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More "Impassable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hand, the democratic formula of "equality before the law" best defines the modern conception of human relations, and this maxim indicates a tone of thought directly the converse of that which begot status; for whereas the one strove to raise impassable barriers against free competition in the struggle for existence, the ideal of the other is to offer the fullest scope for the expansion ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... "T. Sorrel," as his fellow ranchmen called him, had more conceit than common sense. He had heard that the branch road was a short cut to "Roderick's," but not that it was impassable for a team. A man on horseback might pass safely over it, by daylight and with a trustworthy mount. Not otherwise; and though the opening was fairly clear the trail entered a hopeless tangle of underbrush ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... agave, the far-famed mezcal-plant of Mexico. Here and there, mingling with the cacti, are trees of acacia and mezquite, the denizens of the desert-land. No bright object relieves the eye; no bird pours its melody into the ear. The lonely owl flaps away into the impassable thicket, the rattlesnake glides under its scanty shade, and the coyote skulks through ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... integrity to death. In this parable, a voice is heard from the place of torment—the cry is a 'drop of water,' the slightest relief to unutterable woes; and that a messenger may be sent to warn his relatives, lest they should be plunged into the same torment. The impassable gulf defies the vain request, while the despised Christian reposes in everlasting and indescribable enjoyment. This little volume was very popular; nine editions were printed and sold in the author's lifetime, besides pirated copies. Bunyan's feelings and mode of preaching are well ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... been? We had to endure it, so it was best to get it over quickly. In many places the old road was completely gone, and we had to drive through such dreadful holes that we wondered the waggon, came out entire. [Footnote: Much of this part of the road is now under water and well-nigh impassable, the prospect of soon having the Canada Pacific Railway in working order making it seem waste of time and money to repair it.] Never was smooth road greeted with greater pleasure than we hailed the last mile from the "Angle;" ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... little choice between them so far as nearness went; but the boys thought it would be wiser to make for the west shore. Carson lay on that side, and then the ground as a whole lay somewhat higher, so that once they landed they would be less liable to come across impassable sloughs and lagoons formed by the back-water of the ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... this task none are so well educated. To fit them for this work they have been taught in the true school. They have been in that gulf from which they would teach others the means of escape. They have passed that prison wall which others have long declared impassable; and who that has not shall dare to weigh opinions with them as to the mode ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... difficulty of urination, which, by the retention that results, in turn increases the constriction at the root of the penis, and adds to the already difficult return circulation. The bladder by its urine, and the penis by its blood, actually form, by their mutual pressures, an impassable dam at the root of the organ. That this is the true condition has been more than once verified from the instant relief given to the whole condition by the prompt employment of the supra-pubic puncture or aspiration, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... way with the Emperor. He would chat with you as with a friend and a brother, and then when he had wiled you into forgetting the gulf which lay between you, he would suddenly, with a word or with a look, remind you that it was as impassable as ever. When I have fondled my old hound until he has been encouraged to paw my knees, and I have then thrust him down again, it has made me think of ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... arrived there, a crowd had already assembled. Castle-street was then very narrow. It was quite choked up with people. Dale-street was beginning to be crowded while High-street and Water-street were quite impassable. From the windows of all the houses the terrified inmates were to be observed en dishabille, and the large inn in Water-street, the Talbot, which was nearly opposite the Town Hall, had people looking out at ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... sound like a whirlwind the herd dashed through the crackling jungle. I rushed forward, as I was uncertain whether they were in advance or retreat. Leaving a small sample of my nose upon a kittar thorn, and tearing my way, with naked arms, through what, in cold blood, would have appeared impassable, I caught sight of two elephants leading across my path, with the herd following in a dense mass behind them. Firing a shot at the leading elephant, simply in the endeavor to check the herd, I repeated with the left-hand barrel ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... top of the street Jean stopped and went on foot a little way down. He came back, with the report that new shells had made the way impassable; and again Sara Lee shivered. If ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... been made for the defense of the harbor and the town; the whole of the treasure had been landed; the galleon was sunk in the mouth of the harbor; a floating barrier of masts and spars was laid on each side of her, near to the forts and castles, so as to render the entrance impassable; within this breakwater were the five zabras, moored, their treasure also taken out; all the women and children and infirm people were moved to the interior, and those only left in the town who were able to aid in its defense. A heavy fire was opened ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... he had experienced could not possibly have been condensed into a shorter period—that his manly spirit snapped. Let us not judge him too harshly. The girl upstairs had broken his heart, ruined his life, and practically compared him to Roland Bean, and his pride should have built up an impassable wall between them, but—she had cake and cocoa. In similar circumstances King Arthur would ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... us swing from the road. Come, the hedges of Nature are not as impassable as the hedges of man. Through these scrub oaks and wild pears, between this tangle of thickets, over the clematis and blackberry bush,—and here we are under the pines, the lofty and majestic pines. How different are these natural hedges, growing in wild disorder, from the ugly cactus ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... after-turret of the "Suvaroff," tearing the after-bridge to pieces with the flying fragments. Her steering gear was temporarily disabled, and she drifted from her station at the head of the line. One by one in quick succession the heavy steel masts and two huge funnels crashed down. The upper deck was impassable from end to end. In the midst of the confused wreckage handfuls of brave men fought the fires with buckets as they broke out now here now there. Most of the guns were silent. "She no longer looked like a ship," ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... do not differ in any respect from the spermatic veins in substance. They rise in one place from the bottom of the womb, and do not reach from their other extremity either to the stones or to any other part, but are shut up and impassable, and adhere to the womb as the colon does to the blind gut, and winding half way about; and though the testicles are not close to them and do not touch them, yet they are fastened to them by certain membranes which resemble the ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... have gone out to Ellida, but Ellida kept them at a distance with the smooth respectfulness of the iron hand in the glove of velvet; and Clementina first learned from her to imagine the impassable ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... anything to distract me from what I had in view, I felt the pressure of those thick London facts almost to suffocation. Nothing but my denser ignorance saved me from their density, as I hurried with my friend through air that any ignorance less dense would have found impassable with memories. ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... followed by the natives. They made no hostile demonstrations. They merely watched us, apparently from motives of curiosity. All this time we were drawing steadily nearer to the line of lofty mountains, which with their icy crests rose before us like an inaccessible and impassable barrier, apparently closing up all farther progress; nor was there any indication of any pass or any opening, however narrow, through which the great stream might run. Nothing was there but one unbroken wall of iron cliffs and icy summits. At last we saw ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... through woods and up rocks, a far, round-about journey. And the man and his wife went down the river in a spring freshet, headlong with the rapids. [Footnote: One should be familiar with the almost impassable forests of Maine and Canada, even as they are at the present day, to properly appreciate the Chenook's journey. As for the speed of the canoe, I have myself gone down the Kenawha River (Va.), in a dug-out, at the rate of ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... next day in George's motor car, ploughing with difficulty over the heavy roads, which in a month's time would have become impassable. A golden morning had followed the rain; the sun shone clear, the wind sang in the bronzed tree-tops, and on the low hills to the right of us, the harvested corn ricks stood out illuminated against a deep blue sky. When the brown-winged ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... strong enough to occupy and hold a position between Dalton and Resaca. As it was, Thomas should have followed close upon his rear through Snake Creek Gap, with two corps. The distance between the two wings of the army would have been so short and the ground between them so impassable to the enemy as to give us practically a continuous line of battle, and Thomas's two corps in the valley of the Connasauga near Tilton would have been in far better position to strike the retreating enemy when he was compelled to let go of ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... the Countess Sabine. She was resting from her cares as hostess, and as she sat in her wonted seat, silent, her eyes fixed on a log which was turning into embers, her face appeared so white and so impassable that doubt again possessed him. In the glow of the fire the small black hairs on the mole at the corner of her lip became white. It was Nana's very mole, down to the color of the hair. He could not refrain from whispering something about it in Vandeuvres's ear. Gad, it was true; ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... cottonwood bending over half-dry beds of torrents, with vast boulders telling of the fierce fury of water which must have undermined, then loosened and at last tumbled them from the hillsides. These streams are, in the early spring, impassable until a cold day and night check the thaw in the hills, and thus allow ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... standing on a high bank of a great river, with my wife and little girl at my side. I cannot cross the river, and impassable cliffs arise behind me. I hear the noise of great waters; I look, and see a flood coming. The waters rise to our feet, and then to our knees. My little girl stretches her hands toward me and says, "Save me." I stand where no member of my race ever stood before. There ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... the first fine afternoon to walk over to Brail. It was more than three miles by the road, but she was a famous walker. The lanes were still impassable on account of the thaw; February had set in with unusual mildness: the snow had melted, the little lake at Woodcote was no longer a sheet of blue ice, and Eiderdown and Snowflake were dabbling joyously with their yellow bills in the water and their ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... English language fails to provide; Jacob had written in his day long letters about art, morality, and politics to young men at college. Clara Durrant's letters were those of a child. Florinda—the impediment between Florinda and her pen was something impassable. Fancy a butterfly, gnat, or other winged insect, attached to a twig which, clogged with mud, it rolls across a page. Her spelling was abominable. Her sentiments infantile. And for some reason when she wrote she declared her belief in God. Then ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... was pointing excitedly toward the little bay on his left. A single glance in that direction filled him with amazement, then consternation. Recklessly he entered upon the descent. Obstacles that had seemed impassable as he thought of them on the summit were ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... a toilsome journey over the mountains, for very few had as yet passed that way. The deep, shadowy canyons, the rushing streams, the smooth faces of granite walls seemed impassable barriers, but Felix at last passed them all and came into the wild, rugged valley of Bear Creek. He staked his claim, put up his little tent, and went down to the river to wash his first pan of gold. Yes, the prospector had been right; here in this bleak, far region the ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... within itself. As in the class of the artisans (hoi demiourgoi) some can make swords best, others pitchers, so, on the larger survey, there will be found those who can use those swords, or, again, think, teach, pray, or lead an army, a whole body of swordsmen, best, thus defining within impassable barriers three essential species of citizenship—the productive class, the military order, the governing ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... felt assured that he would soon collect his scattered forces and return with fresh troops from Granada. The people were comforted by the words and encouraged by the presence of Reduan, and they had still a lingering hope that the heavy artillery of the Christians might be locked up in the impassable defiles of the mountains. This hope was soon at an end. The very next day they beheld long laborious lines of ordnance slowly moving into the Spanish camp—lombards, ribadoquines, catapults, and cars laden with munitions—while the escort, under the brave ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... this place was equally grand and experimental; grand, as to the width of the road, and beauty of the surrounding country—but experimental, inasmuch as a part of the route royale had been broken up, and rendered wholly impassable for carriages of any weight. Our own, of its kind, was sufficiently light; with a covering of close wicker-work, painted after the fashion of some of our bettermost tilted carts. One Norman horse, in full condition of flesh, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... more of the army than they wanted to, and didn't have such a very good time after all, for ever since three o'clock the roads have been impassable on account of ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... opening of the Trans-Bosporus Railway, the wagon-road to Ismid, and even the Angora military highway beyond, have fallen rapidly into disrepair. In April they were almost impassable for the wheel, so that for the greater part of the way we were obliged to take to the track. Like the railway skirting the Italian Riviera, and the Patras-Athens line along the Saronic Gulf, this Trans-Bosporus road for a great distance scarps and tunnels ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... wind rose rapidly, and in every direction clouds of the newly fallen snow were beginning to ride on the "wings of the wind," pouring over the fences, and filling the road full! My heart sank within me. What could I do? At this rate, by next morning the roads would be impassable, and it was so cold! Besides, if I failed to go on now, it would be very difficult to get my borrowed team together again, and impossible to get my man again; and we could as well live without bread as without wood in ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... or smut, or cobs. And when in spite of all these accidents that lie in wait between the plow and the reaper, they did succeed in raising a good crop and a high price was offered, then the roads would be impassable. And when the roads got good, then the prices went down. Everything worked together ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... beauty; he no more quarreled with the decree than with other inevitable consequences, inevitable degradations, that followed on his entrance as a private under the French flag. He had been used to the impassable demarcations of Caste; he did not dispute them more now that he was without, than he had done when ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Balboa resolved to make a name for himself and to be the discoverer of the other sea. He set off in 1513. The land is not more than forty-five miles wide at Panama, but it is almost impassable even to this day. For twenty-two days the hardy adventurers advanced through a forest, dense with thickets and tangled swamps and interlacing vines—so thick that for days the sun could not be seen—and over rough and slippery mountain-sides ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... by tufts of trees, little woods, and here and there vineyards, but no other cultivation, except gardens like those on Richmond-hill. The whole lake, which is twenty-five miles long, and three broad, is all surrounded with these impassable mountains, the sides of which, towards the bottom, are so thick set with villages (and in most of them gentlemen's seats), that I do not believe there is anywhere above a mile distance one from another, which adds very much to ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... pecuniary canon of beauty, it may be noted that this English seat, and the peculiarly distressing gait which has made an awkward seat necessary, are a survival from the time when the English roads were so bad with mire and mud as to be virtually impassable for a horse travelling at a more comfortable gait; so that a person of decorous tastes in horsemanship today rides a punch with docked tail, in an uncomfortable posture and at a distressing gait, because ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... within the limits of law and constitution, decreased. Every avenue, in fact, was blocked by corruption. juries, courts, legislatures, congresses, they were as if they were not. The people were walled in by impassable barriers. Nothing was left them but the primal, brute instincts of the animal man, and upon these they fell back, and the Brotherhood of Destruction arose. But no words can tell the sufferings that have been endured by the good men, here and ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... (now Charing Cross), and from the same quarter to near Temple Bar (down Drury Lane), as well as the highway then called Perpoole (now Gray's Inn Lane). The footway at the entrance of Temple Bar was interrupted by thickets and bushes, and in wet weather was almost impassable. The roads further west were so bad that when the sovereign went to Parliament faggots were thrown into the ruts in King-street, Westminster, to enable the royal cavalcade to ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... so much while I had so little, I thought. I was handicapped by poverty, and his wealth lay like an impassable barrier between Grace and myself. Then, though I tried hard, I could not drive out the reflection that all would have been different if he had not found our camp. Our partner had gone down in the black pool; we could not save him, but ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... projected over the roadway; and that staircases, balustrades, and doors that opened outwards, obstructed it;—a remarkable coincidence of description. I do not doubt at all, though history is silent, that that roadway was jolting to carriages, and all but impassable; and that it was traversed by drains, as freely as any Turkish town now. Athens seems in these respects to have been below the average cities of its time. "A stranger," says an ancient, "might doubt, on the sudden view, if ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... lonely enough after my company had left; besides which, I clean lost my way, and was forced at last to seek the river and guide myself by that. Heavy work it was; for the river's bank was swampy and often impassable with bushes and woods, so that I had to go miles out of my way to circumvent them, leading my horse by the hand. At last, when I hardly knew where I was, night fell; and worn-out with weariness and hunger, I made for the first house I could see—which chanced to be an inn—and ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... voice the sorrows of women at the absence of their husbands after the rains have set in. The rainy season is in India looked on as the season of love, and separation from the lover at this time is particularly bewailed, all the more as the rains soon make the roads impassable. ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... it. The scattered visitors who took lodgings in the summer in the villages have all departed, and the recollection that they have been here makes the solitude more complete. The woods in which they wandered are impassable, for the rain has been heavy, and the dry, baked clay of August has been turned into a slough a foot deep. The wind, what there is of it, is from the south-west, soft, sweet and damp; the sky is almost covered with bluish-grey clouds, ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... of the Inca, who was living in Cuzco. She took kindly to the suggestion and dispatched to Uiticos a messenger, of the blood royal, attended by Indian servants. The journey was a dangerous one; bridges were down and the treacherous trails were well-nigh impassable. Sayri Tupac's regents permitted the messenger to enter Uilcapampa and deliver the viceroy's invitation, but were not inclined to believe that it was quite so attractive as appeared on the surface, even though brought to them by a kinsman. Accordingly, they kept the ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... seemed at that time as if the whole nation had turned stockjobbers. Exchange Alley was every day blocked up by crowds, and Cornhill was impassable for the number of carriages. Everybody came to purchase stock. "Every fool aspired to be a knave." In the words of a ballad, published at the time, and sung about the streets, ["A South Sea Ballad; or, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... discovering the proximity of so strong a force. The great difficulty was to discover a way of getting from Pehtang on to some of the main roads leading to the Peiho; for the whole of the surrounding country had been under water, and was more or less impassable. In fact, the region round Pehtang consisted of nothing but mud, while the one road, an elevated causeway, was blocked by the fortified camp just mentioned as having been discovered by the reconnoitering party. A subsequent reconnaissance, conducted by Colonel (now Lord) Wolseley, revealed the ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... could not cross the sea—hence the variety native to the Island might be different from the mainland species, and would therefore demand local study before being approached with hostile intentions. I was wont to point out that since the sea presented an impassable barrier, the sand spit, drawn out to a fine point, was just the spot where a piccaninny might be easily rounded up, if it were detected in a preoccupied mood. I suggested that I might be at hand to encounter any untoward results ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... Beaumont Hamel; and I noticed many things, as, clips of cartridges, unexploded bombs, Lewis-gun magazines, parts of a broken machine gun, and various odds and ends of accoutrements. In some places this trench had fallen in because of rain and other things and was almost impassable, wherefore, after much floundering and splashing, F. suggested we should climb out again, which we did forthwith, very ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... avail himself instantly of this first impression. Cape Diamond, around which he was to make his way, presents a precipice, the foot of which is washed by the river, where such enormous and rugged masses of ice had been piled on each other, as to render the way almost impassable.[23] Along the scanty path leading under the projecting rocks of the precipice, the Americans pressed forward in a narrow file, until they reached the block-house and picket. Montgomery, who was himself in front, assisted with his own hand to cut down or pull up the pickets, and open a passage ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... an outlaw she might have forgiven, but that he was, according to report, a low fellow of no birth placed an impassable barrier between them. ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... owing to the unsettled state of the country, were afraid to move from home. A grievous apathy took possession of all classes; agriculture was neglected, and the drains being stopped up, the line of route was inundated, and the road, especially on the low levels, became quite impassable. For centuries it continued in this state, until it was overgrown with a marshy vegetation in the wet places, and covered with turf in the dry. About a hundred years ago Pope Pius VI. drained the Pontine Marshes, and restored other parts of the road, and made ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... and his tribe, Walker and his followers who were as humane and kind to white people as could be expected of any one. I have often wondered at the knowledge of this man respecting the country, of which he was able to make us a good map in the sand, point out to us the impassable canon, locate the hostile indians, and many points which were not accurately known by our own explorers for many years afterward. He undoubtedly saved our little band from a watery grave, for without his advice we had gone on and on, far into the great Colorado canon, from ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... of Tyrone and cutting off his supplies. At length, having collected all his forces, he purposed to hazard an attack on the chieftain himself, in the midst of the desert fastnesses to which he had driven him; but the difficulties which he experienced from the impassable state of the roads, the treachery of scouts and the inclemency of the season, compelled him to defer this undertaking till the return of spring. Meantime, such was the extremity of distress to which Tyrone had been reduced, that numbers ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... was impossible to distinguish friend from foe, and who in countless instances used a false appearance of friendship for ambush and assassination. They were obliged to deal with problems of communication and transportation in a country without roads and frequently made impassable by torrential rains. They were weakened by tropical heat and tropical disease. Widely scattered over a great archipelago, extending a thousand miles from north to south, the gravest responsibilities, involving the life ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... time at a distance, it was long before the news of his colleague's misfortune reached him; and besides, the road lying betwixt the two camps being impassable, it was impossible for him to advance hastily to his assistance. This disastrous accident caused a great consternation in Carthage. The reader may have observed, in the course of this war, a continual vicissitude of prosperity and adversity, of security and fear, of joy ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... face darkened as his eyes rested on it. It was Marley's business to see that the egress for the water was kept free and unblocked with ice, and only yesterday he had given him orders to attend to it. It was the second or third time he had returned to find the entrance to his own house almost impassable. Crossing over with difficulty the frozen stream, he looked into his cabin. There was about a foot of muddy water and ice covering the floor and floating his slippers and some pairs of socks he had left ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... protoplasm, such as the one-celled amoeba or the individual cells of our own bodies, are constantly taking in food and as constantly throwing off wastes. Hence, in the very nature of things, it is impossible to find any mass of protoplasm absolutely pure. And a further and impassable barrier to chemical analysis, or indeed to any adequate scientific examination, lies in the fact that we can never deal with protoplasm exactly as it is, since no analysis can be performed upon it without destroying its life. And yet even dead protoplasm, ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... Jaffa was also used, and here the conditions were even worse. Strictly speaking Jaffa is a port only in name, for all vessels have to anchor off-shore and passengers and stores have to be landed in surf-boats. In the rainy season the bar is almost impassable four days in the week and the roar of the breakers can be heard miles away. Even when the sea was calm enough for stores to be landed, the ground swell was such as to make the ordinary landsman agree with Dr. Johnson's remark "that he would rather go to gaol than to sea." ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... whose ponderous brow and fixed abashing eyes is set the despotism of intellect; Silas Wright,—a well-grown and cultivated specimen of the ordinary statesman; Henry Clay and Col. Fremont,—two halves of the perfected go-ahead spirit; the first shrewd, not to be evaded, knowing; the second impassable to obstacles and alive only to the thing to be done. The heads are finely and studiously lithographed from daguerreotypes by Brady, and suffice to show how utterly fallacious is the notion that character is ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... Poland, travel in winter is easier than at any other time of year. The rivers, which run sluggishly in their ditch-like beds, are frozen so completely that the bridges are no longer required. The roads, in summer almost impassable—mere ruts across the plain—are for the time ignored, and the traveller strikes a bee-line from place to place across ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... surrounded very soon. We marched through the Godwan River and over the colossal mountain near Duivelskantoor, destroying the railway bridges behind us. The road we followed was swamped by the heavy rains and nearly impassable. Carts were continually being upset, breakdowns were frequent, and our guns often stuck in the swampy ground. To make matters worse, a burgher on horseback arrived about midnight to tell us that Buller's column ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... in despair at his sister's unaccountable disappearance—and Fernand perchance already doomed to die! And tears flowed down her cheeks, and trickled upon her snowy bosom, gleaming like dew amongst lilies. Of what avail was the energy of her character in that land along whose coast stretched the impassable barrier of the sea? Oh! it was enough to make even the haughty Nisida weep, and to produce a terrible impression on a mind hitherto acting only in obedience to its ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... north-eastern corner, and is attached to the great Afghan quadrilateral by the thin link of the Panja valley. These narrow limits (called Wakhan) include the lofty spurs of the northern flank of the Hindu Kush, an impassable barrier at this point, where the glacial passes reach 19,000 ft. in altitude, and the enclosing peaks 24,000 ft. The backbone or main water-divide of the Hindu Kush continues to form the boundary between Afghanistan and those semi-independent ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the precipitous barrier of the mountain, greened over where it seemed that scarce a harebell could find root, barred with the zigzags of a human road where it seemed that not a goat could scramble. And in truth, for all the labour that it cost, the road is regarded even by the Marquesans as impassable; they will not risk a horse on that ascent; and those who lie to the westward come and go in their canoes. I never knew a hill to lose so little on a near approach: a consequence, I must suppose, of its surprising steepness. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tender kisses, lays her softly down upon the green mound, and draws down the visor of her helmet. Then, after covering her with her shield to protect her from all harm, he begins a powerful incantation, summoning Loge to surround her with an impassable barrier of flames. As this incantation proceeds, small flickering tongues of fire start forth on every side; they soon rise higher and higher, roaring and crackling until, as Wotan disappears, they form a fiery barrier all around ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... trails and roads were impassable. Mr. Trent, knowing that Louise was safe and happy with her friends, made no effort to reach her; and the Scotts were glad to keep indoors, safe from the ...
— A Little Maid of Ticonderoga • Alice Turner Curtis
... broken pedestals and obelisks, which Bruce conjectures to be those of Meroe, the capital of the African Ethiopia, which is described by Herodotus as a great city in his time, namely, four hundred years before Christ; and where, separated from the rest of the world by almost impassable deserts, and enriched by the commercial expeditions of their travelling brethren, the Cushites continued to cultivate, so late as the first century of the Christian era, some portions of those arts and sciences ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... which with graceful curves united a short row of granite posts, shut out the pedestrians, the vehicles and horsemen, the swine and other animals driven through the city gate. In contrast with the street, which in bad weather resembled an almost impassable swamp, it was always kept scrupulously clean, and the city beadle might spare himself the trouble of looking there for the carcasses of sucking pigs, cats, hens, and rats, which it was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... use of which had been forgotten for hundreds of years in every other country in Europe, was almost the only tool employed in tillage in those parts of the Highlands which were separated by almost impassable mountains from the rest ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... to remember," he muttered, "that this passage may be blocked up or otherwise impassable, and that Fu-Manchu may know of another entrance. Furthermore, since the plan is lost, I have to rely upon my memory for the exact position ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... to convoy a large store of treasure and ammunition coming down to us from the Punjab. The convoy arrived safe on the morning of August 1, and the rain falling heavily on that day, making the ground impassable for guns, the insurgent force, which had moved to our rear, broke up their camp and retired ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... appears to be vainly hovering on the outside of a too solid sphere, seeking an entrance to where I really am. Even during the intimate silences of the night we try to reach one another through the throbbing walls of flesh—we but cling together across the lone, impassable ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... their owners. I recalled to mind the fragile nature of ice, the necessary effects of the great thaw and the heavy rains, remembering that frozen water might still retain most of its apparent thickness, after its consistency was greatly impaired. But, I could do nothing! If we landed, the roads were impassable for runners, almost for wheels, and another hour might carry the ladies, by means of the river, to their comfortable homes. That day, however, which, down to the moment of meeting the unknown sleigh, had been the very happiest of my life, was entirely ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... in a green dingle, musical with splashing water, and surrounded on almost every side by twenty miles of poisonous and rocky desert. The city was thirty miles away; there was but one road, which went no farther than my father's door; the rest were bridle-tracks impassable in winter; and we thus dwelt in a solitude inconceivable to the European. Our only neighbour was Dr. Grierson. To my young eyes, after the hair-oiled, chin-bearded elders of the city, and the ill-favoured ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hundred, not one of whom is able to earn for himself the necessaries of life. At this moment, at least one hundred and fifty broken-down slaves are at this office, covering all the porches, sitting on all the stairs, forming an almost impassable barrier to the entrances—all with a story of want in their faces; in fact of want, from "the crown of the head to the sole of the half-naked feet," and all eager to say, "We has nobody to go 'pon." An old woman ninety-one, sat on the steps just after the sun rose this morning, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... trail enters the Crooked River it is said by the Indians to be exceedingly rough and entirely impassable. We portaged into it the next morning, paddled a short distance up the stream, which is here some two hundred yards in width and rather shallow, then poled through a short rapid and tracked through two others, wading almost to our waists ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... say to one another: he, the old priest, imbued with the traditions of his calling, could pray and resign himself to the will of the Almighty, but she was young and ardent and passionate, she loved and was beloved, and an impassable barrier was built up between her ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... death by the spectators, but the result of his self-devotion was an edict putting a final stop to the gladiatorial shows. The emperor now fixed his residence, which had been at Milan, at Ravenna, a city that was covered on the land side by a wide and impassable morass, over which was an artificial causeway, easily destroyed in case it could not be defended. It had served him as an asylum during the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... resting by night than was supplied by piling the baggage or by the sumpter animals that had fallen. The troops underwent unutterable sufferings, particularly the Gallic infantry, which marched behind the Carthaginians along tracks already rendered impassable: they murmured loudly and would undoubtedly have dispersed to a man, had not the Carthaginian cavalry under Mago, which brought up the rear, rendered flight impossible. The horses, assailed by a distemper in their hoofs, fell in heaps; various ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... forbidden to enter any house—so they could perform their music or sing [249] their songs only in the street, or in a garden. Any occupations other than their hereditary callings were strictly forbidden to them. Between the lowest of the commercial classes and the Eta, the barrier was impassable as any created by caste-tradition in India; and never was Ghetto more separated from the rest of a European city by walls and gates, than an Eta settlement from the rest of a Japanese town by social prejudice. No Japanese would dream of entering an Eta settlement unless obliged to do so in some ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... came in sight of the circus. Imagine, children, a huge encampment like a small town,—with sections, and streets, houses of green canvas on stout poles, tall caravans on wheels enclosing everything as though with impassable walls, and in the centre all sorts of people, in all sorts of costumes, walking ...
— The Curly-Haired Hen • Auguste Vimar
... centre was a wet ravine, which served as a natural outlet for the springs, and which was so full of black alders as to make an excellent cover for woodcock. Until the land was drained, this ravine was impassable in the hay season even, except by a bridge which I built across it. Now it may be crossed at any season and at ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... feet upon a crag that, to the right, broke the scathed and blasted level of the soil. The stream rolled beside and beneath him, and then taking a sudden wind round the spot on which he stood, interposed its liquid fire,—a broad and impassable barrier between his resting-place and escape. There he stood, cut off from descent, and with no alternative but to retrace his steps towards the crater, and thence seek, without guide ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... established there. Since my return, I have given one of these letters to the Royal Asiatic Society, and the other to the British Museum, considering them a great curiosity, so long as this city shall remain separated from us Europeans by such impassable barriers. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... anxiety. League after league was done no faster than a walk; the horse, at every step, sinking into the mud far above fetlock, and coming to the relief station completely exhausted. And all the day the rain poured down without cessation, and the roads grew heavier and more impassable until they were little else than running streams of dirty water pierced, here and there, by the crest of a hill that poked its head out like a ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... enough for both; death had not even threatened to rob him of the prize of such a noble and faithful heart which he had won. But a horrible superstition had arisen, which seemed to place at once an impassable abyss between them, and to say to him, in ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... surface, bearing here and there patches of corn, which even at this season was green, and sometimes a hut or farm-house, shaded by a willow or two and surrounded by large elder-bushes. These insulated dwellings communicated with each other by winding passages through the moss, impassable by any but the natives themselves. The public road, however, was tolerably well made and safe, so that the prospect of being benighted brought with it no real danger. Still it is uncomfortable to travel alone and in the dark through an unknown country; and there are few ordinary occasions ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... followed by my pursuers. Arriving at the last house at the foot of the street, I found myself confronted by a small river, quiet and apparently deep, with all the space from the last house to the river one impassable barrier of giant cactus, I had either to swim the river or turn back, and I ought to have plunged in as I was, revolver and all, the distance over being short; and, as I am an expert swimmer, I could easily have got across, loaded down as I was. But a contemptible ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... July and August, and at these times the brooks are greatly swollen. The one in front of my house sometimes carried away the little wooden bridge that crossed it, and for an hour or two became impassable, but subsided again almost as soon as the heavy rain ceased falling, for the watershed above does not extend far. Every year our operations were impeded by runs in the mines, or by small landslips stopping up our ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... restraint was imposed on my motions. The narrow defile in the gap, through which the river rushed like a torrent, was closed with a gate. The mountains, by which the valley was hemmed in, were utterly impassable, thickly set as they were with jungle, consisting of tangled brier, thorn and forest trees, of which those who have never been in a tropical climate can form no adequate idea. In some places it ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... obstructions that, mountain-like, lay between them; but on its rough sides—flowers on an arid rock—grew the yearning affections, seemingly rootless, yet continuing to bloom in secret, scarce discovered beauty. Of what use was it, he asked himself in bitterness, to brood over these impassable barriers, to cultivate a faith in the power of his own affection strong enough to remove them, to cherish the vain imagination that this incomparably sweet girl and his own plain self were made for each ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... Victory, and Rule, of lordly Man; Far wider tracts within the Torrid Zone Own no such Lord: where Sol's intenser rays Create in bestial hearts more fervid fires, And deadlier poisons arm the Serpent's tooth; In gloomy shades, impassable to Man, Where matted foliage exclude the Sun, The torpid Birds that crawl from bough to bough Utter their notes of terror: while beneath Fury and Venom, couch'd in murky dens, Hissing and yelling, guard the hideous gloom. O'er dreary wastes, untrod ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... on all round Paris. There are crowds on the Boulevard; every one is asking his neighbour for news. I went to one of the Mairies to hear the bulletins read. The street was almost impassable. At last I got near enough to hear an official read out a despatch—nothing important. The commanders at Montrouge and Vincennes announce that the Prussians are being driven back. "Et Clamart?" some one cries. "A bas les alarmistes," is the reply. Every one ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... man to take us, six in all, with our trunks to Delavan. The roads were almost impassable. The rains had fallen so copiously that the streams overflowed their banks, the marshes were full and the prairies inundated. With a good team, however, we made an average of about fifteen miles a day. Our conveyance stuck fast in the mud eighteen times ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... 'brush' lands are those covered with tall trees growing so near each other and being so closely matted together by underwood, parasites, and creepers, as to be wholly impassable." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... preparedness. During the second year of the War of 1812 he learned that the British planned to invade Louisiana, so he concentrated troops four miles below New Orleans in a line of entrenchments a mile in length, extending from the Mississippi River far into the swamp, making both ends impassable. Jackson had 3,500 expert marksmen at his command. They were a strange mixture of men, including long-limbed, hard-faced backwoodsmen, Portuguese and Norwegian seamen, dark-skinned Spaniards and swarthy Frenchmen, besides about ...
— The Mentor: The War of 1812 - Volume 4, Number 3, Serial Number 103; 15 March, 1916. • Albert Bushnell Hart
... he said, still talking with himself. "Wait! wait! wait!—the time is not yet. Separation only exists. There is no divorce. The great, impassable gulf is yet between us. I cannot go to her. She cannot come to me. I must wait, hopefully, if not patiently, the ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... premature and useless exploration. It seemed to me then that I must be totally eliminated from further search for Bowen, since, as I estimated it, the three hundred miles of Caspakian territory I must traverse to reach the base of the cliffs beyond which my party awaited me were practically impassable for a single individual unaccustomed to Caspakian life and ignorant of all that lay before him. Yet I could not give up hope entirely. My duty lay clear before me; I must follow it while life remained to me, and so I set ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... barrier, a proof that he had never loved her. If he had loved her truly, he would never have forgotten her in three short months,—three long months they had heretofore seemed to her, for in them she had lived a lifetime of experience. Another impassable barrier lay in the fact that his mother had met her, and that she was known in the neighborhood. Thus cut off from any hope that she might be anything to him, she had no wish to meet her former lover; no possible good could come of such a meeting; and yet her fluttering ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... secured, but no baggage of any sort, not even the smallest handbag, can be carried, as all other personal belongings must be left on board. Passengers will gather here, and remain here until I send one of the officers for them. The companion doors will not be closed again, but the decks are quite impassable. You hear for yourselves that they are momentarily swept ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... across the stream is impregnable in front, it can be taken in the flank by an amphibious birch. The navigator lifts his canoe out of water, and bonnets himself with it. He wears it on head and shoulders, around the impassable spot. Below the rough water, he gets into his elongated chapeau and floats away. Without such vessel, agile, elastic, imponderable, and transmutable, Androscoggin, Kennebec, and Penobscot would be no thoro'fares ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... like the rest! you are not like the rest! Even when you go wrong, it is not like the rest. It is the vision of the life I might have led with such a woman as you that troubles my dreams in the night-time, when, across the impassable gulf of my irrevocable vow, I have stretched out my hands in entreaty ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... I afterwards encountered, none were of so much real annoyance as those we experienced at first starting from Brisbane. Much rain had fallen, which filled the creeks and set them running, and made the road so boggy and soft as to render them almost impassable. It took us the whole day to transport our party, cattle, and provisions over the river, and the operation was not concluded before sunset; but, as it was a fine moonlight night, I determined to start, however short my first stage might be. Fortunately, my friends had lent me a bullock ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... And every part was fertile as well as beautiful. It was no where deformed by rough or ragged rocks: it did not shock the view with horrid precipices, huge chasms, or dreary caverns: with deep, impassable morasses, or deserts of barren sands. We have not any authority to say, with some learned and ingenious authors, that there were no mountains on the original earth, no unevennesses on its surface, yet ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... A confined enough open space almost completely surrounded by fire. Before her were the blazing farm buildings, behind her was the raging furnace that once had been her home. And on one side of her the flames commingled so as to be impassable. Her head was bowed and her eyes were closed, her hands were pressed tight over her ears in a vain attempt to shut out cognizance of the terror that reigned about and above her. She stood thus despairing. She was ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... twenty-pound Parrotts, and some light batteries—on a commanding position from a quarter to half a mile from the landing. Immediately above the landing a wide and deep ravine opens to the river. For some distance back from the river its bottom was filled with back-water and was impassable. Half a mile back it was still deep, abrupt, and wet, though passable for infantry. Here Colonel Webster gathered from thirty-five to fifty guns. Two of Hurlbut's batteries—Mann's, commanded by ...
— From Fort Henry to Corinth • Manning Ferguson Force
... is three weeks late this year; the first mail boat has not yet arrived, though last year at this time she was on her second trip. The last report from the North—down the coast they call it—that went to Newfoundland and St. John's was "that it was impassable ice this side Hamilton Inlet." A vessel—a steam sealing bark—though, that was here yesterday and has gone to Sidney, C.B.I., reports now that the coast is clear to Hopedale. Beyond we know nothing ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... country! Not a day passed but he thought of Uncle Will and his betrothed. It was not without secret apprehension that he saw the bad season approaching, which would put between his friends and him a barrier still more impassable. ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... hardly more reassuring. The easiest trail to be found would be rough in the extreme, strewn with rocks; besides, snow would soon fall upon the heights of the mountains, burying the trail many feet deep, and perhaps rendering it impassable. The greatest cause for uneasiness lay in the inevitable scarcity of food. Even should a crossing of the mountains be effected, the men would be obliged to subsist for many days largely or wholly upon such roots as they could dig by ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... the form of an impassable wall across the narrow valley, and the steam man was so thoroughly imprisoned that no human ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... letters from the Forest of Deane, that above 1,000 oakes and as many beeches are blown down in one walke there;" and Mr. Fosbroke has recorded from some other source, that near Newent "the roads were impassable till the trees blown down were cut away, in some great orchards it being possible to go from one end to the other without ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... air. They chose the latter alternative; and for the next two hours the flying ship sped northward through Smith's Sound, for the most part over an unbroken field of pack-ice which, to any ordinary vessel, would have opposed an utterly impassable barrier. At two o'clock in the afternoon, however, the Greenland shore suddenly trended to the north-eastward; and after following it for a short time the ice once more began to be intersected with water ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... the way. Concealed by rock and thicket, and unobserved by the British—the trail being regarded as impassable—they reached the hill-top, only thirty yards in rear of the solitary gun in the redan. The noise of their movements was drowned by the crash of the batteries, which reduced Hamilton's stone house ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... Germantown Road, and thence by various streets to what was then known as the Cohocksink Depot; and it was thought that in time this mode of locomotion might drive out the hundreds of omnibuses which now crowded and made impassable the downtown streets. Young Cowperwood had been greatly interested from the start. Railway transportation, as a whole, interested him, anyway, but this particular phase was most fascinating. It was already creating widespread discussion, and he, with others, had gone to see it. ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... of fairy land, that hidden pocket in the hills, always covered by a mystic haze, for which the Mexicans give it the name Humada. Its steep canyon comes down from the breast of the most easterly of the Four Peaks, impassable except by the one trail; it passes through the box and there widens out into a beautiful valley, where the grass lies along the hillsides like the tawny mane of a lion, and tender flowers stand untrampled in the rich bottoms. For three miles or more it spreads out between striated cliffs where hawks ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... effect. The ninth symphony, which the first players called impossible, has lived to be counted not simply the greatest of all of Beethoven's works, but the greatest of all instrumental music. It has been named as an impassable barrier beyond which no later composer might pass and compose an instrumental symphony. Nothing could be more unjust or mistaken. Every composition of Beethoven is a fantasia, which in his earlier work indeed has the form of the sonata, the accepted serious form of the day; but in the works ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... before them there was a ravine so deep that it would be difficult for the cattle to go down, and for the waggons impossible that at a distance of three miles below he could see the river, which was also so embedded in rocks, as to be impassable ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... is a stupid creature, and is often captured by taking advantage of its stupidity. Nature seems to have placed in its little head the belief that in running to the leeward it will encounter some impassable barrier, and be overtaken by whatever pursues it. Ostrich-hunters are well acquainted with this peculiarity, and on approaching a flock they always ride to the windward. This manoeuvre is observed by the birds, who believe that ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... ways from Kongsberg thither; and in our ignorance of the country, we suffered ourselves to be guided by the landlord of our hotel. Let no traveller follow our example! The road he recommended was almost impassable for carrioles, and miserably supplied with horses, while that through Hitterdal, by which we returned, is broad, smooth, and excellent. We left on the morning after our arrival, taking a road which led ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... the young men. Honest Abe was deeply impressed by her talk and fine manners and general comeliness. He felt her grace and charm and spoke of it, with enthusiasm. But to him and to her there seemed to be an impassable gulf between them. She changed her mind about that, however, when she heard him speak and felt the power of his personality and saw his face lighted by the candle of his spirit. It was a handsome face in those moments of high elation. Hardship and malarial poison had lined ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... examination which I have given Mr. S. Kirkham's English Grammar, I do not hesitate to recommend it to the public as the best of the class I have ever seen, and as filling up an important and almost impassable chasm in works ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... representative of wealth and his woman child sat in the carriage on the day of McGregor's triumph. For the moment an impassable gulf seemed to separate them and with intense eyes each watched the hordes of men who massed themselves about the labour leader. At the moment McGregor seemed to have caught all men in the sweep of his movement. Business men had closed their desks, labour was exultant, writers and men given to speculation ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... The creek being still impassable, I remained here another day. Yesterday the horse that was carrying my instruments broke away from the man who was leading him, burst the girths, and threw the saddlebags on the ground. The instruments ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... that the road to the right of the hill was impassable, and that there was open and easy country to ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... if by some irony of Nature, this gentle invasion of spring in the wild wood brought only disturbance and discomfort to the haunts and works of man. The ditches were overflowed, the fords of the Fork impassable, the sluicing adrift, and the trails and wagon roads to Rough and Ready knee-deep in mud. The stage-coach from Sacramento, entering the settlement by the mountain highway, its wheels and panels ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... not happen at once—nor did he wish it to; messages would pass, and Guidobaldo would seek by cajolery to win back his niece. This she would resist, and, in the end her uncle would see the impassable nature of the situation, and agree to her terms that it might be ended. That it should come to arms, and that Guidobaldo should move to besiege Roccaleone, he did not for a moment believe—for what manner of ridicule would he not draw upon himself from the neighbouring States? ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... separate. We cannot remove our respective Sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and each go out of the presence and beyond the reach of the other; but the different parts of our Country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face; and intercourse, either amicable or ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... to be gregarious even on a limited scale. There are one or two officials who are our chief social mainstays, but the difficulty is to muster the few available souls under the same roof at the same moment. A road will be impassable in one quarter, a pony will be lame in another, a stress of work will prevent some one else from coming, and another may be down with a touch of fever. When my little girl gave a birthday party here her only little girl ...
— When William Came • Saki
... along were surprised at the havoc which had been wrought here on the upper river. Small buildings along the shore lay toppled over, boats were here and there marooned high and dry many yards from the shore, and the river was almost impassable in places from the obstructions of uprooted trees and ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... achieved capture even in the face of comparative indifference. The trails to the east led into the heart of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. With the first breath of autumn these byways, difficult of achievement in any case, became more and more impassable. And, while flight toward the west might be successful, it was too charged with a suggestion of failure ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... could see further. He could see that he must always now, from the consciousness of the thing that he had done, he alone. The actual moment of striking his blow had put an impassable gulf between his soul and all the world. Bodies might touch, hands might be grasped, voices ring together, always now his soul must be alone. Only, that Something—of whose Presence he had been, in that instant, aware—could ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... the Union forces, who at once started in pursuit. They met at Gettysburgh, Pennsylvania. Three long days of terrible fighting resulted in the repulse of Lee, and he retreated south in good order. When he reached the Potomac he found it impassable. If Meade had followed Lee up now he might have gained a glorious victory, but he allowed ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... commended—nor subscribed for. Amongst other details omitted in the various [A] despatches of our eloquent ambassador, he did not state (being too much occupied with the exploits of Colonel C——, in swimming rivers frozen, and galloping over roads impassable,) that one entire province perished by famine in the most melancholy manner, as follows:—In General Rostopchin's consummate conflagration, the consumption of tallow and train oil was so great, that the market was inadequate to the demand: and thus one ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... travelling sacks. We presented the Indians some fish-hooks which pleased them. As to crossing the large creek, they said it was not advisable to wade over, as the water was as high as our shoulders or higher, as one of them showed us, and the current was so swift as to render it impassable. He said that not far from their house lived a sackemaker who had in the creek a canoe with which he had set a man across the day before, who had a horse which he swam over; but the sackemaker was not pleased at his doing so without his permission. We promised him a guilder ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... complete. Her earlier impression of the presence of death in the decaying house tightened its hold. She had to assure herself that Silas Blackburn slept untroubled. The thing she had heard was peculiar, and he hadn't answered across the court. The dark, empty corridors at first were an impassable barrier, but while she put on her slippers and her dressing-gown she strengthened her courage. There was a bell rope in the upper hall. ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... suffered a different kind of mortification from that which Lady Langdale and Mrs. Dareville made her endure. She was safe from the witty raillery, the sly innuendo, the insolent mimicry; but she was kept at a cold, impassable distance, by ceremony—'So far shalt thou go, and no farther' was expressed in every look, in every word, and ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... army followed hotly in pursuit, and several skirmishes occurred; but Soult effected a most masterly retreat, saving his army, when it seemed upon the brink of destruction, by leaving his guns and baggage behind him, and leading his men by paths over mountains supposed to be impassable for any large body of men. He lost altogether 6000 men in this short campaign. This included 3600 prisoners either captured in action or left behind in the hospitals, and 1400 killed. The number of guns left behind ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty
... is so varied on account of the range in latitude and altitude, and the natural resources are so great, the claim has been made that if the State were surrounded by an impassable wall, its citizens need not be deprived of any article necessary to a refined and luxurious mode of living: and according to Mr. Henry Gannett in "The Building of a Nation," the population in 1890 was 73.42 per cent. ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... with the exception of the one small field of potatoes in which they were encamped, and which stood out as an oasis in the wilderness. Through the midst of the landscape straggled a muddy road, hopelessly impassable for foot-travellers. Certainly the ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... world'; and quietly tells them the positive conditions and the negative disqualifications for His self-revelation. So my text deals with two things, the crown of loving obedience in the possession of a fuller Christ, and the impassable barrier to His manifestation which unloving disobedience makes. Or to put it into briefer words, we have in one of the verses—first, what brings Christ and what Christ brings; and, in the other, second, what keeps away ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... at Terreagles, their seat, near Traquhair in Peebleshire, and hearing that he much desired the consolation of seeing her, she resolved at once to set out for London. It was winter, and at that period the roads during this season were often almost impassable. She succeeded, however, through great difficulties, in reaching Newcastle, and from thence went to York by the stage; but there the increased severity of the weather and the depth of the snow would not admit of the stage proceeding farther—even the mail could not be forwarded. But Lady Nithsdale ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... of nipa palm as far back as tide water. The plain areas are generally poorly watered except during the rainy season, having only the streams of the steep mountains passing through them. These river beds are broad, "quicky," impassable torrents in the rainy season, and are shallow or practically dry during half the year, with only a narrow, lazy thread flowing among ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... of his best time; and the finest things in this volume are concerned with it. But as compared with the love-lays of the Dramatic Lyrics or Men and Women there is something wistful, far off, even elegiac, in this love-poetry. A barrier, undefinable but impassable, seems to part us from the full tide of youthful passion. The richest in this tender sunset beauty is the St Martin's Summer, where the late love is suddenly smitten with the discovery that its apparent warmth is a ghost of old passion buried but ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... destroyed. He had driven the machine out there, with despatches, on the afternoon of the third day. Some of the heaviest fighting had occurred there, he said, many of the streets being rendered impassable by the heaps of ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... Nations is a well-considered title. The economists anterior to Adam Smith conceived England as surrounded by a barrier impassable to property and money except by trade. In trade there was an exchange apparently on equal terms; but the old economists saw a difference in nature between imports and exports; when wool was sold to Flanders ...
— Speculations from Political Economy • C. B. Clarke
... my escape were so great, that little restraint was imposed on my motions. The narrow defile in the gap, through which the river rushed like a torrent, was closed with a gate. The mountains, by which the valley was hemmed in, were utterly impassable, thickly set as they were with jungle, consisting of tangled brier, thorn and forest trees, of which those who have never been in a tropical climate can form no adequate idea. In some places it would be difficult to penetrate more than a mile in the day; during which time the traveller ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... All I transported three years ago, was conveyed under the canon of the Duke of Richmond. I have no interest in our present representative; nor if I had, is he returning. Plate, of all earthly vanities, is the most impassable: it is not Counerband in its metallic capacity, but totally so in its personal; and the officers of the custom-house not being philosophers enough to separate the substance from the superficies, brutally hammer both to pieces, and return you only the intrinsic: ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... when the head of column was deflected to the left, making a quarter turn, and the regiment was hurled headlong against a post-and-rail fence that ran obliquely in front of the Rummel buildings. This proved for the time an impassable barrier. The squadrons coming up successively at a charge, rushed pell mell on each other and were thrown into a state of indescribable confusion, though the rear troops, without order or orders, formed left and right front into line along the fence, and pluckily began firing across it into the faces ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... carried them in wild bounds across impassable chasms, their laboring lungs checked them in the ascent. The joyous inebriation was wearing off. Winslow met his companion's eyes sheepishly as they stopped where a sheer cliff of basalt above caught and held ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... on the island, for what with wind and rain the lake was impassable for their canoe. The men built a hut of brush and bark which sheltered the party from the driving rain. Menard's mood lightened at the prospect of a rest, and he started a long conversation in Iroquois which soon had even Father Claude laughing in his silent way. The ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... night; during which, up to the middle in snow, we made but little way. There were no paths to be traced in the mountains, and they were in many places impassable. Day at length appeared: we thought ourselves near the frontiers, which are twenty English miles from Glatz, when we suddenly, to our great terror, heard the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... but a nominal result. One was under Colonel Mahon, and repaired the telegraph line in the neighbourhood of Modder River; it was intended to patrol as far as Klip Drift, but the rain made the veldt impassable for waggons. Certainly the line was repaired, but, as the Colonel contemptuously remarked, "What's the use of sending an expedition to repair telegraph lines? An old woman can cut 'em again ten ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... approached, low flat banks appear, which for many a long league are marshy and impassable. It is the district of the Esteros, as these flooded lands are called. Beyond them, in the wet season, immense shallow lakes are formed; but when they are dried-up in the hot weather, a grey dusty soil, full of cracks, and covered ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... distance between them with every long, powerful stride of his horse, but already the three rocks, gaunt and high, loomed before him as if forming an impassable barrier across the road. Suddenly, just as Jose and Gallito had almost reached them and the sheriff was gaining upon the fugitives in great leaps, he saw them swerve their horses aside and dash into a clump of trees to the right of ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... turned its spindle and the wind shifted to the south. Jon sent no message to anyone, nor did he proclaim that the old hay was available. He first wished to see what the thaw would amount to. By the following day, the whole valley was impassable because of slush and water, and the patches of earth appearing through the snowy ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... was! No, Walter; I admire you; if you could be trusted not to misunderstand, I might even say I loved you! I shall always be glad to see you, always enjoy hearing you read; but there is a line as impassable as the Persian river of death. Talk about something ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... and obtained a view of the Mahratta host from rising ground. They were in the fork formed by the junction of the Kaitna with the Juah. Their right consisted wholly of cavalry, and was protected by the high and rocky bank of the stream; which was, at one or two points, impassable for guns. Their left, consisting of the infantry and artillery, was posted in the village of Assaye, which lay near the fork ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... the brig to back quickly so as not to be crushed to pieces. This mass of ice, carried along, broken up and amalgamated by the northern current, crushed up the passage, and if seized by the frost would oppose an impassable barrier to ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... next day, that there had been several skirmishes with the Welsh, and that heavy rains had made the roads all but impassable. No more messages had come. This was not surprising, as it was certain that the Welsh would close in behind the army, as it advanced; and as there would be no great occasion to send news back, the king would not care to weaken ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... life is known to us all; for the most part we are alone, and the voices of friends come only faint and broken across the impassable gulfs ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... at a distance, it was long before the news of his colleague's misfortune reached him; and besides, the road lying betwixt the two camps being impassable, it was impossible for him to advance hastily to his assistance. This disastrous accident caused a great consternation in Carthage. The reader may have observed, in the course of this war, a continual vicissitude of prosperity and ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... what influence the other side has upon us or we upon the human beings beyond this boundary. We think it is opaque, impassable. I am writing of the other wall. There was a puzzle! ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... is the tale of Alexander's shutting up a score of impure nations, at the head of which were Gog and Magog, within a barrier of impassable mountains, there to await the latter days; a legend with which the disturbed mind of Europe not unnaturally connected that cataclysm of unheard-of Pagans that seemed about to deluge Christendom in the first half of the 13th century. In these stories also the beautiful ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... which had been taken to make the Road so. And even here there was a Necessity of marching along the Side of a Mountain, where by vast Labour and Industry, a high Way had been cut for two Miles at least out of the main Rock. The Earl therefore, by somewhat of the same Labour, soon made it impassable. He employ'd to that End many Thousands of the Country People, under a few of his own Officers and Troops, who cutting up twenty several Places, made so many Precipices, perpendicular almost as a Wall, which ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... accomplished, and they were ready to start on their second venture, the elements were again against them, and for a week they were confronted by an impassable wall of foam-crested billows, breaking and roaring upon the bar in the ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... only their extreme summits are visible from that point, Whiteface bold and peaked, Tahawus round and indistinct. The great ridge, hiding all but their heads, is here jagged or flowing, steep, and dark with spruce and pine. It rises like an impassable wall; of a clear morning, a frowning barrier of granite and forest; of a hazy afternoon, the shining, glowing rampart of some ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... leading members and officials of the House and making himself generally agreeable, as was his wont. I little knew what offence I was unconsciously giving to my colleagues. In those days a gulf that was regarded as impassable divided the members of the Press from the members of the House. Occasionally the white-haired, or rather white-wigged, Mr. Ross, the head of the Times Parliamentary corps, might be seen holding a mysterious colloquy in some gloomy corner ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... races and speaking two different languages. The ancient forest has disappeared, but its edge is still marked on the map. We cross it to-day without noticing any alteration in the landscape, but the distant voices of the peasants working in the fields remind us of its ancient shadow and impassable undergrowth. The traveller wonders, one moment, at the change, then takes up the road again, adding one further unanswered question to his load of unsolved problems. The historian evokes the terrible years ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... to the camp this evening; he still found the swamps were impassable, the water and mud lying on them in many parts, from three to four feet deep; there were patches of dry land here and there covered with good but ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... starting from this station for the South. You are aware that hitherto the Nile from about eighteen miles south of Gondokoro to the junction of it with the Unyame Hor (Apuddo, Hiameye, Dufte, or Mahade, as different people call it) has been considered impassable and a torrential stream. Being very much bothered with the difficulties of the land route for this distance, I thought I would establish ports along the river, hoping to find it in steps with portions which might be navigable, instead of what it was supposed to be—viz. a continuous ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... unexplored, roads and railways are needed in many parts, irrigation systems are still to be installed, and wells to be driven. Whole villages and towns are still without means of communication other than almost impassable roads and trails. Even the great progress in sanitation, which has successfully suppressed smallpox, the bubonic plague, and Asiatic cholera, has found the cause of and a cure for beriberi, has segregated the lepers, has helped ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft
... over him by the witchery of this young girl? Had he not his wife? Was she not at Chetwynde Castle? That odious wife, forced on him in his boyhood, long since grown abhorrent, and now standing up, an impassable barrier between him and the dearest longings of his heart. So he crushed down desire; and, while assenting to Obed's plans, made no proposal to assist him in any way ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Mr. Pixley vaguely, as though the name were new and strange to him. Or perhaps it was an endeavour on his part to express the impassable gulf which lay between his visitor and his ward, and the profound amazement he felt at any attempt on his visitor's part to abridge it. He also made a little involuntary preliminary cut at him with the pince-nez, as much as to say, "If this my weapon were of a size commensurate with ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... were capable of responding to affirmatively; yet how he leaves us looking at a "good that is fair," but without a word as to how it is to be attained, in view of, and in spite of, sin. That one short word raises an impassable barrier between us and that fair good, and the more fair the good, the more cruel the pain at being so utterly separated from it; but then, too, the more sweet and precious the love that removes the barrier entirely, and introduces us to a good that is as ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... struck into the brush, threading the paths with the ease of woodsmen. It was necessary to keep to the high inland ridges for the simple reason that the pole trail had by now become impassable. Wallace Carpenter, attempting to follow them, ran, stumbled, and fell through brush that continually whipped his face and garments, continually tripped his feet. All he could obtain was a vanishing glimpse of his companions' backs. Thorpe and ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Passes.—Though the Alps form a barrier they have never formed an impassable barrier, since, from the earliest days onwards, they have been traversed first, perhaps, for purposes of war or commerce, and later by pilgrims, students and tourists. The spots at which they were crossed are called passes (this word is ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to work the destruction of his foes. The Artillery claims that mules are entirely too stubborn, too cowardly, and too hard to manage for the purpose of their arm of the service. It was also an experiment to use two mules per gun. The Engineer Department had reported that the road to the front was impassable for wheeled vehicles, and even the general had apparently thought that four mules per gun would be necessary. The necessity of economizing mules, and the opinion of the detachment commander that two mules per gun would be sufficient, had led to the ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... pursuit was pushed forward to the very edge of the enemy's country; Kay's troopers patrolled the north bank of the river and watched every road and ford; east and west Ripley's and Haynes's brigades formed impassable curtains. ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... thought land that lay inward from the sea was valueless. The forest was an impassable barrier. Later, up to the time of George Washington, the Alleghanies were regarded as a natural barrier. Patrick Henry likened the Alleghany Mountains to the Alps that separated Italy from Germany and said, "The mountain-ranges are lines that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... fugitive slaves, now only partially surrendered, would not be surrendered at all by the other. Physically speaking, we can not separate. We can not remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... already lavished on another: believe me, respect, esteem, are but poor, weak talismans to ward off life's trials. Rise superior to all puerile fancies; bear nobly the odium of old maidism, if such be thy fate, and if, like Sir Walter Scott's lovely creation, Rebecca, you are separated by an impassable gulf from your heart's chosen, or have met and suffered by the false and treacherous, take not any chance Waverley who may cross your path. Like the high-souled Jewess, resolve to live on singly, and strive with the means God has given you, to ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... our sentiments, and aid us in tracing the hidden links which bind apparent dissimilarities, identical oppositions and equivalent antitheses, and teach us the secrets of the chasms separating with narrow but impassable space, that which is destined to approach forever, yet never mingle; to resemble ever, yet never blend. To have awakened early, as did Madame Sand, to the dim whispering with which nature initiates her chosen to her mystic rites, is a necessary appanage ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... brought about since that memorable day is almost unbelievable. The whole country has been revolutionized. Railroads and macadamized roads have been built with steel and concrete bridges and where it used to be almost impassable it is now a pleasure to travel. Schools and colleges have been established. A bureau of labor has averted many strikes. A constabulary force of nearly five thousand men has done wonders in suppressing brigandage, bringing the savage tribes into subjection and preserving ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... scattered homesteads come out with joyful hearts to greet the sunshine. There is, however, no slow transition. Rushing winds from the North-west sweep the sky, the snow vanishes, and after a week or two, during which the prairie trails are impassable, the bleached grass dries and green blades and flowers ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... south of Temiscouata portage, when it was found that, from unforeseen delays in the transportation of the party of J. Renwick by sea to their work, and on the river St. Lawrence from one station to another, it became doubtful whether he could pass the Temiscouata portage before the woods became impassable, his colleague continued his parties in the field until the junction was effected. In this way, while the expenses of the division of J. Renwick have not been materially diminished, those of the division of A. Talcott have been largely increased; but a portion of the general work ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... "in and out" terms, from morning to night, as these others were among themselves; for one thing, the little daily duties of their life would not allow it. The "jolly times" on the Hill were a kind of Elf-land to them, sometimes patent and free, sometimes shrouded in the impalpable and impassable mist that shuts in the fairy region when it wills to be by itself for ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... details she is bereft. She has instead an immeasurably greater thing, intelligence, but whilst intelligence can learn everything it has everything to learn. Subhuman instinct can learn nothing, but is perfect from the first within its impassable limits. It is this lapse of instinctive aptitude that constitutes the cardinal difficulty against which we are assembled. The mother cat not merely has a far less helpless young creature to succour, but she has a far superior inherent or instinctive ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... into the galleries, which were almost impassable. In the distance Lady Holme caught sight of Miss Schley with Mrs. Wolfstein. They were surrounded by young men. She looked hard at the American's pale face, saying to herself, "Is that like me? Is that like me?" Her conversation with Robin Pierce had made her ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... the same first individual, the same first parent—surely very gratuitously increases the difficulties of the subject. Especially it complicates the problem of the distribution of the same plants and animals over countries immemorially separated by gulfs apparently impassable ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... ground where his front was defended, first by the little burn of Bannock, which at one point winds through a cleugh with steep banks, and next by two morasses, Halbert's bog and Milton bog. What is now arable ground may have been a loch in old days, and these two marshes were then impassable by a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... canals, or the waterways that intersected each other over the whole surface of the country. In these days the journey between Bagdad and Bassorah, a distance of some three hundred miles, involves a long detour to the east along the foot of the mountains, in order to avoid impassable marshes and bands of wandering Arabs devoted to murder and pillage. The flat country is infested with mounted brigands who strip unprotected travellers, but in ancient times it swarmed with traffic, every road was encumbered with the movements of merchandise and the march of caravans, the fields ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... the storm continued. Highways were blocked up, while roads less frequented were rendered wholly impassable. The oldest inhabitants of Oakland had "never seen the like before," and they shook their gray heads ominously as over and adown the New England mountains the howling wind swept furiously, now shrieking exultingly ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... Thinkest Thou we shall be right or still lying? They will convince themselves of our rightness, for they will see what a depth of degrading slavery and strife that liberty of Thine has led them into. Liberty, Freedom of Thought and Conscience, and Science will lead them into such impassable chasms, place them face to face before such wonders and insoluble mysteries, that some of them—more rebellious and ferocious than the rest—will destroy themselves; others—rebellious but weak —will destroy each other; while the remainder, ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... are shops, verandahs are almost universal along the pavement. The gutters are very wide—sometimes 5 feet or 6 feet, which is necessary to carry off the large amount of water coming down when it rains. At such times the mud is almost impassable. Melbourne proper is situated in the centre, and stands to the rest of the city somewhat as the City of London does to the various vestries. In Melbourne, however, each of the suburbs—15 in number—has a Mayor, Corporation, and Town Clerk of its own. Any municipality with a ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... cattle sore-footed and too much worn out to continue the journey. There we camped for the winter in the midst of the wilderness, 400 miles from the nearest settlement or postoffice, from which we were separated by a region of mountainous country, rendered nearly impassable in the winter by deep snows, and beset for the entire distance by hostile Indians. Disheartening as the prospect was, we felt that it would not do to give way to discouragement. A few venturesome prospectors from the west ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... At Charlemont, however, intelligence of fresh successes gained by Hamilton and De Rosen, at Cladyford and Strabane, came to restore his confidence; he instantly set forward, despite the tempestuous weather, and the almost impassable roads, and on the eighteenth reached the Irish camp at Johnstown, within four or five miles ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... night, at Mansfield, rain, hail, sleet and snow, such as Ohio had never experienced at that season of the year, (October 10), made the streets impassable. The minstrels played to a very meager audience. After all bills were paid the company had ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... we heard father say. "The servants have been careless in putting out the lights, and something has smouldered and finally caught the curtains—that's the most probable explanation. If that is the case, I fear the back stairs will be impassable; they are even ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Ah! if only they had been invited to a Bacchic revelling, or a feast of Pan or Aphrodit or Genetyllis,[390] why! the streets would have been impassable for the thronging tambourines! Now there's never a woman here-ah! except my neighbour Calonic, whom I see approaching yonder.... Good ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... watergates by which a little boat is always waiting, and secret passageways leading into fair places that are frequented by persons of distinction and charm. No darkness of night obscures these outlets; no neighbour's house shuts off the view; no drifted snow of winter makes them impassable. They are always free, and through them I go out and in upon ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... on my mind most of the time, Tom," replied the good man. "I am often asking myself. Can I not, in some way, lead these benighted souls to the Lamb of God? But how inaccessible they are! What an impassable barrier between them and us! and, with the exception of the youngest of them, how brutal and low! To see such splendidly-formed men spend their time squatted on the earth, playing jack-straws, or some equally silly game, from morning to night, is pitiful. And then their yelling ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... in its room an anxious and brooding wonder. God knows what thoughts passed through that somber mind in those long hours, when, concentrated upon himself, he must have faced the problem of his future and, like one before an impassable stone wall, had to fall back, baffled. He could be sure of only one thing: that never again could he be what he had been once—"the slickest cracksman in America." This in itself tortured him. Heretofore, life had been exactly ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... surface, unless there is a general thaw. You forget where we are, high up in the Dagh. Even where the snow melts, it will freeze every night, and make the roads more impassable. As to our path by the side of the precipice it will ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... after long rides and climbs in the heart of the Sierras. The gorges and canons of Colorado are surpassed; mountains that tower above Pike's Peak rise in steep incline from the still level of the sea; and the shores are clad in forests and undergrowth dense and impassable as the tangle of a ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... having collected all his forces, he purposed to hazard an attack on the chieftain himself, in the midst of the desert fastnesses to which he had driven him; but the difficulties which he experienced from the impassable state of the roads, the treachery of scouts and the inclemency of the season, compelled him to defer this undertaking till the return of spring. Meantime, such was the extremity of distress to which Tyrone had been reduced, that ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... who is looking at the machine while he is giving information is biased by the impressions as to what the machine can do; make allowances for this and get, if possible, an accurate description of the condition of any road which is pronounced impassable, for you alone know what the machine can do, and many a road others think you cannot cover ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... who were hurrying to the scene of disaster. When I arrived there, a crowd had already assembled. Castle-street was then very narrow. It was quite choked up with people. Dale-street was beginning to be crowded while High-street and Water-street were quite impassable. From the windows of all the houses the terrified inmates were to be observed en dishabille, and the large inn in Water-street, the Talbot, which was nearly opposite the Town Hall, had people looking out ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... beautiful house in a green dingle, musical with splashing water, and surrounded on almost every side by twenty miles of poisonous and rocky desert. The city was thirty miles away; there was but one road, which went no farther than my father's door; the rest were bridle-tracks impassable in winter; and we thus dwelt in a solitude inconceivable to the European. Our only neighbour was Dr. Grierson. To my young eyes, after the hair-oiled, chin-bearded elders of the city, and the ill-favoured and mentally stunted women of their harems, there was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the various types of this inference from similarity can be conveniently thrown into three groups. As will be obvious, there is no fixed and impassable ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... attempted to get through the gorge of this river in 1870, he would have found it impassable; but a few river-bed flats had been discovered above the gorge, on which there was now a shepherd's hut, and on the discovery of these flats a narrow horse track had been made from one end of ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... eight o'clock one evening, in the rue Pagevin, in the days when that street had no wall which did not echo some infamous word, and was, in the direction of the rue Soly, the narrowest and most impassable street in Paris (not excepting the least frequented corner of the most deserted street),—at the beginning of the month of February about thirteen years ago, a young man, by one of those chances which come but once in life, turned the ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... shaded three-quarters across by the cliff, the moon being behind this. The other quarter, on the side of the trees, is brilliantly lit up by her beams, showing the timber thick and close along its edge, to all appearance impassable as the facade of rugged rock frowning from the opposite concave of the enclosed circle. Communicating with this are but two paths possible for man or horse, and for either only in single file. One enters the glade coming up the river bottom along the base ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... hour of renunciation, are changed to bitterness and disgust. He remembers the old oracle: "In the Bacchic procession many carry the thyrsus, but few are inspired." The possibility of ultimate failure threatens him more and more while he reflects; as the chasm which you wish to leap grows impassable, if you measure and deliberate. But the vivacity of youth preserves him from any permanent misanthropy or doubt. Nature makes us blind where we should be injured by seeing. We partake of the lead of Saturn, the activity of fire, the forgetfulness of water. His academic praises console him, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... that intervene. We came from the station through the Neustadt, passing the Japanese Palace and the equestrian statue of Augustus the Strong, The magnificent bridge over the Elbe was so much injured by the late inundation as to be impassable; we worn obliged to go some distance up the river bank and cross on a bridge of boats. Next morning my first search was for the picture gallery. We set off at random, and after passing the Church of Our Lady, with its lofty dome of ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitring and recruiting of the holy fraternity that shall combine for the salvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve, and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs. The cooeperation is involuntary, and is put upon us by the Genius of Life, who reserves this as a part of his prerogative. 'Tis fine for us to talk: we sit and muse, and are serene, and complete; but the moment we meet with anybody, each ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the orders of General Armfeldt, have had several skirmishes with the Danes, which have in general proved very favourable to the former; but nothing of importance has yet taken place, owing to the roads being almost impassable from the depth of snow and ice, which, even at this advanced season, cover them. Last Wednesday, accounts were received from Stockholm, of the surrender of Sweaborg! It was the more unexpected from the garrison having withstood two assaults, ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... in such numbness of spirit only that the life of the invalid resembles a premature old age. Those excursions that he had promised himself to finish, prove too long or too arduous for his feeble body; and the barrier-hills are as impassable as ever. Many a white town that sits far out on the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the mountain side, beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is yet as inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and gorges ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... finest of the forage is nearer to the village among the truck-farms—the finest of forage and the fiercest of dangers. Some of the dangers of the plains were lacking, but the greater perils of men, guns, Dogs, and impassable fences are much increased. Yet those who knew Warhorse best were not at all surprised to find that he had made a form in the middle of a market-gardener's melon-patch. A score of dangers beset him here, but there was also a score of unusual delights and a score of holes in the fence for times ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... remained till the sixteenth day of November; when, being in danger of having his communication with Torgau cut off by the enemy, he removed to a strong camp, where his left flank was covered with that city and the river Elbe; his right being secured by a wood, and great part of his front by an impassable morass. Here he was reinforced with about twenty thousand men from Silesia, and joined by the king himself, who forthwith detached general Finck, with nineteen battalions and thirty-five squadrons, to take possession of the defiles of Maxen and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... impassable barrier, she touched me more deeply than when I sued her most. The undulating ripple which was her peculiar expression of joy was more than I could bear. I left the room and was flinging myself from the house to walk in the chill wind; ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... flowers and purple flashes of cranesbill. Here I examined my scratches and the state of things generally. The result of my reflections was to admit that the cobbler was right, that these ravines of the Upper Dordogne were practically impassable, and that the only rational way of following the river would be to keep sometimes on the hills and sometimes in the gorge, as the unforeseen might determine. Hitherto, I had not troubled to inquire where I should ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... at the last moment when too late, we had been unable to drag along with us for the attack on the stockade, the path we had traversed through the bush in the first instance under the leadership of our treacherous guide having almost been impassable ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... misery," bellicose intellectuals, the soldiers unite in showing a contempt which is free from violence but knows no bounds. To them has come "the revelation of the great reality": a difference between human beings, a difference far profounder and with far more impassable barriers than those of race: the sharp, glaring, and inalterable distinction, in the population of every country, between those who profit and those who suffer, those who have been compelled to sacrifice everything, ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... go out among the poor, as she had designed; for in that wilderness of hill and valley, wood and water, the roads even in the best weather were bad enough—but in mid-winter they were nearly impassable except by the hardiest pedestrians, the roughest horses, and the strongest wagons. Very early in January there came a deep snow, followed by a sharp frost, and then by a warm rain and thaw, that converted the hills into seamed and guttered precipices; the valleys ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... no word of the revealing talk; yet, when he and Karen were alone, he was aware of a new chill, or a new discretion, in the atmosphere. It was as if a veil of ice, invisible yet impassable, hung between them, and he could only infer that she had something to hide, he could only suspect, with a bitterer resentment, that Madame von Marwitz had been ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... pale-faces," commenced this exasperated and semi-poetic fury, shaking her fist under the nose of the impassable hunter, "you are not even a woman. Your friends the Delawares are only women, and you are their sheep. Your own people will not own you, and no tribe of redmen would have you in their wigwams; you skulk among petticoated ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... down for ages, until what perhaps had been once a deep canyon was now a narrow flat, a mass of debris, terminating at the top of the steep, ragged cliff that pitched downward before us. The high, rocky ridges on both sides were wholly impassable, at least for the teams. A search finally disclosed, at the base of the ridge on our right, a single possible passage. It was narrow, slightly wider than a wagon, and led downward at a steep incline, into the valley below, with rocks protruding from both its side walls, its ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... and in time they held "hard hats." The stamping of the social die had begun its work. Indeed, after a time there came to be in the great dining-room of the Stone Hotel little groups bounded by unseen but impassable lines. The bankers and the loan agents sat at the head of the hall, and to them drifted naturally the ministers, ever in search of pillars. Lawyers and doctors sat adjacent thereunto, and merchants not far away. There was yet no shrug at the artisan, yet the invisible hand ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... thaw. In spots the little rivulets of water appeared. Another day I saw a fly or a spider awakened after the hard winter. The spring was coming. I realized that in spring it was impossible to go out from the forest. Every river overflowed its banks; the swamps became impassable; all the runways of the animals turned into beds for streams of running water. I understood that until summer I was condemned to a continuation of my solitude. Spring very quickly came into her rights and soon my mountain was free ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... in charge of the gate, but she bent her head obediently and said nothing. It seems to be a general rule with religious houses that no one is ever to wait in the street for admittance; the barrier, which is often impassable, is the door that leads inward ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... shopkeeper's till or stock could be safe. From Bow to Hyde Park, from Thames Street to Bloomsbury, there was no parish in which some quiet dwelling had not been sacked by burglars. [327] Meanwhile the great roads were made almost impassable by freebooters who formed themselves into troops larger than had before been known. There was a sworn fraternity of twenty footpads which met at an alehouse in Southwark. [328] But the most formidable band of plunderers consisted ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Madame Hanska and the Mniszechs, and furniture, carriages, and servants, were despatched in advance. The weather, however, was an important consideration; and on this occasion, owing to the inclemency of the season, the roads were unfortunately impassable, so that the pleasure trip had to be deferred from the middle till the end of February. This was no doubt a sad disappointment to the Countess Anna, who thereby missed much enjoyment, and the delay must have caused intense irritation ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... syringas, calycanthus, and honeysuckle; I open the rickety gate, and find myself in a genuine old-fashioned garden, the homely, inclusive spot that welcomed all growing things to its hospitable bounds, type of the days when there were no impassable barriers of gold and caste between man and his brother man. In the middle of the garden stood a "summer-house," or arbor, whose crumbling timbers were knit together by interlacing branches of honeysuckle and running roses. The summer-house had four entrances, opening ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... reality: its insecurity from violence and oppression, its barbarous discomfort; the life of nobles in unplumbed stone castles; the life of burghers in walled towns, without lighting, drainage, or police; the life of countrymen who took their goods to market over miry roads impassable half the year for any wheeled vehicle. As to the English poets whom we have passed in review, from Coleridge to Swinburne, not one of them joined the Catholic Church; and most of them found romantic literary tastes quite consistent with varying ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... was less than one mile, more than half of which ran from the river to the wood, the remainder extending into the depths of the wood, taking an oblique direction to the left and terminating in the impassable swamp. The parapet was about five feet in height and from ten to twenty feet thick at the base, extending inland from the river one thousand yards. Beyond that, to the wood and swamp, where artillery ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... things we were henceforth to allow to become our life? Suppose we selected a given area of our environment and determined once for all that our correspondences should go to that alone, fencing in this area all round with a morally impassable wall? True, to others, we should seem to live a poorer life; they would see that our environment was circumscribed, and call us narrow because it was narrow. But, well-chosen, this limited life would be really the fullest life; it would ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... situation to scatter the wits of a Napoleon! It was no wonder that for a few moments his thoughts flattened themselves against an impassable barrier. Whitney Barnes was the first ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... men of the village were at work upon the plain, a mass of rock, detached by the slow action of the elements, or else precipitated by an earthquake shock, fell into the narrow cleft by which alone an ascent or descent of the mesa was made, and rendered it impassable. The women and children, left thus on the summit of a cliff four hundred and thirty feet in height, and cut off from communication with their relatives and friends, who were unable to rejoin and rescue them, are said to have slowly perished ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... make this hillside yield its purple banners from the secret storehouses within. So he had struggled with soil and season, with suns that scorched and winds that chilled, with parching days that opened the earth in great crevices, and with torrents that made the paths between the vines impassable for days. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... the silent garden, the deepening shadows, the darkening sky. Above her head, now, high in the air were the faintly rustling palm leaves. Behind the palms stretched the wall, high and blankly impassable. She felt strange, unreal.... ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... Courcelles where, on the following day, they relieved the troops of the 3rd Division in the trenches opposite Serre. The weather was bad, the enemy kept up brisk attentions and the trenches were the worst which the Battalion had ever been in. Most of them were absolutely impassable, being full of water to a height of five feet, with the result that reliefs had for the most part to be made outside the trenches. Owing to this condition of matters, strict orders were issued for the prevention of "trench feet," but notwithstanding ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... an almost continuous succession of snow fields and glaciers beyond all comparison. The snow line is 17,000 feet in midsummer, and in winter comes down to 12,000 and 15,000 feet, and when that altitude is reached snow is continuous and impassable. This is the highest and the most extensive of all mountain ranges. Along the northern frontier of India for 2,000 miles it stands like a vast hedge, the most formidable natural boundary in the world, nowhere lower than ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... canals, in this endless morass—made impassable by flooding—many, many brave German soldiers have sacrificed their lives. During the autumn and winter months of 1914 the whole Yser domain was ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... and a half, miss, by street measurement just now, as, on account of changes, this is impassable," was the prompt reply. "Scarcely half a square by the alley that runs from my back-door, after a short turn, straight through to Maple Street; and, if it is only question of a message, I can send Caleb, so that you may await the coming of the doctor in comfort, in this emporium. He always uses ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... over it. These valleys, now so rich and productive, wore a very different aspect when the brethren first chose them as the place of their retirement. Wide swamps, deep morasses, tangled thickets, wild impassable forests, were their prevailing features. The "bright valley,'' Clara Vallis of St Bernard, was known as the "valley of Wormwood,'' infamous as a den of robbers. "It was a savage dreary solitude, so utterly barren that at first ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... moments through the kitchen window, that he had never seen a happier family, and with a sigh wished that it was his privilege to join them without being thought an intruder. Mildred's reserve, however, formed an impassable barrier, and he was hastening by with downcast eyes, when, to his surprise and the young girl's evident astonishment, Mr. Jocelyn arose and said, "Ah, Mr. Atwood, we're glad to see you. Won't you join our little party? I want to thank you again for offering ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... thing in the world to go to astray, but always difficult to return, Martin Green was astray, but how was he to get into the right path again? A barrier that seemed impassable was now lying across the way over which he had passed, a little while before, with lightest footsteps. Alone and unaided, he could not safely get back. The evil spirits that lure a man from virtue never counsel aright when to seek to return. ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... how came you by those lofty walls? Which of my ancestors had begirt me with an impassable barrier in ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... Major Powell, undismayed by legends of underground channels, impassable cataracts, and whirlpools; of bloodthirsty tribes haunting its recesses,—had passed through the canyons in safety, measuring and surveying as he went. We also knew of the many other attempts that had been made—most of them ending in ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... hope of finding the tiger, much less of rescuing Baboo, dead or alive. The jungle loomed up like an impassable wall on all three sides of the compound, so dense, compact, and interwoven, that a bird could not fly through it. Still I knew that my men, if they had the courage, could follow where the tiger led, and could cut ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... Hollywood-inspired belief, the Sahara does not consist principally of sand dunes, although these, too, are present, and all but impassable even to camels. Traffic, through the millennia, has held to the endless stretches of gravelly plains and the rock ribbed plateaus which cover most of the desert. The great sandy wastes or ergs cover roughly a fifth of the entire Sahara, and possibly two thirds of this ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... the Blue Ridge, that beautiful line of mountains which, as yet, almost formed the western frontier of inhabited Virginia. Winter still lingered on the tops of the mountains, whence melting snows sent down torrents, which swelled the rivers and occasionally rendered them almost impassable. Spring, however, was softening the lower parts of the landscape and smiling in ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... regard to the multitude of instances by which men may be deterred from the attempt, here is my answer. First, what need to dissemble? Either store of instances must be procured, or the business must be given up. All other ways, however enticing, are impassable. Secondly, the prerogatives of instances, and the mode of experimenting upon experiments of light (which I shall hereafter explain), will diminish the multitude of them very much. Thirdly, what matter, I ask, if the description of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... likes, bawling as he likes, hustling as he likes.... He sees the rich, the aristocratic class, in occupation of the executive government; and so, if he is stopped from making Hyde Park a bear-garden or the streets impassable, he cries out that he is ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... another name for it—'the grandmother of all buckets.' I was once in Wastdale with a dean of the Church of England, respectable, sedate, and a D.D. It had poured for days without ceasing; the roads were under water, the passes were impassable, the mountains invisible; there was nothing to be seen but waterfalls, and those in the wrong place; there was no literature; the dean's guide-books were exhausted, and his Bible, it is but charitable and reasonable to suppose, he knew by heart. ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... On the other hand, the democratic formula of "equality before the law" best defines the modern conception of human relations, and this maxim indicates a tone of thought directly the converse of that which begot status; for whereas the one strove to raise impassable barriers against free competition in the struggle for existence, the ideal of the other is to offer the fullest scope for the expansion of ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... of stormy weather, which made the roads almost impassable, helped Robin. She threw herself into her studies with a determination almost as upsetting to Percival Tubbs as her former indifference. And when the studies were over she buried herself in the great divan before the library fire with ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... view of heathen religion it strove to rescue the ideal religion from the actual, and to discover the one revelation of the Divine ideal amid the great variety of religious traditions and modes of worship. But its invincible dualism, separating by an impassable chasm God from the world, and mind from matter, identifying goodness with the one, evil with the other, prevented belief in a religion like Christianity, which was penetrated by the Hebrew conceptions of the universe, so alien ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Europe that we can trace the relations established between men separated by vast distances, by oceans, and by apparently impassable deserts. The shells of the Atlantic and those of the Pacific, the copper of Lake Superior, the mica of the Alleghanies, and the obsidian of Mexico lie together beneath the tumuli of Ohio, and quite recently Mr. Putnam exhibited to the Society of Antiquaries a collection of ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... no time in utilising his victory, for the same day he passed a division of native infantry over a bridge of boats across the Sutlej, the bridge of Sobraon having been broken and burnt at the close of the action, and the ford at Hurrakee being impassable, the river having risen some seven inches in a short time. The destruction of the bridge of Sobraon does not appear to have been a politic measure; it was not necessary as a precaution, because the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... turned back to return to Ghizr, the party carrying the guns were just arriving at a stream called the Shamalkhand, which flows from a high pass of the same name, which is often used as a summer route to Mastuj, but at that time of year is impassable. From this stream to Langar, the camping ground on the eastern side of the Shandur Pass, is some four miles, the valley being open and fairly level, but covered with thick dwarf willow on the banks of the stream flowing down the centre which confines the road to the ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... and snows of winter swept over the lonely island. There would be no court until December to try John, and his imprisonment in Kirkwall jail grew every day more dreary. But no storms kept Christine long away from him. Over almost impassable roads and mosses she made her way on the little ponies of the country, which had to perform a constant steeple-chase over ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... fellow, the mere musicians are as plentiful as niggers on the sea-shore. A publisher might spend his whole day receiving regiments of unappreciated geniuses. Bond Street would be impassable. You look at the publisher too much from ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... evident that this war is breaking down the barriers that have heretofore been impassable, not only between men and women, but between the various classes of society, and that it cannot possibly end without bringing these more closely together, all working to the same end in a more perfect harmony, and that the result of it must be that ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... arbitrarily. They are determined by characters, but these are not arbitrary. The problem is, to find a few definite characters which point to the multitude of indefinite ones. Kinds are Classes between which there is an impassable barrier; and what we have to seek is, marks whereby we may determine on which side of the barrier an object takes its place. The characters which will best do this should be chosen: if they are also ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... inclined to ask what could have tempted her to talk in such a familiar way to a creature like him—human indeed, but separated from her by a gulf more impassable far than that which divided her from the thrones, principalities, and powers of the upper regions? And how is the fact to be accounted for, that here she put out a dainty foot, and reaching for one of her stockings, began to draw it gently ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... beauty, when the glaciers glitter in the sunshine, and the pink flowers of the rhododendron appear as if they were never to be sullied by the tempest. But a storm suddenly comes on; the roads are rendered impassable by drifts of snow; the avalanches, which are huge loosened masses of snow or ice, are swept into the valleys, carrying trees and ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... highways like drowning sailors to a life raft. When an excursion into the woods is proposed, all sorts of exaggerated or imaginary dangers are conjured up, filling the kindly, soothing wilderness with colds, fevers, Indians, bears, snakes, bugs, impassable rivers, and jungles of brush, to which is always added ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... that the line ahead leading past Fordham Cut was impassable. The passenger was stalled ten miles away, and orders from Rockton were to the effect that the Overland Express should take the cut-off. This diverged into the foothills, where there were no such deep cuts as on the direct route, and where it was hoped ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... those whom they dealt with, either inspected every cubic inch of luggage with boorish suspicion and resultant damage or else waved the proffered handbags airily aside with false geniality. The highways, repeating a pattern I had cause to know so well, were nearly impassable with brokendown cars and other litter. The streets of Queens, cluttered with wreckage and refuse, were bounded by houses in a state of apathetic disrepair whose filthy windows refused to look upon the scene before them. The great bridges ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Pullman, for it was utterly destroyed. He had driven the machine out there, with despatches, on the afternoon of the third day. Some of the heaviest fighting had occurred there, he said, many of the streets being rendered impassable by the heaps ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... in the fact that an emigrant party, on its way to the Sonora Pass, and in an endeavor probably to avoid the rough river canyon down which Fremont came, essayed this pass instead of the meadows above. It is a canyon which, at first, promises an easy pass but finally becomes almost impassable. The party in question found it necessary to abandon several of their wagons before they could get over. They, or another party, buried one of their men there, also some blacksmith tools. My endeavors to ascertain what party this was have thus far not been ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... paling was impassable. A small gate leading through it was still locked with a heavy Chinese padlock, and there was no key. One of the officers gave a wave of his hand, and a couple of the soldiers went out and reappeared with axes. In a few blows they had cleared a broad opening; ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... wood parallel to the creek. The situation was strong, to be sure; but hazardous on this account, that had our right wing been defeated, the defeat of the left would almost have been an inevitable consequence, and the whole thrown into confusion or pushed into the Delaware, as it was impassable by boats. ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... embrace, half averting her cheek, though Cecil's arms clung round her as though they would never let her go. The saddest feeling of the many that were busy then in the guilty, troubled heart, was a consciousness that in a few hours the gulf between them would be deep and impassable as the ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... distance, like the Promised Land to true believers. Some visions I beheld of its beautiful angels walking in shining robes; strains of its sweet melody were sometimes wafted across the distance; but I might never enter there. It was no land of promise to me. A gulf, dark and impassable, lay between. And beside all this, as I have already intimated, I considered myself out of danger. My life's lesson had been learned. I knew it by heart. What more could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... self-consciousness, exists in us under manifold limitations. Self-determination is limited by physical, corporeal, and mental conditions, so that there is "an impassable boundary line drawn around the area of volitional freedom." But the most fundamental and original limitation is that of duty. The self-determining power of man is not only circumscribed by necessary conditions, but also by the moral law ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... where he and Burkitt had taken Hampton, saw it. Lee judged roughly that it was separated from him by four or five miles of broken country, impassable to a man on horseback, to be covered laboriously foot in a ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... by night, these two halves of war continue to lie in wait for each other afar, to dig their graves at their feet, and I am helpless. They are separated by frontiers of gulfs, which bristle with weapons and explosive snares, impassable to life. They are separated by all that can separate, by dead men and still by dead men, and ever thrown back, each into its gasping islands, by black rivers and consecrated ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... myrtle-like leaves, garlanding the bushes; woodbines and elder-trees pushing out their small swelling buds; and grasses and mosses springing forth in every variety of brown and green. Here we are at the corner where four lanes meet, or rather where a passable road of stones and gravel crosses an impassable one of beautiful but treacherous turf, and where the small white farmhouse, scarcely larger than a cottage, and the well-stocked rick-yard behind, tell of comfort and order, but leave all unguessed the great riches of the master. How he became so rich is almost ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... Revolution and Napoleon. The fate of India seemed less certain, and the genius of Dupleix roused better hopes for France; yet India, defenceless as it was against European forces, was bound to fall a prize to the masters of the sea, unless some European state could control its almost impassable overland approaches. Clive, perhaps, was almost as much the brilliant adventurer as Dupleix, but he was supported at need by an organized government more susceptible than the French ancien rgime to the pressure of commercial ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... be impassable to-morrow," said Catharine, drawing aside the curtain, only to see a window already blocked with drifted snow. "But—who can be ringing on such ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rationalistic method may appear to us, nothing but supercilious ingratitude could prompt us to disparage the service it has rendered. The rationalists are the men to whom the world is indebted for being the pioneers in the work of breaking down the impassable barrier of hatred and disdain which divided the followers of one faith from those of another. Rationalism began to lift the curse of intolerance and persecution which lay heavily upon the human race. No one who values the freedom to live his own life in his own way should cast aspersions upon the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... necessity taught the people to protect against the severity of the cold and the fleeting but terrible heat of the sun with the shrewd ability which Norwegians display in the two-fold struggle. The difficulty of communication with the outer world, either by land where the roads are impassable, or by sea where none but tiny boats can thread their way through the maritime defiles that guard the entrance to the bay, hinder these people from growing rich by the sale of their timber. It would cost enormous sums to either blast a channel out to sea or construct a way to the interior. ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... Muerta and the Canyon de Chelly are especially noticeable. Many of these canyons are carved in a homogeneous red sandstone, and their walls are often vertical for hundreds of feet. Sometimes the canyons widen into narrow valleys, which are thus walled by impassable cliffs, except where lateral canyons cut ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... the centre and mud on both sides. Those joining Lindenhoek to Neuve Eglise and Wulverghem were also mostly pave. The remainder were mere field tracks for the most part, rarely metalled, and in wet weather almost impassable for mud. ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... see. To let him see it would have been to her an extreme personal degradation, an offence against the decencies of her class. This sorrow of hers, this invisible, yet implacable sorrow, stood between them, waving him away. It opened up again the impassable gulf. He felt himself not only a stranger, but an inferior, separated from her beyond all possibility of approach. She had not changed. She had simply ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... menial capacity in the country where they were born and educated to command. They can trace no difference between themselves and the more fortunate individuals of a race whose blood warms their veins, and whose name they bear. The want of wealth alone places an impassable barrier between them and the more favoured offspring of the same parent stock; and they go forth to make for themselves a new name and to find another country, to forget the past and to live in the future, to exult in the ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... street. But I was approaching the Seminary; and a resolution was suddenly formed to go and ask the pardon and intercession of the Superior. Then the character of Bishop Lartigue seemed to present an impassable obstacle; and the disagreeable aspect and harsh voice of the man as I recalled him, struck me with horror. I recollected him as I had known him when engaged in scenes concealed from the eye of the world. ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... and conventual calm never had been known to desert her; and her high, light, colorless soprano had something in it of the sexless timbre of the boy chorister. With her blond hair pressed meekly to her shapely head she was the delight and despair of poets, painters and musicians, for she turned an impassable cheek to their pleadings. Mrs. Minne would never remarry; and it was her large income that made water the mouth of the impecunious ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... the school was not quite good enough for the others: Shannon was almost impassable, and Amber, the half, generally waltzed round our forwards, and when he secured he passed the ball on to Aspinall, who doubled like a hare along the touch-line. The question then was "Could Acton stop the flying International, ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... Esterhazy and Theodolite, closed this splendid procession; and it is understood that on their arrival at Spy Park they were met by the colonel and some sporting friends, who expressed their astonishment, that after having travelled through such almost impassable roads, amid torrents of rain, and particularly the lap-dog beagles, not more than thirteen inches and a half in height, and consequently often swimming, they should have arrived without ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... skill, enterprise, nor money left in the country. What resources it contained were altogether undeveloped. There was little communication between one place and another, and such roads as existed were for the greater part of the year simply impassable. ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
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