"Lurid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there came a lull in the wind, which had been rising steadily ever since that lurid sunset. Felix looked out of the hut door. The moon was full. It was almost as clear as day with the bright tropical moonlight, silvery in the open, pale green in the shadow. The people were still squatting in great rings round the hut, just outside the taboo line, and beating gongs, and sticks and ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... propagated a few inches from the detonator. Heated in contact with air to a temperature of 480 deg. C., acetylene ignites and burns with a flame, the appearance of which varies with the way in which it is brought in contact with the air. With the gas in excess a heavy lurid flame emitting dense volumes of smoke results, whilst if it be driven out in a sufficiently thin sheet, it burns with a flame of intense brilliancy and ulmost perfect whiteness, by the light of which colours can be judged as ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Jewel of Seven Stars, shining and sparkling with lurid light, as though each of the seven points of each the ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... stepped upon the roof. There was a full moon overhead, yet the vault of the sky at the moment was lurid with light cast up from the fires burning in the streets and open places of the city, and the chanting and chorusing of the old psalmody of Israel filled it with plaintive harmonies to which he could not but listen. The countless voices bearing the burden seemed to say, "Thus, ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... that line sees the usual signs of a colliery in the unsightly pumping-engines surrounded by heaps of ashes, coal-dust, and slag; whilst a neighbouring iron-furnace in full blast throws out dense smoke and loud jets of steam by day and lurid flames at night. These works form the nucleus of the village, which is almost entirely occupied by coal-miners and iron-furnacemen. The place is remarkable for its large population, but not for its cleanness or neatness as a village; the houses, as in most ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... doubt in Lawler's mind, nor in Ruth's, that he had gone to relate his trouble to his "paw;" and that "paw" would presently appear to exact the lurid punishment Jimmy desired. ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... going to have a storm, Yussuf?" said Mr Burne, as he looked round at the lurid brassy aspect of the heavens, and the wild reflections upon ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... seeing and painting in all its lurid colouring the volcanic chaos of this 'stir and smoke' itself. Thus the same Siegfried Sassoon who renders with so much close analytic psychology the moods that cross and fluctuate in the dying hospital patient, or the haunted fugitive, as he flounders among snags ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... wiped the dank sweat from his forehead and gazed around him fiercely, and upwards at that lurid little ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Battered on all sides. But that clangorous din None feared; none flinched; as pattering drops of rain They heard it. Up to the rampart's foot they marched: None hung back; shoulder to shoulder on they came Like a long lurid cloud that o'er the sky Cronion trails in wild midwinter-tide. On that battalion moved, with thunderous tread Of tramping feet: a little above the earth Rose up the dust; the breeze swept it aside Drifting away behind ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... horrible touch of all is introduced when Faust in disgust leaves the revel, because out of the mouth of the witch with whom he had been dancing there had sprung a small red mouse. Throughout the whole play the sense of holy and splendid ideals shines at its brightest in lurid contrast with the hopeless and sordid dark of the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... chanted by the reddish gold wavelets of the "branch." In the eastern sky the florid face of a hunter's moon looked down, from the level line of a leaden cloud, which striped the star emblazoned shield of night, like a bar sinister; and the white lustre of her rays was dimmed to a lurid dulness ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... profanity pretty close to the surface at all times, but the wellspring of it that gushed from him as once more he dragged Kendrick off his feet sounded the depths of anxiety and formed a lurid preface to angry argument. Had Kendrick forgotten Stiles? They couldn't hope to save both prisoners at once. Get Stiles first and they could organize a ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... door closed, he gave himself up completely to black thoughts. He recalled his words to her, uttered years ago, half in jest and half in earnest; he had horrified her beyond expression by telling her how he would punish a wife if he were the husband she deceived. With a grim, lurid smile he remembered the penalty. He had said he would not kill; he would disfigure the woman frightfully and permit her to live as a moral example to other wives. Slitting her mouth from ear to ear or cutting off her nose—these were two of ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... "Volkslied." The old ballad-maker does not vouchsafe explanations about persons and motives; often he gives the history, not expressly nor fully, but by hints and glimpses, leaving the rest to conjecture; throwing up its salient points into a strong, lurid light against a background of shadows. The knight rides out a-hunting, and by and by his riderless horse comes home, and that ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... withdraw to the inmost recesses of their pastures; the sheep crowd into their fold; and the dull stupor of universal nature, whether animate or inanimate, presages its speedily awakening into general convulsion and disturbance, when the lurid lightning shall hiss at command of the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... audible reply, but Harley could see that he was unconvinced, and, in fact, he sent his newspaper a lurid despatch about it, taking events out of their proper proportion, and hence giving to them a wholly unjustifiable conclusion. But Sylvia Morgan was devotedly loyal to her uncle. There were few deeds of his of which she approved more warmly than this of saving Boyd's life, and Hobart, the master ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Eschylus, gives them that peculiar character of simplicity and grandeur, with which no other tragedies are marked in a like degree. Such was the source of the inspiration of classic tragedy, the spring of that stern and severe poetry which throws the lurid hues of a melancholy so profound upon the pallid and affrighted face of humanity. Man, struggling with all the gloomy energy of despair against this vague but formidable Horror, which no virtue or agony could ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... brutal; hers was exalted, impulsive, "head-long," [26] intense, and often fantastic and quaint. His imagination flamed forth like an intenser sunlight, heightening and quickening all that was alive and alert in man and Nature; hers shot out superb or lurid volcanic gleams across the simplicity of natural chiaro-oscuro, disturbing the air with conflicting and incalculable effects of strange horror and strange loveliness. It might have been averred of Browning that he said everything he thought; of her ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... obscene heads bent downward, their sodden eyes gleaming with expectancy. Well they knew that many a gorgeous feast awaited them wherever boulder, tree or swamp lay in the path of the mighty herd. At last the face of the prairie had ceased its surging; no lurid eye-ball light gleamed out of the dusk; and the tempest of cattle had passed, and went rolling out into the unbounded stretches of the ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... disease like "the strong man prepared to run a race," but it had now seized her with giant grasp, and she lay helpless and writhing, with the fiery fluid burning in her veins, sending dark, red flashes to her cheeks and brow. Her eyes had a fierce, lurid glare, and she tossed her head from side to side on the pillow with the wild restlessness of ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... summons about my bed. Over the anxious heart they flow, those slow cadences, so vibrant yet so magnificently passionless, until the nerves of pain cease to throb, and fear shrinks as a taint impossible to the patient of such a physician. It is not his to intimidate or denounce, to evoke visions of lurid hell, to linger over dire vaticinations, or apportion to each his grade of torment, but with cool fingers to smooth the hair back from the forehead, and in grave, tender accents to say: Sleep now, for it ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... tell," she said truthfully, but in such a manner as to convey that three volumes would scarcely have contained the lurid facts. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... lurid antithesis to Jewish emancipation at a time when the latter was consummated not only in Western Europe, but also in the semi-civilized Balkan States.... True, the rise of Russian Judaeophobia—the Russian technical term for Jew-hatred—was paralleled by the appearance of German anti-Semitism ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... him. He rattled his sword in its brazen scabbard, but it gave no answer back to him. His heart grew colder and colder, when suddenly the cloud above him was rent in a dozen places, and lightning flashed through the valley, and the thunder rolled over the echoing mountains. In the lurid glare of the lightning Cuglas saw a hundred ghostly forms sweeping towards him, uttering as they came nearer and nearer shrieks so terrible that the silence of death could more easily be borne. Cuglas turned to escape, but they hemmed him ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... coming! The "Jews" could be heard, with their band, down the street. They would be wanting their banner. Dolores hastily threw a wrapper on, while the captain advanced to the frontiers of his domain to welcome his army. The lurid company drew up in front of the house. The drum-beat softened in tone, but continued to give the rhythm for the privates who stood there marking time, keeping their heads and bodies and legs moving energetically ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... walls, the ground, the faces around them, as they crossed the yard. But, in the furnace-house, a deep and lurid red glared over all; the furnace roared with mighty flame. The men, like demons, in their fire-and-soot colouring, stood swart around, awaiting the moment when the tons of solid iron should have melted down into fiery liquid, fit to be poured, with still, heavy sound, into the ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... fail to mention, and this uncanny fact may be illustrated thus: If an object is blue or if it is yellow it will be recognised by all men as being blue or yellow, as the case may be. One will not say of it, "See that lurid yellow object," to have another reply, "What! that object directly before us? I see nothing yellow about it; it is as black as ink." But I was apparently exactly like such an impossible object. ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... crucible. The desert had multiplied weeks into years. Heat, thirst, hunger, loneliness, toil, fear, ferocity, pain—he knew them all. He had felt them all—the white sun, with its glazed, coalescing, lurid fire; the caked split lips and rasping, dry-puffed tongue; the sickening ache in the pit of his stomach; the insupportable silence, the empty space, the utter desolation, the contempt of life; the weary ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... with impassioned consequences. The very unconsciousness of a looming drama which is shown in such innocent first epistles from women to men, or vice versa, makes them, when such a drama follows, and they are read over by the purple or lurid light of it, all the more impressive, solemn, and ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... tongue," said the Squire promptly, and then drew a lurid picture of a place delivered over entirely to the hovels of nameless people of the lower middle classes, and worse, a place in which you would be as effectually cut off from your fellows as if you went to live in Kamschatka. ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... Prudence listened to the wild stories she told them of the wizards of her race. It was often in the kitchen, in the darkening evening, while some cooking process was going on, that the old Indian crone, sitting on her haunches by the bright red wood embers which sent up no flame, but a lurid light reversing the shadows of all the faces around, told her weird stories while they were awaiting the rising of the dough, perchance, out of which the household bread had to be made. There ran through these stories ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... enjoyed the lurid lights of the French Revolution with Scaramouche, or the brilliant buccaneering days of Peter Blood, or the adventures of the Sea-Hawk, the corsair, will now welcome with delight a turn in Restoration London with the always masterful Col. ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... him as he spoke and smiled. The jewelled scarab, set as a brooch on her bosom, flashed luridly in the moon, and in her black eyes there was a similar lurid gleam. ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... report of a large gun, immediately followed by a long roll of musketry, while at the same moment the bands of the different regiments struck up, and as if by magic a blaze of red light streamed across the dark ranks. This was effected by pine torches held aloft at intervals, throwing a lurid glare upon the grim and swarthy features of the Spaniards, whose brown uniforms and slouching hats presented a most picturesque effect as the red light ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... was even more picturesque and tragical than the Mississippi bubble. There were lively times round about the last of the Sixties and the early Seventies. The Terror lasted longer, but it was not much more lurid than the Commune; the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries in flames, the column gone from the Place Vendome, when I got there just after the siege. The regions of the beautiful Opera House and of the venerable Notre Dame they told me had been but yesterday running streams ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... suffered. But the forcible and picturesque imagery of half-barbaric tribes still remained. The coarseness of the beer-hall is, however, subdued by the gold and silken embroideries with which it is adorned. In a vivid description of a battle, in the midst of lurid flames, of blood and carnage, the enemy is "put to sleep with the sword." When a hero dies in peace, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... passions and lurid imaginations were the urges that drove them—that shaped their conduct toward their fellows. Some of them were rapid gunslingers—in the picturesque idioms of their speech—and there was not a man among them who did not take pride in his ability to "work" his gun. They had accepted Harlan, ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... amazingly during the past few months, and the expression on her face now roused all the dormant manhood in Morley's nature. Ignoring the woman by the stairway, he gripped Molly by the shoulders, and holding her so that the lurid light of the flaming logs fell upon her, he drove his questions into the girl's consciousness and brought alarmed truth forth before a ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... grin gave a momentary lurid hue to Mr. Fox's sallow face. Knowing the game to be in his own hands, he could quietly bide his time; so, assuming a tone of much moderation and dignity, he replied, he had no wish to be hard, and ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... scented souls. Zussmann wavered. Why, indeed, should he refuse their assistance? He knew their self-sacrificing days, their genuine joy in salvation. On their generosities he was far better posted than on Jewish—the lurid legend of these Mephistophelian matrons included blankets, clothes, port wine, and all the delicacies of the season. He admitted that Hulda had indeed been brought low, and permitted them to call. Then he went home to cut dry bread for the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... dome. "(Defunct his sire) She clasp'd him to her breast, "Embrac'd his clay-cold limbs; and all she said "That wretched parents say; and all she did "That hapless mothers do: then through the town "The melancholy funeral pomp she led, "The lurid members following, on a bier "For burning. In the road the dwelling stood "Through which the sad procession took its way, "And sound of lamentation struck the ears "Of Anaxarete, whom now the power "Of vengeance follow'd. Mov'd, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... again burst down in torrents,—the thunder roared over their heads,—and the black, lurid sky, looked as if it contained a second deluge. Flora shivered with cold and exhaustion, and bent more closely over the child, to protect her as much as possible, by the exposure of her own person, from the drenching rain ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... solemn as the quiet star-gazer in the "Midsummer Eve." This poetry is evident in the oddest ways, and escapes analysis, so elusive and so original is it, as in the "Street of Shows." Nothing at first thought seems more hopelessly remote from poetry than the country circus, with its lurid posters of the Giant Schoolgirl, the Petrified Man, and the Mermaid, all in strong sunlight; but the heart carries with it its own mood, and this flaring scene has undergone some indefinite transformation ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... Only petty fishlings, weighing ounces, took the bit between their teeth. We therefore doffed the fisherman and donned the artist and poet, and chased our own fancies down the dark whirlpooling river, along its dell of evergreens, now lurid with the last glows of twilight. Iglesias and I continued dreamily gazing down the thoro'fare toward Mollychunkamug only a certain length of time. Man keeps up to his highest elations hardly longer than a danseuse can ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... On lurid mornings, when the lustrous sea Is violet-shadowed from the warm blue air, When the dark grasses brighten over thee, And the winged ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... others hold the sway he held,— His day and power have passed away; His goodly forests all are felled, And songs of mirth rise, clear and gay, Chaunted by youthful voices, where His battle-hymn once filled the air— Where blazed the lurid council fire, The village church erects its spire; And where the mystic war-dance rang, With its confused, discordant clang, While stern, fierce lips, with many a cry For blood and vengeance, filled the sky, Mild ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... various small articles, as if to rejoin the noble ship she had so lately quitted. The latter was now hove-to, under full sail, an occasional puff of smoke alone betraying the presence of the demon of destruction within. The sky was dark and lowering, the sunset red and lurid in its grandeur, the clouds numerous and threatening, the sea high and dark, with occasional streaks of white foam. Not a breath of wind was stirring. Everything portended a gale. As we lay slowly rolling from side to side, both ship and boat were sometimes plainly ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... that prowls as well by night as day. Ugh! what's this at his feet—soft, clammy, shining in the flaring light? He leaps upon the smooth tree-trunk, growing slantwise instead of perpendicular. What if the torch and the odor of flesh should draw the snakes to the sleeper? The flame flares in wide, lurid curves, revealing the outlines of the sleeping man. Heavens, what a terrible face! He moves in spasmodic contortions. He is smothering. The veins of his neck will break if he is ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... moderation—But I wanted to find out more. "And when would you want me to go?" I asked, with a dissimulation of which I would not have suspected myself capable a moment before. I was maturing in the fire of love, of danger; in the lurid light of life piercing through my ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... from June 23 to July 20 inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter, without making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as black as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured feruginous light on the ground and floors of rooms, but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. All the time the heat was so intense that butchers' meat could hardly be eaten the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered the horses half frantic, and riding irksome. The ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... treachery and deceit; his lack of any high ideals; his bad influence on the child; his luxurious self-indulgent habits, the lies he had told, the insults he had offered her. By now the story had grown to a lurid whole in her imagination, based on a few distorted facts, yet radically and monstrously untrue. Generally, however, when she dwelt upon it, it had power to soothe any smart of conscience, to harden any yearning of the heart, supposing ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lurid gleam of light lit up the semi-darkness of the shed; only for an instant; then it as quickly ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... the picture is heightened through the mingling of the pale moonlight with the lurid reflection from the torches, and the coloring altogether is such that it is in perfect harmony ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... they were obliged to retire; they only committed the more acts of wanton cruelty. The most fearful confusion prevailed; first in one place and then in another the sky was red with the conflagration. Suddenly a lurid light illumined the towers and projecting buildings. The market-place was the principal quarter of the insurgents, who still wanted a leader. There, toward midnight, four men, masked, wearing the habit of one ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... obscure, tenebrious^, sombrous^, pitch dark, pitchy, pitch black; caliginous^; black &c (in color) 431. sunless, lightless &c (sun) (light), &c 423; somber, dusky; unilluminated &c (illuminate) &c 420 [Obs.]; nocturnal; dingy, lurid, gloomy; murky, murksome^; shady, umbrageous; overcast &c (dim) 422; cloudy &c (opaque) 426; darkened; &c v.. dark as pitch, dark as a pit, dark as Erebus [Lat.]. benighted; noctivagant^, noctivagous^. Adv. in the dark, in the shade. Phr. brief as the lightning in the collied night [M. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... was to be enacted a rapid drama of material progress such as the world has never elsewhere seen; but first there must be played the wild prologue of the West, never at any time to have a more lurid scene than here at the Halfway House of a continent, at the intersection of the grand transcontinental trails, the bloody angle of the plains. Eight men in a day, a score in a week, met death by violence. The street in the cemetery doubled before that of the town. There were more graves ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... nearly dark, the sky was overcast with heavy leaden clouds, and only a faint lurid glow on the horizon in the west showed where the sun had gone down. An icy wind, blowing full in their faces, and the hard, frozen surface of the snow, made their progress both difficult and painful. The poor old horse ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... persuades Orso to discard Michiella. The infatuated count waxes as the personification of portentous burlesque; he is having everything his own way. The acting throughout—owing to the real gravity of the vast basso Lebruno's burlesque, and Vittoria's archness—was that of high comedy with a lurid background. Vittoria showed an enchanting spirit of humour. She sang one bewitching barcarole that set the house in rocking motion. There was such melancholy in her heart that she cast herself into all the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... expiring sound of a shout rose above the roar of the ice and waters—but it failed to arouse me. The lights, though, we soon plainly discerned; and on the bluff, at the very mouth of the river, a column of flame began to rise, which cast a lurid light far over the surface of the raging lake. Some persons stood at the edge of the flood waving lighted torches; and I thought from their manner ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... oil, and bundles of shavings kept together with pieces of iron hoop. Tom gave the word to hoist away, and "the flying beacon," as Desmond called it, soon afterwards burst forth into a bright flame. The fire below was then lighted, and as it blazed up it cast a lurid glare over the whole island, on the ribs of their vessel, their hut below the tall cocoa-nut trees, and the lower shrubs. At the same instant loud screams were heard—the birds, startled by the unusual appearance, mounted into the air, numbers flying towards the fire, and the party on ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... of his master's angry shouts, he was galloping in mad haste back toward the uplands, with the fragments of the wagon at his heels. The Captain and Jamie watched him flying before the wind, a red spectre in the lurid light. Then, turning away once more to see to his boat, the Captain remarked, "Well, laddie, I guess we'll have to foot it back when we get through here. But Bill's going to ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... blazing fire some stars shone out benignly. A stillness and a pellucid clearness that were full of remote romance were making the vast desert their sacred possession. The aspect of the camp had changed. It was no longer a lurid and mysterious assemblage of men, animals, and tents, half revealed in the light of blown flames, half concealed by the black mantle of night, but a tranquil and restful picture of comfort and of repose, full of the quiet detail of feeding beasts, and men smoking, sleeping, or huddling together ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... with one blast of his desolating brand, had laid all in ruin. The platform was cleared, and the fallen torches, some half-extinguished, and other flaming on the ground by the sides of the dead, showed, in their uncertain gleams, a few terrified wretches seeking safely in flight. The same lurid rays, casting a transitory light on the iron gratings of the great tower, informed Wallace that the heat of conflict had drawn him to the prison of ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... shudder for the moment. But then she saw that it was a red light like a stormy sunset, with masses of clouds in the sky, and a low sun very fiery and dazzling, which no doubt to a hasty glance must have looked, with its dark shadows and high lurid lights, like the fires of the bottomless pit. But when you looked down you saw the reality what it was. The country that lay beneath was full of tropical foliage, but with many stretches of sand and dry plains, and in the foreground was a ...
— A Little Pilgrim - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... is not free from danger. Fierce storms arise; black clouds gather over the blue expanse, suffused anon with a lurid yellow tinge, and the fierce whirlwind howls along the river-banks, tearing the placid stream into masses of foam; the tall trees bend before the blast, and huge branches are wrenched off and hurled into ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... a novelist without a reference to his plots, unless indeed he discards plots as an article of faith. Mr. Blackmore has no such intention. His stories are full of adventure and dramatic situations, and his melodrama is of the lurid kind on which the calcium light is thrown. Sometimes, as in 'The Maid of Sker' and 'Cripps' they violate every probability. In others, as in 'Mary Anerley,' the mystery is childishly simple, the oft-repeated plot of a lost child ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... who endeavors to surround himself with a belt of wasted land, when overtaken by a conflagration in the prairies. All day the fire continued to rage, and at night the effect was even more appalling; for by the lurid flames the unfortunate Spaniards could read the consternation depicted in each others' ghastly countenances, while in the suburbs, along the slopes of the surrounding hills, might be seen the throng of besiegers, gazing with fiendish exultation on the work ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... just the faintest suggestion of steeliness in her voice now. "I fancy you've been giving him good advice, and painting me in lurid colors. Do you really think so badly of me?" Her hand pressed my arm with warm friendliness; her great blue eyes were watching me with ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... moment he heard a loud shout from the crowd, which was followed by a crash. Dashing once more across the passage, he saw that a lurid flame was piercing the smoke in the other room. The staircase he knew was impassable; probably gone by that time; but he had not time to think, so he drew the blanket over the girl's head and bounded towards the window. There was a feeling ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... his inadequate laboratory and thought out a philosophy said to be half a century ahead of his time. He died in 1911. His life was the drama of an elevated soul of complexities, far more tragic than any life associated with the lurid "killings" around him. ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... there, under the huge coniferous trees, lay patches of snow still unmelted, though the month was June. Indian fire glowed red on the white expanse, blood on marble, and scarlet snow-plant sent up lurid spouts like flaming fountains. The tree-shadows were painted pools of lupin, azure lakes; or they were purple seas of larkspur. Mountain-roses and wild lilac tangled in a maze of pink and white and gold. Bear-clover ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... dropped the quarter in an envelop and was stickin' it on the end of the broken branch, when the front door opens, and out dashes this tall gink with the rusty Vandyke and the hectic face. Yep, it's a lurid map, all right. Some of it might have been from goin' without a hat in the wind and weather, for his forehead and bald spot are just as high-colored as the rest; but there's a lot of temper tint, too, lightin' up the tan, and the deep furrows between the eyes shows it ain't an uncommon state ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... to believe there is nothing you could do. Go to her as my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell her any good you know of me. At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid colours of ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... anything, that she was nothing but a tinted and stippled surface. Her situation was peculiar indeed. She had been the heroine of a scandal which had grown dim only because, in the eyes of the London world, it paled in the lurid light of the contemporaneous. That attention had been fixed on it for several days, fifteen years before; there had been a high relish of the vivid evidence as to his wife's misconduct with which, in the divorce-court, Charles Tramore had judged well to regale a cynical public. The case was ...
— The Chaperon • Henry James
... and he really did more by resolute helpfulness than could have been done by any quantity of exhortation. He ventured to take a long view at sundown, and he found the experience saddening. The enormous chequered floor of the sea divided with turbulent sweep two sombre hollow hemispheres. Lurid red, livid blue, cold green shone in the sky, and were reflected in chance glints of horror from the spume of the charging seas. Cold, cold it was all round; cold where the lowering black cloud hung in the ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... with martial pride, But sabre hilt and rifle true, Oftimes of dark, ensanguined hue, Were ever at the side. They hailed their comrades in the fight, With blazing fires illumed the night, And waged with jest and smile, As toward the lurid torches' light Rode up their chief the while. No pert gallant or Conrad he, With gay plume waving haughtily; Nor donned he aught his troopers o'er, Save that the leathern cap he wore In front a silver crescent bore, Inscribed with "Death or Liberty." Of stature ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... gaze at the countenances over which the lurid torchlight cast a horrid glare, a strong hand grasped my collar, and by a jerk swung me up to a seat on one of the caissons; and at the same time a deep voice said, "Come, youngster, this is more in thy way than mine," and a black-bearded "sapeur" pushed a drum ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... Bessie?" said Muller in a quiet voice, but she, looking into his face, saw that it belied the voice. It was alive with evil passions that seemed to make it positively lurid, an effect that ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... to reflect that it would be wiser to return home. I could not tell what might next happen. The day was drawing to a close. As we looked eastward, we saw the whole sky glowing with a lurid glare, which I afterwards found was produced by the conflagration of Newgate prison, which, after the mob had broken into and released all the prisoners, they set on fire. My relative was very glad to see me back safe, and on hearing of my adventures said that Tom and I were ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... like sea-born flowers, With heaped and glistening bells, Falls round her fast, in ringing showers, With every wave that swells; And, burning o'er the midnight deep, In lurid fringes thrown, The living gems of ocean ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... delightful way. But happier scenes invite, and fairer skies; From your dark bed, children of woe, arise! In caves where peace ne'er smiled, where joy ne'er came, Where Friendship's eye ne'er glistened at the name Of one she loved, where famine and despair Sat silent 'mid the damp and lurid air, The soothing voice is heard; a beam of light Is cast upon their features, sunk and white; 140 With trembling joy they catch the stealing sound; Their famished little ones come smiling round. Sweet Infancy! ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... withholding from them their prey. For now, in this crisis of action, doubts assailed her. She remembered that she had never read the book, though she had heard much of it from Berrand. He was imaginative and essentially mischievous. Perhaps he had exaggerated its tendency, drawn too lurid a picture of its horrible power. Catherine turned a page or two and glanced at the clear, even ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the gloom, As a flower smiles on AEtna's fatal breast, Young Proserpine beside her lord doth bloom; And near—of Orpheus' soul, oh! idol blest!— While low for thee he tunes his lyre of light, I see thy meek, fair form dawn through that lurid night! ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... like some city's spires that gleam afar In golden sunshine when naught else is seen, So in my soul two images grew bright, The loftiest sun-peaks in the shadowy past. I saw myself escaping one dark night, And a red lurid flame light up the gloom Of midnight darkness as I looked behind me A memory 'twas of very earliest youth, For what preceded or came after it In the long distance utterly was lost. In solitary brightness there it stood A ghastly beacon-light on memory's waste. Yet I remembered how, in ...
— Demetrius - A Play • Frederich Schiller
... the column, the last stragglers fell into the file behind, the last torch disappeared into the narrow street, and the broad space that had been so full was left utterly deserted, illuminated only by a dozen dim gaslights in exchange for the lurid glow which a moment earlier had lit up every wall and house from corner stone to ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... which some knowledge is essential to an understanding of his acts and character. Others are brought into prominence only as they are associated with the chief actor in the great drama. Many of them are disappearing,—fading into the smoky and lurid background. But that colossal central figure, playing one of the grandest roles ever set upon the stage of human life, becomes more impressive ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... him lying nearby, sprawled face down on the floor! In the silence and dim lurid glow of the fluorescent tubes, we stood holding our breaths, peering ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... crowd with a large shovelful of red-hot cinders. The rioters stopped to take breath and look on like children at the uncertain flickering blaze, which sprang high one moment, and dropped down the next only to creep along the base of the heap of wreck, and make secure of its future work. Then the lurid blaze darted up wild, high, and irrepressible; and the men around gave a cry of fierce exultation, and in rough mirth began to try and push each other in. In one of the pauses of the rushing, roaring noise of the flames, the moaning ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... soft, fungous, cryptogamic vegetation efflorescing with fierce luxuriance in that ghastly carbonic atmosphere. Rudimental palms and pines of mushroom growth stood there motionless, sending forth no soft and soul-like murmurs into the lurid reek; for as yet leaves and flowers and blue skies and pure breezes were not,—nothing but whiffs of mephitic and lethal vapor ascending, as from a vast charcoal brazier. No lark or linnet or redbreast ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... homilies ceased. From time to time, fresh details and unexpected revelations, wise guesses and shameless fakes, renewed the interest of the original fact. There were days when there was nothing about it in the papers, and then days when it broke out in vivid paragraphs and whole lurid columns again. It was not that the fraud was singular in its features; these were common to most of the defalcations, great and small, which were of daily fame in the newspapers. But the doubt as to the man's fate, and the enduring ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... Pensees de Rafael, Namouna, and Rolla', the last two being very eloquent at times, though immature. Rolla (1833) is one of the strongest and most depressing of his works; the sceptic regrets the faith he has lost the power to regain, and realizes in lurid flashes the desolate emptiness of his own heart. At this period the crisis of his life was reached. He accompanied George Sand to Italy, a rupture between them occurred, and De Musset returned to Paris ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... our evening sacrifice begun, When evil demons, lurid as the clouds That gather round the dying orb of day, Cluster in hideous troops, obscene and dread, About our altars, casting far and near Terrific shadows, while the sacred fire Sheds a pale lustre o'er their ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... another one, that of the women; and below it, at the foot of a lurid stairway, a suite of subterranean (Roman) chambers, a kind of Turkish bath for men, where the water hurries darkly through; the place is reeking with a steamy heat, and objectionable beyond words; it would not be easy to describe, in the language ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... attempt to unionize the Southern mill operatives. It has also been charged that the propaganda for legislation restricting the hours of labor and the age of operatives in Southern mills was financed to some extent by New England manufacturers, and that the writers of the many lurid accounts purporting to describe conditions in Southern mills received pay ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... stormy month of March, a ship was seen from our look-out, drifting at the mercy of the wind and waves. The sky was a mass of leaden clouds, and the sun as it sank from view, threw a lurid glare over the angry waters, such as one might fancy to arise from the deepest abyss of Hades. My father ordered the false light to be shown, which had already brought swift destruction on many a gallant bark. I knew not why, but my heart was interested in the fate of this vessel, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... mutual Love, Society, begin to be possible. How true is that of Novalis: "It is certain my Belief gains quite infinitely the moment I can convince another mind thereof"! Gaze thou in the face of thy Brother, in those eyes where plays the lambent fire of Kindness, or in those where rages the lurid conflagration of Anger; feel how thy own so quiet Soul is straightway involuntarily kindled with the like, and ye blaze and reverberate on each other, till it is all one limitless confluent flame (of embracing Love, or of deadly-grappling Hate); and ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... The colour in her cheek was like a lurid patch under the pallor of her skin. She gave a little gasp, and her hand went to her side. Then she laughed ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... papers the next morning and it is related that there was a brisk conversation between Mr. Hedges and the mayor, when the former arrived at the City Hall, which took on, not an orange and black hue, but rather a lurid flame, of which Mayor Strong was supposed to be but ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... Always amid that lurid carnival of sin floats the figure of Blossom, Blossom with her child-face of dazzling fairness, her china-blue eyes, her round, smooth cheeks. How different from the pinched pallid face of Berna! Poor, poor Berna! ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... and as far as Modesto. After that, under the teaching of Tim, he traveled without paying, riding blind baggage, box cars, and cow-catchers. Young Dick bought the newspapers, and frightened Tim by reading to him the lurid accounts of the kidnapping of the young heir ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... with the sunset glow. The faces of the crew, turned to watch the spectacle, curiously fixed and inhuman, were picked out of the gloom by the same fantastic light. It was as if the schooner, with masts and riggings, etched black against the lurid sky, sailed on into the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and went, yet still the awful struggle continued. Suddenly a shot struck the flag-staff, and the banner, which had waved in that lurid atmosphere all day, fell on the beach outside the fort. For a moment there was a pause, as if at a presage of disaster. Then a grenadier, the brave and immortal Serjeant Jasper, sprang upon the parapet, leaped ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... volcano, these must have been carried to us from it by the wind. As the captain had predicted, a stiff breeze soon afterwards sprang up, under the influence of which we speedily left the volcano far behind us; but during the greater part of the night we could see its lurid glare and hear its distant thunder. The shower did not cease to fall for several hours, and we must have sailed under it for nearly forty miles, perhaps farther. When we emerged from the cloud, our decks and every part of the rigging were completely covered with a thick ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... last, however, they reached the mouth of the crater, and, crawling cautiously to the very edge, peered down into its gloomy depths. At the bottom of the abyss, which seemed to them to go down into the very heart of the earth, a lurid flame burned sullenly, sending up a sulphureous steam, which cooling as it rose, fell again in showers upon the sides of the cavity. Into this one of the brave explorers had to descend, and when they had cast lots the choice fell upon Montano ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... box-couch, a young woman was perched, thin shoulders rounded over the ink-stained drawing-board resting on her knees. She had a large, self-willed mouth and dark Bohemian hair, and wore a dreary cotton kimono over a silk petticoat whose past had been lurid. One hand clutched gingerly a bottle of India ink, the other wielded a ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... money would be given to a Home for Fallen Women. He was a long time hitting off exactly the right charity; but, having pitched on it, he used to wake up in the night and think: 'It won't do, too lurid; it'll draw attention. Something quieter—better taste.' He did not care for dogs, or he would have named them; and it was in desperation at last—for his knowledge of charities was limited—that he decided on the blind. That could not be inappropriate, and it would make the Jury ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... It is the vehicle of passion and emotion, and consequently it may exhibit additional colours, expressing man's less desirable feelings, which cannot show themselves at higher levels; for example, a lurid brownish-red indicates the presence of sensuality, while black clouds show malice and hatred. A curious livid grey betokens the presence of fear, and a much darker grey, usually arranged in heavy rings around the ovoid, indicates a ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... by some that in the pages which follow I have painted in too lurid colours the horrors of a foreign invasion of England. Realism in art, it may be argued, can be carried too far. I prefer to think that the majority of my readers will acquit me of a desire to be unduly sensational. It is necessary ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... her tobacco to sniff . . . . The following trick was particularly agonising: Fedyushka would tie a piece of meat to a thread and give it to Kashtanka, and then, when she had swallowed it he would, with a loud laugh, pull it back again from her stomach, and the more lurid were her memories the more loudly and miserably ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... darkness, they moved up to their new camp—a camp on the very edge of the fighting; and from where they came to a halt, to wait for morning before being assigned to the trenches, they could see the lurid fires that flared across ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... the great army of the criticised, who always consider that the editor of the paper which dissects them is really responsible. The luckless Harriet Martineau, who, if I remember rightly, gives in her autobiography a lurid picture of Lockhart "going down at night to the printer's" and inserting dreadful things about her, and who, I believe, took the feminine plan of revenging herself in an obituary article, was only one of a ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... assumed that the continuance of slavery involved a bloody conflict; that either peaceably or through violence, slavery as contrary to the spirit of the age must come to an end; that the agitation against it could not be suppressed. Faulkner drew a lurid picture of the danger from servile insurrection, in which he referred to the utterances of two former speakers, one of whom had said that, unless something effective was done to ward off the danger, "the throats of all the white people of Virginia will be cut." The other ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... comments on my courage. Now and then a dog ran by, with a terrified air and drooping tail, keeping close to the houses as if for protection. One might have fancied oneself in some city ravaged by the plague, and the burning heat of the atmosphere, and lurid red of the clouds, might ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... danced before his eyes in lurid lights and grotesque shapes, with grinning faces, flying, whirling, in a wild, demoniac waltz. The room was full. The procession he had watched to-night winding out from the mill, stopped and jeered, and pointed skinny fingers at him. Then he was at the bank, and they came in troops, wringing ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... lurid flashes gathered darkling, thick and high, Lines of cranes like gleams of laughter sailed ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... noble rivers and secluded lakes of Wisconsin were held in esteem or fear by the northern tribes, and it was the now-forgotten events and superstitions connected with them, not less than the frontier tendency for strong names, that gave a lurid and diabolical nomenclature to parts of this region. Devils, witches, magicians, and manitous were perpetuated, and Indians whose prowess was thought to be supernatural left dim records of themselves here and there—as near the dells of the Wisconsin, where a chasm fifty feet wide is shown as the ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... sunset, where above the horizon we see collecting thick masses of dark purple cloud, which augur a stormy morrow. Above us the peak of the Archangel is already wreathed in garlands of white mist, a sure sign of coming tempest, and it is amid a lurid light from the sinking sun that we hasten downwards, bending our steps in the direction of Pozzano, where the form of its convent stands out sharply defined against the background of the Bay. Night is rapidly approaching, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... churches; but the four frescoes at the farther end (representing the Adoration of the Magi, our Lord's Baptism, the Crucifixion, and the Descent into Hell), rude as they are, have a grim power which takes hold of our fancy at once. Dante himself might approve the last of the four, in which the lurid atmosphere, the hideous contortions of the demons, and the surging flight of the half-awakened dead, with their blank faces and stony eyes, contrast magnificently with the grand calmness of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... looked at her with a curious uncomprehending gaze, and then said, "Yes, I will go away." He took a step toward Maimie, his eyes like lurid flames. She shrank from him, while De Lacy stepped in his path. With a sweep of his arm he brushed De Lacy aside, hurling him crashing against the wall, and ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... night, it seemed almost as if he could see a vision—as if the outward circumstances in which he had beheld the trio were prophetic—Alice in the glory of the great light, Roger with his way shown clearly by the little lamp of God's Word, and Edward in that black shadow, made lurid and more awful by the faint unearthly light. The moon came out brightly from behind a cloud, just as ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... him the padded wall and dead With gorgeous colour gleams, And huge advertisements are spread, And lurid placards, orange, red, Drive through his ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... The ice was broken into thousands of confused shapes, but none, Hans thought, like the ordinary forms of splintered ice. There seemed a curious expression about all their outlines—a perpetual resemblance to living features, distorted and scornful. Myriads of deceitful shadows, and lurid lights, played and floated about and through the pale blue pinnacles, dazzling and confusing the sight of the traveller; while his ears grew dull and his head giddy with the constant gush and roar of the concealed waters. These ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... reached the fifth floor. The daylight had faded. A sea of roofs was beneath us; and, through the panes above our heads, a great red sky cast lurid gleams over our faces and hands. The girl gave a start of pleasure as she entered her room. It was peaceful and white; but the flaming fire and sky at that moment turned it quite rosy, smiling and aglow. From the rather ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... trouble. With the same hard demeanour, she was led back to prison, and vanished from the public gaze within its iron-clamped portal. It was whispered by those who peered after her that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way of ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The hum of labour resounded from every house; lights gleamed from the long casement windows in the attic storeys, and the whirl of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls. The fires, whose lurid, sullen light had been visible for miles, blazed fiercely up, in the great works and factories of the town. The din of hammers, the rushing of steam, and the dead heavy clanking of engines, was the harsh music which arose from ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... French, from the mass of gallant, dauntless emigrants, many of whom were thus entertained with grateful, commiserating hospitality in households whose members had but lately basked in the sparkling geniality of the southern atmosphere, now lurid and ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler |
