"Lurid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and warned us to prepare for what was coming. Our only chance of getting on was to make an early start, for fortunately a true "nor'-wester" is somewhat of a sluggard. The skies wore their peculiar chrysoprase green tint, except towards the weather quarter, where heavy banks of lurid cloud showed that the enemy was collecting in force. Even the hour of dawn, usually so crisp and cool, brought no sense of refreshment to our languid limbs, and we embarked with the direst forebodings. A few miles further up ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... what to say about things! Weird! Delightful! I dare say that's what Rivers would expect a nice girl to say of his books. He spends half his time being afraid people should think his work is lurid, and the rest in being simply terrified that people should think it's not. He's very clever really, and a ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... his profanity pretty close to the surface at all times, but the wellspring of it that gushed from him as once more he dragged Kendrick off his feet sounded the depths of anxiety and formed a lurid preface to angry argument. Had Kendrick forgotten Stiles? They couldn't hope to save both prisoners at once. Get Stiles first and they could organize ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... chains? I defy you. That is a pow'r I deny you! I will sing! I will rise! Up! To the lurid skies — With the smoke of my soul, With my last breath, Tar-feathered, I shall cry: Ethiopia shall not die! And hand in hand ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... two-hundred-foot field we could plainly see the invaders—forty or fifty men's figures dispersed in a little group. It seemed a sort of encampment. The green light beams seemed emanating from small hand projectors resting now on the ground. The sheen from them gave a dull lurid-green cast to the scene. The men were sitting about in small groups. And some were moving around, seemingly assembling larger apparatus. We saw a projector, a cylindrical affair, which half a dozen of ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... sacrifice. Here, too, they often heard the startling cry of war, and saw their frightened neighbours fly before the murderous spear and plundering hand of lawless power. The invader's torch reduced the native hut to ashes, while the lurid flame seared the green foliage of the trees, and clouds of smoke, rising up among their groves, darkened, for a time, surrounding objects. On such occasions, and they were not infrequent, the contrast ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... side felt as if he were witnessing a burlesque of himself as he listened to the pitiless and lurid description of torment which Elder Wheat poured forth,—the same figures and threats he had used a hundred times. He stirred uneasily in his seat, while the audience paid so little attention that the perspiring little orator finally called for ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... utmost springs, Where, throned in mountain mist, Areouski reigns, Shrouding in lurid clouds his plumeless wings, And sternly sorrowing o'er his tribes remains; His was the arm, like comet ere it wanes That tore the streamy lightnings from the skies, And smote the mammoth of the southern plains; Wild with dismay the ...
— The Culprit Fay - and Other Poems • Joseph Rodman Drake
... state that the money would be given to a Home for Fallen Women. He was a long time hitting off exactly the right charity; but, having pitched on it, he used to wake up in the night and think: 'It won't do, too lurid; it'll draw attention. Something quieter—better taste.' He did not care for dogs, or he would have named them; and it was in desperation at last—for his knowledge of charities was limited—that he decided on the blind. That could not be inappropriate, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... as to get home to India before the winter snows should block the passes. But the expected did not happen. The British General established a British Governor in Cabul who had a heavy hand, and policed the place in a fashion that stirred a lurid fury in the bosoms of haughty Sirdars who had been wont to do what seemed good in their own eyes. He engaged in the sacrilegious work of dismantling the Balla Hissar, the historic fortress of the nation, within whose walls were the royal palace and the residences of the principal ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... ever and a day, or for a day without the ever. At the end of life there may be no definite vista of a Heaven glowing with the light of apocalyptic imagination, but neither will there be the unutterable horror of a Purgatory or a Hell lurid with flames for the helpless victims of an unjust but omnipotent Creator. To entertain such libellous representations at all as part of the contents of "Divine Revelation," it was necessary to assert that man was incompetent to judge of the ways of the God of Revelation, and must not suppose ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... seemed to gather about the injury done and the appeal of Ibycus. The earlier Ibycus had not seemed greatly to interest him. Strickland was used to stormy youth, to its passional moments, sudden glows, burnings, sympathies, defiances, lurid shows of effects with the causes largely unapparent. It was his trade to know youth, and he had a psychologist's interest. He said now to himself, "There is something in his character that connects itself with, that responds to, the idea of vengeance." There came ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... never come to life. She has played her last part. But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... inexpressibly sad in this. It seemed like standing at the death-bed of an old friend. The sea was still heaving violently; the gale, although moderated, was still pretty stiff, and the sun was setting in wild lurid clouds when the Foam rose for the last time— every spar and rope standing out sharply against the sky. Then she bent forward slowly, as she overtopped a huge billow. Into the hollow she rushed. Like an expert diver she went down head foremost ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... the fulfilment of thy baleful plan, Like Satan's triumph at the fall of man? How stood'st thou then, thy feet on Freedom planting, And pointing to the lurid heaven afar, Whence all could see, through the south windows slanting, Crimson as blood, the beams of that Lone Star! The Fates are just; they give us but our own; Nemesis ripens what our hands have sown. There is an Eastern ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... behind the dark hills of the west, gilding the fading heavens with an autumnal brightness, and shedding a lurid glare upon the already drooping and discolored foliage of the surrounding forests. It was an hour of solemn calm. The cool evening breezes stole softly through the air, as if unwilling to disturb the repose of all around. The crystal waters ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... of that character in the scene around him, or in his own contemplations. The fire raged with amazing fury and power,—stimulated to madness as it were, by the pitch, and tar, and dried timbers, and other combustible materials used in the constriction of the boat. The lurid flames ascended to a great height,—the smoke rolled upward in majestic volumes, while the light, red as the flames of AEtna, streamed across the lake, gilding the crumbling battlements of the old fort, ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... 39th Regiment! What visions are conjured up when this name comes on the scene! Cracked and gaping plains, desolate, desert and abandoned of life, scorched beneath a lurid sun of burning fire, waterless, hopeless, relentless, and accursed: that is the picture he draws of the great interior. He had followed up Oxley's footsteps and exposed the fallacies into which that explorer had fallen, and erred ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... a lull in the wind, which had been rising steadily ever since that lurid sunset. Felix looked out of the hut door. The moon was full. It was almost as clear as day with the bright tropical moonlight, silvery in the open, pale green in the shadow. The people were still squatting in great rings round the hut, just outside the taboo ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... long as he carried his body, but it was long before he believed he had been tripped up. Had it been proved to him at the time, he would have taken it as a joke, intending no hurt. He did not see the lurid smile on the man's face as he turned away, a smile of devilish delight at the discomfiture of a hated fellow-creature. Gunn put him to the dirtiest work—only to find that it did not trouble him: the boy was a rare gentleman—unwilling another should have more that he might have less of ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... way a novelist would wind up such a delightful romance," I said. "There would have been at least twenty or thirty pages of lurid description." ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... round; two long lines of them handing bucket after bucket, with machine-like regularity, from the fountain; others removing the furniture from the terrace; cushions, ormolu, fine china, handed out of the lower windows; the whole seen by the wild lurid light that flashed from the windows above, strangely illuminating the quiet green trees, and bringing out every tiny leaf and spray by its fierce brilliancy, that confused every accustomed shadow, while the clouds of smoke rolled down as if to ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... with hands grasping the table's edge on either side of him, was looking down at his swinging brogans, simply lifted his lurid eyes without raising his head, and nodded. "It would be right," he seemed to intimate, ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... fifty-six dollars and sixty cents by twenty-five hundred, we find that each farmer receives an average of thirty and one-quarter cents per year for allowing his fences and buildings to be smothered in lurid advertising signs. So we find that the money received by the farmers from the advertising amounts to about one-quarter of one per cent of their income, a matter so insignificant that it cannot affect them materially, one way ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... flower smiles on AEtna's fatal breast, Young Proserpine beside her lord doth bloom; And near—of Orpheus' soul, oh! idol blest!— While low for thee he tunes his lyre of light, I see thy meek, fair form dawn through that lurid night! ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... and he blows—and blows,— While I drum on his swollen cheek, And croak in his angered eye that glows With the lurid lightning's streak; While the rushes drown in the watery frown That his ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... pleased. For a bush publican and store-keeper he had an unusual reputation for honesty—and well deserved it, for all his roughness and lurid language when aroused to wrath. He asked Gerrard ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... in a moment returned with pitch torches which cast a lurid, flickering light through the room. It was a weird scene, looking down from the gallery. All of the men wore masks except Lupo and the innkeeper, who were boldly undisguised. They peered about the room. Suddenly Lupo's eye caught a corner ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... and gold—lustreless black of coke, lurid crimson of fresh blood, bright glaring yellow of gold new-minted—were the predominant notes in a colour scheme at once sombre and violent. The walls were hung with scarlet tapestries whereon gold dragons ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... oppressive that you could scarcely breathe. These sultry days are the lull before the storm—the pause before the moisture-laden clouds of the monsoon roll over the land 'rugged and brown,' and the wild rattle of thunder and the lurid glare of quivering never-ceasing lightning herald in the annual rains. The manufacture however ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... into their stomachs. Being mothers, they are the despair of reformers, the shadow on the vision of dreamers and they put the black dread upon the heart of the poet who cries, "The female of the species is more deadly than the male." At their worst they are to be seen drunk with emotion amid the lurid horrors of a French Revolution or immersed in the secret whispering, creeping terror of a religious persecution. At their best they are mothers of half mankind. Wealth coming to them, they throw ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... Lurid violet light filled the room, and Seaton turned towards the bar. That two-hundred-pound mass of copper was shrinking visibly, second by second, so vast were the forces being drawn from it, and the searing, blinding ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... the singular stare with which his daughter was regarding him, a look that was indeed a lurid magnet for ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Socorro Texas Rankin rode morosely into San Marcial. Into San Marcial the unbeautiful, with its vista of unpainted shanties and lurid dives. For in San Marcial foregathered the men of the mines and the ranges; men of forgotten morals, but of brawn and muscle, whose hearts beat not with a yearning for high ideals, but with a lust for wealth and gain—white, ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... young men were both bending over the fire for the blaze had died down, and only a red glow from the dying embers cast a lurid light on a narrow semicircle in front of the hearth. The rest of the room lay buried in complete gloom; Sir Andrew had taken a pocket-book from his pocket, and drawn therefrom a paper, which he unfolded, and together they tried to read it by the dim red firelight. So intent were they ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... edge of the town was not entirely without justification for the doctor's hints about desolate moods and environments. The scattered houses stood farther and farther apart in a broken string along the seashore; the afternoon was closing with a premature and partly lurid twilight; the sea was of an inky purple and murmuring ominously. In the scrappy back garden of the MacNabs which ran down towards the sand, two black, barren-looking trees stood up like demon hands held ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... bravely on In such delicious tales of land and sea As may not ever perish utterly. Of still more dubious caste, "Jack Sheppard" drew Full admiration; and "Dick Turpin," too. And, painful as the fact is to convey, In certain lurid tales of their own day, These boys found thieving heroes and outlaws They hailed with equal fervor of applause: "The League of the Miami"—why, the name Alone was fascinating—is the same, In memory, this venerable hour Of moral wisdom shorn of all its power, As it unblushingly ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... is a more or less lurid eastern melodrama, based on the Arabian Nights. A hunchback is in love with a beautiful young dancer, who hates him. He sells her to a fierce old sheik, to get her out of the way of another lover, the sheik's son. Then he takes poison. Sumurun, the sheik's chief ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... eastward, Four days without a night: Round in a fiery ring Went the great sun, O King, With red and lurid light." ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... have posed as the very model and type of respectable composure. As the plan was gradually unfolded, however, the old soldier began to puff harder at his cigar until a continuous thick grey cloud rose up from him, through which the lurid tip of the havannah shone like a murky meteor. From time to time he passed his hand down his puffy cheeks, as was his custom when excited. Then he moved uneasily in his chair, cleared his throat huskily, and showed other signs of restlessness, all of which were hailed by Ezra Girdlestone as unmistakable ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... time. "No, that cannot be!" returns the other, peering through a small window into the barrack-like room. It was from this window the light shone, and, being a bleak November night, a wood fire blazed on the great hearth, shedding its lurid glows over everything around. It is the pale, saline light of wreckwood. A large binnacle lamp, of copper, hung from the centre of the ceiling, its murky light mingling in curious contrast to the pale shadows ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... said the Virginian, striking the frying-pan on his knee, for the frogs were all gone. At those lurid words their untamed child minds took fire, and they drew round him again to hear a tale of blood. The ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... enthusiastic excitement, evidenced for the most part in expletives of a lurid note, covered the retreat of Sir Timothy and his companion. Out in the street a small crowd was rushing towards the place. A couple of policemen seemed to be trying to make up their minds whether it was a fine night. An inspector hurried up ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... thunder were more frequent, and with each flash of lightning the horses grew more unmanageable, until at last they flew along the highway at a speed which rocked the carriage from side to side, and began at last to alarm its occupants. Eloise in her corner was holding fast to the strap, when a lurid flame filled the carriage for an instant with a blaze of light. She had removed her hat, and her face, silhouetted against the dark cushions, startled both the young men with its beauty. It was very white, except the cheeks which were flushed with excitement. Her lips ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... charm, gentle sea with your kiss of death, hear me!" And the sea replies in a song. Voices mingle with the orchestra in a symphony of increasing anger. Vita swears she will give herself to no one but the Stranger. She lifts the emerald above her head, and it shines with a lurid light. "'Receive, O sea, as a token of my oath, the sacred stone, the holy emerald! Then may its power be no longer invoked, and none may know again its protecting virtue. Jealous sea, take back your own, ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... exposed. Sometimes these stairways are of stone, sometimes of wood: when the latter, if in a fair state of preservation, they are taken away bodily, to be put up again in some remote quarter of the town. Shop-windows are offered for sale for like purposes. At night the scene is made lurid by the glare of triangular lanterns, which throw out their warning red light, and the entrance to the street is carefully guarded. Gradually the old buildings are taken to pieces and removed, bit by bit. New walls of creamy stone, with modern windows, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... once under a dark red sunset. The red river reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky, indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so lurid, that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding under the vast ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... to extremes; and had assumed that, being out of work, he was, as a consequence, out of temper with the world, and society, and his nearest kin. But with the demand and response of real cash the jovial frivolity of the scene departed. A lurid colour seemed to fill the tent, and change the aspect of all therein. The mirth-wrinkles left the listeners' faces, and they waited ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... the valiantest of men Lays low his head beneath th' impending doom; In terror he descends death's awsome glen; While there appear flashing through the gloom The lurid shades of deeds which in the bloom Of youth he dared; at last the conscience cries With ruthless voice: "There's life beyond the tomb;" His dying thoughts all vanities despise As on the threshold of ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... shining with a heavy melting heat on Margaret's weighty garments; but she hurried on, never feeling the heat, or hearing Linette's endeavours to draw her attention to the heavy bank of gray clouds tinged with lurid red gradually rising, and whence threatening growls of thunder were heard from time to time. She really seemed to rush forward, and poor, panting Linette toiled after her, feeling ready to drop, while the way was as yet unobstructed, as the two beautiful steeples of the Cathedral ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Then he turned away to glance at the lurid reflection in the sky. Presently his eyes came back ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... moreover, it was the same he and little Lalee had so late been contemplating in security,—the dreaded zygaena: for through the translucent water he could distinguish its hammer-shaped head, and lurid eyes gleaming out from their protuberant ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... lurid sympathy of the men irritated me worse than the boss-over-the-board had done. It must have been on account of the heat, as Mitchell says. I was sick of the shed and the life. It was within a couple of days of cut-out, so ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... pressed against his trembling knees; he saw four rows of ivory flashing in the dim light. Then the dogs crouched at his feet, watching him with eyes as red and lurid as the point of his own cigar. Had he attempted to move, had he tried coercion, they would have fallen upon him ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... a lowering autumn night: piles of lurid thunder-clouds, slowly rising from the earth, had loaded the sky with a solemn and boding canopy of storm. The growl of the distant thunder was heard afar off upon the dull, still air, and all nature seemed, as it were, hushed and cowering under ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... master's angry shouts, he was galloping in mad haste back toward the uplands, with the fragments of the wagon at his heels. The Captain and Jamie watched him flying before the wind, a red spectre in the lurid light. Then, turning away once more to see to his boat, the Captain remarked, "Well, laddie, I guess we'll have to foot it back when we get through here. But Bill's going to have a ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... nightmares and hellish phantoms; all of which were connected with this innocent and happy child; so that, cheerful and pleasant as she was, there was to the grim Doctor a little fiend playing about his floor and throwing a lurid light on the wall, as the shadow of this sun-flickering child. It is certain that there was always a pain and horror mixed with his feelings towards Elsie; he had to forget himself, as it were, and all that was connected with the causes ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the darkness, they moved up to their new camp—a camp on the very edge of the fighting; and from where they came to a halt, to wait for morning before being assigned to the trenches, they could see the lurid fires that flared ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... another and another, as night, gathering in its intensity, swept over the valley, until it was met by an ever-increasing challenge. It was like a myriad host of fairy fire-flies, each diamond pointed, flickering, blinking, never still. And there settled on the under side of the smoke pall a lurid glow as of banked fires, waiting for the work ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... me. I nearly rode into an unguarded trench across the road, and when I started back with my receipt my bicycle would not fire. I found that the mechanic at Dammartin had filled my tank with water. It took me two hours, two lurid hours, to take that water out. It was three in the morning when I got going. I was badly frightened the Division had gone on, because I hadn't the remotest conception where it was going to. When I got back H.Q. were still at ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... to get up, even though she vaguely marvelled how wonderful must be the dawn, since its reflection was of such lurid colour. She lay back drowsy and with nerves tingling; she closed her eyes for they ached and ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... reminding one of an historic parallel in the roseate aspect presented by the early days of the first French revolution, when everybody had hailed as the dawning of a celestial morrow the putrescent glow of old corruption blending into the lurid fire of the coming sans-culottic hell. In this case also an infernal ignis fatuus had arisen to tempt its deluded followers toward a selfish fool's paradise, only to be obtained by wading through seas of fratricidal blood. And how they believed in this ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the station, the storm was coming—great rounded masses of cloud, with silver-foamed edges and red lurid caverns, began to climb slowly up the sky, distant grumbles of thunder came gradually nearer, a few fitful gusts of wind came like sirocco, adding to the stifling heat, and were followed by exceeding stillness, broken by the first few big drops of rain, the visible flashes, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that sign in the skies, men might shudder and turn to a private hearth, or they might give loosest rein to desire for Fame. In the columns of the newspapers, above the name of every Roman patriot, each party found voice. From a lurid background of Moreau's conspiracy and d'Enghien's death, of a moribund English King and Premier, of Hayti aflame, and Tripoli insolent, they thundered, like Cassandra, of home woes. To the Federalist, reverencing the dead Washington, still looking for leadership to ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... cocoanuts an' all th' rest o' th' blasted grub that Pinky was feedin' me, an' most of all I was gettin' tired o' Pinky. She would put cocoanut oil in her hair. Yet (here Mr. Gibney's voice vibrated with emotion as he conjured up these memories of his lurid past) it never occurred to me, at the time, I was that young an' foolish, that she was doin' it for me. She was as beautiful as ever, an' Gawd knows nobody but a fool would get tired o' such a fine woman, every inch a queen, but I ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... red; it nourished that rich radiant energy of passion; it flowed from men as they walked and brooded in loneliness, or as they tossed in sleep. I withdrew my gaze from this face which awoke in me a lurid sense accompaniment, and turned it on the other. An aura of pale soft blue was around this figure through which gleamed an underlight as of universal gold. The vision was already dim and departing, but I caught a glimpse of ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... the lamp on the wall in front of Hilma stretched upward tall and thin and began to smoke. She went over to where the lamp hung and, standing on tip-toe, lowered the wick. As she reached her hand up, Annixter noted how the sombre, lurid red of the lamp made a warm reflection on ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... ladies were bundled into a room where they might get rid of the dust, and the men into another; clean rooms, with whitewashed walls, bare save for a pictured saint or two in lurid colours; floors covered with coarse, bright matting; and iron beds with lace-frilled and ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Leisler and her family, accompanied by Charles, went to bid the doomed men adieu at the jail. Then Charles hurried the weeping women and children home. Great thunder-bolts seemed to rend Manhattan Island. The lightning spread a lurid glare on the sky, and the rain fell in torrents. All of the household knew what was being done, and, falling on their knees, they prayed God for strength. Two hours wore on, and then there came a ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... the past, do not exist. The Settlement has been written up repeatedly by sensationalists, and usually by sensationalists who have never laid eyes on it. Of course, leprosy is leprosy, and it is a terrible thing; but so much that is lurid has been written about Molokai that neither the lepers, nor those who devote their lives to them, have received a fair deal. Here is a case in point. A newspaper writer, who, of course, had never been near the Settlement, vividly described Superintendent McVeigh, ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... kakistocracy—a state of things, which to the honor of our nature, has seldom obtained among men, and which perhaps was only fully exemplified during the worst times of the French Revolution, when that horrid hell burnt with its most lurid flame. In such a state of things, to be accused is to be condemned—to protect the innocent is to be guilty; and what perhaps is the worst effect, even men of better nature, to whom their own deeds are abhorrent, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... rose and fell like a gentle breathing, and showed that the eternal sea was still moving and living. And along the margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation of salt—pink under the lurid sky. There was a sense of oppression in my head, and I noticed that I was breathing very fast. The sensation reminded me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from that I judged the air to be more ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... day, the sun was shining low in lurid western sky, All, all, our little wealth was gone, and mother yearned to die, When sudden, at the open door, a shadow crossed the way, And cheerfully a manly voice did words of ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... one reads lurid accounts of them in the papers, but nothing really is gained unless we strike the guns themselves, and ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... they were coming! The "Jews" could be heard, with their band, down the street. They would be wanting their banner. Dolores hastily threw a wrapper on, while the captain advanced to the frontiers of his domain to welcome his army. The lurid company drew up in front of the house. The drum-beat softened in tone, but continued to give the rhythm for the privates who stood there marking time, keeping their heads and bodies and legs moving energetically ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... feelings. He will see this aura flooded with the beautiful rose-color of pure affection, the rich blue of devotional feeling, the hard, dull brown of selfishness, the deep scarlet of anger, the horrible lurid red of sensuality, the livid grey of fear, the black clouds of hatred and malice, or any of the other hundredfold indications so easily to be read in it by the practiced eye; and thus it will be impossible for any persons to conceal from his the real state ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... always refuse that, sir." And therewith Mr. Ray was remanded to his quarters. Verily there was some reason for Blake's outburst when he came in after hearing Warner's brief description of the official interview which Mrs. Whaling had given in lurid exaggeration ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... Olympia, where, for a month past, "Van Zant's Royal Belgian Circus and World-famed Menagerie" had been holding forth to "Crowded and delighted audiences." Much was made of two "star turns" upon this lurid bill: "Mademoiselle Marie de Zanoni, the beautiful and peerless bare-back equestrienne, the most daring lady rider in the universe," for the one; and, for the other, "Chevalier Adrian di Roma, king of the animal world, with his great aggregation of savage and ferocious wild beasts, including ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... until midnight, notwithstanding the rain, to see the grand rock of Hornelen, a precipice 1200 feet high. The clouds lifted a little, and there was a dim, lurid light in the sky as our steamer swept under the awful cliff. A vast, indistinct mass, reaching apparently to the zenith, the summit crowned with a pointed tour, resembling the Cathedral of Drontheim, and the sides scarred with deep fissures, loomed over us. Now a splintered spire ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... widower and kept bachelor's hall, so to speak. We found him seated on a keg, by the side of an enormous caldron that might have contained the witches' compound, judging from the strange forms of steam that arose from it, while the lurid flames beneath, fed by the oily drippings, lent a still greater weirdness ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... young lily. The white lilies are never more beautiful than when they wave capriciously in the summer wind; and if Laura Dunbar was a little passionate when you tried to thwart her; and if her great blue eyes at such times had a trick of lighting up with sudden fire in them, like a burst of lurid sunlight through a summer storm-cloud, there were plenty of gentlemen in Warwickshire ready to swear that the sight of those lightning-flashes of womanly anger was well worth the penalty of incurring Miss ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Practically ignorant of the spoliation and persecution practised under Henry the Eighth—of blessed domestic memory—of the further persecution which disfigured the "spacious days of great Elizabeth," not to mention the long and shameful history of the Penal Laws, he fixed his mind upon lurid legends of the reign of unhappy Mary Tudor, illustrated by prints in Fox's Book of Martyrs; upon inquisitorial tortures, the very thought of which—even out of doors in the pleasant spring sunshine—made him break into a heavy sweat, and which, by some ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... and a great deal of it was of wood. Fires started almost at once, and it was almost completely on fire by the end of the second day. It had been visible in the telescopic screen even after they were out of atmosphere, a black smear until the turning planet carried it into darkness and then a lurid glow. ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... the merciful amongst us would slay a dog, stood unmoved in the shadow, with his ruthless calm, his deadly serenity, which had no remorse as it had had no mercy, while about his lips there was a cold and evil smile, and in his eyes gleamed the lurid flame of a tiger's triumph—the triumph when it has tasted blood, and slaked its thirst ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... sides. The crowd went because it found the satisfaction of sexual curiosity and erotic tension through the unveiled discussion of social perversities. And the managers produced the plays because the lurid subjects with their appeal to the low instincts, and therefore with their sure commercial success, could here escape the condemnation of police and decent public as they were covered by the pretence of social reform. How far the writers of the play of prostitution ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... action, doubts assailed her. She remembered that she had never read the book, though she had heard much of it from Berrand. He was imaginative and essentially mischievous. Perhaps he had exaggerated its tendency, drawn too lurid a picture of its horrible power. Catherine turned a page or two and glanced at the clear, even writing. It ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and darts down upon them from the roofs above, supposing, from the armor and the plumes which they wore, that they were enemies. They saw the royal palace besieged, and the tortoise formed for scaling the walls of it. The tumult and din, and the frightful glare of lurid flames by which the city was illuminated, a scene ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... thunder and lightning; but through the cloud-rifts, now and then, the moonlight streamed down. Isabella and Otho had been talking earnestly,—so earnestly, that they were quite unobservant of the coming storm, of the strange lurid ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... for, his thoughts went back to a scene he had once had with a half drunken machine-minder whom he had had to pay off. The man had epitomised the chief engineer's qualities and character, as those who encountered his authority understood them, in a few lurid, illuminating phrases. "You know," he had said, "that guy ain't a man. No, sir. He's the mush-fed image of a penitentiary boss. I guess he'd set the grease box of a driving shaft hot with a look. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... merely the warming up exercise of the editor's vocabulary. When he really cut loose on Andy P. Symes the graves of dead and buried adjectives opened to do him honor. In the lurid lexicon of his eloquence there was no such word as obsolete and no known synonym failed to pay tribute to this "mental and physical colossus." In his shirt sleeves, minus his cuffs, with his brain in a lather, one might say, Sylvanus Starr painted a picture of the coming ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... his eyes mutely upon the ruffian. The curate had had the precaution to send on before for torches, for the wintry evening now darkened round them, and the light from the torch-bearers, who met them at the cavern, cast forth its red and lurid flare at the mouth of the chasm. One of these torches Walter himself seized, and his was the first step that entered the gloomy passage. At this place and time, Houseman, who till then, throughout their short journey, had seemed to have recovered ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with the same helpless manner. He could not bring himself to consider Tom Halliday's death. The subject was too far away from him—remote as the dim shadows of departed centuries. In all the universe there were but two figures standing out in lurid brightness against the dense night of chaos—a helpless girl held in the clutches of a secret assassin; and it was ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... hunched in his chair staring at the screaming headlines and re-reading the lurid story. Again an ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... Bobbing heads and figures, vigorous steps and dancing eyes. Life bubbling over everywhere, in laughter, in sharp angry tones, in glad expectant chatter. Deborah's big family. Across the street was a movie between two lurid posters, and there was a dance hall overhead. The windows were all open, and faintly above the roar of the street he could hear the piano, drum, fiddle and horn. The thoroughfare each moment grew more tumultuous to his ears, with trolley cars and taxis, motor busses, trucks and drays. A small red ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... journey held her, the sight of new cities and a new countryside. But when she tried to eat the lunch Aunt Mary had so carefully put up, new memories assailed her, and she went with Mrs. Stanley into the dining car. The September dusk was made lurid by belching steel-furnaces that reddened the heavens; and later, when she went to bed, sharp air and towering contours told her of the mountains. Mountains which her great-grandfather had crossed on horse back, with that very family silver in his saddle-bags which shone on Aunt Mary's table. And ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and bent as the monk stepped upon them, and burned his feet through his coarse sandals; yet he stumbled on. Now and then his foot would crush in, where the lava had hardened in a thinner crust, and he would draw it suddenly back from the lurid red-hot metal beneath. The staff on which he rested was constantly kindling into a light blaze as it slipped into some heated hollow, and he was fain to beat out the fire upon the cooler surface. Still he went on half-stifled by the hot and pungent vapor, but drawn by that painful, unnatural ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... revolution. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color—wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenia and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... But the high wind set all their efforts at defiance. It increased in fury and varied in direction, carrying the conflagration over new quarters. From the Kremlin could be seen vast columns of fire, shooting from building to building, wrapping the wooden structures in lurid sheets of flame, sweeping destruction forward at frightful speed. The roar of the flames, the explosions that from time to time took place, the burning fragments which filled the air, borne on the wings of the wind, all went to make a scene as grand ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... suffered a pang at the pathos of her innocent guile. And if Dyan had his own suspicions, he kept them to himself. He also kept to himself the vitriolic outpouring which he had duly found awaiting him at Jaipur. It contained too many lurid allusions to 'that conceited, imperialistic half-caste cousin of yours'; and Roy might resent the implied stigma as much as Dyan resented it for him. So he tore up the effusion, intended for the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... figure bound to a spar, and guided by a little childish swimmer, who must have gone overboard with his precious freight just before the explosion. They rowed after the brave little fellow, earnestly desiring to save him; but in darkness, in smoke, in lurid uncertain light, amid hosts of drowning wretches, they lost sight ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... candour? None. Not one particle. Nevertheless, danger or no danger, we are bound to speak the truth. We have nothing to do with consequences and moral tendencies and risk to this or that fundamental principle of our belief, nor yet with the possibility of lurid lights being thrown here or there. What are these things to us? They are not our business or concern, but rest with the Being who has required of US that we should reverently, patiently, unostentatiously, yet resolutely, strive to find out what things are true ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... Oppressed beyond endurance by one practitioner, allegiance would be transferred to some new claimant of occult powers, and the breaking of the monopoly of magic would be followed by a temporary lightening of the burdens. Some of the most lurid of Alaskan legends deal with the thaumaturgic contests of rival medicine-men, and one judges that sleight of hand and even hypnotic suggestion were cultivated ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... price and buy himself a rope long enough to house his soul in any Hell, rather than sit on in this one! It is all painted, or was once; all written on that sunken cheek, that matted hair and clammy brow; in that cavernous socket, that eye of lurid despair; on the whole anatomy of a lost soul. The hand that did it was very young, very immature; but it had the youth and the immaturity ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... furious eruption. The Moon, in fact, is a world which has burned itself out. How strange the thought that in a far-back period the inhabitants of Earth, had Earth then been inhabited, might have seen the glare of countless volcanoes diffused, lurid and threatening, over the face of their satellite! How strange the thought that the once active fires should all have died away, and the Moon have thus been prepared for the better reception and reflection of the solar radiance ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... "see, she's at the window! and she's screaming for help!" as a wild shriek rent the air, a black face full of terror and despair showing itself at an upper window, where the fire's lurid ...
— Grandmother Elsie • Martha Finley
... rampant in his corner as he listened; his mental language became impossibly lurid. He felt that he would willingly have given a thousand or two to plant them both into that bit of the outpost line, where a month before he had crawled round on his belly at dawn to see his company. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... have been a scene in hell with the Motombo playing the part of Satan. Indeed, his swollen, diabolical figure supported on the thin, toad-like legs, the great fires burning on either side, the lurid lights of evening reflected from the still water beyond and glowering among the tree tops of the mountain, the white-robed forms of the tall Pongo, bending, every one of them, towards the wretched culprit and hissing like so many fierce serpents, all suggested some uttermost deep in the infernal ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... voice was like the midnight wind That ushers in the storm, When the thunder mutters far behind On the dark clouds onward borne; When the trees are bending to its breath, The waters plashing high, And nature crouches pale as death Beneath the lurid sky. 'Twas in such tones he spake to me, So awful and so dread; If thou would'st read the mystery, Those tones ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... as far as Modesto. After that, under the teaching of Tim, he traveled without paying, riding blind baggage, box cars, and cow-catchers. Young Dick bought the newspapers, and frightened Tim by reading to him the lurid accounts of the kidnapping of the young ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... total darkness. It was in one of these moments of obscurity, that she observed a small and lambent flame, moving at some distance on the terrace. While she gazed, it disappeared, and, the moon again emerging from the lurid and heavy thunder clouds, she turned her attention to the heavens, where the vivid lightnings darted from cloud to cloud, and flashed silently on the woods below. She loved to catch, in the momentary gleam, the gloomy landscape. Sometimes, a cloud opened its light upon a distant ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... tenant, waged under conditions which lend it extraordinary interest. Exacting "landlordism" and recalcitrant "tenantism" seem here to have said their last word. Between a considerable landholder and her tenants a fight is being fought out which throws a lurid light on the present ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... formidable that one might well have reason to be alarmed. P——, the Minister, was, indeed, very talkative and gesticulative; his wife was sad and sighed constantly—elle poussait des soupirs tristes—at the lurid spectacle her husband's words conjured up. According to him, anything was possible. There might be sudden massacres in Peking itself—the Chinese Government had gone mad. Rendered more and more talkative by the wine and the good ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... utter silence. For the trade-wind had fallen dead; the everlasting roar of the surf was gone; and the only noise was the crashing of branches, snapped by the weight of the clammy dust. He went in again, and waited. About one o'clock the veil began to lift; a lurid sunlight stared in from the horizon: but all was black overhead. Gradually the dust-cloud drifted away; the island saw the sun once more; and saw itself inches deep in black, and in this case fertilising, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... palm-trees with the rainbows overhead, And the streets swollen like rivers, and the wet earth's smell, And all the ants with sudden wings filling the heart with wonder, And, afar, the tempest vanishing with a stifled thunder In a glare of lurid radiance from the gaping mouth ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... the different provinces. In Palestine the worst are from the east, the direction in which the desert is nearest; in Lower Babylonia they are from the south; in Susiana from the west or the north-west. During their continuance the air is darkened, a lurid glow is cast over the earth, the animal world pines and droops, vegetation languishes, and, if the traveller cannot obtain shelter, and the wind continues, he may sink and die under ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... Selingman gave the signal for the car to pull up. They drew in by the side of the road and they all stood up in their places. Before them, the red glow which hung over the city was almost lurid; strange volumes of smoke were rising ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a single span separated the foremost from the boy. And now the iron hook fell at his feet, and the fireman stood upon the step with the rescued lad in his arms, just as the pent-up flame burst lurid from the attic window, reaching with impotent fury for its prey. The next moment they were safe upon the great ladder waiting ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... whom his mother comforteth," and when the morning dawned he arose and took up the burden of life again, where he was, ere Vida Irving stole into his heart. No, not that, it could never be the same again. When the lightning sends his lurid bolt down a noble tree, it may not wave green and fair as once; there will be dead branches and the gnarled seam to ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... portraits his head has a lurid look, as if it had been at a higher temperature than that of other men. That high temperature was the source of his inspiration, and the secret of a spell which, during his life, commanded homage ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... mine, and I led her through the saloon, now full of a lurid light, and into the captain's cabin, where ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... upon his knees, silently bowed his head for a moment, and then stood up, self-possessed again, as his son had always known him. It had been a strange and awful awakening for Robert Cairn—to find his room illuminated by a lurid light, and to find his own father standing over him with a knife! But what had moved him even more deeply than the fear of these things, had been the sight of the emotion which had shaken that stern and unemotional man. Now, as he gathered together his scattered wits, he began to perceive ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... undertaken to comply with certain rules and regulations, the company granted me a pass in a first-class carriage to Wolverhampton. I returned to Birmingham by omnibus after dark the same evening, and passing through the heart of the Black Country, made my first acquaintance with that dingy region—its lurid light, its flashing tongues of intercessant flame, and its clouds of stifling, ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... was broken by a sudden peal of thunder overhead. At the same instant the blackness of midnight lifted itself above the stone ledges and dropped down upon the Corral, smothering everything in darkness. A rushing whirlwind, a lurid blaze of lightning, and a second peal of thunder threw the camp into blind disorder. In the minute's lull following the first storm herald, there was a wild scrambling for wraps and lunch baskets. Then the darkness thickened and the storm's fury burst upon ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... day dawned we could see that the distant ridges were enveloped in drifts of dense, white fog. From time to time patches of the fog would glow redly and then become brilliantly incandescent and throw up sheets of lurid flame. German shells came whistling over and burst with angry, reverberating roars. Black fountains of earth and smoke spurted up from the fields and left slowly thinning clouds that hung suspended for a while and then dissolved in air. Sepia-coloured puffs appearing in the sky ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt |
