"Web" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the midst of it, the miniature portrait of Mrs. Wentworth's nephew. It fell into the hands of one of that lady's friends, who immediately despatched the bundle to her. Mervyn, in his interview with this lady, spied the portrait on the mantel-piece. Led by some freak of fancy, or some web of artifice, he introduced the talk respecting her nephew, by boldly claiming it as his; but, when the mode in which it had been found was mentioned, he was disconcerted and confounded, and ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... discovered that the webs of the little spiders in the road, when saturated with moisture, as they were from the early fog this morning, exhibit prismatic tints. Every thread of the web was strung with minute spherules of moisture, and they displayed all the tints of the rainbow. In each of them I saw one abutment of a tiny rainbow. When I stepped a pace or two to the other side, I saw the other abutment. ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... belief of its private members; and the forms of orthodoxy, the articles of faith, are subscribed with a sigh, or a smile, by the modern clergy. Yet the friends of Christianity are alarmed at the boundless impulse of inquiry and scepticism. The predictions of the Catholics are accomplished: the web of mystery is unravelled by the Arminians, Arians, and Socinians, whose number must not be computed from their separate congregations; and the pillars of Revelation are shaken by those men who preserve the name without ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... remarkable scenes of carnage and destruction. I have taken down a ball as large as a man's head consisting of successive layers rolled together, in the heart of which was the den of the family, whilst the envelope was formed, sheet after sheet, by coils of the old web filled with the wings and limbs of insects of all descriptions, from the largest moths and butterflies to mosquitoes and minute coleoptera. Each layer appeared to have been originally suspended across the passage to intercept the expected prey; and, as it became surcharged with ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... melody of his voice. Orson charmed us with the secrets won from his interviews with Pan in the Walden woods; while Emerson, with the zeal of an engineer trying to dam wild waters, sought to bind the wide-flying embroidery of discourse into a web of clear sweet sense. But still in vain. The oracular sayings were the unalloyed saccharine element; and every chemist knows how much else goes to practical food—how much coarse, rough, woody fibre is essential. ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... dulness drives me wild. Then again I merely gaze at it. I try time and again to get my mind on my work, and something—anything, provided it is trivial enough—turns me aside. Just now I saw a spider-web, and that made me think of Bruce, and thence I went by way of Walter Scott to Palestine, and when I came to I was writing a song for—who was the minstrel?—to sing outside of the prison ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... "credulous fool," as Iago calls him, and it is only our sense of Iago's devilish cleverness that allows us to excuse Othello's folly. The strawberry-spotted handkerchief is not needed: the magic in its web is so strong that the mere mention of it blows his love away and condemns both Cassio and Desdemona to death. If this Othello is not easily jealous then no man is prone to doubt and quick to ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... various active forces. There was the joy of the artist who sees that a masterpiece he has begun is progressing satisfactorily; maybe also the satisfaction of the spider when the fly comes near the web; but there was also kindness, pity, great tenderness, and all that over which angels rejoice, as the poet has it. I felt sorry the defenceless little thing should fall into my hands; and that pity increased the love, and the desire to conquer ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... trimetrical grouping of measures (instead of our customary fourfold basis), and a suggestion of Hellenic instruments,—all this lore has not robbed the scene in any sense of an irresistible brilliance and spontaneity. The weaving of Arachne's web is pictured with especial power. Greek traditions have, of course, been used only for occasional impressionisms, and not as manacles. Elaborately colored modern instrumentation and all the established devices from canon up are employed. A piano transcription of part of the music ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... sword, whereof the web was steel, Pommel, rich stone; hilt gold; approved by touch With rarest workmanship all forged weel, The curious art excelled the substance much: Thus fair, rich, sharp, to see, to have, to feel, Glad was the Paynim to enjoy it such, And said, "How I this gift can use and wield, ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... disappointment laughs at the curious fabric, formed by so many efforts and gay with so many brilliant colors, and while the artists imagine the work arrived at the moment of completion, brushes away the beautiful web, and ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... are old enough to make trips alone to the flowery feeding grounds I fly to the edge of the forest and there, tempted to feed from the cone-shaped flowers of a pendant vine, become enmeshed in the web of a great ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... away in a pigeonhole of her desk. She was still thinking soberly of the subtle web of prejudices, feelings and conditions into which she had obtruded her one fixed purpose in life. But if Mr. Elliot had been as good as engaged to Fanny Dodge, as Mrs. Solomon Black had been at some pains to imply, in what way had she ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... it may be as well to notice a distinction between the Hen Harrier and Montagu's Harrier, which has been pointed out by Mr. Howard Saunders, and which holds good in all ages and in both sexes. This distinction is, that in the Hen Harrier the outer web of the fifth primary is notched, whereas in Montagu's Harrier it is plain, or, in other words, the Hen Harrier has the exterior web of the primaries, up to and including the fifth, notched, and in Montagu's Harrier this is only the case as far as the fourth.[7] ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... wit, Quips, cranks, puns, sneers,—with clear sweet thought profound;— And stinging jests, with honey for the wound,"— The subtlest lines of ALL fine powers, split To their last films, then marvellously spun In magic web, whose million ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... then Dan came—a serious young man with a ready-made necktie, who had escaped the city's brand of frivolity—an electrician earning 30 dollars per week who looked upon Lou with the sad eyes of Romeo, and thought her embroidered waist a web in which any fly ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... cooked and served a meal as any under Rupert's rule, which is saying a good deal, and if the young ladies failed to appreciate the "floating island," the "golden nests," and "silver web," so thoughtfully provided for them, Tanty did ample ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... Bruce had six toes!" said Betty, very solemn with the importance of her discovery, her eyes fastened on a representation of that hero asleep in a cave, while a spider as large as his head wove a web of cables across the opening. "Did ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... attempt, Corneille has deduced the intricate web of his tragedy of Heraclius, which requires more than one representation to be clearly understood, (Corneille de Voltaire, tom. v. p. 300;) and which, after an interval of some years, is said to have puzzled ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... surprised when, the minute his back was turned, Dolly came walking quietly back, led by a little wee brown man who scarcely reached up to her knees. Yet she let him guide her, which he did as gently as possible, though the string he held her by was no thicker than a spider web, floating ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... into a hole or socket in the upper jaw, while in the crocodile it fits into a notch. The forefoot of the crocodile has five toes not webbed, the hindfoot has four toes which are webbed; in the alligator the web is altogether wanting. They are so much alike that they ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... woman's personality clung to me like a viscous web. I struggled against it, but it enwrapped me; I could ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... luxury beyond your imagination to conjure,—feel the softness of silks finer than the gossamer web of the spider—hear the night voices of the throbbing desert, or sway to the jolting of the ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... remembrance; thistles, the old insignia of Scotland; and the field daisy, the favorite symbol of King James' mother, the beautiful Queen Margaret. The flowers, entwined together, run in stripes down the splendid web of the scarf, which terminates at each end with what has been a magnificent fringe of similar hues and brightness. The scarf is seven feet in length, by one ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... of the Directory as told in books help to show us of what lies the web of history is woven. The theatre has lately got hold of this period, of which the fashions are still imitated. It has left the memory of a joyous period of re-birth after the gloomy drama of the Terror. In reality the drama of the Directory ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... pleasantly given in these quaint words found its way to Jessie's heart. Her face became sober, she bit her lips, a stray tear or two hung, like dew-drops in the web of a gossamer, on her long eyelashes, she sighed and after a few moments of silent thought rose, planted her right foot firmly ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester
... late I can think of nothing else than the subject I questioned you about. I was waiting in deep anxiety, and there came to me only foolery and laughter. Farewell, Marit Heidegards, I shall not look at you too much, as I did at that dance. May you both eat well, and sleep well, and get your new web finished, and above all, may you be able to shovel away the snow which lies in front of the church-door. Most respectfully, OYVIND ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... the hand which had fondled him. It was of a strange dead pallor, with a yellow shiny web betwixt the fingers. All over it was a white fluffy dust, like the flour of a new-baked loaf. It lay thick on Sharkey's neck and cheek. With a cry of disgust he flung the woman from his lap; but in an ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... gracious of body, and passing fair of face, dainty and tall, and plump of her person. She stood before the king in a web of fine raiment, and ravished his eyes beyond measure. She filled the king's cup willingly, and was altogether according to his wish. So merry was the king, so well had he drunken, that he desired the damsel in his heart. The devil, who has led many ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... manner, is inquired by a curious posterity, that in so many matters is left unendingly to jump the empty and gaping figure of interrogation over its own full stop. Great ladies must they be, at the web of politics, for us to hear them cited discoursing. Henry Wilmers is not content to quote the beautiful Mrs. Warwick, he attempts a portrait. Mrs. Warwick is 'quite Grecian.' She might 'pose for a statue.' He presents her in carpenter's lines, with a dab of school-box colours, effective to those ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and she was an apt scholar. Now, from a learner she became a teacher, and in the suffering Irene found one ready to accept the higher truths that governed her life, and to act with her in giving them a real ultimatum. So, in the two years which had woven their web of new experiences for the heart of Irene, she had been drawn almost imperceptibly by Rose into fields of labor where the work that left her hands was, she saw, good work, and must endure for ever. What peace it often brought to her striving spirit, when, but for the sustaining and protecting ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... colour of smeared charcoal. We haven't been in the trenches long enough to evolve web feet, so mine are resting on a duck board spread over a quagmire of pea soup. The Heinies are right here, soaking in another ditch beyond a barbed wire fence, about the distance of second base from the home plate. Such ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... lines, and perfect right angles; the actual instrument can only show approximate circles, approximate straight lines, and approximate right angles. Perhaps the spider's part of the work is on the whole the best; the stretched web gives us the nearest mechanical approach to a perfectly straight line; but we mar the spider's work by not being able to insert those beautiful threads with perfect uniformity, while our attempts to adjust two of them across the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... qualities, natural and acquired, requisite for a successful cultivation of the larger forms. He could not grasp and hold the threads of thought which he found flitting in his mind, and weave them into a strong, complex web; he snatched them up one by one, tied them together, and either knit them into light fabrics or merely wound them into skeins. In short, Chopin was not a thinker, not a logician—his propositions are generally good, but his arguments ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... were Norwegian, and her listeners understood nothing of them; but the melody,—the pathetic appealing melody,—soul-moving as all true melody must be, touched the very core of their hearts, and entangled them in a web of delicious reveries. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... away from her, exclaims with energy) Ha! now I understand it all! the mystery is cleared! the web is unravelled! yes, yes, the meaning bursts at once upon me, all in the broad blaze of its daring villany, in all the hypocrisy ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... calls a Canterbury poke, dear boys," he cried. "Let 'em have it, my lads. The beggars look like so many flies in a spider's web; and ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... that sublime sweating establishment of theirs, we know not: that the coat they bring us out is the sorrowfulest fantastic mockery of a coat, a mere intricate artistic network of traditions and formalities, an embroiled reticulation made of web-listings and superannuated thrums and tatters, endurable to no grown Nation as a coat, is ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... Hare to bed on the unroofed porch of a log house, but routed him out early, and when Hare lifted the blankets a shower of cotton-blossoms drifted away like snow. A grove of gray-barked trees spread green canopy overhead, and through the intricate web shone crimson walls, soaring with resistless onsweep up and up to shut out all but a blue lake ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... also we know. No one saw the brother from the time Thaddeus left him. His bed had not been slept in. Thaddeus is evidently in a most disturbed state of mind. His appearance is—well, not attractive. You see that I am weaving my web round Thaddeus. The net begins to ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... legislation they have fenced them around with checks to guard against the effects of hasty action, of error, of combination, and of possible corruption. Error, selfishness, and faction have often sought to rend asunder this web of checks and subject the Government to the control of fanatic and sinister influences, but these efforts have only satisfied the people of the wisdom of the checks which they have imposed and of the necessity of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... in the newspapers an account of a philosopher in Germany who made caterpillars manufacture for him a veil of cobweb. The caterpillars were enclosed in a glass case, and, by properly-disposed conveniences and impediments, were induced to work their web up the sides of the glass case. When completed it weighed four-fifths of a grain. Herschel saw it lying on a table, looking like the film of a bubble. When it collapsed a little, and was in that state wafted up into the air, it wreathed like fine smoke. Chantrey, who was present, after ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... take up the end of a web, and find it packthread, I do not expect, by looking further, to ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... weaver! thou teachest me to persevere. Even if thy web be swept away thou dost commence again, and dost complete it. Again let it be torn asunder, and, unwearied, thou dost again recommence thy work over and over again. I shall follow thy example. I will go on, and I shall ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... "About the news from Eastern parts: And of her absent bairns, puir Highland hearts! If peace brought down the price of tea and pepper, And if the NITMUGS were grown ONY cheaper;— Were there nae SPEERINGS of our Mungo Park— Ye'll be the gentleman that wants the sark? If ye wad buy a web o' auld wife's spinning I'll warrant ye ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the present English-speaking generation is concerned, it cannot be said to really exist at all; spinster and Webster have been completely disconnected from the etymological group of spin and of weave (web). Similarly, there are hosts of related words in Chinese which differ in the initial consonant, the vowel, the tone, or in the presence or absence of a final consonant. Even where the Chinaman feels the etymological relationship, as in certain ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... bobbin. To the right he threw another, and to the left another. The silver wire seemed to whirl until it became a tangle of wire all over the house. The big black cat made an attempt to escape, but it was caught in the wire as a fly is caught in a spider's web, and it hung helpless by ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... may "act" or "be acted upon." For this cause, Dr. Mandeville, who cannot conceive that "to be loved" is in any wise "to be acted upon," pronounces it "fatally defective!" His argument is a little web of sophistry, not worth unweaving here. One of the best scholars cited in the reverend Doctor's book says, "Of mental powers we have no conception, but as certain capacities of intellectual action." ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the past—and of The present there is still for eye and thought, And meditation chastened down, enough; And more, it may be, than I hoped or sought; And of the happiest moments which were wrought Within the web of my existence, some From thee, fair Venice![402] have their colours caught: There are some feelings Time can not benumb,[lx] Nor Torture shake, or mine would now ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... shadow of impracticability; they were very "advanced" ideas in 1914, very Utopian. Against them was an unbroken mass of mental habit and public tradition. While we talked of this "war to end war," the diplomatists of the Powers allied against Germany were busily spinning a disastrous web of greedy secret treaties, were answering aggression by schemes of aggression, were seeing in the treacherous violence of Germany only the justification for countervailing evil acts. To them it was only another war for "ascendancy." That was three years and a half ago, and since ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... Aunt Olivia softly. "Here is her point lace handkerchief. She made it herself. It is like a spider's web. Here are the letters Will Montague wrote her. And here," she added, taking up a crimson velvet case with a tarnished gilt clasp, "are ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... with reason taxes,) and the Schoolmen since, aiming at glory and esteem, for their great and universal knowledge, easier a great deal to be pretended to than really acquired, found this a good expedient to cover their ignorance, with a curious and inexplicable web of perplexed words, and procure to themselves the admiration of others, by unintelligible terms, the apter to produce wonder because they could not be understood; whilst it appears in all history, that these profound doctors were no wiser nor ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... scent. Its erect ears, widened at the base and pointed at the top, gave it an appearance of vivacity and spirit. Its depth of chest, and tucked-up flank, and muscular quarters, marked it as a dog of speed, while its light frame, and the length of the toes, and wideness of web between them, seem to depict the kind of surface over which it was to bound. It is not designed to seize and to hold any animal of considerable bulk; it bounds over the snow without sinking, if the slightest crust is formed upon it, and eagerly overtakes and ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... are slaves to passions, run down with the stream (of desires), as a spider runs down the web which he has made himself; when they have cut this, at last, wise people leave the world free from cares, leaving all ...
— The Dhammapada • Unknown
... came an image in Life's retinue That had Love's wings and bore his gonfalon: Fair was the web, and nobly wrought thereon, O soul-sequestered face, thy form and hue! Bewildering sounds, such as Spring wakens to, Shook in its folds; and through my heart its power Sped trackless as the immemorable hour When birth's dark portal groaned and all ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... be ourselves; And not that other self which nods and smiles And babbles in our name; the one is Prayer, Lending its licensed freedom to the tongue That tells our sorrows and our sins to Heaven; The other, Verse, that throws its spangled web Around our naked speech and makes it bold. I, whose best prayer is silence; sitting dumb In the great temple where I nightly serve Him who is throned in light, have dared to claim The poet's franchise, though I may not hope To wear ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... He knew, he said, that the story he had to relate would appear almost incredible, but a soldier, a diplomat, a master of strategy, such as the personage to whom he now addressed himself, would understand—none better—how to unravel the tangled web, and follow up the clue to its ending in a den of secret, black, and midnight conspiracy. A blob of foam appeared upon his under-lip. He waved his ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... recommends it to him as a subject "which peradventure you may make use of in your way;" and concludes by saying, "in my opinion, which vails to yours, this is choice and rich stuff for you to put upon your loom, and make a curious web of." ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Fourdrinier machine, you may have noticed a brass ring riveted to the cross-bar, and there this cursed little knife—for you see it was a knife, by that time—had been cutting to pieces the endless wire web every time the machine was started. You lost your bonds, Mr. Sisson, because some Yankee woman ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... unto Samson, Hitherto thou hast mocked me, and told me lies: tell me wherewith thou mightest be bound. And he said unto her, If thou weavest the seven locks of my head with the web. And she fastened it with the pin, and said unto him, The Philistines be upon thee, Samson. And he awaked out of his sleep, and went away with the pin of the beam and with ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... loves also to follow in the wake of ships. For any offal or garbage thrown overboard is welcome to its hungry maw, and sailors do not often destroy this bird. When one is taken, however, they hesitate not to make such use of it as they can; and the large web feet, when cleaned and opened, are favourite tobacco pouches. I have one by me that was taken from a large albatross caught on the voyage from Australia. In Kamtschatka the albatross is caught by the natives and made useful. For in the summer, flocks of these ...
— Mamma's Stories about Birds • Anonymous (AKA the author of "Chickseed without Chickweed")
... not in the words (often interrupted, often inevitably confused) of the speakers themselves, but in the words of the brief, plain, studiously simple abstract which I committed to writing for my own guidance, and for the guidance of my legal adviser. So the tangled web will be most speedily and ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... which communicate with the interior of the hives, and which appear to the prowling worm in search of a comfortable nest, just the very best possible place, so warm and snug and secure, in which to spin its web, and "bide its time." When the hand of the bee-master lights upon it, doubtless it has reason to feel that it has been caught ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... fitly sing The source wherefrom doth spring That mighty commerce which, confined To the mean channels of no selfish mart, Goes out to every shore Of this broad earth, and throngs the sea with ships That bear no thunders; hushes hungry lips In alien lands; Joins with a delicate web remotest strands; And gladdening rich and poor, Doth gild Parisian domes, Or feed the cottage-smoke of English homes, And only bounds its blessings by mankind! In offices like these, thy mission lies, My Country! and it shall not end As long as rain ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... for a move from Solomon. In a few minutes he heard a stir in the brush. Then he could dimly see the face of his friend beyond the spider's web. ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... into the library and lighted a cigar. I threw myself into an easy-chair, and as I looked up I saw a spider-web in a corner of the ceiling. "I must speak to Prudence about that in the morning," I said to myself with annoyance. Then for the first time it came to me that I was out of temper, for I am customarily tranquil ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... passed since then. Universities have been opened and multiplied. Military drill has passed into a legend; officers are too few by thousands, the railways have eaten up all the capital and have covered Russia as with a spider's web, so that in another fifteen years one will perhaps get somewhere. Bridges are rarely on fire, and fires in towns occur only at regular intervals, in turn, at the proper season. In the law courts judgments are as wise as Solomon's, and the jury only take bribes ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... piling up armaments (as Mr. Chesterton wants them to), giving the best of their attention and emotion to sheer physical conflict, instead of to organisation and understanding, they will merely weave that web of debt and usury still closer; it will load us more heavily and strangle us to a still greater extent. If usury is the enemy, the remedy is to fight usury. Mr. Chesterton says the remedy is for its victims to fight ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... cruel. And these sullen beings, these oppressed ones, listened without much belief to the music of the new words,—the music for which their hearts had long been waiting. Little by little they lifted up their heads, and tore the meshes of the web of lies wherewith their oppressors had enwound them. In their existence, made up of silent and contained rage, in their hearts envenomed by numberless wrongs, in their consciences encumbered by the dupings of the wisdom of the strong, in this dark and laborious life, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... him; for there is no law or order above knowledge, nor can mind without impiety be deemed the subject or slave of any, but rather the lord of all.' The union of opposite natures, who form the warp and the woof of the political web, is a favourite thought which occurs ...
— Laws • Plato
... upon the battlefield, decorated now with well-mended rents, and with stains of carnage. "Behold it!" cries the idolater. "It is absolutely faultless in perfection and beauty! There is not a blemish on its folds, there is not an imperfection in its web; every thread in warp and woof is flawless; every seam is absolutely straight; every star is geometrically accurate; every proportion is exact; the man who denies it is ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... decree of fate is now accomplished by your own fault; it is the web which you have woven, the thorns of the tree which yourself have planted. I wished to spare, and even to assist, the champion of the Moslems. You braved our threats; you despised our friendship; you forced us to enter your kingdom with our invincible armies. Behold the event. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the field species—epeira and argiope. Last week a big bumble-bee-like fly paid me a visit and suddenly disappeared. To-day I find him dried and ready for the insect-pin and the cabinet on the window-sill beneath the web, which affords at all times its liberal entomological assortment—Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Diptera, and Lepidoptera. Many are the rare specimens which I have picked from these charnel remnants ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... been slight—its period of occultation continued. That fact was evident, but perhaps that would not have been the case in a rigidly parabolical course. This was a fresh problem which tormented Barbicane's brain, veritably imprisoned as it was in a web of the unknown which he ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... flourish away of itself, without knowing why or how. More than all this, I have talked of love affairs with a young tiger. When I told you it was lamentable to see a man of any intelligence descend, as I have done, to all such petty ways of connecting the thousand threads of this dark web, was I not right? Is it not a fine spectacle to see the spider obstinately weaving its net?—to see the ugly little black animal crossing thread upon thread, fastening it here, strengthening it there, and again lengthening it in some other place? You shrug your shoulders in pity; but return ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... was raised as the shaft was seen to fall upon the snowy surface on the opposite side; and the tiny cord was observed, like the thread of a spider's web, spanning the ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... spreading oak, was there; 60 Old Saturn too, with up-cast eyes, Beheld his abdicated skies; And mighty Mars, for war renowned, In adamantine armour frowned; By him the childless goddess rose, Minerva, studious to compose Her twisted threads; the web she strung, And o'er a loom of marble hung: Thetis, the troubled ocean's queen. Matched with a mortal, next was seen, 70 Reclining on a funeral urn, Her short-lived darling son to mourn. The last was he, whose thunder slew The Titan race, a rebel crew, That, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... things to you that should have opened your eyes. I must escape from the house of bondage—must be master of myself, of my word and thought. Oh, the world is so wide, so wide—and we are so narrow! Only gradually did the web mesh itself about me. At first my fetters were flowery bands, for I believed all I taught and could teach all I believed. Insensibly the flowers changed to iron chains, because I was changing as I probed deeper into life ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the fields the grain bowed to Him with a golden wave, rustled the heavy heads of the wheat, and the delicate tasseled oats trembled like a cluster of tiny bells. In the air, filled with brightness here and there, floated the spring thread of the spider's web, blue from the azure of the sky and golden from the sun, as if a veritable thread from the loom of ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Richard, he had by no means returned like the prodigal son. On the contrary, he had sent home a remittance, as it were, by the butler, of more than five thousand pounds. The whole plot had been devised by honest John as the only method of extricating Master Richard from that Monte Carlo spider's web, and had been carried out by the help of the maitre d'hotel, with the squire's approval. And to do the young fellow justice, he never resented the trick that had ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... entirely to ask about the little shoe, or the tall gentleman of the attic. Nevertheless I did, as I went out, throw a glance up to the window of the court—alas! there were more panes broken, the placard was gone, the veil was gone—there was nothing but a flimsy web which a bold spider had stretched across one of the comers. I felt sure that the last six months had brought its changes to other houses, as well as the house ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... you know that there are a great variety of dogs. The Newfoundland dog not only drags carts and sledges, but has a sort of web foot that makes him a particularly good swimmer. He often saves the lives ...
— True Stories about Cats and Dogs • Eliza Lee Follen
... "I'm caught in a web," said Trove, leaning forward, his head upon his hands, "and Leblanc's wife is the spider. How about the money? Have they been ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge. To blot it out is nothing short, if I may so speak, of unravelling the web of University Teaching. It is, according to the Greek proverb, to take the Spring from out of the year; it is to imitate the preposterous proceeding of those tragedians who represented a drama with the omission ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... determined the specialities of every bird's nest, and the general colouration of female birds, with their action and reaction on each other, we can hardly expect to find evidence more complete than that here set forth. Nature is such a tangled web of complex relations, that a series of correspondences running through hundreds of species, genera, and families, in every part of the system, can hardly fail to indicate a true casual connexion; and when, of the two factors in the problem, one can be shown to ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... in the stream, as vapour mingled with the skies, So weaves the brain of mortal man the tangled web of Truth and Lies. ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... look so moody? There are as many furrows on your brow as lines in a spider's web, and your lips are drawn in as if you had dined on green persimmons. Child, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... in the window-bench, her face close to the casement, where an outer pane of rain-water was sliding down the inner pane of glass. Her eyes rested on the web of a spider, probably starved long ago, which had been mistakenly placed in a corner where no flies ever came, and shivered in the slight draught through the casement. Tess was reflecting on the position ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... or lash the stubborn age, With laughing satire; or in rural scenes With shepherds sport; or rack his hard-bound brains For the unexpected turn. Arachne so, In dusty kitchen corner, from her bowels 140 Spins the fine web, but spins with better fate, Than the poor bard: she! caitiff! spreads her snares, And with their aid enjoys luxurious life, Bloated with fat of insects, flesh'd in blood: He! hard, hard lot! for all his toil and care, And painful watchings, scarce protracts a while His meagre, ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... best white swan or goose feathers; have them plucked off the fowl with care not to break the web; free them from down, except a small quantity on the shaft of the feather. Get also a little fine wire, different sizes; a few skeins of fine floss silks, some good cotton wool or wadding, a reel of No. ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... of which is sold by those who produce it. It, therefore, gives rise to an enormous commerce and provides a medium of exchange that almost entirely takes the place of gold in the settlement of interstate and international balances." By it countries are bound together "in its globe engirdling web; so that when a modern economist concerns himself with the interdependence of nations he naturally looks to cotton for his ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... had known the value of them that are bred and to be had in Britain he would never have gone to Colchis to look for any there. For, as Dionysius Alexandrinus saith in his De situ Orbis, it may by spinning be made comparable to the spider's web. What fools then are our countrymen, in that they seek to bereave themselves of this commodity by practising daily how to transfer the same to other nations, in carrying over their rams and ewes to breed and increase among them! The first example hereof was ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... you. Beautiful line! Quite Kipling. Far from me to cavil or carp, Tum-tee-tum-tee-didy, Or shift the shuttle from web or warp. And all for my dark-eyed lydy! Far be it from ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... unapproachable in effect in this particular place and with its surroundings. It has the richness and softness of velvet, and the red of the mahogany doors and furniture finds exactly its foil in the blue greens and soft browns of the web, while the polished floor and velvety antique rugs bring all the richness of the walls down to one's feet and to the hearth with its glow of fire. But this particular room hardly makes an example for general following. It is really a house of state, a house without ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... the Jack of Asia, to the Cattle feeding in our pastures. Among the Birds, this similarity of voice in Families is still more marked. We need only recall the harsh and noisy Parrots, so similar in their peculiar utterance. Or take as an example the web-footed Family,—do not all the Geese and the innumerable host of Ducks quack? Does not every member of the Crow Family caw, whether it be the Jackdaw, the Jay, the Magpie, the Rook in some green rookery of the Old World, or the Crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw that seems to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... terrible punishment inflicted on the Spanish marine England was less disposed than ever to listen to the claims of Spain.[2] Reduced in power, the Spaniards substituted intrigue for warlike measures, and while they entangled King James in its web and hastened a change in the form of government for Virginia, they did not inflict any permanent injury ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... Nassau damask,' at Haughton's in the Coombe, that had taken her fancy mightily, and how she had chosen a set of new Nankeen plates and fine oblong dishes at the Music Hall, and how Peter Raby, the watchman, was executed yesterday morning, in web worsted breeches, for the murder of Mr. Thomas Fleming, of Thomas-street, she did come at last to mention Devereux: and she said that the colonel had received a letter from General Chattesworth, 'who by-the-bye,' and then came a long parenthesis, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... mist began to steam and wreathe upon the foul beer-colored stream. The loathy floor of liquid mud lay bare beneath the mangrove forest. Upon the endless web of interarching roots great purple crabs were crawling up and down. They would have supped with pleasure upon Amyas's corpse; perhaps they might sup on him after all; for a heavy sickening graveyard smell made his heart sink within ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... return and possess again the city I came to know so familiarly in later years, and to be so passionately interested in. Some color of my prime impressions has tinged the fictitious experiences of people in my books, but I find very little of it in my memory. This is like a web of frayed old lace, which I have to take carefully into my hold for fear of its fragility, and make out as best I can the figure once so distinct in it. There are the narrow streets, stretching saltworks to the docks, which I haunted for their ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... head of a valley, the noble bird sprang from the top of a dry tree above me and came sailing directly over my head. I saw him bend his eye down upon me, and I could hear the low hum of his plumage, as if the web of every quill in his great wings vibrated in his strong, level flight. I watched him as long as my eye could hold him. When he was fairly clear of the mountain he began that sweeping spiral movement in which he climbs the sky. Up and up he went without ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... with Plato, and Aristotle, and the Greeks generally, they did not so lead. The Greeks could not feel sure that this effort towards perfection, though it is part of existence, is strong enough to deliver man in this world from the web of evil in which also he is involved, nor even that he makes any approach on the whole towards the loosening of the toils. The spectre of world-destruction, as Whitman says of Carlyle, was always before them. And I wish to ask later on if we may not surmise definite reasons in ...
— Progress and History • Various
... dreams! above the city's strife I picture him, in some lone eyrie pent, What time the crash and roar of London's life Drone deep-mouthed up in sullen music blent, And, hearkening, he weaves with lonely glee A wondrous web ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... still flies me; Her that follows me, I fly; She that I still court, denies me; Her that courts me, I deny; Thus in one web we're subtly wove, And yet we mutiny ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... wheels groaned and swished like the imprisoned monster of Robert's imaginings, and at last came to a halt at the end of the shift; but in the pattern which they had that day woven into the web of industry, there were two bright threads—threads of great beauty and high worth—threads which the very gods seemed proud of seeing there, twisted and twined, and lending color of richest hue to the whole design—threads ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... the old house I could see that the mystic web had been spun, that the great moment of the sale was arriving. The auctioneer was leaning forward now upon the tall cupboard with an air of command, and surveying the assembled crowd with ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... call Parliaments, and there enact Lawes good and wholesome, such as who so breake Are hung by the purse or necke, but as the weake And smaller flyes i'th Spiders web are tane When great ones teare ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... of itself. Proof is a process; but there is no process in this direct conviction of truth. Its assertion is just the denial of process; it is a repudiation of all connections; in such a faith of feeling there are no cob-web lines relating fact to fact, which doubt could break. Feeling is the immediate unity of the subject and object. I am pained, because I cannot rid myself of an element which is already within me; I ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... the barley-fields; market-girls in red cloaks and damsels of high degree; curly shepherd-boys and long-haired pages in gay livery; an abbot on an ambling pad and knights in armor and nodding plumes; and her constant pastime was to weave these sights into the magic web on which she wrought. I undertake, in a modest way, to follow her example, and weave a series of pictures from the sights that daily meet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... during his twenty years' absence, in the later half of which an army of suitors pled for her hand, pleading that her husband would never return; but she put them all off by a promise of marriage as soon as she finished a web (called after Penelope's web) she was weaving, which she wove by day and undid at night, till their importunities took a violent form, when her husband arrived and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... interest upon this strip of coast with its matchless harbor, and regretted that Drake had not discovered it when he wintered his ship close by in 1579. Thus Yerba Buena sprawled and dreamed in the sunshine, unmindful of the web of destiny being ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... wind began to moan, But still the night went on: Through its giant loom the web of gloom Crept till each thread was spun: And, as we prayed, we grew afraid Of ...
— The Ballad of Reading Gaol • Oscar Wilde
... ideas which seem so exactly to describe the dynamic order of nature are not repetitions of their natural counterpart: for mathematical form in nature is a web of diffuse relations enacted; in the mind it is a thought possessed, the logical synthesis of those deployed relations. To run in a circle is one thing; to conceive a circle is another. Our mind by its animal roots (which ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... the flowers and the verdure about me, and the birds that piped overhead, and the booming bees, and the strong sunlight on the grass, and the glimpses of blue sky through the branches, were all busying themselves for me in weaving the web of the poem I wanted to carry ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Fandor saw this foreign spy system under the form of an immense—a vast spider's web. Could one but lay hands on the originator of the initial thread, or the master-spider himself, then they could strike at the extreme ends ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... descended upon her, the reaction of cumulative nervous stress, anesthetizing her will, her desires, her very limbs. She was purposeless, ambitionless, except to lie and rest and seek for some resolution of peace out of the tangled web wherein her ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... relation to the size of the animal, and in fact the larger animals are but seldom invoked. The spider also occupies a prominent place in the love and life-destroying formulas, his duty being to entangle the soul of his victim in the meshes of his web or to pluck it from the body of the doomed man and drag it way to the black coffin in the ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... of outdoors, had softened the memory of that stark tragedy upon which Wanda had come at the edge of Echo Creek. Not forgotten, never to be wiped clean from the memory, still the keen horror was dulled, the harsh details blurred, the whole dreadful picture softened under the web which the spider of time ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... the long Slow smooth strong lapse of Lethe—past the toil Wherein all souls are taken as a spoil, The Stygian web of waters—if your song Be quenched not, O our brethren, but be strong As ere ye too ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... replied Babs. "I shan't let Miss Mills live in my heart at all if she vexes you; but oh, dear; oh, dear! Just look, do look! Do you see that monstrous spider over there, the one with the sun shining on his web?" ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... Jemmy there was no need of going away from home to get beaux," she said complacently to Channing. "Here I've sat, just like a spider in a web, and—look at them all! To say nothing of you," she added, with a little gasp at ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... into my face at that, but I vigorously unplaited about two inches, which seemed to satisfy her. For me, I thought of Penelope and her web ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... sits a man weaving a web of wonderful colours; he throws the shuttles, carrying different coloured threads, across and across, without seeming to look at them, and all the time the web is growing into an intricate pattern under his fingers. So his father wove, and his grandfather and great-grandfather. All ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... o'clock the crust had thawed so that the skees broke through, and before two o'clock the web-shoes were breaking through. Camp was made and the first meal eaten. Smoke took stock of the food. McCan's supply was a disappointment. So many silver fox-skins had he stuffed in the bottom of the meat bag that there was little space left ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... out. She wanted to ask Lil Day or Annette Gaynor what happened if you cut a special examination; but suppose they should ask why she cared to know? That would put another knot into the "tangled web" of her deception. It would have been some comfort to discuss the possibilities of the situation with Betty, but Eleanor denied herself even that outlet. No use reminding a girl that she despises you! ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... parapet, looking upward. The afternoon sunlight fell full upon the russet parchment of her kind old face, shewing the web of wrinkles spun by ninety years of the gently ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... we looked was of fair size and circular in shape. Three windows lit it, and between us and the nearest knelt Dom Basilio, busy with a web of linen which he was tearing into bandages. His was the voice that had commanded us to enter; and passing in, I was aware that the room had two other occupants; for behind the door stood a truckle bed, and along the bed lay my father, pale as death and swathed in bandages; ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... me too far, for so light a reminiscence; but I claim for the loose web of my impressions at no point a heavier texture. Which comes back to what I was a moment ago saying— that just in proportion as you "feel" the morbid charm of Pisa you press on it gently, and this somehow even under stress of whatever respectful attention. I found this last impulse, at all ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... an entirely different psychological impression of the idea represented by the motive, as indicating some new aspect of it in which the motives are all dovetailed together into a compact whole that is simply marvellous. If one considers the "Ring," that gigantic web of motives, and at the same time, in the words of that able critic, Mr. Ernest Newman, "beyond all comparison the biggest thing ever conceived by the mind of a musician," colossal yet logical, gigantic yet compact, the power ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... feeling lies not in the worthy countryman who interrupts the play with cries for justice on the villain, but in him who creates the drama again with the poet, who lives over again in himself each of the thrills of emotion passing before him, and loses himself in their web. The object is a unity or our whirling circle of impulses, as you like to phrase it. At any rate, out of that unity the soul does not return upon itself; it remains one with it in the ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... always in store its retribution. God suffers no dropped stitches in the web of His universe, and the smallest truth evaded, the least wretch neglected, will surely be picked up again in the unending circle that is winding its certain thread around all beings, connecting by invisible links the most insignificant chances ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... and said:— "Sorrow not thus, beloved one, for me. No living man can send me to the shades Before my time; no man of woman born, Coward or brave, can shun his destiny. But go thou home, and tend thy labors there,— The web, the distaff,—and command thy maids To speed the work. The cares of war pertain To all men born in ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... solitude through which man must move alone—without loud-voiced companions to encourage him—and listen until he hears his own heart beat within it. He sits in a cell again, like the first original germ of life, alone and forsaken; and over him a spider skilfully spins its web. At first he is angry with the busy insect, and tears down the web; but the insect begins again patiently. And this suddenly becomes a consolatory lesson to him never to give up; he becomes fond of the little vigilant creature that makes its web as skilfully ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... himself, incapable of understanding her,—oh, if he could but touch him with the angel's spear, and bid him take his true shape before her whom he was gradually enveloping in the silken meshes of his subtle web! He would make a place for her in the world,—oh yes, doubtless. He would be proud of her in company, would dress her handsomely, and show her off in the best lights. But from the very hour that he felt his power over her firmly established, he would begin to remodel her after his own worldly ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... as tall as myself, shaped with slender Amazonian strength, but curved and soft and subtly aware of her feminine allure, strongly interested and pleased at the awe and pleasure in my face. Her, rounded, fully adult body was sketched over with a web of silkily gleaming black net, light and unsubstantial as a dream, clinging and wholly revealing. Her eyes were dark-lidded and wide-set, her brow high and proud, and about her neck hung a web of emeralds set in a ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... further off it always find itself; for by how much the soul struggleth under these distresses, by so much the more doth Satan put forth himself to resist, still infusing more poison, that if possible it might never struggle more, for strugglings are also as poison to Satan. The fly in the spider's web is an emblem of the soul in such a condition—the fly is entangled in the web; at this the spider shows himself; if the fly stir again, down comes the spider to her, and claps a foot upon her; if yet the fly makes a noise, then with poisoned mouth the spider lays hold ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... they can. And it appears sadly out of tune to them, if it does not serve this end. In anything they do, therefore, they consider only selfish consequences. They do not apprehend the universe in its great harmony. They do not trace out its web of mutual relations—a braid of light held in the hand of Infinite Love. They do not know the sympathy that shoots in the crystal, and shimmers in the aurora, and beats in the heart of the ocean, and makes the silent music that ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... this earth is hell, and we are now suffering for sins committed in a former incarnation—would be fully proved. Our friends are the pleasant hypocrites who sustain our illusions. Society is made possible only through a vast web of delicate evasions, polite subterfuges, and agreeable falsehoods. The word person comes from "persona," which means a mask. The reference is to one who plays a part—assumes a role. The naked truth is not pleasant ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... them left the hall door open an' in creeps the little Spider, an' away wid him acrass the hall, an' never stops till he gets to the great big parlour. Up the wall wid him then as fast as he could leg it, an' there if he doesn't go and make his web in a corner of a great big gould pictur' frame. Well, there he sat, the poor fellow, but ne'er a fly at all come next or nigh him, an' by-an'-by in walks the housemaid wid her great big broom, ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... and we know that animals have great powers of communicating their ideas to one another, though their manner of doing this is as incomprehensible by us as a plant's knowledge of chemistry, or the manner in which an amoeba makes its test, or a spider its web, without having gone through a long course of mathematics. I think most readers will allow that our early training and the theological systems of the last eighteen hundred years are likely to have made us involuntarily under-estimate the powers of animals low in the scale of life, ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler |
