"Shrink" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the soil is very wet. Trees will stay in good condition for several days, if the burlap sacks are kept moistened. Wet, soggy soil is certain to shrink away from the roots and leave air pockets which will, in time, kill the trees. If trees are transplanted during a very dry season, they should be thoroughly watered. To do this, remove several shovelfuls of dirt from the ground about a foot from the tree, being ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... marry William after he knew that she loved Paul; such a thought never crossed her mind. Yet, as she looked, a strange feeling of alarm which she did not comprehend swept over her, filling her with formless terror. Some instinct made her shrink, as if this wonderful string of pearls, which she had thought so beautiful a moment before, had turned into a cruel chain and was binding her fast. She did not know that many a weaker man has thus bound many a stronger woman ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... entrance of an untrod cave, I shrink—so hushed the shades and sombre. This death of sense makes life a breathing grave, A vital death, a waking slumber! 'Tis as the light itself of God were fled— So dark is all around, so still, so dead; Nor hope of change, one ray I find! Yet must submit. Though fled ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... thee this morning e'en as I have done: and I would fain have a good leech to Walter lest he should die, although I owe him hatred rather than love. Now, my friend, tell me, is this an evil deed, and dost thou shrink from the Sorceress?" ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... that Joe Swan, now he has change, freedom, and a rise in life before him, would willingly marry Laura if he might. I am not at all sure that, if it came to the point, she would willingly marry him at such short notice, and leave every friend she has in the world. I think she would shrink back, for she can know nothing worth mentioning of him. As to the boy, how do you know that a tour may not be a very fine thing for him? It must be better than moping at Melcombe under petticoat government; and even if Joe married Laura ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... return:—such is the kind of liberality of sentiment which may ruin great nations. The qualities of the lamb may be very excellent qualities, but they are specially inapplicable to dealings with the wolf. Do those who shrink from expense think that the presence of Russia in Afghanistan will be inexpensive to us? Will the weakness which will be the temptation and the opportunity of Russia be less costly than effectual defence? When we enter the councils of Europe ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... His lips. For they offer the realisation of an apparently impossible character, they promise the possession of an apparently impossible vision; and they soothe fears, and tell us that the sight from which, were it possible, we should sometimes fain shrink, is the source of our purest gladness. So there are three things, it seems to me, worth our notice in these great words—How hearts can be made pure; how the pure heart can see God; and how the sight can be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... tender, full of pain, with a note in it too of a struggling self-control that would break in a moment and overwhelm its possessor. As I look back at it I remember that I felt the passion and strength in it so violently that I seemed to shrink into myself, as though I were witnessing something that no man should see, and as though also I were conscious of my own ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... Prometheus, certain dialogues, among them a Symposium, in which Messala, Virgil, and Horace were introduced; and Horace implies that he had planned a prose history of Augustus's wars. [22] He did not shrink from attempting, and what was worse, publishing, poetry, which bore imprinted on it the characteristics of his effeminate mind. Seneca quotes one passage [23] from which we may form an estimate of his level as a versifier. But, however feeble in execution, he was ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... inert, trembling, and terrified. Impressions of early youth are indelible, and this was the first time, since his return from America, that Gabriel found himself in presence of Father d'Aigrigny; and although he did not shrink from the resolution he had taken, he regretted not to have been able, as he had hoped, to gather new strength and courage from an interview with Agricola and Dagobert. Father d'Aigrigny knew mankind too well not to have remarked the emotion of the young priest, and to have endeavored ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... bloody house of life,"[236] merely to supply the anatomists' table. The law which, as a deeper sentence on the guilt of murder, declares that the body of the convicted criminal should be given up to anatomy, is certainly not without effect, for criminals have been known to shrink from that part of the sentence which seems to affect them more than the doom of death itself, with all its terrors here and hereafter. On the other hand, while this idea of the infamy attending the exposition of the person is thus recognised by the law, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... know that who asked it with strong crying and tears? Was not the asking done to teach us two things—that He was very man, like ourselves, shrinking from pain and death as much as the very weakest of us can shrink, and also that we may ask anything and everything, if only we desire beyond it that ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... applause of a gratified audience as surely as the dramatist who introduces on the stage of his flagging action a carriage that can be driven or a fountain that will flow. But the masters of strong imagination disdain such work, and those of deep sensibility shrink from it.[39] Only under conditions of personal weakness, presently to be noted, would Scott comply with the cravings of his lower audience in scenes of terror like the death of Front-de-Boeuf. But he never ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... hence, the prolonged mechanical effort to introduce into each intellectual sponge all the scientific fluid it can contain, even to saturation, and maintain it in this extreme state of perfection if only for two hours during an examination, after which it may rapidly subside and shrink. Hence, that mistaken use, that inordinate expenditure, that precocious waste of mental energy, and that entire pernicious system which overburden for a substantial period the young, not for their advantage, but, on reaching maturity, to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the Rose blows along the River Brink, With old Khayyam the Ruby Vintage drink; And when the Angel with his darker Draught Draws up to Thee—take that, and do not shrink. ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... something servile and contemptible in mine," said Louise; "I always shrink from a woman flaunted out in rustling silks, great, glaring rings on her fingers, and alarming jewels swinging like ponderous pendulums from her ears. I think what a poor, little, pinched, narrow-contracted, poverty-stricken soul is there, that seeks to atone for the lack within, by ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... restaurants, and gorgeous drinking-saloons. A stranger here cannot fail to be struck with the incongruity with which wealth and squalor are blended. Here a dainty restaurant is elbowed by a cheap American gargote, there a plate-glass window blazing with diamonds seems to shrink from a neighbouring emporium stocked with second-hand wearing apparel. Even the exclusive Zero Club with its bow window generally crowded with fashionable loungers, is contaminated by the proximity of a shabby drinking-bar, which, however, does not impair the excellence ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... not shrink from Stratton till all had seen what had taken place. Then, gravely crossing to her father, she laid her hands together upon his breast, while he waited for ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... of frocks and trousers. It was an affection partly filial, partly fraternal—fraternal enough to make him like Irwine's company better than that of most younger men, and filial enough to make him shrink strongly from ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... would avoid living a life of sin: the one, to marry his victim; the other, to break off the connection before it is too late. The first is, of course, the more proper course; but there are cases where marriage is impossible. From the latter a man of any heart must shrink with horror. Yet there are cases, even, where the one sin will prove the least—where she who has loved too well may grieve bitterly at parting, yet will be no more open to temptation than if she ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... quality of acts as well as with their effects, with the soul as well as its environment. And it takes a real live soul to do good or evil. That is the point of Mr. Kipling's Tomlinson—a mere bundle of hearsays—who could win neither hell nor heaven. It is also the teaching of Ibsen. You must not shrink from wrong because you are told it is wrong, but because you see it is wrong. But few people can expect to develop a personality of their own. Current morality is the automatic application of misunderstood ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... to censure Mr. Clay for accepting office under Mr. Adams. We honor him for his courage in doing so. Having made Mr. Adams President, it had been unlike the gallant Kentuckian to shrink from the possible odium of the act by refusing his proper place in the administration. The calumny which anticipated his acceptance of office was a defiance: Take office if you dare! It was simply worthy of Henry Clay to accept the challenge, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... like a man and a soldier," she said, "to presume upon the natural delicacy of a lady under such circumstances. She shrinks from you and fears you. She dare not encounter you even in the presence of so dear a friend as I am. But I do not shrink from you, Captain Fyffe, and I am not afraid of you. I tell you once more that I think your coming here is, all things considered, as pretty a piece of audacity ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... the ladder, followed by several of the men. He springs from terrace to terrace, up to the third. He presses forward to the spot where stand the two captive girls. His looks are wild, and his manner that of one frantic. They shrink back at his approach, mistaking his ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... be raised. The German Emperor, some may hold, fancying that the weight of his sword in the scale would induce the Tsar to shrink from action, had foreseen the anger of the Slav nation at its sovereign's timorous scruples, and looked forward to revolutionary outbreaks which would cripple the Government for years to come and make it unable to think of war, if indeed they did not sweep the Romanoffs from ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... now, what do you think? From fighting it out to the end I don't shrink, But time's running short; we stand well for a win: They say that their eager desire's to go in. Perhaps if they got their desire they'd be posed. Suppose we declare ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 11, 1892 • Various
... man reopened the parlor-door he saw the school director making a motion as if to embrace Podge, who was full of blushes and appearing to shrink away. ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... that shall have more of the scientific and less of the religious character, proofs that shall more distinctly appeal to the senses. Believers in all ages have longed for external support to their faith; unbelievers have refused to believe unless supplied with more physical evidence. Believers shrink from being thrown inwards on themselves; they fear the wavering of their own faith; they are alarmed at the prospect of the buttresses of their belief being taken from them. They find it easier to believe the spiritual ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... seemed to shrink back into the shadows of the carriage. Her face was very pale, and ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... a position some men might have given up the attempt in despair, and saved themselves across the border. But I have always valued myself on my fidelity, and I did not shrink. If not to-day, to-morrow; if not this time, next time. The dice do not always turn up aces. Bracing myself, therefore, to the occasion, I crept, as soon as the house was quiet, to the window, a small, square, open lattice, much cobwebbed, and partly stuffed with hay. I looked out. The ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... like this the most ardent lover of Nature could scarcely fail to shrink from her cold, pallid face and colder breath. Our return to the home, whose ruddy firelight is seen through the frosted window-panes, will be all the more welcome because we have been shivering so long without. The grace of hospitality has been a characteristic of the ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... face. I could learn nothing there. His words had left me partly unconvinced. Somehow I felt that the only time he had spoken the entire truth was when he had spoken of Felicia. Yet it was certainly true that I owed these people something, and I had no wish to shrink ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... greatest sinner who repents shall be forgiven, and, indeed, is more acceptable in the eyes of Heaven than him who has never erred. Far be it from me to attempt to exculpate you in your own eyes, or extenuate your former criminality. You have sinned deeply, so deeply that you may well shrink aghast from the contemplation of your past life—may well recoil in abhorrence from yourself—and may fitly devote yourself to constant prayer and acts of penitence. But having cast off your iniquity, and sincerely repented, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... yield their souls captive to the brief intoxication of love, if no higher and holier feeling mingle with and consecrate their dream of bliss, will shrink trembling from the ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... devolving on every human being,—duties not small nor few, but vast and varied,—which spring from home and private life, and all their sweet relations. The support or care of the humblest household is a function worthy of men, women, and angels, so far as it goes. From these duties none must shrink, neither man nor woman; the loftiest genius cannot ignore them; the sublimest charity must begin with them. They are their own exceeding great reward; their self-sacrifice is infinite joy; and the selfishness which discards them is repaid by loneliness ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... chain'd Prometheus feasts the vulture there, No Cyclop forges thro their summits glare, To Phrygian Jove no victim smoke is curl'd, Nor ark high landing quits a deluged world. But were these masses piled on Asia's shore, Taurus would shrink, Hemodia strut no more, Indus and Ganges scorn their humble sires, And rising suns salute superior fires; Whose watchful priest would meet, with matin blaze, His earlier God, and sooner chaunt his praise. For here great nature, ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... with me; I was alone; she threw herself into an armchair, and told me she came to weep with me over the foolish conduct of the ultras of the King's party. "We must fall," said she, "attacked as we are by men who possess every talent and shrink from no crime, while we are defended only by those who are no doubt very estimable, but have no adequate idea of our situation. They have exposed me to the animosity of both parties by presenting the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... know they shrink in the washing,' which satisfied the grumbler. And that always seemed to me the ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... of that fainting soul within Fay's fortress? Were chance words of Magdalen's beginning to make the rebel stir in his cell? At any rate something stirred. Something was making trouble. Fay began to shrink from Magdalen, involuntarily at first, then purposely for long moody intervals. Then she would be sarcastic and bitter with her, jibe at the housekeeping, and criticise the household arrangements. A day later she would be humbly ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... or meaningless became on his spontaneous and vital. "He is too modest and self-forgetful to wish for the honor," his friends commented now; "but he is too conscientious not to put aside his personal preferences for the good of the church. He may shrink from the high places, but he is the ideal man for them." As much of this sort of thing was said in the public print, it is not impossible that the Rev. Rutherford Strathmore was aware of it; but he had the good taste to ignore it, even in conversation with his nearest friends, and the tact to ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... beloved sister, is prostrated by her sorrows and anxieties," it began, "and I must be her amanuensis—I who would die for her, yet who shrink from this task, well knowing, though she does not, how hard it is to write to one to whom I have given perhaps such infinite pain. Indeed, I should not have had courage to write had she not required it of me, had not your most generous offer and action ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... vowed to wed that man only who should ride over the blazing fire that was laid around her hall. They found the hall and the fire burning around it. Gunnar rode Goti, and Hogni Holknir. Gunnar turns his horse towards the fire, but it shrinks back. Sigurd said: "Why dost thou shrink back, Gunnar?" Gunnar answers: "My horse will not leap this fire," and prays Sigurd to lend him Grani. "He is at thy service," said Sigurd. Gunnar now rides again towards the fire, but Grani will not go over. They ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... and sensitive, "Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my God and your God." But after a few days He showed Himself to Thomas, and bade him boldly touch Him, put his hand in the Master's side, and his fingers into the marks left by the nails of the cross, so that He did not shrink from being touched even on the most sensitive spots. And also even in the earliest days, and as if the new life were to be fully strengthened by doing so, we find Him walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, and from Emmaus back to Jerusalem, as well ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... Jude. But she did not shrink nor shudder now. Young as she was, she had seen death many, many times. She had gone to the portals, alone, with others beside her poor baby. She rose now, and walked over to Jude's side. The night had wrought a change in him, seemingly; or perhaps it was Joyce's regained sanity. ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... of those farewell feasts—festins d'adieu—which Huron custom enjoined on those about to die, whether in the course of Nature or by public execution. Being interpreted, it was a declaration that the priests knew their danger, and did not shrink from it. It might have the effect of changing overawed friends into open advocates, and even of awakening a certain sympathy in the breasts of an assembly on whom a bold bearing could rarely fail of influence. ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... that they have injured his converts, as in the letter to the Galatians. Modern critics have exaggerated this element in a character which does not seem to have been fierce or implacable. He writes like a man engaged in a stern conflict against enemies who will give no quarter, and who shrink from no treachery. But the sharpest expression that can be laid to his charge is the impatient, perhaps half humorous wish that the Judaisers who want to circumcise the Galatians might be subjected to a severer operation themselves ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... are still serving our apprenticeship to life; we are new to the business, a kind of faint-heartedness overpowers us, and leaves us in an almost dazed condition of mind. We feel that we are helpless aliens in a strange country. At all ages we shrink back involuntarily from the unknown. And a young man is very much like the soldier who will walk up to the cannon's mouth, and is put to flight by a ghost. He hesitates among the maxims of the world. The rules of attack and of self-defence are alike unknown ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... Brutus is speaking with reference to his own case, he probably intends 'Genius' in a good sense, for the spiritual or immortal part of himself. If so, then he would naturally mean by 'mortal' his perishable part, or his ministerial faculties, which shrink from executing what the directing power is urging them to. The late Professor Ferrier of St. Andrews seems to take a somewhat different view of the passage. He says, "In this speech of Brutus, Shakespeare gives a fine description of the unsettled state ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... has aggravated my foible, and makes me a wretched correspondent. I should like very much to write letters gracefully and easily, but I can't, because it is contrary to my nature." "I have got," he writes so early as 1873, "to shrink from the use of the pen; to ask me to write letters is like asking a lame man to walk; it is not, as horse-dealers say, 'the nature of the beast.' When others TALK to me charmingly, my answers are short, faltering, incoherent sentences; so it is with my writing." "You," he ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... "I would not shrink at all," she said, gently, "if at any time you saw anybody whom you wished to marry. You need not hesitate. I am not so selfish as that. I do not wish ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... all about him, and seemed greatly pleased with the attention he excited." His company followed the manager on foot. Yet for many years Mr. Pentland was the sole purveyor of theatrical entertainments to several English counties, and did not shrink from presenting to his audiences the most important ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... stretched out flat on the floor, his back to the wall, and he smoked thoughtfully as he looked at David. "A coward? I don't know. I have seen him jump at the snap of a twig. I have seen him tremble at nothing at all. I have seen him shrink at darkness, and then, again, he came through a terrible darkness to reach my cabin that night. Mad? Perhaps. It is hard to believe he is a coward. Would a coward live alone, as he does? That seems impossible, too. And yet he is afraid. That fear is always close ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... enjoyment—of all the sense originally vouchsafed to him. We know the stories that are in the most unfeeling manner told to the disadvantage of the learned and inoffensive gentleman; we know them, and shall not shrink from meeting them. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... baste it well. Stand at one side of the fire, take the fat up carefully with the basting-spoon, and pour it over the lean part of the meat. The basting-spoon will not become too hot if you put it in a plate by the side, not in the tin. If you baste the meat well, it will not shrink or become dry and hard, it will be juicy and savoury, and it will be a ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... nodded pleasantly. "You needn't shrink; I shan't ask you to do anything vulgar, or even anything that, with your present prejudices, you might consider actively criminal. You can help me, you see, in your own profession as a journalist; and in other ways. And my enterprise is greater ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... Miss Shott. "Of course they are, and that's the trouble with them. Some of these days they'll have to be washed, and then they'll shrink up so short that I suppose I'll have to freeze either my chin or my toes. And as to her giving them to me, 'turn about's fair play.' I once joined in to give ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... Louis XVI. had employed this great means whilst the Revolution was but yet in its cradle, we should not now be here! This rigour, the vice of a despot, is the virtue of a nation. Legislators, who shrink from such extreme means, are cowards—criminals: for when the public liberty is assailed, to pardon is to share the crime. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... of the gray shadows of twilight a pair of soft eyes were gazing pitifully into his, as he had seen them gaze in actual life. His mind was passing over the tragic incidents which had swept down upon that ruddy brown head with such merciless force, and a tender pity made him shrink before his thought, as no trouble of ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... the nation's crime; Far heavier vengeance, in the march of time, Attends them still; if still they dare debase And hold inthrall'd the millions of my race; A vengeance that shall shake the world's deep frame, That heaven abhors, and hell might shrink to name. Nature, long outraged, delves the crusted sphere, And moulds the mining mischief dark and drear; Europa too the penal shock shall find, The ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... dainty dame, with haughty brow, Shrink at a load, and shudder at a plough! Sulky, and piqued, and silent would she stand As the tired peasant urged his team along: No word of kind encouragement at hand, For flocks no welcome, and for herds ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... not shrink From just infliction of due punishment On those who seek your life: were't otherwise, I should not merit mine. Besides, you heard The ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... hurried upstairs. It was part of her plan that she should be left alone in the villa chloroformed. Thus only could suspicion be averted from herself. She did not shrink from the completion of the plan now. She went, the strange woman, without a tremor to her ordeal. Wethermill took the length of rope which had fixed ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... are after-considerations; and be sure no writer will grudge a guinea for calm, unbought, unsuspected justice bestowed upon his brain-child. Let all those members of the tribunal, deciding by ballot, (here in an assembly where all are good, great, and honest, I shrink not from that word of evil omen,) judge, as far as possible, together and not separately, of all kinds of literature: I would not have poets sentencing all the poetry, historians all the history, novelists all the novels, and theologists all the works upon religion; for humanity ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... many are disposed to admit. The civilization of a nation seldom extends to a great number of individuals; and does not reach those who in the plantations are in immediate contact with the blacks. I have known very humane proprietors shrink from the difficulties that arise in the great plantations; they hesitate to disturb established order, to make innovations, which, if not simultaneous, not supported by the legislation, or (which would be more powerful) by public feeling, would fail in their end, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... approach; the Maid did shrink; Swift thro' the night's foul air they spin; They took her to the green well's brink, And, with a souse, ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... "be it so. I take you at your word. Though, mind you, M. de Bazan, 'tis no light thing I ask. It is something," pausing, "from which I shrink myself." ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... again like fire the violet kindle, [Str. 1. Ere the holy buds and hoar on olive-branches bloom, Ere the crescent of the last pale month of winter dwindle, Shrink, and fall as falls a dead leaf on the dead month's tomb, Round the hills whose heights the first-born olive-blossom brightened, Round the city brow-bound once with violets like a bride, Up from under earth again a light that long since lightened Breaks, whence all the world took comfort as all ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... life, the idol of my soul,—I will confess it now,—and for you and your future I have lived and toiled and served and loved. I have dreamed you great, high in rank and place, serving your king, winning back the ancient position of our family. I have shrunk from no sacrifice, nor would I shrink from any. 'Tis not that I do not wish you to risk your life in war,—I am a daughter of my race, and for centuries they have been soldiers, and what God sends soldiers upon the field, that I can abide,—but that you ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... vices and laws have been borne, a strange flotsam, upon its unchanging flood. It has had its springs and neaps, its trembling high-water marks, its hour of affluence, when the world has been flooded with golden humanity; its ebb and effluence also, when it has seemed to shrink and desert the kingdoms set upon its shores. The fifteenth century in Western Europe found it at a pause in its movements: it had brought the trade and the learning of the East to the verge of the Old World, filling the ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... know I am handsomer thus! Your eyes ha' told me so already. And look ye, I can be as soft and tender, as meek and helpless as any puling woman of 'em all, when I will. And if I hate fiercely, so is my love—ha, d'ye blench, fool, d'ye shrink; you thing shaped like a man, must ye cringe at ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... precious-stones, on its way to Europe, and suggested an attack. It is true that the roving Hollander merely commanded a couple of the smallest galleots, with about a hundred and thirty men in the two. But when was Jacob Heemskerk ever known to shrink from an encounter—whether from single-handed combat with a polar bear, or from leading a forlorn hope against a Spanish fort, or from assailing a Portuguese armada. The carrack, more than one thousand ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... austere and frowning on their bare, rocky crests; the forest more dark, more black; the trees of the valleys more barren and shriveled; the stones in the road rolled beneath his feet as if fleeing from his touch; the sky contained something repellant; even the air of the island would finally shrink away from his nostrils. In his desperation Febrer realized that he stood alone. Everyone was against him. Only Pep and his family were left to him, and even they would finally draw away under the necessity of living at ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... justice demands that men who boldly claim to be the rulers of the free and happy state of Connecticut, should be known. The men who are to stand in the places of our Trumbulls and our Ellsworths should not shrink from public investigation. To those who respect the authority of God it is a matter of no small moment that those who rule over men should be just, ruling in the fear of God nor will men, accustomed to revere this solemn declaration, lend their aid to elevate men of vicious and corrupt ...
— Count The Cost • Jonathan Steadfast
... the Punjab, he had nothing to do with the case. It was then transmitted to me. There was quite enough doubt as to my power of acting, to have justified me in referring the case to the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab. But I felt that the delay, and, above all, the appearance of a desire to shrink from the responsibility of passing a decision on the case, which this step would involve, would be so mischievous, that, having obtained from the Advocate-General an opinion that I had the requisite authority, I ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... behind me; in the shadow of the gloomy wellingtonias, whose sweeping skirts obscured the grass; but especially, I noticed, in the tops and crests of them. For here, the delicate, graceful curves of last year's growth seemed to shrink back into themselves. None of them pointed upwards. Their life had failed and turned aside just when it should have become triumphant. The character of a tree reveals itself chiefly at the extremities, ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... to speak, but from her parched lips not a word could proceed. She felt as if all the family that moment were conscious of the occurrence between her and her lover; and if the wish could have relieved her, she would almost have wished to die, so much did she shrink abashed in their presence. ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... dubious boon! Stucco Philistia shows in many shapes The babble of baboons, the chat of apes. Why hang, Sir, up a tree, in a big cage, To study Simian speech, which in our age May be o'erheard on Platform or in Pub, And studied 'mid the comforts of a Club? And yet perchance your forest apes would shrink From Smoke-room chat of apes who never think, But cackle imitatively all round, Till their speech hath an automatic sound. Put the dread name of GL-DST-NE in the slot SMELFUNGUS calls his mouth, and rabid rot Will gurgle forth in a swift sewer-like gush Of coarse abuse would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892 • Various
... challenge her as to leave her deluded?—and this quite apart from the exposure, so to speak, of Kate, as to whom it would constitute a kind of betrayal. Kate's design was something so extraordinarily special to Kate that he felt himself shrink from the complications involved in judging it. Not to give away the woman one loved, but to back her up in her mistakes—once they had gone a certain length—that was perhaps chief among the inevitabilities of the abjection of love. ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... been slain; And others banished upon pain of death. But they come back again to meet their doom, Bringing the linen for their winding-sheets. We must not go too far. In truth, I shrink From shedding of more blood. The people ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... which even you will shrink, brave as you are," said the young man, in a voice of emotion, that forcibly struck ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... assail an unprofitable book, but even this is often but a bit of practice. They swish a bludgeon to try their hand. They only take their anger, as it were, upon an outing, lest with too close housing it grow pallid and shrink in girth. Or maybe they indulge themselves in humor. Perhaps they think that their pages grow dull and that ridicule will restore the balance. They throw it in like a drunken porter to relieve a solemn ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... timeously. This of course needs to be wisely done, and after prayer to God to guide us rightly; but we ought to do it. "A word spoken in due season how good is it." Such a word has often been blessed and made effectual, and we should not shrink from speaking it. The right time for speaking it should be chosen, but it should not be left by us unsaid. When Paley the great moralist was a student at Cambridge he wasted his time in idleness and frivolity, and was the butt of his fellow-students. ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... knowledge which had been deepening about him for a year. The time had already passed for him to return, but he did not come. Was there anything in the forecast of the night that made him falter? Was he shrinking—him shrink? She put away the thought as a ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... the length you now see, they began to shrink and grow hard. The knobs on the ends shrank until they became pointed. As soon as they stopped growing the blood stopped flowing up in them, and as they became hard they were no longer tender. The skin which ...
— The Adventures of Lightfoot the Deer • Thornton W. Burgess
... take the deepest interest in the goings-on of his time is part of his greatness; to suppose that he stopped at them, or that he subordinated to political objects or feelings all the other elements of his poem, is to shrink up that greatness into very narrow limits. Yet this has been done by men of mark and ability, by Italians, by men who read the Commedia in their own mother tongue. It has been maintained as a satisfactory account of it—maintained with great labor and pertinacious ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... say that, Aubrey! He would only be vexed to hear that you gave in, and were fickle to your undertaking. Indeed, if I were the volunteer, I should think it due to him, not to shrink as if I were ashamed of what he was ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... occasionally a subject of complaint that children will apparently dislike their father, that they will shrink from him or burst into tears whenever he approaches them. There is no need to see in this the child's jealousy of the father as a rival in the affections of his mother, which is the explanation proffered by the school of Freud. Every action and every ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... you who shall dare to acquit the President," he boldly threatened, "I hurl the everlasting curse of a Nation—an infamy that shall rive and blast his children's children until they shrink from their own name as from ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... proceed no further. But she being a woman not easily shaken from her evil purpose, began to pour in at his ears words which infused a portion of her own spirit into his mind, assigning reason upon reason why he should not shrink from what he had undertaken; how easy the deed was; how soon it would be over; and how the action of one short night would give to all their nights and days to come sovereign sway and royalty! Then she threw contempt ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... to whom he now reveals the secret, only in order that he may be able to deny it at any time; and suppose he were then to affirm, in all seriousness, that he has fulfilled a true human duty; you would either laugh in his face, or shrink back from him with disgust; and yet, if a man has regulated his principles of action solely with a view to his own advantage, you would have nothing whatever to object against this mode of proceeding. Or suppose some one recommends ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... grew into an old man, and became a dull, worn-out creature like herself. Sometimes, watching him, she felt more sorry for him than even for herself; and then, seeing she looked a less miserable and ugly woman, he did not shrink from her ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... nothing more for her to say. She could make no defense of an act which stood before her in all its ugly selfishness. Joe sat still, staring at the wall beyond the stove; she crouched forward in her chair, as if to shrink out ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... recede into poetic distance before he seemed to her a hero. In his cabin as he smoked, in the hard winter day as he felled the forest tree, in the rough, unhandsome experience of every hour, he has been to her the forerunner of refinement and plenty and ease. If taste and imagination shrink from the squalor of the frontier, she remembers the greater squalor and the darker tragedy of the city slum. If the long-haired, shambling, shrill fanatic upon the platform be a contemptuous jest to my Lady ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... tell you that they are that sorceress my brother's wife;' meaning the Queen: 'and that other sorceress, Jane Shore. Who, by witchcraft, have withered my body, and caused my arm to shrink ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... that was not the way to help Charlie. "I know he will feel it hard at first if he goes; but still I am sure he is a brave boy and will not shrink from it, if he feels it to be his duty. You would not have him idling about at home, thinking only of his own comfort, and picking and choosing his work, when his father, who has done so much for him, is suffering from a lingering illness, and wanting ...
— Charlie Scott - or, There's Time Enough • Unknown
... turned deadly pale as he listened to the bishop, and exclaimed, with deep emotion, "It is a terrible sentence. Little did I imagine that any offense I had committed against God or the king could merit such punishment. It is not death that I fear. Death is the common lot of all. But I shrink from dishonor. Yet I may hope that my sufferings will so far expiate my offenses that my innocent family will not be involved in my ruin by the confiscation of my property. This much, at least, I think I may claim in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... be careful to recollect, that I am not endeavoring to screen those sins that I know I have committed. As I feel that they will come under the denomination of venial, and not deadly sins, I shall not shrink from the task which I have imposed upon myself, of recording them as often as they occur at the different periods of my history. I am not insensible of my errors, faults, or frailties; I know that ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... [People shrink back. He goes into church. Mary Doul gropes half-way towards the door and kneels near path. People ...
— The Well of the Saints • J. M. Synge
... had known trouble. He well remembered the days when he had had to learn to dance, and what it was to shrink from blows, and to howl with pain and fear under punishment. Times were not so bad for him now, because his education was over, but still he had to work hard for his living. In every town they passed he must stiffen his long thin back, ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... criticising public I should shrink; but to a sympathizing public I would appeal, trusting the holy mantle of charity will be flung over my errors, and ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... I tell you the Daily Leader will not shrink from its duty. It'll leave no stone unturned to hound the offenders down. I dare say they may be making arrests even now, and once started, we'll never pause till every Spanish sympathiser who has knowledge of the plot is ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... delivered from the curse of having only one child, I can show you the way. But so hard is it that I feel certain you will fail to follow it." This galled the King's pride and he stood up and exclaimed, "I swear, by all that is sacred, as a Kshatriya and a King, I will not shrink, but perform whatever you may ask, however hard." "Then listen," said I. "Light a sacrificial fire, offer up your son: the smoke that rises will bring you progeny, as the clouds bring rain." The King bowed his head upon his breast and remained silent: the courtiers shouted their horror, the Brahmins ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... coveted. But Mesopotamia had remained in the possession of the Persians as the prize of their victory over Valerian, and could only be obtained by wresting it from the hands into which it had fallen. Odenathus did not shrink from this contest. It has been, with some reason, conjectured that Sapor must have been at this time occupied with troubles which had broken out on the eastern side of his empire. At any rate, it appears that Odenathus, after a short contest with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... hated, despised in the sunshine hour, But at dusk,—he's abroad and well: Not a bird of the forest e'er mates with him; All mock him outright by day; But at night, when the woods grow still and dim, The boldest will shrink away; O, when the night falls, and roosts the fowl, Then, then is the reign of ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... shrink when they are touched, each then turned to her own side; but it would have cost both too much not to have fallen asleep as usual, with their arms round each other's necks;—consequently this tiff soon blew ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... quite ready, at once, to share His heaven with this poor defiled creature, the first trophy of the cross. Again—what a lesson of love!—how different, all this, from the common inclination to shrink away from contact and intercourse with the vile! Oh, shame, that there can ever have been such a shrinking in our poor guilty hearts! The servant is not above his Lord. He came to sinners. Let us go ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... Rigsdag of Denmark will not on account of the burden, shrink from the demands of justice; it will not allow it to be said that it refused to satisfy a claim, the justness of which has never been doubted by any civilized nation, nor will it suffer a number of its fellow citizens ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... in process of growth, and it was long ere it reached the solidity won by the Marcionite church through the activity of one man, who was animated by a faith so strong that he was able to oppose his conception of Christianity to all others as the only right one, and who did not shrink from making selections from tradition instead of explaining it away. He was the first who laid the firm foundation for establishing what is Christian, because, in view of the absoluteness of his faith,[402] he had no desire to appeal either to a secret evangelic ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack |
