"Hapless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... realm. The Thracian lover's harp, "drawing iron tears down Pluto's cheek," won his mistress half way to the upper light, and would have wholly redeemed her had he not in impatience looked back. The grim king of Hades, yielding to passionate entreaties, relented so far as to let the hapless Protesilaus return to his mourning Laodameia for three hours. At the swift end of this poor period he died again; and this time she died with him. Erus, who was killed in battle, and Timarchus, whose soul ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... dangerous reef of rocks, which ran out to sea, at a short distance from the southward of the castle. My brother and I seized our hats and cloaks, and bidding the rest of the family not to be alarmed for our safety, we rushed out to see what assistance we might render to the hapless crew of the vessel, should any of them escape alive. She was still at some little distance, and apparently not aware of the imminence of her danger, for she was firing guns of distress to call those on the shore to her assistance, as if, in the situation she was placed, any human ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... turned her head aside, Sent forth a horrid shriek—and died; While Paul confess'd himself in vain Rebecca never spoke again. Ah! little, hapless girl, did she Think Death her bridegroom was ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... to the climate, or, at least, could not have had their origin under any but oriental or meridional skies. The kindlier mood will help you to a truer appreciation of that peculiar keeping of the churches which the stranger is apt to encounter in his approach. Be tender of the hapless mendicants at the door; they are not there for their pleasure, those blind and halt and old. Be modestly receptive of the good office of the whole tribe of cicerones, of custodians, of sacristans; ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... serpent on a tiny wing— A bee it was—for once, I know, I heard a rustic call it so." Thus he spoke, and she the while Heard him with a soothing smile; Then said, "My infant, if so much Thou feel the little wild bee's touch, How must the heart, ah, Cupid! be, The hapless ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... glands, very like little pins, a drop of gum glistening on each and every pin by way of head. This appetizing gum is no other than a fatal stick-fast, the raying pins closing in its aid the more certainly to secure a hapless prisoner. Soon his prison-house becomes a stomach for his absorption. Its duty of digestion done, the leaf in all seeming guilessness once more expands itself for the enticement of a dupe. To see how much ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... attorney was not the man to let the favorable moment pass unimproved. With a rapidity which seemed utterly incompatible with his rotund corporation, he flew to the door, and sprung the trap upon the hapless pair, in the midst of their vision of ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... had suddenly flamed up, was it not a natural supposition that it had become inwrapped in burning hydrogen, which in consequence of some great convulsion had been liberated in prodigious quantities, and then combining with other elements, had set this hapless world on fire? In such a fierce conflagration, the combustible gas would soon be consumed, and the glow would therefore begin to decline, subject, as in this case, to a second eruption, which occasioned the renewed outburst of light on the 20th ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... whisper of it to the King. A servant waiting at dinner inadvertently let slip the word: "Ziska there? Deny it, slave!" cried Wenzel, frantic. Slave durst not deny. Wenzel drew his sword to run at him, but fell down dead: that was the last pot broken by Wenzel. The hapless royal ex-imperial phantasm self-broken in this manner. Poor soul, he came to the kaisership too early; was a thin violent creature, sensible to the charms and horrors of created objects; and had terrible rhinoceros ziskas and unruly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... his position as an Irish Protestant gentleman, ought to have known; knowing these things, he never could have plunged into the raging surge of an Irish popular insurrection. He meant honestly, failed signally, and suffered himself to be involved in a hapless enterprise, because he had not sufficiently studied the people among whom he lived, nor the religious influences ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... thralls; yea, the masters cause them to breed if so their masterships will, and when the children are born, they keep them or slay them as they will, as they would with whelps or calves. To be short, year by year these vile wretches grow fiercer and more beastly, and their thralls more hapless and down-trodden; and now at last is come the time either to do or to die, as ye men of Burgdale shall speedily find out. But now must I go sleep if I am to be where I look to be at ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... rest that wanderers seek! Grant me the joy of wind and brine, The zest of food, the taste of wine, The fighter's strength, the echoing strife The high tumultuous lists of life— May I ne'er lag, nor hapless fall, Nor weary at the battle-call!... But when the even brings surcease, Grant me the happy moorland peace; That in my heart's depth ever lie That ancient land of heath and sky, Where the old rhymes and ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... trouble out of consideration for them as quite ridiculous; indeed, I am inclined to think they regard it as evidence that I am nothing less than a gay Lothario, who is betraying altogether too much interest in their women; for the old school Osmanli encompasses those hapless mortals about with a green wall of jealousy, and regards with disapproval, even so much as a glance in their direction. While riding on one occasion, this evening, I noticed one over-inquisitive female become so absorbed in the proceedings as to quite forget herself, and approach ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... on deck to witness the burning of their vessel. For a few minutes the fire raged furiously, the flames rising in one huge pyramid, till on a sudden they disappeared as she sunk beneath the surface, to which so many of her hapless passengers had lately ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... being seemed to become inspired. A ready wit called to its aid a well-stored mind." In fact, Mary was witty enough to afford to be plain, and beautiful enough to afford to be dull; and early and late she captured hearts, from the days when the poets, Ronsard, De Maison Fleur, and the hapless Chastelard, celebrated her charms in verse to a later and sadder time when, during her captivity in England her young page, Anthony Babington, was so fascinated by her wit and grace that he made a valiant and desperate effort to save her to ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... in 1871, "the spectacle of Bismarck teaching the A B C of Liberal politics to the hapless French. His last mot, they tell me, is this. Speaking of the extent to which the French Emperor had destroyed his own reputation and put an end to the worship of the old Napoleon, he said: 'He has killed himself ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... was ready, he enveloped it in eternal night and equipped it with torment, filling it with fire and fearful cold, with fume and red flame: then he commanded the terrors of suffering to increase throughout that hapless place. 45 ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... generation. Industry, economy, and above all thoroughness were the chief articles of her religion, and she instilled these virtues into the mind of her granddaughter by the most vigorous discipline. A week of solitary confinement was among the penalties inflicted upon the hapless child who had failed to reach the standard of duty prescribed for her. The standard, with Madam Dix, did not differ from perfection discernibly. Mr. Tiffany quotes a lady who in her girlhood, as a special reward ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... here now, her wasted mortal remains are taken out of the house. We have laid her cherished head under the church aisle beside my mother's, my two sisters'—dead long ago—and my poor, hapless brother's. But a small remnant of the race is left—so my poor ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... the city of Rome, they found the senators clothed in their robes and seated with stern tranquillity in their curule chairs; in this manner they suffered death without resistance or even supplication. Such conduct was, in them, applauded as noble and magnanimous; in the hapless Indian it was reviled as obstinate and sullen! How truly are we the dupes of show and circumstance! How different is virtue clothed in purple and enthroned in state from virtue naked and destitute and perishing obscurely ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... older one. I do not know a more heartless sight than the reprint of the Anatomy of Melancholy. What need was there of unearthing the bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest fashion to modern censure? what hapless stationer could dream of Burton ever becoming popular?—The wretched Malone could not do worse, when he bribed the sexton of Stratford church to let him white-wash the painted effigy of old Shakspeare, which stood there, in rude ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... seizes his victim, and does not merely destroy it, but often ingeniously torments it by pulling limb from limb. If the duck be but wounded with the gun, his prey is not instantly despatched to spare all future pain, but feather is plucked out after feather, and the hapless creature is tormented on principle. I have frequently witnessed the cruelty with which parents will sometimes amuse their children, by catching young birds or animals, that they may disjoint their limbs to make them struggle in ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... Goddess, what offended Power Enflamed their rage in that ill-omened hour; anger fatal, hapless Phoebus himself the dire debate procured, fierce To avenge the wrongs his injured priest endured; For this the god a dire infection spread, And heaped the camp with millions of the dead: The King of men the sacred sire defied, And for the King's offence ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... no occasion. Pandora was seized with an eager curiosity to know what this jar contained; and one day she slipped off the cover and looked in. Forthwith there escaped a multitude of plagues for hapless man,—such as gout, rheumatism, and colic for his body, and envy, spite, and revenge for his mind,—and scattered themselves far and wide. Pandora hastened to replace the lid! but, alas! the whole contents of the jar had escaped, one thing only excepted, which lay at the ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... sound—the awful pulse of the old clock beating steadily, calling her, demanding the evidence of her senses,—she who feared no ghosts,—beating out the hours of an agony she was there to witness. And she was yet in time. The hapless creature entrapped within that room dragged its weight slowly across the floor. The clock, sole witness and companion of its sufferings, ticked on impartially. Neither is this any new thing, it seemed to say. A life was starved in here before—not ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... floated away, each a tiny Venus Anadyomene, down the glassy ripples of the reaches. Every moment a heavy splash beneath some overhanging tuft of milfoil or water hemlock proclaimed the death- doom of a hapless beetle who had dropped into the stream beneath; yet still we fished and fished, and caught nothing, and seemed utterly careless about catching anything; till the old keeper who followed us, sighing and shrugging his shoulders, broke forth ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... a question in the House, said the reports were exaggerated. The hapless Irish Secretary, unable to meet this and similar charges with denial, always relies on the plea of "exaggeration." The statement given above is derived from eye-witnesses of both creeds, and from an official source. One word as to the plea ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... hose, obscured from view, Turned on itself and drenched the two— A hapless circumstance That lengthened out her "frizzes" new, ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... inclined for an unhampered bachelorhood, but it soothed my wounded spirit to picture these three hapless females in the grip of Angel and The Seraph, and the music of their outcries lulled ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... themselves and their babes in rude huts where the wind, rain, and snow drove in through yawning fissures which there were no means to close. Others were aged women, who in sore distress sent up their prayers and rolled their quavering hymns to the wintry skies, their only canopy. The story of these hapless families is told in the simple but effective ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... were naturally regular and sweet, while the other was fondled on the knee of a person, whose attention was so much engrossed by her little charge, that, for the present, she could mind nothing else; and it was not till after the first compliments passed betwixt the hapless mother and our adventurer, that he perceived the stranger's countenance, which inspired him with the highest esteem and admiration. He beheld all the graces of elegance and beauty, breathing sentiment and beneficence, and softened into the most enchanting tenderness ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... a laddie Wi' her needless Nays, Thraves will pet the hapless plaidie Wi' their loving ways; So if Kirsty blaw him cauldly As a winter day, Bess and Belle will bless him bauldly Wi' ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... embrace his mother as she met him; but she, turning from entreaties to wrath, said: "Before I permit your embrace, let me know whether I have come to an enemy or to a son, whether I am in your camp a captive or a mother? Has length of life and a hapless old age reserved me for this—to behold you first an exile, then an enemy? Have you had the heart to lay waste this land, which gave you birth and nurtured you? Though you had come in an incensed and vengeful ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... her the funeral service out of the Prayer-book, kneeling and praying for this nameless creature, whom we had never seen alive, as though she had been our companion for many years; both of us shedding tears for her hapless fate as if we had lost a beloved sister. And when we had filled up her grave and departed, we went home, and passed the most miserable day we had ever had to endure since we had first ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... place at a table in front of the birds, with bits of chalk in their hands; mine host stood by as referee in case of disputes; time was called; and silence reigned supreme for a quarter of an hour, broken only by the vocal performances of the Bermondsey and Walworth champions respectively. If a hapless human being did so far forget himself as to cough or tread incontinently upon a nutshell, he was called to silence with curses not ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... of a thousand strong, made their appearance, carrying a banner, and bringing forth two prisoners to die. The wretches were armed after their disorderly fashion; and the prisoners each tied upon a horse. One of these hapless persons too surely was Prasildo; and the other turned out to be the damsel who had told Rinaldo the story of the friends. Having been deprived of the Paladin's assistance, her subsequent misadventures had brought her to this terrible pass. The moment ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... Lorn outcasts forth to labour at the last! Mould the stout sole, sew with the woven thread, Make the good fit, and win their daily bread. This was their strait and doing—this their doom; They sought our shelter, and they found a home! Helpless and hapless, wandering to and fro, Weary they came and hid them from the foe; Two high-born youths, to holy things impell'd, Hunted from place to place, though still they held Their sacred faith, and died for it, and threw The glory of that death on all ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various
... Alfred Tennyson," which Moxon and Co. published in the following year; an event that, for the first time, really introduced him to the public at large. To 1857, again, belongs Rossetti's Blue Closet and Damsel of the Sangrael, both painted for Mr. W. Morris. And in 1857 and 1858, the famous and hapless distemper pictures on the walls of the Union Debating Society's room at Oxford, were engaging Rossetti and his associates, including Burne-Jones, William Morris, Mr. Val. Prinsep, Mr. Arthur Hughes, and Mr. ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... clapped her hands together, and cried, "Sing louder, Orpheus, sing a bolder strain; wake up these hapless sluggards, or none of them will see ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... not only to create the Mary personality but to expel it and restore the hapless Lurancy to perfect health. If the responsibility for the creation rests on Dr. Stevens and the Roffs, to them likewise belongs the credit for the cure. Their insistence on the fact that Mary's spirit could and would be of assistance, was itself as ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... much effort after a new place of work as was involved in writing letters to his friend Grundy, and probably to others, suing for employment. But his offence had been too glaring to be condoned. Mr. Grundy seems to have advised the hapless young man to take shelter in the Church, where the influence of his father and his mother's relatives might help him along; but, as Branwell said, he had not a single qualification, "save, perhaps hypocrisy." Parson's sons rarely have a great idea of the Church. The energy, self-denial, and endurance ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... relish. We were all at this time "hungry as hunters," and beginning to feel very miserable from being wet through. What little ammunition I had left I fired off as signals, or made tinder of to get up a fire, but the wood would not burn. In this hapless condition the black boys began murmuring, wishing to go on, pretending, though both held opposite views, that each knew the way; for they thought nothing could be worse than their present state ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... still preserved a just ascendant over the mind of his ferocious brother. For a while the attention of that brother was confined at home by the invasion of Conradin, the last heir to the imperial house of Swabia; but the hapless boy sunk in the unequal conflict; and his execution on a public scaffold taught the rivals of Charles to tremble for their heads as well as their dominions. A second respite was obtained by the last crusade of St. Louis to the African ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... have fought to save them. But he had no imaginative ideas of death. And his keen perception of the truth was consequently sensitively alive only to that grotesqueness of aspect which too often the hapless victims of violence are apt to assume. He saw no agony in the vacant eyes of the two men lying on their backs in apparently the complacent abandonment of drunkenness, which was further simulated by their tumbled and disordered ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... in his possession belonging to such a heartless scoundrel as Ab Gwilym must have been had he got up the scene above described. Any common man who would expose to each other and the world a number of hapless, trusting females who had favoured him with their affections, and from the top of a tree would feast his eyes upon their agonies of shame and rage, would deserve to be—emasculated. Had Ab Gwilym been so dead to every feeling of gratitude and honour as to play the ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... more than to you here These verses hapless flung, Yet of the Long Ago they seem To me who ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... goes down to the park and rummages through Violet's wardrobe in a state of hapless bewilderment, calling finally upon Gertrude to make a proper selection. Denise attires her young mistress, who looks really pale after this enforced seclusion. Mr. Grandon carries her down-stairs; and if it is not a conventional parlor, the room still ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... a well known fact that the hapless Inez de Castro, the young and beautiful bride of Pedro of Portugal, was murdered, while he was absent on a ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... last, our hapless travellers, deprived of water in this torrid heat, began to feel symptoms of mental disorder. Their eyes swelled in their sockets, ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... whether Meredith himself ever served in the tailor's shop after his father moved from Portsmouth to St. James's Street, London. Nothing is known of his life during the two years after his return from the Moravian school at Neuwied. As for his hapless father (who had been trained as a medical student but went into the family business in order to save it from ruin), he did not succeed in London any better than in Portsmouth, and in 1849 he emigrated ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... cursed leaf, Fell source o' a' my woe an' grief; For lack o' thee I've lost my lass, For lack o' thee I scrimp my glass. I see the children of affliction Unaided, through thy cursed restriction I've seen the oppressor's cruel smile Amid his hapless victim's spoil: And for thy potence vainly wished, To crush the villain in the dust. For lack o' thee, I leave this much-lov'd shore, Never, perhaps, to greet ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... civilisation and that of to-day, and the identity in principle of the self-ward tendency in both. In mediaeval times, as he would say, the robber baron was wont to possess himself of a mountain fortress, whence he swooped down upon hapless passers-by to rob them of their possessions and their lives. To-day the successful financial magnate does the same by effecting corners in corn and such like. The great writer adds, with characteristic ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... always snorting loudly; grabbed another beetle, and then a worm—all by scent, apparently—and reached the hedge-ditch, where, in the pitch-darkness, he could still be heard snorting and scrunching hapless insects, slugs, and worms at scarcely more than one-minute intervals. And he never stopped. He seemed to have been appointed by Nature as a sort of machine, a spiked "tank," to sniff tirelessly about, reducing the surplus population of pests, as if he were under a curse—as, indeed, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... somewhat. I looked about me. Not a sign or vestige remained of the Zebra or her hapless crew. Not a floating thing among the waves caused me to count on the company of a living wretch like myself. Not even a livid corpse across my track served to remind me that I, of all that ship's company, still clung ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... still hung upon their rear, harassing them and cutting off their stragglers; finally, when they made a stand at Sharuhen in Southern Palestine, he laid siege to the town, took it, and made a great slaughter of the hapless defenders. ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... come! Our hapless brother, Tostig— He, and the giant King of Norway, Harold Hardrada—Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, Orkney, Are landed North of Humber, and in a field So packt with carnage that the dykes and brooks Were bridged and damm'd with dead, have ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... three questions ensued. Diana had to fortify her fictitious objection by alluding to her maid's prattle of the household below; and she excused the hapless, overfed, idle ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... clusters cling; 350 Those pois'nous fields with rank luxuriance crown'd, Where the dark scorpion gathers death around; Where at each step the stranger fears to wake The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake; Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey, 355 And savage men more murd'rous still than they; While oft in whirls the mad tornado flies, Mingling the ravag'd landscape with the skies. Far different these from every former scene, The cooling brook, the grassy-vested ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... in which children of this period were brought up. We remember the life of 'The Fairchild Family,' those putative neighbours of this family—in any case, its obvious contemporaries; and we know that the life of those hapless little prigs was typical of child-life in the dawn of the nineteenth century. Depend on it, this family (whatever its name may be: the Thompsons, I conjecture) is no exception to the dismal rule. In this schoolroom, ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... 'Ah, hapless one, it is for that we are here,' answered the elder; 'and this is what you must do. This very night, fill a lamp full of oil, and cover it with a dark cloth, so that not a ray of light can be seen; then take a sharp knife and hide it in your bosom. After the serpent is sound asleep, ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... he celebrated his departures. We hinted this to Mrs. Johnson, but she could not enter into our feeling. Indeed, all the wild poetry of her maternal and primitive nature seemed to cast itself about this hapless boy; and if we had listened to her we should have believed there was no one so agreeable in society, or so quick-witted in affairs, as Hippolyto, when he chose. She used to rehearse us long epics concerning his industry, his courage, and his talent; and she put fine speeches in his ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... 31, 1422, he lay dead at Vincennes. His body after being embalmed was exposed with great pomp in the royal abbey of St. Denis before its translation to Westminster Abbey and an infant son of nine months was left to inherit the dual monarchy. Within a few weeks of Henry's death the hapless king of France was entombed under the same roof; a royal herald cried "for God's pity on the soul of the most high and most excellent Charles, king of France, our natural sovereign lord," and in the next breath hailed "Henry of Lancaster, by the grace of God, king of France ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... began to regard each other with less aversion than formerly; and it became safer and more profitable to purchase women, on the same principle that any other kind of merchandise was bought. Prices were regulated according to the supply in the market and the beauty or the muscular strength of the hapless creatures exposed for sale. Fathers sold or exchanged their daughters, brothers their sisters, without the slightest shame or remorse. Among the Tambanks, in exchanging the women for stock, a woman, full-grown and ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... then Pallas caerulean-eyed. Oh Jove, Saturnian Sire, o'er all supreme! And well he merited the death he found; 60 So perish all, who shall, like him, offend. But with a bosom anguish-rent I view Ulysses, hapless Chief! who from his friends Remote, affliction hath long time endured In yonder wood-land isle, the central boss Of Ocean. That retreat a Goddess holds, Daughter of sapient Atlas, who the abyss Knows to its bottom, and the pillars high Himself upbears which sep'rate earth from heav'n. His ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations—an uncarpeted office, doubtless, of a dusty, haggard sort of appearance;—this it must have been, which greatly helped to enhance the irritable desperation of the hapless Colt. ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville
... and beast. Our good-fortune placed us in a hotel fronting the famous Castel dell' Ovo, across a little space of land and water, and we could hear, late and early, the cackling and crowing of the chickens which have replaced the hapless prisoners of other days in that fortress. At times the voices of the hens were lifted in a choral of self-praise, as if they had among them just laid the mighty structure which takes its name from its resemblance to the ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... only son, who was accused of an intrigue. Her son, fearing the worst, dashed his turban on the ground before his father— the most imploring act an Oriental can use—and knelt, bareheaded, at his feet. But the enraged husband was inexorable, and caused his hapless wife to be baked alive. What a breadth of progress separates us from the state of society in which such a deed could be done openly, and without illegality, by a ruler! Can any woman be too grateful that she stands on this side of ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... The sufferings of this hapless crowd were acute. Provisions were hard to obtain at the way stations. The water supply gave out. A little child died of exposure, and the heart-broken mother held the lifeless body twenty-four hours on her lap. There ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... sins of the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob? is it not Samaria? and what are the high places of Judah? are they not Jerusalem?" The doom pronounced against Samaria was already being carried out, and soon the hapless city was to be no more than "an heap of the field, and as the plantings of a vineyard; and I will pour down the stones thereof into the valley," saith the Lord, "and I will discover the foundations thereof. And all her graven images ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... are now masters, and who tell us that God placed them here on earth to make us happy, would foresee at the beginning of a campaign the poor old men, the hapless mothers, whose very hearts they have torn away to satisfy their pride—if they could see the tears and hear the groans of these poor people when they are coldly told 'Your son is dead; you will see him no more; he perished, crushed by horses' hoofs, or torn to ...
— The Conscript - A Story of the French war of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... what offended power Enflam'd their rage, in that ill-omen'd hour; anger, fatal, hapless Phoebus himself the dire debate procur'd, fierce T' avenge the wrongs his injur'd priest endur'd; For this the god a dire infection spread, And heap'd the camp with millions of the dead: The king of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... then he might have been inconsolable, then might he have cast the gorge at life, then have cowered in the darkening chamber of his being, tapestried with mouldering hopes, and hearkened to the winds that swept across the illimitable wastes of death. But no such hapless lot was Shelley's as that of his own contemporaries—Keats, half chewed in the jaws of London and spit dying on to Italy; de Quincey, who, if he escaped, escaped rent and maimed from those cruel jaws; Coleridge, whom they ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... this is a subject on which she is not called to have any voice and which she prefers to let alone. Surely our womanhood has not become in these last days such a withered and wilted thing that our ears have grown too nice for the cry of these hapless children! As women, we are the natural guardians of the innocence of all children. The divine motherhood that is at the heart of every woman worthy of the name "rises up in wrath" within us and cries: "We will fulfil our trust, not only ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... beneath the afflictive weight Of gloomy cares portentous of her fate;— Yet on her brow still soft Affection beams, Tho' Desperation prompts her sombre dreams. Parental feelings thrill her tortur'd breast, And all the frantic mother stands confest— A very Niobe—sad, hapless name! In figure, features, and in all the same: The same in all as Vengeance fierce pursued Far to a wild and cheerless solitude. For Salmo's bard has sung (by Heaven's decrees) In awful pomp she mounted on the breeze— Borne by the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... his leave of the portrait, for he would never give it up again for any treasure, and that to possess the favour of the original he would forsake all the world. He fell into many more such passionate and incoherent expressions of rhapsody, as of one suddenly smitten and spell-bound with hapless love, bitterly reproaching the ambassador for never having brought him any answers to the many affectionate letters which he had written to the queen, whose silence had made him so wretched. Sir Henry, perhaps somewhat confounded at being beaten at his own fantastic ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... every hope vanished, yet each man clinging to his assigned post of duty in desperation. There was but little firing—the defenders nursing their slender stock, the savages biding their time. When night shut down the latter became bolder, and taunted cruelly those destined to become so soon their hapless victims. Twice the maddened men fired recklessly at those dancing devils, and one pitched forward, emitting a howl of pain that caused his comrades to cower once again behind their covers. One and all these frontiersmen recognized the inevitable—before ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... whip-hand of the housekeeper, and could ordain how many French plums and how many muscatel raisins were to be consumed in a given period. She could bring her powers of arithmetic to bear upon wax-candles, and torment the souls of hapless underlings by the precision of her calculations. She had an eye to the preserves; and if awakened suddenly in the dead of the night could have told, to a jar, how many pots of strawberry, and raspberry, and currant, and greengage were ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... in the payments, then," said Fisher. So the whole party sat down, and scrutinised the hapless treasurer's bills and vouchers, and, after allowing him the benefit of every imaginable doubt, still brought the deficit out at ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... of giantism where husbands Like mushrooms grow, whilst hapless we are forced To be content, nay, happy thought, ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... caught them, held them, while that deadly fusilade opened upon them, reddened with their warm, young blood the soil of their native State—mowed them down, ruthlessly, those hapless Kentuckians. For ruthless it ever seems, when youth and hope and glorious promise are offered in vain. At last they fell back, the living; what flesh and blood could do otherwise? Fell back, but undismayed, and fighting stubbornly inch by inch, as they bore ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... of Henry named the fifth Was in the mouth of every sucking babe; That Henry born at Monmouth should win all And Henry born at Windsor lose all: Which is so plain, that Exeter doth wish His days may finish ere that hapless time. ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... revoked. The ascending path is mounted in deep silence, steep, dark, and enveloped in deepening gloom. And {now} they were not far from the verge of the upper earth. He, enamoured, fearing lest she should flag, and impatient to behold her, turned his eyes; and immediately she sank back again. She, hapless one! both stretching out her arms, and struggling to be grasped, and to grasp him, caught nothing but the fleeting air. And now, dying a second time, she did not at all complain of her husband; for why should she complain ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Whom weight of years, as well as load, oppress'd, Sore groaning in his smoky hut to rest, Trudged wearily along his homeward road. At last his wood upon the ground he throws, And sits him down to think o'er all his woes. To joy a stranger, since his hapless birth, What poorer wretch upon this rolling earth? No bread sometimes, and ne'er a moment's rest; Wife, children, soldiers, landlords, public tax, All wait the swinging of his old, worn axe, And paint the veriest picture of a man ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... Christians were cautioned against pollution by its contact; practical business men were gravely urged to condemn and frown upon this picture of Californian society that was not conducive to Eastern immigration; its hapless author was held up to obloquy as a man who had abused a sacred trust. If its life and reputation had depended on its reception in California, this edition and explanation would alike have been needless. But, fortunately, the young "Overland Monthly" had in its first number ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... whose touch harmonious could remove The pangs of guilty power or hapless love; Rest here, distress'd by poverty no more; Here find that calm thou gav'st so oft before; Sleep undisturbed within this peaceful shrine, Till angels wake thee with a note ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... same trap. In a short time the whole pit was filled with a living, moving, struggling mass of animals, fearful to look at. The savage hunters, wild with excitement, were spearing with relentless eagerness the poor creatures, those below being borne down by the weight of their hapless fellows who brought up the rear. A beautiful koodoo was among the latter. On it came, leaping away, having escaped the spears of its enemies. It reached the fatal pit. I could not help feeling an interest in the creature. Would ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... sent the bride a golden rose, but the union was sterile and unhappy. The Duke, who was in the habit of careering through his palace in full armour, slashing at and wounding anyone that came in his way, was at last locked up. The hapless Jacobea, accused by Sibylla of witchcraft and other crimes possible and impossible, was thrown into prison. Two years long the devilish malignity of the sister-in-law was exercised upon her victim, who, as it is related, was not allowed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... thus it was with this our hapless crew; For on the third day there came on a calm, And though at first their strength it might renew, And lying on their weariness like balm, Lulled them like turtles sleeping on the blue Of Ocean, when they woke they felt a qualm, And fell all ravenously on their provision, Instead ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... looked that hapless lady of the South, Sweet Isabella! at that dreary part Of all the passion'd hours of her youth; When her green Basil pot by brother's art Was stolen away; so look'd her pained mouth In the mute patience ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... the most hapless man in all Egypt! Very soon I shall find a priest in my bed even. Whence did he come? Who ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... holes by the roadside. Rastignac alone went no further than was necessary, just to avoid making any show of shunning Lucien's flashing eye. He could thus note two phases of distress equally deep though unconfessed; first, the hapless Torpille, stricken as by a lightning stroke, and then the inscrutable mask, the only one of the group who had remained. Esther murmured a word in Lucien's ear just as her knees gave way, and Lucien, ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... lead to hell hereafter; a hell of fear, and doubt, and hatred of Him who is all lovely; the hell whereof it is written, that its worst torment is being cast out from the sight of God: unless the hapless sinner opens his eye and believes the covenant of his baptism, and sees that God cannot lie, God cannot change, cannot break His covenant, cannot alter His love; that though he have left his Father's house, and wandered into far countries, and wasted his Father's substance in riotous ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... destroyed Aquileia, was at Mantua marching upon Rome. His intention was proclaimed to crown all his acts of destruction with that of Rome. This was the dowry which he proposed to take for the hand of the last great emperor's granddaughter, proffered to him by the hapless Honoria herself. At the word of Leo the Scourge of God gave up his prey: he turned back from Italy, and relinquished Rome, and Leo returned to his seat. In the course of the next three years he confirmed, at the eastern emperor's repeated request, the doctrinal ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... at that instant feeling with her. More indignant than herself, for his high chivalrous devotion to the fair could ill endure the readiness with which the gentlemen, attendants at ottoman or sofa, lent their aid to mock and to embarrass every passing party of the city tribe, mothers and their hapless daughter-train. ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... these occupations, Which hurt none but the hapless student; Compared with other recreations, Which bring ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... of beauty. In traversing also the "large green courts," with sunshine beaming on the gray walls and glancing along the velvet turf, my mind was engrossed with the image of the tender, the gallant, but hapless Surrey, and his account of his loiterings about them in his stripling days, when enamoured of the ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... as their steeds would allow them. But though they tarried till the flames had abated, and little was left of the noble grove but a collection of charred and smoking stumps, nothing was seen of the fiend or of the hapless girl he had carried off. It served to confirm the notion of the supernatural origin of the fire, in that it was confined within the mystic circle, and did not extend farther ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... that quarter. He was now forced to retire before the superior numbers of the enemy; but Horn and Birkenfeld quickly advanced to his support, and the Imperialists, after a brief triumph, were again expelled from Alsace. The severity of the autumn, in which this hapless retreat had to be conducted, proved fatal to most of the Italians; and their leader, the Duke of Feria, died of grief at ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of the lower city to his solitary prison in the Tower. The streets were filled, after he had passed, with groups of men of all ranks and stations, discussing the strange and mournful vicissitudes in the life of this hapless monarch, now for the second time cut off from all his friends, and immured hopelessly in a ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... and had been brought to Egypt as captives, where they had been sold to the inhabitants, and were now scattered over the land as slaves. They were employed as servile laborers in tilling the fields, or in turning enormous wheels to pump up water from the Nile. The masters of these hapless bondmen conceived, like other slave-holders, that they had a right of property in their slaves. This was in some respects true, since they had bought them of the government at the close of the war for ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... monster's raging thirst to slake; Then leaves me to myself, and flies at last, And I, unbound, yet prison'd fast By magic, follow in her train, Seek for her, tremble, fly again. The hapless creature thus ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... They respected neither the hapless wight nor his owner. Whenever he opened his mouth with the instinct that makes animals proclaim their hurts and appeal for pity on the chance of a heart being within hearing, then did these show their sense of his appeal thus: One of the party crammed the stinging ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... courtier of Charles II. had rushed up; the elephant was pulled and hustled and kicked; for him swiftly the vision of power and glory and vengeance was over, and once again he was the tied and governed prisoner of modern civilisation. The top-hat lay, a battered and hapless remnant, beneath the feet ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... to have been the chief spokeswoman, and each member of the committee served in some degree as an inquisitor, or exhorter, not to repentance, but to disclosures. Baited and badgered, warned and threatened, the hapless prisoner protested she was innocent, denied the charges made against her, told one of the committee to "take heed the devile have not you," and also said, "I must not render evil for evil.... I have ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... lines, toward one of the batteries which had so decimated the hapless wretches lying on the banks of the river. A few moments later, the gallop of two horses echoed over the snow, and the wakened artillery men poured out a volley which ranged above the heads of the sleeping men. The pace of the horses was so fleet that ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... methinks, conceived. Caesar: Speak, Quezox, speak! and free thy surging mind. For well I know abuses rankle there. Our enemies politic, firm entrenched, Have borne with heavy hand upon thy race. Quezox: Ah noble sire, how well thy mind conceives The ills which bear my hapless people down. Much learning fits thee for the ruler's seat And keen discernment flashes from thine eye. There pigmies move within a circle charmed And fatten on rich spoils with cruel glee. They force ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy) |
