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More "Nerveless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... low scream that came moaningly up from her breast, which was drowned in the echoes of the report, Mary Burton made no outcry. She no longer leaned limp and nerveless against the support of the doorway. Something had seemed to snap the cords of her paralysis and out of her blanched face her eyes stared wide and piteous. As the older banker staggered back she was quick to reach the motionless figure and to lift its head ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... a universe—of clay. Where is the mind that should have overtopp'd, Saul-like, the level of the multitude? Where the bold front that in the breach of wrong Stemm'd the fierce current of insidious foes, Flashing Truth's falchion in the van of Time? Shame! it hath rusted in its scabbard, till The nerveless arm can scarce withdraw it thence. O Earth! rejoice that at his side there comes An undimm'd light to beacon on the world; One who upholds the honour of his line Unsullied as the glory of the stars; Whose voice rings clear above the battle strife, And shakes oppression from his iron throne; And ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... old now. The earnest, restless gaze had gone from his eyes; he was staring mutely before him, twisting between nerveless fingers that blank scrap of paper, which had been the ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... her strength after the birth of her child. She lay nerveless and white, so that her husband, her mother, the Colonel, all became alarmed. The celebrated accoucheur who had attended her alarmed ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... dropped off on the table-cloth. He did not perceive the loss until Agatha restored it, and then his fingers seemed unable to slip it on again, until his daughter-in-law aided him. In so doing, the clammy, nerveless feel of the old man's ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... household affairs, produce that lack of time that is offered as an excuse for the neglect of the duty of self-culture. This it is which fritters away thought and the taste for higher things, leaving the mind blank and nerveless except when thus ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Nerveless and dispirited he returned to the garden gate. Some one had been there since he had passed, for there were fresh foot-prints along the walk, of a small, feminine type, and directed toward the forest. The steps had passed outward, and their track was lost in the leaves ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... to see the supposed projecting crag—in reality an enormous mass of ice—which supported the snow-bank on which the Flying Fish rested, break off and go thundering down into the unfathomable depths below. The spectators clung to each other in helpless nerveless terror at so appalling a spectacle as the falling of this mass, weighing probably millions of tons; but the full significance and import of the catastrophe did not present itself to their dazed and bewildered senses until they beheld the Flying Fish, after following the ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... helmet, Spud's lips moved unconsciously to repeat prayers he would have sworn were forgotten these many years. There was a pistol at his belt where his hand was resting; another hung at his other side. But the man made no move to defend himself; he was struck numb and nerveless, not through fear, but through that horror which comes with seeing one's most gruesome superstitions come true. Spud O'Malley, who would have laughed at devils and believed in them while he laughed, knew now that they were real. They had captured Chet; ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... water by the timber, I raised her above it. The weight proved too much and she sank again. Again I pulled her to the surface and again she sank. This I did again and again with no avail. She drowned in my very grasp, and at last she dropped from my nerveless hands to leave my sight forever. As if I had not suffered enough, a few moments after I saw some objects whirling around in an eddy which circled around, until, reaching the current again, they floated past me. My God, man, would you believe me? it was three of my children, dead. ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... it, Mark placed the handles in the nerveless fingers of Mr. Henderson. Then he started the current. In about a minute the eyelids of the aged inventor began to quiver, and, in less than five minutes he had been revived sufficiently to enable him to sit up. He passed his hand across ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... reason were obvious). To show his confidence in me. (Napoleon's jaw does not exactly drop; but its hinges become nerveless. The Lieutenant proceeds with honest indignation.) And I was worthy of his confidence: I brought them all back honorably. But would you believe it?—when I trusted him with MY pistols, and MY horse, ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... could move one of the men kicked her pistol out of her nerveless hand, caught her by the shoulder and dragged the trench-knife from her convulsive grasp. Then he ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... eyes deep, concealing, would have foretold that she would conquer in the trial, that she would force her soul down,—but that the forcing down would leave the weak, flaccid body spent and dead. One thing was certain: no curious eyes would see the struggle; the body might be nerveless or sickly, but it had the great power of reticence; the calm with which she faced the closest gaze was natural to her,—no mask. When she left her room and went down, the same unaltered quiet that had baffled Knowles steadied her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... upon her the mesmeric look of a serpent. Old Gabe was peering covertly from under the brim of his hat, with a chuckle at his lips. Rome had fallen back to a corner of the mill, sobered, speechless, his rifle in a nerveless hand. The passion that fired him at the boy's warning had as swiftly gone down at sight of the girl, and her cutting rebuke made him hot again with shame. He was angry, too-more than angry-because he felt so helpless, a sensation that was new and ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr.
... fixed the peg in the wet sandy soil and began hammering. After each stroke he looked at us and at the river and in all directions. He struck blow after blow and we counted about thirty. That his hands had become nerveless we would understand, for otherwise a dozen strokes should have been enough to make the peg vanish ...
— Indian Ghost Stories - Second Edition • S. Mukerji
... been prudentially soft and nerveless, suddenly hardened into solid muscle, and one of his heavy blows came full and square upon the region of Archy's left eye. The young lord of the manor reeled as though a tornado had struck him, and fell heavily upon ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... And,—fault of novel germs,— Mature the unfallen fruit. Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires, Bad husbands of their fires, Who, when they gave thee breath, Failed to bequeath The needful sinew stark as once, The Baresark marrow to thy bones, But left a legacy of ebbing veins, Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,— Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb, Amid ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... a little moment, however. It passes, and recollection returns. Monica, raising her head, sees the two Misses Blake standing side by side, with folded, nerveless hands, and fixed eyes, and horror-stricken faces. Shrinking still closer to her lover, Monica regards them with a troubled conscience and with growing fear. She is at last discovered, and her sin ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... past the fallen man to the bedside, where for an instant he stood looking down on a placid face and into open eyes. As his glance wandered he saw that the judge's nerveless fingers still grasped ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... they were still in a state of perturbation from which they were not to recover for a long time. Their cheeks were white and their eyes were dark with the dread that remained even after the danger was past. Hetty's arms hung limp and nerveless at her sides as she lay back in the chair and stared numbly ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... revealed that our enemy was gone, in full retreat, leaving killed, wounded, and much property by the way, we all experienced a feeling of relief. The struggle had been so long, so desperate and bloody, that the survivors seemed exhausted and nerveless; we appreciated the value of the victory, but realized also its great cost of life. The close of the battle had left the Army of the Tennessee on the right, and the Army of the Ohio on the left; but I believe neither General Grant nor Buell exercised command, the one ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... middling by the string and swung it around in front of him, whereupon it slipped out of his nerveless fingers and fell over in the ashes. It did not break the middling, but it ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... apostles of peace draw large sections of a nation into the spell of their Utopian efforts, and they thus introduce an element of weakness into the national life; they cripple the justifiable national pride in independence, and support a nerveless opportunist policy by surrounding it with the glamour of a higher humanity, and by offering it specious reasons for disguising its own weakness. They thus play the game of their less scrupulous enemies, just as the Prussian policy, ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... the noon's heat) until the sun began to decline and I was parched with thirst. But now, as I fitted the last of my timbers into place, the board slipped my nerveless grasp and, despite the heat, a sudden chill swept over me as borne upon the stilly air came a voice, soft and rich and sweet, uplifted in song and the ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... fate! {405} My mother sinks to the dark realms of night, Nor longer views this golden light; But to the ills of life exposed Leaves my poor orphan state! Her eyes, my father, see, her eyes are closed, And her hand nerveless falls. Yet hear me, O my mother, hear my cries! It is thy son who calls, Who prostrate on the earth breathes ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... breath gives out, that I dare not knock, that the flowers nearly fall from my nerveless hand? All that is a matter of course to anyone who has ever, in his youth, had dealings with faeries ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... and colour the result of working out a mathematical proposition? Was this exquisite surety of touch and handling, of mass and line composition, all these lovely depths and vast ethereal spaces superbly peopled, merely the logical result of solving that problem? Was it all clear, limpid, steady, nerveless intelligence; and was nothing due to the ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... the wistaria-vine. Her spirit quailed and her cheeks blanched when she saw the naked blade of a dagger held between his teeth. She understood his mission—it was her life and the gold; and the glittering eyes of the robber she recognized as those of Basilio Velasco. After a moment of nerveless terror the ancient resisting blood of the Ovandos sprang into alert activity, and this gentlest and sweetest of young women armed her soul to meet Death on his own ground and his own terms, and ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... patronizing, authoritative air with which Jansoulet encouraged and reassured him: "Be calm, my dear colleague." But the members of the eighth committee did not laugh. They were all, or almost all, of the Sarigue species, two or three being absolutely nerveless, afflicted with partial loss of the power of speech. Such self-assurance, such eloquence ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... his scanty white hair streaming backward on the end of the pallet, which had been turned up to form a pillow. Over him and reaching from his feet to his breast, was drawn a sheet, and on that sheet lay one of his thin, wrinkled and nerveless hands. His eyes were shut, and he might have appeared to be asleep, but that ever and anon there broke from him one of those low but distinct groans indicative of severe inward pain, which had startled the two Zouaves. But the old man was not the most singular ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... the secret room Where Love lay dying; Mystic and faint perfume Met me like sighing; As heaven had cast a still-born star He lay nor stirred; the shell-thin hand Nerveless of high command Where once the lord-veins sped ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... a man for a gentleman as you will find in London.... He has a retreating forehead, large aquiline nose, immense red whiskers, and a mouth contradictory of all talent. A more good-natured, habitually smiling, nerveless expression could hardly be imagined.' Bulwer seems to have made up for his appearance by his high spirits, lover-like voice, and delightful conversation, some of which our ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... seen nor heard from Katherine. During that long night at the club he had planned, in a feverish, restless way, to drive to her home in the morning; but the morning saw him speeding to Chicago, weak and nerveless. During Friday and Saturday he was confined to his room by order of the physician, but on Sunday, a bright day, he ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... chaperone, sat with her niece's arms about her, passing in and out of successive attacks of hysteria. A sailor had knocked one of the young men of the party down to quiet an incipient exhibition of panic. Ralph Oddington and Reginald Wotherspoon stood at the rail, trying with nerveless fingers to roll cigarettes. Two of the girls were weeping in each other's arms. The water bubbled under the turn of the yacht's counters. Two of the sailors were discharging blank shells from the rifle astern in hopes ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... been the fashion to compare the style of Addison and Johnson, and to depreciate, I think very unjustly, the style of Addison as nerveless and feeble[661], because it has not the strength and energy of that of Johnson. Their prose may be balanced like the poetry of Dryden and Pope. Both are excellent, though in different ways. Addison writes with the ease of a gentleman. His readers fancy that a wise and accomplished ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... like a man lifted suddenly from a dungeon into the sunlit world. I was weak. I caught hold of the horn, settled down nerveless in the saddle, and looked around me. The cattle were streaming past in two long lines for the shore, led by Ump and the Aberdeen-Angus, now half-way up the ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... greet in the morning a man sick and emaciated perhaps, but still a human being, erect and in God's image, who, in the evening of the same day, would disappear from among them, making a desperate dash for freedom. The following day a broken, nerveless, shivering wretch would be dragged into their midst, blood-stained, faint, and with the gashes of a blood-hound's teeth covering his face ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... the nerveless hand and held it a moment in silence, and then he laid it gently down and stood up, looking about through the moonlight, toward the cypress swamp and ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... his force, until the prince perceived himself rapidly suffocating. His eyes failed him, and seemed bursting from their orbits; his vision presented nothing but gleams of many colored lights dancing before him; his heart heaved and panted with throes of desperate agony; his arm became almost nerveless, and his sword fell from his hand, while the shouts of the giant announced that the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... confess," he answered hotly, raising his voice. "It is a fine thing to sit here in Paris, among the languid, dull, and nerveless beauties of the Court, whose favours are easily won because they look on dalliance as the best pastime offered them, and are eager for such opportunities of it as you fleering coxcombs will afford them. But this Mademoiselle de Lavedan is ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... betrothed, and, untwining myself from the lithe and nerveless limbs of the savage, I rose to my feet. The ranche ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... that he was ill, that he was jaded, worn out, he had only told half the truth. Exhausted he was, nerveless, weak, but this apathy was still invaded from time to time with fierce incursions of a spirit of unrest and revolt, reactions, momentary returns of the blind, undirected energy that at one time had prompted him to a vast desire to acquit himself of some terrible deed of readjustment, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... sword upon his thigh, Doth gleam the panting soldier's eye, But nerveless hangs the arm that swayed So proudly that terrific blade. The feeble bosom scarce can give A throb to show he yet doth live, And in his eye the light which glows, Is but the stare, that death bestows. The filmy veins that circling thread The cooling balls are turning red; And every pang ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... strong warm hands, all manacled as they were, upon the other's nerveless clammy fingers, sent, more than the words, something of the speaker's own courage to his friend's wrung heart. And yet that very ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... a revolver wake the echoes once more. The knife dropped from the nerveless grasp of the would-be assassin, and with a howl of pain he began dancing an Irish jig on the stone ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... "we pulled against stream with determined perseverance, but in our short daily journeys we made but trifling way against it." The effects of severe toil were painfully evident. The men lost the muscular jerk with the oars. Their arms were nerveless, their faces haggard, their persons emaciated, their spirits wholly spent. From sheer weariness they fell asleep at the oar. No ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... foot upon the neck of the fallen witch-doctor, the ape-man raised his face to the moon and uttered the long, shrill scream of the victorious bull ape. Then he stooped and snatched the zebra's tail from the nerveless fingers of the unconscious man and without a backward glance retraced his footsteps across ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a spring, when he happened to glance upward. A small white hand was hanging over the top of the stone. Sturges was not a Californian, but he sprang to his feet and pressed his lips to that hand. It was cold and nerveless, and clasping it in his he applied his gaze to the rift above the stone. In a moment he distinguished two dark eyes and a gleam of white brow above. Then ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... from her, his hand falling from her arm as if it had grown nerveless, and for a moment there was absolute silence. Then the Beggar Man laughed, such a mirthless, heart-broken laugh that Faith cried out. She dropped the little suitcase she carried and ran ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... wholly successful. It could not well be otherwise. Lucille has returned to Dorset House. Souspennier is confounded altogether by a little revelation which I ventured to make. He spoke of an appeal. I let him know with whom he would have to deal. I left him nerveless and crushed. He can do nothing save by open revolt. And if he tries that—well, there will be no more of this wonderful ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fainted, and, finding that no answers could be extracted from him, he was taken back to his cell and flung upon a heap of straw. As he lay there, Nightgall, with diabolical cruelty, brought Cicely to his side, and bade her look on his nerveless arms and crippled limbs, and mockingly offered to set him free if Cicely would marry him of her own free will. When at Cuthbert's instigation she refused, he forced her away, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... his work, painfully, and very slowly and clumsily, fumbling blindly with the brushes, and finding it difficult, when he sat down, to summon the energy to move again. His limbs, his jaw, were slack and nerveless. But he was very tired. He got to bed at last, and slept inert, relaxed, in a sleep that was rather stupor than slumber, a dead night of stupefaction shot through ...
— The Prussian Officer • D. H. Lawrence
... me and said that the world would soon have a surplus of educated men, that the colleges were turning out many nerveless and useless youngsters, that education seemed to be one of the follies of 1885. The fact was we were getting to be far superior to what we had been. The speeches at the commencement classes were much better than those we had ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... for the first time Joanna Baillie's "Count Basil." I am not sure that the love she describes does not affect me more even than Shakespeare's delineation of the passion in "Romeo and Juliet." There is a nerveless despondency about it that seems to me more intolerable than all the vivid palpitating anguish of the tragedy of Verona; it is like dying of slow poison, or malarial fever, compared with being shot ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... finger touched the trigger, a strange thing happened; a something which sent the rifle clattering from nerveless fingers and set the cold perspiration springing ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... as there is no doubt about the course to be taken, so long as the plan is plainly revealed, it is easy for a courageous man to advance. But to such a one uncertainty is like a shock to the body, palsying the form and changing a strong arm into a nerveless, useless stick of bone and tissue. A cup may be very bitter, salt with the brine of tears and hot with the fire of vitriol, and yet, if all the ingredients in that cup are known to him who drinks it, grief has not ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... embodiment of blithesome happiness. In the chapter dealing with the laundry I had occasion to speak of her voluptuous beauty. Her long years of hard labor—and she labored harder than any one else there—seemed to have wrought no effect upon her handsome, nerveless body. Her lovely eyes, her hair, her dazzling complexion and perfect features, were all worthy the reputation of a stage beauty. She was kind; in her rough, uncouth way, she was kind to everybody—so kind, in fact, that she was generally popular, though envied as enjoying ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... gathering to the full its mighty strength, had upreared itself for a moment majestically above its fellows,—falling, its scattered spray can only impotently sprinkle the dull, dreary shore. Broken and nerveless, I can only wait the lifting of the curtain, quietly wondering if a failure be always irretrievable,—if a prize once lost can ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... from her nerveless fingers, Grace saw her surroundings through a swirling mist. For a moment or two she yielded to the terror that clutched at her heart. Her sturdy nature reasserting itself, she rose, recovered the letter and walked ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... went on and rushed, striving to clasp him. Next moment, before ever I touched him—oh, well was it for me that I touched him not!—some strength seized me and whirled me round and round as a dead leaf is whirled by the wind, and tossed me up and cast me down and left me prone and nerveless. ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... she stood still, looking at the big type with open, staring eyes. Then, with a low cry, like a wounded animal, she let the paper slip from her nerveless fingers. There was a furious throbbing at her temples: her heart seemed to stop. The room spun round, and she fainted just as Steell rushed forward to ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... no one to say him nay. With a scream Lycabetta fell fainting to the floor. Hildebrand was trying to cross himself with nerveless fingers, the women were sobbing hysterically, and the slaves ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... lesser velocity but was earlier discharged. It was because of these last two characteristics that Dr. Johnson applied to Donne and his followers the rather clumsy name of 'Metaphysical' (Philosophical) poets. 'Fantastic' would have been a better word. 4. In vigorous reaction against the sometimes nerveless melody of most contemporary poets Donne often makes his verse as ruggedly condensed (often as obscure) and as harsh as possible. Its wrenched accents and slurred syllables sometimes appear absolutely unmetrical, but it seems that Donne ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... iron-nerved man, trembling and nerveless in expectancy of a revelation of horror; at length ...
— The Dock Rats of New York • "Old Sleuth"
... and walked to the window; then, nerveless and depressed, I went out into the garden again to smoke ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... excitement:—"She rises!" Far away forward, Mr. Baker and three others were seen erect and black on the clear sky, lifting their arms, and with open mouths as though they had been shouting all together. The ship trembled, trying to lift her side, lurched back, seemed to give up with a nerveless dip, and suddenly with an unexpected jerk swung violently to windward, as though she had torn herself out from a deadly grasp. The whole immense volume of water, lifted by her deck, was thrown bodily across ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... present drop in temperature restored her everyday sense of safety. With it came a sudden ebbing of energy and endurance. The "spell" was over for the time, but her escape from the shadow of it left her nerveless and almost indifferent to its returning; apathetic, too, to her tormentor. Going in, she closed the door behind her, apparently not noticing that he followed her, and when he opened it and came in, she ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... wish to know what the word was; but I cannot gratify their curiosity. Mr Braidwood told me, it remained long in his school, but had been lost before I made my inquiry. [Footnote: One of the best criticks of our age 'does not wish to prevent the admirers of the incorrect and nerveless style which generally prevailed for a century before Dr Johnson's energetick writings were known, from enjoying the laugh that this story may produce, in which he is very ready to join them'. He, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... sons of Spain, and strange her fate! They fight for freedom, who were never free; A kingless people for a nerveless state, Her vassals combat when their chieftains flee, True to the veriest slaves of Treachery; Fond of a land which gave them nought but life, Pride points the path that leads to liberty; Back to the struggle, baffled ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... Cora lifeless. With the last effort of his strength Uncas rose to his feet, and hurled Cora's murderer into the abyss below. Then, with a stern and steady look, he turned to Le Subtil and indicated with the expression of his eye all that he would do had not the power deserted him, Magua seized his nerveless arm and stretched him dead by passing his dagger several times ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... in the pallid face before me died piteously away when no report came. If he had had the strength he would have thrown the useless weapon at me. As it was, it dropped from his nerveless fingers. He closed his eyes under the knit brows, upon which cold sweat stood ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... no! Ever since he avowed himself a religious character, he had written nothing but the most vapid and nerveless twaddle. Your poor dear father used to send his letters to me to read, and I sometimes really thought that Silas was losing his faculties; but I believe he was only trying ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... a nullity—a pale, Nerveless and pulseless quasi-invalid, Who, lest the ozone should in aught avail, Remained religiously indoors to read; So that, in wandering at her will, the Child Did, in reality, run ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... there. I shouldn't sleep," replied Maria, with the gentlest sadness conceivable. There was in it no shadow of complaining. Of late years all the fire of resistance had seemed to die out in the girl. She was unfailingly sweet, but nerveless. Often when she raised a hand it seemed as if she could not even let it fall, as if it must remain poised by some curious inertia. Still, she went to the shop every day and did her work faithfully. She pasted ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... where the subdued light struck them, betrayed places worn down to the warp. Mrs. Montgomery herself had a like effect of unsparing use; her personal upholstery showed frayed edges and broken woofs, which did not seriously discord with her nerveless gentility. ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... drew forth his steel matchbox with numb and shaking fingers, opened it and stood stricken dumb. There were only three matches in the box. Unreasoning terror seized him. Three chances for life! He chose a match, struck it, but in his numb and nerveless fingers the match snapped near the head. With a new terror seizing him he took a second match and struck it. The match flared, sputtering. Eagerly he thrust the birch bark at it; too eagerly, alas, for the bark rubbed out the tiny flame. ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... had produced a striking effect on me. My incessant broodings, and the corroding sense of my great irreparable loss and of my desolation had made a nerveless, listless wreck of me, a mere shadow of my former self. I ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... That is Isaac, this Jeremiah, and this Ezekiel. On the other side are the holy warrior martyrs. Then St. Procopius, there St. Theodore, who burnt the temple of Cybele. His torch may yet be relighted. And these archangels, do you think their arms will be forever nerveless and their swords always ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... lamp shining through the open window grew dim; the floor of the verandah rose and fell; his arms dropped nerveless to his sides and, with the faint muffled cry still ringing in his ears, Durham went down ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... were, now tries to subsist when the things it was essentially contrasted with have been abolished. The intellect becomes a Penelope, whose secret pleasure lies in undoing its ostensible work; and science, becoming pensive, loves to relapse into the dumb actuality and nerveless reverie from which it had once ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... might have been a minute before he saw that a man sat in front of the fireless hearth with his arms stretched before him on the table and his head fallen into them. For many minutes there was no sound, no stir of the man's nerveless pose; it might have been that he was asleep. Suddenly the characterless silence of the place was flooded with tragedy, for the man groaned, and a child would have known that the sound came from a torn soul. He lifted his face—a handsome, high-bred face, clever, a bit weak,—and tears ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... great change had come over her. Instead of being nerveless and lifeless, as he had left her, with dull eyes and weak, helpless limbs, she was now agitated, excited; she glanced nervously about her while he spoke, and tapped the finger-tips of one hand restlessly with those of the other ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... a crash at Miss Burton's side. Was it the shock of the falling picture upon unprepared and overstrained nerves, or what was it that produced the instantaneous change in the joyous-appearing maiden? Her hands dropped nerveless from the keys. So great was the pallor that swept over her face that it suggested to he artist the sudden extinguishment of a lamp. She bowed her head and trembled a moment and then ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... compelled him to pause, and more than once he fell asleep in the midst of his labour. Heavy labour it was, too, for the nerveless hands almost refused to form the irregular scrawl. Still he persevered—till evening. Then a burning thirst assailed him, and he looked eagerly round for water, but there was none in view. His eyes lighted up, however, as he listened, for the soft tinkling of a tiny rill filled ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the king, his eyes fell to the silver tablet in the nerveless hand. Moving close, and holding the lamp in convenient position, he knelt and read ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... full length upon the lounge, but they differed strangely in appearance. One was the natural Lincoln, full of life, vigor, energy and strength; the other was a dead Lincoln, the face white as marble, the limbs nerveless and lifeless, the ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... Jerrie's message, 'I need you,' went across the continent, and brought the ready response, 'coming on the wings of the wind.' It was Judge St. Claire who wrote to Harold, for Jerrie's nerveless fingers could not grasp the pen, and she could only dictate what she wished ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... at her in surprise, and were speechless for a moment. Then M. Destournier, recovering, reached out and took the girl's slim, nerveless hand. ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... criticism only, has found means to give the public and literature the impression of a certain superiority. Mademoiselle des Touches had received this writer for the last seven years, as she had so many other authors, journalists, artists, and men of the world. She knew his nerveless nature, his laziness, his utter penury, his indifference and disgust for all things, and yet by the way she was now conducting herself she seemed inclined to marry him. She explained her conduct, incomprehensible to her friends, in various ways,—by ambition, by the dread she felt of a lonely ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... back, sobbing at the sun; amidships Corliss sprawled panting; and forward, choking and gasping and nerveless, the Scotsman drooped his head upon his knees. La Bijou rubbed softly against the rim-ice and came to rest. The rainbow-wall hung above like a fairy pile; the sun, flung backward from innumerable facets, clothed it in jewelled splendor. Silvery ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... Verty would stretch out his hand, and, taking his cedar bow from a chair, bend it thoughtfully, and utter the low Indian murmur, which has been represented by the letters, "ough" so unsuccessfully; then he would allow the weapon to slide from his nerveless hand—his head would droop—the dim dreamy smile would light up his features for an instant, and he would lean upon the desk and ponder—his countenance half enveloped by the long tangled chestnut hair which still flowed upon his shoulders ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... to his post, even after consciousness had departed. The rescuing party found him with head drooped upon his arm, while his nerveless fingers still ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... the forger—was absent, but the two hands, or rather claws—the burglar and the prison-breaker—were present, and the slimly-made, effeminate Crow, if he had not the brains of the master, yet made up for his flaccid muscles and nerveless frame by a cat-like cunning, and a spirit of devilish volatility that nothing could subdue. With such a powerful ally outside as the mock maid-servant, the chance of success was enormously increased. There were one hundred and eighty convicts ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... now. She heard him stammer something about the escape of the mice; she heard him asking her pardon. Dazed, she laid her hand in his as he aided her to descend to the floor; nerveless, speechless, she sank into the big chair, horror ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... enough; yet this is not all. In fact, the Ministry, and Necker himself whom a brass inscription 'fastened by the people over his door-lintel' testifies to be the 'Ministre adore,' are dwindling into clearer and clearer nullity. Execution or legislation, arrangement or detail, from their nerveless fingers all drops undone; all lights at last on the toiled shoulders of an august Representative Body. Heavy-laden National Assembly! It has to hear of innumerable fresh revolts, Brigand expeditions; of Chateaus in the West, especially ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... this heaven. The girl burst backward out of his embrace. Martin's arms fell to his sides, nerveless, and he stood panting, tongue-tied with emotion. Nor did he have the chance to master himself and speak the words he wished, for Ruth, with a half sob, half laugh, turned and sped across the deck, and through the open alleyway door, ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... Northerner who suffered himself to be made the lackey of the South; and Taney, who had denied that, in the contemplation of the American Constitution, the Negro was a man. It was Black, an old Jacksonian, who in the moment of peril held the nerveless hands of the President firm to the tiller. It was Dix, another such, who sent to New Orleans the very Jacksonian order: "If any man attempts to haul down the American ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... of the hole you have a nose-breadth escape. If a hundredth part of the providential deliverances told in Ladysmith were true, it was a miracle that anybody in the place was alive after the first quarter of an hour. A day of this and you are a nerveless semi-corpse, twitching at a fly-buzz, a misery to yourself and a ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... hands were in a nerveless flutter. I could not ring a bell intelligibly with them. I flew to the speaking-tube and shouted to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fellow raised his saber for the final cut that would terminate the earthly career of Tarzan of the Apes when, to the astonishment of both the ape-man and Smith-Oldwick, the fellow stiffened rigidly, his weapon dropped from the nerveless fingers of his upraised hand, his mad eyes rolled upward and foam flecked his bared lip. Gasping as though in the throes of strangulation the fellow pitched forward at ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... looking old warrior entered, followed by a man who was obviously more of a Levantine than a Serb. The older man, small, slight, gray haired, and swarthy, but surprisingly active in his movements for one of his apparent age, raced up to Prince Michael. He fell on his knees, caught that nerveless right hand, and pressed it to ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... different degrees of merit is quite another. The former is the essence of criticism; the latter, one of the most futile pastimes that can readily be imagined. That each man should have his own preferences is right enough. It would be a nerveless and unprofitable mind to which such preferences were unknown. More than that, some rough classification, some understanding with oneself as to what authors are to be reckoned supreme masters of their craft, is hardly to be avoided. ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... idea that she would prefer being left alone. Brant had been secretly hoping it might become his privilege to escort her home, but now he durst not breathe the words of such a request. Something indefinable had arisen between them which held the man dumb and nerveless. Suddenly they came face to face with Mrs. Herndon, and Brant felt the girl's ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... her hot, trembling fingers in his cold, nerveless hand, a moody frown on his brow, and his lips ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... of pencilled paper on the table. The next minute his rapid footsteps crunched on the gravel path. Even after he was gone and she was left quite alone in her old condition, the dead, nerveless sense of despair did not return. An unreasonable lightness of spirit buoyed her—a feeling that after a desolate winter a new season was coming, that her little world was growing larger, lighting indefinably with ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... fresh from carnage, quailed not alone to face The unfathomed depths of Darkness, the solitudes of Space! Strange! the smile of scorn, while nerveless dropped the sword-arm from the sting, On the death that scowled at distance, on the closing murder-ring. Strange! no crimson stain on conscience from the hand in gore imbrued! But Death haunts the death-dealer; blood taints the life ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... ham-and-eggs. He took the ticket and the clipping from Pinny's nerveless fingers and compared them. 19897! That was right. He had won eight hundred dollars. "Where do you cash in?" he ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... single thought Amber sprang upon Rutton, snatched the weapon from his nerveless fingers, and, leaping to the ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... she could not keep her seams straight. The machine they had was ricketty. Sewing, for her, was impossible. For a few days she was stunned with the new demand for which she was unprepared. She was nerveless. It made Sally sick to watch her mother and to realise from the vacancy which so soon appeared upon her face that memory and a kind of futile pondering had robbed her brains of activity. With a bitter sense of grudge against life, a tightening of lips already thin, and a ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... strange reflections must that spectacle inspire him! The outstretched arms lying helpless along the earth—the claw-like fingers now stiff and nerveless—he may be thinking how they once clutched a cowhide, vigorously laying it on his own back, ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... them to papa at once. Grandma's papers. They are very important. What? Prince has not come home? Oh, what can have become of him? Those missing papers! Oh, telephone to papa at once! He must do something," and Grace let the receiver fall from her nerveless hand as she looked out into the storm. The rain, after a long dry spell, was ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Rainbow Lake • Laura Lee Hope
... too, although it reeled slightly, unsteadily rising only to fall away, what a radiance of color it maintained! Here in the garden the drowsy air would lift a flower petal, as some dreamer sunk in hasheesh slumber might touch a loved hand, only to let it slip away in nerveless impotence. Never had the charm of this Normandy sea-coast been as compelling; never had the divine softness of this air, this harmonious marriage of earth-scents and sea-smells seemed as perfect; never before had the delicacy of the foliage and color-gradations of the sky as triumphantly proved ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... evidently slept in her clothes all night. She looked wretched and bloated, and quite curiously dirty, as black as if she had been up the chimney; and even I could see that, early as was the hour, she was hopelessly drunk. Between both of her nerveless, black hands, she held a poker, with which she struck, from time to time, a feeble blow on a piled-up heap of plates, which she persisted in considering a lump of coal. The fire was nearly out, but she hastened to assure me that if she ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... and crossed, throwing little chips of metal from the walls with snapping sounds and going through flesh with sounds like soft tappings. It was over within seconds, the last Gern down and one man still standing beside him, the blond and nerveless Lake. ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... sphere and her work, and she is only happy when she finds pleasure in lovingly, patiently, and faithfully performing the duties and enacting the relations that belong to her as woman. She is not the natural head of society. Man, rough, stern, cold, and almost nerveless, is made to be the head of human society; and woman, quick, sensitive, pliant (as her name indicates), gentle, loving, is the heart of the world. As the heart, she has power. She rules through love, ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... somewhat on the characters of Mouton and Fusilier, not only because of their great devotion to the Confederacy, but because there exists a wide-spread belief that the creole race has become effete and nerveless. In the annals of time no breed has produced nobler specimens of manhood than these two; and while descendants of the French colonists remain on the soil of Louisiana, their names and characters should be reverenced as are those of Hampden ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... severe and prolonged struggle for self-control told upon Lilla. She looked, as she felt, ill and weak. She was really in a nerveless and prostrate condition, with black circles round her eyes, pale even to her lips, and with an instinctive trembling which she was quite unable to repress. It was for her a sad mischance that Mimi was away, for her love would have seen through all obscuring causes, and have brought to ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... woman steps forward, tipping the symbols of despotic power—sceptre and crown—from the nerveless hand and dishonoured brow of her recent lord and master! And down he goes ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... almost nerveless, Joan waited that end which she felt could not long be delayed. She did not know, she could not understand. On every hand was a threat so terrible that in her weakness she believed that life could not long last. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... hand were yellow from the cigarettes that he was always lighting and throwing away; the rest of him became stiff and chilled as the fire died down. "As if I'd murdered her. . . ." The phrase, self-coined, repeated itself in his brain even when he was not thinking of the shaken, nerveless body which he had tried ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... This is masonically called balancing. They then rise, disengage their hands, and lift them up above their heads with a moderate and somewhat graceful motion; cast up their eyes, turning, at the same time, to the right, they extend their arms and then suffer them to fall loose and nerveless against their sides. This sign is said by Masons to represent the sign of astonishment, made by the Queen of Sheba, on first viewing Solomon's Temple. The Most Excellent Master now resumes his seat and says, "Brethren, ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... jaded with travel that it could scarcely lift a foot to continue, its head drooping low as it dragged slowly onward. The traveller seemed in as evil plight as his horse. His head was bent forward upon his breast, the rein had fallen from his nerveless grasp, and he swayed in the saddle as if he could barely retain his seat. As he came nearer, and lifted his face for a moment, he was seen to be frightfully pale and haggard, with the horror of an untold tragedy in his bloodshot eyes. Who was he? An Englishman, evidently, perhaps a messenger ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... now. How we lend our own impulses to the effort with which the veteran grasps the sword wherewith he shore "the stalwart Englisher," strive with him in that strong yearning to whirl it aloft, sink with him in the instant, nerveless reaction, and sorrow that "a child could slay Richelieu now!" He is not the intriguer of dark tradition, wily and cruel for low ambitious ends, but entirely great, in his protection of innocence and longing for affection, and most of all in that supreme love of France to which his other motives ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... sick and unreasoning fear. As she gazed wide-eyed at the living confirmation of the statement that "Gum Shoe Tim" was "as cross as a bear," the gentle-hearted Principal took the paper from her nerveless grasp. ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... chocolate arrived, and by force of habit I consumed it. I felt no interest in any earthly thing; my sole sensation was a dread of the coming night, which all too soon would be upon me. For several hours I sat, pale and nerveless, in my room, despising myself for a weakness and a fear which I could not possibly avoid. I was no longer my own master; I was the slave, the shrinking chattel of a ghost, and the thought of my ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... to the fold. This evening, as all was still, we played a little game of Bridge, as in the old days when life was a pleasant dream. Suddenly a dozen rifle shots, in quick succession, rang out in the air and the cards fell from our nerveless fingers as a stray ball rattled against the iron shutters of our windows. Instinctively we crouched into sheltered corners and waited; another volley and another followed, until finally Monsieur S. whispered in a hoarse voice, "A la cave." The household, including the servants, delighted to ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... religion and politics, the mildest. A kind word melted him. A plea won him. He gave to all local charities, and was gravely depressed for a week when the Titanic went down. And yet—the men in the trained-animal game acknowledged him the nerviest and most nerveless of the profession. And yet—his greatest fear in the world was that his large, stout wife, at table, should crown him with a plate of hot soup. Twice, in a tantrum, she had done this during their ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... first object. His fierce grip upon the German's wrist paralysed the muscles of the man's hand, and the pistol dropped from his nerveless fingers. ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... inefficient, ineffective; inept; unfit, unfitted; unqualified, disqualified; unendowed; inapt, unapt; crippled, disabled &c. v.; armless[obs3]. harmless, unarmed, weaponless, defenseless, sine ictu[Lat], unfortified, indefensible, vincible, pregnable, untenable. paralytic, paralyzed; palsied, imbecile; nerveless, sinewless[obs3], marrowless[obs3], pithless[obs3], lustless[obs3]; emasculate, disjointed; out of joint, out of gear; unnerved, unhinged; water-logged, on one's beam ends, rudderless; laid on one's back; done up, dead beat, exhausted, shattered, demoralized; graveled ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... could not be John Schuyler. It was not possible. John Schuyler was at least a man—not a palsied, pallid, shrunken, shriveled caricature of something that had once been human.... John Schuyler had hands—not nerveless, shaking talons.... This sunken-eyed, sunken- cheeked, wrinkled thing was not John Schuyler—this thing that crawled, quiveringly—from the loose, pendulous lips of which came mirth that was more bitter to hear than the sobs of ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... the cool, delicate, nerveless hand back upon her knee, and rose, for the Sister was folding up her sewing. He looked long after the girlish figure ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Arthur with a sad smile. He took off her glove, and helped to raise her arm, which hung nerveless and powerless by her side. I felt big tears rolling ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... peiod is one of loss to England. The brilliant French conquests of Henry V (SS289, 290) slipped from the nerveless hands of his son, leaving France practically independent. The people's power to vote had been restricted (S297). The House of Commons had ceased to be democratic even in a moderate degree. Its members were all property ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... Their pain unheeded, their groans silenced, the wounded staggered to their feet to look. Even the dying strove to raise themselves on their arms from the reddened soil to gaze, and, gazing, fell back dead. Slowly, mechanically, silently, the living gave way, the weapons dropping from their nerveless grip. Step by step they drew back as if compelled ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... time Mr. Jocelyn might have escaped from his thraldom, but would he? The world is full of people who are proud and self-respecting in the extreme, who are honorable and virtuous, good and kindly at heart, but whose wills are nerveless, though they may go safely through life without suspecting the truth; but if they fall under the influence of an evil habit—if they pass under this mightiest and darkest of all spells, opium hunger—they may ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... his appreciation of the girl's courage, the priest stepped forward and led her to her place beside her bridegroom. She took Haney's big nerveless hand in her firm grasp, and together they listened to the solemn words which made them husband and wife. It seemed that the gambler was passing into the shadow during the opening prayer, but his whispered responses came at the proper pauses, ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... his look told me he had understood my question. He lifted up his thin, emaciated arm, and, seeming to clasp hold of something, he said, "Missionary, I am holding on to God; He is my all of joy and hope and happiness." Then the arm fell nerveless, and my triumphant Indian brother was ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... certainly do," I said as cheerfully as possible, "and I thank you also as His instrument; but if you would keep me from fainting away like a nerveless woman, I beg you ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... his words became inaudible, As in the mazes of the Mammoth Cave, Fainter and fainter on the listening ear, The low, retreating voices die away. His eyes were closed; a gentle smile of peace Sat on his face. I held his nerveless hand, And bent my ear to catch his latest breath; And as the spirit fled the pulseless clay, I heard—or thought I ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... again as he left the finished task, and once more from the highest wind-built ridge his hungering eyes swept the round sea's edge. But he saw no sail. Nerveless and exhausted he descended to the southeastern beach and watched the morning brighten. The breezes, that for some time had slept, fitfully revived, and the sun leaped from the sea and burned its way through a low bank of dark and ruddy clouds with so unusual ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... hand imprisoned—that fragrant, listless little hand, so lifeless, nerveless, unresponsive—as though it were no longer a part of her and ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... low over her. He did not speak at once. He only took the nerveless hand that lay upon his arm and carried it to his lips, breathing for many ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... with an angry laugh and a sharp, downward blow of the butt of his whip upon the peasant's head. Charlot's hand grew nerveless and released the bridle as he sank stunned to the ground. Bellecour touched his horse with the spur and rode over the prostrate fellow with no more concern than had he been a dog's carcase. "Blaise, see to the girl," he called over his ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... small fountains, which, in any other land, would spring merrily along, sparkling and singing among tinkling pebbles, here flow calmly and silently into some pale font of marble, all beautiful with life; worked by some unknown hand, long ago nerveless, and fall and pass on among wan flowers, and scented copse, through cool leaf-lighted caves or gray Egerian grottoes, to join the Tiber or Eridanus, to swell the waves of Nemi, or the Larian Lake. The most minute objects ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... ceased to move at the royal bidding the moment the direct royal pressure was loosened or removed. Enfeebled as they were, the old provincial jealousies, the old tendency to severance and isolation lingered on and woke afresh when the crown fell to a nerveless ruler or to a child. And at the moment we have reached the royal power and the national union it embodied had to battle with fresh tendencies towards national disintegration which sprang like itself from the struggle with the northman. The tendency towards personal dependence and towards a social ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... exclaimed, "Stop!" and immejitly whispered the appallin news in his left ear (tother one hed bin chawed off in a misunderstandin at Bascom's the previous Sunday nite, after servis). Never shel I forgit the look uv woe on that eminent Christian's face. The whip fell from his nerveless hand; and with teers streemin down his cheeks, washin up little streaks uv dirt in the most heart-rendin manner, he gasped in a husky voice to the wife uv his buzzum, "Cut him down, Mirandy! The North's gone Ablishin, and the d——d niggers will be free anyhow!" and ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human] Footnote continued from Page 269 [character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed. . . . The habit of excessive novel reading and theater going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... by a man who was obviously more of a Levantine than a Serb. The older man, small, slight, gray haired, and swarthy, but surprisingly active in his movements for one of his apparent age, raced up to Prince Michael. He fell on his knees, caught that nerveless right hand, and pressed ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... on the face of the little seamstress, a movement of every muscle, and her nerveless fingers could ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... his forehead. It was his turn to have the shivers. There was no more color in his face than in a peeled turnip. His gun shook in his left hand like a aspen, while the spangled gun in his right hand dropped its muzzle towards earth and there was scarcely strength enough in his nerveless fingers to have pulled ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... flexible; but it was vast, and in reality of prodigious power. It was, only at moments, however, as some slight impediment opposed itself to his loitering progress, that his person, which, in its ordinary gait seemed so lounging and nerveless, displayed any of those energies, which lay latent in his system, like the slumbering and unwieldy, but terrible, strength of the elephant. The inferior lineaments of his countenance were coarse, extended and vacant; while the superior, or ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... louder than that of any thunder, it came at length forth from the rock, and taking it in his right hand he with it furiously assailed the Magician, who no sooner felt its keen edge than his club fell from his nerveless grasp, the owl flew hooting away, the serpents crawled hissing off, and the once-powerful Magician fell humbly on his ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... of transformation is still going on in a small way, especially in our provincial manufacturing towns, in which most large commercial undertakings have slipped from the nerveless grasp of the Anglo-Saxon into the more capable and ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... he directed his feet towards the site, upon which he knew there was an old chapel known as Queen's Glasshouse Chapel, whose ownership had slipped from the nerveless hand of a dying sect of dissenters, he could not find the site and he could not see the chapel. For an instant he was perturbed by a horrid suspicion that he had been victimized by a gang of swindlers posing as celebrated ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... tired and spent with the day and as his arm stole, almost snake-like, about her waist, she raised a nerveless hand, plucked feebly to remove the fingers pressing into her side, and then let her hand fall to ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... accepting for her own life a barren sacrifice, but a jealous sentinel on his. Meditating as she sat and as she eyed him,—meditating what employment she could invent, with the bribe of emoluments to be paid furtively by her, for those strong hands that could have felled an ox, but were nerveless in turning an honest penny, and for that restless mind hungering for occupation, and with the digestion of an ostrich for dice and debauch, riot and fraud, but queasy as an exhausted dyspeptic at the reception of one innocent amusement, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... its spurs and pistol and bold leather chaps a mockery of trappings. She looked at him, and decision came back to her, clear and steady. She supported him over to her bed and laid him on it. His head sank flat, and his loose, nerveless arms stayed as she left them. Then among her packing-boxes and beneath the little miniature, blue and flaxen and gold upon its lonely wall, she undressed him. He was cold, and she covered him to the face, and arranged the pillow, and got from its box her scarlet and black Navajo ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... and nerveless. I could resist no longer. I felt my hold relax. I grew weaker and weaker. I was dying. ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... around him for a chair; there was one near the table, and the Girl handed it to him. With one hand he swung it into place before the table, while with the other he jerked off the table-cover, and flung it across the room. Johnson neither moved nor groaned, as the edge slid from beneath his nerveless arms. ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... in trembling. The brief impulse of courage which the address of her lover, and the evident sympathy of the crowd, had imparted, was gone as suddenly as it came. She had no more strength for the struggle; and as she sunk back nerveless, and closed her eyes as if fainting under the terrible glances of both her parents, Giovanni dropped her hand from his grasp. It now lay lifeless at her side, and she was sustained from falling by some of her sympathizing ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... music was. She remembered that Fellowes had bought a music-box which could be timed to play at will—even days ahead, and he had evidently set the box to play at this hour. It did so, a strange, grim commentary on the stark thing lying on the couch, nerveless as though it had been dead a thousand years. It had ceased to play before Stafford entered the room, but, strangely enough, it began again as he said over the dead body, "He did not die by his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... own early margins chiefly served to note, cite, and illustrate the habits of crocodiles. Along the lower or "tail'' edge, the saurian, splendidly serrated as to his back, arose out of old Nile; up one side negroes, swart as sucked lead-pencil could limn them, let fall their nerveless spears; up the other, monkeys, gibbering with terror, swarmed hastily up palm-trees — a plant to the untutored hand of easier outline than (say) your British oak. Meanwhile, all over the unregarded ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... A wave, gathering to the full its mighty strength, had upreared itself for a moment majestically above its fellows,—falling, its scattered spray can only impotently sprinkle the dull, dreary shore. Broken and nerveless, I can only wait the lifting of the curtain, quietly wondering if a failure be always irretrievable,—if a prize once lost ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... like the slaves to be happy as well as you; but I don't like for any body to be ruined, especially people who are so nerveless and inactive as those who have resided in warm islands; surely it is ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland
... his rifle and leaped to his feet, hoping for a shot at a stray otter. The next instant the rifle slipped from his nerveless fingers and struck upon the ground with ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... that he would lie down upon the ridge and cling to it, thus gaining strength by a little rest. But he soon found that this would not answer. His overtaxed frame was becoming nerveless, and his only hope was to escape at once. In trembling weakness he crawled back to the edge and looked over. Annie stepped forward to the foot of the ladder and extended her hands as ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... poor Jacques—how he must suffer! Hark to that low, sickening thud! 'Tis the accursed soap dropping from his nerveless grasp. Hist to that sound—like unto a death rattle! It is the water gurgling in the tub. And what means that low, poignant, smothered gasp? It is the last convulsive cry of Jacques descending into the depths. All is over! ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... stole into the secret room Where Love lay dying; Mystic and faint perfume Met me like sighing; As heaven had cast a still-born star He lay nor stirred; the shell-thin hand Nerveless of high command Where once the lord-veins sped ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... disciples could have secured that of the Master Himself; or that He might have passed away through the midst of them, as He did through the infuriated crowd which proposed to cast Him headlong over the precipice near Nazareth at the commencement of His ministry? Every arm might have been struck nerveless, every foot paralyzed with lameness. Who, then, shall deny that Christ's death was His ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... reached, and the present drop in temperature restored her everyday sense of safety. With it came a sudden ebbing of energy and endurance. The "spell" was over for the time, but her escape from the shadow of it left her nerveless and almost indifferent to its returning; apathetic, too, to her tormentor. Going in, she closed the door behind her, apparently not noticing that he followed her, and when he opened it and came in, she was sitting in his great chair by the fire, taking off the baby's coat, and, ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... till I return," whispered the chief to Cole, and then folding his arms over his brawny chest, he walked with a proud step into their midst. Every tongue seemed to be paralyzed, every limb nerveless, as they, with horror depicted on their swarthy faces, ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... life and light would not go out together. The hope seem'd vain. From out the gloom there came The grinding keel—the tread of hurrying feet— Clashing of words, of steel, and all was dark— And all was still. But hark! a sound—the faint Breathing of one who swims with pain, the plash Of nerveless hands nearer and nearer comes, Yet ever fainter. What boots it now to have Escaped the vengeful swords that smote his kin? The waves engulf him and his bubbling cry. But unhoped help is near—a friendly word— A plunge, then ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... offers in such abundance. Those times are past, those men are no more. In the soft lap of refinement we have allowed the powers to languish which those ages exercised and made necessary. With humble admiration we gaze now at those gigantic forms, as a nerveless old man at the manly sports of youth. Not so in the case of this history. The people that we here see upon the stage were the most peaceful in this part of the world, and less capable than their neighbors of that heroic spirit ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... fingers that neither twitched nor shook. There were a gold cross and a bunch of silver medals hung by a whipcord about the neck of the dead man. This Captain Morgan broke away with a snap, reaching the jingling baubles to Harry, who took them in his nerveless hand and fingers that he could hardly close ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... solemnly adjured him to be frank with him; and Ferris could not. That pity for himself as the prey of fantastically cruel chances, which he had already vaguely felt, began now also to include the priest; ignoring all but that compassion, he went up to the bed and took the weak, chill, nerveless hand in ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... ever unquiet because of the woes of his kind, now knows that peace which "passeth the understanding of man." The hand of the All-Father has forever soothed the heart-hunger and unrest of life from his troubled breast. That hand which swept, at will, every cord of the harp of life, has fallen nerveless, but its music will yet linger in the hearts of men until love of truth and beauty shall utterly fade from the earth. A long good-night to thee, Brave Heart, thy better part has found the better ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... I turned automatically towards Cannon Street Station, knowing my way to it even if blindfolded, stumbling over bodies prone on the pavement, and in crossing the street I ran against a motionless 'bus, spectral in the fog, with dead horses lying in front, and their reins dangling from the nerveless hand of a dead driver. The ghostlike passengers, equally silent, sat bolt upright, or hung over the edge boards in attitudes ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... the old man dropped the Spider's nerveless hand to turn to Mrs. Trapes with a gloomy brow. "You 'eard that, ma'am—you 'eard this perishin' porker call me a bag o'—Joe, I blush for ye! Ma'am, pore Joe means well, but 'e can't 'elp bein' a perisher—but"—and here the ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... art, and the work of second-class artists was evidently much in demand and obtained its meed of admiration. Bissolo was a fellow-labourer with Catena in the Hall of the Ducal Palace in 1492; he is soft and nerveless, but he copies Bellini, and has imbibed something of his ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... scarcity from either; and Almayer could not help them, having at times hardly enough for himself. Almayer, in his isolation and despair, often envied his near neighbour the Chinaman, Jim- Eng, whom he could see stretched on a pile of cool mats, a wooden pillow under his head, an opium pipe in his nerveless fingers. He did not seek, however, consolation in opium—perhaps it was too expensive—perhaps his white man's pride saved him from that degradation; but most likely it was the thought of his little daughter in the far-off Straits ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... the long-protracted suffering of himself and his companion had at last proved too much for the poor lad and that his brain was giving way; for look! the baleful light of madness gleams in his bloodshot eyes! Madness gives new strength to his nerveless limbs as he rises and bends over his companion. As he slowly uplifts his arm its shrunken muscles swell beneath the skin as though they would burst it, his talon- like fingers close with a grip of steel round the haft of the upraised knife, Sibylla closes her eyes in patient ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... while all present stood in reverent silence, and gazed upon the patient with a look of such affection as a father might bestow upon a dying son as he took the weak nerveless hand. ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... fields in golden waves, the colors of the flowers sprang out, the soft cool air was like a supremely magnificent wine that could give old nerveless men the strength of young giants; and the very marrow of his bones seemed to shrink and scream for mercy. "Ought to 'a' done it at night," he said to himself. "Mr. Bates didn't wait till daylight. In the dark—that's it. At the prisons ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... ." Why could he not wrench this feeling from his heart, banish this girl from his eyes? Why could he not be wholly true to her who was and always had been wholly true to him? Horrible—this will-less, nerveless feeling, this paralysis, as if he were a puppet moved by a cruel hand. And, as once before, it seemed to him that the girl was sitting there in Sylvia's chair in her dark red frock, with her eyes fixed on him. Uncannily vivid—that impression! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the upper floor, Therese withdrew almost immediately, with Madame Raquin and Suzanne, the men remaining in the dining-room, while the bride performed her toilet for the night. Laurent, nerveless and depressed, did not experience the least impatience, but listened complacently to the coarse jokes of old Michaud and Grivet, who indulged themselves to their hearts' content, now that the ladies were no longer present. When Suzanne and Madame Raquin quitted the nuptial apartment, ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... under Genevieve's nerveless fingers clicked sharply, and Miss Hart raised her head ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... with agony, letting the spear drop from his nerveless hands, and just as it clattered to the ground Canaris was upon him with a rush, and down they went ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon
... very much alike, these corpses. But here is one that is different. Look at the rich costume in which it is dressed. Look at its bejewelled fingers. There is no crown upon its brow. There is no sceptre in that nerveless hand. Yet it is easy to guess that this corpse, this "pocket that death has turned inside out and emptied" was once a king. Yes, this is the body of Pharaoh, the one time ruler of Egypt. But here he lies to-day among the meanest of his soldiers. He is sprawled in unkingly ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... schemes, that they were insufficient and in many respects objectionable; but that to give the administration hearty support in the most vigorous measures which it was willing to undertake, was better than to aid an opposition utterly nerveless and servile and altogether devoid of so much as the desire for efficient action. It was no time to stay with the party of weakness; it was right to strengthen rather than to hamper a man so pacific and spiritless as Mr. Jefferson; to show a readiness to forward even ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... neck and knock me silly. But I could see with joy that it reduced the speed of my horse. At last as the sun went down, reluctantly, it seemed to me, for he knew that he would never see such riding again, my ill-spent horse fell with a hollow moan, curled up, gave a spasmodic quiver with his little, nerveless, sawed-off tail and died. ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... him off, and he did so, quickly springing to his feet. Doug was on his feet in a twinkling, and rushed upon Dic with uplifted knife. Dic knew that he could not withstand the rush, and thought his hour had come; but the sharp crack of a rifle broke the forest silence, and the knife fell from Doug's nerveless hand, his knees shook under him, his form quivered spasmodically for a moment, and he plunged forward on his face. Dic turned and saw Rita standing back of him, holding Doug's rifle to her shoulder, a tiny curl of blue smoke issuing from the barrel. The girl's face turned ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... With nerveless fingers Peter drew out, not an envelope, but a stiff card. And he stared at the card in the red twilight, and groaned in ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... broke. He laid the cool, delicate, nerveless hand back upon her knee, and rose, for the Sister was folding up her sewing. He looked long after the girlish figure as ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... fact that the other systems of organs are developed in the same way, from tubes formed out of simple layers, did not escape Wolff. The nerveless system, muscular system, and vascular (blood-vessel) system, with all the organs appertaining thereto, are, like the alimentary system, developed out of simple leaf-shaped structures. Hence, Wolff came to the view ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... Because you are nerveless and sluggish and full of forgiveness for all the sins of your life, in thought and in act. You have killed my soul—so you model yourself in remorse, and self-accusation, and penance—[Smiling.] —and with that you ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... heartache and listlessness, a nerveless mood came on him. What was it worth, anyhow-success? Struggle, strife, trampling on someone else. His play crowding out some other poor fellow's hope. The hawk eats the partridge, the partridge eats the flies and bugs, the bugs eat each other, and the hawk, when he ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... open palm. I was conscious as I did so of the extraordinary, appealing helplessness of his hands—instead of being clenched in a death agony as I should have expected they were stretched wide; they looked nerveless, limp, effortless. But when my fingers came to the nearest one—the right hand—I found that it was stiff, rigid, stone-cold. I knew then that Salter Quick had been dead for several hours; had probably been lying there, murdered, all through the ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... scratched nose; then reaching down with deft paw, near the quill-pig's shoulder, he gave a sudden jerk that threw the former over on its back, and before it could recover, the fisher's jaws closed on its ribs, and crushed and tore. The nerveless, almost quilless tail could not harm him there. The red blood flowed and the porcupine lay still. Again and again as he uttered chesty growls the pekan ground his teeth into the warm flesh and shook and worried the unconquerable one he had conquered. ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... unexpected. At sight of it the force that had borne her up through the happenings of that day went out of her, and as she stood with the knife and the rope, that she had brought in the hope of cheating the lynchers, dangling from her nerveless hand her helplessness overcame her. Again and again she called to the dead man for help, called to him as she had been accustomed to call when her woman's strength had been unequal ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... was so tired that his legs seemed incapable of support. He wiped the razor blade and put it away with a lax nerveless hand. He realized that he had been again at the point of murder. He had been saved by the narrowest margin in the world. For a moment the fact that he had been saved absorbed him, and then the imminent danger of his position, his weakness, filled him with ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... feet away from me she stood, arrayed in the gauzy dress of the harem, her fingers and slim white arms laden with barbaric jewelry! The light wavered in my suddenly nerveless hand, gleaming momentarily upon bare ankles and golden ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... and the colonel backed up against it for support. The shock of the surprise, the sudden revulsion of feeling, left him nerveless. ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... swayed on her feet. The pistol wavered and swung in a feeble spiral, no longer pointed at Wayne. Gently, he took it from her nerveless fingers and caught her supple body as ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... the King's affair," he added with even greater fierceness; so that Pak Chung Chang's silver pipe dropped from his nerveless fingers and clattered ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... French physician was departing, he told Guy that he would not fail to come the next night, as he saw every reason to expect a crisis. Guy sat intently marking every alteration in the worn, flushed, suffering face that rested helplessly on the pillows, and every unconscious movement of the wasted, nerveless limbs stretched out in pain and helplessness, contrasting his present state with what he was when last they parted, in the full pride of health, vigour, and intellect. He dwelt on all that had passed ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... engagement ring, broken in twain. It had slipped from her nerveless finger when they took her to her room. With a gesture of impatience, he picked up the fragments, and threw them, diamond and all, out of the window ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... all; they'll find no helper there, And if—without a head—the body should rebel, Convulsive throes I mock, and nerveless fury quell. Whate'er ensues the Emperor must approve, I shall have done my part, and win his love. Here comes ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... sons of Mexico, and strange her fate; They fight for freedom who were never free; A kingless people for a nerveless state." ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... dwelt somewhat on the characters of Mouton and Fusilier, not only because of their great devotion to the Confederacy, but because there exists a wide-spread belief that the creole race has become effete and nerveless. In the annals of time no breed has produced nobler specimens of manhood than these two; and while descendants of the French colonists remain on the soil of Louisiana, their names and characters should be reverenced as are those of ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... would have laughed to see the patronizing, authoritative air with which Jansoulet encouraged and reassured him: "Be calm, my dear colleague." But the members of the eighth committee did not laugh. They were all, or almost all, of the Sarigue species, two or three being absolutely nerveless, afflicted with partial loss of the power of speech. Such self-assurance, such ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... herself into a chair. Her arms lay nerveless on the table. Her face was hidden in them. But now, overhearing us, or stung by some fresh thought, she sprang to her feet in anguish. Her face twitched, her form seemed to stiffen as she drew herself ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... cold with sick and unreasoning fear. As she gazed wide-eyed at the living confirmation of the statement that "Gum Shoe Tim" was "as cross as a bear," the gentle-hearted Principal took the paper from her nerveless grasp. ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... it would not be; my courage was appalled, my arms nerveless. I muttered prayers that my strength might be aided from above. They ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... were upon them as he spoke. Revolvers cracked. Jack Harkness, blonde, curly haired, and of magnificent physique, let his firearm drop as he clapped his hand to a suddenly nerveless right arm. ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... a looking-glass, in which Beatrice's face and Hilda's were both reflected. In one of her weary, nerveless changes of position, Hilda happened to throw her eyes on the glass, and took in both these images at one unpremeditated glance. She fancied—nor was it without horror—that Beatrice's expression, seen aside and vanishing in a moment, had been ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... late, pitifully propped against a stone, the cigarette, he had tried to light to comfort him, dead in his nerveless hand. Tharon had wept and wept for Harkness, for he had been a good comrade, open-hearted and merry. And deep in her soul she harboured dim longings for justice on his ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... line of fire, or would he fail me? Suddenly something touched me on the right temple; it was not like a blow; it was not a shock; for half a second I was conscious. I knew I was hit; knew that the reins had fallen from my nerveless hands, knew that I was lying down upon my horse's back, with my head hanging below his throat. Then all the world went out in one mad whirl. Earth and heaven seemed to meet as if by magic. My horse seemed to rise with me, not ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... Paris in 1763 brought the war to an end. Its course had afforded one more opportunity of simplifying the condition of the fishing industry. The English Ministry, under the nerveless guidance of Lord Bute, omitted to seize it, and the Newfoundland clauses of the Treaty of Utrecht (which had granted to the French fishery and drying rights on the coasts between Cape Bonavista and Point Rich) were confirmed, notwithstanding the fact that the English ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... for the biographer of Milton Samson Agonistes is charged with a pathos, which as the expression of real suffering no fictive tragedy can equal, it must be felt that as a composition the drama is languid, nerveless, occasionally halting, never brilliant. If the date of the composition of the Samson be 1663, this may have been the result of weariness after the effort of Paradise Lost. If this drama were composed in 1667, it would be the author's last poetical effort, and the ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... a cry, coming from no one knew where, which, unearthly in its shrillness and the power it had on the imagination, reverberated through the house and died away in a wail so weird, so thrilling and so prolonged that it gripped not only my own nerveless and weakened heart, but those of the ten strong men congregated below me. The diamond dropped from Mr. Grey's hand, and neither he nor any one else moved to pick it up. Not till silence had come again—a silence ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... burned, her bosom heaved like the sea; her arm bared to the shoulder could have struck a man down. Yet in the midst of her frenzied speech, in full flow, she faltered. Her fists unclenched themselves, her arm dropped nerveless, her eyes sought the ground. Andrew King, pale with rage, sterner than she had ever seen him, stood ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... formidable chimera—John Rex, the forger—was absent, but the two hands, or rather claws—the burglar and the prison-breaker—were present, and the slimly-made, effeminate Crow, if he had not the brains of the master, yet made up for his flaccid muscles and nerveless frame by a cat-like cunning, and a spirit of devilish volatility that nothing could subdue. With such a powerful ally outside as the mock maid-servant, the chance of success was enormously increased. There were one hundred and eighty convicts and but fifty soldiers. If the first ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... resembled their lady's than that of Miss Fulmort, and who made such intolerable blunders, that he bestowed on them more vituperation than, in their opinion, 'he had any call to;' and looked in a passion of despair at the numb, nerveless fingers, once his ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hand trembled under his, then, suddenly nerveless, relaxed. With an effort she lifted her head; their eyes ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... far he saw, approaching the ranch, a single riderless horse. As the animal came nearer and nearer it whinnied on seeing him, and finally changed its course and came directly toward him. Then he saw that there was a man on its back; a man either dead or asleep. His hand hung down nerveless by the horse's shoulder, and swung helplessly to and fro as the animal walked on; the man's head rested on the horse's mane. The horse came up to Sidney, thrusting its nose out to him, whinnying gently, as ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... majority of American women have to give to their household affairs, produce that lack of time that is offered as an excuse for the neglect of the duty of self-culture. This it is which fritters away thought and the taste for higher things, leaving the mind blank and nerveless except when ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Gaston, and he heard Filmer breathe heavily. Then Drew lifted his notes to the desk; tried to fix his eyes and attention upon them, failed and gazed helplessly at that one face in the appalling vacancy. Presently the bits of paper fell from his nerveless hand and fluttered ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... stand close to the lamp-post against which the flute-player leaned, but he made no move to open the door. The light flared on his ashen face, showing it curiously apathetic. His instrument dangled from one nerveless hand. ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... an arm-chair that stood on one side of the blaze, and made her sit down. Then, stooping, he took one of her nerveless hands and held it closely in ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... I raised her above it. The weight proved too much and she sank again. Again I pulled her to the surface and again she sank. This I did again and again with no avail. She drowned in my very grasp, and at last she dropped from my nerveless hands to leave my sight forever. As if I had not suffered enough, a few moments after I saw some objects whirling around in an eddy which circled around, until, reaching the current again, they floated past me. My God, man, would you believe me? it was ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... Rabecque's hand suddenly gone nerveless—nerveless with sheer joy, all else forgotten in the perception that there, safe and sound, stood ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... day with me she took no notice of my presence. Then, the cart empty, she fumbled for matches and lighted a short clay pipe, pressing down the burning surface of the tobacco with a calloused and apparently nerveless thumb. The hands were noteworthy. They were large- knuckled, sinewy and malformed by labour, rimed with callouses, the nails blunt and broken, and with here and there cuts and bruises, healed and healing, such as are common ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... Wotton, apparently nerveless beneath his absolute immobility, let them out—and slammed the door behind them with such promptitude as to give cause for the suspicion that he was a fraud, a sham, beneath his icy exterior desperately afraid lest the house be stormed ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... jarred down a picture that was hung insecurely, and it fell with a crash at Miss Burton's side. Was it the shock of the falling picture upon unprepared and overstrained nerves, or what was it that produced the instantaneous change in the joyous-appearing maiden? Her hands dropped nerveless from the keys. So great was the pallor that swept over her face that it suggested to he artist the sudden extinguishment of a lamp. She bowed her head and trembled a moment and then escaped ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... Her face was positively deathly—lips, cheeks, all alike gray-white, save for the purple hollows under both eyes. One moment I was taking stock of these things, as a doctor might; the next I was on my knees and kissing the nerveless hand at her side, all worn and bruised and stained as it was from her ceaseless strivings of the past week. I knew then that, for me, though I should live a hundred years and Constance should never deign to speak to me again, there was but ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... in her ear, "we can get through to the side aisle now—that's almost clear. Come, Eva, buck up—buck up, I say, or we'll never get out of this!" for Eva, terrified, bruised, and half fainting, was now hanging limp and nerveless ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... of his establishment, was for him, in particular, the seal and attestation of his extraordinary grandeur of mind. His empire dissolved after he had departed; his dominions lost their cohesion, and slipped away from the nerveless hands which succeeded; a sufficient evidence—were there no other—that all the vast resources of the Frankish throne, wielded by imbecile minds, were inadequate to maintain that which, in the hands of a Charlemagne, they had availed to conquer ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... door, and when I went, I found Inspector Johnstone had arrived, and brought with him one of his plainclothes men. You will understand how pleased I was to see there would be this addition to our watch; for he looked a tough, nerveless man, brainy and collected; and one I should have picked to help us with the horrible job I felt pretty sure we should ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... which a seldom-erring critic of his own day, not too generously given, vouchsafed to him. Up to his time the blank verse line always, and the semi-couplet in heroics, or member of the more complicated stanza usually, were either stiff or nerveless. Compared with his own work and with the work of his contemporaries and followers who learnt from him, they are like a dried preparation, like something waiting for the infusion of blood, for the inflation of living breath. Marlowe came, and the old wooden versification, the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... need I care for it? Nothing seems of value to me where you are not—I am nerveless, senseless, hopeless without you. My inspiration—such ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... were concerned, proved, long ago, a failure; first lapsing into Fourierism, and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher spirit. Where once we toiled with our whole hopeful hearts, the town paupers, aged, nerveless, and disconsolate, creep sluggishly afield. Alas, what faith is requisite to bear up against such results of ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... could see a clear picture of himself in the gutter with bloated face and bloodshot eyes a decade hence? Or what boy, slyly smoking one of his early cigarettes, would proceed if he could see his haggard face and nerveless hand a few years farther along? What spendthrift would throw away his money on vanities could he vividly see himself in penury and want in old age? What prodigal anywhere who, if he could take a good look at himself sin-stained ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... Being a quart bottle and reasonably full of liquid, the bartender's chin came down with a chug on the bar. Then he slumped quietly to the floor behind the bar. The sixshooter relinquished by his nerveless fingers remained on top of the bar ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... And such nerveless or nervy creatures as they were! From the top of a cliff, one day, I watched a band of them go down a nearly perpendicular wall. I could not follow, though I did go part way down to where the wall bulged outward. There ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... that his eyes brought to his brain the truth.... This was not John Schuyler. It could not be John Schuyler. It was not possible. John Schuyler was at least a man—not a palsied, pallid, shrunken, shriveled caricature of something that had once been human.... John Schuyler had hands—not nerveless, shaking talons.... This sunken-eyed, sunken- cheeked, wrinkled thing was not John Schuyler—this thing that crawled, quiveringly—from the loose, pendulous lips of which came mirth that was more bitter to hear than the sobs of ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... Truth to dawn; but, at last, when she fancied she saw the first rays silvering the night, and looked up hopefully, it proved one of many ignes-fatui which had flashed across her path, and she saw that it was Goethe, uplifted as the prophet of the genuine religion. The book fell from her nerveless fingers; she closed her eyes, and groaned. It was all "confusion, worse confounded." She could not for her life have told what she believed, much less what she did not believe. The landmarks of earlier ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... were quite serious. He had genuine poetic feeling, but little talent. In trying to reproduce Spenser's richness of imagery and the soft modulation of his verse, he succeeds only in becoming tediously ornate. His stanzas are nerveless, though not unmusical. His college exercise, "The Nativity," 1736, is a Christmas vision which comes to the shepherd boy Thomalin, as he is piping on the banks of Isis. It employs the pastoral machinery, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... met and crossed, throwing little chips of metal from the walls with snapping sounds and going through flesh with sounds like soft tappings. It was over within seconds, the last Gern down and one man still standing beside him, the blond and nerveless Lake. ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... she could not arouse him, she pulled the relaxed and nerveless form to the lounge, but when she attempted to lift the limp figure to the couch she found it almost more than all her woman's strength could accomplish. Luther stirred and muttered, but could not ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... lifted suddenly from a dungeon into the sunlit world. I was weak. I caught hold of the horn, settled down nerveless in the saddle, and looked around me. The cattle were streaming past in two long lines for the shore, led by Ump and the Aberdeen-Angus, now half-way up the north arm ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... trifling. The men lost the proper and muscular jerk with which they once made the waters foam and the oars bend. Their whole bodies swung with an awkward and laboured motion. Their arms appeared to be nerveless; their faces became haggard, their persons emaciated, their spirits wholly sunk; nature was so completely overcome, that from mere exhaustion they frequently fell asleep during their painful and ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... was on the wretch's throat; but there was no occasion to use force: he recognized me, and nerveless, paralyzed, sank on the floor incapable of motion much less of resistance, and could only gaze in my face in dumb ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... to move about feverishly, fearing that her resolution might fail. The key of the chest was in a drawer in her dresser, hidden beneath a pile of yellowed garments. Her hands, so long nerveless, were alive and sentient now. When she opened the chest, the scent of lavender and rosemary, long since dead, struck her like ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... the roots of the Medicean influence were too widely intertwined with private interests, the jealousies of classes and of factions were too inveterate, for any large and wholesome form of popular government to be universally acceptable. Besides, the burghers had been reduced to a nerveless equality of servitude, in which ambition and avarice took the place of patriotism; while the corruption of morals, fostered by the Medici for the confirmation of their own authority, was so widely spread as to justify ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... result of a sleepless night, grew whiter still, and her tired eyes filled with dread. She did not have to recall their conversation of the night before, for it had not left her mind, but her thoughts went back to a former conversation in which he had ridiculed the bandits. The newspaper fell from her nerveless fingers, and she left the table, her breakfast untouched, stealing miserably to her room, to escape her ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... is one of loss to England. The brilliant French conquests of Henry V (SS289, 290) slipped from the nerveless hands of his son, leaving France practically independent. The people's power to vote had been restricted (S297). The House of Commons had ceased to be democratic even in a moderate degree. Its members were all property holders elected by property holders (S297). Cade's ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... that, fresh from carnage, quailed not alone to face The unfathomed depths of Darkness, the solitudes of Space! Strange! the smile of scorn, while nerveless dropped the sword-arm from the sting, On the death that scowled at distance, on the closing murder-ring. Strange! no crimson stain on conscience from the hand in gore imbrued! But Death haunts the death-dealer; blood ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... message, 'I need you,' went across the continent, and brought the ready response, 'coming on the wings of the wind.' It was Judge St. Claire who wrote to Harold, for Jerrie's nerveless fingers could not grasp the pen, and she could only dictate what she wished the judge ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... paper slipped from her nerveless fingers, her head dropped unconsciously upon the table before her, and she knew nothing more until, long afterward, when she awoke from her swoon to find her lamp gone out and the room growing cold, while her heart felt as if it had been paralyzed ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... But the sinister influence of to-day saps his will and renders him infirm; each new to-day is wasted amid thoughts of visionary to-morrows which take all the power from his soul; and, when he is nerveless, powerless, tired, discontented with the very sight of the sun, he finds suddenly that his feet are on the edge of the gulf, and he knows that there ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... the house, bolted the door, returned with trembling limbs to the room above and threw himself down in his chair blanched and nerveless. They who have experienced the minutes when a well-loved one hangs between life and death can alone know what he suffered. It was now that the fleeting poverty of the ideals he had been following became visible. ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... not be better than either to start up at once and shake the disgustful burden from me. But the latter suggestion was at once abandoned, because of the assurance I felt that it would prove fatal; impeded by the heavy coils of the creature, weak and nerveless from excitement, I could not escape its fangs. Again, therefore, I spoke with the hollow but distinct accents which arise from the throat when the speaker is afraid to move a muscle:—"Kulassi Chiragh!"—Lascar, ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... was interesting of itself, but the attention of Sterry was riveted by the figure of a man lying motionless on the ground, only a few paces in front of where the door had been. His nerveless right hand still grasped the Winchester with which he had evidently made a sturdy ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... maybe you won't be so smart!" sneered Len. "Let go my horse!" he cried, roughly, as he swung the animal to one side. But no force was needed; as Dave's nerveless hand fell away from the bridle. He ...
— Cowboy Dave • Frank V. Webster
... all his own, hoping indeed to tune his tongue one day to something less uncouth. None can sympathize more cordially than the writer does with Durtal in his horror of unauthorized devotions, of insufferable vernacular litanies, of nerveless and sickly hymns, of interminable "acts of consecration" void of a single definite idea, more especially when these things are brought into the very sanctuary itself, with stole and cope and every apparent endeavour to fix the responsibility on ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Christian ranks some soldiers whose hands are too nerveless or too full of worldly trash to grasp the sword which they have received, much less to strike home with it at any of the evils that are devastating their own lives or darkening the world. The feebleness of the Christian conflict with evil, in all its forms, whether ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... strokes grew slower and slower, and gradually ceased, Walter's eyes slowly closed, and he sank down unconscious. His paddle fell from his nerveless hand and floated away on the stagnant water just as a dark, shapeless mass crept out of a bunch of reeds and struck the canoe with a ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... pitiful creature leapt to swift and terrible action, for at one bound, as it seemed, he had reached the chair where hung the officer's greatcoat, whipped forth and cocked the pistols and with these murderous things levelled in his hands, crept upon the sleepers. The jug slipped from my nerveless hold and, roused by the crash of its fall, the man Tom lifted his head only to stare dazedly into the nearest pistol muzzle and the awful scowling face behind it; while the highwayman, reaching out his second pistol, awoke Mr. Vokes with a smart rap on the crown, whereupon, ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
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