"Superhuman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... such as this tells upon any man, no matter what his strength of mind or body to begin with; and a perpetually soaked body is apt in time to sodden the soul, unless it have something superhuman to cling to, as this man had in his simple trust in God and ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... dear. I thought you were in correspondence with his people. But perhaps they also are in the dark. It is a most unheard-of thing—quite irrevocable I am told. But I always felt that he was a man to do unusual things. There was always to my mind something uncanny, abnormal, something almost superhuman, about him." ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... and wig had fallen off. The moonlight struck full upon his face and the fine proportions of his figure. He saw that there were half a dozen men spurring onwards in pursuit; but he was full of that fury which gives to men an almost superhuman strength. ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the other forces which he trusts to co-operate with him, in a universe of such a type? They are at least his fellow men, in the stage of being which our actual universe has reached. But are there not superhuman forces also, such as religious men of the pluralistic type we have been considering have always believed in? Their words may have sounded monistic when they said "there is no God but God"; but the original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... kind, though differences in kind are not wanting. An animal has more provision for emergency than a machine. The machine is less versatile; its range of action is narrow; its strength and accuracy in its own sphere are superhuman, but it shows badly in a dilemma; sometimes when its normal action is disturbed, it will lose its head, and go from bad to worse like a lunatic in a raging frenzy: but here, again, we are met by the same consideration as before, ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... the influence which Jeanne obtained both over friends and foes. The French nation, as well as the English and the Burgundians, readily admitted that superhuman beings inspired her; the only question was whether these beings were good or evil angels; whether she brought with her "airs from heaven or blasts from hell." This question seemed to her countrymen to be decisively settled in her favor by the austere sanctity of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of some Goliath of a convict. This chain suggested, not the beams, which it was its office to transport, but the mastodons and mammoths which it might have served to harness; it had the air of the galleys, but of cyclopean and superhuman galleys, and it seemed to have been detached from some monster. Homer would have bound Polyphemus with it, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... complete the day's work. In a little more than a month from this time he has to reap and stack his grain, oats, rye and whatever else he may have sown, and to sow his winter grain for the next, year. To add to the difficulty both grains often ripen about the same time and then it requires almost superhuman efforts on his part to complete his task before the first ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... and ranged in an ascending hierarchy, ordinarily comes a superhuman vicarious leisure class of saints, angels, etc.—or their equivalents in the ethnic cults. These rise in grade, one above another, according to elaborate system of status. The principle of status runs through the entire hierarchical system, both visible ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... me like a thunderbolt, and without a superhuman courage and the aid of Heaven, I should have been crushed at once; but I felt that the fate of my whole life might depend upon that moment. Borch's character was well known to me; I knew him to be ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... strenuous life, and its tragic end, is told in a little book written by Shan F. Bullock. Sir Horace Plunkett wrote an introduction to it, in which he says: "He was one of the noblest Irishmen Ulster has produced in modern times, to whom came the supreme test in circumstances demanding almost superhuman fortitude and self-control. There was not the wild excitement of battle to sustain him; death had to be faced calmly in order that others—to whom he must not even bid farewell—might live." A few minutes before the end, ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... six weeks the dominie's efforts were almost superhuman. He saw every cottage whitewashed; he was nurse and doctor and cook. The laird saw him carrying wailing babies and holding raving men in his strong arms. He watched over the sick till the last ray of hope fled; he buried them tenderly ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... hardest he had yet had to live. But she was hopeful that little by little he would come back to the same recognition of that which she felt was really true, that, in spite of the results, he had been justified in the risk he had taken, and that he could not be blamed that conditions which only a superhuman penetration could have foreseen would arise ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... such kind good-humour that Malcolm, humiliated by the thought of the past, durst not make fresh asseverations. James, in the supreme moment of the pure and innocent romance of which he was the hero, looked on love like his own as the highest crown of human life, and distrusted the efforts after the superhuman which too often were mere simulation or imitation; but a certain recollection of Henry's warnings withheld him from pressing the matter, and he returned to his own joys and hopes, looking on the struggles he expected ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... almost superhuman efforts the party on the rock managed to get abreast of Roylance just as he was half-way between the boat and a patch of rugged boulders which had seemed to promise foothold till help could reach him from above, and still the brave fellow ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... lieutenants skilled mariners, electrical and mechanical engineers, and men whom he himself had instructed in the peculiar duties that would fall to them in the navigation and management of the ark, every detail of which he had laboriously worked out with a foresight that seemed all but superhuman. ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... They seemed weighty men, oppressed by a sad and stolid bovine-sort of integrity. A sober seriousness and enormous certitude characterized all of them. They appeared men without nerves and without fear, as though upheld by some overwhelming power or carried in the hollow of some superhuman hand. The captain, a sad-eyed, strong-featured American, was cartooned in the papers as "Gloomy Gus" (the pessimistic hero ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... have raised abandon me, The spells which I have studied baffle me, The remedy I recked of tortured me I lean no more on superhuman aid; It hath no power upon the past, and for The future, till the past be gulfed in darkness, It is not of my search.—My Mother Earth![119] And thou fresh-breaking Day, and you, ye Mountains, Why are ye beautiful? I cannot love ye. And thou, the bright ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... to be part o' the 'ouse, sir. So when she comes, an' finds as it ain't all been took,—or, as you might say,—vanished away,—why the question as I ax's you is,—w'ot will she say? Oh Lord!" And here, Adam gave vent to his great laugh which necessitated an almost superhuman exertion of strength to keep the table from slipping from its precarious perch. Whereupon Miss Priscilla screamed, (a very small scream, like herself) and Prudence scolded, and the two rosy-cheeked maids tittered, and Adam went chuckling upon ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... bears the stamp of superhuman necessity, men play but a small part; but if we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blucher, does that deprive England and Germany of anything? No. Neither illustrious England nor august Germany is in question in the problem of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time in all places. The task is frankly superhuman, because no block of real existence, with its infinitesimal detail, can be recorded, nor if somehow recorded could it be dominated by the mind; and to carry on a survey of this social continuum ad infinitum would multiply the difficulty. The task ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... sword, and applied to the seditions of little republics speculations formed by observation on an empire which covered half the known world. Of liberty they knew nothing. It was to them a great mystery—a superhuman enjoyment. They ranted about liberty and patriotism, from the same cause which leads monks to talk more ardently than other men about love and women. A wise man values political liberty, because it secures the persons and ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... could not see a child sent to his destruction by that villain Sedley, whoever were his father, for he meant mischief if ever man did. 'Twas superhuman scruple not to hold your peace ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... you are," ordered Miss Campbell, fired with superhuman courage and never once shifting her gaze. "Stand where you are," she repeated. There was not a tremor in her voice. "Now, give me what you are ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... pang, the only real one I ever felt in my life! But it taught me one thing, that the only road toward realization of life and one's self is through suffering. I found out that I could bear, for it seems to me as I look back at that horrible nightmare, that it was almost by a superhuman effort I was able to read the letter at all. But ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... hat and a triple ruff round his neck, and over his shoulder was slung a hunting-horn instead of a sword. Altogether he had not the most dignified aspect in the world; but the spectators gazed at him as if there was something superhuman and divine in his person. They even shaded their eyes with their hands, as if they were dazzled by ...
— Biographical Stories - (From: "True Stories of History and Biography") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for he shortly died. His great soul quitted his body, which was exhausted by almost superhuman exertions, on the 11th of August 1456. Shortly before he died, according to Florentius, a comet appeared, sent, as it would seem, to announce his coming end. The whole Christian world mourned his loss. The Pope ordered the cardinals to perform a funeral ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... The two sects of Greek philosophy that had most adherents among the Romans were those of the Epicureans and the Stoics. Cassius, as an Epicurean, would have no faith in any superhuman powers; but in the moments of danger a man's speculative principles give way to the common feelings of all mankind. I have kept Plutarch's word "enthusiasm," which is here to be understood not in our sense, but in the Greek sense of a person ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... object something far above even the purest patriotic fervor, can inspire deeds more truly worthy of human admiration than this, the highest natural feeling of the human heart; and, for a Christian, the most inspiring pages of history are those which tell of the superhuman exertions of devoted knights to wrest the sepulchre of our Lord from the polluted ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... the fear of international complications, was not prepared to claim this right, even the capitalists considering the king's projects far too hazardous to give him the necessary support. Leopold II was, therefore, left to his own resources to accomplish an almost superhuman task: to obtain the necessary recognition from the Powers, and to sufficiently develop the resources of the Congo to persuade the Belgian people ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... 1811 he purchased an estate near the Tweed, to which he gave the name of Abbotsford. In enlarging his estate and building a costly house, he spent vast sums of money. This, together with the failure of his publishers in 1826, involved him very heavily in debt. But he set to work with almost superhuman effort to pay his debts by the labors of his pen. In about four years, he had paid more than $300,000; but the effort was too much for his strength, and ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... at the usual hour, the sky stranger came again. And, though Wunzh had fasted seven days, he felt a new power arise within him. He grasped the stranger with superhuman strength, and threw him down. He took from him his beautiful garments, and, finding him dead, buried him in the softened earth, and did all else ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... then by human agencies also a State may be overthrown. To be secure against such vicissitudes a throne must be based upon something superior to man's potentialities. Divine authority alone fulfils that definition, and it is because the throne of Japan had a superhuman foundation that its existence is perennial. Therefore the Jingi-kwan stands above all others in the State." In another, book (Jingi-ryo) we find it stated: "All the deities* of heaven and earth are worshipped in the Jingi-kwan. On the day ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of alarm was the various portents vouched for by 86 many witnesses. In the Capitoline Square, it was said, the figure of Victory had let the reins of her chariot slip from her hands: a ghost of superhuman size had suddenly burst out of the chapel of Juno:[182] a statue of the sainted Julius on the island in the Tiber had, on a fine, still day, turned round from the west and faced the east: an ox had spoken in Etruria: animals ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... successfully struggling with death; but these occasional brightenings were always succeeded by a more entire prostration and languor. The personal beauty, for which Ernest had always been remarkable, grew almost superhuman during his illness, and Richard could not resist stealing a little time from his busy labors to paint his brother's portrait. In the execution of this task of love, however, many hindrances occurred; and before it was more than a sketch, the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... superhuman Peal was that? Not man, nor woman, Nor twenty madmen, crush'd, could wreak Their soul in such a ponderous shriek. Dumbly, for an instant, stares The field; and creep men's ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... slumbering forces were slowly awakening; and, becoming more crescendo and stringendo, reveals its full glory at the Piu Allegro. This portion, based on quickened phrases of the first theme, seems charged with superhuman energy, and mounting higher and higher culminates in a majestic proclamation of the choral-like motto ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... a column. They could build, as it-were, with nothing but the last ruins of Rome. They were given no forms but the forms which the fatigue and lethargy of the Dark Ages had repeated for six hundred years. They were capable, even in the north, of impressing even these forms with a superhuman majesty. ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... a short time ago that Shelley was an example of supreme, divine, superhuman genius. It is the sort of thing Mr Gilbert's 'rapturous maidens' might have said: 'How Botticellian! How Fra Angelican! How perceptively intense and consummately utter!' There ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... displayed—her graceful movements, as she occasionally restrained her grey palfrey, who fretted to resume his speed, all combined with her sudden and unexpected appearance to induce the boatswain and his men to consider her as superhuman. ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Alizon, by an almost superhuman effort, burst the spell that bound her, and clasped Dorothy ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to the Silences;—and, on the whole, found that it was an adventure, in sorrowful fact, equal to the fabulous ones by old knights-errant against dragons and wizards in enchanted wildernesses and waste howling solitudes; not achievable except by nearly superhuman exercise of all the four cardinal virtues, and unexpected favor of the special blessing of Heaven. His adventure achieved or found unachievable, he has returned with experiences new to him in the affairs of men. What this Colonial Office, inhabiting the head of Downing Street, really was, and ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... superhuman the self-imposed task of the nation! How sublimely vain the belief that it shall live ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... fighting. Finally one commenced to chew at one of his ears. With an oath, the Hon. Morison struggled to a sitting posture. The rats retreated. He worked his legs beneath him and came to his knees, and then, by superhuman effort, rose to his feet. There he stood, reeling drunkenly, dripping ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... considered heresy, but I confess I did not at first go into raptures, nor perceive any traces of superhuman beauty. The predominant feeling, if I may so express it, was satisfaction; the eye dwells on its faultless outline with a gratified sense, that nothing is wanting to render it perfect. It is the ideal of a woman's form—a faultless ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... hashish is beginning its work. Well, unfurl your wings, and fly into superhuman regions; fear nothing, there is a watch over you; and if your wings, like those of Icarus, melt before the sun, we are here to ease your fall." He then said something in Arabic to Ali, who made a sign ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... gives to his superhuman beings. His euphuism. His dramas miracles of art. His exquisite imagery. Publication of Johnson's edition of the works of. Character ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... He had not passed half the distance to the other boat, when he discovered that it was filling. With his usual rashness, he determined to reach his friends in it by his own exertions, and without calling to them for aid, and by an almost superhuman effort he drove on with his treacherous craft. The ultimate danger was not much to a light and powerful swimmer, and he plunged forward. The noise and commotion of forcing his waterlogged canoe through the water attracted the attention ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... the evening, when Hepsey came to Ruth, worn with the unaccustomed labours of correspondence, and proudly displayed the nondescript epistle, she was compelled to admit that unless Joe had superhuman qualities he would indeed ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... almost superhuman effort to sustain himself, and keep from sinking, but I saw, with horror, that he was settling slowly and surely, and that all his struggles only ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... receipt of the letter. Or he might appear within the six months. The journeys laid out were of vast distances, and through wild and dangerous countries, and by sea as well. Only a good traveller could survive them at all; to execute them in such brief space seemed something superhuman. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... Jews and opposed Paul's innovations, because they were hard of heart and dull of comprehension. This hypothesis is hardly in accordance with the concomitant faith of those who adopt it, in the miraculous insight and superhuman sagacity of their Master; nor do I see any way of getting it to harmonise with the orthodox postulate; namely, that Matthew was the author of the first gospel and John of the fourth. If that is so, then, most assuredly, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... man can believe that the son of a carpenter, together with twelve of the meanest and most illiterate mechanics, unassisted by any superhuman wisdom and power, should be able to invent and promulgate a system of theology and ethics the most sublime and perfect, which all such men as Plato, Aristotle and Cicero had overlooked, and that they, by their own wisdom, repudiated every false virtue, though universally admired, and that ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... small space for compunction in a man's heart when he is in Wilfrid's state, burning with the revival of what seemed to him a superhuman attachment. He had no design to break his acknowledged bondage to Countess Lena, and answered her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Mr Waller, in the intervals of work, talked a good deal, mostly of Edward, his doings, his sayings, and his prospects. The only thing that seemed to worry Mr Waller was the problem of how to employ his son's almost superhuman talents to the best advantage. Most of the goals towards which the average man strives struck him as ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... that such a sense of a superhuman effort at control behind the words that the pain of it was almost intolerable. He wanted, there and then, to have left the room. It would have been better for him had he done so. But some force ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... first two together. I do not think they can begin to illustrate it, until the third arrives; for it is a single minded story, as it were, and an artist should know the end: which I don't think very likely, unless he reads it." Then, after relating a superhuman effort he was making to lodge his visitors in his doll's house ("I didn't like the idea of turning them out at night. It is so dark in these lanes, and groves, when the moon's not bright"), he sketched for me what he possibly might, and really did, accomplish. He would ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... instant and overwhelming assent from the audience. That was my good fortune on the afternoon of Sunday, the fifth of January last. I was certainly extremely fortunate in my interpreters in the enterprise, and that not alone in respect of their artistic talent; for had it not been for their superhuman patience, their imperturbable good humor and good fellowship, there could have been no performance. The terror of the Censor's power gave us trouble enough to break up any ordinary commercial enterprise. Managers promised and even engaged their theatres ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... life had been passed in eminently pleasant places. The seamy side of existence had always been carefully hidden from his eyes. He therefore did not recognise this strange sense which had leapt into his being—the sense of superhuman, physical, ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... soon have found the door was—to me—a proof of their reasoning capabilities. It assured me that they must not be regarded, by any means, as mere animals. I had felt something of this before, when that first Thing peered in through my window. Then I had applied the term superhuman to it, with an almost instinctive knowledge that the creature was something different from the brute-beast. Something beyond human; yet in no good sense; but rather as something foul and hostile to the great and good in humanity. ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... the deck. She heard nothing but the wind and the waves. And then with her hair streaming wild, with lips bloodless, she stood upright and rushed to the deck. The wind tore at her, flying water buffeted her, and the hulk swayed under her feet; but, as though endowed with superhuman power, as though scorning the elements to which she had bowed through the night she ran forward, heedless of everything but that her companion was ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... declaring—that whatever is referred by the sacred penman to a direct communication from God, and wherever it is recorded that the subject of the history had asserted himself to have received this or that command, this or that information or assurance, from a superhuman Intelligence, or where the writer in his own person, and in the character of an historian, relates that the WORD OF THE LORD CAME unto priest, prophet, chieftain, or other individual—have I not declared that I receive the same with ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Bedient did exactly this thing.... Time could not efface the humor evoked by the sight or sound of the magnificent orchestrelle. During one of the Captain's New York trips, he had heard a famous orchestra. The effect upon him was of something superhuman. The Captain went again—followed the musicians to Boston and Philadelphia. The result was more or less the same. Soul flew in one direction; mind in another; and, inert before the players—a little fat man, perspiring, weeping, ecstatic. What came of it, ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... disasters, Napoleon refused the propositions of peace made on condition that he would content himself henceforth with his dominion over France. The allies consequently marched into France, and the almost superhuman activity of the hard-pressed emperor could not prevent their occupation of Paris (March 31, 1814). Napoleon was forced to abdicate, and the allies, in seeming derision, granted him full sovereignty over the tiny island of Elba and permitted him to retain ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... could err. With its exact perpendiculars and horizontals, its geometric regularities, and its Chinese preciseness of fitting, a house had always seemed to him—again in the vagueness of his mind—as something superhuman. The commonest cornice, the most ordinary pillar of a staircase-balustrade—could that have been accomplished in its awful perfection of line and contour by a human being? How easy to believe that it was ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... trouble, Socrates?" you will say; "if you have been doing nothing unusual, how have these rumours and slanders arisen?" I will tell you what I take to be the explanation. It is due to a certain wisdom with which I seem to be endowed—not superhuman at all like that of these gentlemen. I speak not arrogantly, but on the evidence of the Oracle of Delphi, who told Chaerephon, a man known to you, that there was no wiser man than Socrates. Now, I am not conscious of possessing wisdom; but the God cannot ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... huge, even monstrous muscles, knotted and kinked from shoulder to elbow, sank down under the broad barbarian bracelet of bronze and rippled under and rose again from elbow to wrist, ferocious, superhuman! In that movement the dying man read the mute's consecration of his one great strength to the protection of the tenderly loved Laodice. Costobarus motioned to the shittim-wood casket and Momus undid it and strapped it on ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... as well as my own. Mine was therefore a fight for life. A sudden idea flashed across my mind, and I continued to struggle, at the same time gradually forcing my enemy backward towards the door. He shouted for help, but was unheard. He cursed and swore and shouted until, with a sudden and almost superhuman effort, I tripped him, bringing his head into such violent contact with the stone lintel of the door that the sound could surely be heard a considerable distance. For a moment he was stunned, and in that brief second I released his grip ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... Philosophy], Notwithstanding the incomparable sagacity of its author, the 'Principia' contained merely a rough outline of planetary perturbations, though not through any lack of ardor or perseverance. The efforts of the great philosopher were always superhuman, and the questions which he did not solve were simply incapable of solution ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... which had burst suddenly upon Meg's practical nature. He had been subconsciously prepared for the tomb to be one of unusual importance. The soothsayer's prediction had not been mere charlatanry to him. His secret thoughts were so constantly focussed on what is termed the superhuman, that Meg's wonder and horror formed only a minor part of ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... only self-control, almost superhuman, that enabled him to speak those words steadily, for the fierce death-throe was possessing him before he ended. Through the awful minutes that followed, not another sound than the hissing breath escaped through his set lips; his face was not once distorted, though the ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... help thinking that to grumble in the presence of that rich, despotic personality would require a superhuman courage. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sociological novel lack cogency unless the characters are fairly representative of average mankind. Godwin's principal actors are both, to say the least, exceptional. They are lofty idealizations of certain virtues and powers of mind. Falkland is like Jean Valjean, a superhuman creature; and, indeed, "Caleb Williams" may well be compared on one side with "Les Miserables," for Victor Hugo's avowed purpose, likewise, was the denunciation of social tyranny. But the characteristics that would have weakened ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... against the rocks. At this critical moment, whilst held by only one strand of the cable, Lieutenant Jones's boat (although nearly swamped by the frequent shipping of seas) neared the ship; and this officer, watching an opportunity, sprung on board with his intrepid crew, and, by almost superhuman exertions, succeeded in hauling her ahead. She had just reached the point of safety, when her officers and crew, who witnessed her more favourable position, brought about by Lieutenant Jones's courage and perseverance, returned on ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to hich the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... been like the ardour of young love, and now what were his feelings? Men said that he was an infidel; but he would himself deny it with a frigid precision, with the stiffest accuracy of language; and then argue that his acknowledgment of a superhuman creative power was not infidelity. He had a God of his own, a cold, passionless, prudent God; the same God, he said, to whom others looked; with this only difference, that when others looked with fanatic enthusiasm, he looked with well-balanced reason. But ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... the boys, instead of beginning to count, followed the lead of one of their number and scampered to a range of blackberry bushes close by and hid behind it. They imagined Dutchy's humiliation, when he should rise after a superhuman effort and find the place silent and vacant, nobody there to applaud. They were 'so full of laugh' with the idea, that they were continually exploding into muffled cackles. Time swept on, and presently one who was peeping through ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... distinguished, that whilst the former either proceed of mankind, or seek human intercourse, these form a segregated society—one might say, a peculiar kingdom of their own—and are only, by accident or the pressure of circumstances, moved to converse with men. Something superhuman, approximating them to the gods, is mingled up in them: they possess power to help and to hurt man. They are however, at the same time, afraid of him, because they are not his bodily match. They appear either far below the human stature, or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... of the dwarfs, as gatherers and guardians of treasure useless to themselves, but with which some luck's-child may enrich himself and his neighbors. Other analogies between them and the dwarfs, such as their accomplishing superhuman things and being prematurely subject to the dryness of old ago, ("Der Zwerg ist schon im siebenten Jahr ein Greis," says Grimm,) ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... chances is against it. That is why no possible programme could be made that would fit more than a very small portion of a given club. We have seen that many club-programmes are made with an irreducible minimum of intelligence; but even a programme committee with superhuman intellect and angelic goodwill could never compass the solution of such a problem as this. Nor will it suffice to abandon the general programme and endeavour to select for each speaker the subject that he would like best to study and expound. No one knows what ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... and says: "Well, well, you are the greatest woman I ever saw. I thought you would faint dead away when I told you." And as he looks at her, all the glories of physiognomy in the court of Louis XV. on the modern fashion plates are tame as compared with the superhuman splendors of that woman's face. Joan of Arc, Mary Antoinette, and La Belle Hamilton, the enchantment of the court of Charles II., ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... nearly fifteen thousand majority, and of her five representatives in Congress only one was friendly to the policy of the Administration. Michigan, which had been Republican by twenty thousand in 1860, now gave the Administration but six thousand majority, though Senator Chandler made almost superhuman efforts to bring out the full vote of the party. Wisconsin, which had given Mr. Lincoln a large popular majority, now gave a majority of two thousand for the Democrats, dividing the Congressional delegation ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... abandon them. Hescock also had lost most of his horses, but all his guns were saved. Bush's battery lost two pieces, the tangled underbrush in the dense cedars proving an obstacle to getting them away which his almost superhuman exertions could not surmount. Thus far the bloody duel had cost me heavily, one-third of my division being killed or wounded. I had already three brigade commanders killed; a little later I lost my ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan
... persecutors and become a tribe of nomads and serfs. But to these Ulster immigrants such a choice was no choice at all. They knew themselves strong men, who had made the most of opportunity despite almost superhuman obstacles. The drumming of their feet along the banks of the Shenandoah, or up the rivers from Charleston, and on through the broad sweep of the Yadkin Valley, was a conquering people's challenge to the Wilderness which ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... matter of fact, it was very probably that hard, unyielding Faith which made the Sixteenth Century Spaniard the almost superhuman being that he was. Only Spain of the Sixteenth Century could have produced the Conquistadors or such a man as St. Ignatius Loyola, whose learned, devout, and fanatically militant Society of Jesus struck fear into ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... African chief, at which thousands of sacrificed victims accompany the soul of a prince so that it shall not pass alone into the kingdom of spirits, and made her fancy that perhaps this pompous and interminable retinue was about to descend and disappear in the superhuman grave large enough to ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... knees gave way a moment and he shook in her hands. Then, suddenly, he turned wild. "Fiend! you have ruined me!" he yelled; and then, with his natural strength, which was great, and the superhuman power of mad excitement, he whirled her right round and flung her from him, and dashed out of the door, uttering cries of rage ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... dear Eva, things which appear very extraordinary, may often be explained by a chance resemblance or a freak of nature. Marvels being always the result of optical illusion or heated fancy, a time must come, when that which appeared to be superhuman or supernatural, will prove to be the most simple and natural event in the world. I doubt not, therefore, that the things, which we denominate our prodigies, will one day receive ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... marble is remarkable and, after all, is a fine piece of study which would do honor to any other sculptor except Michael Angelo; but there is lacking that Olympian mastership which characterizes the works of that superhuman sculptor. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... pleasant smile, a graceful and courteous attention. At his desk, beneath the romantic picture of his loved and lost Lenore, he would sit, hour after hour, patient, assiduous, and uncomplaining, tracing, in an exquisitely clear chirography, and with almost superhuman swiftness, the lightning thoughts—the 'rare and radiant' fancies as they flashed through his wonderful and ever-wakeful brain. I recollect, one morning, toward the close of his residence in this city, when he seemed unusually gay ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... question him. He discloses the secrets of these mysterious regions to me. And then, the phenomena whose reality Arthur Pym asserted appear around the mythic monster. The curtain of flickering vapours, striped with luminous rays, is rent asunder. And it is not a face of superhuman grandeur which arises before my astonished eyes: it is Arthur Pym, fierce guardian of the south pole, flaunting the ensign of the United States in those ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... last superhuman effort, Aurora made her third attempt; her eyeballs started from their sockets, big, blue veins and cords stood out on her lovely neck, and all the force and vigor of her young life seemed to go out through her pursed lips ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... might use. But the intelligence of genius is profounder and more personal than mere ideas. It has within it something energetic, expansive, propulsive from mind to mind, perennial, yet steady and controlled; and it was with such force that Johnson's almost superhuman personality inspired the art of his friends. Of this they were in some degree aware. Reynolds confessed that Johnson formed his mind, and 'brushed from it a great deal of rubbish.' Gibbon called Johnson 'Reynolds' oracle.' In one of ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... diving suit and placed it in the fisherman's hands? This magnificent benefaction from the Man of the Waters to the poor Indian from Ceylon was accepted by the latter with trembling hands. His bewildered eyes indicated that he didn't know to what superhuman creatures he owed both his ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... heavens, and he practises an asceticism in the cause of science almost comparable to that of Saint Simeon Stylites. Yet they tell me he might live in luxury if he spent on himself what he spends on science. His knowledge is of that strange, remote character, that it seems sometimes almost superhuman. He knows the ridges and chasms of the moon as a surveyor knows a garden-plot he has measured. He watches the snows that gather around the poles of Mars; he is on the lookout for the expected comet at the moment when its faint stain ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... seemed to Frank Merriwell that he must give out; a hundred times he set his teeth and vowed that he would die before he would weaken. No one could know the almost superhuman courage and fortitude which enabled him to keep up and continue his work in the proper manner. Those who watched the crew closely fancied that he worked with the utmost ease, for all ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... could feel, as it were, his hands reach out to claim her; and she felt that while he lived she was not wholly free. She realized that the hand of nomad, disorderly barbarism was dragging her with a force which was inhuman, or, maybe, superhuman. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... head of a respectable firm, the father of five grown-up children, going on like this. The Colonel had thought it would be funny, but as hour succeeded hour, and the ringleader of the frolic gradually became a wearied spectator, this superhuman display of high-spirited energy grew long past a joke. Charlie had never been austere, but there were limits to all things. Good Gad, there were limits! If the man had got drunk or grown vicious, he might have excused him. But to see ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... bed with me the first time, and in broad day; but when thrusting up his own shirt and my shift, he laid his naked glowing body to mine... oh insupportable delight! oh! superhuman rapture! what pain could stand before a pleasure so transporting? I felt no more the smart of my wounds below; but, curling round him like the tendril of a vine, as if I feared any part of him should be untouched or unpressed by me, I returned his strenuous embraces ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... still more decisive. Springing into the pirate craft, wrenching a weapon from the grasp of the chief of the assailants, he drove before him the three remaining men, terror-struck at his sudden and inexplicable appearance, his superhuman size and strength. One by one he swept them overboard; then grasping a huge stone, which formed part of the ballast, he dashed it with the full force of his gigantic strength through the planks of the boat, which at once began to fill. All this ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... forehead so as to bring the two eye-brows together, is he,—my husband Vrikodara! Steeds of the noblest breed, plump and strong, well-trained and endued with great might, draw the cars of that warrior! His achievements are superhuman. He is known, therefore, by the name of Bhima on earth. They that offend him are never suffered to live. He never forgetteth a foe. On some pretext or other he wrecketh his vengeance. Nor is ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... solid in the thing for which they sold themselves. They gave up all pleasures for one pleasure of spiritual ecstasy. They may have been mad; but it looks as if there really were such a pleasure. They gave up all human experiences for the sake of one superhuman experience. They may have been wicked, but it looks as if there ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... special caste with its professional secrets which accepts new members only after long tests. They are evidently persons with over-sensitive nervous systems and liable to hallucinations. As soon as they have their attacks of abnormal excitement, they are conceived to be agents of superhuman powers, and on account of this they are able to prescribe the cure of any diseases. In Australia, therapeutic power belongs to the koonkie, a man who as a child had a vision of a demonic god. From him he received ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... if ever they had doubted its legitimacy of principle. So also with most of the other Boer leaders and their clergy too. The agencies must have been exceedingly subtle, and the jugglery and artifice superhuman, to operate such processes of reasoning, such deception and aberration in honest-minded and even ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... consent of his colleagues to go forth by balloon and try to stir up a warlike spirit in the Provinces. He was made Minister of War in addition to being Minister of the Interior. From Nov. 1, 1870, to Jan. 30, 1871, his efforts were almost superhuman; and but for Bazaine's surrender at Metz, they might ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... lovely women which adorned it. "Here," said he, "are heads worthy to crown that striking figure in the gondola. Behold that all-surpassing portrait by Giorgione, of such beauty as painters and poets may dream of but never find, and yet not superhuman in its type. Too impassioned for an angel; too brilliant for a Madonna; and with too much of thought and character for a Venus—she is merely woman. Belonging to no special rank or class in society, and neither classical nor ideal, she personifies all that is most lovely in her sex; and, whether ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... symphonies, we might readily fall into the mistake of attributing them to another year than that of their composition, and the mistake would be natural, if not inevitable, when we consider the enormous amount of music we know Mozart to have written in 1788. In Purcell we find the same terrific, superhuman energy manifested as the day of his death drew near, and perhaps we may be wrong in imagining that the theatre wholly absorbed him. A few of the anthems may with great probability be ascribed to certain dates because of the royal events with which they are connected. For example, ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... penalty for her crimes, her evil nature, her flint-like callousness, her more than inhuman cruelty, her contempt for the laws of God and man, she was condemned to bury her magnificent personalty, her transcendent beauty, her superhuman charms, in gilded obscurity at a King's left hand. A powerful story ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... beyond the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers. But having placed three-fifths of the slave population under the Constitution, having pledged the Constitution to the protection of slave property, it required an almost superhuman effort to confine the evil to one section of the country. Like a loathsome disease it spread itself over the body politic until our nation became the eyesore of the age, and a byword among the nations of the world. The time came when our beloved country ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... me as she tried, and I made an almost superhuman effort to comprehend and remember. I could not. I was flogged, I was denied food and even water. I was put in dark rooms. I was forbid all play and recreation. I went through this martyrdom year after year and I finally became stubborn ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... isn't a good sort of chap," said Sir Isaac, with that same note of almost superhuman rationality, "only—he isn't ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... you not promise to intrust this poor infant entirely to me? You little know the mischief you have done him. Had you left him to my care, he would have grown up like a child of celestial birth, endowed with superhuman strength and intelligence, and would have lived forever. Do you imagine that earthly children are to become immortal without being tempered to it in the fiercest heat of the fire? But you have ruined your own son. For ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... Washington,—a great, serene man, who, after long reverses, nobly sustained, gained a notable national triumph; to Wallace we feel, as the Italians do to Garibaldi, as a demon of warlike power,—blending courage and clemency, enthusiasm and skill, daring and determination, in proportions almost superhuman,—and ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... we suppose him to have been of a reasonable age when he began his adventures, he must have been between eighty and ninety years old when this book is alleged to have been written. Gomara had overdone the matter in the superhuman achievements which he had ascribed to Cortez, while Las Casas had proved the conqueror and his party to have been a gang of cruel monsters. Now, something had to be done to avert the odium that was beginning to attach to this crusade against the ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... said Risler, leaning over him. "I am at the end of my forbearance. Since this morning I have been making superhuman efforts to restrain myself, but it would take very little now to make my anger burst all bonds, and woe to the man on whom it falls! I am quite capable of killing some one. Come! Be ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... She's just what I need." And now he studied again the scene in which Kedzie took down the draught of bitter beer, and there was a superhuman vividness in the close-up, with its magnified details in which every tiny muscle revealed ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... fought with superhuman valour; but they were taken in the rear by the Macedonian garrison, who suddenly made a sally from the Kadmeia, and the greater part of them were surrounded and fell fighting. The city was captured, plundered and destroyed. Alexander hoped by this terrible example to strike ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... which the popular sleuths of fiction mostly confine their activities; and, secondly, because it combines a maximum of sinister mystery with a minimum of actual bloodshed; and, lastly, because our credulity is not strained unduly either by the superhuman ingenuity of the hunter or an excess of diabolical cunning on the part of the quarry. Otherwise the story possesses the usual features. There is the clever young detective, in whose company we expectantly scour the bazaars and alleys of Mangadone in search of a missing boy. There are Chinamen ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... translates this in its literal sense "gods." The Revised Version gives "god" with "gods" in the margin. Reuss renders the word by "spectre," remarking in a note that it is not quite exact; but that the word Elohim expresses "something divine, that is to say, superhuman, commanding respect and terror" ("Histoire des Israelites," p. 321). Tuch, in his commentary on Genesis, and Thenius, in his commentary on Samuel, express substantially the same opinion. Dr. Alexander (in Kitto's "Cyclopaedia" s. v. "God") has ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... called a "spiritual body," there is nothing in the revelation made to us through the activity of our complex vision to forbid our free and even fanciful speculation as to its use, by the very highest of superhuman personalities, even, let us say, by the Christ himself, of this mysterious energy of the soul which I have named ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... well as teachers go," she said with an indifference that seemed superhuman to the quivering Patricia, who immediately set her up in her mind as authority ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... for the better, if, thought Ishmael, it was not the mere selfishness of the old generation which had ever made him feel Nicky needed improvement. This deepening, this added manliness, would after all have been superhuman in the boy who had gone away. Nicky had lived roughly among rough men, and he had stood the test well. He still had the delightful affectations of youth, but wore them with a better grace. He came back not only the heir and future master of Cloom, but a man who could have won his way in the world ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... should say," said he, with the rare, almost superhuman patience that has made him so valuable ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... not to be outdone in gestures of respect; but presently my bowing opponent saw the error under which I was acting, and suddenly convinced me that, at all events, I was not yet in the presence of a superhuman being, by declaring that he was not “miladi,” but was, in fact, nothing more or less god-like than the poor doctor, who had brought his mistress’s letter ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... such as from existence' brink Ventured but drave too swift to sink. The few who rushed in the body to enter hell, And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames With superhuman inhumanities, Long-famous glories, immemorial shames— And crawling slowly back, have by degrees Regained cool peaceful air in wonder— Why speak they not of comrades ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... I got talking to myself again, I said: 'Doris Blenner, you're a great girl—the best ever; but you're not superhuman. No man has a right to expect a girl to be that. You're too lovable, too human, Doris, to be the superhuman kind. I'll be away in the East Lord knows how long—another two years perhaps—and there's all those army chaps always on the job. We'll just ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... greatest of the national heroes of the Greeks. He is represented as performing, besides various other exploits, twelve superhuman labors, and as being at last translated from a blazing pyre to a place among the immortal gods. The myth of Heracles, who was at first a solar divinity, is made up mainly of the very same fables that were told of the Chaldaean solar hero Izdubar (see p. 46). Through the Phoenicians, these stories ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... clear rattling harmony of Spanish boleros and dances, shrieking out at intervals snatches of songs in time to the music, or twirling the instruments around their heads in a frenzy of excitement. At the tables, too, were more of the excited band, vociferating with almost superhuman fluency in various languages their exploits, pausing occasionally amid the hubbub to clink their glasses together, and then chattering and yelling on as before. In the centre of the apartment were ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... I mentioned it to some of Madame Blavatsky's friends so that she might have an opportunity of giving her version. I am told that she said she gave me an answer as directed by her Guru. I must conclude therefore that unless the Gurus are all glamour, they must be raised by their superhuman merits ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... not otherwise. The tumult continued unabated for near an hour; but as one grew used to it, it gradually resolved itself into three bells, answering each other at short intervals across the town, a man shouting, at ever shorter intervals and with superhuman energy, 'FEUER, - IM SACHSENHAUSEN, and the almost continuous winding of all manner of bugles and trumpets, sometimes in stirring flourishes, and sometimes in mere tuneless wails. Occasionally there was another rush of feet past the window, and once there was a mighty ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of us had any weapon, it appeared, and all that we could do was to struggle in that mutual and tenacious grip and trust to chance. I felt myself growing weaker, but I did not relax my hold and, indeed, came to the conclusion that if I was to survive it must be by making a superhuman effort. With all the force of my muscles and the weight of my body I pushed my man forward, at the same time striving to bend him backward. He gave way a little and struck the railings that surrounded the well of the saloon, ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... time," is one which we are bound to estimate at its genuine value. The more we refine our faculties, other things equal, the wiser we grow: we are the more raised above the thickness of the atmosphere that envelops our fellow-mortals, and are made partakers of a nature superhuman and divine. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... seemed impossible that any human intelligence could have suspected deceit or duplicity in Rosey's clear gaze. But Mr. Nott's intelligence was superhuman. "I was sayin' that Mr. Ferrieres didn't happen in while the young ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... indefinite. That power, therefore, with which the minds of men invested the emperor, was vulgarized by this coarse translation into the region of physics. Else it is evident, that any power which, by standing above all human control, occupies the next relation to superhuman modes of authority, must be invested by all minds alike with some dim and undefined relation to the sanctities of the next world. Thus, for instance, the Pope, as the father of Catholic Christendom, could ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... figure, enveloped in a large black cloak, and covered with a slouched hat, standing at some distance, between the window and the tree, and so intervening as to receive the full influence of the stream of radiance which served to dilate its almost superhuman stature. The sexton stopped. The figure remained stationary. There was something singular both in the costume and situation of the person. Peter's curiosity was speedily aroused, and, familiar with every inch of the churchyard, he determined to take the nearest cut, and ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... themselves prosperous, or deserting them in their distress. A man, then, who has shewn a firm, unshaken, and unvarying friendship in both these contingencies we must reckon as one of a class the rarest in the world, and all but superhuman. ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... hands did not fall at her sides, but shifted about on her lap as if they did not belong to her. Her wandering, senseless eyes stopped their movements, and in them suddenly appeared an expression of deep meaning. The old princess made a terrible, superhuman effort to recover her presence of mind and regain command over herself. A single faint groan broke from her breast, and her teeth chattered. She began to look about the room for a light, but the lamp had been extinguished; the dull gray daylight ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... was upon the crowd, crying to be satisfied. But they had reckoned wrongly, and were soon to learn their error. Every atom of the long youth's fighting blood was raised to boiling pitch. On the instant, the all but superhuman strength at which we marvel in the insane was his. Like flails, his doubled fists shot out in every direction, meeting resistance at each blow. By the dim light he caught the answering glint on sheath knives, but he took no notice. His hat had come off, and his abundant ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... the next train. The poor girl was thrown into a most uneasy position, without the power of changing it. She was nearly suffocated for want of air; the hay-seed fell into her eyes and nostrils, and it required almost superhuman efforts to refrain from sneezing or choking. Added to this was terror lest her absence be discovered, and the heavy box examined. In that state of mind and body, she remained more than two hours, in the hot sun on the railroad platform. At last, ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child
... fish; for often, in what is called a long dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost; indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one's compass, while all the other muscles are strained ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... up the two children one under each arm, ran with superhuman strength to evade the falling derrick—with a last supreme effort he rolled the boys beyond its reach; they were ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... board. He pointed to a microphone. He got at an oxygen bottle and inhaled deeply. Oxygen, obviously, should be an antidote for panic, since the symptoms of terror act to increase the oxygenation of the bloodstream and muscles, and to make superhuman ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... stirred the incense to a dense cloud of smoke, and her blazing eyes, turned from her people, peered through the reek for a reassuring sign from the rock, for what she now demanded of Milo called for superhuman swiftness and surety. As the seconds sped, she kept the smoke swirling thickly, and her voice rang out in a weird incantation that kept the spectators trembling with ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... a strained ankle. For a moment he seemed dazed and unable to realize what had happened. That the whole collapsed roof had been held above him by superhuman effort of Blythe only dawned on him when he saw the bleeding, unconscious form of his friend lying clear of the wreckage, Doc Carson kneeling by him, the others standing silently about. It did occur to Roy, as odd thoughts do come in tense moments, how pleased and content Blythe would ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... He should have fallen out on the pretext of an indisposition, but he was in front of the Emperor who, at the end of the session, would distribute the commissions of sous-lieutenant, so eagerly desired. Flix made superhuman efforts to resist, but at last his strength failed him and he collapsed and was carried away in a most ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... these supernatural powers of the gods for which the student of natural phenomena refused any longer to be a sponsor. This was the parting of the ways between science and religion; and thenceforth the attributes of the "gods" became definitely and admittedly superhuman. ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... a great city was full of interest to these country girls, and it required a superhuman self-control to go about with downcast eyes, noticing nothing. At the weekly conference one of the Sisters acknowledged that if she passed a troop of mountebanks or a peepshow, the desire to look was so strong upon her that ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... answer, Heale had broken forth into loud praises of him, setting forth how the stranger owed his life entirely to his superhuman strength ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... real love. But she seems to have been an extremely good fellow in her age, and not by any means a very bad fellow in her youth. She was at one time pretty, or at least good-looking;[174] she was at all times clever; and if she did not quite deserve that almost superhuman eulogy awarded in the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... superhuman energy, "these two poor boys have shown themselves better men than most here present. See how they bear their fate. Be men, then, and if they must die, let them die ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... among the Kurus, of godlike deeds and prowess. And at that feat of Partha who resembled Sakra himself in his acts, all those rulers of Earth were filled with great wonder. And beholding that feat of Vibhatsu implying superhuman prowess, the Kurus trembled like kine afflicted with cold. And from wonder all the kings there present waved their garments (in the air). And loud was the blare of conchs and the beat of drums that were then ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and the pain of his wound now rendered him furious. He had not hands to touch it or dress it. Frenzied by anger and pain to a strength almost superhuman, he twisted off his iron manacles, as if they had been straws. This done, the chain that bound us together was soon broken, and ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... most superhuman efforts to raise you in society. You can be ten times as proud of your name as ...
— Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit) - A Tragedy in Four Acts • Frank Wedekind
... arbitrantur deas;" i.e. they deem (arbitrantur) very many of their women possessed of prophetic powers, and, as their religious feeling increases, they deem (arbitrantur) them goddesses, i.e. possessed of a superhuman nature; they do not, however, make them goddesses and worship them, as the Romans did Poppaea and her infant, which is covertly ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... taken by the respective armies engaged in the struggle for the supremacy of western Europe. General von Kluck, still in charge of the First German Army, was in control of the western section from the Forest of the Eagle to the plateau of Craonne. He had forced his men to almost superhuman efforts, and by midnight of September 11 he had succeeded in getting most of his artillery across the Aisne, at Soissons, and had whipped his infantry into place on the heights north of the stream. That, with his exhausted troops, he succeeded remains still a tribute ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... terrible than the late physical struggle. The latter had invoked the energy, the courage, and the superhuman strength and endurance to meet it,—had roused the fire of conscious manhood. Now the sick soul revolted at its own folly. The props of self-respect had been knocked away, and he lay prone, humiliated, deprived of the initial courage ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray |
