"Mortal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... another strong instinct which the Marten evinces even when tamed. It has an implacable hostility to cats, and lets slip no opportunity of springing upon them and giving them a mortal wound. In the forests, diminutive as it is in comparison, it battles stoutly with the wild cat; and we shall venture to quote from "The British Naturalist" an account of one of these battles, as from an eye witness. "In the year 1805, a gentleman, on whose veracity we ...
— Charley's Museum - A Story for Young People • Unknown
... stood trembling so that she had to clutch at the table to keep her stand, she seemed an insignificant, pale-faced, ill-shaped woman—not a thing of beauty to the eye. She seemed, also, to be in mortal terror. ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... entered that poor artist's head, that he as a man was not equal to any other mortal, or that there was anything in his position so degrading as to prevent him from giving his arm to a lady who asked for it. He had seen in the fetes in his own country fine ladies, not certainly demoiselles (but the demoiselle Anglaise ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... before the burial, and in the back parlor stood a narrow coffin containing all that was mortal of Lizzie Dayton. In the front parlor Bridget and another domestic kept watch over the body of their young mistress. Twelve o'clock rang from the belfry of St. Luke's church, and then the midnight silence was broken by the shrill scream of the locomotive as the eastern ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... miserable creator. They appalled him often, and often he could make sport with them. For overawing him by their supposed power, they made him a compensation by descending to a fellowship with his follies and vices. But indeed this was a condition of their creation; they must own their mortal progenitor by sharing his depravity, even amidst the lordly domination assigned to them over him and the universe. We may safely affirm, that the mighty artificer of deifications, the corrupt soul of man, never once, in its almost infinite diversification ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... a pig that cries and flings when his throat is cut, fancy to thyself every one to be, that grieves for any worldly thing and takes on. Such a one is he also, who upon his bed alone, doth bewail the miseries of this our mortal life. And remember this, that Unto reasonable creatures only it is granted that they may willingly and freely submit unto Providence: but absolutely to submit, is a necessity imposed upon ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... to do so, saying laughingly that the room was so small that there was no chance of another shell finding its way in. He was, however, mistaken, for the very next day a shell entered, and burst in the room, the fragments inflicting a mortal wound upon Sir Henry, who died a few hours afterward. The loss was a heavy one indeed, both to the garrison, to whom his energy, calmness, and authority were invaluable, and to England, who lost in him one of her noblest and most worthy sons. On his death the command ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... there. Princes had come from China and Barbary and Abyssinia and every other strange out-of-the-way place, to kneel at the feet of fair, obdurate saints who would not even turn the head to look at them; but she had acted, she was conscious, after a much more mortal fashion, and so made herself work for confession and penance. Yet certainly she had not meant to do so; the interview came on her so suddenly, so unexpectedly; and somehow he would speak, and he would not go when ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... carried to the nearest village, and the officers of justice proceeded to open it, when a cry he sent forth frightened all the assistants and convinced the surgeon in charge that the Abbe was not dead; but it was too late to save him, as he had already received a mortal wound. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... him her hand again, smiled at him, and sent him home feeling that he was as near to the threshold of heaven as any mortal thing may hope ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... him, I had seated myself at my father's side. As he concluded, I said to my father, in a low voice,—'If we forgive not our fellow-mortal, how can we expect the forgiveness of our Heavenly Father for our many sins?' I rose from my seat and extending to him hand, said,—'You have, Mr. Almont, my entire forgiveness for all the sorrow you have caused me, and I hope ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... to crunch on the same gravel that Lee's boots crunched on. There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses—bound for dust—mortal—" ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Irishwoman, better known in her country than either Miss Darragh or Mrs. Patrick Campbell, lent her art to the performance of Cathleen ni Houlihan. "Miss Maud Gonne played very finely," writes Mr. Yeats in recording the incident, "and her great height made Cathleen seem a divine being fallen into our mortal infirmity." With these three exceptions, so far as I have been able to find out, no actors or actresses outside of the company have, since 1902, essayed any other than a subordinate part. Yet such is the versatility of the company, men and women ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Colonel, and kept aloof from him as much as possible, rarely seeing him except at meal times, and then saying very little to him and never dreaming how closely he watched her, attributing every pecularity, and she had many, to the Harris taint, of which he had a mortal terror. But however much or little there might have been of the Harris blood in her, the few who knew her found her charming, as she grew from childhood into a beautiful girl of eighteen, apparently forgetful of everything pertaining to her Florida home. The doll-house, with all the expensive toys ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... the return of Lazarus to his home was only a temporary restoration. He came back to the old life of mortality, of temptation, of sickness and pain and death. He came back only for a season. It was not a resurrection to immortal life; it was only a restoration to mortal life. He must pass again through the mystery of dying, and his sisters must a second time experience the agony of separation and loneliness. We can scarcely call it comfort; it was merely a postponement for a little ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... and heart and soul pained as mine is, with every day's observation 'of wrong and outrage' with which this place is filled, but that you might have auricular and ocular evidence of the cruelty of slavery, of cruelties that mortal language can never describe—that you might see the tender mercies of a hardened slaveholder, one who bears the name of being one of the mildest and most merciful masters of which this island can boast. Oh, my friend, another is screaming under the lash, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... what had passed and, when Barkan heard it, he snorted and sparked and railed at Sun and Moon and sparkling Fire, saying, "By the virtue of my faith, I will surely slay mine uncle's son and his people and this mortal, nor will I leave one of them alive!" Then he cried out to the legions of the Jinn and choosing of them seventy-thousand Marids, set out and fared on till he came to Jabarsa[FN35] the city of Japhet and encamped before its gates. When Mura'ash ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... the woman, in a very sad tone; "only," she added, with a sigh, "if we are really going, may not I run up to Delaney Manor and just give 'em a hint? It seems so dreadful to me if anything should happen to them little kids, more particular to little Diana, who was the mortal image ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... of the place after my long ride, strange voices called to me from the sea, from the heather, from the great copper birch over the house. Eyes long dead seemed looking into mine, hands were on my hair, and there came to me, with the feeling of mortal sickness, the terrible, sweet remembrances of an early passion and of things to be known to none save Marian and me and the One who does most wisely for the Great End, but bitterly to us who see but ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... unhappily set This bateless edge on his keen appetite; When Collatine unwisely did not let To praise the clear unmatched red and white Which triumph'd in that sky of his delight, Where mortal stars, as bright as heaven's beauties, With pure ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... thought of Isabel; and of Judge Sharp; of the great, good fortune that had befallen her in being so near them both, and her poor little heart swelled with a world of thankful feelings. I do think the sweetest tears ever shed by mortal, come from those grateful feelings, that, too exquisite for words, and too powerful for silence, can find no language to express themselves ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... gentleman escorting her in mortal dread that she would be burned, safely tucked her long pan into the warmest corner, shut the door, and gravely consulted the clock. "If I look at it in twenty-one minutes, I think it will be done," she ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... fall in love in the wrong place; and so, he applied himself quite as much to conciliate the favour of the parents, as to secure the attachment of Penny. Mrs. Palfrey had not been inaccessible to flattery, and her husband, being also of mortal mould, would not, it might be hoped, be proof against rum—that very fine Jamaica rum—of which Mr. Freely expected always to have a supply sent him from Jamaica. It was not easy to get Mr. Palfrey ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... woman's. The eyes, intensely blue and clear, the broad, high forehead, the thin cheeks and colorless lips, even the heavy braids of brown hair with their auburn lights, did not seem to belong to a mere mortal. And yet she could not be an angel, for even Peace's youthful, untrained mind swiftly read the bitterness and rebellion which lurked in those deep, wonderful eyes. It was as if some doomed soul were looking out through the bars of a prison fortress, without a single ray ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... the covers, and among them portions of English metrical effusions of the period (for the volume must have been bound here). We view this treasure trove wistfully and indulgently; there it is; no mortal eye had fallen on it in the course of three and a half centuries; and how can we be expected to judge its value or quality by the ordinary standard—on an ordinary critical principle? It has come to us like an unlooked-for testamentary windfall. We are not ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... his left hand and touched his side. "'Tis a mortal hurt, and I rejoice in it. I have no wish ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... containing an accurate account of kisses given and received, with slights, huffs, visits, quarrels, suspicions, and jealousies, interspersed with grand sentiments and profound views of life and human nature, yet all illustrative of the utter vanity of earth, and the failure of all mortal pleasures to satisfy the cravings of an immortal mind. The "Confessions" remind us of "Manfred" and "Ecclesiastes" blended,—exceedingly readable, and often unexceptionable, where virtue is commended and vice portrayed in its true light, but on the whole a book which no ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... soul, Unjustly, for thy partial good detain? No—rather strive thy grov'ling mind to raise Up to that unclouded blaze, That heav'nly radiance of eternal light, In which enthron'd she now with pity sees, How frail, how insecure, how slight, Is every mortal bliss. ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... beg for mercy, and if she will not listen, I shall rise and tell her fearlessly, 'Your majesty, Josepha says that you have sentenced her to death. No mortal has power over the life of an imperial princess; God alone has that power. My sister must not go into the vault, for if she does, she dies, and that by ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... to the house where she was stopping. When we reached the place to which we had been directed, my wife not only found her mother but one of her sisters. The meeting was a joyful one to us all. No mortal who has not experienced it can imagine the feeling of those who meet again after long years of enforced separation and hardship and utter ignorance of one another's condition and place of habitation. I questioned them as to when and where ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes
... should abdicate, en masse, and voluntarily sentence themselves to a political ostracism, in order to make room for men of newer ideas and more imbued with the spirit of the time. The moderate and constitutional Jacobins looked upon this abdication as equally fatal to the monarch, as it dealt a mortal blow to their ambition, for they wished to seize on the direction of the power they had just created; they deemed themselves alone competent to control the movement that they had excited, and they ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Rosette, enthusiast as he was, should be irremovable from his observatory? Who could expect otherwise than that, with the prospect before him of viewing the giant among planets, ten times nearer than any mortal eye had ever done, he should have begrudged every moment ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... was long, low, and dark; what light entered it shot from under low blinds and had still some of the ruddy tinge of morning. Valentin and his servant Ivan were waiting for them at the upper end of a long, slightly-sloping desk, on which lay the mortal remains, looking enormous in the twilight. The big black figure and yellow face of the man found in the garden confronted them essentially unchanged. The second head, which had been fished from among the river reeds that morning, lay streaming and dripping beside ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... in Nifelheim,—and whispers of a similar import seemed to rise up from the lidless coffin before us. It was no brother mortal that lay at our feet, softly folded in the embraces of "Mother Earth," but a poor scarecrow, gibbeted for ages on this bare rock, like a dead Prometheus; the vulture, frost, gnawing for ever on his bleaching relics, and yet eternally ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... is well that we should begin by freeing the word education from the incrustations of mortal nonsense that have very nearly obscured its vitality altogether. Before we can educate for motherhood, we must know what education is, and what it is not. We must have a definition of it and its object; in general as well as in this particular ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... afterwards rubbed upon the door-posts. 'This,' to quote one of the dusky fraternity, 'make such a bad mell, that it catch him nose; and de berry Jurabie himself would run away from it!' I know not the extent of Satanic endurance, but for a mere mortal to bear with it is impossible, as I once found by experience, when it compelled me to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... gives one a little shock, but the water ought to be delightful to-day," said she. "But what is the matter with you?—your hand shakes. You are a chilly mortal, cousin." ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... earth more sacred or divine, That gods and men do equally adore, Than this same virtue that doth right define, For th' heavens themselves, whence mortal men implore, Right in their wrongs, are ruled by ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... really had harboured some strange fears and terrors they would have been excusable, when we consider how many circumstances had combined to make it almost a matter of demonstration that Sir Francis Varney was something more than mortal. ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... "Life of the Bee," let him or her study that instructive book. Let him ask why the queen is the End of the hive, why all is for her. Let him ask whether the natural law upon which this depends—the law that all individuals are mortal—does not apply to all races, even our own, and perhaps he will come to agree that the rights of mothers are the oldest and deepest and most necessary of any rights that ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... could go with you," Siegbert groaned as Edmund said adieu to him. "I would ride straight into his camp and challenge him to mortal combat, but as it ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... The horror of mortal suffering may have been greater to Jesus than to other men, because of the fineness and sensitiveness of His physical organization. His body had never been coarsened with sin, and therefore death was utterly alien to it. The stream of physical life, which is one ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... of our unbelieving countrymen. Our safety lies in the terror inspired by a tradition, verified by repeated and invariable experience, that no one who injures one of us but has reason to rue it, that no mortal enemy of the Star has ever escaped signal punishment, more terrible for the mystery attending it. Were we known, were our organisation avowed, we might be hunted down and exterminated, and should certainly suffer frightful ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... method, a genuine love of my noble profession, and a tendency to study from my childhood. Will you not risk something on my ability? If not, God help me, for I shall lose you; and what is life, or fame, or wealth, or any mortal thing to me, without you? I cannot accept your father's decision; YOU ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... the new shores proved in vain. In the end their leader received so severe an arrow wound that he withdrew and left to the victorious Indians the ownership of their land. The arrow was poisoned, and his wound proved mortal. In a short time after reaching Cuba he died, having found death instead of youth in the land ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the dawning of the dawn is golden-colored and has iron poles at the setting of the sun; from thence you see Aditi and Diti—that is, what is yonder and what is here, what is infinite and what is finite, what is mortal and what ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... Colonel de Sucy struggled against mortal agony; tears no longer came to his eyes. His soul, often lacerated, could not harden itself to the sight of Stephanie's insanity; but he covenanted, so to speak, with his cruel situation, and found some assuaging ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... he intends to make one labour suffice for two. But Amphitryon, though, as I told you some time since, will be informed of the whole affair. But what of that? Certainly no one will hold Alcmena guilty: no, no, it would seem highly unbecoming for a god to let a mortal take the consequences of ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... the mother repaid for her righteous education of her son: through him her pride received almost a mortal blow, her justice grew more discriminating, ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... to say. "This world is the real hell, ending in the eternal naught. The dreams of a life beyond and of re-union there are but a demon's mocking breathed into the mortal heart, lest by its universal suicide mankind should rob him of his torture-pit. There is no truth in all your father taught you" (he was a clergyman and rather eminent in his profession), "there is no hope for man, there is nothing he can win except the deep happiness ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... this work of trial and adventure. The abuses, the necessary reforms of company law on earth, are no concern of ours here and now, suffice it that in a Modern Utopia such laws must be supposed to be as perfect as mortal laws can possibly be made. Caveat vendor will be a sound qualification of Caveat emptor in the beautifully codified Utopian law. Whether the Utopian company will be allowed to prefer this class of share to that or to issue debentures, whether ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... happy fortune? And what about the gods? Was it really Prajapati who had created the world? Was it not the Atman, He, the only one, the singular one? Were the gods not creations, created like me and you, subject to time, mortal? Was it therefore good, was it right, was it meaningful and the highest occupation to make offerings to the gods? For whom else were offerings to be made, who else was to be worshipped but Him, the only one, the Atman? And ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... O Fate, wilt thou oppress and baffle me? Tell me, was ever yet a mortal spared of thee? Behold, my loved ones all are ta'en from me away. They left me and content forthright forsook my heart, Upon that day my loves my presence did depart; My pleasant life for loss of friends ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... hand and a torch in the other, threatening to murder him and burn the house. These ideas took such hold of his imagination, that he often started up in bed and screamed aloud. But John was too sincerely religious to cherish a revengeful spirit. The wrong done to him was as great as one mortal could inflict upon another; but he had learned the divine precept not ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... round, round and round; throwing off wondrous births at every revolving; ceaseless as the cycles that circle in heaven. Loud hummed the loom, flew the shuttle like lightning, red roared the grim forge, rung anvil and sledge; yet no mortal was seen. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... of his hat, and went in search of some other Job's comforter. Instead of a passage to England, he saw in a straight line before him the only journey which a mortal may take without ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... way into a mad-house; then it closed, and everything went on as before. Once in my life I had obtained a slight glimpse of the same sensation, and then, too, strangely enough, while swimming,—in the mightiest ocean-surge into which I had ever dared plunge my mortal body. Keats hints at the same sudden emotion, in a wild poem written among the Scottish mountains. It was not the distinctive sensation which drowning men are said to have, that spasmodic passing in review of one's whole personal history. I had no well-defined ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... a very devil; I have not seen such a firago. I had a pass with him, rapier, scabbard, and all, and he gives me the stuck in with such a mortal motion that it is inevitable; and, on the answer, he pays you as surely as your feet hit the ground they step on. They say he has ...
— Twelfth Night; or, What You Will • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... chancel, on trestles draped in black, stood the sombre casket in which lay all that was mortal of her dear teacher. The top of the casket was covered with flowers; and lying stretched out underneath it she saw Miss Myrover's little white dog, Prince. He had followed the body to the church, and, slipping in unnoticed among the mourners, ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... and I deplore his death more than that of any one else. It pleased God that he should die far away from his home. But such, alas! is man's fate. We must console ourselves by the reflection that we are all mortal. Your uncle was very fond of you, and I suppose you have not been forgotten in ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... who knows there is no departure, and that hence he becomes immortal then and there (irrespective of any departure of the soul to another place), 'when all desires which once dwelt in his heart are undone, then the mortal becomes immortal, then he obtains Brahman' (Bri. Up. IV, 4, 7). This view the Stra sets aside. For him also who knows there is the same way of passing out up to the beginning of the path, i.e. previously to the soul's entering ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... the recital immediately upon taking her chair, across the hearth from her son; she led up to it. She was an ample, fresh-coloured, lively woman; and like her son only in being a kind soul: he got neither his mortal seriousness nor his dreaminess from her. She was more than content with Cora's abandonment of him, though, as chivalrousness was not demanded of her, she would have preferred that he should have been the jilt. She ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... guest-chambers, date from the abbacy of Litlington at the end of the fourteenth century. To all lovers of Shakespeare the Jerusalem Chamber is familiar as the place where Henry IV. was carried when he fell stricken with a mortal illness before the shrine, and where Henry V. fitted on his father's crown. In this room in our own days the Revisers of ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... heavens themselves, they were giddy with an apprehension that he would break down in his flight. They dared not believe that genius, learning—any intellectual endowment however uncommon, that was simply mortal—could sustain itself long in a career seemingly so perilous. They feared an Icarian fall. No one surely who was present, could ever forget the awful burst of eloquence with which the orator apostrophized the old Bay State which Mr. Hayne had so derided, or the tones of ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... given him and performed the journey in as short a time as possible; but as he entered the camp, he met Sir Edward indeed, but not as a future bridegroom. He was borne on men's shoulders, pale and almost breathless, just returned from an attack, where by his too great rashness he had received a mortal wound. He followed him with an aching heart to his tent, where Sir Edward recovering his senses, knew him, and asked what brought him there so opportunely, 'to close his eyes, and pay the last duties, to one of whose infancy he had been so careful?' for this ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... had given utterance to the impulsive words. The barman was regarding her with a sort of semi-interest, and Mr. Squibbs also had fixed his bleary (or beery) eyes upon her. Neither would have admitted an active interest in so pale and thin and wretchedly-clad a little mortal. Her hair hung loose, and had no covering; it was hair of no particular colour, and seemed to have been for a long time utterly untended; the wind, on her run hither, had tossed it into much disorder. Signs there were of some kind of clothing beneath the short, dirty, worn dress, but it was evidently ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... fatal night, at nine o'clock in the morning, Hermann repaired to the Convent of ——, where the last honors were to be paid to the mortal remains of the old Countess. Although feeling no remorse, he could not altogether stifle the voice of conscience, which said to him: "You are the murderer of the old woman!" In spite of his entertaining very little religious belief, he was exceedingly superstitious; and believing that the dead ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... last trial. My heart was broken, my head on fire! I became mad, and never did despair take such a hold on me. I listened to nothing but my sorrow; and force became necessary to tear from my arms the mortal remains of my child. ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... human soul, therefore, together with all other souls, attains in its concentrated moments is "an eternal vision" wherein what is mortal in us merges ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... pointing forward to the "dark and bloody ground," and in impassioned but futile eloquence pleading with the pale and panic-stricken fugitives to turn about, to join his company, and to face once more the mortal dangers of pioneer conquest. Significant indeed ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... board: no helmsman steers: I float till all is dark. A gentle sound, an awful light! Three angels bear the Holy Grail; With folded feet, in stoles of white, On sleeping wings they sail. Ah, blessed vision! blood of God! My spirit beats her mortal bars, As down dark tides the glory slides, And starlike ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... he had propagated, during a long and prosperous life, he confirmed by a voluntary death. Apprehensive of the ignominious approach of disease and infirmity, he resolved to expire as became a warrior. In a solemn assembly of the Swedes and Goths, he wounded himself in nine mortal places, hastening away (as he asserted with his dying voice) to prepare the feast of heroes in the palace of the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... come, the last drops had to be drained! So a man will sometimes go through half an hour of mortal terror with a brigand, yet when the knife is at his throat at last, he ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... in pushing the mounted men in as infantry. The future was obscure and uncertain; but, with a feeling of eerie anticipation, he felt the freshness of the dawn of a new mysterious life, when men met men in mortal fight, when the false standards of civilization went to the devil, and man was man. It was good to be alive; to be one of that brigade of fine hefty fellows on the edge of the great adventure, when they would join in the ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... mortal fear of the first error in this regard. When a boy has made a record for bad, it seems to hang to him. The fact that he has told something which he ought to have kept to himself is quoted against him until it becomes a positive ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... purpose, the fluctuation of human powers, the untowardness of circumstances. From the beginning to the end of his work of many years there is no flagging of energy, no indication of weakness. The shoulders burdened by a task almost too great for mortal strength, never tremble under ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... partial entrance, but another iron-ribbed door withheld them from the body of the prison, and there followed a delay while this was broken down. Meanwhile, from within came the sound of turning locks and of clanging steel doors, also a shuffling of many feet and cries of mortal terror, which told that the prisoners had been freed to shift for themselves ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... order, and prompt obedience, even in the beginning of a modern battle. In an ancient battle, there was no noise but what arose from the human voice; there was no smoke, there was no invisible cause of wounds or death. Every man, till some mortal weapon actually did approach him, saw clearly that no such weapon was near him. In these circumstances, and among troops who had some confidence in their own skill and dexterity in the use of their arms, it must have been a good deal less difficult ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... stories—"The Battle of Bunkerloo," for instance—are admirable in all ways, conception and execution having an even excellence. Again, Mr. Hugh Conway's "Daughter of the Stars" is a Short-story which fails from sheer deficiency of style: here is one of the very finest Short-story ideas ever given to mortal man, but the handling is at best barely sufficient. To do justice to the conception would task the execution of a poet. We can merely wonder what the tale would have been had it occurred to Hawthorne, to Poe, or to Theophile ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... might have betrayed his identity to any one more accustomed to the grimaces of his professional character, but which only infected the others with the same contagious merriment. "Come thou home now," he said to Ambrose; "my good woman hath been in a mortal fright about thee, and would have me come out to seek after thee. Such are the women folk, Master Headley. Let them have but a lad to look after, and they'll bleat after him like an old ewe that has lost ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... morn to melt the frosts of night, Still racked with tortures endlessly renewed, And which to end redeemer none is born. Such is the guerdon of thy love for man. A god thyself, thou gav'st, despite the gods, To mortals more than is a mortal's due. And therefore must thou keep this dreary rock, Erect, with frame unbending, reft of sleep, And many a bootless wail of agony Shalt utter. Change of mind in Zeus is none, Ruthless the rule when power is ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... rapidly from mortal blows, and so it was that another half hour found Willie wandering up and down Broadway but at the far end of the street from The Elite Restaurant. A motion picture theater arrested his attention; and presently, ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... before the false charge exploded, and the possibility that the coldness of the body of his victim might arouse medical suspicions. Colwyn did not think that the criminal had avoided killing Mrs. Heredith so as to ensure against that risk of discovery. The infliction of a mortal wound which failed to cause immediate death not only required a high degree of anatomical knowledge, but left the door open to a dying confession which might have upset the whole plan. Fate had helped the murderer ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... speakee, I do not know; but being quite indifferent, I clapped my hands with the rest. The red-faced gentleman, now purple with excitement, then rose, and during a solemn silence delivered himself of a speech, to the effect that the day then passing was certainly the happiest in his mortal career, that he could not find words adequately to express the varied feelings which swelled his throbbing bosom, and that he felt quite faint with the mighty load of honour just thrown upon his delighted shoulders by his bald-headed ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... of that evening is destined to live as long as the body of James Conlan inhabits this mortal coil. When he gave the servant his hat and stick and the footman his card, and heard that powdered monstrosity bawl "Mr. James Conlan" to a room filled with shimmering gowns and glistening shirt-fronts, Jim's flesh went cold. ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... to get hold of himself, to recover his coolness a little. Was it possible that he had made a mortal error? Alas, alas, how could he doubt it now! The arsenate of soda continued. He made, a superhuman effort to ward off the horror of that, even momentarily—the death of innocent Michael Nikolaievitch—and to think of nothing except the immediate consequences, which ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... protecting female endeavors; in which two-fold quality they have the emblem of domestic activity, the distaff, as their attribute. Only a few representations of spinning goddesses now remain; but many are the pictures of mortal spinning-maidens painted on walls, chiefly for female use. For the spinning, a spindle was used, as is still the case in places where the northern spinning-wheel has not supplanted the antique custom. Homer describes noble ladies handling ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Italian, who was an adept in the art of talking over the fair sex, would no doubt have dissipated, if there had been any use in it; but Lenny put a dead stop to all negotiations. He had taken a mortal dislike to Riccabocca; he was very much frightened by him—and the spectacles, the pipe, the cloak, the long hair, and the red umbrella; and said so sturdily, in reply to every overture, "Please, sir, I'd rather not; I'd rather stay along with mother"—that Riccabocca was forced ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... wages of sin,' and is only experienced by men who have transgressed the law of God. So far Moses in his life and in his death carries us—that no transgression escapes the appropriate punishment; that the smallest sin has in it the seeds of mortal consequences; that the loftiest saint does not ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... cura of a parish among them about 1630, and afterwards returned to England and Protestantism. He described, at wearisome length, the supposed metamorphosis of two chiefs of neighboring tribes, the one into a lion, the other into a tiger, and the mortal combat in which they engaged, resulting in the death of one to whom Gage administered absolution. No doubt he had been worsted in a personal encounter with his old enemy, and, being a man of eighty years, had not the vigor to recover. ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... sometimes plied down the stream in their fur-laden canoes,—a place of jagged rocks and crags and bowlders that were all but submerged by the waters. To be hurled against their sharp edges meant death, certain and speedily. He knew that his mortal strength couldn't avail against them. But by yielding to the current he thought that he might swing between them into the open waters below. His arm tightened about ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... his ends, and without pernicious theories, whose very selfishness was a guard against mischievous foreign predilection, and whose local situation was helpful to his appreciation of the utility of the country's commercial and federal systems, while his elevation to the Presidency would be a mortal stab to the Jacobins, breeding invincible hatred and compelling him to lean on the Federalists, who had nothing to fear from his ambition, since it would be checked by his good sense, or from any scheme of usurpation that he ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... good bishop desired he might be permitted to escape; but it was thought proper to punish, with the utmost severity, such an atrocious attempt. He was accordingly apprehended, and, though the wound was not mortal, condemned to be broke. When this dreadful sentence was executed, he cried out, that it was hard he should undergo such torments, for having wounded a worthless priest, by whom he had been injured, while such-a-one (naming the burgher mentioned above) lived in ease and security, after having brutally ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the progress he was making in his Caspar Hauser research. In his broken German he told of the murder of body and soul that had been committed in the case of the foundling: "He was a mortal man comme une etoile," he said. "The bourgeoisie crushed him. The bourgeoisie is ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... ought to be "cut out" It is not only a waste of time and a sore trial to the patience of the country; it is absolutely immoral. It is not true that a member of Congress who, while living was a most ordinary mortal, becomes by the accident of death a hero, a saint, "an example to American youth." Nobody believes these abominable "eulogies," and nobody should be permitted to utter them in the time and place designated for another purpose. A "tribute" that is ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... a gondola, and were presently gliding smoothly over the coloured waters of the lagoon; shining with richer sky reflections than any mortal painter could put on canvas. Not ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... had an extraordinary dread of violating the taboo, and believed that it meant death to the offender or to some one of his family. All present entered into a bond to punish on the spot any man who attempted to replace the taboo or to revenge its removal. Thus a mortal blow was publicly struck at this most miserable superstition, which had caused bloodshed and ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... allowed the water to pass away as before. A small clump of grass and sticks had found lodgment, having been swept there by the unusual amount of falling rain, and in less time than it takes to write it, the mortal remains of my darling would have been flooded, had it not been for the warning and my prompt response. To clean out the small amount of water which had entered while I hastily worked at the trench was short work and ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... they have acquired such glory as appears hardly to be bounded by heaven itself. For although in the very consciousness of a glorious action there is a certain reward, still I do not consider immortality of glory a thing to be despised by one who is himself mortal. ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... The seasons range the country roads, But here in London streets I ken No such helpmates, only men; And these are not in plight to bear, If they would, another's care. They have enough as 'tis: I see In many an eye that measures me The mortal sickness of a mind Too unhappy to be kind. Undone with misery, all they can Is to hate their fellow man; And till they drop they needs must still Look at ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... sleep am I, and the baths I prepare are in the halls of Valhalla. Offer not to the Vala the bath for mortal weariness, and the wine and the food meet for human guests. Sit thee down, daughter of the Dane, and thank thy new gods for the past that hath been thine. Not ours is the present, and the future escapes from our dreams; but the past is ours ever, and all eternity cannot revoke ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... connection there is more than the picturesque contrast between the rapture of Elijah, with its whirlwind, and chariot of fire and horses of fire, and the calm, slow rising, by no external medium raised, of the Christ. It was fit that the mortal should be swept up into the unfamiliar heaven by the pomp of angels and the chariot of fire. It was fit that when Jesus ascended to His 'own calm home, His habitation from eternity,' there should be nothing visible ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and Jaikie will be in and out with orders. They've instructions to watch for the polis, and keep an eye on the Garplefit. It's a mortal long front to hold, but there's no other way. I must be in the hoose mysel'. Thomas Yownie's headquarters is the auld ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... (this mortal world), Sreedhara says, may mean "this form of royal saint that thou hast." ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... support in this heart-rending crisis through which she was passing: who should have been her cool-headed adviser, when feminine sympathy and sentiment tossed her hither and thither, between her love for her brother, who was far away and in mortal peril, and horror of the awful service which Chauvelin had exacted from her, in exchange ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... instruct him to discretion and doth teach him.' Neither can God mean us to sit idle with folded hands waiting to be fed by miracles. Would He have given to man reason, and skill, and the power of bettering his mortal condition by ten thousand instructions if He had not meant him to use those gifts? We find that, at the beginning, Adam is put into the garden, not to sit idle in it, nor to feed merely on the fruits which fall from the trees, as the dumb animals do, but to dress ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... forgiven Sir Francis; they accuse each other of plagiarism, a mortal hatred has sprung up between them, and thus Tschamalouri finished ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... fervently, 'nor of half her goodness. I sometimes think that no mortal could come nearer to our ideal of moral justice and purity. If it were not for her, I should long ago have gone to perdition, in one way or another. It's her strength, not my own, that has saved me. I daresay ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Sinfiotli in the boat, thinking to take a place beside it. But as soon as the body was placed in it the boat went from the land without sail or oars. Sigmund, looking on the old man who stood at the stern, knew that he was not of mortal men, but was Odin All-Father, the giver ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... a man who thinks because he is rich or prominent in some way, that he is smarter than the ordinary man in a lodge. Then is the time that the rest try to teach him humility, and show him that he is only a poor mortal. It does some men good to have their diamonds removed, their good clothes replaced by the tattered garments of the tramp, and then let them look at themselves and see how little they amount to. In some lodges a man is taught a useful ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... "So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by to-morrow about this time," has its counterpart in the lofty terror of the invocation which Lady Macbeth makes to the "spirits that wait on mortal thoughts,"— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... immortality for him who does not advance beyond a certain conscious and partly automatic intelligence on the physical plane? Does the gate of possibilities, does the door of opportunity close with this brief mortal life? To that question science as well as faith answers "no." The law of Evolution is the law of eternal possibility and opportunity. The spark of immortality—the divine spark, implanted by God, when he made man in His image,—this is ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... hardly out of the village before a seasonable toothache put him in mind of his pipe. Would smoking be offensive to me? he inquired. What could I say, having had an aching tooth before now myself? It was a pleasure almost beyond the luxury of breathing mountain air to see the misery of a fellow-mortal so quickly assuaged. The driver, a sturdy young Vermonter, was a man of different spirit. He had never used tobacco nor drunk a glass of "liquor," I heard him saying. Somebody had once offered him fifty cents ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... Dr. May with several men of the Queen's Own bearing Ensign McEachren from the field. They took him into a log house on the left side of the road, and Dr. May desired me to inform him that his wound was mortal. I told him so, and spent some time with him in religious service. I then left him with Rev. Mr. Burwash, whose parishioner he had been for some time previously, and went out to see if I could be useful elsewhere. It afterwards took up a position on a pile ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... ere he depart for the night. The look in the eyes of his dog, happy in that he is short-lived, is one of infinite sadness. All graciousness must henceforth be a sorrow: it has to go with the sunsets. That a thing must cease takes from it the joy of even an aeonian endurance—for its kind is mortal; it belongs to the nature of things that cannot live. The sorrow is not so much that it shall perish as that it could not live—that it is not in its nature a real, that is, an eternal thing. His children are shadows—their life a dance, a sickness, a corruption. The very element of ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... she filled 'er place And sot wid us to larn, But she done run 'er mortal race And ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... apology the boys felt themselves decidedly aggrieved that they were not at once ushered in to supper. Mr Ashford, however, being a mortal of only limited perception, required a good deal more information; and a painful and somewhat petulant cross-examination ensued, the result of which was that our heroes were informed they were not to be trusted, that both Mr and Mrs Ashford were disappointed ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... Canadian steamer, and why, having reached Canada, he should have resolved to postpone his voyage, and make a trial of the famous springs of St. Mary's, are mysteries hid in that book of Fate whose leaves no mortal may turn. We prate in our shallow wisdom about causes, but the most that we can trace is a short line of incidental occasions. A pamphlet which Doctor Eben found in the office of a hotel was apparently ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous |
