"Incubus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Far from me to propose to bridge it over—that the pestered people be pushed across. No! I would save them from further fatigue. I would come to their relief, and would lift from their shoulders this incubus of Art. ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... the comparative isolation, and the evil effects of railway domination account wholly for San Francisco's slow growth toward the end of the century. For, following the several spasms of development incident to the ages of gold, of grain, and of fruit, and the advent of the railway incubus, California for a time betook herself to rest, which indeed was largely paralysis. Then, too, those who had come first and cleared the ground, laying the foundations of fortunes, were passing away, and their successors seemed more ready to enjoy than ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... as to what they may or may not do? Didn't she know how to behave? Well, this was the sort of thing that happened if women had no breeding. He blamed Felicie for the accident that had occurred and was relieved of a heavy incubus. ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... interest is with the great human system, in one of whose veins I am a circulating drop. It is my business to help to keep the system sound, to do my duty without fear or favour. If disease—say a fouled conscience—contaminates me, it is for me to throw off the incubus, not accept it, and transmit the poison. Whatever my lapses of nature, I owe it to the entire system to work for purity in my allotted sphere, and not to allow any microbe bugbear to ride me roughshod, to the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... behind the scene which I had just beheld. In similar fashion in the days of Edward I. and Simon De Montfort, the Commons of England, then struggling up, had wrestled in the narrow Chapter House. And so they had fought in the Lancastrian time; and after the Tudor incubus had been lifted off. So under the Stuarts had the wrangling proceeded from which came at length the "Petition of Right." Substituting the doublet and the steeple hat for their modern equivalents, the spectacle ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... art. To my astonishment, the brutal figure of the carter forced its way into my memory again and again. It (without in the least knowing why) as if the one chance of getting rid of this curious incubus, was to put the persistent image of the man on paper. It was done mechanically, and yet done so well, that I was encouraged to add to the picture. I put in next the poor beaten horse (another good likeness!); and then I introduced a life-like portrait of myself, giving the man the sound ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... opinion in the town of Leslie on this most important and engrossing subject, on the breaking of the day with which our history begins—this eventful Hogmanay. As the evening approached, every one trembled; but the inspiration of incipient drams had had the effect of so far throwing off the incubus as to enable some of the inhabitants, and, in particular, those we have mentioned, to go about the forms of the festival with decent freedom; while the guysers and "reekers," after the manner of buoyant youth, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... sweetly, and looked very gracious; but, nevertheless, his heart did sink somewhat within him, for there had been a hope that a small windfall, coming now so opportunely, might enable him to rid himself at once of that dreadful Sowerby incubus. And then the will went on to declare that Mary, and Gerald, and Blanche, had also, by God's providence, been placed beyond want. And here, looking into the squire's face, one might have thought that his heart fell a little also; for he had not so full a command of his feelings ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... that much enduring and long suffering man, and threw over the daughter the mantle of sweet unconsciousness. Miss Pomeroy fell asleep. In that helpless condition she was quietly conveyed from her father's arms to bed, to the unspeakable relief of Guy, who felt, as the door closed, as if a fearful incubus ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... or sportive play, ('Tween these, no medium's known), She'll drive the incubus away That has assailed thee many a day Upon thine iron throne. She'll make the nimble spirits fleet Up towards the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... country. Gondremark has thus some of the clumsier characters of the self-made man, combined with an inordinate, almost a besotted, pride of intellect and birth. Heavy, bilious, selfish, inornate, he sits upon this court and country like an incubus. ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the fall of the ancient governments which rested like an incubus upon the people of the central empires, has come political change not merely, but revolution; and revolution which seems as yet to assume ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... material support and strength. It is because of this inner dome that the impression of its size, from within the cathedral, can disappoint. Meanwhile, in spite of all the wear and tear of the work, the satisfying of incredulous busy-bodies, and the removal of such an incubus as Ghiberti, who because he was a superb modeller of bronze reliefs was made for a while joint architect with a salary that Brunelleschi felt should either be his own or no one's, the little man found time also to build beautiful churches and cloisters all over Florence. He ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... Christian history must have derived the greatest advantage on special points from the conscientious research, and frequently also from the acute analysis, even of writers of the most extreme school. But it is high time that the incubus of fascinating speculations should be shaken off, and that Englishmen should learn to exercise their judicial faculty independently. Any one who will take the pains to read Irenaeus through carefully, endeavouring to enter ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... enumerates a of these fireside fancies: "And they have so fraid us with host bull-beggars, spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, syrens, kit with the can sticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giantes, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphes, changelings, incubus, Robin-goodfellow, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell-waine, the fier drake, the puckle, Tom Thombe, hobgoblins, Tom Tumbler, boneless, and such other bugs, that we were afraid ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... suffer less from her captivity, having less to afflict her—no dread of that terrible calamity which, like an incubus, broods upon the ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... followers in reference to the influence and leavening of public opinion upon this matter, and to see to it that, in so far as we can help, we set ourselves steadfastly against that devilish spirit which still oppresses with an incubus almost intolerable, the nations of so-called Christendom. Lift up your voices be not afraid, but cry, 'We are the followers of the Prince of Peace, and we war against the war that is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... kings of France, and the long war of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for the succession to the throne of France, engendered what historians have called "the rivalry between France and England;" and this rivalry, having been admitted as a natural and inevitable fact, became the permanent incubus and, at divers epochs, the scourge of French national existence. Undoubtedly there are, between great and energetic neighbors, different interests and tendencies, which easily become the seeds of jealousy and strife; but there are also, between such nations, common ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... really afraid that the strict mamma of her husband's recent incubus will overhear, and sit at another breakwater next day. "Come along!" she says, dispersively and emphatically. "We shall have the shoulder ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the incubus that had hitherto spoiled his enjoyment of the evening, the Colonel gratefully drank the whiskey and soda brought him by Ross's order and sat down cheerfully to play bridge. He always liked dining in the Mess, where ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... and post-biblical mythology into elementary instruction, renders it useful and necessary to go on making a considerable outlay in the same direction. Not yet, has "the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew" ceased to be the "incubus of the philosopher, and the opprobrium of the orthodox;" not yet, has "the zeal of the Bibliolater" ceased from troubling; not yet, are the weaker sort, even of the instructed, at rest from their fruitless toil "to harmonise impossibilities," and "to force the generous new wine ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... which employed him; and the Elizabethan Act, insisting upon the allocation of four acres to each new cottage built, was repealed. But for that repeal, factory slums would be garden cities, unless the incubus of this provision had stopped the factory development. The final result of the inclosure movement upon the country was to deprive the public of most of its commons and open spaces, to deprive the agricultural labourer of all right in the soil he tilled, and to rob him of that ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... child! Where was she on the day of the last engagement of that pugnacious Porcupine, in the year 1805, when England was freed from her long incubus of invasion? ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... often a feature of the actual Churchman. The actual Churchman is often a man whose conscience is an incubus. He can do nothing without weighing motives and calculating results. It makes him introspective to an extent that is positively morbid. He is continually probing himself to discover whether his motives are really ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... passes between the reception of the contagious poison into the system and the appearance of the rash, is called the period of incubation; incubation or incubus meaning, properly, the sitting of birds on their nests, and figuratively, the hatching or concoction of the poison within the body, until prepared for its elimination. There is no certainty about the time necessary for that purpose, as the contagion, after the patient has come in contact ...
— Hydriatic treatment of Scarlet Fever in its Different Forms • Charles Munde
... sent to heal the troubles in the Netherlands, the breach was now past mending. In the States General, as in the nation at large, there were still two parties, one for Orange and one for Philip, but both were determined to get rid of the devilish incubus of the Spanish army. The division of the two parties was to some extent sectional, but still more that class division that seems inevitable between conservatives and liberals. The king still had for him the clergy, the majority of the nobles and higher bourgeoisie; with William were ranged ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... in Queensland, to enter more fully into detail would be inadvisable. The colony is young, but the government is infantine; though, notwithstanding that it is little more than two years old, it has proved itself indefatigable, concise, and beneficial in its workings; and many a local incubus has been removed, and many a long felt desideratum been supplied, during its short period ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... quiet and let one of the nicest women that ever breathed be worn into her grave by that—Incubus? Even if she hadn't been a friend of mine, even if she hadn't been too good for this world, it would have been a shame. As it was the outrage cried to heaven.—and nobody could ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... had petted it, he always manifested an understanding,—I cannot say sympathy. I should have liked to see that boy's sister, if he ever had one, and was not hatched out from some egg found in the desert by an Egyptian incubus or incubator. She must have been a charming young lady, and his mother must have been a beauty, especially when in court-dress,—with her broom et praeterea nihil. But neither, alas, could be ever seen by me, for it is written in the "Gittin" that there are three hundred species of male ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... his swiftest dart. I know not why, but it has chilled my heart Like some dread thing of evil. All night long My nerves were shaken, and my pulse stood still, And waited for a terror yet to come To strike harsh discords through my life's sweet song. Sleep came—an incubus that filled the sum Of wretchedness with dreams so wild and chill The sweat oozed from me like great drops of gall; An evil spirit kept my mind in thrall, And rolled my body up like a poor scroll On which is written curses ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... parliamentary reform died out: neither Whigs nor Tories really cared for it; and the 'glorious spirit of improvement' showed itself in an energy which had little political application. The nobility was not an incubus suppressing individual energy and confronted by the state, but was itself the state; and its individual members were often leaders in industrial improvement. Discontent, therefore, took in the main a different form. Some government ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... is a good worker, too. But I knew him when we were boys. It was one of those rash friendships that so often prove an incubus in afterlife. I may as well tell you plainly, we were once on very intimate terms with one another. But this tactless fellow lays no restraint on himself when other people are present. On the contrary, he ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside," is a safe rule for those who would always retain the good opinion of that all-powerful, but somewhat unintelligent, incubus, "the average person," but the pioneer, the guide, is necessary. That is, if the world ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... which she that day had witnessed. He recalled how, a few moments before, she withdrew her hand, not wishing to pat Saba, who had finished, by strangling, one of the Bedouins. Yes! Stas himself felt an incubus on his breast. It was one thing to read in Port Said about American trappers, killing in the far west red-skinned Indians by the dozens, and another to accomplish that personally and see men, alive a short while before, struggling in their death-throes, in ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... we lose by awaking to find that our Theology is human invention and our eschatology an unhealthy dream. We are freed from the incubus of base Hebrew mythology, and from doctrines of Divine government which outrage morality and set cruelty and injustice in the place of holiness. If we have to abandon cherished anthropomorphic visions of future Blessedness, the details of which are either of unseizable dimness ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... dare not exactly call it "unintelligible moonshine," and so will probably hold their tongue. It is my fixed opinion that we are all at sea as to what is called Poetry, Art, &c., in these times; laboring under a dreadful incubus of Tradition, and mere "Cant heaped balefully on us up to the very Zenith," as men, in nearly all other provinces of their Life, except perhaps the railway province, do now labor and stagger;—in a word, that Goethe-and- Schiller's "Kunst" has ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... painful experiences. He had bought the Tresillack estate twenty years before—on mortgage, I fancy—because the land adjoined his own and would pay him for tillage. But the house was a nuisance, an incubus; and had been so ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Karens. Some of the ruder mythologies have been so utterly extirpated that the children of idolaters have seen the gods whom their fathers worshipped for the first time in the British Museum. While over those more compact and scientific systems which lie like an incubus on mighty peoples, there has crept a sickening consciousness of a coming doom, and they already half own their conqueror in the Stronger One ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... make it no longer a necessity," Lady Delahaye said, smiling. "I want to relieve you and your conscience at the same time of a very awkward incubus. Listen! This is what I propose. Let Isobel come to me for a year! I shall treat her as my own daughter. She will have plenty of amusement. There are the theatres, and no end of scratch entertainments where one can take a girl of her age who is too young for society. She will ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the longing to be primitive is a disease of culture; it is archaism in morals. To be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia. When life was really vigorous and young, in Homeric times for instance, no one seemed to fear that it might be squeezed out of existence either by the incubus of matter or by the petrifying blight of intelligence. Life was like the light of day, something to use, or to waste, or to enjoy. It was not a thing to worship; and often the chief luxury of living consisted in dealing ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... felt it such. I have said to myself sometimes: 'Am I to go on for ever teaching boys Latin grammar, till I wish there had never been a Latin nation to leave such an incubus upon the bosom of after ages?' Then I would remind myself, that, under cover of grammar and geography, and all the other farce-meat (as the word ought to be written and pronounced), I put something better into my pupils; something ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... help looking on the Americans in the light of children—dear relatives; and when I address them, I speak to them with love and affection. I say to them, take warning from the scene I have been describing; do not submit to the incubus of slavery a moment longer than you can avoid it. No sensible man expects you to throw it off at once; but every right-feeling, right-thinking man, does expect you to take every means and make every preparation for its abolition, as soon as that important work can ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... located favor military operations, in the same degree those which are unfortunately placed are disadvantageous. They are an incubus upon the army which is compelled to garrison them and the state whose men and money are wasted upon them. There are many in Europe in this category. It is bad policy to cover a frontier with fortresses very close together. This system ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... that their affairs, at this period, presented a most hopeful aspect. They yet displayed a united front, for they had hitherto been almost entirely free from the evils of sectarianism; and now, that they were relieved from the terrible incubus of a ruthless tyranny, their spirits were as buoyant as ever; for though intolerance had thinned their ranks, it had also exhibited their constancy and stimulated their enthusiasm. Their intense attachment to the evangelical cause ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Indian race is not, in the political scales, worth one white man's vote. Here is the difficulty in any benevolent scheme. If the Indian were raised to the right of giving his suffrage, a plenty of politicians, on the frontiers, would enter into plans to better him. Now the subject drags along as an incubus on Congress. Legislation for them is only taken up on a pinch. It is a mere expedient to get along with the subject; it is taken up unwillingly, and dropped in a hurry. This is the Indian system. Nobody knows really what ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... succession of pairs of young men, whose mission seemed to be to plague their master consciously, and to plague him unconsciously. Once or twice Mr. Gibson had declined taking a fresh pupil, in the hopes of shaking himself free from the incubus, but his reputation as a clever surgeon had spread so rapidly that fees which he had thought prohibitory, were willingly paid, in order that the young man might make a start in life, with the prestige of having been a pupil of Gibson of Hollingford. But as ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Slavery proved at Rome a monstrous curse, destroying all manliness of character, creating contempt of honest labor, making men timorous yet cruel, idle, frivolous, weak, dependent, powerless. The empire might have lasted centuries longer but for this incubus, the standing disgrace of the Pagan world. Paganism never recognized what is most noble and glorious in man; never recognized his equality, his common brotherhood, his natural rights. It had no compunction, no remorse in depriving human beings of their highest privileges; its whole tendency ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... WAS. Ambrose Merlin, the prince of enchanters, son of the nun Matilda, and an incubus, "half-angel and half-man." He made, in addition to Prince Arthur's armor and weapons, the Round Table for one hundred and fifty knights at Carduel, the magic fountain of love, and built Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. He died spellbound ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... own part, I never despaired of Ireland; I do not, I will not, I cannot, despair of my beloved country. She has, in my view, obtained freedom of conscience for others, as well as for herself. She has shaken off the incubus of tithes while silly legislation was dealing out its folly and its falsehoods. She can, and she will, obtain for herself justice and constitutional freedom; and although she may sigh at British neglect and ingratitude, there is no sound of despair in that sigh, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... these, being indeed most apostolical and primitive, they will in a short time advance more in Christian knowledge and reformation of life than by the many years preaching of such an incumbent,—I may say such an incubus ofttimes,—as will be meanly hired to ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... weaker States have ceased to be given over to her tender mercies. To the Triple Alliance has been opposed the Triple Entente. The balance of power has been re-established. The three 'hereditary enemies'—England, France, and Russia—have joined hands, and have delivered Europe from the incubus of German suzerainty. German diplomacy has strained every effort to break the Triple Entente, in turn wooing and threatening France and Russia, keeping open the Moroccan sore as the Neapolitan lazzarone keeps open the wound which ensures his living, and finally challenging ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... to care for him and aid him with all hopefulness and strength. He has vitality beyond one man in a thousand. He may throw off all the incubus of it. But it has come suddenly and is growing." Then he got mad in all his friendship, and blurted out: "Why didn't the great blundering brute send for me when first he felt something he couldn't meet nor understand?" And there were almost tears ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... or two of a kind he more rarely indulged. "He is below par on the Exchange," a friend remarked of a notorious puffing actor; "he doesn't stand well at Lloyds." "Yet no one stands so well with the under-writers," said Dickens; a pun that Swift would have envied. "I call him an Incubus!" said a non-literary friend, at a loss to express the boredom inflicted on him by a popular author. "Pen-and-ink-ubus, you mean," interposed Dickens. So, when Stanfield said of his mid-shipman son, then absent on his first cruise, "the boy has got his sea-legs on by this time!" "I don't ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... whispers suggested that I coached it home in triumph—far be that from working pride in me, for I was unconscious of the locomotion; that a young Mentor accompanied a reprobate old Telemachus; that, the Trojan like, he bore his charge upon his shoulders, while the wretched incubus, in glimmering sense, hiccuped drunken snatches of flying on the bats' wings after sunset. An aged servitor was also hinted at, to make disgrace more complete: one, to whom my ignominy may offer further occasions of revolt (to which he was before too fondly ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... genius" to assist the "smooth working" of an unworkable Constitution, so as to promote the "reconciliation of two great and kindred races." The Irish are pursued with invective for legitimately using the constitutional power given them in order, while freeing Parliament from an intolerable incubus, to gain the right to elicit character and responsibility in themselves by shouldering their own burdens and saving their ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... hideous specimen of decaying vice, trotting in red heels—for Valerie dressed the man as beseemed his income, his cross, and his appointment—horrified Crevel, who could not meet the colorless eyes of the Government clerk. Marneffe was an incubus to the Mayor. And the mean rascal, aware of the strange power conferred on him by Lisbeth and his wife, was amused by it; he played on it as on an instrument; and cards being the last resource of a mind as completely ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... borne down and bleached of all its color by it, the shapes that are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in the darkness, and the weak organizations kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming time. Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in its full stature and native lines ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... over the fairest portions of the earth, and chartered hypocrisy fatten upon its richest lands. It was impossible that the most energetic and quick-witted people of Europe should not feel sympathy with the great effort made by Christendom to shake off the incubus which had so long paralyzed her hands and brain. In the Netherlands, where the attachment to Rome had never been intense, where in the old times, the Bishops of Utrecht had been rather Ghibelline than Guelph, where all the earlier ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that he recognized the central point to be the necessity of thrusting Austria out of the confederation. It is proved now that he was sagacious enough also to perceive that such a wrench would not lead to a permanent estrangement, but that Austria, removed once and for all from her incubus-like and dog-in-the-manger position within the federate body, would become, in her own interest and that of European ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... ether, Salamander! Flow foamingly together, Undine! Shine in meteor-sheen, Sylph! Bring help to hearth and shelf. Incubus! Incubus! Step forward, ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... regiment, and personally governed the first community where emancipation was a success,—who taught the relieved nation, in fine, that there was strength and safety in those dusky millions who till then had been an incubus and a terror,—Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton, Military Governor of South Carolina. The single career of this one man more than atones for all the traitors whom West Point ever nurtured, and awards the highest place on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... incubus of Grizzle's meal-pock was lifted from his bosom. The shame was, if shame was any, that they should have been living in such a house while the thing was done. When the house was sold, let people say what they would! In proportion as a man cares to do ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... incubus of misfortune, bearing to me the light of heaven, with which to see my sins. May it come to turn my heart in the right way, to seek its retribution on the wrong!" Thus concluding, Marston covers his face in his hands, and for several minutes weeps like a child. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... haunted him; a dread lest the conflict might be renewed, and the horrible thought of what the consequences must be in such an event, of which he could not speak, but which rested on his bosom like an incubus. When he had reascended to his study, where he found Maurice and Jean in exactly the same position he had left them in, it was all in vain that he settled himself comfortably in his favorite easy-chair; sleep would not come to him; just as he was on the point of losing himself the crash ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... made to feel the incubus-load, which perseverance in sin heaps on the breast of the reckless offender. What was the most grievous of all, his power to shake off this dead weight was diminished in precisely the same proportion as the burthen was increased, the moral ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... appertaining to his degree, including "pynsons," a kind of boot or shoe. He was also obliged to visit all the schools, invite the masters to be present on the day of inception, and provide them, one and all, with a suit of clothes. This was such a serious incubus that statutes were passed limiting such perquisites to kinsmen or members of the same hall; and it probably explains the custom of incepting for others—the rich acting for the poor. From every inceptor the bedels were entitled to a gratuity of twenty shillings and a pair of buckskin gloves, or an ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... and a Trustee, and, after much anxiety, and the utmost straining of his ability to raise and to contribute funds towards the completion of their house of worship, he was just beginning to enjoy the comfort of seeing the debt, which had hung as an incubus over it for years, wiped out, when this new call was made upon him. A few young people proposed to go out to the assistance of the feeble church, upon the condition that Mr. Charless and Mr. Keith would go with them —wisely concluding that the attempt to sustain it without some such ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... to go; my will was all the other way about. I had so newly thrown off the incubus of responsibility: I was still so fresh a renegade from duty that the daylight clearness of what I OUGHT to do had no power at all to touch my will. My will was to live, to gather pleasures and ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... protests of Herr Schenkel to Grimm. Never once had we seen a lighter in tow in the open sea, though plenty behind the barrier of islands; indeed it was the very existence of the sheltered byways that created such traffic as there was. It was only Grimm's mtier and the incubus of the lighter that had suggested Memmert as our destination at all, and I began to doubt it now. That tricky hoop of ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... poor little lady taken out of the school room to face a position which would be horrifying, even in idea, to a right minded woman of the world. What the girl's mental sufferings must have been only a girl can tell. And ever since—the incubus of that elderly man of unclean antecedents! All that had been incomprehensible about Evadne was obvious now, and also the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... treaty of 1762, and they subject that nation to a perpetual tribute of forty thousand a year to the Nabob of Arcot: a tribute never due, or pretended to be due, to him, even when he appeared to be something; a tribute, as things now stand, not to a real potentate, but to a shadow, a dream, an incubus of oppression. After the Company has accepted in subsidy, in grant of territory, in remission of rent, as a compensation for their own protection, at least two hundred thousand pound a year, without discounting a shilling for that ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... African improvement, has been the greatest obstacle to progress. She fought to keep every advantage to herself, and she succeeded in securing a monopoly of 'recaptives,' who were more wanted elsewhere. She became an incubus in 1820, when all British possessions from N. Lat. 20 to S. Lat. 20 were made her dependencies. The snake was scotched in 1844 by the Gold Coast achieving her independence. Yet Sa Leone raised herself to a government-general in 1866, and ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... seemed to need repairs at every point. The roof had leaked like a sieve, two windows had been blown in, the paint had turned a gray-black, the gutters had been out of order. He had not quite settled the bill for these repairs. He realized it always as an actual physical incubus upon his slender, bowed shoulders. He came of a race who were impatient of debt, and who regarded with proud disdain all gratuitous benefits from their fellow-men. Henry always walked a long route from the shop in order to avoid passing the houses of the doctor and ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... country, where a price was set on his head; ever labouring to infuse fresh valour into his beaten, disheartened followers. That the governing party had any right to be in power, or possessed any virtue of any kind, or were, in fact, anything but an incubus and a curse to the Banda Oriental, she would not for one moment admit. To her mind her country always appeared like Andromeda bound on her rock and left weeping and desolate to be a prey to the abhorred Colorado monster; while ever to the deliverance of this lovely being came her glorious Perseus, ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... it would ease me of a great weight if she would. This fortune, suddenly thrown into my lap, sits like an incubus upon me, Mr. Raymond. When the will was read to-day which makes me possessor of so much wealth, I could not but feel that a heavy, blinding pall had settled upon me, spotted with blood and woven of horrors. Ah, how different from the feelings with which I have been accustomed to anticipate ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... his arm—all he would get to eat for the day. A big-wig now, sir, and as nasty as ever. However . . . There's no doubt he played his part fairly well at the time. He saved us all from the deadly incubus of Sotillo, where a more ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... will give three hundred pesos, though I swear by God, I have not so much money in the world; but I will borrow it to be rid of such an incubus." ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... Isabel the unfortunate blow to his own interests that Mr. Carlyle's marriage had been, the ruinous expense she had entailed upon the family. It struck a complete chill to Isabel's heart, and she became painfully impressed with the incubus she must be to Mr. Carlyle—so far as his pocket was concerned. Lord Mount Severn, with his little son, had paid them a short visit at Christmas and Isabel had asked him, apparently with unconcern, whether Mr. Carlyle had put himself very much out to the way to marry her; whether it ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... over the souls of men for a quarter of a century has about been dissipated; it is already the beginning of the end. It is the dawn; the day is not very far in the future when the American people, roused at last to the exertion of their majesty, will shake themselves from the dread of this incubus and spring up like ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... gradually awake by the exertion of volition, or the muscles connected by habit with such sensations alter the position of the body; but where the sleep is uncommonly profound, and those uneasy sensations great, the disease called the incubus, or nightmare, is produced. Here the desire of moving the body is painfully exerted, by the power of moving it, or volition, is incapable of action, till we awake. Many less disagreeable struggles in our dreams, as when we wish in vain to fly ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the ears of the man who had just committed the most monstrous of all atrocities. He could not get rid of the haunting words; all the ill he had done from his childhood returned to him in fancy, and seemed heaped up to form a mountain which weighed on him like an incubus. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... other interests and projects, which they are really in earnest to promote, though those concerns may lie in no greater proportion than the one in question does within the scope of their individual ability. The incubus has then vanished; and they find themselves in possession of a free agency, and a degree of power, which they will not patiently hear estimated in any such contemptuous terms. What is there then that should reduce them, ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... Carteret and his friends to discover, with inspiration from whatever supernatural source the discriminating reader may elect, that the darker race, docile by instinct, humble by training, patiently waiting upon its as yet uncertain destiny, was an incubus, a corpse chained to the body politic, and that the negro vote was a source of danger to the state, no matter how cast or by ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... therefore, that the study of philosophy has a high cultural value: it encourages the student to reflect upon himself and his human and natural surroundings (society and nature) and to come to grips with reality; it frees him from the incubus of transmitted opinions and borrowed beliefs, and makes him earn his spiritual possessions in the sweat of his face,—mindful of Goethe's warning that "he alone deserves freedom and life who is compelled to battle for them day by day";—it helps him ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... experiments upset the conclusion drawn in 1856. This would account for the satisfaction expressed in the following year at the discovery of another method, on which Darwin wrote to Sir J.D. Hooker: "The distribution of fresh-water molluscs has been a horrid incubus to me, but I think I know my way now. When first hatched they are very active, and I have had thirty or forty crawl on a dead duck's foot; and they cannot be jerked off, and will live fifteen or even twenty-four hours out of water" ("Life and Letters," ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... heavenly power intervenes for him—perhaps (he bitterly conjectures) for fear of offending the Vatican. Sirocco, now and again, blows furiously at his back, but never splits the sheeting. Rain often soaks it, never rots it. There is no help for him. He stands a mock to the pious, a shame and incubus to the emancipated; received, yet hushed up; exalted, yet made a fool of; taken and left; a ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... took occasion at one time to punish a boy with a fair degree of severity (may the Lord forgive me), and now. I know that in so doing I was guilty of a grave error. What I interpreted as misconduct was but a straining at his leash in an effort to extricate himself from the incubus of the negative self-feeling. He was, and probably is, a dull fellow and realized that he could not cope with the other boys in the school studies, and so was but trying to win some notice in other fields of activity. To him notoriety was preferable to obscurity. If I had only ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... shown something of the incubus of taxation which overpowers Ireland from the fact that she—the poorest country in Western Europe—is bound to the richest in such a manner that the latter has not the common prudence to recognise ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... to it that the carpenters did not make away with nails, or dispose of planks in return for drink. Yet all the time my presence was practically useless, seeing that the men stole nails as though I were not even in existence and strove to show me that among them I was a person too many, a sheer incubus, and seized every opportunity of giving me covert jogs with a beam, and ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... the lumen siccum ac purum notionum verarum. He seems to see the injury inflicted upon the sum of thought by the posteriori superstition, the worship of facts, and the deification of synthesis. Lastly, came the reckless way in which Locke freed philosophy from the incubus of innate ideas. Like Luther and the leaders of the great French Revolution, he broke with the Past; and he threw overboard the whole cargo of human tradition. The result has been an immense movement of the mind which we love to call Progress, when it has often been retrograde; ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... obliged to toil more assiduously than ever. It was little consolation to her that she was but a type of many women, who, hardworking and thrifty themselves, are married to men who are nothing but an incubus to their wives and to their families. Small wonder, then, that Mrs. Hableton should condense all her knowledge of the male sex into the one bitter aphorism, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... the same lines of work. After considerable discussion and institutional negotiation, this much of a concession was made: "If your work proves to be excellent, your shortage will be disregarded." So she went to work with that incubus, or stimulus—whichever you wish to regard it—over her. Neither she nor her committee knew how to plan her work, not knowing whether it was to be for two years or for three. And not until the very close of her year's work was her status determined—full credit then being granted ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... I like the dashing rides to Norton Bury. Above all, I like coming back. The minute I begin to climb Enderley Hill, the tan-yard, and all belonging to it, drops off like an incubus, and I wake into free, beautiful life. Now, Phineas, confess; is not this common a lovely place, especially of ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... of Campania. But when once Vespasian has seized the throne, neither he nor his friends nor even his army will feel their safety assured until the rival claimant is dead. They imprisoned Fabius Valens and meant to make use of him if a crisis occurred, but they found him too great an incubus. You may be sure that Antonius and Fuscus and that typical representative of the party, Mucianus, will have no choice but to kill you. Julius Caesar did not let Pompey live unmolested, nor Augustus ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... so badgered," said Sir Hugh, stretching himself a little as though to throw off the incubus of tiresome memories; "and this morning when I left a dull country house, I said to myself: Why not go down and see Amabel?—I don't believe she will mind.—I believe that, perhaps, she'll be pleased.—I know that I want to go very ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... old incubus, came around and was soppy to mother as usual yesterday—the same old business—I might be studying in Paris, now, instead of teaching drawing to stupid little girls, if I hadn't 'formed' what she will call 'that unfortunate attachment.' Not that I minded, really, ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... been sent over to administer the Government, had stooped to a barefaced violence and tyranny in excess of anything which could be truly charged against the Tory Sir John Colborne. All the old abuses were maintained in full vigour. The incubus of the Clergy Reserves was not removed. Appointments to office were still made from one political body only. The Legislative Council still had the power to paralyze the efforts of the Assembly. The Assembly itself was at present as retrograde as the Upper House, and it had ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... the wax effigy in Brompton Cemetery, with the assistance of Hugo's undertakers, and a parson or so, and grave-diggers, and registrars of deaths, and so on and so on. Louis Ravengar will breathe again, thankful that typhoid fever has relieved him of an unpleasant incubus, and since Camilla is underground, he will speedily forget all about her. She will be absolutely safe from him. The inconsolable widower will ostentatiously seek distraction in foreign travel, and in a fortnight, at most, will, under another name, resume his ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... persons do not yet know that the Czar was beaten; they suppose him to have conquered with immense cost; but the nobility knew the truth, and it will leak through to the lowest people, I expect, in the course of a few years. I think Europe has a respite of a quarter of a century from the incubus of Russia; and if in that interval the Hapsburgs are overthrown, all will yet come right. I fear we are still forced again (in spite of Mazzini and Kossuth) to regard the French as having the initiative of revolutions. I have resolved to give up all extra and needless effort ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... her part, was not very well content. She could hardly avoid knowing that she was looked on as an incubus, and she saw that her father, as she called him, dreaded to be questioned as to their relationship. She lived a simple life; rode and played tennis with young Belgians of her own age; read, worked, went to such dances ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... Crusader, sailed the seas beyond Norva's Sound and Serkland,[19] and as pilgrims, traders, travellers, and conquerors in the Mediterranean, their work was of course not one of exploration. They bore a foremost share in breaking down the Moslem incubus on southern Europe; they visited the ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... and witches and enchanters, and once he was lost in a fierce storm at midnight in the mountains, and by the glare of the lightning had seen the Wild Huntsman rage on the blast with his specter dogs chasing after him through the driving cloud-rack. Also he had seen an incubus once, and several times he had seen the great bat that sucks the blood from the necks of people while they are asleep, fanning them softly with its wings and so keeping them drowsy ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... him, haunt and oppress him. What a deliverance!—Yet, what a price had he paid for it! True, but was not the money already sacrificed? Would it have been restored, had the luckless speculator himself remained? Never! Well, fearful then as was the sum, let it go, taking the incubus along with it. Allcraft took care to obtain the consent of Bellamy to his arrangement. He wrote to him, explaining the reasons for parting with their partner; and an answer came from the landed proprietor, acquiescing in the plan, but slightly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... the book. He almost believed that, were the paper left open on the table, no eye would examine its contents. There it lay still hidden within the folds of the sermon, that weight upon his heart, that incubus on his bosom, that nightmare which robbed him of all his slumbers, and he could not rid himself of its presence. Property, indeed! Oh! if he were only back in London, and his cousin reigning ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... not necessitate an additional price, but, on the contrary, the wine-growing resources of the island are so irrepressible that they have withstood the oppression of the past and present, and when relieved of this incubus, not only should the quality improve, but the price should be reduced. In this case, should the Cyprian produce be favoured by a nominal import duty in England, the wine will be within the reach of the poorer classes, and may ameliorate that crying evil ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... from one of his longer absences, he began to talk to her about a governess; but, though in a playful way, she rebelled utterly at the first mention of such an incubus. She had plenty of material for study, she said, in the library, and plenty of amusement in wandering about with the sullen Demon, who was her constant companion during his absences; and if he did force a governess ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... elevated themes, even at the most solemn moments of life, these lewd pictures will sometimes intrude themselves in spite of his efforts to avoid them. It is an awful thing to allow the mind to be thus contaminated; and many a man would give the world, if he possessed it, to be free from the horrible incubus of ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... sufficient, and pay the money back when it is quite convenient.' Disinterested, most praiseworthy man! He left me, impressed with his benevolence, and with my spirit at rest. With the dismissal of my incubus, my appetite was restored. I partook of a hearty dinner, and returned home, happy as a boy again. At the end of a week, I was enabled to repay my benefactor; but, at the end of a fortnight; I was again in need ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... the country. Patience is a virtue. But it may be abused. It certainly has been so in the case of Italy, and by a base conspiracy. When will the people arise in their might, and, by their immense superiority in numbers as well as intelligence, cast off the yoke of the conspirators—the incubus which crushes and degrades them in the eyes ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... sat on the fallen tree-trunk in the garden and stared unseeing across tangled ranks of roses. And after a while his thoughts, as they were wont to do, returned to Ste. Marie—that looming shadow which darkened the sunlight, that incubus of fear which clung to him night and day. He was so absorbed that he did not hear sounds which might otherwise have roused him. He heard nothing, saw nothing, save that which his fevered mind projected, until ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... some reciprocity between him and mankind; that he pays his expenditure in service; that he has not a lion's share in profit and a drone's in labour; and is not a sleeping partner and mere costly incubus on the great mercantile ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... any meaning in the things I have been urging, it is this: that the incubus that lies upon this country is the present monopolistic organization of our industrial life. That is the thing which certain Republicans became "insurgents" in order to throw off. And yet some of them allowed themselves to be so ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... Descent, potential twin Which erst could rein submissive millions in, Are now spent forces on the eddying surge Of Thought enfranchised. Agencies emerge Unhampered by the incubus of dread Which cramped men's hearts and clogged their onward tread. Dynasty, Prescription! spectral in these days When Science points to Thought its surest ways, And men who scorn obedience when not free Demand the logic of Authority! The day of manhood to the world is here, And ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... the lightning-conductor between the heaven- world and earth. We want fearless advocates who will not be turned aside from their course by laughter or by threats. Why is it that the spirit of daring, imaginative enquiry is so dead here? An incubus of spiritual fear seems to beset men women so that they think, if they turn from the beaten track seeking the true, they shall meet, not the divine with outstretched hands, but a demon; that the reward for their ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... insufficient concern; and the whole scene of life had become hopeless enough. Unhappily, such feelings are yet by no means so infrequent with ourselves, that we need stop here to depict them. That state of Unbelief from which the Germans do seem to be in some measure delivered, still presses with incubus force on the greater part of Europe; and nation after nation, each in its own way, feels that the first of all moral problems is how to cast it off, or how to rise above it. Governments naturally attempt the first ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... others and can drain three nurses without taking on flesh. The second question is whether the demon who copulates with the mother or the man whose semen has been taken is the father of the child. To which Saint Thomas answers, with more or less subtle arguments, that the real father is not the incubus but ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... and remove the incubus, to replace and refill the mind, to lift up and enlighten the Japanese peasant, science as already known and faith in one God, Creator and Father of all things, must go hand in hand. Education and civilization will do much for the ignorant inaka or boors, but for the cultured whose ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... point, but there is no wound on Mr Todhunter. Mr Glass took that wound away with him, dead or alive. Add to all this primary probability. It is much more likely that the blackmailed person would try to kill his incubus, rather than that the blackmailer would try to kill the goose that lays his golden egg. There, I think, we have a pretty ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... to say, Miss Wickfield,' pursued Traddles, at once with great delicacy and with great earnestness, 'that in your absence Mr. Wickfield has considerably improved. Relieved of the incubus that had fastened upon him for so long a time, and of the dreadful apprehensions under which he had lived, he is hardly the same person. At times, even his impaired power of concentrating his memory and attention on ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... [891]Inward belonging to the skins next to the brain, called dura and pia mater, as all headaches, &c., or to the ventricles, caules, kells, tunicles, creeks, and parts of it, and their passions, as caro, vertigo, incubus, apoplexy, falling sickness. The diseases of the nerves, cramps, stupor, convulsion, tremor, palsy: or belonging to the excrements of the brain, catarrhs, sneezing, rheums, distillations: or else those that pertain to the substance of the brain itself, in ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... Despite the incubus of African barbarism, this little Jewish tribe on the banks of the legend-famed Sabbath stream has survived with Jewish vitality unbroken and purity uncontaminated. With longing the Falashas are awaiting a future when they will be permitted to join the councils of their Israelitish brethren ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... shall follow this up with a portrait of the least acceptable type of Conservative candidate, wherein all will recognise our Parliamentary incubus. Thus do we open the great campaign! If you would care to, pray keep that proof; some day it may amuse you to look at it, and to recall these early days of our acquaintance. Now I will take you to my house, which, I need not say, you honour by this visit. You are a philosopher, ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... he, "we'll have to put that dinner off for a year or so; I'm going abroad. The steamer sails at four. That was a great talk we had the other night, and it decided me. I'm going to knock around the world and get rid of that incubus that has been weighing on both you and me—the terrible dread of knowing what's going to happen. I've done one thing that hurts my conscience a little; but I know it's best for both of us. I've written to the lady ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... sympathy of the masses, and was like Thiers in refinement and skill; but he would have been less diffuse, less in difficulties for a conclusion. He had intended to rise rapidly to power without burdening himself first with the doctrines necessary to begin with, for a man in opposition, but an incubus ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... adduces authority, as did the translator of romances, in connection with an unfamiliar name. One finds such statements as: "Manna, so it is written";[133] "Such a fiend, as the book tells us, is called Incubus";[134] "In the country of Champagne, as the book tells";[135] "Cursates, saith the book, ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos |
