"Ill-starred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... railway accident, one son at sea, another in a fire, the third and last by disease. I should, of course, be painfully shocked and grieved; but still it would not occur to me to attribute this series of disasters to a divine vengeance or an invisible justice, to a strange, ill-starred predestination, or an active, persistent, inevitable fatality. My thoughts would fly to the myriad unfortunate hazards of life; I should be appalled at the frightful coincidence of calamity; but in me there would be no suggestion of a superhuman will that had hurled the train over ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... me all that last night?" cried the ill-starred Lancaster. He dared not tell Bullard that the Green Box was safe in his house. Bullard would never, however great the compensation, forgive trickery against himself; and Bullard's theory remained to be proved. Lancaster's soul now seized on its last hope: ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... active to defeat our annexation purpose would probably succeed, and the country be lost to us for ever. Oregon is, with a small exception, still a wilderness; our claim to ultimate sovereignty can not be weakened during the continuance of the Oregon convention. That ill-starred partnership has robbed us of the advantages which an early occupation would have given to our people in the fur-trade of the country, and we are now rapidly advancing to a position from which we can command the entire ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... to fit out for their voyages, and, having disposed of their cargoes, to return. A vessel of this description had arrived at the port of London. The subject of the traffic having become invested with interest, a portion of the members of the House paid a visit to the ill-starred craft. The deplorably narrow quarters where hundreds of human beings were to be stowed away during the weeks that might be necessary to make their passage produced upon the minds of these gentlemen a most unfavorable impression. The various insignia of the trade ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... the Mesopotamian delta was, however, but a pin-prick in a distant part compared with the blow that was aimed at the heart of the Turkish Empire in the Dardanelles; and the merits of that famous but ill-starred enterprise, and of the strategy which inspired it, have been one of the most debated questions of the war. Soldiers and civilians, writers and talkers, and even thinkers were divided into two camps, Westerners and Easterners, those who believed that the war could only be won by frontal ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... to be let out! To this turmoil and uproar were added the frantic appeals and inquiries of the passengers who, more or less dressed, had hurried to the deck and who were now speaking to the master of the ill-starred vessel. He answered them briefly: what could be ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... ill-starred midnight ranger! dark, forlorn, mysterious stranger! Wildered wanderer from the eternal lightning on Time's stormy shore! Tell us of that world of wonder—of that famed unfading "Yonder!" Rend—oh rend the veil asunder! Let our doubts and ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... outsider—and treated him as an undesirable alien. In the Transvaal and the Orange Free State he was denied the rights that are accorded to law-abiding citizens in other countries. Hence the Jameson Raid, which was an ill-starred protest against the narrow, copper-riveted Boer rule, and later the final and sanguinary show-down in the Boer War, which ended the dream of ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... found in the Haldimand MSS, Series B, Vol. 123, p. 53, it is the 'brief account' of his ill-starred expedition against Vincennes. He says "On taking an account of the Inhabitants at this place [Vincennes], of all ages and sexes we found their number to amount to 621, of this 217 fit to bear arms on the spot, several being ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... met on landing at Plymouth from his ill-starred voyage to El Dorado by Sir Lewis Stukeley, which was but natural, seeing that Sir Lewis was not only Vice-Admiral of Devon, but also Sir Walter's very ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... a time of war far surpassing in bloodshed and ruin anything witnessed in the Islands before or since. For the first time the Maoris used firearms. Probably a fourth of their race perished in this ill-starred epoch. Hongi, the chief of the Ngapuhi tribe, before referred to, is usually spoken of as the first to introduce the musket into the tribal wars. This was not so. His tribe, as the owners of the Bay of Islands and other ports frequented by traders, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... of this ill-starred young gentleman gravitated towards insanity. The inner mind was exasperated by barefaced injustice and oppression; above all, by his letters being stopped; for that convinced him both Baker and Bailey, with their see-saw evasions, knew he was sane, and dreaded ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... blood, a thief, a perjured false accuser? No, no; lower in the scale of Mammon's judgment, worse in the estimate of him whose god is gold; he was now a pauper, a mere moneyless forked animal; a beggared, emptied, worthless, penniless creature: therefore was he stern against his ill-starred soul, and took vengeance on himself for ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... already going on between Byron and Miss Clairmont; it resulted in the birth of a daughter, Allegra, in January 1817; she died in 1822, very shortly before Shelley. He and Mary had returned to London in September 1816. Very shortly afterwards, 9th of November, the ill-starred Harriet Shelley drowned herself in the Serpentine: her body was only recovered on the 10th of December, and the verdict of the Coroner's Jury was 'found drowned,' her name being given as 'Harriet Smith.' The career of ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... carefully studied by every young man who wishes to make himself a master of our law. In private they had perpetual squabbles, and they quarrelled with equal virulence and indecency before the world. The matrimonial settlement of their only and ill-starred daughter was the occasion of an outbreak on the part of husband and wife, that not only furnished diversion for courtiers but agitated the council table. Of all the comic scenes connected with that unseemly fracas, not the least laughable and characteristic was the grand ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... after a few idle commonplace stories from a gentleman in black ... no one durst say black was his eye; while I ... only wanting that ceremony, am made a Sunday's laughing-stock, and abused like a pickpocket. I was well aware, though, that if my ill-starred fortune got the least hint of my connubial wish, my scheme would go to nothing. To prevent this I determined to take my measures with such thought and fore-thought, such cautions and precautions, that all the malignant planets in the ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... day-dreams while he puzzled, anxiously, over known facts that had become too inconsistent with his beliefs for comfort. That scene enacted in his mother's rooms, at supper, on the evening after the ill-starred ball, when, at his mother's bidding, he had left her, knowing that she wished to keep him from questions that must not be asked, was neither the first such affair that he had seen, nor yet the tenth. He had left the room with hands clinched and his heart burning ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Andre, who had been taken prisoner hard by, and was universally known by the name of Major Andre's tree. The common people regarded it with a mixture of respect and superstition, partly out of sympathy for the fate of its ill-starred namesake, and partly from the tales of strange sights and doleful lamentations ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... and a fort was erected. Then buildings quickly followed, and by the autumn the whole party was well housed in its settlement, called Sainte Croix (Holy Cross). The river they named differently, but it has since borne the title of that ill-starred colony. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... Trenchard. "Ask his craven, numskulled lordship. He had as good a hand in losing it as any. Oh, it was all most infernally mishandled, as has been everything in this ill-starred rising. Grey sent back Godfrey, the guide, and attempted in the dark to find his own way across the rhine. He missed the ford. What else could the fool have hoped? And when he was discovered and Dunbarton's guns began to play on us—hell and fire! ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... licentiate in theology; but shortly after his promotion, he quitted his native country, and was for some years a wanderer amongst the splendid ruins of Italy. The treasures of art which mock the nakedness of this ill-starred country were to him what they are ever to the mind of the artist,—they revealed a new world. Unlike many others, however, Kinkel was not bewildered by the beauty which so suddenly burst upon his view. He was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... were her eyes for the sight of it, the sight of the simple name "Agnes Bibby" at the head of her first signed story—the story that was to take away the reproach from the name that the ill-starred interview ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... most vivid story of all is the following. Strachey had been in office in the ill-starred Coalition under Fox and North. When the Ministry broke up, the King sent for Lord Shelburne, a member of the Coalition, who, it will be remembered, at once formed a Government of his own. While the Ministry was in the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... remembrance of its associations was still keen and vivid. She described its old-world garden by the side of the Thames, where the little King Edward VI. must often have roamed with his pretty cousin Jane: the two wonderful ill-starred children, playing for a brief hour in happy unconsciousness of the fate that faced them. What did they talk about, she asked, as they stood on the paved terrace and watched the river hurrying by? Plato, perchance, and his philosophy, or the marvelous geography-book ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... Country Conversations has put on record some delightful specimens of rural dialogue, culled chiefly from the labouring classes of Cheshire. And, rising in the social scale from the labourer to the farmer, what could be more lifelike than this tale of an ill-starred wooing? "My son Tom has met with a disappointment about getting married. You know he's got that nice farm at H——; so he met a young lady at a dance, and he was very much took up, and she seemed quite agreeable. So, as he heard she had Five Hundred, he ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... his master to forget the three promised ass-colts; so Don Quixote wrote an order to his niece in the notebook of the ill-starred Cardenio. ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Ill-starred Bras-Coupe. He was in that extra-hazardous and irresponsible condition of mind and body known in the undignified present as ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... no scandal, no violence," cried Philometor anxiously. "The best way would be for me to write to Asclepiodorus, and beg him in a friendly manner to entrust this girl—Ismene or Irene, or whatever the ill-starred child's name is—for a few days to you, Cleopatra, for your pleasure. I can offer him a prospect of an addition to the gift of land I made today, and which fell far ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Filostrato, well known through its translation by Chaucer and the Senechal d'Anjou) upon the subject of the loves of Troilus and Cressida and to be in this instance used by him as a synonym for an unhappy lover, whom no rebuffs, no treachery can divert from his ill-starred passion. Such a lover may well be said to be in love with strife, and that the Filostrato of the Decameron sufficiently answers to this description we learn later on from ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... relate stories in so accurate and unvarying a manner as himself—on the day before that on which all persons were freely set at liberty on account of exceptional public rejoicing. Yet in spite of these and many other very unendurable incidents, this impetuous and ill-starred being never felt so great a desire to retire to a solitary place and there disfigure himself permanently as a mark of his unfeigned internal displeasure, as on the occasion when he endured extreme poverty and great personal inconvenience for an entire year in order that ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... Divine permission was short), they suffered a great persecution. But God knows the truth; and it is not permitted, nor do I wish, to interpret the events of His holy will and providence. But it has not seemed proper to me to omit a circumstance which I positively know concerning that ill-starred youth; namely, that after his death, there was found among his papers a letter from his father, Don Basilio de San Miguel (who is said to have been much given to astrology and soothsaying), who told and ordered him not to receive an office of justice under any circumstance, for the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... Yes, fair lady, I have the misfortune to bear that ill-starred title, and I beg you to be seated and open ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... which separated the bay from the lake. He next waited exactly the prescribed time, during which he reconnoitred Macdonough's position from a boat. Then the hour of battle came. The hammering of the shipwrights stopped at last; and the ill-starred Confiance, that ship which never had a chance to 'find herself,' led the little squadron into Prevost's death-trap in the bay. Every soldier and sailor now realized that the storming of the works on land ought to have been the first move, and that Prevost's idea of simultaneous action ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... lay thus, on her side, every detail clearly delineated as liquid fire roared down her open hatches. At last, as she filled with water, the schooner straightened with a mighty effort, a last stand between sea and sky, then sank slowly out of sight in a scene of wild and ill-starred beauty. Her mainpeak disappeared in a shining maelstrom. The convulsed water flashed and hissed, and the circling waves here torches into the dead seaweed and moved the black fields ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... with her clouded one at dinner, again puzzled certain members of the household; and De Forrest, to his disgust, learned that while he slept she had again been with Hemstead. He resolved on sleepless vigilance till the prize was secured, and mentally cursed the ill-starred visit to the country ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... "'I gave the ill-starred prince such an education as I should have liked to receive myself, and no acknowledged son of a king ever had a better. The only thing for which I have to reproach myself is that, without intending it, I caused him great unhappiness; ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Chateau are those of the six pretty daughters of Louis and Marie Leczinska. There are the ill-starred twins, Elizabeth and Henrietta: Madame Elizabeth, who never lost the love of her old home, and, though married, before entering her teens, to the Infanta of Spain, retired, after a life of disappointment, to her beloved Versailles to die; and the gentle Henrietta who, cherishing an unlucky ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... peradventure of a doubt. Concerted action on the part of many, guffawing merrily in chorus, assuredly would hasten the death of the ill-starred victim, if you get what I mean, ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... long term in Spain. Caesar demands as much and is refused by Pompey's friends. Then the storm breaks and Caesar comes back from Gaul to cross the Rubicon, and take all Italy in sixty days. Pompey, ambitious, ill-starred, fights losing battles everywhere. Murdered at last in Egypt, he, too, is dead, and Caesar stands alone, master of Rome and of the world. One year he ruled, and then they slew him; but no one of them that struck him died a ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... storm that raged savagely above them, if they felt not the sand that pressed heavily upon them, what was there to warn, what to arouse them from that ill-starred slumber? ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... through a circle of the more fermentable sinners present, serves the purpose of parliamentary cheering and gets Mr. Chadband's steam up. From mere force of habit, Mr. Chadband in saying "My friends!" has rested his eye on Mr. Snagsby and proceeds to make that ill-starred stationer, already sufficiently confused, the ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... by the hand of death, or smitten by some incurable ailment of mind or body. Erelong, he fondly believed, the recovery would be so far complete that he could consign to the tomb of pleasant memories even the most thrilling episodes of his ill-starred courtship. ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the furniture she brought over from France, some mementoes of her unwise marriage, the little room in which she sat at supper with Rizzio and three or four friends when the assassins rushed in through a secret door, stabbed her ill-starred favorite, and dragged him bleeding through her bed-room into an outer audience chamber, and there left him to die, his life-blood oozing out from fifty-six wounds. The partition still stands which the Queen caused to be erected to shut off ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... immortality who had Tu Fu and Li Po for contemporaries, Ch'ang-an for his capital, and T'ai Chen of a thousand songs to wife? Poet and sportsman, mystic and man of this world, a great polo player, and the passionate lover of one beautiful woman whose ill-starred fate inspired Po Chu-i, the tenderest of all their singers,** Ming Huang is more to literature than to history. Of his life and times the poets are faithful recorders. Tu Fu in 'The Old Man of Shao-Ling' leaves ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... smoking masses, the ruins of palaces, temples, and hospitals, and the seared and mutilated corpses of the dead who have been crushed by the falling walls or burnt in the flames. Then the invading hosts, stricken with dismay, fly from this fated and ill-starred city to darken the snows of Lithuania with their bodies; and of five hundred thousand men—the flower of French chivalry—but forty thousand cross the Beresina to tell the tale! Surely Moscow, like Jerusalem, hath "wept ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... have. It was an ill-starred voyage. It has been ill-starred from the beginning to the end; all ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... toward the wall. While planning for the pantomime the boys had arranged the lid so that it did not close, yet the opening was not perceptible to those seated below. Thus there had been no danger of Anne meeting the fate of the ill-starred Ginevra, the heroine ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... China, meanwhile, had been seething under the surface. An ill-starred reform movement, initiated by the Emperor, had failed, the government was discredited, and the Empress Dowager seized the throne for herself. All China interpreted the event to presage a return to the old order of things—a general anti-foreign movement. ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... notes of hand, absorbed the whole grocery business of the town. But Lincoln was hopelessly inefficient behind the counter, and Berry was a tippler. So in a year's time the store "winked out," leaving as its only important trace those ill-starred scraps of paper by which it had been founded. Berry "moved on" from the inconvenient neighborhood, and soon afterward died, contributing nothing to reduce the indebtedness. Lincoln patiently continued to make payments during several years to come, until he had discharged the whole amount. ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... Peter, Rolla, Ned, Batteau, and Jesse, were hanged together, July 2, 1822. Ten days later Gullah Jack suffered death on the gallows also. Upon an enormous gallows, erected on the lines near Charleston, twenty-two of the black martyrs to freedom were executed on the 22nd day of the same ill-starred month. ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... lose her very best seamstress, so Miss Stuart had her way. The sentimental Frenchwoman's own idea was that Miss Stuart was a young person of rank and position, who owing to some ill-starred love affair had been obliged to run away and hide herself from her friends. However as her hopeless passion in no way interfered with her dressmaking ability, madame kept her suspicions to herself and retained ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... Thou knowest that the fiery sea is quenched That flamed around thy castle. BRUNHILDA. Yet the knight Still lingers who should wield the magic sword And on his war-horse gallop through the flames, When he had won proud Fafner's ill-starred hoard. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... But in this ill-starred cathedral an inept precentor gave out, by way of liturgical canticles, a perfect menagerie of outlandish tunes, which, let loose on Sunday, seemed to scamper like marmosets up the pillars and under ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... cannot say that I was ever practically embarrassed. The embarrassment, the distress, the agony, were all for my unhappy father at home in Muskegon, struggling for life and fortune against untoward chances, returning at night, from a day of ill-starred shifts and ventures, to read and perhaps to weep over that last harsh letter from his only child, to which he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Merrick called in for the last time at her lodgings. He brought in his hand a legal-looking paper, which he had found in searching among Alan's effects, for he had carried them off to his hotel, leaving not even a memento of her ill-starred love to Herminia. "This may interest you," he said dryly. "You will see at once it ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... darkness was gathering intensity. Other sounds rose in the distance, like the hollow muttering of the rising storm: were they the "March! march!"—that terrible order from Paris which had driven that ill-starred man onward day by day, dragging behind him along the roads of his defeat the irony of his imperial escort, until now he was brought face to face with the ruin he had foreseen and come forth to meet? What multitudes of brave men were to lay down their lives for his mistakes; and how complete ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... the dream, its recollection would pass away from her. Not so. Implicitly relying upon her husband's words at the moment, feeling quite ashamed at her own suspicion, Lady Isabel afterward suffered the unhappy fear to regain its influence; the ill-starred revelations of Wilson reasserted their power, overmastering the denial of Mr. Carlyle. Shakspeare calls jealousy yellow and green; I think it may be called black and white for it most assuredly views white as black, and black as white. The most fanciful surmises wear the aspect ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... the poison of the thought acted like a sedative. He grew strangely calm; he almost experienced pleasure and comfort under its influence. Why struggle? Nothing could go right with him. Nothing. He was cursed—cursed with an ill-starred fortune. This sort of thing was his fate. Fate. That was it. Why ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... reminded Mrs Quantock of the Guru, but nothing could have been less like that ill-starred curry-cook than this majestic creature. Eventually she gave a great sigh and ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... and resorted thither in quest of those resources of industry and commerce which Susa lacked. The material benefits due to the presence of the sovereign seem to have reconciled the city to its subject condition; there had been no seditious movement there since the ill-starred rising of Shamasherib, which Xerxes had quelled with ruthless severity. The Greek mercenaries or traders who visited it, though prepared for its huge size by general report, could not repress a feeling of astonishment as they approached it. First of all there was the triple wall of Nebuchadrezzar, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... later ... the mouldering remains were unearthed, and deposited in a building ... on the shore of the lake, near the village of Meyriez.... During three succeeding centuries this depository was several times rebuilt.... But the ill-starred relics were not destined even yet to remain undisturbed. At the close of the last century, when the armies of the French Republic were occupying Switzerland, a regiment consisting mainly of Burgundians, under the notion of effacing an insult to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... shall do as I please with my own servants, and yours too, as you will find, and have found, I should think. Moreover, I am not going to be lectured by you as if I were a child"—Mrs. Lisle flung herself out of the room, to vent her bad humor upon whatever ill-starred ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... in order to arouse the North Germans. He had already gathered a few desperate patriots, and in open hostility was defying constituted authority with the intention of calling his country to arms. The news of Eckmuehl had destroyed his chances of success, and he was soon to end his gallant but ill-starred career in a final stand at Stralsund, whither he had retreated. He was stigmatized by Napoleon as a "sort of robber, who had covered himself with crimes in the last Prussian campaign." In repeated public ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... flattered themselves that this mob, like that of the week before, would, after making an uproar for a day or two, disappear and leave the community in quiet, they were destined to disappointment. The popular exasperation and apprehension which the Squire's ill-starred attempt to regain authority had produced, gave to the elements of anarchy in the village a new cohesive force and impulse, while, thanks to the news of the spread and success of the rebellion elsewhere, the lawless were encouraged by entire confidence of impunity. ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... the colonists; that being considered as sufficient ground, by many of the ablest jurists and theologians of Spain, for selling them as slaves. On the return of the caravels, the Adelantado dispatched three hundred Indian prisoners, and three caciques. These formed the ill-starred cargoes about which Nino had made such absurd vaunting, as though the ships were laden with treasure; and which had caused such mortification, disappointment, and ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... magistrate before whom he might be taken, must let him go at once. I thought, perhaps, if I waited a few hours where I was, he would be sure to rejoin me, and we could then return to Port Jervis without Sarah's son to be sure; but, otherwise, no worse off than we were when we set out on this ill-starred ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... record! Add to it the ill-starred influence he had always attempted to exert over Johnny and Jane (he had, even in Oxford days, brought out their worst side) his quarrels with Oliver in the press, his unconcealed hatred of what he was pleased to call ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... the briny deep career!" This having sworn, and what beside may our returning stay, Straight let us all, this City's doomed inhabitants, away, Or those that rise above the herd, the few of nobler soul; The craven and the hopeless here on their ill-starred beds may loll. Ye who can feel and act like men, this woman's wail give o'er, And fly to regions far away beyond the Etruscan shore! The circling ocean waits us; then away, where nature smiles, To those fair lands, those blissful lands, the rich and happy Isles! Where Ceres ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... the greatest statesmen and wits of the age—who fell victims to the prevailing fascination of the gaming-table. What destroyed Charles James Fox, as a statesman? Gambling! What brought the brilliant Sheridan to the grave? Intoxication, brought on by the ill-starred luck of the ruined gamester? "Holland-house!" immortalized as the resort of genius, as well as for its orgies of dissipation, is not less renowned to infamy, as having been the "hell" of ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... and heartbroken, strove in vain to bring her back to life; she was no more. He broke the fatal weapon into fragments, and flung away the ill-starred diamonds: and while preparations were proceeding for his daughter's funeral instead of her wedding, he had the bleeding but still living Rustem carried into ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... Gentleman, of Estate and Fortune (which of course went the Irish way), who was Scholar, Artist, Newspaper Correspondent, etc. A dozen lines would tell all that is wanted, naming no names. It might be called 'Fragments of Letters by an "Ill-starred" or "Unlucky" Man of Genius,' etc. as S. M. was: 'Unlucky' being still used in Suffolk, with something of Ancient Greek meaning. See if you cannot get this done, will you? For I think many of S. M.'s friends would be glad of it: and the general Public assuredly not the worse. Some of the names ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... "My ill-starred novel—my story of Aberdeen Hall," she laughed. "Don't you remember the night at the Lindsey cabin when I read it aloud, and each one of you girls made such a solemn ceremony of wrapping it up? Gay furnished the box, Lucy the paper, and Kitty tied it with a fresh ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... herself necessary to him, and in part she succeeded. Thorne, lonely and cut adrift, came more and more frequently to his aunt's house and exhibited more and more decidedly his preference for his cousin's society. The thin end of the wedge was in, and but for the move to Virginia, and its ill-starred consequences, the ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... on soft and slippery ground, they and their horses fell in and were drowned. Among them was Sir John of Orleans, a valiant knight, who bore the French banner. But this was a slight misfortune compared with that which the folly and presumption of one man was preparing for that ill-starred host. ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... the last fortnight, since the ill-starred affair of Nogent and the almost incredible discovery he had made that Lady Beltham was still alive, Fandor had not seen Juve. He had been to the Surete a number of ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... slowly into the air, followed by the bewildered Owl, who had not had time to explain the boy's 'new departure' to himself on scientific principles. It was not till they were fully half a mile from the ill-starred spot that the Owl opened his beak to murmur, with an air of long-suffering melancholy ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... Polos with friendly messages for the potentates of Europe, including the King of England. They appear to have sailed from the port of Zayton (as the Westerns called T'swan-chau or Chin-cheu in Fo-kien) in the beginning of 1292. It was an ill-starred voyage, involving long detentions on the coast of Sumatra, and in the South of India, to which, however, we are indebted for some of the best chapters in the book; and two years or upwards passed before they arrived at their destination in Persia.[19] The three hardy ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... tears that now sprang there, the whole man of me, was fashioned of French earth and born of a French mother; I had been tended and caressed by a succession of the daughters of France, the fairest, the most ill-starred; I had fought and conquered shoulder to shoulder with her sons. A soldier, a noble, of the proudest and bravest race in Europe, it had been left to the prattle of a hobbledehoy lackey in an English chaise to recall me ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fling the glaiks in folk's een, wi' their pawky policy, and earthly ingine, their flights and refinements, and periods of eloquence, frae heathen emperors and popish canons. They canna, in that daft trash ye were reading to me, sae muckle as ca' men that are sae ill-starred as to be amang their hands, by ony name o' the dispensation o' grace, but maun new baptize them by the names of the accursed Titus, wha was made the instrument of burning the holy Temple, ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... questioned; for, while it was on foot, and before it was known, frequent hints were given in public journals, moved by Executive impulse, that at the coming session the annexation of Texas was to be introduced by a citizen of the highest distinction. "But the Texan expedition was ill-starred. Instead of taking and rioting upon the beauty and booty of Santa Fe, they were all captured themselves, without even the glory of putting a price on their lives. They surrendered without firing a gun." The failure of this expedition discomfited the war faction in Congress, and injured for ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... the female heart. Yes, you will spend the springtime of your life chasing a painted specter, and go down to a premature grave, disappointed and miserable. Poor child, it needs no prophetic vision to predict your ill-starred career! Already the consuming fever has begun its march. In far-distant lands, I shall have no tidings of you; but none will be needed. Perhaps when I travel home to die your feverish dream will have ended; or, perchance, sinking to eternal rest in some palm grove of the far East, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... the forlorn condition of a man who is very clever, who never makes a bad joke, who is such "good company," such a "jolly dog," such a "happy creature" and "fortunate fellow"! Oh the calamity of possessing a romantic country-seat and fine horses!—the ill-starred luck of a person who is always finding a moon that shines beautifully, a sun that is never too hot, long walks that cannot be too long, and drives ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... Torquato, heaven to us The rich gift of thy genius gave, to thee Nought else but misery. Ill-starred Torquato, whom thy song, So sweet, could not console, Nor melt the ice, to which The genial current of thy soul Was turned, by private envy, princely hate; And then, by Love abandoned, life's last dream! ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... branches. The moaning breeze seemed the wild chant of the Indian priest in honor of the war-god of Anahuac. It told of battles to come and conflicts which would level to the dust the descendants of the conquerors of that ill-starred country. And so the soldier finally fell asleep, with that requiem ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... Apostles of the Slavs, found it necessary to renounce the allegiance of the Greek Church, and to place their converts under the protection of Rome (866). It was from Rome that St. Adalbert went forth on his ill-starred but glorious mission to the Prussians (997); and it was a Pope, Sylvester II, who earned the glory of uniting the Hungarian people to Western Christendom (1000). Finally, Canute the Great, of Denmark and of England, came in the ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... 112, "whose bright eyes Rain influence"; Par. Lost, iv. 669, "with kindly heat Of various influence." Astrology has left many traces upon the English language, e.g. influence, disastrous, ill-starred, ascendant, etc. See ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... ashamed of my first unjust suspicions that Henrietta might not be strictly truthful, and I inquired with sincere interest as to the fate of her ill-starred family. ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... fallen far too much into the hands of the Imperial University, whose literary style is a combination of the humor of the cider-cellars with the verbal fluency of Billingsgate. Under such auspices the ill-starred periodicals naturally oscillate between insipid propriety and labored coarseness. For a month or two the talented contributors go smoothly on in their career of untranslatable pleasantry, till some special atrocity calls forth the fatherly admonition of the police. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... grieve over the loss of his letter-of-credit, left on board the ill-starred Fleuron, for he was exchanged, after a few weeks, and was sent back to England with his crew. This was in 1745. He lost no time in reporting to the owners of the Mars, and so well did they think of him, ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... return to 'share the kingdom' with his friend. From that point the first portion of the play easily unfolds: it deals with the strife, the brief triumphs and the bitter defeats which fill the eventful period of this ill-starred friendship. The actual crisis falls within the third act: it is marked by the murder of Gaveston and the resolution of the king at last to offer armed resistance to the tyranny of the barons. The oath by which he seals his decision ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... anguish. Faithless had she him forsaken, she sometime his best-beloved, Left him, though already parted by strange fate, from realm and heirship. Oh, that destiny he girds not—strength it gave him, hero-courage, Added to his lofty spirit, touches of nobler feeling— 'Tis that she, ill-starred one, leaves him! takes the hand so wrinkled Of that old man, Seville's conqueror! Into the night, along the river, Abensaid now forth rushes: Loudly to the rocky limits, Echo bears his lamentations. "Faithless maid, more faithless art thou ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... once more entered the French service; was sent with a party who vainly attempted to relieve Chandarnagar, and was one of the small party who followed Law when that officer took command of those, who refused to share in the surrender of the place to the British. After the capture of his ill-starred chief, Reinhardt (whom we shall in future designate by his Indian sobriquet of " Sumroo," or Sombre) took service under Gregory, or Gurjin Khan, Mir Kasim's ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... last when my ill-starred life has to reveal its destitution in a long-drawn series of exposures. This penury, all unexpected, has taken its seat in the heart where plenitude seemed to reign. The fees which I paid to delusion for just nine years of my ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... Marcus Mallius and Caepio the Consul were slain and their whole army annihilated in Gallia Narbonensis by the Cimbrians. It was considered a very unlucky day in Spain and Italy; it is still deemed an ill-starred day among the Buddhists and Brahmins. The reason given by Christians for its ill-luck is, of course, because it was the day of Christ's crucifixion, though one would hardly term that an "unlucky event" for Christians. A Friday moon is considered unlucky ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... gallant flag-sergeant, Carney, though grievously wounded, bore back his flag to safety, and fell fainting and exhausted with loss of blood, saying, "Boys, the old flag never touched the ground!" Or another glance, at ill-starred Olustee, where the gallant 8th United States Colored Troops lost 87 killed of its effective fighting force, the largest loss in any one colored regiment in any one action of the war. And so on, by Fort Pillow, which let us pass in merciful silence, and to ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... their enterprise met with success. They saw Trefusis and his chum cautiously descend by means of the ivy; then, directly the lads set out upon their ill-starred tracking expedition, the Germans, as before related, succeeded in outflanking them and effecting ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... forward restlessly. I did not need my sight to pace the poop of my ill-starred first command with perfect assurance. Every square foot of her decks was impressed indelibly on my brain, to the very grain and knots of the planks. Yet, all of a sudden, I fell clean over something, landing full length on ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... a small round shield fashioned of the same tough material. The sword instantly attracted our attention; it was practically identical with the one in the possession of Mr Mackenzie which he had obtained from the ill-starred wanderer. There was no mistaking the gold-lined fretwork cut in the thickness of the blade. So the man had told the truth after all. Our guide instantly gave a password, which the soldier acknowledged by letting the iron shaft of his spear fall with a ringing sound upon the ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... seem to have missed fire through sheer bad luck. To go no further than Sir Arthur Sullivan, some of his finest and most important works have had an ill-starred existence, and even several of his best songs, though introduced to the public under the most favourable auspices, have not "taken on." Sullivan's splendid ditty "Love laid his sleepless head," though sung by Mr. Edward Lloyd all over the country, did not ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... Although Saint Wilfrid eventually found a home in Sussex and worked hard among its people, his first attempt to bring Christianity to the county was, according to his friend Edda's Vita Wilfridi, ill-starred. I ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... he was thinking more of her heart-affair than his own, when she finally left him. Kenneth was heartily interested in the ill-starred romance. He bade her good-night ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... own to settle, and a snub to administer. He turned to the senior Senator who sat at the far left of the stage and thanked him for his welcome to the State; then he turned to Mayor Emmet and thanked him for his welcome to the city. There was not one word of reply to the ill-starred Cobbens, not one syllable in appreciation of the efforts of the committee. He had taken his manuscript from his pocket and laid it on the table before the full meaning of this omission dawned upon the audience, and then they broke loose with an animus which made their previous demonstrations ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... delicate and attentive respect that distinguished her bearing, for the unhappiness he felt beside her; already had both, in fine, begun to console each other with the reflection that the child which Hortense now bore beneath her heart would, one day, be to them a compensation for their ill-starred marriage ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... from Mexico, I met him in New Orleans, in company with that ill-starred man, General Shields, of Illinois, and who, Irishman as he was, fell fighting to fasten upon the South the fetters she now wears. We had not conversed ten minutes before, taking my arm, he walked apart from his visitors and ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... man, and after his arrival in Victoria, in 1852, he led for a time a bush life on the Edwards River. He was later employed as a surveyor in Melbourne, and then became assistant to Professor Neumayer at the Melbourne Observatory, a post he quitted in order to act as assistant-surveyor on the ill-starred journey. ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... searching. He had not felt his age since he had bought his nephew Soames' ill-starred house and settled into it here at Robin Hill over three years ago. It was as if he had been getting younger every spring, living in the country with his son and his grandchildren—June, and the little ones of the second marriage, Jolly and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... speak that which I soberly believe. Just as some ill-starred human creatures are born physically or mentally defective—deformed or idiots—so may they be born spiritually defective. Why not? My reason offers no scientific or moral objection to such a belief. In other respects she is conspicuously ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... here that there came into my head the ill-starred thought of leading them off the road and through the fields close alongside of it on our left hand. The road itself I knew pretty well, and that it bore gradually to the left, all the way to Alton. Carey, whom I consulted, ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... of the ill-starred colony and the conjectural refuge of its remnants among the Croatan Indians of Virginia—as Raleigh named the whole region, including the present North Carolina—fittingly completes the history of Sir Walter's American enterprise. The failure of the colony has been freely charged to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... leave ye the sweet fountain of Hyetis and Byblis, and ye that dwell in the steep home of golden Dione, ye Loves as rosy as red apples, strike me with your arrows, the desired, the beloved; strike, for that ill-starred one pities not my friend, my host! And yet assuredly the pear is over-ripe, and the maidens cry 'alas, alas, ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... Narrower and narrower, till at length ye force him— 55 Yes, ye,—ye force him, in his desperation, To set fire to his prison. Father! Father! That never can end well—it cannot—will not! And let it be decided as it may, I see with boding heart the near approach 60 Of an ill-starred unblest catastrophe. For this great Monarch-spirit, if he fall, Will drag a world into the ruin with him. And as a ship (that midway on the ocean Takes fire) at once, and with a thunder-burst 65 Explodes, and with itself shoots out its crew In smoke ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... we encamped on this ill-starred spot; while the deserters, whose case admitted of no delay rode rapidly forward. On the day following, striking the St. Joseph's trail, we turned our horses' heads toward Fort Laramie, then about seven hundred ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... combat, cunningly fashioned and embroidered, and shining with precious stones. Her pride greatly angered the knights, and Dankwart and Hagen were downcast, for they feared for their lord, and thought, "Ill-starred ...
— The Fall of the Niebelungs • Unknown
... made, a mass of protested bills and writs. The Levantine, gone off to some spa accompanied by her masseur and her negress, was totally indifferent to the ruin of the establishment; Bompain—the man in the fez—in frightened bewilderment amid the demands for money, not knowing how to approach his ill-starred master, who persistently kept his bed and turned his face to the wall as soon as business matters were mentioned. His old mother alone remained behind to face the disaster, with the knowledge born of her narrow and straitened experience as a village woman, who knows what a stamped ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... of her ill-starred marriage, Sans Souci had waned like a waning moon; and the bridegroom saw, with dismay, his fairy bride slowly fading, passing, vanishing from his sight. There was no very marked disorder, no visible or ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... hours after the events narrated in the preceding chapters that Mr. Sherlock Holmes assumed command of the Gehenna, which was nothing more nor less than the shadow of the ill-starred ocean steamship City of Chicago, which tried some years ago to reach Liverpool by taking the overland route through Ireland, fortunately without detriment to her passengers or crew, who had the pleasure of the experience ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... descended on the ill-starred young gentleman with a crushing supposition that at all events it was no business of his. This disposed of Mr. Sampson in a melancholy retirement of spirit, until the cherub arrived, whose amazement at the lovely woman's ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... though for him The fortunes of the spot must hold in store The fates of former chiefs: and on the place Of happy augury placed his tents ill-starred, Took from the hills their omens; and with force Unequal, challenged his ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... recovered the Manor of Merdon, with his liberty, on Queen Mary's accession. Then it was that Philip of Spain rode through one of these villages, probably Otterbourne, soaked through with rain, on his way to his ill-starred ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... descendant of the superstitious old Norsemen, was full of old Norse conceits, and all manner of Valhalla marvels concerning the land of goblins and goblets. No wonder then, that with this catastrophe in prospect, he again entreated me to quit the ill-starred craft, carrying off nothing from her ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... on leave. His time was short, but he managed to pay a flying visit to Gravesend. He also could not resist the temptation of attending the funeral of the Emperor Napoleon in January 1873, and he expressed his opinion of that ill-starred ruler in his usual terse manner—"a kind-hearted, unprincipled man." His youngest brother, to whom he was much attached, and who had shared in the Woolwich frolics, died about this time, and his mother was seized with paralysis, and no longer recognised ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... walked doubtfully on the flagstones which I had many a time helped to wear smooth; I seemed to be wandering in some lonely unknown garden across the seas—in that old garden in Verona where Shakespeare's ill-starred lovers met and parted. The white granite facade over yonder—the Somerset Club—might well have been the house of Capulet: there was the clambering vine reaching up like a pliant silken ladder; there, near by, was the low-hung balcony, wanting only the slight girlish figure—immortal ...
— A Midnight Fantasy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... officers made their way to the Governor, praised his bravery, pointed out the uselessness of further resistance, and offered to allow the garrison to march out with the honours of war and rejoin the Emperor, where they could fight to more advantage. The Governor, who bore the ill-starred name of Moreau, finally gave way, and his troops, nearly all Poles, marched out at 4 p.m., furious at his "treason"; for the distant thunder of Marmont's cannon was already heard on the side of Oulchy. Rumour said that they were the Emperor's cannon, but rumour ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Secession movement had been developed to the extent just detailed, Congress was in session. It assembled one month after the Presidential election, and fifteen days before the Disunionists of South Carolina met in their ill-starred convention. Up to that time there had been excitement, threats of resistance to the authority of the government in many sections of the South, and an earnest attempt in the Cotton States to promote co-operation in the fatal step which so many were bent on taking. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... which gave the key of the mystery, and the description of those ingredients which often haunted his dreams? One thing was certain, that the savour which rose from the venison before him was the same which haunted his memory as the parting effort of the ill-starred Narcisse. ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters |
