"Shrivelled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pampas or forest; but their poor relatives in the sunless caves of Transylvania grow milky white, flabby, and stone-blind. The creatures in the Kentucky caves are all aborted in some way or other; the birds in far-off islands lose the power of flight, and the shrivelled wings gradually sink under the skin, and show us only a tiny network of delicate bones when the creature is stripped to the skeleton. The condor soars magnificently in the thin air over the Andes—it can rise like a kite or drop like a thunderbolt: the weeka ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... books and the wind is wild upon the water. I am gloomy to-night and discouraged. My book, the book I have lost myself in so long, has been refused the fourth time. Had it not been for your hand upon my arm awhile ago it would be now shrivelled and curling among the ashes on ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... be, is fully successful. For a long time the body is repeatedly shaken, but in vain; the tibiae or tarsi, unduly hard, refuse to yield to the patient saw. Sparrows and Mice grow dry and shrivelled, unused, upon the gibbet. Sooner in one case, later in another, my Necrophori abandon the insoluble problem in mechanics: to push, ever so little, the movable support and so to unhook ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... feet, and left her face to face with stern realities. Nothing was the same, or ever would be the same, again. Issues, causes, topics, which scarcely a week before had seemed of such vital and engrossing importance, shrivelled into insignificance or extinction under ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... powerful and terror-striking faces. They were big, fearless and savage: filled with the same proud spirit that had fitted out the great ships. They were from another time than his. He thought that he shrivelled up before them. ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... through, covered her head and shoulders clingingly, that this was the funeral of a poor peasant-man and his wife, who had both died suddenly and both on the same day. The old woman held up her brown, shrivelled hands, and gesticulated pityingly with them in the pouring rain, as she mumbled her hurried tale of sorrow; while the postilion involuntarily slackened pace, that her words might be heard where ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... address, London. She came leaning on the arm of a brother, the only relative she had in the world, and so brilliant was the form of these young people that it occurred to nobody to imagine that it had the most precarious pecuniary foundation, must have faded and shrivelled indeed, after another year or two of anything but hospitality as generous as that of New York. Well-nourished and undimmed, however, it concealed for them admirably the fact that it was the hospitality they were after, and not the ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... where many a family goes without dinner, unless the father can knock down a squirrel in the woods, or his pale sickly boy pick up a terrapin in the swamps? We did, indeed, sometimes fall in with a little corn; but then, the poor, skinny, sun-burnt women, with long uncombed tresses, and shrivelled breasts hanging down, would run screaming to us, with tears in their eyes, declaring that if we took away their corn, they and their children must perish. Such times I never saw, and I pray God, I may never ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... honour, and shown the riches of the Tartar armies. Among other things he heard of a Frankish knight who had fallen in battle with Houlagou's champions, and won much honour, they said, having slain three. He was shown the shrivelled arm of this knight, with a gold ring on the third finger. Maffeo was a man of sentiment, and begged for and was given the poor fragment, meaning to accord it burial in consecrated ground when he should arrive in Europe. He travelled to Bussorah, whence he ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... was scorched and shrivelled upward by the fierce heat below, glowing through and through with red reflected glare, till it arched itself into one vast dome of red- hot iron, fit roof for all the madness down below—and beneath it, miles away, I could ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... only as a change. I believe she would be much happier living there, with this great place off her hands. It is enough to depress any one's spirits to live in a corner like a shrivelled kernel in ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Radicals; not to be soothed even by Mr. G. interposing in favourite character as Grand Old Pacificator. Storm raged all night; division after division taken; finally, long past midnight, Directors again brought up to the Bar, the worn, almost shrivelled, appearance of Conacher's umbrella testifying to the mental suffering undergone during the seven hours that had passed ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... faded silk dress; her black crape bonnet, with two saucy red artificial flowers tucked in at the side, sits so jauntily; that dash of brown hair is smoothed so exactly over her yellow, shrivelled forehead; her lower jaw oscillates with increased motion; and her sharp, gray eyes, as before, peer anxiously through her great-eyed spectacles. And, generous reader, that you may not mistake her, she has brought her inseparable Milton, which she holds firmly grasped in her right hand. ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... pavement that yawned crashingly open to give the impetuous flames their rapid egress, . . fire climbed lithely round and round the immense carven columns, and ran, nimbly dancing and crackling its way among the painted and begemmed decorations of the dome, ... fire enwrapped the side-altars, and shrivelled the jewelled idols at a breath, . . fire unfastened and shook down the swinging-lamps, the garlands, the splendid draperies of silk and cloth-of-gold...fire —fire everywhere! ... and the madly affrighted multitude, stunned by the abrupt shock ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... terrace, this time taking the shortest way. The cavalry dashed off amid a jingling of swords and accoutrements. The Maharajah followed their departure with lowering, flashing eyes. He then ordered his servant to fetch his body physician, Mohammed Bhawon. And when, a few minutes later, the lean, shrivelled little man, with his wrinkled brown face and penetrating black eyes, dressed entirely in white muslin, was ushered into his presence, he beckoned to him graciously, inviting him to be seated by him on the ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... his account, we may depend upon it, would have been put together upon one or other of these principles. Yet, by the side of that unfolding of the secrets of the prison-house of the soul, what lean and shrivelled anatomies the best ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... except the sword Unsheathed and uncontrolled," Once more it knits mankind. Once more the nations go To meet and break and bind A crazed and driven foe. Comfort, content, delight— The ages' slow-bought gain— They shrivelled in a night, Only ourselves remain To face the naked days In silent fortitude, Through perils and ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... of sand are borne over, and drown the narrow fields of durra and of barley. Scraps of close, aromatic pasturage, acacias, date-palms, and dom-palms, together with a few shrivelled sycamores, are scattered along both banks. The ruins of a crumbling pylon mark the site of some ancient city, and, overhanging the water, is a vertical wall of rock honeycombed with tombs. Amid these relics of another age, miserable huts, scattered ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... bear opinion to a loftier seat; To blot the era of oppression out, And lead a universal freedom on. And heaven wants souls—fresh and capacious souls; To taste its raptures, and expand, like flowers, Beneath the glory of its central sun. It wants fresh souls—not lean and shrivelled ones; It wants fresh souls, my brother, give it thine. If thou indeed wilt be what scholars should; If thou wilt be a hero, and wilt strive To help thy fellow and exalt thyself, Thy feet at last shall stand ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... at her incoherent earnestness, but the lady, with true feminine condescension, informed her, in a loud voice, that Allan had an engagement in Scotland on St. Lawrence's Eve. She then started up, extended her shrivelled hands, that shook like the aspen, and panted out: "Aih, aih? Lord preserve us! Whaten an engagement has he on St. Lawrence's Eve? Bind him! bind him! Shackle him wi' bands of steel, and of brass, and of iron! O may He whose blessed will was pleased to leave him ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... discover in an instant that he is not sent by the gods to bring peace, but that he is the awful instrument of destruction. The spectral appearance of Alice at the hour of her departure, on the very spot "on which Lucy Ashton had reclined listening to the fatal tale of woe . . . holding up her shrivelled hand as if to prevent his coming more near," is necessary in order to intimate that the interdict is pronounced not by a mortal human being but by a ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... a most comfortable breakfast of bread and butter and the excellent fish which abound in Kingston harbor, flanked by huge oranges of enticing sweetness, a shrivelled old negro woman, who was on her knees giving the uncarpeted floor its morning application of wax, and rubbing it into a polish with a cocoanut shell, suddenly rose to her feet and kissed her hand to me with ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... me, as I afterwards learnt, upon his daily task of visiting the hospitals, and inspecting the crowded parts of London. I found Ryland much altered, even from what he had been when he visited Windsor. Perpetual fear had jaundiced his complexion, and shrivelled his whole person. I told him of the business of the evening, and a smile relaxed the contracted muscles. He desired to go; each day he expected to be infected by pestilence, each day he was unable to resist the gentle violence of Adrian's detention. The moment ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... looking for he first time at the picture). Ah, what an answer this For envious minds that would restrict his power To writhing limbs and shrivelled flesh! Repose, Beauty, and large simplicity are here. Yes, that is art! Before such work I stand And feel ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... senses, master," exclaimed Rebecca, "such as they are, they are better than none; but had your daughter lived, she would have been as unlike this damsel as you ever were to your bright browed wife. Why you are short and shrivelled, so was your daughter; your features are sharp, and so were hers; she was ever a poor pining thing, and when I laid her in her grave beside her mother, it was a corpse to frighten one; it was well for you, as I ever told you, that she ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... the birds Shibli Bagarag fixed his eye on the old man, and the beard of the old man shrivelled; he waxed in size, and flew up in a blaze and with a baffled shout bearing the branch; surely, his features were those of Karaz, and Shibli Bagarag knew him by the length of his limbs, his stiff ears, and copper skin. Then he laughed a loud laugh, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... silence. As we streamed out of the laboratory, aglow with his electric fire, Sebastian held me back with a bent motion of his shrivelled forefinger. I stayed behind unwillingly. "Yes, sir?" I said, in ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... shrivelled skull in his thin hands and drooped forward in silent listening. Ajeet objected no more, and in the new silence they could hear the shrill rasping of cicadae in the foliage of a gigantic elephant-creeper, that, like ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... in the act of presenting one of the most shrivelled and most elaborately dressed of the ancients, when the queen, attracted by the whispering behind, turned her head in the direction of her ladies of honor. There on the floor, sat the Marquise de Charente Tounerre, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... it bursts the body at length, as a growing nut does its shell; when, instead, the body grows thicker and thicker, lessening the room within, it squeezes the life out of the soul, and when such a man's body dies, his soul is found a shrivelled thing, too poor to be a comfort to itself or to anybody else. Cosmo, to see that man drink, makes me ashamed of my tumbler of toddy. And now I think of it, I don't believe it does me any good; and, just to ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... material, one of the heavy penalties that inexorable law imposes is the drying up, so to speak, of the finer human perceptions—the very faculties of enjoyment. It presents to the world many times, and all unconscious to himself, a stunted, shrivelled human being—that eternal type that the Master had in mind when he said: "Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required of thee." He whose sole employment or even whose primary employment becomes the building of bigger and still bigger barns ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... steadily she floated on, till straight before her lay a broad, bright path, that led up to a golden arch, beyond which she could see shapes flitting to and fro. As she drew near, brighter glowed the sky, hotter and hotter grew the air, till Ripple's leaf-cloak shrivelled up, and could no longer shield her from the heat; then she unfolded the white snow-flake, and, gladly wrapping the soft, cool mantle round her, ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. Whether this be the case with my history or not, I am hardly competent to judge. I sometimes think it might prove useful to some, and entertaining to others; but the world may judge for itself. ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... closed, which they should not be at this hour of the day, if the tree is in a healthy condition. It's the uinay; I know it well. We have passed several on the way as we started this morning, but I noticed none with the flowers thus shrivelled up." ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... the moment of her aunt's arrival, had known that something was wrong. She had expected to see Mrs. Beaufort glowing with renewed youth, radiant. Instead, she looked as if a blight had come upon her, shrivelled—old. When she smiled it was without joy; she was ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... ship was wrecked on the coast, and among other things a chest filled with valuable flower bulbs was washed ashore. Some were put into saucepans and cooked, for they were thought to be fit to eat, and others lay and shrivelled in the sand—they did not accomplish their purpose, or unfold their magnificent colours. Would Jurgen fare better? The flower bulbs had soon played their part, but he had years of apprenticeship before him. Neither he nor his friends ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... Fish prey on fish, and fowl regale on fowl; How Lybian tigers' chawdrons love assails, And warms, midst seas of ice, the melting whales; Cools the crimpt cod, fierce pangs to perch imparts, Shrinks shrivelled shrimps, but opens oysters' hearts; Then say, how all these things together tend To one great truth, prime object, and ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... hoariest local liar. However, she had a new clothes-line bent on to the old horse's front end—and we fancy that was the reason she didn't recognise us at first. She had never looked younger than a hard hundred within the memory of man. Her shrivelled face was the colour of leather, and crossed and recrossed with lines till there wasn't room for any more. But her eyes were bright yet, and twinkled with humour ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... heavy hatchet. So, disturbing these poor bones as little as need be, I took the hatchet and thereafter sword and knife; and then, turning to go, stopped all at once, for tied about the bony neck by a leathern thong I espied a shrivelled parchment. Wondering, I took this also, and coming without the cave, found my companion leaning as I had ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... clients. A gentleman coming to have his corns or warts charmed away would be naturally assisted towards faith by the aspect of the polecat's skeleton, the skulls of two or three local criminals, and the shrivelled, mummified dead things which hung about the walls or depended head downwards from the ceiling. These decorations apart, the wizard's home was a little commonplace. It stood by itself in a bare hollow, an unpicturesque and barn-like cottage, not ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... manageable set of people, than the representatives of the nation at large. And can any sensible man doubt for a moment, which are the most respectable body of men? Examine their persons. Among their predecessors I see many poor, lank, shrivelled, half-starved things, some bald, some with a few straggling hairs, and some with an enormous bag, pendant from no hair at all. Turn, my lord, to the other side. There you will see a good, comely, creditable race of people. They look like brothers. As their size and figure ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... lure she had put forward to Love, the garland she had set in place to show Creed how fine a housewife she was, how grandly she would keep his home for him. The brave red roses, the bold laughing red roses, their crimson challenge was shrivelled to darkened shreds, each golden heart was a pinch of black dust; only the thorny stems remained to show what queen of blossoms had ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... the all-omnipotent hours. On a small table stood two phials, in which were imprisoned dull-coloured liquids, powerless, despite their supposed potency, to stay the hunger of the disease so rapidly consuming the patient; and by their side was a plate of shrivelled fruit, the departing lusciousness of which had failed to tempt an appetite in her whose mouth was baked with the fever that fed on its own flame. There, gathered into a few cubic feet of space, met the great triune mystery of night, of suffering, of sin—the ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... fluttering robed bare-armed women, girls. Men and women of the new age! Rich robes, grey rags fluttered together in the whirl of their movement amidst the dominant blue. A monstrous black banner jerked its way to the right. He perceived a blue-clad negro, a shrivelled woman in yellow, then a group of tall fair-haired, white-faced, blue-clad men pushed theatrically past him. He noted two Chinamen. A tall, sallow, dark-haired, shining-eyed youth, white clad from top to toe, clambered up towards ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... river, drop yer anchor on the flat right opposite thet little sort o' bay yonder, and then put down yer net to good business. D'ye understand whar I mean, lads?" and the Captain pointed with his long, water-shrivelled forefinger, adding, "It seems purty far to go, but it'll pay when you git thar—it'll pay;" and leaning forward, Sam gave the Sarah a shove that sent her clear of the shore, out into the centre of the cove which served as the harbor for all the ...
— Harper's Young People, July 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... somehow the great question that had loomed between them these weeks dwarfed and shrivelled when he tried to explain it ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... after month, the sun looked down from the cloudless sky, till the karoo-bushes were leafless sticks, broken into the earth, and the earth itself was naked and bare; and only the milk-bushes, like old hags, pointed their shrivelled fingers heavenward, praying for the ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... putrefying, and the heart shrivelled in his breast. He clenched his teeth. All he had left was pride. "I will show ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... inconveniences which the Catholics of all ranks suffer from the laws by which they are at present oppressed. Besides, look at human nature: what is the history of all professions? Joel is to be brought up to the bar: has Mrs. Plymley the slightest doubt of his being Chancellor? Do not his two shrivelled aunts live in the certainty of seeing him in that situation, and of cutting out with their own hands his equity habiliments? And I could name a certain minister of the Gospel who does not, in the bottom of his heart, much differ from these opinions. Do you think that the fathers and ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... man! I can see him now, as he went limping up and down the vestibule, with his grey hair sticking up in scrubbing-brush fashion, his shrivelled yellow face, and his large dark eyes, that were as keen as any hawk's, and yet soft as a buck's. The whole room was hung with trophies of his numerous hunting expeditions, and he had some story about every one of them, if only he could be got to tell it. Generally ...
— Long Odds • H. Rider Haggard
... books made hell stink of brimstone and painted the Devil hideous. But Satan is not such a fool. Champagne and Martinis do not taste like Gregory powder, nor was St. Anthony tempted by shrivelled hags. Paganism can be gay, and passion look like love. Moreover, still more truly, Christ could see the potentiality of virtue in Mary Magdalene and of strength in Simon called Peter. The conventional ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... heavens are still and far; But, not unheard of awful Jove, The sighing of the island slave Was answered, when the AEgean wave The keels of Mithridates clove, And the vines shrivelled ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... burst. Close to the trunk the grass is worn away by the restless trampling of horses, who love the shade its foliage gives in summer. The oak apples which appear on the oaks in spring—generally near the trunk—fall off in summer, and lie shrivelled on the ground, not unlike rotten cork, or black as if burned. But the oak-galls show thick on some of the trees, light green, and round as a ball; they will remain on the branches after the leaves have fallen, turning brown and hard, and hanging there till the spring comes again."—Wild ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... time, and now, as they recurred to him, he burst out into childish tears. Poor man! the days of his manhood had gone, and nothing but the tears of a second bitter childhood remained to him. The hot iron had entered into his soul, and shrivelled up the very muscles of his ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... of bitter agony and lamentation rose from the starving Isle of Saints to the gates of Heaven, and fell back unheard; the sky was hard as brass above and the earth was barren beneath, and men and women died in despair, their shrivelled lips still stained green by the dried grass and twigs they had ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... very hot upstairs; the bedrooms smelled faintly of matting, the soap in the bathroom was shrivelled in its saucer. In Margaret's old room the week's washing had been piled high on the bed. She took off her hat and linen coat, brushed her hair back from her face, flinging her head back and shutting her eyes the better to fight tears, ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... of poor mortality, graves here and there and often all too shallow, broken muskets, bullet perforated canteens and torn knapsacks—the debris of a pitched battle. Many trees and shrubs were so lacerated that their foliage hung limp and wilting, while boughs with shrivelled leaves strewed the ground. Nature's wounds indicated that men had fought here and been ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... in the days of his youth, have been a decidedly handsome man, with an imposing presence; but now he was old—how old it was rather difficult to guess, but probably not far short of a hundred—shrunken and shrivelled up until he resembled an animated mummy more than anything else. His head and face were clean shaven, and he was naked, except for a sort of petticoat of feathers about his loins, the said petticoat having evidently at one time been an exceedingly ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... when he was not working, was sheer torture; for he could not read, and had lost all interest in the little excitements, amusements, occupations that go to make up the normal life of man. Every outer thing seemed to have dropped off, shrivelled, leaving him just a condition of the spirit, a state ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was in Blake's office, which was furnished with just that balance between simplicity and richness appropriate to a growing great man with a constituency half of the city and half of the country. She had sat some time at a window looking down upon the Square, its foliage now a dusty, shrivelled brown, when Blake came in. He had not been told that she was waiting, and at sight of her he came to a sudden pause. But the next instant he had crossed the room and was ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... literary men to fame is almost always a surprise to themselves, their families, and their former instructors. Especially the latter, who know much more than the young novelist does, but have never been able to do anything with their knowledge, hold up their shrivelled, or podgy, or gouty old hands in sorrow, declaring that the success of a boy who was such a dolt, such a good-for-nothing, such a conceited jackanapes at school, only shows what the judgment of the public is worth, and how very low its standard has fallen. But the great ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... the stroke that Chi-gwisa- miti shrivelled up as the other giants had done; and when he had got back his breath he begged Makoma to take him as his servant. 'For,' said he, 'it is honourable to serve a man so ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... tails of the hind wings touch the branch and form a perfect stalk to the leaf, which is supported in its place by the claws of the middle pair of feet which are slender and inconspicuous. The irregular outline of the wings gives exactly the perspective effect of a shrivelled leaf." The wonderful "stick insects" in like manner mimic the twigs of the trees among which they lurk. Nor need we go abroad in search of examples, for among our own insects are countless instances of marvellous resemblances to the inanimate or vegetable objects upon which they rest. One of the ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... was Aaron Stark, — Cursed and unkempt, shrewd, shrivelled, and morose. A miser was he, with a miser's nose, And eyes like little dollars in the dark. His thin, pinched mouth was nothing but a mark; And when he spoke there came like sullen blows Through scattered fangs a few snarled words and close, ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... the seasons, summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, his life while it lasts is regulated. But above all he is the microcosm, the tiny percipient centre upon which the immense cosmic circle focusses itself as the sun upon a burning-glass—and he is not shrivelled up by the miracle! Other creatures (he notes) share his sensations; but, so far as he can discover, not his intelligence—or, if at all, in no degree worth measuring. So far as he can detect, he is not only an actor in the grand cosmic pageant, but the sole intelligent ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Temple gate, and brushing in between me and Madame de Boufflers, seized her hand and conducted her to her coach. His dress was a rusty-brown morning suit, a pair of old shoes by way of slippers, a little shrivelled wig sticking on the top of his head, and the sleeves of his shirt and the knees of his breeches hanging loose. A considerable crowd of people gathered round, and were not a little ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... many reasons—the chief one, perhaps, the position of my brother—I went down to see the corpse. A single glance at the poor fellow showed me the terrible truth. The distressed face, sunken eyes, cramped limbs, and discoloured shrivelled skin were all symptoms which I had been familiar with very recently; and at once I pronounced the cause of death to be cholera. The Cruces people were mightily angry with me for expressing such ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... contradictions, and imperfect attainments, and foiled aspirations, and fragmentary faith, and broken services of earth, there be a region of completeness where all that was tendency here shall have become effect; and all that was but in germ here, and sorely frostbitten by the ungenial climate, and shrivelled by the foul vapours in the atmosphere, shall blossom and burgeon into eternal life. The Christian life, as it is to-day, in its attainments and imperfections, is at once the witness of the reality of the power that has produced it, and clamantly calls for a sphere and environment in which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... an elderly gentleman, thin, with sandy hair and a face that seemed familiar. He took off his glove and showed one shrivelled hand. It must be he! I went to him and said, "Captain Wilson, I believe.'' Yes, that was his name. "I knew you, sir, when you commanded the Ayacucho on this coast, in old hide-droghing times, in 1835-6.'' He was quickened by this, and at once inquiries ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... at the open window of Carrie's pretty room and looked out over the scorched landscape burning under the pitiless sun of late summer. But she did not see the scanty, shrivelled vegetation of the parched mountains, nor was she aware of the terrible heat of the day that seemed to have burned away the ambition of every living creature. On the floor beside the little white bed with its pink draperies sat Carrie, panting in the sultry atmosphere, and anxiously watching ...
— Tabitha at Ivy Hall • Ruth Alberta Brown
... a Catholic realm, for the King to have a second wife is considered superfluous by the timorous and shrivelled-brained. In Constantinople, Alexandria, and Ispahan, I should have met with only homage, veneration, respect. Errors of a purely geographical nature are not those which cause me alarm; to have brought into the world so perfect ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... life, are cold upon her marble heart— Like ashes on the altar—just as she stops, That something will escape of soul or essence,— The sum of life, to kindle otherwhere: Just as the fruit of a high sunny garden, Grown mellow with autumnal sun and rain, Shrivelled with ripeness, splits to the rich heart, And looses a gold kernel to the mould, So the old world, hanging long in the sun, And deep enriched with effort and with love, Shall, in the motions of maturity, Wither and part, ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... ardour for toil; but at the magnificent moment when the flowers all cry to them, they seem to be stricken with the fatal ecstasy of work; and in less than five weeks they almost all perish, their wings broken, their bodies shrivelled and covered with wounds. ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... message in secret, with none other by. Yet, so radiant was the beauty of Sarah that a beam of it struck the angel, and made him look up. In the act of turning toward her, he heard her laugh within herself:[148] "Is it possible that these bowels can yet bring forth a child, these shrivelled breasts give suck? And though I should be able to bear, yet is ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... either very small, few and single, or very large and triple; they are {355} sometimes reflexed and much dilated at their bases. In the different varieties the fruit varies in abundance, in the period of maturity, in hanging until shrivelled, and greatly in size, "some sorts having their fruit large during a very early period of growth, whilst others are small until nearly ripe." The fruit varies also much in colour, being red, yellow, green, and white—the pulp of one dark-red gooseberry being tinged with yellow; ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... With their blue petticoats tucked up above their knees, how they pick off the stray pieces of raw haddock, or cod, and, with creaking jaws, chew them; and while they ruminate, bask their own flabby carcasses in the sun! With the dried tail of a herring sticking out of their saffron-coloured, shrivelled chops, Lord! how they gaped when I passed by, hurriedly, like ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... The flowers on the spot where I had lain were crushed to the earth: but I saw that they would soon lift their heads and rejoice again in the sun and air. Not so those on which my shadow had lain. The very outline of it could be traced in the withered lifeless grass, and the scorched and shrivelled flowers which stood there, dead, and hopeless of any resurrection. I shuddered, and hastened away ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... the thorn, Shrivelled and red; The limbs long dead Clutch at a leaf long torn— It taps all day on the spikes As the spume licks ...
— England over Seas • Lloyd Roberts
... bread here, but they are as good-humoured as if all were well. My fleet consisted of my dahabieh, flag ship; tender, a kyasseh (cargo boat) for my horse and sais, wherein were packed two extremely poor shrivelled old widows, going to Cairo to see their sons, now in garrison there; lots of hard bread, wheat, flour, jars of butter, onions and lentils for all the lads of 'my family' studying at Gama'l Azhar, ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... animals—cunning and sulky. The real Hottentot is extinct, I believe, in the Colony; what one now sees are all 'Bastaards', the Dutch name for their own descendants by Hottentot women. These mongrel Hottentots, who do all the work, are an affliction to behold—debased and SHRIVELLED with drink, and drunk all day long; sullen wretched creatures—so unlike the bright Malays and cheery pleasant blacks and browns of Capetown, who never pass you without a kind word and sunny smile or broad African ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... than ever. Every morning Mary examined it with new delight. One morning she came as usual, but what a change had taken place! The frost had withered all the flowers, which were now brown and yellow and fast being shrivelled up by the sun. Poor Mary's sensitive feelings were so affected that she burst into tears, but her father turned the ...
— The Basket of Flowers • Christoph von Schmid
... poor shrivelled hand, which I took very gladly; but it felt so strange in mine that I was frightened at it: it was like something half dead. But at the same moment, from behind me another hand, a rough little hand, but warm and firm and all alive, slipped into ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... the quaint, daintily clean dress of blue, emerged from the cellar-door, bringing with her a savory smell of frying ham and eggs. She glanced at us with suspicious blue eyes, and then, with "Ach! der Liebling! mein schoener Schatz!" caught up Tony to her shrivelled breast in a sudden surprise, and, going back to the door, called "Fredrika!" Another old woman, dried, withered, with pale blue eyes, appeared, and the two, hastily shoving us chairs, took Tony between them, chattering in delighted undertones, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... patent-leather background, what you might not otherwise suspect,—that she was a soldier under the great Napoleon, and fought with him at Waterloo. She also bears, since music goes with war, a worn accordion. She is the old woman to whose shrivelled, expectant countenance you sometimes offer up a copper coin, as she kneels by the flagged crossway path of ...
— In Madeira Place - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... her face, her hands clenched, and she ground her heel down into the path as if she were grinding the insolent smile from his cruel old face. Horrible old man! Dirty, tremulous; with mumbling jaws chewing constantly; with untidy white hairs pricking out from under his brown wig; with shaking, shrivelled hands and blackened nails; this old man had fixed his melancholy eyes upon her with an amused leer. He pretended, if you please! to think that she was unworthy of his precious grandson's company—unworthy of David's little handclasp. She would leave this ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... dust. Perchance, here and there, some decrepit centenarian rubs his purblind eyes with the ointment of memory, and sees these pictures of the past, hallowed by the consecration of time, and finds his shrivelled cheek wet with the pathos sanctifying the joys ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... that shrivelled old shrew. What you might expect. If I had thought of it in time, I'd've been willing to make a book on her laying ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... shrivelled Ah Moy debated. He visibly thought, although none knew the intrinsicness of his thinking as he stared at the gun of the fat pawnbroker and at the leprosy of Kwaque and Daughtry, and weighed the one against the other and tossed the light and heavy loads of ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... Framin, while the Ashantee war was raging some years ago, Mr. Fitzgerald Marriott saw a dance performed by women whose husbands had gone as carriers to the war. They were painted white and wore nothing but a short petticoat. At their head was a shrivelled old sorceress in a very short white petticoat, her black hair arranged in a sort of long projecting horn, and her black face, breasts, arms, and legs profusely adorned with white circles and crescents. All carried long white brushes made of buffalo or horse tails, and as they danced they sang, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... to the opposite wall.... His own picture, framed in silvery maple-wood, hung there.... Behind the frame appeared a bunch of blossoms, long faded and shrivelled to ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... astride the last two classes of poverty. She saw the ragged neck-cloth, the scurfy hat, the broken and patched boots, the threadbare coat, whose buttons had shed their mould, leaving the empty shrivelled pod dangling in congruity with the torn pockets and the dirty collar. Scraps of flue were in the creases of the coat, which showed plainly the dust that filled it. The man drew from the pockets of his seam-rent iron-gray trousers a pair of hands as black as those of a ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... Maldon remarked in a light, indifferent tone, just as though the glory of the moment had not been suddenly rent and shrivelled. "I didn't see your portmanteau in the back room just now, Julian. Has any one carried it upstairs? I didn't ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... and Dickey Harper never existed, that her passion for Norman Hippisley was the unique, solitary manifestation of her soul. It certainly burnt with the intensest flame. It certainly consumed her. What's left of her's all shrivelled, warped, as she ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... courteously; but, it must be confessed, that his apartment, and furniture, and morning dress, were sufficiently uncouth. His brown suit of cloaths looked very rusty; he had on a little old shrivelled unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head; his shirt-neck and knees of his breeches were loose; his black worsted stockings ill drawn up; and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly particularities ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... but a few moments ago expanding with joy and overflowing with the tenderest emotions of a loving bride, suddenly collapsed and shrivelled like a leaf in the fire of this ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... his office in the City, came in about luncheon-time to transact some important business, he was horrified and distressed to see the change in his patron; for Josiah looked crumpled and shrivelled and old. ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... of sun beat upon the wooden roof, forced a way through the shaded windows, lay like a blasting spell upon the parched compound. The cluster-roses had shrivelled and died long since. Their brown leaves still clung to the veranda and rattled desolately with a dry, scaly sound in the ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... His "Epistle to Curio" is a masterpiece of vigorous composition, terse sentiment, and glowing invective. It gathers around Pulteney as a ring of fire round the scorpion, and leaves him writhing and shrivelled. Out of Dryden and Pope, it is perhaps the best satiric piece ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... of watching these dear babies improving as they did,—she might have been a great comfort to us, and she would have found work to do which would have kept her from over-grieving. Poor Lavinia! How well I remember the evening they arrived—she and the two poor yellow shrivelled-up looking little creatures. I remember, sad at heart as we were—only two months after the bitter news of my boy's death!—Nurse and I could almost have found it in our hearts to laugh when the ...
— "Us" - An Old Fashioned Story • Mary Louisa S. Molesworth
... the ugliest creatures that can well be imagined, the back-shell being not unlike the top of an old hackney-coach, as black as jet, and covered with a rough shrivelled skin. The neck and legs are long, and as big as a man's wrist, and they have club-feet as large as a fist, shaped much like those of an elephant, having five knobs, or thick nails, on each fore-foot, and only four on the hind-feet. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... doll came next and brought a penny. There was high bidding over a heavy band-box. When it went for half a dollar to Mrs. Crocker and was found to contain a shrivelled pumpkin of last year's crop, the audience wildly ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... are attracted towards the focus of illegality, irreligion, and desperate enterprise, all the venomous and blighting insects of the state are awakened into life. The promise of the year is blasted and shrivelled and burned up before them. Our most salutary and most beautiful institutions yield nothing but dust and smut; the harvest of our law is no more than stubble. It is in the nature of these eruptive diseases in the state to sink in by fits and reappear. But the fuel of the malady remains, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... it. He turned up his eyes, and my wife cried, 'Murder!' I threw him back from me and got between her and the door, locked it, and put the key in my pocket. 'Now,' I said, 'I'll drag the truth out of you both.' He did look white, he shrivelled up by the chimney-piece, and she—well, she looked as if she could have killed me, only there was nothing to kill me with. I saw her look at the fire-irons. Then, in her nasty sarcastic way, she said, 'There's no reason, Percy, why he shouldn't know. Yes,' she said, 'he is my lover; you can ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... desert," she explained eagerly to the girl, as the horses dragged the carriage over the sandy earth, through whose hard brown surface the harsh, colourless blades of drinn pricked like a few sparse hairs on the head of a shrivelled old man. "In the Sahara, there are four kinds of desert, because Allah put four angels in charge, giving each his own portion. The Angel of the Chebka was cold of nature, with no kindness in his heart, and was jealous ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... began earlier, and her waning youth had shrivelled in the anguish she was then compelled to endure. Cecilia, from the first, had been deaf to her mother's most tender tones, winced and screamed at the touch of her fingers, even when lying with closed eyes. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... hand lifted him in over the bulwarks and deposited him on deck, where he again limply doubled up and sank in a heap, groaning. But he kept his eyes fixed upon my face and, stiffly opening his jaws, pointed to his black and shrivelled tongue; and I, at once recognising his condition, ran aft and, taking a tumbler from the pantry, quickly mixed about a wineglassful of weak brandy and water, with which I sped back to him. I shall never forget the horrible expression of mad, wolfish craving that leapt ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... and works;—then is Religion the inmost Pericardial and Nervous Tissue, which ministers Life and warm Circulation to the whole. Without which Pericardial Tissue the Bones and Muscles (of Industry) were inert, or animated only by a Galvanic vitality; the SKIN would become a shrivelled pelt, or fast-rotting raw-hide; and Society itself a dead carcass,—deserving to be buried. Men were no longer Social, but Gregarious; which latter state also could not continue, but must gradually issue in universal selfish discord, hatred, savage ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... dashed him on the church-floor, shocked by ruthless blow the breath from his body—but Mason shrank away, and cried faintly, "Good God!" Contempt fell cool on Mr. Rochester—his passion died as if a blight had shrivelled it up: he only asked—"What have ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Berselius." He indicated Adams with a half laugh, and Dr. Duthil, turning in his chair, regarded anew the colossus from the States. The great, large-hewn, cast-iron visaged Adams, beside whom Thenard looked like a shrivelled monkey and Duthil like a big baby ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... sagacity, lent her assistance, plying her paws with vast haste and efficiency at the roots of one of the shrubs. This particular one was much smaller than the rest, perhaps because it was a native of the torrid zone, and required greater care than the others to make it nourish; so that, shrivelled, cankered, and scarcely showing a green leaf, both Pansie and the kitten probably mistook it for a weed. After their joint efforts had made a pretty big trench about it, the little girl seized the shrub with both hands, bestriding it with her plump little legs, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... gaze upon relics which are any thing but herself, to wander among a few mouldy ruins, that are only imperfect indexes to lost volumes of glory, and meet at every step the more melancholy ruins of human nature—a degenerate race of stupid and shrivelled slaves, grovelling in the lowest ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... look he gave me; he drew himself up to the height of his cotton umbrella, put his chin inside his cravat, pursed up his dry, shrivelled lips, and with a voice he meant to be ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... antithesis, as he is the antipathy, of the prince. It is the careful portrait of what Hamlet would hate—a remnant of senile craft in the method with folly in the matter—a shy look in the dull and glazing eye, that insults the honesty of Hamlet as much as the shrivelled meaning with its pompous phrase insults his intelligence. So with the other characters; they are all made to justify his demeanour towards them. The queen is heard to confess her guilt, Ophelia is seen to act as a decoy; his ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... fresh-turned prolific soil of Russian Society. With, and alongside of, them a number of no less gifted authors throve uninterruptedly, till the reaction in the second half of the Sixties and in the Seventies fell like a frosty rime upon the luxurious blooms, and shrivelled them. The giants were silenced one by one. Leo Tolstoi remained the ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... things that perish in the using. When you betake yourself to the word, to prayer, to communion, your heart, already searched, drained, scourged by the greedy roots of rank earthly lusts, is a sapless, impoverished, shrivelled thing, where faith in God and loving obedience to his law can no longer grow. Thus perish many bright promises; and high above the ruin, living and abiding for ever stands the word of Christ a witness against all who have been undone by ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... visitors saw a train of the most grotesque figures move toward the upper corridor. Roderick led the way as the scarlet old woman, and was followed by humpbacks, bulging paunches, cumbrous wigs, Scaramouches, Punches, shrivelled Pantaloons, curtsying women embankt by enormous hoops, and overcanopied with a yard of horsehair, powder, and pomatum, and by every disgusting shape that can be imagined, as if a nightmair had been unrolling her stores. They jumpt, and twirled, and tottered, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck |
