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Climax   /klˈaɪmˌæks/   Listen
Climax

noun
1.
The highest point of anything conceived of as growing or developing or unfolding.  Synonym: flood tide.  "In the flood tide of his success"
2.
The decisive moment in a novel or play.  Synonym: culmination.
3.
The moment of most intense pleasure in sexual intercourse.  Synonyms: coming, orgasm, sexual climax.
4.
The most severe stage of a disease.
5.
Arrangement of clauses in ascending order of forcefulness.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Climax" Quotes from Famous Books



... Harold is very naturally accounted for. Actors live only to be admired; vanity rises to its climax in them. Booth preferred this sparrow to sing him peans rather than live by an eagle and be ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend

... difficulty of describing clearly the immediate consequences of the Emancipation. In beginning now to speak of the influence which the great reform has had on the peasantry, I feel that the difficulty has reached its climax. The foreigner who desires merely to gain a general idea of the subject cannot be expected to take an interest in details, and even if he took the trouble to examine them attentively, he would derive from the labour little real information. What he wishes is a clear, concise, and dogmatic ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... conditions; so that the authorities themselves, while persecuting insignificant agitators, not only overlook these phenomena, but even let them stand as necessary accompaniments of our civilization, hail them as the climax of prosperity, and, on occasion, make appreciative and approving ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... steps into a snowstorm. Even during his precipitate retreat he had realized the advisability of telephoning for a taxi, but had been incapable of the anti-climax. He pulled his hat over his eyes, turned up the collar of his coat, and made his way hastily toward Park Avenue. There was not a cab in sight. Nor was there a rumble in the tunnel; no doubt the cars were snow-bound. He hesitated only a moment: it would hardly ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... reached its climax when I found Mr. Mivart citing Father Suarez as his chief witness in favour of the scientific freedom enjoyed by Catholics—the popular repute of that learned theologian and subtle casuist not being such as to make his works a likely place of refuge for liberality of ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... rather an anti-climax, by the way, for it means an audience of but five hundred, which would have been a beggarly account for the new Drury. There is nothing either about its "dome," or about the scenery, except commonplaces so flat that one doubts if it be quite fair to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... is less hope in the older than in the newer world. No single, limited song of one nation can in the future achieve a second climax of the art. It is by the actual mingling of them all that the fairest flower and fruit must come. The very absence of one prevailing native song, held a reproach to America, is in reality her strength; for hers is the common heritage of all strains of song. And it may be her destiny to lead in the ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... silly his actions as a youth. Never before had any one told him to go to the devil. He rather liked it. And he rather admired poor Dank for ordering him out of his cabin, with a perfectly astounding oath as a climax to the command. Moreover, he thought considerably better of the faithful Hobbs for an amazing exposition of human equality in the matter of a pair of boots that he desired to wear that morning but which happened to be stowed away in a cabin trunk. He told Hobbs to go to the devil ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... his splendid trains of artillery to the frontier. "Never was seen in France, and perhaps never will be seen there again, artillery more complete and better furnished," said the Duke, thinking probably that artillery had reached the climax of perfect destructiveness in the first ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... felt that Mrs Weston had hit the nail on the head. What that nail precisely was no one knew, because she had not explained why both Olga Bracely and Georgie were absentees. But now came the climax, bang on the top of the nail, a shrewd ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... only brings into clearer view the delicate touches of Keats or Tennyson; his pictures with a big brush were never meant for the microscope. Here the contrast between his theoretic worship of his idol and his own practice reaches a climax. If, as he professed to believe, "the best poet is he who best executes his work," then he is hardly a poet at all. He is habitually rapid and slovenly; an improvisatore on the spot whore his fancy is kindled, writing currente calamo, and disdaining ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... was clearly not prepared to withstand a campaign for supplies direct from Africa, especially after the accession of the youth Charles I in 1517. At that very time a clamor from the islands reached its climax. Not only did many civil officials, voicing public opinion in their island communities, urge that the supply of negro slaves be greatly increased as a means of preventing industrial collapse, but a delegation of Jeronimite friars and the famous Bartholomeo de las Casas, who ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... regret—that the master-romancer did not make a novel instead of a play out of the material. Though this is called a comedy, it contains more than one element of tragedy in it, and the tone is moody and satirical. The climax, with its abortive love episode, is ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden

... period was this despoliation more rife than in the time of which we write. It had reached its climax of horrors, day after day recurring, when Colonel Miranda became military commandant of the district of Albuquerque; until not only this town, but Santa Fe, the capital of the province itself, was menaced with destruction ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... spoke it wasn't in answer. "It's not, I gather, that your mother's physically ill; her health, on the whole, this spring, seems to have been better than usual. But she's worried, she's anxious, and it appears to have risen within the last few days to a climax. We've tired ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James

... it their fault that the Boers were allowed at this very time to capture the Bloemfontein waterworks, and shatter them. Bad water at Paardeberg caused the epidemic. Bad water at Bloemfontein brought it to a climax. In this little city of the sick the medical men had at one time a constant average of 1800 sufferers on their hands; mostly cases of enteric which, as truly as shot and shell, shows no respect of persons. Not only our fighting-men—soldiers of high degree and low degree alike—but ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry

... bestowed a thought upon the wretched little worm which works its destruction? Who that beholds the gilded vessel gliding in gallant trim—"youth at the prow, and pleasure at the helm;" ever at that instant thought of—barnacles? The imagination is disgusted by the anti-climax; and of all species of the bathos, the sinking from visionary happiness to sober reality is that from which human nature is most averse. The wings of the imagination, accustomed to ascend, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth

... curiosity and blighted hope. Is not that what these symphonies express? The pith of the matter is never reached. The very movement of the adagio, while it expresses a deep, solemn hope, seems to mourn with unutterable sorrow that the hope must be only consecrated and profound, never realized. The climax of the music and the sentiment seems to be always in ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke

... know which they should lose next of that frieze of light-hearted riders who had stood out so clearly against the blue morning sky, when viewed from the deck-chairs of the Korosko. Two gone out of ten, and a third out of his mind. The pleasure trip was drawing to its climax. ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... Beauregard's retreat into North Carolina, where Bragg commanded and was senior in rank, made a new complication; whilst the fall of Wilmington and the danger of Hardee's being cut off before he could unite with the Confederate forces trying to resist Sherman, made a climax of embarrassments which imperatively required the appointment of some one to command in chief in the Carolinas. The same current of opinion in the Confederate Congress which had resulted in Lee's assignment by law (February 9th) [Footnote: Id., pt. i. p. 1.] to command all the ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... see them goaded and lashed and issuing fire from their gaudy but cheap garments.[829] For most wicked people, though they have great households and conspicuous offices and great power, are yet being secretly punished before they are seen to be murdered or hurled down rocks, which is rather the climax and end of their punishment than the punishment itself. For as Plato tells us that Herodicus the Selymbrian having fallen into consumption, an incurable disease, was the first of mankind to mix exercise with the art of healing, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... disciples as Rousseau, who was merely a decadent soul fascinated by the contemplation of his own depravity. The scriptures of such a Solomon, however true in theory, are neither honest nor effective. But as a final climax of your argument, you declare that in your "own experience" you have found these humanitarians "impossible to live with." I do not wonder at that. A question far more to the point is, Did they find you ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More

... then, when Kitty exhibited results, went into rhapsodies of wonder and admiration. Kitty was very triumphant in those days, but a little drop of mortification was in store for her. She was exhibiting all her pretty things one day to a friend, whose congratulations found their climax in the ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... to the probable majority one way or the other. Some profess to know it to a nicety. Others shake their heads and remark vaguely that there is not much to choose either way. So week after week goes by, until the excitement reaches a climax when the date of the election ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... contains a reference to Robert Elsmere. Five days later, on April 15, a sudden exertion, it seems, brought on the fatal attack, and he died. He had outlived his grand climacteric of sixty-three (which he had thought would be "the end as well as the climax") by two years ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... progress, Muslim philosophy had gradually been eliminating the Neo-Platonic, mystic element, and returning to pure Aristotelianism. In Averroes, who professed to be merely a commentator on Aristotle, this tendency reached its climax; and though he still regarded the pseudo-Aristotelian works as genuine, and did not entirely escape their influence, he is by far the least mystic of Muslim thinkers. The two fundamental doctrines upon which he always ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... or the sense of void, that threw Adams into the depths of Hamlet's Shakespearean silence in the full flare of Paris frivolity in its favorite haunt where worldly vanity reached its most futile climax in human history; it was only the quiet summons to follow — the assent to dismissal. It was time to go. The three friends had begun life together; and the last of the three had no motive — no attraction — to carry it on after the others had gone. Education ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... this species of trade, since it enables the dealer to offer his uncalled-for wares in the least suspicious and most natural manner. It was fortunate, also, that I lay at the bottom of the little pile—a climax being quite as essential in sustaining an extortionate price, as in terminating with due effect, a poem, ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper

... Marne turned the fortunes of France from disaster to expansion. But the rest of the settlement is still vague and uncertain, and German imperialism, at least, is already working hard and intelligently for a favorable situation at the climax, a situation that will enable this militarist empire to emerge still strong, still capable of recuperation and of a renewal at no very remote date of the struggle for European predominance. This is a thing as little for the good of the saner German people as it is for the rest of ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... last of all," he said grimly, to Uniacke. "I mean to make a crescendo of horror, and in Jack's figure the loathsomeness of death shall reach a climax. Yes, I will paint him last of all. Perhaps he will come again and pose for me upon that grave." And he laughed as ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... school-mates. One or two private interviews with little aristocrats who jeered at him for his ancestry convinced them that while he might not have had illustrious ancestors, it was not unlikely that he would in time develop illustrious descendants, and the jeerings and sneerings soon ceased. The climax of Bonaparte's career at Brienne was in 1784, when he directed a snowball fight between two evenly divided branches of the school with such effect that one boy had his skull cracked and the rest were laid up ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs

... judge from reading of the case," Merrick replied, "it seems to have been done with a purpose. His attorneys were leading up to that very point in such a manner that, when the climax was reached, she would involuntarily betray herself—as she did—thus confirming in the strongest ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour

... youth with tassels on his boots. "Bring out your oldest brandy for a boast, From that small barrel in the very roots Of your deep cellar, man. Why here is Max! Ho! Welcome, Max, you're scarcely here in time. We want to drink to old Jan's luck, and smoke His best tobacco for a grand climax. Here, Jan, a paper, fragrant as crushed thyme, We'll have the best to wish you luck, ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell

... him, felt young and crude. He told himself that he had nothing to fear. Everybody knew that Anthony cared only for Diana. Yet, even as he comforted himself, he saw Bettina's look of triumphant pride as Anthony brought a clever story to its climax, and his heart ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey

... favourite Du Barry were still working underground. Their pestiferous vapours issued from the recesses of the earth, to obscure the brightness of the rising sun, which was now rapidly towering to its climax, to obliterate the little planets which had once endeavoured to eclipse its beautiful rays, but were now incapable of competition, and unable to endure its lustre. This malignant nest of serpents began to poison the minds of the courtiers, as soon as the pregnancy ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe

... moment, "I'm thinking I have played the deuce with your general routine. All the earlier performances will be in the nature of an anti-climax after this. But—perhaps, later on, when my abominable remarks are not quite so fresh in your mind, you won't regard them as quite such an insult as you do now. Dreadful outsider though I am—unpardonably caddish though it is to have criticised your war work—especially when I have ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... to Japan and alleged hostility against us on the part of fanciful hordes of Japanese in Mexico made me wonder at the time. There were many evidences subsequent to that New Year's Day reception of an attempt to alienate us from Japan. As a climax to it all, as a clarification of what the Emperor had in mind, came the famous Zimmermann note, the instructions to the German Minister in Mexico to align both Japan and Mexico against us when we entered ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard

... of her berth, the rhythmic pounding of the engines, the muffled sound, at intervals, of feet upon the deck, all were soothing; but the remembrance of that discussion, with its mortifying climax, made sleep impossible. This childish sensitiveness she fully realized,—and despised,—but nerves achieved ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell

... grades made in the world are to be found in Blair's Keystone Packets—Climax, Paragon, and ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway

... ought always to be writing sermons," was his only answer, and I guessed that his rage had reached its climax. I tried to lower the flood on his table by means of my pocket-handkerchief, ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley

... section as a more desirable place for colonization than the shores of Africa.[2] As the reaction following the era of good feeling toward the Negroes during the revolutionary period had not reached its climax free persons of color had been content to remain in the South.[3] The unexpected immigration of these Negroes into this section and the last bold effort made to drive them out marked epochs in their history in this city. The history of these people prior to the Civil War, therefore, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... sleep; Timon ends in rags the play he had begun in splendour; Richard flatters the London citizens in a suit of mean and shabby armour, and, as soon as he has stepped in blood to the throne, marches through the streets in crown and George and Garter; the climax of The Tempest is reached when Prospero, throwing off his enchanter's robes, sends Ariel for his hat and rapier, and reveals himself as the great Italian Duke; the very Ghost in Hamlet changes his mystical ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde

... was written we had no colors nor was any designed. Second. That at the time it is alleged the committee called on Mrs. Ross we had no national existence. We were still simply revolting colonies, not yet having declared our independence. Third. As a climax I have found in the Pennsylvania Archives, 2d series, Vol. 1, page 164, the following extract from the Pennsylvania (not the Colonies) Navy Board's minutes, May 29, 1777, being the first bill for colors for ...
— The True Story of the American Flag • John H. Fow

... one's contemplation, is a totally different thing from any sort of substantial identity. Still the object God and the subject I are two. Still I simply come upon him, and find his existence given to me; and the climax of my practical union with what is given, forms at the same time the climax of my perception that as a numerical fact of existence I am something radically other than the Divinity with whose effulgence I ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... This was the climax of her misery; she now wasted from day to day, and grief would soon have terminated her existence, had it not been hastened by the cruelty of Cain, who, upon an expostulation on her part, followed up with a denunciation of the consequences ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat

... adjoining state of Pedir; and the latter, with Pasei, formed the only states on the coast whose chiefs claimed the title of sultan. Yet before twenty years had passed Achin had not only gained independence, but had swallowed up all other states of northern Sumatra. It attained its climax of power in the time of Sultan Iskandar Muda (1607—1636), under whom the subject coast extended from Aru opposite Malacca round by the north to Benkulen on the west coast, a sea-board of not less than 1100 miles; and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... The climax of duplicity is reached when it is averred that the pursuit of such an organized programme during the past twenty years and more had meant peace only, never a thought of conquest, as Ambassador Leyds so innocently declared after failing to gain abroad the ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas

... was still rising, and she longed that the accompanist would force the tone to cover it a little, and put the loud pedal on. He, however, was gazing at his music, and played on quietly until, with startling suddenness, the climax came. ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... on from incident to incident with ingenuity and contagious enthusiasm. The story gives us the Graustark and The Prisoner of Zenda thrill, but the tale is treated with freshness, ingenuity, and enthusiasm, and the climax is both unique and satisfying. It will hold the fiction lover ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White

... and gaping mouths looked like black dots. The noise did not cease but swelled up and recommenced in the recesses of faraway avenues and among the people encamped under the trees, till it spread on and on and attained its climax in the imperial stand, where the empress herself had applauded. "Nana! Nana! Nana!" The cry rose heavenward in the glorious sunlight, whose golden rain beat fiercely on the dizzy ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola

... disappearing in the blue of the sky; or the rays in one and the same arch might change from clear red to clear green, coming and going as if driven by a storm. It was an endless phantasmagoria of sparkling color, surpassing anything that one can dream. Sometimes the spectacle reached such a climax that one's breath was taken away; one felt that now something extraordinary must happen—at the very least the sky must fall. But as one stands in breathless expectation, down the whole thing trips, as if in a few quick, ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen

... upon his toes as he reached his climax—his clenched hand was high above his head—his voice fairly thundered out the final sentence, and with the last word he brought his fist down upon the vat before him. In his eyes blazed ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... with such display of German profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether loses sight of the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer. People were beside themselves with delight over this new faculty, and the jubilation reached its climax when Kant further discovered a moral faculty in man—for at that time Germans were still moral, not yet dabbling in the "Politics of hard fact." Then came the honeymoon of German philosophy. All the ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... That Struggle—made necessary by the insistence of one sovereign after another on regarding Sweden as a Danish province rather than as an autonomous part of a united Scandinavia—had reached a sort of climax, a final moment of utter blackness just before the dawn, when, at Stockholm in 1520, the Danish king, known ever afterward as Christian the Tyrant, commanded the arbitrary execution of about eighty of ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg

... private school at fourteen, and by that time his mind was in much the same state that you would be in, dear reader, if you were operated upon for appendicitis by a well-meaning, boldly enterprising, but rather over-worked and under-paid butcher boy, who was superseded towards the climax of the operation by a left-handed clerk of high principles but intemperate habits,—that is to say, it was in a thorough mess. The nice little curiosities and willingnesses of a child were in a jumbled and thwarted condition, hacked and cut about—the ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... to pieces, profaning monasteries, and showing in their retaliation as much violence—as their enemies had shown cruelty in persecution. In August, 1566, this sacrilegious iconoclasm reached its climax in the irreparable ruin of the magnificent cathedral at Antwerp. Philip replied to these acts, which he interpreted as disloyalty, by sending (1567) his most famous general, the duke of Alva, into the Netherlands with a large army and with instructions to cow the people into submission. Alva proved ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... of you who have not read Mr. Horsfall's volumes on Manchester would do well to do so. Prof. Geddes gave us a vivid picture of a larger regional unit which culminates geographically in the city as industrial climax. In his particular instance he referred, I take, to Dundee. In Dundee there is at this moment an inquiry being started, and I am in communication with those who are doing it, and I hope it will add something to the completeness of the picture we have of that city. In Dundee ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes

... There were moments when he questioned the complete sanity of his eccentric benefactor, who drank whiskey like water, both as to quantity and effect, and who chuckled continuously in his huge gray beard. But such doubts only added to the excitement of the evening, which reached a climax when a lighted candle was thrust in at the door and the pair advised not to make a night of it by the candid crone on her way ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung

... puritans, of Hoadly with non-jurors, of Hanoverian divines with deists and free-thinkers, all may seem now to us narrow and dry when compared with such a drama, of so many interesting characters, strange evolutions, and multiple and startling climax, as gradually unfolded itself to Mr. Gladstone's ardent ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... Creighton with a grin, much as if his friend's query had freed him from a spell. "Piffle, Krech. If a woman like that—high-strung, nervous—were to kill a man it would be in some swift fit of passion. Varr's death came as the climax of a deliberate campaign of persecution. She isn't ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... was not a communion occasion, and asking if they could call this righteousness or faithfulness. No male, so far as I could see, denuded himself for a plunge. These gatherings take place twice a year, and are known far and near to such as put belief in the spell. But the climax of absurdity is in paying the ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... lips a rushing torrent and swept the crowd. Growing each moment more and more conscious of his strength, he attained the heights of eloquence. Intoxicated with the reflex action from the sea of eager listeners, he outdid himself with each succeeding climax of feeling. Never had his voice been so deep, so full, so clear, so penetrating, so thrilling, and never had he been so conscious of its control. Not once did it break. Its loudest trumpet note echoed with ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... I won't go into it—there are reasons why she never will. At last she calmly and firmly asked if she might leave me and go to him. The climax came last night, when, owing to my entering her room by accident, she jumped out of window—so strong was her dread of me! She pretended it was a dream, but that was to soothe me. Now when a woman jumps out of window without caring whether she breaks her neck or no, she's ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy

... the 7th the terror reached a climax. Already at six o'clock the yellow drawing-room, where a sort of reactionary committee sat en permanence, was crowded with pale, trembling men, who conversed in undertones, as though they were in a chamber of death. It had been ascertained ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... not completely reassure Slimak; he was wretchedly in doubt. His dinner gave him no pleasure, and he strolled about the house without knowing what to do. When his irritation had reached its climax, a happy ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... first encounter in the Virginia Legislature has become deathless. Hackneyed though it be, it can never grow old. Referring to the injustice of the Stamp Act, Patrick Henry reached the climax of his speech in these words: "Caesar had his Brutus; Charles the First, his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... his cast-iron chin began to quiver, and his shaggy brows contracted, and his nose, besides becoming purple, began to twist, as if it were an independent member of his face, and he came, in short, to that climax which is familiarly expressed by the words "bursting ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne

... conflict, with a dramatic climax. The reactionary gang did not know that it was beaten. Its members resisted stridently an attempt to write a direct primary plank into the party platform. They wished to rebuke Governor Hughes, who was as little to their liking as Roosevelt himself, and they did not want the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... but as the crown, the climax to the solitude, the detachment, the isolation, would seem but as the laying down the head on the breast of Nature, becoming one with her ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross

... However, the climax of Cappy's indignation over the disaster to the Valkyrie was not attained until a few months later when, in conversation on the floor of the Merchants' Exchange with the skipper of the schooner Tarus, who happened to have been in Papeete at the bombardment, he learned he had done the German ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... meeting, and a dramatic and successful climax to what had seemed a somewhat forlorn quest. Had I the pen of a Swettenham or a Clifford, those sympathetic spinners of delightful tales of a race whose childish faith so lends itself to story, I might here find material for ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser

... whispered consultation with the others and it was agreed it would be foolish to bring matters to a climax now. ...
— The Boy Allies in the Balkan Campaign - The Struggle to Save a Nation • Clair W. Hayes

... was the climax and, that early, Hale got a warning word from England, but he paid no heed even though, after the sale, the boom slackened, poised and stayed still; for optimism was unquenchable and another tide would come with another sale ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.

... The climax was reached at tea-time, when an anonymous hand was thrust beneath the skylight, and a full-bodied tract fluttered wildly down ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs

... the history of the Renaissance Scholarship may be said to have reached its climax in Erasmus; for by this time Italy had handed on the torch of learning to the northern nations. The publication of his "Adagia" in 1500, marks the advent of a more critical and selective spirit, which ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... Johnson, as the act drew near its close and the climax neared where O'Ryan was to enter upon a physical struggle with his assailants. "His blood's up. There'll ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker

... confounded and almost destroyed my moral sense, as she was bound to confound all who looked upon her superhuman loveliness. But—I do not quite know how—I got the better of myself, and once more turned to see the climax ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... appears that gradually, as the onslaughts of the Danes became less frequent, Irish men of learning tended more and more to become teachers rather than mere students, and to gravitate towards a few great centres of study. The climax of this movement towards organization and the eminence of special places was reached about the middle of the eleventh century (1030-1063), when mention is made of thirty-three persons who held the office of fer legind, and when the principal ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor

... bracing concomitant of the cool shower. In a half hour it was gone, but always left me prostrate; then Jack gave me milk punch, if milk was at hand, or sherry and egg, or something to bring me up to normal again. We got to dread the steam so; it was the climax of the long hot day and was peculiar to that part of the river. The paraphernalia by the side of our cots at night consisted of a pitcher of cold tea, a lantern, matches, a revolver, and a shotgun. Enormous yellow ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes

... climax, England was alarmed by the appearance of a French army at Boulogne, just across the Channel. A great number of flatboats were collected, and troops trained to embark and disembark. Apparently Napoleon harbored the firm purpose of invading the British ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... found that our efforts in behalf of civic improvements and the correcting of outrageous abuses were handicapped at every turn by politics. Last year an appeal came to the Woman's Club—to the women of Louisville—to take our schools out of politics. It was a gigantic fight but we won. As the climax of our struggle we spent the greater part of election day at the polls and I think at the close of that day every one of us had exhausted all the joys of 'indirect influence,' which is supposed to satisfy every craving of the female heart. Our club will ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... possibility of Albert's early death and the necessity in that event for a regency owing to the youth of his only son, Albert Frederick. The duke was consequently obliged to consent to a condemnation of the teaching of Osiander, and the climax came in 1566 when the estates appealed to Sigismund II., king of Poland, who sent a commission to Konigsberg. Scalich saved his life by flight, but Funck was executed; the question of the regency was settled; ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... disappearance of the middle class was, for them and for their followers, a development absolutely certain to take place. They saw the same process going on with the same result in agriculture. It might be less rapid in its progress, but not one whit less certain. It was only as the inevitable climax to this evolution that they believed the "dictatorship of the proletariat" would be achieved. In other words, the proletariat would be composed of the overwhelming majority of the body politic and social. That is ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... But Dot capped the climax—as usual. "Neale," she said, with serious mien a day or two after, "if that circus comes to town this summer, will you show us how you played Little Daniel in the Lions' Den? I should think that would ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill

... tragedy which is moving to its climax in the Balkans we all have our responsibilities, and none of us can escape our share of them by blaming others or by blaming the Turk. If there is any man here who, looking back over the last 35 years, thinks he knows where to fix the sole responsibility ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell

... reached a climax—she became conscious that she was about to become a mother. This affected her with terrible fears. She went back to that thought of a possible contingency which had torn her with conflicting feelings on the eve of her marriage. It was impossible ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... the portrait, and to reach the climax of personal contempt, he paints the sordid misery in which he lived at Saffron-Walden:—"Enduring more hardness than a camell, who will liue four dayes without water, and feedes on nothing but thistles and wormwood, as he feeds on ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... or less cynical, and brutal, and philistine. A little at a time I introduce the subjective, the refined, the altruistic; and, by a to-and-fro increasingly intense rhythm of these two opposing themes, worked so to speak in counterpoint, I reach a preliminary climax: of brutality tempered by a ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... answer to prayer. They tell us that King Arthur was not born like other mortals; that he had great luck in killing giants; that one of the giants that he killed wore clothes woven from the beards of kings that he had slain, and, to cap the climax, the authors of this history were rewarded for having written the only reliable history of their country. These are the men from whom we get our creeds and ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... once in Sandusky, Ohio, and spent an evening at a lecture given by Trask, the great anti-tobacconist. In his discourse he had reached the climax of his argument, proving as he thought that tobacco shortened life, when a well dressed man in the audience rose and said, 'Mr. Trask, will you pardon me if I say ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton

... stone. And the stone hurted my foot! And I trod on a Bee. And the Bee stinged my finger!" Poor Bruno sobbed again. The complete list of woes was too much for his feelings. "And it knewed I didn't mean to trod on it!" he added, as the climax. ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll

... nerve-reviver to her nose, but it failed to produce the usual effect. All the servants in attendance stood with their mouths agape, while the three jewel daughters proceeded quietly with their breakfast, and Alice sat among them, a silent spectator of the scene. And now, as if to cap the climax, in walked the culprit, Mr. Jack Camford, in propria persona, looking as unconcerned and innocent as if nothing had occurred to displace him in his father's good graces. At sight of her brilliant son, Mrs. Camford shrieked and fell prostrate on the floor, and Thisbe, in the moment of excitement, ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton

... assumed such redoubtable proportions in his eyes that he felt frightened by her and fled. Henceforth they were husband and wife in name only. It was logic on the march, it was the inevitable disorganization of a household reaching its climax, it was rebellion against nature's law and indulgence in vice leading to the gradual decline of a man of intelligence, it was a hard worker sinking into the sloth of so-called pleasure; and then, death having snatched away the only son, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... picture-show for the first time. It ran for a half hour, showing the sufferings of a poor Hindu buffeted around the world—a long, dreary portion of starvation, imprisonment and pain. The dramatic climax lifted me from the chair. It was his heaven and happiness. His stormy passage was ended. I saw him standing in the rain among the steerage passengers of an Atlantic steamer—and suddenly through the gray rushing clouds, appeared the Goddess of Liberty. He had come home ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort

... and the big, bare, common room assumed in a few minutes almost the aspect of a Royal levee. This was curious enough,—and furnished food for meditation to Professor von Glauben, who was considerably excited by the dramatic denouement of the Day of Fate,—a climax for which neither he nor Sir Roger had been in the least prepared. He said something of it to Sir Roger who ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... and merriest column issues. This is the old plan and it is a sure one. The highest smoke rises from the largest fire, the largest fire boils the biggest pot, the biggest pot generally holds the fattest bacon, and the fattest bacon is kept by the richest farmer. It's a wholesome and comfortable climax, my boy, and one by which I myself was enabled to keep a dacent portion of educated flesh between the master's birch and my ribs. The science itself is called Gastric Geography, and is peculiar only to itinerant young gintlemen who seek for knowledge in ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... this simplicity. It revealed to him a new world, a world newly beautiful but newly perilous, and a changed self,—the self of boyhood, renewed yet transformed, through whose joy ran the reactionary melancholy that, in a happiness attained, glances at fear, and at a climax of life, is aware of gulfs of sorrow as yet unsounded. More than his lover's passion was a tenderness for her and for her unquestioning acceptances that seemed near tears. Karen was in character so wrought and in nature ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... the voice of the lad where he is." In England alone have the rights of blood been as nothing compared with the rights of property, and it is part of the business of this novel to exhibit these interests at a climax of strife. I have no fear that any true-hearted person will accuse me of a desire to cast reproach upon marriage as an ordinance. Recognizing the beauty and the sanctity of marriage, I have tried to show that true marriage is a higher thing than a ceremony, and that ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... where there were no traces, no reminders of the human race which had cast her out and pursued her with torture of body and soul, here in the wilderness her spirits were going up, and her young eyes were looking hopefully round and forward. The up-piling horrors of those two days and their hideous climax seemed a dream which the sun had scattered. Hopefully! That blessed inexperience and sheer imagination of youth enabling it to hope in a large, vague way when to hope for any definite and real ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... felt was my foremost duty. I never went near a recruiting meeting, so that I should not be carried away by enthusiasm to the recruiting office. I must decide when my thoughts were cool and collected. The second week in November brought the climax. I knew my ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams

... of those mellow, golden days that we New Englanders get in October. The year really begins in March, as every farmer knows, and by the end of September or the beginning of October the season has come to its perfect, ripened climax. There are a few days when the world seems to hang still in a dreaming, sweet hush, at the very fulness of the fruit before the decline sets in. I have no words (like Andrew) to describe it, but every autumn ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley

... waxed great. It attained its climax when Rosendo came to him one day to discuss the Alcalde's conduct and the change of sentiment which seemed to be stealing rapidly over the hearts of the people ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... every throat so unanimously that Jim Borum's supplemental oath stood out alone and forceful as a climax. ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon

... verse in Jeremiah was read, and of another who experienced an alarming vertigo and dizziness whenever a great height or dizzy precipice was described. In such instances the power of association of ideas is probably the most influential agent in bringing about the climax. There is an obvious relation between the warnings given by the prophet in the one case, and the well-known sensation produced by looking down from a great height in the other, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various

... for three whole weeks. I say three whole weeks because three whole weeks was a long time for the course of Jack's life to flow smoothly. At the end of a fortnight affairs were always due to run more rapidly and three weeks produced, as a general thing, some species of climax. ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner

... peculiar to the hero only. The heroine's conception is its exact counterpart, and exactly fits it. The heroine as completely as the hero has freed herself from any discernment between good and evil. She recoils from abnormal impurity no more than from normal, and the climax of the book is her full indulgence ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock

... expulsion of the magnates, was of a more dangerous character. Martinowits was beheaded, A.D. 1793, with four of his associates.[17] These attempts so greatly excited the apprehensions of the government that the reaction, already begun on the death of Joseph II., was brought at once to a climax; Thugut, the minister, established an extremely active secret police and a system of surveillance, which spread terror throughout Austria and was utterly uncalled for, no one, with the exception of a few crack-brained ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... As a climax to greetings extended in the City of New York, The Republican Natives of Great Britain and Ireland resident in ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith

... my friends (said the melancholy gentleman), was a climax. The unities in the system of persecution adopted against me were strictly observed. There was beginning, middle, and end complete—nothing wanting. Well—still determined to maintain my neutrality—I wrote a note to my friend, expressing precisely the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... with eyes that grew momently wider. He was amazed to find that deep down in him there was an unmistakable feeling of elation. He had made up his mind, when he left home that morning, that this was to be a day of days. Well, nobody could call this an anti-climax. ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... greatest impression upon me was by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Sundry lectures in my junior year, by Whipple, and at a later period by George William Curtis, also influenced me. It was one of the golden periods of English literature, the climax of the Victorian epoch;—the period of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and the Brownings, of Thackeray and Dickens, of Macaulay and Carlyle on one side of the Atlantic, and of Emerson, Irving, Hawthorne, Ban- croft, Prescott, Motley, Lowell, Longfellow, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... then, the dream-voice spoke again. "Surely—surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried—our sorrows.... And the Lord hath laid on Him—the iniquity of us all." The music crashed into wonder-chords such as Avery had never heard before, swelled to a climax that reached the Divine, held her quivering as it were upon wings in a space that was more transcendent than the highest ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... And now the climax had been reached. An anonymous denunciation had roused the hopes of these sanguinary patriots. It all sounded perfectly plausible. To try and save that traitor, Marie Antoinette, the widow of Louis Capet, was just the sort of scheme that would originate in the brain ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... particular point, but from their successful approach towards their destination. The experiences of Israel reach their apex in the faith of Jesus and of His immediate followers; and they find their explanation and unity in Him. In form the Jewish Bible, unlike the Christian, has no climax; it stops, ours ends. Christians judge the progress in the religious experience of Israel by its approximation to the faith ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin

... gives us strength for another hour. The Greek dragoman and cook, who are sent into Quarantine for our sakes, take compassion on us; the fires are kindled in the cold furnaces; savory steams creep up the stairs; the preparations increase, and finally climax in the rapturous announcement: "Messieurs, dinner is ready." The soup is liquified bliss; the cotelettes d'agneau are cotelettes de bonheur; and as for that broad dish of Syrian larks—Heaven forgive us the regret, that more songs ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... ineffectual efforts to rouse him. Her father came in once. He showed anxiety; that was unmistakable, but was it the anxiety of guilt of any kind? She said nothing. At five o'clock matters abruptly came to a climax. Jen was in the kitchen, but, hearing footsteps in the sitting-room, she opened the door quietly. Her father was bending over Sergeant Tom, and Pierre was speaking: "No, no, Galbraith, it is all right. You are a fool. It could not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... found at the end of a lexicon or in some popular book of maxims. Ludicrous disputes arose between morning papers as to the comparative profundity of each other's researches into Persian lore; but the climax was capped, we think, by one London journal, which politely offered advice to Nasr-ed-Din about his conduct and his reading. "Should Nasr-ed-Din be impressed by English flattery," said this editor gravely, "with an exaggerated sense ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... rained all the morning heavily, but toward the afternoon cleared a little, so that many hoped the climax had been reached, while the more experienced looked for worse. After sunset the clouds gathered thicker than before, and the rain of the day was as nothing to the torrent descending with a steady clash ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... 1789, Mirabeau had been a dramatic character, an individual revelation of theatric passion, a figure-piece single and alone; but the climax was at hand. The achievement of American independence had been an object-lesson most potent. Louis and his queen, Marie Antoinette, could not check the storm, and for the first time in one hundred and seventy-three years, France was to have an assembly of the nation by its representatives. The ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... climax, Mr. Kennedy, senior, pulled up, dismounted, and ran—with an expression of some anxiety on his countenance—to the help of his son, while Tom Whyte came out of the stable just in time to receive the "noo 'oss" as he floundered out of ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne

... but smile, albeit through my tears, at the climax of these threats which seemed to delight and stir the inmost soul of Ernie. His eyes flashed, his cheek crimsoned, his wide red mouth curled with disdainful ire, disclosing the small, pointed pearls ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield

... hitherto been possible for her to conceal her condition from her parents, she was unable to deceive her sister, who was her constant companion. The two girls were always bickering, and Norine had for some time lived in dread of scandal and exposure. And that day the trouble came to a climax, beginning with a trivial dispute about a bit of glass-paper in the workroom, then developing into a furious exchange of coarse, insulting language, and culminating in a frantic outburst from Euphrasie, who shrieked to ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... with regrets, took his hands from his face and gazed steadily at the tragedy nearing its climax. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely

... moment's delay. The eye must be trained to pick up the minutest detail, and must be capable of doing this for hour after hour. For those on submarine patrol in a small ship there is not one second's rest. As is well known, the submarine campaign reached its climax in April, 1917. In that month British and Allied shipping sustained its greatest losses. The value of the airship in combating this menace was now fully recognized, and with the big building programme ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale

... I would watch the sun set in always varying splendour. No two sunsets were anything like the same. Each through the ascendancy of some one shade of colour, or through an unusual combination of colour, had a special beauty of its own. I would watch each ripening to the climax and then shade away into the beauty of the night. And when the day was over the night would reveal that higher, wider life which daylight only ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... of France comes at once to a climax and a termination. His potent and melancholy voice vibrates with the accumulated passion and striving and pain of those far-off generations, and sinks mysteriously into silence with the birth of a new ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... that all that was going on in Scotland should be known without delay at the English court, and his sister was the only possible agent for the purpose. It does not appear that her treachery, now doubly odious, ever cost her the least qualm. The climax was, however, reached, when after persuading James to confide to her his private instructions to the Scottish ambassador residing in London, she contrived that the information thus obtained should be in Henry's hands ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone

... up to Basset Cottage, whither his luggage had been sent before him, he felt a little tired. He was not accustomed to violent emotions, and that morning he had gone through a good deal. His anger and anxiety had for long been fighting for mastery, and both had reached their climax that morning. On the one hand, he wished to avenge himself for the insult paid him, and to show that he was not to be trifled with; on the other hand, his anxiety lest he should be unable to make up matters with Wenna led him to put an unusual value upon ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... and seized my hand as a hint to be quiet. Then she laughed aloud. How can anyone find an amusing subject in a poor hard-brained "studiosus," who cannot grasp that rule, inevitable in every career in life, that the second syllable of dropax, antrax, climax "et caethra graeca" in the first case is long, in the second short—a rule extremely useful to a man later in life when he ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... tremendous 'ahem!' he commenced his speech standing close to little Jerry, who never took her eyes from him, but watched him with a face which varied in its expression with every variation in his voice and manner, and reached its climax when he said: 'I don't b'lieve in saddlin' the town with a debt we don't orto pay. Let the Tracys bury their own ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

... of course, not as the mere cloak of a possible blush that darkness gives courage; it is because it lulls detailed self-realization, such conscious self-realization being always a source of fears, and the blush their definite symbol and visible climax. It is to the blush that we must attribute a curious complementary relationship between the face and the sacro-pubic region as centres of anatomical modesty. The women of some African tribes who go naked, Emin Bey remarked, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... old man somewhat, but nothing availed to lift the cloud which had fallen upon his life; and the intimation of the near approach of his son's marriage with "a lady" coming upon him as it did unexpectedly, was the climax of his depression of spirits. He sat in the chimney-corner and brooded, repeating to himself ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine

... supporting the Sultan against the aggression of Russia reached its climax in the Crimean War (1854-55), which was due mainly to the efforts of the Czar Nicholas to extend his protection over the Greek Christians in Turkey. France, England, and later on the Kingdom of Sardinia ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... waiting for you. I had the balloon in sight all the while you were diving. It was a great sight to watch from below, particularly when you let go your rockets. I'll never forget it, never. But, Lord! Without the climax! Artistically, it ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall

... of Lima, vanity and the love of dress appear to have reached their climax. To this passion for personal adornment they sacrifice everything. Formerly, when none but real pearls and diamonds were worn, many a lady was known to have ruined her husband by the purchase of those costly articles; now, however, thanks to French ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... Limited, Inc. American Can Company American Metal Climax, Inc. American Telephone and Telegraph Company Arabian American Oil Company Armco International Corporation Asiatic Petroleum Corporation Bankers Trust Company Belgian Securities Corporation Bethlehem Steel Company, Inc. Brown ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot

... structurally complete, has developed. A fine accumulative tale belonging to this second class is the Cossack Straw Ox, which has been described under "The Short-Story." Here we have a single line of sequence which gets wound up to a climax and then unwinds itself to the conclusion, giving the child, in the plot, something of that pleasure which he feels in winding up his toy animals to watch them perform in ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... was composed of loops of muslin disposed on each side over a profusion of brown curls which distended the head to an enormous width, and upon the top was visible a high back-comb which quite "capped the climax." The dress of the lady was black silk, sleeves "a la mouton," and a collar of muslin with a deep frill that reached nearly to the elbows. This was fastened with a yellow glass pin, the gift of Mr. Bond on his promised possession of the fair maiden who ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... the most obvious feature of Lyly's style. That style has been carefully analyzed by those who are learned in such things. The study is interesting, with its talk of alliteration and transverse alliteration, antithesis, climax, and assonance. In truth, one does not know which to admire the more, the ingenuity of the man who constructed the book, or the ingenuity of the scholars who have explained how he did it. Between Lyly on the one hand, and the grammarians on the other, the reader ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent

... you," went on West coldly, determined now to so anger the fellow as to bring the whole matter to a climax, reckless of the consequences. "I charge you with murder. I haven't the proof, but I'll get it; I do not know the object, ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish

... been kept from work by the engrossments into which that calamity was to plunge them. The opening pages were all that existed; they were striking, they were promising, but they didn't unveil the idol. That great intellectual feat was obviously to have formed his climax. She said nothing more, nothing to enlighten me as to the state of her own knowledge—the knowledge for the acquisition of which I had fancied her prodigiously acting. This was above all what I wanted to know: had SHE seen the idol ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James

... afternoon James received a note from Mrs. Clibborn, asking him to call upon her. Mary and her father were out walking, she said, so there would be no one to disturb them, and they could have a pleasant little chat. The invitation was a climax to Jamie's many vexations, and he laughed grimly at the prospect of that very foolish lady's indignation. Still, he felt bound to go. It was, after a fashion, a point of honour with him to avoid none of the annoyances which his act had brought upon him. ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham

... or an allegory—that chain and backbone of continuous interest, implying a progress and leading up to a climax, which holds together the great poems of the world, the Iliad and Odyssey, the AEneid, the Commedia, the Paradise Lost, the Jerusalem Delivered—this is wanting in the Faery Queen. The unity is one of character and its ideal. That character of ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... seemed changed into balls of fire; she could not realize that it was Beatrice who lay there, so calm and still—Beatrice, who had knelt at her feet and prayed that she would save her—Beatrice, who had believed herself so near the climax of ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme

... to January 1842, and partly owing to his opposition to the repeal of the corn laws was known as the "Farmers' Friend." He found the estates heavily encumbered when he succeeded to the dukedom in 1839, and his own generous and luxurious tastes brought matters to a climax. In 1847 his residences were seized by his creditors, and the duke left England. His personal property and many of his landed estates were sold, and returning to England he devoted himself to literature. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... strained attention. The girl could not help it, though she dreaded the climax. Her sympathies were now with the hard-pressed, exhausted creature that was making a desperate fight for its life. The pursuers were close upon it, the swimming dogs leading them; and ahead lay a foaming rush of water which seemed less than a ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... reached the bank of the river; and now the astonishment of the botanists reached its climax, when they saw this man let down the huge animal from his shoulders, embrace it with his arms, place it before him in the water, and then mount astride upon its back! In a moment more he was out in the stream, and his buffalo swimming under him, ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid

... friendship for Yavapai Joe; his meeting with Joe which the professor had reported; his refusal to explain to Phil; his return to the ranch when everyone was away and he himself was supposed to be in Prescott—all these and many other incidents had come to their legitimate climax in his presence on that spot with Yavapai Joe, the smouldering fire and the freshly branded calf. He was unarmed, but Phil could not be sure of that, for many a cowboy carries his gun inside the leg of his leather chaps, where it does not so easily ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright

... exquisite face filled with a reflected horror, almost equaling his in force and meaning, till the two awed spectators saw in this moment of startled recognition and the up-gathering of two great natures, the oncoming of some hideous climax for which the many strange and contradictory experiences of the last few days had not ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green

... mother. "Yes," said she, "Miss Eudora has adopted a baby, and she has a baby-carriage, and she wheels it out any time she takes a notion." Ethel's speech was of the nature of an after-climax. ...
— The Yates Pride • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... and struck with the wildest consternation the entire party at the table, including even Lewis, who stood transfixed in the act of drawing a bottle of soda-water, and, letting the cork escape him in his amazement, brought affairs to an unlooked-for climax by hitting Miss Wentworth, who had been looking on with interest without taking any part in the proceedings. When the fright caused by this unintentional shot had subsided, Miss Leonora was found to have entirely recovered herself; ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... you think is going to happen now?" drawled Manning. While he guessed that Britz was setting the stage for a grand climax, he had not the remotest ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin

... moment's reflection, in the manner of the unwelcome envoy who has reached the acute juncture of his recital and is about to disembarrass himself of a dangerous climax, the ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder



Words linked to "Climax" :   point, crown, stop, occasion, male orgasm, rhetorical device, second, finish, cease, terminate, coming, degree, level, top, story, juncture, orgasm, consummation, minute, moment, climactic, end, stage, instant



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