"Abjectly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from Heaven for Becket's murder, Henry resolved to do penance at his tomb. Leaving the Continent with two prisoners in his charge,—one his son Henry's queen, the other his own,—he traveled with all speed to Canterbury. There, kneeling abjectly before the grave of his former chancellor and friend, the King submitted to be beaten with rods by the priests, in expiation of ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... thing for a person to be guilty of such actions, as shall put it in the power of another, even by a look, to mortify him! And if poor souls can be thus abjectly struck at such a discovery by a fellow-creature, how must they appear before an unerring and omniscient Judge, with a conscience standing in the place of a thousand witnesses? and calling in vain upon the mountains to fall upon them, and the hills to cover them!—How ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... Howard felt himself weakening. He was suddenly seized with the feeling that he must obey. Amid roars of laughter he recited the entire alphabet standing on one leg, he crowed like a rooster, he hopped like a toad, and he crawled abjectly on his belly like a snake. One of the fellows told him afterward that he had been hypnotized. He had laughed at it then as a good joke, but now he came to think of it, perhaps it was true. Possibly he was a subject. ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... provoked, and the most forgiving Omnipotence, that, in answer to all men's wanderings and rebellions, only seeks to draw them to itself? That is what God wants to be known for. Is that hard and repellent? Does that make Him a great tyrant, who only wants to be abjectly worshipped? No; it makes Him the very embodiment and perfection of the purest love. Why does He desire that He should be known? for any good that it does to Him? No; except the good that even His creatures can do to Him when they gladden His ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... to the door of her tent and stood, her hair and clothes blown violently, gazing wildly round her. Mr. Pennefather, looking abjectly miserable, crawled after her and remained on his hands and knees at ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... he cooed abjectly, "I wouldn't hurt a fly. Me, I was always a byword amongst my pards. They'd say, 'There goes Brick Willock, what never harmed nobody.' When they kept me in at school I never clumb out the window, and it was me got all the prize cards at Sunday-school. How comes it, honey, that you ain't ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... he spoke. He begged abjectly to be set free. He offered to leave the town at once and never return if the Elder would only ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... than the word of a sorcerer, the hope that the old man and the child, the wise and the ignorant, took from their souls as inborn. Man and fiend had alike failed a mind, not ignoble, not skilless, not abjectly craven; alike failed a heart not feeble and selfish, not dead to the hero's devotion, willing to shed every drop of its blood for a something more dear than an animal's life for itself! What remained—what ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... set, and the twilight shadows were stealing down upon them, when, creeping abjectly upon her knees towards the wretched girl, she said, "There is more, Maggie, more—I have ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... wild astonishment, saw old Jerry crouch abjectly. Then with the mate's final words the old man straightened up as if in accusation. His white hair shone ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... that he might be in the same place with her at that very moment, and without her knowing it, was so strange and painful that she felt a violent revolt of all her strong and joy-loving youth. Why should she go on suffering so unbearably, so abjectly, so miserably? If only she could see him, hear his voice, even hear him say again such cruel and humiliating words as he had spoken on that dreadful day in Venice when that would be better than this blankness, this utter and final exclusion from ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... were so continually torn and scratched that the wounds never had a chance to heal and became infected until they were a mass of sores. On occasion they died, or, when they had become too abjectly spiritless to attack even a rat, were set to work on the tight- rope with the doped starved rats that were too near dead to run away from them. And, as Miss Merle Merryweather said: the bonehead audiences, tickled to death, applauded Duckworth's ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... Clarendon fell under the common fate of great ministers, whose employment exposes them to envy, and draws upon them the indignation of all who are disappointed in their pretensions. Their friends turning as violently against them, as they formerly fawned abjectly ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... with ease, but he also tossed us so high in the air that we all—M'Bongwele and his chiefs included—went right out to sea, until the land was completely lost sight of. This seemed almost to complete his Majesty's subjugation, for he no sooner found himself out of sight of land than he grovelled abjectly at von Schalckenberg's feet and promised anything and everything that we asked of him, if we would but ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... feel quite right in my stomach, and I think they're good for me," said Sylvia, still abjectly. Then she turned and went into the house. Henry started afresh. He felt renewed compunction at his deceit as he went on. It seemed hard to go against the wishes of that poor, little, narrow-chested woman who had had so little in life that a quarter of a pound of peppermints seemed too much ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in the street knows nothing of Biometrika: all he knows is that "you can prove anything by figures," though he forgets this the moment figures are used to prove anything he wants to believe. If he did take in Biometrika he would probably become abjectly credulous as to all the conclusions drawn in it from the correlations so learnedly worked out; though the mathematician whose correlations would fill a Newton with admiration may, in collecting and ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... me explain," he stammered abjectly. "I want you to know how that came about. When I came back from the claims I'd spent all that money and I had to have two thousand more. I had to have it, to get back to New York, or our mine wouldn't have been worth anything. Well, I went to L. W., the banker up here, and bluffed him out ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... What sacrifices, material, moral or military, have they made? Here, in the richest country in the world, with what difficulty do we raise a few thousand pounds to buy a masterpiece. What institution do we starve so abjectly as we starve the National Gallery? Has any one met a rich man who denied himself a motorcar to keep a genius? How dare the people who fill our streets and public places with monuments that make us the laughing-stock of Europe, the people who cannot spare a few ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... appeal to her curiosity. I hoped against hope that some word might come from her, but I was doomed to disappointment. The critics were fulsome in their praise and the public was lavish with its plaudits, but I was abjectly miserable. Another sleepless night and I was determined to see her. She received me most graciously, although I fear she thought my visit one of vanity—wounded vanity—and me petulant because ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... tragic to contemplate or so devastating to suffer as the oppression of will without conscience; and the whole tendency of our family and school system is to set the will of the parent and the school despot above conscience as something that must be deferred to abjectly and ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... were becoming so absorbing he did not know how to go even for a few weeks. There were certain individuals in particular who depended on him from day to day. One was Charles Richards's widow. The poor desperate creature had put herself abjectly into Elsmere's hands. He had sent her to an asylum, where she had been kindly and skilfully treated, and after six weeks' abstinence she had just returned to her children, and was being watched by himself and a competent ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and there, I think that we would have waited for him. He had us, so to speak, abjectly under his thumbs. His word had come to be our law, since it was but child's play for him to enforce it. But it so happened that he now took a step which was to call into life and action that last vestige of manhood and independence that flickered ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... letters for him, laid ready on the writing-table. Nothing of much importance he found there.—Here, though, was a rather diverting letter from Eustace Budgell, that poor fool, abjectly thanking Mr. Pope for his advice concerning how best to answer the atrocious calumnies on Budgell then appearing in The Grub-Street Journal,—and reposing, drolly enough, next the proof-sheets of an anonymous letter Pope had prepared for the forthcoming ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... pretty Berkeley rooms. Once again, on a rainy Sunday, he telephoned that he was coming. And, as has happened ever since man first looked upon woman and called her good, again he played the blind force of male compulsion against the woman's secret weakness to yield. Not that it was Daylight's way abjectly to beg and entreat. On the contrary, he was masterful in whatever he did, but he had a trick of whimsical wheedling that Dede found harder to resist than the pleas of a suppliant lover. It was not a happy scene in its outcome, ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... "Follow me," which brings before our eyes the yawning prison gates, the most hardened sinner feels his courage fail, and abjectly ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... establish a second-hand business failed last Tuesday week? Have you the heart to complain to the manager? Have we not suffered enough? Are our miseries nev—— [the manager enters]. Oh Lord! here he is. [The waiter withdraws abjectly, taking ...
— The Inca of Perusalem • George Bernard Shaw
... and government, which have in the past been the especial sphere of male toil. The Roman woman had for generations been supplanted in the sphere of her domestic labours and in the toil of rearing and educating her offspring, and had long become abjectly parasitic, before the Roman male had been able to substitute the labour of the hireling and barbarian for his own, in the army, and in ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... no romance, nothing like adventure here nowadays, said Helen May to herself, while she watched the little geysers of dust go dancing like whirling dervishes across the sand. A person lived on canned stuff and kept goats and was abjectly pleased to see any kind of human being. There certainly was no romance left in the country, though it had seemed almost as though there might be, when her Man of the Desert sang and all the little night-sounds hushed to listen, and the moon-trail across the sand of the desert lay like ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... would lie down I'd imagine I heard a fire roaring. And then it came. But I was all used up before that, so I wasn't really—I must have fainted, for I don't remember getting into the house—and I do think fainting is the silliest thing! I never did such a thing before," she finished abjectly. ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... notice my rudeness, Miss Lucy," he began abjectly. "Of course I am glad to see you; but I am a little confused, and—well, you understand." He smiled wanly as he spoke, and held out his hand. "Is it all right?" he asked. "Good-bye, then." And as he stepped quietly out the light ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... man his opinion of a woman's dress when he is desperately and abjectly in love with the wearer. Let me look. Like everything else of yours it's perfect. Where did ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the doctor, his glance straying wrathfully toward the rotund clergyman, who all at once assumed an abjectly apologetic air and interested himself in a ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... at Valentine). Get up. (Valentine gets up abjectly.) Now let us have no false delicacy. Tell my mother that we have agreed to marry one another. (A silence of stupefaction ensues. Valentine, dumb with panic, looks at them with an obvious impulse ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... assailant, the onlookers, who all knew him, and all hated and feared him, saw a sudden and surprising transformation. The red all died out of his face, the eyes seemed starting from their sockets, the lower jaw dropped abjectly and suddenly, and, with a yell of terror, John Burrill lowered his head and dashed from the house, as if pursued ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... do not apply to magic proper. Magic seems to consist mainly in the control which mind may exceptionally exercise over matter. In hypnotism, the subject abjectly believes and obeys the operator. If he be told that he cannot step across a chalk mark on the floor, he cannot step across it. He dissolves in tears or explodes with laughter, according as the operator tells him he has cause for merriment or tears: and if he ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... you're nearest, give him this piece of skin from the chicken neck." The big dog padded forward across the room, evidently in such a state of terror about Cousin Ann that Elizabeth Ann felt for him. She had a fellow- feeling about that relative of hers. Also it was impossible to be afraid of so abjectly meek and guilty an animal. As old Shep came up to her, poking his nose inquiringly on her lap, she shrinkingly held out the big piece of skin, and though she jumped back at the sudden snap and gobbling ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... (with moments of success) by an imputation of exalted sentiments, of superstitious scruples, of a refinement of loyalty. Certainly it added at the same time hugely to the price of Vereker's secret, precious as this mystery already appeared. I may as well confess abjectly that Mrs. Corvick's unexpected attitude was the final tap on the nail that was to fix fast my luckless idea, convert it into the obsession of which I'm ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... successfully oppose disciplined troops, and he knew it. The conviction of himself and his associates on the indictments for treason could be prevented before an unbiased non-Mormon jury only by flight. Abjectly as his people obeyed him,—so abjectly that they gave up all their gold and silver to him that winter in exchange for bank notes issued by a company of which he was president,—the necessity of a reiteration of the ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... sudden fit of recollection and saw far back amid the shadows of consciousness the vision of Chamont—Irma d'Anglars, the old harlot crowned with years and honors, ascending the steps in front of her chateau amid abjectly reverential villagers. Then as Satin whistled again, making game of the old hag, who ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... was seated when he entered the room; they were all crowded between the door and his desk. He stood blinking, wondering why they were giving him an ovation, and why Kendrick and Dacre were so abjectly apologetic. Great heavens, did it take the murder of the greatest Moslem since Saladin to convince people ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... oreoide watches, it is doubtful whether the speaker had ever had money enough in his possession at one time to buy one, and yet he talked of taking away "ouah niggahs," as if they were as plenty about his place as hills of corn. As a rule, the more abjectly poor a Southerner was, the more readily he worked himself into a rage over the idea of "takin' away ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... observing something in the writer's eye which he did not like, became all on a sudden abjectly submissive, and, professing the highest admiration for the writer, begged him to visit him in his government; this the writer promised faithfully to do, and he takes the present opportunity of ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... resolution. I became aware I was being held up, so to speak, as if in a wood. The verandah was empty by then, the noise and movement in court had ceased: a great silence fell upon the building, in which, somewhere far within, an oriental voice began to whine abjectly. The dog, in the very act of trying to sneak in at the door, sat down hurriedly to hunt ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Sitting adjourned. Question put that Clause 3 pass. Then SAGE, smelling obtrusively of cigarettes, interposed, and declared it "would be indecent" to accept the Clause without further discussion. Nothing House shrinks from just now more abjectly than from charge of indecency. Accordingly debate stood over, and Thursday may, if the SAGE and his Party please, and the Closure is not invoked, be appropriated for further discussion of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... dark, eyes gazed down at him, instead of stars, out of the heavens. The night, and the stars, and the pines, and the desert wind reproached him for his faithlessness to themselves as comforters; but abjectly he admitted he could make no plea, save that he had heard once more of a ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... now and then by a sign or a grunt, their surprise at not being beaten, or made to carry their captors. Some, however, caught sight of the little calabashes of coca which the English carried. That woke them from their torpor, and they began coaxing abjectly (and not in vain), for a taste of that miraculous herb, which would not only make food unnecessary, and enable their panting lungs to endure the keen mountain air, but would rid them, for a while at least, of the fallen Indian's most unpitying foe, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... adorably child-like and simple, now full of arts and coquettish innuendoes, then again naive, unthinking and almost boyishly blunt and direct; in a word, one of those miraculous New York girls whom abstractly one may disapprove of, but in the concrete must abjectly adore. This easy predominance of the masculine heart over the masculine reason in the presence of an impressive woman, has been the motif of a thousand tragedies in times past, and will inspire a thousand more ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... beginning to feel the end of the world would come soon. It is ten times worse than ever having had to conceal all my feelings and abjectly obey Mrs. Carruthers. Because she did say cynical, entertaining things sometimes to me, and to her friends, that made one laugh. And one felt it was only she who made the people who were dependent upon her do her way, because she herself was so selfish, and that the rest ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... motionless in his place, with his eyes fixed upon his adversary while the latter was preparing his horse to mount, eyes which seemed filled with hatred to their very depths. His face suddenly changed its expression and became abjectly polite when he heard himself addressed anew. He shook his head two or three times ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... hurriedly back and stood bowing between us. He apologized abjectly to the Cuban for intruding me upon him. But the room was the best in the place at the disposal of the prisoners of the Juez O'Brien. And I was a noted caballero. Heaven knows what I had not done in Rio ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... MALONE. [pleading abjectly] Don't be hard on me, Hector. I'd rather you quarrelled and took the money than made friends and starved. You don't know what the world is: ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... hosts of stone idols, charms, and sacred objects, which they abjectly feared, and in which they devoutly believed. They were given up to countless superstitions, and firmly glued to their dark heathen practices. Their worship was entirely a service of fear, its aim being to propitiate this or that Evil Spirit, to prevent calamity or to secure revenge. ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... of the attributes of the dominant race. Thus for those few brief seconds, Liu experienced the whole glory of it. And as little by little Rivers emerged from the drunken to the conscious, to the abjectly, cravenly conscious, so Liu ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... be killed?' says he. But I axed him not to kill the little black un with the white spot on his ear. It be such a nice pig, sir, such a very nice pig!" And the tears flowed copiously down Jan's cheeks, whilst Rufus looked abjectly depressed. "It would follow me anywhere, and come when I called," Jan continued. "I told Master Salter it be 'most as good as a dog, to keep the rest together. But a says 'tis the fattest, and 'ull be the first to kill. And then I telled him to find another boy to mind his ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... which revealed two generations of hunger, homeless boys with vicious countenances, miserable wrecks of humanity, women with bloated faces, came to weep over Nora's bier, and to lay a flower there, and to scuttle away, more abjectly lonely than even sin could make them. If the cats and the dogs, the sparrows and horses to which she had shown kindness, could also have attended her funeral, the procession would have been, from a point of numbers, one of the most imposing the city had ever known. Tig used up all their savings ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... at last unearthed, and Spitz flew at him to punish him, Buck flew, with equal rage, in between. So unexpected was it, and so shrewdly managed, that Spitz was hurled backward and off his feet. Pike, who had been trembling abjectly, took heart at this open mutiny, and sprang upon his overthrown leader. Buck, to whom fair play was a forgotten code, likewise sprang upon Spitz. But Francois, chuckling at the incident while unswerving in the administration of justice, brought his lash down upon Buck with all his might. ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... controversies, and was swayed to one party or the other by the theologians whom, for the time, it took into its favor. The emperors assumed the high prerogative of personally deciding in doctrinal disputes, and of dictating opinions to the clergy, who gradually lost their independence, and became abjectly subservient to the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... "Lorelei," I munching abjectly on deck, on duty at the wheel, while from the cabin below came to my ears the tinkling of girls' laughter, and the merry popping of corks. In theory I was better off than Tantalus, for Tantalus had no beer or sandwiches; but, ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... taken money, or shared it, himself.' {210} But no such words, no such sound, did he utter, nor did one of you hear him do so; he only uttered threats to a different effect. And why? Because he knew that he had done what he was charged with doing; he was abjectly afraid to use any such expressions; his resolution could not rise to them, but shrank back; for it was in the grip of his conscience; whereas there was nothing to hinder him from uttering irrelevant abuse and slander. {211} But here is the strongest proof of all, ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... quivering—helpless, piteously helpless. It was this that stayed him. Had she utterly shrunk away, even had he found her denying, defiant—the aroused man had prevailed. But seeing her so, he caught at the back of a chair as if to hold himself. Then he gazed long and exultingly into the eyes yielded so abjectly to his. For a moment it filled him to see and know, to be certain that she knew and did not deny. But the man in him was not yet a reasoning man—too lately had he come ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... by dusky beams, upon her parentage, she listened abjectly to Dudley, or the opinion of the majority. Would he not say or think, that her clinging to Mrs. Marsett put them under a kind of common stamp, or gave the world its ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... She preceded him, her head thrown up, her shoulders back. Amelia had no idea of dramatic values, but she was playing an effective part. She reached the door and flung it open, but Josiah, a poor figure in its huddled capes, still stood abjectly in the middle of the kitchen. "Come!" she called peremptorily. "Come, Josiah Pease! Out you go." And Josiah went, though, contrary to his usual habit, he did not talk. He quavered uncertainly down the steps, and Amelia called a ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... the shore. And as Tom and I emerged dragging Grits between us,—for he might have been drowned there abjectly in the shallows,—we were met by a stout and bare-armed Irishwoman whose scanty hair, I remember, was drawn into a tight knot behind her head; and who seized us, all three, as though we were ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... for taking into custody the duke of Northumberland, who fell on his knees to the earl of Arundel, that arrested him, and abjectly begged his life.[*] At the same time were committed the earl of Warwick, his eldest son, Lord Ambrose and Lord Henry Dudley, two of his younger sons, Sir Andrew Dudley, his brother, the marquis of Northampton, the earl of Huntingdon, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... a digest of the interrogation of one, Elwar Forell, who was evacuated from forty-eight seventy-one, in company with Guardsman Jaeger. This boy was abjectly terrified and had to be calmed several times during questioning. He was pitiably hysterical when recalling his conversation with Captain Klorantel, who, you will remember, is a ...
— Indirection • Everett B. Cole
... imagine her alighting quite softly on the earth as if on pads, changing into some small animal with a shrew's stringy snout, and running home on short hindlegs into a drain. She moistened her lips and mumbled roughly and abjectly: "I didn't ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... his boot-heel. Why not? It would be only for two days. At Rangoon their paths would separate; he would never see her again. He got up. He would go to her at once and apologize abjectly. And thus he surrendered to the very devil he had but a ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... It was all my fault, and I apologise abjectly to your temper for taking liberties with it. I ought to know by this time that it's in delicate health. Never mind, I've planned a delightful programme for you! What would you like best for a Christmas present ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... with affection come anxiety and care; insomuch that you may see men that use the strongest language against the marriage-bed and the fruit of it, when some servant's or concubine's child is sick or dies, almost killed with grief, and abjectly lamenting. Some have given way to shameful and desperate sorrow at the loss of a dog or horse; others have borne the deaths of virtuous children without any extravagant or unbecoming grief; have passed the rest of ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... fractious Scotch children during several generations; the Douglas never caught one of them, but the threat did. So we are plied with stock-phrases, such as "the Reign of Terror" and "the Horrors of San Domingo," and History is abjectly conjured not to repeat herself, as she certainly will do, if she goes on in the old way. Of course she will. But does she propose to furnish a fac-simile of any critical epoch which haunts the imaginations of mankind? That depends upon circumstances. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... elements of the plan it is still impotent until it has appealed to the basest element in every human breast—the willingness to accept happiness that is bought by the agony of another! It is too abjectly selfish and groveling to command the least respect from a noble character or a great, tender soul. It severs the ties of affection without compunction. It destroys all loyalty. It says, "No matter what becomes ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... shy; more melancholy than before, but I think not so abjectly idiotic. The musical terms seem to be as good as in Beethoven, and that, after all, is the great affair. Bar the dam bareness of the base, it looks like a piece of real music from a distance. I am proud to say it was not made one ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The tears came to her eyes, and she turned her face away. She for the first time had a sense of loss, a moving memory of her father's goodness to her, of an element of tenderness that had passed out of her life forever. And she felt abjectly ashamed—ashamed of her relief at the lifting of the burden of his long struggle against death, ashamed of her miserable wranglings with Martha and Billy's wife, ashamed of her forgetfulness of her father in the exultation over her wealth, ashamed of the elaborately ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... he had long since discovered that May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration. Her innate dignity would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good. But with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly outrageous ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... the Vatican claim was spurned. But the final humiliation took place some years later under Urban VIII.,—the same pontiff who wrecked papal infallibility on Galileo's telescope. He tried to enforce his will on the state of Lucca, which, in the days of Pope Paul, had submitted to the Vatican decrees abjectly; but that little republic now seized the weapons which Sarpi had devised, and drove the papal forces out of the field: the papal excommunication was, even by this petty government, annulled in Venetian fashion and ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... He bit that off short as the significance of what Kellogg had just said hit him. "Good God, Leonard! I beg your pardon abjectly; I don't blame you for taking it seriously. Why, that would make Zarathustra a ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... shot on the spot. No cornered rat could have been more abjectly afraid. His nerve had oozed away the more for the grimness of the man who stood before him—a man with such a wound as that who was still ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... shrink from solitude. Tumult I must have, and distraction of thought. Amid this mob, I say, it was that I passed two days. Feverish I had been from the first—and from bad to worse, in such a case, was, at any rate, a natural progress; but, perhaps, also amongst this crowd of the poor, the abjectly wretched, the ill-fed, the desponding, and the dissolute, there might be very naturally a larger body of contagion lurking than according to their mere numerical expectations. There was at that season a very extensive depopulation going on in some quarters of this great metropolis, and in ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... so abjectly miserable since the time of his father's death; his depression was such that he wished he was dead too; but fate was in a kindly mood and, although he was unconscious of the fact, the ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... to bed that night, pronouncing himself to be the most abjectly miserable of God's creatures, and calling on Providence to remove him speedily from an unsympathetic world. He had said good night to the ladies at eleven o'clock when the three went upstairs to bed, and had forthwith gone to spend ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... 1804 and 1814 had been very barren in external benefits to Spain, with her King held in "honorable captivity" in France, and the obscure Joseph abjectly striving to please not his subjects, but his august brother Napoleon. But in this time of chaos, when there was no Bourbon King, no long-established despotism to stifle popular sentiment, the unsuspected fact developed that Spain had ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... the hotel. The waiters were now abjectly admiring, and in the most mellifluous tones that signified their "great expectations," expressed to the heedless Mr Campbell their congratulations on the discovery of his son. They could scarcely believe their eyes at the sight of Harry, the fine handsome boy, ...
— Wilton School - or, Harry Campbell's Revenge • Fred E. Weatherly
... nature to do off the stage), he had not exaggerated his profound melancholy. Of a light soil and with a tropical temperament, he had exhausted all lively recollection of his brilliant career, and, in the short time since Evan had parted with him, sunk abjectly down into the belief that he was fixed in Fallow field for life. His spirit pitied for agitation and events. The horn of the London coach had sounded distant metropolitan glories in the ears of the exile ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... have made me otherwise is so laid waste, that if I had been bereft of sense to this hour, and instead of being as learned as you think me, had to begin to acquire the simplest truths, I could not want a guide to peace, contentment, honour, all the good of which I am quite devoid, more abjectly than I do. Does not that ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... down the steps, a slim young man, dressed immaculately in the height of fashion, came tripping up to them and addressed Miss Annabel in the most abjectly polite manner. ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... there, shielded by the Church, or suffer elsewhere social ostracism and the prosecution of bigamous relations. Since 1890, the date of the manifesto (and it is to the period since 1890 that my criticism solely applies) the polygamist must be abjectly subservient to the prophets who protect him; he must obey their orders and do their work, or endure the punishment which they can inflict upon him and his wives and his children. Inveigled into a plural marriage by the ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... they could have murdered for came from the house, an unheroic figure with suspenders dangling and a corncob pipe in his mouth, sullen, angry, and withal abjectly frightened, as mere man inevitably is when he sniffs a woman's battle in the air. The bride, at sight of her husband, took to hysterics. She wept, she laughed, and down tumbled her hair. She felt the situation ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... feet and stood cowering abjectly before Scott, rage written on every lineament of his face, but not daring to ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... least. He is under the compulsion of an old custom; and he will even tell you that it is all nonsense. The same force leads him to treat with respect and veneration a chief or chiefess even if abjectly poor, though before the law the highest chief is no better ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... he answered, "bears rather sinister implications. One may be vanquished by America as I have been. One may even submit; but surely one may always resist a little, may not one? One need not abjectly surrender one's finest convictions, ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... of divine grace? and if prayer to himself has plainly been one condition of his coming, why may not prayer to God have been one condition of his judgment having been rightly guided? Will it be pretended that God's proceedings are abjectly submissive to inexorable laws from which those of the doctor are exempt, and that though the latter would certainly not have attended unless he had been asked, the grace of God, if given at all, must have been given equally ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... do let me have a little chasse-cafe; I'm always used to it; ask Joe if I'm not! You don't want to kill me, do you?" And the baronet cried piteously, like a child, and, when the doctor left him for the breakfast-table, abjectly implored Janet to get him some curacoa which he knew was in one of his portmanteaus. Janet, however, was true ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... you love, you are happy in your affection; I read your happiness through your tears—behind the tears which the loyalty of your nature makes you shed; I feel the sighs your affection breathes forth. Louise, Louise, you have made me the most abjectly wretched man living; leave me, I entreat you. ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... strength matched his weakness; her resolution his hesitation, her boldness his timidity; besides, she was of rank and place, and out of pure snobbery he felt himself her inferior. He forgot that humble worship was not the way to win a high-spirited girl. He loved her so abjectly that he lost her; and it was undoubtedly his overpowering sensuality and snobbishness which brought him to his knees, and his love to ruin. He could not even keep her after winning her; desire blinded him. He would not see that Mary Fitton ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... any passes, but him first Behoves make feeling trial how each weighs. In straits like this along the foss are plac'd The father of his consort, and the rest Partakers in that council, seed of ill And sorrow to the Jews." I noted then, How Virgil gaz'd with wonder upon him, Thus abjectly extended on the cross In banishment eternal. To the friar He next his words address'd: "We pray ye tell, If so be lawful, whether on our right Lies any opening in the rock, whereby We both may issue hence, without constraint On the dark angels, that compell'd ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... her breath. Her eyes grew big. She had not thought that Alice Weston—But then that did not matter now. Lorry was so abjectly sorry about something or other. He felt her hand on his sleeve. She was smiling. "You're just a great big, silly boy, ranger man. I'm really years older than you. Please don't tell me anything. I don't want to know. I just want you to ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... drowned in the adieus, and Mrs. Shaw sailed out with flying colors, while Milly sank back abjectly into the seat from which she had risen. Every minute she was realizing with a more awful clearness that she, whose one appearance on the stage had been short and disastrous, was cast to play the leading part in a public play before a large and brilliant audience. She hardly heard ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... figure at his lodgings. A servant having shown him up stairs, he is ushered into his presence, where, seeming bewildered, he looks about inquiringly, as if doubting the object for which he has been summoned. Abjectly he holds his tattered cap in his hand, and tremblingly inquires what ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... said for Ben that he aroused no little conjecture and interest in the minds of the townspeople, striding through the street with the savage woods creature following abjectly at his heels. Evidently Ben's conquest was complete: the animal obeyed his every command as quickly as an intelligent dog. It was noticeable, however, that even the hardiest citizens kept an apprehensive eye on the wolf during the course ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... as they had been doing now; but summoning all his courage to the fore he had grimly said: "who's afraid?" and trembling like a leaf shaken in the wind, he had stalked into the cemetery, much to the admiration of his chums, who had expected the fat boy to back down abjectly. ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... seated hopelessly at the entrance, and smuggle him upstairs into my rooms. There I deposited him on the floor, patted him encouragingly, and gave him water and a couple of sweet biscuits. But he was abjectly miserable, and though he drank a little, would eat nothing. After taking two or three turns round the apartment and sniffing suspiciously at the legs of the chairs and wainscot of the walls, he returned to me where I stood with my back to the window watching him, looked up in my ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... Mrs. Carradyne to sickness. A tale that so abjectly terrified Captain Monk, when it was imparted to him on Tuesday morning, as to take every atom of fierceness out ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... drive Thyrsis into a corner, to tear open his very soul. Also, he manifested anger; it was a deliberate affront that the boy should stand out like this. And Thyrsis, in great distress of soul, explained that he did not mean it that way—he apologized abjectly for his obstinacy. It was the ideas that he had tried to put into his play, and that he ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... But in line 44 his mood turns. He perceives that the burden (gravamen) of the whole matter lies in the incredibly petty nature of this unconquerable, baffling opposition to his will. He sees how the situation would awaken the wonder of the great lords who abjectly obey his lightest word, but he concludes that, after all, the small becomes ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... wonder, I began to think that I had made a mistake; and, clearly, either I had done so or this young man was possessed of talents and a power of controlling his features beyond the ordinary. He unslung his tools, and saluting me abjectly waited in silence. After a moment's thought, I asked him peremptorily what was his errand with the ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... Cunnington—who, according to the President of the Anglo-Albanian Society, the Hon. Aubrey Herbert, M.P., has several years' intimate experience of Albania—said in the New Statesman that in consequence of what occurred to Captain Brodie the Serbian Government was compelled to apologize abjectly. Now I happen to be very well acquainted with the stalwart Pouni[vs]a Ra[vc]i['c], the Montenegrin who arrested Brodie. Albanians have told me that Pouni[vs]a's knowledge of the north and north-west of their country ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... the Prussian State Church are in one important respect the exact opposite of Martin Luther. He was thoroughly independent in spirit and rebelled against authority; they are abjectly submissive to it. As with the professor, so with the pastor, it is no mere accident that he is a puppet-tool of the State. The German Government leaves nothing to chance, and realising to the fullest the ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... by catching a rat, and being intolerably conceited about it—until Sara Ray cured him by calling him a "dear, sweet cat," and kissing him between the ears. Then Pat sneaked abjectly off, his tail drooping. He resented being called a sweet cat. He had a sense of humour, had Pat. Very few cats have; and most of them have such an inordinate appetite for flattery that they will swallow any amount of it and thrive thereon. Paddy had a finer taste. The Story Girl and I were the only ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... made any remark. It was strange to see how dominated they all were by that queer little fragment of humanity, whose head scarcely reached a foot above the table before which he sat. They departed silently, almost abjectly, dismissed with a single wave of the hand. Mr. Fentolin beckoned his secretary to remain. ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... much for Tommy. All his dapper gaiety had disappeared. His clothes seemed to hang loosely on his limbs, and a perspiration broke out on his forehead. All his self-control vanished, and he fell abjectly on his knees ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... pursuit, through an open door, along a huge high saloon, of a just dimly-descried figure that retreated in terror before my rush and dash (a glare of inspired reaction from irresistible but shameful dread,) out of the room I had a moment before been desperately, and all the more abjectly, defending by the push of my shoulder against hard pressure on lock and bar from the other side. The lucidity, not to say the sublimity, of the crisis had consisted of the great thought that I, in my appalled state, was probably still more appalling than the ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... sorry I done it," abjectly repeated the younger child. "Get up, Billy, 'fore you bust my ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... than he flattered and prided himself on being—such was the man. His face was certainly handsome, but I found it excessively dull; for I had conceived the most ridiculous animosity for him. His polished manners seemed to me abjectly servile with Edmee. I should have blushed to imitate them, and yet my sole aim was to surpass him in the little services he rendered her. We went out into the park. This was very large, and through it ran the Indre, here merely a pretty stream. During our walk he made himself agreeable in a thousand ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. so, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height he could hardly hope to attain. It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward circumstance that befel him, and which indirectly sprang from his luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... crawled over his hurt leg, knelt on his chest. He kept perfectly still, setting his teeth without a moan, without a sigh. The master's ardour, the cries of that silent man inspired us. We hauled and hung in bunches on the rope. We heard him say with violence to Donkin, who sprawled abjectly on his stomach,—"I will brain you with this belaying pin if you don't catch hold of the brace," and that victim of men's injustice, cowardly and cheeky, whimpered:—"Are you goin' to murder us now?" while with sudden desperation he gripped the rope. Men sighed, shouted, hissed meaningless words, ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... lesson-book. Even with the help of books he had found it very difficult indeed to prepare his lesson. Now it was impossible. Day after day the teacher would cane him unmercifully. His condition became so abjectly miserable that even his cousins were ashamed to own him. They began to jeer and insult him more than the other boys. He went to his aunt at last, and told her that ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore |
