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More "Verge" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... weave the woof, The winding sheet of Edward's race. Give ample room, and verge enough The characters of hell to trace. Mark the year, and mark the night, When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death, thro' Berkeley's roof that ring, Shrieks of an agonizing king! She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs, That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate, From ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... and arrange them on it. We kissed the hallowed ground, and there made a vow to strive unceasingly to leave a name as worthy of respect and veneration as his. He had frequently carried this ambition to the verge of weakness, but it was a noble weakness, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... and still the merciless brow-beating went on. They had been at it now five long, weary hours. Through the blinds the gray daylight outside was creeping its way in. All the policemen were exhausted. The prisoner was on the verge of collapse. Maloney and Patrolman Delaney were dozing on chairs, but Captain Clinton, a marvel of iron will and physical strength, never relaxed for a moment. Not allowing himself to weaken or show signs of fatigue, he kept pounding the ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... British Commissioner was undertaken. The Republic was in a state of apparently hopeless anarchy, owing to constant conflicts with warlike native tribes around and in the heart of the country. The exchequer was exhausted. By the confession of the President (Burgers) the country was on the verge of bankruptcy.[1] The acceptance of the annexation was not unanimous, but it was accepted formally in a somewhat sullen and desponding spirit, as a means of averting further impending calamity and restoring a measure of order and peace. Whether ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... present. You can not see the actual work which produces that mystery, and I may point out to you, that what is here romantic and pleasing on account of its changeful and informal shadows, is on the verge of becoming mere bewildering confusion; a tendency which always accompanies attempts to imitate the accidental or informal grouping of leaves, so common to their natural state. The further this is carried, the less is it possible ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... "you may at pleasure indulge your fears to the verge of distraction itself—you have a father to fight and watch for you. Mine—my kind, noble, and honoured parent, lies dead on yonder field, and all which remains for me is to act as may best become his memory. But this moment is at ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... did she hear that other sound, which King had detected. It was the thud of horses' hoofs; with it came men's voices faintly. King had gone that way, Gloria stood up, smothered under a sense of aloneness She resented his going; she was on the verge of calling to him; her heart began to beat faster. She wasn't afraid ... she didn't think she ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... Dutch, who, like fallen angels, fear'd This new Messiah's coming, there did wait, And round the verge their braving vessels steer'd, To tempt his courage with so ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... gives 1 in 12 of the adult population. This may be an excessive estimate, but, if we take half of a million, we shall not be accused of exaggeration. Of these some are in the last stage of confirmed dipsomania; others are but over the verge; but the procession ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... quick at rearing a family. It is at most a fortnight since the Rat was laid in the earth; and here already is a vigorous population on the verge of the metamorphosis. This precocity amazes me. It would seem as though carrion liquefaction, deadly to any other stomach, were in this case a food productive of special energy, which stimulates the organism and accelerates its growth, so that the fare may be consumed before ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... secluding itself among the most inaccessible mountain-crags, delights in capering upon the very verge of the most frightful precipices, and skipping from rock to rock across yawning chasms hundreds ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... bowed, and simpered at hearing his own praises. But Miss Browning had no notion of having any doctor praised, who had come to settle even on the very verge of Mr. Gibson's practice, so she said ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... to the Coombe of Coombes. I write while waiting for the fly, and shall post this at Weymouth, where we are to be met. We have been so happy here, that I could be sentimental, if Leonard were not tete-a-tete with me, and on the verge of that predicament. "Never so happy in his life," quoth he, "and never will be again—wonders when he shall gee this white cliff again." But, happily, in tumbles Aubrey with the big claw of a crab, which he insists on Leonard's wearing next his heart as a souvenir of Mrs. Gisborne; he is requited ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?' Of what use is the dominion of a huge, unwieldy empire when even a tiny country like this is so administered that a quarter of its population live always on the verge of starvation? Let the Empire go, let Army and Navy go, let us concentrate our energies upon the arts of peace, science, education, the betterment of the conditions of life among the poor, the right division of the land among those that ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... dependence; why should they be voiceless in the state and world?" So asked the feminists. The factory called for women as labor; they became the clerks, the teachers, the typists, the nurses. Medicine and the law opened their doors, at least in part. And now we are on the verge of universal suffrage, with women entering into the affairs of the world, theoretically at ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... demonstrations which are given of it in the Phaedo, and in the 10th book of the Republic. For the immortality of partial souls has a more principal subsistence, as possessing in itself the cause of eternal permanency. But prior to both these is the immortality of daemons; for these neither verge to mortality, nor are they filled with the nature of things which are generated and corrupted. More venerable, however, than these, and essentially transcending them, is the immortality of divine souls, which are primarily self-motive, and contain the fountains and principles of the life which ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... have his own figures checked up, for even under normal conditions, if one makes a numerical error in work of this sort, he is more than apt to repeat it time and again, and Mitchell knew himself to be deadly tired—almost on the verge of collapse. He was inclined to doze off whenever he sat down; the raucous noises of the city no longer jarred or startled him, and his surroundings were becoming unreal, grotesque, as if seen through the spell of absinthe. Yes, it was necessary ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... his hand on his thigh and stood hesitating on the verge. "Gibberne," I cried, coming up, "put it down. This heat is too much! It's our running so! Two or three miles a second! ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... time of great scarcity of food. The people were on the verge of famine, to relieve which shiploads of corn were sent from Sicily to Rome. The Senate resolved to distribute this corn among the suffering people, but Coriolanus opposed this, saying: "If they want corn, let them promise to obey the Patricians, as their ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... even to the horizon, now stands out distinctly red. Some great ones lift their red backs high above the woods, in the next town, like huge roses with a myriad of fine petals; and some more slender ones, in a small grove of White Pines on Pine Hill in the east, on the very verge of the horizon, alternating with the Pines on the edge of the grove, and shouldering them with their red coats, look like soldiers in red amid hunters in green. This time it is Lincoln green, too. ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... that early civilization it was remarkable; a figure with whom father and daughter were already familiar without abatement of wonder—the figure of a rejuvenated old man, padded, powdered, dyed, and painted to the verge of caricature, but without a single suggestion of ludicrousness or humor. A face so artificial that it seemed almost a mask, but, like a mask, more pathetic than amusing. He was dressed in the extreme of fashion of a dozen years before; his pearl—gray trousers strapped tightly over his ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... continued our course. We soon arrived at the verge of a deep valley amongst mountains, not those of the chain which we had seen before us, and which we now left to the right, but those of the Telleno range, just before they unite with that chain. Round the sides ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... the horizon's verge; To leeward, stormy shadows, violet-black, And the wide sea between A vast unfurrowed field of windless green; The stormy shadows flicker on the track Of phantom sails that ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... of law and order. Even nature turned hostile; a terrible drought shrunk up all the streams until they could not turn the grist-mills, while from the same cause the crops failed almost completely. A hard winter followed, and many cattle and hogs died; so that the well-to-do were brought to the verge of bankruptcy and the poor suffered extreme privations, being forced to go fifty or sixty miles to purchase small quantities of meal and grain at exorbitant prices. [Footnote: Clay MSS. Letters of Jesse Benton, 1782 ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... from all I can learn, come here only to die, and surely it is better to die comfortably at home, avoiding the thousand discomforts of travel, at a time when they are so heard to bear. It is indeed pitiful to see so many invalids, already on the verge of the grave, making a painful way to quack climates, hoping to change age to youth, and the darkening twilight of their day to morning. No such health-fountain has been found, and this climate, fine as it ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... passion that he knocks Goldsmith down. This insult, received before his friends, was too much for the unlucky sizar, who, the very next day, sold his books, ran away from college, and ultimately, after having been on the verge of starvation once or twice, made his way to Lissoy. Here his brother got hold of him; persuaded him to go back; and the escapade was condoned somehow. Goldsmith remained at Trinity College until ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... of a wall, hard and clear against the sky. Then in the shadow he perceived the interior of a room and recognised with a start the green and white decorations of his former prison. And coming quickly across this opened room and up to the very verge of the cliff of the ruins came a little white clad figure followed by two other smaller seeming figures in black and yellow. He heard the man beside him exclaim "Ostrog," and turned to ask a question. But he never did, because of the ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... what I said, when I knocked at your door last night? About one who was your friend once, and who stood on the verge of destruction?" ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... young birds have," Mr. Bronson remarked, turning to Joe with a serious smile; "and I dare say you are on the verge of a somewhat similar predicament, my boy," he went on. "I am afraid things have reached a crisis, Joe. I have watched it coming on for a year now—your poor scholarship, your carelessness and inattention, your constant desire to be out of the house and away in search of ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... are the salt of the earth, and the great antiseptic element in society, still that does not reduce everything else to the verge of corruption which they alone prevent. Yet by their lives they evidently think that it is so, and that they are each and all the keepers of keys which give them a special entrance to the temple of morality, and by which they are able to exclude or admit the grosser ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... administration—ministers without knowledge, and men without integrity, whose councils were timid, weak, and wavering; whose folly and extravagance exposed the nation to ridicule and contempt; by whose ignorance and presumption it was reduced to the verge of ruin. The kingdom was engaged in a quarrel truly national, and commenced a necessary war on national principles: but that war was starved; and the chief strength of the nation transferred to the continent of Europe, in order to maintain an unnecessary war, in favour of a family ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... soliloquy came to a sudden end; for as, rapt in his thoughts, the boy had continued to walk backwards, he had come to the verge where the lawn slided off into the ditch of the ha-ha—and, just as he was fortifying himself by the precept and practice of my Lord Bacon, the ground went from under him, and slap into ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... spoke a fresh line of breakers arose from the deep, farther out than any had been before. This much I observed, but I was too greatly unnerved by the strange manner of Jackson to pay further heed to the sea. It had flashed across my mind that he was on the verge of an attack of delirium tremens, from the effects of the liquor he had been consuming for so long, and the problem was to get him back ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... Tomkins nodded approbation.) "Far, far be it from me to dwell with unbecoming asperity on the conduct of anyone—we are all mortals—and alike liable to err; but when I see a man who has been guilty of an act which has brought him all but within the verge of the prisoners' dock; I say, when I see a man who has been guilty of such an outrage on society as this ruffian Jorrocks, come forward with the daring effrontery that he has this day done, and claim redress where he himself is the offender, it does create a feeling in my mind divided between ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... whither would ye lead me? To pass apparently o'er rugged rocks, ascend high mountains, and descend to vaults; hear the close baying of the forest wolf, and the loud cataract's terrific roar; and now, e'en now, perhaps, to stand upon the verge of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... emigrant, who plants his new home on the skirts of the distant wilderness or prairie, that he is not forever severed from the kindred and society that still share his interest and love; to prevent those whom the swelling tide of population is constantly, pressing to the outer verge of civilization from being surrendered to surrounding influences, and sinking into the hunter or savage state; to render the citizen, how far soever from the seat of his government, worthy, by proper knowledge and intelligence, of his important privileges as a sovereign ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... do it in a panelled room, with pens and paper on the table, and the committee in full cry; or out on the quiet road, with one whom we trust entirely, where the horizon runs, field by field and holt by holt, to meet the soft verge ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... hotly, and, by the general scandalized look on the faces of the others, Irene judged that luckless Peachy must have been on the verge of betraying some secret. She tactfully turned the conversation with a remark upon the beauty of the sunset, and the clanging of the garden bell opportunely broke up the gathering, and sent the girls hurrying helter-skelter along the terrace in the direction ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... controversies, especially when the time came for walking the boundaries. The dispute between broad and narrow gauges is indeed merely a modern form of a long-standing quarrel. A market-town and a seaport would naturally desire to have ample verge and room enough on their highways for the transport of grain, hides, and timber from the interior, and for carriage of cloth and manufactured or imported goods to the inland. On the other hand isolated parishes would contend that driftways ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... said, and flushed. He perceived that she was on the verge of turning away, but something withheld her. "There is no other physician within reach; my father is very ill. I only ask that you come ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... cuts it off from the high ground to the south and east. The highest part of the town is the citadel, or Fort du Chateau, built upon a peak of rock on the site of the ancient castle. It was doubtless the nucleus round which the early town became clustered, until it filled the lower plateau to the verge of the walls and battlements. There being no room for the town to expand, the houses are closely packed together and squeezed up, as it were, so as to occupy the smallest possible space. The streets are narrow, dark, gloomy, and steep, being altogether ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... busier university town. This is in part due to Oxford's situation on a great artery leading from the Metropolis to large centres of population in the west; while Cambridge, although it grew up on a Roman road of some importance, is on the verge of the wide fenlands of East Anglia, and, being thus situated off the trade-ways of England, has managed to preserve more of that genial and scholarly repose we would always wish to find in the centres of learning, ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... to the ground, cigar case, cigarette case, matches and cartridge extractor streamed down to earth in clattering showers from their abiding places; the blood rushed to my head till I was on the very verge of apoplexy, and still Chota Begum, remembering her instructions to be careful, held me up aloft, until slowly, very slowly indeed, she lowered me into the howdah, dizzy and stupid with blood to the head. The attention was well-meant, but it was distinctly not one ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... dreams awake, while Giorgione's goddess more divinely reposes, and sleeping dreams loftier dreams. The motive is in the borrowing robbed of much of its dignity and beauty, and individualised in a fashion which, were any other master than Titian in question, would have brought it to the verge of triviality. Still as an example of his unrivalled mastery in rendering the glow and semi-transparency of flesh, enhanced by the contrast with white linen—itself slightly golden in tinge; in suggesting the appropriate ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... on the veranda of a small redwood cabin, putting her baby to sleep. The infant displayed that aggressive wide-awakeness which seems to characterize babies on the verge of somnolence. Now and then it plunged its dimpled fists into the young mother's bare white breast, stiffened its tiny form rebelliously, raised its head, and sent gleams of defiance from ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... debate, had taxed their powers to the uttermost; and now, with such feeble voices and timid manners, without the slightest knowledge of Cushing's Manual, or the least experience in public meetings, how could a woman preside? They were on the verge of leaving the Convention in disgust, but Amy Post and Rhoda De Garmo assured them that by the same power by which they had resolved, declared, discussed, debated, they could also preside at a public meeting, if they would but make the experiment. And as the vote of the majority ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... know any one connected with China, or at all acquainted with the subject, who is not of opinion that the opium revenue is very near its termination. Even the favourite authority of the President of the Board of Control, Mr. Marshman, declared his opinion that India was on the verge of a great financial crisis. Whether the present Chinese Government retains its power, or the insurgents be successful and a new dynasty be established, the scruple against the importation of opium ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... the summer of '74. Its tone is in accordance with the multitude of articles upon the same subject which occurred about the same time, and, like them all, or most of them, is rather farfetched. It is too broad. Its denunciations cover too much ground. They verge upon untruth. ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... with so charming a niceness, we might have been a long time ago upon the verge of the state, and yet found a great deal to do ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... Then I no longer behold the Milky Way as that awful Ring of the Cosmos, whose hundred million suns are powerless to lighten the Abyss, but as the very Amanogawa itself,—the River Celestial. I see the thrill of its shining stream, and the mists that hover along its verge, and the water-grasses that bend in the winds of autumn. White Orihim['e] I see at her starry loom, and the Ox that grazes on the farther shore;—and I know that the falling dew is the spray from the Herdsman's oar. And the heaven seems very near and warm and human; ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... him back! Believer? here is the past history and present secret of thy safety in the midst of temptation. An interceding Saviour was at thy side, saying to every threatening wave, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther?" God often permits His people to be on the very verge of the precipice, to remind them of their own weakness; but never farther than the verge! The restraining hand and grace of Omnipotence is ready to rescue them. "Although he fall, yet shall he not be cast down utterly; and why? for the Lord upholdeth ...
— The Faithful Promiser • John Ross Macduff
... regard in the Confederacy by saving Davis from capture. He had, with his own hand, shot Wesley Boone when the plan of capture was on the verge of success. Could anything be clearer than his odious treason? Hadn't he, of all the unfortunates of the battle, found favor and luxurious quarters in Richmond? Hadn't he cunningly cajoled the Boones into the visit to the rebel household, in order ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... was dusted, and she began to sweep the floor, which happily, she thought of sprinkling with water, as from the window she had seen them do to the marble court of the palace. That swept, she rushed again to the hole—but still no food! She was on the verge of another rage, when the thought came that she might have forgotten something. To her dismay she found that table and chairs and every thing was again covered with dust—not so badly as before, however. Again she set to work, driven by hunger, ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... remaining anxiety. Even on ordinary days it provoked wild excitement, which forced him to take special measures; and what would now happen, as it wended its way through this dense multitude of thirty thousand persons, consumed by such a fever of faith, already on the verge of divine frenzy? Accordingly, in a sensible way, he took advantage of this opportunity to give Abbe ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... and yelling savages closed round them. All was useless; not an enemy could they shoot, while the savages thrust them forward with wild yells to the very verge of a precipice five hundred feet high. Over it they were driven, hurled to destruction by the mass of Latookas pressing onward. A few fought to the last; but all were at length forced over the edge of the cliff, and met the just ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... well. About the first of September I had one of my old dyspeptic attacks, and since then my stomach has troubled me more or less, reducing me in weight and making me despondent. I think, however, I am now on the upgrade once more. After you left here Julia was quite sick for a spell. She was on the verge of nervous prostration. I packed her off to Lynch's for a month, and she came back very much improved, and now she weighs more than ever before. The children are well. Trotty attends a day school near by. Pinny has gone back to his military school, and is doing very well. I would like to send Daisy ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... get the bitter apples," said Cecily hastily, seeing that Felix, Felicity and Dan were on the verge of a quarrel more bitter than ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the warrior's evil fate allowed His steps that fountain's charmed verge to gain. Though restless, roving on adventure proud, He traversed oft the ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... for me he would make an exception. He spoke of the rapids with such intense passion that I felt rather uneasy, and began to wonder whether the man was not mad. I grew alarmed, for he was driving along over the very verge of the precipice, jumping the stone heaps. I glanced at him sideways: his face was calm, but his under-lip twitched slightly; and I had noticed this particularly with ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... tell such a whopper, Mr. Darrel, especially when one is on the verge of eternity," ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... threw its burning rays on the fields, and under this shower of flame life burst forth in glowing vegetation from the earth. As far as the eye could see, the soil was green; and the sky was blue to the verge of the horizon. The Norman farms scattered through the plain seemed at a distance like little woods inclosed each in a circle of thin beech-trees. Coming closer, on opening the worm-eaten stile, one fancied that he saw a giant garden, ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... the fact that Great Britain, besides numerous corps of well-organized and well-instructed militia, has at this time within her North American Provinces more than 20,000 of her best regular troops. The whole of those forces might be brought to the verge of our territory in a few days. Two-thirds of that regular force has arrived out since the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... explicit revelation. This parable out of which my text is taken, is perhaps the most definite and continuous of His words about the invisible world; and yet all the while it lay there before Him; and standing on the very verge of it, with it spread out clear before His gaze, He reads off but a word or two of what He sees, and then shuts it in in darkness, and says to us, in the spirit of a part of this parable, 'You have Moses and the prophets—hear them: if these are not enough, it will not be enough for you ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... cash large blocks of Standard Oil stock which had long been held by this or that interest for investment," and no more was thought of the incident. Even the most alert financiers never suspected that the most important stock secret of the age had been on the verge of becoming ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... the circus, and, far beyond both, the cruel amphitheatre, constituted, for the ancient world, a passionate enjoyment, that by many authors, and especially through one period of time, is described as going to the verge of frenzy. And we, in modern times, are far too little aware in what degree these great carnivals, together with another attraction of great cities, the pomps and festivals of the Pagan worship, broke the monotony ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... war, which he basely fled before, as soon as he had lighted its horrid torch; as soon, in fact, as he had murdered an old officer, whose services had extended over the world, and who was just on the verge of what he hoped would be a peaceful termination of his toils in his country's cause; as soon as he had burned the houses of a widow who had never offended him, and of a worthy citizen, whose only crime in his eyes was his ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... exclusively male profession to shame. If the work of the average man required half the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average prostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge of starvation. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... an explicit, action. The wit may never rise to the surface, it may never flame out into a witticism; but it helps to give brightness and transparency, it warns off from flights and exaggerations which verge on the ridiculous—in every genre of writing it preserves a man from sinking into the genre ennuyeux. And it is eminently needed for this office in humorous writing; for as humor has no limits imposed on ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... and Goldsborough the condition of train-loads of these released captives. Their situation has been surgically and medically recorded in the surgeon-general's official reports. There is no room for dispute. They were men reduced to idiocy and to the verge of the grave by the direct effects of hunger and exposure and the diseases necessarily connected with such suffering. They were not of the dregs of humanity, who might be said to fall into animality when the restraints of society ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... in one golden rule—not to frighten or daunt the student with big tasks at first. A single grain of wheat, not a whole ear of corn; some tiny seed, tiny shell; but whatever is chosen, to be pursued with a needle-pointed pencil to the very verge of lens-work. I must yet again quote Ruskin. "You have noticed," he says,[9] "that all great sculptors, and most of the great painters of Florence, began by being goldsmiths. Why do you think the goldsmith's apprenticeship ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... enough the hopelessness of their position; probably with the intensity of youth she exaggerated it, which was scarcely necessary, as a small rut is apt to widen into a bottomless pit if it crosses the path of those who are living up to the utmost verge of a narrow income. As she reviewed the endless instances of her mother's self-abnegation which memory supplied—her cheerful industry, her brave struggle to live like a gentlewoman on a pittance, her tender thought for the welfare and happiness of her children—she felt she ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... she cowered. Only now she was interjecting a new harassment into the already complicated mystery by pleading that someone repair straightway to her and render assistance, as she felt herself to be on the verge of fainting dead away. ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... it was, excited the Spaniards to the verge of madness; and if it had not been for their officers, they would have seized their weapons and rushed forward again to the attack, to avenge the ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... tell him of the hand which had written, of her message. The words almost passed her lips, but again she refrained, she obeyed her super-senses. She was convinced that Michael, when his blood was up, ran terrible risks, that he was reckless to the verge of folly. She had heard a letter read in the hospital which had been written to a mother about her son. His Colonel had said, "There are some men who will storm hell, there are others who will follow, ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... work to be attended to first. In the choice of scholars, e.g., we have considered whether we should not limit our selection to such as might pass the next winter with me at Sugar Loaf Island, and so that the vessel need not run down to leeward of it. Solomon Islands are the extreme verge. In the East Island, where there would be merely a question of nothing or something, we may take very young men who would perhaps not be easy to keep out of harm at Sugar Loaf, because there will be no difficulty about ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "It was many years ago that I found Poe in Baltimore in a state of starvation. I gave him clothing, free access to my table, and the use of a horse for exercise whenever he chose; in fact, I brought him up from the very verge of despair." ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... believed nothing of it; but the bitterness lay in its being said. A shy man is never popular. His shyness passes for pride, and people hate him for it. Tiberius was very shy. So society was always anxious to take down his pride a little. The truth was, he was humble to the verge of self-distrust. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... There was a hanger-on at that establishment (a supernaturally preserved Druid I believe him to have been, and to be still), with long white hair, and a flinty blue eye always looking afar off; who claimed to have been a shepherd, and who seemed to be ever watching for the reappearance, on the verge of the horizon, of some ghostly flock of sheep that had been mutton for many ages. He was a man with a weird belief in him that no one could count the stones of Stonehenge twice, and make the same number of them; likewise, that any one who counted them three times ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... more fatal to the very foundations of political society, than the spectacle of a government that can be defied with impunity.[45] That demoralizing spectacle has been seen far too often during recent years, and at the moment when the war broke out it had led us to the verge of national disaster. The war has brought us into closer touch with realities than we had been for many a long year before, and it has taught us how ruinous it is in fatuous complacency to "wait and see" whither ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... laughed. "I always do," she said, "with reservations." She turned to Burnaby. "Where are you just back from?" she asked. "I understand you are always just back from some place, or on the verge ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the warrior Piegans On their way to fight the Crow; Stood upon its verge, and wondered What could mean ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... to the future. The marquis had been relieved in his mind after a consultation with a distinguished barrister, and, moreover, was pleased at the prospect of leaving this island of fogs for the sunny shores of France. The times were exciting; the country, on the verge of proposed electoral reforms. But in France the new social system had sprung into existence and—lamentable fact!—duty towards one's country had assumed an empire superior to ancient devotion ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... erred. Had he contented himself with looking fierce and ominous, all would have been well. White Fang, on the verge of retreat, would have retreated, leaving the meat to him. But Baseek did not wait. He considered the victory already his and stepped forward to the meat. As he bent his head carelessly to smell it, White Fang bristled slightly. Even then it was not too late for Baseek to ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... the verge of despair, even the friendliness with which she was trying to sweeten his cruel fate became unbearable, and while she was entreating him to continue to care for her and to remain on the same terms of intimacy with her father and herself, he ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... however, the laid ghost walked again in the shape of another petition from the "Pennsylvania Society for promoting the Abolition of Slavery," signed by its venerable president, Benjamin Franklin. This petition asked Congress to "step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow-men."[25] Hartley of Pennsylvania called up the memorial of the preceding day, and it was read a second time and a motion ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... to us of the starry theatre-folk, his family intimates, as though they were haphazard occupants of an omnibus. How we envied him! And he was forever writing plays which he read to us; which plays, I remember, were always on the verge of being produced by Irving. We believed in him firmly. He alone of the little crew had a ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... set them against their employers, preaching everywhere bloodshed and anarchy, inflaming the minds of people who in ordinary times are contented, even happy? You have made yourself feared and hated in every country of the world. You have brought America almost to the verge of revolution. And now, just when England needs peace most, when affairs on the Continent are so threatening and every one connected with the Government of the country is passing through a time of the gravest anxiety, you intend, they say, to start a campaign here. You say ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... near that source. At the top of the rock, and just above the spot where the waterfall shoots down the precipice, is at this day a stagni or pastoral dwelling, which the herdsmen of Ithaca still inhabit, on account of the water necessary for their cattle. One of these people walked on the verge of the precipice at the time of our visit to the place, and seemed so anxious to know how we had been conveyed to the spot, that his enquiries reminded us of a question probably not uncommon in the days of Homer, who more than ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... against the electors of Stafford, was coolly turned into ridicule by Mr. Rigby, Paymaster of the Forces. But Mr. Fox, whose eloquence was always ready at the call of good nature, and, like the shield of Ajax, had "ample room and verge enough," to protect not only himself but his friends, came promptly to the aid of the young orator; and, in reply to Mr. Rigby, observed, that "though those ministerial members, who chiefly robbed and plundered their constituents, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... abrupt manner of proceeding, Louis followed Casson to the verge of the lane, and waited there till ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... long contest, involving several issues, in which a Secretary of War was finally removed from office with the consent of his own personal and political friends, a President was impeached and escaped removal from office by only one vote, and the country was brought to the verge of another civil war. As I had helped Evarts, Seward, and some others whose names I never knew, to "pour oil on the troubled waters" in the time of Grant and Stanton, and to get everybody into the ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... the first rays of the rising sun; towards the east and west apparently illimitable, but interrupted northward by a chain of table-topped hills, and along its southern edge by a continuous cliff, rising wall-like to the height of several hundred feet, and trending each way beyond the verge of vision. ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... that voyage in the Scotia has killed me. I went to Dr. Abercromby, and he told me I was on the verge of an attack of jaundice. I am certainly better, but feel far from well. Listless, worried in body, not a bit in spirits, and as if I had eaten copper. I want to get into the position of delighting to accept and do His will, yet I feel ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... the Shade came back to us, brought thither by an irresistible force which condemned him to perch on the verge of Hell. My divine Guide, guessing my curiosity, touched the unhappy Shade with his palm-branch. He, who was perhaps trying to measure the age of sorrow that divided him from that ever-vanishing 'To-morrow,' started and gave a look ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... that forces you to come here—nothing!" Her lips were trembling; her voice wavered; the apparent shamelessness of my behavior was driving her to the verge of tears. "Is there no place where I am safe from you? Mr. Bayne, how can you? I shan't listen to a single word while you keep your foot ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... would keep his word and free him; but gradually this hope vanished, and as the column marched into Toulon on the 28th of January, Benedetto was on the verge ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... succeeding events in the domain of intellectualism it is impossible to deny that there was some justification for their gloomy apprehensions. In St. Thomas Aquinas this intellectualizing process marked its highest point and beyond there was no margin of safety. He himself did not overstep the verge of danger, but after him this limit was overpassed. The perfect balance between mind and spirit was achieved by Hugh of St. Victor, but afterwards the severance began and on the one side was the unwholesome hyper-spiritualization of the Rhenish mystics, on the other the false ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... Ferris, who kept Priscilla on the verge of nervous prostration for a whole semester, entered upon her college career in an entirely unpremeditated and impromptu manner. It began one day away back in November. Georgie Merriles and Patty ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... at the extreme verge of the land of the living, before the gate upon which words ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... found so ready to aid a colleague in distress. Take the case of poor Robert Franz, for instance, who lost his hearing through the whistle of a locomotive, and thereby lost his professional income, and was brought to the verge of starvation because his stupid contemporaries (I mean ourselves) refused to buy his divine songs. Hardly had his misfortune become known when Liszt, Joachim, and Frau Magnus arranged a concert tour for his benefit which netted $23,000, and insured him comfort ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... inch by inch, they fought their way along the edge of the foaming rocks, until Kit feared he had made a mistake. And then, when on the verge of himself turning back, they came abreast of a narrow opening, not twenty feet wide, which led into a land-locked enclosure where the fiercest gusts scarcely flawed the surface. It was the haven gained by the boats of previous days. They landed on a shelving beach, and the ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... constant becoming, and its source is not in the matter through which it is manifested, though inseparable from it. The material substance of life, like the rain-drops, is in perpetual flux and change; it hangs always on the verge of dissolution and vanishes when the material conditions fail, to be renewed again when they return. We know, do we not? that life is as literally dependent upon the sun as is the rainbow, and equally dependent upon the material elements; but whether the physical ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... the torrent; and in half a minute found himself comfortably lodged in an elevated corner. From this he overlooked the court, and he could perceive that the captain had well performed his promise of driving Mr. Dulberry home: the reformer was advanced to the very utmost verge of the privileged space, and obliged to support himself against the pressure behind by clasping a pillar: as the captain in turn clasped Mr. Dulberry, and enfolded him, as one box in a 'nest' of boxes is made to inclose another, the poor reformer's station was an unhappy one: ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... of business. What did he understand of these speculations into which he was drawn? Nothing. It is a difficult and often a dangerous thing to manage large capitals. They have no doubt deceived him, cheated him, misled him, and driven him at last to the verge of bankruptcy." ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... of Otsego, if we except the principal high ways, were, at the early day of our tale, but little better than wood-paths. The high trees that were growing on the very verge of the wheel-tracks excluded the suns rays, unless at meridian; and the slowness of the evaporation, united with the rich mould of vegetable decomposition that covered the whole country to the depth of several inches, occasioned but an indifferent foundation for the footing of travellers. ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... approached the verge of despair; a remnant of self-respect was all that intervened between me and the gulf. In the eyes of the world, I was doubtless covered with grimy dishonour; but I resolved to be clean in my own sight—and to the last I repudiated the contamination of her crimes, and wrenched myself from connection ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... avoid the seaman, and her foot caught in a coil of rope. For a moment she swayed on the verge of the dock—then Drew's hand shot out, and he caught her arm, steadying her. But the packet she carried flew from her hand and disappeared beyond the stringpiece ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... disturbed that day. McKnight did not appear at all. I sat at my desk and transacted routine business all afternoon, working with feverish energy. Like a man on the verge of a critical illness or a hazardous journey, I cleared up my correspondence, paid bills until I had writer's cramp from signing checks, read over my will, and paid up my life insurance, made to the benefit of an elderly sister ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... get little or no employment. The supply greatly exceeded the demand; there were no hirers of labour. Had the colony been as large and as prosperous as its neighbour it could scarcely have absorbed the glut of workmen; but it was really on the verge of bankruptcy—its finances were embarrassed, its trades and industries at a standstill. But not only were the convicts idle; they were utterly depraved. It was soon found that the system which kept large ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... understand what I mean when you consider the quite recent date of, say, the introduction of anaesthetics or antiseptics, the discovery of the knee-jerk, bacteriology, or even of such a doctrine as the circulation of the blood. We are at this very time, if I mistake not, on the verge of new insights which will enable man to laugh at disease—laugh at it in the sense of over-ruling its natural tendency to produce death, not by any means in the sense of destroying its ever-expanding existence. ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... also moral philosophy. They were regarded as the justest of men, and on this account were intrusted with the settlement of private and public disputes. They had been the means of preventing armies from fighting when on the very verge of battle, and were especially intrusted with the judgment of cases involving human life. According to Strabo, they and their fellow-countrymen held that souls and the universe were immortal, but that fire and water would sometime prevail. Sacrifices were never made, Strabo says, without ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... heart, Lady May was conscious that Paul was a little more to her than any other man could be. So she felt herself at first, aggrieved by his long silence during their ride home, which, to tell the truth, she had carefully planned for, and afterwards was just on the verge of being seriously offended. ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his ankles against floor and counter edge. And, the crowning indignity of all—felt himself dragged like a flayed carcass the full length of the room, out of the door, and jerked to his feet upon the verge of the steep descent to the lake. Felt the propelling impact of the heavy boot that sent him crashing headlong into the underbrush through which he rolled and tumbled like a mealbag, to bring up suddenly in ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... away. Then he lighted a cigar, and read the letter, and studied it. Many a man, capable of murder in heat of passion, could not have resisted the pathos of this letter. Many a Newgate thief, after reading it, would have felt such pity for the loving husband who had suffered to the verge of death, and then to the brink of madness, and for the poor bereaved wife, that he would have taken the letter down to Gravesend that very night, though he picked two fresh pockets to defray ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... Newquay and Fistral Bay, one may go to the verge of the waves, and breathe the ozone that rises from the line of breakers, without the necessity of making detours to avoid fruit-stalls and bathing-saloons. Fortunately the fine sands around Newquay have not yet become a mart for sweetmeats and cocoanuts, nor are they the happy hunting ground of ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... Christophe: and life was on the verge of giving him the lie in a terrible fashion. The miracle is everywhere, like fire in stone: friction brings it forth. We have little notion of the demons ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... voice made de Hooch turn his head away from the periscope's eyepieces. Willows' face was gray, and a thin film of greasy perspiration reflected the light from the overhead plates. The man was on the verge of panic. ...
— The Bramble Bush • Gordon Randall Garrett
... when I came onto a fine large plain. Behind me was the canyon, gloomy like the lair of some evil beast, while before me the sun was setting, and made the valley like a sea of golden glaze. I stood, knight-errant-wise, on the verge of one of those enchanted lands of precious memory, seeking the princess of my dreams; but all I saw was a man coming up the trail. He was reeling homeward, with under one arm a live turkey, and swinging from the other a ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... verge, The last faint tracing on the blue expanse, Rise Moab's summits; and above the rest One pinnacle, where, placed by Hand Divine, Israel's great leader stood, allow'd to view, And but to view, that long-expected land He may not now ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... encyclopaedist, and a captain of encyclopaedists. Force inexhaustible, and inexhaustible willingness to give out force; unappeasable curiosity to know; irresistible impulse to impart knowledge; versatile capacity to do every thing, carried to the verge, if not carried beyond the verge, of incapacity to do any thing thoroughly well; quenchless zeal and quenchless hope; levity enough of temper to keep its subject free from those depressions of spirit and those cares of ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... fully determined should end its days in peace, and never pass from our hands; the little coach- house and stable were let; the servant boy, and the more efficient (being the more expensive) of the two maid-servants, were dismissed. Our clothes were mended, turned, and darned to the utmost verge of decency; our food, always plain, was now simplified to an unprecedented degree—except my father's favourite dishes; our coals and candles were painfully economized—the pair of candles reduced to one, and that most ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... and Billy had become curiously silent. For half an hour he had given no recognition of her existence save once, when the chill evening wind caused him to tuck the robe tightly about her and himself. Half a dozen times Saxon found herself on the verge of the remark, "What's on your mind?" but each time let it remain unuttered. She sat very close to him. The warmth of their bodies intermingled, and she was aware of a ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... muttered; then fell to staring ahead of him, again heedless of his surroundings. This abrupt relapse into his former state of sullen and defiant silence tantalized the girl to the verge of anger, especially now that she had seen something of his true self. She was painfully conscious of a sense of betrayal at having yielded so easily to his pleasant mood, only to be shut out on an instant's whim, while a girlish curiosity ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... scena, entitled "HAGAR," by Rocco Ricci, which she fancied that either Carlo or her dear old master had sent, and she devoured it. She thought it written expressly for her. With HAGAR she communed during the long hours, and sang herself on to the verge of an imagined desert beyond the mountain-shadowed lake and the last view of her beloved Motterone. Hagar's face of tears in the Brerawas known to her; and Hagar in her 'Addio' gave the living voice to that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... is English Biography,' says Carlyle, 'bless its mealy mouth! A Damocles sword of Respectability hangs for ever over the poor English Life-writer (as it does over poor English Life in general), and reduces him to the verge of paralysis. Thus it has been said there are no English lives worth reading, except those of Players, who by the nature of the case have bidden Respectability good-day. The English biographer has long felt that, if in writing his man's biography he ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... no breath on dew-bespangled flower, There is no wind sighs on the sleepy wave, There is no sound hangs in the solemn air. All, all are silent, all are dreaming, all, Save those eternal eyes, that now shine forth Winking the slumberer's destinies. The moon Sails on the horizon's verge, a moving glory, Pure, and unrivalled; for no paler orb Approaches, to invade the sea of light That lives around her; save yon little star, That sparkles on her robe of fleecy clouds, Like a bright gem, fallen ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... wished to convert into supplies for the journey. This was readily agreed to, and, accordingly, next day about noon, they came in sight of Rocky Mountain Fort—so-called because of its being situated in a somewhat wild glen, near the verge of one of the eastern spurs of ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... thought Of such a gulf as he designed his grave. But though the felon on his back could dare The dreadful leap, more rational, his steed Declined the death, and wheeling swiftly round, Or ere his hoof had pressed the crumbling verge, Baffled his rider, saved against his will. The frenzy of the brain may be redressed By medicine well applied, but without grace The heart's insanity admits no cure. Enraged the more by what might have reformed His horrible intent, again he sought Destruction, with a zeal to be ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... worth while to rebuild or repair anything. The town appeared to have been left to itself and to time for at least two hundred years. And yet there really were some inhabitants left. I found another gateway and another ruined barbican, and near to these, on the verge of the precipice, a high rectangular tower, which was the citadel and prison. The lower part was occupied by the schoolmaster of the commune, and he allowed me to ascend the winding staircase, which led to two horrible dungeons, one above the other. ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... second, a number of business concerns known as Diaconies. As long as these Diaconies prospered, the Brethren were able to keep their heads above water; but the truth is, they had been mismanaged. The Church was now on the verge of bankruptcy; and, therefore, the Brethren held at Taubenheim ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... to drive the chariot of the Sun, his father, through the heavens. But his unskilful hands frighten the steeds. The flaming chariot, thrown out of its course, approaches the terrestrial regions. The whole universe is on the verge of ruin when Jupiter strikes the imprudent Phaeton with ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... American whose father had been rich at the time, but had subsequently lost all he possessed by an unfortunate investment, depending upon an invention, which had afterwards become enormously valuable. Finding himself driven to extremities and on the verge of failure, he had been glad to make over his whole interest to a distant relative, who assumed his liabilities as well as his chances of success. Utterly ruined, save in reputation, he had bravely accepted a salaried post, had worked himself to death in eighteen months ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... I hasten to add, because I disputed his conclusions: it was an effect of the very force with which, when I had fathomed his wretched premises, I took them to my soul. It was very well to talk with Jane Highmore about his standing alone: the eminent relief of this position had brought him to the verge of ruin. Several persons admired his books—nothing was less contestable; but they appeared to have a mortal objection to acquiring them by subscription or by purchase: they begged or borrowed or stole, they delegated one of the party perhaps to commit the volumes to memory ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... surface of the body becomes cold it is evident that the small blood vessels in the skin have contracted and are keeping the blood away, as during a chill, or that the heart is weak and is unable to pump the blood to the surface, and that the animal is on the verge of collapse. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... connect themselves in any kind of alliance with England; and on the 25th of September, Stephen Vaughan had reported that troops were being raised in Germany, which rumour destined for Catherine's service.[633] Ireland, too, as we shall hear in the next chapter, was on the verge of an insurrection, which had been fomented by ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... was. The storm kept up all day, and in the afternoon, when Nan was on the verge of tears and Bert had almost made up his mind to go back alone to the fair grounds and see if he could hear any news, there came a knock ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the County Fair • Laura Lee Hope
... in a tone of the greatest alarm, just as Mrs. Tibbs was on the extreme verge of a ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... was to be guided in future. Life, to be true, must involve all the functions of the soul—thought, emotion and will; must be lived with a healthy fulness. He had not so lived it. His error had lain in detachment, which had well-nigh brought him to the verge of destruction. And now it was with him ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... doubt that the German General Staff will hesitate to employ extreme measures if Germany is ever on the verge of real starvation? If necessary, we must expel all the inhabitants from the territories which our armies have occupied, and drive them into the enemy's lines; if necessary, we must kill the hundreds of thousands of prisoners ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... a sharp gesture toward him, as if on the verge of falling, and as sharply recovered herself. "Oh, I wish—how I wish I ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... decreed had dawned Loud rang the bull-horn; and on every breeze Floated the banners, saffron, green, and blue; While issuing from the horizon's utmost verge The full-voiced People flocked. So swarmed of old Some migratory nation, instinct-urged To fly their native wastes sad winter's realm; So thronged on southern slopes when, far below, Shone out the plains of promise. Bright they came! No summer sea could ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... leaped upon Cortes, wrapped their arms around him, and attempted to throw themselves off the top of the temple, devoting themselves to death, if so be, they might compass their bold design. It was on the very verge of eternity that Cortes tore himself free from them. Singled out for attack because of his position and because of his fearlessness in battle, his life was saved again and again by his followers, until it seemed to ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... suffered from the intelligence I shall not attempt to describe to you. I had but little interest in life before; it is now heavy and sickening to me. I feel as if I never should smile again; every circumstance of aggravation attends it. To perish on the verge of the shore, when he was just about to embark, after six years in the climate, when we thought the danger past. With letters from him full of felicitation of himself, and rapture at the hope of soon meeting us again, and when we were expecting him every moment in our embrace, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... in the face was much the same as it had been before. The struggle had been too great, the fight for the other lost self had exhausted him, mind and body, and only a deep obliquity and a great weariness filled the countenance. He had come back to the verge, he had almost again discovered himself; but the opening door had shut fast suddenly, and he was back again in the night, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... he was once on the verge of doing what would have brought him undying disgrace when, as if she had been drawn out of the air, his mother stood before him, looking reproachfully at him. Thus the fascination of temptation was broken by what he always believed to have been a ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... bicycle, carrying a bag stuffed with newspapers on his back, ride rapidly out of a side street into the middle of the congested traffic as if there were nothing substantial to hinder his progress ... and as he stared about him, it seemed to him that Fleet Street was on the verge of ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... place suggested the struggles of a family on the verge of extinction, this idea was further borne out by what looked like its determination to stand a long final siege at least in the matter of rations, for it swarmed with life. In the quiet crystalline air from dawn till after sunset the sounds arising from it were the clamor of a sincere, outspoken ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... cold water on Old Tom's delight. He pitched it back in the shape of a doubt of what Andrew had told him. Whereupon Andrew defied him to face three miserable women on the verge of hysterics; and Old Tom, beginning to chuckle again, rejoined that it would bring them to their ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of Kent,' says Gibbon, 'which borders on Sussex and the sea, was formerly overspread with the great forest Anderida; and even now retains the denomination of the Weald, or Woodland.' On the verge of this region, now diversified with the traces of civilization and culture, and at the distance of some thirty miles from London, stands Penshurst, for many generations the domain and seat of the illustrious family of Sydney. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... your adjectives. We all know that Steve is square on every side, and straight in every corner. Don't be so earnest; you fatigue me to-night. I am on the verge of a nervous headache, and I really think you had better leave me." She turned her chair towards the fire as she spoke, and hardly palliated this act of dismissal by the faint "excuse me," which accompanied ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... however, as he walked on for mere walking's sake, he found himself on the verge of a cliff, and saw, over the brow of it, a few feet below him, a ledge of rock, where he might find some shelter from the blast, which blew from behind. Letting himself down by his hands, he alighted upon something that crunched beneath his ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... to rave under the vile restraints of Philistine surroundings? Then you can form some notion of the state I was in when I took the step of writing that advertisement; I was, I firmly believe, on the verge of lunacy! For two or three days I had come back home from the school only to pace up and down the room in an indescribable condition. I get often like that, but this time things seemed reaching a head. Why, I positively cried with misery, absurd as it may sound. My blood seemed ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... John XXIII seemed not unlikely to gain his end. Constance was thrown into confusion by the news of his flight. The mob rushed to pillage the papal residence. The Italian and Austrian prelates prepared to leave the city, and the council was on the verge of dissolution. But Sigismund's zeal and energy succeeded in averting such a disaster. He restored order in the city, persuaded the prelates to remain, and took prompt measures to punish his rebellious vassal. An armed force ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... her low, possessed voice, she asked him how he was. And he answered her, in the habit of more than thirty years: 'Well, I don't think I'm any the worse, dear.' But he was frightened of her, underneath this safeguard of habit, frightened almost to the verge of death. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... keeping anything from me?" she cried, I thought on the verge of "nerves," so hesitating no longer I arose and turned ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... we will allow her time enough, after giving mankind the inspired tinker who painted the Christian's life as that of a hunted animal, "never long at ease," desponding, despairing, on the verge of self-murder,—painted it with an originality, a vividness, a power and a sweetness, too, that rank him with the great authors of all time,—kind Nature, after this gift, sent as his counterpoise the inspired ploughman, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the white man's sail Swayed free before the sunrise gale. Cloud-like that island hung afar, Along the bright horizon's verge, O'er which the curse of servile war Rolled its red torrent, surge on surge; And he, the Negro champion, where In the fierce tumult struggled he? Go trace him by the fiery glare Of dwellings in the midnight air, The yells of triumph and despair, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... to the verge of understanding one thing. Man has so fanned the flame of the loves of men and women, as to make it overpass its rightful domain, and now, even in the name of humanity itself, he cannot bring it back under control. ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... 21st of August, 1673, by the battle of the Texel. In it, as in others, were amply justified the words with which a modern French naval officer has stamped them: "United by momentary political interests, but at bottom divided to the verge of hatred, never following the same path in counsel or in action, they have never produced good results, or at least results proportioned to the efforts of the powers allied against a common enemy. The navies of France, ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... opposition. When Mr Gladstone resigned the leadership of his party in 1875, Bright was chairman of the party meeting which chose Lord Hartington as his successor. He took a less prominent part in political discussion till the Eastern Question brought Great Britain to the verge of war with Russia, and his old energy flamed up afresh. In the debate on the vote of credit in February 1878, he made one of his impressive speeches, urging the government not to increase the difficulties manufacturers had in finding employment for their workpeople by any single word or act which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... along the seashore, called Parali, preferred a constitution midway between these two forms, and thus prevented either of the other parties from carrying their point. Moreover, the state was on the verge of revolution, because of the excessive poverty of some citizens, and the enormous wealth of others, and it appeared that the only means of putting an end to these disorders was by establishing ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... that their shovels bore down into the precious pocket. The earth flew. They worked like madmen, with nervous energy and power of will; and when the chest finally came into sight, rotten with age and the soak of earth, they fell back against a tree, on the verge of collapse. The hair was damp on their foreheads, their breath came harshly, almost ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... charmed by her voice, I could see that; and poor, dear Reginald was positively absurd about her voice. And dear Margaret does not sing so well—it is no use pretending that she does—and Sir Philip is trembling on the verge—oh, yes, I am sure that I have been very wise. What is that ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... south of Leeds, on the verge of a wild moorland tract, lay an ancient manor, now rich with cultivation, then barren and unenclosed, which was known by the name of Hallamshire. Iron abounded there; and, from a very early period, the rude whittles ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was quenched by the first tears she had shed since the shadow fell upon her; and when 'Lena produced the note, and she saw it was indeed true, the ice about her heart was melted, and in choking, long-drawn sobs, her pent-up feelings gave way, as she saw the gulf whose verge she had been treading. Crouching at 'Lena's feet, she kissed the very hem of her garments, blessing her as her preserver, and praying heaven to bless her, also. It was the work of a few moments to array her in her traveling dress, and then very cautiously ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... a tomb, and never will I, hapless one, betray thy sister's bed, since I shall hold thee more a friend dead than living. But the oracle of the God has never yet wronged thee, although thou art indeed on the very verge of death. But excessive mischance is very wont, is very wont to present changes, when ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... make this clearer. In 1887 Germany was on the very verge of War with France and Russia. At that moment her superior efficiency, the consequence of this inborn sense of duty—surely one of the highest qualities of humanity—was so great that it is more than probable that less than six weeks ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... in old and humble houses they had room to breathe and an eminence for light and air. Their shanties clung to the side of the hill or hung on the very edge of the precipice overlooking the bay, on the verge of which a wall kept their babies from falling. The effect was picturesque, and this hill was the delight of painters. It was all more like Italy than anything in the Italian quarter of New York and Chicago—the very climate and surroundings, the wine country close at hand, the bay for ...
— The City That Was - A Requiem of Old San Francisco • Will Irwin
... operations was perfectly simple. A tradesman on the verge of bankruptcy would come to him, Verminet would look into his case and make him sign bills for the sum he required, handing him in exchange bills drawn by other tradesman in quite as serious a predicament as himself, and pocketed a commission of two per cent. upon both ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... in the domain of intellectualism it is impossible to deny that there was some justification for their gloomy apprehensions. In St. Thomas Aquinas this intellectualizing process marked its highest point and beyond there was no margin of safety. He himself did not overstep the verge of danger, but after him this limit was overpassed. The perfect balance between mind and spirit was achieved by Hugh of St. Victor, but afterwards the severance began and on the one side was the unwholesome hyper-spiritualization of the Rhenish mystics, on the other the false intellectualism ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... home; but in 1782 she had one hundred and twenty in commission or ready for commission, while France had never been able to exceed seventy-one. Again, as late as 1840, when the two nations were on the verge of war in the Levant, a most accomplished French officer of the day, while extolling the high state of efficiency of the French fleet and the eminent qualities of its admiral, and expressing confidence in the results of an encounter with an equal enemy, goes on to ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... life, it is not difficult to understand the peculiar fascination which such a problem as he solved in Robinson Crusoe must have had for him. It was not merely that he had passed a life of uncertainty, often on the verge of precipices, and often saved from ruin by a buoyant energy which seems almost miraculous; not merely that, as he said of himself in one of ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... for you will forget me in the excitement of discovery and adventure; but I—what can I do in the midst of all the old associations?" "Never mind, sweetheart," he said, kissing her hand, "I have seemed on the verge of despair all the time." Seeing that their separation must shortly begin, Ayrault tried to assume a cheerful look; but as Sylvia turned her eyes away they were suspiciously moist. Just one minute before the starting-time Ayrault took Sylvia back to her mother, and, after pressing ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... men, after they had become lost in the prairies, to wander about for days without exercising the least judgment, and finally exhibiting a state of mental aberration almost upon the verge of lunacy. Instead of reasoning upon their situation, they exhaust themselves running a-head at their utmost speed without any regard to direction. When a person is satisfied that he has lost his way, he should stop and reflect upon the course he has been traveling, ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... Bell, who thus sadly ended his career when on the verge of an honored retirement, was in a way an old acquaintance of mine. It was he who had refused me a transfer to the Monongahela during the war; and he and my father, having been comrades when cadets at the Military ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... fertile meadow-land before flowing back into the narrow gorge past Intombi Spruit Camp. How the Boers got there one can only imagine, for neither the Imperial Light Horse pickets on Waggon Hill, nor the Manchesters holding the very verge of that cliff which we call Caesar's Camp and the Kaffirs Intombi, nor the mixed force of volunteers and police watching the scrub lower down, saw any form or heard a movement during the night. It was intensely dark for two or three hours, but in that still ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... conquered by his clear, open life the occasional hostility of a later day; and at the period of his accession to the Throne was, without and beyond question, the best liked Prince in Europe—the most universally popular man in the United Kingdom and its external Empire. Upon the verge of His Majesty's Coronation there occurred that sudden and dramatic illness which proved so well the bravery and patience of the man, and increased so greatly the popularity ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... by his window he was recalling the separate events of the day. The court room had been crowded to the verge of suffocation; when he entered it a sudden hush and a mighty craning of necks had been his welcome, and he had felt his cheeks redden and pale with a sense of shame at his hapless plight. Those many pairs of eyes that were fixed on him seemed ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... scenery became softer, gentler, yet more picturesque. At one point we saw what I believe to be the utmost northern verge of Sherwood Forest,—not consisting, however, of thousand-year oaks, extant from Robin Hood's days, but of young and thriving plantations, which will require a century or two of slow English growth to give them much breadth of shade. Earl ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... At the southern verge of the mighty forest called the Andredsweald, or Anderida Sylva, Gilbert d'Aquila, last of that name, founded the Priory of Michelham for ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... revelations, and revelations of a kind which caused him to gasp. He saw middle-aged matrons dipping and hopping and twisting about the room in company with middle-aged, stout, red-faced men who looked as if on the verge of apoplexy. He saw Mr. Hungerford laboring dutifully to pilot a woman of forty through the sinuosities of the "hesitation waltz," and when the lady, who was inclined toward plumpness, had collapsed into an armchair, he sought out her late ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... are acting unselfishly. They say it is so selfish to be always considering whether this is good or harmful or that is likely to encroach upon the domain of health. If this sentiment is carried to the verge of hypochondria, we grant its truth. There is nothing more odious than a person who is constantly looking out for the weathercocks, and who, as soon as he finds the wind in a certain quarter, shuts himself ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... one morning, on the little bridge over the stream that ran at a distance of a few hundred yards from the Red House. The two boys were bespattering themselves in the meadow below, by the water's verge. They called up at intervals to their mother the announcement of some new ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... her—and saw that her lips trembled, and that she was still on the verge of tears. He hurried off at once, realising that she wanted a minute or two to recover herself. His heart beat foolishly fast and uncomfortably,—he wondered what ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... subsidiary grip upon belt or pantaloons. But to the Frenchman all smooth and rugged came alike: his legs sprawled impartially: and once, having floundered on top of the leading Samaritan with a shock which rolled the pair to the very verge of a precipice, he recovered himself, and sat up in an attitude which, at half a mile's distance, was eloquent of tipsy reproach. In short, when the procession had filed past the edge of my tent-flap, I crawled out to watch: ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to his afflicted members?"-(Saint's Privilege, vol. 1, p. 674). The text here quoted forms the foundation of Bunyan's admirable Advice to Sufferers, in which he delightfully dwells upon the topics which Evangelist addresses to the Pilgrims, when on the verge of bitter persecution-(ED). ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... within the Ring upon your right down to its Center; then by straightning a little your left Rein, and laying your right Leg Calf to his side, make a half Circle to your left hand, from the Center to the outmost Verge, and these you see contrary turned make a Roman S. Now to your first large Compass, walk him about on your left hand, as oft as before on the right, and change to your right within your Ring; then Trot ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett
... Nevertheless, he permitted Madison to draft new instructions for the commissioners, in the hope that the treaty could be made a basis for further negotiations. While these new instructions were crossing the ocean, a disaster occurred which brought the United States and Great Britain to the verge of war. ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... helped their mother. But all three, my Master, were lost to me, taken away by the unfathomable wisdom of the Father. Two fell in war, the third was killed by the machinery while at his work. That broke my strength, and when they brought me to the hospital I was on the verge of despair, and life seemed a greater burden than I could bear. Your image, my Saviour, had just been finished by a sculptor, who had carved it from the wood of the nut-tree by the Fresh Spring. They put it up opposite to my bed. It represented you, my Lord, on ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... still gripping Ida, who was on the verge of collapse. She looked at Cora with wonder ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... night had fairly set in a hundred fires blazed upon the mountains—far as the eye could reach, for miles and many miles, one dazzling gigantic illumination. Papal monograms, crosses, tiaras shone forth in startling proportions. High up, far from any human habitation, on the verge of the snow, in clearings of the mountain forests, on Alpine pastures, these fiery letters had been patiently traced by toiling men and lads. Anton and Jacobi were not behind-hand, and by means of two hundred little bonfires had devised the papal initials ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... down from the north, chilling all the earth, and the Northmen imagined that these were set in motion by the great giant Hrae-svelgr (the corpse-swallower), who, clad in eagle plumes, sat at the extreme northern verge of the heavens, and that when he raised his arms or wings the cold blasts darted forth and swept ruthlessly over the face of the earth, blighting all things ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... of men of genius to be afraid of coldness and insipidity, from which they think they never can be too far removed. It particularly happens to these great masters of grace and elegance. They often boldly drive on to the very verge of ridicule; the spectator is alarmed, but at the same time admires their ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... driver behind Amy's back and was preparing to get away, but these views of Amy's mother were so complete an innovation that I paused. On the verge of a first drive I had never in my life stopped to consider the ethics of golf-club cleaning. Why had not Amy a pocket and a rag of sand-paper like resourceful Jimmy Baines? I don't remember to have ever read anything on the niceties of the art of scouring clubs. It is a subject ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 5th, 1914 • Various
... him as compelled me always to remember and think of him, though I had no intention of offending God: however, I was pleased to see him, to think of him and of his good qualities. All this was so hurtful, that it brought my soul to the very verge of destruction. ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... irregularity in the outcome of the separate naphtha-bearing plots. An instance was mentioned to me of a peasant proprietor who had made enough money on which to live sumptuously, but he hungered for more, and engaged in further boring operations. He was on the verge of losing everything, when oil was suddenly struck, and he made a fortune. He laboured hard himself, and literally went to sleep a poor working man, and awoke to find his dream ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... delicate fancies, could have breathed no atmosphere less richly perfumed with old romance. In New York he would certainly have been in danger of a Barnum's museum, beside Washington's nurse and the woolly horse. It is a triumph of art that a being whose nature trembles on the very verge of the grotesque should walk through Hawthorne's pages with such undeviating grace. In the Roman dreamland he is in little danger of such prying curiosity, though even there he can only be kept out of harm's way by the admirable skill of his creator. Perhaps it may be thought by some severe ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... curious absence of detail as to the fight. The combat, indeed, owes its enduring fame to two somewhat irrelevant circumstances—first, that it was fought when France and England were not actually at war, but were trembling on the verge of it. The sound of the Arethusa's guns, indeed, was the signal of war between the two nations. The other fact is that an ingenious rhymester—scarcely a poet—crystallised the fight into a set of verses in which there is something of the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... bushmen do not advertise their chivalry—and wandered round the straggling Settlement vaguely surprised at its sobriety, and turning up in such unexpected places that the little bushman was constantly on the verge of apoplexy. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... very precipitous rock. Not the faintest glimmer of daylight reaches that spot; but after a while we stand on the brink of a perpendicular precipice, the bottom of which is strongly illuminated through a hole in the surface rock more than 200 feet above. Standing on the verge of this awful pit in the dim light, the rocks and crags seem to take on most weird shapes. We go down into the great hole by a ladder eighty feet high and twelve wide, and, reaching the bottom, are as yet but at the mouth of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... system of the predatory beast that he uses fear to weaken the powers of his prey before he assaults it. Animal psychology is essentially utilitarian. Cowering, trembling, muscularly relaxed, on the verge of emotional shock, we are easier ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... Yorkshire town where he usually had his abode, he came little short of being adored by the women of his own particular sect, who crowded to listen to his fervent discourses, and came away from them on the verge of hysteria, so profoundly moved were their sensitive souls by his damnatory doctrines. The men were more reluctant in their admiration, yet even they were always ready to admit "that he was an excellent fellow, with his heart in the ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... upon the cruel murder of his father that he was constantly on the verge of insanity, devising plans to either slaughter himself or wreak a terrible vengeance ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... with it, or at the present day are eager to part with it for a consideration. In order to get the Whigs into power, and themselves places, they brought the country by their inflammatory language to the verge of a revolution, and were the cause that many perished on the scaffold; by their incendiary harangues and newspaper articles they caused the Bristol conflagration, for which six poor creatures were executed; they encouraged ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... his every effort to assure himself that no harm could come to Virginia Maxon before they reached her. The girl's father had not spoken since they discovered that she was missing from the campong, but his face was white and drawn; his eyes wide and glassy as those of one whose mind is on the verge of madness from ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... were always a good, honest little girl, and you have grown up an honest woman; you want to do your duty and slave for Marcus and Dot, and you have begun nobly by starving yourself until you are on the verge of an hysterical attack, but we must think of Marcus. Martha must not go, at least, not until the winter is over. I have been saving a few pounds for your Christmas present I meant you to have had a new dress and jacket, and a few other little ...
— Doctor Luttrell's First Patient • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was translated into English, under the title of The Religious Philosopher, 3 vols. 8vo., 1718-19. The charge against Paley has been ably and satisfactorily discussed in the same volume of the Athenum (see pp. 907. 933.), and at the present time we have neither "ample room nor verge enough" to re-open ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... alluding to his own declining strength, he thus proceeds:—"I am fast approaching that end which we must all come to. My own term I feel is expiring, and happy is the man who does not live to see the destruction of his country, which discontent has brought to the verge of ruin. Hitherto thrice happy England, how art thou torn to pieces by thine own children! Strangers, who a year ago looked up to you as a happy exception in the world, with admiration, at this moment know thee not! Fire, riot, and bloodshed, ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... impelled by a huge enthusiasm, and seeing ahead of him something he had had no practical reason for aspiring to. He went out in all weathers and stayed out to all hours. Whatsoever rebuffs or difficulties he met with he never was even on the verge of losing his nerve. He actually enjoyed himself tremendously at times. He made friends; people began to like to see him. The Munsbergs regarded him as an inspiration of ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and calm, though in the west heavy clouds were gathering and seemed to promise rain soon. But overhead the sun shone brightly, the air was calm and warm, and the little dell on whose verge he stood a very pretty ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... hills Shone clear upon the horizon. Then awoke A strange and unknown longing in their souls, As if for something loved in years gone by, And vanished in its beauty and its love So long, that it retained no name or form, And lay on childhood's verge, all but forgot, Wrapt in the enchanted rose-mists of that land: As if amidst those hills were wooded dells, Summer, and gentle winds, and odours free, Deep sleeping waters, gorgeous flowers, and birds, Pure winged throats. But here, all things ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... he had initiated an amphibious campaign of highly original daring, he was not on the battlefield when his army was suddenly attacked. He arrived to find his right wing crushed and his whole force on the verge of defeat. He blamed no one. Without more than a passing second's hesitation, he said quietly to his chief subordinates: "Gentlemen, the position on the right must be retaken." Then he mounted his horse, and galloped along the line shouting to his men: "Fill your cartridge cases quick; the enemy ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... must be sure that nothing was divulged which passed between them on these matters, and he might repose the same confidence in us. As to the formation of the Household, the Queen made two conditions, viz. that the persons to compose her Court should not be on the verge of bankruptcy, and that their moral character should bear investigation. On the Queen's accession Lord Melbourne had been very careless in his appointments, and great harm had resulted to the Court therefrom. Since her marriage I had insisted upon a closer line being drawn, and though Lord ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... very obliging and attentive; but if it would not seem ungrateful, I would hazard the statement that their attentions are unremitting to the degree of being almost embarrassing, and proffered to the verge of obtrusiveness. I think, in short, that they are hardly quite delicate in their politeness. They press their hospitality on you till you sigh for a little marked neglect. They are not content with simple statement. They offer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... marching in the distance, the chink of money in the counting, and the creaking of doors held stealthily ajar, appeared to mingle with the patter of the drops upon the cupola and the gushing of the water in the pipes. The sense that he was not alone grew upon him to the verge of madness. On every side he was haunted and begirt by presences. He heard them moving in the upper chambers; from the shop he heard the dead man getting to his legs; and as he began with a great effort to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and followed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lines, saying he had found much to admire in the work, but that a gracious public full of nerves would not stand so much cold water poured upon it. The seventh firm to whom he submitted the tale was on the verge of bankruptcy. Kinross was absolutely startled when he received a laconic note accepting his MS., and offering a very fair royalty. He was not to know that these publishers had taken it in the spirit of a man who with six shillings for his only capital ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... was thinking of getting away to bed, the worthy man must needs insist on having family worship, to which the servants had also to be summoned. It was the inordinate length of this service at such a time of night that had driven old Lord Fareborough to the verge of madness. ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... said Mr. Brownlow, solemnly, "do not say that now, upon the very verge of death, but tell me where they are. You know that Sikes is dead, that Monks has confessed, that there is no hope of any further gain. ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... Indians concealed by the prairie grass and timber, and from this situation, in almost perfect security, they fired down upon Braddock's men. The only exposure of the French and Indians, resulted from the circumstance of their having to raise their heads to peep over the verge of the cliff, in order to shoot with more deadly precision. In consequence, all of them who were killed in the early part of the action, were shot through ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... the lighthouse in a hurry, intending to call on a shipping agent, naturally he wouldn't stay in port long," said Blake. "Besides——" He stopped suddenly, being on the verge of saying something that would give Joe ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton
... himself on the verge of a proposal—with an effort he choked back the impulse. "You're just the romantic age," she continued—"fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly-wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... multifarious vows, I am a candidate for thy eternal wealth.' 'O thou of ascetic wealth, returned Rama, 'My gold and whatever other wealth I had, have all been given away unto Brahmanas! This earth also, to the verge of the sea, decked with towns and cities, as with a garland of flowers, I have given unto Kasyapa. I have now my body only and my various valuable weapons left. I am prepared to give either my body or my weapons. Say, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... in genius for commerce with the Indians, and in skillful marketing of Indian products, that Hanna calls him "The King of the Traders." Lavish in his expenditures, big in his ventures, he made and lost fortunes with equal facility. He alternated between the height of opulence and the verge of bankruptcy. Like Sir William Johnson, Croghan had a special aptitude for making friendships with the Indians, so that, according to his own statement, "he was in such favor and confidence with the councils of the Six Nations ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... corrupt governments had contracted foreign loans under conditions that made their repayment almost impossible and had spent the proceeds in so reckless and extravagant a fashion as to bring the country to the verge of bankruptcy. Bolivia, similarly governed, was still the scene of the orgies and carnivals which had for some time characterized its unfortunate history. One of its buffoon "presidents," moreover, had entered into boundary agreements with both Chile and Brazil, under which the nation ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... Harold, my brother, may prepare for battle. Never shall it be said that the son of Godwin forsook the son of Sigurd." It must have been a strange look that passed between those two brothers, thus on the verge of a deadly strife, each surrounded with dangers that could scarcely be averted, and but of late actuated with bitter hate, but, at the decisive moment, that hatred giving way, and their hearts yearning to each other, with the memories of long-past days, yet both too proud to show how they ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... three centuries of their recorded history, they were in a sense a dependency of America. As a dependency of New Spain they constituted the extreme western verge of the Spanish dominions and were commonly known as the Western Islands. When the sun rose in Madrid it was still early afternoon of the preceding day in Manila. Down to the end of the year 1844 the Manilan calendar was reckoned after that of Spain, that is, Manila time was ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... present cause for agitation, except, if you will pardon me for saying it, your own needlessly alarming words and manner," said Ishmael cheerfully, to reassure the frightened women, who seemed upon the very verge of hysterics. ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... great was the humiliation when one who stood beside me heard the distant sound of a shepherd's pipe, and I heard nothing; or heard the shepherd singing, and I heard nothing. Such experiences brought me to the verge of despair;—but little more and I should have put an end to my life. ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... that a man does not carry exploded cartridge-cases, especially "browns," which will not bear loading twice, about with him when shooting. In other words, that cartridge-case had been fired inside the crater. Consequently there must be a gun somewhere. I was on the verge of asking Gunga Dass, but checked myself, knowing that he would lie. We laid the body down on the edge of the quicksand by the tussocks. It was my intention to push it out and let it be swallowed up—the only possible mode of burial that I could think of. I ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... quivering on the verge of half-discovered things, flashes of intuition, fragments of deduction, Beth ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... which would enable man to rise above the abject state into which he has fallen, and to return to his original perfection." To the evil offices of these demons, he attributed his late disaster. He had been on the very verge of the glorious discovery; never were the indications more completely auspicious; all was going on prosperously, when, at the critical moment which should have crowned his labours with success, and have placed him at the very summit of human power and felicity, the ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... you're on the verge and preparing to leap in—and you know it. Let some other man be the life-saver, Harleston. You're much too fine a chap to waste yourself ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... more than in almost any other land, the Reformation was a political revolt. Indeed, it may well be called a political necessity. At the moment when Gustavus Vasa was elected king, Sweden was on the verge of bankruptcy. The war just passed had drained the resources of the country, and left her heavily involved in debt. The principal creditor was Lubeck. Precisely how much had been borrowed from that town it is impossible to determine, though ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... him?" Larry was quite eager now. He seemed to be on the verge of discovering something; if not of the Potter mystery then of the other, that cropped up every now and again—that of the man he had ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis
... was bound to come up and you must sit down and listen quietly." The elder, on the verge of a tempestuous reply, constrained himself to a painful attention. "It's useless to point out to you the beneficial changes in sea carrying, for you are certain to deny their good and drag out the past. So I am simply forced to tell you that after careful consideration we ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... tongue is sharper than a two-edged sword; to noble natures like his, it strikes home to the heart. Ralph Wilson, you are an old man standing on the very verge of the grave. You accused my son of theft, and declared on your word of honour as a Christian that you ...
— George Leatrim • Susanna Moodie
... of nervous oppression burst its way into relief. She laughed loudly and wildly—she was on the verge of hysterics, when Benjulia's eyes, silently questioning her again, controlled her at the critical moment. Her laughter died away. But the exciting influence still possessed her; still forced her into the ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... grew to the verge of the precipice. A full foliaged oak and a luxuriant maple, the former still fresh with its dark green leaves, the latter making a vivid contrast with its pale yellow, purple-red, and orange hues, leaned ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... Yet lest our gift should stretch too far, We will it with this law restrain, That when from hell he takes his flight, He shall from looking back refrain.' Who can for lovers laws indite? Love hath no law but her own will. Orpheus, seeing on the verge of night Eurydice, doth lose and kill Her and himself with foolish love. But you this feigned tale fulfil, Who think unto the day above To bring with speed your darksome mind. For if, your eye conquered, you move Backward to Pluto left behind, All the rich prey which thence you took, You lose while ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... girl I ever saw in my life," he admitted. "I wanted to speak to you. Two or three times I was on the verge of it but I never could quite get up the courage. I'm not much good at starting conversations with girls. My kid brother, Ted, has the monopoly of that sort of thing ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... and then he would stagger along for minutes after consciousness of what he was doing had deserted him, for there are men in that Bush, at least, who know what it is to stop with suddenly opened eyes on the verge of a collapse, and find that they have wandered from the path—only in Nasmyth's case there was no ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... me, as he had heard from the hunters, who had been on my trail about eighty miles to the Saltpetre caves on the Currents River, that I had been killed by the Indians. Every one was pleased to see me, and no one more so than my kind Kentucky host, who had been the last to bid me adieu on the verge of the wilderness. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... limits.... Such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the States.... We shall lie down," continued the orator, "pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... respect for principles that he teaches and applies so loosely himself. It is, furthermore, difficult to understand how he expects submission to the decisions of his organization when he himself has been on the verge of revolt both against the national and international movement. He has always avowed his profound disagreement with the methods of the Socialists in practically every State but his own. He and his associates were at one moment ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... entered upon his duties at a crisis in public affairs which required the utmost foresight, resolution and prudence. Great Britain and the United States were on the verge of war. In 1807 the long series of wrongs inflicted by England upon the commerce of America, and the rights of her seaman, had been consummated by the affair of the Leopard and Chesapeake. This wanton insult had thrown the country into violent commotion, and occasioned the embargo ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... to represent Covenanting as a mere Jewish thing, is an error. It was engaged in before the father of the Hebrew race was called. It was practised when the Levitical economy was on the verge of dissolution, and attended to in the apostolic age by churches that were not subjected to its peculiar institutes. It was provided for the Church, whether existing in Old or New Testament times. It was independent ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... Though ever the sight that salutes them again and adores them awhile is blest, And the heart is a hymn, and the sense is a soul, and the soul is a song. Alone on a dyke's trenched edge, and afar from the blossoming wildwood's verge, Laughs and lightens a sister, triumphal in love-lit pride; Clothed round with the sun, and inviolate: her blossoms exult as the springtide surge, When the wind and the dawn enkindle the snows ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... approaching ever nearer; a soulless, heartless, and unjoyous laugh, like that of the loon, solitary by the lakeside at midnight; a laugh which culminated in an unearthly shout close at hand, then died away by slow gradations, as if the accursed being that uttered it had withdrawn over the verge of the world whence it had come. But the man felt that this was not so—that it was near by and ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... investigation was extended to all the northern region of Lincoln Island, whose most secret nooks were explored. The colonists even went the length of tapping every rock. The search was extended to the extreme verge of the mountain. It was explored thus to the very summit of the truncated cone terminating the first row of rocks, then to the upper ridge of the enormous hat, at the bottom ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... and the Chemung, but it was scarcely the thought of any one of the five that they would travel the vast distance without interruption. Henry, as he sat in the boat in the darkness, felt that once more they were on the verge of great events. Used so long to the life of the wilderness and its countless dangers, the sudden throb of his heart told not of fear, but rather of exultation. It was the spirit rising to meet what lay before it. The same strength ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... these savages he suffered from 'cold, heat, smoke, and dogs,' and bore in silence the foul language of a medicine-man who made the missionary's person and teachings subjects of mirth. At times, too, he was on the verge of death from hunger. Early in the spring he returned to Quebec, after having narrowly escaped drowning as he Crossed the ice-laden St Lawrence in a frail canoe. He had made no converts; but he had gained valuable experience. It was ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... a delicious meal was spread before her, to which she did full justice, feeling by this time on the verge of starvation. ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... men back of all this?" Mr. Sinclair asked. He felt sure now that he was on the verge of a ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... longed to be there again. Is there aught in the place whereof folk tell wide about, so that I might have heard it told of and not noted it at the time? Nay, lady, said the dame, save perchance that it is on the verge of a very great and very evil wood, otherwise it was once a merry town and of much ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... second week in June, Beatrix's baby was born, and for days afterward, the mother's life, so long in danger, now hung by a thread. Then the good old fibre of the Danes reasserted itself, and Beatrix came slowly upward from the verge of the River of Death. Bobby's face cleared itself of its shadows, Thayer signed his contracts and, the next week, he and Arlt ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... of that moment of ineffable delight, and her brown eyes sparkled with the glow of a soul on fire, and she was brought back to earth only by the knowledge that Felix, standing at his post near a window, was on the verge ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... beautiful! but on the verge From side to side, beneath the glittering morn, An Iris sits amidst the infernal surge, Like Hope upon a death-bed, and, unworn Its steady dyes, while all around is torn By the distracted waters, bears serene Its brilliant hues with all ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... went out of her expression, and Mirabelle was on the verge of sniffling. "That's just exactly it. I know you won't. And the humiliation of it to me. When you know perfectly well ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... church, found that the spiritual influence had been concentrated in hands as haughty as their own, and connected with no feelings likely to buttress their order any more than the Crown—a new and sterner monkery, under a different name, and essentially plebeian. Presently the Scotch were on the verge of republicanism, in state as well as kirk, and I have sometimes thought it was only the accession of King Jamie to the throne of England that could have given monarchy a chance of prolonging its existence here." One ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... beginning to look forward, almost hopefully, to the Christmas vacation, that a flood of light streamed suddenly upon Miss Pillby's troubled mind. The revelation happened in this wise. Evening service at a smart little newly-built church, where the function was Anglican to the verge of Ritualism, was a privilege reserved for the elder and more favoured of the Mauleverer flock. All the girls liked this evening service at St. Dunstan's. It had a flavour of dissipation. The lamps, the music, the gaily decorated altar, the Saint's-day banners and processional hymn, were faintly ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... untrue; and, on the other hand, the more universal and entire it is, the more perfect and vital will be the art. Bearing this in mind, and also the facts that Shakspere's early training was effected in a little country village; that upon the verge of manhood, he came to London, where he spent his prime in contact with the bustle and friction of busy town life; and that the later years of his life were passed in the quiet retirement of the home of his boyhood—there would be good ground for an argument, a priori, even were ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... quite suddenly, the obvious, satisfactory answer came to him. The factors clicked into place, and he wondered why he hadn't thought of them long ago. He looked up from the reports, at the people on the verge of panic, and he knew what to say to quiet them. ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... determined should end its days in peace, and never pass from our hands; the little coach- house and stable were let; the servant boy, and the more efficient (being the more expensive) of the two maid-servants, were dismissed. Our clothes were mended, turned, and darned to the utmost verge of decency; our food, always plain, was now simplified to an unprecedented degree—except my father's favourite dishes; our coals and candles were painfully economized—the pair of candles reduced to one, and that most sparingly used; ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... with Suka leading, and carrying a lighted torch made from the spathe of the cocoanut tree, we made our way through the darkened forest to the house in which Susani and her people were living. It was situated on the verge of the shore, on the weather side of the narrow island, so as to be exposed to the cooling breath of the trade wind, and consisted merely of a roof of thatch with open sides, and the ground within covered with coarse mats, upon which we saw were ...
— Susani - 1901 • Louis Becke
... doubt a considerable depression of prices, and, in some degree, a stagnation of business. But the case presented by Mr. Speaker was not one of depression, but of distress; of universal, pervading, intense distress, limited to no class and to no place. We are represented as on the very verge and brink of national ruin. So far from acquiescing in these opinions, I believe there has been no period in which the general prosperity was better secured, or rested on a more solid foundation. As applicable to the Eastern ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... went on, up and up, cautiously, clear of head as one who had from childhood played about the cliffs, and reaching the summit breathless, to stand on the extreme verge, watching one of the ravens, which came sailing up, saw him at a distance, rose above his head, and then began to circle ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... scene. While paying out cable there was the fear of the rope breaking or the anchor dragging; then, on nearing the wreck, there was the risk of being dashed to pieces on the rocks, and after getting under her lee, the surging of the waves kept them constantly on the verge of being hurled against the rigging. The wreck of the foremast, too, which still lay rolling alongside, was a source of constant anxiety, and the rolling of the ship itself rendered it probable that one or both of the remaining ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... Chesterfield to distinguish himself from his patient and good-natured countrymen, and ridiculously to afford the world an opportunity of examining into the particulars of an adventure which would perhaps never have been known without the verge of the court, and which would everywhere have been forgotten in less than a month; but now, as soon as ever he had turned his back, in order to march away with his prisoner, and the ornaments she was supposed to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... as they were. However distinct the mental image might have been to him, with the descent of but one flight of steps into the market-place below, it must have retreated again, as if at touch of some malign magic wand, beyond the utmost verge of the horizon. But it had been actually, in his clearest vision of it, a confused place, with but a recognisable entry, a tower or fountain, here or there, and haunted by strange faces, whose novel expression he, the great physiognomist, could by no means read. Plato, indeed, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... mind,' Trombin answered, 'but it works slowly. You are on the verge of guessing what my inspiration is. Let us, for a large consideration, be the means of carrying off the Lady Ortensia for this rich young man, and when we have done so and received his money, let us execute the plan we have already made. For it will be easy for us to persuade her to do anything ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... concerning his famous uncle's surrender only to her and to death, when he succeeded in conquering his quickly kindled senses. Blushing at his own weakness, he averted his eyes from the Queen, and when he met those of Proculejus and the other witnesses of the scene, he realized the abyss on whose verge he stood. He had half succumbed to the danger of losing, by a moment's weakness, the fruit of great sacrifices ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... child," said Nan, laughing, yet on the verge of tears herself. "You might have been drowned, you WOULD have been had it not been for Mr. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... lights his waning moons, and Venus dips her queenly robes anew. Thy fountains are shoreless as the ocean of heavenly love; thy centre is everywhere, and thy boundary no power has marked. Thy beams gild the illimitable fields of space, and gladden the farthest verge of the universe. The glories of the Seventh Heaven are open to thy gaze, and thy glare is felt in the woes of the lowest Erebus. The sealed books of heaven by thee are read, and thine eyes like the Infinite can pierce the dark veil of the future, ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... black night's sport to hold me as chief mourner; and, indeed, poor wretch, I had much to mourn for. The great plumed hat they had put upon me flapped and swaled over my eyes so as almost to blind me. My foot was for ever catching in my great mourning cloak, and I on the verge of tripping myself up; and there was a hot smoke sweltering from the tapers, and a dreadful smell of new black cloth and sawdust and beeswax, that was like to have suffocated me. Infinite was the relief when two of the ladies attired in black, who had sat on either side of me, as though ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... I embarked upon lengthy thanks for their kindness to me after my accident. I tried to understand Lady Osprey's game of patience, but it didn't appear that Lady Osprey was anxious for me to understand her patience. I came to the verge of ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... which he would treat plainly of the normal circle of their physiological lives; but this would be a method of dealing with the whole matter which would be open to criticism, and for me, at least, a task difficult to the verge of the impossible. I propose a more superficial plan as on the whole the most useful. The man who desires to write in a popular way of nervous women and of her who is to be taught how not to become that sorrowful thing, ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... dialecticians and theologians was unfortunate. He not only felt himself the intellectual superior of any living man, which he probably was, but he also began to look down upon the current thought of his time as obsolete and unworthy, and to set at naught even current opinion. He was now on the verge of forty, and his life had so far been one of spotless purity; but now, under the influence of vanity, this too gave way. Having no further conquests to make in the intellectual world, he began to consider whether, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... advanced, the mighty weight in his hand, to the verge of the dreadful gulf of the Earthquaker. The dim walls grew radiant; a long slant arm of yellow light touched the black body of the Earthquaker, and a thrill went through him, and shook the world, so that, far away, the bells rang in Pantouflia. A moment more, and he would waken in his strength; ...
— Prince Ricardo of Pantouflia - being the adventures of Prince Prigio's son • Andrew Lang
... It is observed by one of the fathers, that he who restrains himself in the use of things lawful, will never encroach upon things forbidden. Abstinence, if nothing more, is, at least, a cautious retreat from the utmost verge of permission, and confers that security which cannot be reasonably hoped by him that dares always to hover over the precipice of destruction, or delights to approach the pleasures which he knows it fatal to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... will give her great comfort; and if she should be hastening to her account, what a pleasure will it give such a lady as you, to have illuminated a benighted mind, when it was tottering on the verge of death! ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... dangerous. "The convention," said Martin, "was on the verge of dissolution, scarce held together by the strength of a hair." When things were looking darkest, Oliver Ellsworth and Roger Sherman suggested a compromise. "Yes," said Franklin, "when a joiner wishes to fit two boards, he sometimes pares off a bit from both." The famous Connecticut ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... our fellow-countrymen in the parts I have named is worse than that of any people in the world, let alone Europe. I believe that these people are made as we are, that they are patient beyond belief, loyal, but at the same time broken-spirited and desperate, living on the verge of starvation, in places where we would not keep our cattle.... Our comic prints do an infinity of harm by their caricatures. Firstly, the caricatures are not true, for the crime in Ireland is not greater than that in England; secondly, they exasperate the people ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... gayety, and from every side they were assailed by the raucous whistles of ferry-boats. The surroundings were not conducive to sentiment, but for the first time Polly Kirkland seemed a little uncertain, a little frightened; almost on the verge of tears, almost persuaded to surrender. For the first time she laid her hand on Ainsley's arm, and the shock sent the blood to his heart and held him breathless. When the girl looked at him there was something in her eyes that neither he nor ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... slipped to the very verge of the rock, where he lay face down with right arm and leg completely over the precipice, his left hand vainly grabbing empty air for grip of anything that would hold him back. Captain Lewis was horrified, but kept his presence of mind; for the man's life hung ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... superfluous to remark that he was in a trance that day. His father, at the breakfast table, jovially prodded him about being late, until he barely caught himself on the verge of telling his queer secret. And so absent-minded was he at the office that he found he had entered the account of a prosaic old firm ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... ticked on, and still the merciless brow-beating went on. They had been at it now five long, weary hours. Through the blinds the gray daylight outside was creeping its way in. All the policemen were exhausted. The prisoner was on the verge of collapse. Maloney and Patrolman Delaney were dozing on chairs, but Captain Clinton, a marvel of iron will and physical strength, never relaxed for a moment. Not allowing himself to weaken or show signs of fatigue, he kept pounding the ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... such a whopper, Mr. Darrel, especially when one is on the verge of eternity," said Ruggles, ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... and essayed conversation, but her companion's blond head was bowed over the book in her lap, and the effort met with no response. Lulled by the somniferous droning of insects and lazy echoes from afar, Miss Chapin was on the verge of slumber, when she saw her guest rapidly turn the last pages of her novel, then, with a chocolate between her teeth, read wide-eyed to the finish. Miss Blake closed the book reluctantly, uncurled slowly, then stared out through the dancing ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... determined to broaden his views by travel. He went to Italy, which the Englishmen of his day still regarded as the home of art, culture, and song. After about fifteen months abroad, hearing that his countrymen were on the verge of civil war, he returned home to play his part in the mighty tragedy of ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... other; and like wild boars whetting their savage tusks, they met, their cheeks all moist with foam; and they rushed forward with their lances; but they couched beneath the orbs of their shields, in order that the steel might fall harmless. But if either perceived the other's eye raised above the verge, he drove the lance at his face, intent to be beforehand with him: but dexterously they shifted their eyes to the open ornaments of their shields, so that the spear was made of none effect. And more sweat trickled ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... picture receded and new lands came into view, familiar lands which he had traversed often. They too were black and wasted with the tempest of war from east to west, but nevertheless those swarming streams came on, countless and undiminished, up out of the south and east, while on the western verge vast armies and fleets battled desperately with each other on sea and land, as though they heeded not those locust swarms of dusky millions ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... practised also moral philosophy. They were regarded as the justest of men, and on this account were intrusted with the settlement of private and public disputes. They had been the means of preventing armies from fighting when on the very verge of battle, and were especially intrusted with the judgment of cases involving human life. According to Strabo, they and their fellow-countrymen held that souls and the universe were immortal, but that fire and water would sometime ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... led straight across the clearing into another forest, lying upon the verge of which I saw a bit of white. It appeared to stand out in marked contrast and incongruity to all its surroundings, and when I stopped to examine it, I found that it was a small strip of muslin—part of the ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... he concluded solemnly. "Master Courage," he added with becoming severity, seeing that the youth was on the verge of making a ribald remark, which of necessity had to be checked betimes, "come into my room with me and help me to clean the traces of my difficult task from ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... and spades, while the women remained outside the church with the cure, they sought a suitable ambuscade. Approaching a mill on a rising ground adjacent to the verge of the forest, they saw the light of the burning farm flaming against the stars. There they waited under enormous oaks, before a ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... brought things into shape, putting the transportation in good working order, giving each regiment its proper quota of wagons, and turning the surplus into the general supply trains of the army. In accomplishing this I was several times on the verge of personal conflict with irate regimental commanders, but Colonel G. M. Dodge so greatly sustained me with General Curtis by strong moral support, and by such efficient details from his regiment—the Fourth Iowa Volunteer Infantry—that I still bear him and it great affection ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... visible in those directions, even to the horizon, now stands out distinctly red. Some great ones lift their red backs high above the woods, in the next town, like huge roses with a myriad of fine petals; and some more slender ones, in a small grove of White Pines on Pine Hill in the east, on the very verge of the horizon, alternating with the Pines on the edge of the grove, and shouldering them with their red coats, look like soldiers in red amid hunters in green. This time it is Lincoln green, too. Till the sun got low, I did ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... supplied the information. She had been on the verge of despair, harboring her fear and despair all alone, with the loyal desire to protect not only Foster, but Alice as well, and now she felt an immense relief to have a man's ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... a fine of forty thousand pounds, and to be imprisoned in the Tower during the King's pleasure. He was declared incapable of holding any office in the State or of sitting in Parliament: and he was banished for life from the verge of the court. In such misery and shame ended that long career of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... it all," Honor explained at length; and Quita nodded. The fact that she was crying her heart out on the shoulder of her detested rival made the whole incident dreamlike to the verge of stupefaction: and it was Honor ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... enormously swollen civil expenditure, and with the inclusion of services strictly Imperial in origin and character. Now it is a different matter, and we are faced with the opposition of British statesmen who, by sustaining the Union, drove Ireland to the verge of insolvency, and now use insolvency as an ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... the rays of suns extinguished, the splendours of vanished worlds, the glories of Olympus eclipsed—all seemed to have concentrated their reflections. When contemplating them one thought of eternity, and felt himself seized with a mighty giddiness, as though he were leaning over the verge of the Infinite. ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... no answer, and it is more than probable that I shall receive none in this world which one or both of us may be upon the verge of leaving. In the latter case we can settle the matter elsewhere—perhaps. In the former, should it be my lot to go and yours to stay, I hope that you will think kindly of me at times as of one who loved you ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... be much noted for cutlery and hardware, iron as well as coal being abundantly produced in Shan-si. Apparently the present Birmingham of this region is a town called Hwai-lu, or Hwo-luh'ien, about 20 miles west of Cheng-ting fu, and just on the western verge of the great plain of Chihli. [Regarding Hwai-lu, the Rev. C. Holcombe calls it "a miserable town lying among the foot hills, and at the mouth of the valley, up which the road into Shan-si lies." He writes (p. 59) that Ping-ting chau, after the Customs' barrier (Ku ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... toward the mountains of the Picts. For all the interval of time and space, I, when I looked from the cliff-house on the broad Pacific, was that man's heir and analogue: each of us standing on the verge of the Roman Empire (or, as we now call it, Western civilization), each of us gazing onward into zones unromanised. But I was dull. I looked rather backward, keeping a kind eye on Paris; and it required a series of converging incidents ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Kallikrates, will I once more wash and make me pure and clean, and yet more fit for thee. Therefore also, when thou dost in turn stand in the fire, empty all thy heart of evil, and let soft contentment hold the balance of thy mind. Shake loose thy spirit's wings, and take thy stand upon the utter verge of holy contemplation; ay, dream upon thy mother's kiss, and turn thee towards the vision of the highest good that hath ever swept on silver wings across the silence of thy dreams. For from the germ of what thou art in that ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... beyond which there seemed to be nothing but the snow-covered slope, with only a few projecting rocks along the edge of a tremendous gorge which now broke upon our astonished gaze. Toward this we directed our course, and, an hour later, stood upon its very verge. Our venerable companion now looked up at the precipitous slope above us, where only some stray, projecting rocks were left to guide us through the wilderness of snow. "Boys," said he, despondently, "I cannot reach the top; I have not rested during ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... painful to her that Henrietta should be so much excited about what had never after all been more than a potential love affair. To tell the truth, she thought it a trifle petty and not worthy the dignity of one on the verge of old age. She wanted to be sympathetic, and she was too kind to say anything that would wound, but Henrietta could see that Evelyn did not ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... boldly onward in pursuit of wealth, were already in the enjoyment of a competency in their own part of the Country. They take their wives along with them, and make them share the countless perils and privations, which always attend the commencement of these expeditions. I have often met, even on the verge of the wilderness, with young women, who, after having been brought up amid all the comforts of the large towns of New England, had passed, almost without any intermediate stage, from the wealthy abode of their parents, to a comfortless hovel in a forest. Fever, solitude, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... perpetual creation, a constant becoming, and its source is not in the matter through which it is manifested, though inseparable from it. The material substance of life, like the rain-drops, is in perpetual flux and change; it hangs always on the verge of dissolution and vanishes when the material conditions fail, to be renewed again when they return. We know, do we not? that life is as literally dependent upon the sun as is the rainbow, and equally dependent upon the material elements; but whether the physical conditions sum up ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... thirtieth descendant of the Thegn—was close on six feet in height and thin, with thirsty eyes, and a smile which had fixed itself in his cheeks, so on the verge of appearing was it. His hair waved, and was of a dusty shade bordering on grey. His wife, of the same age and nearly the same height as himself, was of sanguine colouring and a Cornish family, ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... made at Yale College And now she is dead—& I can never tell her. And of the article: "I read it to the cat Been on the verge of being an angel all my life Carbuncle is a kind of jewel Compliment that helps us on our way Defeat waits somewhere for every conqueror Don't reform any more. It is not an improvement Edited manuscript-by a half wit Embroidery line Every man is strong until ...
— Widger's Quotations from Albert Bigelow Paine on Mark Twain • David Widger
... To overhang the world; for wide expand Beneath the wan stars, and descending moon, Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams, Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom Of leaden-colored even, and fiery hills Mingling their flames with twilight on the verge Of the remote horizon. The near scene In naked, and severe simplicity Made contrast with the universe. A pine Rock-rooted, stretch'd athwart the vacancy Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blast Yielding one only response at each pause, In most familiar ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... drive the chariot of the Sun, his father, through the heavens. But his unskilful hands frighten the steeds. The flaming chariot, thrown out of its course, approaches the terrestrial regions. The whole universe is on the verge of ruin when Jupiter strikes the ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... race of princes who proclaimed themselves the heirs of Charlemagne, and a factious younger branch that was eager to bury the Constable de Bourbon's treason under the throne; obliged too, to fight down a heresy on the verge of devouring the monarchy, without friends, and aware of treachery in the chiefs of the Catholic party and of republicanism in the Calvinists, Catherine used the most dangerous but the surest of political weapons—Craft. She determined to deceive by turns the party that was anxious to secure ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... nothing at all then—nothing that any one would pay a cent to read. I have told you from the start that what you want is a grande passion, something to stir your soul to its depths. You are on the verge of that experience. Already you have had a glimpse of what it will be like. For the first time the touch of a woman's fingers has driven sleep from your eyelids. No, you didn't tell me you laid awake all ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... little, simply coined shoals of money out of. Whereas the simple fact of the case was it was simply a case of the husband not being up to the scratch, with nothing in common between them beyond the name, and then a real man arriving on the scene, strong to the verge of weakness, falling a victim to her siren charms and forgetting home ties, the usual sequel, to bask in the loved one's smiles. The eternal question of the life connubial, needless to say, cropped up. Can real love, supposing there happens to be another chap in the case, exist between married ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... in this way they got under cover of a little clump near the water's edge, and near enough to the gigantic game. Upon their hands and knees they now approached the verge of the underwood; and having parted the leaves, looked through. The mighty quadruped was right under their eyes, within twenty yards ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... losing its purchasing power. The people about here all profess to be very hot for the South, but when you come to buy anything from them what they call 'Linkum money' goes ten times as far. We have never known anything but profusion, but now we are on the verge of poverty." ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... knew, was quite true. Whether I should ever rear No. 1 was a matter for time to prove. It was so delicate that once or twice already it had been on the verge of collapse, but I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... Rigby came in. Without a word Eddie popped up, a bit red in the face, and followed the lawyer into the private room, closing the door behind him. Rosie's ears went very pink and she pounded the keys so viciously that the machine trembled on the verge of collapse. ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... the next chapter, which partly public sentiment, partly lack of army and navy, made it impossible for our Government to prevent, enraged Great Britain to the verge of war. After the British orders in council of November 6, 1793, intended to destroy all neutral commerce with the French colonies, and Congress's counter-stroke of an embargo the following March, war was positively imminent. The President resolved to send Jay to England as envoy extraordinary, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... completely avoid friction; so that the results would have remained only middling, had not this ingenious physicist devised a new improvement which has some analogy with superheating of steam in steam engines. He slightly varies the initial temperature of the compressed air on the verge of liquefaction so as to avoid a zone of deep perturbations in the properties of fluids, which would make the work of expansion very feeble and the cold produced consequently slight. This improvement, simple as it is in appearance, ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... and set to work. It was hard work, but her fingers were willing, and Zara's frightened pleading, as the thunder began to roar, and flashes of lightning came to her through the cracks in the woodshed, urged her on. And then, just as she was on the verge of success, she heard Jake's coarse laugh in her ear. "Look ...
— A Campfire Girl's First Council Fire - The Camp Fire Girls In the Woods • Jane L. Stewart
... are on the verge, take not the leap! Go back whence you set out, and tell us of that other, and still more mysterious Azzageddi; him whom you hinted to have palmed himself off on ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... not only troubled, he was seriously embarrassed. The hint thrown out by his little brother about the Koshare had struck him; for it led to the inference that the child had knowledge of secret arts and occult practices of which even he, Okoya, although on the verge of manhood, had never received any intimation. Far more yet than this knowledge, which Shyuote might have obtained through mere accident, the hint at unpleasant relations between Okoya and ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... management; but its Address and Resolutions were hardly laid at Mr. Johnson's feet, when, in his exultation, he blurted out that unfortunate remark about "a body called, or which assumed to be, the Congress of the United States," which, it appears, "we have seen hanging on the verge of the government." Now all this was in the Address of the Convention, but it was not so brutally worded, nor so calculated to appall those timid supporters of the Johnson party who thought, in their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... now on the verge of fifty, strikingly handsome in his features, and of imposing presence, from the union of a fine person with manners unusually dignified. No man understood better the art of restraining his least governable impulses of anger or malignity within the decorums of ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... movement of the head, a comfortable h'm-m, and a half-smile. Sympathetic he was, indeed, and warm with the fire that never goes out in great natures. He had much dignity; so much that persons in his own country sometimes thought him shy and reticent to the verge of morbidness. But it was merely the gentlemanliness of the man, who was jocund with no one but his intimate friends, and never fierce except with rascals, as I observed on one or two occasions. Those who thought him ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... surveyed their Canaan. Beneath them moved the unruffled river, gliding around the reed-grown shores of marshy islands, the haunt of alligators, and betwixt the bordering expanse of wide, wet meadows, studded with island-like clumps of pine and palmetto, and bounded by the sunny verge of distant forests. Far on their right, seen by glimpses between the shaggy cedar-boughs, the glistening sea lay stretched along the horizon. Before, in hazy distance, the softened green of the woodlands was veined with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... not reply; an imperceptible twitching tightened her lips; then the young mouth relaxed, drooping a trifle at the corners. Lying there, so outwardly calm, her tired, faraway gaze fixed absently on him, she seemed on the verge of slumber. ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... came for the brigade to march. It now consisted of only three regiments, for the time of one, composed of three months' men, had expired while at Centreville; and though requested and importuned to remain a few days longer, they basely withdrew, even while they were on the very verge of the battlefield. This regiment left, and carried with it the scorn and contempt of the loyal and true men, who were as ready to fight the battles of their country on ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... my companions at times, I had vague misgivings. It was as if these two had fascinated me to the verge of some danger. Sometimes Castro, looking up, uttered vague ejaculations. Carlos pushed his hat back and sighed. They had preoccupations, cares, interests in which they ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... his window he was recalling the separate events of the day. The court room had been crowded to the verge of suffocation; when he entered it a sudden hush and a mighty craning of necks had been his welcome, and he had felt his cheeks redden and pale with a sense of shame at his hapless plight. Those many pairs of eyes that were fixed on him seemed ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... Raglan appeared, and a pang of apprehension shot through her bosom. She was approaching the unknown. Like one on the verge of a second-sight, her history seemed for a moment about to reveal itself—where it lay, like a bird in its egg, within those massive walls, warded by those huge ascending towers. Brought up in a retirement that ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... harmony That mingle in the silent sky Then slowly disunite, passed by And left the tenderness of tears, 985 A soft oblivion of all fears, A sweet sleep: so we travelled on Till we came to the home of Lionel, Among the mountains wild and lone, Beside the hoary western sea, 990 Which near the verge of the echoing shore The massy forest ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Annan left the victim of his tact and technique agreeably trapped, suffering gratefully, excited by self-approval to the verge of sentimental tears. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... to seize him. His lips shut and his figure stiffened with determination. "But it has to be—it has to be," he declared abruptly. His air was forceful to the verge of aggressiveness as he ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... among many in both high and low life that calls for vehement protest. The question with many seems to be how near they can come to the verge of decency without falling over."—Ashore ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... say that I had the three hundred pounds, ineerest and all, plack and farthing, to pay; though, by my folly and simplicity, I had brought my wife and family to the verge o' ruin, she never was the woman to fling my silly conduct in my teeth; and all that she ever did say to me upon the subject, was—'Weel, Nicholas, this is the first o' your bill transactions, or o' your being caution for ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... like cold water on Old Tom's delight. He pitched it back in the shape of a doubt of what Andrew had told him. Whereupon Andrew defied him to face three miserable women on the verge of hysterics; and Old Tom, beginning to chuckle again, rejoined that it would bring them to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pale, and their cheeks contracted, and they gazed with lips apart and opened eyes on the sea, as if on the point of uttering a cry half-suppressed by fear. They were standing on tiptoe on the very verge of the shore, with their tunics girt up to the knee, and extending their arms towards the bull, as if meditating to rush into the sea in pursuit of him, and yet shrinking from the contact of the waves. The sea was represented of a reddish tint inshore, but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... here Baseek erred. Had he contented himself with looking fierce and ominous, all would have been well. White Fang, on the verge of retreat, would have retreated, leaving the meat to him. But Baseek did not wait. He considered the victory already his and stepped forward to the meat. As he bent his head carelessly to smell it, White Fang bristled slightly. Even then it was not too late ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... lake's left bank, As we sail hence to Brunnen, right against The Mytenstein, deep-hidden in the wood A meadow lies, by shepherds called the Rootli, Because the wood has been uprooted there. 'Tis where our Canton boundaries verge on yours;— ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... asked her, "a skeleton? Do you know, I think that Rick's ghost, or whatever influence presides over this house, has a sense of humor. You find a room, or a trunk, or something which makes you feel that you are on the verge of getting what you want, and then it all fades into just nothing again. Now, by rights, that writing-desk should have contained the secret message which would have told us where to find a hidden passage or something. But what is in it? A couple of pieces of lining almost ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... given to be fiery in Parliamentary talk withal; and these did proceed to Porto-Bello on the Spanish Main of South America; did hurl out on Porto-Bello such a fiery destructive deluge, of gunnery and bayonet-work, as quickly reduced the poor place to the verge of ruin, and forced it to surrender with whatever navy, garrison, goods and resources were in it, to the discretion of fiery Vernon,—who does not prove implacable, he or his, to a petitioning enemy. Yes, humble the insolent, but then be merciful to them, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... fire of them hurt. Matt, in spite of his heavy nature, slept lightly, like a wild animal alert in its sleep; and Jim noticed, every time he moved, that his partner's body moved sufficiently to show that it had received the impression and that it was trembling on the verge of awakening. For that matter, Jim did not know whether or not, frequently, the other was awake. Once, quietly, betokening complete consciousness, Matt said to him: "Aw, go to sleep, Jim. Don't worry about them jools. They'll keep." And Jim had thought that at that particular moment Matt ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... fur-traders, where he had deposited a lot of peltries, which he wished to convert into supplies for the journey. This was readily agreed to, and, accordingly, next day about noon, they came in sight of Rocky Mountain Fort—so-called because of its being situated in a somewhat wild glen, near the verge of one of the eastern ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... Jennie left the room. She came back later, so full of mystery, as Helen declared, that she seemed on the verge of bursting. ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... with the Father was broken, in that awful hour when He cried: 'My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?' We tread there on the verge of mysteries, beyond our comprehension; but this we know—that it was our sin and the world's, made His by His willing identifying of Himself with us, which built up that black wall of separation. That hour ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... the foes drew nearer, all Lisburn and Antrim together came pouring into Londonderry. Thirty thousand Protestants, of both sexes and of every age, were crowded behind the bulwarks of the City of Refuge. There, at length, on the verge of the ocean, hunted to the last asylum, and baited into a mood in which men may be destroyed, but will not easily be subjugated, the imperial race turned desperately to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... alive three million, five hundred thousand starving children in Central Europe, but in addition to contribute to that enormous fund to save the thirty million Chinese who find themselves at the verge of starvation, owing to one of those recurrent famines which strike often at that densely populated and inert country, where procreative recklessness is encouraged as a matter of duty. The results of this international charity have not justified the effort nor repaid the generosity ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... travelling agents or the credit system: and to this policy he has adhered. Besides this, he spared no expense which he judged would add to the value of his publications, and his judgment has always set the bounds far off on the very verge of extravagance. Whatever machine promised to keep his office abreast of the times, and increase the capacity for good work, he has dared buy. Whatever man he has thought would brighten and strengthen his staff of assistants, he has gone for, and if ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... of the state banks, or not filled at all. If with the former, whence are they to derive their increased means of circulation, seeing that nearly all of them have carried their issues to the extreme verge of safety, and some of them, perhaps, beyond it? It will, however, be said, that there will be new banks established—the capital that is vested in the Bank of the United States will not be annihilated by the termination of that establishment, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... prove the final wrench to a heart that had been on the verge of breaking for many a year, and it was not long before Olive and ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... effects which at once seize upon the imagination, and inspire it with new worship of Nature, we have great lack. In private grounds we cannot of course command the opportunity which the long tenure under British privilege gives; but the conservators of public parks have scope and verge; let them look to it, that their resources be not wasted in the niceties of mere gardening, or in elaborate architectural devices. Banks of blossoming shrubs and tangled wild vines and labyrinthine walks will count for nothing in park-effect, when, fifty years hence, the scheme shall have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... the world to trust to except Moses' word, and Moses' report of God's Word. 'We will do you good; God has said that He will do good to us, and you shall have your share in it.' It was a grave thing, and, in many circumstances, would have been a supremely foolish thing, credulous to the verge of insanity, to risk all upon the mere promise of one in Moses' position, who had so little in his own power with which to fulfil the promise; and who referred him to an unseen divinity, somewhere or other; and so drew bills upon heaven and futurity, and did not feel himself at all bound to pay them ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... the Founder. Before the death of his brother and predecessor Mangku, who died in 1259 before an obscure fortress of Western China, it had been intended to remove the seat of government from Kara Korum on the northern verge of the Mongolian Desert to the more populous regions that had been conquered in the further East, and this step, which in the end converted the Mongol Kaan into a Chinese Emperor,[3] was carried ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... foretell earthquakes. France is undermined; America is moving; all Europe is prepared to discard Christianity as a crab its shell; Economics are reduced to a science; nature is ransacked; we are on the verge of something novel and tremendous; I feel ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... wind fans. The sea sighs a love melody. The caressing sand takes print of my foot alone. All the world might be mine, for none is present to dispute possession. The sailless sea smiles in ripples, and strews its verge with treasures for my acceptance. The sky's purity enriches my soul. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... on and on he went, Till he attained the forest's verge, The garish day was well-nigh spent, Birds had already raised its dirge. Oh what a scene! How sweet and calm! It soothed at once his wounded pride, And on his spirit shed a balm That all its ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... opens from the verge of these hills; the waters that gather on its pleasant pastures and fat fields, or among the green moss tracts of its lowlands, flow eastward by the Boyne or southwestward by the Shannon to ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... was possible to contemplate with some calmness the prospect of giving her up if he failed in his search. When Carvel had proposed to come out and had asked my advice, we had fancied ourselves on the verge of the final discovery, and with natural and pardonable enthusiasm Paul had joined me in urging John to bring his family at once. He had felt sure that the end was near, and he had wished that Hermione might arrive ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... paced the room in deep sorrow. "You, Williams! on the verge of the sixth-form. Alas! I fear, from this, that the state of things among you is even worse than ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... next week or two a series of distressing events took place which brought Mrs. Stevenson almost to the verge of nervous prostration. The night before her husband's departure a peasant on the estate died of the prevailing disease, and for some unknown reason the body, much swollen and disfigured, was permitted to lie just outside the gate during the entire morning. Next ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... natural couch, and there they laid him, and bade him rest, in spite of the delight which made him believe himself capable of any exertion. Where he lay,—always holding Jupiter's cage, and often talking to him as to a playfellow,—he was on the verge of a green area, shut in by magnificent trees, in all the glory of their early foliage, before the summer heats had deepened their verdure into one rich, monotonous tint. And hither came party after party; ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... he had. Almost on the verge of failure he had unearthed the gold buried so long before by the ...
— The Young Treasure Hunter - or, Fred Stanley's Trip to Alaska • Frank V. Webster
... doth brood, At the furthest verge of the reef-spilt foam; And the world's lone ends Are met as friends, And the homeless heart ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... own part of the world would lead us to consider as the one great security for good government. We have to engraft on despotism those blessings which are the natural fruits of liberty. In these circumstances, Sir, it behoves us to be cautious, even to the verge of timidity. The light of political science and of history are withdrawn: we are walking in darkness: we do not distinctly see whither we are going. It is the wisdom of a man, so situated, to feel his way, and not to plant his foot ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and fro, the sweat stood in large drops upon his forehead. With my own handkerchief I wiped his lips and brow tenderly—my nerves were strung up to an almost brittle tension—I smiled as a woman smiles when on the verge of hysterical weeping. ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... massive, but good-humoured features, that glowed with the rich tint of a hale old age. A bunch of large gold seals, depending from a massive jack-chain of the same metal, oscillated with becoming dignity from the lower verge of his waistcoat, over the goodly prominence of his "fair round belly." Glancing his half-closed, but piercing eye around his auditory, as if calculating the contents of every pocket present, he commenced his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various
... morrow double toil.—Ye, who have pass'd In idle sport the days that fled so fast, Days, that nor Grief recalls, nor Care retrieves, At length be wise, and think, that of the part Remaining in that vital period given, How short the date, and at the prospect start, Ere to the extremest verge your steps be driv'n! Nor let a moment unimprov'd depart, But view it as the latest ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... permanent green which can be described as gorgeous, being not unlike the richest velvet. Pure and clear as the emerald, it may be called the Prussian Blue of Greens, of such richness, depth, and transparency is it. In hue of a bluish-green, its deepest shades verge on black, while its light tints are marked by transparent clearness unsurpassed. No compound of blue and yellow will afford a green at once so beautiful and stable, so gifted with the quality of light, and therefore so suited for aerial and liquid effects. Used with ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... is not sufficient to be inoffensive—we must be profitable servants to each other: we are, in the second place, to proceed to the utmost verge in paying the respect due to others. We had better go a little too far than stop short in this particular. My lord Shaftesbury hath a pretty observation, that the beggar, in addressing to a coach with, My lord, is sure not to offend, even though there be no lord there; but, on the contrary, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... just now, these phenomena formerly had the power of terrifying ignorant mortals, either when the orb of light and life seemed on the verge of extinction, or when the beautiful Phoebus was covered with a veil of crape and woe, or took ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... forward, and in her low, possessed voice, she asked him how he was. And he answered her, in the habit of more than thirty years: 'Well, I don't think I'm any the worse, dear.' But he was frightened of her, underneath this safeguard of habit, frightened almost to the verge of death. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... that always hung about Sir Charles in Hyacinth's house did not interfere with his personal air of enjoying an escapade, nor with his looking distinguished to the very verge of absurdity. As to Cecil, the reaction from his disappointment of the afternoon had made him look more vivid than usual. He ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... warm-hearted and generous to the verge of violence, but a man in every way unfitted by temperament, experience, and mode of life to undertake the guardianship of a child. To have an infant dropped into his arms was as excellent an imitation of a calamity as could well happen to him. I am told that no ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... product of the dairy for three months to make up the deficit. That was just like Brook Farm. The most ambitious performance in my time was the rendition of the Oratorio of Saint Paul, which was given twice by request, but this was in the summer when we had ample room and verge ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... gaining this station. The bank was as high as my breast. It was easy, therefore, to crouch beneath it, to bring my eye close to the verge, and, laying my gun upon the top of it among the grass, with its muzzles pointed to the door, patiently ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... grief or regret, and when his son mourned the death of his wife the philosopher reproved him. In all things he reasoned upward toward the throne; his grand aim was to build up an ideal state. He therefore magnified reverence for parents and all ancestors even to the verge of idolatry, but he utterly failed in that symmetry in which Paul makes the duties of parents and children mutual. Under his system a father might exercise his caprice almost to the power of life or death, and a Chinese mother-in-law is proverbially a tyrant. ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... no longer control himself. His pupil had become his master. The fact itself did not surprise him. Woman is more exalted than man in morality. There is no virtue, no devotion, no heroism in which she does not surpass him; but once impelled to the verge of the abyss, she falls faster and lower than man. This is attributable to two causes: she has more passion, and she has no honor. For honor is a reality and must not be underrated. It is a noble, delicate, and salutary quality. It elevates manly attributes; ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... pursues at will His devious course. A glimpse of such sweet life I saw when, from the melancholy walls 210 Of Goslar, once imperial, I renewed My daily walk along that wide champaign, [U] That, reaching to her gates, spreads east and west, And northwards, from beneath the mountainous verge Of the Hercynian forest, [V] Yet, hail to you 215 Moors, mountains, headlands, and ye hollow vales, Ye long deep channels for the Atlantic's voice, [W] Powers of my native region! Ye that seize The heart with firmer grasp! Your ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... growing rarer, become more and more frequent; indeed, I think that if the really great man were to confess to the working of his mind, we should see him constantly besieged by inspirations ... inspirations! Ah! how human thought only turns in a circle, and how, when we think we are on the verge of a new thought, we slip into the enunciation of some time-worn truth. But I say again, let general principles be waived; it will suffice for the interest of these pages if it be understood that brain instincts have always been, and still are, the initial and the determining ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... of the sufferer—though uttered loudly in that paroxysm of an emotion which, in another, would almost have touched the verge of despair—was yet rendered more uncertain and indistinct from the condition of exhaustion in which he hung; and so, amid the darkness, and confused noise, and dull footsteps of the moving multitude, there were some who did not hear what he had said. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... vacancy, only, met their gaze. He no longer—so her beam pierced further and further—looked at her on a level, with the frankness of mere mutual need and trust. No; such silence, such watchfulness implied superiority. The last verge of shadow was reached when she could make out that he looked at her from an affectionate, a paternal,—oh, yes, still a very lover-like,—height, not less watchful for being tender; not less steady for being, still, rather ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... frog on the verge of the stream, "they are all as bad as one another; the perch is a rogue and a thief; the pike is a monster of iniquity; the heron never misses a chance of gobbling up somebody; and as for the drake, for all his glossy neck and his innocent ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... unusual depression in the other. I was said to be one of the most eloquent commoners of the day—her family were powerful—my wife was in a decline, and recovery hopeless. Here, then, was a career for ambition; but that was not all. I was poor—embarrassed almost beyond hope—on the very verge of ruin. Indeed, so poor, that it was as much owing to the inability of maintaining my wife in her proper rank, as to fear of my friends and the world, that I did not publicly acknowledge her. But why dwell on this? I loved the woman whose heart and thought ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... was not a fact the night of her admission to Dallas, was almost come to pass. The few days of great cold and hunger in February, coupled with long confinement in the dirt-floored house, were having their effect. She was on the verge of illness. ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... of Harald Hardrade, "the experienced king of the Northmen," that he undertook a voyage out into the sea towards the north and "explored the expanse of the northern ocean with his ships, but darkness spread over the verge where the world falls away, and he put about barely in time to escape being swallowed in the vast abyss." This was Ginnungagap, the abyss at the world's end. How far he went no one knows, but at all events he deserves recognition as ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... th' industrious hag, with footstep bare, And loins ungirt, the sleeping fire to light; And lovers thrill'd that season of despight, Which wont renew their tears, and wake despair. When my soul's hope, now on the verge of fate, (Not by th' accustomed way; for that in sleep Was closed, and moist with griefs,) attain'd my heart. Alas, how changed! "Servant, no longer weep," She seem'd to say; "resume thy wonted state: Not yet thine eyes from mine are doom'd ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... afterwards converts the generic name of Gave into one peculiar to itself. The sides of the mountains are thickly clothed with box, which grows to a great height; and at this season the Autumn tint had given to it the loveliest hues, contrasting well with the dark pines which climb to the verge of vegetation on the far-off slopes. Suddenly, the character of the scene is altered,—the road descends—the foliage disappears, or shows itself only in patches in the ravines, and masses of dark grey rock usurp its place; the noisy waters of the Gave make themselves ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... dreams. I would assoil him. Father! 'Tis said, upon the giddy verge of life The eye grows steady, and the soul sees clear Thought guiding action in all human things, Not in the busy, whirling masque of life, Reality unreal, but in truth. Then the eye cuts as the chirurgeon's knife Mocks the poor corpse. I saw ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... snowy, arrow-like minarets; the Seven Towers, with their fancy-pictured terrors, fade gradually from my sight, as the steam-boat rapidly ploughs the glassy wave. The eye, straining itself for a last glimpse of the beautiful city, beholds it resting, like a phantom, on the indistinct verge where heaven and the waters meet, until it sinks into the bosom of ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... was in an uproar, for the chevalier's wife had come hurrying in, the chevalier's daughter was on the verge of hysterics, and the chevalier's prospective son-in-law was alternately hugging the great beast-tamer and then shaking his hand and generally deporting himself like a respectable young man who ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... forgive her, Since she did leave the rich contents behind. Amelia, give this feather more a slope, That it sit droopingly. I would look all Dissolvement, nought about me to bespeak Boldness! I would appear a timid bride, Trembling upon the verge of wifehood, as I ne'er before had stood there! That will do. Oh dear!—How I am agitated—don't I look so? I have found a secret out,— Nothing in woman strikes a man so much As to look interesting! Hang this cheek Of mine! It is too saucy; ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... her checked on the east with her Austrian ally on the verge of pleading for peace; her fleet cowering in the Kiel Canal like a frightened hen beneath ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... In his copper-banded vessel Left his tribe in Kalevala, Sailing o'er the rolling billows, Sailing through the azure vapours, Sailing through the dusk of evening, Sailing to the fiery sunset, To the higher landed regions, To the lower verge of heaven; Quickly gained the far horizon, Gained the purple-coloured harbour, There his bark he firmly anchored, Rested in his boat of copper; But he left his harp of magic, Left his songs and wisdom sayings To the lasting ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... an archipelagic manner. We then dress our islands, objecting strongly to too close a scrutiny of our proceedings until we have done. Here, in the illustration, is such an archipelago ready for its explorers, or rather on the verge of exploration. There are altogether four islands, two to the reader's right and two to the left, and the nearer ones are the more northerly; it is as many as we could get into the camera. The northern island to the right is most advanced in ...
— Floor Games; a companion volume to "Little Wars" • H. G. Wells
... hand upwards. Night lay like a sack around and below us: but right aloft, at the zenith, day was trembling. Slowly established, it spread and descended upon us until it touched a distant verge of hills, and there, cut by the rim of the rising sun, flowed suddenly with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... but was keenly interested in its effect upon the people. If it interested and helped them, it was a good program; if it did not, it was a poor program and no amount of learning or technical perfection could redeem it. He sometimes reduced his more scholarly teachers to the verge of despair by his insistence that there should be nothing on the program at any exercise to which the public was invited which the every-day man and woman could ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... succeeded by violent gusts of wind and large pattering drops. It was a dreary moment. The dogs were fast drawing on their victim, and nothing but despair and death stared him in the face. The ground now began to get irregular and varied, and a hope arose in his heart that he was getting on the verge of the moors. Still he was entirely ignorant as to the direction. The clouds then burst with a violence which their threatening aspect had long foretold, and in an instant Smyth was drenched to the skin; the ground became slippery, and the footing was precarious. Still he burst wildly onwards; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... Back of the permanent structures rise, this glorious July day, the tepees of the Chipewyans, Slavis, and Dog-Ribs who have come in from the hunting-grounds for their treaty money. Fort Smith struck us as being more "dead" than any northern post. But it is on the verge of great things. Mr. Brabant has announced that this place is to succeed Fort Simpson as headquarters for the Northern fur-trade, and his personality will soon send unction into the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... avoid friction; so that the results would have remained only middling, had not this ingenious physicist devised a new improvement which has some analogy with superheating of steam in steam engines. He slightly varies the initial temperature of the compressed air on the verge of liquefaction so as to avoid a zone of deep perturbations in the properties of fluids, which would make the work of expansion very feeble and the cold produced consequently slight. This improvement, simple ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... most "excellent dissembling;" but when she has fooled and chafed the Herculean Roman to the verge of danger, then comes that return of tenderness which secures the power she has tried to the utmost, and we have all the elegant, the poetical Cleopatra ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... for a while; Mrs. Delarayne gradually receding from the position of one on the verge of a dangerous malady, to that of a person merely threatened with a serious breakdown if her worries were not immediately ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... wrote, "the place where once devils were worshipped has now become a Christian oratory." Here, too, he laid his plans for the evangelisation of the people. When suffering from one of his moods of depression as to his own state, he thus writes of this place:—"I began to pray as on the verge of eternity; and the Lord was pleased to break my hard heart. I lay in tears, interceding for the unfortunate natives of this country; thinking within myself that the most despicable soodra of India was of as much value in ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... again!" exclaimed Grace. "It's just like old times. I can't help feeling sad though. We thought when we were graduated from high school that our parting of the ways had come, but now that we are all standing on the verge of our life work, it seems to me that this is going to be the real parting. I can't help wondering if things will seem quite the same again when ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... prescribe spells and sell charms, the humblest professional healers in this country are the herbalists. These men wander through the fields on Sunday seeking for herbs with magic properties of curing disease, preventing childbirth, and the like. Each of them believes that he is on the verge of a great discovery, in which Virginia Snake Root will be an ingredient, heaven knows why! Virginia Snake Root fascinates the imagination of the herbalist as mercury used to fascinate the alchemists. On week days he keeps a shop in which he sells packets of pennyroyal, dandelion, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... was quiet and pleasantly modulated, and he spoke English with the faintest slur—perceptible, perhaps, only to the keenest ear—of a French accent. To ears less keen it would merely seem that he articulated with a precision so singular as to verge ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... From the verge of the water the land rises uniformly on all sides, with green and sloping acclivities, until from gently rolling hill-sides and moderate elevations it insensibly swells into lofty and majestic heights, whose blue outlines, ranged all around, ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... increased to ninety, after which she had no bottom; which happened to us also at our second trial, though we sounded with a line of 150 fathoms. This is the shoal laid down in most charts by the name of the Abrollos,[1] and it appeared we were upon its verge; perhaps farther in it may be extremely dangerous. We were then, by our different accounts, from sixty to ninety leagues east of the coast of Brazil. Next day but one we spoke a Portuguese brigantine from Rio Janeiro bound to Bahia de ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... the Female World as any Man in Great-Britain, tho' the chief of my Knowledge consists in this, that they are not to be known. WILL, immediately, with his usual Fluency, rambled into an Account of his own Amours. I am now, says he, upon the Verge of Fifty, (tho' by the way we all knew he was turned of Threescore.) You may easily guess, continued WILL., that I have not lived so long in the World without having had some thoughts of settling in it, as the Phrase is. To tell you truly, I have several times ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms and was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... for another week. You know, madame, how fond his Majesty is of the Louis Treize Belvedere, and the telescope erected by this monarch,—one of the best ever made hitherto. As if by inspiration, the King turned this instrument to the left towards that distant bend which the Seine makes round the verge of the Chatou woods. His Majesty, who observes every thing, noticed two bathers in the river, who apparently were trying to teach their much younger companion, a lad of fourteen or fifteen, to swim; doubtless, they had hurt him, for he got away from their grasp, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... country and showed that the inhabitants were very generally scattered over its surface. We could now look on such fires with indifference, so harmless were these natives compared with those on the Darling, and the smoke now ascended in equal abundance from the furthest verge of the horizon. It was impossible to discover the sources of streams or the direction of any ranges visible in the surrounding country; but upon the whole I concluded that the only practicable route for us homewards at that ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... Sidney was appointed to govern was one of great military and commercial importance. Flushing was the key to the navigation of the North Seas, ever since the disastrous storm of a century before, in which a great trading city on the outermost verge of the island had been swallowed bodily by the ocean. The Emperor had so thoroughly recognized its value, as to make special mention of the necessity for its preservation, in his private instructions ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... has been enumerating all the various vicissitudes of prosperity and adversity, of construction and destruction, of society and solitude, of love and hate, for which there is scope and verge enough in one short human life; and his conclusion is, as it always is in the earlier part of this book, that because there is such an endless diversity of possible occupation, and each of them lasts but for a little time, and its opposite has as good a right of existence as itself; ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... companionship, the terrible monotony of her life, the restless nights, the dank gloomy atmosphere in which she had her perpetual being, were, she told herself dully, doing their work. And she did not care. But if her brain was sodden, her nerves felt as if on the verge of explosion. She noticed that her hands were not steady, and sat for hours, wondering what was coming upon her. She cared ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... standing at the verge of the forest, and she half turned towards him with a little choking cry that asked, as plainly as words, "Is this all you have to say? Are you blind, that you cannot ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... down beside him and tenderly stroked his sweat-covered forehead, took his head into her lap, and did not seem to fear him terrible as he looked—like one of the damned on the verge of the grave. ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... heir of the monarchy. All his vast enterprises had failed. He suffered, to all appearance, a righteous retribution for his early passion for military glory. "He had invaded the rights of Holland; and Holland gave him no rest until, with the aid of the surrounding monarchies, France was driven to the verge of ruin. He had destroyed the cities of the Palatinate; and the Rhine provinces became a wall of fire against his armies. He had conspired against liberty in England; and it was from England that he experienced the most fatal opposition." His ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... everything else must be bought out of his slender income—L50 if a married man (unordained), or L30 if a bachelor. Often in the earlier days, while the Maoris were still unfriendly, even pork and potatoes were not to be had. More than once Henry Williams and his family were brought to the verge of starvation. ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... her that Henrietta should be so much excited about what had never after all been more than a potential love affair. To tell the truth, she thought it a trifle petty and not worthy the dignity of one on the verge of old age. She wanted to be sympathetic, and she was too kind to say anything that would wound, but Henrietta could see that Evelyn did not enter ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... these young people they were sporting upon the verge of a precipice, but its slippery edge was concealed by flowers. They were playing with the firebrands of death and thought they ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... I ran to the verge and peered down. I saw a great heap of frozen snow fallen on its edge and partly canted over, half covering a deep red stain which was turning black and horrid in the ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... and yet needful preliminaries you will be able to follow me in a careful study of the least, the very lowliest and smallest, of all living things. It lies on the very verge of our present powers of optical aid, and what we know concerning it will convince you that we are prepared with competent skill to attack the problem of the life-histories of the smallest living forms. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... another, into the hands of the successful revolutionists, or were seized by former slaves, Don Ignacio found it difficult to meet his royal master's demands. The fickle King, already childish to the verge of imbecility, gave scant thanks in return for the Rincon loyalty, and when at last, stripped of his fortune, deserted by all but the few Tory families who had the courage to remain in Cartagena until the close of the war, Don Ignacio received with sinking heart the news of the battle ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... strewed with doubts, and the limits of unbelief and mistrust have become extended on every side,—Inspiration, like an ill-defined boundary-line on a map, is suffered faintly to hem in, and enclose the utmost verge of the unhappy domain.—Whereas, we maintain that a belief in the Bible, as an Inspired Book, should, at the outset, prescribe a ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... with something that was evil and supernatural. They felt occasionally that the power of his eye was dreadful; and as it began to be whispered about that it was by its evil influence he had brought Alice Goodwin to the very verge of the grave for the purpose of getting at the property, which was to revert to him in case she should die without issue, there was not one of them who, on meeting him, either in or about the house, would run the ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... The good dame of the house, with an enormous cap, enormous petticoats, enormous earrings, and all the glaring good-humour of a countenance of domestic plenty and power, came to meet us on the threshold; and her reception of me was ardent, to the very verge of stranglulation. Nothing could exceed her rapture at the sight of me, or the fierceness of her embraces, except her indignation at the sight of my traveling companions. Her disgust at the mayor and his deputy—and certainly after their night trip they were not figures ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... luminous gleam flickering on the distant verge of the black disc, at once engrossed the complete attention of our travellers and set them to divining its course. It could not possibly be confounded with a star. Its glare was reddish, like that of a distant furnace on a dark night; it kept steadily increasing in size and brightness, ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... M.—Farewell to the Coombe of Coombes. I write while waiting for the fly, and shall post this at Weymouth, where we are to be met. We have been so happy here, that I could be sentimental, if Leonard were not tete-a-tete with me, and on the verge of that predicament. "Never so happy in his life," quoth he, "and never will be again—wonders when he shall gee this white cliff again." But, happily, in tumbles Aubrey with the big claw of a crab, which he insists on Leonard's wearing ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... finished everything according to his wish, the emperor, rising higher in spirit as his difficulties increased, and building such hopes on Fortune, which had not yet proved unfavourable to him, that he often pushed his boldness to the verge of temerity, unloaded some of the strongest of the vessels which were carrying provisions and warlike engines, and put on board of them eight hundred armed men; and keeping the main part of the fleet with ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... sobered by responsibility, making by sheer force of character something abiding and coherent out of the strange welter of warring factions from which Great Britain emerged as a united kingdom. Wales was a hot-bed of rebellion, Scotland the "plague-spot of the North," the Cinque Ports on the verge of going over to France. Only a strong man, with strong men under him, could have saved England then. Morlac of Gascony is not the easy reading which many people insist on in novels which deal with the past, and for this reason ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... evening when at the highest moment of her justifiable wrath Mr. Freddie would appear and nonchalantly suggest a "few eats for some chaps who'd dropped in" as casually as though Janet were not already on the verge of explosion. Of course she would prepare the lunch, stabbing the bread-saw viciously into the defenseless loaf and muttering dark things as she assembled something she called "old doves" on a big Sheffield ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... was characteristic, resembling his carriage in that it was slow and distinctive. He seemed deliberately to choose each word and to give to it all its value, syllable by syllable. His English was perfect to the verge of the pedantic; and his voice was metallic and harsh, touching at time, when his words were vested with some subtle or hidden significance, guttural depths which betrayed the Chinaman. He possessed uncanny dignity as of tremendous intellect ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... and build magnificent mansions whilst neglecting to drain the land and to repair the fences. They would spend lavishly on luxuries, but they would grudge food to the cattle and manure to the fields. Thus, with all their splendid possessions, the German heirs were always on the verge of bankruptcy. ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... pantry and gazed at Danny with sparkling eyes, while Pearlie, on the verge of tears, vainly tried to awaken in him some sense of the shame he was bringing on her. Camilla hurried to the pantry again, and brought another cookie. "I believe, Mrs. Francis, that Danny is hungry," she said. "Children sometimes act that ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... an immediate hammering of tables and jingling of glasses, accompanied with loud cries of "Mr. Green for a song! Mr. Green! Mr. Giglamps' song!" cries which nearly brought our hero to the verge of idiotcy. ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... During five months among these savages he suffered from 'cold, heat, smoke, and dogs,' and bore in silence the foul language of a medicine-man who made the missionary's person and teachings subjects of mirth. At times, too, he was on the verge of death from hunger. Early in the spring he returned to Quebec, after having narrowly escaped drowning as he Crossed the ice-laden St Lawrence in a frail canoe. He had made no converts; but he had gained valuable experience. ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... he used to tot up his liabilities for that accursed month, near whose yawning verge he already stood; and then, think of every penny coming to him, and what might be rescued and wrung from runaways and bankrupts whose bills he held, and whom he used to curse in his bed, with his fists and his teeth clenched, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... quiescent, only muttering fitfully; the next moment he called crisply for Fat Joe—he feared for his bridge—and Joe had to exert every iron muscle to hold him down. And always he spoke Barbara's name, with a poignant gentleness that left Miss Sarah on the verge of collapse. But he continued to live, through that day and the next night, even when the doctor shook his head and Fat Joe rose to go for the girl, as he had promised he would, in the last extremity. He continued to live, and with the coming of the second dawn suddenly he was ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... and Ned, as to the lawfulness of the war which the English buccaneers carried on with the colonies of a nation at peace with their own, the Spaniard saying that they approached very nearly to the verge of piracy. Ned had never given the subject much consideration before. He had done as others did, and had regarded the Spaniards as lawful prey, their cruelty towards the natives forming, in the eyes of the English sailors, a justification for any treatment ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... the sailors' tales of vast, undiscovered lands beyond the seas of Japan must have acted on his imagination like a match to gunpowder.[1] Already he was dreaming those imperial conquests which Russia still dreams: of pushing his realm to the southernmost edge of Europe, to the easternmost verge of Asia, to the doorway of the Arctic, to the very threshold of the {5} Chinese capital. Already his Cossacks had scoured the two Siberias like birds of prey, exacting tribute from the wandering tribes of Tartary, of Kamchatka, of the Pacific, of the Siberian races in the northeasternmost ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... even held out of her entering into a foreign alliance against us. So much for our domestic—now for our foreign condition and prospects. He would see Europe exhibiting serious symptoms of distrust and hostility: France, irritated and trifled with, on the verge of actual war with us: our criminally neglected differences with America, fast ripening into the fatal bloom of war: the very existence of the Canadas at stake. In India, the tenure by which we hold it in the very act of being loosened; our troops shedding their blood in vain, in the prosecution ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... o' li!" And his hand was raised for the blow, and his teeth were clinched in deadly hate. He paused for a moment, and then pinioned the Tory's arms, and, with one rapid stride, dragged him to the verge of the rock, and held him quivering ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... necessities. His first approaches were always made under the semblance of friendship; but his victims soon repented their imprudent confidence when they felt themselves in his power. Unrestrained by a sense of honour or the feelings of humanity, he felt no scruple in pursuing his interest to the very verge of what the law would call fraud. Even his own relations complained that he duped them without scruple; and none but strangers to his character, or persons compelled by necessity, would have any dealings with this man. Of what advantage to him, or ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Gardens, Miss Gibson was at home, and to my unspeakable relief, Mrs. Hornby was not. My veneration for that lady's moral qualities was excessive, but her conversation drove me to the verge of insanity—an insanity not entirely free ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... whether the park has a western extremity. You reach it at last, and proceed between the green fields of Constitution Hill, when you find yourself at the corner of Hyde Park, a much more spacious pleasure-ground. You proceed westward in Hyde Park until you are weary, when you find yourself on the verge of Kensington Gardens, a vast extent of ancient woods and intervening lawns, to which the eye sees no limit, and in whose walks it seems as if the whole population of London might lose itself. ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... through small streams. Our horses were high in mettle, and we spared them not. By taking a wide detour we had outflanked the French pickets, and were almost out of all risk, when suddenly on coming to the verge of rather a steep hill, we perceived beneath us a strong cavalry picket standing around a watch-fire; their horses were ready saddled, the men accoutred, and quite prepared for the field. While we conversed together in whispers as to the course to follow, our deliberations were very ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the floor, candlesticks rested on the chimney-piece, and there was no meaningless bric-a-brac, nor other objects of suspected beauty to distract attention. As you enter the house, the library occupies the large right-hand corner room. It was simple to the verge of austerity, and the farthest possible removed from a "collection." There was no effort at arrangement—they were just books, for use and for their own sake. The portfolio of fugitive notes and possible material for future use was interesting, suggesting the source of ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... of written Constitutional Liberty it is reserved for us to teach the World that, under the American Stars and Stripes, Slavery marches in solemn procession; that, under the American flag, Slavery is protected to the utmost verge of acquired territory; that under the American banner, the name of Freedom is to be faintly heard, the songs of Freedom faintly sung; that, while Garibaldi, Victor Emanuel, every great and good man in the World, ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... and Monroe, looking around, read the whole situation at a glance. Masterson still suspected him, and was listening! Monroe frankly laughed and made a little sound, the mere whisper of a whistle, as he met Masterson's baffled look with one of cool mockery; it was nonchalant to the verge of insolence, and enraged the Southerner, strong in his convictions of right, as a blow could not have done. For a blow a man could ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... and dimly aware that to be bored was out of harmony with something or other, Helen was on the verge of thinking, but, as I have said, escaped the snare in a very direct and simple fashion: she went fast asleep, and never woke till her maid brought her the cup of kitchen-tea from which the inmates of some houses derive the strength ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... ruin—very true, however—everything in the recital had amused Dorsenne. He knew enough Italian to appreciate the untranslatable passages of the language of the man of the people. He was again on the verge of laughter, when the fresco madonna, as he sometimes designated the young girl, handed him an envelope the address upon which soon converted his smile into an undisguised expression of annoyance. He pushed aside the day's ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... multitude. In this condition, his veins swollen, and the perspiration standing in large beads upon his forehead, he took one fearful and agonizing glance upon his past life, and felt, now that he stood on the verge of eternity, that the retrospect was like a glimpse of hell. The change that came over his features was frightful beyond all belief; his face became nearly black, and his eyes, which grew bloodshot almost in a few minutes, had, notwithstanding, a sharp delirious expression ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... crystal wall of Heaven; which, opening wide, Rolled inward, and a spacious gap disclosed Into the wasteful deep: The monstrous sight Struck them with horrour backward, but far worse Urged them behind: Headlong themselves they threw Down from the verge of Heaven; eternal wrath Burnt after them to the bottomless pit. Hell heard the unsufferable noise, Hell saw Heaven ruining from Heaven, and would have fled Affrighted; but strict Fate had cast too deep Her dark foundations, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... adventures are more rational. He catches a jester—of admirably foolish expression- -putting a match to a powder-magazine; he is wonderfully preserved in mountain avalanches and hurricanes; reins up his horse on the verge of an abyss; falls through ice in Holland and shows nothing but his head above it; cures himself of a fever by draughts of water, to the great disgust of his physicians, and escapes a fire bursting out of ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more news for you,' said the orator. 'The cause of liberty is spreading, deepening, strengthening. We are on the verge of civil war. Latest information from Ballarat, Bendigo, and all the large centres shows that the hour of strenuous resistance, of resistance to the death, has almost come. Even now it may have struck. As I speak, the men of Ballarat may be shedding their blood to rescue our adopted ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... made his celebrated swing around the circle in a private train delivering hot speeches in defence of his conduct. The man engaged me to write out the notes from his reading. He came in loaded and on the verge of incoherence. We started in, but about every two minutes I would have to scratch out whole paragraphs and insert the same things said in another and better way. He would frequently change words, always to the betterment of the speech. I couldn't understand this, and when he got ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... and the most cherished day-dreams of very early years would probably convince them that the strongest taste for tragedy comes before one's teens, and inclines to the melodramatic; that sentimentality (of some kind) is grateful to the verge of mawkishness; and that simple tastes are rather a result of culture and experience than ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... deficiency in the energy-arousing viscera which brings a lowered coenesthesia, a lessened vigor and lowered mood. In youth the state of the organs brings a state of well feeling; in old age there is a constant feeling of a low balance of energy and mood, and the person is always on the verge of unpleasant feeling. In the great change periods of life—at puberty and the climacteric (or the menopause)—the sudden change in the activity of the sex organs may produce great alterations[2] in the coenaesthesia and therefore in the energy ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... understood, so to be judged, and only so far to be credited. The mathematical he made, I say, exception of: number and measure he believed in to the extent of their significance, but that significance, he was never weary of reminding you, was slender to the verge of nonentity. Science was true, because it told us almost nothing. With a few abstractions it could deal, and deal correctly; conveying honestly faint truths. Apply its means to any concrete fact of life, and this high dialect of the wise ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rocks and rusted bars with leaf and flower. He could not echo with his heart the fiendish sentence of eternal fire. In spite of book and creed, he read "between the lines" the words of tenderness and love, with promises for all the world. Above, beyond the dogmas of his church—humane even to the verge of heresy—causing some to doubt his love of God because he failed to hate his unbelieving fellow-men, he labored for the welfare of mankind, and to his work gave up his life ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... down to the verge of the woods, where I saw a light, we entered a large bark wigwam, where he said he often slept during ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... searched the rigid lines of his face in astonishment. In their struggle to establish the impossible she had been so far ahead, so greatly the more confident and daring, had tempted him to such heights, scorning every dizzy verge, that now, when she turned quite back from their adventure, humbly confessing it too hard, she could not understand how he should continue to set himself doggedly toward it. Perhaps, too, she trusted unconsciously ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... been pointed out by any one, but surely it is one of the most appalling lapses of genius which could be indicated. Even the beautiful song in the third scene of the first act, "There's a woman like a dew-drop, she's so purer than the purest," is, in the circumstances, nearly over the verge which divides the sublime from the ridiculous. No wonder that, on the night the play was first acted, Mertoun's song, as he clambered to his mistress's window, caused a sceptical laugh to ripple lightly among the tolerant auditory. It is with diffidence ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... and promises of the morning, Julia went off. Eleanor sat a little while thinking; not long; and met Mr. Carlisle the next time he came, with precisely the same sweet self-possession, the unchanged calm cool distance, which drove that gentleman to the last verge of passion and patience. But he was master of himself and bided his time, and talked ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... to the literary contemplation of virtue that was clearly and positively defined, and of Sin, that invariably commenced with a capital letter. That this man, in his awful condition, hovering on the verge of eternity, should allow himself to be attracted by—but it ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... like a cucumber; but he paws, and tosses, and moves about, pretends to eat, to nibble here, and switch his tail there, and so manoeuvres as to keep the running quail away from the unprotected edges of the field. When they get to the verge protected by the net, they begin to take alarm; they are probably not very certain about the peculiar looking 'old cow' behind them, and running along the net, they see the decoy quails evidently feeding ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... younger trees seemed to revive, and a stranger passing over the ground to-day would scarcely believe that fire had been feeding on those woods for a fortnight only a few seasons back. A group of tall, blasted hemlocks, on the verge of the wood, is the striking monument of the event. The evergreens generally suffer more than other trees, and for some cause or other the fire continued busy at that point for several days. We repeatedly passed along the highway at the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... a lonely night of anguish; Quite too clamorous is that idly-feigning Couch, with wreaths, with a Syrian odour oozing; Then that pillow alike at either utmost Verge deep-dinted asunder, all the trembling 10 Play, the strenuous unsophistication; All, O prodigal, all alike ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... limit, margin, border, edge, line, term, bound, enclosure, marches, termination, bourn, frontier, marge, verge. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... bloody towels, and in a shallow glass tray was a small object like a damaged piece of earthworm. "Not a bit too soon," said the surgeon, holding this up in his forceps for my inspection. "It's on the very verge of perforation." I affected a detached and scientific interest, but the prevailing impression in my mind was that this was a fragment from very nearly the centre of ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... interests of farmers and landlords by putting high duties upon imported food, had consigned to the poor-houses of Great Britain and Ireland more than two millions of paupers, and reduced two millions more to the verge of despair. John Bright was the great orator of the movement for the repeal of those laws. After six years of the best sustained agitation ever witnessed in a free country, the farmers and land-owners were not yet convinced. ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... half-asleep. Ritson, apparently for want of something better to do, was seated on the main-topmast cross-trees, with the ship's telescope in his hand, scrutinising the motions of the distant schooner, whose tiny "royal" was now visible from the deck, gleaming white as snow on the extreme verge of the horizon. ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... male citizen twenty-one years old, who had resided six months in the State and who had within one year paid taxes or a road assessment, or had been enrolled and served in the militia. Although, said Van Buren, this report is on the verge of universal suffrage, it did not cheapen the invaluable right, by conferring it indiscriminately upon every one, black or white, who would condescend to accept it. He was opposed, he said, to a precipitate and unexpected prostration of all qualifications, and looked with dread upon the great ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... of the little village are busy. One is clearing a spot on the verge of the forest for his homestead; another is hewing the trunk of a fallen pine tree, in order to build himself a dwelling; a third is hoeing in his field of Indian corn. Here comes a huntsman out of the woods, dragging a bear which he has shot, and shouting to the neighbors to lend ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to his feet and turned his face westward towards the sea with outstretched arms, and a look and gesture of utter yearning gave poignancy and spirit to the careless, sleepy grace of his face and figure. He seized the boy's arm. "See now," he cried, his voice trembling upon the verge of music, "it is nearly twelve years that I have been a wanderer, shorn of my strength and my glory! Look you, boy, at the line of hills yonder. Behind those hills lie the blue sea-ridges, and still beyond, lies the land ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact—never, I believe, noticed in the schools—that, in our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember. And thus how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia's eyes, have I felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression—felt it approaching—yet not quite be mine—and so ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Scott never visited, and never saw except from the ocean. There is a beach upon that coast, just above Cockburnspath, that might well have suggested to him the quicksand and the final catastrophe. I saw it when the morning sun was shining upon it and upon the placid waters just rippling on its verge; and even in the glad glow of a summer day it was grim with silent menace and mysterious with an air of sinister secrecy. In the preparation of this piece for the stage all the sources and associations of the subject were considered; and the ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... years,—the times when the three children were born to them. Edgar was born Jan. 19, 1809, and his mother appeared upon the stage again February 10, and played to the end of the season almost incessantly. The family were poor to the verge of destitution at all times, and the little woman had need of a brave heart when the children came crowding into the poor unfurnished nest. One cannot doubt that there was much of pain and worry in the little creature's heart before the birth of Edgar; and no doubt the paint ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... any consideration of the supernatural world. On Hamlet's brooding there breaks no ray from Christian revelation. No hope of a hereafter soothes Lear as he bends over dead Cordelia. Macbeth, hesitating on the verge of crime, throws out of the scale any dread of future retribution,—assure him only ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... eventually wash the city walls of Florence. A few steps farther, travelling south, we pass into the valley of the Tiber, and, after traversing a barren upland region for a couple of hours, reach the verge of the descent upon Caprese. Here the landscape assumes a softer character. Far away stretch blue Apennines, ridge melting into ridge above Perugia in the distance. Gigantic oaks begin to clothe the stony hillsides, and little by little a fertile mountain district of chestnut-woods ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... such pursuit I too must think of adopting," replied Fitzroy, "else I shall sink into the gulph of ennuit to the verge of which I am fast approaching. Independent of the frequent ruinous consequences of the gaming-table, I have taken a dislike to its associates, and therefore abandoned their society; nor will you be surprised at my having ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... inevitably the accompaniment of human weakness and crime, the prevailing discontent seems groundless. But of course an agitation so widespread, so much in earnest, so capable of evoking sacrifice, even to the verge of starvation and the risk of life, must have some reason in human nature. Even an illusion—and men are as ready to die for an illusion as for a reality—cannot exist without ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... mankind is conducting a series of elaborate experiments—always on the verge of the great discovery but never quite making it—always thinking that the secret is about to be revealed but never quite uncovering it—always failing in his experiments but always finding in the process something that leads him, with ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... Schoenhausen the more oppressive I found the thought of entering upon the old loneliness once more, for who knows how long. Pictures of a wasted past arose in me as though they would banish me from you. I was on the verge of tears, as when, after a school vacation, I caught sight of Berlin's ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... indifferentism in those days—at any rate amongst Whig divines. But in most of them one is liable to come at any moment across one of those strange sallies to which Gray alluded, when he said of the effect of Sterne's sermons upon a reader that "you often see him tottering on the verge of laughter, and ready to throw his periwig in the face ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... highest pastures we find, further, the alpine accentor (Accentor collaris) and the alpine pipit (Anthus spipoletta). The crag-martin (Cotyle rupestris) haunts lofty cliffs in the alpine region. On the upper verge of the pine forests, or in the scrubby vegetation just beyond, the following are not uncommon — black woodpecker (Picus martius), ring-ousel (Turdus torquatus), Bonelli's warbler (Phylloscopus Bonellii), crested til (Parus cristatus), citril ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... "oratory in the house of Bishop Skinner," there are gathered seventeen bishops and near two hundred clergy, together with a vast congregation of the faithful. What do they represent? Not what those who came together a century before had represented; not one Church brought almost to the verge of extinction, and another threatened with even deeper ruin. No! but they represent a Church that has emerged from the darkness that shrouded it in Scotland; a Church that has risen from what seemed but shattered fragments in the United States; the great ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... and hovering on the verge of Mythus and Fairyland, there is a ballad called "Finn the ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
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