"Cataclysm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... population with the most searching destructiveness, and when all was over they had to be wept over in ruined homes and in the midst of a society which was wrecked from top to bottom, and in which all relatives and friends had sunk together to common perdition. There has been no other such cataclysm in history. Great states have been conquered before now, but conquest did not mean a sudden and desolating social revolution; so that to a Southerner the loss of relatives on the battle-field or in the hospital is ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... have come from is a mystery. It might have been that, in the ages past, the chain of islands from Luzon to Borneo was a part of Asia, an extensive mountain system populated by the tiny men found there to-day. If so, then they were driven to the highlands by the cataclysm that in prehistoric ages might have broken up the mainland into islands, leaving only the summits of ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... change is an agony and a bliss. It is a cataclysm and a new world. It is our most serious hour, perhaps. And yet we cannot be responsible ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... them very justifiable. Seeing that this chain of the Carpathians was here and there circular in form and with high peaks, they concluded that it anciently formed important amphitheatres. These mountainous circles must have been broken up by the vast cataclysm to which the Sea of Rains was due. These Carpathians looked then what the amphitheatres of Purbach, Arzachel, and Ptolemy would if some cataclysm were to throw down their left ramparts and transform them into continuous chains. ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... to perish In time than in eternity. No question Pends here of individual life; our sight Must broaden to embrace the scope sublime Of this trans-earthly theme. The Jew survives Sword, plague, fire, cataclysm—and must, since Christ Cursed him to live till doomsday, still to be A scarecrow to the nations. None the less Are we beholden in Christ's name at whiles, When maggot-wise Jews breed, infest, infect Communities of Christians, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... are times when it is unseasonable to touch a man on the leg. This was a moment when it was unseasonable in the case of Mr Pickering. He bounded silently into the air, his whole being rent asunder as by a cataclysm. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... I cannot now recollect textually. I saw the signature of Gaspar Ruiz. He was an audacious fellow. He had snatched a soul for himself out of a cataclysm, remember. And now it was that soul which had dictated the terms of his letter. Its tone was very independent. I remember it struck me at the time as noble—dignified. It was, no doubt, her letter. Now I shudder at the depth of its duplicity. Gaspar Ruiz was made to complain of ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... predicted beforehand that innumerable millions of human beings would be transported with security at a headlong speed for hundreds of miles along a ferruginous track, the most temporary deviation from which would produce the inevitable cataclysm and no end of a smash, the working majority would have expressed their candid opinion of such rhodomontade by cocking ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... done and been through was naught, less than naught. To worry about physical discomforts was babyish. Inviting vistas of knowledge, technical attainment, experience, and endurance stretched before him, illuminating the night. His mind dwelt on France, on Mons, on the idea of terror and cataclysm. And it had room too for his wife and children. He had had no news of them for over twenty-four hours; and he had broken his resolve to write to Lois every day; he had been compelled to break it. But in the morning, somehow, he would send a telegram ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... and, muttering and grumbling, rolled across the narrow strait slowly and sullenly. Australia scowled at our penitent Island, threatening direful inflictions—lightning, thunder, and an overwhelming cataclysm. Behind that frowning Providence there was a smiling face. The good storm, albeit black and angry, behaved benignly. Gentle rain came, and a picturesque little electrical display to a humming accompaniment of far distant thunder, followed by a soothingly ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Gideon Gory, of Winnebago, Wisconsin! Why any one knows that the Gorys were to Winnebago what the Romanoffs were to Russia—royal, remote, omnipotent. Yet the Romanoffs went in the cataclysm, and so, too, did the Gorys. To appreciate the depths to which the boy Gideon had fallen one must have known the Gorys in their glory. It happened something ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... mortals, put two and two together and made the answer four when it was not four at all. She had been deceived by circumstantial evidence. Jill, whom she had left in England wealthy and secure, she had met again in New York penniless as the result of some Stock Exchange cataclysm in which, she remembered with the vagueness with which one recalls once-heard pieces of information, Freddie Rooke had been involved. True, she seemed to recollect hearing that Freddie's losses had been comparatively slight, ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... sketch fully in another chapter, did not injure the Bank. The directors generously tried to save the fallen company, but (as might have been expected) utterly failed. With prudence, perhaps, gained from this national cataclysm, the Bank, in 1722, commenced keeping a reserve—the "rest"—that rock on which unshakable credit has ever since been proudly built. In 1728 no notes were issued by the Bank for less than L20, and as part of the note only was printed the clerk's pen ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. We may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... rule, many of them spending much time and trouble on good works in their leisure hours. What they want as financiers is plenty of good business and as little as possible disturbance in the orderly course of affairs. Such a cataclysm as the present war could only terrify them, especially those with interests in every country of the world. When war comes, especially such a war as this, financing in its ordinary and most profitable sense has ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... pointing first up to the sky, then down to the ground, and last to their own hearts. The Society was called the Hung League, because all the members adopted Hung as a surname, a word which suggests the idea of a cataclysm. By a series of lucky chances the inner working of this Society became known about fifty years ago, when a mass of manuscripts containing the history of the Society, its ritual, oaths, and secret signs, together with an elaborate set of drawings of flags and other regalia, fell into the hands ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... arrogant stride, the magnificent address, the broad, vehement, grandiloquent pronouncements, the sumptuous texture of his music seems forever proclaiming the victory of man over the energies of fire and sea and earth, the lordship of creation, the suddenly begotten railways and shipping and mines, the cataclysm of wealth and comfort. His work seems forever seeking to form images of grandeur and empire, flashing with Siegfried's sword, commanding the planet with Wotan's spear, upbuilding above the heads of men the castle of the gods. It dares measure itself with the terrestrial forces, exults in the fire, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... fleets had ruled the vanished seas known to us as the Sahara and North Africa, whose golden capital had looked proudly out upon an empire mightier than Rome—an empire which the Atlantic Ocean had swallowed up. The story of this cataclysm which had engulfed Atlantis, brought to new lands by a few survivors, had bequeathed to men the legend of the Deluge. The riddle of The Sphinx, most ancient religious symbol in the known world, was resolved; for Paul saw it to represent man emerging from the animal and already aspiring ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... perambulations through that hell of poverty, vice, and hunger. She often returned home pale and silent, having reached the uttermost depths of human abomination, and never daring to say all. At times she trembled and raised her eyes to Heaven, wondering what vengeful cataclysm would swallow up ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... Morrell made up her mind to do a thing, she usually did it. A cataclysm of nature was about all that would ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... that a whirlwind might have carried it, but that, in that case it would be no supposititious, or doubtfully identified whirlwind, but the greatest atmospheric cataclysm in the ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... Staupitz, blinking fiercely as he rubbed his aching head, which had rattled sharply against the table that arrested his flight across the room, was too bewildered to swear out the oaths that were frothing within him when he realized that the earthquake, the whirlwind, the cataclysm that had tumbled him and his companions about like so many nine-pins was no other and no more than the slim and pleasant young gentleman who stood there so composedly. While the bewildered ruffians were picking themselves up, and with some little difficulty recovering their breath, the young gentleman ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the calm and peace prevailing on the great passenger ship, the shadow of war impended over all. The bloody struggles of the great European cataclysm were proceeding at the other end of the English Channel and dire hints of dangers on the sea in the "war zone" had accompanied the sailing of the ship. But on this bright May day, as the liner approached its destination, danger seemed far distant and few indeed among passengers or crew ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... Rule, when the foundations of society are all becoming fluid. Don't flatter yourself for a moment that your particular little sect or your particular little dogma is going to survive the gentle cataclysm any more than my particular little sect or my particular little dogma. All alike are doomed to inevitable reconstruction. "We can't put the Constitution into the melting-pot," said Mr. John Morley, if I recollect his words aright. But at the very moment when he said it, in my humble ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... in biographical literature. This quality was increased by the complete publication, while it also became a new proof that 'good blood cannot lie,' that the hero is a hero even in utterances kept secret from the very valet. If, as has happened before and might conceivably happen again, some cataclysm destroyed all Scott's other work, we should still have in this not merely an admirable monument of literature, but the picture of a character not inhumanly flawless, yet almost superhumanly noble; of the good man struggling against adversity, not, indeed, with a sham pretence ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... recurring ages of the puranas. Each yuga, maha-yuga, and karpa is followed by a period of more or less complete destruction. The achievements of each period are forgotten, because its results are obliterated or consumed by a mighty cataclysm. And thus no gain acquired in any past age is available for the coming epoch. In this way, the whole idea of the puranic chronology is the most effective ever devised by man in any land to bring discouragement and despair into the heart of ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... not be so biased as the present in estimating the character of the Negro and his worth to the nation. It is to be hoped that every Negro who, during his service at the front, received such impressions and had such experiences as to throw light upon the many phases of that world cataclysm will in the near future follow the example of these worthy women. The public will welcome history of divisions and regiments and will certainly be interested in the mere personal narrative presenting the experiences peculiar to those individuals ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... moisture that drain from it. It is cold enough to set one shivering in perpetual motion. I look upwards, this way and that; everything is borne down by dreadful gloom. I might be derelict and alone in the middle of a world destroyed by a cataclysm. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... astonished the civilized world with his successes. He made himself master of almost half the globe. The reign of Napoleon was an earthquake which, for fifteen years, shook the sea and the land, carrying down innumerable human lives in the general cataclysm. But he sunk at last! He aspired to the very heaven of heavens in his ambitions; and his conquests were the wonder and terror of mankind. But he left France smaller, weaker, poorer, and more debased and depraved than ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... by the best critics as the foremost living Spanish novelist, is without doubt the chief exponent of that ferment of political and social thought in Spain which had its inception in the cataclysm of 1898, and which gave rise to the new movement in ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... harbour). Then the fish addressing the associated Rishis told them these words, "I am Brahma, the Lord of all creatures; there is none greater than myself. Assuming the shape of a fish, I have saved you from this cataclysm. Manu will create (again) all beings—gods, Asuras and men, all those divisions of creation which have the power of locomotion and which have it not. By practicing severe austerities he will acquire this power, and with my ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... dark and gloomy caverns. Strangely it had no intersecting canyons. It jealously guarded its secret. Its unusual formations of cavern and pillar and half-arch led me to expect any monstrous stone-shape left by avalanche or cataclysm. ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... it incredible that in the ancient nebula that was the matrix of our solar system similar, or rather dissimilar, particles in all but the subtle essence we call life, might have become entangled and, resisting every cataclysm as they had resisted the absolute zero of outer space, found in these caverned spaces their proper environment to develop into the race of the Silent Ones and—only they could tell ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... that harmless cataclysm in the theater of the opera of Wallace, Indiana, excited not a person in Europe but me, and so came near to not being worth cabling to Florence by way of France. But it does excite me. It excites me because I cannot make out, for sure, what it was that moved the spectator ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... deck, there were great globules of it on the bulk-heading, and everything, including the men's clothes and blankets, was wet. They lay in their bunks from necessity, because it was a somewhat laborious matter to sit, and said very little since it was difficult to hear anything amidst the cataclysm of elemental sound. Indeed, it became at length almost a relief to turn out into inky darkness or misty daylight dimmed by flying spray to take a trick at ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... cataclysm, Bolvar distinguished himself in Caracas, going hither and thither among the ruins, counteracting with his words the effect of the speeches of the royalists and assisting to dig out of the debris corpses and the wounded, ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... gift of prophecy. The coming year passed rapidly, and I saw what fate had in store for the world for the twelve months immediately ahead of me; then followed a decade, then a century, and then others, until, just as I was approaching the dread cataclysm which is to mark the end of all mortal things, I heard a quick, ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... was a little taken aback. To her it seemed a social cataclysm, something unheard of, that her daughter should propose to be any one's secretary. Yet this woman, who was certainly of her own order, had accepted the thing as entirely natural—had dismissed it, even, with a few casual remarks. Julien, ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... government crisis of the autumn of 1899, we, in company with all other foreigners in China, realized that conditions were becoming serious, yet never did we expect or prepare for such a cataclysm as took place when the storm clouds suddenly burst in ...
— How I Know God Answers Prayer - The Personal Testimony of One Life-Time • Rosalind Goforth
... answered his mother, meekly. "And this disobedient girl shall mind me, too." Rita had never in all her life disobeyed a command from either father or mother. She was obedient from habit and inclination, and in her guileless, affectionate heart believed that a terrific natural cataclysm of some sort would surely occur should she even ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... Island is but a low sandy reef, on which a few straggling fruit trees try to keep the remembrance of its bygone beauty. It is as bare and desolate as the bones of those who filled its halls in the cataclysm of that dreadful night—bones which now waste to whiteness on sterile shores or are wrought into ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... of the geological drama, came a frost—a nipping-frost; and slowly but surely the whole arctic and antarctic worlds were chilled and cramped, degree after degree, by the gradual on-coming of the Great Ice Age. I am not going to deal here with either the causes or the extent of that colossal cataclysm; I shall take all those for granted at present: what we are concerned with now are the results it left behind—the changes which it wrought on fauna and flora and on human society. Especially is it of importance ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... sovereign, though we know not why. We feel it, that is all!—fulgurant moments, which throw, as it were, a flash of lightning upon our destinies, like those meteors which shine forth from time to time in the heavens, and of which none can say what their purple signifies, whether it be a cataclysm or an apotheosis. Well, it appears to me that we, you and I, are now face to face with one of ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... declared my love and received the assurance of its return. By means of this exercise my resolution daily grew stronger, until at last I had piled together such a mass of obstinacy as it would have taken a cataclysm of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... vast masses of highly trained men against vast masses of highly trained men, with rapid transportation over good roads, complete equipment, thorough organization, backed by generous resources, in the cataclysm ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... reaction, when, in the intervals of jazzing, we have nothing to satisfy the spiritual void left by the War except the possibility of an industrial cataclysm at home and the triumph of Bolshevism abroad, we owe a large debt of gratitude to Sir THOMAS BEECHAM for his efforts to revive the Town. And the Town is at last appreciating at their full worth his services both to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... machines and subject to unprecedented and unimaginable panics. No man can tell what savagery of desperation these new conditions may not release in the soul of man. A conspiracy of adverse chances, I say, might contrive so great a cataclysm. There is no effectual guarantee that ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... five, two." He shook his head. "We have no idea. It's apparent that there must have been some world-wide cataclysm here to change the contours of the land masses so much. We may have to wait on a return space flight to bring a 'copter or a hydroplane to explore farther." His hand swept beyond the boundaries of the map to indicate the whole ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... one remove from deadly hate. Almost at the beginning of the first act Isolda, devoured by a longing for revenge, schemed to murder Tristan, and she does not falter in her purpose until he has taken the drink; the reaction has all the violence of a cataclysm; all is delirium; there is not a moment of happy lingering over the joy of a possible; new life; there is no time for that, no thought of it. All is burning wrath and hate and equally burning lust and greed for the ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... a startled look as she listened to the man's words. They made her wonder at the change in him. Had that terrible cataclysm impressed him with a new view of the life by which he was surrounded? It might be. Then, suddenly, a fresh thought occurred to her. A memory rose up and confronted her, and a sudden joyous anxiety ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... as the very citadel of tyranny? The Bastille fell, and the sound re-echoed through Europe. It was the signal of a new era and a new hope. The Revolution had begun—that mighty movement which, in its meaning and consequences, dwarfs every other cataclysm in history. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... pause to reflect upon the most staggering and tragic cataclysm of Nature that has been visited upon our country since first our forefathers won it from the Indian—the unprecedented succession of tornadoes, floods, storms and blizzards, which in March, 1913, devastated vast areas of territory in Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska and a dozen ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... as though this were something due her; that she was entitled to his reassurance that the threatened cataclysm should not drag her down with him. When she made no reply he seemed to feel that he had not made himself clear, and he repeated, in other terms, that she need not be concerned for the outcome; that he ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... painstaking thrift and a bare margin to subsistence. Such conditions stifle world interests. The earthquake which threatened civilization disturbed the habitant merely because it hazarded his critical balance on the edge of want. The cataclysm over the ocean was none of his affair. And his affairs pressed. What about the pig if one went to war? And could Alphonse, who is fourteen, manage the farm so that there would be vegetables for winter? Tell ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... all those responsible for the policy of Greece appeared to be unanimous in the decision not to be drawn prematurely into the European cataclysm, but to reserve her forces for the defence of the Balkan equilibrium. Under this apparent unanimity, ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... religion, although no bigot, he was of the greatest strictness, and, admitting everything as an article of faith, nothing appeared difficult to his conception. He believed the deluge to have been universal, and he thought that, before that great cataclysm, men lived a thousand years and conversed with God, that Noah took one hundred years to build the ark, and that the earth, suspended in the air, is firmly held in the very centre of the universe which God had created from nothing. When I would say and ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... pandemonium. Then gradually the sounds subsided almost entirely. My watch showed three o'clock. I turned over again, grateful for the few hours left ... and in that instant, without a breath of warning, there burst out the supreme cataclysm of a band of some twenty hoarse and battered pieces in an endless, unfathomable noise that never once paused for breath until daylight stole in at ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... a better religion than any belief respecting the unseen powers. "If individual life is short, the life of the human species is not." How does he know this? The dark demon of Nature he has so vividly described may sweep away the puny race to-morrow by some fell cataclysm; and it would be a blessing if she did in his view. "If such an object," he continues, "appears small to a mind accustomed to dream of infinite and eternal beatitudes, it will expand into far other dimensions when ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... thoughts, because no sooner had the day begun to dawn around us than the airships of the Martians appeared. Evidently the people in them were dazed by the disaster and uncertain what to do. It is doubtful whether at first they comprehended the fact that we were the agents who had produced the cataclysm. ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... some one caught Blenheim's arm from behind just as he fired; but I was not certain. For suddenly that same whistling shriek sounded over us, nearer this time, more ominous; the earth seemed to rock and then to end in a mighty shock and cataclysm. Blackness enveloped me, and I dropped into a ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... he rode abroad the next day no man suspected the cataclysm which had shattered Hump Doane's world into a chaos ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... gray light the strangely weathered mesas were ruined castles, stupendous in bulk; the mighty buttes and crumbled peaks were colossal cities overthrown by the cataclysm of time. It seemed to Enoch, that nowhere else in the world could one behold such epic loneliness. The excitement that had buoyed him up since Diana's arrival suddenly departed, and his life with all its ugly facts was vividly in ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... was only a mood of nature, a bold promise, a beautiful record. He meant that mountains had sifted away in its dust, yet the canyon was young. Man was nothing, so let him be humble. This cataclysm of the earth, this playground of a river was not inscrutable; it was only inevitable—as inevitable as nature herself. Millions of years in the bygone ages it had lain serene under a half moon; it would bask silent under a rayless sun, in the ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... but I know the nature of it. It was the kind of remark you make when you know that nothing in the world can help your case. But Howells was honest—he had to say the heart-breaking things he did say: that there was no help for this calamity, this shipwreck, this cataclysm; that this was the most disastrous thing that had ever happened in anybody's history—and then he added, "That is, for you—and consider what you have done for Bishop. It is bad enough in your case, you deserve to suffer. You have committed this crime, and you deserve to have ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... exist for him. That day was a long way off, of course, but the chill of it had brushed her face; and she was no longer heedless of such signs. She resolved to cultivate all the arts of patience and compliance, and habit might have helped them to take root if they had not been nipped by a new cataclysm. ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... lantern at the bridgehead at Brod did not know that he held the destiny of Europe in his hand. And yet, this is the truth. Had he permitted us to pass unquestioned we should have reached Sarajevo in time to prevent the greatest cataclysm of all the ages." ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... 30 we had the unique experience of witnessing this crumbling action at work—a cataclysm of snow, ice and water! The ship was steaming along within three hundred yards of a cliff, when some loose drifts slid off from its edge, followed by a slice of the face extending for many hundreds of feet and weighing ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... known to his associates as a man of splendid and many-sided vitality. A college classmate, Dr. John Denison, graphically describes him, "A sort of cataclysm of health, like other cyclones from the South seas"; what the Tennessee mountaineers call "plumb survigrous"; an islander, with the high courage and jollity of the tar; "a kind of mental as well as physical amphibiousness." Extraordinary in his training and versatility; ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Only Miss Craven and Peters, more intimate, saw the effort that he made. To Miss Craven it seemed sometimes as if he were deliberately living through a self-appointed period—she had found herself wondering what cataclysm would end it. She was conscious of the impression, which she tried vainly to dismiss as absurd, of living over an active volcano. What would be the result of the upheaval when it came? She had prayed ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... nothing to say, for he seemed involved in a cataclysm that had crushed him, and so moved toward the door. She walked by his side and stepped back when he opened it. He held out his hand as if to bid her good-by, for the last time, but she appeared to disregard it and ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... was once the holy isle. In places dying palm-trees, whose long trunks are to-day under water, still show their moistened plumes and give an appearance of inundation, almost of cataclysm. ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... she obeyed, oblivious of the peril to herself but in an agony lest her presence and position increase his danger. De Launay dominated her, and she stood as rigid as a statue, awaiting the cataclysm. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... cables. And then she shrieked. It was for pity. It was for some one to help her, at any rate to take notice of her. She was dying. Her soul was leaving her. And she was alone, panic-stricken, in the midst of a cataclysm a thousand times surpassing all that she had imagined of sickening horror. "I cannot endure this," she thought passionately. "It is impossible that I should be asked to endure this!" And then she wept; beaten, terrorized, smashed and riven. No commonsense now! No wise ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... stories to tell of sublime catastrophes, the crash of systems, and the swallowing up of chains of cloud-capped mountains in the yawning abysses of a world that might at any moment turn itself inside out. Alas! the cataclysm theories had to die the death, and we had to comfort ourselves with a dull prosaic dream of forces acting with infinite slowness, grinding, and evolving through unnumbered ages, the great laws working themselves out without ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... the sullen water and hurled it in steaming spray around their bases, while huge stones fell hissing into the water on all sides. The eruption must have shaken the entire sphere; the gushing of those vomiting throats was a cataclysm of such magnitude that I could not guess ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... still at this time under the stress of the emotion caused by the terrible earthquake of 1663. Father Lalemant has left us a striking description of this cataclysm, marked by the naive exaggeration of the period: "It was February 5th, 1663, about half-past five in the evening, when a great roar was heard at the same time throughout the extent of Canada. This noise, which gave the impression ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... course difficult to conjecture what will be the ultimate effect of such a world-cataclysm as the present European war on the fate of the Jews of the world. The chief center of interest naturally lies in the eastern field of the war which happens to rage within the confines of Old Poland. This kingdom, founded by the Jagellons, brought together Roman Catholic Poland and Greek ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... cheap finery in the kitchen, just a trifle more ugly and debased than that worn in the drawing-room; hence the miserable pretentiousness, and pinchbeck fine-ladyism, filtering like poison through every pore of our society, to result God only knows in what grave moral cataclysm, unless women of mind and education will come to the front, and endeavour to ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... bewilderment amidst the growth, paused to rattle a faint warning, half coiled in case the horse's step meant a new threat, then went on with a rather piteous air of not knowing where to find refuge against this cataclysm of ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... men into its vortex—men, customs, institutions, civilizations, indeed the age and epoch wherein we lived, we had felt moving into chaos—into nothing, to be reborn some day into we know not what, in the cataclysm out there on the front. We had seen it. But seeing it had revealed nothing. For many nights we had heard the distant roar of the hungry guns ever clamouring for more food, for the blood of youth, for the dreams of age, for the hopes of a race, ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... man with an open free mind can ponder these facts and not answer forthwith and without faltering—to a democratised edition of a Greater Britain Overseas. Only a world cataclysm or national upheaval displacing every nation from its foundations can shake Canada ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... never shall we be more truly convinced that all this agitation and delirium of mankind's are nothing in view of the share of eternity which each one carries within himself, and that all these monstrosities will end in a better future. This war is a kind of cataclysm which succeeds to the old physical upheavals of our globe; but have you not noticed that, in the midst of all this, a little of our soul is gone from us, and that we have lost something of our conviction of a Higher Order? Our sufferings come from our small human patience taking the ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... confers. The resources of this vast country are practically in the hands of half a dozen men. Merely by holding up a finger, these men could, to suit their own selfish ends, start a universal panic which might bring about a financial cataclysm, involving the whole world in disaster. I do not say they would use this power for evil, but they are in position to do so if it served their purpose. I want to have such power, only if I had it I would not use it for evil. I would use it for good. Conditions in the industrial world are very critical. ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... abyss, and formidable eruptions have led to the pouring forth of immense quantities of pumice-stone. The three islets mentioned above would be the remains of the old central cone, and a bed of pumice-stone from 98 to 131 feet thick is spread over the whole of their surface, telling of a violent cataclysm of which neither history nor ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries presaged the Reformation of the sixteenth, and if the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth was the forerunner of political revolutions throughout the Western World, we may well, after the mechanical and economic cataclysm of the nineteenth, cease wondering that ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... unfulfilled, the currents of thought and action are not flowing in the direction they anticipated, but the facts they faced have altered little and we moderns have made our own diagnosis, and we have decided on a remedy. The remedy is not revolution in the historic sense; it is not a cataclysm, it has no room for hatred. Its method is evolutionary; its watch-word is ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... eternal purposes are writ too large in the past to mistake them. And it is the ardent hope of America that Russia—that Empire which has so generously accorded us her friendship in our times of peril—may not by cataclysm from within, but of her own volition, place herself fully in line with the ideals of ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... barometer of business conditions. In its coming it had exemplified again the characteristic symptoms of a panic which I have set forth on pages 7-16 of the introduction to this book. After the spasm of March 14th and the business cataclysm of the following October, the business world staggered along, but with the strength merely that results from courage and the exercise of reserve power husbanding its resources and lightening its load. The decrescendo movement of another ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... sound with a terrifying swiftness, and Suma knew it must be the river. The abrupt bank was fully half a mile distant but toward it the startled creature bounded in gigantic leaps that took her over the sand with the speed of the wind. The goal had all but been attained when the cataclysm struck. A wall of water, four feet high and crested with foam came rushing down the river bed with incredible swiftness, engulfing everything within its reach. The sandbar with its varied population was submerged in a flash and as the air imprisoned ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... the minds of those for whom such events personally shook and darkened or brightened the world. Nothing can dwarf personal anguish at its moment of highest power; to the last agony and despairing terror of the heart-wrung the cataclysm of earthquake, tornado, shipwreck is but the awesome ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... this fact until they had made a sad mess of society They had the votes and the power to do so if they pleased, and their leaders meant they should. Some of these desponding observers went so far as to predict an impending social cataclysm. Humanity, they argued, having climbed to the top round of the ladder of civilization, was about to take a header into chaos, after which it would doubtless pick itself up, turn round, and begin to climb again. Repeated ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... Tarnow-Cracow line, had fought its way over every inch of the ground, making a record of forty-five battles in forty-five days. At least, according to old measures, these fights would be classed as battles. Under the stupendous conditions which surrounded this modern cataclysm, they probably range as little more than ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... day, what with staff meeting and so on, and its being Bank Holiday did not make much difference to them. But in the afternoon he was free to read carefully the Sunday papers, and was appalled with the swiftness of the approach of the universal cataclysm. After Evensong and supper, then, he got out paper and pen and wrote, though it took much longer than he thought it would. In the end he begged the Bishop to remember him if it was really necessary to find more chaplains, and expressed his ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... of the church at that time, enjoyed an immense reputation amongst his congregation. He was a very eloquent man, but was principally known as always prophesying the imminent end of the world. He had been a little unfortunate in some of the dates he had predicted for the final cataclysm, these dates having slipped by uneventfully without anything whatever happening, but finally definitely fixed on a date in 1867 as the exact date of the Great Catastrophe. His influence with his flock rather diminished when it was found that Dr. Cumming had renewed ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... we are born. But once we are here, we may create our own world, if we choose. Since I have stood on my own feet, I have never met my master. For every time I choose a friend I determine my fate anew. I can think of no cataclysm that could have the force to move me from my path. Fire or flood or the envy of men may tear the roof off my house, but my soul would still be at home under the lofty mountain pines that dip their heads in star dust. Even life, that was so difficult to attain, may serve me merely ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... In this cataclysm, Bolivar distinguished himself in Caracas, going hither and thither among the ruins, counteracting with his words the effect of the speeches of the royalists and assisting to dig out of the debris corpses and the wounded, ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... different to any other parting, that had perforce been during the past year. The presence of Chauvelin in her house, the obvious planning of this departure for France, had filled her with a foreboding, nay, almost a certitude of a gigantic and deadly cataclysm. ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... on clear to the mill without another word; without even a grin from the broad-faced Ole, who sat in ponderous thought in the wagon ahead. To a nature such as his the infrequency of a new idea gives it the force of a cataclysm; during its presence, obliterating ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... course among the ravines of the Blue Ridge, through the narrow defile of the Devil's Garden, sunless, strewn with rubble of boulders, with a chaos of shattered rock masses—debris, superstition said, of cataclysm—of the Crucifixion, when the mountain crests tore themselves asunder, and cast their pinnacles into the abyss for rage and grief. The searcher had climbed on and on, until he reached the nook sacred to ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... Now that the dreadful step was practically taken, he was free to wind up the business of his office, leaving things in order for his successor. Once he had thought that he could not stay in the capital or in the West after the cataclysm. But now the manlier thought prevailed. A hard fate was making him his father's betrayer; but beyond the betrayal, with the bare duty done, he would take his place as his father's son, proving his love and loyalty by going down with him to any depth ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... the figure of Chloe Carstairs from his thoughts as he went about his day's work. Intuitively he knew that she was a bitterly unhappy woman, that her life, like his own, had been rent in two by a cataclysm of appalling magnitude, such as visits very few human beings, and he told himself that this woman, too, had been down in the depths even as he had been. And no man, no woman, who has once known the blackness of the abyss, that "outer darkness" in which the soul sits apart ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Europe which has been their most prominent characteristic. Even the sway of the Dutch Company (an older but weaker brother of John Company in India) had caused them to revolt. The local rising, however, was hardly noticed in the universal cataclysm which followed the French Revolution. After twenty years, during which the world was shaken by the Titanic struggle between England and France in the final counting up of the game and paying of the stakes, the Cape Colony was added in ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... guests Sat pallid as their dinner vests. A moment more and, root and branch, That mansion fell in avalanche, Story on story, floor on floor, Roof, wall and window, joist and door, Dead weight of damnable disaster, A cataclysm of ...
— Moral Emblems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has its moments of fantastic hysteria, and when it is on the rampage the only thing for a rational man to do is to climb a tree and let the cataclysm go by. And so, some time ago, when the word nature-faker was coined, I, for one, climbed into my tree and stayed there. I happened to be in Hawaii at the time, and a Honolulu reporter elicited the sentiment from me that I thanked ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... facts seem to be at variance with the doctrine of Uniformity, or with anything like a slow process. The entombment of these animals must have been very sudden, and due, one would naturally think, to a tremendous cataclysm followed by immediate freezing, else their flesh would have become tainted. A recent English writer predicts another deluge owing to the constant accumulation of ice at the Antarctic Pole, which for untold ages has been attracting and freezing the waters of the Northern Hemisphere. A lowering process, ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... cutting down to what lay under the first envelope of planet-skin, perhaps the resulting wound might have resembled that slash. What had caused such a break between the height on which they stood and the much taller peak beyond, Shann could not guess. But it must have been a cataclysm of spectacular dimensions. There was certainly no descending to the bottom of that cut and reclimbing the rock face on the other side. The fugitives would either have to return to the river with all its ominous warnings of trouble to come, or find some ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... can figure, this is about what must have happened. Some sudden, deadly, numbing plague or cataclysm must have struck the earth, long, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... looked for the fomenter of this frightful international conflict and was disposed to place the blame on the basis of rumor and personal feeling. On the other hand each nation concerned has vigorously disclaimed responsibility for the cataclysm. Austria - very meekly - claimed that Servia precipitated the conflict. Germany blamed it upon Russia and France, the former from Slavic race sentiment, the latter from enmity that had existed since the loss of Alsace and Lorraine in 1870. They, on the contrary, laid all the blame upon ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... standard of rebellion had been raised; here and there might be found a Dutchman as stiff-necked as the fate that he defied. His father and his father's father had lived here upon the Lesser river, and nothing short of a cataclysm of nature should avail to budge him. The commissioners might cut up his cabbage-patch into building sites and reduce his garden to the limits of a city block, but they could not touch his beloved Arcadia House, with ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... be but one party now, and that at the Prophet's disposal.... He grew bewildered as he regarded the prospect, and saw how the whole plane of the world was shifted, how the entire foundation of western life required readjustment. It was a Revolution indeed, a cataclysm more stupendous than even invasion itself; but it was the conversion of darkness into light, ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... panic seized the city. The truth became at last apparent. This was not a defeat merely, it was a cataclysm. All hope was gone. The myriad dwellers in the city were left defenceless. No retreat, no flight was possible except to a few, for the pack-oxen and carts had almost all followed the forces to the war, and they had not returned. Nothing could be ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... sympathetically involved. After all, importance in fiction is exactly like importance in life; important to whom? the philosopher asks. The relativity of things human is a wholesome theory for the artist to bear in mind. Even as the most terrific cataclysm on this third planet from the sun in a minor system, makes not a ripple upon Mars, so the most infinitesimal occurrence in eighteenth century Hampshire may seem of account,—if only a master ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Plato's TIMAEUS story of Atlantis, he tells of the inhabitants' advanced state of scientific knowledge. The lost continent is believed to have vanished about 9500 B.C. through a cataclysm of nature; certain metaphysical writers, however, state that the Atlanteans were destroyed as a result of their misuse of atomic power. Two French writers have recently compiled a BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ATLANTIS, listing over 1700 ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... philosopher, known to posterity as Lao Tzu, who taught men, among other things, to return good for evil. His parentage, birth, and life have been overloaded in the course of centuries with legend. Finally, he is said to have foreseen a national cataclysm, and to have disappeared into the West, leaving behind him a book, now called the Tao-Te-Ching, which, for many reasons, he could not possibly ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... sleeping, mountain scenery, and a month of idleness." This experience, somewhat idealized, is the basis of the first part of "Tiger Lilies". Here Lanier had the opportunity of seeing at its best the life of the old South just before it vanished in the cataclysm of the Civil War. Of that life he afterwards wrote: "Nothing can be more pitiable than that at the time when this amiable outcome of the old Southern civilization became known to the world at large, it became so through being laid ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... "'Dear bachelor, says Lisette'—I have forgotten the tune. Well then, you know that there are four cardinal points. Now suppose there were to turn up a fifth cardinal point, all the harmony of nature would be upset. What they call a cataclysm—you understand?" ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... planes came droning home as they buried him, and the German guns roared on and guns answered, defending Amiens. And in spite of all, the cemetery had the air of quiet, remaining calm and aloof, as all French graveyards are. For they seem to have no part in the cataclysm that shakes all the world but them; they seem to withdraw amongst memories and to be aloof from time, and, above all, to be quite untroubled by the war that rages to-day, upon which they appear to ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... is hers," he repeated. "She was a wife, and the adultery is hers. More, she was the seducer. It was she who debauched your mind with lascivious readings, and tore away the foundations of virtue from your soul. If in the cataclysm that followed she was crushed and smothered, it is no ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... revered equally with the holy books,[2] and the other writings of the same class, which kept up so much excitement in the popular imagination. The advent of the Messiah, with his glories and his terrors—the nations falling down one after another, the cataclysm of heaven and earth—were the familiar food of his imagination; and, as these revolutions were reputed near, and a great number of persons sought to calculate the time when they should happen, the supernatural state of things into which such visions transport us, appeared to him from the first ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... in one stupendous passage (measures 246-277) it seems as if the very Heavens were falling about our heads. At measure 282 a theme of ideal repose is interpolated—just the contrast needed after the preceding cataclysm. The Development proper is renewed in measure 298 and after a repetition of the interpolated theme in measures 320-335 the rhythm of the first theme asserts itself in all its majesty, carrying us upward to a veritable table-land of sublimity. From this ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... ages. If only a mummy now turn over in his porphyry sarcophagus, a papyrus is generally found under him; and the finder, with the papyrus in his hand, may go forth fully warranted to revise every event from the first cataclysm of the Devonian age to the last earthquake in Java, and every man from Moses ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... mean because you've been in love?" And then as he but looked at her in silence: "You've been in love, and it hasn't meant such a cataclysm, hasn't proved ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... power and told Lieutenant De Long "it would keep the boys warm up in the Arctic," when they generated current with it. The ill-fated ship never returned from her voyage, but went down in the icy waters of the North, there to remain until some future cataclysm of nature, ten thousand years hence, shall reveal the ship and the first marine dynamo as curious relics of a ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... stored in his stable. We managed to raise four saddles, and we found the animals in good condition and spirited, withal unused to being ridden. I remembered the San Francisco of the great earthquake as we rode through the streets, but this San Francisco was vastly more pitiable. No cataclysm of nature had caused this, but, rather, the tyranny of the labour unions. We rode down past Union Square and through the theatre, hotel, and shopping districts. The streets were deserted. Here and there ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... she continued to think and cautiously to inquire about work she said no more to him. She spent not a penny, discouraged him from throwing money away—as much as she could without irritating him—and waited for the cataclysm. Waited not in gloom and tears but as normal healthy youth awaits any adversity not definitely scheduled for an hour close at hand. It would be far indeed from the truth to picture Susan as ever for long a melancholy figure to the eye or even wholly ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... thought—of no shading nor explanation. The questioner was not the type to deal unsteadily with a problem, and Gaston had been too simple and direct to note fine points or shadings. Perhaps neither of them had understood. Life had been so fair until the terrible thing had loomed up. It had come like a cataclysm—how could they, young and inexperienced as they had been, deal with ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... mortal existence was essentially bad and kept his eyes steadfastly fixed on another, was the victim at once of false philosophies and of the literal messianic prophecies of the Jews, which were taken over with Christianity. The earthly kingdom which was to come was to be the result of some kind of a cataclysm. Personally, I believe our Lord merely used the Messianic literature as a convenient framework for his spiritual Kingdom of heaven, and that the Gospels misinterpret his meaning on ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... time. And they would divide up the orchards, and demand that the product of the harvests—thousands and thousands of duros paid for oranges by the Englishmen and the French—should belong to all." But to stave off such a cataclysm, there stood don Ramon, the scourge of the wicked, the champion of "the cause" which he led to triumph, gun in hand, at election time; and just as he was able to send any rebellious trouble-maker off to the penal settlement, so he found it easy to keep at liberty all those who, despite ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... morally certain. He refuses the Republican nomination for President, in 1912, when another, viewing himself and his party less objectively, through vanity perhaps, might have believed that his own nomination was the one thing needed to prevent that year's Republican cataclysm. Four years later he accepts the Republican nomination for President, when as the result showed, there is at least a reasonable chance to win. He takes the post of Secretary of State when neglected opportunities lie ready to his hand and when the force of world ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... people, the religious respect with which they inspired him, his confidence in life, the simple need that he had of loving others and of being loved, his moral faith, blind but absolute. It was a complete cataclysm. He was crushed by brute force, without any means of defending himself or of ever again escaping. He choked. He thought himself on the point of death. All his body stiffened in desperate revolt. He beat with fists, feet, head, against the wall, howled, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Twice in his own life he had raced against death in a forest fire. But never had he seen a fire like this must have been. All at once he seemed to hear the roar of it in his ears, the rolling thunder of the earth as it twisted in the cataclysm of flame, the hissing shriek of the flaming pitch-tops as they leapt in lightning fires against the smoke-smothered sky. A few hours ago he had stood where Father John's Cabin had been and the place was a ruin of char and ash. If the fire ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... volcano's mouth? What if the method whereon things have proceeded since the creation were, as geology as well as history proclaims, a cataclysmic method? What then? Why should not this age, as all others like it have done, end in a cataclysm, and a prodigy, and a mystery? And why should not my ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... After the present cataclysm, we know very well that we shall have to improve and extend our higher education. Only, in building up the new, let us not lose grip upon the irreplaceable ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was really the case of Italy itself—conversion? The deepest passion in the poet's life came to him when, a voluntary exile in France, he witnessed the splendid reawakening of French spirit in face of awful danger. Living in Paris during the early months of the cataclysm, witness of the mobilization, the rape of Belgium, and the turn at the Marne, the heroic struggle for national existence in the winter trenches, he saw with a poet's vision what France was at death-grips ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... Carlyle's sneer after all. Till we had succeeded in some higher way than this, we had only the success of physical growth. Our greatness, like that of enormous Russia, was greatness on the map—barbarian mass only; but had we gone down, like that other Atlantis, in some vast cataclysm, we should have covered but a pin's point on the chart of memory, compared with those ideal spaces occupied by tiny Attica and cramped England. At the same time, our critics somewhat too easily forgot that material must make ready the foundation for ideal triumphs, that the arts ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... he had seen had been exceptional, conclusive things, that the besieging of New York and the battle of the Atlantic were epoch-making events between long years of security. And they had been but the first warning impacts of universal cataclysm. Each day destruction and hate and disaster grew, the fissures widened between man and man, new regions of the fabric of civilisation crumbled and gave way. Below, the armies grew and the people perished; ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... could reach us. The race is an undeveloped thing. A few centuries later it will have evolved another sense. This century may see the first huge step—because the power of a cataclysm ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... French Republican soldiery in 1792, and he retired to Lausanne. He protested against the Revolutionary aggression in his Lettres d'un Royaliste Savoisien; inspired by the mystical Saint-Martin, in his Considerations sur la France, he interpreted the meaning of the great political cataclysm as the Divine judgment upon France—assigned by God the place of the leader of Christendom, the eldest daughter of the Church—for her faithlessness and proud self-will. The sacred chastisement accomplished, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... indulge in such emotional demonstrations, and she could not imagine any possible cause. She moved the pink satin slippers out of reach of Harriet's thrashing feet, gathered up the fallen elephant and scattered chocolates, and sat down to wait until the cataclysm should pass. ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... the situation grew ever greater, strained towards the snapping-point, while the little cloud, the man's hand, which had arisen above the eastern horizon grew and overspread the heavens in a pall that became ever more black and threatening. For a few days yet it seemed that perhaps even now the cataclysm might be averted, but gradually, in spite of all the efforts of diplomacy to loosen the knot, it became clear that the ends of the cord were held in hands that did not mean to release their hold till it was pulled tight. Servia yielded to such demands as ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... of the Valley; and I now jokingly remarked that his wild tumble-down-and-engulfment hypothesis might soon be proved, since these underground rumblings and shakings might be the forerunners of another Yosemite-making cataclysm, which would perhaps double the depth of the Valley by swallowing the floor, leaving the ends of the roads and trails dangling three or four thousand feet in the air. Just then came the third series of shocks, and it was fine to see how awfully silent and solemn ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... cataclysm of Duke Georges happily took place. The single one there was would have gladly been mischievous if he could; but Luther outlived him—lived for twenty-four years after this, in continued toil, re-shaping the German Church, and giving ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... enforced. Poor enforcement, moreover, in the years 1808 to 1820 meant far more than at almost any other period; for these years were, all over the European world, a time of stirring economic change, and the set which forces might then take would in a later period be unchangeable without a cataclysm. Perhaps from 1808 to 1814, in the midst of agitation and war, there was some excuse for carelessness. From 1814 on, however, no such palliation existed, and the law was probably enforced as the people who made it ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... to tradition, brought into the world several sons, who dug the palis of Hulaana. It may be asked whether Hina, which means a fall, does not indicate a deluge (Kaiakahinalii of the Hawaiians), or some sort of cataclysm, and whether the islanders have ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... bully who was none the less cruel because he argued that he was disciplining the boy properly, bringing him up "right." Discipline or not, Big Tom did not know the meaning of mercy; and to Johnnie the blow of one of those great gorillalike fists was like some cataclysm ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... Bible-teaching reforms. Yet such are relatively superficial matters. The main reason for the comparative absence of religious revival among men at the front is that we all have been overtaken by the cataclysm of war in a condition ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... put the date of the cataclysm which destroyed all or part of that famous country at nine thousand years before Christ. If Denis de Milet, who wrote scarcely three thousand years ago, believed that in his time, the dynastic issue of Neptune was still ruling its dominion, ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... an entry? It's a tumble, a catastrophe, a cataclysm! Ye gods! A meteor, an aerolith, a bit of the moon falling on to the stage would be less horribly disastrous! I will take off my play! Chevalier, come in again, ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... I was absolutely certain that the Great War was caused by economic factors; British and German capital were competing, and the losing party took up the sword. I am not so certain now. It may be that the cataclysm was a natural ebullition of human nature, and as a cause the economic rivalry may have been just as insignificant as the murder ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... and do the deed not inscribed in the book of practice; a race of pigmies, slaves to tradition and superstition, lacking all force of individuality and rushing, like wild maniacs, toward the treacherous eddies of that social cataclysm which has swallowed the far mightier and greater nations ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... communards, set on the heights of Pere-Lachaise (the great city of the dead where the slumber of so many of earth's most illustrious imposed no respect upon the "Bolsheviki" of that cataclysm) aimed at the Pantheon, shot short and struck the Polytechnic. One shell burst in the midst of an improvised hospital there, gravely wounding ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... such cataclysm during the centuries of the Republic. Here the old stock though somewhat mixed with Etruscans, survived. The ancient aristocracy retained its dominant position in the state and society, and its mores even penetrated downward. They were not stifled by new southern ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank |
