"Rending" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... majestically through long, dead black swells. Peter poked his way up forward to the solitary lookout in the peak and glanced overside. Broad, phosphorescent swords broke smoothly with a rending, rushing gurgle over the steep cut-water. His eyes darted here and there over the void as his mind struggled to straighten ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... judgment inevitable, hell everlasting, heaven hard to win, ignorance is acceptable to God as a proof of faith and submission, abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of life—these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediaeval Church. The Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick veil which they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world, and flashing the light of reality upon the darkened places of his own nature. For the mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture in the classical humanities; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... tears from a lump of pig iron, and his own capacity to open the floodgates of emotion was phenomenal. He had that rare and priceless gift shared by some members of the theatrical profession of being able to shed real tears at will. His sobs and groans were truly heart-rending. This, as might be expected, rendered him peculiarly telling in his appeals to the jury, and he could frequently set the entire panel snivelling and wiping their eyes as he pictured the deserted home, the grief-stricken ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... torture of children, who, as children will, had undoubtedly listened to, and learned from, the conversations carelessly carried on in their presence by parents and other older people, this unfortunate little girl's cruel, heart-rending fate. ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... abolitionists. And there were a very great number of honest, conscientious men who were appalled as they looked forward to the boldly threatened consequences of even the mildest action in opposition to slavery—the rending of the church, the ruin of the country, the horrors of civil war, and its uncertain event, issuing perhaps in the wider extension and firmer establishment of slavery itself. It was an immense power that the bold, resolute, rule-or-ruin supporters of ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... stone above the lairs of the frightened little foxes. He would hear, very faint and far off, the chug-drug of a boar sharpening his tusks on a bole; and would come across the great gray brute all alone, scribing and rending the bark of a tall tree, his mouth dripping with foam, and his eyes blazing like fire. Or he would turn aside to the sound of clashing horns and hissing grunts, and dash past a couple of furious sambhur, staggering to ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... operation is performed, but which is always declared to be highly prosperous, if a liberal present has been made. During the performance of the ceremony, the forests appear in a blaze, the most discordant shouts rending the air, intermixed with the sounds of their instruments, composing altogether a tumult, which is heard at the distance of many leagues. The dancing is described as of the most ludicrous kind, marked by those indecencies, which generally distinguish the amusements of the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... desolate, long dismantled, and waiting only to be torn down for the behoof of speculative dealers in old material. What aforetime was a tree-bordered drive, now curved between dead stumps, a mere slushy cartway; the stone pillars, which had marked the entrance, damaged in the rending away of metal with a market value, drooped sideways, ready at a touch to bury themselves ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... profaned the most secret places of their souls with outcries and gesticulations, he bade them consider the deeds of their ancestors in such a fashion that they were flushed to their tingling ears. Some of them—the rending voice cut a frozen stillness—might have had relatives who perished in defence of their country. They thought, not a few of them, of an old sword in a passage, or above a breakfast-room table, seen and fingered by stealth since they could walk. He adjured them to emulate those illustrious examples; ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... it touches none of the questions of social science, it is not a philosophical treatise, and it is not a dozen things that it might have been. The critic cannot forgive the author for this disrespect to him. This isn't a rose, says the critic, taking up a pansy and rending it; it is not at all like a rose, and the author is either a pretentious idiot or an idiotic pretender. What business, indeed, has the author to send the critic a bunch of sweet-peas, when he knows that a cabbage would be preferred,—something not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Antiquarian Philosophers teach, the royal Sceptre was from the first something of a Hammer, to crack such heads as could not be convinced) will all along find somewhat to do. And thus in perpetual abolition and reparation, rending and mending, with struggle and strife, with present evil and the hope and effort towards future good, must the Constitution, as all human things do, build itself forward; or unbuild itself, and sink, as it can and may. O Sieyes, and ye other Committeemen, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... whole number was often not to be distinguished, until the eye having adapted itself to the darkness, they were pointed out, or were heard, or some filthy bundle of rags and straw was seen to move. Perhaps the poor children presented the most piteous and heart-rending spectacle. Many were too weak to stand, their little limbs attenuated, except where the frightful swellings had taken the place of previous emaciation. Every infantile expression had entirely departed; ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... regrets may have been his in that hour of awful mystery, we may not know. In the words of another: "What blight and anguish met his agonized eyes, whose lips may tell? what brilliant broken plans, what bitter rending of sweet household ties, what sundering ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... and believed that without it the war would end in disaster to our cause. Having given that assurance in the extremity of our peril, the violation of it now, in the day of our power, would be a rude rending of that good faith which holds the moral world together; our country would cease to have any claim upon the confidence of men; it would make the war not only a failure, but ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... the inscription over the doorway, after the reading of which Dante's ears were assailed by words of agony and heart-rending cries. "This," said Vergil, "is the home of those melancholy souls who lived without infamy and without praise. Cowards and selfish in life, they are denied even entrance to hell." As they looked, a long train passed by, stung by gadflies ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... so dreadful, Eveline struggled for liberty with such frantic energy, that she partly effected her purpose by forcing her arms from the bonds which confined them. But this only convinced her of the impossibility to escape; for, rending off the veil which wrapped her head, she found herself in total darkness, and flinging her arms hastily around her, she discovered she was cooped up in a subterranean cavern, of very narrow dimensions. ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... off together, and she stooped over the head of the stairs in order to see them once more, and a laugh—piercing, heart-rending, reached them from the place where she stood. Frederick pushed Rosanette into the cab, sat down opposite her, and during the entire drive did ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... heights, hacked all about with steel and fast-falling axes, when husbandmen emulously strain to cut it down: it hangs threateningly, with shaken top and quivering tresses asway; till gradually, overmastered with [631-662]wounds, it utters one last groan, and rending itself away, falls in ruin along the ridge. I descend, and under a god's guidance clear my way between foe and flame; weapons give ground before me, and ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... one of the few descendants of a mysterious (or now mysterious) people who had had their home on a series of islands in one of Terra's seas, islands which almost a hundred years before had been swallowed up in a series of world-rending quakes—Japan was the ancient name of that nation. While Karl Kosti had come from the once thickly populated land masses half the planet away which had borne the geographical name of "Europe." No, all the way along ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... striking the walls of the fort with a mighty impact, that structure was shaken to its very foundations. Even untouched, one felt shaky and uncertain on that hillside, and one would have felt his body rending to pieces as he looked where a shell burst in the midst of a trench, and heard the filthy squelch and sharp cries above the roar, and saw the awful faces through the red glare and curtain of smoke, and the mangled corpses of dead bodies hurled ...
— The Battle of Bayan and Other Battles • James Edgar Allen
... in a cool, limpid pool. He had been so long in the turmoil and strife of the struggle for success—for wealth; had been so wholly surrounded by those who strove as he strove, tearing and trampling and rending those who were in their way, that he had almost lost sight of the life that lay outside of the dust and din of that arena. He had almost forgotten that life held other rewards than riches. He had forgotten the calm and tranquil region ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... ghastly that he dared not recall them: screams of torn men, rending of torn planks; howling terrors on every side, shattering his head, bursting his heart, ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... my patron, Colonel Murphy, again came in sight, and invited me to occupy a shelter-tent, on the brow of the hill at White Oak. To my great joy, he was able to offer me some stewed beef, bread and butter, and hot coffee. I ate voraciously, seizing the food in my naked fingers, and rending it ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... master, 'thou shouldst understand Thou'rt in the second circlet, and shall be, Until thou come upon the horrid sand. Give good heed then: more wonders thou shall see, Yea, to confirm all stories I have told.' On every side I heard heart-rending cries, But not a person could I there behold: Wherefore I stopped, bewildered with surprise. Methinks he thought I thought the voices came From some that, hiding, in the thicket lay: Because the Master said, 'If thou but maim One of these plants, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... It was a heart-rending scene. Women searching for their babies along the road, where they had been lost; others sitting in the dust crying and wringing their hands; for by this time we had not an idea but what Baton Rouge was either in ashes, or being plundered, and we had saved nothing. I had one dress, Miriam ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... too evidently a man of the world, knowing in his ripe experience that there existed a sufficient number of such cold natures to warrant the obtrusion of this heart-rending formula; and I doubt not that these negative specimens of the possible alone restrained my namesake from going beyond mere ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the occasion, have grown from the need of the heart to cheat separation of its pain. The Poles have an expression of infinitely deeper meaning, which embodies all that human nature can utter of grief and despair—"To meet nevermore." This is the heart-rending farewell with which the patriot exiled to Siberia takes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... friend here, because I feel it must be love. I was in hopes it was his cousin. But it is not so; it must be something that has happened abroad. Love alone can account for it. It is not his debts that would so overpower him. What are his debts? I would pay them myself. It is a heart-rending business. I am going to him. How I tremble!' 'How good you are!' exclaimed Miss Temple, with streaming eyes. 'I shall ever be grateful; I mean, we all must. Oh! do go to him, go to him directly; ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... "Judge how heart-rending it was to come to my room and find and read your discouraging letter of the 15th. Now, as to the young men, you must not wait to be brought forward by the older men. For instance, do you suppose that I would ever have got into notice if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... heaven; and if I attain not thereunto, I will buy it!" Thereupon, he sets the dogs on his brother, spits in his eye, locks the gates, and goes back to his feasting. The dogs which are set upon poor Lazarus bring him their food, instead of rending him. After three efforts to move his brother to compassion, poor Lazarus entreats the Lord to let him die: "Send sudden death, Lord, winged but not merciful," he prays. "Send two threatening angels; ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... to you my heart-rending interviews with Manon during this journey, and what my sensations were when I obtained from the guards permission to approach her caravan? Oh! language never can adequately express the sentiments of the heart; but picture ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... And I know not nor care if there be an awaking Ever at all any more, for the years that have torn us apart, Few, so few as they are, will ever be rending and breaking: Sooner by far than I knew have they wrought ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... may be grateful for it—of no more comfort to us than sweet music to a drowning man. We may be miserable, and unable to help being miserable, and unwilling to help it too. We do not wish to flee from our sorrow: we do not wish to forget it. We dare not. It is so awful, so heart-rending, so plain-spoken, that God, the master and tutor of our hearts, must wish us to face it and endure it. Our Father has given us the cup—shall we not drink it? Oh! for a comforter who will help us to drink the bitter cup—who will give us faith ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... am not a coward. If I were really in a like scene fear would be the least of my emotions; but in the dream I tremble and am afraid. Slowly, silently, the door opens, the men of the dark enter, wall and windows begin to reel. I hear a quick, loud cry, rending the silence and falling into a roar like that of flooding waters. Then I wake, and my dream is ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... he had been keeping. Now, through the mists of memory, he recalled snarls and the bruising contact of a furry body, during the battle he so, dimly remembered, and that once his foe had cried, out, as though at the impact of rending teeth. ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... questions were on a hundred lips; and before any intelligible answer could be given, a woman gave utterance to the most heart-rending scream, and made such frantic attempts to spring into the water, that the intervention of several strong men was required ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... gaped at him, incredulous, an awful thing happened. With an appalling roar and a rending of steel and iron, the submarine halted abruptly in its headlong flight, reared upward at an acute angle and then fell forward with a tremendous crash. The adventurers were thrown violently against a steel ...
— The Heads of Apex • Francis Flagg
... watchman having disappeared, they entered a narrow lane, skirted by a few detached houses, all of which were shut up, and marked by the fatal cross. As they passed one of these habitations, they were arrested by loud and continued shrieks of the most heart-rending nature, and questioning a watchman who stood at an adjoining door, as to the cause of them, he said they proceeded from a poor lady who had just lost the last of her ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was over, the boy rose and calmly strapped to his back a satchel covered with deer-skin, containing a few books, linen, and a change of very plain apparel. While engaged in this, the uproar of grief in the house was perfectly heart-rending. When just ready to set out, he reverently took off his hat, knelt down, and, with tears streaming from his eyes, craved humbly and meekly the blessing and forgiveness of his father and mother. The mother caught him in her arms, kissed his lips, and, kneeling also, sobbed ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... that night, at any rate. Driving the car as though it were a monoplane in a clear sky, with an open throttle that awoke the echoes, Oldershaw charged into Fifth Avenue and caught the bonnet of a taxicab that was going uptown. There was a crash, a scream, a rending of metal. And when Martin picked himself up with a bruised elbow and a curious sensation of having stopped a punching bag with his face, he saw Oldershaw bending over the crumpled body of the taxi driver and heard a girl with red lips and a small ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... the ancient King, Rending his hair so long and grey: “With sable and mard I’ll them reward Who dare this ...
— Ermeline - a ballad - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... which they were very ill paid. The Poor-laws ground to the dust not only the paupers, but those who had risen just above that state, and were obliged to pay poor-rates. The changes produced by peace following a long war, and a bad harvest, brought with them the most heart-rending evils to the poor. Shelley afforded what alleviation he could. In the winter, while bringing out his poem, he had a severe attack of ophthalmia, caught while visiting the poor cottages. I mention these things,—for this minute and active sympathy ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... sing the song of Sigurd and the face without a foe, And they sing of the prison's rending and the tyrant laid alow, And the golden thieves' abasement, and the stilling of the churl, And the mocking of the dastard where the chasing edges whirl; And they sing of the outland maidens that thronged round Sigurd's hand, And ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... greatly injured, but the cathedral was not materially hurt. A German who had been in Hamburg during the time of the great fire, assured an English reporter that the scene of desolation in that city on the morning after the conflagration was less heart-rending than that presented by the ruined quarters of Strasburg when the Prussian conquerors marched in. And yet the inhabitants, had General Ulrich been willing, would ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... know all soon, dear Ludwig," said the Margrave, with a heart-rending look. "You marked Gottfried, who ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... saucers come together in one grand smash, but the kettle broke the bottle of cream, which in its turn absorbed all the sugar. Jack looked coolly round at us with an air of mild satisfaction, as if he thought he had done something very clever, whilst our shrieks were rending the air. ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... situation she had to face. Nor did Thora just then realize that within the past hour her girlhood had vanished, and that she had suddenly become a woman with a woman's fate upon her and a woman's heart-rending ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... crash as if heaven and earth had met; a wild, deep cry, made up of all tones of human agony and fright; the shriek of escaping steam; the rending and splintering of wood and iron; destruction, terror, pain, and death, all mingled in one awful moment. Then those who had escaped unhurt began the sad and terrible task of withdrawing from the ruin the maimed and bleeding bodies of those ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... Dr. Donne would have put into the dykes? unless he meant the Baptists, instead of the Independents, the holders of the Independent church principle. No—not 'schismatical,' I hope, hating as I do from the roots of my heart all that rending of the garment of Christ, which Christians are so apt to make the daily week-day of this Christianity so called—and caring very little for most dogmas and doxies in themselves—too little, as people say to me sometimes, (when they send me 'New ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... hath bred, Through peril onward led, Free, of undaunted mood, Still lavish of their blood, With soul untaught to yield, Rending each chain! To such the bloody field, Brings ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... turned away from the edge, and had penetrated about fifty yards of close brushwood, when there came a frightful rending crash from behind us. With one impulse we rushed back the way that we had come. The ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... violence which characterises the storms of the tropics. The elements, escaping from their wonted continence, rage in fiercer war. The long-gathering electricity, suddenly displaced from its equilibrium, seems to revel in havoc, rending asunder the ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... a horrible crash of rending and breaking. The sequoia, burnt to the very roots, cracked ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... not he, but his friend, is to have the immortality that his poetry will surely bring. While this comparison with the Latin poems may not much aid an interpretation that seemed clear and certain without it, at least its sudden rending from their thought does not weaken, but strengthens the effect of the statement that the writer was to have no part in the immortality ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... like mica in the intense blue of the sky. Round about the shrapnel burst in little puffs like cotton-wool. A shout went up from the soldiers who stood in groups in the street of the ruined town. A whistle split the air, followed by a rending snort that tailed off into the moaning of ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... humiliation, and fell one April morning, in his retirement near Pisa, unconscious under the double shock of invasion and civil war. Though he recovered later, his horizon remained dark. The patriot suffered to see party spirit and warring factions rending the nation he had so often called the pilot of humanity’s bark, which seemed now to be going straight on the rocks. “Finis Galliæ,” murmured the historian, who to the end lived and died with his ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... troubles has been that the man from the livery-stable was unable to get our hand-bags, so that we actually had to go to bed last night and get up this morning without a sponge, comb, toothbrush, or any blessed thing. We were nearly sprinkling ashes on our heads and rending our garments when the fact was broken to us; but, considering we had no other clothes to fall back upon, we suppressed our feelings (and drowned our tears) in sleep, putting in nearly twelve hours, as it was 9.15 when we woke this morning, and it was not very late when ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... the success of his scheme, I shrieked with agony on learning the calamity which I had drawn on the head of my generous friend; and never was my heart, tried as it had been for so many years, nearer to despair. I knew not how to lull the rending thoughts which succeeded each other in my bosom, and had recourse to opium to suspend for some hours the anguish which I felt. M. do Montmorency, calm and religious, invited me to follow his example; the consciousness ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... really to act only after the scene in which her nurse tells Juliet of what she supposes is her lover's death. The quick gasp, the terrified stricken face, the tottering step, the passionate and heart-rending accents were nature's own marks of affecting overwhelming grief. Miss Anderson has great power over the lower tones of her rich voice. Her whisper electrifies and penetrates; her hurried words in the passion of the scene, where she drinks the sleeping potion, and afterward in the catastrophe ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... looked, an enormous billow, topping all the others, and coming after them, like a driver following a flock, swept over the vessel. Her foremast snapped short off, and the men who clung to the shrouds were brushed away like a swarm of flies. With a rending, riving sound the ship began to split in two, where the sharp back of the Mansie reef was sawing into her keel. The solitary man upon the forecastle ran rapidly across the deck and seized hold of a white ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... these clouds of Heaven? Or is it the descendant of a long race of mountains, existing under appointed laws of birth and endurance, death and decrepitude? There can be no doubt as to the answer. The rock itself answers audibly by the murmur of some falling stone or rending pinnacle. It is not as it was once. Those waste leagues around its feet are loaded with the wrecks of what it was. On these perhaps, of all mountains, the characters of decay are written most clearly; around these are spread most gloomily ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... for that purpose. Tea and damper formed their evening meal; and by the light of a blazing fire, their condition looked less desperate. Mrs. Vickers had set the pannikin on a flat stone, and dispensed the tea with an affectation of dignity which would have been absurd had it not been heart-rending. She had smoothed her hair and pinned the white shawl about her coquettishly; she even ventured to lament to Mr. Frere that she had not brought more clothes. Sylvia was in high spirits, and scorned to confess ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... warned Throcker, as the men came on; he and Steering could feel the rock upon which they lay vibrate; there was a rending and splitting going on all through the ledge. "Can you hold on a minute alone, sir?" gasped Throcker suddenly. "I have a bad heart and it's going back on me,"—he ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... would soon have revealed a more terrible sight still, had there been any eyes to behold it. At midnight, while a peal of thunder was just dying away in the distance, the crust of death flew asunder, rending in all directions; and, pale as his investiture, staring with ghastly eyes, the form of Karl started up sitting on the couch. Had he not been far beyond ordinary men in strength, he could not thus have rent his sepulchre. Indeed, had Teufelsbuerst ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... have been hitherto forced to occupy. It is quite monstrous, in the first University of the most favoured of Christian lands, that a man should be compelled thus to lift up his voice in defence of the very Inspiration of GOD'S Word. O that Divine narrative, which is for ever rending aside the veil, and disclosing to us the counsels of the presence-chamber of the ALMIGHTY!—O those human characters, beset with all the infirmities of our fallen nature,—whose words and actions ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... boiled and gave off thick clouds of steam through which flashed dazzling discharges of lightning accompanied by a thundering, grinding sound like a million mills. The ocean heaved spasmodically and the air shook with a rending, ripping noise, as if Nature were bent upon destroying her own handiwork. The glare was so dazzling that sight was impossible. The falukah was tossed this way and that, as if caught in a simoon, and he was rolled hither ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... lorded, gold-bright hall, in gloomy nights; and ne'er could the prince {2d} approach his throne, — 'twas judgment of God, — or have joy in his hall. Sore was the sorrow to Scyldings'-friend, heart-rending misery. Many nobles sat assembled, and searched out counsel how it were best for bold-hearted men against harassing terror to try their hand. Whiles they vowed in their heathen fanes altar-offerings, asked with words ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... sound of an angry "snuff!" a sudden, wild threshing in the snow, and the next instant a tremendous weight struck the roof of their house. A rending of bark and thatch followed, and a massive black form shot down into the center of the room and lay there a moment, stunned. Paul, too, was dizzy. He had been struck a glancing blow on the shoulder by the big black body in its fall, ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... river—just such screams as would be uttered by a person who was being murdered. Sometimes a young maiden was seen emerging out of the waters, half naked, with dishevelled hair, that covered her shoulders, and the country resounded with her heart-rending crying as she appeared in the lake. The frequent crying of the Spirit gave to ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... hope that the feeling of our citizens will not be again excited by the occurrence of such a painful and heart-rending accident as the one over which a number have been called to mourn, as we are confident that by proper management and strict attention it may ...
— A Pioneer Railway of the West • Maude Ward Lafferty
... but they did not resent his sexual freedom; the Censor would not have objected if he had torn away the most intimate curtains of decency or rent the last rag from private life. What the Censor disliked was his rending the curtain from public life. There is still much of that spirit in our country; there are no affairs which men seek so much to cover up as public affairs. But the thing was done somewhat more boldly ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... wreckage of a boat, and I begin to tremble with excitement. If the Mate would only speak! A thought strikes me—that he will never speak to me again; then the sea comes. As she rolls to starboard, the great wave lifts his head and springs like a wild beast at the rail. A hoarse roar, a rending, splitting sound of gear going adrift, and the sea strikes the poop with terrific impact. Then the water soughs away through the scuppers. And athwart the blackened sky there darts a dazzling flash of lightning. As I hold to my stanchion, soaked to the skin, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... deliberation from branch to branch. It vanished through a floor of thick leafage, and struck the ground with a dull crash. It must have fallen under the very jaws of an unseen waiting monster; for there arose at once a strange, hooting roar, followed by the sound of rending flesh and cracking bone. Loob grinned over his feat, and Grom, glancing at A-ya, muttered quietly: "It is better to be up here than down there." As he spoke, and they all peered downwards, a dreadful head, with the limp body of ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... for her spouse, the sun; Garths in their glad array Of white and ruddy branch, auroral, gay, With azure chill the maiden flow'r between; Meadows of fervid green, With sometime sudden prospect of untold Cowslips, like chance-found gold; And broadcast buttercups at joyful gaze, Rending the air with praise, Like the six-hundred-thousand-voiced shout Of Jacob camp'd in Midian put to rout; Then through the Park, Where Spring to livelier gloom Quicken'd the cedars dark, And, 'gainst ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... thunder seems to rend the very mountains, the rain pours down in white sheets, the lightning runs along the ground and looks as if it would set the world on fire; the wind goes tearing through the trees, bending the palms like reeds, rending the broad banana-leaves to ribbons; branches crack and fall down, and the whole air is filled with whirling ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... that heart-rending longing for the sight and touch of the loved one again that is so unendurable in the first hours of separation, I thought I would do that, and I left the half-filled trunk and went downstairs ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... bed—clasping and tearing her long dishevelled hair with desperate fingers. Blood was tricking down her fair brow, and she was now laughing a hard, harsh, mirthless laugh, now bursting into violent wringing sobs, now rending her bodice and striking at her bare bosom, as the wind roared in through the open window, and the rain poured in torrents and soaked ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... spite of their healthy forest lives they are far less sound than an average white community. They have their own troubles, with the white man's maladies thrown in. I saw numberless other cases of dreadful, hopeless, devastating diseases, mostly of the white man's importation. It is heart-rending to see so much human misery and be able to do nothing at all for it, not even bring a gleam of hope. It made me feel like a murderer to tell one after another, who came to me covered with cankerous bone-eating sores, "I can do nothing"; and I was deeply touched by the simple statement ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... made his mark as a novelist. "La Beata," an Italian story, published three years ago, is greatly praised by London critics, one strong writer describing it as a "beatific book." The character of the heroine has been drawn with a pathos rare and heart-rending, nor can the reader fail to be impressed with the nobility of the mind that could conceive of such exceeding purity and self-sacrifice in woman. Mr. Trollope's later novels of "Marietta" and "Giulio Malatesta" have also met with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... enlivened each station along the route by rending sacred songs and solos as The Kano Express ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various
... themselves with great difficulty into their shrunken garments, which looked more like tights than trousers, every button and seam obviously strained to the bursting point, and set to work playing tennis with their accustomed vigour. Soon there was a sound of rending cloth, and the senior midshipman, a portly youth of Teutonic amplitude of outline, lay down flat on his back on the lawn. A minute later there was a similar sound, and another boy lay down on his back and remained there, and a third lad ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... or maiden truly falls in love; up to this time, regard for the opposite sex has been merely a light fancy, barely skin deep; but now it takes hold of the heart strings and plays upon them with an agony that is truly heart rending. Who is there with red blood in his veins that does not look back upon his first heart conflict with almost pathetic reverence? Parents should be more concerned than they usually are over the conquest of the heart of youth. Such affairs may carry with them consequences which are more serious ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... about five minutes of this futile work he appeared again at the window. The water was nearly on a level with the opening now, and rising moment by moment, while there were ominous ripping and rending sounds in Katherine's ice island, which warned her that the rescue must take place in the next few minutes if it was to ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... means of usefulness and enjoyment, have been questioned, attacked, and in various places, and with respect to millions of the human race, finally overthrown. A licentiousness of opinion and conduct, daring, outrageous, and rending asunder every bond formed by God or man, has taken place of former good sense and sound morals, and has long threatened the destruction of human good. Industry, cunning, and fraud have toiled with unrivaled ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... almost drank my breath away; And, to her passion bending, She clasped me close, with her lion claws My hapless body rending. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... exhausted the news, they may glance idly over the front and back of the paper before laying it aside. So Desmond, before he even troubled to open his paper, let his gaze wander down the second column of the front page whence issue daily those anguishing appeals, mysterious messages, heart-rending entreaties and barefaced begging advertisements which give this column its ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... and I loving and pitying him, we separated; I had not time to preach my full doctrine, but gave him instead a deep and misty glass of cool beer, and pledged him brotherhood, freedom, and an equal law. Then I went on my way, praying God that all these rending quarrels might be appeased. For they would certainly be appeased if we once again had a united doctrine in Europe, since economics are but an expression of the mind and do not (as the poor blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the mind. ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the tale of the Kings, and of them * Each was rending lion, a furious foe: And thou stolest the wits of me, all of them * And shotst me with shaft of thy magic bow: Thou hast boasted of slaves and of steeds and wealth; * And of beauteous lasses ne'er man did know; How presents in mighty store didst spurn, * And disdainedst lovers both high and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the head, and he was carried to the nearest house, immediately opposite. Mrs. Lincoln, in a frantic condition, was assisted in crossing the street with the President, at the same time uttering heart-rending shrieks. Surgeons were soon in attendance, but it was evident that ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... night The King Suddhodana dreamed troublous dreams. The first fear of his vision was a flag Broad, glorious, glistening with a golden sun, The mark of Indra; but a strong wind blew, Rending its folds divine, and dashing it Into the dust; whereat a concourse came Of shadowy Ones, who took the spoiled silk up And bore it eastward from the city gates. The second fear was ten huge elephants, With silver tusks and feet that shook the earth, ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... because silently borne, with clear sight and calm courage, he looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes, whose lips may tell—what brilliant, broken plans, what baffled, high ambitions, what sundering of strong, warm, manhood's friendships, what bitter rending of sweet household ties! Behind him a proud, expectant nation, a great host of sustaining friends, a cherished and happy mother, wearing the full rich honors of her early toil and tears; the wife of his youth, whose whole life lay in his; the little boys not ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... came the tidings that the Persians had cut their way through to the gates, and at that they fled from the breastworks. [67] The women, seeing the rout in the camp, fell to wailing and lamentations, running hither and thither in utter dismay, young maidens, and mothers with children in their arms, rending their garments and tearing their cheeks and crying on all they met, "Leave us not, save us, save your children and yourselves!" [68] Then the princes gathered the trustiest men and stood at the gates, fighting on the breastworks themselves, and urging their ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... parted amidships, the floor of the saloon heaved up in the center with a mighty crash of rending woodwork and iron. Men and women, too stupefied to sob out a prayer, were pitched headlong into chaos. Iris, torn from the terrified grasp of her maid, fell through a corridor, and would have gone down with the ship had not a sailor, clinging to a companion ladder, caught her as she whirled along ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... you stay and break my mother's heart? You know she would mourn for you with the rending of garments and the seven days' sitting on the floor. Go! You have cast off the God of ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... ditch on each side, the pony bolted, upon which what does John do but jump out! He says he was thrown out, but it cannot be. The reins immediately became entangled in the wheels, and away went the pony down the hill madly, with Kate inside rending the Isle of Thanet with her screams. The accident might have been a fearful one, if the pony had not, thank Heaven, on getting to the bottom, pitched over the side; breaking the shaft and cutting her hind legs, but in the most ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... maiden clasped her hands over her face, cried out and shuddered. The lightning had shivered a tree upon which her gaze was fixed, rending it as she could have rent ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... brightness of evolution depended, as he saw it, upon woman being herself, retaining first of all those stores of beauty and spirit which are designed to be her gifts to manhood and the race. In the eyes of the future, he believed, these women would stand as the inspired pioneers of a rending transition period. ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... bare, shelving ledge that overhung the brook. Probably they could not see where they were going, or else those behind shoved the foremost off the brink; at any rate, six of the horses went headlong down into the rocky bed of the torrent, whence instantly arose heart-rending squeals ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... another yellow pool of the moon, lay the partly devoured carcass of a fawn. A wolf had killed it, and had fed, and now two giant owls were rending and tearing in the flesh and bowels of what the wolf had left. They were Gargantuans of their kind, one a male, the other a female. Their talons warm in blood, their beaks red, their slow brains drunk with a ravenous greed, they rose on their great wings in sullen rage when ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... above human nature, to suppose that he was to watch over Morton's safety, and rescue him from all the dangers to which his state of imprisonment, and the suspicions which he had incurred, must repeatedly expose him? She therefore resigned herself to the most heart-rending apprehensions, without admitting, and indeed almost without listening to, the multifarious grounds of consolation which Jenny Dennison brought forward, one after another, like a skilful general who charges with the several divisions of ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Margaret, dancing in an ecstasy of joy, while hand over hand down posts, catching at braces, slipping, sliding, springing, the men of both sides kept dropping from incredible distances to the ground. Suddenly through all the tumultuous shouts of victory a heart-rending scream rang out, followed by a shuddering groan and dead silence. One-half of Rory's purlin plate slipped from its splicing, the pin having been neglected in the furious haste, and swinging free, fell crashing through the timbers upon the ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... Great drops of rain were beginning to fall, and lightning flashes rending the darkness disclosed the long, silent line of the fortifications, with telegraph poles at intervals, or the frowning door of a casemate. Now and then the footsteps of a patrol making the rounds, ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... doubly grieved for leaving poor Rose all alone, especially as this was her day for being white and beautiful. She begged her not to leave the house, but to live on the milk of her sheep, and to bake cakes of some meal which was in the bin. Their adieus were heart-rending; although the soldiers declared that in three days the forester should be at liberty to return, provided the innocence of his family was established. Rose believed them, and endeavoured to take courage. But more than a month passed, and ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... below was suddenly blotted out in a skyward belching of gray flame; a huge volcano-burst of momentarily illuminated dust. Instinctively they braced themselves for the concussion that followed,—a bellowing thunderclap and a rending of earth and air that shook the surrounding hills and drowned the shriek ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... like to see him ducked in this broth before we depart from the lake." And he to me, "Ere the shore allows thee to see it thou shalt be satisfied; it will be fitting that thou enjoy such a desire." After this a little I saw such rending of him by the muddy folk that I still praise God therefor, and thank Him for it. All cried, "At Filippo Argenti!" and the raging florentine spirit turned upon himself with his teeth. Here we left him; so that I tell no more ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... wring his very soul. What did he cast off in that moment? What did he grapple with? Shefford had no means to tell, except by the instinct which baffled him. But whether the Mormon's trial was one of spiritual rending or the natural physical fear of a perilous, virtually impossible venture, the fact was he was magnificent in his acceptance of it. He turned to Shefford, ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... or as a bone, polished in wet and sun, worried of wild beaks, and of the whelps' teeth— worried of flesh, left to bleach under the sun, white as ash bled of heat, white as hail blazing in sheet-lightning, white as forked lightning rending the sleet?) ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... Paracelsus. The usual accusation against Browning is that he was consumed with logic; that he thought all subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectual disquisition; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of plucking knots to pieces and rending fallacies in two; and that to this method he sacrificed deliberately, and with complete self-complacency, the element of poetry and sentiment. To people who imagine Browning to have been this frigid believer in the intellect there is only one answer necessary or sufficient. It is the ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... the fire at my feet was overthrown. The very vault of heaven swung to and fro, ebbing and heaving with the general convulsion. The doleful psalmody in the neighboring ground broke abruptly. The chorus of many feminine voices sent forth but one rending shriek. The clamor of thousands of the town-folk from their encampment gave its wakeful response. Then the dead silence of consternation ensued. I picked up every stick and brand that had been scattered about, steadied myself in my chair, and hung down my head. "These ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... quantity, or amount that is the result of the division of something greater, is the general word, including all the others of this group. A fragment is the result of breaking, rending, or disruption of some kind, while a piece may be smoothly or evenly separated and have a certain completeness in itself. A piece is often taken for a sample; a fragment scarcely would be. Division and fraction are always regarded as in connection with the total; ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... cautiously, touching here and there the fringe of massacre and fire, often scenting smoke, sometimes hearing a distant shot. Once we encountered an Oneida runner, painted blue and white, and naked save for the loin-cloth, who told us of the civil war that was already rending the Long House; and I then understood more fully what Magdalen Brant had done for our cause, and how far-reaching had been the effects of her appearance ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... rending the poor child's mind between two affections, especially as there will be a very short time to decide in, for I shall certainly not send her if Victoria's is ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... me is not worthy of me.'' "Go, preach,'' He commanded. "Woe is me if I preach not,'' cried Paul. Hostile rulers and priests and mobs and the bitter Cross did not swerve Him a hairbreadth from His purpose; nor did the rending of the early disciples in the arenas of Nero, the burning of a Huss and a Savonarola, the pyres of Smithfield, the dungeons of the Tolbooth and the thumb-screws of the Inquisition quench ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... in early life to have had her cousin Bridget once pointed out to her, climbing a style. But the name of kindred, and of cousinship, was enough. Those slender ties, that prove slight as gossamer in the rending atmosphere of a metropolis, bind faster, as we found it, in hearty, homely, loving Hertfordshire. In five minutes we were as thoroughly acquainted as if we had been born and bred up together; were familiar, even to the calling each ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... fast-collecting waters beneath. The stifled sounds of rushing streams were heard issuing from the hidden beds of every natural rill; while the larger brooks were beginning to burst through their wintry coverings, and throw up and push on before them the rending ice and snow that obstructed their courses to the rivers below, to which they were hurrying with increasing speed, and with seemingly growing impatience at every obstacle they met in their way. The road had also become so soft, that the horses sunk nearly to the flank ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... his excitement, Buos forgot himself and entwined with the flowing form of the she-creature, and the result was a rending of the air that cracked like heat lightning over the field. "No," he repeated again. "They must not be too late. They must learn. They must build from the very ground, and then they must fly. And then their ...
— Reluctant Genius • Henry Slesar
... prevent her spleen from being perceived. At last she called all the ladies, and making them scat themselves around her, began to talk of love; and seeing that the Lady du Vergier said nothing, she asked her, with a heart which jealousy was rending— ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. V. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... of hope and fear, as she sits expecting him, is extremely beautiful; and some of the expressions, in the original singular yet musical Gascon, must lose greatly by translation, either in French or English. Her lamentations on her blindness remind one of Milton's heart-rending ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... since an hour ago, here made a playful run at the speaker's heels under the belief that the football had recommenced; and the heart-rending yelps which Railsford heard in the room below a few moments later were occasioned by an endeavour to detach the playful pet's teeth from the ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... or of a physical nature—can be brought about only through the abolition of wage work and the right of private ownership of land and the sources of maintenance and nourishment of mankind. There are heart-rending cries over the blasphemous opinion that property is not as holy a thing as its possessors would like to make it. They declare that possessions must not be less protected than human life, for they are necessary foundations of society. The case is represented as though ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... the misty plaint of the Unconceived! O crystal incuriousness of the monad! The faint swarming toward the light and the rending of the sphere of hope, frustrate, inutile. I am the seed called Life; I am he, I am she. We walk, swim, totter, and blend. Through the ages I lay in the vast basin of Time; I am called by Fate into the Now. On pulsing ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... towards a denser part of the tree, and a second and third discharge failed to bring him down. The poor maimed creature then trailed his limbs to one of the topmost branches, where we descried him soon after, seated and picking the entrails from a wound in his abdomen— a most heart-rending sight. The height from the ground to the bough on which he was perched could not have been less than 150 feet, and we could get a glimpse of him only by standing directly underneath, and straining our eyes ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... right angles to the direction of proposed flight. The car was set in motion and the propellers revolved rapidly, the engine working perfectly, but there was something wrong with the launching. The rear guy-post seemed to drag, bringing the rudder down on the launching ways, and a crashing, rending sound, followed by the collapse of the rear wings, showed that the machine had been wrecked in the launching, just how, it was impossible for me to see. The fact remains that the rear wings and rudder were wrecked before the machine was free ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... he could not tell—that he was wounded in the shoulder—that a carriage would be sent for and the wounded man taken to his house. Here a heart-rending groan came from Smith, and Culkins, with a Donnybrook shriek, burst from his seconds, knocked over the doctor's lantern, and fled towards the town like greased lightning amidst a chorus of ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne
... also, what the relation is which the phenomena at the death of Christ, the darkening of the sun, the quaking of the earth, the rending of the rocks (compare Matt. xxvii. 45, 51; Luke xxiii. 44), occupy to the passage before us. They were like the [Hebrew: mvptiM] here, actual declarations of the divine wrath, and forerunners of the approaching judgment; and they were recognised as such by the guilty, to whom this symbolical ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... Turkish authority, they anticipated no special danger. "At evening, as we were entering the city," writes Mr. Montgomery, "to visit the governor of the place, according to custom, a furious mob of men and boys dragged us from our horses, and at once began beating and stoning us with frantic rage, rending the air with savage yells. Our Protestant guide was driven out of sight amid volleys of stones, the mob crying, 'Kill him! kill the wretch!' The deacon was allowed to secrete himself; but for Avedis and myself there was no escape ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... had been discharged for neglect, Mr. Harrington offered a reward of five thousand dollars, somebody had seen the child in Detroit, another had seen him in Canada, another had seen him at a movie show, another had heard heart-rending cries in some marsh or other, and so ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... rose from the house a rending, crashing sound of woodwork, broken or thrown about, mixed with a quick scream so appalling that Adam, stout of heart as he undoubtedly was, felt his blood turn into ice. Instinctively, despite the danger and their consciousness of it, husband ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... image of Gertrude rose before her, pale and suffering, and she heard her heart-rending words, "If I could only see him once more!" Veronica could not sleep, nor could she come to ...
— Veronica And Other Friends - Two Stories For Children • Johanna (Heusser) Spyri
... counted the number of windows that were illuminated with a pale quiet glimmer, like that of night-lights at the bedside of some agonizing sufferers. She crossed the railway bridge as the trains rushed by with a noisy rumble, rending the air in twain with their shrill whistling! Ah! how sad everything seemed at night-time! Then she turned on her heels again and filled her eyes with the sight of the same houses, doing this ten and twenty times without pausing, without resting for a ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... a desperate fugitive from below, she leaped, her propeller suddenly screaming, and arched high through the air before she dove with a rending, splintering crash onto the upper ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... Sebalds Church, which had been cast by old Master Grunewald, Master Pernhart's closest friend. Their brazen voices stirred my soul and heart, and presently the cannon in the citadel and on the wails rattled out a thundering welcome to the Emperor, rending the summer air. My heart beat higher and faster. But suddenly I meseemed that all the bravery of the town and the holiday weed of the folks, the chiming of bells and the roaring of cannon were not meant to do honor to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... least a cart-track, to follow, found himself, by the worst of luck, assigned to a portion of the thick belt of wood which stretched between the two roads. Nature had not intended him for a pioneer: he was essentially a city man. However, he toiled on, rending the undergrowth, putting up game, falling over tree-roots, and generally acting as advertising agent for the ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... must find out a mighty person who observing the ranks of the celestial army shattered by the Danavas will be able to reorganize it with vigour.' He then repaired to the Manasa mountains and was there deeply absorbed in thought of nature, when he heard the heart-rending cries of a woman to the effect, 'May some one come quick and rescue me, and either indicate a husband for me, or be my husband himself.' Purandara said to her, 'Do not be afraid, lady!' And having said these words, he saw Kesin (an Asura) adorned with a crown and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli |
