"The author can and does write well; the descriptions of | | scenery are particularly effective, always graphic, and | | never overstrained."

She was horribly overstrained and wanted to cry, but she began to laugh, and for some minutes could not stop.

" This added to the feeling; and, in another instant, the excitement might have risen into hubbub, had not the emotions of one little woman found vent in a low and sobbing cry which relieved the tension and gave just the relief needed to hold in check the overstrained feelings of the crowd.

It was absurd, of course, it was a trick of the imagination, of a wearied and overstrained brainbut the tall figure in the blue sergeah, how like it was to that of Stafford!

Think that my feeling is all morbid and overstrained about it, if you will.

I have seen in so many instances the injurious effect of weak or overstrained arguments in defence of religion, that I am perhaps more jealous than I need be in the choice of evidences.

" Lord Mansfield's doctrine of a virtual representation of the Colonies must be admitted to be overstrained.

Doubtless their nerves were overstrained by the terrible event at Cafaggiuolo.

Then, like a band of iron tightening round her heart, would come the thought of her promise to Tom Ryfe, the bitter regret for her own weakness, her own overstrained notions of honour, as she now considered them, in committing that promise to writing.

Mr. Collier does not seem to know that a deeper and heavier desire to sleep follows upon the overstrained exercise of excited attention than on the weariness of a dull and uninteresting appeal to it.

" The effort she calls upon her memory to make to recover the traces of her earliest impressions of life,the strangeness of the events unfolded to her,the duration of the recital itself, which is considerable,and, above all, the poignant personal interest of its details, are quite sufficient to account for the sudden utter prostration of her overstrained faculties and feelings, and the profound sleep that falls on the young girl.

Her mother saw this and said gently: "She's overstrained, that's all.

He thought her looking cross, but in deference to her recent anxieties he called it, even in his own mind, overstrained.

Papa was overstrained carrying a log and limped as long as he lived.

Folly of some sort is indeed one of the fatal rocks upon which all overstrained theories of sanctification are almost certain to be wrecked; and in excitable, crude natures, the evil is apt to take the form either of mental extravagance, perhaps derangement, or of silly, if not still worse, conduct.

Her face was hidden in her hands, and only her heaving shoulders showed the sudden emotion which had swept upon her overstrained soul.

It was no part of Richelieu's policy to tolerate any individual, however inferior to himself in rank and station, who ventured to place himself beyond the pale of his own jealous authority; and thus the overstrained indulgence of the King to a brave and successful soldier had signed his death-warrant.

In Elizabeth's reign, the court language was formed on the plan of one Lillie, a pedantic courtier, who wrote a book, entitled "Euphues and his England, or the Anatomy of Wit;" which quality he makes to consist in the indulgence of every monstrous and overstrained conceit, that can be engendered by a strong memory and a heated brain, applied to the absurd purpose of hatching unnatural conceits.

But still his assurance would probably have had weight with the jury but for the overstrained honesty of his companion.

Her religion pervaded her whole being, and seemed to govern every thought, word, and deed, yet never was morbid or overstrained.

Every one feels what is meant when we speak of a person's ways being "natural," in contrast to being artificial, or overstrained, or studied, or affected.

For battlefield I felt this was, and my overstrained nerves no longer holding my imagination in check, I could already see human forms writhing in agony, and hear the moaning of souls on the brink of Eternity.

At the same moment it happened that Tasso, having returned from a fruitless and uncongenial mission to the Valois court, enjoyed a brief period of calm and prosperity in the congenial society of Leonora d' Este, before the critical bickerings to which he exposed himself in connexion with the Gerusalemme wrought havoc with an already over-sensitive and overstrained temperament.

Our overstrained nerves gave way all at once, and in ten minutes I could hardly raise a cup of coffee to my lips.

That the bow of human nature was by Puritanism bent immeasurably too far, that it overstrained the soul by stretching it to the height of an almost horrible idealism, makes the collapse of the Restoration infinitely more excusable, but it does not make it any the less a collapse.