"Throe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to have laid aside the monarchical, and taken up the republican government, with as much ease as would have attended their throwing off an old and putting on a new suit of clothes. Not a single throe has attended this important transformation. A half dozen aristocratical gentlemen, agonizing under the loss of pre-eminence, have sometimes ventured their sarcasms on our political metamorphosis. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... altering the position of their arms or legs. An indescribable appreciation of the impression which he made upon others filled my heart. His isolation from the sympathy of every person there gave me a pain and a pity, and for the first time I felt a pang of tenderness, and a throe of pride for him. But Alice, upon whom he never made any impression, saw nothing of this; her gayety soon removed the stiffness and silence he created. The party grew noisy again, except Ben, who had not broken the silence into which he fell as soon as ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go! Be our joys three parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... letter a second time before speaking, for I feared to betray myself. The choice of a friend might be a momentous occasion for me. I had already ground for hope, that she had asked me to help her in the first throe of her trouble; but love makes its own doubtings, and I feared. My thoughts seemed to whirl with lightning rapidity, and in a few seconds a whole process of reasoning became formulated. I must not volunteer to be the friend that the father advised ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... morning the school-house withstood its last throe. At ten o'clock, in the midst of a reading-lesson, there entered the young Pole's father. His ox-gad was in his hand; he did not remove his hat, but strode forward to the teacher's desk, sputtering broken English. When he came near, he shook his empty fist so close to the little girl that she ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... is the birth-throe of a new European order of things. The man who attempts to judge the future by the old standards or to force the future back to them will be found to be hopelessly out of date. The world will have no use for him. The world has ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... through which he drifted with her, his arm around her, her pale gold hair blowing about his face. In the same instant he was aware of the pitiful inadequacy of speech. God! If he could so frame words that she could see what he then saw! And he felt the stir in him, like a throe of yearning pain, of the desire to paint these visions that flashed unsummoned on the mirror of his mind. Ah, that was it! He caught at the hem of the secret. It was the very thing that the great writers and master-poets ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... barren are those mountains and spent the streams: Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams, A throe of the heart, Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound, No dying cadence nor long sigh can sound, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... dull and gray. The rain had ceased, but the clouds hung dark and brooding above a world which, in its windless calm, following the spent storm-throe, seemed to us to be waiting "till judgment spoke the doom of fate." We were all up early. None of us, it appeared, had slept well, and some of us not at all. The Story Girl had been among the latter, and she looked very pale and wan, with black shadows under her deep-set eyes. Peter, however, had ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of poetry. This, indeed, it still seems to me, notwithstanding the well-meaning suasion of certain admirers of the poem who have hoped "I should do it justice," thereby meaning that I should eulogise it as a masterpiece. It is a gigantic effort, of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan. That the poem contains much which is beautiful is undeniable, also that it is surcharged with winsome and profound thoughts and a multitude of will-o'-the-wisp-like fancies which all ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... our souls with dissolution's strife; Soaks them with unrest; makes our every breath A throe, not action; from God's purest gift Wipes off the bloom; and on the harp of faith Its fretted strings doth slacken still and shift: Life everywhere, perfect, and always life, Is sole redemption ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... last be distinguished from recruits. The new regiments were instantly gone, lost, scattered, as if they never had been. But the sweeping failure of the charge, the battle, could not make the veterans forget their business. With a last throe, the band of maniacs drew itself up and blazed a volley at the hill, insignificant to those iron intrenchments, but nevertheless expressing that singular final despair which enables men coolly to defy the walls of a ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... vital part had been struck. For some minutes the huge leviathan lashed and rolled and tossed in the trembling waves in his agony, while he spouted up gallons of blood with every throe; then he rolled over on his back, and lay extended a lifeless ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... Minstrel came. Light-hearted youth! aye, as he hastes along, 45 He meditates the future song, How dauntless lla fray'd the Dacyan foe; And while the numbers flowing strong In eddies whirl, in surges throng, Exulting in the spirits' genial throe 50 In tides of power his life-blood seems ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... this earth without a refuge, Buddh Winning the way had deemed it all too hard For mortal feet, and passed, none following him. Yet pondered the compassion of our Lord, But in that hour there rang a voice as sharp As cry of travail, so as if the earth Moaned in birth-throe "Nasyami aham bhu Nasyati loka! Surely I Am Lost, I And My Creatures:" then a pause, and next A pleading sigh borne on the western wind, "Sruyatam dharma, Bhagwat!" Oh, Supreme Let Thy Great Law Be Uttered! Whereupon The Master cast ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... to each other. Ever this distance between,—a man's honor, and faith to his friend, Fred Lawrence thought, never allowing his secret soul to swerve. There were midnights when he softly paced the floor, his lips compressed, his brow ghostly white, and his hands clinched in the throe of a man's deathless love. Then he thought he could not endure it, that he must stay away. But circumstances were stronger than will. Did God mean that this anguish should redeem that other old treachery, that his soul should be purified by its baptism of ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... twined his life in mine—far as had progressed, and near as was achieved our minds' and affections' assimilation—the very suggestion of interference, of heart-separation, could be heard only with a fermenting excitement, an impetuous throe, a disdainful resolve, an ire, a resistance of which no human eye or cheek could hide the flame, nor any truth-accustomed human ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the fond hearts of all the turtle-doves Are broken in compassion of her woe, And every tender little bird that loves Feels in his breast a sympathetic throe; And flowers are sad wherever she may go, And hoarse with sighs the ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... thunder; all its pointed boughs Pierc'd the deep snow—its round and mighty corpse, Bark-flay'd and shudd'ring, quiver'd into death. And Max—as some frail, wither'd reed, the sharp And piercing branches caught at him, As hands in a death-throe, and beat him to the earth— And the dead tree upon its slayer lay. "Yet hear we much of Gods;—if such there be, "They play at games of chance with thunderbolts," Said Alfred, "else on me this doom had come. "This seals my faith in deep and dark unfaith! "Now Katie, are ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... hair were swept forward toward the corner upon which her gaze was fixed, and in which the conditions had now grown so tense with imminent occurrence and so rent with some inconceivable throe that she involuntarily rose, and, stepping forward against the pressure of her petticoats which were blown about her ankles, she impatiently thrust her ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... hast forgotten them, and fain wouldst slay me. Do not, [I beseech you] by Pelops and by thy father Atreus, and this my mother, who having before brought me forth with throes, now suffers this second throe. What have I to do with the marriage of Paris and Helen? Whence came he, father, for my destruction? Look upon me; give me one look, one kiss, that this memorial of thee at least I, dying, may possess, if thou wilt not be persuaded by my words. Brother, thou ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... the question to which she had deafened herself with such crucifying effort—"What if Ariadne should die?" It was as though someone had called to her. She looked down into the black abyss from which she had willfully turned away her eyes, and saw that it was fathomless. A throe of revolt and hatred shook her. She bowed her head to her knees, racked by an anguish compared with which the torture of childbirth was nothing; and out of this deadly pain came forth, as in childbirth, something alive—a vision as swift, as passing as a glimpse ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... what day * He fared from natal country fain to go: His home left he and went from us to grief; * Nor to his brethren could he say adieu: Yea, his loss wounded me with parting pangs, * And separation cost me many a throe: He fared farewelling, as he fared, our eyes; * Whenas his Lord vouch-safed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Have killed her: where I sucked there have I struck. Mother! Mother! [He drinks. The anguish of it hath taken hold of me, And I am gripped by Nature. O, it comes Upon me, this too natural remorse. I faint! I flinch from the raw agony! I cannot face this common human throe! Ah! Ah! the crude stab of reality! I am a son, and I have killed my mother! Why! I am now no more than him who tills Or reaps: and I am seized by primal pangs. Mother! [He drinks. The thunder crieth motherless. Ah! how this sword of lightning thrusts at me! O, all the artist in my soul ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... of mine! Soul, soul, soul of throe! Thy soul, my soul, two souls entwine, And sing ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... tone of inexorable sadness, the sadness of fate itself in Andrew's voice. He had, as he spoke, the full realization of that stage of progress which is simply for the next, which passes to make room for it. He felt his own nothingness. It was the throe of the present before the future; it was the pang ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Surrey might quake with reiterated "pitsfull"—still there remained over and above the feast-crumbs sufficient for the battenings of other than theatrical appetites. Immediately the press-gang—we beg pardon, the press—arose, and with a mighty throe spawned many monsters. Great drama! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... inward throe at these words, and a great fear seized him. He had done something wicked which he wanted no one to know about, and so far he had thought himself safe. But now Heidi spoke exactly as if she knew everything, and whatever she did ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... on the ground that he has never had friends before in the world. He seems like another man, or the same man come to life. And it isn't his fault that he's a priest. I suppose," he added, with a sort of final throe, "that a Venetian family wouldn't use him with the frank hospitality you've shown, not because they distrusted him at all, perhaps, but because they would be afraid ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... courage to live out every throe of anguish fate assigned me, and principle to contend for justice and liberty ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... the singer, "can the good come without a struggle? Is the beautiful accomplished without strife? Recall the tales of primeval chaos, when, as sang the Ascraean singer, love first darted into the midst; imagine the heave and throe of joining elements; conjure up the first living shapes, born of the fluctuating slime and vapour. Surely they were things incomplete, deformed ghastly fragments of being, as are the dreams of a maniac. Had creative Love stopped there, and then, standing on the height of ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... her name to him ere he knew her, and the sad sweetness of her name filled his soul, and he replied to her with it weakly, like a far echo that groweth fainter, 'Bhanavar! Bhanavar! Bhanavar!' Then a change came over him, and the pain of the poison and the passion of the death-throe, and he was wistful of her no more; but she lay by him, embracing him, and in the last violence of his anguish he hugged her to his breast. Then it was over, and he sank. And the twain were as a great wave heaving upon the shore; lo, part is wasted where it ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... tempestuous Joy of the great plan's hour, The throe of the heart that controllessly Burns with a dream of power, And wins it, and seizes victory It had seemed folly to hope— All he hath known: the infinite Rapture after the danger, The flight, the throne of sovereignty, The salt bread of ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... wife,—an soa aw thowt Aw'd introduce her, as aw owt. Mi hont wor pleeased to see us booath,— To mak fowk welcome nivver looath,— An th' table grooaned wi richest fare, An one an all wor pressed to share, Mi sweetheart made noa moor to do. Shoo buckled on an sooin gate throe; Mi hont sed, as shoo filled her glass,— "Well, God bless thi ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... boyhood—that boyhood of wonder and hope, Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope,— Till lo, thou art grown to a monarch; a people is thine; And all gifts, which the world offers singly, on one head combine! On one head, all the beauty and strength, love and rage (like the throe That, a-work in the rock, helps its labour and lets the gold go) High ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning them,—all Brought to blaze on the head ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... nobly refused to obey, and called on the troops to remain with him. They wavered; but they are a pampered army, personally much attached to the king, who pays them well and indulges them at the expense of his people, that they may be his support against that people when in a throe of nature it rises and striven for its rights. For the same reason, the sentiment of patriotism was little diffused among them in comparison with the other troops. And the alternative presented was one in which it required a very clear sense of higher duty to act against habit. Generally, after ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... streaming with blood from a score of wounds. Once, indeed, as a deep-searching thrust entered her very vitals, she raised her massy flukes high in air with an apparently involuntary movement of agony; but even in that dire throe she remembered the possible danger to her young one, and laid the tremendous weapon as softly down upon the water as if it ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... only you, put vigour in my wing: Be mine, be mine, until the world shall take you, When leaves are falling, then our paths shall part. Sing unto me the treasures of your heart, And for each song another song I'll make you; So may you pass into the lamplit glow Of age, as forests fade without a throe. ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... in all England, wrote for Beerbohm Tree, took on another music professorship, promised a trip to Germany, and at last, staggering home one night, on his way to his wife and little boy and girl, fell in his tracks and in four days was dead, at the age of thirty-seven. They say that in his death-throe he arose and facing some great, ghostly choir raised his last baton, while all around the massive silence rang with the last mist-music of his ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... great gong struck. Just over his head, penetrating wood and iron, he heard the mighty throe of the Pit once more beginning, moving. And then, once again, the limp and ravelled fibres of being grew tight with a wrench. Under the stimulus of the roar of the maelstrom, the flagging, wavering brain righted itself once more, and—how, he himself could not say—the business ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... desire that spurred on and consumed me! Greeting! my parting soul cries, and greeting again!... O my country! Beautiful is it to fall, that the vision may rise to fulfilment, Giving my life for thy life, and breathing thine air in the death-throe; Sweet to eternally sleep in thy ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... had done his work, but he had hardly reckoned on the strength of this man. With a vast throe of fear Locasto tried to free himself. Tenser, tenser grew the thongs; they strained, they bit into his flesh, but they would not break. Yet as he relaxed it seemed to him they were less tight. Then he rested ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... for mercy. As I prayed, My soul cast off its shameful enterprise; And when it fell, I saw my godless self— My own degraded, tainted, guilty heart, Which it had hidden from me. Oh, the pang— The poignant throe of uttermost despair— That followed the discovery! I felt That I was lost beyond the grace of God; And my heart turned with instinct sure and swift To the strong struggler, praying at my side, And begged his succor and his prayers. I felt That he must lead me up to where ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... nose to the ground, set up a fierce bark. When arrived at the spot, the party halted, and perceived the body of an Indian, slightly covered with earth, leaves, and a few dry bushes. Hastily throwing off the covering from his head, they discovered hideous features, wildly distorted by the last throe of death, and bloody from a wound in his forehead made by a ball. His scalp had been taken off also, by those who buried him—from fear, probably, that he would be found by enemies, and this secured as a trophy—a ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... seemed to me that I had been struck a violent blow, and the next instant I was struggling amongst broken wood, dust, and plaster, fighting fiercely to escape; for there was a horrible dread upon me that at the next throe of the earthquake we should be buried alive far down in the bowels of ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... the stone of the Kaabah, keep the faith which has been throe and mine since my mother, dying, gave me to thy mother, whose milk gave me health and, in my youth, beauty—and, in my youth, beauty!" Suddenly she buried her face in her veil, and her body shook with sobs which had no voice. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... until some night when the wind comes fiercely down the river, and heavy storms have increased the volume of water as well as loosened the last bolt that yet holds her securely together,—then, when there is none to witness the death-throe of wood and iron, she will heave and labor and at last break apart. The two fragments will go sweeping down, whirled over like playthings—touching the points of the rocks and giving out groans and shrieks like those which precede dissolution; ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... feeding juices from the mother-earth of a rich common-folk-talk, can bring forth a sound and lusty book. True vigor of expression does not pass from page to page, but from man to man, where the brain is kindled and the lips are limbered by downright living interests and by passions in the very throe. Language is the soil of thought; and our own especially is a rich leaf-mould, the slow growth of ages, the shed foliage of feeling, fancy, and imagination, which has suffered an earth-change, that the vocal forest, as Howell called it, may clothe itself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... that's just the thing I'd like especially to sing; But at the task my spirits faint, For 'tis not every one can paint Battalions, with their bristling wall Of pikes, and make you see the Gaul, With, shivered spear, in death-throe bleed, Or Parthian stricken from ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... sick, child, sure enough. Ho, ho! sir, you have taken drows; what, another throe! writhe, sir, writhe; the hog died by the drow of gypsies; I saw him stretched at evening. That's yourself, sir. There is no hope, sir, no help, you have taken drow; shall I tell you your fortune, sir, your dukkerin? God bless you, pretty ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... once on their lonely way Met in the heavenly height, And they dreamed a dream they might shine alway With undivided light; Melt into one with a breathless throe, And beam as one ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... strike Columbus River—pass me two or throe skeins of thread to stand for the river; the sugar bowl will do for Hawkeye, and the rat trap for Stone's Landing-Napoleon, I mean—and you can see how much better Napoleon is located than Hawkeye. Now here you are with your railroad complete, and showing ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... nearly the same centre; here existing as an augitic rock, there as a syenite, yonder as a basalt or amygdaloid. At one place it uptilted the sandstone; at another it overflowed it; the dark central masses raised their heads above the surface, higher and higher with every earthquake throe from beneath; till at length the gigantic Ben More attained to its present altitude of two thousand three hundred feet over the sea-level, and the sandstone, borne up from beneath like floating sea-wrack on the back of a porpoise, reached in long outside bands its elevation of from six to ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... thou hast enough inconveniences that are inevitable, without increasing them by throe own invention; and art miserable enough by nature, without being so by art; thou hast real and essential deformities enough, without forging those that are imaginary. Dost thou think thou art too much at ease unless half thy ease is uneasy? ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... he was dying. Some people, you know, die hard—some part with life lightly, as if it was a faded robe they shook off to don a brighter one. Others—my father was one, and I am like him—see one by one their trusts, their hopes, their loves die: then with a deathly throe sunder themselves from ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... beat his heart and throbbed his veins, As morn's first struggling gleam. His rift net caught, He e'en must follow its meandering beam, Till something on the walls his footsteps brought To rest. He shuddered as he saw the death-throe stains ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... and the whole country from the sea foam to the foothills looked tumbled and new, with the newness of infinite antiquity. The last thunders of creation seemed scarcely to have died away, the last throe scarcely to have ceased, leaving million-ton rock cast on rock and the new, shear-cut cliffs spitting back their first taste of ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... makes no attempt to rise, nor movement of any kind, save a convulsive tremor through his frame; the last throe of parting life, which precedes the settled stillness of death. For surely ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... who had learnt to believe it mere dishonour and tameness to forgive the son for his father's deeds. A cloistered priest could hardly do so: pardon to a hostile family came only with the last mortal throe; and here was this warlike king forgiving as a mere ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... an' by that the throe blood's in him still. The rale gintleman to dale wid, for ever! We knew he only wanted to come at the thruth, an' thin he'd back us agin the villain that harrished us! To the divil wid skamin' upstarts, that hasn't the ould blood 'in thim! What are they ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... here,—and if we fail to impress it suitably upon the reader, it is our own fault, not that of the theme, here is one of the truest points of melancholy interest that occur in ordinary life. It was the final throe of what called itself old gentility. A lady—who had fed herself from childhood with the shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was that a lady's hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for bread,—this born lady, after sixty years of ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... not know that he had spoken. The name upon his tongue, a name he had said low to himself often to-day and yesterday, was born of the throe which made fire-currents of his veins, the passion which at the instant seized imperiously upon his being. She could not see his face, and hers to him was a half-veiled glory, yet each knew the wild gaze, the all but terror, in the other's eyes, that anguish which indicates ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... meat will she bestow; And were I only young again! Said "Hate ye shall have and the hunger throe"— To honied words we ...
— The Return of the Dead - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... be understood now that this was not a conclusion with Ben-Hur, but an impression merely; and while it was forming, while yet he gazed at the wonderful countenance, his memory began to throe and struggle. "Surely," he said to himself, "I have seen the man; but where and when?" That the look, so calm, so pitiful, so loving, had somewhere in a past time beamed upon him as that moment it was beaming upon Balthasar became an assurance. Faintly at first, at last a clear ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... spelling only, and of a character to be appreciable only by the eye, escaping altogether the ear: thus it is with 'draft' and 'draught'; 'plain' and 'plane'; 'coign' and 'coin'; 'flower' and 'flour'; 'check' and 'cheque'; 'straight' and 'strait'; 'ton' and 'tun'; 'road' and 'rode'; 'throw' and 'throe'; 'wrack' and 'rack'; 'gait' and 'gate'; 'hoard' and 'horde'{117}; 'knoll' and 'noll'; 'chord' and 'cord'; 'drachm' and 'dram'; 'sergeant' and 'serjeant'; 'mask' and 'masque'; 'villain' ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... were wet. Something surged in him like the throe of the river where the ship went in. It was good to have ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... him not because of his sins, but because of his greatness—not because he sought to deceive the world, but because he sought to make it noble. And through that greatness of his he endured a double agony: not only the reviling, and the torture, and the death-throe, but the agony of sinking from the vision of glorious achievement into that deep shadow where he could only say, "I count as nothing: darkness encompasses me: yet the light I saw was the ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... I save thee, thou blighted bud—blighted by my"—His lip grew pale; he struck his forehead, and a groan like the last expiring throe of nature escaped him. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... true and pure of soul, Mute in the throe of love's mysterious pain— Like thine own steel within the fire's glow, Flashed forth to ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... divine drear accents flow, No soul that listens may choose but thrill to know it, Pierced and wrung by the passionate music's throe. ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... silence for a moment. Then the stranger stretched forth his hand. "Yet in that leaving him, remember;—It is not the act, but the will, which marks the soul of the man. He who has crushed a nation sins no more than he who rejoices in the death throe of the meanest creature. The stagnant pool is not less poisonous drop for drop than the mighty swamp, though its reach be smaller. He who has desired to be and accomplish what this man has been and accomplished, is as this man; though he have lacked the power to perform. Nay, remember ...
— Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland • Olive Schreiner
... of the jays came. Not many, in fact, had been asked, and when Jeff Durgin actually appeared, it was not known that he was both the first and the last of his kind. The lady who was matronizing the tea recognized him, with a throe of her quickened conscience, as the young fellow whom she had met two winters before at the studio tea which Mr. Westover had given to those queer Florentine friends of his, and whom she had never thought of since, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... despot's power; But long before that hour, While yet, in false and vain imagining, Thy sister nations would not own their foe, And turned to jest thy warnings, though the low, Deep, awful mutterings, that precede the throe Of earthquakes, burdened all the ominous air; While yet they paused in scorn, Of fatal madness born,— Thou, oh, my Mother! like a priestess bless'd With wondrous vision of the things to come, Thou couldst not calmly rest Secure ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... endless strife, From Weser's marsh to Naples' laughing bay, Was but the throe that marked the nascent life Emerging ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Israel, mourn! Give utterance to the inward throe, As wails of her first love forlorn The virgin clad in ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... dreams will still Convert that couch to snow, And in my slumbers shot and shout Are ringing from Glencoe." That stalwart man arose and paced The chamber to and fro, While to his brow the sweat-drop sprung Like one in mortal throe. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... a molten rock, fused in a subterranean furnace, and cast in some frightful throe of the cooling sphere, high up above the surface of the sea, the seething mass forming into mountains and valleys, the valleys hemmed in except at their mouths by lofty barriers that stretch from thundering central ridges to the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Arbaces brandished the knife on high. Glaucus gazed upon his impending fate with unwinking eyes, and in the stern and scornful resignation of a fallen gladiator, when, at that awful instant, the floor shook under them with a rapid and convulsive throe—a mightier spirit than that of the Egyptian was abroad!—a giant and crushing power, before which sunk into sudden impotence his passion and his arts. IT woke—it stirred—that Dread Demon of the Earthquake—laughing to scorn alike the magic of human guile and the malice ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... locking it. I leant a little against the opposite wall of the corridor, feeling rather funny; for it had been a narrow squeak.... 'Theyr be noe sayfetie to be gained bye gayrds of holieness when the monyster hath pow'r to speak throe woode and stoene.' So runs the passage in the Sigsand MS., and I proved it in that 'Nodding Door' business. There is no protection against this particular form of monster, except, possibly, for a fractional period of time; for it can reproduce ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... the house she pulled open a chest of drawers which used to stand in the room where she slept when a child. It was full of her own childish clothing, a little girl's linen and muslin; and she thought with a throe of despair that she could as well hope to get hack into these outgrown garments, which the helpless piety of Mrs. Bolton had kept from the rag-bag, as to think of re-entering the relations of the life ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... misgiving that we do not touch the writer's true quality, and that these scenes of his, so elaborately and conscientiously prepared, have cost him much thought and pains, but not one throb of the heart or throe of the spirit. The experiences that he depicts have not, one fancies, marked wrinkles on his forehead or turned his hair gray. There are two kinds of reserve—the reserve which feels that its message is too mighty ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... give me a definition of love according to thy idea. What can it be—for thou seest it exists out of romances. This worthy youngster undertook these little conspiracies through love. Thou heardst it thyself with throe unworthy ears. Come, what is love? For my part, ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... writhed as if in torture, And it staggered to and fro; And its very shell was shaken In the anguish of its throe: ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... Dead with a throe that was almost like a literal death. This—on this he had lived; the ether of ecstasy was the breath of his life. He clutched at the stained red handkerchief knotted about his throat as if he were suffocating; he tore it open as ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... throe of the conflict had come. It was no longer to be a duel at a distance—no more a contest between rifle-bullets and barbed arrows; but the close, desperate, hand-to-hand contest of pistol, knife, ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... patient! go and watch the wheat-ears grow, So imperceptibly that ye can mark nor change nor throe: Day after day, day after day till the ear is fully grown; And then again day after day, till ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... constricted in its icy urns The genial flame of Earth, and there With torment and with tension does prepare The lush disclosures of the vernal time. All joys draw inward to their icy urns, Tormented by constraining rime, And there With undelight and throe prepare The bounteous efflux of the vernal time. Nor less beneath compulsive Law Rebuk-ed draw The numb-ed musics back upon my heart; Whose yet-triumphant course I know And prevalent pulses forth shall start, Like cataracts that ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... my eyes. It was not a known and familiar scene, but a brilliant sketch, made out of materials I remembered, but could not by a deliberate effort have combined so effectively. It was a spontaneous throe of the imagination, which had force to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... traveller. It was too late to dismount. In entering alone this gorge, I had not the faintest idea that I would have occasion to regret my foolish imprudence. I had not realized its character. It was simply an enormous crevasse, rent by some Titanic throe of nature, some tremendous earthquake, which had split the granite mountain. In its bottom I could just distinguish a hardly perceptible white thread, an impetuous torrent, the dull roar of which filled the defile with ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... utmost!" The pain caught her like a physical throe. It suddenly came to her how the girl must have loved him to be so generous—what memories there must be ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... Those dark angels, the moving men, how heartless they seem in their brisk and resolute dispassion—yet how exactly they prefigure the implacable sternness of the ultimate shepherds. A strange life is theirs, taking them day after day into the bosom of homes prostrated by the emigrating throe. Does this matter-of-fact bearing conceal an infinite tenderness, a pity that dare not show itself for fear of unmanly collapse? Are they secretly broken by the sight of the desolate nursery, the dismantled crib, the forgotten clockwork monkey lying in a corner of the ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... 162; sudden change, radical change, sweeping organic change; change of state, phase change; quantum leap, quantum jump; clean sweep, coup d'etat[Fr], counter revolution. jump, leap, plunge, jerk, start, transilience|; explosion; spasm, convulsion, throe, revulsion; storm, earthquake, cataclysm. legerdemain &c. (trick) 545. V. revolutionize; new model, remodel, recast; strike out something new, break with the past; change the face of, unsex. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... wrestle, in which both lads were overthrown, then the gaunt and muscular brute stretched its length in a shivering throe, dead even while it ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... by this time passed muster, and was soon after on board. The afflicted grand-mother stood, with her eyes transfixed on the vessel, gazing on her unheeding boy, who, insensible to the agonizing feelings that rent her breast, felt not one single throe of regret, his mind being entirely engrossed in contemplating the bright future, which the sergeant, who ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... suffering, ache, smart, throe, rack, agony, torture, distress, qualm, discomfort, pang, excruciation, paroxysm, gripe, twinge, cramp, travail, stitch, crick, anguish; heartache, misery, dolor. Antonyms: ease, comfort, relief, solace. Associated Words: anodyne, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... profound As the thunderings resound, Come thy wild reverberations in a throe that shakes the ground, And a cry Flung on high, Like the flag it flutters by, Wings rapturously upward till it ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... without a sin to show; * Or heart that leans to other wight or would thy love forego: Or treason to our plighted troth or causing thee a throe?' * And if he smile then say ye twain in accents soft and slow, 'An thou to him a meeting grant 'twould ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... hath, dead one, summoned thee to light? Back to gaping Orcus' fearful bonds, Haughty mourner! triumph not to-night! On Philippi's iron altar, lo! Reeks now freedom's final victim's blood; Rome o'er Brutus' bier feels her death-throe,— He seeks Minos.—Back ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... we have said, in all directions around the scene of the earth-throe. Over a large part of its course its passage was unnoted, because in the open sea the effects even of so vast an undulation could not be perceived. A ship would slowly rise as the crest of the great wave passed under her, and then as slowly sink again. ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... Jesu, maid's son, What was the feast followed the night Thou hadst glory of this nun? Feast of the one woman without stain. For so conceived, so to conceive thee is done; But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain, Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... Rishi's house, the darkness disappeared, light burst upon him; perfectly silent and at rest, he reached the last exhaustless source of truth; lustrous with all wisdom the great Rishi sat, perfect in gifts, whilst one convulsive throe shook the ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... hard to finish When earth with tender grace Prepares for her dear children So sweet a resting place; And though in dissolution's throe The melody be riven, The song abruptly ended here Goes ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... obstruction in a tumbling heap and sprang at the flag as a panther at prey. He pulled at it and, wrenching it free, swung up its red brilliancy with a mad cry of exultation even as the color bearer, gasping, lurched over in a final throe and, stiffening convulsively, turned his dead face to the ground. There was much blood ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... in America was struggling out of the earth. The whole country was in a similar throe. Everywhere were great dreams partly realized. One could not help but imagine what the nation would become, just as one could not look at the unfinished Capitol at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue without completing ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... of the birth of Mickiewicz, Russia was bringing to a close a prodigious period of development in almost every field of human activity. It was really the birth-throe of a nation that was to move powerfully, and to dominate—partially—the new age. And the splendid and never again to be equalled pageant of the life of Catherine the Great, with its wild dreams of world dominance and of the glorious ...
— Sonnets from the Crimea • Adam Mickiewicz
... struggling feebly in what seemed to be a spot of dim light. Ah! the sight was horrible: the limbs once so round and lovely shrivelling up into nothings; the eyes—those eyes that shone like heaven—being quenched into black dust; the lustrous golden hair now lank and discolored. The last throe came. I beheld that final struggle of the blackening ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... from the recesses of the gynaeceum there breaks a cry, expressing rather wrath and surprise than mere pain. Then there comes another, more plaintive—the moan of a strong man in the death-throe. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... with them, alas! a wounded foe, Bound hand and foot, yet nursed with cruel care, Lest that in death he might escape one throe They had decreed his living flesh should bear: A youthful officer, by one foul blow Of treachery surprised, yet fighting still Amid his ambushed train, calm as the snow Above him; hopeless, yet content to spill His blood with theirs, ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... closed with a crash and jar that rocked the whole island. It was the final throe of the volcano's travail. The lurid light above the crater subsided. The dust began to fall thick upon the treasure seekers as they lay upon the ground. They sat up, dazed and horror-stricken. It was some time before ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... tho you send me A beggar from your door, You, my lord, whom I honour, And you, his sisters four, To whom there have come no children To make your bosoms feel How even a thought so full of throe Can make my sick ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... earthquakes and travail of Nature, there is at last birth; the Seventh Travail-throe has been successful, in some measure successful. Here actually is Baby Carlos's Apanage; there probably, by favor of Heaven and of the Sea-Powers, will the Kaiser's Pragmatic Sanction be, one day. Treaty of Seville, most ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... submerged his will and his consciousness, till they sank, gathering impetus, into a void below—the vacancy of the spirit that looses its hold on the body and is rudderless. He knew the blackness which is death, the momentary throe of entering it, the shock, the sense ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... retaining of this paper was so important to him that even in his death throe he thrust it in this strangest of all hiding-places, as being the only one that could be considered safe from search. And the girl! Her first words on coming to herself were: 'You have left that line of writing behind.' Mr. Gryce, those words, few and inexplicable ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... I am wholly throe. Let your mother be brought here as soon as she is free. Here are twenty ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... than foggy England was spread out before him in treacherous Hindostan with its warring tribes, its dying creeds, its dead languages, its history sweeping far back into the mists of the unknown. For every problem of the human mind, every throe of the restless heart of man is worn old and threadbare in Hindostan, with its very dust compounded of the wind-blown ashes of dead millions upon millions. Gross vulgar Gold reigns now as King on the broad savannas where spice plantations and indigo farms vary the cotton, rice, and ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... governor to the Dauphin, and withdraw to his estates, where he was to do penance. M. de Meaux, a friend of the family, read the prayers for the dying, to which the Duchess made response, and three minutes before the final death-throe, she consented to let him preach a funeral sermon in eulogy ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... bore me further than my force would go, * And for them made me suffer resurrection throe: Oh, have compassion, cruel! on this soul of mine * Which, since ye fared, is pitied by each envious foe; Nor grudge the tender mercy of one passing glance * My case to lighten, easing this excess of woe: Quoth I 'Heart, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... wild unfathered mass no birth In divine seats hath known; In the blank echoing solitude, if earth, Rocking her obscure body to and fro, Ceases not from all time to heave and groan, Unfruitful oft, and, at her happiest throe, Forms what ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... old man, in which she denounces his apparently weakening thirst for revenge, only to learn the secret of that gentle exterior. Unhappily, the delay of justice has preyed too grievously upon the mind of Isabella. There have been moments when she ran frantic. In a final throe of madness, having hacked down the fatal tree, she thrusts the knife into her own breast. The great day comes, and before the Viceroy of Portugal (father of Balthazar), the Spanish king, the Duke of ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... and sure; whereof the initiatory pang approached, felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet as when the virgin band, the victors chaste, feel at the end the earthy garments drop, and rise with something of a rosy shame into immortal nakedness: so I lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill into the ecstasy and out-throb pain. I' the gray of the dawn it was I found myself facing the pillared front o' the Pieve—mine, my church: it seemed to say for the first time, 'But am not I the Bride, the mystic love o' the Lamb, who took thy plighted ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson |
