"Mephitic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... minds have become accustomed to draw results as remote as the very eternities from any premises given. My difficulty on the other hand, has been that in practical matters, owing to the existence of this great mephitic swamp of slavery, men have been utterly unwilling to draw conclusions at all; and that the most familiar principles of political economy or politics have been enunciated, and then always docked ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... it came to turn upon a "yes" or "no" of mine. I hesitated, I know not why. In the little pause the fire burned low between us, and the shadows deepened in the burrow cavern until they strangled the eye as mephitic vapors scant a man of breath. The silence, too, was stifling. There was no sound to breach it save the gurgling murmur of the river, and this was subdued and intermittent like the death-rattle in the throat of ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... curious on the subject of the demon of Socrates, went to the cave of Trophonius, to learn of the oracle about it. There, having for a short time inhaled the mephitic vapour, he felt as if he had received a sudden blow on the head, and sank down insensible. Then his head appeared to him to open and to give issue to his soul into the other world; and an imaginary being seemed to inform ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... since. The torment of my sensibility was so great that I wished the sergeant to fall dead at my feet, and the stupid soldiers who stared at me to turn into corpses; and even those wretches for whom my entreaties had procured a reprieve I wished dead also, because I could not face them without shame. A mephitic heat like a whiff of air from hell came out of that dark place in which they were confined. Those at the window who had heard what was going on jeered at me in very desperation: one of these fellows, gone mad no doubt, kept on urging me volubly to order the soldiers to fire through the ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... of recent date, There comes a strange mephitic blast. Here lies—Ha! Backbite, you at last— 'Tis he indeed: and sure as fate, They buried him in overhaste— Into the earth he has been cast, And in this grave, Before the man ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
