"Incubus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of severity (may the Lord forgive me), and now. I know that in so doing I was guilty of a grave error. What I interpreted as misconduct was but a straining at his leash in an effort to extricate himself from the incubus of the negative self-feeling. He was, and probably is, a dull fellow and realized that he could not cope with the other boys in the school studies, and so was but trying to win some notice in other fields of activity. ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... friend remarked of a notorious puffing actor; "he doesn't stand well at Lloyds." "Yet no one stands so well with the under-writers," said Dickens; a pun that Swift would have envied. "I call him an Incubus!" said a non-literary friend, at a loss to express the boredom inflicted on him by a popular author. "Pen-and-ink-ubus, you mean," interposed Dickens. So, when Stanfield said of his mid-shipman son, then absent on his first cruise, "the boy has got his sea-legs on by this time!" "I don't ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... to the character of the wager left her in a haze. Sometime during the day or evening she must maneuver to get them together and tell them frankly that she knew everything. She wanted her sapphires; more, she wanted the incubus removed from Thomas' shoulders. Mad as March hares, both of them; for they had not the least idea that ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... Williams, "The Most High God hath provided and cut out this part of the world for a refuge and receptacle for all sorts of consciences?" How had not Connecticut fallen? How passed her ancient glory, how ignored her charter's rights? How firm a grip upon her had that incubus of her own raising, the pernicious union of Church and State? Break that, as elsewhere it had been broken, and then as freemen demand a constitution guaranteeing ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... end of this book. An Italian advocate, Scipio Sighele, has devoted a monograph to the subject of dual crime, in which he examines a number of cases in which two persons have jointly committed heinous crimes.(3) He finds that in couples of this kind there is usually an incubus and a succubus, the one who suggests the crime, the other on whom the suggestion works until he or she becomes the accomplice or instrument of the stronger will; "the one playing the Mephistophelian part of tempter, preaching evil, urging ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... rock-islands studding the surface of an ocean, and telling of the sunken continent below: this monstrous thousand odd pounds he had been fool enough to borrow. Never would he be able to pay off such a sum, never again be free from the incubus of debt. Meanwhile, not the ground he stood on, not the roof over his head could actually be called his own. He had also been too pushed for money, at the time, to take Ocock's advice and ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... enumerates a of these fireside fancies: "And they have so fraid us with host bull-beggars, spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, syrens, kit with the can sticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giantes, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphes, changelings, incubus, Robin-goodfellow, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell-waine, the fier drake, the puckle, Tom Thombe, hobgoblins, Tom Tumbler, boneless, and such other bugs, that we were afraid ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... afraid of what he had done, and of what he was going to permit William Smith to do. It was certainly dangerous—certainly rather a wild scheme. However, the die was cast. And within twelve hours he would be relieved of the intolerable incubus of the portrait. ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... must ask, What if we are in the wrong and do the wrong, and hate because we have injured? What then? Why, then, let us cry to God as from the throat of hell; struggle, as under the weight of a spiritual incubus; cry, as knowing the vile disease that cleaveth fast unto us; cry, as possessed of an evil spirit; cry, as one buried alive, from the sepulchre of our evil consciousness, that He would take pity upon us the chief of sinners, the most ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... unfortunate circumstances, it would certainly in time have become popular in the nation. It was beyond question Washington's party, and, notwithstanding the false charges of monarchism and British sovereignty, it was patriotic. Had it existed forty or fifty years longer, until that incubus which haunted Jefferson's brain had passed away, and the republic become so firmly established that people would no longer fear British dependency, the Federal party would have been a firmly fixed institution. Had Federal ideas been fully inculcated instead of Jeffersonianism and Calhounism, ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... despotism both political and religious firmly established in France and Spain and Italy, and in half of Germany; while the rest of Germany seemed to have exhausted itself in the attempt to throw off the incubus. But in England this same epoch saw freedom both political and religious established on so firm a foundation as never again to be shaken, never again with impunity to be threatened, so long as the language of Locke and Milton and Sydney shall remain a living speech ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... of the soul! Ye wild and freakish gambolings of the spirit, freed from the incubus of matter, and unfettered by the control of reason, of what fantastic caprices are ye the originators 137—what caricatures of the various features of our waking life do ye not exhibit to us, ludicrous and ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, harkened—I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me—to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... as rich as the GURNEYS - An incubus then I thought her, So I threw over that rich attorney's Elderly, ugly daughter. The rich attorney my character high Tried vainly to disparage - And now, if you please, I'm ready to try This Breach ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... had become hopeless enough. Unhappily, such feelings are yet by no means so infrequent with ourselves, that we need stop here to depict them. That state of Unbelief from which the Germans do seem to be in some measure delivered, still presses with incubus force on the greater part of Europe; and nation after nation, each in its own way, feels that the first of all moral problems is how to cast it off, or how to rise above it. Governments naturally attempt the first expedient; ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... that opposition to its behests, in deed, or in word, or even in thought, as far as thoughts could be surmised, should he punished with death; and by adhering to the purport of this horrid decree, the voice of a nation returning to its senses was subdued. Men feared to rise against the incubus which oppressed them, lest others more cowardly than themselves should not join them; and the Committee of Public Safety felt that their prolonged existence depended on their being able to perpetuate this fear. It determined, therefore, to strike terror into the nation by exhibiting ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... if it be a curse, may be rolled off, as man has rolled away the curse of labor; as the curse has been rolled from the descendants of Ham. My mission is to preach this new gospel. If you suffer, it is not because you are cursed of God, but because you violate His laws. What an incubus it would take from woman could she be educated to know that the pains of maternity are no curse upon her kind. We know that among the Indians the squaws do not suffer in childbirth. They will step aside ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... thought of him as dying," she said, and there was something like wonder in her voice. "He had gradually become settled in my mind as a sort of incubus—I felt that I was to see him always, smiling, immaculate and unscrupulous—a sort of beast with whom cleanliness took the place ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... this backwardness in agricultural pursuits. The implements made use of here on the plantations are such as were rejected by New England farmers over half a century ago; and the methods of cultivation are a century behind the times. Slavery and land-monopoly are the incubus. ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... books which touch at all on political matters are rigidly excluded. These are among the causes which strike us as most prominent, but whose effects obtain only when despotism is not so gross as to be an incubus upon the whole moral and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... raising its head. Heard through the land like the blast of a bugle, the proclamation rallied the patriotism of the country to fresh sacrifices and renewed ardor. It was a step that could not be revoked. It relieved the conscience of the nation from an incubus that had oppressed it from its birth. The United States were rescued from the false predicament in which they had been from the beginning, and the great popular heart leaped with new enthusiasm for "Liberty and ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... him, haunt and oppress him. What a deliverance!—Yet, what a price had he paid for it! True, but was not the money already sacrificed? Would it have been restored, had the luckless speculator himself remained? Never! Well, fearful then as was the sum, let it go, taking the incubus along with it. Allcraft took care to obtain the consent of Bellamy to his arrangement. He wrote to him, explaining the reasons for parting with their partner; and an answer came from the landed proprietor, acquiescing in the plan, but slightly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... like the dashing rides to Norton Bury. Above all, I like coming back. The minute I begin to climb Enderley Hill, the tan-yard, and all belonging to it, drops off like an incubus, and I wake into free, beautiful life. Now, Phineas, confess; is not this common a lovely ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... never despaired of Ireland; I do not, I will not, I cannot, despair of my beloved country. She has, in my view, obtained freedom of conscience for others, as well as for herself. She has shaken off the incubus of tithes while silly legislation was dealing out its folly and its falsehoods. She can, and she will, obtain for herself justice and constitutional freedom; and although she may sigh at British neglect ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of the matter.... In truth it has come to our ears, not without immense trouble and grief to ourselves, that in some parts of Higher Germany ... very many persons of both sexes, deviating from the Catholic faith, abuse themselves with the demons, Incubus and Succubus; and by incantations, charms, conjurations, and other wicked superstitions, by criminal acts and offences have caused the offspring of women and of the lower animals, the fruits of the earth, ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... my poor little lady taken out of the school room to face a position which would be horrifying, even in idea, to a right minded woman of the world. What the girl's mental sufferings must have been only a girl can tell. And ever since—the incubus of that elderly man of unclean antecedents! All that had been incomprehensible about Evadne was obvious now, and also the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... subject, on the breaking of the day with which our history begins—this eventful Hogmanay. As the evening approached, every one trembled; but the inspiration of incipient drams had had the effect of so far throwing off the incubus as to enable some of the inhabitants, and, in particular, those we have mentioned, to go about the forms of the festival with decent freedom; while the guysers and "reekers," after the manner of buoyant youth, had been flirting with their terrors, and singing and blowing to "keep their spirits ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... when the people become enlightened by education, they insist, and will insist upon their rights, and refuse to be pressed to death by such a bloated and blood-sucking incubus as ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... enter more fully into detail would be inadvisable. The colony is young, but the government is infantine; though, notwithstanding that it is little more than two years old, it has proved itself indefatigable, concise, and beneficial in its workings; and many a local incubus has been removed, and many a long felt desideratum been supplied, during its ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... result? It is but the ancestor of a long line of laws which load our statute-books, and have built up our poor-law system, merely substituting for one evil another which burdens the country like an incubus, and, vulture-like, is eating ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... to himself over and over again, that it behoved him to make some great effort to shake off this incubus that depressed him; but yet no such effort had hitherto been even attempted. Now at last he arose and shook himself, and promised to himself that he would be a man. It might be that the misfortune under which he groaned was heavy, but let one's sorrow be what it may, there is always a better ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... monster, in "The Tempest." He seems there to have created a person which was not in nature, a boldness which, at first sight, would appear intolerable; for he makes him a species of himself, begotten by an incubus on a witch; but this, as I have elsewhere proved, is not wholly beyond the bounds of credibility, at least the vulgar still believe it. We have the separated notions of a spirit, and of a witch; (and spirits, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... military operations, in the same degree those which are unfortunately placed are disadvantageous. They are an incubus upon the army which is compelled to garrison them and the state whose men and money are wasted upon them. There are many in Europe in this category. It is bad policy to cover a frontier with fortresses very close together. This system has been wrongly ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... an incubus," he contradicted me, almost indignantly. "You're entirely different from what ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... locked on the inside. Third, this blade here has a tiny touch of blood at the point, but there is no wound on Mr Todhunter. Mr Glass took that wound away with him, dead or alive. Add to all this primary probability. It is much more likely that the blackmailed person would try to kill his incubus, rather than that the blackmailer would try to kill the goose that lays his golden egg. There, I think, we have a pretty ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... of Campania. But when once Vespasian has seized the throne, neither he nor his friends nor even his army will feel their safety assured until the rival claimant is dead. They imprisoned Fabius Valens and meant to make use of him if a crisis occurred, but they found him too great an incubus. You may be sure that Antonius and Fuscus and that typical representative of the party, Mucianus, will have no choice but to kill you. Julius Caesar did not let Pompey live unmolested, nor Augustus ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... the strict mamma of her husband's recent incubus will overhear, and sit at another breakwater next day. "Come along!" she says, dispersively and emphatically. "We shall have the shoulder of ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... carcass become the prey of the carrion-crow and the buzzard, and the wild beasts of the desert wilderness howl a requiem over your bones! Go now, and meet your doom! Go with the curse of wretched innocence ever abiding upon you! Go with the canker-worm of festering corruption ever hanging, like an incubus, upon your prostituted heart, and may its fangs, charged with burning poison, pierce the very vitals of existence, till life itself shall become a burden ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... quite chopfallen. I was relieved, it is true, from the incubus of debt; but then how small a figure I had cut in the eyes of Dr. Cheron! Besides, I was small for the second time—reproved for the second time—lectured, helped, put down, and poohpoohed, for the second time! Could I have peeped at myself just then through the wrong end of a telescope, ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... rendered a companion altogether undesirable,—and though on one occasion he encountered a gentleman-novelist with a note-book, who was exceedingly anxious to fraternize with him and discover whither he vas bound, he succeeded in shaking off this would-be incubus at Mosul, by taking him to a wonderful old library in that city where there were a number of French translations of Turkish and Syriac romances. Here the gentleman- novelist straightway ascended ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... years are on my soul, And on my conscience. I've an incubus: My one distinction, and a parlous toll To glory; but ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... lecture was another financial failure, and in the hall I paid and dismissed that highly respectable incubus—my agent. ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... doctor closed his eyes and thought, "Now for the grand secret." Then came the immense pressure—the convulsive straining, the failing light, the noise in the ears. First the young man found himself crushed under some strangling incubus; then, with a shrieking gasp, he was in the upper air. But he was under a hamper of ropes that strung him down as if he were in a coop, and his dulled senses failed for a moment to tell what ailed him. At last, after seconds that seemed ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... that all this peril has been brought upon us by that foul system which came so near making a wreck of you, my precious one, as it has wrecked thousands of pure and gentle souls. I foresee that this war is destined, by mere force of circumstances, to rid the Republic of that deadly incubus. Rosa, are you not willing to give me up for the safety of the country, and the freedom of your ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... seems, therefore, probable that further experiments upset the conclusion drawn in 1856. This would account for the satisfaction expressed in the following year at the discovery of another method, on which Darwin wrote to Sir J.D. Hooker: "The distribution of fresh-water molluscs has been a horrid incubus to me, but I think I know my way now. When first hatched they are very active, and I have had thirty or forty crawl on a dead duck's foot; and they cannot be jerked off, and will live fifteen or even twenty-four hours out of water" ("Life and Letters," II., page 93). ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Gilbert, it was as if this departure had relieved him from an incubus; he was in better spirits from that moment, and returned to his habits of kindness to both grandmamma ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... described as "customary expressions of affability" for an indication that his infatuation is reciprocated, the Twins act promptly. They have "no use" for such creatures, they once explained to me; and they proceed to rid themselves of the incubus in a fashion ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... he was mistaken; the creak came from the old stairway outside his door, weighted with the tread of Mrs. Greeve. The tread and the creaking ceased; there came a knock, then heavy descending footsteps on the aged stairway, every separate step protesting until the incubus had sunk once more into the depths from ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... a hypocrite, there is hope for him. But when hypocrisy develops into self-deception, the severance between outward and inward, between appearance and reality, is complete. In a school which is ridden by the examination incubus, the whole atmosphere is charged with deceit. The teacher's attempt to outwit the examiner is deceitful; and the immorality of his action is aggravated by the fact that he makes his pupils partners with him in his fraud. ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... simple—good soul!" cried Helen, bursting into tears. "I cannot tell you all. You do not understand. There is a terrible mystery, which, like an incubus, is brooding day and night in my soul, and drives back all good angels who would enter. I am its ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... who asserted that, of a sudden, after a fashion so wholly unexpected as to be divine,—as great fires, great famines, and great wars are called divine,—a mighty hand had been stretched out to take away the remaining incubus of superstition, priestcraft, and bigotry under which England had hitherto been labouring. The proposed disestablishment of the State Church of England was, of course, the subject of this ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... mutations of mankind. The demigod was dethroned, the pedestal knocked from under, and all Europe rejoiced. The nightmare of fear which had so long pervaded all classes, was after all only a bad dream; the incubus could be shaken off, and mankind again resume its normal mode of living. Waterloo was already foreshadowed in the events of this year, and the people were wild ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... line is clear. Far from me to propose to bridge it over—that the pestered people be pushed across. No! I would save them from further fatigue. I would come to their relief, and would lift from their shoulders this incubus of Art. ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... frightful solitude of its own making in the mind of the Gamester; the slowly quickening but ever quickening descent of appetite down which the Miser is propelled; the agony and cleaving oppression of grief; the ghost-like hauntings of shame; the incubus of revenge; the life-distemper of ambition;—these inward existences, and the visible and familiar occurrences of daily life in every town and village; the patient curiosity and contagious acclamations of the multitude in the streets of the city and within the walls of the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Now, relieved of the incubus that had hitherto spoiled his enjoyment of the evening, the Colonel gratefully drank the whiskey and soda brought him by Ross's order and sat down cheerfully to play bridge. He always liked dining in the Mess, where he ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... upon my getting to the end of the text. I tried again and again, always to be driven back in despair before the crucial words were uttered. At last, with a desperate effort, I seemed to shake off the incubus which was weighing me down, and I finished the words triumphantly, and so loud that I had positively wakened myself up by shouting them out. With returning memory I knew this had happened, and hearing a door open and shut on the half landing below my room, I thought for the moment that someone ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... trotting in red heels—for Valerie dressed the man as beseemed his income, his cross, and his appointment—horrified Crevel, who could not meet the colorless eyes of the Government clerk. Marneffe was an incubus to the Mayor. And the mean rascal, aware of the strange power conferred on him by Lisbeth and his wife, was amused by it; he played on it as on an instrument; and cards being the last resource ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... rush up the mountain out of the oasis to tempt and torture us in our sleep. What could it have been that the goblin in a white robe and with flowing hair held in its arms? Very likely the stone with which the incubus loads our breast when he torments us. The other one seemed to fly, but I did not see its wings. That side-building must be where the Gaul lives with his ungodly wife, who has ensnared my poor Hermas. I wonder whether she is really so beautiful! But what can a youth who has grown up among rocks and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... can't exist without the sight of that wretch, Sibley, I wish she would follow him to New York. If she dotes on such scum, they had better be married, as far as such people can be, and so relieve her relatives of an incubus that ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... a university town, and participating with fidelity in its principal industry, I find that my own particular nightmare of monotony takes the form of examination papers—quires of them, reams of them, stacks of them—a horrid incubus, always oppressive, but then most unendurable when the book-room begins to smell musty in the morning, and the fire is unlit upon the hearth, and last night's student-lamp is stuccoed all over with ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... gazing about him far and wide, until his wondering thoughts and wandering eyes reverted directly to his personal self. He looked down; his feet were bare. Where were the red moccasins? Red moccasins! They were but a part of the dream; or, rather, the very master-fancy of it—the incubus! Never had he seen such things in bodily form. Assuredly, he must be at home, aflat of his back on the floor, asleep ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... o'clock in the morning. Now I could see that my rubber boots had grown so heavy because I was carrying so much of the soil of Northern France. It looked as if I had gout in both feet—the over- bandaged, stage type of gout—which were encased in large mud poultices. I tried to stamp off the incubus, but it would not go. I tried scraping one foot on the other, and what I scraped off seemed to reattach itself as fast as I could ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... child! Where was she on the day of the last engagement of that pugnacious Porcupine, in the year 1805, when England was freed from her long incubus of invasion? ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... with the succession of pairs of young men, whose mission seemed to be to plague their master consciously, and to plague him unconsciously. Once or twice Mr. Gibson had declined taking a fresh pupil, in the hopes of shaking himself free from the incubus, but his reputation as a clever surgeon had spread so rapidly that fees which he had thought prohibitory, were willingly paid, in order that the young man might make a start in life, with the prestige ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... thus some of the clumsier characters of the self-made man, combined with an inordinate, almost a besotted, pride of intellect and birth. Heavy, bilious, selfish, inornate, he sits upon this court and country like an incubus. ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... held by the throat, as General Grant announced, Richmond and all the South in that autumn of 1864, was staggering, suffocating, reeling to and fro under the immense incubus of all-destroying war. ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... the Greek ker ([Greek: ker]) and the Teutonic 'nightmare,' French cauchemar (mara, an incubus, or succuba), belong in this ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... vote. Here is the difficulty in any benevolent scheme. If the Indian were raised to the right of giving his suffrage, a plenty of politicians, on the frontiers, would enter into plans to better him. Now the subject drags along as an incubus on Congress. Legislation for them is only taken up on a pinch. It is a mere expedient to get along with the subject; it is taken up unwillingly, and dropped in a hurry. This is the Indian system. Nobody knows really what to do, and those ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... the National Guard. The leaders at the Hotel de Ville were taken captive. The Palais Bourbon was cleared, and the Deputies were reconvened in their assembly hall. Encouraged by this success, the government resolved to rid itself of the incubus of the national workshops, after a variety of schemes with this purpose in view had been brought forward in the Assembly. The government cut the Gordian knot by a violent stroke. On June 21, an edict was issued that all beneficiaries of the public workshops between the ages ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... to distribute amongst them books of engravings, or odd things purchased from the Jew-basket. She was obliged to be a purchaser, though she was but a slack contributor; and if she had possessed plenty of money, she would rather, when it was brought to the rectory—an awful incubus!—have purchased the whole stock ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... as doth a dream (This is the favourite simile with us) And taking all together it would seem The dream had not implied an incubus; For my part I am somewhat dubious If days like those before they all had known, Tho' Dora's state had been precarious For some three weeks or more I that must own, But she'd recovered now. Oh ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... administer the Government, had stooped to a barefaced violence and tyranny in excess of anything which could be truly charged against the Tory Sir John Colborne. All the old abuses were maintained in full vigour. The incubus of the Clergy Reserves was not removed. Appointments to office were still made from one political body only. The Legislative Council still had the power to paralyze the efforts of the Assembly. The Assembly itself was at present as retrograde as the Upper ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... what I then declared. The Papacy is now a corpse beyond all power of galvanization. It is the lying mockery of a religion,—a source of perennial corruption and immorality among the nations, and most fatally such to our own, upon whose very soul weighs the incubus and example of that lie. But at the present day we either know or ought to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... silver are the mediums of commercial transactions, and copper is the chief medium for the transmission of electric power. These metals, therefore, are quite as necessary as are iron and steel. Moreover, this great waste, a seeming incubus on the face of the earth, is each year disclosing more and more of its mineral ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... the most of the common and the near at hand.' When I have gone abroad, I have carried this spirit with me, and have tested what I have seen by the nature revealed to me at my own doorstep. Well, I am glad I have triumphed at last; I feel much better and like writing again, now that this incubus is off my shoulders." But the incubus soon rested on him again, for the next mail carried a letter begging him to reconsider and let two of his women friends accompany him. So it all came about in a few days, and ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... than this little comedy of the Trial by Fire. The wine and the sun will make vinegar without any shouting to help them, as your Florentine sages would say. You will have the satisfaction of delivering your city from an incubus by an able stratagem, instead of risking blunders ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... and how do ye groan till you are redeemed from it! Ye are bond-slaves, but not willingly, as man is; but how will you ever be turned to nobler purpose? How is this vast, this solid establishment of error, the incubus of many thousand years, ever to have an end? You yourselves, dear ones, will come to nought first. Anyhow, the public way is no place for me this evening. They'll soon be ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... vaguely her heart began to throb once more. She stirred. She moaned, still for the moment powerless to cast off wholly the enshrouding incubus of that ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... of work as a day laborer greatly cheered the young man. Instead of depressing his spirits, it for the first time lifted from his soul that incubus of melancholy with which every Confederate soldier of his class was at first oppressed. Ever since Grant had refused in the Wilderness—a year before—to retire beyond the river after receiving Lee's tremendous blows, Guilford Duncan and ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... of wealth had fallen from his shoulders; the dreadful incubus that had weighed him down and parted his friends from him was gone! And he had not got rid of it by spending it foolishly. It had not ruined anybody yet; it had not altered anybody in HIS eyes. It was gone; and he was a free and happy man once more. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... bitterness in her tone, the instinctive resentment (the colonel thought) of the born aristocrat toward the upstart who had pushed his way above those no longer strong enough to resist. It did not occur to him that her feeling might rest upon any personal ground. It was inevitable that, with the incubus of slavery removed, society should readjust itself in due time upon a democratic basis, and that poor white men, first, and black men next, should reach a level representing the true measure of their talents and their ambition. But it was perhaps equally inevitable that for a generation or two ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... although there is a clog in the way of the lone star State of Texas, in the person of her Governor, ... if he does not yield to public sentiment, some Texan Brutus will arise to rid his country of the hoary-headed incubus that stands between the people and their sovereign will. We intend, Mr. President, to go out peaceably if we can, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... in reference to the influence and leavening of public opinion upon this matter, and to see to it that, in so far as we can help, we set ourselves steadfastly against that devilish spirit which still oppresses with an incubus almost intolerable, the nations of so-called Christendom. Lift up your voices be not afraid, but cry, 'We are the followers of the Prince of Peace, and we war against the war that is blasphemy against ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... to the good morals of those who enact measures and those who uphold them? Do not they make themselves liable to mild criticism? Other countries and sections of countries seek to rid themselves of all incubus of whatever kind. Of this we have numerous examples in the scum from Europe and other parts of the world unloaded upon our shores annually. 2d. Let the Negro with all his moral depravity initiate any movement looking toward his ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... boats put out from the surrounding trawlers, and converged on us for our outward cargo, the empty fish-trunks. That intense band of light which had first betrayed the smoke of the fleet eroded upwards into the low, slaty roof of nimbus till the gloom was dissolved to the zenith. The incubus vanished; the sun flooded us. At last only white feathers were left in the sky. I felt I had known and loved these trawlers for years. All round us were ships' boats, riding those sweeping seas in a gyrating and delirious lunacy; and in each were two jovial ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... triple vengeance the untold horrors of the Spanish Inquisition? They are madly, blindly rushing, they know not where. The blame of dissolution rests upon her. And the still more awful responsibility of a civil war will hang as an everlasting incubus upon her shoulders. Then let her beware ere she "cross the Rubicon"—let her "pause long upon its brink." And shall we all perish by her fratricidal hand? Shall the blood, shed by brother in deadly war with brother, flow ignominiously through our rivers to the ocean & be carried by its waves ...
— Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Father and His Youngest Sister, - 1857-78 • Ulysses S. Grant
... delivered the Establishment took a violent part against the Catholic Church, on the basis of the Protestant tradition. Moreover, I had never as an Anglican been a lover of the actual Establishment; Hurrell Froude's Remains, in which it is called an "incubus" and "Upas Tree," will stand in evidence, as for him, so for me; for I was one of the editors. What I said even as an Anglican, it is not strange that I said when I was not. Indeed I have been milder in my thoughts of the Establishment ever since I have been a Catholic than before, and for an ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... is no divine right of a class or caste, enjoying supremacy or special privilege. It also is a surviving vested interest, that must justify itself, or be swept aside as an incubus. ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... mantle of sweet unconsciousness. Miss Pomeroy fell asleep. In that helpless condition she was quietly conveyed from her father's arms to bed, to the unspeakable relief of Guy, who felt, as the door closed, as if a fearful incubus had been removed. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Postmaster General would serve his country, if he resigned. During the dark days of the summer of 1864, the President's mail was filled with supplications for the dismissal of Blair.(1) He was described as an incubus that might cause the ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... reversal of the processes. But how would the judicious clippings and prickings affect our "pensive public"? Now that I have furnished a house and have a fixed address, under the paws of creditors, I feel I am in the wizard-circle of my popularity and subscribe to its laws or waken to incubus and the desert. Have I been rash? You do not pronounce. If I have bound myself to pipe as others please, it need not be entirely; and I can promise you it shall not be; but still I am sensible when I lift my "little quill" of having forced the note of a woodland wren into the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... there yet remained an abyss of evil which the English tongue refused to mention, but which weighed upon the English mind; and which, unspoken, nay (and it is the glory of the Elizabethan dramatists excepting Ford), unhinted, yet remained as an incubus in the consciousness of the playwrights and the public, was in their thoughts when they wrote and heard such savage misanthropic outbursts as those of Tourneur and of Marston. The sense of the rottenness of the country ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... they must not ask the simple followers to point out the direction. When the leaders assume responsibility they relieve the followers forever of the burden of finding a way. Relieved of this hateful incubus of responsibility for general affairs, the populace can again become free and happy and spontaneous, leaving matters to their superiors. No newspapers—the mass of the people never learning to read. The evolving once more of the great spontaneous ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... 'tis you, sweetheart, whose youth, Tempting my soul with dainty ways, Shall hide from it the sombre truth, This incubus of evil days. Springtime is yours, and flowers; come then, Scatter your roses on my brow, And let me dream of youth again— Alas, for I am ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... came the brisk insistent tapping of hammers on tent-pegs; the shrill neighing of ponies, and shriller chatter of coolies, bargaining for payment in advance; repudiating loads a few ounces overweight, and tragically prophesying death on the road if the illegal incubus were not removed. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... had bid me hope and be brave. She had told me she loved me—she, whom hundreds of brave men would love to call their own. I would try again. I would brake the chains Voltaire had forged; I WOULD hurl from me the incubus ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... on this curious subject, the Essay on Fairies, in the "Border Minstrelsy," vol. ii, under the fourth head; also Jackson on Unbelief, p. 175. Chaucer calls Pluto the "King of Faerie"; and Dunbar names him, "Pluto, that elrich incubus." If he was not actually the devil, he must be considered as the "prince of the power of the air." The most curious instance of these surviving classical superstitions is that of the Germans, concerning the Hill of Venus, into which she attempts to entice all gallant knights, and detains ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... his ankle. As this was his fourth offense, Miranda inquired how many bones there were in the human body, "so 't they'd know when Mark got through breakin' 'em." The time for paying the interest on the mortgage, that incubus that had crushed all the joy out of the Randall household, had come and gone, and there was no possibility, for the first time in fourteen years, of paying the required forty-eight dollars. The only bright spot in the horizon was Hannah's engagement to ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and read the signature, but all restrained their desire until the curiosity of the master of the house was satisfied. Gonzague advanced leisurely to the table, relieved to think the comedy had come to an end, and that he had satisfactorily rid himself of an incubus. He bent carelessly over the parchment, and then sprang back with face as pale and eyes as wild and lips as trembling as if on the pitiful piece of sheepskin he had seen some terror as dread as the face of Medusa. His twitching mouth whispered one word, but ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... so successfully rid himself of such an incubus, he made his valet-de-chambre slip over to Margari to tell the worthy man to wait upon him on the morrow at 11 o'clock precisely, as he had a very pleasant piece of news to impart to him; for he meant to ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... but he would have been less diffuse, less in difficulties for a conclusion. He had intended to rise rapidly to power without burdening himself first with the doctrines necessary to begin with, for a man in opposition, but an incubus ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... walketh now the limitour himself, In under nichtes and in morwenings, And saith his mattins and his holy things, As he goeth in his limitation. Women may now go safely up and doun; In every bush, and under every tree, There is no other incubus than he, And he ne will don ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... with a watermelon under his arm—all he would get to eat for the day. A big-wig now, sir, and as nasty as ever. However . . . There's no doubt he played his part fairly well at the time. He saved us all from the deadly incubus of Sotillo, where a more particular man might ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... should turn disdainfully from the paths of honest industry, and that everything which constitutes the true wealth and greatness of a state should have been despised or forgotten in the lurid and blood-stained glare of military glory, which cowered like an incubus on the breast of Europe. The battle-fields were beyond the frontiers of their own country; the calamities of war were too far distant to obtrude their disheartening features; and no lamentations mingled with the public rejoicings. Many a broken-hearted mother mourned in secret for her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... thought; yet it would ease me of a great weight if she would. This fortune, suddenly thrown into my lap, sits like an incubus upon me, Mr. Raymond. When the will was read to-day which makes me possessor of so much wealth, I could not but feel that a heavy, blinding pall had settled upon me, spotted with blood and woven of horrors. Ah, how different from the feelings with which I have been accustomed to anticipate ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... faintest suggestion of a sound outside. It was Enid listening with all her ears. She had not been long in discovering what had happened. Once the ghastly farcical incubus was off her shoulders she had followed Littimer upstairs. As she passed Henson's room the drone of voices struck on her ears. She stood there and listened. She would have given much for this not to have ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... President and, while he has caused the work and equipment of the College to be further enlarged, he has also been successful in paying off the last dollar of the debt that had hung over it so long as an incubus. ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... myself," with a deep-laid purpose in her mind, "and you may dig, too. You start another hole, right here. I'll dig this big one out more, and I'll be an incubus"—meaning nobody knows what—"and live in it, and you be little crabs trying to get out of my way in these holes ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... There, the incubus was off his straining chest at last! He felt easier, capable of manipulating the situation to some extent, smoothing down ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... after much anxiety, and the utmost straining of his ability to raise and to contribute funds towards the completion of their house of worship, he was just beginning to enjoy the comfort of seeing the debt, which had hung as an incubus over it for years, wiped out, when this new call was made upon him. A few young people proposed to go out to the assistance of the feeble church, upon the condition that Mr. Charless and Mr. Keith would go with them —wisely concluding ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... "Miss Winters, the old incubus, came around and was soppy to mother as usual yesterday—the same old business—I might be studying in Paris, now, instead of teaching drawing to stupid little girls, if I hadn't 'formed' what she will call 'that ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... 1825 in Maryland, western Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. But all these efforts failed and the Southern abolitionists, as we have seen, having "fought the good fight," emigrated to the Northwest about 1830, when Virginia failed to rid herself of the growing "incubus." Just as Birney and Rankin "took up arms" in Ohio there arose a fiercer champion of their cause in the East, where distance from the scene, lack of intimate knowledge of "the system," and a strong popular ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... all the more!" Then, writhing to evade the bore, I quicken now my pace, now stop, And in my servant's ear let drop Some words, and all the while I feel Bathed in cold sweat from head to heel. "Oh, for a touch," I moaned, in pain, "Bolanus, of thy madcap vein, To put this incubus to rout!" As he went chattering on about Whatever he descries or meets, The crowds, the beauty of the streets, The city's growth, its splendour, size, "You're dying to be off," he cries; For all the ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... progress was possible for them until their connection with Spain was severed. Cuba, today, proves Mr. Clay's position. The amiable and intelligent Creoles of that beautiful island are nearly ready for the abolition of slavery and for regulated freedom; but they lie languishing under the hated incubus of Spanish rule, and dare not risk a war of independence, outnumbered as they are by untamed or half-tamed Africans. Mr. Clay's speeches in behalf of the young republics of South America were read by Bolivar at the head of his troops, and justly rendered his name dear to the struggling ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... which was poured on Luther and his doings was so bitter as to be ludicrous. It was declared that his father was not his mother's husband, but an impish incubus, who had deluded her; that, after ten years' struggling with his conscience, he had become an atheist; that he denied the immortality of the soul; that he had composed hymns in honor of drunkenness, a vice to which he was unceasingly addicted; that he blasphemed ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... incubus of African barbarism, this little Jewish tribe on the banks of the legend-famed Sabbath stream has survived with Jewish vitality unbroken and purity uncontaminated. With longing the Falashas are awaiting a future when ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... diminished by a little sympathy, and sufficient perseverance excited to achieve a first success, there arises a revulsion of feeling affecting the whole nature. They no longer find themselves incompetent; they, too, can do something. And gradually as success follows success, the incubus of despair disappears, and they attack the difficulties of their other studies ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... something more than names. Doom had fallen; for more than a twelvemonth the ruins had smouldered, and to-day they were but the harmless haunt of bat and badger. And the world relieved of that intolerable incubus, and recovered of its purging and cleansing sickness, had started once more upon its appointed path—slowly, indeed, at the first, but ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... certain "maid of the night," who appeared to men in sleep and roused without satisfying their passions. (Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia, p. 262.) This succubus was the Assyrian Liler, connected with the Hebrew Lilith. There was a corresponding incubus, "the little night man," who had nocturnal intercourse with women. (Cf. Ploss, Das Weib, 7th ed., pp. 521 et seq.) The succubus and the incubus (the latter being more common) were adopted by Christendom; St. Augustine (De Civitate Dei, Bk. XV, Ch. XXIII) said that the wicked assaults of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... much on his hands; and, I am afraid, my poor old uncle was a hindrance, for he really seemed like a man who had got rid of an incubus when he found that we were willing to do what we could. Then it seems that he was disappointed in Ashley Selby. He thought that, being an inhabitant of the place, the young man would be interested in the people, and make ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... up of old forms of government caused by the French Revolution, came the dislocation of the old conventional modes of thought. Classicism in literature was dead, having weighed like an incubus upon the fancy and fresh life of many generations. England and Germany were at the head of the new movement, which was at a later period to be joined to France. The influence was to extend to Russia, ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... engagement to Clemency. There now can be no possible need for secrecy with regard to it. James, in spite of his vague sense of horror, felt an exhilaration at the thought that now all could be above board, that the shutters could be flung open. He felt as if an incubus had rolled from his mental consciousness. Clemency herself experienced something of the same feeling. She appeared at the breakfast-table the next morning with her hat. "Uncle says I may go with you on your rounds," she said to James. She beamed, and yet there was a troubled and puzzled ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... about half as long, and is a well-written and extremely plausible story about a house owned by an old gentleman of ancient lineage, where there is a collection of gold plate which was said to be an "incubus", that is, the subject of a curse. As indeed ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... choleric dreams of fire, combats, yellow colours, etc. the phlegmatic of water baths, of sailing on the sea; the melancholies of thick fumes, deserts, fantasies, hideous faces, etc. they that have the hinder part of their brain clogged, with viscous humours, called by physicians Ephialtes incubus, dream that they are suffocated. And those who have the orifice of their stomach loaded with malignant humours, are affrighted with strange visions, by reason of those venemous vapours that mount to the brain and ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... modern consequence, To have cothurnal buskins frighted hence. No, teach thy Incubus to poetise; And throw abroad thy spurious snotteries, Upon that puft-up lump of ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... Vikings, like Sigurd the Crusader, sailed the seas beyond Norva's Sound and Serkland,[19] and as pilgrims, traders, travellers, and conquerors in the Mediterranean, their work was of course not one of exploration. They bore a foremost share in breaking down the Moslem incubus on southern Europe; they ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... who copulates with the mother or the man whose semen has been taken is the father of the child. To which Saint Thomas answers, with more or less subtle arguments, that the real father is not the incubus ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... desperate attempt now set afoot to force biblical and post-biblical mythology into elementary instruction, renders it useful and necessary to go on making a considerable outlay in the same direction. Not yet, has "the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew" ceased to be the "incubus of the philosopher, and the opprobrium of the orthodox;" not yet, has "the zeal of the Bibliolater" ceased from troubling; not yet, are the weaker sort, even of the instructed, at rest from their fruitless toil "to harmonise impossibilities," ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Merlin, the prince of enchanters, son of the nun Matilda, and an incubus, "half-angel and half-man." He made, in addition to Prince Arthur's armor and weapons, the Round Table for one hundred and fifty knights at Carduel, the magic fountain of love, and built Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... flesh creep like The prickly writhings of a new-slough'd snake; Each several moment as the awaken'd glare Of the doom'd felon starting from his sleep, While the slow, hideous meaning of his cell Grows on him like an incubus, until The truth shoots like an ice-bolt to his brain From his dull eyeball; then, from brain to heart Flashes in sickening tumult of despair— As in ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... return to his hiding-place in the hold, though he was rather an incubus on board. Phlegmatic, methodic, and by no means communicative, he carefully avoided the seamen, who had always some prank to play off on him, and he kept to his own provisions. He was thin enough in all ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... said Antonia, bestowing one of her rare and wonderfully sweet smiles upon her parent. She rushed away to the house in her headlong style; met Hester in one of the corridors; stopped her to exclaim, "Cheer up, Hetty, the incubus is leaving by the first train in the morning," and then finding Pinkerton, despatched her for orders to Mrs. ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... suffer less from her captivity, having less to afflict her—no dread of that terrible calamity which, like an incubus, broods upon the mind of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... horror and fear that, should I suffer it to gain further ascendency, I might fall back into habitual lethargies, and, remembering what Dr. Pemberton had said, I was determined, if possible, to throw off that incubus of my being, by the strength of my own will, aided by ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... for many long years that the German people would themselves throw off the incubus of the military Government which was crushing out their individuality and making their country an object of distrust and fear to all those interested in the progress of civilisation; but if you will not rid yourselves of the monster which has dishonoured and disgraced you before the world, ...
— Plain Words From America • Douglas W. Johnson
... presents itself. The extraordinary states of mental disintegration evince the separate and irregular function of certain mental nerve tracts, or grouped nerve tracts with which goes necessarily a coincident suspension, partial or complete, of the functions of all the rest; the supernatural incubus, therefore, neither demoniac nor divine, only morbid. Thus the strange nervous seizures, with their mental concomitants, not being outside the range of positive research, but interesting events within it, become useful natural experiments to throw an instructive light upon the intricate ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... aggrieved by the masters, and refused to work: Mr. Bronte thought that they had been unjustly and unfairly treated, and he assisted them by all the means in his power to "keep the wolf from their doors," and avoid the incubus of debt. Several of the more influential inhabitants of Haworth and the neighbourhood were mill-owners; they remonstrated pretty sharply with him, but he believed that his conduct was right and persevered ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... night when the contract was signed I have felt under an incubus, and since he appeared here yesterday, punctual to the appointed hour, I have felt as if I had a veritable "old man of the sea" upon my shoulders. He flies up stairs and along the corridors as noiselessly ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... for him and aid him with all hopefulness and strength. He has vitality beyond one man in a thousand. He may throw off all the incubus of it. But it has come suddenly and is growing." Then he got mad in all his friendship, and blurted out: "Why didn't the great blundering brute send for me when first he felt something he couldn't meet nor understand?" And there were almost tears in ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... reason and intelligence, they undoubtedly subserve a noble purpose. But the quarantine laws all over the world, with some rare exceptions, being the offspring of ignorance and terror, are not only the climax of absurdity, but act as an incubus on commerce, causing ruinous delays in mercantile operations, much distress, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... measure from ourselves. Hitherto the American office has not taken upon itself the task of returning to their writers undelivered and undeliverable letters. This it is now going to do. It is, as I have said, shaking off from itself that terrible incubus, the franking privilege. And the expediency of introducing a money-order office into the States, connected with the post-office as it is with us, is even now under consideration. Such an accommodation is much needed in the country; but ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... doors of knowledge to their workpeople, or their children. It was a dozen years before the Institution was able to remove to a home of its own in Newhall Street, but it rapidly got into a hopeless state of debt. To lessen this incubus, and provide funds for some needed alterations, the committee decided to hold an exhibition of "manufactures, the fine arts, and objects illustrative of experimental philosophy, &c." The exhibition was opened Dec. 19, 1839, and in all ways was a splendid success, a fairly-large sum of money ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... the first black regiment, and personally governed the first community where emancipation was a success,—who taught the relieved nation, in fine, that there was strength and safety in those dusky millions who till then had been an incubus and a terror,—Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton, Military Governor of South Carolina. The single career of this one man more than atones for all the traitors whom West Point ever nurtured, and awards the highest place on the roll of our practical ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... to be the common medium of light—our rooms may be illumined by electricity, or from fifty other sources which now are never dreamed of. In the mean time, the annual outlay during eleven years is an additional incubus upon the prime cost of the plantation, which, at the expiration of this term, may be reduced to one-tenth ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... of hours he could no more bear the incubus of this thought than he could put up with the flat prospects of married life the night before. He was all at sea, barely sane, in fact. His life had been so long purely intellectual that this sudden strain of passion and fierce practical ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... casual. Wallace, it was easy to see, was enormously relieved. Mary had been put in unreserved possession of the facts and had endured them better than he could possibly have hoped. He began chatting about the farm again, not now as an incubus but as a hopeful possibility. Both the boys had real mettle in them and might be expected to buckle down and show it. Rush would forget the disillusionment of his holiday hopes when the necessities of the case were really brought home to him. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Matsudairas are. This stone colossus is almost seventeen feet in length and lifts its head six feet from the ground. On its now broken back stands a prodigious cubic monolith about nine feet high, bearing a half-obliterated inscription. Fancy—as Izumo folks did—this mortuary incubus staggering abroad at midnight, and its hideous attempts to swim in the neighbouring lotus- pond! Well, the legend runs that its neck had to be broken in consequence of this awful misbehaviour. But really the thing looks as if it could only have been ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... thought to shelter. Meantime the South feels still the intolerable weight of that Constitution, the intolerable sting of the demand of her northern brothers, that she shall be asked to endure, in the name of this incubus, this body of the law, the continuous burglarizing of her honor and her prosperity—the burglarizing of the house of ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... familiarising me with what lay behind the scene which I had just beheld. In similar fashion in the days of Edward I. and Simon De Montfort, the Commons of England, then struggling up, had wrestled in the narrow Chapter House. And so they had fought in the Lancastrian time; and after the Tudor incubus had been lifted off. So under the Stuarts had the wrangling proceeded from which came at length the "Petition of Right." Substituting the doublet and the steeple hat for their modern equivalents, the spectacle of the Long Parliament must ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... either some gross scandals or an ill-advised reactionary movement back to absolutism may develop a crisis within a few years of the peace settlement. The mercantile and professional classes will join hands with the social democrats to remove the decaying incubus of the Hohenzollern system, and Germany will become a more modern and larger repetition of the Third French republic. This collapse of the Germanic monarchical system may spread considerably beyond the limits of the German empire. It will probably be effected without ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... knew not whither to direct his flight: he dared not dash for the street with this imminent tattered incubus—she was almost upon him—and he frantically made for the kitchen door, only to swerve with a gasp of despair as his foot touched the step, for she was at his heels, and he was sickeningly assured she would cheerfully ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... struggled to hold his footing against the awkward incubus, to throw the man off so that he could pursue Barney. His efforts were vain. Morse, evidently trying to regain his equilibrium, plunged wildly at him and sent him ploughing into the willows. The Montanan landed heavily on top, pinned him down, and ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... were opposed to the O'Brien movement; but the Young Irelanders, and most of the Old Irelanders, were exasperated, and in their speeches and newspapers denounced Lamartine as the enemy of liberty, the sycophant of England, and the incubus of the French provisional government. It was said that he had married an English lady, and was more English at heart than French—that he would betray the republic to England or to monarchy. Those persons who had been foremost in holding him up as a demi-god, now abused him not only as a traitor, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of society; and not even his own household have for a moment associated other ideas than those of the rigid and august with the memory of the Baron Ritzner von Jung, the demon of the dolce far niente lay like an incubus upon the university. Nothing, at least, was done beyond eating and drinking and making merry. The apartments of the students were converted into so many pot-houses, and there was no pot-house of them all more famous or more frequented than that of the Baron. Our carousals ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... languid grace. He looked like a convalescent Apollo. Never, on any previous occasion, had he practiced more successfully the social art which he habitually cultivated—the art of casting himself on society in the character of a well-bred Incubus, and conferring an obligation on his fellow-creatures by allowing them to sit under him. It was undeniably a dull evening. All the talking fell to the share of Mr. Vanstone and Miss Garth. Mrs. Vanstone was habitually silent; Norah ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... "stop," "straight ahead," "to the right," and "to the left." The words mano and silla mean really "hand" and "saddle"; I have been told that they are linguistic survivals of the days when women, rode on pillions and the fair incubus indicated that she wished to turn either to the side of her right hand or to the ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... and the criterion of the justice of scientific conclusions, in all that relates to the origin of things, and, among them, of species. In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been embittered and their good name blasted ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of the ancient governments, which rested like an incubus on the peoples of the Central Empires, has come political change not merely, but revolution; and revolution which seems as yet to assume no final and ordered form, but to run from one fluid change to another, until thoughtful men are forced to ask themselves, with what governments and of ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... are to support the else meagre outline of a Greek tragedy, will not do. Let experiments be tried upon worthless subjects; and if this of Mendelssohn's be Greek music, the sooner it takes itself off the better. Sophocles will be delivered from an incubus, and we from an affliction of the ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... kind letter of welcome. My long rest has completely restored me. As my doctor told me, I was sound, wind and limb, and had merely worn myself out. I am not going to do that again, and you see that I have got rid of the School Board. It was an awful incubus! ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley |
