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More "Grovelling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... join the Muse's revel, Begad, I wish you at the devil! In vain my verse I plane and bevel, Like Banville's rhyming devotees; In vain by many an artful swivel Lug in my meaning by degrees; I'm sure to hear my Henley cavil; And grovelling prostrate on my knees, Devote his body to the seas, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to and fro before her, and suddenly I stopped, and I said: Tell me, O Chaturika, what would the Queen say, if I told her of thy habit of babbling to thy relations of her secrets? And for answer, Chaturika began to sob, grovelling upon the floor at my feet. And I said: Sit still, thou little fool, and listen: for thou shalt earn my forgiveness by doing as I bid thee: and if not, I will save the Queen trouble by becoming thy executioner myself. To-morrow night, I ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... Kings, who and how many they killed and enslaved; the grovelling adulation of the abased; the unlimited jubilation of the victor; from the primitive state of most ancient kings, and the Roman triumphs where queens walked in chains, down to our omni present soldier's ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... victim writhed in a paroxysm of agony; his veins swollen almost to bursting. Whether real or imaginary, whether a victim to insanity or of some supernatural agent, its influence was not the less terrible in its effects. Starting suddenly from his grovelling posture, he cried, fixing his eyes on De Vessey ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... the overcoming of an evil habit, the rising superior to opposition and attack, the spiritual exaltation that comes from resisting the invasion of the grovelling material side of life. Sometimes when you are worn and weak with the struggle; when it seems that justice is a dream, that honesty and loyalty and truth count for nothing, that the devil is the only ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... and Grace, who were together in advance of Veath and Lady Tennys, encountered the latter's husband. Pie had fallen, and was grovelling, cursing, screaming, praying on the steps. Hugh pulled him to his feet. With a mad yell he fled onward and upward. At the top he was checked by the sailors, who were vainly trying to keep the people back. He struggled past them and on toward the open deck. An officer caught ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... laborers who are enslaved are all negroes, or persons more or less purely of African derivation. But this is only accidental. The principle of the system is, that labor in every society, by whomsoever performed, is necessarily unintellectual, grovelling and base; and that the laborer, equally for his own good and for the welfare of the State, ought to be enslaved. The white laboring man, whether native or foreigner, is not enslaved, only because he cannot, as yet, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... vanishing; we have been set upon our feet; we have been allowed to walk; we are beginning to smile,—that is, some of us. Those whose fathers were helped on are nearer the man as he should be than those whose fathers are still grovelling. My child, I think, stands a perfect type of what culture and refinement can give. She is not an exception; there are thousands like her among our Jewish girls. Take any intrinsically pure-souled Jew from his coarser surroundings and ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... to this form of torture. A forefinger extended with a threatening waggle was sufficient to rob her of every vestige of self-control, while the play of her brother's fingers over her ribs reduced her instantly to grovelling submission. To do Graham justice, he was quite unable to appreciate the fact that this pastime cost Ruth real suffering. He would have put his hand into the fire before he would have struck his sister, yet he frequently subjected ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... "Well, it isn't grovelling yet in the mire with popular fiction, but it is standing still, and whatever is standing still is going backward, or at least other things are passing it. To hold its own, the vaudeville must grab something more than its own. It must venture into regions ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... therefore you may feel secure in this," replied Miss Malison, with ready flattery; for she knew Miss Grahame's love of designing, and really felt gratified at any plan tending to injure Mrs. Hamilton, whom she detested with all the malevolence of a mean and grovelling mind, which despised the virtue that was too ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... effects of tobacco upon public and private morals, are seen in the idle, sauntering habits, which the use of it engenders,—in the benumbing, grovelling, stupid sensations which it induces,—but especially in perpetuating and extending the practice ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler
... trained and influential British opinion would then be found on the side of the champions of Slavery, and against those of Abolition, the prediction would have been universally treated by Englishmen as an emanation and a proof of the most grovelling malignity, not less despicably silly than shamelessly calumnious. The time of trial came; and what no one would have ventured to suggest as conceivable proved to be the actual and positive truth. There must ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... are fast obliterating all traces of the Roman walls of Isurium; their foundations having been dug up for the mercenary purpose of obtaining their materials. We cannot sufficiently censure such irreverence to "hoar antiquity," or the contracted and grovelling ideas ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... the absence of the men, whose efforts, if present, they would not hesitate to scoff at. The disturbing influence of the resolution became at once perceptible, and the earliest means were taken to bring the question to an issue. Mr. Hume, a parsimonious economist, of niggard principle and grovelling sentiment, undertook the office of coercing the Irish. He gave notice of a motion for a call of the House. This man, a mean utilitarian, had been rejected by the country of his birth and the country of his adoption, and found refuge in an Irish constituency, that returned him without solicitation ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... Scroope got off the car, and holding the priest's hand, answered the kindly salutation. But he did so with a constrained air and with a solemnity which the priest also attributed to his newly-begotten rank. Fred Neville,—as he had been a week or two since,—was almost grovelling in the dust before the priest's eyes; but the priest for the moment thought that he was wrapping himself up in the sables and ermine of his nobility. However, he had come back,—which was more perhaps than Father Marty ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... horse and looked down at the native whose life he had saved. The man was grovelling in the sand in abject fear and gratitude. Stobart motioned to him to get up and return to the others. He did so, and as he slunk away, the drover noticed that the middle two fingers of ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... little further on, among the grovelling figures which closely pave this fifth cornice, Dante beholds Hugues Capet, founder of the third dynasty of French kings, and stigmatized as "root of that ill plant," because this poem was composed only a few years after Philip IV's criminal attempt against Pope ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... hastily to recover the volumes, and promptly knocking his head against that of Billykins, who was also grovelling for the same purpose, while Nealie plunged into the business of their visit, hoping to divert the attention of the master of the house from the awkwardness of the boys, poor things; but Sylvia giggled in quite a disgraceful fashion, then blinked hard at a bust of Apollo which stood on a bookshelf ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... a trifle grimly. "I didn't at all like his looks when I was talking about the flying machine. The brute looked as if he were quite capable of locking me up and starving or torturing me until I gave him the secret. My word, I should like to see him try! I'd have him grovelling at ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... a good horse with lashes stung, She spoke her shameful speech. Serene He heard the fury of the queen, And to her words so vile and dread Gently, unmoved in mind, he said: "I would not in this world remain A grovelling thrall to paltry gain, But duty's path would fain pursue, True as the saints themselves are true. From death itself I would not fly My father's wish to gratify, What deed soe'er his loving son May do to please him, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... wealth. The deeper a man digs into the gold mine, the less able—ay, less willing—is he to breathe the sweet air of upper earth, or to bask in the daylight of heaven: downward, downward still, he casts the anchor of his grovelling affections, and neither can nor will have a heart for ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... exceedingly well-penned epistle, addressed thus early to a school-fellow who had found his way to New York. In this remarkable letter, the boy seems to have written with prophetic instinct. "To confess my weakness, Ned," he says, "my ambition is prevalent, so that I contemn the grovelling condition of a clerk or the like, to which my fortune condemns me, and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station.... I mean to prepare the way for futurity.... I shall conclude by saying, I wish there ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... thing, or nothing, and guides in no degree. That the true result of the natural style of gardening is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities than in the creation of any special wonders or miracles, is a proposition better suited to the grovelling apprehension of the herd than to the fervid dreams of the man of genius. The negative merit suggested appertains to that hobbling criticism which, in letters, would elevate Addison into apotheosis. In truth, while that virtue which consists in the mere avoidance ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... she could not sing. If she could, what a story she would have told in a wordless way to this man who was coming! All she could do to show that he was welcome was to make crackers. Cooking is a sensual, grovelling utterance of feeling, you think? Yet, considering the drift of most women's lives, one fancies that as pure and deep love syllables itself every day in beefsteaks as once in Sapphic odes. It is a natural expression for our sex, too, somehow. Your wife may keep step ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... natural and united conquerors of the world. We wish to conquer that world, with angels at our head, in order that we may establish the happiness of man by a divine dominion, and crushing the political atheism that is now desolating existence, utterly extinguish the grovelling tyranny of self-government.' ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... to Deity the low, grovelling, vindictive, feelings which agitate and disgrace themselves. If Roman Catholic principles are true and undeniable, none but Roman Catholics will be saved from the wrath to come. If Anglo-Catholic principles are true and undeniable, none but Anglo-Catholics will be saved from the wrath ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... ready for the battle; "And this time," said he, "we will make an end of it." "So be it," said the Red Knight. Then the Red Knight smote Gareth on the hand so that his sword flew from his grasp, and with another blow he brought him grovelling to the earth. At the sight of this, Linet cried aloud, and hearing her, Gareth, with a mighty effort, threw off the Red Knight, leaped to his sword, and got it again within his hand. Then he pressed the Red Knight harder than ever, and at the last bore him to the earth, and unlacing his ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... earnest love of order in things intellectual, in every excess of disorder in things material, and his passionate love of the beautiful could be profaned by frequent grovelling amid the hideous deformities of vice. Poe, in his reverence for Art (his only reverence), seemed generally to set greater store on the elaborate and artistic perfection of his works, than in the spontaneity of genius therein displayed. So it would seem, at least, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of fields between the path which the Edwards children followed on their way to school and the two roads was the poorhouse. It was a low, stone-basemented structure, with tiny windows, a few of them barred with iron, retreating ignominiously within thick walls; the very grovelling of mendicancy seemed symbolized in its architecture by some unpremeditatedness of art. It stood in a hollow, amid slopes of stony plough ridges, over which the old male paupers swarmed painfully with spades and shovels when spring advanced. When spring came, too, ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... night, near to another caravan, which, notwithstanding that it bore on the lawful panel the great name of Jarley, and was employed besides in conveying from place to place the wax-work which was its country's pride, was designated by a grovelling stamp-office as a 'Common Stage Waggon,' and numbered too—seven thousand odd hundred—as though its precious freight ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... soldiery, whom I had not observed before, were gathering like swarms of flies at the door of one of the Chinese guard-houses, which line the enclosing walls of the Palace. They were evidently much excited by some discovery. Wishing to learn what it was, I dismounted and pushed in. Grovelling on the ground lay an elderly Chinese, whose peculiar aspect and general demeanour made it clear what he was. He was a Palace eunuch, left here by some strange luck. The man was in a paroxysm of fear, and, pointing into the guard-house ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... was yellow to its fall; and lo! the youth was sighing heavy sighs and leaning to the ground on one elbow, and she flung herself by him on the ground, seeking for herbs that were antidotes to the poison of the serpent, grovelling among the grasses and strewn leaves of the wood, peering at them tearfully by the pale beams, and startling the insects as she moved. When she had gathered some, she pressed them and bruised them, and laid them along his lips, that were white as the ball of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... far as it was possible for anything to soothe me, and I shifted slightly to one side and looked up at him furtively and crossly, my poor face all blubbered with tears and smeared with mire where I had lain grovelling. ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... travelling to and fro in the house. He never spoke, save in his own dialect and with the Master; walked without sound; and was always turning up where you would least expect him, fallen into a deep abstraction, from which he would start (upon your coming) to mock you with one of his grovelling obeisances. He seemed so quiet, so frail, and so wrapped in his own fancies, that I came to pass him over without much regard, or even to pity him for a harmless exile from his country. And yet without doubt the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... light of day. It was the longed-for opening, though still far away. He thought that he had out-distanced Radicofani and stumbled on, exultation giving him new strength when a sudden eclipse of this star of hope made him crouch motionless, grovelling close to the earth. A man's head and shoulders were silhouetted blackly against the brightness. The man peered cautiously into the tunnel, and listened; but neither hearing ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... resembling legs have injury, and bah! the men at arms are gone. Heart and courage is nothing to them, lith and limb everything: give them animal strength, what are they better than furious bulls; take that away, and your hero of chivalry lies grovelling like the brute when he is hamstrung. Not so the sage; while a grain of sense remains in a crushed or mutilated frame, his mind shall be strong as ever. Catharine, this morning I was practising your death; but methinks I now rejoice that you may ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... when we are sick and sorry, when we feel in every fibre what poor things we are, and when all our fortitude is needed to enable us to bear our temporary inferiority patiently, without being forced besides to assume an attitude of eager and grovelling politeness towards the ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... to Percy's to try to grovel in the dust before him, but he wouldn't see me. It's no good grovelling in the dust of the front steps for the benefit of a man who's in bed on the second floor, so I withdrew in more or less good order. I then got the present idea. Mark how all things work together for good. When they come to you and say "No title for you. Your son slugged our pal Percy," ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... life of humility, innocence, and simplicity of manners, neglect of riches, absence of worldly ambition and honors, with an eloquence and persuasiveness which have not been surpassed. These could not be inventions of the grovelling authors who relate them. They are far beyond the powers of their feeble minds. They show that there was a character, the subject of their history, whose splendid conceptions were above all suspicion of being interpolations ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... startled eyes the grim fact that had always been there. And even while not consciously felt, guilt hampers the soul's insight into divine realities, clips its wings so that it cannot soar, paralyses its efforts after noble aims, and inclines it to ignoble grovelling as far away from thoughts of God and goodness as ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... kinsmen and friends of the dead.[63] Now it was surely more worthy of a belief in the natural depravity than in the natural perfectibility of the sons of Adam, thus to assume without parley or proviso a base mercenariness on the one hand, and grovelling terror on the other, as the origin of a doctrine which was obviously susceptible of a kinder explanation. Would it not have been more consistent with belief in human goodness to refer the doctrine to a merciful and affectionate and truly humanising anxiety to assuage the horrors ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... presently from the pianist's drooping head to the face of the protegee, and the contrast between what was expressed by this young person's gaze and attitude and what he was himself feeling again drew his attention to her. No grovelling and no soaring was here, but an elation almost stern, a brooding concentration almost maternal, a dedicated power. Madame Okraska, he reflected, must be an extraordinary person if she really deserved that gaze. He didn't believe that she quite did. ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Joe, thoughtfully—his feeling of despair seeming to have deadened the agony he had felt; "I've been thinking it out while you were grovelling up there like a rat, and I think that the air will soon be all driven out of the mine by the water. Ugh! hark at it now. How it comes bubbling and racing up there! If you put your head over the edge of the rock there, it's fit to blow ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... temptress did not tempt even the prurient taste which gave us the Parisian operatic versions of the stories of Phryne, Thais, and Messalina. Richard Strauss's "Josephslegende" stands alone in musical literature. There is, indeed, only one reference in the records of oratorio or opera to the woman whose grovelling carnality is made the foil of Joseph's virtue in the story as told in the Book. That reference is found in a singular trilogy, which was obviously written more to disclose the possibilities of counterpoint than to set forth the story—even if it does that, which I cannot ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... even she, haughty lady, was put in the shade, when her young but gargantuan sister, the Aquitania, floating leisurely between the booms, claimed the attention of the harbour, and reduced us all to a state of grovelling homage. And then the Olympic, not to be outdone by these overrated Cunarders, would join the company with her nose ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... this analyzing is needed in England, the land of reviews and reviewing, how much more necessary is it in America, where veritable criticism is not even old enough to be young; its germ, however grovelling it may be, not yet having taken the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... had been grovelling on her knees before the gipsy fire, 'the kettle will go off the boil if you don't make tea instantly. If it were not your birthday ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... soul that lives on high; While men lie grovelling here! His hopes are fix'd above the sky, And ...
— Hymns and Spiritual Songs • Isaac Watts
... these contentions. She is abominably rouged, and before me she is grovelling, as she must have seen some ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... uneventful days! The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of the hands with both of his, twisted outward as he grasped two fingers in each hand. Robert's face went putty-grey as the bones snapped. Muldoon no longer cared about fair play. His knee came up where it could do most damage, and Robert sank grovelling to the floor. ...
— Lease to Doomsday • Lee Archer
... there has fallen to me a disproportionate share of victories. But let me not boast. For the present, I have done all that I meant to do in this matter. It is for you, dear reader, now to get a floor, a friend, some soldiers and some guns, and show by a grovelling devotion your appreciation of this noble and beautiful gift of a limitless game that I ...
— Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books • H. G. Wells
... her head in quick negative, striving to keep Peggy from saying more. But Tzaritza had crawled to Peggy's feet and was literally grovelling there ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... and Herr Frays, who had started by refusing to let her appear, was now full of grovelling apologies. He offered her a contract. But Lola, having other ideas as to how her time should be employed in ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... clerks, statesmen; or whether he roar and rant, and drink and sing in taverns—a fellow over whose grave no one will breathe a single heigh-ho, except from the cobweb-tie of what is called good fellowship—who has no view nor aim but what terminates in himself—if there be any grovelling earth-born wretch of our species, a renegade to common sense, who would fain believe that the noble creature, man, is no better than a sort of fungus, generated out of nothing, nobody knows how, and soon dissipating in nothing, nobody knows where; such a stupid beast, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... pain discovers secrets, or betrays his confederates, or deserts many duties of life? Will you act in a manner consistently with courage, and its attendants, greatness of soul, resolution, patience, and contempt for all worldly things? Can you hear yourself called a great man when you lie grovelling, dejected, and deploring your condition with a lamentable voice; no one would call you even a man while in such a condition. You must therefore either abandon all pretensions to courage, or else pain must be put out ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... of the armlet the Wanderer fell on the earth, grovelling among the ashes of the pyre, for he knew the gold ring which he had brought from Ephyre long ago, for a gift to his wife Penelope. This was the bracelet of the bride of his youth, and here, a mockery and a terror, ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... oiled linen cloth served to admit a feeble semblance of light, and to keep out the rain. The labourer's fire was in the middle of his house; he and his wife and children huddled round it, sometimes grovelling in the ashes; and going to bed meant flinging themselves down upon the straw which served them as mattress and feather bed, exactly as it does to the present day in the gipsy's tent in our byways. The labourer's only light by night was the smouldering fire. ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... any rate, that the cenacle of politicians, whose interests are to be thrown in relief against this mass of grovelling corruption, forms but a feeble contrast, even in the purely artistic sense. We have no right to doubt that Disraeli thought that Coningsby and his friends represented the true solution of the difficulty; yet if anybody had wished ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... of old newspapers, with my mother's prognostics, that I never should find it, and loud prophecies that I should catch my death, which I did not, but dirty and dusty, and cobwebby, I came forth after two hours' grovelling with my object in my hand! Cut it out, added a few lines of new end to it, and packed it off to Lupton Relfe, telling him that it was an old thing written when I was sixteen. Weeks elapsed, and I heard no ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... foul air—gleaming lights, then dense blackness—so the hours passed. Sally after sally the snowplow made, only to withdraw to give way to the pick crews, and they in turn, gasping and reeling, hurried out for the attack of the plow again. Men fell grovelling, only to be dragged into the open air and resuscitated, then sent once more into the cruelty of the fight. The hours dragged by like stricken things. Then—with dawn—the plow churned with lesser impact. ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... minds over the deadly nature of that accident. It must have been a pretty sight, the fierce industry of these beggars toiling on a motionless ship that floated quietly in the silence of a world asleep, fighting against time for the freeing of that boat, grovelling on all-fours, standing up in despair, tugging, pushing, snarling at each other venomously, ready to kill, ready to weep, and only kept from flying at each other's throats by the fear of death that stood silent behind them like an ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... varied methods, John Gunter, the fisherman, preferred the grub-and-grovelling method, and the favourite scene of his grovelling was a low grog-shop in one of the lower ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... of darkness had already well nigh passed, and but for the thick storm-clouds and the drizzling rain, some streaks of early dawn might have been seen on the horizon, when at the door of Marcus Laeca, in the low grovelling street of the Scythemakers—strange quarter for the residence of a patrician, one of the princely Porcii—the arch-conspirator stood still, and glared around with keen suspicious eyes, after ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... the whole grovelling tribe of Leppins, outnumbering the Van Horns, possibly, are ready with oral testimony and a shower of depositions, and what all besides. Ouf! not an inch do I yield. J'y suis; j'y reste. Not an inch should anybody else yield. Well, thank me, Roger, for ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... world that lifts them up to high degree, And treads us down in grovelling misery! England affords these glorious vagabonds, That carried erst their fardels on their backs, Coursers to ride on through the gazing streets, Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits, And pages ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... flesh and blood presently glutteth with satiety," and the mortal circuits of earth and time are a round of griefs and pangs from which they would escape into the impersonal Godhead. Sheerly against this lofty strain of poetic souls is that grovelling life of ignorance which, dominated by selfish instincts, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... these two young men live together: one endeavoring by the aid of religion, and by studying the wisdom of the past, to exalt and purify his fallen nature; the other by grovelling in the dust, and mingling with beings yet more sinful and degraded, rapidly debased his mind to a more degenerate ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... had arisen, and therefore attempting the impossible task of galvanizing dead creeds into a semblance of vitality; and strange superstitions creeping out of their lurking-places, and gaining influence in a luxurious society whose intelligence was an ineffectual safeguard against the most grovelling errors; and a dogged adherence of formalists and conservatives to ancient ways, and much empty profession of barren orthodoxy; and, beneath all, a vague disquiet, a breaking up of ancient social and ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... learnt to pay these potentates the respect which is their due. Well-born men and women trot along Park Lane in obedience to the hooting calls of motor horns. No one considers himself degraded by grovelling before a plutocrat. ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... assert that in Heaven there will be factories working women and children for starvation wages; coal-mines and private property in land, dividing the population of Heaven into two classes, one revelling in riches and luxury, destructive of soul and body, the other grovelling in poverty, also destructive of all that is best in life? If not, how can they consistently support the system which inevitably produces that ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... coming on, and that the difficulties I find in my present views are greater than I thought them to be, and that here I am in the presence of a magnificent and consistent system shooting up on every side, whilst all that I see against it is weak and grovelling.' (Letter ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... held in the surface like a pennant on an air-blast. In a few minutes the icy flood had robbed me of all sensation in my limbs, and showed how impossible was the plan, so I gave the signal to haul me in; which they did, nearly cutting my body in two with the rope. And if ever there was a grovelling fire-worshipper, it was my frozen self when ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... nearer view. We began to forgive him, to disbelieve in any personal spite of his, and to recall that he himself, seen thus, was far more precious than any mappy dulness we could have seen from his summit. One great upright pyramid like this was worth a continent of grovelling acres. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... perceptible what right they have to scorn him, though he seems to acquiesce, in a manner, in their doing so. And yet he cannot wholly have lost his self-respect; and doubtless there were persons on the stoop more grovelling than himself. ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the Dramatic "biz" preferred? There you may "boom" it like a bird. Turn on the Absolute-Absurd; By that strange tap the mob is stirred. Be dismal, deathly, dirty, dim; Grovelling, ghastly, gruesome, grim, Anything meaning morbid whim; Quidnuncs will cry, "What treuth! what vim!" Chorus—Tra-la-la! "Boom" to-day! [As long as ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... be maintained, indeed, that the withdrawal from the Indian of the Government's protecting arm, and the recognition of his position, as no longer that of a needy, grovelling annuitant, but as one of equal footing with the white before the law, would—far from bringing blessings in their train—promote, with other evils, a pernicious development, with calamitous reaction upon him, of the aggrandizing instinct of the white, who ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... of this, Dyke dropped down flat, and lay panting and motionless for a few minutes. Then he began to crawl straight for the horse, grovelling along upon his breast. But this soon proved to be far too painful and laborious a mode of progression, and he rose to his hands and knees, feeling that it must be that way or nohow, though fast growing desperate enough to rise ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... that we twain shall carry off great glory to the ships for the Achaians, having slain Hector, for all his thirst for fight. No longer is it possible for him to escape us, not even though far-darting Apollo should travail sore, grovelling before the Father, aegis-bearing Zeus. But do thou now stand and take breath, and I will go and persuade this man to confront thee ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... "don't crouch grovelling on the floor there. Get up and let us know the meaning of this. Good heavens! the lad may be here ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... The youth grovelling before him wondered to see him calm, and plucking up spirit stood upright. "You must go back to her, and ask her to get it for you," Blondel said firmly. "You can be back ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... nor the stalls of your cathedrals: no! let the venerable orders of the hierarchy exist with all their advantages." And shall I tell them, "I reject your just and reasonable petition, not because it shakes the Church, but because there are others, while you lie grovelling upon the earth, that will kick and bite you"? Judge which of these descriptions of men comes with a fair request: that which says, "Sir, I desire liberty for my own, because I trespass on no man's conscience,"—or the other, which says, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... good-bye to his master, and over a glass of wine heartily thanked his friend, the commercial traveller, for having given him self-confidence and will,—"will, that iron bar, which keeps a man's back erect and prevents him from grovelling on all fours." And he swore a solemn oath never to forget his friend, who had taught him ...
— In Midsummer Days and Other Tales • August Strindberg
... beheld her Titan stripped. To what vast length of limb and mounds of thews, How trained to scale the eminences, pluck The hazards for new footing, how compel Those timely incidents by men named luck, Through forethought that defied the Fates to choose, Her grovelling admiration had not yet Imagined of the great man-miracle; And France recounted with her comic smile Duplicities of Court and Cabinet, The silky female of his male in guile, Wherewith her two-faced Master ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and felt many severe disappointments—and what is the amount? I long for a little peace and independence! Every obligation we receive from our fellow-creatures is a new shackle, takes from our native freedom, and debases the mind, makes us mere earthworms—I am not fond of grovelling! ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... appeals to Gerald's weakest side. He worships success. She is going to have a marvellous career, and she can help Gerald on in his. He can write plays for her to star in. What have I to offer against that? Yes, I know it's grovelling and contemptible of me to say that, Ginger. I ought to be above it, oughtn't I—talking as if I were competing for some prize... But I haven't ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... had fallen prone and was grovelling weakly. "Oh, I won't tell on you," he wailed imploringly. "I won't, I won't, Fong Wu; I ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... discredit to the house, a blight, a sore, a gangrene. It turned over in its sleep, the cover was hurled aside, and a grotesque object, round, pulpy, webbed, and of leprous whiteness—an object which Letty could hardly associate with a hand—came grovelling out. Letty's stomach heaved; the thing was beastly, indecent, vile, it ought not to live! And the idea of killing flashed through her mind. Boiling over with indignation and absurdly forgetful of her surroundings, she turned round and groped ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... way, fragmentary, comet-like; the whole race of mankind has marched around the globe again and again. The leaders—the head—were the favored few, priests and kings, warriors and nobles; the vast tail, the untaught, the unawakened, the ignorant, servile masses, the grovelling slaves, but a remove from ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... sprang upon the nearest, and seized him by the horn; and up and down they wrestled, till the bull fell grovelling on his knees; for the heart of the brute died within him, and his mighty limbs were loosed beneath the steadfast eye of that dark witch maiden, and the ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... which was, when they began their work, an abominable burden on the spiritual life of the nation. If the Catholicism of Chateaubriand, of Lamennais, of Montalembert, was a different thing from the Catholicism of a Dubois, or a Rohan, from the vile corruptions of the Jesuits and the grovelling superstitions of the later Jansenists, it was the execrated freethinkers whom the church and mankind had to thank for the change. The most enlightened Catholic of to-day ought to admit that Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, were the true reformers of his ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... said that all this argued grovelling inclinations. I do not think so; not that I mean to vindicate myself in any great degree; I know too well what a whimsical compound I am. But in this instance I was seduced by no love of low company, nor disposition to indulge in low vices. I have always despised the brutally vulgar; and ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... you mean by grovelling, Mr. Bertram. I don't like grovellers myself. I like men who can keep their heads up—who, once having them above the water, will never allow them to sink. Some men in every age do win distinction and wealth and high place. These are not grovellers. If I were you I ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... sacrifice honour for a few paltry dollars—who will debase himself for gain—whose gross sensuality suffocates all high, spiritual love? No! no! It is impossible! And she who unites herself with such a man, must either shrink, grovelling, down to his mean ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... significance we call a brother poet. "Allen," he writes in 1813, "has lent me a quantity of Burns's unpublished letters.... What an antithetical mind!—tenderness, roughness—delicacy, coarseness— sentiment, sensuality—soaring and grovelling—dirt and deity—all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!" We have only to add to these antitheses, in applying them with slight modification to the writer. Byron had, on occasion, more self-control than Burns, who yielded to every thirst or gust, and could never have lived ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... the service of mankind to be A guardian god below; still to employ The mind's brave ardor in heroic aims, Such as may raise us o'er the grovelling herd, And make us shine for ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... suffer. His infatuation became a mania, and, up to the very day on which the Countess told the story, he persisted in his appeals to the Princess. In person he had gone to her to plead his suit, on his knees, grovelling at her feet. He went so far as to exclaim madly in the presence of the alarmed but relentless object of his love that he would win her or turn the whole earth into ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... man troubled in his sleep, as if it felt some sensible torment. Many have climbed to the top thereof, where they heard the groans more plainly than they could below. One among the rest being a-top, spoke to the tree; but presently came down much astonished, and lay grovelling on the earth speechless for three hours, and then reviving said, Brampton, Brampton, thou art much bound to pray.' The author of this news is one Mr. Vaughan, a minister who was there present and heard and saw these ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... made that observation. Strange people the Jews—endowed with every gift but one, and that the highest, genius divine,—genius which can alone make of men demigods, and elevate them above earth and what is earthy and what is grovelling; without which a clever nation—and who more clever than the Jews?—may have Rambams in plenty, but never a Fielding nor a Shakespeare; a Rothschild and a Mendoza, yes—but never a Kean nor ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... deep in philosophy, grovelling through Diogenes Laertius—Plutarch's "Placita" and sich—and often wondering whether the schoolmasters have any better ground for maintaining that Greek is a finer language than English than the fact that they can't write ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... passengers and seamen who were on the deck crying and wailing: "these are Christians—these men have been promised by you, but now, the inheritance of perfect bliss. What is their faith, that it does not give them strength to die like men? Why is it that a woman quails not, while they lie grovelling on the deck?" ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... would let the other men go first into the grub-boat, and then he would go down on his hands and knees, grovelling fiercely upon the ground where they had been sitting, trying to find some stray crumbs of tobacco. Once he sneaked down the river bank and filled his pipe with dead willow leaves. At the first whiff of ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... we're frightening anything we slow down, slip out the clutch, and glide so stealthily by that the creature gets no excuse for hysterics. I used to think before you taught me to drive, and I had the experience and the responsibility myself, that you wasted time grovelling to animal prejudices; but I've changed my mind. I've learned there's no fun to be got out of pig-selfishness on the road, and leaving a trail ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... slavery over again, to do anything to rescue his beloved Master Harry from this calamitous position. Harry was touched with the lad's expressions of affection, and told him to get up from the ground where he was grovelling on his knees, embracing his master's. "All you have to do, sir, is to give me my clothes to dress, and to hold your tongue about this business. Mind you, not a word, sir, about it to ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in their most literal sense, becomes the calm and settled habit of the soul, is life ever redeemed from drudgery and dreary emptiness, and made full of interest, meaning, and divine significance. Not till then do its grovelling wants, its wearing cares, its stinging vexations, become to us ministering spirits, each one, by a silent but certain agency, fitting us for a higher and ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... other elements besides that of the highest respectability. In plain terms, I found him to be a pretty equal compound by nature, of the fool, the tyrant, and the coward. There was only one direction in which what grovelling sympathies he had, could be touched to some purpose. Save him waste, or get him profit; and he was really grateful. I succeeded in working both these marvels. His managing man cheated him; I found it out; refused ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... himself to its guidance, deceit wounds him no more— hollow-hearted friendship proffers not its hand to sting—love exercises not its fatal sorcery—foes are afar—and his heart, if not the waves, is comparatively at peace. And oh! the wonders of the deep! Ocean! tame is the soul that loves not thee! grovelling the mind that scorns the joys thou impartest! To lean our head on the vessel's side, and in idleness of spirit ponder on bygone scene, that has brought us anything but happiness,—to gaze on the curling waves, as impelled by the boisterous wind, we ride o'er the angry ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... too good-natured a man not to say that, if she wished to resign, his house and arms were open to her. Still, however, he could not bear to remove her from the Court. His veneration for royalty amounted in truth to idolatry. It can be compared only to the grovelling superstition of those Syrian devotees who made their children pass through the fire to Moloch. When he induced his daughter to accept the place of keeper of the robes, he entertained, as she tells us, a hope that some worldly advantage or other, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of slavery, been living independent lives, in close contact with civilisation, and enjoying all the rights of manhood under British laws. From their earliest infancy they have known no language but the English, and no religion but Christianity; while the former are still barbarians, grovelling in fetishism, cursed with slavery, ignorant, debased, and wantonly cruel. The West India negro has so much contempt for his African cousin, that he invariably speaks of him by the ignominious title of "bushman." ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... necessity of some exertion; and with an energy, for which a few moments before I had hardly dared to hope, I poured out my soul in prayer. I besought mercy upon the blood-stained creature who was grovelling beside me—I asked that repentance and peace might be vouchsafed him—I begged, for our Redeemer's sake, that his last moments might know that untasted rapture of sin forgiven, and a cleansed soul, which faith alone can bring to fallen man—I ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... there, did not improve on acquaintance. The walls, five feet high, were built of poles some five inches in diameter; the low roof, made of similar poles, was heavily heaped with earth. What with this deep earth-covering, and with their grovelling toward the earth in such a flat and neighborly fashion, they had a dreadfully under-foot look, and seemed rather dens than houses. Many were ragged and rotten, all inconceivably cheerless. No outhouses, no inclosures, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... sufferings of a better man than thou art would less afflict me than thine. Perhaps it is still in my power to restore thy liberty and good name, and yet—that is a fond wish. Thou art past the age when the ignorance and grovelling habits of a human being are susceptible of cure." There he stopped, and, after a gloomy ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... felt some sensible torment. Many have climbed to the top of it, who heard the groans more easily than they could below. But one among the rest, being on the top thereof, spake to the tree; but presently came down much aghast, and lay grovelling on the earth, three hours speechless. In the end reviving, he said: "Brampton, Brampton, thou art much bound to pray!"' The Earl of Lincoln caused one of the arms of the ash to be lopped off and a hole bored through the body, and then was the sound, or hollow voice, heard more audibly ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... pronounced the name he held out his hand again and flicked his fingers. The dog rose from his grovelling posture and came eagerly forward, wagging his lank tail. He rubbed his nose against the man's hand and slowly licked the ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... amounting perhaps to monomania, and yielding one lesson to repay the world for his existence, viz. that there is no state of the soul so dangerous as that in which the vices of the sensualist are envenomed by the grovelling ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... he dared not launch the new thought boldly. He wrote a grovelling preface, endeavouring to excuse Copernicus for his novel idea, and in this he inserted the apologetic lie that Copernicus had propounded the doctrine of the earth's movement not as a fact, but as a hypothesis. He ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... hardly call to mind any other so thoroughly calculated to turn the average well-constructed man or woman into an exuberantly incurable idiot. For what does it amount to when we come to pan it out? If there exist grounds for the misgiving, why then it is going begging—grovelling for something which the other party has not got to give; if groundless, is it not a fulfilling of the homely old saw relating to cutting off one's nose to spite one's face? (We disclaim any intent to pun.) ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... grovelling at their feet, spending millions of francs to entertain the Tzar—France, a nation which must see a prospect of double her money returned before she parts with a sou; with the cathedrals filled with couronnes sent by the ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... stolidly, although evidently not without some inward apprehension. It was a piteous sight—the poor distorted reasoning faculty grovelling as a slave to ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... stands before their door, &c. Old men have (pedem in cymba Charonis) one foot in the grave already; and the Greek word [Greek: geron] (an old man) is derived from [Greek: para to eis gen oran], which signifies a looking towards the ground; decrepit age goes stooping and grovelling, as groaning to the grave. It doth not only expect death, but oft solicits it."—Christ. Ness's Compleat History and Mystery of the Old and New Test., fol. Lond. 1690, chap. xii. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 207, October 15, 1853 • Various
... over others; swellings of the ambition to propagate one's own creed, and proselytize victoriously; hungerings to see self reflected in another convinced. In such efforts lie dangers as vulgar as the minds that make them, and love the excitement of them. But genuine love is far beyond such grovelling delights; and the peril of such a relation is in inverse proportion to the ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... said. "What is it to be insane? It is to have faculties exalted beyond the comprehension of the multitude; to soar above the grovelling world. Their eyes are too weak to bear the glory, and, because they are blind, they think others cannot see. The fools declared my father was insane. They say the same of you, Holden, and, the next thing, I shall be ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... unusually slow and patient, did not alter the fact that he was just a common human being. The lump that rose in his throat was so big, and so hard, he did not try to swallow it. He hurried back into Rainbow Bottom. The first log he came across he kicked over, and grovelling in the rotten wood and loose earth with his hands, he brought up a half dozen bluish-white grubs. He tore up the ground for the length of the log, and then he went to others, cramming the worms and dirt with them into ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... heard Richard crying for her upstairs. She dragged herself up at once, but remembered and fell grovelling on the floor and wept. But Richard continued to call for her, and she struggled to her feet and made her way up the stairs, clinging to the banisters. She looked over her shoulder at the loathed room and was amazed to see that this mawkish early morning light showed it much tidier than ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... of the fragrance that will presently rush out to inundate your hungry senses, and prepare them, by the delicate visitation of atoms, for the keen gusto of ampler contact! Especially if you have confidence in the dinner-giving capacity of your host—if you know that he is not a man who entertains grovelling views of eating and drinking as a mere satisfaction of hunger and thirst, and, dead to all the finer influences of the palate, expects his guest to be brilliant on ill-flavoured gravies and the cheapest Marsala. Mr. Ely was particularly worthy of such confidence, and his virtues as ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... irreconcilables, who welcomed the destruction of their fatherland in order that the man who had made it the glory and the envy of the world should be driven from it. Many of these creatures were members of the same Senate who, a few years previously, sent Napoleon a fervent address couched in grovelling language, imploring him to cement the hold his personality had on the national life. The following is what they say, and what they ask him to do:—"You have brought us out of the chaos of the past, you have made us bless the benefits of the present. Great man, complete your work, and make ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... explains the difference in the demeanor of different companies of men and women, in great emergencies of danger. Read one narrative of shipwreck, and human nature seems all sublime; read another, and, under circumstances equally desperate, it appears base, selfish, grovelling. The difference lies simply in the influence of a few leading spirits. Ordinarily, as is the captain, so are the officers, so are the passengers, so are the sailors. Bonaparte said, that at the beginning of almost every battle there was a moment when the bravest troops were liable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... who, while owing his every comfort as well as the continuance of his race, to woman, denied her every intellectual initiative! 'Who would have thought that a woman'—could do anything but bend low before a man with grovelling humility saying 'My lord, here am I, the waiting vessel of your lordship's pleasure!—possess me or I die!' We have changed ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... "paint a saint," whom he can still speak of, in tones of earnest admiration, as "wily as an eel." His implied concessions and merely parenthetic denials, his abominable insinuations and suggestions, come, evidently enough, from the instincts of a grovelling mind, literally incapable of appreciating goodness, as well as from professional irritation at ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... was like a lightning flash upon a dark night. I had heard of the vagaries of a woman's love, but was it possible that this spirited woman loved that poor creature whom I had seen grovelling last night in a frenzy of fear? But now I remembered also where I had seen the name Sibylle. It was upon the fly-leaf of his book. 'Lucien, from Sibylle,' was the inscription. I recalled also that my uncle had said something to him about ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Mr. Hastings, not behaving like a good, fair colleague in office, not to let them know that he was going on in this career of receiving bribes, and to deprive them of their share in the glory of it: but they were grovelling creatures, who thought that keeping clean hands was some virtue.—"Well, but you have applied some of these bribes to your own benefit: why did you give no account of those bribes?" "I did not," he says, "because it might have excited ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the serpent opened his golden mouth and fell to laughing. The thought that this little mortal, grovelling before him, could believe himself able to repay the kindnesses received ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... contrasted by the littleness of his motives, which at once denoted both his baseness and his meanness, and marked him for a traitor and a trickster. Nay, in his style and writing there was the same mixture of vicious contrarieties;— the most grovelling ideas were conveyed in the most inflated language, giving mock consequence to low cavils, and uttering quibbles in heroics; so that his compositions disgusted the mind's taste, as much as his actions excited the soul's abhorrence. Indeed this mixture of character seemed, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... large upon this subject; which I shall endeavour to do in a manner suitable to it, that I may not incur the censure which a famous critic bestows upon one who had written a treatise upon "the sublime," in a low grovelling style. I intend to lay aside a whole week for this undertaking, that the scheme of my thoughts may not be broken and interrupted; and I dare promise myself, if my readers will give me a week's attention, that this great city will be very much changed for the better by next Saturday night. I ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... live and remember," cried the little elderly man, "old Toonie was me!" Then he threw himself grovelling at his son's feet, and began crying: "Oh, be quick and take me away! Make them give me up to you: ask to have me! I am your poor, loving old father whom you never saw; all these years have I been looking and ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... a deer for a hundred yards and fell grovelling upon the turf, the laugh still griping him with the energy of a panther's jaws, while Claude, who, in blind pursuit, had come threshing into his father's arms, pulled his hat over his eyes and strode away towards the skiff ferry. As Mr. ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... incident occurred in connection with the Greek question of 1850, when the English fleet threatened to blockade the Piraeus. Punch was indignant at this high-handed show of strength towards the little kingdom, and taking the mean-looking, grovelling British Lion by the ear (in his cartoon) asks him, "Why don't you hit someone of your own size?" With the exception of the occasion when he disrespectfully represented the noble beast as stuffed and moth-eaten, this is the only "big cut" wherein the Lion ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... birds that dust themselves never wash: and I once thought that those birds that wash themselves would never dust; but here I find myself mistaken; for common house-sparrows are great pulveratrices, being frequency seen grovelling and wallowing in dusty roads; and yet they are great washers. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... themselves of their vermin. As far as I can observe, many birds that dust themselves never wash; and I once thought that those birds that wash themselves would never dust; but here I find myself mistaken: for common house-sparrows are great pulveratrices, being frequently seen grovelling and wallowing in dusty roads; and yet they are great washers. Does ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... Hypothesis aethikae] published in 1660, contains the first clear statement of Euthumism made by any Englishman. See p.223.] Hutcheson, and Shaftesbury. Paley thrust himself among Public Eudaimonists, and our author well exposes his grovelling morals, aiming to produce the "greatest happiness of the greatest number," a system which has too long been taught among the students of our colleges and high schools. But he properly belongs to the Private Eudaimonists; for this interpreter of ethics to the ingenuous youth of England and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... more important reflections than that of the Tuscan and Lombard commonwealths. The character of the Italian statesman seems, at first sight, a collection of contradictions, a phantom as monstrous as the portress of hell in Milton, half divinity, half snake, majestic and beautiful above, grovelling and poisonous below, We see a man whose thoughts and words have no connection with each other, who never hesitates at an oath when he wishes to seduce, who never wants a pretext when he is inclined to betray. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... contentment during the very days when he had decided to leave and was asking himself where he should next abide. One of his delights was to return to a house which he had quitted years ago, to behold the excitement and bustle occasioned by his appearance, and play the good-natured autocrat over grovelling dependents. In every case, save the two already mentioned, he had parted with his landlady on terms of friendliness, never vouchsafing a reason for his going away, genially eluding every attempt ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling thing that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... little band of white men. And at this point in the drama the whole shouting, yelling crowd suddenly became silent, pulled up short, and, as four more of their number dropped, flung themselves on their faces to the earth, grovelling and howling loudly for mercy. And only just in the nick of time, too, so far as the white men were concerned, for had the courage of the savages lasted long enough to carry them a further fifty yards, they would have arrived within striking distance, ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... Mr. Archer," shrieked Sara, and laid herself on the floor at his feet with a grovelling motion, as if striving with her mother earth for comfort. There was not a film of art in this. She had never been to a theatre. The natural urging of life gave the truest shape to her entreaty. Her posture was the result of the same feeling which made the nations of old bring their sacrifices ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... of nature, sometimes vouchsafed even to the cow, like to imagine themselves advanced people, 'destroyers,' and to push themselves into the 'new movement,' and this quite sincerely. Meanwhile the really new people are very often unobserved by them, or even despised as reactionaries of grovelling tendencies. But I don't think there is any considerable danger here, and you really need not be uneasy for they never go very far. Of course, they might have a thrashing sometimes for letting their fancy run away ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Invention, by finding out a Method to supply this natural Defect in his Subject. Accordingly he leaves the Adversary of Mankind, in the last View which he gives us of him, under the lowest State of Mortification and Disappointment. We see him chewing Ashes, grovelling in the Dust, and loaden with supernumerary Pains and Torments. On the contrary, our two first Parents are comforted by Dreams and Visions, cheared with Promises of Salvation, and, in a manner, raised to a greater Happiness than that which they had forfeited: In short, Satan is represented ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... days now, Ned; but they were really happy while they lasted. We were the salt of the earth; we were lifted above those grovelling instincts which we saw manifested in the lives of others. Each contributed his share of gas to inflate the painted balloon to which we all clung, in the expectation that it would presently soar with us to the stars. But it only went up over the ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... the other had dropped upon the floor and was grovelling in drunken hysterics at his feet. "It makes me sick to see a man act ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... able to get a dish of glory and a dish of beef-steak on the same day; in consequence of which, the heart, which ought properly to be soaring in the clouds, or, at all events, in a castle half way up, is more generally to be found grovelling about a hen-roost, in the vain hope, that, if it cannot get hold of the hen herself, it may at least hit upon an egg; and such, I remember, was the state of my feelings on this occasion, in consequence of my having dined the three preceding ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... sacred person of the "Right Honourable William, Lord Marquis of Harrington," and showing, almost pathetically, how frequently the literary workers of Queen Anne's "golden age" were wont to beg the influence of some powerful patron. The dedication seems absolutely grovelling when viewed from the present standards, but Mr. Rowe and his friends saw therein nothing more remarkable than respectful homage to one of the world's great men. The republic of letters was then an ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... wheel; now he glories; now the bells in heaven do ring; now the angels shout for joy, yea, are bid to do so, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost' (Luke 15:1-10). Now also the sinner, as a token of being overcome, lies grovelling at his foot, saying, 'Thine arrows are sharp in the heart of the king's enemies, whereby the people fall under ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... illustrate so remarkably the powers of man's imagination; some of us admire and even humbly try to follow them in their high philosophical excursions, though we know the risk of being snubbed by the inquiry whether grovelling dissectors of monkeys and blackbeetles can hope to enter into the empyreal kingdom of speculation. But still we feel that our business is different; humbler if you will, though the diminution of dignity is, perhaps, compensated ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... of African colonization which originated in and is perpetuated by a worldly, Pharoah-like policy beneath the dignity of a magnanimous and Christian people;—a system which receives much of its vitality from ad captandum appeals to popular prejudices, and to the unholy, grovelling passions of the canaille;—a system that interposes every possible obstacle in the way of the improvement and elevation of the colored man in the land of his birth;—that instigates the enactment of laws ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... owe nothing to another, is the praise which men, who do not much think what they are saying, bestow sometimes upon others, and sometimes on themselves; and their imaginary dignity is naturally heightened by a supercilious censure of the low, the barren, the grovelling, the servile imitator. It would be no wonder if a student, frightened by these terrors and disgraceful epithets, with which the poor imitators are so often loaded, should let fall his pencil in mere despair, conscious how much he has been indebted ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... ideal picture, and not reality, with which we have to do. Hence the number of these idolaters was seventy—the successors of the seventy whom Moses led up to Sinai to see the God of Israel! And now here they are grovelling before brute forms painted on the walls in a hole in the dark. Their leader bears a name which might have startled them in their apostasy, and choked their prayers in their throats, for Jaazan-iah means 'the Lord hears.' Each man has a censer ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... rushed into the room, staff in hand, at the outcry. Now he stood glowering indignantly upon the grovelling bearer. ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... glorious Miss Hollister. Surely no one who had once met her could do otherwise than think of her constantly, he reflected; and the reflection made him a bit jealous. What business had others to think of her? Impertinent, grovelling mortals! No man was good enough to do that—no, not even himself. But he could change. He could at least try to be worthy of thinking about her, and he knew of no other man who could. He'd like to catch any one else doing so little as mentioning ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... maintained, indeed, that the withdrawal from the Indian of the Government's protecting arm, and the recognition of his position, as no longer that of a needy, grovelling annuitant, but as one of equal footing with the white before the law, would—far from bringing blessings in their train—promote, with other evils, a pernicious development, with calamitous reaction upon him, of the aggrandizing instinct of the white, who would lure and entrap him into ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... hissed over his shoulder. But the dragoman had screamed out something which arrested the blow, and which brought the chief and the lieutenant to his side with a new interest upon their swarthy faces. The others crowded in also, and formed a dense circle around the grovelling, pleading man. ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... While you seemed but a demon of vengeance, you commanded terror, and to good purpose; but such a foul fiend as thou hast of late shown thyself—such a very worthless, base trickster of the devil—such a sordid grovelling imp of perdition, can gain nothing but scorn from ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... they can't expound, Prepare a fancied bliss or woe? Shall reptiles, grovelling on the ground, Their ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... took the other, and we charged that door with such hearty goodwill that at the first assault it yielded, lock and hinges being torn from the woodwork, and the door itself falling flat with a crash like the crack o' doom. Ajax, the log, and I rolled into the next room, and as we were grovelling on the floor I saw that the room was full of Chinamen, and that our late guide was in the middle of them. The light was so bad that I was unable to see more than this. It was plain that we had to deal with an organised gang of criminals. Thugs who practised their trade as a fine art. ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... policy, who would like to negotiate and compromise, who still believe in the possibility of a reconciliation with France, who still think that the pen should smoothen the rugged path before us, or unravel the knot of our difficulties—those cowardly, grovelling hearts are the real enemies of our cause, and more dangerous than Napoleon with all his armies. For they are weighing down our courage, paralyzing our arms, and stifling our enthusiasm. But for ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... men would have wished to be known, sprang toward me with well-meant, if rough, caresses,—evidently the few scratches he had amounted to nothing. I forgave him the cat cheerfully, but my poor carnations! They do not belong to the grovelling tribe of herbs that bend and refuse to break like portulaca, chickweed, and pusley the accursed. Fortunately, just then, a scene of the past year, which had come to me by report, floated across my vision. Our young hounds, Bob and Pete, in the heat of undisciplined rat-catching (for these ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... conquer that world, with angels at our head, in order that we may establish the happiness of man by a divine dominion, and crushing the political atheism that is now desolating existence, utterly extinguish the grovelling tyranny of self-government.' ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... and openly avowed his intention to make her suffer. His infatuation became a mania, and, up to the very day on which the Countess told the story, he persisted in his appeals to the Princess. In person he had gone to her to plead his suit, on his knees, grovelling at her feet. He went so far as to exclaim madly in the presence of the alarmed but relentless object of his love that he would win her or turn the ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... been a time when certain of his private occupations—interviews with personages of wealth or influence, cryptic conversations, resulting always, however defiant the beginning, in the same grovelling pleas and promises—had amused and interested the cynic most mightily: been the cream of his labors, indeed. But latterly even these scenes had palled; and it came to him with a faint shock of surprise that he was beginning to remember with relief those few occasions on which such talks had ended, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... reproduce in his work the character of the place which gave him birth. For, of all the historians—I do not say of antiquity but of all time—none is more rationalistic than he, none more free from any belief in the 'visions and omens, the monstrous legends, the grovelling superstitions and unmanly craving for the supernatural' ([Greek] {197a}) which he is compelled to notice himself as the characteristics of some of the historians who preceded him. Fortunate in the land ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... want anything. If you think that the columns of the People's Banner are to be bought, you must have opinions respecting the press of the day which make me pity you as one grovelling in the very dust. The daily press of London is pure and immaculate. That is, the morning papers are. Want, indeed! What do you ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... and forbore to utter any of those pious commonplaces by which she might have attempted to bring him to a better frame of mind. She had tact enough to divine that he was best left to himself—left to struggle out of this grovelling state by some effort of his own, rather than to be dragged from the slough of despond ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Rumple, diving hastily to recover the volumes, and promptly knocking his head against that of Billykins, who was also grovelling for the same purpose, while Nealie plunged into the business of their visit, hoping to divert the attention of the master of the house from the awkwardness of the boys, poor things; but Sylvia giggled ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... the punishment of heaven on you grovelling wretches. Keep this in your head and be more careful hereafter. You can never talk ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... been, heretofore, often unjustly accused of ambition. Low, grovelling souls, who are utterly incapable of elevating themselves to the higher and nobler duties of pure patriotism,—beings who, forever keeping their own selfish ends in view, decide all public measures by their presumed influence ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... glow of a candle or torch but the blessed white light of day. It was the longed-for opening, though still far away. He thought that he had out-distanced Radicofani and stumbled on, exultation giving him new strength when a sudden eclipse of this star of hope made him crouch motionless, grovelling close to the earth. A man's head and shoulders were silhouetted blackly against the brightness. The man peered cautiously into the tunnel, and listened; but neither hearing nor ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... devil, perhaps," he said, with stony helplessness, "but when I received your letter I was grovelling on my knees praying that I might get back to her—and atone—as far as a ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... precepts of the purest morality and benevolence, sanctioned by a life of humility, innocence, and simplicity of manners, neglect of riches, absence of worldly ambition and honors, with an eloquence and persuasiveness which have not been surpassed. These could not be inventions of the grovelling authors who relate them. They are far beyond the powers of their feeble minds. They show that there was a character, the subject of their history, whose splendid conceptions were above all suspicion of being interpolations from their hands. Can we be at a loss in separating such ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... far above us. If you WILL fling yourself under the wheels, Juggernaut will go over you, depend upon it; and if you and I, my dear friend, had Kotow performed before us every day,—found people whenever we appeared grovelling in slavish adoration, we should drop into the airs of superiority quite naturally, and accept the greatness with which the world ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "What are ye grovelling down there for, ye drunken beast?" shouted the angry waiter, as he came down with a thud. "Why don't you walk on your two feet ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... forthwith had gone out of the remnants of their minds over the deadly nature of that accident. It must have been a pretty sight, the fierce industry of these beggars toiling on a motionless ship that floated quietly in the silence of a world asleep, fighting against time for the freeing of that boat, grovelling on all-fours, standing up in despair, tugging, pushing, snarling at each other venomously, ready to kill, ready to weep, and only kept from flying at each other's throats by the fear of death that stood silent behind them like an ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... say that; but, I pray you, have mercy on me.' The poor, distorted figure threw itself down, grovelling at ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... whole grovelling tribe of Leppins, outnumbering the Van Horns, possibly, are ready with oral testimony and a shower of depositions, and what all besides. Ouf! not an inch do I yield. J'y suis; j'y reste. Not an inch should anybody else yield. Well, thank me, Roger, for having given you this ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... a vehement revolt against the present. Meanwhile, however, the answers generally given to sceptics are apparently contradictory. To limit our hopes to this world, it is sometimes said, is to encourage mere grovelling materialism; in the same breath it is added that to ask for an interest in the fate of our fellow-creatures here, instead of ourselves hereafter, is to make excessive demands upon human selfishness. The doctrine it seems is at once too elevated ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... flattery, is one of the most accomplished children I ever saw in my life, with quite the air of fashion, to keep such company. Are you not afraid that Master Merton should insensibly contract bad habits, and a grovelling way of thinking? For my own part, as I think a good education is a thing of the utmost consequence in life, I have spared no pains to give my dear Matilda every possible advantage." "Indeed," replied Mrs Merton, "one may see ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... warbles through the vernal wood: The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line: In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true From poisonous herbs extracts the healing dew? How instinct varies in the grovelling swine, Compared, half-reasoning elephant, with thine! 'Twixt that and reason, what a nice barrier, Forever separate, yet forever near! Remembrance and reflection how allied; What thin partitions sense from thought divide: And middle natures, how they long to join, Yet never ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... him, grovelling upon the deck, and sick he was indeed; with much difficulty we got him on shore; within a very few days, to the best of my remembrance five days, I perfected his cure; we became very familiar; I observed in him that he had some secret thoughts that ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... adherence to a cause. When King George reached England he dismissed Mar from office, suspecting him of sympathy with the Jacobite movement. Mar had expected something of the kind, and had written an obsequious and a grovelling letter to George, in which he spoke of the king's "happy accession," professed unbounded devotion to the house of Hanover, and promised that "You shall ever find in me as faithful a subject as ever any king had." The new king, however, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... self-sacrifice for another. Benevolent abstinence is its own reward and asks no more. Abstinence in hope of gain, denying himself while another is using his wealth, cannot be regarded as an act of benevolence, but of a selfish grovelling greed; more gratified to see his wealth increase than to himself enjoy its use. That is the spirit of the miser and receives the contempt of all right ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... hard-hearted tyrant who had rejected her prayer, on the sleek dames who would point the finger at her child, on the smug town that had looked askance at her all these years—that had set her beyond the pale of its dull grovelling pleasures, and shut her up in that lonely House on the Wall! Now—now she had it in her hand to take tenfold for one. Her face so shone at the thought that the man watching her felt a touch ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... broke the friendship. The power of Russia, Prussia, and Austria were hopelessly wrecked more than once, and on each occasion they intrigued him into war again, and then threw themselves at his feet, grovelling supplicants for mercy, ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... he exclaimed loftily. "But there, what can you expect from a low, grovelling beetle? Away, sir, pass on! Your very presence is distasteful to me. The idea of placing ME upon the same level—in the same family, as a low-born, mean, insignificant, utterly valueless——" Here the Diamond fairly choked ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... of Beaubocage dried his tears with an effort. Beaubocage—Cotenoir. Ah, me! what empty sounds those two once magic names seemed to him now that his son's life had been sacrificed to so paltry an ambition, so sordid a passion, so vile and grovelling a desire! He took the boy on his knee, and kissed him tenderly. His thoughts bridged over a chasm of five-and-twenty years as his lips pressed that fair young brow; and it was his own son—the son whom he had disowned—whose soft hair was mingling itself now with the grey ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... are lowered by the influence which is exercised over them by physical science. But any interpretation of nature by physical science is far in advance of such idealism. The philosophy of Berkeley, while giving unbounded license to the imagination, is still grovelling on the level ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... deserts many duties of life? Will you act in a manner consistently with courage, and its attendants, greatness of soul, resolution, patience, and contempt for all worldly things? Can you hear yourself called a great man when you lie grovelling, dejected, and deploring your condition with a lamentable voice; no one would call you even a man while in such a condition. You must therefore either abandon all pretensions to courage, or else pain must be put ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... audience wholly unprepared to accept it. For instance, in Monsieur Alphonse, a husband, on discovering that his wife has had an intrigue before their marriage, and that a little girl whom she wishes to adopt is really her daughter, instantly raises her from the ground where she lies grovelling at his feet, and says: "Creature de Dieu, toi qui as failli et te repens, releve toi, je te pardonne." This evangelical attitude on the part of Admiral de Montaiglin was in itself very surprising, and perhaps not wholly admirable, to the Parisian public of 1873; but Dumas ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... people seeks; proclaims aloud It was no time for counsel; in their spears Lay all their prudence now: the tyrant yet Was not so firmly seated on his throne, But that one shock of their united force Would dash him from the summit of his pride Headlong and grovelling in the dust. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... Science?" demanded Heliobas. "The foot of the mountain, at which men now stand, grovelling and uncertain how to climb? or the glittering summit ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... suppliant look, others are stoical, but all will have to roll at last upon the sand of the arena, condemned by the inexorable caprice of a people greedy for blood. "The modest virgin," says Juvenal, "turning down her thumb, orders that the breast of yonder man, grovelling in the dust, shall be torn open." And all—the heavily armed Samnite, the Gaul, the Thracian, the secutor; the dimachoerus, with his two swords; the swordsman who wears a helmet surmounted with a fish—the one ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... fruit of industry, attention, labour, and pains. At least I am resolved to try my doctrine by the test of experience.' There is a class of people, however, to whom this will sound heretical, forbidding them, as it were, the right to babble with grovelling familiarity of Rab, Rob, Robbie, Scotia's Bard, and the Ploughman Poet; and insisting on his name being spoken with conscious pride of ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... armlet the Wanderer fell on the earth, grovelling among the ashes of the pyre, for he knew the gold ring which he had brought from Ephyre long ago, for a gift to his wife Penelope. This was the bracelet of the bride of his youth, and here, a mockery and a terror, were those kind arms in which he had lain. Then his strength was ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... fight me! If you like to have it in black and white, I've been all the brains of the business here—single-handed! It was I got the secret of the wolf bait from the mother of your lame friend here," he pointed with his unoccupied hand to my grovelling boy, "when first I followed Paulette out from New York and laid up in Skunk's Misery to wait till I had a clear way to get to La Chance. That old ass Thompson gave me that, when I scooped him up on the road. After I'd used him, two of my men drowned him in Lac Tremblant—and you'd never have ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... stock which, coeval with the republic itself, had produced the conqueror of Tyre, given a queen to Hungary, and more than one Doge to Venice. The brilliancy of this descent was tarnished in the present chief representative of the family by the most base and grovelling avarice; for at that moment, in the recent war, at which all other Venetians were devoting their whole fortunes to the service of the state, Morosini sought in the distresses of his country an opening ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... a ravening dog, at the damsel, who, fallen on her knees and held fast by the two mastiffs, cried him mercy, and smiting her with all his might amiddleward the breast, pierced her through and through. No sooner had she received this stroke than she fell grovelling on the ground, still weeping and crying out; whereupon the knight, clapping his hand to his hunting-knife, ripped open her loins and tearing forth her heart and all that was thereabout, cast them to the two mastiffs, who devoured them ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... that the ancestors of the Highlanders, i.e., the Picts and Scots, originally came from Ireland and are of Formosian and Milesian descent, it will be readily understood that their proud old clans—and rightly proud, for who but a grovelling money grubber would not sooner be descended from a warrior, elected chief, on account of his all-round prowess, than from some measly hireling whose instincts were all mercenary?—possess ghosts that are ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... made a powerful impression on the one-year volunteer. From the moment when Heppner had lain grovelling on the ground before him a thorough change came over Trautvetter. The whole scene had been unspeakably revolting to him; he was seized with a grim horror on his own account too. Half unconsciously the sight of the big imposing-looking ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... the height of self-abnegating greatness. God sometimes deprives men of the strength necessary for action, but He never robs them of the faculty of progress, of spiritual elevation. Head and heart throb with the same pulsation; the brain thinks not aright without the healthful heart. Meanness and grovelling are always voluntary, and their essence is to resist superiority, to struggle against it, to try to degrade it: thus, all the bitter reactions of the Past against the changes truly needed for the development of the Future, spring from a primeval ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... years; and yet here is one whose office it seems to be to watch it! My spirit felt the necessity of some exertion; and, with an energy for which a few minutes before I had hardly dared to hope, I poured out my soul in prayer. I besought mercy upon the blood-stained creature who was grovelling beside me; I asked that repentance and peace might be vouchsafed him; I begged, for our Redeemer's sake, that his last moments might know that untasted rapture of sin forgiven, and a cleansed soul, which faith alone can bring to fallen man; I conjured him to help and aid me ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... India are an ancient people. When thirty centuries ago our ancestors were grovelling in the lowest depths of primitive savagery, our fellow-Aryans of India were enjoying a civilization of their own, which was, in its way, unique and distinguished. Their philosophy shows testimony ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... this same night the wealthy burgess Pranzo, who, having prepared a banquet, was standing in his doorway awaiting the arrival of his guests, did see, by the light of the said Cethru's lanthorn, a beggar woman and her children grovelling in the gutter for garbage, whereby his appetite was lost completely; and, forasmuch as he, Pranzo, has lodged a complaint against the Constitution for permitting women and children to go starved, the Watch do hereby indict, accuse, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... attending this species of intimate direction, when wisely and skilfully managed, cannot be doubted. Grovelling and imperfect natures have often thus been lifted up and carried in the arms of superior wisdom and purity. The confession administered by a Fenelon or a Francis de Sales was doubtless a beautiful and most invigorating ordinance; but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... contemporaries, or successors of Shakespeare and Webster has given proof of this double faculty—this coequal mastery of terror and pity, undiscolored and undistorted, but vivified and glorified, by the splendor of immediate and infallible imagination. The most grovelling realism could scarcely be so impudent in stupidity as to pretend an aim at more perfect presentation of truth; the most fervent fancy, the most sensitive taste, could hardly dream of a desire for more ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... have now a mind to look, Perhaps their graver fancies may be took With what is here, though but in homely rhymes: But he who pleases all must rise betimes. Some, I persuade me, will be finding fault, Concluding, here I trip, and there I halt: No doubt some could those grovelling notions raise By fine-spun terms, that challenge might the bays. But should all men be forc'd to lay aside Their brains that cannot regulate the tide By this or that man's fancy, we should have The wise unto the fool become a slave. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the Doctor, recalling himself from a downward look at the grovelling Browett, "she made me promise to be in at four o'clock. Really I couldn't evade her—it was either four o'clock to-day or the first possible day. What could I do? Aunt Bell, I won't pretend that this being looked up to and sought ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... Wang was grovelling in the dirt at Lin's feet, but Lin answered him only with a loud laugh which finally burst into a roar. "Duck feathers! ha! ha! ha! and all over your body? Why, that's too good a story to believe! You'll be wanting to live in the water next. ...
— A Chinese Wonder Book • Norman Hinsdale Pitman
... penetration, poetic grandeur, and fervid sublimity of imagination, Carlyle is the superior beyond measure. But Emerson is as much his superior in that high and transparent sanity, which is not further removed from midsummer madness than it is from a terrene and grovelling mediocrity. This sanity, among other things, kept Emerson in line with the ruling tendencies of his age, and his teaching brings all the aid that abstract teaching can, towards the solution of the moral problems of modern societies. Carlyle chose to fling himself ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... against the contrast of this hideous place with the light and colour she had left. She was a rebel. The contrast was too great. How could she live in a room like this? How could anybody live? It was not life at all, but a mere grovelling. And Sally had tasted something that thrilled her. She had come into contact with a life resembling the life led by those who travelled in the motor broughams she so much admired. She was ravenous for such a life. Her natural arrogance was roused and inflamed ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... stared at him as though he were grovelling stupidity, and then lay back on her cushions with a "You will drive ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... and instantly a soldier swooped upon the grovelling figure, twitched him to his feet and drew him apart, stuttering furious ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... wickedest, which ever disgraced an immortal being? What will you say, when heaven and hell are before you, and the books are opened, and therein you find the sum total of your youthful desires and dreams, your passionate wishes for things of this world, your low-minded, grovelling tastes, your secret contempt and aversion for serious subjects and persons, your efforts to attract the looks of sinners and to please those who displease God; your hankerings after worldly gaieties and luxuries, your admiration of ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... by finding out a Method to supply this natural Defect in his Subject. Accordingly he leaves the Adversary of Mankind, in the last View which he gives us of him, under the lowest State of Mortification and Disappointment. We see him chewing Ashes, grovelling in the Dust, and loaden with supernumerary Pains and Torments. On the contrary, our two first Parents are comforted by Dreams and Visions, cheared with Promises of Salvation, and, in a manner, raised to a greater Happiness than that which they had forfeited: In short, Satan is represented ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... not half grown, opened formidable jaws and long claws. Gerard, in a fury of excitement and agitation, flung himself on it, and delivered a tremendous blow on its nose with his axe, and the creature staggered; another, and it lay grovelling, with ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... civilisation, and enjoying all the rights of manhood under British laws. From their earliest infancy they have known no language but the English, and no religion but Christianity; while the former are still barbarians, grovelling in fetishism, cursed with slavery, ignorant, debased, and wantonly cruel. The West India negro has so much contempt for his African cousin, that he invariably speaks of him by the ignominious title of "bushman." In fact, the former ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... mankind has marched around the globe again and again. The leaders—the head—were the favored few, priests and kings, warriors and nobles; the vast tail, the untaught, the unawakened, the ignorant, servile masses, the grovelling slaves, but a remove from the ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... become; but mark my words—if you are ever tempted by passion, and vanity, and fine ladies, to form liaisons, as the Jezebels call them, snares, and nets and labyrinths of blind ditches, to keep you down through life, stumbling and grovelling, hating yourself and hating the chain to which you cling—in that hour pray—pray as if the devil had you by the throat—to Almighty God, to help you out of that cursed slough! There is nothing else ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... "Are you a man, to lie grovelling on the floor like that? Rise up, or you will lose my esteem for ever, if that be of any ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... in Italian and every other language of which he was master, but obtained no reply. The man remained stupidly, idiotically dumb, only grovelling lower and ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... little peace and independence! Every obligation we receive from our fellow-creatures is a new shackle, takes from our native freedom, and debases the mind, makes us mere earthworms—I am not fond of grovelling! ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... children for starvation wages; coal-mines and private property in land, dividing the population of Heaven into two classes, one revelling in riches and luxury, destructive of soul and body, the other grovelling in poverty, also destructive of all that is best in life? If not, how can they consistently support the system which inevitably produces that state of things ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... mounted in his chariot and returning from some wondrous victory. Besides, humility in my opinion is more a weakness than a virtue, . . and even granting it were a virtue, it is not possible to Kings,—not as long as people continue to fawn on royalty like grovelling curs, and lick the sceptred hand that often ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... answered, "and thou ridest as the furies that pursue the souls of the wicked—as the devils of the mountains after a liar. He would not have lasted much farther, this bundle of sweating dust. Get up, fellow!" he said, touching Phraortes's head with his toe. "Thou liest grovelling there like ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... she, too, was pale, and her hazel eyes may have looked a little larger than usual. But she had herself well in hand. Half sitting, half leaning on the Captain's table, she preserved her courage sufficiently to seek to calm the octoroon waiting-woman who was grovelling at her feet in a ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... as he who tends cattle and horses is called, despises the shepherd as a grovelling, inferior creature, and considers 'tailing sheep' as an employment too tardigrade for a man ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... pessimism that haunts their literature, and the dram-drinking habits of the peasantry. The Muscovite temperament and the Muscovite climate naturally lead to idealist strivings against the hardships of life or a dull grovelling amongst them. Melancholy or vodka is the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... mobs of India or China"? Or this about his Concord neighbors, as he looks down upon them from a near-by hill: "On whatever side I look off, I am reminded of the mean and narrow-minded men whom I have lately met there. What can be uglier than a country occupied by grovelling, coarse, and low-minded men?—no scenery can redeem it. Hornets, hyenas, and baboons are not so great a curse to a country as men of a similar character." Tried by his ideal standards, his neighbors and his countrymen generally ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... accused of ambition in presenting this measure. Ambition! inordinate ambition! Low, grovelling souls who are utterly incapable of elevating themselves to the higher and nobler duties of pure patriotism—beings who, forever keeping their own selfish aims in view, decide all public measures by their presumed influence on their own aggrandizement—judge me by the venal rule which they prescribe ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... world has looked on with mingled pity and scorn at the blindness of the man who stood there and paraded his faithfulness; while all the world has bent with a pity that was near to love, a pity that was full of sympathy because man recognized his condition and experience, for the poor creature grovelling upon the pavement, unwilling and unable even to look upon the altar, but who, standing afar off, said, "God be merciful to me a sinner!" Whatever else you say, don't say, "I have been the very best I could." That means that you have not merely lived in the rooms of your ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... yet another? yet? O desperate state Of grovelling honour! seest thou this, O sun, And do we see thee after? Methinks, day Should lose his light, when men do lose their shames, And for the empty circumstance of life, ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... wretchedness. Can a true woman love a man who lacks principle—who will sacrifice honour for a few paltry dollars—who will debase himself for gain—whose gross sensuality suffocates all high, spiritual love? No! no! It is impossible! And she who unites herself with such a man, must either shrink, grovelling, down to his mean ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... in grovelling before me for no sort of reason, and soon bores me, so I send him away to the kitchen, where ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... nature, sometimes vouchsafed even to the cow, like to imagine themselves advanced people, 'destroyers,' and to push themselves into the 'new movement,' and this quite sincerely. Meanwhile the really new people are very often unobserved by them, or even despised as reactionaries of grovelling tendencies. But I don't think there is any considerable danger here, and you really need not be uneasy for they never go very far. Of course, they might have a thrashing sometimes for letting their fancy run away with them and to teach them their place, but no more; ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... which may mean much, or little, or nothing, and which guides in no degree. That the true 'result of the natural style of gardening is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities, than in the creation of any special wonders or miracles,' is a proposition better suited to the grovelling apprehension of the herd, than to the fervid dreams of the man of genius. The merit suggested is, at best, negative, and appertains to that hobbling criticism which, in letters, would elevate Addison ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... such a miserable, thoughtless wretch!" he thought. "How could I neglect everything which might have helped to save my poor father for the sake of grovelling here, and all the time my mother ill, perhaps dying, while I slept, not seeming to ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... that, if that be such a crime to you, O strew me forth upon the watery waste, And drown me in the deep. If death be due, 'Twere sweet of death by human hands to taste.' He cried, and, grovelling, our knees embraced, And, clasping, clung to us. We bid him stand And tell his birth and trouble; and in haste Himself the sire Anchises pledged his hand, And he at length took heart, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... of irreconcilables, who welcomed the destruction of their fatherland in order that the man who had made it the glory and the envy of the world should be driven from it. Many of these creatures were members of the same Senate who, a few years previously, sent Napoleon a fervent address couched in grovelling language, imploring him to cement the hold his personality had on the national life. The following is what they say, and what they ask him to do:—"You have brought us out of the chaos of the past, you have made us bless the benefits of the present. Great man, complete your work, and make ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... prudence boast its grovelling art To chill the generous sympathies of heart, Teach to subdue each thought sublimely wild, And crush, like Herod, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... one of those curiosities of history the key of which is found in the grovelling nature of most human ambition. The son of Napoleon was far away. For those who were actuated by vulgar hopes, to wait was to run the risk of losing those first favors which are always easiest to obtain from a government that has need to win forgiveness for its accession. ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... veracity, with which he salutes them. Their Christian character, like seeds sown in some favoured tropical land, had sprung up swiftly; yet not with the dangerous kind of swiftness which presages decay of the growth. It was only a few days since they had been grovelling before idols, but now he can speak of 'your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope' . . . and declare that the Gospel 'sounded out' from them—the word which he employs is that which is technically used ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... wounds him no more— hollow-hearted friendship proffers not its hand to sting—love exercises not its fatal sorcery—foes are afar—and his heart, if not the waves, is comparatively at peace. And oh! the wonders of the deep! Ocean! tame is the soul that loves not thee! grovelling the mind that scorns the joys thou impartest! To lean our head on the vessel's side, and in idleness of spirit ponder on bygone scene, that has brought us anything but happiness,—to gaze on the curling waves, ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... half way, and leave the bottom legs sticking out for you to knock your head against, or hang your hat upon; no bed, no bedding. There was an old sack, by way of rug, before the fireplace, and four or five children were grovelling about, among the sand on the floor. The execution was only put in, to get 'em out of the house, for there was nothing to take to pay the expenses; and here I stopped for three days, though that was a mere ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Mr. Offitt asked "if any brother had anything to offer for the good of the order." This called Mr. Bott to his feet, and he made a speech, on which he had been brooding all day, against the pride of so-called science, the arrogance of unrighteous wealth, and the grovelling superstition of Christianity. The light of the kerosene lamp shone full on the decorated side of his visage, and touched it to a ferocious purpose. But the brotherhood soon wearied of his oratory, in which the ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... the attempt at suicide and the revolver-shot had completely unnerved her. All her energies were dispersed, like the sticks of a bundle whose string has been cut; and she had a painful impression that the man, who was grovelling at her feet, was in reality slowly getting ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... with one glorious thrust of his indignant spear, why did not guilty Israel avenge that splendid murder? Why did not every man of the tribe of Simeon become a Goel to the dauntless assassin? Because Vice cannot stand for one moment before Virtue's uplifted arm. Base and grovelling as they were, these money-mongering Jews felt, in all that remnant of their souls which was not yet eaten away by infidelity and avarice, that the Son of ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... would be combined; and the authority of avowal would be united to the security of concealment. The serpents in Virgil, after they had destroyed Laocoon, found an asylum from the vengeance of the enraged people behind the shield of the statue of Minerva. And, in the same manner, everything that is grovelling and venomous, everything that can hiss, and everything that can sting, would take sanctuary in the recesses of ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... church bells.... The carillon was ringing.... Church bells were chiming through the night. To Bobinette, the abject creature grovelling in the mire of the roadway, the bells sounded ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... groan, a roar, a swift surging of men, thick, black, like swarming bees. Some bent above the two prone figures. Others caught at the rope, grovelling, snarling. ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... fell grovelling to his one good knee. It was Thor, god of thunder and lightning and ...
— Regeneration • Charles Dye
... was grovelling upon the ground. He was hairless, like the one they had seen escape the attack of the giant bat, and his cheek was slashed with a healing cut that might have been made by a ripping talon. He abased himself before ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... wandered, dumb Till evening, when he paused, thoroughly spent On a blind hill-top: down the gorge he went, Yielding himself up as to an embrace. The moon came out; like features of a face, A querulous fraternity of pines, Sad blackthorn clumps, leafless and grovelling vines Also came out, made gradually up The picture; 'twas ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... lay aside the ensigns of her dignity, at the veering of the popular air. Virtue, throwing open heaven to those who deserve not to die, directs her progress through paths of difficulty, and spurns with a rapid wing grovelling cowards and the slippery earth. There is likewise a sure reward for faithful silence. I will prohibit that man, who shall divulge the sacred rites of mysterious Ceres, from being under the same roof with me, or from setting sail with me in the same fragile ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... Despite his prayers and grovelling pleas, therefore, they hurled him bodily out upon the deck, delivering him to the mercy of the fearful things from which they ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... quarry; but all in vain, as his whining testified, so that poor Dick was called off, and had to run nearly a quarter of a mile before he could find a place to creep through, which he did at last by scraping a little of the earth from beneath the pales, and then grovelling through, getting stuck about the middle of his back, though, and whining till he got free, which he did after two or three struggles, and then ran to join his young masters, who were whistling and calling him as loudly as they could, and who now turned their steps homeward, for Harry declared ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... slew it with the knife, and tossed its body on the ground. At length, it seemed, it reached the turn of the high- priestess. She set down the basket on the steps, moved into the centre of the ring, grovelled in the dust before the reptiles, and still grovelling lifted up her voice, between speech and singing, and with so great, with so insane a fervour of excitement, as struck a sort of horror ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... gentle reader will excuse me for dwelling on these and the like particulars, which, however insignificant they may appear to grovelling vulgar minds, yet will certainly help a philosopher to enlarge his thoughts and imagination, and apply them to the benefit of public as well as private life, which was my sole design in presenting this and other accounts of my travels to the world; wherein I have been chiefly studious of truth, ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... scatter a wisp of mist and show startled eyes the grim fact that had always been there. And even while not consciously felt, guilt hampers the soul's insight into divine realities, clips its wings so that it cannot soar, paralyses its efforts after noble aims, and inclines it to ignoble grovelling as far away from thoughts of God ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... purse of her lover, and his credit into the bargain, are taxed to the utmost to fit her out in becoming style. The wife of a free trapper to be equipped and arrayed like any ordinary and undistinguished squaw? Perish the grovelling thought! In the first place, she must have a horse for her own riding; but no jaded, sorry, earth-spirited hack, such as is sometimes assigned by an Indian husband for the transportation of his squaw and her pappooses: the wife of a free trader must have the most beautiful animal she can lay her ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... tired, and she began to feel angry with him, contemptuous too. The Arab could not find the money, and the little horn now piped its warning of departure. It was absolutely necessary for her to get in at once if she did not mean to stay at El-Akbara. She tried to pass the grovelling Arab, but as she did so he suddenly sprang up, jumped on to the step of the carriage, and, thrusting his body half through the doorway, began to address a torrent of Arabic to the passenger within. The horn sounded again, and ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... precincts of the temple were many priests gathered around the altars, praying, weeping, grovelling in the dust. Impostors in safety, they were not the less superstitious in danger! Calenus passed them, and entered the chamber yet to be seen in the south side of the court. Burbo followed him—the priest struck a light. Wine and viands strewed the table; ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which—having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather—they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves. The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... secure in this," replied Miss Malison, with ready flattery; for she knew Miss Grahame's love of designing, and really felt gratified at any plan tending to injure Mrs. Hamilton, whom she detested with all the malevolence of a mean and grovelling mind, which despised the virtue that was too ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... his cane tightly, as was his wont when working into a passion: 'juries is ineddicated, vulgar, grovelling wretches.' ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... herself with the untimely fate of her lovely niece, and with the death of her mother, which had immediately followed it. At other times she congratulated herself for having repulsed far from her two wretched creatures, who, she said, had both dishonoured their family by their grovelling inclinations. Sometimes, at the sight of the many miserable objects with which Paris abounds, she would fly into a rage, and exclaim,—"Why are not these idle people sent off to the colonies?" As for the notions of humanity, virtue and religion, adopted by all nations, she said, ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... of the ambition to propagate one's own creed, and proselytize victoriously; hungerings to see self reflected in another convinced. In such efforts lie dangers as vulgar as the minds that make them, and love the excitement of them. But genuine love is far beyond such grovelling delights; and the peril of such a relation is in inverse proportion to the reality of ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... noble and proud heart felt humbled by this pious grovelling of her husband; "not so, we will be more than dust and food for worms. The dust of common mortals will be scattered in every direction by the hand of Time, and over their graves will History walk with destroying feet; but she ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... littleness of his motives, which at once denoted both his baseness and his meanness, and marked him for a traitor and a trickster. Nay, in his style and writing there was the same mixture of vicious contrarieties;— the most grovelling ideas were conveyed in the most inflated language, giving mock consequence to low cavils, and uttering quibbles in heroics; so that his compositions disgusted the mind's taste, as much as his actions excited the soul's abhorrence. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... upon Sheridan Knowles and Talfourd, among the moderns—and the base, malignant, and selfish partiality of theatrical managers, who insist upon performing those plays only which are adapted to the stage—whose grovelling souls have no sympathy with genius—whose ideas are fixed upon gain, have hitherto smothered those blazing illuminati, George Stephens and his syn—Syncretcis; have hindered their literary effulgence from breaking through the mists hung before the eyes of the public, by a weak, infatuated adherence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... France grovelling at their feet, spending millions of francs to entertain the Tzar—France, a nation which must see a prospect of double her money returned before she parts with a sou; with the cathedrals filled with couronnes sent by the French press; ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... the inheritance. In most countries in these times the abjectness is vanishing; we have been set upon our feet; we have been allowed to walk; we are beginning to smile,—that is, some of us. Those whose fathers were helped on are nearer the man as he should be than those whose fathers are still grovelling. My child, I think, stands a perfect type of what culture and refinement can give. She is not an exception; there are thousands like her among our Jewish girls. Take any intrinsically pure-souled Jew from his coarser surroundings and give him the highest advantages, and ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... take this liberty, how mean, how grovelling and flat, would be their verse! As suppose they ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... blackest colours; though Dyer was by no means apt to deal in such portraits. Dyer said he was a man of the most mischievous, uncharitable, and malignant disposition. Sir Joshua Reynolds observed to me that Hawkins, though he assumed great outward sanctity, was not only mean and grovelling in dispostion, but absolutely dishonest. He never lived in any real intimacy with Dr. Johnson, who never opened his heart to him, or had in fact any accurate knowledge of his character.' Prior's Malone, pp. 425-7. See post, Feb. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... bent and grovelling, arms outstretched in ludicrous bewilderment, every line of him beseeching guidance along this path ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... ridding themselves of their vermin. As far as I can observe, many birds that dust themselves never wash: and I once thought that those birds that wash themselves would never dust; but here I find myself mistaken; for common house-sparrows are great pulveratrices, being frequency seen grovelling and wallowing in dusty roads; and yet they are great washers. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... a somewhat soldierly manner; and the Catholic, by the very pomp with which he chants his Te Deum, somewhat conceals the meaning of his act, and, keeping God a little out of sight, makes his mass express the natural feeling of a human triumph. But the sleek Puritan, at once grovelling and presumptuous, mingles with his sanguinary mood all the morbid sickly conceit, all the crawling affected humility of the conventicle. All his bloodsheds are "mercies," and they are granted in answer to his long and miserable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... in the darkness which she felt had been without a gleam of brightness for weeks and months. The mystery that had bewildered her was solved by the word; and from that moment she rose from grovelling in shame and self-pity, and began to live again ...
— Different Girls • Various
... your cathedrals: no! let the venerable orders of the hierarchy exist with all their advantages." And shall I tell them, "I reject your just and reasonable petition, not because it shakes the Church, but because there are others, while you lie grovelling upon the earth, that will kick and bite you"? Judge which of these descriptions of men comes with a fair request: that which says, "Sir, I desire liberty for my own, because I trespass on no man's conscience,"—or ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the stones bespattering the aged drunkard with its contents, he fell upon the grass wringing his hands and bemoaning his hard fate. The others met his grief with muttered curses, and one of them spurned the grovelling creature with his foot, showering ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... at an end forever, she disdained to seek meaner lovers among the humbler classes. Every offer made to her by men of medium rank, was spurned by the proud harlot with supreme contempt. 'I am a companion for nobility—not for the grovelling masses,' she would reply, in answer to all such offers; nor did the pinchings of want and hunger even for a moment shake her resolution, or disarm her prejudices. She might, had she been disposed, have still lived in comfort and even splendor, by becoming an inmate ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... flowers, and peddling—in the portraiture of the moods and methods of love, living lives of frivolity, taking pleasure in mere riches and the lusts of the eye, while thousands of wretched mortals were grovelling in the mire.... Then where was our refuge? ... The Church was the refuge of God's people ... from Christ came the ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... capable; to rob her highest faculties of their legitimate operation and reward; to belittle and narrow her mind; to dwarf her affections; to turn the harmonies of her nature to discord; and, as the human mind must be active, to compel her to employ hers with low and grovelling thoughts, which ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... chaff. It moved belly-deep in the standing grain, a hippopotamus, half-mired in river ooze, gorging rushes, snorting, sweating; a dinosaur wallowing through thick, hot grasses, floundering there, crouching, grovelling there as its vast jaws crushed and tore, and its enormous gullet swallowed, incessant, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... talking about the flying machine. The brute looked as if he were quite capable of locking me up and starving or torturing me until I gave him the secret. My word, I should like to see him try! I'd have him grovelling at my ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... a poor politician who expects to see political liberty achieved or enjoyed by nations made up of 'base, grovelling' specimens of ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... it, shook my sword and cut at him, then we spun round and round in a mad waltz to the measured music of our meeting swords, and sometimes either wounded the other somewhat but not much, till I beat down his sword on to his head, that he fell grovelling, but not cut through. Verily, thereupon my lips opened mightily with ...
— The Hollow Land • William Morris
... believed just as now. The priest's authority has so mastered his faith, that it accommodates itself to any demand upon it; and the English stranger looks on the scene, for the first time, with a feeling of scorn, bewilderment, and shame at that grovelling credulity, those strange rites and ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of others to his. He cannot directly get any praise, therefore he would indirectly find excuse by shrouding his unworthiness under the blame of others. Hence detraction is a sign of a weak, ignoble spirit; it is an impotent and grovelling serpent, that lurks in the hedge, waiting opportunity to bite the heel of any ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... success had brought her, he had imagined himself a great writer, a man with a compelling message to his fellows. It seemed only necessary to reach out his hand in order to grasp a chaplet—a crown. With her the world seemed his debtor. Now he was a thing cast off, a broken boy grovelling at the foot of ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... anything to do with all this underhand and grovelling intrigue. Mr. Ratcliffe was a man of dignity and self-respect, who left details to his subordinates. He waited calmly until the President, recovered from the fatigues of his journey, should begin to feel the effect of a Washington atmosphere. Then on Wednesday morning, ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... know what you mean by grovelling, Mr. Bertram. I don't like grovellers myself. I like men who can keep their heads up—who, once having them above the water, will never allow them to sink. Some men in every age do win distinction and wealth and high place. These are ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... before the resurrection of their bodies cannot be conceived to suffer physically, since they lack the senses and organs of pain. So Dante pictures the damned united to forms shadowy yet real, palpable and visible. They sometimes lose the human semblance and assume more sinister shapes, grovelling as hideous serpents, bleeding and wailing from shrubs and trees, or bubbling ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... has at length struck. The flag is unfurled. The gentry want to extirpate us by means of poison, we will extirpate them with fire and sword. The brave shall live, the cowards shall die. Ye, who see your children, your parents tormented and grovelling in the dust, snatch up your arms and avenge them. Fear not the soldiers, they also will be on our side. Let none go who has short-cropped hair. Two deputies must proceed forthwith from every village to Hetfalu, which ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... conspirator!' said he. 'Get up, you grovelling hound! Here, Gerard, take charge of him and bring ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... far the greater part, thousands on thousands of the little monstrosities, fell prone and grovelling. Their hideous masklike faces hidden, there they lay on the moss and all among the undergrowth, the trampled, desecrated, befouled ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... learn from an exceedingly well-penned epistle, addressed thus early to a school-fellow who had found his way to New York. In this remarkable letter, the boy seems to have written with prophetic instinct. "To confess my weakness, Ned," he says, "my ambition is prevalent, so that I contemn the grovelling condition of a clerk or the like, to which my fortune condemns me, and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station.... I mean to prepare the way for futurity.... I shall conclude by saying, I wish there was a war." This may be regarded ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... simply a wonder!—the most wonderful musical wonder in the world!—and she has a perfectly marvellous voice. Her master Gigue says that when she is sixteen she will have emperors at her feet! Emperors! There are only a few,—but they'll all be grovelling in the dust before her! You must prepare some pretty rooms for her, Spruce, those two at the top of the house that look right over the lawn and woods—and make everything as cosy as you can. I'll put the finishing touches. And I must send ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Christianity as far as you are concerned—He would not have been different in essence from other teachers,—though high above them in degree,—who speak to us of the shining heights of duty that we are to scale, but leave us grovelling in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
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