"Ill-starred" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... career was brilliant. In 1848 he entered the Ecole Normale, taking the second place in the annual competition for admission, Taine being first. Among his college contemporaries were Taine, Francisque, Sarcey, Challemel-Lacour and the ill-starred Prevost-Paradol. Of them all About was, according to Sarcey, the most highly vitalized, exuberant, brilliant and "undisciplined.'' At the end of his college career he joined the French school in Athens, but if we may believe his own account, it had never been his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... tempting fiend, for such is ambition to the female heart. Yes, you will spend the springtime of your life chasing a painted specter, and go down to a premature grave, disappointed and miserable. Poor child, it needs no prophetic vision to predict your ill-starred career! Already the consuming fever has begun its march. In far-distant lands, I shall have no tidings of you; but none will be needed. Perhaps when I travel home to die your feverish dream will have ended; or, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... fates were against us, as always in this ill-starred voyage. I, watching from my sand dune, saw a second figure emerge from the arroyo's mouth. It appeared to stagger as though hurt; and every eight or ten paces it stopped and rested in a bent-over position. The murky light was too dim ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... one—from the corpse of its ill-starred owner, he secreted it inside his tattered rag of a coat, and without ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... wall to your true lover? What bones, pray, did the Sieur Pyramus, that ill-starred Babylonish knight, make of a wall? did not his protestations slip through a chink, mocking at implacable granite and more implacable fathers? Most assuredly they did; and Pyramus was a pattern to all lovers. Thus ran the meditations of Master Francois as he ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... him like the side of a mountain falling on a hapless traveler, during a landslide season. And, Malone told himself, he had never possessed less hap in all of his ill-starred life. ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Jeremiah Horrocks devised, when pursuing Kepler's theory of planetary motion,—his intuition being, that the motions of the spheres might be represented by terrestrial movements. We may mention the observation which the ill-starred Horrocks makes, in a letter,[1] on the occasion of this experiment, as one of the sublimities of Science:—"It appears to me, however, that I have fallen upon the true theory, and that it admits of being illustrated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... chap, don't think that I don't appreciate what you have attempted for us; it was quite the most amazingly splendid thing I ever heard of! But now, with matters as they stand, there is nothing for us to do but withdraw. Let them have the mine; it is blood-stained and ill-starred. I wouldn't have a thing to do with it if they returned ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... only in the bottoms or in marshes is a rank herbage found. Across these desert regions the trails of the emigrant bands passing to the Far West have often been marked: first, in the east, by furniture and goods abandoned; further west, by the waggons and carts of the ill-starred travellers; then by the bones of oxen and horses bleaching on the plain; and, finally, by the graves, and sometimes the unburied bodies, of the emigrants themselves, the survivors having been compelled to push onwards with the remnant of their cattle to a more fertile region, where ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... spoken by Gaveston himself, are no less than the royal message bidding him return to 'share the kingdom' with his friend. From that point the first portion of the play easily unfolds: it deals with the strife, the brief triumphs and the bitter defeats which fill the eventful period of this ill-starred friendship. The actual crisis falls within the third act: it is marked by the murder of Gaveston and the resolution of the king at last to offer armed resistance to the tyranny of the barons. The oath by which he seals ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... have been relieved by comic incidents like those of Knight's escape from his guard; but there is very little record of anything except sorrow and suffering, danger and death. Certainly in the captivity of John Slover, another of Crawford's ill-starred and ill-willed crew of marauders, there were few gleams of happier chance to distinguish it from most histories of the sort. He had been captured by the Indians when a boy of eight years, and carried from his home in Virginia to their town of Sandusky, where he was adopted into their ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... sister's house to which fate has led him, where, ill-starred and unhappy like himself, this other child of Waelse's lives, in subjection to Hunding, her lord, who has come by her through some obscure commerce, and to whom she is no more than part of the ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... party. But in other cases he would not agree to the impulsive proposals of the Athenians, and he opposed them when, elated by their power and good fortune, they talked of recovering Egypt and attacking the seaboard of the Persian empire. Many, too, were inflamed with that ill-starred notion of an attempt on Sicily, which was afterwards blown into a flame by Alkibiades and other orators. Some even dreamed of the conquest of Etruria and Carthage, in consequence of the greatness which the Athenian empire had ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... behind them. The only one of whom I could hear anything was the terrible Stelzer, surnamed Lope. This fellow had taken advantage of the passing of Polish refugees, who had at that time already been driven over the frontier and were making their way through Germany to France, to disguise himself as an ill-starred champion of freedom, and he subsequently found his way to the Foreign Legion in Algeria. On the way home from the gathering, Degelow, whom I was to meet in a few weeks, proposed a 'truce.' This was a device which, if it was accepted, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... says he. "He prophesied there would be rain. He advised you not to undertake our ill-starred journey of—yesterday." There is distinct and very malicious meaning in the emphasis he throws into the ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... Conversations has put on record some delightful specimens of rural dialogue, culled chiefly from the labouring classes of Cheshire. And, rising in the social scale from the labourer to the farmer, what could be more lifelike than this tale of an ill-starred wooing? "My son Tom has met with a disappointment about getting married. You know he's got that nice farm at H——; so he met a young lady at a dance, and he was very much took up, and she seemed quite agreeable. So, as he heard she had Five Hundred, he wrote next day ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... Oh, thou ill-starred midnight ranger! dark, forlorn, mysterious stranger! Wildered wanderer from the eternal lightning on Time's stormy shore! Tell us of that world of wonder—of that famed unfading "Yonder!" Rend—oh rend the veil asunder! Let our doubts and fears ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... is left but blackened and smoking masses, the ruins of palaces, temples, and hospitals, and the seared and mutilated corpses of the dead who have been crushed by the falling walls or burnt in the flames. Then the invading hosts, stricken with dismay, fly from this fated and ill-starred city to darken the snows of Lithuania with their bodies; and of five hundred thousand men—the flower of French chivalry—but forty thousand cross the Beresina to tell the tale! Surely Moscow, like Jerusalem, hath "wept sore ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... habits and customs upon which that fabric, if designed for permanence, should be built—nor with the uneducated and fierce chivalry that longed for a restoration of the warrior empire—nor with the dull and arrogant bigots who connected all ideas of order and government with the ill-starred and worn-out dynasty of the Bourbons. In fact, GOOD SENSE was with him the principium et fons of all theories and all practice. And it was this quality that attached him to the English. His philosophy on this ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was beheaded for aspiring to the hand of Mary Stuart. This name was written boldly over the fireplace, and the girl turned from it with a sigh as the thought occurred to her that all who were connected in any manner with that ill-starred princess must meet with some ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... the colonists; that being considered as sufficient ground, by many of the ablest jurists and theologians of Spain, for selling them as slaves. On the return of the caravels, the Adelantado dispatched three hundred Indian prisoners, and three caciques. These formed the ill-starred cargoes about which Nino had made such absurd vaunting, as though the ships were laden with treasure; and which had caused such mortification, disappointment, and ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... at Farley Row, following the narrow road that runs behind the houses in the main street and the great, vacant stables and outbuildings of the White Lion Inn. And here, as though the immediate displeasures of this ill-starred day were insufficient, memory arose and recalled other displeasures of long ago. Recalled old Jackie Deeds lurching out of that same inn yard, empty pipe in mouth, greedy of alms. Recalled the old postboy's ugly morsel of profanity—"God ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the last revolt against the Martian government, an ill-starred revolt that ended almost before it started when the troopers turned loose the heavy heaters and swept the streets ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... a night's carouse. The dispersed Ciconians rallied, gathered together their allies, and attacking the revellers, defeated them with great slaughter, so that less than half of them escaped in their ships. Yet this was only the first of the many mishaps which befell the ill-starred Ulysses. So persistently did misfortune pursue him that the superstitious Greeks declared that he must have incurred the hatred of the sea-god, Neptune, who would not ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... hours after the events narrated in the preceding chapters that Mr. Sherlock Holmes assumed command of the Gehenna, which was nothing more nor less than the shadow of the ill-starred ocean steamship City of Chicago, which tried some years ago to reach Liverpool by taking the overland route through Ireland, fortunately without detriment to her passengers or crew, who had the pleasure of the experience of shipwreck without any of the discomforts of drowning. As will be remembered, ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... know not whither, outcast, fated At fortune's whim, A soul unholy, steep['e]d in Its mortal sin, Against the God who had created Me like to Him. 65 I am that soul ill-starred, unblest, That by nature shone in gleaming Robe of white, Of angel's beauty once possessed, Yea, loveliest, Like a ray refulgent streaming Filled with light. 66 And by my ill-omened fate, My atrocious devilries, Sins treasonous, More dead than death is now my state Bowed with this weight ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... fourteenth a little excitement was afforded us, to relieve us from the monotonous life which we are spending. A detachment of the regiment, commanded by Captain Griggs, made a bold dash upon an ill-starred portion of Mosby's band, near Aldie, where we captured three men and twenty horses and equipments, most of which had formerly belonged to our service, having been taken by these wily guerillas. Nearly every horse had the familiar "U. S." upon his shoulder; ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... where there are no cities full of people to offer me sacrifices or choice hecatombs? Nevertheless I had to come, for none of us other gods can cross Jove, nor transgress his orders. He says that you have here the most ill-starred of all those who fought nine years before the city of King Priam and sailed home in the tenth year after having sacked it. On their way home they sinned against Minerva, {52} who raised both wind and waves against them, so that all his brave ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... was thinking more of her heart-affair than his own, when she finally left him. Kenneth was heartily interested in the ill-starred romance. He bade her good-night with real affection ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... of Castro, the pope's own abominable son. For some months my father had been enjoying the shelter of the Perugians, and he had repaid their hospitality by joining them and bearing arms with them in the ill-starred blow they struck for liberty. They had been crushed in the encounter by the troops of Pier Luigi, and my father had ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... current of man's passion to her own deliberate gain—nay, ninety-nine out of a hundred women do it. But the majority only play for a suburban villa and a few hundred pounds a year; Queen Christina of Spain handled her cards for a throne and the continuance of an ill-starred dynasty. ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... her good-natured father, and the monkey-tricks of her little brothers; and she told all this with a simple grace and innocent frankness not a little alluring. Yet I was pretty near the truth; for, without being aware of it, she uniformly concluded with the one favourite theme: her ill-starred love. Still I went on acting the part of the UNAMIABLE, in the hope that she would take a spite against me. But whether from inadvertency or design, she would not take the hint, and I was at last fairly compelled to give up by sitting down contented ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... repetition, as everybody from the first welcomed her into it with the cordial confidence she merited. I have spread out this proceeding to your view, not altogether from its intrinsic interest, but because, perhaps, it affords the key to interpret the course of this ill-starred man in his wrangles with his congregation, and his terrible prominency in the awful scenes of the witchcraft delusion. He seemed to have had a love of excitement that was irrepressible, an all but insane passion ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... to us The rich gift of thy genius gave, to thee Nought else but misery. Ill-starred Torquato, whom thy song, So sweet, could not console, Nor melt the ice, to which The genial current of thy soul Was turned, by private envy, princely hate; And then, by Love abandoned, life's last dream! To thee, nought ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... its might and its omniscience, Lanyard doubted if the Pack had as yet identified Michael Lanyard with that ill-starred Marcel who once had been as intimate with this forgotten way as any skulking tom of ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... every outlet, hem him in Narrower and narrower, till at length ye force him— 55 Yes, ye,—ye force him, in his desperation, To set fire to his prison. Father! Father! That never can end well—it cannot—will not! And let it be decided as it may, I see with boding heart the near approach 60 Of an ill-starred unblest catastrophe. For this great Monarch-spirit, if he fall, Will drag a world into the ruin with him. And as a ship (that midway on the ocean Takes fire) at once, and with a thunder-burst 65 Explodes, and with itself shoots out its crew In smoke and ruin betwixt ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... every item of the show, the performer came round with an escallop shell into which the more generously disposed dropped small copper coins. The place was nearly always crowded with men in black frock-coats and crimson fezzes. Ill-starred Valentine Baker had been employed by the Sublime Porte to create an English gendarmerie, and this fact had brought a large number of English military men into Constantinople, who were anxious to enlist under ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... Pompey steals a march by getting a long term in Spain. Caesar demands as much and is refused by Pompey's friends. Then the storm breaks and Caesar comes back from Gaul to cross the Rubicon, and take all Italy in sixty days. Pompey, ambitious, ill-starred, fights losing battles everywhere. Murdered at last in Egypt, he, too, is dead, and Caesar stands alone, master of Rome and of the world. One year he ruled, and then they slew him; but no one of them that struck him ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... to the process, too; and romance—it is not an insipid chain of flowerbeds we have to follow, but the holy warriors of Saint Louis, the roistering braves of Henry the Great, the gallant Bourbons, the ill-starred Bonapartes. These as they passed have left their monuments; it may be only in a crumbling old chapel or ruined tower, but there they are, eloquent of days that are dead, of a spirit that lives forever staunch in the heart of the fervent ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... of my first unjust suspicions that Henrietta might not be strictly truthful, and I inquired with sincere interest as to the fate of her ill-starred family. ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... the background of his work. He is no idyllic posture-monger. The march of events as they drive forward the primitive earth-born men and women of Wessex, thrills one with the same weight of accumulated fatality, as—the comparison is tedious and pedantic—the fortunes of the ill-starred houses of Argos and Thebes. One peculiarity of Mr. Hardy's method must finally be mentioned, as giving their most characteristic quality to these formidable scenes—I mean his preference for form over color. Who can forget those desolately emphatic human protagonists silhouetted ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... But in this ill-starred cathedral an inept precentor gave out, by way of liturgical canticles, a perfect menagerie of outlandish tunes, which, let loose on Sunday, seemed to scamper like marmosets up the pillars and under the roof. And the artless voices of the choir-boys were drilled ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... a most marvellous thing, for which he could conceive of no better name than CLICKMITOAD. After recovering from their surprise and terror, this 'bold peasant' and his neighbours, all armed with pokers and other formidable weapons, crept up to the ill-starred ticker, and smashed ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... a licentiate in theology; but shortly after his promotion, he quitted his native country, and was for some years a wanderer amongst the splendid ruins of Italy. The treasures of art which mock the nakedness of this ill-starred country were to him what they are ever to the mind of the artist,—they revealed a new world. Unlike many others, however, Kinkel was not bewildered by the beauty which so suddenly burst upon his view. He was not surfeited. His enthusiasm, tempered by the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... the old Camaralzaman, Ayoub, the Slave of Love, or the Calendars, Blind-eyed and ill-starred royal scions, Charm us in age as ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Here we passed the tiny group of houses called Pitsani, little dreaming that three months later it would become famous as the place where the Matabililand police were marshalled, and from which they started on their ill-starred march into the Transvaal, whose bare and forbidding hills we saw a few miles away to the east. Presently the ground becomes rougher, and the track winds among and under a succession of abrupt kopjes (pronounced "koppies"), mostly of granitic or gneissose rock. One is surprised that a ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... chariot still stood the ill-starred hero. Then, just as his team was turning, he let loose the left rein unawares, and struck the farthest pillar, breaking the spokes right at his axles' center. Slipping out of his chariot, he was dragged along, with reins dissevered. His frightened colts tore headlong ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... realization of Miss Jane's rapidly failing strength; and the probability of her death, which a year ago would have been entirely endurable as an avenue to wealth, now appeared the direst catastrophe that had yet threatened her ill-starred life. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the Hornet, having captured the British brig Peacock, on his return was placed in command of the Chesapeake, the ill-starred frigate which struck her flag to the Leopard off the coast of Virginia. While refitting his vessel at Boston, a challenge was sent him to fight the Shannon, then lying off the harbor. Lawrence, although part of his crew were discharged, and the unpaid remainder ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... sorceress—the French as an inspired heroine; while the wise on both sides considered her as neither the one nor the other, but a tool used by the celebrated Dunois to play the part which he assigned her. The Duke of Bedford, when the ill-starred Jeanne fell into his hands, took away her life in order to stigmatize her memory with sorcery and to destroy the reputation she had acquired among the French. The mean recurrence to such a charge against such ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... 2, 1822. Ten days later Gullah Jack suffered death on the gallows also. Upon an enormous gallows, erected on the lines near Charleston, twenty-two of the black martyrs to freedom were executed on the 22nd day of the same ill-starred month. ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... searching. He had not felt his age since he had bought his nephew Soames' ill-starred house and settled into it here at Robin Hill over three years ago. It was as if he had been getting younger every spring, living in the country with his son and his grandchildren—June, and the little ones of the second marriage, Jolly and Holly; living down here out ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... banquet given in honour of envoys from China; and the beauty of the bauble having thus been noised abroad, Ne no Omi was required to show it at the palace. It was immediately recognized by the Empress, sister of the ill-starred prince, and Ne no Omi, having confessed his crime, was put to death, all the members of his uji being reduced to the rank of serfs. One moiety of them was formed into a hereditary corporation which was organized under the name of Okusakabe, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... resentment. His isolation was menaced. He regarded the Briton as an "Uitlander"—an outsider—and treated him as an undesirable alien. In the Transvaal and the Orange Free State he was denied the rights that are accorded to law-abiding citizens in other countries. Hence the Jameson Raid, which was an ill-starred protest against the narrow, copper-riveted Boer rule, and later the final and sanguinary show-down in the Boer War, which ended ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... the ill-starred Guelph sympathies of Florence for a foreign prince, which familiarized it with foreign intervention, came all the disasters which followed. But who does not admire the people which was wrought up by its venerated ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... he has had his chance in all fairness and has failed. I say that during the years of this ill-starred experiment you have fought valiantly to make him win. I have, at least, not interfered by act or a word. If he had not arranged this meeting I should never have done so—and since he is responsible for our being brought together now he ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... knew the place; for by nearly starving there, years before, with the others of Governor la Barre's ill-starred expedition, he had contributed to ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... astounding news, indeed! The commanding officer of that ill-starred garrison could not himself have been more astonished, when he was unexpectedly summoned to surrender by an enemy who appeared to start out of the earth, than was le Bourdon, at hearing this intelligence. To western notions, ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... guessed that I wish to meet him. For I can not deny it. I am looking out for an opportunity to repair my clumsy mistake and show myself in a less unfavorable light than I did at that ill-starred visit. And she is the reason why ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... up to Oxford with a "stock of erudition which might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy might have been ashamed." Both erudition and ignorance were left pretty well undisturbed during his short and ill-starred university career. At Lausanne he found himself, for the first time, in possession of the means of successful study, good health, calm, books, and tuition, up to a certain point: that point did not reach very far. The good Pavillard, an excellent man, for whom Gibbon ever ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... we encamped on this ill-starred spot; while the deserters, whose case admitted of no delay rode rapidly forward. On the day following, striking the St. Joseph's trail, we turned our horses' heads toward Fort Laramie, then about seven hundred miles to ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... itself upon the attention of any serious student England and Ireland have from the commencement of their ill-starred connection been countries standing on different levels or at different stages of civilization; they have moreover been countries impelled by the force of circumstances towards a different development. ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... suitor now gave the news to his lady-love. Those two horrid men had at last been found guilty, and punished with all the severity of the law. "Poor fellows," said Lady Eustace,—"poor Mr. Benjamin! Those ill-starred jewels have been almost as unkind ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... individuals with their gimlet are there. Ill-starred pair of individuals! For the result of it all is that Patriotism, fretting itself, in this state of nervous excitability, with hypotheses, suspicions and reports, keeps questioning these two distracted ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... lit the gas in Mr. Sleuth's sitting-room and looked about her with a fearful glance. Somehow everything seemed to speak to her of the lodger, there lay her Bible and his Concordance, side by side on the table, exactly as he had left them, when he had come downstairs and suggested that ill-starred expedition to his landlord's daughter. She took a few steps forward, listening the while anxiously for the familiar sound of the click in the door which would tell her that the lodger had come back, and then she went over to the window ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... ancestors of that negro, before the days of the Pharaohs, laying the foundations of your religion and locating the stars in heaven. At that time your forbears were gibbering cave savages, sharpening bones and gnawing raw flesh. When you see the negro on the opposite seat, the ill-starred one who has gone down in the human race while we have gone up, think about him, study him, speculate as to his ultimate end—and your own. Don't merely say to yourself, "That's a plain negro," and go on ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... Left him, though already parted by strange fate, from realm and heirship. Oh, that destiny he girds not—strength it gave him, hero-courage, Added to his lofty spirit, touches of nobler feeling— 'Tis that she, ill-starred one, leaves him! takes the hand so wrinkled Of that old man, Seville's conqueror! Into the night, along the river, Abensaid now forth rushes: Loudly to the rocky limits, Echo bears his lamentations. "Faithless maid, more faithless art ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... arrival in the old country, to arrange the plans of the impending outbreak. How their labours eventuated, and how the Fenian insurrection of March, '67, resulted, it is unnecessary to explain; it is enough for our purpose to state that for several months after that ill-starred movement was crushed, Colonel Kelly continued to reside in Dublin, moving about with an absence of disguise and a disregard for concealment which astonished his confederates, but which, perhaps, contributed in no slight degree to the success with which ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... previous thrift, I cannot say that I was ever practically embarrassed. The embarrassment, the distress, the agony, were all for my unhappy father at home in Muskegon, struggling for life and fortune against untoward chances, returning at night from a day of ill-starred shifts and ventures, to read and perhaps to weep over that last harsh letter from his only child, to which he lacked the courage ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... that music is her requiem, and his too! For after those vows had been pronounced, and the black veil had shut out hope for ever, a haggard youth was released from confinement, of whose few and ill-starred years the turbid waters of the Pasig ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... Sandwich Islands it has been employed with no small success in the treatment of scrofulous affections, and in combating the ravages of a disease for whose frightful inroads the ill-starred inhabitants of that group are indebted to their foreign benefactors. But the tenants of the Typee valley, as yet exempt from these inflictions, generally employ the 'arva' as a minister to social ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... short, Jarl, the descendant of the superstitious old Norsemen, was full of old Norse conceits, and all manner of Valhalla marvels concerning the land of goblins and goblets. No wonder then, that with this catastrophe in prospect, he again entreated me to quit the ill-starred craft, carrying off nothing from her ghostly hull. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... An ill-starred town in England seems to have enjoyed so unenviable a reputation for some centuries for the folly and stupidity of its inhabitants, that I am induced to send you the following Query (with the reasons on which it is founded) in the hope that some of your readers may be able ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... (replied Socrates). In the event, for instance, of some ill-starred expedition or of some disastrous voyage or other incident of the sort, of which veritably there are enough to spare—when those who owing to their health and strength take a part in the affair are lost; whilst those who were ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... us have no scandal, no violence," cried Philometor anxiously. "The best way would be for me to write to Asclepiodorus, and beg him in a friendly manner to entrust this girl—Ismene or Irene, or whatever the ill-starred child's name is—for a few days to you, Cleopatra, for your pleasure. I can offer him a prospect of an addition to the gift of land I made today, and which fell far short ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... openly, that not a few of the women began to think that their return together was something more than a coincidence, and that Lucien and Louise, loving with all their hearts, had been separated by a double treason. Pique, very likely, had brought about this ill-starred match with Chatelet. And a reaction set in against ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... of any note occurred in the family until the return of that ill-starred man, the Master. But I have to place here a second extract from the memoirs of Chevalier Burke, interesting in itself, and highly necessary for my purpose. It is our only sight of the Master on his Indian ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... loyal and lofty soul, blameless wife, devoted and pathetic adherent to the fallen fortunes of her ill-starred father? ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... replied she gravely: 'I would not be married in winter—in December, at least,' she added, with a shudder—for in that month had occurred both the ill-starred marriage that had bound her to her former husband, and the terrible death that released her—'and therefore I said another year, ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... the experience of many years in the public life of France, in the Representative Chamber of the Orleans Monarchy, and in the Legislature of the Republic,—delivered for the benefit of readers far removed by time and distance, during the latter months of the rickety infancy of that ill-starred Government and the first period of the Second Empire. Tocqueville spoke from a point of vantage, such as few other men have attained, upon a theme which he had studied profoundly in youth, and upon which Fate had ever since been writing elaborate commentaries. He spoke with a ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... toward the wall. While planning for the pantomime the boys had arranged the lid so that it did not close, yet the opening was not perceptible to those seated below. Thus there had been no danger of Anne meeting the fate of the ill-starred Ginevra, the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... gathered a few desperate patriots, and in open hostility was defying constituted authority with the intention of calling his country to arms. The news of Eckmuehl had destroyed his chances of success, and he was soon to end his gallant but ill-starred career in a final stand at Stralsund, whither he had retreated. He was stigmatized by Napoleon as a "sort of robber, who had covered himself with crimes in the last Prussian campaign." In repeated public utterances the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... thought, perhaps, if I waited a few hours where I was, he would be sure to rejoin me, and we could then return to Port Jervis without Sarah's son to be sure; but, otherwise, no worse off than we were when we set out on this ill-starred ...
— Seven Wives and Seven Prisons • L.A. Abbott
... blue and brave blood, is perhaps one of her characteristics, as is many another well born woman's. She had a long list of worthy ancestors in colonial and revolutionary days, and the McNeils, and General Knox, figure largely in her genealogy, as well as the hero who killed the ill-starred Paugus. ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... statecraft. Yet what Emperor could escape immortality who had Tu Fu and Li Po for contemporaries, Ch'ang-an for his capital, and T'ai Chen of a thousand songs to wife? Poet and sportsman, mystic and man of this world, a great polo player, and the passionate lover of one beautiful woman whose ill-starred fate inspired Po Chu-i, the tenderest of all their singers,** Ming Huang is more to literature than to history. Of his life and times the poets are faithful recorders. Tu Fu in 'The Old Man of Shao-Ling' ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... Unbridled sensuousness surges through the songs rising to the chambers of noble ladies. Kabbalistic passion glows in the mysterious love of the Jew. The German minstrel sings of love's sweetness and pain, of summer and its delights, of winter and its woes, now of joy and happiness, again of ill-starred fortunes. And what is the burden of the exiled Hebrew's song? Mysterious allusions, hidden in a tangle of highly polished, artificial, slow-moving rhymes, glorify, not a sweet womanly presence, but a fleeting vision, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... many splendid compositions seem to have missed fire through sheer bad luck. To go no further than Sir Arthur Sullivan, some of his finest and most important works have had an ill-starred existence, and even several of his best songs, though introduced to the public under the most favourable auspices, have not "taken on." Sullivan's splendid ditty "Love laid his sleepless head," though sung by Mr. Edward Lloyd all over the ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... fortnight, since the ill-starred affair of Nogent and the almost incredible discovery he had made that Lady Beltham was still alive, Fandor had not seen Juve. He had been to the Surete a number of times, but Juve ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... rarely seen a topographical panorama of such diversified character: it has reminiscences of history and poetry to lead us through the retrospect of chivalrous ages, princely contests for crowns that rarely sat lightly on their wearers, and the last flickering hopes of defeated ambition and ill-starred fortune. Yet, how powerfully, not to say painfully, are these pages in the chronicles of human actions, when contrasted with the broad volume of nature, as spread before us in this picture. Alas! what is the majesty of the mightiest of the kings that dwelt ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... fallen on the floor," said he to himself, "or I left it lying on my chair. Or perhaps I have it about me—I am so absent-minded!" He searched himself with hurried movements, but did not find the ill-starred purse. His memory cruelly retraced the fatal truth, minute by minute. He distinctly saw the purse lying on the green cloth; but then, doubtful no longer, he excused Adelaide, telling himself that persons in misfortune should not be so hastily condemned. There was, of course, ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... gentleman in black ... no one durst say black was his eye; while I ... only wanting that ceremony, am made a Sunday's laughing-stock, and abused like a pickpocket. I was well aware, though, that if my ill-starred fortune got the least hint of my connubial wish, my scheme would go to nothing. To prevent this I determined to take my measures with such thought and fore-thought, such cautions and precautions, that all the malignant planets in the hemisphere should be unable ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Brynhild, encased in a complete armor, lying in a death-like sleep, to which she had been condemned by Odin. Sigurd woke her by opening her corselet, fell in love with her, promised to marry her, but deserted her for Gudrun. This ill-starred union was the cause ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Mexico, I met him in New Orleans, in company with that ill-starred man, General Shields, of Illinois, and who, Irishman as he was, fell fighting to fasten upon the South the fetters she now wears. We had not conversed ten minutes before, taking my arm, he walked apart from his visitors and Shields, and commenced to converse upon the ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Mr. Lisle, that I shall do as I please with my own servants, and yours too, as you will find, and have found, I should think. Moreover, I am not going to be lectured by you as if I were a child"—Mrs. Lisle flung herself out of the room, to vent her bad humor upon whatever ill-starred persons ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... to Fort St. Louis on the Illinois, reaching France via Quebec. In this expedition France took possession of Texas, nor did she ever relinquish the claim till, in 1763, the whole of Louisiana west of the Mississippi was ceded to Spain, La Salle's ill-starred attempt led later to the planting of French colonies by D'Iberville at Biloxi Island, in Mobile Bay, soon abandoned, and at Poverty Point, on the Mississippi; and still later to the settlement of New Orleans and vicinity. Growth in these parts was slow, however. So late as 1713 ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... the Polos with friendly messages for the potentates of Europe, including the King of England. They appear to have sailed from the port of Zayton (as the Westerns called T'swan-chau or Chin-cheu in Fo-kien) in the beginning of 1292. It was an ill-starred voyage, involving long detentions on the coast of Sumatra, and in the South of India, to which, however, we are indebted for some of the best chapters in the book; and two years or upwards passed before they arrived at their destination in Persia.[19] The three hardy Venetians survived all ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Add to it the ill-starred influence he had always attempted to exert over Johnny and Jane (he had, even in Oxford days, brought out their worst side) his quarrels with Oliver in the press, his unconcealed hatred of what he was pleased to call ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... the voice, "I know not who you are, or how you come to be on board this most ill-starred ship. Your voice, however, has a reassuring tone in it, and I would risk opening my door to you if I could; but I cannot, for—like all the rest of the passengers, I believe—I am bound and absolutely helpless, and I think that, if you will take the trouble ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... the tapestry she worked, the furniture she brought over from France, some mementoes of her unwise marriage, the little room in which she sat at supper with Rizzio and three or four friends when the assassins rushed in through a secret door, stabbed her ill-starred favorite, and dragged him bleeding through her bed-room into an outer audience chamber, and there left him to die, his life-blood oozing out from fifty-six wounds. The partition still stands which the ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... were her eyes for the sight of it, the sight of the simple name "Agnes Bibby" at the head of her first signed story—the story that was to take away the reproach from the name that the ill-starred interview had brought! ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... the stricken man poured forth his tale, and the Red Cross Knight learned that once he was happy and free, like other men, till on an ill-starred day he and a friend had fallen in with a cursed wight who called himself 'Despair,' who had plucked all hope from their breasts, and bade them seek death, the one with a rope, the other with a knife. His friend, ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... not for thought. It is necessarily assumed that, in some way or other, the gap between things and thought is got over by knowledge. How the connection is brought about may not be known; but, that there is the connection between real things and true thoughts, no one can well deny. It is an ill-starred perversity which leads men to deny such a connection, merely because they have not found ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... were almost green at his death, sought to chase away the recollections of his ill-starred splendour, by rides and walks in the island, and conversation with his suite in his garden; and Louis XVIII. after his restoration to the throne of France, passed few such happy days as his exile at Hartwell, which though ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... ill-starred concurrence of circumstances, which might have palliated any excesses either of temper or conduct into which they drove him, it was, after all, I am persuaded, to no such serious causes that the unfortunate alienation, which so soon ended in disunion, is to be traced. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... restlessly. I did not need my sight to pace the poop of my ill-starred first command with perfect assurance. Every square foot of her decks was impressed indelibly on my brain, to the very grain and knots of the planks. Yet, all of a sudden, I fell clean over something, landing full length on ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... not permit his master to forget the three promised ass-colts; so Don Quixote wrote an order to his niece in the notebook of the ill-starred Cardenio. ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... feet, what am I to say? I might dilate upon the beauties of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or Edmund Spenser's immortal Faerie Queene, or Shakespeare's tender women, the Juliet we love, the Rosalind who is ever in our hearts, the Beatrice, the Imogen, gentle Ophelia, or kindly but ill-starred Desdemona, or the great heroes of tragedy, Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello, or I might ask you to hear a word about Ben Jonson, "rare Ben," or poor Philip Massinger who died a stranger, of the Puritan Milton, the great Catholic Dryden, or Swift, or Bunyan, Defoe, Addison, Pope and Burke and ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... Touches. The chevalier was much enamored of the celebrated authoress, who had great influence over him, did not accept him and turned him over to Mme. de Rochefide. Beatrix played with the heir of the house of Guenic the same ill-starred comedy carried through by Antoinette de Langeais with regard to Montriveau. Calyste married Mlle. Sabine de Grandlieu, and took the title of baron after his father's death. He lived in Paris on Faubourg Saint-Germain, ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... so often to Mount Dunstan—oftener than not. Youth should not know such awakening, he was well aware; but he had known it sometimes even when he had been a child, and since his return from his ill-starred struggle in America, the dull and reluctant facing of the day had become a habit. Yet on the morning after his talk with his friend—the curious, uplifted, unpractical talk which had seemed to hypnotise him—he knew when he opened his eyes to the light that he had ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ambition. The United Irishmen favored the invasion, which the Volunteers had been formed to repel. The feud between moral and physical force broke out. The failure of the sterner policy in 1798 did not daunt Emmet from his ill-starred attempt in 1803. He combined Lord Edward's chivalry with some abilities worthy of Tone, but he failed. The failure he redeemed by a swan-song from the dock and a demeanor on the scaffold which have ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... Hayes had caused the banns to be published at the town of Worcester; judging rightly that in a great town they would cause no such remark as in a solitary village, and thither he conducted his lady. O ill-starred John Hayes! whither do the dark Fates lead you? O foolish Doctor Dobbs, to forget that young people ought to honour their parents, and to yield to silly Mrs. Dobbs's ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this dismal epoch, was the ruin of the Louisbourg expedition. The greater part of La Motte's fleet reached its destination a full month before that of Holbourne. Had the reverse taken place, the fortress must have fallen. As it was, the ill-starred attempt, drawing off the British forces from the frontier, where they were needed most, did for France more than she could have done for herself, and gave Montcalm and Vaudreuil the opportunity to execute a scheme which they had nursed since ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... the French service; was sent with a party who vainly attempted to relieve Chandarnagar, and was one of the small party who followed Law when that officer took command of those, who refused to share in the surrender of the place to the British. After the capture of his ill-starred chief, Reinhardt (whom we shall in future designate by his Indian sobriquet of " Sumroo," or Sombre) took service under Gregory, or Gurjin ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene |
