"Sheer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... found speech to answer. 'Yes,' he said, 'what is it?' The lawyer was out of breath, and clinging to the mane in sheer weariness. ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... more desperate battle with herself than she ever had been called upon to fight before. She did not now believe that they would be rescued, but that did not prevent her keeping up the battle as long as a single vestige of strength remained. It was sheer grit that kept Harriet Burrell afloat during that long, heart-breaking swim among the Atlantic ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... a volunteer captain in the Breton struggles for independence with which he had no sympathy. As a great soldier he ranks with Hoche after Napoleon in the revolutionary time. Hoche was younger still, having been born in 1768. In 1784 he enlisted as a common soldier and rose from the ranks by sheer ability. He died at the age of thirty, but as a politician and strategist he was already famous. Kleber was an Alsatian who had been educated in the military school at Munich and was already forty-one years old. Having enlisted under the Revolution as a volunteer, he so distinguished ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and ghastly form that lay rotting in the pauper's grave! The children wild in the streets, the mother a destitute widow; both deeply tainted with the deep disgrace of the husband and father's name, and impelled by sheer necessity, down the precipice that had led him to a lingering death, possibly of many years' duration, thousands of miles away. We had no clue to the end of the tale; but it was ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... conscious of the evidences that her horse had been ridden too long and hard, and that he was worn out with fatigue. She did not know that she had ridden round and round over the marshes, and had passed several times through the same lanes. Childe Harold, the sure of foot, actually stumbled, out of sheer weariness of limb. Perhaps it was this which brought her back to earth, and led her to look around her with eyes which saw material objects with comprehension. She had reached the lonely places, indeed and the evening was drawing on. She was at the edge of the marsh, and the land about her was strange ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of hours' toilsome climb over broken stones, and up masses that were mastered by sheer scrambling. Now and then an easy rock slope presented itself, or a gully between two buttresses of the mountain, as they won their way higher and higher. Only once was there a really dangerous place—a mere ledge, such as they had passed along on the previous day, ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... a sheer drop of two hundred feet, and the road here skirted the cliff edge murderously close, for the simple reason that cliff falls had eaten the bordering grass to within a few feet of the road. This course ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... fact, through sheer exhaustion, for years of anarchy and war had broken the strength of both sides; and at last "that happened which would least be believed, that the division of the kingdom was not settled by the sword." The only body of ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... sheer fanaticism!" said Mrs. Randolph. "I cannot let her encourage it. If I did, she would not be fit for anything by and by. She is fit for very ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... idea in the world, that we should gather up the loose, rough fringes of society and weave the broken threads into a common warp and woof. The social fabric is no stronger than its weakest thread. . . . To help and to save for the sheer love of helping and saving is the noblest thing any of us can do—I feel that. This must be an old story to you; I'm ashamed that I never saw it all for myself. It's as though I had been looking at the world through a blurred window, from a comfortable warm room, when some one ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... for her sentiment, not hearing the feeble laugh that followed, as Dunn, in sheer imbecility, again referred to the extravagant ludicrousness of the situation. "It is about the biggest thing in the way of a sell all round," he repeated, lying on his back, confidentially to the speck of smoke-obscured sky above him. He pictured ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... found that their total number of one hundred and five was made up in the proportion of four carpenters to forty-eight "gentlemen." Not inadequately provisioned for their work, they came repeatedly almost to perishing through their sheer incapacity and unthrift, and their needless quarrels with one another and with the Indians. In five months one half of the company were dead. In January, 1608, eight months from the landing, when the second expedition arrived with reinforcements and supplies, only thirty-eight were ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... rose gradually for two miles behind it; and then fell at once in a great precipice toward 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 ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... shoulders; but sheer destitution was before him; and if he could summon fortitude to undergo the extremes of want and hardship, for what had he rescued his helpless charge if it were only to bear as hard a fate as that from which he had wrested him? It was easy to think of seventy miles as nothing, when he was in ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... snare. The sweet of my life was gone for aye, When fortune against me did declare; She brimmed me a cup of grief unmixed, And I must drink it and never spare. Or ever our meeting 'tide, sweetheart, Methinks I shall die of sheer despair, I prithee, fortune, bring back the days When we were a happy childish pair; The days, when we from the shafts of fate, That since have pierced us, in safety were! Ah, who shall succour the exiled ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... throw himself fully dressed upon a cot in his tent for an hour's sleep. His face grew haggard and deeply lined with anxious care, his hollow eyes—dark-rimmed—were bloodshot and burning as if with fever, his jaws were set as if by sheer power of his will he would beat the river into submission. And he barked his orders shortly in a hoarse strained voice that told of nerves stretched almost to the breaking point. In critical moments, when it looked as though the river in the next instant would ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... Wickersham, from sheer despair and physical exhaustion, sank limp in the arms of his captors, the sergeant, on the pretext of seeking the aiders and abettors in the riot, half carried, half led the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... vision! We enjoyed, what not three men in Weissnichtwo could boast of, a certain degree of access to the Professor's private domicile. It was the attic floor of the highest house in the Wahngasse; and might truly be called the pinnacle of Weissnichtwo, for it rose sheer up above the contiguous roofs, themselves rising from elevated ground. Moreover, with its windows it looked towards all the four Orte, or as the Scotch say, and we ought to say, Airts: the sitting-room itself commanded three; another came to view in the Schlafgemach (bedroom) at the opposite ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... But I was a high favourite; not an officer, and scarce a private, in the castle would have turned me back, except upon a thing of moment; and whenever I desired to be solitary, I was suffered to sit here behind my piece of cannon unmolested. The cliff went down before me almost sheer, but mantled with a thicket of climbing trees; from farther down, an outwork raised its turret; and across the valley I had a view of that long terrace of Princes Street which serves as a promenade to the fashionable inhabitants of Edinburgh. A singularity ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... take refuge, while sometimes the more daring chiefs converted these detached peaks and masses of rock, numbers of which you can see as you come up the Ghaut by railway, into almost impregnable fortresses. Many of these masses of rock rise as sheer up from the hillside as walls of masonry, and look at a short distance like ruined castles. Some are absolutely inaccessible; others can only be scaled by experienced climbers; and, although possible for the natives with their bare feet, are impracticable to European ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... creek by the current, squealing piteously, but it was evidently a case of "many waters cannot quench love," for a little further on piggy would appear, very much baked, but holding out gallantly, till sheer exhaustion compelled him to give in, when he would lie down under a tussock, apparently dying; but, as we were coming home in the dusk, Helen, my pretty bay mare, has given many a shy at piggy starting up from his shelter with gambols and squeals ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... can't pass among the men for half an hour without discovery. They are a class apart, they talk their own language, cherish their own secret traditions, live in a world to which no stranger ever penetrates. You could pass as a naval officer more easily than you could as a Pongo. It is sheer madness, Dawson." ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... solemn he has you in fits of laughter again. His is really a book that belongs to world-literature; as good reading, for us now, as for any ancient Chinaman of them all. I think he worked more strenuously in the field of sheer intellect—stirred the thought stuff more—than most other Chinese thinkers,—and so is more akin to the Western mind; he carves his cerebrations more definitely, and leaves less to the intuition. The great lack in him is his failure to appreciate Confucius; and to explain that, before ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... then, appeared in its fullest force, the practical difficulty in education which a mere student could never overcome; a difficulty not in theory, or knowledge, or even want of experience, but in the sheer chaos of human nature. Lord Russell's course had been consistent from the first, and had all the look of rigid determination to recognize the Southern Confederacy "with a view" to breaking up the Union. His letter of September 17 hung ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... followed day after day from dawn to dark and fought again and again a fierce outlaw tusker elephant that from sheer lust of slaughter had killed men, women, and children and carried on for years a career of ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... the deplorable decay of the morning wardrobe), you have something more actual to go on than the hallucinations of a peasant lad setting his foot manfully on the lowest rung of the social ladder. I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation; and I hereby warn all peasant lads not to be duped by my pretended example into regarding their present servitude as a practicable first step to a celebrity so dazzling that its subject cannot even suppress ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... book, the sixth of the series by Lucy Fitch Perkins we meet with Firetop and Firefly, and their family. The setting is in an age where none of the nice things of the civilised world exist at all. There are no books, no wheels, no firearms to hunt with, and everything has to be done by sheer cunning, or found out by sheer accident. The twins' parents set off on a short voyage of exploration, to see what lies over the horizon, and the twins sneak off to follow them secretly. Of course they soon have ...
— The Cave Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... like a prison." Finding on the mantel a bit of stale candy, she popped it into her mouth from sheer force of habit. But it was no sooner in than, with an expression of disgust, she spat it out on the floor. Scornfully, she added: "Makes me think of the old days, the dairy kitchen ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... shadowed, but I do not mean to arrest her. You see, if I asked Fuselier for a warrant against Lady Beltham, a person legally dead and buried more than two months ago, that excellent functionary would swallow his clerk, stool and all, in sheer amazement." ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... antagonist now saw that nothing could serve his purpose but an exercise of sheer weight and brute force, and he pressed on and on with such fury that Tom almost cried aloud in his fear. But Lord Claud was wary and watchful; he gave way for a while, only parrying the thrusts, and that with not so much force as before; then suddenly ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... this time had tackled a task that was beyond them. They struck out rapidly, as did the man to whose aid they had rushed, but the sheer weight ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes
... Spirit of the Hurricane himself, the sea Azrael, in storm and in darkness, came thundering on with stunning violence, tearing off the snowy scalps of the tortured billows, and with tremendous and sheer force, crushing down beneath his chariot wheels their mountainous and howling ridges into one level plain of foaming water. Our chainplates, strong fastenings, and clenched bolts, drew like pliant wires, shrouds and stays were torn ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... in five minutes after the departure of madam from the supper-room. I went straight to the library; calmly stated my resolution to Nighthawk; and in spite of his most obstinate remonstrances, and repeated refusals, broke down his opposition by sheer force of will. It took me half an hour, but at the end of that time I had succeeded. Nighthawk listened, with bent head, and pale face covered with drops of cold perspiration, to my orders. These orders were to have ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... steamers, the size of tugs, but with upstanding bows and a sheer suggesting speed and buoyancy, were lying off the fish market, and mine, the Windhover, had the outside berth. I climbed over to her. Blubber littered her iron deck, and slime drained along her gutters. Black grits showered from her stack. The ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... feet. So that he is a dead man, or a lost man from the very first. The gravitation of sin in a human soul acts precisely in the same way. Gradually, with gathering momentum it sinks a man further and further from God and righteousness, and lands him, by the sheer action of a natural law, in the ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... hundred widows swept in his small voice, Now tenor, and now bass of drummy war. He smiled, compact of loam, this orchard man; Mused like a midnight, webbed with moonbeam snares Of flitting Love; woke—and a King he stood, Whom all the world hath in sheer jest refused For helpless laughter's sake. And then, forfend! Bacchus and Jove reared vast Olympus there; And Pan leaned leering from Promethean eyes. "Lord!" sighed his aspect, weeping o'er the jest, "What simple mouse brought such ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... a sword-thrust along the gutter beside the banquette, where a pariah dog nosed a dead rat and was silhouetted. They picked out, too, the occasional pair of Corinthian columns, built into the squalid stucco sheer with the road that made history for Bentinck Street, and explained that whatever might be the present colour of the little squat houses and the tall lean ones that loafed together into the fog round the first bend, they were once agreeably pink and yellow, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... yards or so and came to the bed of a dry stream which issued from between two great rocks. Behind one of these rocks there opened out a grassy plot a few yards square, and beyond the grass a little lifted platform of rock against a sheer cliff. Here they camped, picketing their horses on the grass and cooking their supper upon the platform of rock over a tiny fire of dry twigs, for the wind was blowing down the canyon and they knew that they could cook their meal and have their smoke without fear of detection. For some time ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... "I spared him;—out of sheer downright Christian charity! I said to myself 'Love your neighbours.' 'Don't be selfish.' 'Do unto him as you would he should do unto you,'—that is, think of his welfare. Though I had him in my net, I let him go. Shall I go to heaven for ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... fighting was hottest, and when it seemed that the outnumbered French must break, Bayard once more dashed forward against the foe, as if by sheer force of courage, to wrest victory from inexorable Fate. For one mad, glorious moment he and his company swept irresistibly against the victors; the next, he was struck by a stone from an ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... vessel ever seen in Baltimore. A fleet and graceful schooner with a magical turn for speed, she mounted sixteen long twelve-pounders and carried a hundred officers, seamen, and marines, and was never outsailed in fair winds or foul. "Out of sheer wantonness," said an admirer, "she sometimes affected to chase the enemy's men-of-war of far superior force." Once when surrounded by two frigates and two naval brigs, she slipped through and was gone like a phantom. During ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... ride through the mountains of the Sierra Morena would have been a blood-curdling and nerve-shattering experience. Often she had to guide her mule along a rough path barely a couple of yards wide, with a sheer drop of hundreds of feet on one side, a path where a stumble or a false step on the part of the animal would have ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... enlistment. A people untrained to bear the burden of heavy taxes not only devotes to the public service sums gathered by private subscription that in any other country would be deemed fabulous, but by sheer force of public opinion compels its legislators to the utmost ingenuity and searchingness of taxation. What was uttered as a sarcasm on the want of public spirit in Florence is here ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the impalpable something that, like a curtain of spirit, gathered around. He, too, was now as white as the shrubs through which he wended his way, and every now and then he doffed his cap, and, with a wild laugh of delight, flung its covering of snow upon the ground. Then, out of sheer fulness of life and rapport with the scene, he would rush for a yard or two up the steep sides of the Clough and roll downwards in the soft substance which lay ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... passionately addicted to gambling, staking everything they possess, and continuing at it night and day, until compelled to desist by sheer hunger, or by the loss of all. I could not understand their game; we, in fact, used our best endeavours to abolish the pernicious custom, and, to avoid countenancing it, were as seldom present as possible. It is played with a few small sticks, neatly ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... town? You can take a bath now before dinner. Ay! loodee! [very loud and peremptory]. Go and tell my Ivan to heat up the bath quick! Akh Chort yeekh! vazmee!" and the restless little man finally stopped from sheer exhaustion, and began pacing nervously across the room, while the Major related our adventures, gave him the latest news from Russia, explained our plans, the object of our expedition, told him of the murder ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... few days later (January 11) he accomplished the tour de force of the campaign. In the plain to the west of Colesberg there arose an isolated kopje, some six hundred feet in height, called Coles Kop. This hill, which rises almost sheer from the plain, taxes the wind of the unencumbered climber to the utmost. Being higher than the surrounding kopjes, it commands both Colesberg and the enemy's laager. The Boers had left it ungarrisoned, thinking it ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... Isabel's bed, and lie there with her arms behind her head, to the deplorable ruin of her ruff; with her buckled feet twitching and tapping; and go on and on talking like a running stream in the sun that runs for the sheer glitter and tinkle of it, and accomplishes nothing. But she was more respectful to Isabel's simplicity than at first, and avoided dangerous edges and treacherous ground in a manner that surprised herself, telling her of the pageants at Court and fair exterior of it all, and little about the ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... included some of the most celebrated critics and press representatives of the neighbourhood, was unanimous in acknowledging her spirited conception of what was certainly a difficult and delicate role, which, in less skilled hands than hers, might have degenerated into buffoonery or sheer melodrama. She was greatly to be congratulated on her achievement, and it is hoped this is not the last time she will appear on the boards and give Devon audiences the opportunity of enjoying her rare humour. It may be noted that, in addition ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... boundary-wall of the valley, and the sound of roaring water grew tumultuous as they rounded the curve in the road and came into the little triangular nook which had been anciently formed by the Colorow as it descended in power from its source in the high parks. On the left the ledges rose almost sheer for a thousand feet, and from the edge of this cliff ore-buckets, a-slide on invisible cables, appeared in the sky, swooping like eagles, silently dropping one by one, to disappear, tamely as doves, in the gable end of a huge, drab-colored mill which stood upon the flat ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... face in the cushions. She realized that she had been abducted, and was being held a prisoner in this strange place. But she must—she felt she must—do as the woman told her. Just a few tears from sheer nervousness, then ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... the dark, Which grasping without question, he is led Where there is work that he must do for God. The trial still is the strength's complement, And the uncertain, dizzy path that scales 230 The sheer heights of supremest purposes Is steeper to the angel than the child. Chances have laws as fixed as planets have, And disappointment's dry and bitter root, Envy's harsh berries, and the choking pool ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... about as uncertain calculations as the hatching of guinea eggs, or the sprouting of parsley seed. What is theirs can't be worth much; but what belongs to somebody else, is invaluable; moreover, they are liable to sudden tantrums of sheer obstinacy, that hang on like whooping-cough, or a sprain in one's joints. Did you never see a mule take the sulks on his way to the corn crib and the fodder rack, and refuse to budge, even for his ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... man, gazing on the scene, Would say a lovely spot was here, And praise the lawns, so fresh and green, Between the hills so sheer. I like it not—I would the plain Lay in its tall old ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... the road brought Porto Venere in sight, and on its grey walls flashed a gleam of watery sunlight. The village consists of one long narrow street, the houses on the left side hanging sheer above the sea. Their doors at the back open on to cliffs with drop about fifty feet upon the water. A line of ancient walls, with medieval battlements and shells of chambers suspended midway between earth and sky, runs ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... safely to the shelf rock, a huge slab of granite as level as a house floor, about thirty feet long and ten feet deep. At the back towered a solid sheet of granite for a hundred feet or more, while in front the rocks dropped sheer for almost twice ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls in the Hills - The Missing Pilot of the White Mountains • Janet Aldridge
... from sheer untalked talk. For lack of a creative listener they gradually fill up with unexpressed emotion. Presently this emotion begins to ferment, and finally—bang!—they blow up, burst, disappear in thin air. In all that community I suppose there was no one but the little faded ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... were sages, some of them seemed sheer noddies; Some of the same like a "Wandering Flame," and others as "Astral Bodies." Some of theirs croaked "Ha! ha!" some of them chuckled "Ho! ho!" And I got so sad, I was heartily glad when I found it ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... (taking off his hat with feeling). "God bless ye, sir, and send ye many happy days, and well spent, with the pretty lady I see alongside; asking your pardon, miss, for parting pleasanter company—so I'll sheer off." ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... until you see our frocks for the boat!" she warned him. "Nina has a yellow coat—and I have a black lace and a white embroidery! Really—REALLY I have never seen anything like the white one. SHEER, ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... the castle wall. There was a breach in it which had been boarded up. On to this she climbed, and so got over between the wall and the ditch; and looking down she saw the ditch was very deep and the sides very sheer, and ...
— Aucassin and Nicolette - translated from the Old French • Anonymous
... despair could not be crowded into so short a song, and the whole brief tragedy is wrought with a grandeur and climax positively epic. It is a flash of sheer genius. ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... her the terrific countenance she had last seen on Jane's wedding day, and she fell silent from sheer inability to utter a protest befitting ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... cleverness, a thing that soon satiates without satisfying. Evadne had seen soul in her lover's eyes, but now they struck her as hard, shallow, glittering, and obtrusively blue; and she noticed that his forehead, although high, shelved back abruptly to the crown of his head, which dipped down again sheer to the back of his neck, a very precipice without a single boss upon which to rest a hope of some saving grace in the way of eminent social qualities. "Thank Heaven, I see you as you are ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... colored as well as white persons, that it was on account of hatred to the African, or in other words, on account of hatred to his color, that the African was selected as the subject of oppression in this country. This is sheer nonsense; being based on policy and nothing else, as shown in another place. The Indians, who being the most foreign to the sympathies of the Europeans on this continent, were selected in the first place, who, being unable to withstand ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... of his partner, General A. S. Sanford, he was First Lieutenant. When permission was received for the organization of the First Ohio Artillery as a three years regiment, Mr. Hayward was tendered, and from a sheer sense of duty to the country accepted, the Lieutenant Colonelcy of the regiment. He took an active part in recruiting, drilling, and organizing the men as fast as received, and sending them to the front. When the regiment was divided and sent ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... abandoned. "In the matter of sabres," said a grenadier, "I like only the edge." Violent and weak both together, in spite of his real merit and his genuine worth, often giving up wise resolutions out of sheer embarrassment, he nearly always failed in what he undertook; the outcries against the reformers were increased thereby; the faults of M. de St. Germain were put down ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... When the Temple came into view, rising majestically in the distance, they shouted to each other, "The Temple of the Lord! The Temple of the Lord!" out of sheer joy in beholding the sacred structure that ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... comfort, but he had not expected more, and he strolled away in sheer vacuity of heart and thought to the principal theatre of the city, where just then a bright comic opera was running. The lights, the gay music, the brilliantly-dressed crowd upon the stage, made no impression on his mind, and ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... in the tenement district, Philip had more than given the extra thousand dollars the church insisted on paying him. The demands on him were so urgent, the perfect impossibility of providing men with work and so relieving them had been such a bar to giving help in that direction, that out of sheer necessity, as it seemed to him, Philip had given fully half of the thousand dollars reserved for his own salary. His entire expenses were reduced to the smallest possible amount. Everything above that went where it was absolutely ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... the most perverse and passionate being in the whole world. What is more, he throws money away as if it were dust. The day on which he gave the thrashing with blows like falling leaves and flowing water, he dragged (lit. pull alive, drag dead) Ying Lien away more dead than alive, by sheer force, and no one, even up to this date, is aware whether she be among the dead or the living. This young Feng had a spell of empty happiness; for (not only) was his wish not fulfilled, but on the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... light sea over broken rock. But no rock was there. A few feet below him a broad ledge stood out, a rough platform as large as a great room, thickly grown with wiry grass and walled in steeply on three sides. There, close to the verge where the cliff at last dropped sheer, a woman was sitting, her arms about her drawn-up knees, her eyes fixed on the trailing smoke of a distant liner, her face ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... circumstances. Within the past year many tribes have shown, in a degree greater than ever before, an appreciation of the necessity of work. This changed attitude is in part due to the policy recently pursued of reducing the amount of subsistence to the Indians, and thus forcing them, through sheer necessity, to work for a livelihood. The policy, though severe, is a useful one, but it is to be exercised only with judgment and with a full understanding of the conditions which exist in each community for which it is intended. On or near the Indian ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... kind Venus cured her beloved byblow Aeneas when he was wounded on the right thigh with an arrow by Juturna, Turnus's sister. Since the very wind of laurels, fig-trees, or sea-calves makes the thunder sheer off insomuch that it never strikes them. Since at the sight of a ram, mad elephants recover their former senses. Since mad bulls coming near wild fig-trees, called caprifici, grow tame, and will not budge a foot, as if they had the cramp. Since ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... 743), "Art's great function—to rehearse within us greater egoistic possibilities, to habituate us to larger actualizations of personality in a rudimentary manner," and so to arouse, "aimlessly but splendidly, the sheer as ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... discover that my worst fears were realized; a large section of the cliff had split off the Mesa and slid down into the narrow gateway completely filling the space and leaving a wall of over one hundred feet of sheer precipice for us to climb before we could escape from ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... suddenly die out there in the field in some mysterious way, so that there might be much self-condemning woe at the farm-house when they found her, cold and still. And she could not refrain from weeping with sheer pity for herself. After pondering for a while on the sad picture of her untimely death, she changed to one of great deeds and happiness, wealth and renown, in some far-off land toward which she was half determined to set out. But ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... reflected that she had several miles to travel, most of which was through the gloomy woods; but there was no hesitation on the part of Nellie, who, but for the sturdy teaching of her parents, would have crouched down beside the log and sobbed in terror until she sank into slumber through sheer exhaustion. ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... hand of Jarasandha. Such an act of virtue by thee, O son of Devaki, assisted by the might of Bhima and Arjuna, is most extraordinary. O Vishnu, languishing as we all were in the terrible hill-fort of Jarasandha, it was verily from sheer good fortune alone that thou hast rescued us, O son of the Yadu race, and achieved thereby a remarkable reputation. O tiger among men, we bow down to thee. O, command us what we shall do. However difficult of accomplishment, thy command ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... third day sheer obstinacy forced me to the tunnel. My self-respect goaded me on. I would not give in. I must hold this job down, I must, I MUST. Then at ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... From sheer necessity some of the old hands are kept on when these changes are made. Were this not done, the work would come absolutely to a dead lock. But as it is, it may be imagined how difficult it must be for men to carry through ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... composition of great charm and mystic unction; but it lacks the concentrated force of Luis de Leon. Luis de Leon has a lofty dignity of his own; he outstrips all rivalry by virtue of his nobility, by virtue of his intellectual vigour, by virtue of sheer excellence rather than by curious refinements of technique. These positive qualities defy reproduction by even the most accomplished of imitators. It has been said that Luis de Leon's verse, as well as his prose, has noticeable roughnesses; but let us not derive a wrong impression ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... shortened sail, and formed a line of battle; while the rest, under the protection of the six frigates, proceeded on their voyage with all the sail they could carry. The British squadron was likewise drawn up in line of battle; but Mr. Warren, perceiving that the enemy began to sheer off, now their convoy was at a considerable distance, advised admiral Anson to haul in the signal for the line, and hoist another for giving chase and engaging, otherwise the French would, in all probability, escape by favour of the night. The proposal was embraced; and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... sufferings, for the remedy was worse than the disease. Again her father took her home, since all despaired of her recovery, her nervous system being utterly shattered, and her pains incessant by day and by night; the least touch was a torment. At last she sank into a state of insensibility from sheer exhaustion, so that she was supposed to be dying, even to be dead; and her grave was dug, and the sacrament of extreme unction was administered. She rallied from this prostration, however, and returned to the convent, though in a state of extreme weakness, and so remained for eight ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... one, and gradually penetrated them, at the same time keeping always near you and watching your movements when you least expected it. But enough—I never reveal my methods. Suffice it to say that in this I have succeeded by sheer patience and application. Every word of my allegation I am prepared to substantiate in due course at the Old Bailey." Then, after a second's pause, he looked straight at the culprit standing there, ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... for two hours. Sometimes it dropped with locked wheels down sheer walls of clay, again it was dragged, careening drunkenly, out of fathomless pits. It pitched and tossed, slid and galloped, danced grotesquely from one wheel to another, from one stone to another, recoiled out of ruts, ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... by the influence of the audience on the writer are many. First of all comes a fault far enough removed from the characteristic vices of the charlatan—to wit, sheer timidity and weakness. There is a kind of stage-fright that seizes on a man when he takes pen in hand to address an unknown body of hearers, no less than when he stands up to deliver himself to a sea of expectant faces. This is the true panic fear, that walks at mid- day, ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... me such sheer folly, such egregious lunacy, to precipitate one's self into the unknown, seeing that one can hardly expect the Giver of Life to welcome the soul He has not called. And I have often wondered what depths of misery, of shame, must overwhelm the uninvited soul in what someone has called 'the ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... fought," the jarl answered. "But I have deeper reason for thanking Ranald than for sparing my own life, or for staying a blow in time out of sheer love of ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... Dr. James declared, "it's just what I expected—sheer exhaustion, and nothing else. But she'd better be got out of ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... to some of the biggest-hearted men who ever left the shores of Great Britain and Australasia, and that the stupendous difficulties confronting them may be properly appreciated. It is no tale of glamour and romance; it is a tale of sheer, hard graft, generally under ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... shillings on his poem—the original MS. too,—else had they nothing to pawn, save a few gold and silver dreams which they couldn't spare. What was to be done? Sell some books, of course! It made them shudder to think how many poets they had eaten in this fashion. It was sheer cannibalism—but what was to be done? Their slender stock of books had been reduced entirely to poetry. If there had only been a philosopher or a modern novelist, the sacrifice wouldn't have seemed so unnatural. And then Beauty's ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... and weeping from sheer despair, would simply have to tell some one of her troubles, she would go off to the tavern-boat, which, like its mistress, was also aging rapidly with the years. There she would be listened to in silence, with an expression of sorrow, or a shake of the head from sina ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... between Frank and his friends! Hans shed nearly a bucketful of joyful tears, and Professor Scotch actually swooned from sheer amazement and delight. When the professor recovered, he clung ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... alteration in a small room in a small time as in that parlour when they went back to finish tea. So dark, so deserted, so perfectly disenchanted. It seemed such sheer nonsense to be sitting tamely there, when she was at a dance with more lovers than man could calculate fluttering about her—with the whole party doting on and adoring her, and wanting to marry her. Miggs was ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... now, Ready, for want of water, how can we possibly keep up our strength to meet them in a suffocating smoke and flame? we must drop with sheer exhaustion." ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... and gape and stare and go! What is more painful than the chatter of the connoisseur as it falls upon the long ears of the ignoramus! Collecting is a secret sin—the great pushing public must be kept out. It is sheer madness to puff and praise your hobby, and to invite Dick, Tom, and Harry to inspect your stable: such conduct is to invite rebuff, to expose yourself to just animadversion. Keep the beast in its box. This is my first ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... been an argument. He looked satisfied; indeed masterly; which expression changed slightly as he stood there, the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it seemed, he ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... riding around the herd, quieting it. That there had been no stampede was due to the fact that the shooting had come from all sides at once, and the creatures, bewildered, had turned in upon themselves and crowded together in sheer terror, trampling to death a number in the center of ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... nae gang" sounded powerful final, so the ladies departed in awed silence and I assumed a martyr-like air and acted like a very much abused woman, although he did only what I wanted him to do. At last, in sheer desperation he told me the "bairn canna stand the treep," and that was why he was so determined. I knew why, of course, but I continued to look abused lest he gets it into his head that he can boss me. After he had been reduced to the proper plane of humility and had explained and begged ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... so often applied to regions like this, would, however, be inappropriate here, for in God's name the locality is famous. On a promontory whose sides fall down in sheer precipices all about, except where a narrow neck of rock connects it with the net-work of cliffs, is a vast monastery, the Mother Abbey of the Olivetani. In 1313 a noble of Siena, Bernardo Tolomei, in the midst of a life of literary distinctions and pleasures, received, it is said, the grace ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... his power. I can imagine the idea becoming an obsession as he dwells on it. A dozen times with his hand on the lever he lets his mind explore the possibilities of a moment's defection. Then one day he pulls the signal off in sheer bravado—and hastily puts it at danger again. He may have done it once or he may have done it oftener before he was caught in a fatal moment of irresolution. The chances are about even that the engine-driver ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... locked the door assuredly did not make his exit by the window," Kelson remarked with a laugh, as he looked up at the sheer surface of the upper wall; "unless he was bent on suicide, in which case we should have found what was left of him at the foot ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... comforted, my daughter. Your lord's wisdom Goes hand in hand with his known piety Thus dealing with your son. To love a Jewess Is flat contempt of Heaven—to ask in marriage, Sheer spiritual suicide. Let be; Justice ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... from the sheer multitude of varying dispositions, refined by the gentlemanly tone of character indigenous to the college, afford advantages superior to all ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... army at his back, he kept down a rebel city in 1862. Massachusetts is not likely soon to stand in need of either of these processes. But he never has accomplished anything else of much importance when his point could not be carried by sheer blustering. The history of all his other attempts may be comprised in three words— ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... rounded a turn with a sheer drop of several hundred feet on Rick's side, and the sidewinders were lost to view. Rick looked down at the steep slope and said, "Nice place to ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... that he was not a shouting success in business so far. The rosy dreams that had floated near all through his days of hard study had one by one left him, until his path was now leading through a murky gray way with little hope ahead. Nothing but sheer grit kept him at it, and he began to wonder how long he could stick it out if nothing ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... before the sunset fled: Now, while the cloud-enshrouded corpse of day Is lowered along a red funereal way Down to the dark that knows not white from red, A clear sheer breeze against the night makes head, Serene, but sure of life as ere a ray Springs, or the dusk of dawn knows red from grey, Being as a soul that knows not quick from dead. From far beyond the sunset, far above, Full toward the starry soundless east it blows Bright as a child's ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... "appallingly evil, and yet mingled with the sheer wickedness of it was also a certain perverseness—the perversity of ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... let not one escape sheer estruction at our hands, not even the man-child that the mother beareth in her womb; let not even him escape, but all perish together out of Ilios, uncared ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... The sheer emotion of it shook Dick out of the sense of revelry which had come upon him during his fight. He pushed his way through the crowd, and climbed over the railings into the darkness of St. James's Park. It was officially closed ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... beauty, and the pang Of sheer delight in perfect visioning? Have I forgotten how the spirit sang When shattered breakers sprayed their ocean-tang To ease the blows with which the great cliffs rang? Have I forgotten how the fond stars fling Their ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... utterly ignoring their guides, scrambled up quicker than the Arabs could follow them. Mr. Damer started off at a pace which soon brought him to the end of his tether, and from that point was dragged up by the sheer strength of his assistants; thereby accomplishing the wishes of the men, who induce their victims to start as rapidly as possible, in order that they may soon find themselves helpless from want of wind. Mr. Ingram endeavoured to ...
— An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids • Anthony Trollope
... Rome, did but make Rousseau's experiment. "The emotions of men," Rousseau argued, "have by seventeen hundred years of asceticism and Christianism been so disciplined, that they can now be trusted to their own guidance." The hour of his death, whether by a pistol bullet or by poison, or from sheer weariness, was also the hour of Rousseau's deepest insight into the human heart. That hour of penetrating vision into the eternal mystery made him glad to rush into the silence and the darkness. Napoleon, trusting to the word and to the ideal Liberty, to man's ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... he had gained the shadow of a by-street, by a sheer unconscious instinct; then he paused, and looked round him—what could he do? He wondered vaguely if he were not dreaming; the air seemed to reel about him, and the earth to rock; the very force of control he had sustained made the reaction stronger; he began to feel blind and stupefied. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... patriotism that made Miss Mink refuse to do her part. Every ripple in the small flag that fluttered over her humble dwelling sent a corresponding ripple along her spinal column. When she essayed to sing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," in her high, quavering soprano, she invariably broke down from sheer excess of emotion. But the American army fighting for right and freedom in France, and the Army individually tracking mud into her spotless cottage, were two very different things. Miss Mink had always regarded ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... for a certain cocksureness about them which savours of the man in a country house who will insist on telling you a series of good stories about himself, one after the other, until the guests in the smoking-room, in sheer despair of ever getting their turn of talking about themselves, or of turning on the tap of their own good stories, light their candles, yawn, and go pensively ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... however, General Fielding seems to have been unable or unwilling to pay his son's expenses, which must have been far less there than at an English University; and Henry's return to London in 1728-29 is said to have been due to sheer impecuniosity. When he returned to England, his father was good enough to make him an allowance of L200 nominal, which appears to have been equivalent to L0 actual. And as practically nothing is known of him for the next six or seven years, except ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... sweepingly condemned the whole republic of Mexico in general, and Jose Romero in particular, winding up with the statement that the no-account greaser had gone and got sick, here at the last minute—Frosty would seem to imply, out of sheer perversity—and when it was too late to teach another ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... depths of his overcoat steering the ship with very white bony hands; while Ransome and I rushed along the decks letting go all the sheets and halliards by the run. We dashed next up on to the forecastle head. The perspiration of labour and sheer nervousness simply poured off our heads as we toiled to get the anchors cock-billed. I dared not look at Ransome as we worked side by side. We exchanged curt words; I could hear him panting close to me and I avoided turning my eyes his way for fear of seeing him fall down ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... door of the museum. Probably he had gone there to look for a way out. This would never do. The plate I cared not a fig for, but the museum specimens were a different matter; and he might damage them from sheer malice. ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... that," said the artist, shaking his head, "when men get thoroughly accustomed to danger they become foolhardy, and don't realise it. I think it sheer madness to ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... soundless, moveless, and dark, save where it broke in white foam at his feet; near the horizon a pitch-black wall of cloud seemed to rise sheer from the water and join the gray sky that arched over the great flat spaces. And in the absence of stars, the earth itself seemed to gain in vastness and mystery, its own awfulness, as it sped round, unlessened by those endless perspectives of vaster planets. And from the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Wislac, "and why I cannot, save for sheer cowardice, I know not, having been brought up on Thames side, and never daring to go ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... by a hair's breadth through sheer bad luck, and it was only by exercising almost superhuman restraint that we prevented ourselves from doing bodily harm to the three Chinese who ruined our hunt. Every evening for a week we had faithfully taken a goat into the "Long Ravine," for the blue tiger had been seen ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... play, or any favour. Nay, more, if any storm whatever Brew'd trouble here or there, The man was sure to have his share, And suffer in his purse, Although the god fared none the worse. At last, by sheer impatience bold, The man a crowbar seizes, His idol breaks in pieces, And finds it richly stuff'd with gold. 'How's this? Have I devoutly treated,' Says he, 'your godship, to be cheated? Now leave my house, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine |
