"Throe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tortured man and wept, And cried to Heaven for mercy. As I prayed, My soul cast off its shameful enterprise; And when it fell, I saw my godless self— My own degraded, tainted, guilty heart, Which it had hidden from me. Oh, the pang— The poignant throe of uttermost despair— That followed the discovery! I felt That I was lost beyond the grace of God; And my heart turned with instinct sure and swift To the strong struggler, praying at my side, And ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... despot's power; But long before that hour, While yet, in false and vain imagining, Thy sister nations would not own their foe, And turned to jest thy warnings, though the low, Deep, awful mutterings, that precede the throe Of earthquakes, burdened all the ominous air; While yet they paused in scorn, Of fatal madness born,— Thou, oh, my Mother! like a priestess bless'd With wondrous vision of the things to come, Thou couldst not calmly rest Secure ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... thirst; Land, by the oceans passed; Transport, by throe; Peace, by its battles told; Love, by memorial mould; Birds, ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... a crash and jar that rocked the whole island. It was the final throe of the volcano's travail. The lurid light above the crater subsided. The dust began to fall thick upon the treasure seekers as they lay upon the ground. They sat up, dazed and horror-stricken. It was some time before their ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! Be our joys three-parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... have courage to live out every throe of anguish fate assigned me, and principle to contend for justice and ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... back upon the meagre pillow, was in her death-throe groping in the air, with glazed eyes rolled upward to the ceiling, while the under jaw dropped lower, lower, leaving the mouth half open never to be closed again, save by ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... as if in torture, And it staggered to and fro; And its very shell was shaken In the anguish of its throe: ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... gratitude to you and your mother. It's only conceivable on the ground that he has never had friends before in the world. He seems like another man, or the same man come to life. And it isn't his fault that he's a priest. I suppose," he added, with a sort of final throe, "that a Venetian family wouldn't use him with the frank hospitality you've shown, not because they distrusted him at all, perhaps, but because they would be afraid of ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... upon his impending fate with unwinking eyes, and in the stern and scornful resignation of a fallen gladiator, when, at that awful instant, the floor shook under them with a rapid and convulsive throe—a mightier spirit than that of the Egyptian was abroad!—a giant and crushing power, before which sunk into sudden impotence his passion and his arts. IT woke—it stirred—that Dread Demon of the Earthquake—laughing to scorn alike the magic of human ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... pistol clenched in his failing hand, With the death mist spread o'er his fading eyes, He saw the sun go down on the sand, And he slept, and never saw it rise; 'Twas well; he toil'd till his task was done, Constant and calm in his latest throe; The storm was weathered, the battle was won, When he went, my friends, ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... who look at creeds as things to be changed like coats, whenever they seem not to fit them, little know what we Catholic-hearted ones suffer. . . . If they did, they would be more merciful and more chary in the requirements of us, just as we are in the very throe of a new-born existence. The excellent man, to whose care I have committed myself, has a wise and a tender heart . . . he saw no harm in my concealing from my father the spiritual reason of my giving up my curacy (for I have given it up), and only giving the ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... left the chaos which was in the beginning. If this earth were capable of the sentiments and emotions of justice and virtue, which in human mortal beings are the evidences and the pledge of our divine origin and immortal destiny, it would heave and throe with the energy of the elemental forces of nature, and project this enemy of two races of men into that vast region, there forever to exist, in a solitude as eternal as life, or as the absence of life, emblematical of, ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... a heart that goes; * And from hill-foot of eyelids the tear-rill flows: And parting and sorrow and exile and dole * And farness from country and throe that o'erthrows: Naught am I save a lover distracted by love, * Far parted from loved one and wilted by woes. And 'tis Love that hath brought me such sorrow, say where * Is the noble of soul who such ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... made drink a brimming cup, what day * He fared from natal country fain to go: His home left he and went from us to grief; * Nor to his brethren could he say adieu: Yea, his loss wounded me with parting pangs, * And separation cost me many a throe: He fared farewelling, as he fared, our eyes; * Whenas his ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Dead with a throe that was almost like a literal death. This—on this he had lived; the ether of ecstasy was the breath of his life. He clutched at the stained red handkerchief knotted about his throat as if he were suffocating; he tore it open as he swayed backward on his knees. ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the most wild, shrill and unearthly that ever came from the death-throe of a breaking heart, arose upon the air, and echoed through the woods, and the widow sunk, fainting, to the ground. They raised her up—the blood was flowing in torrents from her mouth. They bore her to the house, and laid her on the bed. John Dulan ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... The last throe of the conflict had come. It was no longer to be a duel at a distance—no more a contest between rifle-bullets and barbed arrows; but the close, desperate, hand-to-hand contest of pistol, ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... The last expiring throe of a mighty superstition was about to convulse the little society at Salem, and, as usual in such cases, ignorance and prejudice went hand in hand for the destruction of reason and humanity. The last ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... morning the school-house withstood its last throe. At ten o'clock, in the midst of a reading-lesson, there entered the young Pole's father. His ox-gad was in his hand; he did not remove his hat, but strode forward to the teacher's desk, sputtering broken English. When he came near, he shook his empty fist ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... Stewart, who had learnt to believe it mere dishonour and tameness to forgive the son for his father's deeds. A cloistered priest could hardly do so: pardon to a hostile family came only with the last mortal throe; and here was this warlike king forgiving as a mere matter ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is soft—yet dreams will still Convert that couch to snow, And in my slumbers shot and shout Are ringing from Glencoe." That stalwart man arose and paced The chamber to and fro, While to his brow the sweat-drop sprung Like one in mortal throe. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... only one of the jays came. Not many, in fact, had been asked, and when Jeff Durgin actually appeared, it was not known that he was both the first and the last of his kind. The lady who was matronizing the tea recognized him, with a throe of her quickened conscience, as the young fellow whom she had met two winters before at the studio tea which Mr. Westover had given to those queer Florentine friends of his, and whom she had never thought of since, though she had then promised herself to do ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... forth from the recesses of the gynaeceum there breaks a cry, expressing rather wrath and surprise than mere pain. Then there comes another, more plaintive—the moan of a strong man in the death-throe. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... was. A vital part had been struck. For some minutes the huge leviathan lashed and rolled and tossed in the trembling waves in his agony, while he spouted up gallons of blood with every throe; then he rolled over on his back, and lay extended a lifeless mass ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... the initiatory pang approached, felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet as when the virgin band, the victors chaste, feel at the end the earthy garments drop, and rise with something of a rosy shame into immortal nakedness: so I lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill into the ecstasy and out-throb pain. I' the gray of the dawn it was I found myself facing the pillared front o' the Pieve—mine, my church: it seemed to say for the first time, 'But am ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... sound As profound As the thunderings resound, Come thy wild reverberations in a throe that shakes the ground, And a cry Flung on high, Like the flag it flutters by, Wings rapturously upward till ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... low hooning of the whistling. I dashed out, slamming the door and locking it. I leant a little against the opposite wall of the corridor, feeling rather funny; for it had been a narrow squeak.... 'Theyr be noe sayfetie to be gained bye gayrds of holieness when the monyster hath pow'r to speak throe woode and stoene.' So runs the passage in the Sigsand MS., and I proved it in that 'Nodding Door' business. There is no protection against this particular form of monster, except, possibly, for a fractional period of time; for it can ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... and starry voids through which he drifted with her, his arm around her, her pale gold hair blowing about his face. In the same instant he was aware of the pitiful inadequacy of speech. God! If he could so frame words that she could see what he then saw! And he felt the stir in him, like a throe of yearning pain, of the desire to paint these visions that flashed unsummoned on the mirror of his mind. Ah, that was it! He caught at the hem of the secret. It was the very thing that the great writers and master-poets ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... volcanic hills, no water, not much grass, the soil is thin, the ground is covered with cactus, or prickley pear, the blossom of which is very beautiful of different colors, some pink, some yellow & some red. Here the earth has felt a shock at no very distant period, & by a convulsive throe, these enormous piles of volcanic rocks were upheaved; I went out and climbed upon the top of one of these mountains of red stone sat down, & looked with wonder about, & thought of the dreadful scene which it must have once presented. Then came the question, ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... your endless strife, From Weser's marsh to Naples' laughing bay, Was but the throe that marked the nascent life Emerging from the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... all time. For power rose against him not because of his sins, but because of his greatness—not because he sought to deceive the world, but because he sought to make it noble. And through that greatness of his he endured a double agony: not only the reviling, and the torture, and the death-throe, but the agony of sinking from the vision of glorious achievement into that deep shadow where he could only say, "I count as nothing: darkness encompasses me: yet the light I saw was the ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... heartless they seem in their brisk and resolute dispassion—yet how exactly they prefigure the implacable sternness of the ultimate shepherds. A strange life is theirs, taking them day after day into the bosom of homes prostrated by the emigrating throe. Does this matter-of-fact bearing conceal an infinite tenderness, a pity that dare not show itself for fear of unmanly collapse? Are they secretly broken by the sight of the desolate nursery, the dismantled crib, the forgotten clockwork ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... and that with as much sceleritie as you maye." He also indulges in the natural wish that his college bills "had leaden wings and tortice feet." This was in 1617. The young man's patrimony, whatever it may have been, had dwindled, and he confesses to "many a throe and pinches of the purse." For the moment, at least, his prospects were ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... by this time passed muster, and was soon after on board. The afflicted grand-mother stood, with her eyes transfixed on the vessel, gazing on her unheeding boy, who, insensible to the agonizing feelings that rent her breast, felt not one single throe of regret, his mind being entirely engrossed in contemplating the bright future, which the sergeant, who enlisted ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... the stone of the Kaabah, keep the faith which has been throe and mine since my mother, dying, gave me to thy mother, whose milk gave me health and, in my youth, beauty—and, in my youth, beauty!" Suddenly she buried her face in her veil, and her body shook with sobs which had no ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... mansion, spread the festive board; Welcome the gay, the noble, and the fair! Through the bright hall in joyous concert poured, Let mirth and music sound the dirge of care! But ask thou not if happiness be there, If the loud laugh disguise convulsive throe, Or if the brow the heart's true livery wear; Lift not the festal mask!—enough to know No scene of mortal life but teems with mortal woe! ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... that one exclamation, and stood panting and staring. The black bulk of Kelpie lay outstretched on the yellow sand, giving now and then a sprawling kick or a wamble like a lumpy snake, and her soul commiserated each movement as if it had been the last throe of dissolution, while the grey fire of the mare's one visible fierce eye, turned up from the shadow of Malcolm's superimposed bulk, seemed to her tender heart a mute appeal ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... those mountains and spent the streams: Our song is the voice of desire, that haunts our dreams, A throe of the heart, Whose pining visions dim, forbidden hopes profound, No dying cadence nor long sigh can ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... soul of mine! Soul, soul, soul of throe! Thy soul, my soul, two souls entwine, And sing thy lauds ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... once. A Mexican woman on my other hand, looked daggers at me for an instant, divining my words, but she was too eager to see all the blood and the anguish in the arena, not to miss a throe of the dying horse, to turn her eyes away for more ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... silence for a moment. Then the stranger stretched forth his hand. "Yet in that leaving him, remember;—It is not the act, but the will, which marks the soul of the man. He who has crushed a nation sins no more than he who rejoices in the death throe of the meanest creature. The stagnant pool is not less poisonous drop for drop than the mighty swamp, though its reach be smaller. He who has desired to be and accomplish what this man has been and accomplished, is as this man; ...
— Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland • Olive Schreiner
... scream, and it was as though a shuttle shot all across the sea in one breath, and a second head and neck tore through the levels, driving a whispering wall of water to right and left. The two Things met—the one untouched and the other in its death-throe—male and female, we said, the female coming to the male. She circled round him bellowing, and laid her neck across the curve of his great turtle-back, and he disappeared under water for an instant, but flung up again, grunting in agony while the blood ran. Once ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... columns, some of them capped by a huge flat rock laying as regularly as if placed there by the hand of mechanical skill, and then again they were thrown down and lay scattered around as if by some violent throe of nature. Though there were vast fields of rock, not a shrub, nor any sign of vegetation could be seen. All was desolate, sand and rock. What struck them as being very singular about these rocks, was the fact that, they were divided into two distinct parts, leaving a pathway through them ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... world shall take you, When leaves are falling, then our paths shall part. Sing unto me the treasures of your heart, And for each song another song I'll make you; So may you pass into the lamplit glow Of age, as forests fade without a throe. ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... spasms that with each throe seemed to tear his frame asunder; still he conquered them, and his words went on; his eyes fastened on the burning white glare of the wall as though all the beauty of this woman glowed afresh there to ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... steeplejack appeared at the little doorway with a ladder. Planting it in a jiffy, he scrambled up, took me under his arm, bore me down and laid me against the parapet, where at first I began to cry and then emptied my small body with throe after throe of sickness. ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... suffering, ache, smart, throe, rack, agony, torture, distress, qualm, discomfort, pang, excruciation, paroxysm, gripe, twinge, cramp, travail, stitch, crick, anguish; heartache, misery, dolor. Antonyms: ease, comfort, relief, solace. Associated Words: anodyne, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... "You will not throe me off my guard thus," said Henry, sternly. "You are my prisoner. I know you to be a pirate. At any rate you will have to prove yourself to be an honest man before you quit this hut a free man. Mother, leave this place that I may lock ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... days—thickened up, and I turned my eyes away from the dying face, half hidden by the darkness. His struggles were very terrible, but with my weight upon his lower limbs, and my grasp upon his windpipe, that death-throe was as silent as it was horrible. The end came slowly. I could not bear the horror of it longer. I must finish it and be done with it. I put my right arm under the man's shoulders and raised the upper part of his body from the berth. Then a desperate wrench with my left arm, and ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... white-hot, to the daily issues of private and public life, in a way to make pampered ladies hold their breath, and men of the world their brows. Such a man, to whom the least sin seemed black and bottomless, yet who appeared to know by experience the soul's every throe in the foulest crimes, was not going to show his joys on the surface ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... we strike Columbus River—pass me two or throe skeins of thread to stand for the river; the sugar bowl will do for Hawkeye, and the rat trap for Stone's Landing-Napoleon, I mean—and you can see how much better Napoleon is located than Hawkeye. Now here you are with your ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... Israel, mourn! Give utterance to the inward throe, As wails of her first love forlorn The virgin clad ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... wide; And eyes the simple rustic hind, Whose toil upholds the glittering show, A creature of another kind, Some coarser substance, unrefin'd, Placed for her lordly use thus far, thus vile, below. Where, where is love's fond, tender throe, With lordly honour's lofty brow, The powers you proudly own? Is there, beneath love's noble name, Can harbour, dark, the selfish aim, To bless himself alone! Mark maiden innocence a prey To love-pretending snares, This ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... reiterated "pitsfull"—still there remained over and above the feast-crumbs sufficient for the battenings of other than theatrical appetites. Immediately the press-gang—we beg pardon, the press—arose, and with a mighty throe spawned many monsters. Great drama! Greater Press! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... were seated together, regarding with impatience the brief preparations to embark. Boone, Roughgrove, Sneak, and Joe were busily engaged lading the vessel. Sneak had hastily brought thither his effects, and without a throe of regret abandoned his house for ever to the owls. Joe succeeded with but little difficulty in getting the horses on board. The fawn, the kitten, the hounds, and the chickens ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... the night; Her lily breasts have known the bliss Of the cool air's unfaltering kiss. She is made one with loveliness, Enfranchised from the world's distress, Given utterly to joy, a bride With a bride's hunger satisfied. Now, though she heavily walk, and know The sharp premonitory throe And the life leaping in the gloom Of her most blessed and chosen womb, It is as though foot never was So light upon the glimmering grass. She is shot through with the stars' light, Helped by their calm, unwavering might. In tall, lone-swaying ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... it well, had heard it often by his camp fire in his old prospecting days—the yell of a California lion in the mountains beyond. The night was drawing toward its last deep hours when he came to a straight uprearing of rock, a ledge, broken and heaved upward in some ancient earth-throe. He felt along its face, glazed by water films, close-curtained by shrubs and ferns, found ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... appearances, but in nearly the same centre; here existing as an augitic rock, there as a syenite, yonder as a basalt or amygdaloid. At one place it uptilted the sandstone; at another it overflowed it; the dark central masses raised their heads above the surface, higher and higher with every earthquake throe from beneath; till at length the gigantic Ben More attained to its present altitude of two thousand three hundred feet over the sea-level, and the sandstone, borne up from beneath like floating sea-wrack on the back of a porpoise, ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... a throe abate, Is chiseling and quarrying, early, late. The hoarse flood chafes, with straiten'd tides: Aloft, the proud Arch climbs ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Aw'd introduce her, as aw owt. Mi hont wor pleeased to see us booath,— To mak fowk welcome nivver looath,— An th' table grooaned wi richest fare, An one an all wor pressed to share, Mi sweetheart made noa moor to do. Shoo buckled on an sooin gate throe; Mi hont sed, as shoo filled her glass,— "Well, God ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... wherever woe Of high or low the bosom wrings, There, gasp for gasp, and throe for throe, Is answer'd ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... woods, when shaken by the breeze, Take deeper, firmer root; As winter's frosts but make the trees Abound in summer fruit; So every bitter pang and throe That Christian firmness tries, But nerves us for our work below, And forms us for the ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... car, Up went the hum celestial. High afar The Latmian saw them minish into nought; And, when all were clear vanish'd, still he caught A vivid lightning from that dreadful bow. When all was darkened, with Etnean throe The earth clos'd—gave a solitary moan— And left him once again in ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... so true and pure of soul, Mute in the throe of love's mysterious pain— Like thine own steel within the fire's glow, Flashed forth to me—then faded ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... went over the obstruction in a tumbling heap and sprang at the flag as a panther at prey. He pulled at it and, wrenching it free, swung up its red brilliancy with a mad cry of exultation even as the color bearer, gasping, lurched over in a final throe and, stiffening convulsively, turned his dead face to the ground. There was much blood upon the ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... moaned—among the boulders below the ruins, a throe of its tide being timed to regular intervals. These sounds were accompanied by an equally periodic moan from the interior of the cottage chamber; so that the articulate heave of water and the articulate heave of life seemed but differing ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... second time before speaking, for I feared to betray myself. The choice of a friend might be a momentous occasion for me. I had already ground for hope, that she had asked me to help her in the first throe of her trouble; but love makes its own doubtings, and I feared. My thoughts seemed to whirl with lightning rapidity, and in a few seconds a whole process of reasoning became formulated. I must not volunteer to be the friend that the father advised his daughter to have to aid her in her ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... worthy sir, that's just the thing I'd like especially to sing; But at the task my spirits faint, For 'tis not every one can paint Battalions, with their bristling wall Of pikes, and make you see the Gaul, With, shivered spear, in death-throe bleed, Or ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... sound and lusty book. True vigor of expression does not pass from page to page, but from man to man, where the brain is kindled and the lips are limbered by downright living interests and by passions in the very throe. Language is the soil of thought; and our own especially is a rich leaf-mould, the slow growth of ages, the shed foliage of feeling, fancy, and imagination, which has suffered an earth-change, that the vocal forest, as Howell called it, may clothe itself anew with living ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... and consumed me! Greeting! my parting soul cries, and greeting again!... O my country! Beautiful is it to fall, that the vision may rise to fulfilment, Giving my life for thy life, and breathing thine air in the death-throe; Sweet to eternally sleep in thy ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... how well!" answered the man, with a throe of bitter passion breaking up the calm he ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... lightly, as if it was a faded robe they shook off to don a brighter one. Others—my father was one, and I am like him—see one by one their trusts, their hopes, their loves die: then with a deathly throe sunder themselves from life. But pardon ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... motherhood; All love begins and ends there,—roams enough, But, having run the circle, rests at home. Why is your expiation yet to make? Pull shame with your own hands from your own head Now,—never wait the slow envelopment Submitted to by unelastic age! One fierce throe frees the sapling: flake on flake Lull till they leave the oak snow-stupefied. Your heart retains its vital warmth—or why That blushing reassurance? Blush, young blood! Break from beneath this icy premature ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... became mist, writhing and tinged with faint colors, that submerged his will and his consciousness, till they sank, gathering impetus, into a void below—the vacancy of the spirit that looses its hold on the body and is rudderless. He knew the blackness which is death, the momentary throe of entering it, the shock, the ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... around her, until some night when the wind comes fiercely down the river, and heavy storms have increased the volume of water as well as loosened the last bolt that yet holds her securely together,—then, when there is none to witness the death-throe of wood and iron, she will heave and labor and at last break apart. The two fragments will go sweeping down, whirled over like playthings—touching the points of the rocks and giving out groans and shrieks like those which precede dissolution; then for one moment there will be ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... too hard For mortal feet, and passed, none following him. Yet pondered the compassion of our Lord, But in that hour there rang a voice as sharp As cry of travail, so as if the earth Moaned in birth-throe "Nasyami aham bhu Nasyati loka! Surely I Am Lost, I And My Creatures:" then a pause, and next A pleading sigh borne on the western wind, "Sruyatam dharma, Bhagwat!" Oh, Supreme Let Thy Great Law Be Uttered! Whereupon The Master cast his vision forth on flesh, Saw who should hear and who must ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... the mind, frightened and cornered, determined to dominate; a fierce delight in the battle raging behind her serene and smiling mask to the accompaniment of that vulgar blare of war where mind over matter was as powerless in the death throe as incantations ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... there have I struck. Mother! Mother! [He drinks. The anguish of it hath taken hold of me, And I am gripped by Nature. O, it comes Upon me, this too natural remorse. I faint! I flinch from the raw agony! I cannot face this common human throe! Ah! Ah! the crude stab of reality! I am a son, and I have killed my mother! Why! I am now no more than him who tills Or reaps: and I am seized by primal pangs. Mother! [He drinks. The thunder crieth motherless. Ah! how this sword ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... heart and throbbed his veins, As morn's first struggling gleam. His rift net caught, He e'en must follow its meandering beam, Till something on the walls his footsteps brought To rest. He shuddered as he saw the death-throe stains ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... sunsets. In her rummaging about the house she pulled open a chest of drawers which used to stand in the room where she slept when a child. It was full of her own childish clothing, a little girl's linen and muslin; and she thought with a throe of despair that she could as well hope to get hack into these outgrown garments, which the helpless piety of Mrs. Bolton had kept from the rag-bag, as to think of re-entering the relations of the life so ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... ocean of poetry. This, indeed, it still seems to me, notwithstanding the well-meaning suasion of certain admirers of the poem who have hoped "I should do it justice," thereby meaning that I should eulogise it as a masterpiece. It is a gigantic effort, of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a wrestling Titan. That the poem contains much which is beautiful is undeniable, also that it is surcharged with winsome and profound thoughts and a multitude of will-o'-the-wisp-like fancies which all shape ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... unfather'd mass no birth In divine seats hath known; In the blank, echoing solitude if Earth, Rocking her obscure body to and fro, Ceases not from all time to heave and groan, Unfruitful oft, and at her happiest throe Forms, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Roth * And mix our lives nor part them evermo'e! How blest were we as 'death one roof we dwelt * Conjoined in joys nor recking aught of woe; Till Fortune shot us pith the severance shaft; * Ah who shall patient bear such parting throe? And dart of Death struck down amid the tribe * The age's pearl that Morn saw brightest show: I cried the while his case took speech and said:—* Would Heaven, my son, Death mote his doom foreslow! Which be the readiest road wi' thee to meet * My Son! for whom I would ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... other cities in America was struggling out of the earth. The whole country was in a similar throe. Everywhere were great dreams partly realized. One could not help but imagine what the nation would become, just as one could not look at the unfinished Capitol at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue without completing its lines ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... or legs. An indescribable appreciation of the impression which he made upon others filled my heart. His isolation from the sympathy of every person there gave me a pain and a pity, and for the first time I felt a pang of tenderness, and a throe of pride for him. But Alice, upon whom he never made any impression, saw nothing of this; her gayety soon removed the stiffness and silence he created. The party grew noisy again, except Ben, who had not broken the silence into which he fell as soon ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... brought with them, alas! a wounded foe, Bound hand and foot, yet nursed with cruel care, Lest that in death he might escape one throe They had decreed his living flesh should bear: A youthful officer, by one foul blow Of treachery surprised, yet fighting still Amid his ambushed train, calm as the snow Above him; hopeless, yet content to spill His blood with theirs, ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... Suddenly a thrill of consciousness went up from her left hand—the hand that held her skirts—such a thrill as is known only to the sex that wills to have its pocket there. She made one or two convulsive confirmatory clutches at it from the outside, then, with a throe of actual despair, she thrust her hand into her pocket. It was a crushing fact, her purse was gone—her purse that held the possibilities of her journalistic future molten and stamped ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... done his work, but he had hardly reckoned on the strength of this man. With a vast throe of fear Locasto tried to free himself. Tenser, tenser grew the thongs; they strained, they bit into his flesh, but they would not break. Yet as he relaxed it seemed to him they were less tight. Then he ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... boyhood of wonder and hope, Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope,— Till lo, thou art grown to a monarch; a people is thine; And all gifts, which the world offers singly, on one head combine! On one head, all the beauty and strength, love and rage (like the throe That, a-work in the rock, helps its labour and lets the gold go) High ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning them,—all Brought to blaze on the head of one ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... is the birth-throe of a new European order of things. The man who attempts to judge the future by the old standards or to force the future back to them will be found to be hopelessly out of date. The world will have no use for him. The world has left behind forever the ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... singer, "can the good come without a struggle? Is the beautiful accomplished without strife? Recall the tales of primeval chaos, when, as sang the Ascraean singer, love first darted into the midst; imagine the heave and throe of joining elements; conjure up the first living shapes, born of the fluctuating slime and vapour. Surely they were things incomplete, deformed ghastly fragments of being, as are the dreams of a maniac. Had creative Love stopped there, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... after such Diplomatic earthquakes and travail of Nature, there is at last birth; the Seventh Travail-throe has been successful, in some measure successful. Here actually is Baby Carlos's Apanage; there probably, by favor of Heaven and of the Sea-Powers, will the Kaiser's Pragmatic Sanction be, one day. Treaty of Seville, most imminent of all those dreadful Imminencies of War, has passed ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... didst hale Unto thy couch in the cave. 'Mother! mother!' I shrieked out my wail— Wroughtest the pleasure of Kypris; no shame made the god-lover quail. Wretched I bare thee a child, and I cast him with shuddering throe Forth on thy couch where thou forcedst thy victim, a bride-bed of woe. Lost—my poor baby and thine! for the eagles devoured him: and lo! Victory-songs to thy lyre dost thou chant!—Ho, I call to thee, son Born to Latona, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... radical change, sweeping organic change; change of state, phase change; quantum leap, quantum jump; clean sweep, coup d'etat[Fr], counter revolution. jump, leap, plunge, jerk, start, transilience|; explosion; spasm, convulsion, throe, revulsion; storm, earthquake, cataclysm. legerdemain &c. (trick) 545. V. revolutionize; new model, remodel, recast; strike out something new, break with the past; change the face of, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the retaining of this paper was so important to him that even in his death throe he thrust it in this strangest of all hiding-places, as being the only one that could be considered safe from search. And the girl! Her first words on coming to herself were: 'You have left that line of writing behind.' Mr. Gryce, those words, few and inexplicable as they are, contain ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... looking up expectantly, from the abyss, at the traveller. It was too late to dismount. In entering alone this gorge, I had not the faintest idea that I would have occasion to regret my foolish imprudence. I had not realized its character. It was simply an enormous crevasse, rent by some Titanic throe of nature, some tremendous earthquake, which had split the granite mountain. In its bottom I could just distinguish a hardly perceptible white thread, an impetuous torrent, the dull roar of which filled the defile with mysterious ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... minaca. Three tri. Threshold sojlo. Thrift sxpareco. Thrifty sxparema. Thrill vibri, eksciti. Thrive prosperi. Throat gorgxo. Throb bati, palpiti. Throbbing bato—ado, ekbato. Throe agonio. Throne trono. Throng (crowd) amaso. Throttle sufoki. Through tra. Throw jxeti. Throw across transjxeti. Throw out eljxeti. Thrush turdo. Thrust pusxegi, enpusxi. Thumb dika ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... indignant Earth Which gave the sons of England birth 140 Had felt their blood upon her brow, And shuddering with a mother's throe ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... state of things lasted nearly an hour, after which time nature seemed to recover herself by a sudden throe, for a brisk breeze, which was highly refreshing to our senses, and which was attended by the loud hollow subterranean sound I have before referred to, unexpectedly sprang up, and swept off, as if by magic, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... and the whole country from the sea foam to the foothills looked tumbled and new, with the newness of infinite antiquity. The last thunders of creation seemed scarcely to have died away, the last throe scarcely to have ceased, leaving million-ton rock cast on rock and the new, shear-cut cliffs spitting back their first taste ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... Freemen know The truly loyal throe That gives heroic impulse to the Man— The passion and the fire, The chivalrous desire: Our Fathers ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... the wild unfathered mass no birth In divine seats hath known; In the blank echoing solitude, if earth, Rocking her obscure body to and fro, Ceases not from all time to heave and groan, Unfruitful oft, and, at her happiest throe, Forms ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... the great gong struck. Just over his head, penetrating wood and iron, he heard the mighty throe of the Pit once more beginning, moving. And then, once again, the limp and ravelled fibres of being grew tight with a wrench. Under the stimulus of the roar of the maelstrom, the flagging, wavering brain righted itself once more, and—how, he himself could not say—the business ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... pang of exquisite suffering—a throe of true despair—rent and heaved my heart. Worn out, indeed, I was; not another step could I stir. I sank on the wet doorstep: I groaned—I wrung my hands—I wept in utter anguish. Oh, this spectre of death! Oh, this last hour, approaching in such horror! Alas, this isolation—this banishment from ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the fond hearts of all the turtle-doves Are broken in compassion of her woe, And every tender little bird that loves Feels in his breast a sympathetic throe; And flowers are sad wherever she may go, And hoarse with sighs the waterfalls ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... and ragged, as though broken by a torrent of storm. What is technically called the "ox-eye," the "egg of the tornado," appeared in a fragment of space, glistening below the gloomy rain-arch. The wind ceased to blow; every sound was hushed as though Nature were nerving herself, silent for the throe, and our looks said, "In five minutes it will be down upon us." And now it comes. A cold blast smelling of rain, and a few drops or rather splashes, big as gooseberries and striking with a blow, are followed ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the utmost!" The pain caught her like a physical throe. It suddenly came to her how the girl must have loved him to be so generous—what memories ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... called my life was a garment about my feet, For the web of the years was rent with the throe of a yearning strong. With a sweep as of winds in heaven, with a rush as of flames that meet, The Flesh and the Spirit clasped; and I cried, ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... will she bestow; And were I only young again! Said "Hate ye shall have and the hunger throe"— To honied words we list ...
— The Return of the Dead - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... upheaval going on a little further south being here, for the ice lay positively as smooth as a table before me. It is my belief that this stretch of smooth ice has never, never felt one shock, or stir, or throe, and reaches right down to the bottom ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... eyes were wet. Something surged in him like the throe of the river where the ship went in. It was good to have built ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... blossoms, dim and gray, Lost on the wind? Ah, no, Hark, from yon clump of English may, A cherub's mocking crow, A sudden twang, a sweet, swift throe, As Daisy trips by Dan, And careless Cupid drops his ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... light, Jesu, maid's son, What was the feast followed the night Thou hadst glory of this nun? Feast of the one woman without stain. For so conceived, so to conceive thee is done; But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain, Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... swift-winged Winds, And River-wells, and laughter innumerous Of yon Sea-waves! Earth, mother of us all, And all-viewing cyclic Sun, I cry on you,— Behold me a god, what I endure from gods! Behold, with throe on throe, How, wasted by this woe, I wrestle down the myriad years of Time! Behold, how fast around me The new King of the happy ones sublime Has flung the chain he forged, has shamed and bound me! Woe, woe! to-day's woe and the coming morrow's I cover with one groan. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with his image once had been A gift from him: And so it was that its carving keen Refurbished memories wearing dim, Which set in her soul a throe of teen, And a tear on her ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... with thee then, when first thy lap was ungirdled, Thy lap to the genial Heaven, the day that he woo'd thee and won thee! Fair was thy blush, the fairest and first of the blushes of morning! Deep was the shudder, O Earth! the throe of thy self-retention: Inly thou strovest to flee, and didst seek thyself at thy centre! Mightier far was the joy of thy sudden resilience; and forthwith Myriad myriads of lives teem'd forth from the mighty embracement. Thousand-fold ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... am wholly throe. Let your mother be brought here as soon as she is free. Here are twenty ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Constance! Could I save thee, thou blighted bud—blighted by my"—His lip grew pale; he struck his forehead, and a groan like the last expiring throe of nature ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby |
