"Lurid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the answer, and there was lurid disappointment in the face of the squat figure beyond ...
— The Day of the Dog • George Barr McCutcheon
... stand in it; but that was on the other side of the hill, and the fire might surround us before we could gain its banks. We could barely see the dark outline of the hill ahead, the darkness being increased by the contrast of the lurid flames raging behind us. We dashed across the more open space, where the grass was for some reason of less height than in her parts. Here many of the animals which had passed us, paralysed by fear, had halted as if expecting that they would be ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston
... personally identified and of which some knowledge is essential to an understanding of his acts and character. Others are brought into prominence only as they are associated with the chief actor in the great drama. Many of them are disappearing,—fading into the smoky and lurid background. But that colossal central figure, playing one of the grandest roles ever set upon the stage of human life, becomes more impressive as ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... ascending toward heaven, and sometimes precipitated upon the earth, struggled, as it were, in mutual conflict, whirling in circles with intense velocity, and accompanied by winds, impetuous beyond all conception; while flashes of awful brilliancy, and murky, lurid flames incessantly broke forth. From these confused clouds, furious winds, and momentary fires, sounds issued, of which no earthquake or thunder ever heard could afford the least idea; striking such awe into all, that it was ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... locomotion. As during the season of courtship it becomes edged with bright colours, there can hardly be a doubt that it is a masculine ornament. In many species the body presents strongly contrasted, though lurid tints, and these become more vivid during the breeding-season. The male, for instance, of our common little newt (Triton punctatus) is "brownish-grey above, passing into yellow beneath, which in the spring becomes a rich bright orange, marked everywhere with round dark spots." The edge of the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... hope, because he never felt it; and when, in the summer and autumn of 1792, the Revolution in France assumed a bloody and ferocious character, and the noble goal toward which his friend the marquis had so enthusiastically pressed was utterly lost sight of in the midst of the lurid smoke of a self-constituted tyranny, as bad in feature and act as the foulest on history's records, he was disgusted, and with the conservative party, then fortunately holding the reins of executive and legislative power, he resolved that the government of the United ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... from June 23rd to July 20th inclusive, during which period the wind varied to every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun, at noon, looked as blank as a clouded moon, and shed a rust-coloured ferruginous light on the ground, and floors of rooms; but was particularly lurid and blood-coloured at rising and setting. All the time the heat was so intense that butchers' meat could hardly be eaten on the day after it was killed; and the flies swarmed so in the lanes and hedges that they rendered ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... it necessary to stand and act the story she is telling. Her memory is amazing and she turns with equal readiness to copious quotations from the Scripture and other pious observations to amusing but wholly unprintable anecdotes of her somewhat lurid past. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Mississippi Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... was a boat-house where orderlies from the New Zealand hospital in Amiens used to get skiffs for an hour's rowing, leaning on their oars to look at the picture of the cathedral rising like a mirage beyond the willows and the encircling water, with fleecy clouds above its glittering roof, or lurid storm-clouds with the red glow of sunset beneath their wings. In the dusk or the darkness there was silence along the banks but for a ceaseless throbbing of distant gun-fire, rising sometimes to a fury of drumming when the French soixante-quinze was at work, outside ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... birth-place of Nelson or the death-scene of Simon de Montfort strike a strange chill to the soul? I can tell quite easily what this dim aversion to tourists and their antiquities does not arise from—at least, in my case. Whatever my other vices (and they are, of course, of a lurid cast), I can lay my hand on my heart and say that it does not arise from a paltry contempt for the antiquities, nor yet from the still more paltry contempt for the tourists. If there is one thing more dwarfish and pitiful than irreverence for the past, ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... the night was coming on. Then I flung open the port of my cabin, which had been closed to exclude the rain, and, poking my head out, saw that the sky was still overcast with enormous masses of blackish, lurid-looking cloud which, as I watched, I saw were working slowly in a strange writhing fashion, as though agitated by ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... the 23rd of August, at daybreak, some heavy black clouds suddenly obscured the sky, which just before was quite fair. And the sun was so wholly concealed that it was impossible to see what was near or even quite close, so completely did a thick lurid darkness settle on the ground, preventing the least use of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... were given in Latin, and in truth all learning was locked up in this tongue. But astrology and the theological fairy-tales of the people floated free. They were a part of the vagrant hagiology of the roadside preachers, who with lurid imaginations said the things they thought would help carry conviction home and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... the ordinary forms of splintered ice. There seemed a curious expression about all their outlines—a perpetual resemblance to living features, distorted and scornful. Myriads of deceitful shadows, and lurid lights, played and floated about and through the pale-blue pinnacles, dazzling and confusing the sight of the traveller; while his ears grew dull and his head giddy with the constant gush and roar of the concealed ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... chilly rains from time to time; and the whole air seemed to have taken on something sharper than a chill. It was as if a door had been opened in the northern corner of the heavens; letting in something that changed all the face of the earth. Great grey clouds with haloes of lurid pearl and pale-green were coming up from the plains or the sea and spreading over the towers of the city. In the middle of the moving mass of grey vapours was a splash of paler vapour; a wan white cloud whose white seemed somehow more ominous ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... to speak for any of his colleagues? If so, then at that very early stage of our Lord's ministry there was a conviction beginning to work in that body of ecclesiastics which casts a very lurid light on their subsequent proceedings. It was a good long while after, when Jesus Christ's attitude towards them had been a little more clearly made out than it was at the beginning, that they said officially, 'As for this fellow, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... that fell thickly on the moist forehead. As he dreamed the sky grew ghastly as the dead. The night crouched as if in terror along the edges of the river, beneath the bridges and among the masonry and the barges aground, and in the ebbing water a lurid reflection trailed ominously. And as the day ascended, the lamps dwindled from red to white, and beyond the dark night of the river, spires appeared upon faint ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... the north of Africa the lurid phantom of the Arabian crescent, one horn reaching to the Bosphorus and one pointing beyond the Pyrenees. For a while it seemed that the portentous meteor would increase to the full, and that all Europe ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Don Annunzio himself that evening, Rita found him far less guarded than his wife in his expression of patriotic zeal. He echoed her saying, that every Mambi in the country knew where to come when he wanted anything; and he went on to draw lurid pictures of what he would do to the Gringos if ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... burst down in torrents,—the thunder roared over their heads,—and the black, lurid sky, looked as if it contained a second deluge. Flora shivered with cold and exhaustion, and bent more closely over the child, to protect her as much as possible, by the exposure of her own person, from the drenching rain ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... the limbs of the pilgrim. He saw his form dilate and expand in height and in breadth, until his head seemed to touch the pale crescent moon, and his bulk shut out from view all beyond itself. He saw his eyes firing and flaming like globes of lurid light, and he saw his hair and beard converted into one mass of living flame. The fiend stood revealed ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... an inside presentiment that made it some time before he could even consent to listen to it. But at last, when the others reminded him that it was a noble act, and for the good of Albert's uncle, he let them explain the horrid scheme in all its lurid parts. ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... learned a hard lesson. She saw in human beings not their achievements, but their possibilities. Therefore she quickened repentance by a positive method, not by morbid analysis of evil, not by lurid pictures of the consequences of sin, but by filling the soul with glowing visions of that holiness which to see is to long for. She never despaired of quickening in even the most degraded that flame of "holy desire" which is the earnest of true holiness to be. We find her impatient of mint ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... miserable three quarters of an hour. The kitchen seemed to wear a strange desolate look, though seen in its wonted bright light of fire and candles, and in itself nice and cheerful as usual. Fleda looked at it also through that vague fear which casts its own lurid colour upon everything. The very flickering of the candle blaze seemed of ill omen, and her grandfather's empty chair stood a signal of pain to little Fleda whenever she looked at it. She sat still, in submissive ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... scintillated with a lurid sinister light, as if filled with fire, ready to blaze out. In the American newspapers he had often seen his name coupled with such opprobrious phrases, but never without feeling savagely wrathful. And not ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... a lurid stain Shone on the dusty floor, a dismal token, Projected from the casement's painted pane, Where all ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... belonged to the fierce class of anti-slavery men who were inspired by humane sympathy with the slave and righteous abhorrence of slavery, but also by hatred of the slaveholder. What he himself seemed to enjoy most in his talk was his sardonic humor, which he made play upon men and things like lurid freaks of lightning. He shot out such sallies with a fearfully serious mien, or at least he accompanied them with a grim smile which was not at all like Abraham Lincoln's hearty laugh at ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... afterwards described by William Black in his "Macleod of Dare." As we sailed across the Sound in the evening from Oban to Auchincraig, the sky was full of torn rain-clouds flying swiftly and catching the lurid hues from the sunset, whilst the distant mountains and cliffs of Mull were of that dark purple which seems melancholy and funereal in landscape, though it is one of the richest colors in the world. It was dangerous weather for sailing, being very squally, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... below were but muffled sounds at the pit's mouth; but, alas! these muffled sounds, and one flash of lurid flame that shot up into the air, told the tale of horror to every experienced pitman and his wife, and the cry of a whole village went up ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... and gave a deeper purple to the broad outline of heathy mountains which surrounded this desolate spot. The Dwarf sate watching the clouds as they lowered above each other in masses of conglomerated vapours, and, as a strong lurid beam of the sinking luminary darted full on his solitary and uncouth figure, he might well have seemed the demon of the storm which was gathering, or some gnome summoned forth from the recesses of the earth by ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... for want of some more interesting view of character and manners. We long to take him by the hand and show him finer lights—eyes of but meaner range, after all, being adequate to the gape at the vertical business blocks and the lurid sky-clamour for more dollars. We feel in a manner his sensibility wasted and would fain turn it on to the capture of deeper meanings. But we must leave him to himself and to youth's facility of wonder; he is amused, beguiled, struck on the whole with as ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... than once Grandon is lifted from his feet. It seems as if the awful struggle went on for hours while the fire is creeping stealthily about with its long blue and scarlet tongues. He hears a crackling up-stairs, it grows lurid within, and he remembers stories of men struggling with fiends. There floats over his sight the image of Irene Lepelletier; of Violet, sweet and sad-eyed. Will it be too late for her to go to happiness? Will Pauline Murray's love be only a green withe binding the Samson of these ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... then went to other places, endeavoring to buy scrap copper, trolley wire, electric cable, anything made of the ruddy metal, but found none for sale in quantities large enough to be of any use. After several hours of fruitless search, he returned home in a towering rage and explained to Crane, in lurid language, his failure to secure the copper. ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... with passionate enthusiasm in a broad cataract of flames, now bending down low to feed on the green bushes, devouring acres of them at a breath, now towering high in the air as if looking abroad to choose a way, then stooping to feed again,—the lurid flapping surges and the smoke and terrible rushing and roaring hiding all that is gentle and orderly in the work. But as soon as the deep forest was reached, the ungovernable flood became calm like a torrent entering a lake, creeping and spreading beneath the trees where the ground was level ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... yawned all round them. At last, however, they reached the mouth of the crater, and, crawling cautiously to the very edge, peered down into its gloomy depths. At the bottom of the abyss, which seemed to them to go down into the very heart of the earth, a lurid flame burned sullenly, sending up a sulphureous steam, which cooling as it rose, fell again in showers upon the sides of the cavity. Into this one of the brave explorers had to descend, and when they had cast lots the choice fell upon Montano himself. His preparations ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... like this when the first glow of joy had suffused his life; and then had come that night, that wonderful night, which began, in the lurid fire, and ended foully with Preston's words. Here was the key: she too loved, as he had, and this feeling which had drawn them together from the very moment when he had looked from the helpless form on the hospital chair to her had grown, surging up in her heart as ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... endurance by one practitioner, allegiance would be transferred to some new claimant of occult powers, and the breaking of the monopoly of magic would be followed by a temporary lightening of the burdens. Some of the most lurid of Alaskan legends deal with the thaumaturgic contests of rival medicine-men, and one judges that sleight of hand and even hypnotic suggestion were cultivated to a ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... presently one light began to fill a room so brilliantly that she knew a lamp must have been overturned and set the house on fire. Dunke burst from the front door, scarce a dozen paces from her. There was a kind of lurid fury in his eyes. He was as ravenously fierce as a wolf balked of its kill. She chose that ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... moment the rally of the foe, endeavoured rapidly to form themselves into some kind of order, the flame continued to spread till the whole heavens were illumined. By its light, cuirass and helmet glowed, as in the furnace, and the armed men seemed rather like life-like and lurid meteors than human forms. The city of Granada was brought near to them by the intensity of the glow; and, as a detachment of cavalry spurred from the camp to meet the anticipated surprise of the Paynims, they saw, upon the walls ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in 1848 as secretary to a deputy from Guadaloupe. At that time he was just twenty-five, energetic and ambitious, with considerable ability and cultivation. Being poor, however, he accepted a dependent position which insured his expenses paid to Paris, that marvellous city, the heat of whose lurid flames extends so far over the world that it attracts even the moths from ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... apparent that the entire strangeness of our circumstances and surroundings—great loss of weight, attenuated but highly oxygenated air, consequent exaggeration of the results of muscular effort, rapid development of weird plants from obscure spores, lurid sky—was exciting my companion unduly. On the moon his character seemed to deteriorate. He became impulsive, rash, and quarrelsome. In a little while his folly in devouring some gigantic vesicles and his consequent intoxication led to our capture by the Selenites—before ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... engaged. The captain, aided by the passenger, was lashing the throat of the gaff down to its place, when a heavy bolt of lightning, accompanied at the same instant by a terrific peel of thunder, struck the main-royal mast-head, and leaped down the mast in a lurid current of fire. At the throat of the main-boom it was divided, part of it following the mast down into the cabin and hold, and the rest darting off on the spar, where the captain, the passenger, and three men were at work on the spanker. Every one of them was struck down, ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic
... was too late. The barrel of the revolver gleamed blue in the lurid glare of a big H.E. which burst behind them, and Dennis had already pressed ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... The only writing on the paper was the legend, THE DARK OF THE MOON SOCIETY. Above it there were three marks done in red paint, which gave them a curiously lurid effect. They consisted of a circle with two ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... was one great lurid, brassy glare, overhung with banks of sinister clouds, a leaden purple above, fiery crimson below. The unnatural light fell strongly upon us both. A big shadow passed for an instant across the sunset, and we, looking instinctively up, saw the circling bulk of some huge bird of ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... rocks they sprung, While vigor more than human strung Each arm and heart.—The exulting foe Still thro' the dark defiles below, Trackt by his torches' lurid fire, Wound slow, as thro' GOLCONDA'S vale The mighty serpent in his ire Glides on with glittering, deadly trail. No torch the Ghebers need—so well They know each mystery of the dell, So oft have in their wanderings Crost the wild race that round them dwell, The very tigers from their delves ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... blue eyes glowed, As thro' the whirling gloom she rode, Her laboring breath drawn sharply in; Pitted against yon rushing wheels Were tireless grit and trusty heels, And with God's favor they might win! And soon along the perilous line Flamed out the lurid warning sign, While round her staggering horse the crowd Surged with wild cheers and plaudits loud.— And this is how, thro' flood and rain, Brave ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... decomposition is only propagated a few inches from the detonator. Heated in contact with air to a temperature of 480 deg. C., acetylene ignites and burns with a flame, the appearance of which varies with the way in which it is brought in contact with the air. With the gas in excess a heavy lurid flame emitting dense volumes of smoke results, whilst if it be driven out in a sufficiently thin sheet, it burns with a flame of intense brilliancy and ulmost perfect whiteness, by the light of which colours can be judged as well as they can by daylight. Having its ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sinking sun, now vanishing down the vapoury horizon, and filling the great heaven, high across whose arch the cranes and wildfowl streamed in line, square, and triangle, with flashes of flying gold and the lurid stain of blood. And then ourselves—three modern Englishmen in a modern English boat—seeming to jar upon and look out of tone with that measureless desolation; and in front of us the noble buck limned out upon a background ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... an urgency that the ancient world had never known the Christian world believed in immortality and visualized the circumstances of the life to come so concretely that in a medieval catechism the lurid colour of the setting sun was ascribed to the supposition that "he looketh down upon hell." [5] Nothing in this life had any importance save as it prepared the souls of men for life to come. Even ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... lingering by the quay, having no money wherewith to enjoy himself in a tavern. He had seen something of the lading of the Northumberland, and heard more from a stevedore. No sooner had he cast off the falls and seized the oars, than his knowledge awoke in his mind, living and lurid. He gave a whoop that brought the two ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... in ether fade, Deep groves between them cast a solemn shade, Slow moves their settling mist in lurid streams, And dusky radiance streaks the solar beams. Fixt on the view the great discoverer stood, And thus addrest the messenger of good: But why these seats, that seem reserved to grace The social toils of some illustrious race, Why spread so wide and form'd so fair in vain? And ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... see'st the war-clad steed That prances o'er the mead, And neighs to be among the pointed spears— Or in black armour stalk around Embattled Bristol, once thy ground, Or haunt with lurid glow the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... which sends them to seek the land before a storm arises, were now winging towards their nests with the shrill and dissonant clang which announces disquietude and fear. The disk of the sun became almost totally obscured ere he had altogether sunk below the horizon, and an early and lurid shade of darkness blotted the serene twilight of a summer evening. The wind began next to arise; but its wild and moaning sound was heard for some time, and its effects became visible on the bosom of the sea, before the gale was felt on shore. The mass of waters, now ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... she went on. "I remember, even now, the view from the house-top that night. In a sense, it was finer than this; everything was more lurid and yet more chaotic; one simply felt that underneath all those mysterious places was some great being, toiling and struggling—Life itself, groaning through space with human cogwheels. Up here one sees too much. Oh, my dear Leonard," she ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... overawed at first into quietude, has lifted its head among us, and waxes wroth and ravening. There are dissensions at home worse than the guns of our foes. Some that did run well have faltered; some signal-lights have gone shamefully out, and some are lurid with a baleful glare. But unto this end were we born, and for this cause came we into the world. When shall greatness of soul stand forth, if not in evil times? When the skies are fair and the seas ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... mass of vapour which had seemed to threaten the earth with instant destruction suddenly parted. The red and lurid Sun was visible, but his light and heat were quenched in the still ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... significance. It was this quality which made him at times a specially pleasant companion, and always an agreeable narrator. The point of his story, or what seemed to him the point, was rarely that which struck me. It was the incidental sidelights the story threw upon his own nature and the somewhat lurid surroundings amid which ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... on the whole the most gruesome episode in American history, and it sheds back a lurid light upon the long tale of witchcraft in the past." (Fiske's New France and New ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... In the lurid sheen of them she saw the lad leap from his rock and rush towards her. A flash fell and split a boulder not thirty paces from him, causing him to stagger, but he recovered himself and ran on. Now he was quite close, but the water was closer still. It was coming in ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... distant from the volcano, these must have been carried to us from it by the wind. As the captain had predicted, a stiff breeze soon afterwards sprang up, under the influence of which we speedily left the volcano far behind us; but during the greater part of the night we could see its lurid glare and hear its distant thunder. The shower did not cease to fall for several hours, and we must have sailed under it for nearly forty miles, perhaps farther. When we emerged from the cloud, our decks and every part of the rigging were completely covered with ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... his appointment she played The Baroness Telka, a lurid, lustful, remorseless woman—a creature with a vampire's heart and the glamour of Helen of Troy—a woman whose cheeks were still round and smooth, but whose eyes were alight with the flame of insanity—a frightful, hungry, soulless wretch. And as he sat at the ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... knees, silently bowed his head for a moment, and then stood up, self-possessed again, as his son had always known him. It had been a strange and awful awakening for Robert Cairn—to find his room illuminated by a lurid light, and to find his own father standing over him with a knife! But what had moved him even more deeply than the fear of these things, had been the sight of the emotion which had shaken that stern and unemotional man. Now, ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... glances wander o'er the main! Tis the vex'd billows, that insurgent rave, Their white foam silvers yonder distant wave, Tis not his sails! thy husband comes no more! His bones now whiten an accursed shore!— Retire,—for hark! the seagull shrieking soars, The lurid atmosphere portentous lours; Night's sullen spirit groans in every gale, And o'er the waters draws the darkling veil, Sighs in thy hair, and chills thy throbbing breast— Go wretched mourner!—weep thy griefs to rest! "Yet, ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... had certain qualities in common; both had ambitions to be "sporty." They shared an inclination for lurid neckties, fancy socks and striped silk shirts; they believed themselves wise as to the ways of the world, and each had been heard to express the opinion that Ridgley School was a "slow old dump." Campbell was the leader of the two—he dominated ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... go to the "Moulin Rouge," but every American does on his first night in Paris, and emerges with enough cab fare to return him to his hotel, where he arrives with the positive conviction that the red mill, with its slowly revolving sails, lurid in crimson lights, was constructed especially for him. He remembers, too, his first impressions of Paris that very morning as his train rolled into the Gare St. Lazare. His aunt could wait until to-morrow to see the tomb of Napoleon, but he would see ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... the night; and I awake with a terrible start. A bright red light streams through the panes. I throw open the window; the sky to the left is one mass of dark smoke and lurid streaks of light—it is a fire, Paris on fire![105] I dress and go out. At the corner of the Rue de Trevise a sentinel stops me, "You can't pass." I am so bewildered that I do not think of noticing whether he is a Federal or a soldier. What am I to do, where am I ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... stage with pallor on her face, yet lurid passion, Stalks Norma brandishing the dagger in ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... she rose and left the house. As she walked down Beacon street, the sun was just sinking in the West, and its red glow mounted midway up the heavens. As she looked at it, the sky seemed one great molten sea, with its hot, lurid waves surging all around her. She thought it came nearer; that it set on fire the green Common and the great houses, and shot fierce, hot flames through her brain and into her very soul. For a moment, she was paralyzed and sank to the ground; then springing to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... on the pink and lilac, lemon-yellow, scarlet and orange of the pot plants,—hydrangeas, pelargoniums, and early-flowering chrysanthemums,—set, three deep, along the base of the house wall, the whole length of the terrace front. The atmosphere was thick. Masses of purple cloud, lurid light crowning their summits, boiled up out of the southeast. But the worst of the storm was already over, and the parched land, grateful for the downpour of rain, exhaled a whiteness of smoke—as in thanksgiving from off some altar of incense. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Boccaccio, De Foe, and Browne. The vast annihilation that has swallowed all things—the voiceless solitude of the once busy earth—the lonely state of singleness which hems me in, has deprived even such details of their stinging reality, and mellowing the lurid tints of past anguish with poetic hues, I am able to escape from the mosaic of circumstance, by perceiving and reflecting back the grouping and combined ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... officers who occupied the wing of the building nearest the fire. Wooden houses of many various colors were devoured in a few moments, and had already fallen in; magazines of oil, brandy, and other combustible materials, threw out flames of a lurid hue, which were communicated with the rapidity of lightning to other adjoining buildings. A shower of sparks and coals fell on the roofs of the Kremlin; and one shudders to think that one of these ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... a spark that towered and hovered overhead, and burst into coiling volumes of lurid smoke with a moving heart of flame. Light broke on a neighbouring hill that had been unseen and forgotten; the hill was crowned with fantastic trees that danced, and a wavering tower. From our own valley below there came a vicious ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... where armed encounters among cowboys and gamblers, deputies and desperadoes, were too frequent to attract attention; Caldwell, on the Indian border; Hays City, Abilene, Ellsworth—any of a dozen cow camps, where the head of the rails caught the great northern cattle drives, furnished chapters lurid enough to take volumes in telling—indeed, perhaps, gave that stamp to the West which ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... the far northern marshes flock down, by thousands, the geese and the mallards. From the meadows and wide-prairied plains, for their long southward journey preparing, In croaking flocks gather the cranes, and choose with loud clamor their leaders. The breath of the evening is cold, and lurid along the horizon The flames of the prairies are rolled, on the somber skies flashing their torches. At noontide a shimmer of gold, through the haze, pours the sun from his pathway. The wild-rice is gathered and ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... gaze at the countenances over which the lurid torchlight cast a horrid glare, a strong hand grasped my collar, and by a jerk swung me up to a seat on one of the caissons; and at the same time a deep voice said, "Come, youngster, this is more ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... crash of destroyed artillery ammunition shook the ground. The less brilliant, but steadier, glow of burning stores and sheds and houses was constantly multiplied, and the flash of every new explosion revealed fresh masses of black smoke rising in sharp outline against the lurid horizon. It was an apocalyptic spectacle; nothing short of a volcanic eruption could produce those tremendous effects of infernal illumination. Millions of pounds' worth of material, all the fruits of two and a half years ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... scholastic back stiffens, his elbows go out, his etiolated complexion corrugates and darkens, his moustaches increase and grow and spread, and curl up horribly; a large, red scar, a sabre cut, grows lurid over one eye. He expands—all over he expands. He clears his throat startlingly, lugs at the still growing ends of his moustache, and says, with just a faint and fading doubt in his voice as to whether he ...
— Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books • H. G. Wells
... no doubt in Lawler's mind, nor in Ruth's, that he had gone to relate his trouble to his "paw;" and that "paw" would presently appear to exact the lurid punishment Jimmy desired. ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... chill brings on all manner of liver complaints and indigestions. All who can afford it, draw tight the jalousies, and sulk in darkness; the leaves are parched, as by an Atlantic gale; the air is filled with lurid haze, as in an English north-east wind; and no man can breathe freely, or eat his bread with joy, until ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... a man could speak; With horror all aghast, In groups, with pallid brow and cheek, We watched the quivering mast! The atmosphere grew thick and hot, And of a lurid hue, As, riveted unto the spot, Stood ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... know it. It is certainly old enough to have a lurid past. I picked it up in the bazaar at Teheran. That inscription on the blade ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... him, or in his own contemplations. The fire raged with amazing fury and power,—stimulated to madness as it were, by the pitch, and tar, and dried timbers, and other combustible materials used in the constriction of the boat. The lurid flames ascended to a great height,—the smoke rolled upward in majestic volumes, while the light, red as the flames of AEtna, streamed across the lake, gilding the crumbling battlements of the old fort, flushing the ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... tragedies without the help of Europeans. Before French or English influence had been felt in the interior of the continent, a great part of North America was the frequent witness of scenes still more lurid in coloring, and on a larger scale of horror. In the first half of the seventeenth century the whole country, from Lake Superior to the Tennessee, and from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, was ravaged by wars of extermination, in which tribes, large ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... later the lady was ensconced comfortably on her bed, smoking cigarettes and deep in the perusal of Garnaby Williams, the Boy Detective, which, with other threepenny works of lurid fiction, she had sent out to purchase. She felt, and rightly, that before the strain of attempting further intercourse with Albert, it would be as well to fortify herself with a good ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... The Settlement has been written up repeatedly by sensationalists, and usually by sensationalists who have never laid eyes on it. Of course, leprosy is leprosy, and it is a terrible thing; but so much that is lurid has been written about Molokai that neither the lepers, nor those who devote their lives to them, have received a fair deal. Here is a case in point. A newspaper writer, who, of course, had never been near the Settlement, vividly described Superintendent McVeigh, crouching in a grass hut and ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... from the mass of gallant, dauntless emigrants, many of whom were thus entertained with grateful, commiserating hospitality in households whose members had but lately basked in the sparkling geniality of the southern atmosphere, now lurid and ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... walked to the window. A mighty host of gray clouds, piled thickly one upon another, and torn and tunneled by feverish wind-gusts, were hastening swiftly and silently across the sky from the west. Beyond, where they were thickest and angriest, a yellowish, lurid tint was reflected against them. The valley darkened like a frowning face, and the summits of the western hills were blotted out of sight. A lightning-flash shivered brightly through the air, and then came the first growling, leaping, accumulating ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... and he had given a certain amount of consent to his abductions—he had left the real for the chimerical; the true for the false; Dea for Josiana; love for pride; liberty for power; labour proud and poor for opulence full of unknown responsibilities; the shade in which is God for the lurid flames in which the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... noisy! And Stanislaw Przybyszewski—whom Vance Thompson christened a prestidigious noctambulist-has literally stormed over it. It is barbaric, it is perhaps pathologic, and of it Liszt has said most eloquent things. It is for him a dream poem, the "lurid hour that precedes a hurricane" with a "convulsive shudder at the close." The opening is very impressive, the nerve-pulp being harassed by the gradually swelling prelude. There is defiant power in ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... lo! this night, Forgetful of my prayers, and thine own promise, Thou turnest from us; Lettest the heathen enter in our city, And, without pity, Murder out burghers, seize upon their spouses, Burn down their houses! Is such a breach of faith to be endured? See what a lurid Light from the insolent invader's torches Shines on your porches! E'en now, with thundering battering-ram and hammer And hideous clamor; With axemen, swordsmen, pikemen, billmen, bowmen, The conquering foemen, O Sophy! beat your gate ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... air of the room seemed to stifle her, though it was by no means overheated. She went to the window and looked out. It was a wild wet evening, and the wind drove the rain before it in sheets. In the west the lurid rays of the sinking sun stained the clouds blood red, and broke in arrows of ominous ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... upon by Sergeant Ra-hilly to "certify" a lunatic, to commit some unfortunate person with diseased intellect to an asylum. Sometimes he signed the required document. Often he hesitated, although he was always supplied by the sergeant and his constables with a wealth of lurid detail about the dangerous and homicidal tendencies of the patient. ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... Army, and the most striking articles of his attire, when sweeping, were a flame-colored flannel shirt and a shiny black hat with "Prepare to Meet Thy God" on the front in large silver letters. The combination of color was indescribably pictorial, and as lurid and suggestive as an ...
— The Story of Patsy • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... with almost a shudder. He undid the wrapper, shook it open and looked at it. Then suddenly he sat like a man turned to stone. The cigar burnt out between his teeth, his eyes were riveted upon that page, the black letters seemed to have become lurid. The sentences stabbed, he was face to face with the impossible. The paper which he read was dated on the preceding day. Before him was a fourth article, dated from Paris, dated less than forty-eight hours ago, signed "Julien Portel." The ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the sun on one of the bleakest and coldest days of the year. The sun itself was sinking behind the distant hills, and the sky was brilliant with its fiery javelins, which threw a lurid light across the cold gray heavens, the last protest of departing day against the approach of the chill dismal night. The snow lay heavy upon the ground, and spread like a great white pall over the sins ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... to have occurred. During the long and frosty winter preceding this fatal year, a comet appeared in the heavens, the sickly colour of which was supposed to forebode the judgment about to follow. Blazing stars and other meteors, of a lurid hue and strange and preternatural shape, were likewise seen. The sun was said to have set in streams of blood, and the moon to have shown without reflecting a shadow; grisly shapes appeared at night—strange clamours and groans were heard in the air—hearses, ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... neither more nor less than that it would kill Lady Beldonald if I were to paint Mrs. Brash; for at this lurid light had we arrived in so short a space of time. It was for me to decide whether my aesthetic need of giving life to my idea was such as to justify me in destroying it in a woman after all in most eyes so beautiful. The situation was indeed sufficiently queer; for it remained to be seen what ...
— The Beldonald Holbein • Henry James
... of children through the surf. Endless trains of thoughts, like little waves, rippled forward and broke on the shore of her drowsiness. But each thought-ripple, though it ran lightly, was tinged with copper-coloured gleams as from a lurid sunset. Helena felt that the sun was setting on her and Siegmund. The hour was too composed, spell-bound, for grief or anxiety or even for close perception. She was merely aware that the sun was wheeling ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... least they are satisfactory to them. Why disturb them? They are doing very well. This talk about their being lost, and needing a Savior, is reckoned out of date. The old common statements about so many thousands dying daily, and going out into a lost eternity, are not liked. They are called lurid. And, indeed, they are not used nearly ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... grin of solicitation on the mask of night. They were walking thus, as he felt, nearer and nearer to where he should see his ships burn, and it was meanwhile for him quite as if this red glow would impart, at the harmonious hour, a lurid grandeur to his good faith. It was meanwhile too a sign of the kind of sensibility often playing up in him that—fabulous as this truth may sound—he found a sentimental link, an obligation of delicacy, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... several of Browning's later books, it is a study in evil. The two characters who fill the stage of this little history are tragic comedians; they, too, are "real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us that fiction, if it can imagine events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read us no such furrowing lesson in life." The character of Miranda, the sinner who would reconcile sin with salvation, is drawn with special ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... virtues that are far more rare to persons of your rank than devotion. In fine, you owe happiness to yourself; for, notwithstanding the promises of religion, you will never find happiness in those agitations into which I perceive you cast by the lurid ideas of superstition. In this path you will only encounter doleful chimeras, frightful phantoms, embarrassments without end, crushing uncertainties, inexplicable enigmas, and dangerous reveries, which are only calculated to disturb your repose, to deprive you of happiness, and to render ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... Looking along the road they saw all the shopkeepers at their doors, the pavements eager. And then, in the distance, the white horse jingling its trappings of scarlet hair and bells, with the dusky Kishwegin sitting on the saddle-blanket of brilliant, lurid stripes, sitting impassive and all dusky above that intermittent flashing of colour: then the chieftain, dark-faced, erect, easy, swathed in a white blanket, with scarlet and black stripes, and all his strange crest of white, tip-dyed feathers swaying down his back: as he came nearer ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... Over against Mr. Dixon's lurid and grossly misleading pictures of the conduct of the Negroes in reconstruction days, we offer the following tribute to the race, clipped from the columns of the Nashville Banner, perhaps the most widely read daily newspaper in the state of Tennessee, and a paper ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... interesting fact about this spirited performance is, that it is a satirical literary handling of the great proposition which Burke enforced, with all the thunder and lurid effulgence of his most passionate rhetoric, five and thirty years later. This proposition is that the world would fall into ruin, "if the practice of all moral duties, and the foundations of society, rested upon having their reasons made clear and demonstrative ...
— Burke • John Morley
... from the landing pad, then a heavy concussion made Hense's chest contract. Lurid flames rose skyward. The attacking flier rose sharply and disappeared. Hense ...
— The Best Made Plans • Everett B. Cole
... darkness suddenly came over the face of Nature. The sombre gloom was relieved only by a strange lurid glare, which hung on the distant horizon far away across that weird land. The air was soon filled with fine ashes, which descended in such quantities as to cover all vegetation, and completely hide exposed ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... slumber starts; Reckless of toil and danger, if he win The tributary meed of grateful hearts. From pavement rough, or frozen ground, His engine's rattling wheels resound, And soon before his eyes The lurid flames, with horrid glare, Mingled with murky vapors rise, In wreathy folds upon the air, And veil the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Think the tyrant, whose great soul is trade, Whose history, a crater, belching black And lurid, keeps glad Easter morning back From half the world—loves thee save to invade, As blackward planned? loves thee, along whose track March Human rights up to the ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... conflagration raged in Doemville. The Doemville Academy, mysteriously fired, first fell a victim to the devouring element. The candy shop and cigar store, both holding heavy liabilities against the academy, quickly followed. By the lurid gleams of the flames, a long, low, sloop-rigged scow, with every mast gone except one, slowly worked her way out of the mill-dam towards the Sound. The next day three boys were missing—C. F. Hall Golightly, B. F. Jenkins, ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... sea-birds cry! 730 In clouds they overspread the lurid sky, And hover round the mountain, where before Never a white wing, wetted by the wave, Yet dared to soar, Even when the waters waxed too fierce to brave. Soon it shall be their only shore, And ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... true that to the public mind there is a more lurid and spectacular menace in such diseases as small-pox, yellow fever and plague, medical men and public health workers are beginning to realize that, with the warfare against such maladies well organized, it is now time to give attention to the heavy loss from lowered physical efficiency and chronic, ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... congealed billows creaked and bent as the monk stepped upon them, and burned his feet through his coarse sandals; yet he stumbled on. Now and then his foot would crush in, where the lava had hardened in a thinner crust, and he would draw it suddenly back from the lurid red-hot metal beneath. The staff on which he rested was constantly kindling into a light blaze as it slipped into some heated hollow, and he was fain to beat out the fire upon the cooler surface. Still ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... closed, he gave himself up completely to black thoughts. He recalled his words to her, uttered years ago, half in jest and half in earnest; he had horrified her beyond expression by telling her how he would punish a wife if he were the husband she deceived. With a grim, lurid smile he remembered the penalty. He had said he would not kill; he would disfigure the woman frightfully and permit her to live as a moral example to other wives. Slitting her mouth from ear to ear or cutting off her nose—these were two of the penalties he would inflict. He ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... traveller by that line sees the usual signs of a colliery in the unsightly pumping-engines surrounded by heaps of ashes, coal-dust, and slag; whilst a neighbouring iron-furnace in full blast throws out dense smoke and loud jets of steam by day and lurid flames at night. These works form the nucleus of the village, which is almost entirely occupied by coal-miners and iron-furnacemen. The place is remarkable for its large population, but not for ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... would be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I plainly see my miserable office,—to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock's run down; ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... peeped and then rushed out on to the landing in dressing-gowns and shawls, and all sorts of quaint- looking wraps. One light was always left burning all night long, so we could see each other, even when the smoke hid that other horrible lurid light, and it is wonderful how brave we all were on the whole. Mother came forward wrapped in her long blue gown, and found a chair for Madge Talbot, who was the only one who showed signs of breaking down, just as quietly and graciously ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... They disappeared in the hell of shell-fire as though it were quite an every-day incident. I opened the door, climbed the steps, and stood outside. The sight which met my eyes was magnificent in its grandeur. The heavens were split by shafts of lurid fire. Masses of metal shot in all directions, leaving a trail of sparks behind them; bits of shell shrieked past my head and buried themselves in the walls and sandbags. One large missile fell in an open space about forty feet on my left, and exploded with a deafening, ear-splitting crash. At ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... mother, and a group of male and female mourners at its foot—a group of colours that less imitate than rival nature, and tinged by grief itself; a scale of tones for which even Titian offers me no parallel—yet all equally overcast by the lurid tone that stains the whole, and like a meteor hangs in the sickly air. Whatever inequality or dereliction of feeling, whatever improprieties of commonplace, of local and antique costume, the master's rapidity admitted ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... cut through the trees and landed the missiles a mile inland. The roar of the heavy guns, pent and echoed between the high banks, was like continuous thunder, lit by lurid flashes as they belched out 13-inch Shrapnel and scattered ounce balls like hail among the steadfast ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... Thornton had seen her close to Outwood station on the fatal Thursday night, and had been told of her denial that she was there. She stood as a liar in his eyes. She was a liar. But she had no thought of penitence before God; nothing but chaos and night surrounded the one lurid fact that, in Mr. Thornton's eyes, she was degraded. She cared not to think, even to herself, of how much of excuse she might plead. That had nothing to do with Mr. Thornton; she never dreamed that he, or any one else, could find ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... untranslatable. He also felt dimly that the hate and malice with which he was regarded by the individual at his feet was of a more concentrated and enduring character than most men have the power to originate. In the lurid light of that one glance he was able, though he was not very clever, to pierce the darkest recesses of his cousin's heart, and to see his inmost thought, no longer through a veil, but face to face. And what he saw was sufficient to make the blood leave his ruddy cheek, and ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... "Go not forth, O Hiawatha! To the kingdom of the West-Wind, To the realms of Mudjekeewis, Lest he harm you with his magic, Lest he kill you with his cunning!" 55 But the fearless Hiawatha Heeded not her woman's warning; Forth he strode into the forest, At each stride a mile he measured; Lurid seemed the sky above him, 60 Lurid seemed the earth beneath him, Hot and close the air around him, Filled with smoke and fiery vapors, As of burning woods and prairies. For his heart was hot within him, 65 Like a living coal his heart was. So he journeyed westward, westward, Left the fleetest deer ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... to banish hope and let the mind Drift like a feather. I have had my share Of what the world calls trial. Once a fire Came in the darkness, when the city lay In a still sea of slumber, stretching out Great lurid arms which stained the firmament; And when I woke the room was full of sparks, And red tongues smote the lattice. Then a hand Came through the sulphur, taking hold of mine, And the next moment there were shouts of joy. Ah! I was but a child and my first ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... dispersed the vapours hanging nearer the earth. Sometimes the moon was totally eclipsed; at others, it shed a wan and ghastly glimmer over the masses rolling in the firmament. Not a star could be discerned, but, in their stead, streaks of lurid radiance, whence proceeding it was impossible to determine, shot ever and anon athwart the dusky vault, and added to the ominous and threatening ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... eye was not calculated to enliven his mind. The old mansion stood out against the western sky, black and silent. One long, lurid pencil-stroke along a sky of slate was all that was left of daylight. No sign of life was apparent; no light at any window, unless it might have been on the side of the house hidden from view. No owls were on the chimneys, no ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... cloud, with deep openings between, which shine with a lurid yellow. The great bubbling storm-clouds form a framework around the western sky, while everywhere shoot yellow streaks and red beams, which die away and disappear and are pressed down into the sea, until we see only one ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... ashore, took his orders, and went back on board the cutter. A lurid sunset was blotted out by the heaviest squall of the day, and Sheldon watched the whale-boat arrive in the thick of it. As the spritsail was taken in and the boat headed on to the beach, he was aware of a distinct hurt at sight of Joan at the steering-oar, standing erect ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... seemed to be holding it aloft in the rumbling, vaguely-flashing air, directly over the heads of his victims, and he fancied he could see their pale, upturned faces. Few specimens of the human countenance had ever given him such pleasure as these, lighted in the lurid fashion I have hinted at, and he was disposed to sip the cup of contemplative revenge in a leisurely fashion. It must be added, too, that he was at a loss to see exactly how he could arrange to witness the operation ...
— The American • Henry James
... say visualised, the contemporary Roman as a human being. There exist denunciations of the morals of the Roman world of this date which would lead one to believe that every man was a Nero and every woman a Messalina: denunciations so lurid that, if they were a third part true, the continuance of the Roman Empire, or even of the Roman race, for a single century would be simply incomprehensible. On the other hand there have been accounts of the material glory ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... no denying this fact. The pasty-faced man told Blinky with lurid emphasis just how smart. He had seen with his own eyes and this was too ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... weekdays. And I never read ANY book now unless either Miss Stacy or Mrs. Allan thinks it is a proper book for a girl thirteen and three-quarters to read. Miss Stacy made me promise that. She found me reading a book one day called, The Lurid Mystery of the Haunted Hall. It was one Ruby Gillis had lent me, and, oh, Marilla, it was so fascinating and creepy. It just curdled the blood in my veins. But Miss Stacy said it was a very silly, unwholesome book, and she asked me not to read any more of it ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Flying Dutchman Wagner had exploited the uncanny, the terror and mystery of gray winter seas; in Tannhaeuser he turned to the conflict between the gross, lurid passions of man and the sane, pure side of his nature; and now, in Lohengrin, he was to give us an opera which for sheer sustained loveliness has only one parallel in his works—the Mastersingers. ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... to the north, and there, low on the horizon, was a lurid red gleam like a smouldering fire, while just above it a greenish blackness of cloud hung heavy and motionless. Towards the central part of the heaven two or three stars shone with frosty brightness, and through a few fleecy ribbons ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... grasped her wrist and pulled her backward. All the man's brutal passion had been aroused. The fierce border blood boiled within his heart. Unmasked he showed himself in his true colors a frontier desperado. His eyes gleamed dark and lurid beneath his bent brows and a short, desperate laugh ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... carried by for sacrifice. Here, too, they often heard the startling cry of war, and saw their frightened neighbours fly before the murderous spear and plundering hand of lawless power. The invader's torch reduced the native hut to ashes, while the lurid flame seared the green foliage of the trees, and clouds of smoke, rising up among their groves, darkened, for a time, surrounding objects. On such occasions, and they were not infrequent, the contrast between the country and the inhabitants must have ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... a fine appearance. Three or four of the snorting, galloping monsters had just finished their journey, and there was a quantity of flaming ashes lying under the brazen bellies of each that looked properly lurid and demoniacal. The men at the station came out with flaming torches—awful-looking fellows indeed! Presently the different baggage was handed out, and in the very worst vehicle I ever entered, and at the very slowest pace, we were borne to the "Hotel ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... The lurid gleam of light which the thought of ceasing to exist and to suffer had brought to Graham faded. It did seem like profanation. At any rate, at that moment it was a hideous truth that such a creature might by the chance of any accident resolve into mere dust. ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... he blows—and blows,— While I drum on his swollen cheek, And croak in his angered eye that glows With the lurid lightning's streak; While the rushes drown in the watery frown ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... findings of the Committee. Again nearly half a year passed before the report of the Committee was made public, and the bloom had already been taken off it for most Indians by the report of a Commission instituted on its own account by the Indian National Congress which, partisan and lurid as it was, never received full refutation, as the witnesses upon whose evidence it was based were, for technical reasons, not heard by the Hunter Committee. The complete surrender of civil authority into military hands first ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... rainbows overhead, And the streets swollen like rivers, and the wet earth's smell, And all the ants with sudden wings filling the heart with wonder, And, afar, the tempest vanishing with a stifled thunder In a glare of lurid radiance from the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... the blast of scorched July Drives the pelting hail, From thunderous lightning-clouds, that blot Blue heaven grown lurid-pale. Weedy waves are tossed ashore, Sea-things strange to sight Gasp upon the barren shore And fade away ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... hundred people almost black, and destitute of clothing, were assembled under the boughs and among the stems of a huge banyan tree, which formed, as Nowell remarked, a sort of natural temple. In front of it was a small stone altar, with fire burning on it, the flames from which shed a lurid glare on the rapidly darkening shadows of the huge tree. Before the altar were two figures; the most unearthly, horrible—indeed, I may say demoniacal—I have ever set eyes on. I could scarcely ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... Caspar is there before him. The glen lies deep in the mountains. A cascade tumbles down the side of a mighty crag on the one hand; on the other sits a monstrous owl on the branch of a blasted tree, blinking evilly. A path leads steeply down to a great cave. The moon throws a lurid light on the scene and shows us Caspar in his shirt-sleeves preparing for his infernal work. He arranges black stones in a circle around a skull. His tools lie beside him: a ladle, bullet-mould, and eagle's-wing fan. The high voices ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the chill night air the yelping challenge of the coyotes is heard, but the sentries give no sign. Despite grief and care, Nature asserts her sway and is fast lulling Lee to sleep, when, away up on the heights to the northwest, there leaps out a sudden lurid flash and, a second after, the loud ring of the cavalry carbine comes echoing down the canyon. Lee springs to his feet and seizes his rifle. The first shot is quickly followed by a second; the men are tumbling up from their blankets and, with the instinct of old campaigners, thrusting ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... helplessness, innocence and beauty. One of the band, a tall broad-shouldered man of middle-age, with an immense quantity of whiskers perhaps worn as a visible sign of inward wildness, was, despite his hardened nature, moved to remonstrance. Under cover of lurid oaths and outrageous obscenity, he advanced his opinion that "the kid" needn't be shot just because her father was a ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... his blood sour, that tormented his dreams with nightmares and hellish phantoms; all of which were connected with this innocent and happy child; so that, cheerful and pleasant as she was, there was to the grim Doctor a little fiend playing about his floor and throwing a lurid light on the wall, as the shadow of this sun-flickering child. It is certain that there was always a pain and horror mixed with his feelings towards Elsie; he had to forget himself, as it were, and all that was connected with ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lake, Gorgopis, glowed— To Megara's Mount it came; They feed it again, And it streams amain A giant beard of flame! The headland cliffs that darkly down O'er the Saronic waters frown, Are pass'd with the swift one's lurid stride, And the huge rock glares on the glaring tide, With mightier march and fiercer power It gain'd Arachne's neighbouring tower— Thence on our Argive roof its rest it won, Of Ida's fire the long-descended ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was to be enacted a rapid drama of material progress such as the world has never elsewhere seen; but first there must be played the wild prologue of the West, never at any time to have a more lurid scene than here at the Halfway House of a continent, at the intersection of the grand transcontinental trails, the bloody angle of the plains. Eight men in a day, a score in a week, met death by violence. The street in the cemetery doubled ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... habit, and no more a "sin" than is biting the nails. Unfortunately, people with no other qualification than a desire to do good, wrongly harp on the "sin" of it and draw lurid pictures of physical and mental wreck as the end of such "sinners", ignorant that if all masturbators went mad the world would be ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... dread winds were abroad, and fast and frequent hurried the clouds beneath the thrones of the kings of night. And ever and anon fiery meteors flashed along the depths of heaven, and were again swallowed up in the grave of darkness. But far below his brethren, and with a lurid haze around his orb, sat the discontented star that had watched over the ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and shallow seas are generally brighter-coloured than those confined to cold and deeper seas. The birds which are confined to continents are, according to Mr. Gould, brighter-coloured than those of islands. The insect-species confined to sea-coasts, as every collector knows, are often brassy or lurid. Plants which live exclusively on the sea-side are very apt to have fleshy leaves. He who believes in the creation of each species, will have to say that this shell, for instance, was created with bright colours for a warm ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... stream, and the increased roar of the cataract. No earthly scene perhaps could surpass the appalling sublimity of that which they beheld;—every instant the lightning, which became more and more frequent, converting the black waters into billows of living fire, or wreathing itself in lurid spires around the huge crag that now rose in sight; and again, as the thunder rolled onward, darting its vain fury upon the rushing cataract, and the tortured breast of the gulf that raved below low. And the sounds that filled the air were even more fraught with ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... passed a cruel night. Such a catastrophe casts the lurid gleams of its charcoal over the whole of life, showing reefs, pools, depths, where the eye has hitherto seen only summits and grandeurs. Struck by the horrible picture of a young man lying back in his chair to die, with the last proofs of ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... When the craft grounded they strove like madmen to push it clear. Trimble Rogers tore the water with a paddle, straining every sinew and condemning Blackbeard to the bottomless pit in a queer jargon of the Spanish, French, and English tongues. It required such a lurid vocabulary to give vent to his feelings. He was even more distressed when he sighted the clump of gum trees near by which he and Bill had purloined the pirogue. Beyond this the creek ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... tongue," said the Squire promptly, and then drew a lurid picture of a place delivered over entirely to the hovels of nameless people of the lower middle classes, and worse, a place in which you would be as effectually cut off from your fellows as if you went to live ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... history of mankind. He illuminated his dead enemy's face to frighten his living foe: the staring eyeballs he made globes of fire; the teeth he left white, for so they were more terrible by the contrast; but the palate and tongue he tipped with fire, and made one lurid cavern of the red depths the chapfallen jaw revealed: and on the brow he wrote in burning letters "La Mort." And, while he was doing it, the stout Denys was quaking, and fearing the vengeance of Heaven; for one mans courage is not another's; ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... free rein to his tongue, and found in his pal, Bill Hawkins, one with ready ears to hear his tale of woe. The wretch began to feel himself frightfully ill-used. So, fired at last by the evermore lurid story of his wrongs, the "partner" brought the magistrate, so they could swear out a warrant, arrest the two "outlaws," and especially secure the bundle of "Hoag's ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... sky is clouded, Gaspard, And the vexed ocean sleeps a troubled sleep, Beneath a lurid gleam of parting sunshine. Such slumber hangs o'er discontented lands, While factions doubt, as yet, if they have strength To front ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... still burning fiercely under the beautiful land. No spectacle could have been more sublime than that which the Roman Campagna presented at this period, when no less than ten volcanoes were in full or intermittent action, and poured their clouds of smoke and flame into the lurid sky all around the horizon. Up to the foot of the mountains the sea covered the vast plain; and the action of these waves of fire and steaming floods forms a natural epic of the grandest order. Prodigious quantities ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... storming party turned the prows of the barges towards the shore, they were discovered; and from McHenry, Covington, and the City Battery burst a thunderous artillery-fire, that shook the houses in Baltimore, and illumined the dark shores of the river with a lurid glare. Bold as the British sailors were, they could advance no farther under so terrible a fire. Two of the barges were shot to pieces, leaving their crews struggling in the water. A ceaseless hail of grape and canister spread death ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... change. A fairy circle of prismatic colour is gathering round the moon, beautifying the scene a thousandfold; an inner girdle of hazy emerald hue immediately surrounds the lurid orb, which is now seen as "in a glass darkly"; whilst encircling all is a narrow rim of red light, like the rosy hues of the setting sun that have scarcely died away in the west. The beauty of this lunar rainbow is enhanced by the framework ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... the circumstances under which they were uttered made them maudlin sentiment rather than a manly pledge. As spoken, they were so ominous that the loving woman might well have trembled and lost her girlish flush. But even through the lurid hopes and vague prospects created by dangerous stimulants, Mr. Jocelyn saw, dimly, the spectre of coming trouble, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... by fear, Soon is check'd the starting tear, While in yonder piece I view, Which VANDERVELD's bold pencil drew 100 Through all it's gloom'd extent the ocean Work'd into wild impetuous motion, And with more dread t' impress the soul Grimly frowns the lurid sky, And the condensing vapours roll, And the fork'd light'nings fly—- With shatter'd sails and low-bent mast Drives before the whirling blast The fondering vessel—-Hark! I hear (Or does the eye deceive the ear?) 110 The thunder's voice, ...
— A Pindarick Ode on Painting - Addressed to Joshua Reynolds, Esq. • Thomas Morrison
... aptitude for systematic work. The massacre of Louvain, the hideous brutality of the Germans—as regards non-combatants—to mention only one or two of the appalling occurrences of these last weeks—have thrown a lurid light on the real character of twentieth-century German culture. "By their fruits ye shall know them," said our Lord, and the saying which He aimed at the Scribes and Pharisees of His time is indeed applicable to the proud votaries of German civilization today. Nobody ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... beset. His attempts at serious sentiment and pompous reflection are too often deplorable, because inanimate and stilted. When he warns a heroine against an error of judgment by shouting, "'Tis the madness of the fawn who gazes with adoration on the lurid glare of the anaconda's eye," or murmurs, "Farewell, my lovely bird; I'll soon return to pillow in thy nest," we need all the stimulus of his irony and his velocity to carry us over such marshlands ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse |
