"Abject" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arose and going inside the cabin closed the door. After that the dog lay in abject misery so deep that two big tears squeezed from his eyes and rolled down his face. To be shut out was worse than the blow. He did not take the trouble to arise from the wet leaves covering the cold earth, but closing his eyes went ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... in precipitating the crisis of the situation with magical promptness, for Caroline sprang to her feet, turned with a shudder and buried her head in Andrew's hunting coat somewhere near the left string for cartridge loops. She clung to him in abject terror. ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... one of the soldiers. "We aint going to hurt you. Git up from yer knees!" For St. John had indeed fallen upon his knees in his abject terror. ...
— Young Captain Jack - The Son of a Soldier • Horatio Alger and Arthur M. Winfield
... fort of Meerut sheltered him for the time, but in that fort he was ere long surrounded. The investing army was large, and, as the chances of escape diminished, the Pathan's audacity at length began to fail, and he offered terms of the most entire and abject submission. These being sternly rejected, he prepared for the worst. On the 21st of December a general assault was delivered by the Mahratta army; against which Gholam Kadir and his men defended themselves ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... rushed forth, and after the manner of his caste, was abject in his apologies for the absence of Prince Adalbert. . . . He had taken every precaution. . . . All had been in vain. . . . The infatuated unfortunate would steal away to the ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... For she had utterly failed to attract his fancy. He was fastidious, and all he had seen in her had been the sensuous charm of a sinuous grace which, to him, was no charm at all. He had almost hated her for the abject adoration that young Eric's eyes had held. Her art, wonderful though he admitted it to be, had wholly failed to enslave him. He had looked her once—and once only—in the eyes, judged her, ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... Jimmy, "a man living like that, in abject, abominable terror, in black funk—keeping it up, all day and half the night, for five solid weeks—before ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... itself. There are such hours at any rate for some. Whether they come to all mankind I know not; whether the squalid Andaman or the hideous Fuegian ever feel them I know not; nay, I know not whether they ever come, whether they ever can come, to the wretched outcasts of earth's abject poverty and fathomless degradation; whether they ever come, whether they ever can come, to the cruel and the proud, to the malicious and the mean, to the cynical and discontented; yet, if they come not ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... see in all his wanderings so much abject, repulsive misery among human beings in the most heathen lands, as that which startles him in his civilized Christian home, for nowhere are the extremes of wealth and poverty so painfully presented. ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... him that begot, And the travail of her that bore, Behold they are evermore As warp and weft in our lot. We are children of splendour and flame, Of shuddering, also, and tears. Magnificent out of the dust we came, And abject ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... collision with Sam Hardwicke his cowardice showed itself too plainly to be mistaken. Now there is a curious thing about cowards of this sort. When they are once found out they lose the little appearance of courage that they have taken such pains to maintain, and become at once the most abject and shameless dastards imaginable. That was what happened to Jake Elliott. When Sam conquered him so effectually on the occasion of the boot stealing, he lost all the pride he had and all his meanness seemed to come to the surface. If he had had ...
— Captain Sam - The Boy Scouts of 1814 • George Cary Eggleston
... of abject slavery was in full force when the railroads ousted many of the small operators, and largely by pressure of power took possession of the mines. In vain did the miners' unions implore the railroad magnates for redress ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... frightened as anybody. He stood six feet one in his stockings, and was a match for any two in the country side, and yet, I am happy to think, he was as bad as any one. As for me, to say that my heart became like water and my knees like soft wax, is to express in mild words my state of abject terror. There was no need to inquire what the maids thought, for smothered shrieks, louder and louder as each peal of knocks vibrated through the little house, proclaimed sufficiently their ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... the same," said he, "Madam. And, albeit I neither be earl, lord, nor baron within it, yet has God made me—how abject that ever I be in your eyes—a profitable member within the same. Yea, Madam, to me it appertains no less to forewarn of such things as may hurt it, if I foresee them, than it does to any of the nobility; for both my vocation and conscience craves plainness ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... dugazon, does not even try to listen; her eyes wandering listlessly over the audience. The calorous secret out, and in her possession, how she stumbles over her train to the back of the stage, there to pose in abject patience and awkwardness, while the gallant baritone, touching his sword, and flinging his cape over his shoulder, defies the world and the tenor, who is just recovering from his "ut de poitrine" ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... it is nothing but slavery. I found it just as hard to be beaten over the head with a piece of iron in New York as it was in Virginia. Whips and chains are everywhere necessary to degrade and brutalize the slave, in order to reduce him to that abject and humble state which Slavery requires. Nor is the effect much less disastrous on the man who holds supreme control over the soul and body of his fellow beings. Such unlimited power, in almost every instance ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... eat, plying him with food and then with question after question about the trip, about Barbara Redding and about Molly's going to school. Mormon made abject apology for talking too much and Sandy told how close a shave it ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... settlement—so the report went—at the Temple of Apollo.[172] To the actual conversation there were only two witnesses, Cluvius Rufus[173] and Silius Italicus,[174] but the expression of their faces was watched from a distance. Vitellius was said to look abject and demoralized: Sabinus showed less sign of ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... sending some intelligent surgeon to live amongst them. They at present pant for the pruning-hand of civilization and the arts; love and adore us as beings of a superior nature, but gently upbraid us with having left them in the same abject state they ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... and the exercise of delegated power tyrannical. If they have either spirit or talent, they lift themselves above their situation; but when they cannot do this, they are, in my estimation, the most abject of all classes—gipsies and beggars not excepted. Mr Cherfeuil was, in himself, a mine of learning; but he delivered it out from the dark cavities of his mind, encumbered with so much ore, and in such misshaped masses, that ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... if I "didn't like it," meaning the state of things in Gombroon, I might "abdicate." Yes, I knew that. I might abdicate; and, once having cut the connection between myself and the poor abject islanders, I might seem to have no further interest in the degradation that affected them. After such a disruption between us, what was it to me if they had even three tails apiece? Ah, that was fine talking; but this connection with my poor subjects had grown up so slowly and so genially, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... decided that bishops must not be invested by kings with the ring and staff of their office, because by such investiture they were the king's vassals, Henry decided to invite Anselm to receive the archbishopric afresh from the King's hands by a new act of investiture. To Anselm the abject submission of the bishops to the Red King had been a painful spectacle; and now Henry was making a demand that would emphasise the royal supremacy, and the demand was intolerable and impossible. Again Anselm stood practically alone in his resistance to the royal will, and again the question ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... unless their morals be fixed on the same immutable principles as those of man, no authority can make them discharge it in a virtuous manner. They may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent. ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... of it," the boy exclaimed as his eyes encountered an abject, huddled-up figure seated next a ragged, ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... have demanded the most abject and degrading obedience. In order to please them, man must lay his very face in the dust. Of course, they have always been partial to the people who created them, and they have generally shown their partiality by assisting those ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... an' they just keep a waitin' an' a waitin' till they starve, cause you was mean enough to kill the mother bird just for fun." Ham's hat had long since come off, and he stood with downcast eyes, not knowing what to say. The old lady looked him up and down with a look of abject pity and ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... all," said Rose; then putting her pretty palms together, and casting a look of abject supplication on Edouard, ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... 1675 John Eliot, from the midst of his work among the Indians, warned the governor against the sale of Indians taken in war, on the ground that "the selling of souls is dangerous merchandise," and "with a bleeding and burning passion" remonstrated against "the abject condition of the enslaved Africans." In 1700 that typical Puritan, Judge Samuel Sewall, published his pamphlet on "The Selling of Joseph," claiming for the negroes the rights of brethren, and predicting that there would be "no ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... himself wholly of this cruel suspicion. And yet ... he could never clear himself of her having suspected him; he understood that, and it seemed to him a terrible thing. No matter how humble her contrition, how abject her apologies, nothing could ever get back of what was written, or change the fact that she had believed him capable ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... spending their utmost strength to placate him, while the naked spirit of murder moved in every heart among them. At the tail of the brace, Conroy, with his cuts stanched, pulled with them. His abject eyes, showing the white in sidelong glances, watched the great, squat figure of the mate ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... Wait until the 1st of February, and you shall see such an army enter Rome as never before invaded it. I assert that within three miles of this place, at the gates of this capital of Christendom, human beings are living lives more abject than that ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... unworthy. The voices and the concert of voices of angels and men be to Thee; the concert of all thy saints in heaven and of all Thy creatures in heaven and on earth; and of me, beneath their feet an unworthy and wretched sinner, Thy abject creature; my praise also, now, in this day and hour, and every day till my last breath, and till the end of this world, and then to all eternity, where they cease not saying, To Him who loved ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... got up, went over to the wall, leaned his arms upon it and hid his face on them. There were tears in his eyes. At that moment he was suffering more than she was. His soul was rent by an abject sense of loss, an abject sense of guilty impotence and shame. It was frightful that he could not be what he wished to be, what he had thought he was. He longed to comfort her and could not do anything ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... his webs to the great manufacturer, and I saw my mother anxiously awaiting his return to know whether a new web was to be obtained or that a period of idleness was upon us. It was burnt into my heart then that my father, though neither "abject, mean, nor vile," as Burns ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... who followed her into the room, carrying her impedimenta, wore the bored expression of the R.A. who is expected to admire the work of an outsider. He was the abject slave of his good-natured wife—she was good-natured, in spite of her love of scandal—and his only fault from her point of view, and his greatest one in the eyes of people in general, lay in an unfortunate habit of thinking aloud, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... no, Mr. John Effingham. I was disgusted at the meanness of their rites, and really shocked at the abject manner in which the people knelt on the cold damp stones, as if they ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... important. One must admit that his position was not one to encourage impartiality in his presentation of facts, and that the imperial favour was not won by plain speaking; nevertheless we have before us a man who could not obliterate himself enough to play the abject flatterer always, and he gives us the reverse, too, of his brilliant picture, as we shall ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... Barney, his voice rising hoarse, "you would all of you laugh at that brute ruin the name and honour of a lonely girl!" He walked up and down before the group which stood huddled in the corner in abject terror, more like a wild beast than a man. "You're not fit to live! You're beasts of prey! No decent girl is safe from you!" His voice rose loud and thin and harsh. He was fast losing hold of himself. His ghastly face, bloody and horribly disfigured, made an appalling ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... confession, made a hazardous attempt with the Turks; it was successful, and since that time the necessary tragical dignity has been allowed to this barbarous people, among whom the customs and habits of the rudest despotism and the most abject slavery are often united in the same person, and nothing is known of love, but the most luxurious sensuality; while, on the other hand, it has been refused to the Europeans, notwithstanding that their religion, their sense of honour, and their respect for the female sex, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... come, doing futile things of which he was ashamed. He was ashamed of his two words to Dr. Buzzard; he went out of the shop as soon as he had crumpled up the paper again and thrust it into his pocket. It had been an abject little exposure of dreadful impossible passion. He appeared in fact to be too ashamed to come back. He had once more left town, and a first week elapsed, and a second. He had had naturally to return to the real mistress of his fate; she had insisted—she knew how to insist, ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... near the hearth to greet Monty, and shouted with the manner of a chieftain for fuel to be piled on instantly—"For a great man comes!" he announced to the rafters. And the kahveh servants, seven sons of the owner of the place, were swift and abject in the matter of obeisance. They were Turks. All Turks are demonstrative in adoration of whoever is reputed great. Monty ignored them, and Kagig came down the length of the room to offer him a hand on terms of ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... lips were apart, but he failed to observe that the teeth they revealed were creditably white; her cotton-gloved hand repressed her fluttering heart, but he did not see its tumultuous throbbing. He gulped as he said, with a fallen jaw and a look of abject misery that pierced ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... THAT—the Arguellos—if there's a hound of them living—might go down on their knees to have their name borne by such a creature! By the Eternal, sir, if one of them dared to cross her path with a word that wasn't abject—yes, sir, ABJECT, I'd wipe his dust off the earth and send it back to his ancestors before he knew where he was, or my ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... Wretched, abject, his uneasy glance shifted first from one to the other of his patrons, who were now his judges, and for aught he knew would be his executioners as well. The gambler glared back at him with an expression ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... Oxford scholar, is of course a worshipper of Charles, and a hater of Puritans. We do not wish to raise a prejudice against so young a man by quoting any of the ridiculous, and often somewhat abject, rant with which he addresses their majesties on their return from Scotland, on the queen's delivery, on the birth of the Duke of York, and so forth; for in that he did but copy the tone of grave divines and pious prelates; but he, unfortunately ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... pathetic, this pair of eager eyes suddenly turned inward; this discovery of an empty soul; this comparison with his grandfather's golden hoard; and this pitiful confession of abject poverty. I felt sorry for him, just as I felt sorry for the lady in the tramcar. The lady in the tramcar looked into a purse that she thought to be empty, and suffered all the agony of a great loss. The young fellow in the debating ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... that we could love such a One—a God who had predestined all human sin and woe, who had fore-ordered things in such a manner that unnumbered hapless souls were doomed evermore to stumble and to suffer. Such a God might inspire a shuddering, wondering, abject awe, but never affection. Only a good God, aiming at the evolution of goodness, the making of character, could have endowed us with freedom, for only through such an endowment can such ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... to the inner truth of the individual soul that is made the spring of action, but obedience to an external authority, to a book, to a prophet, to a judge or to a king. In judges, to woman in various ways is given an exalted position; she is not the abject slave or unclean vessel, the drudge, the servile sinner, the nonentity, as depicted in other parts ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... in thought with such a possibility; in spite of which there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his long riddle the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his situation would be an abject anticlimax. It would represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of which his existence could only become the most grotesques of failures. He had been far from holding it a failure—long as he had waited ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... electrics lit up that distressful palace of all the luxuries, and they fared sumptuously, swinging on through the emptiness of abject desolation. Now they heard the swish of a water-tank, and the guttural voice of a Chinaman, the clink-clink of hammers that tested the Krupp steel wheels, and the oath of a tramp chased off the rear-platform; now the solid crash of coal ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... great sights of the world—something unique and apart, something the like of which we shall never see again. And awed as we are by the mountains' unsurpassed magnificence, we do not bow down in any abject way before them. We are not impressed by our littleness in comparison. They have, indeed, shown us that the world is something greater than we knew. But they have shown us also that we too are something greater than we knew. The peaks in their dazzling altitude ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... body-guard, and took his seat on the Rostra in a curule chair. Tiridates and his suite were then introduced between the two long lines of soldiers; and the prince, advancing to the Rostra, made an oration, which (as reported by Dio) was of a sufficiently abject character. Nero responded proudly; and then the Armenian prince, ascending the Rostra by a way constructed for the purpose, and sitting at the feet of the Roman Emperor, received from his hand, after his speech had been interpreted to the assembled Romans, the coveted ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... destruction. To such desperate beings the stock operator—the market-maker—is the straw to save them from drowning, and to him they turn as the one possible source of aid and hope. I only knew these men at sight's end, but they knew me and were sure in their abject plight that I could help them—by what wizardry they never stopped to think. They were terribly certain that unless the market turned, their brokers must have additional margin or their stock would be thrown overboard, sinking prices ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... of it, returned to Peking, having sent word to Feyanku to pursue Galdan with unrelenting vigor, there being no security while he remained at large. The recent powerful chief was now at the end of his resources. He fled for safety from camp to camp. He sent an envoy to Peking with an abject offer to surrender. He made new overtures to the Russians, and sought in a dozen ways to escape from his implacable enemies. But Feyanku kept up the pursuit, ceasing only when word came to him that the fugitive was dead. Anxiety, hardships, chagrin, ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... mature, was so merry-hearted an individual that he found all delight in interminable romps with Scraps. So strong was the play-instinct in him, as well as was his constitution strong, that he continually outplayed Scraps to abject weariness, so that he could only lie on the deck and pant and laugh through air-draughty lips and dab futilely in the air with weak forepaws at Michael's continued ferocious- acted onslaughts. And this, despite the ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... with her was gone the secret of his treason. Then he began to doubt. I had MEANS to penetrate all his thoughts, as well as to know his acts. Then he became a slave to a horrible fear. He fled in abject terror to a convent. They still existed in Paris; and behind the walls of Jacobins the wretch thought himself secure. Poor fool! I had but to set one of my somnambulists to sleep. Her spirit went forth and spied the shuddering wretch in his cell. She described the street, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... on one ear, followed immediately by a sharp slap on the side of her head from the big grey cat, sent her reeling dizzily away from the dish. She recovered herself and turned in abject terror, her one thought to escape from this uncalled for abuse, but directly in her path stood the black-and-white cat with lashing tail and flaming eyes. Another turn, and she was again confronted by the grey, crouching angrily ...
— The Book of the Cat • Mabel Humphrey and Elizabeth Fearne Bonsall
... a mystery deeper still—the strange deception he seemed to impose on the dead man's acquaintances. And this filled him, somehow, with the most abject dread and fear. Brassfield seemed to have been a well-known man; for porters and clerks in New York do not call the obscure countryman by name. To step out on the street was, perhaps, to run into the very arms of some one who would penetrate the disguise. Yet he could not long remain in this ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... I left the water, but a few seconds had elapsed and the saurian was not two yards from me. The abject horror and hopelessness of that moment was something I can never forget. Suddenly Lekas came floundering through the mud; a second more, and he perceived my enemy when almost within reach ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... have not to learn that, though a stanch republican in America, he was the most abject courtier in France; and though a violent defender of liberty and equality on the other side of the Atlantic, no man bowed lower to usurpation, or revered despotism more, in Europe. Without talents, and almost without education, he thinks intrigues negotiations, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... fearlessly, asking for shorter hours and lower wages for workers, as it pointed out labor's valuable contribution to the development of the country. It also called attention to the vicious contrasts in large cities, where many lived in tumbledown tenements in abject poverty while the few, with more wealth than they knew what to do with, spent ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... purchase of quitclaim for personal service. But the manifestation and expression of sympathy may make the gift of immeasurably more worth and efficacy. Considerate courtesy, delicacy, and gentleness are essential parts of beneficence. There are very few so abject that they do not feel insulted and degraded by what is coldly, grudgingly, superciliously, or chidingly bestowed; while the thoughtful tenderness which never forgets the sensibilities of those whom it relieves, inspires comfort, hope, and courage, arouses ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... However clumsy and meaningless it may seem, it is still a solemn performance. It gives public expression, under very strange forms, to the idea that has found its most perfect utterance in the German philosopher's[8] definition of "abject reliance upon God;" whereas in its lowest form it is still "a vague and awful feeling about unity in the powers of nature, an unconscious acknowledgment of the mysterious link connecting the material world with a realm ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... overturned the post to which Cox was being bound. He could not tell very much about the execution done by the balls, for at first he believed it was some new form of torture which the savages had invented; but when the painted crew fled across the river in abject fear, leaving him comparatively at liberty, he began to understand that the comrades whom he had wickedly wronged were doing what they ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... down as an unfailing and universal axiom, that "all pride is abject and mean." It is always an ignorant, lazy, or cowardly acquiescence in a false appearance of excellence, and proceeds not from consciousness of our attainments, but insensibility ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... rubbed his eyes. It would not be winked out. There was a loud crash of thunder and a furious dash of rain against the window; then another blinding stroke of lightning. He drew the clothing over his head in abject terror. Again the thunder rolled as if in savage comment on the writing on ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... needs of the other departments, will naturally take the word of its administrative head, especially since he desires the same freedom. This was actually the case in Sacramento, Cal., where the commission plan was tried for fifteen years and given up as an abject failure. Says the Hon. Clinton White of that city: "In almost every instance, the board soon came to the understanding that each man was to be let alone in the management of the department assigned to him. This ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... them collapse into utter farce. Disgusted by their intrusion on his privacy, the Priapus adopts a simple but exceedingly vulgar expedient to alarm these appalling hags. In an instant they fall into the most abject terror, suspend their incantations, and, tucking up their skirts, make off for the more comfortable quarters of the city as fast as their trembling limbs can carry them—Canidia, the great enchantress, dropping her ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... middle of the room, her hands clasped tragically over her heart, her mouth open for another shriek, stood Aunt Maria, trembling. Stripped of her regal trappings she made an abject picture; the snowy puff lay on her bureau and from under a nightcap, now sadly awry, straggled wisps of yellow-gray hair. Her round body was warmly clad in a humble flannelette nightdress, high-necked and long-sleeved. ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... perceives himself discovered, when he makes one desperate and final effort to escape, but ceases all struggling as you come up, and behaves in a manner that stamps him a very timid warrior,—cowering to the earth with a mingled look of shame, guilt, and abject fear. A young farmer told me of tracing one with his trap to the border of a wood, where he discovered the cunning rogue trying to hide by embracing a small tree. Most animals, when taken in a trap, show fight; but Reynard ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... to own it, but I was frightened, downright frightened. I quailed and I quaked. The sight of Sir Charles stepping out of the study window filled me with abject rapture. Metaphorically speaking, my craven soul squirmed at his heels. He was to me as a strong tower and house of defence.—But look here, Damaris, joking apart, tell me weren't you disturbed, didn't you hear any strange noises ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... ourselves, as soon as the tackles were hooked into the jollyboat's ringbolts I ordered the four savages in the canoe to leave her and come on deck to help to hoist in the boat; and this they did in a state of the most abject fear and trembling. Then I sent them for'ard to the windlass to assist in breaking out the anchor; and it was not until the schooner was actually adrift that I permitted them to begin the transfer ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... Jew covers His race for me. These were reported to have enjoyed in earlier times a period of much prosperity, which had been destroyed in one of the dramatic political reverses frequent in Eastern annals. Since then they had remained a degraded and abject class. Certainly, they were externally a very peculiar and unprepossessing people. The physiognomy commonly associated with the name Jew was very evident, though the cast of feature had been brutalized by ages of oppression and servility. A singular distinctive mark was ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... well disposed individuals, of different nations and ages, who have humanely exerted themselves to suppress the abject personal slavery, introduced in the original cultivation of the European colonies in the western world, Bartholomew de las Casas, the pious bishop of Chiapa, in the fifteenth century, seems to have been the first. This amiable man, during his residence ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... beacon, whose ashes, when this earthly fuel is burnt out, must yet be flung into Tophet. Withered and shrunk as this poor form is, it is yet animated with two spirits—one active, shrewd, and piercing, to advocate the cause of the Church of Jerusalem; one mean, abject, and despairing, fluctuating between madness and misery, to mourn over my own wretchedness, and to guard holy relics on which it would be most sinful for me even to cast my eye. Pity me not!—it is but sin to pity the loss ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... the Popish clergy have been extolled, as men of the most eminent piety, while places have been furnished by government, to accommodate them in their mass service; and a branch of the bloody house of Bourbon, whom divine vengeance has reduced to the abject state of a wandering exile, is admitted among us, with all marks of honor, and, with his train, provided for, as if he were a zealous supporter of the Protestant cause, seeking an asylum from the rage of Papal persecution in this reformed land. It cannot escape the notice of the attentive ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... excommunicated personally. When he found that Philip of France was prepared to seize his kingdom, and that his crimes had so alienated him from his own people that he could hope for little help from them, he cringed with the craven fear so usually found in cruel men, and made the most abject submission. In the interval between the proclamation of the interdict and the fulmination of the sentence of excommunication (A.D. 1210), John visited Ireland. It may be supposed his arrival could not excite much pleasure in the hearts of his Irish subjects, ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... the house where he and his escort had taken up their quarters with a newly-raised levy of two thousand five hundred unarmed peasants. By a ruse he got their leaders into his hands, and these showed such abject cowardice that the peasants refused further to follow them, and asked Terence to take the command of ...
— Under Wellington's Command - A Tale of the Peninsular War • G. A. Henty
... me!" she said. "I'm all foam. But I've conquered his majesty King Devil for once. He's come back positively abject. My dear, do get up! You're ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... What was the use of going farther? He had fallen too low. His degradation was abject. It was hopeless, irreparable, irremediable. "End it all—end it all." The words ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... smile of abject acquiescence overspread the features of the now trembling Ministers. Their Chief noted it with a gloomy glare. Then with a furious gesture, he suddenly kicked a waste-paper basket into the air. "You may ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... of the popes; and their authority reigned paramount there under every costume; whilst theocracy made its last efforts there. Never had the sacerdotal system more completely swayed a nation, and never had a nation been reduced to a more abject state of degradation. The Inquisition was its government,—the auto-da-fes its triumphs,—bull-fights and processions its only diversions. Had the inquisitorial reign lasted a few years more, this people would have been no longer reckoned amongst ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... economist, Jean de Bloch, it means "slow destruction in time of peace by swift destruction in the event of war." In Europe to-day millions are being robbed of the necessaries of life, millions more are suffering the pangs of abject poverty in order to support this so-called "armed peace." Note the condition in our own country. Last year we expended on our army, navy, and pensions sixty-seven per cent of our total receipts. Think of it! In a time of profound peace more than two ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... beat the boy daily; removed his books and converted them into pipe-lights; cut off his hair, and made him wear the red Jacobin cap; dressed him in a scarlet livery, and compelled him to clean his own and his wife's shoes, and to give them the most abject obedience. At last the boy's spirit was thoroughly broken, and Simon not only did as he had said, and forced his victim to sing the "Carmagnole," and shout "Vive la Republique!" but made him drunk upon bad wine, and when his mind was confused forced ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... man, save one of those abject products of that hideous Revolution, would have listened to such heartrending accents. But this man only laughed and turned on his ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... of pleasing appearance, good title and fortune, but quite without character behind his fierce upstanding mustache. Inheriting her father's rigid will, she had kept the young officer in a state of abject submission. She stroked his hair in public as if he had been her pet dachshund, and patted his hand at kindly intervals as had he ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... must request that you call for your discharge, and come home as soon as possible. I cannot exist without you, and I require your assistance in the grand work I have in contemplation. The time is at hand, the cause of equality will soon triumph; the abject slaves now hold up their heads; I have electrified them with my speeches, but I am getting old and feeble; I require my son to leave my mantle to, as one prophet did to another, and then I will, like him, ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Campbells. He alleges, however, that in April, before the murder, James of the Glens visited James More, then a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle, 'caressed him,' and had a private conversation with him. The abject James More averred that, in this conversation, James of the Glens proposed that James More's brother, Robin Oig, should kill Glenure for money. James More was not examined at the trial of James of the Glens, perhaps because he had ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... centuries, were cultivated to noble fruitfulness by the monks of the East. For their humility, obedience, and reverence for their superiors it is not wise to praise them just now; for those are qualities which are not at present considered virtues, but rather (save by the soldier) somewhat abject vices; and indeed they often carried them, as they did their abstinence, to an extravagant pitch. But it must be remembered, in fairness, that if they obeyed their supposed superiors, they had first chosen their superiors themselves; that ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... Orion Clemens was a trial. The letters of the latter show that scarcely one of them but contains the outline of some rainbow-chasing scheme, full of wild optimism, and the certainty that somewhere just ahead lies the pot of gold. Only, now and then, there is a letter of abject humiliation and complete surrender, when some golden vision, some iridescent soap-bubble, had vanished at his touch. Such depression did not last; by sunrise he was ready with a new dream, new enthusiasm, and with a new letter inviting ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... forgiving himself. He felt shame, but shame was something that could be walked off. Faster ... with an amorous mumble soothing him and the hurt. After all, was it so important? Yes ... no. Forgive himself, but not too quickly. He walked.... Words made circles in his head—abject and sorrowful circles about the dream of the ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... groveling serpent in the ooze, there lies Caliban, abject in fear, with not a ray of love. Hopeless, loveless, see him lie—a spectacle so sad as to make the ragged ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... and stared mercilessly at the abject creature before her, who seemed to droop and wilt under her gaze as if he were sinking through ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... in fact seized, but afterwards liberated by a counter-order of Louvois. Heaven, however, took care of their punishment for the crime which they had committed upon my poor brother; for Langhans died in the most abject wretchedness, and Winkler went mad and ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... that if we should be contented for the present with damming up prostitution and suppressing the causes which render prostitutes more and more abject, without yet being able to abolish the whole evil, a transformation of our social life, and especially the suppression of the reign of capital as a means of exploitation of the work of others, and suppression ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the impact of physical death and destruction, the one reality that every fool can understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science and religion from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying grotesquely in the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and most abject terrors. Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet the pretences of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud like hats in ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... contained hundreds of pictures glorifying and almost deifying the Iron Chancellor. One particularly arrested my attention. It was the familiar picture of the negotiations for peace between Bismarck and Jules Favre in the terrible winter of 1871. The French statesman has sunk into a chair in abject despair, struck speechless by the demands of the conqueror. Bismarck stands triumphant and his proud bearing and arrogant manner fail to suggest any such magnanimous courtesy as that with which Grant accepted the sword of Lee at Appomattox. The picture ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... dread, doing no wrong? You have among you many a purchas'd slave, Which, like your asses, and your dogs, and mules, You use in abject and in slavish parts, Because you bought them:—Shall I say to you, Let them be free, marry them to your heirs? Why sweat they under burthens? let their beds Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates Be season'd with such viands? You will answer, The slaves are ours:—So do I answer you. The ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... traffic do not usually disturb the placidity of the bullock, but if he once gets frightened and loses his head, he gives way to unmitigated panic. The first appearance of the motor-car, which is now almost as common in parts of India as it is in England, reduced many bullocks to a state of abject terror. Fortunately most mishaps with bullock-carts are not very serious in their results. The cart is not easily broken, and is quickly righted. But having occasion to travel in a public motor-car through a country district where the car was then a novelty, it was alarming to see the ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... freedom, that is, when and how to resist, in the faith that resistance to tyrants is obedience to truth; that the irrepressible kicker against tyranny, as Dr. Wilson observes, is the only true freeman. In her conservative, almost abject submission, Japan was yet unfit for free government. The Japanese people were willing to do almost anything suggested by their Emperor, but they had first to learn what was meant by representative government, "to understand its processes and requirements." The Japanese had to ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... Rowland was then laid on the large table. Opposite to it was placed the Jew. Seeing from the threatening looks of his captors, that they were about to wreak their vengeance upon him, the miserable wretch besought mercy in abject terms, and charged his master with the most atrocious crimes. His relation of the murder of Sir Rowland petrified even ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to ascribe some share in the restoration of good to Klopstock, both because his own writings exhibit nothing of this most abject euphuism, (a euphuism expressing itself not in fantastic refinements on the staple of the language, but altogether in rejecting it for foreign words and idioms,) and because he wrote expressly on the subject ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... motion of any other part of his body, I saw that smile fade from his face. It disappeared as if a blast of the night wind, entering the room, had dried it, crumbled it, and blown it away. In its place I now saw the terrible, eye-widened, and fixed stare which we recognize as the facial sign of some abject, unreasoning terror, or of death, after the clutch of some ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... could do nothing else I could at least howl—howl! How utterly futile, for who, in God's name, would hear me? The thought of all there was above me, of all the piles of earth and grass—for the idea that I was not actually buried never entered my mind—filled me with the most abject sorrow and despair. The utter helplessness of my position came home to me with damning force. Rescue was absolutely out of the question, because the only persons, who knew where I was, believed me dead. To my friends and relations, my fate would ever remain a mystery. The knowledge ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... position of inferiority. Yet Canada had a vigor of her own. It was not in spiritual deference only that she differed from the country of her birth. Whatever she had caught of its corruptions, she had caught nothing of its effeminacy. The mass of her people lived in a rude poverty,—not abject, like the peasant of old France, nor ground down by the tax-gatherer; while those of the higher ranks—all more or less engaged in pursuits of war or adventure, and inured to rough journeyings and forest exposures—were rugged as their climate. Even the French regular troops, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... slavery—themselves slave-holders—against that Union his own native State was then supporting, and against the flag of liberty. He scarcely struck a blow in open fight.... His service was servile and corrupt; his flight was abject, and his reward disgrace."—War Papers and Personal Recollections of the ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... to a member of the privileged classes, or has in any way brought their disfavor upon himself, he sinks to the rank of a pariah, who is banished from all cities and villages and is the object of general contempt, as an abject being who can only perform the lowest ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... met more assurance than his own and a calm air of superiority that was troubling to Steve's pride. The mother, always apologetic on account of the one great act of injustice she had done her son, felt awe as she looked, and as her pride grew she became abject, and the boy accepted the attitude of each as his just due. But on Mavis the wave of his influence broke as on a rock. She was as much changed from the Mavis he had last seen as she was at that time from the little Mavis of the hills, ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... as Uncle by his nephew's fiancee, was in ill humor as he devoured his lunch. In the first place he hadn't been getting the attention that he had expected. He was used to being treated with a certain deference, an abject humility was as fitting to a man of wealth and position. These northern people, however, didn't seem to know how to fawn. They were courteous enough, gave good service, but were inclined to speak to him as man to man,—an inference of equality that he regarded with great displeasure. ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... and shuddered, twisted to his side, and at last sat up weakly. In his eyes there was now a great terror, while in place of his drunkenness was only fear and faintness—abject fear of the great bulk that sat and smoked and stared at him so fishily. He felt uncertainly of his ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... period is absolutely eliminated. Venus is jealous because divine honors are paid to the Princess Psyche on account of her beauty; so she sends her son Cupid to punish Psyche by making her fall in love violently (amore flagrantissimo) with the lowest, poorest, and most abject man on earth. Just at that time Psyche has been exposed by the king on a mountain top in obedience to an obscure oracle. Cupid sees her there, and, disobeying his mother's orders, has her brought while asleep, by his servant Zephir, to a beautiful ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... profond des nuits, sur la nuee, Une bete difforme, affreuse, extenuee, Un etre abject et sombre, un pourceau, s'eleva; Ouvrant un oeil sanglant qui cherchait Jehovah; La nuee apporta le porc dans la lumiere, A l'endroit meme ou luit l'unique sanctuaire, Le saint des saints, jamais decru, jamais accru; Et le porc murmura:—Grace! ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... beating helplessly, screeching in terrified protest, or perhaps, if he had got it by the neck, with beak wide agape and silent, and eyes staring, as it left the farmyard for ever. I have seen blood-spillings and down-crushings and abject defeat here and there in my time, but the red hen has remained in my mind as the type of helpless tragedy." He was silent for a moment as if he were again musing over the three-letter drama that had so ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... one hazard all was won! Pushkara, in play thus conquered—with a smile the king rejoined: "Mine again is all this kingdom—undisturbed, its foes o'ercome. Fallen king! Vidarbha's daughter—by thine eyes may ne'er be seen. Thou art now, with all thy household—unto abject slavery sunk. Not thyself achieved the conquest—that subdued me heretofore! 'Twas achieved by mightier Kali—that thou didst not, fool, perceive. Yet my wrath, by him enkindled—will I not 'gainst thee ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... behind its gates allowed themselves to breathe more freely, and to congratulate themselves upon the dangers they had escaped. Such is the story of the famous, or infamous, "Cantor of Coltbrigg," one of the most disgraceful records of the abject collapse of regular troops before the terror of an almost unseen foe that are to found in history. Well might loyal Edinburgh despair if such were its best defenders. The town was all tumult, the Loyalists were in utter gloom, the secretly exulting Jacobites were urging the impossibility of resistance, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... alarmed," whispered Robin to the fast paling girl, into whose eyes the most abject misery had leaped at the sight of the two officers. "Leave it to me. I can fix them all right. There's nothing to be worried about—well, sergent, what ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... the great central tower, with its tiny windows lighted from within, the grim walls behind which the descendant of the world's conquerors, the bearer of the proudest name in Europe, and wearer of its most ancient crown, had spent the last days of his brilliant life in abject shame, sorrow, and degradation. The memory had swiftly surged up before him of that night when he all but rescued King Louis and his family from this same miserable prison: the guard had been bribed, the keeper corrupted, ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... boldness that had made them very pleasing to some people, they looked scared; the mouth too was rendered conspicuous by the absence of the firm lines that once gave it character; indeed the man's whole appearance was pitiful and almost abject. ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... to those who associate America with plenty and comfort, there is a very large class of persons at New York living in a state of squalid and abject poverty; and in order that the children belonging to it may receive some education, it has been found necessary by the benevolent to supplement the common school system with ragged or industrial schools. In order not to wound the pride of parents who are not too proud to receive a ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... innocent, so pretty, so unconscious, so sympathetic with everybody and everything, so very young, yet so wondrously wise and womanly, that he felt an irresistible desire to prostrate himself at her feet in abject slavery. ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... disaster and defeat experienced by the arms of Ava, to demand homage from the English envoys. The firmness of these gentlemen, and the fear of renewed hostilities, caused the sovereign to waive his claims to forms and ceremonies of abject submission, and the issue was peaceful. Cordial relations with the Birmese dominions were not however established, either at that juncture or subsequently: but the salutary fear of British power, caused by the war of 1851-2-3, prevented any violent ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... suspected priest, the lawyers, the Pope who presides at the trial,—each tells the story, and each unconsciously reveals the depths of his own nature in the recital. The most interesting of the characters are Guido, the husband, who changes from bold defiance to abject fear; Caponsacchi, the young priest, who aids the wife in her flight from her brutal husband, and is unjustly accused of false motives; Pompilia, the young wife, one of the noblest characters in literature, fit in all respects to rank with Shakespeare's great heroines; and the Pope, a splendid ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... who had been sent to protect her was grievously scandalized by the jaunty little sailor's hat and double-breasted jacket which she had selected for her travelling costume. But the woman had been bred to almost abject subservience, and had no idea of venturing upon spoken criticism or advice. She was greatly troubled, however, about the impression this singular costume might produce on her old mistress, and felt really shocked when she saw the ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... memorable adventure of the fulling mills," said Don Quixote, "I have never seen Sancho in such a fright as now; were I as superstitious as others his abject fear would cause me some little trepidation of spirit. But come here, Sancho, for with the leave of these gentles I would say a word or two to thee in private;" and drawing Sancho aside among the trees of the garden and seizing ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... we will not dwell upon it. Those who saw the bride's face as she entered the carriage with her husband will never forget its expression of horror, disgust, and abject fear. A year later, the desired heir arrived, a microcephalous idiot, to whom a merciful providence allowed but eighteen months of life; and in due time, the August Prince himself ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful is man! How passing wonder He, who made him such! Who centered in our make such strange extremes From different natures, marvellously mixed, Connexion exquisite of distant worlds! ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... and to sink into my own armchairs But now I had no pleasure in the thing. I had a bath, and changed into uniform, and that made me feel in better fighting trim. But I suffered from a heavy conviction of abject failure, and had no share in Macgillivray's optimism. The awe with which the Black Stone gang had filled me three years before had revived a thousandfold. Personal humiliation was the least part of my trouble. What worried me was the sense of being ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... earlier war, started upon a campaign of deliberate terrorism. This time they were resolved to win at any cost. Spurning every offer of conciliation, they burned, ravaged, and laid waste, spread desolation along their pathway, and reduced thousands to abject poverty ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... indicate the extent to which judgment may be influenced by familiarity with perversions of the taxing power. And when we seek to reinstate the self-confidence and business enterprise of our citizens by discrediting an abject dependence upon governmental favor, we strive to stimulate those elements of American character which support the ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various |
