"Grovelling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... far as it was possible for anything to soothe me, and I shifted slightly to one side and looked up at him furtively and crossly, my poor face all blubbered with tears and smeared with mire where I had lain grovelling. ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... necessary to enter as far as possible with confidence. From the general point of view that is not an easy matter as things stand. I am bound to say I am getting pessimistic about the War. The chief trouble is the total lack of action that characterises it. This grovelling in ditches is a rotten, foolish business in many ways—though to me sitting in comfort and safety behind the lines is ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Christians—these men have been promised by you, but now, the inheritance of perfect bliss. What is their faith, that it does not give them strength to die like men? Why is it that a woman quails not, while they lie grovelling on ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... legs with a snarl, and though not half grown, opened formidable jaws and long claws. Gerard, in a fury of excitement and agitation, flung himself on it, and delivered a tremendous blow on its nose with his axe, and the creature staggered; another, and it lay grovelling, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... want anything. If you think that the columns of the People's Banner are to be bought, you must have opinions respecting the press of the day which make me pity you as one grovelling in the very dust. The daily press of London is pure and immaculate. That is, the morning papers are. Want, indeed! What do you think ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... husky, became comparative strong and clear. "El hijo—Agua para mi Pedrillo—No le hace pari mi—oh la noche pasado, la noche pasado!" He was told to compose himself, and that his boy would be taken care of. "Dexa me verlo entonces, oh Dios, dexa me verlo"——and he crawled, grovelling on his chest, like a crushed worm, across the deck, until he got his head over the port sill, and looked down into the boat. He there beheld the pale face of his dead son; it was the last object he ever saw, "Ay ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the story of my wrongs—The miserable Highland drover, bankrupt, barefooted,—stripped of all, dishonoured and hunted down, because the avarice of others grasped at more than that poor all could pay, shall burst on them in an awful change. They that scoffed at the grovelling worm, and trode upon him, may cry and howl when they see the stoop of the flying and fiery-mouthed dragon.—But why do I speak of all this?" he said, sitting down again, and in a calmer tone—"Only ye may opine it frets my patience, Mr. Osbaldistone, ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... they and their constitution and their political rights should be trampled under foot by foreigners, introduced through a breach in the Constitution." The Federal opposition to the proposed War of 1812 has been described. It was a result of the "low, grovelling parsimony of the counting-room," as ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... no room for desperadoes contemporaneously with Her. Then he became conscious of the lady's raiment, and his brown cheeks flamed brick-red, while he dropped his eyes. In his shrinking, grovelling modesty, he made ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... at every repast I read five or six pages." Yet, he attached the most importance to "Locke's Essay," for he acknowledged that it turned his attention to metaphysics, and, he said, "It awakened me from my stupor, and induced me to form a resolution to abandon the grovelling views which I ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... concealment. The serpents in Virgil, after they had destroyed Laocoon, found an asylum from the vengeance of the enraged people behind the shield of the statue of Minerva. And, in the same manner, everything that is grovelling and venomous, everything that can hiss, and everything that can sting, would take sanctuary in the recesses of this new ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the Bible; let us remember that the Old Testament represents those early centuries when the people of Israel were surrounded by the corruptions of Baal worship, which transcended the grovelling wickedness of all other heathen systems, ancient or modern. Let us bear in mind the kind of training which the nation had received amid the corruptions of Egypt, all rendered more effective for evil ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... already well nigh passed, and but for the thick storm-clouds and the drizzling rain, some streaks of early dawn might have been seen on the horizon, when at the door of Marcus Laeca, in the low grovelling street of the Scythemakers—strange quarter for the residence of a patrician, one of the princely Porcii—the arch-conspirator stood still, and glared around with keen suspicious ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... grovelling down there for, ye drunken beast?" shouted the angry waiter, as he came down with a thud. "Why don't you walk on your ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... adherence to a cause. When King George reached England he dismissed Mar from office, suspecting him of sympathy with the Jacobite movement. Mar had expected something of the kind, and had written an obsequious and a grovelling letter to George, in which he spoke of the king's "happy accession," professed unbounded devotion to the house of Hanover, and promised that "You shall ever find in me as faithful a subject as ever any king had." The new king, however, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... repulse, shines with immaculate honors; nor does she assume nor lay aside the ensigns of her dignity, at the veering of the popular air. Virtue, throwing open heaven to those who deserve not to die, directs her progress through paths of difficulty, and spurns with a rapid wing grovelling cowards and the slippery earth. There is likewise a sure reward for faithful silence. I will prohibit that man, who shall divulge the sacred rites of mysterious Ceres, from being under the same roof with me, or from setting sail with me ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... fell upon their knees and howled for mercy. While Deppingham was holding his wife's limp form in his arms, calling out to her in the agony of fear, utterly oblivious to all else that was happening about him, his two friends were swiftly disarming the grovelling natives. Selim's knife severed the cords that bound Bobby Browne's hands; he was staring blankly, dizzily before him, and many minutes passed before he was able to comprehend that deliverance ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... been utterly confounded by the English ceremony of 'introduction,' when enforced as the sine qua non condition of personal intercourse. If England is right, then how clownishly wrong must have been his own previous circles! If England is not ridiculously fastidious, then how bestially grovelling must be the spirit of social intercourse in his own land! But no man reconciles himself to this view of things in a moment. He kicks even against his own secret convictions. He blushes with shame and ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... have often been reproached on this score. But I have always found it possible, without using vulgar and exaggerated abuse, to express the contempt which, in common with every right-minded man, I feel for the grovelling herd of incompetent boobies, whose minds are as muddy as the Rowley Mile after a thunderstorm. Surefoot was always a favourite of mine. Two months ago I said, "if Surefoot can only face the starter for the Two Thousand ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... mine in hours of fear Or grovelling thought to find a refuge here, Or through the aisles of Westminster to roam, Where bubbles burst, and folly's dancing foam Melts if it cross the threshold—where the wreath Of awestruck ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... are an ancient people. When thirty centuries ago our ancestors were grovelling in the lowest depths of primitive savagery, our fellow-Aryans of India were enjoying a civilization of their own, which was, in its way, unique and distinguished. Their philosophy shows testimony ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... salt in England, minds not swayed by mere externals, he is fully convinced; if he were not, he would spare himself the trouble of writing; but to the fact that the generality of his countrymen are basely grovelling before the shrine of what they are pleased to call gentility, he cannot shut ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... crying for her upstairs. She dragged herself up at once, but remembered and fell grovelling on the floor and wept. But Richard continued to call for her, and she struggled to her feet and made her way up the stairs, clinging to the banisters. She looked over her shoulder at the loathed room and was amazed to see that this mawkish early morning light showed it much ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the priest's hand, answered the kindly salutation. But he did so with a constrained air and with a solemnity which the priest also attributed to his newly-begotten rank. Fred Neville,—as he had been a week or two since,—was almost grovelling in the dust before the priest's eyes; but the priest for the moment thought that he was wrapping himself up in the sables and ermine of his nobility. However, he had come back,—which was more perhaps than Father Marty had expected,—and the best must be made ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... noble is his language—never pert— How grand his sentiments which ne'er run riot! As when he swore 'by God he'd sell his shirt To head the poll!' I wonder who would buy it The skin has passed through such a deal of dirt In grovelling on to power—such stains now dye it— So black the long-worn Lion's hide in hue, You'd swear his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... me. Neither did they follow. When we reached the outskirts of the crowd, and the ranks thinned, they had a mind, many of them, to surge along in our wake; but Zaemon whirled the Symbol back before their faces with a blaze of lurid light, and they fell to their knees, grovelling, and ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... merchantmen look very small indeed. But even she, haughty lady, was put in the shade, when her young but gargantuan sister, the Aquitania, floating leisurely between the booms, claimed the attention of the harbour, and reduced us all to a state of grovelling homage. And then the Olympic, not to be outdone by these overrated Cunarders, would join the company with her nose ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling thing that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an elevated ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... make a needless ado about capital punishment,—taking lives, when there is no life to take. Memento mori! We don't understand that sublime sentence which some worthy got sculptured on his gravestone once. We've interpreted it in a grovelling and snivelling sense; we've wholly ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... a miserable, thoughtless wretch!" he thought. "How could I neglect everything which might have helped to save my poor father for the sake of grovelling here, and all the time my mother ill, perhaps dying, while I slept, not seeming to ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... young men live together: one endeavoring by the aid of religion, and by studying the wisdom of the past, to exalt and purify his fallen nature; the other by grovelling in the dust, and mingling with beings yet more sinful and degraded, rapidly debased his mind to a more degenerate and ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... has ever flowed from the confessions of Rousseau, or the autobiographical sketch of Hume? From the first we rise with a confused and miserable sense of weakness and of power—of lofty aspirations and degrading appetencies—of pride swelling into blasphemy, and humiliation pitiably grovelling in the dust—of purity of spirit soaring on the wings of imagination, and grossness of instinct brutally wallowing in "Epicurus' stye,"—of lofty contempt for the opinion of mankind, yet the most slavish subjection to their most fatal prejudices— of a sublime piety ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... we shall merely mention the latter so far as they may serve to elucidate the case of the Gitanos, their brethren by blood and language. Spain for many centuries has been the country of error; she has mistaken stern and savage tyranny for rational government; base, low, and grovelling superstition for clear, bright, and soul-ennobling religion; sordid cheating she has considered as the path to riches; vexatious persecution as the path to power; and the consequence has been, that she is now poor and powerless, a pagan ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... young horseman who had come to their assistance so opportunely was none other than Count Ferralti, whom they had such good reason to distrust. He was sitting upon his horse and staring with amazement at Beth, at whose feet the driver was grovelling while tears flowed down his bronzed cheeks and he protested in an absurd mixture of English and Italian, by every saint in the calendar, that the girl had saved him from a frightful death and he would devote his ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... a satisfaction to know that they were our fellow-travellers still, as high and out of our reach as our own destiny. Truly the stars were given for a consolation to man. We should not know but our life were fated to be always grovelling, but it is permitted to behold them, and surely they are deserving of a fair destiny. We see laws which never fail, of whose failure we never conceived; and their lamps burn all the night, too, as well as all day,— so rich and lavish is that nature which ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... y-slaw, *slain Hath all the bodies on an heap y-draw, And will not suffer them by none assent Neither to be y-buried, nor y-brent*, *burnt But maketh houndes eat them in despite." And with that word, withoute more respite They fallen groff,* and cryden piteously; *grovelling "Have on us wretched women some mercy, And let our sorrow sinken in ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... used I, brought up among horses and their riders, to jeer at the wretched attempts of the tailor to remain permanently upon any central point of the horse's spinal ridge! How cheerful my feelings, when that man of shreds and patches fell prostrate in the sawdust, where he lay grovelling until the next revolution of his noble steed, when the animal caught him up by the baggiest portion of the trousers and carried him round the arena as a terrier might a rat! But, oh, what mingled joy and admiration, when out from the worried mass of coats ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... man but him alone, To use a body so, though 'tis one's own: Yet this false comfort never gives him o'er, That whilst he creeps his vigorous thoughts can soar; Alas! that soaring to those few that know, Is but a busy grovelling here below. So men in rapture think they mount the sky, Whilst on the ground the entranced wretches lie: So modern fops have fancied they could fly. As the new earl,[59] with parts deserving praise, 120 And wit enough to laugh at his own ways, Yet loses all soft days and sensual ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... out to inundate your hungry senses, and prepare them, by the delicate visitation of atoms, for the keen gusto of ampler contact! Especially if you have confidence in the dinner-giving capacity of your host—if you know that he is not a man who entertains grovelling views of eating and drinking as a mere satisfaction of hunger and thirst, and, dead to all the finer influences of the palate, expects his guest to be brilliant on ill-flavoured gravies and the cheapest Marsala. Mr. Ely was particularly worthy of such confidence, and his virtues as an Amphitryon ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... the poor man seeks his den. Unheeded issues forth again; Wherefore appears he, none inquires, Nor why—nor whither he retires. All that his pride would fain conceal, All that shame blushes to reveal; The petty shifts, the grovelling cares, To which the sous of want are heirs; Those evils, grievous to be borne, Call forth—not sympathy, but scorn; Here hidden—elude the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... reproduce in his work the character of the place which gave him birth. For, of all the historians—I do not say of antiquity but of all time—none is more rationalistic than he, none more free from any belief in the 'visions and omens, the monstrous legends, the grovelling superstitions and unmanly craving for the supernatural' ([Greek] {197a}) which he is compelled to notice himself as the characteristics of some of the historians who preceded him. Fortunate in the land which bore him, he was ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... this luxury and benefit among the general multitude, have been a Brahminical caste, dissociated by an imagined essential distinction of nature. While they were exulting in this elevation and free excursiveness of mental existence, the prostrate crowd were grovelling through a life on a level with the soil where they were at last to find their graves. But this crowd it was that constituted the substance of the nation; to which, nation, in the mass, the historian applies the superb epithets, which a small proportion of the men of that age claimed by a striking ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... Decameronian tales and sound of lute and psaltery, unconscious of the gigantic scythe wielded by the gigantic dishevelled Death, and which, in a second, will descend and mow them to the ground; but the crowd of beggars, ragged, maimed, paralyzed, leprous, grovelling on their withered limbs, see and implore Death, and cry stretching forth their arms, their stumps, and their crutches. Further on, three kings in long embroidered robes and gold-trimmed shovel caps, Lewis the Emperor, Uguccione of Pisa, and Castruccio of Lucca, with their retinue of ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... gentlemen of high spirit. In truth, for our own part, we are disposed to look upon such gentleman as being rather incumbrances than otherwise in rising families: happening to be acquainted with several whose spirit prevents their settling down to any grovelling occupation, and only displays itself in a tendency to cultivate moustachios, and look fierce; and although moustachios and ferocity are both very pretty things in their way, and very much to be commended, we confess to a desire to see them bred at the owner's proper cost, rather than at ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... soldiery, whom I had not observed before, were gathering like swarms of flies at the door of one of the Chinese guard-houses, which line the enclosing walls of the Palace. They were evidently much excited by some discovery. Wishing to learn what it was, I dismounted and pushed in. Grovelling on the ground lay an elderly Chinese, whose peculiar aspect and general demeanour made it clear what he was. He was a Palace eunuch, left here by some strange luck. The man was in a paroxysm of fear, and, pointing into ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... log-rolling and sly advertisement, and by the difficulty of stemming the tide of public ignorance and indifference, let him remember that at least he is a free man, and need lick nobody's boots; and let him cast an eye upon the chronicles of shameful humiliation, childish deference, grovelling servility, and whimsical reward or punishment, favour, or neglect, that marked the "golden age" when musicians found patrons from whose conceit or ennui they might ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... of Cleves had made her unwelcome appearance. One of the most curious and indeed incomprehensible facts concerning Henry VIII., is the admiring awe and grovelling gratitude with which he was adored by most of the women whom he had the privilege of ill-treating. After the year 1527, when he first conceived the desire of raising Anne Boleyn to the throne, and of divorcing Katharine, except for the ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... you deceived me! That mind which I esteemed so great and valiant, proves to be feeble, puerile, and grovelling, a slave to vulgar errors, and weaker ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... WILL fling yourself under the wheels, Juggernaut will go over you, depend upon it; and if you and I, my dear friend, had Kotow performed before us every day,—found people whenever we appeared grovelling in slavish adoration, we should drop into the airs of superiority quite naturally, and accept the greatness with which the ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... I put him down? Because, you know, I'm dashed if I'm going to do any grovelling and that ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... tribes and nations represented; then will he fancy the agitation of the mass, the swaying of the white-clad bodies, the tossing of bare arms and distended hands, the working of tearful faces turned up to the black-curtained pile regardless of the smiting of the sun—here men on their knees, there men grovelling on the pavement—yonder one beating his breast till it resounds like an empty cask—some comprehension of the living obstruction in front of the Jew ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... Lord, and take our parts E'en on Thy throne of purity! From these our proud yet grovelling hearts Hide not ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... judgments thus venerate, live according to the ordinances of the Church. It is a great wickedness in you to admit such crimes as do not become the conversation even of secular men. Your profession is the heavenly life. Do not condescend to the grovelling wishes and vulgar errors of ordinary mortals. Let the men of this world be coerced by human laws; do you obey ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... in many minds, and among them in some of the most estimable in feeling and purpose, inveterate dislike. To suppose that life has (as they express it) no higher end than pleasure—no better and nobler object of desire and pursuit—they designate as utterly mean and grovelling; as a doctrine worthy only of swine, to whom the followers of Epicurus were, at a very early period, contemptuously likened; and modern holders of the doctrine are occasionally made the subject ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... as the natural and united conquerors of the world. We wish to conquer that world, with angels at our head, in order that we may establish the happiness of man by a divine dominion, and crushing the political atheism that is now desolating existence, utterly extinguish the grovelling tyranny of self-government.' ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... night. Her spirit returned not to her till the crescent of the moon was yellow to its fall; and lo! the youth was sighing heavy sighs and leaning to the ground on one elbow, and she flung herself by him on the ground, seeking for herbs that were antidotes to the poison of the serpent, grovelling among the grasses and strewn leaves of the wood, peering at them tearfully by the pale beams, and startling the insects as she moved. When she had gathered some, she pressed them and bruised them, and laid them along his lips, that were white as the ball of an eye; and she made him drink drops ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for his want of sincerity, and Gay showed what could be still made of the form by introducing real rustics and turning it into a burlesque. Then, as Johnson puts it, the 'effect of reality and truth became conspicuous, even when the intention was to show them grovelling and degraded.' The Rape of the Lock is the masterpiece, as often noticed, of an unconscious allegory. The sylph, who was introduced with such curious felicity, is to be punished if he fails to do his duty, by imprisonment in a ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... American servant exhibits no such weakness as civility; he is resolved to let you know that you are in the country of equality, and, in order to do that effectually, he treats you as a grovelling inferior. You ask a civil question, and he flings his answer at you as he would fling a bone at a dog. Every act of service which he performs comes most ungraciously from him, and he usually contrives to let you plainly see two things—first, he is ashamed of ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... to make her suffer. His infatuation became a mania, and, up to the very day on which the Countess told the story, he persisted in his appeals to the Princess. In person he had gone to her to plead his suit, on his knees, grovelling at her feet. He went so far as to exclaim madly in the presence of the alarmed but relentless object of his love that he would win her or turn the whole earth into ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Gringuet's servants recoiled, while the market people gasped with astonishment. But I knew that the respite would last a moment only, and I stood forward. "Arrest that man," I said, pointing to the collector, who was grovelling on the ground, nursing his foot and ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... quitting him; go sir, you are unworthy of my anger. Pursue thy grovelling schemes. Strive to force to your arms a lady who abhors you, and were it not on one account, must ever continue to ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... but is less interesting intrinsically than as having given occasion to an indignant prose vindication by the poet, which, considering his self-evident honesty, is the most valuable document in existence for explaining the apparently grovelling panegyric of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. It makes clear (what indeed an intelligent reader might gather for himself) that the traditional respect for rank and station, uniting with the tendency to look for ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... day thou hast Trampled the Emperor's lands beneath thy feet. Oh, I am but a woman! Were I man, I'd find some better thing to do, than here Lie grovelling ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... for the other had dropped upon the floor and was grovelling in drunken hysterics at his feet. "It makes me sick to see a man act ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... smoke, and blinding, pungent clouds of chaff. It moved belly-deep in the standing grain, a hippopotamus, half-mired in river ooze, gorging rushes, snorting, sweating; a dinosaur wallowing through thick, hot grasses, floundering there, crouching, grovelling there as its vast jaws crushed and tore, and its enormous gullet swallowed, incessant, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... a good deal more. He is quite an ogre, and lives in a miserable hovel. How Katherine can degrade herself by grovelling there with him for the sake of what she ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... between novels and poems, and between poetry and eloquence, is interesting as throwing light upon his own poetic susceptibilities. He holds that poetry is the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion. It is curious to find one who is sometimes assailed as the advocate of a grovelling philosophy complaining that the chivalrous spirit has almost disappeared from books of education, that the youth of both sexes of the educated classes are growing up unromantic. "Catechisms," he says, "will be found a poor substitute for the old romances, ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... beings he had ever seen, the laziest and the dirtiest, be Christianized and terrified into worthy citizens of this fair land? Could the clear white flame that burned in the brains of the padres strike fire in their neophytes' narrow skulls, create a soul in those grovelling ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... and precaution, lowered her great bulk upon the bed in a coil—she had been standing—the centre of which was occupied by four glossy Irish Wolfhound puppies, who had arrived respectively at ten, eleven, twelve, and half-past twelve that night. The four, then blindly grovelling over the carpeted bed, were now perfectly sheltered in the still heaving hollow of their mother's flank. These comparatively world-worn pups had not arranged themselves conveniently in a cluster to receive their loving ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... British opinion would then be found on the side of the champions of Slavery, and against those of Abolition, the prediction would have been universally treated by Englishmen as an emanation and a proof of the most grovelling malignity, not less despicably silly than shamelessly calumnious. The time of trial came; and what no one would have ventured to suggest as conceivable proved to be the actual and positive truth. There must have been some deep-lying reason for this,—some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... Despite his prayers and grovelling pleas, therefore, they hurled him bodily out upon the deck, delivering him to the mercy of the fearful things from which they had ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... calmly, "Come now, base, ill-born brood; call ye it highway robbery to give freedom to those in bondage, to release the captives, to succour the miserable, to raise up the fallen, to relieve the needy? Infamous beings, who by your vile grovelling intellects deserve that heaven should not make known to you the virtue that lies in knight-errantry, or show you the sin and ignorance in which ye lie when ye refuse to respect the shadow, not to say the presence, of any knight-errant! ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... to Percy's to try to grovel in the dust before him, but he wouldn't see me. It's no good grovelling in the dust of the front steps for the benefit of a man who's in bed on the second floor, so I withdrew in more or less good order. I then got the present idea. Mark how all things work together for good. When they come to you and say "No title for you. ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... unaided eye. Revived, the three others saw it plainly—a great dim circle, visible as is the dark portion of the new moon—and, the power shut off, they felt themselves falling toward it with sickening speed. Perkins screamed with mad fear and flung himself grovelling upon the floor. Margaret, her nerves still unstrung, clutched at her heart with both hands. Dorothy, though her eyes looked like great black holes in her white face, looked DuQuesne in the ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... ground. At length, it seemed, it reached the turn of the high- priestess. She set down the basket on the steps, moved into the centre of the ring, grovelled in the dust before the reptiles, and still grovelling lifted up her voice, between speech and singing, and with so great, with so insane a fervour of excitement, as struck a sort of ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... that poor Dick was called off, and had to run nearly a quarter of a mile before he could find a place to creep through, which he did at last by scraping a little of the earth from beneath the pales, and then grovelling through, getting stuck about the middle of his back, though, and whining till he got free, which he did after two or three struggles, and then ran to join his young masters, who were whistling and calling him as loudly as they could, and who ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... isn't grovelling yet in the mire with popular fiction, but it is standing still, and whatever is standing still is going backward, or at least other things are passing it. To hold its own, the vaudeville must grab something more than its own. It must venture ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... gave us half-crowns for rehearsing him when other children were learning the Robin's Petition, what think you of this poor boy Leonard knowing few of the novels and none of the poems? No wonder the taste of the day is grovelling lower and lower, when people do not begin with the pure high air of his world! To take up one of his works after any of our present school of fiction is like getting up a mountain side after a feverish drawing-room or an offensive street. If it were possible to know the right ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... young person, and now and then one who is not in first youth, witnessing the sight in the religious atmosphere of such a church as this, without a suspicion of susceptibility, has suddenly seen what Paul saw on the road to Damascus, and has fallen on his face with the crowd, grovelling at the foot of the Cross, which, for the first time in his ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... is no rest anywhere else; there is no peace, no pleasure, no satisfaction—except close at His side. 'Speak Lord! for Thy servant heareth.' 'To whom shall we go but unto Thee? Thou hast the words of eternal life.' Look how these disciples, grovelling there on their faces, were raised by the gentle hand laid upon their shoulder, and the blessed voice that brought them back to consciousness, and how, as they looked about them with dazed eyes, all was gone. The vision, the cloud, Moses and Elias—the lustre ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... is coming on, and that the difficulties I find in my present views are greater than I thought them to be, and that here I am in the presence of a magnificent and consistent system shooting up on every side, whilst all that I see against it is weak and grovelling.' (Letter ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... of writing is a caput mortuum of impotent spite and dulness, till it is varnished over with the slime of servility, and thrown into a state of unnatural activity by the venom of the most rancorous bigotry. The eminent professors in this grovelling department are at first merely out of sorts with themselves, and vent their spleen in little interjections and contortions of phrase—cry Pish at a lucky hit, and Hem at a fault, are smart on ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... who had made it the glory and the envy of the world should be driven from it. Many of these creatures were members of the same Senate who, a few years previously, sent Napoleon a fervent address couched in grovelling language, imploring him to cement the hold his personality had on the national life. The following is what they say, and what they ask him to do:—"You have brought us out of the chaos of the past, you have made us bless the ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... impression on the one-year volunteer. From the moment when Heppner had lain grovelling on the ground before him a thorough change came over Trautvetter. The whole scene had been unspeakably revolting to him; he was seized with a grim horror on his own account too. Half unconsciously the sight of the big imposing-looking ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... mean it, you grovelling coward. And if you take my advice you'll submit, for it has ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... swarms, unregenerate, in the narrow little streets, chaffering, chattering, laughing in its rags as though there had never been a siege, a surrender, and a revolution. Beggars display their stumps and their sores, grovelling on the ground like brutes. Ragged children run for miles beside the carriage, singing for alms; and stop at last, laughing, as though it had been a good joke to run so far and get nothing for it. One monument in all this scene of squalor arrests attention—the now disused examination hall. It ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... had imagined himself a great writer, a man with a compelling message to his fellows. It seemed only necessary to reach out his hand in order to grasp a chaplet—a crown. With her the world seemed his debtor. Now he was a thing cast off, a broken boy grovelling at the foot of the ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... by a bitter laugh, and produced a decided effect on the grovelling George, who slowly raised himself upon his hands, and, lifting his head, looked his cousin ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... it is an ideal picture, and not reality, with which we have to do. Hence the number of these idolaters was seventy—the successors of the seventy whom Moses led up to Sinai to see the God of Israel! And now here they are grovelling before brute forms painted on the walls in a hole in the dark. Their leader bears a name which might have startled them in their apostasy, and choked their prayers in their throats, for Jaazan-iah means 'the Lord hears.' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and proselytize victoriously; hungerings to see self reflected in another convinced. In such efforts lie dangers as vulgar as the minds that make them, and love the excitement of them. But genuine love is far beyond such grovelling delights; and the peril of such a relation is in inverse proportion to the ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... chink or crevice, there pierces through the countenance of a man, through the very posture of his body as he stands or moves, a glimpse of his nobility and freedom, or again of something in him low and grovelling—the calm of self-restraint, and wisdom, or the swagger of insolence ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... in the straw and darkness of a solitary continental mad-house—squalid, neglected, and becoming gradually that which he was said to be. And he always shaped him somehow after the outlines of a grizzly print he remembered in his boyish days, of a maniac chained in a Sicilian cell, grovelling under the lash of a half-seen gaoler, and with his teeth buried in ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... house, a blight, a sore, a gangrene. It turned over in its sleep, the cover was hurled aside, and a grotesque object, round, pulpy, webbed, and of leprous whiteness—an object which Letty could hardly associate with a hand—came grovelling out. Letty's stomach heaved; the thing was beastly, indecent, vile, it ought not to live! And the idea of killing flashed through her mind. Boiling over with indignation and absurdly forgetful of her surroundings, she turned round and groped for a stone to ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... no degree. That the true 'result of the natural style of gardening is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities, than in the creation of any special wonders or miracles,' is a proposition better suited to the grovelling apprehension of the herd, than to the fervid dreams of the man of genius. The merit suggested is, at best, negative, and appertains to that hobbling criticism which, in letters, would elevate Addison into apotheosis. In truth, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... as His organ of intercourse with and influence upon the world. The grand record of his vision is the first example of prophetic utterance respecting the destinies of the world at large; and we see how the base and grovelling nature of the man was overpowered by the irresistible force of the prophetic impulse within him, so that he was constrained to bless the enemies he was hired to curse. And in this respect he represents the purest of the ancient heathen oracles; and his answer to Balak breathes the ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... journey of Clapperton. The great and wealthy merchant, on appearing in the presence of the king, first fell on his knees, and then throwing off his shirt, extended himself naked and flat on the ground, whilst his attendants almost buried him beneath dust and mud; after grovelling like a beast for some time in this position, he suddenly started up, shook off the mud from him, in which operation he was assisted by two of his wives, who then assisted him in equipping himself in his best attire, with his bow and quiver, and all the other paraphernalia of ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... finest Invention, by finding out a Method to supply this natural Defect in his Subject. Accordingly he leaves the Adversary of Mankind, in the last View which he gives us of him, under the lowest State of Mortification and Disappointment. We see him chewing Ashes, grovelling in the Dust, and loaden with supernumerary Pains and Torments. On the contrary, our two first Parents are comforted by Dreams and Visions, cheared with Promises of Salvation, and, in a manner, raised to a greater Happiness than ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... kind of lurking in the background, bunched up together. They seemed abashed by this strange frenzy of their womenfolks. How'd they know, the poor dubs, that a poet wasn't something a business man had ought to be polite and grovelling to? They affected an easy manner, but it was poor work. Even Judge Ballard, who seems nine feet tall in his Prince Albert, and usually looks quite dignified and hostile with his long dark face and his moustache and goatee—even the good old judge was rattled after a brief and unhappy effort to ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... notice—those who wilfully deluded their species, and those who permitted their species to delude themselves. The first of those classes consisted of the selfish tyrants who upheld an unjust supremacy by systematic delusions, and of grovelling mountebanks who quenched their avaricious thirst at the fountains of credulity and ignorance. The second class comprehended spirits of a nobler mould: It embraced the speculative enthusiasts, whom ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... grovelling, he got in again, and Uncle John insisted upon exchanging cards with the stranger. He got out his from some pocket, but the American had not one. "By the living jingo," he said, "I've no bit of pasteboard handy—but my name is Horatio Thomas Nelson ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... jaws of hell, and left to others, worthy of the transcendent honour, the glorious task of saving souls. What was I, steeped in sin, as I had been up to the very moment of my conversion—what was I, insolent, pretending worm, that I should raise my grovelling head, and presume upon the unmerited favour that had been showered so graciously upon me? It remained for those—purest and best of men, whose lives from childhood onward had been a lucid exposition of the word of truth—whose deeds had given to the world an assurance of their solemn embassy; it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... assert that in Heaven there will be factories working women and children for starvation wages; coal-mines and private property in land, dividing the population of Heaven into two classes, one revelling in riches and luxury, destructive of soul and body, the other grovelling in poverty, also destructive of all that is best in life? If not, how can they consistently support the system which inevitably produces that state of things ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... Extinguishing all free and generous love Of enterprise and daring, even the pulse That fancy kindles in the beating heart To mingle with sensation, it destroys,— Leaves nothing but the sordid lust of self, 90 The grovelling hope of interest and gold, Unqualified, unmingled, unredeemed Even by hypocrisy. And statesmen boast Of wealth! The wordy eloquence, that lives After the ruin of their hearts, can gild 95 The bitter poison of a nation's woe, Can turn the worship of the servile mob To their corrupt and glaring ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... confined to grovelling scenes of night, No more a tenant pent in mortal clay; Now should we rather hail thy glorious flight, And trace thy journey to ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... but one privilege and advantage to man's body above other moving creatures, that he is not, as others, grovelling, but of an erect, of an upright, form naturally built and disposed to the contemplation of heaven. Indeed it is a thankful form, and recompenses that soul, which gives it, with carrying that soul so many feet higher towards heaven. Other ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... what you mean by grovelling, Mr. Bertram. I don't like grovellers myself. I like men who can keep their heads up—who, once having them above the water, will never allow them to sink. Some men in every age do win distinction and wealth and high ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... the note to strike, and struck with a sure hand. The barricade was torn aside, and the people swept forward, falling on their knees, grovelling at Paul's feet, kissing the hem of his garment, seizing his strong hands ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... they were falling in love with each other, and then—an odd thing began to happen to me at night. Do you know when she lay there asleep beside me (he laughs shrilly) I would hear him, pushing open the door, crawling into the room, coming to me on his hands and knees, grovelling, whining, begging me (he is almost shouting) for her, for her, imagine it! And I, I had to get up and give my place to him. (He covers his eyes with his hands in a. convulsive moment.) Phew! Then ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... shaken quite out of my exultation. I stood raging at myself in a defiant scorn, struck dumb at the folly that will let a man who loves one woman go sweethearting with another. Her eyes stabbed me, the while I stood there dogged yet grovelling, no word coming to my dry lips. What was there to be said? The tie that bound me to Aileen was indefinable, tenuous, not to be phrased; yet none the less it existed. I stood convicted, for I had tacitly ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... lights, then dense blackness—so the hours passed. Sally after sally the snowplow made, only to withdraw to give way to the pick crews, and they in turn, gasping and reeling, hurried out for the attack of the plow again. Men fell grovelling, only to be dragged into the open air and resuscitated, then sent once more into the cruelty of the fight. The hours dragged by like stricken things. Then—with dawn—the plow churned with lesser impact. It surged forward. Gray light broke through at the end of the tunnel. The grip of at least one ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... the slovenly girl had announced—were told by him very curtly that they must go to the Public Prosecutor for the order. Anna went out without a word. Manske bowed and apologised profusely for having disturbed the Herr Untersuchungsrichter at his repast; he felt the necessity of grovelling before these persons whose power was so almighty. The Examining Judge made no reply whatever to these piteous amiabilities, but turned on his heel, leaving them to find the door as ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... Arnott into the darkness. 'We aren't beginning again!' We descended by the stairs, to find ourselves knee-deep in a grovelling crowd, some crying that they were blind, others beseeching us not to make any more noises, but the greater part writhing face downward, their hands or their ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... spot where Defarge the vendor of wine had stood, a moment before; but the wretched father was grovelling on his face on the pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood beside him was the figure of ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... temple were many priests gathered around the altars, praying, weeping, grovelling in the dust. Impostors in safety, they were not the less superstitious in danger! Calenus passed them, and entered the chamber yet to be seen in the south side of the court. Burbo followed him—the priest struck ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... scene by scene that strange old long-ago, Crowding my opened memory, presents Tumultuous, as in dreams, some dreadful state Wherein I knew not falsehood from the truth; Where hope ascending struck the star of Love, Then fell down headlong grovelling in despair; But rose at length and walked the beaten way. So dim and far these things; so worn and changed, I scarcely feel that I am he who sought And won her love. And is it true indeed, That I absorbed in tenderest intercourse Of trustful glance, and trustful ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... girl out from top to toe, and paid her jolly well, too, and Van Drissel had the run of the house, and then went away with three boxes of the brigadier's cigars into the bargain. A German isn't a human being when you come to look at it—he's just a mean beast, a bully when he's top dog, and a grovelling worm when he's cornered. Does your crush take many ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... never again! After the night when Mary Vance told them its gruesome tale they would not have gone through or near it on pain of death. Death! What was death compared to the unearthly possibility of falling into the clutches of Henry Warren's grovelling ghost? ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... human beings were permanently crowded together in dwellings centuries old, built upon ancient drains and vaults that were constantly exposed to the inundations of the river and always reeking with its undried slime; a little, pale-faced, crooked-legged, eager-eyed people, grubbing and grovelling in masses of foul rags for some tiny scrap richer than the rest and worthy to be sold apart; a people whose many women, haggard, low-speaking, dishevelled, toiled half doubled together upon the darning and piecing and smoothing of old clothes, whose ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... It isn't exactly the same as, let us say, Shakespeare's point of view: but if you feel that he has seen everything worth seeing, and said everything worth saying, then, of course, it is no good going on. But that is pure grovelling; no lively person ever does feel that—he says, 'Hang it, he has left some things out!' After all, everyone has a right to his point of view, and if it can be expressed, why, it is worth expressing. We want all ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... candle or torch but the blessed white light of day. It was the longed-for opening, though still far away. He thought that he had out-distanced Radicofani and stumbled on, exultation giving him new strength when a sudden eclipse of this star of hope made him crouch motionless, grovelling close to the earth. A man's head and shoulders were silhouetted blackly against the brightness. The man peered cautiously into the tunnel, and listened; but neither hearing nor ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... in philosophy, grovelling through Diogenes Laertius—Plutarch's "Placita" and sich—and often wondering whether the schoolmasters have any better ground for maintaining that Greek is a finer language than English than the fact that they can't write the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... a blind impulse made them clamour for his head. He was Vitellius' kinsman, they howled; he had betrayed Otho; he had embezzled their donative. They would listen to no defence, although he implored them with outstretched hands, grovelling for the most part flat upon the ground, his clothes all torn, his face and chest shaken with sobs. This only served to inflame the soldiers' anger. His very excess of terror seemed to prove his guilt. Aponius[43] tried to address them, but his voice was drowned ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... deliverance? Arise—the naked clothe, the hungry feed, The sick and wounded tend,—soothe the distressed. If thy weak arm cannot protect, yet plead With bold rebuke the cause of the oppressed, Kindling hot shame in Mammon's votaries, Abashed, at least, in lucre's grovelling quest; And, in the toil-worn serf, a glad surprise Awakening—when, from brute despondency, Taught to look up to heaven with dazzled eyes.— Thus mayst thou do God service,—thus apply Thyself, within thy limit, to abate What wickedness thou ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... demonstrating the bad policy of such behaviour, which could not fail of entailing infamy upon the author; and the small temptation that a man of Mr. Marmozet's figure and success could have to consult his interest in such a grovelling manner, which must create contempt and abhorrence of him in his patrons, and effectually deprive him of the countenance and protection he now enjoys in such an eminent degree. He pretended to laugh at my simplicity, and asked, if I knew for which of his virtues he was ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... is one of those curiosities of history the key of which is found in the grovelling nature of most human ambition. The son of Napoleon was far away. For those who were actuated by vulgar hopes, to wait was to run the risk of losing those first favors which are always easiest to obtain ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... absorption—hardly do they dare to breathe lest they should miss a point of her beauty! Ah, you would know, could you see it all, upon whose side the glory lies and upon whose the shame! Compare that moment of exaltation with the grovelling life of your Christians! Low-minded, flesh-devouring, Christians, discerning not the difference between clean and unclean! Bah! And you would have my little Sellamal leave all ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... vernal wood: The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line: In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true From poisonous herbs extracts the healing dew! 220 How instinct varies in the grovelling swine, Compared, half-reasoning elephant, with thine! 'Twixt that and reason, what a nice barrier: For ever separate, yet for ever near! Remembrance and reflection how allied; What thin partitions[88] ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... Virtue. Compare him with the most famous of the Dutch masters, and he rises into glory; coarseness and vulgarity in them had no point out of which could come instruction. If they picture the issues of their own minds, they must have been gross and sensual; they ransacked the muck of life, and the grovelling in character, for themes that one should see only by compulsion. But Hogarth's subjects were never without a lesson, and, inasmuch as he resorted for them to the open volume of humanity, like those of the most immortal of our writers, his ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... innumerable crowd of either sex and of every age, pronounced a seasonable and pathetic discourse on the forgiveness of injuries, and the instability of human greatness. The agonies of the pale and affrighted wretch, who lay grovelling under the table of the altar, exhibited a solemn and instructive spectacle; and the orator, who was afterwards accused of insulting the misfortunes of Eutropius, labored to excite the contempt, that he might assuage the fury, of the people. [29] The powers of humanity, of superstition, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... couple of feet lower than his heels, carried him in triumph across the playground, and staggered half-way up the steep garden path, when Acton happening to tread on a loose pebble brought the whole procession to grief, and caused the noble band of conquering heroes to be seen all grovelling in a mixed heap upon ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... brother (whom they knew and loved, and had often followed under fire), who had been sent from camp to make terms with the troops, recognised one of the spies, just as execution was about to be done upon him—and the wretch, with horrid outcries, grovelling and kneeling at Colonel Warrington's feet, besought him for mercy, and promised to confess all to him. To confess what? Harry turned away sick at heart. Will's mother and sister never knew the truth. They always fancied it was in action he ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... surface of Dr. Grey's character, realized that no tinge of cynicism, no affectation of contempt for his country and countrymen lurked in his heart, while erudition and foreign sojourning seemed only to have warmed and intensified his sympathy with all noble aims—his compassion for all grovelling ones. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... not improve on acquaintance. The walls, five feet high, were built of poles some five inches in diameter; the low roof, made of similar poles, was heavily heaped with earth. What with this deep earth-covering, and with their grovelling toward the earth in such a flat and neighborly fashion, they had a dreadfully under-foot look, and seemed rather dens than houses. Many were ragged and rotten, all inconceivably cheerless. No outhouses, no inclosures, no vegetation, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... the king, which were so ostentatiously displayed a while ago; that those various kinds of armour, and multitudinous names of nations, never heard of before, Dahans, and Medes, and Caducians, and Elymaeans, are nothing more than Syrians, a race possessed of such grovelling souls, as to be much fitter for slaves than for soldiers. I wish, Achaeans, that I could exhibit to your view the rapid excursions of this mighty monarch from Demetrias; first, to Lamia, to the council of the Aetolians; then to Chalcis. You ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... hour has at length struck. The flag is unfurled. The gentry want to extirpate us by means of poison, we will extirpate them with fire and sword. The brave shall live, the cowards shall die. Ye, who see your children, your parents tormented and grovelling in the dust, snatch up your arms and avenge them. Fear not the soldiers, they also will be on our side. Let none go who has short-cropped hair. Two deputies must proceed forthwith from every village to Hetfalu, which is to be ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... Concord neighbors, as he looks down upon them from a near-by hill: "On whatever side I look off, I am reminded of the mean and narrow-minded men whom I have lately met there. What can be uglier than a country occupied by grovelling, coarse, and low-minded men?—no scenery can redeem it. Hornets, hyenas, and baboons are not so great a curse to a country as men of a similar character." Tried by his ideal standards, his neighbors and his countrymen generally were, of course, found wanting, yet he went about among them helpful ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... said he. 'Get up, you grovelling hound! Here, Gerard, take charge of him and bring him ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... nature—bred by her people—had been stronger than the love of revenge or the fear of punishment. Joe was the first to read the meaning of her superstitious horror, knowing as he did her hatred of Nellie and her love for Harry. And suddenly pointing at the grovelling figure, he said in a shocked voice: "Boys, I see it all now; she's the murderer. She meant to stab Nellie, her rival, and would have done it if we hadn't in the darkness last night pitched our tent next to Nellie's. The tents are alike, and she ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... Fair-hands' shield through. When the young knight saw his shield cloven asunder he was a little ashamed of that stroke and of her language, and then he gave the other such a buffet upon the helm that he fell on his knees, and Fair-hands quickly pulled him upon the ground grovelling. Then the Green Knight cried for mercy, and yielded himself unto Sir Fair-hands, and prayed ...
— Stories of King Arthur and His Knights - Retold from Malory's "Morte dArthur" • U. Waldo Cutler
... Joe, thoughtfully—his feeling of despair seeming to have deadened the agony he had felt; "I've been thinking it out while you were grovelling up there like a rat, and I think that the air will soon be all driven out of the mine by the water. Ugh! hark at it now. How it comes bubbling and racing up there! If you put your head over the edge of the rock there, it's fit to blow you away, and it smells horribly. But can't ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... messengers, and its summit touching the place where a glory shone that paled even the lustrous constellations of that pure sky. Jacob had thought himself alone; the vision peoples the wilderness. He had felt himself defenceless; the vision musters armies for his safety. He had been grovelling on earth, with no thoughts beyond its fleeting goods; the vision lifts his eyes from the low level on which they had been gazing. He had been conscious of but little connection with heaven; the vision shows him a path from ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... man, of any grade of desert in intellect or character, can climb to any public distinction, no matter what, in America, without first grovelling down upon the earth, and bending the knee before this monster of depravity; when any private excellence is safe from its attacks; when any social confidence is left unbroken by it; or any tie of social decency and honour is held in the least regard; when any man in that Free ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... remain. What could it profit them to gather what they must straightway disgorge? But if they refuse to abase themselves before money, they would doubtless abase the foe. Thus it was better for them to stand erect in valour than be grovelling in greed; with their souls not sinking into covetousness, but up and doing for renown. In the battle they would have to use not ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... vanishing; we have been set upon our feet; we have been allowed to walk; we are beginning to smile,—that is, some of us. Those whose fathers were helped on are nearer the man as he should be than those whose fathers are still grovelling. My child, I think, stands a perfect type of what culture and refinement can give. She is not an exception; there are thousands like her among our Jewish girls. Take any intrinsically pure-souled Jew from his coarser surroundings and give him the highest advantages, ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... of an evil habit, the rising superior to opposition and attack, the spiritual exaltation that comes from resisting the invasion of the grovelling material side of life. Sometimes when you are worn and weak with the struggle; when it seems that justice is a dream, that honesty and loyalty and truth count for nothing, that the devil is the only good paymaster; when hope grows dim and flickers, then ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... have done what I purposed. To stay longer, to expostulate, to beseech, to enumerate the consequences of thy act—what end can it serve but to blazon thy infamy and embitter our woes? And yet, O think, think ere it be too late, on the distresses which thy flight will entail upon us; on the base, grovelling, and atrocious character of the wretch to whom thou hast sold thy honor. But what is this? Is not thy effrontery impenetrable, and thy heart thoroughly cankered? O most specious, and most profligate ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... strength necessary for action, but He never robs them of the faculty of progress, of spiritual elevation. Head and heart throb with the same pulsation; the brain thinks not aright without the healthful heart. Meanness and grovelling are always voluntary, and their essence is to resist superiority, to struggle against it, to try to degrade it: thus, all the bitter reactions of the Past against the changes truly needed for the development of the Future, spring from a primeval ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... impostor and biped animal already alluded to, actuated by an overweening desire of notoriety, and in order to catch the applause of some one, grovelling in the morasses of insignificance and vice, like himself, leaves his native obscurity, and indulges in falsehood, calumny, and defamation. I am convinced that none of the highly respectable Teachers of ———— has had any participation in this scurrilous ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... he held out his hand again and flicked his fingers. The dog rose from his grovelling posture and came eagerly forward, wagging his lank tail. He rubbed his nose against the man's hand and slowly licked the ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... Sometimes grovelling in the dust of gross selfishness which clings more or less to all of us, we bow worshipping before the gods, into which we elevate the meanest qualities of our own nature, apotheosizing sinful lusts of hate and vengeance; and while we vow reckless ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the summit of which was his crown of empire. At twenty-six, the man who, but a little earlier, was an out-of-work captain, eating his heart out in a Marseilles slum, was General-in-Chief of the armies of France, with the disarmed rebels of Paris grovelling at ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... ignorance and barbarity are fast obliterating all traces of the Roman walls of Isurium; their foundations having been dug up for the mercenary purpose of obtaining their materials. We cannot sufficiently censure such irreverence to "hoar antiquity," or the contracted and grovelling ideas which actuate ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... order of people, which once banished Cratinus and his company, because his scenes were not grossly comic enough for them, is no excuse for Aristophanes, as Menander could find out the art of changing that grovelling taste, by introducing a species of comedy, not altogether so modest as Plutarch seems to insinuate, yet much less licentious than any ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... What a grovelling disposition! What a poor part you act in the world, to confine yourself to family affairs, and to think of no more soul-stirring pleasures than those offered by an idol of a husband and by brats of children! Leave these base pleasures to the low and vulgar. Raise your thoughts ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... sight of the armlet the Wanderer fell on the earth, grovelling among the ashes of the pyre, for he knew the gold ring which he had brought from Ephyre long ago, for a gift to his wife Penelope. This was the bracelet of the bride of his youth, and here, a mockery and a terror, were those kind arms in which he had lain. Then his strength was shaken with ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... instant: Pall-Mall was still strong in him. The next he was grovelling on the floor. No saurian ever swung a tail so scaly and so curly as his. Clubland was a thousand years away. With horrific pants he emitted ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... his clear statements and demonstrations of facts, and his profound earnestness. Webster said concerning him that he had "the indisputable basis of high character, unspotted integrity, and honor unimpeached. Nothing grovelling, low, or mean, or selfish came near his ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... he chants his Te Deum, somewhat conceals the meaning of his act, and, keeping God a little out of sight, makes his mass express the natural feeling of a human triumph. But the sleek Puritan, at once grovelling and presumptuous, mingles with his sanguinary mood all the morbid sickly conceit, all the crawling affected humility of the conventicle. All his bloodsheds are "mercies," and they are granted in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... aloud 110 It was no time for counsel; in their spears Lay all their prudence now; the tyrant yet Was not so firmly seated on his throne, But that one shock of their united force Would dash him from the summit of his pride, Headlong and grovelling in the dust. 'What else Can reassert the lost Athenian name, So cheaply to the laughter of the world Betray'd; by guile beneath an infant's faith So mock'd and scorn'd? Away, then: Freedom now 120 And Safety dwell not but with Fame in arms; Myself will shew you where their mansion lies, And ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... He poured new blood into crumbling principalities, and taught the fingers of the untutored savage to war. His religion, in many places, put out the ineffectual fires of the fetich-house, and lifted the grovelling thoughts of idolaters heavenward. His language, like the new juice of the vine, made its way to the very roots of Negro dialects, and gave them method and tone. In the song and narrative, in the prayer and precept, of the heathen, the Arabic comes careering ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... curled round my waist and I was flung aside, to slither and roll down the swaying deck until I was stopped by the bulkhead. When I picked myself up, I saw half the men securing the crate and the other half grovelling around something on the deck. It was Liosha. She lay white and senseless with blood ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... as follows:—"'Nothing has surprised me more than the grovelling propensities of the English on the subject of names. Thus this very inn, which in America would be styled the 'Eagle Tavern,' or the 'Oriental or Occidental Hotel,' or the 'Anglo-Saxon Democratical Coffee-house,' or some other equally noble or dignified appellation, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... had screamed out something which arrested the blow, and which brought the chief and the lieutenant to his side with a new interest upon their swarthy faces. The others crowded in also, and formed a dense circle around the grovelling, pleading man. ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... man had fallen prone and was grovelling weakly. "Oh, I won't tell on you," he wailed imploringly. "I won't, I won't, Fong Wu; I swear ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... as I can observe, many birds that dust themselves never wash: and I once thought that those birds that wash themselves would never dust; but here I find myself mistaken; for common house-sparrows are great pulveratrices, being frequency seen grovelling and wallowing in dusty roads; and yet they are great washers. Does ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... his feet. His breath was quick and strong, a smile was on his lips, and he looked into the distance with lifted face and flashing eye, as if a glorious vision had arisen there. A touch on his foot brought him to himself. Pepehi was grovelling before him, baring his breast and offering to Kamehameha the poisoned dagger he had but a few moments before aimed at the young king's heart. Lifting him from the ground, Kamehameha comforted the priest with ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... the winter than the careless kennel men would have wished to be known, sprang toward me with well-meant, if rough, caresses,—evidently the few scratches he had amounted to nothing. I forgave him the cat cheerfully, but my poor carnations! They do not belong to the grovelling tribe of herbs that bend and refuse to break like portulaca, chickweed, and pusley the accursed. Fortunately, just then, a scene of the past year, which had come to me by report, floated across my vision. ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... friend Eabani, grovelling on the bare earth." The selfish fear of death struggled in his spirit with regret at having lost so dear a companion, a tried friend in so many encounters. "I do not wish to die like Eabani: sorrow has entered my heart, the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero |
