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More "Desperate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Negro. The Rhode Island Assembly in 1778 resolved to raise a regiment of slaves, who were to be freed at enlistment, their owners in no case being paid more than L120. In the Battle of Rhode Island August 29, 1778, the Negro regiment under Colonel Greene distinguished itself by deeds of desperate valor, repelling three times the assaults of an overwhelming force of Hessian troops. A little later, when Greene was about to be murdered, some of these same soldiers had to be cut to pieces before he could be secured. Maryland ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... things, and I want you to understand. So Churchill doesn't like the whole business. But he's under the shadow. He's been thinking a good deal lately that his day is over—I'll prove it to you in a minute—and so—oh, he's going to make a desperate effort to get in touch with the spirit of the times that he doesn't like and doesn't understand. So he lets you get ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... doing me an injury, without a thought of their own necks. They might have been thrown out and killed, but they did not hesitate because of that. The one thought was to do me some way—any way. Hartwick always was a desperate fellow, but I did not fancy Harlow could be such a chap. However, he was driving that horse, and the way he drove was proof enough that he is careless of life ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... marshal thereafter; Of Canelious, right ugly, is the first, Who from Val-Fuit came across country there; The next's of Turks; of Persians is the third; The fourth is raised of desperate Pinceners, The fifth is raised from Soltras and Avers; The sixth is from Ormaleus and Eugez; The seventh is the tribe of Samuel; The eighth is from Bruise; the ninth from Esclavers; The tenth is from Occiant, the desert, That is a tribe, do not the ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... a desperate fight now for about a quarter of an hour between man's two best slaves—fire and water; and John Willows looked anxiously on, asking himself the question, which was to win. At the end of the above-mentioned time, in spite of the inflammable nature of the old building, the ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... and she wavered slightly under his black eyes. The fight was becoming a little too desperate even for her ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... better understanding of things than they imagined they had. They were almost universally disgusted with the Innovation, while the advocates for it were yet endeavoring to make the world believe, that the opposition to it arose from a few men only, of "no property" and "desperate fortunes," who were "endeavoring to bring things into confusion, that they might have the advantage of bettering their fortunes by plunder." Little did they think that it was then known, as it now appears in fact, that those who were assiduously watching for places, preferment and ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... desperate hurry," observed the Honourable John, ignoring the epithets with which we assailed him. He was never offended, and never perturbed. When the vials of our wrath were poured upon him, as they had been pretty freely during the holiday, they ran off him like the proverbial ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... that visit especially, because this was the last time I saw the Nelson bungalow. On arriving at the Straits I found cable messages which made it necessary for me to throw up my employment at a moment's notice and go home at once. I had a desperate scramble to catch the mailboat which was due to leave next day, but I found time to write two short notes, one to Freya, the other to Jasper. Later on I wrote at length, this time to Allen alone. I got no ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the courtier, laughing, in order that he might seem to comprehend the quotation, "your majesty may be perfectly right in relying on the good feeling of France, but I fear I am not altogether wrong in dreading some desperate attempt." ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... all countries in the world!" she culminated—a desperate note invading her wrath. "The one place where he should not be allowed to sow his wild oats—if the modern anaemic young man has enough red blood in his veins—for that sort of thing. And it's your obvious duty to be quite frank with ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the roadway of the bridge was guarded by a low stone wall; the other side was naked and open and bare to the deep, slow-moving water beneath. It was a dangerous place to attack a desperate man clad ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... around. Since the time they were both five Nellie Tanner had supplied in full all the feminine requirements he had ever desired. And she did at this moment. But Nat Burns had seen a great deal of her in the last three months, he remembered, taking advantage of Code's desperate ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... Batavia, several rafts of spars for masts, and if the plan of building ships at Pinang should be encouraged large supplies of frame-timber for the purpose may be obtained from this river, provided a sense of interest shall be found sufficiently strong to correct or restrain the habits of treachery and desperate enterprise for which these people have in ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... Liberal peer. Why, being the kind of Gallio I am, I should have been, like a second Daniel, thrown among these lions, I could not understand. They were not the least likely to convert me to their own desperate intensity of feeling. If Lady Moyne wanted to convert me a far better plan would have been to invite me to her house after the politicians had gone away. Circe, I imagine, did not attract new lovers by parading those ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... portmanteau out upon the wayside, a wonder to all beholders; or to leave the door ajar, so that any thievish tramp or holiday schoolboy might stray in and stumble on the grisly secret. To the last, as the least desperate, his mind inclined; but he must first insure himself that he was unobserved. He peered out, and down the long road; it lay dead empty. He went to the corner of the by-road that comes by way of ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in this way, it usually is possible to fill her place with a convenient young sister, or even with an elderly aunt. But when a man is wanted, and, especially, as in the case in point, a clever man, the matter very readily may become desperate. Mrs. Rittenhouse Smith certainly was dismayed, yet was she not utterly cast down. She had faith in her own quick wits, which had rescued her in times past from other social calamities, though never from one ...
— A Border Ruffian - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... from drink, for which he had a propensity, and, as if under a vow, he went naked for nearly two years. He also meditated suicide, and was probably only prevented from committing it by the influence of a white friend. He sought honourable death in desperate encounters with all the enemies he could find, and in this period acquired his name, or title, from a very destructive attack he made upon a party of another tribe. He lived a year or two with the Pawnees, ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... who tasted liquor in all our town in those days. To have been betrayed into taking too much just once would have been to lose one's character; and when my father heard of Stephen's being seen a good many times when he was not able to take care of himself, it seemed to him that it was a desperate case. I think he would as lief have laid me down in the graveyard beside my little brothers, as have thought of giving ...
— Stephen Grattan's Faith - A Canadian Story • Margaret M. Robertson
... existence of many of them. This stoppage, however, had likewise been nearly productive of fatal consequences to the whole party. In fact, another mutiny was within an ace of breaking out, which, if not checked at the moment, could only, in their desperate situation, have ended in irretrievable and total destruction. Bligh mentions, in his printed narrative, the mutinous conduct of a person to whom he gave a cutlass to defend himself. This affair, as stated in his original manuscript journal, wears a ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... way. Then she would divide her years between the little studio in England and Kami's big studio at Vitry-sur-Marne. No, she would go to another master, who should force her into the success that was her right, if patient toil and desperate endeavour gave one a right to anything. Dick had told her that he had worked ten years to understand his craft. She had worked ten years, and ten years were nothing. Dick had said that ten years were nothing,—but that was in regard to herself only. He had said—this ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... there could be no further joy in life for him when his protector was slain. Nature, grief, despair, foreboding, terror,—these were my allies; with these I hemmed him in, and drove him to his last desperate resolve. Know that your oppressor died childless, heartbroken, weeping, groaning in spirit; the time of his mourning was short, but it was a father mourning for his son; he died by his own hand, bitterest, most awful of deaths; that death comes lightly, by comparison, ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... they were out of it, and the order was Dennis, Early, Richards, and Lang. At the beginning of the second mile, Early, whose duty it was to have gone up and helped Dennis make the pace at the third half-mile, had manifestly had enough of it, and, after two or three desperate struggles to keep up, was passed by Richards. When, therefore, they came to the mile and a half, Dennis was leading Richards by some fifteen yards, and those who knew the game expected to see the Harvard man try to overtake Dennis, and in so doing ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... unite. Johnston's assistants in command were Beauregard and Bragg, both able and experienced officers. On the morning of April 6, the Confederates fell upon Grant's outposts and drove them headlong against the main body. Desperate valor was shown in the ensuing attack, and before the afternoon it seemed that nothing could save the Union army and its commander from complete disaster. The river was in high flood, two impassable creeks flanked the Federals, while ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... of Namur, in Flanders, these fellows happened to be both in the trenches when the French made a desperate sally and were beaten off at last with much loss and in such confusion that their pursuers lodged themselves in one of the outworks, and had like to have gained another, in the attack on which a young cadet of the regiment in which Blunt served was killed. Blunt observing it, went to ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... fact, such desperate efforts to learn all about poetry that her system got quite out of order. But although she did not in the course of the day hit upon anything, she quite casually succeeded in her dreams in devising eight lines; ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... citizen. You will be at the mercy of the successful general whose triumph may make him the idol of the armed millions that alone can accomplish our subjugation. In the South, butchery and rapine by hordes of desperate negroes—in the North anarchy and political intrigue, to be merged into dictatorship and the absolutism of military power. Such would be the results of your triumph and ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... Austin can administer the calomel to-morrow, then. . . . And do ring up Daisy Craig; tell her mother I'm desperate, and that she and Drina can occupy the same ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... coat hung limp and weary in the wardrobe, and the gross receipts of the evening were under my pillow. I needed sleep, for I was worn out with travel and anxiety, but the fear of being robbed kept me from repose. I know how desperate a man becomes when he yearns for another's gold. I know how cupidity drives a wicked man to mangle his victim, that he may win precarious prosperity, and how he will often take a short cut to wealth by means of murder, when, if he would enter politics, he might accomplish his purpose ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... Life, the Water of Immortality, the Fountain of Youth—a favourite and wide-spread myth during the Middle Ages. In the romance of Sir Huon of Bordeaux the hero boldly encounters a griffin, and after a desperate fight, in which he is sorely wounded, slays the monster. Close at hand he discovers a clear fountain, at the bottom of which is a gravel of precious stones. "Then he dyde of his helme and dranke of the water his fyll, and he had no ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... he dreaded only second to death. He had already twice suffered the horrors of delirium tremens, and he now had good cause for fearing another attack. It was to this Ginsling referred when he said if he broke off suddenly it might lead to serious consequences. So, after what seemed to be a desperate struggle—the better instincts of his nature endeavoring to overcome the craving of his appetite and the sophistry of his tempter—he concluded he would just take a little now to help him over this ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... reported himself. He had read the 'Anabasis,' some Herodotus, three plays of Euripides, and was now making some desperate efforts on Aeschylus and Sophocles. Any Plato? David made a face. He had read two or three dialogues in English; didn't want to go on, didn't care about him. Ah! ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... things necessary? Were they the inevitable results of the desperate struggle of determined patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult to the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty? No! nothing like it. The fresh ruins of France, which shock our feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devastation of civil war: they are the sad, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... points, and four minutes of time to play. The struggle had ceased to be a turning of tricks and test of speed. Henceforth, it was man against man, pound for pound. Suddenly, the opposing team braced itself and began a steady drive down the gridiron. With desperate energy, the Sunrise eleven fought for ground, giving way slowly, defending their goal like true Spartans, dying by inches, until only three yards of space were left on which to die. The rooters shrieked, and the girls sang of courage. Then ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... coins, with each fresh debasement, passed out of the country or at any rate out of circulation, the base coins becoming the medium of exchange. Thus the foundations of commercial stability were sapped, while foreign trading operations were thrown into desperate ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... assuring them that they were certain to reach the wells that afternoon, and always bearing an air of confidence in the future before them. But when they were alone together, and looked into each other's eyes, it was evident that they thought they were in a very desperate position. ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... Maya, Bobbie made one step out of his hiding-place, caught hold of the worm, bit it in two, and began calmly to eat the one half, heedless of its desperate wriggling or the wriggling of the other half in the grass. It was ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... which, so far as human aspiration and desert were concerned, classed the black man and the ox together. And the Negro knew full well that, whatever their deeper convictions may have been, Southern men had fought with desperate energy to perpetuate this slavery under which the black masses, with half-articulate thought, had writhed and shivered. They welcomed freedom with a cry. They shrank from the master who still strove for their chains; they fled to the friends that had freed them, even though those friends ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... gazing absently in front of him! Recollections of mean and envious criticisms, ugly underhand slanders, petty intrigue, his own shame-faced patronage! And then the vision of a lovely, white-faced woman making her desperate self-accusal, and of a terrible, vulgar mother trying to hold her back with threats and pleadings! He turned at last to the two men, his ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... she said, with a desperate anger at his immobility. "When I saw you with her to-day, ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... upon religion as a painful necessity at some remote and desperate emergency of the future; but, after the hours spent with Hemstead, it seemed a source of joy beyond all the pleasures of her highly favored life. She was like one who had been living in the glare of artificial light, brilliant enough, it is true, but who ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... notified his consciousness of the presence of the new-comers with a short nod of recognition; but he was too much occupied to welcome them with words. He seemed in a desperate ill-humour with his official visitors, and replied to all their queries with a significant elevation of his broad shoulders, and a brief "No" or "Yes," ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... blockade increased in strictness, under Commodore Rowley. Decaen's situation was growing desperate. Fortunately for him, the French squadron brought in three prizes in January, 1810, slipping past Rowley's blockade, much to that enterprising officer's annoyance. The situation was temporarily relieved, but the assistance thus afforded was no better than ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... abilities is first carried away by his passions, it is necessary that sentiment and taste varnish the enormities of vice, and give a zest to brutal indulgences: but when the gloss of novelty is worn off, and pleasure palls upon the sense, lasciviousness becomes barefaced, and enjoyment only the desperate effort of weakness flying from reflection as from a legion of devils. Oh! virtue, thou art not an empty name! All that life can ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... order for the repayment of an olde and desperate debt of three thousand marks, a debt so desperate, as foure yeeres left out of their accounts, and by the opinion of them all, not thought fit to be dealt with, for too much offending the Emperour, or impeaching his other ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... their destination. These brave officers had reached Hispaniola after a voyage of four days, little short of miraculous, accomplished as it was in a frail canoe. They immediately made the governor acquainted with the desperate condition of Columbus and his companions. Ovando, in a spirit of malice and injustice, detained these officers, and after a delay of eight months, under pretext of ascertaining the real condition of affairs, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... abruptly. "The cops will get wind of this. They jerk up a circus man on the slightest excuse. It's something of an honor, I believe, to land one of us in jail. The darned rubes talk about it for weeks afterwards, telling how they nailed a desperate character. Everybody connected with a show is a regular devil in their eyes. And that reminds me. I had my lamps on a couple of blue boys down the street as I came up. We'd better go up ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... that if Patoff had mimicked Miss Dabstreak in the first half of his speech, he had imitated me in the second portion of the sentiment. I do not like to be made game of, because I am aware that I am naturally pedantic. It is an old trick of the schools to rouse a pedant to desperate and distracted self-contradiction by quietly ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... carried on and provided against destruction of human life and property. This was the position for instance at the Beaver in the mountains while the Canadian Pacific was under construction. For the time being it was a terminus, and all manner of lawless, desperate and disorderly characters were there to prey upon the navvies, many of whom were foreigners and a good many of whom were just as reckless and offensive as could be imagined. To keep these rough men in order, and there were several hundreds of them mostly armed, there ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... bent upon engaging in a struggle which the pain in his wrist, and shame for having allowed himself to be disarmed, would have made desperate, Cornelius took a decisive step, belaboring his jailer with the most heroic self-possession, and selecting the exact spot for every ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... homemade breads and jams, honey and hot scones spread out upon a spotless cloth around a centre piece of daffodils and early garden flowers. For a rejected suitor I felt singularly cheerful; for a blighted being I made a most excellent meal; and for the desperate misogynist I had determined on becoming I surely felt too much placid satisfaction at Mrs. ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... Desperate now, the lad placed her on the floor, and, thrusting his head from the window, perceived that he could clamber up the two or three feet of rain spout that ran close by, and gain a position on the roof just overhead. ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... engineer must have been miserable and desperate when he sent me to fetch Grindhusen. He was so little used to trouble that the moment anything went wrong he felt the need of some one to confide in. And now when he was going about day after day, thoroughly disheartened and full of pity for ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... I ever do that was good to you, except marry Mr. Grandcourt?" said Gwendolen, starting up with a desperate resolve to be playful, and keep no more on the perilous edge of agitation. "And I should not have done that unless it had pleased myself." She tossed up her chin, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... my mind to get taken on," she concluded. "Et me voila! I did all sorts of desperate jumps that day. I felt desperate. If I hadn't got it, there was only the Morgue. ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... force, amounting to fifteen thousand men, in the vicinity of Northampton. He received orders from the houses to rescue, by force[c] if it were necessary, the persons of the king, the prince, and the duke of York, from the hands of those desperate men by whom they were surrounded, to offer a free pardon to all who, within ten days, should return to their duty, and to forward to the king a petition that he would separate himself from his evil counsellors, and rely once more on the loyalty of his parliament. From Northampton Essex ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... distance. How might that audience of Paris, Texas, appropriately date its letters? Not Anno Domini, but many years B.C. The African deserves no pity. His hideous crime was enough to drive a father to any madness, and too many such monsters have by their acts made Texas justly desperate. But for American citizens to crowd to the retribution, and look on as at a holiday show, reveals the Inquisition, the Pagans, the Stone Age, unreclaimed in our republic. On the other hand, the young men and women ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... Perhaps the most ironic strength of these kinds of archival electronic resources is that many of the teachers AM interviewed were desperate, it is no exaggeration to say, not only for primary materials but for unstructured primary materials. These would, they thought, foster personally motivated research, exploration, and excitement in their students. Indeed, these materials have done just that. ...
— LOC WORKSHOP ON ELECTRONIC TEXTS • James Daly
... This desperate profanation was emulated in the provinces. Fouche, in Lyons, ordered a civic festival in honour of one Chalier. An ass, with a mitre on its head, and dragging a Bible at its tail, formed a characteristic portion of the ceremony; the Bible was finally ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... men from over the Missouri border. Accordingly, in 1857, the free-state men so vastly outnumbered the slavery contingent, that even pro-slavery men had to acknowledge it. Then the slavery party made its last desperate effort. Toward the close of that year the Lecompton Constitution was framed by a convention chosen at an election in which the free-state men, perhaps unwisely, had refused to take part. When this pro-slavery instrument ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... defined as the offspring of FICTION and LOVE. Men of learning have amused themselves with tracing the epocha of romances; but the erudition is desperate which would fix on the inventor of the first romance: for what originates in nature, who shall hope to detect the shadowy outlines of its beginnings? The Theagenes and Chariclea of Heliodorus appeared in the fourth century; and this elegant prelate was the Grecian Fenelon. It has been ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... me, the heat tormented me, the dry air made me shrivel and gasp; and, as he lay on the grass, the great salmon whirled his desperate nose once more to the river, and leaped, leaped, leaped, even under the mountain of air. He could leap upwards, but not forwards, and yet he leaped, for in each rise he could see the twinkling waves, ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... each side the strife was bloody and desperate. Bold men grasped each other by the throat, and they held their swords to each other's breasts, scowling one upon another with the ferocity of contending tigers, ere each gave the deadly plunge which was to hurl both into eternity. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... movement. The baronet, incapable of saying more, pointed to a chair for him to sit down; then sinking into another himself, took out his handkerchief, and wiping away the large drops which stood on his forehead, panted for respiration. At last, with a desperate kind ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... assault on Lee's left, under Jackson, with his best troops. The charge was furious, and a bloody struggle ensued; but Jackson succeeded in repulsing the force. It fell back in disorder, but was succeeded by a second and a third line, which rushed forward at the "double-quick," in a desperate attempt to break the Southern line. These new attacks were met with greater obstinacy than at first, and, just as the opponents had closed in, a heavy fire was directed against the Federal column by Colonel S.D. Lee, commanding the artillery at Lee's centre. ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... indignation and impatience. They considered M'Dougal as acting, if not a perfidious, certainly a craven part. He was continually repairing to the camp to negotiate, instead of keeping within his walls and receiving overtures in his fortress. His case, they observed, was not so desperate as to excuse such crouching. He might, in fact, hold out for his own terms. The Northwest party had lost their ammunition; they had no goods to trade with the natives for provisions; and they were so ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... said, annoyed not only at my own clumsiness but at the absence of anything of Anne's old heroic spirit. "For his sake, at least, you must keep your head. Why, my dear woman, one look at your face, grown as desperate as it sometimes appears now, would ruin Julian with the whole world. Even I, knowing the whole story, would find it hard to forgive him if you should fail to continue to be the splendid triumphant creature whom we know ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... idea, and I don't think I shall trouble my head with the question," replied the captain. "We have given them provisions enough to keep them alive for several days, and they can make their way to some town. I don't consider their condition as at all desperate. If Captain Ringgold thinks it necessary, he will ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... every move I made, but later, as her headache grew worse, she got desperate. So then I put my hand down into the shoe-bag and found the key, where it had slipped ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... ordinary expression, it must be confessed, was of a chastity to make one desperate—a sublime coldness—an ignorance of all possibilities of human passion, such as would have made the moon-bright eyes of Phoebe or the sea-green eyes of Athena appear by comparison more liquidly tempting than those of a young girl of Babylon sacrificing to the goddess Mylitta within the ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... his life in order to become the President of the United States; because the power of that office is temporary, limited, and subordinate. The prize of fortune must be great to encourage adventurers in so desperate a game. No candidate has as yet been able to arouse the dangerous enthusiasm or the passionate sympathies of the people in his favor, for the very simple reason that when he is at the head of the Government he has but little power, but little wealth, and but little glory to ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... the firemen carried round and round, in and out, like crazy creatures. I am sure I saw one fellow, with a white pail, pitch through the same window into the red-hot flames fifty times. The poor girl-boy, being desperate, just pitched in, determined to burn herself, while the woman in yellow and the ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... particular fish appeared to have no show on earth—or rather in the water—and after fourteen leaps he was hauled up to the boat in such short order that if we had gaffed him, as we used to gaff Marlin, we would have had a desperate fight to hold him. But how easy to cut him free! He darted down like a blue streak. I had no fair sight of him to judge weight, but Captain Dan said he ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... of every Christian mind. Whereupon, falling into consideration that the Mermaid, albeit a very strong and sufficient ship, yet by reason of her burden not so convenient and nimble as a smaller barque, especially in such desperate hazards; further, having in account how great charge to the adventurers, being at 100 livres the month, and that in doubtful service, all the premises considered, with divers other things, I determined to furnish the Moonlight with revictualing and sufficient ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... at Franspoort. To the right and left of us some desperate fighting went on for several days, and at Donkerhoek a fierce battle took place, but we ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... insurmountable obstacles to an eventual marriage. For it had not been the purpose of Israel to marry at once, but at a future day, when prudence should approve the step. So, oppressed by his father, and bitterly disappointed in his love, the desperate boy formed the determination to quit them both for another ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... themselves to wayfarers, and in such a case the traveller was never seen again alive. Tales of Robin Hood began to take shape. The by-ways and thickets were peopled with men, innocent or guilty, but all alike desperate. One Richard, we read, whose fellow at the plough fell dead in an epileptic fit, fled in terror of the judges to the woods, and so did many a worse man than Richard. We find constantly the same tale of the sudden quarrel, the blow with a stick or a stone, the thrust ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... her capacious lap, and the precious Scorpion snatched out of her arms. Polly's firm, muscular young fingers tightly held the dog's mouth, and in an instant Scorpion and she were out of sight. Notwithstanding all his fighting and struggling and desperate efforts to free himself, she succeeded in carrying him to a little deserted summer pagoda at a distant end of the garden. Here she locked him in, and allowed him to suffer both cold and hunger for the remainder ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... the office, an' I sat until it was long after dark. I couldn't believe 'at she was desperate enough to marry me; I could see the gulf between us plain enough, an' the higher you are the plainer you can see the difference; but I could see that unless Jabez changed his ways, why, the oldest man the' was couldn't tell how far Barbie would go. I didn't think a ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... c. 2. He observes, (c. 5,) that the desperate sallies of two Gallic legions were like a handful of water ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... my mind that he understood the girl's desperate ruse, and that he was waiting for the issue. I picked furiously at the ropes which bound my hands, and a long strand uncoiled and ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... made such an avowal, it might occasion an irreconcilable breach with her husband. At Kenilworth, again, she might plead her cause with her husband himself, whom Janet, though distrusting him more than the Countess did, believed incapable of being accessory to the base and desperate means which his dependants, from whose power the lady was now escaping, might resort to, in order to stifle her complaints of the treatment she had received at their hands. But at the worst, and were the Earl himself to deny her justice and protection, still at Kenilworth, if she chose ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... have puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor. For some time this Birmingham machine ran along by our side—a piece of familiarity that already of itself seemed to me sufficiently Jacobinical. But all at once a movement of the horses announced a desperate intention of leaving us behind. "Do you see that?" I said to the coachman.—"I see," was his short answer. He was wide awake,—yet he waited longer than seemed prudent; for the horses of our audacious opponent had a disagreeable air of freshness and power. ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... —— May bowl!" he groaned, and then sat down in the chair beside his couch to feel of his head, which seemed a gigantic bass drum, hollow and reverberating. Like a flash his desperate flirtation with the wife of his own squadron chief came back to his ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... whence they had arisen at my cry. I sat down upon a stone, and feeling that I was fast going into a state of distraction, tried to collect my faculties, and to consider what was best to be done, or, indeed, if anything could be done. With the sense of my desperate condition came also a horrible sense of the ludicrous. What would my principals in London think of their continental agent shivering, without a rag on, upon the desolate banks of the Danube? Here was I, a man well known upon 'Change, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... to shelter old eyes from the glare. When she was very tired with doing her work Mrs. Prettyman would totter out into the garden. She was getting terribly lame now, yet afraid to acknowledge it, knowing, with the desperate wisdom of poverty, that once to give in, very often ended in giving up altogether. So her lameness was 'blamed on the weather,' 'blamed on scrubbing the floor,' blamed on anything rather than the tragic, incurable ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... conduct of the war. After two years of hard conflicts—Aquillius is said to have fought in person with Athenion, and to have killed him in single combat—the Roman general at length put down the desperate resistance, and vanquished the insurgents in their last retreats by famine. The slaves on the island were prohibited from bearing arms and peace was again restored to it, or, in other words, its recent tormentors were relieved ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... KIDD— His cruellest acts were kindness, compared with the deeds I did! Never a pitying pang felt I for youth, sex, age, or rank— All who fell into my clutches were doomed to pace a protruded plank! Yet the desperate demon of those days is now a Churchwarden mild, Holding the bag at Collections—and all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 13, 1892 • Various
... Which Skipper Bill, as a Desperate Expedient, Contemplates the Use of His Teeth, and Archie Armstrong, to Save His Honour, Sets Sail in a Basket, But Seems ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... in his own moral condition which alone will allure him to virtuous conduct. To expose children to public ridicule or contempt tends either to make them sullen and despondent, or else to arouse their resentment and to make them reckless and desperate. Most persons remember through life some instances in their early childhood in which they were disgraced or ridiculed at school, and the permanence of the recollection is a test of the violence ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... effect, until the flight of the American militia on that side exposed the battery to certain capture. The sailors then spiked their guns, and marched off unmolested. The sailors of the "Carolina," on that day of desperate fighting, were in the centre of Jackson's line, between the Creoles and the swarthy Baratarians under Dominique Yon. Here they worked their howitzers, and watched the scarlet lines of the enemy advance and melt away before ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... could equal mine in its degree and strength. This was not in her nature. She was one taught to subdue her nature, to repress the tendencies of her heart, to submit in silence and in meekness. She had invariably done so until the insane urgency of her mother made her desperate. But for this desperation she had still submitted, perhaps, had never been my wife. In the fervent intensity of my own love, I fancied, from the beginning, that there was something too temperate in the tone of hers. Were I to ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... thrilled by the desperate fight of the heroic old Cat. Her whole race went up higher in his esteem that day; and the fact that the house Cat really could take to the woods and there maintain herself by hunting was all that was needed to give her a place in his ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... let him fall prostrate before the foot of our throne, with his hands bound behind his back. Should he hesitate, swift destruction shall be poured on his head, on his whole race, and on his country." [146] The desperate extremity to which the Palmyrenian was reduced, called into action all the latent powers of his soul. He met Sapor; but he met him ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... impious crests—have quelled Outrage and bloody power, and, in despite Of what the People long had been and were Through ignorance and false teaching, sadder proof 215 Of immaturity, and in the teeth Of desperate opposition from without— Have cleared a passage for just government, And left a solid birthright to the State, Redeemed, according to example given 220 By ancient lawgivers. In this frame of mind, Dragged by a chain of harsh ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... Caffie's at a quarter past five. Where was he at this moment? What witness could he call upon? Caffie's wound was made by a hand skilled in killing, and this learned hand was his, more even than that of a murderer. Every one knew that his position at that moment was desperate, financially speaking; and, suddenly, he paid his debts. Who would believe the Monte ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... came to pass that on a certain night in August, about two in the morning, Paul Coquenil found himself alone in the baron's spacious, silent library before a massive safe. The opening of this safe is another matter that need not be gone into—a desperate case justifies desperate risk, and an experienced burglar chaser naturally becomes a bit of a burglar himself; at any rate, the safe swung open in due course, without accident or interference, and the ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... her! ah! the fearful, madd'ning thought, Unto a wilder grief his soul it wrought; With desperate pride he wrestled with his pain Lest she should see it in his face again. But ah! what slender chain of love is this That can be broken ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... fuse to a barrel of gunpowder, and fling it into the midst of them. Unfortunately the missile caught in a branch, and was thrown back into the fort, exploding with disastrous consequences to the besieged. The savages taking advantage of the confusion, forced their way into the fort;—one more desperate struggle,—then all was over. Only four Frenchmen and four Hurons fell alive into the bands of the Iroquois, who, terrified at a victory which had cost them so dearly, returned to their villages as fast as possible, not daring to carry out the projected invasion of a country ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... custom of atchieving, or attempting, some desperate and perilous adventure, without either necessity or cause, was a peculiar, and perhaps the most prominent, feature of chivalry. It was not merely the duty, but the pride and delight, of a true knight, to perform such exploits, as no one but a madman would have ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... of manoeuvres and positions and battle joined. I told him of sieges and assaults, of starvation and hardship in trenches, and of sentinels freezing in the snow. I told him of routs and surprises, and desperate last stands and faint hopes, and the pitiless pursuit of fugitives and the dead upon the field. I told, too, of the past, of invasions and massacres, of the Huns and Tartars, and the wars of Mahomet and the Caliphs, and of the ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... melodrama on the detectives. Another arrest which was watched by the writer took place at dead of night in a dirty lodging-house in an East End street. A house-to-house search had been instituted by forty or fifty armed detectives. They expected desperate resistance when they found their quarry. And at last they came upon the man they sought sleeping peacefully on a truckle bed. A giant detective lifted him bodily. A great coat was bundled over his night shirt, and he was sent off ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... fellows that made life miserable to the miners returning to the coast. The bushrangers traveled in gangs of all the way from five to fifteen or twenty, and sometimes more, and each gang was led by the most desperate man among them. They used to 'stick up' solitary travelers, or travelers in groups of a dozen or more. They lay in wait at turnings of the road or near the summits of hills, and generally took their victims by surprise. ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... be no question as to the identity of these kites. They were the Gap Gang, and in desperate plight. Their lugger was gone, and their leader dead. At sixes and sevens among themselves, they had quarrelled with the only man who might somehow have saved them. Behind them lay the gallows; before them the sea—and ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... rising ground, desired quarter, which Alexander, guided rather by passion than judgment, refused to grant, and charging them himself first, had his horse (not Bucephalas, but another) killed under him. And this obstinacy of his to cut off these experienced, desperate men, cost him the lives of more of his own soldiers than all the battle before, besides those who were wounded. The Persians lost in this battle twenty thousand foot, and two thousand five hundred horse. On Alexander's side, Aristobulus says there were not over four and thirty ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... bomb throwers; assumed organisation where in the nature of things it could not exist; spoke of the social revolutionary party one moment as of a perfectly disciplined army, where the word of chiefs was supreme, and at another as if it had been the loosest association of desperate brigands that ever camped in a mountain gorge. Once Mr Verloc had opened his mouth for a protest, but the raising of a shapely, large white hand arrested him. Very soon he became too appalled to even try to protest. ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... because I was desperate. I tell you I wanted to die. What is the use of living if one is persecuted like this? There is nothing to live ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... Hines and two of his classmates at once securely bound a handkerchief about Peter John's face, a task that was not accomplished without a desperate struggle. ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... fair number of travellers bound from the West through Weston to Bristol must use it. The gang could not lie in perpetual guard over it. Why had they set a trap on this particular night, then? The smugglers were a lawless and desperate body, but they did not, as a rule, descend to foot-paddery or robbery. As long as no one interfered with them they were seldom the first to break the peace. Then, why had they lain in wait for me, who had never injured them? Could it possibly be that I had been betrayed? ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for every day was too short for them; what with reading all the morning, and starting out in the afternoon in strange garments (which became shabbier and more ragged very rapidly as the weeks slipped on) upon all manner of desperate errands; walking unheard-of-distances, and losing their way upon the mountains; scrambling cliffs and now and then falling down them; camping all night by unpronounceable lakes, in the hope of catching mythical trout; trying ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... of desperate laugh, as if the notion of so much misery and such various mutilation were too grotesque not to be amusing. "Well, what can you do?" he went on. "If you don't strike, the men think you're afraid of them; and so you have to begin hard and go on hard. I always ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... General Banks's critical position, I have been compelled to suspend General McDowell's movements to join you. The enemy are making a desperate push upon Harper's Ferry, and we are trying to throw General Fremont's force and part of General McDowell's ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... blurted her last desperate problem: "He's learnin' all kind of new things. Me, I ain't learnin' anything. When Chuck comes home he'll just think I'm ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... under circumstances of perpetual jolting and interruption? If we can only confuse him all through the drive, between Nature as it is, when he looks up at the view, and Nature as it is not when he looks down again at our sketch-books, we shall drive him into the last desperate refuge of paying us compliments, and shall slip through his professional fingers with our pet feathers ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... himself. After his lonely existence he was suddenly in the vortex of the whirlpool. He had promised his life to Sir John Dacre and to his country to be staked upon a hazard, which he thought to be hopeless, and knew to be desperate. He did not think of swerving from this promise, for he felt that he must be true to his order and ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... Whenever I have made a fool of myself before, I have been for sticking it out, and trying to turn all mankind—that is, you—into a a fool too, so that I shouldn't be an exception. But this time, I think, I had a kind of inspiration. I felt that my case was desperate. I felt that if I adopted my folly now I adopted it forever. The other day I met a man who had just come home from Europe, and who spent last summer in Switzerland. He was telling me about the mountain-climbing over there,—how they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... his head. "I can't say what French Pete 'll do. He 's been fooled on the iron, and fooled on the oysters, and he 's that disgusted he 's liable to do 'most anything desperate. I would n't be surprised to see him go off with Nelson towards Redwood City, where that big thing is that I was tellin' you about. It 's somewhere ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... was lost to him for evermore. He was now a prisoner, branded, hopeless. He would never be able to withstand the influences that had closed around him and upon him. He supposed that he should become desperate, become a ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Democratic Party of the North sympathized with the South in its attempts to dissolve the Union. During the entire period of the war, New York, Ohio and Indiana were divided States, and Indiana was only kept in line by the active and desperate fidelity of Oliver P. Morton. In the presence of these difficulties Mr. Lincoln recommended the purchase of all the slaves in the States not in rebellion; then he suggested the deportation of the manumitted slaves and the free blacks, to Central America, and for this ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... the railway station and who must be about due to arrive. I did not know who or what it might be, but even the thought of someone else made me feel safer, for in so ticklish a piece of business as this, in dealing with at least a pair of desperate men such as we knew them to be in the ominously quiet little house, a second and even a third line of re-enforcements ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... were enforced; or it might be he owned the land up here, and took me for a poacher who hadn't any right to be fishing on his preserves; then again, he looked so ugly and black that I even figured whether he could be a desperate fugitive from justice who'd been hiding in the Pontico Hills country, and hated to see anybody coming ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... chiefs renowned for valour chose; Down to the strand he speeds with haughty strides, Where anchor'd in the bay the vessel rides, Replete with mail and military store, In all her tackle trim to quit the shore. The desperate crew ascend, unfurl the sails (The seaward prow invites the tardy gales); Then take repast till Hesperus display'd His golden circlet, in ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... he was through with the wasp, 'I don't know. I don't know,' and he seemed, somehow, helpless and desperate, as if he had come to the end ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... won by fair means, he must be conquered by foul," said the desperate villain; "but if we offer him rather more than the count has already promised for his share of the booty, of course he will consult at once ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... in and stood by the bed. She did not speak. She looked at me as if to say that sometimes desperate things have to be done. I understood. I acquiesced. Did Mrs. Brown do it? I never asked. Zoe's sufferings were very great. All this for Lamborn's drunken madness. And then Zoe began to mend. She was out of her difficulty. She ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... remarks that this is considered to mark a kind of turning-point. In 1862 things improve again. In July he is employed in three cases of which two were 'glorious triumphs,' and the third, the 'Great Grimsby riot,' which is 'at present a desperate battle,' is the biggest case he has yet had on circuit. The circuit turns out to be his most profitable, so far. On October 20 he reports that he has got pretty well 'to the top of the little hill' of sessions, and ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... trouble, and rebel against him or resist him. England always sends help to them, the help of an expeditionary force, or, failing that, the help of irregular volunteers. Sir Philip Sidney dies at Zutphen; Sir John Moore at Corunna. There is always desperate fighting in the Low Countries; and the names of Mons, Liege, Namur, and Lille recur again and again. England always succeeds in maintaining herself, though not without some reverses, on the sea. In the end the power of the master ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... among them the best of wills and of cooeperative arrangements, the European peoples could not keep themselves alive this winter and make any substantial advance towards reparation of the damage of war and industrial recovery. If human cooeperation is to save these weak and desperate peoples, it must be a cooeperation of more than the nations of Europe. Only by the better provided nations of the world coming to the rescue can the worse-provided nations survive and recover. It would be foolish to mince ...
— Morals of Economic Internationalism • John A. Hobson
... had considered the matter a moment longer, probably I should not have had the courage to open the battle; for, if I failed to hit the Indian, my situation would become desperate, and with an empty rifle in my hand, I could only depend upon my legs for safety, while the savages would be able to escape with their prize before the soldiers could be ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic
... apparently impressed by his reputation which at this time was growing rapidly as that of a capable and daring agent of Cromwell's; and even once or twice when he condescended to hint at the vastness of the affairs on which he was engaged, in a desperate endeavour to rouse her admiration, she only looked at him steadily a moment with very penetrating eyes, and began to speak of something else. He ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... my life," exclaimed Wallace, straining her to his heart, "I obey thee. But if the hand of one of the desperate robbers dares ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... "A desperate attempt at robbery, culminating in the death of one man and the capture of the criminal, occurred this afternoon in the City. For some time back Mawson & Williams, the famous financial house, have been the guardians of securities which amount in the ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... 'em—SOME sort of dashingness, anyhow! Nobody ever looked at poor Bibbs before, and neither'd she—no, SIR! not till she'd tried both Roscoe and Jim first! It was only when her and her family got desperate that she—" ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... from Reykjavik, had followed the line of the sea. We took our way through poor and sparse meadows, which made a desperate effort every year to show a little green. They very rarely succeed in a ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Violante was under a roof so honoured, and seemingly so safe, as Lord Lansmere's, did not discourage this bold and desperate adventurer. We have seen him set forth to reconnoitre the house at Knightsbridge. He had examined it well, and discovered the quarter which he judged favourable to a coup-de-main, should ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the cowardice of Magny. He found means to communicate with her from his prison, and her Highness, who was not in open disgrace yet (for the Duke, out of regard to the family, persisted in charging Magny with only robbery), made the most desperate efforts to relieve him, and to bribe the gaolers to effect his escape. She was so wild that she lost all patience and prudence in the conduct of any schemes she may have had for Magny's liberation; for her husband was inexorable, and caused the ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in desperate need," she went on quickly. "There was a debt—a debt of honor—I wished to pay. And Mr. Foster told me you were interested in that desert land; that you were going to look it over. He caught me by long distance telephone ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... found that Madame de Selinville prodigiously admired the 'silly swains more silly than their sheep,' and was very anxious that M. le Baron should be touched by their beauties; whereupon honest Philip made desperate efforts to swallow them in his brother's stead, but was always found fast asleep in the very middle of arguments between Damon and Thyrsis upon the devoirs of love, or the mournings of some disconsolate nymph over her jealousies ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... blessed vision! After all the years, Thou'rt with us yet. To-day, as heretofore, Men see Thee still and they cast off their fears, And take fresh courage to press on once more. The soldiers, bearing from the desperate fight A wounded brother, see Thee, in the way, And know Thee for the Saviour, Healer, Friend, For once again, Thy loved ones hear Thee say (O Christ! White Comrade, in their stand for right!) "Lo, I am with you alway, ...
— The Comrade In White • W. H. Leathem
... before us. This is the meaning of the desperate unrest and unhappiness of women. It is this that has drawn us here to enter our protest against the wicked, old, one-legged order of things. Our honored Miss Anthony has gone through fire and hail while she worked for her convictions. All of us have ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... destruction of the French fleet under Admiral Tourville, off La Hogue, led to a material change in their views. After that naval engagement it became obvious that the cause of the fugitive King was in the mean time desperate, and the Scottish officers, with no less gallantry than honour, volunteered a sacrifice which, so far as I know, has ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... stolid countrymen. Mistress and slave were much together, the master's duties requiring his presence near his prince. Time hung heavily on the lady's hands and, as an ennui antidote, she embarked in a desperate flirtation with the handsome fellow, for Egypt's dark-eyed daughters dearly love to play fast and loose with the hearts of men. Of course it was very wrong; but youth and beauty will not be strictly bound, the opportunity seemed made for mischief, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Sigurd from the moment he becomes acquainted with his royal birth until his final destruction. From a frank and generous youth, who is confident that he is born for something great, he is driven by the treachery, cruelty, and deceit of his brother, the king, into the position of a desperate outlaw and guerilla. The very first scene, in the church of St. Olaf, where the boy confides to the saint, in a tone of bonne camaraderie, his joy at having conquered, in wrestling, the greatest champion in the land, gives one the key-note ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the first, when, I had time to at all think of it," Damaris answered with rather desperate bravery, "I couldn't see there was anything for me to forgive. It was the other way about. For haven't I so much which he might very well feel belonged, or ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... and racing up a difficult glen, plunged into the Covenanting flank. Meanwhile the more advanced part of the Covenanting force were driving back some Gordons from a hill on Montrose's left, who were rescued by a desperate charge of Aboyne's handful of horse among the red coats; Airlie charged with the Ogilvies; the advanced force of the Covenant was routed, and the Macleans and Macdonalds completed the work they had begun ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... to go down to the office of the hotel, and see if he could not make some arrangement with the landlord. It would be extremely distasteful, but his ample letter of credit would be at least a voucher of his final ability to pay. As a desperate resort he could go and try to get the money ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... nearest neighbor. When the Indian had made the circuit of the town in this manner he looked very sleek and happy, indeed, but the people were no wiser. The knowledge of having been shamefully buncoed by an Indian and disappointed in their lust for gold made the Mexicans desperate. They held an indignation meeting and resolved to capture the wily Navajo and compel him, under torture, if necessary, to divulge the secret of his gold mine. Consequently, they overcame the Indian, ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... deadly pale. His uncle's manner had taken him by surprise; but even in this desperate moment, when he felt that all was lost, he attempted to assume the ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... towards the cabin and Poppy, leaving the men exchanging glances of hopeless consternation. Then, as he turned to descend, the desperate Joe ran up and laid a detaining hand ...
— A Master Of Craft • W. W. Jacobs
... "He is desperate: and you know it is hard to go on losing and losing, and then the moment luck turns to be done out of it, in spite of a written bargain. I've ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... close behind, some side by side, Like clouds in stormy weather, They run, and cry, "Nay let us die, And let us die together." A Lake was near; the shore was steep; There never Foot had been; 50 They ran, and with a desperate leap Together plung'd into the deep, Nor ever more were seen. Sing, mournfully, oh! ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... had less hope of making his arrangement. He considered the matter carefully and judiciously, but at last he decided that he could not trust the vindictive devils, and he turned his mind strenuously toward resistance. Although not pugnacious, he had plenty of the desperate courage of necessity, and his dusky black eyes were very resolute as he said to Thurstane, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... you had better not." So he kissed her in the hall before the others, made some commonplace suggestion about the place, and with his bag in hand left, nodding to them all as he got into the carriage. Isabelle, who had appeared dazed these days, as if, her heart and mind occupied in desperate inner struggle, her body lived mechanically, left the two men to themselves and went to her room. And shortly afterwards Cairy, who had become subdued, thoughtful, pleaded work and ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... The fox-faced man is apt to be sly, the triangular man is likely to be a lump. So Mr. Asche, being rectilinear, was on the square; just as Mr. Hogan, being soft and round, was slippery and hard to hold. Three days passed, during which Mrs. Mathusek grew haggard and desperate. She was saving at the rate of two dollars a day, and at that rate she would be able to buy Tony a trial in five weeks more. She had exhausted her possibilities as a borrower. The indictment slept in O'Brien's tin file. Nobody ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... How often shall we be required to encounter this desperate elegance? I almost begin to repent ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... they found themselves being carried along in the human stream well out of reach of the blows being showered down by the rallying party from the house, who literally drove their enemies before them, at first step by step, striking back in their own defence, rendered desperate by their position, then giving up and seeking refuge in flight, when with a rush their companions gave way more ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... the torments she endured, and that after doing much good during her mortal career she would, when her time came to quit the world, be placed high amongst myriads of angels. She said that whenever urged by despair to relieve herself from her pains by a desperate course, this bright and beautiful angel would stand before her and pour words of consolation and ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... to the ground, and from behind the shelter of his horse had shot the first robber through the body. Our two companions now drew together, and took refuge behind some large rocks, preparing to receive the charge of a band of half dozen who now appeared. The situation looked desperate. Don Gaspar fired and missed. He was never anything of a marksman, and his first shot must have been a great piece of luck. Barry held his fire. The robbers each discharged his rifle, but harmlessly. Then just as they ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... all; it pleased God to bring a greater affliction yet upon us, for in the beginning of the storm we had received likewise a mighty leak, and the ship in every joint almost having spewed out her Okam, before we were aware (a casualty more desperate than any other that a Voyage by Sea draweth with it) was grown five feet suddenly deep with water above her ballast, and we almost drowned within, whilest we sat looking when to perish from above. This, imparting no less terror ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... lock up your papers in a strong box that nobody can open. They imagine you are at Paris on some commission, and there is no trusting French hotels or servants. America is in a desperate situation, The accounts from the Congress are not expected before the 10th, and expected very warm. I have not time to tell you some manoeuvres against them that will make your blood curdle. Write to me when you can by private hands, as ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... or three minutes Mrs. Armine heard nothing but the noise of the wind, which seemed to have taken entire possession of the chamber, and she felt as if she were its prey and the prey of the darkness. Something that was like hysteria seized upon her, a desperate terror of fate and the unknown. In the wind and in the darkness she had a grievous sensation of helplessness and of doom, of being lost for ever to happiness and light. And when the wind was shut out, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... wounded. Ned, watching his chance, got in several blows, first at one and then at the other of the huge creatures. The third devil fish, which had not been wounded, had disappeared. Finally Koku, with a desperate blow, succeeded in severing the tail from the beast attacking him, and that battle ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... army approaching the capital. The commanders of Gorkha, especially Jagajit, complied most reluctantly, and made a peace with Garhawal. The Brahman, their associate, now considering their affairs desperate, on being desired to accompany them, treated the request with insolence, asking who they were, that he should follow. They had, however, only retired a little way, when information was brought, that peace had been made with the Chinese, on ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... on the strange actions of Marufa the more he was persuaded that that wily colleague was acting upon sound information, and the tangle of his affairs made him so desperate that he decided to gamble upon that assumption: for magician Bakahenzie began to realize that Marufa had somehow scored a point and that now was approaching the crux which would determine whether he won back or lost for ever ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... ears. In vain his assistant, a deft-fingered man with a beard, twirled the waxen-faced figure to show the "semi-princesse back" and the "near-Empire front." Corn-blue chiffon and panne velvet are not much worn in Fourteenth Street. The auctioneer grew desperate. "Twenty-five dollars," he repeated with such scorn that the timid woman who had made the bid wished herself at home and in bed. ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... Mortimer's garden, but the evening breeze, although it cooled his brow, failed to calm his excited feelings. Suddenly it occurred to him that his absence from Mr. Mortimer's would excite attention in those who saw him enter, so he made a desperate effort to be calm, and retracing his steps, was soon in the drawing room with Mabel Mortimer on his arm, much to ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... the state of the body after this event to indicate a future existence, but rather every thing to perplex such a sentiment, and to confound such an expectation. There is nothing in its aspect which seems to foretel life—nothing to predict resuscitation. In general, however desperate the case, hope is sustained by the most trifling circumstances, the feeblest glimmerings of the yet unextinguished lamp; if there be the gentlest breath, or the slightest motion, the solicitude of wakeful tenderness is still maintained, and the possibility at least of a return to health is ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... exclusive right in which to call up the motion to reconsider, after which others could do so. During this time the opponents worked madly to get one of the loyal 49 to change his vote without avail. They attempted every unscrupulous scheme known to control legislation. All failing, as a last desperate move, 36 in the early morning hours made a hegira to Decatur, Ala., where they remained for ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... ground of common Orthodox faith; he would hardly have called for help on the ground of common Slavonic speech and origin. If he had done so, it would have been rather by way of grasping at any chance, however desperate or far-fetched, than as putting forward a serious and well understood claim which he might expect to find accepted and acted on by large masses of men. He might have received help, either out of genuine sympathy springing from community of faith or from ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... me, though the others, it seemed to me, he let alone. The moment, however, that one of them touched me, Solon made his teeth meet in the calves of his legs. I struggled as hard as I could to free myself, but what could I do, a mere boy, in the hands of powerful and desperate men. Knowing that I must be aware of their plot, they seemed bent on my destruction. Already they had got me off my legs, close to the bulwarks, and were about to heave me overboard; the gag slipped from my mouth, and I shouted out hastily for help. The mutineers, alarmed by ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... free man, at that time have got more?-A free man was getting from 9 to 10 a ton; and things came to such a pass that the people got desperate. There were poor years at the same time, and the men applied to their landlord, and got their liberty on condition of paying 15s. a head of liberty money. That was kept on until a few years ago, and then it was put ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... sensation supplied a large part of the material for his poetry, and among the senses it was especially the one that has the remotest association with ideas that he drew upon most constantly—the sense of smell. In his desperate search for new and strange sensations he went the round of violent and exhausting dissipations, and as his senses flagged he spurred them with all sorts of stimulants. Meanwhile he observed himself curiously ; the result in his poems is an impression of peculiarly ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... fast the sheet of a mainsail or foresail. What ho! no nearer! is What ho! no higher now. But old salts remember no nearer! and it may be still extant. Seasickness seems to have been the same as ever—so was the desperate effort to pretend one was not really ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... street in many a town fell suddenly silent and deserted, and grass grew between the stones of the causeway. Here and there fires were kept burning night and day to purify the air, but this availed little. In many a thorpe and village all the inhabitants were swept away and even robbers and desperate vagrants were too greatly in fear of infection to enter the ownerless houses. Sometimes in the fields one saw little children, and perchance an aged woman, trying to manage a plough or ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... Yum needed to go to San Francisco to sign certain papers before the Chinese Consul, permission had first to be obtained from San Quentin. Then, too, neither man was nasty tempered. Saxon had been apprehensive of the task of bossing two desperate convicts; but when they came she found it a pleasure to work with them. She could tell them what to do, but it was they who knew how do. Prom them she learned all the ten thousand tricks and quirks of artful gardening, and she was not long in realizing how helpless she would have been had she ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... His strength being much broken down, I then ordered gum ammoniac, with small doses of opium, and infusum amarum, continuing the squill at intervals. At length I was urged to give the Digitalis, and considering the case as desperate, I agreed to do it. The event was as I expected; no increase in the urine took place; and the medicine being still continued, his pulse became slow, and he apparently sunk under its sedative effects. He was ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... hate on thee!—What, wilt thou say "Through every woman's nature one blind strand Of passion winds, that men scarce understand?"— Are we so different? Know I not the fire And perilous flood of a young man's desire, Desperate as any woman, and as blind, When Cypris stings? Save that the man behind Has all men's strength to aid him. Nay, 'twas thou... But what avail to wrangle with thee now, When the dead speaks for all to understand, ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... final. During months and years the baroness and her daughter had been slowly preparing for the great event. The most unheard-of economies had been imagined and carried out in the attempt to give Hilda a little outfit for her wedding, just enough to hide the desperate poverty in which they had lived. Many a long winter's evening had the two ladies spun the fine flax by the smouldering fire; many a long day had Hilda and Berbel spent at the primitive loom in the sunny room of the south tower; through many a summer's noon had the long breadths ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... The desperate resource which she had tried during the first act, of seeking entertainment from the very conversation which prevented her enjoying it, was not now even in her power: for these gentlemen, though as negligent as the young ladies ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... expresses are few and simple—ideas common to all men; but they take a special colour from his own feelings and experiences, and he renders them with a poignancy which is his own, with a melancholy gaiety and a desperate imaginative sincerity. His figure is so interesting in itself—that of the enfant perdu of genius—and so typical of a class, that the temptation to create a Villon legend is great; but to magnify his ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... in all the great towns, proves that the pack-horses could tramp along the old Roman roads with facility. Indeed, amongst the Normans the commercial spirit was indigenous. The Danes and the folk of Danish blood were diligent traders. The greed of gain unites readily with desperate bravery. When occasion served, Drake would deal like a Dutchman. Any mode of making money enters into facile combination with the bold rapacity of the Flibustier." There was much material prosperity in Normandy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... places where the blaze seemed to be expiring, it would suddenly shoot up into brilliant cones, and pyramids of flame, and this was repeated as often as he approached it. At last he drew back a little, and made a desperate leap into the flames. The united effects of the heat, the violent exertion, and the fear of being burned in the desperate attempt, resulted in his restoration of life. He awoke from his trance, and, though weak and exhausted, he soon recovered his health ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... the last hour, the ladies continued, if words might have been trusted, in absolute despair; and in truth, when one examined into the resources at their command, the case seemed desperate enough. To be sure, Baltimore was near, and was soon under contribution; even Philadelphia and New York were lightly visited, more than one belle having sent thus far for a dress. Some of these, by the way, were, like the Chevalier de Grammont's, swamped on the road, ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... sea had dug out in the sand in stormy weather. But he was feeling better! It was a relief to be thinking that he would soon be talking to Rosario again. Those terrible insults she had hurled at him had stopped hurting. His brain was no longer that whirl of mad desperate ravings! He seemed to be walking on air, instead, as though his heavy body were a feather! Yet there was still a griping sensation in his throat, that caught his breath; and when he swallowed, his ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... which the flower of the Roman aristocracy succumbed to the conqueror of Gaul, with vastly inferior forces, did not end the desperate contest. Two more bloody battles were fought—one in Africa and one in Spain—before the supremacy of Caesar was secured. The battle of Thapsus, between Utica and Carthage, at which the Roman nobles once more rallied under Cato and Labienus, and the battle of Munda, in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... exertion, the population began to outgrow the employment, and there was a necessity for plantations to serve as an outlet. Men who, under happier circumstances, might have led decent lives, and done good service, were now driven by want to desperate courses—"witness," as Richard Hakluyt says, "twenty tall fellows hanged last Rochester assizes for small robberies;" and there is an admirable paper addressed to the Privy Council by Christopher Carlile, Walsingham's son-in-law, pointing ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... fancied he felt her heart beating, but at last he made up his mind that she was really dead. I felt her hands. They were deathly cold. At times Moors bury people warm, and not unfrequently alive. They are always in a desperate hurry to get corpses under ground, thinking the soul cannot have any peace whilst the body lies unburied. As the last service to the body, Omer took some earth and stopped up her nostrils. This was done to prevent her reviving should she be not really dead, and attempt to move. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... pursuing turned round, and with a spasm of desperate terror took a deliberate aim at him. Sylvestre stopped short, smiling scornfully, sublime, to let him fire, and seeing the direction of the aim, only shifted a little to the left. But with the pressure upon the trigger the barrel of the Chinese jingal deviated slightly in the same direction. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... married," said Feltram, with a quiet decision which chilled Sir Bale, for he had by no means made up his mind to that desperate step. ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... all that afternoon; he walked about that dreary house like a patrol, till at last he was observed of the inmates, and knots of girls gathered at the windows—alas! only to giggle at his forlorn and desperate appearance. ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... bright freedom of sixteen hours a day in a cellar was lost to him for evermore. He was now a prisoner, branded, hopeless. He would never be able to withstand the influences that had closed around him and upon him. He supposed that he should become desperate, become a tiger, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... tugs, one clear white and one all black, offered a change in looks, though in nothing else, for each one, with two barges of coal, was making desperate hauling of it, and the Breakwater yet ...
— The Seiners • James B. (James Brendan) Connolly
... with which, as I have shown, the weed-continent swarmed. When these were upset upon the rock, I was confounded to perceive the length and thickness of some of them; and could only conceive that this particular fish must be a very desperate enemy to them, and able successfully to attack monsters of a bulk infinitely greater than ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... was alarmed, and there was an unanimous determination to oppose it. The right simply is not regarded; it is the exercise of it that is the object of opposition. It is this exercise that has irritated and made almost desperate several of the colonies. But the noble lord (Lord North) chooses to be consistent, and is determined to make them all alike. The only province that was moderate, and in which England had some friends, he now treats ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... exhaustion had not yet become grave. The conscription act, passed in April, 1862, had kept the ranks full. The hope of foreign intervention, though distant, was by no means wholly abandoned. Financial matters had not yet assumed an entirely desperate complexion. Nor had the belief in the royalty of cotton received its coup de grace. The vigor and courage of the Confederacy were unabated, and the unity of parties in the one object of resistance to invasion doubled its effective strength. Perhaps this moment was the flood-tide of Southern enthusiasm ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... developed into a reign of terror during the second half of the first year of the world catastrophe. While the armies on the land were locked in terrific conflict, and the navies were sweeping the seas, the huge ships of the air were hovering over cities with a desperate resolve to win on all sides. By degrees the pilots of the various nations learned to work in squadrons. The tactics of the air began to be developed and opposing aerial fleets maneuvered much as did the warships. Long raids by fifty or more machines were reported, tons of bombs being released ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... attire, and if it is to be procured in this place, I will take care that you shall be suitably equipped to morrow. For the rest, trust to time, for it is a great provider of remedies even for the most desperate cases." ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the others in generosity, for our own provisions were running very low. It is true that the bread and biscuits were mildewed, the cheese stale, and the bacon as hard as stone, but the boys gave the best they could, the very poverty and humbleness of the gifts attesting their own desperate plight, and bearing proud witness to the extent of their sacrifice. With tears in their eyes and reiterated protestations of thanks, our guests staggered back through the night to their lines, undoubtedly carrying with them tender memories of ...
— Four Weeks in the Trenches - The War Story of a Violinist • Fritz Kreisler
... the birch canoes, which on the waters of the St. John are easily managed by one man, are never intrusted on those of the Metis to less than two. Our departure from Metis in boats so deeply loaded, as was afterwards learned, was considered there as a desperate attempt, and although but one of them sustained injury, this is to be ascribed to the great skill of the boatmen; and to show the velocity of the stream in a still stronger light, it is to be recollected that, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... becoming more confused than ever. Now it was not only ghosts, but jam and jelly which went to make up the terrors of the situation. But she was growing desperate. She groped right ...
— Dotty Dimple At Home • Sophie May
... said I. "Supposing a gang of men—men of no conscience, desperate, adventurous men—gets together, as men were together on that ship, the doings and fate of which seem to be pretty mysterious. They're all out for what they can get. One of them is in possession of a valuable ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... creature in a dream I moved,—my very hands looked transparent and spirit-like as I stretched them out towards that marvellous Symbol!—and when my eyes glanced for a moment at the folds of my covering veil I saw that its white silkiness shone with a pale amethystine hue. On—on I went,—a desperate idea possessing me to go as far as I could into that strange starry centre of living luminance—the very boldness of the thought appalled me even while I encouraged it—but step by step I went on resolutely till I suddenly ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... vacant places, and these, after a desperate struggle, were secured by two athletic-looking girls and a red-haired schoolboy. The conductor waved back the disappointed boarders and they dropped off sulkily. I watched them a moment and then my eyes toward two soldiers, who were crossing the street. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... early in the morning, to Dartford, for a post chaise and four, to be sent to him at Northfleet, and for four horses to be ready to take him on to town; and that Mr. Sandom; a Mr. Alexander M'Rae, a person in most desperate circumstances; and Mr. Lyte, who is, I believe, a little Navy Agent, and a very poor man, were the persons who had come in this post chaise; and that M'Rae and Lyte were the two persons who were dressed in ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... sort of frantic desperation, I began, to ply myself with impossible sums in mental arithmetic, until I nearly got a brain fever; and the cars stopped, and the dreaded station was shouted in my ears, while I was in the midst of a desperate encounter with a group ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... word was law. Whoever she named was produced in court. The sneak-thief, Arthur Price, was employed by the judges to perform a mission that was at once congenial to his tastes and in harmony with his criminal education. He was sent among the incarcerated Negroes to administer punch, in the desperate hope of getting more "confessions!" Next, he was sent to Sarah Hughson to persuade her to accuse her father and mother of complicity in the conspiracy. He related a conversation he had with Sarah, but she denied it to his ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... Doctor Matthai sprang out of bed and ran to the door. Then a horrible scream of terror and anguish rang through the house. An invisible hand seemed to drag the unfortunate man out of the room. There was a brief, desperate struggle on the landing, the creature went heavily down the stairs, and the street door shut with ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... in a very "nervy" state, as it was felt that ere long the enemy would make another desperate attempt to capture the rest of the mining area, either by direct frontal attack from the East towards Bethune, or by continuing his enveloping movement from the North, and attacking it from that direction across the La Bassee Canal. A large part ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... with axes, many fired through the loopholes; Phillips made a circuit of the fort and tried the bayou stockade, while Herbert's 7th Texas attempted to cross the ditch on the land side. The fight at the stockade was desperate in the extreme; those who succeeded in surmounting or turning this barrier found an impassable obstacle in the ditch, whose existence, strange to say, they had not even suspected. Here the combatants fought hand to hand; even the sick, who had barely strength to walk from the hospital ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... unruffled serenity of a dignified philosopher who gazes unperturbed upon their pangs? So did we meditate when facing the deliberate and mild tranquillity of the priestly person presiding over the bulletin board announcing the arrival of trains at the Pennsylvania Station. It was in that desperate and curious limbo known as the "exit concourse," where baffled creatures wait to meet others arriving on trains and maledict the architect who so planned matters that the passengers arrive on two sides at once, so that one stands grievously in the middle ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... invites it, courts the point of the Ithuriel-spear, whose touch can but reveal more clearly the grace and grandeur of her angelic proportions. The advocates of Slavery have taken refuge in the last covert of desperate sophism, and affirm that their institution is of Divine ordination, that its bases are laid in the nature of man. Is anything, then, of God's contriving endangered by inquiry? Was it the system of the universe, or the monks, that trembled at the telescope of Galileo? ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... making a desperate effort, they swam on up the swift little current, and were nearing the tree fast, getting well toward the bough on which we two boys were seated, when all at once they stopped and ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... self-possession. He knew by the desperate energy with which Nellie clung to his arm that she was helpless, and that every minute they were likely to plunge headlong into and among ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... chin lowered. Without moving her head she looked up at Mrs. Harsanyi and smiled; a smile much too cold and desperate to be seen on a young face, Mrs. Harsanyi felt. "Mrs. Harsanyi, it seems to me that what I learn is just TO DISLIKE. I dislike so much and so hard that it tires me out. I've got no heart for anything." ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... answer the cry. But broader than the fact of the wish of some stood the need of all! Populous cities without one witness to the grace of God! Wide regions untraversed by the feet of His messengers! Hubert had thought New Laodicea a place of desperate need; and so it was in the matter of vital, fruit-bearing piety. But as he thought of the inky darkness in which China's millions dwelt this seemed a place ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... singular precision describes the waning light of the once proud Crescent,—the expiring breath of what has been termed by a bold figure, "the sick man."[13]—Under this vial, however, and likewise as the termination of the second woe, a general, final and desperate alliance is to be found to resist the aggressive forces of the "Lord of Hosts."—This confederacy is headed by the dragon, and is identical with the war, (ch. xii. 17,) against the "remnant of the woman's ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... cries she, fighting with a desperate desire for tears, that is still strongly allied to anger. "You would leave me. You will be no longer my guardian. Ah! was I not right? Did I not tell you you were in a hurry ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... what friend could she apply to learn how much of a rick of hay one horse ought to eat in a month of hunting? In such a matter she might have trusted Andy Gowran implicitly; but how was she to know that? And then, what if at some desperate fence she were to be thrown off and break her nose and knock out her front teeth! Was the game worth the candle? She was by no means sure that she liked Mrs. Carbuncle very much. And though she liked Lord George very well, could it be ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... in the impression on her mind regarding Gerald; only she heard no news of her two sovereigns, and he did not so much as give her the opportunity of speaking to him alone. The heartache was growing worse than ever, and she was beginning to have a sort of desperate feeling that she would—she would—do she knew not what—write to Mr. Wortley—write more strongly to Gerald than she had ever yet dared to do—when one morning, a foreign looking letter arrived, in handwriting she knew full well, though it had never before been addressed to herself. There ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... blood royal: the noonday sun seemed to take fresh lustre from his suit of cloth of gold, the air to be enriched by his perfume, the world to be vastly the better for his furs and jewels. Though it was plain that the tricked-out poet was in a desperate dilemma he managed to bear himself with a dignity that consorted royally with his pomp. Olivier bowed low to the ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the herd succeeded in escaping from the blood and dust of this desperate battle, and made off over the plains; but they were quickly overtaken, and the lance or the arrow brought them down on the green turf. Many of the dismounted riders were chased by bulls; but they stepped lightly to one side, and, as the animals passed, drove their ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... preparedness that might fit one to receive the further confidence of God. Such tranquillity as one gained by putting aside the problems which encompassed one, must be a hollow and vain tranquillity. One might indeed never learn the secret; it might be the will of God simply to confront one with the desperate problem; but a deep instinct in Hugh's heart told him that this could not be so; and he determined that he, at all events, would go about the world as a patient learner, grasping at any hint that was offered him, whether it came by the waving of grasses on ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... bold coarse Amazons; and the few men who appeared had a slouching gait, and looked at us from under their eyebrows with an expression at once cunning and fierce. We met many begging friars—horrible specimens of their species: altogether I never beheld such a desperate set of canaille as appear to have congregated ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... citizens and the country; they had learned the importance of a more thorough discipline and organization; and those who had gone forth as to a picnic or a holiday, sat down "to count the cost" of "enduring hardness as good soldiers." The nation discovered that this struggle for life was desperate and even dubious, ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... Indians, the Hurons were desperate gamblers, staking their all,—ornaments, clothing, canoes, pipes, weapons, and wives," loc. cit. p. xxxvi. Compare Palfrey, of Massachusetts Indians. The same is true ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... was very important to the Confederates, because it was the principal storehouse they now had for feeding their armies about Richmond. It was well known that they would make a desperate struggle to maintain it. It had been the source of a great deal of trouble to us heretofore to guard that outlet to the north, partly because of the incompetency of some of the commanders, but chiefly because ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... foolish, desperate, infantile promises; trying to placate Him in His might with my resolutions for better things, trying to strike bargains, at the last moment, with the Master of Life and Death—even protesting that I'd forgive Dinky-Dunk for anything and everything he might have done, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... was steady; the happy smile on her lips, and the eager expression of her eyes, might have led a spectator to believe that she was thirsty and had mixed herself a refreshing draught. She had no look of a desperate creature laying violent hands on her own life; she felt no hesitancy, no fear of death, no burthen of the guilt she was incurring—nothing but ecstatic weariness and hope; blissful hope of a life without end, united to those ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... since there was no sensibility in the body; so pressure on the injured parts elicited no groans. He prescribed egg and brandy in small quantities, and showed Mrs. Monckton how to administer it to a patient in that desperate condition. ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... Vinton Arnold, would be true to her whatever might happen. Poor Mrs. Jocelyn's best hope was, that the financial storm would blow over without fulfilling their fears. She had often known her father to be half desperate, and then there was patched up some kind of arrangement which enabled them to go on again in their old way. Still, even with her unbusiness-like habits of thought and meagre knowledge of the world, she could not ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... presently came back with a dipper of water, and held it dripping over Sylvia. "Hadn't you better drink a little?" he urged. But Sylvia suddenly motioned him away and sat up. "No, I don't want any water; I don't want anything after this," she said, in a quick, desperate tone. "I can never look anybody in the face again. I can never go to ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and I was a bad man, and she left me! She was right enough! I wasn't fit for a decent woman to live with. All the same, I missed her; and it was another kick down Hellward for me when she went. I got desperate then; I took to drink worse than ever, and I began to let my business go and speculate. You wouldn't know anything of the city, sir; but I can tell you this, when a cool chap with all his wits about him starts ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sniffed Murray, "I doubt that I would have waited for you if I had suspected you were so desperate as to ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... Peloponnesian chiefs, however, were not content. They held a secret council, and resolved to steal secretly away. This treacherous purpose came to the ears of Themistocles, and to prevent it he took a desperate course. He sent a secret message to Xerxes, telling him that the Greek fleet was about to fly, and that if he wished to capture it he must at once close up both ends of the strait, so that ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the Returners, successful and unsuccessful in many different ways. But they all are resumed in the one long desperate Return of Ulysses, the wise and much-enduring man. In space as well as in time his Return is the longest; in spirit it is the deepest and severest by all odds. The present poem, therefore, is a kind of resumption and summary ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Rendered desperate by the emergency, Ingred struggled through the reeds to the very edge of the river, and lifted up her voice in an agonized cry ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... with an escort of Tartars and with carriage horses which at times seemed to fly over the ground. General de Kotzebue knew every foot of the soil and was, of course, a splendid host on such an occasion. On this first day the field of the desperate Alma fight was gone over carefully and on the succeeding morning the ruined ramparts and redoubts of the once great Fortress of Sebastopol—not as yet restored—were visited and studied. The Cemetery of Cathcart's Hill was visited and here there ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... indeed, had fallen into straits so desperate that an appeal to the Liberator offered the only hope of salvation. While the royalists under their able and vigilant leader, Jose Canterac, continued to strengthen their grasp upon the interior of the country and to uphold the power of the viceroy, the President chosen by ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... substituted for what is here set down. There is nothing here of my talk with the English soldier prisoners and nothing of my visit to the officers confined in the Butyrka Gaol. There is nothing of the plagues of typhus and influenza, or of the desperate situation of a people thus visited and unable to procure from abroad the simplest drugs which they cannot manufacture at home or even the anaesthetics necessary for their wounded on every frontier of their country. I forgot to describe the ballet which I saw a few ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... all the several ports and places in Ireland where it would be convenient to land from France." An open trial, indeed, was not denied him; but with hasty rites he was branded a base and false traitor and doomed to be hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. That desperate felon, after prolonged investigation by the Holy See, has lately been declared a martyr ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... of Marengo was lost for a couple of hours: the negligence of General Melas, who trusted too much to the advantages he had gained, and the audacity of General Desaix, restored the victory to the French arms. While the fate of the battle was almost desperate, Bonaparte rode about slowly on horseback, pensive, and looking downward, more courageous against danger than misfortune, attempting nothing, but waiting the turn of the wheel. He has behaved several times in a similar way, and has found his advantage in it. But I cannot help always thinking, ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... fling herself, or the tragedy or comedy that lay within, before careless passers-by. The first page has the date, in red letters, October 2, 1860, largely and clearly written. I am sure the woman's hand trembled a little when she took up the pen; but there is no sign of it here; for it was a new, desperate adventure to her, and she was young, with no faith in herself. She did not look desperate, at all,—a quiet, dark girl, coarsely dressed ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... once, without expecting it from each other: Secondly: That full of the Design to take the Time, and not knowing it, you push upon the Enemy's Thrust, without foreseeing how to avoid it; and thirdly, when an Inferior or desperate Man, unable to defend himself, had rather run on your Thrust in endeavouring to hit you, than strive in vain to avoid it. These are not only the Occasions of the same Time, but ...
— The Art of Fencing - The Use of the Small Sword • Monsieur L'Abbat
... Tim's supporters strove to hold him off the floor so that his hand would still be above the grasping hands that shot up. Once, for an instant, his arm was jerked down. Again it went up. But evidently the paper had broken, and with a last desperate effort, before he went down, Tim flung the coin out in a silvery shower upon the heads of the crowd beneath. Then ensued a weary period of arguing ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... between two big, strong men—the one desperate, unscrupulous, brutal; the other angry enough, but retaining self-control. They crashed onto the floor, Westcott still retaining the advantage of position, and twice he struck, driving his clenched fist home. Suddenly he became aware that some one had jerked ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... the carriage, Roberta," shouted Grand, suddenly alive to his peril. He trembled, but he was not the man to run from an adversary, nor was he likely to sell his life cheaply. With a quick, desperate tug, he jerked himself free of David's grasp. His hand flew to his inside ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... not be heard. But the course of the seasons is not more fixed, than it is certain that these ministerial arts must be temporary in their operation and fatal in their issue; because the more men are flattered, the more desperate they are when the calamity comes upon them. Already the West India Islands begin to cry out, as you will have seen in the address from the Island of Barbadoes. The great number of captures lately ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... the remainder of the day in a desperate state of ill-humour, which was increased by finding that Mlle. de Coulanges could neither stand nor walk. Mrs. Somers was persuaded that Emilie, if she would have exerted herself, could have done both, but that she preferred exciting the pity of the whole house; and this, all circumstances ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... point-blank refused to go into other people's pockets. During this short period of his life he was the most successful and famous lobbyist in Washington, and the most sought after by the most rascally and desperate claimants of ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... murderous volley directed at Hawk Kennedy had come perilously near doing for himself. With the calm which followed the issue of his struggle with Kennedy, came a dull rage at McGuire for placing him in such danger, which only showed his employer's desperate resolve and his indifference to Peter's fate. For Hawk Kennedy had been within his rights in supposing Peter to be concerned in the trick and only the miracle of the expiring torch which had blinded the intruder had saved Peter from the fate intended for Hawk. Peter understood now the ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... the wife of Comte Sixte du Chatelet, prefect of Charente and a state councilor. Despite the warm reception given him, first by a laudatory article in a local newspaper, and next by a serenade from his young fellow-citizens, he left Angouleme hastily, desperate at having been responsible for the ruin of his brother-in-law, David Sechard, and contemplating suicide. While walking along he chanced upon Canon Carlos Herrera (Jacques Collin—Vautrin), who took him to ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... were shanghaied a Deputy Sheriff of Arizona, a member of the Northwest Mounted Police, and a desperate outlaw and ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... sin chiefly instigated the revolt, and brought on the ruin of the angelic spirits, so it is not improbable, that it will be a principal instrument of misery in a future world, for the envious to compare their desperate condition with the happiness of the children of God; and to heighten their actual wretchedness by reflecting on what they ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... bruise imposthumated, and afterwards turned to a stinking ulcer, which made everybody shy to come near her, yet she wanted not the help of many able physicians, who attended very diligently, and did what men of skill could do; but all to no purpose, for her condition was now quite desperate, all regular physicians and her nearest relations ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... sooner got on top than she remembered that no time had been mentioned, or, if it had, that she had forgotten it. She turned and rode up the hill again, and looking down, saw Stafford riding along the valley in desperate haste, and yet looking about him uncertainly. Her heart beat with a quickened pulse, sending the delicate colour into her face, and she pulled up, and, leaning forward with her chin in her hand, ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... part of the trip, than Cary. And, further, the travel is so difficult that about all a man can carry is supplies for himself; and the Indians cannot stand the pace that our men intend to strike; nor, if it should come to the last extremity, and a forlorn hope was needed to make a last desperate push for discovery or relief, could the Indian guides, so far as we have any knowledge of them, be relied on. That the boldest measures are often the surest, will probably again be demonstrated by our Grand ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... speculation to all, a few of his female acquaintance excepted (for he had no friends), who asserted roundly that it represented them all, and some were even willing to go the length of saying that it represented more, and stood for dirty, drivelling, desperate, and a few other choice words which it is quite unnecessary to mention. Only a few, and these were among the knowing and peculiarly observant ones of Gorman's intimates, said that "D" stood for "deep." But then, many of those who thus pronounced their opinion, ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... that your pot-boiling is a desperate and barely sufficient expedient to keep the wolf from the door. So she is planning to help you realize ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... sharp, desperate fight. Strong natures have to. Why was she born with these ambitions and aims and capabilities and the ardent desire to do something? All girls did not have them. Some in the class laughed and made merry without a ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... valuable as a short history of the ostrich method of dealing with realities. The beggar, of course, continues to cry aloud after his tongue, and even his head, have been removed, because there are so many millions of him. Again and again, in the course of history, he has gathered desperate courage to defy authority that is blind and evil. Always at last, as in the French and the Russian revolutions and in the more recent European revolts, he succeeds in wresting the power from those in autocratic authority. ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... miner magnates of the courageous stand of the Western Federation of Miners during the reign of terror of the money powers. For years everything was done to disrupt them, but without results. The latest outrage is a renewed and desperate attack on that labor organization. Are the working people of America going to look on coolly at a repetition of the Black Friday in Chicago? Perhaps there will also be a labor leader, a la Powderly, who will be willing to carry faggots ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... with a shuddering instinctive fear. Then suddenly the thunders seemed to stifle all memory of sound—and left only the silent universe with myself and this terribly beautiful thing in the midst of utter emptiness. And I loved it with a strange, desperate, tigerish love. It expressed itself so magnificently; and that is really all a man, or a waterfall, or a mountain, or a flower, or a grasshopper, or a meadow lark, or an ocean, or a thunderstorm has to do in this world. And it was doing it right ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... malice, as well as to homicide; that having myself whetted the appetite of the populace to blood, no wealth, no power, could prevent my becoming their victim: and thou tellest me thy secret now, ere the trial be over and the innocent condemned, to show what a desperate web of villainy thy word to-morrow could destroy; to enhance in this, the ninth hour, the price of thy forbearance; to show that my own arts, in arousing the popular wrath, would, at thy witness, recoil upon myself; and that if not for ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... had SIXTY of them in a gang, driving them around the country like brutes, to dig up gold and silver for them, (which they will get enough of yet.) Should the lives of such creatures be spared? Is GOD and Mammon in league? What has the Lord to do with a gang of desperate wretches, who go sneaking about the country like robbers—light upon his people wherever they can get a chance, binding them with chains and hand-cuffs, beat and murder them as they would rattle-snakes? ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... a wretched son of mortality: to all which the genie princess replied, that her remonstrances were vain; she had fixed her affections, and would rather be torn into a thousand pieces than desert the object of her heart. The mother upon this finding the case desperate, and being herself softened by the uncommon beauty of the youth, who had fallen at her feet, entreating mercy for his beloved, at length relented, and agreed to sanctify their loves by her consent to their marriage. It was accordingly celebrated; and this island, which after the name ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... of Sir Marcus. Jealousy makes men (and women) do strange and desperate things. The character of Eric Coverly, the new baronet, ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... lamentable truth: that the strange position in which destiny had placed her—a position strange but not infamous—had made of her a being apart, had put her outside the ordinary life of humanity, outside the law of love!... A desire to explain, to convince, to justify herself, the desire of a desperate creature at bay, burned up in her like a flame: it flashed and died. Henri had no confidence in her! He believed this odious thing of her—this abominable, incredible thing!... Her heart was full to bursting with an agony of grief, of outraged innocence.... ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... the captain. "I'm about desperate; I'd rather hang than rot here much longer." And with the word he took the accordion and struck up "Home, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... establishment does not produce great results in the building of the Church when compared with the work of evangelists and educationalists. In some places their aid was at first apparently necessary to success, but as time went on that first desperate importance ceased. We have not so large a medical force that we can afford to use it for any but the most important and necessary purposes; yet, if the establishment of a native Church is the dominant purpose, large numbers of medicals are doing work which is (from this point ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... Two eyes she had beseeching me Meekly and brave, and her brown breast Throbbed hot and quick above her heart; And then she opened her dagger bill,— 'Twas not a chirp, as sparrows pipe At break of day; 'twas not a trill, As falters through the quiet even; But one sharp solitary note, One desperate, fierce, and vivid cry Of valiant tears, and hopeless joy, One passionate note of victory; Off, like a fool afraid, I sneaked, Smiling the smile the fool smiles best, At the mother bird in the secret hedge Patient upon her ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume II. • Walter de la Mare
... stop," said the almost desperate girl, "I will shut myself up and not appear till he is gone. I will any way, if you don't ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... who has conferred on me all his duties and power. After the military operations which were carried on as far as the last town in Isabela, being tired and somewhat sick, I was put in charge of these military headquarters, which I found to be very much mixed up, the town, moreover, being desperate on account of the assaults committed by my predecessor, Rafael Perca, who was appointed by the Colonel, and who was formerly 2d Captain of the steamer Filipinas. After arriving and taking charge, having received numerous complaints against him, I ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... armadillos and gigantic crabs, to which Mr. Roosevelt has given the name of Kermit crabs, to commemorate the escape of his son, who was carried off by one of these monsters and rescued by a troglodyte guide after a desperate struggle. On emerging from the forest the travellers were faced by perpendicular granite crags, which they ascended on the backs of some friendly condors.... The summit proved to be an extensive ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... evil without remedy? Is human nature always to be sacrificed to outward decoration? Is the outward always to triumph over the inward man? Is nobleness of sentiment never to spring up among us? May not a reform in this particular begin in the laboring class, since it seems so desperate among the more prosperous? Cannot the laborer, whose condition calls him so loudly to simplicity of taste and habits, take his stand against that love of dress which dissipates and corrupts so many minds among the opulent? Cannot the laboring class refuse ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... constitution—coming from both sides, they neutralize each other. To argue a constitutional question by guessing at the "suppositions" that might have been made by the parties to it, would find small favor in a court of law. But even a desperate shift is some easement when sorely pushed. If this question is to be settled by "suppositions," suppositions shall be forth ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... attempt to plant an English colony in America. Drake, finding the people in a desperate state, took them in his ships and sailed with them for England. Hardly had they gone before other ships came and the missing colonists were sought for in vain. Then fifteen men were left on the island to hold it for England, and ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... suburban train. He purposely appeared gay before his train-acquaintances. He left the train in high spirits. He pursued a lonely path toward home. He reached a stream. He set to work making many marks of a desperate struggle. He placed a revolver at his heart and fired. Then with unusual fortitude he threw ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... received an expected visitor at her apartment. Expecting him, she made a desperate effort to appear as strong and unconcerned as she had been on the occasion of a former meeting. There was little in her appearance to suggest worry, illness or alarm when she entered the rather unsettled little library and confronted ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... attack east of Telepotch and Polen; severe fighting for the height near Oravozil is in progress, the Russians reoccupying it by a desperate assault after losing it earlier in the day; 600,000 Austro-German troops are now engaged over an irregular line between the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... say about the goodwill and devotion of all engaged, I perceived and deeply felt last night. It moved me even more than the demonstration itself, though I do suppose it was the most brilliant ever seen. When I got up to speak, but for taking a desperate hold of myself, I should have lost my sight and voice ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... swell. Poor Lorraine! I don't mean poor because of the estate, because he's rich, of course; but do you know, I think he's sadder than ever. He's very much cut up that the Colonel died, of course, but he seems desperate about everything, and talks more about suicide than he did at Snuffy's, Jem says. One thing he is quite changed about; he's so clean! and quite a dandy. He looked awfully handsome, and Jenny said he was beautifully ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... according to the word of General Saterges, it was rascality which the General could pardon. He had gained many a victory in desperate strife,—now one other, the last and most complete: the kingdom's fairest star to shine among his honors! The proclamation of Stephen Cordier's pardon would instantly make broad the way to Chateau Desperiers. She came of a proud race, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... progressive, and at peace with [12] all men, we West Indian Blacks, were we ever to become constitutionally dominant in our native islands, would emulate in savagery our Haytian fellow-Blacks who, at the time of retaliating upon their actual masters, were tortured slaves, bleeding and rendered desperate under the oppressors' lash—and all this simply and merely because of the sameness of our ancestry and the colour of our skin! One would have thought that Liberia would have been a fitter standard of comparison in respect of a coloured population starting a national life, really and truly equipped ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... there is no action, however original or peculiar, which is not in respect of far the greater number of its details founded upon memory. If a desperate man blows his brains out—an action which he can do once in a lifetime only, and which none of his ancestors can have done before leaving offspring—still nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of the movements necessary to achieve ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... and the other killed the invader of his domestic peace, for which offence the Governor said he would never allow a man to be hanged. It is to Mr. McDaniel's credit that this clemency was exercised in full view of the desperate efforts which have been made for more than a year to save from the gallows one Turner, a man of influential family, for whose crime there was no excuse. All recourses of appeal to the courts having been exhausted, Turner's ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 06, June, 1884 • Various
... in so desperate a condition, my child?" asked Mr. Halberg; "and did your mother's patience never fail her, so that she would speak accusingly of ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... North Cape had left on the previous day—there would not be another for a fortnight. Cursing his ill-luck, he resolved to reach the Altenfjord by land, and began to make arrangements accordingly. Those who knew the country well endeavored to dissuade him from this desperate project—the further north, the greater danger, they told him,—moreover, the weather was, even for Norway, exceptionally trying. Snow lay heavily over all the country he would have to traverse—the ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... there had been dreadful riots, and disorders in Paris. The Swiss Guards had been cut to pieces, and the king and royal family imprisoned. The priests had nearly all perished or been banished from France. The national assembly was divided into desperate factions, which often turned their arms against one another. When one party triumphed, proscription followed, and the guillotine was put in requisition, and blood flowed in torrents. The grossest irreligion likewise prevailed. Leaders of the atheistical mob would extend their arms ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... with the sensitive soul of him, and hidden always under an impassive mask of self-control, lay the battling spirit, an indomitable fighting streak; it cropped out in a cool, calculating manner of taking desperate chances when the sleeping devil in him was roused. He would sidestep trouble—and one met the weeping damsel at many turns of the road in those raw days—if he could do it without loss of self-respect; but the man who stirred him up needlessly, or ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... self-control enough to sit silent, but her mouth assumed that peculiar expression which at times revealed a few little mysteries of her nature—showing that beneath the quietude and simplicity of the girl lay the strong, desperate will of ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... seen this desperate work can form but a faint conception of its true character. Written or spoken words may conjure up a pretty vivid picture of the scene, the blackness of the night, and the heaving and lashing of the waves, but words cannot ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... disappears, he saw the face of Diana Welldon, he remembered her words to him not an hour before, and the issue of the conflict, other considerations apart, was without doubt. But there was her brother and his certain fate, if the two thousand dollars were not paid in by midnight. He was desperate. It was in reality for Diana's sake. He approached the table, and his old ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... remark in myself the vice of falsehood—on the contrary, I was, if anything, too outspoken and truthful. Yet, during this first stage of my manhood, I often found myself seized with a strange and unreasonable tendency to lie in the most desperate fashion. I say advisedly "in the most desperate fashion," for the reason that I lied in matters in which it was the easiest thing in the world to detect me. On the whole I think that a vain-glorious desire to appear different from what I was, combined with an impossible hope ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... 'I entered on his lodgings t'other day, chiefly because I had seen this very board. It matters little to me where I live, and I had a desperate hope that some intelligence might be cast in my way there, which would not reach me elsewhere. Yes, I live at Brass's—more shame for me, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... more in this interval. All that precedes is a desperate attempt to induce me to continue my descriptions: notoriety ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... are both excellent things, but I do not admit the inference. A wide and most fertile territory, as yet but thinly inhabited, may easily be made to yield abundant food for its population: and where a desperate villain knows, that when he has made his town or his village "too hot to hold him," he has nothing to do but to travel a few miles west, and be sure of finding plenty of beef and whiskey, with no danger that the law shall ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... sat quite still, her fingers twisted together and straining on her knee. If Sister Giovanna had looked up, she would have wondered how mere sympathy could be so deep and stirring. But she could not; her own struggle was too desperate. Minutes passed before she spoke again, and then there was a change in her, for her voice ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... bold knights, who had ever lived in the realms of romance. Maria addressed the Hungarian barons in an impressive speech in Latin, the language then in use in the diets of Hungary, faithfully describing the desperate state of her affairs. She committed herself and her children to their protection, and urged them to drive the invaders from the land or to perish in the attempt. It was just the appeal to rouse such hearts to a phrensy of enthusiasm. The youth, the beauty, ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... all the rage and scorn that a threat so contrary to all schoolboy codes of honour and friendship might deserve. I believe Alured struck him, but at any rate Trevor Lea gained his point, though at the cost of a desperate quarrel. ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... there, And the world and its kingdoms Incredibly faded; And you group through the Terror Above you and under For the light, for the warmth, The assurance of life; But the blasts are ice-born, And your heart is nigh burst With the weight of the gloom And the stress of your strangled And desperate endeavour: Sudden a hand - Mother, O Mother! - God at His best to you, Out of the roaring, Impossible silences, Falls on and urges you, Mightily, tenderly, Forth, as you clutch at it, Forth to the infinite Peace of ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... admit, an arrangement apt to miscarry in the heat of desperate battle, but I could think of none better, since it was absolutely necessary that no ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... magnifying mirror he spied the squat khaki buildings of his base. Werewolves of War, the batch of planes he belonged to had been christened, and it was a richly deserved title. In front of the front they fought, detailed to desperate, harrying missions, losing an average of ten men a day. The ordeal of gas and fire and acid bullets added five years to a man's brow overnight—if he served with the ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... white men and wipe them out, as he had wiped out the little garrison at Navidad. A friendly cacique, Guacanagari, who had been the ally of the Admiral from the first, gave him information of this plot, and the danger was seen by Colon's acute mind to be desperate indeed. He had only a small force, torn by jealousy and private quarrels, and a defensive fight at this stage of his enterprise would almost surely be a losing one. The territory of Caonaba included ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... a settlement of the succession and declined to go farther in the matter. Essex was thus thrown upon his own resources, and his anger against the queen being roused afresh by the refusal to renew his monopoly of sweet wines, he formed the desperate project of seizing her person and compelling her to dismiss from her council his enemies Raleigh, Cobham, and Cecil. As some pretext, he intended to affirm that his life was in danger from these men, who were in league with the Spaniards. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... thus endeavoring to shield one another from suspicion, and, as a result, are both equally in peril. Our being alone together here will enrage Monsieur Cassion, and he will use all his power for revenge. My testimony will only make your case more desperate should I confess what I know, and you ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... raider Wolf after a cruise in which she had sunk eleven vessels in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The extension of submarine warfare to the sinking of hospital ships was more shocking as an exhibition of barbarity than alarming as a proof of naval efficiency, and may even have been designed as a desperate measure to commit Germany beyond recall to the alternative of victory or irredeemable ruin. As an outrage against international morality it was only exceeded by the torpedoing on 6 June of a Dutch vessel on which British delegates were to have gone to The Hague to discuss with ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... delighted in the exercise of power, and rejoiced in conflicts or commotions, from the exhilaration they occasioned, and the opportunity they gave for the gratification of the activity of his nature. He pursued the object of getting possession of the ministry house and land with such desperate pertinacity, not, I think, from avaricious motives, but for the sake of the power it would give him as a considerable landholder. His love of form and public excitement led him to operate as he did with his church. He kept it in continual action during the few ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... gold, and all my wealth is gone!— You partial heavens, have I deserv'd this plague? What, will you thus oppose me, luckless stars, To make me desperate in my poverty? And, knowing me impatient in distress, Think me so mad as I will hang myself, That I may vanish o'er the earth in air, And leave no memory that e'er I was? No, I will live; nor loathe I this my life: And, since you leave me in the ocean thus To sink or ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe
... army in France have been subjected to as severe a trial as it is possible to impose upon any body of men. The desperate fighting described in my last dispatch had hardly been brought to a conclusion when they were called upon to face the rigors and hardships of a Winter campaign. Frost and snow have alternated ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... her with baffled rage and hate. For a moment she almost decided to take her chances and seek Burke Lawson in the distant Hollow. But night was coming—the black, drear night of the low places. Marg was desperate, but a primitive conservatism held her. Not for all she hoped to gain would she brave Burke Lawson alone in the secret places of Devil-may-come Hollow! So she followed after Nella-Rose and reached home while her sister was preparing ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... a moment, Dale, while I tell you what I propose. It is a desperate venture, but if you are still going to be obstinate it is all I can think of, and we might just as well try it as throw ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... hunting for him, and was, therefore, totally unaware of the flank movement that was under way. It could not be that he was still asleep; he had no fears on that score. It might be, too, that the Irishman had arrived at the conclusion that the situation had grown so desperate as to warrant him in the dernier resorte he had fixed upon. If such was the case, then, as Mickey himself might have said, "the ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... woman to herself. She made a desperate effort for self-command. Little by little, the unmeaning look died down, and presently she sat silent and moveless, staring at the two with stormy eyes out of ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... could do nothing, Ala was far away at the capital, even supposing that she should be disposed to set out in search of us, and hours, perhaps days, must elapse before she could be informed of what had happened. Not even when Jack and I were in the dungeon had our case seemed so desperate. ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... body might expect to see you back again, another season," observed Daggett, glancing meaningly towards his companion, as if he had seriously revolved so desperate a plan in his mind. "'Tisn't often that a sealer lets a station like that you've described drop out of his recollection in a ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... itself while Gefty was making a rapid and rather desperate mental review of various heavy-duty tools which might be employed as weapons to force the janandra into submission and haul it off for confinement elsewhere in the ship. Not impossible, but a highly precarious and ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... result, the defeat of Lee and Jackson by General Hooker. But the desperate character of the situation rendered it necessary ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... at the worst hold the boat until he could summon other help by shouting. He had barely got his feet upon the rock, when the twigs by which the boy was holding gave way. He seized the boat, but it dragged him from his uncertain footing, and with a desperate effort he clambered over its side and found himself ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... worked it was hurt by the gun; but in its passage across the deck it knocked down and killed three men, and jammed one of the guns on the other side in such a way that it became for a time unserviceable. Ben Bolter and his comrades were making desperate efforts to clear the wreck, when they heard a shout on deck for the boarders. The bowsprit of the Waterwitch had by that time been shot away; her rigging was dreadfully cut up, and her wheel smashed; and Captain Ward ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... and a little sick. She got only the meaning of the words, their value would come later. But with a desperate effort she pulled herself together, and smiled with ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... Parker testified—sought the little fellow vehemently, and had he been successful, he might yet have made some effort, trusting to his master's toleration; but the loss and reproach had made him an absolutely desperate man. Was it blind flight or self-destruction? That he had money about him, having cashed a cheque of his master's, favoured the first idea, and no one would too curiously inquire whether Mr. Egremont was aware of ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this resolution so suddenly? There was time, all the time in the world, and having once neglected the thing at the very start, it was curious that she should now, at this late date, make her desperate resolve. Preston had not been worse, more difficult to handle. In fact, when the two women had grown used to his case, the management had been simple enough. He had thought she was inured to the disgust and the horror—placid ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... necessarily, as matters were managed, an unlimited power over the people, and gratified that malignant vigilance which ever attends upon suspicion and conscious guilt. Many of the tenants, for instance, when driven to the uttermost depths of distress and misery, have been desperate enough to appeal to the head landlords, and almost in every case the agent himself was enabled to show them their own letters, which the absentee had in the meantime transmitted to the identical party ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... relieving force failed to relieve. It was under Havelock and Outram; and arrived when the siege had been going on for three months. It fought its desperate way to Lucknow, then fought its way through the city against odds of a hundred to one, and entered the Residency; but there was not enough left of it, then, to do any good. It lost more men in its last fight than it found in the Residency when it ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... society, and the flunkey FitzPlushe, by virtue of his supposed wealth, sat amongst peers and was idolised. Then was the harvest-time of scheming lawyers, parliamentary agents, engineers, surveyors, and traffic-takers, who were ready to take up any railway scheme however desperate, and to prove any amount of traffic even where none existed. The traffic in the credulity of their dupes was, however, the great fact that mainly concerned them, and of the profitable character of which ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... be rejected, as it can not be a true theory. Every true theory passes through these three stages,—possibility, probability, and certainty. A theory is not science, until it is certainly true, and so becomes knowledge. The evolution of man from the brute is in the throes of a desperate struggle to show that it may possibly be a true theory or hypothesis. Yet some who are ready to admit that they are "scientists," claim ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... well as I do that that doesn't make a particle of difference. If I had been a boy instead of a girl, and had bucked the world for a living, I'd probably have done worse; and, anyway, it doesn't matter!" Her voice rose as if she were growing desperate. "I—I—like you—to pieces, Ward, and I'd—I'd rather marry you—than anyone else. But I don't want to think about that for a long while. I don't want to be engaged, or—or any different than the way we've been. It was good to be just pals. It was like my pretend Ward. I—I always wanted him—to ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... of her belongings, in charge of her mother's maid, and the immediate necessity of dressing more carefully than had been possible when she had been so rudely roused by the Baroness. She was surprised to find herself so little tired by the desperate adventure, and without even a cold as the result of the never-to-be-forgotten chill she had ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... colonists, the problem of fighting the full power of England was apparently a desperate one. The militia, with superior numbers, had chased the British from Concord, and had made a stubborn defence at Bunker Hill; but the British were about to move with overwhelming strength. To raise, equip, clothe, and feed armies was the task of a strong administration, ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... which every happy night You cure with ease and with delight; With pleasure, as the poet sings, Too great for mortals less than kings. Chloe, when on thy breast I lie, Observes me with revengeful eye: If Chloe o'er thy heart prevails, She'll tear me with her desperate nails; And with relentless hands destroy The tender pledges of our joy. Nor have I bred a spurious race; They all were born from thy embrace. Consider, Strephon, what you do; For, should I die for love of you, I'll haunt thy dreams, a bloodless ghost; And all my kin, (a numerous host,) ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... had to pronounce the irrevocable vows, had resolved to fly at all hazards; that Sister Mary, unconscious of her designs, had proposed to take her on a party of pleasure, and that the rash girl, blind to every risk but that of delay, had seized on this desperate means of escape. What must have followed had she not chanced on Odo, she had clearly neither the courage nor the experience to picture; but she seemed to have had some confused idea of throwing herself on ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... was just, only just, sufficient to turn first one and then the other of them upon its hinges and work the various bolts and bars into their respective places. Two men could never have done the job, but being three and fairly desperate we managed it. Then we retreated to our archway and, as nothing happened, took the opportunity to eat and drink a few mouthfuls, Quick remarking sagely that we might as well die upon full ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... increased the excitement and terror a hundredfold. All eyes were strained in the endeavour to ascertain something of their position, and presently the Farne Lights became visible. After a moment's consultation, the awful truth made the men desperate. There was no doubt as to the imminent and immediate peril in which they were, for the dangerous character of the coast of the islands was well known. The captain and men, aroused to almost superhuman effort by the awful catastrophe that was coming upon them, ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... we might have to go to the bottom—s-sst! like that. And now Red Dick and his cargo steamer were belting through the tide rips toward the Terra del Fuego shore, to find a bay, I suppose, and a bit of a beach to haul up and patch things. And I couldn't help thinking as he went that he'd lost a desperate reputation about as easy as any ever I heard of; but I might as well also say now that I'd been shipmates with Red Dick, and I always did believe he was a good deal of a bluff. But my crew didn't think that. There was great ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... overview: North Korea, one of the world's most centrally planned and isolated economies, faces desperate economic conditions. Industrial capital stock is nearly beyond repair as a result of years of underinvestment and spare parts shortages. Industrial and power output have declined in parallel. The nation has suffered its eleventh ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... she persuades Etzel to invite her brothers to his court on a visit. Against many forebodings and warnings they come, Hagen with them. After numerous interesting episodes upon the journey, they arrive at Etzell's court and are handsomely welcomed. But the inevitable quarrel soon breaks out and a desperate fight begins. After a most desperate and bloody struggle, Gunther, Hagen, and a few followers are shut up in a hall. To ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... "but I ate the others before I knew you were coming. They are good, aren't they? Does your mother ever bake sugar cakes?" he ended in a desperate attempt ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... the subject. The result of this is either to lead to the view that there is no subject, whence we arrive at materialism; or to lead to the view that what is presented is part of the subject, whence we arrive at idealism, and should arrive at solipsism but for the most desperate contortions. Now I wish to preserve the dualism of subject and object in my terminology, because this dualism seems to me a fundamental fact concerning cognition. Hence I prefer the word acquaintance because it emphasises the need of a ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... certain ancient notes. That some such plausible objection was now raised against Micaiah is very likely, otherwise Jehoshaphat, who used to disbelieve all such false prophets, could never have been induced to accompany Ahab in these desperate circumstances. ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... by Terrestrial women; and not half aware what she did, but yielding instinctively to the habit of compliance with imperative command spoken in a masculine voice, she opened her hands just as I had lost all hope. With one desperate effort I swung her fairly on to the platform, and, seeing her safe there, fell back myself scarcely ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... his confederate meant, and the intended effect was produced. He began to think that Smith was a desperate man, and capable of murdering him, or instigating his murder, in case of treachery. This made him feel rather uneasy, in spite of his capture ...
— Rufus and Rose - The Fortunes of Rough and Ready • Horatio Alger, Jr
... of the sort that waxes as the straits become more desperate. Since the town abandoned and betrayed her, she would depend upon her citadel, and by a stubborn resistance make Cesare pay as dearly as possible for the place. To the danger which she seems almost ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... himself from under his fallen horse, which was lying across his legs. I couldn't let him lie like that; so I pulled up, leaped down, and, shouting to Sandho to stand, dashed at the fallen and wounded horse's head, caught him by the bit, and dragged at him to make him rise. The poor beast made a desperate effort, and got upon three legs; but sank back again with a piteous groan, for it had stepped into some burrow and snapped its off hind-leg right in two. However, the horse's effort had saved its rider, who struggled to his feet, his face blackened with powder and bleeding, ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... getting desperate, of that there is now no shadow of doubt. The Tientsin trains that have been lately running more and more slowly and irregularly, as if they, too, were waiting on the pleasure of the coming storm, are going to run ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... me and I will hold my peace, And make plain to me wherein I have erred. How agreeable are upright words! But what does a reproof from you reprove? Do you think to reprove mere words, When the speeches of the desperate are as wind? You fall upon a blameless man, And you make merchandise of your friend. Now therefore be pleased to look upon me; For surely I will not lie to you. Turn ere you let injustice be done, Yea, turn again, my cause is righteous. Is there injustice ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... as being the least important. Then my feet either slipped too far into the stirrups and were cut, or they were jerked out; every corner was a new terror, for at each I was nearly pitched off on one side, and when at last Upa stopped, and my beast stopped without consulting my wishes, only a desperate grasp of mane and tethering rope saved me from going over his head. At this ridiculous moment we came upon a bevy of brown maidens swimming in a lakelet by the roadside, who increased my confusion by a chorus of laughter. How fervently I hoped that the track would never ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... cast. In a general rising lay the only hope of safety for Sharp's murderers. Desperate themselves, they determined to carry others with them along the same path, and by some signal show of defiance commit the party to immediate and irretrievable action. The occasion for this was easily found. May 29th, the King's ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... in, lads," cried the heroic and desperate Highlander, wielding a great green blanket in a way that might have roused the admiration if not the envy of Ajax himself. "Keep it ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... Calais last September. Nevertheless, he felt anxious and nervy; he could not comprehend the apathy assumed by the factitious Mole. That the apathy was assumed Chauvelin was keen enough to guess. What it portended he could not conjecture. But that the Englishman would make a desperate attempt at escape was, of course, a foregone conclusion. It rested with Hebert and a guard that could neither be bribed nor fooled into treachery, to see that such an ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... [11] Strange infatuation, desperate pride, that man should reject the humbling simplicity of Divine truth, and run so anxiously, greedily, and in hosts, in the road to ruin, because priestcraft calls it 'the way of God'; preferring the miserable sophistry of Satan and his emissaries to the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... shrewdness which prognosticates as well as discerns, and saw the inevitableness of the ultimatum of all irregularities in a world which, however irregular it is in practice, still holds regularity as its model of conduct and progression. Ida Edgham would, in the desperate state of the earth before the flood, have made herself famous. As it was, her irregular talents had a limited field; however, she did all she could. It always seemed to her that, as far as the right and wrong of things went, her own happiness ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... an universal cough Convulsed the skies, as during a debate, When Castlereagh has been up long enough (Before he was first minister of state, I mean—the slaves hear now); some cried "Off, off!" As at a farce; till, grown quite desperate, The Bard Saint Peter prayed to interpose (Himself an ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... indeed, desperate. It had taken practically all John's income to live respectably. Living expenses were high and rents exorbitant. What made matters worse, there was practically no life insurance. John had intended ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... that?" he asked, pulling himself together with a sudden desperate self-possession that caused Sweetwater to cast a quick significant glance at the coroner, as he withdrew to his corner, leaving the ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... and now as the golden-bearded and long-eared Midas. And last of all he appears as the disappointed, disillusioned man, "infelix academicus ignotus." A wife and children on his hands, his occupation gone, his hopes of the Revels Mastership blasted, he becomes desperate, and writes that last bitter letter ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... body swept round the monster and imprisoned him tightly. The four, so suddenly rescued, swam away to a safer distance from the struggle, and then they turned to watch the encounter between the two great opposing powers of the ocean's depths. Yet there was no desperate fight to observe, for the combatants were unequal. The end came before they were aware of it. Zog had been taken by surprise, and his great fear of Anko destroyed all of his magic power. When the ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... form "God refuse me" occurs in Webster's White Devil (ed. 1871, p. 7), where Dyce quotes from Taylor, the water poet: "Would so many else in their desperate madnes desire God to Damne them, to Renounce them, to Forsake them, to Confound them, to Sinke them, to Refuse them?" "Against ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... Benjamin Rush, who remained his correspondent when he was in Europe. Added to all his other troubles, his domestic afflictions were very great. At the age of thirty-two, he had buried four wives. The fifth was a desperate fury, who gave him great trouble as long as he lived. After preaching about six years in Philadelphia, he was seized with an irresistible impulse to visit England. No persuasions could divert him ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... Rue St. Jacques, i. 310; compels parliament to register the inquisition edict, i. 312; his indignation at the psalm-singing on the Pre aux Clercs, i. 315; summons Francois d'Andelot, whom he orders to be imprisoned, i. 317, 318; desperate schemes to obtain money, i. 321; makes the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis with Philip of Spain and Mary of England, i. 322; communicates to William, Prince of Orange, his own designs and those of Philip II. against the Protestants, ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... come into the cells whenever I liked, and to stay there as long as it pleases me. But prisoners are like children: you must not worry them. But I opened the wicket, and I remained there, watching him. Ah, gentlemen, I have been here twenty years, and I have seen many desperate men; but I never saw any despair like this young man's. He had jumped up as soon as I turned my back, and he was walking up and down, sobbing aloud. He looked as pale as death; and the big tears were running ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... dinner-time without intermission; and though the duke made some desperate efforts, and some successful ones, his losses were, nevertheless, trebled. Yet he ate an excellent dinner, and was not at all depressed; because the more he lost the more his courage and his resources seemed to expand. ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... five. Where was he at this moment? What witness could he call upon? Caffie's wound was made by a hand skilled in killing, and this learned hand was his, more even than that of a murderer. Every one knew that his position at that moment was desperate, financially speaking; and, suddenly, he paid his debts. Who would ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... mortar-vessel in to bombard the stranded ships, but by this time Cochrane had become desperate. He adopted a device which recalls Nelson's use of his blind eye at Copenhagen. At one o'clock he hove his anchor atrip and drifted, stern foremost, towards the enemy. He dare not make sail lest his trick should be detected and a signal ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... were only two of the thieves, and the sheriff with a large posse was pursuing them and forcing every man they came across into the chase, and a regular man-hunt was on. It was interesting only because one of the thieves was a noted outlaw then out on parole and known to be desperate. We were in no way alarmed; the trouble was all in the next county, and somehow that always seems so far away. We knew if the men ever came together there would be a pitched battle, with bloodshed and death, but there seemed little chance that ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... back as spray from a rocky coast. Regiment after regiment was repulsed, and the Coldstreams still advanced. Saxe thought the battle lost, and begged the king and the dauphin to flee while time permitted. At the last desperate moment, he rallied the artillery and all the forces of his army for a final effort. The artillery was massed before the English, and they had none to answer it. The king himself led the charge against their flanks, which the Dutch should have protected. But the ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... briefly, the truth: how young Arthur had had frequent quarrels with his grandfather over his waste of money, how after one of them, not at all unlike the others, he had disappeared, and how Captain Stewart, in desperate need, had set afoot his plot to get the lad's greater inheritance for himself. He described for her old David Stewart and the man's bitter grief, and he told her about the will, about how he had begun to suspect Captain Stewart, and of how he had traced the ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... noticed his gestures, which were indeed those of a desperate man, and Sergius exclaimed: "Are we then wholly abandoned? Why does not the thorn-bush light its fires, and destroy the evil-doers with its flames? Why is the thunder silent, and where are the lightnings that played round the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... were slashing down the grass with their swords, and sweeping it away with their shields, while my Tokrooris were beating it down with long sticks and tearing it from its withered and fortunately tinder-rotten roots, in desperate haste. The flames rushed on, and we already felt the heat, as volumes of smoke enveloped us; I thought it advisable to carry the gunpowder (about 20 lbs.), down to the river, together with the rifles; while my wife and Mahomet dragged ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... overworked. Once the entire army of cashiers, driven to defensive action, had combined in order to demand from Hugo, not only higher pay, but an increase in their numbers. Hugo had immediately consented, expressing regret that their desperate ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... agitation, something in the hunted, desperate way in which his eyes were running over the ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... she was aiming at. She could afford to smile, but somehow she was coming to feel that this little man who was now her husband had it in him, after all, to put up a fierce and desperate fight for his own. If he were pushed to the wall he would fight back like a wildcat, and well she knew that there would be ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... road, our conductors, made invocations of Allah and of the Prophet in loud and shrill tones, accompanied by repeated blows with a leather thong on the drums suspended to their saddle-bow. Our conversation chiefly turned upon the Turcomans, and although we were all agreed that they were a desperate enemy, yet we managed to console ourselves by the hope that nothing could withstand our numbers and appearance, and by repeatedly exclaiming, 'In the name of God, whose dogs are they, that they should think of attacking us?' Every one vaunted his own courage. ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... material resolution, of the Chicago platform, and carried it through the sub-committee and the general committee, in spite of the most desperate and persistent opposition on the part of Tilden and his friends, Mr. Cassidy himself in an adjoining room labouring to defeat it."—New ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... came a sudden, loud, human scream; and immediately, from different parts of the decks, there rose, afresh, some most horrible shouts of agony from odd men. This grew into an intense screaming that shook my heart up; and there came again a noise of desperate, brief fighting. Then a breath of cold wind seemed to play in the mist, and I could see down the slope of the deck. I looked below me, towards the bows. The jibboom was plunged right into the water, and, as I stared, the bows disappeared into the sea. The deck of the house became a wall to ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson
... power on earth could have drawn any one of us from our places that hour. We watched, holding our breaths. The mate paused in her search; we could hear the wash beating along her sides; reared her neck as high as she could reach, blind and lonely in all that loneliness of the sea, and sent one desperate bellow booming across the swells as an oyster-shell skips across a pond. Then she made off to the westward, the sun shining on the white head and the wake behind it, till nothing was left to see but a little pin point of silver on the horizon. ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... in this depth of despair snatching at an equally desperate hope, "what if, instead of keeping this silence, you were to go to her ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... of the question, nay, the very sound of a name totally silent for so many years, made Fortune's heart throb till its beating was actual pain. Then came a sudden desperate ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... hope he will take no notice of us. I must give you the advice which an old Namaqua chief gave me. He said—'Whenever you see a lion moving in the middle of the day, you may be certain that he is in great want of food and very angry. Never attack one then, for they are very dangerous and most desperate.' If, therefore, Major, you wish a very serious affair, and one or two lives lost, you will attack that animal. But you must expect that what I say ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... particular interest, yet the very receiving affectionately and greedily such a general report as good and true, gives some ease and relaxation to the heart. To see delivery possible, is some door of hope to a desperate sinner. But to see it, and espy more than a possibility, even great probability, though he cannot reach a certainty, that will be as the breaking open of a window of light in a dark dungeon. It will be as the taking off of some of the hardest ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... a gray day, chill and ominous. As the three most interested in the event came together on the road facing the point from which Hazen had decided to make his desperate plunge, the dreariness of the scene was reflected in the troubled eye of the lawyer and that of the still more profoundly affected Ransom. Only Hazen gazed unmoved. Perhaps because the spot was no new one ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... them, and seized the ships of Zemar, Beyrout, and Sidon. The forces sent from Gebal to Zemar were made prisoners by the Amorite chief at Abiliya, and the position of Rib-Hadad daily became more desperate. Pa-Hor, the Egyptian governor of Kumidi, joined his opponents, and induced the Sute or Beduin to attack his Sardinian guards. Yapa-Hadad, another governor, followed the example of Pa-Hor, and Zimridi the governor of Sidon had from the ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... the window hung dripping under their load of moisture, each spray shedding a constant shower on the spray below it. On one of these lower sprays, under the perpetual drip, what should we see but a poor little humming-bird, drawn up into the tiniest shivering ball, and clinging with a desperate grasp to his uncomfortable perch. A humming-bird we knew him to be at once, though his feathers were so matted and glued down by the rain that he looked not much bigger than a honey-bee, and as different as possible from the smart, pert, ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... AMONG THE EARLY SETTLERS. A series of desperate encounters with Indians, daring exploits of Texan Rangers, incidents of guerilla warfare, fearful deeds of desperadoes and regulators of the west, and graphic delineations of hunting and trapping well worthy universal preservation. ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... enough, saith wisdom; for he feareth to ask for more; And that by the sweat of my brow, addeth stout-hearted independence; Give me enough, and not less; for want is leagued with the tempter; Poverty shall make a man desperate, and hurry him ruthless into crime; Give me enough, and not more, saving for the children of distress; Wealth oftentimes killeth, where want but ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... Serbia to Salonika in a box car lighted only by candles, bitterly cold, and frightfully exhausting. We were seven hours in travelling fifty-five miles, and we arrived at our destination at three o'clock in the morning. Several of the men contracted desperate colds, which clung to them for weeks. Davis was chilled through, and said that of all the cold he had ever experienced that which swept across the Macedonian plain from the Balkan highlands was the most penetrating. Even his heavy clothing could not ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... induced them to enter this order,—and recall, in this connection, a little anecdote current here in Rome, to the following effect:—A young fellow, from whom Fortune had withheld her gifts, having become desperate, at last declared to a friend that he meant to throw himself into the Tiber, and end a life which was worse than useless. "No, no," said his friend, "don't do that. If your affairs are so desperate, retire into a convent, become a Capuchin." "Ah, non!" was the indignant ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... enough," said Captain Blastblow, as he thrust his hand into the inside of Cornwood's shirt. The latter seemed to understand what this movement meant, and he renewed his struggles in the most desperate manner. ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... free and, a bit breathless, but with the same desperate gaiety, exclaimed: "If this is matrimony, give ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... step nearer to the bound man, her arms half outspread as though she would guard him from them; her face, with its luminous, soft pallor, was suddenly desperate and strange. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... transformation of the century—seemed after the fatal crisis of Novara (1849) further than ever from a close. Now was the morrow of the vast failures and disenchantments of 1848. Jesuits and absolutists were once more masters, and reaction again alternated with conspiracy, risings, desperate carbonari plots. Mazzini, four years older than Mr. Gladstone, and Cavour, a year his junior, were directing in widely different ways, the one the revolutionary movement of Young Italy, the other the constitutional movement of the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... with people who wanted them enough to pay for them even a tithe of their cost, it would have been wiser. Failing this, a fire seems the only thing for them, and their removal to the cheaper custody of a combustible or slow-burning warehouse the best recourse. Desperate people, aging husbands and wives, who have attempted the reconstruction ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... bad business. Of "Tannhauser" we sold over two thousand copies. One thing more: tell me, dear Liszt, how could we make it possible that I could attend the first performance in Weimar incognito? This is a desperate question, especially as at this moment it is no longer, as it recently was, a matter of indifference to me whether I am to dwell in a royal Saxon prison or not. Listen: I hold the Grand Duchess in high regard; would not this lady, to whom I attribute real nobility, at your suggestion ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... well as some doubts of a similar nature in reference to two or three of the best of the foremast hands, alone left him at all in doubt as to the expediency of such a course. As no boats were lowered from the cruiser, however, the necessity of resorting to so desperate a measure, did not occur, and the duty of lightening the schooner had proceeded without interruption. As soon as the boatswain came off from the islet, he and the men with him were directed to take the hands and lift the anchors, ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... that the convict had expressed great anxiety lest I should decline to see him. My hoped-for visit was the only matter which appeared to occupy the mind or excite the care of the mocking, desperate young man; even the early and shameful termination of his own life on the morrow, he seemed to be utterly reckless of. Thus prepared, I was the less surprised at the scene which awaited me in the prisoner's cell, where I found ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... more important, I fear, than many of them guess. This will be a desperate war, and ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... you had it you needed not many signs to know it by, at least you would not doubt of it, more than he that sees the light can question it. But, I say, to believe in Christ is simply this: I,—whatsoever I be,—ungodly, wretched, polluted, desperate, am willing to have Jesus Christ for my Saviour, I have no other help, or hope, if it be not in him. It is, I say, to lean the weight of thy soul on this foundation stone laid in Zion, to embrace the promises of the gospel, albeit general, as "worthy of all ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... will render it the most convenient possible for the suppressing of piracy. The most desperate and active pirates of the whole Indian Archipelago are the tribes of the Sooloo group of islands lying close to the north shore of Borneo, and the people of the north and northeastern coast of Borneo itself; these have of late years proved extremely troublesome both ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... the street-corners; we have transcribed these placards, and our readers will remember them. During sixty years that the cannon of revolution have, on certain days, boomed through Paris, and that the government, when menaced, has had recourse to desperate measures, nothing has ever been seen like these placards. They informed the inhabitants that all assemblages, no matter of what kind, would be dispersed by armed force, without previous warning. In Paris, the metropolis of civilization, people do not easily believe that a man will ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... before, but nobody had had the sense to discover us. We couldn't discover ourselves,—though if we could have foreseen how the sere and yellow nations of the earth would taunt us with youth and inexperience, we should have had to do something desperate!" ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and earth for pelf, And hanging friends[133] to save thyself: Thou son of Chance! whose glorious soul On the four aces doom'd to roll, Was never yet with Honour caught, Nor on poor Virtue lost one thought; 70 Who dost thy wife, thy children set, Thy all, upon a single bet, Risking, the desperate stake to try, Here and hereafter on a die; Who, thy own private fortune lost, Dost game on at thy country's cost, And, grown expert in sharping rules, First fool'd thyself, now prey'st on fools: Thou noble gamester! whose high place Gives ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... foresee trifles. The difficulty in which this prediction of the Servant's grave being 'with the rich' places those who reject the Messianic reference of the prophecy to our Lord may be measured by the desperate attempts to evade it by suggesting other readings, or by making 'rich' to be synonymous with 'wicked.' The words as they stand have a clear and worthy meaning on one interpretation, and we even venture to say, on one interpretation only, namely, that they ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... were heard, and the moon shone calmly on the water. Ere long he beheld the last of his companions sink without struggle or cry. Should he give in also? Not for a moment would he yield to such a thought; and he prepared himself for the desperate struggle. ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... thickest ranks of the enemy. His uncouth war-horse and awkward armour had scarcely less effect than his wonderful address and courage in attracting the attention of both parties; and when after three desperate charges, his sorry steed was slain under him, one of the Christian chiefs make a powerful effort for his rescue, bore him to a neighbouring eminence, and presented to him a more suitable coat of armour, and a horse more worthy ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... one of them was getting the worst of it, and was inclined to "hedge." In fact, he had had enough of it; but he was too wise to abandon his tactics when it was time for him to retreat. Mustering all his power, he made a desperate effort, and succeeded in forcing the other back enough to turn his huge body without exposing his flank to the tusks of the enemy, and ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... of the Medea is admirable; her desperate situation is, by the conversation between her nurse and the keeper of her children, and her own wailings behind the scene, depicted with most touching effect. As soon, however, as she makes her appearance, the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... front of the Gerald Road Police Station, and Hamar was conducted to an ante-room, prior to being taken before the inspector. Just as a policeman was about to search him, he made one last desperate effort. ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... The rifle barrel was thrust down the bear's throat after the stock had been torn away, and upon the steel still are shown the marks of the brute's teeth. The same teeth were knocked out by the flailing blows of the desperate pioneer, who finally escaped when Bruin tired of the fight. Then Hamblin discovered himself badly hurt, one hand, especially, chewed by the bear. The animal later was killed by a neighbor and was identified by broken ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... the empire the important Cirta and the other communities assigned to the Roman condottiere Publius Sittius for himself and his troops(97) obtained the legal position of Roman military colonies. The stately provincial towns indeed, which the insane fury of Juba and of the desperate remnant of the constitutional party had converted into ruins, did not revive so rapidly as they had been reduced to ashes, and many a ruinous site recalled long afterwards this fatal period; but the two new Julian colonies, Carthage and Cirta, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... past, we have been under momentary expectation of a rising among the negroes, who have assembled to the number of nine hundred or a thousand, and threatened to massacre all the whites. They are armed with desperate weapons, and secrete themselves in the woods. God only knows our fate; we have strong guards every ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... estate influenced his bodily health, under this accumulated misery and desperate excitement, began to be made manifest to all. The sturdy husbandman was transformed into a tremulous drunkard; the contented cottager, into a querulous hypochondriac; the calm, religious, patient Christian, into a tumultuous blasphemer. Could all this be, and even Roger's ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the fishes! What did I care for him? It was mainly to punish Francoise's presumption that I showed my power and made him fight that desperate duel with Captain ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Preamble. "Isabella, by the Grace of God, Queen of France: who, by Reason of the King's Infirmity, has the Administration of the Government in her Hands, &c."—But when the Affairs of the Commonwealth were reduced to that desperate Future, that all Things went to Rack and Ruin, She was by the Publick Council banished to Tours, and committed to the Charge of Four Tutors, who had Orders to keep her lock'd up at Home, and to watch her so narrowly, that ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... a thunder-bolt, backwards, dragging the Norwegian with her; and though, by the weight of her antagonist's strength, her nose was almost forced between her fore-legs, she shook her head violently, and making a desperate lunge, struck her countryman somewhere about the silver buckle of his belt, or, pugilistically speaking "in the wind," with her forehead, and threw him, gun, pistols, provender, salt-bag, and all, towards a ravine formed ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... confidence of the clergy. In every movement Catharine exhibited wonderful sagacity and energy. It was not to be supposed that the partisans of Peter III. would be ejected from their places to give room for others, without making desperate efforts to regain what they had lost. A very formidable conspiracy was soon organized, and the friends of Catharine were thrown into the greatest state of alarm. But her courage did not, for ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... he's so clever, too. And if all I hear about him is true, the more he is beaten, the more dangerous he becomes. He doesn't like to be beaten, and it makes him so angry that he takes all sorts of chances, and does the wildest, most desperate things to get even. They say he was very unfair to a lot of small shopkeepers in the city when he was building up ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... same afternoon, a whole battalion of Turkish troops, sent out from Salonica, surrounded one of the mountains in which the brigands' stronghold was situated; and after desperate fighting, in which many men were killed on either side, compelled the surrender of ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... a moment an almost ungovernable impulse swept upon her to make some excuse, anything, no matter how wild, a sudden faintness, anything, and run from him back into the cottage. And then she tried to think, think in a desperate sort of way of some subject of conversation that she might introduce that would stave off, postpone, defer the words that she knew were even now on his lips—nothing—she could think of nothing—only ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... the story of the evolution of a young priest from an inexperienced celibate to a fully developed man, by which phrase is meant spiritually and intellectually developed by the desperate method of temptation. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... blows parrying here, thrusting there, upon all the boundaries of isolated and besieged Christendom. He will attend to learning, but the ideal of learning is repetitive and conservative: its passion is to hold what was, not to create or expand. An anxious and sometimes desperate determination to preserve the memory of a great but half-forgotten past is the business of his court, which dissolves just before the worst of the Pagan assault; as it is the business of Alfred, who arises a century later, ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... lodge where the Chivington massacre occurred lived the father-in-law of John Powers. He was known the plains over as a peaceable old Indian (Old One Eye), the chief of the Cheyennes, but his "light was put out" during this desperate ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... sheriff frequently presided, a young lawyer's exhaustive eloquence in striving to prove that his client was not due the sum sued for, drew from his lordship the following interruption: "Excuse me, sir, but throughout the conflict and turmoil engendered by this desperate dispute with the pursuer I presume the British Empire is not in any danger?"—"No, my lord," came the reply, "but I fear after that interrogation from your lordship my client's ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... Jason (a descendant of AEolus, the wind god) appeared before him with one foot unsandalled. He had lost his sandal while crossing a swollen stream. Pelias, anxious to rid himself of this visitor, against whom the oracle had warned him, gave to Jason the desperate task of bringing back to Locus the Golden Fleece (the fleece of a speaking ram which had borne Phryxus and Helle through the air from Greece, and had reached Colchis in Asia Minor, where it was dedicated to ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and energy of fiends. The roof of the house caught fire: the dwelling burned rapidly; you could see the flames like the tongues of wild beasts, licking the bare and vanishing walls; a single being was observed amid the fiery havoc, shrieking and desperate he clung convulsively to a huge account book, It was Master Joseph. His father had made his escape from the back of the premises and had counselled his son instantly to follow him, but Master Joseph wished to rescue the ledger as well as ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... with these little worries, Hadria. I should have said that some desperate crisis was hanging over you, instead of merely a domestic disturbance." Valeria was established on the lawn, with ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... at last become that the clergymen arose in a body and demanded better performances; while a desperate and disgusted party was also formed which was opposed to all singing. Still another band of old fogies was strong in force who wished to cling to the same way of singing that they were accustomed to; and they ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Parson Adams is the most excellent of men. His cassock is ten years old; over it he dons a coarse white overcoat, and travels on foot to London to sell nine volumes of sermons, wherewithal to buy food for his family. He engages the innkeeper in serious talk; he does desperate battle to defend a young woman who has fallen into the hands of ruffians on the highway; and when he is arrested, his manuscript Eschylus is mistaken for a book of ciphers unfolding a dreadful plot against the government. This is a hit against the ignorance and want of education ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... of a nation is a means of the public safety. Who quarrel more than beggars? Who does more earnestly long for a change, than he that is uneasy in his present circumstances? And who run to create confusions with so desperate a boldness, as those who have nothing to lose, hope to gain by them? If a king should fall under such contempt or envy, that he could not keep his subjects in their duty, but by oppression and ill usage, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... her at all. Calendar, he believed, was capable of prevarication, polite and impolite. Had he lied to his daughter? or to Kirkwood? To both, possibly; to the former alone, not improbably. That the adventurer had told him the desperate truth, Kirkwood was quite convinced; but he now began to believe that the girl had been put off with some fictitious explanation. Her tranquillity and self-control were remarkable, otherwise; she seemed very young to possess those ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... are loth to leave the society and comfort to which their bread-winner's official position has raised them, and he, held by his affection, is ready to sacrifice all convictions and principle to remain in power. To this man politics becomes a desperate gamble, and the country's interests can go to the dogs so long as he can ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... and the prisoner watches the countenances of the jury, as a dying man, clinging to life to the very last, vainly looks in the face of his physician for a slight ray of hope. They turn round to consult; you can almost hear the man's heart beat, as he bites the stalk of rosemary, with a desperate effort to appear composed. They resume their places—a dead silence prevails as the foreman delivers in the verdict—'Guilty!' A shriek bursts from a female in the gallery; the prisoner casts one look at the quarter from whence the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the usual deep impression on Nero; but Petronius was not deceived as to this, that what he had said was a desperate means which in a fortunate event might save the Christians, it is true, but might still more easily destroy himself. He had not hesitated, however, for it was a question at once of Vinicius whom he ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... meanwhile pushed on and built Fort Maurepas on Lake Winnipeg; but his father dared not leave Fort St. Charles without supplies. De la Verendrye's position was now desperate. He was hopelessly in debt to his men for wages. That did not help discipline. His partners were not only withholding supplies, but charging up a high rate of interest on the first equipment. To turn back meant ruin. To go forward he was powerless. Leaving ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... of the world's most centrally planned and isolated economies, faces desperate economic conditions. Industrial capital stock is nearly beyond repair as a result of years of underinvestment and spare parts shortages. Industrial and power output have declined in parallel. The nation has suffered its eleventh year of food ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... of my edition of the Rig-Veda, and if anybody wishes to see what can be done by misrepresentation, let him read what is written there, and what Professor Whitney made of it in his articles in the "Journal of the American Oriental Society." His misunderstandings are so desperate, that he himself at times feels uneasy, and admits that a more charitable interpretation of what I wanted to say would be possible. When I saw this style of arguing, the utter absence of any regard for what was, or what might charitably be supposed to have been, my meaning, Imade ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... composing the army in France have been subjected to as severe a trial as it is possible to impose upon any body of men. The desperate fighting described in my last dispatch had hardly been brought to a conclusion when they were called upon to face the rigors and hardships of a Winter campaign. Frost and snow have alternated with periods of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... we'll face it like men! I tell you I am desperate; I have fixed my stakes and I don't intend to be driven from them. The more I think, the more ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... available man into service. She's enslaving the Belgians to work in her factories so that German workmen can be sent into the ranks. She's calling up mere boys who ought to be at their schoolbooks. I tell you, boys, Germany's desperate. She's beginning to realize what a fool she was to bring America into the war, and she's going to try to get a decision before we get ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... Kennedy had come perilously near doing for himself. With the calm which followed the issue of his struggle with Kennedy, came a dull rage at McGuire for placing him in such danger, which only showed his employer's desperate resolve and his indifference to Peter's fate. For Hawk Kennedy had been within his rights in supposing Peter to be concerned in the trick and only the miracle of the expiring torch which had blinded the intruder ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... a disordered flight. When their flight led thither, some, shamefully throwing down their arms, rushed blindly into the river; others, while lingering on the banks, undecided whether to fight or flee, were overpowered. Never before was a more desperate ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... yet more summary process than a drumhead court martial, "strung up," and buried ignominiously. I have been told that 120 ruffians were disposed of in this way here in a single fortnight. Cheyenne is now as safe as Hilo, and the interval between the most desperate lawlessness and the time when United States law, with its corruption and feebleness, comes upon the scene is one of comparative security and good order. Piety is not the forte of Cheyenne. The roads resound with atrocious profanity, and the rowdyism of the saloons and bar-rooms ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... Then, with a desperate grasp, a death-clutch, he caught one arm of the grapnel, holding fast as the shock came. He was carried clear of the tree, and partly submerged in the water as his added weight brought the ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... my senses will scarce recall ... The horror they came in the night to tell ... The mare had galloped riderless home, Blown and bleeding and flecked with foam, And they found him there by the sunken wall, Hurt to the death by the desperate fall. How it had chanced, he could only tell, Ere the merciful numbness stole his brain; How the chestnut rose to the leap and fell.... Then his senses closed on the shocks of pain. He spoke, they ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... enthusiasm, and having nothing else to do, he spent several days in visiting the scenes of historic events with which his reading had made him familiar. But his slender purse grew daily more attenuated, and he soon found himself in a truly desperate situation, a friendless, unprepossessing young man, knowing no trade or profession, and without an acquaintance in the city. His last penny was spent. A whole day passed without his tasting food. A second ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... this instant.' He looked so wild, so mad, so desperate, that Norah felt herself to be in bodily danger; but her time of dread had gone by. She had been afraid to tell him the truth, and then she had been a coward. Now, her wits were sharpened by the sense of his desperate state. He must leave the house. ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... must tell you that we can no longer flatter ourselves with the least hope of having your dear valuable Aunt Jane restored to us. The symptoms which returned after the first four or five days at Winchester, have never subsided, and Mr. Lyford has candidly told us that her case is desperate. I need not say what a melancholy gloom this has cast over us all. Your Grandmamma has suffered much, but her affliction can be nothing to Cassandra's. She will indeed be to be pitied. It is some consolation to know that our poor invalid has hitherto felt no very severe pain—which ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... which hung on the wall, at which he darted, clutched it, and, with a feline leap, sprang through us again. I have heard much of amok running lately, and have even seen the two-pronged fork which was used for pinning a desperate amok runner to the wall, so that for a second I thought that this Malay was "running amuck;" but he ran down toward Mr. Hayward, our escort, and I ran after him, just in time to see a large alligator plunge from the bank into the water. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... will be no necessity for anything of that kind," said the captain. "However, we are dealing with men who are desperate, and who have been taught that they must do desperate things to accomplish their purposes, hence the safe rule, in all cases, in dealing with them, is to do the very opposite of that which they ...
— The Boy Volunteers with the Submarine Fleet • Kenneth Ward
... He was now in the little inner court of the redoubt, with his back planted against the Corinthe building, a sword in one hand, a rifle in the other, holding open the door of the wine-shop which he barred against assailants. He shouted to the desperate men:—"There is but one door open; this one."—And shielding them with his body, and facing an entire battalion alone, he made them pass in behind him. All precipitated themselves thither. Enjolras, executing with his rifle, which he now used like a cane, what single-stick players ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... earnestly we longed for letters which might inform us of the truth! but our cunning captors took care that we should not get them. Perhaps they themselves believed the reports they spread among us. One thing we knew, that in spite of all their reverses, the English were not likely to give in without a desperate and prolonged struggle, and that, therefore, our captivity might be continued to an indefinite period. I therefore considered if I could not make myself more comfortable than I had hitherto been. I called Tom Rockets to my councils. He, ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... the paternal circle in Russell Square, where there was plenty of gaiety, and where the jokes of his good-natured old father frightened his amour-propre. His bulk caused Joseph much anxious thought and alarm; now and then he would make a desperate attempt to get rid of his superabundant fat; but his indolence and love of good living speedily got the better of these endeavours at reform, and he found himself again at his three meals a day. He never was well dressed; but he took the hugest ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... degraded light. Dispatches shall go directly to St. Domingo; and we will soon follow them. We can produce as good soldiers on our estates, as those in France. Our own arms shall make us independent and respectable. If we are once forced to desperate measures, it will be in vain that thousands will be sent across the Atlantic to bring us back to our former state." On hearing this, I entreated the deputies, to wait with patience. I observed to them, that in a great revolution, like that of France, things, but more particularly ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... growing situation was veiled to the three figures of it. Graham did not know of Paula's desperate efforts to cling close to her husband, who, himself desperately busy with his thousand plans and projects, was seeing less and less of his company. He always appeared at lunch, but it was a rare afternoon when he could ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... represent two distinct classes, viz.: (1) those who are fearfully tormented by the consciousness that they are losing their virile powers, and become irritable, jealous and often desperate; and (2) those who are completely indifferent to ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... Franklin had been most fond of the company of Manuela Moreto, and had listened with wonder and admiration to the fluent stories of the dark-eyed, olive-skinned girl from Cuba, tales of her father's desperate adventures in the trocha in the years before American intervention had rid the "Pearl of the Antilles" of Spanish rule. Spanish-American pupils, daughters of wealthy tobacco, sugar or coffee planters, were not infrequent at this and other convent schools around Baltimore, and ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... suffering even more distress of mind than of body. When it was too late, he regretted his rash deed. For he freely confessed that being driven to despair and almost if not quite to madness, by the desperate state of his affairs, he had procured laudanum through the agency of his servant, having persuaded the old man that he merely wanted the medicine to ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... but I knew it all through. And to go against you and do something you did not like was more than I could face. I should have gone on for years, perhaps, and never had courage for it," she cried. She was tingling all over with excitement and desperate ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... behind them, without making so much fuss about it. What then? We are now all upon a footing; therefore let us be sociable and merry. What do you say, Isaac? Is not this a good motion, you doting rogue? Speak, you old cent per cent fornicator? What desperate debt are you thinking of? What mortgage are you planning? Well, Isaac, positively you shall never gain my favour till you turn over a new leaf, grow honest, and live like a gentleman. In the meantime give me a kiss, you old fumbler." These words, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... tropical products which had become increasingly necessary to the civilized nations of Europe. In them, and in that portion of the continent which extended on either side of the Isthmus, known under the vague appellation of the Spanish Main, Great Britain, during her desperate strife with the first Napoleon,—a strife for very existence,—found the chief support of the commercial strength and credit that alone carried her to the triumphant end. The Isthmus and the Caribbean were vital elements in determining ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... stoppage, however, had likewise been nearly productive of fatal consequences to the whole party. In fact, another mutiny was within an ace of breaking out, which, if not checked at the moment, could only, in their desperate situation, have ended in irretrievable and total destruction. Bligh mentions, in his printed narrative, the mutinous conduct of a person to whom he gave a cutlass to defend himself. This affair, as stated in his original manuscript journal, wears a ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... however, that France, as a whole, was guilty of the gross excesses that disfigured her struggles for liberty know little of the great mass of moral feeling that endured through all the abominations of the times, and mistake the crimes of a few desperate leaders and the exaggerations of misguided impulses for a radical and universal depravity. The France of the Reign of Terror, even, has little more to answer for than the compliance which makes bodies of men the instruments of the enthusiastic, the designing, and the active—our own country ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the first step was to deserve her esteem, and to begin by conducting myself towards her, and her father, with perfect sincerity and openness. The more I was convinced of my father's inflexibility, the more desperate I knew my circumstances were, the more I was bound not to mislead by false appearances. They would naturally suppose that I should inherit my father's fortune—I knew ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... companion laughed bitterly. "Leagued with bold and desperate men, to rid the world of a knot of vipers, for months I had waited for the moment when they should assemble together, in order to annihilate at one blow the entire brood. Daily we prayed, if you will call that praying, that this moment would arrive: but months after months passed: we ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... by plunging into the Serpentine. This is very gratifying. Was late at the office as I had to look in at the Palace on the way, in order to get knighted, but managed to get a good deal of work done before I was interrupted by a madman with a razor, who demanded 100. Shot him after a desperate struggle. Tea at an ABC, where I met the Duke of —-. Fell into the Thames on my way home, but ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... were numbered, because of dissatisfaction at the waste and extravagance of a world gone mad with national excesses committed in the name of civilization, in reality the price of our modernization, in a final desperate effort to rally their waning fortunes stampeded their awakening masses into a ruinous interracial war in order to stave off ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... of Carthage was coming swiftly to an end before them. Under their very eyes the two Roman galleys had shot in, one on either side of the vessel of Black Magro. They had grappled with him, and he, desperate in his despair, had cast the crooked flukes of his anchors over their gunwales, and bound them to him in an iron grip, whilst with hammer and crowbar he burst great holes in his own sheathing. The last Punic galley should never be rowed into Ostia, a sight for the holiday-makers of Rome. She would ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... strenuous nor was it followed up by hostile action, for Sweden and Holland were on friendly terms. Sweden, the great champion of Protestant Europe, had intervened in the Thirty Years' War to save the Protestants of Germany. The Dutch had just finished a similar desperate war of eighty years for freedom from the papal despotism of Spain. Dutch and Swedes had, therefore, every reason to be in sympathy with each other. The Swedes, a plain, strong, industrious people, as William Penn aptly called them, were soon, however, seriously interfering ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... sun, too, was hard to get; the day was exceedingly hot, and there were only a few trees about. As many as could be got into the shade were put there, but we had to keep moving them round to avoid the sun. Many of the cases were desperate, but they uttered not a word of complaint—they all seemed to understand that it was not our fault ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... manner and voice, A desperate hungry imploring haste; I rush'd up the stairs—I had not a choice, And I snatch'd the notes from where they were plac'd All that I had—to the window I rush'd— With kisses and tears in his hands I laid; He return'd the kisses, ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart
... Rosalie. Where is she, my child? Where is your angel mother, whom I have sought sorrowing so many years? They tell me that you are married,—that it is your husband who watches you with such jealous scrutiny. He must not know who I am. I am a reckless, desperate man. It would be dangerous to us both to meet. Guard my secret as you expect to find your grave peaceful, your eternity free from remorse. When can I see you alone? Where can I meet you? I am in danger, distress,—ruin ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... first half of the nineteenth century, yet more heavy artillery was wheeled into place, in order to make a last desperate defence of the sacred theory. The leaders in this effort were the three great Ultramontanes, De Maistre, De Bonald, and Lamennais. Condillac's contention that "languages were gradually and insensibly acquired, and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... a cloud of golden hue and transparent She has encircled about, whence darted fire resplendent. As when fire from the town ascending clambers the ether Out of the island afar, around which enemies gather— Fierce the defenders all day engage in desperate warfare, Forth from the town advanc'd; but soon as the sun has descended Flame with beacons the dense, huge turrets; upwards the blazes Flaring, struggling ascend to be seen by friends and by neighbours, If with assistance in war o'er the sea in ships they are coming— So from Achilles's ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... of the last Slavs to occupy the throne of Bohemia—he was a Prince of Poland—Vladislav succeeded one of the most popular of Bohemian monarchs, George Podiebrad. The times in which Vladislav reigned were evil; the internal religious struggles of Bohemia had reached a desperate stage; all attempts to reunite the Utraquists with Rome had failed, and Alexander Borgia was Pope. The reign of this King, for all the glory of the monuments that commemorate it, seems as it were illumined ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... "I grew desperate, for I knew this would all be repeated to her master in the morning. This girl was nothing but a well-paid spy upon ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... would seem to have arrived when, in fulfilment of Lord Auckland's proclamation, the British army should be withdrawn from Afghanistan. For the moment this appeared to be the case. But in reality it was not so, and our position soon became dangerous, then critical, and at last desperate. In the first place, the long line of communication was liable at any time to be interrupted, as already mentioned; then, again, the arrival of Shah Soojah had excited no enthusiasm; and the very fact that we were foreigners in language, religion ...
— Indian Frontier Policy • General Sir John Ayde
... uneasy and unhappy about them; God only knows what the result of this state of things will be." After entering into further details, he concludes by observing, "At all events I stand relieved from reproach, having so repeatedly cautioned them against what appeared to me a desperate situation." ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... means to show you all Billabong before dark, she'll have to hurry," said Jim lazily. "Don't you let yourself be persuaded into anything so desperate, Tommy." ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... "Because I was desperate," was the defiant response. "I had just learned how you had escaped from Louis, but I had not a thought of finding you here. When I saw you in my room, however, a great fear came over me that you would yet ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... is to be done,—ship—chaplaincy, curacy, literature, selling sermons at five shillings each,—what not. I am no longer master of Northwold school!' He strove to speak carelessly, but bending over his packing, thrust down the clothes with desperate blows. ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dropped it, when he perceived that it was useless to him; the malice, insolence, and hatred, he revealed; the leer with which he exulted, even at this moment, in the evil he had done—all this time being desperate too, and at his wits' end for the means of getting the better of us—though perfectly consistent with the experience I had of him, at first took even me by surprise, who had known him so long, and disliked him ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... into the bar alone, in a desperate state of love which made him call for a port and another, by Jove! Then he sat down at a table in a corner, lit a cigar and examined his glass, as though truth lay at the bottom. For he could not tell ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... pipe, even if he take the liberty of doing so in one's bedroom, is not very ill-boding. To be sure Mr. Menzies' own father died not long after, but the attempt to connect the wraith of a third person with that event is somewhat desperate. ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... bottom long before I could get to a part of the ocean where ships were likely to be. And as to navigating a raft through that tangle of weed, already thick enough around me to check the way of a sharply built boat, the notion was so absurd that only a man in my desperate fix would ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... believe it if they choose, but I can not believe, that in sailing round Libya, they had the sun on their right and—to the north." In going round Africa they had no occasion to lose sight of land, and their vessels were amply stored. The voyage, however, was regarded as desperate and ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... state of mind even more desperate than that of Karl, Olga went home with Herman. Their journey was as silent as their carriage was silent. Herman was absorbed in contemplation of the information Millar had given him regarding business affairs in Russia, ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... I do spy a kind of hope, Which craves as desperate an execution As that is desperate, which we would prevent And if thou darest, I'll give thee remedy! Hold, then! go home, be merry, give consent To ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... moment, at another a jolly old spitzbub' sending with a loose jest a girl from the chorus of the Theater des Westens into blushes—and being sent himself in return with a looser. At another (one removed from that of a duo of palpable daughters of joy engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand encounter with a colossal roastbif englisch mit Leipziger allerlei) a family man with his family. At still another, another family man with his. At another, the Salome from the Koenigliches Opernhaus—at another a noted advokat—at another, two little girls (they can't he ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... she too believes that, though there was a time when she fought, with desperate strength, against ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... no means confined to plants under glass. In the case of a lot of stove plants badly affected, the desperate course of committing the whole to the fire, and then repairing and painting the house, is often the cheapest in the end. We have known a Pine-grower compelled to destroy a houseful of plants that have been infested by the introduction of a plant from a ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... and dancing on the bank for a few minutes after my embarkation—the kangaroo dog having a charcoal burner's antipathy to the bath—but at last becoming desperate, he had plunged in, and was rapidly approaching whilst I judiciously gauged the height of the root, and meanwhile balanced the unsteady bark under my feet. When the root was within six inches of the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... June, 1781, was the day chosen for this assault. But made, as it was, with the besiegers' works incomplete, though the men fought with desperate courage, the fort was successfully defended, and General Greene ordered his troops to retire, after they had suffered the loss of one hundred ...
— The Last Penny and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... when there is no way out. It is not that ruin or death for those in whom these forces are embodied is of the essence of the situation; only that in the complete destruction of a force or purpose when it has been embodied in a strong desperate character, the death of that character is usually involved. There is no solution but to cut the knot. The tragic has been defined as "that quality of experience whereby, in and through some serious collision, followed by fatal catastrophe or inner ruin, something valuable in personality becomes ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... strength of this man's enmity dwarfed any he had ever known. Stark had planned his settlement coldly and with deliberate malice; moreover he was strong enough to stand aside and let another take his place, and thus deny to Gale the final recourse of a hunted beast, the desperate satisfaction that the trader craved. He tied his enemy's hands and delivered him up with his thirst unsatisfied—to whom? He thrust a weapon into the hand of his other enemy, and bade this other enemy use it; worse than that, forced him to strike the man he honored—the man he loved. Burrell never ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... But these desperate efforts were vain; the iceberg, driven by a submarine current, moved rapidly towards the exit; the brig was still three cable-lengths distant, when the mountain, entering the vacant space like a wedge, joined itself to its companions, and closed the ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... taken possession of my bed. Shall I complain, or shall I be silent? Shall I return to Calydon, or shall I stay here? Shall I depart from this abode? or, if nothing more, shall I oppose {their entrance}? What if, O Meleager, remembering that I am thy sister, I resolve on a desperate deed, and testify, by murdering my rival, how much, injury and a woman's grief ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... from his chariot cast 390 Thymbraeus to the ground pierced through the pap, While by Ulysses' hand his charioteer Godlike Molion, fell. The warfare thus Of both for ever closed, them there they left, And plunging deep into the warrior-throng 395 Troubled the multitude. As when two boars Turn desperate on the close-pursuing hounds, So they, returning on the host of Troy, Slew on all sides, and overtoil'd with flight From Hector's arm, the Greeks meantime respired. 400 Two warriors, next, their chariot and themselves They took, plebeians brave, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... Anarchists, or whatever party happens to be his BETE NOIRE for the moment, as the cause of some outrage just perpetrated. This indisputable fact is that homicidal outrages have, from time immemorial, been the reply of goaded and desperate classes, and goaded and desperate individuals, to wrongs from their fellowmen, which they felt to be intolerable. Such acts are the violent recoil from violence, whether aggressive or repressive; they are the last desperate struggle of outraged and exasperated human nature for breathing ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... but Pen did not forget. There came a morning when, a letter having arrived from Aunt Sophy saying that Pauline was much better—in fact, quite herself again—and that she and both the girls would be home in about a week, the little girl was rendered desperate. ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... thought of it in that way. He knew, of course, that the slaves who rowed the racing galleys were the offscouring of mankind, desperate men, drawn from all nations. It was as much as two men could do to handle one oar, and all must pull in unison as a huge machine. The Venetian dromond was to other merchant-ships as the dromedary to other camels. To make the speed required ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... up a little past Miss Mayhew, and began speaking to the frightened horses in firm, quiet tones. At first they paid no heed to him, and as the stage made a sudden and desperate lurch, the young lady ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... thirty-eight million of Frenchmen outside Paris may be of opinion that the centralization of all power in the hands of the most corrupt and frivolous capital in the universe has had its share in reducing France to her present desperate condition, and may be resolved to assert their claim to have a voice in the conduct of public affairs. The Parisians regard all provincials as helots, whose sole business it is to hear and to obey. If the result to France of her disasters could be to free her at once from the domination of ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... judged!" broke in Mr. Hyden, standing before her, his features working in a desperate struggle with his emotions. Then he spoke with more calmness. "She is my grandchild," ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... "I heared tell o' that. But 'tis not t' the point. Davy, lad," in an undertone which betrayed great agitation, "she've her cap set for a man, an' she's desperate." ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... who have so often since the Chevalier de St. George's Recovery killed him in our publick Prints, have now reduced the young Dauphin of France to that desperate Condition of Weakness, and Death it self, that it is hard to conjecture what Method they will take to bring him to Life again. Mean time we are assured by a very good Hand from Paris, That on the 2Oth Instant, this young Prince was as well as ever he was known to ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... to his doom—calmly and proudly erect, be it said, for a Pathan always knows how to die with dignity and resignation to the will of God. Nor must we forget that he was a brave man, for in coming to the citadel he had boldly ventured his life on a desperate chance, and perfidy in the game of war brings shame only when it meets with discomfiture. Peace ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... battle was not fought and won. There had been a struggle, and what seemed to be a victory, but the enemy—intrenched in the very citadel of life—had rallied, and would make another desperate attempt to retrieve ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... had an unexpected effect. Jeff's fears were blotted out by his desperate need. Some spark of the fighting edge, inherited from his father, was fanned to a flame in the heart of the bruised little warrior. Like a tiger cat he leaped for Ned's throat, twisted his slim legs round the sturdy ones of his ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... of whisky, "an' he owned it was blockade," and a long and detailed account of "the Dutchy's" resistance to arrest, in which the ferocity of his behavior would have been creditable to a bloodthirsty villain driven to desperate straits. ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... honesty. You are Sir Henry's friend. He believes you as such—you!" And she laughed the hollow laugh of a woman who was staring death in the face. She was haggard and drawn, and her hands trembled with nervousness which she strove in vain to repress. Lady Heyburn was desperate. ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... hat, which I got at an out-door stand near Peck Slip, a belt and jackknife, and two or three trifles. After these purchases, I had only one penny left, so I walked out to the end of the pier, and threw the penny into the water. The reason why I did this, was because I somehow felt almost desperate again, and didn't care what became of me. But if the penny had been a dollar, I would have ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... discuss the stock market, and Leila a beautiful, blonde and orphaned waitress upon whom several of the fashionable frequenters had exercised seductive powers in vain. They lay in wait for her at the side entrance, followed her, while one dissipated and desperate person, married, and said to move in the most exclusive circles, sent her an offer of a yearly income in five figures, the note being reproduced on the screen, and Leila pictured reading it in her frigid hall-bedroom. There are complications; she is in debt, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of their evident rustication, he bent his course towards the Opera House; for clouds were gathering, and, with the favour of Providence, there seemed a chance about midnight of picking up some helpless beau, or desperate cabless dandy, the choicest victim, in a midnight shower, of these ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... of Stralsund are all on record, and had once a certain fame in the world; but, except as a distant echo, must not concern us here. It lasted till midwinter, under continual fierce counter-movements and desperate sallies from the Swedish Lion, standing at bay there against all the world. But Friedrich Wilhelm was vigilance itself; and he had his Anhalt-Dessaus with him, his Borcks, Buddenbrocks, Finkensteins, veteran men and captains, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... last point that I mused especially. The housing problem is hard, doubtless; but nobody, my mind protested as I surveyed the crescent, nobody is driven to so desperate a solution of it as this! There are tents, there are caves, there are hollow trees...and there are people who prefer—this! Yes, 'this' is a positive taste, not a necessity at all. I swept the bay with a searching eye; but heads on the surface of water tell nothing to the sociologist, and in bath-robes ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... track. System of cultivation. Pottery. Special exorcising. Death of the last mule. Rescue of Chirikaloma's wife. Brutalities of the slave-drivers. Mtarika's. Desperate march to Mtaka's. Meets Arab caravans. Dismay of slavers. Dismissal of sepoys. Mataka. The Waiyau metropolis. Great hospitality and good feeling. Mataka restores stolen cattle. Life with the chief. Beauty of country and healthiness ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... sprung from the blood of Uranos," the great original progenitor of the stock. "Their king or leader was Porphyrion, their most powerful champion Alkyoneus." Their mother was the earth: this probably meant that they represented the common people of a darker line. They made a desperate struggle for supremacy, but were conquered by Zeus. There were also two rebellions of the Titans. The Titans seem to have had a government of their own, and the names of twelve of their kings are given in the Greek mythology (see ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... watching me shrewdly, speculatively. Then, still pretending, he went off in another direction. He told me he'd bought a good wagon. He said, 'I'd keep it here in the corral. It would be better than a buckboard.' Then I knew for certain that he was aware of my doings. For I used a buckboard. It was a desperate moment. I waited. All of a sudden he dropped his mask of lightness, and became serious. I can never forget his poor, dear face as he gave me his final warning. 'Kate,' he said, 'if there was anybody I—liked, and was anxious about, running whisky in this place, I'd show them the corral ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... and if he has the courage to do so, I shall have the courage at once to bring about their eternal separation; I can do it! But here he comes! I feel faint! My God! Why hast Thou made me love with such desperate devotion him who no longer ...
— The Stepmother, A Drama in Five Acts • Honore De Balzac
... free-fall in 1999. The beginning of 1999 saw the banking sector collapse, which helped precipitate an unprecedented default on external loans later that year. Continued economic instability drove a 70% depreciation of the currency throughout 1999, which forced a desperate government to "dollarize" the currency regime in 2000. The move stabilized the currency, but did not stave off the ouster of the government. Gustavo NOBOA, who assumed the presidency in January 2000, has managed to pass substantial economic reforms and mend relations with international ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... powers of earth shall not prevail. It was just as certain that Virginia would come back to the unchallenged control of her white race—that before the moral and material power of her people once more unified, opposition would crumble until its last desperate leader was left alone, vainly striving to rally his disordered hosts—as that night should fade in the kindling glory of the sun. You may pass force bills, but they will not avail. You may surrender your ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... (Woman's Great Learning), that famous classic of Japanese girlhood which teaches the submission of women and the superiority of men. It was a type which was becoming rare in her own country. Little Asako had nothing in common with the argumentative heroines of Bernard Shaw or with the desperate viragos of Ibsen, to whom Sadako felt herself spiritually akin. Asako must be a fool. She exasperated her Japanese cousin, who at the same time was envious of her, envious above all of her independent wealth. As she observed to her own mother, it was most improper that a woman, and a young ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... but conscious; and though King was exhausted, he held on to Kitty, and held on to the boat, with a desperate grip. ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... and outworn body to comply with its will. Doctor Byrne turned and stared again at the face of Cumberland. He felt as if he understood, now, the look which was concentrated so brightly on the vacant air. It was illumined by a steady and desperate defiance, for the old man was denying his ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... well quicker, Mat. I want to go to Santa Fe with Beverly," I wailed, making a desperate effort to get out ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... other in jest. Observing the natives looking on with amazement, and fancying that the men were engaged in deadly fray, it drew our attention to the scene. They no doubt came to the conclusion that we must be a desperate set of fellows, and killed one another upon the slightest provocation. At all events, this little incident appeared to have a very good effect, as the natives, who had continually been interfering with our observations, now left us, not wishing to be so ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... heroes in the world. He returned her compliments; and she appeared still more lovely to him near, than she had done at a distance. I know not whether she felt more joy at being delivered from the desperate danger she had been in, than he for having done so considerable a service to ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... not say what it was that prevented his jumping. He gathered himself together, hurled himself through, the air, and measured his length on the ground. They roared with laughter at him. He had to try again. Tears in his eyes, he made a desperate attempt, and this time succeeded in jumping. That did not satisfy his tormentors, who decided that the obstacle was not high enough, and they built it up until it became a regular break-neck affair. Jean-Christophe tried to rebel, and declared that he would not jump. Then ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... offer to leap over, and asked what if he should leap over there. I told him I would give him 40l. if he did not go to sea. With that thought I shut the doors, and W. Howe hindered him all we could; yet he opened them again, and, with a vault, leaps down into the garden:—the greatest and most desperate frolic that ever I saw in my life. I run to see what was become of him, and we found him crawled upon his knees, but could not rise; so we went down into the garden and dragged him to a bench, where he looked like a dead man, but could not stir; and, though he had broke ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... not have believed me," Gomez laughed. "You had no goods with you, and your speech showed that you were not a Peruvian. I have often wondered on the way to what nation you belonged, and how it was that one so young could be ready to undertake so desperate an enterprise as you proposed; but now that I know you are an officer under the terrible English admiral I can well ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... them upon duly weighing the nearness of their approaching Ruin and Destruction, and finding things run so hard against them, reflecting upon the Extremity of their Affairs, and how if they had not drawn in the High Church-Champions to damn the Projects of their own Party, by running at such desperate Extremes as all Men of any Temper must of course abhor, they had been undone; truly now they began to consider, and to consult with one another what ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... of London the position at first sight seems desperate. During the last twenty years, in consequence of the intervention of middlemen, rents have risen 100 per cent.; owing to the folly of managers the salaries of the company have increased to a similar extent; whilst the cost of scenery, costumes and the like also has grown enormously. Indeed, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... everything objectionable in the past: it gave them afresh the impression that had most to do with their having worked round to a confidence that on Maisie's part was determined and that she could see to be on her companion's desperate. She had had for many hours the sense of showing Mrs. Wix so much that she was comparatively slow to become conscious of being at the same time the subject of a like aim. The business went the faster, however, from the moment she got her glimpse of it; it then fell into its place ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... nor interpreter," he continues. "We commenced our desperate journey in darkness about an hour after sunset. I led the way, Mrs. Baker riding by my side and the British flag following close behind us as a guide for the caravan of heavily laden camels and donkeys. And thus we started on our march ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... superior man. He certainly believed it himself: hence he was very impatient at being confined to so narrow a sphere of action, and thought his brilliant ability wasted upon the prosecution of a chicken-thief or a poacher. But his almost desperate efforts to secure a better office had always been unsuccessful. In vain he had enlisted a host of friends in his behalf. In vain he had thrown himself into politics, ready to serve any party that ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... in the latch and his foot on the stair. Would he come in as he always did? or would he remember her complaint of being tired, a complaint she so seldom made? It was as a blow to Elinor when she heard his step go on past her door: and yet she was glad. Had he come in there was a desperate thought in her mind that she would call him to her bedside and in the dark, with his hand in hers, tell him—all that there was to tell. But it was again a relief when he passed on, and she felt that she was spared for an hour or two, spared for the new day, which perhaps would give her courage. ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... to appropriate, Mr. Buckton having so frequent a perverse instinct for catching first any eye that promised the sort of entertainment with which she had her peculiar affinity. The amusements of captives are full of a desperate contrivance, and one of our young friend's ha'pennyworths had been the charming tale of "Picciola." It was of course the law of the place that they were never to take no notice, as Mr. Buckton said, whom they served; but this also never prevented, certainly on the same gentleman's ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... said, "in this, the quickest way home is the longest way, so your proverb say. We shall all act and act with desperate quick, when the time has come. But think, in all probable the key of the situation is in that house in Piccadilly. The Count may have many houses which he has bought. Of them he will have deeds of purchase, keys and other things. He will have paper that he ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... walks, of this old house, or that new mill, and of the states of society consequent on the changes involved by the suggestive dates of either building. She remembered the times when watchers or wakeners in the night heard the distant word of command, and the measured tramp of thousands of sad desperate men receiving a surreptitious military training, in preparation for some great day which they saw in their visions, when right should struggle with might and come off victorious: when the people of England, represented ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... French, even borrowing their nomenclature of "imperialism?" Why can not we, too, in the language of Burke, be content to set our feet "in the tracks of our forefathers, where we can neither wander nor stumble?" The only difficulty in the way of our so doing seems to be that we are in such a desperate hurry; while natural influences and methods, though in the great end indisputably the wisest and best, always require time in which to work themselves out to their results. Wiser than the Almighty in our own conceit, we think to get there at once; the "there" in this case being ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... Miss Cicely Farmond—a charming girl, I may mention; there was every excuse for me, still it was a rotten thing to do, I quite admit. I told her that I was hard up and feeling desperate, and I even said I was going to sit up late! And on top of that Sir Reginald was murdered that very night. Imagine my sensations for the next few days, living in the same house with the woman who had heard me say that! She held my fate in her ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... all blazoned gold, Bright lists of danger where with trumpets pass Riders like those for whom bride-bells are bold To beautiful desperate conflict, Michaelmas Of golden heroes, how my sad soul saith Your praise! Nor does to you her love deny, Solemn strange Cups that carry dreamy death To quench those fevers when they flame too high. But now the Victories have broken wings; ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... his arrival at Cannes. At the end of this time, having received no answer, he used to beguile his impatience by rambling on the sea shore, or watching the sports of the peasants, till at length, evidently heart-sick and desperate, he set out for Toulon on the rash expedition which closed his career. "Toujours, toujours, il avoit la mine triste.—Ah! si vous l'aviez connu, vous auriez pleure son sort—il etoit un si bel homme!—d'une taille superbe!" said our honest host, whose knowledge of Murat was probably ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... high-bred comeliness, with its curling lips and scornful eyes. He had the letter now, and a gleam of joy danced in his eyes as he tore it open. A hasty glance showed him what his prize was; then, coolly and deliberately he settled himself to read, regarding neither Rischenheim's nervous hurry nor my desperate, angry glance that glared up at him. He read leisurely, as though he had been in an armchair in his own house; the lips smiled and curled as he read the last words that the queen had written to her lover. He had indeed come on ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... of drawing some encouraging omen from her countenance. He had come to this party determined to say something that should explain to her his sentiments. He thought he could speak to her better in a crowd than alone. Now or never! said he to himself. With desperate effort, and with an oppressed voice, he said—the very thing he did not ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... moonshine—"Time was" said he, "when this had been the very pastime I desired." The murderous animal attacked him with such impetuosity that his well-tried skill failed him, and he was the next moment thrown under its feet. The struggle now became desperate, for the animal had no common foe to contend with. Before it could wound him with its tusks, which seemed of unusual size, it required not an instant's thought in Rudolf to draw his dagger from ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... had no money to buy cloaks for his children. He had put off buying new hoes and spades for such a long time that the old ones were completely worn out. He had no seeds for his fields. He was in a desperate plight. ...
— Ancient Man - The Beginning of Civilizations • Hendrik Willem Van Loon
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