"Sheer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of beauty, speaks even amidst the ruins of the houses of hypocrisy and shame which he has wrecked. There is scarce a page in all his writings in which sheer beauty does not stand out amid the ugliness of carnage and destruction—in which the strains of celestial music are not heard above the roar of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... High Commissioner and President Kruger had agreed to meet at Bloemfontein, was received by the Uitlanders with relief; not hope, because it was believed that the President's object was to get something, not to give something; but sheer relief, because, come what might, the position could never again be the same as it was before the conference. Something must change; someone must yield; the unbearable strain must cease. Sir Alfred Milner—wise and just and strong—commanded ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... years of Europe will achieve more, and will at last present Cathay with the alternative of moving on or moving off. Instinct might lead us on if progress were an automatic law of nature, but this belief, though widely held, is sheer superstition. ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... Angelo on the further side of the harbour, and almost repented of his venture. To complete his dejection, he seems to have courted failure. Instead of boldly throwing his whole force upon the small garrison and overwhelming them by sheer weight, he tried a reconnaissance, and fell into an ambuscade; upon which he incontinently abandoned all thought of a siege, and contented himself with laying waste the interior of Malta, and taking the adjacent ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... lost Omar, Kona and Goliba, half fearing that they had been blown to atoms by the shell, nevertheless the courage of my comrades never failed, although gaining the top of the hill and defeating the cavalry by sheer force of numbers, they were driven back again at the point of the bayonet, while from the ruins of the palace-gate a steady rifle fire was poured upon us at ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... their steadiness of nerve to the greatest test, by keeping the precipice constantly in view, except when hidden by the fog. Indeed, they could drive their alpenstocks through the overhanging rim of frozen snow, and look sheer down through the hole thus made to the amphitheatre below. One of the guides left them, unable longer to endure the sight of these precipices so close at hand. As they neared their goal they feared lest the mist might, at the last, deprive them of the culminating moment for which they had ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... of the British Museum, says: "Nine-tenths of the talk of Evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by facts. This museum is full of proofs of the ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... answer, To their challenge made no answer, Only rose, and, slowly turning, Seized the huge rock in his fingers, Tore it from its deep foundation, Poised it in the air a moment, Pitched it sheer into the river, Sheer into the swift Pauwating, Where it still is seen ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... tell my story, hand over the notes and diamonds, and trust to the saving power of truth and innocence. I could have laughed as I thought of it. I saw myself bringing home the corpse and giving an account of myself, boggling with sheer shame over the absurdity of my wholly unsupported tale as I brought a charge of mad hatred and fiendish treachery against a man who had never, so far as I knew, had a word to say against me. At every turn the cunning of Manderson had forestalled me. His careful concealment ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought. These are the sides of him which are revealed with extraordinary ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Zambesi river, which, to a great extent, protected it upon three sides. The fourth, that opposite to them, except at one place where a kind of natural causeway led into the town, was also defended by Nature, since here for more than fifty feet in height the granite rock of the base of the hill rose sheer and unclimbable. On the mount itself, that in all may have covered eight or ten acres of ground, and surrounded by a deep donga or ditch, were three rings of fortifications, set one above the other, mighty walls which, it was evident, had been built by no modern ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... the real culprit, though the Baron is certain that every reader must expect him to do so, and must feel quite sure that, in spite of the author's reticence on the subject, it was he who really committed the murder, and escaped even the author's detection, unless, out of sheer soft-heartedness towards the puppets of his own creation, JAMES PAYN knowingly let him off at the last moment. The judicial portion of the novel, including the scene in the Coroner's court, is just what would have been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... child's surroundings in the north. Cecily was being intellectually starved; that seemed clear to Mallard himself after a little conversation with her. It was wonderful how much she had already learnt, impelled by sheer inner necessity, of things which in general she was discouraged from studying. So Cecily left England, to return only for short intervals, spent in London. Between that departure and this present meeting, Mallard saw her only twice; but the girl wrote to him with some regularity. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... on the sheer assumption, which is surely a fallacy, that suppressio veri is always and not only sometimes suggestio falsi, I do not see that he exceeded a due licence in this matter, while that he was wise in his generation ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... deal, after all; all the discontented, puling, peevish, wanting people one met must be great fools; they had made their beds and made them wrong; the great thing, the simple secret, was to make them right. A husband and wife must pull together, in everything. Pulling together would be sheer joy. ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... account of the roughness of the ground to lead our horses along the steep incline of the mountainsides, and each time Donald set his teeth and dragged his shattered ankle through bracken and over boulder by sheer dour pluck. Hunger gnawed at our vitals, for in forty-eight hours we had but tasted food. Deadly weariness hung on our stumbling footsteps, and in our gloomy hearts lurked the coldness of despair. Yet hour after hour we held our silent course, clambering like ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... faces, but they seldom persevered very steadily in subjecting me to this privation. Unhappy beings! they were sadly plain. The awful haggardness that gave something of character to the faces of the men was sheer ugliness in the poor women. It is a great shame, but the truth is that, except when we refer to the beautiful devotion of the mother to her child, all the fine things we say and think about woman apply only to ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... was as much merrier than you, for instance, as you are merrier than your father. Sometimes he fell, like a spinning-top, from sheer merriment. Have you seen a greyhound leaping the fences of the Gardens? That is ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... the uniform of the United States, did you say, 'Don't disgrace it; this is the white man's Government?' When they toiled on the march, in the mud, the rain, and the snow, and when they fell out of the ranks from sheer weariness, did you cheer them on with the encouragement that 'this is the ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... adversary's wings, or even detaching squadrons to cut off his retreat. They formed their line several ships deep and when the hour of battle came, advanced directly at their best speed against the enemy, endeavoring to run down his vessels by sheer force, and never showing any acquaintance with or predilection for manoeuvres of a skilful antagonist, who avoided or successfully withstood this first onset, they were apt through their very numbers to be ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... bargain of Dr. Cutler with Congress, the Associators prepared to migrate en masse to their purchase. What the hardy spirits among the country people of the South Atlantic States had been able to accomplish by individual initiative and sheer endurance, the town-dwellers of the North Atlantic States did more systematically and rapidly by concerted action. Organisation and government protection saved the Ohio Associators from such experiments ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... the gipsying, or picnic, had been that of loving Fancy too exclusively, and depriving himself of the innocent pleasure the gathering might have afforded him, by sighing regretfully at her absence,—who had danced with the rival in sheer despair of ever being able to get through that stale, flat, and unprofitable afternoon in any other way; but ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... fundamental characteristic of human language that it includes two distinct elements: first, the purely acoustic element, represented by the sheer succession of sounds, and secondly the variety of meanings represented by various groups of sounds, meanings which seem to have nothing to do with the sounds as such. This state of language, where the sound-value of the word and its value as a sign to denote ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... line of fitful light coming from a door ajar in their dungeon. The poor victims would then go in haste to this door, pull it open and, blinded by the sudden light, step out upon the green slope terminating quickly in a precipice, which went sheer down to the sea. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... fellows of the live-and-let-live type, who would rather cultivate their own potatoes than quarrel about vestments or the Trinity. Violently acquisitive, of course, like most southerners. I know a parish priest, a son of poor parents, who, by dint of sheer energy, has amassed a fortune of half a million francs. He cannot endure idleness in any shape, and a fine mediaeval scene may be witnessed when he suddenly appears round the corner and catches his workmen wasting their time and ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... destiny—risen from nothing and by the sheer genius of his will throwing three worlds into chaos, at one stage combining two worlds into his self-created Empire; and menacing the third. Surely Tarrano was a greater man than this Rhaalton. I knew it; much as I hated Tarrano I was ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... going down to the deepest part of her heart, woke up and raised again the half-appeased want and sorrow. Again she dreamed that she was folding her little child in her arms, and woke to find them empty. She could not stand against this, and decided, in sheer desperation, to quit the field. She would go on the Continent to Justina; rest and change would help her, and she would send back the ring, when all was arranged, ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... talkative person he had in these days strangely little to say. It became manifest that, in the long run, the Colonel would suffer the most physically; but his young companion, having less patience and more ambition, more sheer untamed vitality in him, would suffer the most in spirit. Every sense in him was becoming numbed, save the gnawing in his stomach, and that other, even more acute ache, queer compound of fatigue and anger. These two sensations ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... was his mother, a small and exquisite woman with music in her heart and in the tips of her fingers; his memory of her was dim, but he knew that she had been the maddest and the merriest of all possible mothers—a creature of joy and sunshine and the sheer happiness of existence. And then her sister Mirabelle, who found life such a serious condition to be in, and loved nothing about it, save the task of reforming it for other people whether the other people liked it or not. And finally, her brother John, bald, ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... honey-combed with tombs, villages and Buddhist lamaseries in the detached localities where population occurs. A pleasure walk through one of these Tibetan towns means a climb by steep flights of steps hewn out of the rock, varied by a saunter up ladders, where the sheer face of a cliff must be surmounted to reach the houses on a ledge above.[1297] Pictures of these recall forcibly the cliff-dwellings of the Pueblo Indians. Even the important market city of Leh covers the lower slope of the mountain at an altitude of 11,500 feet, and from its height overlooks the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... within a mile of a Munich military band, and are not stone deaf, you listen to it, and do not think of much else. It compels your attention by its mere noise; it dominates your whole being by its sheer strength. Your mind has to follow it as the feet of the little children followed the playing of the Pied Piper. Whatever you do, you have to do in unison with the band. All through our meal we had to keep time ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... phenomena] is one to be discussed on its merits, in order to arrive at a distinct opinion how far it may be connected with facts insufficiently appreciated and explained by science, and how far with superstition, delusion, and sheer knavery. Such investigation, pursued by careful observation in a scientific spirit, would seem apt to throw light on some ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... tempted to butt his poor head against the office wall, goat-fashion, in an attempt to stimulate some new ideas worth while. Nevertheless, one night he wakened from a sound sleep and found himself sitting up in bed, the possessor of a plan so flawless that, in sheer amazement, he announced aloud that he would be—jiggered. Some cunning little emissary of the devil must have crept in through his ear while he slept and planted the brilliant idea in ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... centre of Bolshevism in Britain, though the spirit of it is in other parts also. But on the Clyde a number of very determined and exceedingly well meaning, but "heady," Socialists of the S.L.P. "impossibilist" type have influenced by sheer persistence a good many others who do not understand whither they are being led. Here, again, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" means the dictation of the proletariat by these "impossibilists," in order to bring capitalist industry to its knees. ...
— Bolshevism: A Curse & Danger to the Workers • Henry William Lee
... one," the plucky boy in the boat made answer, and with a parting shot and a laughing "Farvl!" he leaped from the sinking boat into the dancing Maelar water. Striking boldly out, he swam twice round the boat in sheer bravado, defying the enemy; now ducking to escape the pursuing stream, or now, while floating on his back, sending a return shot with telling force against the men at the pump—for he still ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... reached the big house on upper Fifth Avenue, and as they entered, Dolly felt a little appalled at the grandeur everywhere about her. Not so Dotty. She loved elegance, and as her feet sank into the deep soft rugs, she laughed out in sheer delight of being in such beautiful surroundings. Mrs. Berry took the girls at once to their rooms, and sent ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... in many points; in none so glaringly as in that condition which required unanimity in questions of peace or war, and in the provision, from which they had no power to swerve, that all the taxes should be uniform. Both these stipulations were, of sheer necessity, continually disregarded; so that the government could be carried on at all only by repeated violations of the constitution. In order to excuse measures dictated by this necessity, each stadtholder was perpetually obliged to form partisans, and ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... responded there; "inartistic!" would be solemnly decided. Note well. Whenever you present the actual, simple truth, it is, somehow, always denounced as a lie—they disown it, cast it off, throw it on the parish; whereas the product of your own imagination, the mere figment, the sheer fiction, is adopted, petted, termed pretty, proper, sweetly natural—the little, spurious wretch gets all the comfits, the honest, lawful bantling all the cuffs. Such is the way of the world, Peter; and as you are ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... rose gradually for two miles, behind it; and then fell at once in a great precipice towards Geneva, going down three thousand feet in four or five cliffs, or steps. Now that whole group of cliffs had simply been torn away by sheer strength from the rocks below, as if the whole mass had been as soft as biscuit. Put four or five captains' biscuits on the floor, on the top of one another; and try to break them all in half, not by bending, but by holding one half down, and tearing the other halves straight ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Mr. Roger Potion 'Sir, 'This is to let you know that I have quitted the Thunder man of war, being obliged to sheer off for killing my captain, which I did fairly on the beach, at Cape Tiberoon, in the Island of Hispaniola; having received his fire and returned it, which went through his body: and I would serve the best man so that ever stepped between stem and stern, if so be that he ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... last he stopped from sheer lack of breath, Old Mother Nature spoke, and her voice was very severe. "I'm ashamed of you, Chatterer," said she. "Unfortunately, what Happy Jack has said about you is true. In many ways you are a disgrace to the Green Forest. Still I don't know how the Green Forest could get along without ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... and at it, again," he exclaimed, common-placely enough, his voice a bit uncertain. Stern had walked narrow girders six hundred feet sheer up; he had worked in caissons under tide-water, with the air-pumps driving full tilt to ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... that our soldiers have made any attack on the life or property of a single Belgian citizen without being forced to it by sheer necessity.... ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... dreamed of it as anything but merciful in its quickness. It was as if his adversary had broken an inviolable pact with him and he sweated and tossed on his bed of straw while Neil sat cool and silent on the bench against the dungeon wall. Sheer exhaustion brought him relief, and after a ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... earnestly, giving him more of her attention than had been usual, of late, "Here is something to think, Peter. It's this: we have so much to be thankful for, because she never—knew! It was madness," Cherry went on, eagerly, "sheer madness—that is clear now. I don't try to explain it, because it's all been washed away by the frightful thing that happened. I'm different now; you're different—I don't know how we ever thought ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... of wall-like mountains rose in two tiers before them literally into the clouds, for several of the lower clouds floated far below the highest peaks, and from the summit of the highest range a river, equal to the Thames at Richmond, dropt sheer down a fall of above two thousand feet. Here it met the summit of the lower mountain-range, on which it burst with a deep-toned, sullen, never-ceasing roar, comparable only to eternal thunder. A white cloud of spray received the falling river in its soft embrace, and sent ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... at it," replied his foe. "Still further," continued the warlike mountaineer in sheer desperation, "you must not even think ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... sink to the depths in which John B. Gough found himself at the age of twenty-five years. By sheer force of will he raised himself from the slough in which he wallowed, till he attained a position honored among men, and performed a service of exceptional usefulness ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... where the said river ran into the sea. There was no beach there, for the water was ten fathom deep close up to the lip of the land; but there was a great haven land-locked all but a narrow outgate betwixt the sheer black cliffs. Many a great ship might have lain in that haven; but as now there was but one lying there, a round-ship not very great, but exceeding trim and meet ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... enter the city would have been to abandon his hopes of a triumph—Cato condescended to use the arts of obstruction in opposing him. He spoke till sunset against the proposition, and it failed by sheer lapse of time. Yet the opposition was fruitless. Caesar of course abandoned the empty honor, and secured the reality, all the more certainly because people felt that he had been hardly used. And so ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... ship's deck in the blind haste and terror of the moment, one man leaping upon another, and a third on both. At last, and whether by design or accident, the bows of the Good Hope were liberated; and the ever-ready Lawless, who had maintained his place at the helm through all the hurly-burly by sheer strength of body and a liberal use of the cold steel, instantly clapped her on the proper tack. The ship began to move once more forward on the stormy sea, its scuppers running blood, its deck heaped with fallen men, sprawling ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... They have to be humored. After all, they are a harmless, good lot, but stiffened with hereditary ideas, worse than by rheumatism. If I should give a few drops in half a glass of water, and order a teaspoonful at a time, I should fly in the face of something which no mortal man can conquer, sheer heredity. The grandfathers and great-grandfathers of these people took their physic on draft, the children must do likewise. Sometimes I even think the medicine would lose its effect if taken in any other way. Nobody can estimate the power of a fixed ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... lustrous, and wistful, as they looked out of the white thin face, where the once glowing colour had dwindled to two burning carnation spots. It was so piteous a change that as he took her hand he was silent, from sheer inability ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Christ, who has said to her: "He that heareth you heareth Me; he that despiseth you despiseth Me." She is the Mistress of truth. It is the property of the human mind to embrace truth wherever it finds it. It would, therefore, be not only an act of irreverence, but of sheer folly, to disobey the voice of this ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... owned, was monotonous, and yet not without haunting beauty. Mile on mile, hour on hour, we glided through sheer desert. Yellow sand to right and left—now stretching away endlessly, now a valley between small broken hills. Sometimes the hills sloped away from us, then they closed in again. Now they were diaphanous blue on the horizon, ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... school with face and eyes aglow with something more than the mere delight of living. It meant mischief, pure and simple, but Little Teacher was not always discerning. She gave him a welcoming smile of sheer sympathy with his mood. She didn't smile, later, when the schoolroom was distracted by the sound of raucous laughter, feminine screams, and a fluttering of skirts as the girls scrambled to standing posture in their chairs. Astonished, she looked for the cause. ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... door being found locked from the inside made the thing impossible. There were two windows to the room, both of which were shut, one being fastened by the catch, while the catch of the other was broken—an old fracture. Below these windows was a sheer drop of fifty feet or more, without a foot or hand-hold near. The windows in the other rooms were shut and fastened. Certainly it seemed suicide—unless it were one of those accidents that will occur to people who fiddle ignorantly with firearms. ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... followed now led him closer to the shore, and by and by he came to a place where the mountains seemed to rise sheer out of the sea, and there was only a, narrow path high up along the side of the cliff. Far down beneath his feet he could hear the waves dashing evermore against the rocky wall, while above him the mountain eagles circled and screamed, and gray ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day before—but one couldn't as much as glance at that pile without feeling in it a long accumulation of history. What kind of history I was not prepared to guess: perhaps only that sheer weight of many associated lives and deaths which gives a majesty to all old houses. But the aspect of Kerfol suggested something more—a perspective of stern and cruel memories stretching away, like its own grey avenues, into a ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... investigation had been progressing, Watts had looked at the shelf of law books, had looked out of the window, had whistled, and had yawned. Finally, in sheer ennui he had thrown open a door, and looked to see ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... the wave, that rises to fall, Rises a sheer green wall like a barrier of glass That has caught the soul of the moonlight. Caught and prisoned the moon-beams; Its edge is frittered to foam. ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... nods. "In a field hospital, under fire," says he, "late last September. That's all we know. Where do you think, though, I ran across that boy of hers? Found him at Zenobia's; found them both rather, at a theater. Sheer luck. For if you'll pardon my saying it, that youth is a nephew I'm going to be proud of some of these ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... not for sheer hurry of business been able to spare five minutes to finish my letter. Besides my farm business, I ride on my Excise matters at least two hundred miles every week. I have not by any means given up the Muses. You will see in the third volume of Johnson's Scots songs that ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Archie saw that the lad had sufficient presence of mind to hastily buckle his belt round his waist again, then, his right shoulder numb, he dived steeply, bringing his plane up and straightening it out after a sheer drop of ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... peasants have a feeling for paint over there—we heard a tap on the window. It was the padrona. I saw that she wanted to speak to me, and I went in. She was an old, crippled woman, holding to life by sheer will, sitting all day by the fire in one room. She spoke French, so we could talk. To my surprise she was very much interested in me—asked questions about my work, my family, and so on. I couldn't understand why. But when I left she began crying and told me that I reminded her of ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... emerged, where the road stretched level before them, for a quarter of a mile. On one side rose the huge bulk of the mountain. On the other side the steep wall of the canyon fell away in impossible slopes and sheer drops to the torrent at the bottom. It was an abyss of green beauty and shady depths, pierced by vagrant shafts of the sun and mottled here and there by the sun's broader blazes. The sound of rushing water ascended on the windless air, and there was a hum ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... and tossed for several hours, praying and weeping, weeping and praying, until from sheer fatigue she lay perfectly quiet. Suddenly she sat up and listened. The stupor of slumber dulled her hearing, and she struggled to catch again the sound that had awakened her. From somewhere across the hall she heard a faint click, click, which ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... keeping the child in health, and the appliances of a vigorous physical development. The Christian mother, to this end, should make herself acquainted with the physiology of the infant body. Many well-meaning mothers, from sheer ignorance, destroy the health of their children; and it is on this account perhaps that four-tenths of them die under five years of age. They should also consider the bearing of the body upon the mind and ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... ends, Sheer the precipice descends, Loud the torrent roars unseen; Thirty feet from side to side Yawns the chasm; on air must ride He who crosses ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... world: and she began to wonder more than ever before whether she would ever go into it and see for herself what was there. With the thought, she rose slowly to her feet, moved slowly to the cliff that dropped sheer ten feet aside from the trail, and stood there like a great scarlet flower in still air. There was the way at her feet—that path that coiled under the cliff and ran down loop by loop through majestic oak and poplar and masses of ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... opening of 1799 to unite the two Parliaments. The opposition of the Irish borough-mongers was naturally stubborn and determined, and when the plan was introduced into the Parliament at Dublin, it was only saved from rejection by a single vote. But with men like these it was a sheer question of gold; and their assent was bought with a million in money, and with a liberal distribution of pensions and peerages. Base and shameless as were such means, Pitt may fairly plead that they were the only means by which the bill for the Union could have been passed. As the matter ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... built to shelter a family of boys, and steps being a superfluity scorned by their agile legs, there was a sheer drop of three feet to the ground upon that side. Evadna made it in a jump, just as the boys did, and landed lightly ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... value in the bulk of these chapters. Indeed, desirous though I have been to give the Traveller's work complete, and sharing the dislike that every man who uses books must bear to abridgments, I have felt that it would be sheer waste and dead-weight to print these ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... captivating simplicity which the young Goethe, and later the young Heine, caught from the songs of the people. Schiller is always in pursuit of the intense, the extraordinary, the ecstatic, and sometimes fails to impress through sheer superabundance of the impressive. His imagination wanders between a wild sensuality,—so lubricious in its suggestions, now and then, as to occasion gossip to the effect that he had become a libertine,—and ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... not yet in sight, because the front of White Face, though apparently a sheer and awful precipice when viewed from the valley, was in fact wrinkled with gullies and buttresses and bucklings of the tortured strata. But the sound of his coming was now quite intelligible to her. That softly ponderous tread, that careless displacing of stones, those undisguised ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... to sheer Diablo off closer under the wall, to make the slope where his companion had escaped. But Diablo was uncontrollable. He was running wild, with breaking gait. Closer and closer crept that white, smoothly ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... libidinum whereof Suetonius speaks; the Spintrian medals, found in these recesses, still bear witness that the biographer trusted no mere fables for the picture he has drawn. Here, too, below the Villa Jovis, gazing 700 feet sheer down into the waves, we tread the very parapet whence fell the victims of that maniac lust for blood. 'After long and exquisite torments,' says the Roman writer, 'he ordered condemned prisoners to be cast into the sea before his eyes; marines were stationed ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... level of the street. In the rays of a sinking sun he was received with jeers, groans, and imprecations. Balakian women have warm blood in their veins and are not given to measuring their words over-nicely. He stared about him in sheer wonderment. A mob of women gazed up at him and its one expression was unconcealed wrath. Children and men hung about the circle of vengeful amazons laughing, shouting and urging violence. Pobloff, in his dressing-gown, was a fair target. "Where are our husbands? Brute, beast, in what prison have ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... asked him about it. 'Do you really mean to tell me,' I said, 'that you were baffled by the case, that you actually don't know what the man died of?' 'Pardon me,' he replied, 'I know perfectly well what caused death. Blank died of fright, of sheer, awful terror; I never saw features so hideously contorted in the entire course of my practice, and I have seen the faces of a whole host of dead.' The doctor was usually a cool customer enough, and a certain vehemence in his manner struck me, but I couldn't get ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... make it up to you to-morrow, if you sheer off quietly; if you don't, not a blessed thing shall you have out ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... all sheer nonsense, whatever Gwen thinks? She may think the sins of the congregation are as scarlet. To me they are ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... letters, written in trenches or in billets. When Tommy was reported wounded, Miss Willmot had a bad day of it with an almost hysterical Nelly Davis. When the wound turned out to be nothing worse than a hole in the calf of the leg, made by a machine-gun bullet, Miss Nelly cried from sheer relief. When, by the greatest good luck in the world, Private 7432 Collins was sent down to 73 General Hospital, no more than a mile distant from the Camp, Miss Nelly ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... dreamed a dream of sadness and the sea, And I will turn again, if yet I may, To where the rolling rondure of the deep Broadly affront the sky's infinity. Sleeping or waking, knew I naught but this; Sorrow and Love, above a desolate main, From the sheer battlements of opposite clouds, Kissed, and embraced, and parted company.... This is the self-same bay where we put in, Yonder the restless keel did gore the sand. There was the sailor's fire, and up and down, Are scattered mangled ropes, splinters, and spars, Fragments and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... had watched the whole proceeding. He could only hold on to a sail and, by the sheer strength of his hands and arms, save himself from being carried overboard, as sea after sea swept over them. He strained his eyes until it seemed as though they would burst, to follow the movements ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... itself forth in writing so copiously that his revision was chiefly devoted to reducing the over-abundance. He never shrank from any of the drudgery of preparation, but I think his own part of the work was sheer pleasure to him." ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of biscuits for fourpence," said Priscilla, "if you go in for plain arrowroot. Of course they're rather dull, but then you get very few of the better sorts. Take macaroons, for instance. They're nearly a halfpenny each in Brannigan's. Sheer robbery, ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... small adjoining drawing-room, where she dined; if, indeed, to sit down to a table, to look with disgust at the dishes, and take the precise amount of nourishment required to prevent death from sheer starvation, can be called dining. The meal over, she returned at once to the old-fashioned low chair, in which she had sat since the morning, in the embrasure of the one ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... reflecting the sheer astonishment of the others; "then why the devil are you wearing yourself out? And why are we spending our time and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... were bare of trees, the current ran rapidly, forming whirlpools, while many sleepy crocodiles lazily flopped into the water as we passed. After ascending some twenty miles, the river turns sharply to the right and runs between cliffs which descend sheer into the water, forming a narrow chasm not more than half a mile broad. As the whole of the immense volume of water in the Congo has to pass through this gorge, it is enormously deep and the current is very rapid. ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... who took to chopping in sheer desperation; and the muscles of both gave them full occupation for five minutes. Philetus stood comfortably warming himself at the fire, looking first at one and then at the other, as if they were a show and he had paid for it. Barby ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... him along the thicket and up the rocks to a cleft — a hole in the sheer rock overhung by ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... through the plate glass, and proved to be an actor out of work and an undischarged bankrupt. He demanded compensation for some fancied injury, would hear nothing of the valuable dog he had killed or the window he had broken, obliged Grubb by sheer physical obduracy to straighten his buckled front wheel, and pestered the struggling firm with a series of inhumanly worded solicitor's letters. Grubb answered them—stingingly, and put himself, Bert ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... speech, is given us in the matter of sleep. Among adults the act of going to bed serves as a powerful suggestion to induce sleep. Seldom do we seek rest so tired physically that we drop off to sleep from the irresistible force of sheer exhaustion. Yet as soon as the healthy man whose mind is at peace, whose nerves are not on edge, finds himself in bed, his eyes close almost with the force of a hypnotic suggestion, and he drops off to sleep. ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... Tho' he call lustily "help, neighbours, help!" No soul regards him, or attends his yelp. Should one, too kind, to give him succour hope, Wish to relieve him, and let down a rope; Forbear! (I'll cry for aught that you can tell) By sheer design he jump'd into the well. He wishes not you should preserve him, Friend! Know you the old Sicilian Poet's end? ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... one could scarcely blame him for drawing a pistol and shooting the launchman—fatally, according to Mr. Schultz. Of course, after that, to have lingered longer inside the three-mile limit would have been sheer insanity, so Mr. Schultz, taking matters into his own hands, had uphooked and skipped with doused lights from the jurisdiction of ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... with which to console himself; his endurance is of the finest order—simple, sheer resolution, a resolve that with no reward, he will never disgrace himself. He knows what ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... In sheer self-defense he talked with an animation he seldom displayed. Evelyn was evidently much taken by him, and, fired by her manifest interest, he indulged in fantastic paradox and wild flights of fancy. Seemingly ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... the acquiescence of the other seamen in this act of retributive justice. Jackson, with a loud oath, attempted to spring into the boat, but was repelled by the seamen; again he made the attempt, with dreadful imprecations. He was on the plane-sheer of the brig, and about to make a spring, when a blow from a handspike (the same handspike with which he had murdered the unfortunate seaman) struck him senseless, and he fell back into the lee-scuppers. The boat then shoved off, and had not gained more than ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... connection, or rather in connection with the other case of Froude, it is worth while to take another figure from Dickens's history, which illustrates the other and better side of the facile and popular method. Sheer ignorance of the environment made him wrong about Dunstan. But sheer instinct and good moral tradition made him right, for instance, about Henry VIII.; right where Froude is wildly wrong. Dickens's imagination ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... seventeen. The rest of the Wilmots went into Saint X's newly developed but flourishing fashionable society. They had no money to give return entertainments or even to pay their share of the joint, dances and card parties Arthur decided to sheer off. "I came to ask you to the house for sup—dinner to-night," said he. "It's lonely—just mother and Del and me. Come and cheer us up. Come along with ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... his speech or attitude. He was not posing. He spoke of his necessity in the matter-of-fact way in which he had accepted it. It was necessary to earn the sheer essentials of life, in order to get a footing—to get sufficient capital to open up his office again. He would not have borrowed if he could, and a penniless lawyer in New York is in as bad a position as a penniless tramp. Not only was he glad of this opportunity to earn a couple of dollars, ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... spirits and they had wit. "Capulet's" rhymes; the series of ballades written by Baring, Bentley, Phillimore, Belloc and G.K.C.; "Mrs. Markham's History" written by Belloc; there was little of this quality in the other weeklies. Side by side with the serious attacks was a line of satire and of sheer fooling. The silver deal in India was being attacked in the editorials, while Mrs. Markham explained to Tommy how good, kind Lord Swaythling, really a Samuel, had lent money to his brother Mr. Montague (another Samuel) for the benefit ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... activity associated with the Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge Saint Helena: rugged, volcanic; small scattered plateaus and plains Ascension: surface covered by lava flows and cinder cones of 44 dormant volcanoes; ground rises to the east Tristan da Cunha: sheer cliffs line the coastline of the nearly circular island; the flanks of the central volcanic peak are deeply dissected; narrow coastal plain lies between The Peak and ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... the first year had passed without mishap, and already the second was nearing its close. The school board congratulated itself. Had the faculty known that for most of his scholarship, poor as it often was, Van Blake was indebted to the sheer will power of Bob Carlton they might have felt less sanguine. Day after day Bob had patiently tutored his big chum in order that he might contrive to scrape through his lessons. It was Bob who did the work and Van who serenely accepted the fruits of it—accepted ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... it was rivalry between him and Master Francis!' said the Doctor, laughing. 'How he launched out against young men's conceit when Francis was singing with her. Sheer jealousy! He could see nothing but dilapidation, dissent, and dirt at Laneham, and now has gone ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a lively strain. Jacob Farnum was bustling about, although, as far as could be seen, his only impulse was sheer excitement. ...
— The Submarine Boys on Duty - Life of a Diving Torpedo Boat • Victor G. Durham
... granted, the members of the congregation, and all their friends and relations—to say nothing of the whole human race which was included in a general clause—would have had nothing more to hope for, and must have succumbed to sheer repletion. It was a rousing sermon, but it contained not a single reference ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... figure continued its onward career; and Freeman once more levelled his weapon,—when a voice, which gave him such a start of surprise as well-nigh caused him to pull the trigger for sheer lack of self-command, called out, "Why, you abominable young villain! What the mischief do you mean? Do ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... disgrace upon his parents, no eye brightens at the mention of his name. Alas! he is a specimen of the "homeless boy" of whom his neighbours the minstrels will sing to-morrow. He is silent and moody, for he is not in funds. Are there none among the company whom sheer misfortune has brought down into this underworld? we ask. Aye, there are, for in this kitchen there are representatives of all sorts and conditions. See that man in the corner by himself, speaking to no one, cooking nothing, ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... Sheer off! you won't? then damme, here's at ye. [Drives them off.] Tell me, old man, what cause had you given them ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... running quarrel with Fate during the game, and when she was not abusing Fate she was generally reproaching her partner. Eve was always her partner; and to-night she devoutly hoped that her employer would elect to rest. She always played badly with Mrs. Rastall-Retford, through sheer nervousness. Once she had revoked, and there had been a terrible moment ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... him; in fact, no one could tell him, and in sheer desperation Jason answered all six of the advertisements, determined to find out for a ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... more defiantly, 'His wife—' He didn't finish the sentence, Ramon, for father groaned suddenly, terribly, as if he were in swift pain; the man gave a little sneering laugh, and I could hear him moving about in the library, whistling half under his breath in sheer bravado. I could not bear to hear any more. I put my hands over my ears and fled back to my room. What could it mean, Ramon? What is this about father and some other man and his wife which the stranger dared to insinuate! reflected ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... him for a moment, speechless through sheer lack of comprehension. Then she glanced at Lady Elisabeth and the truth dawned upon her. It was more than she could ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
