"Incubus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... punish a boy with a fair degree of severity (may the Lord forgive me), and now. I know that in so doing I was guilty of a grave error. What I interpreted as misconduct was but a straining at his leash in an effort to extricate himself from the incubus of the negative self-feeling. He was, and probably is, a dull fellow and realized that he could not cope with the other boys in the school studies, and so was but trying to win some notice in other ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... introduced the modern era of mechanical power brought under man's control, so Jenner thought about and experimented with cowpox until he had satisfied himself that he had discovered something which would rid the human race forever of the incubus of an intolerable pestilence. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... the central point to be the necessity of thrusting Austria out of the confederation. It is proved now that he was sagacious enough also to perceive that such a wrench would not lead to a permanent estrangement, but that Austria, removed once and for all from her incubus-like and dog-in-the-manger position within the federate body, would become, in her own interest and that of European peace, New ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... their baggage trains and packed their portmanteaus. My intention in going to St. Meuse was to witness this evacuation scene, and to be a spectator of the return of light-heartedness to the French population of the place, on the withdrawal of the Teuton incubus which for three years had lain upon the safety-valve of their constitutional sprightliness. I had been a little out of my reckoning of time, and when I reached St. Meuse I found that I had a week to stay there before the event should occur which I had come to witness; but ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... fear, and gave themselves up for lost. At length an old woman, who was a passenger by the vessel, came on deck and entreated them to throw her overboard as the only means of preserving their own lives, saying that she had long been haunted by an 'incubus' in the shape of a man, from whose grasp she could not free herself. Fortunately for all parties there was another passenger on board—a priest—who was called to the rescue. After a long admonition, and many sighs and prayers, 'there ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... intelligent or as they induce a person to dispense with exercise of his own judgment. If what was said earlier (See p. 159) about originality of thought seemed overstrained, demanding more of education than the capacities of average human nature permit, the difficulty is that we lie under the incubus of a superstition. We have set up the notion of mind at large, of intellectual method that is the same for all. Then we regard individuals as differing in the quantity of mind with which they are charged. Ordinary persons are then expected to be ordinary. Only the exceptional ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... deliverance!—Yet, what a price had he paid for it! True, but was not the money already sacrificed? Would it have been restored, had the luckless speculator himself remained? Never! Well, fearful then as was the sum, let it go, taking the incubus along with it. Allcraft took care to obtain the consent of Bellamy to his arrangement. He wrote to him, explaining the reasons for parting with their partner; and an answer came from the landed proprietor, acquiescing in the plan, but slightly doubting the propriety of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... although there is a clog in the way of the lone star State of Texas, in the person of her Governor, ... if he does not yield to public sentiment, some Texan Brutus will arise to rid his country of the hoary-headed incubus that stands between the people and their sovereign will. We intend, Mr. President, to go out peaceably if we ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... undermined the empire. Slavery proved at Rome a monstrous curse, destroying all manliness of character, creating contempt of honest labor, making men timorous yet cruel, idle, frivolous, weak, dependent, powerless. The empire might have lasted centuries longer but for this incubus, the standing disgrace of the Pagan world. Paganism never recognized what is most noble and glorious in man; never recognized his equality, his common brotherhood, his natural rights. It had no compunction, no remorse in depriving human beings of their highest privileges; its ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... story is about half as long, and is a well-written and extremely plausible story about a house owned by an old gentleman of ancient lineage, where there is a collection of gold plate which was said to be an "incubus", that is, the subject of a curse. As indeed ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... Government, at first organized for conquest and subjugation, had to change its character until it became more and more to consist of experiments in a new social machinery that would free somebody of the incubus. So through the centuries, one technique of liberty after another was tested in the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... by mere dread of new things, while to the same youth and to his friends it has simply never occurred, often enough, to think of Chesterton as a critic. It cannot be too strongly urged that an undue admiration of the distant past has sat like an incubus upon the chest of European literature, and Shakespeare's greatness is not in spite of his "small Latin and less Greek," which probably contributed to it indirectly. Had Shakespeare been a classical scholar, he would almost certainly have modelled his plays on Seneca or Aeschylus, and the results ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... chastely-rallying forefinger. 'O you gentlemen, you gentlemen! Fie for shame, that you are so hard upon us poor maligned disciplinarians of our sex, for your sakes! But as Miss Ferdinand is at present weighed down by an incubus'—Miss Twinkleton might have said a pen-and-ink-ubus of writing out Monsieur La Fontaine— 'go to her, Rosa my dear, and tell her the penalty is remitted, in deference to the intercession of your ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... military operations, in the same degree those which are unfortunately placed are disadvantageous. They are an incubus upon the army which is compelled to garrison them and the state whose men and money are wasted upon them. There are many in Europe in this category. It is bad policy to cover a frontier with fortresses very close together. This system has been wrongly imputed to Vauban, who, on ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... installed at the Hotel de Ville. The government supporters rallied the National Guard. The leaders at the Hotel de Ville were taken captive. The Palais Bourbon was cleared, and the Deputies were reconvened in their assembly hall. Encouraged by this success, the government resolved to rid itself of the incubus of the national workshops, after a variety of schemes with this purpose in view had been brought forward in the Assembly. The government cut the Gordian knot by a violent stroke. On June 21, an edict was issued that all beneficiaries of the public workshops between ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... "straight ahead," "to the right," and "to the left." The words mano and silla mean really "hand" and "saddle"; I have been told that they are linguistic survivals of the days when women, rode on pillions and the fair incubus indicated that she wished to turn either to the side of her right hand or to the ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... of men, I supplicate and entreat you to observe one point for me. Remember that the Goodeniaceae have weighed like an incubus for years on my soul. It relates to Scaevola microcarpa. I find that in bud the indusium collects all the pollen splendidly, but, differently from Leschenaultia, cannot be afterwards easily opened. Further, I find that at an early stage, when the flower first opens, a ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... of anarchy and rebellion, we should hardly be prepared for such a complete repudiation of those principles as is conveyed in the line before us, did we not know that the same anxiety to get rid of the "Bare-bones" incubus universally prevailed. The numerals, it will be seen, make up the number 1661, which was the year of the coronation of King Charles II.; and, no doubt, also the year in which the dial in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... women have thought, that there must be something wrong in a system that made her husband spend all his strength laboring to make money so much of which was paid, in one form or another, to this black incubus. She thought, as so many other women have thought, that there must be something wrong with a system of life that meant that, with rare exceptions, such help was all that could be coaxed into doing housework; but Lydia, unlike the other women she knew, did not—could not—stop at the realization ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... glaring. The Austrian race have no faculties that can ever enable them to understand the Italian character; their policy, so well contrived to palsy and repress for a time, cannot kill, and there is always a force at work underneath which shall yet, and I think now before long, shake off the incubus. The Italian nobility have always kept the invader at a distance; they have not been at all seduced or corrupted by the lures of pleasure or power, but have shown a passive patriotism highly honorable to them. In the middle class ferments much thought, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... contrived to impress upon Lady Isabel the unfortunate blow to his own interests that Mr. Carlyle's marriage had been, the ruinous expense she had entailed upon the family. It struck a complete chill to Isabel's heart, and she became painfully impressed with the incubus she must be to Mr. Carlyle—so far as his pocket was concerned. Lord Mount Severn, with his little son, had paid them a short visit at Christmas and Isabel had asked him, apparently with unconcern, whether ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... palatable to the King and the object of all Downing's scheming, was that "it was to new-model the whole Government of the country, in which the King resolved to have no more superior officers." The power of these superior officers was an incubus of which ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... mother had had time to get the tea, it would have been different; but the fire had been out when he went in. "He wouldn't have downed me so easy if I had had anything in me," he muttered, and his anger grew as he thought of all he had been made to suffer. For he was still the swaggerer. Now that the incubus of his father's tyranny no longer pressed on him directly, a great hate rose within him for the tyrant. He would go back and have it out when he was primed. "It's the only hame I have," he sobbed angrily to the darkness; "I have no other place to gang till! Yes, I'll go back and have ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... the shrill neighing of ponies, and shriller chatter of coolies, bargaining for payment in advance; repudiating loads a few ounces overweight, and tragically prophesying death on the road if the illegal incubus were not removed. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... became as rich as the GURNEYS - An incubus then I thought her, So I threw over that rich attorney's Elderly, ugly daughter. The rich attorney my character high Tried vainly to disparage - And now, if you please, I'm ready to try This Breach of Promise ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... good time. That had been his intention, at least till he saw Lord George at the deanery. But now there were serious thoughts in his mind. When he arrived Mary had for the time got nearly rid of the incubus of the Italian Marchioness with her baby. She was all smiles as she kissed him. But he could not keep himself from the ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... if not held by the throat, as General Grant announced, Richmond and all the South in that autumn of 1864, was staggering, suffocating, reeling to and fro under the immense incubus of ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... that as soon as the accursed Germans had turned their backs, their day would come, and the true principles of the Republic, the principles of '79, would then be triumphant, and France would be free of the incubus of the selfish capitalists who ground down the people. I could see that Dampierre thoroughly sympathized with the fellow, and I believe that if there is trouble he is capable of putting on a red cap and marching with the ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... or so, and then set himself to the table to read and write. He took all his sermons and all the theological works he had begun to compose during the time he had been a clergyman and put them in the fire; as he saw them consume he felt as though he had got rid of another incubus. Then he took up some of the little pieces he had begun to write during the latter part of his undergraduate life at Cambridge, and began to cut them about and re-write them. As he worked quietly at these ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... beginning to apply Adam Smith's principles to finance. The cry for parliamentary reform died out: neither Whigs nor Tories really cared for it; and the 'glorious spirit of improvement' showed itself in an energy which had little political application. The nobility was not an incubus suppressing individual energy and confronted by the state, but was itself the state; and its individual members were often leaders in industrial improvement. Discontent, therefore, took in the main a different form. Some government was, of course, necessary, and the existing system was ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... interest is with the great human system, in one of whose veins I am a circulating drop. It is my business to help to keep the system sound, to do my duty without fear or favour. If disease—say a fouled conscience—contaminates me, it is for me to throw off the incubus, not accept it, and transmit the poison. Whatever my lapses of nature, I owe it to the entire system to work for purity in my allotted sphere, and not to allow any microbe bugbear to ride me roughshod, to the detriment ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... opposed to the O'Brien movement; but the Young Irelanders, and most of the Old Irelanders, were exasperated, and in their speeches and newspapers denounced Lamartine as the enemy of liberty, the sycophant of England, and the incubus of the French provisional government. It was said that he had married an English lady, and was more English at heart than French—that he would betray the republic to England or to monarchy. Those persons ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... deliverance; and with the gratitude and the awe came repentance; and repentance brought a resolution to fly, since I could not wrestle with my mighty and dread temptation: the moment that resolution was formed, it was as if an incubus were taken from my breast. Even the next morning I did not return home: my anxiety for you was such that I forgot all caution; I went to your house myself; I saw one of your servants to whom I was personally unknown. I inquired respecting you, and learned that your ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... has come to our ears, not without immense trouble and grief to ourselves, that in some parts of Higher Germany ... very many persons of both sexes, deviating from the Catholic faith, abuse themselves with the demons, Incubus and Succubus; and by incantations, charms, conjurations, and other wicked superstitions, by criminal acts and offences have caused the offspring of women and of the lower animals, the fruits of the earth, the grape, and the products ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... sailed the seas beyond Norva's Sound and Serkland,[19] and as pilgrims, traders, travellers, and conquerors in the Mediterranean, their work was of course not one of exploration. They bore a foremost share in breaking down the Moslem incubus on southern Europe; they ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... his own country, where a price was set on his head; ever labouring to infuse fresh valour into his beaten, disheartened followers. That the governing party had any right to be in power, or possessed any virtue of any kind, or were, in fact, anything but an incubus and a curse to the Banda Oriental, she would not for one moment admit. To her mind her country always appeared like Andromeda bound on her rock and left weeping and desolate to be a prey to the abhorred Colorado monster; while ever to the deliverance of this lovely being came her glorious ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... birth and blood, had compensation for his inferiority in cash and comforts. When the poor man thought of these things—and he did little else now but think of them—bitterly, though generally in silence, he cursed him whom he looked upon as his oppressor and incubus. It never occurred to him that if Mr. Flannelly built the house he lived in, he should be paid for it. He never reflected that he had lived to the extent of, and above his precarious income, as if his house had been paid ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... nevertheless, his heart did sink somewhat within him, for there had been a hope that a small windfall, coming now so opportunely, might enable him to rid himself at once of that dreadful Sowerby incubus. And then the will went on to declare that Mary, and Gerald, and Blanche, had also, by God's providence, been placed beyond want. And here, looking into the squire's face, one might have thought that his heart fell a little also; for he had not so full a command of his feelings as his brother-in-law, ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... old forms of government caused by the French Revolution, came the dislocation of the old conventional modes of thought. Classicism in literature was dead, having weighed like an incubus upon the fancy and fresh life of many generations. England and Germany were at the head of the new movement, which was at a later period to be joined to France. The influence was to extend to Russia, and may be said to date from the reign of Alexander I. It was headed by Zhukovski, ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... some of the clumsier characters of the self-made man, combined with an inordinate, almost a besotted, pride of intellect and birth. Heavy, bilious, selfish, inornate, he sits upon this court and country like an incubus. ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... just looked at him as he slept! She looked—and loathed herself, that she—so clean, so graceful, so sweet in spite of all her sin—should be allied with a dead man. The evenings passed for her on fettered hours; but for the window she had died from her incubus, or at least stood up and shrieked and ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... displaying the manners, bent, and inclination of his characters, is pointed out to the reader's admiration. The copiousness of his invention, and his judgment in sustaining the ideas which he started, are illustrated by referring to Caliban, a creature of the fancy, begot by an incubus upon a witch, and furnished with a person, language, and character befitting his pedigree on both sides. The passions are then considered as included in the manners; and Dryden, at once and peremptorily, condemns both the extravagance ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... not ascribed to any natural process such as we now recognise in the "parthenogenesis" of insects and crustaceans, but to the visitation of the mother by a spirit—a floating, volatile demon or angel (known as an "incubus" in the Middle Ages) beneficent or malicious as the case might be. Stories of the nocturnal visits of these mysterious ghostly "incubi" are on record in great number and variety, both in European and Oriental tradition and legend. There seems ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... in that peculiarly distressing state of mind in which one oppressing idea displaces or colours every other, absorbing, intermingling with, empoisoning, and, like the filth of the harpy, turning every thing into disgust—when a certain incubus rides upon the brain, as the Old Man of the Mountain did upon the shoulders of Sinbad, burdening, irritating, and rendering existence a misery—when, looking around, you see but one object perched everywhere and grinning ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... was there ever such stuff concocted before? I almost hear the bray of that donkey, who originated in a flower. And pray, most sapient self! what is nature? It seems now, to me, a form, a mere dead incubus of matter. And could this inert tangible matter, sublimate in its hard, dead bosom, an essence so subtle, as to be freer of the bonds of time and space? At such a preposterous suggestion even a donkey might bow his ears with shame. So I will hand this "progressive ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... England town, Douglass began the life of a freeman, from which, relieved now of the incubus of slavery, he soon emerged into the career for which, in the providence of God, he seemed by his multiform experience to have been especially fitted. He did not find himself, even in Massachusetts, quite beyond the influence of slavery. While before ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... in the supplies of which the army was so sorely in need. The attack upon Fort Fisher was probably precipitated by these expeditions, which could in no wise affect the real issues of the war. But Mr. Mallory was from first to last an incubus upon the country. I do not impugn his patriotism, nor his private character, but his official imbecility, which wrought much damage to the cause, is a legitimate ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... terrible dream, rescue and safety depended upon my getting to the end of the text. I tried again and again, always to be driven back in despair before the crucial words were uttered. At last, with a desperate effort, I seemed to shake off the incubus which was weighing me down, and I finished the words triumphantly, and so loud that I had positively wakened myself up by shouting them out. With returning memory I knew this had happened, and hearing a door open and shut on the half landing below my room, I thought ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... America was not yet aeons distant from this Japanese institution, the male incubus of the girl child. She did not speak, for she was thinking of what she had said in the studio—of the edginess of her temper. "Spinsters may scold, but not spiritual mothers," she thought. She might have been very happy, but for a mental anchor fast to that ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... birth of a son, as the bringer of prosperity, and grief, hardly concealed, at the adversity of a daughter's advent. Unchristian? Yes; but not for the lack of the milk of human kindness; rather from the incubus of an evil social ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... of drowsiness engulfed her she did not know. She hardly realised she had been asleep when gradually she became aware of something heavy lying across her body, pressing down upon her with an inert weight. The unpleasant consciousness grew, she wanted to rid herself of the incubus, but she felt curiously drugged, impotent. The weight increased; at the same time it seemed to have life of a certain sort, slow-moving and lethargic; it crept upward slowly, always pressing heavily ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... contemplate. Mrs. Clarkson had now all that any woman could reasonably be expected to desire. She had triumphed over her sister-in-law and those of her husband's relatives who had circulated rumors detrimental to her character, and had become the possessor of a comfortable home, without the incubus of an impotent husband. But she was not content; Randolph Thomson, turning his back on her and his boy, had married a young lady of fortune; so vowing vengeance against men in general for their falseness and inconstancy. ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... days subsequent to the rebuke which his housekeeper had given him. But no one laid a hand upon the book. He almost believed that, were the paper left open on the table, no eye would examine its contents. There it lay still hidden within the folds of the sermon, that weight upon his heart, that incubus on his bosom, that nightmare which robbed him of all his slumbers, and he could not rid himself of its presence. Property, indeed! Oh! if he were only back in London, and his cousin reigning ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... system. Slavery was introduced into the American colonies, against the wishes of the settlers, by the avarice of British traders and with the connivance of the British government. Just previous to the Revolution, the Colony of Massachusetts made several attempts to relieve itself of the incubus, and the acts of the General Court were smothered or vetoed by three successive Governors, under the plea that they had such instructions from England. In 1772, the Assembly of Virginia petitioned the throne of England to ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... treasure —the best blood of England. Half a million of men, I believe, perished in that great undertaking. Nor are the evil consequences of that war adequately described by what I have said. All the disorders and disturbances of Europe, those immense armaments that are an incubus on national industry and the great obstacle to progressive civilization, may be traced and justly attributed to the Crimean War. And yet the Crimean War need ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... did not want to go; my will was all the other way about. I had so newly thrown off the incubus of responsibility: I was still so fresh a renegade from duty that the daylight clearness of what I OUGHT to do had no power at all to touch my will. My will was to live, to gather pleasures and make my ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... seems, therefore, probable that further experiments upset the conclusion drawn in 1856. This would account for the satisfaction expressed in the following year at the discovery of another method, on which Darwin wrote to Sir J.D. Hooker: "The distribution of fresh-water molluscs has been a horrid incubus to me, but I think I know my way now. When first hatched they are very active, and I have had thirty or forty crawl on a dead duck's foot; and they cannot be jerked off, and will live fifteen or even twenty-four hours out of water" ("Life and Letters," II., page 93). The ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... whether the demon who copulates with the mother or the man whose semen has been taken is the father of the child. To which Saint Thomas answers, with more or less subtle arguments, that the real father is not the incubus but the man." ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... conflict arises in such a consciousness, and the decision has to be instantaneous, irresolution is the portion of one whose weakness has placed him in subjection to another stronger will, and then we behold a subjection which has almost imperceptibly become an incubus: the victim has taken the first step towards an abyss where the feeble in will run the risk of perdition. Thus the more the young are placed in subjection, without power to exercise their own wills, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... prospect of work as a day laborer greatly cheered the young man. Instead of depressing his spirits, it for the first time lifted from his soul that incubus of melancholy with which every Confederate soldier of his class was at first oppressed. Ever since Grant had refused in the Wilderness—a year before—to retire beyond the river after receiving Lee's tremendous blows, Guilford Duncan and all Confederates of like intelligence had foreseen ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... statute dealt so roughly. With what result? It is but the ancestor of a long line of laws which load our statute-books, and have built up our poor-law system, merely substituting for one evil another which burdens the country like an incubus, and, vulture-like, is ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... I shall follow this up with a portrait of the least acceptable type of Conservative candidate, wherein all will recognise our Parliamentary incubus. Thus do we open the great campaign! If you would care to, pray keep that proof; some day it may amuse you to look at it, and to recall these early days of our acquaintance. Now I will take you to my house, which, I need not say, you honour ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... town lecture was another financial failure, and in the hall I paid and dismissed that highly respectable incubus—my agent. ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... it? The whole thing was so obvious. "You ought not to think about yourself. You ought to think only of him and of his work. Nothing else matters." If she could say that to Joan, what might she not have said to her mother who, so clearly, she divined to be the incubus—the drag upon her father's career? She could hear the child's dry, passionate tones—could see Mrs. Phillips's flabby cheeks grow white—the frightened, staring eyes. Where her father was concerned the child had neither ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... should speak so gravely as that industry, whatever it may be, which is the occupation or delight of his life; which is his tool to earn or serve with; and which, if it be unworthy, stamps himself as a mere incubus of dumb and greedy bowels on the shoulders of labouring humanity. On that subject alone even to force the note might lean to virtue's side. It is to be hoped that a numerous and enterprising generation ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his wife, rising and standing before him, a rather terrifying figure; "be at least truthful. You would not have given up the estate even though it was burdened with an incubus like me." ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... carrying so much of the soil of Northern France. It looked as if I had gout in both feet—the over- bandaged, stage type of gout—which were encased in large mud poultices. I tried to stamp off the incubus, but it would not go. I tried scraping one foot on the other, and what I scraped off seemed to reattach itself as fast as I could ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... own part, I never despaired of Ireland; I do not, I will not, I cannot, despair of my beloved country. She has, in my view, obtained freedom of conscience for others, as well as for herself. She has shaken off the incubus of tithes while silly legislation was dealing out its folly and its falsehoods. She can, and she will, obtain for herself justice and constitutional freedom; and although she may sigh at British neglect ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... incubus, came around and was soppy to mother as usual yesterday—the same old business—I might be studying in Paris, now, instead of teaching drawing to stupid little girls, if I hadn't 'formed' what she will call 'that unfortunate attachment.' Not that I minded, really, though ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... having so successfully rid himself of such an incubus, he made his valet-de-chambre slip over to Margari to tell the worthy man to wait upon him on the morrow at 11 o'clock precisely, as he had a very pleasant piece of news to impart to him; for he meant to make Margari believe that it was through his, Mr. John Lapussa's special ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... the drawing-room, to distribute amongst them books of engravings, or odd things purchased from the Jew-basket. She was obliged to be a purchaser, though she was but a slack contributor; and if she had possessed plenty of money, she would rather, when it was brought to the rectory—an awful incubus!—have purchased the whole stock ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... the day with which our history begins—this eventful Hogmanay. As the evening approached, every one trembled; but the inspiration of incipient drams had had the effect of so far throwing off the incubus as to enable some of the inhabitants, and, in particular, those we have mentioned, to go about the forms of the festival with decent freedom; while the guysers and "reekers," after the manner of buoyant youth, had been flirting with their terrors, and singing and blowing to "keep ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... of unthinking foolishness or rash presumption, you find yourself weighed down with the incubus of a vow not made for your shoulders, the only way out is to make a clean breast of the matter to your ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... men and women, to lay to heart the duty of Christ's followers in reference to the influence and leavening of public opinion upon this matter, and to see to it that, in so far as we can help, we set ourselves steadfastly against that devilish spirit which still oppresses with an incubus almost intolerable, the nations of so-called Christendom. Lift up your voices be not afraid, but cry, 'We are the followers of the Prince of Peace, and we war against the war that is blasphemy ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... brethren, Burmah, and the Karens. Some of the ruder mythologies have been so utterly extirpated that the children of idolaters have seen the gods whom their fathers worshipped for the first time in the British Museum. While over those more compact and scientific systems which lie like an incubus on mighty peoples, there has crept a sickening consciousness of a coming doom, and they already half own their conqueror in the Stronger ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... occupancy: as all these dark anticipations crowded upon me more and more, and my friends continually intruded their relentless remarks upon the apparition in my room; a great change was wrought in me. I resolved to gather all my faculties together, and forever rid me of this intolerable incubus. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... "I will give three hundred pesos, though I swear by God, I have not so much money in the world; but I will borrow it to be rid of such an incubus." ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... rhetorical acting. The playwright who sets forth with the idea that, in writing a poetical drama, he is going to continue the great Elizabethan tradition, is starting on a wild-goose chase. The great Elizabethan tradition is an incubus to be exorcised. It was because Mr. Stephen Phillips was not Elizabethanizing, but clothing a vital and personal conception of drama in verse of very appealing lyrical quality, that some of us thought we saw in Paolo and Francesca the dawn of a new art. Apparently ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... thousand a year to the Nabob of Arcot: a tribute never due, or pretended to be due, to him, even when he appeared to be something; a tribute, as things now stand, not to a real potentate, but to a shadow, a dream, an incubus of oppression. After the Company has accepted in subsidy, in grant of territory, in remission of rent, as a compensation for their own protection, at least two hundred thousand pound a year, without discounting a shilling for that receipt, the ministers condemn this harassed nation ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... so far as, at the time when they were delivered the Establishment took a violent part against the Catholic Church, on the basis of the Protestant tradition. Moreover, I had never as an Anglican been a lover of the actual Establishment; Hurrell Froude's Remains, in which it is called an "incubus" and "Upas Tree," will stand in evidence, as for him, so for me; for I was one of the editors. What I said even as an Anglican, it is not strange that I said when I was not. Indeed I have been milder in my thoughts of the Establishment ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... the various probabilities connected with the signing of the capitulation. A persistent apprehension haunted him; a dread lest the conflict might be renewed, and the horrible thought of what the consequences must be in such an event, of which he could not speak, but which rested on his bosom like an incubus. When he had reascended to his study, where he found Maurice and Jean in exactly the same position he had left them in, it was all in vain that he settled himself comfortably in his favorite easy-chair; sleep would not come to him; just as he was on the point of losing ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... for a long time. Finally he appeared to throw off the incubus, and, with a return of his ordinary ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... the hypocrite realises that he is a hypocrite, there is hope for him. But when hypocrisy develops into self-deception, the severance between outward and inward, between appearance and reality, is complete. In a school which is ridden by the examination incubus, the whole atmosphere is charged with deceit. The teacher's attempt to outwit the examiner is deceitful; and the immorality of his action is aggravated by the fact that he makes his pupils partners with him in ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... I had thought incessantly of my poor little lady taken out of the school room to face a position which would be horrifying, even in idea, to a right minded woman of the world. What the girl's mental sufferings must have been only a girl can tell. And ever since—the incubus of that elderly man of unclean antecedents! All that had been incomprehensible about Evadne was obvious now, and also the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... desirable a result, and the subject will doubtless engage in the future, as it has done in the past, the anxious consideration and wise action of the Canadian Government, who have a right to appeal to the President of the United States and his advisers, to relieve them from the incubus of the presence in our territories of so many of the wards of that Government, and who are without the means or opportunities of ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... is young, but the government is infantine; though, notwithstanding that it is little more than two years old, it has proved itself indefatigable, concise, and beneficial in its workings; and many a local incubus has been removed, and many a long felt desideratum been supplied, during its short ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... no divine right of a class or caste, enjoying supremacy or special privilege. It also is a surviving vested interest, that must justify itself, or be swept aside as an incubus. ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... fifteen years ago. Doubtless were I to repeat my visit I should find progressive changes too numerous for detail. Happy little middle-class Parisians now run to and from their Lyces unattended. Young ladies in society imitate their Anglo-Saxon sisters and have shaken off that incubus, la promeneuse ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... getting dark, I had not touched food since starting, nor had I wetted my lips. My thirst was now intolerable. The travelling rule, about keeping on, was an ugly incubus. Samson would go his own ways - he had sense enough for that - but how, when, where, was I to quench my thirst? Oh! for the tip of Lazarus' finger - or for choice, a bottle of Bass - to cool my tongue! Then too, whither would the mustang ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... somewhere, and its failure lay in the fact that it did not develop in him ideals of success that would have made him immune to these irritating factors. We have often heard it said that education should rid the mind of the incubus of superstition, and one very important effect of universal education is that it does offer to all men an explanation of the phenomena that formerly weighted down the mind with fear and dread, and opened an easy ingress to the forces of superstition and fraud and error. Education has accomplished ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... Superstition! that horrid incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks, and poison chalices, and foul sleeping draughts, is passing away without return. Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky; but the stars ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... as "a royalist," "an enemy to the rights of man;" as a "friend of oligarchy;" as a "misanthrope, educated in contempt of his fellow-men;" as "unfit to be the minister of a free and virtuous people." Privately, and through the press, Mr. Monroe was warned that he "was full of duplicity;" "an incubus on his prospects for the next presidency, and on his popularity." When these calumnies were uttered, as some of them were, in the House of Representatives, they naturally excited the indignation of Mr. Adams, and the anxiety of his friends. Being asked by one of them ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... general expectation of the impending judgment and destruction of the world have rolled down to the present time. The portentous season passed, all things continuing as they were, and the immense incubus rose and dissolvingly vanished. And the Mediaval Church, like the Apostolic Church before, instead of logically saying: Our expectation of the physical return of Christ was a delusion, fancifully concluded: We were wrong as to the date; and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... North Carolina. But all these efforts failed and the Southern abolitionists, as we have seen, having "fought the good fight," emigrated to the Northwest about 1830, when Virginia failed to rid herself of the growing "incubus." Just as Birney and Rankin "took up arms" in Ohio there arose a fiercer champion of their cause in the East, where distance from the scene, lack of intimate knowledge of "the system," and a strong popular dislike of the South gave unwonted strength to the new evangelism. ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... end of this book. An Italian advocate, Scipio Sighele, has devoted a monograph to the subject of dual crime, in which he examines a number of cases in which two persons have jointly committed heinous crimes.(3) He finds that in couples of this kind there is usually an incubus and a succubus, the one who suggests the crime, the other on whom the suggestion works until he or she becomes the accomplice or instrument of the stronger will; "the one playing the Mephistophelian part of tempter, preaching evil, urging to crime, the other allowing ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... patriarchal,[4] and is now placing all his individual strength to the task of heaving off this incubus from the breast of our body politic, but with small avail, for he has no lever to assist him—no fulcrum whereon to rest it; otherwise he might say with Archimedes, 'With these I could move a world.' ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... certainly has been so in the case of Italy, and by a base conspiracy. When will the people arise in their might, and, by their immense superiority in numbers as well as intelligence, cast off the yoke of the conspirators—the incubus which crushes and degrades them in the eyes ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... spade. What, shall thy lubrical and glibbery muse Live, as she were defunct, like punk in stews? Alas! that were no modern consequence, To have cothurnal buskins frighted hence. No, teach thy Incubus to poetize; And throw abroad thy spurious snotteries.... O poets all and some! for now we list Of strenuous vengeance ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... took an incubus off my mind, and I hastened, somewhat revengefully, to acquaint the professional philanthropist, who had been so barren of ideas, with my intention to set up ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... himself over and over again, that it behoved him to make some great effort to shake off this incubus that depressed him; but yet no such effort had hitherto been even attempted. Now at last he arose and shook himself, and promised to himself that he would be a man. It might be that the misfortune ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... whose mission seemed to be to plague their master consciously, and to plague him unconsciously. Once or twice Mr. Gibson had declined taking a fresh pupil, in the hopes of shaking himself free from the incubus, but his reputation as a clever surgeon had spread so rapidly that fees which he had thought prohibitory, were willingly paid, in order that the young man might make a start in life, with the prestige of having ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... so respectable, might have been trusted not only to hold its own against Afghan onslaught, but if necessary to take the offensive with success. But alas, the heart of the hapless force had gone to water, its discipline was a wreck, its chiefs were feeble and apathetic; its steps were dogged by the incubus of some 12,000 camp followers, with a great company of women and children. The awful fate brooded over its forlorn banners of expiating by its utter annihilation, the wretched folly and sinister ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... strongly emphasises the migratory character of the earliest human groups. The second shows how each group is relieved of the incubus of too great a number for the economic conditions by the double process of sending forth its young males, and of its younger females being ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... the last few days that Robert had become capable of speaking thus. His nature had at length arrived at the point of so far casting off the incubus of his grandmother's authority as to assert some measure of freedom and act openly. His very hopelessness of a hearing in heaven had made him indifferent to things on earth, and therefore bolder. Thus, strange as it may ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... all its color by it, the shapes that are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in the darkness, and the weak organizations kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming time. Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in its full stature and native lines in the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... consciousness a substantial independence and a directive physical force which were incongruous with it: a force and independence perfectly congruous with the Platonic soul, which had been a mythological being, a supernatural spirit or daemon or incubus, incarnate in the natural world, and partly dominating it. The relations of such a soul to the particular body or bodies which it might weave for itself on earth, to the actions which it performed through such bodies, and to the current of its own thoughts, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... and reaping the fruit of her early industry, she was obliged to toil more assiduously than ever. It was little consolation to her that she was but a type of many women, who, hardworking and thrifty themselves, are married to men who are nothing but an incubus to their wives and to their families. Small wonder, then, that Mrs. Hableton should condense all her knowledge of the male sex into the one ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Second Presbyterian church. He was an Elder, and a Trustee, and, after much anxiety, and the utmost straining of his ability to raise and to contribute funds towards the completion of their house of worship, he was just beginning to enjoy the comfort of seeing the debt, which had hung as an incubus over it for years, wiped out, when this new call was made upon him. A few young people proposed to go out to the assistance of the feeble church, upon the condition that Mr. Charless and Mr. Keith would go with them —wisely concluding that the attempt to sustain it ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... would be disgusting enough to make you scruple to fall down and worship the owner of such wealth? But I will make you feel my power, though it suits my honour to hide the source of it. I will be an incubus to your city, since you have rejected me as a magistrate. Like the night mare, I will hag ride ye, yet remain invisible myself. This miserable Ramorny, too, he who, in losing his hand, has, like ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... home governments, in the toils of a system which on the one hand had served their remote forbears with good effect, but which on the other hand civilized peoples had long and almost universally discarded as an incubus. In these colonial beginnings the negroes were to be had so cheaply and slavery seemed such a simple and advantageous device when applied to them, that no qualms as to the future were felt. At least no expressions ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... a laugh, and started home with a song—then stopped. She foresaw the musty room to which she was going, the slatternly incubus of a man. Saw—with just such distinctness as had once dangled the stiff, gray scrub-rag before her eyes—Schwirtz's every detail: bushy chin, stained and collarless shirt, trousers like old chair-covers. Probably he ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... prejudices; and he had been educated between thirty or forty years before, which is saying virtually, that he was educated under the influence of the British opinions, that then weighed (and many of which still weigh) like an incubus on the national interests of America. It is true, Mr. Effingham was in all senses the contemporary, as he had been the school-fellow, of his cousin; that they loved each other as brothers, had the utmost ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... notice, from the hedge of the plantation into the adjoining pale thoroughfare, and pause amid its emptiness for a moment, was to exchange by the act of a single stride the simple absence of human companionship for an incubus of ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... "customary expressions of affability" for an indication that his infatuation is reciprocated, the Twins act promptly. They have "no use" for such creatures, they once explained to me; and they proceed to rid themselves of the incubus in a ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... than they had done for a very long time. Pedro Alvarez walked about with a more self-confident air than usual, and Lawrence sang and laughed and rattled away as had been his custom in former days; even Hilda looked as if she had been relieved of an incubus which had depressed her spirits. She said nothing; she did not even mention the name of Father Mendez, but if by chance she heard it, she gave a slight shudder, while the frown which grew on her brow showed that whatever the influence he had gained over her, it was not of a ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... trouble at the camp, supposing it would affect himself but slightly; but he now realized that a suspension of operations there would mean an entire change in his mode of living. The prospective change weighed on his sensitive spirits like an incubus. Even The Pines, he dismally reflected, would no longer seem the same quiet, homelike retreat, since it was to be invaded and dominated by a youthful presence between whom and himself there would ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... unfortunate circumstances, it would certainly in time have become popular in the nation. It was beyond question Washington's party, and, notwithstanding the false charges of monarchism and British sovereignty, it was patriotic. Had it existed forty or fifty years longer, until that incubus which haunted Jefferson's brain had passed away, and the republic become so firmly established that people would no longer fear British dependency, the Federal party would have been a firmly fixed institution. Had Federal ideas been fully inculcated instead of Jeffersonianism and Calhounism, ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... doors of knowledge to their workpeople, or their children. It was a dozen years before the Institution was able to remove to a home of its own in Newhall Street, but it rapidly got into a hopeless state of debt. To lessen this incubus, and provide funds for some needed alterations, the committee decided to hold an exhibition of "manufactures, the fine arts, and objects illustrative of experimental philosophy, &c." The exhibition was opened Dec. 19, 1839, and in all ways was a splendid success, a fairly-large sum of ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... custom, social fear, and, above all, Those sacramental manacles the church Had bound her in, and to the end would keep, Forbade the poor, scared, helpless little woman To free herself, by one condign resolve, From the foul incubus that sucked her life. So a false sense of duty kept her tied, Feeding in him all that was pitiless. And now she's dying. I had gone to-day To take some little dainties, cream and fruit, And ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... quite old enough to perceive that the old woman's tale about the Sand-man and his little ones' nest in the half-moon couldn't be altogether true; nevertheless the Sand-man continued to be for me a fearful incubus, and I was always seized with terror—my blood always ran cold, not only when I heard anybody come up the stairs, but when I heard anybody noisily open my father's room door and go in. Often he stayed away for ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... trembled from limb to limb—the ice of a thousand winters seemed curdling through my blood. The bell rung—once, twice—no answer. I would have leaped out of the carriage—I would have forced an entrance, but I was unable to move. A man fettered and spell-bound by an incubus, is less helpless than I was. At last, an old female I had ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... but in one, to show the copiousness of his invention; it is that of Caliban, or the monster, in "The Tempest." He seems there to have created a person which was not in nature, a boldness which, at first sight, would appear intolerable; for he makes him a species of himself, begotten by an incubus on a witch; but this, as I have elsewhere proved, is not wholly beyond the bounds of credibility, at least the vulgar still believe it. We have the separated notions of a spirit, and of a witch; (and spirits, according to Plato, are vested with a subtle body; according to some ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... similar fashion in the days of Edward I. and Simon De Montfort, the Commons of England, then struggling up, had wrestled in the narrow Chapter House. And so they had fought in the Lancastrian time; and after the Tudor incubus had been lifted off. So under the Stuarts had the wrangling proceeded from which came at length the "Petition of Right." Substituting the doublet and the steeple hat for their modern equivalents, the spectacle of the Long Parliament must have been very ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... no, 'tis you, sweetheart, whose youth, Tempting my soul with dainty ways, Shall hide from it the sombre truth, This incubus of evil days. Springtime is yours, and flowers; come then, Scatter your roses on my brow, And let me dream of youth again— Alas, for I ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... fight he had seen by the camp fire, and especially the picture of those three stark, bloody forms that lay stretched upon the earth, seemingly watching every movement he made, followed and weighed him down like some smothering incubus. Then he saw, more vividly than ever before, the mountainous task ahead. With no horse, and the hundreds of miles of mountain and prairie, with the dangers besetting him on every hand, what possible hope had he for believing he was ever to reach his ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... and that they must do something towards the end for which they were made. The thought is faint at first, but by degrees grows weightier, till at last they can stand it no longer, and, making a great effort to throw off the incubus of babyhood that weighs so heavily upon them, they burst open the back door of their shell and slowly creep out backwards. It takes about five minutes for them to get entirely out, head, legs and all, and then for a moment or two they gaze ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... strike; the hands in the neighbourhood felt themselves aggrieved by the masters, and refused to work: Mr. Bronte thought that they had been unjustly and unfairly treated, and he assisted them by all the means in his power to "keep the wolf from their doors," and avoid the incubus of debt. Several of the more influential inhabitants of Haworth and the neighbourhood were mill-owners; they remonstrated pretty sharply with him, but he believed that his conduct was ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... An impiety and poisonous futility every Law of them that is so made; all Nature is against it; it will and can do nothing but mischief wheresoever it shows itself in Nature: and such Laws lie now like an incubus over this Earth, so innumerable are they. How long, O Lord, how long!—O ye Eternities, Divine Silences, do you dwell no more, then, in the hearts of the noble and the true; and is there no inspiration of the Almighty any more vouchsafed us? The inspiration of the Morning Newspapers—alas, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... such various and distant races, that there is a certain phthisical Scot who will always be pleased to hear good news of you, and would be better pleased by nothing than to learn that you had thrown off your present incubus, largely consisting of letters I believe, and had sailed into some square work by way ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... woman of the town? Did she lack a certain sense of niceness which warns women as to what they may or may not do? Didn't she know how to behave? Well, this was the sort of thing that happened if women had no breeding. He blamed Felicie for the accident that had occurred and was relieved of a heavy incubus. ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France |
