What is "overmaster"

Usage examples of "overmaster".

Just now, however, his yellow monkey face was convulsed with an expression of intense malignity, and he was standing there in the sunshine cursing rapidly beneath his breath in Dutch, and shaking his fist after the form of the retreating Boer--a very epitome of impotent but overmastering passion.

His face, though unweathered and unseamed, and much too fine and thin in texture, had a curious affinity to the faces of old sailors or fishermen who have lived a simple, practical life in the light of an overmastering tradition.

The impulse to go and do so now, overmastered her sense of what was due to Comus in the way of explanation.

The lewd, perennial, overmastering spell That keeps the rolling universe ensphered, And life, and all for which life lives to long, Wanton and wondrous and for ever well.

Nor shall I recount further incidents of the life that is now to end - a life of wandering, always and everywhere haunted by an overmastering sense of crime in punishment of wrong and of terror in punishment of crime.

The hidden attraction which drew Clement to the young girl with whom he had passed into the Valley of the Shadow of Death overmastered all other feelings, and he gave himself up to the fascination of her presence.

But he was liable to intercurrent fits of jealousy and rage, such as the light-hued races are hardly capable of conceiving, blinding paroxysms of passion, which for the time overmastered him, and which, if they found no ready outlet, transformed themselves into the more dangerous forces that worked through the instrumentality of his cool craftiness.

She was full of vague terror, overmastered by the darkness, dreadfully alone.

All being mainly due to the species of the same group having descended from a common progenitor, from whom they have inherited much in common,--to parts which have recently and largely varied being more likely still to go on varying than parts which have long been inherited and have not varied,--to natural selection having more or less completely, according to the lapse of time, overmastered the tendency to reversion and to further variability,--to sexual selection being less rigid than ordinary selection,--and to variations in the same parts having been accumulated by natural and sexual selection, and thus adapted for secondary sexual, and for ordinary specific purposes.

You will allow me to tell you that what I learned at Kimbolton brought me here with two overmastering desires: the first to bring you to book, and the second to shake the hand of the boy who tried to rescue from your clutches a girl whose youth and innocence must have protected her from any but an unprincipled villain!

Encouraged by the knowledge that they had a safe retreat in case of being overmastered, they fought with such heart that the enemy was defeated, and the grateful Mohegans named the place the Bridge of God.

At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have tried to overmaster other species in the great battle for life.

Once come, I was at once appalled at having twice been so overmastered by desire, this time replacing with unkindest force my kindless deception in the grove.

The wolfishness meant only that he never questioned the overmastering importance of what he -- whoever and whatever he was -- might be doing.