"Recoil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thing so soiled by the tears of the overhanging willows, so grown upon with parasites, so decayed, so battered, so neglected, such a haunt of rats, so advertised a storehouse of rheumatic agonies, that the heart of an intending occupant might well recoil. A plank, by way of flying drawbridge, joined it to the shore. And it was a dreary moment for Jimson when he pulled this after him and found himself alone on this unwholesome fortress. He could hear the rats scuttle and flop in the abhorred interior; the key cried among ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... it had indeed been. His memory glanced lightly over the long monotonous years with a sort of shuddering recoil. He thought of his father's frequent absences, and of his return from one of them in the middle of a winter's night, propped up in an invalid carriage, with a surgeon in attendance, and blood-stained bandages around his leg. And he thought of a night when he had ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... you here," said Charles Gould, in the uproar. The flames leaped up sky-high, and in the recoil from the scorching heat across the road the stream of fugitives pressed against the carriage. A middle-aged lady dressed in black silk, but with a coarse manta over her head and a rough branch for a stick in her hand, staggered against the front wheel. Two young girls, frightened and silent, were ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... mind was synonymous with "things as they ought not to be." He frankly asserts: "Caleb Williams was the offspring of that temper of mind in which the composition of my Political Justice left me"[75]—a guileless confession that may well have deterred many readers who recoil shuddering from political treatises decked out in the guise of fiction. But alarm is needless; for, although Caleb Williams attempts to reveal the oppressions that a poor man may endure under existing conditions, and the perversion of ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... discovering the falsehood and the fraud of it. Nor could I help agreeing with him, when he told me all of it, as with tears in his eyes he did, and ready to be my slave henceforth; I could not forbear from owning that it was a low and heartless trick, unworthy of men who had families; and the recoil whereof was well deserved, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... temptations against which we are told we must fight. Spirit flies forward—Body pulls back. But Spirit is one day bound to win! We have attained in this generation a certain knowledge of Soul-forces—and we are on a verge, where, if we hesitate, we are lost, and must recoil upon our own Ego as the centre of all desire. But if we go on boldly and leave our own Ego behind, we shall see the gates of Heaven opening indeed, and all the Mysteries unveiled! How often we pause on the verge of better things, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... stride, and going in the most elastic way in spite of the long run, but the eland was labouring heavily, as Dyke drew trigger, felt the sharp, jerking recoil shoot right up his arm to the shoulder; and then to his astonishment, as he dashed on out of the smoke, he was alone, and the eland lying fifty yards behind, where it had come down with a ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... chance for which Jetson had been watching. His kick didn't land; he hadn't intended that it should, but Dave's surprised recoil gave the other the chance that he really wanted. Both of Jetson's fists struck on Dave's nose, drawing ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock
... European fiat regarding an independent Albania was the recoil of Servia against Bulgaria. Confronted by the force majeure of the Great Powers which estopped her advance to the Adriatic, Servia turned her anxious regard toward the Gulf of Saloniki and the Aegean Sea. Already her victorious ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... to him to see how I was staggered by this. I had never thought that what I had done to-day might recoil on the head of my own brother. However, I affected not to be ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... not subdue a violent passion, increased her misery. One moment she was a heroine, half determined to bear whatever fate should inflict; the next, her mind would recoil—and tenderness possessed her whole soul. Some instances of Henry's affection, his worth and genius, were remembered: and the earth was only a vale of tears, because he was not to sojourn ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... would be. I doffed my shawl, tucked up my flounces, turned my straw bonnet into a basket, and began gathering and scrambling—for, manage it how you may, nutting is scrambling work,—those boughs, however tightly you may grasp them by the young fragrant twigs and the bright green leaves, will recoil and burst away; but there is a pleasure even in that: so on we go, scrambling and gathering with all our might and all our glee. Oh, what an enjoyment! All my life long I have had a passion for that sort of seeking which implies finding (the secret, I ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... appear so," she said, with a flash of her occasional repugnance to the man; and then after a pause, "Herr von Gondremark," she added, "I recoil from this extremity." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... malice or of sorcery, or that power Which erring men call Chance, this I hold firm: Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt, Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled; 590 Yea, even that which Mischief meant most harm Shall in the happy trial prove most glory. But evil on itself shall back recoil, And mix no more with goodness, when at last, Gathered like scum, and settled to itself, It shall be in eternal restless change Self-fed and self-consumed. If this fail, The pillared firmament is rottenness, And earth's base built on stubble. But come, let's on! Against the opposing will and arm ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... their savage associates. And now we find them, in further contempt of the modes of honorable warfare, supplying the place of a conquering force by attempts to disorganize our political society, to dismember our confederated Republic. Happily, like others, these will recoil on the authors; but they mark the degenerate counsels from which they emanate, and if they did not belong to a sense of unexampled inconsistencies might excite the greater wonder as proceeding from a Government which founded the very war in which it has been so long engaged on a charge ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... shoulder; and as he insisted upon putting immense loads in his gun, the results were sometimes disastrous to him and ridiculous to us. He often sprang back after a shot, as if he had been kicked by a horse, or wrung his hands, which had borne the recoil. His misses and misfortunes, however, never made him angry or dejected. After each failure, out came the red bandanna to wipe his brow, and as a shout of laughter greeted the performance, he would say calmly, with only a gleam of a smile, "So, ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... directed by mysterious influences to take revenge. We have before us a great nobleman, who by atrocious murders has gained possession of the throne, and is slain in fighting for it: the poet brings us into immediate proximity with the crime, its execution, and its recoil: it seems like an inspiration of hell and of its deceitful prophecies: we wander on the confines of the visible world and of that other world which lies on the other side, but extends over into this, where it forms the ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... what puzzled the professor—there was a very evident lack of something in the face, in no way interfering with its intellectual aspect, but giving it, at times, an unnatural and even uncanny look. In meeting the young man's eyes, the old gentleman was ever and anon conscious of a disposition to recoil and shudder, and, at the same time, felt impelled, by what resembled a magnetic attraction, to gaze the harder. Did the very fact that some universal human characteristic was omitted from this person's nature endow him with an ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... attest, was an invincible determination of purpose, which set at naught all risks and all sufferings. He had cast himself with all his resources into this enterprise, and, while his faculties remained, he was not a man to recoil from it. On the other hand, the masculine fibre of which he was made did not always withhold him from the practice of the arts of address, and the use of what Dollier de Casson styles belles paroles. He respected the priesthood,—with the exception, it ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... Larry's appearance caused Sullivan to recoil a step. He fairly glared at the young reporter and then looked at Grace, who was trembling from the words and ...
— Larry Dexter's Great Search - or, The Hunt for the Missing Millionaire • Howard R. Garis
... Then feels immediately some hollow thought Hang like an interdict upon her hopes. 260 This is my lot; for either still I find Some imperfection in the chosen theme, Or see of absolute accomplishment Much wanting, so much wanting, in myself, That I recoil and droop, and seek repose 265 In listlessness from vain perplexity, Unprofitably travelling toward the grave, Like a false steward who hath much received And renders nothing back. Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, [V] loved 270 To blend his murmurs with ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... for its father. Its father, was he not a criminal? Yes! but was it for her to ruin him, to invoke the law, to send him to death, after having taken him to her heart, to deliver him to infamy which would recoil on her own head and her child's and on the infant which was yet unborn? If he had sinned before God, was it not for God to punish him? If against herself, ought she not rather to overwhelm him with contempt? But to invoke the help, of strangers to expiate this offence; to lay ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARTIN GUERRE • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... patience, O woman, for the issue of patience is praised. This lion it is which transgresseth against us, and the transgressor, perforce must Almighty Allah destroy him. Indeed, 'tis our long-suffering that shall slay him,[FN166] and he that doth evil needs must it recoil upon him." A few days after, the king went forth one morning to hunt and falling in with the lion, he and his host, gave chase to him and ceased not pursuit till they slew him. This news reached Abu Sabir who improved the occasion to his wife, "Said I not ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... civilized, the most free, the most prosperous? Pardon me; no! They are the half-starved, half-clothed, half-human sons of the forest and the waste; or, when gathered in states, they are slaves without enjoyment or sense beyond the hour; and the reason that they do not recoil from the pangs of death is because they have never known the real pleasures or the true objects ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... There was no proof of Lord Fleetwood's having schemed to thwart his wager, so he put that accusation by: thinking for an instant, that if the man desired to have his wife with him, and she left the country with her brother, his own act would recoil; or if she stayed to hear of a villany, Carinthia's show of scorn could lash. Henrietta praised my lord's kindness. He had been one of the adorers—as what man would not be!—and upon her at least (he could hardly love her husband) he had not wreaked his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... water. What is meant, in the case of chemical affinity, is, that the pull of that affinity, acting through a certain space, imparts a motion of translation of the one atom towards the other. This motion is not heat, nor is the force that produces it heat. But when the atoms strike and recoil, the motion of translation is converted into a motion of vibration, which is heat. The vibration, however, so far from causing the extinction of the original attraction, is in part carried on by that attraction. The atoms recoil, in virtue ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... and training should be its helpers hinder it instead. Why do they do this? Because their fastidious, aesthetic natures are outraged by a crudeness which they themselves could easily refine away if they chose; because also they recoil at a lack of conformity to existing conventions—conventions so hampering to the inner spirit of the Newness, that in order to incarnate at all it must of necessity ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... ran between stone dykes, bordering pasture and arable enclosures. The pace, close upon fifty miles an hour, took them up to and past the suspected group so swiftly that it was impossible to note the faces of the men who formed it while their movements of recoil and surprise might have been due to the unusual ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... speaking he handled the gun, that was loaded, observing which I moved behind him. Off it went in due course, its recoil knocking him backwards—for that gun was a devil to kick—and its bullet cutting the top off the ear of one of his wives. The lady fled screaming, leaving a little bit of her ear ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... discouraged her; but she could not reconcile her sense of the continuity of all high effort to his unperturbed air of finishing each picture as though he had despatched a masterpiece to posterity. In the first recoil from her disillusionment she even allowed herself to perceive that, if he worked slowly, it was not because he mistrusted his powers of expression, but because he had really so ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... breath, Nelson raised the .45, sighted, and, remembering his former experience, fired at the enormous right eye. As in a dream, he felt the recoil. The monster neither slowed nor swerved in the least, though its great, saucer-like eye disintegrated horribly. Immediately Nelson swiftly sighted at the other eye and fired, just as the allosaurus' shadow ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... strong enough to wrestle with facts such as these? which one of us can look them long in the face and live? In the desperate recoil, some of us find ourselves recklessly striving to forget and ignore them, and some find a surer refuge in facts that are stronger still than they; but to one and all, in kindly compassion to human weakness, each new emotion, each passing interest and trivial incident, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... good actress ought to represent it, by an expression and recoil of apprehension that she had ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... says may be true," she replied, "but only to a certain point. If the Emperor, instead of his guard and his good soldiers, had only conscripts who would recoil under fire, he could not win great battles like that of Austerlitz. Nevertheless, he is the ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... is still easy is to get the diamonds in scoundrel-fashion—that is, by theft; and—stop! in 1826, when I was about eight years old, a terrible drama happened at Tijuco, which showed that criminal would recoil from nothing if they could gain a fortune by one bold stroke. But ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... would those blessed ages Have come round, had I recoil'd before The curse of this? Behold my Spain! Here blooms The subject's good, in never-clouded peace: Such peace will I bestow ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... is ever true of sins against the human brotherhood. The recoil of a blow struck at another's interests has often the retributive wrath of heaven in it, and the selfish soul that would destroy a fellow-creature for its own pleasure is ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... insist on loaded connotations. It's a necessary period of rest. Recoil time for a whole society—well, it all works out neatly in Tighe's formulation. The present state of affairs should continue for about seventy-five years, we feel at the Institute. In that time, reason can—we hope—be so firmly implanted in the basic structure of society that when the next great ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... to appreciate some of the points of my performance so far as it has gone? The pretext on which I bared my foot for its delicate job under your very eyes, eh? Not so vain as it looked, in either sense, I fancy! Should you have said that your hand would recoil from a revolver the moment it went off? You see, I staked my life on it, and I've won. And what about that fall? It was the lottery! I was prepared to have my head cracked like an egg, and it's still pretty sore. The broken wrist ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... their shortcomings, the previous evening, she had centralized it in Lauzanne, picturing him as symbolical of good acts and evil repute. Patently it was difficult to become interested in such a young woman; actually she monopolized their thoughts. Inconsistently the fair offender felt no recoil of this somewhat distressing situation; her mind busied itself chiefly over the reclamation ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... done—far from it. Unfortunately, it was not terminated, but interrupted. What interrupted it I need hardly tell you, as you will guess that it was the tide. Yes, it was the tide, which, as soon as it had fairly begun to cover the stones, seemed to rush over them all at once. It did not recoil, as I have often seen it do upon the beach. There it flows in gradually, wave after wave; but upon the reef—the surface of which was nearly of equal height—the water, at the first rush, swept all over the rocks, and was soon of ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... it was all right. There was a terrific, roaring explosion, and she staggered backwards under the savage kick of the recoil. Recovering herself instantly, and proud of the great noise she had made, she peered through the smoke, expecting to see the bear topple over upon his nose, extinguished. Instead of that, however, she observed a convulsive flopping of wings in the birch-tree above the ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... you put ten cartridges in and pull the trigger and shoot ten times with your eyes shut, if you want to, and it hits where you point it. Every time an employer pulls the trigger on a successful business boy, and a good idea of business is fired, the recoil puts a new idea into the chamber, and you pull again, and so on until the magazine of the brainy boy is emptied, when you load him up again, and he is ready for business, and the employer wouldn't be without him, and would not go back to the old-fashioned one-idea boy, ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... that afterwards almost every other musician strikes us as being too robust. If people would believe me, they would not form the highest idea of Wagner from that which pleases them in him to-day. All that was only devised for convincing the masses, and people like ourselves recoil from it just as one would recoil from too garish a fresco. What concern have we with the irritating brutality of the overture to the "Tannhauser"? Or with the Walkyrie Circus? Whatever has become popular in Wagner's art, including that which has become ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... Nobody could speak. The air was so packed full of sound that it seemed as if it could not possibly hold one sound more. It was like the booming of a thousand great guns at the same time; the shock, the recoil, and the rush of air across the entrance to the tank was as if artillery practice on an immense scale were going on. There was a screaming sound as if shells were hurtling through space. Now the ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... Misnar, "is too much for even the Sultan of the East to hear. But, may the all-righteous Allah approve of my thoughts and actions; so shall the infernal powers destroy the wretches that employ them, and the dark poisoned arrow recoil upon him that blew it forth. But, O sages, though your numbers are reduced, your integrity is more tried and approved; therefore let your Sultan partake of the sweetness of your counsels, and learn from aged experience the wisdom of the sons of earth. Say, then, what doth the peace ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... this might be reversed. A cabin might be defended with such maddened courage by some stout rifleman, fighting for his cowering wife and children, that a score of savages would recoil baffled, leaving many of their number dead. A boat's crew of resolute men might beat back, with heavy loss, an over-eager onslaught of Indians in canoes, or push their slow, unwieldy craft from shore under a rain of rifle-balls, while the wounded oarsmen strained ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... a recoil of the ship, which slowly and gently, but surely and almost comically, to Cadogan's way of thinking, urged the stout waist of Meade against the edge ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... breathed through her beaded veil her dislike of pioneer reformers is as old as human nature. But it was not the sigh of wisdom, but of weariness, in my lady. There is a certain insight even in gentle youth which does not recoil from the pioneer, and foresees the soft sward springing under the harrow as it tears the heavy clods. Those in whom youth abides never outgrow that precious insight and foresight. One such, not less fair than my Lady Cavaliere, ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... I recoil from no hypothesis: let us see, let us investigate. It is already a great point that the opponents confess that, during the first period of civilization, things could not have gone otherwise. It remains to ascertain whether the institutions of this period are really, as has ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... total merit has never yet been recognised as it assuredly would have been had he chosen a happier mode of publication. I do not think a greater disservice could be done to a man of science, than to overstate his claims: such overstatement is sure to recoil to the disadvantage of him in whose interest it is made. But when Mayer's opportunities, achievements, and fate are taken into account, I do not think that I shall be deeply blamed for attempting to place him in that ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... was placed upon city walls, was a great cross-bow for hurling arrows upon an enemy. In it was combined the bow and arrow, and the sling. The mammoth arrow was put in the groove, the twisted ropes were connected with levers, and the powerful recoil would send the strong and sharp arrow a ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley
... panel. He shot out of the chair and across the control room just as Loring fired his ray gun. There was a loud hiss as the gun was fired, and then the thud of a body against the wall, as Loring was suddenly shoved by the recoil of the charge. ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... Sprang in a thousand shivers on the helm, And in the hand the hilt remain'd alone. Then Rustum raised his head; his dreadful eyes Glared, and he shook on high his menacing spear, And shouted: Rustum!—Sohrab heard that shout, And shrank amazed; back he recoil'd one step, And scann'd with blinking eyes the advancing form; And then he stood bewilder'd; and he dropp'd His covering shield, and the spear pierced his side. He reel'd, and staggering back, sank to the ground; And then the gloom dispersed, and the wind fell, And the bright sun broke ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... the other day in which a very powerful modern writer describes a certain woman as "having God on her visiting list." We may recoil from the phrase, but it very vitally describes a very awful commonplace. Countless thousands have God on their visiting lists. They pay Him courtesy-calls, and between the calls He is forgotten. Perhaps the call is paid once a week in the ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... apparent, was yet an effect too subtle to be described. He rose on my entrance, and, other visitors being present, stood with one hand on the back of his chair, awaiting my greeting. So dignified was his manner, so reserved his expression, that I experienced an involuntary recoil, until I turned to him and saw his eyes suddenly brighten as I offered my hand; a barrier seemed to melt between us, and I felt that ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... slaughter from which every properly-balanced Christian mind is bound to recoil with horror. One such tale has recently been given to us in the pages of the Avicultural Magazine, of London, for January, 1912, by Mr. Hubert D. Astley, F.Z.S., whose word no man will dispute. In condensing it, let us ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... unutterably forlorn and wretched. If only she could do something! She told herself, with a sensation of recoil and revolt, that she could never face another day of suspense and waiting spent as had been the whole of ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... with Augustine had been the clear impossibility that had flashed for her in her need; she had seized upon it and it had armed her in her reiterated refusal. But how tell Augustine that there had been more than the clear impossibility; how tell him that deeper than renouncement was recoil? To tell that would be a disloyalty to her husband; it would be almost to accuse him; it would be to show Augustine that something in her life was spoiled and that her husband had spoiled it. So perplexed, so jaded, ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... or public sentiment, or both combined—destroy him,' said Mr Tappertit. 'Miggs says so too. Miggs and me both say so. We can't bear the plotting and undermining that takes place. Our souls recoil from it. Barnaby Rudge and Mrs Rudge are in it likewise; but the villain, Joseph Willet, is the ringleader. Their plottings and schemes are known to me and Miggs. If you want information of 'em, apply to ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... her crushed lover Emilie must recoil in terror, and not seem to add the weight of her body to that ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... are too imprudent, Marsa. I am not a man to make recoil by speaking of danger. Through the gate, or over the wall if the gate is barricaded, I shall come to you again, and you will have to listen ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... being relaxed by eternal repetition, and it was now evident that I must trust to my own ability to pull the matter quickly through as I thought best. But it was not the fatigue due to this system that finally made Niemann, the main prop in my work, recoil from the task which at the start he had undertaken with an energy full of promise. He had been informed that there was a conspiracy to ruin my work. From this time forward he was a victim to a despondency ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... familiar with the dull barrenness of Casaubon than with the pregnant vivacity of Mrs. Poyser. In the study of the inward workings of the human mind, George Eliot is unsurpassed by any novelist. Thackeray alone can dispute her pre-eminence in this respect. However much the reader may recoil from the horror of Little Hetty's crime, he cannot deny that it follows as a natural consequence. Although Dorothea's marriages are extremely disappointing, the train of thought which led her to enter into them is ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... bombing Boche dugouts now!" said he; and remembering the dugouts I had seen, I could picture the awful fate of those within, the choking fumes, the fire-scorched bodies! Truly the exponents of Frightfulness have felt the recoil of their ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... were written in a desire to work off a fit of depression, and make amends for folly. They are sincere and often very excellent. Great preachers have often been great sinners, and the sermons that have moved men most are often a direct recoil from sin on the part of the preacher. Remorse finds play in preaching repentance. When a man talks much about a virtue, be sure that he is clutching for it. Temperance fanatics are men with a taste for strong drink, trying hard to keep sober. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... in her national life we admire, Much we recoil from, or needs must dispute; Germany needs her baptism of fire, But you will find us the first to salute— (God speed the "Day" the awakening shall ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... fish smell strong; pray go You to some other chimney, and there take Essay of other giblets; make Merry at another's hearth—y'are here Welcome as thunder to our beer; Manners know distance, and a man unrude Would soon recoil and not intrude His stomach to a second meal". No, no! Thy house well fed and taught can show No such crabb'd vizard: thou hast learnt thy train With heart and hand to entertain, And by the armsful, with a breast unhid, As the old race of mankind did, When either's ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... from her easy chair with a quick movement, for she was still a vigorous woman. "Then that's settled! I'll give you a cheque for L100 to-day—and one every six months as long that is, as you're a widow." Then she smiled a little satirically, for Enid had made a quick movement of recoil which Alice Crofton ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... Comana,(29) who possessed ambition enough to hazard his secure and respectable position in the hope of mounting the throne of the Lagids. His attempts to gain the Roman regents to his interests remained without success; but he did not recoil before the idea of being obliged to maintain his new kingdom with arms in hand ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Gentlemen," continued he, addressing the Guardsmen, "I request you will be silent with regard to this adventure. Great personages may have had a hand in what you have seen, and if talked about, the evil would only recoil ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of a few years' shortcomings here on earth, would be the reverse of Godlike. Satan himself would recoil from it. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... which God hath commanded. But so long as we live in this vale of misery, we shall be plagued and vexed with flies, with beetles, and with vermin, etc., that is, with the devil, with the world, and with our own flesh; yet we must press through, and not suffer ourselves to recoil. ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... murderous intent, and Hamilton fell mortally wounded. The shot from Burr's pistol long reverberated. It woke public conscience to the horror and uselessness of dueling, and left Burr an outlaw from respectable society, stunned by the recoil, and under indictment for murder. Only in the South and West did men treat the incident lightly as ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... disport themselves among the straw that formed the bed of the farmer's pet bacon-pigs. In a few minutes out came an old patriarchal-looking rat, who, having taken a careful survey, quietly began to feed. After a long aim, bang went the gun—I fell backwards, knocked down by the recoil of the rusty old piece of artillery. I did not remain prone long, for I was soon roused by the most unearthly squeaks, and a dreadful noise as of an infuriated animal madly rushing round and round the sty. Ye gods! what had I done? ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... and that true partaking of the sacrament of love and faith and sorrow that makes Christ the very life-blood of our being and doing? And has not James Marvyn also his lesson to be taught? We foresee him drawn gradually back by Mary from his recoil against Puritan formalism to a perception of how every creed is pliant and plastic to a beautiful nature, of how much charm there may be in an hereditary faith, even if ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... the comfortable assurance; to her it seemed more than likely Lulu had been too venturesome, and that a swiftly incoming wave had carried her off her feet and swept her in its recoil ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... has been claimed for Codex B and Codex {HEBREW LETTER ALEF}, threatens to grow into a species of tyranny,—from which I venture to predict there will come in the end an unreasonable and unsalutary recoil. It behoves us, therefore, to look closely into this matter, and to require a reason for what is being done. The text of the sacred deposit is far too precious a thing to be sacrificed to an irrational, or at least a superstitious ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... looks around, Exulting in his distance from the ground. The tender speckled moth here dancing seen, The vaulting grasshopper of glossy green, And all prolific Summer's sporting train, Their little lives by various pow'rs sustain. But what can unassisted vision do? What, but recoil where most it would pursue; His patient gaze but finish with a sigh, When musing waking speaks the sky-lark nigh! Just starting from the corn she cheerly sings, And trusts with conscious pride her downy wings; Still louder breathes, and in the face of day Mounts up, and calls on Giles ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... Chariot and charioteer lay overturn'd, And fiery foaming steeds. What stood, recoil'd O'erwearied, through the faint Satanic host, Defensive scarce, or with pale fear surpris'd, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... heavy, and it usually took twenty men to serve it. The mouth was raised from the "kastion" by means of a pulley, and the former taken away; then and not till then could the gunner properly get the range. The carriage vacuum sucking apparatus had to be well fixed in hard ground to prevent recoil. ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... certain discount for friction and the recoil of the gun, the net work realized by the powder-gas as the shot advances AM is represented by the area ACPM, and this is equated to the kinetic energy e of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... our Lord's recoil from the tumult. He had retired before cunning plotters; He withdrew from gaping admirers, who did not know what they were crowding to, nor cared for His best gifts. It was no fastidious shrinking from low natures, nor any selfish wish for repose, that made Him take ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... said, with a flash of her occasional repugnance to the man; and then after a pause, 'Herr von Gondremark,' she added, 'I recoil from this extremity.' ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and moderate, had gone out of town: the former to its country-house, or a foreign hotel; the latter to lodgings at the seaside to bathe out of machines and prey on shrimps. The lull that reigned in and about Sapps Court was no doubt a sort of recoil or backwater from other neighbourhoods, with high salaries or real and personal estate, whose dwellings were closed and not being properly ventilated by their caretakers. It reacted on business there, every bit as much as in Oxford Street; and that was how Tapping's ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... open fly, With impetuous recoil and jarring sound, Th' infernal doors, and on their ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... good one—a new ten-inch rope. It sung like the deep tones of an organ, loud above the rattle of the rigging and the shrouds, but that was its death-song. It gave way with the noise of a cannon, and in the smoke that followed its recoil, they were dragged out by the wild ice and driven hither and hither ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... been entirely harmonious with its origin. What scenes of horror, what refinements of iniquity, do the annals of monarchies present! If we should paint human nature with a baseness of heart, an hypocrisy, from which all must recoil and humanity disavow, it would be the portraiture of kings, their ministers ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... youth. But it was inevitable that a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind which always compensated itself for its artistic radicalism by an involuntary leaning toward external respectability, should recoil from whatever was convulsionary and destructive in politics, and above all in religion. He reads the poems of Wordsworth without understanding, who does not find in them the noblest incentives to faith in man and the grandeur of his destiny, founded always upon that ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... tell you what I think of you, and I am going to do so. Davis has been reared like a gentleman, and it is but natural that he should recoil from contact with ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... as I supposed,' resumed the doctor, with the same measured utterance. 'You recoil from this arrangement. Do you expect me to convince you? You know very well that I have never held the Mormon view of women. Absorbed in the most arduous studies, I have left the slatterns whom they call my wives ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... situation admitted; and when the assailants rushed to the assault, not intimidated by their horrible and unnatural yells, nor yet dispirited by the [146] presence of a force so far superior to their own, they received them with a fire so steady and well directed, as forced them to recoil; leaving one of their slain on the field of attack. This alone, argued a great discomfiture of the Indians; as it is well known to be their invariable custom, to remove, if practicable, those of their warriors who fall in battle. Their subsequent movements, satisfied the inmates ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... from his place of inaction and rushed into the fray like an uncaged lion, and placed himself between A.P. Hill and the river. For a few moments the earth trembled with the tread of struggling thousands, and the dreadful recoil of the heavy batteries that lined the crest of the hill from right to left. The air was filled with the shrieking shells as they sizzled through the air or plowed their way through the ranks of the battling masses. Charges were met ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... serpent appears. Old divines imagined that the creature whose shape Satan borrowed for the temptation had originally no malignant aspect; neither the poisoned fangs, nor eyes of fire, nor cold, scaly, wriggling form which man and beast recoil from with instinctive horror. They fancied that the curse, "Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat," was followed by a sudden metamorphosis, and that till then the appearance of the serpent was as lovely as it is now loathsome. They gave the words of the curse ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... tolerate their choosing so much as a centurion or a tribune for themselves. Are you going to allow this precedent, and by your acquiescence make their crime your own? You will soon see this lawless spirit spreading to the troops abroad, and in time the treason will recoil on us and the war on you. Besides, innocence wins you as much as the murder of your emperor: you will get from us as large a bounty for your loyalty as you would from others for ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... frame is of a richer consistency, and has, altogether, greater vitalizing properties than that in ourselves, since on the severest day in winter he will frequently scorn any covering beyond his shirt, and the nether garments usually suggested by its mention, and, so apparelled, will not recoil ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... was made; we were then near a high rocky lee shore, on which a heavy surf was beating. The wind being on the beam, the canoes drifted fast to leeward; and, on rounding a point, the recoil of the sea from the rocks was so great that they were with difficulty kept from foundering. We looked in vain for a sheltered bay to land in; but, at length, being unable to weather another point, we were obliged to put ashore on the open beach, which fortunately was ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... order to obtain reparation for the injury which this government might inflict upon them, as we see has been attempted. The city and commandant of Macan request these islands to make reparation immediately for the goods, so that the difficulty may not recoil upon them, to the damage of their goods and of the commerce between Yndia and Japon, which they declare to be of great importance for the preservation ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... of the enthusiasm of women at the South in aid of the Slave-holders' Rebellion, and can form some estimate of the "fierceness of their wrath"; but, God be thanked, the days approach when their mad passions will recoil upon themselves—the days approach when their evil cause must die. Let us unitedly pledge ourselves to stand by the Government, in our legitimate sphere, and out of it, if needs be. Let us, with womanly zeal, help to crush the power of its ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... far prefer a cavern On some rocky sea-girt isle, Where the constant intonations Of the waves as they recoil With their soughing and deep moaning For a momentary rest, Tell of liquid matter only That bespeaks itself distressed, Than to live where human bodies Bend and writhe for freedom's air, Till the heart breaks in deep sorrow, And the soul ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... world," said he, "through many changes of fortune and varieties of humor, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil?—five years from now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward lies your way; nor can anything but death avail to ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... predecessors he had conceded not one point to the other side. In spite of all that his enemies could say, his {183} personal honour and dignity remained untarnished. The nicknames and cruel taunts flung at him, in the earlier months, apparently by his own ministers, recoil now on their heads, as the petty insults of unmannerly politicians; indeed, the accusations which they made of simplicity and honesty, simply reinforce the impression of quixotic high-mindedness, which was not the least noble feature in Metcalfe's character. His generosity ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... his hand groping for hers. As he found and clasped it, he made a movement as if he wished again to draw her towards him. Gently she resisted, and at once she felt that he responded to her feeling of recoil, and Nan, with a confused sense of shame and anger, was now hurt by his submission. Most men in his place would have made short work of her resistance,—would have taken her, masterfully, into the shelter of ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... her this disease of the brain had been engendered; but the man she had seen that night, wrapt in the game of chance, lurking in her room, and counting the money by the glimmering light, seemed like another creature in his shape, a monstrous distortion of his image, a something to recoil from, and be the more afraid of, because it bore a likeness to him, and kept close about her, as he did. She could scarcely connect her own affectionate companion, save by his loss, with this old man, so like yet so unlike him. She had wept to ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... door which I had left open behind me. As its sharp bang rang through the room, I realized into what a pitfall I had stumbled. Only a political intrigue of the most desperate character could account for the words I had heard and the actions to which I had been a witness. But I was in no mood to recoil even from such dangers as these, and so my look showed her as she leaned toward me with ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... vanished from their posts with the speed of lightning, and closed in the centre of the lists with the shock of a thunderbolt. The lances burst into shivers up to the very grasp, and it seemed at the moment that both knights had fallen, for the shock had made each horse recoil backward upon its haunches. The address of the riders recovered their steeds by use of the bridle and spur; and having glared on each other for an instant with eyes which seemed to flash fire through the bars of their visors, each made a demi-volte,[57-7] and, retiring ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... house by a French window, and Maud drew back into her room. What was there in that childish face that appealed so tremendously to her womanhood—wholly banishing her first involuntary sense of recoil? She could not have said, she was only conscious of the woman in her throbbing with a deep compassion. She stood and waited for the child's coming ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... the left elbow should be almost directly under the rifle. The right hand should do more than half the work of holding the rifle up and against the shoulder, the left hand only steadying and guiding the piece. Do not try to meet the recoil; let the whole body move back with it. Do not be afraid to press the jaw hard against the stock; this steadies the position, and the head goes back with the recoil and insures that ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... enjoyed his new existence, and that there was danger of his forgetting the taste of sorrow, she changed her tone.—One day, when he had not returned home exactly at the appointed minute, she received him with a frown,—such as would have made even Mars himself recoil, if Mars could have beheld such a frown upon the brow ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... All of these, with a very few exceptions, are mounted on railway-trucks. In fact, the only large calibered piece not thus mounted is the Schneider mortar, a very efficient weapon, having a remarkably smooth recoil, which has a range of over six miles. It is transported, with its carriage and platform, in six loads, each weighing from four to five tons, about four hours being required to set up the piece ready ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... the man, with his all too light burden, halted. A flame shot through him as Molly turned her head to gaze too: he shook with a brief agony of jealousy—jealousy of the dead! The next instant he felt her recoil, look up pleadingly and cling to him again, and he knew into the soul of his soul that the words spoken by those loyal lips—now clay beneath that clay—were coming true, that, out of his house laid desolate to him was to rise a new ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... attract their attention. Insensibly the sight of that ever-rolling flood must have deeply affected them. They must have come to love it as they beheld it through the greater part of the year. The sight of its destructive power may have made them recoil for a time in fear and awe. But this would be forgotten as the flood subsided, and the river was again smooth and smiling and passing ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... began to quiver; then it darted at the stick, throwing itself its entire length. Hazel retreated, the snake coiled again and again darted. By repeating this process four or five times, he enticed the creature away; and then, availing himself of a moment before it could recoil, he struck it a smart blow ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... near birch brush. Fall season. Hunting for partridge allowed from September to December. Tramping through the woods. Something moving. Creeping up. How I felt; excited; hand shook. Partridge on log. Gun failed to go off; cocking it properly. The shot; the recoil. The flurry of the bird. How partridges fly. How they taste when cooked. Getting the bird. Going home. Partridges are found in the woods; quail in the fields. What my sister said. My brother's interest. My ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... explications was to give sudden check to that undercurrent of thought which for some time had been setting towards this conception. As soon as it was made clear whither the concession that animals may be changed by their environment must logically trend, the recoil from the idea was instantaneous and fervid. Then for a generation Cuvier was almost absolutely dominant, and his verdict was ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... pressure of pecuniary liabilities, contracted with a view to their immediate liquidation, but remaining unliquidated through a combination of circumstances, I have been under the necessity of assuming a garb from which my natural instincts recoil—I allude to spectacles—and possessing myself of a cognomen, to which I can establish no legitimate pretensions. All I have to say on that score is, that the cloud has passed from the dreary scene, and the God of Day is once ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... Montaigne so often enlarges. For Shakspere, then, with his mind newly at work in reverie and judgment, where before it had been but perceptive and reproductive, the theme was one of human impotence, failure of will, weariness of spirit in presence of over-mastering fate, recoil from the immeasurable evil of the world. Hamlet becomes the mouthpiece of the all-sympathetic spirit which has put itself in his place, as it had done with a hundred suggested types before, but with a new inwardness of comprehension, a self-consciousness added to the myriad-sided consciousness ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... heavenly, the visible as the invisible. For what is love but attraction or sympathy towards some object, whereby we desire to blend with it? And what is hate but repulsion or antipathy, whereby we are forced to fly or recoil ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... Hogan had continued to make himself a bugbear. He had a horror, too, of being thought capable of doing a dishonourable thing, and the shame he felt at having peeped into a letter was so stinging, that the idea of asking any one's advice in the dilemma in which he was placed made him recoil from the thought of such aid. Now, Father Phil had relieved him from the difficulties his own weakness imposed; the subject had been forced upon him; and once forced to speak he made a full acknowledgment of all that had taken place; and ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... streets. Shock and recoil of traffic. The stock-still brick facade of an old church, against which the waves of people lurch and withdraw. Flare of sunshine down side-streets. Eddies of light in the windows of chemists' shops, with their blue, gold, purple ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... She had been too much tired to hear anything the night before, but to-night there was scratching, nibbling, careering, fighting, squeaking, recoil and rally, charge and rout, as the grey Hanover rat fought his successful battle with his black English cousin all over the floors and stairs—nay, once or twice came rushing up and over the bed—frightening its occupant almost out ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the effect of his cousin's rather short and haughty letter. It must go, of course, whatever his own and Madame de Sainfoy's disapproval; but there were things that diplomacy might do, without, as it seemed, any serious consequences to recoil on the diplomatists. Madame de Sainfoy might gain imperial favour, Monsieur de la Mariniere might help her and save his foolish boy, and no one in the family, except themselves, need know ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... leave the communing of men, The murmur of the passions; And live alone, to live again With endless generations. Are we so brave?—The sea and sky In silence lift their mirrors; And, glassed therein, our spirits high Recoil from their own terrors. Be ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... the caves of Inisfallen, 35 Still secure mid the wildest war of the sky, The phantom courser scours the waste, And his rider howls in the thunder's roar. O'er him the fierce bolts of avenging Heaven Pause, as in fear, to strike his head. 40 The meteors of midnight recoil from his figure, Yet the 'wildered peasant, that oft passes by, With wonder beholds the blue flash through his form: And his voice, though faint as the sighs of the dead, The startled passenger ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... there; that which you send abroad will come back. The interest of the public creditor is indissolubly bound up with the interest of the whole people. Whatever affects him affects us all; and the evil that we might inflict upon him by paying an inferior dollar would recoil upon us with a vengeance as manifold as the aggregate wealth of the Republic transcends the comparatively small limits of our bonded debt. And remember that our aggregate wealth is always increasing, and our bonded debt steadily ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... Every year has seen the disproportionate increase until now. Every modern European state is more or less like a cranky, ill-built steamboat in which some idiot has mounted and loaded a monstrous gun with no apparatus to damp its recoil. Whether that gun hits or misses when it is fired, of one thing we may be absolutely certain—it will send the steamboat to the ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... her head coquettishly. For a few minutes they scrubbed away there together, side by side on their knees above the rim of the pool. Then, without warning, his hot, red lips burned her neck. Her swift recoil was also a ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... revenge was complete, and I had proved that the four-ounce was perfectly irresistible if held straight with the heavy charge of twelve drachms of powder. Since that time I have frequently used sixteen drachms (one ounce) of powder to the charge, but the recoil is then very severe, although the effect upon an animal with a four-ounce steel-tipped conical ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... the fauna and flora of the present world find themselves in a period of recoil with regard to their modification. In the tertiary period the fauna and flora of the world were richer than to-day; many more older species have disappeared than new ones have arisen. This fundamental fact seems due to the extremely ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... recoil of the surf from the reef that is hawsing her bows up into the wind, sir," explained the master, as he strained at the wheel, with the sweat trickling down from underneath the rim of his hat. "There—now she falls off again—steady ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... the arm; and, like an unchained lion, he sprang up and stared her in the face. There was a terrible look upon his features, making her recoil in dismay. Was that the affectionate gaze with which she had expected to be greeted? Was that the outward indication of the pleasing resolves with which her eager ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... here! in this so good a soil? The sight of this doth make God's heart recoil From giving thee his blessing; barren tree, Bear fruit, or else thine end will cursed be! Art thou not planted by the water-side? Know'st not thy Lord by fruit is glorified? The sentence is, Cut down the barren ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... force forward against the recoil, mi amo,' said the old gunner, shakily. 'Dig your fingers into the ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... divine, Too well, too well My flesh doth know the heart-perturbing thing; That dread theology alone Is mine, Most native and my own; And ever with victorious toil When I have made Of the deific peaks dim escalade, My soul with anguish and recoil Doth like a city in an earthquake rock, As at my feet the abyss is cloven then, With deeper menace than for other men, Of my potential cousinship with mire; That all my conquered skies do grow a hollow mock, My fearful powers retire, No longer ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... not reply and did not recoil. He seemed ready himself to catch the beech-tree in his open arms in order to cast it on the ground ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... will be noticed that as this distance increases we have augmented pressures, and these are not due, as might be supposed, to increase of head, which is practically nothing, but they are due to the recoil of a portion of the stream, which occurs increasingly as it becomes more and more broken up. These alterations in pressure can only be eliminated when care is taken to measure that only due to impact, without at the same ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... limpet grip. Lester sank to his knees, tugging savagely at the tightly clasped burden, and angry cries rose from the scandalized onlookers. A questioning, threatening ring formed round him, then shrank back in recoil as he shrieked out one hideous word. Lady Barbara heard the word and saw the crowd race away like scattered sheep, saw the Prince forcibly hustled away by his attendants; also she saw her son lying prone in an agony of overmastering terror, his spasm of daring shattered by ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... into the water, and at once was eagerly followed by his friends and his bodyguard. The darkness of night and the violent recoil of the roaring waves made it hard for them to help him, and it was not until daybreak, when the wind abated, that he reached the land, faint and helpless in body, but with his spirit invincible ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... be ours. Then they began to wallop and met with their enemies, there were men slain and overthrown on every side. Then thrust in among them the knights of the Table Round, and smote down to the earth all them that withstood them, in so much that they made them to recoil and flee. By God, said Sir Gawaine, this gladdeth my heart, for now be they less in number by twenty thousand. Then entered into the battle Jubance a giant, and fought and slew down right, and distressed many of our knights, among whom was slain Sir Gherard, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... ill-regulated, is not only wasted in the void, like that of gunpowder burned in the open air, and steam unconfined by science; but, striking in the dark, and its blows meeting only the air, they recoil and bruise itself. It is destruction and ruin. It is the volcano, the earthquake, the cyclone;—not growth and progress. It is Polyphemus blinded, striking at random, and falling headlong among the sharp rocks by the impetus of his ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Steel, gravely. "I saw you come down, I saw you peep in—all dread and reluctance! I saw you recoil, I saw the face with which you shut those doors and put out the lights. And afterwards I learned from the medical evidence that your husband must have been dead at that time; one thing I knew, and that was that he was not shot during the next hour and ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... slave, of merchant and merchandise, cannot long subsist. To sell on an auction-block or deliver over to a slave-driver an immortal soul, for which Christ has died, is an enormity before which the Christian sense of right will always recoil in the end. "In this," it is written, "there is neither Greek nor Jew, nor circumcision nor uncircumcision, nor barbarian nor Seythian, nor bond nor free, but Christ is all and in all." Let slaveholders put to themselves ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... respect for a large ship as ordinarily constructed. Working the guns in small revolving turrets, as by Ericsson's or by Coles's plan, and loading and cooling them by steam-power, and taking up their recoil by springs in a short space, as by Stevens's plan, are improvements in this direction. The plan of elevating a gun above a shot-proof deck at the moment of aiming and firing, and dropping it for loading or protection ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... wild, passionate utterances of Lillie that Harry felt a recoil of mingled conscience, fear, and that disgust which man feels when she, whom God made to be sought, degrades herself to seek. There is no edification and no propriety in highly colored and minute drawing of such scenes of temptation and degradation, though they ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that bordered it there came sounds that were horrible, because she knew them to be inaudible to any ear less charged with insanity; small sounds of movement, of strange shiverings, swarmings, crepitations; sounds of incessant, infinitely subtle urging, of agony and recoil. Sounds they were of the invisible things unborn, driven towards birth; sounds of the worm unborn, of things that creep and writhe towards dissolution. She knew what she heard and saw. She heard the stirring of ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... the man's entire form seemed to wilt and quiver. Then the recoil, tense and savage, concentered in the eyes, in which appeared a hatred that screamed of immeasurable pain. He turned abruptly away, and, recollecting himself, ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... things love, and love that was infinite? Love which was not essential to his divine nature, could never have carried him through so great a work as this: Passions here would a failed, would a retreated, and have given the recoil; yea, his very humanity would here have flagged and fainted, had it not been managed, governed, and strengthened by his eternal Spirit. Wherefore it is said, that "through the eternal Spirit he offered himself without spot to God" (Heb 9:14). And that he was declared to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... French squares. Burning with impatience they watched the mighty torrent of horse sweep across the plain, then came the roar of artillery and the incessant rattle of musketry. Then they saw with astonishment the cavalry recoil; they witnessed charge after charge, and then saw them sweeping round the squares, while the plain, where they had first attacked, was strewn thickly with the bodies of men and horses right up to the bayonets of the French line. The Arabs burst ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... officers in this new craft. It was pleasant to see their benign exultation in her powers of mischief, and the delight with which they exhibited the circumvolutory movement of the tower, the quick thrusting forth of the immense guns to deliver their ponderous missiles, and then the immediate recoil, and the security behind the closed port-holes. Yet even this will not long be the last and most terrible improvement in the science of war. Already we hear of vessels the armament of which is to act entirely beneath the surface of ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the moral effect of these deceptive practices upon your own character, is there not in the acts themselves an inherent meanness and baseness, from which a pure-minded youth would instinctively recoil? Is there not something false and rotten in the prevailing sentiment on this subject among young persons at school? When by some convenient fiction you reach a higher standard than your merits entitle you to, is it ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... said Trevannion: "it is very unbecoming to talk in this manner of so sacred a profession. A hunting and card-playing clergyman ought to be stripped of his gown without hesitation. Any right-minded person would recoil with horror at such a character. It is a great disgrace to the profession; no clergyman ought to enter into any kind of improper dissipation. Your ideas ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... himself from such a reproach, that he felt his task to be an invidious one. The majesty of grief, expressing itself with Christian meekness, and appealing as it were, from the grave to the consciences of men, could not be violated without a recoil of angry feeling, ruinous to the effect of any logic or rhetoric the most persuasive. The affliction of a great prince, his solitude, his rigorous imprisonment, his constancy to some purposes which were not selfish, his dignity of demeanor in the midst of his heavy trials, and his truly ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne |
