"Abject" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The judge regarded him with a look of great steadiness. He saw his small face go white, he saw the look of abject terror in his eyes. The judge raised his fist and brought it down with a great crash on the table, so that the breakfast dishes leaped and rattled. "We don't know any boy ten years old with a ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... Meditation is to call to your attention a new method of defence, by which you may reduce the will of your new wife to a condition of utter and abject submission. This is brought about by the reaction upon her moral nature of physical changes, and the wise lowering of her physical condition by a diet ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... instinctively that Mime is bad, low and cunning—and it does not justify him: Mime, with an ulterior purpose, it is true, has saved him from death by starvation in his infancy, and nurtured him, and the least Siegfried could do was to leave the abject creature in peace. It is true also that he is mending Siegfried's sword—but this is to anticipate. I cannot accept Siegfried as a specimen of the highest heroic humanity. The boldness of a man who because of his dull wits cannot realise danger ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... unsaid, no act undone, To prove to me thou wert my abject slave. Ah! Love, hadst thou been wise enough to save One little drop of ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... reasonable to ascribe some share in the restoration of good to Klopstock, both because his own writings exhibit nothing of this most abject euphuism, (a euphuism expressing itself not in fantastic refinements on the staple of the language, but altogether in rejecting it for foreign words and idioms,) and because he wrote expressly on the ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... which Butler was treated on this occasion must always remain an almost solitary stain upon the memory of Abraham Lincoln. On the memory of Benjamin Butler stains hardly show. At a later stage of the war Butler showed such abject cowardice that Grant begged that if his political importance required that he should have some military command he should be placed somewhere where there was no fighting. This time Butler saved himself by blackmailing his commanding officer. At the conclusion of peace the man went back to politics, ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... hand on thy revolver in anger, and against strangers in our land, thou wilt be thrown into prison, and thou wilt receive ten months. I will come and see thee, and listen to the music of thy clanking chains, and we will talk of to-day's doings!" By the time Stephan had finished, abject fear was depicted on the man's face, and his companions showed signs of having heard enough. Murmuring apologies, they sheered off, and with a slow and thoughtful rhythm paddled back the ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... of a middle man were, servility to his superiors, and tyranny towards his inferiors: the poor detested this race of beings. In speaking to them, however, they always used the most abject language, and the most humble tone and posture—"Please your honour; and please your honour's honour" they knew must be repeated as a charm at the beginning and end of every equivocating, exculpatory, or supplicatory sentence; and they were much more alert in doffing their caps to these new men, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... He stood six feet one in his stockings, and was a match for any two in the country side, and yet, I am happy to think, he was as bad as any one. As for me, to say that my heart became like water and my knees like soft wax, is to express in mild words my state of abject terror. There was no need to inquire what the maids thought, for smothered shrieks, louder and louder as each peal of knocks vibrated through the little house, proclaimed sufficiently their sentiments ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... abject terror of the man. It mitigated her wrath with scorn, and so saved him for the moment. She cried out to him fiercely, her voice rough ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... him—I won't see him!" interrupted Sir Francis backing to the furthest corner of the room, in what looked very like abject terror, as if he had completely lost his presence of ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the French revolutionists; he was prosecuted for sedition, and deemed himself only safe from compulsory exile by a voluntary exit to America. This event took place about two years after Montgomery's first connexion with Sheffield, and he had now reverted to his former condition of abject dependence unless for a fortunate occurrence. This was no less than his being appointed joint-proprietor and editor of the newspaper by a wealthy individual, who, noticing the abilities of the young shopman, purchased ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Signor Rodicaso and friends, Fidelia rose, turned toward them, and made a profound courtesy, as if to signify her abject submission. Signor Rodicaso bowed with equal profundity, and straightway proceeded to make a speech to the lady, in which he spoke of the wild idolatry that he had long felt for her, and alluded most disparagingly to his own merits. If the Signor's ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... hospital. From that place, too, they began to send yearly reports known as the Annual Letters to their generals in Rome, and these Letters give an interesting insight into the conditions then existing in Japan. The writers "describe a state of abject poverty among the lower orders—poverty so cruel that the destruction of children by their famishing parents was an every-day occurrence." This terrible state of affairs was due to the civil wars which had entered their most violent phase ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... should but a few short years subsequently enter the city in which she was now feasted and flattered, a penniless wanderer, only to be driven out in terror and sickness, to seek a new shelter, and to die in abject despair! ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... enabling it to survive its tormentors. The Jews were the nation of hope. Like hope this people is eternal. The storms of fanaticism and race hatred may rage and roar, the race cannot be destroyed. Precisely in the days of its abject degradation, when its suffering was dire, how marvellous the conduct of this people! The conquered were greater than their conquerors. From their spiritual height they looked down compassionately on their victorious but ignorant adversaries, who, feeling the condescension of the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... with here and there a few meagre crops of corn. The natives were poorer, humbler, and more miserable than any people we had yet observed in the course of our travels: whenever we stopped they flocked around us in crowds; and, asking for charity, used the most abject gestures....The Polish peasants are cringing and servile in their expressions of respect; they bowed down to the ground; took off their hats or caps and held them in their hands till we were out of sight; stopped their carts on the first glimpse of ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... negatively, to the fund of popular good sense and experience. The lack of such popular support caused the death of the French liberal monarchy; and no such regime can endure, save, as in England, by virtue of a somewhat abject popular acquiescence. As long as it does endure, moreover, it tends to undermine the virtue of its own beneficiaries. The favored minority, feeling as they do tolerably sure of their position, can scarcely avoid a ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... of its robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... as it were, from its stagnatory condition of abject fear. It traveled swiftly, urged by a pursuing dread over plans for the future. The guiding star of his thought was safety. At all costs he must find safety for his property and himself. So long as Retief was at large there could be no safety for him in Foss River. He must ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... they harbored! In those gloomy, tumbledown Jew houses, intellectual endeavor was at white heat. The torch of faith blazed clear in them, and on the pure domestic hearth played a gentle flame. In the abject, dishonored son of the Ghetto was hidden an intellectual giant. In his nerveless body, bent double by suffering, and enveloped in the shabby old cloak still further disfigured by the yellow wheel, dwelt the soul of a thinker. The son of the Ghetto might have worn his badge with pride, ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... Contemporary philanthropy, I believe, recognizes that extreme poverty and overcrowded slums are veritable breeding-grounds of epidemics, disease, delinquency and dependency. Its aim, therefore, is to prevent the individual family from sinking to that abject condition in which it will become a much ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... arrived. They had, indeed, said that it would be their last night—that Plassans would be swallowed up in the earth, or would evaporate into smoke before daybreak; and now, lying in their beds, they awaited the catastrophe in the most abject terror, fancying at times that ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... appointing three men as Sumunter's advisers to hold him in restraint in case any wrong-headedness on his part should get the mastery of him, I begged they would proceed. This proved successful for the time. Sumunter wrote me a letter, stating his intention of abject servitude, and ratified it by presenting his spear and shield, through the hands of the interpreter, for me to return to him as an acknowledgment that I would henceforth forgive him; and we again ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... first place, as we have observed in the notes on that book, the road above between the fire and the fettered men, indicates that there is a certain ascent in the cave itself from a more abject to a more elevated life. By this ascent, therefore Plato signifies the contemplation of dianoetic objects in the mathematical disciplines. For as the shadows in the cave correspond to the shadows of visible objects, and visible ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... my boyhood I was tearing at the dead roots of that cherished plant, which was the Hope of Her Love. It had grown with my own life, and now with its death to-day I felt that I had lost all that was dear to me. Then, in the midst of this abject self-pity, I was stricken with shame. I thought of Comyn, who had borne the same misfortune as a man should. Had his pain been the less because he had not loved her from childhood? Like Comyn, I resolved to labour for ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in the world's history followed with amazing rapidity, and are duly recorded in all their interesting details in these pages. The flight and abdication of the Kaiser; the abject surrender of the German high seas fleet and submarines to the British Grand Fleet and its American associates; the withdrawal of the defeated German armies from Belgium and France; the return of ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... as steel, which dived into his own, Morange was seized with abject fear. All his weakness, his cowardice of heart returned. Could he accuse her of such an atrocious crime? He pictured the consequences. And then, too, he no longer knew if he were right or not; his poor ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... The abject one found a glove of Grizel's, that she did not know she had lost, and put it in his pocket. There it lay, unknown to her. He knew that he must not even ask them to bury it with him in his grave. This was a little ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... interruption. At the moment he was bounding up the companion-ladder, a young man of feeble character—who would have been repudiated by the sex, had he been born a woman—sprang down the same ladder in abject terror. He went straight into the bosom of the ascending doctor, and they both went with a crash to ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... brocades and the quaint paraphernalia of bygone days inspired his apocalyptic words. His language in those telegrams and letters was highfaluting and bombastic. And I read other communications of his—mostly abject appeals for help—devoid of dignity and manliness, when the gloom of dissipated illusions was made unbearable by fear of dethronement and death. And the figure cut by the Tsarlet, who addressed those humble prayers—mostly to ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... first feeling of bitterness and injustice, could not prevent herself considering the Goualeuse as a rival. Her pride revolted in feeling that she blushed; that she suffered, in spite of herself, at a rivalry so abject. She resumed, then, in a cold manner, which cruelly contrasted with the affectionate benevolence of her first words, "And how is it, girl, that your protector leaves you in prison? How did you ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... taught Meg a lesson she'll remember. She meant to bring him home to supper after the Opera, where, in spite of my first experience, we're constant now in attendance; but, to her surprise, then dismay, then almost abject remonstrance, I prepared to go out before dinner to inspect the new studio Kitty and ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... a great captain, nor a mighty ruler; he was only one of the people, but, nevertheless, a hero. Born under the flag of a nation which claimed for its cardinal principle of government, that all men are created free, yet held in abject slavery four millions of human beings; which erected altars to the living God, yet denied to creatures, formed in the image of God and charged with the custody of immortal souls, the common rights of humanity; he declared that the hateful inconsistency ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... where will it stop, and at what precise point of frenzy and delusion will a healthy grown-up man be ready to rush headlong upon a cutlet or make a dash for death or glory at a ham-sandwich? This is obviously the most abject stage of all; worse than that of the man who drinks for the sake of work, and much worse than that of the man who drinks for the sake ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... meannesses, as elsewhere in their glory and beauty. And not so much their meanness and weakness, as that of those who have distorted these innocent servants of truth to become tools of falsehood and the abject instruments of the extinction of all ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... for self-defense. From that hour their doom was resolved on: the crime of disrespect was deemed worthy of death, though their previous crime of abduction and violence might have obtained pardon. It was no easy matter, however, among an abject and timid population, to find executioners of the sentence against two brave and warlike men, well armed and watchful, and who, it was well known, would sell their lives dearly; and the subsequent proceeding is, as already observed, curiously characteristic of the people, and the ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... were absolutely indifferent to her. And when a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for. I say nothing about the social mistake, which would have been abject, which, of course, I would not have allowed, but I assure you that in any case the whole thing would ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... abdication, which was only conditional. More than a thousand addresses were delivered to me last night: I am conjured to resume the reins of government I renounced my rights to the crown only to avert the horrors of a civil war, having never had any other abject in view than the glory and happiness of France. But, seeing as I now do, the dissatisfaction inspired by the measures of the new Government, I can explain to my Guard the reasons which induced me to revoke my abdication. It is true that the number of troops on which I can count will scarcely ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... she was seen by a party of women to misconduct herself in this garden with a police sergeant, and then to sit on his lap and weep. Yet this last I do not wholly believe, for the sergeant in question is a veteran scarcely able to put one foot before the other. Also, Jonah, though a brute, lives in abject fear of his stepmother." ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... round him. He saw himself ruined in everything that he had held dear. He would be the laughing-stock of Rome; he, the hero of a score of amorous escapades, the darling of as many patrician maidens, jilted by the one woman to whom he had become the abject slave. Courage ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... and every kind of sorrow and despair. I had stretched out longing arms to the world, but not a heart opened to me. And suddenly, when the taste of men's cruelty was bitter in my mouth, capricious fortune snatched me from abject poverty and gave me delirious wealth. I was ploughing a barren field, and flung up a nugget. From that moment gold dogged my footsteps. I enriched the few friends I had—they turned howlingly from me because I ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... not always suspected. My experience of barrack-life has enabled me to receive without hesitation what has been said of the occasional merriment of slaves in America and elsewhere, and fully to credit the often-repeated statement, that the abject serfs of despotic Governments laugh more than the subjects of a free country. Poor fellows! If the British people were as unhappy as slaves or serfs, they would, I daresay, learn in time to be quite as merry. There are, however, two circumstances that ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... July 1830, that "unless God send us some miraculous help, we have to look forward to a period of destruction similar to that which the Roman world experienced about the middle of the third century." Now, when I see a man scribble such abject nonsense about events which are passing under our eyes, what confidence can I put in his judgment as to the connection of causes and effects in times ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... abject rage he could easily have done her violence and as easily have run forward and cried her pity. Between the two impulses he crouched ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the Italians, Spanish, French to-day, "he said. "The Church has had them under its complete control fifteen hundred years, and you see the result. Look at the Irish all about us;—always screaming for liberty, yet the most abject slaves of their ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... the Senate and his body-guard, and took his seat on the Rostra in a curule chair. Tiridates and his suite were then introduced between the two long lines of soldiers; and the prince, advancing to the Rostra, made an oration, which (as reported by Dio) was of a sufficiently abject character. Nero responded proudly; and then the Armenian prince, ascending the Rostra by a way constructed for the purpose, and sitting at the feet of the Roman Emperor, received from his hand, after his speech ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... reasons for becoming a soldier. It may be a matter of hereditary luck or abject hunger or heroic virtue or fugitive vice; it may be an interest in the work or a lack of interest in any other work. But there would always be two or three kinds of people who would never tend to soldiering; all those kinds of people were there. A lad with red hair, large ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... father for the son to run through it entirely. A very few years left him an imbecile in body and mind, to become the prey of a parcel of sharks who, dressing in purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously every day, held him in a state of abject slavery and fear. One day, aboard his own yacht, off Naples, they married him to a notorious woman. Under the guardianship of his wife and her villain paramour he wandered like a spectre amid the scene ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... have betrayed my abject despair. I was so completely knocked over that I offered no opposition when the Colonel impudently took the telegram out of my hand ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... What more can ravish and exalt thy heart? It cannot but ravish and exalt; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex thee, to take in all that suggests. Thou child of the dust! Thou speck of misery and sin! How abject thy weakness! how great is thy power! Thou crawler on earth, and possible (I was about to say) controller of the skies! Weigh, and weigh well, the wondrous truths I have in view: which cannot be weighed too much; ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... words the Doctor left the room, leaving Paul in a state of abject horror and dread which need not be described. Never, never again would he joke, as he had been wont to do with Dick in lighter moods, on the subject of corporal punishment under any circumstances—it was no fit theme for levity; if this—this outrage were really done to him, he could never ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... might bring accident, ruin, and perhaps sudden death before sunset. He shook all over, and the blue eyes never winked, and seemed to grow more and more angry till they positively blazed with wrath, and, at last, the fellow uttered a cry of abject fright and turned and ran up the dirty street at the top of his speed. But Cucurullo went quietly on his way, smiling with a little satisfaction; for, after all, it was something to command kindness and hospitality, or inspire mortal terror, by the deformity that afflicted ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... to do?" The wretched man's tone was not merely humble—it was abject. His grand Prince Albert coat was torn in three places; one tail hung down dejectedly over his hip; one sleeve was ripped half-way out. His collar was unbuttoned and the ends rode up hilariously over his cheeks. ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... force has the passion over all his nature. It expands the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In giving him to another it still more gives him to himself. He is a new man, with new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims. ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... sufficiently. I will not repeat the language of the guard and coachman on discovering the trick played; but after direful threats as to what the showman might 'expect' as the result of his device, matters were amicably arranged. The owner of the bear made most abject apologies all round (I fancy giving more than civil words to the coach officials), I interceded for him, and the mail set off at double speed to make up for lost time. Only, with my knowledge of ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... but a few well-directed volleys from a Gardiner gun (which did not jam) caused the hostile force to disperse, and we landed in great state. Marching on the chief's house, we were received with an abject submission that I had scarcely expected. The people were absolutely cowed, more by the fulfilment of the prophecy, I think, than even by the execution done by our Gardiner machine gun. At the bishop's request, I delivered a harangue in the native tongue, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... Horrible discord! till the crowd behind Shouting pursue, and part the bloody fray. At once their wrath subsides; tame as the lamb The lion hangs his head, the furious pard, Cowed and subdued, flies from the face of man, Nor bears one glance of his commanding eye. So abject is a tyrant in distress! At last within the narrow plain confined, A listed field, marked out for bloody deeds, An amphitheatre more glorious far 450 Than ancient Rome could boast, they crowd in heaps, Dismayed, and quite appalled. In meet array Sheathed ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... expression of countenance was so conspicuous that I many a time have heard the country people remark, "These are the slaves of the party." They have neither spirit nor pluck as compared with the Africans, and if one saw a village he turned out of the way to beg in the most abject manner, or lay down and slept, the only excuse afterwards being, "My legs were sore." Having allowed some of them to sleep at the fire in my house, they began a wholesale plunder of everything they could sell, as cartridges, cloths, and meat, so I had to eject them. One of them then threatened ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... about to skip up the bank, when, with forbidding arm, she cried: "Don't you approach me!"—and he stood checked and abject, one foot planted on the bank, looking up, ready to dart for her in her Oriental dress, flimsy, baggy at the girdle, her arms bare, her fingers clasped before her, making convex the two tassels of the girdle, from ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... been ill-blood. The cause of this want of family harmony is but indistinctly stated, but apparently it was due to the irregular habits of the son, and to the severity of the father; while all this domestic misery was rendered doubly bitter by the almost abject want of the household. On the night of November the 9th, 1856, Venanzio Bonci, the father, Maria Rosa, his wife, and their daughter, Caterina, were at supper in the miserable room, which formed the whole of their dwelling, waiting for the return of the son, Luigi, who had been absent ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... maladroit speech of Mr. Goschen. But Mr. Storey, clear, resonant, resolute, speaks to a House that listens with the stillness of great situations. Every word tells. The issue is understood and knit; and now let us troop into the lobbies, and proclaim to the world either our abject unfitness to govern an empire and pass a real statute, or let us stand by our great mission ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... is not dead, the ideal love, but indwells, a redeeming power, wherever there are desolate hearts and minds to be updrawn and united by its ministry; a power so lustral in its nature, that no abject and despairing thought creeps into its presence but is purified and exalted by its regard. This love brings hope and cheerful constancy; with a shining falchion it affrights into their natal darkness the monstrous forms of despair, ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... that is cunning enough to know how to drive a hard bargain for the painted face she has to sell. But that is the sort of woman who can make that sort of conquest. A good woman now, who would have made him an honoured and good wife, would never have made such a blind, abject slave of him. He is bewitched! He is mad! and ought not to be allowed to carry out so insane a project! Perhaps it may still be possible to induce him to hear reason. It was very odd, that way, that just at last he promised ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... abject pauperism,' put in Herbert blandly; 'a reductio ad absurdum of all your visionary Schurzian philosophy, my dear Ernest. Look at it another way, now, and just consider. Which really and truly matters most to you and me, a great work of art or a highly respectable ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... ag'in it; but Nell stamps 'round an' starts to weep some, an' at that, like every other troo gent, he gives in abject. ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... of the old nobility of France came unmistakably under one or other of these extreme descriptions, there were to be found, in the country districts, some who were free alike from such boundless extravagance and such abject poverty. Of this small and exceptional class the Marquis de Beaujardin was a striking example. His naturally calm and unexcitable temperament had been still further disciplined by early habits of self-command, first as a scholar and subsequently as a soldier. Slow to apprehend the bearings of questions, ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... destruction by the prompt kindness of the British governor. A slight prolongation of the voyage would have rendered her as helpless as if peopled by a phantom crew; and she must have been blown before the wind until dashed to fragments on the rocks on some uninhabited part of the coast. The extremity of abject powerlessness had unquestionably been reached when the wide entrance to Port Jackson could not ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... vanity he has excited, and who views his position as dearly important. Our driver not unfrequently is the monster tyrant of his circle; but whether from inclination to serve the interests of his master, or a knowledge of the fierce system that holds him alike abject, we know not. At times he is more than obedient to his ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... rushed forth, and after the manner of his caste, was abject in his apologies for the absence of Prince Adalbert. . . . He had taken every precaution. . . . All had been in vain. . . . The infatuated unfortunate would steal away to ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... situation was often truly embarrassing, for she had as little desire that the besiegers should capitulate as she had intention of surrendering herself. In this respect Miss Wildmere's tactics were easier to carry out. She was not in the least annoyed by any number of abject and committed slaves, and she was approaching the period when she proposed to surrender with great discretion, but to whom was ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... his perfervid dreams of justice and freedom, he becomes a madman and a criminal. Franz, on the other hand, represents the scheming intellect sundered from conscience and natural feeling. He is a monster of cool, calculating, hypocritical villainy. At the end he cowers in abject terror before the phantom conscience that he has reasoned out of existence in the first act. The portrait of the two brothers, as thus conceived, is crudely simple. There are no delicacies of shading, no ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them [Footnote: 25] not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude; liberty looks, amongst them, like something that is more noble and liberal. I do not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... while the snow was falling in heavy flakes, and Huntsman's manufactory threw its red glare of light over the neighborhood, a person of the most abject appearance presented himself at the entrance, praying for permission to share the warmth and shelter which it afforded. The humane workmen found the appeal irresistible, and the apparent beggar was permitted ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... of England, and do not choose to deal in generalities with regard to it until my ignorance has lost something of its density. Liverpool impressed me unfavorably, but I scarcely saw it. The working class seemed exceedingly ill dressed, stolid, abject and hopeless. Extortion and beggary appeared very prevalent. I must look over that city again if ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... luxuriously, and generally prolonged until two o'clock in the morning. Such is the life spent by the wealthy classes under these skies so favoured by Heaven. But there exists, as in Europe, and even to a greater extent, the most abject misery, of which I shall speak hereafter, throwing a shade ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... and the companionable insects had ceased to hum and flutter, left to await the coming of this awful creature. The stammering step came round the bend of the lane, and I saw for the first time a person whom I grew to respect and pity later on, but who struck me then with such an abject sense of terror as I have sometimes ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... boot-black, though perfectly civil and attentive, let you understand, if you have eyes, that they are Republicans; while in the quarters tenanted or frequented only by the Artisan and the Laborer you meet none but devotees of "the Republic Democratic and Social." The contrast between the abject servility of the Poor in London and their manner here cannot be realized without actual observation. A hundred Princes or illustrious Dukes in Paris would not attract as much attention as any one of them would in London. Democracy triumphed in the drawing-rooms of Paris ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... something to do with my decision. She was a beautiful young girl of seventeen or eighteen, and very far superior to her surroundings. She had a native grace and a pleasing way about her that made everybody that came under her spell her abject slave. White and black who knew her loved her, and none, I thought, more deeply and respectfully than Jube Benson, the black man of all work about ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... my unhappiness has become ever deeper, darker, more poignant. I can never tell you all I have suffered, all the abject misery of that time: can never tell you how often in spirit I have called upon you as if my last hour had come, nor describe to you the thrill of joy, the upward bound of my whole soul towards the light of hope, if, for one moment, ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... more self-control.] Yes. Judgment upon you and me. Now, as we stand here, we have our deserts. While he lived, we let ourselves shrink away from him in secret, abject remorse. We could not bear to see it—the thing he had ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... a man, alone, In abject poverty, with hand Uplifted o'er a block of stone That took a shape at his command And smiled upon him, fair and good— A perfect work of womanhood, Save that the eyes might never weep, Nor weary hands be crossed in sleep, Nor hair that ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... weak, and the ideality of the brow, and the delicacy of the nostril and upper lip were unaltered. Nevertheless, and in spite of the suggestion of ease which still lingered about his tall figure, there was something so abject about his whole appearance, his painful self-consciousness at finding himself once more among people that had justly cast him out was so apparent, that Anne longed for an excuse to bid him go forth and hide himself once ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... woke from his long debauch of hate and jealousy and despair; for the first time since that night in the garden, he faced his fate with a clear mind. Death had set his seal forever to a testimony which he had been able neither to refuse nor to accept; in abject sorrow and shame he thanked God that he had been kept from dealing that last cruel blow; but if Don Ippolito had come back from the dead to repeat his witness, Ferris felt that the miracle could not change his own passive ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... against infection, half to fortify his heart against conscience. Tom had never reproached him for his share in the public folly. Indeed, Tom had never reproached a single soul. Poor wretches who had insulted him had sent for him, with abject shrieks. "Oh, doctor, doctor, save me! Oh, forgive me! oh, if I'd minded what you said! Oh, don't think of what I said!" And Tom had answered cheerfully, "Tut-tut; never mind what might have ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... prisoner did not expect much mercy; for we could see that his face was absolutely livid when, pistol in hand, either of us approached to examine his bonds; and once, in his abject dread, he shrieked aloud to Lilla to come and save him ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... she bade him, without a word of remonstrance, and indeed with a sort of dignity which even at that moment surprised her. All the time, too, he had kept his eyes steadily upon hers, he had answered her questions simply, there had been nothing abject in his manner; so that Ethne already began to regret this last thing which she had done. However, it was done. Feversham had ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... occupied the public and the salons. I spoke of an article by Chateaubriand in the Mercure, which attracted attention at the moment of my leaving. One sentence had particularly struck me, and I quoted it word for word, for it was fixed in my memory: 'When in the abject silence the only sound heard is the chain of the slave, and the voice of the informer, when all tremble before the tyrant, and it is as dangerous to incur his favor as to merit his displeasure, ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... how? It had been done so cleverly that not a single clue was left for Podmore to work on—once he had proved beyond question that Clayton had not double-crossed him. Clayton had taken the first train for Chicago; but not before Podmore had third-degreed him into abject fear. No, Clayton had had no hand in it; that was certain, and with that once established, the identity of the arch-thief remained a mystery which baffled investigation—especially when the situation called ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... high Coliseum, Clear by the garlanded line cut of the Flavian ring. Beautiful can I not call thee, and yet thou hast power to o'ermaster, Power of mere beauty; in dreams, Alba, thou hauntest me still. Is it religion? I ask me; or is it a vain superstition? Slavery abject and gross? service, too feeble, of truth? Is it an idol I bow to, or is it a god that I worship? Do I sink back on the old, or do I soar from the mean? So through the city I wander and question, unsatisfied ever, Reverent so I accept, doubtful ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... any friends who would have given him a helping hand, it might never have come to this. But, in the first place, Hardy had no home that could be called a home. His mother was fond of him in her way; but she was now a hysterical invalid, abject under the influence of her second husband, and year by year his step-father's jealousy (the jealousy of a childless man) had driven the mother and son further apart. Of the Havilands, whom he would naturally have ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... violate at pleasure. 'Because the gods were wicked, man was religious; because Olympus was cruel, earth trembled; because the divine beings were the most lawless of Thugs, the human being became the most abject of sycophants.' Even in the most solemn mysteries no such thing as instruction was known—'the priest did not address the people at all.' Hence all moral theories, all doctrinal teaching was utterly disjoined ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... like to be even dispossessed by a most powerful and determined enemy. He asked their deliberations as to help for the king in his difficulties. Oxford was the king's birthplace and was also in Lincoln diocese.{9} The Court party, who advocated abject submission to the king's becks, at once proposed that the barons of England, among whom were the bishops, should furnish three hundred knights to the king, which knights should serve for a year without ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... him, he will at least die at home. He had left the village at an early age, and had never gone back to visit. He goes home with his wife and his little daughter. There he finds his mother, his father, and his two brothers and their wives in the most abject misery. The whole family is entombed in a dark and filthy "isba" full of flies. Nicholas and his wife immediately see that it would have been better for them to have remained in Moscow. But it is too late. They ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... answer me at your peril—was there not a live fly in the dead man's mouth when his hand was placed on the will?" The witness was taken aback at this question; he trembled, turned pale, and faltered out an abject confession that the counsellor was right; a fly had been introduced into the mouth of the dead man, to allow the witness to swear ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... accused man gave a strange, guttural sound, expressive of abject fear, and as the tall figure drew nearer, he rose to flee ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... murdered by a blind clarionet player; and the ringmaster, a sort of Hercules with the face of a galley-slave, a Silenus in scarlet drawers, roared out his furious appeal in a loud voice. Mixed with the crowd of loafers, soldiers, and women, I regarded the abject spectacle with disgust—the last vestige of the ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... abject, so incoherent, so wild with apprehension, the directors began to whisper gravely among themselves, while one got quietly up and called the porter to guard ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... particular an extensive East India trade. Among its inhabitants were merchants, reckoned remarkably shrewd, and many of them very wealthy; and quite a number of aristocratic families, who were looked up to with the abject toad-eating kind of civility that follows "the nobility." On the whole, Bristol was a very fashionable, rich, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... educate has been a staple of England's diplomatic trade since modern diplomacy began. To compel the trade of Ireland to be with herself alone; to cut off all direct communication between Europe and this second of European islands until no channel remained save through Britain; to enforce the most abject political and economic servitude one people ever imposed upon another; to exploit all Irish resources, lands, ports, people, wealth, even her religion, everything in fine that Ireland held, to the sole profit and advancement of England, and to keep all the books ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... the sound of music and song, and He commanded him furthermore to summon thirty thousand angels, to serve as his body-guard, fifteen thousand to right of him and fifteen thousand to left of him. In abject terror Moses asked Metatron, "Who art thou?" and the angel replied, "I am Enoch, the son of Jared, thy ancestor, and God has charged me to accompany thee to His throne." But Moses demurred, saying, "I ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... that he and his co-religionists, who are many, and the landed proprietors, also, of Hindu race, are frightened and put out by this election business and by the importance we have bestowed on lawyers, pleaders, writers, and the like, who have, up to now, been in abject submission to them. They say little, hut after all they are the most important fagots in the great bundle of communities, and all the glib bunkum in the world would not pay for their estrangement. They have controlled ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... then he is great and incomparable; the other according to the multitude, just as we judge of the nature of the horse and the dog, popularly, by seeing its fleetness, et animum arcendi; and then man is abject and vile. These are the two ways which make us judge of him differently, and which occasion such disputes ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... of religious zeal, and by a presumptuous factious spirit under that of liberty. If the first could prevail, they would establish implicit belief and blind obedience, and an Inquisition to maintain this abject servitude. To assert antipodes might become once more as heretical as Arianism or Pelagianism; and men might be dragged to the jails of some Holy Office, like Galilei, for saying they had seen what in fact they had seen, and what every one else that pleased might see. If the second ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... a squad of some dozen barefoot wretches, in coolie clothes, with queues un-plaited, crawled on all fours through the first arch. They crouched abject, while the tall Master of Incense in the dove-gray silk sternly examined ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... attachment, deep and lasting, sprung up between me and my persecuted pupils, which made parting from them intensely grievous; and,{207} when I think that most of these dear souls are yet shut up in this abject thralldom, I ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... by the vengeance of the gods, deprived of sight by his own mad act, and driven from Thebes by his subjects and his sons, wanders forth, abject and forlorn, he is supported by his daughter Antigone; who leads him from city to city, begs for him, and pleads for him against the harsh, rude men, who, struck more by his guilt than his misery, would drive him from ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... suddenly in its upward course, and Carl's jaw dropped as he stared in abject fear at that ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... adductus is post-Augustan. Jam and nondum both have reference to the writer's progress in going over the tribes of Germany, those tribes growing less and less free as he advances eastward: already under more subjection than the foregoing tribes, but not yet in such abject slavery, as some we shall soon reach, sc. in the next chapter, where see note ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... militated vastly against the welfare and development of the Colony. For four years the Government had to remit the payment of tribute in Negros Island, and the others lying between it and Luzon, on account of the abject poverty of the natives, due to these raids. From the time the Spaniards first interfered with the Mahometans there was continual warfare. Expeditions against the pirates were constantly being fitted out by each succeeding ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... these features of mine! Even as affairs stood now, could I make a confidant of Temple and let him see me through the stages of the adventure? My jingling of verses, my fretting about the signification of flowers, and trifling with symbols, haunted me excrutiatingly, taunting me with I know not what abject ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... too, conscience is extinct; for him, also, there is no respect of King or Pope; he has placed himself above law, and substituted his own will for justice. With his pen, as Cellini with his dagger, he assassinates; his cynicism serves him for a coat of armour. And so abject is society, so natural has tyranny become, that he extorts blackmail from monarchs, makes princes tremble, and receives smooth answers to his insults from Buonarroti. These three men, Machiavelli, Cellini, and Aretino, each in his own line, and with the proper differences that pertain to ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... oppressors, we hear them to-day clamoring for the privilege of wearing anew the accustomed yoke, and feeling again the familiar lash! Are these white men, with Anglo-Saxon blood in their veins, and the fair fame of this country in their keeping? Why, if the most abject slave that ever toiled on a Southern plantation, cast off by his master and compelled to claim the rights of a freeman, should, of his own deliberate choice, elect to return to his miserable vassalage, who would not pronounce him unfit to enjoy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... small basket, and into this she packed some old cloths and pieces of biscuit. Then she picked up the terrier, cuffed it on both sides of the head, popped it into the basket, tucked its humbly-agitated tail under its abject ribs, closed the basket, and fastened it with a skewer. She next addressed a label to her cousin's home, tied it to the basket, and despatched a servant with it to the railway-station, instructing her that it should ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... feeling of cold and abject soul-nausea he shut the book, put it away on a bookshelf in which he saw a gap, and went to turn out the lamp. As the flame flickered and died out he heard Jimmy's foot ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... autumn flood, and revealed himself as indeed King of Waters! Such delightful three days in hospitable New Orleans! Might it not be possible to tarry even here? "No," cried the inexorable George. "We have put our hand to the plough. Who will turn back?" Two days of abject wretchedness on the Gulf of Mexico. "Why were we born? Why did we not die before we left solid land?" And then the ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... time to do a thing, biff; and Hanigan got it squarely on the jaw. We hustled him out of there as soon as we could, but Mr. Bridegroom had all his Irish up and followed him out. Eventually we succeeded in calming him down; "Stub" made a most abject apology, and I don't believe he ever used his knife and fork for any ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... in the dining-room window, so that he knew his father had come home. At that all his sorrow and sense of a grievous wrong done to him was swallowed up in abject physical terror. Even later in life, when things had shrunk into reasonable proportions, it was difficult for him to see his father as others had seen him, as an unhappy not unlovable man, gifted with an erratic genius which had ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... of proof. He had received bribes; he had given false judgments for money; he had perverted justice to secure the smiles of Buckingham, the favorite; and when a commission was appointed to examine these charges he was convicted. With abject humility, he acknowledged his guilt, and implored the pity of his judges. The annals of biography present no sorrier picture than this. "Upon advised consideration of the charges," he wrote, "descending into my own conscience, and calling ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... as every body knows, had in the Middle Ages a connotation as strictly defined as a word could have, being the proper legal designation for those persons who were the subjects of the less onerous forms of feudal bondage. The scorn of the semi-barbarous military aristocracy for these their abject dependants, rendered the act of likening any person to this class of people a mark of the greatest contumely; the same scorn led them to ascribe to the same people all manner of hateful qualities, which doubtless also, in the degrading situation ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... exclaims the more candid separatist or sceptic, taking up the argument declined by his scoffing brother. Catholics, it is supposed, are under the dominion of so abject a superstition, that the moment the subject of their religion is introduced, they cease to exert their ordinary common sense and powers of criticism, and believe any thing and every thing that seems to be marvellous. Granting them to be sincere, the charitable Protestant is of opinion ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... Sir Francis," rejoined the other; "and if you had followed my counsel, you would not have condescended to play the abject wooer, but have adopted the manlier course, and demanded ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... within the same," said he, "Madam. And, albeit I neither be earl, lord, nor baron within it, yet has God made me—how abject that ever I be in your eyes—a profitable member within the same. Yea, Madam, to me it appertains no less to forewarn of such things as may hurt it, if I foresee them, than it does to any of the nobility; for both my vocation and conscience craves ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... astute of the three, was the first to recover himself. It occurred to him that unless the rest of the story were prevented from coming out, their humiliation would be complete and abject. ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... denuesto m. insult, abuse. derecho m. right. derramar shed. derredor m. circuit; en —— de round about, around. desafiar challenge, defy. desafo m. duel, combat. desahogo m. relief, alleviation, comfort. desalentado, -a discouraged, abject. desasirse disengage one's self, break loose, extricate one's self. desatar untie, undo, loosen, let loose; —se break loose, break out. desatento, -a unmindful, heedless, rude. desatino m. folly, wildness, reeling. descansar ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... notice that changed, abject aspect, that bearing, devoid totally of confidence? All pretense of a certain coster smartness that he remembered, had vanished; the hair, once curled with cheap jauntiness, hung now straight and straggling; a tawdry ornament ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... risky undertaking and, furthermore, there is to be considered the spirit of traditional submissiveness which at all times and in all places marks the attitude of the slave or serf towards his master. One has only to remember the many accounts of abject resignation by the peasants of France and the moujiks of Russia before the revolutions that changed the order of the past in those countries. No such considerations affect the Native where his anger ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... is thy abject mind so basely bent As of thy Muse to maken Merchandize? (And well I wote this is no strange intent.) The hopefull glimps of gold from chattering Pies, From Daws and Crows, and Parots oft hath wrung An ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More |
