shook and trembled in abject terror. ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... method of correspondence with the universe is not to be identified with "mere feeling" in its lowest and least orderly forms. Contemplation does not mean abject surrender to every "mystical" impression that comes in. It is no sentimental aestheticism or emotional piety to which you are being invited: nor shall the transcending of reason ever be achieved by way of spiritual ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... me to do?" The wretched man's tone was not merely humble—it was abject. His grand Prince Albert coat was torn in three places; one tail hung down dejectedly over his hip; one sleeve was ripped half-way out. His collar was unbuttoned and the ends rode up hilariously over his cheeks. His necktie was gone. His sleek hair stuck out in damp wisps about his frightened ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... population lives in abject poverty. Nearly 70% of all Haitians depend on the agriculture sector, which consists mainly of small-scale subsistence farming and employs about two-thirds of the economically active work force. The country has ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... with the temptation to feel completely happy again. A feeling of outrage, of resentment against nature itself, mingled with an agony of pity, as he noted on the now placid features a certain look of humility, almost abject, like the expression of a smitten child or animal, as of one, fallen at last, after bewildering struggle, wholly under the power of a merciless adversary. From mere tenderness of soul he would not ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... remanded to the guard-house and Paine brought over in his place. Howard swaggered insolently past the sergeant of the guard on his return, and when told to get ready to go out to work, replied, "I guess not, Johnny, unless you want to lose your stripes." But Paine came "home" scared and abject. Men in quarters said that both the captain and Sergeant Haney stormed at him until he didn't know black from white, and the temporary company clerk, excluded from the office during the conference, was called in finally to witness Paine's signature to a paper, the contents of which ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... ferocious in the hour of victory, as they were prone to fly at the first suspicion of defeat—men who delighted in bloodshed, but who preferred finding their victims ready bound for the slaughter. It was the abject cowardice of these troops, which gave so wonderful a career of success to the Vendeans; it was their diabolical cruelty which has made the sufferings of the royalists more notorious ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... full of spirit and the pride of life? The kitchen became her own domain where the three of us fought for the position of her most abject slave. Even Mary Ellen could scarcely work for watching her antics with an old stocking, which she pretended was a rat. Once she caught a live mouse and set us all shouting. Mary Ellen, in her excitement, upset a gravy-boat of hot gravy, and ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... me, Helen?" the man asked in a faint, trembling voice, and went on pleading with her, in words so abject and so wretched that they wrung the girl's heart more ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... without hitch or let up, reels off destruction. To such desperate beings the stock operator—the market-maker—is the straw to save them from drowning, and to him they turn as the one possible source of aid and hope. I only knew these men at sight's end, but they knew me and were sure in their abject plight that I could help them—by what wizardry they never stopped to think. They were terribly certain that unless the market turned, their brokers must have additional margin or their stock would be thrown overboard, sinking prices still lower and bringing down their friends' stock, and so ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... There was abject terror in it, and yet there was also a sort of grisly joy, and his eyes feasted on the silent agony ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... a train; only our friend beneath us seems superior to haste." "I would give a good deal to know," said Cortlandt, "what is pursuing those giants, and whether it is identical or similar to the mutilator of the mastodon. Nothing but abject terror could make them run like that." "I have a well-formed idea," said Bearwarden, "that a hunt is going on, with no doubt two parties, one in the woods on either side, and that the hunters may be on a scale commensurate with that of their victims." "If the excitement is caused by men," ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... Dunc, and then for Jock Howieson, which homage and tribute of victory Speug received with affected contempt but great pride of heart. In order to conceal his feelings he turned to his faithful henchman, little Nestie Molyneux, who, always a delicate-looking little laddie, was now an altogether abject spectacle, with torn clothes, dripping hair, and battered face. "Nestie," said Speug, in hearing of the whole school, "ye're a plucky little deevil," and although since then he has been in many places and has had various modest triumphs, that ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... therefore heir to all the family property; the second is his younger brother, the husband of Pamela, who has been disinherited on account of his marriage, and lives on half-pay in a state but little removed from abject poverty. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... "it won't last a month! We'll put them out of business if it does. They'll weaken, Mr. Barwig, you'll see! They'll weaken all right." The ashen appearance of Von Barwig's face, the abject despair he saw depicted there aroused the man's sympathy. "It won't be long, Mr. Barwig," he repeated in a softened voice. "I know it's hard, but what are we to do? If we don't ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... by no means certain that I should be a hero at the Equator, but I am fully convinced that I should be an abject coward at the North Pole. Three mornings ago I stood for two hours by the Ambulances de la Presse, and my teeth have not ceased to chatter ever since. I pity the unfortunate fellows who had to keep watch all night on the plateau of Villiers more than those who were put out of their misery the ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... this house. They're not the public. The public is that shouting, perspiring mob out there watching the soldiers, and Frau Berg and her boarders are the public, and so are the soldiers themselves. The public here are all the people who obey, and pay, and don't know; an immense multitude of slaves,—abject, greedy, pitiful. I don't think I ever could have imagined a thing so pitiful to see as these respectable middle-aged Berlin citizens, fathers of families, careful livers on small incomes, clerks, pastors, teachers, professors, drunk and mad out there publicly on the pavement, dancing ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... indignation, devoted them as sacrifices to her vengeance. Nor was her surprise so much the effect of his dissimulation, as of his want of taste and discernment. She inveighed against him, not as the most treacherous lover, but as the most abject wretch, in courting the smiles of such an awkward dowdy, while he enjoyed the favours of a woman who had numbered princes in the train of her admirers. For the brilliancy of her attractions, such as they at present shone, she appealed to the decision of her minister, who consulted ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... reduced him to a state of abject misery. He began to fear that he was really growing mad. In that case he would be a fit subject for a "keeper." He longed with unutterable longing to throw off this terrible restraint; but he could ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... said. "I'm all foam. But I've conquered his majesty King Devil for once. He's come back positively abject. My dear, do get up! ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... of the trial, Delano had maintained his confidence and composure; but at length the evidence of his own people, and the master and crew of the Helen, became so overwhelming that he lost all hope, and, overcome by the most abject fear, sunk down, and would have fallen, had he not been supported. Recovering himself a little, he broke forth into earnest petitions that his life might be spared. He made the most trivial and weak excuses for his conduct, ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... 'em to? Where is it drawin' the hull nation to? Is it drawin' 'em down into a slavery ten times more abject and soul-destroyin' than African slavery ever wuz? Tell me," sez ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... the military profession arises a corresponding contempt of all other professions whatsoever paid by fellow-citizens, and not by the king or the state. The clerical profession is in the most abject degradation throughout Southern Germany; and the reason why this forces itself less imperiously upon the public notice is, that, in rural situations, from the absence of a resident gentry (speaking generally), the pastor is brought into rare collision with those who style themselves ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Turn now to the second great civilization, the Roman. During the first centuries after the founding of Rome the Roman woman had no rights whatever, her condition being as abject as that of the Grecian. With the growth of riches and of power in the State, more social but still no legal freedom was accorded. The elder Cato complained of the allowing of more liberty, and urged that every father of a family should keep his wife in the proper state of servility; but in ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell |
