"Tortured" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knowledge. When he had found and broken open an ant-hill, so eager was he that, shutting his eyes, he snatched up the maddened insects by handfuls and swallowed them, dust and ants together, and was then tortured for hours, feeling and thinking that they were still alive within him, running about in search of an outlet and frantically biting. The strange food sickened him, so that he grew thinner and paler, until at last he could barely crawl on hands and feet, and ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... h'impartant that I h'arrive promptly to-day. I have business h'affairs." His countenance assumed tortured lines as he endeavored to maintain his gravity, then failing in his attempt, he burst suddenly into a gale of merriment that sent forth a shower of peanuts and lemon candy. "Praise God, boss, we are 'appy ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... and down my narrow room, tortured and agonized by my doubts, now stopping to reason over the possibilities of success, now looking from the window to try if, in the gesture and bearing of those without, I could conjecture anything that passed. Too well I knew the vaunting character of the French soldier, in defeat as ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... scored by numberless small lines. Moreover it was unadorned by either beard or moustache. His hair was grey, and was worn somewhat longer than is usual. He could speak fluently almost every language of the East, and had been imprisoned by the Russians for sealing in prohibited waters, had been tortured by the Chinese on the Yang-tse, and, to his own unextinguishable disgrace, flogged by the French in Tonquin. Not the least curious trait in his character was the affection he entertained for Kitwater. The pair had been together ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... the mother of Khaled, defeated of her object, went back to her son, who was tortured by the most cruel anxiety. He rose suddenly to his feet, for his love had reached the point of desperation, and asked with inquietude what were the feelings of his cousin. When he learned the answer of Djaida his distress became overwhelming, for her ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous
... own ideas of happiness and virtue accept what is ready made for them by the hand of legislators? Nor do we address those Manfreds who having taken off too many garments wish to raise all the curtains, that is, in moments when they are tortured by a sort of moral spleen. By them, however, the question is boldly stated and we know the extent ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... can break the forever-law of infinite Love, was, and is, the serpent's biggest lie! and ultimates in a religion of pagan priests bloated with crime; a religion [10] that demands human victims to be sacrificed to human passions and human gods, or tortured to appease the anger of a so-called god or a miscalled man or woman! The Assyrian Merodach, or the god of sin, was the "lucky god;" and the Babylonian Yawa, or Jehovah, was the [15] Jewish tribal deity. The Christian's ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... You murdered Tim Kelly treacherously. You planned to spoil an innocent girl's life by driving her to worse than death. You shot your partner in the back after he did his best to help you escape. You tortured Onistah and would have killed him if we hadn't come in time. You assaulted my friend here and he'll probably die from his wounds. It's the end of the long trail for you, Bully West. Inside of half an hour you will be dead. If ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... offered swine on it, and he compelled many of the Jews to raise idol altars in every town and village, and to offer swine on them every day. But many disregarded him, and these underwent bitter punishment. They were tortured or scourged or crucified. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... jewels worn by famous beauties of the great old days; brocades and velvets which had been their ball dresses; books which had Andrew Jackson's name on yellow fly-leaves; weird souvenirs from the haunted house where terrible Madame Lalaurie tortured slaves to death; fetishes which had belonged to Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen; sticks and stones of the varnished house where Louis Philippe lived, and letters written by Nicholas Girod, who plotted to rescue Napoleon from St. ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... into the study and laid him fully in the light. His puckered yellow face presented a sight even more awful than the other, and his blue lips were drawn back, exposing both upper and lower teeth. There were no marks of violence, but his limbs, like Strozza's, had been tortured during his mortal ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... made known to her on the night of his decease the secret of the young man's origin, and had conjured her to do justice to the lad. Her self-love had deterred her in consummating this duty, and conscience had therefore tortured her. She was enabled to reach New York, where she left the preacher's son the bulk of her property, and received his gratitude and forgiveness before ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... the general situation of the unfortunate Africans. They are beaten and tortured at discretion. They are badly clothed. They are miserably fed. Their drudgery is intense and incessant and their rest short. For scarcely are their heads reclined, scarcely have their bodies a respite from the labour of the ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... need for telling him the new fear which had tortured her, during those endless hours of waiting after she had sent off her telegram. Instead, she took his sympathy as it was given, with loving optimism; but she nestled even more closely against her cousin's side, as if for the hour she gained strength from the touch of his protecting ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... to interpret the words 'proper measures' as understood in the land of the knout. The mistress of Field Marshal Keith could not be got at; she had gone to Sweden, and this chivalrous proposal failed. The woman was not tortured in Russia to discover a Prince who was in or near ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... over all the community at Alexandria, and the prisons were crammed with victims. It was whispered with horror amongst the faithful, that in Syria, in Arabia, in Mesopotamia, in Cappadocia, in all the empire, bishops and virgins had been flogged, tortured, crucified or thrown to wild beasts. Then Anthony, already celebrated for his visions and his solitary life, a prophet, and the head of all the Egyptian believers, descended like an eagle from his desert rock on the city of Alexandria, and, flying from church to church, ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... on a truck, and his place was filled immediately by another. As fast as one man was taken another came. The line seemed endless. One and all, their faces expressed keen apprehension, lest some chance awkwardness should touch or jar the tortured feet. Ten at a time they were wheeled away. And still they came and came, until perhaps two hundred had been taken off. But now something else was happening. Another car of badly wounded was being unloaded. Through the windows could ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... interpolations and restored as far as possible to the form it received from the hand of its author, the poem of Job is the most striking presentation of the most obscure and fascinating problem that ever puzzled and tortured the human intellect: how to reconcile the existence of evil, not merely with the fundamental dogmas of the ancient Jewish faith, but with any form of Theism whatever. Stated in the terms in which the poet—whom for convenience sake we shall identify ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... this man of prey, for the ever voracious appetite of this enjoyer, who felt as if he were being pushed away from table before the feast was over! All crumbled and escaped him, Sacco stole his millions, and Benedetta tortured his flesh, stirring up that awful wound of unsatisfied passion which never ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... base enough to resort to slander, and to the most wanton and barefaced falsehoods, which they have trumped up to blacken me. The separation from my wife was a subject that they never failed to urge against me, after having tortured it into a thousand aggravated shapes; not one of which was true. If, however, I would but have joined any one of these factions—would have followed the example of Sir Francis Burdett, and deserted the great mass of the people, by going over to, and joining ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... them, more powerful than reality! To think of it! So much dust, the veriest trifle, a patch of colour on a canvas, a mere semblance destroying all their happiness!—he, silent, indifferent, brutal at times, and she, tortured by his desertion, in despair at being unable to drive away that creature who ever encroached more and more upon their ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... plainly that she didn't want him to remain with her alone. He wondered how long Ramsey would be staying in Paris, and what effect his presence would have on his intercourse with Madame de Corantin. Would he be able to see as much of her or would she drop him in favour of Ramsey. The thought tortured him, but it wormed its way more and more into his brain. Bobby had very little confidence in his powers of pleasing; it was a common experience of his to be thrown over in favour of men much less attractive ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... restlessly to and fro across the room, but presently came back to the seat she had abandoned, and to the inspection which, while it tortured her, she yet evidently compelled herself ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... deride! The solemn sorrow dies in scorn; And lonely in the waste, I hide The tortured heart that would forewarn. Amid the happy, unregarded, Mock'd by their fearful joy, I trod; Oh, dark to me the lot awarded, Thou ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... magnetic power, is pulling me yet more southerly, towards Inspruck and Italy. No saint in the golden legend was ever more tortured by temptation, than I have been for the last twenty-four hours ... with the desire of visiting those celebrated places. Thrice has some invisible being—some silver-tongued sylph—not mentioned, I apprehend, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... was taken out of irons on the 25th of that month, but it was not till the 24th of July that he was ordered to appear before the Council and required to take an oath to answer all the questions put to him. He refused and protested, and was tortured in the boot, but, spite of the awful agony, remained "obstinate and disingenuous," whereupon the Privy Council "resolved to use all methods necessary to bring the said Mr William Spence to a true and ingenuous confession, and for expiscating the truth ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... been a terrible day—the hottest of the summer. And for a week now the irrigation ditches had been dry. To-day the cotton leaves had wilted; and the girl had looked away from the fields all afternoon. It tortured her to see those rich green plants choking ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... admission seemed close at hand. Evolution was becoming change of form broken by freaks of force, and warped at times by attractions affecting intelligence, twisted and tortured at other times by sheer violence, cosmic, chemical, solar, supersensual, electrolytic — who knew what? — defying science, if not denying known law; and the wisest of men could but imitate the Church, and invoke a "larger synthesis" to unify the anarchy again. Historians have got into far too ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... question him like that; and not legal, neither. You'll please to leave us to ourselves, sir; we ain't a show. We can but say what we saw and heard, whatever the consequences may be, but we need not be tortured ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Protestant traveller tells us that he found the Nestorian Christians, who had survived the massacres of their race, living in holes and pits, their pastures and tillage land forfeited, their sheep and cattle driven away, their villages burned, and their ministers and people tortured; and how a Catholic missionary has found in the neighbourhood of Broussa the remnant of some twenty Catholic families, who, in consequence of repudiating the Turkish faith, had been carried all the way from Servia and Albania across the sea to Asia Minor; the men killed, ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... who may presume to analyze the anguish of your tortured heart as you throw yourself, in such abandonment of grief, on the tomb of your lost parent? The luxuriant grass, swaying to and fro in the chill October blast, well-nigh concealed the bent and drooping form, as she knelt and laid her head on ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... toward our institution, that they will die rather than offer sacrifice. They own no king or monarch but the crucified Jew who they believe is alive now. And they show their malevolence to us by asserting that we shall all hereafter be tortured in Hades for ever." ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... another tip-topper. What do you think of this for a storm?—'The liquid acclivities were rising taller, and more threatening. With a scream of passion the tortured ship hurled itself at their deep-green crests. Cascades of rain, and hail, and snow, were dashing down upon her unprotected bulwarks. The inky sky was one vast thunder-clap, out of which the steely shaft ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... first moment, as the ringing of the Angelus bell in a Catholic country-side. For one moment everybody stood motionless and mute, the women with arms akimbo on aching hips, the black washers with drooping, relaxed shoulders. Each tortured frame seemed to heave with an inaudible "Thank God!" and then we slowly scattered in all directions—some to the cloak-room, where the lunches were stored along with the wraps, some down ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... fearless voice, running his stern, indignant eye over the court, its officers, and leading partisans around the bar. "Don't your consciences tell you what it was? Then I will! It was the death-screech of the poor murdered French, whose tortured spirit, now beyond the reach of your power, went out with that fearful cry which has just ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... tortured me; I hastened my pace. Our general was a man of German extraction, honest and good-hearted, but strict in his adherence to military discipline. I went into the little house that had been hastily put up ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... yes! The place in which some of the poor creatures are tortured in order to obtain confessions and information with as much cruelty as in the black days of the Inquisition. These walls are thick, and their cries are not heard from ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... public business, as it were in the great games, came to have the pre-eminence of all competitors in the assembly. But when he first addressed himself to the people, he met with great discouragements, and was derided for his strange and uncouth style, which was cumbered with long sentences and tortured with formal arguments to a most harsh and disagreeable excess. Besides, he had, it seems, a weakness in his voice, a perplexed and indistinct utterance and a shortness of breath, which, by breaking and disjointing his sentences, much obscured the sense and meaning of what he spoke. So that in ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... effects of my recent love, attracted the notice of the other domestics of the household, they especially struck with wonder a nurse of mine, old in years and experienced, and of sound judgment, who, though well aware of the flames that tortured my breast, yet making show of not knowing thereof, frequently chided me for my altered manners. One day in particular, finding me lying disconsolate on my couch, seeing that my brow was charged with doleful thoughts, ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... the skin. His bed was full of eels and frogs; and when the poor boy tried to get a nap in a chair a tame owl and a pair of pet bats flapped their wings in his face and tweaked his nose and ears. At the earliest peep of dawn the tortured Prince shouldered his box and ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... subject has been preying on my mind,' I admitted. 'But I am not so tortured with misgivings as before. Miss Warrington has ceased to—er—interest herself in me. In fact ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... they should have neither freedom nor the right of suffrage. A certain person, although not properly, yet with a brave soul, tore down this edict and cut it up, saying in derision: "These are the triumphs of Goths and Samaritans." Having been brought to judgment, he was not only tortured, but was burnt in the legal manner, and with admirable patience he ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... how vast and how close to us is the problem of existence—this equivocal, tortured, fleeting, dream-like existence of ours—so vast and so close that a man no sooner discovers it than it overshadows and obscures all other problems and aims; and when one sees how all men, with few and rare exceptions, ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... her thoughts tortured her like searing irons. In all her life Gladys had never done the hard thing when there was an easier alternative, and the struggle between the two forces in her was a mortal one. But the constant example ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... order to crush the cause with which I am identified; and a scene has been enacted here, somewhat resembling that which took place in a certain committee room, at Toronto, in regard to a certain Inspector-General. Every single forgetfulness or omission of mine has been magnified and tortured in every possible way, to destroy my reputation for integrity, and my standing in the country. A newspaper in Toronto, whose editor-in-chief is a man of very great notoriety, has said, since the commencement of this inquiry, that, in my early days, I made mercenary approaches ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... The murder of his foster-brother, Clitus, in a drunken brawl, was followed, in 327 B.C., by the discovery of a fresh conspiracy, in which Callisthenes, a nephew of Aristotle, was falsely implicated. For challenging Alexander's divinity, he was cruelly tortured and hanged. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... anybody to be a greater loser in all regards. She has moved my very soul. The lodging was inconvenient, and they would have removed her to another; but I would not suffer it, because it had no room backward, and she must have been tortured with the noise of the Grub Street screamers mention(ing) her husband's murder to ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... were tortured to lay a plot against Agathe and her son, on the basis of Max's programme. But the devil alone, or chance, could really help them to success; for the conditions given made ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... housekeeper—since you won't take my word for it. I hope every drop of water leaks outa these bags before you get home. I hope old Mister falls down and spills it. I've a good mind not to let you have any, anyway. Maybe you could be starved and tortured into coming down ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... inquiry into the reality of the facts of the Christian religion is more accurate than that of those whose lives were devoted to its study; or that we have any just reason to attach as much weight to the assertions of persons, who, by their own showing, tortured and murdered men and women convicted of no crime but that of bearing the name of Christ, as to those of these martyrs, whose characters they acknowledged to be blameless, and who sealed their testimony with the last and highest attestation of sincerity—their blood. Considered ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... about the room. But the expression of relief and confidence which had come into her face soon died out. The evil counselors that lead the soul into sin become its tormentors after the sin is committed, and torture it with fears. So tortured they this guilty and wretched woman at every opportunity. They led her on step by step to do evil, and then crowded her mind with suggestions of perils and consequences the bare thought of which ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... However, I only mention it for the present to explain our friend's absence in Ireland. Alice often worked herself up to a pitch of terror lest her husband had fulfilled his threat and really deserted her. He returned when it suited him to do so, and tortured her with a story of a wealthy Irish widow who had fallen desperately in ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... come to our attention (cf. recipes No. 140 and 259). Cruel methods of slaughter were common. Some of the dumb beasts that were to feed man and even had to contribute to his pleasures and enjoyment of life by giving up their own lives often were tortured in cruel, unspeakable ways. The belief existed that such methods might increase the quality, palatability and flavor of the meat. Such beliefs and methods may still be encountered on the highways ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... and hide from duty behind it. We ought not to decide hastily or rashly, but we ought to decide, and then act upon our decision. One may cultivate the habit of indecision until his usefulness is greatly hindered, and he is constantly tortured wondering what he ought to do. It would be better to make a few mistakes than to let indecision hold us back ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... me that Le Beau caught the dog in one of his traps, took him to his cabin, and tortured him into shape for the big fight. When Durant came he was so taken with the dog that he bought him, and it was while Le Beau was driving the dog mad in his cage to show his temper that Nanette interfered. Le Beau knocked her down, and then jumped on her and was pulling her hair ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... there being some I did not see. When drinking, even while the cup was held to my lips, they flew into it as if determined to die. Their energy was unbounded, and compelled admiration even while they tortured me. How the men endured them without veils and without ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... of their daily allowance; then by censuring and holding up to the resentment of the people the corn-hoarders, he rather discovered the great scarcity of grain than relieved it by this rigorous inquisition. Many of the commons, all hope being lost, rather than be tortured by dragging out existence, muffled up their heads and precipitated themselves ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... anger tortured him until midnight. Then he had a high fever and a distracting headache, and, the physical torment being the most insistent and distressing, he gave way before it. With such agonizing tears as spring from despairing wounded love he threw himself upon his bed, and his craving, ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... Geoffrey saw Diana she seemed to fascinate him—he refused to give up my letters—said he could not part with them. In this way he tortured me for weeks until at last he wrote from Raydon Manor, saying I should have the letters if I would call for them in person, but it must be at ten o'clock at night—and Diana must go with me. So we went—there were other men there—they ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... of praying?... My supplications ceased abruptly. And my ever ready imagination, stirred to its depths, beheld that awful scene of the last day: the darkness, such as sometimes creeps over the city in winter, when the jaundiced smoke falls down and we read at noonday by gas-light. I beheld the tortured faces of the wicked gathered on the one side, and my mother on the other amongst the blessed, gazing across the gulf at me with yearning and compassion. Strange that it did not strike me that the sight of the condemned whom they had loved in life would ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... he cried at last, mounting again to his perch by the smoke-stack. "Song compose by me for one grand man—ze Van Dorn. I make zees—me, myself—and dedicate to heem!" And he banged at the keys till he tortured the steam into the Liberty ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... his breast, broiling in the rays of the hot sun. To make the keener his thirst, there lay before him a delectable oasis, a patch of moist green, with playing fountains and rippling cascades plainly visible to his tortured gaze. He struggled toward it, and always, as he neared it, some malign influence clutched his wrists—which unaccountably stuck out behind him—and jerked ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... indeed, tortured by the conflicting aims life seemed to furnish me. On the one hand was the necessity of continuing, if I could, my communications with my father; on the other, the duty I owed myself to abandon all for the woman I truly loved, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... offense he might knowingly or unknowingly have committed. That she really had begun to admire Courtland, and to desire him in some degree for her own, only added fuel to her fire. This girl whom he had dared to pity should be burned and tortured; she should be insulted and extinguished utterly, so that she would never dare to lift her head again within recognizable distance of Paul Courtland, or she would know the reason why. Paul Courtland was hers—if she chose to ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... inimitable sigh, that pure sob which tells of grief because it issues from a suffering heart. It is pity and compassion, it is the angel of God arriving among us on the caressing breath, a messenger of mercy, and pouring into the tortured depths of our poor heart its healing dew. It is Jesus saying to Mary, and, in her, to all those whom grief afflicts: "Why weepest thou?" It is David singing: "Why art thou cast down, O my soul?" It is Isaiah crying: "Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people; speak ye comfortably ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... wine, of excess, of sloth. How did I hate this world of the rich, of those who revel in fine food, of the gamblers! How did I hate myself for staying in this terrible world for so long! How did I hate myself, have deprive, poisoned, tortured myself, have made myself old and evil! No, never again I will, as I used to like doing so much, delude myself into thinking that Siddhartha was wise! But this one thing I have done well, this I like, this I must praise, that there is now an end to that hatred against myself, to that foolish ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... breaking hearts their pain relieve; And reverenced are the tears ye shed. And honored ye who grieve. The praise of those who sleep in earth, The pleasant memory of their worth, The hope to meet when life is past, Shall heal the tortured mind at last. ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... homage of Europe to secure our scholars, our wheat and our iron. The soldier has controlled the finances of banking systems and revolutionized labor, society, and arts with his inventions. They saw poor Cuba, beautiful as her surf and femininely sweet as her luscious fruits, tortured in chains. They saw her lovely form through the blood that covered her, and Dewey, Sampson, Schley, Miles, Merritt, Sigsbee, Evans, Philip, Alger, and McKinley of the Grand Army led the forces to her rescue. The Philippines in the ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... sake, gentlemen, do but suppose you had been in my place. What could I say when I felt myself so cruelly tortured? Give him three pieces of gold, said I to the slave that was my housekeeper, and send him away, that he may disturb me no more; I will not be shaved this day. Sir, said the barber, what do you mean by that? ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... that dark, terrible time within those prison-walls, few records appear; few cared to probe the evil, or to propose a remedy. The archives of Eternity alone contain the captive's cries, and the lamentations of tortured lunatics. Only one Eye penetrated the dungeons; one Ear heard. Was not Elizabeth Fry and her coadjutors doing a god-like work? And when she raised the clarion cry that Reformation, not Revenge, was the object of punishment, she shook these old ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... to be trifled with. English troops were employed: the begums were closely confined in their palace at Fyzabad; and, to the lasting disgrace of Hastings, their personal attendants were starved and even tortured, until they consented to surrender their money and estates. Hastings's conduct in withdrawing the guarantee was not without justification ; the means which he suffered to be employed in carrying out his purpose, and for the employment of which he must be held ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... amaze you to hear a fellow in this sink talking plain grammatical English, but before the cocaine fiend caught and tortured me I had brains. Joe Roscoe is a good chap—he has often held out a helping hand, but it was not a bit of use, I only sank deeper. When I recall the things I have done, the meannesses I have stooped to, I squirm and squirm and squirm! Well, I am nearly ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... Whatever said, whatever done, was manifestly another drop in Nesta's foolish happy cup. Could it be all because Dartrey Fenellan countenanced her acquaintance with that woman? The mother had lost hold of her. The tortured mother had lost ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for title Tui Tua Kau. Over the violent seas, beneath the frown, Cold and untoward, of a starless sky, The waves of chance have borne me; thro' the night Around me and above the pitiless trades Were blind with darkness, blown like maiden's hair Across my face. As palm trees beaten by wind, The tortured breakers tossed their streaming crests, And all the light of all my life seemed dead— Then—morning broke, and I behold the sun!"— He held her with his gaze and found her eyes— "On Tonga's shore I reigned a chief, and now I am a beggar at your mercy." ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... the butcheries of its gallant defenders had sickened the civilized world, and until the Christian governments of Europe frowned upon the inhuman indifference of the Government that would force its slaves to fight its battles and then allow them to be tortured to death in the name of "State laws!" Even the most conservative papers of the North began to feel that some policy ought to be adopted whereby the lives of Colored soldiers could be protected against the inhuman treatment bestowed upon them when captured by the rebels. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... his open window. The servants had formed a close circle around the unhappy beings who were receiving their punishment in the court below. The air was filled with the shrieks of the tortured men, blood flowed in streams over their flayed backs, and at every new stroke of the knout they howled and shrieked for mercy; while at every new shriek Munnich cried out ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... homes were both the inspiration and the consolation of the field. They nerved the arm that struck for them. When the son and husband fell in the wild storm of battle, the brave woman-heart broke in silence, but the busy fingers did not falter. When the comely brother and lover were tortured into idiocy and despair, that woman-heart of love kept the man's faith steady, and her unceasing toil repaired his wasted frame. It was not love of the soldier only, great as that was; it was knowledge ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... imbecilities that to future ages will be incredible. For no legal jargon has ever been invented that will express the sympathies and the antipathies of human relationship; they even escape the subtlest expression. Law-makers have tortured their brains to devise formulas which will cover the legitimate grounds for divorce. How vain their efforts are is sufficiently shown by the fact that by no chance can they ever agree on their formulas, and that they are changing them constantly with feverish haste, dimly realising that ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... on, and I was miserable beyond what I can tell you. Nothing more was said on the subject, however, except by Frank, who tortured me by alternate entreaties and reproaches, and sometimes by occasional fits of thoughtfulness and kindness, in which he would leave me to myself, only appealing to me by unobtrusive acts of courtesy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... no longer keep, to some cherished lady; or they have made a considerable sacrifice for a beautiful and noble woman; but where did you ever hear, Miss Vesta, of a famished lover, surrendering every endowment that might win the peerless one, to be himself returned to his sorrow, tortured still by love, and by his neighbors ridiculed? What would Princess Anne say of me? That I had been made a fool of, and hurl new ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... said Mrs. Stowe; "it wrote itself." Again, she said, "I the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin!' No, indeed. The Lord himself wrote it, and I was but the humblest instrument in his hand." It has been said that "'Uncle Tom's Cabin' made the crack of the slave-driver's whip and the cries of the tortured blacks ring in every household in the land, till human hearts could bear it no longer," and that it "made the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... to the seraglio, taking her through by-ways to the palace of the Vizier, lest her shrieks should be heard. Mussapulta followed at a distance, and the slave was left with the tortured and faithful lion. ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... my master, when my useful strength is gone, do not turn me out to starve or freeze, nor sell me to some human brute to be slowly tortured and starved to death, but do thou, my master, take my life in the kindest way, and your God will reward you here and ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... upon the slag, and answer loud and high The harm that ye did to the Sons of Men or ever you came to die." And Tomlinson looked up and up, and saw against the night The belly of a tortured star blood-red in Hell-Mouth light; And Tomlinson looked down and down, and saw beneath his feet The frontlet of a tortured star ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... combination tortured him without his being able to evolve a satisfactory method of removing the blasphemous poster. A direct attack was quite out of the question, for manifestly the Tennessee Shad would demand an adequate explanation for the destruction of his treasured ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... knows her power, and I am afraid this tempts her to abuse it. Her temper, which formerly appeared to me all feminine gentleness, is now irritable and violent; but I am persuaded that this is not her natural disposition; it is the effect of her present unhappy state of mind. Tortured by remorse and jealousy, if in the height of their paroxysms, Olivia make me suffer from their fury, is it for me to complain? I, who caused, should at ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... fickle in their affections, required fresh wonders and signs to keep them faithful to their leader. The opportunity of his enemies came when Charles VIII. of France retired from Florence. They accused Savonarola of all kinds of wickedness. He was cast into prison, tortured, and condemned to death as a heretic. In what his heresy consisted it were hard to discover. It was true that when his poor, shattered, sensitive frame was being torn and rent by the cruel engines of torture, he assented to many things which ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... he startled him by rising in his sleep and throwing out his arms with great urgency, as he said, "Yet more, oh, my God, yet more!" His comrade wakened him and asked him what he meant. "Why," said he, "I was having a vision of things in the East. I was seeing missionaries tortured; some of them were being burned, some of them were having their flesh torn from their bodies, and in many ways they seemed to be suffering in their testimony for Christ's sake. And as I looked, the tears came to my eyes, and a voice said to me, 'That is what ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... less for their sound and wholesome nutriment than for their efficiency to flatter sensuality, inflame the passions, create new wants in the heart, and excite a depraved curiosity. Under this regime the mind is starved and tortured by an incessant hunger. It sadly languishes and pines in the grip of famine; and all this in the midst of full and plenty, but this abundance contains no nutriment, it is made up of news, whether true or false, which amuses without satiating; still the mind enlists ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... only one book to read: this was a history of the lives of great criminals and was full of stories of secret thefts and murders. For the old Jew, having tortured his mind by loneliness and gloom, had left the volume in his way, hoping it would instil into his soul the poison that would blacken it ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... Loraine into a taxi' the cloud deepened. The same self-accusations that had tortured his childhood with the suffering of self-contempt after each act of cowardice had him again by the throat. Never had it been his plan to urge this woman toward divorce. He had simply drifted with pleasant tides and now he found himself washed seaward with a dragging anchor. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... neckerchief; a coarse, staring, shawl-pattern waistcoat; and drab breeches. Mr. Crackit (for he it was) had no very great quantity of hair, either upon his head or face; but what he had, was of a reddish dye, and tortured into long corkscrew curls, through which he occasionally thrust some very dirty fingers, ornamented with large common rings. He was a trifle above the middle size, and apparently rather weak in the legs; but this circumstance by ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... Anna walked out of the church. Why she passed her husband and the boy on the terrace without a look she could not quite have said—perhaps because the tortured does not salute her torturers. When she reached her room she felt deadly tired, and lying down on her bed, almost at once ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... stone." The confessional had no secrets for Cromwell. Men's talk with their closest friends found its way to his ear. "Words idly spoken," the murmurs of a petulant abbot, the ravings of a moon-struck nun, were, as the nobles cried passionately at his fall, "tortured into treason." The only chance of safety lay in silence. "Friends who used to write and send me presents," Erasmus tells us, "now send neither letter nor gifts, nor receive any from any one, and this through fear." But even the refuge of silence was closed by a law more infamous ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... identify them. "A white man can't tell one Chinese from another, and there are always a dozen of 'em ready to swear that the man you've got isn't the one." I was startled to reflect that I, too, could not have conscientiously sworn to either jailor or the tortured prisoner—or perhaps even to my cheerful companion. The police, on some pretext, made a raid upon the premises a day or two afterwards, but without result. I wondered if they had caught sight of the high-class, first-chop individual, with the helplessly outstretched fingers, as that ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... days, on the trip. She seemed less friendly, less cordial. Several times Agony had looked up lately to find Miss Amesbury regarding her with a keen, grave scrutiny and a baffling expression on her face. To Agony's tortured fancy these instances became magnified out of all proportion, and the disquieting conviction seized her that Miss Amesbury knew the truth. The thought nearly drove her mad. It tormented her until she realized that there was only one way in which she could still ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... Pringle, as Boswell says, escaped, but the controversy between Tory and Covenanter raged with great fury, and ended in Johnson's pressing upon the old judge the question, what good Cromwell, of whom he had said something derogatory, had ever done to his country; when, after being much tortured, Lord Auchinleck at last spoke out, 'God, Doctor! he gart kings ken that they had a lith in their neck'—he taught kings they had a joint in their necks. Jamie then set to mediating between his father and the philosopher, and availing himself of the judge's sense of hospitality, which ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... to get up again. Again he fumbled into a compartment. The clammy feel of the creatoid never was more welcome. His breath was coming in whistling gasps. It seemed ages of strangulation before the first cool rush of oxygen expanded his tortured lungs. For a full minute he stood there, inhaling deep draughts. Then once more he was himself, his ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner
... necessary that my life should be tortured out of me in order that my soul may be saved? I don't care to pay such a price. Is it put down that I must be a second Job? Is a boil the ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... all this 'newness' was the feeling inspired in Bazarov by Madame Odintsov, a feeling which tortured and maddened him, and which he would at once have denied, with scornful laughter and cynical abuse, if any one had ever so remotely hinted at the possibility of what was taking place in him. Bazarov had a great love for women and for feminine beauty; ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... perfectly loose, or, better still, as if you had none at all. When you can see a vocalist pushing on the jaw you can be perfectly certain that the tone she is emitting at that moment is a forced note and that the whole vocal apparatus is being tortured to create what is probably ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... were killed. The newspapers of the times contained from day to day indignant protests against the cruelties perpetrated. One individual boasted that he himself had killed between ten and fifteen Negroes. Volunteer whites rode in all directions visiting plantations. Negroes were tortured to death, burned, maimed and subjected to nameless atrocities. Slaves who were distrusted were pointed out and if they endeavored to escape, they were ruthlessly ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... Adam. All the essentials of the Word of Wisdom were made known unto him in his immortal state, before he had taken into his body those things that made of it a thing of earth. He was warned against that very practise. He was not told to treat his body as something to be tortured. He was not told to look upon it as the fakir of India has come to look upon his body, or professes to look upon it, as a thing to be utterly contemned; but he was told that he must not take into that body certain things which were there at hand. He was warned that, if he ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... or Tressady's hook—thou shalt choose the manner of't. And now, unveil, unveil, my goddess of the isle—so shall—' Ha, Martin! My stone took him 'neath the ear, and as he swayed reeling to the blow, lithe and swift as any panther this tortured woman sprang, and I saw the flash of steel ere it was buried in his breast. Even then he didn't fall, but, staggering to a pimento tree, leans him there and falls a-laughing, a strange, high-pitched, gasping laugh, and as he ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... country, if Cupid should find a man out, The poor tortured victim mopes hopeless about; But in London, thank Heaven! our peace is secure, Where for one eye to kill, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... The first stake had been planted not far from the shore, but now Lawrence and his party had to proceed in a straight line over the glacier, which, at this steep portion of its descent into the Vale of Chamouni, was rent, dislocated, and tortured, to such an extent that it was covered with huge blocks and pinnacles of ice, and seamed with yawning crevasses. To clamber over some of the ice-ridges was almost impossible, and, in order to avoid ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... his face turned westward. A few moments ago and he was scarcely conscious of where he was or where he meant to go: he was walking on mechanically in a heavy stupor, through which there stole a haunting sense of degradation and despair that tortured him dully. And suddenly, as if by magic, this has vanished: he seems to himself to have waked from a miserable day dream to the buoyant consciousness of youth and hope. Temperaments which are subject to fits of heavy and causeless ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... as I am aware, have been found only in these two localities. Possibly they are outgrowths of the clay altars of the Ohio mounds, and, if so, reveal to us the probable use of these strange structures. They were places where captives were tortured and burned, the most common sacrifices the Indians were accustomed to make. Be this supposition worthy of consideration or not, it is a fact worthy of notice in this connection that in one of the large mounds in this Kanawha group one of the so-called "clay ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... emerge. Whatever else is right, the theory that Newman went over to Rome to find peace and an end of argument, is quite unquestionably wrong. He had far more quarrels after he had gone over to Rome. But, though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewer compromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more by compromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of abnormal energy and abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written the Apologia. If he sometimes seemed to skin his enemies alive, it was because he himself lacked a skin. In ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... depths of my tortured heart, I mean it.... Now your own true life can return to its—its right groove again. For now you can choose in freedom; and ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Joseph Smith as his prophet, meeting death in famine, plagues, and fevers, freezing in the snows of the mountains, thirsting to death on the burning deserts, being devoured by ravening beasts or tortured to death by the sinful Lamanites; but persisting through it all with dauntless courage to a final triumph so glorious that the very Gods would be compelled to applaud the ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... by the very cruelty and fury, which at other moments made her almost detest him. There was a species of sublimity in the very atrocity of Catiline's wickedness, which fascinated her morbid and polluted fancy; and she almost admired the ferocity which tortured her, and from which, alone of mortal ills, she shrank appalled ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... son—differs as the woman differs from the man. There is in it a peculiar tenderness from the sense of the same womanly consciousness in both of undefendedness and self-accountable modesty—a modesty, in this case, how terribly tortured in the mother by the wild behaviour of the daughter under the impulses of the unclean spirit! Surely if ever there was a misery to drive a woman to the Healer in an agony of rightful claim and prostrate entreaty, it was the misery of a mother whose daughter was thus possessed. ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... sacrament of Christ, but of the pains they endure in this present life, under our very eyes. Did I wish to examine these sufferings, time would fail me rather than instances thereof; they languish in sickness, are torn by pain, tortured by hunger and thirst, weakened in their organs, deprived of their senses, and sometimes tormented by unclean beings. I should have to show how they can with justice be subjected to such things, at a time when they are yet without sin. It cannot be said that they suffer unknown ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... had made a further search for the man, and arrested him, and brought him before you again, a man of that character would have been snatched out of your hands, and would have evaded punishment, and been sent out of the country by this pompous orator. As it was, you tortured and executed him— and so ought you also to have treated Aeschines. {134} The Council of Areopagus knew the part which he had played in this affair; and for this reason, when, owing to the same ignorance which so often leads you to sacrifice the ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... infallible "Word of God," and translated and explained for ages by men only, tends to the subjection and degradation of woman. Historical facts to prove this are abundant. In the dark days of "witchcraft"—through centuries—alleged witches were arrested, tried in ecclesiastical courts, tortured and hung or burned at the stake by men under priestly direction, and the great majority of the victims were women. Eve's alleged transgression, and the Bible edict in the days of the reputed Witch of Endor, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Poland must not rise to be too strong a Country, and turn its back on Russia. No, truly; nor, except by miraculous suspension of the Laws of Nature, is there danger of that. But neither need Poland lie utterly lame and prostrate, useless to Russia; and be tortured on its sick-bed with Dissident Questions and Anarchies, curable by a strong Sovereign, of whom much is expected by Voltaire and the leading ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... falls over the two prisoners; we do not know whether they were tortured, whether they confessed, or what they confessed; but we may naturally connect this letter, directly or indirectly, with the events which immediately followed. In the middle of November we find a commission ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... subject attacked the social use of tobacco with violence and virulence. Perhaps, courtier-like, they followed the lead of the British Solomon, King James I. Their titles are characteristic of their style. A writer named Deacon published in 1616 a quarto entitled "Tobacco tortured in the filthy Fumes of Tobacco refined"; but Joshua Sylvester had easily surpassed this when he wrote his "Tobacco Battered and the Pipes Shattered about their Eares, that idely Idolize so base and barbarous a Weed, or at least overlove so loathsome a Vanity, ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... for a couple of hours it was out of the question to resume work. I occupied that time in taking observations for altitude and longitude, tortured to death as usual by the innumerable bees and piums. (Lat. 8 deg. 54'.6 S.; long. 58 ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... stupor—that is, my mind was in this state, but unfortunately my body was not so. On the contrary, I was racked with severe bodily pain—the pain of extreme thirst—perhaps the most grievous and hardest to endure of all physical suffering. I never should have believed that one could be so tortured by so simple a thing as the want of a drink of water, and when I used to read of travellers in the desert, and shipwrecked mariners on the ocean, having endured such agonies from thirst, as even to die of it, I always fancied there was exaggeration in the narrative. ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... silk I will be obliged by your sending by post, the Stays and Cushion perhaps you may be able to forward by Miss Patty Lingan who will be coming down in nine or ten days, as I am informed. I am just now tortured with black guard consignment business and therefore I conclude by remaining Your ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... men my prophet wail deride! The solemn sorrow dies in scorn; And lonely in the waste I hide The tortured heart that would forewarn. And the happy, unregarded, Mocked by their fearful joy, I trod: Oh! dark to me the lot awarded, Thou ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... dates the humiliation of the discoverers. All their booty and plunder seemed worthless in comparison with the Elysian delights they imagined were concealed behind the closed doors of those holy places, visions of which tortured the women from the western hemisphere and prevented their taking any pleasure in other victories. To be received into those inner circles became their chief ambition. With this end in view they dressed themselves in expensive costumes, took the trouble to learn the "lingo" spoken in the ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... goodness. The man who lives straight, who acts straight when temptation offers, may be no better than—than the man who falls for evil. I once knew a saint who was hanged by the neck because he murdered a man. He gave his life, and intended to give it, for a poor weak fellow creature who was being tortured out of her senses by a man who was no better than a hound of Hell. That man was made of the same stuff as John Kars, if I know him. I can't see Murray McTavish acting that way. Yet I could see him act like the other feller—if it suited him. Murray's good. Sure he's good. ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... had moments of hatred for Grandma: moments when she thought it would have delighted her to see the grim old Puritan scoffed at and humiliated, or even tortured. At the picture of torture, however, Barrie's heart invariably failed, and in fancy she rescued the victim. But never had she hated Mrs. MacDonald ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... I had zigzagged it into the back chamber, Halicarnassus loomed up the back stairs. I stood hot and panting, with the inside of my fingers tortured into burning leather, the skin rubbed off three knuckles, and a bruise on the back of my right hand, where the trunk had crushed it against a sharp edge ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... conformance to fashion, and which in this case is disgusting cruelty. Thoroughbred horses are never docked, whether they be used for racing, steeplechasing or hunting, and it is a monstrous thing to mutilate unfortunate half-breds, especially mares, and condemn them to be tortured by flies, and to have the most sensitive parts of their bodies turned into a safe camping ground for insects, simply because these poor animals have a stain in their pedigree. In summer time, when flies are troublesome, we may often see a long-tailed brood mare at grass ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... gang. Evidently they had taken up Lamborn's cause. Something was preying upon him. He was drinking more heavily. Perhaps he was tormented with the thought that I knew his secret and abided some vengeance upon him. Perhaps his conscience tortured him. At any rate he had become a skulking figure of hatred, showing his teeth and snarling when he saw me and sidling away like a wolf. He had muttered curses as he hurried to one side. "Bloody Englishman" and the like were his remarks. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might ...
— Elsie at Home • Martha Finley
... the ideal sphere again in one of his great poems, the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). This poem is the apotheosis of the French Revolution. Prometheus, the friend of mankind, lies tortured and chained to the mountain side. As the hour redemption approaches, his beloved Asia, the symbol of nature, arouses the soul of Revolution, represented by Demogorgon. He rises, hurls down the enemies of progress and freedom, releases Prometheus, and spreads ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... was, that the cellar was explored by the lord chamberlain, and Guy Fawkes himself was found, with all the materials for striking a light, near the vault in which the coal and the gunpowder were deposited. He was seized, interrogated, tortured, and imprisoned; but the wretch would not reveal the names of his associates, although he gloried in the crime he was about to commit, and alleged, as his excuse, that violent diseases required desperate remedies, the maxim of the Jesuits. But most of the conspirators revealed their ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... literary circle you mention; a literary circle inferior to none in the two kingdoms. Alas! my friend, I fear the voice of the bard will soon be heard among you no more! For these eight or ten months I have been ailing, sometimes bedfast and sometimes not; but these last three months I have been tortured with an excruciating rheumatism, which has reduced me to nearly the last stage. You actually would not know me if you saw me—Pale, emaciated, and so feeble, as occasionally to need help from my chair—my spirits ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... volatile. But he's a dear good boy nevertheless—was so kind to his mother while she was alive, and ran away from school when quite young—and no wonder, for it was a dreadful school, where they used to torture the boys,—absolutely tortured them. The head-master and ushers were tried for it afterwards, I'm told. At all events; Eddy ran away from it after pulling the master's nose and kicking the head usher—so it is said, though I ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... I had continued to harden myself, either by other bloody misdeeds, or by the savage drunkenness of a galley-slave's life, this salutary change in me had never taken place, I know well. But alone—blind—and tortured with a visible remorse, what could I think of? New crimes—how commit them? An escape—how escape? And if I escaped, where should I go—what should I do with my liberty? No; I must henceforth live in eternal night, between the anguish of repentance, and the ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... admirable discrimination and impartiality: "The religious persecutions which prevailed in this reign, proceeded altogether from a different cause from that which stands as an everlasting blot on the memory of Henry VIII. In Henry's instance, people were tortured and murdered in the name of religion, but the real cause was their opposition to the will of an arbitrary tyrant; whereas those who suffered under Mary, were martyred because the Queen conscientiously believed in those principles to which she clung with ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... was her custom, before going to bed. A faint voice called to her from the bed, 'Nellie, my daughter, read the 14th chapter of St. John for your Mother.' 'Yes, Mother,' was the reply, and after turning the leaves a few moments, the child began. All that long Winter day that poor mother had been tortured with pain and remorse. She was poor, very poor, and she knew she must die and leave her child to the mercies of the world. Her husband had died several years before. Since then she had struggled on, as best she could, till now she had almost grown ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... spirit of good will toward all, unfortunately, has not yet taken hold. An already tortured peace seems to be constantly threatened. We shall try to use our influence to increase the possibilities of improved relations among the nations of that region. We are working hard ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... was not put to death at once, as you will hear in the account of the Tower; he was tortured on the rack to make him give up the names of those who had been in the conspiracy with him. Again and again he refused, but at last the awful suffering weakened him so that he hardly knew what he was doing; and when the torturers told ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... As he himself said in writing to his sisters, "if able to accept invitations," he "would have had the run of Faubourg St. Germain." I doubt, however, if his personality is remembered by many, much less that strangely tortured life which probably gave little mark of its suffering even to those who knew him ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... adopted daughter, whose delicate health was the ostensible cause of her departure. What it cost her to leave Paris may well be conjectured, and nothing is more indicative of her power of self-control than this voluntary withdrawal from a companionship which fascinated while it tortured her. Chateaubriand sent letters after her full of protestations and upbraidings; but after a while he wrote less frequently, and for a year they ceased to correspond. To a friend who urged her to return Madame Recamier wrote,—"If I return at present to Paris, I shall again ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... I had left Falloon, and found the situation entirely unchanged. No one had come out of the Hotel Pierre Fatio. Mrs. Blair was paying a very long call, and I could not understand it. All the time I was haunted with a vague and ever present idea that she meant to sell me. The more I tortured my brain to consider how, the less I was able ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... suddenly burst into the room and seized him. A Christian Chinese who was with him escaped over the back wall, and took the sad tidings to his friends. The Boxers dragged Pastor Meng to a temple, and there, having learned that his eldest son had fled, tortured him to make him tell Ti-to's hiding-place. But the secret was not revealed. In the early morning scores of Boxer knives slowly stabbed him to death. But the face of the Master smiled upon this ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... thousands of throats, doubtless wetted by copious drafts of samshu, it grew again suddenly, rising stronger and stronger, hoarser and hoarser, more insane and more possessed, until the tympanums of our ears were so tortured that they seemed fit to burst. Could walls and gates have fallen by mere will and throat power, ours of Peking would have clattered down Jericho-like. Our womenfolk were frozen with horror—the very sailors and marines muttered that this was not to be war, but an Inferno of Dante ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... Lycortas general, and falling upon the Messenians, put all to fire and sword, till they all with one consent made their submission. Dinocrates, with as many as had voted for Philopoemen's death, anticipated their vengeance and killed themselves. Those who would have had him tortured, Lycortas put in chains and reserved for severer punishment. They burnt his body, and put the ashes into an urn, and then marched homeward, not as in an ordinary march, but with a kind of solemn pomp, half triumph, half ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... too, was mysterious. Whence came that undertone like the moan of a weary wastrel tortured with dreams of idyllic innocence long lost? Why did her utterance, like her glorious face, always suggest some inner, darker meaning? There were times when she seemed old—old as vice and cruelty, hoarse with complaints, ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... to the introduction of a tortured and affected style into verse-writing is the sacrifice which has to be made of that dignity and sweetness, that suave elevation, which marks all successful masterpieces. Perhaps as difficult a quality to attain as any which the poetry of the future will be called upon to ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... their bony limbs flung forth in gnarled unnatural gestures, they remind me of frantic skeletons suddenly petrified in their dance of death. They are frenzied, and unutterably tragic. They seem to move; yet they are so dead. And I imagine their denuded tortured arms reaching toward unanswering Heaven in an agony of protest against the fate that has ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... men to the torturers, crushing them beneath the rack, or slaying them by the stroke of the fierce executioner. Men who, if nature had permitted, would rather have lost ten lives in battle than be thus tortured while guiltless of all crime, having their estates confiscated, as if guilty of treason, and their bodies mutilated before death, which is the most ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... poorly-dressed woman, bitterly; "one more out of this world of misery." Then she turned and went down the street. I was glad for the horse. He would never be frightened or miserable again, and I went slowly on, thinking that death is the best thing that can happen to tortured animals. ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... humble friends, there was a Mrs. Desmoulins, the daughter of a Lichfield physician. Johnson had had some quarrel with the father in his youth for revealing a confession of the mental disease which tortured him from early years. He supported Mrs. Desmoulins none the less, giving house-room to her and her daughter, and making her an allowance of half-a-guinea a week, a sum equal to a twelfth part of his pension. Francis Barker has already been mentioned, and ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... something so ludicrous in the making of it by one whom we had just pulled out of the water, that I could not help smiling. Mr. Parasyte saw that smile, and as he always put the worst construction upon what was done by those not in favor, he misinterpreted it, and tortured it into a sneer. ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... and puffing at it thoughtfully. "It's mighty nice in the day time, I'll admit. Then it's a mighty pretty, homey place. But at night, especially on a stormy night, it's different. The wind wails round here like a tortured ghost, the waves beat upon the rock foundation of the tower like savage beasts trying to tear it apart, and the tower itself seems to quiver and tremble. And you start to wonder—" the girls had gathered closer to him, for his voice was grave and his eyes had stopped ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... into the hollowy beyond, and, by the time she had found the children, he was too far away for her voice to reach him. And besides, she was not sure it was her husband, for he had not turned his head at their shouts. This seemed so strange. Why didn't he stop to rest at his old neighbor's house? Tortured by hope and doubt, she hurried up the coulee as fast as she could push the baby wagon, the blue coated figure just ahead pushing steadily, silently ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... was very dark. Mrs. Marley was old, and had been so for some years, so she was used to that; but somehow this fall she seemed to be getting very much older all of a sudden. She found herself very tired at night, and she was apt to lose her breath if she moved quickly; besides this, the rheumatism tortured her. She had saved only a few dollars, though she and her sister had had a comfortable living,—what they had considered comfortable, at least, though they sometimes had been hungry, and very often cold. They would surely go to the almshouse ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... Granice thought how thick and heavy he had grown. It was evident, even to Granice's tortured nerves, that the words had not been uttered in malice—and the fact gave him a new measure of his insignificance. Denver did not even know that he had been a failure! The fact hurt ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... that sad and suffering heart If this be true that Lysias says—Conceive! Alas! Orestes, not so sad thy fate, For the Apollo pardoned, purified— Thy Furies were appeased, thy peace returned, But Judas perished tortured unto death, Unpardoned, unappeased, unpurified. And long as Christus shall be known of men His name shall bear the brand of infamy, The ...
— A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem - First Century • W. W. Story
... well known to Rolla and Cunora. Had not their fellow villagers, many of them, tried time after time to escape from bondage? And had they not inevitably been apprehended and driven back, to be tortured as an example to the rest? It would ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... spectacle, and one refreshing to the heart, to see how the tiger and dove struggle with each other? And I tell you the tiger thirsts so much for blood! Blood is the only balm that he applies to his aching limbs, and by which alone he imagines that he can restore peace and courage to his tortured conscience and his dread of death. Ah, ha! we have told him that, with each new execution of a heretic, one of his great sins would be blotted out, and that the blood of the Calvinists serves to wash out ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach |
