"Stark" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cam', and the Gordons ran, And they were stark and steady, And aye the word among them a' Was, ...
— The Tory Maid • Herbert Baird Stimpson
... warning hand upon the brawler's collarband. We simply hate to tell the rest. No subject here for flippant jest. The mere remembrance of the tale has made our ink turn deadly pale. Let us be brief. Some demon sent stark madness on the well-dressed gent. He gave the constable a punch just where the latter kept his lunch. The constable said 'Well! Well! Well!' and marched him to a dungeon cell. At Vine Street Station out it came—Lord Belpher was the culprit's name. But British Justice is severe alike on pauper ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... beneath the warm skin of her head. Then I held her breasts, that had once seemed to me like two little blind faces raised in prayer. But imagery no longer decorates my thought. My hallucination is no longer a weaver of magical phrases. But stark, real—its heart beating under ribs, its skin glowing with perspiration, its nipples standing out. As I caressed her ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... Caroline stands stark still: she opens wide her eyes which are already considerably widened by amazement. Being inwardly epileptic, she says not a word: she merely gazes at Adolphe. Under the satanic fires of their gaze, Adolphe ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... land's sake, Alix, what on earth are you saying? Are you stark, staring crazy? You come right upstairs and get into bed this minute. My land, I—I believe you're going to be sick. You've got the queerest look in your eyes. ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... the morning the currents of enthusiasm, like those of life, run slow. It is then that the spirit of a man is at its weakest. Or perhaps it was the sight of Valmy that cooled his optimism. There it lay, grey and forbidding even with the yellow sunlight of dawn full upon it, and there, stark and clear, an offence against the sweetness of the new day, were the three royal gibbets. Their sinister hint was emphatic. The justice of the King was without mercy, and sombrely he asked himself, Was he so sure that in his failure he had no ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... starless night, but the electric arc-lights were already scintillating at their mastheads in the headquarters railroad yard across the Pannikin. Later, when the daylight was quite gone and the electrics were hollowing out a bowl of stark whiteness in the night, Ruiz Gregorio wished he had chosen otherwise. The camp lights shone full upon him and on the mustang standing with drooped head at his elbow, and the trail on the other side of ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... shone over her winding-sheet, There stark she lay on her carven bed: Seven burning tapers about her feet, And seven ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... saw at this Allahabad mela was a quantity of human hair, and was told that it had been cut off after the fulfilment of vows, reminding one of a custom to which we find frequent reference in both the Old and New Testaments. I also saw a very disgusting sight—men in stark nudity, sitting in a very composed dignified fashion, and women approaching them with folded hands, and paying them profound homage. These were deemed men of great sanctity, whose blessing brought signal benefit, while their curse entailed terrible ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... but I don't mind. You always did find out our secrets and give us a lift. Well, I never cared much for books, you know; but down yonder when the devil tormented me I had to do something or go stark mad, so I read both the books you gave me. One was beyond me, till that good old man showed me how to read it; but the other, this one, was a comfort, I tell you. It amused me, and was as pretty as ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... sunny and the ground bare, you meet him at all points and hear him at all hours. At sunset, on the tops of the tall maples, with look heavenward, and in a spirit of utter abandonment, he carols his simple strain. And sitting thus amid the stark, silent trees, above the wet, cold earth, with the chill of winter in the air, there is no fitter or sweeter songster in the whole round year. It is in keeping with the scene and the occasion. How round and genuine the notes are, and how eagerly our ears drink them in! The first utterance, and ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... bed lifted his eyes, great dark eyes full of weariness and stark fear—but bowed his head again and ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... mind. I have put myself in a passion once already with that abominable hussy, La Cibot, a porter's wife that sets up to judge her lodgers, forsooth, and insists that you have filched the money from the heirs; you locked M. Pons up, she says, and worked upon him till he was stark, staring mad. She got as good as she gave, though, the wretched woman. 'You are a thief and a bad lot,' I told her; 'you will get into the police-courts for all the things that you have stolen from the gentlemen,' and she ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Burr's release Louis and Richard Hautville came home. They had been trapping on Green Mountain, they said, camping in the little lodge they had built there. When they came in laden with stark white rabbits and limp-necked birds, and one of them with a haunch of venison on his back, Madelon faced them with sudden fierceness, as if to speak. Then she turned away to her work, without a word of greeting. The boy ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... would not give civil respect or honour to their superiors, no not to magistrates; that they held many dangerous principles; that they were an immodest shameless people; and that one of them stripped himself stark naked, and went in that unseemly manner about the streets, at fairs and on market ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... not, Harold; Our Duke is all between thee and the sea, Our Duke is all about thee like a God; All passes block'd. Obey him, speak him fair, For he is only debonair to those That follow where he leads, but stark as death To those that cross him.—Look thou, here is Wulfnoth! I leave thee to thy talk with him alone; How wan, poor lad! how sick and sad for ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... they cursed the Turks in free bush fashion for committing an act of a kind to which they usually rose superior. Facing the bivouac on the steep cliff below the disputed outpost, lay two stark white bodies. The enemy had apparently stripped the dead, of whom there were nine left in the outpost, and had flung the bodies over the cliff. The Regiment was infuriated with this treatment of its dead, ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... matters little. The Fiesolani are not Florentines, people of the valley, but Etruscans, people of the hills, and that you may see in half an hour any day in their windy piazzas and narrow climbing ways. Rough, outspoken, stark men little women keen and full of salt, they have not the assured urbanity of the Florentine, who, while he scorns you in his soul as a barbarian, will trade with you, eat with you, and humour you, certainly without betraying his contempt. But the Fiesolano is otherwise; quarrelsome ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... voice; and everybody who wasn't, wanted the same thing because it was so talked about. So she was asked to sing at musicales and receptions without end, until Alexia exclaimed at last, "They are all raving, stark-mad over her, and it's all Polly's own fault, the ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... are trailed amid their gore; Dark blood is on their manes and sides, all deeply clotted o'er; All vainly now the spur would strike these cold and rounded flanks, To wake them to their wonted speed amid the rapid ranks: Here the bold riders red and stark upon the sands lie down, Who in their friendly shadows slept throughout the halt at noon. Oh, Allah! who will give me back my terrible array? See where it straggles 'long the fields for leagues on leagues away, Like riches from a spendthrift's ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... conveniently be called 'The Military Soudan,' stretches with apparent indefiniteness over the face of the continent. Level plains of smooth sand—a little rosier than buff, a little paler than salmon—are interrupted only by occasional peaks of rock—black, stark, and shapeless. Rainless storms dance tirelessly over the hot, crisp surface of the ground. The fine sand, driven by the wind, gathers into deep drifts, and silts among the dark rocks of the hills, exactly as snow hangs about an Alpine summit; only it ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... these rights be restored by coercion? The Conservatives and the Church said Yes. True to his political faith, Mr Laurier said No. Up and down the province of Quebec he was denounced by the ultramontane leaders. Here was sheer, stark Liberalism of the brand the Church had condemned. Bishop Lafleche declared that no Catholic could without sin vote for the chief of a party who had formulated publicly such an error, and Archbishop Langevin ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... distinguished the day before, now glittered forth in blooms of unfamiliar beauty. Toward that spot were attracted myriads of happy insects, whose hum of intense joy was musically loud. But the form of the life-seeking sorcerer lay rigid and stark; blind to the bloom of the wild flowers, deaf to the glee of the insects—one hand still resting heavily on the rim of the emptied caldron, and the face still hid behind the Black Veil. What! the wondrous elixir, sought with such hope ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... and stark, as though, thought Rankin despairingly, she were already dead. Her right arm was out over the sheet, her thin hand nerveless. Her face was very white, her lips swollen and bleeding as though she had bitten them repeatedly. She was absolutely ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... in its travels from capital to capital and she was conscious solely of the stark majesty of her surroundings. She listened. There was no sound. The spacious stillness was soothing to her nerves; a specific when all the Eternal Painter's art failed. She closed her eyes, trying to realize that great silence as one would try to realize the Infinite. Then faintly ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... This stark audacity of faith was the schoolmaster's. It belonged to him through the Covenanter blood of his English forefathers and through his Scotch mother; but it had surrounded him also in the burning spiritual ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... that his memory was at fault, but because he was perpetually dumbfounded by her genius. Originally, this living-room had been a dolorous cave with varnished yellow-pine woodwork, gas-logs, yellow wall-paper to induce toothache, and a stark chandelier with two anemic legs kicking out at vacancy. She had caused the Orpheum electrician to remove the chandelier; with her own hands, she had painted the woodwork a deep, rich cream-colour; she had ripped out the gas-logs and found what no one had ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... into the recesses of man's natural appetites will never be surpassed. How under the glance of his Norman anger, all manner of pretty subterfuges fade away; and "the real thing" stands out, as Nature and the Earth know it—"stark, bleak, terrible and lovely." His subjects may not wander very far from the basic situations. He does not deal in spiritual subtleties. But when he ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... of June, Gone like the rose the winter through, Save in the ribbed anatomy Of ebon line the moonlight drew, Stark on the snow, of tower or tree, Like letters of a dead ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... the road was deserted. Once a low-hung two-wheeled vehicle rattled by, on which, insufficiently covered by sacking, lay a dead horse, the great head swinging ghastly over the slanting tail- board, the legs sticking out stark in front. A man, perched sideways on the carcass, swore at the rickety crock he was driving, and lashed it under the belly with a short-handled heavy-thonged whip. He was collarless, and the scarlet and orange handkerchief, knotted about his throat, had got shifted, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... abound in dear and great associations, or at worst preach homilies which connect themselves with human dignity and pride. Here on the waste limits of that dread East, to wander among tombs is to go hand in hand with the stark and eyeless emblem of mortality; the spirit falls beneath the cold burden of ignoble destiny. Here lie those who were born for toll; who, when toil has worn them to the uttermost, have but to yield their useless breath and pass into oblivion. For them is no day, only the brief twilight ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... Peggy and I were suddenly stricken with contrition. What were we doing? We had no right to be listening to this pitiful interview. The pain and protest in his voice had suddenly banished all the humour from it, and left naught but the bare, stark tragedy. We rose and tiptoed out of the room, wholesomely ashamed ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... are a little unreasonable! Indeed, my dear friend, I do not think you a little unreasonable, but very nearly stark mad. What! quarrel with your mistress because she is not sorry that your wife is ill, and because she cannot sympathize in your grief for the loss of your son! Where, except perhaps in absurd novels, did you ever meet with these paragons of mistresses, who were so magnanimous and ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... book when Kate entered with excited greeting. "Morton, do you know that those women have been locked in their rooms all day for fear of Clarke and Pratt? Well, they were! Clarke has gone stark mad with jealousy, and even that besotted mother was afraid of him, and admits it. They would be there in that house prisoners this minute only ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... the love for historical literature was quickened by the kind patronage of John Farmer, the genial historian, who was a visitor at the Boscawen farm-house, and who had delightful stories to tell of the exploits of Robert Rogers and John Stark during the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... the views some people hold! Two young fellows quarrel— Then they fight, for both are bold— Rage of both is uncontrolled— Both are stretched out, stark and cold! Prithee, where's the moral? Ding dong! Ding dong! There's an end to further action, And this barbarous transaction Is described as "satisfaction"! Ha! ha! ha! ha! satisfaction! Ding dong! Ding dong! Each is laid in churchyard mould— Strange ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... that had been committed to him, in order to his own vindication, horridly wished 'that the devil might put out his eyes if he had done as was suspected concerning him.' That very night a rheum fell into his eyes so that within a few days he became stark blind. His company being astonished at the Divine hand which thus conspicuously and signally appeared, put him ashore at Providence, and left him there. A physician being desired to undertake his cure, hearing how he came ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... chose as lieutenant the man who had knocked the Indians about, right and left, when called upon to run the gauntlet—John Stark, who could follow a trail as well as any Indian, who was always cool and collected, and as brave as a lion. The men were called Rangers. They wore green frocks, and besides their rifles each man had a long knife which he could use in a close fight. They wore boots and leather leggings, and each ...
— Harper's Young People, October 19, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... braves as though to meet and ask Stabber explanation of his strange quitting the field. Down came a dozen others, young braves mad for battle, eager to join the ranks of this new leader, and Ray, who had turned on Field once more, fixed his glasses on that stalwart, nearly stark naked, brilliantly painted form, foremost of the Indian array and now at last in ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... by Stark of Vienna and Bosscha of Leyden in 1855; the successful problem was solved by Edison ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... the cold hour of dawn, sat the poor girl, with rosy cheeks and with a smiling mouth, leaning against the wall—frozen to death on the last evening of the old year. Stiff and stark sat the child there with her matches, of which one bundle had been burnt. "She wanted to warm herself," people said. No one had the slightest suspicion of what beautiful things she had seen; no one even dreamed of the splendor in which, ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... in the purple heavens, but they noticed not their glory. The ship was wrapped in an awful silence. No night wind whispered its message nor warmed the cold, desolate earth, stretching down from the poles, nor cooled the hot wastes about the equator. The naked mountains rose stark and forbidding into the sky, which hung like a great, bejeweled bowl over the sun-scorched plains, where the dust of many ages lay undisturbed. The shadows lay deep and dark over the valleys and among ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... world. Leaving this country, I travelled fifty days journey to the southward, along the shore of the ocean, when I came to a country called Lamouri[2], in which, owing to the extreme heat, the whole inhabitants go stark naked, both men and women, and they derided me for wearing clothes, saying, that Adam and Eve were created naked. In this country the women are all common, so that no one has a wife; and when a child is born, the mother gives it to any ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... of egotism! This was stark male egotism,—the instinct for domination. And defendants and plaintiffs were alike in spirit, struggling for position in the game. The weaker ones—if they had the hold—would pluck at ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... my view of the question. This lasts till a reaction is brought about by some of the usual means: as time, and love of novelty, etc. I am still very obstinate and persist in my practices. I do not think Stark is an instance of vegetable diet: consider how many things he tried grossly animal: lard, and butter, and fat: besides thwarting Nature in every way by eating when he wanted not to eat, and the contrary. Besides the editor says in the preface that he thinks his death was brought about as much by ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... golden Summers, flaming Autumns, Winters stark and chill, leaving each its tale on the unrolling scroll of time. For in those years the consul departed from Britain with his forces, and the cities ruled themselves, each in a state of feudal independence, now ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... surprised and disappointed. She had expected, on reaching Murray's, to see the stark head of Thunder Mountain towering above it, near and sheer. It was nowhere visible; not even the silvery peaks, its neighbors, were to be seen; there were only forests heaped on forests to the sky line. ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... reason was to apply yourselves to the true source of all our opinions and the only motive to all our conduct! Now, it seems, you think yourselves affronted, because a few of us express some indignation at the minister who has thought fit to strip us stark naked, and expose the true state of our poxed and pestilential habit to the world! Think or say what you will in Ireland, I shall ever think it a crime hardly to be expiated by his blood. He might, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... rows of bleak houses with their tattered window-shades and their fitful lights, Stephen stared wonderingly at the gaunt shape of the man before him. For the first time he was brought face to face with the other half of his world, with the half of the world where poverty and toil are stark realities. This was the way men like Darrow were thinking, men perhaps like Gideon Vetch! These men saw poverty not as a sentimental term, but as a human experience. They knew, while he and his kind only imagined. With a sensation as acute as physical nausea, a sensation ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... of a mile away, approaching him, leading the mustangs. Cleaving the horizon on four sides was a vast plain. On it was not a tree, nor even a hut. Here and there were clumps of palms and cacti, as stark as if cut from pale green stone. At vast intervals were short, isolated mountains, known in the vernacular as "buttes." On the ground was not the withered remnant of a blade of grass; but there were many fissures, and some of them were deep and wide. ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... if you have not gone stark mad, you must have had a sunstroke," said Harold, coming forward, ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... pressure being slight, the speed attained being then greater and allowing the active force to reach a high value. The energy necessary for the production of an ion is, in fact, according to Professor Rutherford and Professor Stark, something considerable, and it much exceeds the ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... steel; For thus spoke Fate, by prophet bred Between the living and the dead: 'Who spills the foremost foeman's life, His party conquers in the strife.'"— "Then, by my word," the Saxon said, "The riddle is already read. Seek yonder brake beneath the cliff,— There lies Red Murdoch, stark and stiff. Thus Fate has solved her prophecy, Then yield to Fate, and not to me. To James, at Stirling, let us go, When, if thou wilt be still his foe, Or if the King shall not agree To grant thee grace and favour free, I plight mine honour, oath, and ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... cried Ethel shortly. "Stark, staring mad! No thanks to you that every bone in your body isn't broken. I wonder what Miss Phipps would have said if she had come in, while you were pirouetting on the mantelpiece! It would have been your turn to be surprised then, my ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of city and island and mountain. But it has a heavy brooding peace that seems to relax the social conscience. Entertaining is intermittent, and its inhabitants return to their winter in San Francisco deeply refreshed. It has its paradoxes like the rest of California. On a stark little peninsula, jutting out from bare hills into the Bay, is San Quentin, one of the State's Prisons, and along the edges of the marsh are Chinese hamlets ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... something in our soil and climate exceptionally favorable to weeds,—something harsh, ungenial, sharp-toothed, that is akin to them? How woody and rank and fibrous many varieties become, lasting the whole season, and standing up stark and stiff through the deep winter snows,—desiccated, preserved by our dry air! Do nettles and thistles bite so sharply in any other country? Let the farmer tell you how they bite of a dry midsummer day when he encounters them in ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... that you cannot but wonder at their recklessness. There is a species of impudence which seems to be specially attached to little birds. In them it reaches the highest pitch of perfection. A bold, swelling, arrogant effrontery—a sort of stark, staring, self-complacent, comfortable, and yet innocent impertinence, which is at once irritating and amusing, aggravating and attractive, and which is exhibited in the greatest intensity in the whisky-john. He will jump down almost under your nose, and seize ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... lake shore I noticed unusual-looking trees—very odd-looking trees indeed, for their trunks seemed bleached and dead, and as though no bark covered them, yet every stark limb was covered with foliage—a thick foliage so dark in colour that it seemed black ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... thickly all round the edges of the Boer main position, and the day was spent in resting the weary men, and in determining at what point the final assault should be delivered. On the right front, commanding the Boer lines on either side, towered the stark eminence of Spion Kop, so called because from its summit the Boer voortrekkers had first in 1835 gazed down upon the promised land of Natal. If that could only be seized and held! Buller and Warren swept its bald summit with their field-glasses. It was a venture. But all ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hard as I could pelt through the mud, beating the charge on my drum until the war-cries of the regiment drowned the sound of it. For we were upon a pleasure trip—lest any man forget,—a pleasure trip amidst stark woods and brown plains flecked with ponds. So we followed him until we came to a place where, in summer, two quiet rivers flowed through green forests—the little Wabashes. And now! Now hickory and maple, oak and cottonwood, stood shivering in three feet of water on what had been a league ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... had no letters from home. We were actually marooned on Lemnos Island: as literally marooned on a barren desert isle as any buccaneer of the old Spanish galleon days. We went suddenly back to a savage life. We went down to bathe stark naked, with the sunset glowing orange on our sunburnt limbs. Here it was that Hawk proved himself a wonderfully good swimmer. He was lithe and supple and well-made—an extraordinary specimen of virile manhood—and he spent his ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... him his coffee, his door was locked, and for all our hammering we couldn't raise a sound. I broke it in at last, expecting that he'd rise up and shoot me, and dodging when it went inward with a crash. But there was nobody to shoot, the room being stark empty, and the only thing of Old Dibs his clothes on a chair. We were at a loss what to do, and waited for half an hour, thinking he might turn up. Then, real uneasy in our minds, we went out to look for him. He wasn't ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... and levers at work which are to effect this laudable purpose. What else can be the meaning of our preacher's taking upon himself to denounce the sentiments of the most serious professors in great cities, as vitiated and stark-naught, of relegating religion to his native glens, and pretending that the hymn of praise or the sigh of contrition cannot ascend acceptably to the throne of grace from the crowded street as well as from the barren rock or silent valley? ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... steamer to make her harbor from that distance. Mr. Beaseley, C.E., in a lecture on coast-fog signals, May 24, 1872, speaks of these bells as unusually large, saying that they and the one at Ballycottin are the largest on their coasts, the only others which compare with them being those at Stark Point and South Stack, which weigh 313/4 cwt. and 411/2 cwt. respectively. Cunningham, speaking of the fog-bells at Bell Rock and Skerryvore lighthouses, says he doubts if either bell has been the means of saving a single vessel from wreck during fog, and he ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... cold when I walk barefooted," mumbled my brave companion; but receiving no reply he drew off his shoes and dropped them beside mine in the cluster of stark bushes which figure so prominently in the illustrations that I have just mentioned. Then he took out his revolver, and cocking it, stood waiting, while I gave a cautious push to ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... man of God was lamenting the deplorable state of the church of Vervignole in the cloister of the cathedral, his meditations were disturbed by strange shrieks, and he saw a woman, stark naked, walking on all fours, with a peacock's feather for a tail. As she came nearer, she barked, sniffed, and licked the ground. Her fair head was covered with mud, and her whole body was a mass of filth. In this unhappy creature ...
— The Miracle Of The Great St. Nicolas - 1920 • Anatole France
... and we met Connor, who had turned back to see how we were getting on, and who informed us we had only one-half hour more before us. Going on, we were greeted by a shout of welcome from our first Ilongot, standing in the trail, subligate, or gee-stringed, otherwise stark naked, and armed with a spear, the sentinel of a sort of outpost, equally naked, with which we soon came up. They were all armed, too, spears and shields, and all insisted on shaking hands with every one of us. You must shake hands when they offer to, an unpleasant ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... events, that he had had enough of it, as he looked along the deck and saw numbers of the men who had been slightly hurt binding up each other's wounds. Several lay stiff and stark, whose bodies were dragged on one side, while not a few, severely hurt, had been carried below to the cockpit, where the surgeon and ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... No bandage bring. Stark-eyed the hero dies. Do you not know that thus for twenty years I've faced both ball and bullet!—for no prize But weal of France, my country? In man's ears, Yea and before God's all-beholding eyes, I swear I never wronged her. But Death nears. Marshal no more, behold a man expire! So ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw
... consummated, cleansed the knight's body and permitted to him and the maiden a united temporal happiness. This story Hauptmann takes exactly as he finds it. But the characters are made to live with a new life. The stark mediaeval conventions are broken and the old legend becomes living truth. The maiden is changed from an infant saint fleeing a vale of tears into a girl in whom the first sweet passions of life blend into an exaltation half sexual and half religious, but pure with the purity ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... John called out, softly at first, then loudly, frantically. But no answer came, except that now the mocking din of the baboons seemed to jeer at us. They appeared to be gathered near us, all together. As we ran towards the sound the moon burst through a rift in the clouds. There ahead of us, stark naked, and running swiftly towards the baboons, we saw the figure of Hector, his body gleaming white in the moonbeams, and by his side the grey ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... was dying helplessly, with my eyes wide open—staring straight up at the roof. At length I stuck my forefinger in my mouth, and took to sucking it. Something stirred in my brain, a thought that bored its way in there—a stark-mad notion. ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... we, Seeing forty of our poor hundred were slain, And half of the rest of us maimed for life In the crash of the cannonades and the desperate strife; And the sick men down in the hold were most of them stark and cold, And the pikes were all broken or bent, and the powder was all of it spent; And the masts and the rigging were ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... mine doth tremble, and I feel A stark affrighted motion in my blood; My soul grows weary of her house, and I All over am a trouble to my self; There is some hidden power in these dead things That calls my flesh into'em; I am cold; Be resolute, and bear'em company: There's something ...
— The Maids Tragedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... Phadhrig?' (How d'ye do, Pat?) 'Slan, go raimh math agut!' (Pretty well, thank you,) says the bear. The people were surprised to hear how plainly he spoke—but the mayor ordered him directly to be ripped up; and after some opposition, and a good deal of difficulty, Pat stepped forth stark naked out of the bear's-skin wherein he had been fourteen or fifteen days most cleverly stitched. The women made off—the men stood astonished—and the mayor ordered his keepers to be put in goal unless ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... thought save that of reaching his enemy again, and fell on the O'Donnells with stark madness in his face. A pistol roared into his stubbly beard and the ball carried off his steel cap, but he cut down the man and pressed into the midst of the pirates, cutting and thrusting ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... with one hand, while upon her shoulder rests an American eagle screaming defiance at the enemies of his country, who are seen fleeing in the distance. Canary bird! small boys! ballet-girl! The man is crazy, sir; stark, staring mad. And now I want you to write up an explanation for me. This kind of thing exposes me to derision. I can't stand it, and, by George! I won't! I'll sue ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... knew would annoy the official Church, now another, perhaps the exact opposite of the last. Now they denied something as old as Europe—such as the right to property: now a new piece of usage or discipline such as Communion in one kind: now a partial regional rule, such as celibacy. Some went stark mad. Others, at the contrary extreme, did no more than expose ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... the House, which I hope will be in a week. He has had an ill surgeon, by the caprice of that puppy Dr. Radcliffe, which has kept him back so long; and yesterday he got a cold, but is better to-day.—What! I think I am stark mad, to write so much in one day to little saucy MD; here is a deal of stuff, indeed! can't you bid those little dear rogues good-night, and let them go sleep, Mr. Presto? When your tongue runs there's no ho ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... I had prepared for him with an avidity and a bonhommie which it did me good to behold; my remedy operated beyond my most sanguine expectations. The poor man was cured of his obstinacy, and became stark mad with jealousy. Then indeed I had some hopes of him; for a madman can be managed, a fool cannot. In a month's time I made him quite docile. With a face longer than the weeping philosopher's, he came to me one morning, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... hear again. My life of innocence moves thee not; so be it. Show then what hath seduced me; let me see it. Was that poor flesh so passing fair, beyond All woman's loveliness? Was I some fond False plotter, that I schemed to win through her Thy castle's heirdom? Fond indeed I were! Nay, a stark madman! "But a crown," thou sayest, "Usurped, is sweet." Nay, rather most unblest To all wise-hearted; sweet to fools and them Whose eyes are blinded by the diadem. In contests of all valour fain would I Lead ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... "Thou art stark mad!" cried the earl. Then he went on, "Konrad, I have wronged thee deeply. In my youth I loved one who neglected me as cruelly as thou hast been neglected, and since then a mischievous spirit of vengeance, as it were, has led me to make women my playthings, to be won and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... warrant he'll feel shakier still. (loudly, with melodramatic fierceness) Fists, be up and doing! 'Tis long since ye have made provision for my paunch. It seems an age since yesterday when ye stripped stark four men and ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... of Silas Blackburn no longer lay peacefully on its back. It had been turned on its side, and remained in a stark and awkward attitude. For the first time the back ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... Demetrius, dirty cad that he is! She lives with the Grinsteads, and Anna with the Travis Underwoods, Phyllis's young man's bosses. If he makes as good a thing of it as they have done, she will be no end of a swell. Mr. Travis Underwood has brought down his hunters and gives me a mount. Claude would go stark staring mad to see ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the site of my house, his arson, his assault on me personally, and was to take place before the elections), he put up a notice that he intended to watch the sky during all comitial days.[411] Public speeches of Metellus disorderly, of Appius hot-headed, of Publius stark mad. The upshot, however, was that, had not Milo served his notice of bad omens in the campus, the elections would have been held. On the 19th of November Milo arrived on the campus before midnight with a large company. Clodius, though he had picked gangs of runaway ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... furiously in Spanish, 'Carne! Sangre! Bourbon!' There is a clanging of steel, a breaking down of gates, and the Constable of Bourbon's horde pours in, irresistible, ravaging all, while he himself lies stark and stiff outside, pierced by Bernardino Passeri's short bolt, and Clement trembles in Sant' Angelo. Christina of Sweden, Monaldeschi's murder red upon her soul, comes next, fawning for forgiveness, to die in due time over there in the ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... was evidently stark, staring mad. I still affected not to observe it, and asked him if that was ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... if in rage, rose in groves like tidal waves. Smooth forests of beech-trees, round and gray, swept over the knolls and slopes of land in a mighty ground-swell. But most of all, the multitude of pines and firs, innumerable and monotonous, with straight, stark trunks, and branches woven together in an unbroken Hood of darkest green, crowded through the valleys and over the hills, rising on the highest ridges into ragged crests, like the foaming edge ...
— The First Christmas Tree - A Story of the Forest • Henry Van Dyke
... or stain on thee, With promise of strength and manhood full and fair! Though cold and stark and bare, The bloom and the charm of life doth awhile remain ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... cast their whole contents into the courtyard without examination, and called to those below, to heap them on the blaze. Men who had been into the cellars, and had staved the casks, rushed to and fro stark mad, setting fire to all they saw—often to the dresses of their own friends—and kindling the building in so many parts that some had no time for escape, and were seen, with drooping hands and blackened faces, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... company: I have the influence that money carries with it, and I could even now make what is known as a 'brilliant' marriage. Did you ever wonder—everybody else did, I know—why I never married? Simply, my dear, because the only man I cared for didn't ask me ... and now I am forty. (How stark and almost indecent it looks written down like that!) At forty, one is supposed to have got over all youthful fancies and disappointments, and lately it has seemed to me reasonable to contemplate ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... a cheaping, so that I went nigh to smiting him, whereas I had a knife in my bosom, but the chaplet refrained me. To make a short tale of it, he bade Bull sell me to him, which Bull utterly naysaid, standing stiff and stark before the Lord, and scowling on him. But the Lord laughed in his face and said: 'So be it, for I will take her without a price, and thank thee for sparing my gold.' Then said Bull: 'If thou take her as a thrall, thou wert best take me also; else shall I follow thee as ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... the Umbilical Cord.—Absence of the membranes has its counterpart in the deficiency of the umbilical cord, so frequently noticed in old reports. The Ephemerides, Osiander, Stark's Archives, Thiebault, van der Wiel, Chatton, and Schurig all speak of it, and it has been noticed since. Danthez speaks of the development of a fetus in spite of the absence of an umbilical cord. Stute reports an observation of ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... "I mean to demonstrate my perfect ability to defend myself, as well as my dangerousness in attack. You are to use the sword with the goad point set in it; so that, if you succeed in hitting me, you will tear a long slash in my hide; for I am going to fence with you in my skin only, stark; mother-naked as I was born. I shall use the unaltered sword and you will have on your fencing-tunic, so that if I hit you, it won't hurt you nearly as much as a hit ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... though the light was softened, the apartment was by no means obscure. Ferdinand was sitting in an easy-chair, supported by pillows. A black handkerchief was just twined round his forehead, for his head had been shaved, except a few curls on the side and front, which looked stark and lustreless. He was so thin and pale, and his eyes and cheeks were so wan and hollow, that it was scarcely credible that in so short a space of time a man could have become such a wreck. When he saw Katherine he involuntarily dropped his eyes, but extended his hand to ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... for the younger? At this mad speed the boat would be close to Macleod in another second or two; but in that brief space of time the younger Cameron had flung his clothes off, and stood there stark-naked ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... a state of affairs so monstrous; but one suffers that pain proudly because one belongs, proudly, to a day in which nothing but stark truth may go from mother to child, not even fairy stories, not even Bible stories. Rosalie's mother is gone and her kind is no more, and in the graces and the manners of this day's generation one perceives, ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... in the old days she had always been a sincere person; she had deceived me about facts, but she had never deceived me about herself. Her personal, stark frankness had been her essential strength. And it was gone. I came back to find Amanda an accomplished actress, a thing of poses and calculated effects. She was a surface, a sham, a Lorelei. Beneath ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... thing about the surf that I do not understand, and that is why witches always walk stark naked along the beach by it at night, and eat sea crabs the while. That such is a confirmed habit of theirs is certain; and they tell me that while doing this the witches emit a bright light, and also ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... time approaching sunset, we reached and rounded a sharp curve, to see down and far away, and to be held mute in our tracks. Between a white-mantled mountain range on the left and the dark-striped lofty range on the right I could see far down into a gulf, a hazy void, a vast stark valley that seemed streaked and ridged and canyoned, an abyss into which veils of rain were dropping and over which broken clouds hung, pierced by red ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... What an eternity it had seemed before he had got him to sleep. How the child had suffered. Mad! Absolutely stark, staring, raving mad with sheer terror.... Had he acted rightly in showing him the picture? He had meant well, anyhow. Cruel phrase, that. How cuttingly his friend de Warrenne had observed, "You mean well, doubtless," ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... grey dawn, and we were working up in shore, without dreaming of breaking the blockade, when it fell stark calm. Presently the Spanish squadron, anchored under Punto Canoa, perceived us, when a corvette, two schooners, a cutter, and eight gunboats, got under weigh, the latter of which soon swept close to us, ranging themselves on our bows and quarters; ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... with grey ash which emphasised his rather potent eyes. His features in profile were pure Greek, and on his low forehead there was a touch of gold. His particular followers or disciples had the silly expression of a mesmerist's subjects; they sat in the dust stark naked and unashamed, and looked ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... an amazing meeting. Mrs Baines almost died of emotion. Jenny Hill went stark mad with hysteria. The Prince of Darkness played his trombone like a madman: its brazen roarings were like the laughter of the damned. 117 conversions took place then and there. They prayed with ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... the splendour of a simple thought, Whether for England or her enemies, Went in the night, and in the morning died; Each bleeding piece of human earth that lies Stark to the carrion wind, and groaning cries For burial—each Jesu crucified— Hath surely won the thing he dearly bought, For wrong is right, when wrong ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... hadst thou then felt how tenderly she prest my Hand in hers, as if she wou'd have kept it there for ever, it wou'd have made thee mad, stark mad in Love!—and nothing but Marcella cou'd ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... war-clubs and short knives. A suitable place was selected. The whole village of the Tetons emptied itself to witness the combat. Men, women, and children swarmed about the arena. The two youthful combatants made their appearance, stark naked, and took their positions about thirty yards apart. Just when the signal was given, Do-ran-to's eye caught that of his betrothed Ni-ar-gua in the crowd. Then said his heart, "Be strong and my arm big!" There was ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... think. All at once she was a quivering mass of cold, helpless flesh, wet with perspiration, sick with a shuddering, retching, internal convulsion, her mind liberated from paralyzing shock. The moment was as horrible as that in which the bear had bawled his frightful rage. A stark, icy, black emotion seemed in possession of her. She could not lift a hand, yet all of her body appeared shaking. There was a fluttering, a strangling in her throat. The crushing weight that surrounded her heart eased before she recovered use of her limbs. Then, the naked and terrible thing was ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... as far as the Rue St. Denis, which he crossed. Everywhere he saw houses gutted and doors burst in, and traces of a cruelty and a fanaticism almost incredible. Near the Rue des Lombards he saw a dead child, stripped stark and hanged on the hook of a cobbler's shutter. A little farther on in the same street he stepped over the body of a handsome young woman, distinguished by the length and beauty of her hair. To obtain ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... whites, stark naked, ran about miserably in the midst of this pandemonium. On a litter was being borne the nude body of a stout man, in whose breast a dagger was sticking as a cross is ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... furnish them with incomparable tea, snuff, and Hungary water, but impregnated the air of the country with such sober and salutiferous steams as very much comforted the heads and refreshed the senses of all that breathed in it. A discarded statesman that, at his first landing, appeared stark, staring mad, would become calm in a week's time, and upon his return home live easy and satisfied in his retirement. A moping lover would grow a pleasant fellow by that time he had rid thrice about the island: and a ...
— English Satires • Various
... He saw Burek lying stark behind the barn, but he had no thought to spare for him; he peered for the traces of the horses' feet. There they were, stamped into the snow as into wax; Kasztan's large feet and the broken hoof of Wojtek; here the thieves had mounted and ridden ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... dhow, on board which the midshipmen found themselves, presented a horrible appearance. The three men who had first been shot lay stiff and stark, weltering in their blood at the foot of the mast. Farther off sat the negoda, with a shot through his leg and another in his body, glaring fiercely at them; while another man lay not far off, writhing in agony, with life ebbing fast. The rest of the crew, greasy, dirty ruffians, with close-fitting ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... Illinois, 1952. An account of buying cattle in Texas in 1853, driving them to Illinois, and later shipping some to New York. Accounts of trail driving before about 1870 have been few and obscurely printed. The stark diary kept by George C. Duffield of a drive from San Saba County, Texas, to southern Iowa in 1866 is as realistic—often agonizing—as anything extant on this much romanticized subject. It is published in Annals of Iowa, Des Moines, IV ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... limbs were becoming more cramped with the cold and the terrible strain of swimming in such waves. But still the brave heart bore him up; and resolutely, sternly he forced himself afresh to the effort before him. He reasoned that where there was such a headland standing out so stark into the sea there ought to be some shelter in its lee. If he could pass it he might find calmer water and even ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... of the gaudy chromo and the illuminated and consoling household motto. Most of the hotels are in the town, at considerable distance from the ocean, and the majestic old sea, which can be monotonous but never vulgar, is barricaded from the town by five or six miles of stark-naked plank walk, rows on rows of bath closets, leagues of flimsy carpentry-work, in the way of cheap-John shops, tin-type booths, peep-shows, go-rounds, shooting-galleries, pop-beer and cigar shops, restaurants, barber shops, photograph ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... think not— no! It's my heart. I'm sore night and day thinkin' of my son, and him lying out there at night without a rag of dry clothing, and water that the bullocks won't drink, and maggots in the meat; and every day one of his friends laid out stark and cold, and one day—'imself perhaps. If anything were to 'appen to him. I'd never forgive meself—here. Ah! Miss Katherine, I wonder how you bear it—bad news comin' every day—And Sir John's face so sad—And ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... make us a happy nation. No, if other things as great in the Church, and in the rule of life both economical and political, be not looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zuinglius and Calvin hath beaconed up to us that we are stark blind. There be who perpetually complain of Schisms and Sects, and make it such a calamity that any man dissents from their maxims.... Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... one old fellow to Malak, stroking my face with his horny, grimy palm. "I never saw anything like it before." Most of the men were clothed in dirty, discoloured rags. The women wore simply a cloth tied loosely over the loins, while male and female children fourteen or fifteen years old ran about stark naked. ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... never so green before, the sky so blue, or the flowers so fragrant. I feet as if I had been born into the world only yesterday, and was looking upon nature for the first time to-day. I never appreciated it before. When I remember that I might even now be lying, stiff and stark, under a fine marble monument, and that instead of that I am riding through an elysium, beside my darling sister, who has really learned to love me, I am too divinely happy. I do not even feel my wound any more. I don't ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... of Communist Republics. There were only frightened, starving people trudging blindly away from cities that were charnel-houses and machines that would not run and trees and crops and grasses that were stark dead where they stood. It would be a long time before anybody would want to cross those lifeless plains and enter the places which once had been swarming hives of ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... amusing impersonations; Miss Maud Powell of Chicago, only fourteen years of age, who had been taking lessons in France and Germany for some years, played exquisite airs on the violin; Mrs. Flora Stark, Miss Alice Blatch and Miss Conway gave us some fine classical music on the piano, and Nathaniel Mellen sang some pathetic negro melodies.[581] Altogether it was a pleasant occasion and I felt quite proud of the varied ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... The chief of the outfit rode in the lead some distance before the first pack-mule. The laden animals followed in single file. Flanking them on each side were the armed guards, with one or two closing in on the rear. Thus they came, winding their way among the stark rocks and the clumps of Spanish bayonet, and when the leader caught sight of Curly Bill from under his huge, silver decked sombrero, he reined in his horse; his grip tightened on the rifle which he carried across his saddle. The outriders pulled up; there was a low rattle of shifting ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... singly and in small parties, whilst dancing was in progress, and in a house open to such mixed society had been admitted without arousing suspicion. There was little that was obscure or inexplicable in the coup; it was an amazing display of force majeure, an act of stark audacity. It pointed to the existence in London of a hitherto unsuspected genius. ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... his own madness Hercules now returned to the cave of his guest-friend Pholus. There among others his host lay, and stark dead. He had drawn an arrow from the body of one who had died from its wound, and, while examining it and wondering how so slight a shaft could be so fatal, had accidentally dropped it out of his hand. It struck his foot and he ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... the sleuths thought he was stark mad. He was aware of the fact that he had but a few hours in which to save the girl who had come at his cry to help him, who had loved him and whom he loved, only to be torn into some place unknown by the forces which were released in his experiment. And he knew he would rather ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... when one sees a Malay pirate, there is no mistaking her for anything else. At night it is generally a stark calm, and whether one is lying idle, with the sails hanging flat against the mast, or whether one is at anchor, one knows that they can't come upon us under sail, and on a still night one can hear the beat of their oars miles away. There is never any fear of being surprised as ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... With all the might that he had, he thrust him up the spear to the haft and, with his sword, struck King Arthur upon the head, that the steel pierced the helmet and bit into the head; then Mordred fell back, stark and dead. ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... purpose was to extirpate the whole race of Jacob, 1 Macc. v. 2. Striking remarks upon the real nature of the struggle at that period, as a struggle of faithful Judaism against Heathenism, the latter of which had gained a considerable party among the people themselves, are made by Stark, in "Gaza und die Philistaeische Kueste," Jena, 52, S. 481 ff. Among other things, he says: "The national distinctions in the boundaries of Palestine had by no means ceased, but continued under ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... it would seem. The boy, revived by a spoonful or two of broth, asked to have the two tame mice on the bed. Peter, opening the cage, found one dead, very stiff and stark. The catastrophe he kept from ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... respect—they long ago dared to describe the monster as it is; and they are now grappling with it, with the overwhelming strength of a great nation's concentrated energies.—The Dutch, those sturdy old friends of liberty, and the French, who have been stark mad for freedom, rank next for the severity of their slave laws and customs. The Spanish and Portuguese are ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... to one another, blackbird to blackbird, thrush to thrush, robin to robin, kin understanding kin, and every bird uttering vain jargon to them that did not wear the same beak and feathers, just like ourselves, Joseph said to himself and he stood stark before a hollow into which he remembered having once been forbidden to stray lest a wolf should pounce upon him suddenly. Now he was a man, he was among men, and all had staves in their hands, and the thoughts of wolves departed at the sight of a wild fruit ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... the Pope stark mad; he stamped, foamed, and raved like one in a phrenzy: he swore the painter should suffer the most cruel death that could be invented, unless he drew another full as good as the former, for if but the least grace was missing, he would not pardon him; but if he would ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... bedroom, of all rooms in any house, reflects the personality of its occupant. True, the actual furniture was paneled, cupid-surmounted, and ridiculous. It had been the fruit of Jo's first orgy of the senses. But now it stood out in that stark little room with an air as incongruous and ashamed as that of a pink tarlatan danseuse who finds herself in a monk's cell. None of those wall pictures with which bachelor bedrooms are reputed to be hung. No satin slippers. No scented notes. Two plain-backed military ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... me cease, for why should I prolong My notes, and vex a Singer with a Song? Oh thou with pen perpetual in thy fist! Dubbed for thy sins a stark Miscellanist, So pleased the printer's orders to perform For Messrs. Longman, Hurst and Rees and Orme. Go—Get thee hence to Paternoster Row, Thy patrons wave a duodecimo! (Best form for letters from a distant land, It fits the pocket, nor fatigues the hand.) Then go, once more the joyous ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... out the baneful night air. In the main room a drop-light with shade flung its radiance on a table and lit up the anxious faces of the few men gathered round it. It showed one poor fellow bolt upright, unspeaking, unmoving, his fixed white eyeballs staring into space, as though he would go stark mad. Those eyes have forever burned themselves into my brain, a pitiful protest against a mad, wild ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... you are, Rod. You're crazy. You're stark, staring, raving crazy! Why in heaven's name should Patricia want to run away with Morton? It is true that I have always wanted her to marry you, but, if she wanted him, she knows mighty well she could have him. I wouldn't put ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... whole lot worse in running its course. It made men and women do such fearful and unreasonable things. It was like delirium tremens, only worse. And if he, Daylight, caught it, he might have it as badly as any of them. It was lunacy, stark lunacy, and contagious on top of it all. A half dozen young fellows were crazy over Freda. They all wanted to marry her. Yet she, in turn, was crazy over that some other fellow on the other side of the world, and would have nothing to do ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... convent church proceeded from the moon, whose rays, shining through the painted windows, fell upon the graves of the old abbots in the presbytery, and on the two biers within the adjoining chapel, whose stark burthens they quickened into fearful semblance ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Sunday, and I need not tell what a pleasure it was to me to hear again the old English services that once I had thought so long, as a boy will. And on that day, for the first time, it came to me that my man, Erling the viking, was a stark heathen, Odin's man. Truly he came to the church with me, and there he stood and stared at all that went on, quietly and reverently enough, but in such wise that I thought that he had somewhere seen the like ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... the opening phrases of the preface, but those which followed were less easy to understand. Then came "Stark: A Conte," about a midinette who, so far as I could gather, murdered, or was about to murder, a mannequin. It was rather like a story by Catulle Mendes in which the translator had either skipped or cut out every alternate sentence. Next, a dialogue between Pan and St. Ursula, lacking, I rather ...
— Enoch Soames - A Memory of the Eighteen-nineties • Max Beerbohm
... admire philosophers because they discover a small part of the wisdom that made all things, they must be stark blind not ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... negroes should have her yet; and drawing his sword, ran upon the captain: for which I was about to strike him through the body; but the captain, not caring to waste steel on such a ribald, with his fist caught him such a buffet behind the ear, that he fell down stark dead, and all the rest stood amazed. Then Mr. Oxenham called out, 'All honest men who know me, and can trust me, stand by your lawful captain against these ruffians.' Whereon, sirs, I, and Penberthy my good comrade, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... is mad!" Mr. Parker sighed, leaning back in his place—"stark, staring mad! His interference with my ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... again a tempting bunch of berries under a low, dense bush caused it to kneel for farther under-reaching. Quonab glided swiftly forward, reached the twenty-five-yard limit, rose to one knee, bent the stark cedar bow. Rolf saw the buck bound in air, then make for the wood with great, high leaps; the dash of disappointment was on him, but Quonab stood erect, with right hand raised, ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... that he was his brother; the next was an old man with a long white beard, but hale and upright; and lastly came a man of middle-age, who led the young woman by the hand. He was taller than the first of the young men, though the other who entered with him outwent him in height; a stark carle he was, broad across the shoulders, thin in the flank, long-armed and big-handed; very noble and well-fashioned of countenance, with a straight nose and grey eyes underneath a broad brow: his hair grown ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... to make his fortune by it. Detectives were put upon his trail in his roaming about the fields, but he managed to elude all efforts at discovery. Being an intemperate man, one cold night after indulging in his cups, he was found by the roadside stark and stiff. Many rude attempts and imperfect searches have been made upon the assurances of Holden to discover the existence of antimony, but thus far in vain, and the supposed suppressed secret of the existence of it in Saugus died ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... moments, careless of your pain, Knowing that only so must England live And win, by sacrifice, the right to reign— Be glad, that still the spur of your bequest Urges your heirs their threefold way along— The way of Toil that craveth not for rest, Clear Honour, and stark Will to punish wrong! The seed ye sow'd God quicken'd with His Breath; The crop hath ripen'd—lo, there ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... in the tense Stillness. To his right lay the cold, drear stretches of the Drowned Lands; the gaunt tree-trunks were but dimly discernible against the gray landscape, and looked more ghostly than ever, standing there, stark and silent, like an army of the dead. Not a light could be seen, nor a sign of human habitation. Above stretched the illimitable blue of heaven, steely cold, like the frozen earth, and spangled with glittering stars. For several nights Gilbert had had very ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... centuries, to which the name Of fair Savitri, men would give,— And then he vanished in a flame. "Adieu, great god!" She took the soul, No bigger than the human thumb, And running swift, soon reached her goal, Where lay the body stark ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... expenses and all just debts had been paid. It was really quite staggering. If Thomas Singleton Bingle had not been so completely wrapped up in his ears, it is certain that he would have acted as any other intelligent human being would have acted at a time like this. He would have gone stark, staring mad. ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... even been included in Dr Currie's edition of his works. It was communicated anonymously by Gall to the publisher of the "Scots Musical Museum," and first appeared in that work. The original MS. of the song was in the possession of Mr Stark, the author of a memoir of Gall ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... wailing people, foremost one who swung An earthen bowl with lighted coals, behind The kinsmen shorn, with mourning marks, ungirt, Crying aloud, "O Rama, Rama, hear! Call upon Rama, brothers"; next the bier, Knit of four poles with bamboos interlaced, Whereon lay, stark and stiff, feet foremost, lean, Chapfallen, sightless, hollow-flanked, a-grin, Sprinkled with red and yellow dust—the Dead, Whom at the four-went ways they turned head first, And crying "Rama, Rama!" carried on To where a pile was reared beside the stream; Thereon they laid him, building ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... all leagued together, and supported by the treasures of England, the wealth of the British nation, wrung from the sweat of John Gull's brow, was lavished to maintain the armies of the Northern hordes, which were advancing against France. John Gull was stark mad with joy at the news of the defeat of the French; and the general cry amongst the shopkeepers and farmers was, "down with Buonaparte, cost what it will!" They not only were willing to advance large sums in taxes, but the Parliament ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... fumbling at the back of Esther's veil and Anne now, seeing some strange significance in the moment, put her quick fingers to work. The veil came off, and Esther stood there, white, stark, more tragic than she had ever looked in all the troubles of her life. The colonel gave a little exclamation of sorrow over her and drew up the best chair to the fire, and Anne pushed back the lamp on the table so that its light should not fall directly on her face. Then there were commonplace ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown |
