"Incubus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to himself over and over again, that it behoved him to make some great effort to shake off this incubus that depressed him; but yet no such effort had hitherto been even attempted. Now at last he arose and shook himself, and promised to himself that he would be a man. It might be that the misfortune under which he groaned was heavy, but let one's sorrow be what it ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... refused to countenance such policy in the duchies, and he resolved on a sudden stroke to relieve the Commonwealth from the incubus of the English mortgage. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to feel the incubus-load, which perseverance in sin heaps on the breast of the reckless offender. What was the most grievous of all, his power to shake off this dead weight was diminished in precisely the same proportion as the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... the central point to be the necessity of thrusting Austria out of the confederation. It is proved now that he was sagacious enough also to perceive that such a wrench would not lead to a permanent estrangement, but that Austria, removed once and for all from her incubus-like and dog-in-the-manger position within the federate body, would become, in her own interest and that of European ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... was she on the day of the last engagement of that pugnacious Porcupine, in the year 1805, when England was freed from her long incubus of invasion? ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... name him just now. This enemy of mine, knowing him to be weak,—knowing him to be an idiot, has got hold of him and persuaded him. He believes the story which is told to him, and then feels happy in shaking off an incubus. No doubt I have not been very soft with him,—nor, indeed, hard. I have kept out of his way, and he is willing to resent it; but he is afraid to face me and tell me that it is so. Here are the girls come back from Buntingford. Molly, ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... hearing this read Mark smiled sweetly, and looked very gracious; but, nevertheless, his heart did sink somewhat within him, for there had been a hope that a small windfall, coming now so opportunely, might enable him to rid himself at once of that dreadful Sowerby incubus. And then the will went on to declare that Mary, and Gerald, and Blanche, had also, by God's providence, been placed beyond want. And here, looking into the squire's face, one might have thought that ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... not a misnomer. Japan appears to me—and I may claim to have studied the matter with some little attention—to have no financial burdens, if burdens be taken to mean something that is inconveniently felt, that is difficult to carry. There is here no people weighed down under the crushing incubus of debt. There is a springiness and alertness, a go-ahead energy about the nation—symptoms not usually connected with the carrying of burdens. Japan seems to me to be in somewhat the same position in regard to finance as France was after the close of the war with Germany ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... leading men of the town and all Eastern North-Carolina make an effort and throw off the incubus that slavery has for a century placed over it, a bright career of prosperity would open before them. A new emigration, bringing energy and industry, would restore their worn-out lands, drain their swamps, educate their youth, and make Newbern echo with the hum of manufactures ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... recognized me at once, although I hardly knew in her the slender, pretty Victoria of old. Her eyes were soft and nice, but smallpox had pitted her nose and cheeks and the deadly incubus of flesh had upholstered her in many soft and cushiony folds. I asked her if she had married and she said she never had, which information I matched with promptness. She spoke English quite well and seemed prosperous and—yes, motherly. There's ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... degree of severity (may the Lord forgive me), and now. I know that in so doing I was guilty of a grave error. What I interpreted as misconduct was but a straining at his leash in an effort to extricate himself from the incubus of the negative self-feeling. He was, and probably is, a dull fellow and realized that he could not cope with the other boys in the school studies, and so was but trying to win some notice in other fields of activity. To him notoriety was preferable to obscurity. If I had only ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... time,—that they should turn disdainfully from the paths of honest industry, and that everything which constitutes the true wealth and greatness of a state should have been despised or forgotten in the lurid and blood-stained glare of military glory, which cowered like an incubus on the breast of Europe. The battle-fields were beyond the frontiers of their own country; the calamities of war were too far distant to obtrude their disheartening features; and no lamentations mingled with the public rejoicings. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... form rush up the mountain out of the oasis to tempt and torture us in our sleep. What could it have been that the goblin in a white robe and with flowing hair held in its arms? Very likely the stone with which the incubus loads our breast when he torments us. The other one seemed to fly, but I did not see its wings. That side-building must be where the Gaul lives with his ungodly wife, who has ensnared my poor Hermas. I wonder whether she is really so beautiful! ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... system, in one of whose veins I am a circulating drop. It is my business to help to keep the system sound, to do my duty without fear or favour. If disease—say a fouled conscience—contaminates me, it is for me to throw off the incubus, not accept it, and transmit the poison. Whatever my lapses of nature, I owe it to the entire system to work for purity in my allotted sphere, and not to allow any microbe bugbear to ride me roughshod, to the detriment ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... unfortunate blow to his own interests that Mr. Carlyle's marriage had been, the ruinous expense she had entailed upon the family. It struck a complete chill to Isabel's heart, and she became painfully impressed with the incubus she must be to Mr. Carlyle—so far as his pocket was concerned. Lord Mount Severn, with his little son, had paid them a short visit at Christmas and Isabel had asked him, apparently with unconcern, whether Mr. Carlyle had put himself very much out to the way to marry her; whether it had entailed ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... to a sound of water dashed on a courtyard, to sunlight streaming through a lattice. She thought she was in a foreign country. And Skrebensky was there an incubus upon her. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... morals. To be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia. When life was really vigorous and young, in Homeric times for instance, no one seemed to fear that it might be squeezed out of existence either by the incubus of matter or by the petrifying blight of intelligence. Life was like the light of day, something to use, or to waste, or to enjoy. It was not a thing to worship; and often the chief luxury of living ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the Revolution was practically bloodless, that great Empire was reduced to a state of chaos. Of course our newspapers made it appear as though everything were in our favour; that the old days of corruption and Czardom were over, and that the people, freed from the tyranny and the ghastly incubus of autocracy, would now rise in their might and their millions, and would retrieve what they had lost in the Eastern lines. Some prophesied that the Revolution in Russia was but the beginning of a movement which should destroy all autocratic Governments and, with ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... quite sufficient, and pay the money back when it is quite convenient.' Disinterested, most praiseworthy man! He left me, impressed with his benevolence, and with my spirit at rest. With the dismissal of my incubus, my appetite was restored. I partook of a hearty dinner, and returned home, happy as a boy again. At the end of a week, I was enabled to repay my benefactor; but, at the end of a fortnight; I was again in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... cloud of human slavery, which for over two hundred weary years had hung, incubus-like, over the American nation, had happily passed away. The bright sunshine of emancipation's glorious day shone over a race at last providentially rescued from the worst fate recorded in all the world's dark history. Up out of the house of bondage, where ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... for a long time. Finally he appeared to throw off the incubus, and, with a return ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... tell mothers stories of the "marvelous improvement in school progress of those children whose brains have been poisoned and starved by the accursed adenoid growths, and how their bodies fairly bloom when the mysterious and awful incubus is removed," to use the words of one school principal. It is worth while to show them "before" and "after" pictures, and "before" and "after" children, and ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... dashing rides to Norton Bury. Above all, I like coming back. The minute I begin to climb Enderley Hill, the tan-yard, and all belonging to it, drops off like an incubus, and I wake into free, beautiful life. Now, Phineas, confess; is not this common a lovely place, ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... under Etna. The fiery eruptions of the mountain are his breath, and the shaking of it ascribed to his shifting from one side to another. In the latter regard he serves in literature as the symbol of a blind, often impotent, struggle to throw off some oppressive incubus. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... foiled ambition. She could again be patient, if patience might be of any service; but in such a condition an eternity of patience is simply suicidal. She was willing to work hard, but how could she work harder than she had worked. Poor young woman,—perishing beneath an incubus which a false idea of fashion had ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... Ambrose Merlin, the prince of enchanters, son of the nun Matilda, and an incubus, "half-angel and half-man." He made, in addition to Prince Arthur's armor and weapons, the Round Table for one hundred and fifty knights at Carduel, the magic fountain of love, and built Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. He died spellbound by the sorceress Vivien ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... worst of worlds, righteousness and justice and truth had been something more than names. Doom had fallen; for more than a twelvemonth the ruins had smouldered, and to-day they were but the harmless haunt of bat and badger. And the world relieved of that intolerable incubus, and recovered of its purging and cleansing sickness, had started once more upon its appointed path—slowly, indeed, at the first, but ever onward ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... manner to himself, his defiant taunts, his final challenge! Langholm was not sorry to remember the last; it relieved him from the moral incubus of the clandestine and the underhand; it bid him go on and do his worst; it set his eyes upon the issue as between himself and Steel, and it shut them to the final possibilities as touching the woman in ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... part against the Catholic Church, on the basis of the Protestant tradition. Moreover, I had never as an Anglican been a lover of the actual Establishment; Hurrell Froude's Remains, in which it is called an "incubus" and "Upas Tree," will stand in evidence, as for him, so for me; for I was one of the editors. What I said even as an Anglican, it is not strange that I said when I was not. Indeed I have been milder in my thoughts of the Establishment ever since I have been a Catholic than before, ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... of his incubus, he walked somewhat faster than his ordinary, and he was already some way through Kensington Gardens when, in a solitary spot among trees, he found himself ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... just the faintest suggestion of a sound outside. It was Enid listening with all her ears. She had not been long in discovering what had happened. Once the ghastly farcical incubus was off her shoulders she had followed Littimer upstairs. As she passed Henson's room the drone of voices struck on her ears. She stood there and listened. She would have given much for this not to have happened, but everything happened for the ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... raining hard—a dogged, dreary downpour drilling through a heavy atmosphere whose enervation was like the oppression of some malign and inexorable incubus; its incessant crepitation resembling the mutter of a weary, sullen drum, dwarfing to insignificance the stuttering of machine-guns remote in the northward, dominating even a dull thunder of cannonading somewhere ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, harkened—I know not why, except that ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... human nature borne down and bleached of all its color by it, the shapes that are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in the darkness, and the weak organizations kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming time. Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in its full stature and native lines in the sunshine. Then shall ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... is even harmful in many ways and terribly destructive. It promotes war. It makes the individual helpless, and crushes him with a sense of his unimportance. It abets the injustice of capitalism. It excludes citizens from any participation in foreign affairs. We must indeed not let this incubus of state overwhelm us. We must keep it in its proper place, even in performing its necessary functions, such as preserving public health. It is better to take some risk, even in such matters, than to override too much ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... forgotten her: I remember her only too well. She is the burden, the incubus of my life. Oh, I know all that you can tell me about her: I know her beauty, her gifts, her virtues; but all that does not charm me. You, you and no other, are the woman that I love; and, beside you, Ethel is nothing to me ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... with endless supplementary adhesions by the minor powers. Seven grand mother-treaties, not to mention the daughters, or supplementary adhesions they had; all Europe rising spasmodically seven times, and doing its very uttermost to quell this terrible incubus; all Europe changing color seven times, like a lobster boiling, for twenty years. Seven diplomatic Crises, we say, marked changings of color in the long-suffering lobster; and two so-called Wars,—before this enormous zero could ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... about L.35 sterling. These are thus tempted to prey upon the people. Such is the terrible organization which the King and Parliament have to encounter in carrying out their reforms, and such is the fearful incubus which has pressed for ages upon the social rights and industrial energies of the ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... help of the great French monarchy to maintain his authority at home; and when his successor turned out to be an anachronism, and found that the loyalty of the nation would not bear the strain of a policy hostile to the strongest national impulses, he was thrown off as an intolerable incubus. The system which had been growing up beneath the surface was now definitely put into shape and its fundamental principles embodied in legislation. The one thing still needed was to work out the system of party government, which meant that parliament should become an organised body ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... Besides, a new scourge was inflicted upon them, compulsory service in the army, unknown until then, a frightful service, with an active period of twenty-five years. Children were torn from their families and their faith, and the whole life of a man was swallowed up. They struggled against this new incubus with all the weapons at the disposal of a feeble population. Bribery, premature marriage, wholesale evasion, voluntary or forced substitution, were the means employed by the well-to-do to save their progeny from ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... there is no sense of restraint in keeping within the limits beyond which we do not seek to go. The willing spirit sets us free, free from the 'ancient solitary reign' of the despot Self, free from the mob rule of passions and appetites, free from the incubus of evil habits, free from the authority of men's voices and examples. Obedience is freedom to them that have learned to love the lips that command. We are set free that we may serve: 'O Lord! truly I am Thy servant; Thou hast loosed ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... equal," and the wrongs of whose victims have of late been so touchingly and truthfully illustrated by that eminent philanthropist, Mrs. Stowe, to the eternal shame of the upholders of the system, and the fearful incubus of guilt and culpability that will render for ever infamous, if the policy is persisted in, the nationality ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... yet it would ease me of a great weight if she would. This fortune, suddenly thrown into my lap, sits like an incubus upon me, Mr. Raymond. When the will was read to-day which makes me possessor of so much wealth, I could not but feel that a heavy, blinding pall had settled upon me, spotted with blood and woven of horrors. Ah, how different from the feelings with which I have been ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... not know what to do with the succession of pairs of young men, whose mission seemed to be to plague their master consciously, and to plague him unconsciously. Once or twice Mr. Gibson had declined taking a fresh pupil, in the hopes of shaking himself free from the incubus, but his reputation as a clever surgeon had spread so rapidly that fees which he had thought prohibitory, were willingly paid, in order that the young man might make a start in life, with the prestige of having been a pupil of Gibson of Hollingford. But as ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... imported European steam machinery for converting the tapioca roots into the marketable article. Whatever enterprise I hear of in the interior is always in the hands of Chinamen. Klang looks as if an incubus oppressed it, and possibly the Chinese are glad to be as far as possible from the seat of what impresses me as a fussy Government. At all events, Klang, from whatever cause, has a blighted look; and deserted houses ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... Indeed, from the first of this very peculiar 'arrangement' I had not been consulted by either Mary or her brother, and I had a dreamy sort of feeling that by and by we should all wake up and find Mr. Gardner was only an incubus, instead of the unpleasant reality he was getting ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... that period the reverberations of the frightful effects of the general expectation of the impending judgment and destruction of the world have rolled down to the present time. The portentous season passed, all things continuing as they were, and the immense incubus rose and dissolvingly vanished. And the Mediaval Church, like the Apostolic Church before, instead of logically saying: Our expectation of the physical return of Christ was a delusion, fancifully concluded: We were wrong as to the date; and still ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Grieve was going to cry. As for himself, his eye twinkled, and he had great difficulty to restrain a burst of laughter. He called a footman near, and Lucy was soon relieved of her fourfold incubus. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Presbyterian church. He was an Elder, and a Trustee, and, after much anxiety, and the utmost straining of his ability to raise and to contribute funds towards the completion of their house of worship, he was just beginning to enjoy the comfort of seeing the debt, which had hung as an incubus over it for years, wiped out, when this new call was made upon him. A few young people proposed to go out to the assistance of the feeble church, upon the condition that Mr. Charless and Mr. Keith would go with them —wisely ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... percentage of disease to the immense population, but statistics take no account of lowered vitality. Without being actually ill, vitality may be reduced to a point at which existence becomes a kind of misery. Alcohol dissolves for a time the cloud on the mind, the incubus upon the energies; and the relief is so great that men do not think of the price they pay for it. No wonder public-houses are the landmarks of London locomotion; they are the Temples of Oblivion, where the devitalised multitudes seek to forget themselves, that ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside," is a safe rule for those who would always retain the good opinion of that all-powerful, but somewhat unintelligent, incubus, "the average person," but the pioneer, the guide, is necessary. That is, if the world is ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... crouching terrors of the sea, Like panthers when a fire weakens their hearts; Ay, this huge sin of nature, the salt sea, Shall be afraid of me, and of the mind Within me, that with gesture, speech and eyes Of the Messiah flames. What element Dare snarl against my going, what incubus dare Remember to be fiendish, when I light My whole being with memory of Him? The malice of the sea will slink from me, And the air be harmless as a muzzled wolf; For I am a torch, and the flame of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... unbonneting? what putrid kennel in your wretched hamlet would be disgusting enough to make you scruple to fall down and worship the owner of such wealth? But I will make you feel my power, though it suits my honour to hide the source of it. I will be an incubus to your city, since you have rejected me as a magistrate. Like the night mare, I will hag ride ye, yet remain invisible myself. This miserable Ramorny, too, he who, in losing his hand, has, like a poor artisan, lost the only valuable part of his frame, he heaps insulting ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... students of early Christian history must have derived the greatest advantage on special points from the conscientious research, and frequently also from the acute analysis, even of writers of the most extreme school. But it is high time that the incubus of fascinating speculations should be shaken off, and that Englishmen should learn to exercise their judicial faculty independently. Any one who will take the pains to read Irenaeus through carefully, endeavouring to enter into his historical position ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... resort, betting palaces, miles of billiard saloons, baseball and football circuses, wild beast rings and the innumerable temples of the Christian and quasi-Christian sects, the Mahomedans, Buddhists, Gnostics, Spook Worshippers, the Incubus Worshippers, the Furniture Worshippers, and so forth; and to the south again a vast manufacture of textiles, pickles, wines and condiments. And from point to point tore the countless multitudes along ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... own part, I never despaired of Ireland; I do not, I will not, I cannot, despair of my beloved country. She has, in my view, obtained freedom of conscience for others, as well as for herself. She has shaken off the incubus of tithes while silly legislation was dealing out its folly and its falsehoods. She can, and she will, obtain for herself justice and constitutional freedom; and although she may sigh at British neglect and ingratitude, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of work as a day laborer greatly cheered the young man. Instead of depressing his spirits, it for the first time lifted from his soul that incubus of melancholy with which every Confederate soldier of his class was at first oppressed. Ever since Grant had refused in the Wilderness—a year before—to retire beyond the river after receiving Lee's tremendous blows, Guilford Duncan and all Confederates ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... Ten years are on my soul, And on my conscience. I've an incubus: My one distinction, and a parlous toll To glory; but ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... from the fatherland, they come from old Ireland. They are the active spirits, native and naturalized, of a generation of free men who never felt the incubus of slavery, and who wish only as Americans to make stronger and plant deeper the principles of the Republican party. It is to these men we who have grown old in this conflict wish now to hand over the banner we have borne. Let them take it and advance it to higher honors. Let them ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... account for the satisfaction expressed in the following year at the discovery of another method, on which Darwin wrote to Sir J.D. Hooker: "The distribution of fresh-water molluscs has been a horrid incubus to me, but I think I know my way now. When first hatched they are very active, and I have had thirty or forty crawl on a dead duck's foot; and they cannot be jerked off, and will live fifteen or even twenty-four hours out of water" ("Life ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... knows whether what he is eating is the product of the Cow or of the Thames mud-banks. (A snigger.) Talk of a Free Breakfast Table! I would free the Briton's Breakfast Table from the unwholesome incubus of Adulteration. At any rate, if the customer chooses to purchase butter which is not butter, he shall do it knowingly, with his eyes open. (Feeble "Hear, hear!") Under this Act anything which is not absolutely unsophisticated ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... At length I became as rich as the Gurneys— An incubus then I thought her, So I threw over that rich attorney's Elderly, ugly daughter. The rich attorney my character high Tried vainly to disparage—- And now, if you please, I'm ready to try This Breach of Promise ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... them until their connection with Spain was severed. Cuba, today, proves Mr. Clay's position. The amiable and intelligent Creoles of that beautiful island are nearly ready for the abolition of slavery and for regulated freedom; but they lie languishing under the hated incubus of Spanish rule, and dare not risk a war of independence, outnumbered as they are by untamed or half-tamed Africans. Mr. Clay's speeches in behalf of the young republics of South America were read ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... is no divine right of a class or caste, enjoying supremacy or special privilege. It also is a surviving vested interest, that must justify itself, or be swept aside as an incubus. ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... formed for a moment, dissolve and disappear for ever. How, then, can any avenging God be anything more than the distempered dream of children? How could such a God torture men when they die, since as soon as they are dead there is nothing left to torture? Let them cast this incubus of irrational fear behind them, and the mere process of life may then be tolerable enough. It may even, in a sober way, be happy. It certainly need not be, as it now is, miserable; and at all events it will be pleasing as a prelude to the luxury of an endless sleep. Of my own ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... had seen by the camp fire, and especially the picture of those three stark, bloody forms that lay stretched upon the earth, seemingly watching every movement he made, followed and weighed him down like some smothering incubus. Then he saw, more vividly than ever before, the mountainous task ahead. With no horse, and the hundreds of miles of mountain and prairie, with the dangers besetting him on every hand, what possible hope ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... wholly for San Francisco's slow growth toward the end of the century. For, following the several spasms of development incident to the ages of gold, of grain, and of fruit, and the advent of the railway incubus, California for a time betook herself to rest, which indeed was largely paralysis. Then, too, those who had come first and cleared the ground, laying the foundations of fortunes, were passing away, and their successors seemed more ready to enjoy than to ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... delight at having so successfully rid himself of such an incubus, he made his valet-de-chambre slip over to Margari to tell the worthy man to wait upon him on the morrow at 11 o'clock precisely, as he had a very pleasant piece of news to impart to him; for ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... as a 'model of policy,' and founded with the object of promoting African improvement, has been the greatest obstacle to progress. She fought to keep every advantage to herself, and she succeeded in securing a monopoly of 'recaptives,' who were more wanted elsewhere. She became an incubus in 1820, when all British possessions from N. Lat. 20 to S. Lat. 20 were made her dependencies. The snake was scotched in 1844 by the Gold Coast achieving her independence. Yet Sa Leone raised herself to a government-general in 1866, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... monstrous curse, destroying all manliness of character, creating contempt of honest labor, making men timorous yet cruel, idle, frivolous, weak, dependent, powerless. The empire might have lasted centuries longer but for this incubus, the standing disgrace of the pagan world. Paganism never recognized what is most noble and glorious in man; never recognized his equality, his common brotherhood, his natural rights. There was no compunction, no remorse in depriving human beings of their highest privileges. Its whole tendency ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... of the ancient governments which rested like an incubus upon the people of the central empires, has come political change not merely, but revolution; and revolution which seems as yet to assume no final and ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... indelible and awful impression seldom equalled in the whole gamut of natural experience. The world a void, grisly, fierce and appalling. We stumble and struggle through the Stygian gloom; the merciless blast—an incubus of vengeance—stabs, buffets and freezes; the stinging drift blinds and chokes. In a ruthless grip ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... you thought I would be an incubus?" I couldn't resist the temptation of retorting. Maybe it was cruel, but there's no society for the prevention of cruelty to dragons, so it can't be considered wrong ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... is a sort of Themistocles. He is a man of wealth, and can snap his fingers at Fortune; can sneer that little sneer of his at things generally, and be none the worse; but what he cannot do is, to shake off an incubus that sits upon his life in the shape of old Habit severe as Fate. This man, with apparently all that is necessary in the world to keep one at peace with it, and to ease declining life with comforts, and cheer with the serener ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... the lumen siccum ac purum notionum verarum. He seems to see the injury inflicted upon the sum of thought by the posteriori superstition, the worship of facts, and the deification of synthesis. Lastly, came the reckless way in which Locke freed philosophy from the incubus of innate ideas. Like Luther and the leaders of the great French Revolution, he broke with the Past; and he threw overboard the whole cargo of human tradition. The result has been an immense movement of the mind which ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... India at cheaper rates than they would otherwise have got it, and by opening the markets of India to the produce of all other European nations. The Corn Laws benefit only one small section of the people of England, while they weigh, like an incubus, upon the vital energies of all the rest; and at the same time injure all other nations by preventing their getting the produce of manufacturing industry so cheap as they would otherwise get it. They have not, therefore, the merit of benefiting other nations, at the same ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... mettle. She must do more now than she had ever attempted before. She must scruple at nothing that might bind him. She would be in the house of her uncle and that uncle a duke, and she thought that those facts might help to quell him. And she would be there without her mother, who was so often a heavy incubus on her shoulders. She thought of it all, and made her plans carefully and even painfully. She would be at any rate two days in the house before his arrival. During that time she would curry favour with her uncle by all her arts, and would if possible reconcile herself to her aunt. ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... believed in a certain "maid of the night," who appeared to men in sleep and roused without satisfying their passions. (Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia, p. 262.) This succubus was the Assyrian Liler, connected with the Hebrew Lilith. There was a corresponding incubus, "the little night man," who had nocturnal intercourse with women. (Cf. Ploss, Das Weib, 7th ed., pp. 521 et seq.) The succubus and the incubus (the latter being more common) were adopted by Christendom; St. Augustine (De Civitate Dei, Bk. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... seemed to understand my position, had bid me hope and be brave. She had told me she loved me—she, whom hundreds of brave men would love to call their own. I would try again. I would brake the chains Voltaire had forged; I WOULD hurl from me the incubus that ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... was indeed the incubus of the Americans. They could not fight the war without it, but they had never succeeded in mastering the difficulties of maintaining and strengthening it. The system of a standing army was of course not to be thought of, and the uncertain recruits who took its place were mostly undisciplined ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... any benevolent scheme. If the Indian were raised to the right of giving his suffrage, a plenty of politicians, on the frontiers, would enter into plans to better him. Now the subject drags along as an incubus on Congress. Legislation for them is only taken up on a pinch. It is a mere expedient to get along with the subject; it is taken up unwillingly, and dropped in a hurry. This is the Indian system. Nobody knows really what to do, and ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... dream, rescue and safety depended upon my getting to the end of the text. I tried again and again, always to be driven back in despair before the crucial words were uttered. At last, with a desperate effort, I seemed to shake off the incubus which was weighing me down, and I finished the words triumphantly, and so loud that I had positively wakened myself up by shouting them out. With returning memory I knew this had happened, and hearing a door open and shut on the half ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... England. Half a million of men, I believe, perished in that great undertaking. Nor are the evil consequences of that war adequately described by what I have said. All the disorders and disturbances of Europe, those immense armaments that are an incubus on national industry and the great obstacle to progressive civilization, may be traced and justly attributed to the Crimean War. And yet the Crimean ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... made a slight movement under the hand that held him, but he did not attempt to speak. The squire went on. "You can't hope for any of those things under existing conditions. It wouldn't be fair to ask any woman to share your present life. It would be almost an insult with this infernal incubus hanging on you. Can't you see my point? Can't you sacrifice your damned obstinacy? You'd never regret it. You're ruining yourself, Dick. Chance after chance has gone by, and you've let 'em go. But you can't afford to go on. You're in your prime now, but let ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... Superstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership? Negro leadership, therefore, sought from the first to rid the race of this awful incubus that it might make way for natural selection and the survival of the fittest. In colonial days came Phillis Wheatley and Paul Cuffe striving against the bars of prejudice; and Benjamin Banneker, the almanac maker, voiced their ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... is about half as long, and is a well-written and extremely plausible story about a house owned by an old gentleman of ancient lineage, where there is a collection of gold plate which was said to be an "incubus", that is, the subject of a curse. As indeed there turns ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... my desire is to add the authority of a great mind like that of the Elizabethan philosopher, to the fact that superstition is so hateful that even blank, bald atheism is preferable thereto. I should state that Bacon in extension of the extract I have quoted, speaking of this soul-destroying incubus on humanity observes that:—"A little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... nations in every age. And when these laws are based on reason and intelligence, they undoubtedly subserve a noble purpose. But the quarantine laws all over the world, with some rare exceptions, being the offspring of ignorance and terror, are not only the climax of absurdity, but act as an incubus on commerce, causing ruinous delays in mercantile operations, much ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... housekeeper had given him. But no one laid a hand upon the book. He almost believed that, were the paper left open on the table, no eye would examine its contents. There it lay still hidden within the folds of the sermon, that weight upon his heart, that incubus on his bosom, that nightmare which robbed him of all his slumbers, and he could not rid himself of its presence. Property, indeed! Oh! if he were only back in London, and ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... at length was Great Britain to be ruined in actual present truth; and those who asserted that, of a sudden, after a fashion so wholly unexpected as to be divine,—as great fires, great famines, and great wars are called divine,—a mighty hand had been stretched out to take away the remaining incubus of superstition, priestcraft, and bigotry under which England had hitherto been labouring. The proposed disestablishment of the State Church of England was, of course, the subject ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... seemed curdling through my blood. The bell rung—once, twice—no answer. I would have leaped out of the carriage—I would have forced an entrance, but I was unable to move. A man fettered and spell-bound by an incubus, is less helpless than I was. At last, an old female I had never seen ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the son of no mortal father, but of an Incubus, one of a class of beings not absolutely wicked, but far from good, who inhabit the regions of the air. Merlin's mother was a virtuous young woman, who, on the birth of her son, intrusted him to a priest, who hurried him to the baptismal fount, and so saved him from sharing ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... rich as the GURNEYS - An incubus then I thought her, So I threw over that rich attorney's Elderly, ugly daughter. The rich attorney my character high Tried vainly to disparage - And now, if you please, I'm ready to try This Breach ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... England, and it may almost be said, of the civilized part of mankind, has been relieved from the incubus which had weighed on it ever since the Trent outrage, and when we are no longer feeling towards the Northern Americans as men feel towards those with whom they may be on the point of struggling for life or death; ...
— The Contest in America • John Stuart Mill
... most delicate attentions upon the eminent stranger, conducting him into the society of the most charming women, his principal object therein being to relieve Abellino of this incubus. As for Abellino, he withdrew, meanwhile, with a few young bucks of his own age, into the card-room, where he was likely to pass the time most agreeably until the arrival ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... therefore, that the study of philosophy has a high cultural value: it encourages the student to reflect upon himself and his human and natural surroundings (society and nature) and to come to grips with reality; it frees him from the incubus of transmitted opinions and borrowed beliefs, and makes him earn his spiritual possessions in the sweat of his face,—mindful of Goethe's warning that "he alone deserves freedom and life who is compelled to battle for them day by day";—it helps him to see things ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... battles, and sailed his ship, and did all he could, it must be confessed, to make everybody around him happy, while a load of sorrow, which felt as big as a bag of shrapnel or a kedge anchor, lay at his own heart. He now determined to get rid of this incubus, to leave it, or creep out from under it somehow. During all these months he had tried, and tried hard, to forget his lost love Gerty, but all in vain. Trying to forget her made matters infinitely worse, so now he meant to indulge himself in the sweet belief that ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... dissensions which culminated in the murder of Charles I., a rampant hot-bed of anarchy and rebellion, we should hardly be prepared for such a complete repudiation of those principles as is conveyed in the line before us, did we not know that the same anxiety to get rid of the "Bare-bones" incubus universally prevailed. The numerals, it will be seen, make up the number 1661, which was the year of the coronation of King Charles II.; and, no doubt, also the year in which the dial ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... apparition of the Sand-man. I was quite old enough to perceive that the old woman's tale about the Sand-man and his little ones' nest in the half-moon couldn't be altogether true; nevertheless the Sand-man continued to be for me a fearful incubus, and I was always seized with terror—my blood always ran cold, not only when I heard anybody come up the stairs, but when I heard anybody noisily open my father's room door and go in. Often he stayed away for a long season ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... proposition is too elementary for discussion that the white man when confronted with a sufficient number of Negroes to create in his mind a sense of political unrest or danger either alters his form of government in order to be rid of the incubus or destroys the political strength of the Negro by force, by evasion, or ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... perpetual occupancy: as all these dark anticipations crowded upon me more and more, and my friends continually intruded their relentless remarks upon the apparition in my room; a great change was wrought in me. I resolved to gather all my faculties together, and forever rid me of this intolerable incubus. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... war, etc. And when Hamilton, in his report, offered a scheme for the redemption of the public debt that effectually silenced the clamors of his enemies, who had insisted that he regarded that debt as a public blessing and meant to fix it upon the country as an incubus, they ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... when he went in. "He wouldn't have downed me so easy if I had had anything in me," he muttered, and his anger grew as he thought of all he had been made to suffer. For he was still the swaggerer. Now that the incubus of his father's tyranny no longer pressed on him directly, a great hate rose within him for the tyrant. He would go back and have it out when he was primed. "It's the only hame I have," he sobbed ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... unconsciousness. Miss Pomeroy fell asleep. In that helpless condition she was quietly conveyed from her father's arms to bed, to the unspeakable relief of Guy, who felt, as the door closed, as if a fearful incubus ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... matter which fills him. Let the preacher consider this, and be persuaded of it,—and it will do much to relieve him from the distress which attends the loss of self-possession, which distorts every feature with agony, and distils in sweat from his forehead. It will do much to destroy that incubus, which sits upon every faculty of the soul, and palsies every power, and fastens down the helpless sufferer to the very evil from which ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... critical appreciation is undaunted by mere dread of new things, while to the same youth and to his friends it has simply never occurred, often enough, to think of Chesterton as a critic. It cannot be too strongly urged that an undue admiration of the distant past has sat like an incubus upon the chest of European literature, and Shakespeare's greatness is not in spite of his "small Latin and less Greek," which probably contributed to it indirectly. Had Shakespeare been a classical scholar, ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... whither to direct his flight: he dared not dash for the street with this imminent tattered incubus—she was almost upon him—and he frantically made for the kitchen door, only to swerve with a gasp of despair as his foot touched the step, for she was at his heels, and he was sickeningly assured she would cheerfully follow him through the house, shouting that damning refrain for ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... he is a good worker, too. But I knew him when we were boys. It was one of those rash friendships that so often prove an incubus in afterlife. I may as well tell you plainly, we were once on very intimate terms with one another. But this tactless fellow lays no restraint on himself when other people are present. On the contrary, he thinks it gives him the right to adopt a familiar tone with me, and ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... foul system which came so near making a wreck of you, my precious one, as it has wrecked thousands of pure and gentle souls. I foresee that this war is destined, by mere force of circumstances, to rid the Republic of that deadly incubus. Rosa, are you not willing to give me up for the safety of the country, and the ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... men walked down the hill together, reaching the hotel about noon. Long before that time the innkeeper had fallen into a way of acknowledging that Adrian Urmand was an incubus; but he had not as yet quite admitted that there was any way of getting rid of the incubus. The idea of having the marriage on the 1st of the present month was altogether abandoned, and Michel had already asked how they ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... then declared. The Papacy is now a corpse beyond all power of galvanization. It is the lying mockery of a religion,—a source of perennial corruption and immorality among the nations, and most fatally such to our own, upon whose very soul weighs the incubus and example of that lie. But at the present day we either know or ought to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... slave system. Slavery was introduced into the American colonies, against the wishes of the settlers, by the avarice of British traders and with the connivance of the British government. Just previous to the Revolution, the Colony of Massachusetts made several attempts to relieve itself of the incubus, and the acts of the General Court were smothered or vetoed by three successive Governors, under the plea that they had such instructions from England. In 1772, the Assembly of Virginia petitioned the throne of England to stop the importation of slaves, using language as follows: "We are ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... I had not touched food since starting, nor had I wetted my lips. My thirst was now intolerable. The travelling rule, about keeping on, was an ugly incubus. Samson would go his own ways - he had sense enough for that - but how, when, where, was I to quench my thirst? Oh! for the tip of Lazarus' finger - or for choice, a bottle of Bass - to cool my tongue! Then too, whither would the mustang stray in the night if I rested ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... seized the throne, neither he nor his friends nor even his army will feel their safety assured until the rival claimant is dead. They imprisoned Fabius Valens and meant to make use of him if a crisis occurred, but they found him too great an incubus. You may be sure that Antonius and Fuscus and that typical representative of the party, Mucianus, will have no choice but to kill you. Julius Caesar did not let Pompey live unmolested, nor Augustus Antony.[177] Do you suppose that Vespasian's ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... Vikings, like Sigurd the Crusader, sailed the seas beyond Norva's Sound and Serkland,[19] and as pilgrims, traders, travellers, and conquerors in the Mediterranean, their work was of course not one of exploration. They bore a foremost share in breaking down the Moslem incubus on southern Europe; they visited the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... object of remark to all travellers; in the latter, even books which touch at all on political matters are rigidly excluded. These are among the causes which strike us as most prominent, but whose effects obtain only when despotism is not so gross as to be an incubus upon the whole moral and intellectual energies ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... which I had just beheld. In similar fashion in the days of Edward I. and Simon De Montfort, the Commons of England, then struggling up, had wrestled in the narrow Chapter House. And so they had fought in the Lancastrian time; and after the Tudor incubus had been lifted off. So under the Stuarts had the wrangling proceeded from which came at length the "Petition of Right." Substituting the doublet and the steeple hat for their modern equivalents, the spectacle of the Long Parliament ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... was, and she guessed the joke, and then, lying there in the dark, she began to laugh softly to herself with laughter that seemed to ease her mind of some old incubus clinging to it—less laughter than a sort of inverted form of crying and ending up almost in the latter with ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... in that peculiarly distressing state of mind in which one oppressing idea displaces or colours every other, absorbing, intermingling with, empoisoning, and, like the filth of the harpy, turning every thing into disgust—when a certain incubus rides upon the brain, as the Old Man of the Mountain did upon the shoulders of Sinbad, burdening, irritating, and rendering existence a misery—when, looking around, you see but one object perched everywhere ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... between the reception of the contagious poison into the system and the appearance of the rash, is called the period of incubation; incubation or incubus meaning, properly, the sitting of birds on their nests, and figuratively, the hatching or concoction of the poison within the body, until prepared for its elimination. There is no certainty about the time necessary for that purpose, as the ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde
... satisfactory to him. He could see and could appreciate better things, and could long for them; but he could not attain to anything better unless he were to alter altogether his mode of life. Would it not be well for him to get a wife? He was rid of Polly, who had been an incubus to him, and now he ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... monster, in "The Tempest." He seems there to have created a person which was not in nature, a boldness which, at first sight, would appear intolerable; for he makes him a species of himself, begotten by an incubus on a witch; but this, as I have elsewhere proved, is not wholly beyond the bounds of credibility, at least the vulgar still believe it. We have the separated notions of a spirit, and of a witch; (and spirits, according to Plato, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... welcome. My long rest has completely restored me. As my doctor told me, I was sound, wind and limb, and had merely worn myself out. I am not going to do that again, and you see that I have got rid of the School Board. It was an awful incubus! ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... conjectures) for fear of offending the Vatican. Sirocco, now and again, blows furiously at his back, but never splits the sheeting. Rain often soaks it, never rots it. There is no help for him. He stands a mock to the pious, a shame and incubus to the emancipated; received, yet hushed up; exalted, yet made a fool of; taken and left; a monument ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... man of strong prejudices; and he had been educated between thirty or forty years before, which is saying virtually, that he was educated under the influence of the British opinions, that then weighed (and many of which still weigh) like an incubus on the national interests of America. It is true, Mr. Effingham was in all senses the contemporary, as he had been the school-fellow, of his cousin; that they loved each other as brothers, had the utmost reliance on each other's principles in the main, thought ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... hold on Italy. Mago, in cisalpine Gaul, was too far off to render aid. The defense of Africa depended on him alone, and he was recalled. He would probably have anticipated the order. Rome breathed more freely when the "Libyan Lion" had departed. For fifteen years he had been an incubus or a terror, and the Romans, in various conflicts, had lost three hundred thousand men. Two of the Scipios, Paulus Gracchus and Marcellus, had yielded up their lives in battle. Only Fabius, among the experienced generals at the beginning of the war, was ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... forty thousand a year to the Nabob of Arcot: a tribute never due, or pretended to be due, to him, even when he appeared to be something; a tribute, as things now stand, not to a real potentate, but to a shadow, a dream, an incubus of oppression. After the Company has accepted in subsidy, in grant of territory, in remission of rent, as a compensation for their own protection, at least two hundred thousand pound a year, without discounting a shilling for that receipt, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... strain had known no relaxation, and the sudden release from the horrible incubus of ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... of France and Belgium which are still groaning under the German incubus are greatly to be pitied. Beyond the terrible agony inflicted by the invaders upon defenceless populations, in the form of executions and house-burnings and various forms of outrage, there is a great mass of ...
— The Illustrated War News, Number 15, Nov. 18, 1914 • Various
... Burrus was dead, probably by poison, and Seneca was in forced retirement. The emperor had also caused his own mother to be murdered. Poisoning, strangling, drowning, or a command—explicit or implied—to depart this life, were his ways of shaking off any incubus upon a free indulgence of his will. His follies and vices had revealed themselves from the first, and had gone to outrageous lengths, but now he is entirely unhampered ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... Karens. Some of the ruder mythologies have been so utterly extirpated that the children of idolaters have seen the gods whom their fathers worshipped for the first time in the British Museum. While over those more compact and scientific systems which lie like an incubus on mighty peoples, there has crept a sickening consciousness of a coming doom, and they already half own their conqueror in the Stronger ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... oddly-shaped rooms of their future home in East Chester Close. None knew how strong was the instinct of self-preservation, it may almost be called, which impelled Ellinor to shake off, at any cost of present pain, the incubus of a terrible remembrance. She wanted to go into an unhaunted dwelling in a free, unknown country—she felt as if it was her only chance of sanity. Sometimes she thought her senses would not hold together till the time when all these arrangements were ended. ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... corruption so induced, with the insatiable longing ever for more wealth and greater influence, did the poison of greed and grasping power enter the system to work its insidious way into every part, slowly transforming the beneficent institution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into an incubus weighing upon all the activities of the people in the nineteenth, an unyielding bar to the development of the country, a hideous anachronism in these ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... half-conscious and much disturbed sleep; the sense of heavy oppression; the apparition hanging over you; the inability to awake; even the grappling at your throat, and the swift disappearance of the vision immediately upon your full awakening—all well-known features of incubus," replied Mr. Berners. But again he thought of the shadow he had seen; now, however, only to dismiss the subject as ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... carefully how this Marietta behaved. At the very first intimation of a disgraceful word or action, Regine would go to her brother-in-law and demand that he should no longer permit his daughter to associate with such an one; then she would call her son as witness, and the incubus would be expelled at once and forever from their presence. Willibald had been on guard when Marietta paid her first visit to Fuerstenstein, had accompanied Toni to Waldhofen when she went to the old doctor's to see her friend, and he was now ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... no modern consequence, To have cothurnal buskins frighted hence. No, teach thy Incubus to poetise; And throw abroad thy spurious snotteries, Upon that puft-up lump of ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... of Cupid-and-Psychology. There are combinations for which no single word can suffice. The phrase belongs to the same class with Lowell's witty denunciation of a certain tiresome letter-writer, as being, not his incubus, but his "pen-and-inkubus." It is as well to admit it first as last: Cupid-and-Psychology will be taught wherever young men and women study together. Not in the direct and simple form of mutual love-making, perhaps; for they tell the visitor, at universities which admit both sexes, that ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the O'Brien movement; but the Young Irelanders, and most of the Old Irelanders, were exasperated, and in their speeches and newspapers denounced Lamartine as the enemy of liberty, the sycophant of England, and the incubus of the French provisional government. It was said that he had married an English lady, and was more English at heart than French—that he would betray the republic to England or to monarchy. Those persons who ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Roger Williams, "The Most High God hath provided and cut out this part of the world for a refuge and receptacle for all sorts of consciences?" How had not Connecticut fallen? How passed her ancient glory, how ignored her charter's rights? How firm a grip upon her had that incubus of her own raising, the pernicious union of Church and State? Break that, as elsewhere it had been broken, and then as freemen demand a constitution guaranteeing ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... folly, cursed the hour that had thrown me and my fortune in his path, and swore that he utterly loathed and despised the silly child whose wealth alone had made her his dupe; and, as he flatteringly expressed it, his 'hated and intolerable incubus.' He had intended to spare her and himself the agony of this hour,—had determined to remain always in Europe, where he could escape the mocking contrast of his bride and his beloved. With indescribable scorn, and a wonderful fertility of derisive ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... individuals; and Pitt was beginning to apply Adam Smith's principles to finance. The cry for parliamentary reform died out: neither Whigs nor Tories really cared for it; and the 'glorious spirit of improvement' showed itself in an energy which had little political application. The nobility was not an incubus suppressing individual energy and confronted by the state, but was itself the state; and its individual members were often leaders in industrial improvement. Discontent, therefore, took in the main a different form. Some ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... "supernatural," "miraculous." It is true, these churches may practically put such goods out of sight; even then, men will not be attracted beyond the expression of a condescending tolerance; and while admitting, as they will, that the church is earnestly endeavoring to get rid of its ancient incubus of theology, free its hands and take hold of the plow handle of progress, ready, if needs be, to drive a furrow deep enough to bury all memories of primitive faith, yet will they turn away from that kind of a church and that ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... de Ville. The government supporters rallied the National Guard. The leaders at the Hotel de Ville were taken captive. The Palais Bourbon was cleared, and the Deputies were reconvened in their assembly hall. Encouraged by this success, the government resolved to rid itself of the incubus of the national workshops, after a variety of schemes with this purpose in view had been brought forward in the Assembly. The government cut the Gordian knot by a violent stroke. On June 21, an edict was issued that all beneficiaries of the public workshops ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... straightway Sorrow shot his swiftest dart. I know not why, but it has chilled my heart Like some dread thing of evil. All night long My nerves were shaken, and my pulse stood still, And waited for a terror yet to come To strike harsh discords through my life's sweet song. Sleep came—an incubus that filled the sum Of wretchedness with dreams so wild and chill The sweat oozed from me like great drops of gall; An evil spirit kept my mind in thrall, And rolled my body up like a poor scroll On which is written curses that the soul Shrinks back from ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... franchise agitation, and the most fanatical Suffragettes began to wonder what they had found so attractive in the prospect of putting ballot-papers into a box. In the country districts the task of carrying out the provisions of the new Act was irksome enough; in the towns and cities it became an incubus. There seemed no end to the elections. Laundresses and seamstresses had to hurry away from their work to vote, often for a candidate whose name they hadn't heard before, and whom they selected at haphazard; female clerks and waitresses got up extra ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... into elementary instruction, renders it useful and necessary to go on making a considerable outlay in the same direction. Not yet, has "the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew" ceased to be the "incubus of the philosopher, and the opprobrium of the orthodox;" not yet, has "the zeal of the Bibliolater" ceased from troubling; not yet, are the weaker sort, even of the instructed, at rest from their fruitless toil "to harmonise impossibilities," ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... fifteenth centuries for the succession to the throne of France, engendered what historians have called "the rivalry between France and England;" and this rivalry, having been admitted as a natural and inevitable fact, became the permanent incubus and, at divers epochs, the scourge of French national existence. Undoubtedly there are, between great and energetic neighbors, different interests and tendencies, which easily become the seeds of jealousy and strife; ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... would not have been without high grounds of probability, that the institution, as a whole, would have hastened more or less rapidly to its final dissolution; and that, one by one, the States of the South, ridding themselves of the incubus of slavery and its comcomitants—oligarchic, mobocratic, and military despotism—would have sought, for their own protection and happiness, to reenter the original Union as Free States. Such an issue of the conflict might ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... certainty in a thing of such a nature; he must see to it that there is some reciprocity between him and mankind; that he pays his expenditure in service; that he has not a lion's share in profit and a drone's in labour; and is not a sleeping partner and mere costly incubus on the great mercantile ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... advantage lay in this: Germany conceived a system of technical education matured and put in operation by the State. Hence, so far as in human affairs such things are possible, the intelligence of Germans was liberated from the incubus of vested interests, who always seek to use education to advance themselves. It was so in England. The English entrusted education to the Church, and the Church was, by the necessity of its being, ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... matter.... In truth it has come to our ears, not without immense trouble and grief to ourselves, that in some parts of Higher Germany ... very many persons of both sexes, deviating from the Catholic faith, abuse themselves with the demons, Incubus and Succubus; and by incantations, charms, conjurations, and other wicked superstitions, by criminal acts and offences have caused the offspring of women and of the lower animals, the fruits of the earth, the grape, and the products of various plants, men, women, and ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams |
