"Grovelling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... others, worthy of the transcendent honour, the glorious task of saving souls. What was I, steeped in sin, as I had been up to the very moment of my conversion—what was I, insolent, pretending worm, that I should raise my grovelling head, and presume upon the unmerited favour that had been showered so graciously upon me? It remained for those—purest and best of men, whose lives from childhood onward had been a lucid exposition of the word of truth—whose deeds had given to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... pursuit of wealth. The deeper a man digs into the gold mine, the less able—ay, less willing—is he to breathe the sweet air of upper earth, or to bask in the daylight of heaven: downward, downward still, he casts the anchor of his grovelling affections, and neither can nor will have a heart ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... playground, and staggered half-way up the steep garden path, when Acton happening to tread on a loose pebble brought the whole procession to grief, and caused the noble band of conquering heroes to be seen all grovelling in a mixed ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... forever, she disdained to seek meaner lovers among the humbler classes. Every offer made to her by men of medium rank, was spurned by the proud harlot with supreme contempt. 'I am a companion for nobility—not for the grovelling masses,' she would reply, in answer to all such offers; nor did the pinchings of want and hunger even for a moment shake her resolution, or disarm her prejudices. She might, had she been disposed, have still lived in comfort ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... whole grovelling tribe of Leppins, outnumbering the Van Horns, possibly, are ready with oral testimony and a shower of depositions, and what all besides. Ouf! not an inch do I yield. J'y suis; j'y reste. Not an inch should anybody ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... for no repair of the inextinguishable wrong you have done me. I only ask you not to fancy that I am to be beguiled by arguments or denials or moved by threats, or that one word I here write is founded on conjecture or inference. Grovelling at my feet, in sobs of shame and with prayers for pardon, Isabel has told me all. Has told me all, Leonard Byington, my once trusted friend. Now, though prostrated on her bed, she rejoices in the double forgiveness of her husband and her priest, blessing him for deliverance ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... to the white man, it was evident that it was clearly enough understood by the Indians, who, before the speech was half over, came swarming out of their huts and prostrated themselves before Phil and Dick, grovelling in the dust. Nor did they attempt to interfere further with the Peruvian; on the contrary, they listened with the utmost attention to all that he had to say to them; and when he had finished, about a dozen of them jumped into one of the largest ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... of ease You may say anything you please, But when I join the Muse's revel, Begad, I wish you at the devil! In vain my verse I plane and bevel, Like Banville's rhyming devotees; In vain by many an artful swivel Lug in my meaning by degrees; I'm sure to hear my Henley cavil; And grovelling prostrate on my knees, Devote his body to the seas, His correspondence to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nor spared The hero for all speed prepared, But urged him with her bitter tongue, Like a good horse with lashes stung, She spoke her shameful speech. Serene He heard the fury of the queen, And to her words so vile and dread Gently, unmoved in mind, he said: "I would not in this world remain A grovelling thrall to paltry gain, But duty's path would fain pursue, True as the saints themselves are true. From death itself I would not fly My father's wish to gratify, What deed soe'er his loving son May do to please him, think it done. Amid all duties, Queen, I count This duty first and ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Percy's to try to grovel in the dust before him, but he wouldn't see me. It's no good grovelling in the dust of the front steps for the benefit of a man who's in bed on the second floor, so I withdrew in more or less good order. I then got the present idea. Mark how all things work together for good. When they ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... epistle, addressed thus early to a school-fellow who had found his way to New York. In this remarkable letter, the boy seems to have written with prophetic instinct. "To confess my weakness, Ned," he says, "my ambition is prevalent, so that I contemn the grovelling condition of a clerk or the like, to which my fortune condemns me, and would willingly risk my life, though not my character, to exalt my station.... I mean to prepare the way for futurity.... I shall conclude by saying, I wish there was a war." This may be ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... and clear. "El hijo—Agua para mi Pedrillo—No le hace pari mi—oh la noche pasado, la noche pasado!" He was told to compose himself, and that his boy would be taken care of. "Dexa me verlo entonces, oh Dios, dexa me verlo"——and he crawled, grovelling on his chest, like a crushed worm, across the deck, until he got his head over the port sill, and looked down into the boat. He there beheld the pale face of his dead son; it was the last object he ever saw, "Ay de mi!" he groaned heavily, and dropped his face against ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... one who is not in first youth, witnessing the sight in the religious atmosphere of such a church as this, without a suspicion of susceptibility, has suddenly seen what Paul saw on the road to Damascus, and has fallen on his face with the crowd, grovelling at the foot of the Cross, which, for the first time in his ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... thankful that I was able to enjoy, even at intervals, the civilising influences of female society. How different my lot to that of many poor lads away for four long years from any one who takes the slightest interest in their moral welfare, or attempts to raise their minds above the grovelling existence of their brutal associates. I should be ungrateful if I did not mention, in addition to other advantages, the benefit I derived from the society of Medley, who was truly ...
— The Two Whalers - Adventures in the Pacific • W.H.G. Kingston
... the artillery experiments were conducted, with an air of knowing all about it, and Schwartz, as usual, pursued her. The gun was sponged and loaded, and the charge was rammed home under Monsieur Dorn's supervision, Lil standing gravely by, and Schwartz grovelling in her neighbourhood. Then the old gendarme himself primed the piece, and taking a torch from a boy who stood near him applied it to the touch-hole. Out at the muzzle sprang the answering flame and roar, and away went Schwartz as if he had been projected by the force of the powder. ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... among labourers, clerks, statesmen; or whether he roar and rant, and drink and sing in taverns—a fellow over whose grave no one will breathe a single heigh-ho, except from the cobweb-tie of what is called good fellowship—who has no view nor aim but what terminates in himself—if there be any grovelling earth-born wretch of our species, a renegade to common sense, who would fain believe that the noble creature, man, is no better than a sort of fungus, generated out of nothing, nobody knows how, and soon dissipating in nothing, nobody knows ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... swarms of flies at the door of one of the Chinese guard-houses, which line the enclosing walls of the Palace. They were evidently much excited by some discovery. Wishing to learn what it was, I dismounted and pushed in. Grovelling on the ground lay an elderly Chinese, whose peculiar aspect and general demeanour made it clear what he was. He was a Palace eunuch, left here by some strange luck. The man was in a paroxysm of fear, and, pointing into ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... contemptuously. "Though it was never any good to try to fight me! If you like to have it in black and white, I've been all the brains of the business here—single-handed! It was I got the secret of the wolf bait from the mother of your lame friend here," he pointed with his unoccupied hand to my grovelling boy, "when first I followed Paulette out from New York and laid up in Skunk's Misery to wait till I had a clear way to get to La Chance. That old ass Thompson gave me that, when I scooped him up on the road. After I'd used him, two of my ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... which we now see producing only such comparatively meagre and insufficient results, actually caused animalcules to be produced from pure sand, and fishes to be created out of oysters, and birds to be generated by slimy and grovelling reptiles, and men to be born from monkeys;—if he should tell us all this, certainly we could offer no direct confutation of the wonderful tale. In regard to alleged facts of this character, the wisest of men are, and always must be, mere children. But it would be monstrous to say, that this ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... degree. That the true 'result of the natural style of gardening is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities, than in the creation of any special wonders or miracles,' is a proposition better suited to the grovelling apprehension of the herd, than to the fervid dreams of the man of genius. The merit suggested is, at best, negative, and appertains to that hobbling criticism which, in letters, would elevate Addison into apotheosis. In truth, while that merit which ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... battle; "And this time," said he, "we will make an end of it." "So be it," said the Red Knight. Then the Red Knight smote Gareth on the hand so that his sword flew from his grasp, and with another blow he brought him grovelling to the earth. At the sight of this, Linet cried aloud, and hearing her, Gareth, with a mighty effort, threw off the Red Knight, leaped to his sword, and got it again within his hand. Then he pressed the Red Knight harder than ever, and at the last bore him to the ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... needless ado about capital punishment,—taking lives, when there is no life to take. Memento mori! We don't understand that sublime sentence which some worthy got sculptured on his gravestone once. We've interpreted it in a grovelling and snivelling sense; we've ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... through the vernal wood: The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line: In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true From poisonous herbs extracts the healing dew! 220 How instinct varies in the grovelling swine, Compared, half-reasoning elephant, with thine! 'Twixt that and reason, what a nice barrier: For ever separate, yet for ever near! Remembrance and reflection how allied; What thin partitions[88] sense from thought divide: And middle natures, how they long to join, Yet never pass th' ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... by scene that strange old long-ago, Crowding my opened memory, presents Tumultuous, as in dreams, some dreadful state Wherein I knew not falsehood from the truth; Where hope ascending struck the star of Love, Then fell down headlong grovelling in despair; But rose at length and walked the beaten way. So dim and far these things; so worn and changed, I scarcely feel that I am he who sought And won her love. And is it true indeed, That I absorbed in tenderest intercourse Of trustful glance, and trustful clasping hands, With her went ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... stronger than hate, they flung themselves at her feet, prostrating their faces to the rock, grovelling like worms, heedless of all except her presence and her supremacy. She was a goddess, one whose will was destruction. Gazing down upon them, conscious of her power, her thin lips smiled in contempt. 'T ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... bow; a submissive, not to say a grovelling and an abject bow. If he had been complimented on his practice of the loftiest virtues, he never could have bowed ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... was talking about the flying machine. The brute looked as if he were quite capable of locking me up and starving or torturing me until I gave him the secret. My word, I should like to see him try! I'd have him grovelling at my feet in ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... their hallucinations circumstantially and historically with the events which had immediately preceded them. Hallucination would have been conscious of a hiatus and not have tried to bridge it over. It would not have developed the idea of our Lord's return to this grovelling and unworthy earth prior to his assumption into glory, unless those who were under its influence had either seen other resurrections from the dead—in which case there is no difficulty attaching to the Resurrection of our Lord himself—or been forced ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... assured; and Herr Frays, who had started by refusing to let her appear, was now full of grovelling apologies. He offered her a contract. But Lola, having other ideas as to how her time should be employed in ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... With a sense of grovelling meanness, Philip sat and listened. Then, with eyes wandering across the floor, he said, "You have nothing to reproach yourself with. You did everything a man could do—everything. And she was innocent also. It was the fault of another. He came between you. ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... time when certain of his private occupations—interviews with personages of wealth or influence, cryptic conversations, resulting always, however defiant the beginning, in the same grovelling pleas and promises—had amused and interested the cynic most mightily: been the cream of his labors, indeed. But latterly even these scenes had palled; and it came to him with a faint shock of surprise that he was beginning ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... the people, as a whole, is far removed, in its grovelling thought, its idolatrous practices, and its thousand-headed ritual, from the teaching of ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... language, and, by consequence, in a style that was never spoken nor written in any language or in any place. But the effect of reality and truth became conspicuous, even when the intention was to show them grovelling and degraded. These pastorals became popular, and were read with delight as just representations of rural manners and occupations by those who had no interest in the rivalry of the poets, nor knowledge of the ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... of the temple were many priests gathered around the altars, praying, weeping, grovelling in the dust. Impostors in safety, they were not the less superstitious in danger! Calenus passed them, and entered the chamber yet to be seen in the south side of the court. Burbo followed him—the priest ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... misunderstood, and, for myself, I wish to claim no exemption from the rule. My one aim is to benefit my readers, and to advance truth. For this I would sacrifice the smiles of Courts, and incur the shallow sneers of the grovelling, chowder-headed horde of flunkeys who sit in high places. My work bears witness to my merit. ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... thou heaven? there is no heaven for me. Despair, death, hell, have seized my tortured soul! When I had raised his grovelling fate from ground, To power and love, to empire, and to me; When each embrace was dearer than the first; Then, then to be contemned; then, then thrown off! It calls me old, and withered, and deformed, And loathsome! Oh! what woman can bear ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Decameronian tales and sound of lute and psaltery, unconscious of the gigantic scythe wielded by the gigantic dishevelled Death, and which, in a second, will descend and mow them to the ground; but the crowd of beggars, ragged, maimed, paralyzed, leprous, grovelling on their withered limbs, see and implore Death, and cry stretching forth their arms, their stumps, and their crutches. Further on, three kings in long embroidered robes and gold-trimmed shovel caps, Lewis the Emperor, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... multitude, have been a Brahminical caste, dissociated by an imagined essential distinction of nature. While they were exulting in this elevation and free excursiveness of mental existence, the prostrate crowd were grovelling through a life on a level with the soil where they were at last to find their graves. But this crowd it was that constituted the substance of the nation; to which, nation, in the mass, the historian applies the ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... slow down, slip out the clutch, and glide so stealthily by that the creature gets no excuse for hysterics. I used to think before you taught me to drive, and I had the experience and the responsibility myself, that you wasted time grovelling to animal prejudices; but I've changed my mind. I've learned there's no fun to be got out of pig-selfishness on the road, and leaving ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... upon our feet; we have been allowed to walk; we are beginning to smile,—that is, some of us. Those whose fathers were helped on are nearer the man as he should be than those whose fathers are still grovelling. My child, I think, stands a perfect type of what culture and refinement can give. She is not an exception; there are thousands like her among our Jewish girls. Take any intrinsically pure-souled Jew from his coarser surroundings and give him the highest advantages, and he ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... and get it down on paper. It isn't exactly the same as, let us say, Shakespeare's point of view: but if you feel that he has seen everything worth seeing, and said everything worth saying, then, of course, it is no good going on. But that is pure grovelling; no lively person ever does feel that—he says, 'Hang it, he has left some things out!' After all, everyone has a right to his point of view, and if it can be expressed, why, it is worth expressing. We want all the sidelights ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Mr. Bumble, grasping his cane tightly, as was his wont when working into a passion: 'juries is ineddicated, vulgar, grovelling wretches.' ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... while owing his every comfort as well as the continuance of his race, to woman, denied her every intellectual initiative! 'Who would have thought that a woman'—could do anything but bend low before a man with grovelling humility saying 'My lord, here am I, the waiting vessel of your lordship's pleasure!—possess me or I die!' We have changed that ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... style of writing is a caput mortuum of impotent spite and dulness, till it is varnished over with the slime of servility, and thrown into a state of unnatural activity by the venom of the most rancorous bigotry. The eminent professors in this grovelling department are at first merely out of sorts with themselves, and vent their spleen in little interjections and contortions of phrase—cry Pish at a lucky hit, and Hem at a fault, are smart on personal defects, and sneer at 'Beauty out of favour and on crutches'—are thrown into an ague-fit ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... modified by the world's progress—was her tenet, and she had no scruple in partaking in any act of worship; while naturally conscientious, and loving all the virtues, she viewed the terrors of religion as the scourge of the grovelling and superstitious; or if suffering existed at all, it could be only as expiation, conducting to a condition of high intellect and perfect morality. No other view, least of all that of a vicarious atonement, seemed to her worthy ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... never on this earth lead a wholly fair and harmonious life, however much they strive. Yet do what you can. If in one act,—for one day,—you can do right, let that live like a point of light in your memory; for if you have done well once you can again. If you fall, do not lie grovelling; but rise upon your feet once more, and struggle bravely on. And if aroused conscience makes you suffer keenly, have patience to bear it. God will not let you suffer more than you need to fit you for his grace. At the very moment ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... their enemies, and could rejoice in having inflicted upon them more injury than they had themselves received. Though they had not captured or annihilated them, they had done enough to inspire and fully sustain their own grovelling pride. ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... of the founder of the shop was also reckoned, to begin with, as good as his professional neighbours. He was college-bred, like his father, as Dora in her jealousy for the dignity of her first lover had stated. This was "all to begin with." Whether because it was advisable, or from mere grovelling instincts, he dropped in turn both the mill and the factory, neither of which did more than pay its way, and retained the shop, which was understood to be a lucrative concern. He did worse; though ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... any grade of desert in intellect or character, can climb to any public distinction, no matter what, in America, without first grovelling down upon the earth, and bending the knee before this monster of depravity; when any private excellence is safe from its attacks, and when any social confidence is left unbroken by it, or any tie of social decency and honor is held in the least regard; when any man in that free country has ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... few paltry dollars—who will debase himself for gain—whose gross sensuality suffocates all high, spiritual love? No! no! It is impossible! And she who unites herself with such a man, must either shrink, grovelling, down to his mean level, or be ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... although evidently not without some inward apprehension. It was a piteous sight—the poor distorted reasoning faculty grovelling as a slave to ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... vanity, nurtured by selfishness and unchecked by religion, became a disease, amounting perhaps to monomania, and yielding one lesson to repay the world for his existence, viz. that there is no state of the soul so dangerous as that in which the vices of the sensualist are envenomed by the grovelling intellect of ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... the deadly nature of that accident. It must have been a pretty sight, the fierce industry of these beggars toiling on a motionless ship that floated quietly in the silence of a world asleep, fighting against time for the freeing of that boat, grovelling on all-fours, standing up in despair, tugging, pushing, snarling at each other venomously, ready to kill, ready to weep, and only kept from flying at each other's throats by the fear of death that stood silent behind them like an inflexible ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... death of her mother, which had immediately followed it. At other times she congratulated herself for having repulsed far from her two wretched creatures, who, she said, had both dishonoured their family by their grovelling inclinations. Sometimes, at the sight of the many miserable objects with which Paris abounds, she would fly into a rage, and exclaim,—"Why are not these idle people sent off to the colonies?" As for the notions of humanity, virtue and ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... in philosophy, grovelling through Diogenes Laertius—Plutarch's "Placita" and sich—and often wondering whether the schoolmasters have any better ground for maintaining that Greek is a finer language than English than the fact that they can't ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... I were you," replied the doctor; "you will find, I fear, a very grovelling and commonplace reality. Felipe, for instance, I have seen. And what am I to say? He is very rustic, very cunning, very loutish, and, I should say, an innocent; the others are probably to match. No, no, senor ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I conform to the maxims of worldly wisdom? can I listen to the cold dictates of worldly prudence and bid my tumultuous passions cease to vex me, be still, find content in grovelling pursuits, and the admiration of the misjudging crowd, when it is only one I wish to please—one who could be all the world to me. Argue not with me, I am bound by human ties; but did my spirit ever promise to love, or could I consider when forced to bind myself—to take a vow, that ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... jolly amusement—the opportunity's too good to be lost! What exhilaration there is on seeing a human soul imbruted and grovelling hopelessly in the dirt or rather to have a body before you, without a soul for the time being—a coarse animal mass, swinish as those whom the wand of Circe smote, but with the human intelligence quenched ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... would take the life of a human being no longer able to give me blow for blow. I loosed my clutch as from a leprous wound, and the Indian gasped again for mercy. Standing upright, I spurned the form grovelling now at ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... sick and wounded tend,—soothe the distressed. If thy weak arm cannot protect, yet plead With bold rebuke the cause of the oppressed, Kindling hot shame in Mammon's votaries, Abashed, at least, in lucre's grovelling quest; And, in the toil-worn serf, a glad surprise Awakening—when, from brute despondency, Taught to look up to heaven with dazzled eyes.— Thus mayst thou do God service,—thus apply Thyself, within thy limit, to abate What wickedness thou seest, or misery: ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... grovelling soul, who know'st not honour's worth, But weigh'st it out in mercenary scales! The secret pleasure of a generous act Is the ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... nothing when a great ideal lies ahead. I for one would rather die following a noble vision than lie grovelling among the broken shards of life. It was that which led so many to sacrifice their all in the Great War. Lack of vision means repression, and often ruin; ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... contentedly down a ladder into a cellar, and calls THAT going home, is a circumstance so amazing as to leave one nothing more in this connexion to wonder at. Otherwise I might wonder at the completeness with which these fowls have become separated from all the birds of the air—have taken to grovelling in bricks and mortar and mud—have forgotten all about live trees, and make roosting-places of shop-boards, barrows, oyster-tubs, bulk-heads, and door-scrapers. I wonder at nothing concerning them, and take them as they are. I accept as products of Nature and ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... The youth grovelling before him wondered to see him calm, and plucking up spirit stood upright. "You must go back to her, and ask her to get it for you," Blondel said firmly. "You can be back within ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... upon public and private morals, are seen in the idle, sauntering habits, which the use of it engenders,—in the benumbing, grovelling, stupid sensations which it induces,—but especially in perpetuating and extending the practice ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler
... and instantly a soldier swooped upon the grovelling figure, twitched him to his feet and drew him apart, stuttering furious protestations ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... roughly, for the other had dropped upon the floor and was grovelling in drunken hysterics at his feet. "It makes me sick to see a man act like ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... from the love of accumulation, the case would have been totally different. He might then have been justly despised, and characterized as being of the earth, earthy—incapable of high and generous sentiments and aspirations—sordid, grovelling, and utterly despicable. Sir William Follett had, during twenty years of intense and self-denying toil, succeeded in acquiring an ample fortune, which he disposed of, at his death, justly and generously; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... forward, and beat so heavily upon the other's helm that it cracked. Sir Caradoc strove to guard himself, but Sir Lancelot was so wroth, and so mighty of his blows, that he could not. At last Sir Lancelot beat him to his knees, and then thrust him grovelling to the ground. Sir Lancelot bade him yield, but he would not, and still sought to thrust at the other. Then the young knight struck at him between the neck and the head ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... young knight saw his shield cloven asunder he was a little ashamed of that stroke and of her language, and then he gave the other such a buffet upon the helm that he fell on his knees, and Fair-hands quickly pulled him upon the ground grovelling. Then the Green Knight cried for mercy, and yielded himself unto Sir Fair-hands, and prayed him to ...
— Stories of King Arthur and His Knights - Retold from Malory's "Morte dArthur" • U. Waldo Cutler
... that, if that be such a crime to you, O strew me forth upon the watery waste, And drown me in the deep. If death be due, 'Twere sweet of death by human hands to taste.' He cried, and, grovelling, our knees embraced, And, clasping, clung to us. We bid him stand And tell his birth and trouble; and in haste Himself the sire Anchises pledged his hand, And he at length took heart, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... imaginings, nay, of the wickedest, which ever disgraced an immortal being? What will you say, when heaven and hell are before you, and the books are opened, and therein you find the sum total of your youthful desires and dreams, your passionate wishes for things of this world, your low-minded, grovelling tastes, your secret contempt and aversion for serious subjects and persons, your efforts to attract the looks of sinners and to please those who displease God; your hankerings after worldly gaieties and luxuries, your ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... How have you deceived me! That mind which I esteemed so great and valiant, proves to be feeble, puerile, and grovelling, a slave to vulgar errors, and ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... wooer? Thou?"—so taunted they— "Nay! Merely poet! A brute insidious, plundering, grovelling, That aye must lie, That wittingly, wilfully, aye must lie: For booty lusting, Motley masked, Self-hidden, shrouded, Himself his booty— HE—of truth the wooer? Nay! Mere fool! Mere poet! Just motley speaking, From mask of fool confusedly shouting, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... perhaps, no remedy. Human nature has not yet shed all the monkey. A lingering and grovelling baseness in the average heart delights in this sort of cast-off clothes of fellow-worms. But if the trade must continue, can we not insist that the profits be shared? If A is to receive ten dollars ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... become a partizan in extensive measures for the supposed temporal benefit of the community, to indulge the vision of great things which are to come, great improvements, great wonders: all things vast, all things new,—this most fearfully earthly and grovelling spirit is likely, alas! to extend itself more and more among our countrymen,—an intense, sleepless, restless, never-wearied, never-satisfied, pursuit of Mammon in one shape or other, to the exclusion ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... animal already alluded to, actuated by an overweening desire of notoriety, and in order to catch the applause of some one, grovelling in the morasses of insignificance and vice, like himself, leaves his native obscurity, and indulges in falsehood, calumny, and defamation. I am convinced that none of the highly respectable Teachers of ———— has had any participation ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... exercised upon opinion during their brief career, and the permanent impression which they have left upon European literature, claim for them especial notice. Before their time, alchymy was but a grovelling delusion; and theirs is the merit of having spiritualised and refined it. They also enlarged its sphere, and supposed the possession of the philosopher's stone to be, not only the means of wealth, but of health and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... strong, a smile was on his lips, and he looked into the distance with lifted face and flashing eye, as if a glorious vision had arisen there. A touch on his foot brought him to himself. Pepehi was grovelling before him, baring his breast and offering to Kamehameha the poisoned dagger he had but a few moments before aimed at the young king's heart. Lifting him from the ground, Kamehameha comforted the priest with a few words ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... subject to the same restrictions. It was, indeed, scandalous in Mr. Hastings, not behaving like a good, fair colleague in office, not to let them know that he was going on in this career of receiving bribes, and to deprive them of their share in the glory of it: but they were grovelling creatures, who thought that keeping clean hands was some virtue.—"Well, but you have applied some of these bribes to your own benefit: why did you give no account of those bribes?" "I did not," he says, "because it might have excited the envy of my colleagues." To be sure, if he ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... her heart first sank and then violently rebelled against the contrast of this hideous place with the light and colour she had left. She was a rebel. The contrast was too great. How could she live in a room like this? How could anybody live? It was not life at all, but a mere grovelling. And Sally had tasted something that thrilled her. She had come into contact with a life resembling the life led by those who travelled in the motor broughams she so much admired. She was ravenous for such a life. ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... but not yet in heaven. Below is seen the earthly life, poor humanity struggling helplessly with pain, infirmity, and death. The father brings his son, the possessed, or, as we should now say, the epileptic boy, who ofttimes falls into the water or into the fire, or lies grovelling on the earth, foaming and gnashing his teeth; the boy struggles in his arms—the rolling eyes, the distorted features, the spasmodic limbs are at once terrible ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... word means the soul. There is no illustration of the immortality of the soul so striking and beautiful as the butterfly, bursting on brilliant wings from the tomb in which it has lain, after a dull, grovelling caterpillar existence, to flutter in the blaze of day and feed on the most fragrant and delicate productions of the spring. Psyche, then, is the human soul, which is purified by sufferings and misfortunes, ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... the profession which he disgraced, grovelling in his tastes, indiscreet, if not licentious, in his habits, he lived unhonoured and died unlamented, save by those who found amusement in his wit or countenance ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... formidable jaws and long claws. Gerard, in a fury of excitement and agitation, flung himself on it, and delivered a tremendous blow on its nose with his axe, and the creature staggered; another, and it lay grovelling, with ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... courage failed him: he dared not launch the new thought boldly. He wrote a grovelling preface, endeavouring to excuse Copernicus for his novel idea, and in this he inserted the apologetic lie that Copernicus had propounded the doctrine of the earth's movement not as a fact, but as a hypothesis. He declared that it was lawful ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... a coward with my lips Who dare to question all things in my soul; Some men may find their wisdom on their knees, Some prone and grovelling in the dust like slaves; Let the meek glow-worm glisten in the dew; I ask to lift my taper to the sky As they who hold their lamps above their heads, Trusting the larger currents up aloft, Rather than ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... squat beetle, vigorous for his size, Pushing tail-first by every road that's wrong The dung-ball of his dirty thoughts along His tiny sphere of grovelling sympathies— Has knocked himself full-butt, with blundering trouble, Against a mountain he can neither double Nor ever hope to scale. So like a free, Pert, self-conceited scarabaeus, he Takes it into his horny head to swear There's no such ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... discovered your ineffable baseness, you have made me mistress of your lot? While you seemed but a demon of vengeance, you commanded terror, and to good purpose; but such a foul fiend as thou hast of late shown thyself—such a very worthless, base trickster of the devil—such a sordid grovelling imp of perdition, can gain nothing but scorn from ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... types and shadows, but in truth. In compassion to human infirmity, numerous ceremonies were originally appointed, to impress awe, and to fill the mind of man with a sense of the majesty of God. The conceptions of a fallen creature being too grovelling at first to comprehend the invisible realities of religion, a system of service was admitted which tended to produce general impressions by an appeal to the external senses, and thus slowly to insinuate sublimer facts, and prepare ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... stiff mind to hold itself upright Against the cords of devilish suggestion Tackled about it, though kept downward strained With sly, masterful winches made of fear. Yea, when the mind is warned what engines mean To ply it into grovelling, and thought set firm, The tugging strings fail like a cobweb-stuff. Not as in Baghdad is it with me now; Nor canst thou, Satan, by a prating mouth Fell my tall purpose to a flatlong scorn. I can divide the check of God's own hand From tempting such as this: India is mine!— Ay, fiend, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... the varied methods, John Gunter, the fisherman, preferred the grub-and-grovelling method, and the favourite scene of his grovelling was a low grog-shop in one of the lower parts ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... against the household gods of Ilium; for that, if our wrong and guilt is so great, throw [605-639]me piecemeal on the flood or plunge me in the waste sea. If I do perish, gladly will I perish at human hands." He ended; and clung clasping our knees and grovelling at them. We encourage him to tell who he is and of what blood born, and reveal how Fortune pursues him since then. Lord Anchises after little delay gives him his hand, and strengthens his courage by visible pledge. At last, laying ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... him, and forbore to utter any of those pious commonplaces by which she might have attempted to bring him to a better frame of mind. She had tact enough to divine that he was best left to himself—left to struggle out of this grovelling state by some effort of his own, rather than to be dragged from the slough of despond by moral ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... here and there at the will of waves, and to have no spring nor mind of its own; or else that it has at least no springy intention and elasticity of purpose, but only a knobby, knotty, prickly, malignant stubbornness, and incoherent opiniativeness; crawling about, and coggling, and grovelling, and aggregating {161} anyhow, like the minds of so ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... that those various kinds of armour, and multitudinous names of nations, never heard of before, Dahans, and Medes, and Caducians, and Elymaeans, are nothing more than Syrians, a race possessed of such grovelling souls, as to be much fitter for slaves than for soldiers. I wish, Achaeans, that I could exhibit to your view the rapid excursions of this mighty monarch from Demetrias; first, to Lamia, to the council of the Aetolians; ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... "been accused of ambition in presenting this measure. Ambition! inordinate ambition! Low, grovelling souls who are utterly incapable of elevating themselves to the higher and nobler duties of pure patriotism—beings who, forever keeping their own selfish aims in view, decide all public measures by their presumed influence on their own aggrandizement—judge ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... realized that no tinge of cynicism, no affectation of contempt for his country and countrymen lurked in his heart, while erudition and foreign sojourning seemed only to have warmed and intensified his sympathy with all noble aims—his compassion for all grovelling ones. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... serpent opened his golden mouth and fell to laughing. The thought that this little mortal, grovelling before him, could believe himself able to repay the kindnesses ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... dare to breathe lest they should miss a point of her beauty! Ah, you would know, could you see it all, upon whose side the glory lies and upon whose the shame! Compare that moment of exaltation with the grovelling life of your Christians! Low-minded, flesh-devouring, Christians, discerning not the difference between clean and unclean! Bah! And you would have my little Sellamal leave all this ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... shall carry off great glory to the ships for the Achaians, having slain Hector, for all his thirst for fight. No longer is it possible for him to escape us, not even though far-darting Apollo should travail sore, grovelling before the Father, aegis-bearing Zeus. But do thou now stand and take breath, and I will go and persuade this man to confront ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... your door, was none other than a fairy prince, who will this very day lift you from the slough of grovelling poverty to the realms of affluence and ...
— Oh! Susannah! - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Mark Ambient
... babbled beatifically about the Catholic Church.... "Two big men like that gabbling like a couple of priest-smitten flappers!" said Gilbert in disgust as he listened to them. "Them and their Cathlik Church!" he added, imitating Belloc's way of pronouncing the word "Catholic." Mouldy, grovelling, fat Papists! he called them, and vowed that he would resign from the Improved Tories if any more of that sort were asked to address them. That was because some one had suggested that Cecil Chesterton ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... the room and joins WILLIAM, who is still grovelling on the floor, and goes on her ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... brought her, he had imagined himself a great writer, a man with a compelling message to his fellows. It seemed only necessary to reach out his hand in order to grasp a chaplet—a crown. With her the world seemed his debtor. Now he was a thing cast off, a broken boy grovelling at the foot of the ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Yet vilest reptiles in their begging prose. Mark, how their lofty independent spirit Soars on the spurning wing of injured merit! Seek not the proofs in private life to find Pity the best of words should be but wind! So, to heaven's gates the lark's shrill song ascends, But grovelling on the earth the carol ends. In all the clam'rous cry of starving want, They dun Benevolence with shameless front; Oblige them, patronise their tinsel lays— They persecute you all your future days! Ere my poor ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... I declare!" he exclaimed loftily. "But there, what can you expect from a low, grovelling beetle? Away, sir, pass on! Your very presence is distasteful to me. The idea of placing ME upon the same level—in the same family, as a low-born, mean, insignificant, utterly valueless——" Here the ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... hardly call to mind any other so thoroughly calculated to turn the average well-constructed man or woman into an exuberantly incurable idiot. For what does it amount to when we come to pan it out? If there exist grounds for the misgiving, why then it is going begging—grovelling for something which the other party has not got to give; if groundless, is it not a fulfilling of the homely old saw relating to cutting off one's nose to spite one's face? (We disclaim any intent to pun.) In either case it ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... may follow Jacob, as he stole from the tents of Isaac, a wanderer like the first fugitive, with his brother's curse upon him. Until this hour all Jacob's views and feelings seem earthly and grovelling. Until now, there has been no indication of that trust and piety which afterwards marked his life. He had seemed worldly, cunning, ready to snatch any personal advantage. From this period he seems ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... the world. We wish to conquer that world, with angels at our head, in order that we may establish the happiness of man by a divine dominion, and crushing the political atheism that is now desolating existence, utterly extinguish the grovelling tyranny ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... churchyard at night was a position so little to his taste, that he had drunk pretty heavily in the public-house for half an hour before-hand, to keep up his spirits. And now he had been paid back in his own coin, and lay grovelling in the mud, and calling profanely on the Lord, whose mercy such men always cry for in their trouble, if they never ask it for their sins. He was so confused and blinded by drink and fright, that he did not see the second ghost ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... no rest anywhere else; there is no peace, no pleasure, no satisfaction—except close at His side. 'Speak Lord! for Thy servant heareth.' 'To whom shall we go but unto Thee? Thou hast the words of eternal life.' Look how these disciples, grovelling there on their faces, were raised by the gentle hand laid upon their shoulder, and the blessed voice that brought them back to consciousness, and how, as they looked about them with dazed eyes, all was gone. The vision, the cloud, Moses and Elias—the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... release which comes with acceptance: not connivance in dishonour, but recognition of evil. Out of that dark vision light was to come, the shaft of cloud turning to the pillar of fire. For here, at last, life lay before her as it was: not brave, garlanded and victorious, but naked, grovelling and diseased, dragging its maimed limbs through the mud, yet lifting piteous hands to the stars. Love itself, once throned aloft on an altar of dreams, how it stole to her now, storm-beaten and scarred, ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... to the hooks, not another word will I say of Sakr-el-Bahr. Shall I unveil the truth to be spurned and scorned and dubbed a liar and the mother of lies?" Then abruptly changing she fell to weeping. "O source of my life!" she cried to him, "how cruelly unjust to me thou art!" She was grovelling now, a thing of supplest grace, her lovely arms entwining his knees. "When my love for thee drives me to utter what I see, I earn but thy anger, which is more than I can endure. I swoon beneath the weight ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... them with a serene ignorance of the fact that they were offered; and at this she strayed off on a little by-way in her revery, and thought how it was his mind, always, that charmed her; it was no ignoble fondness she felt; no poor, grovelling pleasure in his good looks, though she had always seen that in a refined sort he had a great deal of manly beauty. But she had held her soul aloof from all that, and could truly say that what she adored in him was the beauty of his talent, which he seemed no more conscious of than of his dreamy ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... this very question that was so earnestly asked by Mill. 'The ultimate end of education,' says Professor Huxley, 'is to promote morality and refinement, by teaching men to discipline themselves, and by leading them to see that the highest, as it is the only content, is to be attained not by grovelling in the rank and steaming valleys of sense, but by continually striving towards those high peaks, where, resting in eternal calm, reason discerns the undefined but bright ideal of the highest good—"a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night."' And these words are an ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... inspired with the belief that life is a great and noble calling; not a mean and grovelling thing that we are to shuffle through as we can, but an ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... who still believe in the possibility of a reconciliation with France, who still think that the pen should smoothen the rugged path before us, or unravel the knot of our difficulties—those cowardly, grovelling hearts are the real enemies of our cause, and more dangerous than Napoleon with all his armies. For they are weighing down our courage, paralyzing our arms, and stifling our enthusiasm. But for them the king, who, in his modesty, is utterly unaware ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... by Louise and Patsy. The young horseman who had come to their assistance so opportunely was none other than Count Ferralti, whom they had such good reason to distrust. He was sitting upon his horse and staring with amazement at Beth, at whose feet the driver was grovelling while tears flowed down his bronzed cheeks and he protested in an absurd mixture of English and Italian, by every saint in the calendar, that the girl had saved him from a frightful death and he would devote his ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... in any scheme, therefore you may feel secure in this," replied Miss Malison, with ready flattery; for she knew Miss Grahame's love of designing, and really felt gratified at any plan tending to injure Mrs. Hamilton, whom she detested with all the malevolence of a mean and grovelling mind, which despised the virtue that was too exalted for ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... it is consistently comprehensible only by supposing HIM a slave to destiny. Among such vassals to a worse than earthly tyranny, the man who as 'a Scottish servant regarded not his own life or that of any other save his master,' would find doctrines congenial enough to his grovelling nature. So he was willing to believe that 'that which was written of me a million years before I saw the light must be executed by me.' 'I am well taught, and strong in belief,' he says, 'that man does nought for himself; he is but the foam ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... like a lightning flash upon a dark night. I had heard of the vagaries of a woman's love, but was it possible that this spirited woman loved that poor creature whom I had seen grovelling last night in a frenzy of fear? But now I remembered also where I had seen the name Sibylle. It was upon the fly-leaf of his book. 'Lucien, from Sibylle,' was the inscription. I recalled also that my uncle had said something to ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... erroneous. It is the product of the selfish heart. No sentiment is more fertile in covetousness, or more blighting to that generous humanity, which it is the first object of the Christian to cherish. It is a sentiment grovelling in its tendency, bowing multitudes, it is feared, even of professedly good men, to a species of slavery, over which devils smile, and angels weep; knowing that it obstructs the flow of thousands into the treasury of the Lord. A sentiment so hurtful should ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... her head in quick negative, striving to keep Peggy from saying more. But Tzaritza had crawled to Peggy's feet and was literally grovelling there in abject misery. ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... belief in these declarations, in their most literal sense, becomes the calm and settled habit of the soul, is life ever redeemed from drudgery and dreary emptiness, and made full of interest, meaning, and divine significance. Not till then do its grovelling wants, its wearing cares, its stinging vexations, become to us ministering spirits, each one, by a silent but certain agency, fitting us for a higher and ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Richard crying for her upstairs. She dragged herself up at once, but remembered and fell grovelling on the floor and wept. But Richard continued to call for her, and she struggled to her feet and made her way up the stairs, clinging to the banisters. She looked over her shoulder at the loathed room and was amazed to see that this mawkish early morning light showed it ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... vain. Here the yellow grains will be harvested, which buy the smiles of beauty, blunt the sword of justice, and tempt the wavering conscience of young and old. It will bring the human herd to one grovelling level—human swine rooting after the concrete token of power. Here, in later years, the wicked arm of power will be given golden hammers to beat down all before it. Here will that generation arise wherein the golden helmet can dignify the ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... sovereignty. He was noted for his keen logic, his clear statements and demonstrations of facts, and his profound earnestness. Webster said concerning him that he had "the indisputable basis of high character, unspotted integrity, and honor unimpeached. Nothing grovelling, low, or mean, or selfish came near ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... their rifles. The wretches fell upon their knees and howled for mercy. While Deppingham was holding his wife's limp form in his arms, calling out to her in the agony of fear, utterly oblivious to all else that was happening about him, his two friends were swiftly disarming the grovelling natives. Selim's knife severed the cords that bound Bobby Browne's hands; he was staring blankly, dizzily before him, and many minutes passed before he was able to comprehend that deliverance ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... new master's character had other elements besides that of the highest respectability. In plain terms, I found him to be a pretty equal compound by nature, of the fool, the tyrant, and the coward. There was only one direction in which what grovelling sympathies he had, could be touched to some purpose. Save him waste, or get him profit; and he was really grateful. I succeeded in working both these marvels. His managing man cheated him; I found it out; refused to be bribed to ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... pessimism that haunts their literature, and the dram-drinking habits of the peasantry. The Muscovite temperament and the Muscovite climate naturally lead to idealist strivings against the hardships of life or a dull grovelling amongst them. Melancholy or vodka is the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... collect my scattered senses, I found myself nearly suffocated, and grovelling in utter darkness among a quantity of loose earth, which was also falling upon me heavily in every direction, threatening to bury me entirely. Horribly alarmed at this idea, I struggled to gain my feet, and at last succeeded. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Every generation makes the discovery, that its divine vigor has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely? When ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... playfulness of nature, sometimes vouchsafed even to the cow, like to imagine themselves advanced people, 'destroyers,' and to push themselves into the 'new movement,' and this quite sincerely. Meanwhile the really new people are very often unobserved by them, or even despised as reactionaries of grovelling tendencies. But I don't think there is any considerable danger here, and you really need not be uneasy for they never go very far. Of course, they might have a thrashing sometimes for letting their fancy run away with them and to teach them their place, but no more; in fact, even this isn't ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... and crawling into the firelight. Grey Beaver saw him, and stopped munching the tallow. White Fang crawled slowly, cringing and grovelling in the abjectness of his abasement and submission. He crawled straight toward Grey Beaver, every inch of his progress becoming slower and more painful. At last he lay at the master's feet, into whose possession he now surrendered himself, voluntarily, body and soul. Of his own choice, ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... that lifts them up to high degree, And treads us down in grovelling misery, England affords these glorious vagabonds That carried erst their fardels on their backs Coursers to ride on through the gazing streets, Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits, And pages to attend their masterships. With ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... the ambition to propagate one's own creed, and proselytize victoriously; hungerings to see self reflected in another convinced. In such efforts lie dangers as vulgar as the minds that make them, and love the excitement of them. But genuine love is far beyond such grovelling delights; and the peril of such a relation is in inverse proportion to the ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... nor the stalls of your cathedrals. No! let the venerable orders of the hierarchy exist with all their advantages. And shall I tell them, I reject your just and reasonable petition, not because it shakes the church, but because there are others, while you lie grovelling upon the earth, that will kick and bite you? Judge which of these descriptions of men comes with a fair request—that, which says, Sir, I desire liberty for my own, because I trespass on no man's conscience;—or the other, which says, I desire that these men should not ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... mountains prop the skies, And round the smiling landscape lies, Whilst you look down with tearful eyes On grovelling man, My sympathetic fancy flies, The ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... never goes beyond veracity, with which he salutes them. Their Christian character, like seeds sown in some favoured tropical land, had sprung up swiftly; yet not with the dangerous kind of swiftness which presages decay of the growth. It was only a few days since they had been grovelling before idols, but now he can speak of 'your work of faith, and labour of love, and patience of hope' . . . and declare that the Gospel 'sounded out' from them—the word which he employs is that which is technically used for the blast of a trumpet—'so that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... wretched man! who then shall raise thee up From this thy dark estate, forlorn and lost? The Patriarch said. The Angel answered mild, His God, who destined him to noblest ends! 350 But mutual intercourse shall stir at first The sunk and grovelling spirit, and from sleep The sullen energies of man rouse up, As of a slumbering giant. He shall walk Sublime amid the works of GOD: the earth Shall own his wide dominion; the great sea Shall toss in vain its roaring waves; his eye Shall scan the bright ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... he had decided to leave and was asking himself where he should next abide. One of his delights was to return to a house which he had quitted years ago, to behold the excitement and bustle occasioned by his appearance, and play the good-natured autocrat over grovelling dependents. In every case, save the two already mentioned, he had parted with his landlady on terms of friendliness, never vouchsafing a reason for his going away, genially eluding every attempt to obtain an explanation, and at the last abounding in graceful recognition of all that had ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... somewhat necessary to show with what sudden and violent agitation Thor caught a certain warm, close smell as he came around the end of a mass of huge boulders. He stopped, turned his head, and swore in his low, growling way. Six feet away from him, grovelling flat in a patch of white sand, wriggling and shaking for all the world like a half-frightened puppy that had not yet made up its mind whether it had met a friend or an enemy, was a lone bear cub. It was not more than three months old—altogether too young to be away from its mother; ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... political rights should be trampled under foot by foreigners, introduced through a breach in the Constitution." The Federal opposition to the proposed War of 1812 has been described. It was a result of the "low, grovelling parsimony of the counting-room," as Clay ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... oppressed humanity. Yet it was inevitable that baser minds should fail to recognise his purity. While he exhausted his life for the emancipation of a people, it was easy to ascribe all his struggles to the hope of founding a dynasty. It was natural for grovelling natures to search in the gross soil of self-interest for the sustaining roots of the tree beneath whose branches a nation found its shelter. What could they comprehend of living fountains and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... audience wholly unprepared to accept it. For instance, in Monsieur Alphonse, a husband, on discovering that his wife has had an intrigue before their marriage, and that a little girl whom she wishes to adopt is really her daughter, instantly raises her from the ground where she lies grovelling at his feet, and says: "Creature de Dieu, toi qui as failli et te repens, releve toi, je te pardonne." This evangelical attitude on the part of Admiral de Montaiglin was in itself very surprising, and perhaps not wholly ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... now refer to the miserable and grovelling Chinese, who are fed on it almost from the cradle, but to the ordinary cases of educated and intellectual men in this country and in Europe; and I assert that, could there be a realization of all the aspirations, all the longings after the pure, the good and noble that fill the mind and ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... earnest love of order in things intellectual, in every excess of disorder in things material, and his passionate love of the beautiful could be profaned by frequent grovelling amid the hideous deformities of vice. Poe, in his reverence for Art (his only reverence), seemed generally to set greater store on the elaborate and artistic perfection of his works, than in the spontaneity of genius therein displayed. So it would ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of the old man's redemption. The girl herself was a mere child, I shall never forget her face on her wedding day. But she's been plucky since then, I must say. If she has suffered, she hasn't shown it. I don't suppose Longworth ever ill-treats her. He isn't that sort. He's simply a grovelling cad—that's all. Nobody would sympathise much with the poor devil if his wife did ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... usage, until the bruised wings quivered with pain. But an hour spent with Mrs. De Lisle left her in a very different state. True thoughts were stirred, and the soul lifted upwards into regions of light and beauty. There was no grovelling about the earth, no fanning of selfish fires into smoky flames, no probing of half-closed wounds until the soul writhed in a new-born anguish—but instead, hopeful words, lessons of duty, and the introduction of an ennobling spiritual philosophy, ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... the twenty francs began to seem a thing possible, he tried to get work as an engraver. A young woman in a shop took pity on him, gave him work and food, and perhaps permitted him to make dumb and grovelling love to her, until her husband returned home and drove her client away from the door with threats and the waving of a wand not magical.[31] Rousseau's self-love sought an explanation in the natural fury of an Italian husband's jealousy; but we ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... beings were permanently crowded together in dwellings centuries old, built upon ancient drains and vaults that were constantly exposed to the inundations of the river and always reeking with its undried slime; a little, pale-faced, crooked-legged, eager-eyed people, grubbing and grovelling in masses of foul rags for some tiny scrap richer than the rest and worthy to be sold apart; a people whose many women, haggard, low-speaking, dishevelled, toiled half doubled together upon the darning ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... remain silent; it had already been promised to Mr Oriel; that promise she swore should not be kept. He was an apostate, she said, from his principles; an utter pervert; a false, designing man, with whom she would never have trusted herself alone on dark mornings had she known that he had such grovelling, worldly inclinations. So Miss Gushing became an Independent Methodist; the credence-table covering was cut up into slippers for the preacher's feet; and the young thing herself, more happy in this direction than she had been in the other, became the arbiter ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... grovelling numbers fill'd his page, Dennis had never kindled into rage. 'Tis the sublime that hurt the critic's ease; Write nonsense, and he ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... two yards' distance from him. There was an unconquerable repulsion for her in that monkish aspect; it seemed to her the brand of the dastardly undutifulness which had left her father desolate—of the grovelling superstition which could give such undutifulness the name of piety. Her father, whose proud sincerity and simplicity of life had made him one of the few frank pagans of his time, had brought her up with a silent ignoring of any claims the Church could have to regulate the belief and action of ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... all this without fail to Kotsuke no Suke, and he, when he heard how Kuranosuke, having turned his wife and children out of doors and bought a concubine, was grovelling in a life of drunkenness and lust, began to think that he had no longer anything to fear from the retainers of Takumi no Kami, who must be cowards, without the courage to avenge their lord. So by degrees he began to keep a less strict watch, and ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... her, all bent and grovelling, arms outstretched in ludicrous bewilderment, every line of him beseeching guidance along this ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini |
