"Irrecoverable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... harpoons from the dead whale, and were putting our gear in order, when, just as we were going to make fast to it, the huge mass sunk from our sight! We looked at each other with blank disappointment. It was gone—there can be no doubt about it, and was utterly irrecoverable. "Don't grumble, my lads. We should have been worse off had we been fast to it with a gale blowing, and unable to cut ourselves adrift," exclaimed Mr Brand. "Let us thank the Almighty that we have escaped ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... irrecoverable fragment about Yuba Bill, I recall in a story about his visiting a lad who had once been his protege in the Wild West, and who had since become a distinguished literary man in Boston. Yuba Bill visits him, and on finding him in evening dress lifts up his voice in a superb lamentation over ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... creditors to debtors, and the debtor party acquiring daily new strength, everyone is in haste to get into the favored class. In any case, the debtor is safe. He has put his enjoyments behind him; they are safe; no turns of fortune can disturb them. The substance he has eaten up, is irrecoverable. The future can not trouble his past. He has nothing to apprehend. He has anticipated more than fortune would ever have granted him. He has tricked fortune; and his creditors—bah! who feels for creditors? What are creditors? Landlords; a pitiless and unpitiable tribe; ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... is the simple undisturbed life, full of friendliness, piety and humble amusements into which I was born. What this life was, as reflected in a happy childhood, a neglected youth and idealised by its irrecoverable loss the following pages ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... farther use) to keep hold of their tails, that they may be withdrawn as soon as they begin to shew signs of uneasiness; but if the air be thoroughly noxious, and the mouse happens to get a full inspiration, it will be impossible to do this before it be absolutely irrecoverable. ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... ever-memorable year of our Lord, 1609, on a Saturday morning, the five-and-twentieth day of March, old style, did that "worthy and irrecoverable discoverer (as he has justly been called), Master Henry Hudson," set sail from Holland in a stout vessel called the Half Moon, being employed by the Dutch East India Company to seek a north-west ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... children. But, unhappily, it is scarcely possible that, under any system, such a thing can come to pass. My honourable and learned friend does not propose that copyright shall descend to the eldest son, or shall be bound up by irrecoverable entail. It is to be merely personal property. It is therefore highly improbable that it will descend during sixty years or half that term from parent to child. The chance is that more people than one will have an interest in it. They will in all probability sell it and divide the proceeds. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Staines saw his money was as irrecoverable as his sherry; and he said to Rosa, "I wonder whether I shall ever live to curse ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... for yielding to the overseer's solicitation to halt on the evening of the 29th April, instead of travelling on all night as I had originally intended: had I adhered to my own judgment all might yet have been well. Vain and bootless, however, now were all regrets for the irrecoverable past; but the present was so fraught with circumstances calculated to recal and to make me feel more bitterly the loss I had sustained, that painful as the subject was, the mind could not help reverting ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... last rest in his own dear house, in one of those deep, dim chambers of Gardencourt where the dark ivy would cluster round the edges of the glimmering window. There seemed to Isabel in these days something sacred in Gardencourt; no chapter of the past was more perfectly irrecoverable. When she thought of the months she had spent there the tears rose to her eyes. She flattered herself, as I say, upon her ingenuity, but she had need of all she could muster; for several events occurred which seemed to confront and defy her. ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... oppose the pretensions of individuals, I would oppose them in books which could be weighed and answered, in which I could evolve the whole of my reasons and feelings, with their requisite limits and modifications; not in irrecoverable conversation, where however strong the reasons might be, the feelings that prompted them would assuredly be attributed by some one or other to envy and discontent. Besides I well know, and, I trust, have acted on that knowledge, that it must be the ignorant and injudicious who extol the unworthy; ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... course to adopt, but very rarely in regard to a quarrel between a man and woman. Things don't "blow over" with a woman. They lie hidden in her heart, gradually permeating her thoughts until her whole attitude towards the man in question has hardened and the old footing between them become irrecoverable. ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... slipping along in the soundless darkness. It had come on to rain, I know not what had happened to the moon, and the whole place was anything but gay. It was not what I had looked for; what I had looked for was in the irrecoverable past. I groped my way back to the inn over the infernal cailloux, feeling like a discomfited Dogberry. I remember now that this hotel was the one (whichever that may be) which has the fragment of a Gallo-Roman portico inserted into one of its angles. I had chosen it for the sake of this exceptional ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... measures towards the Elector, Ferdinand believed that a sincere reconciliation was not to be hoped for. The violent course he had once begun, must be completed successfully, or recoil upon himself. What was already lost was irrecoverable; Frederick could never hope to regain his dominions; and a prince without territory and without subjects had little chance of retaining the electoral crown. Deeply as the Palatine had offended against ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... either Joyntly or Severally, but what are now publish'd to the World in this Volume. One only Play I must except (for I meane to deale openly) 'tis a COMEDY called the Wilde-goose Chase, which hath beene long lost, and I feare irrecoverable; for a Person of Quality borrowed it from the Actours many yeares since, and (by the negligence of a Servant) it was never return'd; therefore now I put up this Si quis, that whosoever hereafter happily meetes with it, shall be thankfully satisfied if he please ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... our Lord's Witnesses is over; and then what Quickly follows? The next thing is, The Kingdoms of this World, are become the Kingdoms of Our Lord, and of His Christ: and then down goes the Kingdom of the Devil, so that he cannot any more come down upon us. Now, the Irrecoverable and Irretrievable Humiliations that have lately befallen the Turkish Power, are but so many Declarations of the second Woe passing away. And the dealings of God with the European parts of the world, at this day, do further strengthen this our expectation. We do see, at this ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... singing right out as hard as they can at the pulpit, which exactly faces them, and at the preacher, if they like, when he gets into it. The organ, which is placed above the singers, and would crush them into irrecoverable atoms if it fell, is a fine instrument; but it is pushed too far into the wall, into the tower which backs it, and if there are any holes above, much of its music must necessarily escape up the steeple. The organ is played with ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... party, and miserable outsider? No; the best that could happen to him was now happening; let the coming day once be past, let a very few weeks have run their course, and the parting would have lost its sting; he would be able to look back, regretfully no doubt, but as on something done with, irrecoverable. Then he would apply himself to his work with all his heart; and it would be possible to think of her, and remember her, calmly. If once an end were put to these daily chances of seeing her, which perpetually fanned his unrest, all ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... already talked too much. Not to say that the French Revolution has since come; and has blown all that into the air, miles aloft,—where even the solid part of it, which must be recovered one day, much more the gaseous, which we trust is forever irrecoverable, now wanders and whirls; and many things are abolished, for the present, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... had not leave from you to go and Mr. Bromfield advised me by no means to go until I heard from you. You must perceive from this case how impossible it is for me to form plans, and transmit them across the Atlantic for approbation, thus letting an opportunity slip which is irrecoverable." ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... similar memorials, past all numbering, which every year accumulates as the wrecks from household remembrances of generations that are passing or passed, that are fading or faded, that are dying or buried. It is well, therefore, amongst so many irrecoverable ruins, that, in the portrait at Aix-la-Chapelle, we still possess one undoubted representation (and therefore in some degree a means for identifying other representations) of a female so memorably adorned by nature; ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... certainly revenge itself, imposing on its actor a perfect retaliation; "a tooth for a tooth;" an irrecoverable infamy to himself, for the infamy he causeth to others. Who will regard his fame, who will be concerned to excuse his faults, who so outrageously abuseth the reputation of others? He suffereth justly, he is paid in his own coin, will any ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... painfully vivid, but it is far exceeded in poignancy by what follows. Indeed it would be difficult to find in all literature, from the wail of David over Jonathan downward, such an expression of the hopeless longing for an irrecoverable presence as informs the broken melodies, the stanzas which are like sobs, of the fifth section of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... made in his likeness, and the palpitating loveliness of Capri became the hot-bed of the unnatural vices of Tiberius. The whole of Southern Italy was sunk in a debasement of animalism and ferocity which seemed irrecoverable, and would have been so, had it not been for the handful of salt which a Galilean peasant had about that time east into the putrid, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... single lines that, in their pregnant sublimity, attend the Wordsworthian like a shadow throughout his life, warning him continually when he is in danger of making a fool of himself. Thus, whenever through mere idleness I begin to waste the irrecoverable moments of eternity, I always think of that masterly phrase (from, I think, the "Prelude," but ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... But presently there was a stifled sob in the darkness; and Hester knew that Nelly was thinking of those irrecoverable weeks of which ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... meantime Abdallah, who had heard of the king's design, was not less afflicted than his beloved Balsora. As for the several circumstances of his distress, as also how the king was informed of an irrecoverable distemper into which he was fallen, they are to be found at length in ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... for harmony and a heart for feeling must be touched! There is a desponding melancholy in the run of the last line! an air of tender regret in the addition of "quite away!" a something so expressive of irrecoverable loss! so forcibly intimating the Ad nunquam reditura! "They never can return!" in short, such an union of sound and sense as we rarely, if ever, meet with in any author, ancient or modern. Our feelings are ...
— English Satires • Various
... Ballade, that composition so laden with formidable memories—begun it without thinking and without apprehension—showed how far I had lost my self-control. Not that the silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past. No! But I saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she. She was for me one of those ladies that have loved and are dead. The simplicity of her mind and her situation, compared with my mind and my situation, seemed unbearably piteous to me. Why, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... lest, falling into one of my usual fits, I should be buried before my real condition could be ascertained. I doubted the care, the fidelity of my dearest friends. I dreaded that, in some trance of more than customary duration, they might be prevailed upon to regard me as irrecoverable. I even went so far as to fear that, as I occasioned much trouble, they might be glad to consider any very protracted attack as sufficient excuse for getting rid of me altogether. It was in vain they endeavored to reassure me by the most solemn promises. I exacted the most sacred oaths, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... up, saw above her the young perplexity of her boy's face, the suspended happiness waiting to brim over. With a fresh touch of misery she said to herself that this was his hour, his one irrecoverable moment, and that she was darkening it by her silence. Her memory went back to the same hour in her own life: she could feel its heat in her pulses still. What right had she to stand in Dick's light? Who was she to decide between his code and hers? She put out her ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... razed quite, And all the rest forgot for which he toil'd." Shakespeare's Sonnets.] as in his first, risk the loss of that particular battle, is inseparable from the condition of man, and the uncertainty of human means; but that the loss of this one battle should be equally fatal and irrecoverable with the loss of his first, that it should leave him with means no more cemented, and resources no better matured for retarding his fall, and throwing a long succession of hindrances in the way of his conqueror, argues some essential defect of system. Under ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... the pledge I gave thee, to give thee tidings of the other world." For a while Meuccio saw him not without terror: then, his courage reviving:—"Welcome, my brother," quoth he: and proceeded to ask him if he were lost. "Nought is lost but what is irrecoverable," replied Tingoccio: "how then should I be here, if I were lost?" "Nay," quoth then Meuccio; "I mean it not so: I would know of thee, whether thou art of the number of the souls that are condemned to the penal fire of hell." "Why no," returned Tingoccio, "not just that; but still ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... regret, with the editor, that compositions of such interest and antiquity should be now irrecoverable? But it is the nature of popular poetry, as of popular applause, perpetually to shift with the objects of the time; and it is the frail chance of recovering some old manuscript, which can alone gratify our curiosity regarding the earlier efforts of the border ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... angry with himself for feeling happy while Tina's mind and body were still trembling on the verge of irrecoverable decline; but the new delight of acting as her guardian angel, of being with her every hour of the day, of devising everything for her comfort, of watching for a ray of returning interest in her eyes, was too absorbing to leave ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... passing wish about pretty Tessa was almost immediately eclipsed by the recurrent recollection of that friar whose face had some irrecoverable association for him. Why should a sickly fanatic, worn with fasting, have looked at him in particular, and where in all his travels could he remember encountering that face before? Folly! such vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... no one has yet proposed a systematic exploration of the whole earth beneath our feet. Here is this earth, a marvellous onion, a series of encapsuled worlds, each successive foliation preserving the intimate secrets of its own irrecoverable life. And Man the Baby, neglecting the wonderful Earth he crawls on, has cried for the barren Moon! All science has begun with the stars, and Early Man seemed to himself merely the by-play of a great cosmic process. God was first, and Man who had created Him—out of ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... in a black rage at all the irrecoverable sorrows of the past, of that great ocean of avoidable suffering of which this was but one luminous and quivering red drop. I walked in the garden and the garden was too small for me; I went out to wander on the moors. "The past is past," I cried, and all the while across the gulf of five and ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... him. In a man of his age this was an unusual state of things, for when the ardour which will bear analysis has at length declared itself, it is wont to be moderated by the regretful memory of that fugacious essence which gave to the first frenzy of youth its irrecoverable delight. He could not say in reply to his impulses: If that was love which overmastered me, this must be something either more or less exalted. What he did say was something of this kind: If desire and tenderness, if frequency of dreaming rapture, if the calmest approval of the mind ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... loaded with occupations for the day, I was lifted off my feet, and deposited in a drift, and all my things, writing book and letter included, were carried in different directions. Some, including a valuable photograph, were irrecoverable. The writing book was found, some hours afterwards, under ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... you on the whole appeared to be—got round me and muddled me up and made me behave as if in a way that went against the evidence of my senses." But he was to feel as quickly that, whatever the ugly, the spent, the irrecoverable truth, he might better have bitten his tongue off: there beat on him there this strange and other, this so prodigiously different beautiful and dreadful truth that no far remembrance and no abiding ache ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... would make it penal to give long credit for shop goods?-I would make it penal to give any credit at all, and I would admit either party to give evidence against the other party for infringement of that statute, and would be to make all debts so incurred irrecoverable by any process of law. These three things are what I think would form a remedy for the present state of matters. At the same time, I am just as convinced that the merchant ought to live, and must live, and have a reasonable profit, as I am that the people should not pay more for ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... when he brought down that fine fellow whose head adorned his room, the horns just thirty-eight inches long. And in the joy of these recollections there seemed to sound a regretful note, as if he spoke of things gone by and irrecoverable, no longer for him. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... worse alteration has taken place than any visible in the face of nature. We discover that we have lost the old habits, the old capacity of enjoyment; and we soon discover that it was the sympathies, the hopes, the aspirations of youth which, after all, lent to these early scenes their rare and irrecoverable attraction. ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... all of them is a niche, of door or window shape, with a powerfully indented architrave. Reminiscences of the design for the tomb of Julius are not infrequent; and it may be remarked, as throwing a side-light upon that irrecoverable project of his earlier manhood, that the figures posed upon the various spaces of architecture differ in their scale. Two belonging to this series are of especial interest, since we learn from them how he thought of introducing ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... spirit, and condemnations of myself, be overcome by the power of thine irresistible light, the God of consolation; that when those shadows have done their office upon me, to let me see, that of myself I should fall into irrecoverable darkness, thy Spirit may do his office upon those shadows, and disperse them, and establish me in so bright a day here, as may be a critical day to me, a day wherein and whereby I may give thy judgment upon myself, ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... and lost in the Lords in 1802-3. John Rennie was afterwards, at my grandfather's suggestion, called in council, with the style of chief engineer. The precise meaning attached to these words by any of the parties appears irrecoverable. Chief engineer should have full authority, full responsibility, and a proper share of the emoluments; and there were none of these for Rennie. I find in an appendix a paper which resumes the controversy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his bond, interest is payable on overdue instalments, it is never enforced. An examination of the accounts revealed the existence of considerable arrear claims extending over several years, and for the most part irrecoverable now. Practically, the tithe-farmer's obligations have never been discharged in the year to which they belonged. Of the collections credited in the year 1876-77, nearly one-half was on account of ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... before in sparing the life of Antony he could not be without some blame from his party, as thereby setting up against the conspiracy a dangerous and difficult enemy, so now, in suffering him to have the ordering of the funeral, he fell into a total and irrecoverable error. For first, it appearing by the will that Caesar had bequeathed to the Roman people seventy-five drachmas a man, and given to the public his gardens beyond Tiber (where now the temple of Fortune stands), the whole city was fired with a wonderful ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Dunfermline, the richest and most famous in Scotland, were destroyed, and the whole levelled to the ground. The very fields were as far as possible injured—the intention of Edward being, as Fordun says, to blot out the people, and to reduce the land to a condition of irrecoverable devastation, and thus to stamp out for ever any ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... and that you put every moment to, profit of some kind or other. I call company, walking, riding, etc., employing one's time, and, upon proper occasions, very usefully; but what I cannot forgive in anybody is sauntering, and doing nothing at all, with a thing so precious as time, and so irrecoverable ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... shall be exactly the reverse of that of earth, for it shall constantly increase in all the attributes of youth. There will be no dimming of the faculties, but a continual brightening; no grieving over an irrecoverable past, but a constant rejoicing over joys present and to come. There will be no past there, but a present more tangible than this, which is ever slipping from us, and a future far brighter and more certain than any that earth can afford. Strange that men should fail to look at heaven in this light! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the expostulating Jeremiah is here unmistakable; and (as I have said) a Divine answer to his expostulations must have been given him, though now perhaps irrecoverable from among the expansions which it has undergone, verses 26-44. Two things are of interest: the practical carefulness of this great idealist, and the fact that the material basis of his hope for his country's freedom and prosperity was his own right to a bit of ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... moors and gardens; or it is saturated with salt spray; or it communicates the incommunicable in its voicing of that indefinable and evanescent sense of association which is evoked by certain aspects, certain phases, of the outer world—that sudden emotion of things past and irrecoverable which may cling about a field at sunset, or a quiet street at dusk, or a sudden intimation of spring ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... ago, as a boy at school, he used to watch, out of the windows of a stuffy class-room, the great elms of the school close rising just thus in the warm summer air, while his thoughts wandered from the dull lesson into a region of delighted, irrecoverable reverie. To-day he sate for a long time in the little churchyard, the bees humming about the limes with a soft musical note, that rose and fell with a lazy cadence, while doves hidden somewhere in the elms lent as ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... immediately. For three hundred years the trees have been cut down faster than they could grow, first to clear the land, next for fuel, then for lumber and lastly for paper. Consequently we are within sight of a shortage of wood as we are of coal and oil. But the coal and oil are irrecoverable while the wood may be regrown, though it would require another three hundred years and more to grow some of the trees we have cut down. For fuel a pound of coal is about equal to two pounds of wood, and a pound of gasoline to three pounds of wood in heating value, so there would ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... saying, but it is just possible, that an entire confidence placed in Mr Gaskoin might have led to a happier issue; but her own conviction that her position was irrecoverable, her hopelessness and her pride, closed her lips. Her friends saw that there was something wrong; and when a few lines from Major Elliott announced his immediate departure for Paris, they concluded that some strange mystery had divided the lovers, and clouded the hopeful future that for a short ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... Eyeing her wistfully, tenderly, Gilbert murmured, in the voice of long ago, "Why do I stay to wound and to be wounded by the hand that once caressed me? Why do I find more pleasure in your contempt than in another woman's praise, and feel myself transported into the delights of that irrecoverable past, now grown the sweetest, saddest memory of my life? Send me away, Pauline, before the old charm asserts its power, and I forget that I am not the happy lover of ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... it to a globe, pausing and calling on one another to mark the prismatic tints, the fugitive images, symbols, meanings of the wide world glassed upon our pretty toy. We launch it. We follow it with our eyes as it floats from us—an irrecoverable delight. We watch until the microcosm goes pop! Then we laugh and ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... pressing demands, nor those of the late Kur-Mainz, backed by the Reich, and reiterated month after month and year after year, could avail in the matter. Mere angry correspondences, growing ever angrier;—the Archives of the Reich lay irrecoverable at Vienna, detained on this pretext and on that: nor were they ever given up; but lay there till the Reich itself had ended, much more the Kaiser Karl ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... still a step further and assume, in defiance of all reason, that even this totally inconceivable thing were to have happened. It would have meant, of course, not a total and irrecoverable loss to the holders of obligations of the Allied countries, but merely a more or less temporary shrinkage of ...
— War Taxation - Some Comments and Letters • Otto H. Kahn
... the present—he had been carried rapidly past all openings that offered towards the creation of a fortune before he even heard of them, and he first awoke to the knowledge that such openings had ever existed when he looked back upon them from a distance, and found them already irrecoverable for ever. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... next driving, having now acquired the knack, I rendered several more denizens of the air the hors de combats, though—either on account of their great ingenuity in running out of the radius, or creeping into holes, etc., or else the stupidity of the retrieving dogs—their corpses remained irrecoverable. ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... are numbered, and his life-time short and irrecoverable; but to increase his renown by the quality of his acts, this is ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... first coming into that quiet space, with its old houses, its smooth lawns, its majestic trees, he had felt the charm peculiar to such scenes—the natural delight in a form of beauty especially English. Now, the impression was irrecoverable; he could see nothing but those four persons, and their luxurious carriage, and the two beautiful horses which had borne them—whither? As likely as not the identity he had supposed for them was quite imaginary; ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... he told us, was taken away by Pareea's people, very probably in revenge for the blow that had been given him, and that it had been broken up the next day. The arms of the marines which we had also demanded, he assured us had been carried off by the common people, and were irrecoverable; the bones of the chief alone having been preserved, as belonging to Terreeoboo ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... begun for her beyond its confines, but the greater the heights of worldly grandeur she attained, the more distant, the more irrecoverable became the consciousness of the happiness which she had once gratefully enjoyed, and for which she had never ceased to long. And as she now gazed once more at the peaceful, smiling face, whence all pain and anxiety seemed worlds away, and all the love ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers |
