"Labyrinthine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... describing the vision for which preparation has been made in the preceding prelude. It is not without perplexity that an ear unaccustomed to the windings of the terza rima, feels its way among them. Entangled and impeded by the labyrinthine sounds, the reader might be compared to one who, swimming in his dreams, is carried down the course of a swift river clogged with clinging and retarding water-weeds. He moves; but not without labour: yet after a while the very obstacles add ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... have learnt to peer and pore On tortured puzzles from our youth, We know all labyrinthine lore, We are the three wise mert of yore, And we know ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton
... considerable relic of antiquity, considered as a ruin, is the Thermae of Caracalla. These consist of six enormous chambers, above 200 feet in height, and each enclosing a vast space like that of a field. There are in addition a number of towers and labyrinthine recesses, hidden and woven over by the wild growth of clinging ivy. Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely. The perpendicular wall of ruin is cloven into steep ravines, filled up with flowering shrubs, whose thick twisted roots are knotted in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... Incarnate Son In likeness of a leprous serf, she laid: And many a wondrous tale till now unheard; Which, from her handmaid's oath and attestation, Siegfried of Maintz to far Perugia sent, And sainted Umbria's labyrinthine hills, Even to the holy Council, where the Patriarchs Of Antioch and Jerusalem, and with them A host of prelates, magnates, knights, and nobles, Decreed and canonised her ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... afterwards pursued and killed, by all three acting in concert, materially assisted by the dog Fritz. They had incurred great risk in this chase of the bear: for although they had succeeded in destroying the formidable animal they lost themselves in the great labyrinthine cavern, and were only able to find their way out by making a fire with the stocks of their guns, and rendering the bear's-grease available for candles—which fortunately ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... said the Doctor, "specially designed by nature for threading its way through the narrow labyrinthine burrows of ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... her—a fate from which it seemed, there was no escape. It was only too evident that these creatures possessed no gentle or chivalric sentiments to which she could appeal, and that she might escape from the labyrinthine mazes of their underground burrows ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... is to fly on paper wings! From "Greek Heroes" to the Iliad was no day's journey, nor was it altogether pleasant. One could have traveled round the word many times while I trudged my weary way through the labyrinthine mazes of grammars and dictionaries, or fell into those dreadful pitfalls called examinations, set by schools and colleges for the confusion of those who seek after knowledge. I suppose this sort of Pilgrim's Progress was justified by the end; but it seemed interminable to me, in spite of ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... great importance for the sense of smell in those forms. Even in the mammals (the hairy, warm-blooded, young-suckling beasts) the size of the olfactory lobes of the brain and of the olfactory nerves, and the labyrinthine chambers of the nose on which the nerves are spread, is very large, as one may see by looking at a mammal's skull divided into right and left halves. And it seems immoderately large to us—to man—because, after all, so far as our conscious lives are concerned, the sense ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... this is in my humble judgment neither very surprising nor particularly mortifying, if we think what history in the established conception of it means. How are we to expect workmen to make their way through constitutional antiquities, through the labyrinthine shifts of party intrigue at home, and through the entanglements of intricate diplomacy abroad—'shallow village tales,' as Emerson calls them? These studies are fit enough for professed students of the special subject, but such exploration is for the ordinary run of men and women ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... Romes, were to plant them on the ground, side by side, in orderly succession, according to all appearance, the whole vacant area of Italy would be filled with these dismantled stories of Rome, and we should be presented with the spectacle of one continuous city, stretching its labyrinthine pomp to the shores of the Adriatic." This is so far from being meant as a piece of rhetoric, that, on the very contrary, the whole purpose is to substitute for a vague and rhetorical expression of the Roman grandeur one of a more definite character—viz., by presenting its dimensions in a new form, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... incidents, the audience would not become aware of any gap in structure. Yet a story built in this straightforward and successive way may give a vast impression of the shifting maze of life. Mr. Kipling's "Kim," which is picaresque in structure, shows us nearly every aspect of the labyrinthine life of India. He selects a healthy and normal, but not a clever, boy, and allows all India to happen to him. The book is without beginning and without end; but its very lack of neatness and compactness of plan contributes to the general impression it gives ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... since: Tedious land for a social Prince; Halting, he scanned the outs and ins, Endless, labyrinthine, grim, Of the solitude that made him wince, Laying ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... he dreamed not. He would sit him down Thinking to work his problems as of old, And find the star he thought so plain a blur, The columned figures labyrinthine wilds Without my comment, blind and senseless scrawls That vexed him with their riddles; he would strive And struggle for a while, and then his eye Would lose its light, and over all his mind The cold gray mist would settle; and erelong The darkness fell, and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... takes a violent aversion to this lady's person, concludes that the blessedness with which she promises to crown his labours is neither more nor less than moonshine, and accordingly makes the best of his way out of her labyrinthine maze of argument into the attractive arms of Pleasure, bursts the bonds of verbal subtlety, exchanges credulity for common sense, and pronounces, with great justice, that toil is toilsome, and that pleasure is pleasant,—I ask, is this shipwrecked mariner to ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... moral,—that we should never pass judgment on the merits of any person or thing, unless we behold them in the sphere and circumstances to which they are specially adapted. In still another part of the Garden there is a labyrinthine maze, formed of an intricacy of hedge-bordered walks, involving himself in which, a man might wander for hours inextricably within a circuit of only a few yards. It seemed to me a sad emblem of the mental and moral perplexities in which ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dimmest personality in those offices was the girl whose name imaged to everyone little more than a pencil, notebook, and typewriting machine. The vividest personality was Frederick Norman. In the list of names upon the outer doors of the firm's vast labyrinthine suite, on the seventeenth floor of the Syndicate Building, his name came last—and, in the newest lettering, suggesting recentness of partnership. In age he was the youngest of the partners. Lockyer was archaic, Sanders an antique; Benchley, ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... much as my father felt one day when we were going to the country mill to get a grist ground, and I, a boy of seven years, sat in the back part of the wagon, and our yoke of oxen ran away with us and along a labyrinthine road through the woods, so that I thought every moment we would be dashed to pieces, and I made a terrible outcry of fright, and my father turned to me with a face perfectly calm, and said: "De Witt, what are you crying about? I guess we can ride as fast as the oxen can run." ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... Warehouse; a low, whitewashed room, dimly lighted by dusty windows and two gas-burners in wire cages. Around the walls are ranged several statues of meek aspect, but securely confined in wooden cases, like a sort of marble menagerie. In the centre, a labyrinthine grove of pedestals, surmounted by busts, groups, and statuettes by modern Italian masters. About these pedestals a small crowd—consisting of Elderly Merchants on the look out for a "neat thing in statuary" for the conservatory ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 22, 1890 • Various
... the early ages of Christianity, the Christians took refuge in the vast catacombs which stretched for miles in every direction under the city of Rome, and are supposed to have been of Etruscan origin. There, amid labyrinthine windings, deep caverns, hidden chambers, chapels, and tombs, the persecuted fugitives found refuge, and there they performed ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... daughter— Grief the ripple, love the water; And thy brain like wind-harp lies Breathed upon from distant skies, Till, soft-gathering, visions new Grow like vapours in the blue: White forms, flushing hyacinthine, Move in motions labyrinthine; With an airy wishful gait On the counter-motion wait; Sweet restraint and action free Show the law of liberty; Master of the revel still The obedient, perfect will; Hating smallest thing awry, Breathing, breeding harmony; While the god-like graceful ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... handsome volutes to the human capital. Better my mother had never borne me.—I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets—those indispensable side-intelligencers. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... palatal teeth, slightly labyrinthine in character, adjacent to each internal naris. The scapulocoracoid, as shown by Peabody (1958), is Anthracosaurian in structure, as are the long-stemmed clavicles. The limbs have digits rather than fin-lobes, although the digital number apparently is four ...
— A New Order of Fishlike Amphibia From the Pennsylvanian of Kansas • Theodore H. Eaton
... often mentioned in these pages to warrant long description of it here, even if any man who has not lived for years among its labyrinthine passages could describe it accurately. The great descending corridor leads in a wide spiral downwards to the central spot where Hadrian lay, and in the vast thickness of the surrounding foundations there is but ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the return from a Canadian foray, bearing with them plate, candlesticks, and a silver statue that they had rifled from the Church of St. Francis. An Indian who had undertaken to guide the party through the Notch proved faithless, and led them among labyrinthine gorges to the head of Israel's River, where he disappeared, after poisoning one of the troopers with a rattlesnake's fang. Losing all reckoning, the Rangers tramped hither and thither among the snowy hills and sank down, one by one, to die ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... had its full counterpart in the finny hosts which peopled the waters at its base. Below the water-line, the rock seemed one honey-comb of grottoes, affording labyrinthine lurking-places for swarms of fairy fish. All were strange; many exceedingly beautiful; and would have well graced the costliest glass globes in which gold-fish are kept for a show. Nothing was more striking than the complete novelty of many individuals of this multitude. Here hues were seen ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... thickets, and at length came upon the banks of the rivulet Trocara, which flows over a stony bed, and, about a mile above its mouth, falls over a ledge of rocks, thus forming a very pretty cascade. In the neighbourhood, we found a number of specimens of a curious land-shell, a large flat Helix, with a labyrinthine mouth (Anastoma). We learned afterwards that it was a species which had been discovered a few years previously by Dr. Gardner, the botanist, on the upper ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... return to the Sacro Collegio. In one of the immense labyrinthine cellars is a botte for wine capable of containing five thousand litri. There, it is said—I know not how truly—once a year, when the botte was emptied, came four of the spiritual fathers of the college above, with a table ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... permutations of the soul Are infinite, but how to be revealed? On what impassive matter must the whole Inveterate coil of good and ill be sealed! How much too simple all the tale of deeds To pattern out these labyrinthine things, These knots of bright unreason, ghostly bredes Veiled weavers weave, moving with silver wings Within the duskling sense. Most diverse visions Their visionaries darkly reconcile At one sad end. Fate's delicate derisions Through the same hell of penance may beguile Two women, ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... no quaint details to attract the eye; no gorgeous colour-patterns or pleasing irregularities of form; the frosted beauty of the scene appeals rather to the intelligence. Contrasted with the wanton blaze of green, the contorted trunks and labyrinthine shadow-meanderings of our woodlands, these palm groves, despite their frenzied exuberance, figure forth the idea of reserve and chastity; an impression which is heightened by the ethereal striving of those branchless columns, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... is secreter Than the isle of Delos. Echo hence shall stir No sighs but sigh-warm kisses, or light noise Of thy combing hand, the while it travelling cloys And trembles through my labyrinthine hair." ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... agency at work, or whether he was the victim of some conspiracy, he emigrated to America; for several months he had no attacks. A new paroxysm occurring he consulted Gray, who found indubitable evidence of labyrinthine disease. The paroxysms of this disease are usually accompanied by nausea and vomiting, and on account of the paleness of the face, and the cold, clammy perspiration, attacks have frequently been mistaken for apoplexy. In disease of the middle ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... city has passed away. Like the fabulous creations we have read of in the tales of childhood, palaces, temples, boulevards, and theatres have sprung up on the site of the antiquated and labyrinthine city. Under the dynasty of the Napoleons the capital was rebuilt with lavish magnificence. Accustomed to gaze on the splendor of the sun, we seldom advert to its real magnificence in our universe; but pour its golden flood on the sightless eyeball, and all language would fail to tell ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... vanquisht of body, 110 Vainly tossing its horns and goring the wind to no purpose. Thence with abounding praise returned he, guiding his footsteps, Whiles did a fine drawn thread check steps in wander abounding, Lest when issuing forth of the winding maze labyrinthine Baffled become his track by inobservable error. 115 But for what cause should I, from early subject digressing, Tell of the daughter who the face of her sire unseeing, Eke her sister's embrace nor less her mother's endearments, Who in despair bewept her hapless child ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... in a dusky passage of the labyrinthine store, a narrow lane running between two barricades ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... all others she loved this man, and how it all had come about, was a mystery that puzzled her sorely; but she had no labyrinthine heart in which to play hide and seek with her own consciousness. And so vividly conscious was she now of this new and absorbing passion, that she hastily turned her face from her companions toward the cloudy sky, that looked ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... love to close my eyes from time to time, and evoke the dear old haunts from their ruins; to descend once more the perilous steeps of the Rue St. Jacques, and to thread the labyrinthine by-streets that surround the Ecole de Medecine. I see them all so plainly! I look in at the familiar print-shops—I meet many a long-forgotten face—I hear many a long-forgotten voice—I am twenty years of age and ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... know:—Yet on the past Of this dear England if in thought we gaze, About her seems a constant sunshine cast; In summer calm we see and golden haze The little London of Plantagenet days; Quaint labyrinthine knot of toppling lanes, And thorny ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... doubt, as in this case, nature brought the stones there, and man did his part in arranging them; poor Dr. B. would have you believe that every natural rock had been lifted here bodily for architectural purposes, and as bodily made a most elaborate and labyrinthine ruin afterwards. At Penzance, a broiled fish supper, and to bed by midnight, having ordered a twilight gig, wherein by 7 on the ninth I was traversing the beautiful bay. Penzance is a fine town in a splendid ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... conquered. A new cry rises among them. Up, to save yonder sluice; that will save yonder lode; that again yonder farm; that again some other lode, some other farm, far back inland, but guessed at instantly by men who have studied from their youth, as the necessity of their existence, the labyrinthine drainage of lands which are all below the water level, and where the inner lands, in many cases, are ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... passed at the Trinity House, as competent to navigate vessels in particular places. The word branch is also metaphorically used for river divergents, but its application to affluents is improper. Any branch or ramification, as in estuaries, where they traverse, river-like, miles of territory, in labyrinthine mazes. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... are labyrinthine there is little fear of an explorer losing his way: he should, however, be well provided with lights, as it would be extremely awkward to be left in the innermost recess of a cave consisting of ten or a dozen chambers united by narrow ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... Moslem quarter is clean, the Christian quarter dirty, and the Jewish simply filthy. I often had to gallop through the last-named holding my handkerchief to my mouth, and the kawwasses running as though they had been pursued by devils. Everywhere in Damascus, but especially in this quarter, the labyrinthine streets are piled with heaps of offal, wild dogs are gorged with carrion, and dead dogs are lying about. One must never judge Damascus, however by externals: every house has a mean aspect in the way of entrance and approach. This is done purposely to deceive the ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... and trees about a mile wide, making the stately edifice look like a huge diamond encircled with emeralds. Nothing but a blind religious zeal could have brought to completion such a series of connected edifices with their miles of halls, courts, corridors, and labyrinthine passageways. ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... so many languages, was no doubt intelligible only in broad outline to the masses, and sometimes, when it percolated through the labyrinthine maze of such minds as that of the worthy Bishop of Mende, it appeared overwrought, full of contradictions, and of double meanings. It seems then as if the symbolist were splitting a hair with embroidery ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... formality from being carried beyond its just limit. Price, the most judicious of landscape-gardeners, would scarcely have desired to alter arrangements which have quite enough of the varied and the picturesque to satisfy those who do not contend for eternal labyrinthine mazes and perpetually waving lines. There is one straight avenue in front, but the principal carriage-road has just the kind of curve most desirable, sweeping round some fine trees which group themselves for the purpose of affording ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... habits of seclusion, and that apparently capricious abstraction of himself from the society not only of his friends, but of his own family, in which he from time to time persisted. He confessed to occasional accesses of an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinthine shelter of some great city like London or Paris,—there to dwell solitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... the basilica and the imperial apartments, to which its encircling colonnade served as a corridor of communication, indicated that the lady was not a favourite of low degree, to be hidden away in some Rosalind's bower of the immense labyrinthine palace, while the most valuable statues in the entire villa, such as the replica of the Cnidian Venus by Praxiteles, the Eros bending the bow, by the same master, made this temple of love and Venus a fitting pavilion for an empress. Such it may well have been, for ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... lower surface of the body was defended by an armour of singular integumentary shields or scales (fig. 132, c); and an extremely characteristic feature (from which the entire group derives its name) is, that the walls of the teeth are deeply folded, so as to give rise to an extraordinary "labyrinthine" pattern when they are cut across (fig. 132, b). Many of the Carboniferous Labyrinthodonts are of no great size, some of them very small, but others attain comparatively gigantic dimensions, though all fall short in this respect of the huge examples of this group which occur ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... to light comprise a number of chambers, big and little, placed at different heights. We shall have no clear idea of the relation of these different chambers to one another, or of the mode of access to them through the labyrinthine passages and the numerous stairways, until the whole edifice ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... other side of the dell is much lower than the field through which we came, so that it is mainly to the labyrinthine intricacy of these high banks that it owes its singular character of wildness and variety. Now we seem hemmed in by those green cliffs, shut out from all the world, with nothing visible but those verdant mounds and the deep blue sky; now by ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... that minds of the highest order have entered into enmity with the Christian faith, have arraigned it as a curse to man, and have fought against it even upon Christian impulses, (impulses of benignity that could not have had a birth except in Christianity.) All comes from the labyrinthine intricacy in which the social action of Christianity involves itself to the eye of a contemporary. Simplicity the most absolute is reconcilable with intricacy the most elaborate. The weather—how simple would appear the laws of its oscillations, if we ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... tones of Phoebe's soprano set the echoes ringing all over the great workroom. In and out among the aisles and labyrinthine passages that wind through towering piles of boxes, from the thundering machinery far over on the other side of the "loft" to the dusky recess of the uttermost table, ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... fully two hundred yards in length, substantially built; some huge boulders are amongst the stones which form these most intricate labyrinthine fish yards, which as traps are eminently successful, many thousands of Murray cod and other fish being caught ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... height that the obelisks, the colossi, and the entrance pylon were buried to a depth of 40 feet, while inside the building the level of the native village was 50 feet above the original pavement. Seven months ago the first court contained not only the local mosque, but a labyrinthine maze of mud structures, numbering some thirty dwellings, and eighty strawsheds, besides yards, stables, and pigeon-towers, the whole being intersected by innumerable lanes and passages. Two large mansions—real ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... house and labyrinthine grove, With tangled maze, too intricate to tread, But that, in pity for the queen's great love, Its secret Daedalus revealed, and led Her lover's blinded footsteps with a thread. There, too, had sorrow not the wish denied, Thy name and ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... latter, no doubt, being more firmly fixed in his memory by the necessity of practicing them—albeit behind the back of Moses—while he had them still fresh in his mind; for he would naturally resort to every human and inhuman device to wile away the dragging decades consumed in tracing the labyrinthine sinuosities of his course in the wilderness. When a man has assurance that he will not be permitted to arrive at the point for which he set out, perceiving that every step forward is a step wasted, he will pretty certainly use his feet to a better purpose than walking. Clearly, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... the labyrinthine way, adorned by views of rivers, valleys, precipitous crags, and multitudinous mountain tiers. Every night we stopped at rustic inns, and prepared our own food. Sri Yukteswar took special care of ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Moscow, where such a thing was never seen, and where they are not educated up to roller skates. Lastly, as the church specified, St. Vasily, consists of a nest of small churches connected by narrow, labyrinthine corridors, and is approached from the street up two flights of low-ceiled stairs, it is an impossibility that the boy should have viewed the "aisle" and assembled congregation from his skates at the ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... moss, at the roots of a wide-spreading oak. She was leaning back, so that she could look up, up, through vistas of changing greens,—black-green to gold-green,—through a thousand labyrinthine avenues and counter-avenues of leaves and branches, with broken shafts of sunlight caught in them here and there, to the glimpses of blue sky visible beyond. The tree gave you a sense of great spaces, and depths, and differences, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... miraculous home of St. Benedict awaited us in the form of a builded and pictured-over maze of chapels and shrines, cells and corridors, stupefying rock-chambers and caves, places all at an extraordinary variety of different levels and with labyrinthine intercommunications; there the spirit of the centuries sat like some invisible icy presence that only permits you to stare and wonder. I stared, I wondered, I went up and down and in and out and lost myself in the fantastic fable of the innumerable hard facts themselves; and whenever ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... for pleasure, as she frames Some happy lands, that have luxurious names, For loose fertility; a footfall there Suffices to upturn to the warm air Half-germinating spices; mere decay Produces richer life; and day by day New pollen on the lily-petal grows, And still more labyrinthine buds ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Amid the entangling meshes spread, of his loose and flowing hair, Vast and boundless as the woods upon the Himalaya's brow, Nor ever may the struggling floods rush headlong to the earth below. Opening, egress was not there, amid those winding, long meanders. Within that labyrinthine hair, for many an ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... of retreat, leading around labyrinthine corners and by-passages, had doubled back on them without their having been aware of it. They were in the very place Dennis had wished so much to avoid—the chamber ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... preconcerted, silent signal, every horse's head in line, every left hand down, saber or lance exactly poised, every foot motionless, horse and rider still as if wrought from bronze. And then he tells of the labyrinthine evolutions when the long line moving over the school floor coils and uncoils itself more swiftly than any serpent, each horse moving at speed, each one obeying as implicitly as any creature of brass and iron moved by steam. And then he talks of broadsword fights, in which the left hand, managing ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... of Unas, dilapidated without, secretively beautiful within. We went from tomb to tomb, lingering long in the labyrinthine Mansion of Mereruka who, ruddy and large as life, stepped hospitably down in statue-form from his stela recess, to welcome us in the name of himself and wife. Almost he seemed to wave his hands and ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... and carefully watched by DuQuesne and Loring, fairly tore into the task of rebuilding the Osnomian power-plant into the space-annihilating drive of the Fenachrone—for he well knew one fact that DuQuesne's hurried inspection had failed to glean from the labyrinthine intricacies of that fearsome brain: that once within the detector screens of that distant solar system these Earth-beings would be utterly helpless before the forces which would inevitably be turned upon them. Also, ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... may be produced by causes which alter the tension of the labyrinthine fluid, such, for example, as the pressure of wax upon the tympanic membrane, or exudation into the middle ear or into the labyrinth. Giddiness occurring in the course of chronic middle-ear suppuration ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... tread," (Some eager asked) "as anciently "'Twas by the maids of Delos led, "When slow at first, then circling fast, "As the gay spirits rose—at last, "With hand in hand like links enlocked, "Thro' the light air they seemed to flit "In labyrinthine maze, that mocked "The dazzled eye that followed it?" Some called aloud "the Fountain Dance!"— While one young, dark-eyed Amazon, Whose step was air-like and whose glance Flashed, like a sabre in ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... readily in the burning sandy environs, and under the noonday sun, as in the cool and shady alleys of the crowded capital; running, dodging, striking, and shouting with all the strength of his lungs, through the midst of its labyrinthine ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... Dostojewski, is the sole Oriental among the present generation of literary Jews. "A fancy which in its luxurious revelling in blood, splendor, and magnificence seems to us as Oriental as his meditative dreaminess and the subtle satisfaction with which he traces the subterranean, labyrinthine paths of the life of the soul"—these are the salient features which Wolzogen finds in the work ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing color, of dazzling light; in the more complex motory-stimulus of intricate, abrupt and plastic form.... He delighted in the angular, indented, intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for the most delicate, and at the same time most agile, adjustments of the eye. He caught at the edges of things.... Spikes and wedges and swords run riot in his work.... He loved the ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... gave me the opportunity to see also Monument Valley, and the mysterious and labyrinthine Canyon Segi with its great ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... one force that would tame her; but there was that force, and Diane knew that she had submitted to its domination. From weeks of tortuous self-examination she emerged into this knowledge, as one comes out of a labyrinthine cavern into sunshine. Even here in the open, however, was a problem still to solve. Could she marry the man who had never told her that he loved her, even though she herself loved him? Had she the power to give herself without stint, while asking of him only ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... eloquence, touched not unfrequently with flashes of fancy, and kindled at times into heat of imagination. The main fault of his style is one more commonly found in the prose than in the verse of his time—a quaint and florid obscurity, rigid with elaborate rhetoric and tortuous with labyrinthine illustration; not dark only to the rapid reader through closeness and subtlety of thought, like Donne, whose miscalled obscurity is so often "all glorious within," but thick and slab as a witch's gruel with forced and barbarous eccentricities of articulation. As his language in ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of Heaven, I think, has rightly been pronounced his greatest poem, for whilst in its wealth of melody, its magnificence of imagery, and its pathos, it is unsurpassed, it reveals also the finest depths of his thought as he takes us "down the labyrinthine ways" of his mind's flight. But next to that I would put The Making of Viola, a poem which no other, except Rossetti or his sister ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... hair, his eyes turned down, it was hard to realise that this almost slouching fellow held the attention of the shrewd in these matters as the certain head of them all, when the present great leader should have dropped his sceptre. But this was the Webb in whose labyrinthine meshes the cartoonists delighted to picture the unhappy flies of their country's financial system; this was the weaver whose warp was of railroads and his woof the unhappy populace, in yet other pictorial fancies. This was that Webb before which many ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... into labyrinthine shops; he stood with Marie before long counters, while she inspected fine fabrics and, drawing off her glove, felt them critically with her fine hand. He watched her eagerly and devotedly, as if he read the concentration of her thoughts, and ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... bare, with their round pebbles sticking out from the partially decomposed surface, like the piled-up skulls in the great underground cemetery of the Parisians. Massy trees, with their green fantastic roots rising high over the scanty soil, and forming many a labyrinthine recess for the frog, the toad, and the newt, stretch forth their gnarled arms athwart the stream. In front of the opening, with but a black deep pool between, there lies a midway bank of huge stones. Of these, not a ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... Cannon Street, and its centre was now in Exhibition Road. It shone, pale amber, blue-grey and tenderly spacious and fine under clear autumnal skies, a London of hugely handsome buildings and vistas and distances, a London of gardens and labyrinthine tall museums, of old trees and remote palaces and artificial waters. I lodged near by in West Brompton at a house in ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... fitting thoughts inspired; By a dread parting was thy fame acquired, Thy mournful destiny we sorrow'd o'er, For weal and woe thou left'st us evermore, And then again the passions' wavering force Drew us along in labyrinthine course; And we, consumed by constant misery, At length must part—and parting is to die! How moving is it, when the minstrel sings, To 'scape the death that separation brings! Oh grant, some god, to one who suffers so, To tell, half-guilty, his sad ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... followed! Oh, most august revelation! Mile-long were the halls that appeared, and open spaces enormous; Areas fit to hold armies on the day of muster for battle; Hosts upon either side, for amplest castrametation. Depth behind depth, and dim labyrinthine apartments. Golden galleries above running high into darkening vistas, Staircases soaring and climbing, till sight grew dizzy with effort Of chasing the corridors up to their whispering gloomy recesses. Nations were ranged in the halls, nations ranged at a banquet, Even then lightly proceeding ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... is disobedience, self-willed departure from God. That disobedience may be as virulently active in a trifle as in a deed that men call great. Self-will is the tap root of all sin, however labyrinthine ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... for Kantos Kan, and leaving Dejah Thoris in charge of Tars Tarkas I took a dozen warriors and hastened to the dungeons beneath the palace. The jailers had all left to join the fighters in the throne room, so we searched the labyrinthine prison without opposition. ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... behind several of the small windows in the facade of the huge labyrinthine building. Without any hesitation de Batz turned down the Rue du Temple, and soon found himself in front of the main gates which gave on the courtyard beyond. The sentinel challenged him, but he had the pass-word, and explained ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... eventually receive more ample treatment at the hands of some future historian, Mr. Miller has performed a most useful service in affording a guide by the aid of which the historical student can find his way through the labyrinthine maze of Balkan politics. He begins his story about the time when Napoleon had appeared like a comet in the political firmament, and by his erratic movements had caused all the statesmen of Europe to diverge temporarily from ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... upward—arms pointed upward—hounds leaped upward— monstrous snake-heads peered upward out of cracks and caves. Did he not see them move, writhe? or was it the ever-shifting light of the flashes? Did he not hear them howl, yell at him? or was it but the wind, tortured in their labyrinthine caverns? ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... clue to what seemed to the outside world a labyrinthine maze of tangled interests and passions was firmly held in the hand of Barneveld, it was not to him nor to My Lords the States-General that the various parties to the impending conflict applied in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the support of any religious creed. No restraint is placed upon the practice of any religion exercised with due regard to morality. Proselytism in public schools is declared illegal. [267] The prolonged discussion of the friars' position and claims encouraged them to hope that out of the labyrinthine negotiations might emerge their restoration to the Philippine parishes. For a while, therefore, hundreds of them remained in Manila, others anxiously watched the course of events from their refuges in the neighbouring British and Portuguese colonies, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... but not a picture. So long as man and heroism and strife endure, shall Achilles, Godfrey, Satan, and Mephistopheles be types; for they are artistic expressions of essential and historical realities. But though the beck of curiosity lead us through the labyrinthine plot of a novel, long as Gibbon's way through the Dark Ages, yet, when we have finished it, the bubble collapses, the little heavens which had been framed about us roll away, and most rarely does a character remain poetically ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Debray and Terrell, Major with his two brigades under Baylor and Bagby, and the twenty-four guns of McMahon, Moseley, West, and Nettles. The position was too strong and too difficult of approach to be taken by a direct attack save at a great cost. Through the labyrinthine morass that lay between the ferry and the river's mouth Bailey and E. J. Davis searched in vain for a practicable ford. Nothing remained but to try the ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... "Feminine conceit,'' says Lombroso, "explains itself especially in the fact that the most important thing in the life of woman is the struggle for men.'' This assertion is strengthened by a long series of examples and historical considerations and can serve as a guiding thread in many labyrinthine cases. First of all, it is important to know in many trials whether a woman has already taken up this struggle for men, i. e., whether she has a lover, or wishes to have a lover. If it can be shown that she has suddenly become conceited, or her conceit has ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... having intended the best. She continued to ask herself only "was I right?" and it was by the answer to that question that she would abide, whether in the stony content of accomplished righteousness, or in an enduring remorse that pointed to a goal in whose labyrinthine possibilities her soul lost itself ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... Men seem to draw better when they have pigments and a flat surface of rock to work upon, than when they are scratching on hard wood with a sharp edge of a broken shell. Though the thing has little to do with art, it may be worth mentioning, as a matter of curiosity, that the labyrinthine Australian caves are decorated, here and there, with the mark of a red hand. The same mysterious, or at least unexplained, red hand is impressed on the walls of the ruined palaces and temples of Yucatan—the work ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... she who traced the lines of the flower-beds with the ivory tip of her parasol; she who planned the quaint stone gateways and arbours and hedge seats; she who devised the interminable stretches of paths, the labyrinthine walks, the mazes, and the hidden flower-plots. You walk on and on between high hedges, until, if you have not missed your way, you presently find a little pansy or rose or lily garden. It is quite the most unexpected and piquant method of laying out a place I have ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... quiet,—quite soundless save for the beating of our hearts. On every side opened red and yellow ways, sunny glades, labyrinthine paths, long aisles, all dim with the blue haze like the cloudy incense in stone cathedrals, but nothing moved in them save the creatures of the forest. Without the hollow there was no sign. The leaves looked undisturbed, or others, drifting ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... residence for the proudest nobleman England might send us as Viceroy—enclosed east and west between two streamlets, hidden from the highway by a dense growth of oak, maple, dark pines and firs—the forest primeval—letting in here and there the light of heaven on its labyrinthine avenues; a most striking landscape, blending the sombre verdure of its hoary trees with the soft tints of its velvety sloping lawn, fit for a ducal palace. An elfish plot of a flower garden, alas! how much dwarfed, then stood in rear of the dwelling to ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... to the farthest shrine of the opposite Arabian and Indian world, I must show you how the glittering and iridescent dominion of Daedalus prevails; and his ingenuity in division, interposition, and labyrinthine sequence, more widely still. Only this last summer I found the dark red masses of the rough sandstone of Furness Abbey had been fitted by him, with no less pleasure than he had in carving them, into wedged hexagons—reminiscences ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... season, was the end of Barney Bill, and Paul found himself thrillingly alone in London. At first its labyrinthine vastness overwhelmed him, causing him to feel an unimportant atom, which may have been good for his soul, but was not agreeable to his vanity. By degrees, however, he learned the lay of the great thoroughfares, especially those leading to the ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... The labyrinthine approach adds greatly to the delight of a climb to La Californie. If you go by carriage, unless you have a map, you are tempted to feel that the cocher is taking a roundabout route to justify the high price he asked you. But if you go afoot—and without a map—you may ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... a long farewell to "John's," Its stately courts, its wisdom-wooing Dons, Its antique towers, its labyrinthine maze, Its nights of study, and its pleasant days? O learned Synod, whose decree I wait, Whose just decision makes, or mars my fate; If in your gardens I have loved to roam, And found within your courts a second home; If I have loved ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... said his master, whereupon Robin went indeed—not to the awaiting boat, but with a defiant cry end a rush across the sloping sand into the thick wood. The green depths which received him were so labyrinthine, so filled with secret places wherein to hide, that an hour's search might not dislodge him. The sometime Captain of the Cygnet let pass his wilfulness, signed to the boats to push off, awaited in silence the fulfilment of all his commands; then turning, rounded the eastern point of the tiny ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... George's assistance. It was by coming to George's assistance in every difficulty, Gabriella surmised, that his mother had made George what he was; and the girl saw in imagination an endless line of subterfuges, of pitiful excuses and feeble justifications, all hidden in the tortuous labyrinthine windings of the maternal instinct. She saw, with the relentless vision of a Hebrew prophet, the inevitable ruin of the love that does not submit to wisdom ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... anxious to retrieve the error of his first forgetfulness, here, after a moment's struggle for the necessary remembrance, drew the papers from the labyrinthine receptacle which concealed them; and Henry uttered an exclamation of joy as, after cutting the silk, his ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... only a long, gently rising slope separated the fugitives from that labyrinthine network of wildly carved rock. But it was the clear air that made the distance seem short. Mile after mile the mustangs climbed, and when they were perhaps half-way across that last slope to the rocks the first horse of the pursuers mounted to the level ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... talent took, at one time or another, an effective toll. The athletic musician, who composed his own songs and gloried in a gallop, was to make verse simulate, as hardly any artificer had made it before, the labyrinthine meanderings of the fugue and the rhythmic swing ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... himself in this offshoot of Deception Pass, and thereby in some unaccountable manner, missed the canyon with the trails. There was nothing else for him to think. Rustlers could not fly, nor cattle jump down thousand-foot precipices. He was only proving what the sage-riders had long said of this labyrinthine system of deceitful canyons and valleys—trails led down into Deception Pass, but no rider had ever ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... colorful, various, labyrinthine, and ever a little odorous and stale, had no call or promise for Gloria. Had she so desired she would have remained, without hesitation, without regret; as it was she could face coolly the six hostile and offended eyes that followed her out into ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... to herself: How is it that a man to whom music is life and the paradise of his heart can allow himself to be so enveloped in sorrow, so beclouded by gloom? She understood the smarting pains in which he composed; she had a vague idea of the labyrinthine complications of his inner fate; these she grasped. But her own soul was filled with joyless compassion; she wished with all her power to plant greater faith and more happiness ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... the contrary. It is no unusual thing to see such a vagrant, in all the vanity of conscious sanctimony, standing in the middle of the attentive peasants, like the nave and felloes of a cart-wheel—if I may be permitted the loan of an apt similitude—repeating some piece of unfathomable and labyrinthine devotion, or perhaps warbling, from Stentorian lungs, some melodia sacra, in an untranslatable tongue; or, it may be, exhibiting the mysterious power of an amber bade fastened as a Decade to his paudareens* ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... long dugouts, of grotesquely carved prows and gaudy paint common among Pacific tribes, escorted Vancouver's boats northward the second week in June through the labyrinthine passageways of cypress-grown islets to Burrard Inlet. To Peter Puget was assigned the work of coasting the mainland side and tracing every inlet to its head waters. Johnstone went ahead in a small boat to reconnoitre ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... by subtle gradations, by labyrinthine delays, to the final beatification of Adonis. Picture is interwoven with picture, each in turn contributing to the panorama of sensual Paradise. Yet while straining all the resources of his art, with intense sympathy, to seduce ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... instinctive desire to quit them takes possession of the mind, while remaining merely as a curious spectator within them. The narrow steps leading to them are reached through a decorated doorway, and the passage below receives light through a series of gratings. You shortly reach the labyrinthine ways, totally excluded from external light and air, and enter one after another confined dungeons, little more than six feet square, cased with oak to deaden sounds, and to increase the difficulty of attempted escape. To make these ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... my position at fine leg and merged myself with the slips, who, together with point and cover, were bearing a course towards the labyrinthine ways of the kitchen-garden. After vainly searching for an imaginary ball and finding that we were not actually attacked from the rear, we ventured at length ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... moor, and quaking fen, Or depth of labyrinthine glen; Or into trackless forest set With trees, whose lofty umbrage met; World-wearied Men withdrew of yore; (Penance their trust, and prayer their store;) And in the wilderness were bound To such apartments as they found; Or with a new ambition ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... companion set out to climb up to the castle, and I wandered back to the great church. As I sat idly on the steps a monk accosted me, and finding that I had not seen the convent, carried me through labyrinthine corridors and galleries, down long flights of subterranean stone steps, one after another, until I thought we could not be far from the centre of the earth, when he suddenly turned aside into a vast cloister with high arched openings ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... vermicular; mazy, tortuous, sinuous, flexuous, anfractuous^, reclivate^, rivulose^, scolecoid^; sigmoid, sigmoidal [Geom.]; spiriferous^, spiroid^; involved, intricate, complicated, perplexed; labyrinth, labyrinthic^, labyrinthian^, labyrinthine; peristaltic; daedalian^; kinky, knotted. wreathy^, frizzly, crepe, buckled; raveled &c (in disorder) 59. spiral, coiled, helical; cochleate, cochleous; screw-shaped; turbinated, turbiniform^. Adv. in and out, round and round; a can of worms; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... The design was wholly unlike the fanciful figures of anchors, hearts, and cables, sometimes decorating small portions of seamen's bodies. It was a sort of tattooing such as is seen only on thoroughbred savages—deep blue, elaborate, labyrinthine, cabalistic. Israel remembered having beheld, on one of his early voyages, something similar on the arm of a New Zealand warrior, once met, fresh from battle, in his native village. He concluded that on some similar early ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... morning when Slone climbed to a cedared plateau that rose for a whole day's travel, and then split into a labyrinthine maze of canyons. There were trees, grass, water. It was a high country, cool and wild, like the uplands he had left. For days he camped on Wildfire's trail, always relentlessly driving him, always watching for the trap he hoped to ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... one another, did callisthenics. Oh, that was going too far, of course; it was more real than that. But it was true that it was only their minds that met. And it seemed to be true that in the realm of mind they were content to live. Had they, like herself, deep labyrinthine, half-lit caverns down underneath those north-lighted, logically ordered apartments where Rose always found them? If they had they never let her or one ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... fantastic laying out of the park at Marienwerder near Hanover, of which Matthison writes in his "Vaterlndische Besuche,"[16] and in a letter to the Hofrath von Kpken in Magdeburg,[17] dated October 17, 1785. After a sympathetic description of the secluded park, he tells how labyrinthine paths lead to an eminence "where the unprepared stranger is surprised by the sight of a cemetery. On the crosses there one reads beloved names from Yorick's Journey and Tristram Shandy. Father Lorenzo, Eliza, ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... contemporaries. The best of them, Herrick and Carew, with Crashaw as a great thirdsman, called themselves "sons" of Ben Jonson, and so in a way they were; but they were even more sons of Donne. That great writer's burning passion, his strange and labyrinthine conceits, the union in him of spiritual and sensual fire, influenced the idiosyncrasies of each as hardly any other writer's influence has done in other times; while his technical shortcomings had unquestionably a fatal effect on the weaker ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... inevitably exclaim as we watch Victorien Sardou, in whom French ingenuity culminated and caricatured itself, laying the foundations of one of his labyrinthine intrigues. The absurdities of "preparation" in this sense could scarcely be better satirized than in the following page from Francisque Sarcey's criticism of Nos Intimes (known in English as Peril)—a page which is intended, not as satire, but ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... frost nor rain to disturb the original rock-piling. Only the agencies of sand and wind had disarranged the distribution on which the builders of the earliest dynasty had looked. And this was weird, mysterious and labyrinthine. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... anthology, we have gone on the assumption that something more than accidental identity of subject-matter holds together the apparently desultory remarks of poets on the subject of the poet's eyebrows, his taste in liquors, his addiction to midnight rambles, and whatnot. We have followed a labyrinthine path through the subject with faith that, if we were but patient in observing the clues, we should finally emerge at a point of vantage on the other side ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... regular "fishing license." All hands were forthwith set to work to make our key and rancho conform to this calling, and, in a few days, the canvas roof of our hut was replaced by a thatch of leaves, while every dangerous article or implement was concealed in the thicket of a labyrinthine creek. In fact, our piscatory character could not be doubted. In our persons and occupation, we looked as innocent and rustic as a pic-nic party on a summer bivouac for fresh air and salt bathing. Nor was the transformation ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... than had been the palaces in the "City of the Fairest." This citadel, which is fortress and palace in one, still stands like the Acropolis, looking out upon the plain from its lofty elevation. Volumes have been written about its labyrinthine halls and corridors and courts, and the amazing richness of decoration, which still survives—an inexhaustible mine for artists and a shrine for lovers of the beautiful. But Granada cultivated other things besides the art of beauty. Nowhere in Europe was there in the thirteenth and ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... enclosing canal is the Schreijerstoren (1482) or "Weepers' Tower,'' so called on account of its being at the head of the ancient harbour, and the scene in former days of sorrowful leave-takings. Between this and the next crescent of the Heeren Gracht sprang up, on the east, the labyrinthine quarter where for more than three centuries the large Jewish population has been located, and in the middle of which the painter Rembrandt lived (1640-1656) and the philosopher Spinoza was born (1632). Beyond the Heeren Gracht lie the Keizers Gracht and the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... on my feet, listening with an agony of intention. Whether I had heard anything I could not tell; but I felt as if I had. Yes; I was sure of it. Far away, somewhere in the labyrinthine pile, I heard a faint cry. Driven by some secret impulse, I flew, without a moment's reflection, to the closet door, lifted the tapestry within, unfastened the second door, and stood in the great waste echoing hall, amid the touches, ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... extraordinary thing in the world had happened, yet Betty Dalrymple asked no questions. Had she done so, it is probable that Mr. Heatherbloom would have been physically unequal to the labyrinthine explanation the occasion demanded. For a brief spell the girl had continued to regard him and she had seemed about to speak further. Then the blue light of her gaze had slowly turned and her lips remained mute. He was glad of this; of course he would later have to tell something, but ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... territory embraces some sixty thousand acres, and who, during a widowed life of twenty-two years, has borne the stress and strain of Irish estate administration, with its eternal and wearisome chopping and changing of law, its labyrinthine complications, its killing responsibilities. Lady de Burgho is, after all, very far from dead, exhibiting in fact a marvellous vitality, and discoursing of the ins and outs of the various harassing Land Acts, and the ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... my heart, thy ruddy valves,— It is thy master calls: Let me go down, and, curious, trace Thy labyrinthine halls. Open, O heart! and let me view The secrets of thy den: Myself unto myself now show With introspective ken. Expose thyself, thou covered nest Of passions, and be seen: Stir up thy brood, that in unrest Are ever piping keen:— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... tell you that they have not said just what they would like to say; there is always a subtle, lurking something still unexpressed, which something is the real essence of the matter, and which your penetration is expected to divine. In their writings they are eccentric, vague, labyrinthine, pretentious, transcendental,[35] and frequently ungrammatical. These men, if write they must, should confine themselves to the descriptive; for when they enter the essayist's domain, which they are very prone to do, they write what I will venture ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... had to be killed, the pretty Presidente of Sylvecane abducted, or the cries of little girls brought thither by Lebel smothered, such places were convenient for the purpose. They were labyrinthine chambers, impracticable to a stranger; scenes of abductions; unknown depths, receptacles of mysterious disappearances. In those elegant caverns princes and lords stored their plunder. In such a place the Count de Charolais ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... is conducted into the labyrinthine gloom and mould of the cellar. Through the narrow isles, under a low ceiling, papered, as it were, with pamphlets, between ramparts and mounds of books, old Jerry, his head bowed, his lighted taper in hand, proceeds. And Khalid follows ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... reply, he heard the joyous voice of young Maximilian; it sounded very near. The royal party was approaching. The Baronet expressed her earnest desire to avoid it; and as to advance or to retreat, in these labyrinthine walks, was almost equally hazardous, they retired into one of those green recesses which we have before mentioned; indeed it was the very evergreen grove in the centre of which the Nymph of the Fountain ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... went from one part of his home to another without a guide. It was so vast and so labyrinthine that he feared he might become lost forever. The dungeon below the chateau, and the moat with its bridges, were the especial delight of these lonely, romantic old chaps. One of the builders of this rare pile was now sleeping peacefully in the sarcophagus beneath the chapel; the other was ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... the black uneven walls of the more tortuous ancient vaults which give access to these labyrinthine corridors are thousands of casks of wine—some in single rows, others in triple tiers—forming the reserve stock of the establishment. As may be supposed, a powerful vinous odour permeates these vaults, in which the fumes of wine have been accumulating ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... I, reasoning as calmly as was possible, "there is another sure means of not losing my way, a thread to guide me through the labyrinthine subterraneous retreat—one which I ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... investigating the life and death of the late Earl of Glengyle. That mysterious person was the last representative of a race whose valour, insanity, and violent cunning had made them terrible even among the sinister nobility of their nation in the sixteenth century. None were deeper in that labyrinthine ambition, in chamber within chamber of that palace of lies that was built up around Mary ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... mid-ocean, is the sense of loneliness more appalling than to be lost in a labyrinthine forest of the mighty north. Even upon the ocean there is always the chance of being picked up by a passing vessel. But lost in the wilderness! hidden from view, what hope can the stoutest heart entertain of rescue? Here a man is but a thing of naught, ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... of the smallest detail is essentially characteristic of Edison, not only in economy of manufacture, but in all his work, no matter of what kind, whether it be experimenting, investigating, testing, or engineering. To follow him through the labyrinthine paths of investigation contained in the great array of laboratory note-books is to become involved in a mass of minutely detailed searches which seek to penetrate the inmost recesses of nature by an ultimate analysis of an infinite variety of parts. As the reader will obtain a fuller comprehension ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... lamp upon the pavement. The rays made the unctuous dampness of the stone flags glisten, and Sor Tommaso shivered in his broadcloth cloak. Then, as before, he was conducted in silence through arched ways, and up many steps, and along labyrinthine corridors, his strong shoes rousing sharp, metallic echoes, while the nuns' slippers slapped and shuffled as one walked on each side of him, the one on the left carrying the lamp, according to the ancient ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... business. It was this personal adaptability, indeed, that explains Carnegie's success. In the narrow, methodical sense he was not a business man at all; he knew and cared nothing for its dull routine and its labyrinthine details. As a practical steel man his position is a negligible one. Though he was profoundly impressed by his first sight of a Bessemer converter, he had little interest in the every-day process of making steel. He had also many personal weaknesses: his egotism ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... the ancient mind For a gloriousness defined: As she sought and knew your pleasure,— Wiling with a dancing measure, Underneath your closed eyes She calls the shapes of clouded skies; White forms flushing hyacinthine Twine in curvings labyrinthine; Seem with godlike graceful feet, For such mazy motion meet, To press from air each lambent note, On whose throbbing fire they float; With an airy wishful gait On each others' motion wait; Naked arms and vesture free Fill up the dance ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... we left our basket at the Lodge, we knew not. Labyrinthine walks met us in every direction, leading to bowers and dells ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... many very ancient and imperial associations connected therewith, that I had hoped to find an imposing and stately town. But it is always the same old story when we examine celebrities too closely. I found a nest of houses, drilled in every direction with narrow streets of labyrinthine crookedness, and amid which a miserable stream, probably the Gose, winds its sad and muddy way. The pavement of the town is as ragged as Berlin hexameters. Only the antiquities which are imbedded in the frame or mounting ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Thou of the chorded shell and golden plectrum! thou Of the dark eyes and pale pacific brow! Music, who by the plangent waves, Or in the echoing night of labyrinthine caves, Or on God's mountains, lonely as the stars, Touchest reverberant bars Of immemorial sorrow and amaze;— Keeping regret and memory awake, And all the immortal ache Of love that leans upon the past's sweet days In retrospection!—now, oh, now, ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... students in the garb of Wallenstein's soldiers. Five abreast the torch-bearers approached the Emperor's palace, and before his windows the Ziethen Hussars wheeled in and out in mystic evolutions. A labyrinthine series of movements, marked in the darkness only by the flaming torches, was executed in perfect silence; then a simple hymn of the Middle Ages was sung with singular effect by these thousands of young and manly voices; and from ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... Street; but it was, as now, the familiar thoroughfare of relief from the narrower and noisier Fleet Street and Strand, and the part of it which Milton had chosen was the most convenient. The actual house which he took may be still extant, wedged somewhere in the labyrinthine block between Great Turnstile and Little Turnstile; but one could judge but poorly from present appearances how pleasant may have been its old outlook to the rear. The fine open area of Lincoln's-Inn Fields was then only partly built round, and was used as a lounge ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... vertical bars should form the Rue de la Grande-Truanderie, and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and whose transverse bar should be formed by the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The old Rue Mondetour cut the three strokes of the N at the most crooked angles, so that the labyrinthine confusion of these four streets sufficed to form, on a space three fathoms square, between the Halles and the Rue Saint-Denis on the one hand, and between the Rue du Cygne and the Rue des Precheurs on the other, seven islands of houses, oddly cut up, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... frigid enthusiasm as shall conduct us indifferent and unmoved" over the bridge by which you enter Sandwich, and pay a toll if you do it in a carriage. "That man is little to be envied (Doctor Johnson again) who can lose himself in our labyrinthine streets, and not feel that he has reached the welcome limits of progress, and found a haven of rest in an ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins |
