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There were days of gale and tempest, when the shriveled stalks of giant oats were stricken like trees, and lay across each other in rigid angles, and a roar as of the sea came up from the writhing treetops in the sunken valley.
Archfield, always leaving her to herself," but generally very well amused, especially when a group of gentlemen, officers, and county neighbours gathered round the open door talking to the ladies within. Peregrine was there with his hands in his pockets, and a queer ironical smile writhing his features. He was asked if his father and brother were present. "Not my father," he replied.
But at last the visible world, the wall before him, commenced to dislimn; it shifted; it became mist, writhing and tinged with faint colors, that submerged his will and his consciousness, till they sank, gathering impetus, into a void below the vacancy of the spirit that looses its hold on the body and is rudderless.
Then have men to sound themselves, to discover how much of Nature their abstract honourable conception or representative eidolon of young women will bear without going to pieces; and it will not be much, unless they shall have taken instruction from the poet's pen: for a view possibly of Nature at work to cast the slough, when they see her writhing as in her ugliest old throes.
The armed men emptied their weapons blindly into that writhing tangle of forms, and as one finished he stepped back while another took his place. The prison rocked with the din of it; the wretches were shot to pieces, riddled, by that horizontal hail which mowed and mangled like an invisible scythe.
In the burning element human beings appeared writhing in pain; angels of dazzling brightness floated over the fire, and every moment caught the outstretched arms of some fortunate soul whose purgatorial probation had terminated; the angel would carry the soul to a distant sphere of brightness whither Alvira's weak mortal gaze could not follow.
The cities of Flanders were writhing under the Spanish yoke; "the richest spoils of Mexico, the stoutest hearts of Spain," were already mustering to reduce England to the condition of Antwerp or Haarlem; and only Elizabeth's life had seemed to lie between them and her who was bound by her religion to bring all this upon the peaceful land.
Some fell monster, roaming through the heavens, seeking whom he may devour, some dragon, "monstrous, horrible, and waste," whom no Redcrosse Knight shall pierce with his trenchand blade, is swallowing with giant gulps the writhing victim. Blow shrill and loud your bugle blasts! Beat with fierce clangor your brazen cymbals! Push up wild shrieks and groans, and horrid cries,
Only one of the two lamps was alight that above the bed; and on the bed a man lay writhing. He was incredibly gaunt, so that the suit of tropical twill which he wore hung upon him in folds, showing if such evidence were necessary, how terribly he was fallen away from his constitutional habit.
'Oh, who can doubt, thought I, 'that the word was originally intended for something monstrous and horrible? Is there not something horrible in the look and sound of the word afanc, something connected with the opening and shutting of immense jaws, and the swallowing of writhing prey? Is not the word a fitting brother of the Arabic timsah, denoting the dread horny lizard of the waters?
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