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More "Recoil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... death of a hero. The administration of General Grant might well be called the recoil of the cannon: it was the reactionary effect of a great military movement on civil affairs. Sumner alone withstood the shock of it, and he fought against it for four years like a veteran on his last line of defence, feeling victory was no longer possible. Many ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... head-dress fluttered, Pale the settler would recoil, And his deepest curse was uttered On the Red Son of ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... the undertow—the recoil of the surf from the reef that is hawsing her bows up into the wind, sir," explained the master, as he strained at the wheel, with the sweat trickling down from underneath the rim of his hat. "There—now she falls off again—steady ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... v-shaped blue under his chin. Deliberately, Benson squeezed, recovered from the recoil, aimed, fired, recovered, aimed, fired. Five seconds gone. The old man slumped across the desk, his arms extended. Better make a good job of it, six, seven, eight seconds; he stepped forward to the edge of the desk, call that fifteen seconds, and ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... skill, while depreciating the services of others of the fraternity. Such unscrupulous quacks sought also to win over the patient's friends by little attentions, flatteries and innuendoes. Many, said this philosopher, recoil from a man of skill even, if he is a braggart. "When the doctor," he continues, "attended by a man known to the patient, and having a right of entry into the house, advances into the dwelling of the sick man, he should make his appearance in good clothes, with an inclination of the head; ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... essentially therefrom in the submerged part. When the sea is heavy, says Mr. Relvas, and the high waves are tumbling over each other, they pass over my boat, and are powerless to capsize it. My boat clears waves that others are obliged to recoil before. It has the advantage of being able to move forward, whatever be the fury of the sea, and is capable, besides, of approaching rocks without any danger ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 441, June 14, 1884. • Various
... streets. Shock and recoil of traffic. The stock-still brick facade of an old church, against which the waves of people lurch and withdraw. Flare of sunshine down side-streets. Eddies of light in the windows of chemists' shops, with their blue, gold, purple jars, ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... feebly dawning behind them, when the dark hull of a ship, rapidly enlarging, seemed to rise out, broad and distinct, from the thin mist towards the west. The loud and incessant moan of the waves, the dash and recoil of their huge tops breaking against the sides of the vessel, with voices from on board, were distinctly heard, and immediately the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... of the different counties of the United Kingdom; she would have collected in her borders all their capitols and public buildings; and their variety, if not dignity, would valiantly abet her in the rivalry from which one must now recoil on her behalf. She could not, of course, except on such rare days of fog as seem to greet Englishmen in New York on purpose to vex us, have the adventitious aid which the London atmosphere renders; her air is of such a helpless sincerity that nothing ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... stood there, only dimly conscious of the scene about them, the sight of the boat bringing Phebe to the shore with the covered coffin beside her, extinguished in his heart the last glimmering of the hope which had been little more than a natural recoil from despair. He was not taken by surprise, or hurried into any vehemence of grief. A cold stupor, which made him almost insensible to his loss, crept over him. Sorrow would assert itself by and by; but now he felt dull and torpid. When the coffin was lifted out of the ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... unflinching truth of the speaker, that carried his words so directly to the heart of the listener. This is one of the great advantages of plain dealing and frankness. The habitual and wily flatterer may succeed until his practices recoil on himself, and like other sweets his aliment cloys by its excess; but he who deals honestly, though he often necessarily offends, possesses a power of praising that no quality but sincerity can bestow, since his words go directly to the heart, finding their ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... and started back, almost upsetting some one behind him by his recoil, on seeing his daughter in her motionless attitude by the ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Am I then grown so hideous that my sight Withers the roses on a warrior's cheeks, And makes his steps recoil! In Moorish battles He gazed undaunted on death's frightful form, But shrinks to view ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... was no refuge. She had been too much tired to hear anything the night before, but to-night there was scratching, nibbling, careering, fighting, squeaking, recoil and rally, charge and rout, as the grey Hanover rat fought his successful battle with his black English cousin all over the floors and stairs—nay, once or twice came rushing up and over the bed—frightening ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... government of the country; otherwise, the Zulu war was unjust indeed. If we continue to fail, as we have hitherto, to carry out our responsibilities as a humane and Christian nation ought to do, our lapse from what is right will certainly recoil upon our own heads, and, in the stern lessons of future troubles and disasters, we shall learn that Providence with the nation, as with the individual, makes a neglected duty its own avenger. We have sown the wind, let us be careful lest ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... 'which recoil on those who perpetrate them: he who sows vengeance, reaps not peace: and I would that my son should feel that mercy is the highest attribute of humanity. Keep, therefore, the secret of his birth from him, and let him know ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... Faith its bare, dry boughs must shed That nearer heaven the living ones may climb; The false must fail, though from our shores of time The old lament be heard, "Great Pan is dead!" That wail is Error's, from his high place hurled; This sharp recoil is Evil undertrod; Our time's unrest, an angel sent of God Troubling with life the waters of the world. Even as they list the winds of the Spirit blow To turn or break our century-rusted vanes; Sands shift and waste; the rock alone remains Where, led of Heaven, the strong ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the compliment—Rebecca spoke loud enough—and he did hear, and (thinking in his heart that he was a very fine man) the praise thrilled through every fibre of his big body, and made it tingle with pleasure. Then, however, came a recoil. "Is the girl making fun of me?" he thought, and straightway he bounced towards the bell, and was for retreating, as we have seen, when his father's jokes and his mother's entreaties caused him to pause and stay where he was. He conducted the young lady down ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... smoked buckskin. Our muleteer, Delorier, brought up the rear with his cart, waddling ankle-deep in the mud, alternately puffing at his pipe, and ejaculating in his prairie patois: "Sacre enfant de garce!" as one of the mules would seem to recoil before some abyss of unusual profundity. The cart was of the kind that one may see by scores around the market-place in Montreal, and had a white covering to protect the articles within. These were our provisions and a tent, with ammunition, blankets, and ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... as a something rather comical and domestic. But to see a grown man spanked for the crime of attempted murder is horrible. Farallone's fury got the better of him, and the blows resounded in the desert. I grappled his arm, and the recoil of it flung me head over heels. When Farallone had finished, the groom could not stand. He rolled in the sands, ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... kept in sight in comparing the results of such trials:—1st, that the shape and material of two missiles being the same, the heavier will range the farther, because in proportion to its momentum it meets less resistance from the atmosphere; 2d, that the less the recoil of the gun, the greater will be the initial velocity of the ball, since the motion lost in recoil is taken from the velocity of the ball. Of course, then, the larger the bore of the rifle, the greater will be its range, supposing always the best form of missile and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... and raving, and stabbing, and drowning, and poisoning; for with them there is no love without murder. Love, in their representations, is indeed a distorted, ridiculous, horrid monster, from whom common sense, taste, decency, and nature recoil. ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... men—it is accursed and no one has ever felt brave enough or reckless enough to care to cross again its ghostly threshold. Though I never heard any one say it is haunted, there are haunting memories enough surrounding it for one to feel a ghastly recoil from invading precincts defiled by such a crime. So the kindly forest has taken it into its protection, and Nature, who ever acts the generous part, has tried to throw the mantle of her foliage over the decaying roof, and about ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... will not bear malice against you for it; I know what your nature is: it is not a bad or unkind one, though you would often jar terribly on some feelings with whose recoil and quiver you could not possibly sympathise. I imagine you are both enthusiastic and implacable, as you are at once sagacious and careless; you know much and discover much, but you are in such a hurry to tell it all you never give yourself time to think how your reckless eloquence ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... close to them—pressing around them. Almost involuntarily he got up and moved back a few steps, still peering, straining to see in the inky blackness. Something loomed up and bumped into him, only to recoil with a muttered oath; and even as he realised it was a German he heard his sergeant's low voice from a few feet away. "Where are you, sir? Where are you?" The next moment he was back at ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... European fiat regarding an independent Albania was the recoil of Servia against Bulgaria. Confronted by the force majeure of the Great Powers which estopped her advance to the Adriatic, Servia turned her anxious regard toward the Gulf of Saloniki and the Aegean Sea. Already her victorious armies had occupied Macedonia from the Albanian frontier ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... instance, with 1,000 francs there might be three or four honest though unfortunate workmen restored to their families from a prison whither petty debts of 250 or 500 francs had driven them; but these sums being tripled by a shameful exaggeration of costs, the most charitable persons often recoil from doing a good deed at the thought of two-thirds of their bounty merely going to sheriffs and their officers. And yet, there are few hardships more worthy of relief than those befalling such unfortunate people ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... have been entirely harmonious with its origin. What scenes of horror, what refinements of iniquity, do the annals of monarchies present! If we should paint human nature with a baseness of heart, an hypocrisy, from which all must recoil and humanity disavow, it would be the portraiture of kings, their ministers ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... mechanically my legs kept moving forwards, but my eyes were every now and then closed in forgetfulness of all around me, until I was suddenly thrown down by getting entangled amongst the scrub, or aroused by a severe blow across the face from the recoil of a bough after the passage of the boy's horse. I now judged we had come about ninety-three miles from Yeerkumban-kauwe, and hoped that we could not be very far from water. Having tied up the horses for an hour or two, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... friends, if we are not practical, we are nothing. Now, the one main fault in the Christian Church is separation, repulsion, recoil between the component particles of the Lord's body. I will not, I do not care to inquire who is more to blame than another in the evil fact. I only care to insist that it is the duty of every individual man to be innocent of the same. One main cause, perhaps I should say the one ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... conception of our civilization, could have had no meaning in the world that Jesus lived in. In the strict sense of the physiologist, a quite different word ought to be used here.... We all know that there is a morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves which causes those suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from every effort to grasp a solid object. Brought to its logical conclusion, such a physiological habitus becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into the "intangible," into the "incomprehensible"; a distaste for all formulae, for ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... yet to consider this hypothesis as applied to man in Mr. Darwin's latest work. We naturally recoil from the thought that we have sprung from some lower race of animals—that we are only the descendants of some race of anthropoid apes. So long as it is asserted that we are no more than this, we may well be reluctant to admit the suggestion. But if it ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... in full readiness for the particular man[oe]uvre by which it was attempted to make this superiority available against himself. By a new formation of his troops he foiled the attack, and caused it to recoil upon the enemy. Had Pompey then no rejoinder ready for meeting this reply? No. His one arrow being shot, his quiver was exhausted. Without an effort at parrying any longer, the mighty game was surrendered as desperate. "Check to the king!" was heard in ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Guard cruiser quivered under the recoil of the salvo and then bucked under the sudden change of course to elude the torpedoes fired by the enemy a split ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... troops; the dynamite outrages, perpetrated by the structural iron workers, stretching across the entire country, and reaching a dastardly climax in the dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times building on October 1, 1910, in which some twenty men were killed. The recoil from this outrage was the severest blow which organized labor has received in America. John J. McNamara, Secretary of the Structural Iron Workers' Association, and his brother James were indicted for ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... a movement of recoil. She had felt the workman's heavy hand on her hand; and that ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... glass, Sprang in a thousand shivers on the helm, And in the hand the hilt remain'd alone. Then Rustum raised his head; his dreadful eyes Glared, and he shook on high his menacing spear, 515 And shouted: Rustum deg.!—Sohrab heard that shout, deg.516 And shrank amazed; back he recoil'd one step, And scann'd with blinking eyes the advancing form; And then he stood bewilder'd; and he dropp'd His covering shield, and the spear pierced his side. 520 He reel'd, and staggering back, ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... Trevannion: "it is very unbecoming to talk in this manner of so sacred a profession. A hunting and card-playing clergyman ought to be stripped of his gown without hesitation. Any right-minded person would recoil with horror at such a character. It is a great disgrace to the profession; no clergyman ought to enter into any kind of improper dissipation. Your ideas are ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... imploringly. "Your majesty looks so pale that I am afraid any excitement would injure your weak nerves. You need repose and ought not to be irritated; besides, what does your majesty care for the slanders of the populace? Such arrows recoil from ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... deputies of deputies to some members in this House, sent to spy out their liberties, to misrepresent their actions, and to prey upon them: men whose behavior on many occasions has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them; men promoted to the highest seats of justice—some who to my knowledge were glad, by going to a foreign country, to escape being brought to the bar of a court ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... up Ladd muttered low and deep, and swung the heavy rifle around to the left. Far along the slope a figure moved. Ladd began to work the lever of the Winchester and to shoot. At every shot the heavy firearm sprang up, and the recoil made Ladd's shoulder give back. Gale saw the bullets strike the lava behind, beside, before the fleeing Mexican, sending up dull puffs of dust. On the sixth shot he plunged down out of sight, either hit or frightened ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... different it really is. I am no Jephthah's daughter,—he wants no sacrifice, and I make none. Duty, the hardest word to learn, is not leading me. You heard my father's words; but not holding him as I do, his face could not recoil upon your heart like a ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... rising to a scream, as if the old building had found voice and protested against invasion, caused a recoil of the invaders. Girls brought up in neighborly relations with the wilderness, however, could be only a moment terrified by the screech-owl. But at no previous time in its history, not even when it was captured as a fort, ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Whether in some involuntary recoil the pilot pressed a wrong control or whether the action of the grass itself snatched the ladder from the ship I don't know; but that last bit attached to the machine was torn free and fell upon the green. It was the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... touched her. Isabel had gone through a great deal that day, but, with the cruel and sordid history of Hyde's married life fresh in her mind, none of the material horrors at Wancote had produced in her such a shuddering recoil as now. His wife had not been dead six months! "Captain Hyde, how ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... Cold Harbor, the men in blue could not live before such a fire at close quarters, and the regiments were compelled to recoil, while those who were left alive in the crater surrendered. The trumpets sounded the unwilling call to withdraw, and the Winchester men, many of them shedding tears of grief and rage, fell back to their old place, while from some distant point, ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... may be compared to a river, of which the waters succeed each other, drive each other forward, and flow on without interruption; these waters, obliged to roll over an unequal bed, encounter at intervals those obstacles which prevent their stagnation; they never cease to undulate; sometimes they recoil, then again rush forward, thus continuing to run with more or less velocity, until they are restored ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... a cry, and fell down upon her knees at her husband's feet, in a storm of wild and happy tears. He raised her up, bent forward as if to kiss her, but drew back with a heavy sigh. She felt him recoil, and the shudder which chilled ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... valley, along Young's Branch, McDowell established his last line of battle, based on the firm rock of the regulars. But by this time the Confederates had brought up troops from the whole length of their line; the balance of numbers was at last in their favor; and nothing could stay the Federal recoil. Lack of drill and discipline soon changed this recoil into a disorderly retreat. There was no panic; but most of the military units dissolved into a mere mob whose heart was set on getting back to Washington in any way left open. The ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... who would be anxious to secure their candidate against the possible appearance of an heir apparent. It was safer to leave the question of her successor an open one, so that any overt act in favour of any particular candidate would be tolerably certain to recoil on that candidate's head. Therefore Elizabeth would acknowledge neither Mary nor another, though it can hardly be doubted that she did herself look upon the royal Stewarts as the rightful claimants, throughout ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... shrinking of nature, but it was not a recoil of will. The ship may toss in dreadful billows, but the needle points to the pole. The train may rock upon the line, but it never leaves the rails. Christ felt that the Cross was an evil, but that feeling never made Him falter in His determination to bear it. His willing acceptance ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... who by nature and training should be its helpers hinder it instead. Why do they do this? Because their fastidious, aesthetic natures are outraged by a crudeness which they themselves could easily refine away if they chose; because also they recoil at a lack of conformity to existing conventions—conventions so hampering to the inner spirit of the Newness, that in order to incarnate at all it must ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... State, that the burghers were law-abiding and peaceful people, and that their Government was at all times able to control them. It was interesting to see the argument of the burghers getting out of hand, which was used with such effect in the case of Dr. Jameson and quoted by Sir Hercules Robinson, recoil upon the ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... interior, and the smoke from the gun united with the smoke that was already there. Bat simultaneous with the bang and the flash, Frank felt himself hurled back-ward, and to the ground, knocked down by the recoil of the gun, flat on ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... not say so?" continued Fouquet, still laughing; "and I would lay a wager there would be people found wicked enough to laugh at it." This sally disconcerted the monarch. Fouquet was skillful enough, or fortunate enough, to make Louis XIV. recoil before the appearance of the deed he meditated. M. d'Artagnan, when he appeared, received an order to desire a musketeer ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the corner I saw sitting there on my steps the very personification of Ruin, a tumble-down, dilapidated wreck of manhood. He gave one the impression of having been dropped where he sat, all in a heap. My first instinctive feeling was not one of recoil or even of hostility, but rather a sudden desire to pick him up and put him where he belonged, the instinct, I should say, of the normal man who hangs his axe always on the same nail. When he saw me he gathered himself ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... that are insatiable pursuers of glory calumniate glory to others who are their rivals, that they may get it without antagonists. In this they resemble rowers, who face the stern of the vessel but propel it ahead, that by the recoil from the stroke of their oars they may reach port, so those that give vent to precepts like this pursue glory with their face turned in the opposite direction. For otherwise what need was there to utter a precept like this, or to ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... I sat—a mountain-side, Far, far forsaken of the old sea's lip; A rock where ancient waters' rise and dip, Recoil and plunge, eddy, and oscillant tide, Had worn and worn, while races lived and died, Involved channels. Where the sea-weed's drip Followed the ebb, now crumbling lichens sip Sparse dews of heaven that down with sunset slide. I sat long-gazing ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... approached him now on the snow-covered slope, he was conscious again of that swift recoil from chill disapproval to reluctant attraction. Though she was not beautiful, though she was not even pretty according to the standards with which he was familiar, she possessed what he felt to be a dangerous allurement. ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... nights before; for scarcely has the sun drunk in the first drops of dew when a most unaccustomed stir, whose meaning the bee-keeper rarely will fail to grasp, is to be noticed within and around the buzzing city. At times one would almost appear to detect a sign of dispute, hesitation, recoil. It will happen even that for day after day a strange emotion, apparently without cause, will appear and vanish in this transparent, golden throng. Has a cloud that we cannot see crept across the sky ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... intimidated by their horrible and unnatural yells, nor yet dispirited by the [146] presence of a force so far superior to their own, they received them with a fire so steady and well directed, as forced them to recoil; leaving one of their slain on the field of attack. This alone, argued a great discomfiture of the Indians; as it is well known to be their invariable custom, to remove, if practicable, those of their warriors who fall in battle. Their subsequent movements, satisfied the ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... case of what is called a commercial crisis. There is said to be a commercial crisis when a great number of merchants and traders at once either have, or apprehend that they shall have, a difficulty in meeting their engagements. The most usual cause of this general embarrassment is the recoil of prices after they have been raised by a spirit of speculation, intense in degree, and extending to many commodities. When, after such a rise, the reaction comes and prices begin to fall, though at first perhaps ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... down on him and it. Chevalier de Belleisle judges that, however difficult, it can and must be possible to French valor; and storms in upon it, huge and furious (20,000, or if needful 30,000);—but is torn into mere wreck, and hideous recoil; rallies, snatches a standard, 'We must take it or die,'—and dies, does not take it; falls shot on the rampart, 'pulling at the palisades with his own hands,' nay some say 'with his teeth,' when the last moments came. Within one hour, he has lost 4,000 men; and himself and his Brother's ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... Lodge, famous physicist that he is, yet has a vein of mysticism and idealism in him which sometimes makes him recoil from the hard-and-fast interpretations of natural phenomena by physical science. Like M. Bergson, he sees in life some tendency or impetus which arose in matter at a definite time and place, "and which has continued to interact with ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... this world are often thrust upon us in a way to choke us. I had tramped miles, storming for the privileges that had made George Croghan what he was. Fate instantly picked me up from unendurable conditions to set me down where I could grow, and I squirmed with recoil from ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... and such as they, be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked. And thus this lowest of all scrambling fights goes on, and they who in other countries would, from their intelligence and station, most aspire to make the laws, do here recoil the farthest ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... title of American citizen is held in the highest respect, and when pronounced in a foreign land it causes the hearts of our countrymen to swell with honest pride. Surely when we reach the brink of the yawning abyss we shall recoil with horror ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... strength and the wrath of a tropic sea. As a wild steed ramps in rebellion, and rears till it swerves from a backward fall, The strong ship struggled and reared, and her deck was upright as a sheer cliff's wall. Stern and prow plunged under, alternate: a glimpse, a recoil, a breath, And she sprang as the life in a god made man would spring at the throat of death. Three glad hours, and it seemed not an hour of supreme and supernal joy, Filled full with delight that revives in remembrance a sea-bird's heart in a boy. For the central crest of ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... appear so," she said, with a flash of her occasional repugnance to the man; and then after a pause, "Herr von Gondremark," she added, "I recoil from this extremity." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... everybody watched anxiously to see the results of this marksman's shooting, he pulled the trigger; the rifle went off with an extra loud report, and behold! the muzzle of the Martini burst and the violent recoil gave the Lama a fearful blow in the face. The rifle, flying out of his hands, described a somersault in the air, and the Lama fell backwards to the ground, where he remained spread out flat, bleeding all over, and screaming like a child. His nose was squashed; one eye had been put out, ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... whale only fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the blow is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed air, especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways through ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... of having obstructed the war. I admit it. Gentlemen, I abhor war. I would oppose the war if I stood alone. When I think of a cold, glittering steel bayonet being plunged in the white, quivering flesh of a human being, I recoil with horror. I have often wondered if I could take the life of my fellow men, even to ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... you begin to appreciate some of the points of my performance so far as it has gone? The pretext on which I bared my foot for its delicate job under your very eyes, eh? Not so vain as it looked, in either sense, I fancy! Should you have said that your hand would recoil from a revolver the moment it went off? You see, I staked my life on it, and I've won. And what about that fall? It was the lottery! I was prepared to have my head cracked like an egg, and it's still pretty sore. The broken wrist wasn't your fault; it had passed into the accepted ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... in the shadow of Peter Cooper's death, I pray God that all the resources of America may be consecrated. We are coming on to times of prosperity that this country never imagined. Perhaps here and there a few years of recoil or set-back, but God only can estimate the wealth that is about to roll into the lap of this nation. Between five years ago, when I visited the South, and my recent visit, there has been a change for the better that amounts to a resurrection. The Chattahoochee ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... since, according to M. Jonnart's declaration, it rests with the people to call him back after the War; that all resistance on the part of the people will result in the abolition of the dynasty and the establishment of a Republic under Venizelos; that the Allies would not recoil from a bombardment of the capital and a military occupation; but if the people keep quiet, there will be no military occupation of Athens, only some soldiers may land at the Piraeus to stretch ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... prey, the Ammophila's for instance, when devouring its caterpillar. A hole is made in the victim's side; and the head and neck of the nursling dive deep into the wound, to root luxuriously among the entrails. There is never a withdrawal from the gnawed belly, never a recoil to interrupt the feast and to take breath awhile. The vivacious animal always goes forward, chewing, swallowing, digesting, until the caterpillar's skin is emptied of its contents. Once seated at table, it does not budge as long as the victuals last. To tease it with a straw is not ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... necessity of behaving to him on the ordinary footing of man and woman. What a ground to start from with a husband! The idea was hateful to her. She tried the argument that such a procedure arrogated merely a superiority in social standing, but it made her recoil from it the more. He was so immeasurably her superior that the poor little advantage on her side vanished like a candle in the sunlight, and she laughed herself to scorn. "Fancy," she laughed, "a midge, on the strength of having ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... general prosperity, I, of course, except the Moors and Arabs, who will never, I believe, adopt European civilisation; they seem to recoil from before it, like the wild beasts of ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... and nothing moved but pickets of soldiers and Red Guards grimly intent. In front of the Kazan Cathedral a three-inch field-gun lay in the middle of the street, slewed sideways from the recoil of its last shot over the roofs. Soldiers were standing in every doorway talking in low tones and peering down toward the Police Bridge. I heard one voice saying: "It is possible that we have done wrong...." At the corners patrols stopped all passersby-and the composition of these patrols ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... the ghostly foe our souls abuse, And all beyond his force he gains by ruse; He hates the purpose fast he cannot foil,— Then he retreats—retreats but to recoil! In endless barricade obstruction piles, To-day 'tis tears impede, to-morrow—smiles! And this poor dream—his coinage of the night Gives place to other lures, all falsely bright: All tricks he knows and uses—threats and prayers Attacks in ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... short, won the election by pledging itself to be thriftlessly wicked, cruel, and vindictive; and it did not find it as easy to escape from this pledge as it had from nobler ones. The end, as I write, is not yet; but it is clear that this thoughtless savagery will recoil on the heads of the Allies so severely that we shall be forced by the sternest necessity to take up our share of healing the Europe we have wounded almost to death instead of attempting to ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... platform with their backs to Michael's train and their faces to the naked rails on the other side. Higher up Michael could see the breast of an engine; it was backing, backing, towards the troop-train that waited under the cover of the roof. He could hear the clank of the coupling and the recoil. At that sound the band had their mouths to their bagpipes and their fingers ready on the stops. Two or three officers hurried down from the station doors and ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... at once upon the Poles, who were working busily at their trenches, and for a time gained a footing there; but a deadly fire of musketry with showers of arrows and stones, opened upon them from all points, compelled the Scots to recoil from the trenches, when they were instantly attacked by crowds of horsemen in mail shirts and steel caps. Hepburn drew off his men till they reached a rock on the plateau, and here they made their stand, the musketeers occupying the rock, the pikemen forming ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... established on a basis too firm to be shaken, whilst my power and unbounded influence convinced my enemies, that, so long as the present monarch sat upon the throne of France, their attempts at diminishing my credit and influence would only recoil upon themselves. Louis XV generally supped in my apartments every evening, unless indeed, by way of change, I went to sup with him. Our guests were of course of the first order, but yet not of the most exemplary morals. These persons had tact, and saw that, to please the king, ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... at hand. We saw her plainly—saw the rotted planks, the crumbling rigging, the rust-corroded metal-work, the broken rail, the gaping deck, and I could imagine that the clean water broke away from her sides in refluent wavelets as though in recoil from a thing unclean. She made no sound. No single thing stirred aboard the hulk of ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... happened, and that without any doing of his, Rendel's, the truth were discovered? Then with horror he put the idea away. Rachel! it would give Rachel just as great a pang, of course, whoever found it out. The flash of impulse and recoil had passed swiftly through his mind before he woke up, as it were, ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... of mind; but, to mark the progression of vice, we here see this depraved, lost character, hypocritically violating every natural feeling of the soul, to recruit his exhausted finances, and marrying an old and withered Sybil, at the sight of whom nature must recoil. ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... which, indeed, he rather appreciated so far as the reduced fare was concerned, reverse his judgment that he had fallen among kind-hearted folk. It had been a strain on them to maintain an appearance of gentility, and their recoil had been merely that of a stretched piece of elastic. He had lost his importance as a special person, and was now only just one of them. He understood that the family was exactly what it had to be, that its temperament and mode of ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... he stepped back towards the lower end of the cell. Wyat instantly sprang after him, but before he could reach him a flash of fire caused him to recoil, and to his horror and amazement, he beheld the rock open, and yield a passage ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... so profoundly akin to Charlotte's nature that its way, the way of its upward progress, was by violent impetus and recoil. ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... the thought of the Infinite, worship the most exalted beings they may conceive, and let those who cannot quite reach the exalted beings of the spirit world, worship their parents or children, or conjugal companions,—for worship is but unlimited love,—and they who recoil from humanity may perhaps find something to adore in the beauty and grandeur of nature on this globe, which every summer arrays in beauty, and in the grandeur of stellar worlds. From love and adoration come obedience,—which ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... temperature sufficiently high to bring about radioactive changes, the effect of which would be to expel helium and other disintegration products at cathode-ray velocity—(Kathoden-Strahlen-Fortpflanzung-Geschwindigkeit)—from the surface of the earth; and the recoil exerted by this expulsion would add itself to the force of ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... as the world, and as universal as man, and that are too vivid and pronounced to humble their pride or compromise their own distinctive glory. The exquisite shock of the bather as his naked body plunges into the flowing tide; the instinctive recoil on seeing for the first time a dead human body; the delicious thrill with which the lover presses for the first time his lady's lips; the terrifying roar of a lion, the flaunting scarlet of a poppy, and the inimitable flavour ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... not quite true. He was again looking down at her, and she felt his hand groping for hers. As he found and clasped it, he made a movement as if he wished again to draw her towards him. Gently she resisted, and at once she felt that he responded to her feeling of recoil, and Nan, with a confused sense of shame and anger, was now hurt by his submission. Most men in his place would have made short work of her resistance,—would have taken her, masterfully, into the shelter of ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... only rescue for Amy, the only hope for Guy, Philip found himself obliged to work on him by the production of another letter from his sister. He would rather, if possible, have kept this back, so much did his honourable feeling recoil from what had the air of slander and mischief-making; but he regarded firmness on his uncle's part as the only chance for Guy or for his cousin, and was resolved not to let him swerve from ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... women not to warn Honey against talking confidentially with Mrs. McLaughlin, since this would excite her suspicions and recoil upon him, Skinner, with a shower of inconvenient questions. The only thing he could do, then, was to see to it that he and Honey should avoid places where the McLaughlins were liable to be. Skinner had been put to all sorts of devices to find out if the McLaughlins were going ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... her brother, firmly. "The more I think, the more I believe I am right. No one," said he, blushing faintly as he spoke, "can have a greater recoil from profligacy than I have. You yourself have not greater sorrow over this young creature's sin than I have: the difference is this, you confuse ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... her spotted; we're going to open up on her," the voice from the Gaucho announced. "She has two 90's to our one; we'll try to disable them, first." The vision-screen lit with the indirect glare of the gun-flash, and the image in it jiggled violently as the ship shook to the recoil, then steadied again, with the enemy ship visible in the middle of it, growing larger and larger as the Gaucho rushed toward her. The gun fired again and again, flooding the screen with momentary yellow light and disturbing the image as the recoil shook the gun-cutter. ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... when the eye of no superior authority is on them, or nothing else to deter, they are "hail fellow well met" with such of the convicts as are unprincipled enough to curry favor with and assist them in covering up their peccadilloes from their superiors. They naturally recoil at the hardness and parsimony of the Government toward them, evading the performance of duties when they can, and I have heard more than one say: "Why should we care what prisoners do, so long as we don't get into trouble? The Government grinds us down to twelve hours' ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... shoved the stem of the pipe in the comer of his immense mouth, sent out several pungent puffs towards the face of Otto, who, accustomed as he was to the sickening odor of his father's tobacco, was forced to recoil a step and cough the strangling ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... glory. Ruskin notes that the art epochs have also been epochs of war, upheaval, and tyranny. He accounts for this by saying that when tyranny was hardest, crime blackest, sin ugliest, then, in the recoil and conflict, beauty and heroism attained their ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... Pharisaic arrogance, Madonna, you sought to superimpose your will to God's will concerning him—you confounded God's will with your own. And so his sins recoil upon you as much as upon any. Therefore, Madonna, do I bid you beware. Take a humbler view if you would be acceptable in the Divine sight. Learn to forgive, for I say to you to-day that you stand as greatly in need of forgiveness ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... on one occasion the shot and shell fell into a fishing village, and that within sight of an English man-of-war lying at anchor in the harbour at Nassau. Surely it is time that some well-understood laws should be made, and rules laid down, or such doings will sooner or later recoil on ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... us as being too robust. If people would believe me, they would not form the highest idea of Wagner from that which pleases them in him to-day. All that was only devised for convincing the masses, and people like ourselves recoil from it just as one would recoil from too garish a fresco. What concern have we with the irritating brutality of the overture to the "Tannhauser"? Or with the Walkyrie Circus? Whatever has become popular in Wagner's art, including ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... to destroy, not satisfy the hunger. There was sawdust in it, and parchment-dust, and lumber-dust; it was ill salted, badly baked, sad; sometimes it was blue-moldy, and sometimes even maggoty; but the mass of it was honest flour, and those who did not recoil from the look of it, or recognize the presence of the variety of foreign matter, could live upon it, in a sense, up to a certain pitch of life. But a great deal of it was not of his baking at all—he had been ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... is riveted, the gaze is spent Where lavish Nature pours her richest spoil, The tongue is voiceless with bewilderment, Far, far below the ocean's ceaseless toil Makes bosoms inly shudder and all eyes recoil. ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... get it back," she went on while he looked at her in silence a little. Fortune had not supplied him profusely with money, but his emotion was caused by no foresight of his probably having also to put his hand in his pocket for Mrs. Rooth. It was simply the instinctive recoil of a fastidious nature from the idea of familiar intimacy with people who lived from hand to mouth, together with a sense that this intimacy would have to be defined if it was to go much further. He would wish to know what it was supposed to be, like Nash's histrionics. Miriam after a moment ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... will would solidify into stone—whereas his must break. In him something must break. It was a cold and fatal deadlock, profitless. A life-automatism of fixed tension that suddenly, in him, did break. His will flew loose in a recoil: a recoil away from her. He left her, as inevitably as a broken spring ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... lance them in the back; clumsy escopetos drop loaded from the hands of dying cowards. Such are the battles of New Mexico. It is only when these red-skinned Tartars meet Americans or such high-spirited Indians as the Opates that they have to recoil before gunpowder. [Footnote: Since those times the Apaches ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... a matter of no ordinary difficulty, as they apprehended that the Bodagh and his wife would recoil with indignation at the bare notion of even condescending to discuss a topic which, in all probability, they would consider as an insult. Not, after all, that there existed, according to the opinion of their neighbors, such a vast disparity in the wealth of each; on the contrary, ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... to say about that. Having been placed on guard, and not yet relieved, he would permit no hand but his master's to touch anything in his charge. A frightful growl made the boy recoil and go backwards over ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... about women not to warn Honey against talking confidentially with Mrs. McLaughlin, since this would excite her suspicions and recoil upon him, Skinner, with a shower of inconvenient questions. The only thing he could do, then, was to see to it that he and Honey should avoid places where the McLaughlins were liable to be. Skinner ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... profanation. I have only condescended to mention the composition, and the last anecdote, to show how much the world is deluded, by the received opinion that the french are become a new race of exemplary devotees. The recoil from atheism to enthusiasm, is not unusual, but the french in general have not, as yet, experienced this change. That they are susceptible of extraordinary transitions, their history and revolution have sufficiently manifested. In the Journal de Paris, written in the reigns of Charles ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... certain discount for friction and the recoil of the gun, the net work realized by the powder-gas as the shot advances AM is represented by the area ACPM, and this is equated to the kinetic energy e of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... planter class with the bulk of the people had been impaired. Misapprehension appeared on both sides. Too much has been said lately, however, in justification of the poorer classes who were thus wakened suddenly to a distrust of the aristocracy; and too little has been said of the proud recoil of the aristocracy in the face of a sudden, credulous perversion of its motives—a perversion inspired by the pinching of the shoe, and yet a shoe that pinched one class as hard as it did another. It is as unfair to charge the planter with selfishness in opposing the ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... starting off when the door opened, and Cordelia Burr came in. She stared about her in her odd frowning way, and then hurried forward to join the runners. Eva gave a little start of recoil. Alice gave more than a start. She seized Eva and Janey by the wrists, and, pushing them before her, sent a nod and backward to several others who had left the bars to come over to the race-track. She did not say even to herself that she meant to crowd Cordelia out; but ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... same. Let them say to the young men, "You shall not do the things you prohibit us from doing; you shall not, behind our backs, do things you would despise us for doing; you shall not bring into our society characters from which you know every honest and pure woman ought to recoil as she would from a basilisk; you shall not breathe into our faces the pestiferous breath of the drunkard, nor burden our ears with the hateful sound of the blasphemer; you must be what you would have us, or you must be out of our society." Let young women talk thus ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... love that was infinite? Love which was not essential to his divine nature, could never have carried him through so great a work as this: Passions here would a failed, would a retreated, and have given the recoil; yea, his very humanity would here have flagged and fainted, had it not been managed, governed, and strengthened by his eternal Spirit. Wherefore it is said, that "through the eternal Spirit he offered himself without spot ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... yourself, 'Did it begin, in her time, with a harsh word from him and with a hasty reply from her? Will it one day end with me as the jury half feared that it ended with her?' Hideous questions for a wife to ask herself! You will stifle them; you will recoil from them, like a good woman, with horror. But when we meet the next morning you will be on your guard, and I shall see it, and know in my heart of hearts what it means. Imbittered by that knowledge, my next harsh word may be harsher still. Your ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... them; and let me tell him further, as my lord will tell you, gentlemen, that a counsel, in the discharge of his duty to his client, is neither to be intimidated, nor bullied, nor put down; and that any attempt to do either the one or the other, or the first, or the last, will recoil on the head of the attempter, be he plaintiff or be he defendant, be his name Pickwick, or Noakes, or Stoakes, or Stiles, or Brown, ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... cannot make them to be fortune's prizes, scattered to tempt the cupidity of all; but which a few only can catch, while their luck proves the disappointment and vexation of the many. The supposition were monstrous. We so instinctively recoil from supposing such to be the appointment of nature's Author, and so consciously grasp it for a truth clear by its own light—the conviction of a provision fully made in nature for all, whenever nature's wants are truly consulted—that we may safely reject, by this test, every ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... loudly proclaimed; but it is very likely to have indisposed them towards listening. Meantime, so far as I am acquainted with these Roman Catholic demurs, the difference between them and my own is broad. They, without suspecting any subtle, fraudulent purpose, simply recoil from the romantic air of such a statement—which builds up, as with an enchanter's wand, an important sect, such as could not possibly have escaped the notice of Christ and his apostles. I, on the other hand, insist not only upon the revolting ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... mark. Black Bear was struck in the chest with such force, that he was carried off his feet and knocked half fainting to the earth. The other was hit and compelled to recoil a step, but the weapon struck him lengthwise, and he was not harmed. He rallied and brought his gun to his shoulder, but by the time it was leveled, the ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... nothing impossible in the attainment of detachment by other channels. The immense is sublime as well as the terrible; and mere infinity of the object, like its hostile nature, can have the effect of making the mind recoil upon itself. Infinity, like hostility, removes us from things, and makes us conscious of our independence. The simultaneous view of many things, innumerable attractions felt together, produce equilibrium and indifference, as effectually as the exclusion of all. If we may ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... wild turmoil of winds and seas around him, which usually lifted his spirits, was sad, feeling lonely and wretched; he was suffering from the recoil of his little friend's charming presence. Pearl came on deck again looking for him. He did not see her, and the child, seeing an opening for a new game, avoided both her father and mother, who also stood ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... in the end, behold her in the room that I described. Very likely and very naturally, in some fling of feverish misery or recoil of thwarted love, she has quarrelled with her old employers and the children are forbidden to see her or to speak to her; or at best she gets her rent paid and a little to herself, and now and then her late charges are sent up (with another ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Boche dugouts now!" said he; and remembering the dugouts I had seen, I could picture the awful fate of those within, the choking fumes, the fire-scorched bodies! Truly the exponents of Frightfulness have felt the recoil of their own ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... course, be avoided from the start by the guns being altogether more strongly mounted on broad-tyred wheels and broad axles of similar height, size and pattern, and, above all, with a strong and uniform system for checking the recoil of the carriage, of which the drag-shoe, as it was fitted and sent up to us, ...
— With the Naval Brigade in Natal (1899-1900) - Journal of Active Service • Charles Richard Newdigate Burne
... air and threw wide the door. There she was, by a God-given chance. It was like predestined welcome, a confirming of his hardihood. In spite of the sudden blight and shadow on her face, instinctive recoil that meant, he knew, the closing of the door, he grasped her hands, both her soft white hands, and seemed, to his anguished mind, to be dragging himself in by them, and even in the face of that look of hers was over the threshold ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... suddenly came to Mlle. Moriaz; there was no time to recoil from it. She ordered up her coupe. M. Moriaz had just gone out to make a call in the neighbourhood. She determined to profit by his absence, and besought Mlle. Moiseney to make ready in haste to accompany her to Paris, where she had to confer with her dressmaker. Ten minutes later she stepped ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... imagination alight; his own recoil from the conjunction, overborne by immediate concern for Dyan. Unable to forget her—who could?—he had thrust the pain of remembering into the dark background of his mind; and there it remained—a hard knot of soreness and bitterness—as Aruna ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... back. She was far away in thought, and the action was unintentional. In very truth she had been dreaming of Iver, and the embrace chimed in with her dream, and the action of shrinking and repulsion was occasioned by the recoil of her moral nature from any undue ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... straight from here on to the Bethune road along which the trench creeps, the road honeycombed underneath by our shelters, and descend it for four or five hundred yards as it dips down towards Souchez. But all that ground is under regular and terrible attention. Since their recoil, the Germans have constantly sent huge shells into it. Their thunder shakes us in our caverns from time to time, and we see, high above the scarps, now here now there, the great black geysers of earth and rubbish, and the piled columns ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... something to write about that we would even undertake so trifling a subject as haberdashery; but as we went downstairs again to our kennel, au dixieme, as Mr. Wanamaker would call it, we thought seriously about this and decided that we would cause Pete's light-hearted suggestion to recoil violently upon his friendly brow, and that we would write a little essay about this tie and tell its story, which, to be honest, is very interesting to us. And this essay we are now endeavouring to write, even if it has to run ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... relieve you of your watch a short time," said Arthur; and the woman left the room. He led Helen to the bedside, and turning back the sheet, exposed the venerable features composed into everlasting repose. Helen did not recoil or tremble as she gazed. She even hushed her sobs, as if fearing to ruffle the inexpressible placidity of that dreamless rest. Every trace of harshness was removed from the countenance, and a serene melancholy reigned in its stead. ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... of confidence on the part of a person naturally or habitually reserved will often be followed by a phase of recoil. At breakfast next morning their overnight talk seemed to both Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau like something each had dreamt about the other, a quite impossible excess of intimacy. They discussed the ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... time!" called his friend. Sam made no reply. He was watching the wind pushes and waiting for a strong one. It came—it struck the tree-top. There was an ominous crack, but Sam had left enough and pushed hard to make sure; as soon as the recoil began he struck in very rapid succession three heavy strokes, cutting away all the remaining wood on the west side and leaving only a three-inch triangle of uncut fibre. All the weight was now northwest of this. The tree toppled that way, but swung ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... sole foundation of belief was evidently to cut off the hidden springs of moral consciousness, and to support the derivation of ethics from utility. In philosophy, as in politics, there was a sympathetic recoil from extremes. So common sense was brought in as capable of certain intuitive or original judgments which were in themselves necessary, and which luckily coincided with some of the firmest convictions among intelligent mankind. As Carlyle ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... not,—this dead recoil Of weary fibres stretched with toil, The pulse that flutters faint and low When ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... delicious landscape; the air cool and serene; my thoughts collected,—heart and conscience alike at peace. I took, then, the wand, and adjusted it to the palm of the hand as I had done before. I felt the slight touch of the delicate wire within, and again the thrill! I did not this time recoil; I continued to grasp the wand, and sought deliberately to analyze my own sensations in the contact. There came over me an increased consciousness of vital power; a certain exhilaration, elasticity, vigour, such as a strong cordial may produce on a fainting man. All the forces ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... vanity—it is a vile mockery. Life is gladness; it is the death in it that makes the misery. We call life-in-death life, and hence the mistake. If gladness were not at the root, whence its opposite sorrow, against which we arise, from which we recoil, with which we fight? We recognise it as death—the contrary of life. There could be no sorrow but for a recognition of primordial bliss. This in us that fights must be life. It is of the nature of light, not of darkness; darkness is nothing ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... sort of spiritual selection, as flowers have their own colours, and the creatures their own forms and features?" To this we answer (i.) that if you are to be a saint, as God has called you to be, you must have the qualifications and nature of a saint; (ii.) we ought not to recoil from this sum, as if the casting of the figures were necessarily a long process. No, not long! how long does it take one to reach love? Why, we commonly use the expression "falling in love"; and when the ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... first feeling of powerlessness, however, her strong nature sprang with a sharp recoil. She was too noble to surrender without a struggle. She would not even think whether she loved this man; that might be considered upon some safe vantage ground; now all energy must be concentrated upon escaping from the deadly peril in ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... had only just missed them. She had intended to marry a very important person who much admired her. She had been almost sure that she could marry him if she wanted to, and she had found out that she couldn't. It had not been, as in her youth, her own shrinking and her own recoil at the last decisive moment. She had been resolved and unwavering; her discomfiture had been sudden and its cause the quite grotesque one of her admirer having fallen head over heels in love with a child of eighteen—a foolish, affected little child, who giggled and glanced and blushed ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... was a peaceful world, because Opulence, inflated and moderate, had gone out of town: the former to its country-house, or a foreign hotel; the latter to lodgings at the seaside to bathe out of machines and prey on shrimps. The lull that reigned in and about Sapps Court was no doubt a sort of recoil or backwater from other neighbourhoods, with high salaries or real and personal estate, whose dwellings were closed and not being properly ventilated by their caretakers. It reacted on business there, every bit as much as ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... thrusting them down with pikes, hurling grenades and stink-pots from the tops; while the swivels on both sides poured their grape, and bar, and chain, and the great main-deck guns, thundering muzzle to muzzle, made both ships quiver and recoil, as they smashed the round shot through and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... in which it would not be my first interest to be honest?" said Andrew. "Would not my judgment be quickened by the compulsion and the danger? In no danger myself, might I not judge too leniently of things from which I should myself recoil? Selfishly smoother with regard to others, because less anxious about their honesty than my own, might I not yield them what, were I in the case, I should see at once I dared not allow to myself? I can perceive no use in making ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... Dalgetty. "Unless you insist on loaded connotations. It's a necessary period of rest. Recoil time for a whole society—well, it all works out neatly in Tighe's formulation. The present state of affairs should continue for about seventy-five years, we feel at the Institute. In that time, reason can—we hope—be so firmly ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... the nature of the payment might be: but when that matter was explained by the old woman, the honest lad rose up in horror, to think that a woman should traffic in her child's dishonour, told her that he came from a country where the very savages would recoil from such a bargain; and, having bowed the old lady ceremoniously to the door, ordered Gumbo to mark her well, and never admit her to his lodgings again. No doubt she retired breathing vengeance against the Iroquois: no Turk or Persian, she ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... love me!" he cried after a moment's misery in the depths, his spirits leaping high with the quick recoil. His eager hands seized her shoulders and drew her close, so close that their bodies touched and his impassioned eyes were within a few inches of hers of startled blue. "I'll make you ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... support of your prisoners in our hands, nor accommodation for the mere existence of ours, who are now languishing in your prison-ships, it becomes my duty, Sir, to state these pointed facts to you, that the imputations may recoil where they are deserved, and to report to those, under whose authority I have the honor to act, that such measures as they ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... was going to do, struck first, with the broom-handle rapping the beast on its tender nose. Hannibal recoiled with a flash of snarl and flashed back a second sweeping stroke of his mighty paw. Again he was anticipated, and the rap on his nose sent him into recoil. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... cheeks and dropped her brows like a black bar above her glowing eyes. Even in his recoil from what she said Ralph felt the tempestuous heat of her beauty. But for the first time his latent resentments rose in him, and he gave her ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Well in recoil from Manteuffel and his furies, the beaten Russians succeed in forming "a long Line behind Palzig Village," with that Second, slighter or Branch Quagmire between them and us; they get the Village beset, and have the Churchyard of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... because he happened to be steeped in philosophical ways of thinking. The forms in which he gave it expression are predominantly melancholy, because this kind of idealism, with its insistence on the unreality of evil, is the recoil from life of ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... latter they made the fatal mistake of believing our Buchanans, Cushings, and Touceys to be representative men. They were not aware how utterly the Democratic party had divorced itself from the moral sense of the Free States, nor had they any conception of the tremendous recoil of which the long-repressed convictions, traditions, and instincts of ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... one-fourth the weight of the ball, or one ounce of powder, with which it carries with great nicety and terrific effect, owing to its great weight of metal (twenty-one pounds); but it is a small piece of artillery which tries the shoulder very severely in the recoil. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... and Charles was dead; lastly, Savonarola had prophesied his own fall like the man who paced around the holy city for eight days, crying, "Woe to Jerusalem!" and on the ninth day, "Woe be on my own head!" None the less, the Florentine reformer, who could not recoil from any danger, was determined to attack the colossal abomination that was seated on St. Peter's holy throne; each debauch, each fresh crime that lifted up its brazen face to the light of day or tried to hide ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of Salisbury, John had created, in 1351, by way of following suit, a brotherhood called Our Lady of the Noble House, or of the Star, the knights of which, to the number of five hundred, had to swear, that if they were forced to recoil in a battle they would never yield to the enemy more than four acres of ground, and would be slain rather than retreat. John was destined to find out before long that neither numbers nor bravery can supply ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... confidently believe that equal suffrage is coming far more swiftly than most of us suspect. Educated, public-spirited women will soon refuse to be subjected to such humiliating conditions. Educated men will recoil in their turn from the sheer unreason of the position that the opinions and wishes of their wives and mothers are to be consulted upon every other question except the laws and government under which they and their husbands and children must live and die. Equal ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... the many young and zealous friends who gathered around him. These meetings were even more numerously attended after his return from Boston than they were before he was summoned to the bar of the General Assembly; for persecution and injustice naturally recoil on the perpetrators of it, and the victim of such harsh measures is sure to gain friends and supporters among the warm-hearted and ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... Then he flung open the door and leaned out and, from his backward recoil, Raven knew he had hoped unreasonably to find his wife, knocking at her own door. Raven kicked his feet against the step, with an implication ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... wage—in praise or pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste. You may have seen at country fairs a machine by which the rustics test their strength of arm. A country fellow strikes vigorously a buffer, which recoils, and the amount of the recoil—dependent, of course, on the force with which it is struck—is represented by a series of notches or marks. The world is such a buffer. A man strikes it with all his might; his mark may be 40,000 pounds, a peerage, and Westminster Abbey, a name ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... fifty years afterwards. The Maoris of Poverty Bay had a story that Cook gave to one of their chiefs a musket with a supply of powder and lead. The fate of the musket was that the first man to fire it was so frightened by the report and recoil that he flung it away into the sea. The powder the natives sowed in the ground believing it to be cabbage seed. Of the lead they made an axe, and when the axe bent at the first blow they put it in the fire to harden it. When it then ran about like water they tried to ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... The lover submits to all the caprices of a woman; and as a man is never vile while he lies in the arms of his mistress, he will take the means to please her that a husband would recoil from. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... he had turned to bay in a willow thicket. We heard him howl the long-drawn howl for help, and before we could reach the place King saw the Dogs recoil and scatter. A minute later there sped from the far side of the thicket a small Gray-wolf and a Black One of very ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... anti-slavery movement of the nation. Should the war cease to-morrow, it has inaugurated a new era in our nation's history. The folly of the Gulf States, in throwing away a political condition where the conservative sentiment stood by them only too well, must inevitably recoil on their own heads, whether the strife last a day or a generation. No man can estimate the new measures and combinations to which it is destined to give rise. There stands the Constitution, with all its severe conditions,—severe or weak, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... Waterloo. The author must himself have been drunk when he wrote it. Are you not ashamed to set such pitiful cant, I will not say such wilful falsehood and slander, before any rational creature? Did you not know that an overcharged gun would knock the musketeer over by its recoil? I do not tell you to give the convicts all and any books they may desire; but pray what harm would an arithmetic do, unless it taught them to refute the statistics of your lying almanac, which gravely advises farmers to feed ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... this gave play to the sole and the framework, separated the two platforms, and the breeching. The tackle had given way, so that the cannon was no longer firm on its carriage. The stationary breeching, which prevents recoil, was not in use at this time. A heavy sea struck the port, the carronade, insecurely fastened, had recoiled and broken its chain, and began its ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... us to esteem also another form or type of character, and the opposite one; that which is remarkable for—in which predominates—not so much charity as justice; that which was seen in the warriors and prophets of old; who perchance, had a more strong recoil from vice than sympathy with virtue; whose indignation towards that which is wrong and hypocritical was more intense than their love for that which is good: the material, the character, out of which the reformer ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... chocs. The Vicar called the other day, and I have caught several cups of tea on the recoil at the Vicarage since. Miss Stevenson, his ewe-lamb, is A1, and we have had some splendid sport together. We caught eleven beauties yesterday; one ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... As They Are to Godwin's mind was synonymous with "things as they ought not to be." He frankly asserts: "Caleb Williams was the offspring of that temper of mind in which the composition of my Political Justice left me"[75]—a guileless confession that may well have deterred many readers who recoil shuddering from political treatises decked out in the guise of fiction. But alarm is needless; for, although Caleb Williams attempts to reveal the oppressions that a poor man may endure under existing conditions, and the perversion of the character of an aristocrat through the "poison of ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... Paris for his "churching," with ten thousand lances instead of tapers. And, as was his fashion, he started to keep his word: his advance guard was burning villages up to the gates of Paris, when, according to the story, his horse stepped on some hot cinders at Mantes and in his sudden recoil so injured the monarch that he died soon ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... wild, passionate utterances of Lillie that Harry felt a recoil of mingled conscience, fear, and that disgust which man feels when she, whom God made to be sought, degrades herself to seek. There is no edification and no propriety in highly colored and minute drawing of such scenes of temptation ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... wreak his revenge on Essex and Manchester, though the blow would probably recoil upon himself.[b]He proposed in the Commons what was afterwards called the "self-denying ordinance," that the members of both houses should be excluded from all offices, whether civil or military. He would not, he said, reflect on what was passed, but suggest ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... nucleus divides. The first division, as science knows, is a division of recoil. From the perfect oneing of the two parent nuclei in the egg-cell results a recoil or new assertion. That which was perfect one now divides again, and in the recoil becomes ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... over Miss Bart: a sense of remembered treachery that was like the gleam of a knife in the dusk. But compassion, in a moment, got the better of her instinctive recoil. What was this outpouring of senseless bitterness but the tracked creature's attempt to cloud the medium through which it was fleeing? It was on Lily's lips to exclaim: "You poor soul, don't double and turn—come straight back to me, and we'll find a way ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... itself, as far as possible, according to rule, do find this state of matters most unofficial unsatisfactory,—is not to be denied. Complaints are made; attempts are made: but without effect. The attempts even recoil; and must be desisted from, for fear of worse: the sceptre is departed from this Legislative once and always. A poor Legislative, so hard was fate, had let itself be hand-gyved, nailed to the rock like an Andromeda, and could only wail there to the Earth and Heavens; miraculously ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... manner its more entire incorporation into the English language. Thus 'shash', a Turkish word, becomes 'sash'; 'colone' (Burton) 'clown'{55}; 'restoration' was at first spelt 'restauration'; and so long as 'vicinage' was spelt 'voisinage'{56} (Sanderson), 'mirror' 'miroir' (Fuller), 'recoil' 'recule', or 'career' 'carriere' (both by Holland), they could scarcely be considered those purely English words which ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... officer's grip tightened convulsively; the night of a sudden seemed alive with men close to them—pressing around them. Almost involuntarily he got up and moved back a few steps, still peering, straining to see in the inky blackness. Something loomed up and bumped into him, only to recoil with a muttered oath; and even as he realised it was a German he heard his sergeant's low voice from a few feet away. "Where are you, sir? Where are you?" The next moment he was back ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... century ago, Jefferson wrote to Spencer Roane, "The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please."[39] And however much we may recoil from admitting Jefferson's conclusion to be true, it none the less remains the fact that it has proved itself to be true, and that the people have recognized it to be true, and have taken measures to protect themselves by bringing the judiciary under the same degree of control which they ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... summits of the bergs had come into contact with such violence that both the projecting masses of ice had become detached and had gone thundering down into the water, fortunately at some few yards' distance astern of the whaler, and the shock of collision had been so great as to compel the momentary recoil of the bergs, with the ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... dark object at the top of the snow-crusted knoll. Tom was twisting round to get aim across the rail—and the next instant both of us were nearly kicked out of the sleigh by the recoil of the greatly overloaded gun. We both scrambled to our feet, for we heard an ugly snarl. I think the animal leaped upward; I was sure I saw something big and black rise six feet in the air, as if it were coming straight for ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... scandal is so common every where in life, that multitudes are addicted to it without the shadow of a suspicion that they are so. Thousands and thousands of young women whose hearts would recoil at the bare recital of deeds of butchery and blood—nay, who would faint at the sight of the severities, not to say cruelties, which, under the guise of parental discipline, or on the plea of authority, are often and hourly inflicted on ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... but one step which is irrevocable, namely, the final one, and in Charlotte Farnham's besetment this step was the mailing of the letter to Mr. Galbraith. Many times during the evening she wrought herself up to the plunging point, only to recoil on the very brink; and when at length she gave up the struggle and went to bed, the sealed letter was still ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... unfaithfulness of the people.[3] What! these victims who died for their faith, these heroic Maccabees, this mother with her seven sons, will Jehovah forget them eternally? Will he abandon them to the corruption of the grave?[4] Worldly and incredulous Sadduceeism might possibly not recoil before such a consequence, and a consummate sage, like Antigonus of Soco,[5] might indeed maintain that we must not practise virtue like a slave in expectation of a recompense, that we must be virtuous without hope. But the mass of the people could not be contented with that. Some, ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... it was now evident that I must trust to my own ability to pull the matter quickly through as I thought best. But it was not the fatigue due to this system that finally made Niemann, the main prop in my work, recoil from the task which at the start he had undertaken with an energy full of promise. He had been informed that there was a conspiracy to ruin my work. From this time forward he was a victim to a despondency to which, ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... many idealistic maps of progress. We did not get anywhere. It was a convention, not a march. Lovely things were said, but when we got home we found the furnace out. Reactionaries have frequently taken advantage of the recoil from such a period, and they have promised "the good old times"—which usually means the bad old abuses—and because they are perfectly void of vision they are sometimes regarded as "practical men." Their return to power is often hailed as ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... spoke, and from beneath her black eyes seemed to shoot baleful fires of hate and rage unutterable. The full intensity of her nature was aroused, and the expression of her face was terrible in its fury and malignancy. But Gualtier did not recoil. On the contrary, he feasted his eyes on her, and a smile came ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... once gave a movement of recoil. At the first glance, at the first sight of those motionless people, she suspected the danger which her feminine instinct had already foreseen. And, deathly pale, deprived of all her strength, she dared not ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... wife and she loved him. She loved him just as all good women love, with a complete abandon—with heart, mind and strength. He at first had periods of such abandon, too, but his conscience soon made him recoil from an affection of which God might be jealous. He believed that a man should forsake father, mother, wife and child in order to follow duty—and duty to him was the thing we didn't want to do. That which was pleasant ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... resolution of never being taken by them alive; or, at least, unwounded, or unmutilated. I see, I feel that the love of country is our "ruling passion;" and it is this that has and will give us the superiority in battle, by land and by sea, while the want of it will cause some folks to recoil before the American bayonet and bullets, as the British did at Chippewa, ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... who insult the holy name of God by profane and blasphemous language. On all those who now hear me I lay this charge: publish everywhere that I have no hope for such men. They cast in the face of Heaven the stone which will, one day, recoil upon them and crush them. I would also most earnestly exhort you as regards the duty of fasting. Many fathers and mothers come to me in order to impart to me the sorrow which they experience in considering the melancholy fact which cannot escape their observation, that the demon of uncleanness ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... it is clear that we must not seek too high for Jeremiah's rank as a poet. The temptation to this—which has overcome some recent writers—is due partly to a recoil from older, unjust depreciations of his prophetic style and partly to the sublimity of the truths which that mixed style frequently conveys. But those truths apart, his verse was just that of the folksongs of the peasants among whom he was reared—sometimes of an exquisite ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... anybody on a professional matter. He reflected, with much probability on his side, that Lydgate would by-and-by be caught tripping too, and that his ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his professional brethren, would by-and-by recoil on himself. He threw out biting remarks on Lydgate's tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get himself a factitious reputation with credulous people. That cant about cures was never ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the enthusiasm of women at the South in aid of the Slave-holders' Rebellion, and can form some estimate of the "fierceness of their wrath"; but, God be thanked, the days approach when their mad passions will recoil upon themselves—the days approach when their evil cause must die. Let us unitedly pledge ourselves to stand by the Government, in our legitimate sphere, and out of it, if needs be. Let us, with womanly zeal, help to crush the power ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... this, your children will be your curse and the curse of the state. Wherever they go they will become the standard-bearer of the turbulent, and brandish the torch of discord, until at last, perhaps, they will die in a dungeon or upon the gibbet. And then the curse will recoil upon you. It will strike deep into your hearts. It will come to you in the darkness of unfulfilled promises and blighted hopes and injured affections and desolated homes and wounded spirits and disgraced names and infamous memories! And you, in the face of these, ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... of masterly mind, too, is Kue Pih-yuh! When the land is being rightly governed he will serve; when it is under bad government he is apt to recoil, and brood." ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... more delightful amusements.' Johnson's Works, iv. 145. Of Pope Johnson wrote (ib. viii. 321):—'To make verses was his first labour, and to mend them was his last. ... He was one of those few whose labour is their pleasure.' Thomas Carlyle, in 1824, speaking of writing, says:—'I always recoil from again engaging with it.' Froude's Carlyle, i. 213. Five years later he wrote:—'Writing is a dreadful labour, yet not so dreadful as idleness.' Ib. ii. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... muttered low and deep, and swung the heavy rifle around to the left. Far along the slope a figure moved. Ladd began to work the lever of the Winchester and to shoot. At every shot the heavy firearm sprang up, and the recoil made Ladd's shoulder give back. Gale saw the bullets strike the lava behind, beside, before the fleeing Mexican, sending up dull puffs of dust. On the sixth shot he plunged down out of sight, either hit ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... for the general good. Nor do I conceive there is reason to doubt their personal courage, though they are too good-natured often to excite others to put that quality to the test. It is true, they will recoil with horror at the tale of an Indian massacre, and probably cannot conceive what should induce one set of men deliberately and without provocation to murder another. War is not their trade; ferocity forms no part of the disposition of the Esquimaux. Whatever manly qualities they ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... recoil in every fibre of her nature, Diana turned to take up her life burden. She felt as if she had had ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... have been deserted, save for the smoke he saw rising from the kitchen chimney. He tried to call, but found he had no voice left. An unearthly guttural hiss alternately rattled and wheezed in his throat. He fumbled for the rifle, got it to his shoulder, and pulled the trigger. The recoil of the discharge tore through his frame, racking it with a thousand agonies. The rifle had fallen across his knees, and an attempt to lift it to his shoulder failed. He knew he must be quick, and felt ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... its deformity by losing all its grossness." If there be a deep and ulcerated wound, we think the more "the richly-embroidered veil" is torn away the better. Such a deep social wound exists in France; we wish its cure, as we wish the health of all nations and of all men; so far indeed would we "recoil towards a state of nature." We believe that nature wills marriage and parentage to be kept sacred. The fact of their not being so is to us not a pleasant subject of jest; and we should really pity the first lady of England for injury here, though she be a queen; while the ladies of the French ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... block of oak to the top, through which I pierced a hole for the insertion of the match; and this great petard I so placed, that when it exploded it should blow out the side of the vessel next which the pinnace lay. Then securing it with chains, that the recoil might do no damage, I told the boys I was going ashore earlier than usual, and calmly desired them to get into the boat. Then lighting a match which I had prepared, and which would burn some time before reaching the powder, I hastened after them with a beating heart, and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... vision of her march through the great grey rooms—so many of them as there were too!—with her glimmering taper. Miss Staverton met her honest glare with a smile and the profession that she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer Brydon meanwhile held his peace—for the moment; the question of the "evil" hours in his old home had already become too grave for him. He had begun some time since to "crape," and he knew just ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... who forged his uncle's signature, who fought Laertes, and ranted in a grave, and lugged the guts into the neighbour room. His tragedy, like Hamlet's, was the tragedy of an over-powerful will—a will so strong as to recoil upon itself, and fall into indecision. It is easy for a weak man to be decided—there is so much to make him so; but a strong man, who can do anything, sometimes leaves everything undone. Fortunately Beddoes, though he did far less than he might have ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... talent for acting; he knew the ways of the establishment intimately. I grant you that the idea was brilliantly carried out; but everything favored it. As for the essential idea, I do not place it, as regards ingenuity, in the same class with, for example, the idea of utilizing the force of recoil in a discharged firearm to actuate the mechanism of ejecting and reloading. I do, however, admit, as I did at the outset, that in respect of details the case had unusual features. It developed ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... been hitherto vague, in regard, for example, to the sonship of Christ or to the method of his birth. The new opinion arouses the hostility and alarm of minds unaccustomed to so definite a statement, and in the zeal of their recoil they fly to a contrary proposition. The Christians would neither admit that they worshipped more gods than one because of the Greeks, nor deny the divinity of Christ because of the Jews. They dreaded to be ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... not! Prostitution is the source of this domestic infelicity. The "mistress" sips the sweet nectar that is denied to the deceived wife. Legislators have battled with intemperance, but have done comparatively little to banish from our midst this necessary (?) evil. They recoil with disgust from this abyss of iniquity and disease. Within it is coiled a hydra-headed monster, which invades our hearthstones, contaminates our social atmosphere, and whose very breath is laden with poisonous vapors, the inexhaustible source ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the damps away: But, like a gloomy storm, at once to sweep And plunge her to the bottom of the deep. Black were his robes, dejected was his air, His voice was frozen by his cold despair; Slow, like a ghost, he mov'd with solemn pace; A dying paleness sat upon his face. Back she recoil'd, she smote her lovely breast, Her eyes the anguish of her heart confess'd; Struck to the soul, she stagger'd with the wound, And sunk, a breathless image, to the ground. Thus the fair lily, when the sky's o'ercast, At ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... eyes caused him to recoil in horror. There, pressing their shapes against the steel sides, and over the bull's-eyes of the ship were two more of ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... thing so soiled by the tears of the overhanging willows, so grown upon with parasites, so decayed, so battered, so neglected, such a haunt of rats, so advertised a storehouse of rheumatic agonies, that the heart of an intending occupant might well recoil. A plank, by way of flying drawbridge, joined it to the shore. And it was a dreary moment for Jimson when he pulled this after him and found himself alone on this unwholesome fortress. He could hear the rats scuttle and flop in the abhorred interior; the key cried among ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... it had indeed been. His memory glanced lightly over the long monotonous years with a sort of shuddering recoil. He thought of his father's frequent absences, and of his return from one of them in the middle of a winter's night, propped up in an invalid carriage, with a surgeon in attendance, and blood-stained bandages around his leg. And he thought of a night when he had ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... you here," said Charles Gould, in the uproar. The flames leaped up sky-high, and in the recoil from the scorching heat across the road the stream of fugitives pressed against the carriage. A middle-aged lady dressed in black silk, but with a coarse manta over her head and a rough branch for a stick in her hand, staggered against the front wheel. Two young girls, frightened and silent, were ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... mind was synonymous with "things as they ought not to be." He frankly asserts: "Caleb Williams was the offspring of that temper of mind in which the composition of my Political Justice left me"[75]—a guileless confession that may well have deterred many readers who recoil shuddering from political treatises decked out in the guise of fiction. But alarm is needless; for, although Caleb Williams attempts to reveal the oppressions that a poor man may endure under existing conditions, and the perversion of ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... discovering the falsehood and the fraud of it. Nor could I help agreeing with him, when he told me all of it, as with tears in his eyes he did, and ready to be my slave henceforth; I could not forbear from owning that it was a low and heartless trick, unworthy of men who had families; and the recoil whereof was well deserved, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... temptations against which we are told we must fight. Spirit flies forward—Body pulls back. But Spirit is one day bound to win! We have attained in this generation a certain knowledge of Soul-forces—and we are on a verge, where, if we hesitate, we are lost, and must recoil upon our own Ego as the centre of all desire. But if we go on boldly and leave our own Ego behind, we shall see the gates of Heaven opening indeed, and all the Mysteries unveiled! How often we pause on the verge of better things, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... stride, and going in the most elastic way in spite of the long run, but the eland was labouring heavily, as Dyke drew trigger, felt the sharp, jerking recoil shoot right up his arm to the shoulder; and then to his astonishment, as he dashed on out of the smoke, he was alone, and the eland lying fifty yards behind, where it had come down with a ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... chance for which Jetson had been watching. His kick didn't land; he hadn't intended that it should, but Dave's surprised recoil gave the other the chance that he really wanted. Both of Jetson's fists struck on Dave's nose, drawing ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock
... to him to see how I was staggered by this. I had never thought that what I had done to-day might recoil on the head of my own brother. However, I affected not to be ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... not subdue a violent passion, increased her misery. One moment she was a heroine, half determined to bear whatever fate should inflict; the next, her mind would recoil—and tenderness possessed her whole soul. Some instances of Henry's affection, his worth and genius, were remembered: and the earth was only a vale of tears, because he was not to sojourn ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... would be. I doffed my shawl, tucked up my flounces, turned my straw bonnet into a basket, and began gathering and scrambling—for, manage it how you may, nutting is scrambling work,—those boughs, however tightly you may grasp them by the young fragrant twigs and the bright green leaves, will recoil and burst away; but there is a pleasure even in that: so on we go, scrambling and gathering with all our might and all our glee. Oh, what an enjoyment! All my life long I have had a passion for that sort of seeking which implies finding (the secret, I ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... malice or of sorcery, or that power Which erring men call Chance, this I hold firm: Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt, Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled; 590 Yea, even that which Mischief meant most harm Shall in the happy trial prove most glory. But evil on itself shall back recoil, And mix no more with goodness, when at last, Gathered like scum, and settled to itself, It shall be in eternal restless change Self-fed and self-consumed. If this fail, The pillared firmament is rottenness, And earth's base built on stubble. But come, let's on! Against the opposing will and arm ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... their savage associates. And now we find them, in further contempt of the modes of honorable warfare, supplying the place of a conquering force by attempts to disorganize our political society, to dismember our confederated Republic. Happily, like others, these will recoil on the authors; but they mark the degenerate counsels from which they emanate, and if they did not belong to a sense of unexampled inconsistencies might excite the greater wonder as proceeding from a Government which founded the very war in which it has been so long engaged on a charge ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... shoulder; and as he insisted upon putting immense loads in his gun, the results were sometimes disastrous to him and ridiculous to us. He often sprang back after a shot, as if he had been kicked by a horse, or wrung his hands, which had borne the recoil. His misses and misfortunes, however, never made him angry or dejected. After each failure, out came the red bandanna to wipe his brow, and as a shout of laughter greeted the performance, he would say calmly, with only a gleam of a smile, "So, ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... directed by mysterious influences to take revenge. We have before us a great nobleman, who by atrocious murders has gained possession of the throne, and is slain in fighting for it: the poet brings us into immediate proximity with the crime, its execution, and its recoil: it seems like an inspiration of hell and of its deceitful prophecies: we wander on the confines of the visible world and of that other world which lies on the other side, but extends over into this, where it forms the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... what puzzled the professor—there was a very evident lack of something in the face, in no way interfering with its intellectual aspect, but giving it, at times, an unnatural and even uncanny look. In meeting the young man's eyes, the old gentleman was ever and anon conscious of a disposition to recoil and shudder, and, at the same time, felt impelled, by what resembled a magnetic attraction, to gaze the harder. Did the very fact that some universal human characteristic was omitted from this person's nature endow him with an ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... attest, was an invincible determination of purpose, which set at naught all risks and all sufferings. He had cast himself with all his resources into this enterprise, and, while his faculties remained, he was not a man to recoil from it. On the other hand, the masculine fibre of which he was made did not always withhold him from the practice of the arts of address, and the use of what Dollier de Casson styles belles paroles. He respected the priesthood,—with the exception, it ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... Larry's appearance caused Sullivan to recoil a step. He fairly glared at the young reporter and then looked at Grace, who was trembling from the words and ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis
... Then feels immediately some hollow thought Hang like an interdict upon her hopes. 260 This is my lot; for either still I find Some imperfection in the chosen theme, Or see of absolute accomplishment Much wanting, so much wanting, in myself, That I recoil and droop, and seek repose 265 In listlessness from vain perplexity, Unprofitably travelling toward the grave, Like a false steward who hath much received And renders nothing back. Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, [V] loved 270 To blend his murmurs with ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... for its father. Its father, was he not a criminal? Yes! but was it for her to ruin him, to invoke the law, to send him to death, after having taken him to her heart, to deliver him to infamy which would recoil on her own head and her child's and on the infant which was yet unborn? If he had sinned before God, was it not for God to punish him? If against herself, ought she not rather to overwhelm him with contempt? But to invoke the help, of strangers to expiate this offence; to lay ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARTIN GUERRE • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... patience, O woman, for the issue of patience is praised. This lion it is which transgresseth against us, and the transgressor, perforce must Almighty Allah destroy him. Indeed, 'tis our long-suffering that shall slay him,[FN166] and he that doth evil needs must it recoil upon him." A few days after, the king went forth one morning to hunt and falling in with the lion, he and his host, gave chase to him and ceased not pursuit till they slew him. This news reached Abu Sabir who improved the occasion to his wife, "Said I not ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... civilized, the most free, the most prosperous? Pardon me; no! They are the half-starved, half-clothed, half-human sons of the forest and the waste; or, when gathered in states, they are slaves without enjoyment or sense beyond the hour; and the reason that they do not recoil from the pangs of death is because they have never known the real pleasures or the true objects ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... There was no proof of Lord Fleetwood's having schemed to thwart his wager, so he put that accusation by: thinking for an instant, that if the man desired to have his wife with him, and she left the country with her brother, his own act would recoil; or if she stayed to hear of a villany, Carinthia's show of scorn could lash. Henrietta praised my lord's kindness. He had been one of the adorers—as what man would not be!—and upon her at least (he could hardly love her husband) he had not wreaked his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... water. What is meant, in the case of chemical affinity, is, that the pull of that affinity, acting through a certain space, imparts a motion of translation of the one atom towards the other. This motion is not heat, nor is the force that produces it heat. But when the atoms strike and recoil, the motion of translation is converted into a motion of vibration, which is heat. The vibration, however, so far from causing the extinction of the original attraction, is in part carried on by that attraction. The atoms recoil, in virtue ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... and training should be its helpers hinder it instead. Why do they do this? Because their fastidious, aesthetic natures are outraged by a crudeness which they themselves could easily refine away if they chose; because also they recoil at a lack of conformity to existing conventions—conventions so hampering to the inner spirit of the Newness, that in order to incarnate at all it must of necessity ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... ran between stone dykes, bordering pasture and arable enclosures. The pace, close upon fifty miles an hour, took them up to and past the suspected group so swiftly that it was impossible to note the faces of the men who formed it while their movements of recoil and surprise might have been due to the unusual ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... speaking he handled the gun, that was loaded, observing which I moved behind him. Off it went in due course, its recoil knocking him backwards—for that gun was a devil to kick—and its bullet cutting the top off the ear of one of his wives. The lady fled screaming, leaving a little bit of her ear ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... discouraged her; but she could not reconcile her sense of the continuity of all high effort to his unperturbed air of finishing each picture as though he had despatched a masterpiece to posterity. In the first recoil from her disillusionment she even allowed herself to perceive that, if he worked slowly, it was not because he mistrusted his powers of expression, but because he had really so ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... breath, Nelson raised the .45, sighted, and, remembering his former experience, fired at the enormous right eye. As in a dream, he felt the recoil. The monster neither slowed nor swerved in the least, though its great, saucer-like eye disintegrated horribly. Immediately Nelson swiftly sighted at the other eye and fired, just as the allosaurus' shadow ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... strong enough to wrestle with facts such as these? which one of us can look them long in the face and live? In the desperate recoil, some of us find ourselves recklessly striving to forget and ignore them, and some find a surer refuge in facts that are stronger still than they; but to one and all, in kindly compassion to human weakness, each new emotion, each passing interest and trivial incident, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... good actress ought to represent it, by an expression and recoil of apprehension that she had ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... says may be true," she replied, "but only to a certain point. If the Emperor, instead of his guard and his good soldiers, had only conscripts who would recoil under fire, he could not win great battles like that of Austerlitz. Nevertheless, he is the ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... is still easy is to get the diamonds in scoundrel-fashion—that is, by theft; and—stop! in 1826, when I was about eight years old, a terrible drama happened at Tijuco, which showed that criminal would recoil from nothing if they could gain a fortune by one bold stroke. But ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... would those blessed ages Have come round, had I recoil'd before The curse of this? Behold my Spain! Here blooms The subject's good, in never-clouded peace: Such peace will I bestow ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... is ever true of sins against the human brotherhood. The recoil of a blow struck at another's interests has often the retributive wrath of heaven in it, and the selfish soul that would destroy a fellow-creature for its own pleasure is ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... insist on loaded connotations. It's a necessary period of rest. Recoil time for a whole society—well, it all works out neatly in Tighe's formulation. The present state of affairs should continue for about seventy-five years, we feel at the Institute. In that time, reason can—we hope—be so firmly implanted in the basic structure of society that when the next great ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... to appreciate some of the points of my performance so far as it has gone? The pretext on which I bared my foot for its delicate job under your very eyes, eh? Not so vain as it looked, in either sense, I fancy! Should you have said that your hand would recoil from a revolver the moment it went off? You see, I staked my life on it, and I've won. And what about that fall? It was the lottery! I was prepared to have my head cracked like an egg, and it's still pretty sore. The broken wrist ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... their shortcomings, the previous evening, she had centralized it in Lauzanne, picturing him as symbolical of good acts and evil repute. Patently it was difficult to become interested in such a young woman; actually she monopolized their thoughts. Inconsistently the fair offender felt no recoil of this somewhat distressing situation; her mind busied itself chiefly over the reclamation ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... done—far from it. Unfortunately, it was not terminated, but interrupted. What interrupted it I need hardly tell you, as you will guess that it was the tide. Yes, it was the tide, which, as soon as it had fairly begun to cover the stones, seemed to rush over them all at once. It did not recoil, as I have often seen it do upon the beach. There it flows in gradually, wave after wave; but upon the reef—the surface of which was nearly of equal height—the water, at the first rush, swept all over the rocks, and was soon of ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... it was all right. There was a terrific, roaring explosion, and she staggered backwards under the savage kick of the recoil. Recovering herself instantly, and proud of the great noise she had made, she peered through the smoke, expecting to see the bear topple over upon his nose, extinguished. Instead of that, however, she observed a convulsive flopping of wings in the birch-tree above the ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... you put ten cartridges in and pull the trigger and shoot ten times with your eyes shut, if you want to, and it hits where you point it. Every time an employer pulls the trigger on a successful business boy, and a good idea of business is fired, the recoil puts a new idea into the chamber, and you pull again, and so on until the magazine of the brainy boy is emptied, when you load him up again, and he is ready for business, and the employer wouldn't be without him, and would not go back to the old-fashioned one-idea boy, ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... that afterwards almost every other musician strikes us as being too robust. If people would believe me, they would not form the highest idea of Wagner from that which pleases them in him to-day. All that was only devised for convincing the masses, and people like ourselves recoil from it just as one would recoil from too garish a fresco. What concern have we with the irritating brutality of the overture to the "Tannhauser"? Or with the Walkyrie Circus? Whatever has become popular in Wagner's art, including that which has become ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... Nobody could speak. The air was so packed full of sound that it seemed as if it could not possibly hold one sound more. It was like the booming of a thousand great guns at the same time; the shock, the recoil, and the rush of air across the entrance to the tank was as if artillery practice on an immense scale were going on. There was a screaming sound as if shells were hurtling through space. Now the ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... Misnar, "is too much for even the Sultan of the East to hear. But, may the all-righteous Allah approve of my thoughts and actions; so shall the infernal powers destroy the wretches that employ them, and the dark poisoned arrow recoil upon him that blew it forth. But, O sages, though your numbers are reduced, your integrity is more tried and approved; therefore let your Sultan partake of the sweetness of your counsels, and learn from aged experience the wisdom of the sons of earth. Say, then, what doth the peace ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... this might be reversed. A cabin might be defended with such maddened courage by some stout rifleman, fighting for his cowering wife and children, that a score of savages would recoil baffled, leaving many of their number dead. A boat's crew of resolute men might beat back, with heavy loss, an over-eager onslaught of Indians in canoes, or push their slow, unwieldy craft from shore under a rain of rifle-balls, while the wounded oarsmen strained ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... a recoil of the ship, which slowly and gently, but surely and almost comically, to Cadogan's way of thinking, urged the stout waist of Meade against the edge ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... breathed through her beaded veil her dislike of pioneer reformers is as old as human nature. But it was not the sigh of wisdom, but of weariness, in my lady. There is a certain insight even in gentle youth which does not recoil from the pioneer, and foresees the soft sward springing under the harrow as it tears the heavy clods. Those in whom youth abides never outgrow that precious insight and foresight. One such, not less fair than my Lady Cavaliere, ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... I recoil from no hypothesis: let us see, let us investigate. It is already a great point that the opponents confess that, during the first period of civilization, things could not have gone otherwise. It remains to ascertain whether the institutions of this period are really, as has ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... total merit has never yet been recognised as it assuredly would have been had he chosen a happier mode of publication. I do not think a greater disservice could be done to a man of science, than to overstate his claims: such overstatement is sure to recoil to the disadvantage of him in whose interest it is made. But when Mayer's opportunities, achievements, and fate are taken into account, I do not think that I shall be deeply blamed for attempting to place him in that ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... was placed upon city walls, was a great cross-bow for hurling arrows upon an enemy. In it was combined the bow and arrow, and the sling. The mammoth arrow was put in the groove, the twisted ropes were connected with levers, and the powerful recoil would send the strong and sharp arrow a ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley
... panel. He shot out of the chair and across the control room just as Loring fired his ray gun. There was a loud hiss as the gun was fired, and then the thud of a body against the wall, as Loring was suddenly shoved by the recoil of the charge. ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... Sprang in a thousand shivers on the helm, And in the hand the hilt remain'd alone. Then Rustum raised his head; his dreadful eyes Glared, and he shook on high his menacing spear, And shouted: Rustum!—Sohrab heard that shout, And shrank amazed; back he recoil'd one step, And scann'd with blinking eyes the advancing form; And then he stood bewilder'd; and he dropp'd His covering shield, and the spear pierced his side. He reel'd, and staggering back, sank to the ground; And then the gloom dispersed, and the wind fell, And the bright sun broke ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... the other day in which a very powerful modern writer describes a certain woman as "having God on her visiting list." We may recoil from the phrase, but it very vitally describes a very awful commonplace. Countless thousands have God on their visiting lists. They pay Him courtesy-calls, and between the calls He is forgotten. Perhaps the call is paid once a week in the ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... apparent, was yet an effect too subtle to be described. He rose on my entrance, and, other visitors being present, stood with one hand on the back of his chair, awaiting my greeting. So dignified was his manner, so reserved his expression, that I experienced an involuntary recoil, until I turned to him and saw his eyes suddenly brighten as I offered my hand; a barrier seemed to melt between us, and I felt that ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... slaughter from which every properly-balanced Christian mind is bound to recoil with horror. One such tale has recently been given to us in the pages of the Avicultural Magazine, of London, for January, 1912, by Mr. Hubert D. Astley, F.Z.S., whose word no man will dispute. In condensing it, let us ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... unutterably forlorn and wretched. If only she could do something! She told herself, with a sensation of recoil and revolt, that she could never face another day of suspense and waiting spent as had been the whole of ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... with Augustine had been the clear impossibility that had flashed for her in her need; she had seized upon it and it had armed her in her reiterated refusal. But how tell Augustine that there had been more than the clear impossibility; how tell him that deeper than renouncement was recoil? To tell that would be a disloyalty to her husband; it would be almost to accuse him; it would be to show Augustine that something in her life was spoiled and that her husband had spoiled it. So perplexed, so jaded, ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... or public sentiment, or both combined—destroy him,' said Mr Tappertit. 'Miggs says so too. Miggs and me both say so. We can't bear the plotting and undermining that takes place. Our souls recoil from it. Barnaby Rudge and Mrs Rudge are in it likewise; but the villain, Joseph Willet, is the ringleader. Their plottings and schemes are known to me and Miggs. If you want information of 'em, apply to ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... her crushed lover Emilie must recoil in terror, and not seem to add the weight of her body to that ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... are too imprudent, Marsa. I am not a man to make recoil by speaking of danger. Through the gate, or over the wall if the gate is barricaded, I shall come to you again, and you will have to listen ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... being relaxed by eternal repetition, and it was now evident that I must trust to my own ability to pull the matter quickly through as I thought best. But it was not the fatigue due to this system that finally made Niemann, the main prop in my work, recoil from the task which at the start he had undertaken with an energy full of promise. He had been informed that there was a conspiracy to ruin my work. From this time forward he was a victim to a despondency ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... familiar with the dull barrenness of Casaubon than with the pregnant vivacity of Mrs. Poyser. In the study of the inward workings of the human mind, George Eliot is unsurpassed by any novelist. Thackeray alone can dispute her pre-eminence in this respect. However much the reader may recoil from the horror of Little Hetty's crime, he cannot deny that it follows as a natural consequence. Although Dorothea's marriages are extremely disappointing, the train of thought which led her to enter into them is ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... bombing Boche dugouts now!" said he; and remembering the dugouts I had seen, I could picture the awful fate of those within, the choking fumes, the fire-scorched bodies! Truly the exponents of Frightfulness have felt the recoil of their ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... were written in a desire to work off a fit of depression, and make amends for folly. They are sincere and often very excellent. Great preachers have often been great sinners, and the sermons that have moved men most are often a direct recoil from sin on the part of the preacher. Remorse finds play in preaching repentance. When a man talks much about a virtue, be sure that he is clutching for it. Temperance fanatics are men with a taste for strong drink, trying hard to keep sober. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... in her national life we admire, Much we recoil from, or needs must dispute; Germany needs her baptism of fire, But you will find us the first to salute— (God speed the "Day" the awakening shall ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... fish smell strong; pray go You to some other chimney, and there take Essay of other giblets; make Merry at another's hearth—y'are here Welcome as thunder to our beer; Manners know distance, and a man unrude Would soon recoil and not intrude His stomach to a second meal". No, no! Thy house well fed and taught can show No such crabb'd vizard: thou hast learnt thy train With heart and hand to entertain, And by the armsful, with a breast unhid, As the old race of mankind did, When either's ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... from her easy chair with a quick movement, for she was still a vigorous woman. "Then that's settled! I'll give you a cheque for L100 to-day—and one every six months as long that is, as you're a widow." Then she smiled a little satirically, for Enid had made a quick movement of recoil which Alice Crofton ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... Comana,(29) who possessed ambition enough to hazard his secure and respectable position in the hope of mounting the throne of the Lagids. His attempts to gain the Roman regents to his interests remained without success; but he did not recoil before the idea of being obliged to maintain his new kingdom with arms in hand ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Gentlemen," continued he, addressing the Guardsmen, "I request you will be silent with regard to this adventure. Great personages may have had a hand in what you have seen, and if talked about, the evil would only recoil ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of a few years' shortcomings here on earth, would be the reverse of Godlike. Satan himself would recoil from it. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... which God hath commanded. But so long as we live in this vale of misery, we shall be plagued and vexed with flies, with beetles, and with vermin, etc., that is, with the devil, with the world, and with our own flesh; yet we must press through, and not suffer ourselves to recoil. ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... murderous intent, and Hamilton fell mortally wounded. The shot from Burr's pistol long reverberated. It woke public conscience to the horror and uselessness of dueling, and left Burr an outlaw from respectable society, stunned by the recoil, and under indictment for murder. Only in the South and West did men treat the incident lightly as ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... disport themselves among the straw that formed the bed of the farmer's pet bacon-pigs. In a few minutes out came an old patriarchal-looking rat, who, having taken a careful survey, quietly began to feed. After a long aim, bang went the gun—I fell backwards, knocked down by the recoil of the rusty old piece of artillery. I did not remain prone long, for I was soon roused by the most unearthly squeaks, and a dreadful noise as of an infuriated animal madly rushing round and round the sty. Ye gods! what had I done? ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... and that true partaking of the sacrament of love and faith and sorrow that makes Christ the very life-blood of our being and doing? And has not James Marvyn also his lesson to be taught? We foresee him drawn gradually back by Mary from his recoil against Puritan formalism to a perception of how every creed is pliant and plastic to a beautiful nature, of how much charm there may be in an hereditary faith, even if ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... the comfortable assurance; to her it seemed more than likely Lulu had been too venturesome, and that a swiftly incoming wave had carried her off her feet and swept her in its recoil ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... has been claimed for Codex B and Codex {HEBREW LETTER ALEF}, threatens to grow into a species of tyranny,—from which I venture to predict there will come in the end an unreasonable and unsalutary recoil. It behoves us, therefore, to look closely into this matter, and to require a reason for what is being done. The text of the sacred deposit is far too precious a thing to be sacrificed to an irrational, or at least a superstitious ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... looks around, Exulting in his distance from the ground. The tender speckled moth here dancing seen, The vaulting grasshopper of glossy green, And all prolific Summer's sporting train, Their little lives by various pow'rs sustain. But what can unassisted vision do? What, but recoil where most it would pursue; His patient gaze but finish with a sigh, When musing waking speaks the sky-lark nigh! Just starting from the corn she cheerly sings, And trusts with conscious pride her downy wings; Still louder breathes, and in the face of day Mounts up, and calls on Giles ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... Chariot and charioteer lay overturn'd, And fiery foaming steeds. What stood, recoil'd O'erwearied, through the faint Satanic host, Defensive scarce, or with pale fear surpris'd, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... heavy, and it usually took twenty men to serve it. The mouth was raised from the "kastion" by means of a pulley, and the former taken away; then and not till then could the gunner properly get the range. The carriage vacuum sucking apparatus had to be well fixed in hard ground to prevent recoil. ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... our Lord's recoil from the tumult. He had retired before cunning plotters; He withdrew from gaping admirers, who did not know what they were crowding to, nor cared for His best gifts. It was no fastidious shrinking from low natures, nor any selfish wish for repose, that made Him take ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... said, with a flash of her occasional repugnance to the man; and then after a pause, 'Herr von Gondremark,' she added, 'I recoil from this extremity.' ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and moderate, had gone out of town: the former to its country-house, or a foreign hotel; the latter to lodgings at the seaside to bathe out of machines and prey on shrimps. The lull that reigned in and about Sapps Court was no doubt a sort of recoil or backwater from other neighbourhoods, with high salaries or real and personal estate, whose dwellings were closed and not being properly ventilated by their caretakers. It reacted on business there, every bit as much as in Oxford Street; and that was how Tapping's ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... open fly, With impetuous recoil and jarring sound, Th' infernal doors, and on their ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... good one—a new ten-inch rope. It sung like the deep tones of an organ, loud above the rattle of the rigging and the shrouds, but that was its death-song. It gave way with the noise of a cannon, and in the smoke that followed its recoil, they were dragged out by the wild ice and driven hither and hither ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... been entirely harmonious with its origin. What scenes of horror, what refinements of iniquity, do the annals of monarchies present! If we should paint human nature with a baseness of heart, an hypocrisy, from which all must recoil and humanity disavow, it would be the portraiture of kings, their ministers ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... youth. But it was inevitable that a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind which always compensated itself for its artistic radicalism by an involuntary leaning toward external respectability, should recoil from whatever was convulsionary and destructive in politics, and above all in religion. He reads the poems of Wordsworth without understanding, who does not find in them the noblest incentives to faith in man and the grandeur of his destiny, founded always upon that ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... tell you what I think of you, and I am going to do so. Davis has been reared like a gentleman, and it is but natural that he should recoil from contact with ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... as I supposed,' resumed the doctor, with the same measured utterance. 'You recoil from this arrangement. Do you expect me to convince you? You know very well that I have never held the Mormon view of women. Absorbed in the most arduous studies, I have left the slatterns whom they call my wives ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... situation admitted; and when the assailants rushed to the assault, not intimidated by their horrible and unnatural yells, nor yet dispirited by the [146] presence of a force so far superior to their own, they received them with a fire so steady and well directed, as forced them to recoil; leaving one of their slain on the field of attack. This alone, argued a great discomfiture of the Indians; as it is well known to be their invariable custom, to remove, if practicable, those of their warriors who fall in battle. Their subsequent movements, satisfied the inmates ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... from his place of inaction and rushed into the fray like an uncaged lion, and placed himself between A.P. Hill and the river. For a few moments the earth trembled with the tread of struggling thousands, and the dreadful recoil of the heavy batteries that lined the crest of the hill from right to left. The air was filled with the shrieking shells as they sizzled through the air or plowed their way through the ranks of the battling masses. Charges were met ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... serpent appears. Old divines imagined that the creature whose shape Satan borrowed for the temptation had originally no malignant aspect; neither the poisoned fangs, nor eyes of fire, nor cold, scaly, wriggling form which man and beast recoil from with instinctive horror. They fancied that the curse, "Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat," was followed by a sudden metamorphosis, and that till then the appearance of the serpent was as lovely as it is now loathsome. They gave the words of the curse ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... tolerate their choosing so much as a centurion or a tribune for themselves. Are you going to allow this precedent, and by your acquiescence make their crime your own? You will soon see this lawless spirit spreading to the troops abroad, and in time the treason will recoil on us and the war on you. Besides, innocence wins you as much as the murder of your emperor: you will get from us as large a bounty for your loyalty as you would from others for ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... frame is of a richer consistency, and has, altogether, greater vitalizing properties than that in ourselves, since on the severest day in winter he will frequently scorn any covering beyond his shirt, and the nether garments usually suggested by its mention, and, so apparelled, will not recoil ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... was made; we were then near a high rocky lee shore, on which a heavy surf was beating. The wind being on the beam, the canoes drifted fast to leeward; and, on rounding a point, the recoil of the sea from the rocks was so great that they were with difficulty kept from foundering. We looked in vain for a sheltered bay to land in; but, at length, being unable to weather another point, we were obliged to put ashore on the open beach, which fortunately was ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... order to obtain reparation for the injury which this government might inflict upon them, as we see has been attempted. The city and commandant of Macan request these islands to make reparation immediately for the goods, so that the difficulty may not recoil upon them, to the damage of their goods and of the commerce between Yndia and Japon, which they declare to be of great importance for the preservation ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... of the enthusiasm of women at the South in aid of the Slave-holders' Rebellion, and can form some estimate of the "fierceness of their wrath"; but, God be thanked, the days approach when their mad passions will recoil upon themselves—the days approach when their evil cause must die. Let us unitedly pledge ourselves to stand by the Government, in our legitimate sphere, and out of it, if needs be. Let us, with womanly zeal, help to crush the power of its ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... far prefer a cavern On some rocky sea-girt isle, Where the constant intonations Of the waves as they recoil With their soughing and deep moaning For a momentary rest, Tell of liquid matter only That bespeaks itself distressed, Than to live where human bodies Bend and writhe for freedom's air, Till the heart breaks in deep sorrow, And the soul ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... world," said he, "through many changes of fortune and varieties of humor, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil?—five years from now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward lies your way; nor can anything but death avail to ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... predecessors he had conceded not one point to the other side. In spite of all that his enemies could say, his {183} personal honour and dignity remained untarnished. The nicknames and cruel taunts flung at him, in the earlier months, apparently by his own ministers, recoil now on their heads, as the petty insults of unmannerly politicians; indeed, the accusations which they made of simplicity and honesty, simply reinforce the impression of quixotic high-mindedness, which was not the least noble feature in Metcalfe's character. His generosity ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... his hand groping for hers. As he found and clasped it, he made a movement as if he wished again to draw her towards him. Gently she resisted, and at once she felt that he responded to her feeling of recoil, and Nan, with a confused sense of shame and anger, was now hurt by his submission. Most men in his place would have made short work of her resistance,—would have taken her, masterfully, into the shelter of ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... her this disease of the brain had been engendered; but the man she had seen that night, wrapt in the game of chance, lurking in her room, and counting the money by the glimmering light, seemed like another creature in his shape, a monstrous distortion of his image, a something to recoil from, and be the more afraid of, because it bore a likeness to him, and kept close about her, as he did. She could scarcely connect her own affectionate companion, save by his loss, with this old man, so like yet so unlike him. She had wept to ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... door which I had left open behind me. As its sharp bang rang through the room, I realized into what a pitfall I had stumbled. Only a political intrigue of the most desperate character could account for the words I had heard and the actions to which I had been a witness. But I was in no mood to recoil even from such dangers as these, and so my look showed her as she leaned toward me with ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... vanished from their posts with the speed of lightning, and closed in the centre of the lists with the shock of a thunderbolt. The lances burst into shivers up to the very grasp, and it seemed at the moment that both knights had fallen, for the shock had made each horse recoil backward upon its haunches. The address of the riders recovered their steeds by use of the bridle and spur; and having glared on each other for an instant with eyes which seemed to flash fire through the bars of their visors, each made a demi-volte,[57-7] and, retiring ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... house by a French window, and Maud drew back into her room. What was there in that childish face that appealed so tremendously to her womanhood—wholly banishing her first involuntary sense of recoil? She could not have said, she was only conscious of the woman in her throbbing with a deep compassion. She stood and waited for the child's coming ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... the left elbow should be almost directly under the rifle. The right hand should do more than half the work of holding the rifle up and against the shoulder, the left hand only steadying and guiding the piece. Do not try to meet the recoil; let the whole body move back with it. Do not be afraid to press the jaw hard against the stock; this steadies the position, and the head goes back with the recoil and insures that ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... enjoyed his new existence, and that there was danger of his forgetting the taste of sorrow, she changed her tone.—One day, when he had not returned home exactly at the appointed minute, she received him with a frown,—such as would have made even Mars himself recoil, if Mars could have beheld such a frown upon the brow ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... All of these, with a very few exceptions, are mounted on railway-trucks. In fact, the only large calibered piece not thus mounted is the Schneider mortar, a very efficient weapon, having a remarkably smooth recoil, which has a range of over six miles. It is transported, with its carriage and platform, in six loads, each weighing from four to five tons, about four hours being required to set up the piece ready ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... the man, with his all too light burden, halted. A flame shot through him as Molly turned her head to gaze too: he shook with a brief agony of jealousy—jealousy of the dead! The next instant he felt her recoil, look up pleadingly and cling to him again, and he knew into the soul of his soul that the words spoken by those loyal lips—now clay beneath that clay—were coming true, that, out of his house laid desolate to him was to rise a new ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... attract their attention. Insensibly the sight of that ever-rolling flood must have deeply affected them. They must have come to love it as they beheld it through the greater part of the year. The sight of its destructive power may have made them recoil for a time in fear and awe. But this would be forgotten as the flood subsided, and the river was again smooth and smiling and passing ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... began to quiver; then it darted at the stick, throwing itself its entire length. Hazel retreated, the snake coiled again and again darted. By repeating this process four or five times, he enticed the creature away; and then, availing himself of a moment before it could recoil, he struck it a smart blow ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... near birch brush. Fall season. Hunting for partridge allowed from September to December. Tramping through the woods. Something moving. Creeping up. How I felt; excited; hand shook. Partridge on log. Gun failed to go off; cocking it properly. The shot; the recoil. The flurry of the bird. How partridges fly. How they taste when cooked. Getting the bird. Going home. Partridges are found in the woods; quail in the fields. What my sister said. My brother's interest. My ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... explications was to give sudden check to that undercurrent of thought which for some time had been setting towards this conception. As soon as it was made clear whither the concession that animals may be changed by their environment must logically trend, the recoil from the idea was instantaneous and fervid. Then for a generation Cuvier was almost absolutely dominant, and his verdict was ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... pressure of pecuniary liabilities, contracted with a view to their immediate liquidation, but remaining unliquidated through a combination of circumstances, I have been under the necessity of assuming a garb from which my natural instincts recoil—I allude to spectacles—and possessing myself of a cognomen, to which I can establish no legitimate pretensions. All I have to say on that score is, that the cloud has passed from the dreary scene, and the God of Day is once ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... Montaigne so often enlarges. For Shakspere, then, with his mind newly at work in reverie and judgment, where before it had been but perceptive and reproductive, the theme was one of human impotence, failure of will, weariness of spirit in presence of over-mastering fate, recoil from the immeasurable evil of the world. Hamlet becomes the mouthpiece of the all-sympathetic spirit which has put itself in his place, as it had done with a hundred suggested types before, but with a new inwardness of comprehension, a self-consciousness added to the myriad-sided consciousness ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... heavenly, the visible as the invisible. For what is love but attraction or sympathy towards some object, whereby we desire to blend with it? And what is hate but repulsion or antipathy, whereby we are forced to fly or recoil ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... Hogan had continued to make himself a bugbear. He had a horror, too, of being thought capable of doing a dishonourable thing, and the shame he felt at having peeped into a letter was so stinging, that the idea of asking any one's advice in the dilemma in which he was placed made him recoil from the thought of such aid. Now, Father Phil had relieved him from the difficulties his own weakness imposed; the subject had been forced upon him; and once forced to speak he made a full acknowledgment of all that had taken place; and ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... She had been too much tired to hear anything the night before, but to-night there was scratching, nibbling, careering, fighting, squeaking, recoil and rally, charge and rout, as the grey Hanover rat fought his successful battle with his black English cousin all over the floors and stairs—nay, once or twice came rushing up and over the bed—frightening its occupant almost out ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the effect of his cousin's rather short and haughty letter. It must go, of course, whatever his own and Madame de Sainfoy's disapproval; but there were things that diplomacy might do, without, as it seemed, any serious consequences to recoil on the diplomatists. Madame de Sainfoy might gain imperial favour, Monsieur de la Mariniere might help her and save his foolish boy, and no one in the family, except themselves, need know ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... leave the communing of men, The murmur of the passions; And live alone, to live again With endless generations. Are we so brave?—The sea and sky In silence lift their mirrors; And, glassed therein, our spirits high Recoil from their own terrors. Be ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... the caves of Inisfallen, 35 Still secure mid the wildest war of the sky, The phantom courser scours the waste, And his rider howls in the thunder's roar. O'er him the fierce bolts of avenging Heaven Pause, as in fear, to strike his head. 40 The meteors of midnight recoil from his figure, Yet the 'wildered peasant, that oft passes by, With wonder beholds the blue flash through his form: And his voice, though faint as the sighs of the dead, The startled passenger ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... there; that which you send abroad will come back. The interest of the public creditor is indissolubly bound up with the interest of the whole people. Whatever affects him affects us all; and the evil that we might inflict upon him by paying an inferior dollar would recoil upon us with a vengeance as manifold as the aggregate wealth of the Republic transcends the comparatively small limits of our bonded debt. And remember that our aggregate wealth is always increasing, and our bonded debt steadily ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... Every year has seen the disproportionate increase until now. Every modern European state is more or less like a cranky, ill-built steamboat in which some idiot has mounted and loaded a monstrous gun with no apparatus to damp its recoil. Whether that gun hits or misses when it is fired, of one thing we may be absolutely certain—it will send the steamboat to the ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... her head coquettishly. For a few minutes they scrubbed away there together, side by side on their knees above the rim of the pool. Then, without warning, his hot, red lips burned her neck. Her swift recoil was also a ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... revenge was complete, and I had proved that the four-ounce was perfectly irresistible if held straight with the heavy charge of twelve drachms of powder. Since that time I have frequently used sixteen drachms (one ounce) of powder to the charge, but the recoil is then very severe, although the effect upon an animal with a four-ounce steel-tipped conical ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... the fauna and flora of the present world find themselves in a period of recoil with regard to their modification. In the tertiary period the fauna and flora of the world were richer than to-day; many more older species have disappeared than new ones have arisen. This fundamental fact seems due to the extremely ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the arm; and, like an unchained lion, he sprang up and stared her in the face. There was a terrible look upon his features, making her recoil in dismay. Was that the affectionate gaze with which she had expected to be greeted? Was that the outward indication of the pleasing resolves with which her eager ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... here! in this so good a soil? The sight of this doth make God's heart recoil From giving thee his blessing; barren tree, Bear fruit, or else thine end will cursed be! Art thou not planted by the water-side? Know'st not thy Lord by fruit is glorified? The sentence is, Cut down the barren ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... force forward against the recoil, mi amo,' said the old gunner, shakily. 'Dig your fingers into the ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... divine, Too well, too well My flesh doth know the heart-perturbing thing; That dread theology alone Is mine, Most native and my own; And ever with victorious toil When I have made Of the deific peaks dim escalade, My soul with anguish and recoil Doth like a city in an earthquake rock, As at my feet the abyss is cloven then, With deeper menace than for other men, Of my potential cousinship with mire; That all my conquered skies do grow a hollow mock, My fearful powers retire, No longer ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... not reply and did not recoil. He seemed ready himself to catch the beech-tree in his open arms in order to cast it on the ground ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... will be noticed that as this distance increases we have augmented pressures, and these are not due, as might be supposed, to increase of head, which is practically nothing, but they are due to the recoil of a portion of the stream, which occurs increasingly as it becomes more and more broken up. These alterations in pressure can only be eliminated when care is taken to measure that only due to impact, without at the same ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... limpet grip. Lester sank to his knees, tugging savagely at the tightly clasped burden, and angry cries rose from the scandalized onlookers. A questioning, threatening ring formed round him, then shrank back in recoil as he shrieked out one hideous word. Lady Barbara heard the word and saw the crowd race away like scattered sheep, saw the Prince forcibly hustled away by his attendants; also she saw her son lying prone in an agony of overmastering terror, his spasm of daring shattered by ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... into the water, and at once was eagerly followed by his friends and his bodyguard. The darkness of night and the violent recoil of the roaring waves made it hard for them to help him, and it was not until daybreak, when the wind abated, that he reached the land, faint and helpless in body, but with his spirit invincible ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... be ours. Then they began to wallop and met with their enemies, there were men slain and overthrown on every side. Then thrust in among them the knights of the Table Round, and smote down to the earth all them that withstood them, in so much that they made them to recoil and flee. By God, said Sir Gawaine, this gladdeth my heart, for now be they less in number by twenty thousand. Then entered into the battle Jubance a giant, and fought and slew down right, and distressed many of our knights, among whom was slain Sir Gherard, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... ill-regulated, is not only wasted in the void, like that of gunpowder burned in the open air, and steam unconfined by science; but, striking in the dark, and its blows meeting only the air, they recoil and bruise itself. It is destruction and ruin. It is the volcano, the earthquake, the cyclone;—not growth and progress. It is Polyphemus blinded, striking at random, and falling headlong among the sharp rocks by the impetus of his ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Steel, gravely. "I saw you come down, I saw you peep in—all dread and reluctance! I saw you recoil, I saw the face with which you shut those doors and put out the lights. And afterwards I learned from the medical evidence that your husband must have been dead at that time; one thing I knew, and that was that he was not shot during the next hour and ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... slave, of merchant and merchandise, cannot long subsist. To sell on an auction-block or deliver over to a slave-driver an immortal soul, for which Christ has died, is an enormity before which the Christian sense of right will always recoil in the end. "In this," it is written, "there is neither Greek nor Jew, nor circumcision nor uncircumcision, nor barbarian nor Seythian, nor bond nor free, but Christ is all and in all." Let slaveholders put to themselves ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... respect for a large ship as ordinarily constructed. Working the guns in small revolving turrets, as by Ericsson's or by Coles's plan, and loading and cooling them by steam-power, and taking up their recoil by springs in a short space, as by Stevens's plan, are improvements in this direction. The plan of elevating a gun above a shot-proof deck at the moment of aiming and firing, and dropping it for loading or protection ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that bordered it there came sounds that were horrible, because she knew them to be inaudible to any ear less charged with insanity; small sounds of movement, of strange shiverings, swarmings, crepitations; sounds of incessant, infinitely subtle urging, of agony and recoil. Sounds they were of the invisible things unborn, driven towards birth; sounds of the worm unborn, of things that creep and writhe towards dissolution. She knew what she heard and saw. She heard the stirring of ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... the man's entire form seemed to wilt and quiver. Then the recoil, tense and savage, concentered in the eyes, in which appeared a hatred that screamed of immeasurable pain. He turned abruptly away, and, recollecting himself, ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... things love, and love that was infinite? Love which was not essential to his divine nature, could never have carried him through so great a work as this: Passions here would a failed, would a retreated, and have given the recoil; yea, his very humanity would here have flagged and fainted, had it not been managed, governed, and strengthened by his eternal Spirit. Wherefore it is said, that "through the eternal Spirit he offered himself without spot to God" (Heb 9:14). And that he was declared to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... French squares. Burning with impatience they watched the mighty torrent of horse sweep across the plain, then came the roar of artillery and the incessant rattle of musketry. Then they saw with astonishment the cavalry recoil; they witnessed charge after charge, and then saw them sweeping round the squares, while the plain, where they had first attacked, was strewn thickly with the bodies of men and horses right up to the bayonets of the French line. The Arabs burst ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... officers in this new craft. It was pleasant to see their benign exultation in her powers of mischief, and the delight with which they exhibited the circumvolutory movement of the tower, the quick thrusting forth of the immense guns to deliver their ponderous missiles, and then the immediate recoil, and the security behind the closed port-holes. Yet even this will not long be the last and most terrible improvement in the science of war. Already we hear of vessels the armament of which is to act entirely beneath the surface of ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the moral effect of these deceptive practices upon your own character, is there not in the acts themselves an inherent meanness and baseness, from which a pure-minded youth would instinctively recoil? Is there not something false and rotten in the prevailing sentiment on this subject among young persons at school? When by some convenient fiction you reach a higher standard than your merits entitle you to, is it ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... said Trevannion: "it is very unbecoming to talk in this manner of so sacred a profession. A hunting and card-playing clergyman ought to be stripped of his gown without hesitation. Any right-minded person would recoil with horror at such a character. It is a great disgrace to the profession; no clergyman ought to enter into any kind of improper dissipation. Your ideas ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... himself from such a reproach, that he felt his task to be an invidious one. The majesty of grief, expressing itself with Christian meekness, and appealing as it were, from the grave to the consciences of men, could not be violated without a recoil of angry feeling, ruinous to the effect of any logic or rhetoric the most persuasive. The affliction of a great prince, his solitude, his rigorous imprisonment, his constancy to some purposes which were not selfish, his dignity of demeanor in the midst of his heavy trials, and his truly ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the general good. Nor do I conceive there is reason to doubt their personal courage, though they are too good-natured often to excite others to put that quality to the test. It is true, they will recoil with horror at the tale of an Indian massacre, and probably cannot conceive what should induce one set of men deliberately and without provocation to murder another. War is not their trade; ferocity forms no part ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... that the royalists began on all sides to gain ground. Major-General Chidley, who commanded the parliamentary army, (for Stamford kept at a distance,) failed not in his duty; and when he saw his men recoil, he himself advanced with a good stand of pikes, and piercing into the thickest of the enemy, was at last overpowered by numbers, and taken prisoner. His army, upon this disaster, gave ground apace; insomuch that the four parties of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... who can weigh the cause, And trace the secret springs of Nature's laws; Say why the wave, of bitter brine erewhile, Should be the bosom of the deep recoil, Robbed of its salt, and from the cloud distil, Sweet as the waters of ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... like so many guns used in battle, and never have they been capable of such rapid fire. The field gun can fire consistently eight or ten shots a minute, thanks to its modern recoil cylinder and to the steadiness of aim, and literally establish a "curtain of fire" with its torrent of bullets shot down from the air and the cataracts of earth shot up by the bursting of high-explosive shells in the ground, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... movement was applauded by the liberal-minded Englishmen; but the confiscation of property, executions, and ensuing reign of terror soon made England recoil from this Revolution. When France executed her king and declared her intention of using force to make republics out of European powers, England sent the French minister home, and war immediately resulted. With only a short intermission, this lasted from ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... closed in the centre of the lists with the shock of a thunderbolt. The lances burst into shivers up to the very grasp, and it seemed at the moment that both knights had fallen, for the shock had made each horse recoil backwards upon its haunches. The address of the riders recovered their steeds by use of the bridle and spur; and having glared on each other for an instant with eyes which seemed to flash fire through ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... calm followed, during which the snow was cleared from the railway and traffic resumed. The next startler was a message from Irkutsk stating that a terrific gale was breaking down from the north—a recoil from the one just described—accompanied with sixty degrees of actual frost, making it impossible to live out of doors. This storm struck Omsk on February 20, and no words can describe the complete obliteration of man and all his works accomplished by such a gale. ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... Majesty says may be true," she replied, "but only to a certain point. If the Emperor, instead of his guard and his good soldiers, had only conscripts who would recoil under fire, he could not win great battles like that of Austerlitz. Nevertheless, he is the first general in ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... She does not recoil, yet her very atmosphere repels him, while looking up with those woful eyes blanching her cheek by their gathering darkness. "And, Rose,"——she sighs, then ceases abruptly, while a quiver of sudden scorn writhes spurningly down eyelid and nostril ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... miscreant! I understood him now—oh, my God, for strength to tear his cowardly heart from his truculent body! But no; let there be no further unavailing anger. In God's good time all should recoil on his own head. For the present, I must bear, and make myself insensible; if possible; and yet, I would not willingly have had the living greenness of my spirit turned to stone, as we are told branches are in some strange, ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... councils of the Church. The controversy, however, very soon diverged from strictly Pelagian lines, and entered upon a new track—viz., that of Semi-pelagianism, to which is closely allied the principles advocated by the Evangelical Union of Scotland. From extremes there is generally a recoil, and this was the case as regards Augustinianism. Certain monks at Adrumetum drew conclusions from the system which, whether they are admitted or not, are its logical outcome. They said, "Of what use are all doctrines and precepts? Human ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... week of distress and miserable indecision for Diana, racked as she was between her love and her conviction that marriage under the only circumstances possible would inevitably bring unhappiness. Over and above this fear there was the instinctive recoil she felt from Errington's demand for such blind faith. Her pride rebelled against it. If he loved her and had confidence in her, why couldn't he trust her with his secret? It was treating her like a child, and it would be wrong—all wrong—she ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... intrenchments, notwithstanding that a large part of the ground over which they had to move was swept by a heavy fire of canister from both my batteries. Before they had quite reached us, however, our telling fire made them recoil, and as they fell back, I directed an advance of my whole division, bringing up my reserve regiments to occupy the crest of the hills; Colonel William P. Carlin's brigade of Mitchell's division meanwhile moving forward on my right to cover that flank. This advance pressed the enemy to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... younger brothers, because the older brother rose to the leadership from the day the father laid down to die. Whatever you do for your brother will come back to you again. If you set him an ill-natured, censorious, unaccommodating example, it will recoil upon you from his own irritated and despoiled nature. If you, by patience with all his infirmities and by nobility of character, dwell with him in the few years of your companionship, you will have your counsels reflected back upon you some day by his splendor ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... their patients with stories of their own professional skill, while depreciating the services of others of the fraternity. Such unscrupulous quacks sought also to win over the patient's friends by little attentions, flatteries and innuendoes. Many, said this philosopher, recoil from a man of skill even, if he is a braggart. "When the doctor," he continues, "attended by a man known to the patient, and having a right of entry into the house, advances into the dwelling of the sick man, he should make ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... Orloff, when Joseph had finished. "You have honestly earned your epaulets, and to-day you will for the first time appear at my dinner-table as a Russian officer. Ah, I prophesy a great future for you. You have the requisite skill and address to make your fortune. You are shrewd, daring, and you recoil from no means, finding them all good and useful when they forward your aims. With such principles one may go far in this world, and Russia in fact offers you the best opportunity for bringing all these fine ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... artillery of Sheridan on the flank suddenly opened upon the Southern victors. The Southerners whirled and charged Sheridan, but his defense was so strong, and so powerful was his artillery that they were compelled to recoil every time with ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... saw it not—only heard the crackle of twigs, and the swishing recoil of the branches, as its huge body swung ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... intended no harm—quite the contrary! After an instinctive recoil, he leaned against a table and wiped his forehead, breathing in gasps, ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... peacefully alongside a little pier and is boarded by hundreds of reckless sight-seers every day. The conning towers are of sheet-iron and some of the formidable guns are simply painted wood. It is said that if anything larger than a six-inch gun should be fired from the deck of the mimic battleship the recoil would upset the masonry and jolt the whole structure into ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... request any of my crew to try their skill, as I had had enough of firing for the time being, nor did I take a fancy to do so myself. The large bore and light metal of their arms, added to the weight of the charge, spoke of a recoil any thing but pleasing, and which I hear usually takes place. Next day, however, I asked the captain of the boat to show me a shot; he took aim at a diver which kept appearing a-head; he fired when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... therefore, in those concerns should be spontaneously withheld by her upon the same principles that we have never interfered with hers, and that if she should interfere, as she may, by measures which may have a great and dangerous recoil upon ourselves, we might be called in defense of our own altars and firesides to take an attitude which would cause our neutrality to be respected, and choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by ...
— A Compilation of Messages and Letters of the Presidents - 2nd section (of 3) of Volume 2: John Quincy Adams • Editor: James D. Richardson
... amazed at her horror, a horror that made her recoil from him and push his hands away when he tried to touch her. He got up angrily and stood looking down at her, his hands in ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... its heavy, old-fashioned trail and no recoil cylinder was never meant to play any part in an army of movement. You could picture how it had been dragged up into position back of the German trenches and how a crew of old Landsturm gunners had been allowed a certain number of shells a day and told off to fire them at certain ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... high-minded or even alive to his own interests, I scarcely think that he will do so in a spirit of unfair detraction. But in doing this a writer is bound to be accurate, for if he be liberal of such accusations and it can be shown that his charges are unfounded, they recoil with double force upon himself. I propose, therefore, as it is impossible for me to reply to all such attacks, to follow Professor Lightfoot and Dr. Westcott, with some minuteness in their discussion of my treatment of the Ignatian Epistles, and once for all to show the grave misstatements ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... to an old friend. Within the extraordinarily wide sleeve, lined with black silk, I could see the arm, very white, with a pearly gleam in the shadow. But to me she extended her hand with a slight stiffening, as it were a recoil of her person, combined with an extremely straight glance. It was a finely shaped, capable hand. I bowed over it, and we just touched fingers. I did not look then ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... brutality of their visitor made him blush; that he should be accepted as an equal, and the others thus pointedly ignored, pleased him in spite of himself, and then ran through his veins in a recoil of anger. ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... other aristocratic lovers of freedom, he would not ultimately have shrunk from the result of his own equalising doctrines; and, though zealous enough in lowering those above his own level, rather recoil from the task of raising up those ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... any contrivance handy. It should be done a little more than seems necessary for restoring the even line of the edging, which can be fairly well seen by looking along from end to end; this is to allow of a slight recoil when the loops or wooden ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... needs express his love's excess With words of unmeant bitterness. 665 Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together Thoughts so all unlike each other; To mutter and mock a broken charm, To dally with wrong that does no harm. Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty 670 At each wild word to feel within A sweet recoil of love and pity. And what, if in a world of sin (O sorrow and shame should this be true!) Such giddiness of heart and brain 675 Comes seldom save from rage and pain, So talks as ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... equal suffrage is coming far more swiftly than most of us suspect. Educated, public-spirited women will soon refuse to be subjected to such humiliating conditions. Educated men will recoil in their turn from the sheer unreason of the position that the opinions and wishes of their wives and mothers are to be consulted upon every other question except the laws and government under which they and their husbands and children must live and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... lady had a recoil as though he had said something impolite. What a harsh thing to say—instead of finding something nice and appropriate. On board, where she never saw him in evening clothes, Renouard's resemblance to a duke's son was not so apparent to her. Nothing ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... the sash of the window. From the flower-box he sprang to the road beneath. (The facade of the house is called, to this day, Dorset's Leap.) Alighting with the legerity of a cat, he swerved leftward in the recoil, and was off, like a streak of ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... hung with head thrown back between a pair of contracted arms. There was a company of sixty Umbrians who, firm on their hams, their pikes before their eyes, immovable and grinding their teeth, forced two syntagmata to recoil simultaneously. Some Epirote shepherds ran upon the left squadron of the Clinabarians, and whirling their staves, seized the horses by the man; the animals threw their riders and fled across the plain. The Punic slingers scattered here and there stood gaping. The phalanx began to waver, the ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... those words, which began in sarcasm but ended in a queer uncertain tone of suspicion, as if she had blundered on a reason to soothe her vanity for the recoil of my lips from hers, an ugly gleam shot from under her ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... of Weimar told his friends always, To be of courage; this Napoleonism was unjust, a falsehood, and could not last. It is true doctrine. The heavier this Napoleon trampled on the world, holding it tyrannously down, the fiercer would the world's recoil against him be, one day. Injustice pays itself with frightful compound-interest. I am not sure but he had better have lost his best park of artillery, or had his best regiment drowned in the sea, than shot that poor German Bookseller, Palm! It was a palpable tyrannous murderous ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... breath and do your worst; only careful, sharp as you think yourself, that your meddling does not recoil on your own head. Listen, Heda, either you make up your mind to marry me at once and arrange that this young gentleman, who as a doctor I assure you is now quite fit to travel without injury to his health, leaves this house to-morrow ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... thousands of sparks and exciting the tempest with whistling and fiendish laughter in the storm; but the appearance of the shining swords of the two knights and the extended hand of the saintly personage made them recoil and ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... Catholicity, there are men who insult the holy name of God by profane and blasphemous language. On all those who now hear me I lay this charge: publish everywhere that I have no hope for such men. They cast in the face of Heaven the stone which will, one day, recoil upon them and crush them. I would also most earnestly exhort you as regards the duty of fasting. Many fathers and mothers come to me in order to impart to me the sorrow which they experience in considering the melancholy ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... indeed very simple! Nor did the child recoil any longer from the ugly task which milor, with suave speech and tender voice, was so ardently seeking ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... was in this cry, in this "You!" ejaculated with a rapid movement of recoil-amazement, fright, scorn, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... into the ring to give the toilers opportunity for their heated passions, but this war will be like blood to a tiger, it will quicken up the fighting spirit of the animal, and on those who forced this war it will recoil with awful effect. They saw the labor storm approach and put off the evil day. It was like neglecting to physic the human body—the longer deferred, ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... important, that from them, in the whole of modern history taken together, an actual unity results which we shall be compelled to acknowledge. This task is enormous; and when we contemplate its full extent, it is impossible not to recoil before the difficulty. Judge then, gentlemen, whether I ought not to tremble at such an undertaking; but your indulgence and zeal will make up for the weakness of my resources: I shall be more than repaid if I am able to assist you in advancing even a few steps on the road ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... strong; pray go 'You to some other chimney, and there take 'Essay of other giblets; make 'Merry at another's hearth; you're here 'Welcome as thunder to our beer; 'Manners knows distance, and a man unrude 'Would soon recoil, and not intrude 'His stomach to a second meal.'—No, no, Thy house, well fed and taught, can show No such crabb'd vizard: Thou hast learnt thy train With heart and hand to entertain; And by the arms-full, with a breast unhid, As the old race of mankind did, When either's ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... his gun from him, began to recoil the muddied ropes. At length, without a word, he came to Banion's side. He reached down, caught an arm and helped Banion drag the man out on the grass. He caught off a handful of herbage and thrust it out to Woodhull, who remained silent before ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... to hard facts," he thought, conscious in himself of the same instinctive recoil that he had so often criticised in his mother and her contemporaries. How little practice he had had in dealing with unusual situations! Their very vocabulary was unfamiliar to him, and seemed to belong to fiction and the stage. In face of what was coming he felt as awkward ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... evident that they had never before seen any of the white race—from whose complexion, indeed, they appeared to recoil. They believed the Jane to be a living creature, and seemed to be afraid of hurting it with the points of their spears, carefully turning them up. Our crew were much amused with the conduct of Too-wit in one instance. The cook was splitting some wood near the galley, and, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... quitting his abode, on an errand of still greater urgency. "Go, Caleb," said Mr Clayton, "visit and comfort the poor sufferer; and may grace accompany your first labour of love." I proceeded to the place, and, arriving there, was ushered into a small close room—to recoil at once from the scene of misery which was there presented. Lying, with his hat and clothes upon the bed, dying, was the man himself; his wife was busy in the room, cleaning it, quietly and indifferently, as though the sleep of healthy life had closed her partner's eye, and nothing worse. On ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Friedrich's forebodings, an extraordinary recoil, in all Anti-Friedrich affairs, ensued upon Liegnitz; everything taking the backward course, from which it hardly recovered, or indeed did not recover at all, during the rest of this Campaign. Details on the subsequent Daun-Friedrich movements—which went ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... our movements, and using their property whenever they can to aid and comfort the cause of treason. We are too forcibly reminded of the fable we used to read in our schoolboy days, of the Farmer and the Viper. We are only warming into new life and strength this virus of Rebellion, to have it recoil upon ourselves. We hope our authorities will soon discover their ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... refuge. She had been too much tired to hear anything the night before, but to-night there was scratching, nibbling, careering, fighting, squeaking, recoil and rally, charge and rout, as the grey Hanover rat fought his successful battle with his black English cousin all over the floors and stairs—nay, once or twice came rushing up and over the bed—frightening its occupant almost out of her senses, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies' plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... incredibly. Sheer wonder survived his instinctive recoil. It was the bolt, striking twice ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... some energetic career, found itself narrowed down within the little glen of Willamilla, where ardent impulses seemed idle. But these are hard to die; and repulsed all round, recoil ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... and pain: whereas it would have been wiser, and truer to their real inspiration, to have laid all the emphasis on evils to be abated, leaving the good to shape itself in freedom. Suffering is the instant and obvious sign of some outrage done to human nature; without this natural recoil, actual or imminent, no morality would have any sanction, and no precept could be imperative. What silliness to command me to pursue pleasure or to avoid it, if in any case everything would be well! Save for some shadow of dire repentance looming in the distance, I am deeply free to walk as I will. ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... preparing them for a similar feeling of resignation with himself. He had succeeded but indifferently. They strove to appear firm, in order that he should not be less so than they found him; but the effort was very perceptible, and the recoil of their dammed-up emotions was only so much more fearful and overpowering. The strength of Edith had been severely tried, and her head now rested upon the bosom of her father, whose arms were required for her support, in a state of feebleness and exhaustion, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... him who has never erred. Far be it from me to attempt to exculpate you in your own eyes, or extenuate your former criminality. You have sinned deeply, so deeply that you may well shrink aghast from the contemplation of your past life—may well recoil in abhorrence from yourself—and may fitly devote yourself to constant prayer and acts of penitence. But having cast off your iniquity, and sincerely repented, I bid you hope—I bid you place a confident reliance in the clemency of an ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... know I have told you over and over again that no good can come of such bad doings, and that the men will only make matters much worse for themselves. My father used to say that no good ever came of mob violence. They may do some harm for a time, but it is sure to recoil ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... imaginable luxury, and had appreciated them all—was found again, here, in the gray robe of a Sister of Charity, content to endure real, bitter hardships, and to witness daily sights from which womanhood, with all its bravery, must needs recoil. The motives that had urged her to such a step would be hard indeed to define. The same weariness and impatience of inaction that have been alluded to in the case of Royston Keene may have had much to do with it; to this, perhaps, was added a feeling of wild remorse, seeking to vent itself ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... scouting rig. All but their horses and horse equipments left with the quartermaster at the Sidney station, the battalion has been run to Chicago exactly as it came from the plains, and Chicago's "toughs," who would have hooted and jeered, perhaps, at sight of polished brasses and natty uniforms, recoil bewildered before this gang of silent and disciplined "jay-hawkers." Steadily, silently, ominously, the train rolls along. As it is rounding a curve several ugly-looking fellows are seen running at speed towards ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... it. He was not accustomed to yield to his weak inclinations, and he resolved not to do so now. He was sure that if he showed the least sign of wishing to push himself into Arabian's affairs the man would recoil at once, in spite of the drink which was slightly, but definitely, clouding his perceptions. So he took the contrary course. He forced himself to hold out his hand to the ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... last line of battle, based on the firm rock of the regulars. But by this time the Confederates had brought up troops from the whole length of their line; the balance of numbers was at last in their favor; and nothing could stay the Federal recoil. Lack of drill and discipline soon changed this recoil into a disorderly retreat. There was no panic; but most of the military units dissolved into a mere mob whose heart was set on getting back to ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... element, out of which she could not breathe; she was almost in love with misery. And in so sad a world was there not something ignoble about happiness, a selfish aloofness from the life of humanity? And, illogically blent with this questioning, and strengthening her recoil, was an obstinate conviction that there could never be happiness for her, a being of ignominious birth, without roots in life, futile, shadowy, out of relation to the tangible solidities of ordinary existence. To offer her a warm fireside seemed to be to tempt her to be false to something—she ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Until at weapon-point they close. They close, in clouds of smoke and dust, With sword-sway, and with lance's thrust; And such a yell was there, Of sudden and portentous birth, As if men fought upon the earth, And fiends in upper air; Oh, life and death were in the shout, Recoil and rally, charge and rout, And triumph and despair. Long looked the anxious squires; their eye Could in the ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... inarticulateness no longer discouraged her; but she could not reconcile her sense of the continuity of all high effort to his unperturbed air of finishing each picture as though he had despatched a masterpiece to posterity. In the first recoil from her disillusionment she even allowed herself to perceive that, if he worked slowly, it was not because he mistrusted his powers of expression, but because he had really so ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... things which will shock all her received notions, I have been endeavoring by little and little to break her mind, and prepare it for the disagreeable impressions which must be forced upon it. The first hint I gave her upon the subject, I could see her recoil from it with the same horror with which we listen to a tale of Anthropophagism; but she has gradually grown more reconciled to it, in some measure, from my telling her that it was the custom of the world,—to which, however senseless, we must submit, so far as we could do it with innocence, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... develop the vices that make him odious. But, so born and so bred, admired for that which made him hateful, and justified from his cradle in cunning, treachery, and avarice; I claim him as the legitimate issue of the father upon whom those vices are seen to recoil. And I submit that their recoil upon that old man, in his unhonoured age, is not a mere piece of poetical justice, but is the extreme exposition ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... was sweeping our horses along and grinding our knees together. Some fanatic had fallen, and I could feel my horse recoil and half rear as it tramped on him, and I could hear the man screaming and the snarling menace from all about rising to a roar. But my head was over my shoulder as ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... disturb my life, I always have a movement of recoil. I cling for a second to what is, and then I fling myself headlong into what is to be. It is like a gymnast who clings first to his trapeze bar in order to fling himself afterwards with full force into space. In one second what now ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... escopetos drop loaded from the hands of dying cowards. Such are the battles of New Mexico. It is only when these red-skinned Tartars meet Americans or such high-spirited Indians as the Opates that they have to recoil before gunpowder. [Footnote: Since those times the Apaches ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Power that canst transfigure common things, And, like the sun, make the clod burst in bloom,— Unseal the fount so mute this many a day, And help me sing of Linda! Why of her, Since she would shrink with manifest recoil, Knew she that deeds of hers were made a theme For measured verse? Why leave the garden flowers To fix the eye on one poor violet That on the solitary grove sheds fragrance? Themes are enough, that court a wide regard, And prompt a strenuous flight; and yet from ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... who can appreciate him better than you have ever done. Very well! seek your own affinity, and find a new Eden. Don't fret and cry till your eyes are red and swollen, and your whole appearance hideous. It will only recoil on your own head. Nobody will pity you, and the world will pass on and forget you. Live while you live, and leave to-morrow to take care of to-morrow. Remember, "It is a folly to no other second, to wish ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... possibility that Keats may be tempted to bring it into a sonnet. Yes, if a Beef-Essence-Merchant has only provided sustenance for an Explorer he has not lived in vain, however much the poets and the painters recoil from his wares. But of the scientist I am less certain. I fancy that his invention of the telephone (for instance) can only be counted to his credit because it has brought the author into closer ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... first one, and then several students carrying notebooks entered the laboratory from the lecture theatre, and distributed themselves among the little tables, or stood in a group about the doorway. They were an exceptionally heterogeneous assembly, for while Oxford and Cambridge still recoil from the blushing prospect of mixed classes, the College of Science anticipated America in the matter years ago—mixed socially, too, for the prestige of the College is high, and its scholarships, free of any age limit, dredge ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... in supposing me inclined to underrate Mr. Melville's power. He is inclined to High-Churchism, and to such doctrines as apostolical succession, and I, who, am a Dissenter, and a believer in a universal Christianity, recoil from the exclusive doctrine. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... with honorable commercial enterprises; but now, under the auspices of the noble lord, that flag is hoisted to protect an infamous contraband traffic, and if it were never to be hoisted except as it is now hoisted on the coast of China, we should recoil from its sight with horror, and should never again feel our hearts thrill, as they now thrill with emotion, when it floats proudly and magnificently on the breeze." The ministry escaped censure when the vote was taken by ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... mind the day on which Gabriel proposed to your Queen to become the mother of God, asking her consent to the Incarnation, by which was to be accomplished the salvation of the world. The angel's words astonished Mary's humility so far as to make her recoil before such a prodigious elevation, and, to obtain her consent, it was necessary to assure her that the Holy Ghost Himself would accomplish in her this prodigy. Indeed, it was a most memorable moment in the world's history,—a moment wherein the salvation ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... with pikes, hurling grenades from the tops; while the swivels on both sides poured their grape, and bar, and chain, and the great main-deck guns, thundering muzzle to muzzle, made both ships quiver and recoil, as they smashed the round shot through and through ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... in front of the rear sight, and the left elbow should be almost directly under the rifle. The right hand should do more than half the work of holding the rifle up and against the shoulder, the left hand only steadying and guiding the piece. Do not try to meet the recoil; let the whole body move back with it. Do not be afraid to press the jaw hard against the stock; this steadies the position, and the head goes back with the recoil and insures that your face ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... gratis. He continued there ten years after, when finding an inability to procure support from labour, and meeting with no assistance from the parish in which he had been resident for an age, he resigned the place with tears, in 1778, after an occupation of fifty six years, and was obliged to recoil upon his own parish, about twelve miles distant; to be farmed with the rest of the poor; and where, he afterwards assured me, "They were murdering him by inches." — But no complaint of this ungrateful kind lies against that people ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... him again at Spottsylvania Court-House. That day the Cat, standing in her place behind the new and temporary breastwork thrown up when the battery was posted, had the felloes of her wheels, which showed above the top of the bank, entirely cut away by Minie-bullets, so that when she jumped in the recoil her wheels smashed and let her down. This covered all old scores. The other guns had been cut down by shells or solid shot; but never before had one been gnawed down by musket-balls. From this ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... other side of the iron screen, and was lost from sight in the hurrying crowd. And as he disappeared, an unexpected poignant loneliness fell upon his nephew so heavily and so suddenly that he had no energy to recoil from the shock. It seemed to him that the last fragment of his familiar world had disappeared, leaving him ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... with the feeling of exultation and victory, was riding unguardedly on through the scene of ruin he had made, issuing orders, and shouting in a frantic manner as he went, when he was suddenly stopped by a violent recoil of his horse from the burning embers, on which he had stepped, and which had been concealed from view by the ashes which covered them. William, unwieldy and comparatively helpless as he was, was thrown with great force upon the pommel ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... concentric ripples which continue to the very shores or limits of the Universe; then the wave is thrown back upon itself, returns to its starting-point, and the man who began the first movement receives a recoil exactly equivalent to the original impetus. Reaction is equal to action; obstacles on the way may delay its return or break up its energy, but the time comes when the fractions return to the centre that generates the disturbance, which thus receives from the Law ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... would I lay down my miserable life, for I envy those who enjoy the quiet of the Grave: But Death eludes me, and flies from my embrace. In vain do I throw myself in the way of danger. I plunge into the Ocean; The Waves throw me back with abhorrence upon the shore: I rush into fire; The flames recoil at my approach: I oppose myself to the fury of Banditti; Their swords become blunted, and break against my breast: The hungry Tiger shudders at my approach, and the Alligator flies from a Monster more horrible than itself. God has set his ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... sonnets—the greatest sonnets in our literature; but it would be well to warn editors how they print this one sonnet; "I wished to share the transport" is by no means an uncommon reading. Into the history of the variant I have not looked. It is enough that all the suddenness, all the clash and recoil of these impassioned lines are lost by that "wished" in the place of "turned." The loss would be the less tolerable in as much as perhaps only here and in that heart-moving poem, 'Tis said that some have died for love, is Wordsworth to be ...
— Flower of the Mind • Alice Meynell
... A quick recoil, a smothered exclamation on the part of the man he addressed. A barb had been hidden in this simple statement which had reached some deeply-hidden but vulnerable spot in Brotherson's breast, which ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... on the face of the earth. In every foreign region of the globe the title of American citizen is held in the highest respect, and when pronounced in a foreign land it causes the hearts of our countrymen to swell with honest pride. Surely when we reach the brink of the yawning abyss we shall recoil with horror ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... no sign of recognition, but the horror in his once-handsome face, now white and drawn, told of his shock at finding her with me, and fear and recoil weakened him to the point of faintness. In his effort to recover himself, to resist what might be coming, he struggled as one for breath, but from him ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... separate trucks or caissons. As a fort-wrecker this powerful piece of ordnance is most effective. Its total weight is nearly 100 tons. The gun proper is at the left and its Krupp sliding breech can be plainly seen at the side. In the center is the gun carriage, with its very powerful recoil apparatus. When the gun is in action these two sections are joined, being so constructed as to fit together readily. The bursting projectiles were called by the British soldiers "Jack Johnsons," "Black Marias" and "Coal-boxes," from the thick black smoke they produced. These epithets ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... centered on the v-shaped blue under his chin. Deliberately, Benson squeezed, recovered from the recoil, aimed, fired, recovered, aimed, fired. Five seconds gone. The old man slumped across the desk, his arms extended. Better make a good job of it, six, seven, eight seconds; he stepped forward to the edge of the desk, call that fifteen seconds, and put the muzzle to the top of the man's head, ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... conceded not one point to the other side. In spite of all that his enemies could say, his {183} personal honour and dignity remained untarnished. The nicknames and cruel taunts flung at him, in the earlier months, apparently by his own ministers, recoil now on their heads, as the petty insults of unmannerly politicians; indeed, the accusations which they made of simplicity and honesty, simply reinforce the impression of quixotic high-mindedness, which was ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... behold her in the room that I described. Very likely and very naturally, in some fling of feverish misery or recoil of thwarted love, she has quarrelled with her old employers and the children are forbidden to see her or to speak to her; or at best she gets her rent paid and a little to herself, and now and then her late ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... at coquetry, for, in her usual charming selfishness, she was perfectly frank and open; and it might not have been her last, but she had gone too far at first, and was not prepared for a recoil of her own argument. ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... his own, he anticipated and was in full readiness for the particular man[oe]uvre by which it was attempted to make this superiority available against himself. By a new formation of his troops he foiled the attack, and caused it to recoil upon the enemy. Had Pompey then no rejoinder ready for meeting this reply? No. His one arrow being shot, his quiver was exhausted. Without an effort at parrying any longer, the mighty game was surrendered as desperate. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... the "Vindiciae Gallicae" of Sir James Mackintosh made the most impression, especially the last chapter, wherein he declared that the conspiracy of the monarchs to crush the liberties of France would recoil on their own heads. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... and rash act which is about to take place fall upon the head of him who is the instigator of this treachery; but let not my blood recoil upon the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... caterpillar. A hole is made in the victim's side; and the head and neck of the nursling dive deep into the wound, to root luxuriously among the entrails. There is never a withdrawal from the gnawed belly, never a recoil to interrupt the feast and to take breath awhile. The vivacious animal always goes forward, chewing, swallowing, digesting, until the caterpillar's skin is emptied of its contents. Once seated at ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... the sole and the framework, separated the two platforms, and the breeching. The tackle had given way, so that the cannon was no longer firm on its carriage. The stationary breeching, which prevents recoil, was not in use at this time. A heavy sea struck the port, the carronade, insecurely fastened, had recoiled and broken its chain, and began its ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... three times. Then he flung open the door and leaned out and, from his backward recoil, Raven knew he had hoped unreasonably to find his wife, knocking at her own door. Raven kicked his feet against the step, with an implication of being ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Belleisle judges that, however difficult, it can and must be possible to French valor; and storms in upon it, huge and furious (20,000, or if needful 30,000);—but is torn into mere wreck, and hideous recoil; rallies, snatches a standard, 'We must take it or die,'—and dies, does not take it; falls shot on the rampart, 'pulling at the palisades with his own hands,' nay some say 'with his teeth,' when the last moments ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... enemy to a stand. A detachment of musketeers, with E. Johnson at their head, was, meanwhile, despatched round the enemy's flank, which considerably increased their disorder, and, in about twenty minutes, the main front of the assailants began to recoil, but from the numerous obstacles presented to their rear, the entire absence of discipline, and the difficulty of giving a reversed order, without method, to so large a body, and added to all, the delay arising from their ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... sitting-room as before. But he was worse, and talked with a certain incoherence when he told the Queen that he had been listening to the little birds, and they had reminded him of those he had heard at the Rosenau in his childhood. She felt a quick recoil, and when the doctors showed that their favourable opinion of the day before had undergone a change, she went to her room and it seemed to her as ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... the Courier (in my Lord's character) that they are blindly investigating. The head not being destroyed, the obvious alternative is to hide it—and the Baron is equal to the occasion. His studies in the old library have informed him of a safe place of concealment in the palace. The Countess may recoil from handling the acids and watching the process of cremation; but she can surely sprinkle a little ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... We did not recoil, but our line was fairly hurled back by the leaden hail that was poured into our very faces. Eight color-bearers were killed at one discharge of their cannon. We were right up among the very wheels of their Napoleon guns. It was death to retreat now to either ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... ground. The tender speckled moth here dancing seen, The vaulting grasshopper of glossy green, And all prolific Summer's sporting train, Their little lives by various pow'rs sustain. But what can unassisted vision do? What, but recoil where most it would pursue; His patient gaze but finish with a sigh, When musing waking speaks the sky-lark nigh! Just starting from the corn she cheerly sings, And trusts with conscious pride her downy wings; Still louder ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... t'were transform'd to stock. 785 Mean while fierce TALGOL, gath'ring might, With rugged truncheon charg'd the Knight; But he with petronel upheav'd, Instead of shield, the blow receiv'd. The gun recoil'd, as well it might, 790 Not us'd to such a kind of fight, And shrunk from its great master's gripe, Knock'd down and stunn'd by mortal stripe. Then HUDIBRAS, with furious haste, Drew out his sword; yet not so fast, 795 But TALGOL first, with hardy thwack, Twice bruis'd his ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... wonders were in Israel shown, His praise and glory was in Israel known. That saw the troubl'd Sea, and shivering fled, And sought to hide his froth-becurled head Low in the earth, Jordan's clear streams recoil, As a faint host that hath receiv'd the foil. 10 The high, huge-bellied Mountains skip like Rams Amongst their Ewes, the little Hills like Lambs. Why fled the Ocean? And why skip'd the Mountains? Why turned ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... some such wild, passionate utterances of Lillie that Harry felt a recoil of mingled conscience, fear, and that disgust which man feels when she, whom God made to be sought, degrades herself to seek. There is no edification and no propriety in highly colored and minute drawing of such scenes of temptation and degradation, though they are the stock and staple of some ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... appreciate him better than you have ever done. Very well! seek your own affinity, and find a new Eden. Don't fret and cry till your eyes are red and swollen, and your whole appearance hideous. It will only recoil on your own head. Nobody will pity you, and the world will pass on and forget you. Live while you live, and leave to-morrow to take care of to-morrow. Remember, "It is a folly to no other second, to wish to correct ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... him had not passed unnoted by her even at the time, but being herself so greatly in fault she had ascribed it to the recoil of a proud man from the dread of social humiliation. But it took another aspect under the strong light just thrown upon his early life by her discovery in the room below. Nothing but some act, unforgivable and unforgettable ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... near sunset, and the enemy's cavalry thinking the day was theirs, made a dash at Smith, but just as the assailants appeared in the open fields, Capehart's men opened so suddenly on their left flank as to cause it to recoil in astonishment, which permitted Smith to connect his brigade with Custer unmolested. We were now in good shape behind the familiar barricades, and having a continuous line, excepting only the gap to be filled with Pennington, that ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... occur which disturb my life, I always have a movement of recoil. I cling for a second to what is, and then I fling myself headlong into what is to be. It is like a gymnast who clings first to his trapeze bar in order to fling himself afterwards with full force into space. In one second ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... back again into the individual liberty of the democratic states. We see that now we are clearly swinging over to some new form of social solidarity, of which tendency federalism and socialism are expressions, and doubtless from that we shall recoil toward individual liberty once more. It is a safe generalization that whenever human thought shows some decided trend, a corrective movement is not far away. However enthusiastic we may be, therefore, about the idea of progress and the positive ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... of the church's chronic infirmities has been orthodoxism. Perhaps it was the recoil of her unbelief in Christ that sent her over into the ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... contact with prisoners, and when the eye of no superior authority is on them, or nothing else to deter, they are "hail fellow well met" with such of the convicts as are unprincipled enough to curry favor with and assist them in covering up their peccadilloes from their superiors. They naturally recoil at the hardness and parsimony of the Government toward them, evading the performance of duties when they can, and I have heard more than one say: "Why should we care what prisoners do, so long as we don't get into trouble? The Government grinds us down ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... in this cry, in this "You!" ejaculated with a rapid movement of recoil-amazement, fright, scorn, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... two pistols cleared the attacking Maoris from the top of the fence, where they were vainly trying to cut through the lashings; and, cheered on by these successes, the defenders yelled with delight, and used their spears with terrible effect. But the attacking party, after a recoil, came on again as stubbornly as ever, and it was plain enough to those who handled the firearms that it was only a question of time before the besieged would be beaten by numbers; and Don shuddered as he thought of the ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... these are abandoned for their opposites,—as if our countrymen, through successive generations, had lost the sense of solemnity and pensiveness (not to speak of deeper emotions) and resorted to the tombs of their forefathers and contemporaries, only to be tickled and surprised. Would we not recoil from such gratification, in such a place, if the general literature of the country had not co-operated with other causes insidiously to weaken our sensibilities and deprave our judgments? Doubtless, there are shocks of event ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... accomplished at varying rates of celerity, and there are societies not absolutely stationary in which the collapse of the ancient organisation can only be perceived by careful study of the phenomena they present. But, whatever its pace, the change has not been subject to reaction or recoil, and apparent retardations will be found to have been occasioned through the absorption of archaic ideas and customs from some entirely foreign source. Nor is it difficult to see what is the tie ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... did not recoil at the rusticity. This how for what, and the interrogative yes, still remained. Since their first walk, she had not wanted to know, in however great surprise ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... and the fraud of it. Nor could I help agreeing with him, when he told me all of it, as with tears in his eyes he did, and ready to be my slave henceforth; I could not forbear from owning that it was a low and heartless trick, unworthy of men who had families; and the recoil whereof was well deserved, whatever it ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... have sickened with dismay; and whether or not ho had any dread of such a catastrophe, certain it is that he behaved to her more as a pedagogue than a cousinly tutor, insisting on a precision in all she did that might have gone far to rouse resentment and recoil in the mind of a less childlike woman. Just as surely, notwithstanding all that, however, did the sweet girl grow into his heart: it could not be otherwise. The idea of her was making a nest for itself in his soul—what kind of a nest for ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... Although you burn to dregs your midnight oil? O Sage, I give one that will make you moil. Just take one weakling little woman's heart. Prepare your patience, furbish up your art. How now? Did I not see you then recoil? ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... forced to acknowledge that only the purest friendship could prompt me to remonstrate with you on your ruinous career. Of course, if you choose, you can soon wreck yourself; you are your own master; but the infatuation will recoil upon you. Your disgrace and ruin will not affect me, save that, as your friend, I should mourn your fall. Ah, Eugene, I have risked your displeasure— I have ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... out to sea again now that it was so rough, and the wind changed so frequently, seemed more terrible than to remain where they were. Pyrrhus rose and leapt into the water, and at once was eagerly followed by his friends and his body-guard. The darkness of night and the violent recoil of the roaring waves made it hard for them to help him, and it was not until daybreak, when the wind abated, that he reached the land, faint and helpless in body, but with his spirit invincible in misfortune. The Messapians, upon whose coast he had been thrown, now assembled from the ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... of a Hannibal and the profound philosophy of St. Augustine, there grew up some of the most terrible despotisms ever known to the world. The things done daily by the robber sovereigns were such as to make a civilized imagination recoil with horror. One of these cheerful creatures, who reigned in the middle of the eighteenth century, and was called Muley Abdallah, especially prided himself on his peculiar skill in mounting a horse. Resting his left hand upon the horse's neck, ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... both, especially the latter. While we were engaged with her, the breechings of all our lower-deck guns broke, and the guns flew fore and aft, which obliged us to shoot ahead, for our upper guns could not reach her." The breaking of the breechings—the heavy ropes which take the strain of the guns' recoil—was doubtless accelerated by the undue elevation necessitated by the extreme range. The collision with the Eagle was one of the incidents common to battle, but it doubtless marred the completeness of the victory. Of the eight French ships engaged, ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... I am a slave, a favoured slave at best, To share his splendour, and seem very blest! 1110 Oft must my soul the question undergo, Of—'Dost thou love?' and burn to answer, 'No!' Oh! hard it is that fondness to sustain, And struggle not to feel averse in vain; But harder still the heart's recoil to bear, And hide from one—perhaps another there. He takes the hand I give not—nor withhold— Its pulse nor checked—nor quickened—calmly cold: And when resigned, it drops a lifeless weight From one I never loved enough to hate. 1120 No warmth these lips return by ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... punish the innocent as well as the guilty, so I am not with you there, though, like you, I recoil in horror from the perpetration of that fiendish attack upon peaceable troops. I was there myself, and did what I could to quiet the tumult, receiving more than one brickbat for my interference. One ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... change is this in one who like a reed Bent to my twisting hands? Does he recoil? Is this the hound whom I have used to feed With sops of vinegar and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of the other sex, and he is happy to have an opportunity of paying a tribute to female purity and female truth. That there are hearts so disinterested as to lose the considerations of self, in advancing the happiness of those they love; that there are minds so pure as to recoil with disgust from the admission of deception, indelicacy, or management, he knows; for he has seen it from long and close examination. He regrets that the very artlessness of those who are most pure in ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... his lips, but with the recoil of his splendid frame and the ferocious expansion of his eyes. This invitation was a cataract of lightning leaping down an ink-black sky. In one instant of all-pervading clearness ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... a violent exercise like bicycling! Where one gets so hot! So unbecomingly hot! You'd be simply stifled, darling." I caught a darted glance which accompanied the words and which made Ettie recoil into the recesses ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... whole map of humanity on that little spot in the county of Berks. The middle-aged man, a schemer, watching the success of his able scheme, and stunned and wounded by its recoil. And old age, callous to noble pain, all alive to discomfort, yet man to the last—blaming any one but Number One, cackling against heavenly bodies, accusing the sun and the kitchen fire of frigidity—not ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... have been disastrous on the narrow paths cut into the sides of these chasms, but I walked along with a firm tread and without the slightest feeling of dizziness. Sometimes I leaped over a crevasse whose depth would have made me recoil had I been in the midst of glaciers on shore; sometimes I ventured out on a wobbling tree trunk fallen across a gorge, without looking down, having eyes only for marveling at the wild scenery of this region. There, leaning on erratically cut foundations, ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... cares for as if they all were her own breed. Side by side with the penguins, which steal one another's eggs, you have the dotterels, whose family relations are so "charming and touching" that even passionate hunters recoil from shooting a female surrounded by her young ones; or the eider-ducks, among which (like the velvet-ducks, or the coroyas of the Savannahs) several females hatch together in the same, nest. or the lums, which sit in turn upon a common covey. Nature is variety itself, offering all possible ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... firing the first shot was due to a gentleman of Shropshire, unused to this species of warfare, and who seemed to recoil from the reverberation of the report himself had made. 'One hundred guineas,' he exclaimed. Again a pause ensued; but anon the biddings rose rapidly to five hundred guineas. Hitherto, however, it was evident that the firing ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... was a short pause;—and then a shiver, that recoil and tremor which men feel at any exposition of the relics of the dead, ran through the court; for the next witness was mute—it was the skull of the Deceased! On the left side there was a fracture, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... settler, living in peace barely forty miles away, was one of the victims, for he had taken sides with Long Nolan, who without rhyme or reason had been discharged, and violently flung from the premises. There had been a wild rush on the guard, a volley, a recoil, a rally in force, and an outcry for vengeance. Then the guard had to shoot in earnest and self-defence, for their lives were at stake. Some of the men had gone to Argenta to plead with the owners, ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... rakonto. Recitation deklamo—ado. Recite deklami. Reckless senzorga. Reckon kalkuli. Reckoner (book) kalkullibro. Reckoning kalkulo. Reclaim (land) eltiri. Reclaim redemandi. Recline kusxi, apogi. Recluse ermito. Recognition rekono. Recognize rekoni. Recoil (of gun, etc.) repusxo. Recollect memori. Recommend rekomendi. Recommendation rekomendo. Recompense rekompenci. Reconcile pacigi. Reconciled, to be pacigxi. Reconciliation pacigo. Reconsider rekonsideri. Recopy rekopii. Record registri, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... fellow anticipated such dire effects, we might have felt rather uncomfortable at our relative positions; but I doubt whether the owner had ever had occasion to try the efficacy of his boasted manoeuvre, as he would probably at the first discharge have been killed himself either by the recoil or the bursting of the ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... slightly as he felt her caress, and thought how she would recoil from him did she know all. "After all," says some cynical writer, "the illusions of youth are mostly due to the want of experience." Madge, ignorant in a great measure of the world, cherished her pleasant illusions, though many of them had been destroyed by the trials of the past ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... If we were as many as we once were, then against us these invaders could not move at all. But we are three only and also—do we have the right to evoke disaster which will strike not only the enemy but perhaps recoil upon the innocent? There has been enough death here already. And those who are our servants shall no longer be asked to face battle to keep an empty shell inviolate. We would see with our own eyes these invaders, probe what they would ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... so," she said, with a flash of her occasional repugnance to the man; and then after a pause, "Herr von Gondremark," she added, "I recoil from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Gaucho announced. "She has two 90's to our one; we'll try to disable them, first." The vision-screen lit with the indirect glare of the gun-flash, and the image in it jiggled violently as the ship shook to the recoil, then steadied again, with the enemy ship visible in the middle of it, growing larger and larger as the Gaucho rushed toward her. The gun fired again and again, flooding the screen with momentary ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... slaughtered, and their crops burnt and wasted. One republican column assumed and merited the name of the Infernal, by the horrid atrocities which they committed. At Pilau, they roasted the women and children in a heated oven. Many similar horrors could be added, did not the heart and hand recoil from the task. Without quoting any more special instances of horror, we use the words of a republican eye witness, to express the general spectacle presented by the theatre ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... speak. The air was so packed full of sound that it seemed as if it could not possibly hold one sound more. It was like the booming of a thousand great guns at the same time; the shock, the recoil, and the rush of air across the entrance to the tank was as if artillery practice on an immense scale were going on. There was a screaming sound as if shells were hurtling through space. Now the pitch ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... free, you would not have felt the recoil, which, even in a heavy, well-made gun, is equal to the fall of a weight fifty to sixty pounds from a height of one foot, and in overloaded or defective guns, exceeds twice and even three times that. It is a wonder ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... have a better proveditor than the Venetian, another strategus sitting with an army standing by him; whereupon that which is marching, if there were any probability it should, would find as little possibility that it could recoil, as a foreign enemy to invade you. These things considered, a war will appear to be of a contrary nature to that of all other reckonings, inasmuch as of this you must never look to have a good account if you be strict in imposing checks. ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... efforts to form Lilla according to her most exalted ideas; and, as a result, she implanted in that little charge still more complexities of impulse—a greater sensitiveness to the lures of mortal beauty, together with something of her own recoil from all the ultimate consequences of ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... involuntary recoil the pilot pressed a wrong control or whether the action of the grass itself snatched the ladder from the ship I don't know; but that last bit attached to the machine was torn free and fell upon the green. It was the only ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then—more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... One may recoil with a painful sense of material incongruity, as did Hawthorne, when contemplating the noisome suburban street where Burns lived; but all the humane and poetical associations connected with the long struggle sustained by him, of "the highest in man's soul against ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... was not to be diverted from his lecture. "There, Miss Dudley," he said, "look at her now!" Then, catching a crayon, he continued: "Wait! Let me try it myself!" and began rapidly to draw the girl's features. Quite upset by this unexpected recoil of her attack, Catherine would have liked to escape, but the painter, when the fit was on him, became very imperious, and she dared not oppose his will. When at length he finished his sketch, he had the ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... of the boy, and Kitty's passionate, ungovernable recoil from the deformity that showed itself almost immediately after his birth—a form of infantile paralysis involving a slight but incurable lameness. Lady Tranmore could recall weeks of remorseful fondling, alternating with weeks of neglect; continued illness and depression on Kitty's part, settling ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... than our respected lexicographer; and yet we know how little it affected his conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh and lively vein he spoke of life. Already an old man, he ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea. As courage and intelligence are the two qualities best worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... government might inflict upon them, as we see has been attempted. The city and commandant of Macan request these islands to make reparation immediately for the goods, so that the difficulty may not recoil upon them, to the damage of their goods and of the commerce between Yndia and Japon, which they declare to be of great importance for the preservation of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... our revenue the first remark that calls our attention is that they are less exuberantly prosperous than they were at the corresponding period of the last year. The severe shock so extensively sustained by the commercial and manufacturing interests in Great Britain has not been without a perceptible recoil upon ourselves. A reduced importation from abroad is necessarily succeeded by a reduced return to the Treasury at home. The net revenue of the present year will not equal that of the last, and the receipts of that which is to come will fall short of those in the current ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Quincy Adams • John Quincy Adams
... things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without—our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... men's minds were turned to the great events going forward in France. It had not yet occurred to the Italians that the recoil of these events might be felt among themselves. They were simply amused spectators, roused at last to the significance of the show, but never dreaming that they might soon be called from the wings to the footlights. To de Crucis, however, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... alive to his own interests, I scarcely think that he will do so in a spirit of unfair detraction. But in doing this a writer is bound to be accurate, for if he be liberal of such accusations and it can be shown that his charges are unfounded, they recoil with double force upon himself. I propose, therefore, as it is impossible for me to reply to all such attacks, to follow Professor Lightfoot and Dr. Westcott, with some minuteness in their discussion of my treatment of the Ignatian Epistles, ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... the rammer from Pearce's hands when he staggered with a grape-shot through his chest. Poor Jack Pearce! He did not live to see the work 'Scolding Sairy' was to do that night. I had but dragged him beyond reach of the recoil ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the speaker, that carried his words so directly to the heart of the listener. This is one of the great advantages of plain dealing and frankness. The habitual and wily flatterer may succeed until his practices recoil on himself, and like other sweets his aliment cloys by its excess; but he who deals honestly, though he often necessarily offends, possesses a power of praising that no quality but sincerity can bestow, since his words go directly to the heart, finding their support ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... the side door was burst violently open, and a man, white and wild, with a double-barrelled shotgun in his hand, abruptly entered. Darting across the floor, he thrust the muzzle of his weapon almost against Haney's breast and fired, uttering a wild curse at the moment of recoil. ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... you know as well as I do that I speak the truth. When I escaped from that coffin I found myself a prisoner in this very vault—this house of my perished ancestry, where, if old legends could be believed, the very bones that are stored up here would start and recoil from YOUR presence as pollution to the dead, whose creed ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... soil! That marks success (though near to foil) Of one who with prophetic ken, With honest zeal and ceaseless toil, Opposed the vandal wish to spoil This lovely bit of vale and glen; Who, 'mid discussion and turmoil Of adverse minds, did not recoil From vigorous stroke of tongue and pen; And then, till passion ceased to boil, On troubled waters poured out oil And to his plans ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... them, in further contempt of the modes of honorable warfare, supplying the place of a conquering force by attempts to disorganize our political society, to dismember our confederated Republic. Happily, like others, these will recoil on the authors; but they mark the degenerate counsels from which they emanate, and if they did not belong to a sense of unexampled inconsistencies might excite the greater wonder as proceeding from a Government which founded the very ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... own colours, and the creatures their own forms and features?" To this we answer (i.) that if you are to be a saint, as God has called you to be, you must have the qualifications and nature of a saint; (ii.) we ought not to recoil from this sum, as if the casting of the figures were necessarily a long process. No, not long! how long does it take one to reach love? Why, we commonly use the expression "falling in love"; and when the heart is awakened to the sense of the universal ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... who, in quest of beauty, have to go outside time, into the days that are no more, or the days that have never been. As though the wine of life were not as intoxicating, and its vintages as rich nowadays as ever they were! But men who are weary in soul recoil from direct contact with life: they can only bear to see it through the veil of visions spun by the backward movement of time, and hear it in the echo which sends back and distorts the dead words of those ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... embellishment; The mind is riveted, the gaze is spent Where lavish Nature pours her richest spoil, The tongue is voiceless with bewilderment, Far, far below the ocean's ceaseless toil Makes bosoms inly shudder and all eyes recoil. ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... mankind works for a taskmaster who makes bitter every hour of his life only to forget him with the instant of his death; he is ever rolling the stone of human nature upward toward purer heights, to see it recoil and rush down into darkness ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... I envy those who enjoy the quiet of the Grave: But Death eludes me, and flies from my embrace. In vain do I throw myself in the way of danger. I plunge into the Ocean; The Waves throw me back with abhorrence upon the shore: I rush into fire; The flames recoil at my approach: I oppose myself to the fury of Banditti; Their swords become blunted, and break against my breast: The hungry Tiger shudders at my approach, and the Alligator flies from a Monster more horrible than itself. God has set his seal ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... That which has actually been accomplished is the storing up of energy in the Aether around the jar. This storing up of energy is analogous to pulling aside the lath, and is the making use of the elasticity of the Aether, in order to produce a tendency to recoil. When the jar is discharged, which is analogous to letting go the lath, the Aether seeks to recover its former condition by discharging the energy it received. In these operations the elasticity of the Aether is called into play. After ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... RECOIL. The running in of a gun when discharged, which backward motion is caused by the force ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... mid-air, while her long and elegant head nodded each time Mr. Ferdinand and Gustavus pranced carefully sideways to a higher step. The Prophet followed solicitously behind, with hands outstretched to check any dangerous recoil. His face was very grave, ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... public opinion—are sure to be greatly alarmed at these suggestions for their suppression. Poor pigeons! if you only knew what a sorry sportsman it is who fires at you, you'd never flutter a wing. Be of good heart, I say. Even if Williams's gun go off at all, the recoil may hurt himself, but it will never damage you. Take my word for it, "the smooth-Bore of Lambeth never hit anything yet." This assurance of mine—I have given it scores of times personally—never gives the comfort that it ought; for these timid souls, ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... and they entered the chambers together. A fire lingered in the grate, and Barter replenished it, and, having produced a box of cigars and a bottle of cognac, proffered refreshment to his guest. The honest man began somewhat to recoil from himself and from his companion. What was he there for? The answer was pretty evident. There was nothing between this loud-babbling youth and himself which could have drawn them into even a momentary comradeship, ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... back," she went on while he looked at her in silence a little. Fortune had not supplied him profusely with money, but his emotion was caused by no foresight of his probably having also to put his hand in his pocket for Mrs. Rooth. It was simply the instinctive recoil of a fastidious nature from the idea of familiar intimacy with people who lived from hand to mouth, together with a sense that this intimacy would have to be defined if it was to go much further. ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... grew by your neglect; your care of them was displayed in sending persons to govern them who were the deputies of deputies of ministers—men whose behavior, on many occasions, has caused the blood of those sons of liberty to recoil within them; men who have been promoted to the highest seats of justice in a foreign country, in order to escape being brought to the bar of a court of justice in their own." Mr. Pitt opposed the fatal policy of Grenville with singular eloquence; by ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Priam hit the breastplate of Menelaus's corslet, but the arrow glanced from off it. As black beans or pulse come pattering down on to a threshing-floor from the broad winnowing-shovel, blown by shrill winds and shaken by the shovel—even so did the arrow glance off and recoil from the shield of Menelaus, who in his turn wounded the hand with which Helenus carried his bow; the spear went right through his hand and stuck in the bow itself, so that to his life he retreated under cover ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... now and strove to rise to his feet. It was a tremendous effort, but he succeeded, and stood confronting Balcom, while the ominous light of hatred that gleamed from his eyes as they encountered those of Balcom made even that well-poised man recoil and shudder. ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... their head, by passing round upon the enemy's flank, served to increase the consternation which was beginning to pervade their unwieldy body. In about twenty minutes after the settlers had taken their stand, the front of the enemy began to recoil. But from the numerous obstructions in their rear, the entire absence of discipline, and the extreme difficulty of giving a reversed motion to so large a body, a small part only of which was directly exposed to danger, and the delay occasioned by the practice of carrying off all their dead ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... justified by already existent spiritual union, is the normal one. I believe that, however incapable she may be of explaining it, and however her power of reasoning may be vitiated by wrong ideas about the sexual relation, she does instinctively recoil from its use when its reason for existence is not there. She may attribute her reluctance to the fact that she is too womanly (sic), too spiritually minded to have any desire for sexual relations at all; her ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... should they not say so?" continued Fouquet, still laughing; "and I would lay a wager there would be people found wicked enough to laugh at it." This sally disconcerted the monarch. Fouquet was skillful enough, or fortunate enough, to make Louis XIV. recoil before the appearance of the deed he meditated. M. d'Artagnan, when he appeared, received an order to desire a ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... fine bulls. Our revenge was complete, and I had proved that the four-ounce was perfectly irresistible if held straight with the heavy charge of twelve drachms of powder. Since that time I have frequently used sixteen drachms (one ounce) of powder to the charge, but the recoil is then very severe, although the effect upon an animal with a four-ounce ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... liked to show you those pistols," said Musard. "They carry as true as a rifle up to fifty yards. Their only drawback is that they are a bit clumsy, and have a heavy recoil." ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... Tiamat rebels against the gods. Collecting her hosts, among them frightful demon shapes of all imaginable forms, she advances for the purpose of expelling the gods from their seats. The affrighted deities turn for protection to the high gods, Anu and Ea, who, however, recoil in terror from the hosts of the dragon Tiamat. Anshar then applies to Marduk. The gods are invited to a feast, the situation is described, and Marduk is invited to lead the heavenly hosts against the foe. He agrees on condition that ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the silken brutality of their visitor made him blush; that he should be accepted as an equal, and the others thus pointedly ignored, pleased him in spite of himself, and then ran through his veins in a recoil of anger. ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... along, making for that very hole; he heard the sudden quick rustle in the grass behind that followed, beheld the dusky, squat form that it heralded pounce. He watched the snake's head whip round, and drive with all its power in one last desperate stroke; watched it straighten out suddenly, and recoil in an awful quivering spasm, like a severed telegraph-wire, as the hedgehog's razor-sharp teeth cut through skin and flesh and backbone; and, trembling from head to foot, he witnessed, half-fascinated, I think, the awful last threshing flurry of the ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... nothing, I sprang quickly and was just about to lie down behind it, when a man rose from its other side. I did not lie down. He looked at me; I looked at him. He was unarmed. We were about eight feet apart. He began to recoil. There was light sufficient to enable me to tell from his dress that he was a rebel. Of course he would think me a Confederate. ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... even on his philosophic speculations opium operated unfavorably in one respect, by often causing him to leave them unfinished. This is true. Whenever Coleridge (being highly charged or saturated with opium) had written with distempered vigor upon any question, there occurred, soon after, a recoil of intense disgust, not from his own paper only but even from the subject. All opium-eaters are tainted with the infirmity of leaving works unfinished and suffering reactions of disgust. But Coleridge taxed himself with that infirmity in verse before he could at all have commenced ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... however, part of the beautiful poise of things depends upon the fact that whenever you have an exaggerated fanatic of any sort, his exact opposite at once springs up to neutralise him. You have a Mameluke: up jumps a Crusader. You have a Fenian: up jumps an Orangeman. Every force has its recoil. And so these more hide-bound scientists must be set against those gentlemen who still believe that the world was created in ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... unaccustomed stir, whose meaning the bee-keeper rarely will fail to grasp, is to be noticed within and around the buzzing city. At times one would almost appear to detect a sign of dispute, hesitation, recoil. It will happen even that for day after day a strange emotion, apparently without cause, will appear and vanish in this transparent, golden throng. Has a cloud that we cannot see crept across the sky that the bees are watching; or is their intellect battling with a new regret? Does a ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... is the position of very many. They are hovering between the idea of extinction and that of torment. They try to believe in torment; they have been inoculated with that idea; they think, or are afraid, that it is Scriptural; but they recoil from any hearty reception of it. They have not got the length as yet of the idea of final salvation. But some day that truth may flash upon their souls like a gleam of heaven's ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... men remained for some moments a prey to the most horrible suspense. They could neither retreat nor change their position. Their chests rested upon the earth; their backs touched the rocks. They dared not make a movement of recoil for fear of drawing the reptile in pursuit of them. The air, more and more impregnated by the infectious odor ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... told me about your father's plans, I saw your face. If there is any truth in physiognomy, you recoil with horror at the prospect of one day marrying ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... She felt a swift recoil. So that was what war came to. Not just natty figures in khaki that girls cried over in saying good-by to, or smiled at and told how perfectly splendid they were to go; not just high adventure and martial music and the rhythm of swinging ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... powers of mischief, and the delight with which they exhibited the circumvolutory movement of the tower, the quick thrusting forth of the immense guns to deliver their ponderous missiles, and then the immediate recoil, and the security behind the closed port-holes. Yet even this will not long be the last and most terrible improvement in the science of war. Already we hear of vessels the armament of which is to act entirely beneath the surface of the water; so that, with no other external ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... limbo of vanities. At times, however, mostly when unwell, they would come in upon her like a flood: what if, after all, God were the self-loving being theology presented—a being from whom no loving human heart could but recoil with a holy dislike! what if it was because of a nature specially evil that she could not accept the God in whom the priests and elders of her people believed! But again and again, in the midst of profoundest wretchedness from such doubt, had ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... them into the service of the Lord, not counting their lives dear for Christ's sake. The Covenanters overawed! Will the sun faint and fail beneath the gale? Will the oak wither at the loss of a few boughs? Will veterans recoil at the first fire? Rather, will not the ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... confidence on the part of a person naturally or habitually reserved will often be followed by a phase of recoil. At breakfast next morning their overnight talk seemed to both Sir Richmond and Dr. Martineau like something each had dreamt about the other, a quite impossible excess of intimacy. They discussed the weather, which seemed to be settling down ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... was a very evident lack of something in the face, in no way interfering with its intellectual aspect, but giving it, at times, an unnatural and even uncanny look. In meeting the young man's eyes, the old gentleman was ever and anon conscious of a disposition to recoil and shudder, and, at the same time, felt impelled, by what resembled a magnetic attraction, to gaze the harder. Did the very fact that some universal human characteristic was omitted from this person's nature endow him with an exceptional and peculiar power? There ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... seldom self-explanatory, and Keniston's inarticulateness no longer discouraged her; but she could not reconcile her sense of the continuity of all high effort to his unperturbed air of finishing each picture as though he had despatched a masterpiece to posterity. In the first recoil from her disillusionment she even allowed herself to perceive that, if he worked slowly, it was not because he mistrusted his powers of expression, but because he had really so little ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... could twice forgive. Even if I loved you, if I were blind to all else, if I forgot all else, I should still see Camille! Her love for you is a barrier too high to be o'erleaped by any power, even by the wings of an angel; none but a devil would fail to recoil before such treachery. In this, my dear Calyste, are many motives which delicate and noble women keep to themselves, of which you men know nothing; nor could you understand them, even though you were all as like our sex as you yourself appear to ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... this unjust and rash act which is about to take place fall upon the head of him who is the instigator of this treachery; but let not my blood recoil upon the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... But these recoil in riddles and reserves.— The dream's untuned. Ah! vanished chords thereof! Ah! keen divisions of the jangled nerves That strung so long the gracious lutes of love!— Hurry to sell old magian Lamps for new, Though beauty's moonlike domes dissolve and pass: If all ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... it did appear marvelous, the ease with which he dropped the knights of the brass buttons. Cop number one had regained his feet, and drawing his club was about to make a rush, when Oscar threw back the lapel of his coat, and the officer's eyes rested on a little silver badge that caused him to recoil as though he had been ...
— Oscar the Detective - Or, Dudie Dunne, The Exquisite Detective • Harlan Page Halsey
... shaken, whilst my power and unbounded influence convinced my enemies, that, so long as the present monarch sat upon the throne of France, their attempts at diminishing my credit and influence would only recoil upon themselves. Louis XV generally supped in my apartments every evening, unless indeed, by way of change, I went to sup with him. Our guests were of course of the first order, but yet not of the most exemplary morals. These persons had tact, and saw that, to please ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... Robert Cruikshank was an inferior artist in every respect to Seymour, and had not forgotten the tribute which the foolish editor had previously paid to the talents and ability of the latter. Conduct like this could only recoil on the head of the person who was injudicious and spiteful enough to be guilty of it. The "Notices to Correspondents" in subsequent numbers continued to be filled with references and allusions to Seymour, dictated by a malice which was alike silly and childish. They are not worthy of repetition ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... back into the middle of the road. It was an unconscious recoil, and there I stood, still looking at it. It ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... appearance of his bride-elect in such an unexpected place was so appalling to him that his nerve failed him entirely. Instead of clasping her in his arms as he should have done, he had the decency to recoil, and cover his face instinctively from ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... hesitate to wreak his revenge on Essex and Manchester, though the blow would probably recoil upon himself.[b]He proposed in the Commons what was afterwards called the "self-denying ordinance," that the members of both houses should be excluded from all offices, whether civil or military. He would not, he said, reflect on what was passed, but suggest a remedy for the future. The nation was ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... for almost twenty years. This stranger knew of his youthful folly, and she must be prevented from communicating it to others. It was from no sense of aroused conscience that he hastened to lead her to the front room. In this crisis, something other than shuddering recoil from haunting deeds was imperative; unlovely specters must be made ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... powerful weapons of the Hyperion were brought to bear, and in the blast of full-driven beams the stranger's screens flamed incandescent. Heavy guns, under the recoil of whose fierce salvos, the frame of the giant globe trembled and shuddered, shot out their tons of high-explosive shell. But the pirate commander had known accurately the strength of the liner, and knew that her armament was impotent against the forces at his command. His screens were invulnerable, ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... a shadowy figure start up, black-robed, from the flower-laden sod, and, hastily drawing a thick veil over a beautiful, despairing face, glide away among the trees? At this point Lady Newhaven always began to cry. It was too heart-rending. And her mind in violent recoil was caught once more, and broken on the ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... Suddenly there was a recoil in the tumult. Robur had put his hands into his pockets and now held them out at the front ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... from the recoil, the soldiers of Friedwald broke upon his doomed band with a force manifold augmented; broke and carried the flanks with it, for the assaulting parties to the right and left were dismayed by the strength unexpectedly hurled against the center. The bulky Flemish, the lithe Spaniard, the ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... clouds of smoke and dust, With sword-sway, and with lance's thrust; And such a yell was there, Of sudden and portentous birth, As if men fought upon the earth, And fiends in upper air; Oh, life and death were in the shout, Recoil and rally, charge and rout, And triumph and despair. Long looked the anxious squires; their eye Could in the darkness ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... claim Exemptions from the lot of penal shame, Or snatch from glory's plant one servile wreath, To deck the waste of crimes, that frown'd beneath. Harden'd in villany, with fate unfeign'd He mock'd at warning, scorn'd reproach, nor deign'd To answer either, and remorse's dart Recoil'd from his impenetrable heart: Save in those hours when darkness or when pain Recals its force, and guilt recedes again; When passion, vice, and fancy quit their sway, When lawless pleasure trembling shrinks away, While black conviction's rushing whirlwinds quench Her smoky ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... than despise, implying a shuddering recoil, especially a moral recoil. "How many shun evil as inconvenient who do not abhor it as hateful." TRENCH Serm. in Westm. Abbey xxvi, 297. [M.] Detest expresses indignation, with something of contempt. Loathe implies disgust, physical or moral. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... upon the carved cabinet in the corner, and the Something crept stealthily thither. A long-drawn, breathless minute and then—the room was flooded with brilliant light, and a figure, kneeling before the cabinet, uttered a strangled cry and leapt up, only to recoil before ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... seemed to Sir de Fourcy, that Hugo von Danveld advised such actions from which every knight's soul should recoil; and the other brothers not only were not angry with him, but approved of his words. Therefore astonishment seized him more and more; finally he became deeply thoughtful, pondering whether it was proper to join in the ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Infessura, on the other; all these, from whom we learn the real existence of immorality far more universal and abominable than our dramatists venture to show, relate quietly, calmly, with analytical frigidness or gossiping levity, the things which we often shrink from repeating, and sometimes recoil from believing. Great statesmanlike historians and humble chattering chroniclers are alike unaffected by what goes on around them: they collect anecdotes and generalize events without the fumes of evil, among which they seek for materials in the dark places of national or local ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... ambitious work of fiction could have been found. Some two or three years went by, as I well remember, before anything like a revival of literature and of public interest in literature took place. Thus, M. Zola launched his gigantic scheme under auspices which would have made many another man recoil. "The Fortune of the Rougons," and two or three subsequent volumes of his series, attracted but a moderate degree of attention, and it was only on the morrow of the publication of "L'Assommoir" that he awoke, like Byron, to find ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... been accused of having obstructed the war. I admit it. Gentlemen, I abhor war. I would oppose the war if I stood alone. When I think of a cold, glittering steel bayonet being plunged in the white, quivering flesh of a human being, I recoil with horror. I have often wondered if I could take the life of my fellow men, even to save ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... will this success continue? Must I not expect reverses? May not some reaction take place? and have I not in some degree deserved it? Yes, I have used deceit in persuading him of my mother's death. I began now to think that that was a false step, which, if ever discovered, might recoil upon me. I remained a long while in deep thought. I tried to extenuate my conduct in this particular, but I could not; and to rid myself of melancholy feelings, which I could not overcome, I wrote a letter, requesting leave of absence for a fortnight, and took it ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... reply. He was watching the wind pushes and waiting for a strong one. It came—it struck the tree-top. There was an ominous crack, but Sam had left enough and pushed hard to make sure; as soon as the recoil began he struck in very rapid succession three heavy strokes, cutting away all the remaining wood on the west side and leaving only a three-inch triangle of uncut fibre. All the weight was now northwest of this. The tree toppled that way, ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... was ill-aimed, at least the recoil was prodigious. It is unreasonable to attribute principally to the violence of the Liberator the new and determined rally of the South in defense of slavery,—Calhoun and his followers had far wider grounds for their action than that,—but undoubtedly that violence helped ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... of the skin is another quality that varies with the concentration in the blood of the internal secretions. Elasticity of the skin, its recoil upon being stretched like a rubber band, may be taken as a measure of the activity of all the endocrine glands. For, as can be noticed especially upon the back of the hand, the older a man grows, the less elastic becomes the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... "Why did I never recoil before from thy mysterious lore; why did the very strangeness of thine unearthly life only fascinate me with a delightful fear? Because, if thou wert sorcerer or angel-demon, there was no peril ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... knave, the dishonest instrument of some fraudulent conspiracy, concocted for the purpose of putting you into a position of inheriting a name and property to which you have no claim. I ought, on the moment I first saw you, to have been guided by the instincts of my own heart, which prompted me to recoil from and disclaim you. I know not, nor do I wish to know, in what low haunts of vice and infamy you have been bred; but one thing is certain, that, if it be within the limits of my power, you shall ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
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