The crest is a ragged edge of writhing bodies and struggling limbs.

It is something to have at least tasted the cup, and perhaps it is better to turn with writhing lips from the bitter drop near the brim than, drinking it fairly out, to find its sweets pall on the palate, its essence cease to warm the heart and stimulate the brain.

Instantly it released its many coils above, and a tremendous length of writhing snake could be seen whipping over the ground.

[Illustration: "A dark, confused ... writhing mass of humanity."

At length the world, renew'd by calm repose, Was strong for toil, the dappled morn arose; Before the pilgrims part, the younger crept, 150 Near the closed cradle where an infant slept, And writhed his neck: the landlord's little pride Oh, strange return!grew black, and gasp'd, and died.

Shall foreign plagues infest this teeming land, And more than sea-born monsters plough the main? Here the dire locusts' horrid swarms prevail; Here the blue asps with livid poison swell; Here the dry dipsa writhes his sinuous mail; Can we not here secure from envy dwell? When the grim lion urged his cruel chase, When the stern panther sought his midnight prey; What fate reserved me for this Christian race?

In Geanies wood Another deer they slew ... Caoilte, who stood On a high ridge alone ... with eager eyes Scanning the prospect wide ... in mute surprise Saw rising o'er Knockfarrel, a dark cloud Of thick and writhing smoke ...

The bare, writhing branches of yonder sombre oak-grove are steeped in snow, and in the misty air they look so remote and foreign that there is not a wild creature of the Norse mythology who might not stalk from beneath their haunted branches.

from her sacred groves 40 With maniac step the Pythian LAURA moves; Full of the God her labouring bosom sighs, Foam on her lips, and fury in her eyes, Strong writhe her limbs, her wild dishevell'd hair Starts from her laurel-wreath, and swims in air.

and he writhed his face into an idiotic grimace.

Mile-wide, brimful, head-on and boiling and writhing twenty fathoms deep, you could easily have seen, that afternoon, why its turfed levee had to be eighteen feet high and broad in proportion.

Peregrine was there with his hands in his pockets, and a queer ironical smile writhing his features.

Squirming, tossing, writhing figures everywhere!

Afar to my right, within the sky, there burnt a gigantic ring of dull-red fire, from the outer edge of which were projected huge, writhing flames, darted and jagged.

Playing on it, he can give utterance to the subtlest visions, such as this: Just now a beam of joy hung on his eyelash; But, as I looked, it sunk into his eye, Like a bruised worm writhing its form of rings Into a darkening hole.

With the reinforcements the tide turned, ebbing back in a struggling, writhing fury, and soon the ground was clear again of all save the wreck that such a wave leaves behind it.

[All together, at the base of the tree to which they form a crawling, writhing girdle.]

On, over a narrow, red-dirt road, closer down to the gorge, across the long bridge, up and up the steep, writhing grade.

I had never before thought of Regent's Park as a cemetery, but now, through the trees, stretching as far as eye could see, I beheld a flat plain of writhing graves and heeling tombstones.

In terrible agony he writhed his head off my breast.

The, opposing left half started across, took the ball, and thenwhy, then Joel was at the very bottom of some seven hundred pounds of writhing humanity, trying his best to get his breath, and wondering where the ball was!

We need never expect words and metre to do more than they do here: they, fondly thinking to allay Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit Chewed bitter ashes, which the offended taste With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayed, Hunger and thirst constraining; drugged as oft, With hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws, With soot and cinders filled; or more than they do here:

Into what kind of creature shall I writhe and change?

How irritating it was when he lay shut up in his room, his soul looking down with murderous eyes on the poor worm that writhed out its life in view of the pitiless stars, and longing with a fierce wild longing to shake off the burning garment of consciousness, and plunge into the black happiness of the grave, to hear Mrs Norton on the threshold uttering from time to time admonitory remarks.

In the picture, peacocks, which were common symbols for the lover, are shown against a storm-tossed skythe battered clouds and writhing lightning being symbolic references to 'the strife of love.'