"Lurid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... underfoot. I was tired o' breadfruit an' guavas an' cocoanuts an' all th' rest o' th' blasted grub that Pinky was feedin' me, an' most of all I was gettin' tired o' Pinky. She would put cocoanut oil in her hair. Yet (here Mr. Gibney's voice vibrated with emotion as he conjured up these memories of his lurid past) it never occurred to me, at the time, I was that young an' foolish, that she was doin' it for me. She was as beautiful as ever, an' Gawd knows nobody but a fool would get tired o' such a fine woman, every inch a queen, but I ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... pictures of preparation for war flashed through the carriage windows into my brain, mile after mile, through the country of France, until sometimes I closed my eyes to shut out the glare and glitter of this kaleidoscope, the blood-red colour of all those French trousers tramping through the dust, the lurid blue of all those soldiers' overcoats, the sparkle of all those gun-wheels. What does it all mean, this surging tide of armed men? What would it mean in a day or two, when another tide of men had swept up against it, with ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... pictures and double-leaded type the wonders that were to be seen daily and nightly at Olympia, where, for a month past, "Van Zant's Royal Belgian Circus and World-famed Menagerie" had been holding forth to "Crowded and delighted audiences." Much was made of two "star turns" upon this lurid bill: "Mademoiselle Marie de Zanoni, the beautiful and peerless bare-back equestrienne, the most daring lady rider in the universe," for the one; and for the other, "Chevalier Adrian di Roma, king of the animal world, with his great aggregation ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... The will! The cunning of him! What would he tell Hughie and Hannah and Hetty? What would he tell Joan? What was there to tell save that he had put two and two together and made five, a romantic five lurid with melodrama? ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... often gripped hard at his heart during the last two years, a picture drawn for him in a letter from his remaining son, Jack. The letter lay in the desk at his hand. He saw in the black night that shell-torn strip of land between the lines, black as a ploughed field, lurid for a swift moment under the red glare of a bursting shell or ghastly in the sickly illumination of a Verry light, and over this black pitted earth a man painfully staggering with a wounded man on his back. The words leaped to his eyes. "He brought me out ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... that blinding moment, seemed to rock on its foundations; to shatter itself to bits in a chaotic jumble of sound and of movement, shot through and through with lurid flames. Kleig felt himself hurled upward and outward, turned over ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... the simmering of the engine, on somewhere in front. And then "Partenza!" rang out in the night, and "Pronti!" came as a faint echo on before. We laboured on, and the dreams began where they had broken off. For we dreamed in these times, fitful and lurid, coloured dreams; flashes of horrible crises in one's life; Interminable precipices; a river skiff engulfed in a swirl of green sea-water; agonies of repentance; shameful failure, defeat, memories—and then the steady pulsing ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... whence appeared His baleful star with lurid glow; Next, Elba, where the world still feared The fugitive ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... o' nights. The red surged up in his thin cheeks as he picked up the thing. There were horrible woodcuts in it, coloured with liberal splashes of red and blue and yellow, and the print contained matter more lurid still. Vice mopped and mowed and slavered, obscene and hideous, within ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... from being a soldier. He again virtually stood chilled on the bank, with a cold, dreary, hopeless feeling which he believed would benumb his life. He did not know, he was not sure that he had lost Helen beyond hope, until those lurid days when men on both sides were arming and drilling for mutual slaughter. She was always so kind to him, and her tones so gentle when she spoke, that in love's fond blindness he had dared to hope. He eventually learned that she was only sorry ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... questioning, brings up at a dim-lit shed, bare of goods and cargo—the berth of a full-laden outward-bounder. My barque—the Florence, of Glasgow—lies in a corner of the dock, ready for sea. Tugs are churning the muddy water alongside, getting into position to drag her from the quay wall; the lurid side-light gleams on a small knot of well-wishers gathered at the forward gangway exchanging parting words with the local seamen of our crew. I have ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... his titles attractive, a writer must beware of sensationalism and exaggeration. The lurid news headline on the front page of sensational papers has its counterpart in the equally sensational title in the Sunday magazine section. All that has been said concerning unwholesome subject-matter for special feature stories ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... and crept along the foot-board towards the front of the train. Full of half angry anxiety at what seemed to me a Quixotic act, I followed. In one of the carriages we passed I saw my mother and eldest brother, unconscious as the rest. Presently we reached the last carriage, and saw by the lurid light of the furnace that the voice had spoken truly, and that there was no one on the engine. You continued to move onwards. "Impossible! Impossible!" I cried; "It cannot be done. O, pray, come away." Then you knelt upon the footboard, and said,—"You are right. It cannot be done in that ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... the eyes of the confessor flashed like lurid lightnings; his very frame shook, as though he had the fever and ague. Truth seemed so strange to the priest, that he found it hard of digestion. Father and mother both wept, but made no reply. The idea of putting their ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... doubt in Lawler's mind, nor in Ruth's, that he had gone to relate his trouble to his "paw;" and that "paw" would presently appear to exact the lurid ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... after crash, and occasionally crash before crash. The lightning's lurid glare illumines, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... approached within a few hundred yards of the edge of the cliffs, and looked out on the sea. The sky had partially cleared, and the rain had ceased; but huge fantastic masses of cloud, tinged with lurid copper-colour by the setting sun, still towered afar off over the horizon, and were reflected in a deeper hue on the calm surface of the sea, with a perfectness and grandeur that I never remember to ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... that furnace shone through the lattice stonework of the tomb, and in its lurid and ominous glare Adrian beheld the faces of those who refuged with him. What a picture it was; the niches filled with mouldering boxes, the white gleam of human bones that here and there had fallen from them, the bright furnishings and velvet ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... the first-floor windows of the hotel were illumined by an infernal glare. All round her there was lurid light, setting everything in sharp relief. The face of the man who held her was suddenly revealed; and it was her father's.... She had left him inside the building and now ... She was assailed with a terrifying fear that she had gone ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... Michiella. The infatuated count waxes as the personification of portentous burlesque; he is having everything his own way. The acting throughout—owing to the real gravity of the vast basso Lebruno's burlesque, and Vittoria's archness—was that of high comedy with a lurid background. Vittoria showed an enchanting spirit of humour. She sang one bewitching barcarole that set the house in rocking motion. There was such melancholy in her heart that she cast herself into all the flippancy with abandonment. The Act was weak ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... from a distance as the three houses rapidly began to blaze and add to the lurid glare that was illumining the whole interior of the enclosure, while groups of smoke-blackened men were ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... young ones, were at the wharf when the launch emerged from the darkness. Some one was standing up guiding the boat, ready to protect it from violent contact; some one was huddled on the floor of the boat—some one who made no cry, did not look up. They two were all! Just then a lurid flash of lightning seemed to photograph the scene forever on ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... cask-factories, bottle-factories. A bottle-factory is a curious, interesting place, an immense barn, sombre, so that the eye loses itself in the shadows of the roof; and the scanty light is red and lurid from the furnaces, which roar hoarsely and long. Against the glow the figures of men, half-naked, move silently, performing the actions of their craft with a monotonous regularity which is strange and solemn. They move to and fro, carrying an iron instrument on which is the molten ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... condition on these delightful occasions was one compounded of heroic endurance and heroic forgiveness. Lurid indications of the better marriages she might have made, shone athwart the awful gloom of her composure, and fitfully revealed the cherub as a little monster unaccountably favored by Heaven, who had possest himself of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... lonely, wave-encircled height And pledge her life to fame, that she might win The glory of the world's enthroning light, Then give it back to God all freed from sin. Long, long she knelt, her soul in prayer thrown, Unheeding still the lightning's lurid glare; For what were raging storms and nature's moan To that mad strife within ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... rather lurid light on Japanese affection. First, in regard to the facts: Mr. Ishii's attention was called to the need of an orphan asylum by hearing how a child, both of whose parents had died of cholera, was on the point of being buried alive with its dead mother by heartless neighbors when it was rescued ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... solicitude shrank from this vigil; but with unruffled consideration for their comfort their guardian and his assistants made up two beds forthwith. The Baron, subdued to a fierce and snarling moodiness, watched their preparations with a lurid eye. ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... fury, and huge bodies sometimes ascending toward heaven, and sometimes precipitated upon the earth, struggled, as it were, in mutual conflict, whirling in circles with intense velocity, and accompanied by winds, impetuous beyond all conception; while flashes of awful brilliancy, and murky, lurid flames incessantly broke forth. From these confused clouds, furious winds, and momentary fires, sounds issued, of which no earthquake or thunder ever heard could afford the least idea; striking such ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... the UFO's are peaceful, Gorman and Mantell just got too inquisitive, "they" just weren't ready to be observed closely. If the Air Force hadn't slapped down the security lid, these writers might not have reached this conclusion. There have been other and more lurid "duels ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... become large, manly hands, his drooping scholastic back stiffens, his elbows go out, his etiolated complexion corrugates and darkens, his moustaches increase and grow and spread, and curl up horribly; a large, red scar, a sabre cut, grows lurid over one eye. He expands—all over he expands. He clears his throat startlingly, lugs at the still growing ends of his moustache, and says, with just a faint and fading doubt in his voice as to whether he can do ...
— Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books • H. G. Wells
... cursory regard of a man who had no strong interest in any person or group there. They changed singularly in resting upon the family from Ridgeley. A stare of stupefaction gave place to living fires of angry suspicion and amazement—lurid flame that testified its violence in the reddening of cheeks and brow, in the dilating nostril and quivering lips. Then he passed his hand downward over his features, evidently conscious of their distortion, and striving ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... him. He penciled his path Whose omniscient notice the frail fledgling hath. Though lightnings be lurid and earthquakes may shock, He rides on the whirlwind or ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... found it deserted; and secure of a refuge, took his place at the door to watch the face of things; for though the edge of the town was near, the storm was nearer, and it would not do to run for it. The blackness covered everything now, changing to lurid light in the storm quarter, and big scattered drops began to come plashing down. This time Winthrop's mind was so much in the clouds that he did not know what was going on in the earth; for while he stood looking and gazing, two ladies almost ran over him. Winthrop's senses came ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... a woman God warns us in the thunder tones of wrath, and the picture of her doom is lurid with the glow of the devouring flames, "for her feet go down to death and her steps ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... to the periscope, McClure beheld the most spectacular picture that had yet been glimpsed through the eye of the American submarine. The torpedo had struck squarely abaft the ship's magazine and wrecked her completely. The night was painted a lurid glow as a titanic explosion shook the sea and a mass of yellow flame completely enveloped the doomed warship from ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... With an urgency that the ancient world had never known the Christian world believed in immortality and visualized the circumstances of the life to come so concretely that in a medieval catechism the lurid colour of the setting sun was ascribed to the supposition that "he looketh down upon hell." [5] Nothing in this life had any importance save as it prepared the souls of men for life to come. Even Roger Bacon, his mind flashing like a beacon from below ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... destitute of clothing, were assembled under the boughs and among the stems of a huge banyan tree, which formed, as Nowell remarked, a sort of natural temple. In front of it was a small stone altar, with fire burning on it, the flames from which shed a lurid glare on the rapidly darkening shadows of the huge tree. Before the altar were two figures; the most unearthly, horrible—indeed, I may say demoniacal—I have ever set eyes on. I could scarcely believe that they were human. They were black, and with ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... worst, and printed in black-faced pica. Other passages in the speech were in italics. The whole plant of the newspaper had been utilized to give adequate expression to this unparalleled forensic outburst. A much garbled report "in full" was given of the wording, and as lurid yellow as was ever mixed went to make up the account of the incidents in Yimville. According to the report the mob numbered thousands and strong men of both parties wept and gnashed their teeth ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... afterwards, the men said it was a superb sight. The flames burst out and ran rapidly up the masts and the rigging, and lighted up the sea and the sky with a lurid glare. The guns soon became heated and began to go off. They fired their hot shot into the shipping, and even into the town. Then, as if giving a last salute, the Philadelphia parted her cables, ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... flame and roar of the Brooklyn's bow-chaser. The battle had begun. The ship, still half a mile from its mark, was coming on as straight as her gun could blaze, her redskin ally at her side, and all the others, large and less, bounding after by twos. And now in lurid flash and steady roar the lightning and thunder darted and rolled from Morgan, its water-battery, and the Mobile squadron, and from the bow guns of the Brooklyn ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... something inexpressibly sad in this. It seemed like standing at the death-bed of an old friend. The sea was still heaving violently; the gale, although moderated, was still pretty stiff, and the sun was setting in wild lurid clouds when the Foam rose for the last time— every spar and rope standing out sharply against the sky. Then she bent forward slowly, as she overtopped a huge billow. Into the hollow she rushed. Like an expert diver she went down head foremost into the deep, and, ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... problem, this mystery of the Heatherstone family had a lurid fascination about it, but when the woman whom I loved a thousandfold better than I did myself proved to be so deeply interested in the solution, I felt that it was impossible to turn my thoughts to anything else until it ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... mind." Then there is the famous quip that runs back to Tudor times, although it has been attributed to various later celebrities, including Doctor Johnson: A concert singer was executing a number lurid with vocal pyrotechnics. An admirer remarked that the piece was tremendously difficult. This drew ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... damned human race." He told of that with the same wild joy that he told of overhearing her repetition of one of his most inclusive profanities, and her explanation that she meant him to hear it so that he might know how it sounded. The contrast of the lurid blasphemy with her heavenly whiteness should have been enough to cure any one less grounded than he in what must be owned was as fixed a habit as smoking with him. When I first knew him he rarely vented his fury in that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... saw the minister pass and she beat upon the window with her knitting needle, but he hurried by without looking up. Then the anger of Mrs. McGuire was kindled mightily, and she sometimes woke up in the night to express her opinion of him in the most lurid terms she could think of, feeling meanwhile the futility of human speech. It was a hard position for Mrs. McGuire, who had always been able to settle her own affairs with ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... to the edge of the cut and looked off across the country beyond where the waning sunlight fell upon the dense woods, touching the higher trees with its lurid glow. Over that way smoke arose and curled away in ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... the East Fork canon with passionate enthusiasm in a broad cataract of flames, now bending down low to feed on the green bushes, devouring acres of them at a breath, now towering high in the air as if looking abroad to choose a way, then stooping to feed again,—the lurid flapping surges and the smoke and terrible rushing and roaring hiding all that is gentle and orderly in the work. But as soon as the deep forest was reached, the ungovernable flood became calm like a torrent ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... it necessary to stand and act the story she is telling. Her memory is amazing and she turns with equal readiness to copious quotations from the Scripture and other pious observations to amusing but wholly unprintable anecdotes of her somewhat lurid past. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Mississippi Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... cloth of a woollen texture] screens, and other precautions against fire, it was certainly the hottest place in which I had yet ever been. The dim, yellow, yet sufficient light from the lanterns, gave a lurid horror to the various ghastly and blood-greedy instruments that were ostentatiously displayed upon the platform. Crooked knives, that the eye alone assured you were sharp, seemed to be twisting with a living anxiety to embrace ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... marshes flock down, by thousands, the geese and the mallards. From the meadows and wide-prairied plains, for their long southward journey preparing, In croaking flocks gather the cranes, and choose with loud clamor their leaders. The breath of the evening is cold, and lurid along the horizon The flames of the prairies are rolled, on the somber skies flashing their torches. At noontide a shimmer of gold, through the haze, pours the sun from his pathway. The wild-rice is gathered and ripe, on the moors, lie the scarlet po-pan-ka; [a] Michabo [85] is ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... nearby, sprawled face down on the floor! In the silence and dim lurid glow of the fluorescent tubes, we stood holding our breaths, peering and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... positively informed that our Ministers are guilty of the great crime attributed to them," the Herald declared, "we must hope against hope that they are innocent." If guilty they were responsible for the misery of Lancashire (depicted in lurid colours): ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... by day A smouldering flame, a lurid crimson creeps Into the ashy whiteness of her cheeks, And burns ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... past terror in present peace; it is not easy to fancy the rough rabble of Rome in those days, strangely clad, more strangely armed, far out in the waste fields about the Lateran, surging up like demons in the lurid torchlight before the house of the Pope, pressing upon the mailed Count's stout horse, and thronging upon the heels of the Captains and the Prefect, pounding down the heavy doors with stones, and with deep shouts for every heavy blow, while white-robed John and his frightened priests ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... is given in its name; its theme is humble piety. From the infinite number of possible examples one more will suffice,—the well-known "War" by Franz Stuck, in the Neue Pinacothek,—the subject a youth, under a lurid sky, trampling under his horse's feet the bodies of the slain. The theme is again a moral idea,—the ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... are two kinds of motherhood, monsieur; once I knew nothing of such distinctions, but I know them now. Only half of me has become a mother; it were better for me if I had not been a mother at all. Helene is not his child! Oh! do not start. At Saint-Lange there are volcanic depths whence come lurid gleams of light and earthquake shocks to shake the fragile edifices of laws not based on nature. I have borne a child, that is enough, I am a mother in the eyes of the law. But you, monsieur, with your delicately compassionate soul, can perhaps ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... remotest background of the past. And like some city's spires that gleam afar In golden sunshine when naught else is seen, So in my soul two images grew bright, The loftiest sun-peaks in the shadowy past. I saw myself escaping one dark night, And a red lurid flame light up the gloom Of midnight darkness as I looked behind me A memory 'twas of very earliest youth, For what preceded or came after it In the long distance utterly was lost. In solitary brightness ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... The lurid fiction fever soon runs its course with Mademoiselle, if she is let alone, and she turns her attention once more to her schoolmates. She has at least a dozen serious attacks before she is twenty, and at that ripe age, is often a ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... whisperings, clouds of flame color hung above the dark summits of the mountain, and the reflected light turned the ghostly dwellings to a place of blood-tinged mystery. More than one of the adventurers crossed themselves. Don Ruy said it looked, in the lurid glow, like a ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... right place being found was ended the next minute, for a lurid light shot up from the hatch, and a shout arose from the men, who would have rushed away in panic but for the ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... by the American hunter, who endeavours to surround himself with a belt of wasted land, when overtaken by a conflagration in the prairies. All day the fire continued to rage, and at night the effect was even more appalling; for by the lurid flames the unfortunate Spaniards could read the consternation depicted in each others' ghastly countenances, while in the suburbs, along the slopes of the surrounding hills, might be seen the throng of besiegers, gazing with fiendish ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... also reveals the great executive forces of humanity, the child. The soul can paint, execute its ideas, its hopes and its fears in any color—the lurid red of blood, the black of ignorance and crime, or in the living light of beauty. All the same, it is the childhood of man painting its ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... her arms, staring down at him in mortal terror; then, as the whole air grew lurid, nodded and tottered back. With incredible anxiety he watched for her reappearance. His post was becoming perilous. The fire had not yet reached the roof, but it was rapidly undermining its supports, and the heat was unendurable. Would he have to jump to the ground in ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... and the Tenth and Sixteenth Illinois, were the grand guard for the night. They had been under fire all day. They had endured the strain upon their nerves, but through the long night-hours they stood in the drenching rain, beneath the sheets of lurid flame, looking with sleepless eyes towards the front, prepared to repel a ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... to tranquillity, is its proper end. As a man's life begins, faintly, and gives no token of childhood's intensity and the expansion of youth and the perfection of manhood, so it should also end, faintly. The King died a death that was like the calm conclusion of a great, lurid ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... of Novalis: "It is certain my Belief gains quite infinitely the moment I can convince another mind thereof"! Gaze thou in the face of thy Brother, in those eyes where plays the lambent fire of Kindness, or in those where rages the lurid conflagration of Anger; feel how thy own so quiet Soul is straightway involuntarily kindled with the like, and ye blaze and reverberate on each other, till it is all one limitless confluent flame (of embracing Love, or of deadly-grappling ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... small attic in the Tribune building, and seldom allowed anyone to interrupt him. Some man, who was greatly disgusted over one of Greeley's editorials, climbed up to his sanctum, and as soon as his head showed above the railing, he began to rave and rage, using the most lurid style of profanity. It seemed as if he never would stop, but at last, utterly exhausted and out of breath and all used up, ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... the most gruesome episode in American history, and it sheds back a lurid light upon the long tale of witchcraft in the past." (Fiske's New France and ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... came in muffled tones; and bounding out of bed he saw that there was a lurid light on the water, evidently reflected from something burning pretty near at hand, while there was the distant hum of voices, mingled with shrieks and ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... of the 39th Regiment! What visions are conjured up when this name comes on the scene! Cracked and gaping plains, desolate, desert and abandoned of life, scorched beneath a lurid sun of burning fire, waterless, hopeless, relentless, and accursed: that is the picture he draws of the great interior. He had followed up Oxley's footsteps and exposed the fallacies into which that explorer had fallen, and erred just as egregiously himself. True, like Oxley, he ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... animals, once aquatic in habits, throw a flood of lurid light (as the newspapers say) upon the reason why this should be so. For example, frogs and toads develop from tadpoles, which in all essentials are true gill-breathing fish. It is, therefore, obvious that they cannot lay their eggs on dry land, where the tadpoles would be unable to find ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... Stell. A book on the war, by an Englishman. A detective story of the lurid type that lulls us to sleep. His shoes ranged in a careful row in the closet, with a shoe tree in every one of them. There was something speaking about them. They looked so human. Eva shut the door on them quickly. Some bottles on the dresser. A jar of pomade. An ointment such as a man ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... through smoke-red light I saw her beckoning stand; Anon, like a burning bird in fright, She fled with a shriek through the lurid night, And I wailed like a lost soul banned; And an echo flew like an anguished sprite And ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... Arnold believed in eternal damnation; and those who do so must have one very desperate corner in their mind—which, however, reserved for the wicked in the next world, must, I should think, sometimes throw lurid reflections over people and things in this. Whoever can conceive that idea has certainly touched the bottom of despair. "Lasciate ogni speme voi ch'entrate;" and I do not see why those who despair of their fellow-creatures in the next ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... be effected suddenly. She must rely on a slower appeal to Stephen's better self; she must be prepared for a harder task than that of rushing away while resolution was fresh. She sat down. Stephen, watching her with that look of desperation which had come over him like a lurid light, approached slowly from the door, seated himself close beside her, and grasped her hand. Her heart beat like the heart of a frightened bird; but this direct opposition helped her. She ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... rays from the holy heaven come down On the long night-time of that town; But light from out the lurid sea Streams up the turrets silently, Gleams up the pinnacles far and free: Up domes, up spires, up kingly halls, Up fanes, up Babylon-like walls, Up shadowy, long-forgotten bowers Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers, Up many and many a marvellous shrine, Whose wreathed friezes intertwine ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... flames spread. Soon the whole barracks were enveloped, and lurid tongues of fire began to shoot out alarmingly towards the magazine. Putnam now descended, took his station between the two buildings, and continued his active service, his energy and audacity giving new life and activity to officers and men. The outside planks of the magazine caught. They were ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... contains a vast number of Poussin's pictures; they put me in mind of the color of objects in dreams,—a strange, hazy, lurid hue. How noble are some of his landscapes! What a depth of solemn shadow is in yonder wood, near which, by the side of a black water, halts Diogenes. The air is thunder-laden, and breathes heavily. You hear ominous whispers in the vast ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... flower smiles on AEtna's fatal breast, Young Proserpine beside her lord doth bloom; And near—of Orpheus' soul, oh! idol blest!— While low for thee he tunes his lyre of light, I see thy meek, fair form dawn through that lurid night! ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... over the countryside all the evening and throughout the night. Ben, the carter, coming home to the farm with his team, had dropped at the very threshold of the stable, blasted in a lurid furnace of sudden fire. A labourer's cottage had been wrecked; many a stately forest tree had been rent or blighted; the withering havoc had spread far and wide over the hills. On the following morning, the keeper, going his rounds, had found the dead hare ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... answering in its general characteristics and nature to our firefly, though it is quadruple its size, and far the most brilliant insect of its kind known to naturalists. They float in phosphorescent clouds over the vegetation, emitting a lurid halo, like fairy torch-bearers to elfin crews. One at first sight is apt to compare them to a shower of stars. They come in multitudes immediately after the wet season sets in, prevailing more or less, however, all the year round. Their advent is always ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... a vigorous and lurid picture of the survival of the old tribal strife: "1454: Donell O'Donell was installed in the lordship of Tyrconnell, in opposition to Rury O'Donell. Not long after this, Donell was treacherously taken captive and imprisoned in the castle of Inis—an island in Lough ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... really thrilling, but after a time, even her mother felt that the tale was becoming rather lurid for a strictly truthful account, and she dragged Gwen away to the hall, and up the stairway, ...
— Princess Polly At Play • Amy Brooks
... by him, with no less pleasure than he had in carving them, into wedged hexagons—reminiscences of the honeycomb of Venus Erycina. His ingenuity plays around the framework of all the noblest things; and yet the brightness of it has a lurid shadow. The spot of the fawn, of the bird, and the moth, may be harmless. But Daedalus reigns no less over the spot of the leopard and snake. That cruel and venomous power of his art is marked, in the legends of him, by his invention of the saw from the serpent's tooth; ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... action," continued the philosopher, "an effect more horrible. The delightful light of a summer evening was instantly changed into a strange lurid hue, which, infected with sulphur, seemed to breathe suffocation through the apartment. The rich hangings, and splendid furniture of the chamber, the very walls themselves, were changed into huge stones ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... vegetable than in the human world, to remark significantly on the probable history of the persons they met. All the alleys were thronged with promenaders and obstructed by perambulators; and Miss Mellins's running commentary threw a glare of lurid possibilities over the placid family ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... In all the lurid commercial history of his country there had been no figure that had so imposed itself upon the mind of the trading world. He had a niche apart in its temples. Financial giants, strong to direct and augment the forces of capital, and taking an approved toll in millions for so doing, ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... was one great lurid, brassy glare, overhung with banks of sinister clouds, a leaden purple above, fiery crimson below. The unnatural light fell strongly upon us both. A big shadow passed for an instant across the sunset, and we, looking instinctively up, saw the circling ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... growl was the answer, and there was lurid disappointment in the face of the squat ...
— The Day of the Dog • George Barr McCutcheon
... suppression of a religious order to kings, who before long bettered the precedent given them. The sordid story is mainly important to our history as an example of the completeness of the influence of the papal autocracy, and of the submissiveness of clergy and laity to its behests. It was a lurid commentary on the practical working of the ecclesiastical system that the business of condemning an innocent order first brought into England the papal inquisitor and the use of torture. Yet the whole process was but so pale ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... disc left; its convexity was turned upwards, and its horns were nearly horizontal. It was then hidden by a dense mass of clouds; but after a time they opened, and I saw the edge of the moon leave the limb of the sun. The appearance of the landscape was very lurid, but by no means very dark. The common people and children had a very good view of the eclipse, reflected by the pools of water ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... and of which some knowledge is essential to an understanding of his acts and character. Others are brought into prominence only as they are associated with the chief actor in the great drama. Many of them are disappearing,—fading into the smoky and lurid background. But that colossal central figure, playing one of the grandest roles ever set upon the stage of human life, becomes more impressive as the ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... stopped—her bosom heaved up and down—her frame shook dreadfully—her eyeballs became lurid and fiery—her hands were clenched, and the spasmodic throes of inward convulsion worked the white froth up to her mouth; at length she suddenly became like a statue, with this wild, supernatural expression intense upon her, and with an awful calmness, by far more dreadful ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... very dark; but in the murky sky there were masses of cloud which shone with a lurid light, like monstrous heaps of copper that had been heated in a furnace, and were growing cold. These had been advancing steadily and slowly, but they were now motionless, or nearly so. As the carriage clattered round the corners of the streets, it passed at every one a knot of persons ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... simple explanation. Jackson Hyane was a very plausible man. Marguerite Whitland had heard something of her erratic cousin, but certainly nothing in his manner supported the more lurid descriptions of his habits. And Mr. Jackson Hyane had begged her, in the name of their relationships, to take a trip to Aberdeen to examine title-deeds which, he explained, would enable her to join with him in an action ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... beautiful thought, that no soul misses truth willingly. In bare justice to brave, misguided Humanity; in daily touch with beings in so many respects little lower than the imagined angels; in dispassionate survey of history's lurid record of distorted loyalty staining our old, sad earth with life-blood of opposing loyalty, while each side fights for an idea; in view of the zeal which fires the martyr-spirit to endure all that equal ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... his eyes as he stood there, pausing, a panorama much vaster than any he had been able to conceive when last he stood there. He was seeing in review the old life and the new, lurid with contrasts, and, as the pictures of things thousands of miles away rose before his eyes as clearly as the serried backbone of the ridges, he was comparing and settling for all time the actual values and proportions of the things in ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... spent a good while lingering by the quay, having no money wherewith to enjoy himself in a tavern. He had seen something of the lading of the Northumberland, and heard more from a stevedore. No sooner had he cast off the falls and seized the oars, than his knowledge awoke in his mind, living and lurid. He gave a whoop that brought the two sailors leaning over ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... his ingrained theatrical professionalism, and introducing effects which now seem old-fashioned and stagey with as much energy and earnestness as if they were his loftiest inspirations. When Wotan wrests the ring from Alberic, the dwarf delivers a lurid and bloodcurdling stage curse, calling down on its every future possessor care, fear, and death. The musical phrase accompanying this outburst was a veritable harmonic and melodic bogey to mid-century ears, though time has now robbed it of its terrors. It sounds again when Fafnir slays Fasolt, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... cross his arms against the panels and press his head there to shut out the terror. When Tim, kicking in a door three staterooms away, saw this he made one spring back and landed his next kick on a spot that made Jeb flinch. This was followed by another, and still another, while a string of lurid oaths poured from his lips which burned like a lash of fire. Jeb sprang around, one fist drawn back to kill, his eyes glittering as points of iron; but the sergeant's eyes were as points of steel. The next moment Jeb had started on the work of rescue. ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... than a conscious child could know in the arms, upon the bosom of his mother. In the closest contact of human soul with human soul, when all the atmosphere of thought was rosy with love, again and yet again on the far horizon would the dun, lurid flame of unrest shoot for a moment through the enchanted air, and Psyche would know that not yet had she reached her home. As I thought this I lifted my eyes, and saw those of my wife and Connie fixed on mine, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... I saw that amphitheatre of Verona under the strange light of a lurid eclipse some years ago: and I have been there in spirit for these twenty lines past, under a vast gusty awning, now with twenty thousand fellow-citizens looking on from the benches, now in the circus itself, a grim gladiator with sword and ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... warming up exercise of the editor's vocabulary. When he really cut loose on Andy P. Symes the graves of dead and buried adjectives opened to do him honor. In the lurid lexicon of his eloquence there was no such word as obsolete and no known synonym failed to pay tribute to this "mental and physical colossus." In his shirt sleeves, minus his cuffs, with his brain ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... see what had happened to the ammunition party. They disappeared in the hell of shell-fire as though it were quite an every-day incident. I opened the door, climbed the steps, and stood outside. The sight which met my eyes was magnificent in its grandeur. The heavens were split by shafts of lurid fire. Masses of metal shot in all directions, leaving a trail of sparks behind them; bits of shell shrieked past my head and buried themselves in the walls and sandbags. One large missile fell in an open space about forty feet on my left, and exploded with a deafening, ear-splitting crash. ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... sickly drink called "champagne cider" and all manner of vanities. In one corner of the square a theatre was in full swing, the actors making up in public on a balcony above the crowd, so as to whet their curiosity and attract their custom. Beyond was a cinematograph, advertised by lurid paintings of murders and apparitions; and farther on there was a circus with a ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... come to life. She has played her last part. But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... he had been formerly by the addition of a grisly beard, stood in the midst of the cave, with his clasped Bible in one hand, and his drawn sword in the other. His figure, dimly ruddied by the light of the red charcoal, seemed that of a fiend in the lurid atmosphere of Pandemonium, and his gestures and words, as far as they could be heard, seemed equally violent and irregular. All alone, and in a place of almost unapproachable seclusion, his demeanour was that of a man who strives ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... to be like those awful, those unearthly, those unhallowed things that were around him. He felt as if he had fallen from his state, as if he had dishonoured his ancestry, as if he had betrayed his trust. He felt a criminal. In the darkness of his meditations a flash burst from his lurid mind, a celestial light appeared to dissipate this thickening gloom, and his soul felt as if it were bathed with the softening radiancy. He thought of May Dacre, he thought of everything that was pure, and holy, and beautiful, and luminous, and calm. It was the innate virtue ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... to look to aught beyond its effect on the brig. Had one been otherwise disposed, the attempt would have been useless, for the wind had filled the air with spray, and near the islets even with sand. The lurid but fiery tinge, too, interposed a veil that no human eye could penetrate. As the tornado passed onward, however, and the winds lulled, the air again became clear, and in five minutes after the moment when the Swash lay nearly on her side, with her lower yard-arm ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... noise of the worship, and saw the human victim carried by for sacrifice. Here, too, they often heard the startling cry of war, and saw their frightened neighbours fly before the murderous spear and plundering hand of lawless power. The invader's torch reduced the native hut to ashes, while the lurid flame seared the green foliage of the trees, and clouds of smoke, rising up among their groves, darkened, for a time, surrounding objects. On such occasions, and they were not infrequent, the contrast between the country and the inhabitants must have ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... fasting to gain a good appetite. We, who can have all for a wish, little enjoy that all when we have possessed it. Seest thou yonder thick cloud, which is about to burst to rain? It seems to stifle me—the waters look dark and lurid—the shores have lost ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... it is not furnished with muscles, and therefore cannot be used for locomotion. As during the season of courtship it becomes edged with bright colours, there can hardly be a doubt that it is a masculine ornament. In many species the body presents strongly contrasted, though lurid tints, and these become more vivid during the breeding-season. The male, for instance, of our common little newt (Triton punctatus) is "brownish-grey above, passing into yellow beneath, which in the spring becomes a rich bright orange, marked everywhere with round dark ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... numbers of officers and men hastening in the same direction. A lurid light hung over Sebastopol, and it was evident that something altogether ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... dreams. But at the dead of the midnight he was wakened by sounds that might have roused the Seven Sleepers—shouts, cries, and yells, the blast of horns, the tramp of feet, and the more distant roar of hurrying multitudes. He leaped from his bed, and the whole chamber was filled with a lurid bloodred air. His first thought was that the fort was on fire. But springing upon the settle along the wall, and looking through the loophole of the tower, it seemed as if not the fort but the whole land was one flame, and through the glowing atmosphere ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I continued to gaze at the countenances over which the lurid torchlight cast a horrid glare, a strong hand grasped my collar, and by a jerk swung me up to a seat on one of the caissons; and at the same time a deep voice said, "Come, youngster, this is more in thy way than ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... studded with sputtering machine guns. As the evening falls the batteries behind and all about us open fire. Flash after flash of spurting flame leaps out from the great guns. Boom upon boom, deep voiced and varied, follows from the many calibred guns in the darkness, till the night is lurid and the ground beneath us quivers with the earthquake ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... public. My name is, I believe, tolerably well known to the people as a writer of tragic tales, but the somberest imagination never conceived anything so tragic as my own life and history. Not in incident: my life has been destitute of adventure and action. But my mental career has been lurid with experiences such as kill and damn. I shall not recount them here—some of them are written and ready for publication elsewhere. The object of these lines is to explain to whomsoever may be interested that ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... There is a cloud now rising in the west, In shape a hand, and scarcely would its grasp Exceed mine own, it is so small; a spot, A speck; see now again its colour flits! A lurid tint; they call it on our coast 'The hand of God;' I for when its finger rises From out the horizon, there are storms abroad ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... Wagner had exploited the uncanny, the terror and mystery of gray winter seas; in Tannhaeuser he turned to the conflict between the gross, lurid passions of man and the sane, pure side of his nature; and now, in Lohengrin, he was to give us an opera which for sheer sustained loveliness has only one parallel in his works—the Mastersingers. It is the most delicately beautiful thing he wrote; its ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... he gone ten paces from the ditch when a company of Federal soldiers appeared ascending the hill. The voice of an officer sternly commanded him to "Halt and surrender!" The morning sun, piercing with a lurid glare the dense mist, reveals a hundred rifles levelled at his breast. One moment more and his soul is to pass into eternity, for his answer is, "Never ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... which brings the cruder modern aspect of the place into harmony with the fundamental values. Then, before she awakens to the stir and activity of everyday life, old Prague will speak to you of herself and take you into her confidence; she will tell you some startling stories, for she has a lurid past, has the city ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... about fully to uncover, the lamp-light gleaming among the gems and flashing in her hair and down her loosened white silken robe to her naked feet, shining, blue-veined and half-hidden in the green rushes that covered the floor, she seemed to be herself the source from which the lurid light was shed about the room. But her eyes were brighter than all. They were more dreadful by far to look at than Winifred's own—they were rolling wildly as if in an agony of hate, while she was drawing in her breath till that marble throat of hers seemed choking. It was not upon ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... anything; and to have got nearer the luxuriant tribe of which the rare creature was the final flower, the immense, extravagant, unregulated cluster, with free-living ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all busts and curls, preserved, though so exposed, in the marble of famous French chisels—all this, to say nothing of the effect of closer growths of the stem, was to have had one's small world-space both crowded and enlarged. ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... the very heavens. Direction, distance, place, all were blotted out. There was no east, no west; no north, no south. Only an impenetrable ring of fire, no earth, no sky. Only these few bare rocks and this inverted bowl of lurid, hot, cinder-laden air out of which she must ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... threads of real history, other and more lurid colors are interwoven into the web of local lore—legends of the dark doings of famous pirates, of their mysterious, sinister comings and goings, of treasures buried in the sand dunes and pine barrens back of the cape and along the ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... or Tempests of wind and rain, so common in the Western Indies. The water came down in great solid sheets, drenching us to the skin in a moment; the sky was lit up for hundreds of miles round by huge blasts of lurid fire; the wind tore great branches off trees, and hurled them across the bows of our saddles, or battered our faces with their soaked leaves or sharp prickles. The very Dogs were blinded and baffled by this tremendous ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... boats were out of danger and all lingered to watch the splendid yet awesome spectacle of the burning ship alone on the wide sea, reddening the night and casting a lurid glare upon the water, where floated the frail boats filled with pale faces, all turned for a last look at the fated Brenda, slowly settling to her watery grave. No one saw the end, however, for the gale soon swept the watchers far away and separated ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... She was first. Jamie took his way up the familiar street, through the muddy snow; it had been a day of foul weather, and now through the murky low-lying clouds a lurid saffron glow foretold a clearing in the west. It was spring, after all; and the light reminded Jamie of the South. She was there, ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... lurid imaginations were the urges that drove them—that shaped their conduct toward their fellows. Some of them were rapid gunslingers—in the picturesque idioms of their speech—and there was not a man ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... on which there is a large quantity of Irishman. The sun soon loses all brightness, and looks as though seen through smoked glass. The volumes of smoke are something that must be seen to be appreciated. The flames roar, and the grass crackles, and every now and then a glorious lurid flare marks the ignition of an Irishman; his dry thorns blaze fiercely for a minute or so, and then the fire leaves him, charred and blackened for ever. A year or two hence, a stiff nor'- wester will blow him over, and he will lie there and rot, and fatten the surrounding grass; often, however, ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... had left the real for the chimerical; the true for the false; Dea for Josiana; love for pride; liberty for power; labour proud and poor for opulence full of unknown responsibilities; the shade in which is God for the lurid flames in which the devils ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Caucasus mountains a wild storm was gathering. Drear shadows drooped and thickened above the Pass of Dariel,—that terrific gorge which like a mere thread seems to hang between the toppling frost-bound heights above and the black abysmal depths below,—clouds, fringed ominously with lurid green and white, drifted heavily yet swiftly across the jagged peaks where, looming largely out of the mist, the snow-capped crest of Mount Kazbek rose coldly white against the darkness of the threatening sky. ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... superfluities of peace to making its grim engines of destruction. But while the tenth man still labors, the machine, though creaking with its dislocation, can still go on. The economics of war, therefore, has thrown its lurid light ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... encouraged among the teachers of youth, and the highest honors have been decreed to Littres and Renans, and other decided enemies of Jesus Christ. May we not read the condemnation of all such proceedings in the lurid flames of the burning Capital of modern civilization? Now, is it not clear that the primary object of education must be frustrated in the mixed system which proposes to unite children of all religions in the same school, and to treat ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... to measure with it, we dip it in such unctuous and inflammable refuse as we can find, and make our soul's light into a tallow candle, and thenceforward take our guttering, sputtering, ill-smelling illumination about with us, holding it out in fetid fingers—encumbered with its lurid warmth of fungous wick, and drip of stalactitic grease—that we may see, when another man would have seen, or dreamed he saw, the flight of a divine Virgin—only the lamplight upon the hair of a costermonger's ass;—that, having to paint the good Samaritan, we may see only in distance the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... did happen she knew in novelettes, if not out of them! Peg had told her one lurid ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... seaman, folding his arms, paced up and down the paved vestibule, which showed evident tokens of the confusion that sickness and death never fail to create. He paused occasionally before the huge and gaping chimney, and extended his sinewy hands over the flickering embers of the expiring fire: the lurid glare of the departing flames only rendered the darkness of the farthermost portion of the hail more deep and fearful. The clock chimed eleven: it was, as ever, the voice of Time giving warning ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... hurtled down and over, whirling drunkenly in the void, all clear perception left him. Everything became a swift blur, a rushing confusion of terrible wind, and lurid light, and the wild roar ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... the pilgrim. He saw his form dilate and expand in height and in breadth, until his head seemed to touch the pale crescent moon, and his bulk shut out from view all beyond itself. He saw his eyes firing and flaming like globes of lurid light, and he saw his hair and beard converted into one mass of living flame. The fiend stood revealed in all ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... there for the express purpose of catching the susceptible. The shops were modestly attractive from their nature, but the booths deliberately make eyes at you, and with telling effect. The very atmosphere is bewitching. The lurid smurkiness of the torches lends an appropriate weirdness to the figure of the uncouthly clad pedlar who, with the politeness of the arch-fiend himself, displays to an eager group the fatal fascinations of some new conceit. Here the latest ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... lustre over the moor, and gave a deeper purple to the broad outline of heathy mountains which surrounded this desolate spot. The Dwarf sate watching the clouds as they lowered above each other in masses of conglomerated vapours, and, as a strong lurid beam of the sinking luminary darted full on his solitary and uncouth figure, he might well have seemed the demon of the storm which was gathering, or some gnome summoned forth from the recesses of the earth by the subterranean signals of its approach. As he sate thus, with his dark eye turned ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... having drawn, in broken, gasping sentences, the main outlines of his tragical story, was still filling in some of the more lurid details of that morning's happenings upon his farm, when the lookout perched aloft on the hillside signalled the approach of the enemy; and while Carlos dashed off in one direction to sound the alarm bell and occupy his former defence post, Jack rushed off in the other to raise the temporary ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... movement shall not be discovered talking with the doctors, or defining art in the schools, nor shall he be seen at first by peerers in books. The passer-by shall see him, perhaps, through the door of a foundry at night, a lurid figure there, bent with labor, and humbled with labor, but with the fire from the heart of the earth playing upon his face. His hands—innocent of the ink of poets, of the mere outsides of things—shall be beautiful with the grasp of the ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... while they gazed, the sun went lurid down Into the smoke-wrapt sea, and night came on. But through the dark they watched the burning ship Still carried o'er the distant waters.... But fainter, as the stars rose high, it flared; And as, in a decaying winter fire, A charr'd log, ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... sunset glow, and the stern-looking Malay with his following marched in, their steps rustling amidst the leaves that covered the floor; and the leader bent down curiously over Archie, scowling at him fiercely, before turning his lurid eyes searchingly upon the young private, who now lay back with his lids half-lowered, apparently gazing down into ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... can live no longer this dull chrysalid life, in comparison with which, at times, even that past dark dream seems tolerable—for amid its lurid smoke were flashes of brightness. A slave? Well; I ask myself at times, and what were women meant for but to be slaves? Free them, and they enslave themselves again, or languish unsatisfied; for they must love. And what ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... yelled. "You're a lurid liar! What the flamin' sheol do you mean by swiggin' my beer an' flingin' the coloured can in me face? without as much as thank yer! D'yer ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... the varied beauties of the stream, bordered by picturesque woods festooned with graceful creepers, many of them producing rich blossoms of many hues. At night we proceeded, lighted by pitch-pine-torches stuck in the bows of the vessel, which cast a lurid glare on either bank, scaring the numberless alligators which ever and anon put their heads above the surface of the water. At times I fancied that I could see the figures of Indian warriors brandishing their spears, and handling ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... picket firing, with its accompaniment of booming cannon and screaming shells, would rise almost to the dignity of a night battle. In front, from the picket pits, rifles blazed and flashed with their crackling roar; and farther back, the great guns belched forth their lurid flames, casting a momentary glare over the weird scene. The gunners would range their guns before dark, so as to give the rebels a good one when the time should arrive. Every device was resorted to that would make this night-firing ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... Island, I must say, yes; but very seldom. And never but in the evening when the sun was setting, and that under particular circumstances—namely, when he went down into a dark red bank of clouds, or when there was a lurid crimson hue over the sky just above the horizon. Then occasionally you might see the dim hazy outline as of a beautiful mountainous island against the clouds, or the deep-coloured sky. There is an island sometimes seen from our western coast, ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... sinking behind the dark hills of the west, gilding the fading heavens with an autumnal brightness, and shedding a lurid glare upon the already drooping and discolored foliage of the surrounding forests. It was an hour of solemn calm. The cool evening breezes stole softly through the air, as if unwilling to disturb the repose of all around. The ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... thickly in around the crack in the door and the air was hot and suffocating. Somewhere the sound of crackling, snapping wood, the lurid flare of flames—— ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... eyes the extent of the danger to which he was exposed, reached Bristoe Station. There, while the explosion of the piles of shells resembled the noise of a great battle, from the ridge above Broad Run he saw the sky to the north-east lurid with the blaze of a vast conflagration; and there he learned for the first time that it was no mere raid of cavalry, but Stonewall Jackson, with his whole army corps, who stood ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... cities of the south. Avignon, where Jourdan coupe-tete makes lurid appearance; Perpignan, northern Caen also. With factions, suspicions, want of bread and sugar, it is verily what they call dechire, torn asunder, this poor country. And away over seas the Plain of Cap Francais one huge whirl of smoke and flame; one cause of the dearth of sugar. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... at his companion, and saw that the smouldering fire which lurked always in his eyes had burned up into a lurid flame. He read their menace, and he clapped his hands to his empty belt. Then he turned to seize a weapon, but the bight of a rope was cast round him, and in an instant his arms were bound to his side. He fought like a wild ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it was that it was clad in some sort of tight-fitting, fantastic garment. As the landing was in semi-darkness, and the face at all events was most startlingly visible, I concluded it brought with it a light of its own, though there was none of that lurid glow attached to it, which I subsequently learned is almost inseparable from spirit phenomena seen under ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... thing that stood in the way was that the Squire's secretary happened to be a nice woman—and not an adventuress. Elizabeth's sense of humour showed her the kind of lurid drama that Pamela no doubt was concocting about her—perhaps with the help of Beryl—the two little innocents! Elizabeth recalled the intriguing French 'companion' in War and Peace who inveigles the old Squire. And as for the mean and ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his fingers. When Patrolman Willis reached him, he pointed to the cliffs directly across the beach from the shallow water. Lurid yellow tints stained the cliff walls. Odd masses of fallen stone dotted the cliff foot. At one place they were piled high. That pile looked quite natural—except that it was at the very center of the shore line ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... educate our dispositions. Some one has said: "Disposition is a lens through which men and things are seen. A fiery temper, like a red glass, gives to all objects a lurid glare; a melancholic temper, like a blue lens, imparts its own hue; through the green spectacles of jealousy every one else becomes an object of distrust and dislike; and he who looks through the black glass of malice, finds others wearing the aspect of his own ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... usual terror of these wild people; nevertheless, he was not unequal to the occasion. He was surrounded in an instant, but only with women and children; for the gipsy-men never immediately appear. They smiled with their bright eyes, and the flames of the watch-fire threw a lurid glow over their dark and flashing countenances; they held out their practised hands; they uttered unintelligible, but not unfriendly sounds. The heart of Cadurcis faltered, but his voice ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... chanted loathsome spells and terrible curses on Khama. As a boy he had been taught that these witch-doctors had the power to slay or to smite with foul diseases. He would have been more than human if he had not felt a shiver of nameless dread at this lurid and horrible ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... ill to banish hope and let the mind Drift like a feather. I have had my share Of what the world calls trial. Once a fire Came in the darkness, when the city lay In a still sea of slumber, stretching out Great lurid arms which stained the firmament; And when I woke the room was full of sparks, And red tongues smote the lattice. Then a hand Came through the sulphur, taking hold of mine, And the next moment there were shouts of joy. ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Everywhere was the lurid glow of fire, and she became aware of intense heat. Above her head was the roar of tempest, and the vivid, hellish light of the storm. Buck had ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... a long time inconsolable at the final escape of the Pirate from the hands of justice. So was his subordinate, Laver, whose sentiments on the subject are quite too lurid for publication. ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... to superintend, and was suspicious that Halliday seized the opportunity his absence afforded to explain what appeared to him a sacrifice of Anthony Thurston's legacy. One evening when Halliday was down in the canyon watching the workmen toiling in the river, under the lurid blaze of the lucigen, ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... The only writing on the paper was the legend, THE DARK OF THE MOON SOCIETY. Above it there were three marks done in red paint, which gave them a curiously lurid effect. They consisted of a circle with two ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... the destruction of their country,—the most accursed and detested of all criminals, that have drenched a continent in needless blood, and moved the foundations of their times with hideous crimes and cruelty, caught up in black clouds, full of voices of vengeance and lurid with punishment, shall be whirled aloft and plunged downwards forever and forever in an endless retribution; while God shall say, "Thus shall it be to all who betray their country"; and all in heaven and upon the earth ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various |
