|
|
|
More "Lurid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... flickered in the deep fireplace. She had seen a wild, wicked vision there once before. It came again, as things evil never fail to come again at our bidding. Good may delay, but evil never waits. The red fire turned itself into shapes of lurid dens and caverns, changing from horror to horror until her creative fancy formed them into the secret chamber of Beaumanoir with its one fair, solitary inmate, her rival for the hand of the Intendant,—her fortunate rival, if she might believe the letter brought ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... stroke of the master's brush adds to the desired effect. The black and lurid tarn, Roderick Usher with his mental disorder, his sister Madeline, subject to trances, buried prematurely in a vault directly underneath the guest's room, the midnight winds blowing from every direction toward the House of ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... collar. Mr. Pryor had not "stopped" when so bidden, but he stopped now, perforce, for Norman, his long red beard literally bristling with fury, was shaking him until his bones fairly rattled, and punctuating his shakes with a lurid ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... How this bright and lurid picture fills my soul with dread! She herself it is! Aurelia, ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... stopped to read. The only writing on the paper was the legend, THE DARK OF THE MOON SOCIETY. Above it there were three marks done in red paint, which gave them a curiously lurid effect. They consisted of a circle with ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... remaining at Gunville, for God's sake, my dear dear friend, do keep up a correspondence with one or more; or if it were possible for you, with several. I know by a little what your sufferings are, and that to shut the eyes, and stop up the ears, is to give one's self up to storm and darkness, and the lurid forms and horrors of a dream. I scarce know why it is; a feeling I have, and which I can hardly understand. I could not endure to live if I had not a firm faith that the life within you will pass forth out of the furnace, for that you have borne ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... all the glorious list.—Its back was gone, But its vitality went bravely on In such delicious tales of land and sea As may not ever perish utterly. Of still more dubious caste, "Jack Sheppard" drew Full admiration; and "Dick Turpin," too. And, painful as the fact is to convey, In certain lurid tales of their own day, These boys found thieving heroes and outlaws They hailed with equal fervor of applause: "The League of the Miami"—why, the name Alone was fascinating—is the same, In memory, this venerable hour Of moral wisdom shorn of all its power, ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... for a man whom she could not and would not put out of her life, and by her affection for her parents, she was frantic. This place offered hope, and to it she went in all innocence, not knowing that it was only the open door to a life such as the most lurid disorderly resorts of the metropolis could scarcely match. There her credulity was preyed upon, and she was tricked into taking this drug, which itself has such marked and perverting effect. But, though ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... his only response. He was too chagrined, puzzled, and disappointed to venture upon a reply, and after this one lurid gleam of unnatural mirth the murky gloom of the day seemed to settle down ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... of a picture cast by a cinematograph in a darkened auditorium, there leaped upon Maitland's field of vision the picture of Anisty standing at bay, face drawn and tense, lips curled back, eyes lurid with defiance and despair. He stood, poised upon the balls of his feet, like a cat ready to spring, in the doorway between the inner and outer offices. He raised his hand with an indescribably swift and vicious gesture, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... her hand in mine, and I led her through the saloon, now full of a lurid light, and into the captain's cabin, where the rope ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... the bolt open, and the frightened boys poured out. The lurid glare of the flames and the spark laden volumes of smoke were more than they could stand. One and all bolted for the nearest aperture in the creek side of the mill, and fortunately reached it without falling through the ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... vast bank of fire and smoke and then he saw shooting above it pyramids and spires of flame. The Chancellor House and all the buildings near it, set on fire by the flames, were burning fiercely, springing up like torches to cast a lurid light over that scene of death and destruction. Then the woods, despite their spring sap and greenness, caught fire under the showers of exploding shells, and their flames spread along a ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sacrifice. Here, too, they often heard the startling cry of war, and saw their frightened neighbours fly before the murderous spear and plundering hand of lawless power. The invader's torch reduced the native hut to ashes, while the lurid flame seared the green foliage of the trees, and clouds of smoke, rising up among their groves, darkened, for a time, surrounding objects. On such occasions, and they were not infrequent, the contrast between the country and the inhabitants must have been most affecting; ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... rulers, we shall at each suitable occasion compare our beneficent rule with the former unsystematic administrations.... The mistakes of the administrations of the Gentiles will be pictured by us in the most lurid colors: we will sow such antipathy and hatred toward these governments that the masses will prefer peace and quiet in a condition of servitude to the rights of the so-called liberty which for many ages had so tormented them and destroyed the ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... at his side felt as if he were witnessing a burlesque of himself as he listened to the pitiless and lurid description of torment which Elder Wheat poured forth,—the same figures and threats he had used a hundred times. He stirred uneasily in his seat, while the audience paid so little attention that the perspiring little orator finally ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... two furious, fighting, irreconcilable wishes—that of saving her father—that of blessing her lover—began to take terrible form and reality in her mind, as the wind howled, the ruinous house shook, and its timbers groaned, and the blackness of the sky, as the storm increased, deepened the lurid hue of the foul and turbulent fog, (for such the mountain cloud thus in contact with her eyes appeared.) The world, as it were, already left behind, or rather below, the elements alone warring round ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... lurid light streamed out from the wide-open door of the store. Alessandro drew cautiously near. The place was full of men, and he heard loud laughing and talking. He dared not go in. Stealing around to the rear, he leaped the fence, and went to the other house and opened the kitchen door. Here he ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... much confidence as though he had been talking with his Marfa, only perhaps more respectfully. It was impossible to make him contradict himself. The prosecutor questioned him first in detail about the family life of the Karamazovs. The family picture stood out in lurid colors. It was plain to ear and eye that the witness was guileless and impartial. In spite of his profound reverence for the memory of his deceased master, he yet bore witness that he had been unjust to Mitya and "hadn't ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... he led was flat, or worse than flat. The best that can be said of it is that in all this sordid round of bar and barn he learned nothing that in any sort had power to harm his rare physique. His language at times was the worst of its lurid kind. His associates were coarse and drunken. Yet Jim lived with them in all their ways and neither chewed, smoked, nor drank. How or why, none understood. He said simply that he "didn't feel like he wanted to." With ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... increased roar of the cataract. No earthly scene perhaps could surpass the appalling sublimity of that which they beheld;—every instant the lightning, which became more and more frequent, converting the black waters into billows of living fire, or wreathing itself in lurid spires around the huge crag that now rose in sight; and again, as the thunder rolled onward, darting its vain fury upon the rushing cataract, and the tortured breast of the gulf that raved below low. And the sounds that filled the air were even more fraught with terror and menace than the scene;—the ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he could see a vision—as if the outward circumstances in which he had beheld the trio were prophetic—Alice in the glory of the great light, Roger with his way shown clearly by the little lamp of God's Word, and Edward in that black shadow, made lurid and more awful by the faint unearthly light. The moon came out brightly from behind a cloud, just as ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... the young man's heart, and his head hung down, weighted with the bitterest thoughts of his life. His conscience was busy with accusing whispers—"Traitor! Coward! Fool!" The unspoken words burnt into his brain, and fired his dark face with the hues of a lurid sunset. He halted; no man could see him, and he listened to the clamour in the glade. He heard an exultant bay from one of his own hounds. The brute dared more than his master, and was taking a bold share in the events of the moment; and the vindictive ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... deserts will enlarge, forest of infectious, venomous growth will form the habitation of lust and murder. Before great moral or physical revolutions or catastrophes occur, clouds will darken the horizon of the dream mind; storms will gather, lurid flames of lightning will flash their volatile anger; the explosive thunder will recklessly carry on its bombardment; bells will ring, strange knocking will be heard—symbols of a message— phantom forms will be seen, familiar voices will call and plead with you, unknown visitors will threaten ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... an action," continued the philosopher, "an effect more horrible. The delightful light of a summer evening was instantly changed into a strange lurid hue, which, infected with sulphur, seemed to breathe suffocation through the apartment. The rich hangings, and splendid furniture of the chamber, the very walls themselves, were changed into huge stones tossed together at random, like the inside of a wild beast's den, nor was the den without ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Duke of Brunswick, I conceive, Impacting on the enemy's further force Led by, they say, Davout and Bernadotte. God grant his star less lurid rays then ours, Or this too pregnant, hoarsely-groaning day Shall, ere its loud delivery be done, Have twinned disasters to the fatherland That fifty years ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... was an expression such as a man might wear who is undergoing a terrible operation, without chloroform, but is determined not to let a whimper escape him. Tom didn't swear, and by that token they guessed how mad he was. 'Twas a rough shed, with a free and lurid vocabulary, but had they all sworn in chorus, with One-eyed Bogan as lead, it would not have done justice to ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... beneath the thrones of the kings of night. And ever and anon fiery meteors flashed along the depths of heaven, and were again swallowed up in the grave of darkness. But far below his brethren, and with a lurid haze around his orb, sat the discontented star that had watched over the hunters ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... brother and sister after they had penetrated the woods a considerable distance on their return home. It had become like night around them, except that, as has been shown, the gloom was of that peculiar lurid nature which can hardly be described, and can never be forgotten ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... and left the house. As she walked down Beacon street, the sun was just sinking in the West, and its red glow mounted midway up the heavens. As she looked at it, the sky seemed one great molten sea, with its hot, lurid waves surging all around her. She thought it came nearer; that it set on fire the green Common and the great houses, and shot fierce, hot flames through her brain and into her very soul. For a moment, she was paralyzed and sank ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... us, no stranger bogy ever came out of the earth's inside. Our engraving shows the plant about natural size, and indicates the form and local coloring pretty accurately. The ground color is yellowish, blotched with lurid brownish crimson, the long pendent tails being blood color, and the interior of the sepals are almost shaggy. The spectral appearance of the flower is considerably heightened by the smooth, white, slipper-like lip, which contrasts so forcibly in color and texture ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... added that "Sebenia is Italian too." If this be so, how comes it that in 1919 the Italian authorities found it necessary to terrorize Sebenico ([vS]ibenik)—which is presumably the town Mr. Belloc refers to—with machine guns and hordes of secret police and the very lurid threats of Colonel Cappone, the town commandant? I believe it is nearer the truth to say that the population of this town consists of some 13,000 Yugoslavs and ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... optimist at heart; some say, however, that he had really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only know that his talk, the first day I saw him, was of such a sort that if he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be. He walked up and down his room saying what lurid things he would directly do if any one accused him of respectability, so that he might disabuse the minds of all witnesses. There were four or five of his assistants and contributors listening to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... physically, the cleanest member of the band the youth wondered how he had come by his sobriquet—that is, he wondered until he heard Dirty Eddie speak, after which he was no longer in doubt. The Oskaloosa Kid, self-confessed 'tramp' and burglar, flushed at the lurid obscenity of ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sublime. The hunters enter, and from the moment Wolfram begins his really beautiful song about Elisabeth, it remains on Wagner's highest level. The finale is a set piece, of course, and is in free and joyous contrast to the lurid heat and sensual abandonment of the first scene. While the trees wave in the wind and the sun shines, the men shout merrily, and the huntsmen blow away at their horns—and Tannhaeuser has returned to ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... had been watching, a tempest blackly followed the homeward-bound ship. The ocean began to dash and torment itself into a fury of wrath. A high wind came roaring up from the bosom of the waters, and over all gathered a world of lurid gloom, kindled fiercely red by the sun when it went down, and slowly engulfed the ship, which was last seen struggling fearfully in the wild upheaving ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... combatants locked in desperate fight. All the American forces were brought up into Kodish for they had expected to get on to Avda as their order directed. Out in front the night was made lurid by flares and shell fire and gun fire where the two devoted platoons of "K" and "E" Companies with two machine guns of the first platoon of "M. G." Company hung on. Lts. Jahns, Shillson and Berger ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... me on that morning. But, sad to say, even these few hours had made great ravages: sorrow, anxiety, and misery are the most zealous accessories of age. She really looked years older: this might have been partly the effect of the lurid, flickering light, and the disorder of her dress; but sure I am that no one could have recognized the haughty, dignified, imposing woman, who but a few hours since had swept ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... years' practice to discharge one without winking. And over all these float flags of every hue and purport, from the blue and gold with its loyal "Ut rex, sit rex" to the ominous crimson, flaming with a lurid furnace and the terrible motto, "Quasi ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... seen her close to Outwood station on the fatal Thursday night, and had been told of her denial that she was there. She stood as a liar in his eyes. She was a liar. But she had no thought of penitence before God; nothing but chaos and night surrounded the one lurid fact that, in Mr. Thornton's eyes, she was degraded. She cared not to think, even to herself, of how much of excuse she might plead. That had nothing to do with Mr. Thornton; she never dreamed that he, or any ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... great chimneys to show off their colored fires effectively, when Lynde passed through the dingy main street of K—-and struck into a road which led to the hill country. A short distance beyond the town, while he was turning in the saddle to observe the singular effect of the lurid light upon the landscape, a freight-train shot obliquely across the road within five rods of his horse's head, the engine flinging great flakes of fiery spume from its nostrils, and shrieking like a maniac ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... escaped falling into the frozen chasms that yawned all round them. At last, however, they reached the mouth of the crater, and, crawling cautiously to the very edge, peered down into its gloomy depths. At the bottom of the abyss, which seemed to them to go down into the very heart of the earth, a lurid flame burned sullenly, sending up a sulphureous steam, which cooling as it rose, fell again in showers upon the sides of the cavity. Into this one of the brave explorers had to descend, and when they had cast lots the choice fell upon Montano himself. His ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... what laggard steps, with what oppressive tardiness, came the dawn, in long streaks of lurid light above the ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... daring man of his time, he was a master in anatomy, composition, motion. There was nothing select about his type, and nothing charming about his painting. His color was hot and coarse, his lights lurid, his shadows brick red. He was, however, a master-draughtsman, and a man of large conceptions and great strength. Melozzo da Forli (1438-1494), of whom little is known, was another pupil of Piero, and Giovanni Santi (1435?-1494), the father of Raphael, was probably influenced ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... soft the air is! How calm and fresh! This is certainly one of the most beautiful of autumn days. Below, in the valley, the river sparkles like liquid silver, and the trees which crown the hill-tops are of a lurid gold and copper color. The distant panorama of Paris is grand and charming, with all its noted edifices and the dome of the Invalides shining like gold outlined upon the horizon. As a loving and coquettish woman, who wishes to be regretted, gives at the moment of departure her most ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... we camped by the road-side near Lithonia. Stone Mountain, a mass of granite, was in plain view, cut out in clear outline against the blue sky; the whole horizon was lurid with the bonfires of rail-ties, and groups of men all night were carrying the heated rails to the nearest trees, and bending them around the trunks. Colonel Poe had provided tools for ripping up the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... tropical fruits and rubbishy French goods, and through what may be called the Government town or official quarter. It was getting dark when I reached the wharf, and the darkness enabled me to hobble unperceived on board on my bandaged feet. The heat of the murky, lurid evening was awful, and as thousands of mosquitoes took possession of the ship, all comfort was banished, and I was glad when we steamed down the palm-fringed Saigon or Donnai waters, and through the mangrove swamps at the mouths of the Me-kong river, and past the lofty Cape St. Jacques, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... peace that passeth all understanding. The square served many purposes, except mine. The women used it as a convenient place for steaming their linen. This, fashioned into the shape of a huge sugar-loaf, with a hollow centre, stood in a great open caldron upon a tripod over a wood-fire. At night the lurid flames and the grouped figures, illuminated by the glare, were picturesque; but in the daytime the charm of these gatherings was chiefly conversational. Then the children made the square their playground, or were driven into ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... disease," said the Virginian, striking the frying-pan on his knee, for the frogs were all gone. At those lurid words their untamed child minds took fire, and they drew round him again to hear a tale of blood. The crowd ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... agreed therefore to an armistice. Each kept his hold by his right hand,—each raised his left aloft, and shouted for succour. But they shouted in vain; for the storm advanced, as if it heard and were summoned by the cry; the sky was black and portentously lurid; thunder now began to roll; and the waves, which had hardly moved before the explosion, raised their heads crested with foam more turbulently at every instant. "It is in vain," said the second man; "Heaven and Earth are against us: one or both must perish: ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... an impressive and lurid glow in those solemn eyes, which looked as if they had been taken out of some Medusa's head to be set in her beautiful face. And there was a sinister threat in them too which seemed to say: 'Require nothing of her that I do not approve of, or you will be turned into stone on the spot.' She did ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Hans thought, like the ordinary forms of splintered ice. There seemed a curious expression about all their outlines—a perpetual resemblance to living features, distorted and scornful. Myriads of deceitful shadows, and lurid lights, played and floated about and through the pale blue pinnacles, dazzling and confusing the sight of the traveler; while his ears grew dull and his head giddy with the constant gush and roar of the concealed waters. These painful circumstances increased upon him as he advanced; the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... Major Yeates Contending with litigious peasants, With "hidden hands" within his gates, With claims for foxes and for pheasants; We saw Leigh Kelway drop his chin— That precious English super-tripper— In shocked amazement drinking in The lurid narrative of Slipper. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various
... Associations formed throughout the whole length and breadth of America, by the exertions of the assembly of Massachusets Bay, stirred up and kept alive the flame of discord, and occasion need but fan it, and it would kindle into a blaze; the lurid glare of which would be seen burning brightly, and raging furiously across the wide Atlantic. The proceedings in America were but as yet, in truth, the warnings of a terrible commotion—the first intimations of an irruption, more frightful in its nature, and more ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... before another word was spoken, during which period the men had been rowing hard, and the boatswain, who had got hold of the rudder-lines, was steering almost at random for the shore, taking his bearings as well as he could from the gunboat, out of whose funnel sparks kept flying, and a lurid glare appeared upon the cloud of smoke which floated out, pointing to the fact that the stokers were ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... continued to gaze at the countenances over which the lurid torchlight cast a horrid glare, a strong hand grasped my collar, and by a jerk swung me up to a seat on one of the caissons; and at the same time a deep voice said, "Come, youngster, this is more in thy way than mine," and a black-bearded "sapeur" pushed a drum before ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... Together with his ashes. Them the queen Gladly receives. Within the house they enter; Orestes to Electra shows himself: She fans the fires of vengeance into flame, Which in the sacred presence of a mother Had burn'd more dimly. Silently she leads Her brother to the spot where fell their sire; Where lurid blood-marks, on the oft-wash'd floor, With pallid streaks, anticipate revenge. With fiery eloquence she pictured forth Each circumstance of that atrocious deed, Her own oppress'd and miserable life, The prosperous traitor's insolent demeanor, The perils ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... could utter the prayer which I had known and repeated every day from childhood—the Lord's Prayer. The Divine Words came not at my call—no! not one of them, from the beginning to the end! I started up on my knees. A blaze of lurid sunshine flashed before my eyes; a hell-blaze of brightness, with fiends by millions, raining down out of it on my head; then a rayless darkness—the darkness of the blind—then God's mercy at last—the ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... journal which only a few days ago he had opened with almost a shudder. He undid the wrapper, shook it open and looked at it. Then suddenly he sat like a man turned to stone. The cigar burnt out between his teeth, his eyes were riveted upon that page, the black letters seemed to have become lurid. The sentences stabbed, he was face to face with the impossible. The paper which he read was dated on the preceding day. Before him was a fourth article, dated from Paris, dated less than forty-eight hours ago, signed "Julien Portel." The title of the article was "The World's Great ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... has displayed virtues which it would be unworthy of us to deny; for we honour ourselves in recognizing the valour of those whom we are fighting. He has gone to his death in deep, compact, disciplined masses, with a blind, hopeless, obstinate heroism of which no such lurid example had ever yet been known, a heroism which has many times compelled our admiration and our pity. He has known how to sacrifice himself, with unprecedented and perhaps unequalled abnegation, to an idea which we know to be false, inhuman and even somewhat mean, ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... gloom, As a flower smiles on AEtna's fatal breast, Young Proserpine beside her lord doth bloom; And near—of Orpheus' soul, oh! idol blest!— While low for thee he tunes his lyre of light, I see thy meek, fair form dawn through that lurid night! ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... seemed suddenly to glow with life; through the black marble, as through a transparent veil, flushed luminously a crimson and burning hue; around the head played and darted coruscations of livid lightning; the eyes became like balls of lurid fire, and seemed fixed in withering and intolerable wrath upon the countenance of the Greek. Awed and appalled by this sudden and mystic answer to the prayer of his foe, and not free from the hereditary superstitions of his race, the cheeks of Glaucus ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... and portentous change took place. The darkness slowly became less intense, giving place to a lurid ruddy twilight that appeared to emanate from the clouds, for by imperceptible degrees they grew visible and became streaked and blotched with patches of red that suggested the idea of their being on fire within, the incandescence showing through here and there ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... vision, which indicated to her the events that were speedily to follow, and which she prophesied with an accuracy, that, in the end, occasioned general astonishment. One night, after spending several hours in prayer, she saw a lurid light, through which a number of Satan's ministers were hurrying to and fro, shaking their torches, and rejoicing with dreadful glee over the impending calamities of Rome. The Saint fell on her knees, and besought the Lord to spare her unhappy country. Then ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... fire are vomited from the inmost depths: in the daytime the lava-streams pour forth a lurid rush of smoke: but in the darkness a red rolling flame sweepeth rocks with uproar to the wide ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... childish curiosity may be her pleasure, any incident to divert thoughts that make her sensible of her own bereavement. She stops to listen to the denunciations of the crazed prophet, and herself partakes, though callously, of his insanity—half believes, but scarcely feels. The sky is lurid, pestilential; it touches with plague what it illuminates. Such is the picture in its design. The colouring is quite in accordance with the purpose, and completes the sentiment; there is much of a green tone, yet under great variety. There is very great knowledge shown in it of artistical ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... further extremity of the smashana, or burning ground, appeared a group. By the lurid flames that flared and flickered round the half-extinguished funeral pyres, with remnants of their dreadful loads, Raja Vikram and Dharma Dhwaj could note the several features of the ill-omened spot. There was an outer ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... leaves the sketch to be finished by his reader. Thus, when Porteous is hurried away to execution, we attend his ruthless conductors, but we wait not to witness the last details, but flee with Butler from the scene of death, and looking back from afar, see through the lurid glare of torches a human figure dangling in the air—and the whole scene is more present to our minds, than if every successive incident had been regularly unfolded. Thus, when Ravenswood and his horse vanish from the sight of Colonel Ashton, we feel how the impressiveness and beauty of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... home in his old place, after so long absence, that the dead people, dead and buried for years, would have had more right to be at home, in any familiar spot, than he. Ethan Brand, it was said, had conversed with Satan himself in the lurid blaze of this very kiln. The legend had been matter of mirth heretofore, but looked grisly now. According to this tale, before Ethan Brand departed on his search, he had been accustomed to evoke a fiend from the hot furnace of the lime-kiln, night ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Lancaster. It seemed the work of enchantment, so suddenly and so strangely did the fires shoot forth. As the beacon flame increased, it lighted up the whole of the extensive table-land on the summit of Pendle Hill; and a long lurid streak fell on the darkling moss-pool near which the wizard had stood. But when it attained its utmost height, it revealed the depths of the forest below, and a red reflection, here and there, marked the course of Pendle Water. The excitement of the abbot and his companions ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... are killed. The fire of the sons of Sheitan is too strong for us. Your excellency will see the ground is covered with our dead. Bring fire," he ordered, and at the word one of the soldiers lighted a torch made of straw, soaked in oil, which threw a lurid flame over the ground. "See, excellency, ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... crash after crash, and occasionally crash before crash. The lightning's lurid glare illumines, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... I have only one; single, simple, easily-expressed: dread of the United States Custom House. Its terrors and its tyrannies have been depicted in such lurid colours on the other side that I am almost surprised to observe no manifest ogres in uniform caps, but only, it would seem, ordinary human beings. And, on closer acquaintanceship, they prove to be civil ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... insomnia, the pains of violent rheumatism, the dreadful imprisonment of a partial paralysis. I was in and out of hospitals. I spent months on my back, entertained only by my lurid memories. My mind became starved for new material on which to work. It was at that period that I first learned to obscure the awful presence of my own personality by flinging my thoughts into ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... himself with reiterated assurances that he was glorying in the discovery; he told himself that he was not made of the human stuff that can forgive bitter wrongs or forget them until cancelled. He painted in lurid colours his past griefs; through a ghastly morass of revenge grown stale, of memories deadened by time, he tried to struggle back to his original starting-point in vanished years, and feel as he felt when he flung ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... later, we get a vigorous and lurid picture of the survival of the old tribal strife: "1454: Donell O'Donell was installed in the lordship of Tyrconnell, in opposition to Rury O'Donell. Not long after this, Donell was treacherously taken captive and imprisoned ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... Lady Irmingard, Born of a noble race and name! Many a wandering Suabian bard, Whose life was dreary, and bleak, and hard, Has found through me the way to fame. Brief and bright were those days, and the night Which followed was full of a lurid light. Love, that of every woman's heart Will have the whole, and not a part, That is to her, in Nature's plan, More than ambition is to man, Her light, her life, her very breath, With no alternative but death, Found me a maiden soft and young, ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... and cedars, and apple-trees in the midst of the wood to more conventional shapes if we had them to-day. Hugh Bourne might have to overcome that habit of putting his hand before his face as he talked, and he would certainly have to use language much less lurid than he occasionally employed. William Clowes might have to abandon his practice of repeating a sentence over and over again in animated crescendo. Henry Higginson might be instructed not to lapse into impromptu rhyme in his Camp Meeting addresses. ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... inexpressibly sad in this. It seemed like standing at the death-bed of an old friend. The sea was still heaving violently; the gale, although moderated, was still pretty stiff, and the sun was setting in wild lurid clouds when the Foam rose for the last time— every spar and rope standing out sharply against the sky. Then she bent forward slowly, as she overtopped a huge billow. Into the hollow she rushed. Like an expert diver she went down head foremost ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... bettered the precedent given them. The sordid story is mainly important to our history as an example of the completeness of the influence of the papal autocracy, and of the submissiveness of clergy and laity to its behests. It was a lurid commentary on the practical working of the ecclesiastical system that the business of condemning an innocent order first brought into England the papal inquisitor and the use of torture. Yet the whole process was but so pale ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... valiantest of men Lays low his head beneath th' impending doom; In terror he descends death's awsome glen; While there appear flashing through the gloom The lurid shades of deeds which in the bloom Of youth he dared; at last the conscience cries With ruthless voice: "There's life beyond the tomb;" His dying thoughts all vanities despise As on the ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... vast number of Poussin's pictures; they put me in mind of the color of objects in dreams,—a strange, hazy, lurid hue. How noble are some of his landscapes! What a depth of solemn shadow is in yonder wood, near which, by the side of a black water, halts Diogenes. The air is thunder-laden, and breathes heavily. You hear ominous whispers ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... even if he has knowledge of it, he coolly assigns to his country's major international commitment a minimum and constantly diminishing importance. In his view the British Alliance is nothing but a piece of paper which may be consumed in the great bonfire now shedding such a lurid light over the world. What is germane to the matter is his own plan, his own method of taking up arms in a sea of troubles. The second part of the Black Dragon Society's Memorandum, pursuing the argument logically and inexorably ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... occurrence from June 23rd to July 20th inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. All the time the heat was so intense that butchers' meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... and, having become next to unconquerable, now shows that it can keep no terms and must kill or be killed. And through this the question of man's duties to man, on the broadest scale, is incessantly kept in agitation. It is like a lurid handwriting across the sky,—"Learn what man should be and do to his fellow." And the companion sentence is this,—"Thy justice to the strangers shall be the best security to thine ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... the camps and town that the "lady drivers had got it proper," been "completely wiped out," in fact not one left alive to tell the lurid tale. So that wherever we drove the next morning we were greeted with cheery nods and smiles by everyone. The damage to the town was considerable, but the loss of life singularly small. The Detail Issue Stores had gone so far as to exchange bets as to whether we would appear ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... flames. Wherever he trod, as he wandered through his vast and blazing prison, the molten fire was his footing, and the breath of fire was his air. Flowers, and trees, and hills were in that world as in ours, but wrought from one lurid and intolerable light; and, scattered around, rose gigantic palaces and domes of the living flame, like the mansions of the city of Hell. With every moment there passed to and fro shadowy forms, on whose countenances was engraven unutterable anguish; but ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it necessary to stand and act the story she is telling. Her memory is amazing and she turns with equal readiness to copious quotations from the Scripture and other pious observations to amusing but wholly unprintable anecdotes of her somewhat lurid past. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Mississippi Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... at the black sharply, half expecting that he was again going to leap overboard and swim for his liberty, for the man was glaring at the schooner they were approaching fast, his nostrils distended, and there was a curious lurid light in his eyes as if ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... one blood-stain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not seldom amid the excitement of uncertainty, or defeat, or of action, or getting ready for it, or a march. Most of the pages from 20 to 75 are verbatim copies of those lurid and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... for an hour's rowing, leaning on their oars to look at the picture of the cathedral rising like a mirage beyond the willows and the encircling water, with fleecy clouds above its glittering roof, or lurid storm-clouds with the red glow of sunset beneath their wings. In the dusk or the darkness there was silence along the banks but for a ceaseless throbbing of distant gun-fire, rising sometimes to ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... those dismal cries— Man knows his danger now, And veils in dust his brow. Beneath, the yawning earth—above, the lurid skies! Mortal, behold the toil and boast of years In one brief moment to oblivion hurled. So shall it be, when this vain guilty world Of woe, and sad necessity and tears, Sinks at the awful mandate of its Lord, As erst it rose to being at ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... seemed to play around their brows and heaven to be opened above. As they perished at the stake, amidst brutal jeers and shrivelling flames, serenely maintaining their profession, and calling on Christ, over the lurid vista of smoke and fire broke on their rapt vision the blessed splendors of Paradise; and their joy seemed, to the enthusiastic believers around, no less than a Divine inspiration, confirming their faith, and preaching, through the unquestionable truthfulness ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... remember?" stammered Mannie eagerly. He was deeply concerned lest the distinguished cross-examiner should think, that from him of his lurid past he could withhold anything. "I had my coat off—and you said you'd make it hot ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... and he stood up once more a man,—Sid Norman, lost and saved by a woman, his eyes beaming one moment with the tenderest gratitude, but on the next flashing with the most deadly revenge. Heaven and hell, the one with its joyous sunshine, the other with its lurid lights, appeared to struggle and mix up their flashes on Sid Norman's countenance, till gratitude, that rarest grace, was quenched, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... silver chandeliers had burned down very low, and their liquid wax trickled slowly and lazily on the marble table. Whenever Marianne passed them, the draught fanned them to a blaze; then they shed a lurid light on the tall, queenly form in the magnificent dress, and grew dim again when Marianne stepped back into the darker ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... had once had with a half drunken machine-minder whom he had had to pay off. The man had epitomised the chief engineer's qualities and character, as those who encountered his authority understood them, in a few lurid, illuminating phrases. "You know," he had said, "that guy ain't a man. No, sir. He's the mush-fed image of a penitentiary boss. I guess he'd set the grease box of a driving shaft hot with a look. His temper 'ud burn holes in sheet iron. As for work—work? Holy Mackinaw! ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... describing the mountain he was pleased to call his neck, with its half-hundredweight of dewlap; the merciless strength of his horns; the blast of steam from his nostrils into the chill of the October day; the deep-seated objection to everybody in his lurid eyes, attesting the unclubableness of his disposition! How she hesitated between this way and that of expressing to the full his murderousness and the beautiful pliancy of his soul, if got at the right way; showing, as the pseudo-Browning has it, that "we ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... ascending the hurricane deck, stood with folded arms, as if bracing himself to meet the foe. It is coming in all its fury! kind heaven! the fog lifts! it rolls itself away as it were a great scroll. The ink-black heavens are fearfully majestic, seen in the lightning's lurid glare. A speck! yes, 't is the boats! do they see them? Once more the boy flies to the cannon, not pausing to see if they are nearing the ship; his heart beats wildly; 'tis their only chance for life! the hurricane has burst upon them! the enraged deep responds loudly to ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... tenebrious^, sombrous^, pitch dark, pitchy, pitch black; caliginous^; black &c (in color) 431. sunless, lightless &c (sun) (light), &c 423; somber, dusky; unilluminated &c (illuminate) &c 420 [Obs.]; nocturnal; dingy, lurid, gloomy; murky, murksome^; shady, umbrageous; overcast &c (dim) 422; cloudy &c (opaque) 426; darkened; &c v.. dark as pitch, dark as a pit, dark as Erebus [Lat.]. benighted; noctivagant^, noctivagous^. Adv. in the dark, in the shade. Phr. brief as the lightning in the collied ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... with air to a temperature of 480 deg. C., acetylene ignites and burns with a flame, the appearance of which varies with the way in which it is brought in contact with the air. With the gas in excess a heavy lurid flame emitting dense volumes of smoke results, whilst if it be driven out in a sufficiently thin sheet, it burns with a flame of intense brilliancy and ulmost perfect whiteness, by the light of which colours can be ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... it rose among caverns and frothed almost at the verge of the heights. From this headland Mount Desert could be seen, leading the host of islands which go out into the Atlantic, ethereal in fog or lurid in ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... and deeper in the scale of degradation. I was now the slave of a habit which had become completely my master, and which fastened its remorseless fangs in my very vitals. Thought was a torturing thing. When I looked back, memory drew fearful pictures, the lines of lurid flame, and, whenever I dared anticipate the future, hope refused to illumine my onward path. I dwelt in one awful present; nothing to solace me—nothing to beckon me onward to ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... thought, that no soul misses truth willingly. In bare justice to brave, misguided Humanity; in daily touch with beings in so many respects little lower than the imagined angels; in dispassionate survey of history's lurid record of distorted loyalty staining our old, sad earth with life-blood of opposing loyalty, while each side fights for an idea; in view of the zeal which fires the martyr-spirit to endure all that equal zeal can inflict; in contemplation of the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... until midnight, notwithstanding the rain, to see the grand rock of Hornelen, a precipice 1200 feet high. The clouds lifted a little, and there was a dim, lurid light in the sky as our steamer swept under the awful cliff. A vast, indistinct mass, reaching apparently to the zenith, the summit crowned with a pointed tour, resembling the Cathedral of Drontheim, and the sides scarred with deep fissures, loomed over us. ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... sign in the skies, men might shudder and turn to a private hearth, or they might give loosest rein to desire for Fame. In the columns of the newspapers, above the name of every Roman patriot, each party found voice. From a lurid background of Moreau's conspiracy and d'Enghien's death, of a moribund English King and Premier, of Hayti aflame, and Tripoli insolent, they thundered, like Cassandra, of home woes. To the Federalist, reverencing the dead Washington, still looking ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... soon darkness reigned around, the prevailing gloom being only broken by the fiery path of some bombshell winging its parabolic flight through the air, or the long tongue of fire darting forth from the mouth of a stray cannon; while, in the sky above, the lurid smoke-clouds of burning houses joined with the shades of night in casting a pall over the scene of hideous carnage which the bright day had witnessed, hiding it for ever save from the memories of those who were there ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... committed by children without any real aim in view—without any real wish to do wrong, but merely out of curiosity or under the influence of an unconscious necessity for action. There are moments when the human being sees the future in such lurid colours that he shrinks from fixing his mental eye upon it, puts a check upon all his intellectual activity, and tries to feel convinced that the future will never be, and that the past has never been. At such moments—moments when thought does not shrink from ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... I came through the valley desolate, As I came through the valley, like a beam Of lurid lightning I beheld a gleam Of Love's great eyes that now were full of hate. Dear God! Dear God! I could bear all but that; But I fell down soul-stricken, dead, thereat, As I came ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... with a remark that would have procured him a beating in a sailor's dive, and Barry lurched to his feet with a lurid, rumbling oath. Little started up, too, but half-heartedly, then sat down to follow the action of his friend. He too had caught that last remark, and his fingers itched to feel Leyden's windpipe throb ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... spring of 1883 no signs of activity occurred. At this date, smoke, pumice, and cinders, fell without intermission. For eight weeks Krakatau blazed and thundered, the explosions being audible at Batavia, eighty miles off. As the fatal dawn of an August morning broke with lurid light, the culminating shock of an appalling detonation, described as "the very crack and crash of doom," echoed across the ocean, and was heard even in India and Australia, two thousand miles away. Gigantic tidal ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... hoping that the island might be inhabited, Harry ordered a gun to be fired, and blue lights to be burned. As the latter blazed up they cast a lurid glare over the ship and the wild rocky shore, tinging the sheets of spray which still flew over the deck, though the wind had gone down and the sea had much subsided. For a considerable time no answer was returned to these signals. At length a light ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... exclaimed Stell. A book on the war, by an Englishman. A detective story of the lurid type that lulls us to sleep. His shoes ranged in a careful row in the closet, with a shoe tree in every one of them. There was something speaking about them. They looked so human. Eva shut the door on them quickly. ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... two years, a picture drawn for him in a letter from his remaining son, Jack. The letter lay in the desk at his hand. He saw in the black night that shell-torn strip of land between the lines, black as a ploughed field, lurid for a swift moment under the red glare of a bursting shell or ghastly in the sickly illumination of a Verry light, and over this black pitted earth a man painfully staggering with a wounded man on his back. ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... sentimental with her friend the Comte de Guiche—as I would like to feel now?—If I had someone to be sentimental with. Alas! There was an ominous hot stillness in the air, and the sky beyond the Eiffel tower had a heavy, lurid tone in it. ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... lustrous Spanish eyes turned once more to the crimson light in the western sky. Some of that lurid splendor lit her dark, colorless face with a vivid glow. Lady Helena looked at her uneasily—there was a depth here she could not fathom. Was Inez ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... powers discovered that if the rabidly discontented were permitted to preach dynamite and destruction unlimited they would not be so apt to practice their cheerful doctrines. So, without let or hindrance, any apostle of any creed, cult or propaganda, however lurid and revolutionary, may come here of a Sunday to meet with his disciples and spout forth the faith that is in him until he has geysered himself into peace, or, what comes to the ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... man and his fellow; the preacher's whole notion of justice was the punishment of sin; and that punishment was hell, and hell only; so that the whole sermon was about hell from beginning to end—hell appalling, lurid, hopeless. And the eyes of all were fixed upon him with that glow from within which manifests the listening spirit. Some of the women were as pale as himself from sympathetic horror, doubtless also from a vague stirring of the conscience, which, without ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... marchandes de modes, and theatrical shawls and mantles from the stores of the fripiers, covered the biers; and the whole, surrounded and followed by a forest of pikes and bayonets, plumes and flags, had no other light than the lurid and shifting blaze of thousands of torches tossing in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... pride, But sabre hilt and rifle true, Oftimes of dark, ensanguined hue, Were ever at the side. They hailed their comrades in the fight, With blazing fires illumed the night, And waged with jest and smile, As toward the lurid torches' light Rode up their chief the while. No pert gallant or Conrad he, With gay plume waving haughtily; Nor donned he aught his troopers o'er, Save that the leathern cap he wore In front a silver crescent ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... in the light, He ventures forth along the edge of night; With silent foot he scouts the coulie's rim And scents the carrion awaiting him. His savage eyeballs lurid with a flare Seen but in unfed beasts which leave their lair To wrangle with their fellows for a meal Of bones ill-covered. Sets he forth to steal, To search and snarl and forage hungrily; A worthless prairie vagabond is he. Luckless the settler's heifer which astray ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... down on the Marinella, beyond Portici, beyond Torre del Greco, where Vesuvius towered up aloof, an angry mount of amethystine gloom, the conflagration spread and reached Pompeii, and dwelt on Torre dell'Annunziata. Stationary, lurid, it smouldered while the day died slowly. The long, densely populated sea-line from Pozzuoli to Castellammare burned and smoked with intensest incandescence, sending a glare of fiery mist against the threatening blue behind, and fringing with pomegranate-coloured ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... runs smoothest, and, I think, best; but you know better than best. "Lurid" is also a less indistinct epithet than "livid wave," and, if you think so, a dash ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... there came a lull in the wind, which had been rising steadily ever since that lurid sunset. Felix looked out of the hut door. The moon was full. It was almost as clear as day with the bright tropical moonlight, silvery in the open, pale green in the shadow. The people were still squatting in great rings round the hut, just outside the taboo line, and beating gongs, and sticks and ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... propagated a few inches from the detonator. Heated in contact with air to a temperature of 480 deg. C., acetylene ignites and burns with a flame, the appearance of which varies with the way in which it is brought in contact with the air. With the gas in excess a heavy lurid flame emitting dense volumes of smoke results, whilst if it be driven out in a sufficiently thin sheet, it burns with a flame of intense brilliancy and ulmost perfect whiteness, by the light of which colours can be judged as ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Jewel of Seven Stars, shining and sparkling with lurid light, as though each of the seven points of each the ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... stepped upon the roof. There was a full moon overhead, yet the vault of the sky at the moment was lurid with light cast up from the fires burning in the streets and open places of the city, and the chanting and chorusing of the old psalmody of Israel filled it with plaintive harmonies to which he could not but listen. The countless voices bearing the burden seemed to say, "Thus, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... that line sees the usual signs of a colliery in the unsightly pumping-engines surrounded by heaps of ashes, coal-dust, and slag; whilst a neighbouring iron-furnace in full blast throws out dense smoke and loud jets of steam by day and lurid flames at night. These works form the nucleus of the village, which is almost entirely occupied by coal-miners and iron-furnacemen. The place is remarkable for its large population, but not for its cleanness or neatness as a village; the houses, as in most ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... doubt in Lawler's mind, nor in Ruth's, that he had gone to relate his trouble to his "paw;" and that "paw" would presently appear to exact the lurid punishment Jimmy desired. ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... going to have a storm, Yussuf?" said Mr Burne, as he looked round at the lurid brassy aspect of the heavens, and the wild reflections upon ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... seeing and painting in all its lurid colouring the volcanic chaos of this 'stir and smoke' itself. Thus the same Siegfried Sassoon who renders with so much close analytic psychology the moods that cross and fluctuate in the dying hospital patient, or the haunted fugitive, as he flounders among snags ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... wiped the dank sweat from his forehead and gazed around him fiercely, and upwards at that lurid little ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Battered on all sides. But that clangorous din None feared; none flinched; as pattering drops of rain They heard it. Up to the rampart's foot they marched: None hung back; shoulder to shoulder on they came Like a long lurid cloud that o'er the sky Cronion trails in wild midwinter-tide. On that battalion moved, with thunderous tread Of tramping feet: a little above the earth Rose up the dust; the breeze swept it aside Drifting away behind ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... horrible touch of all is introduced when Faust in disgust leaves the revel, because out of the mouth of the witch with whom he had been dancing there had sprung a small red mouse. Throughout the whole play the sense of holy and splendid ideals shines at its brightest in lurid contrast with the hopeless and sordid dark of the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... chanted by the reddish gold wavelets of the "branch." In the eastern sky the florid face of a hunter's moon looked down, from the level line of a leaden cloud, which striped the star emblazoned shield of night, like a bar sinister; and the white lustre of her rays was dimmed to a lurid dulness ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... profanity pretty close to the surface at all times, but the wellspring of it that gushed from him as once more he dragged Kendrick off his feet sounded the depths of anxiety and formed a lurid preface to angry argument. Had Kendrick forgotten Stiles? They couldn't hope to save both prisoners at once. Get Stiles first and they could organize a ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... door closed, he gave himself up completely to black thoughts. He recalled his words to her, uttered years ago, half in jest and half in earnest; he had horrified her beyond expression by telling her how he would punish a wife if he were the husband she deceived. With a grim, lurid smile he remembered the penalty. He had said he would not kill; he would disfigure the woman frightfully and permit her to live as a moral example to other wives. Slitting her mouth from ear to ear or cutting off her nose—these were two of ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... "Volkslied." The old ballad-maker does not vouchsafe explanations about persons and motives; often he gives the history, not expressly nor fully, but by hints and glimpses, leaving the rest to conjecture; throwing up its salient points into a strong, lurid light against a background of shadows. The knight rides out a-hunting, and by and by his riderless horse comes home, and that ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... withdraw to the inmost recesses of their pastures; the sheep crowd into their fold; and the dull stupor of universal nature, whether animate or inanimate, presages its speedily awakening into general convulsion and disturbance, when the lurid lightning shall hiss at command of the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... audible reply, but Harley could see that he was unconvinced, and, in fact, he sent his newspaper a lurid despatch about it, taking events out of their proper proportion, and hence giving to them a wholly unjustifiable conclusion. But Sylvia Morgan was devotedly loyal to her uncle. There were few deeds of his of which she approved more warmly than this of saving Boyd's life, and Hobart, the master ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Eschylus, gives them that peculiar character of simplicity and grandeur, with which no other tragedies are marked in a like degree. Such was the source of the inspiration of classic tragedy, the spring of that stern and severe poetry which throws the lurid hues of a melancholy so profound upon the pallid and affrighted face of humanity. Man, struggling with all the gloomy energy of despair against this vague but formidable Horror, which no virtue or agony could ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... brutal; hers was exalted, impulsive, "head-long," [26] intense, and often fantastic and quaint. His imagination flamed forth like an intenser sunlight, heightening and quickening all that was alive and alert in man and Nature; hers shot out superb or lurid volcanic gleams across the simplicity of natural chiaro-oscuro, disturbing the air with conflicting and incalculable effects of strange horror and strange loveliness. It might have been averred of Browning that he said everything he thought; of her ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... obscene heads bent downward, their sodden eyes gleaming with expectancy. Well they knew that many a gorgeous feast awaited them wherever boulder, tree or swamp lay in the path of the mighty herd. At last the face of the prairie had ceased its surging; no lurid eye-ball light gleamed out of the dusk; and the tempest of cattle had passed, and went rolling out into the unbounded stretches of the ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... disease like "the strong man prepared to run a race," but it had now seized her with giant grasp, and she lay helpless and writhing, with the fiery fluid burning in her veins, sending dark, red flashes to her cheeks and brow. Her eyes had a fierce, lurid glare, and she tossed her head from side to side on the pillow with the wild restlessness of ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... summons about my bed. Over the anxious heart they flow, those slow cadences, so vibrant yet so magnificently passionless, until the nerves of pain cease to throb, and fear shrinks as a taint impossible to the patient of such a physician. It is not his to intimidate or denounce, to evoke visions of lurid hell, to linger over dire vaticinations, or apportion to each his grade of torment, but with cool fingers to smooth the hair back from the forehead, and in grave, tender accents to say: Sleep now, for it ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... tell," she said truthfully, but in such a manner as to convey that three volumes would scarcely have contained the lurid facts. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... him. He rattled his sword in its brazen scabbard, but it gave no answer back to him. His heart grew colder and colder, when suddenly the cloud above him was rent in a dozen places, and lightning flashed through the valley, and the thunder rolled over the echoing mountains. In the lurid glare of the lightning Cuglas saw a hundred ghostly forms sweeping towards him, uttering as they came nearer and nearer shrieks so terrible that the silence of death could more easily be borne. Cuglas turned to escape, but they hemmed him ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... coming! The "Jews" could be heard, with their band, down the street. They would be wanting their banner. Dolores hastily threw a wrapper on, while the captain advanced to the frontiers of his domain to welcome his army. The lurid company drew up in front of the house. The drum-beat softened in tone, but continued to give the rhythm for the privates who stood there marking time, keeping their heads and bodies and legs moving energetically ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... walls, the ground, the faces around them, as they crossed the yard. But, in the furnace-house, a deep and lurid red glared over all; the furnace roared with mighty flame. The men, like demons, in their fire-and-soot colouring, stood swart around, awaiting the moment when the tons of solid iron should have melted down into fiery liquid, fit to be poured, with still, heavy sound, into the ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... fail to mention, and this uncanny fact may be illustrated thus: If an object is blue or if it is yellow it will be recognised by all men as being blue or yellow, as the case may be. One will not say of it, "See that lurid yellow object," to have another reply, "What! that object directly before us? I see nothing yellow about it; it is as black as ink." But I was apparently exactly like such an impossible object. ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... crucible. The desert had multiplied weeks into years. Heat, thirst, hunger, loneliness, toil, fear, ferocity, pain—he knew them all. He had felt them all—the white sun, with its glazed, coalescing, lurid fire; the caked split lips and rasping, dry-puffed tongue; the sickening ache in the pit of his stomach; the insupportable silence, the empty space, the utter desolation, the contempt of life; the weary ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... with impassioned consequences. The very unconsciousness of a looming drama which is shown in such innocent first epistles from women to men, or vice versa, makes them, when such a drama follows, and they are read over by the purple or lurid light of it, all the more impressive, solemn, and ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... tongue," said the Squire promptly, and then drew a lurid picture of a place delivered over entirely to the hovels of nameless people of the lower middle classes, and worse, a place in which you would be as effectually cut off from your fellows as if you went to live in Kamschatka. ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... Prudence listened to the wild stories she told them of the wizards of her race. It was often in the kitchen, in the darkening evening, while some cooking process was going on, that the old Indian crone, sitting on her haunches by the bright red wood embers which sent up no flame, but a lurid light reversing the shadows of all the faces around, told her weird stories while they were awaiting the rising of the dough, perchance, out of which the household bread had to be made. There ran through these stories ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... enjoyed the lurid lights of the French Revolution with Scaramouche, or the brilliant buccaneering days of Peter Blood, or the adventures of the Sea-Hawk, the corsair, will now welcome with delight a turn in Restoration London with the always masterful Col. ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... him as he spoke and smiled. The jewelled scarab, set as a brooch on her bosom, flashed luridly in the moon, and in her black eyes there was a similar lurid gleam. ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... report of a large gun, immediately followed by a long roll of musketry, while at the same moment the bands of the different regiments struck up, and as if by magic a blaze of red light streamed across the dark ranks. This was effected by pine torches held aloft at intervals, throwing a lurid glare upon the grim and swarthy features of the Spaniards, whose brown uniforms and slouching hats presented a most picturesque effect as the red light ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... was even more picturesque and tragical than the Mississippi bubble. There were lively times round about the last of the Sixties and the early Seventies. The Terror lasted longer, but it was not much more lurid than the Commune; the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries in flames, the column gone from the Place Vendome, when I got there just after the siege. The regions of the beautiful Opera House and of the venerable Notre Dame they told me had been but yesterday running streams ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... suffered. But the forcible and picturesque imagery of half-barbaric tribes still remained. The coarseness of the beer-hall is, however, subdued by the gold and silken embroideries with which it is adorned. In a vivid description of a battle, in the midst of lurid flames, of blood and carnage, the enemy is "put to sleep with the sword." When a hero dies in peace, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... passions and lurid imaginations were the urges that drove them—that shaped their conduct toward their fellows. Some of them were rapid gunslingers—in the picturesque idioms of their speech—and there was not a man among them who did not take pride in his ability to "work" his gun. They had accepted Harlan, ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... amazingly during the past few months, and the expression on her face now roused all the dormant manhood in Morley's nature. Ignoring the woman by the stairway, he gripped Molly by the shoulders, and holding her so that the lurid light of the flaming logs fell upon her, he drove his questions into the girl's consciousness and brought alarmed truth forth before a ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... grin gave a momentary lurid hue to Mr. Fox's sallow face. Knowing the game to be in his own hands, he could quietly bide his time; so, assuming a tone of much moderation and dignity, he replied, he had no wish to be hard, and ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... scented souls. Zussmann wavered. Why, indeed, should he refuse their assistance? He knew their self-sacrificing days, their genuine joy in salvation. On their generosities he was far better posted than on Jewish—the lurid legend of these Mephistophelian matrons included blankets, clothes, port wine, and all the delicacies of the season. He admitted that Hulda had indeed been brought low, and permitted them to call. Then he went home to cut dry bread for the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... dome. "(Defunct his sire) She clasp'd him to her breast, "Embrac'd his clay-cold limbs; and all she said "That wretched parents say; and all she did "That hapless mothers do: then through the town "The melancholy funeral pomp she led, "The lurid members following, on a bier "For burning. In the road the dwelling stood "Through which the sad procession took its way, "And sound of lamentation struck the ears "Of Anaxarete, whom now the power "Of vengeance follow'd. Mov'd, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... again burst down in torrents,—the thunder roared over their heads,—and the black, lurid sky, looked as if it contained a second deluge. Flora shivered with cold and exhaustion, and bent more closely over the child, to protect her as much as possible, by the exposure of her own person, from the drenching rain ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... solemn as the quiet star-gazer in the "Midsummer Eve." This poetry is evident in the oddest ways, and escapes analysis, so elusive and so original is it, as in the "Street of Shows." Nothing at first thought seems more hopelessly remote from poetry than the country circus, with its lurid posters of the Giant Schoolgirl, the Petrified Man, and the Mermaid, all in strong sunlight; but the heart carries with it its own mood, and this flaring scene has undergone some indefinite transformation ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... Only petty fishlings, weighing ounces, took the bit between their teeth. We therefore doffed the fisherman and donned the artist and poet, and chased our own fancies down the dark whirlpooling river, along its dell of evergreens, now lurid with the last glows of twilight. Iglesias and I continued dreamily gazing down the thoro'fare toward Mollychunkamug only a certain length of time. Man keeps up to his highest elations hardly longer than a danseuse can ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... On lurid mornings, when the lustrous sea Is violet-shadowed from the warm blue air, When the dark grasses brighten over thee, And the winged ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... others hold the sway he held,— His day and power have passed away; His goodly forests all are felled, And songs of mirth rise, clear and gay, Chaunted by youthful voices, where His battle-hymn once filled the air— Where blazed the lurid council fire, The village church erects its spire; And where the mystic war-dance rang, With its confused, discordant clang, While stern, fierce lips, with many a cry For blood and vengeance, filled the sky, Mild ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... various small articles, as if to rejoin the noble ship she had so lately quitted. The latter was now hove-to, under full sail, an occasional puff of smoke alone betraying the presence of the demon of destruction within. The sky was dark and lowering, the sunset red and lurid in its grandeur, the clouds numerous and threatening, the sea high and dark, with occasional streaks of white foam. Not a breath of wind was stirring. Everything portended a gale. As we lay slowly rolling from side to side, both ship and boat were sometimes plainly ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... that prowls as well by night as day. Ugh! what's this at his feet—soft, clammy, shining in the flaring light? He leaps upon the smooth tree-trunk, growing slantwise instead of perpendicular. What if the torch and the odor of flesh should draw the snakes to the sleeper? The flame flares in wide, lurid curves, revealing the outlines of the sleeping man. Heavens, what a terrible face! He moves in spasmodic contortions. He is smothering. The veins of his neck will break if he is ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... moderation—But I wanted to find out more. "And when would you want me to go?" I asked, with a dissimulation of which I would not have suspected myself capable a moment before. I was maturing in the fire of love, of danger; in the lurid light of life piercing through my ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... from June 23 to July 20 inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter, without making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as black as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured feruginous light on the ground and floors of rooms, but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. All the time the heat was so intense that butchers' meat could hardly be eaten the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome. The ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... treachery and deceit; his lack of any high ideals; his bad influence on the child; his luxurious self-indulgent habits, the lies he had told, the insults he had offered her. By now the story had grown to a lurid whole in her imagination, based on a few distorted facts, yet radically and monstrously untrue. Generally, however, when she dwelt upon it, it had power to soothe any smart of conscience, to harden any yearning of the heart, supposing ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the picture is heightened through the mingling of the pale moonlight with the lurid reflection from the torches, and the coloring altogether is such that it is in perfect harmony ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... they were obliged to retire; they only committed the more acts of wanton cruelty. The most fearful confusion prevailed; first in one place and then in another the sky was red with the conflagration. Suddenly a lurid light illumined the towers and projecting buildings. The market-place was the principal quarter of the insurgents, who still wanted a leader. There, toward midnight, four men, masked, wearing the habit of one ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... obscure, tenebrious^, sombrous^, pitch dark, pitchy, pitch black; caliginous^; black &c (in color) 431. sunless, lightless &c (sun) (light), &c 423; somber, dusky; unilluminated &c (illuminate) &c 420 [Obs.]; nocturnal; dingy, lurid, gloomy; murky, murksome^; shady, umbrageous; overcast &c (dim) 422; cloudy &c (opaque) 426; darkened; &c v.. dark as pitch, dark as a pit, dark as Erebus [Lat.]. benighted; noctivagant^, noctivagous^. Adv. in the dark, in the shade. Phr. brief as the lightning in the collied night [M. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... was to be enacted a rapid drama of material progress such as the world has never elsewhere seen; but first there must be played the wild prologue of the West, never at any time to have a more lurid scene than here at the Halfway House of a continent, at the intersection of the grand transcontinental trails, the bloody angle of the plains. Eight men in a day, a score in a week, met death by violence. The street in the cemetery doubled before that of the town. There were more graves ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... nearly dark, the sky was overcast with heavy leaden clouds, and only a faint lurid glow on the horizon in the west showed where the sun had gone down. An icy wind, blowing full in their faces, and the hard, frozen surface of the snow, made their progress both difficult and painful. The poor old horse ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... persuades Orso to discard Michiella. The infatuated count waxes as the personification of portentous burlesque; he is having everything his own way. The acting throughout—owing to the real gravity of the vast basso Lebruno's burlesque, and Vittoria's archness—was that of high comedy with a lurid background. Vittoria showed an enchanting spirit of humour. She sang one bewitching barcarole that set the house in rocking motion. There was such melancholy in her heart that she cast herself into all the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... expiring sound of a shout rose above the roar of the ice and waters—but it failed to arouse me. The lights, though, we soon plainly discerned; and on the bluff, at the very mouth of the river, a column of flame began to rise, which cast a lurid light far over the surface of the raging lake. Some persons stood at the edge of the flood waving lighted torches; and I thought from their manner ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... oil, and bundles of shavings kept together with pieces of iron hoop. Tom gave the word to hoist away, and "the flying beacon," as Desmond called it, soon afterwards burst forth into a bright flame. The fire below was then lighted, and as it blazed up it cast a lurid glare over the whole island, on the ribs of their vessel, their hut below the tall cocoa-nut trees, and the lower shrubs. At the same instant loud screams were heard—the birds, startled by the unusual appearance, mounted into the air, numbers flying towards the fire, and the party on ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... of his master's angry shouts, he was galloping in mad haste back toward the uplands, with the fragments of the wagon at his heels. The Captain and Jamie watched him flying before the wind, a red spectre in the lurid light. Then, turning away once more to see to his boat, the Captain remarked, "Well, laddie, I guess we'll have to foot it back when we get through here. But Bill's going to ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... blazing fire some stars shone out benignly. A stillness and a pellucid clearness that were full of remote romance were making the vast desert their sacred possession. The aspect of the camp had changed. It was no longer a lurid and mysterious assemblage of men, animals, and tents, half revealed in the light of blown flames, half concealed by the black mantle of night, but a tranquil and restful picture of comfort and of repose, full of the quiet detail of feeding beasts, and men smoking, sleeping, or huddling together ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... with one blast of his desolating brand, had laid all in ruin. The platform was cleared, and the fallen torches, some half-extinguished, and other flaming on the ground by the sides of the dead, showed, in their uncertain gleams, a few terrified wretches seeking safely in flight. The same lurid rays, casting a transitory light on the iron gratings of the great tower, informed Wallace that the heat of conflict had drawn him to the prison of ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... shudder for the moment. But then she saw that it was a red light like a stormy sunset, with masses of clouds in the sky, and a low sun very fiery and dazzling, which no doubt to a hasty glance must have looked, with its dark shadows and high lurid lights, like the fires of the bottomless pit. But when you looked down you saw the reality what it was. The country that lay beneath was full of tropical foliage, but with many stretches of sand and dry plains, and in the foreground was a ...
— A Little Pilgrim - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... is not free from danger. Fierce storms arise; black clouds gather over the blue expanse, suffused anon with a lurid yellow tinge, and the fierce whirlwind howls along the river-banks, tearing the placid stream into masses of foam; the tall trees bend before the blast, and huge branches are wrenched off and hurled into ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... a novelist without a reference to his plots, unless indeed he discards plots as an article of faith. Mr. Blackmore has no such intention. His stories are full of adventure and dramatic situations, and his melodrama is of the lurid kind on which the calcium light is thrown. Sometimes, as in 'The Maid of Sker' and 'Cripps' they violate every probability. In others, as in 'Mary Anerley,' the mystery is childishly simple, the oft-repeated plot of a lost child ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... who endeavors to surround himself with a belt of wasted land, when overtaken by a conflagration in the prairies. All day the fire continued to rage, and at night the effect was even more appalling; for by the lurid flames the unfortunate Spaniards could read the consternation depicted in each others' ghastly countenances, while in the suburbs, along the slopes of the surrounding hills, might be seen the throng of besiegers, gazing with fiendish exultation on the work ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... just the faintest suggestion of steeliness in her voice now. "I fancy you've been giving him good advice, and painting me in lurid colors. Do you really think so badly of me?" Her hand pressed my arm with warm friendliness; her great blue eyes were watching me with ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... moment he heard a loud shout from the crowd, which was followed by a crash. Dashing once more across the passage, he saw that a lurid flame was piercing the smoke in the other room. The staircase he knew was impassable; probably gone by that time; but he had not time to think, so he drew the blanket over the girl's head and bounded towards the window. There was a feeling ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... his inadequate laboratory and thought out a philosophy said to be half a century ahead of his time. He died in 1911. His life was the drama of an elevated soul of complexities, far more tragic than any life associated with the lurid "killings" around him. ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... there, under the huge coniferous trees, lay patches of snow still unmelted, though the month was June. Indian fire glowed red on the white expanse, blood on marble, and scarlet snow-plant sent up lurid spouts like flaming fountains. The tree-shadows were painted pools of lupin, azure lakes; or they were purple seas of larkspur. Mountain-roses and wild lilac tangled in a maze of pink and white and gold. Bear-clover ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... dropped the quarter in an envelop and was stickin' it on the end of the broken branch, when the front door opens, and out dashes this tall gink with the rusty Vandyke and the hectic face. Yep, it's a lurid map, all right. Some of it might have been from goin' without a hat in the wind and weather, for his forehead and bald spot are just as high-colored as the rest; but there's a lot of temper tint, too, lightin' up the tan, and the deep furrows between the eyes shows it ain't an uncommon state ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... to believe there is nothing you could do. Go to her as my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell her any good you know of me. At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid colours of ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... anything, that she was nothing but a tinted and stippled surface. Her situation was peculiar indeed. She had been the heroine of a scandal which had grown dim only because, in the eyes of the London world, it paled in the lurid light of the contemporaneous. That attention had been fixed on it for several days, fifteen years before; there had been a high relish of the vivid evidence as to his wife's misconduct with which, in the divorce-court, Charles Tramore had judged well to regale a cynical public. The case was ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... and he really did more by resolute helpfulness than could have been done by any quantity of exhortation. He ventured to take a long view at sundown, and he found the experience saddening. The enormous chequered floor of the sea divided with turbulent sweep two sombre hollow hemispheres. Lurid red, livid blue, cold green shone in the sky, and were reflected in chance glints of horror from the spume of the charging seas. Cold, cold it was all round; cold where the lowering black cloud hung in the ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... with martial pride, But sabre hilt and rifle true, Oftimes of dark, ensanguined hue, Were ever at the side. They hailed their comrades in the fight, With blazing fires illumed the night, And waged with jest and smile, As toward the lurid torches' light Rode up their chief the while. No pert gallant or Conrad he, With gay plume waving haughtily; Nor donned he aught his troopers o'er, Save that the leathern cap he wore In front a silver crescent bore, Inscribed with "Death or Liberty." Of stature ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... gaze at the countenances over which the lurid torchlight cast a horrid glare, a strong hand grasped my collar, and by a jerk swung me up to a seat on one of the caissons; and at the same time a deep voice said, "Come, youngster, this is more in thy way than mine," and a black-bearded "sapeur" pushed a drum ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... Bessie?" said Muller in a quiet voice, but she, looking into his face, saw that it belied the voice. It was alive with evil passions that seemed to make it positively lurid, an effect that ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... to reflect that it would be wiser to return home. I could not tell what might next happen. The day was drawing to a close. As we looked eastward, we saw the whole sky glowing with a lurid glare, which I afterwards found was produced by the conflagration of Newgate prison, which, after the mob had broken into and released all the prisoners, they set on fire. My relative was very glad to see me back safe, and on hearing of my adventures said that Tom and I were ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... like sea-born flowers, With heaped and glistening bells, Falls round her fast, in ringing showers, With every wave that swells; And, burning o'er the midnight deep, In lurid fringes thrown, The living gems of ocean ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... delightful way. But happier scenes invite, and fairer skies; From your dark bed, children of woe, arise! In caves where peace ne'er smiled, where joy ne'er came, Where Friendship's eye ne'er glistened at the name Of one she loved, where famine and despair Sat silent 'mid the damp and lurid air, The soothing voice is heard; a beam of light Is cast upon their features, sunk and white; 140 With trembling joy they catch the stealing sound; Their famished little ones come smiling round. Sweet Infancy! ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... withholding from them their prey. For now, in this crisis of action, doubts assailed her. She remembered that she had never read the book, though she had heard much of it from Berrand. He was imaginative and essentially mischievous. Perhaps he had exaggerated its tendency, drawn too lurid a picture of its horrible power. Catherine turned a page or two and glanced at the clear, even ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the gloom, As a flower smiles on AEtna's fatal breast, Young Proserpine beside her lord doth bloom; And near—of Orpheus' soul, oh! idol blest!— While low for thee he tunes his lyre of light, I see thy meek, fair form dawn through that lurid night! ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... like some city's spires that gleam afar In golden sunshine when naught else is seen, So in my soul two images grew bright, The loftiest sun-peaks in the shadowy past. I saw myself escaping one dark night, And a red lurid flame light up the gloom Of midnight darkness as I looked behind me A memory 'twas of very earliest youth, For what preceded or came after it In the long distance utterly was lost. In solitary brightness there it stood A ghastly beacon-light on memory's waste. Yet I remembered how, in ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... the column, the last stragglers fell into the file behind, the last torch disappeared into the narrow street, and the broad space that had been so full was left utterly deserted, illuminated only by a dozen dim gaslights in exchange for the lurid glow which a moment earlier had lit up every wall and house from corner stone to ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... which some knowledge is essential to an understanding of his acts and character. Others are brought into prominence only as they are associated with the chief actor in the great drama. Many of them are disappearing,—fading into the smoky and lurid background. But that colossal central figure, playing one of the grandest roles ever set upon the stage of human life, becomes more impressive ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... him lying nearby, sprawled face down on the floor! In the silence and dim lurid glow of the fluorescent tubes, we stood holding our breaths, peering ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... crowd with a large shovelful of red-hot cinders. The rioters stopped to take breath and look on like children at the uncertain flickering blaze, which sprang high one moment, and dropped down the next only to creep along the base of the heap of wreck, and make secure of its future work. Then the lurid blaze darted up wild, high, and irrepressible; and the men around gave a cry of fierce exultation, and in rough mirth began to try and push each other in. In one of the pauses of the rushing, roaring noise of the flames, the moaning ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... soft, fungous, cryptogamic vegetation efflorescing with fierce luxuriance in that ghastly carbonic atmosphere. Rudimental palms and pines of mushroom growth stood there motionless, sending forth no soft and soul-like murmurs into the lurid reek; for as yet leaves and flowers and blue skies and pure breezes were not,—nothing but whiffs of mephitic and lethal vapor ascending, as from a vast charcoal brazier. No lark or linnet or redbreast ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... homilies ceased. From time to time, fresh details and unexpected revelations, wise guesses and shameless fakes, renewed the interest of the original fact. There were days when there was nothing about it in the papers, and then days when it broke out in vivid paragraphs and whole lurid columns again. It was not that the fraud was singular in its features; these were common to most of the defalcations, great and small, which were of daily fame in the newspapers. But the doubt as to the man's fate, and the enduring ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... Pensees de Rafael, Namouna, and Rolla', the last two being very eloquent at times, though immature. Rolla (1833) is one of the strongest and most depressing of his works; the sceptic regrets the faith he has lost the power to regain, and realizes in lurid flashes the desolate emptiness of his own heart. At this period the crisis of his life was reached. He accompanied George Sand to Italy, a rupture between them occurred, and De Musset returned to Paris ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... our evening sacrifice begun, When evil demons, lurid as the clouds That gather round the dying orb of day, Cluster in hideous troops, obscene and dread, About our altars, casting far and near Terrific shadows, while the sacred fire Sheds a pale lustre o'er their ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... another one, that of the women; and below it, at the foot of a lurid stairway, a suite of subterranean (Roman) chambers, a kind of Turkish bath for men, where the water hurries darkly through; the place is reeking with a steamy heat, and objectionable beyond words; it would not be easy to describe, in the language ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... attempt to unionize the Southern mill operatives. It has also been charged that the propaganda for legislation restricting the hours of labor and the age of operatives in Southern mills was financed to some extent by New England manufacturers, and that the writers of the many lurid accounts purporting to describe conditions in Southern mills received pay ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... stormy month of March, a ship was seen from our look-out, drifting at the mercy of the wind and waves. The sky was a mass of leaden clouds, and the sun as it sank from view, threw a lurid glare over the angry waters, such as one might fancy to arise from the deepest abyss of Hades. My father ordered the false light to be shown, which had already brought swift destruction on many a gallant bark. I knew not why, but my heart was interested in the fate of this vessel, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... mutual Love, Society, begin to be possible. How true is that of Novalis: "It is certain my Belief gains quite infinitely the moment I can convince another mind thereof"! Gaze thou in the face of thy Brother, in those eyes where plays the lambent fire of Kindness, or in those where rages the lurid conflagration of Anger; feel how thy own so quiet Soul is straightway involuntarily kindled with the like, and ye blaze and reverberate on each other, till it is all one limitless confluent flame (of embracing Love, or of deadly-grappling Hate); and ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... The colour in her cheek was like a lurid patch under the pallor of her skin. She gave a little gasp, and her hand went to her side. Then she laughed ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... papers the next morning and it is related that there was a brisk conversation between Mr. Hedges and the mayor, when the former arrived at the City Hall, which took on, not an orange and black hue, but rather a lurid flame, of which Mayor Strong was supposed to be but ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... Always amid that lurid carnival of sin floats the figure of Blossom, Blossom with her child-face of dazzling fairness, her china-blue eyes, her round, smooth cheeks. How different from the pinched pallid face of Berna! Poor, poor Berna! ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... and as far as Modesto. After that, under the teaching of Tim, he traveled without paying, riding blind baggage, box cars, and cow-catchers. Young Dick bought the newspapers, and frightened Tim by reading to him the lurid accounts of the kidnapping of the young heir ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... with the sunset glow. The faces of the crew, turned to watch the spectacle, curiously fixed and inhuman, were picked out of the gloom by the same fantastic light. It was as if the schooner, with masts and riggings, etched black against the lurid sky, sailed on into the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and went, yet still the awful struggle continued. Suddenly a shot struck the flag-staff, and the banner, which had waved in that lurid atmosphere all day, fell on the beach outside the fort. For a moment there was a pause, as if at a presage of disaster. Then a grenadier, the brave and immortal Serjeant Jasper, sprang upon the parapet, leaped ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... volcano, these must have been carried to us from it by the wind. As the captain had predicted, a stiff breeze soon afterwards sprang up, under the influence of which we speedily left the volcano far behind us; but during the greater part of the night we could see its lurid glare and hear its distant thunder. The shower did not cease to fall for several hours, and we must have sailed under it for nearly forty miles, perhaps farther. When we emerged from the cloud, our decks and every part of the rigging were completely covered with a thick ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... last, however, they reached the mouth of the crater, and, crawling cautiously to the very edge, peered down into its gloomy depths. At the bottom of the abyss, which seemed to them to go down into the very heart of the earth, a lurid flame burned sullenly, sending up a sulphureous steam, which cooling as it rose, fell again in showers upon the sides of the cavity. Into this one of the brave explorers had to descend, and when they had cast lots the choice fell upon Montano ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... box-couch, a young woman was perched, thin shoulders rounded over the ink-stained drawing-board resting on her knees. She had a large, self-willed mouth and dark Bohemian hair, and wore a dreary cotton kimono over a silk petticoat whose past had been lurid. One hand clutched gingerly a bottle of India ink, the other wielded a ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... money would be given to a Home for Fallen Women. He was a long time hitting off exactly the right charity; but, having pitched on it, he used to wake up in the night and think: 'It won't do, too lurid; it'll draw attention. Something quieter—better taste.' He did not care for dogs, or he would have named them; and it was in desperation at last—for his knowledge of charities was limited—that he decided on the blind. That could not be inappropriate, and it would make the Jury ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... It is the vehicle of passion and emotion, and consequently it may exhibit additional colours, expressing man's less desirable feelings, which cannot show themselves at higher levels; for example, a lurid brownish-red indicates the presence of sensuality, while black clouds show malice and hatred. A curious livid grey betokens the presence of fear, and a much darker grey, usually arranged in heavy rings around the ovoid, indicates a ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... by some that in the pages which follow I have painted in too lurid colours the horrors of a foreign invasion of England. Realism in art, it may be argued, can be carried too far. I prefer to think that the majority of my readers will acquit me of a desire to be unduly sensational. It is necessary ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... her tobacco to sniff . . . . The following trick was particularly agonising: Fedyushka would tie a piece of meat to a thread and give it to Kashtanka, and then, when she had swallowed it he would, with a loud laugh, pull it back again from her stomach, and the more lurid were her memories the more loudly and miserably ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... darkness, they moved up to their new camp—a camp on the very edge of the fighting; and from where they came to a halt, to wait for morning before being assigned to the trenches, they could see the lurid fires that flared across ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... the great army of the criticised, who always consider that the editor of the paper which dissects them is really responsible. The luckless Harriet Martineau, who, if I remember rightly, gives in her autobiography a lurid picture of Lockhart "going down at night to the printer's" and inserting dreadful things about her, and who, I believe, took the feminine plan of revenging herself in an obituary article, was only one of a ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... assumed that the continuance of slavery involved a bloody conflict; that either peaceably or through violence, slavery as contrary to the spirit of the age must come to an end; that the agitation against it could not be suppressed. Faulkner drew a lurid picture of the danger from servile insurrection, in which he referred to the utterances of two former speakers, one of whom had said that, unless something effective was done to ward off the danger, "the throats of all the white people of Virginia will be cut." The other ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... comments on my courage. Now and then a dog ran by, with a terrified air and drooping tail, keeping close to the houses as if for protection. One might have fancied oneself in some city ravaged by the plague, and the burning heat of the atmosphere, and lurid red of the clouds, might ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... danced before his eyes in lurid lights and grotesque shapes, with grinning faces, flying, whirling, in a wild, demoniac waltz. The room was full. The procession he had watched to-night winding out from the mill, stopped and jeered, and pointed skinny fingers at him. Then he was at the bank, and they came in troops, wringing ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... noble rivers and secluded lakes of Wisconsin were held in esteem or fear by the northern tribes, and it was the now-forgotten events and superstitions connected with them, not less than the frontier tendency for strong names, that gave a lurid and diabolical nomenclature to parts of this region. Devils, witches, magicians, and manitous were perpetuated, and Indians whose prowess was thought to be supernatural left dim records of themselves here and there—as near the dells of the Wisconsin, where a chasm fifty feet wide is shown as the ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... sunset, where above the horizon we see collecting thick masses of dark purple cloud, which augur a stormy morrow. Above us the peak of the Archangel is already wreathed in garlands of white mist, a sure sign of coming tempest, and it is amid a lurid light from the sinking sun that we hasten downwards, bending our steps in the direction of Pozzano, where the form of its convent stands out sharply defined against the background of the Bay. Night is rapidly approaching, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... churches; but the four frescoes at the farther end (representing the Adoration of the Magi, our Lord's Baptism, the Crucifixion, and the Descent into Hell), rude as they are, have a grim power which takes hold of our fancy at once. Dante himself might approve the last of the four, in which the lurid atmosphere, the hideous contortions of the demons, and the surging flight of the half-awakened dead, with their blank faces and stony eyes, contrast magnificently with the grand calmness of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... looked at her with a curious uncomprehending gaze, and then said, "Yes, I will go away." He took a step toward Maimie, his eyes like lurid flames. She shrank from him, while De Lacy stepped in his path. With a sweep of his arm he brushed De Lacy aside, hurling him crashing against the wall, and ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... night, it seemed almost as if he could see a vision—as if the outward circumstances in which he had beheld the trio were prophetic—Alice in the glory of the great light, Roger with his way shown clearly by the little lamp of God's Word, and Edward in that black shadow, made lurid and more awful by the faint unearthly light. The moon came out brightly from behind a cloud, just as ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... him the padded wall and dead With gorgeous colour gleams, And huge advertisements are spread, And lurid placards, orange, red, Drive through his ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... The ice was broken into thousands of confused shapes, but none, Hans thought, like the ordinary forms of splintered ice. There seemed a curious expression about all their outlines—a perpetual resemblance to living features, distorted and scornful. Myriads of deceitful shadows, and lurid lights, played and floated about and through the pale blue pinnacles, dazzling and confusing the sight of the traveller; while his ears grew dull and his head giddy with the constant gush and roar of the concealed waters. These ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... reached the fifth floor. The daylight had faded. A sea of roofs was beneath us; and, through the panes above our heads, a great red sky cast lurid gleams over our faces and hands. The girl gave a start of pleasure as she entered her room. It was peaceful and white; but the flaming fire and sky at that moment turned it quite rosy, smiling and aglow. From the rather ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... trouble. With the same hard demeanour, she was led back to prison, and vanished from the public gaze within its iron-clamped portal. It was whispered by those who peered after her that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way of ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The hum of labour resounded from every house; lights gleamed from the long casement windows in the attic storeys, and the whirl of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls. The fires, whose lurid, sullen light had been visible for miles, blazed fiercely up, in the great works and factories of the town. The din of hammers, the rushing of steam, and the dead heavy clanking of engines, was the harsh music which arose from ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... French, from the mass of gallant, dauntless emigrants, many of whom were thus entertained with grateful, commiserating hospitality in households whose members had but lately basked in the sparkling geniality of the southern atmosphere, now lurid and ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
