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More "Convulsion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whose parts are interconnected by so close a union that we cannot wound one without communicating a violent shock to all the others; the wounding or simply pulling of the smallest nerve is sufficient to cause lively irritation to all the others, and to put the body in convulsion; nor can we ease this pain and convulsion except by cutting the nerve higher up than the injured part; but on this all the parts abutting on this nerve become thenceforward senseless and immovable ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... pericardium, etc.; 3d, concussion, or some other alteration in the brain;" none of which phenomena have any known property capable of accounting for the suppression, or almost suppression, of the cadaveric rigidity. But the cause of death may also be that the lightning produces "a violent convulsion of every muscle in the body," of which, if of sufficient intensity, the known effect would be that "muscular irritability ceases almost at once." If Dr. Brown-Sequard's generalization is a true law, these will be the very cases in which rigidity is so much ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Dervish dominion was born of war, existed by war, and fell by war. It began on the night of the sack of Khartoum. It ended abruptly thirteen years later in the battle of Omdurman. Like a subsidiary volcano, it was flung up by one convulsion, blazed during the period of disturbance, and was destroyed by the still more violent ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... wrathful snort and a violent convulsion of the blankets, and an instant later Jock was tearing about the kitchen like a cat in a fit, but by this time Jean was out of doors and ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... a convulsion," she told him, simply. "I am afraid she will have another. We haven't been able to get a doctor—will you ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... possible, administer enema or dose of castor oil. Put ice bag on head and hot water bottle to feet. Keep warm. A child may be put into a warm bath and held until convulsions subside. Keep very quiet and handle as little as possible when the convulsion is over, as handling may cause a repetition of ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... was a steed caparisoned: Within an antique Oratory stood The Boy of whom I spake;—he was alone,[44] And pale, and pacing to and fro: anon 80 He sate him down, and seized a pen, and traced Words which I could not guess of; then he leaned His bowed head on his hands, and shook as 'twere With a convulsion—then arose again, And with his teeth and quivering hands did tear What he had written, but he shed no tears. And he did calm himself, and fix his brow Into a kind of quiet: as he paused, The Lady of his love re-entered there; She was serene and smiling then, and yet 90 She knew she was by ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... and, dark as it was, I detected a strange convulsion cross his features as he turned into the moonlight. But it was gone before we ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... shivered as mere glass-work barks and even some of the larger ships lying in the harbor of Port Royal. Five hundred men perished, and a much larger number were severely wounded. Distress and poverty were the result of this astounding convulsion of nature. ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... of which the Cyclopean Isles are composed are entirely of volcanic origin, and it is far from improbable that they may have at one time been attached to Sicily, and severed from it by some great volcanic convulsion. A careful examination of these large piles of basaltic columns led Dr. Daubeny to the conclusion, that the lavas from which they have been formed were consolidated under great pressure, and probably at the bottom of the sea, whence they have been afterwards ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... experimented by taking some of it home, and giving it to Hens, after I had given them Oates, Barly and Bread-crums; For, soon after they had drunk of it, they became giddy, reeled, and tumbled upon their backs, with convulsion-fitts, and so dyed with a great extention of their leggs. Giving them common-salt immediatly after they had drunk; they dyed not so soon; giving them vineger, they dyed not at all, but seven or eight days after were troubled with ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... say, Kickup," cried the youth, picking up his hat, which had fallen off in the convulsion, and drying his tears, "you're a sweet lookin' creetur, you are! Is this a new frock you've got to go to church with? Come, I rather like that pattern, but there's not quite enough of 'em. Suppose I lend a hand and print a few more ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... but ice upon which snow had melted and frozen again. It was so smooth that one dog could have drawn the sled, yet not so smooth as to deny good footing. We kept well out to sea, passing close to the mountainous mass of Besborough Island, plainly riven by some ancient convulsion from the sheer bluffs of the mainland. Our only trouble was in keeping the dogs well enough out, for, not being water-spaniels or other marine species, they had a hankering after the land and a continual tendency to edge ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... liberties of Holland and Flanders waxed, daily, stronger. A great physical convulsion in the course of the thirteenth century came to add its influence to the slower process of political revolution. Hitherto there had been but one Friesland, including Holland, and nearly all the territory of the future ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... varied action of so many agents it is vain to deny that Christianity has sometimes been so presented as to be misrepresented, but on the whole there had for some time been a marked and a growing friendliness on the part of both people and officials. . . . The convulsion which shook China to its foundations was due to general causes, slow in their operations, but inevitable in their results. It was the impact of the Middle Ages with the developed Christian commercial civilization of ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... each other, the experiment would be given a trial. Assuredly, the members of the convention set them a good example of toleration. "No man's ideas," said Hamilton, "are more remote from the plan than my own are known to be; but is it possible to deliberate between anarchy and convulsion on the one side and the chance of good to be expected from the plan on the other?" "I consent, sir, to this Constitution," said the aged Franklin, in a paper read by his confrere, Wilson, "because I expect no better, and because ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... the American is always conscious of this idealism; often he is not. But let a great convulsion touching moral questions occur, and the result always shows how close to the surface is his idealism. And the fact that so frequently he puts over it a thick veneer of materialism does not affect its quality. The truest approach, the only approach in fact, to the American ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... for the amelioration of conditions to such an extent that his race might be saved from being goaded on to an unequal and disastrous conflict. He hoped that its efficacy would be so self-evident that Earl might stay the hand that threatened the South and the nation with another awful convulsion. No wonder that his voice was charged with deep emotion as he read ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... gaze with stupid awe—then turn to the window, and attempt to repress his sobs—return again—and refuse to credit his bereavement. Surely the hand moved? No! of its free will shall it never move more! The eye! was there not a slight convulsion ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... frightful convulsion, when, weakened by loss of blood, he was lying on his bed of suffering, with his nervous system completely shaken, a band of mutinous Suliotes, in their splendid dirty costumes, burst suddenly into his room, brandishing their weapons, and loudly demanding their savage rights. ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the growing demand of the workers for better conditions of life and the increasing support lent to them by enlightened public opinion this possibility cannot continue indefinitely, and unless a violent convulsion takes place the time will come when great industrial magnates will have to content themselves with moderate profits on their outlay. Thus although at first sight it might appear that the Super-Capitalist must desire to maintain the existing order of things, if he is far-seeing ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... found himself in a place which seemed like a fissure rent in a mountain side, by some extraordinary convulsion of nature. All around rose black, precipitous cliffs. On the side nearest was the precipice by whose base he had passed; while over opposite was a gigantic wall of dark rock, Which extended far out into the sea. Huge waves thundered at its feet and dashed their spray far upward ...
— The Errand Boy • Horatio Alger
... of things assumed strange and ghastly shapes. The wild animals in the woods took fright at the unknown shapes figured on the ground. They fled they knew not whither; and the citizens were filled with greater dread, at the convulsion which "shook lions into civil streets;"—birds, strong-winged eagles, suddenly blinded, fell in the market-places, while owls and bats shewed themselves welcoming the early night. Gradually the object of fear sank beneath the horizon, and to the last shot up ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... erethism. The roar and dust of the daily battle of the Realists was continued under the flush of the sunset, the arms of the Romantics glittered, the pale spiritual Symbolists watched and waited, none knowing yet of their presence. In such an hour of artistic convulsion and renewal of thought thou wert, and thou wert a magnificent rallying point for all comers; it was thou who didst theorise our confused aspirations, and by thy holy example didst save us from all base ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... breaketh the cedar trees,'" said I, "but what you hear is caused by a convulsion of the air; during a thunderstorm there are occasionally all kinds of aerial noises. Ab Gwilym, who, next to King David, has best described a thunderstorm, speaks of these aerial noises ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... the western farmer's face, no doubt expecting a spasm or convulsion, but it was calm—calm as night. Mopsey condescended not another word, but walking or rather shuffling disdainfully away, muttered to herself, "Dat is de very meanest man, for a white man, I ever did see; he looked ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... had happened rather than saw it. The fearful convulsion of fright, followed by maniac rage that leaped to Banker's face told her as though he had shouted the news. His companions and allies were ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... of Love![355] though born in bitterness, And nurtured in Convulsion! Of thy sire These were the elements,—and thine no less. As yet such are around thee,—but thy fire Shall be more tempered, and thy hope far higher! Sweet be thy cradled slumbers! O'er the sea And from the mountains ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... long were confiscate." Later on in the Apology he returns to this grievance, and describes how his adversary "sobs me out half a dozen phthisical mottoes, wherever he had them, hopping short in the measure of convulsion fits; in which labour the agony of his wit having escaped narrowly, instead of well-sized periods, he greets us with a quantity of thumb-ring posies." The men of the Renaissance despised the homely savour of the native English syntax with its rude rhetoric and abrupt logic and its lore ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... everything seemed to rest with that strange sense of stability and continuance, which such a moment of happiness, though it carries every element of change in it, almost invariably brings. It felt as if it might go on for ever, and yet the very sentiment that inspired it made separation and convulsion inevitable—one of those strange paradoxes which ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... some time silent, with hearts beating audibly,—each looking at the others for an answer to this question. The solution seemed to strike us all at the same time, and a fearful one it was. Some terrible convulsion—the falling of the precipice perhaps—had dammed the canon below; no doubt, had blocked up the great fissure by which the stream found its way from the valley. If such were the case, then, the valley would soon fill with ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... replied, that she did so, nor did her mind in the least wander from him. Her voice soon after left her and senses failed; she fell into a lethargic slumber, which continued some hours; and she expired gently, without further struggle or convulsion, in the seventieth year of her age, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Bud Thurston little, tow-headed Bud that used to holler for 'frumes' if he seen me coming a mile off. Doggone your measly hide, where's all them pink apurns yuh used to wear?" He leaned back and laughed—a silent, inner convulsion of pure gladness. ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... heroic, but for one moment a convulsion went over her face; the young life was so strong in her, the young spirit was so joyous in her, existence was so new, so fresh, so bright, so dauntless a thing to Cigarette. She loved life: the darkness, the loneliness, the annihilation ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... property, or confining his limbs, instant removal from office, and transportation to the skies. Truly this is a great undertaking and if the learned manager can only get over the obstacles of the laws of nature, the Constitution will not stand in his way. He can contrive no method but that of a convulsion of the earth, that shall project the deposed President to this infinitely distant space; but a shock of nature of so vast energy and for so great a result on him, might unsettle even the footing of the firm members of Congress. We certainly need not resort to so perilous ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... I recovered the perfect convulsion of laughter into which this scene had thrown me, when the broad brim of Father Nolan's hat appeared at the window of the carriage. Before I had time to address him, he took it reverently from his head, disclosing ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... know his Rhudy!" pulled her black apron over her head and had a silent cry—a little convulsion of the neck and not ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... trial I mean to show you of my strength, yet greater, As with amaze shall strike all who behold.' This uttered, straining all his nerves he bowed, As with the force of winds and waters pent When mountains tremble, those two massy pillars With horrible convulsion to and fro. He tugged, he shook, till down they came, and drew The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder, Upon the heads of all who sat beneath,— Lords, ladies, captains, counselors, or priests, Their choice nobility and flower, not only Of this, but each Philistian city round, Met from ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... to get books regularly from The Spectator and to pay periodical visits to the office, where I learned to understand and to appreciate my chiefs. But more of them later. The year 1886 was one of political convulsion, the year of the great split in the Liberal Party; the year in which Lord Hartington and Mr. Chamberlain finally severed themselves from Mr. Gladstone and began that co- operation with the Conservatives which resulted in the formation of the Unionist Party. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... seized with a convulsion which shook all her body. In wild agony, she cried: 'Oh, it is too late, it is too late! I thought my mother's spirit would come and drag me down to hell if I broke my vow. I took poison with me, Chactas, when I fled with you. I have ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... graves. And Hilda seated herself beside the witch to await the waking. The cock crowed thrice, heavy mists began to arise from the glades, covering the gnarled roots of the forest trees, when the dread face on which Hilda calmly gazed, showed symptoms of returning life! a strong convulsion shook the vague indefinite form under its huddled garments, the eyes opened, closed,—opened again; and what had a few moments before seemed a dead thing sate up and ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... there was nothing to compare with the momentous convulsion which had taken place in France. England had gone through its two revolutions more than a century before, and its people were the freest of any in Europe. Recently it had lost its colonies in America, but it still held ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... triumphant proprietor of the Marshalsea, the Marshal, all the turnkeys, and all the Collegians. In his great self-satisfaction he put his cigar to his lips (being evidently no smoker), and took such a pull at it, with his right eye shut up tight for the purpose, that he underwent a convulsion of shuddering and choking. But even in the midst of that paroxysm, he still essayed to repeat his favourite introduction of ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... man came for me in haste. The baby was dying and the doctor was drunk. I found the little one in a convulsion lying across Mrs. Mavor's knees, the mother kneeling beside it, wringing her hands in a dumb agony, and Slavin standing near, silent and suffering. I glanced at the bottle of medicine upon the table and ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... way was now a narrow crack such as might have been formed by some mighty convulsion of nature which tore apart a gigantic mass of stone, the fracture running here and there where veins of some softer material had yielded, to be separated sometimes only two or three feet, and at others opening out to ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... be wondered that after this harangue Lord Rip sank into a chair, a hideous convulsion upon his ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... biting, annihilating quality in Louis' derision of the absentee. And the others enjoyed it so much. At moments Alvina caught her lip between her teeth, it was so screamingly funny, and so annihilating. She laughed in spite of herself. In spite of herself she was shaken into a convulsion of laughter. Louis was masterful—he mastered her psyche. She laughed till her head lay helpless on the chair, she could not move. Helpless, inert she lay, in her orgasm of laughter. The end of Mr. May. Yet she ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... sweeping away altogether the enigmatic and frivolous sex and disregarding it, at any rate during the hours of convivial session. The Club is troubled to note that in the intolerable rabies and confusion of this business life men meet merely in a kind of convulsion or horrid passion of haste and perplexity. We see, ever and often, those in whose faces we discern delightful and considerable secrets, messages of just import, grotesque mirth, or improving sadness. In their bearing and gesture, even in hours of haste and irritation, the Club ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... and is not found in the Upsal MS. of the Prose Edda, which is supposed to be the oldest extant. Gefjon's ploughing is obviously a mythic way of accounting for some convulsions of nature, perhaps the convulsion that produced the Sound, and thus effected a junction between the Baltic and ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... fears for the country were also shared by some of the wisest men in it. The Duke of Wellington, it is well known, was most desponding, and he anticipated greater horror from a convulsion here than ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... sea, one large bow-window in three compartments; just such a gravel terrace before it as the one we walked up and down together; and the very same sea, dark, neutral-tinted, with its frothing edge of white, as if it was foaming at the mouth in a black convulsion, that your eyes look upon from your window. It is in some respects exactly like St. Leonard's, and again as much the reverse as sad loneliness is to loving and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Mrs. Stowe] was the death of Uncle Tom. This scene presented itself almost as a tangible vision to her mind while sitting at the communion-table in the little church in Brunswick. She was perfectly overcome by it, and could scarcely restrain the convulsion of tears and sobbings that shook her frame. She hastened home and wrote it, and her husband being away, read it to her two sons of ten and twelve years of age. The little fellows broke out into convulsions of weeping, one of them saying through his sobs, ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... quelled. They had gradually increased with the suffering to the most terrible shrieks; then declined into low and inarticulate moans; until a deep-drawn and agonized gasp for breath, and an occasional convulsion, alone remained to show that the vital principle had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... which, when injected into animals,[44] is capable of producing convulsive symptoms. Perhaps the trophic disorders following the nerve lesions made by Brown-Sequard correspond to the formation of precisely this convulsion-causing poison. If so, the toxin passed from the guinea-pig to its spermatozoon or ovum, and caused in the development of the embryo a general disturbance, which, however, had no visible effects except at ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... not morning, Oft the twilight is uncertain. With light steps a path pursuing, By the left-hand side I entered, When I felt a strange commotion; The firm earth began to tremble, And upheaving 'neath my feet, Ruin and convulsion threatened. Stupified I stopped there, when With a voice which woke my senses From forgetfulness and fainting, Loud a thunder-clap re-echoed, And the ground on which I stood Bursting open in the centre, It appeared as if I fell To a depth where I lay buried ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... idea that Davy stood speechless, staring at the Hole-keeper, who rushed to and fro in a convulsion ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... papers,' says Coulton, vaguely, 'the cause of death was disease of the heart.' A brief 'convulsion' is distinctly mentioned, whence Coulton concludes that the disease was NOT cardiac. On December 7, Mason writes to Walpole from York: 'Suppose Lord Lyttelton had recovered the breaking of his ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... local records had existed they would hardly have failed to have given minute details of the convulsion of nature which resulted in the destruction by the sea of the forest lands on the northern and western sides of the island, and in the separation of tracts of considerable magnitude from the mainland. Geologists are agreed in assigning ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... the shore in wild fury, with a prolonged roar which seems like a cry of defiance or the wailing of an infinite crowd. Sea, sky, and earth regard each other gloomily, as though they were three implacable enemies. As one contemplates this scene some great convulsion of ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... waters grew more and more polluted; but new myriads came up momentarily and plunged in, heedless of everything but thirst. Such a spectacle of revengeful passion, ghastly fear, the frenzy of hatred, mortal conflict, convulsion and despair as fell on the eyes of the approaching horsemen has rarely been seen, and that quiet mountain lake, which perhaps had never before vibrated with the sounds of battle, was on that fatal day converted into an encrimsoned ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... mountain-ash figured conspicuously upon a jutting crag immediately below them. Deep sunken in the ravine, and concealed in part from view by the wild herbage and dwarf shrubs, ran a range of precipitous rocks, severed, it would seem, by some diluvial convulsion, from the opposite mountain side, as a corresponding rift was there visible, in which the same dip of strata might be observed, together with certain ribbed cavities, matching huge bolts of rock which had once locked these stony walls together. ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of the sword had cut into the jaw with a swift downward stroke. The corners of the mouth were drawn, as if by a convulsion. Clots of blood besprinkled the beard. The closed eyelids had a shell-like transparency, and the candelabra on every side lighted up the gruesome object with ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... made king during the war. There was at first no decisive action on this proposal. It was dangerous to express any opinion. People were thoughtful, serious, and silent, as on the eve of some great convulsion. No one knew what others were meditating, and thus did not dare to express his own wishes or designs. There soon, however, was a prevailing understanding that Caesar's friends were determined on executing the design of crowning him, ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... stark forms, which lay about—some twenty or thirty of them—in grotesque attitudes. Some sprawled with outstretched arms, their sightless eyes seeming to fix the pale azure of the sky; others were hunched and huddled in a last convulsion. And in the course of his fruitless search for friend and brother, an old instinct reasserted itself in Mahony: kneeling down he began swiftly and dexterously to examine the prostrate bodies. Two or three still heaved, the blood gurgling from throat ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... white except where he was red, and that red was not now his glossy, flaming skin. A terrible muscular convulsion as of internal collapse grew slower and slower. Yet choked, blinded, dying, killed on his ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... Virginians—rare and indelibly branded—but as a people, they were worthy of their traditions and their hereditary honor. With rocking crash and ruin all around her, the grand old commonwealth, scathed by the storm and shaken by the resistless convulsion, still towered erect and proud to the last, and fell only when the entire land had given away beneath her. Two strange features characterized the temper of the Southern people in the last days of the Confederacy. Crushed and dispirited as they were, they still seemed unable to realize the fact that ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... wait and search vainly for those who should have met them at the station, with bundles of the day's shopping to be carried out; homes will be desolate; and the history of rare fossils and petrifactions will have a novel addition. Or, again, that, if some sudden convulsion of Nature, like those which before now have buried wicked cities and the dwellers in them, were to-day to swallow up the great city of New Sodom in America, and keep it under ground for a few thousand years, nothing in all its circuit would ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... his own eyes filling fast with tears, approached more and more nearly to the father of his betrothed bride, Sir Hugh's intelligence seemed to revive. He sighed heavily, as one who awakens from a state of stupor; a slight convulsion passed over his features; he opened his arms without speaking a word, and, as Tressilian threw himself into them, he folded ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... that. If one went to see a dear friend, whose charm and pride it was to live in an exquisitely neat and polished home, and found him pacing hot-eyed through rooms given up to dirt and disorder, one would not rebuke him, but one would wait quietly and soothingly until he desired to tell what convulsion of his life explained the abandonment of old habit. But her eyes travelled to the luminous, snow-sugared hills that ran by the sea to the summit where Roothing Church, an evanescent tower of hazily-irradiated ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the vast grass-slopes of this great valley, on a gradual hill-slope, rose the most remarkable of the lime dikes I have seen. It must enclose with its gigantic wall a space of nearly two miles in width, in the centre of which a wild confusion of tinted limestone strata, disturbed by some old convulsion of Nature, resembles the huge ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... was right or wrong in Kipling was expressed in the final convulsion that he almost in person managed to achieve. The nearest that any honest man can come to the thing called "impartiality" is to confess that he is partial. I therefore confess that I think this last turn of the Victorian ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... a moment. Suddenly he snarled and crouched as though to spring at me with his bare hands. By a mighty convulsion of the will he regained control of himself, however, and assumed a manner of quiet dignity. He even smiled—a ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... have been out of character had not Ali got up a little convulsion on his own account. One day, in the Targhee's absence, he took his gun to "play at powder," and using English material, succeeded in splitting the machine near the lock. When the Targhee returned, and found what damage had been done, he began first to whimper, and then working himself up into a ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... exclaimed Thugut. "My adversaries, whosoever they may be, had better beware of my elephant foot not stamping them into the ground. I hate that boastful, revolutionary France, and to remain at peace with her is equivalent to drawing toward us the ideas of the revolution and of a general convulsion. Short-sighted people will not believe it, and they are my enemies because I am a true friend of Austria. But being a true friend of Austria, I must combat all those who dare oppose and impede me, for in my person they oppose and impede ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... All the American's pent-up fury went into a lunge that the priest could not begin to stand against. He was bowled sharply over and went down. Craig on top, and there the fight ended as suddenly as it had begun. The priest's head thudded into the smooth rock floor; a convulsion quivered his body; he moaned and ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... alludes, appeared to me also, as I have elsewhere[408] observed, to be of the convulsive kind, and of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus's dance; and in this opinion I am confirmed by the description which Sydenham gives of that disease. 'This disorder is a kind of convulsion. It manifests itself by halting or unsteadiness of one of the legs, which the patient draws after him like an ideot. If the hand of the same side be applied to the breast, or any other part of the body, he cannot keep it a moment in the same posture, but it will be ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Amboise had been successfully withstood; but quiet had not returned to the minds of those whose vices were its principal cause. The air was still thick with noxious vapors, and none could tell how soon or in what quarter the elements of a new and more terrible convulsion would gather.[847] The recent commotion had disclosed the existence of a body of malcontents, in part religious, in part also political, scattered over the whole kingdom and of unascertained numbers. To its adherents the name ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... controlling part—an effect such as might be expected if a pawl should be jostled from the teeth of a ratchet-wheel. But before I had time for much conjecture as to its nature my attention was taken by the strange motions of the automaton itself. A slight but continuous convulsion appeared to have possession of it. In body and head it shook like a man with palsy or an ague chill, and the motion augmented every moment until the entire figure was in violent agitation. Suddenly it sprang to its feet ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... A responsive flicker which was almost a convulsion, passed over her face; but she did not awake. It was evident, however, that her spirit was gradually floating up to the surface from the depths of oblivion in which it had been submerged. Tims took off her Tam-o'-Shanter and ulster, and revealed in the simple elegance ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... widow was no more. I cannot imagine when she died. During the four hours of our passage from the wreck to land, her head rested on my lap; yet no spasm of pain or convulsion marked the ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... convulsive discharge of nerve-force. Some years since I saw in consultation a case which well illustrates this point. A boy was struck in the head with a brick, and dropped unconscious. On coming to be was seized with an epileptic convulsion. These convulsions continually recurred for many months before I saw him. He never went two hours without them, and had usually from thirty to forty a day—some, it is true, very slight, but others very severe. Medicines had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... body out; but was seized with another convulsion-fit, before he could reveal it; and in it he lies struggling between life and death—but I'll ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... knelt before her and bathed her temples with cold water, making her also inhale some salts which he found upon the toilet table in the next room. Little by little, these attentions produced an effect; the nervous convulsion became less frequent and a slight flush suffused her pale cheeks. She opened her eyes and then closed them, as if the light troubled them; then, extending her arms, she passed them about Octave's neck as he leaned over her; she remained thus for some time, breathing ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... point we played the Stillman Dane tune, with variations, until we reached home, very late indeed for supper. The domestic convulsion caused by the formal announcement of Talbert's sudden decision had passed, leaving visible traces. Maria was flushed, but triumphant; Alice and Billy had an air of conscience-stricken importance; Charles Edward and Lorraine were sarcastically ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... about a third of the number, walked. The distance to Loch Katrine is about a mile and a half, between lofty mountains, along a glen filled with masses of rock, which seem to have been shaken by some convulsion of nature from the high steeps on either side, and in whose shelves and crevices time had planted a thick wood of the ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... Argyle would adhere), and were to dissolve Parliament if necessary—even so it would be hard to pass through the Lords a measure adequate to stop the clamour for more, and active agitation. I begin to relapse into my belief that there must be long conflict. Nothing seems to me worth a national Convulsion which does not give us new principles and new persons in the Executive Government. I incline to believe that we shall live to see Radicalism (of a grade far beyond what is popularly so named) in high office and carrying ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... their commerce, and the genius of their institutions, so unsuited to schemes of warlike aggrandizement. The government of the United States is in the hands of the mob, which has as little to lose there as elsewhere, by convulsion of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... countrymen; lieutenants and captains who have since made their way in the world, or have died, broken-hearted heroes, before Metz or Sedan; women who seemed obscure, but whose names, in the general convulsion of nations, have risen to newspaper notoriety or to lasting fame; soldiers who have become historians; guerrilleros now pompously called generals; adventurers who have grown into personages; personages who have sunk into adventurers; ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... moment the contents boiled, seething as if possessed. Then, with a fearful convulsion, the waves parted and the water gave up its prey. Two choking, gasping, spluttering heads appeared simultaneously: with one accord four striving paws clawed desperately at the rim of the ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... only a cold stream of water flowed through its bottom, We-lo-lon-nan-nai sat himself down under the rocky ledge at the entrance to the mighty gap in the range, and, lighting his pipe, directed the smoke of the fragrant kin-nik-i-nik toward the heavens. Suddenly there was a terrible convulsion of the earth, and immediately there burst forth fountains of hot water and mud mounds, where before there was not the sign of ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... along with his eight sons, formed the last relic in our province of that race of petty feudal tyrants by which France had been overrun and harassed for so many centuries. Civilization, already advancing rapidly towards the great convulsion of the Revolution, was gradually stamping out the systematic extortions of these robbers. The light of education, a species of good taste reflected, however dimly, from a polished court, and perhaps a presentiment of the impending ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... they are shattered into every imaginable form. The clefts are deep and narrow, great hemlocks rise from the bottoms of the fissures, and the vast masses of fallen or split rock lie piled and cloven, confusedly tossed about, gigantic memorials of the great convulsion that in days long gone by heaped up the long ridge of the Shawangunk, and shattered its northern dip into such majestic and fantastic cliffs. The deepest and wildest chasm is filled by the weird, green lake. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... of God had been found a thing of battle, convulsion, confusion, an infinitely difficult thing: wherefore let us now abandon it, and govern only by so much of God's Christian Law as—as may prove quiet and convenient for us. What is the end of Government? ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... could not find the village. There was no village there; and soon he came to what seemed to be the edge of a gigantic crater, where the earth had been uprooted and tossed aside as if by some huge convulsion of nature. Here and there masses of inflammable material smoked and flickered with red flames. His eyes sought the familiar outlines of the redoubts and fortifications, but found them not. And where ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... headlong, as it were, to its own destruction. For whenever any arose among the nobility[144], who preferred true glory to unjust power, the state was immediately in a tumult, and civil discord spread with as much disturbance as attends a convulsion of ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... horseback!"—the very words bring visions of apoplectic mariners careering madly across sands, three to a horse, every limb in convulsion. Why, it's one ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... single diplomatic post in the roster of this government, from Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. James all the way down to Consul to a guano rock in the Straits of Sunda—salary payable in guano—which disappeared by volcanic convulsion the day before they got down to my name in the list of applicants. Certainly something august enough to be answerable to the size of this unique and memorable experience was my due, and I got it. By the common voice of this ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... party were the same at night as they had been in the morning. But the greatest crises of life steal on us imperceptibly, and have sometimes occurred and wound us in their consequences before we know. The memorable things in a man's career are not always marked by some sharp convulsion. The youth does not necessarily marry the girl whom he happens to fish out of a mill-pond: his future life may be far more definitely shaped for him at a prosaic dinner-table, where he fancies he is only thinking of the wines. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... body, to the murder of them that kill the soul?" And Jurgis was a man whose soul had been murdered, who had ceased to hope and to struggle—who had made terms with degradation and despair; and now, suddenly, in one awful convulsion, the black and hideous fact was made plain to him! There was a falling in of all the pillars of his soul, the sky seemed to split above him—he stood there, with his clenched hands upraised, his eyes bloodshot, and the veins standing ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... of the Quaternary Period, came the biggest convulsion of all. The crest of the Sierra was hoisted, according to Matthes's calculations, as much as eight thousand feet higher in this one series of movements, and the whole Sierra block was again tilted, this time, ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... sealing of her destiny. A wild convulsion shook her inner world; Its lowest depths were heaved tumultuously; Far unknown molten gulfs of being rushed Up into mountain-peaks, rushed up and stood. The soul that led a fairy life, athirst For beauty only, passed into a woman's: In pain and tears was born the child-like need For God, for ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... Nature's activity in the crucible at the earth's centre make one reflect on the possible consequences of the next great convulsion, and the fate that is in store for those intrepid villagers who have perched their primitive huts on the very edge of the Teng'ger crater. With these reflections, we turn away from one of the most solemn and impressive ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... said that before the coming of an earthquake, the sea gives forth deep moanings, as if it felt the approaching convulsion; so at that time there seemed premonitions in the hearts of the people that the whole nation, North, South, East and West, would be swept by a political cyclone that should leave behind it the desolation that ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... shouldered by those theatrical supernumeraries, who never CAN get off the stage fast enough, and who may be generally observed to linger in the enemy's camp after the open country, held by the opposite forces, has been split up the middle by a convulsion of Nature. ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... this singular but beautiful region now presents the form in which it was first fashioned by the Master of Life, or has since received the shape and appearance it bears from the disruption of some mighty mass of waters, from frightful earthquakes, or some other great convulsion of nature—neither I nor my red brothers can say. Yet does it appear plain that no convulsive heavings of an earthquake could have left its outline or its surface so smooth or regular. No bursting of waters from the top of a mountain ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... his slender frame wracked by the convulsion of each new attack. Barney had placed an arm about the boy to support him, for the paroxysms always left ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the morning a dreadful convulsion, at the foot of the fore-mast, roused us from a state of anxiety for our fate, to the idea that the ship was sinking. It was the fore-mast that fell over the side; in about a quarter of an hour an awful mandate from above was re-echoed from all parts of the ship; Pouvores Anglais! Pouvores ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... Sarah had taken an amazed and horrified departure did Saxon fling herself on the bed in a convulsion of tears. She had been ashamed, before, merely of Billy's inhospitality, and surliness, and unfairness. But she could see, now, the light in which others looked on the affair. It had not entered Saxon's head. She was confident that it had not entered ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... Uncle don't know his Rhudy!" pulled her black apron over her head and had a silent cry—a little convulsion of the neck and not an audible ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... with its puny compulsion Can summon the spirit that quickens the lyre; It comes, if at all, like the Sibyl's convulsion And touches the brain with a finger ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... their power, on the other side the Santee; but they stripped the plantations within their reach, as well of slaves as of provisions. Greene could do nothing to prevent them. His own army was in a state of convulsion and commotion; suffering from distress and discontent, and threatened with dissolution. Recent occurrences had awakened his fears ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... opportunity to observe and admire the stupendous precipices that compose the banks of this river; some of which on either side, arise perpendicularly to the height of 200 feet, presenting an appearance as though the opposite banks had been burst asunder by some dreadful convulsion. It is extremely deep, about 180 feet wide, and terminates very abruptly at about eight miles from its mouth, two or three miles below Matanzas. At the head of the Canimar is a small settlement, called the Embarcadero, a kind of thoroughfare to Matanzas for twenty or thirty miles in ...
— Narrative of the shipwreck of the brig Betsey, of Wiscasset, Maine, and murder of five of her crew, by pirates, • Daniel Collins
... black cloud was now zigzagged from moment to moment by lightning, and claps of deafening thunder broke from it. At last the long endurance of the day was spent, and out of its convulsion burst floods of rain, again and again sweeping the promenade-deck where the people sat, and driving them disconsolate into the saloon. The air was darkened as by night, and with many regrets for the vanishing prospect, mingled with a sense of relief from the heat, our friends felt ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... islanders lay on their faces, without offering to look up, or hope for preservation; all her harbours were crowded with mariners, and tall vessels of war lay in danger of being driven to pieces on her shores. "Bless me!" said I, "why have I lived in such a manner that the convulsion of nature should be so terrible to me, when I feel in myself, that the better part of me is to survive it? Oh! may that be in happiness." A sudden shriek, in which the whole people on their faces joined, interrupted my soliloquy, and turned my eyes and attention to the object which had given us ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... races to the northward which we consider as Caffre races. You may have observed, in the history of the world, that the migrations of the human race are generally from the north to the south: so it appears to have been in Africa. Some convulsion among the northern tribes, probably a pressure from excessive population, had driven the Zoolus to the southward, and they came down like an inundation, sweeping before them all the tribes that fell in their path. Chaka's force consisted of ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... under the spell of Parson Dorrance's recent words to sympathize in this; but she had already learned to avoid dissent from Stephen's opinions, and she made no reply. They were sitting on the edge of a great fissure in the mountain. Some terrible convulsion must have shaken the huge mass to its centre, to have made such a rift. At the bottom ran a stream, looking from this height like little more than a silver thread. Shrubs and low flowering things were waving all the way down the sides of the abyss, as if nature had done her best ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... knew of wrestling, the Senestro knew just a bit more. It was a whirling mass of legs and bodies in continuous convulsion, silent except for the terrible panting of the men, and the low, stifled ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... cried Herrick. "There's something here beyond me. Think of that calaboose! Suppose we were sent suddenly back." He shuddered as stung by a convulsion, and buried his face ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ever and anon a mournful gust blew through the shrouds; the birds were screaming on the wing, and the water-line of the black horizon was fringed with a narrow ridge of foam. The thunder rolled at a distance, and I perceived that convulsion of the elements was at hand. The sails were all set, and without assistance I could not reduce them; but I was indifferent to my fate. The lightning now darted in every direction, and large drops of rain pattered on ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... is evident that this attitude could not long continue; the Church knows only the faithful and rebels. But the noblest hearts often make a stand at compromises of this kind; they desire that the future should grow out of the past without convulsion and ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... ancient cathedral. In endeavouring to describe these scenes of violence one is tempted to pass from one simile to another. We may imagine that streams of white lava had flowed from many parts of the mountains into the lower country, and that when solidified they had been rent by some enormous convulsion into myriads of fragments. The expression "streams of stones," which immediately occurred to every one, conveys the same idea. These scenes are on the spot rendered more striking by the contrast of the low rounded forms ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon, marking the advent of one of those human meteors sent at long intervals to astonish and dazzle the world. In this instance, if the man born during Nature's most terrible convulsion, was not destined to exercise a material or lasting influence on the fate of nations, at least his lot was cast in troublous and agitated times; he took share in great events, came in contact with extraordinary men, passed through perils and adventures such as few encounter, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... foundations, and their summits appear ready to tumble down. The waters of the lake quit their bed, and inundate the country. Still louder roaring than that produced by the thunder is heard: the earth quivers; everywhere its motion is simultaneously felt. But after this the convulsion ceases, everything revives. The mountains are again firm upon their foundations, and become motionless; the waters of the lake return by degrees to their proper reservoir; the heavens are purified and resume ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... mere historical curiosity, a sort of political paradox and puzzle. They have described the Irish people at the time as under the spell of something like sorcery. Even in our own days, Mr. Gladstone, in a speech delivered to the House of Commons, treated the convulsion caused by Swift's letters and Wood's halfpence as an outbreak of national frenzy, called up by the witchery of style displayed in the "Drapier's Letters." To some of us it is, on the other hand, a matter of surprise to see how capable ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... removed to Cleveland, taking with him the patterns and materials connected with the stove business, and commenced on his own account in a small way, his capital having been seriously crippled by the financial convulsion of 1837. ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... best rights inherent in human nature, as an experience the world has seen almost enough of has proved. We are in trouble just now, on account of a neglected hereditary melanosis, as Monsieur Trousseau might call it. When we recover from the social and political convulsion it has produced, and eliminate the materies morbi,—and both these events are only matters of time,—perhaps we shall have leisure to breed our own milliners. If not, there will probably be refugees enough from the Old World, who have learned the fashions in courts, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... stepped forward, bowing so low that nothing was seen of him for a brief space, but the small of his back, and when he reared himself up, after this convulsion of nature, Sir Norman beheld a face not entirely new to him. At first, he could not imagine where he had seen it, but speedily she recollected it was the identical face of the highwayman who had beaten an inglorious retreat from ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... surprised a weaver,' said the young lady, laughing till she almost cried. In fact, she was showing in a new light, and becoming quite a funny character upon this theme. And, indeed, this sort of convulsion of laughing seemed so unaccountable on natural grounds to Aunt Rebecca, that her irritation subsided into perplexity, and she began to suspect that her extravagant merriment might mean possibly something which she did ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the perfect convulsion of laughter into which this scene had thrown me, when the broad brim of Father Nolan's hat appeared at the window of the carriage. Before I had time to address him, he took it reverently from his head, disclosing in the act the ever-memorable ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... when he had replaced the jar on its stand and returned to Caesar, he was horrified; for the emperor's head and arms were shaking and struggling to and fro, and at his feet lay the two halves of the wax tablets which he had torn apart when the convulsion came on. He foamed at the mouth, with low moans, and, before Alexander could prevent him, racked with pain and seeking for some support, he had set his teeth in the arm of the seat off which he was slipping. Greatly shocked, and full of sincere pity, Alexander tried to raise him; ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... face there was a cleft, though one invisible even from a few paces away, since its outer edge projected over the inner wall of rock. Moreover, this opening was not above four feet in width, a mere split in the huge mountain mass caused by some titanic convulsion in past ages. For it was a definite split since, once entered, far, far above could be traced a faint line of light coming from the sky, although the gloom of the passage was such that torches, which were stored at hand, must be used by those who threaded it. One man ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... nerve-force. Some years since I saw in consultation a case which well illustrates this point. A boy was struck in the head with a brick, and dropped unconscious. On coming to be was seized with an epileptic convulsion. These convulsions continually recurred for many months before I saw him. He never went two hours without them, and had usually from thirty to forty a day—some, it is true, very slight, but others very severe. Medicines had no influence ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... length of human life is put down at one hundred years. And I believe this to be right. I have observed, as a matter of fact, that it is only people who exceed the age of ninety who attain euthanasia,—who die, that is to say, of no disease, apoplexy or convulsion, and pass away without agony of any sort; nay, who sometimes even show no pallor, but expire generally in a sitting attitude, and often after a meal,—or, I may say, simply cease to live rather than die. To come to one's ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of the Atonement. I can testify that the Atonement may be dropt out of Pauline religion without affecting its quality; so may Christ be spiritualized into God, and identified with the Father: but I suspect that a Pauline faith could not, without much violence and convulsion, be changed into devout admiration of a clearly drawn historical character; as though any full and unsurpassable embodiment of God's moral perfections could be exhibited ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... to this French revolution? Have not they made good use of their time, that in so few years from their last bloody national convulsion men's minds should so have advanced and expanded in France as to enable the people to overturn the government and change the whole course of public affairs with such comparative moderation and small loss of, life? I was ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... to be of the convulsive kind, and of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus's dance; and in this opinion I am confirmed by the description which Sydenham gives of that disease. 'This disorder is a kind of convulsion. It manifests itself by halting or unsteadiness of one of the legs, which the patient draws after him like an ideot. If the hand of the same side be applied to the breast, or any other part of the body, he cannot keep it a moment in the same posture, but it will be drawn into a ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... any gleaming stalactites or stalagmites in sight, the cause of the legend attaching to the place would have been understood, but there was nothing of that nature. The cavern was simply a rent in the side of the canyon wall, created by some convulsion of nature, and all that was ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... hours went by. He wandered stealthily about the rooms like a lost being. It was like matter sighing after, weeping over, spirit. Prince Zaleski had never before withdrawn himself from the surveillance of this sturdy watchman, and his disappearance now was like a convulsion in their little cosmos. Ham implored me repeatedly, if I could, to throw some light on the meaning of this catastrophe. But I too was in the dark. The Titanic frame of the Ethiopian trembled with emotion as in broken, childish words he told ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... lacked the imagination and the insight to conceive of a better adjustment of European affairs under the widening recognition of national rights. The Minister of Austria, to whom at this crisis Castlereagh looked as his natural ally, had no doubt the same dread of a renewed convulsion of Europe, but in his case it was mingled with considerations of a much narrower kind. It is not correct to say that Metternich was indifferent to the Greek cause; he actually hated it, because it gave a stimulus to the liberal movement ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... splashed, in her beautiful clothes, among the frightened swans, rather than invite him to that ineptitude. Oh, her sincerity, Mary Lindeck's—she would be drenched with her sincerity, and she would be drenched, yes, with his; so that, from inward convulsion to convulsion, she had, before they reached their gate, pulled up in the path. There was something her head had been full of these three or four minutes, the intensest little tune of the music-box, and it made its way ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... of these "self-created societies" and to condemn those "combinations of men, who, careless of consequences, and disregarding the unerring truth that those who rouse cannot always appease a civil convulsion, have disseminated, from an ignorance or perversion of facts, suspicions, jealousies, and accusations of the whole Government." The Democratic societies now fell into disrepute and did not long survive their great prototype, ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... the emergency, Caesar should be made king during the war. There was at first no decisive action on this proposal. It was dangerous to express any opinion. People were thoughtful, serious, and silent, as on the eve of some great convulsion. No one knew what others were meditating, and thus did not dare to express his own wishes or designs. There soon, however, was a prevailing understanding that Caesar's friends were determined on executing the design of crowning him, and that the fifteenth of March, called, ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... word was catapulted from him as though by a muscular convulsion. "He murdered my father, and he shall ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... who was half frightened, half amused at the sudden convulsion caused by her favourite's bad conduct, "don't be vexed; see, here is a little bit of my biscuit; I ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... is some great convulsion or momentous event that may or may not be a cause of misery to man. In calamity, or disaster, the thought of human suffering is always present. It has been held by many geologists that numerous catastrophes or cataclysms antedated the existence of man. In literature, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... surrounding islands was obtained. Here Lieutenant Grant hoisted the Union Jack as a signal to the vessels that this was the right entrance to the river. He thought, as have most people since, that this island had been separated from the mainland "by some violent convulsion of nature." It was named Coal Island by Colonel Paterson, but is now known as the Nobbys. The commander's journal tells how plentiful wood and coal were on the mainland, ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... bonis good men beget good children; the rule held even in the geological period; good ichthyosauri begat good ichthyosauri, and would to our discomfort have gone on doing so to the present time, had not better creatures been begetting better things than ichthyosauri, or famine, or fire, or convulsion put an end to them. Good apes begat good apes, and at last when human intelligence stole like a late spring upon the mimicry of our semi- simious ancestry, the creature learnt how he could, of his own forethought, add extra-corporaneous ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... a partial fall, concealed in the coppice, extends seventy yards more; so that the total length of this fragment that fell was two hundred and fifty-one yards. About fifty acres of land suffered from this violent convulsion; two houses were entirely destroyed; one end of a new barn was left in ruins, the walls being cracked through the very stones that composed them; a hanging coppice was changed to a naked rock; and some grass grounds and an arable field so ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... foe, who made one or two convulsive movements as if to arise, but fell back with the blood spouting from the wound and out his mouth. One more struggling effort he makes, but 'tis the last; with a violent convulsion of his whole body the man in the leather jerkin sinks to the ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... being the least formidable of the great Powers for the purpose of offensive operations, and seems to think she contains many elements of convulsion. ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... sorrowful to think that, under the system of picture-worship, there is scarcely a sin of which the poor Greek is not guilty to an enormous extent. With God all things are possible—he can change the hard heart of man by the power of his Divine Spirit; but, morally speaking, it must be some great convulsion that can work a real change in the nation. W.O. Croggon has labored here more than seven years, and knows not of one conversion among the rich Greeks—not one attends the service for worship. He is the Methodist missionary here, and is called the friend of ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... illuminati. Cagliostro was astounding Strasburgh—Cardinal de Rohan ruined himself, and bent before his voice. Like at the fall of great empires—like at the cradle of great things—these signs appeared every where. The most infallible was the general convulsion of human ideas. When a creed is crumbling to atoms, all ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... as he stood upon his feet, however, Little L rolled up the whites of his eyes, fell his full length to the earth, and writhed on the ground in a convulsion. ...
— Good Blood • Ernst Von Wildenbruch
... Wheresoever the lake was shallow enough to allow of men raising their heads above the water, there for scores of acres were to be seen all forms of ghastly fear, of agonizing struggle, of spasm, of convulsion, of mortal conflict, death, and the fear of death—revenge, and the lunacy of revenge—hatred, and the frenzy of hatred—until the neutral spectators, of whom there were not a few, now descending the eastern ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... her cheeks were like two roses. Then her father took the bottle and the cork-screw into his hands. What a strange sensation it was to have the cork drawn for the first time! The bottle could never after that forget the performance of that moment; indeed there was quite a convulsion within him as the cork flew out, and a gurgling sound as the wine was ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... which gave rise to this serious convulsion in the country was, in a measure, an aftermath of the rebellious risings of 1837 and 1838 in Upper and Lower Canada. Many political grievances had been redressed since the union, and the French Canadians had begun to feel that their interests ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... British consumer in the shape of protection to Canadian products, if you put our trade on as good a footing as that of our American neighbours; but if things remain on their present footing in this respect, there is nothing before us but violent agitation, ending in convulsion or annexation. It is better that I should worry you with my importunity, than that I should be chargeable with having neglected to give you due warning. You have a great opportunity before you— obtain reciprocity ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... to acknowledge your Favor of the 22d of Feb. which I receivd a few days ago. The Act for regulating Prices, you tell me has made a great Convulsion especially in Boston. I am exceedingly sorry to hear that Dissentions should arise in a Community, remarkeable for its publick Spirit, and which has heretofore by the united Exertions of Individuals repeatedly ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... believe this,—if we will look on each convulsion of society, however terrible for the time being, as a token, not of decrepitude, but of youth; not as the expiring convulsions of sinking humanity, but as upward struggles, upward toward fuller light, freer air, a juster, simpler, and ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... another matter to discuss whether the overthrow of the guilty cities of Sodom and Gomorrah is connected with that convulsion of nature, with or without miracle, which formed the depression of the great valley; yet it is remarkable that the deepest part of the lake is at the spot which tradition has always pointed out for the site of those cities, ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... of a merry disposition, but her laughter was always noiseless, an internal convulsion which made her actually writhe with pain. "And does your thinking bring you any money?" asked she, as soon as she could ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... me for a moment, fixedly, then, bending his head towards his breast, he appeared to be undergoing a kind of convulsion, which was accompanied by a sound something resembling laughter; presently he looked at me, and there was a broad ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... strength has been fully developed, now bends before the hurricane of civil war, swaying to and fro with fearful and threatening movements at every paroxysm of the tremendous blast. We look on with intense agony of suspense, to see whether it will stand the terrible ordeal, and outlive the unexampled convulsion of social elements in which its strength and endurance have been so sorely tested. Instinctively we know that if it survive the present momentous crisis, successfully resisting the attack of the enemy which ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... turning of the scale; her story should remain untold. It was not that upon the whole she thought it best not to attempt to tell it; but that she could not undertake so explosive a matter. To stop the wedding now would cause a convulsion in Giant's Town little short of volcanic. Weakened, tired, and terrified as she had been by the day's adventures, she could not make herself the author of such a catastrophe. But how refuse Heddegan without telling? It really seemed to her as if her marriage with Mr. Heddegan were about to take place ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... terrible convulsion of nature was that which followed in the landlady's face! She made a run at us, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Among the vasty grottos, borne about In mad rotations, till their lashed force Aroused out-bursts abroad, and then and there, Riving the deep earth, makes a mighty chasm— What once in Syrian Sidon did befall, And once in Peloponnesian Aegium, Twain cities which such out-break of wild air And earth's convulsion, following hard upon, O'erthrew of old. And many a walled town, Besides, hath fall'n by such omnipotent Convulsions on the land, and in the sea Engulfed hath sunken many a city down With all its populace. But if, indeed, They burst not forth, yet is the very rush Of the wild air ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... said he, (but he did not undertake this task without sustaining the trembling and convulsion of his whole frame) "My Lord—waving for a moment the subject of my marriage—permit me to remind you, that when I was upon my sick bed, you promised, that on my recovery, you would listen to a petition ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... entered his tent, but rushed immediately out again, uttering loud cries. We all ran up in disorder, M. le Duc with us, and the assistant pointed to the body of M. de Bragelonne upon the ground, at the foot of his bed, bathed in the remainder of his blood. It appeared that he had had some convulsion, some febrile movement, and that he had fallen; that the fall had accelerated his end, according to the prognostic of Frere Sylvain. We raised the vicomte; he was cold and dead. He held a lock of fair hair in his right hand, and that hand was ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... out the irregular opening and, thrusting the bushes aside with his rifle barrel, judged that Betty had done well. Here was a perpendicular cleft in the rock, one of those cracks which not infrequently result from the splitting of gigantic masses of rock along a well-defined flaw. In some ancient convulsion this fissure had developed, the two monster fragments of the mountain had been divided, one had slipped a little, and thereafter through the ages they had stood face to face, close together. Kendric could barely squeeze his body through; he found ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... and feelings. The two races have not yet made new mores. Vain attempts have been made to control the new order by legislation. The only result is the proof that legislation cannot make mores. We see also that mores do not form under social convulsion and discord. It is only just now that the new society seems to be taking shape. There is a trend in the mores now as they begin to form under the new state of things. It is not at all what the humanitarians hoped and expected. The two races are separating more than ever before. The strongest point ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... chieftains, until they were afterwards stimulated by the intrigues of the disappointed and baffled Earl of Mar. Lochiel, as well as many others, had little to gain, but much to lose, in any change of dynasty or convulsion in the state. Prosperous, beloved, secure, his fidelity to that which he believed to be the right cause was honourable to the highest degree to his character. That he was not sanguine in his hopes, is more than probable. Before he went to the battle of Sherriff ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... if the humor of the animal had suddenly changed. Instead of continuing its discontented growls, or manifesting any further signs of anger, the whole of its shaggy body shook violently, as if agitated by some strange internal convulsion. The huge and unwieldy talons pawed stupidly about the grinning muzzle, and while Heyward kept his eyes riveted on its movements with jealous watchfulness, the grim head fell on one side and in its place appeared the honest sturdy countenance of the scout, who was indulging from ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... under which the country has made, and will continue to make, the most rapid advances. That it must eventually be changed is true, but the times of its change must be determined by so many events, hidden in futurity, which may accelerate or retard the convulsion, that it would be presumptuous for any one to attempt to name a period when the present form of government shall be broken up, and the multitude shall separate and re-embody themselves under ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... appeared to be going down by the stern, with her bow inclined upward at an angle of forty-five degrees. Above all the din and confusion could be heard the roar of a terrific explosion outside. The little submersible was caught in the convulsion of the sea until it seemed her seams would be rent ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... recollection was that of a dream remembered in a dream. The solemn text was in my mind, 'Voices, and thunders, and lightnings, and a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake and so great;' and I now felt as if the convulsion was over, and that its ruins lay scattered around me. The railway, I said, is keeping its Sabbaths. All around was solitary, as in the wastes of Skye. The long rectilinear mound seemed shaggy with gorse and thorn, that rose against the sides, and intertwisted their prickly branches ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... lad between the shoulders. The thrust went home neatly, under the left shoulder-blade, deep and inclined a little upward. It must have reached his heart, for he died after one violent convulsion which threw him into the air, and turned him completely over, his corpse slapping the ground like a flopping fish on a ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... ungovernable fury; but it was between Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its sway. Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into frenzied convulsion—heaving, boiling, hissing—gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... as he sank back he gave a sharp cry. He had practised that cry in more than one cabin, and along with it a convulsion of his features to emphasize the impression he labored ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... man indulged in a convulsion of mirth, which was only checked by the entrance of ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... first there succeeds a second epoch. After another natural convulsion, in which the order of the world and of human life is once more reversed, God withdraws his guiding hand, and man is left to the government of himself. The world begins again, and arts and laws are slowly and painfully invented. A secular age succeeds to ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... in a few moments there were six inches of water all round the house, which the force of the falling streams made to foam, and fume, and flash like a seething torrent. Harry had crept close to Hugh, who stood looking out of the window; and as if the convulsion of the elements had begun to clear the spiritual and moral, as well as the physical atmosphere, Hugh looked down on the boy kindly, and put his arm round his shoulders. Harry nestled closer, and wished it would thunder for ever. But longing to hear his tutor's voice, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... little heed to this, his attention being taken up by the fact that, though there was perfect silence, the tree was alive with birds and monkeys, which were huddled together in groups, as if their instinct had taught them that a terrible convulsion of nature was at hand. As a rule they would have taken flight or scampered about through the branches as soon as human beings had come to the tree, but now, as if aware of some great danger, they were content to share the shelter and run ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... resemble contorted angleworms and where one is as likely to stumble into a man from Bagdad as from Boston. One can stand in the middle of it and with his westerly ear catch the argot of Gotham and with his easterly all the dialects of Damascus. And if through some unexpected convulsion of Nature 51 Broadway should topple over, Mr. Zimmerman, the stockbroker, whose office is on the sixth story, might easily fall clear of the Greek restaurant in the corner of Greenwich Street, roll twenty-five yards more down Morris Street, and ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... suddenly and began to tremble very perceptibly. The other two continued their dance around her, waving their palm fronds over her. The trembling increased in violence until her whole body seemed to be in a convulsion. Her eyes assumed a ghastly stare, her eyeballs protruded, and the eyelids quivered rapidly. The drum and gong increased their booming in volume and in rapidity, while the dancers surged in rapid ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... their body and this earth they now fancied themselves transported, these ungrateful ones. But to what did they owe the convulsion and rapture of their transport? To their ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... bring to light some source of mischief which could not fail to add to the uneasiness of the responsible servants of the Crown. A general election stirred up other noxious ingredients, and during the spring of the year everything seemed to betoken a coming convulsion. At this time the following ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... look beautiful when I am dead. I shall go to bed, and lay myself flat in an attitude—why not? Then I shall break the little pill against the roof of my mouth, and shall not be disfigured by any convulsion or by ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... two men raised him, carried him up the stone steps, and laid him with infinite care on a sofa. He lay, breathing queerly through the nostrils, his eyes closed, his fingers contracted; every now and then a convulsion ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... Avignon. Should it rain, the museum of the town is worth a visit. It contains Horace Vernet's not uncelebrated picture of Mazeppa, and another, less famous, but perhaps more interesting, by swollen-cheeked David, the 'genius in convulsion,' as Carlyle has christened him. His canvas is unfinished. Who knows what cry of the Convention made the painter fling his palette down and leave the masterpiece he might have spoiled? For in its way the picture ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... be a Catholic in heart, and a prince in feeling. They should have judged less favourably of one who could see his mother sacrificed without making one real effort to avert her doom. His weakness, obstinacy, and duplicity, helped to prepare the way for the terrible convulsion of English society, whose origin was the great religious schism, which, by lessening national respect for the altar, undermined national respect ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... twenty-eight thousand cartridges, brought into the country in salt-beef kegs by the British ship Richmond. This not only sharpened the animosity between whites; following so closely on the German fizzle at Laulii, it raised a convulsion in the camp of Tamasese. On the 13th Brandeis addressed to Knappe his famous and fatal letter. I may not describe it as a letter of burning words, but it is plainly dictated by a burning heart. Tamasese and his chiefs, he announces, are now sick of the business, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... half an hour, sometimes pulling with all their strength, sometimes less strongly, as the physician observed the contraction of the nerves to increase or relax. Finally he ordered the tension to be gradually diminished, in proportion as the convulsion passed off. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... forth of this star,' says Mr. Huggins, 'and then the rapid fading away of its light, suggest the rather bold speculation that in consequence of some great internal convulsion, a large volume of hydrogen and other gases was evolved from it, the hydrogen, by its combination with some other element,' in other words, by burning, 'giving out the light represented by the bright lines, and at the same time heating ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... like a petrified Irish outcry. An imploring sound of "Pole! Pole!" issued from her. Then she caught up one hand to her mouth, and rolled her head, in evident anguish at the necessitated silence. A convulsion passed along the row of maids, two of whom dipped to their aprons; but the ladies gazed with a sad consciousness of wicked glee at the disgust she was exciting in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and a mountain-ash figured conspicuously upon a jutting crag immediately below them. Deep sunken in the ravine, and concealed in part from view by the wild herbage and dwarf shrubs, ran a range of precipitous rocks, severed, it would seem, by some diluvial convulsion, from the opposite mountain side, as a corresponding rift was there visible, in which the same dip of strata might be observed, together with certain ribbed cavities, matching huge bolts of rock which had once locked these stony ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... brainless Robert Redmayne, brought his niece to spend her school holiday with him and I discovered in the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl a magnificent and pagan simplicity of mind, combined with a Greek loveliness of body that created in me a convulsion. From the day that we met, from the hour that I heard her laugh at her uncle's objection to mixed bathing, I was as one possessed; and my triumphant joy may be judged, though never measured, when I perceived that Jenny recognized in me the complement ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... the Capital of United Italy and when Universal Freemasonry was instituted in 1870, were incontinently suspended. My readers will not attach a high degree of accuracy to this statement, for there does not appear in reality to have been any convulsion of the Order; there was indeed more rejoicing in Jerusalem than lamentation in the tents of Kedron. Signor Margiotta was the recipient of flattering congratulations from eminent prelates; the bishop of Grenoble ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... please, Dr. Martin," she said, "I'm very sorry, but Mrs. Lihou's baby is taken with convulsion-fits; and they want you to go as fast as ever ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth," and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, "If we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... of us cowered instantly under the archway, rigid, except for the old judge and his convulsion of merriment. ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... immediately after, in a second voyage. In fact, though thankful and impressed by the loss of the others, she had gone through the crisis of the life of her heart and affections, and she had likewise been once in imminent peril through a convulsion of nature. Thus she was inclined to look on the wreck and the Irish cliffs as an experience in the way of business, so she was resolved to see the Giant's Causeway, and to make notes ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... mode in which their policy could, in my opinion, be executed without bloodshed or disastrous convulsion, but in terms of bitter scorn alluded to such as would insult me with a desire to destroy the Union, for which my whole life proved me to ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... against mobs of aristocrats and mobs of democrats; if the army had been sound and the states-general had been convoked at Bourges or Tours instead of at Paris, then the type of French monarchy and French society might have been modernized without convulsion. But none of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... majesty, the element in which it sports, lives, and rules—penetrating to its depths, rolling its surface in thunder on the shore—changing its whole motion, its aspect, its uses, and, grand as it is in its serenity, giving it another and a more awful grandeur in its convulsion. Then, how strangely, yet how admirably, does it fulfil its great human object! Its depth and extent seem to render it the very element of separation; all the armies of the earth might be swallowed up between ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... slightly, with the result that the right side of his face again underwent an alarming convulsion. "I ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... proof against the first visions and fantasies that surprise him; but, as to a natural subjection, consent that he should tremble at the terrible noise of thunder, or the sudden clatter of some falling ruin, and be affrighted even to paleness and convulsion; and so in other passions, provided his judgment remain sound and entire, and that the seat of his reason suffer no concussion nor alteration, and that he yield no consent to his fright and discomposure. To him who is not a philosopher, a fright is the same thing in the first part of it, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... who would come out ahead. Just as you began to feel that the old Chief was at the end of his tether, and ready to give up the ghost, the Shaman, rising suddenly with a demoniac yell, flung himself down on the floor in a convulsion. His body writhed horribly; he kicked ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... gross insinuation regarding his friend's edition de luxe of Through Africa by Daylight; Mary, the maid, who greatly admired the Idiot, not so much for his idiocy as for the aristocratic manner in which he carried himself, and the truly striking striped shirts he wore, left the room in a convulsion of laughter that so alarmed the cook below-stairs that the next platterful of cakes were more like tin plates than cakes; and as for Mrs. Smithers, that worthy woman was speechless with wrath. But ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... stopped—her bosom heaved up and down—her frame shook dreadfully—her eyeballs became lurid and fiery—her hands were clenched, and the spasmodic throes of inward convulsion worked the white froth up to her mouth; at length she suddenly became like a statue, with this wild, supernatural expression intense upon her, and with an awful calmness, by far more dreadful than excitement could ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor wretch that stood out against the eternal night like a menace.... She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all drew near. ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... Her fingers felt like iron rods, pressing into his flesh. As if to complete her renunciation she dropped his hand abruptly. She mastered some violent convulsion that left the merest flicker ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... his lips. Thrice he endeavored to regain his feet, and thrice he failed in his attempts. He strove to speak, but he could only utter a few unintelligible words, for his life blood was suffocating him. A violent convulsion shook every limb, then arose a long, deep-drawn sigh, and then silence—George ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... unknown terror, opens upon his quailing gaze. There are times in man's life, when he is the subject of movements within that impel him to deeds that seem almost superhuman; but that internal ferment and convulsion which is produced when all eternity pours itself through his being turns his soul up from the centre. Man will labor convulsively, night and day, for money; he will dry up the bloom and freshness of health, for earthly power and fame; he ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... glance, and she could see that the little colourless eyes had tears in them. "I shall have to go and leave her, and who will take care of her? She is to have a thing like yours upon her head." He was ready to sob, but kept himself in with a great effort, swallowing the little convulsion of nature. His mother's widow's cap was more to Geoff than his father's death; at least it was a visible sign of something tremendous which had happened, more telling than the mere absence of one who had been so often absent. "Come, Mrs. Warrender," ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... own behavior, poor innocent, crushed by the sins of others. He lived, and every moment was a dying. He gasped as with the last breath, yet each breath came back with new torture. He shivered to the root of nature, like one struck fatally, and the convulsion revived life and thought and horror. After long hours a dreadful sleep bound his senses, and he lay still, face downward, arms outstretched, breathing like a child, a pitiful sight. Death must indeed be a binding thing, that father and mother did not leave the grave to soothe and ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... lovelier spirit has sought the Yellow Springs," replied the trembling Empress. "I regret to inform your Majesty that a sudden convulsion last night deprived the Lady A-Kuei of life. I would not permit the news to reach you lest it should break ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... of some writers, there have been in the past history of the planet alternate periods of tranquillity and convulsion, the former enduring for ages, and resembling the state of things now experienced by man; the other brief, transient, and paroxysmal, giving rise to new mountains, seas, and valleys, annihilating ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... been fascinated, held by the swift interchange between her friend and enemy. But now she had a convulsion of fear. She had seen men fight, but never to the death. Roberts crouched like a wolf at bay. There was a madness upon him. He shook like a rippling leaf. Suddenly his shoulder lurched—his ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
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