"Abject" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... house, frisking joyously. From the kitchen she procured a small basket, and into this she packed some old cloths and pieces of biscuit. Then she picked up the terrier, cuffed it on both sides of the head, popped it into the basket, tucked its humbly-agitated tail under its abject ribs, closed the basket, and fastened it with a skewer. She next addressed a label to her cousin's home, tied it to the basket, and despatched a servant with it to the railway-station, instructing her that it should be paid for ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... to the present day, is a melancholy record of the horrors which can attend religion: human sacrifice, and, in particular, the slaughter of children, cannibalism, sensual orgies, abject superstition, hatred as between races, the maintenance of degrading customs, hysteria, bigotry, can all be laid at it's charge. Religion is the last refuge of ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... abject, yet several hours had passed before he attempted to carry out this design. It was the time of Evensong when he reached the church, and the brothers ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... was inconsistent with Christianity, was in conflict with the rights of man; that it was a slow poison, daily contaminating the minds and morals of their people; that, by reducing a part of their own species to abject inferiority, they lost the idea of the dignity of man, which the hand of Nature had implanted within them for great and useful purposes; that, by the habit from infancy of trampling on the rights of human nature, every liberal sentiment was extinguished or enfeebled; that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... respectable, but how any man possessed of common feelings, can suffer such humiliations from those around him, I cannot conceive. When any person approaches the general to speak to him, his behaviour and address must be the most abject imaginable, and the respect and profound submission which every servant of the company, and every inhabitant must necessarily assume on these occasions, are little short of the adoration paid to the Divinity: this homage is carried to ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... body so full of spirit and the pride of life? The kitchen became her own domain where the three of us fought for the position of her most abject slave. Even Mary Ellen could scarcely work for watching her antics with an old stocking, which she pretended was a rat. Once she caught a live mouse and set us all shouting. Mary Ellen, in her excitement, upset a gravy-boat of hot gravy, and The Seraph slipped and sat ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... her abject poverty, there had been something noticeable about Mag Henderson, aside from mere prettiness. Her print frocks, while often ragged and rarely clean, fitted her figure very neatly, and she managed effects with a bit of ribbon and a cheap feather that might have ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... to think myself of a very nervous turn!" he says, presently, with a smile. "Nancy, you will laugh at me, but I assure you upon my honor that all the way home I have been in the most abject and deadly fright: at every puff of wind I thought we were infallibly going to the bottom: whenever the carriage rocked in the least to-day on the way down, I made up my mind we were going to smash! Little ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... chamber carpeted and walled in the garish flowers which many boards of directors suppose will joy the cheerless breast. There were present a dozen women inmates,—sullen, weary-looking beings who seemed to have made abject resignation their latest vice. They turned their lustreless eyes upon the visitors, and a portly woman in a red waist with a little American flag in a buttonhole issued to them a nasal command to rise. They got to their feet with a starched noise, like dead leaves blowing, and ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... There was a possibility that she could find another, but she was facing the certainty that the one she might have had and with which she undoubtedly could have attracted others, was spoiled by her mother. How long she sat there Elnora did not know or care. She simply suffered in dumb, abject misery, an occasional dry sob shaking her. Aunt Margaret was right. Elnora felt that morning that her mother never would be any different. The girl had reached the place where she realized that she could endure ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... covering a space three feet in diameter, and running out in various directions, in little streams two or three feet long. At the same time, let me say, with that strict justice I force myself to mete out to those whom I dislike, that the island is in a condition of abject submission. There is not much chance of mutiny. The men go to their work without a murmur, and slink to their dormitories like whipped hounds to kennel. The gaols and solitary (!) cells are crowded with prisoners, and each day sees fresh sentences ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... was found in his eventful voyage from India. He told her about the outbreak of the flames, the alarm of the passengers, the coward mob of panic-stricken wretches, who had lost all manliness and all human feeling in their abject fear. Then he described the tall form of Obed Chute as it towered above the crowd. Obed, according to Windham's account, when he first saw him, had two men by their collars in one hand, while in the other he held his revolver. His voice with its shrill ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... looked upon as the emblem of Eternal Wisdom, the only pleader whose persuasions avail to soften the tyrannic humor of the Invincible Devourer of all things. We know how men hate Wisdom and cannot endure to be instructed, and yet they prostrate themselves in abject crowds before Wisdom's symbol every day in the Sacred Temple yonder,— though I much doubt whether such constant devotional attendance is not more for the sake of Lysia ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... is too lamentable a face for a man, Some abject louse asking leave to be, cringing for it, Some milk-nosed maggot blessing what lets it ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... boots, not taken away yet—looking abject, as boots do in such situations—but I was pleased to see that they compared favourably in size with the gray alligator-skin and patent leather eccentricities of Mrs. Senter, reposing on an adjacent doormat. With this frivolous ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... in the Army) was discovered at the hazard table, playing with loaded dice. Before this abject scoundrel could be turned out of his regiment, he was killed in a duel by one of his brother ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... malformation or defect of the vocal organs, which either prevents our uttering it at all, or gives it so thick a pronunciation as to be unintelligible. A mouth filled with the national pudding, or watering in expectation thereof, is wholly incompetent to this refractory monosyllable. An abject and herpetic Public Opinion is the Pope, the Anti-Christ, for us to protest against e corde cordium. And by what College of Cardinals is this our God's-vicar, our binder and looser, elected? Very like, by the sacred conclave ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... see him—I won't see him!" interrupted Sir Francis backing to the furthest corner of the room, in what looked very like abject terror, as if he had completely lost his presence of mind. Lady ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... surveys His humbler habit; here the trembling wretch Unnerved and struck with Terror's icy bolts, Spent in weak wailings, drown'd in shameful tears, At every dream of danger: here, subdued 220 By frontless laughter and the hardy scorn Of old, unfeeling vice, the abject soul, Who, blushing, half resigns the candid praise Of Temperance and Honour; half disowns A freeman's hatred of tyrannic pride; And hears with sickly smiles the venal mouth With foulest ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... country, however abject its inhabitants may appear, where the most daring and ambitious can venture to usurp the supreme power without first obtaining a hold on public opinion; we cannot have a stronger proof of this fact, as applicable to Persia, than what we find ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... monster—most fitly named Madame Bruin—who kept the school. She asked no questions, but led me straightway to the cellar, where she plunged me into an empty barrel and put the lid on over me. Applying her horn goggles to the bunghole, to my abject terror, she informed me, in a sepulchral voice, that that was the way bad boys were dealt with in school. When I ceased howling from sheer fright, she took me out and conducted me to the yard, where a big hog had a corner to itself. She bade me observe that one of its ears had been ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... how they would they could not catch it—it always vanished—vanished just like a phantom directly they came up to it; and the dogs when urged to seize it would only bark and howl, and show indications of the most abject terror. ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... and into the chemist's shop in the Place d'Armes to get my medicine, and ran back again to give it me, before I knew where I was (such is the debilitating influence of malaria), instead of forgiving him, I found myself, in abject contrition, actually asking ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... in through the crack. Taylor was seated in a chair beside the big table, his elbows upon the table and his head in his hands. As I stood there, watching him, he took his hands away and I saw his face. Upon it was an expression of abject misery and utter despair. I opened the ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... be flung at his head; last night I taught Meg a lesson she'll remember. She meant to bring him home to supper after the Opera, where, in spite of my first experience, we're constant now in attendance; but, to her surprise, then dismay, then almost abject remonstrance, I prepared to go out before dinner to inspect the new studio Kitty and ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... disappointments and rebuffs in many quarters, she still kept faith with her ambitions, and, fortunately for herself, she did not see the abject failure of many of her schemes. Some of the gentry from the neighbouring parishes had called, chiefly, she was aware, because of Mr. Ferrol. She was building the superstructure of her social ambitions on that foundation for the present. She told ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the voyage would have rendered her as helpless as if peopled by a phantom crew; and she must have been blown before the wind until dashed to fragments on the rocks on some uninhabited part of the coast. The extremity of abject powerlessness had unquestionably been reached when the wide entrance to Port Jackson could ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... in that same longed-for London, and fell into great misery; but Dr. Grosart disputes this, arguing, with justness, that Herrick's family, which was wealthy and influential, would not have allowed him to come to abject want. With his royalistic tendencies he may not have breathed quite freely in the atmosphere of the Commonwealth, and no doubt many tribulations fell to his lot, but among them was ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... righteousness, is familiar to us and intelligible; but when we read how Indra drank himself drunk and committed adulteries with Asura women, and got himself born from the same womb as a bull, and changed himself into a quail or a ram, and suffered from the most abject physical terror, and so forth, then we are among myths no longer readily intelligible; here, we feel, are IRRATIONAL stories, of which the original ideas, in their natural sense, can hardly have been conceived by men in a pure and rational ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... impulse, the door of the end room in the hall, opposite the stairs, also swung open. In that brief moment I had a glimpse of the interior of the room, of two figures, a man and a woman, the latter clinging to her companion in abject terror. It was only for an instant, for a second thrill passed through the house, the pictures clattered back against the wall, the door of the end room closed violently on its strange revelation, and my own door swung back also. ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... great sights of the world—something unique and apart, something the like of which we shall never see again. And awed as we are by the mountains' unsurpassed magnificence, we do not bow down in any abject way before them. We are not impressed by our littleness in comparison. They have, indeed, shown us that the world is something greater than we knew. But they have shown us also that we too are something greater than we knew. The peaks in their dazzling altitude ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... assertion—that the country which has achieved such greatness, has no retreat in littleness; that, if we should be content to abandon everything, we should find no safety in poverty, no security in abject submission; finally, that we ought to meet it with a firm determination to perish in the same grave with the honour ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... unparalleled decoration; of his kind, of course. Personally, we laugh at him; you had better not, unless you are fain to show that the higher world of polite literature is unknown to you. Sir Willoughby could create an abject silence at a county dinner-table by an allusion to Vernon "at work at home upon his Etruscans or his Dorians"; and he paused a moment to let the allusion sink, laughed audibly to himself over his eccentric ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... his purpose: he made use of his residence in Prussia and the favor of the king to increase his fortune, and to injure and degrade, as far as possible, all those for whom the king manifested the slightest partiality. He not only added to his riches by the most abject niggardliness in his mode of life, thereby adding his pension to his capital, but by speculation in Saxon bonds, for which, in the beginning, he employed the aid of the Jew Hirsch. We have seen that he sent him to Dresden to ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... I will be patient; capricious, I'll bear; turn away, I'll draw near thee; be harsh, I'll be abject; command, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... sound of his voice Mrs. Montague lifted a face upon which utter despair, mingled with abject terror, was written. She bent one brief, searching glance upon the man, and then shrank back again into the depths of her chair, shivering ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... own love could not persuade her to realise the passionate earnestness of mine. It was still more in vain to remind her that such a concession must entail the dishonour that man fears above all perils; would brand me with that indelible stain of abject personal cowardice which for ever degrades and ruins not only the fame but the nature of manhood, as the stain of wilful ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... and blazing eyes Landless sprang forward, and clapped the mouth of the pistol to the ruffian's temple. Roach recoiled, then sunk upon his knees with an abject ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... valued at thirty thousand marks," the novel Italian fashions he preferred, as also with those real amiabilities that made people forget the darker touches of his character, but never tire of the pathetic rehearsal of his fall, the meekness of which would have seemed merely abject in ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... and perhaps have not to learn that, though a stanch republican in America, he was the most abject courtier in France; and though a violent defender of liberty and equality on the other side of the Atlantic, no man bowed lower to usurpation, or revered despotism more, in Europe. Without talents, and almost without education, he thinks intrigues negotiations, and conceives that policy and duplicity ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... might never forget what he had seen and heard. Some day it must have its meaning for him. Thus the father comforted himself. Those jangling quarrels which had often scorched his brain like iron—the memory of their abject scenes came to him then, with a ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... abject terror, Herr Stolz sprang up. Mingled with his normal fear of the dog was a tinge of superstitious dread. He had been so certain the beast was shot! The doctor had given the order for his killing. The doctor was a commissioned officer. Stolz's German mind could not grasp the possibility ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... The abject servility of those magnificent savages was terrifying. How could it be? What was the secret of his rule? More and more I puzzled as the days went by, and though I observed perpetual examples of his undisputed sovereignty, never a clew was there ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... contortions to try various effects. Her husband, however (Gunda, as I called him), was very differently affected, for the moment his wife showed him his own reflection in the glass he gave a terrific yell and bolted to the other end of the little island, in a state of the most abject terror. He never quite overcame his terror and distrust of the mirror, which he evidently considered possessed of life, and in reality a kind of spirit to be feared ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... buzzing with workmen, nor mansion rearing its proud front aloft. And he was the imprudent one, and the others were the sensible, the wise. What would ever become of himself and his troop of children? Would he not die in some garret? would they not lead lives of abject wretchedness? Ah! it was evident the others were right, the others were sensible. And he felt unhinged, he regarded himself with contempt, like a fool who has allowed ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... empire. Manheim and Heidelberg were in possession of Bavaria, and Frankenthal was shortly afterwards ceded to the Spaniards. The Palatine, in a distant corner of Holland, awaited the disgraceful permission to appease, by abject submission, the vengeance of the Emperor; and an Electoral Diet was at last summoned to decide his fate. That fate, however, had been long before decided at the court of the Emperor; though now, for the first time, were ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... speculators from making use of the Rue Quincampoix: they took refuge in the Place Vendome. In a single day that square was covered with tents, where the most sumptuous stuffs were displayed; and, without disquieting themselves with the wild joy of some, or the abject despair of others, the ladies of the court seated themselves at gambling tables, where the choicest refreshments were handed to them. Bands of musicians and courtezans served to amuse that insensate crowd. Soon its excesses led to its being expelled from the Place Vendome; it then fixed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... candles before him, the Automaton stalked forward to the table and impressively deposited the candlestick on it, then stepped back a pace and waved his ponderous hand at the assembled emissaries, who scarcely repressed their own abject terror. ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... get up; untie the rope," wailed the unhappy Vivian, now utterly crestfallen and abject. "I meant your brother no harm; I only intended to frighten him. The pistols ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... merging the individual in the mass to such degree as to paralyze energy, heroism, and genius; but these objections were urged in a way that brought out her originality and generous hopes. There was nothing abject, timid, or conventional in her doubts. The end sought she prized; but the means she questioned. Though pleased in listening to sanguine visions of the future, she was slow to credit that an organization ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... with them, the admiral concluded that no hostility was intended, and allowed them freely to mix with the whites. Their attitude and deportment showed that they looked upon them as gods, paying worship in the most abject manner. In order to show them that his men were but human, the admiral ordered them to eat and drink, that the people might observe that they were but men, as they. Even this failed to convince them and, during the whole time that they remained there, they were treated ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... distracted; and Mrs. Roughsedge, bubbling over with gossip and good-humor, was distraction personified. Stern Justice, in the person of Lord M.'s gamekeeper, had that morning brought back Diana's two dogs in leash, a pair of abject and convicted villains, from the delirium of a night's hunting. The son of Miss Bertram's coachman had only just missed an appointment under the District Council by one place on the list of candidates. A "Red Van" bursting ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the result of an idle quarrel that happened, about the end of August,[21] at Utrecht, between a French and a Dutch plenipotentiary, Mons. Mesnager and Count Rechteren;[22] wherein the court of France demanded such abject submissions, and with so much haughtiness, as plainly shewed they were pleased with any occasion of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... delirious—were, by his own confession, not obtained without violence. This was too much. Forty thousand lives, had he possessed them, could not have gratified my thirst for revenge. Yet, had he but showed courage, he should have died the death of a soldier. But the wretch showed cowardice the most abject, and—,but you ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... at a pageant or a play. To-night she placed herself in the shadow of a screen, from which retreat she could see Clorinda and Dunstanwolde as they received their guests. Thus she found enjoyment enough; for, in truth, her love and almost abject passion of adoration for her sister had grown as his lordship's had, with every hour. For a season there had rested upon her a black shadow beneath which she wept and trembled, bewildered and lost; though even at its darkest the object of her humble love had ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... colony, perish from dysentery. Is it not under circumstances precisely similar, that cholera and dysentery prove most fatal to human beings? How often do the filthy, damp and unventilated abodes of the abject poor, become perfect ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... The abject condition of the great body of Negroes appeals to Christian religion and philanthropy for the help that must come to redeem their lost minds and souls. The South cannot give them a Christian education. The ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., May, 1888., No. 5 • Various
... opposite to his own, and, as he asserted, to the truth; and therefore, instead of copying it, wrote his friend a letter full of masculine resentment and warm expostulations. He very justly observed, that the style was too supplicatory, and the representation too abject, and that he ought at least to have made him complain with "the dignity of a gentleman in distress." He declared that he would not write the paragraph in which he was to ask Lord Tyrconnel's pardon; for, "he despised his pardon, ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... absolute for credence. He, the listener at the grotto? He, the avenger of the family's honour? He, the insurer of little Roger's continuance with the family at a cost the one who loved him best would rather have died himself than pay? Yes! there is no misdoubting this old servitor's attitude of abject appeal, or the meaning of Homer Upjohn's joyfully uplifted countenance and outspreading arms. The servant begs for mercy from man, and the master is giving thanks to Heaven. Why giving thanks? Has he been the prey of cankering doubts also? Has the father dreaded ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... Mehetch to its farthest limit, travelling frequently [through it]. No peasant's daughter did I harm, no widow did I wrong, no field labourer did I oppress, no herdsman did I repulse. I did not seize the men of any master of five field labourers for the forced labour (corvee). There was no man in abject want during the period of my rule, and there was no man hungry in my time. When years of hunger came, I rose up and had ploughed all the fields of the Nome of Mehetch, as far as it extended to the south ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... emancipation, but were ready to reject it when proposed by others. How much soever he looked forward with anxious expectation to the period when the negroes might with safety be liberated, he knew too well the effect which the long continuance of abject slavery produced upon the human mind to think of their immediate emancipation, a measure which at the present moment would be injurious both to them and to the colonies. He and those who acted with him were satisfied with having ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... dead, the ideal love, but indwells, a redeeming power, wherever there are desolate hearts and minds to be updrawn and united by its ministry; a power so lustral in its nature, that no abject and despairing thought creeps into its presence but is purified and exalted by its regard. This love brings hope and cheerful constancy; with a shining falchion it affrights into their natal darkness the monstrous ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... of 100,000. The exhibits were ample, and many of them strikingly unique. Few, even at the South, believed that the Southern States could set forth such displays. The fact that this was possible so soon after a devastating war, which had left the section in abject poverty, was a speaking compliment to the land and to the energy of ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... before her eyes—his manliness, his courage, his strength. Ugo deliberately told of the duel in his rooms, of Savage's heroism in taking up the battles of his timorous friend, of his own challenge in the morning, and of Quentin's abject, cringing refusal to fight. How deliciously he painted the portrait of the coward without exposing his true motive in doing so, can only be appreciated when it is said that Dorothy Garrison came to despise the object ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... among the first at the scene of the fire, but for an interruption. At the moment he was bounding up the companion-ladder, a young man of feeble character—who would have been repudiated by the sex, had he been born a woman—sprang down the same ladder in abject terror. He went straight into the bosom of the ascending doctor, and they both went with a crash ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... I said, still with my abject humility. "Don't take any more trouble—let me go there and ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art or man's device.'" The messengers then quit him, and made their report to the patriarch, who left him in his prison for a considerable time, in the most abject and suffering state. ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... Mr. Carvel angry once, and his soul had quivered. Terror, abject terror, seized him now, so that his knees smote together. As well stare into the sun as into the Colonel's face. In one stride he had a hand in the collar of Eliphalet's new coat, the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of his flesh moved her to the marrow. She sat helplessly. He appeared to enjoy her abject surrender. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... not be measured by the stature of Christ, let us remember that it was precisely thus that he wished it to be measured, delighting to call himself the Son of Man, delighting to call the meanest of mankind his brothers. If some human beings are abject and contemptible, if it be incredible to us that they can have any high dignity or destiny, do we regard them from so great a height as Christ? Are we likely to be more pained by their faults and deficiencies than he was? Is our standard higher than his? ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... The old woman's abject appeal was too much for Joan's soft heart, and her smiling eyes swiftly told the waiting penitent that the sentence was rescinded. Instantly the shadow was ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... "I trust you will permit me to talk with your beautiful ward to-morrow afternoon—alone." And when the lady interpreted the significance of his look, her heart beat rapidly, as she bowed her acknowledgment of abject submission. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... excuses, and the more I urged her the firmer she became. She looked doubtful and frightened. I suppose there was something in my looks or manner that alarmed her; but she would not go, and that literally saved me. You had no idea, sir, that a living man could be made so abject a slave of Satan," he said, with a ghastly groan and ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... father—and this in the presence of that King and of Napoleon. Could crime justify crime—could the fiendish lusts and hatreds of a degenerate race offer any excuse for the deliberate guilt of a masculine genius, the conduct of this abject court might have apologised for the policy which it perhaps tempted the pampered ambition of Napoleon to commence, and which it now encouraged him to consummate by an ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... American, at the thought of one million dollars, can remain covered. His letter to me had said, "for our mutual benefit." I became respectful and polite, I might even say abject. After all, the ties that bind us in those dear old college days are ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis
... is it a drawin' 'em to? Where is it a drawin' the hull nation to? Is it' a drawin' 'em down into a slavery ten times more abject and soul-destroyin' than African slavery ever was? Tell me," ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... admiring posture at the door of his cave. It was Flavius, the honest steward, whom love and zealous affection to his master had led to seek him out at his wretched dwelling and to offer his services; and the first sight of his master, the once noble Timon, in that abject condition, naked as he was born, living in the manner of a beast among beasts, looking like his own sad ruins and a monument of decay, so affected this good servant that he stood speechless, wrapped up in horror and confounded. And when he found utterance at last to his words, they were so choked ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to be confounded with mean-spiritedness, or that abject state of feeling which permits a man to surrender the rights of his character to any one who chooses to infringe upon them. While it thinks little of personal considerations, it thinks the more of character ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... a committee of the States-General, where Monsieur van Hessen opened the business upon which they were assembled, and in a very warm discourse laid before them the conduct of France in the late negotiations, representing the abject manner in which she had laid open her own distresses, which reduced her to a compliance with the demands of all the Allies, and the mean manner in receding from those points to which her Minister had consented. The respective Ministers of each potentate of the Alliance severally ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... agreed that our best plan would be to get hold of all those on deck, and to lash their hands behind them, and then to summon a few at a time of those below to be treated in the same way. We soon had all those above deck secured. It seemed extraordinary that men should submit in so abject a manner to a party of men and boys. They appeared, indeed, entirely to have lost their wits. It shows what boldness and audacity will accomplish. However, it might have been the other way, and we might all ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... Captain Murrell." The judge regarded him with a look of great steadiness. He saw his small face go white, he saw the look of abject terror in his eyes. The judge raised his fist and brought it down with a great crash on the table, so that the breakfast dishes leaped and rattled. "We don't know any boy ten years old with a rifle and bundle!" ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... forest, he has, in nearly every instance, when retaliation or accident has made him the object instead of the spectator of the ruthless nature of his warfare, betrayed the most salutary, and frequently the most abject and ludicrous apprehension of the prowess of his ally. While Content therefore looked so steadily, though still seriously, at the peculiar danger in which he was placed, the four strangers seemingly saw all of its horrors without any ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... preach transform a man into a higher order of beings and endow him with a natural quality to govern? Are the laity an inferior order of beings, fit only to be slaves and to be governed? Is it good policy for mankind to subject themselves to such degrading vassalage and abject submission? Reason, common sense, and the Bible, with united voice, proclaim to all mankind that they are all born free and equal; that every member of a church or Christian congregation must be on the same footing ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... nations of the forest. But now the spirit of the tribe was broken, and they were no longer numbered among the fierce resenters of wrong. The Oneidas trespassed upon their hunting-grounds and slaughtered their people, yet their warriors were too debased and abject to avenge the insult, or wipe away the memory of their wrongs with blood. They were, evidently, hastening to ruin. Their numbers were rapidly diminishing, as well from the usual effects of intoxication as from ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... arrested by the American forces in September, 1899, and remained a prisoner until September 23, 1900. Following his release, he lived for a while in a suburb of Manila, in a poor nipa house, under the most adverse and trying circumstances. He was in abject poverty. ...
— Mabini's Decalogue for Filipinos • Apolinario Mabini
... of the north. A golden wind was blowing, and little white clouds flying aloft in the sunny blue. The church was full of well known faces, upturned, listening, expectant, critical. The hour vanished in a slow mist of abject misery and shame. But had he not learned to rejoice over all dead hopes, and write Te Deums on their coffin lids? And now he stood in dim light, in the vapour from damp garments, in dinginess and ugliness, with a sense of spiritual ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... the attempt ends as usual in the repetition—in the circumstances the inevitable repetition—of the old disaster. Not that at times we do not obtain glimpses of the true state of the case. After seasons of much discouragement, with the sore sense upon us of our abject feebleness, we do confer with ourselves, insisting for the thousandth time, "My soul, wait thou only upon God." But the lesson is soon forgotten. The strength supplied we speedily credit to our own achievement; and even the temporary success is ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... brute was a creature of abject terror, staring out with fear-haunted eyes. Quite humbly he replied: "You are right. You are the only one who can beat the machines. ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... said Clifford, from whose nervous and masculine mind habits were easily shaken. "We have not for so many years discarded all the servile laws of others, to be the abject slaves of our own weaknesses. Come, my dear fellow, rouse yourself. Heaven knows, were I to succumb to the feebleness of my own heart, I should be lost indeed. And perhaps, wrestle I ever so stoutly, I do not wrestle away that which clings within me, and will kill me, though by inches. ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... through their sinful folly Are workers of iniquity, Living on Jehovah's bounty, Wasting in abject poverty. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... went the Chartres Street way: "If I go one more time by way of Royal I shall owe an abject apology, and yet to try to offer it would ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... her, and then her eyes met those of Howat Penny. Even separated from him by the bed she drew away as if from his touch. He saw that she had forgotten the dead man in a sharp realization of the portent of the living. She glanced about the room in the panic of a trapped lark, an abject fright, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... exalted by communion with the Divine Spirit, he appears before his congregation on Sabbath, knowing he has an honestly gotten message to lavish on them; just as there can be no coward and craven more abject than a minister with any conscience who appears in the pulpit after an idle, dishonest week, to cheat his congregation with a diet of fragments seasoned ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... grudging keeping of God's law—however much more it may cost, from the very fact that it is in some way unsympathetic, and against the grain. The service of fear and reverence, which Catholicism regards as the basis and back-bone of love, is held to be abject and unworthy—almost sinful. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... more abject than the bondage of ignorance. John Bunyan was not greatly inconvenienced by being incarcerated in jail. His spirit could not be imprisoned, but the imprisonment of his body gave his mind and spirit freedom and opportunity to do work that, otherwise, might not have been done. If he had lived ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... flowed sluggishly. But in spite of his weakness and the pain he evidently suffered, Jock could hardly wait to lead his masters back to the flock. Hurrying on with him they crossed a little rise of ground and came upon the sheep which were crowded close to one another, panting in abject terror. ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... against it, the thick packet of bank-notes in the tramp's bundle, and all that it might stand for, were as air-blown bubbles to refined gold. Yet he would not go back; he could not go back. To restore the money would be more than a confession of failure; it would be an abject recantation—a flat denial of every article of his latest social creed, and a plunge into primordial chaos in the matter of theories, out of which he could emerge only as ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... hinted that I would be wise to conciliate him if I wished to have my own way. In the act of entering one of the rooms, I turned upon him angrily, and bade him be off. The next moment this half-brother of a Siamese magnate was kneeling in abject supplication in the half-open doorway, imploring me not to report him to his Excellency, and promising never to offend again. Here was a miracle of repentance I had not looked for; but the miracle was sham. Rage, cunning, insolence, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... the Tremenheeres, found a situation in a mercantile house in the City. There was no time for him to pick and choose. It was imperative that he should begin to earn without delay, and not, as his parent frankly remarked, "look to a poor widow for support." This condition of abject poverty was, she declared, "entirely due to his father's criminal carelessness respecting his affairs. She had what would barely keep her alive"—170 pounds per annum—"and that was all." As for ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker |
