"Incubus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them books of engravings, or odd things purchased from the Jew-basket. She was obliged to be a purchaser, though she was but a slack contributor; and if she had possessed plenty of money, she would rather, when it was brought to the rectory—an awful incubus!—have purchased the whole stock than contributed a ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Reformer who, in response to their long and loud appeals, had been sent over to administer the Government, had stooped to a barefaced violence and tyranny in excess of anything which could be truly charged against the Tory Sir John Colborne. All the old abuses were maintained in full vigour. The incubus of the Clergy Reserves was not removed. Appointments to office were still made from one political body only. The Legislative Council still had the power to paralyze the efforts of the Assembly. The Assembly itself was at present as retrograde as the Upper House, and it had been formed by a ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... thought; yet it would ease me of a great weight if she would. This fortune, suddenly thrown into my lap, sits like an incubus upon me, Mr. Raymond. When the will was read to-day which makes me possessor of so much wealth, I could not but feel that a heavy, blinding pall had settled upon me, spotted with blood and woven of horrors. Ah, how different from the feelings with ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... Norton pointed out the shadowy form of Mt. Temple looming ever vaster before them, its mass of rock, of wind-blown, wind-carved peaks lifted in sombre defiance against the stars. It brooded darkly over the lower slopes, like an incubus it dominated the other spines and ridges, its gorges filled with shadow and mystery, its precipices making the sense reel dizzily. And somewhere up there high against the sky, alone, suffering, perhaps dying, a man had waited through the slow hours, and still ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... that can ever enable them to understand the Italian character; their policy, so well contrived to palsy and repress for a time, cannot kill, and there is always a force at work underneath which shall yet, and I think now before long, shake off the incubus. The Italian nobility have always kept the invader at a distance; they have not been at all seduced or corrupted by the lures of pleasure or power, but have shown a passive patriotism highly honorable to them. In the middle class ferments ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... tiny touch of blood at the point, but there is no wound on Mr Todhunter. Mr Glass took that wound away with him, dead or alive. Add to all this primary probability. It is much more likely that the blackmailed person would try to kill his incubus, rather than that the blackmailer would try to kill the goose that lays his golden egg. There, I think, we ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... the charm that lured us on board the "Balaklava," and now "nothing to do," was with us like the Bottle-Imp, an incubus, still crying out: "You may yet exchange me for a smaller coin, if such there be!" "Nothing to do," is an imposture. Something to do is the very life of life, the beginning and end of being. "Picton," said I, "one thing we must do, ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... the incubus of the Americans. They could not fight the war without it, but they had never succeeded in mastering the difficulties of maintaining and strengthening it. The system of a standing army was of course not to be thought of, and the uncertain recruits who took ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... there is hope for him. But when hypocrisy develops into self-deception, the severance between outward and inward, between appearance and reality, is complete. In a school which is ridden by the examination incubus, the whole atmosphere is charged with deceit. The teacher's attempt to outwit the examiner is deceitful; and the immorality of his action is aggravated by the fact that he makes his pupils partners with him in ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... clear. Far from me to propose to bridge it over—that the pestered people be pushed across. No! I would save them from further fatigue. I would come to their relief, and would lift from their shoulders this incubus of Art. ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... as rich as the GURNEYS - An incubus then I thought her, So I threw over that rich attorney's Elderly, ugly daughter. The rich attorney my character high Tried vainly to disparage - And now, if you please, I'm ready to try This Breach of Promise ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... What should have been known before was made clear when any of these state bonds were put on the market. The credit of the state was worthless, and the bonds were valueless. The people became as anxious to shake off the incubus of debt they had imposed upon their infant state as they had ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... bleached of all its color by it, the shapes that are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in the darkness, and the weak organizations kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming time. Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in its full stature and native lines in the sunshine. Then shall God's minstrels build their nests ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the impression of its size, from within the cathedral, can disappoint. Meanwhile, in spite of all the wear and tear of the work, the satisfying of incredulous busy-bodies, and the removal of such an incubus as Ghiberti, who because he was a superb modeller of bronze reliefs was made for a while joint architect with a salary that Brunelleschi felt should either be his own or no one's, the little man found time also to build beautiful churches ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... getting dark, I had not touched food since starting, nor had I wetted my lips. My thirst was now intolerable. The travelling rule, about keeping on, was an ugly incubus. Samson would go his own ways - he had sense enough for that - but how, when, where, was I to quench my thirst? Oh! for the tip of Lazarus' finger - or for choice, a bottle of Bass - to cool my tongue! Then too, whither would the ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... have little to add. Like others with whom I was at one time so long and intimately allied, I have seen nothing of him now for years. The Dean was relieved as if from an incubus when he left college, though I believe there was a cessation of all open hostility after his return from Chesterton's. At least the only authenticated mention of any allusion to old grievances on my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... in a New England town, Douglass began the life of a freeman, from which, relieved now of the incubus of slavery, he soon emerged into the career for which, in the providence of God, he seemed by his multiform experience to have been especially fitted. He did not find himself, even in Massachusetts, quite beyond the influence of slavery. While before the ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... cannot love—as yet. They exact love and miss it. They feel their urgent need of its warmth in their stiffening, frigid lives. Sometimes they gain it, lay their cold hand on it, analyse it, foresee that it may become an incubus, and decide that there is nothing to be got out ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... Terence arranged about the incubus; we only saw that he did not enter the drawing room with it in his arms. He was well received, although there was no special enthusiasm over his arrival; but the first guest is always at ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 1825 in Maryland, western Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. But all these efforts failed and the Southern abolitionists, as we have seen, having "fought the good fight," emigrated to the Northwest about 1830, when Virginia failed to rid herself of the growing "incubus." Just as Birney and Rankin "took up arms" in Ohio there arose a fiercer champion of their cause in the East, where distance from the scene, lack of intimate knowledge of "the system," and a strong popular dislike of ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... protests of Herr Schenkel to Grimm. Never once had we seen a lighter in tow in the open sea, though plenty behind the barrier of islands; indeed it was the very existence of the sheltered byways that created such traffic as there was. It was only Grimm's mtier and the incubus of the lighter that had suggested Memmert as our destination at all, and I began to doubt it now. That tricky hoop of ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... past as doth a dream (This is the favourite simile with us) And taking all together it would seem The dream had not implied an incubus; For my part I am somewhat dubious If days like those before they all had known, Tho' Dora's state had been precarious For some three weeks or more I that must own, But she'd recovered now. Oh how ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... speculated as to how many tremendous physical and spiritual affairs of life are thus wrought by agents not visible to the beholder. Thus were his own thoughts twisted back to those speculations which now perpetually haunted them like the incubus of a dream. What would Will Blanchard say if he woke some morning to find his secret in John Grimbal's keeping? And, did any such thing happen, there must certainly be a mystery about it; for Blanchard could no more prove how his enemy came to learn his secret than might ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... to lay to heart the duty of Christ's followers in reference to the influence and leavening of public opinion upon this matter, and to see to it that, in so far as we can help, we set ourselves steadfastly against that devilish spirit which still oppresses with an incubus almost intolerable, the nations of so-called Christendom. Lift up your voices be not afraid, but cry, 'We are the followers of the Prince of Peace, and we war against the war that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... imported European steam machinery for converting the tapioca roots into the marketable article. Whatever enterprise I hear of in the interior is always in the hands of Chinamen. Klang looks as if an incubus oppressed it, and possibly the Chinese are glad to be as far as possible from the seat of what impresses me as a fussy Government. At all events, Klang, from whatever cause, has a blighted look; and deserted houses rapidly falling into decay, overgrown ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... as if this departure had relieved him from an incubus; he was in better spirits from that moment, and returned to his habits of kindness to ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to go; my will was all the other way about. I had so newly thrown off the incubus of responsibility: I was still so fresh a renegade from duty that the daylight clearness of what I ought to do had no power at all to touch my will. My will was to live, to gather pleasures and make my dear lady happy. But though this sense of vast neglected duties had ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... scales, worth one white man's vote. Here is the difficulty in any benevolent scheme. If the Indian were raised to the right of giving his suffrage, a plenty of politicians, on the frontiers, would enter into plans to better him. Now the subject drags along as an incubus on Congress. Legislation for them is only taken up on a pinch. It is a mere expedient to get along with the subject; it is taken up unwillingly, and dropped in a hurry. This is the Indian system. Nobody knows really what to do, and those ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... of worlds, righteousness and justice and truth had been something more than names. Doom had fallen; for more than a twelvemonth the ruins had smouldered, and to-day they were but the harmless haunt of bat and badger. And the world relieved of that intolerable incubus, and recovered of its purging and cleansing sickness, had started once more upon its appointed path—slowly, indeed, at the first, but ever ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... such of the Roman Catholic citizens as were opposed to the O'Brien movement; but the Young Irelanders, and most of the Old Irelanders, were exasperated, and in their speeches and newspapers denounced Lamartine as the enemy of liberty, the sycophant of England, and the incubus of the French provisional government. It was said that he had married an English lady, and was more English at heart than French—that he would betray the republic to England or to monarchy. Those persons who had been foremost in holding him up as a demi-god, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... mother," said Antonia, bestowing one of her rare and wonderfully sweet smiles upon her parent. She rushed away to the house in her headlong style; met Hester in one of the corridors; stopped her to exclaim, "Cheer up, Hetty, the incubus is leaving by the first train in the morning," and then finding Pinkerton, despatched her for orders ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... by giving them all the produce of India at cheaper rates than they would otherwise have got it, and by opening the markets of India to the produce of all other European nations. The Corn Laws benefit only one small section of the people of England, while they weigh, like an incubus, upon the vital energies of all the rest; and at the same time injure all other nations by preventing their getting the produce of manufacturing industry so cheap as they would otherwise get it. They have not, therefore, the merit of benefiting other nations, at ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... is accountable for many errors of the day. The incubus of this school is fastened upon the vocal profession with octopus-like tentacles which reach out in every direction, and which strive to strangle the truth in every possible way; but, while "life is short, art is long;" the ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... festal was lost in the counting out of rupees. In neighbor homes she has seen rejoicing at the birth of a son, as the bringer of prosperity, and grief, hardly concealed, at the adversity of a daughter's advent. Unchristian? Yes; but not for the lack of the milk of human kindness; rather from the incubus of an evil social system, inherited from ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... will not name him just now. This enemy of mine, knowing him to be weak,—knowing him to be an idiot, has got hold of him and persuaded him. He believes the story which is told to him, and then feels happy in shaking off an incubus. No doubt I have not been very soft with him,—nor, indeed, hard. I have kept out of his way, and he is willing to resent it; but he is afraid to face me and tell me that it is so. Here are the girls come back from Buntingford. ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... the masses the work of arming went forward languidly. The nation was heavy at heart, and it was in vain that the noblemen and gentlemen endeavoured to raise men's spirits; the black incubus of the priesthood sat upon them like a nightmare. The burnings had been suspended while parliament was in session. On the 28th of March the work began again, and Cuthbert Simson, the minister of a protestant congregation, was put to death in Smithfield, having been first ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... be the necessity of thrusting Austria out of the confederation. It is proved now that he was sagacious enough also to perceive that such a wrench would not lead to a permanent estrangement, but that Austria, removed once and for all from her incubus-like and dog-in-the-manger position within the federate body, would become, in her own interest and that of European ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... are maundering about schism. There's another idle army! Then we have artists, authors, lawyers, doctors—the honourable professions! all hanging upon wealth, all ageing the rich, and all bearing upon labour! it's incubus on incubus. In point of fact, the rider's too heavy ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... blood) The convict stretched on his reposeless bed. Then conscience plays th' accusing angel; Spectres of murder'd victims flit before His eyes, with soul-appalling vividness; Hideous phantasma shadow o'er his mind; Guilt, incubus-like, sits on his soul With leaden weight,—types of the pangs of hell. His memory to the scene of blood reverts; He hears the echo of his victims' cry, Whose agonizing eyes again are fixed Upon his face, pleading ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... "Hoe out your row"—an excellent maxim for the idle and disorderly, but not to be taken too literally by the over-exacting and methodical business man who is trying to make the radical change in his view of life necessary to free his mind from the incubus of worry. Nor must the amateur husbandman scan with too anxious eye the weather map and the clouds. If he mind these warnings he may ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... I shall follow this up with a portrait of the least acceptable type of Conservative candidate, wherein all will recognise our Parliamentary incubus. Thus do we open the great campaign! If you would care to, pray keep that proof; some day it may amuse you to look at it, and to recall these early days of our acquaintance. Now I will take you to my house, which, I need not say, ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... overwhelming incubus. I was like a miserable snail, forever lugging my house round on my back—unable to shake it off. A change in our mode of life would not necessarily in itself bring my children any nearer to me; it would, on the contrary, probably antagonize them. I had sowed the seed and I ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened—I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me—to ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... "I will give three hundred pesos, though I swear by God, I have not so much money in the world; but I will borrow it to be rid of such an incubus." ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... The fiery eruptions of the mountain are his breath, and the shaking of it ascribed to his shifting from one side to another. In the latter regard he serves in literature as the symbol of a blind, often impotent, struggle to throw off some oppressive incubus. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... de Ville. The government supporters rallied the National Guard. The leaders at the Hotel de Ville were taken captive. The Palais Bourbon was cleared, and the Deputies were reconvened in their assembly hall. Encouraged by this success, the government resolved to rid itself of the incubus of the national workshops, after a variety of schemes with this purpose in view had been brought forward in the Assembly. The government cut the Gordian knot by a violent stroke. On June 21, an edict was issued that all beneficiaries of the public workshops between ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... not know what to do with the succession of pairs of young men, whose mission seemed to be to plague their master consciously, and to plague him unconsciously. Once or twice Mr. Gibson had declined taking a fresh pupil, in the hopes of shaking himself free from the incubus, but his reputation as a clever surgeon had spread so rapidly that fees which he had thought prohibitory, were willingly paid, in order that the young man might make a start in life, with the prestige of having been a pupil of Gibson of Hollingford. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... once Vespasian has seized the throne, neither he nor his friends nor even his army will feel their safety assured until the rival claimant is dead. They imprisoned Fabius Valens and meant to make use of him if a crisis occurred, but they found him too great an incubus. You may be sure that Antonius and Fuscus and that typical representative of the party, Mucianus, will have no choice but to kill you. Julius Caesar did not let Pompey live unmolested, nor Augustus Antony.[177] ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... for the coming journey, we went to indulge in the luxury of a farewell breakfast at Desire Beaurain's. Of course we emptied a few bottles to our reconciliation. I do not exactly remember how many, but this I do remember, that our irrepressible incubus walked in again, and took his place in the midst of us rather sooner even than he had been wont to do; and he never left us from that time to the moment of our landing at Dover harbor, when he took his, I hope and trust final, departure with a ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... will be quite sufficient, and pay the money back when it is quite convenient.' Disinterested, most praiseworthy man! He left me, impressed with his benevolence, and with my spirit at rest. With the dismissal of my incubus, my appetite was restored. I partook of a hearty dinner, and returned home, happy as a boy again. At the end of a week, I was enabled to repay my benefactor; but, at the end of a fortnight; I was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... so in the case of Italy, and by a base conspiracy. When will the people arise in their might, and, by their immense superiority in numbers as well as intelligence, cast off the yoke of the conspirators—the incubus which crushes and degrades them in the ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... enough!" agreed Collingwood. "But—if things are as I think, Pratt would be an incubus, a mill-stone, for ever. Anyway, I came out to tell you what I've learned, and what I have an idea may be the truth, and above all, to get your definite opinion. You want the Pratt influence out of the way—at ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... from clime to clime, in ever new and higher forms, until man is developed. Well, was there ever such stuff concocted before? I almost hear the bray of that donkey, who originated in a flower. And pray, most sapient self! what is nature? It seems now, to me, a form, a mere dead incubus of matter. And could this inert tangible matter, sublimate in its hard, dead bosom, an essence so subtle, as to be freer of the bonds of time and space? At such a preposterous suggestion even a donkey might bow his ears with shame. So I will hand ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... cannot help looking on the Americans in the light of children—dear relatives; and when I address them, I speak to them with love and affection. I say to them, take warning from the scene I have been describing; do not submit to the incubus of slavery a moment longer than you can avoid it. No sensible man expects you to throw it off at once; but every right-feeling, right-thinking man, does expect you to take every means and make every preparation for its abolition, as soon as that important work can be accomplished. The only ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... often accompanied with fear. At times, violence stalked abroad unchallenged and dark lowering faces skulked about. Even when we felt no personal danger this incubus of savage life all around weighed on our hearts. Thus it was day and night. Even those hours of twilight, which brood with sweet influences over so many lives, bore to us, on the evening air, the weird cadences of the heathen dance or the ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... surface of an ocean, and telling of the sunken continent below: this monstrous thousand odd pounds he had been fool enough to borrow. Never would he be able to pay off such a sum, never again be free from the incubus of debt. Meanwhile, not the ground he stood on, not the roof over his head could actually be called his own. He had also been too pushed for money, at the time, to take Ocock's ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... Mago, in cisalpine Gaul, was too far off to render aid. The defense of Africa depended on him alone, and he was recalled. He would probably have anticipated the order. Rome breathed more freely when the "Libyan Lion" had departed. For fifteen years he had been an incubus or a terror, and the Romans, in various conflicts, had lost three hundred thousand men. Two of the Scipios, Paulus Gracchus and Marcellus, had yielded up their lives in battle. Only Fabius, among the experienced generals at the beginning of the war, was alive, and he, at the age of ninety, was now ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... chairs would be very much out of place and keeping with the small, oddly-shaped rooms of their future home in East Chester Close. None knew how strong was the instinct of self-preservation, it may almost be called, which impelled Ellinor to shake off, at any cost of present pain, the incubus of a terrible remembrance. She wanted to go into an unhaunted dwelling in a free, unknown country—she felt as if it was her only chance of sanity. Sometimes she thought her senses would not hold together till the time when all these arrangements were ended. ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... skill; but he would have been less diffuse, less in difficulties for a conclusion. He had intended to rise rapidly to power without burdening himself first with the doctrines necessary to begin with, for a man in opposition, but an incubus ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... write experimental music for choruses that are to support the else meagre outline of a Greek tragedy, will not do. Let experiments be tried upon worthless subjects; and if this of Mendelssohn's be Greek music, the sooner it takes itself off the better. Sophocles will be delivered from an incubus, and we from an ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... human slavery, which for over two hundred weary years had hung, incubus-like, over the American nation, had happily passed away. The bright sunshine of emancipation's glorious day shone over a race at last providentially rescued from the worst fate recorded in all the world's dark history. Up out of the house ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... monster who dies hard; and like Loki of the Sagas when the snake dropped poison on his forehead, his writhings shook the world and caused earthquakes. Now its power is well-nigh dead. "Superstition! that horrible incubus which dwelt in darkness, shunning the light, with all its racks and poison-chalices, and foul sleeping-draughts, is passing away without return." [Footnote: Carlyle.] But society was once leavened with it. Alchemy, astrology, and magic were a fashionable cult, and so long as its professors ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... matters straight around me of all kinds and bearings. The mention of those confounded "crammers," led me on to talk about examinations in general; and, while on the topic, I could not stop until I had thoroughly relieved my mind from an incubus of educational zeal that has long ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... are two things that are puzzling people about that problem, aren't there? The first is how the murderer managed to slip off the dead man's coat, when he was already pinned to the ground with that stone incubus. The other, which is much smaller and less puzzling, is the fact of the sword that cut his throat being slightly stained at the point, instead of a good deal more stained at the edge. Well, I can dispose of the first question easily. Horne Hewitt took off his own coat ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... million of men, I believe, perished in that great undertaking. Nor are the evil consequences of that war adequately described by what I have said. All the disorders and disturbances of Europe, those immense armaments that are an incubus on national industry and the great obstacle to progressive civilization, may be traced and justly attributed to the Crimean War. And yet the Crimean ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... a certain number of hours he could no more bear the incubus of this thought than he could put up with the flat prospects of married life the night before. He was all at sea, barely sane, in fact. His life had been so long purely intellectual that this sudden strain of passion and fierce practical ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the), of Normandy; so called because his father was said to have been an incubus or fiend in the disguise ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... Ambrose Merlin, the prince of enchanters, son of the nun Matilda, and an incubus, "half-angel and half-man." He made, in addition to Prince Arthur's armor and weapons, the Round Table for one hundred and fifty knights at Carduel, the magic fountain of love, and built Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. He died spellbound by the sorceress Vivien in ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... where the Baron sincerely trusts the good Little Sisters of the Poor are no longer Poor-rated L120 per annum, just by way of parochial encouragement, I suppose, to other charitable persons for relieving the parish "of an incubus of four hundred." The work of these self-sacrificing women cannot be over-rated in one sense, but in the parochial sense (if parochials have any) they can hardly be rated enough. Really a delightful book ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... different theory concerning Jesus, his life, his death, and the effect of his death on the salvation of man. More reasonable ideas are prevailing here. In every direction also there are thousands on thousands who are becoming freed from that horrible incubus of fear as they look out ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... have studied the matter with some little attention—to have no financial burdens, if burdens be taken to mean something that is inconveniently felt, that is difficult to carry. There is here no people weighed down under the crushing incubus of debt. There is a springiness and alertness, a go-ahead energy about the nation—symptoms not usually connected with the carrying of burdens. Japan seems to me to be in somewhat the same position in regard to finance as France was after the close of the war with Germany when the former nation ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... the ancient governments, which rested like an incubus on the peoples of the Central Empires, has come political change not merely, but revolution; and revolution which seems as yet to assume no final and ordered form, but to run from one fluid change ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... "stop," "straight ahead," "to the right," and "to the left." The words mano and silla mean really "hand" and "saddle"; I have been told that they are linguistic survivals of the days when women, rode on pillions and the fair incubus indicated that she wished to turn either to the side of her right hand or to the ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... itself to be permanently over-ridden (any more than it has allowed itself to be kept in permanent subjection in England), even in the large cities where the Anglo-Saxon voter is in a small minority. Ultimately it will throw off the incubus. In the meanwhile it is unjust that Englishmen or other Europeans should accept as evidence of native American frailty instances of municipal abuses and of corrupt methods in a city like New York, where it has not been by native Americans that those abuses and those methods ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... that the probability of either some gross scandals or an ill-advised reactionary movement back to absolutism may develop a crisis within a few years of the peace settlement. The mercantile and professional classes will join hands with the social democrats to remove the decaying incubus of the Hohenzollern system, and Germany will become a more modern and larger repetition of the Third French republic. This collapse of the Germanic monarchical system may spread considerably beyond the limits of the German empire. It will probably be effected without much violence ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... age unguessed of us May lift Its blinding incubus, And see, and own: "It grieves me I did ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... should have been resting and reaping the fruit of her early industry, she was obliged to toil more assiduously than ever. It was little consolation to her that she was but a type of many women, who, hardworking and thrifty themselves, are married to men who are nothing but an incubus to their wives and to their families. Small wonder, then, that Mrs. Hableton should condense all her knowledge of the male sex into the one bitter aphorism, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... Flame, Salamander! Inward, spirally flowing, Gurgle, Undine! Gleam in meteoric splendor, Airy Queen! Thy homely help render, Incubus! Incubus! Forth and ...
— Faust • Goethe
... is young, but the government is infantine; though, notwithstanding that it is little more than two years old, it has proved itself indefatigable, concise, and beneficial in its workings; and many a local incubus has been removed, and many a long felt desideratum been supplied, during ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... for the severities of society; and not even his own household have for a moment associated other ideas than those of the rigid and august with the memory of the Baron Ritzner von Jung, the demon of the dolce far niente lay like an incubus upon the university. Nothing, at least, was done beyond eating and drinking and making merry. The apartments of the students were converted into so many pot-houses, and there was no pot-house of them all more famous or more ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... were I to repeat my visit I should find progressive changes too numerous for detail. Happy little middle-class Parisians now run to and from their Lyces unattended. Young ladies in society imitate their Anglo-Saxon sisters and have shaken off that incubus, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... The vilification which was poured on Luther and his doings was so bitter as to be ludicrous. It was declared that his father was not his mother's husband, but an impish incubus, who had deluded her; that, after ten years' struggling with his conscience, he had become an atheist; that he denied the immortality of the soul; that he had composed hymns in honor of drunkenness, a vice to which he was unceasingly ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... biblical and post-biblical mythology into elementary instruction, renders it useful and necessary to go on making a considerable outlay in the same direction. Not yet, has "the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew" ceased to be the "incubus of the philosopher, and the opprobrium of the orthodox;" not yet, has "the zeal of the Bibliolater" ceased from troubling; not yet, are the weaker sort, even of the instructed, at rest from their fruitless toil "to harmonise impossibilities," and "to force ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... punish a boy with a fair degree of severity (may the Lord forgive me), and now. I know that in so doing I was guilty of a grave error. What I interpreted as misconduct was but a straining at his leash in an effort to extricate himself from the incubus of the negative self-feeling. He was, and probably is, a dull fellow and realized that he could not cope with the other boys in the school studies, and so was but trying to win some notice in other fields of activity. To him notoriety was preferable to obscurity. If I had only been wise I would ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... perpetual occupancy: as all these dark anticipations crowded upon me more and more, and my friends continually intruded their relentless remarks upon the apparition in my room; a great change was wrought in me. I resolved to gather all my faculties together, and forever rid me of this intolerable incubus. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... financially. Great was her delight therefore to be able to report, at the end of this year, a new $2,000 building for dispensary purposes, the money for which had been secured partly from fees, partly from subscriptions. "With the incubus of a heavy rent off our shoulders we may be able to relieve more patients, as ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... no doubt that there are many persons connected with the Protestant churches who would be with the movement were it not for the supposed Bible difficulty. They shudder at anything they think against the Bible, as against the will of God. Take away this incubus, and these persons would experience a change in their views; they would be ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... sufficient perseverance excited to achieve a first success, there arises a revulsion of feeling affecting the whole nature. They no longer find themselves incompetent; they, too, can do something. And gradually as success follows success, the incubus of despair disappears, and they attack the difficulties of their other studies with ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... of decaying vice, trotting in red heels—for Valerie dressed the man as beseemed his income, his cross, and his appointment—horrified Crevel, who could not meet the colorless eyes of the Government clerk. Marneffe was an incubus to the Mayor. And the mean rascal, aware of the strange power conferred on him by Lisbeth and his wife, was amused by it; he played on it as on an instrument; and cards being the last resource of a mind as completely played out as the body, he plucked Crevel again and again, the Mayor thinking ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... this incubus, the little party now went on cheerily. She-wee-she kept them in fun as well as food. His hunting was always successful; he was ever ready to render any assistance in the camp or on the march; while his jokes, his antics, ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... say, therefore, that the study of philosophy has a high cultural value: it encourages the student to reflect upon himself and his human and natural surroundings (society and nature) and to come to grips with reality; it frees him from the incubus of transmitted opinions and borrowed beliefs, and makes him earn his spiritual possessions in the sweat of his face,—mindful of Goethe's warning that "he alone deserves freedom and life who is compelled ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... domination account wholly for San Francisco's slow growth toward the end of the century. For, following the several spasms of development incident to the ages of gold, of grain, and of fruit, and the advent of the railway incubus, California for a time betook herself to rest, which indeed was largely paralysis. Then, too, those who had come first and cleared the ground, laying the foundations of fortunes, were passing away, and their successors seemed more ready to enjoy than to create. But with the ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... channels through which thought forced its way were choked up and the subtle impetus recoiled, powerless to perform its function. He felt the necessity of clear, vigorous thought, but his dull brain would not work—the cold incubus upon it chilled it through and through; and all the time the malignantly beautiful reptile was partly coiling and uncoiling, the articulated ring giving a faint rattle, as if caused by the slight vibration of its body. After a while the serpent lay ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... with a laugh, and started home with a song—then stopped. She foresaw the musty room to which she was going, the slatternly incubus of a man. Saw—with just such distinctness as had once dangled the stiff, gray scrub-rag before her eyes—Schwirtz's every detail: bushy chin, stained and collarless shirt, trousers like old chair-covers. Probably he would always be like this. Probably he would never have another ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... which are given towards the end of this book. An Italian advocate, Scipio Sighele, has devoted a monograph to the subject of dual crime, in which he examines a number of cases in which two persons have jointly committed heinous crimes.(3) He finds that in couples of this kind there is usually an incubus and a succubus, the one who suggests the crime, the other on whom the suggestion works until he or she becomes the accomplice or instrument of the stronger will; "the one playing the Mephistophelian part of tempter, preaching evil, urging to crime, the other allowing himself ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... through tormented myself with the terrible apparition of the Sand-man. I was quite old enough to perceive that the old woman's tale about the Sand-man and his little ones' nest in the half-moon couldn't be altogether true; nevertheless the Sand-man continued to be for me a fearful incubus, and I was always seized with terror—my blood always ran cold, not only when I heard anybody come up the stairs, but when I heard anybody noisily open my father's room door and go in. Often he stayed away for a long season altogether; ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... attained to the close of his pagedom, and the assumption of the second degree in chivalry, that of squire. He ever longed for the day when he should be able to fulfil his promise to his poor stricken father, who, albeit somewhat relieved of his incubus, since the night when father and son watched together, was not yet quite free from his ghostly visitant; moderns would say "from ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... part, I never despaired of Ireland; I do not, I will not, I cannot, despair of my beloved country. She has, in my view, obtained freedom of conscience for others, as well as for herself. She has shaken off the incubus of tithes while silly legislation was dealing out its folly and its falsehoods. She can, and she will, obtain for herself justice and constitutional freedom; and although she may sigh at British neglect and ingratitude, there is no sound ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... pictures will sometimes intrude themselves in spite of his efforts to avoid them. It is an awful thing to allow the mind to be thus contaminated; and many a man would give the world, if he possessed it, to be free from the horrible incubus of a ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... of scientific conclusions, in all that relates to the origin of things, and, among them, of species. In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of Bibliolaters? ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... "Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie," which is edited by him and Virchow (tenth yearly part, X. 1878, p. 66) as follows:—"At the Munich meeting of naturalists, Virchow by a few weighty words cleared the atmosphere, which was heavy and stifling under the pressure of the incubus called Descent, and once more freed science from that nightmare which it has so long—in many opinions so much too long—allowed to weigh upon it; freed it, let us hope, once and for ever. The forecasts of this storm were ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... Hedrick knew not whither to direct his flight: he dared not dash for the street with this imminent tattered incubus—she was almost upon him—and he frantically made for the kitchen door, only to swerve with a gasp of despair as his foot touched the step, for she was at his heels, and he was sickeningly assured ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... fresh-water molluscs has been a horrid incubus to me, but I think I know my way now; when first hatched they are very active, and I have had thirty or forty crawl on a dead duck's foot; and they cannot be jerked off, and will live fifteen and even ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... whose veins I am a circulating drop. It is my business to help to keep the system sound, to do my duty without fear or favour. If disease—say a fouled conscience—contaminates me, it is for me to throw off the incubus, not accept it, and transmit the poison. Whatever my lapses of nature, I owe it to the entire system to work for purity in my allotted sphere, and not to allow any microbe bugbear to ride me roughshod, to the detriment of my ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... she scold, or sportive play, ('Tween these, no medium's known), She'll drive the incubus away That has assailed thee many a day Upon thine iron throne. She'll make the nimble spirits fleet Up towards the head, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... with fear, and gave themselves up for lost. At length an old woman, who was a passenger by the vessel, came on deck and entreated them to throw her overboard as the only means of preserving their own lives, saying that she had long been haunted by an 'incubus' in the shape of a man, from whose grasp she could not free herself. Fortunately for all parties there was another passenger on board—a priest—who was called to the rescue. After a long admonition, and many sighs and prayers, 'there issued forth of the pumpe of the ship,' says Hollinshed, ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... the time when they were delivered the Establishment took a violent part against the Catholic Church, on the basis of the Protestant tradition. Moreover, I had never as an Anglican been a lover of the actual Establishment; Hurrell Froude's Remains, in which it is called an "incubus" and "Upas Tree," will stand in evidence, as for him, so for me; for I was one of the editors. What I said even as an Anglican, it is not strange that I said when I was not. Indeed I have been milder in my thoughts of the Establishment ever since I have been ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... poems growing out of their broad lily-pads. Very tender are the pastoral banks and brooksides of LEAFHOPPER. ELFINLOCKS takes up his pencil, and lo! a hazy, mazy, lazy, dreamy vista where it has touched. But hold! Our critical Incubus has taken the bit between her teeth, and is beginning to run away with us. Stop that; and let our readers enumerate the other first American landscape painters ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... had bid me hope and be brave. She had told me she loved me—she, whom hundreds of brave men would love to call their own. I would try again. I would brake the chains Voltaire had forged; I WOULD hurl from me the incubus that ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... rush up the mountain out of the oasis to tempt and torture us in our sleep. What could it have been that the goblin in a white robe and with flowing hair held in its arms? Very likely the stone with which the incubus loads our breast when he torments us. The other one seemed to fly, but I did not see its wings. That side-building must be where the Gaul lives with his ungodly wife, who has ensnared my poor Hermas. I wonder whether ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and could appreciate better things, and could long for them; but he could not attain to anything better unless he were to alter altogether his mode of life. Would it not be well for him to get a wife? He was rid of Polly, who had been an incubus to him, and now he ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... exactly call it "unintelligible moonshine," and so will probably hold their tongue. It is my fixed opinion that we are all at sea as to what is called Poetry, Art, &c., in these times; laboring under a dreadful incubus of Tradition, and mere "Cant heaped balefully on us up to the very Zenith," as men, in nearly all other provinces of their Life, except perhaps the railway province, do now labor and stagger;—in a word, that Goethe-and- Schiller's "Kunst" ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... hammers on tent-pegs; the shrill neighing of ponies, and shriller chatter of coolies, bargaining for payment in advance; repudiating loads a few ounces overweight, and tragically prophesying death on the road if the illegal incubus were ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... social fear, and, above all, Those sacramental manacles the church Had bound her in, and to the end would keep, Forbade the poor, scared, helpless little woman To free herself, by one condign resolve, From the foul incubus that sucked her life. So a false sense of duty kept her tied, Feeding in him all that was pitiless. And now she's dying. I had gone to-day To take some little dainties, cream and fruit, And there, administering consolation, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... of insanity has undergone a radical change. There is hardly another disease the fear of whose hereditary character is responsible for so much anguish and torture. In former years, when there was an insane uncle or aunt or grandparent that fact weighed like a veritable incubus on the entire family. Every member of the family was tortured by the secret anguish that maybe he or she would be next to be affected by this most horrible of all diseases—disease of the mind. If ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... monstrous curse, destroying all manliness of character, creating contempt of honest labor, making men timorous yet cruel, idle, frivolous, weak, dependent, powerless. The empire might have lasted centuries longer but for this incubus, the standing disgrace of the Pagan world. Paganism never recognized what is most noble and glorious in man; never recognized his equality, his common brotherhood, his natural rights. It had no compunction, no remorse in depriving human beings of their ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... it has chilled my heart Like some dread thing of evil. All night long My nerves were shaken, and my pulse stood still, And waited for a terror yet to come To strike harsh discords through my life's sweet song. Sleep came—an incubus that filled the sum Of wretchedness with dreams so wild and chill The sweat oozed from me like great drops of gall; An evil spirit kept my mind in thrall, And rolled my body up like a poor scroll On which is written curses ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... those terrible truths whereof I can yet only trust myself to hint, might be the fallacies of a diseased sleep. And I contested as it were with the reality of all that I saw, touched, and felt, and struggled like one oppressed with an incubus, that I might awake and find myself again at Quharist in ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... individual helpless, and crushes him with a sense of his unimportance. It abets the injustice of capitalism. It excludes citizens from any participation in foreign affairs. We must indeed not let this incubus of state overwhelm us. We must keep it in its proper place, even in performing its necessary functions, such as preserving public health. It is better to take some risk, even in such matters, than to override too much the individual's personal rights. ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... press forward and read the signature, but all restrained their desire until the curiosity of the master of the house was satisfied. Gonzague advanced leisurely to the table, relieved to think the comedy had come to an end, and that he had satisfactorily rid himself of an incubus. He bent carelessly over the parchment, and then sprang back with face as pale and eyes as wild and lips as trembling as if on the pitiful piece of sheepskin he had seen some terror as dread as the face of Medusa. His twitching mouth ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... half as long, and is a well-written and extremely plausible story about a house owned by an old gentleman of ancient lineage, where there is a collection of gold plate which was said to be an "incubus", that is, the subject of a curse. As indeed there turns ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... kings of France, and the long war of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries for the succession to the throne of France, engendered what historians have called "the rivalry between France and England;" and this rivalry, having been admitted as a natural and inevitable fact, became the permanent incubus and, at divers epochs, the scourge of French national existence. Undoubtedly there are, between great and energetic neighbors, different interests and tendencies, which easily become the seeds of jealousy and strife; but there are ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... that, if the country gets no worse by to-morrow, I will dismiss the boatmen and pursue my way alone again on the bicycle. This resolve very quickly develops into an earnest determination to rid myself of the incubus of the snail-like movements of my new carriers, who are decidedly out of their element when walking, as I am very quickly brought to understand by the annoying frequency of their halts at way-side tea-houses to rest and smoke ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... are even now on foot, copied in a great measure from ourselves. Hitherto the American office has not taken upon itself the task of returning to their writers undelivered and undeliverable letters. This it is now going to do. It is, as I have said, shaking off from itself that terrible incubus, the franking privilege. And the expediency of introducing a money-order office into the States, connected with the post-office as it is with us, is even now under consideration. Such an accommodation is much needed in the country; but I doubt whether the present moment, looking at ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... meaning in the things I have been urging, it is this: that the incubus that lies upon this country is the present monopolistic organization of our industrial life. That is the thing which certain Republicans became "insurgents" in order to throw off. And yet some of them allowed themselves to be so misled ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside," is a safe rule for those who would always retain the good opinion of that all-powerful, but somewhat unintelligent, incubus, "the average person," but the pioneer, the guide, is necessary. That is, if the world is to ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... talent feels itself overawed by the colossus which all the world adores; it falls down and worships, instead of conceiving. The dread of ridicule extinguishes originality in its birth. Immense is the incubus thus laid upon the efforts of genius. It is the chief cause of the degradation of taste, the artificial style, the want of original conception, by which the literature of old nations is invariably ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... the solemn night when the contract was signed I have felt under an incubus, and since he appeared here yesterday, punctual to the appointed hour, I have felt as if I had a veritable "old man of the sea" upon my shoulders. He flies up stairs and along the corridors as noiselessly as a cat, and already knows where ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... say, with a new eye; but a purchaser once seized with this desperate malady has no such refuge. After putting his treasure away for years, at the first glance all his satiety returns. I myself have diagnosed a case where a fine drawing by Gerome grew to be a veritable incubus. It is understood that the market for pictures is falling yearly. I believe that the growth of this dislike to the eternal stillness of a painted scene is a chief cause of the disaster. It operates among the ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... policy,' and founded with the object of promoting African improvement, has been the greatest obstacle to progress. She fought to keep every advantage to herself, and she succeeded in securing a monopoly of 'recaptives,' who were more wanted elsewhere. She became an incubus in 1820, when all British possessions from N. Lat. 20 to S. Lat. 20 were made her dependencies. The snake was scotched in 1844 by the Gold Coast achieving her independence. Yet Sa Leone raised herself to a government-general in 1866, and possibly she ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... welcome tide of drowsiness engulfed her she did not know. She hardly realised she had been asleep when gradually she became aware of something heavy lying across her body, pressing down upon her with an inert weight. The unpleasant consciousness grew, she wanted to rid herself of the incubus, but she felt curiously drugged, impotent. The weight increased; at the same time it seemed to have life of a certain sort, slow-moving and lethargic; it crept upward slowly, always pressing heavily upon her. She was cramped, her body ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... she on the day of the last engagement of that pugnacious Porcupine, in the year 1805, when England was freed from her long incubus of invasion? She was ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... than others and can drain three nurses without taking on flesh. The second question is whether the demon who copulates with the mother or the man whose semen has been taken is the father of the child. To which Saint Thomas answers, with more or less subtle arguments, that the real father is not the incubus but the man." ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... work as a day laborer greatly cheered the young man. Instead of depressing his spirits, it for the first time lifted from his soul that incubus of melancholy with which every Confederate soldier of his class was at first oppressed. Ever since Grant had refused in the Wilderness—a year before—to retire beyond the river after receiving Lee's tremendous blows, ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... bleaching powder it would be worth nearly 150,000l. These figures are, it should be understood, based on theory, but they serve to show to what importance a gas has now reached which twenty-five years ago was a perfect incubus to the manufacturers, and wrought desolation in the country sides miles and miles around the producing works. There has long been an expectation that the ammonia-soda makers would add the manufacture of bleaching powder to their process, but they appear to be as far as ever from that result, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... the easier from the fact that during the six months of their sojourn they had already accomplished much. The Queen, for example, enlivened and encouraged by the intimate companionship of her two fellow countrymen, had gradually thrown off the incubus of her terror, and was now almost her former self again; while Grosvenor had found congenial occupation in fitting the few craft upon the lake with sails, and designing and building other craft of greatly improved model, including half a dozen cutters of the racing-yacht type, which he conceived ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... their time,—that they should turn disdainfully from the paths of honest industry, and that everything which constitutes the true wealth and greatness of a state should have been despised or forgotten in the lurid and blood-stained glare of military glory, which cowered like an incubus on the breast of Europe. The battle-fields were beyond the frontiers of their own country; the calamities of war were too far distant to obtrude their disheartening features; and no lamentations mingled with the public rejoicings. Many a broken-hearted mother mourned in secret for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... faithlessness of experience, who has only read of those dreadful disruptions of the mind and feelings, that scatter the old elements, in order that some new consolidating power may throw them into forms and combinations a thousand times more horrible than all the creation of dark brooding incubus. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... operate upon the ears of Irishmen at large? He is told that under the fear of the Landleague his rent is to be reduced to an extent which is left to his imagination; and then, that he is to be freed altogether from the incubus of a landlord! He is, in fact, made to understand that his cherished Landleague has become all-powerful. And yet he hears that odious men, whom he recognises only as tyrants, are filling the jails through the country with all his dearest friends. Demanding concessions, and the ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... they forced into sight, there yet remained an abyss of evil which the English tongue refused to mention, but which weighed upon the English mind; and which, unspoken, nay (and it is the glory of the Elizabethan dramatists excepting Ford), unhinted, yet remained as an incubus in the consciousness of the playwrights and the public, was in their thoughts when they wrote and heard such savage misanthropic outbursts as those of Tourneur and of Marston. The sense of the rottenness of the country whence they were obtaining their intellectual nourishment, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... champion of the Disestablishment Society, more successful on the platform than in the pulpit, and strenuously of opinion in his heart of hearts that the Church was the great drawback to all progress in England, an incubus of which the nation would gladly be rid. His dress was one of the signs of his character and meaning. Strong in a sense of his own clerical position, he believed in uniform as devoutly as any Ritualist, but he would not plagiarise the Anglican livery and walk about in a modified soutane ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... such pertinacity that Susan was compelled to redouble her exertions, which were ultimately successful in embedding the double-bass in the body of his instrument. The crash was frightful, and Susan, having vainly endeavoured to free herself from the incubus which had fastened upon her, proceeded to scream most lustily as an overture to a faint. These sounds reached the supper-room, and occasioned the diversion in John's favour; a simultaneous rush was instantly made to the quarter from whence they ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... ever feel in that peculiarly distressing state of mind in which one oppressing idea displaces or colours every other, absorbing, intermingling with, empoisoning, and, like the filth of the harpy, turning every thing into disgust—when a certain incubus rides upon the brain, as the Old Man of the Mountain did upon the shoulders of Sinbad, burdening, irritating, and rendering existence a misery—when, looking around, you see but one object perched everywhere and grinning at you—when even ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... the War Department was an unnecessary office. Mr. Conkling supported his motion in a speech in which he said: "My objection to this section is that is creates an unnecessary office for an undeserving public servant; it fastens, as an incubus upon the country, a hateful instrument of war, which deserves no place in a free government in a ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... opposition to its behests, in deed, or in word, or even in thought, as far as thoughts could be surmised, should he punished with death; and by adhering to the purport of this horrid decree, the voice of a nation returning to its senses was subdued. Men feared to rise against the incubus which oppressed them, lest others more cowardly than themselves should not join them; and the Committee of Public Safety felt that their prolonged existence depended on their being able to perpetuate this fear. It determined, therefore, to strike terror into the nation by exhibiting a fearful ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... to the place Dancourt, and having deposited the incubus beside him, stretched his limbs on a bench beneath a tree. His attitude, and his luxuriant locks, to say nothing of his melancholy aspect, rendered him a noticeable figure in the little square, and monsieur Petitpas, from Bordeaux, under the awning of the cafe opposite, stood ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... He felt that he must repay not only that but Undy's share also, before he could again pass a happy day or a quiet night. This plan of throwing up L1,200 a year would badly assist him in getting rid of this incubus. ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... innuendoes, contrived to impress upon Lady Isabel the unfortunate blow to his own interests that Mr. Carlyle's marriage had been, the ruinous expense she had entailed upon the family. It struck a complete chill to Isabel's heart, and she became painfully impressed with the incubus she must be to Mr. Carlyle—so far as his pocket was concerned. Lord Mount Severn, with his little son, had paid them a short visit at Christmas and Isabel had asked him, apparently with unconcern, whether Mr. Carlyle had put himself very much out to the way to marry her; whether ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... to ignore Dr. Pountney, and have a good time. That had been his intention, at least till he saw Lord George at the deanery. But now there were serious thoughts in his mind. When he arrived Mary had for the time got nearly rid of the incubus of the Italian Marchioness with her baby. She was all smiles as she kissed him. But he could not keep himself from the ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... from limb to limb—the ice of a thousand winters seemed curdling through my blood. The bell rung—once, twice—no answer. I would have leaped out of the carriage—I would have forced an entrance, but I was unable to move. A man fettered and spell-bound by an incubus, is less helpless than I was. At last, an old female I ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the monster, in "The Tempest." He seems there to have created a person which was not in nature, a boldness which, at first sight, would appear intolerable; for he makes him a species of himself, begotten by an incubus on a witch; but this, as I have elsewhere proved, is not wholly beyond the bounds of credibility, at least the vulgar still believe it. We have the separated notions of a spirit, and of a witch; (and spirits, according to Plato, are vested ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... them to the Pope; but Venice especially reserved all the rights she had exercised. All the essential demands of the papacy were refused, and thus was forever ended the papal power of laying an interdict upon a city or a people. From that incubus, Christendom, thanks to Father Paul and to Venice, was at last and ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... price had he paid for it! True, but was not the money already sacrificed? Would it have been restored, had the luckless speculator himself remained? Never! Well, fearful then as was the sum, let it go, taking the incubus along with it. Allcraft took care to obtain the consent of Bellamy to his arrangement. He wrote to him, explaining the reasons for parting with their partner; and an answer came from the landed proprietor, acquiescing in the plan, but slightly doubting the propriety ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... the night," who appeared to men in sleep and roused without satisfying their passions. (Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia, p. 262.) This succubus was the Assyrian Liler, connected with the Hebrew Lilith. There was a corresponding incubus, "the little night man," who had nocturnal intercourse with women. (Cf. Ploss, Das Weib, 7th ed., pp. 521 et seq.) The succubus and the incubus (the latter being more common) were adopted by Christendom; St. Augustine (De Civitate Dei, Bk. XV, Ch. XXIII) said that the wicked ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... painless cure to his interesting patient that very evening, if she had not already retired. He was in high good humor. Potts was a brick; Potts was a genius. How lucky that he had happened to go up to college that night! He felt as if an incubus were lifted off his mind. No more pangs of conscience and uncomfortable sense of being a mean and cruel fellow, for him. Annie should be glad to be rid of him before he had ended with her. She should experience a heartfelt relief, ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... from ear to ear and create a laugh throughout the country. Gondremark has thus some of the clumsier characters of the self-made man, combined with an inordinate, almost a besotted, pride of intellect and birth. Heavy, bilious, selfish, inornate, he sits upon this court and country like an incubus. ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... any knowledge of the trend of British statesmanship in the eighties know perfectly well that the occupation of Egypt was looked on as a serious incubus. The Salisbury Cabinet sought to give effect to the promises of evacuation, and with that aim in view sent Sir Henry Drummond Wolff to Constantinople in the year 1887 for the settlement of details. ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose |
