"Cramp" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... This sounds plausible, but is false in fact. Mechanic arts, as agriculture, etc., will indeed be discouraged where the profits and property are, from the nature of the government, insecure. But why the despotism of a government should cramp the genius of a mathematician, an astronomer, a poet, or an orator, I confess I never could discover. It may indeed deprive the poet or the orator of the liberty of treating of certain subjects in the manner they would wish, but it leaves them subjects ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... weeks of pregnancy patients are apt to have cramp-like pains in the lower part of the abdomen. These are often mistaken for labor pains. True labor pains are characterized by starting in the back, extending around the abdomen and toward the pubes and down the thighs; ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... the world, free and splendid as it stretches out before the child, who cannot read his natural history, and follow out its intimations with reverence, must be a tyrant in his home, and the purest intentions will not prevent his doing much to cramp him. Each new child is a new Thought, and has bearings and discernings, which the Thoughts older in date know ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 14. Cramp is effectually prevented by placing the shoes with the toes just peeping from beneath the coverlet; the same is also prevented by tying the garter round the left leg below ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 65, January 25, 1851 • Various
... die some day. Gruby says very soon. But doctors are so inconsistent. Last week, after I had had a frightful attack of cramp in the throat and chest, 'Pouvez-vous siffler?' he said. 'Non, pas meme une comedie de M. Scribe,' I replied. So you may see how bad I was. Well, even that, he said, wouldn't hasten the end, and I should go on living indefinitely! ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... as I told you before," he exclaimed. "You will not sink, and it will keep them from getting the cramp. Kick, Archy! Kick!" ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... another sort of Masonry, which may be call'd the Compound Masonry, for it is all the former together, of Stones hewed and unhewed, and fastned together with Cramp-Irons. The Structure is as follows: The Courses being made of hew'd Stone, the middle place which was left void is fill'd up with Mortar and Pebbles thrown in together; after this they bind the Stones of one Parement or Course to those of another with Cramp-Irons ...
— An Abridgment of the Architecture of Vitruvius - Containing a System of the Whole Works of that Author • Vitruvius
... cried he, "I pray thee, free these limbs from the hateful thongs that eat into the flesh, and so cramp his benumbed members, and Wauchee will fly like a deer to his own people, and also bear away with him the sweet Wild-rose of the Oneidas, to bloom afresh in the gardens of the Mohawks. Will Monega free the bondsman? ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... fallen, with that brace the less. There is a remarkable difference between the characters of the inconveniences which attend a declaration of rights, and those which attend the want of it. The inconveniences of the declaration are, that it may cramp government in its useful exertions. But the evil of this is short-lived, moderate, and reparable. The inconveniences of the want of a declaration are permanent, afflicting, and irreparable. They are in constant progression from ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... one the cramp at one's heart to see such a troop march down the street. As straight as tapers, with fixed look, only one step, however many there may be; and when they stand sentinel, and you pass one of them, it seems as though he would look you through and through; ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... excessive amount of sleep deranges his stomach. While he was in full vigour, he generally went to bed with his clothes on, even to the tall boots, which he has always worn, because of a chronic tendency to cramp, as well as for other reasons. At certain seasons he has kept these boots on for such a length of time, that when he drew them off the skin came away together with the leather, like that of a sloughing snake. He ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... life, each hoary knave Grows, here, immortal, and eludes the grave, Thy virtues immaturely met their fate, Cramp'd in the limit of too ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... such an intense cramp seized him that he could not speak for some time. Then he began again, ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... peacefulness possessed me, overcoming me in spite of myself. Feverish impatience and resistance seemed futile, and in my resignation I began to realise that to avert cramp and disablement from cold—for a chill, moist breeze from the ravine played continuously on me—some sort of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... steps, marines came ashore for the mail, stewards for fruit and fish, Red Cross nurses to shop, tiny midshipmen to visit the movies, and the sailors and officers of the Russian, French, British, Italian, and Greek war-ships to stretch their legs in the park of the Tour Blanche, or to cramp them under a cafe table. Sometimes the ambulances blocked the quay and the wounded and frost-bitten were lifted into the motor-boats, and sometimes a squad of marines lined the landing stage, and as a coffin under a French or English flag was borne up the stone steps stood ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... makes no impression on others correspondent to its desires. The mother would fain electrify the heart of her child; she yearns and burns in vain to make her soul effective on its soul, and to inspire it with a spiritual and holy life; but all her own weaknesses, faults, and mortal cares cramp and confine her, till death breaks all fetters; and then, first truly alive, risen, purified, and at rest, she may do calmly, sweetly, and certainly, what, amid the tempests and tossings of life, she labored for painfully and fitfully. So, also, to generous souls, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... loving ones! she waked not from her swound, And he was taken with the cramp, and in the waves was drowned; But Fate has metamorphosed them, in pity of their woe, And now they keep an oyster ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... I'll see to Mose. Now, bring on a rail, there's a good fellow. I've got a horrid cramp in my legs," began Sam, thinking he had bought help dearly, yet admiring Ben's cleverness in making the ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... go somewheres," she exclaimed with asperity, "for I'm all one cramp setting still so long. And you know you'll have a headache if you don't eat something, ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... That will do: I may have overlooked a bird or two. Where are the biscuits? Are you getting cramp Down by the water there—it ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... by peers or other influential individuals, but because its effect in the house of commons was that it acted as a check on those places which were popularly represented. He further argued, that if a house of commons were once elected on the principles of this bill, it would cramp the crown in the exercise of its prerogatives, and create a body in that house so irresistible as to make their lordships' decisions on all public questions a dead letter. The house of commons would become too much the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... girl, with such a dowdy bonnet on (that, too, of a gauzy texture), who brought her sandalled shoes in an old threadbare velvet reticule. Such mean little boys, when they were not dancing, with string, and marbles, and cramp-bones in their pockets, and the most untidy legs and feet—and ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... outside and the news I got, and for this here I found and fetched along. I need him. I was on a jury once, in a murder case, and they had the tool that done the job and the lawyers tagged it Exhibit A. This is it! He's got a name, but if I tried to say it, it would cramp my jaws and hold my mouth open so long that I'd get assifixiated with this smoke. This is Bill the Bomber! Demeter, hold up the ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... a cramp into you," began Kelley, as they stood beside their fire, "to think that this old relict has actually led us all the way up here in order to water the grave of a sweetheart who died ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... Indigestion and the soggy condition of my clothes kept me awake for some time last night, and the exceptional exercise gives bad attacks of cramp. Our lips are getting raw and blistered. The eyes of the party are improving, I am glad to say. We are just starting our march with no very hopeful outlook. (T. ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... on the table and leaned back with a sigh. My fingers were so stiff with writers' cramp that I felt as though I should never be able to open my hand again. But I, at least, had had a night's sleep. As for the poor Doctor, he was so weary that he had hardly put the tank back upon the table and dropped into a chair, when his eyes closed and ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... Curtall, your discretions are very simple; let me cramp him with a reason. Sirrah, whether is better good ale or small-beer? Alas! see his simplicity that cannot answer me: why, I ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... who rejected both had private prejudices as to snapping-turtles. The surgeon would have threatened intermittent fever, the first assistant rheumatism, and the second assistant congestive chills; non-swimmers would have predicted exhaustion, and swimmers cramp; and all this before coming within bullet-range of any hospitalities on the other shore. But I knew the folly of most alarms about reptiles and fishes; man's imagination peoples the water with many things which do not belong there, or prefer to keep out of his way, if they do; ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the juice of this life-giving plant to his fair lady-love, who "arose and blessed the bestower for the return of health." Water in which peas have been boiled is given for measles, and a Lincolnshire recipe for cramp is cork worn on the person. A popular cure for ringworm in Scotland is a decoction of sun-spurge (Euphorbia helioscopia), or, as it is locally termed, "mare's milk." In the West of England to bite the first fern seen in spring ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... not I show you how the thread cuts my fingers? and I always get cramp, somehow, in my neck, ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... year. Kump it was who cajoled and eventually almost by force persuaded Jake to make a tour of the world. Kump it was who nursed him devotedly through malaria in Mombasa, dysentery in Delhi, hernia in Hong Kong, cramp in Cape Town and acute earache in Edinburgh, and who soothed his bedside with almost womanly tenderness during his fearful outbreak of varicose veins in Vancouver. The work Spout accomplished in spite of slightly adverse ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... was not what he knew it once— The nights were terribly damp; And he never was free from the rheumatiz Except when he had the cramp!" ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... an umpire. Every umpire had fled. They hid behind trees, borrowed silk hats and umbrellas and pretended they were visitors—any device, however mean, to avoid the task of umpiring for that young man. Provided his opponent did not go to sleep or get cramp, one game might last all day. Anyone could return his balls; but, as I have said, to get a ball past him was almost an impossibility. He invariably won; the other man, after an hour or so, would get mad and try to lose. It was his only ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... side, it has not dared to learn that inflexibility of custom and conduct that deadens the spirit into a tame submission. This strange rebound and exaltation would seem to be due less to the physical realities of war—which must in many ways cramp and constrain the individual—than to the relative spiritual freedom engendered by the needs of war, if they are to be successfully met. The man of war has an altogether unusual opportunity to realize himself, to cleanse and heal ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... to cramp the coupe?" Tedda panted. "It weighs turr'ble this weather. I'd 'a' come sooner, but they didn't know what they wanted—ner haow. Fell out twice, both of 'em. I don't ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... much as I could do to crawl to this room. I have walked every step of the way from Liverpool; my wretched limbs have been frost-bitten, and ulcered, and bruised, and racked with rheumatism, and bent double with cramp. I came over in an emigrant vessel, with a herd of miserable creatures who had tried their luck on the other side of the Atlantic, and had failed, like me, and were coming home to their native workhouses. You don't know what some of your ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... of the disputants says: "You say to me that the Church of Rome is corrupt. What then? to cut off a limb is a strange way of saving it from the influence of some constitutional ailment. Indigestion may cause cramp in the extremities; yet we spare our poor feet notwithstanding. Surely there is such a religious fact as the existence of a great Catholic body, union with which is a Christian privilege and duty. Now, we ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... devotions to St. Hubert for the recovery of his son, who was cured by this means. The son also performed the necessary rites at the shrine, and was cured not only of the hydrophobia "but of the worser phrensy with which his father had instilled him." Cramp-rings were also used; and eelskins to this day are tied round the legs as a preventive of this spasmodic affection; and by laying sticks across the floor, on going to bed, cramp has ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... began to think for myself. Under the influence of Mr. Wetherill I had come, as without him I could not have done, to see how much there was of the beautiful and noble in the creed of Fox and Penn, how much, too, there was in it to cramp enterprise, to limit the innocent joys of life, to render progress impossible, and submission to every base man or government ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... "I never could write. I know what ought to be said, and I could say it to any one; but my ideas freeze in the pen, cramp in my fingers, and make my brain seem like heavy bread. I was born for extemporary speaking. Besides, I think the best things on all subjects in this world of ours are said not by the practical workers, but by the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... to one hour. Faintness, nausea, incessant vomiting, epigastric pain, headache, diarrhoea, tightness and heat of throat and fauces, thirst, catching in the breath, restlessness, debility, cramp in the legs, and convulsive twitchings. The skin becomes cold and clammy. In some cases the symptoms are those of collapse, with but little pain, vomiting, or diarrhoea. In others the patient falls into a deep sleep, while in the fourth class the symptoms ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... This Dirzed was spoken of as a generally respected member of something called the Society of Assassins, and that'll give you an idea of what things are like on that sector, and why I don't want to send anybody who might develop trigger-finger cramp at the wrong moment. She and Dirzed left the home of the gentleman who had just had himself discarnated, presumably for Dalla's apartment, about a hundred miles away. That's the last that's been ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... baby, as had been eating of new chestnuts, and got the cramp. So the forring nuss, as wasn't worth her salt, comes screaming after me to come and do something for the baby. Of course I went and did what was right and proper for the poor little suffering creetur; and when I had put him to sleep, I thinks about his neglectful mother, ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... given, because it is not only the earliest, but perhaps the most characteristic of the whole. Despite the apparently unsuitable forms, it is evident that the writer is striving, without knowing it, at what we call journalism. But fashion and the absence of models cramp and distort his work. Its main features are to be found in the personal and satirical pieces, in the vivid and direct humanity of some touches in the euphuist tract-romances, in the delightful snatches of verse which intersperse and relieve ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... preposterous in the idea of trying to stoop her grown stature and simplify her complex tastes and adult interests back into the narrow limits of a child's toy-house. Could it be that she felt something of the same displeasure when she set herself fully to conceive what it would be to cramp herself and her complex interests and adult affections back to ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... wouldn't cramp you none. That cow-punch he went an inch to the good over six foot. I came along about an eighth below him, and Aggy loomed far in the night. We all had features on our faces, and—well, Cactus sure was a pretty little town, with its parks and irrigated gardens, and when we strolled, we noticed the ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... forehead was not remarkable for height, but was peculiarly broad and full with unusual width between the eyes, and if Strato were correct in his speculations with reference to Psyche's throne, then verily my little girl did not cramp her soul in its fleshy palace. Daintily moulded in figure and face, every feature instinct with a certain delicate patricianism, that testified to genuine "blue blood," there was withal a melting tenderness about the parted ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Figure de la Terre of Bouguer, a passage, which shows that this astronomer, whose opinions are of such weight, considered also 36 degrees as the inclination of a slope quite inaccessible, if the nature of the ground did not admit of forming steps with the foot.) We felt the want of cramp-irons, or sticks shod with iron. Short grass covered the rocks of gneiss, and it was equally impossible to hold by the grass, or to form steps as we might have done in softer ground. This ascent, which was attended with more ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... I chide you, dame, to amend you. You are too fine to be a Millers daughter; for if you should but stoop to take up the tole dish, you will have the cramp in your finger at least ...
— Fair Em - A Pleasant Commodie Of Faire Em The Millers Daughter Of - Manchester With The Love Of William The Conquerour • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... Pillsbury's move, intending to displace the Rook. Black has then open lines for his two Bishops as compensation for his shattered pawn position. 11. R-KB4, Castles; 12. KtxKt, QxQch; 13. KtxQ, PxKt. Now it is not easy to find a reasonable plan for White, as Black threatens to cramp White's game with B-Q3 and P-B5. It is therefore necessary for White to take measures against that by playing R-B4 and B-B4. If Black still plays B-Q3, B-B4 follows, with the intention of exchanging and of provoking Black's P-B4, ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... heard this and that and t'other pain mentioned as the worst that mortals can endure—such as the toothache, earache, headache, cramp in the calf of the leg, a boil, or a blister—now, I protest, though I have tried all these, nothing seems to me to come up to a pretty sharp fit of jealousy." —Thinks ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... interests. It is worth while, even at the risk of being called commonplace, to be true to our well-to-do actualities; the very passions themselves seem to be softened and modified by conditions which formerly at least could not be said to wrong any one, to cramp endeavor, or to cross lawful desire. Sin and suffering and shame there must always be in the world, I suppose, but I believe that in this new world of ours it is still mainly from one to another one, and oftener still from one to one's self. We have death, too, in America, and a great ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... cent. of my yearly salary. But if I buy a cigar for ten cents it would be no hardship for me to put a cent in the bank for Bobberts, would it? Not a bit! And if you buy an ice cream soda; it would not cramp our finances to put a cent in the bank for each soda, would it? And yet a cent is ten per cent. ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... Junius.—Mr. Cramp, in his late publication, Junius and his Works, conjectures that the printer having bound a copy of Junius for and under the direction of the writer of the letters, followed the pattern in the binding of other copies; and this, he says, "will account for similar copies having ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... it was beyond me. I was too tired to thrash my arms about and warm myself, but I found strength time and again to chafe her hands and feet to restore the circulation. And still she pleaded with me not to cast off the masts. About three in the morning she was caught by a cold cramp, and after I had rubbed her out of that she became quite numb. I was frightened. I got out the oars and made her row, though she was so weak I thought she would ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... dollar I have made since I've been in the city. Jones has gone under; Pell has gone under. Cramp & Co. will have to make a statement, and get a little time, but they will swim. The General is the only man of the lot who isn't shaken. But, Toll, it's devilish hard. It scares me. A few more such slices ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... Joanne struggled vainly to free herself, and scream after scream rang from her lips. And John Aldous knew that at last the end had come. For there was no longer strength in his arms, and there was something that was like a strange cramp in his fingers, while the clutch at his own throat was turning the world black. His grip relaxed. His hands fell limp. The last that he realized was that Quade was over him, and that he must ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... had been full of fears, the morning found us bright and happy. Not all of us, however. I smile as I remember an incident which occurred a little before daylight. One of our comrades, who had been lying near me, got up, went out into the street, and paced up and down some time, as if to shake off cramp or cold. My eyes followed him mechanically; he was walking in front of the houses, the backs of which look out upon the Passage des Panoramas, and as he did so he cast furtive glances through the open doorways. He went into one, and came ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... when the pressure is applied, they are likely to slip, particularly when the peg-box diminishes rapidly in width under the volute. They must therefore be cut more or less wedge like, according to the modelling or proportion of the parts, so that when placed on, the screwing of the cramp will be direct. When this is done to satisfaction, the usual process advised for the glueing may be proceeded with, and being carefully seen to be in proper order, the cramp with pads against the outside cheeks of the ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... rejoicing was there! How the vassals did stare! The old housekeeper put a clean shirt down to air, For she saw by her lamp That her master's was damp, And she fear'd he'd catch cold, and lumbago, and cramp; But, scorning what she did, The Knight never heeded Wet jacket, or trousers, or thought of repining, Since their pockets had got such a delicate lining. But, oh! what dismay Fill'd the tribe of Ca Sa, When they found he'd the cash, and ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... what? I'll tell you frankly, as man to man, that I can't go on walking all night, Clint. I'm dog-tired and my left leg's got a cramp in it and I'm weak with hunger. Let's find a cosy corner ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... men Above the mold, and bring to human ken The joys of radiance, air and clear bird-songs; So that the brow, o'er moist with sullen toil, May catch a breeze from far-off Paradise; So that the soul may, for a moment, rise Up from the stoop and cramp of daily moil— May own his gift Divine! as sure may trace Its Source, as that of waters kind hands hold To thirsty lips; nor need he mourn (since grace Of his hath such refreshment wrought) if gold Be scant; to him hath richer boon been given An ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... the eighth year of his age, no less than four thousand five hundred and fifty different theses, upon the most abstruse points of the most abstruse theology;—and to defend and maintain them in such sort, as to cramp and dumbfound his opponents.—What is that, cried my father, to what is told us of Alphonsus Tostatus, who, almost in his nurse's arms, learned all the sciences and liberal arts without being taught any one of them?—What shall we say of the great Piereskius?—That's ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... at once noted, that all idea of any "payment," in that sense, must be utterly and scornfully abjured on the foundation stone of every National or Civic Museum. There must be neither companies to fill their own pockets out of it, nor trustees who can cramp the management, or interfere with the officering, or shorten the supplies of it. Put one man of reputation and sense at its head; give him what staff he asks for, and a fixed annual sum for expenditure—specific accounts to be printed annually for all the world's ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... be sure, I permitted no interruptions. But then I took exercise, and for ten days of the fifteen attended the Court of Session from two to four hours every day. This is nothing, however, to writing Ivanhoe when I had the actual cramp in my stomach; but I have no idea of these things preventing a man from doing what he has a mind. My love to all the party at Brighton—fireside party I had almost said, but you scorn my words—seaside party then be it. Lady ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... when going out of his shop to buy grain from the peasants, he pulled his girdle low down and tightened it and prepared for action. The first thing that occurred to him was to free Mukhorty's leg from the rein. Having done that, and tethered him to the iron cramp at the front of the sledge where he had been before, he was going round the horse's quarters to put the breechband and pad straight and cover him with the cloth, but at that moment he noticed that something was moving in the sledge ...
— Master and Man • Leo Tolstoy
... that one felt more conscious of delicate litheness than of size. As her breath came fast with excitement the fine arch of her heaving bosom was that of a Diana. Belted about a waist that had never known the cramp of stays, she wore a pair of trousers thrust into her boot tops and no man ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... to speak, but a terrible cramp in his throat choked him. He appealed with his hands to Slingerland. The trapper lost his smile and the iron set ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... think I moved the mark maybe ... here now is the part he was reading to me himself ... "the remedies for diseases belonging to the skins next the brain: headache, vertigo, cramp, convulsions, palsy, incubus, apoplexy, ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... higher ranks of literature, and of whom Ranke even said that he could hardly be called an historian at all, tried by the stricter test. He had no doubt seen how his unsuggestive fixity and assurance could cramp and close a mind; and he felt more beholden to the rivals who produced d'Adda, Barillon, and Bonnet, than to the author of so many pictures and so much bootless decoration. He tendered a course of Bacon's Essays, or of Butler's and Newman's Sermons, as a preservative ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... of yours has given me the cramp, standing here on the cold pavement. We'll have a little warm posset,—very small and thin, as they say in Tom Jones,—and then ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... cried his brother. "I dare say a fellow would get the cramp before he had well-nigh ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... could not dulness save Thy soul from sin, from infamy thy grave? Blackmore and Quarles, those blockheads of renown, Lavish'd their ink, but never harm'd the town. Though this, thy brother in discordant song, Harass'd the ear, and cramp'd the labouring tongue: 80 And that, like thee, taught staggering prose to stand, And limp on stilts of rhyme around the land. Harmless they dozed a scribbling life away, And yawning nations own'd the innoxious lay, But from thy graceless, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... my dear boy, at the change for the worse in my handwriting. I am suffering for my devotion to the studious habits of a lifetime: my right hand is attacked by the malady called Writer's Cramp. The doctor here can do nothing. He tells me of some foreign woman, mentioned in his newspaper, who cures nervous derangements of all kinds by hand-rubbing, and who is coming to London. When you next hear from me, I may be in London too."—There the ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... sepulchre, lit by neither sun, nor moon, was called a sleeping-room. Alcove-like cells were hewn into the rock; here, on a couch of damp, half-rotten straw, covered with a sackcloth, the unfortunate sufferers were to repose from the day's work. Over each cell a cramp-iron was fixed, wherewith to lock-up the prisoners like ferocious dogs. No ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... grass as it had done when the Normans crossed their not far distant Channel, or rattling over hilltops through leather-coated oak groves which had kept their symmetry since their progenitors were planted by the Druids. Here was nothing to cramp the mind: here was the England that has absorbed Celt, Saxon, Fleming, Norman, generation after generation, each with its passing form of political faith: the England of ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... simply furious at each other and—Oh, I do hate that kind of a mix-up, don't you? I mean—it's so lacking in refinement, but—And Mother wants to come and stay with me for a whole month, and of course I do love her, I suppose I do, but honestly, she'll cramp my style something dreadful—she never can learn not to comment, and she always wants to know where I'm going when I go out evenings, and if I lie to her she always spies around and ferrets around and finds ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... kept at it for wellnigh ten minutes. But t' shore were a lang way off, an' then, sudden-like, I began to think o' Abe Verity, an' t' fear o' death got howd on me an' clutched me same as if I'd bin taen wi' cramp. There were lads fishin' frae boats noan so far off, an' I hollaed to 'em; but they niver heerd. I tewed an' better tewed, but I got no forrarder; an' then I knew I ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... powerless, from being so long above my head. I dared not pull myself up, for the falling of stones and earth, when I first made the attempt, gave fearful note of the feeble tenure by which I was sustained. My left hand began to cramp; the fear of instant annihilation seized me; I could hold by it no longer. I grasped still more firmly by my right, and, stretching my left, found relief, by moving it gently about, to restore the circulation. I dared not bring it down, lest the other had failed; and, stretching ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... balderdash, above all kept on dreadfully short allowance of sleep;—so that now first, when fairly down to rest, all aches and bruises begin to be fairly sensible; and my clearest feeling at this present is the uncomfortable one, "that I am not Caliban, but a Cramp": terribly cramped indeed, if I could ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... to feel that I'm not dreaming," confided Eph, almost in a whisper. "Whee! but it's fine to be out on a craft so big that you don't get a cramp in your leg from walking! Say, do you know, Jack," he whispered, "I am almost crazy to see one of this ship's big ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... Mr. PRINGLE flung his barbed darts at the Government is filled, physically, by Mr. STANTON. Lonely Mr. HOGGE now sits uneasily upon the Front Opposition Bench, but, fearing perhaps lest its dignified traditions should cramp his style, makes frequent visits ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... a cramp in my back, and my neck's gone to sleep!" groaned Old Jimmie, leaning forward on his cane. "Daughter, dear"—plaintively to Maggie—"what is the crazy ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... determine, lay grovelling on his belly in the wet scuppers, and kicking feebly with his outspread toes. We asked him what was amiss, and he replied incoherently, with a strange accent and in a voice unmanned by terror, that he had cramp in the stomach, that he had been ailing all day, had seen the doctor twice, and had walked the deck against fatigue till he was overmastered and had ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it down as an axiom among poets that their ethical natures must develop spontaneously, or not at all. An attempt to force one's moral instincts will inevitably cramp and thwart one's art. It is unparalleled to find so great a poet as Coleridge plaintively asserting, "I have endeavored to feel what I ought to feel," [Footnote: Letter to the Reverend George Coleridge, March 21, 1794.] and his brothers have ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... out of that leg, boys, I'll 'fess up' everything," he began. "That leg feels as if some one were trying to pull some teeth out of it by the roots. A cramp ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... it seemed that the enemy had broken into the camp he picked up the still unconscious officer in his arms, and, without relaxing his hold, bore him to a place of safety. His arm was for many hours paralysed with cramp from the effects of the ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... of a growing body should be entirely free. Nothing should cramp their movements or their growth; nothing should fit too closely or bind the body; there should be no ligatures whatever. The present French dress cramps and disables even a man, and is especially injurious to children. It arrests the circulation ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... expresses it, "remissum magis specie, quam vi: quia cum venditor pendere juberetur, in partem pretii emptoribus accrescebat[e]." But this inconvenience attends it on the other hand, that these imposts, if too heavy, are a check and cramp upon trade; and especially when the value of the commodity bears little or no proportion to the quantity of the duty imposed. This in consequence gives rise also to smuggling, which then becomes a very lucrative ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... under the high land to the north of Hat Hill and were able to cook provisions and take some repose without disturbance. The sandy beach was our bed; and after much fatigue, and passing three nights of cramp in Tom Thumb, it was to ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... teaspoonful of it on moist sugar for a dose, adding three drops of Kayu Puteh oil, extracted from a Borneon wood and called cajeput oil in England, a very strong aromatic medicine. This mixture proved itself very useful. If the patients applied in good time it invariably gave relief to the cramp and pain in the stomach; if the disease had gone on to sickness it was more difficult to administer. Sometimes we followed it up ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... have heard of the efficacy of the stone in the toad's head, alluded to by Shakspeare,[2] for curing the cramp, &c. by application to the afflicted part; but it was left for Dr. B—— to discover the virtues of a toad's leg. Apropos, an eccentric friend of mine, once gravely told me he intended to procure this precious Bufonian jewel; and as probably some reader may feel ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various
... they left her after she reached her sixth birthday. Ah! she is very delicate. For some days past she had seemed ill at ease. She was at times taken with cramp, and plunged ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... blood, though not moving, being in contact with living vessels, need not coagulate. There is no physiological absurdity in supposing such a general arrest of function, originating in the nervous system, and continuing an indefinite period without life being extinguished. If a swimmer be taken with cramp and sink, he is irretrievably dead in five minutes. But if he sink from a fit of epilepsy, he may remain a longer time under water, yet recover. But epilepsy is a form of loss of consciousness beginning ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... altogether! No, don't think. We were barely half way up. Now you must contrive to put on your shoes and stockings." He produced them from his pocket. "And then we must find out how to place ourselves most comfortably and safely. We have but one enemy to fight during the next seven hours—cramp. You must tell me immediately if you feel it threatening anywhere, I have done a lot of scouting in my time, and know a dodge or two. I also know what it is to lie in one position for hours, not daring to move a muscle, the cold sweat pouring off my face, simply from the agonies of cramp. We ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words of the things they have seen and considered. The recording of their tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers. There are only two fates I dread—deafness and writer's cramp. The hand is yet steady; let the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, ...
— Options • O. Henry
... required of children may be too great. Few pupils can write long at a time without eye-strain, muscle cramp, and bad bodily positions. Where this is the case, over-fatigue results if the amount of written work required is large. It is not unusual to find schools in which children are required to spend almost half of their school hours in some form of written work. This ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... negligent of all These lesser graces, she assumes the part Of that Eternal Majesty that weighed The world's foundations, if to these the mind Exalts her daring eye; then mightier far Will be the change, and nobler. Would the forms Of servile custom cramp her generous powers? Would sordid policies, the barbarous growth Of ignorance and rapine, bow her down To tame pursuits, to indolence and fear? Lo! she appeals to Nature, to the winds And rolling waves, the sun's unwearied course The elements and seasons: all declare For what th' Eternal Maker ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... of maids and men lived on comfortably, placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... be your work, but his own, Jane: that is, if you write such a letter as I expect you will. Do not let your fear of offending cramp your expression. Speak your gratitude freely, and also your resolution of independence. Write as freely as you have been speaking ...
— Principle and Practice - The Orphan Family • Harriet Martineau
... beach they walked in days that seem to man long, long ago. How brief and strange the little lives of men, and so beset with customs framed to cramp the heart and curse the soul before its time! To me,—here since Time began to build that bridge of sighs and tears that link the two eternities—it seems but yesternight that, hand in hand they wandered here, so wrapt in happiness ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the gods kept carnival, Tricked out in star and flower, And in cramp elf and saurian forms They swathed their ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the second winter than I did during the first. My limbs were benumbed by inaction, and the cold filled them with cramp. I had a very painful sensation of coldness in my head; even my face and tongue stiffened, and I lost the power of speech. Of course it was impossible, under the circumstances, to summon any physician. My brother William came and did all he could for me. Uncle Phillip also watched tenderly over ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... complexion of his creed, outside of the pulpit his reverence was as genial, jolly, and joky as the cheeriest, smilingest, comfortingest, most latitudinarian Methodist preacher you ever had at your bedside to help you look your latter end in the face, through the dubious issues of a surprise attack of cramp colic, or an overwhelming onslaught of cholera morbus. Indeed, it not unfrequently happens that the human heart is better than the human creed, and the Rev. Burlman Reynolds was wont to square his life by the dictates of his inward ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... days are hot and damp, and my legs are stiff with cramp, And the office punkahs creak! And I'd give my tired soul, for the life that makes man whole, And a whiff of the jungle reek! Ha' done with the tents of Shem, dear boys, With office stool and pew, For it's time ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... a system of instruction that may tend to perpetuate mannerism, to cramp originality, and fetter genius, has of late years led to considerable opposition to art-academies generally, whenever more is contemplated by them than the mere school-teaching of the pupil, and the affording ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... table salt, in a tea-cup of warm water; if this does not stop the vomiting and cramp, repeat the dose; this is very useful in stopping the operation of an emetic, when it has continued too long. Flannel cloths dipped in hot spirits, and sprinkled with cayenne pepper, and applied to the stomach, sometimes relieves the pain; a mustard plaster ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... mortified tone; "I never knew such onlucky broods. A cow got into the orchard and trampled down one. Fifteen as likely ducklings as you'd wish to see. And the rats scared off a hen just as she'd hatched out; and we lost a whole lot more with the cramp." ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... the windows. She likes to snooze, in the sun, and count her money-bags. France is too old to care about religion, or the future—she is thinking how best to be comfortable—here in this world, when she has rheumatism and a cramp in the stomach!" And the old priest wrapped his own soutane about his lean knees, suiting his gesture to ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... humanity! Bridge over the space between, and you have directly the huge continental barrack-yard system all over England. And once get into the condition of a great continental military power, and you get the arbitrary power; you cramp down the people, and you unfit them from being what they ought to be—FREE And all the good influences together at work in this country could not have secured us against this, but for that blessed separation between ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... place, as they had afterwards found out, that they had taken for a summer; the other, the flower of the flock, a middy on the Britannia, dreadfully drowned, and not even by an accident at sea, but by cramp, unrescued, while bathing, too late in the autumn, in a wretched little river during a holiday visit to the home of a shipmate. Then Marian's unnatural marriage, in itself a kind of spiritless turning of the other cheek to fortune: her actual wretchedness and plaintiveness, her greasy children, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... ill of cholera. The child had been ill all night, and not for love or money could he get any one to do anything for them, not even to go for the medicine. The lady was blue, and in great pain from cramp, and the poor unweaned infant was roaring for the nourishment which had failed. I vainly tried to get hot water and mustard for a poultice, and though I offered a Negro a dollar to go for the medicine, he looked at it ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... pursue by passing over all those points of theory which are so dear to Dr. Pym. I know how they are made. Perjury is a variety of aphasia, leading a man to say one thing instead of another. Forgery is a kind of writer's cramp, forcing a man to write his uncle's name instead of his own. Piracy on the high seas is probably a form of sea-sickness. But it is unnecessary for us to inquire into the causes of a fact which we deny. Innocent Smith never did commit ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... stiff women, all reduced to a Sunday nullity. I hated it. It reminded me of that which I knew in my boyhood, that stiff, null 'propriety' which used to come over us, like a sort of deliberate and self-inflicted cramp, on Sundays. I hated these elders in black broadcloth, with their neutral faces, going home piously to their Sunday dinners. I hated the feeling of these villages, comfortable, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... the other hand, and she was urgent on the necessity of thoroughness in the wringing out of one's floor cloth, because a dry floor cloth takes up twice as much water as a wet one, and thus lightens labor; also she advised Mary to change her positions as frequently as possible to avoid cramp when scrubbing, and to kneel up or stand up when wringing her cloths, as this would give her a rest, and the change of movement would relieve her very greatly, and above all to take her time about the business, because haste seldom resulted in clean work, and ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... own houses," said Delphine, at last, "and then complain that they cramp us here, and the wind blows in there, while the fault is not in the order, but in us, who increase here and shrink ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... have disabled him. Perhaps a cramp or a fainting spell of exhaustion. But it was necessarily only surmise, and one theory was ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... supposed to be a cure for many diseases. Lord Bacon says that in his time people afflicted with cramp wore bands of green periwinkle tied about their limbs. It had also its supposed moral influences. According to Culpepper the leaves of the flower if eaten by man and wife together would revive ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... time that the lamp was lighted in the sick-room I could see that the end was near. Excepting an occasional feeling of cramp in her legs, she seemed to suffer less. But her eyes looked sunk in her head; her skin was cold and clammy; her lips had turned to a bluish paleness. Nothing roused her now—excepting the last attempt made ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... inductive philosophy. Bacon has, it is true, repeatedly dwelt on the power of knowledge, but with so many explanations and distinctions, that nothing could be more unjust to his general meaning than to attempt to cramp into a sentence what it costs him a volume to define. Thus, if in one page he appears to confound knowledge with power, in another he sets them in the strongest antithesis to each other; as follows, "Adeo, signanter Deus opera potentiae et sapientiae discriminavit." ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... not touch them—-please follow my wishes, Unless you are anxious to fatten the fishes." The woman obeyed him. "You need not fear me," She replied, "I am wholly at home in the sea. I knew all the arts of the swimmer, I thought, But confess I was frightened when suddenly caught With a cramp in my knee at this distance from shore." With slow even breast strokes the strong swimmer bore His fair burden landward. She lay on the billows As lightly as if she were resting on pillows Of down. She relinquished herself to the sea And the man, and was ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... amazing that the journal was kept so regularly, as Miss Macnaughtan suffered from writer's cramp, and the entries could only have been written with great difficulty. Frequently a passage is begun in the writing of her right, and finished in that of her left hand, and I have seen her obliged to grasp her pencil in her clenched fist before ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... Billoo came to the surface and looked for it, it was thirty feet off. But he set his teeth (I think he set them) and swam after it. Just as he reached it, he fetched an awful yell. He had been seized with cramps. Still, he had sense enough to cling to the door, and, when the first spasm of the cramp had passed, to sprawl himself upon it. There he lay for a while, lapped by the water that came over the door, and writhing ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... much of anything—that is, in the way of ready money. In fact, I must bear all the burden of the funeral expenses. I'm short myself, and it's going to cramp me to get hold of ready cash. I've got to make something of a sacrifice, and ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... later Oliver had splashed up to them, shouting "A rescue! A rescue! Guests Drown While Host Looks On Smilingly! What's the matter, Ted, you look as if you wanted to turn into a submarine? Got cramp?" ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... the whip of twigs, the rush of wind, the heavy, rapid pound of hoofs, the violent motion of his horse—these vied in sensation with the smart of sweat in his eyes, the rack of his wound, the cold, sick cramp in his stomach. With these also was dull, raging fury. He had to run when he wanted to fight. It took all his mind to force back that bitter hate of himself, of his pursuers, of this ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... son, "I never dreamed that fate was likely to cramp me in a cockleshell. I dare say there is a touch of sublimity about it. The associations are in ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... a chum of mine got in the water, and was taken with a cramp," Smithy went on hurriedly, his blue eyes sparking with delight; "why, after what you showed me this morning, I believe that as soon as I know a little more about swimming, I could get ...
— The Boy Scouts' First Camp Fire - or, Scouting with the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... not the cause of this attack,' said she. 'I am subject to these spasms, a sort of cramp of ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... risk of debt, ruin, and misery; living not so much according to our means, as according to the superstitious observances of our class. Though we may speak contemptuously of the Indians who flatten their heads, and of the Chinese who cramp their toes, we have only to look at the deformities of fashion amongst ourselves, to see that the reign ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... then beginning over again until at last the achievement of five hundred steps seemed to take an immeasurable length of time and great effort. Like the ache of a tooth came the first warning of snowshoe cramp in his legs. In the black night he grinned. He knew what it meant—a warning as deadly as swimmer's cramp in deep water. If he continued much longer he would be crawling on his hands ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... but we rested awhile to stretch our limbs after the cramp brought on by the steep and ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... could get her outside of herself, it would do a lot for her. I've a hunch that you have let her get on the shelf. I wouldn't if I were you! I know it may be necessary to keep her to rules, but she thinks too much about the rules; they cramp her. When Nancy ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... especially since Caroline, the brown mare, would rather travel ten miles straight ahead than go backward ten feet. Brit was obliged to "take it out of her" with the rein ends and his full repertoire of opprobrious epithets before he could cramp the wagon and head them ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... produced by drinking copiously of cold water, which arrests digestion and produces cramp of the fourth stomach, probably of the other stomachs, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... deliberately rude with her parent, would refuse to fetch and carry for her, was quickly bored over any little personal service performed for her, and did her best in every way to cramp the widow's ever ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... seems to have gone ashore to see the French authorities. Perhaps he drank too strong a punch of rum and sugar—a drink very prejudicial in such a climate to one not used to it. Perhaps he took the yellow fever, or the coast cramp; the fact cannot now be known. At any rate he sickened, and died there, "before he could accomplish his desires"—"all things hereby remaining in suspense." One account, based on the hearsay of a sea-captain, says that Mansvelt ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... done; but Schools and Children are as slow a way of working, as sowing Acorns, in order to raise Forests, for building Fleets and Cities. Besides, the Funds allowed this noble Design, are so small, as if they were subscrib'd by Papists, in order to cramp it, and lessen its Efficacy; whereas the Contributions ought to be as extended as its Views, and suited to the removal of our great national Defect, our religious Differences. Neither ought such an important Scheme, to be left depending ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... partly through with ease, but lost his hold in such a manner that his body slipped through so as to pinion his arms and leave him wholly powerless either to drop lower or return—the bend of the hole being such as to cramp his back and neck terribly and prevent him from breathing. He strove desperately, but each effort only wedged him more firmly in the awful vise. Hamilton sprang to his aid and did his utmost to effect his release; but, powerful as he was, he could not ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... with two tails, that will make our fortune? Who knows but this lizard may put an end to all our miseries? How often, when we should have an eagle's sight to discern the good luck that is running to meet us, we have a cloth before our eyes and the cramp in our hands, when we should lay hold on it. So go, take her away, for my heart tells me that some good fortune awaits the poor ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... and to set to steeple-hunting instead of running on highways! But it is the lot of many such, in this dislocated time,—Heaven mend it! In a better time there will be other "professions" than those three extremely cramp, confused and indeed almost obsolete ones: professions, if possible, that are true, and do not require you at the threshold to constitute yourself an impostor. Human association,—which will mean discipline, vigorous wise subordination and co-ordination,—is ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... long the Destroying Angel hovered over the devoted city—neither age nor infancy was spared, and numbers were daily hurried from the vigour of living manhood into the silence and oblivion of the grave. Vigorous people, walking along the streets, were suddenly seized with shiverings and cramp, and sank down on the pavement to rise no more, sometimes actually expiring on the cold, hard stones. Pleasure was forgotten, business was partially suspended; all who could, fled; the gloom upon the souls of the ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... ventured to change his position, for his long ordeal was beginning to induce cramp. The faint creaking of the metal bunk seemed, in the dead stillness and to his highly-tensed senses, like the ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... the cramp out of that leg, boys, I'll 'fess up' everything," he began. "That leg feels as if some one were trying to pull some teeth out of it by the roots. ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... yard, There is a man all to you guard. If you put your hand out so, Untoe the guv'nor you must go; Eight o'clock is our breakfast hour, Those wittles they do soon devour; Oh! dear me, how they eat and stuff, Lave off with less than half enough. Nine o'clock you mount the mill, That you mayn't cramp from settin' still. If that be ever so against your will, You must mount on the traaedin' mill. There is a turnkey that you'll find He is a raskill most unkind. To rob poor prisoners he is that man, To chaaete poor prisoners where he can. At eleven o'clock we march ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... of yesterday only aggravated by the cramp which had stolen into his legs during the ride of to-day, climbed down from the buckboard and limped across the lawn to ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... Mischief and torment! O my soul and heart, How are you cramp'd with anguish! Death itself Brings not the like convulsions, O, this day! That ever I ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... compounded of divinity, morality, and policy, with great aspersion of all other arts; and being, in mine opinion, one of the most sound and healthful writings that I have read. Not sick of business, as those are who lose themselves in their order, nor of convulsions, as those which cramp in matters impertinent; not savoring of perfumes and paintings as those do, who seek to please the reader more than nature beareth, and chiefly well disposed in the spirits thereof, being agreeable to truth, and apt for action;'—[this passage contains some hints as to ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... in the last stanzas of Pacchiarotto, and in the Epilogue to the same volume. He insisted that what the critics meant by melody was a childish jingle of rimes like Mother Goose. Referring to Sordello, he makes the Second Student in Pippa Passes remark, "Instead of cramp couplets, each like a knife in your entrails, he should write, says Bluphocks, both classically and intelligibly.... One strip Cools your lip.... One bottle Clears your throttle." In Pacchiarotto, he ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... allegorical processions, might well have occupied thousands of arms for thousands of years in their formation. These corridors of interminable length opened into square chambers, in the midst of which pits had been contrived, through which we descended by cramp-irons or spiral stairways. These pits again conducted us into other chambers, opening into other corridors, likewise decorated with painted sparrow-hawks, serpents coiled in circles, the symbols of the tau and pedum—prodigious works of art which no living ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... him to realize that in these intervals which seemed like inspiration,—intervals in which he felt himself illuminated with inner light,—he cast from him the ideals which he had hitherto cherished. As if for the first time seeing clearly, he felt that men should not be hampered by dogmas which cramp and restrain. A line he had seen somewhere, and which he had put aside as irreverent and irreligious, kept repeating itself over and ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... round-faced and rather green boy, fell under the influences of a large, plump, and very talkative lady who made the portage just behind us. She so absorbed and fascinated the lad that he let the engine run itself into some cramp of piston or wheel. There was a sudden crunching sound and the propeller stopped. The boy minimized the accident, but the captain upon arrival told us it would be necessary to unload from the boat while the engine ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... not be better to do it in the form of letters, addressed to the doctor, and signed by your real name? Write in a candid, mild, and kindly style, and it will have a much more powerful effect upon the mind of the public. Do not cramp yourself, but ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... is filled through and through with intensely painful emotion about himself. He is threatened, he is guilty, he is doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind is fixed as if in a cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and in all the books on insanity you may read that the usual varied flow of his thoughts has ceased. His associative processes, to use the technical phrase, are inhibited; and his ideas stand stock-still, ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... England's lamentable showing in 1915. What good did all our wealth do us now? It would be taken from us—had not the Germans already levied an indemnity of four hundred millions upon Philadelphia? And seized the Baldwin locomotive works, the greatest in the world, employing 16,000 men? And the Cramp shipbuilding yards? And the terminus at Point Breeze down the river of the great Standard Oil Company's pipe line ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... compassing an acquaintance with him, or perhaps of ever seeing him again, dashed my desires, and turned them into torments. I was still gazing, with all the powers of my sight, on this bewitching object, when, in an instant, down he went. I had heard of such things as a cramp seizing on even the best swimmers, and occasioning their being drowned; and imagining this so sudden eclipse to be owing to it, the inconceivable fondness this unknown lad had given birth to, distracted ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... Shakespear's, and several of the celebrated Tragedies of Antiquity, are cast in the same Form. I do not therefore dispute against this Way of writing Tragedies, but against the Criticism that would establish this as the only Method; and by that Means would very much cramp the English Tragedy, and perhaps give a wrong Bent to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... river in spate, and he and the dead stag were on the other. There was no chance of fording the stream, and there was then no bridge. He did not care to swim back, for the excitement was out of him. He was trembling with cold, and afraid of cramp. "A mother-naked man," in a wilderness, with a flood between him and his raiment, was in a pitiable position. It did not occur to him to flay the stag, and dress in the hide, and, indeed, he would have been frozen before ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... and still I kept on swimming. It was torture after the first. I could rest as often as I needed, but the cold water palsied me, and I feared cramp. My shoulder was feverish, and the pain of it sapped my strength. Occasionally I found a log tangled in the reeds, and I pulled myself up on it into the sun. If I had not been able to do that I ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... where the details of his home life are known and exposed to comment. The student's power for mischief is increased. He has only too much reason for believing that he is indispensable from the business point of view. Besides, as every one knows, close contact in narrow circles has a tendency to cramp the mind. Trifling annoyances, real or imaginary, are apt to rankle in the spirit unless they be brushed away by the quick, firm touch of the great world. Kleinstaedtisches Leben, despite its many advantages, fails to develop the burgher in every direction. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... candle. When the candle flame reaches the encircling strip, it will be ignited and in turn will ignite the surrounding paper. The size, heat, and duration of the resulting flame will depend on how much paper you use and how much of it you can cramp ...
— Simple Sabotage Field Manual • Strategic Services |
