"Climax" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... climax of the Prince's wrath. He fell into a state bordering on despair, tore his hair, gnashed ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... off suddenly, making a wilful anti-climax to her speech, and, as Stair knew very well, not in the least finishing as she had meant to. But her housekeeping pride was aroused. He must eat. She would heap his plate. She had heard him late last night moving about. Had he not slept ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... number of experiences without learning how to shudder. In one of them, I remember, he was sitting by the fireside and a pair of live legs fell down the chimney and walked about the room by themselves. Afterwards the rest fell down and joined up; but this was almost an anti-climax. Now that is very charming, and full of the best German domesticity. It suggests truly what wild adventures the traveller can find by stopping at home. But it also illustrates in various ways how that great German influence on ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... to Moslems, mostly performed by aspiration. They hold that in the days of Isa, physic had reached its highest development, and thus his miracles were mostly miracles of medicine; whereas, in Mohammed's time, eloquence had attained its climax and accordingly his miracles were those of eloquence, as shown in the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... have made a vacuum with his hands, as the lizard is said to do with its feet, he would have gone along a ceiling. Now, this pocket-athlete was insanely fond of gripping the dinner-table with both hands, and so swinging; and then—climax of delight! he would seize it with his teeth, and, taking off his hands, hold on like grim ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... very great deal, and when I saw you I thought I should now be rid of my fear. But you merely told me you had no desire to make yourself ridiculous in the eyes either of the Prince or of the city. That is small comfort. I consider it small, and so much the smaller, since, to cap the climax, you contradict yourself, and not only seem to believe in these things yourself, but even expect me to have a nobleman's pride in ghosts. Well, I haven't. When you talk about families that value their ghosts as highly as their coat of arms, all I have to say is, that is a matter of ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... place of Bela, who was intrusted with the government of Transylvania and of all the country between the Theiss and Aluta. With a weak monarch and an exhausted treasury, the land had become the prey of barbarous invaders, and the disorders of the kingdom had reached such a climax that the magnates resolved to appeal to the mediation of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... can in nowise be so clearly defined as by "rough-house." For instance, the turbulent Euclio in Aul. delivers bastings impartially to various dramatis personae and as a climax drives the cooks and music-girl pell-mell out of the house, doubtless accompanied by deafening howling and clatter (415 ff.). Similarly in the Cas. (875 ff.) Chalinus routs Olympio and the lecherous Lysidamus. We may well imagine that ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... irids had widened as though with inspiration. He saw visions as he played, gazing intently into space; Joyce wondered what he saw, sure that it was beautiful, and passionately sad. Gradually, the passion and dignity of the music having reached its climax, it grew weary and spent. The glorious melody sighed its own requiem and softly died away on a ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... some reason, some utterly illogical but nevertheless generally accepted reason, just because she was a female creature, in dealing with her he felt at liberty to cast aside that code of conduct by which ordinarily he acted. And—if the outrage needed a climax—the rest of mankind, should they hear of Willie Jones's behavior, instead of turning from him with the cold shoulder of disapproval, would merely laugh amusedly. Oh, think of it! The injustice of things! The rank, the black injustice! Margery turned wild eyes to heaven to register her dumb ...
— A Little Question in Ladies' Rights • Parker Fillmore
... The climax was reached at tea-time, when an anonymous hand was thrust beneath the skylight, and a full-bodied tract fluttered wildly down ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... therefore with individual responsibility—and that for the express purpose of realising his highest potentialities: it is only when we accept such a reading of the facts as this that we escape from that worst of nightmares which reaches its climax in hurling its foolish defiance at the Most High, challenging His right to punish the instruments of His own will, those "helpless pieces of the game He plays," impotent items in ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... best friends had anticipated that the peaceful climax of all her cares would be a relief to her; and so indeed in the long run it would be to her higher sense, and she would be thankful. But even those who knew her most thoroughly had not estimated the pangs of personal ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... now reached its climax; but it is time to revert more particularly to his personal history. In this his loves very nearly occupy the chief place. That they were many, his songs prove; for in those days he wrote no love-songs on imaginary heroines. "Mary Morison," "Behind yon hills where Lugar ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... us is as paradoxical and rebellious as it is poetic and picturesque. Such a nature, one would think, must be the final blossoming of powerful hereditary tendencies, converging silently through numerous generations to its predestined climax. All we know is that Hamsun's forebears were sturdy Norwegian peasant folk, said only to be differentiated from their neighbours by certain artistic preoccupations that turned one or two of them into ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... Ursula suffered bitterly at the hands of life, Maggie was always single, always withheld, so she went in a heavy brooding sadness that was almost meat to her. In Ursula's last winter at St. Philip's the friendship of the two girls came to a climax. It was during this winter that Ursula suffered and enjoyed most keenly Maggie's fundamental sadness of enclosedness. Maggie enjoyed and suffered Ursula's struggles against the confines of her life. And then the two girls began to drift apart, as Ursula broke from that form of life wherein ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... well as the most important and those oftenest used are, Simile, Metaphor, Personification, Allegory, Synechdoche, Metonymy, Exclamation, Hyperbole, Apostrophe, Vision, Antithesis, Climax, Epigram, ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... ridiculously putting me upon a pedestal, trying to make me fit an ideal character in his book, I think. To prove to him that I am only human, I told him the story of what happened on the Belle Julie. And, to cap the climax, I pointed out our friend Mr. Broffin, who was on guard again—as usual—and told him who the house watcher was and what he wanted. It didn't affect him any more than it would any friend of the family. He was interested in the story as a story, and—and ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... and its identity had long since been evident. But this fact mitigated my curiosity not at all. The "Archives" had furnished a continuous narrative—surely one of the strangest ever committed to writing—and now I was to read the climax of that romantically terrible story; to witness the final achievement of that object that my poor friend had pursued with such ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... have been perpetrated, even in a Government office. It is true that no demand existed for some of them, but it is equally true that in numerous cases, especially in the early specifications of the steam engine and printing machine, the want of them has caused great disappointment. To add a climax to the story, many of the "pulped" specifications have had to be reprinted more than ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... from marking the advent of purity and refinement in literature and life, really represents the climax of degradation, is made most obvious when we regard the role which the hetairai played in social life. In Alexandria and at Athens they were the centre of attraction at all the entertainments of the young men, and to some of them great ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... thus much, but presently he sank half- unconscious, not knowing the puzzle of the shot which had struck him here so far toward the interior of the house. After a time the horror of it all drew to its climax and passed on. Buckner, the storekeeper, slipped down to the railroad station and set going an imperative clicking on the wire. Two hours later there came a special train, whose appearance put an end ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... distinctly a good one. I wished the heroine had not spoiled her fine enthusiasms by mixing them so freely with a personal vendetta; but after all it is not the characterisation that intrigues one here. The plot—which I will not spoil by giving it away—goes excellently, and works up to a capital climax. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various
... other, and all together into one, it seems as if proportion transcended itself and became something different and more imposing. I could never fathom how a man dares to lift up his voice to preach in a cathedral. What is he to say that will not be an anti-climax? For though I have heard a considerable variety of sermons, I never yet heard one that was so expressive as a cathedral. 'Tis the best preacher itself, and preaches day and night; not only telling you of man's art and aspirations in the ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Rhetoric reached their climax in a time of fermentation. The impatience, the feeling of uneasiness and restraint, is felt in the drama of these days, which was wholly under the control of the Chambers. The stage, that "mirror of the times," is often the first manifestation of the unquiet heaving ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... I came to know intimately Wischniegradsky, who had been the head of the Moscow School of Technology and afterward Russian minister of finance. He spoke to me in the highest terms of what original American methods had done for railways; and the climax was reached when the Moscow methods, so highly praised by Boston critics, proved to be utterly inadequate in training mechanical engineers to furnish the machinery needed in Russia, and men from the American schools, trained in the methods of Cornell, sent over ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... climax so swiftly that not one of them had moved except the combatants. Bannister rose and walked over to the place where the body of his cousin lay. He knelt down and examined him. When he rose it was with a very ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... his illustrations sometimes ran to anti-climax. One day, he talked of something (if I recollect right, the electric telegraph), moving with the rapidity of a flash of lightning, with a pair ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... they labored on, and into the fourth night. That night the storm seemed to have reached its climax, if, indeed, any climax could be found to a storm which at the very outset had burst upon them with such appalling suddenness and fury, and had sustained itself all along with such unremitting energy. But on ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... visited the scene hallowed in tradition as the sojourn of St. Fillan, can understand how the genius of Scott should have traced to Fillan's spring that draught of inspiration which conceived such a splendid poem as the "Lady of the Lake"; for it is here that the scenery of Upper Strathearn reaches its climax ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... in the streets, when he's taking his master's horse to a honest stable—a horse you'd go and sell for cats' and dogs' meat if you had your way! Why, I thought,' said the Grinder, producing his concluding remark as if it were the climax of all his injuries, 'that ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... avarice, and ambition. Eight o'clock struck from all the towers in the town. The moon rose late. Fog and darkness wrapped in impenetrable gloom the places where the drama planned by this man was coming to its climax. He was able to silence the struggle of his passions as he walked up and down, his arms crossed, and his eyes fixed on the windows which rose like the luminous eyes of a phantom above the rampart. The deep silence was broken only by the ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... load of potatoes, or a barrel of buckwheat, being given by each party to purchase books with. The selection of these, to suit all tastes, was a matter of some difficulty, the grave and serious declaiming against light reading, and regarding a novel as the climax of human wickedness. One old lady, who by the way was fond of reading, and had studied the ancient tale of Pamela regularly, at her leisure, for the last forty years, was the strongest against these, and, on being told that her favourite tome was no less than ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... engine, he was here, by the mere colliding of a cart and a carriage in a Pekin Street, deprived of all the good of his journey—fraudulent it may be—but really if—I know of no epithet worthy of this climax. ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... the climax of his empty successes. It had been Boston's first oratorio of the season, and the wreath had been an unusually ponderous one. It had met him promptly at the end of his first number, and it had impressed ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... chant, full of dramatic fire and color, while the accompaniment, which is extremely elaborate, furnishes a most picturesque setting. The genius of the composer displays itself here fully as much as in the vocal treatment. When the lyric feeling rises to its climax it expresses itself in the crowning melody, this high tide of the music and poetry being always in unison. As masterpieces of this form may be cited "Die Stadt" and "Der Erlkoenig," which stand far beyond any other works of the same nature in the ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... Christian era. The Christmas tree of to-day is incomplete without its many lights. Its illumination is a homage of light to the source of light. The celebration of Easter in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is a typical example of fire-worship retained from ancient times. At the climax of the services comes the descent of the Holy Fire. The central candelabra suddenly becomes ablaze and the worshipers, each of whom carries a wax taper, light their candles therefrom and rush through the streets. The fire ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... The "scrap of paper" had come to life. It was a great day, an hour of right and might, a soul-stirring climax to a most stupendous drama. The hero rode in triumph; and the villain, after ignominious flight, was hiding behind the skirts of a Dutchwoman, over ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... in the career of those three youths that stood out bright and fresh—never to be forgotten—this first burst of the realities of the Arctic world on minds which had been previously well informed by books. The climax was reached on the day when the Eskimos of the far ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... in spite of all the protests of the other two. This time it is another sort of a dance, a Lithuanian dance. Those who prefer to, go on with the two-step, but the majority go through an intricate series of motions, resembling more fancy skating than a dance. The climax of it is a furious prestissimo, at which the couples seize hands and begin a mad whirling. This is quite irresistible, and every one in the room joins in, until the place becomes a maze of flying skirts and bodies quite dazzling to look upon. But the sight ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... turvy day as this?" asked Gladys, as they sat around the glowing camp fire that night after supper. "First Katherine gets us up at half past three on a false alarm; we have crew practice and then go back to bed and don't get up until nine. And things have kept happening all day until the grand climax just now. Some days stand out like that from all others as the ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... pianist having doubled his speed, the emotion of the music-lovers was reaching its climax, a servant was handing refreshments about on a salver, and was making the spoons rattle, and, as on every other 'party-night', Mme. de Saint-Euverte was making signs to him, which he never saw, to leave the room. ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... degraded, and seeking to degrade, seizing upon this lad's soul, in the disguise of a dead girl, and desiring to possess it. How fantastic that sounded! Did she believe it? She did not know. Then there was the solution of a nervous strain, rising to a climax of insanity. This was the answer of the average doctor. Did she believe that? Was that enough to account for the look in the boy's ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... neither dead nor living but, as it were, suspended, hanging midway between nothingness and existence. His was a darkness unbroken by a ray of thought or sensation, a dreamless inanition, a vast space of peace. The tumult of his mind had swelled and risen to an abrupt climax of silence. Where was the man? Where is any man when insensibility takes ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... fair. Angelica, shouting and laughing, made as much noise in her way as the dogs did in theirs, and the din was deafening; an exasperating kind of din too, not incessant, but intermittent, now swelling to a climax, now lulling, until there seemed some hope that it would cease altogether, then bursting out again, whip cracking, dogs howling and barking, feet scampering, Angelica shrieking worse ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... weight of much knowledge upon their brows, throwing out hints as to the probable majority one way or the other. Some profess to know it to a nicety. Others shake their heads and remark vaguely that there is not much to choose either way. So week after week goes by, until the excitement reaches a climax when the date of ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... text, 'As all the Jacobs were Papists, so the good folks who, through Scott's novels, admire the Jacobs must be Papists too.' An idea got about that the religion of such genteel people as the Stuarts must be the climax of gentility, and that idea was quite sufficient. Only let a thing, whether temporal or spiritual, be considered genteel in England, and if it be not followed it is strange indeed; so Scott's writings not only made the greater part of ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... London cabman when his regular fare is given him. One man, who almost invariably brought only a very small quantity, would begin his conversation with, "No more money now—no more chow-chow (dinner)—no more opium!" Sometimes matters come to a climax, and he tells us that we "too much lie and cheatem;" on which we send him out at ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... of indecisive warfare, in camp as in the field, were destined to have their climax at last. Well for the little battalion, perhaps, was it, after all, that officers and men alike were boiling over with repressed, pent-up fury for action, for when the morrow came it called each soldier into line, and gave him giant work ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... rehashed. The public don't want to think; it wants to laugh. This story is all right for a book, but won't do for a play. I don't see why you quit a good thing for a risk like this. It is foolish and will lose money," he added, as a climax. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... being wrought up to a climax was Nanny's, the maid-of-all-work, who had a warm heart and a still warmer temper. Nanny adored her mistress: she had been heard to say, that she was 'ready to kiss the ground as the missis trod on'; and Walter, she considered, was her baby, of whom ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... were our horses, which were nearly done up. Our bones ached from the Mexican saddles; and, to complete our misery, the two rangers began to turn restive and talk of returning with the horses. At this, the climax of our misfortunes, I luckily hit upon a Mexican, who gave us intelligence of our carriage; and with renewed spirits, but very ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... he was obliged to conceal himself for a time; and to cap the climax, the conduct of his son, who was still in ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... he received a letter from Mr. Lincoln. It was written soon after that curious climax in the courting of Mary Todd. ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... style of this famous salon, simplicity degenerated into affectation, and nobility of sentiment was replaced by an inflated effort to outstrip nature, so that the genre precieux drew down the satire, which reached its climax in the Precieuses Ridicules and Les Femmes Savantes, the former of which appeared in 1660, and the latter in 1673. But Madelon and Caltros are the lineal descendants of Mademoiselle Scudery and her satellites, quite as much as of ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... say. "I've an idea he's a sort of Jack-of-all-trades there, writing up news, setting type in an emergency, and even helping turn off the limited edition of about five hundred copies of the paper that are run every week. So, as Friday night is the climax to their week's work, we're likely to find Jim there with his coat off, and on ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... if, when you come at last, we treat you like an anti-climax. You see, we let ourselves go, once for all, over the Armistice, and, though there will be plenty of celebrations for you, we shan't forget ourselves again. There will be bands, of course, and bunting, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... acquiesce in this. Her instinct said that unless something tentative were left in view, some further part of the drama held out to be played, the simple-minded Tusk would stop their going. His dwarfed intelligence, gauged to one idea, might be satisfied to wait only if waiting promised a climax. And as for the other's returning—this new-found deliverer who was so thoroughly of the mountains, yet whose dialect just now had savored of the "circuit-rider" type—she felt able to cope with that exigency after they were outside. So in her eagerness ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... in a vertiginous crescendo. Spaniardism culminated in Bourbonism, and this, again, reached its climax in the closing years of the eighteenth century, when the conditions of south Italy baffled description. I have already (p. 212) given the formidable number of its ecclesiastics; the number of saints was commensurate, but—as often happens when the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... underlying moral question, some question of human action, something concerning right and wrong. But they also have another characteristic which is more obvious to the average reader—their frank romance. By romance is meant happenings either out of the usual course of events, such as the climax of Lochinvar, or events that ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... Handsome to Robespierre.) Mr. Montalembert, who is universally known as an ultra Catholic, holds that the noblest era in history was that part of the middle ages, when the Catholic faith was at the climax of its influence and splendor. What distinguishes modern times is paganism, and the essence of paganism is modern education and science. Classical education is especially a bad thing. One great hope of this ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... not a very grand climax, nor the kind of arrangement to which Englishmen are accustomed, but perhaps, considering the circumstances, and the well-known predilections of those who made the settlement, it was as much as ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... little carpings, backbitings, and hypocrisies during the evening, and they reached a climax when Betty said, "Lord Bobbie is coming to-night, my dear." "Not if I know it, my love," said the tall lady. "We are goin' to supper at the Nell Gwynne Club, dearest." "Surprised at ye, my darling." "You are a nice one ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... nobility, scions of royalty, flocked to her rooms. She spent profusely and lavishly. The decorations were superb, the entertainments magnificent, in the ceremonious and rather affected style of the period. In 1770 she was at the climax of prosperity. "Galas, masquerades, and festivals, all equally splendid, succeeded one another throughout the season" (Clinch); but after her sky-rocket ascent came the fall: fickle Fashion deserted her, and finally the house and its contents were announced in the ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... The agitation reached its climax in the uproar over the reference which Mr. Chamberlain made to the war of 1870 in his speech at Edinburgh. In this speech Mr. Chamberlain very justly remarked that we could find precedents for any severe measures which we might be compelled to take against the guerillas, in the history of ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seemed rippling up and down my spinal column: the marrow congealed within my bones. But I recovered. When a man has supped full of horror, and there is no immediate climax, he can collect himself and be comparatively brave. A reaction ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... merely an ordinary well-meaning man, forced by circumstances into doing the work of Providence. Mr. Hawk's demeanour seemed to say, "We are two reckless scoundrels, but bless you, I won't give away your guilty secret." The climax came one morning as I was going along the street towards the beach. I was passing a dark doorway, when out shimmered Mr. Hawk as if he had been a spectre instead of the most substantial man within a ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... swaying their bodies sympathetically. He works himself into a frenzy, in which the fiddlers vainly try to keep up with him. He turns and digs the laggard angrily in the side without losing the metre. The climax comes. The bride bursts into hysterical sobs, while the women wipe their eyes. A plate, heretofore concealed under his coat, is whisked out. He has conquered; the inevitable collection is ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... meantime, other things were hurrying events to a climax. Fairfax Lee had hastened home that night in fear of his life. Bill Gaston, once a useful political worker, who had been driven insane by his failure to secure an appointment he craved, and who the day before ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... "To cap the climax, most of them sport ugly black mohair aprons which they call 'alpaca pinnies.' Marjorie, can you imagine what they look like? I told Mother if she wanted me to be English to the extent of wearing a pinafore, I should lie down and die and I'm thankful to say that she simply grinned. But ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... ought to have been recognized for what it really was, the growing of the Apostasy, which has now begun to be avowed and absolutely universal—blinded, I say, by all this, Sir Archibald, we suffered many mighty forces to stealthily, powerfully work together so that the climax that has come upon us, was made ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... culmination. Specially gifted with qualities needed to realize the fulness of its possibilities, they so identify themselves with it by their deeds that they thenceforth personify to the world the movement which brought them forth, and of which their own achievements are at once the climax and the most dazzling illustration. Fewer still, but happiest of all, viewed from the standpoint of fame, are those whose departure is as well timed as their appearance, who do not survive the instant of perfected success, to linger on subjected to the searching tests of common life, but pass from ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... turned the fortunes of France from disaster to expansion. But the rest of the settlement is still vague and uncertain, and German imperialism, at least, is already working hard and intelligently for a favorable situation at the climax, a situation that will enable this militarist empire to emerge still strong, still capable of recuperation and of a renewal at no very remote date of the struggle for European predominance. This is a thing as little ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... somewhat, but nothing availed to lift the cloud which had fallen upon his life; and the intimation of the near approach of his son's marriage with "a lady" coming upon him as it did unexpectedly, was the climax of his depression of spirits. He sat in the chimney-corner and brooded, repeating to himself occasionally ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... with childhood's babbling trill, etc. "The whole of this stanza is very impressive; the mingling of the children's curses is the climax of horror. Note the meaning of the triple curse. The cross is of ancestral yew—the defaulter is cut off from communion with his clan; it is sealed in the fire—the fire shall destroy his dwelling; it is dipped in blood—his heart's blood is to be ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... After this climax the interview was not so long as it was interesting. Two men as far apart as the poles, as remote from each other in mind and body, in training and education or lack of it, in desires and intentions, in points of view and trend of being, as nature and circumstances could make them, talked ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... this disappointing anti-climax, by the disciples of the Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity, except that it was something very voluble and loud, would have been as so much Hebrew or Chaldean to Miss Pross and her protector, though they had been all ears. But, they had no ears for anything in ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... descriptive passages in that work), free play is given to the fancy which works unclogged by verboseness; and judgment marks the circumstances in a description which progresses, apparently without art, to the close of the beautiful climax, and strongly moves the compassion of the reader:—"When he persisted with increased contumacy in his errors, he was condemned of heresy by the Council, and sentenced to be burnt alive. With an unruffled brow and cheerful countenance he went to his ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... grand climax of Bergson's philosophy, his doctrine of Intuition, which he preaches with all the vigour of an evangelist. Our study of his treatment of Change, of Perception, of la duree, and of Instinct, has prepared us for an investigation of what he means by Intuition, for in dealing with ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... at the Rotunda Creek Rush, and when that abode of "wild cat" collapsed, we arranged to take a prospecting trip towards the Olifant River. We made a start, but after a week were driven back by some of the worst weather I have ever experienced. The climax came when we were caught one afternoon on a high mountain plateau by a succession of violent hailstorms. We crept under the lee of a rock for shelter, but our fire was smashed out over and over again by hurtling masses of ice, so we shivered in darkness ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... came to a climax in 1828, through the passing of a customs act, known as the Tariff of Abominations. Sparks falling on ice carry no peril, but sparks falling on the dry prairie cause conflagrations. The news of the passing of the protective ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... day, as stated by Governor Harris, of Tennessee, who was serving as a volunteer aide on Hood's staff, that he never sent the order. This strange neglect of the part of his own chief of staff affords a fitting climax to all the rest of the imbecility that contributed to Hood's failure after he had personally led the main body of his army to a position where by all ordinary chances ...
— The Battle of Spring Hill, Tennessee - read after the stated meeting held February 2d, 1907 • John K. Shellenberger
... Master as he was of his bit of merry England, no man could have enslaved him, and he might at least have lived and let live. My father followed his example in the matter of the deer forest, but that was the climax of his wickedness, whereas it was only the beginning of my grandfather's. Howbeit, whichever bears the palm, there they were, the types after ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... the second stage of labor are of a bearing down character, and constantly increase in force and frequency; the climax being reached as the head passes through the ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... guests of John—Mahony had reluctantly resigned himself to being beholden to Mary's relatives and Mary's friends to the end of the chapter. At best, living in other people's houses was for him more of a punishment than a pleasure; but for sheer discomfort this stay capped the climax. Under Zara's incompetent rule John's home had degenerated into a lawless and slovenly abode: the meals were unpalatable, the servants pert and lazy, while the children ran wild—you could hardly hear yourself speak for the racket. Whenever possible, Mahony fled the ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... G.F.S., Gillian tried not to look too conscious when some of the girls actually tittered in the rear; and she absolutely blushed when Aunt Jane deliberately stated that Ascension Day would fall on a Tuesday. So Gillian averred as she walked up the hill with Jasper and Mysie. It seemed a climax to the diversion she and Jasper had extracted from it in private, both wearing Punch's spectacles for the nonce, and holding such aberrations as proof positive. Mysie, on the other hand, was ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his former pleasures vanish. Even the divine consolation of books is partly if not wholly gone. Behind the printed page, he sees ever the machinery of composition, the preparation for climax, the repetition in its proper place, the introduction and interweaving of major and minor, of theme and contrast. For the fine, glowing fancy of the other man has not appeared in his book, and to the eye of the fellow-craftsman only the mechanism is there. Mask-like, ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... interest. But, after all, it was not Uncle Tom, nor Topsy, nor Miss Ophelia, nor Eliza, nor little Eva that made the book the power it proved to stir the hearts of men, but the great underlying tragedy then already rapidly approaching a bloody climax. ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... faster and faster. About it, the racing waters would leap and boil in their furious, headlong career, shaking and tossing the helpless victim of their might with a vicious strength from which there would be no escape, until, in the climax of the river's madness, the object of its angry sport would be dashed against the cliff, and torn, and crushed, and hammered by the terrific weight of the rushing flood against that rocky anvil, into a battered ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... closed the leaks slightly at midnight, but all hands were pumping all night. A strange occurrence was the sudden appearance of eight emperor penguins from a crack 100 yds. away at the moment when the pressure upon the ship was at its climax. They walked a little way towards us, halted, and after a few ordinary calls proceeded to utter weird cries that sounded like a dirge for the ship. None of us had ever before heard the emperors utter any other than the most simple calls or cries, and the effect of this concerted effort ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... virtue of the tears she shed, she arrived at that supreme disdain, that climax of suffering, where the excess of pain seems a satire, where chagrin, exceeding the utmost limits of human strength, exceeds its sensibility as well, and the stricken heart, which no longer feels the blows, says to the Heaven it ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... the hall I knew that my recitation was at fault and tried to find out why. Once a man and his wife made an exit while I was giving The Happy Little Cripple—a recitation I had prepared with particular enthusiasm and satisfaction. It fulfilled, as few poems do, all the requirements of length, climax and those many necessary features for a recitation. The subject was a theme of real pathos, beautified by the cheer and optimism of the little sufferer. Consequently when this couple left the hall I was very anxious to know the reason and asked a friend to find out. He learned ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... there came a night (it was one of those in which Sara had watched with baby during the measles) when the sea, as if scorning all previous performances, seemed lashing itself into a very climax of rage. Smutty rags of clouds flew across the ominous horizon, and spiteful gusts, apparently from every direction of the compass, caught the old Nautilus in wild arms, and tossed ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... previous works demonstrated the unity of life-reactions in the plant and animal. A climax is now reached when by the application of identical treatment he is able to confer alternately on the same animal nerve, supra-conducting or non-conducting property at will. Under a particular molecular disposition the experimental frog perceived ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... endeavouring to bring the negotiations to a peaceful conclusion, the noble Lord was taking a course which rendered statesmanship valueless in conducting the foreign policy of the nation. The noble Lord, however, at last brought his conduct to a climax. The hon. and learned Member for Sheffield (Mr. Roebuck) came forward as a little David with sling and stone—weapons which he did not even use, but at the sight of which the Whig Goliath went howling and vanquished to ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... reach a climax one afternoon some days before the end of the year. Without, the wind was blowing and snow was descending; inside, the housework dragged monotonously. The only lively people in the house were the little children. They were playing quite riotously in an upper room, ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... after night, hard upon a week; and, as well became such friends—the gambler, the duellist, the man of pleasure, and the fool of Fashion—they never yet had separated for their day-light beds, without a climax to their orgie, something like the ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... fools, and ended it as fiends—fell side by side into one of the sleeping-bunks, the bottom of which was driven down by the shock as they sank exhausted amid the wreck, foaming with passion, and covered with blood. This was the climax; they fell into a state of partial insensibility, which degenerated at last into a deep ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Flying Highwayman, Jack Needham, and other Beggars' Opera heroes, were familiar in our mouths as household words. At such tales, like children closing their circle round the fire when the ghost story draws to its climax, the riders drew near to each other, looked before and behind them, examined the priming of their pistols, and vowed to stand by each other in case of danger; an engagement which, like other offensive and defensive alliances, sometimes glided out ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of Prague, and emulated them by flinging their councillors out of the town-house windows. In return the German miners of Kuttenberg threw sixteen hundred Hussites down the mines. Such is religious war, the very climax of cruelty. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... appearance at this moment was like an anti-climax. It plunged him headlong for a single moment into what he believed to be the absurdity of a situation. He had a quick mental picture of himself out on the dead spruce, performing a bit of mock-heroism by dragging in a half-drowned colt by one ear. In ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... converging spiral ends. Hegel's "bad infinite" belongs to the eddy as well as to the line. "Progress?" writes our author. "And to what? Time turns a weary and a wistful face; has he not traversed an eternity? and shall another give the secret up? We have dreamed of a climax and a consummation, a final triumph where a world shall burn en barbecue; but there is not, cannot be, a purpose of eternity; it shall pay mainly as it goes, or not at all. The show is on; and what a show, if we will ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... as a signal for bringing several other quarrels to a climax. There was a rush through all parts of the sala, drunken shouts mingled with yells of vengeance, knives glanced from their sheaths, women screamed, pistols flashed and cracked, filling the rooms with ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... jugglers, the ventriloquists,—for all these lower orders of public performers existed among the ancients and swarmed in the Pompeian pictures,—or the flute-players enlivening the waits with their melody and accompanying the voice of the actors at moments of dramatic climax. "How can he feel afraid," asked Cicero, in this connection, "since he recites such fine verses while he accompanies himself on the flute?" What would the great orator have said had he been present at ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... reforming—forward again. Then up again the shrill staccato; line drawing nearer. Higher, faster, louder the Satanic scream of lead. Higher, still higher! The head throbbed, beads glistened on the brow—surely the climax was reached. ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... father, an ancestral family, a mother. What a climax! In whom shall I henceforth find an interest? Whom shall I be able to love? After ten years of paternity, ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... circumstance will not fail to strike the reader as a strange omission in these frequent enumerations of the exports of Ceylon. I have traced them from their earliest notices by the Greeks and Romans to the period when the commerce of the East had reached its climax in the hands of the Persians and Arabians; the survey extends over fifteen centuries, during which Ceylon and its productions were familiarly known to the traders of all countries, and yet in the pages of no author, European or Asiatic, from the earliest ages to the close of the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... all her feelings, all her invention, had composed a most beautiful air, and sung it with an effect that must have been heard to be supposed possible. The force with which she uttered every thought to the climax of daring, and the compassion which she infused into the conclusion 'But do not dare to love'—produced the most affecting ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... difficulty in calculating distances. Three days ago, her ladyship went to look out of the window, and, miscalculating the distance—" Here the butler, with a fine dramatic feeling for telling a story, stopped just before the climax of the narrative, and looked me in the face with an expression ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... confused combat, a wild and terrible struggle, the climax of the night-battle. White and red faces mingled before him in a blur, the water seemed to flow in narrow, black streams between the boats and the pall of smoke was ever growing thicker. It hung over them, black and charged now with gases. Paul coughed violently, ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... age in the history of the Renaissance Scholarship may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch of learning to the northern nations. The publication of his "Adagia" in 1500, marks the advent of a more critical and selective spirit, which from that date onward ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... which Verne allows his people in their starving, thirsting condition is proven possible by medical science and recent "fasting"' experiments. The dramatic climax of the tale wherein the castaways find fresh water in the ocean is based upon a fact, one of those odd geographical facts of which the author made such ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... was soon filled to overflowing, and it is much to be regretted that some men who have held a good standing in society followed the crowd to the grocery and partook of Wilson's treat. The rejoicing was kept up till near supper time; but, to cap the climax, soon after supper was over a majority of the jury, together with many others, went to the room that had been occupied for several days by the friend and relation of the murdered Anthony, and commenced a scene of the most ridiculous dancing (as ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Lapis lazuli, malachite, and jasper were used largely, as well as bloodstones, onyx, and Rosso Antico. In Florentine Pietra Dura work, the inlay of two hard and equally cut materials reached its climax. ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... not hear when Chico, finding no comfort, no sign of life in his masters, stood upon them as they lay clasped together in the drift of fine small snow, and in the climax of misery he lifted up the long and wretched ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... episodic love have been hotly explored, its rights have been defended, its spiritual joys have been sung. But Nuptial Love, our queer breed of humans, inconstant at heart, believes to be a tame thing by contrast: nearly all anti-climax. There are delights at the beginning, and a gentle glow (perhaps) at the end: for the rest it is a long dusty journey of which the less said the better. Exceptional couples who do somewhat better than this, and not only get along without storms but live contentedly too, are apt to congratulate ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... to reply, and in a speech of terrible energy and power he arraigned the Lecompton party for all their wrongs and outrages; then, when he had reached the climax of his argument, he leaned forward, and, looking at Mr. Walker from beneath his shaggy eyebrows with his deepset, piercing black eyes, and shaking at him his long bony finger, his whole frame quivering with passion, he said in his deep guttural tones, which seemed more ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... much glee—her walk through the woods, her arrival, the terrible way in which Lurcher had treated her, the kindness of the farmer, the proposed dinner, Nancy's manners. She was working up to the grand climax, to the moment when she should speak ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... with his company. Several ladies solicited his autograph for their albums, and several gentlemen called a meeting of the inhabitants, and resolved to give him a public dinner; a craniologist requested to be permitted to take a cast of his head, and as a climax to his misery, when he was sitting in his bedchamber thinking himself at least secure for the present, the door being bolted; he looked towards the Malvern Hills, which rise abruptly immediately at the back of the boarding-house, and there he discovered a party of ladies ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 389, September 12, 1829 • Various
... Sometimes the bird would be far below me, sometimes near at hand; and very frequently the singer would be hovering a hundred feet above the summit. He would start from the trees on one side of the open space, reach his climax in the air, and plunge down on the other side. His descent after the song is finished is very rapid, and precisely like that of the titlark when it sweeps down from its course to alight ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... April the Galician campaign reached its climax in the bloody battles of the Carpathians and Russian armies seemed slowly but surely pushing their way over the mountains and descending into the Hungarian Plain. (Vol. III, 235-276.) It was at this moment that Italy had chosen to enter the war on the allied side, and there ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... such devout attention to the chant that she did not hear him. The fatigue which had reached such a painful climax had, during this peaceful rest, given way to a blissful unconsciousness of self. It was a kind of happiness to feel no longer the burden of exhaustion, and the song of the wanderers was like a cradle-song, lulling her to sweet dreams. It filled her with gladness, and yet it was not glad, not even ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... away upon a penniless poet who could not support her, and did not even propose to try! "Does he mean to get some work?" was the question; and gently Corydon explained that they intended "to live as brother and sister." And that capped the climax—that proved stark, raving madness, if it did not prove downright ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... been made for this prairie fire picture. In fact, in a way, the whole story of the drama "East and West" hinged on this scene. It was the climax, so to speak—the "big act" if the play had been on the real stage. Naturally Mr. Pertell was ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... reached a climax when the station-master suddenly rushed up shouting: "The Bayonne express is signalled. Make haste! make haste! You have only three ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... brevity, and makes its chief reliance on the point. The other devotes itself in great part to preliminary elaboration in the narrative, making this as amusing as possible, so that the point itself serves to cap a climax. In the public telling of an anecdote the tyro would be well advised to follow the first method. That is, he should put his reliance on the point of the story, and on this alone. He should scrupulously limit himself to such statements ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... air and mounted up, up, up, in slow wide circles whose center was the Tour Eiffel, until he finally reached an altitude of some 10,000 feet. Then, a mere speck in the cold, thin air, he circled slowly around and around, waiting for the German—who never came. Even without this climax the situation was thrilling enough. The Frenchman descended sadly from his lofty beat just as night fell, while waiting Paris was distinctly disappointed. That night in the restaurants one heard Frenchmen express the extraordinary hope that nothing too terrible had ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... sailor's daughter yourself, you know Jack's account of his wife's domestic creed! 'A good fire, a clean hearth, the children abed, and the husband at sea,' is supposed to be the climax of felicity." ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... but didn't he do him up at one shot, and nothing but a little piece of rock in the gum-sling!" exclaimed 'Lias in excitement over the climax of the tale the Deacon had just completed. "I ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... of the ceremony, it was now evidently approaching a climax. The chanting grew louder and more furious and the cymbal players clashed their huge metal instruments together with a deafening clangor. Suddenly, from the passage from which the galleries branched off, there appeared six men clad in robes of flaming scarlet ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... that he began to relate some of the deeds of this man; and his life, it seemed, was written in blood and filth—a tale of murders and rapes and worse. And when as a climax he told me of the horrible, inhuman outrage done to Cosimo Gheri, the young Bishop of Fano, I begged him to cease, for my horror turned me almost ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... solemnly, 'that Ivery thinks the game's nearly over. The play's working up for the big climax ... And that climax is going to be damnation for the Allies, unless we get a ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... stanza remains to show how deeply and bitterly the spectacle of this injustice burnt into his soul. But these pieces are accidents. They do not belong to the immortal part of his work. An American original, unconsciously bringing the revolutionary mind to the climax of all utterances possible to it, has said that 'men are degraded when considered as the members of a political organisation.'[2] Shelley's position was on a yet more remote pinnacle than this. Of mankind ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... it forgot to kill them. The ring of beasts closed in—we could see their yellow eyes glowing in the gloom. Orme and Quick might have got through by the help of their rifles, but they could not leave the others. The dreadful climax ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... trio sought Paddington in a taxi-cab, digesting this desperate climax of an affair that sprang ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... stopped, a conglomerate mass, at the stone abutment of the railroad bridge. The first buildings that struck the bridge took fire, and those that came after were swept into a sea of flame. I thought I had already witnessed the greatest possible climax of anguish, but the scene that followed exceeded in awfulness anything I had before looked upon. The flames grew, hundreds of people were wedged in the driftwood and imprisoned in the houses. Rapidly the fire approached them, and then they began to cry for aid, ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... one of her stories went well, with the true instinct of a story-teller could seldom be persuaded to follow it with another, fearing an anti-climax perhaps. She turned in under her little tent, and soon thereafter trumpeted to ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... as the mere cloak of a possible blush that darkness gives courage; it is because it lulls detailed self-realization, such conscious self-realization being always a source of fears, and the blush their definite symbol and visible climax. It is to the blush that we must attribute a curious complementary relationship between the face and the sacro-pubic region as centres of anatomical modesty. The women of some African tribes who go naked, Emin Bey remarked, cover the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... reason that it was then quite possible to get equal, sometimes better, quality in quite new instruments which were being sent forth every day by the resident makers. With the onward march of time this has been changed; the art of the Italian liutaro having reached its climax some century and a half back, the masterpieces executed during that time are gradually diminishing in number and cannot be replaced by instruments having a sufficiently high degree of excellence; naturally enough the skill of the repairer ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... its climax the possession of the primitive prize, the female. Without dogmatising on so remote a period, it may be suggested as a fair hypothesis that this was the very origin of our organized raids. We certainly ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Then the climax was reached. A scream sounded from above, then silence, then a confused rush of feet. The figure of Luigi filled the opening of the low window, and those nearest surged in to help and see. He was dragged through, head first, and set on his feet. The fire-engine raved and jangled ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure—had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... confederacy with a jealous eye; the Union viewed them and the Emperor with the like distrust; the Emperor was equally suspicious of both; and thus, on all sides, alarm and animosity had reached their climax. And, as if to crown the whole, at this critical conjuncture by the death of the Duke John William of Juliers, a highly disputable succession became vacant in the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... there was some very unsuitable joking about it—and he consented. He attended that service; he played their English hymns," Father Greer paused, and gathered up the table with a glance before his climax. "That young man, I regret to say, was an Irish Catholic, one whom you all ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... guests. Listening Crane rejoiced in them as representatives of the great gift-making race, and indulged himself in a dream of pipe-smoking, orations, treaties, presents and alliances, finding its climax in the marriage of his virgin queen to the king of France, and unvaryingly tending to the swiftly increasing aggrandizement of Listening Crane. They sat down to bear's meat, sagamite and beans. The queen sat down with them, clothed in her entire wardrobe: vest of swan's ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... under the royal displeasure; had been recalled and sent to the Tower, a common enough climax in those days to years spent in the arduous Irish service. His place was taken in 1588 by Sir William Fitzwilliam, who had held it nearly thirty years earlier. Fitzwilliam was a man of very inferior calibre ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... down upon them with her much-maligned nose in the air. As she maneuvered to pass, the ship, which had reached the climax of its normal roll to port, paused, and then decided to go a couple of degrees farther; in consequence of which the young lady fled with a stifled cry of fury straight into the Tyro's waiting arms. Alderson, true to ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... caravan, I would watch the sun set in always varying splendour. No two sunsets were anything like the same. Each through the ascendancy of some one shade of colour, or through an unusual combination of colour, had a special beauty of its own. I would watch each ripening to the climax and then shade away into the beauty of the night. And when the day was over the night would reveal that higher, wider life which daylight only ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... such a manner of working it out. But—and this consideration may afford a ground of conciliation with Miss Faraday and the scholars who hold by the lateness of the episode—the intrinsic beauty and pathos of the situation, the fact of its constituting an artistic climax, would naturally tempt the more gifted of the story-telling class. There would be a tendency to elaborate, to adorn in the newest fashion, hence to modernise, and it is not only conceivable but most probable that the original form should be farther ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... breakfast-guest,—settling into more confident pleasure as dinner came on, for which success was surer; how cold it was, outside; how Joel piled on great fires, and went off on some mysterious errand, having "other chores to do than idling and duddering;" how the day rose into a climax of perfection at dinner-time, to Mrs. Howth's mind,—the turkey being done to a delicious brown, the plum-pudding quivering like luscious jelly (a Christian dinner to-day, if we starve the rest of the year!). Even Dr. Knowles, who brought a great bouquet out for the school-master, ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... of Hugh's recital, rising now and then to some melodramatic climax, then dropping cautiously, rippled on, broken now and again by Sylvie's ejaculations. Behind the door Bella stood like a wooden block, colorless and stolid as though she understood not a syllable of what she heard. But after a ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... was now at no loss to account for his intimacy with its heroes. It so happened that I knew, and was on friendly terms with some of his near relations; and so the two hours I have described took the value of two years. But the climax had to come. Who was the rather seedy-looking personage whom the aids-de-camp appeared so ready to accommodate? Oh, that was Blucher! If I was outrageous before, I was mad now. I explained to Mr Parish the feeling of England with regard to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... home from Belleport was a subdued one, bringing to an afternoon that had been rich in sunshine a climax of shadow. The Galbraiths were far too stunned by the startling revelations of the day to wish to prolong a meeting that had lapsed into awkwardness, and until they had had opportunity to readjust themselves they were eager to be alone; nor did their delicacy of perception fail ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... torrent and swept the crowd. Growing each moment more and more conscious of his strength, he attained the heights of eloquence. Intoxicated with the reflex action from the sea of eager listeners, he outdid himself with each succeeding climax of feeling. Never had his voice been so deep, so full, so clear, so penetrating, so thrilling, and never had he been so conscious of its control. Not once did it break. Its loudest trumpet note ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... steps into a snowstorm. Even during his precipitate retreat he had realized the advisability of telephoning for a taxi, but had been incapable of the anti-climax. He pulled his hat over his eyes, turned up the collar of his coat, and made his way hastily toward Park Avenue. There was not a cab in sight. Nor was there a rumble in the tunnel; no doubt the cars were snow-bound. He hesitated only a moment: it would hardly take him ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... warm and invigorating, and nature at the very climax of her summer beauty, the leaves green and plentiful, and the breeze gentle and refreshing. Everything in the external world tempted one to "fling dull care away" and be happy while these ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... Struggle—made necessary by the insistence of one sovereign after another on regarding Sweden as a Danish province rather than as an autonomous part of a united Scandinavia—had reached a sort of climax, a final moment of utter blackness just before the dawn, when, at Stockholm in 1520, the Danish king, known ever afterward as Christian the Tyrant, commanded the arbitrary execution of about eighty of Sweden's most ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... the design of her lover. The expedient of Mephistopheles, to lull his prey by dissipations, is a failure. Faust finds them "tasteless," and he must return to Margaret. He finds her in prison, crazed and dying, and he strives in vain to set her free. There is a climax, whereat, while her soul is borne upward by angels he—whose destiny must yet be fulfilled—is summoned by the terrible voice of Satan. This is the substance of what is shown; but if the gaze of the observer pierces beyond this, if he is able to ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... it up. 'Now,' he went on, 'if the servants are in the habit of going into one's room during the day when one is away, I can only say that—well, that I don't approve of it at all.' Conscious of a somewhat weak climax, he busied himself in opening the door (which was indeed locked) and in lighting candles. 'No,' he said, 'nothing ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... strongest scenes of a play require the use of some physical accessory,—a screen in The School for Scandal, a horse in Shenandoah, a perfumed letter in Diplomacy. In all such cases, the spectators must be familiarised beforehand with the accessory object, so that when the climax comes they may devote all of their attention to the action that is accomplished with the object rather than to the object itself. In a quarrel scene, an actor could not suddenly draw a concealed weapon in ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... To cap the climax, this superintendent refused to make an accounting for several thousand dollars with which I had entrusted him to make purchases of lands on my personal account. I secured a warrant for his arrest, chased him half over the county with a sheriff, and brought him to the city for trial. On our way ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... just as other people were getting up. And the next night was like that one, and the next after that, and the next after that again. One night it rained, and we both walked along under the same umbrella, and that was what brought things to a climax." ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson |
