"Abject" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... France; but the nervous Latinity of Nicole soon communicated something of the same sensation to a wider circle. {156} Pascal has himself told us that he never repented having written them, nor “the amusing, agreeable, ironical style” in which they were written. Even the condemnation of the Papal See, abject in some respects as was his devotion to his Church, did not move him on this point. He left on record, amongst his Thoughts, the following solemn declaration: “IF MY LETTERS ARE CONDEMNED IN ROME, ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... roses from a bush that hung over the walk, bending down the richly laden bough so that the flowers made a complete circle about her bright young face, and as she raised her eyes she caught the Colonel gazing at her with such a look of abject idolatry that she laughed and blushed. "You see I am on time," she cried, gayly, hastening down to the gate and handing him one of her roses. "I am going to the post-office, and you may walk with me if you care to." If he cared to! Her ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... the remainder of his task, and read a series of pitiful personal appeals that would have melted any heart but his own. They were from needy men and women whom he had despoiled. They were a detail of suffering and disappointment, and in some cases they were abject prayers for restitution. He read them all, to the last letter and the last word, and then quietly tore them into strips, and threw them into ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... country, however abject its inhabitants may appear, where the most daring and ambitious can venture to usurp the supreme power without first obtaining a hold on public opinion; we cannot have a stronger proof of this fact, as ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... was the dying boast of Dutugaimunu that he had lived "a slave to the priesthood." The expression was figurative in his case; but so abject did the subserviency of the kings become, and so rapid was its growth, that Bhatiya Tissa, who reigned A.D. 8, rendered it literal, and "dedicated himself, his queen, and two sons, as well as his charger, and state elephant, as slaves to the priesthood." ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... on a single Mole, unearthed quite by chance; then a Gopher, stalked from behind the big legs of Shag, saved him from utter collapse. Of a verity he was living from hand to mouth; such abject poverty he had never known, not even in the Southland by the ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... he spoke to the boy, who at once took his hands and pulled him into a sitting position, but the man could do no more, and uttered a low groan in his abject weakness as he gazed ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... struggle, experiencing a curious sensation of pleasure in the midst of my pain. When he repeated his order I found its accomplishment no longer repulsive. One of the few pleasurable memories this intimacy, extending over years, has left for me is that moment of abject abasement to one who, with no warmth of feeling, had yet once had sufficient energy to be brutal ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... robe, it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. . . . They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. . . . 'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... such transgressors as Byron, such supporters as Moore and the Noctes Club, that there are so many helpless, cowering, broken- hearted, abject women, given over to the animal love which they share alike with the poor dog,—the dog, who, beaten, kicked, starved, and cuffed, still lies by his drunken master with great anxious eyes of love and sorrow, and with sweet, brute forgiveness nestles upon his bosom, as he lies in his filth ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in which cries for mercy to God and to his kinsman were wildly and blasphemously mingled. The sons of Ishmael turned away in horror at the disgusting spectacle, and even the stern nature of the squatter began to bend before so abject misery. ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... you to Antonio!—Ha! (cry'd he, starting) what said you, Madam? What did Ardelia say? That I had bless'd your Soul with Hopes! That I would cast you away to Antonio!—Can they who safely arrive in their wish'd-for Port, be said to be shipwreck'd? Or, can an abject indigent Wretch make a King?—These are more than Riddles, Madam; and I must not think to expound 'em. No, (said she) let it alone, Don Henrique; I'll ease you of that Trouble, and tell you plainly ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... triumph of him that begot, And the travail of her that bore, Behold they are evermore As warp and weft in our lot. We are children of splendour and flame, Of shuddering, also, and tears. Magnificent out of the dust we came, And abject ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... those faithful denizens of hot climates. The souls of the departed stop to rest and enjoy themselves in this charming spot on their upward flight. Like most primitive people who live near snow-capped mountains, they had an abject terror of the forbidding summits and the snowstorms that seem to come down from them. Probably the Indians hope to propitiate the demons who dwell on the mountain tops by inventing charming stories ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... longer cause to fear him, began to deplore his death" And elsewhere, when speaking of what took place in Syracuse after the murder of Hieronymus, grandson of Hiero, he says, "It is the nature of the multitude to be an abject ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... thoroughfare of the more showy, though by no means less ill-famed Suburra. Into this they struck instantly, walking in single file, and keeping as nearly as possible in the middle of the causeway. The lane, which was composed of dwellings of the lowest order, tenanted by the most abject profligates, was dark as midnight; for the tall dingy buildings absolutely intercepted every ray of light that proceeded from the murky sky, and there was not a spark in any of the sordid casements, nor any votive lamp in that foul alley. The only glimpse of casual ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... replied the abject Grinder, 'I'm sure you would be down upon me dreadful, Sir. I wouldn't attempt for to go and do it, Sir, not if I ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... ask—as has been asked ere now—But is there not in this tone of mind something undignified, something even abject? thus to cry for help, instead of helping oneself? thus to depend on another being, instead of bearing stoically with manly independence? I answer—The Psalmist does bear stoically, just because he cries for help. For the old Stoics cried for help; the earlier and truer-hearted of them, at ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... virtually lord of the Roman world. Although he refrained from assuming the title of king, no Eastern monarch was ever possessed of more absolute power, or surrounded by more abject flatterers and sycophants. He was invested with all the offices and dignities of the state. The Senate made him perpetual dictator, and conferred upon him the powers of censor, consul, and tribune, with the titles of Pontifex Maximus and Imperator ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... trivial, though cunning and dissimulating; and the very evenness of her temper seemed but the clockwork of a heart insensible to its own movements. Vain in prosperity, what wonder that she was so abject in misfortune? What wonder that even while, in later and gloomier years, [Grafton, 806] accusing Richard III. of the murder of her royal sons, and knowing him, at least, the executioner of her brother and her child by the bridegroom of her youth, [Anthony Lord Rivers, ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... things. What sudden turns, What strange vicissitudes in the first leaf Of man's sad history. To-day most happy, And ere to-morrow's sun has set, most abject! How scant the space between these ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... perhaps have not to learn that, though a stanch republican in America, he was the most abject courtier in France; and though a violent defender of liberty and equality on the other side of the Atlantic, no man bowed lower to usurpation, or revered despotism more, in Europe. Without talents, and almost without education, he thinks intrigues negotiations, and conceives ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... next issue of this rag?" he asked. "If so, you will find that the result of this case was a complete vindication. I was triumphantly acquitted. A month later you will find an abject apology from 'The Investigator.' This was a trumped-up affair, the work of my enemies. To-morrow I shall publish the full details ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... 85% of the population live in abject poverty. Agriculture is mainly small-scale subsistence farming and employs two-thirds of the work force. The majority of the population does not have ready access to safe drinking water, adequate medical care, or sufficient food. Few social assistance programs ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... himself became a Catholic before he died. Paul the Deacon says that he "both held the Catholic faith and bestowed many possessions on the Church of Christ, and restored the bishops, who were in a depressed and abject condition, to the honour of their wonted dignity." Whatever may be the meaning of this, it certainly expresses the fact that before the middle of the seventh century the Lombards were passing almost insensibly into the Catholic fold, and Italy had practically become united in one faith ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... up, Mohammed—I give her up. Who am I to dispute with the Mandarin Fo-Hi;' and performing an abject obeisance he backed ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... believe, a more abject slave; society produces not a more odious vermin; nor can the devil receive a guest more worthy of him, nor possibly more welcome to him, than a slanderer. The world, I am afraid, regards not this monster with ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... Busiris and his Memphian chivalry, While with perfidious hatred they pursued The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld From the safe shore their floating carcases And broken chariot-wheels. So thick bestrown, Abject and lost, lay these, covering the flood, Under amazement of their hideous change. He called so loud that all the hollow deep Of Hell resounded:—"Princes, Potentates, Warriors, the Flower of Heaven—once ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... usual; his lips curled in a smile of cynical amusement. Major Post was there, carefully dressed as though he had been attending some social gathering, standing upon the hearth-rug with his coat-tails under his arms. The professor, in whose face seemed written the most abject terror, was talking. Tavernake now could hear ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Cromwell went on slowly, varied by visits to his relatives in Scotland, travels on the Continent, and interviews with distinguished men. His mind at this period (1842) was most occupied with the sad condition of the English people,—everywhere riots, disturbances, physical suffering and abject poverty among the masses, for the Corn Laws had not then been repealed; and to Carlyle's vision there was a most melancholy prospect ahead,—not revolution, but universal degradation, and the reign of injustice. This sad condition ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... the ordeal of the colonel's devilish coldness. Macon's advice had seemed almost logical the moment before. Win Lou Macon by the power of fear, well enough, for was not fear the thing which she had followed all her life? Was it not through fear that the colonel himself had reduced her to such abject, unquestioning obedience? ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... send Anne away, but every other woman with whom he came in contact, addressed him in words more suited to a divinity than to an earthly king. His daughter Mary, after having been spurned as the most degraded and abject creature of the realm, longed for nothing more ardently than "to attain the fruition of his ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... voice, "what does that matter now? The point is that a girl staying in our house has been terribly insulted and practically driven out of it, and she ought to be found and persuaded to come back, when the first thing you will do, Miss," turning to Hilary, "will be to make her the most abject apology you ever made to any one in all ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... being than the moral cur whose likes and dislikes are at the beck and call of bullies that stand between him and his own soul; such a creature gives up the most sacred of all his rights for something more unsubstantial than a mess of pottage—a mental serf too abject even to know that he is being wronged. Wretched emasculator of his own reason, whose jejune timidity and want of vitality are thus omnipresent in the most ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... an extensive government agency for the sale of land in Michigan; whither, at the time, vast numbers of new settlers were daily proceeding in search of homes and happiness. I saw many of these on their way, and as they toiled to their new homes, they looked haggard, forlorn, and abject; and I thought I could distinguish in almost all, especially the women, an aspect of grief that indicated they were exiles, who had left behind all that tended to make life joyous and happy, to seek a precarious ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... Sometimes she was superb in her wrath; at others, abject in her misery. She seemed to pass through the whole gamut of ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... superiors two extremes are to be avoided; namely, an abject and base servility, and an impudent and encroaching freedom. When the well-bred Hyperdulus approaches a nobleman in any public place, you would be persuaded he was one of the meanest of his domestics; his cringes fall little short of prostration; ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... finds him without justification for his conduct. In the second Act, which consists of only one Scene, Beaumarchais carries out his purpose and compels Clavigo under threat of a duel to write with his own hand an abject acknowledgment of his baseness. In consistency with his fickle nature, however, Clavigo prays Beaumarchais to report to Marie his unfeigned remorse and his desire to renew their former relations. Beaumarchais agrees ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... treat their women ill. These poor creatures get the worst of all their food, with the hardest of all their work; and are frequently very severely beaten by their hard and ruthless taskmasters. Degraded as are these aborigines generally, those in the immediate vicinity of Sydney are a more abject race than their more fortunate brethren who inhabit the distant parts of the Colony. This may be partly, if not wholly accounted for, by the facility with which at Sydney they can obtain ardent spirits, to procure ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... long and narrow piece of cloth or silk, which is wrapped round the waist; among the rich a shawl is the general patka. The act of throwing one's patka round the neck and prostrating one's self at another's feet, is a most abject mark ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... eat, plying him with food and then with question after question about the trip, about Barbara Redding and about Molly's going to school. Mormon made abject apology for talking too much and Sandy told how close a ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... realist is not amusing himself as much as ever is the teller of a fairy-tale, though he does not deliberately start out to do so; he is amusing, too, a large part of mankind. For, admitted that the abject, and the test of Art, is always the awakening of vibration, of impersonal emotion, it is still usually forgotten that men fall, roughly speaking, into two flocks: Those whose intelligence is uninquiring in the face of Art, and does not demand to be appeased ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... words Winter started as if a pike had been thrust into his side. On his face was written blank astonishment, which expression, as she proceeded, gave way to one of abject fear. It would have been difficult to say which of the two was the more agitated. He dashed a hand to his brow as if to drive away the fumes of liquor which had mounted to his brain; looked at the kneeling figure; gazed ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... her mind, she did not let a word or look escape her. The first aspect of her temporary aberration was that of fear and deprecation. She was pursued by some one who filled her with terror, and she would lift her hands to keep him off, or hide her head in abject alarm. Then she would beg him to ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... him to pick her up, and set her on his knee, and whittle wonderful wooden dogs and dolls and boats and boxes for her with his jack-knife, as Walley Johnson and the others did. With Walley she would hardly condescend to coquet, so sure she was of his abject slavery to her whims; and, moreover, as must be confessed with regret, so unforgiving was she in her heart toward his blank eye. She merely consented to make him useful, much as she might a convenient and altogether doting but uninteresting grandmother. To all the other members ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... when I am convinced that the empress commands. But in this case I am convinced that it is not my mother, the high-spirited Maria Theresa, who intrusts you with such an abject commission." ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... was inevitable to such a dominant personality she made enemies, who resented her airs and scoffed at her graces. Lady Granville called her "a tiresome, quarrelsome woman"; the Duke of Wellington, one of her most abject slaves, once exclaimed, "What —— nonsense Lady Jersey talks!" and Granville declared that she had "neither wit, nor imagination, nor humour." But to the last day of her long life she retained the homage and admiration ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... man of abject soul in vain Shall walk the Marathonian plain; Or thrill the shadowy gloom, That still invests the guardian Pass, Where stood, sublime, Leonidas Devoted to ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... forward, as it were, from its stagnatory condition of abject fear. It traveled swiftly, urged by a pursuing dread over plans for the future. The guiding star of his thought was safety. At all costs he must find safety for his property and himself. So long as Retief was at large there could be no safety ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... meagre crops of corn. The natives were poorer, humbler, and more miserable than any people we had yet observed in the course of our travels: whenever we stopped they flocked around us in crowds; and, asking for charity, used the most abject gestures....The Polish peasants are cringing and servile in their expressions of respect; they bowed down to the ground; took off their hats or caps and held them in their hands till we were out of sight; stopped their carts on the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... would have been among the first at the scene of the fire, but for an interruption. At the moment he was bounding up the companion-ladder, a young man of feeble character—who would have been repudiated by the sex, had he been born a woman—sprang down the same ladder in abject terror. He went straight into the bosom of the ascending doctor, and they both went with a crash to ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... rubbed his eyes. It would not be winked out. There was a loud crash of thunder and a furious dash of rain against the window; then another blinding stroke of lightning. He drew the clothing over his head in abject terror. Again the thunder rolled as if in savage comment on ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... the cheek of the boy soldier when first he hears the cannon thundering to the terror that glazes the eye of the vanquished swordsman who at every moment expects the deadly point in his heart. But never had I gazed upon a countenance filled with such abject ghastly terror as that which came over St. Auban's when his ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... one built for the Pacha, as Mazagan had informed him in regard to her, he paid her a visit, and found Captain Sharp in command of her. The Moor was known as General Noury here, and he made an abject apology to the visitor. Convinced that the Moor had really reformed his life, they were reconciled, and General Noury was received with ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... of the sensation that the whole house was inverted and disorganized, hopelessly. And the doctor came into the room. She smiled at the doctor apologetically, foolishly, as if saying: "We all come to it. Here I am." She was calm without. Oh, but what a prey of abject fear within! "I am at the edge of the precipice," her thought ran; "in a moment I shall be over." And then the pains—not the heralds but the shattering army, endless, increasing in terror as they thundered across her. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... wild, fierce, passionate Arab boy, Abdoul, with his vehement wrath and no less vehement love, passing from a frustrated design to assassinate Meredith, whom he considered the accepted lover of Havilah, to an abject prostration of his whole being, corporeal and mental, at the feet of his mistress, saluting them with "a devouring storm of kisses," is by far the most intense and successful effort at characterization in the whole volume. The conclusion of the story, which results ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... Jerusalem! Small wonder she had been indignant when he, the Maccabee, in the spirit of mischief, had laid a wife to Julian's door and had described her as most unprepossessing. And that was why her terror of Julian had been so abject! That was why she had flown to him, a stranger, rather than be left alone with a husband who, it seemed, would be rid of her that he might pursue his ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... South waved his head, making it his flugel-man with abject obedience. "Ah, when it was quite a small tree," he said, "and I was a little boy, I thought one day of chopping it off with my hook to make a clothes-line prop with. But I put off doing it, and then I again thought that ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... heavenly oracle cannot fail, which declares that "where there is no vision, the people perish,"[1] Nor should you be seduced from this pursuit by a contempt of our meanness. We are fully conscious to ourselves how very mean and abject we are, being miserable sinners before God, and accounted most despicable by men; being, (if you please) the refuse of the world, deserving of the vilest appellations that can be found; so that nothing remains for us to glory in before God, but his mercy alone, by which, without any merit of ours, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... madam. I know." In abject terror she shrank away from him. "But I have kissed you! If I live a thousand years I shall ...
— The Purple Parasol • George Barr McCutcheon
... eye detected the neglect of the sheep, which were still huddled in the corral, though long past their hour for pasturage; while their bleating expressed hunger as well as dislike of their unusual imprisonment. But Jessica saw first the abject attitude of the collie, Keno, who came reluctantly to greet them with down-hanging head and tail and a reproachful upward glance of his ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... town," he said, hastily. "I saw his man at dinner. The train was reported late, but she made up time." Grasping desperately at his dignity, he swallowed an abject apology and retreated ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... investigated Baghdad, and they nicknamed him Haroun al Roosevelt. He had for his companion Jacob Riis, a remarkable Dane who migrated to this country in youth, got the position of reporter on one of the New York dailies, frequented the courts, studied the condition of the abject poor in the tenement-houses, and the haunts where Vice breeds like scum on stagnant pools, and wrote a book, "How the Other Half Lives," which startled the consciences of the well-to-do and the virtuous. Riis showed Roosevelt everything. Police headquarters were in Mulberry Street, and yet ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... requesting Omnipotence? What can stun and confound thy reason more? What more can ravish and exalt thy heart? It cannot but ravish and exalt; it cannot but gloriously disturb and perplex thee, to take in all that suggests. Thou child of the dust! Thou speck of misery and sin! How abject thy weakness! how great is thy power! Thou crawler on earth, and possible (I was about to say) controller of the skies! Weigh, and weigh well, the wondrous truths I have in view: which cannot be weighed too much; which the more they are weighed, amaze the more; which to have supposed, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... to sit up, but finding the attempt resulted only in the partial movement of a finger somewhere in the distance. "Have I really—surely, surely, I was not so abject as to faint?" ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... my Sunday school. An attachment, deep and lasting, sprung up between me and my persecuted pupils, which made parting from them intensely grievous; and,{207} when I think that most of these dear souls are yet shut up in this abject thralldom, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... king's berserks are not at home; but it is only Hott's opinion that, if they were at home, they would be able to put an end to the depredations of the monster. It was quite natural, however, that he should think so; for to such an abject coward as he was, it must have seemed that nothing could resist such warriors as these berserks were. That they were not at home was due to the fact that they were on one of their regular expeditions. But why they had not been retained at home to cope ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... out a few records that were to be sent to Melbourne, when, to my surprise, one of the pig-headed follows presented himself before me. I should hardly have known him, he was so changed. His feet were bare and bleeding, his clothes were torn into shreds, and his whole appearance of the most abject and ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... in almost abject silence. The little girl was still sleeping. All of the boys had tiptoed up and taken a peep at her lying there, as though hardly able to believe it ...
— Phil Bradley's Mountain Boys - The Birch Bark Lodge • Silas K. Boone
... perusal of a naturalistic book . . . without a vivid desire to escape" from the wretched world depicted in it, "and a purpose, more or less vague, of helping to better the lot and morally elevate the abject beings who figure in it. Naturalistic art, then, is not immoral in itself, for then it would not merit the name of art; for though it is not the business of art to preach morality, still I think that, resting ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... them; they have been proscribed on account of their color; there is a bitter and cruel prejudice against them everywhere, and a large minority of the people of this country to-day, if they had the power, would deprive them of all political and civil rights and reduce them to a state of abject servitude. Women have not been enslaved. Intelligence has not been denied to them; they have not been degraded; there is no prejudice against them on account of their sex; but, on the contrary, if they deserve to be, they are respected, honored, and loved. Wide as the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... I shall be content with adducing the following particulars. The men said, that unwittingly they contracted a terrible dread of their wives, in consequence of which they were constrained to obey their decisions in the most abject manner, and be at their beck more than the vilest servants, so that they lost all life and spirit; and that this was the case not only with those who were in inferior stations of life, but also with those who were ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... longer. I rose to my feet, and crossed the space which lay between the two tables. As I drew nearer to her I watched the child's face. At first a flash of desperate hope seemed suddenly to illumine it; then a fear more abject even than before took its place as she glanced at her companion. She watched me come, reading without a doubt the purpose in my mind with a sort of fascinated wonder. Her eyes were still fastened upon mine when at last I paused before her. I leaned over the ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... approach with a threatening demeanour. Our landing was opposed, but a few well-directed volleys from a Gardiner gun (which did not jam) caused the hostile force to disperse, and we landed in great state. Marching on the chief's house, we were received with an abject submission that I had scarcely expected. The people were absolutely cowed, more by the fulfilment of the prophecy, I think, than even by the execution done by our Gardiner machine gun. At the bishop's request, I delivered a harangue in the native tongue, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... Augustus Tibbetts, Managing Director of Schemes Limited, and Miss Marguerite Whitland, his heaven-sent secretary, were strained to the point of breaking that afternoon. She went away that night without saying good-bye, and Bones, in a condition of abject despair, walked home to Devonshire Street, and was within a dozen yards of his flat, when he remembered that he had left his motor-car in the City, and had to take a cab ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... bookseller, in the New Exchange, for whom he wrote prefaces, and other occasional pieces. But having, as Mr. Malone has observed, a patrimony, though a small one, of his own, it seems impossible that our author was ever in that state of mean and abject dependence, which the malice of his enemies afterwards pretended. The same malice misrepresented, or greatly exaggerated, the nature of Dryden's obligations to Sir Robert Howard, with whom he became acquainted probably about the time of the Restoration, whose ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... with a face full of abject fear and misery, but he was in that frame of weak-mindedness which made him ready to obey any one who spoke, and he rowed on ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... Spartan youths, all these people undergo a long course of training, and exceed the age of one-and-twenty before they are deemed worthy of admission into the ranks of these singular hordes. They have no actual sovereign, but merely two traditionary beings, to whom they bow with most abject servility. These imaginary potentates are always alluded to under the fearful names of "John Doe and Richard Roe;" though they are never seen, still their edicts are all-powerful, their commands extending to the most distant regions, and carrying ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... how to make sugar candy? In my present abject state the only way of amusing myself I can hit on is setting the girls of the school to garden and cook! By way of beginning in cooking I offered to pay for any quantity of wasted sugar if they could produce me a crystal or two of sugar candy. (On the way to Twelfth cakes, you know, and sugar ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... which, the husband going to the bath, his wife charitably released the almost dead tailor, and reproving him for his impertinence, declared if he ever again looked up at her balcony she would contrive his death. The tailor, perfectly cured of love for his superior in life, made the most abject submission, thanked her for his deliverance, hurried home, prayed heartily for his escape, and the very next day took care to move from so dangerous ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... word," she answered, with an air of abject confession. "It don't interest me a mite! I give because it's my bounden duty, but I'll be whipped if I want to knit warm mittens all my life, an' fill poor barrels. Sometimes I wisht I could git a chance to provide folks with what they don't ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... had terrified him into abject submission. He spoke the truth; he would have been willing to say or do anything just then. Lecoq profited by this disposition; and then clearly and concisely gave the lad his instructions. "And now," added he, "I must see and hear you. Where can ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... probably have been already anticipated, the only result of this reticence was, that Matilda saw in his letter an abject entreaty for her consent to his marriage with Ada Parkinson, to avoid legal proceedings, and, under this misapprehension, she wrote the line that abandoned all claims upon him, and then went on with her accounts, which were not so neatly kept that ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... were more and more translated and read, opened new, undreamt-of vistas. The Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare began now to be considered of all books the most worthy to be studied. And thus it came to pass that in a short time a most complete revolution was accomplished in literature, from abject slavery ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... life had been a failure; total, miserable, abject. It had come to nothing; its harvest was a harvest of ashes. If it had been a useful life, he could have accepted its unhappiness; if it had been a happy life, he could have forgiven its uselessness; but it had been both useless and unhappy. He had done nothing for others, he had won nothing ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... for it either by laws of Church or art itself, and to find beauty wheresoever in life it chooses to turn the light of its gaze. So, also, in "Andrea del Sarto," the easy cleverness of the unaspiring craftsman is not embodied apart from the abject relationship which made his very soul a bond-slave to the gross mandates of "the Cousin's whistle." Yet in all three poems the biographic and historic conditions contributing toward the individualizing of each artist are so unobtrusively epitomized and vitally blended, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... charmer thou must put up with the heart-rending bramble of separation." The Nightingale cast his eye upon the scene around him, but saw nothing fit to eat. Destitute of food, his strength and fortitude failed him, and in his abject helplessness he was unable to earn himself a little livelihood. He called to his mind and said: "Surely the Ant had in former days his dwelling underneath this tree, and was busy in hoarding a store ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... Frank, remembering that a great silence had fallen over the neighboring apartment, stole softly to the door and looked in. He saw a picture of abject dejection there—Bluff sitting on the floor, in the midst of piles of garments, clothes bags, and all manner of things, frowning and shaking his head, as if he had lost ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... astonishment, addressing himself to Mardonius, who commanded in chief, "Heavens! against what men are you leading us? Insensible to interest, they combat only for glory!"(115) Which exclamation, though looked upon by Xerxes as an effect of abject fear, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... spoken of my foster parents, but had never said that they were not really my father and mother. I felt ashamed to admit that I was a foundling,—a child picked up in the streets! I knew how the children from the Foundlings' Hospital had been scorned. It seemed to me that it was the most abject thing in the world to be a foundling. I did not want Mrs. Milligan and Arthur to know. Would they not have ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... conspicuous that I many a time have heard the country people remark, "These are the slaves of the party." They have neither spirit nor pluck as compared with the Africans, and if one saw a village he turned out of the way to beg in the most abject manner, or lay down and slept, the only excuse afterwards being, "My legs were sore." Having allowed some of them to sleep at the fire in my house, they began a wholesale plunder of everything they could sell, as cartridges, cloths, and meat, so I had to eject them. One of them then ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... absent a good while, though that feeling might have been occasioned by my interest and anxiety. Finally I heard heavy steps. Wright came in alone. He was leaden-faced, humiliated. Then something abject in him gave place to rage. He strode the room; ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... within the same," said he, "Madam. And, albeit I neither be earl, lord, nor baron within it, yet has God made me—how abject that ever I be in your eyes—a profitable member within the same. Yea, Madam, to me it appertains no less to forewarn of such things as may hurt it, if I foresee them, than it does to any of the nobility; for both my vocation and conscience craves ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... cathedrals and worshipped the king. Look at Salisbury and Lincoln and Ely; read the history of the growth of parliaments. There is nothing more beautifully sensuous than the religious spirit that presided over those master works of English Gothic; there is nothing in life more abject than the relics of the English love and fear of princes. But the steady growth of centuries has left nothing but the outworn shell of the old religion and the old loyalty. The churches and the castles still exist. The ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... the passion over all his nature. It expands the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In giving him to another it still more gives him to himself. He is a new man, with new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... willing to suffer a master, but who revolted from a tyrant; who, with a rare but unappreciated and too nice honor, strove to keep to the yoke that their forefathers had worn, only asking from their ruler the respect and consideration due the faithful servants of his crown, who were no longer the abject slaves of a monarchy, and yet, through an inveterate habit of servitude, were scarcely prepared for the independence of a republic. How nobly he has fulfilled his mission, the hearty applause of two ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... time, but in that fort he was ere long surrounded. The investing army was large, and, as the chances of escape diminished, the Pathan's audacity at length began to fail, and he offered terms of the most entire and abject submission. These being sternly rejected, he prepared for the worst. On the 21st of December a general assault was delivered by the Mahratta army; against which Gholam Kadir and his men defended themselves with resolution throughout the short day. But his men in ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... Gargrave, the Speaker's eldest son, was hung at York, for murder; and his half-brother, Sir Richard, endured a fate only less miserable. The splendid estate he inherited he wasted by the most wanton extravagance, and at length reduced himself to abject want. 'His excesses,' says Mr. Hunter, in his 'History of Doncaster,' 'are still, at the expiration of two centuries, the subject of village tradition; and his attachment to gaming is commemorated in an old ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... foreign food, they are left open for the exportation of Irish grain, an exportation which has already amounted in the present season to a quantity nearly adequate to feed the entire people of Ireland, and to avert the now certain famine; thus inflicting upon the Irish people the abject misery of having their own provisions carried away to feed others, whilst they themselves are left ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... earlier biographers, Herrick had much ado not to starve in that same longed-for London, and fell into great misery; but Dr. Grosart disputes this, arguing, with justness, that Herrick's family, which was wealthy and influential, would not have allowed him to come to abject want. With his royalistic tendencies he may not have breathed quite freely in the atmosphere of the Commonwealth, and no doubt many tribulations fell to his lot, but among ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... mutinous and turbulent during the voyage were now most devoted and enthusiastic. Some begged favors of him, as if he had already wealth and honors in his gift. Many abject spirits, who had outraged him by their insolence, now crouched at his feet, begging pardon for all the trouble they had caused him and promising the blindest obedience ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... is apt to play the dynamite with his or her resolves. Water-drops have ever been formidable weapons of the latter, as we all know; and, not being so accustomed to them then as I have become since, the sight of the poor devil's abject woe and destitution, the thought that illness and suffering were the causes, the secret whisper that my act was a cowardly one, forced me to follow the lines of least resistance, and submit ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... sell their daughters? My heart beats, and my hand trembles, as I write the awful affirmative, Yes! The fathers of this Christian land often sell their daughters, not as Jewish parents did, to be the wives and daughters-in-law of the man who buys them, but to be the abject slaves of petty tyrants and irresponsible masters. Is it not so, my friends? I leave it to your own candor to corroborate my assertion. Southern slaves then have not become slaves in any of the six different ways in which Hebrews ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... explained Dallas. 'That sort of thing has been going on the whole term. If the head of a House is an abject lunatic, there's bound to be ructions. Fags simply live for the sake of kicking up rows. It's meat and drink ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... without their grace and pathos, struggle almost from the first under the crowning unhappiness of unhappiness, that it ceases to be interesting. The five books of the Tristia, written during the earlier years of his banishment, still retain, through the monotony of their subject, and the abject humility of their attitude to Augustus, much of the old dexterity. In the four books of Epistles from Pontus, which continue the lamentation over his calamities, the failure of power is evident. He went on writing ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... said. "I'm all foam. But I've conquered his majesty King Devil for once. He's come back positively abject. My dear, do get up! You're ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... thirdly, of ridiculing the gods which the Athenians worshipped. To prove these evident falsehoods, false witnesses were suborned, upon whose perjuries and the envy and malice of the judges, the accusers wholly relied. They were not disappointed. The judges expected from Socrates that abject submission, that meanness of behaviour, and that servility of defence which they were accustomed to receive from ordinary criminals. In this they were deceived; and his firmness and uncomplying integrity is supposed to have accelerated ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... enemies were resolute enough, accepting defeat with grim carelessness, or with sphinx-like indifference, or even with airy jocularity. But for the most part their alert, eager deference, their tame subservience, the abject humility and debasement of their bent shoulders drove Jadwin to the verge of self-control. He grew to detest the business; he regretted even the defiant brutality of Scannel, a rascal, but none the less keeping his head high. The more the fellows cringed ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... one and a half—the assistant having stork-like proclivities and going home in the autumn to his native Russia, returning in the spring with the first warm winds. I want to keep him over the winter, as there is much to be done even then, and I sounded him on the point the other day. He is the most abject-looking of human beings—lame, and afflicted with a hideous eye-disease; but he is a good worker and plods along unwearyingly from ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... arrested by the American forces in September, 1899, and remained a prisoner until September 23, 1900. Following his release, he lived for a while in a suburb of Manila, in a poor nipa house, under the most adverse and trying circumstances. He was in abject poverty. ...
— Mabini's Decalogue for Filipinos • Apolinario Mabini
... fine: the moon shone down in full brilliancy. But at the appointed time the predicted phenomenon took place, and the wild howls of the savages proclaimed their abject terror. They came in a body to Columbus and implored his intercession. They promised to let him want for nothing if only he would avert this judgment. As an earnest of their sincerity they collected hastily a quantity of food and offered it at his feet. At first, diplomatically hesitating, Columbus ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... result. The Plymouth colony, going out with neither charter nor patronage, and with the purpose not of finding gold or making fortunes, but of establishing a home wherein to dwell in perpetuity—which was handicapped by the abject poverty of its members, and by the severities of a climate till then unknown—this enterprise was found to hold the elements of success from the start, and it steadily increased in power and influence. It suffered from time to time from the tyranny of royal ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... taught. Sanch, you'll have to study up lively for I'm not going to have you beaten by French dogs," said Ben, shaking his finger so sternly that Sancho groveled at his feet and put both paws over his eyes in the most abject manner. ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... more insupportable. This imperious beauty, accustomed to domineer and to be adored, could not struggle against the despair, which the prospect of her fall caused her. What carried her beyond all bounds, was that she could no longer disguise from herself, that she had an abject rival whom she had supported, who owed everything to her; whom she had so much liked that she had several times refused to dismiss her when pressed to do so by the King; a rival, too, so beneath her in beauty, and older by several years; to feel that it was this lady's-maid, not to say this servant, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... the endless meal was over, and yards of white veils had been tied over pounds of hair—or is it, too, bought by the yard?—and some eight ensembles with their abject complements had been packed into three automobiles and a trap, I drew a long breath and faced about. I had just then only one object in life—to find Alison, to assure her of my absolute faith and confidence in her, and to offer my help and my poor self, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the conspirators had determined to stake all upon one final throw. Fortunately the very desperateness of the plot has proved its undoing, and from the tremulous lips of the perpetrators themselves comes to-day a froth of vituperation and rancorous abuse that is the surest confession of abject failure. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... them in the presence, and sometimes in the absence of her husband, as accident, not arrangement, directed. They approached her with all the agitation and tenderness of the most ardent lovers. Amongst the number, was a certain celebrated orator. This man was her abject slave. A glance from her expressive eye raised him to the summit of bliss, or rendered his night sleepless. The complacent husband of Madame G——regarded these men as his most beloved friends, because they enlarged the ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... entrance of Signor Rodicaso and friends, Fidelia rose, turned toward them, and made a profound courtesy, as if to signify her abject submission. Signor Rodicaso bowed with equal profundity, and straightway proceeded to make a speech to the lady, in which he spoke of the wild idolatry that he had long felt for her, and alluded most disparagingly to his own merits. If the Signor's statements could ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... could have invested that "something" with more of creepy horror. We all drew close together. I felt a crinkly feeling along my back which I had never known before. If Peter had not been so manifestly frightened we might have thought he was trying to "pass a joke" on us. But such abject terror as his could not ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... mention it, before you have heard it from mine. The fact is, in plain English"—he was playing with his dessert-knife as he spoke, and seemed to be debating within himself whereabouts upon the dinning-table he should begin to carve his name—"the fact is, I made an abject fool of myself this morning. I love your daughter—and told ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... cause of this want of family harmony is but indistinctly stated, but apparently it was due to the irregular habits of the son, and to the severity of the father; while all this domestic misery was rendered doubly bitter by the almost abject want of the household. On the night of November the 9th, 1856, Venanzio Bonci, the father, Maria Rosa, his wife, and their daughter, Caterina, were at supper in the miserable room, which formed the whole of their dwelling, waiting for the return of the son, Luigi, ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... hideous"—she went on as without hearing him. "Abject above all. Or old above all. It's when one's old that it's worst. I don't care what becomes of it—let what WILL; there it is. It's a doom—I know it; you can't see it more than I do myself. Things have to happen as they will." With which she came back again ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... misfortune. It is the key with which he tries the wards of nature. And from the morning of life to its last twilight he is always looking. forward. The saddest spectacle of all—sadder even than pain, and bereavement, and death—is a man void of hope. The most abject people is a hopeless people, in whose hearts the memories of the past, and the pulses of endeavor, and the courage of faith are dead, and who crouch by their own thresholds and the crumbling tombstones of their fathers, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... the attendance was within a few of 100,000. The exhibits were ample, and many of them strikingly unique. Few, even at the South, believed that the Southern States could set forth such displays. The fact that this was possible so soon after a devastating war, which had left the section in abject poverty, was a speaking compliment to the land and to the energy ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Sir Francis," rejoined the other; "and if you had followed my counsel, you would not have condescended to play the abject wooer, but have adopted the manlier course, and demanded her hand as ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... the strange presence, and caught at a post for support. His self-possession was gone; he trembled like the most abject coward. Only for a moment—and then, when he looked again, ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... condition of successful campaigning at great distances from the mother country and in the midst of hostile people, and the unquestioning respect which they had to pay to the orders of their general prepared them for abject submission to the will of their sovereign. To their bravery, moveover, they owed not only money and slaves, but also necklaces and bracelets of honour, and distinctions and offices in the Pharaonic administration. The king, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... in a very short time she obtained such an influence over me that everything I possessed was at her disposal. Before long, she had so plundered me, and led me into such extravagance, that I was reduced to the most abject poverty, and had nothing I could call my own but this miserable rag which you now see ...
— Hindoo Tales - Or, The Adventures of Ten Princes • Translated by P. W. Jacob
... The judge regarded him with a look of great steadiness. He saw his small face go white, he saw the look of abject terror in his eyes. The judge raised his fist and brought it down with a great crash on the table, so that the breakfast dishes leaped and rattled. "We don't know any boy ten years old with a ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... miserly, manner. His income could not have been less than six thousand dollars a year, and his expenditures could not have been more than six hundred. His dementia, ironically enough from the day that he came into his fortune, took the form of a most pitiable and abject fear that he would die in poverty, misery, and want; and so, year after year, cashing his checks as fast as he got them, never trusting the bank with a penny, he kept hiding away somewhere in his house every cent he could ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... gradually became too numerous, there being only one apartment for ourselves, and such of our servants as were not imprisoned elsewhere. Some of them were frightened out of their senses, and the state of abject fear and trembling in which one Limboo arrived, and continued for nearly a week, was quite distressing* [It amounted to a complete prostration of bodily and mental powers: the man trembled and started when spoken to, or at any noise, a cold sweat constantly ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... bulk of the people was to deepen "the strong delusion," as to Anti-christ, under which they laboured, so that they fed upon "The Lie," and became abject slaves in their wills and worship of ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... at him, at the lean figure sunk in the armchair, at the dragged, infirm face, the blurred, owlish eyes, the expression of abject self-pity, ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... and exultation, had not leisure to recollect, nor perhaps penetration to perceive, the effect that this little sally might have upon his interests. Despotic and boorish as was the genius of Mr. Hartley, it cowred under that of Sophia with the most abject servility. And that lady now vowed eternal war ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... the scarlet flood sweep over her cheeks and then as swiftly fade. It was abject surrender, and yet he had no ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... introspection—and either will serve the turn—to assure us that the expensive splendor of the house of worship has an appreciable uplifting and mellowing effect upon the worshipper's frame of mind. It will serve to enforce the same fact if we reflect upon the sense of abject shamefulness with which any evidence of indigence or squalor about the sacred place affects all beholders. The accessories of any devout observance should be pecuniarily above reproach. This requirement is imperative, whatever latitude may be allowed with regard to these accessories ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... be excepted, indeed, the lower classes of the peasantry, who seem to have been in a more abject state in Aragon than in most other feudal countries. "Era tan absolute su dominio (of their lords) que podian mater con hambre, sed, y frio a sus vasallos de servidumbre." (Asso y Manuel, Instituciones, p. 40,—also Blancas, Commentarii, p. 309.) These serfs extorted, in an insurrection, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... sorrows of ill-starred love, she caught glimpses of something else—a terrible something which she did not understand. Dark forms would now and then appear to her, gliding through the paradise of love, disgraced and abject. The sacred name of love was linked with the direst shame and the deepest misery. Among people whom she knew, things happened from time to time which she dared not think about; and when, in stern but guarded words, her ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... strongly inclined to refuse him; then, perhaps moved to compassion by his abject attitude, she relented and agreed. "Very well," she said, and retaining the picture moved swiftly before him into the shadowed garden. He lagged after her, inventing a hundred impracticable yarns. She found her chair and sat ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... Blank it all, sir, if it comes to THAT—the Arguellos—if there's a hound of them living—might go down on their knees to have their name borne by such a creature! By the Eternal, sir, if one of them dared to cross her path with a word that wasn't abject—yes, sir, ABJECT, I'd wipe his dust off the earth and send it back to his ancestors before he knew where he was, or ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... these dances came feasts of unheard of magnificence, during which the pope in the sight of all men completely ignored Lent and did not fast. The abject of all these fetes was to scatter abroad a great deal of money, and so to make the Duke of Valentinois popular, while poor Jacopo d'Appiano ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the football variety) the world is peopled by three classes, firstly the keen and regular player, next the partial slacker, thirdly, and lastly, the entire, abject and absolute slacker. ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... verandahs, and his Commanding Officer would put in certificates of the prisoner's moral character, while the jury would pant and the summer uniforms of the witnesses would smell of dye and soaps; and some abject barrack-sweeper would lose his head in cross-examination, and the young barrister who always defended soldiers' cases for the credit that they never brought him, would say and do wonderful things, and would then quarrel with me because I had not reported him correctly. ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... back—lean and fawning. No more abject contrition was ever shown by dog before. He was starving. They fed him at the usual hour; and not one ounce more than the usual amount of food did he get. Next day he took his old place in the traces and ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... not amount to much. Groote, the porter, came in, cringing and wretched, in the abject state of a man who has lately been drugged and is now slowly recovering. Although sharply questioned, he had nothing to ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... those hard-drinking days. One evening, when the guests had sat till they were inflamed with wine, they entered the drawing-room, and Burns in some way grossly insulted the fair hostess. Next day he wrote a letter of the most abject and extravagant penitence. This, however, Mr. and Mrs. Riddel did not think fit to accept. Stung by this rebuff, Burns recoiled at once to the opposite extreme of feeling, and penned a grossly scurrilous monody on "a lady famed for her caprice." This he followed up by other lampoons, ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... revived in another shape, and given to the own son of this very man. God forbid that a son should not be under a certain and reasonable subordination! But though in this country we know a son may possibly be free from the control of his father, yet the meanest slave is not in a more abject condition of slavery than a son is in that country to his father; for it extends to the power of a Roman parent. The office of register is to take care that a full and fair rent is secured to government; and above all, it is his business to take care of the body of laws, the Rawaj-ul-Mulk, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... convulsively and had drawn back in abject, cowering terror. What was it she saw? Evidently it was very real and very ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... was the physical or the mental punishment he had had, we cannot possibly determine, but certain it is that something broke him up from that day, and he lingered on a miserable life of two years or more, and died in abject want. ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... annihilate their tribe; for to put out a fire and leave the embers, and to kill a viper and foster its young, would not be the acts of rational beings. Though the clouds pour down the water of vegetation, thou canst never gather fruit from a willow twig. Exalt not the fortune of the abject, for thou canst never extract sugar from a mat or ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... Lady Clare and Shag greeted its last departing rays with a whinny, accompanied by a wanton kickup from the rear—for whatever Lady Clare did Shag felt in honor bound to do, and was conscious of no disgrace in his abject and ape-like imitation. They had spent an hour, perhaps, in such delightful performances, when all of a sudden they were startled by a deep bass whinny, which rumbled and shook like distant thunder. ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... said the courtiers and church dignitaries, debating these matters. The insanity of plebeians was always enormous, and never more so than when fortune for a moment smiled. Full of arrogance and temerity when affairs were prosperous, plunged in abject cowardice when dangers and reverses came—such was the People—such ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... listened to this, at first with that look of abject pain on his face. Then as the substance of the man's confession dawned upon his mind he began to exhibit fresh interest that caused another expression, that of wild hope, to swiftly take the place of ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... dog, Bawsey, burst through the door, and rushed furiously towards him. Surrey drew his dagger to defend himself from the hound's attack, but the precaution was needless. Bawsey's fierceness changed suddenly to the most abject submission, and with a terrified howl, she retreated from the room with' her tail between her legs. Even the old woman ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of social progress,—a part of the succession of civilizations. The past has been inevitably a period of ignorance, of engrossing physical necessities, and of brute force,—not of freedom, of philanthropy, and of culture. During that lower epoch, woman was necessarily an inferior, degraded by abject labor, even in time of peace,—degraded uniformly by war, chivalry to the contrary notwithstanding. Behind all the courtesies of Amadis and the Cid lay the stern fact,—woman a child or a toy. The flattering troubadours chanted her into ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... was not appreciated by the emperor and his nobles. They placed Ernst under the ban of the empire, and thus deprived him of rank, wealth, and property, reducing him by a word from high estate to abject beggary. His life and liberty were left him, but nothing more, and, driven by despair, he sought the retreat of his fugitive friend Werner, who had taken refuge in the depths of the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... and into the chemist's shop in the Place d'Armes to get my medicine, and ran back again to give it me, before I knew where I was (such is the debilitating influence of malaria), instead of forgiving him, I found myself, in abject contrition, actually asking him ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... our prisoner did not expect much mercy; for we could see that his face was absolutely livid when, pistol in hand, either of us approached to examine his bonds; and once, in his abject dread, he shrieked aloud to Lilla to come and ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... her arms akimbo and stared mercilessly at the abject creature before her, who seemed to droop and wilt under her gaze as if he were sinking ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... a gray donkey came tearing down the beach. Max dressed as a farmer, with blue overalls and straw hat, was making a desperate effort to control the donkey, while Gwen in a chintz frock and pink sunbonnet sat close beside him, clinging to her seat in abject fear. ...
— Princess Polly At Play • Amy Brooks
... government, and lose gradually all regard for, and all sympathy with the rights and welfare of the people. There is a tacit agreement between them and the government, by which they are bound to keep the people in a state of utter and abject submission to the despot's will, while he, on his part, is bound to collect from the people thus subdued the sums of money necessary for their pay. Thus it is the standing army which is that great and terrible sword by means of which one man is able to strike awe into ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... resource: if I "didn't like it," meaning the state of things in Gombroon, I might "abdicate." Yes, I knew that. I might abdicate; and, once having cut the connection between myself and the poor abject islanders, I might seem to have no further interest in the degradation that affected them. After such a disruption between us, what was it to me if they had even three tails apiece? Ah, that was fine talking; but this connection with ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... the two families knew of Carter's repeated attempts to be reconciled to Starr; of his feeble endeavor at explanation; of her continued refusal even to see him; and the decided letter she wrote him after he had written her the most abject apology he knew how to frame; nor of her father's interview with the young man wherein he was told some facts about himself more plainly than anyone, even in his babyhood, had ever dared to tell him. Mr. Endicott agreed to keep silence for Starr's sake, provided the young man would do nothing to ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... to you the sudden and abject fear that came over me at that dreadful sight. It was a dread of the abyss, the dread of the crags which seemed to nod upon me. My head swam. I pressed the child to my side and sat my horse as still as a statue. I was speechless ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad |
