"Hag" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Lieutenant Schwatka says, may be more likened to "locust sawdust and wild honey." The first time I partook of this dainty I had unfortunately seen it in course of preparation, which somewhat marred the relish with which I might otherwise have eaten it. The confectioner was a toothless old hag, who mixed the ingredients in a wooden dish dirtier than anything I ever saw before, and filled with reindeer hairs, which, however, were not conspicuous when well mingled with the half-churned grass and moss. She extracted ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... deliberate dragging down of the conception until it becomes symbolical of the lowest and most venal form of love? In the Naples version Amor, a fairly-fashioned divinity of more or less classic aspect, presides; in the Madrid and subsequent interpretations of the legend, a grasping hag, the attendant of Danae, holds out a cloth, eager to catch her share of the golden rain. In the St. Petersburg version, which cannot be accounted more than an atelier piece, there is, with some slight yet appreciable variations, ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... table, idly shuffling a pack of grimy cards, sat Old Meg, a horrible old hag, wrinkled in face like a mummy, with only the stumps of teeth which had more the appearance of tusks. Her unkempt hair was matted and ugly wisps of it hung down over her bleary eyes. For clothes she wore an old-fashioned faded ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... hag doing here? Where is Robert? Where is Thomas? I ordered them to stay till I came. Mr. Turner, why did not you stay? What! has not the coroner been here yet? The coroner must see the body, I tell you. Good God! What ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... November), and shot them in considerable numbers, when they were resting, exhausted by their flight; hardly a creditable practice, and unworthy of a true lover of nature. A wood in Kirkstead, named “Bird-Hag Wood,” was formerly a favourite haunt of the woodcock, and I have shot many in it; but it was cleared away in the seventies. {36a} Woodcock occasionally breed on the moor, and a nest was found some years ago within 80 yards ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... Hapacuson also, that decrepit hag, who personated the righteous Sallasalsor, from Nechal, now stripped of the garments of hypocrisy, filled the eyes of the sages with terror and amazement. Her lean bones, wrapped round with yellow skin, appeared like the superstitious mummies of western Egypt. She was mounted on a dreadful ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... the wicked instrument of the devil.' The culprit was evidently a wild Irishwoman, of a strange tongue. Goodwin, who made the complaint, 'had no proof that could have done her any hurt;' but the 'scandalous old hag,' whom some thought 'crazed in her intellectuals,' was bewildered, and made strange answers, which were taken as confessions, sometimes, in excitement, using her native dialect. . . . It was plain the prisoner was a Roman ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... remains, but not with the spiritual soul. It continues to hold its place in the vast storehouse of the universe. And it is this second daenam which stands before the (spiritual) soul in the form of a beautiful maiden or an ugly hag. That which brings this daenam within the sight of the (spiritual) soul is the third part (i.e., the fifth of the septenary group), the baodhas. Or in other words, the (spiritual) soul has with it, or in it, the true consciousness ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... know just as well as I do that it's a sure melting pot for tar!" exclaimed Larry, hoarsely. "Anybody with one eye could see that, because there's tar all over it. Guess they use it with some of their boats. And Phil, look at that old hag toting that awful bag on her head. What d'ye suppose is in that but geese feathers as old as the hills! Oh, murder! we're up against it good and hard. I can almost feel my wings beginning to sprout ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... "Thou art the greatest hell-hag, and thou wishest that we should take that course which will be the worst for all of us. But ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... the sea, his company being nine. Then he went upon an island, where he saw a withered old woman on her hands at the door of a house. "Whence is the hag?" asked Patrick; "great is her infirmity." A young man answered, and said: "She is a descendant of mine," said the young man; "if you could see the mother of this girl, O cleric! she is more infirm still." "In what way did this happen?" ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... folk, getting down the Black Hag (so he confided to Edward). The two gardener lads had been ordered to attend his Honour. So in order to amuse himself, he, the majordomo of Bradwardine, had been amusing himself with dressing Miss Rose's flower beds. It was but seldom that he found time for such like, though ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... "decliner" of the admonition to turn no more to the hill of doom, but boldly to climb the hill of peace, will fall stricken through the soul. That warning voice, which once shook the desert, has now promised (ver. 26)—for a promise, the promise of an eternal redemption, lies deep in that threatening (Hag. ii. 6)—that not earth only but heaven is yet to feel His shaking, and once for ever when it comes. He, "yet once more," shall work one vast "removing"; and then (ver. 27) a stability irremovable shall finally come in. "The things that ...
— Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews • Handley C.G. Moule
... found her unmoved, but the threat, uttered in a tone which showed that I was in earnest, proved more effectual. With an ugly look, under which my men shrank as if her eye had power to scorch them, the hag said that she would confess, and, with impotent rage, admitted the truth of Boisrueil's surmises. The rearward gate had been barricaded that afternoon by the Great Band, who had had notice of our ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... and woke and dozed again through the hot, airless hours. The memory of the girl, the impression of her attitude, of her pale, unsmiling face, of her low, strong voice, tormented him; he felt himself alone with her in a hag-ridden land where all men were murderers or murdered; and she would have none of him. He arose sour ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... writers on art, and among their readers, something very similar to what had happened, apparently, when the Englishmen of the sixteenth century first came in contact with the Italian Renaissance itself, or whatever remained of it. Their conscience was sickened, their imagination hag-ridden, by the discovery of so much beauty united to so much corruption; and, among our latter-day students of the Renaissance, there became manifest the same morbid pre-occupation, the same exaggerated repulsion, which is but inverted ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... not know, or acknowledge to themselves. The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his fancy. Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his bidding. Harmless fairies "nodded to him, and did him curtesies:" and the night-hag bestrode the blast at the command of "his so potent art." The world of spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women: and there is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other; for if the preternatural characters he describes ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... great-coat, and there he sits like a dragon guarding his treasure, surrounded by masterpieces! He is a cunning connoisseur by this time; he has increased his capital tenfold; he is not to be cheated; he knows the tricks of the trade. The monster among his treasures looks like some old hag among a score of young girls that she offers to the public. Beauty and miracles of art are alike indifferent to him; subtle and dense as he is, he has a keen eye to profits, he talks roughly to those who know less than he does; he has learned to act a part, he pretends to love his pictures, or again ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... than men say. I looked into the mere (the mere was calm), And goodly seemed my beard, and goodly seemed My solitary eye, and, half-revealed, My teeth gleamed whiter than the Parian marl. Thrice for good luck I spat upon my robe: That learned I of the hag Cottytaris—her Who ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... pursued among men than it is pursued by these beasts, not even in our present century. They have their advanced out-posts, their sentinels and spies; their ambuscades, their expedients, and a thousand other inventions of the pernicious and accursed science Warfare, a hag born, herself, of Styx,[10] ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... Valencian, the Murcian on his glebe, you find an exact relation established; the one exhales the other. The man is what his country is, tragic, hag-ridden, yet impassive, patient under the sun. He stands for the natural verities. You cannot change him, move, nor hurt him. He can earn neither your praises nor reproach. As well might you blame the staring noon of ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... seen running to the waterside. A group of women standing on a low knoll gazed intently, and nothing of them but the heads showed above the unstirring stalks of a maize field. Suddenly within a cluster of empty huts near by the voice of an invisible hag was heard scolding with shrill fury ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... lies; a lump of lead by day, And, in my short, distracted, nightly slumbers, The hag ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... de Mont Majeur, a ruin of gigantic size, embracing all periods of architecture; where nothing seems to flourish now but henbane and the wild cucumber, or to breathe but a mumble-toothed and terrible old hag. The ruin stands above a desolate marsh, its vast Italian buildings of Palladian splendour looking more forlorn in their decay than the older and austerer mediaeval towers, which rise up proud and patient and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... noted that they very frequently resorted to hills and mountains, their meetings taking place "on the mead, on the oak sward, under the lime, under the oak, at the pear tree." Thus the fairy rings which are often to be met with on the Sussex downs are known as hag-tracks,[4] from the belief that "they are caused by hags and witches, who dance there at midnight."[5] Their love for sequestered and romantic localities is widely illustrated on the Continent, instances of which have been collected together by Grimm, who remarks how "the fame of particular ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... away in some corner, I got in front of the fire, spied where the mirror was, threw myself upon it, and bounded from its face upon the oval pool of dim light on the ceiling, assuming, as I passed, the shape of an old stooping hag, who poured something from a phial into a basin. I made the handle of the spoon with my own nose, ha! ha!" And the shadow-hand caressed the shadow-tip of the shadow-nose, before the ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... staring rebuke as he hated virtue—hated it as if its well were in the churchyard where the old captain was buried sixty years ago. —Confound him! why wouldn't he lie still? He made some effort to be polite to the old hag, as he called her, in that not very secret chamber of his soul, whose door was but too ready to fall ajar, and allow its evil things to issue. He searched his lumber-room for old stories to tell, but found it difficult to lay hold on any fit for the ears ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... help him in the shop, and stand over a table all day, pushing a big heavy iron. Your complexion will look fine after about fifteen years of baking that way, won't it! And you'll be humped over like an old hag. And probably you'll live in one room back of the shop. And then at night—oh, you'll have your artist—sure! He'll come in stinking of gasoline, and cranky from hard work, and hinting around that if it hadn't ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... old hag, carrying a basket of water-bottles, "'tis she, and the other is Terere. I lived with them once at Tutuila. She who is now made a wife and looketh so good and holy went away but a year ago with the captain ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... from his couch, and with naught upon him but his vest and doublet, he went with his sword in hand to the gate, and there he saw two poor serving-men struggling with a hag dressed all in armour. Behind her came eight others. And their eyes, from between the bars of their helms, shone with a horrible red fire, and from each point of their armour sparks flashed, and the ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... at an imaginary person. "If I didn't, he'd go on all night. He's no more fit to look after himself than a baby—and he gets it again with his boots in the morning.—Yes, yes, call me names if it pleases you. Names don't kill. And if I am a hag, you're a rascal, that's what you are! The way you treat that poor, good ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... Sapeur, because he had served in Africa in his youth, entertained other aversions. He said, with a roguish air: "She is an old hag who has ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... ravishers, and on being thrust into the little cell, she found herself in the presence of an old sibyl, who kept murmuring to herself a Saxon rhyme, as if to beat time to the revolving dance which her spindle was performing upon the floor. The hag raised her head as Rebecca entered, and scowled at the fair Jewess with the malignant envy with which old age and ugliness, when united with evil conditions, are apt to look upon youth ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... the stainless snows it grinned, A foul and withered shape, that cast Ribbed shadows, and the gleaming wind Went rattling through it as it passed; It filled the heart with a strange dread, Hag-like, it made a whimpering sound, And gibbered like the wandering dead In some ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... woods, wold, wildwood. Associated Words: sylvan, sylviculture, nemophilist, nemophily, nemoral, afforest, afforestation, Silenus, hamadryad, glade, reforestize, reforestation, reboise, reafforest, forestry, forester, disboscation, disforest disforestation, hag, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... and now that you will do the next thing that I ask of you, whatever it is, if it is in your power," said the hag when she heard the story, "and I will tell you ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... proportion kept, it exhibited the negative result of a growing annoyance. "God knows why they all show at once," she exclaimed discontentedly, seated—as customary—before the eminently truthful reflection of a newly discovered set of lines. "I'm not old enough to begin to look like a hag." ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of the awful jesting hag, Circumstance, I could only cry 'Winnie! my poor Winnie!' while over my head seemed to pass Necessity and her ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... says the old merchant, "and don't you want your fairing too? I went from one end of the market to the other before I could get what you wanted. I bought the silver saucer from an old Jew, and the transparent apple from a Finnish hag." ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... dreams came into its place. "The cool softness of the air, the brilliant sparkle of the stars! And then the magic of the moonlight! Young child-moon, half-grown girl-moon, voluptuous woman-moon, sallow, old-hag-moon, it was alike to me. Pete says I'm 'fey' in the moonlight. He, says I'm ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... thimble," but that is only because it is really a game of "see the thimble." Suppose that at the end of such a game the thimble had not been found at all; suppose its place was unknown for ever: the result on the players would not be playful, it would be tragic. That thimble would hag-ride all their dreams. They would all die in asylums. The pleasure is all in the poignant moment of passing from not knowing to knowing. Mystery stories are very popular, especially when sold at sixpence; but that is ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... seven when Anthony Barraclough descended the stairs of the flats and hailed a taxi. The street was deserted save for a policeman and an old hag who was sorting over the contents of a dustbin outside the adjoining house. She shot a quick glance at Barraclough and broke into ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... the darkness. From the side of the fire where the women sat darted Esle, the High Priestess, a bloody bit of liver in her hand. Following her, and snarling like an enraged cat, came one of the maidens of the tribe. The aged hag, Esle, whose duty it was to declare to the tribe the will of Degar Astok, the mighty one who dwelt in the heavens and sent the storms to enforce his will, came to a pause before Uglik, ...
— B. C. 30,000 • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... came to Ogumkeok he found a hut, and in it, seated over a fire, the ugliest old hag he had ever seen, trembling in every limb, as if near death, dirty, ragged, and loathsome in all ways. Looking up at him with bleared eyes, she begged him to gather her a little firewood, which he did. And then she prayed him to free her from the wah gook(M.), or vermin, ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... I think," said he. "'Tis respect for my mother that inspires me." And his green eyes flashed upon the painted hag. She ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... wretched old hag who keeps the fruit-stall. And it seems you gave her and all her family tea and cake in the kitchen ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... the devil didn't she? I shall sack that woman. Isabel hasn't a chance to get well with a mischievous old hag like that always ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... believe it; but in her heart she felt that it must be true. As for Thorbeorn, who had heard it all through the wall, whatever he may have thought, he was very indignant, and angry with her too. "Put such mummery out of your head. We are not Christians for nothing, I should hope. A scandalous hag with her bell-wether voice and airs of a great lady! What has she to do with good women, well brought up? A woman's duty is to leave match-making to her parents, and the future to God and His Angels. Who can foretell his end? Can the priest? Can the bishop? No. And who ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... gather in each other's cabins which looked over the large openings on the plantation, and when they would see a light at a great distance and see it open and shut, they would say, "there is an old hag," and if it came from a direction in which those lived whom they called witches, one would say, "Dat looks like old Aunt Susan;" another would say, "No, dat look like man hag;" still another, "I tink dat look ...
— My Life In The South • Jacob Stroyer
... near death, this man directed that, as soon as the breath was out of his body, a cocoa-nut should be cracked, and its kernel disengaged from the shell and placed upon his stomach under the grave-clothes. Having descended to the Shades, he beheld Miru, the horrible hag who rules them, and whose deformities need not now be detailed. She commanded him to draw near. "The trembling human spirit obeyed, and sat down before Miru. According to her unvarying practice she set for her intended victim a bowl of food, and bade him eat it quite up. Miru, with evident ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... say very bandy, Mrs. Jiniwin," he says of his friend's legs, "we will confine ourselves to bandy. He is gone, my friends, where his legs would never be called in question." They go on to the discussion of his nose, and Mrs. Jiniwin inclines to the view that it is flat. "Aquiline, you hag! Aquiline," cries Mr. Quilp, pushing in his head and striking his nose with his fist. There is nothing better in the whole brutal exuberance of the character than that gesture with which Quilp punches his own face with his own fist. It is ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... give it up, of course, but what did she fix this time for? The old witch fixed the time for me to come herself. It's out of my way. And where the devil she can have got to, I can't make out. She sits here from year's end to year's end, the old hag; her legs are bad and yet here all of a sudden she is out ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... for help; I saw the tables, the chairs, the places where she stood or sat, empty, deserted, dead. I could not stay where I was; I had no one to go to but to the parent-mischief, the preternatural hag, that had "drugged this posset" of her daughter's charms and falsehood for me, and I went down and (such was my weakness and helplessness) sat with her for an hour, and talked with her of her daughter, and the sweet days we had passed together, and said I thought her a good girl, and believed ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... the paltry feats of beardless Meltonians, and try to shame old Father Thames himself with muddy Whissendine's foul stream? Away! thou vampire, Indolence, that suckest the marrow of imagination, and fattenest on the cream of idea ere yet it float on the milk of reflection. Hence! slug-begotten hag, thy power is gone—the murky veil thou'st drawn o'er memory's sweetest page ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... are unspeakable! Though I'll admit that thoughtless persons deplore the sadness of the novel of observation and its resemblance to the life it represents. These people would have it jovial, smart, highly coloured, aiding them, in their base selfishness, to forget the hag-ridden existences of their brothers. ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... turned into the squalid street at the end of which stands Springer's. In the sunshine of the mild March morning the facade of the tall buff building looked for all the world like a gaunt, ugly, unkempt hag, frowning between bleared old eyes that seemed to coax—nay, rather to coerce me into entering ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... living with these two people, one a big-headed, and in proportion bigger-nosed man, the other, an old ignorant hag, her face of a dirty yellow, and her jaw! it reminds me of a species of fish which have a mouth that opens vertically—'Melanocetus Johnstoni'—I think the ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... is honest. But having put that cassock on, it poisoned him: he was strangled in his bands. He goes through life, tearing, like a man possessed with a devil. Like Abudah in the Arabian story, he is always looking out for the Fury, and knows that the night will come and the inevitable hag with it. What a night, my God, it was! what a lonely rage and long agony—what a vulture that tore the heart of that giant! It is awful to think of the great sufferings of this great man. Through life he always seems alone, somehow. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... legend says, as grim Sir Ranulph view'd A wretched hag her footsteps drag beneath his lordly wood. His bloodhounds twain he called amain, and straightway gave her chase; Was never seen in forest green, so ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... up to the edges of the ice-river and the green caves of the ice-hills. A wanderer in spring, in summer, autumn and winter, with an empty heart and a burning never-satisfied desire; who hath seen in the uncouth places many an evil unmanly shape, many a foul hag and changing ugly semblance; who hath suffered hunger and thirst and wounding and fever, and hath seen many things, but hath never again seen that fair woman, or that ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... his old associations with Montparnasse, she warmly encouraged my friendship with him—yea, in spite of my living so deep in the wrong bank that the first time he brought her to my studio, she declared she hadn't seen anything so like Bring-the-child-to-the- old-hag's-cellar-at-midnight since her childhood. She is a handsome woman, large, and of a fine, high colour; her manner is gaily dictatorial, and she and I got ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... passed into a room about sixteen feet square and eight feet high. At one end was a stove in which a fire burned feebly, and close by a small kerosene lamp on a table dimly lighted the room. An old hag, who had lost the greater part of her nose, and whose face was half hidden by the huge frill of the cap she wore, sat rocking herself in a rickety chair by the table. The room was more than half in the shadow, and the air was so dense and foul that I could scarcely ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... have a breast in common, I must share in that shame, Since from the womb of some poor woman Each evil one came— Every hot and blundering thought, Every hag-rid will, And every haut king pride-distraught That drove men ...
— The Village Wife's Lament • Maurice Hewlett
... from this hole the green head of a parrot which the old woman carried in her hump. This creature called out, "Cuckoo," in a thin, squeaking, far-away voice, and then withdrew again into the frightful old hag's hump. Oh! when I heard that "Cuckoo!" a cold perspiration formed on my forehead; but suddenly the woman disappeared and then I realized that it ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... devil. Chairs, stand, bed, and my very clothes, took shape and form, and lived; and every one of them cursed me. Then in one corner of my room, a form, larger and more hideous than all the others, appeared. Its look was that of a witch, or hag, or rather like descriptions that I had read of them. It marched right up to me, with a face and look that will haunt me to my grave. It began to talk to me, saying that it would thrust its fingers through my ribs, and drink ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... magnates of the city bourgeoisie—was quite without any cultural direction at all. The chief concern of the American people, even above the bread-and-butter question, was politics. They were incessantly hag-ridden by political difficulties, both internal and external, of an inordinate complexity, and these occupied all the leisure they could steal from the sordid work of everyday. More, their new and troubled political ideas tended to absorb all the rancorous ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... there's a witch astride,— The string you see to her leg is tied. She will do a mischief if she can, But the string is held by a careful man, And whenever the evil-minded witch Would cut some caper, he gives a twitch. As for the hag, you can't see her, But hark! you can hear her black cat's purr, And now and then, as a car goes by, You may catch a gleam from her ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the specter's child. 150 Where with black cliffs the torrents toil, He watched the wheeling eddies boil, Till, from their foam, his dazzled eyes Beheld the River Demon rise; The mountain mist took form and limb, 155 Of noontide hag, or goblin grim; The midnight wind came wild and dread, Swelled with the voices of the dead; Far on the future battle-heath His eyes beheld the ranks of death. 160 Thus the lone Seer, from mankind hurled, Shaped forth a disembodied world. One lingering sympathy of mind Still ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... others! He will surely spy All else—to me, me only, magic-blind! And, hark! the hag with drugs, she said, would try To heal love's madness ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... see you. There's blue haze about the trees where you'll be passing, too beautiful to be predominant. No, the fallow squares of earth will be most frequent—they'll be along beside the track like dirty coarse brown sheets drying in the sun, alive, mechanical, abominable. Nature, slovenly old hag, has been sleeping in them with every old farmer or negro or immigrant who ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... keen ear of the malignant hag, suffering as she was. She raised herself up on her elbow, and pointing with her skinny finger to the horror-stricken ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... long as a precipitate of argentic chloride forms, there is obtained on evaporation brilliant white plates, of a very explosive nature, of potassic argentic fulminate, C(NO{2})KAg.CN, from whose aqueous solution nitric acid precipitates a white powder of hydric argentic fulminate, C(NO{2})HAg.CN. All attempts to prepare fulminic acid, or nitro-aceto- nitrile, C(NO{2})H{2}CN, from the fulminates have failed. There is a fulminate of gold, which is a violently explosive buff precipitate, formed when ammonia is added to ter-chloride of gold, and fulminate of platinum, a black ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... expedition was nearly at an end, and I had no reason to economize my provisions, I gave some to the villagers, and the women especially who had hardly ever tasted rice or tinned meat, were delighted. One old hag actually made me a declaration of love, which, unfortunately, I could not respond to in ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... now Lady Mary's turn to show confusion at the old termagant's talk, and she coloured as red as a sunset on the coast of Kerry. I forgave the old hag her discourteous appellation of "baboon" because of the joyful intimation she gave me through the door that Lady Mary was not to be trusted when I was near by. My father used to say that if you are present when an embarrassment comes to a lady ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... main force, and answered curtly that Ingeborg had a heart of gold. He laughed boisterously, and said one could not raise anything on that; adding, with an air of authority, that he believed I spoke the truth, for it was not likely the hag would have kept anything from her oldest boarder. 'I dare say the real truth is,' he wound up, 'that you are hard up, like me, and want ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... toward Thor, her eyes gleaming under her falling fringes of gray hair. Thor stood, unable to move as the hag came toward him. She laid her hands upon his arms. Her feet began to trip at his. He tried to cast her from him. Then he found that her feet and her hands were as strong against his as bands ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... Canidia, the principal, to perform, the other three to assist in, the concoction of a charm, by means of which a certain youth, named Varus, for whom Canidia had conceived a passion, but who regards the hag with the utmost contempt, may be made obsequious to her desires. Canidia appears first, the locks of her dishevelled hair twined round with venomous and deadly serpents, ordering the wild fig-tree and the funereal cypress to be ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... Express," as the crowd had begun to call her, that creature turned her head diagonally backward and let fall a smile. The encroaching beast stopped as if he had been shot! His rider plied whip, and forced him again forward upon the track of the equine hag, but ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... fame, to part: "So long successful in my art," she cried, "And this proud man, so young and so untried!" "Nay," said the Doctor, "dare you trust your wives, The joy, the pride, the solace of your lives, To one who acts and knows no reason why, But trusts, poor hag! to luck for an ally? - Who, on experience, can her claims advance, And own the powers of accident and chance? A whining dame, who prays in danger's view, (A proof she knows not what beside to do;) What's her experience? In the time that's gone, Blundering she wrought, and still she blunders ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... feature in other people's lives. They would be happier if he were dead. They could easier do without his services in the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his fractious spirits. He poisons life at the well-head. It is better to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I should judge, sir. The old hag was rocking to and fro, crooning to herself until one of the two—the live one, I should call him—hurled a curse at her in Spanish and told her to dry up or he'd kill her. All a bluff, for ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... old crone, who must doubtless have worn it on gala days when she went to Lucifer's drawing-room on the Blocksberg. Look at this scarlet bodice, with its gold tassels and fringe, at this cap besmeared with the last fee the hag got from Beelzebub or his imps: it will give me a right worshipful air. To match such jewels, there is this green velvet petticoat with its saffron-coloured trimming, and this mask would melt even Medusa to a grin. Thus accoutred ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... too, my chabo, bring the gras in too; there is room for the gras in my little stable." We entered a large court, across which we proceeded till we came to a wide doorway. "Go in, my child of Egypt," said the hag; "go in, that ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... while this woman is only cunning. All the lure she possesses is the lure of warm, pulsing youth—grown old she will be a repulsive hag. Speculation has made her one of the Borgias, for in the days of Botticelli a Borgia was Pope, and Cesare Borgia and his court were well known to Botticelli—from such a group he could have picked his model, if anywhere. Ruskin has linked this unknown ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... "There's a hag about fit to knock down a policeman," he rejoined, with a feigned indignation fine to see. "Now be sensible, Anna, and let's get out. Are we babes and sucklings or what? Don't make a scene about it. I don't want you to ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... pugnacity. She would be given, perhaps, to some hard brute of a fisherman who had scraped together more soldi than his fellows, or to some coarse, avaricious contadino who would make her toil till her beauty vanished, and she changed into a bowed, wrinkled withered, sun-dried hag, while she was ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Your fire-eating prophet cares little for the right of the cause, provided the fighter come out conqueror; and many a poet praises only that right which is might over-trampling weakness. I have heard the withered hag of an Indian camp chant as spirited war-song as your minstrels of butchery; but the strange thing of it is, that the people, who have taken the sword in a wantonness of conquest, are the races that have ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... prison for some great offence; they had condemned me to many years' imprisonment, condemned me to spend all my youth behind iron-barred windows and they would only let me free again when I had become a wrinkled old hag. Would you love me if I was in prison? Would you come and stand outside my iron bars and speak to ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... "Vile hag! Your purpose was frustrated! Your crime destroyed her beauty and shortened her days—but she lived—lived for ten sweet, bitter years, hidden away from all eyes save mine,—mine that never grew tired of looking in her patient, heavenly face! Ten years I held her ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... what it would be?' growled the old hag. 'From shelter we shall proceed to demand supper, and from supper money to take us on our way. Upon my word, if I could be sure of finding some one every day whose head was as soft as his heart, I wouldn't ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... worldly. At that very hour of his demise, he had ten going pleas before the Session, eight of them oppressive. And the same doom extended even to his agents; his grieve, that had been his right hand in many a left-hand business, being cast from his horse one night and drowned in a peat-hag on the Kye-skairs; and his very doer (although lawyers have long spoons) surviving him not long, and dying on a sudden ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... before, for every week she had caught and cleaned a mess of fish and carried them up the ravine to the woman's shanty. But today, Tess wanted to consult the seeress about Andy. She believed implicitly in the fortune-pot. Hadn't the old, old hag told her, long ago, when Daddy Skinner was in prison, that the state couldn't hurt ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... before. It required no supernatural wisdom for any man on the floor to see that Bob Brownley's seed had fallen in superheated soil, that his until now secret hellite was about to be tested. It needed no expert in the mystic art of deciphering the wall hieroglyphics of Old Hag Fate to see that the hands on the clock of the "System" were approaching twelve. It needed no ear trained to hear human heart and soul beats to detect the approaching sound of onrushing doom to the stock-gambling structure. The deafening roar of the brokers that had broken ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... old hag," he screamed, now quite beside himself, "one of your rotten tribe's in that lookout tower, d'you understand? If you don't bring that punt across I'll have him crucified before your eyes! Hear ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... that Mr. Neville is very fond of shooting,—so much so that before we knew anything of him except his name we had heard that he had been on our coast after seals and sea birds. We have very high cliffs near here,—some people say the highest in the world, and there is one called the Hag's Head from which men get down and shoot sea-gulls. He has been different times in our village of Liscannor, and I think he has a boat there or at Lahinch. I believe he has already killed ever so ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... petticoats. There's contamination in her circumference, and she trembles with guilt down to the extremities of her corollaries. Ah! you're found out, you rectilineal antecedent, and equiangular old hag! 'Tis with you the devil will fly away, you porter-swiping similitude of the bisection ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... survival as an example of "the conservatism of the religious instinct".[82] The grandmother of the Teutonic deity Tyr was a fierce giantess with nine hundred heads; his father was an enemy of the gods. In Scotland the hag-mother of winter and storm and darkness is the enemy of growth and all life, and she raises storms to stop the grass growing, to slay young animals, and prevent the union of her son with his fair bride. Similarly the Babylonian chaos ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... But the hag's daughter was both wicked and avaricious, and it was not her way to make presents. She therefore made a dash at the little hand, wished the guardian of the well ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... picked out those that belong to the neighbourhood of Pickering, and by the letters placed after each name one can discover in the key given below the special arts practised by each "hag." ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... continue to be that which you are now!" pursued the hag, still attentively reading the lines of her ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... thing that walks by night, In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meagre hag, or stubborn unlaid ghost That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin, or swart fairy of the mine, Hath hurtful ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... sides, and may also from "decomposing animal matter," as we euphemise it now-a-days. The hot pebbles, at high-tide mark,—crowned with a long black row of herring and mackerel boats, laid up in ordinary for the present—are beautifully variegated with mackerels' heads, gurnets' fins, old hag, lobworm, and mussel-baits, and the inwards of a whole ichthyological museum; save at one spot where the Cloaca maxima and Port Esquiline of Aberalva town (small enough, considering the place holds fifteen hundred souls) murmurs from beneath a grey stone arch toward the sea, not unfraught with dead ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... Sometimes I bought a variety of evening papers from a ragged gnome who might be a wonder-child, and made mistakes over the payment to prolong the interview. I leaned against gaunt houses and saw the dancing waifs yield their poor lives to ugly, hag-ridden music. I endured the wailing hymns of voiceless women on winter days in order that I might observe the wretched ragamuffins squalling round their knees the praise of a Creator who had denied them everything. Ah! ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Mr. Upton, with unimaginable irony. "I'd like to take him by the hand—and those infernal Knaggses by the scruff of their dirty necks—and that old hag ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... hag as that teach Rosamond good manners? She knows nothing of them herself! Look how she stands!—actually ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... four years old. and indians at that age are as old as white women are at fifty. if there is any beauty in Creoles, or Indians believe me it fades before they are thirty, and leaves you a homely hag. ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... Deserted House. deg. The Tears of Heaven. Love and Sorrow. To a Lady Sleeping. Sonnet. (Could I outwear my present state of woe.) Sonnet. (Though Night hath climbed her peak of highest noon.) Sonnet. (Shall the hag Evil die with child of Good.) Sonnet. (The pallid thunderstricken sigh for gain.) Love. Love and Death. . The Kraken. The Ballad of Oriana. . Circumstance. . English War Song. National Song. The Sleeping Beauty. . Dualisms. We are ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... so ill!" went on Nozdrev. "And just after I had fallen asleep something DID come and sting me. Probably it was a party of hag fleas. Now, dress yourself, and I will be with you presently. First of all I must give that scoundrel of a ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... under the usual form of cats, till one night he put them to flight with his broadsword, and cut off the leg of one less nimble than the rest; taking it up, to his amazement he found it to be a woman's leg, and next morning he discovered the old hag its owner with but one leg left."—Tylor, Primitive ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... for riflemen, and that is why we are here to find the Sagamore, Mayaro. For our Oneidas have told us that he knows where the castles of the Long House lie, and that he can guide our army unerringly to that dark, obscure and fearsome Catharines-town where the hag, Montour, reigns in her ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... whose legs and arms, raised on high, are each dressed up and capped with a wig under which peers a mask; between these phantoms tremendous fighting and battling take place, and many a sword-thrust is exchanged. The most fearful of all is a certain puppet representing an old hag; every time she appears, with her weird head and ghastly grin, the lights burn low, the music of the accompanying orchestra moans forth a sinister strain given by the flutes, mingled with a rattling tremolo which sounds like the clatter of bones. This creature evidently plays an ugly part ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... others in their ivory whiteness, with an expression resembling that of the hyena. This is considered beauty,—a fashion in full vogue among her countrywomen, who cultivate it with great care,—though to the eyes of the old sailor it rendered the hag all the more hideous. ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... only be induced to admit La Corriveau into her secret chamber and take her into her confidence, the rest—all the rest," muttered the hag to herself, with terrible emphasis, "would be easy, and my reward sure. But that reward shall be measured in my own bushel, not in yours, Mademoiselle des Meloises, when the deed ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Dante we are walking in Hell; see, there is a form, half human and half animal, creeping towards us with lewd look and suggestion. Yonder is an old hag fearful to look upon. Here a group of cast-off wives, whom the law has allowed outraged husbands to consign to this perdition; but who, when sober enough, come back to the upperworld and drag others ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... very poor room in Galway with outer and inner door. Noises of a fair outside. A Hag sitting by the fire. ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... to become a capital fellow; and that I no longer feel inclined to pitch him into a lime-kiln at the mere thought of his putting out a hand to Paula. At the same time," and he started to his feet, "even if I help him to bring the poor little girl away from that demented old hag, I cannot and will not continue to be her physician. There are plenty of quacks about in this corpse of a town, and they may find one ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... old hag, 'he niver tol' me a word. He cum an' he go'd; but he kep his red rag to himself, he did. Duvel! he was a cunning one ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... another, that she was the parent of some lord, who could only be brought to concede something to the Warden by the force of the impledgment of his mother; and, again, that she was the duenna of an heiress, who could only be got through the confinement of the old hag. Be who she might, however, Christie's Will declared, upon the faith of the long shablas of Johnny Armstrong, that he would carry her off through fire and water, as sure as ever Kinmont Willie was carried away by old Wat of Buccleuch from the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... how long a hag may live,' said Elizabeth, 'but she could not have been less than a hundred and thirty years old in the time ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hag he limpit, [moss] An' aye the tither shot he thumpit, Till coward Death behin' him jumpit Wi' deadly feide; [feud] Now he proclaims, wi' tout o' ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... cursed old hag! I know better—there is no time to lose—I must be quick. When will that renegade return from Stamboul? it is time." And Mustapha, with a gloomy countenance, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... heap of sicknesses! You blinking hangman! That you may never die till you'll get a blue hag ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... brow of the cliff on which stood the forlorn and wind-swept house where John Manning lay. An unkempt and hideous old crone as black as night opened the door for him. He left in the hall his hat and overcoat and a little square box he had brought in his hand; and then he followed the ebony hag up-stairs to Colonel Manning's room. Here at the door she left him, after giving a sharp knock. A weak ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... in the meat under her garments, but where she had got it was a mystery. At length I began to doze. There were many sounds in my ear as of thunder and wind, the pigs grunting at the door, and the crackling of the fire in the hag's room. But by and by other sounds seemed to mingle with these—voices of several persons talking, laughing, and singing. At length I became wide awake, and found that these voices proceeded from the next room. Some person was playing a guitar and singing, then others were loudly talking ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... but the house-tops nigher, The corner-lines, the chimneys—look how clean, How new, how naked! See the batch of boats, Here at the stairs, washed in the fresh-sprung beam! And those are barges that were goblin floats, Black, hag-steered, fraught with devilry and dream! And in the piles the water frolics clear, The ripples into loose rings wander and flee, And we—we can behold that could but hear The ancient River singing as he goes New-mailed in morning to the ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... The hag wheeled and approached him swiftly, grasping his shoulders and twisting her face into his. She was a horrible thing—filthy of breath, dirty, with dribbling mouth and red eyes. Her few long black teeth hung loosely like tusks and the folds of fat ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... passions! yes, they would become those impenetrable features! Why, thou deceitful hag! I placed thee as a guard to the rich blossoms of my daughter's beauty. I thought that dragon's front of thine would cry aloof to the sons of gallantry: steel traps and spring guns seemed writ in every wrinkle of it.—But you shall ...
— The Duenna • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... comfortable announcement of a Tory morning paper,—the very incarnation of spiteful imbecility. Such is the self-complacency of the old Tory hag, that in her wildest moments would bite excessively,—if she only had teeth. She has, however, in the very simplicity of her smirking, let out the whole secret—has, in the sweet serenity of her satisfaction, revealed the selfishness, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... then aloof from the house, and the rumbling whereof the evil hag had howled waxed into a thunder, and under our very eyes the great white walls and gold-adorned roofs fell together, and a great cloud of dust rose under ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... we may, ghosts have been seen at dead of night, and not always under the conduct of Mercury;[6] even the Salem witchcraft was very far from being a humbug. They are all true,—the gibbering ghost, the riding hag, the enchantment of wizards, and all the miracles of magic, none of which we have ever seen with the eye, but all of which we believe at heart. But who is it that weirdly draws aside the dark curtain? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various |
